A bit belated, perhaps, but here it is: your guide to the gifts guaranteed to impress the design devotees and architecture aficionados in your life, organized into four convenient categories:

For Kids, or Kids at Heart
Workaholic Chic
Books (and One DVD)
For the Proverbial “Person Who Has It All”

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For Kids, or Kids at Heart

Muji’s City Stencil Set lets youngsters construct their own elaborate cityscape with world monuments from New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. It’s $14.75 at the Muji USA online store. Pairs nicely with the appropriately named 36 Color Pencils in Tube ($16.75).
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Technically, these Frank Lloyd Wright Lego sets are intended for children, but no doubt many architecture-minded adults would love nothing more than to spend a few hours putting together their own miniature Guggenheim ($39.99; ages 10+) or Fallingwater ($99.99; ages 16+). Note: these sets are currently on back order at Lego.com, but ShopWright.org has them in stock as of Dec. 8.

Read more…

Until recently, admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most iconic residence had to content themselves with a one- or two-hour-long group tour of the house—or, perhaps, if they were feeling spendy, a$100 ticket for Sunday brunch or sunset hors d’oeuvres. But architecture buffs with loose pockets can now go several steps further, thanks to Fallingwater’s new Insight Onsite program. Limited to eight people per session, the three-day seminars allow participants to explore Wright’s house at their own pace, quaff cocktails by the fireplace, and dine with curators on the world’s most famous cantilevered terrace (weather permitting). But the organizers stop short of letting people sleep in Fallingwater—guests are put up, instead, at a newer, four-bedroom house on the property (according to Reuters, it was built for the owners’ accountant). The price tag? $1,195 to $1,595 per person, depending on whether you share a bedroom or not. If that’s a little rich for your taste (or your bank account), may I recommend a similarly immersive, but vastly less expensive, Fallingwater experience?  Read more…

Photo: courtesy Steelcase

When Jim Hackett, Steelcase’s CEO, and James Ludwig, the company’s VP of global design, invited us—panelists and moderator—to dine at Wright’s restored Meyer May house, I felt my spine tingle. On the evening before the September 10th symposium, which focused on what today’s designers can learn from the master, I was thinking of how uncomfortable sitting in those stiff chairs would be. But instead we were all pleasantly surprised and grew to understand that Wright knew exactly how to bring people together.

With Jim and James seated at either end of the table and functioning as family patriarchs, the setting turned us into a lively group, willing to express opinions, argue (collegially, if heatedly at times), exchange ideas, and come away feeling that each of us had something to add to the discussion. Though the food, prepared with local produce, was delicious and the service courteous, we felt that it was Wright’s design that made it all work. Read more…

Meyer May photos: courtesy Steelcase

Last week I was fortunate to be in the audience at the Meyer May house anniversary symposium, a wide-ranging discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas and principles as embodied in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, house he built for the clothier Meyer May in 1909. In 1987, the local furniture behemoth Steelcase finished a meticulous two-year restoration of the house—which, among other problems, had a seriously leaky roof—and opened it up for public tours. It’s now considered perhaps the most complete distillation of Wright’s vision, and this year it turned 100 years old.

But the symposium didn’t dwell on the past. Read more…

I’ll admit that I’m often guilty of writing off women’s lives before the 1960s as little more than marriage and childbirth, save for the rare anomaly. How bracing then to learn that anomalies were the norm at Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, starting in 1895 when he hired Marion Mahony as his first associate (she subsequently became the world’s first officially licensed female architect). Mahoney and five of the 100 women that worked with Wright are the subject of the short film A Girl is a Fellow Here (a phrase Wright is known to have used), which premiered last night at the Guggenheim. The film’s genesis was the moment when the director, Beverly Willis, discovered that Isabella Roberts, who has always been listed as a bookkeeper for the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, was actually an architect. It quickly became apparent that Frank Lloyd Wright, whose personal relationships with women were famously rather scandalous, was a progressive employer. Read more…

The new Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim represents a remarkable bit of curatorial restraint on the part of the show’s organizers. Although the show takes up pretty much the entire building—starting near the bottom of the rotunda with the early Oak Park years and then ramping chronologically all the way to the top and concluding, fittingly, with the Guggenheim Museum in New York (along with a couple of unbuilt projects)—the exhibit is a mere fraction of the Wright archive.

“We have enough material in the archive to mount a show of similar scale every year for the next 110 years,” said Phil Allsopp, the president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, at a press event this morning celebrating the show’s opening. Read more…