Exhibition Catalog - Lawrence Technological University

Pursuant to his usual method, Wright planned the
house on a grid. The four-foot-square modules used
to arrange the spaces and visible in plan drawings
are inscribed in the concrete floor. What cannot immediately
be seen is that the module also organized
the house vertically. Wright used grids to impart order
on a house in plan and elevation and to assure that
the parts bore a relationship to each other – in this
case, a proportional relationship governed by the
module.
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Photograph by Balthazar Korab
The Pew House, Wisconsin. Photograph from http://farm4.
static.fl ickr.com/3589/3602796344_44656dc9c9.jpg
The Affleck house was to be a special type of Usonian
with two stories and a terrace; in fact, it belonged
to a family of houses that Wright originated in 1932
with the first (and unbuilt) scheme for the Malcolm
Willey house in Minneapolis. In that important design
Wright created a floor plan with a second-floor living
room intended to take advantage of views of
the surrounding landscape. Wright imagined a balcony
extending from the living room, bounded by a
parapet wall made of overlapping wooden boards.
While not a Usonian house in the true sense, the first
Willey house project introduced many of the core
concepts adapted to later houses.
In 1938, the year before the Afflecks’ request, Wright
embarked on a series of designs for Usonians with
balconies attached to elevated living rooms. One
was a house for John and Ruth Pew near Madison,
Wisconsin. The Pews owned a hillside lot on the shore
of Lake Mendota very similar to the one purchased
by the Afflecks in Bloomfield Hills. Wright decided to
take advantage of the landscape and the view and
resurrected the balcony from the first Willey scheme,
complete with lapped board parapet walls. The
Pew house showed Wright’s propensity for using the
ground to serve as the catalyst for a building’s design.
Wright described his approach in a book published
just two years before meeting the Afflecks:
With the purpose or motive of the building we are to
build well in mind, as of course it must be, and proceeding
from generals to particulars, as “from-withinoutward”
must do, what consideration comes first?
The ground, doesn’t it? The nature of the site, of the
soil and of the climate comes first. Next, what materials
are available in the circumstances…?
We start with the ground…
Why should the building try to belong to the ground
instead of being content with some box-like fixture
perched upon the rock or stuck into the soil, where it
stands out as mere artifice…?
The answer is found in the deal stated in the abstract
dictum, “Form and function are one.” We must begin
upon our structure with that.