If Norman Silk is right, the skies and sidewalks will fill with socks Sept. 25-29 when the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy comes to Detroit for its national conference. As many as 250 people are expected for tours, talks, walks, and special sessions — and Silk forecasts a “knock-your-socks-off” event.
“We wanted our attendees to experience not only the refreshed Detroit but also to embrace the history,” says Silk, a local sponsor of the event along with his partner, Dale Morgan.
In addition to being business owners — of Blossoms in Royal Oak — the men are also owners of a Frank Lloyd Wright home. They received a Wright Spirit Award at a previous conference for the five-year restoration of their 4,300-square-foot Dorothy G. Turkel House, located in Palmer Woods on an acre and a quarter of garden beds and naturalized plots.
It is one of the six homes in southeastern Michigan that conference attendees and lucky ticketed members of the public can see pre- and post-conference. (The tours filled up soon after registration opened in May, but you can still get on the wait list and also register for other conference events at savewright.org/events/annual-conference.) Tour attendees will also see works by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, and William Kessler.
The conference is returning to metro Detroit for the first time since 2006, when it took place in Southfield. John H. Waters, the Chicago-based conservancy’s preservation programs manager, likes to remind people that Michigan is an important state in Wright’s oeuvre, ranking third nationally in quantity after Illinois and Wisconsin with more than 30 of his buildings. Last year’s conference was in Minneapolis.
“We have a sort of rotation, and it was definitely time to get back to Detroit,” Waters says. This time, though, because of changes in the city, coming here “seemed like a no-brainer.” For him, as well as many other conferees who reserved rooms at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel, it will be the first time staying downtown. Fittingly for the urban setting, conference speakers will examine topics relating to Wright’s concept of “Broadacre City,” which fundamentally concerns land use and urban planning in the age of the automobile.
“Part of the goal was to decentralize cities in what Wright saw as a positive way,” Waters says. Chicago, the home of Wright’s practice in his early professional years, was “not a particularly pleasant city.” But Wright wasn’t the only one pondering the subject. Le Corbusier would conceive his “Radiant City,” too, as part of “a larger movement to figure out how to create a livable environment for people.”
For the conferees, Wright’s Broadacre concept could prove an interesting point of comparison with the new-and-improved host city. As Morgan puts it, “Visiting the multitude of houses that we’re going to be visiting,I think they will have a keen appreciation of the sophistication of the city of Detroit.”
They’ll just have to go home without their socks.
Turkel House, 1955-58, Detroit
Owners: Norman Silk and Dale Morgan
“Turkel is one of what Wright called his ‘Usonian Automatics,’” says John H. Waters, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy’s preservation programs manager. “These were concrete-block houses. The blocks would be made custom for the building. Theoretically, the owner could build the building himself or herself. There is one house, the Pappas House outside of St. Louis, where the owners actually did construction — but Dr. Turkel, I’m quite certain, did not. It’s a particularly large house with a two-story living room that’s great for music and entertaining. The current owners have done a fantastic job of bringing this house back to life. Norm and Dale are wonderful supporters of ours. The garden they have is fantastic.”
Silk and Morgan are florists, and they like to remind people that Wright once declared the garden to be the most important “room” of any house.
“We have a big Pewabic vase that’s filled with leafy branches all summer long,”Morgan says.“They’re like 8 feet tall, so they end up towering over the space. And when you look out the windows, you’re seeing big trees with big leaves. It successfully blends exterior and interior so that it becomes a cohesive experience.”
Affleck House, 1941, Bloomfield Hills
Owner: Lawrence Technological University
The Affleck House “is one of a group of late-1930s to 1940 houses that were derived from an unbuilt design for Malcolm and Nancy Willey in Minneapolis,” says the conservancy’s Waters. “It relates to several other houses of the period — the Pew House in Madison [Wisconsin], the Sturges House in Los Angeles, Kathryn and Lloyd Lewis outside of Chicago. These are all houses that are on unusual landscapes, unusual topography, and Wright raises the living area up over a sloped topography.”
“An important feature of this is a cantilevered balcony, and the railing of this balcony has a series of lapped boards that create the parapet. That cantilevered balcony effect is not unlike Fallingwater, which is of course built out of concrete. But it’s doing something really similar in terms of cantilevering out over a natural landscape. Gregor Affleck was a good friend of Wright’s from his youth.”
Smith House, 1949-50, Bloomfield Township
Owner: Cranbrook Educational Community
Smith House is “the last of these tighter-budget Usonians that are mostly wood with only masonry cores,” Waters says. “It’s an L-shaped Usonian, which derives very directly from Wright’s first Usonian, the Jacobs House in Madison. The Smiths had Taliesin Associated Architects, Wright’s successor firm, do a small addition on the house. But it also has quite an extensive art collection, and now it’s under the stewardship of Cranbrook.”
Palmer House, 1950, Ann Arbor
Private owner
“A triangular grid creates a lot of 60- and 100-degree angles in the walls, so the walls don’t come together at 90 degrees, and it creates very interesting transitions in space,” Waters says. He adds that Wright thought 120-degree angles — “where the wall almost curves” — were easier to maneuver around than sharper 90-degree angles.
“So he used the triangle or the hexagon in a number of his later Usonians, and the Palmer House is a great example of that. When you walk around in these houses, I kind of think he’s right! The Palmers were also [personally] very close clients to Wright. [The house] was underwritten by Mary Palmer’s parents and had a decent budget, so it’s very nicely detailed with some striking cantilevers on the rear of the house, what they refer to as ‘prow,’ where I think it’s probably 60 degrees in plan and juts out at a corner to create a covered terrace.”
Goetsch-Winckler House, 1939, Okemos
Private owner
The Goetsch-Winckler House is “a part of what was planned to be a development for a number of Michigan State faculty, including Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler. This was the only one that was actually built,” Waters says, noting that a site was chosen for the development, which was intended to include approximately seven houses, but things didn’t pan out.
“Goetsch and Winckler had this house built on [1.7 acres]. It’s one of the early Usonian houses, as is Affleck. Despite the small size of the house, the large living room has a very spacious feeling, so he’s manipulating a small space to its full effect. For the conservancy, Goetsch-Winckler is an important house because we did briefly own it in order to save it. We purchased it and eventually put a protective preservation easement on the house. The last couple of owners have done quite a bit to try to restore it, including an extensive exterior restoration, which our group has not seen before.”
Schaberg House, 1950 (design), 1958 (completed), Okemos
Private owner
“Schaberg is a later Usonian house,” Waters says. “Wright’s Usonian houses before the war, before 1941, 1942, were definitely focused on clients with a limited budget. The postwar ones tend to be larger. Schaberg is a good example of that: It’s a larger house. For instance, the living room — most of the early Usonians are flat-roofed. Schaberg has a dramatic, sloped living room roof/ceiling. It’s just a little more high-end. And it also has a sensitive addition by an architect named John Howe, who was Wright’s right-hand person from the 1930s on — often called ‘the pencil in his hand.’”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Sept. 6.
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