Frank Lloyd Wright (3 page)

Wright declared that atrocity, the American front porch, to be a “fetish.” Upon closer inspection, one discovers that true Prairie Style is devoid of such things.

The overall Wright design itself was organic and specific, and spilled over into non-residential buildings. Wright declared that the ornament should be of the surface not on the surface, and there should be no tangible background at all. In fact, he took building to a new level and insisted that the architect should not only build the shell of a building or house, but the architect should build the furniture as well, and be responsible for designing every detail, right down to the artwork and landscaping.

Wright could not help himself. He was horrified when he began designing his clean, simple houses only to watch the owners haul in furniture and sentimental decorations that were too ornate, too gaudy, too much in conflict with his concepts. He readily admitted that assimilation was extraordinarily difficult when trying to combine home décor in the form of sculpture, paintings, or pottery. “Very few of the houses were anything but painful to me after the clients brought in their belongings,” he lamented.

Wright’s solution was to design everything in the buildings as integral features. He proposed incorporating built-in furniture, and wall decorations and flooring that defied the owner to cover it with rugs or carpets. A Wright client would have the house they needed, whether they wanted it or not.

To that end, Wright took it upon himself, the architect, to think of everything. He did not want to leave even the light fixtures to the discretion of the homeowner. In fact, he didn’t believe such things should even be seen. The light should be seen, but not the fixture. As a result, the ideal Wright house has indirect, hidden lighting, created by installing false ceilings to conceal fixtures while providing warm, indirect light, emitting from an unseen source.

A Wright house is built to reflect the white from a white floor. It has electric lights hidden within skylights, so that the “source of light is everywhere hidden.”
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Wright carried out this new mission when he was hired to design the Larkin Administration Building for the Larkin Soap Company, of Buffalo, New York, his first independent commercial venture.

Just as with the houses, Wright designed built-in furniture for the Larkin Building, down to the desks and chairs. Ever the practical one, Wright invented chairs that had no legs. Instead, the chairs were attached to the desk by a swinging arm. The technique made it easier for the cleaning staff to sweep and mop the floors as they no longer had to move any chairs.

The Larkin Building was unique for many reasons. It was the first hermetically sealed and air-conditioned building. The purpose was to seal out noxious fumes from trains. To accomplish that, Wright invented a separate stairwell that served as both fire escape and air intake for the ventilation system. It also housed a communication system. The building also featured a fireproof vault--Wright thought of everything.

The Larkin Building

Few people probably realize that Wright invented something that can be found today in virtually every public restroom in America. Frank Lloyd Wright, ever a man of common sense, invented what he called the “hanging water close partition,” the suspended dividers now found in restrooms everywhere, realizing that they too would make it easier to clean floors. Frank’s son, John, wrote in his own book about his father, “Every time I see a porter swinging his mop under one of these closets, I wonder why Dad didn’t patent the idea. He would not patent any of his many inventions.”
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In an innovation that has seldom been implemented elsewhere, Wright created a “light tower” in the center of the Larkin Building. Clerical staff were housed on the second floor, in an open area that rose all the way to the skylight on the sixth floor, providing natural light to the workers below and to the other floors that overlooked the atrium arrangement. Not only did this provide natural light for the office workers, but it reduced the utility bill as well.

Wright lamented that the Larkins never realized how important their building was. “To them it was just one of their factory buildings,” he said, noting that the Larkins continued to renovate their building over the years.

Wright’s technique did not go unnoticed. By 1900, the
Architectural Review
wrote, “The polygonal libraries of the Bagley, Devin and McAfee houses and of Mr. Wright's own studio with their above-head or direct top light and air of quiet seclusion for study and reflection are noteworthy features. The result was not a dim room but one designed with soft light bright enough for library study.”

Wright’s style has often been described as plain, stripped of detail and ornamentation, which was exactly Wright's intention. His style began early in his career and remained a theme in everything he did. He saw ornamentation as sentimentality, and he despised it. In his autobiography, he pondered,
“How do sentimental people ever manage to live on good terms with themselves, at all?”

All Souls was an early embodiment of Wright’s view that the building materials themselves should be the ornamentation. Wood should look like wood, and stone should look like stone. Already the world was taking notice of Wright’s radical departure from artificially ornate cathedrals around the world, opting, instead, for simplicity. It was the
Brickbuilder
who was among the first to recognize that the new style was evolving beyond the influence of Sullivan: “The erection of a novel building will soon be begun by the congregation of All Souls Unitarian Church, whose pastor is the Rev. Jenkins Lloyd Jones. All precedents have been ignored, and a building has been designed to meet in the simplest, quietest, and most natural way the peculiar conditions imposed upon the architects…dignified and plain, almost to severity, depending chiefly for its effectiveness upon largeness and coherence of composition and refinement of the very sparing detail…Wright’s original way, which is a restrained and agreeably geometrified phase of ‘Sullivanesque.’ Frank Lloyd Wright and Dwight Heald Perkins are the associated architects.”
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When discussing the construction of churches, Wright said, “I cannot see the ancient institutional form of any church building as anything but sentimental survival for burial. The temple as a forum and good-time place – beautiful and inspiring as such—yes. As a religious edifice raised in the sense of the old ritual? No. I cannot see it at all as living. It is no longer free.” Wright incorporated truth in everything he created, along with philosophy, environmentalism and faith.

“Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

“The architect should strive continually to simplify; the ensemble of the rooms should then be carefully considered that comfort and utility may go hand in hand with beauty.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

The year was 1899 and Frank’s life was coming together serendipitously. His name first became known because of his work on a Unitarian church building where the influence of Sullivan’s architectural style was recognized as a reflection of the master, though he was already seen as an original. Wright declared that he liked Adler & Sullivan's clean crispness. He also admired Adler for inventing the sound-board as an architectural principle. Wright declared that no public hall ever built by Adler & Sullivan was bad, acoustically speaking.

This was also the year that Wright built his home and studio in Oak Park. Though he eventually fathered seven children and adopted an eighth, Wright posed the question in his autobiography, “Is it a quality? Fatherhood?…I seemed born without [it].” That said,
he gave each of his first six children a musical instrument to learn, and the whole family played music together. He once declared, “Those children! They are worth a monogram each!” While decrying sentimentality, Wright clearly loved his own children, and to a degree he recreated his own childhood, filled with music, for his own children.

John Delano’s picture of Wright’s house in Oak Park

Wright’s studio in Oak Park

The public was also beginning to take notice of Frank Lloyd Wright. It became news when he attended the First National Convention of Architectural Clubs in Cleveland on June 2 and June 3, 1899.
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Everyone seemed to have their eyes on Wright, and by
April of 1900, Frank Lloyd Wright was recognized for four projects by the Chicago Architectural Club, among them the All Souls Building, his own studio, and homes he designed for E.C. Waller and Mrs. Robert Eckart, both in the River Forest suburb of Chicago. All the while, Wright refused to participate in competitions. “[The] Committee always chooses the most average and the result is a building well behind the times before it is begun.” He would make his own way, and felt he did not need the endorsement of others.

Even as the private houses continued to be built, Wright designed five religious buildings. The first one he built was Unity Chapel in Spring Green, Wisconsin in 1886, the LloydWright family’s home. In 1904 he was chosen to rebuild Unity Church in Oak Park; after
Unity Church burned to the ground, the pastor, Rev. Rodney Johonnot, published the booklet,
A New Edifice for Unity Church,
describing his desire for a building that would embody “unity, truth, beauty, simplicity, freedom and reason.” Frank Lloyd Wright was the perfect man for the job, and fortunately, he lived nearby.

Wright proposed abolishing the art and craft of architecture and literature in any symbolic form whatsoever. He advocated, instead, for “the sense of inner rhythm deep planted in human sensibility [which] lives far above all other considerations in art.” He went even further, asking, “Why the steeple?” In designing Unity Church and other religious buildings, he answered that question be eliminating steeples from his buildings.

Unity Temple was unique because it became the “first concrete monolith,” in Wright’s words. Concrete was a new addition to the building materials scene and had previously been considered a poor building material. It took Frank Lloyd Wright to give concrete its proper standing and to be recognized as a respectable material. This is part of the reason Unity Temple is a square building: to accommodate the concrete blocks.

To Wright, the church or temple should be a modern meeting-house, and what he called a “good-time place.” It took 34 tries before Wright had created a design for Unity Temple that met his own standards.
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Pictures of the interior and exterior of the Unity Temple

In 1947, he designed another Unitarian structure when he was contracted to build Shorewood Hills Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin, but not all of Wright’s religious buildings were Unitarian. In 1953, Wright designed Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, but he died before it was completed in 1959.
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Beth Sholom Synagogue was identified by the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the 17 Wright buildings most worthy of preservation. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2007.

A picture of the only synagogue Wright ever designed

Historically, Wright chose squares and rectangles as his geometric shape of choice, but in 1956 he made a distinct departure when he designed the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwautosa, Wisconsin, in the shape of a Greek cross, created in the traditional Byzantine gold and blue.
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A large building, capable of seating more than 1,000 people, it is made of reinforced concrete shaped, molded to create the graceful curves of this church. As with Beth Shalom Synagogue, the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church was also finished after his death.

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church