Frank Lloyd Wright's
SAMARA
John E. Christian, Owner


SAMARAQuest


Benton Sixth Grade Team

The Pinecones

Sarah Bennett / Matt Steiner
Jay Mason / Alaina Farley

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SAMARAQuest
    1   How long did it take to get an appointment with FLW?
    2   Do other FLW Usonian homes ever go on the market?

The Pinecones is a very appropriate name for a team talking about Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and more specifically about SAMARA.

Mr. Wright, loving Nature, liked the many pine trees that I had planted on the building site.

From that he named my House SAMARA after the pinecones and winged seeds coming from the trees.

I first contacted Mr. Wright by telephone in the spring of 1950. He was very gracious on the phone and easy to talk with. My wife and I were most pleasantly surprised that he invited us up to meet with him in his office in Spring Green, Wisconsin located about 400 miles from West Lafayette.

So within two weeks we were on our way to Spring Green to meet with Frank Lloyd Wright. We talked with Mr. Wright in very general terms about our plans for a house. He explained what he was doing in his work and showed us around Taliesin, his summer home and drafting rooms in Wisconsin.

Nothing was decided at that meeting; however, six months later, I made another appointment and it was at that meeting that Mr. Wright agreed to design our House. We all had an understanding that there was no hurry for the final plans. Nothing really happened until the fall of 1953 when we were to meet with Mr. Wright again.

When we arrived, Mr. Wright was ill and we met with his secretary, Mr. Masselink, instead. This started the process working again and on January 1, 1955 we received our final archetectural drawings for SAMARA. This was five years after our initial contact with Frank Lloyd Wright.

It is interesting to note that a few of Mr. Wright's homes (some Prairie style and some Usonian) go on the market each year. A professional organization named the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservatory issues a quarterly newsletter about Mr. Wright's designed buildings.

In each issue of this publication, a listing with photographs of homes for sale is published. For example, in the spring of 1997 issue, fourteen such homes, ranging in cost from a half million to several million dollars, are listed for sale.

I've really enjoyed responding to your team's questions. To learn more about SAMARA, I encourage each of you to visit the other Benton Sixth Grade Team pages. You may also be interested in taking a look at the Benton SAMARAQuest Challenge.

The Benton SAMARAQuest Challenge is designed to expand your learnings beyond what you already know about Frank Lloyd Wright and SAMARA. The Challenge suggests activities for exploring things you're interested in learning more about in your studies of the world's greatest architect.

Visit all of the
Benton Sixth Grade Teams
to learn more about
SAMARA.
The Cherokee Reds / The Waterfalls / The FLWs
The Winged Seed People / Winged Seeds / The Pinecones

Visit these other Benton SAMARAQuest Teams
Grade 3 / Grade 4 / Grade 5 / Grade 6

Return to the Benton SAMARAQuest Main Directory

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Copyright © 1998   All rights reserved.
The John Christian Family Memorial Trust, Inc. and LEARNING ASSOCIATES Latest revision September 30, 1998