When Allen Friedman first learned that the home Frank Lloyd Wright designed for him has a possible date with the wrecking ball, not even Wright himself could have been more crushed.
“Colonial-minded,” declared the outraged Friedman of anyone who would authorize such destruction, leaving it unclear if he was calling that person provincial or referring to the much-scorned Colonial architectural style favored by many in suburbia.
“I consider that house to be a work of art,” he fumed.
The 3,800-square-foot, Y-shape structure in Bannockburn is regarded as a fully realized example of Wright’s Usonian style of home, a category of dwelling he intended to be more affordable than his prairie-style mansions. But it may occupy an even more special niche in the legendary architect’s work:
It is probably the last design he executed before his death in 1959.
Carol Wyant, of the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, noted that the finalized plans for the Bannockburn house reached Friedman’s hands just days before Wright died at age 78 on April 9 that year.
“Judging from the way [Wright] worked, and how he got personally involved in projects, the timing certainly indicates that this was the final one he approved,” Wyant said.
Added Friedman: “I was driving on Lake Shore Drive and — I’ll never forget this — I heard the news that he died on the radio. I almost drove into the lake. Fortunately for me, he’d already designated one of his disciples, Cary Caraway, to pilot the job, which he did in a very competent manner.”
Wright-designed structures continued to be built for several years, the last one being the Marin County Civic Center in California, completed in 1962. But Wright had completed those plans before he tackled Friedman’s house.
Headed for wrecking ball
The north-suburban Bannockburn residence has had several owners since Friedman sold it in 1976. It is now under contract again, but this time to a prospective buyer who has talked to village authorities about demolishing it and has, in fact, obtained an application for a demolition permit. Village officials say Bannockburn has no landmark ordinances strong enough to stop destruction of the home, which is scheduled to pass to the buyer at a closing set for next Friday.
The buyer, represented by a Deerfield attorney, has remained anonymous. The conservancy’s attempts to reach the purchaser, or to seek another buyer, have failed, according to Wyant.
Friedman, 84, who now lives in Skokie and works as a floor salesman in the furniture department at Carson, Pirie Scott, said he was “devastated” when he first learned from a friend of the possible fate of his old home. “I wish I’d never sold it,” he said. “That was the biggest mistake of my life, but the kids were gone and my wife (Esther), who died five years ago, had determined that it was more house than we needed.”
The Bannockburn house, completed in 1960, was the product of much correspondence between Friedman and Wright. Their one and only meeting, which took place in 1959 after Wright agreed to design the home, remains as vivid to Friedman as the architect’s work.
“It was a rather colorful experience,” he recalls.
The 1950s had been a period of great activity by Wright. Over that decade, he oversaw such projects as the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., which was his only high-rise; the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas; Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Penn.; and his renowned Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the late ’50s, he made headlines with his plan, never-built, for a mile-high skyscraper in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Friedman, who was living at the time in Chicago, had decided he wanted to build a new home in the suburbs. He purchased a lot in Glencoe, but was in a quandary about how the house should look.
Wright kind of design
“It was around 1957 or 1958 and I had spent a lot of time driving around the suburbs looking at homes,” he said. “I’d always considered myself to have an artistic bent, but I was unhappy with everything I saw. Then, I came across this testimonial to Wright’s work in House Beautiful magazine and I literally drooled at what I saw. I saw exactly the kind of home I wanted and I immediately wrote to him.”
The eccentric architect replied, wanting to know more about Friedman and his needs. Then, after an extended period of correspondence, Wright accepted Friedman as a client — you didn’t hire Frank Lloyd Wright; in effect, he hired you — and a conference was set up to finalize details at Wright’s office in Spring Green, Wis.
Recalls Friedman, “He pulled up in a red Mercedes-Benz and he was wearing a cape, pork-pie hat and string tie. He bowed to me and said, `Mr. Friedland, what do you do?’ He mispronounced my name, but I let it go by.
“I told him I was a regional sales manager for a steel company. He said, `Oh, an enlightened businessman.’ See, he had a tremendous ego. The very fact that I came to him to design my home, in his mind, made me enlightened.
“He told me the kind of house he preferred to design, which I sort of expected. But a lot of people think he dictated everything that went into a house and that is absolute nonsense.
“Wright had me present a list of every little thing that I wanted, and where I wanted it, so that he could design the house accordingly. That’s what he did. He designed the house around my needs. One thing that he absolutely required, he told me, was that he wanted at least an acre to make it work.”
An acre or more
Since the Glencoe lot measured only two-thirds of an acre, Friedman sold it and purchased a plot of slightly more than 10 acres (eventually scaled down over the years to four) in Bannockburn. His dream home, built of cypress and red brick with 850 feet of spectacular blue-green copper facia along the roofline, began rising and was finally ready for occupancy in 1960. There was almost 3,800 square feet of room.
By then, of course, Wright had passed away. But he would have been an unlikely houseguest, in any case.
“I asked Wright when I met him whether he’d eventually like to come down and see the finished product,” Friedman recalls. “He told me that he studied the topographical surveys very closely that I’d sent him and said, `It’s absolutely unnecessary for me to do that, Mr. Friedland, because I’ve seen enough to already know exactly what it will look like.'”
The sprawling one-level design of Wright’s Bannockburn creation emphasized the importance — and size — of the public rooms, which was important to Friedman because of the number of people he wished to entertain. A low brick wall, 85 feet long, divided the living room and the dining and recreation area. The fireplace was 10 feet high and 26 feet wide.
Many features — such as beds, tables, sofa, cabinets, dressers — were built into the walls, some boasting unusual sharp angles that never failed to amaze guests seeing them for the first time. “The house was full of surprises that just sort of led you along,” Friedman says. “You were always wondering what was just around the corner.”
An `organic’ feel
For Adrienne Smith, one of three Friedman children raised in the home and now an artist in upstate New York, the house had an “organic” feel that was most appealing. Entirely enclosed by glass on one side, it afforded up-close and cozy views of the natural prairie and trees surrounding the structure.
“The house was very bright,” Smith says, “and, early in the morning, sometimes you’d wake up and see a deer nuzzling the window or a fox walking across the yard. It made me very aware of nature at an early age.”
She was 12 years old when the family moved into the new home and it was fun, she says, living in a place where “all the time it seemed like there was a busload of people pulling up for a tour.”
Like her father, Smith says she is shocked by the possibility that the house could disappear.
“In Europe,” she noted, “Wright is an honored figure whose work is considered sacred. It’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t get the same treatment in his own country.”
Friedman occasionally drives by the house. “The last time I did,” he says, “I saw that the grass had grown very high and it made my stomach turn. It’s obviously not being cared for and this is probably upsetting the neighbors.”
The lawyer representing the new buyer indicated to The Tribune that his client is wheelchair-bound and has special reason to make the home compatible with his needs. Wyant, speaking for the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, says her organization stands ready to help make changes to accommodate those needs and still uphold the structure’s architectural integrity — something her preservation group has done with other Wright-planned homes.
However, the homebuilding trend in the Bannockburn area is not toward ground-hugging structures such as what Wright wrought. Instead, it is toward multistory structures containing 5,000-10,000 square feet of space — or, in Friedman’s words, “obscenely” more room than any single family requires.
He says it was already a trend he had to buck when he originally built the home. He says that although there were no problems getting the design approved by village officials, it definitely raised eyebrows among neighbors.
“I’m afraid to say they had the same sorts of minds then in Bannockburn that they apparently still have now,” he said. “How you can take a perfectly fine house, from the standpoint of condition let alone the value of it being the last house by Wright before he died, and demolish it is beyond me.”
