Lewis Spring House & Villa Savoye, Home X 2

How a home reflects your values, politically, morally and aesthetically.

Written by and audio voice Michael Scarmack

Is your home your favorite house?

I think my favorite house is the one we live in, having been there over 3 1/2 decades, working and transforming nearly every boxy room in the house.

Is VV (short for Valley View) the Taj Mahal? No!

Is VV a Villa Savoye? No, but sort of, in some respects.

Is VV a Spring House? No, but it is in other respects, yes!

Is it home? Yes indeed, VV is very comfortable, quiet, unassuming, simple, relatively safe in a world conflated with meaningless distractions.

This message however, wants to address insights about two houses, in two unique styles, in two different countries, by two respected signature architects. Examining personal observations and literary statements of the Spring House in the US of A and Villa Savoye in France is the focus of our reflection.

Resident Byrd Lewis Mashburn & The Wattendorfs & The Scarmacks (author’s photo)

Lewis Spring House, January 11, 2024

From the book “Frank Lloyd Wright Companion” written by William Allin Storrer, he describes on page 384 about the Clifton and George Lewis residence, known as the Lewis Spring House, designed in 1952, by architect Wright, on a site near Tallahassee Florida. The structure, which is a modified Usonian styled family residence, known as a two-story hemicycle, with the exterior consisting of concrete block, combined with crushed Ocala limestone, and mixed in with concrete, so that the final block was a yellowish sandstone color, accented with deep square mortar rakes. The upper story is wood sheathed, mingled with expansive glass.

We visited this house after Suzi, a “Sun Town” resident and her sister, Stacey, (my spouse), arranged a tour with the building owner. Bob, (Suzi’s spouse) drove us to the house located in Northwest Tallahassee. Arriving at the only domestic building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the state, we were met in the driveway by the life long resident Byrd Lewis Mashburn. Byrd is one of four siblings that grew up in the structure and the daughter of Clifton and George Lewis, the original owners of the Spring House.

What we thought would be an hour and a half maximum tour of the home and garden, to our surprise turned out to be an all afternoon affair. The afternoon was more than a tour. It seemed as if the original owners were present as relayed through the voice and memories of Byrd. In Mr. Storrer’s book, we learn that Clifton and George were political activists in surrounding conservative environs. The structure itself engages others in the community, then and today, when visiting the house.

Quoted from the Pamphlet, ”… find your ground “, written by the Spring House Insistute is the following:

“George thought world peace could be promoted through international law and a more powerful more pro-active U.N. He and Clifton were traveling to a World Federalism meeting in Lakeland when they met Frank Lloyd Wright. They'd been excited by his Autobiography: here was someone who, like them, believes in pacifism and globalism and hated both ugliness of spirit and ugliness in the built environment. Clifton says, "Mr. Wright had wonderful ideas about how a house could have a soul, about unity and integrity and simplicity.”

Hemicycle pod interior

The first-floor space is magnificently designed as an open plan. An appendage encloses the circularly formed kitchen. Adjacent to the round kitchen is the entry stair frame the main entrance at the west door, and a fixed dining table and an open circular fireplace. A massive living room bench hugs the southwesterly wall as the occupant gazes upward to an open second story space. The flooring is a red dye added smooth concrete polished surface.

The stairway rises upward and the occupant is met with double door accessing an exterior balcony. The second floor is partitioned with two bathrooms, one adjacent to the Master Bedroom, and further along the cantilevered open hall the Girls Bedroom and the Boy’s Bedroom, terminating to an exterior balcony through a double door.

The roof is low slope with portions cantilever over the ribboned clear story windows for sun shading and soffit protection. The house was designed as a passive solar structure allowing for cooling through natural convection and heating by the Florida sun. By all accounts from resident Byrd, the house has performed well as low intensity energy ‘consumer’.

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Lastly, the building site that was original selected with ten acres by the Lewis couple, was chosen not only for the flora and fauna on the grounds, yet also, for the spring that cast forth water propelling its flow through the site, over a five foot waterfall, along a creek bed, that was later damned up for a pond. During our visit the Cedar Waxwing birds made an unexpected migratory visit of their own. See short video.

As we all know adjacent land owners often refuse to acknowledge what the development of their parcels will do to negatively affecting a neighbors properties. Because of this negligence by adjacent land owners and their lands evolution, the “spring” is now non-functional, thus making a mockery of the original name sake of the home, the “Spring House”.

Nature’s Side, The Lewis Sprig House

Definitions

Usonian home abbreviated features - not all apply to the Lewis Spring House

* Architectural native materials such as brick, wood, and stone, usually without plaster or paint are used.

* Built on affordable and atypical sites.

* Built-in furnishings added to the efficiency of the space.

* Clerestory windows were common and filtered additional light used.

* Floor plans where open without-interior partitioning.

* Flooring embedded with radiant heat assemblies, FLW “gravity heat”.

* Garages usually excluded, carports preferred.

* Horizontal lines found throughout the design.

* Interiors lacking ornamentation.

* Low-sloped roofing assembly with extended cantilevered overhangs.

* Modest in square footage size, anti-McMansion attitude.

* Modular furniture was typical.

* Natural light amply diffused through the interior.

* Passive solar heating.

* Plan L-shaped and embraces a garden terrace , not at this house.

* Private front facing with privacy.

* Rear-side oriented to the natural outdoor landscape.

* Simple houses had no basements or crawl space, set on concrete slabs.

* Three unique areas: a living space, bedrooms and a kitchen / dining area.

* Usonia was FLW word used describing the United States.

* Well organized spatial order. (This plan resemble the shape of a boat).

Research at Villa Savoye

In other zoetic messages, Architect’s Fav 5 and Lincoln Logs to Unité Blocks, we have written about Monsieur Le Corbusier. He created an entire vocabulary used by modernists in the the designs of all sorts of buildings and occasionally works of Architecture, see A Happy Place .

Stacey & Michael on the roof garden at Villa Savoye, May 10, 2023

In the summer of 1977, in my early 20’s, was the first time I visited this structure of modernity. We took a day trip out to Poissy, France with a group of Syracuse architectural students studying Parisian urban design for the summer. It was a delightful field trip, having thoroughly been taught some, but not all of its lessons.

Villa Savoye is the masterpiece of Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier. Commonly cited as the basis for modern architecture, Villa Savoye, found in Poissy, France, is a classic example of Jeanneret's five points of architecture. The villa, less than an hour's journey from Paris, was built in 1929 and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

“A chapter of the exhibition is devoted to the magazine and the first villas that will be erected as manifestos. With the New Spirit Pavilion designed for the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Le Corbusier concretized the establishment of a cognitive space defining both the pictorial space, the space to "inhabit it", the harmony of architectural compositions and the understanding of the urban domain. Le Corbusier's seminal article "Eyes that do not see" defines the new space of modernity, that of a society carried by the machine, the automobile, the plane, the liner, where movement, mobility impose a new conception of space-time. The villas (Villa Stein, Villa Savoye...) are the manifestos of this architecture organized for a liberated body, thought of as a free plan open to the light.“

Rear Elevation Villa Savoye, Poissy , France, May 10, 2023

Definitions - Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier's described "five points" for proposed building constructions, that when completed, would become works of Architecture were noted early on in the architect’s career. Villa Savoye is representative of the origins of modern architecture and is one of the most easily identifiable and esteemed instance of the International style.

The house was originally built as a country retr