November 22, 2004

Photography © 2004 Buffalo City Cemetery

Back in the 1920’s Darwin Martin, a key executive of the Larkin Soap Company, asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a mausoleum for his family at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, New York. Martin - Wright’s loyal client, patron, and friend - commissioned the design between 1925 and 1928. However, due to the Great Depression and other events responsible for Martin’s loss of wealth, the structure was never built during his lifetime.

After extensive research into Wright’s designs, notes, and correspondence between the two men, Forest Lawn has undertaken construction of the memorial. The recently-completed Blue-Sky Mausoleum, made of white granite and concrete, was unveiled in October. This project is one of only three memorials designed by Wright and is considered to be his most innovative. It “breaks the box” of conventional mausoleum design. In place of four walls and a roof, Wright designed broad terraces which climb from the edge of a lake up a gentle hill to a single monolith. The steps cap twenty-four double-tiered crypts.

Wright’s note to Martin explained, “This is a burial facing the open sky – a dignified great headstone commune to all.” He saw “… a nice symbolism in the stepping terraces… a compromise between the grave and the mausoleum,” further commenting, “It may have the better points of both.” He confidently predicted, “The whole could not fail of noble affect.”

In addition to the satisfaction of bringing the design to fruition, the cemetery views the execution of Wright’s plan as an inventive marketing approach to the challenge of perpetual care.

The mausoleum is the first of three previously unexecuted Wright designs being built in Buffalo. The other two projects, a boat-house and a gasoline filling station, are said to be at the brink of groundbreaking.

Barry A. Muskat

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