Frank Lloyd Wright

Phaidon

Parution le 14/09/1999

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Résumé

No architect is as enigmatic and fascinating as Frank Lloyd Wright. In his ninety-two years, ho designed more than 1,000 buildings and saw almost two-thirds of them built.

Wright was very much the product of his time and place and yet ho managed to transcend both. He was nine years old when she famously gave him the set of Froebel building blocks, which would eventually reappear, at a much larger scale, in stone and concrete in building after building. At the age of nineteen, Frank Lloyd Wright left home for Chicago where ho went to work first for Joseph Lyman Silsbee, and thon in 1888 for Louis Henri Sullivan. The early works that followed - among them the Larkin Building in Buffalo (1904), Unity Temple and the great Prairie School houses (culminating in the Robie House, Chicago of 1908) - not only made him famous, but they also served to ground his philosophy.

Throughout his life, Wright sought to build in both the public and the private realms. Wright's work was always uniquely American - some scholars consider him to be the most American of all architects - even though ho drew precedent from Japanese and Mexican architecture. Wright was a practitioner who spoke like a prophet. Unity Temple was one of Wright's earliest buildings and he remained loyal to the design, and the ideas behind it, throughout the years. 'Towards the end of his life Wright sometimes called the Unity Temple his masterpiece and this may well be so', wrote John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown. The building was, in fact, his epiphany. Wright elaborated on this in his 1932 autobiography: 'the idea of the reality of the building as the space within had found tangible expression. The building was a dramatic shift from the traditional church design of the time; it was not a revival style steepled building but 'a modern meeting house'. The Barnsdall House, of 1920, is an excellent example of Wright's use of such forms, here imitated partly in poured concrete, partly in stuccoed frame construction.'

The Barnsdall House was one of several domestic buildings that Wright was to design in California, and although it drew from his earlier work it was also Mayan in inspiration and it benefited, however subtly, from the architects work and travels in Japan.

Wright began with her house, and it is one of his more symbolic houses - or 'pictographic' as James Steele terms it - with its strong Mayan forms and the theme of the hollyhock, Barnsdall's favourite flower, running throughout. Typically, Wright designed everything in the house. Wright's relationship with Aline Barnsdail eventually deteriorated to the point that Rudolf Schindler - the project superintendent eventually took over completing the remainder of the buildings once the house itself was completed. While he taught, wrote and even founded the Taliesin Fellowship after the project, Wright undertook little actual building until the Fallingwater and Johnson Wax company commissions arose.

Johnson commissioned Wright to design the office building, with its great enclosed workspace, and the subsequent tower that was designed more than a decade later. Even today, the great workspace of the administration building continues to inspire awe. In America by Design, Spiro Kostof summarizes the Administration building, and indeed Wrights work in general, saying: 'You penetrate the great fortress-like enclosure, and you are in what is called "the Great Workroom". Wright, who was never known for modesty, would then add, "Lao-Tzu said it, yes. But I built it.