Growing up with Frank Lloyd Wright: Roger Hirsch

New York architect Roger Hirsch grew up in a Usonian community designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Nexus Director Sonia Simpfendorfer met him when they collaborated on a project in the Big Apple, and was fascinated to learn about his experience. Here the principal of Hirsch Corti shares what it was like, and how it influenced him and inspired him to become an architect himself. 

For fans of modernist architecture, Usonia is a holy grail. Usonia Homes is a cooperative community of 47 modernist homes in Pleasantville, New York, approximately 30 miles north of New York City. It was founded in the 1940’s by a group of idealistic New Yorkers who wanted to create a cooperative of modernist homes set within the woods, outside of the city. 

The group engaged Frank Lloyd Wright to help guide the creation of this idealistic community. The guiding principles were based on Wright’s theories, and Wright himself designed three of the 47 homes, as well as the overall layout of the winding roads with abutting circular plots and an abundance of shared, wooded community land.

The remaining homes were designed in keeping with Wright’s ideas about organic architecture, using natural materials with the homes set organically within the natural landscape for the community that America recently designated a National Historic District.

Roger Hirsch on life in the Usonian home he still lives in today

“My parents were one of the last to build a home within the community, completing our home in 1962. The architect of our home, David Leavitt, had lived and worked for many years in Japan, which had a strong influence on his design for our home. All of the exterior decks and surrounding rock gardens and terraces were designed by the noted Japanese American architect and Landscape designer Kaneji Domoto.
 
It was my mother, who is not an architect but who has an incredibly intuitive design sense, who completed the picture. Working with Leavitt and Domoto, selecting natural, warm, interior finishes and surfaces, and filling the home with what would later become iconic classics of modernist furniture and furnishings. Everything from Eames to Saarinen, Knoll to Herman Miller, Georg Jensen to Dansk.
 
My family moved into our new home in 1962, 13 days after I was born, so as a child and young adult, it was the only home I knew. I grew up surrounded by modern architecture, set within nature. At age 8 or 10, going to feed the cats and water the plants for our neighbours who were away on vacation was not out of the ordinary. The fact that it was within a quite prominent Frank Lloyd Wright home didn’t seem strange to me...it’s just what I knew.
 
Although she is not an architect, my mother would take me, even when I was quite young, on day trips to see architecture that she found interesting or important. I remember her taking me to see one of the first buildings in New York to be made of large, modular, prefabricated metal panels, and then to the Yale University campus to see the light glowing through the thin marble slab “windows” of Gordon Bunshaft’s 1960’s rare book library.
 
My grandfather was an architect as well, and I remember him pointing out materials on buildings in Manhattan and explaining how certain materials and details were done correctly or not. So I guess you could say that architecture was an integral part of my childhood.
 
At Hirsch Corti today my partner, Myriam Corti and I are modernists. Modernism is in our blood…it’s what we’ve always done, and it’s what we know and love. We like to think of ourselves as “classic” modernists, meaning that our work is more timeless and not so affected by trends or styles. Our goal is to create work that still looks current and relevant decades after it was designed. Often people will see a project of ours and be shocked that it was built 25 years ago, because to them it looks “new” and current. We like to think that a certain purity of form along with a logic in planning are the roots of our work, and we hope that our clients feel the same.
 
On a personal note, after living in Manhattan for 35 years, my husband and I moved back to the home that my parents built several years ago. The main level of the house is almost unchanged since the 1960’s, and all of the original furniture and furnishings are still in the house. The original Eames, Saaranen, Knoll and Herman Miller furniture are all still there, and all in excellent condition.
 
We wanted to preserve this portion of the house, so we only made minor adjustments. There was, however, a full basement level that was used for storage and mechanical equipment, and we decided to completely renovate this lower level.  The idea was to create a new space that felt completely ours, while preserving the main part of the house mostly as it was.
 
The house is not only a reflection of my family’s lives over the past 60 years, but the original house itself is so beautifully and simply designed, both inside and out. I love the different experience of spending time in the preserved 1960’s upper level of the house and then down in our 2020’s lower level that we created.”

Image credits: Feature photography kindly provided by Roger Hirsch