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Frank Lloyd Wright commissions

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT CLIENT NAMES

Frank Lloyd Wright had 685 known clients.  A given client may have commissioned one or several projects from the architect. This search approach sorts Wright projects alphabetically by the last name of the client, and provides links to project information and all related project drawings detailed in the database. Wright also produced a great deal of work for his own purposes, essentially as his own client. References to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois, Taliesin estate at Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, as well as other more temporary residences and studios (e.g., Chicago, New York, Italy, Tokyo, Japan) will be found indexed under his own name.

Project Information

Ablin, Dr. George and Millie

House for Dr. George and Millie Ablin [Bakersfield, California] (1958)

Note: The following information concerning this project represents original research and analysis by John Geiger, and is based in his long and detailed study of the Frank Lloyd Wright literature as well as personal contacts with members of the Taliesin Fellowship and architectural historians. In addition, he added his own categories of building type and compositional form, as well as other points of consideration that he deemed important to understanding of the design. As with any primary archival source material, the references and sources of attribution should be consulted where possible to affirm the data provided. Sometimes there is an indication of attribution for which there is no matching footnote recorded. Some understanding of the intended source may be discovered in remaining notes or frequently cited publications which appear in the comment field.

Sobriquet or alternative place name: None.

Design Status (as of 2011): Executed.

Occupancy form or use: HOUSING/Residential/Single Family.

Principal building materials: MASONRY/Concrete block, regular.

Number of drawings for this project detailed in the database: 4.

Drawing Number and Description

5812.002     Site and floor plan
5812.005     Floor plan
5812.006     Elevations
Construction supervision: Olson, Thomas

Roof type: Gable.

Note: Records a category devised by Geiger to classify the types of roof structure found in Frank Lloyd Wright projects. These terms were applied consistently through a choice list on Column [ROOFTYPE] in Table MMTFDRAWINGS FILE, and may be searched.

Project Drawing Date Range

Note: Dates for preliminary and working drawings, as well as the start and completion of construction, appear here only when present in the database. Through careful study of original, reproduced, or published Wright drawings, John Geiger developed an elaborate granulation for design process dates and their attributions. Such information is largely available only for Wright projects dating from the mid-1930s until 1959. Sources were often footnoted by an alphanumeric system, but the references are sometimes missing from the locations where they were intended to be recorded; the relationship between footnote letter or numeral and reference is absent. In order to retain the presence of available information, citations are here shown grouped together in one comment field. Some understanding of the intended source may be discovered in remaining notes or frequently cited publications which appear in the comment field. The relevance of references provided by John Geiger can often be recovered through examination of the publications used in his research.See the list of principal bibliographical sources used for this purpose.

Date recorded by John Geiger for chronological sorting: December 1, 1958.

Notes and References

Comments by John Geiger and/or sources of attribution: (a) GEO5812 A house is a house, is a house, and this is just a house. Geiger 09/15/00.

Note: The information shown above is collected from a series of data table columns intended originally to record not only comments or notes, but also to cite sources of attribution for dates assigned to the various stages of drawing preparation in the design process. As with any primary archival source material, the references and sources of attribution shown here should be consulted where possible to affirm the data provided.

This commission is referenced and/or illustrated in the following publications:

Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1951-1959 (Volume 8). Tokyo: A. D. A. Edita. [ISBN: 4-87140-519-2].
Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Complete Works 1943-1959 (Volume 3). Cologne, Germany: Taschen. [ISBN: 978-8228-5770-0].