Saving Wright: The Freeman House and the Preservation of Meaning, Materials, and Modernity by Jeffrey M. Chusid (review)

This extraordinarily engaging book goes to the heart of key issues related to the preservation not only of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture but also of all modernist buildings whose materials and methods were experimental in their time. In many cases, these structures were inconsistently conceived in technical terms and have had major problems since their completion. They are also, in cases like the Freeman House, gems of design that remain compelling examples of their architects’ work, their collaborators’ skills, and their clients’ ambitions. This book wholly recovers these historical and technical realities and, just as importantly, frames them narratively in such a way that the reader sees this case study as representative of field-wide concerns.

As a comprehensive documentation of the preservation efforts at a modernist site, this book brings to mind such overtly similar titles as Ivan Žaknić’s Le Corbusier: Pavillon Suisse: The Biography of a Building or a study of a full reconstruction such as Ignasi Solà-Morales Rubió, Cristian Cirici, and Fernando Ramos’s Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Pavilion. In the Wright literature, variants of this type of study include Zarine Weil’s Building a Legacy: The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Home and Studio. This book describes the logic and process of the site’s restorers, who decided that details of the property should reflect the state of the home and studio in 1909 (the last year that Wright and his family lived there) rather than including later changes.

Jeffrey M. Chusid’s central theme, introduced at the start and revisited at the end, is the need, in preservation projects generally and modernist buildings in particular, to balance the competing claims of “authenticity” and “integrity” relative to those of “authorship.” As he notes, “the authenticity of a site is related to its integrity,” which means, as the National Park Service notes, that “not only must a property resemble its historic appearance, but it must also retain physical materials, design features, and aspects of construction dating from the period when it attained significance” (34). In the case of the Freeman House, since “the home’s original construction was deeply flawed, in both design and execution,” restoring it “in a way that maximizes its integrity, and hence its ‘authenticity,’ implies attempting to preserve something that did not work from the beginning, the building’s particular experimental construction system, which is admittedly one of the most important historical aspects of the building” (35). Equally challenging, in a theoretical and practical sense, is the issue of authorship. On the one hand, “the building’s principal significance for most people lies in its design by Frank Lloyd Wright” (35). Yet, within a few years of its original completion, the house began to undergo a long series of changes at the hands of its original clients, and the architect for most of these was Rudolf Schindler until his death in 1953. Since the house has continuously evolved since its completion in 1925, “an accurate history of this ‘historic’ site would keep those changes; a restoration that took popular sentiment into account, and sought to bring back the glory of Wright’s genius, would not” (35).

In clearly setting forth these central issues early in the book, and revisiting them at intervals throughout his discussion, the author is engaging with a perennial question like the one first famously articulated by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who began his entry on “Restoration” in the eighth volume of his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (10 vols., 1854–68): “The term restoration and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness...