The David Wright House is a single family home in the Arcadia neighborhood of East Phoenix, built by Frank Lloyd Wright for his son David in 1951. The house is known for its unusual circular floor plan, a precursor to Wrights round designed Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
Unfortunately the Wright home was recently bought by a man named John Hoffman who has been considering knocking the home over. The home sits on a rather large parcel, and apparently the developers plans were to knock the home over, split the parcel and build 2 stucco McMansions. Sadly, because the Arcadia area is so lovely, its been suffering a lot of its cool mid century ranch homes being knocked over and replaced with McMansions in recent years.
As you may know, no in tact Frank Lloyd Wright home has ever been knocked over. The people of Phoenix surely don't want the 1st one to be here. There's been a huge community effort to save the building, lead by
ModernPhoenix.net and
BloomingRock.com two terrific architecture websites.
Recently the home was approved for the 1st step of "Landmark designation" which will stave off the threat of demolition for a few years. Tonight the issue of Landmark designation goes before the Village Planning Committee and will hopefully be approved.
This past weekend the home was open to the public- sort of. The interior was closed off, likely for liability reasons. Though the owner of the house tried to spin it that the house is structurally unsound. The architects and engineers who have been in the home on private tours strongly disagree with that assertion.
Anyway, here's my pictures from this past weekends open house showing the exterior:
More info on the House, including some interior pictures and information on the historic preservation process can be found
here,
here and
here.
What can you do to help save the David Wright House?
You can
sign this petition and show your support. They're trying to get to 25K signatures and are about 6K away.
If you'd like to see more pictures, there's tons floating around on places like Twitter and Facebook, just search "David Wright House" and a lot will come up.
Warning:
Finally, before someone posts some idiotic nonsense like "ug typical Phoenix, what a terrible City" (which ALWAYS happens any time PHX is brought up on these forums) keep in mind that the guy that wants to do this isn't from Arizona. Its an out of State developer and as soon as the local community found out about it, there's been a huge uprising to try to stop him. There's a big effort out right now to try to find a buyer who's more sympathetic to the building and its history.