Usonia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Usonia (pronounced [juˈsoʊniə]) is a word used by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright to refer to his vision for the landscape of the United States, including the planning of cities and the architecture of buildings. Wright proposed the use of the adjective Usonian in place of American to describe the particular New World character of the American landscape as distinct and free of previous architectural conventions.

Although rarely used in the sense of "U.S. citizen", Usonian is probably more common than the alternatives. (See alternative words for American.) John Dos Passos used it in his USA Trilogy.

1 Usonian houses
2 Origin of the word
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Usonian houses

Usonian is a term usually referring to a group of approximately 50 middle-income family homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright beginning in 1936 with the Jacobs House [1]. The "Usonian Homes" were typically small, single story dwellings without a garage or much storage, L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace on odd (and cheap) lots, and environmentally-conscious with native materials, flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and natural cooling, natural lighting with clerestory windows, and radiant floor heating. A strong visual connection between the interior and exterior spaces is an important characteristic of all Usonian homes. The word carport was coined by Wright to describe an overhang for a vehicle to park under.

Variants of the Jacobs House design are still in existence today and do not look overly dated. The Usonian design is considered among the aesthetic origins of the popular "ranch" tract home popular in the American west of the 1950s.

[edit] Origin of the word

The word Usonian is of uncertain provenance. Perhaps the earliest published use by Wright was in 1927,

But why this term "America" has become representative as the name of these United States at home and abroad is past recall. Samuel Butler fitted us with a good name. He called us Usonians, and our Nation of combined States, Usonia.

–(Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894-1940, p. 100.)

However, no one has ever been able to find the Butler reference. John Sergeant wrote, "It has been suggested that Wright picked up the name on his first European trip in 1910 when there was talk of calling the U.S.A. 'U-S-O-N-A', to avoid confusion with the new Union of South Africa." (USONA, of course, would have stood for United States of North America.)

The word is clearly cognate with the Esperanto name for the United States, Usono, from whose root form Uson- one also gets the adjective usona (with a lower-case initial u). The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, used this name in his speech at the 1910 World Congress of Esperanto in Washington, D.C., coincidentally the same year Wright was in Europe. However, the Esperanto online dictionary Reta Vortaro at the University of Leipzig [2] attributes the word to Wright.