Distinctly Montana Magazine

49 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m ized materials and built-in furniture to reduce costs and in so doing make it affordable for the average American. As the 1950s, and Wright's tenth decade on Earth, began, Usoni- anism began to appropriate almost space-age components, like the enormous white plastic sphere planter outside of the Lock- ridge Medical Clinic in Whitefish, Montana. He designed it in the year before his death. The Whitefish Pilot reported on Friday, July 10, 1959 on the fas- cinating building: "The new clinic building on Central Avenue by the famed ar- chitect, the late Frank Lloyd Wright, to house the offices of Drs. Lockridge, Whalen and McIntyre, is one of three western proj- ects by Wright considered in an article in the June issue of the Pacific Architect and Builder. "The Whitefish building, the article notes, is the only Wright-de- signed one in Montana, and states that the architect had planned to visit the building, since his desire to have a structure in the Montana mountains was one reason he had designed it." What can we make of the article's insistence that it was the only Wright-designed project in Montana? Could a man in his nine- ties, a man now considered the finest architect of his times, still rue an exhausting year spent poring over plans for a utopian town that would never come to exist and yearning for the free- dom to leave his family? Or did he assume that none of his Mon- tana buildings still stood, and really did long to have a structure in the Montana mountains? Needless to say, Wright didn't visit the building. He did not survive to see any of his Montana projects completed. Yet com- pleted it was, if a few years after the architect's death. It had a horizontally oriented floor plan with orange-tan bricks, 64-feet of floor-to-ceiling windows, a fireplace in the lobby, and a trim of Philippine mahogany painted Cherokee red, Wright's favorite color. There was a planter on its rooftop and a reception desk de-

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