Susan Lawrence (1862-1946) came into the fortune of her industrialist father (Rheuna Lawrence) when she was in her late thirties, and promptly commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build her a fabulous mansion that now competes with Lincoln stops as a tourist draw in Springfield, Illinois.

Susan had Wright build the mansion on top of and around the original Victorian family home that she grew up in; the father's den remained as the inner core of the new Wright structure as a perpetual shrine to the father, whom she worshiped.

Susan would take on many names over her lifetime (including Susan Lawrence, Susan Dana, Susan Lawrence Joergen-Dahl, Susan Gehrmann, Susan K. Lawrence, Mrs. Susan Lawrence Dana Joergen-Dahl Gehrmann) as she continually reinvented herself. In her thirties, she asked her astrologist what letter she should use for her middle name, which is why she identified for a time as Susan Z. Lawrence.

Susan's inheritance was controversial, since she maneuvered behind the scenes to change the terms of the will, which her father had left in writing to her mother. The $3,000,000 estate would be worth around 80 million today. Rheuna owned silver mines in Colorado during the famous Leadville Miner's Strike (1896-97), and some of these were active mines that Susan continued to invest and trade.

Described alternately as "the record of a dream,” "a magic kingdom," "a Springfield San Simeon," "a freakish structure," “a gargantuan folly," and "a sprawling chunk of turn-of-the-century Twilight Zone," the Lawrence house stands today as one of the most famous examples of Wright's Prairie-style home. It dominates the neighborhood block, looking more like an public institution of some kind rather than a family home.

This is not an accident. Unable to break the public/private divide that beset the gender norms of her time, Susan built the house as a quasi-public space, a base of operations for launching progressive schemes that included the establishment of an alternative religious community, women's rights legislation, local educational initiatives, and challenges to racial inequality.

It had this public-facing purpose, but it was also the material out of which Susan fashioned the many facets of her mercurial emerging, dissolving identity. With its seventeen levels, indoor fountain, musical stage, dance hall, bowling alley, faux organ and aquarium, it served as the playground, temple, lecture hall, and organizing hub for her inexhaustible efforts of self-invention.

A statue that greets visitors in the entranceway was commissioned by Wright for the house, and its morphing half human/half skyscraper shape inaugurates a performative dialogue with its owner that resonates through the whole Wright structure. The relay of gazes between Susan, the icon, and her guests set up a Lacanian mirroring of reflected desires.

The poem inscribed on the back of the statue might serve as an apt epitaph for the home's owner:
but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Susan continued to speak regularly with her father through spiritual mediums after his death, and the many written communications are preserved in the state archives. She sought Rheuna's approval and advice, which uncannily mirrored her own desires and intentions.

From her home, Susan established and oversaw the "Springfield Society of Applied Psychology," which later became the "Lawrence Unity Center for Constructive Thinking," and ultimately a prominent local chapter of Unity Church which is now eleven blocks from the Dana House.

Like Circe or Prospero, wooing errant sailors to their magic isle, Susan used the cunning of the gracious host to charm her prey and work her spells. Politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities were drawn to her lair and predictably overpowered by its exquisite seductions.

Wright knew his client, and constructed the house in a way that allowed Susan to perform her public identity in active collaboration with the architectural space. It permitted her to invent herself as a civic figure, but it also blocked her fulfillment of a public identity by serving as its substitute.

Bricks and building materials from the Lawrence's original family home were used to build the Springfield Colored Home, an orphanage that Susan's mother, Mary, financed and fought for all her life, and that Susan continued to support thereafter. The building has been reclaimed by a neighborhood 4H group today. A material assemblage theorist could have a field day with this one

Susan also commissioned Wright to build the library for a local high school, and this work still survives at the school. Evidence for her dedication to emancipatory education is pervasive in the Springfield community to this day.

A friend to Alice Paul and Jane Addams, Susan lobbied for landmark women's rights laws as the state NWP representative. She did this work all by herself, and resigned after a year from exhaustion. She was stung equally by the failure of women to rally behind her and the deceit of male politicians. After the bill failed, the local paper quoted her as saying that "all men are liars."

Emblematic of Susan's complexity, she threw parties for the neighborhood children where she brought together all classes and races, and sent each child home with a goldfish from a hall-length aquarium she set up for the occasions.

Susan was one of Wright's most loyal patrons through his many ups and downs (without her support Wright's aunts' progressive Hillside Home School for Girls would not have survived), but when she was in real trouble toward the end of her life he did not come to her aid.

Her estate attorney hid the letters that revealed Susan's bohemian assignations and liaisons (only recently discovered). She desperately tried to keep a husband and to have children, but her life was built mostly on top of the wreck of these hopes. She kept a beautiful layette in a baby's room next to her bedroom all her life.

Out-of-place with her society's cramped conventions, and wrecked by her extravagances and generosities, she ended her life penniless and alone. She was literally moved across the train-tracks that still run alongside the Wright home, her furniture and valuables were sold off, and she died in a nursing home as a ward of the state.