99% Invisible - 246- Usonia 1

Episode Date: February 8, 2017

Frank Lloyd Wright was a bombastic character that ultimately changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known works, Wright created a small and inexpensive yet beautiful house. This … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If I asked you to think of the most famous architect in American history, even if you don't think you know anything at all about architecture, I bet you could take a guess and I bet your guess would be right. Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the greatest architect of the 20th century. The genius with a T-square has been called the paste center of modern-day architecture. One of the most extraordinary man of art is I. He has literally established the pace for innovations and new ideas in the field of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright left a legacy of some of the most iconic and gorgeous buildings in the United States,

like the Spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Falling Waterhouse in Pennsylvania, which straddles a waterfall, and the futuristic Marin Civic Center, which is the backdrop for Gatica, which is an awesome movie. And that is producer Avery Truffleman. By the end of his career, Wright was on a level of celebrity,

usually reserved for actors and rock stars. He was a household name, and he was on late-night talk shows. Some quarters have denounced Wright as an impractical visionary and a puffer's windbag. He was a household name, and he was on late night talk shows. So Wright wasn't just known for being a genius architect. He made headlines because he was a character. He often wore this outfit that included a flowy cape and a hat and cane. He wrote manifestos, launched insults at other architects,

and loudly critiqued politicians, religion, and society. He declared himself the greatest architect who ever lived. He was unashamed. He's the early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change now.

And Frank Lloyd Wright had this wildly scandalous private life. There were suits against him, property seed, jail, finally divorce. The raw material for big, spicy headlines, Frank Lloyd Wright was the darling of a sensational press. But this bombastic character ultimately changed the field of architecture and introduced a new philosophy of building. Before many of Wright's iconic and famous structures were completed, before falling water, before

the Guggenheim, before the Marin Civic Center, his most significant contribution to our everyday lives was something much more modest. A small, sturdy, inexpensive, and most importantly, very beautiful house designed with the American working class in mind, and it all started with a journalist from Milwaukee. In 1934, a Milwaukee journal reporter named Herbert Jacobs was assigned to take a drive over to Spring Green in Central Wisconsin. He was told to write about Tally Esson, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio. Jacobs didn't really know anything about architecture, and at that particular time,

he wasn't really interested in learning anything about it. Because Herbert Jacobs had other things on his mind. In that November of 1934, his wife was very, very pregnant. The night before his reporting trip, he had brought her to the hospital and stayed up with her until dawn. The nurse has assured her birth that he could go on his reporting trip without missing the birth. And so, he set out that morning alone. Blirriade, completely unprepared.

He drove 120 miles through the chill, gray Wisconsin countryside for his assignment. To me, with Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, who was 67 in 1934, couldn't have cared less about his appointment with Herbert Jacobs of the Milwaukee Journal. Actually, Wright forgot all about it, which wasn't unusual. He was known to blow off journalists. When Jacob arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright's compound, completely distracted by thoughts of his wife and their baby, he learned that the architect was actually on his way out the door. They got to talk

for just over 10 minutes before Wright left abruptly saying, some of the boys will talk to you now. The boys were Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices. They had come to him from all over the world, and they're a part of a fellowship program that Wright established at his home in studio, a campus he called Tally Essin. Tally Essin, a Welsh word, meaning shining brow. Welsh because it was built on land settled by his family who were farmers from Wales, but the shining brow also has to do with Wright's building philosophy. So Taliesin actually is built kind of on the brow, just like your brow of your head. The main Taliesin building crumbles

around the side of a hill, almost like a crown. He felt that you should never build on top of a hill because that destroyed the integrity of the hill. This is Floyd Hamlin. He's an architect at Taliesin. Also part of the integrity of the hill. This is Floyd Hamlin. He's an architect at Tally Essin. Also, part of the faculty of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and I've been here since starting as a apprentice back in 1987. Hamlin works and lives at Tally Essin full-time. Here on Frank Lloyd Wright's family land, we're right used to play as a boy. So, yeah, where are we now?

So where are we? We are. This is just outside of Spring Green, Wisconsin. It's a very beautiful green valley with rolling hills. So he spent a lot of his summers working this land. So he was very familiar with the landscape. And this connection with the outdoors was really formative for right.

He thought that architecture should help people live harmoniously with their environment, rather than shield them from it. The house could become part of nature if it was made with local materials and had big windows and was oriented for just the right amount of sunlight. You orient the house just right so that you take advantage of what nature has to offer

and you're living with nature rather than trying to fight against it. You know, living on the brow of the hill, not on top of it. This all folded into a concept, Frank Lloyd Wright called Organic Architecture. He wanted to spread this gospel to the next generation, which is why he returned to the valley he knew as a boy and established the Talias and Fellowship. The Fellowship was the thing that the Milwaukee Journal wanted Herbert Jacobs to cover in his article. When Jacobs drove into Talias and that morning in 1934, the Fellowship had been going on for two years, and it was hard for the public to wrap their minds around it, including this NBC announcer. The apprentices had to pay $1,100 a year to attend the Taliesin Fellowship, nearly 20 grand today,

and it wasn't like an accredited institution or anything. Students had to do a lot of grunt work like bailing hay, plowing fields, and making meals. But they got to learn Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy of architecture and live with them and work with them. Even though oftentimes this meant serving as an unpaid labor force. When Jacobs was getting his tour of Tally Essin, he described the apprentices as rather long-haired, smiling, and polite young men, who tried their best to explain to him

what organic architecture means. Organic architecture is architecture of its time and of its place. You're not trying to make it look like something that it's not. Right thought that there should be no wallpaper to cover things up. No paint, no plaster. Wood should look like wood, stone should look like stone. Concrete should look like concrete. When Frank Lloyd Wright worked with plywood, he liked to leave the edge of the plywood exposed so that

you saw those layers in there and that became part of the almost ornament or detail. Which was different from frilly traditional European style architecture with rococo gold ornaments and clothet chairs and parlors full of knick-knacks. Just think of Victorian houses stuffed with lots of tiny rooms and covered in bright paint and lacy curtains. This idea of organic architecture wasn't just a break from these traditions. It was a break from new trends in modern architecture too. Cities all over the world were building huge, boxy, glass and steel structures, designed to be hypersleek machines for living and working. Wright explains that these were simply not comfortable for human animals.

They are like goldfish and a globe. And these houses that are so classified as they know are, they're not sensible, it's an abuse of privilege and an abuse of material. Frank Lloyd Wright took the traditional old materials and put them into sleek modern forms. His organic architecture was a new style, born in the United States. And organic architecture, a new sense of what constitutes humanity under harmonious conditions, a harmonious place in which to live and harmonious way to live in it. But Frank Lloyd Wright didn't explain this grand philosophy

to the journalist Herbert Jacobs, because Wright wasn't there. The apprentices did the best they could, but again, Jacobs was very distracted and was only thinking of his wife in the hospital. He thanked the two young men who showed him around Tallyess and got back in his car. Jacobs later wrote, finally I started back to Milwaukee, learning on the way through a telephone call young man who showed him around Tallyesson and got back in his car. Jacob's later road.

Funnily, I started back to Milwaukee, learning on the way through a telephone call to the hospital that I had become a father at about 11 o'clock that morning, at the very moment when I was interviewing right. Herbert Jacob's, his wife, Catherine, and their new daughter, lived in Milwaukee for two more years on his reporter's salary of $20 a week. This was in the mid-30s, the Great Depression. So when Herbert Jacobs was offered a slightly higher-paying job with a paper in the state capital of medicine, the family moved right away.

When we got to Madison, I couldn't find anything within our price range and our newspaper man's price range. It was what we figured would be nice to live in. This is the voice of Herbert Jacobs himself from a 1956 NBC interview. When he and Catherine moved to Madison, they didn't see any houses they liked, or that they could afford. So a cousin of my wife had been out at Taliesin and Mr. Wright and suggested that we have Mr. Wright do something for us. Jacobs didn't really remember much about his first visit to Taliassin two years before. And he murmured something along the lines of,

very interesting, which his wife's cousin took as a yes. But he made an appointment for us to go out there and we went along with that idea. And then on the way out, we were, my wife and I, were trying to think, what is it that we can tell this great man, the architect of rich plants, what can we say to him that would interest him in our very small case? In the past, when Frank Lloyd Wright had designed private homes, they had not been for people like Herbert and Catherine Jacobs. Wright had designed gorgeous, wide homes with broad roofs and expensive living rooms

for wealthy people. His constructions were masterpieces. They were works of art and they were expensive. So we put it as a sort of challenge. But the country needs is a decent $5,000 house. Can you build one? In today's money, $5,000 is about $85,000. That's a pretty reasonably priced house in most real estate markets. Mr. Wright told us that we were the first clients that ever asked him to build a low-cost house. He said, for 20 years, you've been wanting to build one, but no one ever asked him to. Now Wright had long wanted to make a more democratic form of housing, even early in his career. He had been playing around with inexpensive methods of building and other structures, and he had a lot of concepts that he had been scheming around urban planning.

But now, Wright had the chance to make some of his concepts a reality. He had the willing clients, and he had time on his hands. In 1936, he was in a bit of a slump in his career. People couldn't afford fancy big new homes. Again, it was the depression, and a number of big projects had been canceled, and also Wright had already been practicing for decades, and he was slowly getting written off as a husband. And then incomes this young, open-minded couple, Wright could tell them his philosophy, and

teach them how to live well through good architecture. Then he said, do you really want a $5,000 house? He said most people want a $10,000 house for $5,000. Are you willing to give up the things that you have to give up? Mr. Wright made a list of the things that the Jacobs would have to do without if they really wanted a $5,000 house. Tile bathrooms, extra trim, finish, and things like that. Are you willing to give those up?

We didn't know anything about it and we said, sure, it's okay with us. Herbert and Catherine Jacobs didn't know it at the time, but that modest little house that Frank Lloyd Wright was to build for them would be the most practical expression of his ideology. The Jacobs would own the first house in a movement that right-called euconia. The house that Herbert Jacobs built was the first of the euconian houses. Euconian, a right-word meaning the United States is it ought to be at its democratic zenith.

Euconia was Frank Lloyd Wright's name for the United States of North America. In Wright's vision, euconia would be a country full of modest, well-made, beautiful, comfortable little houses that the working class could afford. These Eusonian homes would inspire, educate, and write believed create a new culture for all Americans. I believe now people are going to know what constitutes good architecture and of course good living has to go with it. Good conduct also.

Good dressing too because you wouldn't dress in a loud and vulgar way in a quiet and beautiful room. All these good things are dependent more or less one on the other and add up to something that we call culture. It's only by a natural growth that you can attain culture. Right believe the way to build a better American culture was not en masse, not in apartment buildings or cookie cutter developments.

It was to be catered to the individual. Culture is not for the club. Culture is an individual thing. And that's what our forefathers struck when they declared that the individual is sovereign. Which, to Frank Lloyd Wright, meant that the masses should be unmasked. They should spread out, away from the city. Well, the city, of course, is a thing of the past. There was a time during the Middle Ages when there was the only source of culture.

There was no way of acquiring this thing we call culture, except by direct contact, you see. But for right, that wasn't true anymore. People were connected to culture through radio and telephones and automobiles. They have transportation, speed, listening, this, or we're using now. It's no longer essential for people to crowd together anywhere. These were all parts of Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for America. And this would start to become reality in 1936 with the Jacob's house,

which would come to be known as Jacob's one, or Eusoneo one. Jacob's house was one of the first ones built. This was just a wide open farmland when it was built out here. This is Bill Martinelli, manager of Eusoneo 1. It's in a suburban street outside of Madison, now lined with little suburban houses, but Eusoneo 1 really stands out.

Even if you don't know what it is and you're just driving by, because from the street, it almost just looks like a beautiful wooden wall. The house turns its back on the road. Well, when we get inside or if we go around back, you'll see the whole back of the house is all glass. It's all open to the back. And you know, we did that intentionally, and it kind of closed it off to the street and then opened it up to the back.

As Wright saw it, the point of the house was not to have a big facade to show off to your neighbors with a useless and wasteful patch of lawn in the front in a grand entryway. No. The house should be built for residents, not onlookers. Also, from the street, you can see that there's no garage. A car is parked under a wooden awning, just a little flat roof with no sidewalls. This is the carport,

a term that Frank Lloyd Wright coined. This was one of the many tiny ways Wright kept costs down, and also the carport was an education in lifestyle. Without a garage, the Jacobs wouldn't have space to store their junk. They'd have to simply minimize their possessions and toss what they didn't need. But the carport isn't purely utilitarian. The woodwork on the carport roof has this lovely geometric pattern. It was like these wood kind of stripes in the ceiling.

Yeah, it's funny when I heard about the carport and like scene pictures of it, I didn't expect it to be so beautiful and like, it's really nice. It's the thing in this house, the more you look around the around, the more you see, you know, like with the ceiling here in the carport, you wouldn't expect that. When you get inside, you'll see the same thing. You Sonya 1 is full of small, elegant details. Can we go inside? Sure.

Sure. A warm in here. Oh, wow. You can see how the sun comes in. It's so red, like the brick and the wood and the... Right. Your eye kind of gets drawn in. You Sonya 1 is one floor, and inside it's pretty much one room and a loud cat. The space is all open, no walls between living room, dining room, kitchen. That was kind

of innovative for the time. The kitchen is an alcove adjacent to the living slash dining space, with no door. It's a very, very tiny area. This is the kitchen. It's just a little bit wider than the length of my arms, I think. But each foot quite, each foot square, probably. There's a small hallway with tiny bedrooms, but mostly the one main room is the focus. It's where you're supposed to eat, relax, read, live, all together.

Again, Herbert Jacobs. Mr. Wright is an advocate of the open plan and housing that is the removal of the boxes within boxes, sort of thing, so that you don't have many partitions. The temptation is to be together much more. The open plan was pretty novel and it was cost-saving to not have many walls. The Euconian house is full of these clever, less expensive solutions like the lights on the ceiling. So that's just a steel channel with the wires just laying in there and then bare sockets, bare bulbs. So that's considered the first track lighting, another first to the house.

And now you see track lighting everywhere, wherever you see lights or bulbs affixed to a single beam. That's a euconian invention. Other innovations euconia popularized include the use of flat roofs, built-in furniture, and heated floors. Herbert Jacobs loved those heated floors. Floor heating, now very general, but at that time there were no floor he did residences in this country. All of these innovations were meant to help the

family live well and frugally. They saved money while they lived in the house and they had also saved costs and the construction of the house. But right used some other cost-saving measures that were kind of cheating. Like he stole some bricks from another building of his that he was constructing nearby. Well, Wright didn't steal the bricks himself. He sent a bunch of his apprentices over to Racine, Wisconsin, where his design for the Johnson Wax Building was under construction. He told the apprentices to grab as many bricks as they could and bring them back to Madison.

If you're familiar with the Johnson Wax building the corners are curved so you can see some of these bricks are convex and some are concave. Well those would depend like corner bricks. Another way Wright kept costs down was by taking a huge pay cut himself. Bill Ipaid was for $5,500, which included Mr. Wright's fee of $450. By hook or by crook, Wright did it. He met his challenge of building a beautiful house that Herbert and Catherine could afford. I mean, it wasn't perfect. It was a total adjustment for the family. And the house had problems with rain drainage,

and little things were missing, like initially right for God to put screens in the windows. Which were the kinds of complaints right God a lot. He mostly focused on aesthetics and principles of building, rather than practicalities. And ultimately, the Jacob's house was small. After Herbert and Catherine had two more children, they couldn't fit into the house anymore. And so after six years of living in Eusonia one, the Jacobs family would move off to the countryside, where Frank Lloyd Wright would design them a second Eusonian house. But Herbert Jacobs thought of their first home very fondly. Living in that house was fantastically wonderful. I think it'd be nice if a lot more families had that same sort of thing happen to them.

Mr. Wright thought so too. He thought everybody should live in a house designed by him, and you know, the dishes and clothes designed by him in all of furniture. He did design a lot of his furniture, and in at least one case, he did design a dress for the wife of a client. This was all about changing culture. One home at a time. Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to redesign America, and by that token, Americans.

Good design he thought would make a kinder, more beautiful, more enlightened country. Nowadays, usonian houses may be seen the country wide. You don't need a guidebook. By 1939, Wright had built usonian homes all over the country wide. You don't need a guide book. By 1939, Wright had built Euconian homes all over the country, including houses in Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan, and Virginia. But he wanted to build more. He wanted to have a central factory

that made prefabricated Euconian parts modifiable for each client, depending on their needs for space and site conditions. And originally, the whole idea was all these walls would be manufactured in a factory that never really happened. This was all site built. Frank Lloyd writes factory for Euconian Homes never came to pass. And it became increasingly clear to write that the $5,000 price tag for Euconian Homes just wasn't feasible after the Depression.

Also Wright's career picked up shortly after Euconia won. He started building bigger commissions, the ones we all know him for, like falling water. Among the Wright houses none has been more widely publicized than the Pennsylvania home of Edgar Kaufman, which straddles the waterfall. Wright worked on Euconian Homes up until near the very end of his life. But it was a group of his apprentices that would carry on his vision by building an entire community of Eusonian houses. Turn right onto Eusonian Road.

Next time, on 99% invisible, a trip to Eusonia, New York to see what became a frankloid rights vision, and why these little houses have affected the ways we live. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Troufflement with Serifusive, Blaney Hall, and Mithit's Gerald, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. Katie Mingle is our senior editor. Cole Stead is our digital director. Sean Rial composed all original music for this episode. And Terran Mazza is the Baroness.

Special thanks this week to John and Betty Moore, John Eifler, Jim Sharp, Sam Sharp, Christine Ingram and Jody McGuire. We are a project of 91.7KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Org, where on Instagram and Tumblr too. But if in the course of your life you find yourself in need of really well-tolled, beautiful, design stories, you should seek out and spend time on unin-ipi.org. you