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| The Architect Frank Lloyd Wright 1867-1959 Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods and men, to put man into possession of his own earth. --- The Architectural Forum, 1938 Frank Lloyd Wright turned the American house into an art form, expressive of the freedom so important to Americans, through integrating our daily lives with the natural world we live in. Although he created many remarkable public buildings, including the Johnson Wax Administration Building and the Guggenheim Museum, his main attention was devoted to residential design. His organic architecture aimed to capture the endless freedom of the western frontier by designing houses with horizontal aspects, interior spaces which opened freely to the outdoors, and a harmonious use of materials and pattern - all to create an environment of freedom and repose. Wright's career is generally divided into three periods. His work during this first period (1893 - World War I) was primarily located in the Midwest, and brought forth a new American architectural style - the Prairie house. These long, low buildings stretched out along the flat Midwestern landscape, their horizontality emphasized with bands of windows and spare ornamentation. Low-pitched roofs with broad eaves served to relate them to the ground, creating shelter in the open. Wright left his Oak Park, Illinois studio in 1909, ending his Prairie house period. Between World War I and the mid 1930's, Wright executed relatively few commissions - the most notable being Tokyo's Imperial Hotel and his series of textile block houses in California - but this second period was full of experimentation with different building techniques and new designs based on geometric forms other than the square or rectangle. He wrote An Autobiography in 1932, a book which inspired many young architects and artists to join his newly-formed Taliesin Fellowship, an institute devoted to artistic endeavor. The Fellowship was (and continues to be) based at his homes in Spring Green, Wisconsin (Taliesin) and Scottsdale, Arizona (Taliesin West). Wright emerged from this relatively quiet period with several large projects which captured the public imagination, including Fallingwater, which appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. At the same time, he developed the Usonian house, designed for families of modest income. The Usonians were generally single-story houses with simple floor plans, based on a grid system, with radiant heat, a small, central kitchen space, and usually flat roofs. For the rest of his career, he continued to devote his attention to residential design - both luxurious and spare - with a remarkable variety of form. At his death in 1959, he had built more than 400 buildings - and designed at least twice that many. There are several excellent websites with comprehensive information on Frank Lloyd Wright. We recommend: www.franklloydwright.org The official site of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. This site has excellent chronologies of his life and work, and features audio and video clips, excellent links. www.geocities.com/SoHo/1469/flw.html The All-Wright site, a compendium of information, links, building lists. www.swcp.com/FLW The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy site, with up-to-date information on the protection of extant Wright buildings. Wright's Roots: An Essay Frank Lloyd Wright presented Fallingwater to the architectural community in a special edition of the Architectural Forum in 1938. Included in its contents were many projects he had been working on during those "years of experimentation" since he had left his Oak Park studio in 1909. Wright designed the graphics and layout of this edition, and sprinkled his architectural discussion with some favorite quotes as well as a "Declaration of Independence" he had written as an 1896 Work Song from the Oak Park Workshop. What Wright also presented in the 1938 Architectural Forum were references to the thinkers and designers who influenced him - his architectural roots. More influences can be seen in the years before he launched his own career. As Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater expresses the essence of Wright's organic architecture, which sprang from his love for the land, his desire to create an American art form, and his faith in new technology. He embraced new technology as a way to design buildings which re-connected mankind to the natural world, and adopted the cantilever as the perfect structural means to express the freedom and repose he saw as so important to American life. His buildings engage their landscapes, drawing inspiration from natural forms to become in harmony with them . They provide shelter without confinement; their horizontal nature grounds them in the earth. Their materials are used honestly, and are often native to the area. Wright's early years also provide a clue to the source of his architectural style. Wright was born in Wisconsin in 1867 - only two years after the end of the Civil War. Some of his boyhood years were spent in New England, and later, back on the family farm in Wisconsin. This was a fertile time for the newly-emerging American culture, and it no doubt influenced Wright's thinking. The nation, torn asunder, was struggling to repair itself politically, economically, and socially, and to define itself culturally. Romanticists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson were urging Americans to revere Nature, and to celebrate the importance of the individual. Henry David Thoreau retreated from civilization to isolate himself in the natural world, and in his journals produced a thoroughly organic view of natural life. Walt Whitman "heard America singing," and used his verse to bring definition to American society. In the design world, the Arts and Crafts movement called for the rejection of industrialization, and a return to hand-crafted design with patterns based on natural forms. They embraced the materials of the medieval craftsmen: wood, stone, clay. Cities were considered evil, and rural life was deemed desirable and moral. In 1876, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Americans got their first exposure to the arts of the Orient. Wright's mother attended the Exposition, and brought back with her a new educational tool: Froebel blocks. Developed as part of Friederich Froebel's new Kindergarten program, the "gifts" presented structured play activities using two and three dimensional geometric forms, patterns, and constructions. Even in his later years, Wright fondly recalled building with the maple blocks. The geometric logic of his buildings, their massing, and pattern can be traced back to the time he spent with his Froebel blocks. Upon their return to Wisconsin, the young Wright spent many summers working long and hard hours on the family farm. Wright had dedicated himself to becoming an architect, but could not afford the schooling in Europe that most architectural students of that time period pursued. Instead, he studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin. After only three terms, he left for Chicago to find a job with an architectural firm. He eventually landed one in the firm of Adler and Sullivan. Chicago in the late 1880's was a fast-developing city, the major Midwestern center of commerce and trade, in the midst of rebuilding after its devastating fire. The new availability of steel as a building material, and the invention of the elevator, were leading Chicago architects to an entirely new form for buildings: the skyscraper. Louis Sullivan was the most influential architect of the day, calling on his fellow architects to use an "organic" approach to design. "Form ever follows function," Sullivan argued, and urged architects to look deep into the intent of the building for inspiration for its design, rather than drawing on historic precedents. Sullivan quickly became Wright's mentor. While Wright was thoroughly consumed in his apprenticeship with Sullivan, several historic events took place which undoubtedly influenced the future of his own architectural style. The 1890 U.S. Census declared the western frontier to be closed. In a famous 1893 speech in Chicago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that it was the frontier that defined the characteristic traits of American life: freedom, restless energy, expansiveness. That same year, the World's Columbian Exposition opened on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, and one of its many buildings was a Japanese pavilion, extending long and low on its site, with a broad sheltering roof. As Wright opened up his own practice that year, he was faced with the same question all architects face: what would his buildings look like? In answering this question, he produced an architectural form unmistakably his own, but also formed by the cultural and architectural influences surrounding him Over the course of his 75-year career, Wright's buildings demonstrated a remarkable variety of form, but based on the same principles of organic architecture: design rooted in the natural landscape, providing the users with the peace and serenity needed for daily living, and in so doing, creating a harmonious composition between house and site, and man and nature. The land is the simplest form of architecture. Building upon the land is as natural to man as to other animals, birds, or insects. In so far as he was more than an animal his building became what we call architecture. Looking back, what then is architecture? It is man and more. It is man in possession of his earth. It is the only true record of him where his possession of earth is concerned. While he was true to the earth his architecture was creative. ----- The Future of Architecture, 1953 Work Song (an excerpt): I'll live As I'll work As I am! No work in fashion for sham Nor to favour forsworn Wear mask crest or thorn My work as befitteth a man My work Work that befitteth the man ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE Organic architecture is an architecture from within outward, in which entity is an ideal....Organic means intrinsic - in the philosophic sense, entity - wherever the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole and where the nature of the materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance, becomes clear as a necessity. Out of that nature comes what character in any particular situation you can give to the building as a creative artist. ----Frank Lloyd Wright in a 1953 interview with Hugh Downs THE LAND My prescription for a modern house: first pick a good site. Pick that one at the most difficult site - pick a site no one wants - but pick one that has features making for character: trees, individuality, a fault of some kind in the realtor mind. ---from a speech to the Association of Federal Architects, 1938 AMERICAN The corner window is indicative of an idea conceived, early in my work...that the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So I started to destroy the box as a building. Well, the corner window came in as all the comprehension that was ever given to that act of destruction of the box. The light now came in where it had never come in before and vision went out. You had screens for walls instead of box walls - here the walls vanished as walls, the box vanished as a box. --- 1953 interview with Hugh Downs TECHNOLOGY For the first time in my practice, where residence work is concerned in recent years, reinforced concrete was actually needed to construct the cantilever system of this extension of the cliff beside a mountain stream, making living space over and above the stream upon several terraces upon which a man who loved the place sincerely, one who liked to listen to the waterfall, might well live. ---Wright on Fallingwater, The Architectural Forum ENGAGE THIER LANDSCAPES We try to put into that house a sense of unity - of the altogether that makes it a part of the site. If the thing is successful... you can't imagine that house anywhere than right where it is. It is a gracious part of its environment. It graces its environment, rather than disgraces it. --- in a 1953 interview with Hugh Downs HARMONY Furnishings should be consistent in design and construction, and used with style as an extension in the sense of the building which they "furnish." Whenever possible, all should be natural. The sure reward for maintaining these simple features of architectural integrity is great serenity. ---- A Testament, 1957 SHELTER An idea (probably rooted in instinct) that shelter should be the essential look of any dwelling, put the low spreading roof, flat or hipped or low-gabled with generously projecting eaves, over the whole. I began to see a building not as a cave but as broad shelter in the open, related to vista; vista without and vista within. You may see in these various feelings all taking the same direction, that I was an American, child of the ground and of space, welcoming spaciousness as a modern human need, as well as learning to see it as the natural human opportunity. -- 1936 HORIZONTAL I see this extended horizontal line as the true earth-line of human life, indicative of freedom. Always. --- An Autobiography, 1943 MATERIALS But in this land of ours, richest on earth, in old and new materials, the architect must exercise well-trained imagination to see in each material, either natural or compounded, its own inherent style. All materials may be beautiful, their beauty depending much or entirely upon how well they are used by the architect. --- An Autobiography, 1932 Henry David Thoreau True - there are architects - so called - in this country and I have heard of one, at least, possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, a hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. A sentimental reformer in architecture he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornament was something outward and in the skin merely - that the toroise got its spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-of-pearl tints by such a contrast as the inhabitants of Broadway got their Trinity Church? The man seemed to me to lean over the cornice and whisper his half-truths to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What architectural beauty I see I know has grown from within outward- out of the necessities and character of the indweller and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. - as quote by Wright in The Architectural Forum Walt Whitman What is this you bring to America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better told or done before? Have you not imported this, or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? A rhyme? A prettyness? Is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians - literats of enemies' lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Can your performance companion the open fields and the sea side? Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air to appear again in my strength, gait, face? Have real employments contributed to it? Original makers - not mere amanuenses? Does it meet modern discoveries, calibers, nature face to face? What does it mean to me? To America - does it see behind the apparent custodians? Does it see what finally befalls and has always befallen each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel who has ever asked anything of America? Who are you indeed, who would talk or sing to America? Have you studied out the land, its idioms, and men? Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? Its substratums and objects? Do you see those who would leave all feudal process and poems behind them - and assume the poems and process of democracy? Are you really very strong? Are you really of the whole people? Are you not some coterie? Some school or mere religion? Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life, animating now to life -itself? --- quoted by Wright in The Architectural Forum |
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