"Not So Big" author says Wright got it right

Sarah Susanka - whose best selling "Not So Big" books have made her a giant in architecture today - meets Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most famous architect.

The architect turned best-selling writer will explain on Wednesday, Sept. 17 in Chicago how Wright's work illustrates the principles she describes in her books.

Susanka's movement - call it anti-McMansion - has thousands of followers around the world. And the new push toward sustainability has increased the numbers.

The 10th anniversary of the book that started the Susanka craze, "The Not So Big House," will be published later this month by The Taunton Press. The eighth title in the series, "Not So Big Remodeling: A Better House for the Way You Really Live," comes out in the spring.

If you build a smaller house, you might have the money to make it livable and attractive is the simplified theme of Susanka's volumes.

Many suburban architects and developers agree with Susanka, who is now based in Raleigh, N.C. But often they say they had the ideas before her books came out.

Susanka would probably agree with that. She describes her talent as explaining to us lay people facts that architects know and do automatically.

"A house doesn't have to be a mansion to be wonderful," said Victoria Ranney, president of Prairie Holdings Corp., developer of Prairie Crossing in Lake County. "We emphasized that there would be all kinds of community things - the farm and trails and charter school and retail shopping."

And one 1,600-square-foot model she remembers in the development demonstrated quality rather than size with details like a fireplace, 9-foot ceilings and energy efficiency. Single-family homes sold out three years ago, and condominiums are still available.

When you walk into a home designed by Wright you experience the way he handled the third dimension of architecture, said Susanka - the things you can't see on a floor plan.

"We are beginning to understand the importance of this dimension that most of us are unaware of and how it affects how we feel," she said in a recent telephone interview.

"When I talk about 'The Not So Big House,' it's less on the square footage and more on the overall shape of space."

One way Wright manipulated people's feelings was with a variety of ceiling heights and shapes of spaces.

For example, today's taller men almost have to stoop to walk into the entry of many Frank Lloyd Wright houses, then the rooms open up.

"It gives you the feeling almost of submitting to the building," said Susanka. "Then you're moving into something that's a new realm, a different realm or world."

Consider the famous barrel ceiling in the children's playroom of the home and studio that Wright built for his family and architecture practice in Oak Park.

"Think about the shape of that space," she said. "It's a different shape than we normally experience. If you look at the floor plan you can't tell that's different."

And skillfully putting this all together creates spaces that are comfortable for people, which Susanka compares to creating a musical composition.

Another example is Wright's dining rooms where he often used the chairs around the table to create a "room within a room."

"Crafting an experience with the shape of space. That's what I think most people have no clue about," said Susanka.

One of Wright's methods for creating rooms with interesting shapes was drawing his floor plans over a pattern of hexagons. This is how he ended up with 120-degree angles in some rooms.

Order is the architectural principle mastered by Wright that Susanka finds the most difficult to describe.

He organized at least some houses around the fireplace, for example.

"He let the rooms open around that fireplace almost like a pin wheel," she said.

"These days we might do the same thing around the flat screen television or the kitchen. We pick a hub of the house and everything else gets designed around that ordering principle."

Susanka is designing a home that is organized like a cluster of dwellings. For example, the guest suite is connected by a little walkway to the main house.

A site with a great view could provide another organizing principle. Then a long, thin house might be the strategy. And it could make the house look bigger at the same time.

Susanka believes that beauty is an important part of sustainability because people take care of a home they love and enjoy.

"This is why Wright's work has such a long life. People experience a kind of transport in his buildings and don't know why. He was a composer of space."

The whole idea is not more space, but more livability.

In the first book, Susanka labeled this a sense of "soul," but later found that word too loaded. Now she calls it "character" or "what makes you feel at home."

"A lot of times it's the shape of the space and interconnection between the rooms that makes the space really delightful," she said.

Yes, decorating can help, but that's only a part of the game and sometimes must be used to try to make up for the lack of good architecture or a good skeleton.

"People believe through bigness they are getting a better house," said the architect. "Bigger doesn't automatically mean better. In fact, the opposite might be true. You spend so much money on the bigness and have no money to make it better."