- 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)