Architecture
Massaro House, Frank Lloyd Wright
October 2007: in review
Frank Lloyd Wright was a prolific man. In a career that ran from his early 20s to his death in 1959 at the age of 91, Wright designed and built several hundred structures, including copious private houses. His unbuilt work was even more extensive, and in recent years, enterprising house-builders have been delving into the portfolios to see what, if anything, can be resurrected.
Click on the image above to see inside Massaro House
The Massaro House is one such creative re-birth. Designed in the 1950s for a spectacular site on Petre Island on Lake Mahopac in upstate New York, Wright dashed off a few pencil sketches before conceding that his dramatic ideas would be hugely expensive to realise on this tricky waterside site.
Fast forward to 2007, and Wright’s vision has finally emerged, a faceted structure that appears to grow out of the rock itself. The site’s owner, Joe Massaro, left nothing to chance and employed architect and Wright scholar Thomas A Heinz to realise the design from just five original sketches. As the author of 30 books on the architect, and with experience of restoring and rebuilding over 40 of his designs, Heinz was well-placed to tackle the project.
The challenges were largely technical, with the original concept drawings showing thin, expansive roofs, soaring without supports across the living areas. Heinz turned to modern CAD software to get inside Wright’s three-dimensional vision, using the ArchiCAD system to shape the structure beneath. As a result, Wright’s original plans have been largely realised intact, including a spectacular 78 foot cantilevered wing that reaches out across the lake and a series of triangular skylights that span the living areas. Heavens only knows what Wright would have achieved with similar tools.
INFORMATION
Watch a video of Heinz talking about the project here.
- Website
- http://www.thomasaheinz.com/
