Moriss Gift Interior HABS CAL,38-SANFRA,160-7

The V. C. Morris Gift Shop is located at 140 Maiden Lane in downtown

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, United States, and was designed by

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

in 1948. The store was used by Wright as a physical

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

, or

proof of concept Proof of concept (POC or PoC), also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has prac ...

for the circular ramp at the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

. All of the built-in

furniture Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating (e.g., stools, chairs, and sofas), eating (tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, and sleeping (e.g., beds and hammocks). Fu ...

is constructed out of

black walnut ''Juglans nigra'', the eastern American black walnut, is a species of deciduous tree in the walnut family, Juglandaceae, native to North America. It grows mostly in riparian zones, from southern Ontario, west to southeast South Dakota, south t ...

, is original to the renovation, and was designed by Manuel Sandoval, who apprenticed and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Present day

Xanadu Gallery, which closed in August 2015, spent a significant sum to restore the building to Wright's vision. The gallery's website reported that it "put the million ollar restoration in the capable hands of Aaron Green, who had worked with Wright on other projects such as the Marin Civic Center and was meticulous in maintaining the building's original detail and integrity." The building was reportedly sold to a "high-end designer fashion boutique" as of July 2015 by the

Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is an organization devoted to the historic preservation of buildings and their furnishings and decoration designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as to the study of Wright's career. The organization has gr ...

. The building was occupied – for at least at few weeks in 2016 – by

Gwyneth Paltrow Gwyneth Kate Paltrow (; born ) is an American actress and businesswoman. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Paltrow gained notice for her early work in films ...

's goop MRKT, which identifies itself as a "lifestyle peration offering a tight curation of products and content." The company's San Francisco store webpage reports, :''We partnered with San Francisco interior designer and arts patron Steven Volpe on a re-imagining of this iconic Frank Lloyd Wright space. A consummate historian, Steven sourced original details to bring back to life as the perfect backdrop to our goop MRKT collaboration.'' At the same time, though, the same page indicates store's period of operation is with dates (May 5 through May 22 (no year indicated)) and times,. This operation appeared to have a very restricted term of occupancy, often referred to as a "pop up" shop. In August 2017, ISAIA Napoli, an Italian men's fashion store, moved into the building. The V.C. Morris Gift Shop was listed in 2007 at number 126 on the

American Institute of Architects The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to su ...

' list of the 150 favorite buildings in America. The building is one of seventeen American buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that the

AIA AIA or A.I.A. or Aia may refer to: Aia * Aia, a small town in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, Spain * Aia, current Kutaisi, ancient capital of Colchis * Aia, another name for Aea (Malis), an ancient town in Greece * ''Aia'', the collected ed ...

has designated to be retained as an example of his architectural contribution to American culture. File:V.C. Morris Store exterior HABS CAL,38-SANFRA,160-1.jpg File:Morris Gift ramp HABS CAL,38-SANFRA,160-3.jpg File:FLWs V. C. Morris Shop (159607952).jpg File:V.C. Morris Store 2.jpg

References

* Storrer, William Allin. ''The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion''. University Of Chicago Press, 2006, (S.310)

External links

V.C. Morris Store, 140 Maiden Lane, San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA
- Images in the Library of Congress
V. C. Morris gift Shop
at "Wright on the Web."
''Wright as an educator / Aaron Green and Lloyd Wright''
- radio program produced by Bruce Rodde for Pacifica Radio, in which "Reese Palley describes how San Francisco hippies volunteered to help reconstruct Wright's V.C. Morris Gift Shop."
''Meet Manuel Sandoval.''

''Frank Lloyd Wright''
S. Kliczkowski, Rockport Publishers, , 9781610596688, (publication date not available,) p50 &ff. {{Frank Lloyd Wright 1940s architecture in the United States Commercial buildings completed in 1948 Buildings and structures in San Francisco Frank Lloyd Wright buildings Modernist architecture in California San Francisco Designated Landmarks Union Square, San Francisco