How does Oregon's only Frank Lloyd Wright building compare to his masterpieces around the world? Well, the Gordon House is handsomely low key, which was the intention of the architect's Usonian vision of producing affordable, experimental homes that mirrored the landscape.
And yet it's loaded with style.
Decorative fretwork -- patterned perforated wood lattice original to each structure -- dresses the cedar-and-concrete-block two story he designed in 1957 for Conrad and Evelyn Gordon's farm on the Willamette River near Wilsonville.
There are other telltale signs that this fabled home, rescued from the bulldozer and moved to the Oregon Garden in Silverton, is a Wright original. Flat roof lines with generous overhangs provide shade and geometric cut-outs add character.
Inside, walls of glass frame the gardens and erase the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces. Rooms flow from one to another in Wright's inventive open floor plan. Another breakthrough idea: Radiant-heat concrete floors deliver a modern aesthetic and reduce energy costs.
More important, especially in the days leading to the 150th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday on June 8: This home is open to the public. Few Wright residences can make that claim.
Most are privately owned, sequestered by walls like the Mrs. Clinton Walker House on California's central coast. The 1951 Wright-designed dwelling, perched on a triangular promontory on scenic Carmel Point, has long, horizontal windows and ribbons of red steel that meet at a point to look like a ship's prow. Walker's descendants still own the home Wright said was "as durable as the rocks and as transparent as the waves."
Some Wright houses are for sale, which allows a peek inside. The horseshoe-shaped, 1955 Tiranna ("running water") mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut with 7,000 square feet of living space is listed at $7.2 million. The 1893 Winslow House near Chicago, which was so radical at the time that the owner changed his commute every day to avoid neighbors wanting to complain, sold in December for $1,375,000.
Furniture and light fixtures come with the $1.295 million asking price for the 1958 Paul and Helen Olfelt House with a brick front in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. And the last house the architect designed before he died in 1959, the round Norman Lykes House in Phoenix, was pulled off the market in March after not selling in more than a year, even after a price drop from $3.6 million to $3.25 million, according to Top Ten Real Estate Deals.
Unlike Oregon's only Wright building, these mansions -- and most of the others included on the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy's list of his homes on the market -- weren't in the functional Usonian design for middle-income homeowners.
The 1953 Samuel and Dorothy Eppstein Residence, one of his first ranch-style homes and part of a community of his Usonian dwellings at the Galesburg County Homes Acres in Michigan, sold for $368,000 in July.
By the 1940s, Wright was the most famous architect in the world and yet he turned his attention to suburban housing, transforming the look, feel and function of affordable homes the way he impacted what we expect from hotels, schools, churches, offices and museums.
About 60 Usonian homes were built between 1936 and Wright's death 23 years later. He described these dwellings as having an organic appearance as if they rose "out of the ground and into the light."
To him, "Usonia" meant living in harmony with the land in the United States of North America (USONA).
The only way to experience the way Wright's rooms function and flow is to go inside one of his houses. And, more than ever before, the public will have that opportunity as the world marks Wrights' birthday sesquicentennial.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation lists participating properties at FLW150.org.
You can travel to Taliesin West, Wright's winter home and design laboratory in Scottsdale, Arizona, or to the architect's most famous residential design, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Or you can take a trip to the Gordon House at 869 W. Main St. in Silverton, where supporters work continually to restore and preserve Wright's only realized design in Oregon.
Year round, the nonprofit Gordon House Conservancy offers guided tours, starting at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Thursday through Tuesday. Tickets are $20 (call for reservations at 503-874-6006).
For Wrights' 150th birthday, the Gordon House has three events:
- Wright This Way fundraiser
- Frank Lloyd Wright 150th Birthday Bash Open House,
- Frank Lloyd Wright 150th Birthday Bash Evening Music
Wright was 90 years old when he designed the Gordon House for his clients, who were art and music appreciators. He died before it was completed. Construction of the 2,133-square-foot dwelling took place from 1963 to 1964.
Evelyn Gordon was a weaver and artist who saw her home as an accommodating sequence of galleries to display her contemporary paintings, prints and sculptures. Original paintings, many by Northwest artists, hung on every wall, including in the kitchen where cinder blocks rise 15 feet to meet a skylight.
The Gordon House's kitchen -- considered by experts as one of the finest examples of Wright's innovations to support a more carefree lifestyle -- has paneled refrigerator doors, under-cabinet lighting and the ability for the cook to be freed from a claustrophobic space and be surrounded by family and friends.
His concepts for cooking comfort and efficiency -- including backsplashes to make it easy to clean up wall spills -- continue to influence kitchen design.
An 11-foot-square concrete core that rises from the basement to the kitchen's skylight draws heat from the subterranean boiler or cool air from the earth-cooled basement. The kitchen's tower and a wall fan keep the smell of smoke, fish, fried food and other foods from lingering in what Wright called the "workspace" of the house.
After Evelyn Gordon died in 1997, the home fell into disrepair. When the riverfront property was sold, preservationists and architecture fans -- some of whom would become members of the Gordon House Conservancy -- had the home dismantled and moved 24 miles to the Oregon Garden to save it from being demolished.
The house was reconstructed and opened to the public in March 2002.
Since then, more than 100,000 visitors have walked through the three-bedroom, three-bath house and explored Wright's concepts of great rooms, indoor-outdoor living and passive energy.
The Gordon House, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, can be rented for events, from weddings to concerts. A German Bluthner half concert grand piano has a prominent place in the glass-walled living room.
Wright believed music and design were instruments to family harmony.
Innovative for its time, the modern house has an early version of an entertainment center in the library seating area off the living room. There was also built-in storage for records and a slide-out shelf for a stereo-radio set.
Kathryn Burton, who is the site manager of the Gordon House, wrote in the conservancy's newsletter that the historic home "enjoys" visitors.
"The play of light through the fretwork seems livelier, the orange counter tops in the workspace/kitchen seems brighter and the indoor-outdoor relationship seems more pronounced when folks are here making guesses about the inspiration for the fretwork pattern, stroking those counter tops, or gazing out to the giant white oaks beyond the windows."
-- Janet Eastman
jeastman@oregonian.com
503-799-8739
@janeteastman