As Gothamist and Google reminded us, yesterday was Frank Lloyd Wright’s birthday. The master American architect certainly shaped the way our nation viewed building and our relation with space. It’s too bad that countless other builders hacked up his vision by creating cookie-cutter suburban split-levels and other such throw-away exurban homesteads. One thing this DCist misses about the Midwest is the close proximity to Wright’s architecture. In Washington, we aren’t as fortunate. Corinthian columns and pediments are the norm.

But Wright’s work can be seen out in Virginia at the Pope-Leighey House, near Mount Vernon. While we’re more into Wright’s work from the 1910s and 20s, especially his Chicago-area prarie homes and California textile block homes in the hills of Los Angeles, the Pope-Leighey House is an excellent and well-preserved example of Wright’s Usonian phase that’s worth visiting.

Wright also built a house out in Bethesda on Deepwell Drive for his sixth son, Robert Llewellyn Wright, in 1953. But it’s private and not open to the public. Another son, Lloyd, did the landscape design. If anyone can get us a tour, we’d be forever indebted!

And the Washington Hilton could have looked dramatically different if Wright’s 1940 plan for Temple Heights, called “Crystal City” — Wright actually called it “Crystal Heights” — would have gone through.

From a Revue Urbanisme:

To the critic and historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who was able to study the design when it was featured in the architect’s one-man exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the fall and winter of 1940-41, Crystal City made Rockefeller Center seem like a “timid, half-hearted compromise.”

Perhaps Charles E. Smith could use Wright’s plans and make them come to life at Virginia’s ugly “Crystal City.” Oh, we dream.