Frank Lloyd Wright designed three houses in Montréal and the surrounding region between 1906 and 1950. The CCA owns drawings and letters related to two of these.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s first project in Montréal was a house for Charles Thaxter Shaw, co-founder and president of the Anglo-Canadian Leather Company. A perspective drawing for this unexecuted design (Illustration 1) depicts a monumental granite structure from below its steep site in Westmount. The extensive use of terraced garden walls doubled the length of the house, extending it down the mountain from the head of Mountain Avenue to the principal entrance on Cedar Avenue. For the Shaw family’s active social life Wright proposed a site of entertainment and spectacle, including a bowling alley and a long ballroom flanked by enclosed gardens terminated by a conservatory. The projected costs proved too great, however. Instead, Wright remodeled the Shaws’ Victorian townhouse at 3466 Peel Street, transforming it into a Prairie Style home in 1906. Wright’s design has since been demolished.

George Jacobsen, an engineer specialising in reinforced concrete construction and foundation design for the Arctic, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright on 8 January 1949 requesting designs for a house. Fearing that such a project might not interest the great architect, Jacobsen appealed to his vanity, offering that “…it might please you to have one of your designs, well executed, standing in eastern Canada…[where it would] stand out like a beacon in the night.” Wright accepted (Illustration 2) and in letters of 16 and 17 February Jacobsen laid out his requirements for a modest house on the Ottawa River at Hudson Heights, Québec. By 4 April Wright delivered plans based on the Usonian model of his 1941 Vigo Sundt House project (Madison, WI). Pleased with the plans, (Illustration 3) Peggy Jacobsen wrote “We find the lay-out [of the house] very good, except for the following.” Five pages of precise demands accompanied by explanatory sketches followed, showing Jacobsen’s wife to have been an exacting and informed client: the fireplace was too close to the passageway; the windows were not low enough to see the view; “How do the tradesmen get to [the workspace]?”; “Where is the garbage disposal?”

Wright agreed to work on these changes but after eight months and several importuning letters nothing had been achieved. Jacobsen visited Taliesin, where Wright proposed a new triangular plan projected on a hexagonal grid, similar to his 1941 Roy Peterson House project (Racine, WI) (Illustration 4). The new plan required steel beams for the roof. Steel was still scare in the post-war years, and although Wright agreed to consider alternate structural materials, by 17 May Jacobsen requested a return to the original, rectangular plans. The house was never built.

In addition to the drawings, blueprints and correspondence for the Shaw and Jacobsen houses, the CCA holds twenty drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright, including two perspectives for the 1935 Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Fallingwater (Bear Run, Pa.)