HANDIWORK

About to embark on a new writing project about architectural drawings, I took in this season’s architecture show at MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives.

An architectural drawing can do a number number of things: construct a personal vision, instruct a builder, persuade a client, clarify spatial organization, communicate technical specifications… Most of the drawings in the FLW show are visionary, and what singular visions they are. Prepared for publication or presentation, these exterior perspectives illustrate, all-at-once, the character of the building: its sculptural presence, its materials, its formal stylings, and its relationship to the landscape. Many are so brilliantly composed that they are themselves iconic. A drawing of the David and Gladys Wright House gives a glimpse of its curved inner facade from below, standing at the center of its circular walkway, a small child’s glowing spaceship dream.

Other drawings on display are more fundamentally pragmatic, fixing dimensional and construction details. One poster-sized section drawing of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo slices through its entryway to reveal profiles and details of its customized brickwork and stone panels. It shows every grout line, every turn of every stone panel, every steel reinforcing bar embedded in the concrete decks. Marks noting dimensions have been lain right over those noting profiles, right over those noting materials. The drawing is a cloud of lines, alive with the density, complexity and sensuality of real brick and stone.

Most remarkable are those drawings that convey both the vision and the physicality of a building. A perspective of the Millard House, in colored pencil, shows us its stern textile-block facade from slightly above, as a bird would see it, overlooking a gentle ravine, framed by the drooping branches of decades-old eucalyptus trees. Its yellowing sheet has worn, torn edges, and its surface a rich patina of lead smudges, pencil points, erasings, overlapping lines and small stray marks. The character of the drawing gives the house itself a dark, ancient feeling. It’s less like a building than a natural formation, rising from the ground.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, California (Exterior perspective from the garden) 1923–1924

September 02, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC ARTS

In 1952, in Phoenix, about half an hour from his perch at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright built a house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys. That house has recently been opened to the public, and what a marvel it is.

It’s a small structure, closer in spirit and in scale to a Usonian House than to the expansive, majestic Prairie Style houses Wright is most famous for. Its enclosure is only about sixteen feet wide, and its doorways are barely 5′-6″ high. Like all Wright creations, the house has a vivid sculptural character. Its kooky, spinning, circular geometries prefigure the Guggenheim, and remain true to the space-age stylings the architect favored at mid-century. Entering is dramatic: one approaches on a gravel path below a broad curving ramp, walks up that ramp, and then passes through a low threshold into a living room that seems to hover above ground. The house’s sloped copper roof juts out savagely at the far end, like the prow of a spaceship.

Yet the feeling isn’t avant-garde; it’s intimate. Wright seems to have designed the house to serve real people rather than the visions in his head. And it’s being shown in an informal way that honors this. When I visited, during the holidays, there were doormats at each entrance, LED lanterns lining the walkways, and a Christmas tree in the living room. A circular coffee table, displaced by the tree, was stored upside down on the bed in the second bedroom. Wright-designed chairs and lamps, not original to the design, had been purchased and set in empty nooks. These additions all give the place a warm, lived-in kind of clutter. (In fact the house really is a home; right now one of the architect’s great-granddaughters is in residence.)

True to Wright’s reputation for being a less-than-pragmatic builder, the house needs improvements. Some wood coffers on the living room ceiling are water-damaged. The concrete lining at the bottom of the entrance ramp is spalling, and the steel reinforcing inside rusting. The ramp’s guard wall has crumbled, leaving holes along the bottom where one’s foot can slide through. The plain, rough masonry blocks at the facade have been regrouted in a shade that doesn’t match the original.

At the end of our tour our guide asked us for overall impressions. Several visitors remarked that the house still feels “modern.” One, a former home builder, admired its uncanny domesticity: “You walk right in and it feels like a house.” This is true, and, for an architect with Wright’s titanic ambitions and abilities, also remarkable.

Photograph © Pedro E. Guerrero.

January 02, 2016 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY

The house Frank Lloyd Wright built for Roland Reisley in 1959 in Pleasantiville, NY, might be more affecting than his better-known houses in Chicago. It was the third and final house he built in the 26-house Usonian community there, a spread of one-and-a-half-acre circular plots. Each house is unique, designed in a brazen modern language by Wright or one of his disciples. And each house is modest – by contemporary standards, at least – with a living area, dining room, three or four small bedrooms, patio, and carport. Most are one level, and are located at the tops of the small hills that run through the site, offering lovely views.

The Reisley House is built on a grid of equilateral triangles, so that all its walls meet at 120-degree or 60-degree angles. This creates dramatic roof and wall lines that exaggerate perspective views. While the geometries seem eccentric and impractical, they shape dynamic, graceful interior spaces. The house has an open plan, and only the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets are closed with doors. The major rooms slide seamlessly into one another: vestibule into living room into dining room into hallway, and – when the doors are thrown open, as they were on the summer afternoon I visited – into patio and lawn.

The house is anchored by heavy retaining walls and chimneys, which are finished with local stones set in a rough horizontal ashlar. Interior walls are finished with gold-stained cypress panels that unfold into bedboards, bookcases, banquettes, and tables, all constructed from the same wood. There’s drama in the low thresholds and narrow halls one passes through moving from one room to the next. And then, as one steps inside, there is uncommon repose.

Photography by Roland Reisley, from his book Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright.

June 14, 2015 by Nalina Moses

I recently interviewed nine well-known American architects to find out what house has made the biggest impact on them, and why, for a piece in AIArchitect. I’d expected them to name family houses, fictional houses, or houses they’d built. Instead they all named modern houses in the United States and Europe, most of them canonical. But Brian Phillips, who leads Philadelphia office ISA, made a bold choice: the 1960 Prairie House in Norman, Oklahoma by Herb Greene.

This sloping, funnel-shaped, two-story, wood-frame house, clad with fans of cedar shingles and strips of aluminum, dominates its flat, grassy plot like a wild animal. And this is exactly the idea. Phillips says that the house “needed to show its aggressive plume to stand against the relentless minimalism of the prairie landscape." And Greene, on his website, writes, "The aim is to introduce a reference frame of feeling usually reserved for sentient creatures. Pathos, vulnerability and pain are juxtaposed with the more familiar house-meanings of sheltering, protection and comfort.”

What I love most about the house is its joyous, raucous formal freedom, and its contrarian, macho style. This house was built at the height of the international style, when less was more, and prominent architects were building houses with glass walls, flat roofs, and marble floors. Greene is one of a strain of energetic, unmannered, individualistic American architects – let’s call them Wild Men – who follow the visions in their heads rather than the demands of good taste, or their clients. He trained with Bruce Goff, who had trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom the name of this house, deliberately I think, conjures. If the heart of Wild Man Architecture is in the midwest, where these three men hail from, there is also another healthy strain of it today in Los Angeles, where architects like Eric Owen Moss and Thom Mayne are going at it, and Frank Gehry has become elder statesman. I hope they never stop.

Photograph by Julius Shulman, courtesy of Herb Greene.

April 14, 2014 by Nalina Moses