The Richard C. Smith House is a small Usonian home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed in

Jefferson, Wisconsin Jefferson is a city in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, United States, and is its county seat. It is at the confluence of the Rock and Crawfish rivers. The population was 7,973 at the 2010 census. The city is partially bordered by the Town of Jeff ...

in 1950. It is one of Wright's diamond module homes, a form he used in the

Patrick and Margaret Kinney House The Patrick and Margaret Kinney House was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and it was built in 1951. The home is located in Lancaster, Wisconsin. The house was added to the State Register of Historic Places in 2007 and to the National R ...

, the

E. Clarke and Julia Arnold House The E. Clarke and Julia Arnold House is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed Usonian home in Columbus, Wisconsin, United States. The Arnold house occupies a large site on the west edge of the city of Columbus and overlooks the farmlands to the west ...

and a number of other homes he designed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The house is one-story, with an h-shaped floor plan composed of diamond-shaped units, where the bottom legs of the h enclose a private terrace around a huge old oak. The north side of the house toward the road is mostly coursed limestone, giving privacy, and left rough to suggest a natural outcropping. The south side, facing the terrace and golf course, has many windows. With . The diamond element repeats throughout, in piercings in the

eaves The eaves are the edges of the roof which overhang the face of a wall and, normally, project beyond the side of a building. The eaves form an overhang to throw water clear of the walls and may be highly decorated as part of an architectural styl ...

and in the drawers in the bedrooms. Wright seems to have started the design at the huge oak which was already on the lot. His blueprints show that he drew an imaginary triangle around the tree, then oriented the diamonds, terrace and house around it. The house was a mixed success. The flat roof leaked. The house was either too hot or too cold. The oak tree withered after Wright paved over its roots. The house cost almost twice what Wright had estimated. Yet the NRHP nomination concludes: "The Smith House is no pale imitation of earlier Usonian or Prairie School houses. It is the result of a natural and vital design evolution still underway in the mind of one of the world's greatest architects."

References

* Storrer, William Allin. ''The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion''. University Of Chicago Press, 2006, (S.337)

External links

Smith House on wrightinwisconsin.org
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Richard C. House Frank Lloyd Wright buildings Houses in Jefferson County, Wisconsin Houses completed in 1950 Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Wisconsin 1950s architecture in the United States National Register of Historic Places in Jefferson County, Wisconsin

See also

References

External links