Carla Lind recalls vividly her first visit in 1973 to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park.
Newly arrived in the village, Lind attended a tour sponsored by a small group of locals bent on saving the structure.
“The house was in horrible shape. It had been cut up into five apartments and was very dark,” Lind says. “There was carpeting everywhere and no furniture. The yard was overgrown. Kids in the neighborhood thought it was a haunted house.
“But there was still something so unbelievably compelling about it. You knew this was a very special place,” she says. “Even though the house had been changed a lot, there was no mistaking it. Greatness had been here.”
Captured by the magic of the place, Lind joined the small band of volunteers that made up the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. Little did she suspect then that she was at the beginning of a career devoted to restoring the buildings Wright left as his legacy. For 20 years, as a tour guide, fundraiser, foundation director and restoration consultant, Carla Lind’s life has been intertwined with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Now she has written “The Wright Style” (Simon & Schuster, $50), a richly photographed new book. In it, Lind shares what she has learned about the man many consider America’s greatest architect. She takes the reader on a tour of Wright’s most remarkable Prairie Style, concrete block and so-called Usonian homes. The author also stops in at several houses designed by followers of Wright and finds in them the unmistakable imprint of the master teacher. What sets this apart from previous works on Wright are its focus on interiors, its inclusion of houses by Wright’s followers and a catalog of reproductions at the end.
“Wright designed from the inside out. Rather than building a box and making people’s activities fit into the box, he started inside. He designed in response to the lifestyles and activities of the people who would live there,” Lind says.
In a career that spanned seven decades, from 1885 to his death in 1959, Wright reiterated in about 270 houses the principles of what he called “organic architecture.” Whether a house was to be on a prairie, a beach or a bluff, the architect sought to integrate the building with its site, using materials and colors from nature in its design. Because unity was of the utmost importance to Wright, he frequently created furnishings, accessories and textiles for the interiors of his houses.
“I wanted to enable people to experience Wright’s residential interiors from the point of view of the people who live in them,” Lind says. “The reality of his buildings are the spaces within them,” she says. “Over the years I became aware of how moved people were when they entered his spaces. I’ve seen grown men cry at the experience.
“I’ve been amazed, too,” says Lind, “by the passion that so many Wright owners have for their homes. It’s as if the houses are an extension of themselves.”
In a chapter called “Living with Wright,” the author explores the challenges faced by current owners of Wright houses. Showcased are 10 houses in which the owners have managed to strike a balance between conserving their historic homes and preserving their own lifestyles. Several owners have dared to alter Wright’s original designs with compatible additions, such as the kitchen expansion of the Ingalls house in River Forest.
While Midwesterners are most familiar with Wright’s Prairie Style homes, later designs may come as a surprise. When the popularity of his Prairie Style faded, Wright turned to creating textile block houses in the Hollywood Hills in the 1920s. Built of poured concrete blocks with geometrical designs imprinted on them, the stacked block houses suggest Mayan influences.
Wright’s Usonian houses of the 1930s and ’40s reflected a world changed since the architect’s early years in Oak Park. Wright designed the Usonian house to accommodate American families in which more women were working outside the home. He had observed that Americans no longer had servants, owned cars, were home less often and socialized in the kitchen when they were home.
“The living room and dining area radiated from the workspace, which was the kitchen,” Lind says. “When Wright opened up the space between the kitchen and family gathering areas, his floor plans became more democratic.” Many of today’s contemporary house designs owe a debt to Wright’s Usonian homes, she says.
Lind has watched Frank Lloyd Wright’s popularity change dramatically over the years.
“In the 1970s, Wright was not the phenomenon he is today,” Lind says. “Many people were living in Wright houses and didn’t know it until they were informed.
“While I was working with Wright houses, I became aware of a microcosm of Wright interest. Taliesen (the school Wright founded) started authorizing reproductions of decorative objects. Suddenly auctions were loaded with Frank Lloyd Wright items. And people were writing dozens of books about him,” she says.
Since that first tour to the house of Wright in 1973, Lind has served a five-year stint as director of the Wright Home and Studio Foundation, during which time she helped obtain grants to complete the house’s restoration. She later oversaw the restoration of Wright’s Meyer May house in Grand Rapids, Mich., and was director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a group of Wright homeowners.
“Fortunately, as my own personal interest grew and I became more experienced, public interest grew as well,” she says. “So I’ve had more opportunities to work on Wright. It has been invigorating and enriching.”
