Restoration - Rasikas

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Forthcoming Film To Chronicle Restoration of Westcott House

By early autumn the arduous, five-year, five-million-dollar process of restoring the Burton J. Westcott House will be preserved on film for all to see. In fact, even before the restoration itself began, photographers were on the scene to chronicle the entire saga. In the past five years, Kerry Rasikas, director and editor, and Lisa Steele, producer, of Rasikas Films in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have traveled to Springfield, Ohio, at least twenty times to capture the key moments of the painstaking restoration.

Rasikas and Steele first visited the Westcott property when community groups were helping to demolish the walls that had been erected at the time the original house was subdivided into apartments. Working with Shawn Beckwith, restoration project manager from the Columbus, Ohio, Durable Slate Company that served as construction manager, and Matt Cline, Westcott House site manager, Rasikas and Steele videographed important developments as the house was gradually returned to its original 1908 appearance. Sometimes they worked alone, at other times with a crew. For example, when the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, a Chicago-based group dedicated to preserving Wright-designed properties, met in Springfield in May 2003, Rasikas was there to interview several Wright enthusiasts including John Thorpe, former Conservancy president, and Linda Wagner, curator of Wright's famous Fallingwater near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Later when the thousands of terra cotta replacement tiles were being installed on the roof according to their original color gradation, Rasikas et al. were on hand to record the moment. They also came to film several artisans at work on the house and to photograph visually interesting areas as well as key furnishings such as the skylight.

Rasikas and Steele welcomed this assignment because they themselves had a major interest in the work of Wright. They had previously filmed another restored Wright property, the Meyer May House (1909) in Grand Rapids. This project brought the Rasikas firm to the attention of Rob Kearns, president of the Westcott House Foundation, who then engaged the firm to document the restoration project here.

Working with Alan Rosas, a Grand Rapids-based freelance writer, Rasikas and Steele early discovered three stories in the Springfield project. The first was the process of restoration itself. The second concerned the Westcotts—Burton, a civic leader and automobile manufacturer, his wife Orpha, a forward-thinking social leader, and their children John and Jeanne—and the family's place in the community. The third story focused on architect Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Rasikas and Steele then set about to mesh these three strands in a process that Rasikas terms "organic," because they make discoveries as they go along. Steele is fascinated, for example, that the Westcott House remains somewhat plain; it is not highly decorated. In fact, it stands in contrast to many of Wright's other buildings including his Prairie Style homes. The Meyer May House, for instance, features a mural and more built-in furniture than the Westcott House has. Steele finds this contrast particularly significant because the Westcott House was built at a time of burgeoning wealth when many Westcott contemporaries chose to construct more elaborate homes.

Both Rasikas and Steele, however, understand and appreciate the "beauty in simplicity" that the Westcott House reveals. They attribute the resultant sense of calm to the Japanese influence on Wright's design evident in the awning, pool, pergola, bands of windows, and elsewhere. One video session here focused on the exterior of the house, particularly the front yard with its massive urns and the back garden that, they believe, also communicate this tranquil feeling. Consequently, for them a visit to the Westcott House is an experience, not merely a tour, and they are working to ensure that their photography conveys this important quality.

Currently Rasikas and Steele are concentrating their efforts on the historical elements of the Westcott House and "its time." They have pored over relevant materials in the Clark County Heritage Center in downtown Springfield and presently have a New York researcher studying the National Archives and the Library of Congress for information about the early twentieth century that relates to innovation. This era saw significant creative activity from the likes of Thomas Alva Edison, Gustav Klimt; and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In writing the script for the film, Rosas strove to express the significance of the Westcott House and of Wright himself at a time that witnessed "an extraordinary leap in technology...the time of the first electric generator...the time of the first airplane." Yet today "nobody [seems to have] heard of the Wasmuth Portfolio," an influential collection of Wright's drawings published in Berlin in 1910, or seems to have recognized that Wright put the Westcott House near the top of his own list of best structures.

Rosas recognizes that people visiting this "remarkable" house today probably do not consider it all that unusual; however, if they look at it through the "eyes of the time," then they see that it is "the most amazing, bizarre, crazy thing," he says, architecturally far removed from its Victorian, Queen Anne, Italianate, and Richardsonian Romanesque neighbors. Thus, Rosas took on the writing assignment to communicate that the Westcott House "is incredibly important," designed when "Frank Lloyd Wright was at the crest of the creative wave in the early 1900s."

Rasikas and Steele hope that, when completed, their video will weave together these three stories and also show "passionate people," area citizens eager to move Springfield forward culturally so that the Westcott House spawns creative thinking in the fields of architecture, preservation, and related areas.

Nonetheless, for Rasikas and Steele, this thirty-minute documentary ultimately will provide intrigue, for in the process of preserving the "rebirth" of the Westcott House on film, they are finding more questions than answers--about the restoration enterprise, about the Westcott family, and about Frank Lloyd Wright's influence--questions that are sure to keep researchers coming to the Westcott House for years.