Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson

Author:Mark Anthony Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2014-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Berger House, San Anselmo, California (1950–58), Robert Berger building masonry core, c. 1955. Courtesy of Berger Family Collection.

Berger House, south façade.

Berger House, floor plan. Copyright © The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Berger House, blueprint of north, south, east, and west elevations. Copyright © The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Over the next six years, Robert Berger worked on the house mostly by himself, although Aaron Green acted as consulting architect on the project. His wife, Gloria, and occasionally their children, helped him with a number of tasks, including the plumbing, digging the foundation, and pouring concrete. The biggest task they worked on, and one of the first things to be completed, was building the 20-foot-tall fireplace shaft, which was the masonry core of the house. This required pouring 50 tons of rock and cement into a wooden mold, and it took several months to complete.[14] Robert created the distinct inlaid stone patterns on all the exterior walls out of local pink Sonoma stone (Wright called this material “desert masonry”). He gathered, chiseled, and fitted each of the several hundred stones into the walls by hand. His work had progressed enough by 1956 for the family to move into the first section of the house. The remaining section of the home, and all of the interior finishing work, was finally completed in 1958.[15]

The Berger House retains almost all of its original features, and is considered a gem of the Usonian style. It is a single-story, two-bedroom, two-bath home, with 1,760 square feet of living space and a built-in carport under the overhanging roof to the left of the front door. The low-angled hipped roof, the horizontal massing of the house, and the native stone walls make it appear to be a natural outgrowth of the forested hillside it sits atop. Wright designed the house on an equilateral parallelogram pattern, creating a hexagonal living room that juts off the north side of the home. The living room ceiling is higher than the other rooms, a typical feature of Usonian houses. There is a serene view of the lushly wooded Marin hills in three directions from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. A sliding glass door leads from the living room out onto the concrete deck, which is shaped like a ship’s prow and points almost due north.

The other interior features of the Berger House display classic Usonian elements. The kitchen is in an alcove behind the living room, and there is a raised-hearth fireplace set into the rear wall of the living room, made of concrete inlaid with pink Sonoma stone. There are built-in shelves and cabinets in the kitchen, and one section of these shelves and cabinets runs out into the living room. A built-in table of mahogany extends off these shelves, creating a small dining area at the west end of the living room. Behind these shelves is a playroom for the Berger children, which could double as a study after they went to bed. This open-ended space has a built-in desk and bookshelves along the walls.

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