Frank Lloyd Wright: Master of Organic Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was an American architect who developed an organic architecture in which the building belongs together with its site and its own material. He created the Prairie house in the early 1900s and later works such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Facts

From Sullivan to the prairie

Wright grew up in Wisconsin and came to Chicago in 1887, where he got work with Adler & Sullivan. Louis Sullivan, who had formulated that form follows function, became his model. In 1893 Wright opened his own office and began designing villas in Chicago’s suburbs. He thought the Victorian villa, with its small rooms, towers and trimmings, was closed in and needlessly decorated.

He wanted open rooms, low ceilings, wide overhanging eaves and a building that belonged with the flat landscape around Chicago. The result was the Prairie house, the Prairie School. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and by the Arts and Crafts movement, see Arts and Crafts, he began creating a new American language of form.

The Prairie house and Robie House

In a Prairie house the central hearth or fireplace is the heart, and the rooms flow into each other. Windows sit in bands, with glass in geometric patterns, and long horizontal lines mark roofs and walls. Robie House in Chicago, built 1909–1910, is the best-known example. The building consists of two offset volumes of brick with low, strongly projecting roofs that seem to hover over the street.

Wright often designed everything in the house, furniture, glass windows, lamps and textiles, to obtain a coherent whole. He called it organic architecture: the parts of the building should belong together like the parts of a growing organism. Compare how Le Corbusier in the same years was rethinking the home in a completely different way.

Fallingwater and the Guggenheim

After a period of setbacks Wright came back in the 1930s with his best-known works. Fallingwater (1935–1937) in Pennsylvania he designed for the Kaufmann family. The house lies over a waterfall, with strong concrete cantilevers projecting over the ravine. The rock becomes part of the living room and the stone in floor and fireplace is taken from the site. It is the most famous house in modern architecture.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York, built 1956–1959, is a white spiral where the visitor takes the lift up and walks down along a long ramp. Wright died in April 1959, a few months before it opened. He also designed the Johnson Wax headquarters with its mushroom-shaped columns and the simple, affordable Usonian houses for the middle class.

Legacy and controversies

Wright was a remarkable man: self-assured, hard to work with and with a turbulent private life. He named himself the greatest architect of all time. But his work is nevertheless of great importance. His open plans, flowing spaces and union of building and nature influenced architects such as Mies van der Rohe, who admired Wright, and Alvar Aalto and Jørn Utzon.

Wright also designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, opened in 1923, which survived the great earthquake of the same year. His idea of Broadacre City, a sparsely built city of the future in which everyone has a plot, lies behind much suburban building. Read more about the development of architecture in the guides to functionalism and the history of the skyscraper. The period is found under modernism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which of Wright’s houses is built over a waterfall?