A Tour of a Utopian Home Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Pre…

Amer­i­can is a tricky word. It can refer to every­one and every­thing of or per­tain­ing to all the coun­tries of North Amer­i­ca — and poten­tial­ly South Amer­i­ca as well — but it’s com­mon­ly used with spe­cif­ic regard to the Unit­ed States. For Frank Lloyd Wright, lin­guis­tic as well as archi­tec­tur­al per­fec­tion­ist, this was an unten­able state of affairs. To his mind, the newest civ­i­liza­tion of the New World, a vast land that offered man the rare chance to remake him­self, need­ed an adjec­tive all its own. And so, repur­pos­ing a demonym pro­posed by geo­g­ra­ph­er James Duff Law in the nine­teen-hun­dreds, Wright began to refer to his not just archi­tec­tur­al but also broad­ly cul­tur­al project as Uson­ian.

Wright com­plet­ed the first of his so-called “Uson­ian hous­es,” the Her­bert and Kather­ine Jacobs House in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, in the mid­dle of the Great Depres­sion. Chal­lenged to “cre­ate a decent home for $5,000,” says the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion’s web site, the archi­tect seized the chance to real­ize “a new afford­able archi­tec­ture that freed itself from Euro­pean con­ven­tions and respond­ed to the Amer­i­can land­scape.”

This first Uson­ian house and its 60 or so suc­ces­sors “relat­ed direct­ly to the earth, unim­ped­ed by a foun­da­tion, front porch, pro­trud­ing chim­ney, or dis­tract­ing shrub­bery. Glass cur­tain walls and nat­ur­al mate­ri­als like wood, stone and brick fur­ther tied the house to its envi­ron­ment.” In Pleas­antville, New York, there even exists a Uso­nia His­toric Dis­trict, three of whose 47 homes were designed by Wright him­self.

The BBC Glob­al video at the top of the post offers a tour of one of the Uso­nia His­toric Dis­tric­t’s hous­es led by the sole sur­viv­ing orig­i­nal own­er, the 100-year-old Roland Reis­ley. The Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above fea­tures Reis­ley’s home as well as the Bertha and Sol Fried­man House, which Wright dubbed Toy­hill. Both have been kept as adher­ent as pos­si­ble to the vision that inspired them, and that was meant to inspire a renais­sance in Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion. The Uson­ian homes may have fall­en short of Wright’s Utopi­an hopes, but they did have a cer­tain influ­ence on post­war sub­urb-builders, and have much enriched the lives of their more appre­cia­tive inhab­i­tants. The cen­te­nar­i­an Reis­ley cred­its his star­tling youth­ful­ness to the man-made and nat­ur­al beau­ty of his domes­tic sur­round­ings — but then, this last of the Uso­ni­ans also hap­pens to be one of the rare clients who could get along with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archi­tec­ture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed Amer­i­ca

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.