Mozart lovers have “K” numbers; Austrian musicologist Ludwig van Köchel codified every Mozart work and assigned the numbers so that there would never again be confusion about which work was which. Lovers of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings have what are called “S” numbers, thanks to William Allin Storrer, PhD. If anyone ever confuses one Wright building with another, it won’t be because Storrer didn’t try to clear matters up.

The indefatigable Dr. Storrer’s life work - finding the location and status of every Frank Lloyd Wright building - has resulted in his famous Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, and The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, both of which are published by University of Chicago Press. To the uninitiated, it may seem a simple matter to find all of Wright’s buildings - surely there’s a list somewhere? - but Storrer’s labors have been long and complex. Wright’s career began over a century ago, and records have vanished or been damaged or scattered. One in five Wright buildings has been lost to demolition or neglect. And finding out where a building used to be is not always a simple matter.

There are complicating factors; Wright designed more than one house for some of his clients, and sometimes had more than one client by the same last name. Various Wright associates and followers designed houses strongly resembling Wright’s famous later ones, and Wright spent some time in his early career doing buildings in academic styles like Queen Anne. Dr. Storrer is the one who can - and does - tell that one Prairie-style structure is by the master, and that a very similar-looking one is by Wright’s associate and illustrator, Marion Mahony. What’s more, he can tell you how he knows.

The man behind all this knowledge is a bit of an enigma; despite his fame, Storrer does not have much of a public profile. His discreet personal Website (www.storrer.com) reveals a man with interests in genealogy, photography, geopolitical issues and his own personal history. Endearingly for a world-famous academic, Storrer maintains pages on his high school class (Dearborn High, ’54) and its reunions, even re-publishing yearbook material for the benefit of old classmates. His class will entry says he left his “broken clarinet reeds” to someone; the picture of a young Storrer working his way through, say, “Frenesi” is irresistible to contemplate. Today’s renowned expert is to be found on Storrer’s Wright site, www.franklloydwrightinfo.com, and in the pages of his books. Time spent reading his work reveals very quickly that this is a man in quest of provable fact, nothing less.

Storrer’s methods of proving what is Wright’s, what still exists and what does not, are varied. Old-fashioned research in libraries and archives is key. Visits to the sites where Wright built are, too; Dr. Storrer has been to all of them and photographed each, personally, more than once. New methods include the use of GPS technology to get even more exact “fixes” on each location. Other experts have been enlisted to provide geometric analyses of houses confused with Wright’s; Frank Lloyd Wright worked under geometric rules of his own devising, unique to his œuvre. Others designed buildings that may look like his to the untutored eye, but such analysis can prove they’re not - absolutely not - by Wright.

A recent hour on the telephone proved Dr. Storrer to be far from the forbidding personage his professional reputation would suggest; the man behind the scholarship is a raconteur par excellence, with a merry laugh equally ready to appreciate your joke or one of his own. While Frank Lloyd Wright's work was the main focus, there was many a detour as we talked. Storrer's love of opera and theatre supplied fodder for more than one tale, including a couple about a stint spent as stage manager for a play starring Faye Dunaway. He recommended the upcoming Seattle Opera revival of its 2001 triumph, Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (more familiar to most of us as the "Ring Cycle") with Jane Eaglen as Brunnhilde. In passing, he mentioned his work as a music critic for The Classical New Jersey Society Journal, where his lifelong enthusiasm for opera is summed up in a review of baritone Terence Murphy. Storrer compares Murphy's work in Mozart's La Nozze de Figaro to that of Sherrill Milnes before Milnes' days at the Metropolitan Opera- a comparison few other reviewers today could make from first-hand knowledge.

But for all Storrer's other interests, his love for Frank Lloyd Wright's work reigns supreme. He's particularly passionate when discussing today's tendency to build new structures from plans of unbuilt Wright projects. He is not against the buildings themselves, but he is completely unwilling to catalogue them in his books, feeling that without Wright's personal involvement, the result can only be a shadow of Wright's intent for the original project. He feels that Wright drew so much inspiration from particular sites and clients that it is impossible for buildings realized outside those circumstances to be considered on an equal footing with those Wright sited and saw to completion himself. He's particularly bemused by the recent erections of Monona Terrace and the Nakoma Resort, saying that changes forced by present-day building code considerations were handled insensitively in the first instance, and that Wright's plans were altered in the second. In the case of the Nakoma Resort, it does not help that the project was designed in 1924 for a prairie site in Madison, WI, and that the altered final product of 2001 is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

The most Dr. Storrer will say of projects like these is that they are buildings "from plans of Frank Lloyd Wright's", and he is resigned to the idea that the purity of his approach is not popular with everyone. Since his books are standard references for students of Wright's œuvre, Storrer's denial of an "S" number to a building makes an enormous difference in its recognition by the public. In the case of residential structures, the difference in realty value can be substantial, too. That is not to say that Dr. Storrer never has good news- he recently found the Mitchell Residence in Racine, WI to possess a plan done by Wright, even though the architect who asked for Wright's assistance, Cecil Corwin, detailed the house in his own manner. The Mitchell Residence now proudly bears an "S" number- S.039- and it would be surprising if the value of the house has not risen accordingly.

That, of course, is not William Allin Storrer's concern- only the truth is. In his estimation, a building is directly from the hand of Frank Lloyd Wright, in whole or in part, or it is not by Wright at all. With every passing year, Storrer's work becomes more important, as sites of demolished Wright structures are built over, archives lost, Wright-like copies and clones built, and the past becomes more distant and harder to resurrect. Dr. Storrer has devoted his career to making certain that future generations who want to know about Frank Lloyd Wright's work will have knowledge based in fact, not conjecture. And if those future scholars know their stuff at all, they'll be grateful to the man who called them as he saw them, and saw them plain indeed.

Books by William Allin Storrer available through Amazon.

The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalogue. Third Edition, 2002. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hardcover and paperback.

A Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. 1994. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hardcover.

In addition to these English-language editions, the Companion is available from Taipeistan in Chinese, from Zanichelli Editore S.p.A. in Italian, from Maruzen Co., Ltd in Japanese, and in a CD-ROM edition readable in any Web browser from Prairie Multimedia of West Chicago, Illinois.