Frank Lloyd Wright (2 page)

The subject of “ornament” remained at the heart of everything Wright created throughout his life. He contended that ornamentation should come from the building materials’ natural beauty, not from elaborate and painstaking work by a master craftsman. Wright cited the visionary architect and city planner, Daniel H. Burnham, as saying, “Architecture will never be surpassed. Without a good education in the Classics how can you hope to succeed?”

Not only did Wright value learning--if not from formal education--but he left behind a legacy of learning that continues today. Early in Book Four of his five-book autobiography, Wright announced that the remainder of that book would be composed of lectures that the non-architect might be excused from reading. He could not resist devoting his own story, his autobiography, to teaching his all-encompassing theories of architecture, community, the environment, and politics.

“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

While living and working in Chicago in about 1889, Frank met Catherine “Kitty” Tobin at a church party at All Souls. He described his lack of social interaction with young women at that age as almost a task, rather than something he was motivated to pursue. Perhaps headstrong Kitty sensed this, and wanted to expand introvert Frank's world, even though she was only a high school teenager when they met.

Kitty Wright

Whether he realized it or not, Frank was attracted to strong, independent women. Before his life was over, he would marry three of them, in addition to having a relationship with a fourth woman when Kitty refused to divorce him.

Kitty’s family did not want her to be involved with Frank. They sent her to Michigan with the hope that she would forget him, but she couldn’t. By the time Frank was 21, he and Kitty, his first wife, were married. They divorced more than 30 years later.

In the meantime, Frank’s mother had sold their family home in Wisconsin, and she and Frank’s youngest sister, Maginel, moved to Chicago, where his mother became friends with Rev. Augusta Chapin, who lived in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. When Augusta Jane Chapin was 16 years old, she left her family home in New York, and enrolled at Olivet College in Michigan, far from home. In 1864, Chapin had become one of the first women ordained as a minister. In 1893, she earned a Doctor of Divinity degree from Unitarian Seminary, Lombard University. Chapin became the first woman to earn her doctorate from the school.

That same year, she chaired the Woman’s Committee of the World Parliament of Religions in conjunction with the World’s Columbia Exposition. A charter member of the American Woman Suffrage Association, Chapin was known as an advocate for women’s rights. She was a very busy woman, with her ministerial duties taking her from one end of the United States to another, though she lived in Oak Park, Illinois.

It is not clear how Chapin met Anna Lloyd-Jones Wright, though it was probably through Anna’s Unitarian connections. In fact, the Rev. Chapin and Frank’s mother knew each other well enough that, when Anna and Marginel left Wisconsin, they and Frank lived with Rev. Chapin in Oak Park until Anna decided whether she and her daughter would stay in Chicago. Oak Park was as close to the city as she cared to be.

He continued to live there for many years and built a number of private homes there, in addition to his own home and studio. As a result, Frank Lloyd Wright’s name has become synonymous with Oak Park.

That Unitarian connection continued with his work on the
All Souls Unitarian Church
, also known as the All Souls Building, in Chicago. According to Frank, the pastor and Frank’s uncle, Rev. Jenkins Lloyd Jones, was surprised when he had learned that Frank had been hired for the project without the reverend’s knowledge or influence.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s career continued to progress. In 1893, he established his own independent architectural firm in Chicago, primarily because Adler & Sullivan were only interested in commercial construction and had no interest in designing private homes. Wright’s first project, Winslow House, was a private home in another Chicago suburb, that of River Forest, Illinois. Winslow House is now on the National Register of Historic Places, and is often cited as an early example of what has become known as the Prairie School of architecture, created by Wright and influenced by Sullivan.

The front and back of the Winslow House

When most people think of Prairie Style they conjure up a two-story house with a large, over-hanging roof. To assume that such a description is complete would be an offense to the Prairie Style, and Mr. Wright himself. It has been said that “
Mr. Wright has been doing for the typical residence and apartment house what Sullivan has done for the theatre and office building.”
[8]

Wright was redefining houses.
His goal was sincere in “keeping the truest and best of which man is capable where man can use it.” Frank had realized he was interested in building homes that people should have, whether that was what they wanted or not. He felt it was the only way he could express truth, the truth his grandfather had taught him to respect above all else.

Ivo Shandor’s picture of the Walter H. Gale House, one of Wright’s early works

Steven Kevil’s picture of the Nathan G. Moore House

In Frank’s opinion, the typical American house was a box, cut too full of holes to let in light and air, and with one especially ugly one used to get in and out of it. He especially disliked all the walls, saying in his autobiography that the abundance of walls “implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions.”

Wright dictated there should be no more living quarters on the first floor. The downstairs could be designed with small alcoves where the residents could read or study alone. He declared the entire lower floor as one room, while cutting off the kitchen, which he called a “laboratory.”

The only exception to his first floor bedroom rule was to place the servants’ sleeping and living quarters next to the kitchen, but semi-detached. Keep in mind that Wright began working as an architect when live-in servants were more common among the wealthy. In retrospect, it seems a bit antiquated but it was a way of life for Wright’s affluent clients.

Wright determined that every house should have one chimney. He consented to allowing two at most, but he really preferred only one. He said, “It comforted me to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself. A feeling that came to stay.” Wright wanted to share that feeling with his clients, and the visitors to the houses he would design.

A Frank Lloyd Wright house was more than just a two-story home with big eaves and a chimney. It is easy to overlook the tradition Wright adhered to of never incorporating dormers into his designs. Instead, high-pitched roofs above broad eaves became the hallmark of a Frank Lloyd Wright home, and served as more than decoration--they prevented sun from flooding second-story rooms during the hotter hours on summer days.

Soffits, the underbelly of the eaves, are painted in light-reflecting tones, creating the glow of diffused light in the bedrooms on the second floor. Wright criticized the architectural styles that had gone before him, saying, “The whole roof was ridged and tipped, swanked and galed to madness before they would allow it to be either watershed or shelter.” A practical and environmentally-conscious man, Frank Lloyd Wright frequently designed buildings that would make water collection possible—to be used for landscaping or other uses--especially from his roof designs.

For Wright, “Walls became the function of a screen bringing inside out and outside in.” He saw the landscaping as creating walls, with windows and doors that would allow the outdoor environment to become a part of the interior design. He recommended casement windows everywhere because he deemed them the best form of window for his buildings. He didn’t really care that they were inconvenient for the homeowner.

Wright recognized that people must be able to cluster, sit or recline, confound them, and they must dine—but dining is much easier to manage and offered a great artistic opportunity. The arrangement of sitting in comfort, singly or groups, need not be an informal disarray, but should remain a part of the scheme as a whole. His solution to this matter was to create alcoves for privacy, and large, open spaces in which groups might gather.

The publication
Art & Decoration
described the new designs generated by this up and coming architect as follows: “Frank Lloyd Wright has attained wide popularity in the Middle West and the merits of his very radical architecture seem to have made a strong appeal to his clients. It cannot be denied even by fairly conventional conservatists that there is much in secessionist architecture which is sincerely pleasing. The broad restful spaces the freedom from meaningless moldings…
”
[9]

Wright despised moldings. He described moldings, or trim, as “plastic,” which he saw as a positive concept. He liked that the few moldings he might consent to use could be made by machines, rather than by individuals. Wright proudly declared, “No longer did trim look like carpenter work. The machine could do it all perfectly well as I laid it out.”

He went on to defend this position, saying there was little to conceal in the way of craftsmanship, because the battle between the machines and the Union had already begun to demoralize workmen. Perhaps it was not his best observation, but it was a true one. The machine was becoming a fixture in American society, and rather than resent it, Wright embraced it.