JOHN GALLAGHER

Worth the trip: Tom Monaghan's Frank Lloyd Wright collection on display at Domino's Farms

John Gallagher
Detroit Free Press
This is the way Detroiters saw Frank Lloyd Wright during last visit here in 1957

The world of architecture celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday this month. To mark the occasion, I drove out to Domino’s Farms in Ann Arbor Township where, virtually unknown to the public, one of the nation’s finest collections of Wright material is available for viewing.

Drawings, models, windows, doors, photos, correspondence and much more from Wright’s legendary career can be found on display at Domino’s Farms. Much of the material only recently has been opened for viewing for free by the public — a bonanza for fans of good design.

All of it was collected decades ago by Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s pizza company and builder of Domino’s Farms, who spent millions of dollars to amass the collection.

Both for longtime fans of Wright's work and for newbies who need a basic introduction to America's most famous architect, the collection at Domino's Farms is richly rewarding.

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Monaghan, now 80, dates his appreciation of Wright to his teenage years, when he spent part of his boyhood in an orphanage in the 1940s.

“I always liked architecture,” he said. “I went to the library, architecture section, and I came across this book. It had the Robie House, Fallingwater, and the Johnson Wax Building,” three of Wright’s masterpieces, the first two classic houses that redefined our notions of residential life and the Johnson Wax building a classic open-floorplan office tower. “Holy cow, those were three of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen, they were all entirely different, and they’re all by the same architect. It just blew my mind.”

Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's pizza and Domino's Farms and former owner of the Detroit Tigers, stands near a model of the Turkel House in Detroit, a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that Monaghan once owned. He is photographed at Domino's Farms in Ann Arbor on June 13, 2017.

Once he launched Domino’s pizza and earned a lot of money, Monaghan indulged his passion for Wright. On one occasion, taking his first vacation in a dozen years, Monaghan took his wife and his daughters on a tour of Wright-designed houses in the Midwest.

“My family sat in the trailer and played games and my wife knitted while I was in these houses talking to people. I had the time of my life,” he said.

Born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright first earned fame as an innovative architect in Chicago and suburban Oak Park, Ill. His early Prairie Style houses, with long overhanging roof lines that evoked the horizontal lines of the American prairie, became his signature style.

Wright went on to blend the warmth of the arts and crafts movement with the efficiencies of modern design to craft some of America’s most noted structures in a variety of styles, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Fallingwater home near Pittsburgh. He died in 1959.

Among his Michigan works are the Turkel House in Detroit and the Affleck House and Smith House in Bloomfield Hills. All three are relatively late Wright works, done near the end of his long career, and all show his trademark flowing spaces and sensitive placement within the landscape. The Turkel House stands out for its unusual concrete-block exterior that showed Wright was experimenting with materials to the end.

 Lawrence Technological University owns the Affleck House while the Smith and Turkel houses remain in private hands although occasionally opened to visitors by special arrangement.

Doors and windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on display at Domino's Farms in Ann Arbor on June 13, 2017.

In the heyday of his years building his pizza company, Monaghan used his fortune to buy the Detroit Tigers, collect classic cars, to build the stunning headquarters known as Domino’s Farms, and amass his Frank Lloyd Wright collection.

Monaghan even had Domino’s Farms designed in an updated version of Wright's Prairie Style architecture, a design crafted by architect Gunnar Birkerts.

In more recent years, Monaghan has spent the vast majority of his fortune to build Ave Maria University in Florida, a school dedicated to the values of Monaghan’s Catholic faith. Some years ago, Monaghan sold off some of the larger items in his Wright collection, including Wright-designed furniture, a step he now regrets. But a vast trove remains.

The Monaghan collection contains hundreds of individual items including original sketches in Wright’s own hand as well as one-of-a-kind windows, swatches of Wright-designed carpeting, and more.

A sketch of a proposed house, hand drawn by Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistants, is on display at Domino's Farms in Ann Arbor with other Wright material on June 13, 2017.

Anthony Gholz, a retired architect who worked on Domino’s Farms as a protégé of Birkerts, today serves as a facilitator for the Wright materials in the collection. A lot of the more fragile items remain in the archives but over the past few months Gholz and other staffers have moved a lot of the Wright material out of storage into the public viewing area at Domino’s Farms.

That material is open to public viewing during normal business hours at Domino’s Farms, Monday through Saturday.

Domino’s Farms is located near Plymouth Road and U.S.-23 in Ann Arbor Township. If you go, take note: At more than half a mile long, the headquarters building is a bit hard to navigate. So enter from Lobby C on the west side of the building to see the publicly displayed Wright material. 

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@jgallagherfreep.