Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House Los Angeles Times

ennis house

Then, in 2005, Los Angeles experienced an unprecedented amount of rain. Excessive storm runoff saturated the hillside on which the house sits, causing the further collapse of the retaining wall. The city was so concerned that it temporarily “red-tagged” the building, preventing anyone from entering it until its stability could be confirmed.

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Meetings with homeowners reveal the commitment of each to the preservation of Wright's... To move the process along quickly, the Conservancy drew from its Lewis-Haines Revolving Fund to pay off outstanding architectural and engineering fees so the EHF could obtain necessary building permits. Leary proudly presented the check to repay the Lewis-Haines Revolving Fund at the 2006 Conservancy conference. In 2009, 50 years after his grandfather's death, Eric Lloyd Wright announced that the Ennis House Foundation was putting the landmark up for sale. A private owner, he said, would be better able to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy.

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ennis house

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Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House Is Officially the Most Expensive Wright-Designed Home Ever Sold - Architectural Digest

Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House Is Officially the Most Expensive Wright-Designed Home Ever Sold.

Posted: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]

When actor John Nesbitt purchased the home in 1940, he re-hired Frank Lloyd Wright to add a pool and a billiard room to the residence. Wright had used concrete in monumental projects, but in the 1920s it was still considered a new material, especially for home construction. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminum molds to create a block 16 inches wide, 16 inches tall and 3 1/2 inches thick. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position. The double-wall construction called for exterior blocks and interior blocks to be set about 1 inch apart, and estimates of the total number of blocks deployed by Wright have ranged from 27,000 to 40,000.

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The last and largest of the four concrete-block houses that Wright built in the Los Angeles area remains arguably the best residential example of Mayan Revival architecture in the country. Charles Ennis passed away in 1928, only a few years after the house was completed, and Mabel Ennis sold the property in 1936. The house passed through several owners, including radio personality John Nesbitt, who hired Wright to renovate the property in 1940. Lloyd Wright converted a basement storage area into a billiard room and designed a swimming pool for the north terrace. The hilltop home wasn’t far into construction before problems became noticeable with some of the granite blocks buckling in key places. With construction being overseen by Wright’s son Lloyd, the unhappy Ennis couple fired the Wrights and took over supervising completion of the home.

ennis house

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The concrete—a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site—was hand-cast in aluminum molds to create blocks measuring 16”x 16” x 3.5” that were then woven together with steel rods, giving the textile block houses their name. The Ennis House is unusually monumental and vertical for a Wright residence, but when the architect completed it in 1924 he immediately considered it his favorite. The Charles and Mabel Ennis House (1923) was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the owners of a Los Angeles men’s clothier.

Ennis House history, construction, and renovation

The main house and a second structure connected by a wide bridge and incorporating the garage, chauffeur’s quarters and service facilities, enclose approximately 6,200 square feet. Extensive terraces and the broad motor court add to the expansive footprint of the building that overlooks Los Angeles from its prominent perch in the Hollywood hills. The construction system (textured concrete blocks molded on site with steel reinforcement) presented practical problems from the start. Too much common soil was included in the concrete mix causing the blocks to be less dense than Wright intended and the stepped wall facade allowed moisture infiltration into the blocks and thence to the reinforcement.

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Several members volunteered to resign and the remaining board members began reaching into the local professional community to seek new members with appropriate connections and skills. She proposed a roundtable meeting to discuss strategies for moving forward. She succeeded in persuading representatives from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles Conservancy and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to meet with representatives from the Conservancy and TPCH. The house passed through several owners and in 1968 August (Gus) Brown and his wife became the eighth owners. In an effort to finance repairs and maintenance, Brown formed the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage (TPCH), transferred the house to that non-profit and retained the right to live in the house. Brown promoted the house as the Ennis-Brown House and the building was open for tours on a limited schedule and was used as a set for over a dozen movies and numerous commercials and photo shoots.

In 1940, the house was sold to media personality John Nesbitt, who had Wright add a pool on the north terrace, a billiard room on the ground floor, and a heating system. The Lions now have a massive gap in the draft, currently not holding a pick until 164 overall (fifth round). RT JC Latham (7) will make the transition to the left side to protect Will Levis’ blindside.

Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd, oversaw the construction, which included "more than 27,000 patterned and perforated decomposed granite blocks," according to Variety. The interior is just as grand with lofty ceilings in the living and dining rooms, windows with panoramic views of LA, and the carved stone blocks clearly visible on many of the walls and columns. A loggia runs the length of the building outside, and a swimming pool, added by later owners, completes the picture of affluence. The exterior of the building is constructed from 27,000 precast and intricately patterned “textile” blocks ion a post-and-lintel system – also called a trabeated system – of horizontal beams held up by columns / posts. The interlocking and delicately decorated blocks suggest Wright may have been greatly inspired by Mayan architecture. Even though it’s a private residence, theoretically you should be able to visit it.

German Warehouse, a odd project in southwest Wisconsin, and the first use of his Mayan block patterns, shows how Wright arrived at these unique projects. The protagonists in this book are the concrete blocks, modeled according to geometric shapes. To improve the resilience of the system, Wright placed a web of steel on the sides of the blocks.

Together, the two separate pieces work to conquer the landscape and houses built around the streets, as the whopping 10,000 square foot dwelling expands horizontally across the hilltop. The spine-like loggia runs along the northern side of the house to connect the public and private spaces to the south. “It was the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world,” says Wright. “It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. ” Wright takes on the challenge of creating a warm and decorative material out of the standard cold industrial concrete, and achieves this through the carvings of a repeated geometric design.

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