Herbert and Katherine Jacobs Second House, often called Jacobs II, is a historic house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built west of Madison, Wisconsin, United States in 1946–1948. The house was the second of two designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for journalist Herbert Jacobs and his wife Katherine. Its design is unusual among Wright's works; he called the style the "Solar Hemicycle" due to its semicircular layout and use of natural materials and orientation to conserve solar energy. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2003.
Background
By the 1940s when Wright designed this house, he had been working in architecture for fifty years. He had started in 1887 as a draftsman working under other architects in Chicago. In 1893 he struck out on his own and began to shift from designing traditional buildings (e.g. Queen Anne style) to his then-modern Prairie Style buildings, like his 1908 Airplane House 15 miles east in Madison, which is all straight lines with an emphasis on the horizontal. Wright advocated an "organic architecture," where the building complemented its surroundings, rather than plopping a little knob of European antiquity on the Midwest prairie. He felt the design should highlight the natural beauty of the materials and the site, and the interior should flow into the outdoors. Through the 1910s Wright experienced personal turmoils and in the 1920s commissions for his Prairie Style homes waned, but in the 1930s he became more popular again, getting a big commission in 1936 for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine. In Johnson Wax and other buildings from this period he experimented with curved shapes more than before.
Not much was done with passive solar heating in modern buildings in the U.S. until Fred Keck noticed in 1933 that his demonstration glass House of Tomorrow was warming inside on a winter day in Chicago before the furnace was installed. MIT and Columbia investigated solar-heated buildings in the late 1930s, and in 1940 the Chicago Tribune called Keck's Sloan house in Glenview, Illinois a "solar house." This last house had south walls of glass with extended eaves designed to admit sun through the glass in winter and shade it in summer - an idea Wright incorporated into the Jacobs' second house four years later.
In 1936 Herbert Jacobs, a young Madison newspaperman, and his wife Katherine challenged Wright to design them a small house that could be built for $5000, but would have the beauty and style of other Wright designs. Wright accepted that challenge and stripped down his full-on Prairie Style into a small, one-story L-shaped house with limited windows on the street side, but extensive windows facing the garden space inside the L. The design achieved all the ideals above within the $5000 budget. This house, often called Jacobs I, is a pivotal design - considered by many to be the first and purest of Wright's Usonian houses - his vision for affordable housing in the United States.
Building the second house
But the Jacobs' first house was small, and they quickly outgrew it. In 1942 they moved to a 52-acre farm nine miles west of Madison. "They had decided to become part-time farmers and thus help the war effort while introducing their children to the joys and hardships of farming, which they hoped would build character and proper sense of values." They initially lived in an old farmhouse, but they liked their first house from Wright and asked him to design them a new house. In July 1943 Wright inspected the farm and chose a site with an oak woods behind and a view of rolling hills and valleys to the south. Wright presented one design to the Jacobs - probably an unused design recycled from another client - but it was not what they wanted. Two months later, Wright presented them a very different rough plan saying, "You are getting another 'first'. Here is the answer to the problem of what to build on a hilltop exposed to the full sweep of the wind. In fact, it is suitable for almost any spot in the country where there is good drainage, for the house creates its own site and its own view."