A FORCE OF NATURE
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Content by Arnt Cobbers Frank Lloyd Wright
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SECOND BLOOM 1935-1943
FALLING WATER HOUSE
Fallingwater is considered one of the most important residences of the 20th century. It was erected between 1936 and 1937 as the weekend retreat for the wealthy department store owner Edgar Kaufmann from Pittsburgh. The story of the design, which has been documented by several Taliesin fellows, has become famous.
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Kaufmann met Wright in 1934 in Taliesin when he was visiting his son Edgar Junior, who was a Taliesin fellow. He commissioned Wright soon after the visit. A few weeks later he called Wright to inquire about the design. Wright replied that the house was finished, even though not one drawing had been completed. Kaufmann got into his car to drive the 140 miles from Milwaukee to Taliesin. Wright hurried to his studio, laid down three sheets of drawing paper and started to draw the floor plans of three floors with quiet and concentrated strokes explaining his concept to the group of fellows who watched spellbound. After two house he was done and told two apprentices to draw views from different directions while he himself welcomed the builder-owner, who had just arrived. Fallingwater should originally have cost 20,000 to 30,000; in the end, the total costs including the guest house built in 1938 amounted to 145,ooo dollars. Fallingwater is built in a low mountain range in south Pennsylvania above a small waterfall. Legend has it that Kaufmann originally wanted to build his house further up but Wright asked him: “You love this waterfall don’t you? Then why build your house miles away, so you will have to walk to it?”
“ Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance. A solid high rock-ledge rising beside a waterfall...The
that rock-bank over the falling water. The first house in my experience built of reinforced concrete—the from took the grammar of that construction.
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Fallingwater presents a myriad of moods, depending on vantage point, season, and time of day. The house is a triumphant unity of opposites—the cool, abstract planes of concrete contrasted with the warm interior lights.
natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from
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Architecture now becomes integral, the expression of ever new-old reality: it lies in the livable interior space of the room itself. In integral architecture the room-space itself must come through. The room must be seen as architecture, or we have no twentieth-century architecture. We have no longer an outside merely as outside. No longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside, and the inside may, and does, go outside. They are of each other. Form and function become one in design and execution if the nature of materials and meth-
The open living room, which measures thirty-five feet with views on all sides, is an elegant synthesis of the dialectic between nature and civilization.
od and purpose are all in unison.
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The hearth was built directly on living rock, which extrudes into the floor. The quarried stone floor leads uninterruptedly outside past the glass doors, and the low ceiling provides a sense of shelter even though the glass walls are open to outside.
Fallingwater, a word that happens to contain Frank Lloyd Wright’s initials, is perhaps the best-known private residence in the world. In a sense, Wright was playing a game of one-upmanship with his Internationalist rivals, by incorporating Meis’s floating abstract planes into a building so site-specific that is could only be a part of the American Transcendentalist vocabulary. Fallingwater is a culmination of Wright’s use of abstract, geometric forms and a mature expression of his philosophy of man’s place in nature. The house is a dialectic between natural and sculptural forms: between the anchored and the free-floating; between variety of materials and repetition of forms; between stasis and movement ; between shelter and precariousness; between unity and separateness. The great themes can be seen in the smallest detail of the construction. For example, the dialextic nature of the man-made and the natural is visible in the way that glass and steel directly abut the fieldstone walls. The duality of interior and exterior from the rooms to the terraces is resolved with continuous planes of concrete walls and flagstone floors without thresholds. The hearth is situated on living rock that extrudes more than a foot though the floor. The effect is primitive —a romantic refuge in the heart of a truly modern exterior. The house seems ready to fly in different directions yet rests in a dynamic repose. The genius of the house is that space becomes plastic, continuous, and visible, almost like the stream of water itself. 7
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UNITY TEMPLE—SKYLIGHTS
Wright used lighting of all kinds—built-in fixtures, lamps, stained glass windows and ceiling panels—to guide and define the viewer’s experience of space. Warmly tinted skylights add to the sense of a serene and sheltered space. Set within deep coffers, the skylights are a marvelous interweaving of space and solids.
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MAJOR BUILDINGS 1956-1959
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
Strangely enough, Wright’s most famous building is a museum for modern art of all things. For he did not tolerate any pictures in his buildings except Japanese prints. He did not like modern paintings, and the effect of his architecture was more important to him than any art collection. In fact, the architecture does dominate the exhibits in the Guggenheim Museum.
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Solomon R. Guggenheim, then one of the richest men in America, wanted to exhibit his significant collection of nonobjective modern art permanently. The contact between him and Wright was established in 1943. Wright presented the first designs in 1944 and in 1945, the model was presented to the public. But eleven years should pass before the start of the construction. In-between, there were changes of location, trouble with the construction supervision, and several changes in the management of the museum - Guggenheim himself dies in 1949. When Wright died in 1959, the museum was essentially finished. It was opened in October 1959. Matching the “revolutionary” art of his collection, his museum was to be a new type of building, which would invite the visitors to experience the pictures in a new way. “I’m trying to make a building where seeing works of art would be so natural,” Wright explained.
“ Character is criterion in the form of any and every building or industrial product we can call Architecture in the light of this new ideal of the new ideal of the new order we call Organic” In order to get Organic Architecture born, intelligent architects will be forced to turn their backs on the antique rubbish heaps with which Classic eclecticism has encumbered our practice of Architecture. So far as architecture
and quality of mind that may enter also into human conduct with social implications that might, at first, confound or astound you. But the basis for any fear of them lies in the fact that they are all sanely and thoroughly constructive. Truth is a double-edged sword and can cut both 12
ways, but why cowardice?
The Guggenheim violates many of Wright’s precepts—it has nothing to do with its site among the granite matrons of Fifth Avenue, and is in many respects woefully inadequate as a museum space for displaying art, yet it endures as an icon of the creative power of modern art.
has gone in my own thought it is first of all a character
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14 The vortex quality of space is amplified in such details as the whip-like exterior service ramp that seems to throw off lines of force. Porthole-like windows at street level pick up the circular plan of the building’s footprint.
The inverted ziggurat of the Guggenheim Museum, which looks as if it had been cast on some celestial potter’s wheel, is Wright’s boldest statement of the form of a building as a container of space.
The Guggenheim Museum consists of two spirals cast in concrete, a large one for the exhibition and a smaller one in front for the offices of the museum management. The entrance is situated between them. Inside the museum, the visitor takes an elevator upstairs and then walks down a narrowing spiral ramp of five full revolutions. The ramp opens to an atrium. It is not a substitute for a staircase bit it is the exhibition space itself. This makes it possible to display the collection of the museum or the artistic development of the work of an artist without having to divide the works thematically or chronologically into separate rooms. The room is lit by a large skylight dome in the atrium and by glass slits between the spiral walls. The walls are slightly inclined to the outside to make possible a more “natural” placement of the pictures, like on an easel. Wright’s goal was to “make the building and the painting an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before.” But the museum management and some prominent artists protested vehemently, and just after Wright’s death, changes were made in the concept of hanging the pictures. There was also a heavy
“ Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity.”
dispute about the color of the walls, because Wright rejected white as the “loudest” color. However, Wright died before the issue could be resolved unanimously, and the walls were painted white.
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FURNITURE
Wright claimed to build “organic” architecture that seemed to grow naturally out of the surroundings landscape. He believed the internal space, furnishings and decorative details of a house to be intrinsic to its architecture. Many of his projects incorporated site specific furniture and fittings. These unified projects were intended to possess a natural “organic” beauty that would promote the life of the human spirit. Instead of walls, furnishings were often used as spacial dividers, thereby creating more open interior and a sense of flowing space.
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MAJOR BUILDINGS 1956-1959
FOUNDATION OF DESIGN
Frank Lloyd Wright’s work cannot be subsumed under one heading. At most, there are certain characteristics, which are valid for individual periods of his work. His overall work, which spreads out over 70 years and which comprises more than 450 executed buildings and uncountable projects, designs, and theoretical writings, is more verse and ambiguous than the works of any architect of the 20th century.
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Froebel’s wooden toy kits were designed to guide the creative play of children and further their abilities for geometric abstraction. Frank’s mother wanted him to be an architect: She put up architectural engravings in the whole apartment and gave him Froebel blocks to play with. They were formative for Wright’s concept of architecture.
This new architectural Ideal is, as well, an adequate ideal for general culture. There can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Architecture is still as always basic to Culture we lack. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. Nor any separation from our work. Thus in this rise or organic-integration you see the means to end the petty agglomerations miscalled civilization. By way of this old yet new and deeper sense of reality we may really have organic civilization. In this sense we now recognize and may declare by way of plan and building—the natural. But instead of “organic” we might well say “natural” building. Or we might say 20
integral building: intrinsic building.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY “ Faith in the natural is the faith we now need to grow up on in this coming age of our confused, backward twentieth century.” In his essays and speeches, Wright did not cease to emphasize the fundamental principles of “organic architecture:” moral truth and inspiration won by nature. Consequently, it could not have been Wright’s intention to portray visible nature. He wanted to capture its essence, its divine beauty in his buildings. In his artistic work, Wright sought the unity of truth and beauty, of moral and aesthetic. All of his buildings, as varied as they may be, are an expression of this search. And this is why Wright used moral concepts so often when speaking about architecture: “because beauty is in itself the highest and finest kind of morality so in its essence it must be true.” Wright used geometry as the key to beauty and truth. The fact that geometry is underlying the divine principle of nature is something that Wright had learned as a child from the educational blocks of the pedagogue Froebel. Wright associated the various geometrical shapes with definite ideas in his essay The Japanese Print: The circle stands for infinity, the triangle for structural unity, the spire for aspiration, the square for integrity and the spiral for organic process. In his attempts to express the divine, geometry was Wright’s grammar, an organic integrity that was “the elemental law and order inherent in great architecture,” as he defined it. This clarifies why Wright, who often described his art as organic, strongly abstracted natural form and why he explicitly rejected the depiction as a faithful copy. 21
foundations of his art philosophy. It is rooted in the ideas of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s works were read frequently by Wright’s family in his childhood. Their influence can be seen down to the missionary language of Wright’s own writings. Emerson praises individuality and democracy, and the integrity of the creative persons. Wright realized this romantic ideal of a genius, transcending the mediocre masses to the point at which it almost became a caricature.
Winters know
Visible nature is for Emerson
Easily to shed the snow,
only the manifestation of an
And the untaught Spring is wise
inner and eternal beauty —
In cowslips and anemones.
and this of the divine spirit.
Nature, hating art and pains, Baulks and baffles plotting brains; Casualty and Surprise Are the apples of her eyes; But she dearly loves the poor, And, by marvel of her own, Strikes the loud pretender down. For Nature listens in the rose, And hearkens in the berry’s bell, To help her friends, to plague her foes, And like wise God she judges well. Yet doth much her love excel To the souls that never fell, To swains that live in happiness, And do well because they please, Who walk in ways that are unfamed, And feats achieve before they’re named.
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NATURE, BY RALPH W. EMERSON
In order to understand Wright’s work, it is necessary to understand the
TWO WISE MEN
Wright quit his job at Silsbee in the end of 1887 and started working for Adler & Sullivan, one of the most progressive architectural practices of the city. Sullivan, whom Wright affectionately gave the German title, “Leiber Meister,” beloved Master, was the rising star in Chicago’s architecture. Soon, Wright was chief designing assistant, responsible for 30 other draftsmen. When the practice moved to new rooms two years later, the 21 yearold was placed in an office next to his “Leiber Meister.” In his autobiography, however, Wright does not mention that he had to share the room with a colleague. Adler & Sullivan hardly ever built residential houses because large projects were more profitable. Such projects that Sullivan could not reject without loosing a client were given to his young employee. Wright started to work on his own account under the name of his friend Cecil Corwin. This so-called moonlighting was widely spread in Chicago at the time. However, when he built three houses in the vicinity on Sullivan’s home, the “Leiber Meister” recognized the handwriting of his employee: There was a big quarrel and Wright was dismissed. Wright and Sullivan did not have contact in a long time. Only ten years later did they resume their friendship and stayed close friends until Sullivan’s death in 1924.
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“ I knew I was the beginning of something great, a great truth of architecture. Now architecture could be free�
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FROM 1867 TO 1951
A WRIGHT TIMELINE Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is the avatar of American architecture. His highly original aesthetic and singular philosophy placed him, during his lifetime, in the forefront of modern architecture and resulted in a doctrine for American building design that continues to this day. Despite personal tragedies and changing tastes in the world of architecture, Wright continued to produce major works even as he entered the waning years of a long and distinguished career. Today, over thirty years after his death, not only is Wright’s international reputation intact and growing, but buildings are yet being constructed based on his original designs. As has been said again and again, Frank Lloyd Wright continues to be, both in the legacy of his philosophy and the spirit of his buildings, and extraordinary force of nature.
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Frank Lloyd Wright is born
play the viola and the piano as a child, and liked doing art and crafts. The young Wright was a loner. His only close friend was a boy in Madison, who had lost both legs to Polio. He even shared his book prizes — his sole prizes — with him.
WRIGHT IS BORN
1867
Wright now works for Adler & Sullivan, one of the most important Chicago architectural practices. One year later, Wright builds his own house in Oak Park, Illinois and marries Catherine Lee Tobin.
ADLER & SULLIVAN
1887
UNIVERSITY
1893 DISMISSAL & REBIRTH
Wright enrolls at the Univer-
After his dismissal from Adler
sity of Wisconsin, Madison.
& Sullivan, Wright started to work free-lance, first in partnership with his friend Cecil Corwin and other young architects, then from his own office. Two years later Wright adds a studio complex to his Oak Park house.
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Wright build Bradley House and Hickox House in Kankakee, Illinois, creating the two prototypes for his later Prairie houses.
PRAIRIE HOUSE PROTOTYPES
1900
EXPERIMENTAL FLIGHT FOR ORVILLE WRIGHT
1885
ALFRED NOBEL DONATES THE NOBEL PRIZE
INAUGURATION OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
Wisconsin. Wright learned to
BROOKLYN BRIDGE IS OPENED TO THE PUBLIC
June 8 in Richland Center,
The two large commissions of the 1900s were important: the Larkin Company is a brick building hermetically sealed from the outside world with For the first time Wright moves the roof supports from the corners of the building to the center, thus freeing the walls from their support function. He perfects this system with the Unity Temple in Oak Park.
COMMISSIONS OF THE DECADE
USA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY
numerous technical innovation.
FIRST CINEMA OF THE USA OPENS IN PITTS-
The administration building for
Wright lives in Florence and Fiesole, Italy. The monograph Studies and Executive Buildings is published in Berlin. It initiates Wright’s international breakthrough.
BREAKTHROUGH
1910
1903
VOYAGE TO JAPAN
1909 ROBIE HOUSE
nantly in Tokyo building the large Imperial Hotel. At the same time he designed the spacious Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.
TOKYO & LOS ANGELES
1920
1914 CATASTROPHE
Robie House in Chicago, unde-
In 1914, an employee ran amok
niably the masterpiece of the
killing Mamah Cheney and set-
Prairie house era. Wright goes
ting fire to the house. Never-
to Europe with his new partner
theless, Wright rebuilt Taliesin.
Mamah Borthwick Cheneh.
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LINDBERGH IS FIRST TO FLY OVER THE ATLANTIC NON-STOP
1905
He spent 1917-1922 predomi-
and his utopia The DisappearWright’s mentor Louis Sul-
ing City are published. Wright
livan dies One year later
is also represented at the New
Taliesin burns down again,
York exhibition “International
Wright is forced to sell his
Style” opens in the Museum
Oak Park home.
of Modern Art in New York
A MENTORS DEATH
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1924
1932
FROZEN FOOD IS OFFERED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE USA
THE STOCK MARKET CRASHES/THE FIRST OSCARS
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1932 THE FELLOWSHIP
JAPANESE BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR
Wright’s An Autobiography
Establishment of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to which Wright transfers all of his personal assets.
WRIGHT FOUNDATION
1939
1936 SECOND BLOOM
Also in 1932, he founded
Wright had returned to public
the Taliesin Fellowship as a
attention with publication,
school for architects. The ap-
lectures, and participation in
prentices were to be educated
exhibitions. Finally, he was
by an active life in nature. The
again commissioned to build
central idea was: “Learning by
houses and some of his most
doing.” With the fellowship,
important buildings were
Wright had created a reliable
erected within a few years. He
group of diligent and in some
designed Fallingwater, which
cases very talented collabora-
appeared on the front page
tors. Without them, he would
of important magazines and
never have been able to deal
later advanced to be the most
with his enormous work load.
famous residence of the 20th century.
ELVIS PRESLEY STARTS HIS FIRST US-TOUR
The construction of the Unitarian Church in MadiWright is commissioned to
son us the first of a series of
build the Guggenheim Mu-
churches that Wright builds
seum in New York.
for different denominations.
GUGGENHEIM
UNITARIAN CHURCH
1943
1949
Wright build the first large spiral ramp for V.C. Morris Gift Shop in San Fransisco.
designs the Marin County Civic Center. He dies April 6, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Half a year later, the Guggenheim Museum opens
THE END
1959
1956
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. WINS THE NOBEL
GIFT SHOP SPIRAL RAMP
THE USA EXPLODE FIRST HYDROGEN BOMB IN THE PACIFIC
MARTIN LUTHER KING HOLDS HIS “I HAVE A DREAM” SPEECH
1948
The year Wright dies, he
PRICE TOWER The only one of Wright’s highrise buildings that was realized — the Price Tower — is built in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
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