William Lescaze: Modernism at what price today?

With all my Lescaze research over the last couple of months, I've only just registered that William Lescaze's house at 32 E74th St, aka the Kramer House, is currently for sale for $14 million (the NY Observer asked "Is it worth it?"). Similar to his own midtown townhouse, the Kramer House was built by Lescaze in 1934-35, for friends, Raymond and Mildred Kramer, and is approximately 6,800 square feet. This was the townhouse restored a few years ago by Laura Day. Some images and a plan of the townhouse below, but see also images of the original interiors here and here.

William Lescaze, Kramer House, plan

William Lescaze: Early Interiors

Continuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, which comprise almost entirely interiors. Lanmon notes that in 1928, Lescaze wrote to Le Corbusier complaining that all he ever got commissioned to design was interiors – restaurants, private apartments, retail interiors and exhibition rooms – and Corbu replied sympathetically: “That's the way it always is. I didn't do anything myself for years, besides writing articles and giving lectures. Keep it up.” (in Lanmon 1987: 37) But despite Lescaze’s frustration at not being commissioned to design complete modernist buildings, his early interiors contributed to the growing sense of modernity in 1920s America. Although I haven’t done exhaustive research here, I thought it was worth sharing these images and what little information I have found, as these projects are not widely known nor are the images readily available. All of these projects were completed before Lescaze’s partnership with George Howe and the well-known Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1929-32).


Above: Capital Bus Terminal, 239 West 50th St and 240-242 West 51st St, New York, 1927. I can find very little information on this building, although it does seem to reflect Lescaze’s knowledge of European modernism and seems fittingly designed for a relatively modern form of mass transportation.



Above: Display room for department store Frederick Loeser and Company, Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 1928. Includes Lescaze-designed furniture.



Above: Display room, penthouse studio apartment, Macy’s Department Store exhibition, “International Art in Industry”, 1928. This exhibition also included exhibition rooms by designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Gio Ponti and Kem Weber.



Above: Showroom, Andrew Geller Shoe Factory, Brooklyn, 1928.
Lescaze’s design here is austere and efficient, a retail space stripped back to essential display and furnishings. The color scheme was neutral and Lescaze here displayed his interest in recessed lighting. The Andrew Geller Shoe company was formed by Andrew Geller in 1910 and manufactured upscale shoes. Geller’s nephew, Bertram Geller began designing shoes for the company around the time of the Lescaze commission. Bertram Geller continued the family patronage of modern architecture by commissioning Marcel Breuer to design the influential Geller House, in 1945, and then another house, Geller House II (interior), between 1959 and 1969 (both in Lawrence, Long Island). Marcel Breuer and Associates later redesigned the Andrew Geller company offices and showroom in Manhattan in 1975 (see the Smithsonian Institute’s Breuer archive).



Above: Leopold Stokowski studio apartment, East 71st Street, 1929.

English-born conductor Leopold Stokowski moved to New York in 1905 to work as an organist and choir director. After further study in Paris, he returned to the US to work as a conductor in Cincinnati and became known as a passionate advocate for modern music by living composers. In 1912, Stokowski became conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and his reputation for modern music expanded to include his flamboyant showmanship, which included conducting without a baton and altering the seating of the orchestra. As a committed modernist, he also maintained a life-long interest in modern concert hall acoustics and the latest technological advances in sound reproduction. In Philadelphia, Stokowski continued to premier and champion modern music, including that of modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky.

Lescaze’s New York pied-à-terre for the composer was a studio apartment designed for mobile lifestyle and for a cosmopolitan modern individual – the open space, built-in furniture and flat surfaces stripped of ornament and all historical references cohere into a complete environment, a unity of form, color and space similar to what European modernists were doing in the 1920s. The emphasis on coziness, warmth, decorative and luxurious surfaces that was so popular with the New York bourgeoisie, is completely absent. Lescaze’s painterly abstraction and embrace of a new, universal aesthetic not only self-consciously reject tradition, but also pare back sensory distractions so the inhabitant might focus on higher thoughts. Stokowski’s studio apartment is an economic living space organized in rational manner, its built-in cabinetry, geometric carpet and austere furniture, all designed by Lescaze, suggest a holistic machine built for modern convenience. In this commission, Lescaze clearly understood the modernist ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk and in Stokowski, he presumably found a client with complementary modernist ideals.



Finally, Stokowski was responsible for getting Lescaze the commission to design a new building for the Oak Lane Country Day School in 1929 (sketch above and photos below). Stokowski was a parent at the school and provided funding for a new nursery wing designed by Lescaze. Oak Lane was a progressive school founded in 1916, and in 1924, the school counted philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey among its advisory board members. In the late 1920s, the school’s headmaster William Curry’s educational philosophy was based on modern progressive education principles: “firstly, an enhanced concern for individual children and their way of learning, secondly, the need for pupil participation in school governance, thirdly, a resistance to uninformed parents forcing their views of education upon teachers.” (Dudek 2000: 22) In 1931, Curry moved to Dartington Hall school in England, where he commissioned more Lescaze-designed educational buildings. In these last two examples, the Stokowski apartment and the Oak Lane school, Lescaze’s modernist design not only serves to self-consciously reject traditional design, values and hierarchies, but explicitly emphasizes individuality as the basis for a new modern society.




References

Dudek, Mark, Architecture of Schools: New Learning Environments, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.

Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987.

Leopold Stokowski: Making Music Matter, an University of Pennsylvania Library Special Collection exhibition.

Whatever Happened to William Lescaze?

Of all the entries on this blog over the past three years, the one that has sparked the most interest in terms of emails and queries is this one on architect William Lescaze’s 1934 New York townhouse. Curiously, I have received a few emails over the past couple of years that have addressed me as some kind of expert on Lescaze’s work. While I am, in fact, far from an expert, a basic Google search suggests otherwise. Which not only proves that you shouldn’t believe all that Google says, but more importantly, that there is very little information about Lescaze available online. In fact, even written information on Lescaze’s work is mostly out of print and/or difficult to access (and available only in college libraries). So, in the public interest (and in an effort to maintain the illusion of my expert status), I thought I would add to my previous post and begin to compile more information about Lescaze. I have been especially inspired by the recent comment by Laura Day, a designer who bought Lescaze’s New York townhouse, the Kramer House (1935) in 2006 and revived it back to its original state. Beyond this brief introduction is an incomplete and ongoing bibliography, so please contact me with any additional material you may have or know of and I will add it to the listings below.

The first and perhaps most interesting question to address is: whatever happened to William Lescaze? Or more precisely, how is it that, in the 1930s, he was widely considered, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, as a leader of modernist architecture in the United States (see Lanmon 1987: 10), but today his work has been almost forgotten. After World War Two, it seems, his career and contribution to American modernism was overshadowed by Bauhaus émigrés and their students, and since his death in 1969 has drifted into such obscurity that today, the only monograph devoted to Lescaze’s work, Lorraine Welling Lanmon’s William Lescaze, Architect (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987), is out of print. Compared to the voluminous material on Wright and Neutra available both online and in print, the dearth of available Lescaze material confirms the idea that his career has indeed sunk into obscurity. Mention of Lescaze in general histories of American architecture now is restricted to Lescaze and Howe’s PSFS building in Philadelphia, often claimed to be the first International Style skyscraper in the US. Beyond that, there is precious little material around.

Reviewing his prewar career, it seems remarkable that Lescaze’s career has been so neglected. After all, Lescaze was the sole American at the 1928 CIAM conference in Switzerland, was one of only a handful of American architects included in MoMA’s influential International Style exhibition of 1932, and not only designed modernist buildings and industrial objects, but also wrote articles promoting modern architecture during a time when there was little support for modernism in the US.

William H. Jordy, in a 1984 article “William Lescaze Reconsidered”, (reprinted in ‘Symbolic Essence’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture) considered the highpoint of Lescaze’s career to be the PSFS building (1929-32), and includes the decade 1929-39 as his most interesting period, while Lescaze’s post-war work was described by Jordy as “dull”. Even in his prewar work, however, Jordy argued that Lescaze had “the pragmatic attitude of one who had absorbed the look of modernism more than its message” (Jordy 2005: 175) and adopted the visual effects of one “who receives a cosmopolitan style secondhand” (Jordy 2005: 179).

However, such a reading seems outrageous when one considers Lescaze’s biography, documented in Lanmon’s monograph: while studying with progressive architect Karl Moser at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hoschscule between 1915 and 1919, Lescaze knew of Dada firsthand, as well as Futurism, De Stijl, Constructivism and Le Corbusier’s work through publications. After graduation, Lescaze went to Paris to work (albeit briefly) for Henri Sauvage, a pioneer of prefabrication and devotee of modern ideas on collective housing. Even after emigrating to the US in 1920, Lescaze frequently travelled to Europe in the 1920s, particularly to Berlin, Paris (to visit the 1925 International Exposition and in 1927 specifically to visit Le Corbusier). It is safe to say that Lescaze had significant firsthand experience with the latest currents of European modernism. How is it then that he has come to be seen as a kind of pseudo-modernist?

My initial idea was that once the “real” modernists arrived from the US (particularly Gropius, Mies, and Breuer), earlier exponents of modernism were relegated into the background. Design historian Dennis Doordan replied to my query “Whatever Happened to William Lescaze” via email this week and confirmed this idea, suggesting that Lescaze lacked the academic credibility of the later émigrés. But he also added that Lescaze’s work was not supported by the influential MoMA (beyond the 1932 exhibition), and his small office could not compete for large commissions in the new postwar corporate climate. Although he continued working until the late 1960s, Lescaze’s postwar work remains completely obscure, and even Lanmon’s book has relatively little to say about his postwar career.

What seems to me at this stage to be significant about Lescaze’s career, beyond his PSFS tower and New York townhouses, are:

- his early modernist interiors of the 1920s (I'm still tracking down more images of these).

- other private houses of the 1930s, particularly the Field House (short article in DOCOMOMO, Summer 2006), the Loomis House (see images below), and the Roy Spreter Studio.

- a nursery building for the Oak Lane Country Day School, 1929, which, along with Neutra’s Corona Avenue School in California, was an early progressive educational building (see Weisser article below).

- his Dartington Hall buildings in the UK, 1932-35, also part of Lescaze’s contribution to modernist educational facilities.

- the Williamsburg Houses. Though these get mixed reviews, they do represent Lescaze’s dream of designing modern mass housing. Pommer (below) describes them as “the eclectic and confused reception of European modernist housing”.

- the postwar work, which may be worth another look.

- his writings, which I haven’t a lot of as yet.

- his teaching, which seems to include a brief stint at Pratt Institute, teaching industrial design, and also some kind of connection to Black Mountain.

Again, any help or ideas or comments you have out there, please let me know. I will update these lists as more information comes to hand.


William Lescaze's house for Alfred Loomis in Tuxedo Park, New York, 1937





Online information

Lescaze’s own New York townhouse at 211 East 48th Street (1933-34): New York Landmarks Preservation Commission Report (1976).

Lescaze’s Williamsburg Houses (1935-38): New York Landmarks Preservation Commission Report (2003).


Dawn of a New Age: the Immigrant Contribution to the Arts in America, a 2008-09 Syracuse University Library exhibition, featured a Lescaze section and a dozen images.

Lescaze page at MoMA (includes his Salt and Pepper shakers, model of the MoMA tower proposal, and a coat hook!).

An article on Lescaze in French, “William Lescaze, architecte, peintre et designer”, includes a brief interview with his niece.

Archive

The William Lescaze Papers at University of Syracuse. Biographical materials, lectures, photographs, drawings, correspondence and writings by and about Lescaze, as well as material related to Lescaze's one-time partner, George Howe.

Monograph

Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987 (first publication by Rizzoli, 1982). The most authoritative account of Lescaze’s career to date. This was based on her 1979 doctoral dissertation at University of Delaware.

Writings by Lescaze

Lescaze, William, On Being an Architect, New York: Putnam's Sons, 1942. A rare publication, a copy of which I am yet to track down.

Lescaze also wrote many journal articles, particularly in the 1930s – you may be able to source these through university libraries and some are available as PDFs via the JSTOR database. Here are two major articles I’ve found so far:

Lescaze, William, “The Meaning of Modern Architecture”, The North American Review, Vol. 244, No. 1 (Autumn, 1937): 110-120. This is available via JSTOR but also unformatted here. This is a textbook manifesto of modernist architecture.

Lescaze, William, “A Modern Housing for a Museum”, Parnassus, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov. 1937): 12-14. An article that I think is based on Howe and Lescaze’s earlier proposal submitted for the proposed Museum of Modern Art (New York, a commission that went to Goodwin and Stone). An ambitious (visionary?) project comprising nine blocks of cubic exhibition spaces stacked at angles.

Journal

A special issue of the University of Syracuse journal Courier 19 (Spring 1984), edited by Dennis Doordan, featured a number of articles on Lescaze.

Book chapters and references

Wojtowicz, Robert, ed., Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York, New York: Princeton University Press, 1998. Short section on Lescaze’s 1934 New York townhouse, written by Mumford not long after the building’s completion.

Jordy, William H., “William Lescaze Reconsidered”, in Jordy, William H., ‘Symbolic Essence’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. This is a 1984 article by Jordy, based on his article in the University of Syracuse journal (above).

Articles

Albrecht, Donald, and Thomas Mellins, “Going Gershwin”, Interior Design, March 2007. A good article on Lescaze and Howe’s PSFS Building, focusing specifically on the interiors.

Brooks, H. Allen, “PSFS: A Source for Its Design”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (27: 4 Dec. 1968): 299-302.

Doordan, Dennis P., “Design at CBS,” Design Issues (6:2 Spring, 1990): 4–17. An excellent account of corporate design at CBS including Lescaze’s architecture and interiors of their broadcast facilities in Hollywood (1936-38).

Jordy, William H., “PSFS: Its Development and Its Significance in Modern Architecture”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (21: 2 May 1962): 47-83.

Pommer, Richard, “The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States during the Early 1930s”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (37:4 Dec. 1978): 235-264. Generally critical of the Williamsburg Housing project, designed by Lescaze (and fellow Swiss émigré Albert Frey), Pommer argues that it was a mistranslation of European modernist housing ideas.

Stern, Robert A.M., “PSFS: Beaux-Arts Theory and Rational Expressionism”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (21: 2 May 1962): 84-102.

Weisser, Amy S., “The Little Red School House, What Now? Two Centuries of American Public School Architecture”, Journal of Planning History (5:3, 2006): 196-217.

Thesis

Alan Jon Warner, "Stylistic Influences on the Design of The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building", Masters Thesis, Ohio State University, 1983.

Manitoga and Japan

Following my last entry on Manitoga and the picturesque tradition, this entry analyzes links between Wright’s project and Japanese design traditions, particularly the parallels between Wright’s landscape design and the Edo Period “Tour Garden”. There are several dimensions to the Japanese influence on Wright’s design of Manitoga worth considering: firstly, Wright hired architect David Leavitt to build Dragon Rock specifically because of Leavitt’s Japanese architectural knowledge and experience; secondly, Wright traveled to Japan in the mid-1950s when the house and its surrounding landscape was being designed; and finally, what I’ll be analyzing most carefully here, Wright’s possible borrowings from Japanese garden traditions. While Manitoga might be seen as a mid-twentieth century version of English picturesque landscape design (and its later American iterations) in which nature serves as a model for art, the Japanese tradition, founded on a more nuanced encounter between the artificial and the natural, may align better with Wright’s design ideals. In this blog entry, I want to rethink Manitoga in these terms: if picturesque design creates an artificial “copy” of nature, Japanese design creates an idealized or “heightened” version of nature that is self-consciously artificial and yet natural at the same time.

Russel Wright and Japan

In 1955, after seeing Leavitt’s Japanese-styled New York City apartment in the New York Times, Wright hired the architect to design his dream home at Manitoga, Dragon Rock. Leavitt had extensive knowledge of Japanese design and architecture, having previously worked in Japan with the architect Antonin Raymond. Raymond and his wife, Noémi (also a designer), went to Tokyo in 1919 with Frank Lloyd Wright to work on the Imperial Hotel, and stayed to open their own practice in the 1920s. Leavitt worked with the Raymonds after the Second World War, an experience which was significant for Russel Wright and the construction of Dragon Rock. According to Christine Vendredi-Auzanneau in “Antonin Raymond and the Modern Movement”, “Leavitt’s wood post-and-lintel structure [was] based on the system developed by Raymond at the Kôgai-chô Studio” in Japan (Vendredi-Auzanneau, 60).

Beyond its structural construction, Dragon Rock contains other specifically Japanese elements, including a small “flower arranging room” which I presume was adopted from the Japanese ikebana tradition. In addition, Wright’s ritual transformation of the house’s interior décor in accordance with the seasons could be Japanese in inspiration, and the integration of the interior of Dragon Rock with the landscape might also be traced to a Japanese design sensibility (see my previous blog entry). While I am unsure of the role Leavitt might have played in these, I understand that he was influential in advising Wright to develop the system of paths through the property in the spirit of Japanese garden design. However, given Wright had already begun designing the landscape at Manitoga (at least to some extent) before meeting Leavitt, the impact of Leavitt’s Japanese experience and advice on the landscape design is difficult to gauge.

Wright’s trip to the “Far East” as a design advisor in 1955-56 may have also had an impact on the design of Manitoga. The trip lasted several months and included official stops in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, in addition to an unofficial side trip that Wright took to Japan. At this stage I am unsure exactly what Wright saw in Japan, but there are specific details in the house that relate directly to this Asian trip, such as his use of thin bamboo blinds in his studio, for example. While I assume Wright encountered Japanese architecture and garden design first hand in Japan, there were also sources closer to home that he may have been familiar with. In 1954, for example, MoMA curator Arthur Drexler (with the aid of Antonin Raymond), organized an exhibition of a traditional Japanese house and garden in the museum’s garden in 1954. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden contains the oldest public Japanese garden in the US (constructed 1914-15), a garden that Wright may have been familiar with, and, even closer to Manitoga, Wright may have seen the Japanese garden constructed as part of the Rockefeller’s Hudson River Valley estate, Kykuit (garden construction 1908-09). But to avoid further speculation, I will assume that Wright absorbed Japanese design ideas first hand through at least one of these sources and leave aside elements of Wright’s house and interiors that might display Japanese influences in order to concentrate on connections between Wright’s “Garden of Woodland Paths” and Japanese garden traditions.

Manitoga and the Japanese Garden

Like the picturesque landscape, the traditional Japanese garden had an emphasis on irregularity, asymmetrical arrangements, references to literary and painterly effects, and above all, a design derived from nature. But the attitude towards nature was markedly different in each tradition. The Japanese garden was seen as an ideal microcosm of the world, and design was used as a force that can potentially free what already exists in nature. For Teiji Ito, “the Japanese attitude towards nature is revealed as the continuous endeavor to extract the essence of a stone, a tree, a view.” (Ito, 197). Although often self-consciously “artificial”, garden designs followed natural patterns, and were designed to accommodated both the changing seasons and changes wrought by time. The Japanese garden was designed to contain nature in replica “both physically reduced and spiritually enlarged to suggest the proportions of nature.” (Ito, 139) The formal/informal divide of European landscape traditions does not apply to the Japanese garden, neither does the natural/artificial divide that is commonly used to distinguish designed landscape types.

While these general ideas might be applicable to Manitoga, a more specific category of Japanese garden, kaiyu-shiki teien, the “Tour” or “Stroll Garden”, may have provided a model for Wright’s design. A Tour Garden was not designed to be viewed from a house, pavilion, or static vantage point, but was designed to encourage “the kinetic experience of landscape” (Rogers, 305). The Tour Garden, which emerged during Edo Period Japan (1615-1867), was a composed experience created with stepping-stone paths that guided walkers on prescribed but winding and unpredictable routes, usually comprising a main path with branching paths looping from it. The paths were arranged around a lake or pond and offered the walker a variety of designed scenes to take in along the way.

The oldest surviving example of a Tour Garden in Japan is that of the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto (see image above). While the Palace’s architecture appealed to leading European modernists such as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier (who all visited and wrote about it), they seem to have had little interest in the Tour Garden. Ito describes the experience of walking in the Katsura garden as participating in a kind of drama, and his description is worth quoting at length:

“One is carried through this experience as though the course of footpaths had a musical rhythm. From the shadows of the thicket one suddenly emerges upon a spacious view; the sound of rushing waters incites curiosity and imagination; one climbs a slope in the shade and discovers at the crest a sunny panorama that seems vast.” (Ito, p.191)

Such a description could well apply to Wright’s landscape at Manitoga – the sound of the waterfall hidden by the pergola at the entrance incites curiosity, for example, and Wright’s deliberate use of surprise views and varied arrangements of scenes along his paths is surely Japanese in inspiration. Certainly Wright’s cultivation of a Moss garden above the Quarry Pond and his use of stepping stones paths here and there along the paths must have been influenced by Japanese garden design principles. Interestingly, the paths at Katsura were also known by poetic names like Wright’s “Sunset Path”, “Morning Path” and “Spring Path”. Lastly, while Japanese Tour Gardens such as Katsura included miniature mountains or suggestions of larger natural features in miniature (such as a miniature version of Mount Fuji, for example), Wright’s version of this might be the miniature replica of the Quarry waterfall in the driveway, created from ferns (see image below).

In an essay titled, “Designing with Nature”, a version of which appeared in House and Garden in 1971, Wright described his guiding principles for designing the landscape at Manitoga: follow the natural topography; make paths one way; utilize existing features; cut vistas slowly; and avoid panoramic vision (see Wright, 122-123). This latter idea in which Wright resisted utilizing panoramic visions in his landscape design certainly aligns Manitoga more with Japanese rather than European ideals. While in some ways a self-contained world, the Japanese Tour Garden also typically included “borrowed scenery” from the world outside the garden – designers would consciously incorporate distant mountains into framed views in a similar way to Wright’s exposure to the outside at his various “osio” points along the paths.

Despite these various aspects which may have been adopted from the Japanese garden tradition, Wright made no attempt to replicate a Japanese landscape topographically or to use Japanese flora. Manitoga was not a literal reproduction of a Japanese garden such as at Kykuit or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but it was instead an attempt by Wright to extract the essence of the Hudson River Valley site, its topography, flora and its cultural memories. Like a Japanese Tour Garden, Manitoga is a landscape to be traversed and encountered by the senses, and the experience incorporates the viewer into the landscape in an intimate way. As Ito writes of the Japanese Tour Garden: “In this garden-drama, one becomes the hero oneself because one ‘creates’ this garden by walking through it.” (Ito, 191) At Manitoga, embedded within rather than standing apart from nature, the visitor encounters a similar kinetic and tactile experience as in a Japanese garden, engaging creatively with the essence of nature.

Bibliography

Altman, Cynthia Bronson, “The Japanese Garden at Pocantico”, Orientations, May 2006, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 47-52. Online here.

Helfrich, Kurt G. F. and William Whitaker, eds., Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Ito, Teiji, The Japanese Garden: An Approach to Nature, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972.

Kuck, Loraine, The World of the Japanese Garden: From Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art, New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1968.

Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang; London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

Vendredi-Auzanneau, Christine, “Antonin Raymond and the Modern Movement: A Czech Perspective”, in Helfrich and Whitaker, eds., Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond.

Wright, Russel, Good Design is for Everyone: In His Own Words, Manitoga/The Russel Wright Center and Universe Publishing, New York, 2001.

Manitoga and the 20th Century Picturesque

Following last month’s introduction to Russel Wright’s Manitoga, this month’s blog entry is a brief consideration of Manitoga in the context of the picturesque tradition in architecture and landscape architecture. While Wright’s project is certainly modern, this entry is an outline of a possible historic precedent for the relationship between nature and culture that Wright developed at Manitoga. Apart from any formal affinity between earlier iterations of the picturesque and his project at Manitoga, Wright inherited the picturesque tradition’s ambiguous attitude towards progress, acknowledging the ongoing loss of both wilderness and our connection to the natural environment brought about by modernization and industrialization.

Wright's house, Dragon Rock, perched over the Quarry Pond

The picturesque tradition developed in eighteenth century England as both a reaction against formal gardens based on geometric principles as well as a revitalization of ancient pastoral traditions. The English picturesque was an aesthetic outlook that encompassed not only landscape design and architecture but also poetry and painting too. In the early eighteenth century, poet Alexander Pope urged designers to follow nature in his “Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington”:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column, or the arch to bend,
To swell the terras, or to sink the grot;
In all, let nature never be forgot…

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th’ambitious hill the heavens to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th'intending lines,
Paints as you plant, and as you work, designs.

Pope’s “consult the genius of the place” was picked up by later designers who based their designs on the specific topography of a site (also known as the “genius loci”). For landscape designers in the early eighteenth century, picturesque effects were first borrowed from landscape painting, and included the use of irregularity, asymmetry, and perspective, as well as painterly contrasts of color, shade and form. Designers William Kent and Lancelot “Capability” Brown, for example, broke with formal symmetry and geometry in garden design through their use of serpentine paths, clumps of trees in studied irregularity, meandering artificial water features, and architectural follies. In New Principles of Gardening (1728), designer and theorist Batty Langley urged designers “to copy, or imitate Nature”, while the later theorist Uvedale Price, in Essays on the Picturesque (1794), argued that designers like Kent and Brown had not gone far enough in following nature, insisting that nature was more diverse and random than irregularly placed tree groupings and meandering paths.

In the United States, architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing popularized the picturesque in the nineteenth century. Both were closely associated with the Hudson River School painters (such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand) and writers (such as William Cullen Bryant) who developed an American landscape tradition that was similarly linked to English aesthetic ideals. From the late 1830s, Davis was designing and promoting picturesque rural cottages and gardens in the Hudson River Valley, while Downing’s influential A Treatise of Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841) adapted English models to American topography, climate, and vegetation. Downing urged Americans to take inspiration from their local region, use local plants rather than imported ones, and integrate their houses into the landscape through color and form. For Downing, the rural house and garden had higher moral purpose – life in a picturesque rural setting might offset the inherent dangers of modern city life – and, despite its English aristocratic origins, a fundamentally democratic character through its continuation of the American pastoral tradition established by Thomas Jefferson.

Calvert Vaux and Fredrick Law Olmstead's Central Park, New York

Downing’s partner Calvert Vaux continued these ideals both in practice and in print after Downing’s untimely death in 1852, but more importantly, Vaux went on to design New York’s Central Park in partnership with Fredrick Law Olmstead (see image above). Completed in 1876, Central Park was both a product of human intervention and a paradoxical protest against modernization and the urban condition: a picturesque landscape in the middle of a modern metropolis. The Park was a carefully managed series of scenes – from the wildness of the Ramble to the pastoral meadow of the Great Lawn to the informal water features such as the meandering Lake – all artificial recreations of various topographies that provided a connection to nature (however contrived) for the city’s urban inhabitants. Olmstead and Vaux also designed Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and Olmstead went on to found what was perhaps the first professional landscape architecture firm in America in 1883, subsequently designing dozens of parks around the country. But if the impact of the picturesque tradition was significant in nineteenth century America, it seems to have dissipated by the early twentieth century. Certainly modernist designers, enamoured with progress, new technologies and urban living, returned to geometry and order. Following nature and consulting the “genius of the place” receded in importance as progress became almost synonymous with the scientific and technological domination of nature.

Revitalizing the Picturesque

Russel Wright’s Manitoga revives aspects of earlier picturesque traditions, and his designer landscape challenges the clear nature/culture division that was reinstated into American consciousness by the mid-twentieth century. In 1942, Wright and his wife purchased the steeply sloped seventy-five acre property in the Hudson River Valley as a retreat from urban life (Manitoga is approximately fifty miles from Manhattan). While in some ways Wright’s Manitoga seems to be a direct descendant of Downing and Davis’ Hudson River Valley picturesque ideals, the site he chose was already scarred by industrialization through extensive quarrying and logging. His regeneration of the landscape follows the picturesque principle of following nature, but instead of trying to recreate a pre-industrial wilderness, Wright’s inclusion of human history and technological intervention into his landscape design goes further than his picturesque descendants.

Looking out over the Quarry Pond, Manitoga

Rather than begin by designing a house, Wright began studying the topography, native vegetation and seasonal rhythms of the site – in short, he began by consulting the genius of the place. In a 1970 lecture, he reflected on the project’s beginnings:

“I began designing the land almost immediately, cutting down trees, leaving only the larger ones, leaving groups of hemlock to contrast with groups of birch or making paths – learning the shape of the land – gradually cutting vistas and views… Mary wanted a field so I cut down hundreds of trees to make this field, leaving only the young dogwood. In making vistas like this, I would sometimes take photographs and paint out certain trees before definitely cutting them down. I built a dam across the old quarry pit and changed the course of the small brook to run into the old quarry … thus making a waterfall.”

In keeping with earlier picturesque ideals, Wright’s “garden of woodland paths” was designed using mostly native plants, particularly in his fields of white flowering mountain laurel and deep green hemlock woods. Picturesque features Wright designed include: Mary’s Meadow (described by him above), ponds from the abandoned quarry sites (the Quarry Pond and Lost Pond), a fern glen, boulder groupings, wildflower fields, vistas through openings in the hemlock canopy, and distinct outdoor “rooms”. One of the main water features, the Quarry Pond, was created by diverting a stream at the top of the site to create a thirty-foot waterfall into the quarry. A particular highlight of Wright’s garden “rooms” was the Moss Room, situated on the quarry’s outer rim. These various features and rooms were designed to be experienced in sequential narratives via walking trails that extended from the house into the landscape. Wright’s early training as a theater set designer resurfaced in his creation of landscape “scenes” designed to be experienced by visitors walking the trails.

Part of the fern glen, Manitoga

The Moss Room

While Wright’s design conforms to picturesque design conventions, Manitoga embodies a more complex dialogue with nature than either the eighteenth century English or the nineteenth century American precedents. If the imitation of nature and the suppression of modernization was the aim of earlier designers, Wright challenges picturesque ideals by following nature while also consciously evoking the site’s industrial history through reminders of quarrying in the form of metal hooks embedded in granite boulders, as well as blasting marks left prominently visible on boulders. Even the earlier human habitation of the Hudson River Valley by Native Americans is evoked in Wright’s use of the Algonquin word, Manitoga, meaning “place of great spirit”. He also used the word Osio, a Native American term for a beautiful view, to refer to places on his trails with an opening in the hemlock canopy, designed as a framed view of the distant Hudson River.

An "osio", or framed view of the Hudson River

Blast marks from the former quarrying operation left visible on a granite boulder

As an ongoing dialogue with nature, a design project such as Manitoga could never be truly “finished”, though Wright had completed his house/studio and much of the designer landscape by 1960. In his rehabilitation of the landscape at Manitoga during the 1940s and 50s, Wright was far in advance of later notions of “ecological consciousness’ that were to become widespread in the late 1960s and 1970s when another reaction against modernization and industrialization surfaced in American consciousness. But Manitoga was more than simply an illustration of either picturesque or ecological design principles. Wright’s project was not an attempt to return the landscape to some kind of primeval wilderness, nor was it simply a series of visual scenes to be passively consumed by visitors, but a living embodiment of the tension between nature and culture in the twentieth century. For Wright, Manitoga was designed to be traversed on foot rather than experienced at a distance, and visitors were encouraged to engage with the particularity of its environment through hiking the trails and experiencing the site via all of their senses. It is in this spirit that Wright began an environmental education program at Manitoga the year before his death in 1976, a program that continues today. Perhaps Wright ultimately came to see design as a means to narrate the genius of the place not through informational signage, visual images, or scientific data, but through a complete sensual engagement with the landscape. This aspect of Manitoga I will explore further in my next entry.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Downing, Alexander Jackson, A Treatise of Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841). Online (25MB).

Kowsky, Francis R., Country, Park and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Mallgrave, Harry, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Pope, Alexander, “An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington”, 1731, from Pat Rogers, ed., Alexander Pope: The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Price, Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque (1810 edition). Online (16MB).

Wright, Russel, “Building a Dream House: The Story of Dragon Rock”, unpaginated transcription of a lecture, 1970. Copy at Russel Wright archives, Syracuse University, New York.

All photographs by D.J. Huppatz. More photographs of Manitoga on my Flickr page (access My Pics on column to the right above).

Russel Wright: Manitoga

Constructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a design practice that extended like a Moebius strip from the household objects of the house’s interior to the regeneration of the surrounding landscape. Manitoga’s significance was officially recognized in 2006 when it was designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest level of recognition for historic sites in the United States, but despite this recognition, the project seems to have fallen in the cracks between disciplinary histories. Best known as an industrial designer, it is Wright’s only completed architectural and landscape project, which is presumably why it has inspired little interest from architects or landscape architects. However, it is worth revisiting Manitoga as a design project that is particularly pertinent to 21st century practice – a house, studio, and environment that folded industrial, interior, architectural and landscape design onto a single continuum, and redefined the relationship between design and nature.

Dragon Rock nestled into the walls of the former quarry

In an earlier blog entry, which serves as an introduction to this one, I outlined Wright’s design career up until he began working on Manitoga. Thus this story begins in 1942, when Russel and Mary Wright purchased the property with the intention of building a retreat from life in New York City. The site had been extensively logged and its main feature was an abandoned quarry, which hardly made for a picturesque setting for a future home and studio. Their initial work included creating paths, diverting a stream to make a pool in the quarry, as well as both selective clearing and regeneration of the landscape. With Mary’s death in 1952, Russel, while continuing to practice as a designer in New York City, became increasingly obsessed with Manitoga. After working with the landscape for some years, Wright finally decided on a site for his house and studio. Instead of situating the house on the hill top with views of the Hudson, Wright chose to fit it into the side of the granite cliff overlooking the quarry, enclosed by rocks and trees. Between 1955 and 1960, Wright designed and completed the house, Dragon Rock, with the aid of David Leavitt, an architect who had worked for Antonin Raymond in Japan for several years in the early 1950s. Though Leavitt is officially credited as the architect (and Wright was drawn to his Japanese experience), Wright had very specific ideas on the design of the house, and was certainly responsible for the interior fittings and furniture.

Wright's studio on right, main house to the left

Dragon Rock comprises a split-level living-dining room which flows into a kitchen, a wing for his daughter and a housekeeper to the West, and Russel’s separate bedroom-studio building (which also included a guest room), to the East. The studio is connected to the main house via a vine-draped loggia intended to create a theatrical effect of anticipation for a visitor who can hear but not see the waterfall beyond the screen of vines. The house itself is built on several different levels, creating not only visual interest but also heightening sensory awareness for the occupant moving through the space – though they can hear it, visitors cannot see the waterfall and quarry below until descending into the living-dining room area, further heightening anticipation.

Looking down into the dining room from the living room area

While Dragon Rock contains many innovative design details, Wright suggested two principles as the key to his design process: Blending and Contrasting. Framed in local white oak, the house blends with its natural surroundings, an idea which is carried further by his blending of the house’s interior and exterior by his use of granite stones from the quarry site for the living room’s rough stone stairs, fireplace, and flagstone floor. The living room feels like a cave built into the cliff face. A cedar log supports the main ceiling beam above the dining room. Plant material from the local area was incorporated into the ceilings, and native leaves were pressed behind transparent plastic laminates on a sideboard panel. A local stone becomes a door knob, a branch becomes a towel rack. Via materials, colors, textures and literal appropriations, Wright blended the interiors almost seamlessly with the environment outside.

A local stone becomes a door knob

However, the principle of Contrasting provides both visual and sensual interest in the interiors, with Wright’s juxtaposed the local, natural materials, with modern, high-tech plastics and textiles; regular windowpanes with the organic forms outside; and plastic furniture, panels and partitions with the stone floors and wooden beams. With careful attention to the texture, color and surfaces within the house, Wright incorporated innovative synthetic materials supplied by manufacturers such as DuPont, for whom Wright had previously worked. Dragon Rock was not simply a homage to raw “nature”, but a dynamic interaction between the artificial and the natural, blurring the boundaries between the two.

The cave-like living room, constructed of local granite from the quarry

The house was designed with Wright’s earlier “Easier Living” concepts in mind. He included a practical kitchen arrangement, for example, with a bar for buffet serving of food, built in shelving and pull out racks for easy storage. While Wright’s easy living was not reliant on technology, the house is equipped with a modern washer-dryer and dishwasher. Entertaining and meals were an important part of Wright’s redefinition of American lifestyle and for Manitoga, he took this idea further, designing menus with specific meals designed for both nutrition and aesthetics. Dinnerware and table settings were chosen to compliment particular foods, as well as harmonize with the seasons. Thus the house also designed for a specific way of living that Wright described as a reaction against the increasing mechanization and homogenization of American culture in the 1950s: Dragon Rock, he said, was “a designer’s experiment, not only in designing a house, but in designing a home and the way to live in it.” (Garrison lecture) It is worth noting that the 1950s was the era of the popular prepackaged TV dinner, a phenomenon diametrically opposed to Wright’s “creative living” ideal.

Looking down onto the kitchen-dining room area

Dragon Rock was designed to interact with the seasons, as Wright carefully devised two seasonal schemes for the interiors which included changing curtains, furniture, reversible panels and partitions, and artworks. For summer, cool blues, greens and white shades dominated the interiors, while for winter, warm colors such as brown, red and gold provided a contrast to the winter whites and grays outside. For winter, chairs were covered in fur slipcovers, which could be pulled off in summer. Even the candle chandelier above the dining table was replaced by a Plexiglas summer light fixture. Wright’s design of Dragon Rock ensured that the house and its inhabitants were in a continual and changing dialogue with the local environment – engaging with the materials of the landscape and adapting to seasonal rhythms.

The former quarry

Learning from Manitoga

Wright began working on Manitoga by clearing underbrush, planting native vegetation, pruning trees, and designing a series of trails that followed the site’s topography. From redirecting the stream to creating secret alcoves of native flowers, Wright completely redesigned the formerly denigrated landscape. In his design, Wright retained and highlighted the remnants of native forest remaining, but the site was also selectively cleared and leveled, trees pruned, and perhaps most importantly, plants cultivated in an effort to regenerate the environment. Wright completed extensive study of local flora in an effort to create appropriate plantings for the region and its climate. In his regeneration, Wright paid careful attention to texture, color, light and sensual qualities. The waterfall, for example, was carefully designed for both its aesthetic and aural qualities, stones and boulders were moved to create steps or informal seating, and a moss garden invited visitors to touch its sensuous surfaces. But this was not the recreation of “wilderness”, as Wright acknowledged human intervention into the landscape by exposing a cable hook embedded in a rock, or leaving blasting marks visible on another rock, and even hinting at more recent human intervention here and there in the form of carvings into a stone, for example, or subtle trail markers nailed to trees.

Cable hook embedded in a rock

Wright’s ongoing project at Manitoga included the construction of woodland paths to be experienced on foot, providing a range of sensory experiences for the walker. Four miles of trails, each with individual names such as Autumn Path, Morning Path, Sunset Path or Lost Pond Path, were designed for a particular time of day or season. The paths were carefully conceived to provide a wealth of sensory experiences – they narrow so the visitor has to climb over rocks or brush past undergrowth, then widen to a scene such as a hemlock canopy or bed of ferns. Wright’s ritual paths through the property may have been Japanese in inspiration, but can also be seen in an American context as part of a continuing tradition from New England Transcendentalism, a designer’s response to David Henry Thoreau’s walking in the woods in order to engage with the environment sensually and intimately.

The moss garden

Historically, the 1950s are typically characterized in architecture and design as the triumph of International Style modernism on the one hand, and more popularly, by the growth of suburbia and excessive consumerism. Both International Style modernism and suburban design began with a universal space, regardless of local environment or topography, and both (in their different ways) fetishized new technologies. Unlike either suburbia or the International Style of the period, Wright’s design engages intimately with the local environment, ecology, topography, and history. While modernism was typically confined to urban areas, suburban design was reshaping the landscape beyond cities by a clearing and leveling, thereby erasing the local topography and ecology, and replacing it with the standardized monoculture of the suburban lawn and decorative evergreen trees. Wright’s process at Manitoga was a reverse of this “tabula rasa” beginning of both the International Style and suburbia, beginning instead with an already “disturbed” landscape and carefully regenerating it through intervention and care. However, there could be no “return” of the landscape to the wilderness – the environment, as Wright’s design of Manitoga constantly reminds us, is always already artificial.

Wright's studio

Finally, it is worth reconsidering Manitoga as a contemporary design laboratory. For Wright, nature is always already marked by human intervention, and the dynamic interaction between nature and culture is at the heart of his project. At Manitoga, the environment is more than simply a background for human habitation and consumption, it is integrated into a dynamic relationship with culture, and Wright’s “creative life” actively involves humans in a tactile, sensual relationship with the surrounding landscape. Wright’s design process challenges the industrial society of the mid-20th century, whereby nature was seen in merely utilitarian terms (quarrying and logging), to begin what could be termed a postindustrial design practice that engaged in an alternative dialogue with nature. If the dominant narrative of postwar American culture was the technological conquest of nature by culture, Wright’s view from his studio at Manitoga is a good place to conclude. Wright described this view as a “worm’s eye view” – rather than looking down on the environment from above, Wright consciously positioned his studio so that the designer was situated below, or at least within, the landscape, a perspective which engenders a certain humility and respect.

Inside Wright's studio: "a worm's eye view"

Russel Wright House and Studio, East 48th St

In my last blog entry, I mentioned a possible connection between architect William Lescaze’s house on East 48th Street and designer Russel Wright’s house on the same street. Geographically, the connection is closer than I’d imagined – Lescaze lived and worked at 211 East 48th St, while Russel and Mary Wright lived at 221. Historically, while both were designer home-cum-offices in midtown Manhattan, Lescaze’s 1934 house can be seen as a continuation of a certain austere and uncompromising version of prewar International Style modernism, while the Wright’s 1949 house might represent a alternative attitude towards modernism, with an emphasis on informality, relaxation and an intimate relationship between interior and exterior. The Wrights’ townhouse on East 48th St is also significant as it served as a kind of laboratory for their ideas about modern American lifestyle that culminated in their 1950 bestseller, Guide to Easier Living.

American Modern Lifestyle

Although best known as an industrial designer, Wright began his design career in the 1920s designing sets, props and costumes for Broadway productions. In the early 1930s he shifted into product design, creating a series of bar and serving accessories from spun aluminum. Marketed and successfully sold during the Depression years, Wright’s serving accessories were designed for informal dinners or cocktail parties rather than formal dinners or afternoon teas. Wright’s most commercially successful and best-known design was for the ceramic dinner service, American Modern. First marketed in 1939, American Modern quickly became the best selling dinner service in the United States, and remained so until the mid-1950s. The dinnerware was innovative in a number of ways: it was marketed as flexible (as consumers could mix and match pieces within a range of modern colors), easily washable, durable and importantly, inexpensive. But most of all, it appealed to an emerging informal lifestyle, characterized by a shift away from the excessive number of delicate and decorative pieces needed for formal entertaining.


The hand-crafted look of the American Modern pieces belied their mass production, allowing them to retain the aura of human craftsmanship in an increasingly mass-produced and mechanized world. A further key to the success of the American Modern line was its marketing, largely overseen by Russel’s wife Mary. She created “stage sets” for department stores and promotional material (see photo above). In these, domestic life was portrayed as theater and its commodities were sold as part of a new, casual American lifestyle, free from formal European models that had been the mainstay of an aspirational American middle class for generations.


Staging American modernism: The Guide to Easier Living

After creating some of the props for this emerging lifestyle, Russel and Mary Wright published the script in 1950. Their Guide to Easier Living focused on not only how to design interior spaces that would be suitable for modern middle-class living, but also as a guide to housekeeping and casual entertaining. Their proposals included open floor plans which flowed seamlessly between kitchen, dining room and living room, and an emphasis on open, flexible interior spaces with lightweight modern furniture. There was not only an emphasis on practical, easy to clean and maintain homes but also a shift away from the formal, rule-bound Victorian lifestyle of previous generations to a more relaxed, spontaneous way of living.


Rather than a guide to taste, the Wrights’ book functioned more as a Do-It-Yourself manual. While they emphasized modernism in general, the Wrights were not too proscriptive as to precisely which furnishings, appliances or décor to adopt. Instead, the book contained detailed analyses of many new materials and their properties – new textiles, flooring materials, synthetic coverings for furniture – all analyzed in terms of their practicality, durability, cleanability and comfort (rather than their aesthetic appeal). Of course, Russel’s own American Modern dinnerware was a perfect fit for the Easier Living lifestyle, as were his various furniture designs of the time, particularly the Easy Living range.

East 48th Street: the Easier Living Laboratory

During the late 1940s, the Wrights’ renovation of a New York city townhouse functioned as a laboratory for this new vision of a more relaxed and casual, yet distinctively modern lifestyle. In 1949, the Wrights moved to their newly renovated townhouse at 221 East 48th Street. It included a design studio on the first floor, living space on the second floor, with the third and fourth floors rented out. Rather than a machine for living, here was postwar modernism American-style, where efficient and functional meant easy to maintain, flexible and comfortable. Rather than the purity, abstraction, universal truths and technological fetishism associated with prewar modernism, the Wrights’ were creating modern life as style. Although this was a New York townhouse situated in dense midtown, the modernism is perhaps closer to a Californian suburban model (and not surprisingly the Guide features various references to Californian designers and architects, particularly Richard Neutra and Harwell Hamilton Harris).


The first floor design studio included a small reception room and conference room as well as the working studio at the rear. The reception area featured a frosted glass partition and built-in desk, while the conference room was similarly spare but both revealed a careful attention to lighting and presentation as these were public spaces for meetings with clients. The rear studio space featured an S-shaped wall comprised entirely of six foot high double hung windows overlooking the garden (see photo above). This curved window wall not only created a distinctive effect from outside but also shaped the studio from inside as a kind of garden pavilion as much as a rational modern workspace. An anonymous writer in a contemporary issue of Interiors described the studio floor like this: “It is difficult to find a single non-functional object, and extraneous ornament is conspicuous by its absence.” Although sparse and functional, the studio was also described as “unexpectedly poetic” due to the lemon yellow ceiling and the intimate connection with the exterior garden.

However, upstairs, Mary’s bedroom combined modern built-in cupboards with pink lace curtains, pink walls and a deep green carpet. The Interiors writer continued: “The uncompromising puritans of contemporary design may be disturbed by the fact that the Wrights have set redolently Victorian rooms side by side with pristine modern ones on the upper floors of the house … the melange suggests that the Wrights are practical people (they had a number of Victorian pieces) and that they have a sense of humor. Or perhaps they decided that it would be stimulating and not at all unpleasant to step from the Hardoy chair and raised fireplace of the living room, into a quaint bedroom (Mary Wright’s) where festoons of Nottingham lace dyed solid pink adorn the windows, and thence back to a terrace curved like the desk of an excursion steamer.” It may also be because their vision of modern design was not primarily aesthetic nor technological, but about how individuals could style and inhabit spaces to suit their particular needs.


The Wrights’ living spaces were open and flexible, with built-in desks and cupboards (to maximize both storage space and floor space) and fluorescent lighting hidden under bookshelves (to create an intimate atmosphere). Idiosyncratic innovations included a storage wall that concealed both a piano and a movie projector which could project onto a window blind opposite which doubled as a movie screen (see photos below). This was modernism from the inside out, transforming a small living space into a movie theater, its furniture designed for comfort, ease of cleaning and ease of moving. The living space continued almost seamlessly onto the terrace outside which featured outdoor furniture covered in yellow sail cloth to contrast the lush greens of the carefully designed garden.


A link to Lescaze’s house on the same block was mentioned in the Interiors article when the writer added that Lescaze’s staff had dubbed the house “A Streetcar Named Desire” due to its curved studio windows and spiral metal stairs which resembled a contemporary streetcar. However, I believe this resemblance was short-lived. An inconsistency in the photographs I have of the ground floor confused me for a while (see the photo above of the rear of the studio and the one below it of the living room looking out onto the garden) and I can only assume that the curved studio was replaced by a living room between the visit of the Interiors writer and the photograph above taken from Albrecht’s book. Perhaps this adds to the Wrights’ ideas about the flexibility of modern living! With Mary’s death in 1952, while Russel continued to live at East 48th St, he devoted increasing time and energy into creating the ultimate stage of his lifestyle vision: the designer house and landscape, Manitoga.



Bibliography

Albrecht, Donald, Robert Schonfeld and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Wright, Russel, Good Design is for Everyone: In His Own Words, Garrison, NY: Manitoga/Universe, 2001.

Writer unknown, “Idyll on 48th Street: The Russel Wright Homestead”, Interiors, No 109, 1949.

The website for the exhibition "Russel Wright: Living with Good Design" has some excellent essays on Wright's life and work.