Uncommon places: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

The following program is made possible by a grant from Johnson Wack, Patrix, the maker of quality products for you and your home. What is architecture? Architecture is the frame of life. It is the nature and substance of whatever it is. The universe has a plan. Everything has its plan. The universe has a plan.

The universe has a plan. The universe has a plan. The universe has a plan. The universe has a plan.

The universe has a plan. The universe has a plan. The universe has a plan. And every summer up to the age of 18, I went to the farm because the farm was so much more fascinating and instructive.

Everything in nature was architecture. I wanted to design using those principles and elements of nature. It was not only through nature that right learned the principles of form. As a young child he played with the frable blocks given to him by his mother and designed to teach shape and substance. Wrote right years later in his autobiography, the smooth, shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers, form becoming feeling. Wright's mother wished him to become an architect and was a strong influence on him throughout his life. His father, a minister and musician gave Wright a lasting love of Bach and Beethoven and his first understanding of the similarity between the structure of music and the structure of design.

Well, I heard him play almost all of Beethoven's sonatas. Father taught me to listen to a symphony as I was seeing edifice of sound. Despite those early lessons in form and structure, Wright's early years were not always happy. The family moved constantly and while he was only a teenager, his father left, leaving home and family permanently behind. Wright never saw his father again. Family harmony may have escaped Wright as a child, but family land always provided continuity. Here there was always the soft angle of the hills and the arch of the oak tree. The stretch of the river and the limitless sky, the steady reassuring shapes of the valley.

Now nature is the will, not only the will of God, it's all the body of God we're ever going to be able to see. So why not put a capital in on nature as well as a capital in on God because the two should go together? If Wright's early years were shaped by the valley, he came of age as an architect in the city, the sprawling prairie city of Chicago. There in the quiet, unobtrusive suburb of Oak Park, Wright began both his professional and family life.

It was the 1890s and Wright became the successful, urban young man about town. He met and married Catherine Tobin and began raising a large family. His home and studio became an ongoing experiment in new architectural forms. Soon there were six children and Wright's mother moved in next door. The Oak Park home shows only hints of the architectural themes Wright was developing, the importance of the hearth, the new design of windows. The long compressed hallway leading to a sudden expanse of space and light.

Today only quiet reminders of Wright's growing family remain in the children's playroom, but at the turn of the century the home and studio was far from a quiet place. And as the family grew, so did Wright's professional reputation. After serving an earlier apprenticeship to the renowned architect Louis Sullivan, Wright's own independent practice soon prospered. It was the beginning of a revolutionary period in American architecture and the subdued streets of Oak Park suddenly began to look very different. For Frank Lloyd Wright, the prevailing architecture of turn of the century America was as ill-fitting as a badly tailored suit.

The Victorian house was a distortion that Wright said lied about everything. It didn't fit the American heartland. What Wright wanted to create was what he called a sense of shelter, a feeling as much as a form. His first independent commission was the Winslow House of 1893. The fully developed prairie homes were still nearly a decade away, but the Winslow House was still a breakthrough. A new emphasis on symmetry. Arches the color of the earth. It was Wright's first independent commission, done while still in his mid twenties. Soon after Wright was approached by Nathan Moore, a neighbor of Wright's on Forest Avenue, to build a half timber house in the English style.

Wright fredded about selling out as he later called it in his autobiography, but built the house anyway. After all, he said his children needed new shoes. The house has remained popular over the years, and the original owners loved it. In fact, everyone liked the Moore House, except the architect. But Wright was determined to discover a new form, and with the turn of the century he did, a new architecture for a new age, the Hurtley House. Built in 1902 for the Arthur Hurtley family, the house emphasizes the horizontal, the line of the prairie, the line Wright believed of domesticity. The Hurtley House is private, almost forbidding. The guarded arch of the entryway. The protective arch of the fireplace. Inside, a new emphasis on open design that represented a radical shift from the Victorian.

One living area dissolves into the next. Wright wanted to destroy the cut out box-like character of turn of the century homes. In the Hurtley House, he succeeded. I think all these visual things that the calming effect is in my living room, you can sit there and you can enjoy their house. Today, the Hurtley House is owned by Jack Prost, who delights in owning a Frank Lloyd Wright home. That delight is a common bond that links right homeowners together.

Janet and Alice Fields own an early Wright home in the neighboring Chicago Stubber of River Forest, the Arthur Davenport home. Mrs. Gail commissioned her house. Apparently, there's a story that when she was having the house built in the summer. She went away on vacation and she got a letter from the neighbor across the street who wrote saying, you must come home immediately, you wouldn't believe what he's building. Mrs. Gail wrote back, doesn't matter what he's building. I have utmost faith in Mr. Wright. We've only been in our house for 18 months, so we have many years left to enjoy different aspects. But the thing that strikes me, and I think it still will 10 or more years from now, is the fact that there's so many different vantage points from within the house to enjoy it.

There's an effect about just the way the light comes into the house. In some rooms in particular, and as the sun just crosses during the course of the day, some rooms are just really bathed in light, and the fact that you have windows just wrap around. And I think that's a very unique effect. Just walking by gives me joy to see those planes projecting must be fantastic. You know, I study nature, I try to discover laws of nature because I'm a scientist, and I think, right, did that sort of thing in architecture? What would appeal to the human nature from the way it was created? And it just fits beautifully, just feels so comfortable.

There's each left flow of space, too. The fact that you see beyond, there isn't a closing in, it's an opening out. The fact that in every room, there windows, you see out, brings nature in. During the first decade of the 20th century, Wright enjoyed ever-growing popularity. In 1902, the same year he designed the Hurtley House, Wright received his largest commission to date. The Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield, Illinois. With a $60,000 budget, Wright could build the way he had wanted to build. A masterpiece of prairie design, today it remains a rare example of a completely preserved, right home.

Everything here is as it was. Everything remains from the elegant gathering Susan Dana once orchestrated here. The original Wright designed furniture, still arranged long after the last party was held. The butterfly lamp still cast a soft glow. And everywhere, the color of golden glass. The Dana House, an elegant composition where all the pieces remain locked in time.

For Wright, a repeated shape often became a principal element of design. In the Dana House, a form native to the prairie, the sumac. Like a passage of music, Wright's designs often repeated a particular refrain. The pattern of music. The pattern of design. Unity Temple, 1904. The Oak Park Unitarian Church wanted a new building, but had only $30,000 to build it.

Wright's solution was a cupous creation fashioned out of inexpensive concrete. And it was here Wright thought he discovered something terribly important. What mattered most about a building was not what happened outside. It was what happened within. Unity Temple is where I thought I had the idea that the reality of the building no longer consists in the substance of the walls and roof. In Unity Temple, you'll find walls actually disappearing. Find the interior space opening to the outside. You will see the outside coming in. And there perhaps is where you will find the first conscious expression of the idea that space within to be lived in is the reality of the building.

It is a building of unusual symmetry. It is a building of unfailing and uplifting geometry, a building of both music and man. With each new building now, Wright refined his startling new concept of architecture. And in 1908, he built the most famous of the Prairie Homes, the Roby House. Squeezed into a narrow Chicago lot, the Roby House is anchored to the landscape, yet its fantastic cantilevered roofs still stretch out to the sky. It is a building that seems to be in perpetual horizontal motion. Inside, a trademark of open design.

Windows wrap around the building, bringing the outside in. Walls become freestanding screens and wood trim lead you from one room to the next. The color of the trees, the color of the glass, both helping to define the space within. A concept right now called organic architecture. A building grew from the inside out. Space flowed from one room to the next and ultimately defined the shape of the house itself.

The completion of the Roby House marked the end of Wright's Prairie decade. It had been a turning point in American architecture, and now Wright's career was about to turn dramatically in a different direction. It was 1909, and Wright's studio was enormously successful. By the end of the first decade of the new century, over 100 commissions had been completed. But just as he reached the peak of his suburban popularity, he quite consciously, quite intentionally, through it all away. The suburban life he first had relished now seemed too restrictive. The overbearing reality of family and fatherhood replaced the idealized notion of home and hearth. His son John later wrote,

my father love fatherhood, he just didn't like everything that went with it. Wright also seemed to believe that he had nearly exhausted the prairie style, that he had done with it what creative work he could. I was losing my grip on my work wrote right years later, and even my interest in it, because I did not know what I wanted, I wanted to go away. A few years before, Wright had built this home for Edwin Cheney, whose wife, Memo Borthwick Cheney, took an active interest in Wright and his architecture. Wright found in Mrs. Cheney a companion whose artistic interest more nearly coincided with his own, and in 1909 Wright left family, practice, and oak park behind. He journeyed to Europe with Memo Borthwick Cheney to complete work on a landmark collection of his designs and drawings, the Vosmuth Collection, a collection that won for Wright in the midst of controversy at home, international recognition. A year later, Wright returned, and after a brief attempt at reconciliation with Catherine, Wright left oak park forever.

He journeyed north with Memo Borthwick to his native Wisconsin, the valleys he had loved as a boy. On his mother's family land, he began to build his northern home. He called it tele-esson, Welsh for shining brow. He built it to emerge from the brow of the hill, like an outcropping of native sandstone. He built it not so much on the hill he later wrote as of it. Tele-esson, shining brow, home. But the tele-esson idol was short lived, while away completing work on a project in Chicago, Wright experienced the great tragedy of his life. An insane servant killed Memo Borthwick and her children, seven people died, and tele-esson was burned to the ground.

Wright buried the woman he loved but never married in the family cemetery nearby. Inconsolable, he retreated to the remains of tele-esson, his once glowing career irrevocably changed. And Frank Lloyd Wright was looked upon as a man whose career had reached an early zenith, then fell, dizzily away. Out of the ashes Wright built tele-esson anew, but his reputation diminished by personal chaos and tragedy attracted fewer and fewer commissions.

Between 1915 and 1925, Wright's most significant building was actually constructed not in this country, but in Japan. The Imperial Hotel was a multi-million dollar project that renewed curiosity in Wright when it withstood the disastrous Tokyo earthquake of 1923. It was an elaborate edifice, but this was an era when more attention was focused on Wright's personal entanglements than his professional accomplishments. Wright's life, in fact, grew increasingly controversial, an affair with artist Miriam Noel led to an unhappy marriage and bitter divorce.

And a subsequently aeson with a woman 30 years his junior brought yet another torrent of newspaper headlines. Born in Yugoslavia, Olga Vanamellanoff would eventually help redirect the beleaguered architect's life. But first, the only sought refuge should Wright's rebuilt northern sanctuary, tele-esson. Tele-esson, a place of haunting beauty and tranquility. Yet even here, Wright and the woman who was waiting to become his third wife could not escape controversy. Former spouses sued, debts went unpaid, and the building of new buildings, all but ceased.

It was a time Olga Vanamellanoff could still remember a half century later. He couldn't marry. They considered it living in sin. The wife doesn't give the divorce. What can he do? He loves the woman. So he takes it. With that, go all these disagreeable experiences with people that was how many years ago, longer, 60 years ago, isn't it, before my time? And in my time, I had to win Spring Green and Madison, not everybody rushing out to see what I looked like. But I would go to town. It wasn't pleasant, no? But you couldn't get the divorce again. And yet we didn't want to waste a life which we made very constructive here, even without money.

In Olga Vanamellano, Frank Lloyd Wright finally found a partner for life. And through this difficult period, they began to build a new life together, a life at Eliasim. And through this difficult period, they started to build a new life together. And through this difficult period, they started to build a new life together, a life at Eliasim. Still for Frank Lloyd Wright and Ol'Govanna, the 1920s ended none too soon. Wright needed a new beginning, and in a nearby school building, he found it.

Hillside Home School was originally a private academy run by Wright's two aunts. Now the architect put it to a brand new purpose. What to do with it? We said we should use it. If only we could have students. But how? This is very simple. Let's have them. Let's have a school. This is what really started him then. And he did it. That was the beginning. In a very real sense, it was a new beginning, both for Wright and for what came to be called the Tele-San Fellowship. They came by the score. Zhang would be architects drawn together by their devotion to the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright. Communal in spirit, they worked in the fields as well as the drafting rooms.

One who came nearly 50 years ago and remains a part of the fellowship even today is Cornelia Briarly. I read Mr. Wright's autobiography. I was in architectural school at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, and started to try to find a way to get here. I thought it would be very, very difficult. So soon I got a letter from Mr. Wright saying, come when the spirit moves, Frank Lloyd Wright. So it was a wonderful introduction, actually. So he was always wonderful to me. I had a wonderful relationship with both Mr. and Mrs. Wright over the years. Another who came in the early 1930s was Wright's future son-in-law, William Wesley Peters. So I came up in the summer of 1932, and with the intention at that time, I'm coming. I fully intended to go back to continue on MIT when I came and I got Mr. Wright here

on the day and briefly and was enormously impressed, and actually to change the whole course of my life at that point, and I never went back to MIT that fall as a result of it. Wright's students plowed his fields, repaired his buildings, and paid for the privilege to do so. And they also gave something more. It was, as if Wright, now in his mid-60s, was given by his young admirers a new gift, a rejuvenation of creativity. West Peters. He enjoyed, in fact, fed on the surroundings of people who were rich with life, and he found, in general, that younger people were liable to be not proficient or shaped ideas or anything like that, but had a sense of feeling for life and enthusiasm.

It was a two-way experience. To his students, Wright seemed able to create designs without even picking up a pencil. Ken Lockhart, another of Wright's students in the 1930s, remembers. We knew that he had a particular project, a large public building, perhaps. And he would say, when he arrived at the studio, well, I've got it all designed, and you know, around for the piece of paper, you know, and then he'd say, all I'd have to do now is to put it on paper. Ideas that were never realized during the traumatic decade that preceded now came pouring forth. There were plans for an entire city, for a revolutionary office building, and for a breath taking home to take shape above a waterfall. It was now the mid-1930s, and the cranky old man of American architecture was about to prove that he was far from through. It was the beginning of Wright's second great era.

About this time, Wright met and courted H.F. Johnson. Johnson wanted a new building for his growing recene Wisconsin firm, the Johnson Wax Company. Wright came up with a startling design, a great open space to be supported by giant mushroom-shaped columns. So startling, in fact, that the Wisconsin Industrial Commission said it couldn't and shouldn't be built. Tellyesson Apprettis Cornelia Briarly was there. The Johnson building, I do remember a great deal about that because the commission decided that the column wouldn't hold the amount of weight that Mr. Wright's maintained that it would, but Mr. Wright was absolutely certain that it would. And so they built a column, loading this wide flange with pig iron and sand. And every time a load was put on the column, all the cameramen would get ready with their cameras hoping to see it fall and be ready to take the picture, but it didn't fall. And they loaded it and loaded it until they'd put 65 tons on before it developed a crack.

When it finally developed a crack, they pulled it down. In a sense, Wright forced technology to keep up with his notions of modern design. He wanted, for example, to use glass tubing instead of windows, but no one knew how to seal the tubes together. West Peters helped supervise construction. That was quite a struggle in the building because for one thing, in the Johnson Wax building, it was designed for techniques that didn't exist. And it wasn't until years after it was built that the means of sealing the horizontal glass tubes was developed. But the Johnson buildings were more than just a proving ground for certain design principles. Wright had wanted to build out in the country, a notion HF Johnson rejected in favor of a downtown location. But Wright didn't think much of urban recene.

Why not then, he reasoned create a sealed environment, a place beautiful to be in without having to look out. The Johnson Wax building, designed in 1936. The Johnson Wax building, designed in 1936, was built in 1936, and it was built in 1936. And as you walk into that building, you catch no sense of enclosure, whatever, top or sides.

Here continuity takes over as a principle. The old idea of the building as architecture is, as you see, quite gone. There in the Johnson building in Mystique Sky, where before you only saw the upper angle of the box, you're living in the sky and feel about you in the freedom of space. From 43 miles of glass tubes in case the building, tubes that restrict the view of urban

recene yet help create unrestricted space within. Here the ceiling doesn't sit flatly on the walls. And here there is always something new for the eye to discover. It is a building of never-ending surprise, never-ending geometric combinations. It is its own small integrated universe. Right later wrote that he wanted to create here an office building as uplifting a place in which to work, as any cathedral is, in which to worship. The Johnson Wax administration building was completed in the late 1930s, and accompanying

research tower constructed later. The building's generated enormous publicity, publicity that in the end made a particularly immodest remark from right ring true. H.F. Johnson had asked right where the Johnson Wax sign would go. Right's response, would you put a sign he queried on the Washington Monument? Right's work and personal style may well have been grandiose, but he was primarily a home builder, and right then created for his new patron, a grand new home, Wingspread, the home of H.F. Johnson. Like the spokes of a wheel, Wingspread stretched out across the flat Wisconsin landscape north of her scene. At the center, a gigantic hearth, a hub from which the four wings of the building extend.

Wingspread, one of right's many achievements in the late 1930s. Right had always believed in fitting his designs to the landscape of which they were part, and in 1937 he designed a new home to fit a stark new landscape, the Arizona desert. The home was called simply, Tele-S and West, a winter home for his family and the Tele-S and Fellowship. Never a hero in his native state of Wisconsin where his financial and personal difficulties

were legend. The architect felt welcome in Arizona, Olgavana Wright. We do feel different in Arizona, and Mr. I did, and so did I. We felt people were much easier here, friendlier, they weren't so glum, they weren't so severe looking, the return to Wisconsin was always a little shock and said, my husband, as we were driving, approaching Dodgeville, Wisconsin, said he, well, Mother, get ready, we are coming close to the place where folks don't think much of us, but here people thought quite a lot of us.

Tele-S and attracted increasing numbers of students, and in 1935 the father of one of those apprentices offered right a dramatic new opportunity. At your Kaufman commissioned Wright to build a family retreat in the lovely Wooded Hill Country of Southern Pennsylvania, land that came complete with its own waterfall. If ever there was a building site ready made for Frank Lloyd Wright, this was it. Wright wanted to fit the building to both the landscape and the man who owned it. Edgar Kaufman loved the look of the land and the sound of the water, and this would be

a house that would reflect both. After the building and the surroundings would enhance each other. Again the perspective of one who was there, Cornelia Briarly. When the building was finally built, they asked what color it should be, and of course it's in a beautiful glen of Rhododendron, and Mr. I said paint it the color of a dried Rhododendron and the fall Rhododendron leaf, and they more or less did paint it that color. The building water, a place where man and nature interlocked.

The achievements of the late thirties were mostly buildings of remarkable grandeur, but this era also yielded something more, something every bit as influential, though far less grand. In 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright built his modest Madison Wisconsin house. It was his first Usonian home, a term-right coin to fit the USA. Now being carefully restored by a University of Wisconsin art professor, it met a need for less expensive and less formal living. And it added a distinctive right innovation, the carport. The house faces the back instead of the street, taking advantage of its suburban garden lot. The Usonian Homes foreshadowed the ranch-style houses that swept across the country during the post-war era a decade later. It was designed and built for $5,500.

Wright's Usonian Homes took on many variations in geometric themes, all to fit new and different locations. An example is the Hanna House near Palo Alto, California, a house designed on a hexagonal grid, a house that angles around a California hillside. Wright was now past 70 years of age, and still, he continued to build. There was a structure that spanned another California hillside, the Marin County Building. And amusing him for the heart of Manhattan, the Guggenheim.

And in his 80th year, he designed the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin, Reverend Max Gableer. One of the things that certainly strikes me is the way in which the front of the building is designed, the front, as it was referred to by Mr. Wright, the prowl, like the prowl of a ship, the prowl sailing the unknown.

If you look at the diagonals in it, you'll see that some of them run down as well as up. It's not just a prowl, resting the waves, it's also a prowl digging into the earth. In a sense, connects the earth and the heavens as a sense of open-endedness, of venture. With prowl and the plow, words that really describe the essence of Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy, out of the earth, he used to say, and into the light. Frank Lloyd Wright continued to create until his 91st year. He died April 9th, 1959. And on a somber early spring day, he was buried in the tiny family cemetery near his beloved

Tellyesson. The minister was Max Gableer. I remember the day very well. I drove out to Tellyesson, I remember, and parked up there in the courtyard and went in. A few minutes later, the casket was carried by some of the apprentices outside placed on a cart, a horse-drawn cart, and we all of us walked in what was really a very moving procession. of a century now has passed since Frank Lloyd Wright's death, and part of his legacy, part

of what lives on today, is the tele-S in fellowship. It remains a unique attempt to preserve a tradition. The former apprentices are now the teachers of the next generation of Wright devotees. The fellowship has been faulted by some for producing few other great architects and for trying too hard to keep sacred the memory of an imperfect man. But they do succeed in maintaining a commitment, a commitment to creating beauty in everyday life. Long time fellowship acquaintance, Max Gabler. This sense of the unity of all life, of human life with the life of nature, of the arts, with the necessities of living, whether it be a pause for tea in the afternoon, whether it be a musical program put on by members

of the group, for other members of the group. All of these things are part of a total way of life, which has a sense of wholeness to it, which I find tremendously impressive, which constitutes, I think, a goal which any of us do well to appreciate and keep in mind. Frank Lloyd Wright left behind more than the fellowship. More even than the over 400 buildings he created. His genius gave form and substance to a unique understanding of people and place. A unique understanding of the importance of home. For in a land that never knew quite

what to make of him, he knew what to make of the land. He knew what to see, what to sense, and finally, what to build. . .

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