BY KAREN BOSSICK

Henry Whiting is fond of bragging that he’s lived with Frank Lloyd Wright his entire life—from being raised in a house designed by a charter member of Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship to living in the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in Idaho, built in 1952.

And on Wednesday, June 28, he will present a free lecture, “Landscape into Architecture: Living with Frank Lloyd Wright in Idaho,” at Ketchum’s Community Library.

The lecture, sponsored by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, will start at 6 p.m.

Whiting, who has a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was raised in a house designed by Alden B. Dow, a charter member of Wrights architectural apprenticeship program established at Taliesin in Wisconsin and Scottsdale, Ariz., and the son of Dow Chemical’s Herbert Dow.

Dow, who happened to be Whiting’s great-uncle and mentor, apprenticed under Wright for several months and remained close friends with him until Wright’s death.

As a young man, Whiting moved to Sun Valley to assist with the design of his parent’s new home—an iconic sharply angled structure built with poured concrete on a hill across from Dollar Mountain.

After further immersing himself in Wright’s aesthetic and philosophy, Whiting commissioned a contemporary protégé of Wright’s—architect Bart Prince—to design a home at the mouth of Greenhorn Gulch.

Whiting has spent 35 years restoring the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in Idaho—the Archie Teater house built 200 feet above the Snake River in the Hagerman Valley near Bliss. He has written two books on the studio, commonly referred to as Teater’s Knoll.

The one-room house, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, is shaped like a parallelogram with a sloping room. The walls are made of Oakley stone mined 80 miles away. The inside features a gorgeous fireplace, a hundred windows and rustic Western structure that mimics much of the National Park architecture of the West.

Whiting will focus his lecture on his personal history with the three buildings in his life, as well as Wright’s vision of the harmonious relation of architecture to landscape.

“Henry’s story is a personal one and its thorough line is a devotion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s aesthetic and vision,” said Kristin Poole, artistic director at The Center. “And Teater’s Knolls is a remarkable piece of architectural history worthy of celebration.”