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My involvement in the project goes back to the actual transfer of the archive from Arizona
to New York.
I was in charge of packing and then unpacking the 500,000 pieces of paper that constitute
the archive.
Once we were familiar with looking at more of the drawings and having a couple
that we knew were by Wright's hands you could begin to understand how he did draw and the
quality of his hand.
You know, he's such a larger-than-life figure to everyone and you kind of expect these vast,
sort of you know drawings of great vigor or enthusiasm but in fact he's quite delicate
and sort of more, sort of working his way through all of the details and he does a lot
of writing.
His handwriting is actually rather small.
It's not bold or vigorous so it's easier to tell him within that.
And even looking at the other drawings you can often see his comments throughout the
working drawings as he's approving and making suggestions of how to improve certain projects.
The studio itself developed a capacity to do their own renderings and the major person
behind that early part is Marion Mahony, who was a woman who was from Evanston originally.
She went to MIT and became one of the first graduates of, female graduates of an architecture
school in the United States and she was a licensed architect as well.
She was considered the great graphic hand within his studio.
And she is the early sort of proponent that sets their drawings in this very aesthetic
way.
This seems to have been very important to Wright that he had an aesthetic image for
the drawings not just a kind of pedestrian working drawings with you know, renderings
that were pretty pictures he had such an aesthetic interest in all the arts, in Japanese prints,
in graphic arts in general.
And it's in her image of this with Wright's annotations and adaptations and corrections
that the work goes towards, and the sort of summation of this material is in the Wasmuth
Portfolio, the great summary of Wright's early career that he went to Europe and published
in 1910.
And for me this is a representative set, these three drawings here because it encapsulates
the process of the studio with the major people involved in the projects.
You have the drawing here of the Rogers Lacy Hotel, its conceptual drawing by Frank Lloyd
Wright all the details, all the floors, all the heights, the module of the building.
He's even added a couple of perspectives of how he views the tower will look and then
he's actually reworked it so often that there are, is a cut-out in the middle.
He had to extend the paper several times because the building just kept getting bigger and
so it's really a work in progress.
And then when you look at-- and look at the oral histories of the people involved the
perspective was done by Jack Howe who was the head of the drafting room in the Taliesin
Studios from about 1933 until 1959 when Wright died.
And this perspective according to Howe's oral history was completely done by him, that Wright
never put a pencil to it, so you get the pure version of what the head drafting person would
have done with a perspective drawing.
What you see on the table is just a fraction,
a tiny fraction of the range of what's actually in the archive itself.
There is close to half a million pieces of paper that document the creative genius of
Frank Lloyd Wright.