Excerpt from David Jameson’s book Decoding Architecture: Why Was It Built That Way?
![]() Frank Lloyd Wright in 1954 ![]() Japanese print by Hokusai 1833-34 ![]() Walter Gale bootleg house 1893 ![]() Heurtley House 1902 ![]() Darwin D. Martin House 1904 ![]() Coonley House 1908 ![]() Wasmuth Portfolio Plate #LVI Coonley House Living Room 1910 ![]() Wasmuth Portfolio Plate #XXXIIIa Larkin Building 1910 ![]() Larkin Building interior 1904 ![]() Taliesin Garden Room 1911 ![]() “Sprite” in Midway Gardens 1914 ![]() La Miniatura rendering 1923-24 ![]() Storer House Textile Block 1923-24 ![]() Fallingwater Bill Hedrich photograph 1937 ![]() Hanna House plan 1937 ![]() Taliesin West Desert Masonry 1939 ![]() Hemicycle House interior 1955 ![]() Beth Shalom Synagogue interior 1959 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. |
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