Usonia, N E W Y O R K PROOF 1 Usonia, N E W Y O R K Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright ROLAND REISLEY with John Timpane Foreword by MARTIN FILLER PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, NEW YORK PROOF 2 PUBLISHED BY This publication was supported in part with PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS funds from the New York State Council on the 37 EAST SEVENTH STREET Arts, a state agency. NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10003 Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Ann Alter, Amanda For a free catalog of books, call 1.8... Atkins, Janet Behning, Jan Cigliano, Jane Garvie, Judith Visit our web site at www.papress.com. Koppenberg, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Brian McDonald, Anne Nitschke, Evan Schoninger, © Princeton Architectural Press Lottchen Shivers, and Jennifer Thompson of Princeton All rights reserved Architectural Press—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher Printed in China First edition Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reisley, Roland, – No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any Usonia, New York : building a community with manner without written permission from the publisher Frank Lloyd Wright / Roland Reisley with John except in the context of reviews. Timpane ; foreword by Martin Filler. p. cm. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify isbn --- owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected . Usonian houses—New York (State)—Pleasant- in subsequent editions. ville. Utopias—New York (State)—Pleasantville— History. Architecture, Domestic—New York All photographs © Roland Reisley unless otherwise (State)—Pleasantville. Wright, Frank Lloyd, indicated. –—Criticism and interpretation. i. Title: Usonia. ii. Timpane, John Philip. iii. Title. The drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright are copyright © na.p r the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ. Frontispiece: Detail of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original site plan of Usonia. Editing and layout: Clare Jacobson Design: Deb Wood PROOF 2 Acknowledgments v i Foreword, Martin Filler v i i i Preface x i i Introduction x v i Chapter . DREAMING OF USONIA 1 Chapter . GOING FORWARD 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter . BUILDING USONIA 2 2 Chapter . A COMMUNITY AT LAST 4 4 Chapter . WORKING WITH FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 6 2 Chapter . REORGANIZING THE COOPERATIVE 8 4 Chapter . DAVID HENKEN: OUR MOSES 9 2 Chapter . COMMUNITY LIFE AND ACTIVITIES 1 0 4 Chapter . USONIA REVISITED 1 1 8 Epilog. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE REISLEY HOUSE 1 2 6 INDEX OF USONIA’S HOMES 1 5 2 PROOF 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii I could not have produced this account, fourteen years in For transforming a final draft to this completed the making, without significant help. Surely credit is due text, I thank my editor, Clare Jacobson. Her enthusiastic to the early Usonians who typed and mimeographed—and participation made it happen. saved—the thousands of single-spaced communications A much appreciated grant from the New York during the creation and growth of Usonia. (Analogous State Council on the Arts helped to pay some of the costs communications today, much of it by e-mail, or stored on of this project. magnetic media, is not likely to survive fifty years.) The Decidedly not least, I thank my wife Ronny, who Frank Lloyd Wright Archives was another valuable endured my preoccupation with this history and offered resource. informed comment on much of the text. My friend “Pete” Guerrero contributed beautiful I am grateful to the many Usonians who shared historic photographs and encouraged my efforts, but also their memories of the struggles and triumphs in the life of introduced me to Dixie Legler. I was at an impasse until Usonia, and especially to David and Priscilla Henken, Judy Dixie came on to edit my words and to help me integrate and Odif Podell, Aaron and Millie Resnick, Herbert some of John Timpane’s well-crafted text. She has my Brandon, and Rowland Watts, without whose commit- gratitude. ment Usonia may not have succeeded. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITS USONIA, 1949. HENRY RAPISARDA, COSMO-SILEO ASSOCIATES Martin Filler FOREWORD ix COMMISSIONING A BUILDING BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT WAS SUCH AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE THAT OVER THE YEARS SEVERAL OF HIS CLIENTS HAVE WRITTEN REVEALING MEMOIRS ABOUT THEIR ADVENTURES WITH THE MASTER, WHICH SOME HAVE REGARDED AS THE OUTSTANDING EVENT OF THEIR LIVES. MULTIPLE VOLUMES OF PUBLISHED CORRE- SPONDENCES SHED FURTHER LIGHT ON WRIGHT’S RELATIONS WITH OTHER OF HIS PATRONS. THOSE VARIOUS ACCOUNTS ARE ALIKE IN THEIR REITERATION OF THE VERY SIMILAR roller-coaster course of emotions—admiration, adoration, ed his Midwestern client base, as did the scandal he caused exhilaration, exasperation, resignation, expectation, and by abandoning his wife and six children to run off with ultimate fulfillment—that Wright’s clients went through the wife of a client. The s witnessed Wright’s attempt in the arduous process of bringing his singular designs to to reestablish his practice in Southern California and the reality. Southwest, with just a few houses completed and several In (the year that large-scale construction major projects that came to naught. The onset of the Great resumed in the United States after wartime restrictions Depression only deepened his woes, and he retreated to on rationed materials and nonessential building were Taliesin to found an academy that seemed his last best finally lifted) Wright turned eighty. Though he had been a hope for survival. Wright’s wholly unexpected resur- nationally and internationally acclaimed architect for gence in the late s, with his astonishing trio of late almost half a century, only during the postwar period masterpieces—Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Building, did his workload finally catch up with his fame. Whole and Taliesin West—returned him to the forefront of his decades of his exceptionally long career had been blighted profession, though World War II soon put an end to his by circumstances both within and beyond his control. In prospects here and abroad. the s a shift in fashionable taste away from the arts- Wright always had a deep understanding of the and-crafts movement and toward the colonial revival erod- national psyche, which is one reason why his work speaks VIEW FROM THE BALCONY OF THE REISLEY HOME, 1997. PROOF 1 x Usonia, New York THOUGH REISLEY AND HIS FELLOW in the U.S. (hence the name Usonian) during and after the Great Depression, when even the rich sought to live COOPERATORS IN THE DEVELOPMENT less ostentatiously. Abandoning the late Victorian formal- ity that marked his epochal Prairie Houses (with their OF USONIA WERE ATTRACTED TO THE requisite dining rooms, basements, stables or garages, and servants’ quarters), he advocated a much simplified format WRIGHTIAN AESTHETIC AND THE MAS- (with small dining areas, concrete-slab construction, car- ports, and no provision for domestic help) that accurately TER’S BELIEF THAT A HOUSE MUST BE predicted the nature of postwar family life. His insights ONE WITH ITS SETTING, THEY WERE into suburbanization were particularly prescient. Indeed, many of Wright’s principles—from the private automobile ALSO POSSESSED OF A KEEN SOCIAL as preferred mode of transportation to the conviction that a new generation of homebuyers would be more receptive INSIGHT THAT MAKES THEIR EFFORT to modern architecture—were appropriated by commer- cial real-estate developers who quickly debased them, to ALL THE MORE ADMIRABLE. their great profit and the detriment of the landscape. to a vast American public in a way that no other architect’s Just as Wright had attracted a clientele of adven- does. He was a true Jeffersonian in his inherent distrust turesome self-made technocrats in turn-of-the-century of the city and his belief that the basic building block of Chicago and its environs, so did his work appeal to those our democracy must be the freestanding private house. who, after the upheaval of World War II, wanted to Since the early s Wright cherished the idea of design- remake their world in a more idealistic image. Wright’s ing affordable housing for the masses; he published plans ubiquity as a colorful media personality and his care- for low-cost residences in popular magazines, even while fully crafted persona as a homespun American character he produced his epochal Prairie Houses—richly detailed, encouraged several young admirers to approach him with labor-intensive, and costly—for an upper-middle-class requests that he design houses for them. The architect clientele. was especially intrigued by the proffer to create an entire The fallow years of the s gave Wright ample suburban subdivision in Westchester County, north of time to rethink the question of the modern suburban New York City, to be called Usonia in homage to his new house, culminating in his plans for Broadacre City, a low- residential concept. rise, low-density vision of hypothetical exurban develop- Roland Reisley, one of the active participants ment, as well as in his first Usonian houses. Those radi- in that project and the author of this account of Usonia cally simplified structures represented Wright’s intuitive and the house he and his wife, Ronny, built there, can be response to the future direction of domestic architecture counted among the most important of Wright’s clients. PROOF 1 Foreword xi What he lacked in the economic resources of Aline than any of them had known before. Their long-term suc- Barnsdall, Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., and Herbert F. Johnson, cess, attested to by the fact that the children of several of Jr., Reisley more than made up in commitment and will- the original Usonians have returned to live there, is all the ingness to immerse himself in the technical aspects of more extraordinary given the centripetal demographics of Wright’s architecture. More than fifty years after he first American life over the past half century.