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Featured Books
Top 5 selling books
Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History
Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece
Frank Lloyd Wright's
Taliesin and Taliesin West
Fallingwater book
Fallingwater Rising : Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told. When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul–“the smartest retailer in America”–and a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture. "Highly Recommended".
Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Kentuck Frank Lloyd Wright's
House on Kentuck Knob is splendidly written; simple, alive and
captivating. Donald Hoffmann draws the reader right into the
adventure of how Mr. and Mrs. Hagan acquired the site and got
Wright, by then a quirky octogenarian, to design the building.
Clearly the book, with all its illustrations, will be a steady
seller for visitors who combine visits to Falling Water and Kentuck
Knob. Donald Hoffmann served as art and architecture critic for the
Kansas City Star from 1965 to 1990, was assistant editor of The
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1970 to
1972, and is the author of seven books on the architecture of Frank
Lloyd Wright, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.
About the architect and his work style
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was born as Frank Lincoln Wright in Richland
Center in southwestern Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867. His father,
William Carey Wright, was a musician and a preacher. His mother,
Anna Lloyd Jones was a teacher. [It is said that Anna Lloyd-Jones
placed pictures of great buildings in young Frank's nursery as part
of training him up from the earliest possible moment as an
architect].
Wright spent some of his time growing up at the farm owned by his
uncles near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Frank Lloyd Wright was of Welsh
ethnic heritage, and was brought up in the Unitarian faith. Wright
briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, after which he moved to Chicago to work for a year in the
architectural firm of J. Lyman Silsbee. In 1887, he hired on as a
draftsman in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, run by Louis Sullivan
(design) and Dankmar Adler (engineering) at the time the firm was
designing Chicago's Auditorium Building.
Wright eventually became the chief draftsman, and also the man in
charge of the firm's residential designs. Under Sullivan, whom
Wright called "Leiber Meister" [ beloved master ], Wright began to
develop his own architectural ideas. In 1889 he married his first
wife, Catherine Tobin. He also designed houses on his own toward the
end, homes Wright called "bootlegged" which were done against Alder
and Sullivan's policies concerning such moonlighting. When Louis
Sullivan found out about these homes, Wright was fired from the
firm. The bootlegged houses showed the start of Wright's low,
sheltering rooflines, the prominence of the central fireplace, and
"the destruction of the box" open floor plans.
Wright started his own firm in 1893 after being fired from Adler and
Sullivan, first working out of the Schiller building (designed by
Adler and Sullivan) and then out of a studio which was built onto
his home in Oak Park. Between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed
by Wright were built. During this period he began to develop his
ideas which would come to together in his "Prairie House" concept.
Into 1909, he developed and refined the prairie style. Frank Lloyd
Wright founded the "prairie school" of architecture, and his art of
this early productive period in his life is also considered as part
of the "Arts and Crafts movement".
This very productive first phase in Wright's career ended in 1909,
when he left his wife and 5 children to go to Germany. He was joined
there by Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a former client and now
his lover. From 1912-1914, Wright and Ms. Chaney lived together at
Taliesin, a home Wright had built at the site of his uncles' farm
near Spring Green. This period ended when a crazed servant murdered
Ms. Chaney and 6 others, also setting a fire that destroyed much of
Taliesin. During the period from 1914-1932, a time of personal
turmoil and change, Wright rebuilt Taliesin (and nearly lost it to
bank for closure), divorced Catherine, married and separated from
Miriam Noel (spending a little time in jail as part of this
situation), and met his third wife, Olgivanna Milanoff.
Architectural designs during this period included the Imperial Hotel
in Tokyo (a large and complex design that required much time in
Japan to oversee it), and the concrete California residences. Few
commissions were completed toward the end of this period, but Wright
did lecture and publish frequently, with books including An
Autobiography in 1932.
The Taliesin Fellowship was founded in 1932, with thirty apprentices
who came to live and learn under Wright. An Autobiography served as
an advertisement, inspiring many who read it to seek him out. The
architect's output became more organized and prolific, with help of
the numerous apprentices who assisted in design detail and site
supervision.
His most famous work, Fallingwater, was designed in 1936. The
fellowship was expanded as Taliesin West was built in Arizona as a
summer location for the school. Few buildings were produced during
the war years, but the G.I.Bill brought many new apprentices when
the war ended. This post-war period to the end of Wright's life was
the most productive. He received 270 house commissions, and designed
and built the Price Tower skyscraper, the Guggenheim Museum (which
required Wright to live in New York City for a time), and the Marin
County Civic Center.
Well Wright never retired; he past-away on April 9, 1959 at the age
of ninety-two in Arizona. He was interred at the graveyard at Unity
Chapel (His first building) at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In 1985,
Olgivanna Wright passed away, and one of her wishes was to have
Frank Lloyd Wright's remains cremated and the ashes placed next to
hers at Taliesin West. Amid much controversy, this was done. The
epitaph at his Wisconsin grave site reads: "Love of an idea, is the
love of God".
"...having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the
greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the
greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the
greatest architect of all time." Frank Lloyd Wright.
His Style
His great contribution during the Oak Park years was the Prairie
house, which heralded a new approach to domestic architecture.
Throughout his life Wright had a great capacity for reinvention and
creativity, and during the 1890’s he sought to define a new
aesthetic for the American domestic building; home made, which did
not refer to European models but used local materials from local
sites for local clients. He used the landscape of the open spaces of
the Midwest and its materials; the local brick and stone to create
buildings that enhanced the lives of the families who lived within
them. His houses encouraged the flow of people around generous
spaces (multiple entry/exit points) with a central gathering point,
usually a fireplace. These houses offered protection from the baking
heat of summer: they had overhanging eaves (the roof extending out
beyond the walls – Frank Lloyd Wright typical standard) with
casement windows opening just beneath them. He preferred casements,
windows that open outwards on a hinge down one side, as they suit
the human arm and hand so easily. Often the eaves flared far beyond
the house (Frank Lloyd Wright learned the strength of steel in the
shipyards of Chicago and used great metal beams to create dramatic
cantilevered extensions and floating balconies that emphasized the
horizontality of the Prairie houses).
In addition he embraced the use of the machine in architecture and
design, as a means of enhancing the beauty of natural materials by
highlighting their own qualities; wood could be cut to show its
interior pattern to best advantage.
Most of his houses were built on a unit plan, with an underlying
grid that made building them relatively straightforward. This habit,
which became enormously significant in his later Usonian houses,
began as early as the 1880s. To begin with he used units of squares
or rectangles and it was not until the 1930s that the more
unexpected shapes, such as diamonds, triangles and hexagons, came
into his collection.
The Prairie houses tended to be set on either a cruciform or a
pinwheel plan. The cruciform is simply a cross: a horizontal and
vertical axis, one larger than the other but geometrically related,
symmetrical and often with a living space of three zones taking up
the larger axis. The pinwheel, on the other hand, is dynamic, not
static. Think of a cross with a long narrow vertical axis and a
short thick horizontal one. This gives a rectangle in the middle and
four segments (two wide and two slim). So swap the top narrow
segment of the vertical axis with the short fat left-hand segment,
and you get a pinwheel. The beauty of a pinwheel is that while it
keeps a balance and proportion between the different areas of a
house, it allows for definition of spaces and visual movement
(narrow to wide, or enclosed to opened) between them, making the
interior volumes much more interesting to inhabit.
Wright was a master of this spatial manipulation.