Frank Lloyd Wright Swats Fellow Architects

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND MASON CITY •

Maria Durell Stone (wife of architect Edward Durell Stone) in Edgar Tafel, Ed., About Wright: An Album of Recollections by Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: John Wiley, 1993, p. 57—

A few hours after I arrived at Taliesin [in 1954] we dined with others outside under a large tree. Flies, for some reason, were prolific on this warm spring day. [Frank Lloyd] Wright remedied this annoyance by having a fly swatter next to his chair. As a fly landed, he would pick up the swatter and take precise aim. "That's [Walter] Gropius," he jovially exclaimed, and then he would take aim again at another unsuspecting fly. "And that's [Le] Corbusier," he would add, until dead flies littered the table and he had struck down the so-called hierarchy of modern architecture.

• Design by Roy R. Behrens, using public domain portrait photograph (colorized) of Wright (c1926), from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, and his own photograph of the restored City National Bank and Park Inn in Mason City IA, now officially known as the Historic Park Inn Hotel.