76 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 76 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 76 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 201TUTU111
REAL ESTATE
Frank’s place
Lloyd Wright’s solo Long Island project remains at ease with itself
The Rebhuhn House, as it’s known,
is Frank Lloyd Wright’s sole Long
Island project, but singularity is not
its only charm.
It was a comeback project for
Wright, the first after a dry spell
of more than 20 years, an attempt
to move past his earlier prairie
stylings into a design that was at
once modern and utilitarian and
suited for the newly evolving life
of suburbia. Usonian, he called it,
after an idealized vision of America
that celebrated individuality and
oneness with nature.
“People thought he was dead,”
said Caroline Rob Zaleski, author
of Long Island Modernism:
1930-1980. “He was forgotten. He
didn’t work all through the 1920s
and 1930s. If you were a modern
architect coming up in architecture
school in the 1930s, you were hardly
taught Frank Lloyd Wright.”
The house, on a pie slice-shaped
parcel in Great Neck Estates, was
begun in 1937 for Benjamin and
Anne Rebhuhn, publishers of what
was then considered “morally progressive”
content, including articles
on birth control, for which Benjamin
was once jailed.
Wealthy and intellectual, they
were the perfect clients for Wright,
who sought to make the design
and building experience as much
metaphysical as physical, guiding
customers through a “spiritual
and intellectual transformation,”
according to Zaleski.
“It’s really not about designing a
building,” added Timothy Totten,