Frank Lloyd Wright Poster | Kelly Cunningham

Wright poster © Kelly Cunningham 2014

Cedar Rock, originally known as the Lowell Walter Residence, was designed in 1950 by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An exemplar of his Usonian style, it is located near Quasqueton IA, and has been designated as Cedar Rock State Park. For the past ten years, the Friends of Cedar Rock organization has held an annual seminar—called An Afternoon with Frank Lloyd Wright—in which speakers talk about Wright's life, beliefs and achievements.

To celebrate the tradition of that seminar, in the fall of 2014, graphic design students in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, were asked to design a series of posters that focus on Wright and his accomplishments, not limited to Cedar Rock. The poster above was designed by Kelly Cunningham in a course in Digital Image Design (2014).

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Richard Neutra, Life and Shape [his autobiography] . New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1962, pp. 179. Neutra, a Viennese-born architect, came to the US in 1923, and eventually moved to Chicago, where he searched for buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he had admired while living in Europe—

I looked around the western part of Chicago, and south, near the university, but nobody could tell me anything about this famous architect I was talking about. People were flabbergasted that I should have picked up the ideals of a great Chicagoan in a European library…

But where were the prairies, the woods, the lawns? Where, anyway, was Woodlawn Avenue? Once I got there, I would actually find the famous Robie House. My heart always skipped when I imagined the moment: I would ring the doorbell and ask in very broken English, "Is Mr. Robie in?" And so I finally did.

"Mr. Robie? Never heard of him." There was a Mrs. Wilson living there. She had bought the house some years back, and was probably the fifth owner. She wasn't at all enthusiastic about it—but to me it was a lovely, wonderful place.

I asked Mrs. Wilson why she had bought the house. "Oh," she answered, cold fish, "I got it very cheap. The man who owned it had to get out. No, she didn't particularly like it, and she had all kinds of petty criticisms. Nothing was working, of course; at that time the house was already some fifteen years old, and badly neglected.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).