Frank Lloyd Wright and His 1929 Cord L-29 4-Door Convertible

Just the “Wright Car” for the Holidays!

Excerpted from an article by Darrell Burnett in “The Gallery Times” – Dec. 2024

Ho-Ho-Ho-rsepower! As we arrive at the doorstep of December, one monumental milestone appears to have disappeared beneath the tinsel and trappings of this holiday season. On December 2nd, a full 122 years ago in 1902, French designer Leon-Marie-Joseph-Clement Levavasseur was awarded a patent for the first operable V-8 engine.

When the 39-year-old Levavasseur accomplished what would turn out to be one of the seminal moments in automotive history, he was as far from a car as he was from America. This forward thinking Frenchman’s original V-8 engine was aimed at aircraft not automobiles. A V-8 wouldn’t find its way under the hood of a car until 12 years later when Cadillac introduced its V-8 powered 1914 Type 41 with a then shocking 70 horsepower!

My deep dive into researching the first V-8 cued my curiosity. On the heels of this fresh pursuit of power, I couldn’t help wondering who was the first bona fide “car nut”? I cast my vote for Frank Lloyd Wright. Yes, that Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s most famous architect.

Mr. Wright was so famous that I challenge you to find anyone who can name a second world-famous architect in the last two centuries without resorting to the gurus of Google. Even more amazing is that Frank Lloyd Wright’s insatiable appetite for automobiles got off to a slow start. He didn’t own his first car until he was 44 years old.

That wasn’t his fault. Frank Lloyd Wright was born June 8th, 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, 26 years before the Duryea Brothers introduced the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1893, and a full 15 years before Henry Ford’s landmark Model T arrived on the scene. He quickly made up for lost time.

Mr. Wright was a brilliant architect, but when it came to cars he didn’t know where to draw the line. His fine taste in transportation frequently eclipsed his wherewithal to purchase his chariots of choice, a technicality that Mr. Wright never let get in his way. Oblivious to the pressure on his purse strings, he owned or rented 85 cars and 1 motorcycle over a span of just 42 years. Of those 85, there wasn’t a junker in the bunch. If it was beautiful and fast, or fast and beautiful, then it was car CATNIP for Frank Lloyd Wright!

Among his most famous conquests was the 1929 Cord L-29 4-door convertible pictured here.

Never a slave to understatement, Mr. Wright had it custom painted Taliesin Orange.

Despite designing over 1,000 buildings, mansions, and homes in his lifetime, Frank Lloyd Wright curiously never designed an automobile — not even a sleepy sedan. That didn’t prevent him from redesigning them however, which he did frequently.

Frank Lloyd Wright stopped driving in 1937 at the age of 70, but that didn’t stop him from buying cars for another 21 years right up until the time he passed away at the age of 91 in 1959. The world remembers Frank Lloyd Wright as a driving force in architecture, I fondly remember him as simply a …driving force!