Malcolm Willey House
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
In nineteen thirty-two, a University of Minnesota administrator named Malcolm Willey and his wife Nancy wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright asking whether the famous architect might design them a home for around eight thousand dollars. Wright said yes. The first design proved too expensive, so Wright started over, eventually delivering a modest twelve-hundred-square-foot house on Bedford Street in Minneapolis that cost about ten thousand dollars.
He called it Gardenwall. What Wright built there in nineteen thirty-four turned out to be the laboratory for an idea that would reshape American architecture. The Willey House was the direct precursor of what Wright called Usonian houses, modest single-story homes designed for the American middle class that could be built affordably without sacrificing the principles of organic design.
From this one modest commission came a whole approach to how ordinary Americans might live in beautiful, thoughtfully designed homes. The house still stands in the Prospect Park neighborhood, a small building with an outsized place in architectural history.
