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November 22, 2004
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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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