The Acres: One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Experiments in Community
Some Frank Lloyd Wright houses ask to be understood as individual works of architecture.
The Acres asks you to look a little wider.
Hidden among the woods outside Galesburg, Michigan, four Wright-designed houses sit within one of his most interesting experiments in community planning. Individually, the David and Christine Weisblat, Eric and Pat Pratt, Samuel and Dorothy Eppstein, and Curtis and Lillian Meyer houses are distinct expressions of Wright’s Usonian ideas.
The fifth house at The Acres, the Günther and Anne Fonken House, was designed after Wright’s death by former Taliesin apprentice Francis “Will” Willsey, extending the community’s architectural story beyond Wright’s four original residences.
Taken together, however, they tell a much larger story—one about land, affordable housing, shared resources, and Wright’s belief that architecture should extend well beyond the walls of a house.
The original plat shown here carries the title Galesburg Country Home Acres. Historical sources also refer to the development as Galesburg Country Homes. Today, most of us simply know it as The Acres.
And The Acres is not just a neighborhood that happens to contain four Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
The neighborhood itself is part of the design.
Building a Different Kind of Community
The story began in the mid-1940s with a group of friends, many of them scientists working for the Upjohn Company in nearby Kalamazoo, who began talking about cooperatively building modern and affordable homes in a rural setting.
Lillian Meyer played an important role early in the story. She was part of the small group that traveled to Taliesin in Wisconsin in 1946 to meet with Wright.
Wright’s advice was essentially to start with the land.
The group found roughly 71 acres east of Kalamazoo in Charleston Township, but not everyone agreed on the location. Some felt the site was simply too rural and too far from town. The group amicably divided and led to two communities being planned by Wright, The Acres and Parkwyn Village.
Note: I reference Parkwyn Village a few more times throughout this blog post. It is the other cooperative residential community in nearby Kalamazoo, Michigan, planned by Wright in 1947. It deserves a full write up of its own, this article focuses on The Acres.
The Galesburg group purchased the 71 acres in Charleston Township and moved forward with what became The Acres. Wright visited in March 1947.
What he drew for Galesburg was anything but a conventional subdivision.
The Circles
Looking at the original Galesburg Country Home Acres plat might be the easiest way to understand what Wright was trying to do.
Instead of carving the property into a grid of rectangular lots with houses lined up along straight streets, Wright arranged approximately twenty-one circular, one-acre homesites across the land. Large portions of the property remained open and communally owned, with roads, rolling ground, woods and a pond tying everything together.
The circles are important.
Each house had its own defined piece of ground, but the landscape did not visually stop at the property line. There were no conventional backyards stacked against one another. The spaces between those circles became part of a larger shared landscape.
That feels very Wright to me.
His idea of organic architecture was never just about putting a building in nature. It was about the relationship between the two. Here he was trying to apply that thinking not to a single house, but to an entire community.
There was even a very practical fight required to preserve the idea. The Federal Housing Administration would not approve financing for houses on Wright’s circular lots. At Parkwyn, the plan was eventually altered to more conventional parcels. The Acres families found another way to finance their houses and kept the circles.
That decision is a big reason we can still read Wright’s original idea in the landscape today.
Building It Together
The cooperative idea went beyond simply owning shared land.
The families were deeply involved in building the houses themselves. Concrete blocks were made by the owners, and the two Wright communities—The Acres and Parkwyn Village—even shared block molds as construction progressed.
One detail from the historical material I especially like is how the Acres families pooled their buying power to purchase rough mahogany from a Grand Rapids lumber yard and then had it milled locally. They were able to obtain the material for roughly the cost of white pine.
That tells you a lot about this place.
There was Wright’s larger architectural vision, but there was also the reality of families figuring out how to actually build it—sharing materials, labor, knowledge and probably a fair amount of trial and error along the way.
Three of the four Wright houses use related in-line Usonian plans and concrete-block construction, but they are hardly copies of one another. The Curtis Meyer House goes in a completely different direction with its solar hemicycle form.
That is where The Acres becomes especially interesting: the houses speak the same architectural language without all saying the same thing.
That was also one of the coolest aspects of The Acres for me to photograph. Planned communities can so easily become studies in repetition, with one basic house receiving only small variations from lot to lot. The Acres is almost the opposite. These houses are substantially different—in their plans, volumes, geometry and relationship to the land—and that creates a much more visually exciting community to move through and photograph.
I noticed something similar while photographing Usonia in New York, another Wright-planned community. There is a shared set of ideas holding the neighborhood together, yet the individual houses retain remarkably different personalities. For a photographer, that variety keeps you looking. You begin to recognize Wright’s larger ideas without ever feeling like you are photographing the same house twice.
David and Christine Weisblat House
Designed in 1948 and completed in 1951, the David and Christine Weisblat House was the first of the Wright houses at The Acres to be completed.
The house uses Wright’s four-foot unit system and an in-line plan, with living, dining and workspace areas toward one end and the original bedrooms extending along a gallery. Handmade concrete block provides much of the structure while mahogany warms both the exterior and interior. The workspace receives much of its natural light through a skylight—something bankers apparently warned Christine Weisblat would give her sunstroke. Nearly sixty years later, Michigan Modern noted that neither the predicted sunstroke nor the predicted collapse of the carport roof had occurred.
The amount of work hidden inside what looks like a relatively simple block system is remarkable. The historical material notes that thirty-four different block shapes were required for the house.
A 1961 addition by John Howe and William Wesley Peters extends from the original house at a 120-degree angle and adds another layer to its geometry.
Photographing the Weisblat House, one of the things that kept pulling my attention upward was the ceiling. The folded, faceted wood planes create an incredible amount of depth overhead, making the interior feel much more dynamic than its low, horizontal exterior might suggest. Light catches those different surfaces differently throughout the room, so what initially looks like a low, grounded Usonian interior becomes much more layered once you spend some time inside it.
I was also drawn to the patterned concrete block, where small openings allow light—and occasional glimpses of the landscape—to pass through the masonry. It is a small detail, but photographically it adds another layer to the relationship between inside and outside.
That is something I find myself doing more and more when photographing Wright: not just looking across a room, but studying the entire vertical relationship from the floor and built-ins all the way to the ceiling.
Eric and Pat Pratt House
The Eric and Pat Pratt House tells perhaps the clearest story of the do-it-yourself nature of The Acres.
Eric Pratt served as purchasing agent for the Acres Association, and the Pratts planned from the beginning to build their own home. Wright designed the long in-line house on a four-foot-square module so it could grow in stages along with their family. Construction began in 1950, the family moved in during 1951, and work continued through 1954.
They acted as their own contractors and made the sand-colored concrete blocks themselves. Red-stained mahogany was used with the block, while the slab floor incorporated Wright’s familiar radiant heating system.
What struck me while photographing the Pratt House was just how much was happening within what initially feels like a very straightforward Usonian interior. In many ways, it is essentially one long rectangle—and I loved that simplicity. Sometimes Wright’s simplest designs can be some of the most interesting to photograph because you begin noticing how much is being accomplished within such a restrained framework.
The mahogany ceiling grid, built-ins and clerestory windows reinforce that geometry as you move through the house. Even the front exterior reminded me a little of Wright’s Suntop Homes.
That shift between compression and openness is something Wright uses over and over, but here the length of the house makes you especially aware of it. You move along the architecture before it gives you the larger view.
It also reinforces something important about the houses at The Acres: these were not abstract architectural exercises. They were family homes designed to change with the people living in them. The Pratt House was conceived with that growth already built into the idea.
Samuel and Dorothy Eppstein House
The Samuel and Dorothy Eppstein House takes that same general in-line vocabulary and creates a very different spatial experience.
The house was started in 1951, and the family moved into its completed first phase in 1953. Like their neighbors, the Eppsteins were directly involved in construction and made many of the roughly 3,000 concrete blocks required for the house. Dorothy Eppstein later recalled some of the decidedly unglamorous work involved, from cleaning lime deposits from blocks to cutting openings for switches and electrical outlets.
The site itself helped shape the design. Samuel Eppstein wanted to excavate into the hill rather than simply place the house on top of it. The result takes advantage of the rise while also solving a privacy problem created by the house’s relationship to the road.
Most striking is the change in volume inside. The living area rises dramatically compared with the lower spaces around it, while a semicircular retaining wall helps shield the house from the road.
I first photographed the Eppstein House in 2018, and that vertical change was one of the things that stayed with me. From outside, these Acres houses can read as incredibly horizontal compositions. Step inside and Wright starts playing with height, ceiling, enclosure and release.
For me, that makes the Eppstein House less about finding one defining view and more about showing how those spaces unfold.
Curtis and Lillian Meyer House
Then Wright changes the rules.
The Curtis and Lillian Meyer House, designed in 1948 and constructed in 1950–51, is the only solar hemicycle at The Acres. Instead of the long in-line geometry of its neighbors, the house curves across the site, opening east and slightly south as it follows the slope.
The historical description gets wonderfully specific: Wright worked from a circular-segment module measured in 7½-degree increments, with a central two-story drum connecting the different levels of the house. The bedroom wing sits above part of the living space, allowing the glazed living room façade below to rise through two stories.
Even the masonry is different. Rather than using the same molded blocks found in the other Acres houses, the Meyer House uses custom concrete block construction. Mahogany again provides the wood trim.
I photographed the Meyer House alongside Eppstein in 2018, and even then its difference from the other Acres houses was immediately apparent.
Photographically, the curve changes everything.
With the in-line houses, I find myself working with strong horizontal movement and looking for the moments when Wright breaks or redirects it. At Meyer, the architecture is already turning. The walls, glass and circulation pull your eye around the house rather than straight through it.
And because the building is tied so closely to the slope, it becomes difficult to photograph the house without also photographing the land. Which is exactly the point.
Four Houses, One Larger Idea
Only five houses were ultimately constructed within Wright’s much larger plan, four of them designed by Wright. The Acres was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, recognized not simply for its individual buildings but for its significance in architecture, community planning and landscape architecture.
That last part matters.
I first photographed the Eppstein and Meyer houses years ago. Returning to The Acres later to photograph Pratt and Weisblat changed the way I looked at the entire place.
At first, I was doing what I usually do: studying each building individually. Where does the light enter? How does Wright move you through the space? Where does the ceiling change? How do the materials connect inside and outside?
But once you begin moving between the houses, another layer becomes visible.
Some of the most important design at The Acres exists between the architecture.
It is in Hawthorne Drive bending through the landscape. In the houses disappearing behind trees and landforms. In the lack of obvious property divisions. In the open ground continuing beyond a wall of glass. And in the way Wright positioned these houses so each could have its own identity without completely separating itself from the larger community.
The Acres was never fully realized as Wright envisioned it. Roughly twenty-one proposed homesites ultimately became only a handful of houses.
But enough of the idea survives.
Wright’s architecture does not end at the walls of the house. The landscape—and the space between the houses—is part of the design.
All five houses at The Acres are privately owned, however, currently there are two on the market and the rare opportunity to experience two of the Wright’s designs overnight (through Airbnb).
David and Christine Weisblat House: View the For Sale listing
Samuel and Dorothy Eppstein House: View the For Sale listing | View the Airbnb listing
Curtis and Lillian Meyer House: View the Airbnb listing