Affleck House – Frank Lloyd Wright

Constructed in 1941, just before war hit the US, this house for chemical engineer Gregor Affleck and his family is an early example of Wright’s Usonian Houses—a series of ingenious low-cost homes for thinking Americans. A chemical engineer  who invented a fast-drying automotive paint, Gregor and his wife Elizabeth brought up their family in the house and lived there until they died.

 Pictures and story of the house at the Michigan Modern site. The house is presently being renovated by Lawrence Tech students. Just 220sqm in an L-shaped floor plan (with 200lm of shelves!) and sited in a natural amphitheatre, the house is unusual in Wright’s oeuvre in running against the contours rather than with them.  Anchored at one end visually and structurally, and bearing similarities in its arrangement to his Lloyd Lewis House of the same year, it is built over three levels to cantilever over a ravine.  A loggia (middle photo above) sits over a stream, and divides living and bedroom wings.