How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Changed America | Architectural Digest

Frank Lloyd Wright designed over 1,000 buildings during a career that spanned more than 70 years and was constantly reinventing himself. From developing his philosophy of organic architecture to his famous prairie-style houses, he even created a type of home specifically intended to make great design affordable to the average American, which we'll talk about at the end of this video. Hi, I'm Michael Weitzner. I'm an architect, and today we're going to break down the many styles of Frank Lloyd Wright and see how his work evolved over time. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War. He died in 1959, shortly after the U.S. sent troops into Vietnam. In that 92-year lifespan, he would witness a giant leap in technology, the implementation of indoor plumbing, electricity, the invention of the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, and the dawn of space travel. Of the 1,000 buildings he designed in his lifetime, 532 of them were built, an astounding number. But to understand how his style evolved over his career, we need to go back to one of his very first jobs. At age 20, Wright joined the office of Adler & Sullivan, a prominent and important practice in Chicago, whose ideas of skyscraper design are still in practice today. Louis Sullivan was known as the father of modernism. Sullivan believed that first and foremost, a building should be functional. In fact, he coined the term, form follows function, which would inspire architects of skyscrapers and modern buildings for generations to come, including Frank Lloyd Wright. While working for Sullivan, Wright quickly rose to be relied upon as a prominent designer, so much so that when one looks at a floor plan of their new offices in the auditorium building, along with Sullivan and Adler's offices, there is an office labeled Mr. Wright's Room. He was only 22 at the time. Two years later, at age 24, Frank Lloyd Wright contributed significantly to the design of the Charnley House, in collaboration with Louis Sullivan. This is the Charnley House, on what is called the Gold Coast of Chicago, the northeast section near the lake. This house foreshadows many of his design ideas that were to come. You can also see Sullivan's presence here, as it bears the hallmarks of the Chicago school style of early modernism. So what you see in this photograph is the building resembles very strongly an Italianate palazzo. It's got this veranda that sticks off the front with this Sullivan-esque kind of ornamentation that he was known for. And it's got this band at the top, sort of the beginnings of a clerestory that Wright would later go on to use quite often. And it's got this prominent entrance that Sullivan used quite often. So what's interesting about this is that a lot of the hallmarks that Sullivan used in his skyscrapers are actually evident here. Sullivan's ideas of skyscraper design were actually inspired by a column, believe it or not, where there's a base, there's a shaft, and there's a capitol. So the other thing that I find really interesting about this photograph, there's also sort of the beginnings of what we'll see later in Wright's prairie style. And we'll see later in examples how Wright takes this and expands on it even further. Soon after this building was built, Wright took on some after-hours freelance work because he was in need of some extra money. When Sullivan found out, he was enraged because it was specifically stated in his contract that Wright would not do any freelance work. And so Wright left the company to strike out on his own. Whether he was fired or quit remains a mystery. At the age of 26, Wright's solo career was underway. He had a wife, Catherine, and two children to support, and another one on the way. One of his first commissions was for a friend in River Forest near Oak Park, where he and his family lived just outside of Chicago. It's here that we see the beginning of a style that he would truly make his own, and one that he is possibly most remembered for, the prairie style. The prairie style is known for horizontal lines being parallel to the earth, open floor plans, low-pitched roofs, strong overhanging eaves, and a strong connection to nature, among other things. And while Wright was a pioneer of the prairie style and its most famous practitioner, he was not alone in developing it. A group of architects that Wright referred to as the New School of the Middle West were embarking on a journey to create a new American architectural style, together, distinct from the traditional European influences. Inspired by the sweeping plains of the western U.S., this group included architects such as George Elmsley, Myron Hunt, and George Washington Mayer. While they all contributed to the shared American language of architecture, it was undoubtedly Wright who would take these ideas to their fullest expression. This is the Winslow House, which reveals the nascent ideas of the prairie style. So here's everything that jumps out at me. One thing he does, which is very reminiscent of Sullivan, is he creates that same sort of strong entrance, made out of stone with ornamentation around it, and these square windows. But now you can see, instead of this tripartite layout, he actually only has two sort of levels in this building. He's got this base, which the entrance is worked into, out of Roman brick, and then above that he's got this frieze. You see the beginnings of what he would later refer to as his clerestory windows, with this strong overhang of a hip roof. So that dark material below the roof makes it act like a void, and here it actually reads as if the roof were floating above this base piece at the bottom. So the other thing that makes this very distinctive from the Charley House is how horizontal it is. And he articulates that by breaking up the mass into these long, low, horizontal pieces. So this house is not yet fully in the prairie style. Wright would receive many, many more commissions in the following years. These included the Willits House, the Susan Dana Lawrence House, the Heller House. One of the most notable was the home he designed for Darwin D. Martin in Buffalo. The Martin House takes the prairie style to a new level. This is a full-on prairie style house, compared to the Winslow House. Wright does a number of things to increase the horizontality and make it more parallel to the earth. And one of the things he liked to do was create these planters so that the house sort of stepped up from the earth up to the roof. And the other thing that you could see very strongly is there's no longer any symmetry. Where the Winslow House was clearly a rectangle with a roof on top of it, this you don't read the rectangle at all. One of the core principles of Wright's architecture was the open plan and breaking open the box. Where most architects would create a rectangular room and plan, Wright would actually break this room up and break the corners away. So essentially what you'd get are these open corners. And he would also do that in the vertical direction. He would take the roof and he would bring the wall only up a certain distance so that the roof appears to hover over the wall. Then he would just infill that with a piece of glass. So he liked to break open the corners, essentially. That's how he felt the box gets broken open. And you could see that right here, right? So you could see these windows and the roof above floating above. You could see it over there as well. So instead of a full wall coming up and meeting the eave of the roof, what he does here is he just brings these piers up. And then he fills in between the piers with a spandrel which creates a terrace. And then he pushes that wall back further. And he all of a sudden gets this whole different reading of in and out where the exterior and the interior become blurred. So these windows are breaking the box vertically and these piers are breaking the box horizontally. A few years later he would take the prairie style to its pinnacle with his design for the Robie House on the south side of Chicago. Okay, this is the Robie House. This was completed in 1910. And it still looks as striking today, a hundred and something years later, as it did back then. What he's done is he's gone even more horizontal than he did at the Martin House. So now he's lowered these hip roofs so they're even more shallow. They extend even further. Look how far this roof extends out over this terrace. He pulls the brick of the terrace further out. He has this longer line of windows under this roof eave. But now you can see the total separation between roof and form below as if the roof hovers. And these windows are what fills that gap. Wright was very inspired by nature. And so by breaking the box it was his way of bringing more of the outdoors inside the house. He wanted to blur the boundary between the inside of the house and the outdoors. Let's take a look at how these windows relate to the inside of the house. So this row of windows that you see right here along the street are actually this row of windows on the inside. And the other thing he does is the idea of the open plan. So he has a hearth or a fireplace in the center of the room. And that's the only divider between what's the living room and what's the dining room on the other side of that hearth. It's just a fragment of a wall. So the corners are removed and one central element makes the division between two rooms. All the hallmarks of the prairie style are here. It's low and horizontal. It's made out of Roman brick. He has these huge roof overhangs. Walls that rise up from the landscape as planters and then become the house. So the building transitions from the earth to the roof. And of course the blending of interior and exterior materials. So he brings the brick that he builds the house out of into the interior. It is in many ways the most elegant example of the prairie houses. So at this point in time there are a series of radical changes in Wright's personal life. These would lead him to uproot his life and reinvent himself as well as his architectural style in new surroundings. He left his wife and six children and left the United States to go to Europe with Martha Borthwick Cheney known as Maima. Cheney was a translator and an early figure in the feminist movement who Wright considered his intellectual equal. After two years in Europe Wright returns in 1911 and settles in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Where he builds himself a new house that he called Taliesin. Which means shining brow in Welsh. Wright's ancestral home. So it employs sort of all his ideas of the prairie style. In 1914 while Wright was in Chicago overseeing the Midway Gardens construction, tragedy would befall Taliesin. A deranged worker murdered Cheney and her two children along with four others and set the house on fire. Wright would rebuild but the tragic incident left a deep wound and effectively marks the end of Wright's works in the prairie style. Shortly after Wright was invited to Japan to design the Imperial Hotel. Wright was strongly influenced by Japanese art and architecture and was an avid collector of Japanese prints and sculptures. And so it is ironic that when he received his first commission in Japan he looked to other cultures for inspiration for the design. It seems to be somewhat inspired by Mayan and Native American art and architectural forms. Which would continue to influence his work going forward. In 1919 a new period of Wright's architecture began. This time in Los Angeles. So this is the Hollyhock house and there are still many elements of the prairie style here. Where it spreads out horizontally along the land. He keeps these low walls that act as planters in some cases and others terraces. But obviously Wright is looking at something new. And he's created these heavy roof forms that clearly appear to be Mayan in their influence. So now instead of using brick he's using stucco. Which changes the whole flavor of the house. Instead of having a base and then a freeze and then a roof. Now the roof sits directly on the base. There's no intermediate zone of the facades. The other thing Wright does because now we're in a very warm climate. Is he has a lot of the windows facing inward towards an interior courtyard. Instead of along the exterior. So he takes another idea of bringing nature and the outdoors to the interior. But here he borrows from the Spanish colonial. And he actually creates a courtyard with gardens and hanging plants. And wraps the house around that. So the Hollyhock house is named for the flowers that grow wild on Olive Hill where the house was built. This house with its massive roof and Mayan inspired forms would lead to a new period for Wright. One based on innovation and technology. So this Mayan influence design continued with the textile block houses in the Hollywood Hills. Which we talked about in our haunted house video. These houses employed blocks cast in concrete with ornamental designs in the mold. And were connected with steel reinforcing rods to create these elaborate and intricate designs. These included the Ennis house, the Freeman house, the Stora house. And the Millard house known as La Miniatura which is in Pasadena. These blocks were sometimes perforated and sometimes opaque. And the textile blocks were created on the site where the house was built. Using the earth and sand and stones from the ground on which they were constructed. This was core to an idea that Wright had been exploring since the early days of the prairie style. A guiding design philosophy which he called organic architecture. In his own words he said, no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. Hill and house should live together. Each the happier for the other. And although the idea of organic architecture had informed his entire career. Since he first conceived of it in 1894. He would continue to hone this idea even further in two of his most famous houses. Taliesin West and Falling Water. With the onset of the depression after the crash of 1929. Wright found himself without any work. And he decided to create a fellowship where he taught his ideas and principles of organic architecture. Edgar Tafel wrote a terrific book on the fellowship called Apprentice to Genius. I always encourage aspiring architects to read it. If after they read it they're not inspired. I tell them they should consider a different profession. So in 1927 Wright goes to Arizona. He gets a commission to collaborate on a design for a hotel in Phoenix. Designed for the Biltmore Company with one of his former students. There he discovered the dry arid landscape appealed to him. And decided to purchase land outside of Phoenix in Scottsdale. It was here that he would design and build Taliesin West. Which would both embody his ideas of organic architecture. And serve as a place where he could teach them to a new generation of American architects. In fact the apprentices participating in Wright's Taliesin Fellowship. Contributed greatly to the creation of the estate. Not only contributing to its design. But also taking part in its fabrication and construction. Mixing cement. Installing frameworks. And even quarrying stones. The finished estate was called Taliesin West. And it is now the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. So this is Taliesin West. And what I find remarkable about it. Is how it echoes the forms of the hill behind it. This is a great example of Wright's maxim to build of the hill. And not on the hill. So you can see he's still using elements from the prairie style. He's using materials from the site like he did in the Los Angeles houses. And it's all coming together to form this new kind of organic architecture. One that echoes the desert landscape. But now he's trying to shield the really hot desert sun. And so he does a few interesting things. Over here on the right. He creates these exterior beams. That sit above the roof. And are angled up. He hangs what was originally canvassed from it. But is now a sort of polycarbonate plastic material. The idea being that it would allow the light in. But without too much heat. Let's take a look at the house from another side. I love how he echoes the hill in a number of different ways. He echoes the hill by canting the concrete walls of the base. He echoes the hill by the slope of the wooden beams on this roof. And he echoes the hill with these stairs. That gradually, very gradually make their way up. With these very short risers and deep treads. So that again it looks like part of the landscape has just come right down. Through the building. So the other thing is the way this wooden roof hovers above the stone base. And his same idea as he had with the prairie style. Where in that gap he puts glass. So that the roof appears to hover. So what really shows his ideas of organic architecture at play here are the materials. He's doing something really special here with the concrete. And he's doing it on the exterior as well as on the interior of the house. So concrete is essentially three ingredients. It's cement which acts as glue. It's water and it's aggregate. And the aggregate is typically gravel sized stones. That are quite often not even exposed. But in this case Wright is doing something radically different. And he's taking stones and rocks and boulders even. That he finds on the site around the building. And he's inserting them into the concrete. So in effect they're acting like aggregate. And what I love about this is the aggregate here is so big. That it's sort of going right up to the point where. Is this a stone wall with like excessive amounts of mortar? Or is it a concrete wall with really huge aggregate? And I love that there's sort of an ambiguity about that. He's using what he finds at the site to reinforce his idea of organic architecture. And the other thing it does in Wright's ideas about organic architecture. Is it brings the outside in. So the materials he uses on the exterior are used on the interior. So Taliesin West stands today as an incredible example of Wright's philosophy. Of organic architecture. But the next house we're going to look at. Is considered by many to be his greatest work. This is Falling Water. There was an apprentice at the Taliesin Fellowship. Edgar Kaufman Jr. Whose father was a department store magnate. Edgar Kaufman Sr. known as EJ. Asked Wright to design a country house for him in the woods. About an hour south of Pittsburgh. This house arguably one of the most famous in the world. Would bring Wright at almost 70 years old. A new wave of notoriety. Considered a modern masterpiece. The house is composed of a series of stacked balconies. Like concrete trays. Cantilevering out over a waterfall. Glass fills the horizontal voids between the trays. So one way to look at this is that these trays. Move up the mountain from the falls. But the other way to look at it is. They actually cascade down the mountain. Just like the waterfalls. So most architects would have placed the house. With a view of the falls. But not Wright. Wright puts the house on top of the falls. He basically asks EJ. The owner of the house. Where do you sit? And he said well I sit on this rock. And he built the house around that rock. On top of the falls. In fact the rock surface is visible. Coming through the floor of the living room inside the house. He was bringing the idea of organic architecture. To a whole other level. It becomes one with the falls. A unified whole. Architecture and nature acting together. And the other thing he does. Is these windows actually open from the corner. So again he's still with his idea of breaking the box. And opening up the corners. So we're going to look at another angle of the house. Which really shows how the house is an evolution. From his early prairie style designs. What's great about this image. Is you really feel the cantilevers. Of these concrete terraces. And the other thing I really like about it. Is you can see the trellis that he created. That's half inside and half outside. You can see how he brings a stair. Right down to the falls. So you can actually sit on this lower landing. And dangle your feet into the water. I have visited this house twice over the years. And it's an incredible revelation. Just how melded together. He makes the architecture. With the surrounding natural landscape. So modernism had been flourishing in Europe for almost 20 years. With architects like Walter Gropius. Le Corbusier. And Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And Wright was not a fan of this group. The house is an astonishing example of modern architecture. It was almost as if Wright. Contemptuous of the European architects said. You want to see a modern house? I'll show you a modern house. After Fallingwater. Wright starts to look at other building arrangements. He is expanding his ideas about plan. Using new shapes. Hexagons and triangles and circles. To create new kinds of layouts and spaces. But the next notable evolution of his style. Was less focused on novel compositions. And more focused on the needs of everyday people. So at the same time that Fallingwater is being built. Wright is approached by an old friend. Who was a journalist from Wisconsin. Who asked if he could design an affordable house for the every man. Not just the wealthy. One that would cost $5,000. Wright embraced that challenge. And set out some guidelines for what he called. His Usonian houses. The term is an acronym for the United States of North America. And was another advancement in Wright's quest. To create a uniquely American style of architecture. So this is the Herbert Jacobs house. The first Usonian that Wright built. And we're looking at a view from the rear of the house. But a lot of things are evident when you view it. So the Usonian house has the following characteristics. Natural materials. Wood, stone and brick. Flat roofs. With extended overhangs to shade windows. Parallel to the earth. A companion to the horizon. No gutters or downspouts. Claristory windows for natural lighting. L-shaped plants to fit around a garden. In harmony with nature. Designed to blend with the surrounding landscape. Built-ins to reduce furniture and clutter. No painting. Cover the walls in wood and oil the wood as necessary. No plastering. Interior trim is eliminated. There's no basement. It's just a slab on grade. And in that concrete slab he actually put heating coils. So that he created a radiant floor. For a very affordable house. Which is kind of incredible. He was an early adapter of that innovative technology. Okay, so this is the front of the house. Which has a completely different feel. So I love the contrast between the two sides of the house. So you can see that the rear of the house has a ton of glass. To let the nature come inside. But the front of the house is much more concealed. The side that faces the street has very few windows. Just this line of claristory windows under the roof overhang. So instead of lots of glass along the street. Where everybody could look in. Wright was basically advocating. Put all the glass on the back of the house. Where it's more private. The house ended up costing $5,500. Including the architect's fee of $450. He imagined these houses being built in bulk. To bring the cost down even further. Wright would design over 100 Usonian houses. Scattered all over the country. And he did this after the age of 70. He never stopped exploring. He never stopped trying to create new things. And he never stopped evolving his style. Frank Lloyd Wright's career in many ways defies categorization. There's simply no way we can unpack the entirety of Wright's work in a single video. In this video we focus primarily on his residential projects. But we've left out many of his other works. Including Unity Temple. The Larkin Building. The Price Tower. The Johnson Wax Headquarters. Midway Gardens. The Guggenheim. The Marin County Center. The Synagogue in Elkins Park outside of Philadelphia. Florida Southern College. And the list just keeps on going. It's really a remarkable career. And in many ways unmatched by any other architect ever. What is your favorite Frank Lloyd Wright building? And let us know what other architects you'd like to learn more about.