Simplicity and Peace

The American Purpose

The connection between the spaces we inhabit and our emotional health, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Marie Kondo.

In 1939 Loren Pope, then a twenty-eight-year-old copy editor for Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star, wrote a letter to famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright asking for a house that Pope, at the time, could not afford. “There are certain things a man wants during life, and, of life,” Pope wrote, “material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you.” Pope eventually got a one-sentence answer from Wright: “Dear Loren Pope, of course I am ready to give you a house.”

Pope couldn’t get a commercial loan to build the house. He had to rely on financing from his employer. Still, within two years Pope was living in a twelve-hundred-square-foot home built by Wright outside Washington. While it was modest in scale and building materials, it was, as the Pope family and the subsequent owners, the Leighey family, found, a “great and quiet soul.”

Today, our homes have become our offices, gyms, schoolrooms, and happy-hour hangouts. It seems quixotic to believe they can reduce our anxieties as well. But a walk through the Pope-Leighey House teaches a different lesson.

The Pope-Leighey home was one of Wright’s first “Usonian” houses. He built sixty of them; fourteen survive today. Wright used the word “Usonian,” derived from “United States of North America,” to promote the idea that the houses were architectural expressions of the American democratic ethos, structures that would enable all American families, even those with restricted budgets, to abandon their “stifling little colonial hot-boxes” for an environment of self-sufficiency and beauty.

By the time Pope wrote his letter, Wright had been through the personal and professional wringer. With the 1929 stock market crash, his large-scale residential and commercial commissions dried up. In earlier decades, Wright had abandoned his first wife and their six children to move to Europe with his mistress. A crazed butler murdered his second wife and her children and set fire to his Taliesin studio, all of which was followed by a still-bigger fire a few years later.

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This article originally appeared in The American Purpose, January 8, 2021.