#freemanhouse

“In conservation, the question is sometimes, how many buckets is it? And the Freeman House is 19 buckets, 2 tarps, and a trashcan.”

Those are the safeguards the Freeman House’s live-in caretakers must put up for every Los Angeles rainfall. Trudi Sandmeier, Director of Graduate Programs in Historic Conversation at the USC School of Architecture, made this quip while sharing her insights on the challenges of conserving the Freeman House. The Freeman House is one of just four “textile block” houses by Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles County, and, in true Frank Lloyd Wright fashion, it leaks. It leaks in part because its cement blocks are mixed with soil from the site it stands on–pebbles, sand, and all. Concrete ideally is mixed with very fine aggregate; the more varied the aggregate, the more air will be allowed in, and the more sponge-like the blocks will be. 

Water penetration is the bane of conservation efforts, so why doesn’t USC get rid of these doomed, spongy blocks in favor of hardier concrete? After all, USC has one of the original casts. 

Wright didn’t just cast his concrete blocks from on-site sand aggregate because it was cheaper, he chose to do so because he believed in staying true to the inherent materials of the site, in incorporating nature while also controlling nature. To do away with the original blocks, problematic for water damage as they may be, would be to do away with a characteristically Wright element of design and a large part of his building philosophy. “Stay close to nature,” Wright once instructed his students. “It will never fail you.” 

But nature can certainly pose a few problems. The concrete blocks are only one example of how the Freeman House is a live case study of some of the tough questions in heritage conservation. Given a finite budget, how do we avoid repeating the “mistakes of the past” while maintaining what is historically important about a building? Moreover, how do we determine what is historically important? Who or what is this building about?

Conservationists are constantly having to make choices. Ms. Sandmeier introduced us to the four treatments used in conservation, according to the Secretary of the Interior’s guidelines: 

1) Preservation: places a high premium on the retention of all historic fabric through conservation, maintenance, and repair. It respects a building’s continuum over time, and through successive occupancies, and the respectful changes and alterations that are made. (Essentially, the goal is to freeze the property.)

2) Rehabilitation: emphasizes the retention and repair of historic materials, but more latitude is provided for replacement because it is assumed the property is more deteriorated prior to work. (This is most commonly done in “preservation” work; it allows for updates to electrical and plumbing systems or structural work.)

3) Restoration: focuses on the retention of materials from the most significant time in a property’s history, while permitting the removal of materials from other periods. (Conservationists will “bring the property back” to a certain moment in history.)

4) Reconstruction: establishes limited opportunities to re-create a non-surviving site, landscape, building, structure, or object in all new materials. (While this is rarely done, it usually takes place if such reconstruction is essential to the public understanding of a property.)

The Freeman House is being rehabilitated. While there are some who may argue that the Freeman House is a “Wright House” and only its Wright-designed features should be restored, Sandmeier argues the Freeman House is centrally about the Freemans. Samuel and Harriet Freeman were themselves people of significance; they were integral actors in a particular bohemian era of Los Angeles history, and they were the driving force behind why and how the house was built. They were close friends with Rudolph Schindler, “who knew and admired Wright’s work” (Sweeney 79), and they turned to him for furniture and modifications to the house--in all, close to 40 different modifications! Some of his additions are especially unique and memorable: a working kitchen that folds out from a self-contained cabinet, a built-in metallic-painted cut-out hearth with graduated sections, wood panels that work off Wright’s grid structure. John Lautner, too, made adjustments to the windows. 

To decide which architect’s legacy is most important to preserve would be, perhaps, to miss the point. The house is foremost a story about the Freemans, and it cannot be told without all of the contributions they commissioned.