In the Spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright

Joe Massaro owned an island and a handful of unfinished sketches by the architect. His course was clear: Honor the man and build the house

by Paula Lehman

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As the boat pulls up to the dock on Petre Island, N.Y., it falls into the shadow of a solid cement cantilever suspended over the water. Moving toward the island, the 78-foot cantilever meets an inclined rock embankment, the foundation of a house seamlessly fitting into the irregular formation of the ground. From the water it looks like a ship, its bow jutting out over the lake.

The house represents the culmination of a saga that began back in 1950 when Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America's most influential architects, designed a house he promised would surpass his 1937 masterpiece, Fallingwater. But the 5,000-sq.-ft. house, commissioned by engineer A.K. Chahroudi for a plot on this 10-acre island in the middle of Lake Mahopac, was never built. In fact, it was all but forgotten until 1999, when retired contractor and new island-owner, Joe Massaro, acquired five of Wright's original sketches and decided to bring the drawings to life.

Since then the building has been at the center of a fight over design authenticity and— in an age when "starchitects" such as Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenmann are already selling their back catalogs of drawings and models for substantial sums of money—might just prove the focal point of a new age of retroactively or even posthumously produced designs. One thing is for sure: This house is finally a reality. On July 12, workers put the finishing touches on the Massaro House, as it is now known.

Filling In the Blanks

Stones taken from around the island stick out of concrete walls. The walls slope toward the water as if to slide down the rocks below them. In Wright's trademark style, five stone chimneys sit low atop the roof and windows dot the entire house, including the upper half of the roof. Inside, red concrete triangles create a grid across the floor, and each wall rests neatly along a line and blends seamlessly into the pattern. The earth tones and flood of natural sunlight create a calm atmosphere, while the length of the cantilever makes the living room seem surprisingly spacious.

The original drawings that Massaro bought included a floor plan featuring built-in and stand-alone furniture, three elevation plans, and a building section. But Wright had only worked on the plans for three months and his designs were not complete. So Massaro hired architect Thomas A. Heinz to fill in the blanks. Heinz, who runs his eponymous architectural firm in Libertyville, Ill., is considered something of an expert, having consulted on 40 Wright buildings, not to mention the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"The expression 'standing on the shoulders of giants' comes to mind," says Heinz of the process of constructing the Massaro house. In channeling the famous architect, Heinz relied on his knowledge of all of his projects—and on advanced technologies. To create a full set of construction documents he scanned the five available drawings into a computer and then used ArchiCAD software to translate the information into a three dimensional image. The software produced a database of viable dimensions for everything from the rooms to the concrete walls—and proved that Wright's expansive design ideas were possible. "This wasn't my design so I really needed to understand how everything was put together," said Heinz. "I needed to work in three dimensions."

Questioning the Authenticity

The software allowed Heinz to obtain a detailed, vertical section view of the house so that he could better understand its structural demands. Getting this 3D assessment of what construction might entail before any kind of commitment to build saved both time and money. (Massaro, who bought the island for $700,000 in 1990, refused to give details of the final cost of construction.)

Given the speculation that went into the design, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (which Wright himself founded in 1940 as a repository for his work) has refused to recognize the structure as genuine, and purists grumble that the redesign has no authenticity.