1. Which words below describe Frank Lloyd Wright?
- architect, confident, dreamer, genius, modest,
- nonconformist, poet, realist, revolutionary, uncertain.
2. How were the most houses designed in the late 19th century?
Exercise 2. Read and translate the following words and word combinations:
Foremost, enrol, elaborate, devise, pace setter, devastating, apprentice, rocky ledge.
COMPREHENSIVE READING
One of the great creative geniuses of this century, Frank Lloyd Wright was first and foremost a working architect, dreaming countless architectural dreams and turning them into reality. He was an iconoclast and a nonconformist who found the background for his architecture in nature and in man’s Romanticism as expressed in poetry, music, and dance.
Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1869, in the tiny Midwestern town of Richland Center, Wisconsin. From the very beginning, his mother wanted him to become an architect; and from his earliest memories, he wanted to be one.
When he was 15 years old, Wright enrolled in a civil engineering course at the University of Wisconsin, for at that time the university did not offer courses in architecture. While studying at the university, he worked as a part-time apprentice for a Madison, Wisconsin, building contractor. Because of his great interest and talent in building design, Wright soon became a supervisor of construction jobs; but this was not what young Wright wanted to do. He wanted to design buildings, not supervise their construction.
With very little money and no formal training in architecture, Wright left the university and went to Chicago, Illinois, in 1887, to look for the kind of work he wanted. There he found a job at $8 a week as a draftsman in the office of Adler and Sullivan. Following the leadership of its brilliant designer, Louis Sullivan, this firm was attempting to break with European tradition and establish an American form of architecture. Under Sullivan’s influence, Wright specialized in residential design. Wright left the firm in 1893 to work independently.
With the rapid industrial development taking place on the prairies outside Chicago, the time was ripe for challenges. Many new houses were being built, and in keeping with, the honored traditions of the day, the typical home was a box-like affair of brick or wood. Often elaborately decorated, it usually stood out in ugly contrast to the simple beauty of the prairie landscape. In Wright’s view, “the usual Chicago prairie house lied about everything in it. It had no sense of unity at all nor any sense of space as should belong to a free man among a free people in a free country.”
Young Wright wondered why men built their homes this way. Logic offered no answer, so he began to devise answers of his own, designing buildings that would be both functional and beautiful.
His answers have long since become familiar terms: “space within as reality,” the “organic growth of a house from the inside out,” and the “blending of a house with its natural surroundings.” He was always eager to explain his ideas:
He soon became internationally famous for his designs; and by the time he was 32, he was exerting a powerful influence on new forms of architecture.
A favorite term which Wright employed to describe his work was “organic architecture”. By this, he was referring to the human requirements of a building – with its location and material determining its final form.
Wright’s “prairie houses” were his first dramatic example of “organic architecture.” In issues of the popular magazine, Ladies Home Journal, 1901, Wright published plans for “A Home in a Prairie Town” and “Small House with Lots of Room in It,” in which he attempted to link the indoors to the outside and to create an impression of living areas in harmony with their surroundings. In an era of ornate, Victorian style mansions, “boxes cut full of holes to let in light and air,” these smooth flowing homes of abstract design created a sensation.
The Robie House, in Chicago, Illinois, is the best known of Wright’s prairie houses. It has flat roofs with a broad overhang, horizontal bands of brick, and rows of long windows. The inside is not divided into tiny rooms but instead has open living space. It has no attic or basement, and the exterior has the appearance of different geometric shapes grouped together in a unified design.
In 1904 Wright designed his first commercial building, the Larkin Company-office building in Buffalo, New York. Since this building was to be located in an industrial area surrounded by factory and railroad buildings, Wright focused upon the interior, creating a court five stories high, lighted naturally by a skylight, with offices located on balconies overlooking the central court. Wright directed that a pipe organ be installed on the ground floor for half-hour concerts by an employee each morning and afternoon, a precursor to the lunch-hour concerts given in building corridors or courtyards, for office workers today. The top floor has a restaurant and a roof-top garden for employee use. Wright also designed the metal office furniture and the first metal vertical letter files to be used anywhere. The Larkin Building was the world’s first air-conditioned office building and a pace setter for industrial and office design.
In 1915 Wright began one of his most famous projects, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Wright had to face serious engineering problems in the construction of the hotel because of the poor subsoil and high water table of the building site and the frequency of earthquakes in the region. He solved these problems through the use of floating foundations which would support sections of the hotel while being able to respond to the wavelike motions of an earthquake. Wright’s success in using engineering to master the problems of nature was dramatically emphasized when, one year after its opening in 1922, the Imperial Hotel survived a devastating earthquake which left thousands dead and much of Tokyo leveled.
Personal and financial problems, arising after Wright’s long period of residency in Japan to supervise the construction of the Imperial Hotel, forced him into inactivity. When finally, he was able to undertake new projects, the American stock market crashed (1929), and years of economic depression removed the financial backing which Wright required to see his projects built.
During these years, he remained at Taliesin, his Wisconsin farm, and earned some money through writing and lecturing. In 1932 Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship, an unusual experiment in architectural education; and he invited apprentice architects to his studio to work and study alongside of him. Eventually, hundreds of promising young architects were to work with Wright in Wisconsin and at Taliesin West, his winter studio in Arizona which he built in 1938.
By 1936 Wright was able to renew his production. That year one of his most famous structures was built – Falling Water, in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Projecting out over a waterfall, the house rests on a rocky ledge. A massive boulder that is allowed to penetrate the floor of the living area forms the fireplace in the center of the house; the waterfall is below. Great sweeping supporting beams extend from this core of fire, rock, and water to carry the eye to the landscape beyond. The box-like rooms which Wright so disliked cannot be seen anywhere. All interior corners dissolve in glass. All interior spaces extend across broad balconies into the landscape. In this masterpiece, we see the respect which Wright had for the landscape, his love for materials and their appropriate expression and his desire for harmony of expression.
Falling Water and countless other buildings which Wright designed bear witness to his innovative genius. His design for the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin, has served as an inspiration for industrial and office design in the second half of the twentieth century as the Larkin Building had done in the first. His plan for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, designed during World War II when Wright was already in his seventies, so confounded the City building department and challenged its codes that it was not completed until 1959, the year of Wright’s death.
COMPREHENSIVE CHECK
