Frank Lloyd Wright Page 20Frank Lloyd Wright Page 21
Unity Temple
Wright was also asked to build the 1905 Unity Temple, aplace of worship for the Universalist Church in Oak Park.Coming from a long tradition of Universalists, he acceptedthe commission on a very slim budget of $45,000. Due to
these nancial constraints Wright built for the rst time
with poured concrete. A square two-storey space housedthe temple of worship and behind it was a rectangularparish meeting house for socialising. The temple of worshiphad to seat 400 people yet Wright still managed to createan intimate space. To enhance the visual drama, thesetwo structures were connected by a modest entrance withlow ceiling. The roof of the building was supported by thefour square masses in the room, the poured concrete wallstherefore became as screens with glass windows above.
Personal Troubles
Wright was now a popular and established architect, buthe entered a phase of emotional turmoil in 1909 afterfalling in love with the wife of a client and neighbour,Mamah Borthwich Cheney. Leaving Wright’s wife and six
children and closing his studio, the couple ed to Berlin.
During this time Wright worked on a book of his work forthe Germany publisher Ernst Wasmuth as well as travellingto Austria, Italy and France. He returned to the US in 1911and managed to secure enough money to build a home forhimself, Manah Cheney and her two children on land givento him by his mother at Spring Green in Wisconsin. Hecalled the house Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning “shining
brow” and the name of a Welsh bard. However, tragedy
struck at Taliesin when in 1914 a chef, Julian Carleton,murdered Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children and
four others and then set re to the house.
This period of turbulence in Wright’s private life overlappedwith the commission for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo,which consumed him from 1916 to 1922 when he spenta great deal of time in Japan overseeing the work. Thehotel’s owner had chosen a western architect to bridgethe cultural divide for the western visitors to Tokyo andWright rose to this challenge. The main feature of the100-roomed hotel was the grand three-storey lobby andtwo-storey dining room, ballroom and auditorium. Theuse of soft lava block or Oya stone enabled Wright to useextensive carving and decoration. When the Great Kanto
earthquake struck Tokyo in 1923, the oating foundations
and reinforced steel construction ensured that the Imperialwas one of the few buildings to survive, although most of itwas demolished in 1968.
The Imperial Hotel
in Tokyo, Japan
While in Japan, Wright received a commission from the oilheiress and theatrical producer, Aline Barnsdall to build ahouse, shops and theatre complex for her in Los Angeles.Only the main house, the 1917 Hollyhock House, and resi-dences A and B were constructed. Inspired by his experi-ences in Japan, Wright had a new sense of freedom withdecoration and applied the abstracted motif of a holly-
hock, a favourite ower of the client, in cast concrete to
parapets, pinnacles and planters. In form the HollyhockHouse is the link between Wright’s early Prairie Style and
his later textile block concrete houses. It also reected his
newfound interest in Mayan temple design.
Wright had a new
sense of
freedom
...
Returning to the US in 1922, Wright took up residencein Los Angeles and established a practice there. Thefollowing year he married Miriam Noel, with whom he hadlived since Mamah Cheney’s murder. While working on theHollyhock House, he began to build four other houses in
the Los Angeles area. In these projects he rened the new
architectural language he had experimented with on theHollyhock and which he believed to be more appropriateto southern California than the neo-Spanish or colonial style housesbeing built around him. Wright wasinspired by the concrete block andthe creative possibilities of this cheapand, generally, neglected, material.He designed a block that could bemoulded on site, with its size andweight determined by what couldeasily handled by a single person.Very little skilled labour was neededand the blocks could be laid with amason’s mortar course with steel rodsinserted for structural stability. Aftercompleting his block houses in LA,Wright believed there was no futurefor himself in the West and returnedto Taliesin.
More Tragedy
Another re, this time accidental, destroyed much of
Taliesin in 1925 and threw Wright into debt. His unhappymarriage to Miriam Noel ended in 1927 and he married
the dancer Olgivanna Hinzenburg. Their rst yearstogether were dogged by Wright’s nancial difculties.
The combination of his prolonged absence from thecountry, infamous reputation and the economic depressionthat followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 ensured thatcommissions were scarce until the mid-1930s. Duringthis period he worked on a range of experimental andspeculative designs few of which were executed, whichled to a shift away from the domestic to larger projects.Wright also used his fallow period to open an architecturalschool, the Taliesin Fellowship, which taught its studentsthrough doing by balancing academic achievement withworking the land and sustaining the community.
Return to Prestige
With the help of his students, Wright was able to workon larger experimental projects such as 1934’s BroadacreCity, his blueprint for an ideal way of living composed ofa continuous grid of low-rise regional settlements withan acre for each living plot. A model was made by thestudents which toured throughout the US.
Broadacre City
blueprint from Taliesinpublication
Closely related to the principles behind the Broadacre Citywas the Usonian House project developed from the early1930s as a series of small suburban homes designed to beaffordable to middle-income families with no servants’quarters and a single living room.The word Usonian came from United States. Wrightreworded his mentor Louis Sullivan’s famous phrase
“form follows function” as “form and functions are one”
to describe the reduced nature of these homes. Of thedozens of residential commissions received by Wright inthe late 1930s and 1940s the majority were for Usonianhomes.By the time the 1936 Herbert Jacobs House was built inMadison, Wisconsin the Usonian template had been fully
developed. Forming an L-shape the oorplan consisted of
the living room on one side and the bedrooms in the otherwith a workspace and dining area in the centre. To saveon plumbing costs the workspace and bathroom were lo-cated close together, and a small basement was excavatedbelow the kitchen for a furnace. The L-shape form alsoallowed the house to be placed at the corner of the lotthereby creating more garden space accessed by Frenchdoors. Structurally the supporting elements of the housewere brick with the non-supporting walls made of a ply-wood core, covered with building paper for insulation and
waterproong. Bookshelves and cabinets were built-in to
add stability. The rest of the furniture was usually made ofplywood by the client or a local contractor. The budget forthe Jacobs house was $5000 for construction and $500 forthe architect’s fee.
The Herbert Jacobs House
, built according tothe Usonian template
Usonian House Project
drawings
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