While the historic Burnham Block represents the optimistic beginning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first attempt to design modest homes, the Elizabeth Murphy House at 2106 East Newton in Shorewood, Wisconsin, marks the tumultuous end of the American System-Built idea.
Yes, it costs more to live in a historic home and it carries special burdens. But no steward that I know is in it to flip it.
As soon as we moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Elizabeth Murphy House, we began unearthing lost clues explaining Wright’s evolving ideas about the wants and needs of common folks (like us). We will share experiences through stories and photos at this Sunday Morning Forum.
With every plan to repair something on this old house comes an urgency to study and document what is learned in the process.
Wright was thinking - forty years before anyone else - of lush walkable neighborhoods featuring long, low affordable homes with shadowy eaves, banks of windows, grassy yards and built-in gardens.
A current project inventory and links to posts and images.
Wright took special care in specifying the gutters on American System-Built Homes as: "...galvanized iron gutters and down spouts wherever and as indicated on drawings." We're doing as he directed.
Neighbors, friends and the historically curious are invited to attend a presentation - chock full of photographs, tales of stewardship and mysterious backstories - about the historic Elizabeth Murphy House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
Stewardship is not a product of special oversight placed on historic homes. It comes, instead, from a shared commitment to storytelling, passed between generations.
Learn more about The Elizabeth Murphy House and its place in Frank Lloyd Wright's work and legacy, by attending a presentation on Friday, 6/14/2019 at 12:30pm at the Hefter Center at UWM.
