Forget the State Capitol. Forget Lincoln’s home. Forget Lincoln’s Tomb. The most beautiful man-made object between Interstate 80 and the Saint Louis Arch is the house at the corner of Fourth and Lawrence streets in Springfield that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Susan Lawrence Dana 88 years ago.
But only a few of them are open to the public and then only once a year. So most of the time you can see only their outsides. The rest of the prairie- house idea–flowing interior spaces instead of separate rooms, earth-tone color schemes, a minimum of extraneous decoration–is hidden. (Wright’s Oak Park home, his base from 1889 to 1909, has been restored and is fascinating, but it was built too early to be considered a full-fledged prairie structure.) Only two true prairie houses, authentically furnished and restored as residences, are open to the public year-round, inside and out –the small Meyer May House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, restored by Steelcase Inc. in 1987, and the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield.
Even so, it is possible to forget the age of the house and the genius it took to build it 88 years ago. In a sense, Wright’s work has become the victim of his success. The revolution of the early 1900s is the common sense of today: every time you strip paint off wood to let the grain show, every time you knock out a wall to open up a space, every time you visit a suburban ranch house, you are under Wright’s influence. His ideas have become so much a part of the culture that you can tour a house of his and think, what a nice place–and forget that it was designed when your grandfather was a boy.
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Wright detested these houses with the passion every revolutionary has for the establishment. “Our aesthetics are dyspeptic from incontinent indulgence in ‘Frenchite’ pastry,” he wrote in the Architectural Record in 1908. “We crave ornament for the sake of ornament; cover up our faults of design with ornamental sensualities that were a long time ago sensuous ornament. We will do well to distrust this unwholesome and unholy craving and look to the simple line; to the clean though living form and quiet color for a time, until the true significance of these things has dawned for us once more. The old structural forms which up to the present time, have spelled ‘architecture’ are decayed.”
“He accomplished this feat with an office of only about a dozen people,” says Hasbrouck. Many of his helpers became highly competent architects in their own right, but none was Wright’s equal. Hasbrouck concludes that to achieve what he did Wright had to have been “an incredibly efficient manager of architecture” as well as a great designer. And he had to have had the full confidence of his clients. “You don’t average a commission every three weeks for ten years by being arrogant.”
Present-day guesses put the cost of the house to Dana at somewhere between $60,000 (Hallmark) and $120,000 (Hasbrouck)–at a time when a typical midwestern eight-room, two-story masonry house could be had for $4,000. It was Wright’s largest commission up to that time. The house was built in two two-story units connected by a “conservatory” hallway, with a large enclosed garden. Its size alone would have made it noteworthy in the town, but it seems to have bewildered the locals. Its red tile roof suggested Spain to some; its saucily slanted copper gutters reminded others of Japan. Its windows with their subtly colored geometric patterns echoed the native sumac; the long horizontal lines of its roof and tan brickwork echoed the flat central Illinois prairie itself.
To celebrate her home’s completion in December 1904, Dana hosted a series of lavish parties–for the workmen and their families (155 people), for children, for residents of a local old- people’s home, and for the Springfield Women’s Club.
