Raised Ranch – Revenge on Frank
The first Raised Ranch was a single story affair built by a man named Cliff May in San Diego in 1932. The idea was to build a home that was as economic as possible and fit the minimal needs of depression-era families. What made this building a ranch? Essentially it was a bifurcated plan, bedrooms on one side, living space on the other side with low pitched roofs and broad eaves. To be honest I’ve been an architect for 25 years and I’ve never understood the name “Ranch”, but I did understand one thing. That this building was the ultimate revenge on the one truly iconic architect that’s ever lived, Frank Lloyd Wright.
You see at the same time that Cliff May was building his Ranch, Frank Lloyd Wright was desperately trying to have some relevance (and get some work) during the Depression by pushing the Usonian home. These were one-story affairs as well, a little smaller, with low pitched or flat roofs, but Frank thought the way to affordability was to use scrap lumber for all the framing. These homes had the multiple weavings of trim, double cantilevered roofs and extraordinarily low ceilings (remember Frank was only 5’3”) that were a hallmark of his Prairie style architecture.
Given all of these interweavings Usonian homes tended to fall apart over time. In fact it took over $600,000 to simply restore one in Pennsylvania a few years ago. Frank was a social person and knew about popular culture, and it must have simply driven him crazy to see the incredibly bland, bourgeois-friendly Ranches proliferate across the United States in the 1950s as the gist of its exterior aesthetics and interior organization can be traced directly to his Prairie houses while his Usonian homes were ignored by the general public. It’s as if fine Szechwan cooking was interpreted by La Choy.
The greatest outrage for Frank must have come when the one-story ranch soon became the “Raised Ranch” with story and-a-half or two story walls, completely violating every aesthetic tenant of Prairie style horizontality.
Let’s face it. All architects want immortality, and Frank will of course have his for at least a century or two given the extraordinary bulk of his work. But, millennia from now, given the fact that millions upon millions of Raised Ranches proliferated across the fruited plain, it wouldn’t surprise me that they were seen as the ultimate architectural fruit of this aesthetic Johnny Appleseed.
