The Wright Inspiration

By Wolf Von Eckardt

A pizza king who owns the Detroit Tigers plans a museum

It took 31 years, but Frank Lloyd Wright's wish has finally come true. In 1953 the master designed a small, practical house that was erected as part of a huge retrospective of Wright's work on the site of the present Guggenheim Museum in New York City. When the show ended the house was dismantled, and Wright expressed the hope that it could be sold at auction to someone who would "permanently reestablish" it.

Last week, it was. Having lain in storage for years, original cabinet fronts, light fixtures, door frames and window sashes, along with twelve pieces of concrete block, 3 1/2 chairs and the plans, were offered in a benefit auction for Channel 13, New York City's public television station. The buyer: Tom Monaghan, 47, ebullient owner of the Detroit Tigers, head of the 1,450-store Domino's Pizza empire and, by his own account, the world's leading Frank Lloyd Wright fanatic since he was twelve years old. He beat out prospective purchasers from across the U.S. and the Philippines with a bid of $117,500.

Monaghan intends to rebuild the house as part of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum at Domino's Pizza new world headquarters on 300 semirural acres near Ann Arbor, Mich. He will be assisted by Architect-Builder David Henken, 68, a former Wright student who was in charge of putting up the house originally. Henken saved the fragments when earlier efforts to sell the house failed. He estimates that the reconstruction will cost $250,000.

Wright's house anticipated the contemporary search for an affordable, compact home design that fits today's lifestyle of working parents and kitchen entertaining. Wright claimed to have designed more than a hundred of these houses, to which he applied Samuel Butler's term Usonian (derived from the initials U.S.). Their architecture was intended to embody the spirit of democracy as Wright saw it, a spirit of close-to-nature individualism and hearth-centered family life. The exterior of the two-bedroom house shows mostly an unassuming brick wall. It has no attic, porch or basement, and its core consists of a single spacious, harmonious unit of living room, dining room and kitchen, focused on the fireplace.

Attractively displayed, the structure could be an important inspiration to America's approach to housing, the Wright inspiration. One of Monaghan's other planned structures at Ann Arbor sounds less salutary. He intends to put up Wright's "Golden Beacon," a 56-story skyscraper that was designed in 1956 for the Chicago lakefront but never built. Its design is to be adapted to accommodate Domino's office needs, a move that may result not only in an anachronism but a stylistic pastiche. "I don't want to turn the place into a Disneyland," Monaghan insists. "I just want to pay tribute to the greatest master of the arts that ever lived, of all time."

--By Wolf Von Eckardt.

Reported by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York