The assignment: One of our staff photographers took photos of a fellow with the Lake Mahopac island he owns and a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house built on it.
I was to write about it.
I found myself back in time. And not because I learned Wright, who died in 1959, had been commissioned to design a house on the island, Petra Island, decades ago by a previous owner (the house didn't happen, but a smaller Wright-designed cottage there did).
No, it took me to the early to mid-1990s. I was studying at Connecticut College, on my way to an English major and music theory/history minor. Along the way, I also took two or three architectural history classes that turned out to be among my favorites.
As I remember it, the classes took me perhaps as far back
as ancient Greek and Roman columns, to Italian Renaissance architects, and eventually to masters of mid-20th Century modernism. Wright, whose 20th century "Prairie style" architecture was like nothing else, stayed with me.
The houses Wright designed that were built in Chicago and its close suburb of Oak Park.
That organic quality in many of his works, as if parts of them sort of just bloomed out of the ground.
A horizontal emphasis of many designs. Elements that could feel like something from an ancient world and all at once like some artifact transported back from a future one.
Manhattan's spacecraft Guggenheim Museum; the homes in southern California.; the buildings never built, only canvasses of dreams.
I've written about houses, housing, and apartments since I began reporting. Not that many featured an architect with such a distinctive style that it's taught in college textbooks. More often, the reporting involved local planning and zoning boards, the issue of affordable housing, and how residents reacted to development proposals.
But there have been architectural wonders at each reporting stop.
In Ridgefield, Connecticut, grand homes, including Colonials, perch on an unforgettable Main Street (Cass Gilbert, architect of the U.S. Supreme Court building, designed the town's fountain on Main.)
In Nantucket, Massachusetts, former whaling-era captains' homes line parts of its historic, cobblestoned downtown on the island, 30 miles south of Cape Cod. Head out of downtown, to the mid-island and outer reaches, and homes conform to weathered-shingle looks. (That's not simply homeowners' choices or trends; Nantucket holds one of the nation's toughest design codes, maintained by its historic district commission).
In Rhode Island, Bristol, on Narragansett Bay, had more than it share of historic homes, from my Providence Journal reporting days. So did Providence's East Side, where Brown University is located. And there were plenty of other Ocean State examples, too.
Wright's designs, though, came from another place.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website put it this way: "Over the course of his 70-year career, Wright became one of the most prolific, unorthodox and controversial masters of 20th-century architecture, creating no less than twelve of the Architectural Record’s hundred most important buildings of the century. Realizing the first truly American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels and museums stand as testament to someone whose unwavering belief in his own convictions changed both his profession and his country."
One of Wright's best known is Fallingwater, a home and now museum in Pennsylvania. It was designed in 1935 for the owners of Pittsburgh's biggest department store.
In 1935? In 2026, the house still looks like some science-fiction setting.
I interviewed the owner of Petra Island about the Wright-inspired house he built, what it took to get it done and why he would attempt such a task.
I could never have seen that moment coming all those years ago in a classroom in Connecticut's New London, where I remember the slideshows of Wright's designs, another new world just being revealed.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: A reporter's walk down an architectural memory lane
