I'm not supposed to tell you where the Lykes House is.

It's one of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses hidden around Phoenix. These include the circular 1952 David Wright House hidden at 5212 East Exeter Road, the 1954 Harold Price "Grandma" House hidden at 7211 North Tatum, the 1950 Benjamin Adelman House hidden at 1123 West Palo Verde Drive, the 1950 Raymond Carlson House hidden at 1123 West Palo Verde Drive and the 1953 Boomer House (and I know exactly where the Boomer House is, concealed behind its thick, thick, thick shrubbery on the edge of a golf course, because I was chased out of there once) whose owners would be just as happy not to see you at 5808 North 30th Street, within easy walking distance of the Arizona Biltmore, and that's okay, they deserve their privacy.

The Norman Lykes House is feminine but sits commandingly on its landscape, a citadel, a fortress. As the road comes up, you approach the house from underneath. The site is a south-facing canyon where you can see the lights of downtown Phoenix, but you can't easily be seen, a secluded canyon containing maybe a couple dozen other expensive custom homes, most of them existing in an ugly, combative, forcefully ignorant relationship to the site and the strong sun. The Lykes House, for all its faults, looks fabulous compared to them.

 

In architectural history the Norman Lykes House is the very last design credited to Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright died in 1959, leaving behind a profusion of signed work, unfinished and unsigned work, reusable elements, partially approved work of students, tantalizing suggestions, dusty archives, rejected projects and like that. The Lykes House was finished in 1967, finished off by Taliesin architect John Rattenbury for the original client on the original site, so it counts as the last official FLW house.

In exterior form the Lykes House is interesting because it's a "desert rose" (read: "pink") circular concrete-block castle mounted onto and into the hillside.

The road continues uphill, allowing pedestrians like us the chance to look down at the house.

You'll see circles.

Wright has a long history with circles. He was intellectually restless, you already know that. In the 1950s, in his last years, he produced a number of large circular buildings - the Greek Orthodox Church, the Marin County Civic Center, the Gammage Auditorium - which have always suggested to me an entire unfinished genre. The Gammage, for instance, is uncomfortable to look not because it's ugly, it's not exactly ugly, but it's two things at once: dated in a way that points back to styles of the 50's, like a sort of a pink sombrero for Greer Garson, and a futuristic look not-ascribable-to-any-year-at-all. Its circle-ness is compromised, or is it stabilized, by those two weird arms. Inside, the floorplan is a clever arrangement of two intersecting circles, like an "8", the smaller one containing the stage & dressing rooms & backstage, the larger one containing the auditorium and lobby, and the intersection is the threshold between performers and audience. Then of course there's the Guggenheim.

But those are big, broad circles in public buildings, with lots of margin for error from a space-planning standpoint.

Way back in 1936 Wright produced a couple of experimental residential designs, on a much smaller scale, as if to say, "I've achieved mastery of the standard rectangular grid, let's move on, shall we?"

 

One experiment was the Hanna House, also called the Honeycomb House, designed on a hexagonal module (can't call it a grid any more) and built in Palo Alto close to Stanford University. There's not a single 90-degree angle in it. Wright called them 'bee cells' in a letter to the long-suffering clients. He chose a module unit-length of thirteen inches, and marked those hexagons into the slab floor, and every building element conforms to those 120-degrees and those 13-inch lengths or multiples thereof. The clients loved it (eventually) and a whole book about the experience, it's become one of his most acclaimed and documented houses, and now as a result there are hexagonal houses all over the place, not.

Around the same time Wright drew up plans for what became known as the Ralph Jester House, with a floorplan all based on circles. Twelve circles, actually, organized into three distinct pavilion-clusters (if you can picture that), meaning that the client must step outside to get from one pavilion to another, for instance from the living room to the kitchen. The living room is 26 feet in diameter. Ralph Jester wouldn't or couldn't accept the design. According to Brendan Gill this design was unsuccessfully shopped to 9 other clients over the years, including Huntington Hartford in 1947. It was deemed impractical and expensive as, indeed, most builders and architects would agree that it is. Decades afterward it was built as the Pfeiffer Residence on the grounds of Taliesin West, as impractical as ever.

The Wright photographer Pedro Guerrero talks in his memoirs about the 1952 David Wright house a couple of miles away from the Lykes house. This is a spiral floorplan. Guerrero says that Wright was using his son's house as a sort of rough draft or dress rehearsal to anticipate problems with the big spiral Guggenheim, and that FLW did indeed make a late addition to the exterior, a straight wall, to anchor the composition and make it a little less dizzying.

 

All of which leads us to the Lykes House here. Its 2800-square-foot interior floorplan based on five or six intersecting circles and cylinders, bigger and smaller, geometrically intersecting each others' centers (not that you could tell), with all the built-in furniture and fixtures built into the same curves and forming concentric circles. (The house is for sale right now, and it's a wonder it hasn't been marketed as an energy vortex or an orgone accumulator.) The original design included five bedrooms trailing off to the south, like a tail, some of them unworkably tiny. Typically FLW would prefer to squeeze you out of the bedroom, out of the bathrooms, out of the kitchen, out into the great room where you could socialize properly. In 1993 Rattenbury renovated them down to three more spacious bedrooms, which is more socially normal these days.

Ordinarily circular rooms on this residential scale are -- well, let's not say they're the worst decision you can make, let's say circular rooms come with interesting tradeoffs.

First, they're expensive to build. A constructed curve gives builders and contractors an almost infinite number of chances to screw up. Builders and contractors aren't used to it, and that requires more thought and energy and labor, and they will charge you extra for the terrible pain of learning. There might be rework.

Curves are desirable but so expensive and so complicated that you can observe a number of strategies to get curves integrated without really paying for them. Incorporating a single strategic curve or archway somewhere on the façade (known as the old-single-curve-on-the-façade-trick), sometimes the roof line, often in an ornamental or superfluous design element, is one way. Another trick is to build the house with all straight lines and right angles, and then go curve-crazy in the landscaping like courses of serpentine brick paths and edging and stuff like that. Next time you're looking at houses, look at the patterns of straight lines and curves, you'll see exactly what I mean.

 

Second, circles are hard to fit together efficiently; they tend to create wasted convex leftover space all around them. Circles don't nest. That's why the Jester house turned out as three separate pavilions under one roof. (And that's why I think the Guggenheim is a funny poke in the eye to New York City; at the margins of the spiral it wastes some of the most valuable real estate in the world.)

Third and most interesting, curves are disorienting. Humans tend to constantly monitor their surroundings for orienting cues without consciously realizing it. Most of us have been trained to expect right angles and flat surfaces. Odd angles or non-flat surfaces can cause vertigo, and that violates an unspoken, unexamined but absolutely critical spatial expectation. When confronted with something else, people get mad, they get confused, they get dizzy, and sometimes, as in the finest work of Peter Eisenman, they vomit up their lunches.

NOT, I hasten to add, for the benefit of any real estate agents reading this, that the Lykes House would make people vomit. I'm only pointing out that the Lykes House is another brave Frank Lloyd Wright experiment into alternative spatial rhythms. God bless him for trying something different.

Oh, and I lied to you, it wouldn't be 2800 square feet, would it.

If you've enjoyed reading, please contribute via PayPal. Your contributions help support this site. Wright people usually have excellent taste, don't you think?