Hanna House - Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House in San Francisco was voted by the AIA as one Wright's seventeen most treasured buildings -- known as the 'Honeycomb House' because of its hexagonal module, which Wright used to nestle the house around the hill, and to make movement within the house easier, relaxed and more 'human.'

In the Architectural Record Wright described the hexagonal module as "a pattern more natural to human movement.

The house is also a prime example of the vertical layering of Wright's interiors -- horizontal expanse, then ceiling decks, then roof and clerestory windows above -- and his idea that a house should be like a living thing, changing over time as the circumstances of its occupants changed.

The light-weight ply partitioning (right, click to enlarge) and the unifying hexagonal module made renovations, not so much painless, but at least easy to unify thematically, as two incarnations of the floor plan (left) indicates. The crucial thing in building in the expectation of change is that the essence of architecture is the space within, space for life, and as our lives change so too should our shelter. Says Wright,

"What is architecture anyway? Is it the vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying taste of the various lords of mankind? I think not.
"No, I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived. So architecture I know to be a Great Spirit....
"Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is really architecture."