The Currier: A Governor's Bequest and the Frank Lloyd Wright Houses

Moody Currier served as governor of New Hampshire from eighteen seventy-nine to eighteen eighty-one. He was also a banker, a lawyer, and, by the end of his life, a man who had decided that his adopted city should have an art museum. He and his wife Hannah Slade began planning in the eighteen nineties.

Moody died in eighteen ninety-eight. Hannah died in nineteen fifteen. Their combined estate formed the basis of the Currier Gallery of Art, chartered by the state legislature in nineteen nineteen.

The museum building opened in October of nineteen twenty-nine, in an Italian palazzo-style structure on Ash Street, a few days before the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. The timing was not ideal. But the collection grew regardless.

What makes the Currier singular, beyond its collection, is what it holds outside its main building. In nineteen fifty, the physician Isadore Zimmerman and his wife Lucille commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house on Heather Street in Manchester's north end. Wright applied his Usonian philosophy to the commission: a single-story structure of brick and wood, cantilevered carports, open interior flow, furniture designed as part of the architecture itself down to a quartet stand for chamber music.

In a letter to Wright in nineteen fifty-two, the Zimmermans wrote that theirs was the most beautiful house in the world. They lived there for thirty-six years. In nineteen eighty-eight, they bequeathed it to the Currier.

The Currier also stewards a second Wright house nearby. They are the only two Wright houses open to the public in New England. Neither one looks like it belongs in a mill city, which is precisely the point.