Frank Lloyd Wright has designed another Wichita building? Not quite, but close

Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 with two Wichita buildings to his name. Now there’s a third in the works, this time for the Fundamental Learning Center, that’s heavily influenced by his design principles and by an actual rendering he made for a building at Wichita State University that was never built.

Wright’s story is interwoven with the center in a few ways, including one that floored center co-founder and executive director Jeanine Phillips: Wright once had plans to build a house at 143rd and Central, the same intersection at which the center — without knowing his plans — chose to build.

“It’s a pretty amazing story,” Phillips said.

First, though, there’s the story of the center and why it needs a new school.

Phillips and Gretchen Andeel founded the center in 2000, initially to educate parents and teachers on how to help children with dyslexia learn.

Both women have children with dyslexia, a learning difficulty that affects reading, spelling and sometimes the ability to keep words straight while speaking.

Phillips also has dyslexia, which was not diagnosed until she was almost out of college.

Educating the educators is still one of the center’s core missions, but it also has a school for children with dyslexia and offers evaluations of children with severe reading issues.

The center grew at Parklane over the years, which included the addition of a school in 2014. In 2016, the center moved to about 18,000 square feet at 2220 E. 21st St. just west of Grove.

The new 38,000-square-foot school will be on 25 acres at the northeast corner of 143rd and Central. Fourmile Creek runs through the property, where a lake sits as well.

The center is conducting a $20 million capital campaign.

The building, its parking lot and grounds are $15.5 million. The remainder of the money will be for endowments for education and operations. The center has raised $10 million so far through a quiet campaign it started two years ago. It will receive a $2 million challenge grant from the Mabee Foundation if it can raise $5.83 million by Jan. 14, 2021. Construction is slated to begin in July 2021.

The current school accommodates 60 students. The new one will have 120 students, but Phillips said it’s still not enough.

“The need is so huge.”

Phillips said the biggest need is to train teachers on how to teach children with dyslexia.

Previously, the state never had mandatory dyslexia testing. Now it’s going to start, and Phillips said the center has to grow to help keep up with that demand.

She said dyslexia has long been known as a “Neiman Marcus diagnosis” in that children who have low socioeconomic statuses can’t get help.

“Education has not taken care of these kids,” Phillips said.

“Their parents have to have the resources to change their lives, and that’s not fair.”

Shocking discovery

The moment Phillips said she realized the center needed its own specially designed school came in 2012 when she conducted an assessment with a fourth-grade student.

“When I’m done, you can ask me questions,” Phillips told the boy.

Her questions had been about what he couldn’t do. The boy asked, “Why didn’t you ask me to show you what I could do?”

The experience confirmed what Phillips already knew: Children with dyslexia often excel in areas outside of reading.

Phillips said she then knew she had to build a different kind of school to teach in a different kind of way, particularly with subjects such as design, dance, drama, art, music, building, innovation, technology and other areas in which children with dyslexia do well.

As she began discussing a new school, Phillips said her father, former WSU treasurer Larry Jones, told her about a juvenile cultural center that Wright designed for WSU in 1953.

Wright also designed the Corbin Education Center at WSU, which was dedicated in 1964, but the juvenile cultural center never happened.

“We need to go get that plan,” her father told her.

“I thought he was crazy,” Phillips said. “Turns out it was hidden in a big drawer in a maintenance shed. It was shocking.”

Late WSU president John Bardo approved the center taking the plan.

It served as an inspiration rather than model for the center.

The Wright inspiration

“I don’t think anybody can copy his work,” said GLMV Architecture architect Craig Rhodes, who designed the new center.

Nor would Wright want his work copied, said Rhodes, an expert on Wright and, in particular, his work in Kansas.

“I think Wright did want his principles understood,” Rhodes said. “Wright’s work was definitely rooted in philosophies, and that’s really important. . . . We did a lot of unpacking of (his) work, kind of what gives it meaning and makes it special.”

That includes long horizontal lines and the way the building connects with the ground around it by immersing itself in the landscape. Rhodes said it also has elements that reach to the sky.

The environment in which his buildings were built was huge for Wright, so there’s a lot of glass to bring the outside in.

One feature from Wright’s juvenile cultural center that influenced the new Fundamental Learning Center was its round shape, which students of Wright later used in the design of Century II.

The new center has a central space with three wings off of it: an administrative wing, a training center for educators and a learning lab, “which is similar to what Wright had proposed,” Rhodes said.

Jennifer Remsberg, the center’s director of marketing and communications, said that central space is key to greeting everyone who enters with warmth and a connection to nature.

“We refer to that space around here as the hug.”

Rhodes said Wright’s buildings often are organized around courtyards to incorporate the outside. The juvenile cultural center had one, and Rhodes incorporated one into the new center’s space as well.

What would Wright think?

Rhodes believes the new Fundamental Learning Center “will stand on its own as a piece of unique architecture.”

Still, he can’t help wondering what Wright would think of it.

“It’s really hard to know because he was a bit of a quick wit. Some people would say a little hard to get along with.”

Rhodes said the real goal was to create the right environment for children who have been traumatized by traditional education in traditional settings to now learn in a way that best suits them.

“That’s really what this facility is supposed to be — for the transformation of those kids’ education,” Rhodes said. “The most important part maybe doesn’t have to do with Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Final twist of fate?

In early 2018, Phillips said she took her board to College Hill to see the Allen House, which Wright designed in 1915.

On the second floor in the home’s museum, Phillips saw Wright’s 1935 sketch for the Hoult House at the northwest corner of 143rd and Central.

The house — directly across the intersection from where the Fundamental Learning Center will be and where Crestview Country Club is today — was supposed to be Wright’s first “usonian” house.

Usonian was his word for a low-cost structure with high design that could connect average homeowners with nature and art and be a social living space, although it was never built on this spot.

Phillips couldn’t believe what she saw.

“How crazy is that? . . . So Frank Lloyd Wright himself had picked that spot on the Fourmile Creek.”

Phillips also noted that Wright may have been an undiagnosed dyslexic. She said his mother home-schooled him and, because he was a challenge to teach, she created her own system for instructing him.

With that information along with the lost WSU plans and the Hoult House plans for the same intersection, Phillips said she believes it all must mean something.

“I say there are no coincidences here.”

This story was originally published March 15, 2020 at 5:03 AM.