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To drive through Buffalo's Parkside district is to revisit a time before the city's long economic decline, when it was still a powerhouse of Great Lakes prosperity. Stately, well-maintained Queen Anne-style mansions line the area's leafy streets. And, as you near the corner of Jewett Parkway and Summit Avenue, the district's most famous property comes into view: Frank Lloyd Wright's house for Darwin D. Martin.

Nearly 100 years after its completion, this home is still a startling sight. In contrast to its upright, uptight neighbours, it is emphatically horizontal, iconoclastic and monumental. Now is an especially interesting time to see the signature Prairie Style house and the other Wright-designed buildings on the site that form the Martin House Complex. After decades of serious disrepair, the site is in the midst of a $33-million restoration -- and for the first time in 45 years it's possible to see the long, axial view Wright established with a pergola (or walkway) that formerly stretched from the main house's entry hall to a glass-roofed conservatory. The pergola and conservatory will be complete by late September 2006.

The Martin complex isn't the only Wright design in the news in Buffalo. Though he died in 1959, a surprising number of recently completed, current and pending projects in and around the city originated on the master architect's drawing board. An un-built 1920s gas station prototype by Wright, for example, is part of a planned expansion to the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum. Construction is also expected to begin on a boathouse designed in 1905.

Meanwhile, two other commissions for the Martin family are generating architectural buzz. In nearby Derby, N.Y., the Martin family's summer home, Graycliff, is open for tours in the midst of its renovation. And Wright's final commission for the family, the Blue-Sky Mausoleum, was unveiled in 2004. Though no one is interred there yet, one crypt has been sold. Prices range from $138,500 to $1-million.

Largely responsible for making Buffalo a major centre for Wright's work, Darwin rose up the ranks at the Larkin Company, a Buffalo-based soap manufacturer, and by 1906 he was one of the highest-paid executives in the United States.

It was through Martin that Wright designed the Larkin Company's Administration Building, completed in 1906. Despite being considered one of his most influential buildings it was demolished in 1950 to make way for a parking lot.

Still standing, however, is Barton House, a relatively modest home for Martin's sister and brother-in-law. It was the first building Wright designed for the Parkside site.

Martin's own 16-room dream home, completed in 1907, was unlike anything Buffalo had ever seen, both within and without. Wright substituted structural pier clusters for conventional bearing walls, creating pavilion-like spaces.

After the Depression and Martin's death in 1935, this house was left empty for a decade and a half. During that time, intricate glass windows and quarter-sawn oak mouldings disappeared. Later, a developer demolished the back property's pergola and conservatory to put up apartments.

Although most bricks and mortar buffs are pleased with the restoration and reconstruction now under way at the Martin House Complex, the wholesale construction of Wright's unfinished works after his death (in some cases, on sites other than those he had in mind) strikes detractors as unpalatably ersatz.

As for Wright himself, he probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that his designs are still stirring debate nearly half a century after his death, or sparking a frenzy of construction. He liked to see himself as a provocateur, and his correspondence with Martin reveals that the architect had a deep and abiding faith in his own genius.

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