With more than 600 executed buildings to his credit, Frank Lloyd Wright is regarded by many as the greatest architect of the twentieth century. In 1900, he began designing his celebrated and unprecedented prairie houses, which include the Robie House in...
[more]With more than 600 executed buildings to his credit, Frank Lloyd Wright is regarded by many as the greatest architect of the twentieth century. In 1900, he began designing his celebrated and unprecedented prairie houses, which include the Robie House in Chicago (1909) and the Coonley House (1908) in Riverside. They were, according to H.R. Hitchock, "something of as much consequence in the history of the dwelling as the architects of the fifteenth century who turned the defensive castle into the residential mansion." In these homes, wrote Hitchcock, "room flowed into room...interior and exterior flowed into one another to create an abstract design in space relationships."
During this period, Wright also created the Larkin Company's Administration Building in Buffalo (1904), which was the first office building in the United States to use metal-bound, plate-glass doors and windows, all-metal furniture, and air conditioning. Between 1915 and 1922 he worked on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, in which he used a unique earthquake-resistant combination of concrete supports, cantilevered floors, and a foundation floating on a cushion of soft mud. The design was tested in 1923 by an actual earthquake, and passed.
After a period of professional decline from the late-1920s to the mid-1930s, Wright stormed back with his Kaufmann House -- cantilevered over a waterfall at Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936), and the Administration Building for the S.C. Johnson & Son Company in Racine, Wisconsin (1936-39) -- with a streamlined exterior of brick walls and a now-famous interior of mushroom-shaped columns. Later notable works include the unconventional V.C. Morris gift shop in San Francisco (1949), the crescent-shaped Herbert Jacobs House II located near Madison (1942), and the circular Friedman House (1949-1951) located near Pleasantville, New York. In 1950, Wright completed the 15-story Research and Development Laboratory for the Johnson Wax Company, which features a round-cornered tower and cantilevered floors anchored to a concrete foundation that penetrates over 50 feet into the ground.In 1959, Wright finished the Guggenheim Museum in New York, capping a career that has been described as farsighted, ingenious, and inexplicably vital. Bruno Zevi wrote that modern architecture is indebted to Wright's sense of space within reality, his feeling for the organic growth of the house from interior to exterior, and his ability to blend his work with its natural surroundings. "After the industrial revolution and the progress of engineering had driven architecture to take refuge in applied decoration," writes Zevi, "Wright effected a completed artistic synthesis."
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