The Frank Lloyd Wright scholars and enthusiasts gathered here this weekend love Buffalo and what it has done with the Wright-designed Darwin Martin House. But the Wrightdesigned boathouse on the Black Rock Channel and the Blue Sky Mausoleum in Forest Lawn Cemetery — not so much.

"These other projects are basically cartoons and do not serve his legacy very well," said Paul Harding of Chicago, an architect and owner of the E. Arthur Davenport House, a Wright-designed residence in River Forest, Ill.

Dont take it personally, Buffalo.

It is a continuing debate that was revived for at least a few hours Saturday by devotees taking part in the annual conference of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

At issue: Whether Wright designs constructed after his death in 1959 can be considered authentic works of the American master.

Wrights projects, as the arguement goes, were more than lines on paper. The architect would devise changes as he collaborated with his client, and he would revise plans on the construction site as problems or ideas arose.

The designs alone were just one step in the process. To say that posthumously built structures reflect his full genius rubs some of his admirers the wrong way.

The Darwin Martin House on Jewett Parkway is different. Wright built that house while in constant contact with Martin, chief financial officer of the Larkin Company. A trove of papers reveals Wrights decisions during construction, from 1903-05, and his forceful proposals to Martin and his wife.

Even though the house fell into disrepair and then underwent extensive restoration in modern times, it is accepted as an authentic Frank Lloyd Wright creation.

"There is a great difference in reconstructing a work and constructing a work that never appeared," one participant in the discussion said Saturday.

"Everybody has their own idea of preserving Wrights legacy," said Jeffrey Herr, curator of Hollyhock House, a Wrightdesigned home built in Los Angeles in 1921. "My feeling is, is authentic the important criteria? I dont particularly think so, although you can see I am in disagreement with others."

Wright left his sketches to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., apparently with the intent that someday they would be built. The Foundation sells the designs, and made them available for a gas station designed for Buffalo and planned for construction in 2011; the Blue Sky Mausoleum that Wright designed for Darwin Martin before the stock market crash of 1929; and the boathouse, built with the guidance of Wright apprentice Anthony Puttnam.

John Courtin was a founding director of the Martin House Restoration Corp. and the Frank Lloyd Wright Rowing Boathouse Corp.

"Going back to the boathouse, one of the things I see in that building, is all these young people, pouring into that building, they all know it is a Frank Lloyd Wright building," Courtin said. "They dont know much more about his architecture — yet. But someday they will learn and they will become champions of his work."

The debate does not target Buffalo, which is happy to be a stage for Wrights art and a destination for people who appreciate architecture.

Projects elsewhere have been questioned, too.

Florida Southern College in Lakeland properly chose not to promote the "water dome," completed in 2007 as an original Wright structure, said Dale Gyure, an architectural historian and a professor at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich.

Wrights original idea to have water spray from a single pipe ringing a pool of water would not have worked, and his design, first attempted in the 1940s, was reconfigured for the water dome that opened just two years ago, Gyure said in his slide show about the project.

Paul Penfield intends to build what he considers the last home that Wright designed, and he has no doubt that Riverrock, to rise in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, should be considered an authentic Wright structure.

Wright had designed the home for Penfields father, but the final drawings arrived the week of Wrights funeral in April 1959. Still, Penfield watched while his father discussed Riverrocks design with Wright.

"I was present in Wrights office when the discussion took place. I have the radiation burns to prove it," Penfield said. "The plans are the work of Mr. Wright in every sense."

Critics of the authenticity debate ask why it seems to be so exclusive to Frank Lloyd Wright and his legacy.

"Many of the great cathedrals of Europe took over 200 years to build," Penfield said later. "Many of them fell down during that process. . . . I never heard a Frenchman question the authenticity. So I think what it is, is a predominantly American obsession. I think thats understandable given the fact this is the nation that brought us reality TV."

Wright, according to those questioned Saturday, left no indication in his papers about whether he might have viewed the structures built after his death as authentic.

"I think that he would think that this whole thing of building his designs after his death is a folly. Thats my feeling," said Chicago architect Harding.

Said Herr, the curator of Hollyhock House: "I cant help but think, Wrights ego being as healthy as it was, that he would be very pleased to see the buildings go up simply because it keeps his name very much out in the public."