By WENDELL NELSON
Special to The Gazette
Portage County has a number of Prairie Style buildings - those with long, low silhouettes; horizontal bands of windows; wide, overhanging eaves; and earth materials and colors. But only one was designed by the best-known Prairie Style architect of them all, and perhaps America's greatest architect: Frank Lloyd Wright. That is the Dr. Frank Iber house at 3000 Springville Drive in Plover.
The Ibers were the first, and are still the only, owners of the house. Frank Iber was a local physician for many years. He was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1898, and served in the U.S. armed forces in World War I. His obituary in the June 4, 1990, Stevens Point Journal summarized his medical career:
"He received his medical degree from the Cincinnati Medical College in 1924 and served his internship at Cincinnati General Hospital from 1924 to 1925. He was in the general practice of medicine in Eaton, Ohio, in 1925-28, operating his own hospital. From 1928-33, he was a fellow in surgery at the Mayo Clinic and received his master of science in surgery from the University of Minnesota in 1932….
"Dr. Iber was licensed to practice in Wisconsin in 1933 and since then, has been practicing medicine in Stevens Point, specializing in surgery."
Before building this house, he owned the house known as Cascade Chalet, north across the Little Plover River. He was living there when he decided to build a new house. His wife, the former Betty Fischer, still remembers the experience of working with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright was born of a Welsh family in Richland Center, Wis., in 1869. He attended high school in Madison (but apparently never graduated), according to Meryle Secrest's "Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography" (1992), and took classes at the University of Wisconsin for a year or two. Then (in about 1887), he went to Chicago, and got a job in the office of J. Lyman Silsbee, an architect. A year or two after that, he began working for the firm of Adler and Sullivan. There he came under the influence of Louis Sullivan, one of leaders of The Chicago Style, and a pioneer designer of early skyscrapers.
Secrest and Storrer say that Wright's first independent commission (1887) was the first building of the Hillside Home School, run by two of his aunts in Spring Green, Wis. (It was not a Prairie Style building - he had not evolved his mature style yet - but a Queen Anne-Shingle Style hybrid, reflecting the most popular styles of the time.)
Among his most famous creations are Fallingwater, the spectacular house in Bear Run, Connellsville, Pa., (1935); the Johnson Wax Company's buildings in Racine (1936 and later); the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa (1956); and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, completed months after his death in 1959. Taliesin, Wright's home and studio and architectural school near Spring Green, Wisconsin, still functions, as does its Arizona counterpart, Taliesen West. ("Taliesin" means "shining brow" in Welsh.)
Wright's inspirations for the Prairie Style were several. First, some of his mentor Louis Sullivan's creations, unlike the famous Chicago skyscrapers, were long and low, and used natural materials. The Farmers' and Merchants' Union Bank in Columbus, Wis., was designed by Sullivan in 1919, according to Kristin Visser's "Frank Lloyd Wright & the Prairie School in Wisconsin" (1992.)
Also, ancient Egyptian temples and Japanese paper-houses gave Wright some ideas. But, as the name of the style implies, it was largely America, with its vast open spaces, especially those on the prairies and plains of the Middle and Far West, that showed him his way. And his style was a reaction to the towers and turrets of three-story Victorian mansions, houses that projected up from the land but, he felt, didn't belong to it. He designed buildings that lived in harmony with that land, that looked like part of the terrain. He called his ideal residence the Natural House.
Betty Iber remembers that Dr. Iber got the idea of having Wright design his house from his acquaintance with Dr. Arnold Jackson, of the Jackson Clinic in Madison. Jackson was Wright's personal physician, according to Kristin Visser, and his house, designed by Wright, was just being completed in 1956. Iber decided that he too wanted a Wright house, and contacted Wright, who was nearing the end of his long life.
(Betty Iber also recalls that Dr. Jackson's house was moved to Beaver Dam, and Visser confirms the memory: Dr. Jackson had died not long after his house was completed, his wife died a few years later, and the house was rented out for a time. Then the land was bought for development, and the house was offered for $1 to whomever would move it off. "A young… man named Christopher Fecht bought the house and moved it to a site outside Beaver Dam, intending to restore the home and live in it. Unfortunately, Fecht was in deep financial trouble by the time the house was finally moved. He committed suicide. The house sat empty for two years until new owners bought and restored it," Visser writes. In "The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion" (1993), William Allin Storrer says the Jackson house was moved in February of 1985.)
Oddly, there is some uncertainty about when the Iber house was built. Visser says it was built in 1956, while Storrer says 1957. For her part, Betty Iber recalls the house as having been completed about the time of her daughter Renee's eighth birthday; Renee was born on August 17, 1950, according to the Portage County Register of Deeds birth records. Also, Betty Iber remembers the construction taking "from August to August; it took a whole year to build." The tax rolls on the land parcel show a valuation of the "improvements" (buildings) at $800 in 1957, $15,000 in 1958, and $20,000 in 1959. These figures provide further evidence that the house was built in 1957 and 1958, the years before the valuation increase.
Equally oddly, the Stevens Point Daily Journal does not mention the house - neither its plan, construction, nor completion. Yet it ran a front-page obituary for Wright in its April 9, 1959, edition, in a story so long it was continued on a back page. But even that story neglects to mention Wright's Plover house, completed only a year and a half earlier.
In any case, according to both Storrer and Visser, the house was not a one-on-one design from Wright. Rather, he created two basic designs from which the Marshall Erdman & Associates Co., Madison, built seven prefabricated houses: five from one plan, and two from the other. This house is one of the five built from the first plan. The other four houses still stand in Beaver Dam, Madison, Barrington Hills, Ill., and Richmond (on Staten Island), N.Y. According to Betty Iber, Edward Sommers (1907-68), the local contractor for the Iber house, traveled to Madison to confer with Wright and Marshall Erdman staff members, to learn more about Wright's design and Erdman's prefabricated materials for it.
Visser provides the background of these houses. "Throughout his career, Wright was interested in mass production of housing... In 1954, he discovered that Marshall Erdman… was selling modest prefabricated homes. Wright offered to design better prefabs, ones that he believed could be marketed for $15,000, which was half again as much as Erdman was charging for his own version.
"Wright didn't do much on the project until late 1955, but by spring of 1956 he had final plans… His design was for a single story home with a pitched-roofed bedroom wing joining a flat-roofed living-dining-kitchen area centered on a large fireplace. A carport with one end of its roof resting on a detached storage shed completed the design. Eventually, Wright produced variations, including a fourth bedroom and options for a full or partial basement. The several versions ranged in size from 1,860 to 2,400 square feet.
"To limit costs, Wright used standard Andersen windows and Pella doors, and designed the prefab to be built using standard sheets of plywood, Masonite and drywall. The exterior was to be painted Masonite with horizontal redwood battens attached, though the house could also be built of stone or concrete block, or partially faced with stone.
"The prefab package Erdman offered included all the major structural components, interior and exterior walls, floors, windows and doors, as well as cabinets and woodwork. In addition to a lot, the buyer had to provide the foundation, the plumbing fixtures, heating units, electric wiring, and drywall, plus the paint.
"Before the buyer could purchase the house, he or she had to submit a topographic map and photos of the lot to Wright, who would then determine where the home should sit on the lot. Wright also intended to inspect each home after completion, and to apply his famous glazed red signature brick to the home if it had been completed as planned….
"The house(s) didn't sell as well as Erdman had expected, partly because costs were often as high as for custom-built homes."
Wright involved himself in all aspects of the construction of the Iber house, Betty Iber recalls. On some visits, he hobbled around the grounds on crutches to oversee the work, because he had a broken leg. More often, he walked briskly around in his black hat and flowing black cape, looked for a few minutes at the progress of construction, gave some orders, and left.
Dr. Iber became frustrated, because he wanted to talk to Wright, and ask questions about the house, but he couldn't catch Wright at the building site. So Iber asked a neighbor boy, John Ross, to keep watch for Wright, and if the architect showed up at the site, to call Iber at his medical offices, so he could hurry over. But most of the time, Wright was still gone before Iber, with patients to examine and treat, could get there.
And, despite the fact that he was in his late 80s and within a year or two of his death, Wright was still his notoriously uncompromising, autocratic self. When Dr. Iber didn't want the house set so directly into the hillside, and Betty Iber wanted a larger bathroom, Wright replied that his way was the way it going to be. "If you don't want it my way, then you can't have my house!" He gave in on only the garage; he had wanted a carport. As it was, the Ibers had to wait a full year before their house was fully certified according to Wright's specifications, and they got the brick-red tile with his gold signature on it. (It was sent to them from Taliesin West; Wright may have been dead by then.). It is attached to the fireplace.
Completed, the house has all of the earmarks of his "Natural House" principles by blending in with the land. First, it is set into the hillside overlooking the Little Plover River. Also, it has a long, low, horizontal silhouette, accentuated by long, narrow bands of windows; long horizontal battens (strips) added to the siding; horizontal pieces projecting at random from the stonework walls; wide overhanging eaves; and a wide chimney. And it is made of natural materials - stone and wood (and, as we have seen, Masonite, a pressed-wood product) - painted or stained earth colors ("sandstone," Betty Iber calls the exterior color) or (in the case of the cedar shakes on the roof) left untreated to weather naturally.
Inside, the same themes are carried out by the same details, emphasized by the absence of traditional partitions, allowing large, open, airy spaces - giving the feeling of being outdoors. Light fixtures, instead of hanging like chandeliers, are sunken, with their ends flush with the ceiling; and the same long, horizontal battens seem to make the walls go on forever. (Betty Iber says she regards those strips as "dust-catchers.") Also, there are stone walls - the permanence and solidness of the earth brought inside. And there is wood, rich wood: three kinds of mahogany - from, among other places, Honduras and the Phillipines.
Each completed house used a unique combination of the options available to the owners. The basic plan called for a masonry core: stone, brick or concrete block. The Iber house has a limestone core. Other options included here, according to Storrer's "The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion" (1993) and Visser, are a full, exposed (walk-out) basement; four - intead of three - bedrooms; cedar shakes on the roof; and extra stonework along the lower exterior walls. Finally, while "most of the exterior paneling of the Iber house is painted, the fascia and soffits (eaves) are (stained) blonde mahogany, providing a strong horizontal band of color between roof and walls," Storrer says.
Dr. Iber outlived Wright in more ways than one, dying in 1990 at the age of 92. He served Stevens Point and Portage County in various capacities - as physician and surgeon, as an officer in local health organizations and as the founder of the Dr. Frank Iber Scholarship Fund, which awards money to students entering the health professions.
But not the least of his accomplishments was his gift to Portage County of a house designed by America's greatest architect.