The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvre expands yearly as, for example, with these two small books on two of Wright’s smaller Usonian houses. The residential component of Wright’s vision for a redesigned United States of North America, Usonians were built across the country in the last two decades of the architect’s long career. They would be enormously influential on American housing design for the remainder of the twentieth century. The books under review take very different approaches, but share a focus on individual Usonian houses and the story of their making.

The Sidney and Mildred Rosenbaum House was built 1939–40 in Florence, Alabama; the William and Mary Palmer House was built 1951–52 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They share the basic Usonian features—flat roof, prominent chimney, deeply overhung eaves, and open living spaces—and like most Usonians, they were based on a module: rectangular, triangular, or the arc of a circle. The module was inscribed in the concrete floor slab that also contained a grid of hot water pipes that heated the house. The Rosenbaum House was based on a 2×4’ rectangle; the Palmer House on an equilateral triangle with sides of approximately 4’6” in length.

The houses share other design elements as well. They present a relatively closed aspect to the street but open to private gardens via glass walls; they are both one-story structures designed to be managed by a wife without servants. But there the similarities end. Mary Palmer still lives in the house she and her husband commissioned from Wright in 1950. In contrast, the Rosenbaum house barely survived into the 1990s, enduring major structural and systems failures before succumbing to neglect. The two books are thus very different in tone. The Palmer book celebrates a family, and tells a story of owners who spent a lifetime working to create garden landscapes to complement the house. The Rosenbaum book—written by the director of Florence city museums, who was responsible for its restoration—reads as a litany of woes and a timeline of the rebuilding. Thus one is full of promise, the other a catalogue of problems.

Wright worked closely with the Palmers on the design of their Usonian. It was one of the last houses on which he provided such extensive personal oversight. The couple had very strong ideas about how they wanted to live, and Mary Palmer had no qualms about getting Wright to change his initial concept—she even persuaded him to reorient the house on the site, which Grant Hildebrand thinks was a key to the success of the design. Hildebrand, who earlier authored a very interesting study of Wright’s spatial sensibilities (Grant Hildebrand, Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), here discusses the role of music in Wright’s and the Palmers’ lives, and suggests (without pushing the idea too far) that this shared interest went a long way toward cementing a good working relationship between client and architect. Mary Palmer had asked Wright to design “a house in which music in all its complexities is an integral part” (103). Wright, Hildebrand argues, provided a “continuous temporal sequence” similar to musical composition (he analyzes Beethoven’s sonatas on this point) that nonetheless should not be taken as the “key” to the design or to an appreciation of the house. Hildebrand offers reasoned, balanced, and thought-provoking ideas about connecting music and architecture that extend beyond the particulars of the Palmer House.

“Logic does not always mean buildability—it all depends on the logic” (47). Hildebrand makes this point in connection to the slab-on-grade system that Wright specified for all the Usonian houses; but it strikes me as an entry point for an analysis of Wright’s modular geometries and their effect on the Usonian furniture design as well. Seeing photographs of the elaborately folded planes of the living room chairs, the hexagonal end tables, footstools—even beds!—one comes away appreciating the conception of geometry as an ordering device but feeling that Wright carried modularity too far.

History is the product of the historian’s source material, and it is telling that the Palmers’ contractor is a much greater presence in this story than is John Howe, the Taliesin apprentice who acted as Wright’s onsite overseer. Acknowledged graciously, and complimented, Howe is nevertheless given little attention compared to the anecdotes from and about the local builders, with whom the authors obviously spoke at length. On the other hand, the Rosenbaum book is filled with the travails of Burt Goodrich, Wright’s supervising assistant. We do not learn much about the contractors’ experience in building the house, but Goodrich’s difficulties with his automobile and girlfriend are oddly foregrounded, and the reader is left with the distinct impression that it was easier to get hold of his correspondence file than to interview the carpenters.

The Rosenbaum House was one of the earliest Usonians, the Palmer House one of the last. Their contrasting histories suggest the wisdom of not being a pioneer. The chimneys at the Rosenbaum never worked well, and the roofing design was inadequate, with leaks appearing almost immediately. When Mildred Rosenbaum sold her house to the city of Florence in 1999, “years of leaks had damaged the joists, ceilings, walls and portions of the exterior trim. Termites had cored many of the walls” and cantilevers were near collapse (7).

Both houses shared some of the same structural problems. The in-slab heating system in the Rosenbaum failed soon after the house was completed (6), while a similar radiant heating system in the Palmer House survived until 1999, when two-thirds of the piping failed (67). The Palmers had a new fin-tube hot water system installed throughout the house; the Rosenbaums made do with space heaters for decades.

In his introduction to the Rosenbaum book, Donald Lambert makes the keen observation that, “Wright never fully intended to create affordable housing for the middle class so much as to make beautiful housing less expensive” (12). This is borne out by the cost overruns both families faced; these in turn reflect the differing approaches the clients took to Wright. The Rosenbaums paid $55,000 (Wright’s original estimates totaled $22,500) for their 1,500 square-foot house and a 1,100 square-foot addition a few years later. The Palmers paid $60,000 (twice the original estimate) for their 1,700 square-foot house a few years after that. But the Rosenbaum book portrays its protagonists as too much in awe of Wright to demand much satisfaction, and one gets the feeling he did not go out of his way for undemanding clients; the result was a design that required a $500,000 renovation in the 1990s. The Palmer House was designed for clients who shared Wright’s interests, and built to higher standards, so it remains in beautiful condition today.

Rich in details of construction and repair techniques, the Rosenbaum book will be of particular interest to historic preservationists, although the entire story of its restoration may not be found here. William Allen Storrer, in the Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1993), notes that “renovation of the entire structure was completed in 1970 by the Taliesin Associated Architects” (269). Curiously, the authors make no mention of this effort.

The Palmer book—like the Palmers themselves—will appeal to intellectually inclined readers who are interested in the ideas behind Wright’s cypress board and batten walls. Hildebrand discusses the design in terms of music, fractal geometry, light and space, and shows the Palmers’ love of gardening (especially Japanese gardens), which added depth and texture to the overall experience of the house. As the Palmers’ daughter said of her mother: “she realized her nature in the house” (88).

The authors of the Rosenbaum book offer only vague appreciation, and are content to say, “it was fluid and poetic” (36). The fact that it was a “genuine Wright design” seemed sufficient to make it important—while Hildebrand shows us why the Palmer House is a masterpiece.