GAMBIER — In the early 1990’s, photographer and Kenyon College professor Gregory Spaid walked into an exhibition in Columbus and unknowingly stepped into a passion project that would continue for decades.
Spaid is an American artist whose photographs seek to illuminate the beauty and meaning found in everyday life.
His work has been featured in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. He’s an author of several monographs including Grace: Photographs of Rural America.
The Columbus show Spaid viewed was a retrospective of Joe Munroe, an accomplished agricultural photographer who had just donated his archive to the Ohio Historical Society.
The room buzzed with conversation, and in a brief exchange, Munroe asked Spaid where he was from.
When Spaid replied Gambier, Munroe responded, “Oh, I almost lived there.”
Then came the story: how he and his wife, Virginia, had commissioned none other than Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for them on a hillside overlooking the Kokosing River.
The home was never built, but it’s a story now being told, thanks to Spaid’s new exhibition at the Gund Gallery in Kenyon College, titled To Dream A House: Frank Lloyd Wright in Knox County.
Spaid curated the exhibit in collaboration with Gund Gallery staff and members of the local community, including descendants of the Walker family.
The show features all 24 of Wright’s original drawings for the house, from conceptual sketches to full working plans, as well as archival photographs by Munroe.
Joe Munroe’s request to Wright was heartfelt. In a 1945 letter, he wrote, “Virginia and I would like very much for the next to be a ‘Wright.’”
Two years later, the full plans arrived. The Munroes were delighted. The home Wright designed was a Usonian house – a term used for a series of relatively affordable, modern homes intended for middle-class Americans.
“It is very democratic,” Spaid said. “Wright wanted good design to be available to everyone, not just the wealthy.
“He was a visionary, and this house was about making good design, about the human experience.”
Spaid described how the plans included classic Wright elements: a flat roof with cantilevered overhangs, radiant floor heating, passive solar features through large windows, and a carport rather than a garage. Wright even included something rare in his residential design – a darkroom and photography studio.
“But,” Spaid added, “the house never made it off the page.”
Despite their deep admiration for the design, the Munrows could never afford to build it.
They remained in Mount Vernon for nearly a decade, where Joe opened a studio on South Main Street and launched a career that would eventually span publication in National Geographic, Life, and Look magazines.
In 1955, the family relocated to Orinda, California, still holding on to the dream that one day they might resurrect Wright’s plans.
In assembling the exhibit, Spaid became deeply immersed in Munroe’s life and work.
He tracked down the house plans at Taliesin West in Arizona and unearthed a trove of correspondence between Munroe and Wright at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
“The letters were fascinating,” Spaid said. “They weren’t just about logistics – there was this sense of mutual respect between the two.
“Wright was a mentor to Munroe in many ways.”
That relationship had begun years earlier. As a young photographer working for General Motors in Detroit, Munroe had caught the eye of Eliel Saarinen, director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
When Frank Lloyed Wright needed someone to photograph his houses in Michigan, it was Saarinen who recommended Munroe.
Their collaboration culminated in an important project: photographing Wright’s scale model of what would become the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
“It’s kind of amazing,” Spaid noted. “Those were the images Wright used to pitch his design. Munroe’s photographs helped shape the Guggenheim’s public perception before it was even built.”
When asked if there were artistic parallels between Wright’s architecture and Munroe’s photography, Spaid paused.
“I think Munroe had a strong foundation in modernism – he studied with Ansel Adams, was part of a camera club with Callahan in Detroit,” Spaid said. “He had an eye for form and balance.
“Wright’s houses – especially the Usonians – were so visually discipled. There was probably a kind of aesthetic sympathy between them.”
The exhibit doesn’t stop at Wright and Munroe.
It also highlights the Walker Sheep farm, a once-renowned operation in Knox County that Munroe photographed during his early assignments for The Farm Quarterly, a large-format agriculture magazine known for its striking imagery.
The Walker family helped introduce Monroe to the area and even helped him secure
the land where the Wright house would have stood.
In Spaid’s view, these three narratives – Wright’s design, Munroe’s artistic journey, and the agricultural heritage of the Walkers – form a composition that captures both a moment in history and a sense of place.
“I like that it’s a local story,” he said.
Spaid noted that stories like this one challenge assumptions often held by people in cities.
“There’s this subtle superiority complex,” Spaid said.
“As if nothing of artistic or cultural value could come from a rural place. But here you have a visionary photographer, a legendary architect, and a groundbreaking agricultural story and it all happened right here in Knox County.”
Though the house was never built, the dream of it remained alive for decades.
In California, the Monroes even purchased a lot at Pebble Beach, hoping to build the house there. But rising land values and the costs of raising four children made that impossible.
The plans, rolled and tucked away, became a symbol of both artistic ambition and middle-class limitation.
Munroe dieed in 2014 at age 97. Virginia, at 102, five years later. They were married for 79 years.
Today, Wright’s house for the Munroes lives on, if not in brick and timber, then in the graphite and memory that is ‘To Dream A House: Frank Lloyed Wright in Knox County,’ which runs through July at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College.
Thanks to Gregory Spaid’s work, it now lives in public view.
Spaid’s recent projects explore themes of environmental and human movement, including a series titled Reading Trees, which reflects his deep interest in nature, and Pedestrians, an abstract exploration of urban rhythm.
Fore more information online visit the exhibition website: https://sites.google.com/kenyon.edu/todreamahousefranklloydwrighti/home