Couple ‘houses’ Frank Lloyd Wright legacy
John and Betty Moore moved in on a picture-perfect day in July 1989.
“In the evening there was a full moon — we were surprised that we could see it from the windows in so many different spots in the house,” Betty recalls.
That moon was a nice touch, since the couple, both of whom work in the Department of Chemistry, were moving into a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “hemicycle,” roughly the shape of a crescent moon. The house is one of two Usonian (“affordable housing for the people”) structures in the Madison environs that were built for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs.
“Before we moved in, when the house was empty, it looked like an unused theater stage,” says Betty. “As we placed our furniture throughout the house, it seemed to change, making ‘scenes’ on what had been the empty stage.”
That’s probably exactly what Wright, an architect of not only buildings but also just about everything with which he came into contact, had in mind. Begun in 1944 but not finished until 1948 due to war shortages, Jacobs II is a passive solar design. The sun enters through south-facing windows in winter, helping to heat the building. In summer, when the sun is high in the sky, an overhanging roof shades the windows.
By mid-October the sun starts to flood the windows again. John says, “It can get pretty toasty in the fall.”
A heated concrete floor originally provided primary winter toastiness. An artificial berm, created from earth removed from the front of the house, banks its rear. The interior is signature Wright, with his trademark low ceilings, open floor plan and limestone walls. John says that although the square footage is actually quite small (2,162 square feet), it contains some 400 tons of stone.
Friends warned the Moores: “They said we were going to have to do a lot of work on the house, and keep doing it,” John says. Happily, most of the major repair work had been done in the early 1980s, long before the Moores moved in. Renovations included a new radiant floor (the cost of heat for the property in 1980 had been $3,500), a high-efficiency furnace, air conditioning, a new roof, new windows and skylights, a new window wall and updated plumbing and wiring.
The refurbished house had the impact on the Moores of, well, 400 tons of stone, both say.
“We had looked at a number of houses in Madison when we were moving from Ann Arbor; most of them were pretty interchangeable,” John says. “When our Realtor asked if we wanted to look at a Wright house, we were open to the idea, although we weren’t Wright aficionados.”
“The whole of the house really drew us in,” Betty says. “It interested us, and we kept trying to figure it out. We’re still trying to figure it out.”
The organic nature of Jacobs II presents challenges as well as pleasures.
“There may be things that aren’t in the house that we might miss, but I can’t think of anything that would make sense to add to it — additions just wouldn’t fit in well with the whole,” Betty says. “The only example I can think of would be a screened porch. We had one in another house and just loved it — we ate most of our meals there whenever the weather was tolerable. This house doesn’t have one, and it couldn’t — it just wouldn’t work.”
The outreach work for the chemistry department that both John and Betty do certainly has exposed a lot of people to Wright’s architectural vision. John is a chemistry professor specializing in chemical education. He edits The Journal of Chemical Education. Betty is an associate editor of The Journal of Chemical Education. Their jobs require them to regularly entertain chemistry faculty, students and high school teachers from across the country. Jacobs II is a great help in that capacity, John says.
“Its informality and openness seem to relax our guests; it also relaxes us as hosts,” he says.
However, some Wright fans come to visit Jacobs II on the spur of the moment. “We accommodate them as best we can — it varies from case to case,” Betty says. “By and large we’ve had some very nice visitors, some with interesting stories, some with interesting houses of their own, some who have taught us things about our own house!
“It has not lost its fascination for us. It took us at least a year to get the full experience of its unique design, its relation to the outdoors, the movement of the sun and its penetration of the house in different seasons. The fascination never pales.”
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