His Houses Missed America's Future, But They Were Riches Enough for America | A Curious Person

June 8 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Happy birthday, Mr. Wright.

In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared as a guest on the famous CBS game show What's My Line?

He wrote his name on a blackboard, then took a run of yes-or-no questions from a panel of blindfolded celebrities — columnists, actors, poets. He could answer only Yes or No; they had to guess who he was.

The questions came at him like this: "Does your having such a pleasant voice have anything to do with your profession?" "Does your work involve the law?" "Can you draw?" "Do people often come looking for you?" When one panelist asked, "Since you can draw, are you a designer or an architect — like Frank Lloyd Wright?", the studio audience broke into applause. Wright had been on stage barely seven minutes.

Set aside, for now, the gossip — the college degree he never finished, the three marriages, the client's wife he ran off with while still married, the murders in his own household, the sideline dealing ukiyo-e prints. Frank Lloyd Wright became one of America's greatest architects because, in the end, his work still speaks for him.

Over his lifetime he designed 1,114 buildings, and 532 of them were built. He had no interest at all in the industrialization of building, so he rarely touched the skyscrapers just then rising in his era, and poured his appetite for exploration and experiment into villas and small houses instead — which architect today would choose that road?

Prairie Style was Wright's first exploration of the house

Wright grew up in the countryside and valleys of Wisconsin. Farm life — up with the sun, down with the dusk — gave him a temperament close to nature, and his particular eye was trained on the natural world too. Looking back, the architectural creed he preached all his life, reverence for nature, owes much of its shape to those childhood years.

Like his parents, Wright was a man of strong character. At 20 he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and went to Chicago to look for work. After a short spell as a draftsman at one architectural firm, he moved to the office of Louis Sullivan, where he drew interior plans for the soon-to-open Auditorium Building.

The 1880s were years of booming industry and fast-swelling cities in the United States, and a golden age for building in Chicago. Wright's mentor, Louis Henry Sullivan, was one of the leading figures of the Chicago School and carried the title "father of the skyscraper."

Sullivan thought highly of Wright and soon promoted him to chief draftsman, but Wright seemed to care little for the commercial buildings his mentor specialized in. What he took to instead was the house — a type the firm set no store by — and he designed a good number of them that broke no new ground but held small inventions.

When Sullivan found out that Wright had been taking private commissions on the side, mentor and apprentice fell out, and Wright simply set up on his own and took design work independently.

Across the dozen or so years from 1899 to 1910, Wright kept working on the house he came to call the Prairie Style.

The fashion in architecture then was Neoclassicism — put plainly, a continuation of the Greek and Roman manner, grand in scale and hungry for perfect symmetry. But as Wright saw it, the new urban middle class was growing, and with it the demand for houses. Add the fact that he was working in the American Midwest, a place of wide land and few people, and he arrived at an idea: don't follow the crowd upward into tall buildings, build outward instead.

He tried his hand at many small houses and villas, pitched at the middle class.

These buildings shared a set of traits. Most sat on wide suburban lots, merging with the nature around them. Their structures were spare and low, insisting on the horizontal line; the roofs were not tall, but the eaves were broad. To make the most of daylight, the windows were larger and more numerous than in a traditional house. The old fireplace, once buried in an outer wall, moved to the center of the house. And the finishes shed every unnecessary ornament, leaning on plain brick, stone, and wood to show the beauty of the materials themselves.

The Robie House in Chicago counts as the summit of Wright's Prairie Style.

The Robie House stands on the University of Chicago campus, and from a distance the first thing it does is spread sideways: low eaves thrown out in huge cantilevers, broad windows hidden in their shadow. Slender Roman brick wraps the outer walls, the white mortar lines sharpening the horizontal reach — his stance against the Neoclassical fashion of the day. On top of that horizontal frame, blocks of different sizes step in and out, pushing toward the street layer by layer through balconies, stairs, and walls, and drawing back inward layer by layer toward the base.

Beyond the rich exterior, Wright also designed many entrances, each with a different function, each suited to a different way of moving, which enriched the winding path into the house.

In 1910, the German publishing house Wasmuth, which had brought out a portfolio of his work, staged an exhibition of Wright's Prairie Style houses in Berlin. It stirred European architectural circles, and the Robie House was the work people talked about most.

"Usonian" houses: Wright's work on the house shifted with what American society needed

In 1929, economic crisis broke out in the United States, and over the next few years the world economy sank into the Great Depression. Those were also the low years of Wright's own life: the slump on one side, public gossip about his private life on the other, and he reached the point of having no commissions at all.

But his work on the house went on, and the people he had in mind were still the middle class the crisis had battered. He put forward a new housing system he called "Usonian," built on cheap materials, practical structure, and flat roofs.

Next to his earlier Prairie Style, what occupied him in this period was how to cut building costs to the bone, and how to simplify the structure of a house further while making sure it still fit the setting it stood in.

To cut costs, he chose to build with reinforced concrete and prefabricated materials.

To simplify the structure, he gave up the cross-shaped plan of the Prairie houses.

A typical Usonian house split into two parts, a living zone and a private zone. The first held a living room centered on a fireplace, an alcove that served as the dining room, and a kitchen open to the living room. The second held a study, a guest room, and a bedroom with a workroom attached. These spaces ran off a single corridor, with the owner's bedroom usually at the end of it. In a few of the houses, to keep the plan from stretching too far, Wright put the private rooms on a second floor, but the open plan survived essentially intact.

Beyond the ordinary rectangle, Wright worked out circular, spiral, and hexagonal variations too — flexible, adaptable, fitted to American families of different means and different habits, and for a long stretch they stood for the image of the modern American home.

Take the Hanna House, which Wright built for the Stanford professor Paul Hanna, and which is the best example of his hexagonal invention.

When it was first finished in 1937, it was seen as the model of the affordable Usonian house, with great continuity and flexibility of space. Over the next 25 years Wright kept taking part in extending and remaking it, until it had grown into a residential complex covering 6,000 square meters, with a small family guesthouse, a souvenir shop, a storehouse, a two-car garage, a carport, a cottage, and a garden — far past anything the American middle class could afford. Which, from another angle, proves how well Wright's design could keep pace with a family's changing needs.

Fallingwater, the most inventive work of his life

A clear sense of nature showed in Wright's work very early. If the Prairie houses and the Usonian houses above reflect an instinctive attention to the state of society and the needs of the middle class, then the theory of "organic architecture" he preached all his life states his pursuit of nature and natural materials outright.

To the end of his life Wright never gave "organic architecture" a fixed definition, largely because his view of it never stood still — it kept developing as he built. His mentor Sullivan had proposed that form follows function. Wright held that function and form could never be fully separated in design: "the structure, the materials, and the method of building fuse into one, making an organic whole in the service of humanity."

Scholars have written plenty about "organic architecture," and no shortage of people have thrown themselves into interpreting Wright's theory of it, but those twisted expositions, thick with trade argument, read as far too murky. Wright himself, though, once drew a comparison that captures exactly what organic architecture looked like in his head: "I like to use reinforced concrete to imitate the structure of a plant when I design a building — a trunk at the center, buried deep in the ground, with each floor seeming to grow out of that trunk, rising level upon level, while sunlight or moonlight comes down through the skylights and creates the feeling of natural light indoors."

But no words, however forceful, match what a building does to a person directly. Fallingwater, once praised as "the greatest building in American history," is the living textbook of the organic architecture Wright argued for.

In 1934, the German-born businessman Edgar Kaufmann bought a piece of land at Bear Run, in the southeastern outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and asked Wright to design him a vacation house.

There is a story about the design of this house, full of legend and still unverified. In March 1935, Wright asked Kaufmann for a topographic survey marking every large boulder and every tree more than 15 centimeters across, then let six months pass without drawing a line. Then, one day in September, Kaufmann telephoned to ask whether he could come and look at the sketches. Wright said yes at once, and in the two hours it took Kaufmann to drive over, he finished the design sketches at extraordinary speed and named the house "Fallingwater."

Fallingwater is built into the hillside, and the piers that hold up its structure are all made of the rough rock already on the mountain, so that the whole complex looks as though it grew out of the hill.

The most inventive part is how it merges with the waterfall: the white cantilevered balconies reach out from the house into open air, hanging above the water, with the falls pouring out from under the balcony and the stream winding along beneath the house. If you want to touch the water, you can take the stairs down from the big balcony and stand with the stream running at your feet. Stream and waterfall both seem to have become part of the building.

Wright once said: "I wanted Kaufmann to live with the waterfall, to make it part of the whole family's life, and not just admire it from the side." It turned out as he wished — the house became the Kaufmann family's favorite retreat. They lived there for 26 years, until 1963, when they gave this landmark of architectural history to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Today Fallingwater is a National Historic Landmark, open to the public.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger has gone so far as to say that he has spent his whole life working with buildings and words, and still does not know how to say what he feels in front of Fallingwater: "It is not too much to say that no American architect since has been his equal."

The architecture critic Rowan Moore, in a piece published recently in The Guardian, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Fantasist or Genius?”, makes the same point: his greatest works, Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum, have their flaws, but without them the world would certainly be no better than it is.

He is counted among the earliest founders of Modernist architecture, and he refused all his life to be counted a Modernist

Wright belonged to the generation before Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. In a career that ran more than seventy years, he lived through both the beginning and the rise of Modernism. After his death he was honored, together with those three, as one of the four masters of Modernist architecture.

The odd part is that Wright always attacked the modern big city, held Modernist architecture in contempt, and kept refusing to be filed in the Modernist camp.

It has to be admitted that ego and arrogance made up a large share of Wright's character. His social circle was narrow to begin with, and he cared to accept only the devotion of his disciples and the regard of his friends.

He looked down on Gropius and Le Corbusier; when the two men came to the United States and called on him, Wright simply would not see them, which is how the lasting dislike between them began. Even Mies van der Rohe, whom he admired at first, drew his loud displeasure as Mies went further and further down the Modernist road, and the relationship between them slowly cooled.

It is true that Wright's early work had a large influence on Modernist architecture. Rowan Moore's piece takes the same view: the planning and design of the houses Wright invented early on carried more freedom, more movement, and more openness, and to some degree changed the course of modern architecture. Which is also why Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies all held him in sincere respect before they came to the United States.

But Wright's work really was unlike Modernist architecture and its insistence on function and reason. He called himself "the Beethoven of architecture," and the Finnish master Eero Saarinen called him the Michelangelo of the 20th century. That cookie-cutter kind of building — the boxy skyscraper, the house chopped into box-shaped rooms — was plainly not the road Wright walked.

Through Wright's work the design of American houses and small villas grew richer, more practical, closer to ordinary people, and thick with poetry. It would not be too much to say he carried the American middle-class house into a new stage.

Switch to his work in other fields — the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, finished in 1915, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, finished in 1956 — and neither followed the fashion of its time either.

The Imperial Hotel was one of the few overseas projects Wright ever took. He was still in his phase of resisting the fashionable Neoclassical style, and he designed a luxury hotel of no great height, roughly H-shaped, mixing in local Japanese manner, with many interior courtyards. The brick-and-stone walls carried a great deal of carved stone, and the ornament even held features of traditional Mexican art.

What the building is most praised for, though, is its structure. The cantilevered foundation, sitting above silt, could take a shock, which made the Imperial Hotel one of the few buildings left standing after the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, while the courtyard pool, which doubled as a water source for firefighting, made the hotel a safe island in the sea of flames — and won Wright a worldwide reputation.

By the time he built the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Modernist architecture ruled. Wright still kept clear of the mainstream and built a spiral museum, an original among the ranks of square boxes around it, and out of place there too.

This is Wright's only work in New York. The main body of the building is a large spiral structure, winding up and outward on the outside, while the curve and ramp inside run up through six floors. The middle of the spiral opens into empty space. The museum's collection is shown along the ramp, and visitors walk up it looking as they go. The natural light in the hall comes mainly from a glass dome, and strip windows on the outer face along the ramp let in daylight too.

It was a work Wright was proud of, and it drew loud criticism. Plenty of critics pointed out that a building of this structure conflicts with a museum's job of showing art: the walls are slanted, which gets in the way of hanging paintings, so the paintings shown at the opening all had their frames taken off; the ramp is slanted too, which does not match how visitors look at art — people often need to stop, or even back away for a wider view, which makes the ramp less than friendly.

Wright lived to 92, and his career in architecture ran 72 years. Over that long stretch he had more than enough episodes that looked, from outside, like a checkered life, and more than enough swings between low and high, but the work he left in this world — the famous buildings the histories of architecture return to again and again — is the best footnote to a creativity that ran ahead of its time.

As he put it in a 1957 interview with the American television reporter Mike Wallace: "I would like to have a free architecture, one you could see standing there, an honor to the landscape around it rather than a disgrace."

Image sources: franklloydwright.org, ArchDaily, Hanna House, Robie House, Fallingwater