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Building a Dream by hand with the World's Greatest Architect
9" x 9", hardbound
288 pages,
over 600 photos and drawings
Reviews
Minneapolis Star Tribune Review, Feb. 1, 2021
By Kevin Duchschere
Growing Up Wright
By Lonnie Lovness. (River Place Media, 288 pages, $45.)
In the summer of 1955, a starry-eyed couple named Don and Virginia Lovness drove from White Bear Lake to Spring Green, Wis., to ask Frank Lloyd Wright how to expand their unfinished walkout home. His advice: Sell the "mess" and buy 10 acres to build new. Virginia said they couldn't afford one of his houses, but the 88-year-old Wright, taken with the petite young woman, pounded the table and said, "We'll do it! We'll build you a house for $10,000!"
And so the Lovnesses embarked on the adventure of a lifetime, combining their meager resources with an immeasurable amount of sweat equity (they couldn't afford a builder) to construct a classic Wright Usonian of 1,600 square feet, fashioned of Wisconsin limestone that they themselves chiseled and laid.
The do-it-yourself house, overlooking a small lake in the country west of Stillwater, is the focus of this handsome coffee table book that's loaded with personal photos and charmingly written by the couple's oldest daughter.
The book — "Growing Up Wright: Building a Dream by Hand With the World's Greatest Architect" — is also the story of that couple. He was a brilliant 3M chemist and jack-of-all-trades, she a Hamline-educated artist and graphic designer, and they forged a warm relationship with Wright, his wife and associates at Taliesin.
There are some intriguing sidebars, including the Lovnesses' friendship with Josef Stalin's daughter, who married a Wright protégé, and the difficulties involved in selling a Wright house — Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen's drummer, wanted to buy it but only if he could move it to New Jersey, and the deal fell through.
A dozen Wright-designed buildings stand in Minnesota today, including the Lovness home and a cottage they built later on the property, but likely none of them have the improbable back story that Lonnie Lovness tells here with such humor and devotion. This is the up-close-and-personal memoir that Wright fans, especially those in Minnesota, have been waiting for.
Inside the book
A dream takes shape
Life in a Wright home
A dream takes shape
With no building experience, in April, 1956 the young couple began by laying tons of stone for the central hearth. Over two years they completed the house.
My mother the mason
Life in a Wright home
A dream takes shape
My mother would lay stone during the day and rake the joints in the evening, working until dark. My sister and I spent the summers collecting pebbles for fill as the house rose around us.
Life in a Wright home
Life in a Wright home
Life in a Wright home
When the house was finished in the late fall of 1957, my sister and I had a bedroom to share. My father - a chemist, aviator, boxer and consummate builder - was a renaissance man with a soft side.
Taliesin visits
Taliesin visits
Life in a Wright home
Our parents made regular visits to Spring Green where we would take part in the elaborate pageants put on by the Fellowship and apprentices.
The cottage
Taliesin visits
Renewal, 2016
The Cottage took almost 3 years to build by hand, using salvaged lumber and stone. It became their main home and saw a constant stream of visitors over the years.
Renewal, 2016
Taliesin visits
Renewal, 2016
New owners did a complete and careful restoration of the studio, totally enclosing it over the winter. The cottage was also refurbished and a third Wright design was built on the property. The final chapter documents this Herculean task with many photos.
Photo Gallery
The Peterson Cottage, 1959
Here are two photos from about 1970. Don and Virginia went through the Peterson cottage while considering whether to build a copy of it, or one of the three cabin plans Wright had drawn for them in 1958. The Peterson was only ten years old but had been abandoned. The real damage had not yet been done by Mother Nature,
The Lovness Cottage, 1975
Lonnie's book has extensive information and many photos of both the Peterson and Lovness cottages. Lonnie and Virginia are shown on the cottage front steps in the 1990s.
More about the lovness homes
