Frank Lloyd Wright’s Largely Forgotten Forays Into Prefab Housing
If you were plotting a Frank Lloyd Wright tour of American architecture, the 2700 block of West Burnham Street in Milwaukee might not make your itinerary. But on this quiet street, you can find evidence of the architect’s career-long obsession with creating affordable, sometimes prefabricated, housing for the masses.
Six of Frank Lloyd Wright’s early-20th-century American System-Built Homes—four duplexes and two bungalows—are still standing in the Burnham Park neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The structures were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
Constructed between 1915 and 1916 with precut factory lumber that was shipped for on-site assembly to save waste and labor costs, the six houses on this block—four two-apartment duplexes and two bungalows—were Wright’s first attempts at attainable architecture. They were also the prototypes for his series of standardized houses known as the American System-Built Homes.
Wright did more sketches for this project than any other in his career, producing over 960 drawings with upward of 30 unit variations from 1911 to 1917. According to Dale Gyure, an architecture professor and Wright scholar, the American System-Built Homes embody ideas from Wright’s 1901 speech The Art and Craft of the Machine, in which the architect spoke of building affordable housing by letting machines free humans for more high-level design.
New York City boasts only two Frank Lloyd Wright structures: the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, and this 1959 prefab on Staten Island. The Cass House (also known as Crimson Beech) was built according to Wright’s Prefab No.1 plan for Marshall Erdman & Associates. Wright reportedly planned to tour the house, but became ill and died before his scheduled arrival.
Wright teamed up with Milwaukee real estate developer Arthur L. Richards to sell the homes via a dealership model, offering small units for $2,750-$3,500, with large ones ranging from $5,000-$100,000. But the combination of a sluggish economy and the entry of the United States into World War I effectively scuttled the project. Only about 20 were ever built.
The Usonian-style Socrates Zaferiou House is one nine prefab homes Wright designed for builder Marshall Erdman in the 1950s as part of his Clausland Mountain Park development in Blauvelt, New York. The single-story, L-shaped residence was built in the early ’60s, shortly after Wright’s death.
Still, over the course of his career, Wright revisited similar concepts often. His Usonian homes, which were built starting in the late 1930s, represent a more ambitious attempt at a design system that could be replicated, with concrete slabs embedded with piping for radiant heating and carports instead of garages. Writing in Architectural Forum in 1938, Wright identified the challenge of building "the house of moderate cost" as "not only America’s major architectural problem, but the problem most difficult to her major architects." He continued: "I would rather solve it with satisfaction to myself…than build anything I can think of."
The Walter and Mary Ellen Rudin House is a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed prefab building in Madison, Wisconsin. Designed in 1957 and completed two years later, it is the first of the only two examples of the second type (known as Prefab No.2) of the Erdman prefab houses.
These projects led to the Erdman homes, a series of three prefabricated structures that Wright designed for Marshall Erdman, a builder who had collaborated with Wright on the 1951 Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin. Each "set" would come with all the major pieces needed to assemble a home; the buyer would have to provide the foundation, wiring, and plumbing, and even submit a topographic map for Wright’s approval. The layouts of the two models that were constructed—the L-shaped No. 1 and flat-roofed No. 2—slightly resembled Wright’s Usonian models. "Wright wasn’t trying to change the manufacturing or prefab system," Gyure says. "He was trying to take advantage of it."
Wright’s Prefab No.2 featured an attached carport and a double-height living room with a wall of windows. His third design for the Erdman prefab houses was never constructed.
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