March 2025.
Springfield’s Westcott House is the only Prairie School house in Ohio known to be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wikipedia’s list of Wright works includes the Mosher House in Wellington but acknowledges that it is only attributed to him by some sources, and his subsequent work in Ohio is in his later Usonian style.
The Westcott House is located at 85 South Greenmount Avenue, a little over a mile east of downtown Springfield, Ohio. It is bordered by empty lots to the north, High Street and the Richardsonian Romanesque Fifth Lutheran Church to the south, Greenmount Avenue and Greenmount Cemetery to the east, and High Street’s Victorian houses to the west.
History
I couldn’t find any historic photos, so the ones in this section are my own from the first day I visited.
Burton Wescott and his family came to Springfield from Richmond, Indiana in 1903, where Burton worked as the treasurer of the American Seeding Machine Company. He and his wife Orpha quickly became some of Springfield’s most prominent citizens, and his wife was known for her progressive spirit. When the family was looking for an architect to design their home along East High Street (where Springfield’s richest citizens then lived), Orpha suggested that they commission Frank Lloyd Wright. It was designed in 1906 and built in 1908 in Wright’s trademark Prairie school style, featuring a horizontal profile, wide eaves, and stucco and brick materiality.
Burton Westcott brought his father’s Westcott Motor Car Company to Springfield in 1916. Wright acknowledged the family’s interests in automobiles and built a garage to the west of the house, which was planned to have a turntable. Burton also served on the town council and was elected president (Springfield’s mayor equivalent) in 1921. Orpha Westcott died unexpectedly in 1923, and her funeral was held inside the house. Burton’s health declined afterwards, probably due to stress caused by the failure of his car company, and he too died in 1926. The house was sold to another owner that year, and he lived there until he died in 1941.
What usually happens to Wright houses after the original owner dies is that they rapidly change hands afterwards, and since different homeowners have different tastes, features such as the Wright-designed furniture begin to walk away. Indeed, this same situation occurred to the Westcott House. In 1944, Eva Linton bought the house, and she subdivided the interior into five apartments while renovating the garage into a living space for herself. The house gradually fell into disrepair during her ownership, and it was inherited by her daughter Dorothy Snyder after her death in 1981. Dorothy sold it to her son Ken and his wife Sherri in 1988. After Ken’s unexpected death in a car accident just three years later, Sherri had difficulty maintaining the house and it was sold to the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy in 2001, who subsequently sold it to the newly-formed Westcott House Foundation.
The Westcott House Foundation was established by Springfield citizens who wanted to restore the house. They commissioned the firms Chambers, Murphy, and Burge and Schooley Caldwell to perform the work, which took almost five years to complete and included restoring the masonry and stucco. When it was completed in 2005, the house opened as a museum with tours for the public.
Photos
The Westcott House is much longer than it is wide. The side that faces High Street itself is minimal but displays typical Wrightian tendencies:
The house is very horizontal, unlike most homes of the period. Its cantilevers, courses of dark wood, and widely overhanging eaves amplify this effect greatly.
At an angle, you can see the covered balcony created by the massive roof overhang, as well as the various cantilevered sections:
As in many other Wright houses, he designed pretty much everything within the home, including the furniture and garden features. The urn is one of his designs, too.
I like these gates to the entrance below:
Wright’s Prairie designs usually included some kind of ornamentation, but his were more geometric in nature and sparingly applied. Ornament was usually seen on features like doors or windows, not almost everywhere like similarly-sized Victorian-era houses. Additionally, the location of this entrance is deliberately ambiguous and not centered on the High Street facade.
Here is the house in its full extent, viewed from the north:
The plan is basically organized into two units, which are separated by a central garden influenced by Japanese precedents. It includes a reflecting pool.
The north side is simple and faces the alley behind:
The wall along the east side is lined with Japanese-inspired woodwork and decorative plants in urns:
Detail of an urn and surrounding trellis:
The various materials and right angles of the north side:
The walls are largely light stucco, lined with painted dark wood courses. This provides a simple grayscale contrast, which the earthy red roof stands out from.
The house was closed the first day I visited, and I decided not go inside the second time around. SAH Archipedia writes:
“Here the guest is introduced to the classic Wrightian sequence of dramatic spaces. From the low and dark entrance, located below the first floor, one proceeds up toward the soaring vertical space of a grand staircase that leads to the private quarters. This, the only vertical space in the house, is crowned by a skylight with three stained glass panels. Both the skylight and clerestory windows above the main entrance have the same simple yet elegant pattern of repetitive squares. The combination of clear and warm amber-colored glass casts a geometric pattern on the walls throughout the day. This illuminated effect is dramatized by the shimmering quality of the encaustic wall finish, which is reminiscent of the brushstrokes of Impressionist paintings.
The living quarters at Westcott House embody Wright’s organic concept of the interior, where the room’s essence is the space enclosed by the walls, not the walls themselves, which are broken and freed from their confining role. In the front three rooms partitions separate functions in a subtle way. The ceiling continues uninterrupted from the library, through the living room, and to the dining area, unifying the three and inviting the eye to explore the space. The living quarters are bound together by the deep, autumnal colors of the walls, dark wood trim, and a consistent geometric pattern. The centrally placed living room features a generous fireplace flanked by inglenook benches, the symbolic heart of the household. Here the occupant is offered a complex view through bands of wood casement windows on the south, east, and west walls. There is a shoji-like quality to these windows, which are designed as a repetition of squares that frame vistas to the outdoors.”
It’s great that this house has been preserved and serves as a museum today. I like Wright’s architecture even though it’s a little while past my area of expertise (hence why I found it a little difficult to write too much about the house’s design), but I understand his work is very well-known and he undoubtedly changed the course of American architecture.
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment