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Hollyhock House- a genius architect vs. a headstrong client

During the time Frank Lloyd Wright was continually traveling to Japan for the Imperial Hotel, one of Wright’s most prominent commissions came from oil heiress, Aline Barnsdall. Wright was asked to design the Hollyhock House, other residences and two theaters. Barnsdall envisioned  a cultural center in Los Angeles.

Barnsdall v urged Wright to stretch his imagination to the limit. She wrote Frank Lloyd Wright, “ You will put your freest dreams into it. For I believe so firmly in your genius that I want to make it the keynote of my work” Is it any wonder that Wright reportedly said,” When you are a genius, it is hard to be modest”.

While Wright was planning her commission, Barnsdall was constantly traveling throughout the world. At the same time, Wright made at least ten ship voyages to Tokyo for the Imperial Hotel. They communicated by letter and telegram.  Wright wrote in his Autobiography on page 227: ”

“We went to work- or I did. My client, I soon found out, had ideas and wanted yours but never worked much for long at a time, being possessed by incorrigible wanderlust that made me wonder, sometimes, what she wanted a beautiful home for, anyhow, anywhere………she would drop suggestions as a war plane drops bombs and sail away into the blue. One never knew where or from where the bombs would drop – but they dropped…… Now, with a radical client like Aline Barnsdall , a site like Olive Hill, a climate like California, an architect head on for freedom, something had to happen even by proxy. This Romanza of  California had to come out on Olive Hill.”

Frank Lloyd Wright saw a great opportunity for his architectural practice in Los Angeles. Wright detested the pseudo-Spanish architecture and the representations of Italian “Renaissance” architect. Wright thought that California should have an architecture that was free of European influence.  Wright believed that pre-Columbian architecture-Mayan best represented what Wright imagined as the architecture of southern California. Few houses have had the monumental devotion that Wright gave to Hollyhock House.

Wright  forbid Barnsdall v from making changes during construction. Autobiography, p.229.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about Barnsdall and her house. “Herself a pioneer, this daughter of the pioneer lived up to integral romance when all about her was ill with pseudo-romantic in terms of neo-Spanish, lingering along as quasi-Italian, stale with Renaissance, dying or dead English half-timber and Colonial” . Wright was the American advocate for a more modern architecture.

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Quarter of Broadacre City model compared to a one mile grid composed of 640 (broad) acres at 264 x 165 feet (approx. 80 x 50 m) each.

Usonian House

In the designing the Usonian House , Frank Lloyd Wright completely revised the conception of the ideal domestic environment. The objective of the Usonian houses was to create affordable housing. Eliminating of anything unnecessary was Wright’s answer. The defining features of Wright’s design were: radiant floor heating,a single story with a flat roof and widely cantilevered eaves, floor-to-ceiling windows and doors opening to a garden with patio, a kitchen-bathroom unit slightly elevated above roof line, a bedroom zone, a kitchen-dining-living zone semi-divided by function, prefabricated walls, built-in closets, street facing clerestory windows and a carport( a term Wright invented). Wright eliminated air conditioning and as much finish work as possible. The first Usonian house was the Jacobs house in Madison,Wisconsin where the winters are cold and the summers humid.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect for 73 year.  Not withstanding the length of his career,  Wright’s accomplishments are truly awesome.

When you visit the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, you can see Wright’s genius in his designed houses. All these Wright homes are over 100 years old. Today, these Wright houses look like contemporary home

Prairie Homes

The W.W. Willits house- first Prairie House- 1902

Wright created the prairie house with a horizontal line, meant to blend with the flat midwestern landscape. Wright designed broad, open spaces instead of strictly defined rooms of the Victorian era. He said ” the reality of a building is not the container but the space within”

The W.W. Willits house, built in Highland Park, Illinois in 1902, was the first house that embodied all the elements of the prairie style. His masterpiece of the prairie style is the Robie House, built in Chicago in 1909. The Robie House is considered one of the most important buildings in American architecture- a forerunner of modernism in architecture. Tours of the Robie House attracts visitors year round.

Robie House – designated by the American Institute of Architects as one of five greatest American houses.

Wright did not aspire simply to design a house, but to create a complete environment, and he often dictated the details of the interior. He designed stained glass, fabrics, furniture, carpet and the accessories of the house. Legend has it that, in at least one case, he even designed the gowns of his client’s wife.The controlling factor was seldom the wishes of the individual client, but Wright’s belief that buildings stongly influence the people who inhabit them. He believed that “the architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes the responsibility .

The name prairie house is derived from a 1901 story, A home in a Prairie Town, that appeared  in the Ladies Home Journal about the house Wright designed for the magazine. After the magazine was published, Wright became the toast of Europe. He traveled to Germany where a best selling book of his drawings was published. Although Wright became a celebrity architect in Europe, in the United States, the architectural establishment was very critical of his work.

Larkin Building

Larkin Building

Wright’s practice was not only houses. In Buffalo Wright designed the Larkin Building. Larkin Company administration building, the first entirely air-conditioned modern office building on record.  It is block like and extremely simple in its forms, and has very little ornamentation….the Larkin building was decisively vertical…Indeed, it was the first consciously architectural expression of the kind of American structure which Europeans were beginning to discover to their delight: the great clusters of grain silos and similar industrial monuments that men like Corbu and Gropius found so exciting in the early 1920s.

“I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin building [Wright said years later]. I found a natural opening to the liberation I sought when [after a great struggle] I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into freestanding, individual features.”  — Frank Lloyd Wright.

Unity Temple- a Unitarian Church

Unity Temple

The architecture of Unity Temple represents a dramatic departure from customary design for a house of worship, even by modern standards. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this structure over 100 years ago specifically to “not merely create a religious structure, but one that fitly embodies the principles of liberal religion for which this church stands… unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.”

There are very specific reasons why the building was designed and constructed in such a unique manner.  This is a cubist structure of poured concrete- one of the first of poured concrete buildings.

Unity Temple is considered to be one of Wright’s most important structures dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. Because of its consolidation of aesthetic intent and structure through use of a single material, reinforced concrete, Unity Temple is considered by many architects to be the first modern building in the world. This idea became of central importance to the modern architects who followed Wright, such as Mies Van Der Rohe, and even the post-modernists, such as Frank Gehry.

right had long been intrigued by Japanese culture (he was an avid collector of Japanese prints), so when the opportunity came to build a project in Tokyo, the Imperial Hotel he lobbied for the project. Commissioned in 1916, the hotel was to represent the emergence of Japan as a modern nation and symbolize Japan’s relation to the West. To that end, Wright designed the building as a hybrid of Japanese and Western architecture.

The overall U.S. unemployment rate is 10%. For professionals, this rate  was 4.4%. For architects 20%. The construction industry is also 20%. This rate varies by states and communities. For example,  Minnesota architects, according to the local chapter of the AIA, the rate is over 40%.  It is no coincidence that multi-family starts are the lowest in 40 years.  Much risk must be taken out of the development process to give the lenders the confidence to finance real estate development.

A TRIPLE WHAMMY

Most architects work is provided by public bodies or building developers. With most State and local governments suffering huge deficits, there is a scarcity of public work. Because  developers are starved for available financing for private real estate development, there is a scarcity of private work. The Stimulus Program was Congress and the Administration’s answer to this horrible economic collapse. This much heralded Federal Stimulus Funds were scheduled for developments that were “shovel ready”. This law was passed and funded a year ago. Based on the present unemployment rates for architects and construction workers, it would appear that the stimulus funds have not impacted these fields.  I  would guess that most of the stimulus funds spent to date went for operational costs not capital costs. To pay for operational deficits of state and local governments, not the building of “shovel ready” developments. What will happen next with the remaining stimulus funds is everybody’s guess.

HELP FOR THE DESIGN AND BUILDING PROCESS

New BIM (building information modeling) technologies have begun to replace traditional drafting with three-dimensional modeling. With the development of the Building Information Modeling (BIM), the increasing role of contractors, material suppliers, and owners will have a larger impact on a building’s evolution.  Will this lower the importance of architects in the design of buildings?  This is heralded as a saver of development time and cost. To take advantage of this new technology, everybody in the development process must be skilled in this BIM process.  Getting up to speed presents a major obstacle, as software and training can be prohibitively expensive. There must be a massive program to bring the development community up to speed on BIM at an affordable cost. The community benefit of developing  better designed and less costly buildings will be getting our economy up to speed.

Architecture — and design in general — is about problem-solving.  There may be a  tremendous opportunity in pushing “a more holistic view of design,” in solving a broader pool of problems that might expand the client base beyond building developers.  It’s not necessarily just designing things that are physical. It’s designing programs, solutions that can be social or environmental. For example, a community program can he developed in that focuses on reducing energy consumption. As architects learn to more broadly apply their trade, new economic opportunities will emerge.

In an earlier edition of this blog, I told about the warning to architects in Progressive Architecture written some 40 years ago. This concerned construction managers replacing architects as the “master builder”. How many “clerk of the works” do you see on construction jobs today? The role of the clerk of the works is primarily to represent the interests of the owner in regard to ensuring that the quality of both materials and workmanship are in accordance with the design information such as plans, specification and engineering drawings, in addition to enforcing quality standards. This was done by the clerk of the works for over 600 years. The only group that has liability for not attaining these goals is the architect. These substitutes for the architect in representing the owner’s interest during the construction only add an additional layer of bureaucracy. This wastes time and money with no added responsibility.  Put this role where the liability is and where the best knowledge of the plans and specifications are- with the architect.

A building is an economic entity whose goals are to take care of unmet user’s need, provide a public benefit, and meet the economic goals of the lenders and investors.

1. To meet the user’s needs. the quality and quantity of the space must adhere to the plans and specs.

2. To meet the public need , the buildings must adhere to all zoning and building codes.

3, The lenders and investors goals are the building is constructed  for the budget within the scheduled time.

The standard construction contract published by the AIA makes the architect the determiner of #1.

The local authority provides for With  #2.

The contractor signs a contract for #3. By virtue of this contract, the contractor can ask for a change order because of unforeseen events, inconsistencies between inn the plans, spec or between the two. The BIM shall eliminate many of these.  With the BIM, much improved early estimates of job cost, will have more buildings built within budget.

The architect designs the development based on the economic goals developed by the developer. What is the best answer to have the development these goals.?

Through an integrated project delivery method, owners, designers, and builders can move toward unified models and improved design, construction, and operations processes.  In response to increasing owner demand, architects, engineers, construction managers, contractors, and specialty disciplines are forming strategic alliances and working in new and innovative ways.  The use of integrated project delivery and Building Information Modeling (BIM) will advance integration of the design and construction processes, allowing greater predictability of project outcomes.