Last summer season, we reported that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fountainhead had come available on the market for $2.5 million; following its itemizing with Crescent Sotheby’s International Realty, the property has now been acquired by the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA).
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
The buy of the Wright-designed residence in Jackson’s mid-century Fondren neighbourhood marks a big step within the museum’s aim of participating native communities, and can open Fountainhead to the general public for the primary time.
The home, also called the J. Willis Hughes House, was designed in 1948 and accomplished in 1954 for oil speculator J. Willis Hughes, who lived there together with his household till 1980. It was later bought by the architect Robert Parker Adams, who devoted years to its restoration earlier than his dying in July.
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
Fountainhead has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 for its architectural significance. It is a quintessential instance of Wright’s Usonian philosophy – his imaginative and prescient for a distinctly American fashion of structure. Usonian properties had been sometimes single-level bungalows designed for middle-income households, emphasising affordability, performance, aesthetic simplicity and concord with nature.
Fountainhead was constructed with out conventional supplies corresponding to stud partitions, sheetrock or brick, as an alternative that includes Heart Tidewater Red Cypress partitions and ceilings and floor-to-ceiling home windows. Its parallelogram structure responds to the location’s distinctive topography, influencing all the pieces from wall placement to door proportions.
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
The residence is named Fountainhead partly because of the perception that Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, was impressed by Wright’s life. The title additionally refers to a key architectural characteristic: Wright used the location’s sloping terrain to increase the bed room wing into the panorama, incorporating a fountain that feeds right into a swimming pool, which then flows right into a stream.
(Image credit score: G. Douglas Adams Photography)
Following the acquisition, MMA will start restoring the house and growing a plan for its upkeep, with the general public opening date to be introduced later. The museum will handle the property and its programming to make sure its long-term relevance, together with offering bus shuttles to the location. MMA director Betsy Bradley describes that, in making Fountainhead an extension of the museum’s choices, it would ‘[allow] access to this national treasure, inviting visitors to engage deeply with Mississippi’s architectural heritage and design legacy’.
The board of trustees chair, Lisa Percy, predicts that ‘Fountainhead will become a must-see destination and unique experience for residents of and visitors to Jackson’, adding that MMA was inspired by successful initiatives at other institutions, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s buy of Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House in Arkansas.
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