PIECEMEAL AESTHETICS: POETICS OF PARTS IN USONIAN AUTOMATIC HOUSES

Abstract

In 1950s a small number of houses, which their architect Frank Lloyd Wright called Usonian Automatic Houses, were built across the country. As the name also suggests, these were single-family houses built along the spatial organization principles of Usonian houses. However, unlike earlier Usonian houses, they were made of custom concrete blocks that can be produced on site, and assembled in a variety of ways. These houses, like previous examples of Usonian Houses, were part of Wright’s solution to small house problem, but with them he opens a new page as he aims to eliminate the role of the contractor, so that the house owners would have flexibility over construction period and cost. Usonian Automatic houses have been considered a negligible part of Wright’s career as they were never studied as a category, and decisively left out in studies concentrating his work as a whole –or his residential buildings as theme. Studies upon any one of them is occasionally included in studies framed by materials or methods. Only a few studies, concentrating on Usonian houses, briefly mention them as a category of their own. And even then, neither the number and identification, nor the way they are treated is settled. They are represented as a marginal fraction, or experimental projects on the way towards prefabrication, which matured in panel construction houses. This paper is a re-reading of their history as an aesthetic paradigm as well as a technical one

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