Samara - Trip Report (tl;dr)

[Kimbell175113]

[ QUOTE ]
Awesome trip report Kimbell. I just now took the time to read it. Pretty cool! So how much of the house did you end up seeing anyway? Did you get the whole tour like bedrooms and everything? Is there a basement level? You mentioned that you didn't see "flat" walls or doors, but how is that possible? Also, you mentioned that they explained to you guys how Wright went about building this particular house. Please share! What did you learn about his building method? (I know nothing about him other than that I think his homes look amazing.) I read the wiki article you linked and it said that this house has more color than a typical FLW home.

I would so love to see it. I wonder how difficult it is to schedule a tour.

[/ QUOTE ]
-We went through everything but the master bedroom and bathroom, which was standard for the tours (they happen all the time, we weren't even the only one that day.)

-No basement. I'm under the impression that Wright didn't like them.

-Basically the house is based around a strong center with every room sorta just hanging off of it. Obv there is steel keeping this all together behind the scenes, and this allows a lot of openness: no columns or posts, few load-bearing walls, etc. Randomly turn and look in any direction from any spot and you'll see other rooms, maybe even outside. Imagine a line going straight out from your eyes: it'll be a long while before it hits a wall and stops.

-Wright apparently just invented stuff on the spot, always with an eye for the future. He foresaw that the owners would have multiple TVs, and left places for them. (One is a super badass remote-controlled mechanical trapdoor piece of brilliance that rises out of what looks like a little wooden cabinet.) There's heating in the form of water flowing through pipes under the floor: this takes less space, doesn't [censored] up the air, and is more efficient. The house was built to work well both with and without air conditioning. The list goes on. I don't know about the particular methods of carpentry or whatever, if that's what you were asking: the docent was more of an artsy guy as opposed to a technical buff.