Exhibition Catalog - Lawrence Technological University

21
furniture for the Afflecks to match their house. 50 The
pieces were simple and horizontally oriented, fitting
with the house’s design theme. For the living room,
Wright designed a dining table, end tables, and a set
of wooden chairs with upholstered backs and seats;
each chair could be used individually or combined
with others to form a sofa. Other chairs for the house
consisted of a Y-shaped plywood base supporting
an L-shaped seat and back. All of the chairs and
tables were unadorned, emphasizing the nature of
their materials (cypress plywood) to match the rest
of the house.
There is evidence that the Afflecks were not entirely
pleased with their Wright-designed furniture. Ruth
Adler Schnee, a pioneer of mid-century modernist
furniture and interior designs in Michigan who worked
with Minoru Yamasaki and Buckminster Fuller, among
others, recalled being hired by the Afflecks to provide
alternatives. According to Schnee, “the Afflecks
asked me to help them because Frank Lloyd Wright
had designed furniture for them, built into the house.
It was so uncomfortable that they wanted me to
see if I could improve on that.” 51 Historical evidence
confirms that the family owned many pieces of non-
Wright furniture.
In late summer/early fall 1942, Wright designed special
wool rugs for the living room and loggia and Gregor
hired a weaver to fabricate them. They featured a
series of multi-colored diagonals against a backdrop
of vertical lines. But as envisioned, the rugs’ thickness
was problematic since the French doors leading out
to the terrace reached down to within millimeters of
the floor. In an exchange of correspondence in late
1942, Wright suggested trimming the bottom of the
doors to gain the necessary clearance. Photographs
from that time show a more practical solution – the
rugs are moved away from the doors.
At approximately the same time Affleck requested a
“plywood mural” for the loggia. 52 It may be that the
proposal was aimed at Wright’s personal secretary,
Eugene Masselink, a talented artist who designed a
number of plywood screens and murals for Wright
houses in the 1950s. Masselink’s work typically included
dramatic vertical slashes, circles, and triangles in
bright colors; some of these abstract art pieces had
the secondary effect of emphasizing the diagonal
axes that placed such an important role in Wright’s
planning at the Affleck house and elsewhere. The
nature of that item is unclear, and the house shows
no signs of a mural of any type being installed. 53
After construction finished and the family moved
in, Gregor Affleck tabulated the construction costs,
and estimated the total expenditure at approximately
$19,000. This was extremely expensive for the
time, since the average American house cost about
Eugene Masselink Mural, at Grand Rapids Art Museum
http://www.artmuseumgr.org/uploads/assets/masselinkweb.png