After the womenfolk in the household have gone to bed, I like to spend a minute trawling a few porn sites. In my case it may be either www.privateislandsonline.com (the estate agency most beloved of James Bond villains) or more commonly www.savewright.org, with its section ‘Wright on the Market’ listing all the properties currently on sale that were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
It is a senseless dream, of course. There are no Wright buildings outside the US (bar a handful in Tokyo) and those on sale are usually either a) priced at $4 million, b) in need of ruinously expensive restoration, or c) located seven hours’ drive from Des Moines. I am slightly tempted by the $750,000 Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet, Minnesota, ‘the world’s only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station’, but I suspect my family might not be too keen on the move, even though the bright lights of Duluth are a mere three hours’ drive away.
Among the more elaborate Wright buildings, however, you sometimes find a more reasonable property, what Wright called a ‘Usonian’ home (Wright’s own coinage, as was the ‘carport’ that often formed part of the design). Aimed at servantless middle-income Americans, these single-storey homes look fabulous and undated 70 years after they were built. They also make innovative use of space, having a very large communal living area and small bedrooms — unlike many British homes where rooms are of an identical cramped size.
The democratising idea behind these designs was that people would pay Wright for plans and then build houses themselves. Would it be impossible for the best modern British architects to offer something similar today? Can a newspaper not fund a competition to create a template for the British version of the Usonian home?
I write about this because it seems that residential architecture is one area where innovation has stalled in Britain.
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