The bank robbery capital of the world
I have been in a few of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and in every case it turned out like this:
The Prairie School (of architecture), for which Wright was a pioneer, was all about horizontality. That typically meant flat roofs, deep overhangs and, in the case of Wright’s work, exceptionally low ceiling heights.
I’m about 6’3”. Many of his clear heights were less than 7’ and I believe his doorways were often 6’2”. This clearly doesn’t work for me, but it mattered for what Wright was trying to do. And I don’t think he was the type to worry about small matters like the comfort of tall people.
The above photos were taken at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Wright bought the land (495 acres) in 1937, and turned it into both his winter home and a teaching studio.
Apparently Wright paid $3.50 per acre at the time, which feels like a pretty good deal to me. It shows you the power of just buying and holding things over long periods of time.
Today, Taliesin West is the home base of Wright’s foundation and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I’m glad I was able to finally visit it after reading about it for so many years in architecture school.
If any of you have gone to architecture school (or know someone who went to architecture school), you’ll know that everything revolves around something called studio. Studio – that’s really all you need to say – is worth many multiples of your other classes and consumes an even greater multiple of your time. What time will you be in studio? How’s studio going? I was in studio really late last night. This is how the conversations go.
So I was intrigued by Seth Godin’s post this morning comparing “working in a studio” to working in a factory. The latter, he says, relies on compliance: “More compliance leads to more profits. Do what you’re told, faster and cheaper, repeat.” And this was very much the narrative of the 20th century and was the model that empowered small-town America to thrive (see yesterday’s post).
However, the studio is different. Here is how Godin defines it:
The studio, on the other hand, is about initiative. Creativity, sure, but mostly the initiative to make a new thing, a better thing, a process that leads to better.
It’s peer to peer. The hierarchy is mostly gone, because the tasks can be outsourced. So all that’s left is leadership.
Initiative plus responsibility. Authority is far less important, as are the traditional measures of productivity.
It is not difficult to tell the two apart, which is how Godin ends his post. But it is worth noting that the studio model also thrives in a different kind of geography, compared to the factory model. So not only is the studio itself a different place, it also wants to situate itself in a different kind of place. So in a way, what we are seeing today is the new studio geography.
This isn't a laneway suite per se, but Office Ou here in Toronto recently completed this garage conversion. The idea was to take a typical rear laneway garage and turn it into something that could better house a wide range of uses.
As Toronto reconsiders its laneways and as fewer people own cars (a separate topic to be debated), we are likely to see many of these spaces rethought. In this case, the result is a true extension of the existing home. You probably want to have a nice looking car -- a Porsche would do -- if you're going to continue to use it for that purpose.
I'm drawn to spaces like this because I start imagining all of the different use cases: a dining room, an office, a studio for photoshoots, a place for Pecha Kuchas, and so on. In big and expensive cities it can be rare to have that bit of extra space that allows you to tinker and experiment. And I am a big fan of tinkering.
Office Ou was founded by Nicolas Koff, Uros Novakovic, and Sebastian Bartnicki. Nicolas and I went to architecture school together both here in Toronto and in Philadelphia. Congratulations on completing a beautiful project.
Photo: Adrian Ozimek
