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When you think of New York architecture, Lake Erie isn’t the first place that comes to mind. While many of the state’s grand structures, from the iconic Empire State Building to the unexpected Campbell Apartment bar in Grand Central Station, are in New York City, a trip further upstate will reveal unexpected architectural brilliance.
In the early part of the 1900s, Frank Lloyd Wright began making a name for himself by creating revolutionary designs for homes. While his buildings span across the United States as beacons of a new homegrown modernist design aesthetic, some of his earliest buildings – and those of his predecessors and followers – are concentrated in Upstate New York. While embarking on an architectural viewing trip might bring back bad memories from grade school, for those with an interest in modern design, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust’s Wrightway Tours are a rare treat.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a pioneer in the field of American architecture. He epitomized the Prairie shcool, which featured clean modernist lines, and later gave way to his Usonian buildings, small middle-class homes built for the new 1930s-era US. While his most famous work – the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which itself is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – might be another in the grandiose panorama of New York City, the only way to fully appreciate his work is to find the beauty he found in simpler places.
For this, Wrightway bases the tour near Buffalo, New York, a place that both influenced Wright and later became home to some of his finest works. Travelers on the excursion will stay, for example, in East Aurora’s Roycroft Inn, built in 1897 by Elbert Hubbard. Hubbard was a local entrepreneur and an aesthetically-minded eccentric who founded the Roycroft community of artists to celebrate the emerging Arts and Crafts movement in the United States. There are 14 original Roycroft buildings left, including the inn, where Hubbard published two magazines and extolled the virtues of the design movement.
While Hubbard’s inn is the perfect home base, there is much else to see. In one of several more surprises of architectural beauty in Buffalo, New York, the first day’s excursion begins with Adler and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building and H.H. Richardson’s Richardson Towers, prominent architects who gave rise to Wright’s ingenuity. Sullivan, in fact, has been called the “father of modernism” and was known to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor.
From there, the trip moves on to Frank Lloyd Wright’s own masterpieces, beginning with the Darwin Martin Complex, Wright’s summer home. The trip culminates with a visit to Graycliff, a home built in 1926 that, many critics argue, signals the architect’s transition from Prairie-style homes to his later work in concrete and his interest in ecological architecture.
