Eye Music

On Thursday I went to the Pope-Leighy house in Fort Alexandria, Virginia. It’s a Usonian house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1941. I’m working on a piece on it, which will appear here in the future.

But now, as I begin the writing process I’m trying to put my finger on just what makes Wright’s houses (for me, it’s the Prairie and Usonian houses) so appealing. They seem to really nail that emotion of “home.” I was thinking it had something to do with their horizontal orientation, which engenders a sense of serenity, but Wright also uses verticals to play off the horizontals and to add strength as part of his compression and release pas de deux. Is it the materials? Just four in this case: wood, brick, concrete, glass, or maybe it’s the way the light pours in. (At the Pope-Leighy, Wright sandwiched glass between wood cutouts that vaguely resemble a Southwestern Indian motif, a less expensive version of his stained glass. These cast dappled patterns on floor and walls, which Wright called “eye music.”) Or perhaps it’s the way the houses relate to their natural settings. Clearly, it’s all these things and the spirit of harmony, integrity and honesty that they embody.