Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/496780
182 CULTURED PHOTOS COURTESY OF WRIGHT he new Wright Design Masterworks catalog is full of rare and seminal works by architects, designers and artists being offered up for auction this May. Images include an early chair by Charles Eames and a rare table by Pierre Jeanneret from Chandigarh—and the Winton Guest House designed by Frank Gehry in 1987. The Gehry house isn't the first iconic property to be offered for sale, but its inclusion reflects the shift in how architecture is being re-contextualized and framed as a design object. Wright opened during a critical moment—at the start of the aughts and just when the 20th-century design market was about to heat up. Entrepreneur Richard Wright, 51, had certainly evolved from his early days as a picker—scrounging for kitchen clocks and kitschy lamps—to focus on postwar art and design, which he discovered early on was accessible, affordable and held mass appeal. In the late 1980s, the Maine native set up a stall at the 26th Street flea market in New York selling Mexican silver jewelry from the '50s and '60s and Eames rockers. It's where Wright met Mark Isaacson and Mark McDonald of Fifty/50 gallery, who were an inspiration as part of the first generation of dealers to focus on mid-century modern and influential in helping Wright distinguish the best of '50s design. Wright insists, "I wanted to create something but I didn't know what, and I discovered the antique business," adding "really the world of junk." Wright got hooked, opening a store in Chicago, while shuttling back and forth to New York, even selling a NASA spacesuit his first time out at the New York Pier show. In 1993, the Treadway/Toomey galleries in Oak Park, Illinois, hired Wright as the head of their modernism department and in the spring of 1999, the dealer's defining moment arrived when he organized his first auction, an Eames-only event. According to Wright, it was highly successful and soon after he left Treadway to strike out on his own. As the market continued to expand, Wright refocused by opening a 40,000-square-foot space in a two-story building in the West Loop of Chicago, where he could create stylish selling exhibitions and gorgeous catalogs while also educating the buyer. When the Wright auction house opened its doors in the spring of 2000, included was a sale called the American Scene: Art of the 1930s and 1940s, a genre which Wright found challenging. Instead, he decided to emphasize 20th-century design, which he has sold consistently over the years. Twenty selling exhibitions are presented each year at the Chicago flagship and now at the New York outpost located in the Parke-Bernet Building, which opened in 2013. This year contemporary works are gaining momentum and Wright's offerings include artist Scott Burton's sculptures, Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata's furniture and an upcoming music video and installation called "Show Me," by New York lighting designer Lindsey Adelman opening in June. Wright's first major architecture sale, held in 2006, was architect Pierre Koenig's 1958 Case Study House #21 in Los Angeles. The pristine property was well documented in a smart catalog that included newly commissioned photographs by Julius Shulman, along with historical images of the Case Study that Shulman shot in 1959. The house sold to the Seoul-based Seomi family for $3,185,600 (Gallery Seomi now uses the house as its Los Angeles outpost). Wright's approach to use the art world model to frame the sale as collectible art, worked. "When a house is for sale, the buyers have the power, they set the schedule and negotiate the price, which is a downward negotiation" says Wright. He adds, "That doesn't work for signature properties." Wright wasn't the first to take on the sale of iconic properties—in 2003 Sotheby's handled the sale of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1951 steel-and-glass Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois, for $7.5 million. Owned by British art patron Lord Palumbo, the Farnsworth sale deeply affected Wright as he commenced with the business of auctions. "Certainly the Farnsworth was controversial. It was a galvanizing event which I came to see as positive—it forced people into action," he says, commenting on concerns that the house might be bought as a large sculpture, or worse, moved. The telephone bidding ensued leading to the sale and preservation of the house by The National Trust and Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, who managed to raise the funds needed in the eleventh hour. In 2008, Wright handled the sale of three iconic properties including Frank Lloyd Wright's 1948 Laurent House in Rockford, Illinois, which sold for $578,000. The two other properties, Marcel Breuer's 1949 Wolfson Trailer House and studio in upstate New York, and Louis I. Kahn's 1959 Esherick House in Philadelphia failed to sell. "I forgot about my buyers and the luxury aspect," says Wright emphasizing factors that came into play like the global economy, price and the proximity of the houses to neighboring properties. Wright clearly likes a challenge and on May 19 he's auctioning Gehry's Winton Guest House. The original owners Mike and Penny Winton, who lived in Wayzata, Minnesota, commissioned Gehry to design the house—or rather a series of six geometric-interconnected structures clad in various materials. In 2001, the Wintons sold the Guest House along with their Philip Johnson–designed residence to Kirt Woodhouse, who sub-divided the 12-acre property while gifting the Gehry structures to the University of St. Thomas, approximately 100 miles south in Owatonna, Minnesota. The Guest House, which now has an estimated value of $1 million to $1.5 million, will need to be moved again, but according to Wright, "Gehry blessed the move once." A replica of Gehry's original model, which is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, will be on view at a reception at Wright's New York gallery, with a model on display in Minneapolis. Barry Bergdoll, the former Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, claims that since Colonial times, uprooting houses was something that "Americans were willing to do for the economy of not building anew. Today, the aim seems to use the art market to realize a far greater price for the building that has been forced into a divorce from its site. Gehry's building is a seminal and brilliant design, important to preserve even if it means relocating it," Bergdoll says. "We've learned that auctions are fraught with problems and not the ideal formula for most architecture," says Wright, who remains hopeful and believes the structure can translate to another site. "It's not Fallingwater," he says. "There is nothing controversial about this. We are seeking to save the house." T