Talk by T. Gunny Harboe, FAIA (Harboe Architects)
The Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer Lecture

Monday, November 16, 2015
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: MoMA, The Celeste Bartos Theater

Co-sponsored by Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and The Museum of Modern Art

Taliesin West was established in 1937 as Wright’s winter home, studio and campus for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation recently released the Preservation Master Plan for this U.S. National Historic Landmark. Gunny Harboe, preservation architect and founder of Chicago-based Harboe Architects, and the plan’s primary author, will present the major tenants of the Taliesin West plan. Mr. Harboe has overseen preservation of some of Wright’s most significant sites including the Robie House and Unity Temple.

The Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer lecture series honors the work of Mr. Pfeiffer, a widely recognized expert on Wright and author of numerous books on Wright’s life and works. Mr. Pfeiffer studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale de Beaux Arts and was  apprentice to Wright from 1949-1959, and to Olgivanna Lloyd Wright from 1959-1987.

Upon Wright’s death in 1959, Mrs. Wright gathered the archive of his work at Taliesin West, thereby preserving and keeping intact the visual and textual legacy of one of history’s great architectural geniuses. It was an unprecedented action, since architectural archives of such size and scope for a single architect did not exist at that time. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, as Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, curated and organized the archives from 1959-2012.

Image credit:
Frank Lloyd Wright. Taliesin West Master Plan (1938).
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)