History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

Organic Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright

Term Paper for History of Architecture (AP313)

Prannay DhingraRoll Number: 16

Sushant School of Art and Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture spanned a 72-year career that began in the late 1880s and continued until his death in 1959. From the start of his independent practice, in or about 1893, Wright’s work went through several phases and focused on such themes as nature, organicism, the Midwestern Prairie, modernism, and the search for an American identity through architecture. His designs ranged widely from apartment buildings, religious buildings, speculative developments, and entire new community plans.

His design system utilized basic geometric shapes---squares, circles, and triangles—anchored by grids and proportioned according to the materials and methods of construction that constituted his buildings. He related the meaning of his work to the order of nature, believing that the correlation of physical form to nature would elevate the spiritual condition of humankind. His buildings and designs were metaphors for technology, nature, and democracy.

Wright barely acknowledged modernism as the major cultural phenomenon of his lifetime. The complex phenomenon of modernism encompassed literature, the visual arts, music, and politics, and its preoccupations ranged widely to include perceptions of space, time, myth, parody, originality, the role of outcast, attacks on religion etc. There appear to be some fundamental interests like functionalism, abstraction—a new language of form—and a social program.

In functionalism—the concept that there is a rational relationship between the form of a object and its purpose—Wright identified form and function as one and the same which implies that building structure, materials, and method of construction melded together to create an organic whole suited to human needs.

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History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

Organic ArchitectureIn the latter half of 19th century, the effort to create a modern architecture began to come together from disparate ideas. These efforts were identified with the development of skyscraper. The technological development of tall buildings was the hope that a new modern architecture would also represent the American identity and set of values distinct from those of European modernism.

Yet, Wright’s work was often very different from many other modernists. This is because of Wright’s concept of Organic Architecture. For Wright, true modern architecture & organic architecture were synonymous.

His concept of organic architecture evolved from set of architectural principles in the 1890s into a lifestyle by the 1930s. Wright formulated six major design principles in defining the organic architecture.

1. Simplicity and repose should be the measures of art.In this he wrote, a building should have as few rooms as possible; openings should be integrated into the structure and form; detail and decoration should be reduced; and appliances, fixtures, pictures, and furniture should be integrated into the structure.

2. There should be as many different styles of houses as there were styles of people.A man who has individuality has a right to its expression in his own environment.

3. A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings. His designs for the gentle hills of the Midwest west characterised by low, sloping roofs, sheltering overhangs, and terraces. If a building had no natural features to draw upon, he believed it should be as attractive as possible.

4. Colours require the same conventionalizing process to make them fit to live with that natural forms do.A method of abstracting form to its essentials, to colour and to plant forms as sources of design motifs.

5. Nature of materials

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History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

Wood should look like wood, showing its grain and natural colour, and same apply to brick, stone, and plaster. Wright considered these materials as “friendly and beautiful.”

6. A house that has character stands a good chance of growing more valuable as it grows older while a house in the prevailing mode, whatever that mode may be, is soon out of fashion, stale, and unprofitable. Buildings should have qualities analogous to the human qualities of sincerity, truth, and graciousness.

Wright’s organic principles provide the fundamental links between him and other modern architects. They establish the basic tenets of his architecture: functionalism, technology, metaphysics, social purpose, and a language of architectural forms.

“So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no ‘traditions’ essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but—instead—exalting the simple laws of common sense—or of super-sense if you prefer—determining form by way of the nature of materials...” — Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture, 1939 (2)

Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the word ‘organic’ into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to “form and function are one,” using nature as the best example of this integration.

Although the word ‘organic’ itself refers to something which has the characteristics of animals or plants, Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture takes on a new meaning. It is not a style of imitation, because he did not claim to be building forms which were representative of nature. Instead, organic

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History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

architecture is a reinterpretation of nature’s principles as they had been filtered through the intelligent minds of men and women who could then build forms which are more natural than nature itself. (2)

Organic architecture involves a respect for the properties of the materials (for example, Wright rejected the idea of making a bank look like a Greek temple). Organic architecture is also an attempt to integrate the spaces into a coherent whole: a marriage between the site and the structure and a union between the context and the structure. (3)

Throughout his 70 year career, Frank Lloyd Wright published articles, gave lectures, and wrote many books. The philosophy of organic architecture was present consistently in his body of work and the scope of its meaning mirrored the development his architecture. The core of this ideology was always the belief that architecture has an inherent relationship with both its site and its time.

When asked in 1939 if there was a way to control a client’s potentially bad taste in selecting housing designs for his Broad acre City project, Wright replied, “Even if he wanted bad ones he could find only good ones because in an organic architecture, that is to say an architecture based upon organic ideals, bad design would be unthinkable.” In this way, the question of style was not important to Frank Lloyd Wright. A building was a product of its place and its time, intimately connected to a particular moment and site—never the result of an imposed style.

In 1957, two years before his death, Frank Lloyd Wright published the book, A Testament, which was a philosophical summation of his architectural career. In an essay entitled “The New Architecture: Principles”, he put forth nine principles of architecture that reflected the development of his organic philosophy. The principles addressed ideas about the relationship of the human scale to the landscape, the use of new materials like glass and steel to achieve more spatial architecture, and the development of a building’s architectural “character,” which was his answer to the notion of style. (4)

During the later 1920s and 1930s Wright's Organic style had fully matured with the design of Graycliff, Fallingwater and Taliesin West.

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History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

Figure 1: graycliff,  Buffalo, New York

Ref: http://0.tqn.com/d/architecture/1/0/g/x/graycliff.jpg

Wright was asked to design a house of sunlight that would also admit fresh breezes. The result was Graycliff, a mid-career example of Wright’s concept of "organic architecture" where barriers are broken between buildings and the outside.

Built between 1926-31, Graycliff is one of Wright’s most significant designs of the 1920s, and shares several innovative architectural elements with Wright’s most famous dwelling, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania (designed a decade later).

All three Graycliff buildings are constructed of local limestone and feature bold sand-stucco planes with red stained cedar shingle roofs. (3)

Falling water, for Edgar Kaufmann in southwestern Pennsylvania, hangs over a waterfall using the architectural device known as the cantilever. Wright described his architectural style as "organic"--in harmony with nature, and

though Falling water reveals vocabulary drawn from the International style in

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Figure 2: Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1937)

Ref: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Wrightfallingwater.jpg/681px-Wrightfallingwater.jpg

History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

certain aspects, this country house exhibits so many features typical of Wright's natural style, the house very much engaged with its surroundings. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals.

Indeed, Wright placed the house’s occupants in nature in a way that requires a special effort to partake of her beauty: in order to see the waterfalls, people must move onto the terraces and lean over the balconies. Wright had placed the house not on the slope looking down to the falls, but directly over them. He not simply wanted to look at the waterfalls but to live with them.

If we look at the features of fallingwater is in the detail of the balcony edges and the parapet edges throughout the house. He was also famous for the color perspectives and also the concrete gently wrapped around both edges and corners. Such details demonstrate Wright’s igneous blending of structure and form. (5)

At Taliesin West, because of the comfortable year-round climate, Wright was able to integrate the outdoors with his indoor spaces. He designed high sloping roofs, translucent ceilings, and large, open doors and windows that created a subtle distinction between the home and the environment. Taliesin West, Wright's winter home and studio complex in Scottsdale, AZ, was a laboratory for Wright from 1937 to his death in 1959. Now the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and archives, it continues today as the site of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. (4) 

Bibliography

1. Hess, Alan. Frank Lloyd Wright: Natural Design, Organic Architecture: Lessons for Building Green from an American Original. s.l. : Rizzoli (October 16,

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Figure 3:  Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

Ref: http://arizonaexperience.org/sites/arizonaexperience.org/files/base_images/frank-lloyd-wright_taliesin-west-

History of Architecture (AP313) | Essay | 2014

2012).

2. Disare, Monica. pittsburg post-gazette. post-gazette.com. [Online] august 2013. [Cited: 28 march 2014.] http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/art-architecture/2013/08/04/Graycliff-Secret-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-house-on-the-Lake/stories/201308040214.

3. Wright, Frank Lloyd. In the Cause of Architecture, Organic Architecture Looks at Modern 1908-1952. New York : s.n., 1908-1952.

4. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959 and Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim. Sixty Year of Living Architecture. New York : [New York] : Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

5. Larkin, David. Frank Lloyd Wright: the Master works. London : Rizzoli International Publications, 1993.

6. cruz, cesar a. THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE UNITED STATES: THE STORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE. illinios, USA : Vozdushnyi zamok, 2011.

7. Wright, Frank Lloyd. [Online]

8. —. frank lloyd wright foundation. http://www.franklloydwright.org/. [Online] 2012. [Cited: 28 march 2014.]

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