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.