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http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/10/03/arts/artsspecial/2012100403WRIGHT.html?ref=design
It’s hard to say which is more startling. That a developer in Phoenix could threaten — by Thursday, no less — to knock down a 1952 house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Or that the house has until now slipped under the radar, escaping the attention of most architectural historians, even though it is one of Wright’s great works, a spiral home for his son David.
It’s hard to say which is more startling. That a developer in Phoenix could threaten — by Thursday, no less — to knock down a 1952 house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Or that the house has until now slipped under the radar, escaping the attention of most architectural historians, even though it is one of Wright’s great works, a spiral home for his son David.
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The prospect of its demolition has suddenly galvanized preservationists,
as these crises often belatedly do. They are pursuing a two-pronged
attack, trying to have the building designated a landmark, although in
Arizona, where private property rights are strong, landmark status is
really just a stay of execution, limited to three years. After that the
owner is free to tear down the place. So the other prong of attack is to
find some preservation-minded angel with deep pockets who will buy it
from the developer. Preferably today.
Wright designed this 2,500-square-foot concrete home for David and his
wife, Gladys, on a desert site facing north toward Camelback Mountain in
a neighborhood called Arcadia.
The area, known since the 1920s for its citrus groves and romantic
getaway resorts among old Spanish colonial and adobe revival homes, was
increasingly subdivided after the war and filled with new,
custom-designed ranch houses.
But the Wright lot still had its orange trees. The architect took
advantage of them by raising his son’s house on columns, to provide
views over the orchard. It was a touch that partly echoed Le Corbusier’s
famous Villa Savoye in France; at the same time Wright chose a spiral design akin to the Guggenheim Museum’s. He had drawn plans for the Guggenheim by then, but it was still some years away from construction.
The David Wright house
is the Guggenheim’s prodigal son, except that unlike the museum, whose
interior creates a vertical streetscape while turning its back on the
city, David’s house was configured by Wright to look both inward and
out. It twists around a central courtyard, a Pompeian oasis to which he
gave a plunge pool and shade garden, but also faces onto the surrounding
desert, with sweeping views of the mountain.
The house is coiled, animated, like a rattlesnake, yet flowing and open.
A spiral entrance ramp gives it a processional grandeur out of
proportion to its size — especially nowadays, when many of the old ranch
homes in Arcadia have been torn down to make way for McMansions that
dwarf Wright’s house. The developer’s plan for the site involves
subdividing the lot and erecting two or more new houses.
“There is no house quite like this one, with its mythic content,” is how
Neil Levine, the architectural historian and Wright scholar, put it the
other day. “Everything is custom designed so that the house is, more
than most of Wright’s later buildings, a complete work of art.”
How could such a house go largely unnoticed? David and Gladys Wright
didn’t want their home in a residential neighborhood to be a museum, and
so not many architectural scholars or even Wright experts ever got
inside it, to see the rug and chairs and mahogany woodwork that Wright
devised, even though it is only about a dozen miles from Taliesen West,
the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
David died in 1997 at 102; Gladys in 2008, at 104, leaving the house, no
longer in mint condition, to granddaughters who sold it to a buyer
promising to fix it up and live in it. But the buyer did neither, and
the place, on its 2.2-acre lot, went back on the market. This June a
developer called 8081 Meridian bought it.
“The place was uninhabited for four years and it had never been placed
on a watch list,” explained John Hoffman, managing partner of 8081 Meridian,
when I called him on Monday. “We didn’t close on the property until the
city approved a lot split. The line through the property went through
one end of the house, so it was an indirect approval for demolition.”
That was his interpretation, although demolition requires separate city
approval, and in any case, before the sale closed, the landmark process
was already under way. It is scheduled to reach the City Council on Nov.
7. Though not written into the city ordinance,
it has for several years been city policy in Phoenix to seek owner
consent before designating any building for historic preservation, and
because 8081 Meridian never gave its consent, and has no intention of
doing so, Mr. Hoffman says he rejects the landmark process outright.
The threatened deadline derives from a demolition permit that a staff
member in the city development office issued to him and his partner,
Steve Sells, despite the fact that other city officials had flagged the
house to ensure no permit would be issued.
Planning authorities learned of the permit and voided it after the
demolition company the developer had hired, concerned about razing a
Wright house, called to check that the permit was valid. Mr. Hoffman
maintains that the permit is legal and that it expires on Thursday.
It may be that the demolition threat is being used as leverage to drive
up the price to be paid by preservationists. Having just bought the
house for $1.8 million, Mr. Hoffman said 8081 Meridian is looking to
clear $2.2 million from any sale, and has so far rejected a cash offer
floated several weeks ago from an anonymous, out-of-state Wright lover.
This prospective buyer promised a little over $2 million, according to
the realtor representing him.
Underlying the brouhaha is a proposition Arizona voters passed in 2006,
Prop 207, which calls for the compensation of owners any time the
government adopts some regulation that affects the value of their
property. No money has been paid so far, but the law has clearly had its
desired effect, making cities like Phoenix fearful of changing their
regulations and spooking city lawyers and historic preservationists.
The bottom line, for economic as well as cultural reasons, should of
course be protecting both owners and society. Toothless though a
three-year landmark delay may seem, it’s an eternity in pro-development
Arizona, and it can work. Various owners in the Woodland Historic District
in Phoenix, near the State Capitol, were dissuaded, during just such a
reprieve, from tearing down early-20th-century bungalows, and with some
city historic preservation bond money, have begun a restoration that has
revitalized the area.
Years ago Phoenix prevented the owner of El Encanto Apartments,
a conspicuous Spanish Colonial low-rise, from tearing it down to put up
a high-rise, and the stay helped shift the building into the hands of a
preservation-minded developer.
As for sparing the David and Gladys Wright house, you don’t have to be a
preservationist to believe that a major work by one of the greatest
American architects has a value to posterity, as well as to its Arcadia
neighbors, that competes with the interests of developers, who are
already well placed to make a healthy profit after just a few months’
investment. In retrospect, steps should have been taken long ago, by
Wright’s heirs and by city officials, to avoid all this.
But what’s now a cliffhanger is also a no-brainer.
