Clarke House |
Suffield, Connecticut 1947
In 1946, Marian and Richard Clarke moved to Suffield, Connecticut, sixteen miles north of Hartford and ten miles south of Springfield, Massachusetts, and rented a farmhouse just outside the town center. Richard Clarke had left a position teaching chemistry at Connecticut Wesleyan to take another job as director of the Ohio Wesleyan University Ordnance Research Laboratory (ORDWES), an aerial reconnaissance nighttime photography development program at Bradley Field, later Bradley Airport. Suffield was three miles away. There was a post-war housing shortage, and the Clarkes had the idea to buy and renovate the barn next to them as a multiple unit apartment building. They also bought a nearby twenty-acre piece of farmland, which they planned to subdivide, keeping one parcel where they would build a house for themselves.
They had simple space requirements: storage for a large collection of LP records and books, space to enjoy these, a fireplace, some utility/workspace, a guest bedroom. They did not plan to have children. Richard Clarke was content to lead a somewhat hermetic existence of reading and listening to classical music. Marian was more outgoing and liked to both cook and entertain.
She invited her brother, Robert May, to come live with them while undertaking the design work. Decommissioned the previous year as an officer in the Navy, which he had joined in 1942 following a three year apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert May had just completed a brief architectural refresher program at his Alma mater, the University of Michigan, and was now a free agent seeking his first work as a self-employed architect. Ultimately, the Clarkes were unable to acquire a loan for the barn renovation, but plans for their house went ahead when Robert May arrived in the fall of 1946. Ground was broken in 1947 and the house was completed in 1948.
In 1949, Progressive Architecture gave the house an honorable mention in its awards for the previous year. Honorable mentions also went to Richard Neutra, Ralph Twitchell, and Paul Rudolph. Another house was almost concurrently designed and built for another young couple, Clint and Ellie Ford, on one of the newly surveyed lots (Clint had been recently hired by Richard Clarke to work at ORDWES). Although twenty-three lots in all were laid out, well under half had been built on as recently as the 1970’s, thus allowing the site a rural flavor for many years thereafter, even as Suffield increasingly became a bedroom town for Hartford.
The Clarkes’ site was given the name “Quonnock Hollow,” which never quite stuck, becoming known only as “the Clarke house.” It was built on the central lot, at the crest of the southwestern end of a shallow natural bowl. While not the biggest lot, that was purchased by the Fords, it offered views in all directions, especially to distant tobacco fields with their distinctive slat-sided drying barns and dairy cow pastures. However, perhaps an even greater asset to this site was the pair of two hundred year old white oak trees, one quite spectacular, both visible from good distances on that rolling land. The architect sited the house just northeast of the two oaks, with a terrace reaching out between them. The oaks’ massive girths stood only twenty feet from the house’s deeply overhanging eaves and their foliage provided considerable shade from the summer sun’s arc from south to west.
The Clarke house, 1460 square feet of living space with a two-vehicle carport, was designed on a four-foot square grid. Bumping out from what is essentially a long rectangular form, are the orthogonal dining room alcove on the southwestern side and living room reading nook on the northwestern side, and the diagonally oriented carport to the northeast and living room wall to the south. These elements all add both volume and visual interest to the house’s long main axis, along which runs a corridor connecting the living and bedroom wings.
However, it is the disposition of the diagonals that helped make the house such a vibrant space to inhabit and to view externally. At their intersections with or near the alcoves, masonry hearth and chimney, masonry structural piers, flat and low-pitched gable roofs, clerestories and soffits provide light and shadow to animate the details. While these effects have always been clear to me, the underlying source and design logic of the diagonal elements only became apparent to me when viewing the final site plan, which shows the house’s overall form in the context of a never completed landscaping scheme. The house’s form interlocked with a hexagonal paved terrace, which, in turn, was surrounded by a lawn given an outwardly hexagonal form by the boundaries of a raspberry patch, and formal perennial border, the latter dissolving into more informally placed bushes and ground cover to the northwest. The house, terrace, lawn and boundary were intended to be integral, with each element sharing definition, each providing enclosure, at the same time trying to reach out and relate to the open terrain surrounding the house on all sides.
Although standing alone in the fields, the house shares its aloneness with the great oaks, and therefore always seemed a part of the land, always seemed whole. One might conclude that the total house/landscaping design scheme was more formalistic than essential, that if, in its incomplete state the absence of its defining elements went unmissed, then perhaps they were not that necessary to begin with.
I don’t know if either Marian Clarke or Robert May actively bemoaned the incomplete nature of the total design. I suspect not, at least in her case. She divorced Richard Clarke several years after the house was completed, moved away in the early sixties, and in the intervening years her own career became a central focus of her life.
Certainly, the architect wrestled with these issues. Two earlier schemes survive, and they indicate an increasing effort to both relate the plan to its envelope and roof, and to its site. All of the schemes were based on the four-foot grid. While no elevations exist for the first scheme, its rooflines are clearly drawn on the plan. The final built version strikes me as evidence that the roof lines were as important to the architect as was the building’s footprint - its elevations and sections, as with the drawn elevations and sections of the second scheme, indicated his intention of bringing the sun’s full path of light into the interior in winter while providing deep shade but diffuse northern light in the summer, maintaining a distinctly low profile to the ground plane outside, and, inside, accentuating the building’s roof valley intersections, clerestories, beams and supports. In all of the schemes, the living and sleeping areas are grouped around a central core of a combination fireplace and utility room. In scheme #1, simple hipped roofs link together the living room and satellite music and workspace areas, the bedroom wing, and a carport. Bedrooms are situated on the east side of the house, the living spaces face south and west, and the carport faces north. Neither oak tree is located on the plan.
In scheme #2, the trees are very prominent, in fact, the entire building has rotated its orientation so that living and adjacent exterior spaces face southwest and literally embrace one of the oaks. The built design retains this orientation, but elongates the parti along the single long axis. While scheme #2 is considerably more substantial than scheme #1, with retaining walls, a pergola which wraps around the house (and one of the oaks) and terminates in a 180 degree landscaped arc, it seems to have traded these highly developed and expensive exterior spaces for the promise of numerous living areas dotted in as “future” spaces.
In both earlier schemes what is presumably a kitchen is, in fact, denoted as a “work area.” Two roof plans are considered in scheme #2. In one elevation, the roof is a simple long, low-pitched gable, while in the other it is considerably more sectional, with prow-like diagonal gable roof ends appearing. Apparently, the architect liked them visually. Maybe, however, he was concerned that they were contrived, or affected, neither served a purpose nor related sufficiently to the pergola and hemispherical terrace end, or perhaps that they too closely mimicked some of Mr. Wright’s well-known rooflines. In any case, they remained in the final built scheme. This time, however, they more effectively echoed, indeed literally paralleled the landscaped forms of which they were a part.
Materials used were relatively simple, but the methods were neither inexpensive nor conventional for the time. The entire house rested on an integrally golden-yellow colored concrete floor slab with in-floor radiant heat distribution. Masonry load bearing walls were of in-place formed double shell insulated cinder concrete. Cinders were cheap and widely available at the end of World War II and their deep gray color and the concrete’s rough texture provides perhaps the most predominant feature to both the house’s interior and exterior. Externally, its color and texture provides a neutral base for the horizontals of the Wright inspired Cherokee red rake boards. Inside, it also contrasts with the reflective surfaces of the house’s extensive birch and maple casework and built-in furniture. The cinder block walls are exposed throughout the house, with the exceptions of pine tongue-and-groove wainscoting in the master bedroom and plastered walls in the guest and utility rooms. The large south and west facing windows are double-glazed. The ceiling is constructed of the highly textured “tectum” paneling above exposed doubled 2 x 6 rafter beams.
Compression and release, that favored design strategy of Mr. Wright, was used thoroughly in this essentially Usonian type of house. By carefully interrelating the house’s interior spaces to the low flat roofed sections and long axial gable, of which one plane was extended where the house widens at the living room, the architect created a series of interior rooms that flow into each other in plan, while volumetrically breathing in and out to form a range of heights and changing sense of envelopment. For example, the living room ridge peaks at 12’, while the adjacent dining alcove and built-in reading nook are an intimate 7’-1”, each with soffit light diffuser panels. The partition between kitchen and corridor stops short of a typical ceiling intersection. On the approach to the living room, upon entering the house from the north side shadows of the carport, one enters the corridor, 7’-6” high and 5”-6” wide at that intersection. Turning left toward the living room, the corridor immediately shrinks to an almost claustrophobic 3’ width with diffuse northern light filtering down from a diagonal clerestory overhead, the only illumination in this relatively dim interior space. However, visible ahead is the large window facing south out onto the great oak tree and fields beyond. Coming into the living room one experiences the tremendous release of its full height, and the play of direct and ambient light from numerous levels on warm and rough-hewn surfaces.
The honorable mention for Robert May’s Clarke house design awarded by Progressive Architecture in their June 1949 issue had a significant impact on both his career and architecture. First, it was good publicity and led to a series of house commissions among the faculty at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. These were relatively young and progressive clients, who, like the architect, were just out of the war themselves and eligible for zero-interest GI Bill mortgages. Second, although the critique rendered by the Progressive Architecture jury was largely complimentary, it also included a stinging comment that had a lasting effect on the architect and seemed to contribute to a major shift in his design work. Third, there was also the fact that May’s fellow prizewinners were more representative of the International Style, then in vogue among America’s corporate and institutional elite. Pietro Belluschi, the winner, and the other honorable mentions, among them Paul Rudolph and Richard Neutra, all carved out successful careers in a style of architectural modernism that ultimately prevailed over the organic work of Frank Lloyd Wright, his adherents, and apprentices like Robert May.
Progressive Architecture’s comments underscored an already emerging reality. In its Report of the Jury the magazine wrote, “the house for Mr. and Mrs. Richard G. Clarke, in Suffield, Connecticut, designed by Robert Carroll May of Hartford, was liked for its siting, for its unusually fine, even poetic plan, and particularly for its use of concrete blocks and exposed framing. Some members found it derivative, but so creatively done within the Usonian framework that it merited a mention.” Over the fifty years of his life that followed this comment, the architect would complain of this last (and, it should be noted, only) criticism which he deemed patently unfair. He would claim that this charge - of being derivative - was sniping at Wright’s apprentices who, for the most part, made no bones about their admiration for the work of Wright and for their apparent willingness to work in the master’s idiom, and shadow. However, the real issue, what rankled May, was that he felt that critics never leveled the same criticism at the growing legion of young architects laboring in the also long shadows of Corbusier, Mies and Gropius. The comment remained a thorn in his boot. Thornier still would have been a gut feeling that modernism, not so-called organic architecture, was ascendant.
Another design in this community, the Ford house, was built contemporaneously with the Clarke house and was materially and formally very similar. May never designed other houses like these. The “derivative” comment, patronizing if nothing else, no doubt contributed to May’s consciously changing his architectural vocabulary soon thereafter. During the war years, he had found the time to work up a variety of designs that exhibited to varying degrees his teacher’s influence but that also contained kernels of different work to follow. The Clarke and Ford houses were the last unabashed embrace of Wright’s idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The ten houses he designed subsequently for the UConn-Storrs faculty between 1951-59 were design exercises in siting, natural light, warm materials and informal open floor plans. Almost all were set in heavily wooded sites located on private roads. Their exterior forms receded in importance. In almost all cases, their roofs were flat, or nearly flattened, reflecting less of the Wrightian preoccupation with roofs, and more of the general concerns of other young post-war American progressive architects who were largely unburdened by architectural manifestoes. Their designs were therefore driven in equal parts by the post-war shortage of materials and a freely borrowed hybrid of Wright’s innovations, internationalist/modernist aesthetics, American informality and regional vernacular.
Robert May’s fellow prize winners in that 1949 issue of Progressive Architecture are in some ways a snapshot of this. In 1949, Paul Rudolph was 31, Robert May was 35, Pietro Belluschi was 50 and Richard Neutra was 57. Neutra was already a well-established internationally known architect and the author of several well regarded books. He freely acknowledged his debt to Adolph Loos and Frank Lloyd Wright while cutting a swath that clearly owed something to but clearly departed from both of them. Rudolph’s practice, on the other hand, was as fledgling as Robert May’s in 1949. Both these men were WWII veterans and Rudolph’s student tenure at Harvard under Gropius almost exactly paralleled Robert May’s apprenticeship under Wright. Belluschi was a good deal older than both May and Rudolph, and though almost as old as Neutra, he was still as yet an unknown in the country at large and was only beginning to hit his stride in a long career that yielded many designs, manifesto free but modernist at heart.
While Robert May’s Clarke house stood apart in the Progressive Architecture awards issue as the only obviously Wrightian building, within several years of its publication the gap between his design aesthetic and theirs had shrunk considerably. The integration of water, natural materials and a deeply sympathetic view of the site in its natural state made Neutra’s designs generally more akin to May’s, despite his frankly modernist inclinations. Belluschi’s designs were also similar, but in the way their modernism was made somehow less emphatic by an interest in the vernacular, in his case represented by northwestern shallow-gabled ranch style houses built of wood that eschewed dramatic form, choosing instead the familiar. However, some differences would never be bridged.
Progressive Architecture’s honorable mention for Rudolph went to one of his first Florida houses, the house for Mrs. Marion Miller in Siesta Key, Florida. The magazine wrote, “It was admired for its sweep, orderliness, and particularly for the repetitive use of the frames, which make the interiors very pleasant.” Maybe the seeds of Rudolph’s brutalist concrete buildings lay in the formalist designs of this and his other early houses. Robert May never found these aspects of his peers’ work appealing. In conversations with the architect over many years, he liked to invoke a comment of his later employer Larry Perkins (Perkins and Will) who said that concrete was a “sullen” material. Perhaps it was the material itself, or perhaps it was that material in the hands of a northeastern academic heritage that rendered it in ways that were intellectually satisfying more than anything. However, to Robert May, so much of the modernist output was in various ways “sullen.” Later in life, he would express a regret that he hadn’t broken away earlier from the Wrightian idiom. On the other hand, his slow veer away from Wright and toward the modernists was tentative, always with a mixture of feelings.
The Storrs houses led to the commission for a new junior-senior high school in Storrs, which was completed in 1956. This in turn led to a commission for a veterinary school of medicine at UConn, an important break-through which went far but then died in rancorous politics in the Connecticut General Assembly. Meanwhile, his work brought him to the attention of the progressive governor of the state at that time, Abe Rubicoff, who wanted him to design a second home. The governor, his wife and Robert May traveled to the Connecticut coast and back one bleak autumn day to survey the site. It was a long day together in a car and, according to May, it was difficult to talk to Mrs. Rubicoff. He did not get the job. The loss of these two potentially very important jobs coincided with a drying up of his residential work in the Storrs-Hartford area. The number of people interested in his kind of design work was limited then, as now, in New England.
Architectural Digest recently noted that flat roofs and crisp geometries took root in southern California in the twenties, thanks in part to European émigrés and the benign climate, long before another generation of artists in exile brought the message to Harvard and the Northeast. Progressive architects enjoyed a heyday in communities as far removed as New Canaan, Connecticut and Sarasota, Florida, as well as Los Angeles. However, the overwhelming majority of Americans clung to what they knew - familiar images of Cape Cod, Mediterranean revival, ranches and Craftsman cottages. Paul Rudolph found a welcoming niche in sunny Florida and Pietro Belluschi and Richard Neutra, both European émigrés, took root in California’s benign climate. Esther McCoy described Neutra’s architecture as, “an eternal search for the southland, cradle of civilization.” Neutra himself has written, “Man loves to immigrate to the south, or to conquer it... like all Nordic barbarians we want to go to sunny Hellas, or to the land where the lemon blooms and no icy storms trouble us.”
Robert May spoke many years later of his possible misstep in going to the northeast, to conservative, Yankee New England, to build a practice. Only hindsight could provide this view, because by most accounts things looked promising at the time. Soon after the Clarke house was completed, he met his future wife there. The Clarkes’ wedding gift to them was one of the Quonnock lots. Robert May designed and built a house there for his growing family, and soon after its completion his mother moved from Ann Arbor into her own small house which he designed for her and which was built on the far side of Quonnock Hollow. From a child’s point of view, this family compound was idyllic, and for May, it had many deep satisfactions. During this same period the Storrs clients did lead to other clients who had enticingly larger budgets, most notably a house for a couple in West Hartford, which was published in Progressive Architecture in February 1954 (Bassevitch house).
Nonetheless, the well ran dry. May did go south to seek work but only as far as New York where he went to work for the firm of Perkins and Will. Then, as now, they were progressive, skilled designers of secondary schools, and he continued in this vein for some years to follow, largely abandoning any further residential work.
This would constitute a third time he had found it necessary to make a break from Frank Lloyd Wright. The first time, having been recently accepted to join the Taliesin Fellowship and then awarded a Booth Fellowship for travel in Europe (1938), he wrote Wright asking for a deferral on his beginning date. Wright, never liking second position wrote back, “Don’t try it. It is up to you of course.” Robert May packed his bags for Europe, but just before leaving received another note from Wright, “... Meantime, if you haven’t spent your money or changed your mind, or changed your money and spent your mind, we’ll be seeing you soon.”
The second break was leaving Taliesin to join the Navy. Wright’s isolationist views were widely known. Both pacifistic and geo-political in their sources, they extended to an admiration for the declamations of famous isolationist Charles Lindbergh. Robert May’s letters home during his apprenticeship between 1939-42 echoed these sentiments precisely until ending abruptly soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and his imminent decision to join up. Perhaps more significant than Frank Lloyd Wright’s views were Olgivanna Wright’s views. Her controlling influence of many social aspects and norms at Taliesin were every bit as important as his in its day-to-day life. Robert May said that he and Olgivanna enjoyed a cordial relationship always, but his decision to leave the fellowship for the war would have been a decision to leave the fold in more ways than one.
Until this fall, I had not seen the Clarke house in 35 years. I had written about it before, however, but not in a critical way: at the beginning of my Boston Architectural College education, my Architectural Forum class was asked to draw from memory a building or interior that had made a deep impression, had influenced us to become architects, and to write about it. I sketched a childhood memory of a deeply shadowed corner of the Clarke house living room, looking up a tall bookcase to a clerestory window under the gable. Light is pouring in and around an oak bough resting on a soffit just below the clerestories. The oak bough, which, as I recall, never let go of its brown leaves, was taken from the 200-year-old tree just outside the wall and gave the impression of still being connected.
I wrote about how the material, spatial, and luminous qualities of this house changed my aesthetic perceptions for life. This didn’t happen, of course, in a vacuum, but rather as a matter of comparison. It was because the Clarke house, and our nearby family’s house, the Ford house, and a constellation of other houses my father designed nearby and elsewhere were so totally different from almost all the houses I have entered since on a routine basis. I grew up feeling almost as though I came from another culture, had inhabited another country before “coming” to America.
Our family left the Suffield compound of family houses when I was young and though we returned to visit my aunt Marian Clarke at her house for several more years, I largely grew up in suburban neighborhoods in New York and Pennsylvania where I moved through realms of Cape Cod, ranch, raised ranch, split level, and colonial style modern builders’ developments. The occasional what-have-you, bungalow, authentic Victorian or Greek revival or colonial, even a 1920’s Tudor, or most rare of all, full blown modernist house, were only outposts, rare specimens to be savored for their many obvious differences, including material and design craftsmanship. As a kid I didn’t define the differences in my father’s houses, but I remember being acutely aware of their net effect. The contrasts in these experiences stimulated confusion, wonder, and puzzlement, nothing unusual there and perhaps a useful experience for any designer who seeks ideas through reconciling influences and polarities.
The Clarke house, a compact “essay” by my father about his sensibilities, ideals and beliefs written in the unmistakable syntax of Frank Lloyd Wright has provided a kind of primer for my design imagination, a kind of Weekly Reader of architectural ideas that I was lucky to receive. To the extent that the personal, subjective experience of life enlivens design, my experience with the Clarke house will always be relevant. Its relevance to the rest of the world is more difficult to ascertain. My visit this fall may have raised more questions than provided answers, and the question of its relevance looms large.
The Clarke house has had one continuous owner since it was purchased in 1965 from Marian Clarke. While apparently much loved and appreciated by the owners, it has been greatly modified in ways that the architect hardly would have approved. The Ford house, on the other hand, passed through a succession of owners, the most recent one beset with numerous personal problems, not least of which were bad tenants. This house has been modified almost beyond recognition and is in a terrible state of disrepair. Foreclosed by a bank this year, it is vacant, falling apart, and for sale. (Its interior, which I did see, still has some semblance of its original intention. I did not get to see the Clarke house interior).
When built in 1947, the Clarke house was surrounded by rolling meadows in three directions, the Ford house on the edge of a wood. Now, thirty-foot tall trees and thickets have sprung up all around the Clarke house, attenuating the house’s intended relationship to its site. Also springing up, all around the perimeter of the lot, are a handful of identical white, vinyl sided “raised ranches.” The architect would be aghast. Keeping the meadows open would have required great will and effort by the current Clarke house owners and, in view of the banality of their surrounding neighbors’ homes, the growth of natural screening is probably desirable. However, how does one interpret the modifications to the Clarke house and the terrible dilapidation of the Ford house? Is there something about the personal, idiosyncratic nature of their design that caused the Clarke house to be altered out of necessity to match more closely the new owner’s personal tastes and requirements, and caused the Ford house simply to be allowed to fall apart? Was it because the personal vision of its architect meant absolutely nothing to the succession of disconnected owners who didn’t value that vision, perhaps even hated the house because of its enigmatic foreignness?
I do know that as recently as the early 1990’s, of the ten houses in Storrs, which my father had designed for an assortment of academics, almost all had their original owners. In an emotional dinner held by a gathering of these owners to honor the architect, they feted him one by one with testimonials of their love for their homes and how changed their lives had been by these homes. Would the Ford house have found more loving stewards if, like the Clarke house, shared values were a part of its history? Would the Ford house have found more loving stewards if it was irrevocably rooted to its site by the presence of not merely one but a pair of two-hundred year old oaks? I don’t know the answers to these questions. However, while I was there in Suffield this fall I was musing: what if, instead of being designs that were deeply personal aesthetic statements driven by ideals, they were instead designs more in the spirit of simple New England vernacular? If that had been the case, would the Clarke house have been so altered (would it have been necessary?) or would the Ford house have been so mistreated? The enlightened community of academics at Storrs probably appreciated vernacular as well, but opted for being “progressive” rather than status quo. In the town of Suffield, in the 1940’s, a rural community of tobacco and dairy farmers, Yankee bluebloods, and a small but politically significant prep school community, the status quo was then, as now, typically opted for in favor of being “progressive”. Vernacular designs, in addition to gaining greater acceptance and value, have the advantage of standing mute: vernacular does not speak of manifesto or aesthetic philosophy, or if it does in the manner of, say, New England Greek Revival, it speaks of manifesto or philosophy long ago accepted into the main fabric. Vernacular is mute because it is generic, locally, or regionally generic, perhaps, but nonetheless generic. Here, I’m using the term generic not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that because the design does not represent a personal vision of design it is more accepting of a range of people’s needs and idiosyncrasies.
Currently occupying a key spot outside the Clarke house living area is a doghouse. The Clarke house is not so precious a design as to disallow a doghouse, but the design definitely isn’t as inclusive as its (older) vernacular farmhouse neighbors where such messy incursions as gabled outbuildings of all sizes are a natural fit. I think it’s a safe bet that neither my father nor my aunt would have found it in their hearts to include a doghouse so near to the building. The Clarke house design is truly poetic, to use Progressive Architecture’s expressive compliment, and like a tightly structured poem there doesn’t seem to be room for change. Any rhythmic misstep, any un-intended dissonance upsets its balance. To be fair, the country is littered with modernist buildings that share this same resistance to ad hoc change. Perhaps there are even more than one or two Neutra, Rudolph, or Belluschi houses with doghouses also taking up residence beside their perfect glass jewel box exteriors.
In 1978, the year he died, Carlo Scarpa wrote, “it was Wright’s work that really ravished me. I had never had an experience like it. It swept me away like a wave - you can see this in some of my designs for houses.” I was too deeply impressed by Wright’s work. Now I don’t like those houses anymore, because I don’t think one should imitate so shamelessly. In our class, instructor Mark Brus alluded to the tragic irrelevance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. Despite its genius and Mozart-like fecundity of ideas and expression, his work seems to resist relevance to our time. Moreover, despite Wright’s unquestioned attachment to his own many writings on organic architecture and his tireless exposition of the ideas and principles they contained, they seemed to resist application in the hands of most other architects.
However, Wright’s work ravished other, gifted architects like Scarpa who weren’t so readily dissuaded from designing buildings in clear homage to him. My father, a very talented but by no means luminary designer, was born only eight years after Scarpa and was so ravished by Wright’s work that he was willing to submit himself to the ego-challenging role of apprentice. While hitching your wagon to a star does have its obvious benefits, for any designer there is also a price to be paid, one that Scarpa, my father and many others (of lesser and greater talent) have appreciated at different points in their careers. My father, like Scarpa, recognized that Wright’s work had swept him “away like a wave,” and he also worked to find other expressive means. However, like Scarpa, and like most of his fellow apprentices in the 1930’s, my father never abandoned a deep reverence for Frank Lloyd Wright as a teacher and an architect.
The work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, and the post-FLW Taliesin Fellowship in general, is mostly thought of as occasionally standing on its own (Fay Jones springs to mind), but largely being derivative, and just as often possibly bad, excessive, or slavishly imitative. On the other hand, it is hardly thought of at all - doomed, despite protestations to the contrary, to irrelevance. I believe that the Clarke house stands on its own as a potent work of art and as soul-nourishing architecture. Its relevance to our time may be small, but in the great scheme of things, I’m not certain if relevance matters much. The work of Mozart, and his generation of gifted and less gifted imitators and generations that followed, represents a tiny share of today’s music market. Britney Spears has a huge share. Is she relevant and Mozart irrelevant? To the extent that architecture is irrelevant to most people, but deeply relevant to a few, small gems like the Clarke house continue to have meaning.
Damon May, Fall 2001
Suffield, Connecticut 1947
In 1946, Marian and Richard Clarke moved to Suffield, Connecticut, sixteen miles north of Hartford and ten miles south of Springfield, Massachusetts, and rented a farmhouse just outside the town center. Richard Clarke had left a position teaching chemistry at Connecticut Wesleyan to take another job as director of the Ohio Wesleyan University Ordnance Research Laboratory (ORDWES), an aerial reconnaissance nighttime photography development program at Bradley Field, later Bradley Airport. Suffield was three miles away. There was a post-war housing shortage, and the Clarkes had the idea to buy and renovate the barn next to them as a multiple unit apartment building. They also bought a nearby twenty-acre piece of farmland, which they planned to subdivide, keeping one parcel where they would build a house for themselves.
They had simple space requirements: storage for a large collection of LP records and books, space to enjoy these, a fireplace, some utility/workspace, a guest bedroom. They did not plan to have children. Richard Clarke was content to lead a somewhat hermetic existence of reading and listening to classical music. Marian was more outgoing and liked to both cook and entertain.
She invited her brother, Robert May, to come live with them while undertaking the design work. Decommissioned the previous year as an officer in the Navy, which he had joined in 1942 following a three year apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert May had just completed a brief architectural refresher program at his Alma mater, the University of Michigan, and was now a free agent seeking his first work as a self-employed architect. Ultimately, the Clarkes were unable to acquire a loan for the barn renovation, but plans for their house went ahead when Robert May arrived in the fall of 1946. Ground was broken in 1947 and the house was completed in 1948.
In 1949, Progressive Architecture gave the house an honorable mention in its awards for the previous year. Honorable mentions also went to Richard Neutra, Ralph Twitchell, and Paul Rudolph. Another house was almost concurrently designed and built for another young couple, Clint and Ellie Ford, on one of the newly surveyed lots (Clint had been recently hired by Richard Clarke to work at ORDWES). Although twenty-three lots in all were laid out, well under half had been built on as recently as the 1970’s, thus allowing the site a rural flavor for many years thereafter, even as Suffield increasingly became a bedroom town for Hartford.
The Clarkes’ site was given the name “Quonnock Hollow,” which never quite stuck, becoming known only as “the Clarke house.” It was built on the central lot, at the crest of the southwestern end of a shallow natural bowl. While not the biggest lot, that was purchased by the Fords, it offered views in all directions, especially to distant tobacco fields with their distinctive slat-sided drying barns and dairy cow pastures. However, perhaps an even greater asset to this site was the pair of two hundred year old white oak trees, one quite spectacular, both visible from good distances on that rolling land. The architect sited the house just northeast of the two oaks, with a terrace reaching out between them. The oaks’ massive girths stood only twenty feet from the house’s deeply overhanging eaves and their foliage provided considerable shade from the summer sun’s arc from south to west.
The Clarke house, 1460 square feet of living space with a two-vehicle carport, was designed on a four-foot square grid. Bumping out from what is essentially a long rectangular form, are the orthogonal dining room alcove on the southwestern side and living room reading nook on the northwestern side, and the diagonally oriented carport to the northeast and living room wall to the south. These elements all add both volume and visual interest to the house’s long main axis, along which runs a corridor connecting the living and bedroom wings.
However, it is the disposition of the diagonals that helped make the house such a vibrant space to inhabit and to view externally. At their intersections with or near the alcoves, masonry hearth and chimney, masonry structural piers, flat and low-pitched gable roofs, clerestories and soffits provide light and shadow to animate the details. While these effects have always been clear to me, the underlying source and design logic of the diagonal elements only became apparent to me when viewing the final site plan, which shows the house’s overall form in the context of a never completed landscaping scheme. The house’s form interlocked with a hexagonal paved terrace, which, in turn, was surrounded by a lawn given an outwardly hexagonal form by the boundaries of a raspberry patch, and formal perennial border, the latter dissolving into more informally placed bushes and ground cover to the northwest. The house, terrace, lawn and boundary were intended to be integral, with each element sharing definition, each providing enclosure, at the same time trying to reach out and relate to the open terrain surrounding the house on all sides.
Although standing alone in the fields, the house shares its aloneness with the great oaks, and therefore always seemed a part of the land, always seemed whole. One might conclude that the total house/landscaping design scheme was more formalistic than essential, that if, in its incomplete state the absence of its defining elements went unmissed, then perhaps they were not that necessary to begin with.
I don’t know if either Marian Clarke or Robert May actively bemoaned the incomplete nature of the total design. I suspect not, at least in her case. She divorced Richard Clarke several years after the house was completed, moved away in the early sixties, and in the intervening years her own career became a central focus of her life.
Certainly, the architect wrestled with these issues. Two earlier schemes survive, and they indicate an increasing effort to both relate the plan to its envelope and roof, and to its site. All of the schemes were based on the four-foot grid. While no elevations exist for the first scheme, its rooflines are clearly drawn on the plan. The final built version strikes me as evidence that the roof lines were as important to the architect as was the building’s footprint - its elevations and sections, as with the drawn elevations and sections of the second scheme, indicated his intention of bringing the sun’s full path of light into the interior in winter while providing deep shade but diffuse northern light in the summer, maintaining a distinctly low profile to the ground plane outside, and, inside, accentuating the building’s roof valley intersections, clerestories, beams and supports. In all of the schemes, the living and sleeping areas are grouped around a central core of a combination fireplace and utility room. In scheme #1, simple hipped roofs link together the living room and satellite music and workspace areas, the bedroom wing, and a carport. Bedrooms are situated on the east side of the house, the living spaces face south and west, and the carport faces north. Neither oak tree is located on the plan.
In scheme #2, the trees are very prominent, in fact, the entire building has rotated its orientation so that living and adjacent exterior spaces face southwest and literally embrace one of the oaks. The built design retains this orientation, but elongates the parti along the single long axis. While scheme #2 is considerably more substantial than scheme #1, with retaining walls, a pergola which wraps around the house (and one of the oaks) and terminates in a 180 degree landscaped arc, it seems to have traded these highly developed and expensive exterior spaces for the promise of numerous living areas dotted in as “future” spaces.
In both earlier schemes what is presumably a kitchen is, in fact, denoted as a “work area.” Two roof plans are considered in scheme #2. In one elevation, the roof is a simple long, low-pitched gable, while in the other it is considerably more sectional, with prow-like diagonal gable roof ends appearing. Apparently, the architect liked them visually. Maybe, however, he was concerned that they were contrived, or affected, neither served a purpose nor related sufficiently to the pergola and hemispherical terrace end, or perhaps that they too closely mimicked some of Mr. Wright’s well-known rooflines. In any case, they remained in the final built scheme. This time, however, they more effectively echoed, indeed literally paralleled the landscaped forms of which they were a part.
Materials used were relatively simple, but the methods were neither inexpensive nor conventional for the time. The entire house rested on an integrally golden-yellow colored concrete floor slab with in-floor radiant heat distribution. Masonry load bearing walls were of in-place formed double shell insulated cinder concrete. Cinders were cheap and widely available at the end of World War II and their deep gray color and the concrete’s rough texture provides perhaps the most predominant feature to both the house’s interior and exterior. Externally, its color and texture provides a neutral base for the horizontals of the Wright inspired Cherokee red rake boards. Inside, it also contrasts with the reflective surfaces of the house’s extensive birch and maple casework and built-in furniture. The cinder block walls are exposed throughout the house, with the exceptions of pine tongue-and-groove wainscoting in the master bedroom and plastered walls in the guest and utility rooms. The large south and west facing windows are double-glazed. The ceiling is constructed of the highly textured “tectum” paneling above exposed doubled 2 x 6 rafter beams.
Compression and release, that favored design strategy of Mr. Wright, was used thoroughly in this essentially Usonian type of house. By carefully interrelating the house’s interior spaces to the low flat roofed sections and long axial gable, of which one plane was extended where the house widens at the living room, the architect created a series of interior rooms that flow into each other in plan, while volumetrically breathing in and out to form a range of heights and changing sense of envelopment. For example, the living room ridge peaks at 12’, while the adjacent dining alcove and built-in reading nook are an intimate 7’-1”, each with soffit light diffuser panels. The partition between kitchen and corridor stops short of a typical ceiling intersection. On the approach to the living room, upon entering the house from the north side shadows of the carport, one enters the corridor, 7’-6” high and 5”-6” wide at that intersection. Turning left toward the living room, the corridor immediately shrinks to an almost claustrophobic 3’ width with diffuse northern light filtering down from a diagonal clerestory overhead, the only illumination in this relatively dim interior space. However, visible ahead is the large window facing south out onto the great oak tree and fields beyond. Coming into the living room one experiences the tremendous release of its full height, and the play of direct and ambient light from numerous levels on warm and rough-hewn surfaces.
The honorable mention for Robert May’s Clarke house design awarded by Progressive Architecture in their June 1949 issue had a significant impact on both his career and architecture. First, it was good publicity and led to a series of house commissions among the faculty at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. These were relatively young and progressive clients, who, like the architect, were just out of the war themselves and eligible for zero-interest GI Bill mortgages. Second, although the critique rendered by the Progressive Architecture jury was largely complimentary, it also included a stinging comment that had a lasting effect on the architect and seemed to contribute to a major shift in his design work. Third, there was also the fact that May’s fellow prizewinners were more representative of the International Style, then in vogue among America’s corporate and institutional elite. Pietro Belluschi, the winner, and the other honorable mentions, among them Paul Rudolph and Richard Neutra, all carved out successful careers in a style of architectural modernism that ultimately prevailed over the organic work of Frank Lloyd Wright, his adherents, and apprentices like Robert May.
Progressive Architecture’s comments underscored an already emerging reality. In its Report of the Jury the magazine wrote, “the house for Mr. and Mrs. Richard G. Clarke, in Suffield, Connecticut, designed by Robert Carroll May of Hartford, was liked for its siting, for its unusually fine, even poetic plan, and particularly for its use of concrete blocks and exposed framing. Some members found it derivative, but so creatively done within the Usonian framework that it merited a mention.” Over the fifty years of his life that followed this comment, the architect would complain of this last (and, it should be noted, only) criticism which he deemed patently unfair. He would claim that this charge - of being derivative - was sniping at Wright’s apprentices who, for the most part, made no bones about their admiration for the work of Wright and for their apparent willingness to work in the master’s idiom, and shadow. However, the real issue, what rankled May, was that he felt that critics never leveled the same criticism at the growing legion of young architects laboring in the also long shadows of Corbusier, Mies and Gropius. The comment remained a thorn in his boot. Thornier still would have been a gut feeling that modernism, not so-called organic architecture, was ascendant.
Another design in this community, the Ford house, was built contemporaneously with the Clarke house and was materially and formally very similar. May never designed other houses like these. The “derivative” comment, patronizing if nothing else, no doubt contributed to May’s consciously changing his architectural vocabulary soon thereafter. During the war years, he had found the time to work up a variety of designs that exhibited to varying degrees his teacher’s influence but that also contained kernels of different work to follow. The Clarke and Ford houses were the last unabashed embrace of Wright’s idiosyncratic vocabulary.
The ten houses he designed subsequently for the UConn-Storrs faculty between 1951-59 were design exercises in siting, natural light, warm materials and informal open floor plans. Almost all were set in heavily wooded sites located on private roads. Their exterior forms receded in importance. In almost all cases, their roofs were flat, or nearly flattened, reflecting less of the Wrightian preoccupation with roofs, and more of the general concerns of other young post-war American progressive architects who were largely unburdened by architectural manifestoes. Their designs were therefore driven in equal parts by the post-war shortage of materials and a freely borrowed hybrid of Wright’s innovations, internationalist/modernist aesthetics, American informality and regional vernacular.
Robert May’s fellow prize winners in that 1949 issue of Progressive Architecture are in some ways a snapshot of this. In 1949, Paul Rudolph was 31, Robert May was 35, Pietro Belluschi was 50 and Richard Neutra was 57. Neutra was already a well-established internationally known architect and the author of several well regarded books. He freely acknowledged his debt to Adolph Loos and Frank Lloyd Wright while cutting a swath that clearly owed something to but clearly departed from both of them. Rudolph’s practice, on the other hand, was as fledgling as Robert May’s in 1949. Both these men were WWII veterans and Rudolph’s student tenure at Harvard under Gropius almost exactly paralleled Robert May’s apprenticeship under Wright. Belluschi was a good deal older than both May and Rudolph, and though almost as old as Neutra, he was still as yet an unknown in the country at large and was only beginning to hit his stride in a long career that yielded many designs, manifesto free but modernist at heart.
While Robert May’s Clarke house stood apart in the Progressive Architecture awards issue as the only obviously Wrightian building, within several years of its publication the gap between his design aesthetic and theirs had shrunk considerably. The integration of water, natural materials and a deeply sympathetic view of the site in its natural state made Neutra’s designs generally more akin to May’s, despite his frankly modernist inclinations. Belluschi’s designs were also similar, but in the way their modernism was made somehow less emphatic by an interest in the vernacular, in his case represented by northwestern shallow-gabled ranch style houses built of wood that eschewed dramatic form, choosing instead the familiar. However, some differences would never be bridged.
Progressive Architecture’s honorable mention for Rudolph went to one of his first Florida houses, the house for Mrs. Marion Miller in Siesta Key, Florida. The magazine wrote, “It was admired for its sweep, orderliness, and particularly for the repetitive use of the frames, which make the interiors very pleasant.” Maybe the seeds of Rudolph’s brutalist concrete buildings lay in the formalist designs of this and his other early houses. Robert May never found these aspects of his peers’ work appealing. In conversations with the architect over many years, he liked to invoke a comment of his later employer Larry Perkins (Perkins and Will) who said that concrete was a “sullen” material. Perhaps it was the material itself, or perhaps it was that material in the hands of a northeastern academic heritage that rendered it in ways that were intellectually satisfying more than anything. However, to Robert May, so much of the modernist output was in various ways “sullen.” Later in life, he would express a regret that he hadn’t broken away earlier from the Wrightian idiom. On the other hand, his slow veer away from Wright and toward the modernists was tentative, always with a mixture of feelings.
The Storrs houses led to the commission for a new junior-senior high school in Storrs, which was completed in 1956. This in turn led to a commission for a veterinary school of medicine at UConn, an important break-through which went far but then died in rancorous politics in the Connecticut General Assembly. Meanwhile, his work brought him to the attention of the progressive governor of the state at that time, Abe Rubicoff, who wanted him to design a second home. The governor, his wife and Robert May traveled to the Connecticut coast and back one bleak autumn day to survey the site. It was a long day together in a car and, according to May, it was difficult to talk to Mrs. Rubicoff. He did not get the job. The loss of these two potentially very important jobs coincided with a drying up of his residential work in the Storrs-Hartford area. The number of people interested in his kind of design work was limited then, as now, in New England.
Architectural Digest recently noted that flat roofs and crisp geometries took root in southern California in the twenties, thanks in part to European émigrés and the benign climate, long before another generation of artists in exile brought the message to Harvard and the Northeast. Progressive architects enjoyed a heyday in communities as far removed as New Canaan, Connecticut and Sarasota, Florida, as well as Los Angeles. However, the overwhelming majority of Americans clung to what they knew - familiar images of Cape Cod, Mediterranean revival, ranches and Craftsman cottages. Paul Rudolph found a welcoming niche in sunny Florida and Pietro Belluschi and Richard Neutra, both European émigrés, took root in California’s benign climate. Esther McCoy described Neutra’s architecture as, “an eternal search for the southland, cradle of civilization.” Neutra himself has written, “Man loves to immigrate to the south, or to conquer it... like all Nordic barbarians we want to go to sunny Hellas, or to the land where the lemon blooms and no icy storms trouble us.”
Robert May spoke many years later of his possible misstep in going to the northeast, to conservative, Yankee New England, to build a practice. Only hindsight could provide this view, because by most accounts things looked promising at the time. Soon after the Clarke house was completed, he met his future wife there. The Clarkes’ wedding gift to them was one of the Quonnock lots. Robert May designed and built a house there for his growing family, and soon after its completion his mother moved from Ann Arbor into her own small house which he designed for her and which was built on the far side of Quonnock Hollow. From a child’s point of view, this family compound was idyllic, and for May, it had many deep satisfactions. During this same period the Storrs clients did lead to other clients who had enticingly larger budgets, most notably a house for a couple in West Hartford, which was published in Progressive Architecture in February 1954 (Bassevitch house).
Nonetheless, the well ran dry. May did go south to seek work but only as far as New York where he went to work for the firm of Perkins and Will. Then, as now, they were progressive, skilled designers of secondary schools, and he continued in this vein for some years to follow, largely abandoning any further residential work.
This would constitute a third time he had found it necessary to make a break from Frank Lloyd Wright. The first time, having been recently accepted to join the Taliesin Fellowship and then awarded a Booth Fellowship for travel in Europe (1938), he wrote Wright asking for a deferral on his beginning date. Wright, never liking second position wrote back, “Don’t try it. It is up to you of course.” Robert May packed his bags for Europe, but just before leaving received another note from Wright, “... Meantime, if you haven’t spent your money or changed your mind, or changed your money and spent your mind, we’ll be seeing you soon.”
The second break was leaving Taliesin to join the Navy. Wright’s isolationist views were widely known. Both pacifistic and geo-political in their sources, they extended to an admiration for the declamations of famous isolationist Charles Lindbergh. Robert May’s letters home during his apprenticeship between 1939-42 echoed these sentiments precisely until ending abruptly soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and his imminent decision to join up. Perhaps more significant than Frank Lloyd Wright’s views were Olgivanna Wright’s views. Her controlling influence of many social aspects and norms at Taliesin were every bit as important as his in its day-to-day life. Robert May said that he and Olgivanna enjoyed a cordial relationship always, but his decision to leave the fellowship for the war would have been a decision to leave the fold in more ways than one.
Until this fall, I had not seen the Clarke house in 35 years. I had written about it before, however, but not in a critical way: at the beginning of my Boston Architectural College education, my Architectural Forum class was asked to draw from memory a building or interior that had made a deep impression, had influenced us to become architects, and to write about it. I sketched a childhood memory of a deeply shadowed corner of the Clarke house living room, looking up a tall bookcase to a clerestory window under the gable. Light is pouring in and around an oak bough resting on a soffit just below the clerestories. The oak bough, which, as I recall, never let go of its brown leaves, was taken from the 200-year-old tree just outside the wall and gave the impression of still being connected.
I wrote about how the material, spatial, and luminous qualities of this house changed my aesthetic perceptions for life. This didn’t happen, of course, in a vacuum, but rather as a matter of comparison. It was because the Clarke house, and our nearby family’s house, the Ford house, and a constellation of other houses my father designed nearby and elsewhere were so totally different from almost all the houses I have entered since on a routine basis. I grew up feeling almost as though I came from another culture, had inhabited another country before “coming” to America.
Our family left the Suffield compound of family houses when I was young and though we returned to visit my aunt Marian Clarke at her house for several more years, I largely grew up in suburban neighborhoods in New York and Pennsylvania where I moved through realms of Cape Cod, ranch, raised ranch, split level, and colonial style modern builders’ developments. The occasional what-have-you, bungalow, authentic Victorian or Greek revival or colonial, even a 1920’s Tudor, or most rare of all, full blown modernist house, were only outposts, rare specimens to be savored for their many obvious differences, including material and design craftsmanship. As a kid I didn’t define the differences in my father’s houses, but I remember being acutely aware of their net effect. The contrasts in these experiences stimulated confusion, wonder, and puzzlement, nothing unusual there and perhaps a useful experience for any designer who seeks ideas through reconciling influences and polarities.
The Clarke house, a compact “essay” by my father about his sensibilities, ideals and beliefs written in the unmistakable syntax of Frank Lloyd Wright has provided a kind of primer for my design imagination, a kind of Weekly Reader of architectural ideas that I was lucky to receive. To the extent that the personal, subjective experience of life enlivens design, my experience with the Clarke house will always be relevant. Its relevance to the rest of the world is more difficult to ascertain. My visit this fall may have raised more questions than provided answers, and the question of its relevance looms large.
The Clarke house has had one continuous owner since it was purchased in 1965 from Marian Clarke. While apparently much loved and appreciated by the owners, it has been greatly modified in ways that the architect hardly would have approved. The Ford house, on the other hand, passed through a succession of owners, the most recent one beset with numerous personal problems, not least of which were bad tenants. This house has been modified almost beyond recognition and is in a terrible state of disrepair. Foreclosed by a bank this year, it is vacant, falling apart, and for sale. (Its interior, which I did see, still has some semblance of its original intention. I did not get to see the Clarke house interior).
When built in 1947, the Clarke house was surrounded by rolling meadows in three directions, the Ford house on the edge of a wood. Now, thirty-foot tall trees and thickets have sprung up all around the Clarke house, attenuating the house’s intended relationship to its site. Also springing up, all around the perimeter of the lot, are a handful of identical white, vinyl sided “raised ranches.” The architect would be aghast. Keeping the meadows open would have required great will and effort by the current Clarke house owners and, in view of the banality of their surrounding neighbors’ homes, the growth of natural screening is probably desirable. However, how does one interpret the modifications to the Clarke house and the terrible dilapidation of the Ford house? Is there something about the personal, idiosyncratic nature of their design that caused the Clarke house to be altered out of necessity to match more closely the new owner’s personal tastes and requirements, and caused the Ford house simply to be allowed to fall apart? Was it because the personal vision of its architect meant absolutely nothing to the succession of disconnected owners who didn’t value that vision, perhaps even hated the house because of its enigmatic foreignness?
I do know that as recently as the early 1990’s, of the ten houses in Storrs, which my father had designed for an assortment of academics, almost all had their original owners. In an emotional dinner held by a gathering of these owners to honor the architect, they feted him one by one with testimonials of their love for their homes and how changed their lives had been by these homes. Would the Ford house have found more loving stewards if, like the Clarke house, shared values were a part of its history? Would the Ford house have found more loving stewards if it was irrevocably rooted to its site by the presence of not merely one but a pair of two-hundred year old oaks? I don’t know the answers to these questions. However, while I was there in Suffield this fall I was musing: what if, instead of being designs that were deeply personal aesthetic statements driven by ideals, they were instead designs more in the spirit of simple New England vernacular? If that had been the case, would the Clarke house have been so altered (would it have been necessary?) or would the Ford house have been so mistreated? The enlightened community of academics at Storrs probably appreciated vernacular as well, but opted for being “progressive” rather than status quo. In the town of Suffield, in the 1940’s, a rural community of tobacco and dairy farmers, Yankee bluebloods, and a small but politically significant prep school community, the status quo was then, as now, typically opted for in favor of being “progressive”. Vernacular designs, in addition to gaining greater acceptance and value, have the advantage of standing mute: vernacular does not speak of manifesto or aesthetic philosophy, or if it does in the manner of, say, New England Greek Revival, it speaks of manifesto or philosophy long ago accepted into the main fabric. Vernacular is mute because it is generic, locally, or regionally generic, perhaps, but nonetheless generic. Here, I’m using the term generic not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that because the design does not represent a personal vision of design it is more accepting of a range of people’s needs and idiosyncrasies.
Currently occupying a key spot outside the Clarke house living area is a doghouse. The Clarke house is not so precious a design as to disallow a doghouse, but the design definitely isn’t as inclusive as its (older) vernacular farmhouse neighbors where such messy incursions as gabled outbuildings of all sizes are a natural fit. I think it’s a safe bet that neither my father nor my aunt would have found it in their hearts to include a doghouse so near to the building. The Clarke house design is truly poetic, to use Progressive Architecture’s expressive compliment, and like a tightly structured poem there doesn’t seem to be room for change. Any rhythmic misstep, any un-intended dissonance upsets its balance. To be fair, the country is littered with modernist buildings that share this same resistance to ad hoc change. Perhaps there are even more than one or two Neutra, Rudolph, or Belluschi houses with doghouses also taking up residence beside their perfect glass jewel box exteriors.
In 1978, the year he died, Carlo Scarpa wrote, “it was Wright’s work that really ravished me. I had never had an experience like it. It swept me away like a wave - you can see this in some of my designs for houses.” I was too deeply impressed by Wright’s work. Now I don’t like those houses anymore, because I don’t think one should imitate so shamelessly. In our class, instructor Mark Brus alluded to the tragic irrelevance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. Despite its genius and Mozart-like fecundity of ideas and expression, his work seems to resist relevance to our time. Moreover, despite Wright’s unquestioned attachment to his own many writings on organic architecture and his tireless exposition of the ideas and principles they contained, they seemed to resist application in the hands of most other architects.
However, Wright’s work ravished other, gifted architects like Scarpa who weren’t so readily dissuaded from designing buildings in clear homage to him. My father, a very talented but by no means luminary designer, was born only eight years after Scarpa and was so ravished by Wright’s work that he was willing to submit himself to the ego-challenging role of apprentice. While hitching your wagon to a star does have its obvious benefits, for any designer there is also a price to be paid, one that Scarpa, my father and many others (of lesser and greater talent) have appreciated at different points in their careers. My father, like Scarpa, recognized that Wright’s work had swept him “away like a wave,” and he also worked to find other expressive means. However, like Scarpa, and like most of his fellow apprentices in the 1930’s, my father never abandoned a deep reverence for Frank Lloyd Wright as a teacher and an architect.
The work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, and the post-FLW Taliesin Fellowship in general, is mostly thought of as occasionally standing on its own (Fay Jones springs to mind), but largely being derivative, and just as often possibly bad, excessive, or slavishly imitative. On the other hand, it is hardly thought of at all - doomed, despite protestations to the contrary, to irrelevance. I believe that the Clarke house stands on its own as a potent work of art and as soul-nourishing architecture. Its relevance to our time may be small, but in the great scheme of things, I’m not certain if relevance matters much. The work of Mozart, and his generation of gifted and less gifted imitators and generations that followed, represents a tiny share of today’s music market. Britney Spears has a huge share. Is she relevant and Mozart irrelevant? To the extent that architecture is irrelevant to most people, but deeply relevant to a few, small gems like the Clarke house continue to have meaning.
Damon May, Fall 2001