“Many architectural historians have commented on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design approach in matching structure so seamlessly to site. The Marin County Civic Center is an extraordinarily vivid example of his ability to do just that.”

The previous quote comes from Janet Halstead, Executive Director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Halstead is a woman with more than a passing interest in identifying the Marin Civic Center, its design perspective, relationship to surroundings and its place among the greatest, most interesting and indigenous designs created during a professional life that spanned an incredible near-nine decades.

Do the math: Wright was born in 1867, a mere two years after the end of the Civil War. He began his design career in his late teens in the 1880s. It ended with his death in mid-1959, having lived through 18 Presidencies, and with his team completing the designs for his last, most advanced and civic-minded project: the Marin Civic Center.

The downtown Chicago-based Wright Conservancy is deeply involved in saving the master’s work, including the Marin Civic Center by, according to Halstead, “helping preservation-minded owners find preservation minded buyers.” The problem, according to Halstead, is that “we’ve already lost 25 percent of what Wright built. The Conservancy goal is to help create and preserve the legacy of Wright’s work, 70 percent of which is currently in private hands.”

The Conservancy is focused on saving and honoring Wright’s residential, corporate and civic work with a primary focus on the dozen Wright projects that the Conservancy is stewarding, full steam ahead, towards a place on the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List.

The Conservancy is currently involved in a process called “serial nomination,” going beyond highlighting any single phase in Wright’s career, but rather enabling each of his significant structures to stand, as Halstead suggests, “on its contribution to world architecture.” Although Wright’s work was controversial throughout much of his career, the adulation that he first enjoyed overseas in places like Great Britain, Germany and Japan, began to take root in America by the 1930s. Looking at Wright’s 1910 “Prairie Style” Robie House, is to be able to view the past and future of American architecture simultaneously.

Another exemplar of the ever-growing celebration of Wright’s work was the rural western Pennsylvania masterpiece, Fallingwater. Completed in 1937 the stunning simple amalgam of stone, glass, water and concrete was tardily, in 1991, recognized by the American Institute of Architects as nothing less than “the best work ever produced by an American architect.”

Similar to Fallingwater, the Marin Civic Center, with its hill-spanning arches is now similarly celebrated for its fusion of nature and human design. Today, we may be less celebratory about the Civic Center’s tribute to America’s postwar automobile mania; a circulation system that moves traffic through the site via portals running underneath the building’s massive ground-level arches. Even if slightly out of step, however, Wright’s position as America’s greatest indigenous architect has been increasingly celebrated over time.

Beginning with the 1972 World Heritage Convention in Paris, the goal of UNESCO’s “World Heritage List” was to preserve and celebrate some of humanities most important and threatened natural and human-made sites. These include the Taj Mahal, Acropolis, Australian Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Opera House, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and other of the greatest works of man and nature. If the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy’s Janet Halstead has her way, something like a dozen of Wright’s greatest works will soon be residing on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, representative of one of humanities most influential oeuvres.

The process of naming Wright to The List has not always been a smooth one.  In 1982 the United States placed five Wright projects on a “Tentative List” for UNESCO. Politics intervened and by the middle of the decade, America had withdrawn from UNESCO, remaining a half-hearted member of the World Heritage Committee until a dispute over Yellowstone National Park led to a halt in U.S. nominations between 1995 and 2009.

Beginning in 2002, however, discussions had begun to create a new Heritage List to supersede the earlier ones. In 2004, the World Heritage Center and UNESCO finally sponsored a meeting to discuss a pool of Wright projects for future inclusion as World Heritage List Sites that possessed according to the recommendations, of the U.S. National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS), “outstanding universal value.”

By 2010, the process of nominating sites for the new World Heritage List was underway with a dozen Frank Lloyd Wright projects selected with material having been sent out to architectural scholars for comment and review.

A second review will be taking place spring, 2011. Some of the Wright buildings on the tentative list include Taliesin, his rural Wisconsin Headquarters, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and, of course, the Marin County Civic Center, in San Rafael. The latter is widely regarded as one of the largest and most important civic projects in post-World War II America.

If successful, these dozen Frank Lloyd Wright projects will be America’s first new World Heritage listings in years and, as Janet Halstead notes, will enable Wright to join Spanish design master, Antonio Gaudi, who has seven buildings on The List, in a very select group; “the sole World Heritage listings as architects with multi-building nominations.” Attempting to explain how the process has finally, after two stalled decades, come close to fulfillment, Susan Jacobs Lockhart, President of the Wright Conservancy admitted that “it may appear, as it did to me … almost a miracle.”  And a down Wright miracle at that.