 I'm starting with this photograph of Wright arriving at the San Francisco airport in 1957, which I found in the San Francisco Chronicles photo archive, because I love the fact that he looks so vigorous and energetic, only about a month before his 90th birthday. Also, I'd like to imagine that his evident good spirits here were due to his pleasure in coming back once more to this city that he genuinely enjoyed being in, as we know from his correspondence and interviews. Well, first let me mention how I got involved in this subject of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in the San Francisco area. During the years that I taught the history of architecture at Stanford, one of the courses I gave was a seminar on Wright, and we would take field trips to his buildings in the Bay Area, such as his wonderful shop on Maiden Lane here in the city, just off Union Square, originally the VC Morris Shop, and I'll say more about this building later. And this got me interested, especially in Wright's projects designed for the Bay Area, both the built and the unbuilt projects, and I started doing research on the topic. More recently, when I would tell people that I was writing a book on Wright's Bay Area works, a common response was, well, what is there? There's the Marin County Civic Center, people would point out, and San Rafael and that shop on Maiden Lane that we just saw, and a few houses, but is that really enough for a book? That was sometimes what people would tell me. And they were always surprised when I told them that, in fact, Wright designed roughly 30 projects for the Bay Area, although only about a third of them were actually built. And I'll say something later about why so many of them were not built. Here's a map that I created showing the locations of all of these projects. You probably can't see the numbers there, but they're a number for each of the projects, and they correspond to a list next to the map in the book. Moreover, these projects include some of Wright's most unusual and innovative designs. For example, his first design for a skyscraper of 1913, the call building was to be on Market Street, Market and Fourth Streets here in the city. And even though it wasn't constructed, it was one of Wright's favorite designs, and he built a couple of large models of it, one of which we see here on the right, which he kept behind his drafting table at Taliesin, his home and studio in Wisconsin. If built, this would have been the tallest building west of Chicago at this time, and it was also one of the most advanced skyscraper designs of that time. Another of Wright's Bay Area projects was a very unusual mortuary complex of 1947, the Daphne Funeral Chapels, to be a church and do both streets here in the city. Next to the San Francisco Mint, which we see in this drawing by Wright, one of Wright's drawings of the project, and we see, of course, up at the top here, there's the San Francisco Mint, which you're probably familiar with up just off of Market Street near Dubose. And when Wright first went to the site and asked Mr. Daphne what the large building was up on the rock, and Daphne said it was the San Francisco Mint, Wright said, we'll make the mint look like a morgue and your morgue look like a mint. And also another one of his projects for the Bay Area, a small Christian science church for Bolinas in Marin County of 1956, again not never built, and an amazing industrial plant and company headquarters for San Carlos on the peninsula, also of the mid-50s, which would have been Wright's largest structure if it had been built. Using the structural system Wright had created in the 1930s for the Johnson administration building in Racine, Wisconsin, with these innovative and remarkably slender lily pad columns, as they're sometimes called, and a fanciful wedding chapel commissioned by the Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley Oakland Hills and various structures for the Marin County fairgrounds adjacent to the Civic Center, including a fair pavilion, which we see at the top there with a tent-like roof suspended on cables and an amphitheater, and an amazing reinforced concrete bridge for the San Francisco Bay that Wright called the Butterfly Bridge, which he started working on in 1949, though he never actually received the commission for it from the state, and later I'll say more about this project also. And some of Wright's house projects for the Bay Area were also extremely innovative. For example, the Hannah House of 1937 at Stanford was the first time that he was able to talk a client into constructing a type of building he had been thinking about for a number of years with a plan based totally on non-rectangular geometry, in this case the hexagon. And we can see here, if you can see the plan clearly enough, that there are no Wright angles in the plan at all. It's totally 60 and 100 degree angles based on a hexagon grid, and as a result, Wright sometimes called this the honeycomb house. And he did this really as a furtherance of his desire to break open the box, as he put it, of conventional architecture. And as I say, this was the first time that he had found a client willing to build a structure with this non-rectangular geometry, and this really inaugurated an important characteristic of Wright's later work, the use of non-rectangular geometry such as triangles, hexagons, and circles. Another house in the Bay Area that's of interest, the Berger House in San Enselmo in Marin County, is unusual for a different reason. The man who commissioned it, Bob Berger, a teacher, constructed it for his family totally by himself, and as a result it took him nearly 20 years to build, probably the longest construction job of any of Wright's buildings. And the construction was especially difficult for Berger, because Wright had given him a design using what he called desert masonry construction. And this required building forms, and in the next slide here we see photographs taken at different times of Bob Berger working on this house over the years, photographs taken by his family, and a couple of his sons were kind enough to give me these photographs. And so up at the top here we see him building the forms for these walls, and then splitting large stones, and we see him doing that over here, to give them more or less flat surfaces, then placing them in the forms in such a way that when the concrete is poured and the forms removed, the stones are visible on the surface of the walls. Wright had first used this kind of construction at Taliesin West, his winter home and studio in Arizona in the 1930s. And the Berger House is unusual for another reason, it's Wright's only house for which he also designed a separate structure for the family dog at the request of one of Berger's sons. So it's Wright's only dog house. And among Wright's unconstructed house projects for the Bay Area are a couple of his most spectacular designs, such as this one designed in 1945 for Lillian and V.C. Morris, the people who commissioned the shop on Maiden Lane, the house being directly on the ocean in the C. Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco on Camino del Mar, if you're familiar with that area down below Lincoln Park. The design was so unusual and the site so precipitous, right on the cliffside there, that it turned out to be too difficult or expensive to construct. Wright then came up with some other designs for this site, such as another one here, almost equally amazing and dramatic, but none of them got built, even though the Morris's loved the designs, especially the first one. Well, another interesting thing about Wright's projects for the Bay Area is that they range over virtually his entire career. The first one for a small house in Oakland dates from around 1900, almost at the beginning of his career, just as he was starting to develop his prairie house style in the Chicago area, which you may be familiar with, some of his most famous buildings date from that prairie house period. And this is a mysterious design, which I'm sorry is a little hard to see here. I took three details from the design that are all on one rather large sheet of paper that was discovered in Wright's studio following his death. And there's no other information about this design. It doesn't even identify the client's name on the drawing or the address in Oakland. But it does say down at the bottom, dwelling for Oakland, California, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, Chicago, Illinois, partly based on the fact that he, when he had his office in Chicago and also based on the style of the drawing and even more on the style of the design of the house, it's clear that it has to date from about 1900. This house really, we see here in a sense the beginning of the prairie house style, of his development of the prairie house style. With an emphasis, oops, I didn't want to move ahead. I wanted to use my light pointer here to point out the horizontal, emphasis on the horizontal with hipbed roofs, windows banked together to create openings in the upper part of the wall. And one very strange detail, it's probably a little hard for you to see, but the floor plan is composed of two squares that are overlapped or intersect some of the very kind of unprecedented at the time, but something that Wright was playing with at the beginning to develop this idea of more fluid and more complex planning types. And there are other details in this design which show that it has to date from just around 1900, just at the beginning of his career. So we have a, and it's the earliest design by Wright for any location, really west of the middle west. And so we have one of Wright's earliest designs here in the Bay Area, not built as far as we know. The other interesting thing is that it's not known whether this was ever built. So conceivably it was, but since we don't know the address or the client's name, we really don't know. And I've had a couple of people in the Oakland Planning Office who've been helping me to try to learn more about, see if we can find anything about this mysterious project. And that the end of Wright's career are several of his Bay Area projects, such as the Marin County Civic Center, which we saw before. Here's one of his overall drawings for the Civic Center, which he began working on in 1957, but was still designing when he died in 59. And in fact, one of Wright's very last commissions that he received was just before his death in April 1959. And it was for a church in San Francisco, the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, which was to be on Brotherhood Way in the southwest part of the city. He was just beginning to sketch out his ideas for the project, and we see some of these sketches here, just a few days before he died at the age of 91 in April of 1959. And as sketchy as these are, they show Wright approaching this design in a fresh and innovative way to the extent that I've been able to sort of decipher what he had in mind in these sketches, even at his advanced age and in failing health. I think it's best for me to take questions after the talk. But thank you. I want to entertain your question. When I began working on the book and decided to include Wright's unbuilt projects, as well as the constructed ones, I realized that people might wonder why so many of them were not built. As I mentioned, only about a third of the projects were constructed. Here's also one more of the unconstructed house projects, the Hargrove House in Orinda, which would have been one of Wright's most impressive houses. And since there's that stereotype about Wright that you may have heard stories about, that he was difficult to deal with and sometimes treated his clients badly, I realized that some people would assume that this was probably the cause of these projects not getting constructed. So I decided I had to try to find out the reasons for each of the unbuilt projects. Now actually, when I mentioned to a couple of my friends who were practicing architects that only about one third of Wright's Bay Area projects were constructed, they told me that this wasn't that unusual for many architects. But even so, I wanted to be able to answer the question. And I decided that I had to get access to the correspondence between Wright and the clients of all these projects, correspondence mostly in the Frank Lloyd Wright archives, which used to be Italian and West in Arizona, but is now at the Avery Library in New York. And with this correspondence, hundreds of letters and other documents, I was able to determine the reasons that each of these projects wasn't built. And it turns out that there were many different reasons, but surprisingly, almost none of them had to do with Wright treating the clients badly. This actually surprised me a bit. In a few cases, it was actually the clients who were difficult to deal with. And in some cases, the designs were so unusual that construction would have been difficult or too expensive, as I mentioned, in the case of that sea cliff design for the Morrises. Here we see that again. Or the client simply found the designs too strange to accept. And this was the case with a house that Wright designed in 1939 for a Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Piedmont Pines in the East Bay. The site reminded Wright of the Lake Tahoe site, where in the 1920s he had designed a group of buildings, here's one of them, that were never constructed, using a kind of Indian teepee shape. And he decided that this would be perfect for the Piedmont Pines site that the Smith said, which had a similar topography, he felt. But the Smith apparently found the design too peculiar and got into an argument with Wright. And these are things I discovered by going through all of this correspondence between Wright and the clients. So they had a difficult argumentative meeting, and they refused to pay him the fee they owed him for the preliminary design, which the correspondence reveals was only $240. It's amazing that, and this was, but they wouldn't even pay him $240 for all the work he had done to design this. Now this, by the way, was one of the very few cases I found of an unpleasant situation between Wright and one of his Bay Area clients. And in a couple of cases, that call building skyscraper and the butterfly bridge, there actually was no client. Wright simply did the design in the hope that it would get built. So that's another reason that some of these projects didn't get built, that there wasn't actually a client. And then there were some unexpected reasons why a building wasn't constructed. For example, a house that Wright designed in 1950 for a man named Robert Bush and his wife at Stanford. He was a young faculty member at Stanford, and he and his wife were friends of the Hanna's who had built the Hanna house in the 1930s. Well, the Bushes found Wright to be very amiable, as seen in their letters, and they loved the design that he produced for them, which we see here. And we're all ready to build it. But then there's a sad letter in the archive from Robert Bush to Wright, reporting that their daughter had been stricken with polio. And because of this, and all the medical expenses, they would have to forget about building the house. But he added that, of course, they would pay the fee they still owed Wright for the design as soon as they could. Well, as I was going through the correspondence, the next letter was from Wright immediately writing back to Robert Bush, expressing his sympathy for their daughter and saying, quote, don't worry about paying us. So there's a story that sort of contradicts the stereotype of Wright as always being mean to his clients. Well, I have to say that reading the hundreds of letters between Wright and his Bay Area clients, most of which had never been looked at by scholars before, as far as I know, was one of the most compelling and sometimes touching aspects of this research project for me. And I decided to include in the book all of these stories of Wright's relationships with his Bay Area clients. Well, another aspect of Wright's work in the Bay Area is that San Francisco is the only place where he had a branch office that is separate from Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. In 1951, when he started getting quite a lot of work in the Bay Area, he asked one of his former Taliesin apprentices, Aaron Green, to be his associate in San Francisco. And here we see the two of them in a later photograph. And they opened an office on Grant Avenue in downtown San Francisco. And here's the building. The building is still there. It's at 319 Grant Avenue on the second floor. Wright designed the office interior. And here we see his plan that he worked on with his notes on it. It was actually an ingenious design for the interior of this office with screen-like walls made of redwood slats and translucent glass. Oops, again I meant to use my light pointer rather than the advance. Here are these screen-like walls set at suggesting the hexagonal geometry, perhaps, of the Hannah House, creating three spaces. The drafting room, an entrance area, and a private office. But allowing, because this had translucent glass, these screen-like walls, it allowed some natural light and also visual privacy in each of these three spaces. So it was a very clever design for a space that only had windows on one side. Here, of course, looking out on Grant Avenue. It was a somewhat difficult design problem. And here we see what the office actually looked like, the private office and reception area at the top and then the drafting room below. Although we're not seeing it here in its original location on Grant Avenue. After Wright's death in 1959, Aaron Green continued to use the office but then had to leave the building and he dismantled the office interior and was later installed in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh where we see it here. But then this office interior has a strange kind of odyssey as a history. Because in 2004 it was dismantled again and sold to a collector in Buffalo, New York. And it's been in storage there ever since. And it's been a fond hope of mine to have it returned to San Francisco someday and installed somewhere here. Well, now I'm going to turn to another aspect of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright in San Francisco, which is the various ways that he was covered in the local press. And to get this information, I spent countless hours here in the newspaper archives in the public library up on the fifth floor and also found material in the history room on the sixth floor. In the 1940s and 50s, the later part of Wright's career, the Bay Area newspapers covered him in basically two ways. On the one hand, there were stories about his projects in the Bay Area, as we would expect. Here we see on the left a full page article about his design for his butterfly bridge to go across the San Francisco Bay. And on the upper right there, a story about his hiring by Marin County to design the Civic Center and an article about his Daphne mortuary design. You can see the its title, Death and Taxes. And this refers to one of Wright's quips about the proximity of the mortuary to the mint, which is described in that little article. So that was one type of newspaper coverage about Wright. I might just mention that Wright had a distinctive and sometimes wicked sense of humor. For example, he later recalled that he had to visit in connection with designing the Daphne mortuary complex. That he later said he had to visit several other mortuaries with Mr. Daphne to learn about what they required and the programmatic requirements of designing mortuaries. And he said, quote, this nearly got me down. I would come back home wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Daphne had a way of referring to the deceased as the merchandise, and that would cheer me up. But another kind of press coverage during this period was about the often opinionated statements that Wright made in interviews and talks during his many visits to San Francisco. In general, Wright disliked American cities and the architecture in them. And he didn't spare the buildings in San Francisco, calling them, for example, shanty architecture, and saying, on one occasion, it's time you had another earthquake here. Yet, otherwise, he liked the city. Perhaps it's the only American city that he did genuinely like. On one of his visits in 1944, he said the following. San Francisco is the most charming city in America and the most cosmopolitan and picturesque, but the most backward city architecturally. Yet, it manages because of the character of its hills and environment and its people who are the best looking in the country. I like that. And then he continues, I don't know how much of this is due to natural advantages or accident, but I like San Francisco. As far as I know, it's about the only city in America that he ever said anything like that about. So positive. So in his later years, it was Wright's designs as well as his opinions on things that were reported in the press. And also the various things he did while in San Francisco, such as a round table forum that he participated in in 1949 on modern art in which he played the gadfly, making all sorts of controversial statements about contemporary art in society, which got widely reported in the local press. For example, he got into a couple of big arguments in this forum with the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was also on the panel. Here we see in one of the their sessions, here's Wright and here's Marcel Duchamp down there, and they got into some amazing arguments, and I had to get the transcripts of this whole of these sessions from the San Francisco Art Institute. And at one point, and another one of the sessions, the one at the bottom here, and here we see Wright at the end of this table here, he one of the after Wright was making controversial statements, one of the other participants interrupted and said, what Mr. Wright is saying is sheer nonsense, which naturally did not sit well with Wright and things started going downhill from then on. But what's interesting is that the newspaper stories that San Franciscans first read about Wright many years earlier were very different from this. They had almost nothing to do with his architecture or his public statements, but with the scandals and tragedies in his personal life in the 1910s and 20s. In 1909, Wright had left his wife and family and gone to Europe with the wife of one of his former clients, a woman named Maima of Borthwick, Cheney. And when they returned in 1911, he built the first Taliesin in Wisconsin as their new home, mainly to get away from Chicago and to try to avoid the negative publicity about their relationship. And then in August 1914, there was this terrible event reported here in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, those two stories, in which Maima Borthwick and her two children were murdered along with four other people at Taliesin, murdered by a servant who had apparently become deranged, and the house was partially burned down. The article here from the examiner up there, the article in the next morning says that three people were killed because it wasn't yet known that seven had died. And more details of the tragedy kept being reported day after day in the San Francisco newspapers along with the story of Wright's relationship with Maima Borthwick, making him out to be a disreputable or at least extremely unconventional character. And for many years, virtually the only news about Wright in the San Francisco newspapers, and this is what I discovered by really going through all of these newspaper, working in the newspaper archives here in the library, about the only news about Wright was about these personal problems of his. As he finally then in the succeeding years divorced his first wife, married another woman, Miriam Noel, then separated from her and met Olga Vana Milanoff, who eventually became his third wife and actually contributed to the success of his career in several ways for the rest of his life. But in the 1920s, these personal problems involved all sorts of legal battles and disputes which the newspapers loved. There were times I found that day after day there would be in the San Francisco newspapers in the early and mid 20s, there would be one story after another about Franklin Wright's problems or his these of women in his lives. It was like a long-running soap opera. And in 1927 there was a local angle to this story when Miriam Noel, his estranged second wife, who had disappeared from Chicago several months earlier, as according to the press, was found hiding in San Francisco, as the papers said, in an apartment building at 925 Sutter Street on Lower Knob Hill, where she gave several sensational interviews to the papers, Attacking Wright and Olga Vana. Here we see two of the stories from the examiner. And in the one on the left here, here's Miriam Noel and Wright of course and this is Olga Vana. In the in the first story in February, she was quoted as saying, I've been here in San Francisco for my health. This is Miriam Noel, was quoted as saying, the shock and publicity that followed my husband's devotion to Mada Milanoff has so completely undermined my health that I'm a nervous wreck. I came out here to recover and I've succeeded wonderfully. California is wonderful. I've gained 30 pounds since I've been here, she said. She apparently liked San Francisco cuisine. Well, Miriam stayed here in San Francisco until September when her divorce from Wright was finally settled. The photograph on the right shows her boarding a train for Los Angeles and she was quoted as saying, I've had several offers from Hollywood and I'm going to drop in tomorrow and have some screen tests taken. I might stay and work in a picture and then I'll go on to Paris. I'm going to drown my sorrows in art. So what's interesting, I think, and the reason I bring this all up is that for many years the general public heard mainly about these scandalous and sensational aspects of Wright's life. And it wasn't until later that newspapers began reporting on his architecture in a serious way. And this early focus on the scandalous or tragic aspects of his personal life colored the public perception of Wright to some extent for the rest of his life, I think. Most books on Wright's architecture don't mention or tend to avoid these more sordid topics, but I decided that they were relevant to the larger question of how Wright and his architecture were perceived by the general public. Next, let me mention a couple of Wright's buildings in the Bay Area that I haven't shown so far. First is one called the Bueller House in Orinda of 1948. In most ways, it's typical of Wright's Usonian house type that he was developing or had developed in the 1930s with concrete slab floors and radiant heating and other features that made them a somewhat less expensive prototype for middle-class suburban housing. But the Bueller House here has some unusual traits not usually found in the Usonians, especially a large octagonal living room, which we see in this photograph, with a sloping plane for a roof, not the normal way you'd think of roofing, an octagon, which creates a very dramatic interior space. It's a really beautiful room. And another house I want to show here, the Bazette House in Hillsborough, which has a hexagonal plan, like the earlier Hannah House, though it's a completely different plan and a smaller house. But one of the most interesting things about this house has to do with the people who lived here. First were the Bazettes, Sydney and Louise Bazette, who built it in 1940 and loved the house, but only lived in it for two or three years due to personal problems. Then they rented it for two or three years and then it was bought by young refugees from Europe, Louis and Betty Frank, who lived there for the rest of their lives and had Wright design a small addition to the house. So it's sometimes called the Bazette Frank House. But the person who rented the house in the early 1940s, before the Franks bought it, was a man named Joseph Eichler, who at that time worked in his family's wholesale food business. But he got to love the house so much that he became interested in architecture and several years later bought a company that produced tract houses. But he wanted to create a better type of tract housing than existed. And he hired the architect Robert Anshin and then later some other architects who, and Robert Anshin, at first designed prototypes for Eichler that were simplified versions of Wright's Usonian houses. And here we see a very early ad from the Palo Alto Times for advertising these Eichler homes as they were called. You can see the full price of it is $9,400. And this led to more fully developed designs for these Eichler homes, thousands of which, as you probably know, were built in the Bay Area and elsewhere, but mainly in the Bay Area. And they were widely published and won architectural awards and had an important influence on post-war suburban house design in America. And Eichler later acknowledged fully the influence that Wright and the Bazette House had on him. He later said about living in the Bazette House for just those two or three years. He said, it was a revelation to me. I admired Wright's rich design and asked myself if such houses could be built for ordinary people. So one of Wright's Bay Area buildings had an unexpected and significant effect on American suburban architecture. Well, now let's look more closely at the VC Morris Shop on Maiden Lane here in the city. As I mentioned before, Wright was commissioned in 1944 to design a house for the Morris's, Lillian and VC. He was always called VC Morris, and it took me a while to find his full name. His full name was Veer Chase Morris, but for some reason he insisted on just being known as VC Morris, and that was the name of their shop. But before the shop was designed, they had commissioned him to design their house for their property at Sea Cliff on Camino del Mar, and we saw before this amazing design that he came up with. And for several years, they kept pursuing this house project, trying to get it to work and to be feasible, and Wright produced other designs for the site. We saw one of those before. And in the process, Wright and the Morris's became good friends, and there is a photograph I found of Wright and Lillian Morris at Stinson Beach, where they had some property and they asked Wright to, this was later in the 1950s, they asked him to design a beach house for them at Stinson Beach, and he did. He designed that house, but which also was not built. There were other reasons why that one wasn't built. Aaron Green, who had worked on these projects, on the later projects for the Morris's with Wright, Aaron Green was later in an oral interview asked if Wright ever got discouraged because none of his house projects for the Morris's was constructed, and he said, no, he liked the Morris's so much that he just kept trying. Then in 1947, they mentioned to Wright that they were planning to remodel their shop on Maiden Lane. Their shop was just in an undistinguished small building on Maiden Lane, and much to their surprise, he offered to do the design for them. It was surprising because Wright almost never took remodeling jobs, he considered it kind of beneath his dignity or that he wasn't, that they wouldn't give him an opportunity to do interesting enough projects, but he accepted in this case. And I think the reason is that I think it clearly had to do with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, because beginning in about 1943, earlier in the 40s, Wright had been working on his design for the Guggenheim Museum, for Solomon Guggenheim in New York. Here we see some of his drawings as he was trying to work out the design, but the process kept dragging out and kept being delayed and it was unclear whether it was really going to be built, and he was exploring various ways of dealing with the concept of a spiral ramp as the basic form of this museum, this building. And it wasn't until the late 50s that the museum was actually constructed. So I think that Wright took on the Morris job in 1947, because he saw here an opportunity by completely redesigning the Morris's shop to explore on a miniature scale the Guggenheim concept of a spiral ramp as the centerpiece of a building whose function was the display of objects. So in that sense that the programs were very similar. And here I have views of the two buildings, the Guggenheim on the right, of course, and the VC Morris shop on the left. And the Morris shop was constructed in 1949 long before the Guggenheim got built. So there's this fascinating relationship between these two projects. And with the Morris shop Wright, in a sense, was doing a kind of small scale tryout of the Guggenheim concept. And if we look at one of the, look at a detail of one of Wright's section drawings for the shop, we see that he was even thinking of how to display some of the Morris's merchandise on the ramp itself in circular recesses in the walls. And this is, in fact, how it was constructed and used. Here we see a photo of it taken right after the construction of the shop, when it was still the VC Morris shop. Well, this turned out to be one of Wright's own favorite buildings. And whenever he came to San Francisco, he would visit it. It was on his walk from the St. Francis Hotel, where he usually stayed, to his office where they're in Greenon, Grant Avenue. And Green later recounted how Wright would often enter the shop and rearrange the merchandise. As are typical of Wright, here we just see another view of the interior right after its construction. Although Green added, when he described how Wright would do this, he added, if I came back the next day, everything would be right back where it was before Mr. Wright had been there. And Wright's design for the exterior of the shop, though it may look rather plain at first, is also really an extraordinary design with a number of subtle and unusual details. I might mention that the shop has been sold recently and that does not have a new tenant yet, so it's closed now. So you can't go in the shop now, but of course you can go there and see this exterior. For example, on the exterior here the main surface is pulled out just slightly from the surrounding frame, and you can't see that too well here, but it's as if there's a kind of frame around, and then the central part of it is pulled out. And the bold arched entryway there is emphasized by a series of recessed bands, as you can see. And on the left side is a column of removed bricks which are lit at night and have a, this is an old photograph taken right after the construction of the building, and have a counterpoint in a horizontal row, as you can see, of lit squares at the base of the building. And here we see another more recent view of that. But then there's an amazing detail which is normally not pointed out, I think, in discussions of this building in the Wright literature. In the tunnel-like entrance there that you go through to enter the building, the vault in this tunnel-like entrance is brick on one side, and I think I have the next slide, here that shows that better, is brick on one side, but glass on the other, which had never been done before, as far as I know. It was really somewhat unprecedented and shows that Wright was willing to violate the conventional logic or rules of architectural logic in a way that most architects probably would not have dared to do. A vault, after all, should be made of a continuous material. So he's doing something very odd here. And in this and many other ways this is really a remarkable building. In my opinion, it's one of Wright's most brilliant designs, both inside and out. And as I say, the building was recently sold and will have a new commercial tenant. I've actually been working with the San Francisco Planning Department and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the main Frank Lloyd Wright organization, to try to ensure that the interior as well as the exterior is fully protected and preserved. Well, finally, I'm going to say something more about Wright's amazing design for a bridge across the San Francisco Bay. Following World War II, there were calls to build a second bridge from San Francisco to Oakland to accommodate increased traffic. This was, of course, before the Bart tunnel was proposed. And a structural engineer who lived in Berkeley, Yaroslav Polivka, who had worked with Wright on a couple of his earlier projects, suggested that Wright produce a design for this bridge, which he did in 1949. It was a really unprecedented design, mostly consisting of precast concrete sections that reminded Wright of butterfly wings. So he called it the butterfly bridge. But the most dramatic part was the central section with two arches spanning 1,000 feet, which we see in the upper drawing there, which reportedly would have been the longest concrete bridge span at that time. The two arches separating at the center. This was the unusual, perhaps most unusual feature about this design. These arches separated in the center and supported a suspended landscape park. And oops, again, I'm advancing when I don't mean to. Here's the central part of the bridge. And you can see how the roadway splits here, so that there are two arches. And then the idea was that one could pull off into this landscape park and enjoy the views from above. And you can even see part of this park that's up in that drawing. Really amazing and kind of crazy idea, maybe, but certainly something that's never been done before. Well, Wright and Polivka promoted the design and received a lot of favorable attention and publicity. And here's that article that we saw before from the San Francisco Call newspaper. And it includes a map showing where this was to be. This is the existing bay bridge. And this is where Wright's design was to be, running from just about the end of Army Street over to Alameda. But the state agency in charge of such projects rejected the design as being too radical and untested. Nevertheless, Wright continued to promote it over the next several years. And in 1953, he constructed an impressive model of the central section, which he presented at a large public event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which at that time was in the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Civic Center. The model then stayed there and was seen by many more people, including groups of school children, as we can see here. Then the model was exhibited in other places in the San Francisco area, such as the Emporium Department Store. And in this photograph we see, this is Aaron Green, but this is George Christopher, Mayor Christopher, who was a big supporter of this project. And then exhibited at the Stonestown Shopping Center, and here we see it at Stonestown. Well, Wright's presentation of the design at that Civic Center event was widely reported in the press. And let me read from the Chronicles story about it, which gives an idea of the enthusiasm the public had for Wright's works. It also gives an idea of the exuberant and dramatic flair that Wright himself had in promoting these projects. I'll just show one another view where we see the model as well as that drawing, which was also on exhibit at this event in the Civic Center, 1953. Well, here's part of the article that was in the Chronicle about this event. Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled a model of his butterfly bridge for the San Francisco Bay last night with a flight of rhetoric as soaring as the bridge's great arches. He said, here is your bridge, steal the sinews, buried in the flesh, concrete. He's describing reinforced concrete there. A bridge for all time, no upkeep ever needed. And then going back to the article, the audience that jammed the San Francisco Museum of Art to see and touch the 16 foot model of the bridge was appropriately uplifted. The 535 seats in the main auditorium were sold out. Another 500 listeners applauded Wright's words in an overflow gallery and an estimated 500 more sprawled on the marble floors with their ears cocked to amplifiers. Wright called his bridge, this concatenation, this wedding of two materials, an eternal bridge in which the water becomes with the bridge a great element of beauty. We can't go on building bridges that are the equivalent of poles and wires. He's referring to trust bridges and suspension bridges, which he thought this would be a better type of bridge. And above all, we can't have this obstreperous interference in the name of science into the realm of beauty. He's talking about the state engineers who rejected his design. Mopping his brow with an enormous handkerchief, Wright said, you are citizens, all of you, aren't you? Divorce the bridge from politics. Stop worrying about Oakland. Get out and build it yourselves. He was a real showman. By the way, that reference to Oakland was because Wright's design for this butterfly bridge had been received very enthusiastically in San Francisco, but a different site for the bridge was favored in the East Bay for various reasons. Well, in more recent years, Wright's butterfly bridge has been re-proposed on several occasions. For example, after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 when the famous bridge designer T.Y. Lynn examined the design, Wright's design, and said he thought it was structurally feasible. And Jerry Brown, when he was a mayor of Oakland, said, it's a fantastic design. If we had this bridge leading into Oakland, it would be a major boon. People from all over the world would come to drive across it. So by then, it was appreciated in Oakland too. Like so many of Wright's buildings and projects, this bridge looks as advanced and amazing today, I think, as when it was proposed more than 50 years ago and even longer ago in the case of other designs of Wright's. For example, his C. Cliff house for the Morris's more than 70 years ago, or his radical hexagonal house for the Hanna's at Stanford 80 years ago, or his call building skyscraper for Market Street more than 100 years ago. Well, I hope I've been able to suggest the really remarkable qualities and diversity of Wright's Bay Area works and some of the fascinating aspects of his relationship with San Francisco. Thank you.