SPEAKER_12: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If I asked you to think of the most famous architect in American history, even if you don't think you know anything at all about architecture, I bet you could take a guess. And I bet your guess would be right.
SPEAKER_06: Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the greatest architect of the 20th century.
SPEAKER_07: The genius with a t-square has been called the pacesetter of modern-day architecture.
SPEAKER_06: One of the most extraordinary men of our time.
SPEAKER_00: He has literally established the pace for innovations and new ideas in the field of architecture.
SPEAKER_15: Frank Lloyd Wright left a legacy of some of the most iconic and gorgeous buildings in the United States, like the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fallingwater House in Pennsylvania, which straddles a waterfall, and the futuristic Marin Civic Center, which is the backdrop for Gattaca, which is an awesome movie.
SPEAKER_12: And that is producer Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_15: By the end of his career, Wright was on a level of celebrity usually reserved for actors and rock stars. He was a household name, and he was on late-night talk shows.
SPEAKER_06: Some quarters have denounced Wright as an impractical visionary and a pompous windbag. Yeah? How do you feel about such criticism, Mr. Wright? Doesn't affect me particularly. Doesn't bother you?
SPEAKER_05: Not a bit.
SPEAKER_12: So Wright wasn't just known for being a genius architect. He made headlines because he was a character. He often wore this outfit that included a flowy cape and a hat and cane. He wrote manifestos, launched insults at other architects, and loudly critiqued politicians, religion, and society. He declared himself the greatest architect who ever lived. He was unashamed. You see, early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility.
SPEAKER_05: I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change now.
SPEAKER_15: And Frank Lloyd Wright had this wildly scandalous private life.
SPEAKER_07: There were suits against him, property seized, jail. Finally, divorce. The raw material for big spicy headlines. Frank Lloyd Wright was the darling of the sensational press.
SPEAKER_15: But this bombastic character ultimately changed the field of architecture and introduced a new philosophy of building.
SPEAKER_12: Before many of Wright's iconic and famous structures were completed, before Falling Water, before the Guggenheim, before the Marin Civic Center, his most significant contribution to our everyday lives was something much more modest. A small, sturdy, inexpensive, and most importantly, very beautiful house designed with the American working class in mind. And it all started with a journalist from Milwaukee.
SPEAKER_15: In 1934, a Milwaukee Journal reporter named Herbert Jacobs was assigned to take a drive over to Spring Green in central Wisconsin. He was told to write about Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio.
SPEAKER_12: But Jacobs didn't really know anything about architecture. And at that particular time, he wasn't really interested in learning anything about it.
SPEAKER_15: Because Herbert Jacobs had other things on his mind. In that November of 1934, his wife was very, very pregnant. The night before his reporting trip, he had brought her to the hospital and he stayed up with her until dawn. The nurses assured Herbert that he could go on his reporting trip without missing the birth. And so he set out that morning alone. Blurry-eyed. Completely unprepared.
SPEAKER_12: He drove 120 miles through the chill, gray Wisconsin countryside for his assignment. To meet with Frank Lloyd Wright.
SPEAKER_15: Wright, who was 67 in 1934, couldn't have cared less about his appointment with Herbert Jacobs of the Milwaukee Journal. Actually, Wright forgot all about it. Which wasn't unusual. He was known to blow off journalists.
SPEAKER_12: When Jacobs arrived at Frank Lloyd Wright's compound, completely distracted by thoughts of his wife and their baby, he learned that the architect was actually on his way out the door. They got to talk for just over 10 minutes before Wright left abruptly, saying, Some of the boys will talk to you now.
SPEAKER_15: The boys were Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices. They had come to him from all over the world. And they were part of a fellowship program that Wright established at his home and studio, a campus he called Taliesin. Taliesin.
SPEAKER_07: A Welsh word meaning shining brow.
SPEAKER_12: Welsh because it was built on land settled by his family who are farmers from Wales. But the shining brow also has to do with Wright's building philosophy. So Taliesin actually is built kind of on the brow, just like your brow of your head.
SPEAKER_15: The main Taliesin building curls around the side of a hill, almost like a crown.
SPEAKER_14: He felt that you should never build on top of a hill because that destroyed the integrity of the hill.
SPEAKER_15: This is Floyd Hamblin. He's an architect at Taliesin.
SPEAKER_14: So part of the faculty of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. And I've been here since starting as an apprentice back in 1987.
SPEAKER_12: Hamblin works and lives at Taliesin full time here on Frank Lloyd Wright's family land, where Wright used to play as a boy.
SPEAKER_15: So yeah, where are we now?
SPEAKER_14: So where are we? We are, this is just outside of Spring Green, Wisconsin. It's a very beautiful green valley with rolling hills. So he spent a lot of his summers working this land. So he was very familiar with the landscape.
SPEAKER_15: And this connection with the outdoors was really formative for Wright. He thought that architecture should help people live harmoniously with their environment, rather than shield them from it. The house could become part of nature if it was made with local materials and had big windows and was oriented for just the right amount of sunlight.
SPEAKER_14: You orient the house just right so that you take advantage of what nature has to offer and you're living with nature rather than trying to fight against it.
SPEAKER_15: You know, living on the brow of the hill, not on top of it. This all folded into a concept Frank Lloyd Wright called organic architecture. He wanted to spread this gospel to the next generation, which is why he returned to the valley he knew as a boy and established the Taliesin Fellowship.
SPEAKER_12: The fellowship was the thing that the Milwaukee Journal wanted Herbert Jacobs to cover in his article. When Jacobs drove into Taliesin that morning in 1934, the fellowship had been going on for two years and it was hard for the public to wrap their minds around it, including this NBC announcer.
SPEAKER_07: The Taliesin Fellowship. Just what is it? A school and yet not a school. A colony of devoted men and women. A principality whose king is Frank Lloyd Wright. Apprentices there called, not students. They are, says Mr. Wright, as the fingers of my hand.
SPEAKER_12: The apprentices had to pay $1100 a year to attend the Taliesin Fellowship, nearly 20 grand today. And it wasn't like an accredited institution or anything. Students had to do a lot of grunt work like bailing hay, plowing fields, and making meals. But they got to learn Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy of architecture and live with them and work with them, even though oftentimes this meant serving as an unpaid labor force.
SPEAKER_15: When Jacobs was getting his tour of Taliesin, he described the apprentices as rather long-haired, smiling, and polite young men who tried their best to explain to him what organic architecture means.
SPEAKER_14: Organic architecture is architecture of its time and of its place. You're not trying to make it look like something that it's not.
SPEAKER_12: Wright thought that there should be no wallpaper to cover things up, no paint, no plaster. Wood should look like wood. Stone should look like stone. Paint should look like concrete.
SPEAKER_14: When Frank Lloyd Wright worked with plywood, he liked to leave the edge of the plywood exposed so that you saw those layers in there. And that became part of the, almost ornament or detail.
SPEAKER_15: Which was different from frilly, traditional, European-style architecture, with rococo gold ornaments and clawfoot chairs and parlors full of knick-knacks. Just think of Victorian houses stuffed with lots of tiny rooms and covered in bright paint and lacy curtains.
SPEAKER_12: This idea of organic architecture wasn't just a break from these traditions. It was a break from new trends in modern architecture, too. Cities all over the world were building huge, boxy, glass and steel structures designed to be hyper-sleek machines for living and working. Wright explains that these were simply not comfortable for human animals.
SPEAKER_05: They are like goldfish in a globe. And these houses that are so classified as they now are, they're not sensible. It's an abuse of privilege and an abuse of material.
SPEAKER_12: Frank Lloyd Wright took the traditional old materials and put them into sleek, modern forms. His organic architecture was a new style, born in the United States.
SPEAKER_05: An organic architecture, a new sense of what constitutes humanity under harmonious conditions. A harmonious place in which to live and a harmonious way to live in it.
SPEAKER_15: But Frank Lloyd Wright didn't explain this grand philosophy to the journalist Herbert Jacobs. Because Wright wasn't there. The apprentices did the best they could, but again, Jacobs was very distracted and was only thinking of his wife in the hospital. He thanked the two young men who showed him around Taliesin and got back in his car.
SPEAKER_12: Jacobs later wrote, Finally, I started back to Milwaukee, learning on the way through a telephone call to the hospital that I had become a father at about 11 o'clock that morning at the very moment when I was interviewing Wright.
SPEAKER_15: Herbert Jacobs, his wife, Catherine, and their new daughter lived in Milwaukee for two more years on his reporter salary of $20 a week.
SPEAKER_12: This was in the mid 30s, the Great Depression. So when Herbert Jacobs was offered a slightly higher paying job with a paper in the state capital of Madison, the family moved right away. When we got to Madison, I couldn't find anything that within our price range and our newspaper
SPEAKER_08: man's price range, it was what we figured would be nice to live in.
SPEAKER_15: This is the voice of Herbert Jacobs himself from a 1956 NBC interview. When he and Catherine moved to Madison, they didn't see any houses they liked or that they could afford. So a cousin of my wife's had been out at Taliesin with Mr. Wright and suggested that we have
SPEAKER_08: Mr. Wright do something for us.
SPEAKER_12: Jacobs didn't really remember much about his first visit to Taliesin two years ago. And he murmured something along the lines of very interesting, which his wife's cousin took as a yes. But he made an appointment for us to go out there and we went along with that idea.
SPEAKER_08: Then on the way out, we were, my wife and I were trying to think, what is it that we can tell this great man, the architect of rich clients, what can we say to him that would interest him in our very small case?
SPEAKER_15: In the past, when Frank Lloyd Wright had designed private homes, they had not been for people like Herbert and Catherine Jacobs. Wright had designed gorgeous wide homes with broad roofs and expansive living rooms for wealthy people. His constructions were masterpieces. They were works of art and they were expensive.
SPEAKER_08: So we put it as a sort of challenge. What the country needs is a decent $5,000 house. Can you build one?
SPEAKER_12: In today's money, $5,000 is about $85,000. That's a pretty reasonably priced house in most real estate markets. Mr. Wright told us that we were the first clients that ever asked him to build a low
SPEAKER_08: cost house. He said for 20 years he'd been wanting to build one, but no one ever asked him to.
SPEAKER_12: Now Wright had long wanted to make a more democratic form of housing, even early in his career. He had been playing around with inexpensive methods of building and other structures, and he had a lot of concepts that he had been scheming around urban planning.
SPEAKER_15: But now Wright had the chance to make some of his concepts a reality. He had the willing clients and he had time on his hands. In 1936 he was in a bit of a slump in his career. People couldn't afford fancy big new homes. Again it was the Depression and a number of big projects had been canceled and also Wright had already been practicing for decades and he was slowly getting written off as a has-been.
SPEAKER_12: And then in comes this young, open-minded couple. Wright could tell them his philosophy and teach them how to live well through good architecture. Then he said, do you really want a $5,000 house?
SPEAKER_08: He said most people want a $10,000 house for $5,000. Are you willing to give up the things that you have to give up?
SPEAKER_15: Mr. Wright made a list of the things that the Jacobs would have to do without if they really wanted a $5,000 house.
SPEAKER_08: Tile bathrooms, extra trim finish and things like that, are you willing to give those up? We didn't know anything about it and we said sure, that's okay with us.
SPEAKER_15: Herbert and Catherine Jacobs didn't know it at the time, but that modest little house that Frank Lloyd Wright was to build for them would be the most practical expression of his ideology.
SPEAKER_12: The Jacobs would own the first house in a movement that Wright called Usonia.
SPEAKER_07: The house that Herbert Jacobs built was the first of the Usonian houses. Usonian, a Wright word meaning the United States as it ought to be at its democratic zenith.
SPEAKER_15: Usonia was Frank Lloyd Wright's name for the United States of North America. In Wright's vision, Usonia would be a country full of modest, well-made, beautiful, comfortable little houses that the working class could afford. These Usonian homes would inspire, educate, and Wright believed, create a new culture for all Americans.
SPEAKER_05: I believe now people are going to know what constitutes good architecture and of course good living has to go with it. Good conduct also, good dressing too, because you wouldn't dress in a loud and vulgar way in a quiet and beautiful room. All these good things are dependent more or less one on the other and add up to something that we call culture. It's only by a natural growth that you can attain culture.
SPEAKER_12: Wright believed the way to build a better American culture was not en masse, not in apartment buildings or cookie cutter developments. It was to be catered to the individual.
SPEAKER_05: Culture is not for the crowd. Culture is an individual thing and that's what our forefathers struck when they declared that the individual is sovereign.
SPEAKER_15: Research to Frank Lloyd Wright meant that the masses should be unmasked. They should spread out away from the city. Well the city of course is a thing of the past.
SPEAKER_05: There was a time during the Middle Ages when it was the only source of culture. There was no way of acquiring this thing we call culture except by direct contact.
SPEAKER_12: But for Wright that wasn't true anymore. People were connected to culture through radio and telephones and automobiles. They have transportation, speed, listening, this, which we're using now.
SPEAKER_05: It's no longer essential for people to crowd together anywhere.
SPEAKER_15: That was Frank Lloyd Wright's vision for America and it would start to become reality in 1936 with the Jacobs House, which he called Eusonia One.
SPEAKER_03: Jacobs House was one of the first ones built. This was just a wide open farmland when it was built out here.
SPEAKER_15: This is Bill Martinelli, manager of Eusonia One. It's in a suburban street outside of Madison now lined with little suburban houses. But Eusonia One really stands out, even if you don't know what it is and you're just driving by, because from the street it almost just looks like a beautiful wooden wall. The house turns its back on the road. Well, when you get inside or if you go around back you'll see the whole back of the house
SPEAKER_03: is all glass. It's all open to the back. And he did that intentionally to kind of close it off to the street and then open it up to the back.
SPEAKER_15: As Wright saw it, the point of the house was not to have a big facade to show off to your neighbors with a useless and wasteful patch of lawn in the front and a grand entryway. No. The house should be built for residents, not onlookers.
SPEAKER_12: So from the street you can see that there's no garage. A car is parked under a wooden awning, just a little flat roof with no side walls. This is the carport, a term that Frank Lloyd Wright coined. Well, this is the carport of the house.
SPEAKER_03: This is considered the first named carport. That was a term that Wright came up with.
SPEAKER_12: This was one of the many tiny ways Wright kept costs down. And also the carport was an education in lifestyle. Without a garage, the Jacobs wouldn't have space to store their junk. They'd have to simply minimize their possessions and toss what they didn't need. But the carport isn't purely utilitarian. The woodwork on the carport roof has this lovely geometric pattern.
SPEAKER_15: There's like these wood kind of stripes in the ceiling. Yeah. It's funny when I'd seen, when I'd heard about the carport and like seen pictures of it, I didn't expect it to be so beautiful. And like, it's really nice. That's the thing in this house, the more you look around, the more, more you see, you know,
SPEAKER_03: like with the ceiling here, the carport, you wouldn't expect that. And when you get inside, you'll see the same thing.
SPEAKER_12: Usonia One is full of small, elegant details. Can we go inside?
SPEAKER_15: Sure.
SPEAKER_03: Warm in here. Oh wow. You can see how the sun comes in. It's so red. Every, like the brick and the wood and the...
SPEAKER_03: Your eye kind of gets drawn in.
SPEAKER_12: Usonia One is one floor and inside it's pretty much one room and a loud cat.
SPEAKER_03: The space is all open. No walls between, you know, living room, dining room, kitchen. That was kind of innovative for the time.
SPEAKER_12: The kitchen is an alcove adjacent to the living slash dining space with no door. And it's a very, very tiny area.
SPEAKER_15: This is, this is the kitchen. It's just a little bit wider than the length of my arms. I think about eight foot square, probably.
SPEAKER_03: There's a small hallway with tiny bedrooms, but mostly the one main room is the focus.
SPEAKER_15: That's where you're supposed to eat, relax, read, live all together. Again, Herbert Jacobs. Mr. Wright is an advocate of the open plan and housing that is the removal of the boxes
SPEAKER_08: within boxes sort of thing so that you don't have many partitions. The temptation is to be together much more.
SPEAKER_12: The open plan was pretty novel and it was cost saving to not have many walls. The Usonian house is full of these clever, less expensive solutions like the lights on the ceiling.
SPEAKER_03: So that's just a steel channel with the wires just laying in there and then bare sockets, bare bulbs. So that's considered the first track lighting, another first to the house.
SPEAKER_15: And now you see track lighting everywhere, wherever you see lights or bulbs affixed to a single beam. That's a Usonian invention.
SPEAKER_12: Other innovations Usonian popularized include the use of flat roofs, built in furniture and heated floors. Herbert Jacobs loved those heated floors.
SPEAKER_08: Floor heating now very general, but at that time there were no floor heated residences in this country.
SPEAKER_15: All of these innovations were meant to help the family live well and frugally. They saved money while they lived in the house and they had also saved costs in the construction of the house. But Wright used some other cost saving measures that were kind of cheating. Like he stole some bricks from another building of his that he was constructing nearby.
SPEAKER_12: Well Wright didn't steal the bricks himself. He sent a bunch of his apprentices over to Racine, Wisconsin, where his design for the Johnson Wax building was under construction. He told the apprentices to grab as many bricks as they could and bring them back to Madison.
SPEAKER_03: If you're familiar with the Johnson Wax building, the corners are curved so you can see some of these bricks are convex and some are concave. Well those would have been like corner bricks.
SPEAKER_12: Another way Wright kept costs down was by taking a huge pay cut himself.
SPEAKER_08: Bill I paid was for $5,500 which included Mr. Wright's fee of $450.
SPEAKER_12: By hook or by crook, Wright did it. He met his challenge of building a beautiful house that Herbert and Catherine could afford.
SPEAKER_15: I mean, it wasn't perfect. It was a total adjustment for the family. And the house had problems with rain drainage and little things were missing. Like initially Wright forgot to put screens in the windows.
SPEAKER_12: Which were the kinds of complaints Wright got a lot. He mostly focused on aesthetics and principles of building rather than practicalities.
SPEAKER_15: And ultimately the Jacobs house was small. After Herbert and Catherine had two more children, they couldn't fit into the house anymore. And so after six years of living in Usonia I, the Jacobs family would move off to the countryside, where Frank Lloyd Wright would design them a second Usonian house. But Herbert Jacobs thought of their first home very fondly. Living in that house was fantastically wonderful.
SPEAKER_08: I think it would be nice if a lot more families had that same sort of thing happen to them.
SPEAKER_12: Mr. Wright thought so too.
SPEAKER_03: He thought everybody should live in a house designed by him and you know, the dishes and clothes designed by him and all the furniture.
SPEAKER_15: He did design a lot of his furniture. And in at least one case he did design a dress for the wife of a client. This was all about changing culture. One home at a time.
SPEAKER_12: Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to redesign America. And by that token, Americans. Good design he thought would make a kinder, more beautiful, more enlightened country.
SPEAKER_07: Nowadays Usonian houses may be seen the country wide. You don't need a guidebook. By 1939 Wright had built Usonian homes all over the country, including houses in Alabama,
SPEAKER_12: California, Illinois, Michigan, and Virginia. But he wanted to build more.
SPEAKER_15: He wanted to have a central factory that made prefabricated Usonian parts modifiable for each client depending on their needs for space and site conditions. And originally the whole idea was all these walls would be manufactured in a factory.
SPEAKER_03: That never really happened. This was all site built.
SPEAKER_15: Frank Lloyd Wright's factory for Usonian homes never came to pass. And it became increasingly clear to Wright that the $5,000 price tag for Usonian homes just wasn't feasible after the Depression.
SPEAKER_12: Also Wright's career picked up shortly after Usonian won. He started getting bigger commissions. The ones we all know him for, like Falling Water.
SPEAKER_07: Among the Wright houses none has been more widely publicized than the Pennsylvania home of Edgar Kaufman, which straddles a waterfall.
SPEAKER_15: Wright worked on Usonian homes up until near the very end of his life. But it was a group of his apprentices that would carry on his vision by building an entire community of Usonian houses.
SPEAKER_10: Turn right onto Usonian Road.
SPEAKER_12: Up next after the break, a trip to Usonian, New York to see what became of Frank Lloyd Wright's vision and how these little houses have affected the ways we live. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes. And they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the GEOM sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? When I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it, it just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_12: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_05: The future of architecture is the future of the human race. The two are one. If humanity has a future, it is architecture.
SPEAKER_12: That is architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who never shied away from making grand statements about architecture. Or himself.
SPEAKER_05: I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world, and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant.
SPEAKER_12: I believe that the buildings we live in affect the kinds of people we become, the tastes we have, and the comforts we seek. And he said that he could rebuild the entire culture of the United States. He claimed that he could change the nation by changing its architecture.
SPEAKER_05: I did say that, and it's true. It's amazing what I could do for this country.
SPEAKER_15: And a big part of his plan, his philosophy, his proposed building system, was called Eustonia.
SPEAKER_12: Here again is Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_15: Wright's ideas about living in harmony with nature, using organic materials in a modern way, and creating affordable, democratic housing had inspired a new generation of architects. So much so that they would go on to found an entire community based on Wrightian principles. Turn right onto Eustonia Road.
SPEAKER_12: Nestled in leafy hills near Pleasantville, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan, is a little village called Eustonia. All the homes have low, flat roofs. They're tucked away into the trees, so you can hardly see them on lush summer days. It almost looks like some sort of Star Wars planet, fit for suburban Ewoks. There's no big welcome sign, no gift shop or leaflet. But in the middle of the community, there is a plaque.
SPEAKER_15: Eustonia Homes, a cooperative was founded in 1944 by idealistic young families to pursue the dream of owning a modern, affordable home in the country following World War II.
SPEAKER_12: The cooperative was started by a couple of Wright disciples who had studied at Frank Lloyd Wright's school, Taliesin, most notably a man named David Henkin. And although Wright would be involved with the project, it was Henkin who guided it, as the plaque says.
SPEAKER_15: This land was acquired in December 1946, and in April 1947, Frank Lloyd Wright, the supervising architect, sent the unique site plan.
SPEAKER_12: The site plan put 40-some houses on circular properties without fences, so that the property boundaries would flow into each other. Homes wouldn't be on little square plots with white picket fences.
SPEAKER_15: David Henkin and his family looked for other similarly-minded people who could come and join their community and invest in it. And among those idealistic young people was Roland Risley. He and his wife had just been married in 1950.
SPEAKER_17: We had no money. We had no children. We were both only children. We wanted to plant our roots and start a family. And we heard from a friend that there's a community in northern Westchester that's building affordable homes supervised by Frank Lloyd Wright.
SPEAKER_15: This building project had a communal mortgage. They would pay for the houses together on land they all owned. It's a cooperative.
SPEAKER_17: Let's take a look. Curious. And we came up here, and there were already 10 or 11 homes that were nearing completion or beginning to be occupied. We were welcomed with open arms, and the enthusiasm of the people who were here and talking about their project was infectious. And we were hooked. We decided that we'll join the community.
SPEAKER_12: But it wasn't all a big romantic adventure.
SPEAKER_17: It was a real risk. First of all, first was radical. These days it's called mid-century modern. But the architecture then was radical.
SPEAKER_15: Meaning these homes were so strange-looking to the larger world that the people who chose to live in them were seen as radical. And in some ways they were. Some of them were lefty Jews from the Bronx with socialist ideals about land ownership.
SPEAKER_17: The true cooperative that we were was radical.
SPEAKER_15: The true cooperative in the sense that no one owned their house?
SPEAKER_12: Yes. Also, this was a financial risk, since the houses were not as cheap as they were supposed to be.
SPEAKER_17: The supposed $5,000 cost, well, it turned out it was not a realistic number.
SPEAKER_15: During and after World War II, materials and labor became more expensive. And the building of Usonian homes involved special skills and custom fixtures. And the houses ended up being double or triple their price estimates. The Risley's house was over 20 grand. But the members of Usonian would not be deterred. We were determined to go forward with this.
SPEAKER_17: We were all very optimistic. People would come occasionally to see these houses under construction. You gotta come and see Insania.
SPEAKER_12: When Roland and his wife signed up for the community, they thought they'd work with one of the Taliesin graduates to design their house, not the master himself.
SPEAKER_17: We didn't dream of approaching Frank Lloyd Wright. I mean, really. Who would have thought of such a thing?
SPEAKER_15: But Frank Lloyd Wright did, in fact, want to design Roland's house. They met up in New York, and they exchanged letters and ideas about the plans, and Roland went out to see Wright at Taliesin. And he was a real person.
SPEAKER_17: You could talk to him. You could exchange a joke. I mean, people don't see him that way. But there it was.
SPEAKER_15: Roland was 26. Wright was 83. He said, come on, Roland, sit down.
SPEAKER_17: You're my client. I'm your architect. I'll redesign your house as many times as I have to until I've satisfied all of your needs. You have to speak up. If you don't, you'll take what you get.
SPEAKER_12: Roland's house would be one of three in Usonian, New York, that Frank Lloyd Wright designed himself. About five years after the Risleys moved in, when Roland and his wife had kids, Frank Lloyd Wright added an extension to their house.
SPEAKER_15: In fact, Roland is the last living owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home built specially for him. And he still lives in it.
SPEAKER_17: I came to realize after some years living here that there had not been a day in my life when I didn't see something beautiful. Even the terrible days that occur in every life.
SPEAKER_15: The house is completely Usonian, with a simple carport and sumptuous wooden walls that almost glow and one big main room and a tiny kitchen. It almost feels like you're outside because it has these big glass windows with long roof overhangs to draw the eye out towards the thick forest of trees just outside.
SPEAKER_17: I think that it has had an effect on me in many ways. The neuroscientists say that that kind of sense reduces stress and is good for your emotional health. And maybe good for physical health, too. I'm 92 years old. I'm in pretty good shape for 92. And I attribute that partly. I mean, who knows? I'd like to attribute that to experience beauty around me for most of my life, which is quite remarkable.
SPEAKER_12: As Roland sees it, Frank Lloyd Wright's idea that better architecture could create a better way of life has been entirely true. We could depend on each other if there was a problem or a need.
SPEAKER_17: The kids all knew all the adults by their first name. Used to say that children growing up here had 50 aunts and uncles in Usonian.
SPEAKER_12: For the first 40 years of Usonian, New York, only 12 of the 48 houses changed hands.
SPEAKER_17: Six of those to next generation members of the community. There were only two divorces. I used to joke they couldn't decide who'd get the house.
SPEAKER_15: But life started to move at different paces for people living in Usonian. Suddenly they weren't all new young families. They were all groups of people in different phases with different needs.
SPEAKER_12: And when it was time for homes to change hands, prospective buyers were thrown off by the cooperative nature of the village. In the first decades of Usonian, members didn't own their homes.
SPEAKER_17: We decided very reluctantly to grant title to the individual home sites to each member while retaining all of our common land as a cooperative. And that made a big difference. Suddenly people were more willing to look at that.
SPEAKER_12: But if you're not Roland Risley and your house wasn't custom built for you by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, the Usonian houses can be a bit of an adjustment. Today, most of the homes in Usonian, New York have been expanded.
SPEAKER_15: Many and all new additions have been built in a Usonian style using local materials, flat roofs, big glass windows, and righty insensibilities. They have to be built that way.
SPEAKER_13: While the outsides are not landmarked, they are governed by the board of Usonian. The insides are not at all.
SPEAKER_15: This is Evan Kingsley. He's one of the newcomers to Usonian. Relatively. He's been there since 2003.
SPEAKER_13: But I think for the most part, those of us who have chosen to move here are really sensitive to the aesthetic of the interior.
SPEAKER_15: But there's one specific part of the interior that has changed in a lot of the Usonian homes.
SPEAKER_13: We've completely redone the kitchen.
SPEAKER_12: As was the case in most Usonian homes, the kitchen in Evan's home was this little alcove. Very efficient and very, very tiny.
SPEAKER_15: Wright never realized that the whole family might actually want to hang out in the kitchen. Nowadays it's as much a place to gather as the living room or the dining room. Evan has added new tiling and appliances and expanded his kitchen, but not by much. Well, we bumped that wall out by taking some closet space away and we gained, I don't know,
SPEAKER_13: maybe 10 inches there. That's all that we gained in doing that.
SPEAKER_12: There are a smattering of Usonian homes throughout the United States, some designed by Wright and some by his apprentices, but all following the same basic principles. And like Evan Kingsley's home, many of these other Usonian houses are hard to modify because they're often governed by boards who are trying to preserve them as historic pieces of architecture. And also the owners themselves want to make sure they keep within the principles of the house.
SPEAKER_16: You have X number of cabinets. You don't have cabinets up at the top. They weren't put there. And if you could add them, you would violate the principles. There's no Frank Lloyd Wright police who come around and look and see if you changed the
SPEAKER_16: inside. That's what we joke about, but there isn't.
SPEAKER_15: That's Betty and John Moore. They live in Wisconsin in the house called Jacobs 2. It's the second Usonian house that Wright designed for that journalist Herbert Jacobs.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Well, you want to make sure that you can adapt to the house because it's not going to adapt to you.
SPEAKER_16: You aren't going to change it much.
SPEAKER_12: Like most Usonian homes, Jacobs 2 had a carport, big windows, an open plan, and concrete floors with a heating system in it.
SPEAKER_09: The floor is nice and cool now. But in the winter you come downstairs with bare feet and it's nice and warm.
SPEAKER_15: I mostly wanted to play that clip because I love how Betty and John actually complete each other's sentences.
SPEAKER_12: Betty and John's house needed a lot of attention, which is why it was on the market for four and a half years before they bought it.
SPEAKER_16: Oh, everybody wanted to look at it. It was a curiosity, but nobody wanted to live here.
SPEAKER_02: They're really not for everyone. The reason they sit on the market sometimes for so long is because people consider them a difficult living.
SPEAKER_12: That's John Eifler, an architect in Chicago who has restored a number of right houses, including Usonian 1.
SPEAKER_02: In order to preserve them, you sometimes have to modify them in order to make them more livable.
SPEAKER_12: But even experts like Eifler have a tough time keeping track of how many Usonian homes exist.
SPEAKER_15: So how many are there? I don't know. I have no idea. I've heard numbers ranging from 27 to 140. It all depends on your definition of what an authentic Usonian house is. You could consider Usonian a period in Frank Lloyd Wright's life, a period in American architectural history, which would include the houses by the apprentices, or just a general architectural style. Depending on your definition, the number of Usonian houses continues to grow. In 2013, a new Usonian house was built on the campus of Florida Southern College. It was a design of Wright's from 1939, but constructed 74 years later, all according to Wright's plans and principles.
SPEAKER_12: Usonian certainly never came to pass in the way that Frank Lloyd Wright originally envisioned, with every American living in an affordable custom home. And in fact, elements of the Usonian home have evolved into something else entirely.
SPEAKER_15: So it is kind of true that the, that Usonian directly influenced the development of the ranch home?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, without a doubt. Yes, I think so.
SPEAKER_15: Yes. Yes. Ranch style houses are all over the country in nearly every suburb. They are horizontal, close to the ground, one story. They have an open floor plan with few walls. So it's not hard to see the similarities to Usonian. Although ranch homes are generally less inspired. They don't have the elegant details and they're made with standard materials.
SPEAKER_12: Wright might not have been pleased the concepts of Usonian got absorbed into. Essentially the epitome of cookie cutter suburban housing, but at least these houses really were affordable for the middle class. Unlike all the Usonian houses after Usonian won. After World War II, the American suburbs were full of ranch homes.
SPEAKER_02: There weren't that many variations after the war. And the suburban ranch home was pretty much it. I mean that, unless you were living in some humongous mansion or something, everyone was living in ranch homes in suburbia. It was a very prevalent form of housing.
SPEAKER_12: Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 at age 89, three years after finishing Roland Risley's house in New York.
SPEAKER_15: He died having created an American style for home building. A way in which natural wood, bricks, and masonry are used in a simple, modifiable way. A way that is cozy, stylish, organic, and honest. His influence is there where you see lots of wood and stone, and where you see big open floor plans. Where homes are oriented to the sun, or away from the street. Where you see a structure built into a hill instead of on top of it. Connected and responding to the landscape.
SPEAKER_12: And yes, whether he would have liked it or not, Frank Lloyd Wright's influence can be found in ranch homes in the suburbs and in the details of all kinds of homes. All around us, in ways Wright never imagined. bleary005's Walk Of Tucson,Aiming For hospitality. Senior Editor, Delaney Hall, Sharife Yousif, Emmitt Fitzgerald, Taryn Masa, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are Project 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio-topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you wanna drool over some Musonia homes, look no further than 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_01: If you get a friend a go-to order for McDonald's for free using points in the McDonald's app, you don't have to tell them you got it for free. Earn free food with the McDonald's app. And participating McDonald's.
SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.
SPEAKER_11: Nissan has a car for everyone. Every driver who wants more. Whatever your more is, more fun, more freedom, more action. From sports cars, sedans, and EVs, to pickups and crossovers. With Nissan's diverse lineup, anyone can find something to fit their more. Get more revs in their sports cars, more guts with all-wheel drive, and more than enough options to fit your driving style. Nissan can take you where you wanna go. Learn more at NissanUSA.com.
