An American Proceeding: Building the Grant House with Frank Lloyd Wright

by Donna Grant Reilly, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Foreword)

In June 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a surprise visit to the Grant house, under construction near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was Wright's first visit to the site, and he was worried about the house because, unlike most of Wright's clients, Doug Grant was building it himself, serving as his own general contractor and doing his own electrical work and carpentry. He and his wife, Jackie, quarried all of the stone for the house from their own quarry on the property, and both took an active part in the construction. Upon his return to Taliesin, Wright told the assembled group of architects and apprentices that he was extremely pleased by what he had seen. He delivered a long tribute to Grant, calling the act of building one's own house "an American proceeding." The book's foreword, contributed by the Wright Foundation's Director of Archives, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, calls the Grant house, "among some of the finest and most inspired that Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed."

182 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2010

Reviews

[Don Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a special book because of its subject matter. Even if Ms.Grant had written the story of her parents' experiences with Frank Lloyd Wright and the building of their house poorly, it would have been worth reading. But she wrote a compelling, informative book about the the subject. I've lived withing 25 miles of this house for over 30 years and I wasn't aware of its existence until I visited Cedar Rock, another of Wright's Usonian houses, located in Quasqueton, Iowa, in 2014. I found this book in the museum there and read it while traveling to Mason City to stay in the Park Inn, a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I just read the book a second time.

If you have an interest in Frank Lloyd Wright's work, this book is a must read. It seems improbable that a young couple from Cedar Rapids, Iowa could have convinced Wright to design a house for them that they planned to build themselves with stone quarried on their property. They succeeded and earned Wright's admiration and respect by building the house he designed for them.