Editor's Note: This story is from the April 1908 issue of Architectural Record. See the original pages here, and read our Record Looks Back essay, “Soap Opera: The Larkin Building," from the August 2016 issue here.
This business building, the architectural creation of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright of Chicago, is reproduced in many excellent photographs, some of which will be shown in this article and others in the March number of the Architectural Record. From among them I select Fig. 1 as the most capable of giving a general idea of the design. The plan given in Fig. 8 shows the purpose of each member of the building, and the scale can be estimated as to the heights, on the basis afforded by the steps of the entrance doorways, checked by the height of the doorway (seen in Fig. 1) themselves, and by comparison with the plan. It is not safe to utilize the courses of brick in this way, because their height is uncertain; the bricks may be of unusual dimension or laid with unusually wide joints. The nearest tower-like mass in Fig. 1—that against which the telegraph pole is seen relieved—is about 90 feet high. The broader mass behind it would be, then, about 110 feet high, and this appears to be the highest level of the walls. A perspective draughtsman can easily determine the relative proportions, as width compared to height, etc., -but this front may be taken, in the absence of any figure mentions on the plan, roughly as 90 to 95 feet in width, not, of course, including the north wing seen in Fig. 2.
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