The Mysterious Mr. Storrer

I was cruising through the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy's chat site, when I came across a message that made my jaw drop. A user posted a message he received from author and scholar, William Allin Storrer, that is sure to rattle a lot of cages in the Wright-world...

The cryptic message user DRN received in his email stated:

"Next week everything you thought you knew about Frank Lloyd Wright changes.

Check out Pulitzer prize-winning architecture critic and writer Blair Kamin’s article in the Sunday July 6 CHICAGO TRIBUNE.

Then, on Monday the 7th, check out FrankLloydWrightInfo.com for the rest of the story. The Rediscovering Wright Project.

Prairie was a failure; American, not Democratic. Where is Wright’s first Democratic community? From whom did he get his first architectural ideas and how did he develop them?

A new era in Wrightian studies begins in one week from today."

Whoa! Sounds like the DaVinci Code or something. Of course I immediately went to Mr. Storrer's website and read the following statement:

"So you thought every Frank Lloyd Wright building had been found. Wrong. For the past decade, most often with colleagues Richard Johnson and Daniel Watts, have been following up on a statement made to me by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. He was working on the Foreword to the original The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, a complete Catalog as I was perusing his materials for In the Nature of Materials, and one day commented, "Wright would drive me through Evanston and Oak Park and Hyde Park and every so often he'd point to a house and say, 'I did that one but no one will ever know.'" Well, now we know. Over the next several months our researches will be revealed...

...THREE DOZEN OR SO NEVER BEFORE CATALOGED AND HITHERTO UNKNOWN WRIGHT STRUCTURES. WATCH FOR THE PRESS RELEASE IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST."

Needless to say we'll stay on top of this story as it develops. I'm intrigued to find out the list of these previously unlisted FLW structures and how they stayed a secret for so long. Stay tuned!

Comments

[Marty Hackl]

Those guys are nutcases, you know. I would take anything from them with a grain of salt.

Several years ago, Rich Johnson was throwing a lot of things at me, trying to get me to corroborate several of his "discoveries", in this case, of "undiscovered" John Van Bergen designs on the North Shore and Evanston -- based, it seems, on nothing other that he wanted to write a book on undiscovered Prairie School buildings, and make his way into the academic world as an "Architectural historian" somehow by the back door.

I took the time to examine everything he showed me, and found that every one was completely frivolous and without any documentation whatsoever, or when scant documentation existed, showed that there was no basis. For example, building permit dates, for a "Van Bergen" design predated his becoming an architect in 1911 by several years.

And Johnson's lack of understanding and inability to recognize individual characteristics of the different Prairie School architects, convinced me that, at best, he was an amateur, like myself.

When I explained things to him, and described certain consistent characteristics of Van Bergen's work that would help in identifying his buildings, and would not support Johnson's weak "research", I never heard from him again.

So, it seems, he teamed up with Storrer. Birds of a feather. (Music from the "Twilight Zone" playing in the background.)