The Life & Work of Frank Lloyd Wright
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Kentuck Knob in Stewart Township, PA
houses such as the Gregor S. and Elizabeth B. Affleck House (1941) in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which projects over a ravine; and the Hanna-Honeycomb House (1937) in Palo Alto, California, which features a honeycomb planning grid. Gordon House, completed in 1963, was Wright’s last Usonian design. His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that was a feature of countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright, including open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization and efficiency in building. ‘Usonian’ is a term usually referring to a group of approximately sixty middle-income
family homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright beginning in 1936 with the Jacobs House. The “Usonian Homes” were typically small, singlestory dwellings without a garage or much storage, L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace on odd (and cheap) lots, with native materials, flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and natural cooling, natural lighting with clerestory windows, and radiant-floor heating. A strong visual connection between the interior and exterior spaces is an important characteristic of all Usonian homes. The Usonian design is considered among the aesthetic origins of the popular “ranch” tract home popular in the American west of the 1950s.