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Wright in Racine
New life for the Glasner House
Posted by:
mhertzberg on
December 15, 2007 at
8:57PM CST
Jack Reed and the Glasner House  Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg  Two hundred people toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Glasner House during the 2007 national meeting of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. I had the fortune of being with the group of 50 that toured the house with Jack Reed, who bought the house in 2003 when it was threatened with demolition by developers, and who is restoring it. This article grew out of that tour. Wright designed the Glasner House in 1905 for a ravine at 850 Sheridan Road, in Glencoe, Illinois. The house is just north of his Brigham House, and is south-east of the Ravine Bluffs development which has six Wright homes. Jack Reed did not realize that he was about to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house when he opened the mail on a March day in 2003. He was happy to see a letter from Jeannine Majde, a close friend, who lives near Washington, D.C. “It was addressed in a familiar hand, and there was a full page article from the Washington Post about how the Glasner House is threatened (with demolition).”  There was more in the envelope than just the clipping. Dr. Majde also enclosed a note on her personal stationery. She is a biologist, so the stationary was ringed with vines, twigs, and flowers. Writing in black ink, “in her neat, feminine script,” she wrote Jack, “I think you need to own (and save) the Glasner House. It looks like quite the buy by our standards.” Dr. Majde was a department manager for the Office of Naval Research. “The best managers are those who give the job to the best person for it, and leave them alone. I think she was exercising her managerial expertise in a new field. She gave the job to the right guy. I was not looking to do it, but she knew I cared about Wright, had the resources, and was a perfectionist. The fact that the letter came from her had more weight than if I had seen the article in the Chicago Tribune.” One generally does not rush out to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and neither did Reed. He did a little introspection according to a system called Focusing, as he weighed the pros and cons of acting on Dr. Majde's suggestion: "Jack, do you want to do this? No." That didn't feel good. "Do you want the house to be destroyed without your trying to do something? God, no." That felt much worse. He bought the house, gutted the “unsympathetic alterations,” and is restoring it to its original condition. The only significant structural difference will be the addition of bedrooms and a modern bathroom to the lower floor. The lower floor was never finished by Wright, so Reed is comfortable making those changes. He never intended to live in the house. He only wanted to save it and then sell it to someone who will become its next steward.  Ann McGregor, right, of Wright on the Park (Mason City), on the tour.   The tour included the unfinished lower level of the house, which we entered from the west side of the house (center photo).  Instructions to the workers are taped to some of the walls. Reed’s introduction to Wright came when he was a student at the University of Chicago, and a friend took him to the Robie House. “I remember the first building (I saw), but I was not aware of what I was looking at, but I knew it was different from anything else. It was unlocked, and abandoned. We had just a book of matches for illumination. “It took me some time to put things together. Gradually in the liberal studies at the University, I began to appreciate proportion, and organization in the form of things, not only the built thing, but it could be in a piece of writing or music. I began to appreciate the Robie house in this way even before I began reading about Wright.”   Jack Reed's journey with Wright unexpectedly took him from the Robie House to the Glasner House.  The north side of the house, including the lower level. Reed sharpened his appreciation for Wright’s work as he put thousands of miles on his dark green 1967 Volvo 122S coupe, driving back and forth across the Midwest through the late 60s and 70s, training the lens of his Pentax camera on buildings by Wright and other Prairie-style architects. “I had some money to live on, so after working in electronics, I decided, ‘I don’t need this,’ so I took up a project. I looked up what documentation there was about Wright and his contemporaries in the Midwest, between Minneapolis and Cincinnati. “I would drive up and down the Midwest with a camera....so I could appreciate Wright’s composition, looking up these old buildings and taking pictures of them. I would run across some I didn’t know about.” He particularly remembers discovering Rock Glen , an enclave of homes by such architects as Walter Burley Griffin and F. Barry Byrne in Mason City, Iowa, which is also home to two Wright buildings. “I drove into Rock Glen one morning. I didn’t know it was there. I was looking for a way out of town and drove east from (Wright’s) Stockman house.”  Rock Glen, Mason City, Iowa He saw the first of several homes by Griffin, and wondered, “Where I am I?” He was astonished. “I looks like it has fallen out of Mars or somewhere!”  James Blythe House, by Walter Burley Griffin, Rock Glen, 1913. He was never reticent about asking homeowners if he could photograph their house. “I would take off my sports coat, walk up and say, ‘Hi I’m very keen on the architecture of so-and-so. May I walk around the other side of your house? Some would say, ‘get out of here,’ others would invite me in.” The trips were draining, but the results were rewarding. “I’m kind of a self starter and self-steering person, so I do these projects. It was hard staying on the road, surviving on 3-4 hours of sleep. I was exhausted, but then these slides would show up in the mail from Kodak and I’d run them through my projector, and it was ‘Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!’ Film was dirt cheap compared to a night in a motel. I would show the slides to friends. They were flabbergasted.” Why Wright? “I suppose there’s a certain kind of complete work of art where Wright and his contemporaries were interested in something new, not that we couldn’t learn from the ancients, and that seemed to fit into something with me. I was really taken with that, with carrying forth the classic into modern times. “He didn’t revive the classic, he built on it. The clarity and completeness of his designs: it wasn’t just the building, it was the furnishings and the relation of the building to the site, the so-called organic unity of the building. The organic completeness of it really appealed to me. That includes the client’s purpose, and to a certain extent the local styles and building materials, everything drawn together (into) a rich experience. “There is another artist that I admire along with Wright, in the performing arts, George Balanchine. His art has the same sort of completeness, and an even more subtle and complex dynamic balance of elements for each viewer. Balanchine saw the dancer as an individual as well as a performer, and made ballet-worlds where music and dance complement each other in changing ways like partners do. In Wright’s designs, you had this constant mingling of site and setting and the life of the inhabitants.” Reed does not really regret his decision. “I felt I had to try, although I accepted the possibility of failure. And so I did try, and with some consternation, I seem to have succeeded. It’s been fun. It’s good to see it happening. I have met interesting people. I relate to the workers. It’s a combination of things. It’s an application of engineering for an aesthetically satisfying result in a structure whose architecture will delight the people who experience it.” He reflects on the process. “There’s a certain amount of luck, but half of luck is being prepared.” Reed anticipates that the restoration of the house at 850 Sheridan Road, and then of the landscaping, will be done in 2009 or 2010.    Jack Reed, steward of the Glasner House
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