[Music] when your father's the most celebrated architect in America the greatest gift he can give you is a house Frank FL Wright designed this house for his son David and daughter-in-law gladus using many of the same ideas that he was building into the Guggenheim Museum spirals are fascinating forms they can symbolize the infinite or longevity David and Gladis Wright they both lived to be more than 100 years old at the David and Gladis wri house the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity as it moves from one generation father to the Next Generation son and even today as it moves between father and daughter working on this [Music] Restoration located in The Arcadian neighborhood of Phoenix Arizona this neighborhood was once filled with orang groves today it's a residential neighborhood it's a special place it's unlike anything else that Frank L wri did in the course of his career and we're so excited to show it to you the entry to this house really begins here at the bottom of a spiral ramp W began exploring spiral forms along with all of the other Elementary geometries that were part of his body of work in the 1920s this is long before we came up with ways to curve glass and curve Woodwork in a way that was structurally sustainable and so what we see is this combination of polygon forms triangular ends for the wood framework for the windows and even for the roof set above the circular surfaces of the building itself it's this interesting jux toos of forms that's really a signature of frl wri's body of work this whole experience coming up the ramp it's this little journey that Wright's taking you on the movement through space is something that right calls the continual becoming this idea that space is constantly unfolding and revealing itself and you really see that as you climb up the ramp and come up here to the entry now that we're at the top of the ramp we see this beautiful landscape we're out in this bright sun and Wright wants to create a jux position so he's going to take us in under a low ceiling and sort of a shaded darkened [Music] space wri has this technique that he calls compression and release being enveloping darker space and then opening up into a lighter brighter more expansive space this is very similar to taking a walk through nature where you might be walking on a forest path nature is embracing you and then suddenly you're in a clearing where you're open to the sky there's bright light all around you it is an emotional Journey that we take much of the work on this house the delineation the renderings and the design of the rug were done by a right Apprentice from China named Ling po Ling came over from China in the 1940s and worked with Wright and worked at the foundation for many decades after Wright died in 1959 the furniture is made of plywood really humble material but in the mid-century right gravitated to this material you look at the edge detail what you see are the different layers of the plywood and instead of covering that up like most people would right exposes it and celebrates it he wants you to see not only how the furniture is made but indeed that the wood itself like the cement blocks from which the house is constructed could actually be quite beautiful even these tables themselves have this unusual feature little hold down the center for this beautiful circular Globe so again the circle the sphere the sense of festivity is always part of every element of design of this house this fireplace beautiful cylinder tapering in in fact this is the continuity from one of the peers below tapering upward from the ground all the way up past the roof and into the chimney but a beautiful circular fireplace a beautiful fireplace great that again reflects the circles patterns of this house there's another important sense of intergenerational continuity that's reflected in this house Frank lyd Wright designs this house for his son David and David's family today the current owners are Bing who who has brought his daughter a newly minted architect into the restoration of this house I come to the uis for the first time to study architecture and then year later I went back to China get my wife from there our community also my family grown so we have our first daughter and then later on we have two more daughters it was only natural for me to want to study architecture as soon as I told my dad that I was expecting him to be so excited but he said don't do architecture it's a hard life but of course as his daughter I don't listen to him so I did exactly the opposite of that and I studied architecture on this property Dave glad R house come to my attention a spec Builder bought the property from the family with the intention to demolish the house and create the two spec houses so the first I learned that is like we got to rescue this my dad called me and asked me if I would consider leaving my job to come work with him to restore the David and gladus right house [Music] it means a lot for my parents to come as Chinese immigrants and sort of be here preserving the legacy of American architecture as [Music] well this ceiling is constructed of Philippine Mahogany it's a wood species that you can't get today unfortunately because the roof leaked into this room for many years this mahogany ceiling became stained and because you can't get this wood anymore cleaning and removing that staining is a meticulous craft if any Board gets destroyed you actually have to replace the whole ceiling and indeed all the wood in the house because it's all one species so one of the things that I love about this restoration is the very careful attention to detail because the house hasn't been properly maintained especially the most beautiful wood you can see if you see before it was night and day different when we started to dig to uncover it there were like three or four layers of spray foam insulation up there anytime there was a big storm I think the owners were just like go spray up another layer and hopefully it'll do it this time embarking on this journey it kind of felt like we were able to uncover history of the past that wasn't [Music] written beyond the look of the ceiling it also has a really interesting function Wright loved to connect interiors and Exteriors we have a piano here in the room Wright loved the piano everybody in his family was Musical music was something that they gravitated to well how do you get your musical performances Outdoors you create a ceiling that will reflect the sound out through these doors and down into the courtyard where you might be gathering for a party or just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon right at learned about Acoustics in his first apprenticeship in Chicago with Dan Mar Adler one of the great acousticians in American architectural history and he brought that into his practice and used it everywhere but seldom with such dramatic effect as you see in this house we've already experienced compression and release in the entryway into the living room and now we're going to go through another somewhat compressed space which is this hallway that takes us from the central living space to the primary bedroom of the [Music] house another sense of release after the compressed space of the hallway and once again we have an emotional Journey you also have this beautiful built-in banket you'll notice that there's some storage underneath it no wasted space in a Frank lloid W house this is important right often designs rooms so that they have a different emotional impact and a different sense of space when you're standing or when you're sitting and when you sit in here the views will be very different it may be hard to tell but we could actually start in one of those carports and make a continuous spiral up the ramp through the entry through the living room down the hallway and into this bedroom without ever breaking that continuous curve let's go see the other room that people are always curious about what we would call the kitchen but what Frankl write called the workspace so we're going to take this journey back through the hallway once again we have the sense of surprise space is unfolding and even though we've been here before and we know what's expected it's still the sense of seeing this room differently but as we come to the workspace I want you to First notice something special we have this cone that's tapering how do you have a door well you cut the door to meet the building again this wonderful little gesture but Wright has thought of [Music] everything Wright doesn't refer to these spaces as kitchens these are spaces where you do your work to prepare for your guests it's not like kitchen of today that become social spaces but truly a space that's just designed for the work and in this case also a little table for the family got a little trapezoidal trash can that fits perfectly into that space it's one of those features that just Delights people when they visit the [Music] house you also see this angled Line This ramp that takes us to the roof he's actually revealing the structure of the building in this space that there's this continuity that's [Music] provided up here on the rooftop Terrace we can really see wri's intention how he connects the building with the landscape out to our Southeast we see the papao butes and behind me in the other direction the head of the camel of Camelback Mountain by firmly centering this building between these two landmarks s that nature provided right gives us the sense of being part of this world and not merely on it but at one with it you'll notice that we're actually walking under the house because the house is elevated this Courtyard is an outdoor room but it wasn't just a room to gather in maybe have a picnic and it also originally had a pool also because the pool itself being constructed out of concrete block slowly over time begins to disintegrate something that Wright didn't anticipate when he built the house so today we just have the memory of the pool reflected here when you stand in the middle of this Courtyard on this Central P you can hear sound reverberating from all around you it's a space that will capture what we hear from inside the house to give you the sense that you're not Outdoors but really you're just in another room of the house [Music] David Wright worked for the besser manufacturing company and they made concrete block molds and so David insisted that his company's molds and concrete block be used for the Construction and design of this [Music] house and for right concrete block wasn't simply an industrial material he saw it as elevated and this particular block I think he really enjoyed and so you'll see that at the end of wherever there was a concrete slab he included this decorative block with a circular Motif and then this piece coming out of [Music] it it also shows something that Wright really enjoyed about working with concrete which is called an architecture terms plasticity meaning that it's moldable you'd think that when your father is the architect building this house would be easy but it wasn't all the usual challenges between architect and client showed up everything from budget to not having the right Foreman in fact at one point David writes his father and asks for some changes and says Dad can the house be only 90% Frank Floyd Wright and 10% David and gladus Wright and Wright said you're making your poor old father tired but accommodated his son's wishes at the end of the day what we see in between them is the change of gifts reflected in correspondence it's been a really interesting experience and cherished experience too working with my dad I feel like I've learned so much about him and it's explained just seeing him at work and how he makes his decisions even today I was thinking about I'm so annoyed that my dad is getting these Window Washers to come the same day we're filming this video and I realized he did that because it's the desert so if we did this 2 days in advance they would have been completely covered in dust so little things like that have showned me that my dad is really the smartest person I know I saw when I come here I really want to work in the skyscrapers you know in New York City in LA in Chicago working for a big architect so after the years I think that this is my destiny the plan for the future of this property I want to become my architecture design studio I can open my door to let my client come so that's kind of indirect way to welcome the public to able to see this masterpiece I feel really lucky that we have a place like this home to come back to and we'll get to enjoy it for many generations to come