This is one of the areas I’m least qualified to opine upon.

That won’t stop me.

I’ll open by showing perhaps my favorite building of all time — a building that no longer exists.

The Larkin Administration Building, built for the Larkin Soap Company,  stood in my former hometown of Buffalo, New York, from the early until the mid 20th century.  You can read a good chunk of the story here.  Or you can get the whole story from Professor Jack Quinan’s excellent Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building:  Myth and Fact.

A couple key facts are that the imposing brick structure was uniquely designed to make office workers (mostly young women) comfortable in an otherwise grimy industrial area of town.  It arguably had the first central air conditioning system of any large office building — an evaporative system that cooled the air and scrubbed it of the soot and ash inherent to its surroundings.

Sadly, the Larkin Soap Company began its fatal decline in the 1920s, and eventually left its former office building empty and derelict.  The City of Buffalo tore it down in 1950 — as Frank Lloyd Wright’s popularity was just burgeoning.

PS — is that an early Smart parked out front?