Conscious Choice: Wright At Home

April 2000

Wright At Home

by Deb Olin Unferth

No American residential architect challenged the values and standards around him more than Frank Lloyd Wright. While his contemporaries were building Queen Anne houses, he was designing his odd prairie homes. Years before the Bauhaus experimented with technology and art, Wright was designing prefab houses. As early as 1914, he was drawing sketches of Kandinsky-like murals to cover walls. Even earlier he was making Mondrian-like windows. It’s true that in Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris at this time, modern art was flourishing. But Chicago was still a conservative backwater where Wright’s houses stood out in stark contrast.

A visionary in his profession, he was a veritable revolutionary in society. In his flowing cape, leather vest, and beret, he cut a dramatic figure. He carried a cane, which he would wave and point, and he let his hair grow in curls down the back of his neck. He scandalized Oak Park by deserting his wife and six children. To everyone’s astonishment, he dropped everything and left for Europe with the young wife of a colleague. Later, his neighbors in Spring Green, Wisconsin, were shocked when Wright’s home was the site of a horrible massacre: an insane butler axed seven people, including his lover, and set fire to the house. With Wright’s total of three wives, three fires, decades of communal living, and numerous other social oddities, the reporters had a field day. They splashed his name across the front page regularly and his career often suffered from it.

Wright had always been independent minded, particularly about architecture. From his early twenties, he was insisting that Americans must break from their European-based architectural past of Victorian style homes and create new and unique forms. He believed these forms would be inspired by the American landscape and color scheme. They would reflect American values of family, work, and progress. He created, from this vision, the prairie style.

The prairie house grew out of two basic beliefs about architecture. The first Wright learned from his early mentor, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, with whom he worked for several years on projects including the Auditorium Building (now Roosevelt University). Sullivan said over and over until it became the phrase he would be known for, "Form must follow function!" Architecture should be practical, that is, it should reflect the needs and values of the people living within it. Since Americans value progress and democracy, their buildings should be built with the very latest materials and mechanical and engineering devices. To this end, Wright’s first commercial office building, the Larkin Building, used innovations unheard of at the time, such as an air-filtration system and steel furniture he designed. The interior was wide open to reflect a democratic and friendly working environment. Similarly, as American families value a peaceful and simple home life, Wright argued that residences should be free of ornamentation and should emphasize privacy and security. Wright also designed homes to suit the needs of individual families. He was known for such idiosyncrasies as building pianos into the wall or placing the kitchen in the center of the house.

The second basic belief was his theory of organic design. He believed, as many modernists did, that the purpose of art is to attempt to express the inner essence of an object. A painting of a piece of fruit is successful not because it looks like a piece of fruit, but because it expresses the fruitness of the fruit, the essential nature of the fruit, that special quality that makes it fruit and not something else. This would be a simple idealized form. In this sense, Wright would argue, if it actually looks like a piece of fruit, it probably isn’t successful because an individual piece of fruit is specific and particular, not essential and universal. Architecture, as a part of one’s environment and yet also an artistic creation, should express the essence of the environment and grow naturally from it, not fight against it. It should blend with the horizon, not strike it. It should match the color scheme, not clash with it. Importing cluttered European styles with their peaked roofs and bright colors to the wide expanses of the American landscape was grotesque. Better to move with the horizon in horizontal lines. Better to match the materials to the colors and textures of the wood, stone, and foliage around it. Better to work with the idealized geometric forms such as squares and circles which are functional and express the essential nature of shape. (To see examples of this, investigate the Robie House in Hyde Park, Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park, and Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. They are some of the best examples of organic design in the country.

As much as we enjoy Wright’s prairie houses, there are problems with his theory of organic design. Perhaps we should grow naturally from our environment, but the history of the human race attests that we don’t. Instead we seek to conquer and oppress it. And we don’t cast off impractical styles rooted in history: we keep them around for centuries. Furthermore, the postmodernists would say there is no such thing as an essential nature so it is impossible to express the essential nature of a landscape. We see our environment through historical eyes trained in a tradition. Viewed this way, there is something contradictory in saying we should blend with our environment but reject our history. Our past is our environment. We are revolutionary and reactionary, forever looking back to see the future.

Wright must have been a tormented soul. He valued artistic and personal harmony above all else, yet his work stood out from his surroundings and his life clashed with social norms. In Chicago we are lucky to have such easy access to his houses, which, ironically in the end, are a conservative expression of faith in domestic bliss and belief in the American project.

Take a virtual tour of Wright’s work at www.franklloydwright.com.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: