Osman: We're looking at an ad from the Sunday Chicago Tribune from July 8th, 1917, actually.
And this is of a house that is, according to the caption, being built.
And then there's a huge headline that says: “You can own an American home.”
So, striking headline.
Osman: I think it's important to think about the fact that “You can own an American home”
is in every newspaper that circulated throughout the Chicago area.
So anybody who picks up that newspaper is being addressed by this sentence but furthermore,
they're being told that they cannot just own an American home but distinctly American architecture
by a distinct American architect.
Probably the most famous architect of that time, 1917, Frank Lloyd Wright.
On the shop drawings and on the folio that was published by the Richards Company, every
drawing that we saw said, usually in the lower right, patent applied for which for us was
a clue that Wright was interested in interfacing with industry and creating intellectual property
from his designs.
And typically a work of art will be copyrighted but an invention is something that you patent.
So it was an interesting idea to think about architecture as something that you could patent.
Skjonsberg: I think the point is since the beginning of his career, Wright has been very
interested in how the machine can be an emancipatory thing.
That this is the forerunner of democracy as he calls it.
So the evils that are experienced through industrial process talking about inequity
in labor or ecological degradation which was already apparent at that time.
So, he was interested in architect as an artist being able to harness this emancipatory quality
of the machine and bring that to everyone.
Everyone who picks up a paper, as it turns out.
Osman: I think what's important about having a factory built house is that in order to
get the common person, as it were, to have access to a house, you'd need to reduce the
cost of the labor that it would take to make that house.
So engaging the factory meant that you could reduce the amount of labor that was on the
job site.
So for Wright, engaging in the factory was really about democratizing access to houses
more generally but also, of course, to his own authored beautiful houses.
Osman: So in the nineteen teens, when he's approached by the Richards Company, the labor
market is very expensive in the U.S. and as a result, engaging in factory labor would
have made sense.
By the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the labor is very cheap.
So Wright moves away from factory made houses precisely because he can make houses as he
always wanted to in the most beautifully crafted way possible with intricate and incredibly
beautiful details.
The difference between the prefabricated house made in the factory and the houses that we're
looking at here is that these houses were made actually by master craftsmen.
The idea was to capitalize on the cheap labor market during the Great Depression and give
access to people who, otherwise, wouldn't have access to Frank Lloyd Wright homes to
a system of houses that he called Usonian which would populate the entire continent
of the United States.
Skjonsberg: So this brings us maybe from the houses that were built in wood to those that
were built in concrete.
The Usonian automatic system which was intended to be built of concrete blocks.
And these were intended to be made by the home builders themselves from the soil coming
from their own property.
So the intention was and several of these houses were made that way that the clients,
usually husband and wife, would work together making the blocks.
They would work together establishing the slab for the house.
These vertical rods were situated at regular intervals at two foot on center around the
perimeter.
The blocks were slid down onto these rods and as subsequent courses were laid up, horizontal
rods were also inserted.
This was a definitely a paradigm shift that it goes away from industrialized products
to locally sourced site specific mode of production.
Skjonsberg: I think Wright was concerned about the role of architecture in society.
He was ambitious that architecture not be lost as a cultural force.
And so his ambition for first systems and then for standards were all in a way were
guided by the ambition that it be something that's a cultural force.
So when you talk about Usonian house, Usonia to him is a term for a culturally mature United
States.
So if you talk about, “you too can own an American home,” in this case, it's talking
about an aspiration for a greater society actually.