Lower Merion Conservancy

2. Suntop Homes
Ardmore

We are fortunate to have in Lower Merion a building created by Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most famously innovative architect. Though he never attended architecture school, Wright designed 1,100 buildings, of which only some 500 were finished-- among them the acclaimed Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Perhaps reflecting his native Wisconsin roots, Wright pioneered a new architectural design, a long, low building dubbed the Prairie Style. Less well known was his championing of small low-cost homes that he dubbed Usonian, an example of which is Suntop, a quartet of homes joined at a central point and facing Sutton Road and East Spring Avenue in Ardmore. Built in 1939, only three years after Fallingwater, this is Wright's dramatic re-interpretation of the Philadelphia rowhouse.

Updated: 1/19/2004 © 2010Lower Merion Conservancy. All rights reserved.

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