Riverview Terrace Restaurant
building by architect Frank Lloyd Wright
The Riverview Terrace Restaurant, also known as The Spring Green Restaurant, is a building designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953 near his Taliesin estate in Wisconsin. He purchased the land on which to build the restaurant as, "a wayside for tourists with a balcony over the river." Construction began the next year, with the roof being added by 1957. The building was incomplete when he died in 1959, but was purchased in 1966 by the Wisconsin River Development Corporation and completed the next year as The Spring Green restaurant. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.
History
In 1968, Food Service Magazine had an article about the newly opened restaurant:
... [W]hen a restaurant is designed by such a giant in his profession as the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it's important to find out what makes it a thing of beauty—to analyze in detail the elements of its design and appointments in search of principles that can be applied to food service facilities elsewhere.
No one in the past century has influenced architecture as an art and science more profoundly than Frank Lloyd Wright. Basic to his philosophy of "organic" architecture was the tenet that a building and its environment should be as one—that the structure, through proper blending of native materials and creation of appropriate linear features, should be in perfect harmony with its surroundings.
"Organic architecture comes out of nature," Wright said in a Food Service Magazine interview shortly before he died. He believed that each detail of the architecture and interior should be related to the building's overall concept.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Riverview Terrace Restaurant” as building by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as building by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29097028. Authority coordinates are 43.142, -90.071. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1957, 1959 and 1966.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
- Historic place names
- Jurisdictional context
- Routes into maps and plans
Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Riverview Terrace Restaurant”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Riverview Terrace Restaurant primary sources, Riverview Terrace Restaurant archive and Riverview research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Riverview Terrace Restaurant”?
- What physical evidence or contemporary plan supports the description?
- Which authority defined the place, boundary or structure at the relevant date?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Riverview Terrace Restaurant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.