The Gordon House is a two-story Usonian–style house at the Oregon Garden in Silverton, Oregon, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with Burton Goodrich as the supervising architect, the house was completed in 1963 for the farmer Conrad Gordon and his wife Evelyn. The house was originally situated near Wilsonville, Oregon, between the Willamette River and Mount Hood, but it was relocated to the Oregon Garden in 2001. The Gordon House is one of two based on a 1938 "dream house" design published in Life magazine, the other being the Bernard Schwartz House in Wisconsin. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Conrad and Evelyn Gordon visited Wright's Taliesin West studio in Arizona in 1956 and subsequently asked him to design a house for them. Ed Strandberg was hired as the general contractor, while Goodrich assisted in the house's design and oversaw the completion of the house after Wright died in 1959. The Gordons lived there until their respective deaths. After Evelyn died in 1997, her son sold the house in 2000 to the Smith family, who wanted to demolish it. The Smiths agreed in November 2000 to donate the house to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy on the condition that the house be relocated. After the second story and roof were moved to the Oregon Garden in March 2001, the house was restored, and the ground-level first story was rebuilt. The house opened to the public in March 2002, becoming the only publicly accessible Wright home in the Pacific Northwest.
The house is arranged in a "T" shape, with bedrooms and maintenance rooms in one wing and the main living space in another wing. The exterior is made of concrete and red cedar, interspersed with large glass windows and perforated decorative boards; there are also overhanging flat roofs, and terraces. Adjoining the house are a terrace to the east and a carport to the south. The interior covers , with a radiant heating system and concrete and red-cedar decorations. The master bedroom, living room, office, and kitchen are on the first floor, while the other bedrooms are on the second floor; there is no attic. Wright also designed built-in furniture and custom furnishings for the house.
Site The Gordon House is located at the Oregon Garden in Silverton, Oregon, United States. Until 2001, it was located in the city of Wilsonville, Oregon. It was originally surrounded by grass, wildflowers, and plants. At the Oregon Garden, the house sits on nearly the same latitude as at its original location. After the house was relocated to the Oregon Garden, a wheelchair-accessible pathway and a gravel driveway were built around it. The topography of the original site has been replicated at the new location. A grove of Oregon white oaks, a native tree that has mostly been eradicated from the area, is also planted around the house. There are also some deciduous trees, which resemble the trees that were planted around the house's original site. A path leads from the west side of the house to an "outdoor room", and another path connects to a trail called the Oregon Garden Loop.
History
Design context During the 1930s, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had received significant press coverage after having completed Fallingwater, a house for the Kaufmann family in Pennsylvania. At the time, Wright designed houses mostly for well-off families, but he was also beginning to design lower-cost Usonian houses for middle-class families. In general, his Usonian houses tended to have open plans, geometric floor grids, in-floor heating, and a carport, without a garage or basement. Throughout his career, he also designed several farmhouses.
In mid-1938, Life magazine invited eight architects (including Wright) to draw up "dream houses" for four families, each in a different income bracket. Each architect drew up either a modern design or a traditional design for each family. Wright and Royal Barry Wills were respectively asked to create modern and traditional–style designs for a middle-income family, the Blackbourn family of Minneapolis. Wright described his design as "a little private club" with an open plan first floor, bedrooms on the second story, an enclosed patio, a flat roof, and an outdoor pool or sunken garden. The Blackbourns ultimately selected Wills' design, and the eight dream house plans were published in Life magazine on September 26, 1938, rapidly gaining large amounts of attention. The Wisconsin businessman Bernard Schwartz was the first to commission Wright's Life plan; this became the Bernard Schwartz House, built in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1940.
Gordon ownership
Development
The farmer Conrad Gordon and his wife Evelyn of Salem, Oregon, visited Wright's Taliesin West studio in Arizona in 1956. The Gordons owned of cleared land and of farmland in the Willamette Valley, which they had bought in 1948. Their site, known as Gordon's Run, was located near Wilsonville, Oregon, overlooking the Willamette River on the west side and Mount Hood to the east. The site had formerly been part of the Aurora Colony, founded before Oregon had become a state. The Gordons had farmed Gordon's Run for more than a decade before selling off most of the land, keeping for themselves. By the late 1950s, they wanted to develop a house on the land. Evelyn had been a longtime art and architecture enthusiast with a particular interest in Wright's work. Sources disagree on whether the Gordons had visited Taliesin West specifically to ask Wright to design them a house, or whether they had merely mentioned the idea of developing a new house to a tour guide, who then put them in contact with Wright.
Wright initially was reluctant to accept the commission, but he ultimately accepted it because he had never designed a building in Oregon, (S.451) and he aimed to design at least one building in every U.S. state. In addition, his onetime apprentice Burton Goodrich, who worked in nearby Lake Oswego, would be able to oversee the design. Goodrich sent over plat diagrams and geological surveys of the site to Wright. After agreeing to design the Gordon House, Wright sketched out the plans in colored pencil, taking inspiration from the 1938 Life plan. Wright never visited the site before his death, instead working entirely off drawings and photographs; he was busy designing New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at the time. Conrad objected to Wright's original low-to-the-ground couches, instead preferring cushions like those in his Chevrolet vehicle. As a result, the couch cushions were designed to the same dimensions as the cushions in Gordon's vehicle.
The Gordons initially planned to spend $25,000, far more than the $15,000 average cost of a bungalow at the time. When they began looking for a construction contractor, the Gordons received bids of up to $100,000. As such, even though the house's design was finished in 1957, construction did not begin for another several years. After Wright died in 1959, Goodrich oversaw the completion of the Gordon House. The contractor Ed Strandberg, who would later become a longtime collaborator of Goodrich, was hired to construct the house. Strandberg recalled that, in 1962, an inspector for Oregon City's building-permit department was initially reluctant to grant the house a construction permit, citing the low ceilings and the presence of gravel under the foundation footings. After Strandberg told the inspector the architect's name, he recalled that he not only received his permit, but also had several photographers take pictures of the plans. Construction took three months longer than expected because contractors were focused on perfecting the house's architectural details.
Usage The house was finished in 1963 or 1964, several years after Wright died. It had cost $56,000 in total. The Gordons moved into the house on May1, 1964, and hosted an open house for visitors the following week. The open house, which went on for five days, attracted 300 students and 1,500 other visitors. Afterward, Evelyn continued to host visitors who were interested in the building's architecture, keeping a guestbook and inviting visitors inside for a story and a walking tour. Evelyn displayed her artwork, including weavings, sculptures, and paintings, in the house. Conrad lived in the house until his death, though sources disagree on whether he died in the 1960s, 1978, or 1979.
The Clackamas County government added the house to its list of historic resources in 1992. The house sustained minor damage after a flood in the 1990s. The Gordons' son Edward placed the house for sale in the early 1990s, requesting either $3.1 million or $3.3 million. He expected that the land could be subdivided, but the house was far enough from Portland that there was little demand for subdividing the land. The asking price was then reduced to $2.3 million, and then to $1.1 million. Evelyn retained the house until her death in 1997, after which Edward again placed the house for sale. By then, The Sunday Oregonian reported that the house was boarded up. The existing house had rotting wood, drafty walls, and a leaking roof, and the concrete foundation made it very difficult to move the house.
Preservation attempts
Sale and proposed demolition
In September 2000, David and Carey Smith bought the Gordon property, including the house, for approximately $1.1 million. Deborah Vick, who lived nearby and was on the board of directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, recalled that the organization had been "hoping for responsible owners" but were unaware that the Gordon family had accepted an offer for the house. The Smiths announced plans to construct a new house. Because the land was zoned solely as farmland, Oregon zoning laws required that the existing house be sealed up or demolished before a new house could be built on the site. The Sunday Oregonian reported that David Smith was vague about his plans for the Gordon House but that Clackamas County officials had received inquiries about the possibility of demolishing the house. That October, the Smiths asked the county's board of commissioners to remove the house from the county's list of historic places, since they could not receive a demolition permit unless the designation was revoked.
The architectural community expressed concerns about the proposed demolition of the house, which heretofore had received little public attention. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and the American Institute of Architects' Portland chapter sent the Smiths several letters offering to buy or restore the house, initially receiving no response. The Smiths' contractor asked the architect Alan Mascord to design a house costing $1.5 million, which he declined. Mascord recalled that he had unsuccessfully tried to convince the Smiths to preserve the Gordon House. The interior designer Diane Plesset and her husband Jay also proposed buying the Gordon House and moving it to another part of the Smiths' land. The Clackamas County board of commissioners received large amounts of correspondence from across the U.S. advocating for the house's preservation, prompting it to schedule a public hearing for what was usually a pro forma delisting process.