Category: Frank Lloyd Wright

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‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s $10,000 Home’

Book Chronicles the ‘History, Design and Restoration’ of Chicago’s Emil and Anna Bach House

Interview with Brian R. Hannan

As Bob Hartnett wrote a book — his first — about the home Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Emil and Anna Bach, he took a page from his tour guide training.

“The instructors told us, if we were ever stuck for something to say, to just look around the room you are in and describe what you see,” Hartnett recalled. “In one sense, the Bach House speaks for itself, and all I needed to do, to create something worth sharing, was look around and describe what I saw.”

He continued: “My original thought for the book was to describe who Emil and Anna were and how they came to build their house with Wright as their architect. I also decided to briefly discuss the other owners so that readers would get a sense of who lived in the house.

“I did feel it was important to describe the efforts former owners took to secure the house and those who changed the house from the way Wright had designed it. I closed the book with a description of the restoration.”

Bob Hartnett

Hartnett, 64, is a retired public works administrator for the city of Rolling Meadows. He said his “passing interest” in Wright grew as he learned more about the Wisconsin-born architect and the opportunity to lead tours at his home and studio in the Chicago suburbs.

“I thought this might be a fun thing to do, and I signed up,” Hartnett said. “I enjoy interacting with the guests and being able to share interesting stories about an incredible man and a beautiful home. This book grew out of that love and desire to extend my outreach and appreciation even further.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Hartnett hasn’t led a tour since last February. He said he’s using the downtime to write a second book about Wright. He’s exploring the “bootleg” houses Wright designed in the early 1890s when he was the principal draftsman at Adler & Sullivan.

“I hope to be giving tours again soon,” Hartnett said. “In the meantime, I recommend anyone looking for information on the Bach House to pick up a copy of my book.”

We recently spoke with Hartnett about the Bachs and the house they built on Sheridan Road, just west of Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.

What led Emil and Anna to commission Wright to design a home for them? How did they select the site?

In the early 1900s Chicago’s North Shore was an up-and-coming place for those who had the means to leave the dirty and dusty city and relocate to the clean and quiet villages that were popping up along the shores of Lake Michigan. As the population of Chicago grew, the footprint of the city grew, too. Many of these small villages along the outer edge of the city were annexed by Chicago. The village of Rogers Park where the Bach House is located was annexed in 1893.

The year 1893 was an important year in Wright’s life as well. This was the year he left the firm of Adler & Sullivan and began his own architectural practice. As Wright was designing his early houses in Oak Park and neighboring River Forest, he was searching for a way to create a new form of architecture that would be entirely of and for the United States. In 1900 Wright received two commissions for neighboring homes in Kankakee, Ill. These homes were for B. Harley Bradley and Warren Hickox. These men were brothers-in-law, as Harley had married Warren’s sister, Anna.

These two homes are considered the first true Prairie School houses designed by Wright.

During the years between 1900 and 1909, Wright designed several prairie homes in and around Chicago. One such home was for Oscar Steffens (1909) Oscar had also been in the brick trade. In 1913 he sold his house to Otto and Louise Bach, one of Emil’s older brothers.

Emil and Anna Bach wedding photo

By 1915, Emil and Anna were living in a house on Montrose Avenue (near the site of the family’s successful brick manufacturing plant). The couple wanted to move away from this dirty, noisy site, and they both liked the area and the house Emil’s brother Otto owned. Emil sought out Wright because of his appreciation for his brother’s house.

Emil and Anna purchased their lot from another couple who had purchased the lot a few years before but had not built a home there. In 1915 there was a clear view at this site from Sheridan Road to the shores of Lake Michigan. The site was quiet, accessible, beautiful and the right price.

What about the Bach House led you to think it had an important story to tell? Where does it fit in the overall Wright catalog?

I think when most people think of Wright’s work, they think of Fallingwater (1935) in Pennsylvania or maybe some of his commercial works such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1943) in New York. But Wright had more than 500 buildings designed and erected, and more than 400 of them are still intact. Wright became an independent architect in 1893 after leaving the firm of Adler & Sullivan. His prairie period lasted from 1900 to approximately 1915. However, Wright uses elements from this period well into the 1930s.

The Bach House is small, but it holds many interesting features that make it more that just a box with holes cut into it. On the exterior, Wright designed a trellis system that extends the house horizontally and casts shadows on the house that move as the earth turns from day into night.

The Bach House, circa 1916. Photographer unknown.

In 1907, Wright had an article published in the April edition of the “Ladies Home Journal” magazine. The article was titled “A Fireproof House for $5,000.” The Bach house is one of many houses from this period to be based on the home pictured in that article.

Wright was interested in creating not only beautiful but also practical homes. The Bach House expresses this idea — that even a small house in an urban setting can be charming and a respite from our busy, noisy world.

Chronologically the Bach house holds an interesting place in Wright’s career, as it is one of the few individual homes Wright designed after he returned from Europe in 1911 and before he left the United States in 1915 for Japan, where he designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. On the interior of the Bach house, we can find features of Japanese architecture.

Does the house have any interesting/apocryphal anecdotes involving Wright — as other properties do?

The Wright-isms started even before the house was built. I will note a few here:

Even though the Bachs owned a brick manufacturing plant, there are no Bach bricks in the Bach House. Wright did not like the color of the bricks and refused to use them.

The predominant color of paint on the interior walls is a light-yellow color, but this is not a color you could just go and purchase. The color of paint was specially mixed, and Wright called the color “Sunshine Yellow.” There was little remaining of the original plaster in the house, but in his youth, Tim Samuelson, now a wonderful Chicago cultural historian, snuck a few chips of plaster with the original paint home with him and kept them for decades, thinking, as he told an interviewer later, “Maybe someday, someone will restore the property.” These chips were used to restore the building to its correct color.

The Bach’s son, Theodore, married Ruth Freese, and they lived with his parents from 1927 to 1934. In the material Emil and Anna’s grandson, Owen, gave me, there was a set of three typed pages which told the story of how an unsuspecting Ruth met Wright. In her story, which she titles “It Happened Only Once,” she describes the scene as she went to answer the doorbell expecting to find someone selling door-to-door. When she opened the door, she saw a man in a tattered hat standing there who asked to see Mrs. Bach. She left the man standing outside as she went to get her mother-in-law, who, when she saw the man, cried, “Why, it is Mr. Wright! Let him in.”

Editor’s Note

The Emil and Anna Bach House (1915) is located at 7415 N. Sheridan Road in Chicago. It is owned by TAWANI Enterprises Inc. and is available for overnight stays and events.

About the Book

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s $10,000 Home: History, Design and Restoration of the Bach House”

Publisher: Hilton Publishing Co. and Master Wings Publishing, 2019
Price: $24.95, paperback, 160 pages
Where to Buy: Amazon

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Broadacre City

Revisiting Wright’s Vision of a ‘New Freedom’ for American Living in an Age of Global Pandemic

By Brian R. Hannan

When Frank Lloyd Wright introduced Broadacre City to readers of “The New York Times Magazine” in March 1932, the United States was in the grips of the Great Depression and on the cusp of the Dust Bowl. As the concept evolved and the apprentices built a promotional model, he promised it would bring a “new freedom for living in America.”

“The Broadacre City is not merely the only democratic city,” Wright wrote. “It is the only possible city, looking toward the future.”

Nearly nine decades later, Broadacre City remains both a curiosity in the architect’s portfolio and a challenge. As we work to stop the spread of COVID-19 and shore up the economy, was Wright right? Could his utopian vision help to advance our own search for national and personal renewal in the postmodern era?

Jennifer Gray

“It’s almost uncanny how perfect it would be in the current moment,” said Jennifer Gray, curator of drawings and archives at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. “The pandemic has given people a chance to re-evaluate” how, even in the best of times, they’re forced to juggle competing professional obligations and personal commitments.

“People are waking up to that, and they realize they want to reset the balance.”

For Wright, Gray said, Broadacre City emerged as his response to overlapping concerns about the machine, densely populated cities — which he described as a “fibrous tumor” — and rising economic, political and social inequalities. She contends he conceived Broadacre City as a thought experiment rather than as a literal blueprint: How can the United States ease the urban-rural divide, reconnect citizens with nature and foster a renewed sense of autonomy and self-reliance?

In other words, “more agency,” Gray said. “They’re not dependent on the government or their boss or whatever else. I think that’s the whole idea.”

Home and land ownership emerged as the common denominator for Wright, who would assign each “Usonia” household a thoughtfully designed house atop a minimum of one acre — more for farms or families with children. Removing the distinction between landlords and tenants, while providing people with the means of growing their own food and selling the excess for profit, would eliminate much of the inequality he saw and bolster democracy.

Humane use of the machine would ensure societal needs were met while reducing the hours people worked. With more time, they could enjoy leisure, exercise, the arts and community and social activities. At four square miles, each self-contained-and-interconnected Broadacre City minimized commutes, reducing stress and congestion. Many workers could use the telephone to perform their duties at home, and radio would keep citizens informed.

“All common interests take place in a simple coordination wherein all are employed: little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university…, little laboratories…,” Wright wrote. “Economic independence would be near, a subsistence certain; life varied and interesting.”

In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, quarantining in place would be easier, and people need not fear eviction. Less density, when paired with social distancing, could translate into lower spread.

The downside? “You wouldn’t actually be able to do it,” Gray said, citing massive redistribution of wealth, prohibitive cost and wholesale restructuring. “It’s more about thinking through different ways of living and different ways of being in a community.

“So even if the solution is not Broadacre City, we can at least make improvements on things like education, local government, environmental sustainability, class disparity and gender and racial inequality,” she added. “I think it’s a way to think through these problems, and maybe we arrive at solutions that are more practical.”

The changes Wright envisioned with Broadacre City, occasionally reflecting his inclinations and idiosyncrasies — a car in every carport and not a power line in sight — were sweeping. Even he conceded in a 1935 article for “Architectural Record” that “(t)here are too many details involved in the model of Broadacres to permit complete explanation. Study of the model is necessary study.”

Indeed, Wright would spend the rest of his life tinkering with Broadacre City and tweaking its central concepts. He filled three books and several articles with his musings and continually wove new architectural projects into the plywood tapestry: Beth Sholom Synagogue, The Illinois, the Marin County Civic Center, Price Tower and various Usonian homes, among others.

The Broadacre City model last visited the Badger State in 2011 as part of an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum: “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century.” At the time, the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, then archives director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, told a reporter: “It seems like a good time to remind people that there was a good way in which architecture helped people live better and live in harmony not only with themselves but the planet they are living on.”

Gray agrees, phrasing in the present tense the renewed optimism she sees amid architects and the progress they can facilitate through coordinated, grassroots action — if not the top-down mandate of a Broadacre City. “We can change the society we live in,” she said. “We don’t have to take the status quo.”

For Further Reading

• “Broadacre City: An Architect’s Vision,” “The New York Times Sunday Magazine,” March 20, 1932
• “The Disappearing City,” Frank Lloyd Wright, William Farquhar Payson, 1935
• “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan,” “Architectural Record,” 1935
• “When Democracy Builds,” Frank Lloyd Wright, University of Chicago Press, 1945
• “The Living City,” Frank Lloyd Wright, Horizon Press, 1958

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The Wright Stuff

Left: Unity Temple photo by James Caulfield. Right: Photo of the drafting studio at Taliesin West by Jill Richards.

Wright Virtual Visits Returns this Week with New Series of Weekly Tours

By Brian R. Hannan

Phase 2 of Wright Virtual Visits premieres at noon CDT today with a Facebook Live collaboration between Taliesin West and Unity Temple. Co-hosting the event are Unity Temple Restoration Foundation’s Heidi Ruehle and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Jeff Goodman, both of whom will discuss Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of natural light in his architecture.

Phase 1 of the virtual visits project began at the end of April and continued through mid-July, growing from the dozen sites that initially signed on to participate to more than 20. Ruehle said her colleagues at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy were looking for an innovative way to continue their educational mission amid statewide travel restrictions and the global coronavirus pandemic.

“Since all the sites were experiencing shutdowns, we thought it would be important to keep the sites open – virtually, if nothing else – to keep interest going,” Ruehle said. “The whole world was thrown into this new, unusual way of living, and these visits were a nice break from all of the bad news. It has been a relief just to be able know that once a week you can tune in and get away for a few minutes through these experiential videos.”

While Ruehle describes the Phase 1 pairings as somewhat random – outside of the proof-of-concept pilot between Taliesin West and Unity Temple – she said the current series’ matches are more deliberate, with themes determined in advance. So far, 20 sites – including new additions such as Burnham Block in Milwaukee and the Pope-Leighey House in Mount Vernon, Va. – have volunteered to provide online tours.

When Monona Terrace Community Center and Hollyhock House present on Aug. 27, for example, they’ll discus Wright’s garden terraces and vistas. More information about Phase 2 visits and links to Phase 1 visits are available on the building conservancy’s website.

For Ruehle, the project has been rewarding for myriad reasons – from the creativity and effort the various sites brought to the series to the opportunity to “think beyond the obvious” and highlight areas of Unity Temple that only parishioners experience.

“It was challenging to rethink how to show certain spaces in the building that you don’t typically focus on,” she said, noting a library and the temple’s kitchen. “It has been interesting to see the different approaches the sites have taken, from very casual walk-throughs to more scripted and produced efforts.”

Upcoming Wright Virtual Visits

  • Aug. 27: Monona Terrace (Madison) and Hollyhock House (Los Angeles). Theme: Garden terraces and vistas
  • Sept. 3: Gordon House (Silverton, Ore.) and Burnham Block (Milwaukee). Theme: Architecture for democracy

Ruehle is the executive director of Unity Temple Restoration Foundation.

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Drawing Frank

Herbert and Katherine Jacobs I House (1937), Madison, Wisc. © Michael Pipher

Artist Michael Pipher Explores Wright’s Architectural Vision with Ink-and-Paper Renderings

Interview with Brian R. Hannan

These days, one of the toughest tickets in town is for a tour of a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed property. While a few sites have opened in the midst of the current pandemic, other sites will remain indefinitely closed.

Michael Pipher at the Seth Peterson Cottage (1958). Photo by Brian R. Hannan.

So we sat down with Michael Pipher, a New Jersey artist, for a chat about the more than 5,300 ink-and-paper renderings he’s made of Wright’s work over the course of nearly four decades — the buildings we know and love, lost along the way or never built. He agreed to offer a virtual tour via several of his rarely seen interior drawings.

Pipher said he began drawing “from a young age, mostly freehand stuff like cartoons. I had a love of Disney and the buildings there. I was intrigued by them.

“Having a mom in real estate, I was exposed to homes I knew — the ones I liked, I would start drawing those for fun…. Wright entered my life a short time after that with images of Fallingwater, SC Johnson, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Robie House and the Marin County Civic Center. They filled my head in wondrous delight,” Pipher said.

“I would read anything I could get my hands on that had to do with Wright. The more I read, the more I wanted to know. His designs fueled my soul. I went from drawing Mickey to drawing Fallingwater with the same delight.”

Seth Peterson Cottage (1958), Lake Delton, Wisc. © Michael Pipher.

Much is written about Wright’s connectivity between internal and external space. What do you think Wright understood about interior space — for its own sake — that enhances its beauty and utility?

The sense of space in any Wright structure is so much a part of the whole design. This has been the case since the early days to the last projects he designed. The spaces developed over his career, but the main concept remained. The Prairie homes had a space within a space — the inglenook in the living room that was transferred to Usonian homes as alcoves within one main space or great room. In the case of the Pope-Leighey House, the dining space is a part of the whole, but Wright lowers the ceiling to make it more intimate.

We are not meant to stand in a Wright home; we are meant to sit and interact in the space. One of the things most people don’t really get to appreciate is the spaces as they were intended to be used. While you can take a tour of a Wright public site, you mostly cannot sit down or touch anything, so you’re truly not getting the full experience he intended.

Wright would frame the landscape with the placement of windows; he lowered ceilings to force the eye outward to nature. Here we get into a area that transcends what architecture is and what it truly can be. I think when you hear stewards of a Wright-designed home talk about their house, you hear them say how the home changed their lives for the better. You have just another part of the genius that was Wright. I believe he wanted not only the owners but also their guests to sit and think of their place in nature.

I know it is very philosophical to think that a building can truly touch something deep inside us; provoking thought is very far removed in residential architecture today. You look at new housing developments today, and you see that what Wright called “the paper box boys” are still doing things the way they did back in Wright’s time and not reaching for something better or learning from what he gave us.

While today’s buyers want an open floorplan, in a way, what they are getting is an empty shell, hollow of emotion. Wright used and laid the spaces or rooms out in a very playful way. The Prairie homes use of banded trim that lead your eye from space to space, and the homes feel like they are never-ending.

SC Johnson Administration Building (1936), Racine, Wisc. © Michael Pipher.

Wright wanted us to discover, to explore and to interact with his treasures.

The new generation may have an open plan but do these people have something to touch their heart or soul? Not in my opinion. Not all the paint and fancy pillows in the world can do that.

I find so many new homes are designed not for a family but what’s going to bring the builder the most return on investment. New homes are big for the sake of being big, on small lots to maximize the number of homes.

The thought of a family coming together in one space is lost. Parents are in different areas of the home, and the kids are off doing their own thing in their rooms. Wright gave the family unit a space that was beautiful to come together that made everyone want to be in that space.

Look at the SC Johnson Administration Building. Employees wanted to come to work just to be in that Great Workroom.

YWCA Scheme 1 (1949), Racine, Wisc., unbuilt. © Michael Pipher.

What do you think we find so compelling about Wright’s architecture today?

I believe that for those who want something more than an off-the-shelf plan, with the same old elevation, Wright and organic architecture hold the answers for that special home. With more and more public sites open for curious minds to see firsthand what we in the Wright world already know, some people will visit and just see a nice old home. For those lucky few who can see the open floorplan the way it was meant to be lived in and used, they’ll recognize that the function of the build is in direct relation of the form of the building.

Many people come to visit because of the man and not the architect. I think they are missing out on something special. Wright said architecture was the mother of all arts, and he was a master of using all the arts to the fullest and creating something more beautiful than just a vase on a shelf.

Wright pushed the envelope with design and with construction materials. One can look at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center — even though it was built 23 years ago, it looks like it was built yesterday. Now take into account that the first design Wright proposed was in 1938 — and it was more futuristic than what was built 82 years later. It still is. Hollywood can put a Wright design from 1923 in a movie set in the future, and it doesn’t look out of place. I find that compelling.

Taliesin III living room (1925), Spring Green, Wisc. © Michael Pipher.

What does re-creating Wright’s work do for your appreciation and understanding of a given property?

Every drawing I do is still a learning exercise, even after 38 years. As a designer, I do stop and look at unbuilt project and will think, “Well, if you did this or that it could be an improvement.” But then I stop and say, “Don’t be silly.”

But, seriously, with new construction materials and improvements, there are things that could be revisited or expanded on — but only with the deepest understanding of the principles that Wright taught us.

Wright was known for trying new things or taking a plan he designed years before and tweaking it and reintroducing it. One has to evolve to try new things but still be respectful of the land and the owners for which it is designed. Wright said: “A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly as much as he is made by the way of a cultivated enriched heart.”

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SC Johnson Headquarters

SC Johnson Headquarters. © The Atom Brick Co.

New Building Brick Model Gives Fans a Hands-on Experience with Company’s Racine Campus

By Brian R. Hannan

Later this summer, admirers of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed SC Johnson Administration Building and Research Tower will be able to bring them home. An Illinois company, The Atom Brick Co., is preparing to launch a 1:350 scale interconnecting brick model.

As with the actual iconic structures, Adam Reed Tucker, the company’s founder, said he based the set on their famed lily pad- and taproot-inspired supports. He used removable roof and wall panels to make the model more “engaging.”

“It’s really understanding the circulation, the structure, the interior spaces and how they relate to one another. You don’t get that unless you’re able to peel off the outer layers and peer inside,” he said. “When you take off the roof and reveal all the columns and colonnades that occur, you feel this place is special.”

Tucker launched Atom Brick in early 2019 after several years with Lego System A/S, where he helped to launch the company’s famed architecture series with popular renditions of Wright’s Fallingwater, Guggenheim Museum and Robie House. Wright designs in Atom Brick’s initial lineup — all licensed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation — included the Darwin D. Martin Housing Complex, Taliesin West and Unity Temple.

Looking ahead, Tucker said he’s working with the foundation to develop sets based on other Wright-designed structures, as well as Wright’s art glass and furniture. The idea, Tucker said, is for Wright properties to sell them in their gift shops and for his company to sell them online, providing “engaging educational gifts in a way that hasn’t quite been offered before.”

More information is available at theatombrick.com.

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Connecting the Dots



New Biography Explores Wright’s Childhood Interests, Adult Achievements

By Brian R. Hannan

Long before he put pencil to paper and penned a new chapter in the story of American architecture, Barb Rosenstock reminds us, Frank Lloyd Wright was a boy. A “prairie boy,” that is, who fell in love with shapes.

“Frank Lloyd Wright took his first breath on the Wisconsin prairie,” she writes. “He crawled in the paths of brush-footed butterflies and toddled through waves of tall grass … growing into the kind of boy who wondered … what makes the prairie feel like home?”

Helping to shape those musings, we learn in “Prairie Boy: Frank Lloyd Wright Turns the Heartland into a Home,” (Calkins Creek) is his mother, Anna. She gives him his first set of Froebel gifts – with a cube, a cylinder, a set of dowel rods, a sphere and three lengths of string – and sets him on an artistic path.

As Wright’s interest grows: “More blocks from Mother. Rectangles. Triangles. Half-moons” Rosenstock writes. “Frank set these new shapes on paper grids, studied sample pictures of pinwheels, crosses and stars. He shifted one shape to the next, turning piece by piece, his mind like a kaleidoscope.”

Years pass, Wright’s desire to be an architect deepening as he grows into an adult. Taking his first job as a draftsman in Chicago, Wright soon joins the well-known architecture firm Adler & Sullivan before opening his own shop.

“He sketched long, rectangular houses that snuggled into the flat plans,” Rosenstock writes. “He colored them in reds, browns and golds.”

In writing about Wright, Rosenstock said she hopes to encourage children to find and pursue their passion in life – not to copy someone else. It’s a theme she’s explored in the biographies for children she’s written about children who grew into well-known grownups: founding father Ben Franklin, photographer Dorothea Lange and painter Vincent van Gogh, among others.

“I stick really close to the child this person started as, and the actions of that child – and the interest of that child,” Rosenstock said. “The book is not set up as ‘be just like Frank.’ It is more set up like ‘your interests as a child have meaning, and they’re important.’ Wonderful things can come out of following what your brain and your hands tell you you’re interested in.”

“Prairie Boy” published in September 2019 – just weeks before a darker, adult examination of Wright’s life arrived in bookstores. In “Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright,” (Alfred A. Knopf) author Paul Hendrickson chronicles the conflagrations that defined Wright’s career and personal life. He explores the self-invention and reinvention Wright must have hoped would douse them.

By coincidence, both Rosenstock and Hendrickson trace their interest in Wright to childhood memories of the home he designed in Kankakee, Ill., for B. Harley Bradley. Rosenstock fondly recalls her father – a builder – taking her to see the Prairie School house.

Where the two books diverge, of course, is the level of detail they reveal about Wright’s personal life. Where Hendrickson’s Wright is fully realized, Rosenstock’s Wright is age-appropriate for the 7-to-10-year-old audience she has in mind.

Indeed, the Wright readers meet in “Prairie Boy” is a curious and precocious child. From the Wisconsin heartland he called home, he “built big dreams” and “turned architecture inside out.”

“Like magic, he shook dozens of shapes from his shirtsleeves – ovals, hexagons, triangles, cubes, spheres and cylinders,” Rosenstock writes in the book’s final pages. “Frank’s buildings grew like children, like grasses, like the earth itself.”

Editor’s Note: Visit barbrosenstock.com to learn more about the author and to download educational resources for “Prairie Boy.”

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Organic Architecture and Sustainability

Stuart Graff Explores Ecosystems and the ‘Intrinsic Nature’ of the Places Where We Live, Play, Work

By Brian R. Hannan*

Stuart Graff

For Stuart Graff, “sustainability” is the newest front in understanding Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of organic architecture and its implications for a 21st-century world.

“We live in a time where, on one hand, we pay a lot of lip service to notions of sustainability,” the president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation said. “But what do we revere? We revere buildings that have no connections to the world around them – at least many people do. Why are we revering those buildings as opposed to the buildings that call attention to themselves because they just become a part of the fabric of a city, a community, a landscape?

“Those are the buildings we should be revering because they are doing the work of nature,” Graff said. “They are allowing human endeavor to be a part of nature as opposed to being the exception from it.”

In April, Arizona-based Graff presented a pair of lectures on sustainability – one in the Golden Rondelle at the S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. corporate headquarters in Racine and another in the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in Madison. Bringing a mindfulness to how we manage change in a modern society and efficiently use finite natural resources “fits into American values,” he said.

“You can go back to the ‘Declaration of Independence’ and go back even further to John Locke’s enlightenment philosophy in which he explores the idea of laws from nature, which includes concepts like equality and liberty. Then look at the way Ralph Waldo Emerson treated them, speaking of the natural law as this spiritual thing that seems to come out of the land itself,” Graff said. “It is this thing that just blossoms and flows, and Wright picks up on that throughout his entire life and body of work.”

Like Wright before him, Graff acknowledges the challenge of capturing such lofty ideals in common sense language. But through his extensive reading and musing about Wright and transcendental principles, he said, “I keep coming back to this notion of an ‘ecosystem.’”

In this construct, Graff defines architecture as “sustainable” when its purpose and setting – its “intrinsic nature” – are connected to the land on which it is built.

“Trees grow because the nutrients in the soil make sense, when the amount of available water, the amount of light and the surrounding plants, animals and activity all allow it to thrive there,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t a building be doing the exact same thing and, for that matter, why shouldn’t a city be doing the exact same thing? And a person, their life and their activity be doing the exact same thing?”

Editor’s Note: In July 2018, Graff wrote about sustainability and Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture in an article for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s blog, “The Whirling Arrow.” The essay is titled “Organic Architecture and the Sustaining Ecosystem.”

* Note: Article based on an interview transcript made by Michael Ditmer, president of Wright in Wisconsin.

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Mirror Lake

© Lindal Cedar Homes

Lindal Cedar Homes Re-imagines the Seth Peterson Cottage for New Series

By Brian R. Hannan

In developing her master’s degree thesis at the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SOAT), Trina Lindal looked to Frank Lloyd Wright, the school’s founder, and his late-in-life work for inspiration.

“What are the essential Usonian elements?” Lindal wondered. “How do we respect that but also create a home for modern living?”

Answering those questions led Lindal and collaborating architect Aris Georges, a former Taliesin fellow and SOAT instructor, to create the Imagine Series. Seattle-based Lindal Cedar Homes launched it this past June in response to a licensing agreement proposal from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Lindal is a granddaughter of company founder Sir Walter Lindal, a pioneer in building prefabricated homes, and a daughter of Bob Lindal, the current president and CEO.

The Imagine Series consists of seven homes inspired by Wright’s Usonian designs and design principles. The lineup includes what Lindal describes as “translations” of the Seth Peterson Cottage (Mirror Lake); the Bachman-Wilson House (Crystal Springs); the Gordon House (Silverton); the Jacobs I House (Madison); and the Penfield House (Willoughby) — as well as two Lindal-original homes, the Highland Park and the Mesquite.

Stuart Graff, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation underscores that distinction. “While the houses are all inspired by Wright’s designs,” he said, “very importantly, we didn’t want to replicate Wright’s work. A ‘Frank Lloyd Wright house’ is a Frank Lloyd Wright house.”

Accordingly, Lindal and the foundation were guided by what Graff describes as the “intellectual underpinnings of a Usonian. How do you take a small space and make it feel like a big space by (leading viewers’) eyes in different directions, by connecting strongly to the outside world? How can these principles be deeply embodied in a house designed for contemporary dwellers and meeting contemporary needs?”

For Lindal, the Peterson cottage proved to be an obvious choice — both for its Usonian bona fides and also for its aesthetic as “that little cabin in the woods that people associate with Lindal.”

The Lindal translation of the Peterson cottage closely resembles Wright’s original. Notable differences include post-and-beam construction on Lindal’s 5-foot, 4-inch grid and the absence of mitred glass in the corners of the front window bank. The Mirror Lake is slightly larger at 958 square feet.

Graff predicts the Mirror Lake will be well-received. “There’s a lot of love for the Peterson cottage in the Wright community,” he said.

“Maybe a few people who stay there will, in turn, decide they love it so much they want to embrace the design — and they can go out and buy the kit. It’s a heckuva souvenir, if you will.”

Note: This article appears in the Fall 2018 issue of the semi-annual newsletter of the Seth Peterson Cottage Conservancy, which does not endorse the Lindal Cedar Homes’ Imagine Series.

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The Seth Peterson Cottage

By Brian R. Hannan

When an opening at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Seth Peterson Cottage unexpectedly became available this week, I had only one thought: Road trip!

I recruited a friend, and we made plans to leave the next morning for a brief, overnight visit. I’d been wanting to stay at the cottage since I learned of it last fall while preparing for our outing to Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Spring Green, Wisc. The cottage, however, was booked solid for all of 2017 and, for that matter, much of 2018.

Still, I made a daily habit of checking the reservation website, hoping for a cancelation. I was soon rewarded.

The Usonian-influenced Seth Peterson Cottage sits on a wooded promontory in what today is Mirror Lake State Park, in Lake Delton, Wisc. The one-bedroom, one-bath home features an open floor plan with flagstone floors, limestone and plywood walls and a large fireplace as a focal point in the living area. The furniture is based on the final construction drawings Wright delivered shortly before his death in April 1959.

A stone terrace along the cottage’s northern facade overlooks Mirror Lake, while near-floor-to-ceiling-height windows on the western side provide abundant natural light. The small-but-functional kitchen sits a few feet to the right of the front door.

A private bedroom and en suite bath are found at the rear of the house, in the southeast corner.

When we arrived, I was so excited to see the cottage that I saw past the overcast, gray skies and soggy, brown yard. I took a quick tour of the house — all 880 square feet of it — and then hurried to make some pictures before the daylight faded.

My friend and I then headed to the store to stock up for dinner that night (T-bone steaks, caramelized onion/mushroom and Caesar salad) and breakfast the next morning (poached eggs, toast, bacon and coffee). I built a blazing fire in the fireplace; after dinner, we sat around the hearth and talked over gin and tonic.

I especially enjoyed hearing this song play on my iPad during a lull in the conversation. (“The Light” by The Album Leaf)

Snow began falling as we chatted and continued overnight. We awoke to a winter wonderland.

Laying in bed that evening before I fell asleep, I thought of Peterson and the dream that brought him to this idyllic spot. His long-fought campaign to convince a reluctant Wright to design a house for him finally paid off, and he looked forward to sharing it with his fiancée.

And then Wright, a childhood hero with whom Peterson shared a birthday, died. One year and one day later, Peterson — troubled by that loss, the end of his engagement and mounting construction costs — took his own life. He never lived in the cottage that today bears his name and would not exist without him. I found myself feeling sad for, and grateful to, that young man for this gift, a legacy so many people will be able to enjoy on his behalf.