Works
There are two houses built by William Gray Purcell for his personal residence in Minneapolis. The second was built in 1913 and called "Lake Place" by the Purcell family. Known now as the Purcell-Cutts residence, the house is maintained by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This residence is considered one of the finest achievements of any progressive firm in residential design.
His "Maryhill" in Edina, Minnesota, is interesting because of the documentation of how it was created. It was designed by Purcell in correspondence with the future owners, Paul and Mary Carson, and the 600 pieces of their correspondence are in the University of Minnesota's Architectural Archives.
Not all of Purcell's work fits in the "Prairie School" category. Several of his houses in Portland's West Hills show how he adapted his ideas to fit a more urban setting. A feature shared by one of those houses and Maryhill is a sleeping loft, but the Portland example also features a wooden carving of Nils on his goose flying out over the living room.
Read more about this topic: William Gray Purcell
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother’s in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)