E.A. Smith house in Oakland by Frank Lloyd Wright

This beautiful design for E.A. Smith unfortunately never came to be built.  As explained in Frank Lloyd Wright: The complete Works:

The house for E.A. Smith, intended to be built in the northern pine forest of California, is a development of the fir-tree type cabin done for the Lake Tahoe Summer Colony in 1922. For Lake Tahoe the plan was more compact, since it was basically a weekend or vacation dwelling. With the Smith plan, an extended wing provides for more bedrooms, while the living-dining área is still in the great “teepee” form that blends so harmoniously with the surronding fir trees.

Although for some reason this design has never received much attention on the part of the publications, I think is singular enough to deserve a close look by its own merits.

So now we can speculate what it would have happened if the Smith family had carried out their initial idea of building their house in the beautiful Piedmont Pines, Oakland.

As with other Wright designs, this is a domestic version of a much more ambitious and large project:

Lake Tahoe Summer Colony which is a spectacular project in an idyllic setting that I hope someday to have the time to model.

Technical aspects.

These images have been made using my usual workflow: Modeling in Autocad, lights, cameras and vegetation in 3dsmax + Vray and finishing touches in Photoshop.

The software Railclone has been key in the realization of this model, since all the work with wood planks uses this plugin for 3dsMax.

ForestPack, a software by the same company, has been necessary for the creation of forest and shrubs.

The texture for the Desert Masonry is the same created for the Pauson house.

The skies belong to the Peter Guthrie collection, and the vegetation to R&D Group.

The complete set of images is located here.

The debate at savewright.com here which includes interesting information related to this project.

9 Comments Add yours

  1. Anonymous says:

    I am from Oakland, so always excited to see something related. Beautiful renditions. A Tahoe colony would be very exciting although i can’t imagine the hours.

    1. David Romero says:

      Currently my friend and collaborator Chad Solom is making one of the cabins and I hope to help him finish it:

      http://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=11305&sid=b2aff52f06d8ff8fdc8aa074927270f7

  2. Ida says:

    just curious, which state park in Lake Tahoe might have housed the colony?

    1. David Romero says:

      I’m afraid I do not have that information, but I’m sure you can ask in this thread:

      http://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=11305&sid=b2aff52f06d8ff8fdc8aa0

  3. Jeff Case says:

    Please render Sea Cliff. I wish someone would build it.

    1. David Romero says:

      Yes, it is a very beautiful project, I hope to do it someday.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Greetings from Serbia. I am so delighted with this project that I want to build it on Mount Tara, 200 km south of Belgrade, from the Siberian larch. Is there a chance to get drawings with precise dimensions in meters and the thickness of the required timber?Thanks in advance.PS.my mail is novomore|@hotmail.com

    1. David Romero says:

      This project never went beyond the draft stage, so there are no drawings with the precise construction details to build them. In any case, you can consult the drawings that exist here:

      https://library.artstor.org/#/search/arttitle:(%22drawing%20number%203811%22)%20AND%20artcurrentrepository:(Avery);size=72;page=1;sort=1

      Good luck!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.