#russell wright

[designobjectory]

"Shedding Light", an article about table lamps in House Beautiful, November 1935

[thevisualvamp]

Have a seat

[swapsomnia]

Sax is the Wright family’s doctor, and he does all sorts of odd jobs for them- including making Russ a metal functioning jaw with voice box.

Russell belongs to @cursetale

[rickinmar]

brass household objects made by Chase Brass in Waterbury Connecticut. Russell Wright designs on some of them. 1930s.

[looksbak]

[thecrankyprofessor]

[drownmeinbeauty]

SLEIGHT OF HAND

Modern American product designer Russell Wright proclaimed, “The hand of man should not be visible.” Wright’s house-studio in Hudson County, Dragon Rock, set high into the rock face of an abandoned quarry, conforms to this dictum. The structure can’t be seen or understood completely from any angle on the ground, and gives no clear image of itself. It’s a deft act of camouflage, one that even an accomplished architect might not be able to execute.

If Wright’s iconic midcentury dinnerware feel charmingly dated today, this house doesn’t. It has the rough, eccentric personal presence of those by Bruce Geoff and Bart Prince. It’s less an object of its time than a figment of its creator. It’s no surprise that Wright got his start in theater design; the house feels like a loose assemblage of moments rather than a cohesive structure. There’s a narrow passage that squeezes one from the studio into the main house, a twisting spill of rock stairs leading down to the dining room, and a low, skewed two-seat banquette in the center of the living room. Even on a sunny summer day the great room, framed with exposed wood beams and a tree trunk, felt shadowed and forlorn, as if the visitor were trapped inside its creator’s dark dreams.

Wright shared many ideas (building into the earth, the open plan, motifs derived from nature) with his extraordinary architectural counterpart, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the master architect’s contemporary houses, scaled similarly, offer experiences that are physically and psychically expansive. They can overwhelm but they can also, often, dazzle. The rhythm of the ornament, the spatial complexity, the sly spatial transitions, can transport. One never feels, as at Dragon Rock, that the finishes are rough, the proportions pinched, or the connections between materials unconsidered. Russell Wright’s home is best understood as a personal experiment. To consider it as architecture is unfair; that discipline requires a firmer, more coherent hand.

Photograph of Dragon Rock by Rob Penner.

[transdiffusion]

Something new, by Russell Wright