Frank Lloyd Wright's final house will be built in an unlikely setting – Somerset
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Version 0 of 1. Frank Lloyd Wright may have been dead for over 50 years, but that hasn't stopped the cape-wearing architect from building beyond the grave. The last decade has seen a clutch of posthumous works completed across America, but now his last ever domestic design looks set to be built in the UK – in an unlikely corner of Somerset. The low-slung villa was originally designed in 1947 for a rocky hillside in Santa Barbara, California, looking out across the sparkling waters of the Pacific, but plans have now been submitted to have it built on green belt land in Wraxall, south of Bristol, overlooking a fishing lake. The project is the brainchild of local parish councillor Dr Hugh Pratt, who worked as an engineer in the States and has toured many of Wright's houses; not content with a postcard, he wanted to bring an entire building back. The scheme has received rare permission from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation – which owns the trademark of the architect's name and copyright of all his works – after the Somerset site was visited and approved by one of its official architects, Stephen Nemtim. Nemtin, who died last month, had worked at Wright's Taliesin studio for over 50 years and was married to the oldest surviving member of Wright's original fellowship, founded in 1932. He worked up the designs for the house on its new site, on former Tyntesfield estate land, with Bath-based architect Stephen Brooks, who has updated the scheme to fit with contemporary building regulations – inserting a steel frame and secreting swathes of insulation behind the rugged rubble walls. The original design is characteristic of Wright's later domestic work, composed of a long, low-lying wing of rooms extending out into the landscape, emerging from a central core of intersecting circular forms. Little cylindrical towers, clad in rough stonework, emerge like defensive sentinels, housing a library and study that anchor the horizontal planes. Elements slip and slide past each another, framing a dining and dancing area that steps down to a poolside terrace, the whole thing sailed over by a projecting copper roof. "It is a unique opportunity for Britain to get a unique work of art," says Pratt, who assures that the building will be open for public visits, and has even drawn up a transport plan for remote parking in Bristol, from where archi-tourists will be shuttled in a six-seater minibus. The plans have been submitted under planning policy's so-called country house clause, which makes allowances for "truly outstanding or innovative" architecture in the green belt, but some local residents are not so convinced. One objector has branded it a "museum piece", adding that "a design from the 1940s is not what a contemporary and innovative eco-friendly architect would propose". The more important question is perhaps, is it what Wright himself would have proposed? The posthumous works that have been built to date are generally in the same place they were intended to be – if not always executed in exact faith to the original. One fan, who built one of Wright's designs for a house on a heart-shaped island in New York, felt the full force of the foundation, which sued him for using the name, claiming the scheme was not entirely in keeping with what the architect would have wanted. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that the maestro of "organic architecture", so wedded to the importance of site and context, would be entirely comfortable with a zombie villa being erected in the rolling hills of Wraxall. "A building should appear to grow easily from its site," Wright stated in his 1908 manifesto, In the Cause of Architecture, "and be shaped to harmonise with its surroundings if nature is manifest there." His drawings for the Santa Barbara house did exactly this: they show the house growing out of a hilltop, with a curvaceous terrace projecting in a daring cantilever as the land below falls away to the sea. The Somerset drawings, meanwhile, suggest something altogether more suburban, a cosy bungalow set into grassy mounds and surrounded by trees. Judging from previous Wright resurrections, the lesson seems to be less about accuracy and intent, and more about soothing the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation by employing one of its architects. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |