Frank Lloyd Wright sketched a home for Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand had started a two decade long correspondence with the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937. Although the two met for the first time a year after the publication of The Fountainhead.

On display, at an exhibition on "Drawings and Objects by Architects," currently being held in Los Angeles, is "a preliminary rendering of a "cottage studio," in colored pencil on paper, that the legendary architect crafted for Rand". The cottage was never built.

"Cottage studio" is an unlikely term for an imposing, cantilevered building with horizontal bands of fieldstone. Asymmetric terraces of concrete or stucco radiate off a vertical spine, perhaps a chimney, and seem to float on ribbons of clerestory windows.

With expressive gestures, Wright suggests cascading vines and fountains to soften the composition of hard materials. A writing studio was to be placed at the top of the tower with louvered windows to capture light, ocean views and air. Rand (1905-82) expressed her delight in an October 1946 letter to Wright:

"The house you designed for me is magnificent. I gasped when I saw it. It is the particular kind of sculpture in space which I love and which nobody but you has ever been able to achieve.

In "The Fountainhead," modern architecture provided a convenient vehicle for her views. In her 1937 letter, she told Wright that her new novel "is to be the story of an architect who follows his own convictions throughout his life, no matter what society thinks of it or does to him. . . . A man who has an ideal and goes through hell for it. So you can understand why it seems to me that of all men on earth you are the one I must see."

But she added: "My hero is not you. I do not intend to follow in the novel the events of your life and career. His life will not be yours, nor his work, perhaps not even his artistic ideals. But his spirit is yours -- I think."

The letter is one of hundreds in the posthumous 1995 collection "Letters of Ayn Rand" edited by Michael S. Berliner.

Please read the complete article "Frank Lloyd Wright sketch on exhibit" by Martha Groves, in the Los Angeles Times, on 3 Oct. 2009.