Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

Over sixty years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright continues to be recognized as the greatest architect of the Twentieth Century. His seventy-two year career was punctuated with worldwide fame, hostile derision, and artistic triumphs. Wright’s acknowledged masterpieces outnumber the entire output of many other architects. And the complete body of his work was so vast that historians now summarize his career into three “Golden Ages.”

Though actually born in 1867, he consistently lied that his birth was 1869 to make himself seem like more of a prodigy. He needn’t have fibbed, though, as he’s still thought by historians to have been the greatest American architect and certainly belongs in the global architectural pantheon with Andrea Palladio, Christopher Wren, or Mies van der Rohe.

CAREER

The career of Frank Lloyd Wright commenced after only a few months of college course work at the University of Wisconsin, when he apprenticed to Chicago architect, J. Lyman Silsbee.

His first buildings, like those of Silsbee, were in the prevailing shingle style of Queen Anne architecture. In February 1888, though, he found a position with Adler and Sullivan, one of Chicago’s most important architectural firms. Louis Sullivan became for Wright the only other architect he consistently admired, always referring to him as “Lieber Meister.” Silsbee Queen Anne 1885

The two formed a design synergy that surpassed the usual employee hierarchy, and where Wright often felt he was “the pen in the master’s hand.”

The egocentric Wright’s talent, however, was far too advanced to continue in an apprenticeship with anyone for long and he began taking on independent design jobs in secret.

The discovery of these “bootleg houses” resulted in his termination from Adler and Sullivan and the startup of his own firm at age 26. Though the two wouldn’t speak for years after this indignation, Wright’s first house after leaving Sullivan hinted at the master’s influence, marking the 1893 William Winslow House of River Forest as perhaps the most “Sullivanian” of Wright’s great early houses. William Winslow House 1893

His first independent commission was, for its time, totally modernistic but in retrospect, another page in the Sullivan notebook and somewhat resembling the Ottoman Pavilion of the World’s Fair of 1893. Not yet a Prairie house, it nevertheless stretched the hip roof over a symmetrical Roman brick base and, interspersed within its modeled frieze, the beginnings of ribbon windows just under that roof. Ottoman Pavilion Columbian Exposition 1893

Being 800 miles from the East Coast was just far enough away for Chicago to innovate architectural solutions by clients hating the idea of a pseudo European villa as their dream home. The wealthy businessmen wanted to create modern buildings for themselves and as an architect needs brave, moneyed clients to stretch the acceptable limits, Frank Lloyd Wright found them in the Chicago area.

The Midwestern environment and pioneer mindset opened Wright to several major developments in his aesthetic. Gone was any vestige of the Queen Anne vocabulary or Greek revival plan. Instead of defined “rooms” he worked in volumetric spaces. Picturesque silhouettes of turrets and finials were replaced with hovering planes in command of rhythmic vertical elements. He had found that the “geometry” of architecture was more compelling than any formulaic application of traditional grammar and could be customized to the setting, the uses, and the client.

WORLD’S FAIR When Daniel Burnham’s Neoclassical Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago in 1893, Wright found one building irresistible, the “Ho-o-den” Japanese pavilion standing alone on the lagoon’s “Wooded Isle.” Seeing the traditional wooden structure of simple post and beam construction, nearly invisible walls and its wide eaves embracing the landscape, he may have had the inspiration for his first Prairie houses created a few years later. Ho-o-den Japanese Pavilion 1893

Although Wright wouldn’t have credited another culture with his inventions, the 1893 Japanese Pavilion and the authentic 17th century Katsura Villa near Kyoto are probably his influences for his early 20th century Prairie Houses. By 1900, Wright considered closed rooms too confining and he became more interested in volumetric intermingling with open spaces encircling a central hearth. Katsura Villa circa 1690

PRAIRIE SCHOOL

After a few years of refined experimentation, Frank Lloyd Wright began the 20th century by transforming architecture into a modern language with new rules of grammar. The more avant-garde architects and designers in the Midwest followed Wright’s lead as well as the latest ideas flowing out of Europe to create a new direction for architecture: the Prairie School.

Primarily used in suburban houses, the Prairie vocabulary challenged the rigid demarcation of rooms by eliminating wall partitions to let the living spaces flow together seamlessly. Carpets, textiles, and art glass shared similar motifs and color was limited to muted earth tones instead of the riotous palettes and clashing styles of fashionable upscale houses. The building materials were limited to those found in the immediate area; brick, if the earth yielded clay; stone, if the ground was rocky; and natural, not painted wood, from nearby trees. These elements, used logically, became one definition of his new concept: “Organic Architecture.”

20th CENTURY

Wright’s self-described “New School of the Middle West” became known in Europe from articles published in the “International Studio.” Deep currents of Modernism were coursing through Austria and Germany with designers Adolf Loos, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser leading a crusade for the avant-garde. And Scotland’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh demonstrated with his astonishing interiors that Modernism was a force that defied traditional environments.

The year 1900 arrived with Wright establishing his artistic primacy with the first of many Prairie houses and landmark office and apartment buildings.

LARKIN BUILDING

His new vocabulary was applied to Buffalo’s 1904-06 Larkin Administration Building, the first modern office building of the 20th century. Each floor of the five-story building was built with ten-inch thick slabs of reinforced concrete modules on 24-inch wide steel beams and the entire exterior was covered in dark red bricks to match the Larkin Warehouse across the street. The masonry of the $4,000,000 building used pink-tinted mortar and its roof was paved with brick.

Its interior, however, was far from the looks of its forbidding and nearly windowless façade. Flooded with light, its open “nave” of five floors was surrounded by airy balconies coated in buff-colored semi-glazed brick. The top floor housed a kitchen, bakery, dining room, classrooms, a conservatory, and a branch of the public library.

Because it was to be built next to a smoky and noisy railroad yard, its windows were sealed and the first practical air purifying system was installed to regulate its atmosphere. He poured a mixture of concrete and “Magnesite” on the floors. And built-in metal furnishings and wall-hung toilets made it easier to maintain.

ILLINOIS

His monolithic concrete 1906-08 Unity Temple in Oak Park updated the church as a formalist exercise in simple cubic volumes and horizontal planes, utilizing reusable concrete forms in modular arrangements.

Unity Temple 1905-08

Unity Temple interior

Wright was now the preferred architect modernist clients requested to create their visions of this new century. And the 1908 Frederick Robie House in Hyde Park capped this period with one of the most sublime urban house ever conceived.

Robie House interior 1908

Robie House today

Mamah Borthwick Cheney circa 1900

MAMAH BORTHWICK CHENEY The prolific Wright, an accomplished draftsman at 20 and an established architect by 26, had fed his ego and pocketbook with a string of acclaimed houses for important individuals. His personal life, though, was anything but settled. The lovely wife of client Edwin Cheney, whose 1903 Oak Park house was being designed with Mamah Borthwick Cheney’s considerable input, turned his head. Conservative Oak Park was appalled when Wright left his wife and six children to live openly with Mrs. Cheney. This major social transgression, along with his discontent at not progressing to major, corporate clients downtown, led to the end of his Oak Park practice in 1909.

WASMUTH PORTFOLIO

Wright had arranged a publication deal with Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth, to produce the definitive architectural monograph of his career. Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, otherwise known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, was produced in 1910 when Wright was only 43 years old.

Sequestered in Italy and utilizing the few renderers remaining in his Studio as well as his gifted young son, Lloyd, Wright feverishly reproduced idealized versions of his best Prairie works for the high quality lithographs to be used in the two-volume portfolio. He retreated to a Tuscan villa to refine the images before publication in Berlin, incidentally finding new inspiration among the medieval stones of Florence and Fiesole, Italy.

As a longtime collector of Japanese woodblock prints, Wright tried to approximate a similar aesthetic in his monograph. Each of the plates, showing a perspective in a natural landscape, a detail, or a floor plan, was to be a complete story of a building that could stand alone as an art object. The completed book remains his greatest work of illustration art.

The portfolio’s arrival on the drafting boards of European modernists was a sensation, allegedly inspiring already gifted architects to transformations of their own. A somewhat apocryphal story was that sharing the same Berlin office of Peter Behrens, and discovering this work together, were Walter Gropius and young men who would later be known as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and “Le Corbusier.”

The truth, however, was that Gropius had already left Behren’s employment at that time and Mies and Jeanneret barely met. But Mies’ architecture of the Bismarck Memorial shortly later shows a pronounced Larkin Building seed.

TALIESIN EAST

There were no cheering crowds upon his return. Having poisoned the well of Oak Park clients and confronting an office nearly empty of draftsmen, he and Mrs. Cheney left for his boyhood home near Spring Green, Wisconsin. In 1911, on the brow of the most scenic hill acquired by his mother, Anna, and overlooking his family’s valley, he began to build Taliesin, a self-sufficient farm that also combined home and studio into his own private Xanadu. Throughout his life, Taliesin would remain his anchor and design laboratory.

It would distill Wright’s Prairie House on a true Wisconsin Prairie (albeit with hills as a scenic backdrop). He would also use the native limestone in slabs pulled out here and receding there (called “pop-out” technique), as load-bearing piers for a caravan of low-hipped roofs.

Taliesin Hill Tower in Winter 1911

Taliesin 1911

Though the windows underneath them would lack the stained glass and bronze caming of some of his client’s houses, his would be ribbons of plate glass with cinematic views of the landscape.

The finishing touch was a life-size sculpture flanking the carriageway, “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” in a plaster cast of the terra-cotta version of 1902 by Richard Bock. Until Wright worked in 1914 with Alfonso Iannelli and his “Sprite” figures for Midway Gardens, this was as close as he would get to the fusion of the human form and geometry.

Though The Wasmuth Portfolio had convinced Europe of Wright’s leadership in modern American architecture, his stature here in the States had plunged as a result of his social indiscretions. His once radical houses had become less alluring to potential clients increasingly drawn to the comfort food of colonial American and vernacular European styles.

MIDWAY GARDENS

Edward C. Waller, Jr., was the son of a Wright client. He had an idea for a spectacular indoor/outdoor entertainment venue and the old Sans Souci Amusement Park on Chicago’s South Side at 60th and Cottage Grove was a big enough site at nearly two square blocks to build it.

The 1913-14 entertainment complex gave to Wright the opportunity to answer Europe’s brand of Modernism with his own. “Geometricizing” both his architecture and the symbols of the human body sculpted by Alfonso Iannelli as rooftop and indoor finials meant he responded to Europe’s “Constructivism” with a particularly American approach. Waller couldn’t keep the Gardens open and in 1916, it was sold as a beer hall to the Edelweiss Brewing Company. Midway Gardens 1914

Built of load-bearing yellow brick and monolithic concrete, it would be nearly impossible to demolish by its demise in 1929 and was reported to have bankrupted the company doing it.

TRAGEDY In August of 1914, while Wright was working at Midway Gardens, a deranged servant set fire to Taliesin after blocking all but one of the exits for escape. In the rush to flee the burning building, seven people were butchered by the crazed man, including Mrs. Cheney and her two children. Wright immediately raced to Wisconsin to deal with the event, no doubt assumed by his old Oak Park neighbors to be Divine retribution. But other than a few Prairie Houses built, the lack of commissions here resulted in his flight to Japan and the multiyear project to design Tokyo’s spectacular Imperial Hotel. Imperial Hotel 1916

CALIFORNIA After returning from Japan, Los Angeles, formerly home to two of his sons and now the location of one of them, became the focus of a new burst of artistic endeavor by the 1920s. For some of his new clients there, he employed a cast stone “textile block” method of building concrete block reinforced walls, ironically adapted from those sons’ experiments in modular construction. Ennis House Textile Block 1923-24

John Lloyd had invented “Lincoln Logs,” still sold in toy stores, and Lloyd had already been using a cast stone modular unit he’d named “Knit Blocks.” Whatever the inspiration, Wright’s new method was perfectly in tune with the sunny environment and ancient context of indigenous American construction, imparting a somewhat Aztec/Mayan look to these spectacular hillside houses.

FALLINGWATER

The 1935-36 weekend retreat Wright designed for Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store mogul and the father of one of his young apprentices, became America’s most famous modern house and his thumb in the eye to the new “International Style.”

On what had been his company’s vacation property, Kaufmann showed Wright his Pennsylvania vacation spot. Responding to the geological strata of the site, Wright’s mastlike tower of stacked Pottsville sandstone held aloft three cantilevered levels in reinforced concrete hovering over the Bear Run valley, a tiny river that exploded into a graceful waterfall on the Kaufmann’s favorite parcel of land.

He expressed the rocky site by metaphorically lifting the stones out of the riverbed to create the interior floor planes. He showcased the largest rock, the Kaufmann’s choice spot to sunbathe (still anchored into the hill), as the hearthstone for the living room fireplace. And instead of orienting the structure to face the falls, Wright floated the entire structure over the falls, merging the house inseparably into the total natural picture. Wright had procrastinated about the design drawings until the last hours when Kaufmann had called from Milwaukee and wanted to come to Taliesin to see what the architect had wrought. Building lore has it that Wright captioned the bottoms of the drawings with “Fallingwater” just as Kaufmann’s car pulled into the driveway. The architect was reported to have told the astonished Kaufmann, on presenting the hastily drawn plans, “I want you to live with the waterfall. Not just look at it.” Fallingwater 1936

The tower is a sandstone hinge holding the stacked cantilevered trays like a tree holds out branches and contains cave-like kitchen, dressing room, study, and fireplaces whose flat sandstone rocks pulled out here and there mimic the stone ledges of the property and are constructed like Wright’s Taliesin limestone walls of 1911.

Not everything went well between Wright and Kaufmann, however. His earliest idea was to coat the cantilevers in gold leaf, settling on buff-cream in the end. But construction drawings for the concrete apparently didn’t specify enough rebar rods for the spooked Kaufmann and incredulous contractor. That led to vituperative letters between Wright and the department store magnate.

While Wright was away on a trip, some of his own Taliesin apprentices along with the engineers on site surreptitiously added more steel rods to the cantilever’s interior beams. Even so, they began to sag precariously as the supports were removed. The daring cantilevers aren’t monolithic concrete slabs, though. Mostly built of structural beams on top of thinner slabs, their weight is a fraction of that for full concrete slabs. And in addition to that lighter weight, the cavities made by the beams and joists formed airspaces under the redwood subfloor supporting the flagstones for a warmer than usual touch under bare feet. Fallingwater interior 1936

Kaufmann’s family moved in on Christmas 1937 and the final cost was $155,000. In January 1938, Wright and the house were celebrated in four magazines and countless articles with both the architect and the color rendering of the house gracing the cover of “Time” magazine.

In 1991, the American Institute of Architects voted it the country’s most significant building.

Even though extra steel had been installed inside the beams by engineers in 1936, by 1997 the most daring living room and master bedroom terrace cantilevers had sagged seven inches or two degrees.

After exhaustive measurements, it was decided to thread steel cable at the sides of the cantilever beams longitudinally and several concrete joists laterally in a “post-tension” method. In the end, the cantilevers were only raised three-quarters of an inch but the sagging had stopped. Fallingwater view 1936

As Wright wanted, the rooms are filled with the sound of the waterfall. In 2019, Fallingwater joined with seven other Wright buildings to comprise the addition of “The 20th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright” to the Unesco list of World Heritage Sites. They are added to a list of spectacular structures like the Taj Mahal and Parthenon.

Regarded as the greatest 20th century house ever built, Fallingwater resurrected Wright’s career and his image in the public consciousness, punctuating for historians his “Second Golden Age.”

USONIAN HOUSE

At the beginning of his career, Frank Lloyd Wright became known for his custom dream homes for the wealthy. But also like an over-imaginative child, only with an actual architect’s tools, Wright had dreamed up a new nation called “Usonia.” Here and there within it he had designed an ideal city more dependent on open space called “Broadacre City.”

By the mid-thirties he felt that quality design should not be dependent on a large budget. He invented a spare, efficient, modular based concept for building for $5,000 that would provide a homeowner all the luxuries that counted in his early houses: interpenetrating spaces, extravagant light, varied ceiling heights, and the all-important central hearth. Jacobs Usonian 1936

His name for this type of building was a modified acronym for his dream country: “United States of North America.” That the Usonian House was an alliterative cousin to “utopian” could only enhance its marketing appeal.

Built on a concrete slab, it was closer to the ground and thus more interactive with nature. Early Usonians abandoned the pinwheel plan of the Prairie houses, opting for L-shaped or linear plans that reduced the sleeping areas to small cells. Wright opened the kitchen or “workspace” into the largest floor areas devoted to living and dining. Traditional walls built of 2 x 4 studs were replaced inside and out with layered plywood and board panels that self-insulated against wind or sound and used today as “SIPs” or “Structural Insulated Panels.”

JOHNSON WAX HEADQUARTERS

After Fallingwater, the other great structure of the thirties that cemented his newfound fame was Racine’s 1939 Johnson Wax company headquarters, whose mushroom columns and Pyrex clerestories transformed the modern office workspace into a cathedral of the future.

In 1936, Herbert (“Hib”) F. Johnson, Jr., the youngish president of the family company, S.C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin, hired Wright to design what he specified be the “...best office building in the world.” Though Wright lobbied for his building to sit in acres of forest, Johnson insisted it be in the crumbling city and the footprint of his company’s demolished factory and already prepared site.

Wright obliged by turning the entire red brick (Cherokee red) building into an isolated fortress with few windows facing outward. And since there was no view in the desolate factory neighborhood, this would be an opportunity to hermetically seal off the building for underfloor steam heating in winter and chilled and dried air for summer temperatures.

But he also had another idea. Like his 1904-06 Larkin building in Buffalo, the spatial drama would be front and center in a magnificent, central open space flooded with light. Johnson Wax interior 1936-39

Wright had been impressed with the space and abstracted light inside the European cathedrals he’d seen in 1910 and instilled that feeling in this building. Also, the actual “Organic” architecture of a forest of trees and its filtered sunlight became another metaphor for its construction.

Wright instituted a veritable forest of tree-like “dendriform” columns supporting its vast 21-foot high ceiling with skylights of Pyrex glass tubes in between the topmost discs to filter sunlight down the middle. After the initial design process, though, fluorescent lamps were inserted between the two layers of Pyrex tubes for lighting on dark days.

The curtainwalls of Cherokee Red face brick were a sandwich comprised of asphalt soaked cork inside an interior of face brick as well. Topped by Pyrex tube clerestories on both lower and mezzanine floors, the complete lack of an outside view was reported to increase efficiency by the managers. And resembling modern-day inverted Minoan columns, the buildings’ concrete forests with nine-inch diameter bases topped by 18-foot discs are among the most alluring and astonishing forms in 20th century architecture. He achieved these by reinforcing their hollow concrete construction with steel mesh rather than rods of rebar. But the columns’ seeming fragility wasn’t understood by the Wisconsin State Building Commission, which thought Wright’s method needed a public test requiring a mock-up holding a twelve-ton load. After sixty tons had topped the mock-up before it crashed to the ground, the contrite commission granted a building permit to Johnson and Wright. Johnson Wax column test 1937

The Pyrex tubes, however, proved an unwieldy method for the skylights and clerestories. From the start, the minute gaps of the two-inch and one-inch diameter glass tubes leaked water through the neoprene gaskets. And burned-out fluorescent lighting tubes required expensive removal and replacement of the inner Pyrex layers of both ceiling skylights and wall clerestories.

The building opened in 1939 to great acclaim and cost $500,000 in Depression dollars. When Wright’s three-legged chairs tipped over with the shifting weight of the secretaries using them, he designed four-legged chairs to replace them. Overall, though, the workers in the building initially enjoyed the interior.

By 1957, the company had had enough of the leaking Pyrex tubes in the ceiling and replaced the top layer with rooftop skylights. Wright was infuriated. But the company had learned the lesson of his over-riding aesthetics and solved the inadequate mezzanine heating and cooling with cleverly hidden devices within cabinets.

JOHNSON WAX RESEARCH TOWER

Near the end of 1943, Johnson wrote to Wright about the need for his research department to inhabit their own wing and thought a U-shaped two-story addition might suffice. But since 1936, the architect had thought a pagoda-like tower of up to 15 stories next to the administration building would work. Wright, of course, won out.

The tower floors were designed to also cantilever from a central “taproot” buried into the earth like a tree. But unlike a pagoda’s “heart pillar” of a solid post (usually a tree trunk) at the center designed to gently move in seismic activity, the central member would be a hollow tube carrying plumbing and ventilation conduits and act similar to the main circulatory and breathing systems of a human body.

The final design drawings were completed in 1947 and construction began at the beginning of 1948. The “root” was actually a 54-foot deep concrete cone and disc poured without usual wooden formwork to allow it to meld with the earth. The 153-foot tall tube growing upward was a cluster of 13-foot diameter supply and exhaust spaces and elevator, toilet. and stairway shafts. Six 40-foot square floors alternated with 35-foot diameter round mezzanines to form 13 floors of research levels in the 15-story building. Wrapped in Cherokee Red face brick parapets, 17.5 miles of Pyrex tubing, and opened in 1950, the “Johnson Research Tower” had cost $3.5 million or nearly five times its estimated cost. Johnson Wax Research Tower 1943-50

In 1982, city safety inspectors said if the tower was to remain in use, an exterior fire escape needed to be erected beside it. As Johnson Wax saw from the start, the look of the entire complex of buildings was as important to its P.R. as the company’s scientific innovations. It was then decided to relocate the many researchers to a building nearby and close the tower.

Veritably sealed tight, the tower was restored and by 2013 once again a lighted beacon for the company’s public relations. Wright’s poetic forms of the new Modernism were the direct opposite to the cold austerity of the International Style. Both Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax headquarters became icons for an America remaking its image into a technological, political, and cultural powerhouse.

TALIESIN WEST

From the late-twenties on, Wright had led his Taliesin entourage to the Arizona desert during the Winter and an approximation of an Arabian fantasy he called “Ocotilla Camp.” By the early-thirties, the beauty of the landscape and the desire to avoid Wisconsin’s harsh winter season led him to invent the Taliesin “Fellowship” and, in 1939, construct his new base, Taliesin West, near Scottsdale.

His past fame was re-ignited by a new generation of young architects, eager to actually pay for the privilege of sitting at the feet of the great man. There would be plenty of opportunities for foot sitting, but his other goal was to have strong, youthful bodies digging foundations, gathering stones and otherwise constructing his new desert fantasy. Wright invented a method of inverted formwork holding rocks, gathered on the surrounding land, and binding cement to create, upon peeling away the forms, “Desert Masonry.” On top of this were angular wooden trusses initially holding taut canvas roofs simulating the blinding white tenting of his 1929 Ocatilla Camp. Taliesin West Bell Tower 1939

By his late sixties, Wright was the most famous architect in the world, pictured on the cover of Time. Twice before considered passé, this supremely egocentric artist had been vindicated in his sense of self-esteem and has since been widely considered the greatest living architect of his time.

The 1940s and 1950s were his final years of experimentation and the “Third Golden Age” historians have named. But Wright could not rest on all the laurels he’d accumulated through his astonishing career. So many people vied to have the master design their houses that Wright had the luxury to choose which clients would have that privilege. He customized his Usonian houses to a wider range of wealth than those initial utopian versions for the common man, expanding the modules into myriad triangles, circles, and parallelograms. Taliesin West 1939

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

The major project that consumed most of his last years, however, was his long gestation and construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Initially commissioned in 1943 and finally opened in 1959, Wright fought through a decade of zoning battles with the city and many design revisions and parcel acquisitions until he arrived at the final concept and one of his greatest buildings.

Like the exterior of reinforced concrete in all his colorful iterations (even shocking pink), he designed the interior of the main gallery with the material for canted walls and continuous ramp floor to be as other-worldly and abstract as the non-objective art collection it would hold. But after Guggenheim died in 1949, the estate was in the hands of his heirs who removed the museum’s first director and guiding light, Hilla Rebay, and her apartment there from further involvement. In 1951, Solomon’s nephew, Harry Guggenheim had acquired two more 5th Avenue buildings so Wright could expand the museum’s footprint and achieve the huge spiraling form Wright called “The Grand Ramp.” Guggenheim Museum early rendering 1940s

He now had the entire 5th Avenue block between 88th and 89th Streets for the project so he flipped the spiral rotunda to the 88th Street corner for a larger structure that has become one of the most photographed buildings in New York.

But one of the last design revisions was for the elimination of the planned interior plywood formwork for pouring concrete traditionally. To shave costs, he’d decided to spray the outer plywood canted vertical walls with five inches of Gunite or “shotcrete.” The 13 1/2-inch thick horizontal ramp would still be made in a poured-in-place method but the Gunite sprayed walls of concrete would be denser, thinner, and lighter. Guggenheim Museum model 1953

After the exterior plywood forms were removed and their joints ground down, a membrane of buff colored polyurethane, called “Cocoon” formed a waterproof coating that remained for nearly fifty years.

The heirs also fundamentally changed the collection to completely alter the method of its display and to be more in tune with a Museum of Modern Art approach of flat gallery walls. Rebay’s replacement removed Wright’s easel-like presentation of leaning the paintings back into their niches and covered the curving wall with a straight wall of plastered lathe and also replaced Wright’s natural lighting at its edges with an artificial light. Guggenheim Museum interior 1959

But to use a concept all international museums employed then and the most egregious change to an architect was in redesigning the entire color of Wright’s buff-cream interior with dead white paint.

Even with its design changes, Wright freed museum architecture from adhering to any universal style and it became the most expressionistic architecture in the museum boom years of the nineteen-eighties and nineties.

Wright also ignored the unrelenting orthogonal grid of Manhattan real estate in its exterior and traditional museum presentation in the interior to create a continuous spiral gallery around a monumental central space. Along the Central Park site, its off-white, splayed and rounded parapets counterpointed the rectilinear masonry cliff of apartment buildings on both sides much as an obviously man-made Fallingwater effected as it floated above its natural waterfall. Guggenheim Museum section 1959

Finally, Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrated his magic on a New York stage, and did it on one of the most prominent sites in the city. His virtuoso result led many to criticize that the museum building itself was the greatest holding in the collection, overshadowing the modern art it displayed. In any case, the Guggenheim Museum achieved instant legitimacy in the public art consciousness and continues to push the boundaries of architecture in its worldwide locations.

LEGACY

When Wright died in 1959 at ninety-two, he certainly entered into the pantheon of the greatest artists in world history if he hadn’t already. In architecture, his influence is felt whenever building must respect the natural environment.

Architecture is the unifying force of art and science. Technology must seamlessly merge into aesthetics for architecture to become, as the Greeks believed, the greatest of all the arts. Frank Lloyd Wright is an important artist because he crossed all disciplines and found each one to be a link in a great chain. Painting and drawing, sculpture and music, performance and spectacle, even geometry and physics; all are quests for beauty.

Nature itself has an architecture that Wright clearly understood. Perhaps his greatness lay in the simple fact that his own creativity was intertwined so completely within its language.

The Twentieth Century was an ocean of change in world history. Frank Lloyd Wright is the bridge that connects an architecture of antiquity to an architecture of personal expression. To this day, Wright’s influence on Modernism remains unchallenged.