Cox finds inspiration in the Wright way

BLUEPRINT Building: Wingspread, Wind Point Completed: 1939 Builder: Benjamin Wiltscheck, Racine Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright Biggest Fan: Tom Cox, Hoffman, Appleton

When choosing his favorite building in Wisconsin, Tom Cox harkened back to his days as a young designer.

As an undergraduate student in Nebraska in the 1970s, he joined several of his classmates on a nationwide road tour of America's important buildings, a journey that took him to Frank Lloyd Wright's Wingspread home near Racine.

Little did Cox know that his professional career would bring him to Wisconsin, where he's principal in charge of Hoffman, the Appleton-based architecture and construction-management company. But even if he hadn't ended up in the Badger State, it's still fairly safe to say that his visit to Wingspread 30 years ago was burned into his memory.

"To me, the building is more than just a prairie-style house that Wright built," said Cox, who's also the president of the American Institute of Architects-Wisconsin Chapter.

Wingspread, which Wright designed for the Johnson family and which now serves as the headquarters for the Johnson Foundation, combines Wright's Usonian vision with prairie-style elements, Cox said. The "strong horizontal lines" of prairie architecture merge with the Usonian ideal of an "everyman house," creating a unified whole, he said.

For architect Tom Cox, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wingspread house near Racine embodies a designer's desire to give form to ideas. Photos by Thomas A. Heinz courtesy of the Johnson Foundation

"He grabbed those ideas and put them into a larger home," Cox said.

And typical of a Wright design, Wingspread achieves its sense of harmony in part by blending in and responding to its setting.

"It sits so well on the site, it looks like it's part of the site," Cox said.

The four jutting spurs of Wingspread's interior converge on a 30-foot-high chimney that rests in the middle of a 40-foot-by-60-foot octagonal room. Cox likened this "wigwam fireplace notion" to a hearth in a teepee, and it's an inspired reminder that Wright intended Wingspread as a home.

Cox said it's hard to incorporate specific Wingspread elements into his own work, which includes house design. Instead, what Cox said he's carried with him is Wright's ability to infuse bricks and mortar with thoughts and aesthetic goals without resorting to a jumbled mishmash.

"It has a clarity of vision and a clarity of concept," he said. "He just had conceptual ideas that he wanted to build architectural ideas around. You can see the ideas that he was trying to achieve quite clearly. He had a vision that he wanted to translate into a building."

- Jeremy Harrell