There could be few more Amer­i­can styles of dwelling than the tract house, and few more Amer­i­can archi­tects than Frank Lloyd Wright. But Wright, of course, nev­er designed a tract house. Each of his dwellings, to say noth­ing of his pub­lic build­ings, was in every sense a one-off, not just in its lay­out and its details but in its rela­tion­ship to its con­text. Wright believed, as he declared in his book The Nat­ur­al House, that a build­ing should be “as dig­ni­fied as a tree in the midst of nature.” This he held true even for rel­a­tive­ly mod­est res­i­dences, as evi­denced by the series of “Uson­ian hous­es” he began in the late nine­teen-thir­ties.

The Vox video above fea­tures the “cypress-and-brick mas­ter­piece” that is Pope-Leighey House in Alexan­dria, Vir­ginia, which Wright com­plet­ed in 1941. “Bound­ed by the hum­ble bud­get of the Pope fam­i­ly” — Loren Pope, its head was work­ing as a news­pa­per copy edi­tor at the time — “this struc­ture nonethe­less exhibits the dis­tinct fea­tures char­ac­ter­is­tic of his for­mi­da­ble vision and style.”

So says the house­’s page at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion, which adds that “the archi­tec­tur­al ele­ment of com­pres­sion and release, the can­tilevered roofs, and the win­dows that open to the out­side cre­ate an imme­di­ate inter­ac­tion with the sur­round­ing land­scape.”

Video pro­duc­er Phil Edwards pays spe­cial atten­tion to those win­dows. He cites Wright’s con­vic­tion that “the best way to light a house is God’s way — the nat­ur­al way, as near­ly as pos­si­ble in the day­time and at night as near­ly like the day as may be, or bet­ter.” In the case of the Pope-Leighey house, achiev­ing this ide­al involved the use of not just near­ly floor-to-ceil­ing win­dows, but also cleresto­ry win­dows per­fo­rat­ed in a dis­tinc­tive geo­met­ric pat­tern and posi­tioned so as to cast “light hung like pic­tures on the wall.” The effect is so strong that the house­’s two relo­ca­tions appear not to have dimin­ished it — and so sin­gu­lar that, despite the enthu­si­asm of post-war tract-house devel­op­ers for Wright’s inno­va­tions in hous­ing, it nev­er did make it into Levit­town.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japan­ese Mas­ter­piece, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel in Tokyo

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

How Insu­lat­ed Glass Changed Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion to the Tech­no­log­i­cal Break­through That Changed How We Live and How Our Build­ings Work

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Tokyo once had a hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright. Such an archi­tec­tur­al asset, one might assume, would be pre­served at all costs, yet this one was demol­ished in 1967. But the fact that Wright’s Impe­r­i­al Hotel stood for only 45 years won’t sur­prise any­one famil­iar with Japan­ese build­ing cul­ture, nor will the fact that it was only one of a series of Impe­r­i­al Hotels that have occu­pied the same site. As evi­denced by the Ise Grand Shrine, which has been demol­ished and rebuilt every twen­ty years since the eighth cen­tu­ry, a struc­ture’s val­ue in Japan has noth­ing to do with its longevi­ty. Still, this expla­na­tion may not sat­is­fy Wright enthu­si­asts, the great major­i­ty of whom have only been able to see the mas­ter’s most famous Japan­ese build­ing in pho­tographs, dia­grams, and post­cards.

Just this year, the Frank Lloyd Trust has giv­en us a way to expe­ri­ence it as nobody could in its hey­day: a vir­tu­al tour video “shot” from the per­spec­tive of a fly­ing drone. (Watch above.) It comes as an entry in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works, which “brings Wright’s demol­ished and unre­al­ized struc­tures to life through immer­sive dig­i­tal ani­ma­tions recon­struct­ed from Wright’s orig­i­nal plans and draw­ings, along with archival pho­tographs.”

Here we have Wright’s East-meets-West mas­ter­piece recon­struct­ed just as it must have looked when it opened on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1923 — the same day, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, as the Great Kan­tō earth­quake that dev­as­tat­ed Tokyo. The Impe­r­i­al Hotel took some dam­age, but came through intact.

A less­er earth­quake had already struck the pre­vi­ous year, but it left the hotel unharmed despite its still being under con­struc­tion. (The same can’t be said of the frag­ile remains of the orig­i­nal Impe­r­i­al Hotel, built in 1890 and gut­ted by fire in 1922, that Wright had been com­mis­sioned to replace.) But over sub­se­quent decades, time took its toll in oth­er ways: “the Wright-designed Impe­r­i­al would even­tu­al­ly be con­sid­ered by the post-war trav­el­er to be dark and musty,” writes Steve Sund­berg at Old Tokyo, “and its un-air-con­di­tioned rooms too small. The hotel’s foun­da­tion, too, had by then set­tled uneven­ly into the soft sub­soil; its long hall­ways and cor­ri­dors came to have a wavy, rub­bery appear­ance about them.”

Even when new, the Impe­r­i­al Hotel had its dis­com­forts: Sund­berg quotes a 1925 Far East­ern Review arti­cle call­ing it “a hun­dred years ahead of the age in its archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures and fifty years behind in many things which make for the com­fort of its patrons.” Wright “sac­ri­ficed every­thing to his art, rais­ing a mon­u­ment to his genius and bequeath­ing to the Japan­ese the dif­fi­cult task of mak­ing it a finan­cial suc­cess.” It was finan­cial exi­gen­cies, in part, that moti­vat­ed its demo­li­tion and replace­ment with a third, high-rise Impe­r­i­al Hotel in 1967 — whose own impend­ing demo­li­tion and replace­ment was announced just last year. France-based Japan­ese archi­tect Tsuyoshi Tane has pro­duced a design for the fourth Impe­r­i­al Hotel; what trib­ute, if any, it pays Wright’s lega­cy we’ll only find out when it opens in 2036.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Why Japan Has the Old­est Busi­ness­es in the World? Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

On your first day in archi­tec­ture school, you have to design a dog­house. Hav­ing nev­er set foot inside an archi­tec­ture school, I con­cede that the pre­vi­ous sen­tence may well be false, but you have to admit that it sounds plau­si­ble. As the sim­plest form of shel­ter in com­mon use across the world, the hum­ble dog­house presents to an aspir­ing archi­tect the most basic pos­si­ble test. If you can’t build one, what busi­ness do you have build­ing any­thing else? Yet it was with char­ac­ter­is­tic idio­syn­crasy that Frank Lloyd Wright, that most famous of all Amer­i­can archi­tects, took on the project of a dog­house only toward the end of his long life and career.

Images cour­tesy of the Marin Coun­ty Civic Cen­ter

“ ‘Eddie’s House’ is a dog­house designed gratis by Wright in 1956 to com­ple­ment a Uson­ian-style house he built on com­mis­sion for Robert and Glo­ria Berg­er between 1950 and 1951, in the Marin Coun­ty town of San Ansel­mo, Cal­i­for­nia,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. The com­mis­sion, such as it was, came from the Berg­ers’ twelve-year-old son Jim. “I would appre­ci­ate it if you would design me a dog­house, which would be easy to build, but would go with our house,” he wrote to Wright, spec­i­fy­ing Eddie’s dimen­sions and offer­ing com­pen­sa­tion in the form of his paper-route mon­ey.

“A house for Eddie is an oppor­tu­ni­ty,” replied the archi­tect, and the fol­low­ing year — after fin­ish­ing up the pre­vi­ous project that had delayed him, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um — he sent Jim a lit­er­al back-of-the-enve­lope dia­gram. As explained in the brief video from Marin Coun­ty’s Youtube chan­nel above, that was stan­dard Wright prac­tice: the archi­tec­t’s rough draw­ings were then con­vert­ed into prop­er plans by his staff at Tal­iesin. “I want­ed it to be easy,” says the grown-up Berg­er. “It was­n’t. It was a night­mare, so my dad built it.” And as for Eddie, he nev­er actu­al­ly slept in it.

The Berg­ers’ gold­en retriev­er “cer­tain­ly wouldn’t be the first of Wright’s clients to be dis­ap­point­ed by some of the architect’s short­com­ings,” writes Sharp. “Appar­ent­ly, as with many of Wright’s designs, the roof to Eddie’s House leaked.” Nev­er­the­less, it’s become a beloved addi­tion to the Wright canon since Berg­er rebuilt it for Michael Min­er’s Roman­za: A Frank Lloyd Wright Doc­u­men­tary and sub­se­quent­ly donat­ed it to the coun­ty. To this day, the repli­ca of Wright’s small­est work remains on dis­play inside his largest one: the Marin Civic Cen­ter, a slight­ly lat­er and much more ambi­tious build­ing, but one not entire­ly lack­ing in fam­i­ly resem­blance to Eddie’s House.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Steve Mar­tin Per­forms Stand-Up Com­e­dy for Dogs (1973)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Last year we told you about the plan to install a retractable floor in the Colos­se­um, thus restor­ing a fea­ture it boast­ed in its ancient glo­ry days. Though the state pledged €10 mil­lion, the bud­get of an ambi­tious ren­o­va­tion will sure­ly come to many times that — but still, we may imag­ine, only a frac­tion of the mon­ey it took to build the Colos­se­um in the first place. In fact we have to imag­ine it, since we have no records of what that icon of Rome actu­al­ly cost. In the video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the chan­nel Told in Stone, does so by not just mar­shal­ing all his knowl­edge of the ancient world but also crowd­sourc­ing oth­ers’ knowl­edge of mod­ern con­struc­tion tech­niques and expens­es.

First, Ryan must reck­on the cost of the Colos­se­um in ses­ter­tii, the “big brass coins” com­mon in Rome of the first cen­tu­ry AD. “At the time the Colos­se­um was built,” he says, “one ses­ter­tius could buy two loaves of bread, four cups of cheap wine, or a sin­gle cup of good wine.”

The aver­age unskilled labor­er could expect to earn around four ses­ter­tii per day, and this project need­ed thou­sands of such labor­ers to exca­vate its foun­da­tion trench alone. Then came the lay­ing of the foun­da­tion itself, fol­lowed by the build­ing of the super­struc­ture, which remains for­mi­da­ble even in the ruined state we know today. Its mate­ri­als includ­ed 100,000 cubic meters of traver­tine — “rough­ly one-fifti­eth, inci­den­tal­ly, of all traver­tine ever quar­ried by the Romans.”

A good deal of traver­tine also went into the Get­ty Cen­ter, per­haps the clos­est thing to a Colos­se­um-scale con­struc­tion project in mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca. The Get­ty’s total cost came to $733 mil­lion, a price tag befit­ting the wealth syn­ony­mous with its name. But it still came cheap­er than the Colos­se­um by Ryan’s esti­mate, or at least by most of the esti­mates at which he arrives. Con­sult­ing with sev­er­al of his view­ers expe­ri­enced in archi­tec­ture and con­struc­tion, he cal­cu­lates that build­ing an exact repli­ca of the Colos­se­um in today’s Unit­ed States — tak­ing into account the much greater effi­cien­cy of cur­rent tools, as well as the much greater cost of labor — rough­ly equiv­a­lent to $150,000,000 to more than $1 bil­lion. That amount of mon­ey obvi­ous­ly exists in our world; whether we pos­sess the nec­es­sary ambi­tion is less clear. Then again, ancient Rome did­n’t have Lego.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Roman Colos­se­um Has a Twin in Tunisia: Dis­cov­er the Amphithe­ater of El Jem, One of the Best-Pre­served Roman Ruins in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.