Historic Frank Lloyd Wright Framed Signed Letter Lenkurt Elec. Design Not Built

Description: It’s very historically noteworthy that in this letter, FLW strives to assure Lenkurt that in light of his age that should he "pass on", his firm was more than capable of fulfilling the the project. I believe this adds significant value to this document as he did pass away shortly thereafter. This framed and signed letter from FLW is one of the corresponds between himself and Lenkurt Electronics and frame measures 23” x 16”. A must have for any Frank Lloyd Wright collector or investor. This design has been featured in a book highlighting FLW’s best West Coast Designs and buildings written by Paul V Turner. I the book’s cover features this amazing design. The article reads: Check Out This Gorgeous, Unbuilt Tech Firm That Frank Lloyd Wright Designed For Silicon Valley23 January 2017 “The Bay Area work of the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, both the ten or so projects that were built and twenty or so more that only made it to the design or sketch phase, has now been chronicled and thoroughly documented in a new book from Yale University Press, Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco. Written by Wright scholar and emeritus professor of art at Stanford Paul V. Turner.“But probably the most wildly ambitious, beautiful, and unfortunately unbuilt of Wright's local projects, and one that could have been among his great masterworks, was the headquarters of nascent technology firm The Lenkurt Electric Company, commissioned by early Silicon Valley telecom pioneers Lennart G. Erickson and Kurt E. Appert. Lenkurt had a promising construction budget of $1,000,000 in 1955 (about $9 million in today's dollars) which quickly grew to almost double that as their construction plans expanded. They ultimately wanted an office and manufacturing facility of about 50,000 square feet on land they'd purchased in San Carlos on the Bayshore (101) freeway. Wright would devise a grand scheme based loosely on his famed Johnson Wax Company building in Racine, Wisconsin (completed in 1939), with much of the building's structure supported on a series of 240 "lily-pad" columns, with natural light allowed in across coned skylights between the columns. Different from the much smaller building in Wisconsin, this one would be raised up by the columns allowing for a one-story parking structure to occupy the entire ground level. For the project, Wright's team would draw one of his dramatically colorful nighttime renderings on black paper, as shown on the books cover, showing one side of the building flanked by a reflective moat.Ultimately, the project would prove ill-timed for the clients and possibly un-buildable for various reasons with Erickson indicating at one point that Wright's local people, including his main San Francisco architect Aaron Green, weren't capable of spearheading such a complicated project, and with Wright himself approaching 90 years old by the time construction would have been set to begin. And, by 1959, Lenkurt would be a victim of its own success, and in a great Silicon Valley tradition would get acquired by General Telephone and Electronics, allowing Erickson and Appert to retire early and abandon the building project for good. (And ultimately, Lenkurt, which made carrier equipment for telecoms, would become a division of GTE Communications, and be subsumed by Lucent in the 1990s.)” I do have another framed signed letter as well as seven other signed correspondences that are not framed the will be posted soon.

Price: 2650 USD

Location: DeKalb, Illinois

End Time: 2024-11-24T22:22:03.000Z

Shipping Cost: 85 USD