The Goetsch-Winckler House: Frank Lloyd Wright's Favorite Small House
Near Lansing, Michigan
On a wooded lot in Okemos, just east of Lansing, sits a small house that Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly counted among his favorites. It is easy to miss from the road, which is partly the point.
The story behind the Goetsch-Winckler house begins in nineteen thirty-eight with an unusual arrangement. Several professors at Michigan State University formed a cooperative and bought a forty-acre tract in Okemos with the idea of building an intentional community, a cluster of affordable, architect-designed homes that would embody Wright's principles of organic architecture. They called it Usonia Two, borrowing the name Wright had given to his vision of a democratic American architecture scaled to ordinary incomes. Wright designed homes for each member of the cooperative.
The cooperative fell apart when the members could not secure financing. Most of the houses were never built. But two of the professors, Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler, both art instructors at Michigan State, decided to go ahead on their own. They found a different lot in Okemos, purchased it in early nineteen forty, and hired Wright to build his design for them on the new site.
The result is a single-story Usonian house laid out in a straight line, fitting itself to the slope and the trees rather than imposing on them. The walls are board-and-batten and brick. The ceilings are plywood, the floors concrete, the trim fir. Clerestory windows run along the top of the exterior wall, filling the interior with indirect light without exposing it to the street. Floor-to-ceiling glass faces the garden. The built-in furniture is Wright's own design. The house is small, under fifteen hundred square feet, but spatially intricate, the rooms flowing into each other with no wasted space.
Wright reportedly said it was the Usonian house he was most satisfied with. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-five and remains a private residence that occasionally opens for tours.
