CONTINUATION OF ROBERT BERGER HOUSE DISCUSSION

A few weeks ago I was looking through my black and white negatives and color slides of Wright houses and came across this photo:

When I found the negative for this black and white photo, I was looking for small Wright diamond module houses similar to the Robert Berger house, 1951-1957 of San Anselmo, California.

The house shown above is another small Wright diamond module house. The McCartney home is part of one of the small communities of Wright-designed houses, or Usonian homes. I photographed and visited the four Wright houses at Galesberg Village which are south of the Kalamazoo area. I think there is another small community of Wright homes at Pleasantville, New York.

For some reason I do not remember being at the Ward McCartney house - but I did make a trip  into Michigan in the summer of 1958, with Thomas E. Rickard, to see and photograph Wright houses. I remember being at the Brown house in Kalamazoo and we must have seen the McCartney home in that same aea. I am sure that I took the picture of the diamond module home shown in a black and white photo below.

Although this view I am showing above as the black and white photo does not show the wild nature  of the site on which the McCartney house sat in the summer of 1958, I have some other photos of the house showing that unkept landscape. The photos of the Ward McCartney house taken by Peter Beers and on his site at

http://www.peterbeers.net/interests/flw_rt/Michigan/McCartney_House/mccartney_house.htm

show a well-kept landscape in contrast to that of 1958.

I did not find the floor plan for the Ward McCartney house. In the fall of 1957 and again in 1958 Wright allowed me to photograph his floor plans and perspective drawings of many of the houses of the fifties at the Hillside Drafting Room.

But the McCartney house looks similar to the Robert Berger house, built by Berger himself. The floor plan for the Robert Berger house is shown second. The initial floor plan of the Berger house had only one bedroom, though a second was added later. Third, below is the floor plan of the Patrick Kinney house of Lancaster, Wisconsin, also of the early fifties. The small Kinney house has two bedrooms.

In both the Berger and Kinney homes a central kitchen stack rises above the roof. A hexagonal shaped living area flows around that central stack. The angles are not the 90 degree angles of the box, but are 120 and 60 degrees. The "corners" in the living area are 120 degrees, for example. Rock "fins" extend out from both the Berger and Kinney houses, though i do not see them on the Ward McCartney dwelling, a year or so earlier than the Berger home.

In both the Berger and Kinney homes a central kitchen stack rises above the roof. A hexagonal shaped living area flows around that central stack. The angles are not the 90 degree angles of the box, but are 120 and 60 degrees. The "corners" in the living area are 120 degrees, for example. Rock "fins" extend out from both the Berger and Kinney houses, though I do not see them on the Ward McCartney dwelling, a year or so earlier than the Berger home