Larkin Administration Building

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The Larkin Building was designed in 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York, at 680 Seneca Street. It was demolished in 1950. The five story red brick building was noted for many innovations, including air conditioning, stained glass windows, built-in desk furniture, and suspended toilet bowls (hung from the walls, not supported by the floor). Sculptor Richard Bock provided ornamentation for the building.^[1]

Wright said of the building:

"It is interesting that I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under), and adopted many other innovations like the glass door, steel furniture, air-conditioning and radiant or 'gravity heat.' Nearly every technological innovation used today was suggested in the Larkin Building in 1904." — Frank Lloyd Wright as quoted by Kaufmann, Edgar, ed. An American Architecture, pp. 137-138.

Architectural historian Vincent Scully, Jr. wrote the following on the structure:

"Vertical brick piers and wall planes... made possible the splendid integration of space, structure, and massing which Wright achieved in the Larkin Company Office Building at Buffalo, of 1904. In space the building was conceived of as facing inward, with a glass-roofed central hall rising the entire height and with horizontal office floors woven around it. The pattern of piers and walls which makes these spaces is clearly unified in both plan and section. The vertical piers rise uninterruptedly inside, and the horizontal planes of the office floors are kept back from their edges, so that they seem, once more, to be woven through them. Stairways are grouped in vertical shells of wall at the four corners of the building, which then reveals all these articulations upon its exterior: the big piers, the smaller ones between them, the horizontal spandrels and the corner towers, expressed purely as free-standing space containers at the edges of the main, interwoven mass... Entrance was at the side, under a portal set back between the main mass and the thin, subsidiary office block, from the end of which a metallic sheet of water sprang. Here Wright achieved one of the first of his monumental spatial sequences. The exterior is challenging and rather forbidding, but it tells us that something is contained inside. Entrance to it must be sought. It is finally found in the dark place behind the fountain. The block is thus penetrated surreptitiously as it were, and essentially from below. The advance is from outer light toward interior dimness beyond which, to the left, somewhat more light could be perceived filtering down between the central piers. These then rise up toward their rich capitals in a climactic spatial expansion, lighted from above as in Roman buildings and creating, as those also did, an idealized interior space cut off from the world outside. At the same time, the stiff verticals of the interior of the Larkin Building continued to recall the challenge of the exterior, so that the occupant could not feel himself to be simply inside a shell. The sequence was an emotional one and a progress: challenge, bafflement, compression, search, and finally, surprise, release, transformation, and recall. It was almost a Baroque progression, but its methods were stiffer and harder, befitting the industrial program which they praised. Significantly enough, the building also recalled the Romantic-Classic projects of the first revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, particularly in the harshness of its forms but even in the rather underscaled world globes which were flaunted upon its exterior."

^[2]

The Larkin Soap Company was founded in Buffalo in 1875. Among the principals were John D. Larkin, Elbert Hubbard, and Darwin D. Martin. By the early years of the twentieth century, the company expanded beyond soap manufacturing into groceries, dry goods, china, and furniture. Larkin became a pioneering, national mail-order house with branch stores in Buffalo, New York City and Chicago. At the time it commissioned its headquarters, Larkin was prosperous and the high price for a well-designed, innovative building was not a barrier. The company, known for its generous corporate culture, also commissioned Wright to design row houses for its workers, which were never built.^[3]

In 1939 the firm made interior modifications and moved retail operations into the building. In 1943, the firm's fortunes were in decline and it sold this building and others. The Larkin Company, which never recovered from the Great Depression and changes in American retailing, eventually declared bankruptcy.

Wright's Administration building was foreclosed upon for back taxes in 1945 by the city of Buffalo. The city tried to sell the building over the next five years and considered other uses. In the meanwhile, it was vandalized. In 1949 the building was sold to the Western Trading Corporation, who announced plans to demolish it for a truck stop. It did so in 1950 despite protests from the architectural community. No truck stop ever materialized. A single brick pier along a railroad embankment is all that remains from Wright's original building. The remainder of the site is now a parking lot with a marker and an illustrated educational panel.

Other parts of the company's extensive manufacturing and distribution complex survive. The enormous former Larkin Warehouse, not designed by Wright, has been successfully converted into Class A office space.

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Larkin Administration Building

• The Larkin Building, Buffalo, NY: History of the Demolition by Jerome Puma, 1978
• Work of Art: Demolition of Larkin Building was Key Loss for Preservation Advocates
• Great Buildings: Larkin Building
• Larkin Company: The People, Products and Premiums
• Larkin Soap Company
• Some Historic Images and the Story of the Larkin Building's Demise