• Frank Lloyd Wright house tours in Oak Park

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    This Old House    ‘s terrific Hardware Aisle blog is always full of good stuff – tool and material reviews, pointers to new techniques, and last week an article on Frank Lloyd Wright house tours. Read the whole article on their site:

    Why does it captivate us to walk through the homes where legends lived or worked?

    It started with Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, then Ricky Schroder’s sweet living room on "Silver Spoons," and later the suggestive banister at Sigmund Freud’s pad.

    Come May 17, 2008 architecture devotees will flock to Oak Park, Illinois,
    which is base camp to explore a cluster of homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
    and his contemporaries.

    The homes range from a Civil War-era Italianate
    built around 1860 to the Harry S. Adams House (pictured) built in 1913-14.

  • real estate listings: MLS to RSS

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    So, obviously I’ve become a bit addicted to Yahoo Pipes. This free tool lets you aggregate, organize, and filter data from an unlimited number of RSS feeds and databases and present it in almost any kind of electronic form you can imagine.

    I’ve found a really good use for it, one which is – amazingly – missing from the vast majority of real estate listing sites. Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com and all the others: you are really letting the entire industry down by not having raw MLS data available as an RSS feed! I just could not believe that in an age when so many of us get our data on mobile devices and from feed readers that these firms wouldn’t have easily-configurable custom RSS feeds of their listings, but sure enough they don’t. Ziprealty is one of the very few to have such a useful feature, and more power to them for it.

    Using Ziprealty’s listings, house-for-sale posts on Craigslists in a dozen markets and a few other small sites here and there, I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that includes only listings self-described as "Craftsman," "Mission," "Prairie," or "bungalow." Now, if I can only figure out how to include photos of each property…

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/hewnandhammered/homesforsale

    If you are an agent, a broker or an MLS firm, please publish your data as a configurable / custom RSS feed. This way, searches that could take hours can be finished in just a minute or two, and users don’t need to revisit the sites every single day – using a service like feedburner or one of the many rss-to-email services, we can be notified only when our search criteria pop up in a market we are interested in, in our price range.

    And if you know of any listings services that do issue their data as an RSS feed, please share that info in the comments section below – I’d love to add them to the pipe. Also, let me know if you’d like me to include other cities’ Craigslist posts, I can do that pretty easily.

    If this tool is useful to you and if you think other folks might find it interesting, please digg it:


  • Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kentuck Knob (1954), Ohiopyle PA

    This wonderful FLW property – built in the "deluxe" Usonian style on a beautiful 80-acre lot – is just a few miles from Fallingwater. Along with the extensive sculpture garden, it is open for public tours.

    The House on Kentuck Knob was designed in 1954 and completed in 1956 for I. N. and Bernardine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmans, for whom Wright built Fallingwater. The home, build of tidewater cypress, glass and 800 tons of local sandstone – and a very striking copper roof – is situated in western Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, and includes a gorgeous view of the Youghiogheny River gorge and the surrounding hills.

    The Hagans lived in the house for 30 years, and sold it to Baron Peter Palumbo, an English developer, art collector and architecture conservationist, in 1986.

    • slideshow of images from Kentuck Knob and its sculpture garden, including a few of Fallingwater

    Thanks to Douglas Sanders’ wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog for reminding us of this very pretty and unique home!

  • Frank Lloyd Wright in Buffalo: a podcast conversation with Neil Levine

    Caroly Batt with the Buffalo-Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau writes to tell us about a very interesting podcast:

    Harvard University professor and noted Frank Lloyd Wright
    Scholar and author Neil Levine recently discussed Wright’s important
    architectural contributions to the Buffalo area. Buffalo is the home to many acclaimed Wright
    achievements including the Darwin Martin House Complex and Graycliff
    Estate    . The interview is available
    as an audio podcast on the Wright Now in Buffalo website.

  • Frank Lloyd Wright & the house beautiful

    From June 28 through October 8, the Portland Museum of Art is presenting a new exhibit showcasing "Frank Lloyd Wright’s passion for creating a new way of life for Americans through architecture."

    In particular, the exhibition focuses on his legendary skill in
    creating harmony between architectural structure and interior design
    while fulfilling the needs of a modern lifestyle. Featuring
    approximately 100 objects, the exhibition includes furniture,
    metalwork, textiles, drawings, and accessories from the collections of
    the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and other public and private
    collections. Curated by Dr. Virginia T. Boyd, professor at the
    University of Wisconsin-Madison, Frank Lloyd Wright and the House
    Beautiful conveys the methods through which Wright implemented the
    philosophy of the “house beautiful.” The exhibition explores how Wright
    sought to develop a modern interior reflective of a uniquely American
    spirit of democracy and individual freedom, illustrates his development
    in integrating the space with furnishings and architectural elements,
    and shows his experiments with bringing these ideas to the homes of
    average Americans.

    Several podcasts and audio programs relating to the exhibit are also available: