Squabble Breaks Out Over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Legacy

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Frank Lloyd Wright, who called himself the greatest living American architect, can still create a scandal 47 years after his death.

A squabble over his legacy pits Wright purists, a prickly bunch, against a retired sheet-metal contractor named Joe Massaro, who is building a home in Putnam County, N.Y., based on designs Wright sketched in 1950. The purists argue that any deviation from what the master architect intended means Mr. Massaro can’t call his home a true Frank Lloyd Wright creation. And since Mr. Massaro is working from sketches, not blueprints, his project can’t be legitimate.

“He says his construction is within 2 inches of Wright’s design,” Wright expert William Allin Storrer said. “Nuts to that! You design it exactly according to plan or you don’t call it a Frank Lloyd Wright house.”

Mr. Massaro disagrees. Wright meant the four-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot house to be built exactly where Mr. Massaro is building it, on the rocky tip of wooded, 11-acre Petra Island in Lake Mahopac, 50 miles north of New York City. Mr. Massaro said he departed from Wright’s design only to satisfy modern building codes and to make sure that the home’s 25-foot concrete deck, cantilevered over the lake, doesn’t fall down.

“I wouldn’t have built it if I couldn’t put it exactly where Frank intended it,” said Mr. Massaro, who often refers to Wright by his first name. “They can pick it apart all they want, but in 25 years, this will be considered one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces.”

The house is at least six months from completion, but one Wright scholar has already compared it to Fallingwater, probably Wright’s best-known residence.

“It’s one of the most dramatically sited houses Wright ever designed,” said Robert Twombly, author of “Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture.” “It’s just a knockout.”

An engineer named A. K. Chahroudi bought Petra Island in 1949 and asked Wright to design a masterpiece for his family to live in. Chahroudi couldn’t afford the $50,000 home Wright drew up and persuaded the architect to blueprint a 1,200-square-foot cottage instead. The Chahroudi family lived there nine years, according to Dod Chahroudi, A. K. Chahroudi’s son. Mr. Massaro is using the cottage as construction headquarters, and it will remain when the new house is finished.

Wright designed more than 1,000 buildings; some 477 were built. A dozen have gone up since his death at the age of 92 in 1959,including three now under construction in Buffalo, N.Y. Those also have drawn criticism from Wright fans, some of whom say no structure Wright drew up should be built after his death.

Wright was notoriously fussy about his designs, going so far as to rearrange the furniture on visits to completed homes.

The design for the island “masterpiece” was site-specific; it incorporated a 12-foot-high, 60-foot-long rock, nicknamed “whale rock,” to form the exterior of the house’s entry and a long interior wall. A smaller “tail rock” is used as a bathroom and kitchen wall.

“It’s not a house that can be built anywhere else,” Dod Chahroudi said.

The entrance to the single-story structure is 7 feet high, but in typical Wright fashion the claustrophobic dimness gives way to an 18-foot-high living area made bright by 26 triangular skylights.

Mr. Massaro poured 150 tons of concrete to make the floors, ceilings and some of the walls. In order to cart the material from the mainland, Mr. Massaro waited until the lake froze over and dragged the ingredients across the ice behind six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles called “gators.” It took 36 hours of continuous pouring, because the structure’s stability requires the cement to be seamless.

The house’s most arresting feature is the cantilevered deck, which juts more than 25 feet over the lake.

“The extent of the cantilever is mind-boggling,” Mr. Twombly said.

Mr. Massaro, who lives with his wife, Barbara, on the mainland, a 10-minute boat ride from the island, won’t divulge how much he’s spent, joking that costs have exceeded the original $50,000 budget.

“If I’d known how much trouble it would be, I never would have started,” Mr. Massaro said. “But now that we’re this far along, I’m glad I did it.”

Dod Chahroudi gave Mr. Massaro copies of Wright’s drawings when Mr. Massaro bought Petra Island in 1995. After a subsequent visit to Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa., Mr. Massaro said he knew he had to build the house.

“I started falling in love with Frank,” Mr. Massaro said.

Mr. Massaro tried to enlist the help of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, established in 1940 to conserve the architect’s work. Mr. Massaro said the foundation wanted $450,000 to supervise construction and a guarantee that the home would be built.

That didn’t sit well with Mr. Massaro, who got into business right out of high school and sold his company, Elmsford Sheet Metal, in 2000. So he hired Wright scholar and architect Thomas Heinz to help.

The foundation sued Mr. Massaro, who agreed in a settlement to limit the use of Wright’s name in connection with the house to the phrase “inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Philip Allsopp, chief executive of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, declined to speak about the Mr. Massaro settlement. He did say that he was concerned about the bastardization of Wright’s style.

“If he were alive today, he’d be supervising” construction of the Mr. Massaro house, Mr. Allsopp said. “No one who is not Frank Lloyd Wright could do that.”


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