5 DAY BLINDS

LaTourette Park, Lighthouse Hill, Staten Island, New York City, New York, United States

"The Crimson Beech" (Cass House) on Staten Island is the only residence, and one of only two complete buildings, in New York City designed by American master architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An example of the "Prefab No. 1" prefabricated house designed by Wright in 1956 for builder Marshall Erdman & Associates of Madison, Wisconsin, "The Crimson Beech" was built in 1958-59 under the supervision of Wright's associate Morton H. Del son.

The Erdman prefabs were Wright's last major attempt in his long career to address the problem of well-designed moderate-cost houses, and despite the lesser cost he achieved a design quality consistent with his previous residential work. The components of the house were shipped by truck from Madison and assembled on a steep site on Lighthouse Hill overlooking Richmondtown.

A low, L-shaped, horizontally-articulated residence employing an architectural vocabulary characteristic of Wright's Usonian houses, it is faced in cream-colored painted Masonite with redwood battens and smooth-faced red brick, and has a carport, a reddish-painted terne metal gabled roof, and clerestory windows on the front and large expanses of glass on the rear.

The residence was commissioned by William and Catherine Cass after seeing Wright in a television interview, and the house has been very well maintained by the original client. "The Crimson Beech" took its name from a large several-hundred-year-old copper beech tree formerly growing in the front yard.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Moderate-cost Houses

Although American master architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is perhaps best known for his residential commissions for the well-to-do and for his wide range of monumental designs, he also had an interest throughout his extraordinarily long career in the problem of producing well-designed moderate-cost housing. As stated by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Wright strongly believed that the average American was entitled to a home that could also be a work of art..~

He knew that if the maxim was to apply to the 1 ewer-income home, it would require either prefabrication or a systems-built method of construction. It meant, he explained, that the home would have to go to the factory, rather than skilled labor coming onto the building site.

As early as 1901, Wright produced a series of designs for moderate-cost model suburban houses for the Ladies Home Journal, which included "A Small House with 'Lots of Room in It'" and "A Fireproof House of $5000." In the 1910s he developed an innovative semi-prefabrication scheme called the "American Ready-Cut System," in which lumber pre-cut in the factory could be assembled at the site in a variety of designs.

In 1916 a number of wood and plaster houses and duplex apartments were built in Milwaukee by Arthur L. Richards employing this system. Wright's intention was "an organization systematized in such a way that the result is guaranteed," cutting out "the tremendous waste that has in the past made house building on a beautiful scale possible only to the very rich."

His textile block houses in California of the 1920s, a project for sheet metal houses in California (1937), and his revival of the use of textile blocks in 1951 also demonstrate his involvement in different construction systems and affirm his interest in prefabrication.

In 1932 Wright spoke before the National Association of Real Estate Boards, discussing the concept of "the assembled house," and remarked that "there is no reason why the assembled house, fabricated in the factory, should not be made as beautiful and as efficient as the modern automobile."

In 1936-37 many of Wright's ideas about moderate-cost housing came to fruition with his first completed "Usonian" house, for Herbert Jacobs in Madison, Wisconsin. In the Usonian house, Wright's "dwelling place that has no feeling at all for the 'grand' except as the house extends itself in the flat parallel to the ground," Wright re-worked many architectural themes he had previously employed some thirty years before in his Prairie houses.

Usonian houses typically exhibited a number of planning and construction characteristics. Instead of decoration Wright relied on the beauty of natural materials. Many of the components of traditional building were eliminated, and standard materials and details were adapted to a geometric module. "Sandwich walls," consisting of a plywood center lined with building paper and faced with interior and exterior siding, held together with screws, and a simple slab roof carried on laminated 2x4 supports provided most of the basic enclosure of the Usonian house.

It had a functional spatial flew arranged around a masonry "core" with the kitchen,

I'm standing in the courtyard of St. Paul's Chapel across from Ground Zero. St. Paul's became a place to pray and sleep for the many volunteers who searched fruitlessly for days for any hope in the rubble. The black fence you see around the yard is the one you've seen in pictures where people came to place pictures of the missing, and where firefighter and policemen's boots were placed on the spikes to be identified.

I've heard people talk about how angry they are that 5 years later there isn't a memorial, but until you go there and see for yourself you really don't GET how horrible it is that no one has done anything yet. St. Paul's has made a nice attempt to put up some pictures and to collect cards that were sent to New York and make displays showing those and some of the things left on the fence, but its not enough.

In my picture you can see a large awning. That's the awning for the PATH train station to New Jersey, not a memorial. All those people you see standing over there are looking for a place to remember and all there is to see are a few pictures and a gaping hole in the ground. Beyond the awning you notice that the entire block is free of any structure, which in New York is shocking to see.

The weirdest thing? I went there expecting to FEEL something. But if there hadn't been the few pictures put up, and the tourists standing around, you'd never know that one of the most tragic events in our history occured here.