The Kalil House: Frank Lloyd Wright's Concrete Block Dream in Manchester

In the mid-nineteen fifties, Frank Lloyd Wright was in his late eighties and still designing houses. He had a new idea, one he called the Usonian Automatic, and it was aimed at a problem he had been thinking about for decades: how to build a beautiful house that ordinary people could afford, and that the owners themselves could help construct.

The answer, Wright decided, was the concrete block. Not poured concrete, not conventional masonry, but a modular system of custom-cast blocks that could be assembled like an elaborate three-dimensional puzzle. Each block was designed to interlock with the next; the walls, ceilings, and decorative elements all came from the same basic unit, produced on site. No specialized trades required. A family and their neighbors could theoretically build the whole thing.

In practice it was more complicated. When Toufic Kalil, a physician living in Manchester, commissioned Wright to design his house in nineteen fifty-five, the project used approximately two thousand five hundred eighty individually cast blocks. The construction took longer and cost more than planned. The final bill was roughly seventy-five thousand dollars, three times the original estimate, in nineteen fifty-five money.

Only seven Usonian Automatic houses were ever built. The Kalil House is one of them, and it sits on Heather Street in Manchester's North End, almost entirely unknown to the city around it. Manchester is, remarkably, home to the only two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in New England that are open to the public. Both now belong to the Currier Museum of Art, which runs tours through the house.

Wright died in nineteen fifty-nine, four years after designing this house. The Kalil House is one of the last residential commissions he completed.