THE GEIGER DATABASE

SEARCH OPTIONS
Frank Lloyd Wright commissions

GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS

Frank Lloyd Wright produced projects for sites located in 48 American states and 10 foreign countries. Some unbuilt projects, graphics designs, and publications do not have locations given in the archival record and are absent in this search.

Project Information

House for Erling B. and Katherine Brauner, Usonia II, scheme 1, project [Lansing, Michigan] (1939)

Note: The following information concerning this project represents original research and analysis by John Geiger, and is based in his long and detailed study of the Frank Lloyd Wright literature as well as personal contacts with members of the Taliesin Fellowship and architectural historians. In addition, he added his own categories of building type and compositional form, as well as other points of consideration that he deemed important to understanding of the design. As with any primary archival source material, the references and sources of attribution should be consulted where possible to affirm the data provided. Sometimes there is an indication of attribution for which there is no matching footnote recorded. Some understanding of the intended source may be discovered in remaining notes or frequently cited publications which appear in the comment field.

Name of client: Brauner, Erling B. and Katherine.

Sobriquet or alternative place name: Usonia II.

Design Status (as of 2011): Unbuilt.

Occupancy form or use: HOUSING/Residential/Single Family.

Principal building materials: MASONRY/Brick, board and batten.

Number of drawings for this project detailed in the database: 5.

Drawing Number and Description

3918.??1     Floor plan
3918.015     Floor plan
3918.017     Elevations
3918.018     Cross section

Individuals recorded as contributing to project:

Note: Not everyone who contributed to a project may be named; only those whose participation has been confirmed from a source appear above. Occasionally names presented as contributors to a project may seem chronologically anomalous. This usually occurs when an individual prepared drawings for publicity, exhibition, or publication long after the original date of a commission.

Howe, John

Roof type: Flat2+.

Note: Records a category devised by Geiger to classify the types of roof structure found in Frank Lloyd Wright projects. These terms were applied consistently through a choice list on Column [ROOFTYPE] in Table MMTFDRAWINGS FILE, and may be searched.

Project Drawing Date Range

Note: Dates for preliminary and working drawings, as well as the start and completion of construction, appear here only when present in the database. Through careful study of original, reproduced, or published Wright drawings, John Geiger developed an elaborate granulation for design process dates and their attributions. Such information is largely available only for Wright projects dating from the mid-1930s until 1959. Sources were often footnoted by an alphanumeric system, but the references are sometimes missing from the locations where they were intended to be recorded; the relationship between footnote letter or numeral and reference is absent. In order to retain the presence of available information, citations are here shown grouped together in one comment field. Some understanding of the intended source may be discovered in remaining notes or frequently cited publications which appear in the comment field. The relevance of references provided by John Geiger can often be recovered through examination of the publications used in his research.See the list of principal bibliographical sources used for this purpose.

Date recorded by John Geiger for chronological sorting: February 5, 1939.

Working drawings date August 5, 1939 [footnoted as: (1)].

Notes and References

Comments by John Geiger and/or sources of attribution: (1) See drawing 3918.017 signed this date. Geieger 05/11/96.

Note: The information shown above is collected from a series of data table columns intended originally to record not only comments or notes, but also to cite sources of attribution for dates assigned to the various stages of drawing preparation in the design process. As with any primary archival source material, the references and sources of attribution shown here should be consulted where possible to affirm the data provided.

This commission is referenced and/or illustrated in the following publications:

Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1936-1941 (Volume 6). Tokyo: A. D. A. Edita. [ISBN: 4-87140-517-6].
Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Complete Works 1917-1942 (Volume 2). Cologne, Germany: Taschen. [ISBN: 978-3-8365-0926-8].