There may very well be few extra American types of dwelling than the tract home, and few extra American architects than Frank Lloyd Wright. However Wright, in fact, by no means designed a tract home. Every of his dwellings, to say nothing of his public buildings, was in each sense a one-off, not simply in its format and its particulars however in its relationship to its context. Wright believed, as he declared in his e-book The Pure Home, {that a} constructing must be “as dignified as a tree within the midst of nature.” This he held true even for comparatively modest residences, as evidenced by the collection of “Usonian homes” he started within the late nineteen-thirties.
The Vox video above options the “cypress-and-brick masterpiece” that’s Pope-Leighey Home in Alexandria, Virginia, which Wright accomplished in 1941. “Bounded by the standard price range of the Pope household” — Loren Pope, its head was working as a newspaper copy editor on the time — “this construction nonetheless reveals the distinct options attribute of his formidable imaginative and prescient and elegance.”
So says the home’s web page on the Frank Lloyd Wright Basis, which provides that “the architectural aspect of compression and launch, the cantilevered roofs, and the home windows that open to the surface create a right away interplay with the encircling panorama.”
Video producer Phil Edwards pays particular consideration to these home windows. He cites Wright’s conviction that “one of the best ways to mild a home is God’s manner — the pure manner, as almost as attainable within the daytime and at night time as almost just like the day as could also be, or higher.” Within the case of the Pope-Leighey home, attaining this very best concerned using not simply almost floor-to-ceiling home windows, but additionally clerestory home windows perforated in a particular geometric sample and positioned in order to forged “mild hung like photos on the wall.” The impact is so sturdy that the home’s two relocations seem to not have diminished it — and so singular that, regardless of the keenness of post-war tract-house builders for Wright’s improvements in housing, it by no means did make it into Levittown.
Associated content material:
A Digital Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Misplaced Japanese Masterpiece, the Imperial Lodge in Tokyo
Take a 360° Digital Tour of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Private Dwelling & Studio
That Far Nook: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles – A Free On-line Documentary
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack publication Books on Cities, the e-book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Fb, or on Instagram.