The Acres: Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Community

Just south of here, down a quiet road in Galesburg Township, sits one of the most unusual experiments Frank Lloyd Wright ever attempted. It is called The Acres, and it began not with an architect and a wealthy client but with a group of scientists who wanted to build an intentional community together.

In nineteen forty-nine, a small circle of researchers from the Upjohn pharmaceutical company in nearby Kalamazoo pooled their resources to buy seventy acres of Michigan farmland. They wanted to live near each other, share open land, and build homes that reflected the values of postwar idealism: cooperation, connection to nature, modest means used wisely. They hired Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright designed the community as a naturalistic plat where each house sat on a circular lot, surrounded by fifty acres of shared land and a three-acre pond. His vision called for as many as twenty-two houses in total, though in the end only four of his designs were built, for the Weisblat, Pratt, Eppstein, and Meyer families, constructed between nineteen forty-eight and nineteen fifty-three. Each is a Usonian home, the affordable, organic, single-story model Wright had spent the nineteen thirties and forties refining as his democratic answer to the American bungalow. Radiant floor heating, natural wood and brick, strong horizontal lines flowing into the landscape.

The families who built here were doing something Wright had long preached but rarely seen practiced at scale: neighbors choosing each other before choosing a house. The community they formed outlasted Wright, who died in nineteen fifty-nine. A fifth home, designed by a Taliesin fellow, was designed that same year and occupied in nineteen sixty. The Acres was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand four. The four Wright houses still stand, still occupied, essentially as built.