Exhibition Catalog - Lawrence Technological University

cross-ventilation. Combined with sensitive siting and
abundant natural growth around the houses, these
features allowed Usonian occupants to keep comfortable
even on the hottest summer days.
7
Initial Contact
How the Afflecks came to desire a Frank Lloyd Wright
home is open to speculation. The couple visited
Taliesin as early as 1924, according to Gregor’s recollections,
and both he and Elizabeth were impressed.
But it was not until sometime in the late 1930s that
Gregor and Elizabeth Affleck apparently encountered
some drawings or photographs of Wright’s Fallingwater
house in Pennsylvania, and were intrigued.
They proposed to contact Wright to see if he would
design a house for them. In September 1939, they
made another trip to Taliesin.
The Afflecks were the perfect kind of clients for Wright.
He particularly attracted younger and progressively
minded couples who had strong opinions, an interest
in nature, and a disdain for the more formalized living
conditions of earlier generations. 16 Gregor seems to
have been the driving force behind the Afflecks’ decision.
Their daughter, Mary Ann, later described her
father as a “rather eccentric” man who wanted an
“unusual home,” while her mother was remembered
as having “more conventional tastes.” 17 In contrast
to Gregor’s enthusiasm over the possibility of owning
a Wright-designed home, evidence indicates Elizabeth
was hesitant. “We may have some diffuculty
[sic] with Mrs. Affleck but so far as I am concerned,”
Gregor told Wright, “you can be as inventive as you
have a mind to be.” 18
During the Taliesin visit in 1939, Wright told the Afflecks
to begin by buying some property in the country –
“one or two acres of land, something with a little
character to it, something nobody else can do anything
with,” and preferably near some water. 19 The
Afflecks then searched for almost a year before finding
what they thought was the perfect place in the
“wilds” of Bloomfield Hills, just north of Birmingham
and the famous Cranbrook properties and about
twenty miles northwest of downtown Detroit. The site
was just over two acres in size and heavily-wooded,
with a small slope running down to a ravine containing
a pond between the house and Woodward
Avenue, the extension of Detroit’s main thoroughfare
that connected the city with Pontiac. The land
dropped approximately twenty-five feet from the
hillside where the house would be built to the water
below. Gregor later described the lot as “a little valley
completely covered with tall trees and with no
level land at all.” 20
Photograph by Harvey Croze
Photograph by Anon.
On May 30, 1940, Gregor sent a letter to Wright officially
asking him to design their home. Wright’s response
to Affleck’s initial photographs and sketches