The Frank Lloyd Wright George D. Sturges Residence

And yet the Sturges Residence is also much like a powerful machine. The long, horizontal lines of lapped heart redwood cladding on the terrace and exterior walls give the building the look of an aircraft in flight.

The façade represents Wright’s embrace of the popular Streamline Moderne design style of the 1930s—a progressive American complement to the sleek, sculpted lines of the Art Deco movement in France.

Objects and buildings—from cars to cocktail shakers, radios to Radio City Music Hall—were designed with smooth surfaces, horizontal lines, and curved edges that suggest speed, forward motion, agility, and industry. Wright explored the style most extravagantly in the Johnson Wax Headquarters, with its sweeping curvilinear forms inside and out, and walls faced with “Cherokee Red” bricks and raked mortar that accentuate the flowing, low-slung lines of the building.

And surely Wright’s creativity would have been sparked

by George Sturges’ employment with Lockheed. As the architectural historian David Gebhard wrote: the “Sturges House arguably expresses the architect’s most abstract expression of his attachment to the ideals of speed and movement of the 1930s.”

61