Take a Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Demolished Imperial Hotel

John Hill
26. August 2022
Photo: Screenshot of film by Frank Lloyd Wright Trust

To date, people who wanted to experience a remnant of Wright's Imperial Hotel had to visit the Meiji-Mura open-air architectural museum near Nagoya, where the hotel's lobby and reflecting pool were reconstructed in 1976. This writer visited a couple of decades ago but could only see the exterior, since the interior was off limits. But the lobby and pool, as the video reveals, were small pieces of the sprawling 250-room hotel. As such, a visit to the reconstruction just scratches the surface on the larger whole, which is comprehensively modeled and rendered in the film based on original plans and historical photos.

The reconstructed lobby at Meiji-Mura. (Photo: John Hill)

Two years in the making, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works – The Imperial Hotel is part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust's "The Lost Works – Demolished and Unrealized Buildings" series, which also includes the Larkin Administration Building that was built in Buffalo, New York, in 1906 and demolished in 1950. The architectural visualization of both films in the series was done by Razin Khan. What will he do next? This writer hopes it is Midway Gardens.

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