“I might admire it within the occasion you’ll design me a canine house, which is likely to be easy to assemble, nonetheless would go along with our house,” wrote Berger inside the letter. “The reason I would love this canine house is for the winters primarily.”
The letter Berger wrote Wright. Credit score: COUNTY OF MARIN
He equipped Eddie’s age, “4 years outdated or in canine life 28 years,” and dimension, “two and a half ft extreme and three ft prolonged.”
He equipped to pay the architect for the design with money from his paper route.
“A house for Eddie is an opportunity,” wrote Wright in his reply, dated June 28, 1956. “Someday I shall design one nonetheless merely now I am too busy to concentrate on it. You write me subsequent November to Phoenix, Arizona and I may have one factor then.”
It wasn’t until the next yr that the architect despatched Berger the plans for the triangular canine house, written on the once more of an envelope and equipped for free of charge. The design choices signatures of Wright’s work often and of the Bergers’ home, identical to the low-pitched roof and exaggerated overhang.
The canine house on the Marin County Civic Coronary heart. Credit score: COUNTY OF MARIN
The canine house on present, nonetheless, is just not the exact canine house utilized by Eddie. Berger’s father, Robert, and brother, Eric, constructed the canine house in 1963 when Berger joined the Navy, six years after receiving the plans from Wright. Nonetheless the family’s labrador didn’t use the canine house, and in 1970 Berger’s mother Gloria despatched it to the dump, in accordance with the county.
In 2010, Berger and Eric constructed one different mannequin of the canine house from Wright’s plans as part of a documentary, “Romanza,” about Wright’s life. And in 2016 Berger donated the distinctive building to Marin County.
The canine house is the smallest building Wright ever designed, the county says. The architect died in 1959, merely two years after mailing Berger the design for his canine companion.
