American is a tricky word. It can refer to everyone and everything of or pertaining to all the countries of North America — and potentially South America as well — but it’s commonly used with specific regard to the United States. For Frank Lloyd Wright, linguistic as well as architectural perfectionist, this was an untenable state of affairs. To his mind, the newest civilization of the New World, a vast land that offered man the rare chance to remake himself, needed an adjective all its own. And so, repurposing a demonym proposed by geographer James Duff Law in the nineteen-hundreds, Wright began to refer to his not just architectural but also broadly cultural project as Usonian.
Wright completed the first of his so-called “Usonian houses,” the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of the Great Depression. Challenged to “create a decent home for $5,000,” says the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s web site, the architect seized the chance to realize “a new affordable architecture that freed itself from European conventions and responded to the American landscape.”
This first Usonian house and its 60 or so successors “related directly to the earth, unimpeded by a foundation, front porch, protruding chimney, or distracting shrubbery. Glass curtain walls and natural materials like wood, stone and brick further tied the house to its environment.” In Pleasantville, New York, there even exists a Usonia Historic District, three of whose 47 homes were designed by Wright himself.
The BBC Global video at the top of the post offers a tour of one of the Usonia Historic District’s houses led by the sole surviving original owner, the 100-year-old Roland Reisley. The Architectural Digest video above features Reisley’s home as well as the Bertha and Sol Friedman House, which Wright dubbed Toyhill. Both have been kept as adherent as possible to the vision that inspired them, and that was meant to inspire a renaissance in American civilization. The Usonian homes may have fallen short of Wright’s Utopian hopes, but they did have a certain influence on postwar suburb-builders, and have much enriched the lives of their more appreciative inhabitants. The centenarian Reisley credits his startling youthfulness to the man-made and natural beauty of his domestic surroundings — but then, this last of the Usonians also happens to be one of the rare clients who could get along with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Related content:
What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius
How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America
Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932)
How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Introduction
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As a Canadian, I will let you know that although we will answer to being North American, we have never answered to being American.
As as Central American, which in itself is a political description of the southern end of North America AND the central part of _America_ (not “The Americas” or the “American Continent”), there is no need for clarification as to what America is (and it does include all countries from Argentina and Chile all the way north to Canada) — just look at historical maps.
The issue is one of language and human laziness where few are willing to say “The United States of America” — or USA.
Note the USA part, or US in this case, being a critical root to Wright’s Usonian homes (from the “US” monicker).
It is OK to take shortcuts butbwe should also be willing/able to know and understand the nuances.
America, simply put, is the whole continent.
It seems rather like a mistake in editing that the title of this piece, which is about “usonian” houses and describes “utopian homes”. “The Usonian homes may have fallen short of Wright’s Utopian hopes,” you write.
Why you would even think we would accept you I cannot fathom. 🤭
unique architecture
20 sided polygon
pizza house, fascinating
origami furniture
No it doesn’t. Reread it.
“no need to …” clarifies “America”.
Which is what Wright did, as noted at the beginning of the article.
Over here we regard the landmasses as two continents, connected by a land bridge, and call them The Americas, and the bit in the middle as Central America. It works for us.