How Frank Lloyd Wright Let Nature Shape His Homes | Architectural Digest

Frank Lloyd Wright designed over 500 buildings across 33 states. His work helped define modern living and gave America its own architectural voice. Wright's philosophy of organic architecture aimed to unite structure and landscape. A home, he believed, should not be placed upon the land but grow from it. Natural, intentional, and inseparable from the environment around it. From the rolling plains of his youth to the vast silence of the Sonoran Desert. Working until his death at the age of 91, Wright spent much of his life's work trying to define, elaborate, and sharpen his philosophy. In this video, we explore a selection of Frank Lloyd Wright's projects that demonstrate how he treated the landscape not as a backdrop but as a collaborator. Spaces that invite the outside in and express the essential principles of organic architecture. While not a complete portrait of his philosophy, these works offer a window into his enduring vision of harmony between the built and the natural. We begin in Arizona, where he spent his later years. Drawn by its harsh climate and rich natural materials, he found the perfect setting to test his ideas of organic architecture. As Phoenix's population grew rapidly, Wright became concerned about what he called the ever-advancing human threat to the integral beauty of Arizona. In turn, he crafted designs that embraced the desert, shaping a civic identity grounded in the landscape itself. Project 5011, How to Live in the Southwest, known as the David and Gladys Wright House, is a clear expression of Wright's desert mission to design in harmony with the land. When your father's the most celebrated architect in America, the greatest gift he can give you is a house. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys, using many of the same ideas that he was building into the Guggenheim Museum. Spirals are fascinating forms. They can symbolize the infinite or longevity. David and Gladys Wright, they both lived to be more than 100 years old. At the David and Gladys Wright House, the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity as it moves from one generation father to the next generation son, and even today, as it moves between father and daughter working on this restoration. Located in the Arcadia neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona, this neighborhood was once filled with orange groves. Today, it's a residential neighborhood. It's a special place. It's unlike anything else that Frank Lloyd Wright did in the course of his career, and we're so excited to show it to you. The entry to this house really begins here, at the bottom of a spiral ramp. This whole experience coming up the ramp, it's this little journey that Wright's taking you on. The movement through space is something that Wright calls the continual becoming. This idea that space is constantly unfolding and revealing itself, and you really see that as you climb up the ramp and come up here to the entry. Now that we're at the top of the ramp, we see this beautiful landscape. We're out in this bright sun, and Wright wants to create a juxtaposition. So he's going to take us in under a low ceiling, and sort of a shaded, darkened space. Wright has this technique that he calls compression and release. Being enveloping, darker space, and then opening up into a lighter, brighter, more expansive space. This is very similar to taking a walk through nature, where you might be walking on a forest path. Nature is embracing you, and then suddenly you're in a clearing, where you're open to the sky. There's bright light all around you. It is an emotional journey that we take. Much of the work on this house, the delineation, the renderings, and the design of the rug, were done by a Wright apprentice from China named Ling Po. Ling came over from China in the 1940s, and worked with Wright, and worked at the foundation for many decades after Wright died in 1959. There's another important sense of intergenerational continuity that's reflected in this house. Frank Boyd Wright designs this house for his son David, and David's family. Today, the current owners are Bing Hu, who has brought his daughter, a newly minted architect, into the restoration of this house. On this property, David Glada's red house came to my attention. A spec builder bought the property from the family with the intention to demolish the house, and create the two spec houses. So the first I learned of that is, like, we got to rescue this. My dad called me and asked me if I would consider leaving my job to come work with him to restore the David and Glada's Wright house. It means a lot for my parents to come as Chinese immigrants, and sort of be here preserving the legacy of American architecture as well. This ceiling is constructed of Philippine mahogany. It's a wood species that you can't get today. Unfortunately, because the roof leaked into this room for many years, this mahogany ceiling became stained. And because you can't get this wood anymore, cleaning and removing that staining is a meticulous craft. If any board gets destroyed, you actually have to replace the whole ceiling, and indeed all the wood in the house, because it's all one species. So one of the things that I love about this restoration is the very careful attention to detail. Because the house hasn't been properly maintained, especially the most beautiful wood you can see. If you see before, it was night and day difference. When we started to dig to uncover it, there were like three or four layers of spray foam insulation up there. Anytime there was a big storm, I think the owners were just like, go spray up another layer, and hopefully it'll do it this time. Embarking on this journey kind of felt like we were able to uncover history of the past that wasn't written. Beyond the look of the ceiling, it also has a really interesting function. Wright loved to connect interiors and exteriors. You have a piano here in the room. Wright loved the piano. Everybody in his family was musical. Music was something that they gravitated to. Well, how do you get your musical performances outdoors? You create a ceiling that will reflect the sound out through these doors and down into the courtyard, where you might be gathering for a party or just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. Wright had learned about acoustics in his first apprenticeship in Chicago with Dankmarr Adler, one of the great acousticians in American architectural history. And he brought that into his practice and used it everywhere, but seldom with such dramatic effect as you see in this house. Up here on the rooftop terrace, we can really see Wright's intention, how he connects the building with the landscape. Out to our southeast, we see the Papago Buttes. Behind me in the other direction, the head of the camel of Camelback Mountain. By firmly centering this building between these two landmarks that nature provided, Wright gives us the sense of being part of this world and not merely on it, but at one with it. You'll notice that we're actually walking under the house because the house is elevated. This courtyard is an outdoor room, but it wasn't just a room to gather in, maybe have a picnic in. It also originally had a pool. Also because the pool itself being constructed out of concrete block slowly over time begins to disintegrate, something that Wright didn't anticipate when he built the house. So today, we just have the memory of the pool reflected here. David Wright worked for the Besser Manufacturing Company and they made concrete block molds. So David insisted that his company's molds and concrete block be used for the construction and design of this house. And for Wright, concrete block wasn't simply an industrial material. He saw it as elevated and this particular block, I think he really enjoyed. And so you'll see that at the end of wherever there was a concrete slab, he included this decorative block with a circular motif and then this piece coming out of it. It also shows something that Wright really enjoyed about working with concrete, which is called in architecture terms, plasticity, meaning that it's The plan for the future of this property, I want to become my architectural design studio. I can open my door to let my client come. So that's kind of indirect way to welcome the public to able to see this masterpiece. In Arizona, Wright's vision deepened amid the beauty of the desert, but it wasn't his first exploration of how nature and community could coexist. In 1948, in the wooded hills of Pleasantville, New York, he helped create Usonia, a cooperative neighborhood that embodied his belief in affordable, well-designed homes rooted in nature and free from urban congestion. Frank Lloyd Wright designed these houses with the objective of making them out of natural products and providing people an opportunity to be close with nature, fairly simple structures, and yet one that was special, not like a cookie cutter house that everybody else had. My name is Brian Renz. My family and I are owners of the Frank Lloyd Wright Bertha and Saul Friedman House, also known as Toy Hill, here in a community called Usonia, which is part of Pleasantville, New York. Usonia as a community started way back in the 40s when two architects in the city decided to be interested in a cooperative community. Frank Lloyd Wright assisted in this. He helped lay out the roads. He helped lay out plans for the properties. We've had the opportunity to meet the Friedman family, and as a matter of fact, we even have a video that showed this house being built and other neighborhood houses, including Frank Lloyd Wright, being present and active on the site. Because of the peculiar nature of the community and the fact that it had the cooperative ownership, it was a very novel concept at the time. People in the surrounding community are said to have referred to it instead of Usonia, that they referred to it as Insania. The first thing you'll notice as we walk up to the house is this most unusual carport. It's said that Frank Lloyd Wright was the first person to put car and port together, something he did throughout the country. His homes rarely had garages. This particular carport is most unique. It's a single pillar of concrete with a 20-sided polygon of concrete that some people have described as a mushroom. The experts on Wright will suggest that he probably thought of it as more of a tree. Other people look at it and see a concrete spaceship. The geometry of the building is peculiar in that it's two cylinders. It's not exactly circles. It's a 20-side polygon, which is called an icosagon, and indeed I did have to look that up. The main material of the house is concrete along with locally sourced stone. There are a number of quarries near here. This is compression that Wright uses. It's a standard thing in virtually all of his buildings. So as we enter, we're still compressed. We can already see that there's massive natural stone, just like in the exterior, on the interior also. One of those things he'll do to make the inside much like the outside. Welcome to the main living area of the house. What I'm going to show you first is the geometric center of the first floor of the house. So this is the exact center of it, all the way down to the floor and up to the ceiling. We have radial lines in the floor that go along with the 20-sided polygon. Each section is 18 degrees. That's the geometry throughout the house. My daughter will irreverently call the house pizza house. Everything in the house is laid out like a piece of pizza, and that includes the bedding upstairs. This little corner, this we call our library. Wright's idea on living determined very much how he designed the furniture in the built-ins. Very, very little furniture. Everything's built-in. When I was speaking with the prior owner, his advice was only bring a toothbrush because there's no room for anything else. When we moved into the house, one of the first things I wanted to do was get these two chairs. They're a longtime personal favorite of mine. These were first designed at Frank Lloyd Wright's studio. They're called Origami, and they're seen in a lot of Wright homes. To me, they were just perfect for the spot. These tables are red oak, and they're original to the house. They have part of the geometry of each room built into the table. Next, we have a classic floor lamp from Taliesin. This was purchased by a prior owner. It's been here for at least 25 years. It's present in very many of the homes in our community, but especially in Frank Lloyd Wright properties. It's a very popular lamp. One of the early clients in the cooperative was Roland Risely. He has recently turned 100, and he still lives in the same house that he hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build for him when he was just 26 years old, and he's the oldest living Frank Lloyd Wright client in the entire world. I'm Roland Risely, and I'm the owner of this house known as the Risely House, which was designed for me by Frank Lloyd Wright. My wife and I actually met at Cornell. In 1950, we married. At that point, we were wanting to build a home and put down roots for a family, and we were told there's a community building affordable homes supervised by Frank Lloyd Wright. Well, let's go take a look, and it was a cooperative that was really an idealistic, egalitarian cooperative. We liked that idea. We liked the land. We liked the community. The people who joined Usonia, everybody accepted the idea of Wright and his disciples and Wright approving on the design. To show you the second floor, we need to go up Frank Lloyd Wright's circular stairway. One of the key things here is always having a hold of the handrail. They do look a little bit dangerous. Welcome to the second floor. Here at the top of the stairs, there's a couple of interesting things. We have three vent holes that are very strange. They're at the top of each of the three bedrooms. They provide ventilation to be able to flow through, but they're one of the sources of one of the big problems in the house when we have guests. I always have to warn the guests that there are no secrets here because you can hear everything. As we head back to the primary bedroom, compared to a typical suburban home, it is quite small, but you have to remember everything is built in. The double dresser is of particular interest because of some of the special things the cabinet maker had to think of. Notice the scroll cutting along the edge of the natural stone. The shape of the cabinet is an irregular piece of pizza, and all of the drawers have to be custom made to shape to fit that. Here's an example of that. So it's not rectangular, it's not square, and it would be something that they would definitely have to pay a lot of attention to. People are always shocked by the size and shape of the bed. Basically, it's the size of a queen mattress at the top, and it works out that it's the size of a twin bed at the bottom. Again, it has the same geometry as all of the rooms in the house. This bed has never been moved. The wooden boards in the base of the bed are nailed to the floor. It's always been here. It's always been the same size, and surprisingly it works. When quizzed about this, Wright would respond everyone he ever knew was wider at their shoulders than at their feet, so he didn't think it was a problem. When we make changes in the house, we do get input from other people in the community. There's a lot of history in the neighborhood. We would discuss it with neighbors, especially those who have a long historical stake in the community. The community feeling that they've had from the early part of the history of the community even continues today. We could not possibly have anticipated how the house would influence our lives. The whole experience would become a central part of my life, a long life. I just turned 100, and there's now widespread scientific belief beauty in one's environment does reduce stress. I realized that not a day of my life that I fail to see something beautiful here. The light off the stone, I look at the grain of the wood, little things, but just it's beautiful. The cooperative nature of the community back in the late 40s and the early 50s is hard to reproduce in modern America. There's no question about that, but here we still have much more than the normal commitment between residents. Across state lines in New Canaan, Connecticut, sits Toronto, one of Wright's largest private homes. Set beside a waterfall and pond, the land itself shaped his vision. Its sweeping curve, red concrete, and warm mahogany echo the rhythm of the natural world. One of my favorite quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright is this, nature is the only body of God we see. What he's saying is that nature has this sacred quality. It's something that we need to take care of, that we need to treat with respect and dignity. And because we're a part of nature, we also need to treat each other with respect and dignity. This connection that Wright is trying to build into his buildings with nature, in fact, make our lives better. Toronto was commissioned by John Rayward in 1955, and it's among the last of the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright built since he died in 1959. While Toronto was being built, Wright was in New York City working on his largest commission, the Guggenheim Museum. During that time, Wright fled his suite in the Plaza Hotel and came up here to Connecticut because he enjoyed this house's connection with nature. This is one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright designs, but I've only ever seen it in photographs and in the drawings that Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices created. When I walked into the space, it really made my heart race a little bit because it's this beautiful intersection of this sweeping curve of the solar hemicycle and this rectilinear design. I don't think I've seen that in any other Frank Lloyd Wright property in the same way. And it's this beautiful expression of material in one of the most breathtaking settings of all of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. The setting rivals even perhaps Wright's most famous work, Falling Water, in the way that the house engages nature. The curve in this house is what Wright called a solar hemicycle. What that means is that the curve follows the movement of the sun through the day. So the curve out here faces east. That means it's gathering the morning light, and as the sun moves through the sky, the light in the room continuously spreads and expands, illuminating the space not only with that natural light, but with the warmth of the sun. It's even an early form of sustainable design because the sun is being used to heat the space, especially in winter. Wright loved materials, the integrity of materials, the intrinsic character of materials, and bringing that out was something that was a central part of his organic architecture. Even humble material like this concrete block, Wright left it exposed not only to show what the house was built from, but also to show how the concrete itself was made. But he does something unusual with it. The horizontal joints between concrete block units are deeply raked. You see that horizontality expressed because that horizontality is the relationship with the earth itself. The vertical joints are raised a little bit so that they're flush with the concrete masonry unit. Those two things together underscore this horizontality and the relationship of building, people, and the land itself. He juxtaposes this material with this really warm, wonderful Philippine mahogany. And when you put these two things together, sort of the coolness of the block and the warmth of the wood, and once again we get a bit of an emotional experience just by the juxtaposition of materials themselves. And if you imagine a walk through the woods, you don't just see one thing. You see different kinds of trees, shrubs, bushes, and other plants. Nature does not like a monoculture. That actually doesn't really work very well. Wright is replicating that experience on interiors by creating these juxtapositions of material. The material that starts inside the house extends outside. There's this continuity of material broken only by this thin pane of glass that draws your eye outward, and inside and outside start to become a bit blurred. This is the primary suite. Today it's used as an office. It's a small space, and there's a reason for that. Wright wanted to connect people with other people, even within a family, and so he creates these designs to push you outwards. The concrete block of the wall lines up in an exterior planter so that there's nature within the walls of the building, even though it's outside. And you also encounter the pool. You'd start your day with this connection with water, and that's important in this house because the name Tarana was selected by Wright to signify the relationship of this house to the Noraton River right outside the window here. And that swimming pool really floats out over a pond that he's created by damming that river, and then you have the river itself. So there's always this connection with running water, Tarana being an aboriginal word for running water. You'll notice how narrow this hallway is. There's a reason for that. We don't spend time in hallways, and Wright doesn't want you to spend time in this hallway. As you emerge from the bedrooms that line this space, he really wants you to move out but head directly to that living space, that big open floor plan that's connected with that primary view that's setting above the river and into the forest. This is now one of the many bedrooms that exist in Tarana. Because that primary bedroom that Wright had designed for the Raywords was quite small, they came back to him a few years after the house was initially built and asked him to design a more expansive primary suite for them. A much larger bedroom, still having a connection with the natural world, but also a huge primary bathroom suite. And here in the bedroom, a circular dressing area and closet, there's even an observatory above this bedroom suite so that at night Mr. Rayward could go up and through a telescope gaze at the stars. Because the house had such a beautiful setting, Wright designed it in a way that would take advantage of the natural landscape. He left the natural stones in situ just where the river had placed them hundreds if not thousands of years ago and he gives the house this great sense of repose. The gray of the concrete withdrawing, the warmth of the wood emerging so that the building seems to have always belonged in this setting. When I first encountered Wright's work as an eight-year-old boy, it was the space and the light that got me all excited because I'd never seen anything like it. Today, the space and the light still excites me because I now understand why that gives us the feeling that it does, why we feel different in a Frank Wright house, and that's because he uses space and light to create this sense of intimacy with the world around us. It concerns me that there's so much bland architecture, it's just functional, when what we could do and what we should do is take that inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright to give their clients a gracious way to live as part of the world around them, connected with everybody and everything that will make their lives better.