Lisle, Ill. ? A prefabricated home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and threatened with demolition has been carefully dismantled and shipped 570 miles to Pennsylvania for reassembly.

After the home’s owner died in 2002, a developer wanted the land underneath it, but not the house itself.

The developer eventually donated the 47-year-old crumbling structure to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The nonprofit group then gave it to a Pennsylvania man under the condition that he restore and preserve it.

The house was disassembled last week.

“There hasn’t been a Wright building torn down for over 30 years,” said Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Chicago-based Wright Conservancy. “It would’ve been hard to say, ‘Well, now there is one.'”

This is no free house, though. The high school teacher who’s taking it, Tim Baacke, said it would cost more than $100,000 to take the house apart and move it to Johnstown, Pa., and restoration will cost as much as three times that amount. He said corporate sponsors were helping to defray the cost.

Baacke said the house itself, a three-bedroom, single-story structure, made the move possible. The building is one of Wright’s least expensive designs and was intended for mass production.

“It is a project that can be done only because of the style of Wright’s design to begin with,” said Baacke, a Wright enthusiast. “It really lent itself well to be moved to Pennsylvania.”

When Wright died in 1959, he was America’s most-celebrated architect. The last of his buildings to be torn down was Milwaukee’s Arthur Munkwitz Apartments in 1973.

A modest ranch-style home, built on a design by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is shown in this Nov. 8, 2003, file photo, in Lisle, Ill. The prefabricated home threatened with demolition was carefully dismantled last week and shipped 570 miles to Pennsylvania for reassembly, where it will be restored and preserved.