In 1954, Bette and Ted Pappas asked Wright to design a home in St. Louis for them. Although Ted was certain that Wright did not design for the common man, Bette’s faith was rewarded when Wright accepted. The

home he designed for the Pappas family was a Usonian Automatic, one of

the last homes he designed before his death at age 91 in 1959.



Unfortunately metal molds for the blocks were not available and the

blocks had to be cast in molds created by a local craftsman. Several contractors worked on the job, but for unknown reasons they all quit. Because the work was progressing so slowly, the lending institution called in its loan. So Bette and Ted Pappas decided to build the home themselves. After working 4 years during evenings, weekends, and vacations, they finally moved into the home in 1964 (Figure 1).

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT IN MISSOURI



Missouri has only five buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and each of them has a distinctive design and history. Although Wright's earliest surviving design, his own home in Oak Park, Illinois, dates back as far as 1889, he was not seen in Missouri until 1940, when the Clarence Sondern House and the Kansas City Community Christian Church were built. (They

are numbered 279. and 280 in William Allin Storrer's Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalogue, published by MTT Press in 1974.) The church was one of Wright's more troubled projects and was much altered during construction from his original plan. The Sondern House, originally a Usonian design, was given a new living room by Wright in 1948 for Arnold Adler (Storrer 307). The design for the Kraus House (Starrer 340), which is usually not classed with the Usonian projects because of its size and geometrical complexity, dates to 1951, although construction extended over many years. An even larger time lag occurred with the Theodore Pappas House in Town and Country (Storrer 392), Which was designed in 1955 but built only in 1964 on a different site. It is a "Usonian automatic" house in brown-tinted concrete block, largely built by the clients. The last Wright design in Missouri was the 1956 house for Frank Bott (Storrer 404). Designed to take advantage of its view over Kansas City, it has a terne metal roof over desert rubblestone walls.



FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT IN THE NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES



Of the five Wright buildings in Missouri, only one has thus far been listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the 1964 Pappas House in Town and Country.

The Theodore A. Pappas House, and idiosyncratic monument of modern architecture, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in1978, when it was only 14 years old. It is one of two houses in St. Louis designed by the architecture giant Frank Lloyd Wright, the only example in Missouri of Usonian Automatic mode. Wright designed it between 1955 and 1959 at the Pappas’ request and they completed its construction between 1960 and 1964.



The entire body of the Pappas House, including the roof is made up of concrete blocks standardized to a module. These blocks were placed on top of and next to one another with no mortar. The hidden sides of each block had hollows though which steel rods were inserted, running vertically and horizontally, crating a “knit: effect. Grout was used to fill the hollows aft eth rods were in place. Theoretically, all elements of the house could be manufactured and sent to the owners as a sort of “do-it-yourself” kit, the “automatic” aspect of Wright’s Usonian Automatic Unit. In fact, however, the Pappas’ had to make all the blocks themselves. The concreted was pretinted according to Wrights idea that color should be in and not on the surface. The color scheme throughout the house is monochromatic, a warm natural, earthen color, complemented by a uniform unstained Philippine mahogany for trim and built in furniture.