martinhouseclr

173 4 // ANALYSIS & EVALUATION elaborate carpet bedding, knot gardens, parterres, shrub hedges, and fountains. Within the Ladies Home Journal article was another revolutionary concept billed as the Quadruple Block Plan. This drawing of a 4-unit full-block composition ultimately served as the illustrative progenitor to the complex weaving of multiple structures into a series of defined landscape spaces as first developed at the Martin House. Indeed, the Martin House has been described as the closest Wright ever came to constructing the concept. 23 From these beginnings came a series of ‘Prairie Style’ houses, culminating in the elaborate “confirmation of the compositional possibilities” of Wright’s Darwin Martin House. 24 Within the matrix of garden spaces created by the structures, Wright and his associate of the time, landscape architect Walter Burley Griffin, designed garden features and planting beds that were arranged on the same grid as the house, on axis from internal sight lines, and unique to the American domestic landscape. Wright did not have a supreme command of plant material that would have been required to prepare detailed planting designs. Though his use and appreciation of plant material is seen in 23 National Register of Historic Places, Inventory Nomination Form: Darwin D. Martin House, George Barton House, Gardener’s Cottage, 2. The description within the NR nomination is credited to Robert Twombly. 24 Ibid., 8. the many Wright drawings published, particularly the 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio drawings, where he uses such features to visually market the idea of a truly integrated house and landscape. For instance, Wright’s relationship with the prevalence of vine cover on houses of the Victorian era seems partially misunderstood. This undoubtedly stems from an often-recited quote from the 4 October 1953 issue of New York Times Magazine, reading: “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” Contemporary interpretations of this assume it to mean that Wright always held a distaste for vine cover on houses, or that vines indicate a failure of an architect, which may have been his feeling late in life. However, quite contradictory to that notion are the Wasmuth portfolio perspective drawings which include an abundance of vine covered houses, some featuring vine cover on nearly every visible façade, vines spanning across verandahs and pergolas, and trailing down urns and planter boxes. As an opportunity for Wright to graphically revise and present for popular consumption his previously built works, if the Wasmuth drawings truly represented the design intent of his work prior to 1910 (even often ignoring realities), then clearly he must have felt there was a usefulness for vines in connecting house and landscape. Similarly, the abundant foundation plantings represented in the Wasmuth drawings challenges the popular contemporary notion that the “Prairie Fig. 170 ‘A Home in a Prairie Town,’ Ladies Home Journal , 1901.