Polymath Park (Treetops)

In 1962, Peter Berndtson, a former Taliesin fellow, drew a master plan for a residential development that he named Treetops and Mountain Circles. Only two of the twenty-four houses planned for the wooded site were built, for Pittsburgh industrialists James Balter (1964) and Harry Blum (1965). In 2006, the new owner of the site, Thomas D. Papinchak, a local builder, disassembled the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Duncan House (1957) from Lisle, Illinois, and moved the pieces to the renamed Polymath Park for reconstruction in 2006–2007.

Wright had sold three prefabricated house designs to the Erdman Builders of Madison, Wisconsin. The Duncans purchased Style 1 as a kit. (Nine houses of this design are scattered across four states.) While its shallow gable roof is not typical of Wright's designs, the composition anchored by a heavy stone chimney and thinly layered stone walls that emphasize the house's horizontality is quintessentially Wrightian. The house uses Maryland ledge rock, an alternative foundation material specified by Wright, rather than the original cement block chosen by the Duncans.

The Berndtson designs vary considerably. The Balter House is the larger of the two, with a shallow hipped roof above deep eaves, a fieldstone base, and redwood board-and-batten walls surrounding the ribbon windows. The great room and screened porch are cantilevered into the woods surrounding the house. Redwood beams outline the cathedral ceiling inside. The Blum house, which overlooks a pond and a twenty-acre meadow, is much smaller. Its hipped roof shelters stuccoed walls with redwood trim, and the interior has mitred corner windows and several built-in cabinets. There is also a farmhouse on the property that Berndston lived in while the two houses were built. Today, the Duncan and Balter houses are available for rental and the Blum house serves as a visitors' center.