Larkin Administration Building - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Larkin Building was designed in 1904

1904 in architecture

The year 1904 in architecture involved some significant events.-Buildings:* The Bergeret House in Nancy is completed by Lucien Weissenburger, with ironwork by Louis Majorelle, interior paintings by Victor Prouvé, stained glass by Jacques Gruber, and woodwork by Eugène Vallin.* The Villa des...

by Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...

and built in 1906 for the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

. The five story dark red brick building used pink tinted mortar and utilized steel frame construction. It was noted for many innovations, including air conditioning, stained glass

Stained glass

The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...

windows, built-in desk furniture, and suspended toilet bowls. Though this was an office building, it still caught the essence of Frank Lloyd Wright's type of architecture. Sculptor Richard Bock

Richard Bock

Richard W. Bock was an American sculptor and associate of Frank Lloyd Wright.He was particularly known for his sculptural decorations for architecture and military memorials, along with the work he conducted alongside Wright....

provided ornamentation for the building.

Located at 680 Seneca Street, the Larkin Building was demolished in 1950

1950 in architecture

The year 1950 in architecture involved some significant events.-Buildings:*Alas Building completed in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The tallest building in Buenos Aires between 1950 and 1996, surpassed by the Le Parc tower....

History

The Larkin Soap Company was founded in Buffalo in 1875. Among the principals were John D. Larkin, Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Green Hubbard was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he met early success as a traveling salesman with the Larkin soap company. Today Hubbard is mostly known as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an...

, and Darwin D. Martin

Darwin D. Martin

Darwin D. Martin was an early 20th Century New York State businessman best known for the house he commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright.-Early life:...

. By the early years of the twentieth century, the company expanded beyond soap manufacturing into groceries, dry goods, china, and furniture. Larkin became a pioneering, national mail-order house with branch stores in Buffalo, New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

and Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. At the time it commissioned its headquarters, Larkin was prosperous and the high price for a well-designed, innovative building was not a barrier. Due to their growth, the company decided to expand its complex in Buffalo, New York in 1902. The company, known for its generous corporate culture, also commissioned Wright to design row houses for its workers, which were never built.

Design

Exterior details of the 200 feet (61 m) by 134 feet (40.8 m) building were executed in red sandstone; the entrance doors, windows, and skylights were of glass. Floors, desktops, and cabinet tops were covered with magnesite for sound absorption. For floors, magnesite

Magnesite

Magnesite is magnesium carbonate, MgCO3. Iron substitutes for magnesium with a complete solution series with siderite, FeCO3. Calcium, manganese, cobalt, and nickel may also occur in small amounts...

was mixed with excelsior and poured, and troweled like cement, over a layer of felt to impart its resiliency. Magnesite was also used for sculptural decoration on the piers surrounding the light court and for panels and beams around the executive offices at the south end of the main floor. Wright designed much of the furniture. The interior walls were made of semi-vitreous, hard, cream colored brick. A 76 feet (23.2 m) light court was located in the center of the building which provided natural sunlight to all of the floors. Between its support piers ran fourteen sets of three inspiration words each, such as: GENEROSITY ALTRUISM SACRIFICE, INTEGRITY LOYALTY FIDELITY, IMAGINATION JUDGEMENT INITIATIVE, INTELLIGENCE ENTHUSIASM CONTROL, CO-OPERATION ECONOMY INDUSTRY.

Architectural historian Vincent Scully, Jr. wrote of the structure:

"Vertical brick piers and wall planes... made possible the splendid integration of space, structure, and massing which Wright achieved in the Larkin Company Office Building at Buffalo, of 1904. In space the building was conceived of as facing inward, with a glass-roofed central hall rising the entire height and with horizontal office floors woven around it. The pattern of piers and walls which makes these spaces is clearly unified in both plan and section. The vertical piers rise uninterruptedly inside, and the horizontal planes of the office floors are kept back from their edges, so that they seem, once more, to be woven through them. Stairways are grouped in vertical shells of wall at the four corners of the building, which then reveals all these articulations upon its exterior: the big piers, the smaller ones between them, the horizontal spandrels and the corner towers, expressed purely as free-standing space containers at the edges of the main, interwoven mass... Entrance was at the side, under a portal set back between the main mass and the thin, subsidiary office block, from the end of which a metallic sheet of water sprang. Here Wright achieved one of the first of his monumental spatial sequences. The exterior is challenging and rather forbidding, but it tells us that something is contained inside. Entrance to it must be sought. It is finally found in the dark place behind the fountain. The block is thus penetrated surreptitiously as it were, and essentially from below. The advance is from outer light toward interior dimness beyond which, to the left, somewhat more light could be perceived filtering down between the central piers. These then rise up toward their rich capitals in a climactic spatial expansion, lighted from above as in Roman buildings and creating, as those also did, an idealized interior space cut off from the world outside. At the same time, the stiff verticals of the interior of the Larkin Building continued to recall the challenge of the exterior, so that the occupant could not feel himself to be simply inside a shell. The sequence was an emotional one and a progress: challenge, bafflement, compression, search, and finally, surprise, release, transformation, and recall. It was almost a Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

progression, but its methods were stiffer and harder, befitting the industrial program which they praised. Significantly enough, the building also recalled the Romantic-Classic projects of the first revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, particularly in the harshness of its forms but even in the rather underscaled world globes which were flaunted upon its exterior."

Wright said of the building:

"It is interesting that I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under), and adopted many other innovations like the glass door, steel furniture, air-conditioning and radiant or 'gravity heat.' Nearly every technological innovation used today was suggested in the Larkin Building in 1904." — Frank Lloyd Wright as quoted by Kaufmann, Edgar, ed. An American Architecture, pp. 137-138.

Decline and demolition

In 1939 the Larkin Company made interior modifications and moved retail operations into the building. In 1943, the firm's fortunes were in decline and it was forced to try to sell the building. Never recovering from the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

and changes in American retailing, the firm eventually declared bankruptcy.

Wright's Administration building was foreclosed upon for back taxes in 1945 by the city of Buffalo. The city tried to sell the building over the next five years and considered other reuses. In 1949 the building was sold to the Western Trading Corporation, who announced plans to demolish it for a truck stop. It did so in 1950

1950 in architecture

despite protests from the architectural community. No truck stop ever materialized. A single brick pier along a railroad embankment is all that remains from Wright's original building. The remainder of the site is now a parking lot with a marker and an illustrated educational panel.

On November 16, 1949, architect J. Stanley Sharp stated in the New York Herald-Tribune:

"As an architect, I share the concern of many others over the destruction of Frank Lloyd Wright's world-famous office building in Buffalo. it is not merely a a matter of sentiment; from a practical standpoint this structure can function efficiently for centuries. modern engineering has improved upon the lighting and ventilation systems Mr. Wright used, but that is hardly excuse enough to efface the work of the man who successfully pioneered in the solving of such problems. The Larkin Building set a precedent for many an office building we admire today and should be regarded not as an outmoded utilitarian structure but as a monument, if not to Mr. Wright's creative imagination, to the inventiveness of American design."

"The destruction of all but one pillar of the Larkin Administration Building is tragic in the architecture community. Hopefully in the future we will consider the value of a significant building such as this, and work to preserve it."

Hydraulics neighborhood, present day

A large portion of the Larkin company's extensive manufacturing and distribution complex has survived. The 600,000 sq ft Larkin Terminal Warehouse

Larkin Terminal Warehouse

The Larkin Terminal Warehouse is located at 726 Exchange Street, Buffalo, New York in a neighborhood known as the "Hydraulics". The neighborhood was one of Buffalo's earliest industrial districts and it derived its name from the construction of a small hydraulic canal...

, not designed by Wright, was successfully renovated and converted into Class A office space in 2002. The Larkin U Building at 239 Rensselaer street was converted into Class A office space in 2011. The Larkin Factory Complex Buildings (The Seneca Industrial Center) at 701 Seneca Street is slated for a residential conversion, while a number of other Larkin buildings as well as the streetscape continue to see investment.

Extensive Larkin Company records and photographs survive in the library collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

External links

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