Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (pronounced [frank lojd rajt]; Richland Center, June 8, 1867 - Phoenix, April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator, who designed more than a thousand structures, of which 532 were completed. Wright advocated the design of structures that were in harmony with humanity and the world. environment that surrounded them, a philosophy known as organic architecture. He was the initiator of the Prairie School movement, developing the Usonian concept of housing. In 2019, eight works by Wright were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

Biography

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois, according to Wright's design (1898).

House of Walter Gale (1893) in Queen Ana style, with windows bands and porch in voladizo according to Wright's aesthetics.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born into a family of Unitarian shepherds of British origin, and spent a good part of his childhood and adolescence on a farm in Wisconsin, in full contact with nature, which years later conditioned his conception of architecture.

He entered to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin, but after two years he decided to drop out and moved to Chicago, where he began working in the studio of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, but considering him too "conventional" an architect », Frank Lloyd Wright decided to leave that job and start working with Louis Sullivan, who had his studio in the Auditorium Building (Chicago) and who is also part of the so-called Chicago School. This man, Frank would remember with affection and respect.

During these years he designed the Winslow House, in River Forest, Illinois, the first of the famous series of prairie dwellings. These are single-family houses, strongly integrated into their environment. The roofs protrude considerably from the facades and the windows form a continuous horizontal sequence. The central nucleus of the houses is constituted by a large chimney, around which the rooms are arranged. Other houses designed in this style were, for example, the Willitts, in Highland Park, Illinois, and the D. Martin, in Buffalo.

Wright created a new concept regarding the interior spaces of buildings, which he applied in his prairie houses, but also in his other works. Wright rejects the previously existing criteria of interior spaces as rooms closed and isolated from the others, and designs spaces in which each room or hall opens up to the others, thereby achieving great visual transparency, a profusion of light and a feeling of spaciousness and openness. To differentiate some areas from others, he uses partitions made of light material or ceilings of different heights, avoiding unnecessary solid enclosures. With all this, Wright established for the first time the difference between «defined spaces» and «closed spaces».

Wright also carefully studied Mayan architecture and applied a reminiscent Mayan style to many of his homes, known as Mayan Revival.

Consecration

Guggenheim Museum, New York, projected by Lloyd and whose construction was completed in 1959, a few months after the architect's death.

Wright left his family in 1909 and traveled to Europe. The following year he presented his work at an architecture and design exhibition in Berlin, where he gained wide recognition. A publication that was published about his works influenced the new generations of European architects.

Back in the United States, he designed his own home, Taliesin, which burned down three times over the years, and was always rebuilt anew by Wright.

The years between 1900 and 1910 cover the so-called classical stage, during which he writes several books and gives some lectures. This period is described by the architect himself as that of the houses on the prairie, due to the large number of summer houses that he built in the woods or next to the lakes of Wisconsin and Michigan and in the wooded suburbs of northern Chicago..

The analysis of the constitution of the materials and the relationship with the natural environment are basic aspects in these constructions; All of them have in common the T or cross-shaped plan, the composition by volumes, the gabled or hipped roof and the covered porches as a spatial continuation of the interior. Among them we can mention the Ward Willits (Highland Park, Chicago, 1902), Glasner (Glencoe, Illinois, 1904), Cooley (Riverside, Illinois, 1908) and Robie (Chicago, 1908) houses.

In 1901 he gave a lecture on Art and Crafts of the Machine, at the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts (published in 1930). In 1904 he built the Larkin factory (Buffalo), with a monumental character, rectangular structure and brick façade. For this building he also designs the furniture, adapting it to his work function. The most famous work from this period is the Unity Temple (Oak Park, 1904), in which he used reinforced concrete for the first time and left the electrical installation visible as an integral part of the architecture and design.

Hotel Imperial, Tokyo (1923).

During the years 1915 to 1922 Wright worked with Antonin Raymond on the Imperial Hotel project in Tokyo, Japan, for which he developed a new method of construction resistant to earthquakes, which consisted of placing its foundations on hydraulic tilting supports whose effectiveness was proven after remaining intact after the earthquake that devastated the city in 1923. This hotel, unfortunately, was demolished in the 60s.

Another innovative project in terms of construction method was the Barnsdall house, in Los Angeles, which was made using precast cement blocks, designed by Wright. This construction method was later applied to other of his works as well. An example is the Millard house, for whose design he created a block with ethnic figures, which he also used as a unit of measure. The block was made with sand from the area, trying to "integrate" the house into its surroundings. Another example is the Ennis-Brown house built with what he called "fabric blocks" and which is the largest of those built in Los Angeles.

When he went through a period in which he did not have many commissions, Wright took the opportunity to write a book on urban planning, which he published in 1932, the year in which he began his Tertulias and the school in Taliesin, through which great architects and 20th century artists such as: John Lautner, E. Fay Jones and Paolo Soleri. Years later he created another center in Arizona and today these are the places where his foundations are.

He definitively established his studio and residence in the farm he built for this purpose in the middle of the Phoenix desert, called Taliesin West (1938-59), in which he achieved the absolute integration of the building into the landscape, and where the model of a city distributed horizontally over the territory and whose inhabitants have cars to move around it.

One of his most outstanding and best-known projects that perpetuates his genius, was carried out between 1935 and 1939. It is the Kaufmann house or Fallingwater house in Bear Run, built on a huge rock, directly above a waterfall on the Bear Creek with a very modern style ahead of its time.

In the following years, Wright designed all kinds of projects, and in all of them he introduced original and advanced criteria for his time. He also wrote other books and numerous articles, some of which have become architectural classics of our time.

Family

House of the Cascada (Fallingwater), Mill Run (1937).

Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times and had seven children, four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Milanoff Svetlana.

His wives were:

• Catherine "Kitty" (Tobin) Wright (1871-1959), a social worker, (cased in June 1889, divorced in November 1922)
• Maude "Miriam" (Noel) Wright (1869-1930), artist (married in November 1923, divorced in August 1927)
• Olga Ivanovna "Olgivanna" (Lazovich Milanoff) Lloyd Wright (1897-1985), dancer and writer (married in August 1928)

One of Wright's sons, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright, was also a noted architect in Los Angeles. A son of Lloyd Wright (and grandson of Wright), Eric Lloyd Wright, is currently an architect in Malibu, where he projects mainly residences, but also civil and commercial buildings.

Another of his architect sons, John Lloyd Wright, created Lincoln Logs in 1918, working primarily in the San Diego area. Frank's granddaughter, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, is an architect in Colorado Springs, Colorado; she is the mother of Christine, an interior designer in Connecticut, and Catherine, a professor of architecture at the Pratt Institute.

Wright designed a home for David Samuel Wright, son of his first marriage to Catherine, and David's wife, Glady.

Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter was Wright's granddaughter. Baxter was the daughter of Catherine Baxter (née Catherine Wright), born of Wright's first marriage. A Baxter daughter, Melissa Galt, lives and works in Atlanta, where she worked as an interior designer.

Her stepdaughter Svetlana (Olgivanna's daughter) and son Daniel were killed in a car accident in 1946. Her widower, William Wesley Peters, later married Svetlana Alliluyeva, the youngest daughter and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. The couple divorced because she was unable to adjust to the communal lifestyle of the Wright communities, compared to her father's life in the Soviet Union, and due to constant interference from Wright's widow. Peters served as President of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation from 1985 to 1991.

A great-grandson of Wright, S. Lloyd Natof, currently lives and works in Chicago as a master carpenter specializing in the design and creation of custom wood furniture.

World Heritage Site

On July 7, 2019, UNESCO declared eight works by Frank Lloyd Wright World Heritage Sites: the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Unity Temple in Oak Park (Illinois); the Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago; the Taliesin House in Spring Green, Wisconsin; the Hollyhock house in Los Angeles; the house of the waterfall (Fallingwater) in Mill Run (Pennsylvania); the Taliesin West house in Scottsdale, Arizona; and the first Herbert and Katherine Jacobs house in Madison, Wisconsin. At its forty-third meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, the World Heritage Committee selected eight of the architect's most emblematic works under the heading The architecture of the century XX by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Unesco describes it like this:

These buildings are a sample of the “organic architecture” conceived by Wright, which is characterized by the open plan of the constructions, the difumination of the limits between the interior and the exterior of these, and the extremely original use of materials such as steel and concrete. The innovative architectural solutions of the “organic architecture” fully met in their day the functional needs of the buildings concerned, whether they were homes, places of work or religious worship, or spaces for playful and cultural activities. Wright's achievements in that decade greatly influenced the evolution of modern architecture in Europe.

Most important works

The Winslow House (1894) was Wright's first major commission.

Nathan G. Moore's house (1895), Oak Park, Illinois.

Casa Ennis, in neomaya style, Los Angeles (1924).

Open office concept in the complex designed by Wright at the Johnson Wax administrative headquarters.

• Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, 1889-1909
• Winslow House, River Forest, 1894
• House Frank W. Thomas, Oak Park, 1901
• Willits House, Highland Park, 1901
• Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, 1902
• Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, 1903 (demolished, 1950)
• Darwin House D. Martin, Buffalo, 1903-1905
• Unity Temple, Oak Park, 1904
• House of Dr. G. C. Stockman, Mason City, 1908
• Edward E. Boynton House, Rochester, 1908
• Robie House, Chicago, 1909
• Park Inn Hotel, the latest standing hotel designed by Wright, Mason City, 1910
• Taliesin House, Spring Green, 1911 & 1925
• Midway Gardens, Chicago, 1913 (demolished, 1929)
• Casa Hollyhock (Aline Barnsdall Residence), Los Angeles, 1919-1921
• Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1923
• Hotel Imperial, Tokyo, Japan, 1923 (demolished in 1968; the hall was rebuilt in Meiji Mura, near Nagoya, Japan, in 1976)
• Graycliff, Derby, 1929
• Westhope (Richard Lloyd Jones Residence, Tulsa, 1929
• House Malcolm Willey 1934, Minneapolis
• Fallingwater (Edgar J. Kaufmann Mr. Residence), Mill Run, 1935-1937
• Johnson Wax Headquarters, Racine, 1936
• Casa Jacobs 1, Madison, 1936-1937
• Housing Usage, several places, 1930 to 1950
• Taliesin West, Scottsdale, 1937
• Herbert F. Johnson Residence ("Wingspread"), Wind Point, 1937
• Ben Rebhuhn House, Great Neck Estates, 1938
• Child of the Sun, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, 1941-1958, site of the largest collection of the architect's work
• First Unitarian Society of Madison, Shorewood Hills, 1947
• V. C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, 1948
• Kenneth Laurent House, Rockford, the only Wright home designed to be accessible to the disabled, 1951
• Patrick and Margaret Kinney House, Lancaster, 1951-1953
• Price Tower, Bartlesville, 1952-1956
• Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, 1954
• Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, 1956-1961
• Kentuck Knob, Ohiopyle, 1956
• Marshall Erdman Prefab Houses, several places, 1956-1960
• Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, 1957-1966
• R.W. Lindholm Service Station, Cloquet, 1958
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Manhattan, 1956-1959
• Gammage Auditorium, Tempe, 1959-1964

The First Unitarian Meeting House, in Madison 1947

Destroyed works

Wright designed more than 400 structures that were built of which some 300 survive as of 2005. At least five have been lost to the forces of nature: W. L. Fuller's waterfront home on Pass Christian, destroyed by Hurricane Camille in August 1969; the Louis Sullivan Bungalow in Ocean Springs, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and the Arinobu Fukuhara House (1918) in Hakone, Kanagawa, Japan, destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. In January 2006, the Wilbur Wynant House in Gary, Indiana was destroyed by fire. In 2018 the complex Arch Oboler in Malibu, was destroyed by the Woolsey fire.

Notable Wright buildings intentionally demolished included: Midway Gardens (built 1913, demolished 1929), Larkin Administration Building (built 1903, demolished 1950), Francis Apartments, and Francisco Terrace Apartments (Chicago, built in 1895, demolished 1971 and 1974, respectively), the Geneva Inn (Lake Geneva, built 1911, demolished 1970), and the Banff National Park Pavilion (built 1914, demolished 1934). The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (built 1923) survived the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, but was demolished in 1968 due to planning pressures. The Hoffman Auto Show in New York City (built 1954) was demolished in 2013.

Works not built or built after Wright's death

The Crystal Heights project in Washington, D.C.

• Crystal Heights, a mixed large urbanization in Washington, D.C., 1940 (not built)
• The Illinois, a 1 mile high tower in Chicago, 1956 (not built)
• Monona Terrace, a convention center in Madison, designed in 1938–1959 and built in 1997
• Clubhouse del Nakoma Golf Resort, Pens County, designed in 1923; open in 2000
• the semi-circular passive house in Hawaii, designed in 1954, built in 1995; the only house of Wright in Hawaii

Legacy

Significance of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was the central figure of the so-called organic architecture, a trend that emblematically represented an alternative point of view and a different aesthetic, somewhat opposed or complementary to rationalist architecture, whose most conspicuous representative was Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

Wright always remained faithful to the individualist ideology of American «pioneerism», which returns to the exaltation and deepening of the relationships between the individual and the architectural space and between it and nature or the natural space, assumed as a fundamental reference of the works themselves. This interest led him to focus on his favorite theme of the single-family house or residence, the « prairie houses », which constituted the determining aspect of his beginnings as an architect.

In his book Organic Architecture (1939), Wright expounds his ideas on architecture; where he postulates an architecture that refuses mere aesthetic research or simple superficial taste , since they are nothing more than external impositions on the relationship between man and nature. The architectural project has to create a harmony between man and nature and build a new system that shows a real balance between the built environment and the environment, through the integration of various artificial or man-made elements (buildings, streets, etc.) within nature. All this is part of a single interconnected system, an organism, the architectural space. The cascade house (The Fallingwater) is the paradigmatic example of this way of doing and understanding architecture.

Acknowledgments

Late in his life (and after his death in 1959), Wright received many honorary awards for his achievements. In 1941 he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects in 1949. That medal was a symbolic "burial of the hatchet" between Wright and the AIA. In a radio interview, he commented: "Well, I never joined the AIA, and they know why." When they gave me the gold medal in Houston, I frankly told them why. Thinking that the architectural profession is the only thing that happens to architecture, why would I join them?". He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Frank P. Brown Medal in 1953. He received honorary degrees from several universities (including his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin), and several nations made him honorary members of their academies national art and/or architecture. In the year 2000, Fallingwater was named "The Building of the 20th Century" in an informal survey of the top ten buildings, conducted by members attending the AIA's annual convention in Philadelphia. On that list, Wright appeared alongside many of America's greatest architects, including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; he was the only architect to have more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House, and the Johnson Wax Building.

In 1992, the Madison Opera House commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon, based on the early events of Wright's life. The work has since had numerous revivals, including a June 2013 revival in Fallingwater at Bull Run by the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. In 2000, the play Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, based on the relationship between the personal and professional aspects of Wright's life, premiered at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

In 1966, the United States Postal Service honored Wright on a series of Prominent Americans 2-cent stamps.

"So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" is a song written by Paul Simon. Art Garfunkel stated that the origin of the song arose from his request that Simon write a song about the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Simon himself stated that he didn't know anything about Wright, but he wrote the song anyway.

In 1957, Arizona was making plans to build a new capitol building. Being of the opinion that the projects presented for the new capitol were tombs to the past, Frank Lloyd Wright offered Oasis as an alternative to the town of Arizona. In 2004, one of the spires included in his design was erected in Scottsdale.

The city of Scottsdale, Arizona renamed a portion of its Bell Road, a major east-west thoroughfare in the Phoenix metropolitan area, after Frank Lloyd Wright.

Already mentioned above is the designation of his eight most notable works as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2019.