A Dog House by Frank Lloyd Wright
Jim Berger was 12 years old in 1956 when he put pencil to paper, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked a favor.
He had a paper route, he said, and hoped that the architect might design for Eddie, his black Lab, a house “which would be easy to build and would go with our house.” His father had commissioned Wright to design a house in 1952, and would spend 20 years building it in San Anselmo, Calif.
Wright wrote back. A dog house for Eddie would be “an opportunity,” he responded. “Someday I may design one, but just now I’m too busy to concentrate on it. You write me next November to Phoenix, Arizona and I may have something then.”
Berger complied, and sure enough received a full set of working drawings for a triangular-shaped dog house of four square feet, to be built of the mahogany and cedar scraps left over from the main house.
“It looks like a Star Wars cruiser,” says Michael Miner, who’s taking a reconstructed version of the original on a coast-to-coast tour to promote Romanza, his film on Wright’s work in California. “Frankly, it’s the best story ever about Wright. People think he was this curmudgeonly old architect, but here he was, breaking down and doing something wonderful for a 12-year-old.”
Berger would grow up to join the army, and never build the dog house. But his father and brother took up the project, completing it in 1963. After his father died in 1973, Jim’s mother would take it to the dump and discard it.
“Then it occurred to me in 2010 to ask if it might be rebuilt,” Miner says. “So Jim and his brother Eric built it exactly to Mr. Wright’s specifications. They finished it in the fall of 2010.” Miner filmed the constuction process, and included it in Romanza.
The new dog house will likely prove more popular than the original, which was shunned by Eddie and all subsequent dogs. “He didn’t like it – he liked to sleep by the warmth coming out of the front door,” he says.
Even the new little house suffers from that complaint common to many of Wright’s larger designs:
“Yes, it does leak,” Miner acknowledges.
For more on Michael Miner and Romanza, go to: http://www.designedbyfranklloydwright.com/
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I loved this one…great story.
I’ve heard lots of stories about renowned architects… this is probably the best! Maybe because I love both dogs and Frank Lloyd Wright so much
Love the low woof line. A classic design that went deservedly and instantly to the dogs.
You can’t blame the dog for not using his FLW doghouse…..it leaked!!
I certainly was not on my wife’s good side that evening I brought home that precious little stray dog. I probably should have talked to her first before I decided to bring him home. Once she calmed down I reasoned with her and she agreed to keep our new friend as long as he remained an outdoor dog. I couldn’t believe it, I just picked this poor homeless dog up off of the street and now he has to sleep in the back yard. With that said I immediately started looking at dog house plans and preparing for the construction of his new home.