“The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday and tomorrow. In that lies hope.” – Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958.
The Larkin Power House is an endlessly fascinating structure, and forms the background for this “urban scene of the week,” this blog’s periodical commentary on particular vantage points in the Hydraulics. The view is found at the nexus of yesterday and tomorrow, communicating history and possibility.
The scene, taken a few dozen feet from the New York Central tracks south of Swan Street, is archetypal of Buffalo’s industrial landscape, with its massive factory buildings rising over the urban prairie. The Power House is part of a composition of industrial structures undoubtedly taken into consideration by Frank Lloyd Wright when he designed the Larkin Administration Building, which broke ground only two years after the Power House began construction in 1902.
Though only a fence pier remains of the Administration Building, demolished in 1950, it is perhaps particularly apt that a vantage point reminiscent of the Midwest prairie today acts as a foreground to a complex to which Frank Lloyd Wright, author of the Prairie School of Architecture, made an important contribution. The inspiration of the Prairie School, which grew out of appreciation for America’s vast horizontal landscape (think the endless prairie of the Midwest) and emphasized the relationship of buildings to nature, is brought into focus at industrial sights of the Larkin District.
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