[Romeo and Juliet]

Photographing from an oblique angle, Frank Lloyd Wright renders this windmill almost unrecognizable. Such funhouse distortion would become a favorite trick of modernist photographers, but more peculiar is the architect who willfully contorts his own design. After Wright built this structure in Wisconsin in 1897, a camera allowed him to keep tweaking its appearance in apparent pursuit of an oft-stated goal: "the elimination of the insignificant." Conceived in harmony with his earlier Hillside Home School project, built for his aunts, the windmill fuses two columnar forms: a short octagon and a taller, thinner rhombus, evocative to some of Romeo and Juliet joined in an embrace. Leveling these forms into flat planes, Wright’s sidelong view shaves the structure to its essential silhouette.