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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> The trouble with modern materials and techniques is that they are 
> expensive to develop.  Few of us have the reputation of Bucky Fuller.  I 
> would like to see someone of that stature delve into the field again but 
> housing is so dominated by single point suppliers and innovation stifling 
> building codes that I suspect it will have to be someone more the stature 
> the builders in the "Home Work" book.  A perfect task for a homesteader in 
> a no building code area.

The challenges of developing low-cost, widely available housing are beyond 
building codes, materials and techniques, and the stature of the innovator. 
Such a dream has been pursued by many, including men of substantial 
stature. No less than Frank Lloyd Wright attempted such a task. His Usonian 
houses were the best he could do. They were the inspiration for Joseph 
Eichler's simple, flat-topped houses that were the bottom of the price line 
when I entered real estate in 1969.

"This would lead him in the early 1930s to dream up Broadacre City, his 
utopian plan for a landscape crisscrossed by highways—a low-rise and 
low-density community, with a few odd high-rise apartment towers for 
unreconstructed urbanites, a formula, some complained, for suburban sprawl, 
and Wright's response to Corbusier's city plans. Misplaced in its practical 
concept of urbanism or not, this same socializing spirit inspired his 
L-shaped Usonian house for less affluent suburbanites (Wright made up the 
word, deriving it from the "United States of North America"; he claimed the 
houses could be built for $5,000 to $10,000), a humane vision that became 
popular.
"Hundreds of these houses were built and they made an impact on progressive 
American modernist architects while also anticipating the ranch house 
developments of postwar America, with their cookie-cutter planned 
communities. Wright's houses called for connected dining and living 
quarters, a workspace instead of a conventional kitchen, overhanging roofs, 
wood siding, strip windows, concrete foundations, and a modern carport. 
They were efficient, spare, and light. They recognized an increasing 
informality in society and a desire for homes that were easy to use. Wright 
hated the banality of Levittowns, but Levitt himself rightly credited 
Wright for having set a standard for what low-cost housing might be."

From a review of:
The Dreams of Frank Lloyd Wright
By Michael Kimmelman
Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable
Lipper/Viking, 251 pp., $19.95

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18174