“Where the River Meets the Horizon: The Walter House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten Vision of Freedom” A meditation on architecture, post-work life, and the meaning of creation in an age of AI with Benjamin Hunnicutt.

Perched quietly above the Wapsipinicon River in Quasqueton, Iowa, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Walter House is more than a work of architecture—it is a vision of a life no longer dominated by work. Designed in 1950 as part of his Usonian project, the house reflects Wright’s belief that the technology—properly directed—could liberate humanity from toil, freeing individuals to build, dwell, and create with dignity and joy. In today’s world of artificial intelligence and accelerating automation, the Walter House stands as a prophetic symbol of what Wright called “the morality of the machine”: not endless production, not perpetual government expansion, but the individual’s recovery of time, craft, and domestic meaning. My talk will revisit Wright’s Usonian ideal through the lens of the Walter House, exploring how its modest elegance and integration with nature point toward a future in which freedom is not found in consumption or career, but in the rediscovery of leisure, place, the pleasure of making a home, and building community.