GREAT BUILDINGS A world-class welcome By Barry A. Muskat; photos by kc kratt The display cases and an interactive gallery feature archival materials that have never been previously displayed. Original photographs and letters document Buffalo history as well as the Larkin/Martin/Wright connections, and help show the estate in its century-old context. Toshiko Mori’s highly anticipated Darwin Martin House Visitors Center is a gem of a building on its own. This complement to one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s very best Prairie houses may also be the most sophisticated building completed in Buffalo in decades. The commission was the result of a national competition. The challenge for the architectural entries was to design a building that would be able to stand next to a venerable icon—a century-old masterpiece. Submissions needed to be respectful, to be somewhat “absent” in their presence, yet have an integrity of their own. Mori’s glass pavilion fulfills those difficult requirements while beautifully serving a practical programmatic agenda. A beautiful Donor Wall recognizes contributors who made the entire restoration possible. Tours begin with a brief orientation presentation shown on a glass screen and Holopro projection system. A spectacular skylight references the atrium of Wright’s Larkin Administration Building. Though the Martin House has operated tours for many years and throughout the first four phases of its extensive restoration project, the new Visitors Center finally gives the property the physical tools it needs to comfortably welcome the number of local, national, and international visitors that are drawn here. The design is a unique glass pavilion. Mori confesses that glass is a material with which she is fascinated. “In terms of physics, it’s a liquid—a mutable, responsive material. Candy is the same: melt candy and it’s sugar and water; as temperature cools it returns to a solid state.” She continues, “Glass reacts with light and reflects. The addition of layering, adding a film, can enhance the performance of a building: the performance criteria of glass has exponentially increased in the last twenty-five years.” Mori cites the Martin House as having the most windows of any of Wright’s Prairie structures. “He called his windows 'light screens:' he used them as a threshold between nature and artifice, as a screening device mediating the human environment with the outside.” In an essay written in the 1920s, Wright described modern, machine-made glass as “the most precious of the architect’s new materials.” Indeed, this pavilion is all about the glass. Its exterior is an envelope of the material and its interior is skillfully layered in it, creating a quiet and harmonious order. Here we find the grammar of ultimate refinement, incorporating and expanding the very best goals and ideals of early modernism into a relevant twenty-first-century contemporary vitality. In the reduction of mass to simple forms, this is the very essence of elegance and proportion. But make no mistake, this building is far from simple. It pays attention to every detail and incorporates the latest technologies and environmental efficiencies. Glass window/walls soar from floor to ceiling. These may be the largest triple thermal panes used in any installation in North America. Each of the panels weighs twenty-eight hundred pounds. An interior glass wall becomes a screen for images that are used as an orientation for tours. In nontechnical terms, this particular glass is layered like a sandwich. A film layer contains thousands of holographic and laser cells that accept projected imagery. The result is a striking visual as six ceiling-mounted projectors send images from the rear of the screen onto a clear field. Mori’s pavilion works perfectly on the site for five significant reasons: the proportions, the scale, the spacing, the materials, and the distance between the original buildings and the new building. Wright had designed six buildings for the original estate: the Martin House (now the historic landmark), the Barton House (a smaller house for Martin’s sister and her family), along with the Pergola, Conservatory, Carriage House, and Gardener’s Cottage. To my mind, the new Visitors Center sits perfectly on Wright’s tartan grid, exactly where he might have placed it (had he any clue that the site would become a major tourist destination). In reference and reverence to Wright’s historic structures, every dimension of the pavilion is carefully planned. The skylight is a reference to the Larkin Building’s atrium in its ability to open the entire building for natural light. It accentuates the four main piers which anchor the building both structurally and conceptually. These piers are spaced in the same fashion as those in the Martin House living room. And most effectively, the stainless steel columns between each of the huge panes of glass on the new building uses the same spacing as the posts of the pergola windows that they parallel. The new pavilion follows the rhythms of the original pergola and offers a quiet spot to view Wright’s designs. Named the Eleanor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion to honor Greatbatch for his important contribution to medical science of the implantable pacemaker, the Visitors Center had a team of funders that includes the Oshei Foundation, the East Hill Foundation, the County of Erie, and New York State. Mary Roberts, executive director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation, notes, “The building will equip the campus and assist our volunteers and staff in welcoming visitors from around the world.” She continues, “The project will become the lynchpin for the cultural tourism industry in our region and an acclaimed point of pride for all of New York State.” Visitors now will see much more than just the Martin House. “One of our main ambitions for the display cases was to show the wonderful archival materials that will be seen in the house once it is fully restored—and also provide illustrations for the abstract ideas that are really hard to talk about on the tours,” says Lesley Neufield, Museum Planning Project Coordinator. “Our idea was this: Let’s show the aspects of the story that are not visible in Martin House when someone is on tour—archival photos, abstract ideas, construction—a primer to give context to Wright, Martin, and the city of Buffalo of that era.” A welcome surprise is that the new pavilion offers a view of the Martin House campus from a point of view that no one has seen in decades. “Through the design phases I knew that the building would provide a viewing platform for the Martin House, but when I first walked inside I understood how powerfully it does so and what an emotional impact it has,” explains Neufield. “It frames the extent of Wright’s compositions in a highly succinct way and makes it absolutely apparent that Wright’s buildings are beautifully harmonized.” Mori’s pavilion echoes Wright’s designs with soaring cantilevers and wide overhanging eaves, but she’s flipped the sloping roof of the Prairie House to reinvent it in a welcoming gesture. A whole new perspective may now be viewed from the west, showing the pergola as part of a courtyard, framed by the adjacent buildings. I humbly predict that this will become the most-photographed angle of Wright’s Martin House and will be the new image that appears in coffee table books and architectural history texts. And that’s the point of the Visitors Center. It’s there as a highly serviceable entity to make the historic site function to its potential. But it smartly fades into the context of the entire composition. Its mass can’t be seen over the pergola when viewed from Summit, yet the building can be seen through when approaching from the Garden’s Cottage. It shows off the star attraction. It respects Wright’s symphony, but by no means plays second fiddle. Barry A. Muskat is Buffalo Spree’s architecture critic. A businessman and architectural historian, he sits on the City of Buffalo Preservation Board and has followed this project since its inception. 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