Today, AD travels to Phoenix, Arizona, to tour the David and Gladys Wright house—the home designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright for his son. When your father is America’s most celebrated architect, the greatest gift he could give you is a house, and this unique home uses many of the same ideas Lloyd Wright incorporated in the design of the Guggenheim Museum. The spiral structures, often symbolizing the infinite or longevity, are poetic, as David and his wife Gladys lived to be over 100 years old in this house. After many years of neglect and threats of demolition, father-and-daughter duo Bing and Amanda Hu bought the house and have since been on a mission to restore it to its former glory, keeping its legacy alive.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00When your father is the most celebrated architect in America, the greatest gift he can give
00:13you is a house.
00:14Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys,
00:19using many of the same ideas that he was building into the Guggenheim Museum.
00:25Spirals are fascinating forms.
00:27They can symbolize the infinite or longevity.
00:30David and Gladys Wright, they both lived to be more than 100 years old.
00:34At the David and Gladys Wright House, the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity
00:39as it moves from one generation father to the next generation son, and even today as
00:45it moves between father and daughter working on this restoration.
00:55The house is located in the Arcadian neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona.
00:58This neighborhood was once filled with orange groves.
01:01Today, it's a residential neighborhood.
01:05It's a special place.
01:07It's unlike anything else that Frank Lloyd Wright did in the course of his career, and
01:10we're so excited to show it to you.
01:15The entry to this house really begins here, at the bottom of a spiral ramp.
01:21Wright began exploring spiral forms, along with all of the other elementary geometries
01:25that were part of his body of work, in the 1920s.
01:34This is long before we came up with ways to curve glass and curve woodwork in a way that
01:39was structurally sustainable, and so what we see is this combination of polygon forms,
01:45for the triangular ends, for the wood framework, for the windows, and even for the roof, set
01:50above the circular surfaces of the building itself.
01:56It's this interesting juxtaposition of forms that's really a signature of Frank Lloyd Wright's
02:00body of work.
02:03This whole experience coming up the ramp, it's this little journey that Wright's taking
02:07you on.
02:08The movement through space is something that Wright calls the continual becoming.
02:12This idea that space is constantly unfolding and revealing itself, and you really see that
02:16as you climb up the ramp and come up here to the entry.
02:21Now that we're at the top of the ramp, we see this beautiful landscape, we're out in
02:25this bright sun, and Wright wants to create a juxtaposition.
02:29So he's going to take us in under a low ceiling, in sort of a shaded, darkened space.
02:42Wright has this technique that he calls compression and release, being enveloping darker space,
02:49and then opening up into a lighter, brighter, more expansive space.
02:55This is very similar to taking a walk through nature, where you might be walking on a forest
02:59path, nature is embracing you, and then suddenly you're in a clearing, where you're open to
03:04the sky, there's bright light all around you.
03:06It is an emotional journey that we take.
03:11Much of the work on this house, the delineation, the renderings, and the design of the rug,
03:17were done by a Wright apprentice from China, named Ling Po.
03:20Ling came over from China in the 1940s, and worked with Wright, and worked at the foundation
03:25for many decades after Wright died in 1959.
03:33The furniture is made of plywood, really humble material.
03:38But in the mid-century, Wright gravitated to this material.
03:40If you look at the edge detail, what you see are the different layers of the plywood, and
03:44instead of covering that up like most people would, Wright exposes it, and celebrates it.
03:50He wants you to see not only how the furniture is made, but indeed, that the wood itself,
03:55like the cement blocks from which the house is constructed, could actually be quite beautiful.
04:01Even these tables themselves have this unusual feature, a little hole down the center for
04:06this beautiful circular globe.
04:08So again, the circle, the sphere, the sense of festivity is always part of every element
04:13of design of this house.
04:16This fireplace, beautiful cylinder tapering in.
04:18In fact, this is the continuity from one of the piers below, tapering upward from the
04:23ground all the way up, past the roof, and into the chimney.
04:28But a beautiful circular fireplace, a beautiful fireplace grate, that again, reflects the
04:32circles, patterns of this house.
04:37There's another important sense of intergenerational continuity that's reflected in this house.
04:43Frank Lloyd Wright designs this house for his son, David, and David's family.
04:47Today, the current owners are Bing Hu, who has brought his daughter, a newly minted architect,
04:54into the restoration of this house.
04:58I come to the U.S. for the first time to study architecture, and then a year later, I went
05:03back to China, get my wife.
05:05From there, our community, also my family, grown, so we have our first daughter.
05:12And then later on, we have two more daughters.
05:14It was only natural for me to want to study architecture.
05:18As soon as I told my dad that, I was expecting him to be so excited.
05:22But he said, don't do architecture, it's a hard life.
05:25But of course, as his daughter, I don't listen to him.
05:29So I did exactly the opposite of that, and I studied architecture.
05:32On this property, David Claudette's red house, come to my attention, a spec builder bought
05:39a property from the family with the intention to demolish the house and create two spec houses.
05:45So the first I learned that is, like, we got to rescue this.
05:49My dad called me and asked me if I would consider leaving my job to come work with him to
05:55restore the David and Claudette's red house.
06:02It means a lot for my parents to come as Chinese immigrants and sort of be here preserving
06:08the legacy of American architecture as well.
06:17This ceiling is constructed of Philippine mahogany.
06:21It's a wood species that you can't get today.
06:23Unfortunately, because the roof leaked into this room for many years, this mahogany ceiling
06:29became stained.
06:30And because you can't get this wood anymore, cleaning and removing that staining is a meticulous
06:36craft.
06:37If any board gets destroyed, you actually have to replace the whole ceiling and indeed
06:41all the wood in the house because it's all one species.
06:44So one of the things that I love about this restoration is the very careful attention
06:48to detail.
06:50While the house hasn't been properly maintained, especially the most beautiful wood you can
06:55see, if you see before, there was night and day difference.
07:00When we started to dig to uncover it, there were like three or four layers of spray foam
07:05insulation up there.
07:06Anytime there was a big storm, I think the owners were just like, go spray up another
07:11layer and hopefully it'll do it this time.
07:14Embarking on this journey kind of felt like we were able to uncover history of the past
07:19that wasn't written.
07:23Beyond the look of the ceiling, it also has a really interesting function.
07:26Wright loved to connect interiors and exteriors.
07:29We have a piano here in the room.
07:33Wright loved the piano.
07:34Everybody in his family was musical.
07:36Music was something that they gravitated to.
07:40Well, how do you get your musical performances outdoors?
07:44You create a ceiling that will reflect the sound out through these doors and down into
07:50the courtyard where you might be gathering for a party or just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon.
07:59Wright had learned about acoustics in his first apprenticeship in Chicago with Dank
08:03Maury Adler, one of the great acousticians in American architectural history.
08:08He brought that into his practice and used it everywhere, but seldom with such dramatic
08:12effect as you see in this house.
08:15We've already experienced compression and release in the entryway into the living room.
08:21And now we're going to go through another somewhat compressed space, which is this hallway
08:25that takes us from the central living space to the primary bedroom of the house.
08:32Another sense of release after the compressed space of the hallway.
08:46And once again, we have an emotional journey.
08:49You also have this beautiful built-in banquette.
08:52You'll notice that there's some storage underneath it.
08:54No wasted space in a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
08:56This is important.
08:57Wright often designs rooms so that they have a different emotional impact and a different
09:03sense of space when you're standing or when you're sitting.
09:06And when you sit in here, the views will be very different.
09:14It may be hard to tell, but we could actually start in one of those carports and make a
09:19continuous spiral up the ramp, through the entry, through the living room, down the hallway,
09:26and into this bedroom without ever breaking that continuous curve.
09:34Let's go see the other room that people are always curious about.
09:37What we would call the kitchen, but what Frank Lloyd Wright called the workspace.
09:41So we're going to take this journey back through the hallway.
09:46Once again, we have the sense of surprise.
09:49Space is unfolding.
09:50And even though we've been here before and we know what's expected, it's still the sense
09:54of seeing this room differently.
09:57As we come to the workspace, I want you to first notice something special.
10:02We have this cone that's tapering.
10:07How do you have a door?
10:09Well, you cut the door to meet the building.
10:13Again, this wonderful little gesture, but Wright has thought of everything.
10:21Wright doesn't refer to these spaces as kitchens.
10:25These are spaces where you do your work to prepare for your guests.
10:28It's not like kitchens of today that become social spaces, but truly a space that's just
10:34designed for the work.
10:35And in this case, also a little table for the family, and a little trapezoidal trash
10:41can that fits perfectly into that space.
10:45It's one of those features that just delights people when they visit the house.
10:51You also see this angled line, this ramp that takes us to the roof.
10:56He's actually revealing the structure of the building in this space, that there's this
11:01continuity that's provided.
11:08Up here on the rooftop terrace, we can really see Wright's intention, how he connects the
11:13building with the landscape.
11:15Out to our southeast, we see the Papago Buttes.
11:21Behind me in the other direction, the head of the camel of Camelback Mountain.
11:25By firmly centering this building between these two landmarks that nature provided,
11:31Wright gives us the sense of being part of this world, and not merely on it, but at one
11:37with it.
11:40You'll notice that we're actually walking under the house, because the house is elevated.
11:48This courtyard is an outdoor room, but it wasn't just a room to gather in, maybe have
11:53a picnic in.
11:54It also originally had a pool.
11:56Also because the pool itself being constructed out of concrete block, slowly over time begins
12:01to disintegrate, something that Wright didn't anticipate when he built the house.
12:06So today, we just have the memory of the pool reflected here.
12:10When you stand in the middle of this courtyard on this central paver, you can hear sound
12:15reverberating from all around you.
12:17It's a space that will capture what we hear from inside the house, to give you the sense
12:23that you're not outdoors, but really you're just in another room of the house.
12:31David Wright worked for the Besser Manufacturing Company, and they made concrete block molds.
12:37So David insisted that his company's molds and concrete block be used for the construction
12:42and design of this house.
12:48And for Wright, concrete block wasn't simply an industrial material.
12:52He saw it as elevated, and this particular block, I think he really enjoyed.
12:56And so you'll see that at the end of wherever there was a concrete slab, he included this
13:01decorative block with a circular motif, and then this piece coming out of it.
13:10It also shows something that Wright really enjoyed about working with concrete, which
13:13is called in architecture terms, plasticity, meaning that it's moldable.
13:25You'd think that when your father is the architect, building this house would be easy, but it
13:30wasn't.
13:31All the usual challenges between architect and client showed up, everything from budget
13:37to not having the right foreman.
13:38In fact, at one point, David writes his father and asks for some changes and says, Dad, can
13:44the house be only 90% Frank Lloyd Wright and 10% David and Gladys Wright?
13:50And Wright said, you're making your poor old father tired, but accommodated his son's wishes.
13:56At the end of the day, what we see in between them is the exchange of gifts reflected in
14:00correspondence.
14:02It's been a really interesting experience and cherished experience, too, working with
14:11my dad.
14:12I feel like I've learned so much about him, and it's explained just seeing him at work
14:17and how he makes his decisions.
14:19Even today, I was thinking about, I'm so annoyed that my dad is getting these window washers
14:25to come the same day we're filming this video.
14:28And I realized he did that because it's the desert.
14:31So if we did this two days in advance, they would have been completely covered in dust.
14:36So little things like that have shown me that my dad is really the smartest person I know.
14:43I saw when I come here, I really want to work in the skyscrapers, you know, in New York
14:48City, in LA, in Chicago, working for a big architect.
14:52So after the years, I think that this is my destiny.
14:57The plan for the future of this property, I want to become my architecture design studio.
15:03I can open my door to let my client come.
15:07So that's kind of indirect way to welcome the public to able to see this masterpiece.
15:15I feel really lucky that we have a place like this home to come back to, and we'll get to
15:20enjoy it for many generations to come.