REAL-ESTATE

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Lessons to be learned from Frank Lloyd Wright at the Usonian House in Lakeland

Harold Bubil
harold.bubil@heraldtribune.com

Reading and listening only go so far when it comes to understanding architecture.

There’s nothing like experiencing the three-dimensional genius of a master designer.

Florida Southern College, where the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth in 1867 is a year-long celebration, provides such an opportunity. But rather than simply walking past buildings that are part of a functioning college campus, you can tour a house that was completed in 2013 from a 1939 blueprint by the man considered by many to be America’s greatest architect.

Part of the Sharp Family Tourism and Education Center, the house is an example of Wright’s famous “Usonian houses.” Only 60 were built.

This one is a house museum. Guided tours are offered at $7. Other tours, from $20 to $55, include the main campus buildings designed by Wright, who is famous for creating a uniquely American form of modern architecture over the course of his 70-year career that ended with his death in 1959.

Ninety miles from Sarasota, Florida Southern College, which has been voted among America’s 10 most beautiful campuses for more than a decade, takes pride in having the largest single-site collection of Wright-designed buildings — 13 of them — in the world. They were built between 1941 and 1958. FSC President Dr. Anne Kerr is committed to repairing, restoring and maintaining them in an ongoing and costly effort based on priority. Thousands of visitors tour the architecture each year, with 20 percent of them from outside the United States. The campus was named a National Historic Landmark in 2012.

Sarasotans often make the trip on tours presented by architectural groups. In the 1940s, the early leaders of the “Sarasota School” of architecture movement would travel to Lakeland to see Wright’s work and bring back ideas, and that is still being done.

“Every semester, I take the students from my University of Florida graduate seminar for a tour of the Florida Southern campus,” said influential Sarasota architect Guy Peterson. “Spectacular” is how Peterson describes the new Usonian house.

Its “organic,” out-of-the-earth concept speaks to “the human scale, integrating architecture with the land and materiality,” Peterson said. “The textures are rich, but honest, and the spaces are complex, but yet so simple — always based on a geometry that you can understand.

“The house in Lakeland is a beautiful example of this. He uses concrete block that is regional to Florida, and the extension of the floor slabs (in Cherokee red, Wright’s signature color) beyond the exterior of the house makes me feel like he is extending our eye out to the horizontal Florida landscape.”

USF adjunct professor Michael Halflants, of Halflants + Pichette Studio for Modern Architecture in Sarasota, is impressed by FSC’s commitment to recreating what he calls a “small architectural masterpiece.

“Every precast block was custom-built” in Massachusetts, Halflants said. “More than 5,000 pieces of colored glass were cast into the blocks. The steel reinforcement, the furniture, the window casing, and hardware were all purpose-built by various teams of craftsmen.

“At a time when many institutions of higher education erect mediocre facilities, Florida Southern College led by example by producing a work that could encourage its students and faculty to aspire for excellence.”

One of a kind

Although Wright's originals were intended to be affordable, Florida Southern’s Usonian House cost about $1.3 million to build.

“Part of that is because nobody builds these,” said docent Paul Waterman during a recent tour for the Herald-Tribune. “You can’t go to The Home Depot and buy textile blocks,” which are adorned with a geometric pattern for visual interest. Square openings in many of the blocks are filled with colored glass in one of eight hues.

“When the sun shines, it is like little jewels coming into the building,” said Mark Tlachac, former director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitors Center, in a recent video produced for Polk County government.

“There is 10,000 linear feet of cypress wood, which is hard to get,” Waterman said. The house also has energy conservation features that were not part of the original plan, and geothermal power, he added.

It was constructed with a massive steel frame to ensure longevity of the cantilevered roof and overhangs. Concrete columns hold up the house; the textile blocks are not load-bearing. Nor are they interlocking, although they appear to be.

Elsewhere on the campus, the textile blocks are held together with steel rebar, which proved to be problematic. “The steel rusted and cracked the block,” Waterman said. A lot of the restoration efforts are focused on this problem.

It was avoided at the Usonian House by using stainless-steel rebar. “The rebar weaves them together. That is where the name comes from,” Waterman said of the “textile block” terminology.

The house has the floor plan — small bedrooms and a large central room for family gatherings — and the geometrically inspired details for which Wright’s Usonian houses are known.

“Like any great piece of architecture, it really needs to be experienced,” architect Jeff Baker, who supervised construction, told The Ledger, the Herald-Tribune’s sister newspaper in Lakeland, when the house opened.

“Models and photographs don’t really capture the feel of it,” he said. Walking into the completed house for the first time, he said, “was literally like walking into a sculpture. It was kind of spiritually moving.”

Middle-class housing

The Usonian House concept was developed by Wright as a way to build affordable houses for middle-class America in the lean years before World War II. “Usonia” means “United States of North America,” with an i thrown in for poetic effect. They were priced at $12,000 or less.

"Wright believed architecture for the middle-class was lacking in the U.S.," Waterman said.

This version has 1,700 total square feet with two smallish bedrooms that are used as instructional and meeting spaces, and a small “work area” that would have served as a kitchen.

The foyer has a low ceiling — a hallmark of Wright buildings — that is made of the same golden-brown cypress as is found outside, especially in the carport, which has a dramatic, 36-foot cantilevered shading roof. (Steel beams are intended to keep it from sagging.)

Using the same materials inside and out, including the signature textile blocks in the walls, is one of Wright’s devices for bringing the outdoors in.

The foyer yields to what could be called a great room. Here, the ceiling, still in cypress, jumps from under 7 feet to about 10 feet. This room has a dining table, sofa, fireplace and Taliesin barrel chairs — all designed by Wright and manufactured by Copeland. Even the chess set was designed by Wright.

Clamps beneath the dining table allow it to be made bigger or smaller to meet family needs. The sofa cushions may be removed to reveal storage cabinets. The tops to three stools at the opposite end of the room may be removed to access storage space in the bases.

The fireplace would have been seldom used in Florida, but it functions as a focal point of the room. Here, it does not function as a fireplace; air-conditioning ductwork is hidden behind the mantle.

“There is social engineering on Wright’s part to bring the family together in the Depression. His house would turn its back on the street to shut out the Depression.”

But in this case, it faces the street to gain attention from the tourists. Still, it is “intimate with the environment,” Waterman said.

Wright had “an idea of how people could live and organize their space, and it is beautifully executed, even 80 years ago,” said Brian Renz, who has been a docent at FSC for six years and is considered the go-to Wright guru since the retirement of Mark Tlachac. “Most of those lessons still apply, even though there weren’t televisions and other items that we require nowadays.”

Wright’s social-engineering effort continues in the two bedrooms, which are not tiny, but not large, either. They are intended for sleeping only.

“The bedrooms are quite ample, and larger than in many Wright houses,” Renz said. “But even so, they are not designed as places to read. You are supposed to be in the central room with your family and your guests. That is where you do everything. There is no eat-in kitchen; everyone takes meals in the same room in the same space. That is certainly a key part of the plan.”

The house lacks much storage space, even in the carport, or even places to hang artwork.

Noting that Wright invented the carport, Waterman said, “This is the nicest carport I have ever seen. He believed America had gotten past the horse-drawn carriage, so we did not need a carriage house and we did not need a barn.

“The carport serves a couple of functions. One was to park the car. The other was that as a social engineer, he would help, through his architecture, to change how we lived our lives. So there is no place to store your stuff here. You have to keep it nice and clear and simple.

“The Usonian Home – there was no storage in an attic or a basement. No wallpaper, no paint. A lot of these things were radical.”

"Uniquely American"

Sarasota architect Greg Hall is among the many local designers who have made the Wright pilgrimage

“Wright’s concept for creating a uniquely American architecture has as a central premise that our buildings should be tied to our unique natural environment and not rooted to European precedent,” Hall said. “This continues to have a great influence on architects.

“The ‘Sarasota’ School is a form of regional modernism with a preoccupation to delimit inside-to-out, and a mandate for designing buildings that capitalize on engaging our environment,” Hall said. “Wright’s influence on our Sarasota School architects is widely recognized. This ‘Usonian’ notion of embracing place, and designing buildings to sit lightly in this environment, should be an imperative for all new architecture and a source for design inspiration.

“It results in a timeless forward thinking architecture.”

Information: Flsouthern.edu/FLW. Call 863-680-4597. The Usonian House at the Sharp Family Tourism and Education Center is at 840 Johnson Ave., Lakeland, in the Lake Morton Historic District. BuildingTheUsonianHouse.com is a website by Lakeland resident Michael Maguire that chronicles the construction of the house.

He knows his Wright now

On Sarasota architect Leonardo Lunardi’s first day of architecture school at the University of South Florida, he and the other students were asked to fill out a questionnaire.

One of the questions: “Who is your favorite architect, other than Frank Lloyd Wright?”

Lunardi, who had wanted to be an aeronautical engineer but switched majors as that program was full, thought to himself, “Who’s Frank Lloyd Wright?”

“Well, there are too many to mention,” he wrote.

Since then, the Milan, Italy, native has learned quite a bit about Frank Lloyd Wright, who was born 150 years ago, in 1867.

In researching a story on Wright’s Usonian House at Florida Southern College, I sent my own brief questionnaire to several Sarasota architects. Lunardi’s responses:

Q. What is the importance and influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian housing program?

A. The houses changed how people thought of their living spaces. The project responded to the current economic state and allowed the middle class access to tailor-made houses that were practical and functional.

Q. Have you seen the Usonian House at Florida Southern College?

A. No, but I have seen a few of the Usonian houses in the Minneapolis area.

Q. What does it mean to you?

A. I appreciate seeing that Wright’s architectural approach is consistent and independent of scale and budget. When subject to these limitations, challenging the status quo becomes much more meaningful.

Q. What are the lessons for laypeople?

A. The lessons are many; the same lessons apply to all of Wright’s body of work. Below are a few:

-- The value of architecture and design. It is important for clients to work with an architect/designer with vision.

-- Architecture should be married to the landscape. Wright was known for his efforts of bringing the landscape into the architecture, and vice versa. This is an effective way to increase the perceived size of the spaces.

-- Homes can be designed to allow phasing. Many of the projects were designed to be expanded over time.

-- Prioritize living spaces over bedroom and bathroom spaces. The amount of space that most homes in Sarasota dedicate to bathroom and bedrooms spaces, in relationship to the living space, feels disproportionate.

-- Prioritize the pedestrian over the automobile.