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Believing that the space within that

building is the reality of that building

Frank Lloyd WrighArchitect(1867-1959)

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One of the founders of modern

architecture in North America,Frank Lloyd Wright embraced theuse of new technology, materials and

engineering to create some of the 20th

centurys most influential and iconic

buildings. During a long and productive

career spanning 70 years he designedover 1,000 buildings of which over 400

were built.

Wright developed a language of

architecture that did not look to Europebut was unique to the United States. As

well as creating buildings which were

radical in appearance, Wright had a

rare ability to integrate them with the

landscape stemming from his deeplove and knowledge of nature. It was

this gift that marked him out from

contemporary pioneers of modern

architecture, such as Le Corbusier

and Mies van der Rohe, and makehis buildings seem in tune with our

environmentally conscious era.

Born in 1867, Wright was the eldestchild of William Russell Cary Wright, a

Unitarian minister and music teacher,

and Anna Lloyd Jones Wright. His father

gave him a love of music, but it was his

mother who encouraged him to becomean architect. As well as hanging prints

of cathedrals on his bedroom wall,

she bought him a Frederick Froebel

Kindergarten system on a visit to the

Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. Thissystem consisted of a set of coloured

strips of paper, two dimensional

geometric grids and a set of wooden

bricks comprising cubes, spheres and

pyramids. Later Wright wrote themaple wood blocks. all are in my

fingers to this day. An infinite and

playful combination of these geometric

shapes gave Wright the core forms of his

architecture.

At 18, Wright enrolled to study

engineering at the University of

Wisconsin, Madison but, desperateto pursue a career in architecture, he

dropped out and moved to Chicago

where he quickly found work with the

architectural firm of Joseph Lyman

Silsbee. Wrights ambition, however,

soon took him to Adler and Sullivan,Chicagos most progressive architects.

Louis Sullivan was an important

influence on Wright and put him

in charge of the firms residentialbuilding work. He also gave him a

loan in 1889 to purchase land to

build a home for himself and his new

wife, Catherine Lee Tobin, in the Oak

Park district of Chicago.

During the next 16 years, Wright

developed thePrairie Style ofarchitecturein a large number ofcommissions for private homes inChicago, in particular, in Oak Park.

It is to his credit that most of his

clients were extremely pleased with

the homes Wright built. One of his

less published achievements was hismastery of the internal environment,

with great attention paid to lighting,

heating and climate control.

The 1906 Robie House in Chicago was Wrights most mature expression

of the Prairie Style of architecture.

Frederick Robie, an engineer and

industrialist, wanted a house full of

light with views of the street, butwithout his neighbours looking in.

In 1893 Wright was asked to leave

the firm for pursuing too muchprivate work - and at the age of 26,

he started his own practice.

Using brick, concrete, steel

and glass, Wright constructed a

massive cantilever on the west

side of the house that gave theliving room privacy and shelter

from the sun. It also opened

out the house by moving away

from the tight box shape of

traditional homes.The low, horizontal form is

exaggerated with the use of

ribbons of cream stone for the

base plinth and copingstones

and red brick for the walls.

A central fireplace open above

the mantel gave greater unity

of space to the large living and

dining rooms, which Wright sawas the centre of family life.

Although there was no external

garden, the use of massive

planters and urns softened the

hard edges of the building andat each level Wright designed a

terrace, balcony or porch to break

the division between inside and

outside. All internal details

including the furnishings, light

fittings, rugs andthe essential art glass

were also designed by Wright.

The Prairie Style aimed to create a

truly North American architecture,but Wright also drew inspiration from

Europe: from the French rationalist

writings of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc and

the British Arts and Crafts movement.He also had great knowledge of the

art and architecture of Japan and the

culture of pre-Columbian America.

Although radical, Wright can be viewed

within the context of a group of USarchitects and designers, who included

Gustav Stickley and the brothers

Charles and Henry Greene.

They had similar external influences,

yet also looked to their native USculture and climate to create confident

work with a sense of national identity.

Wright was also asked to buildthe 1905 Unity Temple, a place of

worship for the Universalist Church in

Oak Park. Coming from a long tradition of

Universalists, he accepted the commissionon a very slim budget of $45,000. Due to

these financial constraints Wright built

for the first time with poured concrete.

A square two-storey space housed the

temple of worship and behind it was arectangular parish meeting house for

socialising. The temple of worship had to

seat 400 people yet Wright still managed

to create an intimate space. To enhance

the visual drama, these two structures

were connected by a modest entrancewith low ceiling. The roof of the building

was supported by the four square masses

in the room, the poured concrete walls

therefore became as screens with glasswindows above.

Wright was now a popular and

established architect, but he entereda phase of emotional turmoil in 1909

after falling in love with the wife of a

client and neighbour, Mamah Borthwich

Cheney. Leaving Wrights wife and six

children and closing his studio, thecouple fled to Berlin. During this time

Wright worked on a book of his work for

the Germany publisher Ernst Wasmuth

as well as travelling to Austria, Ita ly and

France. He returned to the US in 1911and managed to secure enough money to

build a home for himself, Manah Cheneyand her two children on land given to

him by his mother at Spring Green in

Wisconsin. He called the house Taliesin,a Welsh word meaning shining brow

and the name of a Welsh bard. However,

tragedy struck at Taliesin when in 1914

a chef, Julian Carleton, murdered Mamah

Borthwick Cheney, her two children andfour others and then set fire to the house.

This period of turbulence in Wrights

private life overlapped with the

commission for the Imperial Hotel

in Tokyo, which consumed him from

1916 to 1922 when he spent a greatdeal of time in Japan overseeing

the work. The hotels owner had

chosen a western architect to bridge

the cultural divide for the western

visitors to Tokyo, and Wright rose tothis challenge. The main feature of

the 100-roomed hotel was the grand

three-storey lobby and two-storey

dining room, ballroom and auditorium.

The use of soft lava block or Oya

stone enabled Wright to use extensivecarving and decoration. When the

Great Kanto earthquake struck Tokyo

in 1923, the floating foundations andreinforced steel construction ensured

that the Imperial was one of the few

buildings to survive, although most of

it was demolished in 1968.

While in Japan, Wright received a

commission from the oil heiress and

theatrical producer, Aline Barnsdall

to build a house, shops and theatre

complex for her in Los Angeles. Onlythe main house, the 1917 Hollyhock

House, and residences A and B

were constructed. Inspired by his

experiences in Japan, Wright had a

new sense of freedom with decorationand applied the abstracted motif of

a hollyhock, a favourite flower of theclient, in cast concrete to parapets,

pinnacles and planters. In form the

Hollyhock House is the link betweenWrights early Prairie Style and his

later textile block concrete houses. It

also reflected his newfound interest

in Mayan temple design.

Returning to the US in 19

took up residence in Losand established a practic

following year he marriewith whom he had lived

Cheneys murder. While w

the Hollyhock House, he four other houses in the

area. In these projects he

new architectural langua

experimented with on thand which he believed to

appropriate to southern

than the neo-Spanish or

houses being built aroun

Wright was inspired by

block and the creative p

this cheap and, generall

material. He designed a

could be moulded on sitand weight determined

easily handled by a sing

Very little skilled labourand the blocks could be

masons mortar course inserted for structural s

After completing his blo

in LA, Wright believed t

future for himself in thereturned to Taliesin.

The hotels owner ha western architect

the cultural divide

western visitors to

and Wright rose to this

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Another ire, this time accidental,destroyed much of Taliesin in 1925 and threw

Wright into debt. His unhappy marriage to

Miriam Noel ended in 1927 and he married

the dancer Olgivanna Hinzenburg. Theirirst years together were dogged by Wrights

inancial dificulties. The combination of

his prolonged absence from the country,

infamous reputation and the economic

depression that followed the Wall Streetcrash of 1929 ensured that commissions

were scarce until the mid-1930s. During this

period he worked on a range of experimental

and speculative designs few of which were

executed, which led to a shift away from thedomestic to larger projects.

Wright also used his fallow period to openan architectural school, the TaliesinFellowship , which taught its studentsthrough doing by balancing academic

achievement with working the land and

sustaining the community. With the helpof his students, Wright was able to work on

larger experimental projects such as 1934s

Broadacre City, his blueprint for an ideal way

of living composed of a continuous grid of

low-rise regional settlements with an acrefor each living plot. A model was made by the

students which toured throughout the US.

Closely related to the principles behind

the Broadacre City was the Usonian Houseproject developed from the early 1930s as a

series of small suburban homes designed to

be affordable to middle-income families with

no servants quarters and a single living room.

The word Usonian came from United States.Wright reworded his mentor Louis Sullivans

famous phrase form follows function

as form and functions are one todescribe the reduced nature of these homes.

Of the dozens of residential commissions

received by Wright in the late 1930s and

1940s the majority were for Usonian homes.

By the time the 1936 Herbert Jacobs House

was built in Madison, Wisconsin the Usonian

template had been fully developed. Forming

an L-shape the loorplan consisted of theliving room on one side and the bedrooms

in the other with a workspace and dining

area in the centre. To save on plumbing costs

the workspace and bathroom were located

close together, and a small basement wasexcavated below the kitchen for a furnace.

The L-shape form also allowed the house

to be placed at the corner of the lot therebycreating more garden space accessed by

French doors. Structurally the supportingelements of the house were brick with the

non-supporting walls made of a plywood

core, covered with building paper for

insulation and waterprooing. The rest ofthe furniture was usually made of plywood

by the client or a local contractor. The

budget for the Jacobs house was $5000 for

construction and $500 for the architects fee.

Most of Wrights residential commissionsin this period were for middle-income

professionals such as teachers and

journalists, with a few from self-made

businessmen like Frederick Robie. The

1935 commission for Fallingwater at MillRun, Pennsylvania from Edgar J. Kaufmann

was an exception and resulted in Wrights

most imaginative solution for a residential

commission which is among his mostfamous buildings.

The son of a successful Pittsburgh

department store owner Kaufmann was

one of the Fellowship apprentices who

participated in the Broadacre City project.He even persuaded his father to fund the

construction of the model for a nati onwide

exhibition tour. The Kaufmanns became

close friends with the Wrights and, by theend of the year, were discussing a project

to design a country house to replace a basic

cottage. Wright wrote to Kaufmann:The visit to the waterfall in the woods

stays with me, and a domicile has taken

vague shape in my mind to the music of the

stream.

The design consisted of reinforcedconcrete cantilevered slabs, anchored

to the cliff that formed terraces hanging

over the waterfall. Between the horizontal

slabs were stone walls that echoed the

cliff side below the waterfall. Each of thethree levels had its own terrace and an

outside stairway leading to other terraces

and balconies. The lines of the building

were rounded and gentle in contrastto the angular inish of Wrights earlier

structures. The stone work was built up in

layers with some stones raised proud to

create a rough surface as if just hewn from

the quarry.

As ever Wright was concerned with

creating an interior living space that was

practical and comfortable. Gravity heat was

installed by placing coils of pipes underthe concrete slab loor. When organic

architecture is properly carried out no

landscape is ever outraged by it but is

always developed by it, said Wright.

The good building makes the landscapemore beautiful than it was before the

building was built. This was Wrights

achievement atFallingwater.

The visit to the waterfall in the woods stays

with me, and a domicile has taken vague

shape in my mind to the music of the stream.

-FLWFallingwater

(pictured above)

Mill Run, PA

From the early 1940s to his deathin 1959, Wright was extraordinarily proliicand designed almost 500 projects, almost

half of his total output. By far the most

famous is the 1956 Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum in New Yorkcommissioned by the

eponymous art collector and his curator Hilla

Rebay. As the narrow Manhattan plot required

the design to be vertical and not horizontal,

from the beginning Wright envisaged acontinuous ramp circling around the centre of

the interior.

Yet it took an immense struggle to see

the building he wanted accepted andconstructed. Guggenheim accepted the

design but after his death in 1949 Wright

had to persuade a dubious board of trustees

that the building was viable. Several changes

were made as more land was acquired andseven complete sets of drawings were made

before construction began in August 1956.

The building was completed in 1959, six

months after Wrights own death.

Moulded concrete reinforced by steel created

the plastic curvilinear forms. What Wright

described as the box with its use of post

and beam construction was completelyoverturned at the Guggenheim where one

loor lows gently into another. The walls of

the building were slightly sloped back to give

the effect of a painting on an easel.

Like some small object from nature, a leaf or

egg, the Guggenheim design is complex yet

simple - as if Wright had bought a little slice

of nature to a corner of New York City.

One of Wrights last projects was his irst

government building, the 1957 Marin CountyCivic Centre at San Rafael, California. He

was asked to build a centralised home for

13 thirteen county departments with an

administration building, a hall of justice and

preliminary plans for a theatre, auditorium,fairground pavilion and lagoon on a hilltop

and valley site spread over three hills.

Contrasting forms distinguished the various

functions of the buildings.

The central features were a huge lattened

dome and adjacent high tower, a long thin

administration building and hall of justice.

Constructed in pre-cast pre-stressedconcrete and steel this group of buildings

revealed Wrights mastery of a complex set of

buildings with a heavy list of requirements.

The County Board had expected Wright

to latten the hill tops to create an easierplot for building but he was inspired by the

awkward site and produced a set of buildings

that are bold and almost futuristic in their

design and setting.

Frank Lloyd Wright diedthe age of 92. Despite the ldips in his career he had cont

and building for 70 years and

left a thriving practice. Unlikewho perhaps are remembere

decade of work Wright was ab

his architecture moved with t

requirements of a fast- movinthe newest materials and tech

poured concrete to under loo

happy to design for all income

Yet Wright was not a mainstrehis deep love of nature and se

stronger than his desire for th

a romantic who wanted to cha

emotional qualities. A house a

family was an almost sacred pof a ire at its heart.

Indeed it is his romantic and e

to architecture and its environ

Wrights work seem particula

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