Small as the house was—fifteen hundred square feet in all—the many
ingenuities of its plan made it seem at least twice that size. In the shape
of an L, with the base of the L parallel to the street and embracing the
living room, workroom, bathroom, and entry, and the upright of the L
paralleling the northern boundary of the property and embracing the three
bedrooms, it presented a harsh, even a forbidding, aspect to the street,
having only a narrow band of clerestory windows at the point where the
blank house wall and the overhang of the flat roof met. The family car
would occupy most of what in conventional houses would be a front porch,
while the front door, being set at right angles to the street, was nearly
invisible. If the street facade of the house was uninviting (and must have
distressed the _]acobses’ neighbors, who were used to glancing into one
another’s windows), the inner facade was an unexpected and delightful
expanse of high glass doors, opening from the living room onto a sunny
eastern terrace; the bedrooms looked south through matching high glass
doors and shared with the living room a view of the ample garden.
The house gained an almost instant fame, in part because of the public-
ity aroused by its low cost (emerging from the Great Depression, hundreds
of thousands of Americans were eager to possess a house in the five-
thousand-dollar range), in part because of its unprecedentedly open design,
and in part because of the curious nature of its construction—nobody
had ever tried living on a slab before or had ever tried cooking in something
called a workspace, lit from above and scarcely to be distinguished from
the adjacent dining space. It was all very odd and perhaps, given the
past history of the architect who had designed it, faintly scandalous; so
great was the number of people who came to peer and poke about and
shake their heads as the house went up that, once the Jacobses had moved
in, they decided to charge admission to the premises: twenty—five cents.
&&&&&&&&&&&
One might quarrel with Wright and say of the Jacobs house that it
was Usonia Three, having been preceded by houses designed in the Usonian
vein for the Hoult family, in Wichita, Kansas, in 1935, and for the Lusk
family, in Huron, South Dakota, later in the same year. Both houses, which
never got beyond the planning stage, owed a good deal to the Willey
house of 1934, which must then be categorized as ur-llsonlan, OT even
Premature Usonian. All such labels, creating boundaries in a process that
by its nature is without boundaries, are nonsensical; nevertheless, Wright
himself was willing to establish periods and affix dates-—on occasion, to
alter dates—whenever it served a sufficiently advantageous (and sufficiently
devious) purpose. He invented the term Prairie House foria kind Of house
that had little to do with the prairie and much to do with the suburbs,
and he invented the term Usonian in order to‘ impose an American name
on a style of house having far more to do with the structures that Mies
van der Rohe and other architects in Middle Europe were designing than
it did with the design of houses in Middle America.
As we have seen, Wright plucked the word Usonia from some as yet
unidentified source; what matters is not where the word came from but
the weight that Wright meant it to carry, and why. He was always placing
his literary and oratorical gifts at the service of his profession; often, he
wrote things and said things that were mere repetitious bombast and yet
they were the means—clumsy, indirect, too high in pitch—that enabled
him to accomplish something of value in his career. “Usonian” staked a
claim on behalf of the work that was far more than a mask for whatever
foreign strains may have entered into it. So in its time did “Broadacre
City,” which if Wright hadn’t stamped it as his own would have struck us
as a wisecracking book-title by the sour likes of Sinclair Lewis.
Throughout his entire career, Wright was determined to place an
authentic American stamp upon his work. Drawing inspiration, as well as
certain major principles of scale and volume, from a score of foreign sources
(Austria, Scotland, japan, Mexico), he sedulously covered his tracks with
allusions to an American past drawn not from history—Wright was shaky
on American history——but from American letters.
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