Frank Lloyd Wright's German Warehouse

Frank Lloyd Wright's monolithic German Warehouse stands forlornly on the corner of S. Church and E. Haseltine in Richland Center, WI. I've watched that building now for almost half a century. Highway 14 used to run right through town and the warehouse was on the left, exactly where we always turned right to get to my grandma's house when I was growing up.  I was back there recently and got another look. The old Warehouse is looking worse--it actually looks abandoned:

German Warehouse, northern facade and back

German Warehouse, eastern facade detail 

German Warehouse, rear portico

German Warehouse, rear portico

German Warehouse, service entrance

German Warehouse, loading dock 

German Warehouse, decay in 2012 

German Warehouse, decay in 2012 (detail)

I'd like to know who owns it and more about the problems associated with keeping it intact. I did not get a look inside--it's probably pretty awful--Wright's roofs were notoriously leaky and the German Warehouse had a flat one--a worst case scenario in Wisconsin winters.

Wright designed the building as a warehouse with some small retail space, but it never caught on. What could it be used for today? Not for its original purpose--storing stuff.  Practically anything Wright-related not nailed down is already owned and safely housed somewhere else so a new museum of his "stuff" would probably not fly. Richland Center is not exactly a tourist destination. And yet it could be something--it must be something...*

When I was in Richland Center, I drove my kids and my mom around town, letting her free associate about her past: who, what, where, & when. Wright was born in that town in 1867 and my mom can still point to the house which she knew growing up as "his," but she admits that it's always been controversial. Wright left Richland Center early on for Madison, only returning there after the First World War to build the Warehouse for a client named A.D. German. Things never went well. The people of Richland Center never fully embraced their native son. I still heard the echos growing up in the 1960s: "The Warehouse is different" ("different" is Wisconsin code for ugly); "he never paid his debts" or "he ran that coed school over in Spring Green"--that's code for scandalous.  But times change.

My mom also showed me a tiny cemetery outside of Richland Center where four of her sisters lie buried. They bracketed her in age but three died as young children and their graves lay hidden and forgotten for 70 years--much like their stories--until she finally bought them a decent tombstone this year. She showed me where. I know that there is a Wright somewhere back in my mom's genealogy and I noticed the name "Wright" on a nearby gravestone so I wonder if we're related--she didn't know but I'm tempted to find out.

If only the people who cared about Wright's legacy could unite around this particular building and help transform it. Perhaps people who care don't even know the problems that this building faces, and so I can spread that word at least--for now. I'd do much more if I had the means.
___________________________

*...what after all are these buildings now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of Frank Lloyd Wright?

Rumford, Soddy, and The Crash

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)

Despite years of formal education in chemistry, I'd never really heard of Frederick Soddy until I started reading about the early days of radioactivity. He wrote a book called The Interpretation Of Radium (1909) which is available free online here.  The book so influenced H.G. Wells that he dedicated his book, The World Set Free (1914), to Soddy.

Soddy seems to have had two careers--first as an accomplished physical scientist (Chemistry Nobel in 1921) and then as a sort of social scientist, but more accurately as a social activist during the Great Depression. In this way he was a prototype Linus Pauling, who won both a Chemistry Nobel and a Peace Nobel for his activism.

Soddy was a chemist by training but today he'd be called a radiochemist. He must have seen or heard firsthand many of the key discoveries in nuclear physics in the late 19th and early 20th century, first at Oxford and then as graduate student with Lord Rayleigh. Afterwards, Soddy moved to Canada around the same time Ernest Rutherford did and the two joined forces. Together they discovered the natural transmutation of elements. Soddy's Nobel Prize citation reads:

for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes.

His isotope work came later.

Recall that Count Rumford first paid attention to the heat given off boring cannon and thereby converted our notions of energy.  Like Rumford, Soddy first realized how much heat and energy radioactive decay gave off--orders of magnitude more energy than burning fossil fuels did and it was also seemingly inexhaustible. Soddy was so prescient regarding how much energy was locked inside uranium, radium, and thorium that he warned Britain's government about the dangers of "atomic" bombs during the First World War.

The notion of cheap and abundant atomic energy crested in 1954 with Lewis Strauss' famous too cheap to meter statement, though it appears that he was referring to hypothetical hydrogen fusion reactors.

Soddy died in 1956 in relative obscurity. This (from the Wiki bio) is intriguing:

In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a 'quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships', offering a perspective on economics rooted in physics—the laws of thermodynamics, in particular—and was 'roundly dismissed as a crank'. While most of his proposals - 'to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort' - are now conventional practice, his critique of fractional-reserve banking still 'remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom'. Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels. Energy obtained from the fossil fuels could not be used again. This criticism of economic growth is echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

How the past gets Bury'd

I love stories like this one about the man who first noticed and explained what's behind my Rime of the Ancient Elements:

...an alternative proposal was put forth in 1921 by Charles Rugeley Bury (1890-1968), who was a lecturer at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. The scheme that he described succinctly in a mere seven pages is essentially the scheme to be found in modern introductory textbooks of chemistry and physics. He deduced from the chemical evidence that the electrons are arranged in successive layers containing 2, 8, 18, and 32 electrons. He gave a clear discussion of the electronic arrangements in the actinides and lanthanides, and even made some predictions (inevitably but not quite correct) for the transuranic elements.
Bury's scheme was reproduced in The Electronic Theory of Valency by Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (1873-1952); this was an important book that first appeared in 1927 and which interpreted the chemical behavior of the elements in terms of their electronic configurations. Sidgwick acknowledged the important contribution of Bury, but almost all subsequent accounts have failed to do so and Bury's name is now almost entirely forgotten.

~Keith J. Laidler, The World Of Physical Chemistry, Oxford University Press: New York, 1993

I can't even find a photo of Bury on the Internet. :(