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If you happen to live in a split level house or apartment and love it, thank Frank Lloyd Wright. If at twilight you can sit on your patio cantilevered over a verdant ravine, thank Frank Lloyd Wright. If the next time you go a local art gallery or museum for an exhibition and you don’t have to trudge from one dreary room to another but instead can view the exhibition as an integrated, continuous body of the artist’s work, thank Frank Lloyd Wright.
Considered by many to be the greatest architect who ever lived, Wright’s career as an American architect spanned more than fifty years. He was born in Wisconsin in 1867 and lived there most of his life. His work was as seminal in 1904 when he designed the Larkin Building in Buffalo as it was in 1956 when he designed New York City’s Guggenheim Museum.
Wright initially trained in the offices of Louis H. Sullivan, perhaps one of America’s foremost and
influential architects.
By 1904, however, Wright was beginning to make his own indelible mark on American architecture. He designed the Larkin Building, using an open main floor plan with galleries rising along each side. The interior lines were strong, horizontally and vertically, but the sense of space and openness was one of vastness. The brick work was plain and unadorned, with nothing to distract or pre-occupy from the building’s purpose.
Wright is perhaps best known for his design of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1916 because he designed it as earthquake proof, using engineering techniques which would later be incorporated into his house designs and would enable him to integrate the house into sometimes very difficult terrain. In 1923 when Tokyo was almost leveled by a massive earthquake, the hotel remained unscathed.
Wright was to excel again, this time in Racine, Wisconsin, with his design of the Johnson’s Wax headquarters in 1936. Here, graceful mushroom-shaped columns support a glass ceiling over the main hall, providing an effective counterpoint to the balance of the structure, which was remarkably Miesian in design. Later Wright designed the Johnson’s Wax Research Center, where he cantilevered each floor from a central core, quite different from the headquarters building, yet comfortably integrated with the overall site. One might term it a variation on the
theme of openness.
More than his offices, Wright’s house designs have probably had the most influence across America. Rectilinear shapes, vertical, horizontal, cantilevered free space, shaped to eliminate doorways yet create defined living areas – form followed function and needed no introduction or closure. This was the advent of the split level, part of what Wright termed “organic architecture”.
Even in his house designs, Wright went a step further. He demanded that a house be a part of the landscape in which it was situated. One did not simply plunk a house atop a cliff. Rather, one made of the house a natural undifferentiated part of the cliff’s physiognomy. It was designed to belong atop the cliff as surely as a rock or tree.
The Kaufmann House in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, designed in 1936 is an example of this. The house features cantilevered balconies extended over rugged forested ravines and waterfalls. Wright’s own residences, the Taleisin homes, further describe his concept, mindful, too, that with many of his house commissions Wright insisted on designing the furnishings as well.
The Guggenheim Museum remains one of Wright’s most controversial, yet influential commissions. As his houses had no doorways or boxed rooms, nor does the Guggenheim. Viewing is a progressive passage and the works on display can be positioned to optimize this effect.
This design for art galleries has been replicated throughout the United States and Canada. Indeed, Canada’s National Museum of Art exemplifies the style, blending circular ramps and vaulted open rooms, the building working synergistically with exhibits to ensure the best possible appreciation of the artists’ works.
Perhaps most important of all is that Frank Lloyd Wright (1885-1959)influenced the very lifestyle of many Americans with his wide open living styles. Indeed, his influence on American architectural design will be felt for a long time to come.
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