Didn’t post my infographics so might as well do it now:

This infographic I created shows that although there was stalled productivity in the 1920s and the 1930s, the innovations Wright was able to design during that time made him wildly successful and in high demand once people could begin to afford to commission buildings again.

The second infographic I made shows the number of Usonian homes per state to complement the map I made in case you can’t quite tell the location of each pin.

In order to preserve my website I need to ensure that both my email address linked to the account and my password for my account are strong enough to prevent either from being hacked. While that scenario is in some ways within my control, there are other scenarios that are not. For example, many of my graphics are screenshots and so they aren’t likely to be corrupted in any way, but most of them are screenshots that link back to an interactive display of some sort. Should the website hosting those interactive maps disappear or simply stop hosting my interactive maps and graphs I would have broken links on my website and no way to solve it. Should wordpress crash and lose everything, however, I have all of my links, posts, and images saved and all may be re-uploaded with ease.

Here it is!

madelinepicciano.wordpress.com

Following the stock market crash on October 29, 1929 and coupled with the additional hardships of the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest, the Great Depression was an unprecedented era of severe economic distress that caused widespread unemployment as high as 25%, forced hundreds of thousands of Americans into homelessness, and resulted in the failure of over 5,000 banks. During a financial crisis, especially one of such magnitude, bank lending dries up and the lack of available credit inhibits investment.[1] Yet despite significantly reduced capital for the funding of such projects, a multitude of breakthrough advances in many different fields made the 1930s the most innovative decade of the twentieth century.[1]

One such field that experienced a wealth of progressive ideas during this time was architecture. Although he had no formal training in the department, Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary concepts and designs have elevated him as the most influential American architect of the twentieth century. When commissions became scarce during the Great Depression, Wright began working on a series of efficient, single-story residences for lower income households . At the time, most architecture in America was simply borrowed from traditional European designs and America was lacking an original style that could accommodate the less formal direction that domestic life was taking, seen in the large, informal living rooms found in many of his homes.[2] Along with a desire to build homes that average, middle class Americans could afford, Wright wanted to build homes possessing a uniquely American style, hence the name “Usonian,” derived from the acronym “United States of North America.”[2]

The first Usonian house was built in 1936 for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs at just over $5000 and it featured many new approaches to construction that would be found in all of the homes to follow including the Pope-Leighey House completed six years later in 1941.[2] Though generally very modest in size, Wright’s use of narrow hallways and low entryways combined with the elevated roof and floor to ceiling glass walls upon entering the room as well as the interior ‘open plan’ which he designed and was the first to implement created a feeling of spaciousness. The homes were L- shaped to fit around a garden terrace, but also to allow in more natural light, something very important to his personal and original design aesthetic, “organic architecture,” which required the harmony of human habitation and the natural world through designs strongly connected and integrated with their surroundings. Wright applied this philosophy to every aspect of the design process down to the building materials and the furniture within the home, which he designed and in built into the actual home.[3]

In addition to the open floor plan, Wright was the first to create a cantilevered carport with no support beams and coined the term ‘carport.’ The carport is certainly an architectural contribution from Wright that we see today.[6] Another common point of modern architecture that he designed and implemented was the radiant heated floor. Each Usonian home is built on a concrete slab foundation, within which are embedded hot water pipes to heat the home when needed.[5] In addition to those innovations, while we would admire more than we would marvel at the dramatic use of windows throughout the home, they are actually a great engineering feat! Those walls entirely made of glass cannot support any of the weight of the house. In the Pope-Leighey House there are multiple walls per room that are unable to support weight and so a lot of work had to go into balancing the building properly. This use of glass walls was coined by Wright as ‘structural glass,’ and really promotes the closeness to nature he constantly strove for.[5]

The Pope-Leighey House cost $7000, a stretch for Loren Pope who made just $50 a week as a copy editor for the Evening Star, but he and his wife agreed that owning such a natural and contemporary home was well worth the cost and begged Wright to build it for them, saying in a letter “Dear Mr. Wright, There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you.”[6] However after just six years of bliss in the home of their dreams it was decided that their growing family simply needed more space and so they moved from their Falls Church residence to a farm in Loudoun county, biding their time until they could afford another Wright home.[6] Unfortunately when they were finally able to commission their second home, Wright was busy with the Guggenheim Museum in New York and did not survive its completion. Having working until the age of 92, however, Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive and lasting legacy despite the years of economic hardship in his prime have immortalized him as the greatest American architect of all time.[4]

Went through a lot of hassle and had to redo the same thing at least four times, but I made an interactive floor plan! Unfortunately the program I used would only allow me to use three markers, but I think I highlighted the important parts well enough.  Enjoy!

While I had obviously heard of a carport before, not being someone with much interest in architecture meant I was not really familiar with some of Wright’s other contributions.  Though I did not doubt their significance given his brilliance, when while showing my mom some elements of my final project, I was surprised she said to me “Radiant floors? He designed those?” Somewhat puzzled as to why radiant floors of all things would pique my mother’s interest I responded “yeah, he put them in all of the Usonian homes since they were only one level.” She continued to look at my graphs and charts before casually adding “you know your grandparent’s have a radiant floor system in their house, right?” Ha! I did not, actually. I did not expect to have any sort of personal connection with Frank Lloyd Wright or his designs, regardless of how influential or prevalent to modern day.  This was a very cool realization.

After being unable to simply embed my wordle due to JSTOR’s incompatible interface and encountering the similar problem of being unable to simply share the Ngram I created with my final project’s website, I have gone through the tedious steps to screenshot both of these visuals, crop them, add a nice frame to them because why not, post them onto some image hosting site, and then properly code them as image hyperlinks so that they may be both viewed on my website, but also expanded.  The wordle I created was derived from the article Wright’s Small Rectangular Houses: His Structure of the Forties and Fifties by Bernard Pyron in the Art Journal publication.  This particular article details not just Wright’s career, but specifically his desire to design homes for middle class Americans and the stylistic and structural elements found in these highly efficient, more affordable designer homes.

The second text mining application is an Ngram of words coined by Wright during his career to describe some of the more dominant innovations found specifically in the Usonian homes.  What it shows is that with the exception of ‘Organic Architecture,” his aesthetic philosophy, these terms represent significant contributions to modern architecture and can still be found in houses today despite a period of severe economic downturn.

PowerPoint presentation is completed after a bit of a delay trying to redefine my overall point.  Hope its worth the wait:  Frank Lloyd wright’s

I have finally mapped (at least most of) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses across the United States.  The overlay is one of the few maps I could find that visually displays the severity of the economic decline regionally during the Great Depression.  After becoming the wildly successful genius behind Fallingwater in the throes of the Great Depression, Wright began to work on unique and well-designed homes that the average, middle-class American could afford.  What I found with the creation of my map was that the bulk of the single family houses he designed were located in the areas of the United States that were only in the mid-range of economic decline.  Additional research shows that the vast majority of those home owners were in fact middle to even lower-middle class and so we are able to see in multiple ways that Wright was able to attract and satisfy his target market.

Economic Downturn During the Great Depression and Usonian House Locations

The irony of it all is that his lower income homes now sell for millions!

Our class readings for Thursday consisted of:

• Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History
• Ted Nelson’s “Complex Information Processing”
• And the YouTube video –History of the Internet

As the title states, the video describes the history of the web beginning with the functions and processing abilities of the very first computers before any sort of network connection even existed.  Programming was done with punch cards like the ones handed out in class and took a tremendous amount of trial and error as well as time.  During the Cold War, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) planned a large scale computer network to disintermediate communication and prevent the Soviet’s from advancing more quickly, this became the ARPANET.  Three other concepts key to the internet also emerged at this time:

1. The American RAND Corporation developed the concept of a military network
2. The British NPL (National Physical Laboratory) developed the concept of a commercial network
3. The French CYCLADES (Institut de Recherche d’Informatique et d’Automatique) developed the concept of a scientific network

It is interesting to consider that despite how basic these primitive networks were, the essential content of the internet remains the same: Military material, Commercial material, and Educational material.  It is also interesting to consider that without the fear of the Soviets during the Cold War, the push to create the technology that is now fully integrated into almost every aspect of life would not have been so dire.  I can only wonder where technology would be now without the initial need for an alternative communication network in the event of a nuclear attack.

Continuing the development of my final project topic, I believe I have narrowed down my question to discovering exactly how innovative the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright in the Usonian Homes such as the Pope-Leighey House were and how significantly they have impacted modern designs.