The Drafting Room

USONIA is an old word for the American middle: ordinary people on ordinary land, and an architecture that belongs to both. The Prairie and organic houses of the early twentieth century set out a grammar we still draw with: a house laid on a module, low roofs with deep eaves, a carport instead of a garage, clerestory light, board and batten walls, a radiant slab, a low entry that opens into a tall room, and a plan that grows out of the site instead of being set down on it.

Organic Design.

The site decides. Sun, slope, trees and approach are read before a line is drawn, and the building takes its shape from them. Materials are used for what they are: stone as stone, wood as wood, glass as light. Rooms open to one another and to the land. That is the whole method, and every project page on this site starts from it.

The Catalog.

From 1908 to 1940 Sears sold houses by mail: a perspective on top, plans below, a price in a box, an order blank at the back. The idea that a good house could be chosen from a book and shipped to a rail siding is the closest thing this studio has to a founding myth. The catalog you are reading borrows its bones from those books, which are now in the public domain and worth an afternoon on the Internet Archive.

Light Screens.

The leaded windows of the Prairie houses were mostly clear glass, with a lattice of came and small cells of amber, gold, green and a little red, drawn with a T-square, a triangle and a compass. The composer in this room works the same way: a grid, a few 45 degree cuts, color held to a small share of the field.

The Vernacular.

Fieldstone walls stacked by the first farmers. Round and gambrel dairy barns and the quilt blocks painted on them. Limestone ledges in Door County and sandstone cliffs at the Dells. Sugar maples in October. Amish crews who still raise a frame by hand. The land around Elderon and Wittenberg is the material the studio actually works with.