Belvedere Finished?

The last few months have been very instructive. I had feared that I would lose some of my momentum on this project, and I did. It was a result of several factors, but probably the biggest one was the mess that was the Belvedere top. It's incredibly complex and, perfectionist that I am, I couldn't get everything to line up the way I wanted it to. I ended up having to create a new model that was just of the top, play with that for ages, and then insert that into the existing model. Along the way I had to rearrange the columns at the top several times and I finally realized that the way they were drawn and the way they were built were different. I decided to go with the way they were built and this seems to work pretty nicely. Another problem was that the way I had been drawing the decorative metal edge along everything was somewhat wrong (the angle of the upper part was too steep) and had to redesign that and then replace it everywhere it already was. I also have been spending a lot of time making the brick joints nicer where it meets any of the decorative concrete. This process is slow going and tedious, even for me, but it makes the joints look nice and crisp so it's worth it.

Unfortunately I do not have any drawings from Taliesin, but I am still trying to get them. It's been a very interesting process and even though it hasn't been successful (yet), I've learned a lot. After all, it isn't every day you deal with a major private archive.

On a more hopeful note, I just purchased a copy of Light Screens: The Complete Leaded-Glass Windows of Frank Lloyd Wright by Julie L. Sloan. It's an expensive, out of print book and I gambled that it would have some new info on Midway Gardens in it. I was right! There isn't a lot, just a few drawings, but they are far more than I had before. This gives me the proper window design for the Restaurant/Bar areas as well as a design for the doors to those rooms. I had no idea that the doors and their sidelights were art glass. In the photos they are shown with curtains. Was the art glass installed? Who knows, but in my version it will be. I'm trying for an 'ideal' Midway Gardens; something between what was built and what was drawn, hopefully with the best of both worlds.

The other drawings puzzle me a great deal as they show windows I am totally unfamiliar with. Are they somewhere else in the building or were they just alternate designs that were never used? I'm pretty sure the latter is the case for at least one of them, but I have no idea for the others. Problmatically, many of the glass designs shown in the photos are not included in the published drawings. However, I know a whole lot more than I did two days ago, which is always exciting.

Interestingly, it looks as though the windows were only done in three colors. They look as though they were made primarily of clear glass and all the accents were in red, white, and black glass. Coincidentally, red is the only color I have been able to bring myself to use thus far, so I'm not too far off. I know Kruty says that Wright did use green and blue as well (specifically in some of the light fixtures) but I think it was pretty sparing. It will be interesting when I finally get to the murals in the bar-I think it will change my color sensibility for this project and may let me use a wider variety of colors.

Speaking of murals, I'm really tempted to try and do some sort of 'City by the Sea' mural in the octagon above the Belvedere, but I'm not sure what that would look like. Wright ended up creating a mural by that name for the stage surround at Taliesin West, and I've considered adapting it for the Belvedere. However, it would be an adaptation and I don't know that there is enough design there to adequately cover that much surface area. I'll worry about that later.

Here are some images of what I've been up to. Sorry it isn't the massive progress from the beginning of the year, but it's not bad either. I rather doubt I'll get back to that level of productivity again, but I do hope that I'll never go this long without blogging again.