http://www.iit.edu/~kraejen/Jestersfinal4.

htm#

Jens Oliver Kraemer, an architecture student from Stuttgart, Germany has an

interesting virtual tour of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most engaging residential
designs, the Ralph Jester House (1938). As stated on the site:

The Project for Ralph Jester at Palos Verdes, California, is the first residence design
where Wright uses the circle to the fullest...The house was designed for a coastal
desert climate and a client working in the movie business. The use of circles in any
design poses obvious problems: How to deal with the interstices between the circles
where they touch one another, how to deal with furnishing...( and how to get
matching interior renderings in perspective view...)

This design was never built for its original client, however a version of it does exist
on the campus of Taliesin West (brought to life by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer.) It's a
remarkable use of space and one that obviously fired the imagination of Jens.

One last thought--we have always been amused that Wright was the trend-setter for
the idea of the "infinity pool"--a staple of the (once) popular TV show, the O.C.

Jester
House
California,
Palos Verdes
1938.

Frank Lloyd
Wright

Perspective
The Jester site
was a long,
narrow strip of
land bordered
on both sides
by neighbors
close to the lot
line, but with a
distance view
of the Pacific
Ocean.

In the Jester
House plan
Wright , placed
the circles
widely spaced
on a square
grid. In plan, in
fact, the
square grid
pervades, an is
reflected in the
roof with the
trellis openings
corresponding
to the unit
system in the
floor. But in
elevation,
every element
in the house is
circular, rising
drums and
cylinder. The
windows on
the exteriors a
long, low band
of glass set
directly at eye
level when a
person is
sitting down.
This keeps the
interior
protected from
overexposure
to the
California
Sunshine

Plan
Where the
openings give
into the patio,
the glass is full
length plate
glass windows
or glass doors,
totally
protected by
the patio roof.
The patio is the
central feature,
inviting
breezes,
offering shade.
To the south a
large
swimming pool
extends from
the slab edge
to the wall
terrace, and
then spills over
the landscape
bellow. As
designed for
Ralph Jester,
the column
masses and
fireplace where
to be built of
stone masonry,
the peripheral
walls of the
house of
curved
plywood
laminated in
layers with
building paper
inside to
provide
insulation.

Air View
Home

Table

Lamp

Chair

Environment 1

Environment 2

Jester 2

Plan &
Elevation

Jester
House
California,
Palos Verdes
1938.

Frank Lloyd
Wright
General view

Entrance Facade

View Across
Swimming Pool
Living Room

Home

Table

Lamp

Chair

Environment 1

Environment 2

Jester 1

Patio
 Going in Circles
The Lykes House, Phoenix Arizona
 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.