For Wright, American System-Built Homes met a complex design challenge: to create affordable beautiful modest homes. But for Richards, the ASBH program was one item on vast menu of real estate products he could offer.
This upcoming new book begins by unravelling a mystery: how might a house designed by the world's most famous architect become lost in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
Citing a vast body of drawings and plans, historians have called the ASBH project the largest single design effort by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Underneath magnificent art lie the trials, troubles and lessons-learned by the artist.
Since the house originally had no drive, garage or carport, a garage was added in 1976. It was both practical and necessary to the preservation of the house.
