Frank Lloyd Wright I INTRODUCTION Robie House The Frederick C.

« Hills/DeCaro HouseAmerican architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a pioneer of modern architecture, lived and worked in the Chicago area during thelate 19th and early 20th centuries.

He designed many single-family houses, known as prairie houses.

The Hills/DeCarohouse in Oak Park, west of Chicago, is one of more than 20 houses Wright designed while living in the town between 1890and 1910.© 2007 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: Mary Ann Hemphill/Photo Researchers, Inc. Experimenting in many styles during the 1890s, Wright proved his mastery of the architectural ideas of the time.

Instead of pursuing those ideas, however, he chose touse his principles of organic architecture to develop the prairie house—a long, low structure that hugged the Midwest prairie.

A shallow roof emphasized its horizontallines.

Wright disliked basements, and beginning with the William Winslow house (1893) in River Forest, Illinois, his earliest independent commission, his buildings wereset firmly on the earth, rather than in it. The first prairie house, the Ward Willits residence (1901) in Highland Park, Illinois, followed a cruciform (cross) plan based on a grid of 39-in (99-cm) squares.

A fireplace facing into the living room is at its center or core.

The entry forms one arm of the cross.

Opposite it is the dining room.

The living room projects to one side,the kitchen and servants’ quarters to the other.

The cross, or a variation of it, was Wright’s favorite plan of this period. In the Willits residence Wright established basic spatial principles he would follow in his prairie houses and his later designs.

At the approach to the house, Wrightreduced space by using an overhanging roof, side walls, and stairs that bring the person entering closer to the roof.

All this compression sets the stage for a dramaticexplosion of space as one finally turns into the living room.

Wright’s living rooms typically have a height of one-and-a-half or two stories, but they seem much largerbecause of the compression experienced before entering them.

Wright also designed the furnishings of many of his houses, or he had other designers create them tohis detailed specifications. In 1908 Wright designed a smaller prairie house, in River Forest, Illinois, for Isabel Roberts, his office bookkeeper and the daughter of an earlier client.

Modest in price,it was America’s first split-level house, with bedrooms a half story up from the living room and the kitchen a half story down. The crowning achievement of Wright’s prairie architecture is the Frederick C.

Robie house (1906-1909) on Chicago’s South Side.

This long, three-story structure standsno taller than the surrounding two-story houses.

A roof cantilever extends 6.4 m (21 ft) from the western wall of the house over a west-facing veranda.

On the southfacade, 14 glass doors open onto a main-floor balcony, which shades the 10 windows and 4 doors on the ground floor below.

A shallow roof overhang enables sunlightto enter through the main-floor doors in winter but keeps sunlight out in the hot summer months.

At noon in midsummer, sunlight just reaches the foot of the glassdoors, thereby leaving the interior in shade.

This design for a hot summer climate exemplifies the architect’s sensitivity to the environment. B Work in Japan and California From the beginning Wright’s goal had been to create a democratic American architecture, providing designs for houses that middle-class families could afford.

However,most of his prairie houses were built for wealthy clients.

When he failed to achieve his goal, Wright abandoned America, prairie architecture, and his first wife and wentto Europe.

There he produced the Wasmuth portfolio (1911), a publication of drawings of his work; in many cases Wright altered these drawings to make them appearmore beautiful.

His fame grew as a result of this publication, and in 1913 Wright received a commission for a huge hotel in Japan.

The design and construction of thishotel, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, kept him busy from 1915 to 1922.

Built of reinforced concrete, it was one of only a handful of buildings in Tokyo to survive intact asevere earthquake in 1923. On his trips to Japan, Wright frequently stopped in California, and in the early 1920s he joined his architect son Lloyd Wright in southern California.

There he designedfour houses built of patterned concrete blocks.

Steel reinforcing rods knit the blocks together to form walls in what Wright called a textile block system. C Usonian Houses Wright achieved his goal of low-cost, democratic American architecture with his Usonian houses of the 1930s.

Usonia was Wright’s term for the United States of North America, with an i added for a pleasing sound.

The Usonian house had a simple design, usually with an L-shaped floor plan.

This plan separated the noisier living space on one leg of the L from the quieter bedroom space on the other leg.

The floor was made of concrete slabs, typically in a square grid of 4 by 4 ft (1.2 by 1.2 m) foreasy construction.

Pipes carrying heated water ran beneath the floor and provided radiant heat.

The kitchen, which Wright called the workspace, and two supportingwalls at each end of the house were of masonry (brick or stone).

Long wood panels, emphasizing the structure’s horizontality, were used for both interior and exterior walls.

Glass window walls on the inside of the L opened onto the yard, while the wooden outside of the L closed the house off from the street. The first Usonian house to be built was the Herbert Jacobs house (1936) in Madison, Wisconsin.

Wright created more than 50 such houses, sometimes varying the Lplan or using equilateral triangles, diamonds, or circular segments as the module for the grid.

In the 1950s Wright substituted masonry for wood on the exterior, at firstusing blocks and then reintroducing the textile block system he pioneered in California.

The masonry blocks for the system were 16 in (41 cm) wide and could be madeby the client to reduce the cost. D Fallingwater and Other Late Works. »