A Touring Exhibit : Wright’s ‘Usonian’ House Draws Crowds in Dallas

In New York, a new book about fabled architect Frank Lloyd Wright has sold out quickly at many bookstores despite the hardback’s hefty, $24.95 price tag.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., finishing touches are being put on the National Center for the Study of Frank Lloyd Wright, an eclectic collection of objects the architect designed over his fruitful, 92-year life.

The exhibit is being organized by pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, who has spent more than $13 million in the last two years buying everything from Wright-designed chairs to leaded windows.

And in Dallas, hundreds of visitors each day silently shuffle through a massive new exhibition of the architect’s work that includes a full-scale “Usonian Automatic House,” a concept that Wright had hoped would allow middle-income people to essentially design and build their own customized home with little or no help from professional craftsmen.

Experts aren’t sure why Wright, who died in 1959, has suddenly become the focus of so much attention. But many believe the iconoclastic architect would have enjoyed all the hoopla.

“Frank Lloyd Wright was very much a self-promoter,” said Jay Rounds, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It’s nice to see all these other people pay so much attention to him now. His work certainly merits it.”

While the renewed interest in the revered architect has spawned more than a dozen new Wright exhibits, few have drawn the praise being showered on the exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. It was organized by the Scottsdale Arts Center Assn. and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and is supported by Whirlpool Corp. and Kohler Co.

Simple to Assemble

The three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot Usonian home and the rest of the traveling exhibition is designed to teach visitors more about Wright and “organic architecture,” the term he used to describe his work. The term refers to Wright’s belief that all parts of a building relate to each other as they do to the whole, just as they do in nature.

Natural light streams into the house through dozens of windows, and rooms “flow” into each other without creating a “boxy” feeling for occupants.

Wright developed the Usonian Automatic System in the 1950s, said Lee Cohen, a trustee of the Scottsdale Arts Center Assn. Usonian referred to the United States, and automatic to a system in which simple building components could be assembled by virtually anyone in a variety of different forms.

Wright’s design called for the use of hundreds of precast concrete blocks, grooved on their edges so reinforcing rods could be slipped between them. As the cement blocks rose, concrete grout was poured into the cavities to bind the blocks and rods into a single structure.

Owners would purchase the materials and Wright’s basic plans for walls, rooms and furniture; exactly how they’d be put together was up to the individual.

The simple construction method and building components allowed nearly everyone to get involved in the construction of their own homes, Cohen said, and eliminated the need to hire masons and other professionals.

Guggenheim Museum

Although Wright designed several Usonian houses, only a dozen or so were built across the nation, Cohen said. The home in the exhibit was designed for a client in the Northeast in 1955, but was never built for him.

Wright designed more than 1,000 homes and other buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and several buildings in Los Angeles. Two exhibits of the architect’s work are currently at Barnsdall Park.

Cohen said the Usonian home on display in Dallas shouldn’t be viewed as “Frank Lloyd Wright’s answer to today’s building and affordability problems,” but as a challenge to architects, builders and others to “incorporate their own ideas, and those of Wright’s, to make our homes more creative and livable.”

The rest of the new exhibition includes architectural drawings and renderings by Wright, large-scale models of many of his projects, furnishings he designed and several photographs of himself and his work.

The exhibit will open at the National Museum of American History, Washington, in June, and then move to three other states before stopping in San Diego in April, 1990.