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Frank Lloyd Wright was a a master of self-imagery. His photographs show him as an artist, clad in a cape and beret, as a beloved teacher surrounded by his apprentices,and as a powerful visionary lecturing. In his talks Wright told about his integrity, other architects moronic worship of the past instead of portraying the culture they lived in, and the spirituality of his architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright  architectural career spanned from 1891 to 1959. In the last 16 years of his Wright’s practice, his reputation became magic. Up to then he hardly made a living. Wright and  admirers said that was because  his architecture was so advanced that many prospective clients were afraid to try something so different than what was then being designed. But in these last sixteen years of his practice he received more commissions than in the preceding fifty-two years. There were a few contemporary architects whose work he admired- notably- Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe. He hated the dominant American architecture style- Beau Arts style architecture .. The housing style he abhorred was the box.  In 1948,  the American Institute of Architects (AIA) finally  awarded Wright their Gold Medal.  In his acceptance speech, Wright said he had done every thing possible to eliminate Cape Cod Colonial house style and further since he never  joined the AIA, he consistently maintained his amateur status. Then he and Thomas Jefferson were the only non-members to ever  receive this award. Wright was an avid student of architecture.

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was an mid- 19th century French architect and theorist, famous for his public discourse on “honesty” in architecture, which eventually transcended all revival styles, to form the emerging spirit of Modernism. Wright advocated what Viollet-le-Duc wrote about many years before.

Here is some of the work of Wright’s final years.

The Guggenheim Museum is Wright’s most famous work. The commission came in 1943 from Solomon Guggenheim. Guggenheim was a great admirer of Wright’s work, but he died while the drawings of the Museum were being prepared . After his death, the trustees of the estate were against the Museum  by Wright. Wright prepared seven complete different sets of working drawings. Finally, thirteen years after Wright received this commission,  construction began. The Museum was completed after Wright had passed on.  The sixteen years Wright worked on the Museum required the most time Wright had spent on any commission. The  Museum was a spiral, continuos ramp.  After the construction started, Wright had criticism of his design. The complaints were similar to the criticism that Frank Gerhy received for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain. The building is a wrk of art that everything else is diminished including the Art work. Wright replied to these critics- “it will make the building and the paintings an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before”

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK CITY

Kenneth Laurent House-1948

Kenneth Laurent, a wheelchair bound  paraplegic, asked Frank Lloyd Wright design a house for him. The plan of the house as the first in a series of “football” designs by Wright. Two curves that meet at the ends. One curve is the outside terrace. The other forms a long gallery that connects the living room at end to the master bedroom at the other end of the house. This is among Wright’s finest residential designs

Laurent House, Rockford, Illinois

Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin

Frank LLoyd Wright came from a family of Unitarian ministers. When Wright received this commission, his wife, Olgivanna, made one suggestion that he make the roof represent hands held together in prayer.  The building had a very limited budget. Before the building was completed the church was over budget. The future of the unfinished building was very bleak. The very real prospect was that the church would never be finished. Wright recruited his own apprentices to work until late in the evening plastering, paining and doing the finish work on the exteriors. The church opened with a sermon by Frank Lloyd Wright and a concert by the Taliesin Fellowship.

This a different church design- no steeple, no facade , no relationship to churches of bygone days

First Unitarian Meeting House- Madison

Palmer House

The Palmer House is based on a triangular unit system . Six triangles were combined to form a hexagon. The clients were devotees of classical music. Wright, a perfectionist,

created a home for great acoustics.

Palmer House, Ann Arbor Michigan

H.C. Price Company Tower

The tower for the H.C. Price Company was based on a 1929 design for the St. Mark’s Church in New York City. This commission was a victim of the 1929 stock market crash. The Price Company wanted a three story with a parking lot for cars and their pipeline trucks. The preliminary design Frank Lloyd Wright presented Price was a 22 story office building and ten duplex apartments. Wright was a great salesman. The compromise was 19 stories. After the tower opened , Wright wrote a book titled “The Story of the Tower- the Tree that Escaped the Crowded Forest”. He wrote” The skyscraper, planned to stand free in an open park and thus more fit for human occupancy, is as nearly organic as in tension and concrete in compression can make it: doing for the tall building what Lidgerwood made steel do for the long ship. The had its keel: this concrete building has its steel core. A composite shaft of concrete rises through the floors, each slab engaging the floors at nineteen levels. Each floor proceeds outward from the shaft as a cantilever slab extended from the shaft, similar to the branch of a tree from its trunk.  The slab, thick at the shaft,  grows thinner as it grows thinner as it goes outwards in overlapping scale pattern  in concrete until at the final outer  leap to the screen wall it is no more than 3 inches thick. The outer enclosing screens o0f g;ass and copper are pendant from the edge of the cantilever slabs. …… this idea had to wait twenty-five years for full realization. This is the logical development of the idea of a tall building in the age of steel and glass; as logical engineering as the Brooklyn Bridge or an ocean liner. But the benefits of modernity such as this are not merely economic. There is greater privacy,safety, and beauty for human lives within it than is possible in any other type building…….. Individuality should be no less appropriate to American business , be even more appropriate than to other facets of American life. ….Witness this release of the skyscraper from the slavery of commercial bondage to the human freedom prophesied  by our Declaration of Independence. Democracy builds.

Interior of Beth Sholom, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania

Marin County Civic Center

This is the only public commission Frank Lloyd Wright ever received. After Wright received this commission, many residents of Marin County objected to the choice of Wright as the architect. The Marin County Board of Supervisors stood by their choice of architect despite the clamor against Wright. For many years we resided  in Marin County, Califormia and every time I drove passed the Marin County Civic Center I was in awe of its beauty. It is an awesome sight. The entire length of the building has a glass skylight that fills the main corridor with light. The Civic Center arises form the land. This Civic Center best illustrates what Wright had in mind when he wrote, “ When organic architecture is properly carried out no landscape is ever outrages by it but is always developed by it. The good building makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built”.

During the 1920′s Frank Lloyd Wright received many valuable  commissions, but almost all of these were terminated after the Stock Market crash in 1929.  Things started to change, when in 1933 Edgar J. Kaufmann, son of the owner of the Kaufmann Department Store in Pittsburg. became  fellow of the Taliesin Foundation.  When young Mr. Kaufmann was part of the team developing the Broadacre City, he was successful in getting his father to fund of the model for a nationwide tour. Soon the parents of Edgar and the Wrights became good friends.  The Kaufmanns had a summer cabin near a stream south of Pittsburg that had badly deteriorated and they wanted to replace their   Wright designed a home over the stream. This was to be one of the greatest homes in American architectural history.

There are many stories told by Wright’s apprentices of designs appearing fully formed in the first drawing . Wright drew the Fallingwater design from scratch in the two hours it took the Kaufmanns to drive to Taliesin, and the finished home is virtually identical to these initial sketches.

Fallingwater

The beauty and drama of Fallingwater’s streamline design has earned a place in architectural history. In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects named the house the “best all-time work of American architecture”. The real accomplishment of Fallingwater is the simple, quiet way, and yet magical way in which the the building sets man in nature  Wright wrote to the Taliesin Foundation: “Fallingwater is a great blessing- one of the greatest blessings to be experienced on earth”

In Wright’ wrote in the “Essential Frank Lloyd Wright:” about Fallingwater:

” This building is a late example of the inspiration of the site, the cooperation of an intelligent, appreciative client and the use of entirely masonry materials —–The grammar of the slabs at their eaves is best shown by a detail. But the roof water is caught by a lead strip built into the concrete above near the beginnings of the curve so that water dripping by gravity at the bottom of the curve – as it does- does not very much stain the curves. It is not the deluge of water in a storm that hurts a building : it is ooze and drip of dirty water in thawing and freezing, increased by slight showers. The cantilever slabs here carry parapets and the beams. This may be seen clutching big boulders. But next time, I believe. parapets will carry the floors- or better still we will make will know enough to make the two work together………The effects you see in this house are not superficial effects.”

The Johnson Wax Administration Building

After Fallingwater , “the sky was dark at Taliesin”. Out of nowhere, an important commercial project came to Wright, The Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin. Racine was close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. Wright compared this commission to the Larkin Building in Buffalo. Both were located in unattractive environments. The architecture was turned inwards. The Johnson Wax Building has no windows. Light pours down from the roof. All support for the roof is carried on mushroom shaped columns.  The State of Wisconsin refused to issue a building permit for this building. The columns were designed to carry 12 tons. The Wisconsin building experts ruled in refusing the permit that columns would only bear a maximum of 5 tons. Wright challenged this finding. Wright had a column built on site . As the State officials watched ,tons of cement bags were placed on the mushroom shaped column. After 60 tons had been placed on the Column without any cracking, the State agreed to issue the permit. These columns were called dendriform shafts. Wright wrote about the Johnson Wax Administration Building:

“Organic architecture designed this great building to be an inspiring a place to work in as any cathedral ever was in which to worship. It was meant to be a socio-architectural interpretation of modern business at its top and best.The building was laid out upon a horizontal unit system twenty feet on centers both ways, rising into the air on a vertical units system of three and and a half inches: one especially large brick course. Glass was not used as bricks in this structure. Bricks were bricks. The building itself  became- by way of long glass tubing- crystal where crystal either transparent or translucent was felt to be more appropriate.  In oder to make the structure monolithic the exterior exterior enclosing wall material appeared inside wherever it was sensible for it to do so.

The  main feature of construction was the simple repetition slender hollow monolithic dendriform shafts or stems-the stems standing tip-toe in small brass shoes bedded at the floor level.

The great structure throughout is light and plastic- an open glass-filled rift is up there where the cornice might have been. Reinforcing used was mostly cold-drawn steel mesh-welded. The entire steel-reinforced structure stands there earthquake-proof,. fireproof, soundproof, and vermin-proof. Almost fool-proof but alas, no. Simplicity is never fool-proof nor is it ever for fools”

The Interior of the Johnson Wax Administration Building

Exterior of Johnson Wax Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin

These two buildings brought great fame to Wright. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City had a very well attended architectural exhibit of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. During the last 16 years of his life, Wright received 50% of the total architectural commissions of his entire career. For Frank Lloyd Wright life began at 76.

Next time we will explore this very creative period of Wright’s career.