Two Frank Lloyd Wright homes hit the market in the Northeast this fall. We’ve already covered one of them—the James B. Christie house—which hit the market in New Jersey at $1.5 million. The other is the Toufic H. Kalil house in Manchester, New Hampshire, which went up for sale at $850K.
Although the two mid-century residences share the architecture of Wright’s Usonian ideal, the fact that the Kalil house is a Usonian Automatic makes it the more interesting of the two. The history of Wright’s ‘do-it-yourself’, prepackaged houses—there were seven different Usonian Automatic homes offered as part of the series—is a side road of American architecture where the high philosophical aspirations of the discipline and the alluring simplicity of modular designs meet.
Despite the seven design options, and Wright’s burgeoning reputation during the era, only seven examples of the Usonian Automatic series were built. The Kalil house is structural evidence which explains why: despite his gift for reconciling the poetic and technical aspects of architectural form, the cerebral and the freely inviting, the enclosed and the continual, the natural landscape and human engineering, Wright was unable to reconcile his aspirations with the limitations of the modular home…and the expectations of buyers who wanted the just-add-water variety of homebuilding independence. The major purveyor of the modular at the time was Sears & Roebuck; Wright’s designs were far more complex, and the materials weren’t easy to assemble by the typical young husband-and-wife teams who wanted to build their own dwelling.
In fact, the Usonian Automatic wasn’t really a modular at all; the parts were too small. The Kalil house is constructed of nearly 1,500 concrete blocks. The components were heavy, though; each block weighs over 200 pounds. In the end, the family hired contractors to build the place, and went $70K over budget. When it was completed, though, it was apparently worthwhile: it has remained in the family until the present day, and has never been offered on the market until now.
Click here to view details of the house.
Photo credit: Paula Martin Group
