The Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, a landmark of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School architecture, has launched a new exhibition titled “Collecting Ourselves.” The show highlights the museum's decades-long, painstaking effort to track down and repatriate the original furniture and decorative objects designed specifically for the site. While the structural restoration of the complex was completed in 2017, the task of reuniting Wright’s holistic interior vision—including his iconic Barrel chairs and intricate art glass—remains an ongoing archival and curatorial challenge.
This initiative underscores a shift in historic preservation that moves beyond mere bricks and mortar to embrace Wright’s philosophy of total design. By documenting the provenance and recovery of these dispersed artifacts, the exhibition sheds light on the often-invisible labor of curators and researchers. It serves as a case study in how house museums must navigate the secondary market and private collections to restore the integrity of architectural masterpieces that were stripped of their contents over decades of neglect.