Frank Lloyd Wright

the michigan difference

While looking through your excellent centennial booklet I came across the picture of Frank Lloyd Wright in the old student drafting room. It brought back some fond memories from 1957.

Four of us architecture students learned that FLW would be delivering an address in Detroit. We decided to invite him, without really expecting him to accept, to the student drafting room for a chat with all of us. I was detailed to secure his agreement.

I placed a call to Taliesin in Spring Green and asked to speak to Mr. Wright. In a few minutes, to my surprise, he came on the phone. I issued the invitation. After a brief consultation with his secretary he accepted.

After his Detroit address, which we attended, he was driven to Ann Arbor where he spent the night with the Palmer family, whose home he had designed several years earlier (see article page 20). We were invited to visit him in the house that night for coffee. He expounded on several principles of design. My one recollection is that the top of the Washington Monument is too pointed. It should have been flatter—more in the nature of the material.

We picked him up the next morning in my ’57 Plymouth (with tail fins yet!) that he roundly condemned, took him to the Architecture & Design Building and back after the talk, the subjects of which I cannot remember. To the lady of the house, he pointed out an offending crack in a brick retaining wall which he marked with a resounding whack of his cane.

To her chagrin, Mrs. Palmer reported that upon rising she found Wright had, sometime in the night, moved all her living room furniture back into exactly the places he had originally planned for them. Even a baby grant piano that traveled from one end of the room to the other. I believe he was about 82 at the time.

—John E. Crouse, B.Arch.’59

The university has been inviting alumni/ae to share how Michigan has made a difference in their lives. We have been sharing these stories periodically in Portico.

On The Wright Path

In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Palmer House, UM alumnus Grant Hildebrand explores an architectural masterwork…and completes a personal odyssey spanning more than 50 years.

by Linda Fitzgerald

On a fall day in 1953 architecture student Grant Hildebrand got his first glimpse of the Palmer House in Ann Arbor. “Somehow, I had become interested in Frank Lloyd Wright and managed to locate a copy of Taliesin Drawings, one of the few books on Wright available at the time,” he explains. “Among the drawings was a sketch of the Palmer House, so I decided to track it down.”

The house had been commissioned in 1950 by University of Michigan Professor of Economics William (“Billy”) Palmer and his wife, Mary, a graduate of the UM School of Music and avid musician. Given that Wright was in his early 80s at the time and deeply immersed in design and construction of the Guggenheim Museum, it seemed unlikely he would agree to take on a small residential project in a Midwestern college town. The fact that he accepted the commission was, as Hildebrand later learned, a testament in large part to Mary Palmer’s persistence and charm.

Map in hand, Hildebrand made his way by foot along Geddes Avenue and down the twists and turns of Orchard Hills Drive. Suddenly, there it was. Writing about that moment more than 50 years later, he would remember it this way:

“There was no mistaking it…an architectural sculpture embedded in a knoll…It was the first building by Wright I had ever seen—was perhaps the first building of which I was conscious that it was a work of architecture; it seemed the most beautiful thing I could have imagined.“

Although Mary and Billy Palmer were in plain sight, working in the garden, Hildebrand was too shy to approach them. (That introduction would have to wait until 1986, when the couple hosted a reception for Hildebrand and other notable speakers featured at a UM symposium on Frank Lloyd Wright.) Still, it was an encounter the young architecture student would never forget: one that would set in motion a series of events involving a diverse group of UM faculty and graduates, and would culminate in the 2007 publication of his book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Palmer House.

Constructing A Successful Career

After receiving his B.Arch. in 1957, Hildebrand spent two years with Albert Kahn Associates in Detroit. In the early 1960s, as a designer with Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, he found himself working on the World Trade Center. “It was not a satisfying project,” he recalls. “There were many troubling issues. The size. The fact that the building had taken over a viable community in south Manhattan.” That pivotal experience sent him back to the UM for a graduate degree in architectural history.

In 1964, Hildebrand accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington. By the mid-1970s, he had received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award along with the rank of full professor, and had published a groundbreaking work entitled Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn.

Then, in 1978, he attended a lecture by British geographer-turned-landscape designer Jay Appleton. “That talk changed my life,” says Hildebrand. “Appleton’s position was that most of what we find appealing in landscapes has to do with an ancient predilection for choosing settings that offer survival advantages. One particular example is what he calls the refuge and prospect duality. In other words, a cozy, safe, dark retreat for sleeping, preparing food and raising young conjoined with bright, open meadows where our ancestors could see and hunt game clearly.It seemed wonderful to me, the way Appleton broke the boundaries between art and science. I decided to push that theory into architecture.”

Making The Wright Connections

Thus began a new phase of Hildebrand’s career, both as a teacher and scholar. Realizing that the refuge-and-prospect duality “happens all over the place” in Wright’s houses, he began to study those constructions closely. As he points out, “The survival spaces as described by Appleton need to be contiguous, something you find time after time in Wright’s residential designs. It’s a common feature of his houses to have dark cozy spaces that move into a wide sweep of windows overlooking a vista.”

As part of his research, Hildebrand interviewed the original owners of Wright houses and discovered they recognized Appleton’s values immediately in their own spaces. He shared his findings through two groundbreaking books, The Wright Space, Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses (1991) and Origins of Architectural Pleasure (1999). His work garnered interest and praise among professionals. “But the highest praise of all,” he insists, “came from Mary Palmer, who told me that I was the only person who had been able to describe what it actually feels like to live in a Wright house.”

Arriving Full Circle

In 1986, Grant Hildebrand returned to Ann Arbor as guest speaker at a symposium organized by his mentor and UM Professor of Architecture Leonard K. Eaton. It was through Leonard and his wife, Ann—who were planning to produce a monograph of the Palmer House—that Hildebrand made the acquaintance of Mary and Billy Palmer. In 1999, he once again found himself in Ann Arbor, this time as a visiting professor at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. During that year, he became a familiar and welcome guest in the Palmer household.

As Hildebrand admits, “I had wanted to write about the Palmer House for a long time.” In 2004, that wish was unexpectedly fulfilled when the Eatons—recognizing that other obligations would make it impossible for them to complete their monograph—asked him to build on their work.

Hildebrand describes the 15 months that followed as “marvelous fun,” adding that, “of all the books I’ve written, this was the one that gave me the most pleasure.” From the Eatons he received a compilation of interviews with members of the Palmer family, a three-page poem by Mary Palmer, a collection of black-and-white photos, and several pages of text on the actual house. Working as many as 12 hours a day, he organized and wrote the content, hired photographers, prepared diagrams, searched Taliesin archives, created a graphic design for the book, and proofed and indexed the manuscript.

A Crowning Architectural Achievement

If Frank Lloyd Wright’s Palmer House was a labor of love, it was also a learning process for Grant Hildebrand, a time in which he gained a deeper appreciation not only for Wright’s technical mastery and creative brilliance but also for the people who inspired the house and lived in it. He holds Mary Palmer in particularly high esteem, describing her as “a remarkably charming woman whose determination, nevertheless, was such that, in the winter of 1952 she drove 5,000 miles, from Ann Arbor to Scottsdale, to sort out some key differences with Wright.”

Hildebrand is equally admiring of Mary and Billy’s ability to make peace with the house—and to make it their own. “Wright’s houses are very strong,” he observes. “They grab you and they’ll take over your life if you allow it. To their credit, the Palmers refused to live in a museum. They valued and loved the house without worshipping it.”

As for the house itself, the book project served to deepen Hildebrand’s affection and regard. He notes, “In terms of other works by Wright, this is remarkably successful architecture. There is no awkwardness of resolution, there are no serious disadvantages. He’s created a wonderfully sculptural space, and one that’s built to last. I place the Palmer house near the top of Wright’s corpus, one of the crowning achievements of his late career.”

An Uncertain Future

What lies ahead for the Palmer House? On that question, Hildebrand expresses both concern and guarded optimism. It’s very likely in the near future the house will be put up for sale. “If it goes to a private owner, who knows what they’ll do with it?” he asks with some anxiety. “It’s not a house that can or should be remodeled.”

A far better fate, he suggests, would be for the UM to purchase the site and perhaps build a small conference center in the adjoining meadow. “Considering its historic significance, the house is very low maintenance,” he notes. “It has a long and rich association with the University community. And it’s also a building of real distinction. A century from now, to possess this structure would be like owning a Michelangelo.”