martinhouseclr

174 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT Style” house should not include foundation plantings. In reality, the earliest published treatise on the Prairie-style landscape, written by Wilhelm Miller in 1915, practically pleaded with readers to plant “shrubbery at the foundation to connect house, woods, and prairie.” 25 The popularity of foundation plants have beginnings firmly set at the very end of the Victorian era, becoming increasingly popular in post-Victorian domestic landscapes. This is perhaps, in part, due to the restoration and conservation ethic besought by the Prairie Spirit landscape or maybe simply the late-Victorian purging of a popular, but scientifically inaccurate, belief that plants near foundations and windows restricted air circulation and promoted unhealthy living conditions – a common belief repeated by doctors of the Victorian age. In either case, the contemporary application of “foundation plantings” as we know today would have been foreign to Wright at the time. However, despite his somewhat contradictory sound-bites later in life, the nestling of vegetative materials into corners, allowing the fall color of sumac to rise up and frame a September view from a verandah – and, indeed, blocking some views of the stylobate – seemed to have at least some planned compositional importance in Wright’s unification of house and landscape. 25 Wilhelm Miller, The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening, Urbana, University of Illinois College of Agriculture, Department of Horticulture, 1915, 22. Along with the Martin House, two other large scale “unbudgeted” multiple building compositions of Wright’s Prairie period are recognized as comparable. These are the Susan Lawrence Dana House (1902-1904) and the Avery Coonley House (1908). However, neither of the compositions are recognized for Wright’s assimilation of garden and house, nor for the distinctiveness of their landscape features. The Dana House includes landscape spaces that are compositionally arranged tightly within a house- defined grid but, except for a narrow fountain court, does not attempt to humanize nature with vegetative materials nor does the house exhibit the distinctive architectural blending of structure and site. The Coonley House, on the other hand, is an exceptional integration of architecture and site. But with respect to the implementation of Wright’s unified landscape, the landscape offered by Wright ultimately was no more than a wonderful implementation of site planning – the landscape was not implemented as designed. The garden design was completed some years later by landscape architect Jens Jensen. 26 Unbuilt though it was, perhaps the closest kin to the Martin House in terms of the unified composition of both architectural and landscape materials in a humanizing way is the H.J. Ullman House project. The scale of the house and landscape is practically an order of magnitude 26 Aguar, Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs, 118. Fig. 170 Avery Coonley House, site plan, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1908, unrealized (landscape).