Marble City Stories Presents: That Other Hallowed Hill

The Seamour and Gerte Shavin House, and the Influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on American Homebuilding

Photo by Jim Roberts, sourced through Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission under the CC BY-SA license.

On a hill to our west, there is a house.

Actually, there are many houses. The hill is Missionary Ridge, a suburb overlooking Chattanooga. Most of the homes there were built during the American mid-century period, some older, some newer. One is very different from the rest, you can tell just by looking at it that it’s something special.

That home is the Seamour and Gerte Shavin house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1952. It is the only Frank Lloyd Wright structure in the state of Tennessee. The home has never been sold, the original owners spent nearly their entire lives there. Gerte Shavin died on May 15, 2020, at the age of 98, bringing a close to nearly 70 years of life in her Wright-designed home.

I’ve driven by the home many times since I first learned about it, nearly a decade ago. I had heard that Gerte would give tours to fans of Wright, and tell stories of her family’s time working with the architect on their Usonian residence. Of being invited to Taliesin, to meet with the man who was once more famous and globally-recognized than any other architect. It is difficult to find a singular genius in architecture, but maybe Wright was one – and he offered his expertise to the burgeoning middle class, designing homes they could sometimes even afford. The Usonian model defined American homeownership in ways visible and invisible, its very ethos a uniquely American utopia.

Since beginning this article, I learned that the Shavins, too, lived unique and fascinating lives. Originally from New York, Seamour Shavin moved his business to Chattanooga so the couple could work with the Highlander Center during the Civil Rights movement. Alongside Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, they worked tirelessly to combat the issues of systematic racism and inequality across the South. Even after their time at the center, they remained steadfast in their beliefs – until the pandemic began, Gerte Shavin was actively engaged in community organizing in Leesburg, VA, where she was living with her son.

Wright’s career dominated the first half of the 20th century, his education completed under the tutelage of the Father of American Skyscrapers and his inspiration drawn from nature through the Arts and Crafts movement. He changed styles all his life, each time setting the standard to which other architects of the time would be held. He lived in a laboratory of his own making, building the perfect home for himself while designing a holistic spatial experience for each of his clients. The attention he gave each project was exacting, and perfect, whether he was building a home for the Shavins, creating a college for the women of southern Florida, or redesigning Baghdad.

By far, the most incredible thing about Wright, especially later in life, was his radical egalitarianism. If you wrote a letter, chances are you’d end up with a house of his own design. Sometimes he’d mail the plans, other times he’d consult with local builders and his own Taliesin-trained architects to take on the project himself. The man who designed world-changing mansions for the children of the Gilded Age was designing homes for everyone else, too.

Or, at least, that was the pitch. The $5,000 home was always just out of reach, despite best efforts.

Wright was driven by convictions about the nature and meaning of design, ideals about man’s nature in the universe and the built environment, in ways few architects have been before or since. There is perhaps no figure with more influence in the field of architecture than Wright, despite his insistence that everyone was 5’8” and never any taller, that chairs didn’t need a fourth leg, that roofs just… leaked, and there was no stopping it, and you’d be better off just scooting out of the way. He pushed the boundaries of American design into something entirely of our, and his, own making. For decades, we lived in his world, whether through his architectural influence or the domination of his work in pop culture and media. Even HBO’s Game of Thrones references his work.

The architectural principles embodied by the Shavin house are seen across not only the work of Wright, but of every American architectural period between the 40s and the 80s. Ranch homes, the long, wide replacement for GI bill houses and staples of neighborhoods even today, are riffs on his Prairie Style homes like Robie or Wingspread, made simpler, easier to build. His Usonian work launched a thousand tiny homes, a million brick boxes with window walls and terraced ceilings. He interpreted mythical and ancient architecture with the same religious zeal; in many ways, the Guggenheim is one of the first Postmodern structures ever built.

It’s no great secret, I like Frank Lloyd Wright. It is incredible to me that he built a home here, and even more incredible, its caretakers lived in that home nearly their entire lives. To live in a home by Wright is to live with Wright, every aspect of your life dictated by his intricate and comprehensive design. Many of his homeowners found the homes unlivable, selling them off early on. The Shavin home, on the other hand, represents a remarkable success for Wright’s utopian ideal, and is part of a small handful of livable homes he designed. In part, that may be due to the closeness of the Shavins’ ideological principles to Wright’s own.

Since the home’s construction in 1952, the field of residential architecture has changed in ways none could have foreseen. Fashions have come and gone, but the mystical appeal of America’s greatest architect, his imposing presence on the field, and his visions of architectural unity have remained constant. Frank Lloyd Wright changed the world, but he also changed the lives of a Tennessee family, and in doing so, changed the way we think about home.

Author’s Notes

This was a more difficult article than most to write. I had reached out to the Shavins when I started this piece last week, and learned of Gerte’s passing the day after – John Shearer, a friend and local journalist who covers the architecture beat for Knoxville and Chattanooga, has been a family friend of the Shavins since 1987. John helped me get in touch with David Shavin, Gerte and Seamour’s son, to schedule an interview with him and his mother.

There is good news: David Shavin still wants to talk about the home, and his parents’ work and legacy. We’re going to be doing that at the home itself, near the end of next month. Look forward to a photography-heavy interview in early July.

This coming Thursday, we’re taking another trip just outside Knoxville, and exploring the history and influence of Black Mountain College. Both this story, and that one, serve to illustrate some interesting and outsized presences here in the Southeast. In Asheville, North Carolina, Buckminster Fuller, Philip Johnson and Josef and Anni Albers established an American Bauhaus. I think that’s worth talking about. Until then, take care.