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News October 2015
Bachman-Wilson House to re-open after being moved from NJ to Arkansas
October 15, 2015
As previously reported, a multi-year effort by architects Sharon and Lawrence Tarantino to relocate the Bachman-Wilson House – a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home – led to the house being acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR. After a careful and tedious two-year process of planning, disassembly, transport, and reassembly, the house will open to the public November 11. Access to the house is free, but limited to small groups in order to help preserve the structure. Completed in 1956, just three years before Wright’s death, the concrete and mahogany structure exhibits many of the architectural principles Wright advocated throughout his career. Moving a building so closely integrated with the surrounding landscape is usually discouraged, but increased flooding along New Jersey’s Millstone River was causing severe damage to the structure.
In its new home on a wooded 120-acre campus overlooking Crystal Spring, the Bachman-Wilson house will be accompanied by an interpretive center designed by students from the Fay Jones School of Architecture in Fayetteville, AR. Jones, an important pupil of Wright’s, designed the mid-century home of Alice Walton, founder of Crystal Bridges, which is what originally gave the Tarantinos the idea to reach out to the museum. While it is unfortunate to see a rare FLW structure leave the tri-state region (only three left in New Jersey), the house’s future is now secure and it can, as the museum’s mission states, aid in telling the story of American art in all its forms.
“Frank Lloyd Wright House Is Rebuilt Anew, Piece by Piece, in Arkansas,” Curbed.com, October 7, 2015.
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