Saving Wright: The Freeman House and the Preservation of Meaning, Materials, and Modernity

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Jeffrey M. Chusid (Cornell University)

Saving Wright

The Freeman House and the Preservation of Meaning, Materials, and Modernity

Jeffrey M. Chusid (Cornell University)

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English

WW Norton & Co
23 December 2011

Individual architects & architectural firms; Houses, apartments, flats, units

""Dear Mrs. Freeman: I am glad to know that you are still happily 'at home.' Sincerely, Frank Lloyd Wright.""

Winner of The University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation's 2012 Historic Preservation Book Prize, 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 Wright's 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 Wright's 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 Wright's 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.

Saving Wright also received an honorable mention for the 2012 Lee Nelson Book Award from the Association for Preservation Technology, Intl. (APT).

By: Jeffrey M. Chusid (Cornell University)
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 264mm, Width: 226mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 1.082kg
ISBN: 9780393733020
ISBN 10: 0393733025
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 23 December 2011
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jeffrey M. Chusid, is an architect and an associate professor in the historic preservation planning program at Cornell University. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of Southern California, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Texas at Austin. His professional work has included architectural design, planning for cultural landscapes and historic communities, and materials conservation projects in California, New York and Texas as well as China, Fiji, Bosnia, and Ukraine. He was the first United States coordinator for DOCOMOMO and the founding president of the Texas Chapter of the Association for Preservation Technology and is currently president of the Society for the Preservation of Historic Cements. A past editor of the Journal of Architectural Education, he has lectured, written articles, and curated exhibitions on modernist architecture in India and in Southern California, with special emphasis on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chusid was the director of the Freeman House, and its preservation architect, from 1986 to 1997. His book, Saving Wright, was awarded the 2014 Society of Architectural Historians Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award and the 2012 Historic Preservation Book Prize by The University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation, and received an honorable mention for the 2012 Lee Nelson Book Award from the Association for Preservation Technology, Intl. (APT).

Reviews for Saving Wright: The Freeman House and the Preservation of Meaning, Materials, and Modernity

This well-written and informative book shares [Chusid's] close-up view of a fascinating case study and discusses philosophical issues and practical problems that we encounter with many twentieth-century structures. . . . [A] valuable addition to the libraries of admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright and preservation professionals involved with twentieth-century structures.