The Dana Thomas House

It's funny how sometimes the assignments you're not at all enthused about end up being the assignments you really love.  I took a modernism class (big mistake!  We had to read James Joyce.  Ugh) and for one of our papers we had to see some work of modernism and write about it.  I went to Springfield, Illinois and toured Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana-Thomas House, which was amazing.  I've toured my fair share of Wright houses, but this one has to be my favorite.  Anyway, I really like the paper I ended up writing about it.  I hope you do too.  If nothing else, at least read the first two paragraphs, which I particularly like.
And if you're ever in Springfield, tour this house.  Seriously.  It's amazing.

Dana-Thomas House:  Movement and Function

            Imagine a 19^th century parlor.  The walls are burgundy and they seem to soak up what weak light the windows allow, leaving you in the dark.  Against one wall a fireplace looms, a mixture of black metal and brown brick with two miniature columns holding up the gray granite mantle.  Your feet pass over the musty, oxblood red carpet on your way to a corner where a dusty porcelain tea set sits atop a dark, wooden table.  To the side of the table is a chair.  Perhaps its upholstering was once scarlet, but over the years it has faded into a dusted rose color.  A piece of rope lies across it, warning you, whatever you do, not to sit down.  This room is strictly “look but don’t touch.”  It is because of this policy that you fear to raise your arms.  Though you are not especially tall, you suspect that should you lift your arms over your head, they would hit the low ceiling, drawing reprimands from the tour guide.  The tour guide draws your attention to the butterfly design on the smoky fireplace cover, a motif he says is carried on throughout the house.  As more and more members of the guided tour enter and ogle at the cast iron butterflies, the small parlor becomes crowded, like too many people on an elevator.  Claustrophobia itches beneath your fingernails and when the tour guide at last announces it is time to move onto the next room, you race to the door with a sigh of relief.  The sigh is nearly immediately overcome by a gasp when the door opens and light floods in. 

The room in which you now find yourself is a world of movement—no dust could collect here.  A ceiling vaults to the sky instead of looming overhead.  The previous room’s heavy browns and cold blacks become warm honeys and creamy whites.  Different floors and ceilings dip into each other, a graceful confusion rather like MC Escher’s Relativity.  Geometric butterflies—creations of green triangles and rectangles—are flitting in the stained glass windows.  A fountain gurgles and a fireplace shoots you a wide grin.  The tour guide informs you that this is the same room though which you entered the house—and you recognize the statue of the woman bursting from the earth, so he must be correct, but all the same it seems incredible to you.  The room—is it one whole room or innumerable fractions of different rooms sweeping into each other—is not the same at this angle.  Perhaps while you were gone it rearranged itself.  If there was ever a room capable of such a feat, this room would seem to be it.

In the above situation, you were [I removed my name for purposes of anonymity].  The tour guide was Larry and the house was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House, located in Springfield, Illinois.  When Susan Lawrence Dana hired Frank Lloyd Wright to renovate her Victorian home, she had one important condition:  her old parlor must be preserved.  Wright honored this stipulation.  As the project went on, the house became unrecognizable.  It was not so much a renovation as building an entirely new house, to which Wright lent his very modern perspective.  Within this example of modern architecture, however, the past lived on in the form of the Victorian parlor, a vestigial pocket of times gone by.  When I walked from the Victorian box to the openness of the Wright’s ‘entry way/staircase/living room/there is no easy way to categorize a room in a Wright house’-room, the tenets of modernism became all the clearer because they existed in such stark contrast to the room I had just occupied.  Dark-light.  Closed-open.  Stagnant-moving.

Modernist architecture stresses function over form.  In a modernist building, form follows function.  As someone who lives in a pre-modern, Victorian house, I can attest that Victorian buildings were often not built with function in mind.  Rooms are so small and cut off from each other that during a crowded party moving from point A to point B can be near impossible, especially if you’re carrying a tray of pita and hummus.  Keeping our house cooled and heated is extremely expensive; during winter we mostly just walk around wearing several blankets and trading off who gets to carry the cat.  Our house is, in many respects, functionally deficient, yet it does have rather ostentatious design elements: a fireplace with ionic columns, egg-and-dart molding, and, I kid you not, a bust of Satan on the roof.  The Victorian parlor described above is in much the same vein.  Design elements do not contribute to function, and function is often neglected.  Wright’s part of the house is, of course, not.  It is dazzlingly simple, in fact.  Large expanses of plain wood and white wall.  There is no molding and whenever a statue is present, attention is drawn to it, whereas in a Victorian house decorative pieces are set up somewhat like a treasure hunt.

In Dana House, Wright focused on creating a house that was as functional as possible for a specific client.  Most Victorian houses were not designed with a specific person in mind, but Dana’s needs are omnipresent in her home.  As a socialite living in the state capital in the early 1900s, for her, entertainment was key.  She needed a house designed for small get-togethers and extravagant dinner parties as well.  The design of the house reflects this dual need.  Wright designed his rooms so they could be easily altered.  Dana needed a large dining room so Wright built her one, but she also needed a little breakfast nook so he installed a curtain.  All Dana needed to do was draw the curtain and voila, a breakfast nook was partitioned from the main dining room.  The same method is used in many areas of the home because, technically speaking, the home is only comprised of a few very large rooms.  The house is very open at its base, but the curtains allowed Dana to change how open she wanted it to be.  Other elements of function may be easily spotted.  Wright built in a storage area under the bedrooms.  A walk way over the dining room allows an entire string quartet to sit there playing music, unseen by the guests below.  One room features massive, built-in tables intended for displaying art which could be easily folded up when the room was altered into an auditorium.  The most striking example of function, however, is in the main entry way I described before, where the guests would first enter the house.  The room is set up with staircases all around it, allowing Dana to make a dramatic entrance, moving from one staircase to the next before she finally descended to meet her guests, having now established herself as their queen.  Dana House was her dream home, built to her every need and specification.  For Dana, it was the most functional house imaginable. 

There are innumerable reasons for which the Dana-Thomas House is modernist.  As I write this paper, they trip from my fingers, raising their hands and begging “pick me!”  The extra long bricks Wright uses emphasize the horizontal lines often found in modernist architecture.  Wright used unconventional materials and methods, as evidenced by his cantilevered benches, similar to Wright’s Fallingwater.  Wright also installed several examples of functional new technology, like an intercom system, and electric stove, and a gray water system.  But the two most key elements of Dana House which most clearly cement it as a work of modernism are, in my opinion, movement and function.  This is a house that moves, both in regards to the alterations possible and through the structure itself: the transitional levels and the flowing lines. When it was built, before it was surrounded by uniform houses, it must have appeared to have grown from the landscape, a natural extension of grass and dirt.  The Dana-Thomas House changes from every angle, making it into a living being itself.  As far as functionality goes, the Dana-Thomas House was as functional as possible for the person who would live there.

The Dana-Thomas House is inseparable from Dana herself; her life is the true historical context of the house.  It was built with the profits of silver mines in the Rocky Mountains.  Widowed, Dana made it her life’s goal to rule the Springfield social scene, her independence and considerable wealth giving her more freedom to chase this dream than nearly any other woman of the times would have had.  Dana was always on the forefront, embracing new ideas.  When her neighbors had traditional organs, Dana had Wright install an electric organ.  Dana’s deep desire to be on the edge of progress, ahead of the rest of Springfield aristocracy, makes her house a true work of modernism, a house of progress which moves forward and forward and never stops changing.