INTO THE GROUND
From the outside, the Darwin Martin House (DMH) in Buffalo might be the most lyrical of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes. It’s a lovely bundle of low-lying horizontals: brick walls, concrete railings, ribbon windows, and overhanging eaves, that seems to hover above the flat lawn. In its composition it feels more relaxed, and refined, than even more celebrated Wright works like the Robie House.
But the house’s interiors are something different. The rooms on the ground floor (entrance, living room, sitting room and dining room) are set in a dense, interlocking plan around two large freestanding brick fireplaces. There are no doors or archways to mark the boundaries between the rooms, only wood beams and shifting heights in the ceilings. These ceilings are set low, so low that someone six feet tall would have trouble moving from one to the next.
The walls are all finished with a gold-tinted plaster. And they are trimmed with wood bases at the bottom, wood frames at the corners, and wood coves at the top. What plaster surfaces that remain are encrusted with wood display niches, bookcases, radiator covers, and window seats. Overhead, the ceilings and beams are also trimmed in wood. All this heavy woodwork – in teak with a heavy grain, stained the color of tea – weighs the space down. And when one moves to the windows for relief one can’t see beyond their intricate stained glass panels and the deep eaves to the sky. So one’s view remains pinned low, to the horizon.
It was one of Wright’s commandments to build into the ground rather than on the ground. And one typically finds inside a Wright house, like Robie House, a protected, burrowed feeling. But at DMH one finds instead a sense of compression, as if one is being pressed into the ground. This is an uncommon Frank Lloyd Wright house. Rather than a dynamic, fluid interior, it offers one that’s tangled, and overbearing.