Staten Island Erdman Prefab "Crimson Beech"

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Tom
Posts: 3793
Joined: Sun Jan 30, 2011 7:53 pm
Location: Black Mountain, NC

Post by Tom »

The kitchen windows look like double hung windows to boot.
I didn't realize it was brick at first.
Thought it was shake siding.
Thought it was some California 60's Esherick
or MLTW.
SDR
Posts: 22359
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 11:33 pm
Location: San Francisco

Post by SDR »

The windows in the Erdmans are a disappointment to me, as they must have been to the architect -- I like to think. Their vertical asymmetry continues to puzzle me; that's a more serious flaw than that they are "guillotine" windows . . .

I knew a man named Fritz Wanamaker, black sheep of the Philadelphia merchant family, by his own admission. He was making nice oak culinary work-carts for the kitchen, with butcher-block tops, utensil and pot racks, etc, made in several sizes. After making and selling these rather high-end objects for a few years, he "knocked himself off," to use his term, with a lighter-weight and somewhat reduced version of the cart, to sell at a more attractive price.

I think of the Erdman Pre-fab #1 as Wright "knocking off" his own work, for those who didn't need or couldn't afford the real thing . . . in the same way, perhaps, that the ASBH structures were a reduction of the custom work of the Prairie/post-Prairie work.

Today, of course, anything from Wright's hand enjoys super-star status, quite understandably. No one, however, could mistake an Erdman for one of the custom houses of the post-war years, inside or out. The LA work in the Textile Block idiom are not of that nature, nor I think are the Usonian Automatics: neither group consists of repeated versions of a single plan; each is a unique creation.

SDR
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