Glamorous cars like those displayed at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in northern Indiana often ended up in the garages of celebrities. I knew about the popularity of the Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles among famous Hollywood stars of the 1930s, but learning about famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright's reputation as a "car guy" was an unexpected and fascinating surprise for me.
I spotted a small exhibit of Frank Lloyd Wright drawings near a brilliant red-orange 1929 Cord L-29 Cabriolet on one of the museum's upper levels during our recent visit there. Given my latent leanings as a gearhead and frustrated architect, the exhibit aroused my curiosity.
It turns out that the great architect had a real fascination with cars--a fascination that informed many of his designs. He even attempted to design a few cars!
This ACD exhibit of 50 authentic and authorized Wright prints continues through October 25, 2009. The Cord automobile is part of the museum's permanent collection.
The prints come from the trust operating Samara, a Lafayette, Indiana home designed by Wright in 1954. The original owner, John Christian, still lives in the home and opens it to the public for tours, lectures and other events.
The Cord Cabriolet, or convertible, is a car originally owned by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The car is similar to the Cord L29 Phaeton Wright himself purchased in 1929 and painted the same bright Cherokee Red eventually called Taliesin Orange for the color used extensively at Wright's schools and studios in Wisconsin and Arizona.
Wright admired the Cord because of its front-wheel drive and streamline design.
The architect wrote copy for a sales catalog praising the Cord's performance on dirt, gravel and concrete roads near his Wisconsin studio. He felt front-wheel drive was more "logical and scientific" than rear-wheel drive and pronounced it "inevitable" for all future cars.
Best of all? The architect thought the car "looked becoming to the houses I design".
The 1929 Cord originally cost an average of $3,095, at a time when the average price for a Ford or Chevy was closer to $450. The museum's car weighs 4,300 pounds and has an 8-cylinder, 125 horsepower engine.
It wasn't unusual for the architect to consider how automobiles and his architecture appeared together. He often designed for and around automobiles, starting as early as 1908 in his design for the Robie House in Chicago that included a three-car garage. He also coined the word "carport" and often included these car shelters with some of his designs for more modest 1930s homes.
Wright's fascination with cars and facilitating their easy movement around buildings also influenced his design for the famous spiral ramp at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Movement between Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona drove Wright's his purchase of a car quite different from the big Cord--the quirky little compact Crosley Super Roadster.
The Crosley, like the Cord, was an Indiana-built car and the brainchild of rich radio manufacturer and owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, Powel Crosley Jr.
Crosley's car company had headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio and assembly plants in the Indiana towns of Richmond and Marion.
Considered the first modern compact car, the 4-cylinder Crosleys weighed less than 1,000 pounds and had a Crosley radio in the instrument panel.
The ACD Museum owns a two-passenger Crosley convertible originally owned by Wright and painted the signature Taliesin Orange. Wright purchased a small fleet of these tiny cars from a Madison, Wisconsin car dealer during the early 1950s.
Wright's Crosley fleet saw service most notably during twice-yearly trips between Wisconsin and Arizona. The architect, his staff and students left Taliesin in Wisconsin each fall to winter at Arizona's Taliesin West, returning to Wisconsin each spring. The trip took a week each way and the travelers camped along the way.
The Crosleys, like Wright himself, may have been a bit ahead of their time. They got 50 miles per gallon of gas, which probably wasn't that impressive to drivers in those days of cheap fuel prices.
Crosley car sales eventually tanked, and the company closed for good in 1952.
© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved
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