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...