Art: Wright or Wrong

The Grand Canal of Venice is the most spectacular of all municipal thoroughfares. Graceful gondolas and chugging motorboats travel its waters, and its banks are lined with great pink-tinted palazzi, decorated with balconies and frills of cake-icing beauty and delicacy. Last week Venetians and Venice-lovers were engaged in a heated esthetic and sentimental wrangle with the advocates of progress and modern architecture. The issue: a proposal to construct a house designed by U.S. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright on a curve of the Grand Canal.

It all started in 1952 when a wealthy Italian contractor named Paolo Masieri commissioned Architect Wright to design...

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