American Proceeding

In June 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a surprise visit to the Grant house, under construction near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was Wright's first visit to the site, and he was worried about the house because, unlike most of Wright's clients, Doug Grant was building it himself, serving as his own general contractor and doing his own electrical work and carpentry. He and his wife, Jackie, quarried all of the stone for the house from their own quarry on the property, and both took an active part in the construction. Upon his return to Taliesin, Wright told the assembled group of architects and apprentices that he was extremely pleased by what he had seen. He delivered a long tribute to Grant, calling the act of building one's own house "an American proceeding." The book's foreword, contributed by the Wright Foundation's Director of Archives, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, calls the Grant house, "among some of the finest and most inspired that Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed."