WRIGHT: SAVING WRIGHT. THE FREEMAN HOUSE AND THE PRESERVATION OF MEANING, MATERIALS AND MODERNITY

This book is a case study on the preservation of an important work of modern architecture. The story of the Freeman House, and of the attempt to save it, entails almost all of the provocative issues that make historic preservation as a field so fascinating, technologically and theoretically complex, and politically charged. Saving Wright chronicles the ongoing struggle to save Wrights Freeman House in the Hollywood Hills, the setting for fascinating people and events but deeply flawed from the time it was built ninety-five years ago. The Freeman House was an experiment born out of Frank Lloyd Wrights polemical vision of a new kind of architecture for the middle class, for modern America, and, in particular, for the Los Angeles foothills. Its design and construction were difficult, thus, along with many poor decisions, planting within a beautiful work of architecture the seeds of its own destruction. Jeffrey M. Chusid, who lived in the house and studied it while Harriet Freeman was still alive and residing there and, later, after she gave it to the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, examines the experimental 'textile-block' construction system, the power of Wrights architecture, the interaction of people and place, and the concepts and challenges of historic preservation'why and how we do it. The Freeman House is a valuable case study because it serves as a test of established preservation procedures and protocols, of building forensics and conservation techniques, and of the meaning of a historic site to overlapping and not necessarily compatible communities. 200 photographs and drawings