Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
You Can Now Build Your Very Own Frank Lloyd Wright House
Quotes:
Lloyd, 60, had been fascinated with Wright since childhood, and he especially liked Wright’s modest Usonian houses, which feature open floor plans, walls of glass and flat roofs with extensive overhangs. But a real Wright house wouldn’t have satisfied Lloyd.
Wright (who died in 1959) rarely made space for TV sets, much less the 85-inch screen that lets Lloyd watch while sitting near his fireplace some 20 feet away. Wright’s rooms were often tiny and had ceilings as low as 7 ½ feet. And Lloyd, a self-described techie, wanted other features that were unknown in Wright’s day, like a smart-home system.
…
So in 2019 he began searching for an architect who would design him a “21st-century Frank Lloyd Wright house.” “They all looked at me like I was crazy,” he says. Then, while googling, he learned that Lindal Cedar Homes had just begun selling kits for houses based on Frank Lloyd Wright designs. “It was exactly what I wanted, tied up with a bow,” he says.
Lindal, established in Canada in 1944 and now based in Seattle, sells kits that allow houses to be built quickly and with minimal waste. Most of its models are rustic-looking, with the titular wood siding, but their post-and-beam construction (picture a grid of large horizontal and vertical supports) makes room for expansive windows.
Notes:
That headline should (as is often the case) include the caveat, “if you have tons of money,” but that aside, I think it’s interesting that this company—which utilizes all sorts of pre-fab housing approaches that I’m a big fan of (in terms of cost, sustainability, and these approaches often being the most logical in terms of building something solid, fast)—is taking this approach, pitching Frank Lloyd Wright remixes, basically, upgrading those designs (some of which are famously beautiful, but unstable, and not exactly built for modern tastes in terms of size, where everything is located, etc) and selling them as fancy kit-buildouts.
Makes me wonder if there are other companies doing similar things for the designs of other well-known architects?
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