Frank Lloyd Wright’s Surprising Richard & Georgia Lloyd Jones House

What was Frank Lloyd Wright thinking when he designed one of the largest houses of his career, Westhope, the Richard and Georgia Lloyd Jones house? The most prominent aspect of the house is utterly unique in his work, and from photographs I could not understand its purpose. And when I visited the house, would I feel that this prominent element succeeded? And if it did, why did he never use it again?

These questions have nagged at me for decades. So, when we planned a family get-together in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my first time there, I was led to Peter Walter, the delightfully garrulous real estate agent who was listing the house, and he generously invited us to view it in November of 2025. Following are musings on the house, largely jotted down on the flight home, and made without reference to any dedicated essays on the house which, to date, I have not studied. Photos below are by me where uncredited.

The Lloyd Jones house, Westhope, (1928-1931) is a tour de force and the monomaniacal application of a single design concept, that of walls composed of alternating concrete piers and identically wide floor to ceiling windows. It was this design motif, utterly unique in the 700+ buildings he built, that I wanted to see, because I was desperate to find what the effect of this one-off configuration would be inside, and outside. The answer, in short, was that the effect was fascinating and brilliant. Given that I concluded that it was, and that I knew that he always reworked ideas over and over in successive buildings, why did he not pick this one up again?

In the Lloyd Jones house Wright played with this motif in a variety of ways, but primarily to compose the perimeter of the house such that the neighboring lots are viewed from the house only through the alternating vertical window bands. The effect is to reduce the surroundings’ prominence and instead turn the vista into a row of narrow snapshots. As a result, one quickly ceases to focus on anything in the landscape, because each vista is so narrow.
Instead, the wall composition is perceived simply as an interesting screen of alternating light and dark at night or light and texture during the day:

The payoff is in the living room, on the side that faces the rear yard whose enclosing wings turn the yard into a court. The view of the courtyard and its pools from the living room is through uninterrupted adjacent slots of glass, that is to say not interrupted by columns, so it is a panoramic view, and thus it is the focal point of the main public spaces:

View from the court, since modified, towards what was once the covered terrace.

After writing about the view to the courtyard from the living room I learned that the lower portion of the living room was once a covered terrace, so, what actually was the view of the court from the living room itself? We see it in this photo which shows us that Wright did not completely open the living room to the court, but rather removed every second pier from a colonnade that separated them, creating what is nonetheless a dramatic vista:



Might it have resonance with Wright’s beloved traditional Japanese architecture?

I will have to examine historic photos, renderings, or site plans to establish what the original design of the courtyard was, but I find that shorter piers are used to wrap two sides of the court. And at the transition between the house and these piers step down in series from the height of the house to the reduced height of the court’s other enclosing piers, as they bracket a staircase:

On the fourth side of the courtyard is a garage and a caretaker’s quarters, with a small utility basement. It completes the courtyard’s enclosure. At the main entry to the home is a partially cantilevered roof (center right below) which provides shelter from the rain, and initiates Wright’s characteristic sequence of compression and expansion proceeding into the house.

The living room area as it exists today is at two levels. The lower level, formerly the covered terrace, is directly in front of the panorama and two of its glass panels are virtually frameless doors that open to the courtyard. The higher and deeper living room level puzzled me because there is a very deep beam projecting below the ceiling midway, which visually divides the space into two, and today interrupts the flow of one’s attention out to the court from the farthest space. There is insufficient definition separating the spaces on the two sides of the beam, and the two higher spaces are currently furnished as a single large seating area, so the room therefore is sliced in half by the beam. The bottom of the beam is the dark strip at the top of the photo below:

I must to look at period photographs and historic plans to learn whether there were other furnishings or architectural devices originally to reinforce the division of the two quasi-spaces from each other. The far space (left center, below) is scaled to house a piano or a billiards table. The as built floor plan in William Storrer’s The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion indeed shows a piano in it, so likely there was one initially.
An axonometric drawing by Wright’s studio of the house, with roof removed shows the beam, which I have outlined in a dashed, red box, below. Note that in his drawing Wright has removed the middle 2/3 of the beam in order to allow us to see the room from above, unintentionally making the point that the beam cuts the room in half:

Studying Wright’s drawings in the monograph of his work from 1924 to 1936 I assess that the mystery beam was needed in order to have a clear span across the room, but he also used it to raise the ceiling in the central portion of the living room, inserting large clerestory strip windows (that is, continuous high windows) below this high ceiling. The clerestory bathes the room in a wonderful, subtle web of soft sunlight. See below:

The piers are transformed in many ways around the house. In locations, including at entry and separating the living room from the office, the piers reappear at the same spacing, but with no glass between them, serving as screens between hallways and rooms, which we see below left:


The center right piers above have ornamental castings in the block panels, with light bulbs behind them, thus becoming mysterious, even magical, built-in light fixtures, below:

All of this is utterly characteristic of Wright’s textile block projects, as I describe later.

 

Influences by Others

In three locations on the ground floor, and one location on the second floor, one or two piers are absent and instead wholly glass walls project out from the house and step in as they go out, creating idiosyncratic, articulated triangular spaces, below:

What are they about? They are too narrow to be used in any obvious way. Later, referring to a text, I discovered that they were intended as conservatories, providing enough natural light for plants to flourish in them, which would provide a link between nature outside and the interior of the home. It seems to me that they partake in a conversation with European early modernists who, in the years immediately before, published concepts for large steel and glass buildings in the architectural magazines – noteworthily Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Mies in particular designed a famed, unbuilt, large crystalline skyscraper, so Wright, perhaps, was executing his interpretation of such a glass, crystalline folding wall, albeit at a petite scale. Mies’s widely published sketch of his skyscraper is below:

The house engages in other ways in a dialogue with the emerging International Style vocabulary of the 1920s. This vocabulary consists largely of asymmetrically composed rectangular building masses with horizontal roofs and ceilings, cantilevers, piers or columns, and floor-to-ceiling glazing in exterior walls. All of the Lloyd Jones house’s ceilings are flat (that is, horizontal) and all the roofs are horizontal as well—something rarely encountered in Wright’s work before the 1920’s. Wright avidly followed the work of other architects via journals, and he examined the International Style work in the magazines that he subscribed to. One of them devoted an entire issue to his own work in 1925, so surely he examined the work in other issues of the journal as well. Westhope’s massing, and its floor plan are modernist. 

Many consider Wright’s earlier Prairie period houses to be the origin of the modernist floor plan. One of the leading European modernists wrote that the publication of Wright’s Prairie Period work in Europe in 1911 “saved us 50 years” (though the references to this quote are highly ambiguous). It was a source of considerable ire to Wright that modern architecture came to be considered a European invention, and he later engaged in a battle to demonstrate his superiority at modernism when he designed the universally admired Edgar Kaufman house, Fallingwater, in 1935, below:

Each pier of the Lloyd Jones is composed of stacks of four textile block panels, and in a few places blocks, most of which are utterly unadorned, are replaced with sculptural, pierced blocks, shown four images above. Wright had a conflicting position on ornament. His Prairie work is gloriously ornamented with art glass windows but, under the influence of the International Style, ornament on buildings came to be considered retrogressive. The Austrian/Czech architect Adolph Loos influentially wrote, “Lack of ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.”

And yet, though the house’s alternating piers and glass strips are less fussy than the ornamented Art Deco US work of this period, they do engage in a conversation with that vocabulary as well, specifically with Art Deco’s simplified aesthetic called Stripped Classicism n . Stripped Classicism is a style which was popular for institutional buildings through the 1930s and beyond. Referencing this style as early as 1929 would have been an avant-garde choice, characteristic of Wright. A well-know example dating just after the Lloyd Jones house is below:

Detail of Radio City Music Hall, New York City, N.Y., Edward Durrell Stone, architect 1931-1932, photo by dconvertinia -CC by-SA 2.0.

A later example of the style is below:

Mausoleum of Atatürk (Anıtkabir), Ankara, designed 1941. Photo by Bgag. © CC 3.0.

In summary, Westhope is a bit of a mashup of high and low, of the early International Style and Art Deco’s Stripped Classicism, but in refracting both it is utterly unique; characteristic of other works by Wright, both grammars were transformed through his protean genius.


The Design of Westhope’s Textile Blocks

Wright’s textile block system derived from his work on the Imperial Hotel (Tokyo, Japan, 1913-1923). When he arrived in Japan he discovered that a common volcanic stone in Japan, oya stone, was full of tiny air bubbles, and therefore was very easy to carve. Being common and not so durable it was considered a humble stone in Japan, and Wright had to argue insistently with his client that a hotel being built by the emperor to house visiting Westerners should be ornamented with this inexpensive stone. Of course, Wright won the argument. It must have been an enormous battle. But once he was set up in his temporary studio on the site, it allowed him to draw at full scale, the designs for each patterned textile panel, about 17” x 17”, highly ornamented, and hand the sheet to an assistant who in turn handed it to a Japanese stone mason, such that Wright could constantly look out the window of his studio and watch stone masons below cutting the shapes into the blocks that he had just designed:

Given that architects do not see the fruit of their creative work for many months and sometimes years, this must have been an extraordinarily fulfilling experience for him, and is probably the reason why he drew on the order of 300 different designs for ornamental textile blocks for the hotel. The saturation of ornament throughout the ceilings and brick walls in the Imperial Hotel was unique in Wright’s body of work, but he transformed the hotel’s system of ornamental, individually hand-carved panels into concrete blocks or panels, quickly cast in aluminum molds, in many of his designs of the next decade:

We see in the drawings above that each panel has a semi-circular recess in all four edges. As the walls went up, the recesses between them, both vertical and horizontal, were filled with steel rebar and cement mortar. There was an air space between the two sides of the wall, providing some insulation. Horizontal rebar tied the two sides together, making a strong, monolithic wall in spite of an economical use of materials.

Most of his textile block designs were not built, but fortunately three were, each exquisite, known collectively as the California block houses, dated 1922 and 1923.

So consistently did he design (mostly unbuilt) projects using this system through the 1920s, that we can consider the period between his Prairie work which ended roughly in 1911 and his Usonian period, which started in 1935, as his Textile Block period.

Throughout Wright’s career when he used ornamental elements, particularly art glass in his Prairie buildings and clerestories in his Usonian houses, the designs were abstractions of some aspect of the building, frequently the floor plan. In this case, we can hypothesize that the panels’ framing vertical elements with space between them represent the piers and slit windows, and the central field between them represents in plan the house (below in the phot) and the courtyard enclosed by the house (above in the photo). See below:

The house has several fireplaces, but given the warmth of the climate in Tulsa Wright would have anticipated that they would not be used much, so there was no reason to create organizing spaces around them for families together. Surely this is why none of them are prominent, in contrast to those in his houses in northern climates. And the Lloyd Jones fireplaces are completely integrated into the textile block vocabulary of the house. Their simplicity is modernist, but the cast-stone ornamental lintels over them is characteristically Wrightian. See below:

The screen that separates the living room from the hallway to the office terminates at the fireplace above, but that fireplace sits within a unique segment of wall which jogs slightly at each vertical block joint (above). This is a final variation or modification of the vocabulary of the textile block system. It is a bit surprising but reappears years later in the concrete block walls of some of his Usonian Automatic homes.


Coda: A Dead End—Yes or No?

My visit to Westhope answered the questions I had had held for decades: what was the effect of inhabiting a home whose exterior walls were composed of equal narrow alternating piers and window slits? Did these walls create successful rooms? My answer was “Yes.” Westhope is a rich, highly inventive, and stunning home.

One of America’s greatest architectural historians is Neil Levine. One of his career’s specialties has been the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1996 he generously sent me a copy of his 500+ page, newly-published, comprehensive masterwork on Wright, magisterially and fittingly simply titled, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Upon returning from Tulsa I felt compelled to see what Neil’s perspective was on the Lloyd Jones house. Oddly, the house had no listing at all in the book’s index. I turned to the chronological section in which it would have been covered. There I found a single phrase on Westhope—that the house “turned out to be an aesthetic dead-end,” (Page 191) I was crestfallen to read this, and puzzled, because I enormously respect Neil’s insights, but I myself had found the house to be a revelation, and felt that Westhope’s vocabulary of alternating pier and vertical slit window was the apotheosis of Wright’s textile block era.
During the next hours I mulled over Neil’s assessment. There was an important sense in which it was accurate, in that this was the final house Wright built using the textile block system. But was this end truly dead?
It eventually occurred to me that there was a logical reason why Wright would not return to designing with what ultimately proved to be an expensive vocabulary of concrete blocks for another 20 years. That reason was the Great Depression.
Wright began his work on the 10,000 square foot house during the Roaring Twenties, a period of effusion, excess, excitement, and possibilities. Tolerably perhaps during the 1920’s, the house was completed for more than 2-1/2 times its original budget. By the time the home was done the US had entered a severe world-wide economic downturn.  The three large apartment building commissions on Wright’s drafting board in 1931 vanished, and the 11 other designs he worked on over the next two years also came to naught. Some of those few projects were even without clients—simply make-work for the paying apprentices he started to take in during the Depression to have an income stream. Until 1935 only a single (and small) paying project of his was built.
With unemployment up by over 500% in the early 1930’s and many families turned out of their homes, Wright attempted to be a part of a solution to America’s crisis in the way that he could, by creating a highly economical (yet still beautiful and contemporary) house.
This is not the place for me to fully treat his solution, the Usonian home, but the pertinent element of it is that he updated a 19th-century system of constructing walls, a system that was so economical that in the prior decades it had been used to build farm shacks for hired laborers. What Wright turned the primitive system into was an elegant wall that consisted of three thin layers of wood. The outside face and inside face were simple wood siding, and between them was a layer of tar paper to stop the wind, and a thin stack of boards to add structural strength—in effect making a sandwich with the siding serving as the bread, the boards the contents, and, I suppose, the tar paper as the mayo. Screws held the layers of the thin sandwich together. Wright attempted to further save cost by having the walls panelized, that is, built in segments en masse on tables in woodworking shops and trucked to the job sites.
When commissions for homes really began to return to him in the second half of the 1930s it was the Usonian system that he drew upon.
Neil is correct in noting that with Westhope Wright ceased designing using the textile block system. But was the end a dead end? Would the endlessly inventive Wright have designed many more textile block homes had the Depression not intervened? We cannot know.
At the same time, Wright’s entire oeuvre of houses neatly fits into a series of sub-chapters of about a decade in length. Opportunities to use new methods of construction, changes in the economy, changes in taste, and Wright’s eternally inventive mind contributed to his periodic new directions. Even the true Usonians were the product of only about a decade, and were followed within a few years by what Wright called Usonian Automatics, which eerily similar to his textile block system, were again composed of patterned concrete blocks. See below:

Construction using concrete blocks was an early 20th century invention but it ramped up responding to post-World War II innovation and a pent-up desire for economical homes. In 1949 Popular Mechanics published a 64-page publication to teach its readers how to build their own concrete block homes, below:

It was very shortly after this publication that Wright revived and updated the textile block system now named Usonian Automatics, which he proposed be built by their occupants.

Was the Lloyd Jones house a dead end, or the start of a Depression-induced pause? In either case, as it sits today, lovingly restored by its recent owner Stuart Price, it is a noteworthy, even extraordinary, work by America’s greatest architect.