Storer House (Los Angeles, California) - Wright's Textile-block Houses

Wright's Textile-block Houses

Considered an example of Wright's pre-Columbian or early Modernist architecture, Storer House is one of four textile-block houses he built in Southern California, the others being the Millard House, the Samuel Freeman House and the Ennis House. The textile-block houses were named for their richly textured brocade-like concrete walls. The style was an experiment by Wright in modular construction that he called the Textile Block System. He sought to develop an inexpensive and simple method of construction that would enable ordinary people to build their own homes with stacked blocks, tied together with steel rods. One writer has described Wright's concept this way: "By unifying decoration and function, exterior and interior, earth and sky -- perforated blocks served as skylights -- Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal."

Wright was also intrigued by archaeological discoveries on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and used elements from Mayan architecture and design in the Storer House. Wright used sledgehammers and aluminum molds to imprint elaborate Mayan-inspired patterns into the blocks. The four Southern California textile-block houses represented Wright's earliest uses of the exotic, monumental Mayan forms. Storer House is the only one of Wright's textile-block houses to use multiple block patterns—four in all.

Wright's textile block houses did not catch on as he had hoped. As The New York Times later said of the California houses built by Wright in the 1920s: "It didn't help that he was obsessed at the time with an untested and (supposedly) low-cost method of concrete-block construction. What kind of rich person, many wondered, would want to live in such a house? Aside from the free-spirited oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, whom he fought with constantly, his motley clients included a jewelry salesman, a rare-book dealing widow and a failed doctor."