The archives' extensive holdings related to the planning, building, decor and use of Graycliff in its heyday-including letters, blueprints, photographs and interviews with family members-also are expected to enhance requests by the Graycliff Conservancy for funding from state and federal funding agencies, private foundations, and corporate and individual donors.

Built in 1929 on a 60-foot-high gray shale cliff in Derby, overlooking Lake Erie's eastern shore, Graycliff is considered to be one of Wright's most overlooked masterworks. The residence was an airy, open, sunlit dwelling wrapped in elements of its natural landscape. It originally was surrounded by 8 acres of trees, hidden gardens and grassy meadows.

Graycliff was abandoned by the family in 1941, however, and the Piarist Fathers occupied the house for decades but could not afford upkeep and repair. The property is now held by the Graycliff Conservancy, which is moving to restore the residence and gardens. But structural changes in the original property and the sale of all its furniture would, under most circumstances, make restoration to its original state very difficult.

In October, the UB Archives helped to move the Graycliff restoration process along through a symposium titled "Frank Lloyd Wright in Western New York." Speakers examined lesser-known aspects of several of Wright's buildings in Buffalo and Rochester, including Graycliff. In connection with the event, the archives also has mounted an exhibition of Graycliff plans and photos from its collection. The exhibition will be open through January in the Poetry/Rare Books Room, 420 Capen Hall, during regular business hours.

Rodney Obien, assistant to University Archivist Christopher Densmore, was largely responsible for the exhibition. While preparing for it, he turned up some heretofore unidentified plans in the Cornell University Library that are certain to inform the preservation and restoration efforts. The discovery of these plans, coupled with the archival photos, Obien said, will make it possible for the Graycliff Conservancy to replicate the fine gardens while the house is restored.

Graycliff should be understood in the context of the popular architecture of the day and Wright's own canon, preservationists say. UB's extensive collection of letters between Wright and Darwin D. Martin illuminate the collaborative manner by which the two men and Mrs. Martin debated, disagreed and determined the final plans for Graycliff as an infinitely more comfortable home than the family's residence on Jewett Parkway in Buffalo, according to family consensus.

Graycliff's floor plan and room orientation, which the letters indicate were suggested by Darwin Martin, recall those of the then-popular English manor house. Wright employed aspects of this basic plan, but added innovations like native construction materials, and opened the entire structure to lake breezes that cooled the interior and made vast expanses of lake and sky visible from many rooms.

Cantilevered balconies, so loved by both Wright and Martin, are seen in photos to open over the gardens and onto the lake above a cliffside esplanade that helps meld the residence with its natural environment.

Interviews with the Martins' grandson, Darwin Foster, and his sister, the Rev. Margaret Foster, who spent their childhood summers at Graycliff, are held in the UB collection and provide a rare and intimate look at the relationship between a home and the family that appreciated and enjoyed its most engaging features.

Darwin Foster called Graycliff "a beautiful place. A wonderful place. We all just loved it there....We had one whale of a good time in those days."

Margaret Foster recalled that when the windows were open on both sides of the house, "the wind would blow right through - clear, clean and marvelous - it blew so hard that the poplars would double over, but it was a warm wind. The windows set up an environment, so that wherever you turned, you could see and smell the blue of the lake."

So despite 60 years of benign neglect, the archives offer ample evidence of Graycliff's original warmth and welcome so resonant with Martin's documented urge to gather his family in an architectural embrace.