The Tonkens House, Frank Lloyd Wright in Cincinnati

In the northern Cincinnati suburb of Amberley Village sits one of the most unusual houses in Ohio: a single-story home built entirely of concrete blocks that were mixed and cast on the property itself. Gerald Tonkens was a car dealer in his mid-thirties when he approached Frank Lloyd Wright in nineteen fifty-four with twenty-five thousand dollars and a dream. Wright took on the commission and produced a Usonian Automatic design, his system for building affordable homes from interlocking concrete units that owners could theoretically mold themselves.

Tonkens hired Wright apprentice John deKoven Hill to oversee construction, which consumed well over a hundred thousand dollars before the family moved in during nineteen fifty-six. The result incorporates eleven different concrete block patterns and more than four hundred inset windows. It remains the only Usonian Automatic house in Ohio and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-one.