Built in 1937, this Usonian Modern house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, whom would go on to commission Wright to design a second home for them further west about a decade later. The house is considered Wright’s first Usonian-style house, a departure from his previous Prairie School work in both aesthetics and in clientele, as the Jacobs family were Wright’s first clients who were middle class, rather than wealthy. The house was built during the Great Depression, and is the result of Herbert Jacobs, a friend of Wright, challenging the architect to design an affordable and decent home for $5,000. Wright took on the project, and created a design philosophy from it known as “Usonian,” which takes its name for Wright’s proposed moniker for people, places, and things from the United States of America, distinguishing it from the long-established phrase “American” which, confusingly, can refer to either people, places and things from either the United States of America, or the North American and South American continents. Wright envisioned a new form of architecture with the Usonian philosophy that would be affordable and not be beholden to traditions derived from Europe, responding instead to the American landscape. Wright designed his Usonian homes to not feature shrubbery, prominent foundations, chimneys, or front porches, and instead, directly connect to the surrounding landscape, and utilized materials including glass, stone, wood, and brick in the design and construction of the houses. The Jacobs House I became the prototype typical house for Wright’s envisioned “Broadacre City” concept that intended to drastically alter the form of human settlement in North America, which somewhat influenced suburban development in the United States, but did not ever get realized in anything close to resembling what Wright had intended. The Usonian houses grew more elaborate over time, eventually becoming far less affordable than they were intended, but the Jacobs House I was the first of these houses, and the most true to form, embodying the underlying design philosophy. At the time of the house’s construction, Herbert Jacobs was a young journalist who had just took on a position at the Madison Capital Times, and had a wife, Katherine Jacobs, and a young daughter. The Jacobs family lived in the small house until they outgrew it, moving out and selling the house in 1942, moving to a farm nine miles west of Madison, where they commissioned Wright to design them a new house, the Jacobs House II, in 1946-1948, which he dubbed his “Solar Hemicycle House,” which featured a more curvilinear form meant to follow the path of the sun and take advantage of passive solar heating in the winter and daylighting in the summer. The Jacobs family remained in Madison until Herbert retired in 1962, after which they lived in California until their deaths.
The L-shaped house is clad in wood and brick with a low-slope roof and wide overhanging eaves. The simple form of the house is a result of the Usonian philosophy of economical design, with small ribbon windows on the front offering privacy, contrasting with the much larger windows in the rear, which open to the rear garden. One end of the front facade features a carport that is open on two sides with a cantilevered roof supported by brick walls that run along the portions of the carport’s perimeter that adjoin the rest of the house. The house’s entrance is off the carport, as the design recognizes the primacy of the automobile in accessing the house, rather than walking to it from somewhere nearby. The house’s exterior accentuates its horizontality with its banded wooden cladding, roofline, and front facade windows, carrying over from Wright’s earlier Prairie School work. Inside the house, it is divided into two distinct areas, with the rear wing being quieter and more private spaces with the bedrooms and study inside this wing of the house. By contrast, the front wing has the more public areas, with an open-plan living room and dining room, the kitchen in a nook behind the fireplace, a terrace with large glass doors looking out at the rear garden, and the bathroom sitting between the two sections of the house. The interior features the same materials as the exterior, with brick and wood cladding, including economical prefabricated sandwich drywall, and wooden trim, and a stained concrete floor throughout containing heat conduits based on the Korean “Ondol” or “warm stone” system of heating, which consisted of pipes in a layer of sand below the house’s floor slab. The house does not feature an attic or basement except for a small cellar containing a boiler under the kitchen and bathroom, and was built utilizing a version of the simple slab-on-grade construction that became popular in the following decades for suburban middle class housing. The only major difference between this house’s four-inch slab foundation and conventional slab-on-grade construction is that it lacks any footings except at the large masonry fireplace, as the heating system prevents the ground under the house from freezing, eliminating the need for a footing below the frost line to prevent frost heave.
The house was a sensation when it was built, and the Jacobs family allowed tours of the house early on. The house was prominently featured in magazines and publications, and influenced the design of the ranch house that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s with its open kitchen, dining room, and living room. After the Jacobs family moved out, the house was cared for inconsistently by subsequent owners. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, owing to its major historical significance, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2003. In 1982, the house was purchased by James Dennis, an Art History professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, who subsequently restored the house’s exterior and interior to their original appearance, and updating the building systems, which had worn out. The house remains in excellent condition today under the careful stewardship of multiple owners. The house is occasionally open for tours through the owner’s partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program, Inc. One of the latest developments in the significant house’s history came in 2019, when it became one of eight Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings in the United States to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright”, alongside other notable buildings including Taliesin and Taliesin West, the Hollyhock House, Unity Temple, the Robie House, Fallingwater, and the Guggenheim Museum. The house’s influence on 20th Century modern residential architecture cannot be overstated, as it was the first time that such design quality really became attainable for the average person. The house, along with Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Complex, marked a renaissance in Wright’s career, making him the well-known historical figure he is today, rather than as a derivative of Louis Sullivan he would likely have been viewed as had he ended his career at an age when most people retire.
