Frank Lloyd Wright: Ideologies, Principles, Values

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT Romantic genius, artistic iconoclast, heroic individualist: these were the labels Wright attached to himself, these the standards against which he measured his own behavior. The works of Frank Lloyd Wright made him the most famous American architect, and his buildings ushered in a new era of architecture. The breadth of his work, which spanned over seven decades, demanded attention. However, more than pure volume of production underscored his importance to the built environment, both past and present. The mention of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s name most likely conjures up visions of ―Prairie Houses‖, his famous ―Fallingwater‖, or perhaps, the Guggenheim Museum. While these forms are all very different, they do posses a common denominator, the principle of organic architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrating organic architecture, 1953

 Background stepped in strong Unitarian, transcendental principles surrounding pastoral, educational, agricultural aspects. Strongly Welsh – mother fostered literature, poetry, philosophy and music which developed a sense of human value and love of nature 

Worked for architects J. Lyman Silsbee, Louis Sullivan & Dankmar Adler – Sullivan only architect Wright has acknowledged as having influenced him – more attitudinal style – concept of architectural honesty – form follows function, meaning honesty of expression essential pre-condition to creation of beautiful building

 Attempted to create new architecture that reflected American democratic experience, based solely on America‘s democratic values  Believed in native materials; insisted that buildings grow naturally from their surrounding e.g. branch of a tree a natural cantilever – this influence apparent in his works such as the earth-hugging ―Prairie House‖ to cascading cantilevers of Fallingwater, from sky-lighted forest of concrete columns in Johnson Wax Administration Building, the rugged beauty of Taliesin West, to spiraling ―snail-like‖ Guggenheim Museum  Believed that ―the closer man associated himself with nature the greater his personal, spiritual and even physical well-being grew and expanded as a direct result of this association‖ 

Described as having an intuitive understanding of social and human needs; designed to human scale

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Career generally divided into 3 periods:

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 Buildings demonstrated variety of form but all based on the same principles of “organic architecture”. The philosophy of organic architecture was present consistently in his body of work and the scope of its meaning

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o 1893-WWI – Prairie House – new American Style o Between WWI and mid-1930‘s, sometimes called the lost years – relatively few commissions, most notable Tokyo‘s Imperial Hotel, period of experimentation with different building technologies and new designs based on geometric forms other than square or rectangle, established Taliesin Fellowship o Usonian Era 1932-1959 – Usonian House: designed for families on modest income, generally single-storey house with simple floor plans, based on a grid system, with radiant heat, a small central kitchen space and usually flat roofs – also large projects such as Fallingwater

mirrored the development his architecture. The core of this ideology was always the belief that architecture has an inherent relationship with both its site and its time.  When asked in 1939 if there was a way to control a client‘s potentially bad taste in selecting housing designs for his Broadacre City project, Wright replied, ―Even if he wanted bad ones he could find only good ones because in an organic architecture, that is to say an architecture based upon organic ideals, bad design would be unthinkable.‖ In this way, the question of style was not important to Frank Lloyd Wright. A building was a product of its place and its time, intimately connected to a particular moment and site—never the result of an imposed style.  In an essay entitled ―The New Architecture: Principles‖, he put forth nine principles of architecture that reflected the development of his organic philosophy. The principles addressed ideas about the relationship of the human scale to the landscape, the use of new materials like glass and steel to achieve more spatial architecture, and the development of a building‘s architectural ―character,‖ which was his answer to the notion of style. 

NATURE. means not just the ―out-of doors,‖ clouds, trees, storms, the terrain and animal life, but refers to their nature as to the nature of materials or the ―nature‖ of a plan, a sentiment, or a tool. A man or anything concerning him, from within. Interior nature with capital N. Inherent principle.

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ORGANIC. denotes in architecture not merely what may hang in a butcher shop, get about on two feet or be cultivated in a field. The word organic refers to entity, perhaps integral or intrinsic would therefore be a better word to use. As originally used in architecture, organic means part-to-whole-as-whole-is-to-part. So entity as integral is what is really meant by the word organic. INTRINSIC.

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FORM AND FUNCTION ARE ONE. Form follows function. This is a much abused slogan. Naturally form does so. But on a lower level and the term is useful only as indicating the platform upon which architectural form rests. As the skeleton is no finality of human form any more than grammar is the ―form‖ of poetry, just so function is to architectural form. Rattling the bones is not architecture. Less is only more where more is no good. Form is predicated by function but, so far as poetic imagination can go with it without destruction, transcends it. ―Form follows function‖ has become spiritually insignificant: a stock phrase. Only when we say or write ―form and function are one‖ is the slogan significant. It is now the password for sterility. Internationally.

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ROMANCE. like the word BEAUTY, refers to a quality. Reactionary use of this honorable but sentimentalized term by critics and current writers is confusing. Organic architecture sees actuality as the intrinsic romance of human creation or sees essential romance as actual in creation. So romance is the new reality. Creativity divines this. No teamwork can conceive it. A committee can only receive it as a gift from the inspired individual. In the realm of organic architecture human imagination must render the harsh language of structure into becoming humane expressions of form instead of devising inanimate facades or rattling the bones of construction. Poetry of form is as necessary to great architecture as foliage is to the tree, blossoms to the plant or flesh to the body. Because sentimentality ran away with this human need and negation is now abusing it is no good reason for taking the abuse of the thing for the thing. Until the mechanization of buildings is in the service of creative architecture and not creative architecture in the service of mechanization we will have no great architecture.

speak of truth we speak of generic principle. The genus ―bird ― may fly away as flocks of infinitely differing birds of almost unimaginable variety: all of them merely derivative. So in speaking of tradition we use the word as also a generic term. Flocks of traditions may proceed to fly from generic tradition into unimaginable many. Perhaps none have creative capacity because all are only derivative. Imitations of imitation destroy an original tradition. TRUTH is a divinity in architecture.

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TRADITION. may have many traditions just is TRUTH may have many truths. When we of organic architecture

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ORNAMENT. Integral element of architecture, ornament is to architecture what efflorescence of a tree or plant is to its structure. Of the thing, not on it. Emotional in its nature, ornament is- if well conceived-not only the poetry but is the character of structure revealed and enhanced. If not well conceived, architecture is destroyed by ornament.]

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SPIRIT. What is spirit? In the language of organic architecture the ―spiritual‖ is never something descending upon the thing from above as a kind of illumination but exists within the thing itself as its very life. Spirit grows upward from within and outward. Spirit does not come down from above to be suspended there by skyhooks or set up on posts. There are two uses of nearly every word or term in usual language but in organic sense any term is used in reference to the inner not the outer substance. A word, such as ―nature‖ for instance, may be used to denote a material or a physical means to an end. Or the same word may be used with spiritual significance but in this explanation of the use of terms in organic architecture the spiritual sense of the word is uppermost in use in every case.

THIRD DIMENSION. Contrary to popular belief, the third dimension is not thickness but is depth. The term ―third dimension‖ is used in organic architecture to indicate the sense of depth which issues as of the thing not on it. The third dimension, depth, exists as intrinsic to the building. Even though the horizontal is

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characteristic designs complex

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Wright‘s still

arrangement

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space as demonstrated by the 3-dimensional quality of the façade. (Robie House)

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plane

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SPACE. A new element contributed by organic architecture as style. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity. architecture serves to employ in building. The breath of a work of art.

The new reality which organic

Applications: o

the Site - an architecture where the buildings are built to complement the natural terrain

Frank Lloyd Wright said, when speaking of his home in Wisconsin, Taliesin: And of course the countryside is Southern Wisconsin. Low hills. Protruding rock ledges. Wooded site. And the same thing applied to Taliesin, that applied to, later on to Bear Run (Fallingwater). The site determined the features and character of the house. Taliesin really is a stone house. And it is a house of the north. And it was built for the north. I loved the icicles that came on the eves. And in winter, the snow would sweep up over it, and it looked like the hill itself, or one of the hills....so I chose Taliesin as a name, it means "Shining Brow". And Taliesin is built like a brow on the edge of the hill, not on top of the hill, because I believe you should never build on top of anything directly. If you build on top of the hill, you lose the hill. If you build one on the side of the top, you have the hill and the eminence that you desire, you see. Well, Taliesin's like that.

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The terrain of the United States varies dramatically, perhaps one of the reasons Frank Lloyd Wright so loved America. The Prairie Houses in the midwest, particularly Chicago, were built according to its flat landscape. The low profiles and horizontal lines of these houses were exacerbated by the prairie, and vice versa. The concrete textile block homes of the Los Angeles area are neatly tucked in to the Hollywood hills, so you know neither where the house ends nor where the hills begin. It is an integration of architecture and nature. The most dramatic example of this is the Bear Run house, Fallingwater. Located in the mountainous region of southwestern Pennsylvania, Fallingwater is built not only into the side of the mountain, using materials excavated from the mountain, but additionally over a stream and waterfall. The waterfall appears to flow out of the house. One could not replicate such a drama filled site. When the Edgar Kaufmann's commissioned Wright to design their weekend home at Bear Run, they wanted it near the waterfall, their favorite spot. They assumed Wright would design the house so that it was oriented toward the waterfall. They had no idea Wright planned to build the house on top of the waterfall.

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.the Nature of Materials - how any material acts; determines how to emphasize the simplicity of materials

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Often, Frank Lloyd Wright would use natural, local materials. If it was possible to use materials excavated from the site, he would do it. Or use materials found in that local region. In Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, his desert camp, the primary building material is what he referred to as desert masonry. The walls of Taliesin West are made from a collection of specially selected stones, large and small, found strewn about the desert floor, which he welded together with concrete -concrete made of cement purchased in Scottsdale, and additional sand from the foundation of Taliesin West.

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Wood is sturdy and sturdy and flexible. Glass is transparent and allows light to filter in any number of ways. Concrete is fluid. Brick and stone are solid. If you take a piece of wood, and you carve that piece of wood, or you paint that piece of wood, you have lost the simplicity of wood and warped its nature. But if you take a slab of wood, and you neither paint nor carve that piece of wood, but rather relied on its natural grain texture and color, then you have maintained the simplicity of wood. This is how Wright worked. He never abused materials. He allowed them to perform as they would. When Wright built a structure of concrete, for instance, the Unity Temple, he didn't create slabs of concrete and stack them one on top of the other. He poured it. Concrete before it dries is a naturally fluid material. Concrete itself may not be natural or organic in the sense that it came from the earth, but the nature of concrete as a material is to flow. In the Unity Temple, Frank Lloyd Wright had a large, wooden cast built, and allowed the concrete to flow into it and form before it dried. Every feature of that building is concrete poured on site.

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The Physical Construction and Structure - modern materials, with the mastering of the machine, can be held together in different ways and new interpretations of space

While buildings had traditionally been constructed with the repetition of posts and beams, Frank Lloyd Wright expanded that constricting idea by opening up spaces. In his Prairie houses, Frank Lloyd Wright first began to do this by expanding the windows. Instead of having gaps within windows, he positioned them as ribbons of windows, interconnected, separated only by thin partitions. These ribbons of windows began to take up more and more wall space, until eventually, there was no longer wall space, but rather screens of light. The elimination of walls, breaking the box, as Wright called it, allowed for a new form of interior freedom unseen before. In the Larkin Administration Building, 1904, Frank Lloyd Wright freed up the interior space with a massive atrium, and a skylight from above, filling the space with natural light. In the Imperial Hotel of Tokyo, 1915-23, the construction involved new ways of putting a building together so that a building could pull, be flexible, and as proven, survive a massive earthquake. The Imperial Hotel's method of concrete construction, organically constructed to respect the materials and let them perform as they are intended to, allowed it to survive an 8.3 earthquake in 1923 the largest Japan had until 2011. Few buildings survived the quake, but days later Wright received a telegram stating that the Imperial Hotel survived as a testament to his genius. In his Los Angeles architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright used his concrete textile block method. He designed hollow blocks of concrete, with geometric patterns, and lined them up, stacked them atop one another, and joined them together with the assistance of steel rods inserted through the hollow insides. Wright had made homes in a manner similar to creating textiles.

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 When he told clients to throw away their belongings or when he cajoled them into spending far more than they had ever intended on their houses, he was serving his vision of an ideal truth. Given his own perennial indifference to money, one can almost imagine that he literally had trouble regarding it as real. When he underestimated costs, he may sometimes have fooled himself as much as he did his clients, for the money (perhaps even the client) was just a means to an end. Indeed, Wright went so far as to suggest that money actually acquired its value by enabling his genius to create, and was as good as worthless if not pressed into the service of some higher good. ―Money,‖ he told his apprentices, ―becomes valuable because you can do

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 Traditionally house has been enclosed space, an inside, refuge for individual and family; he wanted openness without dominance; destroyed the ‗box‘ and created new, general interaction between inside and out – concept of inside changed from that of a refuge to become a fixed point in space, from which man could experience a new sense of freedom and participation; this point in space often where Wright placed great fireplaces with vertical chimneys

something with it. If you take away all the creative individuals, all the men of ideas who have projected into the arena of our lives substantial contributions, money would not be worth anything.‖  Above all else, Wright‘s vision served beauty. When he quibbled with Sullivan‘s dictum that ―form follows function,‖ suggesting instead that ―form and function are one,‖ he was in fact revealing that when push came to shove his own true passion was form more than function. What he admired in the Arts and Crafts movement was its commitment to crafting all objects in such a way as to render them beautiful. What he loved about Japan was the idea of a culture in which every human action and every human object were integrated so as to make of an entire civilization a work of art.  In pursuit of beauty, he sought to subordinate all elements of his architecture to a consistent style that would express their underlying unity. No matter how radically his individual buildings may differ from each other, they all express his struggle for aesthetic consistency, his habit of seizing a single abstract theme and recapitulating it with endless variations as if in a Beethoven symphony. Consistency from first to last,‖ Wright declared, ―will give you the result you seek and consistency alone.‖ The vocabulary in which he sought to achieve this consistency was geometrical, so that Fallingwater, to take an obvious case, is an almost obsessive rumination on the possibilities of the cantilever, from the basic structure of the suspended floors right down to the treatment of the bookshelves. ―You must be consistently grammatical,‖ Wright said, for a building, ―to be understood as a work of Art.‖ Geometry was the key to grammatical consistency, which was in turn the key to aesthetic unity, which was in turn the key to beauty, which was in turn the key of God.

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Prairie Houses e.g. Robie House Chicago, Illinois 1906-1909

Aim was to capture endless freedom of Western frontier – create an environment of freedom and repose 

Been described as subtle, complex, calm, and horizontal

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According to Tate & Smith, ―his spatial geometry reflects his structural invention; lighting reinforce space, furnishings reiterated his linear schemes, construction materials and his every ornamental detail is integrated with his larger

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concerns‖

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UNITY TEMPLE OAK PARK 1906- 2 simple rooms linked together by entrance lobby, heavy, simple concrete walls and flat slab roof – described as having repose quality of tranquility

 But consistency alone was not enough; it was only of value if coupled with the new. Newness was proof of creative genius, and consistent newness was the best proof of all. Just as he tried hard not to seem influenced by anyone else‘s style, Wright had a restless urge to keep inventing new styles lest he start repeating his own too often. His boastfulness and his competitive need to claim priority over all other architects were surely tied to the horror of repetition. So was his love affair with new technologies, his willingness to experiment with virtually any new material that came his way so he could claim that he, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the first architect ever to have employed it. Describing to his apprentices the many innovations he had supposedly made in constructing the Larkin Building—air conditioning, plate-glass windows, integral desk furniture, suspended toilet bowls, and so on—he concluded, ―I was a real Leonardo da Vinci when I built that building, everything in it was my invention.‖

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 Wright‘s love of new technologies was matched by a desire to use old technologies in new ways. His fascination for the new and his need to show off his unsurpassed talents as an architectural virtuoso undoubtedly help explain his tendency to demand so much of his materials, daring to test their limits almost to the point of failure if it meant achieving effects he could claim as uniquely his own. Had he lived to be able to take advantage of the newer technologies and stronger materials of our own day, he would surely have pushed them to their limits as well. The proof he demanded of his genius was to go where no architect had ever gone before, and that meant accepting risks that few others were willing to take. If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs, badly heated rooms, sagging cantilevers, and unhappy clients, then Wright was more than willing to pay the price.