SC Johnson has announced a new, free exhibit at The SC Johnson Gallery: At Home with Frank Lloyd Wright, located on the company’s Racine, Wis., campus. The exhibit, Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vision of The American Home, is scheduled to open to the public on Friday, May 3, 2013.
The exhibit is the most recent addition of Wright artifacts to the campus and celebrates “Usonia,” a term which describes Wright’s architectural vision for the development of cities featuring practical, yet beautiful, homes for the middle-class. Usonian homes took a new approach to construction, utilizing less expensive materials and typically excluding basements and attics. The homes also featured a strong visual connection between the interior and exterior spaces, with great emphasis placed on the main living areas and spaces devoted to bringing the family together.
Wright completed his first Usonian house for Herbert Jacobs in 1936. Jacobs was a newspaper man located in Madison, Wis. The “exploded” model is on loan from the Milwaukee Art Museum and will allow visitors to explore the precise proportions, scale and natural materials used to create the home.
“The exhibit is a glimpse of Wright’s answers to the greater question of how to design beautiful spaces that are both affordable and complementary to their natural surroundings,” said Brady Roberts, chief curator of The Milwaukee Art Museum. “The objects in this exhibition are not only stunning, but offer great insight into Wright’s practices which anticipated the current trend of sustainable architecture.”
PHOTO: Exploded view model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Usonian house, Jacobs House I, in Madison, Wis. (Collection Milwaukee Art Museum) Visitors can see the model at The SC Johnson Gallery: At Home with Frank Lloyd Wright, located at the SC Johnson campus in Racine, Wis., beginning Friday, May 3, 2013. Photo courtesy Mark Hertzberg. (PRNewsFoto/SC Johnson)