WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD 1867-1959

Architect

America's Premier Architect

One of the world's most famous architects, Frank Lloyd Wright had a profound and enduring effect on Western architecture. His professional career spanned seventy years, starting with a revival of past styles and continuing through the beginnings of modern architecture, a movement in which he played a major role. Throughout his career he maintained a strong reverence for life and nature. His architecture was always far ahead of the work of other architects. He was a creative innovator and experimented throughout his long career with structure, using great steel and concrete cantilevers and poured concrete. He was one of the first architects to see the design capability of concrete blocks, designing buildings of custom-cast blocks with patterns. He also introduced open planning in buildings, letting spaces flow into each other rather than enclosing them with walls. He was interested in machines and was an early advocate of factory-manufactured products in his buildings.

Early Life

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on 8 June 1867. His father deserted the family when Wright was sixteen. His mother was a strong-willed woman who had decided that her son should become an architect. Starting when he was seven, his mother tutored him in the art of building designs by playing with blocks and paper, a technique originated by Friedrich Froebel. Using a basic set of blocks and other simple materials, Wright drew plans for buildings and constructed them, furniture and all. At eighteen he went to Chicago to work in the offices of Louis H. Sullivan. As a designer and draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright worked on some of their finest buildings, such as the Wainwright Building (1891) in Saint Louis. Most important, he absorbed much of the philosophy, design principles, and engineering knowledge of the two partners. He left the firm in 1893 to set up his own practice.

The Prairie Style

During his early career Wright worked from a studio in downtown Chicago. He designed houses, gradually developing what he called his Prairie Style, which adopted the horizontal lines of the Great Plains. He also built the Larkin Building (1904) in Buffalo and the Robie House (1907) in Chicago. Throughout these years he developed his mature philosophy of an organic architecture, an architecture that grew like living organisms by adaptation to specific environments, sites, uses, and materials.

Wright's Mature Period

The second, or mature, period of Wright's career began when, in 1911, he built his home and studio, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. It burned twice and was rebuilt each time. Notable buildings from this period include Midway Gardens (1914), a great indoor and outdoor amusement center in Chicago; the Imperial Hotel (1922) in Tokyo, which survived the great earthquake of 1923; and the Millard House (1923) in Pasadena, California.

Usonian

Faced with fewer commissions in the 1930s, Wright started a new series of houses he called Usonia, a term for the United States used by Samuel Butler in his 1872 novel, Erewhon. Usonia was Wright's utopian vision of an American democracy in which life was led closer to nature, where architecture supported community, and where every family had a beautiful home. With these houses, many of which were in California, Wright pioneered the custom-designed concrete block, a material no other architect used toward such aesthetic ends. At the end of the decade he produced some of his finest buildings. He designed what many view as a residential masterpiece, the Kaufmann House (1936), called Fallingwater because it was built over a waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. In 1939 he completed the Johnson Wax Company Administration building in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1940 he started the designs for Florida Southern University at Lakeland, which was completed in 1952. He also began work on his own winter house and school, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1939, on which he worked until his death in 1959. In 1949, when he was eighty years old, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects.

Sources:

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942);

Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright; His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979).

Frank Lloyd Wright 1867-1959, American architect, b. Richland Center, Wis. Wright is widely considered the greatest American architect. After studying civil engineering at the Univ. of Wisconsin, he worked for seven years in the office of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan in Chicago.

The Prairie Style

Wright's first independent commission was the Winslow residence (1893) in River Forest, Ill. Establishing himself in Oak Park, Ill., he built a series of residences with low horizontal lines and strongly projecting eaves that echoed the rhythms of the surrounding landscape; it was termed his prairie style. The most famous examples are located in Chicago and its suburbs; they include the Willitts house (1900?-1902), Highland Park; the Coonley house (1908), Riverside; and the Robie house (1909), Chicago.

Innovative Techniques and Styles

From the beginning Wright practiced radical innovation both as to structure and aesthetics, and many of his methods have since become internationally current. At a time when poured reinforced concrete and steel cantilevers were generally confined to commercial structures, Wright did pioneer work in integrating machine methods and materials into a true architectural expression. He was the first architect in the United States to produce open planning in houses, in a break from the traditional closed volume, and to achieve a fluidity of interior space by his frequent elimination of confining walls between rooms. For the Millard house (1923) at Pasadena, Calif., he worked out a new method, known as textile-block slab construction, consisting of double walls of precast concrete blocks tied together with steel reinforcing rods set into both the vertical and the horizontal joints.

Important Works

The Larkin Office Building (1904; destroyed 1950), Buffalo, and Oak Park Unity Temple (1908), near Chicago, were early monumental works that exerted wide influence. Among other notable works are the Imperial Hotel (1916-22; demolished 1968; partially reconstructed, Meiji Mura Mus., Inuyama, Japan), Tokyo, Japan, which withstood the effects of the 1923 earthquake; the Midway Gardens (1914; destroyed 1923), Chicago; and Wright's own residence "Taliesin" (1911; twice burned and rebuilt) at Spring Green, Wis. Among his later projects were "Taliesin West" (1936-59), Scottsdale, Ariz. (which has continued since his death as a school of architecture); the Johnson administration building (1936-39; research tower, 1950), Racine Wis.; and the house for Edgar Kaufmann, "Fallingwater" (1936-37), Bear Run, Pa., which is dramatically cantilevered over a waterfall.

After World War II, Wright continued a large and ever-inventive practice until his death. He created dynamic interior spaces with spiral ramps for the V. C. Morris Gift Shop (1948-49), San Francisco, and for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1946-59), New York City. Other notable later buildings include a Unitarian church (1947), Madison, Wis.; the Price Tower (1955), Bartlesville, Okla.; and Beth Sholom Synagogue (1959), Elkins Park, Pa. He left numerous unrealized projects, including one for a mile-high skyscraper ( "The Illinois" ) for Chicago and an ambitious design for a civic center in Madison, Wis. The latter was later reconceived as the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center and opened in 1997.

Writings and Bibliography

Wright's architectural philosophy was expressed in his lectures and writings. Among them are On Architecture (1941); When Democracy Builds (1945); Genius and the Mobocracy (1949, enl. ed. 1971), an evaluation of his master Louis H. Sullivan; The Future of Architecture (1953); An American Architecture (1955); and A Testament (1957). His influence can be seen throughout Europe. Volumes illustrative of his works were published in France and Germany as early as 1910. In 1995 about 5,000 of his architectural drawings were published in CD-ROM form as Frank Lloyd Wright: Presentation and Conceptual Drawings.

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959), Wisconsin‐born architect, began work as an assistant to Louis Sullivan (1887–94). He developed a Prairie style having low horizontal lines to harmonize with the Midwestern landscape, large windows, open terraces, and interiors treated as unified flowing space. His cantilever construction and poured and reinforced concrete also illustrate his creed that form should follow function. After 1910 he replaced his simple surfaces by external ornamentation, as in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel (1916–22), also known for the floating cantilever construction, which enabled it to withstand the earthquake of 1923. During the 1920s, he stressed patterned blocks of precast concrete, reinforced at the joints, which produced an austere effect, as in the Millard house (1921). Later he became more occupied with homes and office buildings that achieve their effect mainly through the disposition of masses and the frank emphasis upon modern materials rather than decoration. His books include Modern Architecture (1931), An Autobiography (1932, revised 1943), Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture (1941), When Democracy Builds (1945), revised as The Living City (1958), and The Natural House (1954). He was the inspiration for the hero of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead and of Meyer Levin's novel The Architect.