Photos © Mark Hertzberg (2024)

I had a half hour wait before meeting 22 guests coming from coast-to-coast to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thomas P. Hardy House on their weeklong Road Scholar tour (I am with the group as a Road Scholar guide for three days on these tours, as they travel through Racine, Milwaukee, Madison, and Spring Green). I have been in the house countless times, including leading 14 of these tours. While I try to see something new on every visit to a familiar Wright design, I did not think there was anything new to see in the house.  I had already played Wordle and my other daily games phone games. I had already looked at my emails. I plopped down in a chair in the living room and looked up. I looked up some more and then I knew what I had to do…I had to lie down on the floor and start taking pictures of the ceiling.

Then I walked over to the stairs and looked up at the second floor:

When I then went outside to greet the bus, I saw reflections of Wright’s leaded glass front hallway windows and their reflected images in a new way:

Today, as our guests toured Wright’s American System-Built duplex at 2132/34 W. Burnham Street in Milwaukee, I looked down instead of up. The duplex is being restored with help from a Save Americas Treasures grant. These are the back stairs:

On-line links:

Road Scholar’s “Architectural Masterworks of Frank Lloyd Wright tour:

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure/22976/Architectural-Masterworks-of-Frank-Lloyd-Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block:

http://wrightinmilwaukee.com

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