A Delicate Balance: The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright

A Delicate Balance
The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright
Twentieth Century Humanities
Professor Will Adams
Valencia College

Frank Lloyd Wright
 Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-
1959) was an American
architect, interior designer,
writer, and educator, who
designed more than 1,000
projects, which resulted in
more than 500 completed
works.
 Wright promoted organic
architecture and was a
leader of the Prairie School
movement of architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright
“What is architecture anyway? Is it the
vast collection of the various buildings
which have been built to please the
varying taste of the various lords of
mankind? I think not. No, I know that
architecture is life; or at least it is life itself
taking form and therefore it is the truest
record of life as it was lived in the world
yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will
be lived. So architecture I know to be a
Great Spirit….Architecture is that great
living creative spirit which from
generation to generation, from age to
age, proceeds, persists, creates, according
to the nature of man, and his
circumstances as they change. That is
really architecture.”

Frank Lloyd Wright
 Wright was born on June 8, 1867.
 He started his formal education
in 1885 at the University of
Wisconsin School for Engineering.
 In 1887, he stopped his education
without taking a degree and
moved to Chicago, where he was
consecutively a part of two
architectural firms.
 In 1893 he started his own
architectural practice.
 Wright designed more than
1,000 projects, which resulted in
more than 500 completed works.

Frank Lloyd Wright
 Frank Lloyd Wright is considered the
most influential American architect
of the 20th century.
 His legacy is an architectural style
that departed from European
influences to create a purely
American form, one that included
the idea that buildings can be in
harmony with the natural
environment.
 He blended ancient architectural
elements, such as columns, with new
construction technologies, such as
reinforced concrete, to create his
buildings.

Wright’s Home & Studio
 The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and
Studio at 951 Chicago Avenue in
Oak Park, Illinois, served as Wright's
private residence and workplace
from 1889 to 1909 – the first 20 years
of his career.
 It was here he raised six children with
his first wife, Catherine Tobin.
 Innovatively, Wright used his home
as an architectural laboratory,
experimenting with design concepts
that contain the basis of his
architectural philosophy.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972
and declared a National Historic Landmark four years later.

 In 1898, Wright added a
studio, described by a fellow
architect as a workplace with
"inspiration everywhere."
 In the Studio, Wright and his
associates developed a new
American architecture: the
Prairie Style, and designed 125
structures, including such
famous buildings as the Robie
House, the Johnson Wax
Building & the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum.

Wright’s Philosophy
 Wright practiced what is known
as organic architecture, an
architecture that evolves
naturally out of the context,
most importantly for him the
relationship between the site
and the building.
 Wright’s creations took his
concern with organic
architecture down to the
smallest details.
 Wright believed that design and
art should be an integral part of
our lives.

Between 1901 and 1911
Wright worked on a
series of suburban
houses called Prairie
Houses.
These houses were low
buildings with shallow roofs
and often with an open
interior plan. Many of the
design elements found in
these structures can be seen
in modern suburban houses.

He evolved a new concept of
interior space in architecture.
Rejecting the existing view of
rooms as single-function boxes,
Wright created overlapping
and interpenetrating rooms
with shared spaces.
Wright conceived virtually every
detail of both the external design
and the internal fixtures,
including furniture, carpets,
windows, doors, tables and
chairs, light fittings and
decorative elements.

 Wright fully embraced
glass in his designs and
found that it fit well into
his philosophy of organic
architecture.
 Glass allowed for
interaction & viewing of
the outdoors while still
protecting from the
elements.

 Finally, Wright’s biggest
innovation was his use of
the cantilever to create
structures of supreme
strength & balance that
seemed to float, free of
support.
 A cantilever is a projecting
structure, such as a beam,
that is supported at one
end by a fulcrum and
carries a load at the other
end or along its length.
Beam
Fulcrum

THE ROBIE HOUSE
THE JOHNSON WAX HEADQUARTERS
THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
FALLINGWATER
Wright’s Masterworks

The Robie House
5757 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago Illinois

The Robie House
 The Robie House on the
University of Chicago campus
is considered one of the most
important buildings in
American architecture.
 It was created by Frank Lloyd
Wright for his client Frederick
C. Robie, a forward-thinking
businessman.
 Designed in Wright's Oak
Park studio in 1908 and
completed in 1910, the
building is both a masterpiece
of the Prairie Style and
renowned as a forerunner of
modernism in architecture.

The Robie House
 Typical of Wright's Prairie houses,
he designed not only the house,
but all of the interiors, the
windows, lighting, rugs, furniture
and textiles.
 As Wright wrote in 1910, “it is quite
impossible to consider the building
one thing and its furnishings
another. ... They are all mere
structural details of its character
and completeness.”
 Every element Wright designed is
meant to be thought of as part of
the larger artistic idea of the
house.

TheJohnsonWaxHeadquarters
 Another prominent building of
Wright's is the Johnson Wax
Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin.
 This building’s construction took
place from 1936 - 1939.
 Much like the Robie House, the
structure took heavy advantage of
the strength and versatility of
reinforced concrete.
 The colors that Frank Lloyd Wright
chose for the Johnson Wax building
are cream (for the columns
and mortar) and "Cherokee red" for
the floors, bricks, and furniture.

TheJohnsonWaxHeadquarters
 The interior columns were a
unique reverse of what is
typically seen with a wide,
lily-pad top that narrows as
it approaches the base.
 In a fairly radical move the
building had very few
exterior windows, instead
relying on plastic tubing to
bring in and diffuse outside
light.
 The overall result was a
style that had never before
been seen.

TheSolomonR.GuggenheimMuseum
 The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum
in New York City
occupied Wright for
16 years, from 1943 until
his death in 1959.
 Today it is probably his
most recognized
masterpiece of
architecture.

TheSolomonR.GuggenheimMuseum
 The building rises as a warm
beige spiral.
 Its interior is similar to the inside
of a seashell.
 Its unique central geometry was
meant to allow visitors to easily
experience Guggenheim's
collection of nonobjective
geometric paintings by taking an
elevator to the top level and
then viewing artworks by slowly
walking down the spiral.

Unfortunately, when the museum was completed, a
number of important details of Wright's design were
ignored, including his desire for the interior to be
painted off-white. Furthermore, the Museum
currently designs exhibits to be viewed by walking
up the curved walkway rather than walking down
from the top level.

Fallingwater
 What can be considered Wright's
most famous building,
Fallingwater, was constructed from
1935 to 1939, in Mill Run,
Pennsylvania.
 In this house he took advantage of
reinforced concrete to create a
flowing, cantilevered design.
 His goal with the design was to put
the inhabitants of the house in as
close contact with nature as
possible.
 A stream flows right through the
structure and is accessible from
within the house.

Fallingwater
 Fallingwater is a man-made
dwelling suspended above a
waterfall.
 It offers an imaginative solution
to a perennial American
problem: how to enjoy a civilized
life without intruding upon the
natural world.
 Especially in the United States,
which had once possessed infinite
acres of unspoiled land,
technological progress almost
always comes at the expense of
nature.

Fallingwater
THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
 A long tradition of American
landscape painting had
developed partly to satisfy city
dwellers with restorative
glimpses of the countryside
they’d left behind.
 With Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd
Wright went one step further—
designing a house nestled into a
mountainside, with views that
made the house appear to be
part of nature itself.
Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1848

Fallingwater
Fallingwater has been
described as:
“The best-known private
home for someone not of
royal blood in the history
of the world."

Fallingwater
 Fallingwater was
commissioned by Edgar J.
Kaufmann, founder of a
prominent Pittsburgh
department store.
 To escape the pressures of
business, Kaufmann and
his family regularly left
the city for their sixty-
acre woodland retreat in
the Allegheny Mountains.

Fallingwater
 By 1935, the Kaufmanns’ country
cabin was falling apart, and
Wright was invited to design
them a new weekend residence.
 Kaufmann undoubtedly
envisioned a house overlooking
the most outstanding feature of
the property, a mountain
stream cascading over
dramatically projecting slabs of
stone.
 Wright believed that a country
home should become part of the
landscape.

Fallingwater
 Perched over a waterfall
on Bear Run in the western
Pennsylvania highlands, the
rural retreat has also been
called the fullest realization
of Wright's lifelong ideal of
a living place completely at
one with nature.
 He studied the site from
every point of view before
making the audacious
proposal to build the house
on the side of the cliff.

Fallingwater
 The waterfall itself would be
invisible from the interior but
wholly integrated into the
plan, with a stairway from the
living room giving direct
access and the rush of falling
water always echoing through
the house.
 Wright had never been
constrained by convention,
but even for him, the design
for Fallingwater is a stunning
feat of invention and one of
the most original and
groundbreaking concepts in
the history of architecture.

Fallingwater
 A traditional country house
would have been set back
from the road on a
manicured lawn with a
pleasing view of the wilder
regions that lay safely beyond
its boundaries.
 Wright reversed that idea.
 Fallingwater, a large, low
structure hovering like a
boulder over the falls, seems
almost as much a part of
nature as apart from it.

 Fallingwater is like a piece of abstract art from the 20th century.
 It’s been simplified into basic, essential shapes.
 What is the dominant shape you see?

 Every element of its design is meant to blur the distinction between the
natural and built environments, to integrate the residents into the outdoors.
 Reinforced-concrete, cantilevered slabs carry the house over the stream.

 Deeply recessed rooms, fieldstone floors, and unusually low ceilings create the
impression of a cave—a private, sheltered space within the natural scheme of things.

 From the living room, a suspended stairway leads directly
down to the stream.

On the third level
immediately above,
terraces open from
sleeping quarters,
emphasizing the
horizontal nature of
the structural forms.

 Fallingwater is constructed on three levels primarily of reinforced
concrete, native sandstone and glass.
 Soaring cantilevered balconies are anchored in solid rock.
 Walls of glass form the south exposure, and a vertical shaft of
mitered glass merges with stone and steel to overlook the stream.

If, through light and sound and structure, Fallingwater evokes
the feeling of existing in the unspoiled American wilderness,
everything else about it is unmistakably modern.

Fallingwater
 The house is a marvel of
twentieth-century
technology.
 Although it proved
impractical for all sorts of
reasons, it was the
architect’s (if not the client’s)
dream house.
 As a result of this, Wright
would not permit a single
alteration to his original
design.

The most striking element of the design – and the biggest engineering
challenge – is the series of reinforced concrete terraces, cantilevered
above the rocky ledges and parallel to the natural lines of the site.

Although firmly anchored in solid rock, the terrace platforms appear to defy
gravity; Wright compared them to trays balanced on a waiter’s fingers.

Between the terraces are rooms with glass walls—transparent
boundaries between inside and out.

Walls not made of glass are built of locally quarried stone, and the massive, central
fireplace is composed of boulders removed from the site to make way for construction
but restored to form the hearth, the traditional heart of a home.

As the distinguished scholar and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable
has observed, the effect of Fallingwater “is not of nature violated, but of
nature completed—a dual enrichment”.

 Left: A recessed stairwell leading to Bear Run from the living room.
 Top right: Cantilevered portico covering the entrance driveway.
 Bottom right: Living room fireplace, showing the living rock built into the hearth.

A Delicate Balance: The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright

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A Delicate Balance: The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright