New Wright House Opens In Western Penn.

 

 

AP — NEW WRIGHT HOUSE OPENS IN WESTERN PENN.

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By Ramit Plushnick-Masti

Associated Press Writer

ACME, PENN. (AP) — Western Pennsylvania has long been home to two of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s best known works, Kentuck Knob and Fallingwater. Now, a third Wright creation, the Duncan House, has been moved here from Lisle, Ill., offering visitors a broad architectural experience — tours of two impressive homes and an overnight stay in a 1950s-era house.

Each of the homes is a different style, providing an overview of the artists’ work in a 30-mile radius, making it one of just about a dozen places nationwide where several Wright buildings are on display in a concise area. Duncan House is one of only six Wright homes nationwide open to overnight guests.

“This is the trinity for us,’’ said Patricia Coyle, director of marketing at Kentuck Knob. “We sell fantasy here because people come through here and they are transcended from their every day life into Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision.’’

Fallingwater, designed for the Kaufmann family of the department store fortune, is an upscale home that cost $155,000 in 1937, or $2.1 million today. The house’s concrete terraces flow over and alongside the Bear Run waterfall, giving the appearance that it is one with nature.

Currently maintained and run by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Fallingwater gets more than 120,000 visitors annually. Last December, actress Angelina Jolie surprised boyfriend Brad Pitt with a visit to the home for his birthday.

At a time when Wright had become known as the “old man of modern architecture,’’ Fallingwater broke a ten-year lull in his work, tour guide Louise Dean shouts over the roar of the nearby waterfall.

Fallingwater made Wright popular again, and he went on to design another 200 buildings, among those Kentuck Knob and Duncan House.

Located just seven miles from Fallingwater, Kentuck Knob was built in 1956 for the Hagans, who owned the largest dairy farm west of the Alleghenies. The home is considered a higher-end Usonian, a name coined by the architect for works aimed at the middle class.

The stone house with its copper roof has a hexagonal theme. The six-sided shape aligns the overhangs and fills the skylights as the house stands in grand style over the Youghiogheny River gorge.

Wright, who was working on 12 other projects at the time, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, visited the property only once for three hours while it was being built. He designed the entire structure by looking at topographic maps and interviewing the Hagans.

The home opened to visitors 11 years ago, when Lord Peter Palumbo, the current owner, sought a way to maintain the house he bought for $600,000 in 1986. Palumbo, a friend of the late Princess Diana and Great Britain’s royal family, put a massive sculpture garden on the property, including two pieces of the Berlin Wall.

Just 15 miles from there — but about a 30-minute drive along winding mountain roads — is the Duncan House. A more modest, prefabricated Usonian, it is one of only nine of this type ever built.

Carefully reconstructed on the 125-acre Polymath Park Resort, the home opened in June to overnight guests, nearly a year after the grueling process of putting it back together began.

“Every day was problem-solving really ... The challenge was not only rebuilding a house built 50 years earlier, but one that had fallen into disrepair,’’ said Laura Nesmith, the resort’s director, explaining that many parts had to be refurbished as construction was in process.

Since it opened, the house has been a raging success. Overnight stays are already booked straight through Thanksgiving.

“A lot of these people, their life dream is to see Fallingwater and they can’t sit and they can’t touch and then they come here and they can lay on the couch, and they love it,’’ Nesmith said.

Spacious, bright and affordable at $47,000 — or about $350,000 today — Duncan House is a perfect example of Wright’s attempt to allow the middle-class family to leave what he called “the box.’’ Fifty years after it was originally built, the home remains modern.

The exterior is adorned with stripes in Cherokee red — Wright’s signature color. The interior remains true to the year it was built, 1957: The kitchen has red Formica countertops, the appliances are original, the doors open accordion-style, the walls are bleached mahogany.

Yet the one-story design — featuring large windows, cathedral-style ceilings, a three-step drop to the living room, a carport door leading to the kitchen and master bedroom’s glass shower stall — is evidence that today’s ranch homes are direct descendants of Wright’s Usonians.

“If you looked at all three of these houses you could see how Wright responded to a wealthy client, an upper middle-class client and a middle-class family,’’ said Lynda Waggoner, director of Fallingwater. “It gives you a spectrum of his work.’’

 

AP — PENN MUSEUM PUTS PANAMANIAN TREASURES ON VIEW

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By Joann Loviglio

Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. (AP) — Visitors to a new exhibit of dazzling gold artifacts and other ancient treasures have a fickle river in central Panama to thank for it.

When the Rio Grande de Cocle changed course in the early 1900s, a tantalizing cache of golden beads and pottery pieces washed upon its banks. Mysterious accounts of a river flowing with gold enticed a University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology excavation team to the site in 1940.

There, they uncovered the cemetery of a thriving pre-Columbian settlement previously unknown to historians and dating from approximately 700 to 900. About 150 of the most important artifacts they excavated are on display at the museum’s “River of Gold.’’

“There have been a lot of excavations in Panama since then,’’ said Pamela Jardine, curator of the exhibit. “But no one has ever come up with another of these large graves.’’

Archaeologists from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum first visited the site in Sitio Conte, Panama, about 100 miles west of Panama City, in the 1930s. The Conte family, who owned the land, invited Harvard and Penn archaeologists to the site after realizing the significance of the treasures the shifting river was pushing to the surface.

Buried on and around the three-tier gravesite’s 1,000-year-old skeletons were gold pendants, bracelets, beads and small chest plates. The level of artistry and technical prowess astonished the archaeologists, Jardine said.

Most of the artifacts discovered during the Penn Museum’s 1940 excavation feature motifs of animals or animal-human hybrids that likely served as family insignia or battle emblems.

Archaeologists, short on money and pressed for time with the rainy season approaching, unearthed thousands of items in just three months.

Chest plates and arm cuffs, worn in battle and at burial, were created from hammered gold sheet. Some employed the repousse metalworking technique, in which a relief design is created on the front of a piece by hammering on the reverse side.

Pendants, bangles and other pieces feature finely detailed faces and ornamentation made by the lost-wax casting method — a complex process still in use today — of gold/ copper alloy with precious and semiprecious stones, animal teeth and bones, and ivory.

“They’re not artists just starting out; they were very sophisticated,’’ Jardine said. “Looking at the pieces, I also like to think that they were having fun with what they were doing.’’

The burial site, remarkably undiscovered by Spanish conquistadors who effectively decimated the native population in the Sixteenth Century, contained 23 skeletons wearing and surrounded by mortuary objects that allowed researchers to determine their social status. The commoners were buried with less gold than the high chief and others of the elite class — including his wife and the warriors he led in battle.

“Think about gold: It’s got amazing strength, it doesn’t tarnish, the way it shines in the sun,’’ Jardine said. “It made them almost supernatural.’’

After its Philadelphia run ends December 16, “River of Gold’’ departs for a two-year tour to Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, La.; The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; Frank H. McClung Museum in Knoxville, Tenn.; Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Neb.; and Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Mich.

AP — VIENNA MUSEUM: NO NEW CONTRACT

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By William J. Kole

Associated Press Writer

VIENNA, AUSTRIA (AP) — The Austrian Culture Ministry will not renew a contract for the embattled director of Vienna’s prestigious Art History Museum, where a Renaissance figurine valued at $69.3 million was brazenly stolen in 2003.

Culture Minister Claudia Schmied said in a recent statement that Wilfried Seipel’s contract would not be extended when it expires on December 31, 2008. She said the search for a successor would begin in October or November.

Although Schmied praised Seipel for his 17-year leadership of Austria’s most renowned gallery — known in German as the Kunsthistoriches Museum — he has been fiercely criticized for lax security that authorities say the thief easily exploited.

The thief, Robert Mang, was sentenced last autumn to four years in prison for stealing the Sixteenth Century gold plated “Saliera,’’ or salt cellar, by Florentine master Benvenuto Cellini.

Investigators recovered the figurine after Mang led them to the forest outside Vienna where he had buried it, but the case triggered a national debate over whether the Austrian capital’s famed museums have proper security.

Schmied, noting that Seipel will reach retirement age at the end of 2009, credited him with “leaving a significant mark’’ on the downtown museum.

Seipel, 63, told Austrian media late Tuesday he considered the decision a “clean and normal solution’’ and said an extension “would only have caused argument.’’

“We have the stormy times behind us,’’ the Austria Press Agency and public broadcaster ORF quoted him as saying.

Housed since 1891 in a massive stone edifice on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, the museum boasts one of the world’s most impressive collections of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculptures and other treasures, as well as numerous works from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Schmied said the decision not to extend Seipel’s contract was made “with the highest mutual appreciation of everyone involved.’’

But Seipel had come under intense public pressure to resign after the high-profile May 2003 “Saliera’’ heist.

Numerous members of parliament called on Seipel to step down, arguing that his poor management ultimately was to blame for the theft. At one point, Seipel did offer his resignation, but then-Culture Minister Elisabeth Gehrer refused to accept it, saying museum guards were responsible.

Mang had testified that his theft was “child’s play’’ because the museum lacked bulletproof glass and relied on obsolete security cameras and outmoded motion detectors.

The thief climbed scaffolding to reach the second floor of the museum, where he got in by smashing a window, then broke open a glass showcase, removed the figurine and apparently left the way he came.

Museum officials said guards heard an alarm but discounted it as false.

AP — ICONIC CYCLORAMA AT GETTYSBURG IS GETTING NEW HOME, RESTORATION

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By Martha Raffaele

Associated Press Writer

GETTYSBURG, PENN. (AP) — Slowly but surely, a 123-year-old oil painting designed to place viewers in the middle of the climactic, ill-fated Confederate assault on Union Army troops during the Battle of Gettysburg is returning to its former glory in a new home.

A team of conservators has begun installing the 14 original sections that comprise French artist Paul D. Philippoteaux’s 360-degree canvas inside a museum and visitor center under construction at Gettysburg National Military Park.

The canvas has been cleaned and is being mended before each section is hoisted into place with a system of ropes and pulleys. The conservators work atop a temporary platform in the gallery, kneeling on rubber mats and leaving their shoes off to protect the material.

The final phase will include painting in a swath of sky that was trimmed from the original 1884 cycloramic painting — pieces of it had been used over the years to patch holes — and filling in damaged areas.

“To get it to this point is really a miracle,’’ said Maura Duffy, a senior conservator working on the project. “Most of the things I’ve worked on that are large ... have been murals, and they’re attached to walls, so they’re stable. This is hanging on its own.’’

The cyclorama restoration began in 2003 as part of a broader fundraising campaign to improve the national park, which attracts nearly two million tourists annually. The $103 million museum and visitor center is expected to open in April. The cyclorama, which accounts for $11 million of the cost, will be on public display next September.

It depicts Pickett’s Charge, the dramatic Union Army stand against the Confederate troops on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, the final day of battle. Philippoteaux, aided by several assistants, based his work on hundreds of battlefield sketches he made, a series of panoramic photographs and interviews with battle veterans.

The cyclorama was first exhibited in Boston, then shipped to other cities and later cut into sections for display in a New Jersey department store. The National Park Service purchased the painting in 1942 and moved it to a new visitor center in 1962, but officials discovered the facility was far from ideal, park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon said.

“There was a big flat roof that we could not stop from leaking,’’ Lawhon said. “The painting also was not properly hung — it was stretched at the top, but allowed to hang loose at the bottom, like a shower curtain.’’

In the new facility, the painting will be displayed in its original hyperbolic shape, meaning the canvas will be stretched at the top and bottom to form a cylinder curved inward, creating a more three-dimensional effect.

In the process of removing grime and materials such as wax that were applied to strengthen the canvas, conservators discovered that previous repair efforts resulted in some embellishments, Duffy said. One area that originally showed a young boy holding one end of a stretcher was painted over to depict him carrying buckets instead, and a tree was added to cover one damaged area, she said.

“The tree’s not supposed to be there, so we took that off,’’ Duffy said.

David L. Olin, the project’s lead conservator, said the original painting has held up remarkably well, considering its age and the punishment it has taken over the years. It even survived two storage-shed fires.

“It’s deteriorated, but given what it’s been through, I’ve seen a whole lot worse,’’ Olin said. “I like to think about the fact that we have gotten to the painting in time to avoid the inevitable.’’