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Zimmerman House. Currier Gallery of Art, 192 Orange St., Manchester, NH 03104.
Permanent exhibition, opened Oct. 18, 1990. Tours of Zimmerman House: Th-Sa 10:30-2:30, Su 2-3:30; general admission $5, seniors and students $3, gallery members free (includes transportation to the house). 1,800 sq. ft. house and carport on 3/4 acre lot. Michael Komanecky, curator; Rosalie Reed, site administrator; John Tilton, restoration architect; Peter W. Cook, interpretation specialist; Barbara Pitsch, director of education.
Historic Structure Report for the Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman House. By Tilton and Lewis Associates. Ed. by Carla Lind. (Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1989. 62 pp. $10.00.)
Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman House: Its History and Its Restoration. By Michael Komanecky. (Forthcoming.)
Historic house museums can bring the past to life more readily than case and panel exhibits, by placing visitors with the artifacts in a context that is both familiar (a home) and different (a home as it appeared at some date in the past). Yet the inherent contradiction in a historic house museum is that the techniques used to preserve and to interpret detract from the visitor's ability to experience the house as a home rather than as a museum. To minimize that interference and subtly assist the house to speak could be described as the historic house challenge.
Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman first encountered Frank Lloyd Wright through his writings in the Manchester Public Library. They asked Wright to design a home suited to their life-style and interests, and Wright drew up the designs in 1950 after meeting with the Zimmermans at Taliesin. In form and design the Zimmerman House is a Usonian, a type of house conceived by Wright during the 1930s as efficient, inexpensive housing. The Zimmerman House has such Usonian features as a one-floor open plan and gravity heat, but its structure of glazed brick, cast concrete, and Georgia cypress wood took it out of the low-cost category. Wright designed the gardens, the fabrics, and all of the furniture except for the Steinway grand piano.
The Zimmermans loved their house and wanted to share it with others. Within ten years of moving in, they were seriously considering leaving the house as a bequest to the Currier Gallery of Art. When Lucille Zimmerman died in 1988...