At Fountainhead, the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed residence tucked into Jackson, Mississippi’s Fondren neighborhood, nothing is sq.. The home emerges from the hillside with corners that slice obliquely into area and shadows fall at surprising angles. Even the sunshine, strained by means of skylights and cypress louvers, enters rooms diagonally.
However Fountainhead’s impression isn’t simply visible, it’s atmospheric. Inside, surrounded by Coronary heart Tidewater Pink Cypress, the structure features precisely as Wright supposed his Usonian properties to. It softens the road between indoors and open air, turning on a regular basis mundanities right into a deliberate, nearly ritual expertise.
This week, the Mississippi Museum of Artwork (MMA) confirmed that it has acquired the property, making certain that one in every of Wright’s late-career masterworks will enter public stewardship for the primary time. For Jackson, it’s a uncommon architectural inheritance. For the museum, it marks a daring growth of its mission. And for admirers of Wright, it’s one other chapter within the lengthy effort to guard his Usonian legacy.
Wright designed Fountainhead in 1948 for J. Willis Hughes, an oil speculator who requested the architect for one thing formidable on a steep, wooded parcel. Wright’s response was a parallelogram, a whole residence organized by diamond-shaped geometry, extending into the panorama like an unfolding fan.
Every part inside serves the bigger rhythmic order with triangular soffits, slender clerestories, angular built-ins, lighting fixtures and ottomans that echo the house’s geometry. There aren’t any proper angles, no ornamental prospers, nothing that breaks the continuity of fabric. Constructed with out studs, sheetrock, brick, tile, or paint, the home is pure cypress, glass, and copper.
Its nickname, “Fountainhead,” comes partly from Wright’s design. The bed room tapers towards a fountain that cascades right into a pool which then flows all the way down to a stream. However the identify additionally nods to Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, whose uncompromising architect protagonist was lengthy rumored to be impressed by Wright.
Hughes and his household lived within the residence till 1980, when architect Robert Parker Adams purchased it and commenced a restoration that turned his life’s work. He repaired injury attributable to shifting Yazoo clay, restored the kitchen, preserved unique furnishings, and gave excursions so detailed that friends generally stayed for 2 hours.
The home was listed earlier this yr, weeks earlier than Adams’s dying, for $2.5 million, however his widow, Sherri Mancil, bought the home for simply $1 million together with all the unique Wright furnishings to safeguard the house’s future and make sure that the architectural ensemble stays intact.
The Mississippi Museum of Artwork’s acquisition is a strategic, city-shaping transfer. The museum, lengthy a cultural anchor in downtown Jackson, has been increasing its mission to higher serve neighborhoods throughout the town. Fountainhead offers it a option to embed programming, excursions, and partnerships straight into Fondren, whereas additionally positioning Jackson as a vacation spot for Twentieth-century American structure.
Solely a handful of museums within the nation personal Wright homes; essentially the most notable is Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork, whose relocation and preservation of Wright’s Bachman-Wilson Home has grow to be a significant draw. Fountainhead enters that lineage, however in contrast to the Bachman-Wilson Home, it can stay on its unique web site, the place its structure can’t be divorced from the contours of the land that formed it.
To face inside Fountainhead is to grasp why Wright insisted that structure be an extension of nature. In his 1932 autobiography Wright wrote, “No home ought to ever be on a hill or on something. It needs to be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and home ought to reside collectively every the happier for the opposite.” Fountainhead fulfills this ethos actually. Its partitions ripple alongside the slope; its home windows body timber as in the event that they’re a part of the furnishings; its geometry is decided not by human desire however by the hillside’s logic.
Now, the Mississippi Museum of Artwork holds the accountability for safeguarding Fountainhead, working with architects and preservation specialists to revive the home and set up a long-term upkeep plan. The museum will oversee all programming on-site, with guests shuttled from its downtown campus. A gap date will likely be introduced as soon as restoration is underway.
