NEWS ARTICLE: BUFFALO NEWS (6/07) 'WINGED VICTORY' RETURNS AS ADORNMENT OF DARWIN MARTIN HOUSE Judy Kieffer says she considers herself lucky that no one else thought of replacing the replica of Winged Victory. The return of three “lost buildings” to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House Complex last fall inspired Judy Kieffer to bring back something else that vanished from the compound years ago. Entering the reconstructed pergola from the main house for the first time, Kieffer, a Martin House volunteer, beheld an immense photograph of Nike of Samothrace in the newly rebuilt conservatory 100 feet away. She had studied the Greek statue, also known as Winged Victory, as an art major at the University of Michigan and had made two pilgrimages to the Louvre in Paris, where it has resided since 1863. She was unaware that a century earlier Wright, who scattered classical statuary around his prairie houses to counter the rectilinear architectural style, had placed a replica Nike at the very center of the seven-structure Jewett Parkway complex. It was visible from the front entrance 180 feet away. The telescopic view was “the most compelling synthesis of architecture and narrative anywhere in Wright’s work,” said Jack Quinan, a Wright scholar and Martin House curator. Kieffer decided on the spot to replace the long-missing statue not only as her contribution to the $50 million Martin House restoration project, but also to honor her husband, James M., a Buffalo trial lawyer who died unexpectedly in June 2005. “I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do. I’m lucky nobody else thought of it,” she said Tuesday after the 9-foot, 6- inch-tall white statue was unveiled precisely where its predecessor stood before the complex was vacated in the 1930s. Matt Meyer of Hamilton Houston Lownie architects called the return of Winged Victory “a victory for the Darwin Martin House Restoration Corp. and a victory for Buffalo.” No one knows what became of the original, but it probably disintegrated or was vandalized after the Martin family abandoned the estate in 1936. The original likeness of the mythological goddess Nike was sculpted around 200 B.C. in Greece as a marble altar piece. It was moved to Paris after a French diplomat and amateur archaeologist found it on the island of Samothrace. The plaster-coated fiberglass reproduction, which Mary Roberts, Martin House chief executive officer, described as “extraordinarily faithful” to the one Wright commissioned in 1906, was molded by Giust Gallery/ Skylight Studios of Woburn, Mass., from photographs taken in the 1920s.