Issue date:
Nov. 6-8, 1998
The Wright stuff
Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy of architecture
Also this week:
Back to the article on Frank Lloyd Wright
Some of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright:
Fallingwater
Prairie Houses
S.C. Johnson Wax Co. Administration Building
Guggenheim Museum
Taliesin
Go to top Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pa.
When asked which religion he subscribed to, Wright liked to say, "I put a capital N on nature and call
that my church." He believed true spiritual enlightenment could be achieved most
thoroughly through communion with the natural world. Throughout his career, he strove
to find ways to incorporate elements from nature into his designs, to "bring the
outside in," as he said. Nowhere was he more successful in making a building that was
in perfect harmony with the mysteries of the natural world than in the house he
created for Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann in 1935.The Kaufmann family loved to picnic along the banks and swim in the deep pools under the
spectacular waterfall of a stream on a beautiful, unspoiled piece of property they
owned in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. They asked Wright to design a weekend
hideaway that would celebrate the stunning site by affording a view of the stream
from the house. Instead, Wright boldly put the house on top of the waterfall, integrating the feature of the landscape his clients loved above all others into the house itself so the sound of the waterfall always would be
present. In the process, he created what immediately became the most famous house
of the 20th century. The Kaufmann family eventually donated the house to the Western
Pennsylvania Conservancy, after decades of enjoying it themselves.
Open to the public daily except Monday, mid-March through November, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Reservations required. Call 724-329-8501.
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The Robie House, with its Wright- designed furnishings,is perhaps the finest of all his Prairie Houses.
It's on Chicago's South Side. |
Prairie houses, Chicago Frank Lloyd Wright's first burst of creative
energy and undeniable brilliance came when he began his own practice in the genteel
Chicago suburb of Oak Park in the 1880s, and there perfected what he called the
Prairie House, perfectly suited to life in the newly created American suburb at the
dawn of a new century. He proved himself to be a bona-fide revolutionary, refusing to
conform to the Victorian architectural fashions of his day.Wright created an
entirely new kind of home - specially designed to fit into the flat Midwestern
landscape, featuring secluded gardens, sheltering overhangs and low terraces, and
stripped of the decorative detail he considered superfluous. Oak Park and the
surrounding towns boast more Wright houses than any other region; several are open to
the public, including Wright's own "Home and Studio" and the Cheney and Robie houses.
In addition, his transcendent Unitarian church, Unity Temple, is in downtown Oak
Park.
Home and Studio and Robie House are open daily; call 708-848-1976. Cheney
House is now a bed-and-breakfast; 708-524-2067. Unity Temple is open weekdays, 1-4
p.m. (with guided tours on weekends); call 708-383-8873.
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S.C. Johnson Wax Co. Administration Building, Racine, Wis. Above all else, Wright was concerned
with creating environments within which people could achieve their full human
potential - spiritually, emotionally, even physically. Because he understood how
profoundly we are all affected by the spaces we inhabit, he refused ever to create
purely utilitarian spaces; he always managed to work in some element that would allow
for the possibility of uplift, even of transcendence. In the 1936 commission for an
office building for progressive Johnson Wax, he found, once again, a client that
shared his expansive vision of architecture, and the company gave him free rein to
realize that vision.As the great modernist architect Philip Johnson recently
remembered, "What Wright did was something that's unheard of in the business world.
In the business world, you have a lot of offices, right? They have to be five feet
apart. They have to be all glass to the outside, and then you get numbers on them,
and then you take an elevator." But Wright had something altogether different in
mind: a radically innovative structure supported by graceful lily-pad-shaped concrete
forms, creating a vast room filled with diffused light that gave the company's
clerical workers one of the greatest public spaces in America. As critic Paul
Goldberger explains, "The Johnson Wax building was all about ennobling the worker,
giving the clerical workers the nave of the cathedral, in a way." A visitor will
find legions of secretaries typing away at desks Wright designed, basking in the
subtle light, all of them fortunate enough, more than 60 years after the building was
completed, to experience Wright's singular genius every time they come to work.
Tours are on Fridays only. Reservations are required. Call 414-631-2000.
Go to topGuggenheim Museum, New York City
When Wright was offered the chance to design a
museum in Manhattan in 1943, he saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime. Creating a
major museum in the world's most important city would virtually guarantee him
immortality. So Wright determined to create a building unlike any other. "Wait till
you see the blueprints for the Guggenheim," he told a friend. "It's going to stand
... almost directly across from the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. It's going to make
the Metropolitan look like a Protestant barn." For 15 years Wright battled to get
his unorthodox circular building up, and though he was overjoyed when construction
finally began in 1956, Wright did not live to see his masterpiece completed. In April
1959, six months before the museum opened, he died. But despite the controversies
that once surrounded the project, the Guggenheim is now universally recognized as one
of Wright's most superb achievements. The thrilling space he created at 89th Street
and Fifth Avenue is truly monumental, but also intensely intimate; it is somehow
grandiose and human, infinite and enclosed, all at the same time.
Open to the public Sunday-Wednesday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Call
212-423-3500.
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Taliesin, Spring Green, Wis.The most effective window on any architect's ideas can be found in
the design of his own home. Three of Wright's residences still stand, and none better
epitomizes the grand sweep of his genius than the estate he built in the Wisconsin
countryside where he'd spent his boyhood summers. He called it "Taliesin" - "shining
brow" in Welsh - because, he explained, "Taliesin is built like a brow on the edge of
the hill, not on top of the hill. ... If you build on top of the hill, you lose the
hill." Above all, Wright wanted his house to be an ad for himself, a perfect
example of what he called "organic architecture," meaning a building should express
the essence of the landscape around it. He began work on Taliesin in 1911, and for
the rest of his life it was his greatest laboratory, his testing ground for the many
ideas he experimented with during his career. Visitors to Taliesin today not only can
soak up the exquisitely placed buildings, endlessly alluring vistas and understated
but elegant public rooms, but also can wander across the same fields Wright himself
surveyed. His restless spirit endures in all of his buildings, but it is impossible
to visit Taliesin and not commune intimately with Frank Lloyd Wright, both the man
and the architectural genius.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation uses Taliesin as a working architectural school,
meeting place and museum. Estate open to public daily, May 1-Oct. 31, 8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Call 608-588-7900.
Photo Credits: HEDRICH BLESSING, Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. (Robie House).
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