The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Fourth Edition: A Complete Catalog
528
The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Fourth Edition: A Complete Catalog
528eBook
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Overview
William Allin Storrer is one of the experts leading this charge, and his definitive guide, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, has long been the resource of choice for anyone interested in Wright. Thanks to the work of Storrer and his colleagues at the Rediscovering Wright Project, thirty-seven new sites have recently been identified as the work of Wright. Together with more photos, updated and expanded entries, and a new essay on the evolution of Wright’s unparalleled architectural style, this new edition is the most comprehensive and authoritative catalog available.
Organized chronologically, the catalog includes full-color photos, location information, and historical and architectural background for all of Wright’s extant structures in the United States and abroad, as well as entries for works that have been demolished over the years. A geographic listing makes it easy for traveling Wright fans to find nearby structures and a new key indicates whether a site is open to the public.
Publishing for Wright’s sesquicentennial, this new edition will be a trusted companion for anyone embarking on their own journeys through the wonder and genius of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226435893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 215 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
A Complete Catalog
By William Allin Storrer
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 William Allin StorrerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-43575-6
CHAPTER 1
IT'S ALL IN THE PLAN
EVEN GENIUS NEEDS NURTURING
When Frank Lloyd Wright was asked how he came up with a design, he would often draw a seed and then develop it into a design. A seed has within it the plan of what it will be, but it needs to be pollinated in order to become what is in that plan. So, too, geniuses must master their vocational tools before they can work their magic in their chosen career.
So it was that Frank Lincoln Wright, who came into the world in Bear Valley, Wisconsin, June 8, 1867, was surrounded with photographic images of architectural structures placed in his bedroom by his caring mother. Youthful time in Massachusetts would have revealed to him wondrous structures in such styles as Colonial and Federal.
Where then, one must wonder, did Wright learn the basics of architectural design and the running of an architectural office? For this, we must look to when Wright was in Madison, Wisconsin, and at the two people who were his earliest influences, Lew Forester Porter and Allan Darst Conover, a.k.a. Alan Conover.
Lew Forester Porter was educated at Beloit College and the University of Wisconsin. He was, later, the supervising architect of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the second-highest domed capitol in the country (shorter than Washington, DC, by 19 inches out of respect). Porter was a principal in the firm of Conover and Porter from 1885 to January 1899.
Alan Conover, son of a classics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed a successful science, mathematics and engineering career by teaching engineering and building construction at the University of Wisconsin in the 1880s. He became interested in architecture with the construction of Science Hall by Milwaukee architect Henry Koch, who also designed Milwaukee's city hall. Conover served as the local architect and altered Science Hall during construction, though by how much we do not know. In 1885, Conover began practicing architecture while he continued teaching. It was then that he took on Lew Porter, a talented former student, as partner. Conover handled most of the political connections while Porter handled most of the true architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright commenced his formal education in 1885 at the University of Wisconsin School for Engineering. He took classes part-time while apprenticing under Conover. His exposure to the ideas of Alan Conover and Lew Porter must have opened up a treasure chest of ideas for him. The fact that he was in the office for over two years (perhaps more) left an indelible impact on his formative mind. This experience was a complete college education unto itself since Wright could learn about historical backgrounds, world culture, engineering, client agendas, and construction materials, along with the ins and outs of commercial and residential architecture.
This education must have seemed like a godsend to Wright. The firm began a pattern for him that would be repeated throughout his early career and apprenticeship: that of having two powerfully gifted men as mentors, one oriented more toward business and engineering, the other steeped in design and aesthetics. Alan Conover and Lew Porter formed such a team. Then came Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Cecil S. Corwin. And finally, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.
Perhaps the most important single building that contributed to Wright's development was Conover and Koch's Science Hall. The mark Science Hall had on Wright's thinking is unmistakable. Science Hall was built with a frame made completely of steel beams, three- foot thick walls, double-wall air pockets and little interior wood. It was the first completely fireproof building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus and is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the world that makes substantial use of structural steel.
Here are a few seminal ideas that Wright could have learned from Madison and its Science Hall:
1. Science Hall is built into the hill not on top of it. This thematic core stayed with Wright his entire life, including for Taliesin (S.172), Fallingwater (S.231) and Marin County Civic Center (S.415–S.417).
2. The approach and entryway to the building take the visitor up a series of dramatic turns before compressing space at the entryway and exploding it in the interior. This is standard with Wright from his Prairie works onward.
3. Excess interior and exterior ornament is stripped away. This is decidedly not a Koch contribution to the design, but it is what Conover did as part of his alterations. Unlike many Victorian architects, Conover and Porter found that the integrity as well as beauty of a building lay in its fundamental truth as an architectural statement. Throughout his career, Wright exhibited a proclivity for removing exterior details and simplifying form. Wright laid claim to having designed the Heating Plant building behind Science Hall, a structure that embodies all the fundamental principles espoused by Conover and Porter. In fact, Conover's alleged drawing of a balanced beam structure was reiterated precisely the same way in one of Wright's Madison boathouse projects a few years later.
4. Science Hall uses bricks as bricks, stone as stone, wood as wood. This technique does not attempt to disguise or tease these materials into something they are not. Here we have the essence of "in the nature of materials," later the title of a book collaboration between Wright and Henry-Russell Hitchcock.
5. Science Hall revels in soaring space that virtually hollows out the interior and makes it seem as light as a feather. What Koch-Conover-Porter achieved here is that old Asian proverb (attributed to Lao-Tse) about architecture not being defined by the walls of a building, but rather the space contained within the walls. This flowing, free-form space would become one of the hallmarks of Wright's practice. Unity Temple (S.096) is an excellent example of how this lesson was put into practice years later.
6. Congruent with masterful and dramatic use of space in Science Hall is the atrium. The whole central core — out of which the logic and interior of the building grow — is open and soaring. The earliest example of this open core in Wright's work is Dr. Harlan's home (S.018). It is interesting to note that in Corwin and Wright's collaborations, only Wright seems interested in this theme, which he repeats in the Roloson Rowhouses (S.026), and later on a grand scale, in the Larkin Administration Building (S.093).
7. Science Hall features innovative use of building materials. It is one of the first buildings in the United States to use a steel understructure to frame the building, which was at the time an almost unprecedented use of this material for practical and aesthetic purposes. This steel made the building fireproof, allowed the exterior and interior walls to be dissolved into flowing space, created an inner world inside the outer shell and became an integral exposed design element. Is it surprising that Wright never separated engineering from aesthetics in his commissions?
One can imagine Conover being frustrated by his protégé: "Frank, that won't work! Do it this way, the way I demonstrated in class!" Apparently Conover was not always pleased with Frank Wright, who now used Lloyd as his middle name, though Conover enjoyed the younger man's enthusiasm and originality. Fifteen years after he had solved a problem with an elegant post-and-beam structure, Wright would solve the same problem with a cantilever, which Conover had said couldn't be done.
What Wright may have contributed to Conover's designs cannot be ascertained reliably, but one cannot help noticing that Conover's designs gained flair, a liveliness lacking from his pre- and post- Wright years.
The groundbreaking ideas that underpinned Conover and Porter's projects were unparalleled in Wright's education. Wright may have later embellished and expanded on Conover and Porter's fundamental truths, but he learned and thoroughly assimilated them in Madison first.
Wright's next mentors were J. Lyman Silsbee and Cecil S. Corwin. Silsbee came from upstate New York to Chicago as the doyen of the shingle style. Corwin, a decade older than Wright, was a Silsbee draftsman and later an architect. Given that Wright boasted that all he needed to design a building were his T square and triangles, we must assume that it is Corwin working with Wright when we find interior spaces contained by a compass. When Wright began his own architectural practice, Corwin was nearby. In Chicago, their offices were side-by-side.
Examples of their collaborative work are sprinkled throughout Wright's work —
S.014, S.020, S.028 and S.039 are the most obvious — up to 1896 when Corwin decamped to New York City. In Chicago's Hyde Park, there are rows of buildings by Corwin that show Wright's handiwork in geometric detail.
But there was yet another duo that influenced Wright: Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, whose great Auditorium Building was in design and construction during Wright's short time at their office. It was here that Wright designed a score of buildings, many of which are considered moonlighted or bootlegged works, as Wright's contract specified no "outside" work. One does have to wonder, however, how Sullivan could not have known of Wright's work outside the office, as the hardware — door knobs, hinges, plumbing fixtures — was bought by Wright from the same supply source used by his "Lieber Meister."
With its main entry in an extreme corner and centrally located fireplace, Frank Lloyd Wright's own house plan gives us the first example of what was spatially important to the young architect.
Over some drawings shown here, a green square has been drawn as an aid to the reader in following the incorporation of Wright's home plan into later designs, such as the one for the Parker residence (S.017). The square, to Wright, meant integrity.
Note that in both these plans Wright placed the entry and stairs to a corner of the house. Many Victorian houses had a central entry and stairway that split the house in two. Wright's simple relocation of the entry to the side created a greater flow of interior space, the "space within to be lived in," which became a standard that he carried even into the Usonian structures.
This relocation became a signature of many a Wright design. Sometimes he located the entry to the side of the house, fully away from the street facade, as in the McArthur (S.011) and Harlan (S.018) homes. This carried through to his later development of the square house in the "Fireproof House for $5,000" and its variants.
The Prairie house turns the square inside out but, again, the entry is placed in a wing where it does not interfere with the flow from room to room. Finally, in his reduction of Prairie to his Usonian ideal, a simple L, the entry is placed under the carport roof (creating the first compression of space so essential to Wrightian space from Prairie onward) at the outside of the L corner so that, once entrants step inside, they find further compression to the sides, only to be released upon entry to the high-ceilinged living room.
The Prairie era ran from Willits (S.054) through Tomek (S.128), the predecessor to the more famous Robie (S.127), and on to 1909 when Wright left for Fiesole, Italy, a small town overlooking Florence. Mamah Borthwick Cheney also headed to Europe having left her husband (S.104). She was researching Swedish philosophies including those of Emanuel Swedenborg.
When (Frank) Lloyd Wright (Junior) was asked to design the Swedenborgian church in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, a.k.a. Wayfarers Chapel, and a.k.a. The Glass Church, he said he needed to do no research into the religion, because it was, as Lloyd told me, what his father had taught him as a boy "on his knee."
In Fiesole, Wright, with his son Lloyd and an office draftsman, produced the great Wasmuth Portfolio. Its two volumes contained 100 lithographs of Wright's work. Its actual title was Ausgefürte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. Including works as early as 1893, but looking heavily at the work of the first decade of the twentieth century, this collection amounted to Wright's celebration of and epitaph to Prairie.
He now broke from working for wealthy clients and for a decade strove to find a way to meet the needs of middle-class clients. From River Forest to Glencoe to Madison, he sought but didn't find the answer.
You must be wondering why I have not mentioned any of Wright's nondomestic work: Larkin Building (S.093), Unity Temple (S.096), City National Bank and Park Inn Hotel (S.155–S.156), for instance, all built in the Prairie era.
Or Midway Gardens (S.180), the Imperial Hotel (S.194), the Johnson Wax complex (S.237–S.238), Florida Southern College (S.251–S.258), the Guggenheim Museum (S.400) or the Marin County Civic Center (S.415–S.417), later well- known works.
It is not because they are not important works. It is because Wright's goal in all his architecture was to create a Democratic American Architecture. To Wright, this had to be done for the home, the domestic temple.
What is important to know about Wright's commercial and religious buildings is their tripartite arrangement of spaces. Everything is divided three ways, with the main room the largest, most open space. This is the tripartite arrangement of Unity Temple (S.096), the Larkin Administration Building (S.093), the Johnson Wax Administration Building (S.237), and the Guggenheim Museum (S.400).
It would be foolish to think that what Wright makes a standard in one area of design is not carried through to other areas. So, as we now move on to the Usonian era, this presentation of tripartite space should be easily transferred in your, the reader's, mind:
1. Living room
2. Workspace-entry
3. Quiet space (bedrooms)
A completion of our journey through Wright's creation of a Democratic American Architecture must now follow. After designing in the style of Silsbee, learning from Corwin and Sullivan, then experimenting as his clients would allow, Wright achieved Prairie architecture with the Ward Willits house (S.054). Then came the square houses with entry half outside the basic square. Turning his back on Prairie with the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio, he still continued designing square houses, sometimes elongated into rectangles for narrow sites.
Then in the 1920s, four clients, possibly coming first to his son Lloyd, who had developed a reputation as a designer of sets for Hollywood movies, approached Wright and he created the first Usonian textile-block houses.
Four houses (S.214–S.217) were all on hilly sites, a problem Wright previously had only needed to solve extensively for Taliesin (S.218). But even that was not as steep as the hillsides for Harriet and Samuel Freeman (S.216) and for John Storer (S.215), or the deep ravine for Alice Millard (S.214), or the hilltop of the predecessor of Usonian in-line designs, the Mabel and Charles Ennis residence (S.217).
That these houses were templates for later Usonian structures can be demonstrated in their geometry. Most clearly, one needs to see how the Samuel Freeman house is the forerunner of what most Wright historians (even I for a while) called the first Usonian, the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First residence (S.234).
Below is S.216, the Freeman house, geometrically altered from its hilly site to a flat site. How did I get this? By transforming a design for a steep hillside into what it could have been on a flat site.
Now, look at the first diagram of the Freeman house, where both axes have been flipped to get an image that can be seen in direct comparison to the Jacobs First residence:
This arrangement — living room, workspace, quiet (bedroom) space — became the signature of all Usonian homes. If this seems complex, it was simple to Wright while he used only his T square and triangles to create his house plans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright by William Allin Storrer. Copyright © 2017 William Allin Storrer. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionIt’s All in the Plan
Catalog of Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings
List of the Extant Work of Frank Lloyd Wright by Zip Code
Credits for Photos Not Otherwise Identified
Index