Issue 360 May 31st 2023

The Headlines

Laurent Home Celebrated As Veterans' Grant Program Marks 75 Years

Congressmen and other national and local dignitaries stopped in Rockford, Illinois, to celebrate the anniversary of a program designed to support disabled veterans that made the one-of-a-kind Frank Lloyd Wright designed Laurent House possible.

Kenneth Laurent, a World War II Navy veteran who was paralyzed at age 27, wrote to Wright in 1948 to ask the famed architect to design an accessible home. The home was designed a year later and in 1950 the Laurent family obtained what was one of the first couple dozen Specially Adapted Housing program grants. That program was approved the same year Laurent wrote to Wright.

“It’s interesting that a letter, a very short letter that’s still on the typewriter there today, could start something that eventually … helped thousands of other veterans and thousands of other Americans with disabilities live independently in a home,” said Michael Frueh, the principal deputy under secretary for benefits of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The 75th anniversary of the formation of the SAH grants is June 19. Congressman Mark Takano, a Democrat who represents California’s 39th District, wanted to stop at the local architectural gem to mark the anniversary. Takano is the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Kenneth and Phyllis Laurent used a $10,000 SAH grant to help pay the cost to build their home at 4646 Spring Brook Road. They built additions onto the home to raise their children, Marc and Jean.

The 2,600-square-foot home is the only wheelchair-accessible Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house. Wright created a blueprint for an open-plan, single-story home that could accommodate the Kenneth Laurent’s needs some 40 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was established.

Unmistakably Wright

C.J. Coombs writes about another amazing Frank Lloyd Wright design. The Emil Bach House, a Prairie style home, is located on North Sheridan Road in the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. At the time it was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, it was privately owned.

Emil Bach, a co-owner of the Bach Brick Company, was a fan of Wright’s work. The site of the house was purchased by Emil Bach and his wife, Anna, on December 5, 1914. In the following year, Bach commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the house. In 1934, they sold the home to Joseph Peacock and he owned it until 1947. In 1951, the property changed hands two times with the second owner keeping the property until 1959 when he sold it to Joseph Blinder.

Wright designed the home after a trip to Europe. The house is two stories with a basement, and when it was initially built, there was a view through the back of the lot to Lake Michigan. Eventually, other buildings were erected and interrupted that view. As the neighborhood changed with more commercial properties going up, the house was no longer seen as the country home it once was with the view of Lake Michigan.

The home has historic and cultural value and has earned its role as a landmark in Chicago. On September 28, 1977, the Bach House became a Chicago Landmark. On January 23, 1979, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Supposedly, the reason the house hasn’t been demolished might be due to the historic preservation easement. It “forbids whoever owns the home to demolish or even to change it without permission of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois.”

Book On Unity Temple Awarded Gold Medal

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple: A Good Time Place Reborn” with text by Patrick F. Cannon and original photographs by James Caulfield has been awarded the 2023 Gold Medal for Architecture by the Independent Publishers Book Awards.

Published by the nonprofit Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, the book it tells the story of the design, construction and restoration of the landmark building that was designated as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Unity Temple underwent a complete restoration, completed in 2017 under the supervision of UTRF. The book includes a section on the restoration by the architect in charge, T. Gunny Harboe.

This is the seventh book on Chicago-area architecture and architects by Cannon and Caulfield, and it’s the third to receive the top prize from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. They are currently working on a major revision of an earlier book on famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.

“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple: A Good Time Place Reborn” is available for purchase onsite at Unity Temple, 875 Lake St. in Oak Park, or online at utrf.org/store.

Penwern Gate Lodge Lanterns Shine Beautifully Again

Mark Hertzberg recently posted on his blog Wright in Racine on the restoration of the bronze gate lodge lanterns at the Wright-designed "Penwern" on Delavan Lake, WI. The beautifully patternred lights had been painted over decades ago, but the recent painstaking restoration lets their original beauty really shine.

Harry Gesner’s Malibu Sandcastle House Lists For $27.5 Million

Sandcastle, a distinctive cylindrical-shaped home in Malibu, Calif., is coming on the market for $27.5 million.

The beachfront property was the longtime home of the late architect Harry Gesner, who built it for his own family in the early 1970s, according to his son Zen Gesner, who grew up there. The architect died last year, and the property is being sold by a trust benefiting the three children he shared with his late wife, actress Nan Martin.

The roughly 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom main house is shaped like a sand castle, with a small tower overlooking secluded Watkins Cove, said Zen Gesner, who is also a real-estate agent listing the property with colleague Chris Cortazzo of Compass. The house was largely built with salvaged materials such as old telephone poles, maple from a high school gym, old-growth redwood harvested in the 1800s, and windows and doors from one of Hollywood’s silent film theaters, he said.

The roughly 0.73-acre property has about 122 feet of beachfront, a wraparound deck and steps to the sand. A spiral staircase with treads handmade out of driftwood leads up to Harry Gesner’s studio, which is located in the tower. The property also includes two guesthouses, a three-car garage, an outdoor shower and surfboard storage, according to the listing agents.

The property is next door to Harry Gesner’s iconic Wave House, an unusual home that resembles breaking waves and is said to have inspired the design of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The architect designed that house for a friend in the 1950s, but always had his eye on the site next door, his son said. Zen Gesner said his father proposed to his mother on the bluffs overlooking Watkins Cove, telling her, “‘If you marry me, I’ll build your dream house.”

Harry Gesner grew up in the Santa Monica area and was a passionate surfer, his son said; he sketched the Wave House with a grease pen while hanging in the surf break on his longboard. After serving in World War II, he briefly audited a class at Yale University with Frank Lloyd Wright and was invited to continue his studies under Wright at the architect’s Taliesin West studio in Arizona, but declined.

“My dad at the time said, ‘Well, I appreciate you, I respect you. But I really feel that I need to forge my own way,’” Zen Gesner said.

Harry Gesner’s designs were intrinsically linked to nature, his son said: “He would sit on a job site for hours in a chair with his sketchpad, and he wouldn’t leave until he saw how nature interacted with the environment and that particular site.”

The decision to sell Sandcastle was a difficult one, Zen Gesner said, but makes sense given that he and his siblings are spread out across the country. He said they hope to find “an owner that will respect and appreciate it as much as my family did.”

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