Frank Lloyd Wright Trifecta

I'm curious about this guy; I'm pretty sure his is an overblown reputation (hey! maybe he was a genius at one thing at least) but I want to learn more; maybe I'm not being fair to him or to his "fans."

Burns/Novick did a video about FLW for PBS. (Some video stores rent things first presented as TV.)

Here's a good reason to visit Pittsburgh: Two Wrights can't be wrong is about FLW houses you can see near there.

Comments

[Henry IX]

The best FLW anecdote I know concerns a day when Wright was called to give testimony as an expert witness at a trial. He went with a friend, who sat as a spectator when Wright went to the witness box. To the introductory "State your name and occupation," Wright answered. "My name is Frank Lloyd Wright, and I am the world's greatest living architect." After the testimony, as Wright and his friend were leaving the courthouse, the friend asked, "Frank, how could you say that in court?" Wright's answer was, "I had to. I was under oath."

[Tom]

Frank Lloyd Wright is probably over rated mostly because of the fact that his buildings were totally designed environments that people couldn't make their own and also that they were experimental buildings that leaked and in general performed badly.

He was not the most obsessive control freak architect of all time. That honor goes to Van de Veld (I believe he was a belgian) who designed the correct clothes to wear in his houses, but Wright was up there. He designed all the furniture and housewares like china and silverware for each house. I believe he also designed all the light fixtures and tried to design the telephones and electrical outlets. I was in one FLW house and the door assemblies were screwed in. The orientation of the slots were meticulously aligned at each joint and there were hundreds of exposed screw heads. This is too much for my personal taste. Perhaps I have a little too much Le Corbusier influence, but I believe that anonymous mass production objects are beautiful and it is not the role of the architect to design every little thing that goes into a house. I also belive that buildings should support and encourage territorial appropriation by the user and that this should enhance a good building not detract from it as it would in a Wright building.

That said, he did several important and influential things that are worth recognizing. Remember that this guy started in the 1880's - he was one of the first architects to design for and recognize the implications of things like electric lighting and forced air ventilation. I don't remember all the specifics of what he did, but they are in Reyner Banham's book Architecture of the Well Tempered Environment. His houses were very influential on later mass housing design. Think about this discription - a one story house with deep eaves and a hipped roof, an open plan and lots of glass. That could be either an early 1900's FLW prarie style house or a 1950's ranch house. People can say that is good or bad, but it is still a pretty strong influence. Also, his concrete block houses in Los Angeles are very cool by my book though not everyone may agree with me.

[JRoth]

OK, I'm openly a FLW partisan, so get your salt out, but here's my attempt at being fair and balanced:

Wright was, of course, famously arrogant. Much of this was heartfelt, much of it was deserved, and some of it was pure PR. For a Victorian-era architect to have a viable career in the Atomic Age required no small amount of marketing. As you suggest, that was one of his areas of genius. His arrogance was also a response to what he felt was the snub he received from European Modernists (one of them said Wright was the greatest architect of the 19th C.). Arguably he has had the last laugh.

Anyway, the more important issue is, of course, his architecture. Having been in a number of his houses, and having heard from his interns and read several books about him, I strongly believe that the view put forward by Tom is an exaggerated and unfair one. Yes, he did design fabrics and plates for his buildings (although the plates were generally for public buildings, and so appropriate), and the screw example seems extreme. Yet these were not flamboyant gestures, or the eccentricities of a little dictator. The man firmly believed in a whole, organic vision, and that vision extended through all scales. Architects are taught to examine their designs at differing scales - from its place in a community to the very screws in the walls. Wright had an amazing faculty for this - it was one of his great strengths. I don't think that he was wrong to believe that his furniture best complemented his rooms.

It's also worth noting that most Wright houses have fairly eclectic art & furnishings, and they are often quite at home as well - good art matches good art. Don't underestimate the flexibility of his spaces. A Victorian lamp looks more at home, I think, at Fallingwater than at the Barcelona Pavilion. (The Fallingwater guest house has a small Picasso tacked up - it doesn't even rate a mention in the tour.)

As for his alleged indifference to clients' desires and comfort: I think that this is an almost entirely exaggerated issue. Yes, he uttered things like "Move the table" to a client whose table was being leaked on. But his houses are fundamentally humane, in a way alien to most of the "International Style." He was experimental, and could be wrong (especially when pushing those cantilevers), but his eye was always on the human experience, not on some idealized fantasy (note that Le Corbusier disliked designing for real humans so much that he invented Modular Man). I find Wright's spaces uniformly comforting and welcoming, yet exhilarating. They make you want to sit and talk and read and look out the window - they're homey. The highest compliment for a residential architect.

Last, a few brief points - with projects like the Usonian Houses, he was deeply concerned with bringing good design to everyone - and was really pretty effective at it (many young couples who buy ticky-tack houses today commissioned those little masterpieces); at Jacobs II (Solar Hemicycle), he anticipated green architecture by 25 years; he was the opposite of today's starchitects, who build to write - he wrote when he couldn't build, but he lived to build - some 900 commissions, 700+ built; his (very dubious) vision of Broadacres City was a forerunner of the modern, auto-centric suburb, but with some vital differences that addressed some of the worst aspects of the modern beast; it's also worth noting that, as much as we urbanists recoil from the burbs, the Shining Cities built on the International Style template have proven to be abject failures beyond the worst of sprawling America.

Oh, and I live in Pittsburgh, and Kentuck Knob and Fallingwater are both dazzling, and located in some of the prettiest country anywhere. Come see for yourself.

[evariste]

I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, where there are a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. I took the tour a couple of times. He's a great architect, but I'm no architecture critic.
My favorite FLW anecdote is about the time when he met the then-king of Iraq, when he was submitting some designs to him. He introduced himself as "His Majesty, the American Citizen".
Priceless.

[John Massengale]

Wright was discussing architecture with an idealistic young architect.

"Yes, we all do God's work," Wright said, "you in your way and me in His."

[acdouglas]

>"'Yes, we all do God's work," Wright said, "you in your way and me in His.'"

Sounds apocryphal to me. Someone's grafted Landowska's famous good-humored quip to Casals ("You play Bach your way, and I'll play Bach his way") onto Wright, _mutatis mutandis_.

ACD

[Famous architects]

Famous architects

[flwfan]

Real fans of Frank Lloyd Wright should check out buffalo NY -- they have his greatest Prairie Home the darwin martin house-- a complex with 9 parts to it including three other houses. It's awesome. There's another FLW house within walking distance and another only 5 minutes away. There's a nearby summer house too called graycliff and a whole bunch of other buildings wright designed but never got to build. They're being built posthumously. Plus Buffalo is the only city besides chicage with buildings by Wright, H H richardson and Louis Sullivan.The ones in Buffalo are each considerd to be amongteh greatest examples of each of their works. I just was there and had a great time! also found this GREAT article about it.