Society of Architectural Historians

Transcription

>> Good afternoon everyone and thank you for coming. There are additional seats on the balcony but there are still plenty of seats throughout if you feel like moving. Welcome to Pennsylvania College of Technology. My name is Penny Lutz and I am the Manager of the Gallery at Penn College. The lecture today, as well as the exhibit, Frank Lloyd Wright's Samara a Mid-Century Dream Home, are part of the many events launching Penn College's Centennial Celebration, which is taking place in 2014. The college's past and present focus on applied technology education inspired us to bring this exhibition to campus, as it encompasses architecture, construction, design and environmentalism. After the lecture we invite you to join us in the gallery for a reception from 5 to 7pm. I am very pleased to introduce our speaker today. Jack Quinan is a historian of architecture, specializing in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Arts and Crafts Movement, American architecture of the 19th century and utopian communities. He is a founder of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Wright's [inaudible] work and he is the Senior Curator and a member of the Board of Directors of Wright's Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York. He was recently named a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is a distinguished service professor emeritus in the Department of Visual Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an adjunct professor at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He has written five books on Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture and has published numerous articles. We are pleased to welcome one of the leading authorities on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to our campus. May I now present Jack Quinan. [ Applause ] [ Background Sounds ] >> Jack Quinan: I'm not going to read. Sorry about that delay. I'm really pleased to be here. The drive down from Buffalo is wonderful and I thought that would be, you know, just worth it by itself but when I got on 4th Street and saw all those Victorian houses I could not believe it, wow. We have a main street in Buffalo, I should say Delaware Avenue, that's quite famous, but it's all chopped up. A lot of loss of important buildings but this is all intact here. Keep it up. Here's my plan today. I'm going to talk about the Froebel Kindergarten Method and its impact on Frank Lloyd Wright very briefly and that's going to be a kind of datum for what follows. Then I'm going to talk about the Prairie Period as a way of maybe creating a second layer of data and then after that we'll move to Usonian Houses. I haven't been to Samara so I'm not going to be able to speak with any authority whatsoever on it, but I do know a lot about Usonians as I hope to demonstrate shortly. Let's see. So the Froebel Method, Friedrich Froebel was a German pedagogist who wrote a book creating the kindergarten in about 1840, and the idea was that kids, children, babies were sort of going from ages two and three directly to first grade with no transition, and he wanted to create a place, system, an organized system, that consisted of ten gifts that were graded. The first gift was these three solid geometric objects and that's a page from Froebel's book on the right where you can see a kind of instruction. The idea wasn't just play it was always organized around higher thoughts. The sphere, according to Froebel, should be connected with the moon and the sun and the roundness of the earth and things of that kind. Also, these objects the child would get to feel them, to feel the difference, to notice the way a sphere will roll on a table, a cube will sit solidly on a table and a cylinder could do either one, so they begin to learn difference. From there the graduated blocks get pretty complicated and I don't want to belabor that but they came in little boxes and the child would be encouraged to spill out what was in the box, as you see there it looks like about eight blocks, and then they would understand wholes and then parts and then they would put them back in and they would be wholes again, w-h-o-l-e-s of course. And then they got into domino like shapes, more shapes in boxes and so forth. There was no drawing, no free hand drawing. There was at the late end of the ten gifts some weaving. Frank Lloyd Wright was introduced to this by his mother at the age of nine. Froebel prescribed that children start at the age of three and by the way [inaudible] also studied this method. Kind of intriguing. So here you see Wright at about the time he would have started and a page from a Froebelian book that's very important because the child is made to do one important thing and that was to sit at the table that had a grid on it and they had to declare what they were going to do with the blocks on the grid before they did it. It's wasn't just woo, let's knock them down and all that, so again it was very organized. Well Frank Lloyd Wright had some comments about this, if I can find them that are pretty crucial. Here it is. This is him writing in his autobiography in 1932. Talking about his mother he said, "She had seen the gifts in the Philadelphia Exposition. The strips of colored paper glazed in mat, remarkably soft, brilliant colors. Now came the geometric byplay of those charming checkered color combinations. The structural figures to be made with peas and small straight sticks." That was another, the late ones, where you would use clay peas and toothpicks and you can make a cube that way. "The smooth, shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers, form becoming feeling. What shapes they made naturally if only when one would let them." This is going to be a kind of [inaudible] motif for the talk, that Wright reminiscing back to being nine years old is remembering the feeling as well as the visual impact of those colors. I'll come back to that at the end. These are some Froebel patterns. Some of you may know them. This one, this is a page from Froebel's book and this one here obviously matches up to this concrete block, one of Wright's California block houses of the 1920's, and this is an early Wright building in Chicago, 1891 and you can see the four rooms with the big living room and an entry access to the fireplace that also loosely follows that pattern, and this can be pursued ad nauseam. Well when Wright was maturing as a young, potential architect the two dominate styles, and I'm probably not telling you anything new here, were what we might broadly call Victorian, or in this case stick style Victorian. That was one and the other of course was the Classical, the Classical Revival, the American Renaissance, that kind of thing. He of course leaned toward the more picturesque and this one of his very earliest drawings for a school for his maiden aunts, Nell and Jane, from 1887. But then after he left Adler and Sullivan's office in Chicago where he spent about five years, he went into private practice designing houses and if you look closely at these, or maybe not so closely, you can immediately see that he was really enamored of the octagon, of octagonal spaces. Indeed there are way more than I'm showing you and I'm talking about a period from leaving Adler and Sullivan, 1893 until 1900; a seven year period myriad houses with this motif. It used to be a favorite of mine to ask my students, what do you think that was about. And the answer was breaking the box. He famously would explode the corner of housing in America but in this case he's using the octagon in many instances as a way to shape a room, but in fact an octagon like the circle is rather hermetic, so it wasn't the answer. Oddly enough the answer came right at the turn of the century with the first Prairie House, Home in a Prairie Town in the "Ladies Home Journal", which you see here in plan and in elevation. This house was never built but being in the "Ladies Home Journal", which had a really big readership, 100,000 versus the "Architectural Record", which was about 2,500, he was no fool. This did have a lot of impact on his career. The characteristics aren't important to into except I want to say this about the Prairie House. That the double roofs and the central chimney, the cross axis all of those characteristics that you see in this house will be multiplied from 1901 until he leaves the United States with his mistress in 1909. In eight years he designed over 115 houses and 60 of them were built; 60 Prairie houses, so he was really busy. He was building at the rate of 10 to 12 houses a year plus the Larkin Building and Unity Temple, which are much bigger than a house. So things were really, you know, moving fast for him. Here is the Home in a Prairie Town and the [inaudible] house that I showed earlier, the Victorian house, which you can see Wright has rejected the kind of picturesque random feeling, although an organized, organized his house pretty much around the cross axis. Now, where does that come from? He used to joke that builders would say to him, or potential clients, "Oh you want one of those Wright houses, one of those dress reform houses", which is not a term he invented at all but, but something severe about this. Well I would remind you that this is a grid like form and at the same time that Wright is doing this Josef Hoffmann is turning to the grid in Vienna along with other Secession architects, and Rennie Macintosh in Glasgow is also using grids, so it's something, you might say it's in the [inaudible], but for Wright it's more than that; it's American, and you'll find all of those, among those many 60 houses I mentioned I picked out four. The Martin of course, the Coonley House in River Forest, I'm sorry Riverside, Illinois, the Ullman House, which was not built, and the Heath House in Buffalo down there. All various kinds of rectilinear or right-angled gridded buildings. Where's it coming from? I think it's coming from where Wright's coming from. He grew up in, where are we, this part of the country. He lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, he lived over in Massachusetts a little bit, but he identified the house as Prairie and the Prairie is a grid. Here's Kansas, a grid. His town in Kansas, a grid and if you got a lot there it would be a grid, right, so the houses were tailored to the cardinal directions incidentally also sacred directions to Native Americans. Well there was one problem with the Prairie House if you want to let me problematize it and that is that they were not that tall. The Martin House that I'm showing you here, you see Wright published it from a bird's eye view from a church steeple across the street, because I think I published it and at some point I said it was a village of huts. It's not a very prepossessing building. If you think back to the Vanderbilt mansion, [inaudible] like this, vertical and classical [inaudible]. There was nothing of that in the Prairie House and in fact Clarence Fuermann, his favorite photographer usually used a height of eye that's ridiculously low, but Wright demanded you get low when you shoot his houses. He wanted that sense of certain monumentality that you could only get by getting down near maybe three feet off the ground. His favorite photographer who passed away a year or so ago, Pete Guerrero, was five foot three by the way; Wright liked Pete. So I'm going to show you very quickly some of the different solutions that Wright created at this point in the Prairie Period to try to you might say combat this verticality of the classical monument, even the Victorian house. The Willis House was just the first big Prairie House. You can see, sorry wrong button. You can see he's given it the central two-story grid to focus on. It gives the house, you might say, some umph. Then if you look closely at the Prairie Period you find, and this is just pre-period, you find a number of his houses that strive for verticality somewhat clumsily I think. Like Furbeck and William Martin's House. This is, and the Fricke House, all of these in his neighborhood in Oak Park; strange sort of vertical thrusts. Another solution that he came up with and I imagine he'd work it out with the clients, was to move them up to the second story as the main living level of the house. So here at Heurtley House, this is all basement activities at grade and then up here is the dining room and over here is the living room, which inside, hmm. I'm going to show you behind these windows. I never got quite the image I would like but those are the windows in the dining room. This is a ship I was on in the Antarctic but it reminded me of that sense of having command of the neighborhood. You live up one story, you look out, you feel tall. So he's working with the person inside the building. It's not about having big columns on the outside. At least he's getting to that with these ideas. Another, around 1908, he did about four houses, one in Buffalo, that have two story living rooms. Most of you architects can read that big, big space and then the kitchen's back here, it's not reflected, then a servant room and a cellar and bedrooms up here, so the house kind of opens itself quite generously as another way -- it's still a low house but you're inside you feel like whoa, especially when you step in a little narrow, compressed area and then boom the space explodes. And then of course the great moment is right before he goes to Europe, leaves his family, is the Robie House where he actually, sorry, he actually manages three stories without that awkwardness and he does it ingeniously really by layering, I think I counted, I won't say a number but if you count each coping and not brick course but, yes brick courses and everything, he just layers it up horizontally over and over and over and over again, so you lose the site of a kind of awkward reach. It just seems to float there. Another thing that he did that became somewhat problematic and maybe drove him to Europe was this passion for the [inaudible] the total work of art that he offered every client. Now a lot of people could not afford to pay him for everything. They wanted a house. They had furniture but a lot of them were caught up in the great houses like Willits and Martin and Robie and Coonley, houses that were completely designed by Wright inside and out. Well this is Susan Dana House in Springfield Illinois and it's been pretty much kept intact since it was built in 1901, this isn't the main part of the house, this is the gallery but everything you see there, except the flowers, is designed by Wright. And the amount of energy that went into these buildings is astonishing. I'm probably the only person that ever would have done this but there's 750 pieces of glass in that window in the Martin House. You can count if you want but not today. So where is this taking us? Here's another shot in Dana. What I'm getting at is that Wright created something wonderful for various reasons that we really can't get into because we're not looking at the Prairie Period that much, but his energy, his desire was greater than his ability to make it work. So in 1906, right in the middle of the Prairie Period, one of his draftsmen, Charles White, writes to a friend in Vermont and he says, "I'm glad your trip did so much good. It's precisely this lack of attention to a vacation that has caused Mr. Wright to become so sort of petered out this year. For the past three months it has been almost impossible to get him to give any attention to us. As he expresses it, he has no appetite for work and I think the reason is that he has taken no period of complete rest from his work in several years." So we find Wright kind of boxed himself into a bit of a corner. I have another quotation from Darwin Martin and the correspondence between Martin and Wright regarding the Martin House in Buffalo, and basically I'll summarize it quickly. Wright thinks that Martin owes him about $3,000 and Martin thinks he owes Wright about $600 and Wright writes him and says "As a matter of fact I cannot do the work as I want to do it for the regular fees we have fixed. At that price I can make no money on work like yours giving such elaborate study to detail." And then he goes on and basically says, "I know my fee for building, designing your house was seven and half percent, but I think the furniture should be 15 percent", and Martin being Martin paid him, paid him again you might say. So Wright was kind of up against a problem that, one of several kinds of problems. One was he always had to be instructing or gathering craftspeople that could do what he wanted, and they would come from all over the place, all over the country, skilled craftsmen but they still had to be instructed by him to do what he wanted, and he had at the same time persuade his clients to pay for it, and it was just sort of untenable. So I don't want to say, so he went to Europe with his girlfriend, but that's one solution I suppose. Anyway we'll drop the Prairie Period at that unseemly moment and you can see I'm jumping pretty much from leaving town down to the Concrete Block houses. So he's out of the country for a period around 1910 and 11 and then he gets the Imperial Hotel commission in Tokyo and he's back and forth but he's basically in Tokyo for six years and then he comes back and while he's in Tokyo he's still building these concrete block houses, what he called Textile Block Houses in California. Actually a German modernist, Rudolph Schindler helped him and his own son, Lloyd Wright who trained under his father, a prominent Los Angeles architect Lloyd became, they helped on these houses, but these are the four Concrete Block Houses. Three of them are what Wright developed as the textile block method. On the right is the way he published it in the 1950's for the book, "The Natural House", and there he's using a very severe undecorated concrete block, you can see it's very narrow and they're paired so there's an air lock, air space, in between but the real trick is these rebars that are then infused or surrounded by cement or concrete to form a solid wall. This is not proven to be a good idea over 100 years. They're all, being California, things are growing into the cracks and splitting them open. They're hell to take care of. This is the Ennis House, which very nearly collapsed a couple years ago and you can see the decorative block system that he was using there. So he took, he kind of abandoned this idea but he kept it in the back of his mind and it reappears in the Usonian Period over here much later. In fact he even encouraged some of his Usonian clients to have the molds made and cast their own blocks on weekends until they had enough to build the house. And believe it or not a number of people did that, so this wasn't all for naught. But behind it is the idea that "Oh my gosh we need to do things more cheaply. We've got to get away from this 750 panes of glass, pieces of glass, thing." So let's see, that brings us to at last the Usonians, and I'm showing you here the, a vintage picture of the first Jacobs House in Madison. Herb Jacobs was a newspaper man. His two daughters, see in this vintage photograph, the house is just finished. One of them, I think this one, is Susan Jacobs Lockhart, she's a friend of mine. She's very active in the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a former President of it. Here she is and here's the house today. For many, many years it was in the hands of Jim Dennis, a Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, and for reasons that you'll see momentarily, Jim spent I think every cent he ever made keeping this house afloat. It was a very low cost house, a $5,000 house in 1937 but it is the prototype for the whole Usonian idea, and from this point forward, from 1937 until Wright's death in 1959, he designed over 250, I think around 250 Usonian houses and set himself up with his apprentices, people who were studying with him as though he were a school and paying him to do that, and he would farm out an apprentice to each house for the most part. I know the Zimmerman House in New Hampshire from 1951, an apprentice named John Geiger lived in New Hampshire with the Zimmerman's for a year to get that house built, and Wright never saw it. That's rare. Anyway here's the sort of typical ideas of the Usonian, some of you probably know these cold, but Wright created the idea of the heat mat. We think he got this idea from being in Japan, the idea of a heated floor, and so this is the Jacobs, this is a pit for their furnace and then the pipes radiate over the slab, well I should say under the slab, they radiate over the site and then there's gravel on top of them and then a slab of four inch concrete over that. That's the floor and Jim Dennis found that he had to have it jack hammered up to fix it, so they weren't great in the long run. But there's that and then there's the sandwich wall construction, which I note is diagramed very nicely in the exhibition in the library. So here's a diagram of the wall, of the sandwich wall, it has no void in it so there's no wiring. It gets cold through a wall like that, there were problems with these walls, but they were handsome and he created a new kind of board and batten instead of vertical like in the 19th century, it's horizontal and screwed into a core of wood. This is the interior of the house. The entrance is where that plant is, very narrow, and we're in the living room and then to the right is a little place to eat and then behind this mass, the chimney mass is a bathroom and what he called a works of space or a kitchen. Then the tail of the house goes off at right angles where there's three bedrooms and a little office for Herb Jacobs. This is all pine, pine construction and brick stiffeners at certain points, so it's low cost, it did come in around $5,000. And the point I'm coming back to that I started with is what you see here. The house is inevitably small and low and whatever the Victorians and Classicists were doing, forget about it. This is something else altogether. And what Wright does to kind of obviate that situation is he creates these different planes. This plane for the carport, this plane for the house proper, the chimney and then a plane over the work space or kitchen. So you've got this kind of subtle shifting that makes the house interesting. Otherwise it would be a box, right, it wouldn't be very interesting at all, but we don't want to spend too much time on the outside because these houses are about the inside and Wright talks often about how he read [inaudible] who said, "The reality of the cup is the inside not the cup", and from that he realized the reality of the house is the interior. So look how far he's come in about 37 years, 36 years. The Willits House cross axial servant quarters and kitchen, you might say the giant work space back here, dining room, living room, entry and now it's reduced to this L, rather generous living room, close to the street, opened to the lot, Katherine Jacobs could sort of command the house from the kitchen area. If she had guests and watch the children in the yard, she could see everything because this whole part of the house is glaze and this is rather closed. So Wright is paring down but then he's going to expand and go in various directions with these ideas. Now at the same time that he created the first Prairie House he immediately did a whole bunch of them. I'm sorry. Not Prairie but Usonian. I think he did 10 or 12 of them boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just like that and at the same time he was doing Johnsons Wax, Fallingwater and Taliesin West. Amazing. He was 70. He wasn't about to retire; far from it. So we're going to look at, we're going to put Samara in the context of some Usonians, and the first place to turn for that is John Sergeant's book. John came from Cambridge University in the early 70's when he just started teaching and rode around the U.S. on busses, visited as many Wright houses as he could and then wrote this book, which is still in print, and in it he created these five topologies for Usonians. The first, the Polliwog, well what it sounds like is something big with a tail, big head, little tail, and the Jacobs house is certainly one of those. By the way the Rosenbaum House in Florence, Alabama is almost the same as the Jacobs House but it was added onto by Wright so it changed its configuration. A second, the second typology today we might call it a split level perhaps, where, sorry, the bedroom wing is here, this is a kind of, what is down there, kind of utility spaces under here and then the main living level is up here. This is a wonderful house by the way. I haven't been there for years but I remember being really struck by the craft of the house and its location alongside the Des Plaines River; it's pretty neat too. Harper House is diagonals and I think they're pretty obvious. The grid here is a square but you can see how he's inserting diagonals through the plan. I'm showing you these but there are multiples of them so he's going all over the place trying out different things. The Richardson House, this is a very unflattering photograph of it, this pier mass here or fire place mass is what you see right there, but what's important is that it is a hexagonal grid, which he used for two California Houses; the Paul Hanna House and the Bazett House. So there are multiple hexagonal grids. They were very, all these were very specialized, difficult to build, and again I have to remind you the Wright either himself had to train people or get people. Like I visited the Hanna House this fall and the person taking me around said that this was built by a man, I think he said his name was Taylor, from Palo Alto and Wright interviewed him and said why don't you come to Taliesin and then the guy spent a couple of weeks with Wright at Taliesin West and then came back and built the Hanna House. Wright, he got up to speed, that kind of thing. Cumbersome but still these are relatively low cost buildings. To me, for me one of the crowning glories of this whole Usonian episode was the Goetsch-Winckler House in Okemos Michigan and again the things I talked about before, the very subtle shifts of horizontal planes work I think very elegantly here. Square grid again at this point, living room, little dining area, kitchen area, bedrooms and a bath, very simple. It's, actually on the other side is a hill slope down so has a nice kind of woody view beyond, but I see this and I think, I think of Mies van der Rohe; some of the houses Mies was doing in the 20's and 30's and 40's, and then inside. Wow. Samara is what Wright would call an inline, which we just saw. I don't know if I mentioned that but this is the fifth, I think the fifth, of the typologies. So the Samara is inline, but if you look at that plan for a minute in terms of living room, entrance slot, the fire place, living room, entrance slot, fire place, dining here at Jacobs, dining here, it all lines up except, of course, instead of this bend it's all piled behind into one single line, and these are in the exhibition. Frankly I pulled them off the web. I'm not that familiar with the house as I said but built-ins because extremely important to Wright in the Usonian Period. Built-ins for various reasons. I know that he told when the Jacobs house was completed, one of them pushed against the wall and it went [inaudible], you know, and he said well get some books in those book shelves and it'll stiffen right up. I can imagine, I can imagine that he had similar stories to tell the Christians. So the thing that surprised me in preparing this talk was that John Sargent in his trip around the country and writing that book, created those typologies, and he left out what I think are the most interesting buildings of this, of this ilk, of the Usonian type; certainly the Jester House. It didn't get built except someone built it at Taliesin in the 70's but I mean it didn't get built on Pacific Palisades in California where this great pool would have dribbled down into the Pacific, instead it got built in the desert with grass in the circle. But nevertheless it's a fascinating building because each of those cylinders that you see constitutes an individual. This is the living room, this was my room at one time, I stayed there doing research, and a kitchen and dining area here, but this is all open. There's a roof over it, a kind of perforated roof, so there's a kind of freedom about it. It's really quite remarkable. It's almost like being in a park or something of that kind. Then there's this. Wright had warned the Jacobs not to build in Madison but they did. He said you'll want more land, you'll want, the kid's will grow whatever, so five, six years later they commission this other house, the second house, which is an arc facing south so that the sun goes right into the house, dished out in front as a kind of pool of warmth and on the backside it's a berm so earth comes right up to the second floor window. Real cozy. A neat little house. And then this. My all-time favorite. Who would ever want to build, well I shouldn't say that with Dan Liebinskin [phonetic] around but imagine building with an acute angle in the kitchen or work space, but sure enough here it is, the back of the kitchen, but you know it could be counter space. And then you know what do you do upstairs? Well Wright simply brought the roof down to the kitchen, eliminated what might have been a problem here. So this is the Arizona desert so the house opens itself north where you get indirect light. It was for a single person, Jorgine Boomer. And this, there are a number of houses of this kind arcing, pieces of circles put up against counteracting circles or arcs. Kenneth Laurent was the only Wright client I know that was wheelchair bound, recently passed away and his house has been up for sale. Quite an attractive -- Wright always of course bringing passive solar qualities to the house. This is the interior and every one of these, and I've been in about 100 of them, they always have remarkably nice woodwork, beautifully crafted woodwork and a lot of piano, what do you call them, piano hinges for doors and things like that; really nice. And then this for his son David. David Wright was in some way connected to the concrete block business and his father designed this for him and his wife Gladys in North Phoenix. I think you may know about it. A couple years ago two guys from Montana with a little bit of money bought this whole area and were going to cut it up into four lots and one of them would have gone right through this house, and our organization, wasn't me, but people in my organization actually stopped them and we were able to find someone to acquire the house, an attorney from Las Vegas, and saved it. It's remarkable. It's basically an arc shaped house like others but it's elevated up. Wright called it "How to Live In the Desert". Notice the woodwork follows the rhythm of the house. Well this is sort of turning into now a kind of and another one and another one and I don't want to do that to you, so I'm going to talk a little bit in conclusion about Roland Reisley's House in Pleasantville New York. Pleasantville is a community that Wright designed at the behest of a former apprentice named David Henken. Had 32 lots I think and they were circles and that meant that the land in between the circles was communal property and the banks didn't want to lend money to these people, so it was quite a tricky proposition, but they hung in there and they built, three of the houses are by Frank Lloyd Wright, a number of them are by David Henken and other prominent architects. It's a beautiful place. It's called Usonia New York in Pleasantville. It's very wooded and it looks out into preserved land as well. So I'm showing you the Reisley House from, probably from Google Earth here, just to give you a sense of it but it's a little bit of an illusion because the original house was just, sorry, I have fat thumbs. This is the original house and then a wing was added when they had children. So here's the original plan and I wanted you to see the topographical situation because it's fairly, isn't precipitous but there's quite a slope here going down and the house was initially going to be 12 degrees more this way but Wright decided to rotate it and then when they had to add a wing for the children, he could shoot the wing out that way. More about that in a second. So when you go there this is what you initially see. This is a rare Usonian that has a basement because Roland was an amateur photographer and he wanted a dark room. So we're looking up at the, what I would call the main facade I guess, that one sees from down below, and again it's wood with stiffeners, this time out of material called gneiss or gneiss, a kind of granitic, quite beautiful rock that was quarried nearby and again I visited Roland in the fall and talked to him about the house and we've been emailing back and forth and he's giving me more information. But he was very, very pleased with the way the mason was able to connect with Wright on making this work. You're looking at what was the original bedroom part of the house. I already mentioned the addition. They built the house in '51 and in '54, '55 they already wanted to add to it. Roland said business went well or something like that. So what I'm trying to get to here beyond just categorizing stuff, is it was somewhat informed by an interest I'd had for the last five years in phenomenology and I'm not going to go into what is phenomenology about but I'm very interested in, and I'm sure some of you are hip to this, that which is beyond the visual particularly for architecture, the tactile, the masonic issues and the body and space or kinesthetics, especially that. For an architect I think kinesthetics are really important. Now Wright has come from, well we'll look at this in a minute, but Wright has come from a certain gridded rigidness in the Prairie Period to a much more human centered from the inside out, from within outward house. So if that shot of the house from, you know the kind of glamour shot, it wasn't very glamorous, I don't think he was worried about that, but you encounter the building perhaps driving as I did somewhere here and you turn and you come up a driveway that's quite a rise, I wish I knew what in feet, and that's the carport and so the car you see, it's not mine, is over here and then there's this pier mass and then the carport proper here, is over here. So Wright now has come to a point where the car is part of the experience of the house. This is remote, this is not a place where a lot of people are going to be around and in order to access this house, to interact with this house, you have to drive, you have to be invited and you have to drive to it and practically into it. And you'll notice that he has a roof that seems to almost lilt up like the cap of a visor and bear with me one second. This is what Wright said to Walter Davidson in May, no I'm sorry, to Darwin Martin in May of 1926 when he built their summer house in Lake Erie. This is a quote. "Coming into the house would be something like putting on your hat and going out of doors from an ordinary house." Now Wright often used the language of the body. Another time he said, "When the Larkin Building came from me", not when I designed it or built it, when it came from him. This sense of a continuity between him, his inner self and the building and of course you may know that he generally formed his buildings in his head and there's ample publications now of these talks that he gave to his apprentices over the years were recorded and are now published, and he would say to them "You know, I don't go near the paper until I've got the house ready", and of course they're [inaudible] how do I do that? He said it takes time, it takes time. But again this sense of the eternal, the felt, remember from Froebel, the feeling of those blocks it was all so, so human and personal. Kind of I don't know. So, you've gotten out of your car and you're going up to the door, now this house is all diagonals. It's not rectilinear. So when you approached their door and notice how all the lines in the cypress converge you toward the door and this is a plane, the door recedes and then things come forward from there. So you're kind of gently led to the door you might say that way, but most, to me most important are these steps. Wright I met in Taliesin West a lot and Wright used risers that are only up to about four inches and then very deep and on a diagonal that meant that as you walk around Taliesin you just glide, you're never trudging up a stair because you're never working very hard and you always have the option of stepping farther or less far because you have so much depth. The depth might be 14 inches but on the diagonal it grows to 16 or whatever, you get the idea. It's kind of minimizing the sense of effort I guess. But shortly you come through this little slot, which is right here, which takes you pretty directly into the living room. This is the original plan of course. The living room with a dining area right adjacent to it and then this is the big facade we saw from down below, master bedroom and studio over here and work space or kitchen over here, so very, very compact. By the way since Roland Reisley and his wife Ronnie were very interested in music, serious music, wanted to have a big sound system in there and when the house was finished -- I just asked him how tall his ceiling was and he couldn't tell me, but he said it didn't work very well sonically so Wright put these in, he put some baffles up to improve the sound of the space. Hope to write a book about Wright and sound one of these days. So here's the living room as it might have originally been except the dining table would have been right here and you can get something of the sense of expansion when you step into that living room space, and then right beyond this is a whole battery of doors and windows, now with the addition there's more. I think I have it on tap here. It's not a great image but this is to the left, so the house just kind of blows itself open to this diagonalized prow that goes out and what do you see but woods across the street. And Roland said "Well, you know, except for the winter we spend most of our time outdoors, out on that plaza, on that terrace". Just to reiterate the point, I lived in the Barton House here in Buffalo for a year for various reasons and this is back in the Prairie Period, 1902, '03, and it's the grid it's the cross axial plan and here it is and here is Roland's house and I hope that it's readily apparent that these are different, but what I can't convey and I can only urge you if you're interested in this you have to experience these buildings. I mean I can talk myself until I'm blue in the face, but it's about being there, about being in them and feeling the diagonals. What I best can illustrate that is by what doesn't happen in the Barton House. Because you come right angles, turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right again and you're in the living room. Every time you turn there's something opposite you, glass or a wall or something right at right angles to you, boom, boom, boom, boom like that. Over here you're always gliding by something, there's always a movement beyond that's again experientially quite special. So here's the corner of the Barton House living room. The fire place is right here and you can see that Wright has a very emphatic corner, rather deadly and it's dark most of the time in there. Well, actually this is a good place to end I think. Thank you all very much and I will take questions. [ Applause ] I would be happy to answer questions if there are any. >> If anyone has a question please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone. >> I was wondering if any of these houses are visitable. >> Jack Quinan: Oh yes. >> All of them? Back here. >> Jack Quinan: Any of the Usonian Houses? >> Any of them. >> Jack Quinan: The Kraus House in St. Louis is a Usonian that's public. The Paul Hanna House at Stanford is publically accessible. The David Wright house, no. >> In Arizona the one isn't visible? >> Jack Quinan: Not, not now. It's kind of in transition but let's hope. >> Any other questions? Well thank you Jack and Jack Quinan will be giving a short gallery talk at 6pm in the gallery and he'll be over there if you want to ask questions one on one, so let's have a round of applause. [ Applause ]