Here's today's ADG article on it:
Museum gaining historic house
Crystal Bridges to move home from N.J. to Bentonville
CYD KING
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
BENTONVILLE — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is adding a rare, mid-1950s Frank Lloyd Wright house to its collection. Disassembling and moving the structure from where it is situated along the Millstone River in New Jersey and putting it back together on a site with a similar view on the museum’s 120-acre grounds will take roughly 15 months to complete.
The move is a last-ditch effort at preserving the structure and would not otherwise be considered an option, said Janet Halstead, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a Chicago-based international organization dedicated to preserving Wright’s remaining buildings and facilitating transfers of Wright’s properties. The Millstone River has gradually encroached on the 2,800-square-foot home over the past two decades, causing extensive damage.
“Only as a last resort would the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy consider moving a house from its original site,” Halstead said.
The previous owners and caretakers, the architect/designer team of Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino, spent years looking for a buyer, including listing it on the conservancy’s website. Diane Carroll, media relations manager for Crystal Bridges, said the two parties came together as a result of “being in the same community of talking art and architecture.
“It was just a fortuitous meeting where we learned of their need to sell and relocate the house, and as they learned more about Crystal Bridges, they realized we could work together well and be a good pair,” she said.
Carroll did not disclose the purchase price, saying only that the cost of disassembling the house is included in the acquisition arrangement between the couple and the museum.
“I don’t have any dollar amounts to share,” she said.
The Tarantinos will take on the painstaking work of deconstructing the house later this month, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. has offered to truck it in parts to Bentonville at no cost. The Tarantinos are experts at this type of work, receiving awards for the preservation of their house as well as other Usonian-style homes from the American Institute of Architects and the conservancy, according to a news release from the museum on Wednesday.
The conservancy’s Halstead said the organization has a high level of confidence in the Tarantinos’ ability to move the Bachman Wilson House.
“They’ve been such wonderful stewards of this home,” she said. “They rescued a house that was not in great shape and made it beautiful again, putting a lot of time, effort and money into doing that.” At least some of the work was done using Wright’s original drawings. All furnishings were restored and rebuilt with 1950s upholstery fabrics matching the house and the period.
“I know this was a difficult decision for them,” Halstead added. The pair bought the house in 1988 and lived there for about 20 years. “We know the deconstruction will be done with meticulous care, and they’ll be involved in the reconstruction, as well.”
Wright developed the Usonian house type during the Great Depression as a prefabricated, affordable prototype for Americans of all socio-economic classes, said Dale Allen Gyure, a board member for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and a professor of architecture at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich.
“Wright spent the last two decades of his life designing variations of the Usonian and promoting its virtues, including simple materials, easy construction, combined living-dining areas, and efficient kitchens — all ideas which entered the mainstream of the American housing market,” Gyure said. “The Bachman Wilson House is one of the few Usonians with more than one story, containing two bedrooms on a mezzanine overlooking the living room and leading to an outdoor balcony.”
Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, interim dean of the University of Arkansas’ Fay Jones School of Architecture, said the context for [Usonian-style homes] remain of monumental importance today.
“The ideas that are embedded in the Bachman Wilson House speak to Wright’s earliest and all too often-forgotten work,” she said.
“The catchword here that is so significant for us is ‘affordable,’” she added. “His notion of how we should live was an affordable home in harmony with nature for all people.”
The house, located in the Borough of Millstone in Somerset County, N.J., could also be described as an open two-story pavilion. A stepped concrete base supports glass walls. Horizontal and vertical planes form unique spaces both inside and out, dissolving the physical boundary of the enclosure with natural surroundings.
Americans have had a tendency in recent decades to build and live in homes “far bigger than any one individual should be living in on a dayto-day basis,” Goodstein-Murphree said. “We forget how much the temperance of Wright’s aesthetic was about defining an American lifestyle — a good American lifestyle — one that speaks to so many of our contemporary concerns, such as sustainability of every kind.”
Husband and wife Abraham Wilson and Gloria Bachman commissioned Wright to design the home, which was completed in 1954. At the time, Bachman’s brother, Marvin Bachman, was an apprentice in the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship and Wright was working on the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
At Crystal Bridges, the house will likely be erected above Crystal Spring, the natural spring from which the museum takes its name. It will be a short distance from the museum’s art trail, which is accessible from the south lobby. It will have a view similar to where the house is now with woods and a view to water.
Once installed, the house will be made available for study, limited programming and tours. Crystal Bridges’ educational and public program offerings include an architectural focus that will be enhanced through the addition of the Bachman Wilson House to Crystal Bridges’ grounds. Through an ongoing partnership with the UA, the museum is expected to develop additional educational programs specifically related to UA’s architecture school.
The late architect Fay Jones, an Arkansas native, met Wright, in 1949. Wright became a mentor and Jones was later an apprentice at Taliesin East and a member of the Taliesin Fellowship, Goodstein-Murphree said.
