Blue-Sky Mausoleum is a $1.2 million open-air structure built into a small hillside on the grounds of the 269-acre burial ground. Its 24 crypts lay in two rows that climb the hill-like steps. A reflecting pond lies near the base of the mausoleum, while a 7-foot stone monolith adorns the top. Prices start at $300,000 and ascend to $1.5 million. These are not lifeless assets; values will increase as the crypts sell, according to Forest Lawn CEO Joseph Dispenza.

Each crypt can hold two caskets or four cremation urns. As of presstime, Dispenza says that one crypt had been sold and that he is in advanced discussions with interested parties in North America and Europe. The Blue-Sky website (www.blueskymausoleum.com) receives about 1,000 hits a day from all over the world, and Dispenza expects all the crypts to sell within two years.

Darwin Martin, one of Wright’s patrons and closest friends, commissioned the design of the mausoleum in the 1920s as a communal resting place for his family. But after Martin lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, the plans languished for decades. Forest Lawn purchased the rights to design Blue-Sky from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in 2002, the single proviso being that only one mausoleum be built using the blueprints.

Lead architect Anthony Puttnam studied directly under Wright during the 1950s. He is a principal at Taliesin Architects, the firm established in 1953 to continue Wright’s style of architecture. “We achieved the effect Mr. Wright would have wanted—the crypts scale the hill, looking up toward the sky and beyond,” Puttnam muses. Dispenza notes that the mausoleum blends well with the cemetery’s landscaping. “Its walls are the conifers surrounding it, and its ceiling is the sky,” he beams. The monolith that embellishes the site boasts Wright’s own description of the mausoleum: “. . . a burial facing the open sky . . . the whole could not fail of noble effect.”

Puttnam is building two more of Wright’s unfinished works: a filling station and a boathouse. Both structures will be located in Buffalo, making the city a destination for devotees of Wright’s work.