Friendship With Wright
Martin and Wright formed a lifelong friendship due to their similar outlooks on family. Although John D. Larkin, the company president, was unimpressed by Wright, Martin convinced Larkin to give Wright the job. By this time Martin had built a considerable fortune and asked Wright to design a house for him as well. This project would become the historic Darwin D. Martin House. Wright had complete freedom and an almost unlimited budget to execute it. Isabelle Reidpath Martin, Darwin's wife, was unhappy with the house due the limited light it received, as she was nearly blind. Darwin and Isabelle and their two children, however, would live there for over 20 years. During this time Martin's fortune continued to rise, while Wright, with whom he kept in constant contact, fell on troubled times. Martin began to lend Wright money, becoming the largest benefactor behind Wright's Taliesin. At one point Wright solicited Martin to become his business partner. Martin declined, having just retired from the Larkin Company. During a fallow period in Wright's career, Martin commissioned him to design a summer home, Graycliff, stressing that this house was to conform to Isabel's desires. The result was one of Wright's most important mid-career designs, taking extensive advantage of Graycliff's location on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie. The largest of the three buildings at Graycliff, the Isabelle R. Martin House, is transparent, allowing views of the lake through the house. Terraces and cantilevered balconies enhance the organic nature of the buildings.
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Famous quotes containing the words friendship and/or wright:
“Some friends play at friendship but a true friend sticks closer than one’s nearest kin.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 18:24.
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)