Frank Lloyd Wright, Darwin D. Martin, and the Whittier-Rosenwald School for Hampton Institute

Abstract

..;; •... / · ~ ...:.ll ARRIS 20 § VoLUME 21 § 2010 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, DARWIN D. MARTIN' AND THE WHITTIER-RosENWALD ScHooL FOR HAMPTON INSTITUTE JACKQUINAN In 1928 Frank Lloyd Wright submitted a design for a new building for the Whittier primary school at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia (Figures 1 and 2). Following more than a year of deliberation, Wright's design was rejected and subsequently drifted from view except for its appearance in two books on Wright from the 1980s in which it is identified as "The Rosenwald Negro Children's School, La Jolla, California."1 Owing to Wright's long and impressive record of innovative designs for a wide variety of building types, including buildings for education, this article will explore the matter further in an attempt to answer the following questions: What circumstances led Wright to submit a design to the Hampton Institute ? Why was it identified with Julius Rosenwald, the president of the Sears Roebuck Company in Chicago ? Why was it rejected? And finally, how does this design stand up to critical assessment? First it is necessary to consider the setting of the commission and the principal individuals involved. FIGURE 1 (LEFT TOP) Frank Lloyd Wright, the Whittier-Rosenwald School at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia, 1928, bird's-eye perspective #1. (Frank Lloyd Wrighr Foundacion # 2904.001, Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright are copyrighr © 2010, Frank Lloyd Wrighr Foundarion . Scotrsdale. Arizona) FIGURE 2 (LEFT BOTTOM) Frank Lloyd Wright, the Whittier-Rosenwald School at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia, 1928, bird's-eye perspective #2. (Reproduced from rhe DonJld D. Walker Collecrion, Prinrs and PhorogrJphs Division, Library of Congress, with permission of rhe Frank Lloyd Wrighr Foundadon. Drawings oF Frank Lloyd Wright ,ue copyrigln © 1957, 20 I0. Frank Lloyd Wrighc Foundation, Scorrsdale, Arizona) VoLUME 21 2010 § ARRIS 2 I JACKQUINAN HAMPTON INSTITUTE The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (Figure 3), founded in 1868, was one of the more than 100 schools, institutes, and colleges that sprang up across the South for the education of young African American men and women in the aftermath of the Civil War.2 Situated upon an abandoned plantation site on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the James and York Rivers at Chesapeake Bay, Hampton offered academic subjects and training in such practical skills as weaving, printing, shoe-making, carpentry, machine operation, and scientific farming . As a normal school, however, the practice of the teaching of young children was especially important. Toward that end, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker and abolitionist from Massachusetts, endowed Hampton's Whittier School. Hampton Institute , funded by a combination of Virginia's Morrill Land Grant Act monies and donations from wealthy, northern liberals and abolitionists, featured impressive buildings by J. Cleveland Cady of New York; Alexander Trowbridge of Washington; and Richard Morris Hunt, also of New York, whose Virginia Hall of 1874 (Figure 4) lends a distinctive Ruskinian ruggedness to the waterfront campus.3 DARWIN MARTIN In 1927 it came to the attention of Darwin Martin, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist in Buffalo, New York, with ties to the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, the Voorhees Industrial Institute in Denmark, South Carolina, and the Hampton Institute, that the original Whittier School building at Hampton was to be replaced by a new structure.4 Martin, an astute dealmaker, recognized an opportunity to unite three entities of particular importance to him-his long-term interest in educational opportuARRIS 22 ~ VoLUME 21 ~ 2010 nities for young African Americans, his relationship with Julius Rosenwald, President of the Sears Roebuck Company, and his patronage of the prominent American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Martin's role in Wright's involvement at Hampton had deep roots. Martin began his career in business in 1879 at the age of thirteen selling Larkin Company soap door to door in the New York City area and in Boston for $5 per week. However, based upon his work ethic and a prodigiously retentive memory, John D. Larkin, the president of the company, invited Martin to Buffalo and made him the Larkin Company bookkeeper the following year. Through intensive study, obsessive dedication to work, and the invention of a card file system essential to the expansion of the Larkin Company into...