Artist Recreates Demolished Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings in Full Color

From Fallingwater to the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright's structures are some of the most iconic of the past century. But a few of his buildings never had the chance to earn widespread admiration because they were demolished before color photography went mainstream. Now, Dezeen reports that architect David Romero is using his computer to restore these lost designs to their original states.

The two buildings Romero chose to recreate—the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York and the Rose Pauson House in Phoenix, Arizona—were mostly documented in black-and-white images. The Pauson house burnt down a year after it was built in 1942, and the Larkin building was destroyed in 1950 to make room for a truck stop that was never completed. An ardent admirer of Wright’s work, Romero chose to put these two pieces at the center of his "Hooked on the Past" project.

Using 3D-modeling programs and Photoshop to add the finishing details, the Spanish architect was able to create photorealistic visualizations of the buildings' exteriors and interiors. The Buffalo office building has been rendered with red brick and pink-tinted mortar, a design detail that was just recently uncovered. For the Phoenix residence, he had a few rare color images to work from, but they had faded over time. You can take a visual tour of the sites in all their former glory below.

[h/t Dezeen]

All images: David Romero via Flickr //& CC BY-NC-SA 2.0