ICF Textile Block Revival ?

Frank Lloyd Wright exiled himself to more libertarian California - after scandal and tragedy shooed him out of the more prim and proper Midwest. For many good reasons he decided that concrete was the appropriate material with which to build in semi arid Los Angeles - warm in the day and cool in the evening. His culminating essay on concrete in California was the enormous Ennis House - not too far from Griffith Observatory - and perched toward the top of a hill.

The story behind Wrights choice of concrete goes back to the 19th century when explorer Frederick Catherwood read about the Mayan site of Copan and decided to see it for himself. He made an amazing set of drawings published in a book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, which Wright was almost certainly familiar with. As well the 10th Century Puuc architecture of the region actually used a concrete like substance serving as both wall core and the carrier of its intricately carved decorative stone details - if I understand the technique correctly. Finally Wright believed America needed and deserved its own architecture - in the words of Brendan Gill an 'autochthonous' architecture arising uniquely out of unique place and formed from indigenous materials.

With all this whirling around in his mind, Wright went to bed and awoke with the idea for the California textile block buildings firmly formed. The largest of these textile block houses by far is the Ennis House which, though hard to believe, will soon celebrate its hundredth birthday. Now given its advanced age, the lack of quality control in making the concrete its blocks are cast from, its exposure to numerous tremors over the years, and the severe 1994 Northridge temblor - its easy to understand how the house came to be in dire need of repair, repair of almost biblical proportions for which only a billionaire would do. Miraculously just such a personage appeared and at just the right time. The great Ron Burkle purchased Ennis house in 2011 and set about shoring it up, restoring it's textile block, and generally making it beautiful, shiny, and new. A year ago or so it was put up for sale - and architectural photographer Mary Nichols prepard the listing photos. Her superb photos, hands down the best ever made of Ennis House can be viewed here. Mary was kind enough to grant me permission to use one photo for a texture map in a 3D study I undertook imagining how Wright's textile block might be used today.

Now Wright had built with concrete previously - plans for an example concrete home appear in his 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio, prepared during another Wright self exile to Europe. Wright's 1912 Robert Lamp House in Madison was also built of cast concrete. The roof was flat and had a trellised garden - 30 years before Wright designed his more famous concrete house, Fallingwater. The Lamp house, btw, was the first to use the open plan L shaped living space formalized by Wright's colleague / employee Walter Burly Griffin.

At this point its worth mentioning that in this same period Thomas Edison pursued development of concrete structures, founding the Edison Portland Cement Company in New Village, NJ. Edison's building strategy with concrete dramatizes the sharp difference between the mind of the engineer and that of the artist. For Edison it was mosthly a matter of using concrete to simulate the appearance and duplicate the features already found in the architectural styles of the day. For Wright it was a question of comprehending new design implications afforded by concrete and following them out so as to devise a completely new architecture.

And so on the one had you have a typical Edison design in Upper Montclair, NJ just below Anderson Park built in 1912. On the other you have Wright's Fallingwater outside of Pittsburgh built in 1935.

Incidentally one of Wright's more famous proteges, John Lautner, spent his life in pursuit of pushing Wrights artistic development of concrete to its logical extremes. Two of Lautner's most famous concretehomes are the Sheats-Goldstein Residence and the Bob Hope house, the latter interestingly enough now in possession of none other than Ron Burkle, savior of the Ennis Home.

Now there has developed an interesting hybrid of cast and precast concrete strategies, with the ICF concrete construction method, a simplified concrete building system which emerged some time in the 1930s or 1940s depending on who you talk to. Wright would no doubt be in sympathy with ICF construction, which affords the DIYer the opportunity to build in concrete, as Wright sought to make possible with his Usonian Automatics. If you imagine pouring concrete into a portable ice chest you've just about got the principle. The issue from Wrights artistic architectural perspective is that the typical ICF building looks so curiously plain. The wonder is that given Wright's now hundred year old object lesson on beautifying concrete construction - epitomized in Ennis House - why have so few seem to have gotten the memo. And so on that note, VRT would like to offer up its own attempts to make use of Wright's designs in the hopes of stimulating a Textile block revival.

I hasten to point my example design is meant only to serve as a study, as a way to think about what concrete might allow you to do not really feasible with anything else. The plans would of course need scrutinizing by structural engineers, as well as adaption to the needs of the individual family. The design I offer is generic meant to call attention to concretes seemingly under utilized and insufficiently explored possibilities. And so on that score I've devoted the whole upstairs and roof to two garden areas, one indoor for winter the other outdoor for summer. I've thrown in a hot tub as well as a nod to one of Northern California's great contributions to American society, as well as to flaunt the great loads concrete can support. In keeping with Wright's classic 1953 Usonian Exhibition House built on where now stands the Manhattan Guggenheim, my design is relatively closed to the street and very open to the back garden. I have kept lot size small as appropriate for an urban development one might wish to develop in the NYC metro area.

And like the Guggenheim, and the Lamp House before it, I have made a roof garden a prominent feature but this time with an eye toward the high tech green house systems which offer adjustable shading and very good insulation. I'm particularly impressed with a green house system put out by a company called Nexus: Their application is agricultural - but it appears to be easily adaptable

and well suited to rooftop greenhouse construction. Its mechanized retractable overhead curtain allows you to modulate sunlight in the summer as well as increase insulation in the winter.

The bedrooms are two level - bath and dressing area on the ground level and sleeping / study areas above. The alcove bed is actually housed in the horizontal chase space above the sofa bank in the living area.

My hope in doing this study is to stimulate interest in the ICF industry to improve the fabric aesthetics of the ICF facade making ICF buildings competitive on curb appeal , welcome additions to the neighborhood.