The letter was presented as evidence, kept in the family, of a win over star architect. The chain of events was as follows, although we do not agree with the interpretations made by the journalist almost 70 years later.
"Frank Lloyd Wright was furious with my great-uncle Tommy. The mercurial architect was at work on his masterpiece SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wis., and he had a problem. the glass tubes he wanted to wrap around corners of the tower had a tendency to let in not just the light, but also the rain. [As the reader will know, it was not just the corners, was all perimeter]
Thomas H. Truslow Jr., a general sales manager at Corning Glass Works, proposed a solution of flexible waterproof strips directly to Johnson executives, bypassing Wright.
What came next was a great irritation of Frank Lloyd Wright expressed in the following terms in the letter he sent to Mr. Truslow, "Are you then unfamiliar with the way of work with an architect," the letter was wrote in a typed letter on November 10, 1948. He added an angry question mark in green ink.
“The scheme is not the Johnson Company’s,” the typing continued. “It is the architect’s.” Then more green scribbled rage: “Mine.”
The story ends later telling that Wright summoned his uncle, Thomas H. Truslow Jr. to a meeting at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, where he presented two solutions for two other Wright projects.
The journalist concludes telling how when his uncle, who didn't have no children, on the occasion of a wedding of his nieces and nephews called the family to pick a wedding gift from the objets he collected over his lifetime, our journalist David Montgomery chose the Wright's letter. His uncle believed that "he was cheating himself." Although, he says that now, it hangs as trophy on the wall of his house in tribute to "the pluck of a salesman"
Seeing this, with so long and in the current context, I still think like his uncle, the mitifica journalist and deludes himself.
It is obvious, that Wright's answer was angry, even rude and somewhat pretentious. Surprising that the architect would take the typewriter to send a letter to a vendor who had skipped the protocol responsibilities in a project.
It is all too common, although sometimes with great reason, that the attitudes of architects are are stigmatized, however it is not when this occurs in other professions, for example, I never understand why, everyone would be shocked if a seller of "heart valves" talks directly to the patient and not previously the doctor. Surely, our journalist confused and he doesnt know what is the civil and criminal liability of architects, very diferent for a journalist, and also think it is obvious that the journalist writes with the same or more arrogance that Wright on his letter.
