Thomas A. Heinz:
No Place Like (This) Home
On mornings when the fog hangs low over the lake, the island home that Frank Lloyd Wright designed looks like a sleek yacht at harbor, its prow pointed to the horizon. Outside, it presents simple, streamlined planes. But inside, wrote Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the man who commissioned Fallingwater, “it becomes a magic maze of caves and unexpected corners, of rising and falling levels and light, veiled or in sudden shafts of brilliance.”
Though Wright designed the home in 1950 — when he was in his eighties — it took 50-odd years after his death for it to get built. And it might never have been built if Joe and Barbara Massaro hadn’t discovered a perk that came with the 11-acre island on Lake Mahopac in New York that they bought in 1995: Frank Lloyd Wright had created preliminary drawings for a house to be built on the island for one of its previous owners.
Inspiration to Build
Approaching Chicago architect and renowned Wright scholar Thomas A. Heinz, AIA, the Massaros asked: Could he help them bring Wright’s vision to life? And could he build the home on the exact location — a rocky edge of the island — that inspired Wright? Other Wright designs have been built after his death, but the Massaros wanted to build this one on the site for which it was intended.
Congenial and articulate, Heinz is a passionate Wright devotee and scholar. He has worked on more than 40 Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, restorations, and reconstructions, including the reconstruction of the living room of the Frances W. Little house, now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Heinz also has done for Wright’s architectural legacy what Audubon did for the birds of America. Heinz has photographed and documented nearly 500 buildings and sites designed by the great twentieth-century American architect for his newest book, “Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide” (Northwestern University Press, 2006).
Reverse Engineering
Heinz had just one problem in taking on the project. Wright’s one-eighth-inch-scale pencil drawings included a floor plan, a section, and three elevations. There were no notes, no material indications, no structural details. Most of Wright’s designs followed a rectangular or square grid, but the Massaro house is based on a complex grid of five-foot equilateral triangles.
To create the working drawings for the 5000-square-foot residence — built of concrete, glass, stone, mahogany, and a massive, 60-foot long whale-shaped boulder — Heinz visited, photographed, and studied the building site. He examined how “Whale Rock” would form some of the interior and exterior walls.
He also reviewed letters that Wright had exchanged with his original client and revisited buildings he had designed on a triangular grid between 1947 and 1953.
Then, using Archicad software on his Power Mac, Heinz reverse-engineered Wright’s design.
The Wright Intention
“The point of working on Wright’s buildings,” Heinz is quick to point out, “is not to show that I worked on them, but to show what Frank Lloyd Wright has done. We didn’t want any interpretation.”
To understand Wright’s design, Heinz had to see it exactly the way Wright had. “When I design a building, I know the entire thing because it’s in my head before it’s on paper,” Heinz explains. “However, this I didn’t design, so I had to learn what Frank Lloyd Wright intended. This is where Archicad and my Mac really told me everything about the building.”
Heinz has used computers since the ’80s and was aware of CAD applications for architects. He spent a year “looking into all of these software programs to find out how hard or easy they might be to work with,” he says. “Could I find a piece of software that would work the way my brain works — which is three dimensionally — and give me good results? Archicad was perfect for that.”
Virtual Construction
Heinz worked slowly and deliberately, keeping to the plans exactly as Wright drew them and building a virtual house from the footings up, on the computer.
In Archicad, he excavated the building site, set the foundations, added floors, walls, windows, and roof — each time in three dimensions to make the design come into being the way Wright drew it.
“An elevation or floor plan is a flat, two-dimensional drawing, and there’s only so much information you can understand,” he says. “How do you show the relative location of a foreshortened wall three feet high, another one six feet high, and a third 12 feet high that may not be connected? With the 3D ability of this program, I could show the design from different points of view so everyone — owners, builders, and officials — could understand the nature of the construction. It was much easier to communicate when everyone was on the same page.”
