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Painting of my home is at the Art Institute of Chicago

Melensdad

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Just thought this was sort of interesting.

The painting below is at the Art Institute of Chicago.

My home was designed in 1912. It was actually never built as intended. The original blueprints were destroyed in a fire. It was supposed to be built in a neighborhood in Mason City, Iowa called Rock Crest & Rock Glen. 2 architects were involved. Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin (with his wife, artist/architect Marion Mahoney Griffin). Mr Wright and Mr Griffin designed the homes, laid out the neighborhood and I believe they built all but 1 home, the one that we live built. Mrs Griffin did water color renderings of the homes and also did a painting of the neighborhood (seen below)

As I said, the home which we built, was actually supposed to be built in that neighborhood, but as the plans were destroyed it was never built. We found a pen and ink drawing of the property & the floorpan and had an architect recreate the floor plan, updating parts of it for modern living convenience (we have 4 bathrooms, it was designed with 2) and put on a 3 car garage instead of a 1 horse stall and carriage barn. And we built it in Indiana, on a similar sloping property instead of in Iowa. The footprint of our home is as close to identical as we could scaled it out to be, the main floor rooms are in the same locations as the originals, although we substituted a dinette for the quarter's of the live-in maid. We also altered the maid's bathroom and it is now the powder room on the main level. Upstairs where there were 5 bedrooms + 1 bath, we have 3 bedrooms, a laundry room and 2 baths. In every case we made sure the interior walls coordinated with the exterior window placements so the exterior shell retains its design integrity.

In the image below, what I'd refer to as "our home" is on the very far right side of the painting, sort of the upper right corner, last house on the end of the road. There were 250 copies of this painting printed on archival paper a few years ago by one of the Frank Lloyd Wright preservation groups, recently I was able to purchase one of those numbered copies of this painting and will be giving it to the lovely Mrs_Bob for her birthday.

Just think its sort of an interesting thing, after living here for 26+ years we still find things out about this home.

s-l1600.jpg
 
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bczoom

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Staff member
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That's sweet Bob.
I'm a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, having lived by and visited many of his sites.
His buildings in western NY are still highly revered.
 
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