University Place

Frank Lloyd Wright's American System-Built Homes

– Tonight, we welcome Mike Lilek. Mike is a president of Shining Brow LLC, a software development company, creating solutions for field service organizations, and they’re based here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mike is also recognized as the leading scholar on Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Built Homes. He’s currently the curator of the Burnham Block, six Wright-designed American System-Built Homes on Burnham Street in Milwaukee. Mike has supervised the restoration of two of these, which I don’t know if any of you have ever been involved in a house restoration, but it is a lot of work. And is currently working on the first monograph about the project. Please join me in welcoming Mike Lilek. (audience applauds)

– I’d like to ask what sites have you visited? And there’s so many of you, so maybe we’ll just take a couple of them. This is my son visiting Monona Terrace, that is Bucky Lloyd Wright, he’s one of the Bucky on Parade series, if you go to Madison this summer you’ll see them all over town, they’re very cool, but that’s Bucky Lloyd Wright. Maybe 10 people just yell out what sites have you visited?

– [Audience Member] Dana House. – Fallingwater. – Taliesin. – Taliesin, Fallingwater, Taliesin West. – Kentuck Knob. -Kentuck Knob in Pennsylvania. Fallingwater. What? – Polymath Park. – Polymath Park, right. – Johnson Wax.

– Johnson Wax, Zimmerman House. Okay, great, thank you. That, we’ll have to leave it there. This happened to me this morning. (audience laughs) I asked my wife, would you believe that I’d be speaking at the Wright Lecture Series at the Wade House tonight. In your wildest dreams, would you ever have thought of that? And she kind of, she wasn’t sure what to say, but she said, “Oh, I’m sorry honey you’re not in my wildest dreams.” (audience laughs) So I guess the answer’s no. Alright, who’s this character?
– Steve Jobs.

– Steven Jobs. This is a great audience. Steven Jobs, this is a technology lecture, right? (audience laughs) ‘Cause, okay, never mind. Steven Jobs, 1997, he had left Apple Computer. He came back to Apple Computer. It was probably the most recognizable brand on the planet. It sold the best technology. How many people have an Apple something in their pocket right now? Or with them or at home? But it had a problem, it wasn’t financially viable. And so Steven Jobs had to come up with a way of bringing this company back to life. He had left the company for a while, he came back. And he went to his ad agency, and they talked about what could you do to bring this company back. And they settled on the idea that they’re not about making boxes, they’re not about creating a thing that has a fast hard drive and a lot of memory in it, and we’re not going to talk about the size of our computer, size of our hard drive, the size of our processor. Instead, we’re going to talk about what people do with these machines and what they can create. And he came up with an ad campaign called Think Different. And Think Different featured people who’d never been in an advertisement before for the most part. People like Pablo Picasso, Jim Henson of the Muppets, Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, and then at the end just before the end, he got to Frank Lloyd Wright. And it was his way, I think, of saying that Frank Lloyd Wright was a person who thought differently about problems, and thought about things in a different way. Frank Lloyd Wright was not about selling boxes or houses, he was about creating experiences, and he was really about creating a total environment that people could live in. He wanted to shelter his clients in a complete and total environment that would bring them closer to nature, that would give them serenity at the end of a busy day, and that would give them a place to gather their family together.

Those were kind of three key principles for Frank Lloyd Wright. So Steven Jobs I think was certainly recognizing that, but I think he points to what Frank Lloyd Wright was all about. And we’re going to keep moving. So tonight I’m going to talk not about technology, but about 10 things that you should know about Frank Lloyd Wright’s American System-Built Homes. I’ve used 10 because if I’m boring, you at least know how much longer you have to listen to me. (audience laughs) So, number one, Frank Lloyd Wright is a revolutionary. He figured out, more than anything, how to envision things that didn’t exist. So let’s take a little bit of a tour of some Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. And I’ll caution you, I’m going to read a little bit in the beginning and then it’s going to go freewheeling from there. This is the Herman Winslow House, and to think about Frank Lloyd Wright as somebody who thought differently, Winslow was so ridiculed by his neighbors, this is Frank Lloyd Wright’s first prairie house, Winslow was so ridiculed by his neighbors that he had to take a different train than the one that left from near his house to get into his office in the city because he was being laughed at and ridiculed for living in this goofy house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s first major commission, the Winslow House. 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright was 26 years old and he left the architectural firm of Adler & Sullivan in Chicago to begin what would be a revolutionary career in architecture. He envisioned a new architectural grammar and applied enormous creativity and imagination to building beautiful buildings that would shelter his clients. In short, going back to Steven Jobs, he would think differently. So a couple of the homes, you have Winslow, you have the Heurtley House in Oak Park, Illinois. You have the Susan Lawrence House in Springfield, Illinois. Who’s been there? Some of you. And you know that Frank Lloyd Wright not only designed the house and the furnishings but what else?
– [Audience] Her clothing.

– Her clothing. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a dress for Ms. Lawrence because he was creating a complete environment, sort of out there. You have the Frederick C. Bogk House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Avery Coonley House, River Forest, Illinois. Darwin Martin House Complex in Buffalo, New York. In short, Frank Lloyd Wright designed many houses, he had designed 130 houses before he got to the American System-Built Homes project, and he had designed most of those houses for people that could afford just about anything, people with really deep pockets, people who money was not really an issue or an object. Going back a little further in time, and, in fact, starting with the first speech that Frank Lloyd Wright gave in 1894, which was entitled The Architect and the Machine, which was given at the University Guild in Evanston, Illinois. Frank Lloyd Wright would introduce ideas that he would argue for the rest of his life. The speech was expanded and edited and rewritten many times, it was first published in an article in a periodical called “Art in the Home” in 1898. And finally, eventually distilled almost 60 years later in his book titled “The Natural House,” which was published in 1954.

If you want to learn about Frank Lloyd Wright deeply and you want to understand his principles, that’s the book to get more than anything else. Very simple, very easy read, The Natural House. You can still find it in used book stores and Ebay and et cetera. But in 1898, in this speech he would say, “I should like to give you a set of golden rules for house building. First, the house should appear to be part of the site. It should be simple, containing as few rooms as will meet the conditions under which you live.” And right there is a good time to consider improvement in that former habit of living in the interest of simplicity. Frank Lloyd Wright would go on to say, “There’s nothing like a good, easy, home-like plan to influence you in these very things and take the starch out of the stiff collar of your everyday life.” Wright would go on to say, “The better houses of today are those with a living room and several other rooms in one, with a large fireplace or sunny exposure. Beside this is a reasonable hallway and a small reception room. Proportional is the great thing in this fundamental work. It means that it should contain harmonious relationships between the various rooms that all may contribute to easy utility and quiet beauty. And then make the kitchen fit to live in.”

Now, a kitchen, if you would think back 102 years ago was often a small room, dimly lit or with small windows in the back of the house, that maybe a hired person or somebody who’s taking care of the house would occupy, but it was not a central part of the house, and Frank Lloyd Wright would advocate that the kitchen should be a central part of the house, a living space like all the others. Wright would continue with the following words that would become his lifelong mission statement, “Go to nature, thou builder of houses, and consider her ways, let your home appear to grow easily out of its site. Shape it to sympathize with its surroundings, and then go to the woods for your color scheme and not the ribbon counter at Marshall Field’s.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s creativity was influenced by his response to the world around him, certainly the changing family. This photograph is from the American System-Built Homes model B1 in circa 1917. I’m introducing to you the Chadwick Family, they were the first to live and occupy in the house. But going back to the changing family, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright notes that, “After 1900, the square footage of new homes was drastically reduced to compensate for the increased expenses of plumbing, heating, and other technological improvements. By 1910, it was rare to have a single-purpose room such as libraries, music rooms, pantries, sewing rooms, spare bedrooms, which would have comprised the typical Victorian home. Changes in the middle-class house signaled new patterns in life, and the average number of children had also decreased to 3 1/2 by 1900, and many middle-class families had only two children.”

Magazines like the House Beautiful and Ladies Home Journal had regular features on smaller homes, promoting a sense of coziness, rather than asceticism. Wright’s designs would be published three times in the Ladies Home Journal between 1901 and 1907 alongside other arts and crafts style homes of the period. So how many of you have heard of the smaller, tiny house movement? So they had one set up last night, we were at the state fair last night, and my son was attracted to it. Of course, he’s just a student in college right now, but everyone wants to go and see the tiny house and line up for it. In addition, while Wright was searching for simplicity and serenity in his homes, the story of his own life couldn’t be more opposite. His personal life was almost complete and total chaos. By 1903 he had designed a home for clients Edward and Mamah Cheney in Oak Park, Illinois. It was this commission that precipitated the famous love affair between Wright and Mamah that have the two leaving their respective families and Wright’s architectural practice to travel to Europe in 1909.

Wright worked on his celebrated Wasmuth portfolio while Mamah took a teaching position and visited with the celebrated feminist and intellectual Ellen Key. That’s Mamah. Mamah was highly educated, a professional woman who became fully engaged in Key’s teachings. Upon her return to the United States, she would become the official Swedish to English translator of Key’s work, hoping to bring her radical, at least for the times, feminist teaching to an American audience. This is Ellen Key. Wright himself would participate in the translation of the texts, among many other things, Key called for reworking the family institution based on equality of the sexes. And Wright returned from Europe ahead of Mamah and turned himself to the task of building a new home for the two of them in Spring Green, Wisconsin. He named the home Taliesin. And it’s speculation to an extent, but I feel that Wright’s interlude with radical feminism would’ve had a profound effect on his housing designs from 1910 forward. Taliesin itself is a free-flowing and very informal building, and in many ways not seen in his earlier prairie homes. Taliesin marks a clear departure to the future. And two more interior photographs from original– Actually, I think these photographs might be in the photo album in the museum next door. So women in the changing family had catalytic roles in the evolution of the American System-Built Home designs. So that’s actually one of the Chadwick family’s cranking the Model T in front of our American System-Built Homes on Burnham in Milwaukee, circa 1917. It was also a response to what was going on in Europe, this is the Palace of Fine Arts in St. Louis, there was a world’s fair, actually it was called the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition where Wright would have experienced things like secessionist chairs.

Here we have a Milwaukee, and just an incredible scholar, I’m sorry to say he’s passed away, Pieter Godfrey helping us in the living room of the American System-Built Homes in Milwaukee trying to understand the furniture that Wright had designed and is bringing Austrian and German furniture in to use as an example. This is a drawing that Frank Lloyd Wright did and you see the chair at the end of the table. And there you see it executed, on the left side it’s sitting in the living room in the American System-Built Home model B1 on Burnham Street. Wright would have had a lot of influences from this world’s fair. Here you have the program for the 1904 World’s Fair, You’ll notice the typography in the upper left-hand corner. You’ll notice the layout of the room. He would’ve been exposed to Ernst Wasmuth, who he would go and do the Wasmuth portfolio with in 1909. There are other people that are doing typography and photography, Wright was so interested in this that he would pay for some of his draftsmen to go and see the world fair. He actually paid for their train fare to go from Chicago to St. Louis. And notice the typography of the letterhead of these American System-Built Homes, an example of which is in the middle of the page, compare that to the program for the 1904 World Fair and you’ll see that Wright was absorbing a fair amount of what he saw from the Germans and the Austrians of the time. He was also very much influenced by the Japanese print. He visited Japan as early as 1905 and found the culture, what he would say as a very human culture, it was a civilization that he thought of almost entirely as a work of art.

So the people themselves were almost a part of the artwork, if you will, or the tableau of Japan. He understood the connection that Japanese made between nature and architecture, and he understood the simplification of their art, and the elimination of the insignificant. Frank Lloyd Wright was a noted scholar in the Japanese print and published a book in 1912 called “The Japanese Print,” which Wright would then go on to say would help him in understanding simplicity and unity and a symmetry in his own design. He felt that the two-dimensional art form of the Japanese print was able to make a significant contribution to his own learning and he would say, “If the Japanese prints were deducted from my education, I don’t know what direction the whole might have taken.” Wright traveled to Japan several times, and in 1913, so just two years before the American System-Built Homes were begun, he would leave the United States with a $25,000 bankroll. So imagine that, 1913, taking $25,000 with you. This was from the William and John Spaulding brothers of Boston, and they were bankrolling Wright’s purchase of Japanese prints on their behalf. So it’s somewhat interesting to the American System-Built Homes in that Wright was such a major art dealer that he actually made more money buying and selling Japanese prints than he did on the commission for the Imperial Hotel in Japan, and I think that most of the money that came to do the American System-Built Homes in Burnham was really payrolled, bankrolled, if you will, by selling Japanese prints. Frank Lloyd Wright was an intellectual sponge, he was influenced by tons of things in the world around him, he synthesized them, brought them all together and it was through his genius that he would go on to continue to create beautiful homes, and then that leads us to the American System-Built Homes. So the number two point, again, if you’re counting, we’re at number two. The American System-Built Homes were trendy.

I like this picture of the Model T assembly line, Henry Ford, so Frank Lloyd Wright was not immune to looking around in the world and understanding what was going on. What they were trying to do with housing, though, was something akin to what the Ford and the Industrial Age and the assembly line was doing, they were trying to create many homes. They were trying to solve a problem of instead of having each client meeting individually, one-on-one with the architect, and in this case it’d be Frank Lloyd Wright in his studio in Spring Green. Instead of doing that, you would now be able to go to a builder or dealer’s office and see prints and decide on the American System-Built Home that you chose, they would produce it, if you will, in a lumber yard, they would pre-cut the wood, make it ahead of time, and ship it to the job site. We’ll get into that a little bit more. But this was something new, innovative, and different for the time. There are other people that were doing similar things. Here’s a weird one, Thomas Edison, I think we’ve all understood how important he is to our culture, but in 1917 he created or he patented a system of home building and basically what you have here is a shell of a three-bedroom house, I’m sorry, three-story house, and a concrete mixer that would mix the concrete, take it up to the top of the house, drop it in the top, and it would go down the forms to create this three-story house. Okay, so you’d mix up all the concrete, pour it in, and it would work its way down, and you’d end up with a three-story house. There’s a model of it with Thomas Edison, so Edison’s thinking about new ways to build a house. And there’s actually a street of them in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Now, that’s one example.

You also have Sears and the craftsman homes; we’ve all heard of the craftsman homes. You go to the back of the Sears catalog and you’d see a section of homes that you could buy as a kit. You also would get individual separate catalogs that would list all of the homes that craftsman would sell. There it is again, that’s the actual home constructed in Chicago, and these dot the landscape throughout the United States, they’re all over Milwaukee in the suburbs. They’re quite sought after to this day, I think most of you realize that. Well-built, but Sears was doing it, there was another company out of Midland, Michigan, called Aladdin Homes, and Aladdin Homes was doing tens of thousands of these kit homes. So you could go to a catalog and buy an Aladdin Home, model whatever, and have it shipped to your job site and have your contractor construct it for you. There’s the kit home called House on the Rock. (audience laughs) That’s right, that’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright house, okay. Number three, collaboration, so you can’t do this alone. So, going back to Steve Jobs and going back to some of the experience I have in running technology companies, it’s impossible to build a large company and do important things individually, as a single person. You really have to collaborate, and you have to have a lot of people involved. In the case of the American System-Built Homes, there’s this guy the name of Arthur Richards. Arthur Richards was a developer in the city of Milwaukee, by 1904 he was constructing over 40 houses a year. And he would advertise that he was buying all of his materials in bulk, and he had his own mason, his own architect, his own furnace guys, his own carpenters, and he would deliver to you your own house for a fixed price, key in pocket, so guaranteed fixed price cheaper than anybody else. So Arthur Richards, 1904, city of Milwaukee, lots of houses.

Arthur Richards and Frank Lloyd Wright would meet up as early as 1912, this is a hotel. It’s a real photograph of a hotel that was on the shore of Lake Geneva. If you go there today, it’s where you see the eight-story condo building. The hotel was torn down in the 1980s, I think, but this is the first collaboration between Arthur Richards and Frank Lloyd Wright, they worked on a hotel. They did several other projects that didn’t get built, but by 1915 and into 1916 they collaborated on this project that they called the American System-Built Homes. This collaboration was memorialized in a contract, and that contract, if you looked at the fees that were involved, had The Richards Company paying Frank Lloyd Wright $1,163,000 a year, adjusted for inflation to 2015. So Frank Lloyd Wright was thinking big, right. This was his meal ticket if you will. This was what he was going to count on for his living. This was a huge, huge personal investment for him. He spent more time doing the drawings for this project than anything else he worked on his entire career. We’ve counted, there’s more than 966 drawings for the American System-Built Homes in the Frank Lloyd Wright archives today, which they’re stored at Columbia University in case you want to go check them out. But Frank Lloyd Wright was thinking big, this was no small affair. The American System-Built Homes are a system of marketing, so go back to Steve Jobs. I want to create something or do something that’s different, something that no one else is doing. Well, certainly the homes that you would get from Sears or Aladdin were marketed, but it really was unusual for an architect to market their services 102 years ago. But Frank Lloyd Wright and Arthur Richards and some other people really figured out a new way to do this, and they were pretty good about it. So you’d see advertisements like this as early as June of 1917 in the Chicago Examiner newspaper. Good news about a home, and some flowery text about what it might be like to live in one of these homes. You’d see an advertisement like this, imagine this as a full-page newspaper ad in the Chicago Tribune in 1917, July of 1917, and it starts out with a rendering of what one of the American System-Built Homes might look like. A banner headline, you can own an American home, and some flowery text done by a gentleman who would become a well-known writer and novelist later on, Sherwood Anderson, but at this time he was a copywriter in the advertising agency that they had hired, flowery text about what it might be like to live in one of these American System-Built Homes, and across the bottom a list of the builders or dealers who would construct one for you. So the idea was you would see an ad like this. If you’re interested and enticed by the text or if you’re interested in learning more about it, you would go to the builder or dealer’s office and learn more or place your order, if you will.

If you did go to the builder or dealer’s office, they would present you or give you a series of drawings. And the drawings would be finely crafted and printed. And this is about an eight and a half by 11-inch form along with a portfolio of some text by Mr. Wright or Mr. Anderson, they both had some contributions to it. But you’d see these portfolios of prints of the different models of the American System-Built Homes. I think there’s about 12 general series of homes in the American System-Built Homes, and, again, you know, the idea is Frank Lloyd Wright, you can’t all go meet with him individually in his office, but he wanted to create a series of designs or models that could be mass marketed, so there’s 12 of them, roughly, and lots of variations within the models that would be sold through builders or dealers. So instead of going to meet with Mr. Wright one-on-one you’d go visit a builder or dealer’s office, that builder or dealer would show you the different models that were available, you’d pick and choose from those models. The next thing that would happen is your builder or dealer would make a phone call to the Milwaukee offices of Arthur Richards, and The Richards Company would put all of the materials together for your American System-Built Home, wrap it up in a package, put it on a railroad car, and send that railroad car to the rail siding closest to where you wanted to construct your home. Your builder would then pick up the model, take it to your site and construct your Frank Lloyd Wright American System-Built Home.

Now, again, we’re still on marketing, and just a little bit of comparing and contrasting on the left side you have the Aladdin Homes version of marketing, and on the right side you have the American System-Built Home model B1. Let me just read you from the Aladdin Homes brochure. I think the home on the right is called the Sherman, “Living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, three bedrooms, bath, closet are shown in plan of this desirable bungalow. Attractive group windows are furnished for living room.” That’s it, and if you look closely at the floor plan, it says, living room, 24 by 16. By contrast, the American System-Built brochure, “Most people want plenty of light and air in their house. You probably do, and convenience, too. And if in addition to these things your house has an individuality about which sets it out from the other houses, you undoubtably will be better pleased. It’s a place of joy and peace, a place about which should move soft-voiced women and earnest, thoughtful men.” The floor plan in this isometric drawing, the breakfast table is set for breakfast, there’s flowers in the vases, there’s hats in the closet shelves, there’s furnishings, there’s a piano in the living room. This tiny little model B1, which is only 805 square feet, Frank Lloyd Wright, like he did with Susan Lawrence Dana, is showing you how to live in this space. Far more richer, far deeper, far more enticing, if you will, than the Aladdin Homes brochure on the left. The American System-Built Homes represented a system of design. This is like mental sorbet, right? I mean, that’s a real subdivision in Markham, Ontario, Canada. There’s no trees, every house looks the same just about. I mean, how could you live there? Ugh. 12 series in the American System-Built Homes by Wright and The Richards Company, 81 different models could be generated out of these series of homes. I’ll tell you how that works in a minute, five garages. They range in size from very small to very large. This presentation drawing for the model E3, the E3, three story, five bedroom, room for two maids. So very large American System-Built Home. You also have some apartment buildings. Unfortunately, Milwaukee had two of these, they were torn in the 1970s to make way for a street-widening project on North 27th at Highland Boulevard. There’s a photo of the buildings circa 1917.

Again, going back to the different models. This is the model A243. This is the model A243 as well, but a different kind of drawing. So here we have the floor for the A243, but this floor plan is shown with a flat roof, a hip roof, or a gable roof. So you’re sitting in the builder or dealer’s office, you’re seeing these presentation prints like this, and along with that you’re given all these choices. Do you want that flat roof version, the hip roof version, or the gable roof version? If you look closely, you’ll see the window patterns are different, would you like this kind of art glass or that kind of art glass? Some of the homes had two porches, you could have a front porch and a back porch. Mom or dad, I suppose, could configure the kitchen however they wanted it. It was basically modular. Frank Lloyd Wright would create a series of designs that you could choose how you’d like your kitchen laid out. Again, 966 drawings for this. They were really cranking out so many options that I think by the end of the day you could create your very own unique Frank Lloyd Wright designed American System-Built Home, which was a very different experience than going to the back of the Sears catalog and getting the Mediterranean, where your main choice was what color would you paint the walls. This is the model B1, it’s on Burnham Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, please come and visit it. We’re open Fridays and Saturdays throughout the summertime, and then twice a month in the winter months. But the model B1 also had– There’s the model B1. But, there was a variation to the model B1. There was a B11 and a B23, and so you could choose the model B1 with a one-story, two-bedroom configuration. You also could choose the B11 with a two bedroom upstairs configuration and a roof garden. So now you had either a two bedroom or a four bedroom, or you could choose the B23, which was just one bedroom. So you could have the B series with a one-bedroom, two-bedroom, or three-bedroom configuration, and you would see drawings, renderings like this, that Mr. Wright had drawn to help you pick your model. You’re sitting there with a builder and you’re sorting it out and figuring out. Again, at the end of the day, the builder would call up, The Richards Company in Milwaukee, they would package your home together in the kit and send it off to where you intended to build your home. This is a model C3, just another example, there are four of these that we know to exist. There’s two in Illinois, one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and one in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, actually. The interior of the model C3, and, again, all laid out with furnishings and carpets and where everything belongs. An interior rendering of what it might look like on the model C3. That’s the version in Oshkosh. Model C3 circa 1924, I believe, in Milwaukee. Another American System-Built Home, same kind of design, you see a floor plan, three different roof styles. Wright was always using the same hip, flat, or gable roof style. This one was just recently discovered just a few years ago in Shorewood, Wisconsin. Elizabeth Murphy House model A203 on Newton Street in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

And the garage was added in the ’70s I think. Number six, the American System-Built Homes were a system of production. Not only did Mr. Wright design the basic designs, but he was thinking about how to produce these things and so one of the things he took advantage of was the fact that if you cut the lumber in advance and you cut the lumber in a lumber yard, that really what you could do then is you could fancier things than if you tried to set up shop, if you will, on the street that you were constructing your home. So they took full advantage of that, and there’s some really intricate cuts and some things that Mr. Wright was able to do because the lumber was cut in a lumber yard and shipped, pre-cut, if you will, to the job site. So here you have all of the different details that Mr. Wright had worked out about how the lumber would be cut and the different notches and so on and so forth. Mr. Wright also tried some very innovative new things, and one of them was a brand of stucco for the house. The stucco brand was called Elastica, and, again, just to give you an idea of how out there Mr. Wright was, this stuff was magical. In fact, last night I was at the Wisconsin State Fair and I was thinking as I was watching the guy doing the Ginsu knives thing, ’cause that mesmerizes me. (audience laughs) I can’t leave, I can turn but I can’t leave. So the Ginsu knife guy and the Elastica guy learned from each other, right? Elastica was supposed to be you could put it on in cold weather. You could put it on thin, it would stick to anything, and it would last forever. Not true. (Audience laughs)

None of it was true. In fact, the Elastica stucco looked great on the Burnham houses for about 20 years, and then it didn’t look so good anymore. And the Burnham houses had to be re-covered with something else. So if you came to the Burnham houses in the last 20 years or so, what you’re seeing is not the original stucco layer, Elastica, the stuff that Mr. Wright tried that was out there that was highly touted and well-received, but basically phony in any event. Again, Mr. Wright’s trying to do things that are out there and innovative. It doesn’t always work, right, you try it, but it doesn’t always work. Yeah, okay, system of construction, number seven. In 1950, in October of 1950, and Mr. Wright drew this drawing for some houses that he did in Glencoe, Illinois, for his attorney, a gentleman by the name of Sherman Booth. If you know anything about construction, you know that the standard way that we construct buildings is, when we use a wood framing system, is we put those wood frame, those two-by-fours, those framing members, 16 inches apart. Carpenter would call that 16 inch on center. The Glencoe houses in Illinois were all designed that way. Mr. Wright was using standard construction techniques in Glencoe in October of 1915. But in September of 1915 he was drawing the American System-Built Homes just a few weeks earlier. And he’s drawing these homes totally different. He’s drawing them with the two-by-fours 24 inches on center, that gave him an incredible amount of additional flexibility to change the way the windows were put in the house and to articulate or kind of change the design of the house, it also made them slightly more efficient to build because you didn’t have to figure out how to frame the house to support snow loads by putting headers. It’s a long story, but this was cool and innovative. It was very different from Mr. Wright. Mr. Wright did not return to this after the American System-Built Homes, but he was trying new things.

Sometimes people come to Burnham and they ask me the silly question, “Do Mr. Wright’s roof leaks,” or “Do the roofs leak here?” And I look at them in all earnestness and say, well, I have a story to tell you, and that story is Mr. Wright had cousins and their name was, they were the Lloyd Jones Family, and they owned a house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was Frank Lloyd Wright design. Mr. Wright designed this house for them. And when the Lloyd Joneses were ready to leave the house, it’s reported rather correctly, or I hope correctly, that Mrs. Lloyd Jones was interviewed by the local television crew, and they asked her a question, “Well, does your roof leak?” And she looked at them rather adamantly and says, “Well, what do you expect if you leave a work of art out in the rain?” (audience laughs) Now, I can tell you having been on the roof of the model B1 when we restored it, filming the working crew that was there. As we peeled off the roof, little by little by little and we worked our way across the roof, that that roof, which is a flat roof, really didn’t leak. And at that time the building was about 90 years old. We thought we would find rot everywhere, we didn’t. The model B1 in Milwaukee and all of the American System-Built Homes are built with a roof in– Basically it’s in the shape of a bowl and it has a drain in the center of it and that drain takes the water away. Mr. Wright did not like rain gutters. But it conducted the water away, and because the house was so well-built and the roof was taken care of, that’s kind of the key. If you take care of and you maintain your roof, even if it’s a flat roof, it’s going to be okay a hundred years later. But so here we are with a model B1. You’d think that it might leak, didn’t leak, so there’s your construction stories. I don’t think there’s anything left. This is actually the Glencoe houses in Illinois. This is an exterior photograph of what they look like. There’s another one, they’re beautiful. You can see them from the street, they’re not open to the public. And number eight, so we’re getting close. Limited success. So the contract that Mr. Wright had with Arthur Richards, million dollars a year in royalties, this is his meal ticket. They were thinking of building tens of thousands of these homes, they were going to build them all across North America, they were going to go the United States, they were going to go up to Canada, they had visions to go down to Mexico. They were thinking about going over the pond, over the Atlantic into Europe, and they were going to build tens of thousands of these things. You would see American System-Built Homes in every city in the nation. What happened?

– [Audience] Depression. – First World War. – World War I. – Great Depression. – World War I.

– World War I. The homes on Burnham Street were completed on the fifth of July, 1916. 10 days later in the Milwaukee Journal, there was a picture of a march, here it is, down Grand Avenue which was renamed Wisconsin Avenue. So right down the center of the city, 28,500 and some people are marching in a preparedness march. The psyche of the city at this timeframe, in this timeframe, is we’re getting ready to go to war. Milwaukee is a melting pot, lots of Germans, lots of different cultures represented, ethnic backgrounds represented there. We weren’t quite sure whether we were supporting this side or that side, whether we should be in or not in. There were people that had strong feelings in both ways. But 10 days after we completed the houses on Burnham, 28,000 people are marching down the center of the city preparing to go to war, and we were one of the last cities in the country to hold this kind of march. They were generally referred to as preparedness marches. I’ve just been reading a fantastic book about Milwaukee in this timeframe, and the scholar who wrote the book is pointing out that there are probably about 150,000 spectators, too, so it’s not just 28,000 people marching, it’s a whole city getting ready to go to war. So what happens in wartime, circa 1916? Building materials are diverted to the war. The War Department gets to say we’d like all the wood, and the concrete and all of the other stuff that’s important to building a house. You have wartime inflation, so what’s left, the price of those materials goes up, and the psyche of the city and the country is really thinking about we’re going to war. It’s not time to buy a new house, not time to settle, not time to start a family. Basically, if you research building permits in the city of Milwaukee from 1916, about three and a half years, almost nothing is being built, and that same story repeats itself across the United States.

So why do we only have a few of these American System-Built Homes? World War I. In addition to that, there’s 20 of ’em. We think there’s 11 in Wisconsin, there’s one in Indiana that’s since burned down, one in Iowa, and seven more in Illinois. In Madison, we have one that was recently discovered, there’s six on Burnham, the 27th Street four-families are demolished, the Oshkosh home, and then the Newton Street home in Shorewood. There could be one or two more, maybe a few more. And the reason that we can discover a Frank Lloyd Wright house that has never been written about by scholars, so the West Lawn house in Madison and the house on Newton were recently discovered. And the reason for that is because Arthur Richards held all the cards, he knew where they were built, he knew where the kits were shipped, he took the money. And he couldn’t afford to pay his royalty payments to Frank Lloyd Wright, so all of a sudden you have this sort of incentive to maybe not tell the whole story. Frank Lloyd Wright sued Arthur Richards to end the contract when he wasn’t getting paid. He was not happy about this. I’ll tell you, however, that sort of the epilogue to that is they would go on and have a great corresponding relationship and have dinner with each other from time to time. But Mr. Wright was not happy that his meal ticket wasn’t going to come home to roost, that Richards couldn’t pay the royalty fees and he sued them, or he sued The Richards Company and he got all his drawings back. And that basically ended the project. Now, in addition, Mr. Wright heads off to Japan and works on his commission for the Imperial Hotel. So he’s really out of the country. He doesn’t have the second guy. Remember we talked about collaboration, you really need more than one person involved in this kind of endeavor, this is a big deal. So Wright doesn’t have the marketing genius, the buzz saw, if you will, behind the project. He’s in Japan and this project just fails, it just dies on the vine, if you will. If not for World War I, if Richards would’ve been able to succeed in the way they thought, we would have American System-Built Homes all across the country in places where we might today have Sears craftsman homes. That’s the West Lawn house. The Burnham block, so the model B1 to the right and then there’s four two-families or two-family flat Cs, duplexes, if you will, available, if you came to the Burnham Street site you’d see the B1 and one of the duplexes on a tour.

And a nice rendering by Frank Lloyd Wright of one of the duplexes. This is the building that we completed restoration on in 2014. So I’ll just take you through a little bit about what we did to restore the homes. This is what the B1 looked like when we acquired it in 2002. We had a lot of work to do, that front porch has been enclosed, so somebody in 1939 they added a roof on and they enclosed all of the, they put these windows in here. So one of the first things we had to do was take all of that away. This is a picture of the interior, the living room space. We had all that beautiful shellac that had to come off, and those Formica countertops and that linoleum floor in the kitchen, that’s all great. One of the ways you restore a house when it has Elastica stucco, which I forgot to tell you has asbestos in it, is you wrap the house in a bubble so there’s scaffolding and the house is all wrapped up in a bubble. It took us 13 months to restore this house. And while we were doing it, we had to make sure that while we were taking off the Elastica-brand stucco, which had asbestos in it, that we didn’t let any of those tiny little fibers escape off into the environment, so we had negative air pressure built up, we had guys in space suits with respirators, at the end of the day they would get washed down in the basement, make sure that they were not letting any of those little tiny fibers escape. And we had an engineer who sat there with a book all day long reading, checking the indicators to make sure that we weren’t letting fibers escape. And I personally, I personally, am a hazardous waste originator in the state of Wisconsin, can you believe that? (audience laughs) My wife would say sure you are. We had a wonderful team of architects from Uihlein-Wilson Architects and Beyer Construction working with us. In this case what we’re trying to do is get the exact mix of stone to make the stucco, to recreate the stucco finish. Of course, we didn’t use asbestos this time, but we had to take the stucco off the house and put a new stucco system back on it. I’m not a hundred percent sure, I didn’t have time to work on this, but I think Uihlein-Wilson is the same architectural firm that did this facility. Is that, that’s correct, okay, thank you. So some of the work that we did to take the porch down. Whenever you do this stuff you get a surprise, right? So my surprise was the porch deck was about 18 inches of concrete with steel beams. So we had guys with jackhammers knocking it out. That was a change order, those are not cheap. Yeah. Guys in space suits taking off the lead paint. The wonderful craftsmen from Beyer Construction figuring out how to put the new stucco system back on. They basically had to invent this. The tools and the methods for doing this, we had an architect from the National Park Service working with us and he pointed us to how this was done and gave us the right names to do it, but to actually figure it out, we had Lori, who swore like a drunken sailor and her boss Bob who took it all day long, and sometimes you’d think Lori was in charge, but she’s such a sweetheart and Bob is such a genius, these two guys worked together to figure out this new stucco system. And I’ll tell you one thing, right after this picture was taken, they decided they didn’t like this panel, they struck it all off and started over again. Very, very, very detail-oriented, very fine group of people to work with.

Other craftsmen doing different things. Just amazing craftsmanship, this is Acker Millwork, at least second generation, but, no, there’s three generations of Ackers working on millwork in Milwaukee out of a small office near our house. The interior of the living room undergoing restoration. We had to deal with cracked plaster and so on. Basically, though, the interior is more than 90%, actually even higher than that, original. So all of the wood trim, the cabinets. The only thing that we’ve had to recreate is the furnishings. And there you have it. And on to number 10. So the last one, if you’re counting, influences. Frank Lloyd Wright, we talked about where did Frank Lloyd Wright get his influences from, what was he influenced by, but Frank Lloyd, it goes two ways. The houses you see here, actually the house on the left is by an architect, by van ‘t Hoff. Van ‘t Hoff was given a copy of the German translation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio by his father, this made a profound influence on him, and in June 1914 he traveled to the United States to see Mr. Wright’s work and meet him in person, visiting some of the buildings in the Chicago area. And what you see is actually Mr. Wright on the right, Mr. van ‘t Hoff, or architect van ‘t Hoff on the left. You can see some of the similarities. This is cross pollination folks. This is a gentleman named Jan Wils. I cannot pronounce the text of the book that this came from, but it translates in English to The Dwelling, and in 1922, Mr. Wils was writing to future or prospective buyers or clients, if you will. So a young architect writing to clients about what to expect and what to know when you’re building your first home. And notice the similarities between Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing for the interior of the model C3 and the hand sketch that Mr. Wils did in his 1922 book published in the Netherlands. Knowing that a copy of these American System-Built Homes drawings were circulating in Europe at the time, and he certainly would’ve been in an office that had one.

Mr. Wright tried different projects similar to the American System-Built Homes when that didn’t work. In 1938, this is in Los Angeles, so there was a project, all steel houses. They were going to be prefabricated houses on a hillside in Los Angeles. That actually didn’t get constructed. In the late 1950s, he worked with Marshall Erdman, the Erdman Company out of Madison, Wisconsin, on prefabricated homes. This actually became quite successful, but by this point in time, prefabricated homes kind of had a bad rap. So when Mr. Wright was doing the American System-Built Homes he was thinking about quality and how can I build houses quickly without having interaction necessarily with the clients, but it was never about being cheap. It was always quality construction, built rock-solid. By the 1950s, prefabricated homes kind of got a bad rap, the Erdman’s tried to turn that around, Mr. Wright contributed some designs for the homes and quite a few of them were actually built in the Midwest, there’s a number of them in the Madison area, and then up into Minnesota and so on, featured prominently in the magazines of the day and advertised heavily. Now, I’m going to connect our current president Donald Trump to Frank Lloyd Wright. This is what happened, Donald Trump wants to build the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. The area around the Taj Mahal Casino is dilapidated, run down, and needs to be redeveloped. So the local casino authority says to Donald Trump, you want to build your casino, great, you also have to contribute some funds to our redevelopment effort and fund some of the rest of the redevelopment of the area around your casino, it’s going to help ya, right, ’cause it’s going to make your property more valuable. So they do redevelopment by bulldozer. They go through block after block after block and basically wipe everything out so they have just clean space. They hire, or they have a contest sort of, where they find different architectural firms to design homes that would fit in this neighborhood around the Trump Taj Mahal Casino. And among the firms that they hire was Taliesin Architects, sounds like the successor firm of Frank Lloyd Wright. And the Taliesin Architects pull off the shelf the American System-Built plans and they build a whole block of these things. So they bring them up to code, they think they’re going to be desirable. They think they have an opportunity to sell more of these things, and they build a whole block and I think this was in the 1980s, late 1980s I think. But there’s a whole block of these that exist in Atlantic City in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.

We love welcoming people to the Burnham site. We’re seeing about 5,000 visitors a year right now. We’re only open a few days a month, but they come from all over the place. This past weekend I had visitors from Germany and Paris, we’ve had visitors from 33 different countries. They come from every state in the Union, and we’d be proud and excited to welcome you as well. We also have a lot of students and academic groups that come in, the students love to draw the home and sort of understand what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing with his designs. And full classrooms of students come, and actually one more closing thought. So architectural historian and archivist, Nicholas Olsberg probably put it best when he said, “From the first publication of his work in 1901, a model middle class home for the prairie town until the Erdman prefab venture in the last years of his long career, everything that mattered most to Frank Lloyd Wright was wrapped up in this single fundamental problem: How to house every working American family in an efficient, economical, and life-enhancing work of art, and how to seize new technologies and production techniques to realize that goal.” “Among all of his work, the American System-Built Homes are the primary landmark, they are vital not only to comprehending Frank Lloyd Wright, but even more to understanding how architectural thinking can transform the everyday into something both individually expressive and cumulatively harmonious.” And with that, I’ll say thank you and take any questions. (audience applauds)