Diego C.
Yelp
You arrive at Manitoga (and I thought I had to drive all the way to Winnipeg!) by a steep drive and park outside a tiny visitor's center where they show a video and sell crockery. I tried to watch the video from the doorway of the crowded room, but the docents kept tapping me on the shoulder with inane questions and suggestions that I climb over people to get a seat (Do I appear ready to faint?), so I took a short walk up one of the hiking trails (by the way - not sure how a guide can be "amazing" - the only reasons I can think of would be swiftly removed by the censors) so never saw the video. That's OK; some snowy evening by the fire, I'll watch it online, free of demands for the make and model of my vehicle.
Video finished, up the hill you go. Keep your voices down and be careful not to make eye contact with the house along the path because, although it used to be owned by the Wrights, it's now in private hands. Reading between the lines: "THAT should have been our Visitor's Center, dammit, instead of that pathetic little hut."
The setting of the house and studio, an old quarry, is impressive. Lush and woody, the Hudson Valley's natural environment at its best. You even see (if you went today) a couple of Lady's Slipper orchids in bloom. Wow. Much mention is made of the experience the Wrights were trying to create for their visitors, the power they wielded to manipulate their environment, and how everything had to be "just so." On the long approach to the house, a hilly pathway that climbs around the quarry itself, abundant with Mountain Laurel, ferns, waterfall and moss, soothes the visitor. The tour guide puts so much emphasis on the experience of the senses you forget that you were enjoying the walk and begin to feel guilty about all the subtleties your sensibilities are too crude to appreciate.
Lots of pretentious cliches, liberally peppered with "sort of" and "kind of" (wasn't this docent convinced of what she was saying?) and finally you arrive at the studio. (Still no house. The bigger the build-up, the bigger the payoff better damn well be!) Some hints at Philip Johnson's Glass House here, with its open feeling. A warm treatment of surfaces, innovative at the time, comprise this small gem of a building. The non-conventional juxtaposition of natural and industrial materials is a Wright trademark; it's wonderfully successful in this intimate studio. Then the tour guide oh-so-vaguely hints a homosexual living arrangement, concluding her statement with a facial expression probably not unfamiliar to those who administer colonoscopies. I checked my watch. Yep, it's 2015.
On to the main house, with its dramatic waterfall (they re-directed a stream to accomplish this) nearby. Was this a knockoff of Frank Lloyd Wright's (there's that name again) Falling Water? Nah, everybody likes water and horizontal houses. The house clings to the hillside, nestled into it, with steel and glass jutting from the rock. The roof is planted with low sedum. The painted color of the steel is said to blend with the surrounding rock, but it's cooler, perhaps intentionally. Inside the modestly-sized main house is a jumble of rooms furnished with boulders that plunges steeply to a living room with a spectacular view and decidedly Flintstones feel. Don't go into the kitchen; it's unrestored and dumpy. You step out onto the patio and tiptoe across a path of stones, then back down the hill (Shhhh...) on a more direct route to your car. Before you leave, you're cornered and subjected to a harangue about the financial woes of maintaining such an important house; presumably the fact that you just shelled out $20 to walk through it isn't good enough.
