Wright House in Tallahassee

I am not really a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright - mostly because he understood, perhaps too well, how influential appearances are.  I don't begrudge him his taking advantage of this knowledge - I'm annoyed that people focus on his forms, and don't pay attention to the meta-texts that make his buildings have neat spaces.  And that he experimented too much, and so people think they can copy his stuff and it will last.  It won't.  He didn't have all the answers, people!  Enough ranting.

I heard in graduate school that there was a Wright-designed house in Tallahassee, and I think I know what neighborhood it's in, but I never knew anything else about it.  Lo and behold, it's covered in November's Dwell Magazine.

That plywood bit on the ceiling covers a crack in the roof structure.  The owner, Clifton Lewis, needs financial help to make repairs.  The article has this to say:

The Wright owner who faces the biggest hurdles may be Clifton Lewis, a freethinker who was born into one of Tallahassee's most prominent families.  In the 1940s, she met Wright at a world federalism conference - they were both believers in international government - and she persuaded him to design a house for her young family.  Not long after, Lewis became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Tallahassee.  Her activism led some white customers to abandon her husband's bank, plunging the once-wealthy family into genteel poverty.  The Wright house, still not finished at the time, suffered along with them.

"My mother and father had a certain amount of money and ran out of money at the point when the interior was completed," says Ben, one of the Lewises' four children.
These days, the masonry on the outside of the house is crumbling, and the roof is propped up with two-by-fours.  Then, too, the lack of storage space has led to an almost comical solution: Lewis has strung up clotheslines across the double-height living room.  The mess was reported in a story in a Florida newspaper, which Ben says was "heartbreaking" because his morhter had sold a beloved beach house, her only other remaining asset, to raise the money for a roof repair.

"She'd like help with the house, but only with no strings attached," explains Ben.  Lewis hopes that when the house is finished, she can move to a new building across the street, and turn the house into a place where people, inspired by great architecture, will talk about making the world a better place.

If that sounds far-fetched, so was the idea of hiring the great Wright in the first place.  As her daughter Byrd Lewis Mashburn declares, "The house is what she lives for."

Comments

[roof repair]

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[Orlando Roof Repair]

fantastic structural roof design. it's going to look great when its finished.