For Purists, N.Y. House Is Just Not Wright

By Bob Ivry
Bloomberg News
Saturday, November 18, 2006

Frank Lloyd Wright, who called himself the greatest living American architect, can still kick up controversy 47 years after his death.

A squabble over his legacy pits Wright purists, a prickly bunch, against a retired sheet-metal contractor named Joe Massaro, who is building a home in Putnam County, N.Y., based on designs Wright sketched in 1950. The purists argue that any deviation from what the master architect intended means Massaro can't call his home a true Frank Lloyd Wright creation. And since Massaro is working from sketches, not blueprints, his project can't be legitimate.

"He says his construction is within two inches of Wright's design," Wright expert William Allin Storrer said. "Nuts to that! You design it exactly according to plan or you don't call it a Frank Lloyd Wright house."

Massaro disagrees. Wright meant the four-bedroom, 5,000- square-foot house to be built exactly where Massaro is building it, on the rocky tip of wooded, 11-acre Petra Island in Lake Mahopac, about 55 miles north of New York City. Massaro said he departed from Wright's design only to satisfy modern building codes and to make sure that the home's 25-foot concrete deck, cantilevered over the lake, doesn't fall down.

"I wouldn't have built it if I couldn't put it exactly where Frank intended it," said Massaro, who often refers to Wright by his first name. "They can pick it apart all they want, but in 25 years this will be considered one of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpieces."

A New Fallingwater?

The house is at least six months from completion, but one Wright scholar has already compared it to Fallingwater, probably Wright's best-known residence.

"It's one of the most dramatically sited houses Wright ever designed," said Robert Twombly, author of "Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture." "It's just a knockout."

An engineer named A.K. Chahroudi bought Petra Island in 1949 and asked Wright to design a masterpiece for his family to live in. Chahroudi couldn't afford the $50,000 home Wright drew up and persuaded the architect to blueprint a 1,200-square-foot cottage instead. The Chahroudi family lived there for nine years, according to Dod Chahroudi, A.K.'s son. Massaro is using the cottage as construction headquarters, and it will remain when the new house is finished.

Wright designed more than 1,000 buildings; about half were built. A dozen have gone up since his death at the age of 91 in 1959, including three now under construction in Buffalo. Those also have drawn criticism from Wright fans, some of whom say no structure Wright drew up should be built after his death.

Wright was notoriously fussy about his designs, going so far as to rearrange the furniture on visits to completed homes.

The design for the Petra Island "masterpiece" was site-specific; it incorporated a 12-foot-high, 60-foot-long rock, nicknamed "whale rock," to form the exterior of the house's entry and a long interior wall. A smaller "tail rock" is used as a bathroom and kitchen wall.

"It's not a house that can be built anywhere else," Dod Chahroudi said.

The entrance to the single-story structure is seven feet high, but in typical Wright fashion the claustrophobic dimness gives way to an 18-foot-high living area made bright by 26 triangular skylights.

Seamless Concrete

Massaro poured 150 tons of concrete to make the floors, ceilings and some of the walls. In order to cart the material from the mainland, he waited until the lake froze over and dragged the ingredients across the ice behind six-wheeled, all-terrain vehicles called gators. It took 36 straight hours of pouring, because the structure's stability requires the concrete to be seamless.

The house's most arresting feature is the cantilevered deck, which juts more than 25 feet over the lake.

"The extent of the cantilever is mind-boggling," Twombly said.

Massaro, who lives with his wife, Barbara, on the mainland, a 10-minute boat ride from the island, won't divulge how much he's spent, joking that costs have exceeded the original $50,000 budget. "If I'd known how much trouble it would be, I never would have started," Massaro said. "But now that we're this far along, I'm glad I did it."

Dod Chahroudi gave Massaro copies of Wright's drawings when Massaro bought Petra Island in 1995. After a subsequent visit to Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa., Massaro said he knew he had to build the house.

'In Love With Frank'

"I started falling in love with Frank," Massaro said.

Massaro tried to enlist the help of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, established in 1940 to conserve the architect's work. Massaro said the foundation wanted $450,000 to supervise construction and a guarantee that the home would be built.

That didn't sit well with Massaro, who got into business right out of high school and sold his company, Elmsford Sheet Metal Works Inc., in 2000. So he hired Wright scholar and architect Thomas A. Heinz to help.

The foundation sued Massaro, who agreed in a settlement to limit the use of Wright's name in connection with the house to the phrase "inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright."

Philip Allsopp, chief executive of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, declined to speak about the Massaro settlement. He did say that he was concerned about bastardizing Wright's style.

"If he were alive today, he'd be supervising" construction of the Massaro house, Allsopp said. "No one who is not Frank Lloyd Wright could do that."

Critics' concerns center on four details of Massaro's house.

They point to the so-called desert masonry, or decorative "rubblestone," a Wright trademark. Wright embedded native rocks in the concrete supports of his homes. In most, the rocks were flush with the concrete. In Massaro's home, they stick out.

"That's not the way Wright intended, plain and simple," Storrer said.

Such talk infuriates Massaro.

In order to follow building codes, Massaro said, he had to add four inches of Styrofoam insulation inside the support posts, making it impossible to embed the odd-shaped granite stones he harvested from the island and still keep the house from collapsing.

"Frank would have changed this," Massaro said. "He would have had to."

Flat vs. Domed

Wright purists argue that Massaro's 26 skylights are domed; Wright designed skylights that were flat.

Massaro counters that the flat ones leak.

Wright defenders insist that the designs stamped into the home's copper fascia are too shallow. They also point to some of Wright's drawings that show a stairway coming off the cantilevered deck.

Massaro said he didn't build the stairs because they would descend into three feet of water.

If the purists' objections seem petty, it's because the little things matter a great deal to Wright's fans.

"It's the small details that we'll never know about," said Rich Herber, who owns a Wright house in Fort Wayne, Ind. "The outside of the Massaro house is dead-on. When you go inside, it's such a big house, it will be very hard to make the details" the way Wright envisioned.

Massaro, however, said he's worked hard to fulfill Wright's vision, searching for craftspeople who could make custom furniture, copper fascia, triangular skylights, angular doorknobs and mahogany ventilation grilles, among other detail work, in an effort to please not Wright's acolytes but the architect himself.

"When Frank says this is what I want, I try to go find it," he said.