Frank Lloyd Wright's Los Banos ranch house affirms balance of life with nature
By Alan Hess
for the Mercury News
Posted: 03/27/2009 04:47:31 PM PDT
Santa Clara County, the once-verdant "Valley of Heart's Delight," didn't have to disappear under asphalt, condos and shopping centers. If city officials and developers had made different decisions 60 years ago, it could today blend fruit orchards and homes, green space and green workplaces.
A hint of the valley-that-might-have-been can be seen outside Los Banos, the town less than 90 minutes southeast of San Jose, over Highway 152. It can be found in a house designed in 1954 by the visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright for Central Valley farmers Randall and Harriet Fawcett.
Now for sale at $2.7 million, the house will be a unique homestead for some lucky family. For the rest of us, it is a confident proclamation that life can be lived in balance with nature.
The design permitted the architect to realize, at least partially, one of his fundamental concepts. Wright believed the ideal city would allow residents to live on at least an acre of land, where they could grow their own food and livestock, or crops to sell at local farmers markets.
People could live in harmony with the natural rhythm of the growing season in their backyards — instead of depending on the assembly line of mass agribusiness that now spreads from Chile to China to Chowchilla.
Wright promoted these ideas 80 years ago. Today that vision is alive in the local-foods movement that encourages people to buy from local farmers — or grow it themselves. Wright is more relevant today than the day he died — exactly 50 years ago April 9.
The Fawcetts' house embodies this ideal. The young couple were members of a longtime farming family when they chose Wright to design their home.
His work had inspired them in college at Stanford University. In his project for the couple, Wright showed how a gracious, sheltering home for a growing family (it has five bedrooms) could coexist with orchards and fields.
Most Wright houses stand on average suburban lots, like those in Marin County, Palo Alto, Orinda, Atherton and Hillsborough. His most famous house, Fallingwater, was built over a waterfall in the middle of a rugged forest in southwestern Pennsylvania — with no room for growing crops.
But the Fawcett house sits in the middle of 80 acres of flat Central Valley land, in the vast grid of mile-square fields and country roads that stretch from Interstate 5 to the Sierra Nevada. No other Wright house seems quite so open to nature — and so much a part of it.
Thoughtful design
The house (designed with associates Aaron Green and Robert Beharka) is not a box. It's a loose confederation of walls and roofs that subtly define useful spaces, always directing attention to the views of the green fields and the hills toward the distant coast.
The house is built of common concrete cinder block. In the hands of hospital and school architects, this mundane material produces mundane architecture. In Wright's hands, it becomes extraordinary.
Astonishingly, these walls are not vertical, but tilt inward — each row slightly overhanging the row beneath.
Indeed, every wall, ceiling and window is angled in one way or another. There is hardly a right angle in the entire structure. But in Wright's hands, the free-floating, irregular design becomes a carefully orchestrated symphony of space, color and texture.
The house is tuned to its environment. The Central Valley can be hot and windy, so Wright turned the mostly windowless entry facade toward the prevailing wind and created three wings that embrace a central court.
That landscaped court (with pool) was sunk a few feet into the soil, and the excavated soil was piled up along the open fourth side as a protective berm. The wind sweeps up and over the house, making outdoor living pleasant most of the year.
To reduce maintenance, Wright tinted the concrete floor with a tan-gold powder. Dusty footprints aren't so noticeable.
This practical, well-built ranch house can take the wear and dust of a hardworking farm family. But it is also a home of culture, beauty and grace. Its low-lying forms — stretching out into the landscape, the crenelated copper trim along its roof line, the flowing spaces that unite indoors and out — are as elegant and sophisticated as any Atherton mansion.
Land's role
Wright saw no contradiction in uniting culture and agriculture. Like his hero Thomas Jefferson, he believed that the educated farmer-citizen was the bedrock of American democracy.
Like Jefferson, he distrusted big cities and their corrupt bankers — not so wild a suspicion these days. So as a brilliant and provocative final act for his tumultuous life, Wright threw himself into the design of homes and cities to promote an alternative: living on the land.
Never one to rest on his laurels (when asked which house was his favorite, he ebulliently replied, "The next one!"), Wright was inventing new forms and new buildings until his death at age 91.
His designs included such boldly unconventional public buildings as Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum (featured recently in the movie "The International") and the Marin County Civic Center.
San Jose's Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Wright's colleagues after his death, is another worthy example.
Like Wright's entire career, his ultramodern designs were controversial. Many critics thought the old man was off his rocker. I must disagree. The Fawcett house is a masterful and unorthodox design — one of the best houses from the last decade of Wright's life.
Like his greatest works, the Fawcett house weds his philosophy about humanity's place in the natural world with his tremendous architectural talent.
It demonstrates how our own Valley of Heart's Delight might have become an agrarian metropolis where citizens lived close to the earth, producing their own food and reducing their carbon footprint. Yet those practical considerations would have sacrificed nothing in terms of beauty or civility.
It would have been a natural solution for the Silicon Valley lifestyle.
Wright's vision of the alternative city is tantalizing to contemplate. We could still reconfigure the city to allow more of it. Wright, dead for half a century, may yet show us a way into the future.
http://www.mercurynews.com/arts/ci_12013570
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