martinhouseclr

80 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT was titled “Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright” and includes both the Darwin D. Martin House and Larkin Administration Building, as well as another Buffalo home designed for a Larkin Soap Company’s office manager (the William R. Heath House). 190 The portfolio was the very first-ever publication of Wright’s work and the drawings no-doubt indicate Wright’s carefully chosen design intentions for the various works, often divergent with actual built conditions. Two drawings of the Darwin D. Martin House are present within the Wasmuth portfolio, consisting of a site plan of the property and a perspective drawing from an axonometric position looking down from the corner of Jewett Parkway and Summit Avenue. The plan drawing of the property includes both the interior first floor layout and a schematic level complete landscape. It is an important drawing that not only shows Wright’s vision for the Martin House as he wanted the world to see, but also how he refined and reinforced many of the house’s axial relationships with the landscape. [Fig. 57] The drawing shows enhanced axial relationships between the Summit terrace garden and the Unit Room (the unified space of the dining room, living room and library), with a never-constructed pathway though a much more formal version of the Summit terrace garden directly on axis with the room. 190 Interestingly, the Wasmuth plan seems to indicate mixed borders (a layered mix of woody shrubs and perennials) along either side of the pergola rather than the predominantly perennial border (a border garden of perennials-only, without woody shrubs) known to have existed. Furthermore, aside from the significant shrub massings along the house’s main entry walk and the borders along either side of the pergola, foundation plantings are conspicuously absent from the bases of the raised planters and the Summit terrace wall. 191 The Barton House, on the other hand, seems to be lush with vegetation around the entire publicly visible facades of the house, matching the known landscape. Similarly, the property’s western boundary along the driveway, as well as the significant massing of the Floricycle and street corner – appear to represent at least schematically-similar conditions as existed. The Wasmuth plan also shows a linear grouping of large shrubs which extend from the Barton House entry walk and front yard, to the south, toward the Floricycle. The shrub massing does not continue fully to the south and meet the Floricycle periphery, yet the drawing noticeably expands on what was known to exist at the time near the Barton verandah and entry – to such a degree that one could credibly mistake it as openly referencing the Griffin shrub border along the Summit Avenue sidewalk, still yet-to-be designed or even commissioned by Martin at the time of the Wasmuth portfolio preparation. It is imaginable that Wright painstakingly reviewed 191 With the absence of the curving streets and the obtuse angle of the corner, it is curious that Wright did not include a privacy wall in the Wasmuth re-drawing of the Martin site plan. As it was clearly his preference, and it could have been easily squared with the rest of the composition, the idea of including an expanded shrub border along the sidewalk seems to contradict or at least confuse the ultimate design intent for this part of the landscape. and edited these drawings for publication, yet they seem to include the semblance of a feature that Wright criticizes in October of the year the portfolio was published. 192 Most notably, the plan feature most inconsistent with reality is Wright’s complete disregard of the obtuse angle of the property’s southeastern boundary at the corner of Jewett Parkway and Summit Avenue. As early as 1903 Wright made Martin quite aware of his conscious decision to ignore the prevailing method of house layout on the mildly curvilinear street system of Parkside, choosing to place all buildings associated with the Martin House square with one-another. For whatever reason, Wright strongly reinforces the axial grid relationships and right-angle layout concept in the Wasmuth plan by drawing Jewett and Summit to be at 90-degrees from one- another. This has the effect of creating additional land at the corner that never existed, pulling the Floricycle and corner plantings away from the street corner. To rectify this, Wright draws in a substantial mass of additional trees and shrubs to fill in this created land-space, vegetating it fully to his revised street corner. The additional Wasmuth drawing showing the Martin House, a wonderfully crafted Marion 192 Incidentally, it would seem that Wright’s choice to ignore the true layout of the streets in the Wasmuth plan would have the consequence of diminishing the significance of his May 1903 design decision to ignore them in the layout of the house and grounds – which is now celebrated as being one of the most distinctive and bold decisions of the site arrangement. In fact, it would eliminate the possibility for any reader of the Wasmuth portfolio to know of this design gesture. Fig. 57, opposite Darwin Martin House, plan, Wasmuth portfolio version, 1910.