Exhibition Catalog - Lawrence Technological University

Gregor, who once described himself as a “total survival
of the Protestant work ethic,” became a successful
chemical engineer.5 He obtained a number
of patents, including one in Canada for a process
for cleaning paint spray booths and another in the
United States for a method for recovering residual
coating materials from the walls and air of spray
chambers. He would later establish and operate
the Colloidal Paint Products Company in Detroit, a
chemical business for auto products and cosmetics.
These endeavors earned Gregor a healthy income;
as he later admitted, he had “discovered how to
make money.” 6 In his spare time he pursued an interest
in photography. Elizabeth enjoyed gardening
and sewing and stayed at home to raise their son,
Gregor Peter Affleck, born in 1925. By the late thirties
the couple had purchased a Colonial Revival-styled
home in Pleasant Ridge in the Detroit suburbs.
2
Photograph by Anon.
Frank Lloyd Wright in 1940
When the Afflecks first contacted Frank Lloyd Wright
about designing a house in 1939, the architect was
enjoying a professional renaissance at the ripe age
of seventy-two. After extremely rough years in the
late twenties and early thirties, things had begun
to change for Wright in 1932. The Depression and
changing tastes in architecture had hit him hard. In
the previous six years he had been able to construct
only seven projects, and two of those were for himself
and one for a cousin. An important architectural
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
which gave birth to the phrase “International Style,”
depicted Wright as a “half-modern” architect and
an “individualist” whose inventive period had long
passed. He had taken to writing and lecturing to support
himself, while many believed him to have retired
– or worse. “I have been reading my obituaries to a
considerable extent over the past year or two, and
think, with Mark Twain, the reports of my death greatly
exaggerated,” Wright once wrote. 7
But in 1932 a series of events occurred which would
stimulate Wright’s architectural renewal. First, Wright
founded the Taliesin Fellowship at Spring Green, Wisconsin,
to train young architects in his philosophy of
organic architecture and to provide a steady means
of income through tuition payments. Despite the
hard times Wright retained a certain amount of respect
in the architectural world and had no trouble
attracting students. The Taliesin Fellowship proved to
be a key factor in the revitalization of Wright’s career
by providing him with an inspiring atmosphere, similar
to his Oak Park, Illinois, office in the early 1900s, where
many of the Prairie School architects trained.
Drawing by Taliesin, Photographs by Anon.
Wright further established himself in the public eye with
two books in 1932. The first was An Autobiography,
which has been perceptively described as “a difficult,