Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
Frank Lloyd Wright’s life spans two important periods: from the
late 19th century to the mid-20th century, the eras before and
after World War I and the period between the wars and after
World War II.
As a person, he embodied some of the most characteristic
attitudes of his age. He had a supreme confidence in the future
and a romantic yearning for the pre-industrial past.
He had the very American attitude of a deep interest in flux and
flow, expanding energies, and dynamism coupled with a search
for unifying principles and organic coherence. These ideas are
related to his interest in continuous space brought together into
unifying shapes.
In an article in Architectural Forum (May 1953, p.106) entitled
“The Language of Organic Architecture,” Wright made the
following statement:
Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain
from which all rhythms flow and to which they
must pass. Beyond time or infinity.
Prominent images in Wright’s writings and language are terms
such as “continuous becoming,” with allusions to rivers, seas,
and the American prairie. It relates to 19th-century thinking
about historical and biological evolution, the geology of the
earth in process.
But within the continuous becoming emerges a giant
individualism characterized by arrogance, loneliness, and
mobility--qualities that typify American culture in myriad ways.
For Wright, the final polarity was nature and civilization. This
polarity was related to the opposition between confidence in
science and the search or yearning for a primordial past, natural
laws, instinctive order
Wright loved the land, not just as a setting or foil against which
to play out a scenario but as itself an expression of intrinsic
natural evolution and organic principles. He always sought an
intrinsic relationship between his architecture and its natural
setting. This is not so difficult if you live your entire life in one
landscape setting. Yet, Wright built all over North America in
the most diverse locations.
The principle he used was the intention to echo natural form in
abstract shapes and rhythms.
Wright was born in either 1867 or 1869--he never admitted the
correct date. The Civil War had ended. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman were still alive and
contributing to American culture.
Wright was born on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, and
reared as a country boy with a rural arrogance (“Defend the
rural areas of Wisconsin against the ‘Slickers’!”). His father
was a Unitarian circuit preacher and musician. His mother was
a Welsh woman of strong will and heavy influence. Wright’s
father disappeared when Frank was 12 years old.
His mother aimed to make her son into an architect. She hung
pictures of Salisbury Cathedral in his nursery and bought
Froebel blocks for him to play with. These blocks were his
introduction to Euclidean geometry.
Country school and manual labor instilled conservative principles
and a value for work in Wright’s mind. All this later became part
of the Taliesin program at Spring Green, Wisconsin, and at
Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Wright family motto was “Truth Against the World.”
Wright spent a year and a half in the School of Engineering at the
University of Wisconsin. In 1887, he set out for Chicago
“equipped with nothing but genius,” he later wrote. This was the
classic story of the country boy going to the city to seek his
fortune. He financed the trip by selling the mink collar his mother
had sewn to his coat; and he carried a copy of Plutarch’s Lives of
the Most Imminent Men.
Wright ended up in the offices of Adler and Sullivan whose career
was at its zenith around the 1890s. He offered himself to Sullivan
as a draftsman and as a “sympathetic though critical listener.”
Wright recognized Sullivan’s romanticism and his talent. Wright
called Sullivan his “Lieber Meister” or “beloved master.” He
always acknowledged his debt to Sullivan’s formative influence,
but also under-dramatized the freedom offered by the architectural
environment of the Chicago Renaissance. He also underplayed
the debt he owed to Richardson.
Ward Willits House, Highland Park, IL, 1902
Wright and the Prairie House
Among Wright’s notable accomplishments is the concept of the
“Prairie House” and what has been termed the “prairie style.”
There is no prairie to be found in Chicago or its suburbs or in
Wright’s own Wisconsin. The true prairie is part of the Great
Plains in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, perhaps southern
Illinois. For Wright, the prairie was the essence of the middle
west, something indigenous to which the East Coast could lay no
claim.
The prairie represented freedom, democracy, opportunity,
closeness to nature, closeness to the earth, all of life as a single
great work of creation. He believe American domestic
architecture should express this.
There is no simple, straight-forward definition of this. The
symbolism is complex.
The Robie House, Chicago, IL, 1908-9
Plan,
Main Floor
Plan,
Lower Level
The Larkin Company Administration Building,
Buffalo, NY 1904-5
Unitarian Universalist Church (Unity Temple),
Oak Park, IL, 1906