Preservation ... The Wright Way
Jim Kimsey's never-before-photographed Frank Lloyd Wright house restored to its original splendor
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GARY LANDSMAN
BY CHRISTINA WILKIE
There has long been a sense among the collectors of artistic masterpieces that
the paintings or sculptures they acquire never really "belong" to them in
the traditional sense of the word. Great collectors are not owners, but rather
stewards, entrusted with the preservation of a piece of history for the benefi t
of future generations. Of course, this is easy to understand in the case of a Picasso
or a Michelangelo...but what if the masterpiece were a house, on your property?
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This was precisely the question that Washington philanthropist
and AOL co-founder James V. Kimsey faced when, in 2000, he
purchased the property adjacent to The Falls, his 21,000 sq. foot
house overlooking the Potomac River in McLean. The masterpiece
in this case was none other than a Frank Lloyd Wright house built in 1952
- one of only three properties that Wright designed in the Washington area.
Known to Wright's disciples as the Marden House, this hemicycle design
set into the rocky hillside was named after
Luis and Ethel Marden, the photographer
and mathematician couple for whom the
home was designed. The Marden's occupied
the residence until 2003.
Presented with a choice, Kimsey decided
to do what any steward of a masterpiece
would, and he undertook its restoration to
exactly what the artist intended it to be.
Kimsey even visited Wright's archivists at the
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, housed at Taliesin West in Arizona, and in
2004, he began the $1 million-plus restoration. The result is pure F.L.W., a
cinderblock work of minimalist genius suspended over a torrent of rapids
half a mile south of the Key Bridge.
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