Frank Lloyd Wright House May Move From USA To Italy

words by Carol King The Bachman Wilson House in Millstone New Jersey may be moved to Italy. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house in 1954 for Abraham Wilson and his first wife, Gloria Bachman. The structure is one of the purest designs from Wright’s Usonian period. In 1988, architects Sharon and Lawrence Tarantino acquired the house. They have restored the building and rebuilt the kitchen according to Wright’s original drawings. However, because of problematic site conditions and the exponentially future threat of flooding, the owners have put the Bachman Wilson House up for sale for US$1.5 million in an effort to preserve it. The buyer will have move the concrete-and-wood building to a suitable natural site, with proper solar orientation. The current owners will oversee the packing of every building component, built-in furnishings and furniture, which will be carefully loaded into container trucks, transported and reconstructed on the appropriate site. An Italian architect, Paolo Bulletti, has come up with a plan to move the house to Fiesole, near Florence, where Wright lived in 1910. Wright stayed at the town’s Villa Belvedere on Via Verdi. The villa was Wright’s inspiration for his home in the USA, Casa Taliesin, which is now the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Bulletti organised an exhibition dedicated to Wright in 2010, called ‘Frank Lloyd Wright in Fiesole: 100 Years Later’. Bulletti is acting as the Italian agent for the Tarantinos to find a buyer. Bulletti told the ‘The New York Times’ that the house could not be used as a residence in Fiesole because it does not meet planning regulations. However, he said: “But it can be erected in protected land, a park or a garden as if it were a sculpture.”