{"id":544,"date":"2014-07-26T12:04:32","date_gmt":"2014-07-26T16:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/?p=544"},"modified":"2018-08-12T12:11:33","modified_gmt":"2018-08-12T16:11:33","slug":"millard-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/2014\/07\/26\/millard-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Millard House"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Millard House, located in Pasadena, California, was the first of Frank Lloyd Wright’s four “textile block” houses \u2014 all built in Los Angeles County in 1923 and 1924. Wright took on the Millard House following his completion of the\u00a0Hollyhock House<\/a>\u00a0in Hollywood and the\u00a0Imperial Hotel<\/a>\u00a0in Japan.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"MillardHse_9145-9149_Yard\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By this time, Wright felt typecast as the\u00a0Prairie<\/a>\u00a0house architect and sought to broaden his architectural vision.\u00a0Wright turned to the concrete block as his new building material. Wright wrote in his autobiography that he chose to build with concrete blocks as they were “the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world,” and he wanted to see “what could be done with that gutter-rat.”\u00a0The textile-block houses were named for their richly textured\u00a0brocade<\/a>-like concrete walls.\u00a0The style was an experiment by Wright in\u00a0modular housing<\/a>;\u00a0he sought to develop an inexpensive and simple method of construction that would enable ordinary people to build their own homes with stacked blocks.[5]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0By adding ornamental designs to mass-produced blocks, Wright hoped the blocks could become a “masonry fabric capable of great variety in architectural beauty.”\u00a0One writer has described Wright’s concept this way: “By unifying decoration and function, exterior and interior, earth and sky \u2014 perforated blocks served as skylights \u2014 Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal.”<\/p>\n

\"MillardHse_9165\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"MillardHse_9168_BlockDtl\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wright was commissioned to build Millard House by Alice Millard, a rare-book dealer for whom Wright had built a home in\u00a0Highland Park, Illinois<\/a>. in 1906. Seeking to integrate the Millard House with the land, Wright designed the home to cling to the lot’s steep\u00a0ravine<\/a>, nestled it among the trees, and fabricated the home’s concrete blocks using sand, gravel, and minerals found on the property.\u00a0By using roughly textured, earth-toned blocks, he sought to blend the house with the color and form of the trees and hillside. While the design was in most ways a departure from Wright’s prior work, it was consistent with his lifelong love of natural materials and his belief that buildings should complement their surroundings. He later said that Millard House “belonged to the ground on which it stood.”<\/p>\n

The blocks were created in wooden molds with patterns on the outside and smooth on the inside. The blocks feature a symmetrical pattern of a cross with a square in each corner.\u00a0Wright reinforced the blocks using conventional mortar.\u00a0The project cost $17,000 \u2014 70% more than the $10,000 budget Millard had given to Wright.\u00a0Some accounts state that the builder walked off the job, “leaving Wright to finish the project himself, out of his own pocket”.<\/p>\n

The 2,400-square-foot (220\u00a0m2<\/sup>) house consists of a vertical three-story block. The first floor has the kitchen, servant’s room and a dining room opening onto a terrace with a reflecting pool. The second floor has the main entrance, guest room, and a two-story living room with a fireplace and balcony. The third floor contained Millard’s bedroom with a balcony overlooking the living room and outdoor terrace.<\/p>\n

Like many of Wright’s homes, Millard House suffered from leaks during rains. After the house flooded in a storm, Millard wrote a letter to Wright complaining about the inadequate storm drain that resulted in the basement filling entirely with muddy water and the water rising to six inches (152\u00a0mm) in the dining room.<\/p>\n

Millard added a separate studio in 1926, designed by Wright’s son,\u00a0Lloyd Wright<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[excerpts from Wikipedia]<\/em><\/p>\n

\"MillardHse_9167_GateHdwr\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Millard House, located in Pasadena, California, was the first of Frank Lloyd Wright’s four “textile block” houses \u2014 all built in Los Angeles County in 1923 and 1924. Wright took on the Millard House following his completion of the\u00a0Hollyhock House\u00a0in Hollywood and the\u00a0Imperial Hotel\u00a0in Japan. \u00a0 By this time, Wright felt typecast as the\u00a0Prairie\u00a0house … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,66],"tags":[156,42,162,155,163],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1079,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/1079"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulpiazzaarchitect.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}