when architects were like baseball players...

in 1962, the topps company, manufacturer of baseball cards and bazooka bubble gum, created a "non-sport" bubble gum card set called famous americans, featuring numerous personalities from american history. one of the stranger inclusions was a card featuring frank lloyd wright.

it is easy to imagine kids coveting a sandy koufax or a mickey mantle, and perhaps even a card with someone like george washington; but i would imagine when a kid, in 1962, opened a pack of bubble gum cards and discovered a card with frank lloyd wright on it, he simply sighed, and thought "huh?"...

seeing as every young boy has dreamt of one day seeing himself on a baseball card, i kind of feel sorry for wright, as the set containing his image hit the dime stores and newsstands 3 years after he'd died.

at one point, maybe 8-10 years ago, the topps company began to sell their own archive of original art for numerous sports and non-sport sets. having been a voracious card collector when i was a kid, i was constantly watching to see what they might pull out and sell, hoping to win a piece of art of some sacred collected object i had as a kid. unfortunately not much from that era came out, and most of what did, was insanely expensive.

while it came from a set that was released a few years before i was born, i was intrigued by the wright art, because i believe he was the only architect to ever appear on a bubble gum card; but because there are a ton of folks who collect wright related ephemera, i couldn't imagine being able to buy it... i figured it would sell for crazy money.

fortunately, the bubble gum card collecting community had little love for architects, and not another soul was interested; and so, i managed to win it for a song.

the artwork, and the card which was eventually printed from it, is a rare object, merging bubble gum, baseball cards, and architecture. it is a kind of collision two of my childhood and post-childhood ( i would hesitate to use the word "adult") obsessions. the funny thing is that if i had been born a few years earlier, and was old enough to be buying baseball cards in 1962, i can imagine opening a pack of gum cards expecting to see a ballplayer, and pulling out this card with wright on it, and caring more about the piece of bubble gum...

when one attempts a vision of harmonies...

"when we perceive a thing to be beautiful, it is because we instinctively recognize the rightness of the thing. this means we have revealed to us a glimpse of something essentially of the fibre of our own nature... a flash of truth stimulates us, and we have a vision of harmonies not understood to-day, though perhaps to be to-morrow."

images from taliesin west taken with my phone, text from frank lloyd wright circa 1910 from frank lloyd wright essential texts, edited by robert twombly.

the architect as hot-rodder...

i discovered this image of the eames house in reyner banham's 1962 "guide to modern architecture". i'd never seen this image before, with charles' notations referencing a manufacturer's standard window sizes (the house was mainly built without any custom materials)... it's certainly a beautiful thing... (and one more potential score?).

banham has a special way of writing about architecture, as you can see here by his description of eames and the eames house: to many thinking men, frank lloyd wright was never the all-american architect of his own image of himself. he never appeared as much at ease in the real america as in the america of some splendid usonian dream, and - in some curious ways - he trailed a whiff of the european meisterschule of the high romantic period. charles eames, for all his internationalism and lack of whitmanesque ham, is as american as cambell soup. for all his love of things european and oriental he handles power tools and catalogued components like a hot-rodder born, and his own house, spare and elegant, square and ineloquent, is american like a shaker chair or a trestle bridge."