Samuel Freeman House
The Samuel Freeman House is a house at 1962 Glencoe Way in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles in California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright with a mixture of Islamic and Maya architectural elements, it was completed in 1925 for the jewelry salesman Sam Freeman and his wife Harriet, a teacher. The house is the smallest of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, the others being La Miniatura, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. The Freeman House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and California Historical Landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Freeman House consists of an L-shaped structure with a detached garage, which sit on the slope of a hill. The exterior is built of 12,000 concrete textile blocks, which are alternately plain in design or decorated with engraved patterns. There are double-story corner windows and various terraces, including a rooftop terrace. Inside, the house has at least of space, split across two levels. It has an inverted floor plan, with a kitchen and a living–dining room on the upper level, as well as two bedrooms on the lower level. Wright's protege Rudolph Schindler designed most of the furniture, while Wright himself created some pieces. The house lacks a traditional foundation, instead being supported on textile-block retaining walls; the southern part of the house hangs above the hillside.
Sam and Harriet Freeman may have commissioned Wright to design the house after hearing about him through Harriet's sister. A new-building permit was issued in April 1924, and the structure was substantially completed in March 1925. The Freemans lived in the house for over a half-century, using it for avant-garde salons. After Sam died, Harriet donated the house in 1984 to the University of Southern California, which tried to renovate it over the next four decades. The house had deteriorated over the years and was damaged further during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and restoration efforts proceeded slowly during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. USC sold the house in 2022 to the real-estate developer Richard Weintraub.
Site
The Freeman House is located at 1962 Glencoe Way, a dead-end street in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the house is placed on the side of a hill. It occupies an irregular land lot sloping south toward the intersection of Franklin and Highland avenues, near Hollywood Boulevard. Wright's nearly-contemporary John Storer House and Ennis House were also built on hilltop sites; the writer Robert C. Twombly wrote that this made the houses look "seemingly impenetrable" from the street. The lot covers a total of ; the house occupies the northern corner of the lot.Immediately to the south is the Hollywood United Methodist Church and the Villa Bonita apartment building. Additionally, Magic Castle and the Yamashiro Villa are located slightly farther to the west, and the Highland Towers Apartments is located to the east across Highland Avenue. The surrounding neighborhood also has houses designed by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler. The segment of Glencoe Way abutting the house was established in 1922, several years after the neighborhood was subdivided and just before the house was built. The street had not been paved when construction started.
Architecture
The Freeman House is one of eight buildings that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Millard House, the Hollyhock House, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. The Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer houses were the only textile block houses he designed in Los Angeles. According to the writer Hugh Hart, "Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal." Few of his clients ended up commissioning textile-block designs, given the novelty of the construction method. As The New York Times later said: "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 [Alice Millard] and a failed doctor ."The Freeman House's style has been characterized as a blend of Islamic and Maya architecture. After designing the four textile-block houses, Wright went on to design various concrete-block buildings across the U.S., including Usonian houses made of "Usonian Automatic" blocks. The architect Jeffrey Chusid stated that the house's design had to encapsulate "the clearest, most efficient expression of ideas" due to the limited space available.
Exterior
Facade
The house's massing consists of a detached garage and an L-shaped house, the latter of which has a largely cubic form with mostly-square floor slabs. An open-air loggia originally connected the house and garage, though it was enclosed in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The exterior is made of 12,000 concrete textile blocks. The blocks are made of materials taken from the site, such as sand, which may have been the source of the blocks' buff-colored tint. The typical block has square faces measuring across. Although each block is deep, the interiors of the blocks are hollow, meaning that the layer of concrete in each block is at most thick. Mortar joints are placed between the blocks, which are fastened to each other using loops of steel; the blocks also contain steel rods. The "textile block" name is derived by the fact that the steel rods are integrated with the blocks to give the facade a knitted-together appearance.Some of the textile blocks are plain, while others are engraved with motifs. The juxtaposition of plain and engraved blocks is the only ornamentation used on the house's facade. Since only one face of each engraved block contains decorations, the outer walls are made of two layers of blocks, with an air gap between them; this allowed both the interior and exterior faces of the walls to have engraved patterns. The engraved blocks' decorations are variously cited as depicting the site layout, an overlaid square and chevron, or a combination of the site plan and a eucalyptus tree. Sources disagree on how many types of blocks were used, although at least three types have been identified. The blocks on the southern facade are alternately protruded or recessed, and the blocks are laid in a more complex pattern as the facade ascends. The facade also includes vertical piers with alternating plain and engraved concrete blocks. Other parts of the facade contain perforated concrete blocks. The textile blocks absorbed moisture easily and were prone to decay because of impurities that existed when the blocks were cast.
Wrapping around the house's corners are two-story windows. The windows lack vertical mullions or other visible means of support at the corners, and the glass panes on each side of the corner are instead joined to each other directly. Mullions do exist elsewhere within these windows and are placed apart. The windows, which extend from the lower level's floor slab to the soffit beneath the roof, were intended to create an open effect, giving the illusion that there are no corners. The Freeman House was one of Wright's first buildings to use such windows. The windows are interspersed between the concrete-block walls, which contain additional reinforcement. The primary facade along Glencoe Way generally lacks windows or other openings, which are instead clustered along the other facades. The main entrance is hidden away behind a wall that surrounds the house's garden.
Terraces and roof
The Freeman House lacks a traditional foundation because Wright wanted the house to appear to grow from the site. Instead, it has textile-block retaining walls and interior walls. The house is susceptible to earthquake damage due to its hillside location and the loose soil underneath; the southern end of the house is especially vulnerable.In the rear are balconies overlooking Highland Avenue and the Hollywood neighborhood. According to one source, the balconies were intended to "extend and enhance the openness of interior spaces". South of the house, a retaining wall encloses a terrace, which stands on a layer of fill. Wright's initial plans called for several rectangular terraces and a semicircular retaining wall, but these were not built. These plans also called for an interior partition wall on the lower level to be extended outside of the house, down a flight of stairs, and into the terraces. Due to a scarcity of open space, the roof was originally designed as a terrace, but it seems to have been sparsely used by the Freeman family. The roof protrudes over the southern part of the house. The roof originally leaked because it lacked a flashing, which was added shortly after the house's completion.
Interior
The house is variously cited as having or, which is split across two levels. The house has two bedrooms and was originally built with one bathroom; a second bathroom was added later on but was removed in a 2000 renovation. The interior is decorated with textile blocks bearing geometric motifs. Wright designed a small amount of furniture for the house, including two benches, shelves, and a dining table. The house mainly includes furniture designed by Wright apprentice Rudolph Schindler, who created either 35 or 60 pieces for the house. Although some original furnishings such as lamps remained in the 1990s, other pieces such as bookcases and chairs have been removed.Upper level
Similar to other houses in Los Angeles with inverted floor plans, the kitchen and living–dining spaces are on the main floor, while the bedrooms are on the level below. The kitchen and bedrooms are small compared to contemporary houses. The house's entrance leads directly to a hallway that runs past the kitchen and living–dining space, which in turn abuts the perforated blocks on the facade. Because the perforated blocks do not have lights, the corridor is dark at night. A stair leads from the entrance hall to the house's lower level.There is a fireplace hearth on the living–dining room's northern wall, which is surrounded by textured blocks and flanked by benches with shelves. The southern wall leads to a balcony, and there are wrap-around windows at the room's corners; both of these features were later used in Wright's other structures. Due to the design of the windows, the corners of the upper-story floor slab are cantilevered. The center of the living–dining room has a hardwood floor, while the perimeter of the room's floor is made of concrete blocks. Two piers separate the southern part of the living–dining room from the rest of the space. The room's ceiling consists of wooden joists placed 16 inches apart, the same width as the window panes and the floorboards. Part of the room's ceiling is raised to create a clerestory, which is illuminated by perforated blocks. There are two large I-beams running north to south across the living–dining room's ceiling, dividing the room into thirds. The southern third of the room has a lower ceiling than the rest of the space.