were all strands of ideas he developed in his Usonian houses. This article outlines this work and follows through with the development of the quadruple concept in Malaysia, and how combined with the two other strands of Wright’s work leads toHoneycomb

In the years following the Depression, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a series of moderate
cost houses which he called Usonian Houses. These designs were practical
demonstrations of Broadacre City, Wright’s vision for the ideal city for the future – a
multicentered, lowdensity, autooriented suburbia. Measured by the number of years he
spent at it, Broadacre City was the chief work of Wright’s mature life. The architect
introduced his scheme for a decentralised city after the depression in 1932 in the book,

This vision stands out in contrast to that of the other leading architect of the modern
movement, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. In this article we pick out three strands of his
work: the quadruple house, the clustered plats of his Usonian sub-divisions, and his use
of the hexagonal grid. We will show how these strands were further developed by other
architects elsewhere in the world, and conclude by describing how they come together in
our present work in Malaysia, which we call Honeycomb Housing.

The Quadruple House
One of the least appreciated of Wright’s work is the Quadruple House at Ardmore,
Pennsylvania designed in 1939, but based on an idea dating back to 19021. Here four
housing units are attached by a cross-wall, and accessed by separate driveways at right
angles to each other, such that from each elavation you could see only the entrance to
one house (Figures 1-2).

Frank Lloyd Wright is known mainly for the houses he designed for the rich, but here is
a design suitable for the lower income group. The cross party walls that divide each block
into four units are shared thereby reducing the cost of each unit. Typical single family
homes on ½ acre lots could provide a density of 8-10 persons per acre. Here was a new
house type that could triple that. Wright produced this design to be a prototype for mass
housing that does not sacrifice what Americans were used to! Wright wrote ‘in this

scheme standardisation is no barrier to the quality of infinite variety to be observed in
Nature. No entrance to any dwelling in the group is beside any other entrance to another
dwelling. So far as the individual can know, the entire group is his home. He is entirely

unaware of the activities of his neighbours. There are no looking from front windows to
backyards….Playgrounds for the children (on) sundecks, are here independent roof
gardens placed where the mother… has direct supervision over hers’2. However, in 1942

an ambitious design for a mass housing project for 100 units of quadruple homes for the
U.S. government in Pittsfield, Massachusetts went awry. Architects in the state lobbied
the government insisting that the job be given to a local architect. The government
relented,and dismissed Wright. The government offered to buy the plans from him. This
would have allowed the designs to be built. However Wright would have none of this,
and he never returned to designing quadruple homes.

America so thoroughly forgot about this novel building type that in 1990, the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office remarkablygranted a patent to a Richard Mitchell for a building
form that is basically the quadruple idea3.

However, halfway around the world, in Malaysia, the quadruple form has been around
since 1976. In that year was completed 676 units of low-cost two storey houses in Kuala
Lumpur (Figure 3). Here clusters of four units joined together at cross walls also link to
neighbouring units by a link at first floor, creating rows of terraces, with footpaths below
the links. They were designed by Tay Kheng Soon (now a scion of the Singaporean
architectural fraternity), and was an experiment in high-density low-rise housing forms.
The housing layout was influenced by the studies of Lionel March and Leslie Martin and
others at the Land Use and Built Form studies in Cambridge, UK, published in the book
“Urban Space and Structures” in 19724.

Although, this project was considered a success - it was completed within budget, and set
off Tay Kheng Soon on an illustrious career - the building type did not immediately
become popular. Certainly, it did nothing to displace the terrace house as the most
common housetype. Perhaps, the design was just too radical. Whereas the standard
terrace house could have a car porch in the front yard Tay’s houses were accessed via
footpaths; the car had to be parked at the road surrounding the scheme. The lack of an
access road to each unit also meant that the houses could not qualify for land titles. They
were categorised as subdivided buildings, and therefore could only receive “strata-titles”
like those of apartments. From the point of view of investment, this was a negative.