Architecture CodeX #73 Reisley House, Usonia NY by Frank Lloyd Wright
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- Опубликовано: 10 авг 2023
- AND THE NICE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: Architecture CodeX looks at the last person who lives in the house he and his wife commissioned from FLW as part of an unusual enclave of people looking to build a better world. Roland's account of what it was like to work with FLW will surprise you!
ERRATA: During the video, I am pronouncing Roland's last name incorrectly. It is RIZEley. Any explanation as to why I did that will sound like a self-serving excuse. I know this now, as Roland RIZEley and I have been able to correspond since. I reached out prior to recording but we were not able to communicate. Roland RIZEley says he is 6'-0" tall not 6'-6" and raising the height to 6'-9" was Wright's idea and not Mr. RIZEley's. I see that I misapplied the original height of the ceilings 6'-6" to Roland's own height. Roland RIZEley believes I misapplied the term "protégé" to Aaron Resnick as he was never part of any formal Taliesin apprenticeship. Roland would suggest I use the term "disciple." As you know, once posted, it is not possible to edit or change a video, so an errata is the only means to correct my mistakes. My apologies to you thanks again to Roland RIZEley for keeping me on track.
0:00
0:23 Skip Intro = Meet Roland
1:11 The design process with a nice FLW
3:45 Usonia and the Book
7:23 The House Design
11:44 Usonia Legacy
#Wright #franklloydwright #Usonia #pleasantville #mtpleasant #modernarchitecture #Molinelli #architecture #architecturedesign #architecturelovers #residential #residentialbuilding #rolandreisley #reisley 
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This video brought me back to my early memories as a child.... the feeling that there were very substantial men doing very substantial and historic things. The world felt so "solid" and "permanent" back then.... of stone, glass and heavy beams. God bless FLW.
Society has forgotten the intrinsic value of living with good design❤thank you for a beautiful reminder
You are welcome. Thanks for watching and commenting.
Some years ago, we visited Usonia and met the Reisleys, who led our group on a tour of the house. Two things, to me, embodied Wright. For one, they had a beloved family dining table. Wright insisted on designing one to fit the house, which they didn't like. They would swap tables, and hide their own table, when Wright visited. The other was that Wright told Roland that the house needed a copper roof, at a cost, then, of $8,000.00. When demurred, Wright said, authoritatively, "A gentleman has a copper roof." I have studied Wright and explored his work since I was 13, when I bought a beautiful photographic essay on Fallingwater, a book I still have. 2 weeks ago, I took the house tour, crossing it off my bucket list after 60 years.
Roland has many of these stories in his book and I did not want to steal all his thunder! ;-) Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy some other ACX videos whether they are about FLW or not.
Great story!
Wright was definitely a genius tyrant. lol
@@cavaleer But apparently not to everyone. Maybe he was just more mellow when he was older.
Thank you❤
I have one of the original screen doors from one of the houses at Usonia. My wife, nephew and his (then) girlfriend took a walk around the neighborhood one day back in the 1990's. I happened to be "clean up week", and several properties had junk, old appliances and whatnot stacked on the curb. One house was actually throwing out a screen door! I still have it. I don't know if it was in the original plans, but still it surprised me that it would be discarded. It is made of wood, with brass screening, and period-correct spring knob latch.
Interesting. I won't comment as I went to a school where someone saved a couple of square inches of a football field because Harry Oliver kicked a really long game winning field goal from there. So, it is all good. (ND over Michigan 29 to 27 in 1980)
Thank you for this wonderful video. As an architecture student I had two encounters with god damn it FLW, both of which would have confirmed the arrogance. I was a student at the University of Illinois in the 50s and he came to lecture. At the end of the lecture he advised us all to leave UI and come to study with him. A second incident involved a city planning event in Chicago where he was the keynote speaker. Hey insulted everybody and stated that he thought city planning was stupid and said I'm going to go take a nap.
BTW i had one client who came to me with sketches for a house on a hexagonal grid which was eventually built near Poughkeepsie. I have never seen the final result as we had something of a disagreement. This is very very rare for me, only two or three clients out of several hundred. Before falling water was sold, i used to call Kauffman Secretary and get permission to take clients and friends to visit falling water. It was very different without the crowds And everything was original as it was only 21 years old. Alex Wade
. Sorry voice dictation does some weird things
Great stories! So, the question remains was he always arrogant to everyone or was there a path to bringing out his niceness. Perhaps paying him and letting him do what he wanted to do was one way to stay on his good side. Thanks for watching and commenting. I hope you enjoy some other Architecture Codex videos as well!
I was also an architectural student at the UoI at Navy Pier, Chicago.
Thank you for this fascinating episode in which you document important history!
Thanks for watching and commenting. There is a human side to every story that we Architects tend to forget because we are so focused on buildings.
I am from Buffalo NY and I have been in the 2 Wright homes there.I now live in FL I have been to the FL Southern College in Lakeland FL and to the Guggenheim in NY all a must see
Wright included a pair of Scandanavian chairs at the temporary display house in manhattan, He also had a pair of department store upholstored chairs at Taliesen. Otherwise, his designs normally prevailed, not cozy by any means but gorgeous. Wright could at times be difficult, a topic that is worthy of debate. The Reisley house is a gem.
I have clients who love me and I have had clients who unfairly detest me. Usually because I caught them lying to me or some who does not know how to read plans or understand architecture got a bug in their ear and they cut off all communications- totally ghosted. So I like that there was someone who could truthfully counter the standard Wright narrative of arrogance. Thanks for bring a loyal fan.
Excellent video. Thank you very much. I'm a Wright fan (from UK) and it's great to discover your channel.
Thank you for watching. Because I have not been to London for over 40 years, I feel I am neglecting all the new work done there. I have St Pauls Cathedral coming up, but I really want to do something from the 21st century!
Thanks Michael, I really enjoyed this insight into FLW.
Thanks for watching!
Nice work and new perspectives for my interest in FLW and protégés
Thanks for watching and commenting.
I lived in aFrank Lloyd Wright home in the 80’s designed by one of his architects. It was very special. Located in the Mission Canyon Santa Barbara Ca. Area . Loads of light and simple beauty. The adjoining property had another home from the 40’s.
It was a special wedding gift for the owners wife. Feel truly blessed to live along the babbling brook and beautiful trees.
That's the kind of praise an architect truly prizes. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoy other Architecture Codex videos!
Wright and the other architects who designed “less than comfortable” chairs should have taken a road trip to Sam Maloof’s workshop and home. The Maloof rockers were designed originally for nursing mothers, so you can bet they were comfortable.
I’ve wondered what Wright would have thought of Maloof’s home, hand-built by Sam primarily of wood right down to the door latches.
My Frank Lloyd Wright book collection (more of an accumulation, actually) sits next to my single Sam Maloof book. I almost hate to pull them off the shelf because a quick review of a particular item invariably becomes an hours-long page turner.
Great video! Thanks
I really like this style architecture
Thanks for watching. If you view other videos, you might find other styles of architecture that may appeal to you!
Great content! Thank you
Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoy the non-FLW videos too!
If there is a heaven I hope in my heart of hearts that it will look like Usonia.
- Frederick A. Lee / ARCHITECT
There is a heaven, but Jesus was the master builder. According to the Gospel of John 14:2-14 "There are many rooms in my Father's house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. I would not tell you this if it were not so. And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am." 😉
Love Watching FLW documentaries! Love the 2degrees of separation makes this one distinctive for sure!
Thank you for watching.
I can never learn enough about FLW. I ride my motorcycle for the gorgeous 2 hrs 15 min each way from my home in Northern IL probably 3-4 times per year and I always stop at Franks (now empty) grave at the family chapel just across the country road from Taliesin. It’s sad to see Mamah’s grave stone busted up from the large tree roots that I picture as planted by Frank.
👍Frank is Elvis. Thanks for watching
Super ! MAgnificent.
Thanks! And thanks for watching. Hopefully you will enjoy some not-FLW videos.
Great home! I visited it a couple years back, the owner was accommodating
He is!
the Robie House is on Woodlawn Ave in Chicago
Did I say something different?
Very rarely, (as in NEVER), is written about the ONE and ONLY Frank Lloyd Wright in Frankfort, the capitol of Kentucky. I live three blocks over from it.
Admittedly, FLW's office was so prolific, gems like this often to not get to the top of his lists of greatest buildings.
Related Videos: ACX #50 Taliesin West, Scottsdale AZ (with side trip to Kentuck Knob PA) ruclips.net/video/PUmCCU4M2xI/видео.html AcX #25 Falling Water, PA ruclips.net/video/09pbyvsDz54/видео.html
Those of us outside of the profession are prone to our own form of tunnel vision ,definitely. Wright commentary is a competitive and crowded field. Some will spice up their accounts to entertain the audience, plus their are outright inaccuracies and gaps in knowledge abounding. W was so famous there had to be much jealousy, to the current day and beyond. Love him or loath him, you can't properly study architecture without attempting to assess his importance and impact. He remains a giant in the field. It took me a while , but I now believe there are others who deserve equal appreciation, and I think the greatest urban planners deserve to be included in the same conversation because of their pervasive daily impact on people. Don't buy the house, buy the neighborhood? Usually? Broadacre City was his biggest goof IMO, but perhaps his most popular idea, unfortunately to this day- suburban sprawl.
As you can see, I am trying not to make this the FLW channel. I look at all kinds of buildings from all kinds of architects. Admittedly the FLW ones seem to get more attention. And I still tend to skew towards famous buildings with the hope that a large portion of the audience will know of it even if they have been there. Then if they are watching I can bring in new insights that make the video rewarding. It appears that most people click when the see something only when they know it, so building an audience has been tough.. I have script developing where I purpose look at non-famous buildings (houses group by similar design) but I may still need to a famous visual image to get clicks. Thanks again for your comment. You say you are outside the profession but are you an urban planner.
@architecturecodex9818 I just discovered the term "citizen planner", so hopefully, I qualify. I have also heard of citizen scientists and citizen experts.
Not that the two incidents are related? What the hell does that mean?
My birth did not cause FLW to die...
Wow
That's deep
@@waynereiffenstein7153 I cannot tell from your post whether you appreciate the humor of that or any other statements, are being sarcastic, or truly do not understand.
It's true.
It isn't humorous.
I hope you understand
@waynereiffenstein7153 Sorry that line has made hundreds of people in a live audience laugh. It seems you are the one lacking.
Wright could be said to be arrogant; he admitted as much himself. He adored the clients for whom he built houses; he was not one to pick fights with them unnecessarily. Too much is made of falsehoods like his supposed insistence on total control of how people lived in his homes. The correspondence is filled with client requests for changes, and with his acceding to those requests, redrawing over and over to satisfy both them and himself.
It is not true that the Reisley (pronounced Rye-sley) house is a rare example of non-orthogonal design in Wright's work; of 144 houses built after 1940, 76 of them are orthogonal (designed on a square or rectangular unit) and 57 contain or are designed on non-orthogonal plan units---equilateral triangles, parallelograms, or arcs.
Thanks for watching and commenting. If you have the data regarding the non-orthogonal plans since 1940, I will defer to you. But I think it is still a fair statement, look at the totality of all the houses he did in his entire career that it was not usual for them to be done with an equilateral triangle module. I acknowledge meeting Roland but never claim to be best buds. And when I gently reached out to discuss this video with him, he did not get back to me. If you know him and the pronunciation of his name, I will again defer to you, but I have heard it pronounced both ways around the region, in a circle of his peers where I regularly teach.
Thanks. Yes, I went through Storrer's "FLW Companion" to make a count of the orthogonal and non-orthogonal houses built after 1940. Some instances were a close call, but every triangular and "diamond"-grid house was included, making up most of the 57. Someone recently pointed to the Hanna house as the first non-orthogonal Wright design, but the unbuilt desert resort, San Marcos-in-the-Desert of 1927---and one of two houses nearby, also unbuilt---were designed on a 30-60 grid, and before that houses and barges for the Lake Tahoe project of 1922 employed 45- and 60-degree angles. In the early career, octagons and 45-degree elements were occasionally employed. My count does not, of course, include all the unbuilt work, in which many more non-orthogonal plans appear.
I have not met Roland; a video in which he spoke provided evidence that convinced me---at long last---of that less-often-heard pronunciation of his name. It would conform to the norm for ei or ie names, where the second letter of the pair typically dominates.
(I didn't intend to cross out a portion of my post; I don't know how that happened . . .)
I visited Mrs Darwin Martin’s lakefront summer home this summer. Mrs Martin asked Frank to widen the dining room. It really was nearly unusable. Wright objected because it would ruin the symmetry of the outside. He was correct. She got her way, but Wright had the builders end the wooden planking at the original width and then fill in the added space with planks 90 degrees. He left this protest in a very obvious place, that she would see every time that she ate.
So, since I made the video and our original conversation, I have communicated with Roland and he confirms that it is RIZEley. You were correct. Look for that in an errata attached to the explanation.