That would be an interesting article for the NYT Travel section

Terry Teachout is on vacation in the Mid-west (Ok, he's on a research trip) and tells us:

I'll be driving out to Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse to spend the night. I expect to have much to say about this experience later in the week. In the meantime, permit me to point out that Muirhead Farmhouse is one of five Wright houses available for short-term rental.

These are the others:

• Haynes House, Fort Wayne, Indiana
• Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio
• Seth Peterson Cottage, Mirror Lake, Wisconsin
• Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin

In addition, the first Usonian house, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, is available for monthly rental.

That would be a fun tour...maybe in late August when you can stop at county fairs. Of course maybe it's too hot then..so maybe October?

(Links in the original post.)

•••

OK. So I start to take this post seriously. No, not to do an article for the NYT but merely to go and stay at these cabins. "Experience Wright's genius." My sister and her family live in Chicago and so maybe next time I am back there we'll make a party of it and do a little "architecting." Maybe I'll take my clubs — there is some very good golf in the Mid-west. So I check out the Seth Peterson Cottage. And here is what I find:

Unless I am mis-reading the sketch (and I have done so before) it seems to be an idiotic and uncomfortable floor plan. Guests have to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. That breaks the most basic rule of "zoning" interior spaces to create a continuum of "public" to very private spaces. Maybe Wright himself would respond by saying that I don't understand "art" or that I am hung-up on bourgeois notions of privacy. Sheesh.

Comments

[Terry Teachout]

It's not that you're misreading the sketch--it's that you aren't familiar with the history of the building. The Peterson Cottage was designed for a single occupant (though two people could stay there with ease). I spent a night there two years ago and found it entirely comfortable and satisfying.

[David Sucher]

Terry's explanation would be totally convincing if I was certain that a person who lives alone never (or rarely) has even one guest.

[JRoth]

Similarly, the cabin at Walden was utterly impractical! Take that foolish book off the shelves!

David, if you're designing a tiny, single-occupant cabin (for a client you've actually met and spoken with), the "continuum" of public-to-private is almost irrelevant. Maybe Seth didn't care about privacy. Maybe he kept his bedroom immaculate. Maybe he had guests once a month, and therefore valued other things more than the standard hierarchy of spaces.

This would be a poor design for mass-production. But you have no standing to tell Frank Wright and Seth Paterson if it was a good design for Seth.

No offense, but sometimes, David, I think your developer viewpoint crowds out everything else you know about the world.

[David Sucher]

Building for only the first user is a totally egotistical and ecologically un-sustainable approach. An error such as Wright made (in locating the one WC at the far end of a bedroom) lacks grace. It calls for remodeling by virtually any future user, which is a waste of resources especially as plumbing is the single most exspenive element of a structure to change or add. No, I don't think that the location of the ONE WC is a totally private matter, especially when Wright is held up as sort of "genius" from whom we should learn. Sheesh.

And I don't get your reference to Walden at all.

[Emily]

Interestingly, this floorplan is almost identical to the plan of a crappy little duplex that I shared with my boyfriend for a short time. I was always opening the door to the furnace closet thinking it was the bathroom (that door having been prominently placed in the living room). It was really annoying.

[Al Z]

From what I could gather briefly from the 'nets, this was Wright's last design, was built after he died (he never even visited the site), the builder modified Wright's original layout, and the cottage was never completed until it was "restored" recently. So I'm not sure its fair to characterize this as typical Wright. That being said, this seems like a fairly remote location, so maybe the key is in fact with the plumbing. The bathroom abutting the kitchen may have been a necessary design choice. One might ask, how is (and was) water supplied to this cottage? And where is waste water disposed of? Was Wright even concerned with these "infrastructure" considerations?

[JRoth]

Sorry, David, didn't mean to be gone so long. I brought up Walden because I would bet that most users would find Thoreau's cabin at Walden to be an unsatisfactory home. Which, by the standards you apply in your post and your rejoinder to me, makes it "idiotic," "egotistical and un-sustainable."

Look, I'm a more doctrinaire environmentalist than you, based on what you've written over the last 4 years, but I'm not about to deny people their idiosyncrasies, especially when embodied in tiny, low-impact homes. Adding a non-bathroom route to the bathroom in this house would take 1/100 of the resources used to build any number of graceful, sensible, basic-rule-adhering homes. The ecological argument is, IMO, bogus when talking about an already-tiny house. And the sensibility argument simply doesn't hold for a one-off, highly personal home.

I just think you've got FLW stuck in your craw, and anything he did that is, by some measure, "inferior" to tract housing, you're going to pick on. Whether he was justified or not, whether he satisfied his client or not.

[Honeybun]

It is factual that the original design was modified by one of Wright's assistants. During the Peterson project, Wright was nearing the end of his life and never stepped foot on the project site, rather, he relied on his trusted staff to complete the project. As with many FLW designs, the cost of the structure as it was being built, became over budget leaving Peterson in a financial bind, hence, creating necessary changes to the original Wright plan in hopes of completing the project. Peterson was unable to honor any further expense and the cottage was scrapped. Later, Peterson took his own life at his parents home in a final tragic twist to the tale. Thankfully, preservationists have saved this wonderful and amazing little gem for all of us FLW fans to enjoy and appreciate.