Written by Brian Libby for Titan Vol. 2
Photos by Jon Moore and Will Corwin
Sometimes it takes a threat to bring a treasure to light.
Such was the fate of Oregon’s most pedigreed work of residential architecture: its only building by the great Frank Lloyd Wright: the Conrad and Evelyn Gordon House. Yet in a certain sense, light is something this house never lacks.
The house, designed in 1957 and completed in 1963 (four years after Wright’s death), is today visited by more people than at any other point in its six-decade history. Nestled into a hillside at the Oregon Garden outside the small Willamette Valley town of Silverton, its floor-to-ceiling glass seems to perfectly frame views of the oak-tree- festooned landscape. The Wright-designed gem enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the adjacent 80-acre botanical garden, which opened in 1999 and itself attracts some 250,000 visitors per year. Though it’s small, the house still feels dynamic, with its cantilevered balconies, custom fretwork and floor-to-ceiling glass.
Crisis and Opportunity
In 2001, the Oregon Garden provided an ideal landing spot when the Gordon House was threatened with demolition. The house had originally built in the village of Charbonneau, just outside metropolitan Portland urban growth boundary, along the Willamette River with a view of snow-capped Mt. Hood. Yet when it was sold at the turn of the new century, its owners, who reportedly had not even heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, simply wanted to tear down this small, admittedly decaying dwelling to build something bigger. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and the American Institute of Architects brokered a solution. Crews carefully cut the house into pieces and moved it 21 miles south for reconstruction—almost as if the Oregon Garden became a kind of pearly-gated Eden.
I happened to be working at the Portland chapter of the AIA when the Gordon House faced its demolition threat 21 years ago, a staffer listening in on some of the conference calls that negotiated the house’s saving and the move’s logistics. Reporting for local newspaper Willamette Week, I also got to spend an extraordinary day at the Gordon House before it was moved, as architect-historian Al Staehli photographed the building at its original site.
Walking its grounds, wandering its halls and beholding its rooms in the slowly changing angles of light from morning to afternoon, I was struck not only by the house’s aesthetic beauty, be it the architect’s signature fretwork creating shadow patters or the way Wright’s carefully orchestrated procession led from the low-ceilinged foyer to the double-height, glass-ensconced living room. It was also the house’s vulnerability. In this case I’m speaking not about the demolition threat, but how for all its Wrightian pedigree, this is not an ambitious castle.
The Gordon House, a comparatively small 2,133-square-foot dwelling in Wright’s Usonian series, was meant for ordinary Americans to afford. Its original owners, Conrad and Evelyn Gordon, were just an old couple living on a quiet suburban lane, in a concrete-block house with a leaky roof. But make no mistake: this It was superlative design for the masses, which is particularly compelling now, in a time when real architects design less than 10 percent of American homes.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright was the son of a musician-turned-preacher father and a teacher mother who divorced when he was a teen. Wright, brilliant yet iconoclastic, studied architecture at the University of Wisconsin but quit before earning a degree. Instead, he learned by working, first as a draftsman and apprentice in Chicago, for pioneering architects like Louis Sullivan. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, there was a local building boom, and the invention of elevators was about to enable the world’s first skyscrapers.
But Wright, though he produced designs for several tall buildings over the course of his long career (most of which went unbuilt), would instead become known for a series of great houses and cultural buildings that hugged the landscape. Beginning in the late 1880s in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and gaining momentum in the early 20 the century in a variety of cities, Wright designed a succession of residential masterworks in what became known as the Prairie style, an American version of the Arts & Crafts movement, itself a kind of rebellion against the harshness of the Industrial Revolution by celebrating hand-made craftsmanship. Wright’s Arthur Heurtley House from 1902 his circa-1908 Unity Temple, both in Oak Park, spoke to this mastery.
Though the Prairie Style period was just one chapter in Wright’s long career, it provided a template that would lead to designs like the Gordon House: one and two-story homes with open floor plans, low-pitched roofs with broad overhanging eaves, horizontal ribbons of windows, stylized built-in furniture, and a wide use of natural materials, particularly stone and wood. Wright’s homes were distinctive for their lack of separation between shared spaces like the entry area, living and dining rooms. Influenced by classical architecture, his designs were based on grid systems: often simple rectangular grids for his humbler designs, yet also hexagons and parallelograms in his more ambitious works. Influenced by Japanese architecture, he carefully considered how his houses fit into their landscapes, and oriented homes to their courtyards.
From Fallingwater to Usonians
As his fame grew and his career continued over a half-century, Wright moved far beyond houses, creating iconic landmarks like 1923’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, 1939’s Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, and 1959’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Yet it would remain houses for which he was most widely acclaimed, especially 1937’s sublime Fallingwater residence in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. In 2000, it was named the 20th century’s greatest work of American architecture by the American Institute of Architects.
Fallingwater was luxurious, yet Wright was ultimately more interested in houses that could be afforded by the masses, which he dubbed Usonians, as part of a broader interest in suburban development and city planning. Amidst the struggles of the Great Depression and a burgeoning industrial age, Wright was as much social-engineer as designer. Five years before Fallingwater, his 1932 book The Disappearing City (one of several books Wright over his career—influencing generations of architects) imagined spread-out, automobile-oriented suburbs and towns featuring houses with simple, innovative methods of construction and open floor plans that did away with servants’ quarters and guided family members toward large living areas.
The same year Fallingwater was completed, the first Usonians appeared, including the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin and the Paul and Jean Hanna House in Palo Alto. By 1939, there were six more completed in Maryland, Wisconsin, California and Michigan. They were meant as affordable housing for Americans earning a household income of $5,000 to $6,000 (about 106,000 to $127,000 in 2022). Sharing many qualities with Wright’s Prairie Style houses such as open floor plans, flat roofs and cantilevered overhangs, Usonians were often L-shaped, designed to wrap around a back garden or terrace, with relatively little glass or public space facing the front of the house.
Designing the Gordon
The Gordon House, though officially designed in 1956-57 and completed in 1963, is actually based on an older design, from this earlier Usonian period: a modern home design plan that Wright was commissioned to create for Life magazine in 1938 and adapted to the clients’ site. The couple had earned a comfortable living running Evelyn Gordon’s family laundry business, which they sold, acquiring a dairy farm outside Wilsonville, Oregon beside the Willamette River.
Evelyn, an art lover, persuaded her husband that they should try to commission the famous architect. An audience with Wright at his Taliesin West estate in Arizona sealed the deal. The architect completed his Gordon House design in 1957, at an estimated cost of $25,000 (more than twice what $5,000 adjusted for inflation would have been). The couple, lacking funds, did not break ground on the project for another six years, ultimately selling a portion of their farmland to fund construction.
Based on a seven-by-seven-foot grid system, the T-shaped house set a public living and dining room perpendicular to a two-story wing in front, containing the foyer and bedrooms; a ground-floor master suite of its own at one end of the T, with additional rooms upstairs. The living room was the star of the show, at one and a half-stories and a succession of floor-to-ceiling windows, .To aid privacy, its front windows were accented with Wright’s signature ornamental wood fretwork. Throughout, the house is an exercise in careful proportions, such as the 15-degree angle used for its chamfer wood moldings and kitchen countertops. Exterior balconies clad with cedar, painted in the architect’s trademark Taliesin red (also known as Cherokee red).
For 34 years between its construction and Evelyn Gordon’s death in 1997, the Gordon House lived a quiet life at the end of a residential street at the edge of the suburbs. If its endangerment was a crisis, its move was an opportunity. At the Oregon Garden, it has a chance to be not just a residence but a cultural landmark. And with one of the state’s other most celebrated works of architecture a mile away—the Mt. Angel Abbey Library, one of only two buildings in the United States designed by the iconic Finnish midcentury architect Alvar Aalto—the Gordon House has even become part of a two-building architectural pilgrimage.
The House Today
Last year, the Gordon House celebrated two decades on its new site, which has attracted thousands of visitors annually and continues to inspire. “People are just amazed how you can have simple design that's still very artistic,” says Bruce Brown, a longtime Gordon House board member. “In the mid-century, the average residential house was about 250 square feet per resident and now it's close to 1,000 square feet, which tells you a lot. Wright was a master of understanding the spatial relationships within the house and scaling a space to each function.”
As with many small house-museums, fundraising is an ongoing challenge. Ongoing maintenance has in recent years included a sagging balcony reconstructed, and a leaking roof replaced. Yet staff is the Gordon House’s largest ongoing expense. Thankfully there is once again continuing revenue from tours. For donors willing to spend just a bit more, the Gordon House now offers what’s called “Night With Wright,” allowing one to spend the night. “There's a handful of Wright houses around the country where you can do that, and it’s special,” Brown says. “You have the experience of watching the sun rise and set, experiencing the way the light moves through the house and taking time to really notice all the little details.”
The Gordon House is also a site for weddings and business retreats. “You can get 100-plus people if you set up out on the lawn,” Brown adds. “But it's also great for small, little intimate ceremonies inside the house where you can fit more like 30 or 40 people comfortably.” Something about its vintage-modernism seems to speak to both tradition and the future, and its combination of clean architectural lines and garden site make a perfect wedding-photo backdrop.
The Gordon House is also conducive to music performances. The living room includes a donated baby grand piano that numerous artists have performed on, and the space’s wood trim gives rich, resonant acoustics. When the weather is warm and small concerts can be played on the back terrace. Brown recalls just such a concert in fall 2019, less than six months before the Covid-19 pandemic began, featuring pianist and bandleader Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, who led singalongs as part of a fundraiser. “It was a really special night,” Brown says, “and little did we know it would be the last one for a little while.”
Now, though, the Gordon House has once again opened its doors—to special events and simply to being seen: by architecture lovers and Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts, by inspiration-seeking homeowners, by Oregon Garden visitors surprised to discover it, and by members of the community and region returning again and again.
The Gordon House could have been lost back in 2000. Many demolitions, especially houses, can occur before preservation campaigns have time to begin. Yet for as dark as those days were for Oregon’s only Frank Lloyd Wright design, and for all the ruptures necessary to take apart the building and rebuild it elsewhere, the Gordon House is arguably better off for its tumultuous moment 21 years ago. That’s when it truly became treasured.
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