Frank Lloyd Wright's Striking Pop-Cultural Legacy
The apartment of Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. The titular House on Haunted Hill, where Vincent Price’s character invites guests to survive a night of frights and win a fortune. The penthouse setting of Twin Peaks’s faux soap opera “Invitation to Love.” The Great Pyramid of Meereen, prominently featured on Season 6 of Game of Thrones.
These TV and film settings span decades and genres, from science fiction to horror to fantasy. But they have one crucial connection: They all either filmed in, or were directly inspired by, one private residence in Los Angeles: the Ennis House, built in 1924 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Stone-colored and covered with intricately patterned tiles, it looms imperiously from atop the Los Feliz hills—and, as the Historic American Buildings Survey described it in 1969, “appears from the distance as a tremendously large monument rather than a two-bedroom dwelling.”
Wright, who was born 150 years ago this year, may have gone too far with the Ennis House; it’s a dramatic, not particularly inhabitable example of how far he would go in his experiments toward developing regional styles. But as a paean to striking grandeur, it has had a beguiling effect on its viewers. And it’s a remarkable example of why, nearly six decades after his passing, Wright is still considered preeminent Americanhas been as “a mass of contradictions” but also as “a maker and mirror of the American century.” The Ennis House is a mostly unconsidered piece of that legacy, but incorporated into pop culture again and again it serves as a peculiar and living testament to Wright’s unique contributions to the visual landscape—in real life and onscreen.
