Usonia

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"Usonian" redirects here. For the alternative name for a United States citizen, see Names for United States citizens#Alternative_terms .
The interior of the Rosenbaum House

Usonia (pron.: /juːˈsoʊniə/) was 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.

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Usonian houses [edit]

'Usonian' is a term usually referring to a group of approximately sixty 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, 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 sheltering a parked vehicle.

Variants of the Jacobs House design are still in existence today.[citation needed] The Usonian design is considered among the aesthetic origins of the ranch-style house popular in the American west of the 1950s.

Origin of the word [edit]

Gordon House

The word Usonian appears to have been coined by James Duff Law, an American writer born in 1865. In a miscellaneous collection entitled, Here and There in Two Hemispheres (1903), Law quoted a letter of his own (dated 18 June 1903) that begins "We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title 'Americans' when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves." He went on to acknowledge that some author had proposed "Usona", but that he preferred the form "Usonia".[2] 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, this is a misattribution, as Butler never used the word.

It has become the established name for the United States in Esperanto.[3] The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, used Usono in his speech at the 1910 World Congress of Esperanto in Washington, D.C., coincidentally the same year Wright was in Europe.

Noted Usonian houses [edit]

The John D. Haynes House, viewed from the northwest

See also [edit]

Notes [edit]

  1. ^ "Frank Lloyd Wright - The Jacobs House 1936". 
  2. ^ James D. Law, Here and There in Two Hemispheres (Lancaster: Home Publishing Co., 1903), pp. 111–12n.
  3. ^ Wiktionary:Usono

External links [edit]

Look up Usonian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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