-

Frank Lloyd Wright and the organic

architecture,

by Hugues HENRI
1) Relationship and differences between Louis Sullivan and Frank
Lloyd Wright :
Thus, the parallel of the comparative situations in France and the United
States at the end of the 19th century would tend to establish a generalized regressive
observation of functionalism, however this observation must be put into perspective
with regard to the United States. On the one hand, in San Francisco, from 1894
onwards, there was a Californian school of architecture called the "Bay Region Style"
dominated by the Greene brothers and which sought a modernist synthesis between
East and West. This Californian school would later blossom in the 1920s with the
contribution of Rudolf Schindler (1887-1953), a Viennese architect who was formerly
associated with Wright and who built the famous Lowell Beach House in 1926.
Above all, there was the relative filiation between Louis Sullivan and Frank
Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), which perpetuates architectural modernity in the United
States, even if Wright also left Sullivan's office to emancipate himself from the
"beloved Master". He had joined the Adler and Sullivan agency in 1887 and quickly
became its foreman, but in 1893, Sullivan had to fire Wright who showed an
unfortunate tendency to build, for his own profit, individual houses for the clients of
the Adler-Sullivan firm, which his contract as foreman expressly prohibited him from
doing.

2) Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wirght's break-up and the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair
This rupture is to be dissociated from the crisis provoked in avant-garde
architectural circles by the 1893 World's Fair. However, as Frank Lloyd Wright
recounted, shortly after the closing of the 1893 World's Fair, Daniel Burnham came to
see him and offered to take care of his wife and children if he agreed to study
architecture for four years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. All his expenses
would be taken care of by Burnham who offered him a place of choice in his agency
on his return. Wright refused this offer because he was not fooled by Burnham's
desire to divert him and detach him from Louis Sullivan's progressivism. However,
the break between Sullivan and Wright was motivated by differences.
Indeed, although still considering himself Sullivan's disciple, Wright, according
to Michel Ragon, is in no way similar to the Chicago school, because he rejects the

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steel structure, the large glass surfaces and the vertical architecture, which are its
main characteristics.
Thus when he built the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York, in 1904, he
distinguished himself from Chicago functionalism: rejection of the steel frame, a
massive general silhouette reminiscent of American grain silos that must have been
of such interest to avant-garde European architects and theorists such as Gropius
and Le Corbusier. The building is built around a central void, on the periphery of
which are four floors of open-plan offices: lighting is both zenithal (through the glass
roof covering the central courtyard) and lateral (through the large horizontal windows
on each level).
This lighting will be taken over by Wright for the Salomon Guggenheim
Museum in New York more than 50 years later. Wright pushed back the square-
planned towers containing the stairs and ventilation systems at the four corners. It
was by making a clear distinction between serving spaces and spaces served, as Le
Corbusier and Louis Kahn did in the 1950s and 1960s, that Wright achieved the
singularity of the plan and volumes and the deconstruction of the box in architecture.
In addition, the Larkin Building was equipped with an air-conditioning system, an
innovation that determined the hermetic aspect of the building.
This closure is not only constructive and spatial, but also carries symbolic
aspects. Thus Wright wrote in 1932 in An Organic Architecture: "The dignified interior
with zenithal lighting produced the effect of a large official family at work in clean and
airy premises". By creating a space that is inward-looking, yet bright and open,
Wright wanted to create a sense of community, biblical and moralist among Larkin's
employees.
Wright's antagonisms with the functionalist architecture of the Chicago School
appear here: to steel-frame construction, Wright opposes masonry architecture; to
the transparent glass of skyscrapers, he opposes opaque cliffs; to the multicellular
and anonymous partitioned space of functionalism, he opposes a unique,
decompartmentalized space, capable of communicating the sense of community
work. It is a conception to which he remained faithful, as witnessed by the Johnson
company headquarters built in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1930.
Thus Wright distinguished himself from the Chicago School by building
administrative and religious buildings: a reinforced concrete bank project, the
Unitarian Church in 1906; a small hotel in Iowa in 1909; all have the same
characteristics we have just seen: stone, brick or concrete masonry, etc. However, it
is in the individual homes of the Prairie Homes that Wright will excel.

Synthesis in relation to modernity :

Frank Lloyd Wright differs from the functionalism of the Chicago school by his
rejection of the main characteristics of this school: rejection of the load-bearing metal
framework, rejection of vertical architecture. Other forms of modernity appeared very
early on in his work, which he would deepen throughout his career, such as the
distinction between servant spaces and served spaces, a spatial concept that Louis
Kahn (1901-1974) would systematize as the first American architect according to the
international style, by questioning the glass and steel architecture of Mies van der
Rohe (1886-1969).
The other form of modernity is that of the deconstruction of the box in
architecture, which anticipates the Houses of the Prairie and their free and open plan
on the outside space that Wright will also build, and in which he will deepen his

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spatial conception of organic architecture. This research was systematized by Gerrit
Rietveld (1888-1964), and many other modern architects, both European and
American.

Wright's education and training.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) of English origin by his father and Welsh by
his mother, received from kindergarten onwards an original education, with the non-
directive Fröbel educational method, which consisted in allowing the child to make
constructions of his choice with squares of wood, paper and string. Wright played
there throughout his childhood. According to Michel Ragon, his mother would have
predestined him before he was born to be an architect. He studied engineering at the
University of Wisconsin where he had no architecture. He did not graduate but
entered the studio of J. L. Silbee and then Adler and Sullivan in 1887, where he
trained as an architect. In 1889, he built his own house inspired by Bruce Price, in the
stripped down spirit of the pioneer trusses, with, however, already a Japanese
influence in the pyramidal roof.

Back to the origins and founding myths of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright will try to regenerate the individual habitat that fell into the historicist
pathos, taking inspiration from the first houses of the American pioneers and their
synthesis with other influences such as the traditional Japanese habitat.
Wright, influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris, is part of the American
de-urbanist tradition that began with Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd president of
the USA, in the name of agrarian democracy. It is perpetuated in the naturalist
metaphysics of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1882) and in the individualist anarchism
of Henry Thoreau (1817-1862). In the nineteenth century, this de-urbanist thought
tended to consider that the man of the industrial age was dehumanized and
depersonalized by mechanism. Wright therefore, as a reaction against urban
concentrations, opted for individual construction. If he rejects the European academic
tradition embodied by Daniel Burnham, it is to revive the American romantic tradition
of the prairie, of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.

Franck Lloyd Wright: Maison Willits, 1901

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 As early as 1894, he began a theoretical reflection on the relationship between
nature and architecture: he wanted to root his houses in the landscape, thus reviving
A. J. Downing's notion of "Fitness", which, inspired by the painters of the Hudson
River School, demanded the integration of architecture into the site. He wants to use
natural and local materials like the early settlers and pioneers.
He dreams of a garden city, where one would see "as many kinds of dwellings
as there are kinds of people and as many differentiations as there are different
individuals". Like John Ruskin and William Morris, whose contemporary influences
he suffers, he distrusts the machine, but without, like them, rejecting it. According to
Michel Ragon, he calls his architecture "organic" to differentiate it from European
"functionalist" architecture.
He states his conception as follows: "I began to see a building, primitively, not
as a cave, but as a large open shelter connected to the landscape ... I had the idea
that the planes parallel to the earth in the constructions identify with the ground and
do much to make these constructions belong to the ground. "Elsewhere, during a
discussion with Giedion who asked him if he had had human intervention to integrate
a terraced house so well into the hill, Wright replied: "No, it's the natural ground, I
never build houses on top of a hill; I build them around the hill, like the eyebrow
around the eye!".
The watermark here is the essence of the designs governing the architecture
of Wright's Prairie Houses. In addition, Wright's growing opposition to functionalism
can also be read: refusal of machinism, of vertical and multicellular architecture. Like
Jefferson and Ruskin, Wright gave architecture a moral, educational mission, like
Sullivan he proclaimed his democratic convictions: "Our democracy has always
proclaimed the primacy of the individual!".

Frank Lloyd Wright : Highland Park House

3) The Houses of the Prairie.

Notion of cycle :

It was from 1900 that Wright began to assert himself with the "Plans for a
house for a prairie town" reproduced in the Ladies Home Journal. Plans which were
to be the origin of a whole series of individual houses and individualized with respect
to each other by the variables: plans and materials : Hichox House, Kantakee, Illinois
(1901); Ward House, Willet Park, Illinois (1901); Willits House, Highland Park, Illinois

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(1901); Heurtley House, Illinois, (1902); Charles Ross House, Lake Delavan,
Wisconsin, (1902) ; Robert Evans House, Limongwood, Illinois, ( 1904); Martin
House, Buffalo (1904); Isabel Roberts House (1907); Coonley House (1908);
Thomas Gale House, Oak Park (1909); Robie House, Chicago (1909).

Difficulties of all kinds :

The numerous orders should not hide Wright's difficulties in finding clients,
bankers and construction companies, who were often very reluctant, as he recounted
during a conference at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931: "After the construction of
the first house, my second client refused to have a house different from the others to
the point of being forced to hide to go and catch his daily train if he wanted to avoid
being laughed at. At first the bankers refused to lend the money for the construction
and it was necessary to find friends to finance the first houses. The industrialists
started looking at the name on the plans and after reading mine, they rolled up the
purlins and gave them back to the contractor saying : We are not here to chase after
trouble. Often, the contractors were unable to read the plans correctly because they
were too different from the others, so many left the construction unfinished. »
After 1910, and his trip to Europe, Wright also experienced inner exile which
led him to retire to Taliesin, before returning to glory with the Waterfall House in
1935.

Frank Lloyd Wright : Robie House

Plans and features :

These houses are characteristic: free and open plan, in one piece, which can
adopt for the small houses, a cruciform plan, the largest, "L" or "T" plans. The plans
radiate from the center, which is often the fireplace, thus resuming the old use of the
central chimney in the homes of the first American settlers. The large living room or
Living room was decompartmentalized and multifunctional: places for eating, reading,
receiving, etc..
The houses of the Prairie spread out horizontally, opening onto the outside
space by overflowing wings and roofs, which are integrated into nature, drowning in
it, eliminating the hiatus between inside and outside in favor of an organic fusion. In
this regard, Wright declared: "Our civilization is emerging from the cave age. We are
done with fortified dwellings. Our ancestors lived in the trees, they are our
predecessors and not the wild animals that hide to protect themselves. "Moreover,

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there are no cellars or attics: everyone has the right to space and only animals live in
dens.
"The house of the free man is not a palace, nor a Palladian or colonial villa,
nor a Tudor cottage, nozr when it is well integrated into the architecture. If each
house is different (and what a prodigious variety in the Prairie cycle) none of them is
the home of pride and claims to be a symbol of prestige or power . On the contrary,
all of them are horizontal and by the long bands of their walls, by the base that often
extends them, they are perfectly integrated into the landscape whose breath they
seem to espouse, to gather wisdom and peace. a financial hotel: it ignores the
historical references but not the decoration. We are men of 1900, and our dear old
master (Louis Sullivan) taught us all that decoration, whether colored stained glass or
sculpture in low relief, can mean benevolence and courtesy »
In fact, prairie homes symbolically participate in the expanse of the prairie
rather than actually having it, as they are located in suburban areas, or in small
towns like Oak Park. Some of them, among the most successful, are surrounded only
by a very modest garden treated with free vegetation, as is the case of the Maison
Robie, which thus diffuses an imaginary space infinitely larger than the real space
treated by Wright.

Roof and chimney: symbolic of the shelter.

Frank Lloyd Wright : Willits House

Roof overflows, which accentuate the suitability of the house to the ground
and the site, were criticized for obscuring the houses, to which Wright replied: "Man
understands that without the protective roof, there is no real house. He begins to
refer to his house by the word roof.... The very soul of the cottage, its essence, its
raison d'être are in the roof ... Think how different these 2 expressions are : under my
roof / in my walls. In the southern architecture, this roof has much less importance.
But in the north, the soul of a domestic construction lies in the remarkable character
and vast proportions of the shelter that protects it from the weight of snow and the
whip of hail. You will be able to build the facade of your cube as well as possible ... if
the roof is not visible, there will always remain a certain coldness that you will not be
able to erase. »
A large roof, often with multiple slopes combined with extraordinary virtuosity,
and steep enough to withstand rain and snow. The roof means protection, security of
the shelter, autonomy of the family group: "Privacy", especially since the entrance is
never frontal but diverted and hidden by a wall or a low wall, the house is itself
parallel to the street whose movement it espouses, without barriers or enclosures, to
better integrate the house into the site and expand the plot on which it is built.

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 A roof and a chimney. Wright had nothing against central heating, which he
incorporated into his first "Usonian" houses, but he liked fire, before which men
began to gather, before which the unity of the family group was rebuilt every day:
"Instead of the meagre brick chimneys as steep as the fingers of justice, there was
only one large and generous chimney, on gently sloping roofs, instead of the
escarpments of yesteryear.
The inner hearth justifying the proportions of the fireplace would then become the
place of a real fire, which seemed extraordinary at the time.
At that time, there were only marble mantels on the walls, barely able to hold
a few pieces of coal and wood. This mantel was an insult to comfort but a real
fireplace became an important part of the construction in all the houses I was given
to build in the countryside. I liked to see the fire, burning everything and buried in the
masonry itself, at the base of the house. »

4) The organic space :

Thus the vast central fireplace is the heart and the pivot around which the
interior space is organized, where in Wright's ingenious application of the free plan,
"all the rooms come together into a whole that air and light can penetrate from all
sides! "This requires the maximum elimination of doors and partitions, of nooks and
crannies, to transform the traditional compartmentalized space, the "box and its box-
like nests", into an open, fluid and generous space, the organic space. Also the
confidential elements of the house, the bedroom and everything that invites
reflection, retirement, solitary rest have never interested Wright much. What is
essential for him is the space of the living-room, which generally occupies the entire
first floor: all family activities are merged there in an ideal communal space.

Frank Lloyd Wright : Thomas Gale House

The deconstruction of the box :

It continues and asserts itself through the free and open plan and the corner
windows, about which Wright writes: "The corner window is representative of an idea
I had from my first works, namely that the box is a symbol of concentration... This is
why I will try to destroy the principle of the box in construction. As if to give all its
scope to this idea, the corner window made its appearance. "
Wright's conception of architecture as an organic structure, as spatial
continuity, as an extension of the human body, a conception that is the opposite of

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the concentration camp "functionalist box", emerges. Gerrit Rietveld borrowed this
famous corner window from his Schröeder House, built in 1924 in the Netherlands.
Breaking the box on the inside is not enough, it must also be given the means
to interact with the outside and to absorb it through a whole system of terraces,
canopies, porches, projecting rooms, all of which correspond to a real break in the
plan, and thus consummate the break with traditional symmetry.
Here we must also remember Thomas Jefferson and the way he already
deconstructed the ancient symmetry in the Monticello Residence, with polygonal
projections at the ends and under the western portico; in the same way, Jefferson
arranged the interior space by playing with differences in ceiling heights, which leads
Vincent Scully to see in it a proto-modern concern to break the box.

Architecture as adapted and individualized answers:

Each Maison de la Prairie has a particular plan. Wright's task is to translate the
difference in situations and orders into a particular response to a place, a person, a
climate. Also, the materials vary according to the place, here brick, there, dry stone,
there again wood, etc..
The materials that Wright uses outdoors reinforce the integration of houses
with the soil and natural sites. For example, he uses the rough stone walls that
connect the house to the surrounding rocks. Here he takes up the problem of the
relationship between the natural and the built that Henry Hobson Richardson had
addressed in the Souls' pavilion.

5) Inventions and innovations :

This naturist attitude is not retrograde as with Ruskin, because he does not
condemn the machine: "It is no longer possible to suppress the machine. It is and
remains the pioneer of democracy, which is the supreme goal of our hopes and
wishes? We see that it is the servant of the new order, and its liberator, if man knows
how to use it in a spirit of creation.... The machine is cruel but honest... .»
Indeed, Wright's houses were not only beautiful, they offered a great
repertoire of inventions: plans open to the outside, corner windows, central heating
through the floor, indirect lighting, air conditioning, piping incorporated into the walls
which nothing should disturb the modulation, built-in furniture, etc..
Finally, the organic dimension that can be read in the free plans open to the
outside and in the concern for integration into the natural site, is extended by the
integration of furniture as organic elements of the architecture. Wright designed this
integrated furniture specifically for each Maison de la Prairie.

Frank Lloyd Wright : Warterfall House, 1934

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 So as little furniture as possible, with a very economical design and materials,
integrated and thus freeing up the central space. No decor, of course, no artwork or
cultural references. A certain taste for comfort, an obvious horror of luxury. Allusions
to the pioneering spirit, a very anti-urban character, materialization of the "gospel of
democratic simplicity" derived from Thomas Jefferson, showing a certain puritanical
austerity.

Frank Lloyd Wright : Warterfall House, 1934

6) Synthesis in relation to modernity :

Wright, another conception of modernity: organic architecture.

Wright's singularity is multifaceted: he knows and has practiced the

functionalism of the Chicago school in Adler-Sullivan's studio. He acknowledged
having read Viollet-le-Duc, his Lectures on Architecture and his Dictionnaire raisonné
de l'architecture, which, according to him, enabled him to emerge from the despair he
had felt after reading another great pre-modern writer, Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de
Paris and his perception of the Renaissance as the twilight of art and especially
architecture, because it was the time when the machine, the printing press, dealt its
fatal blows to art. It is also clear that he knows John Ruskin, William Morris and the
Arts & Crafts movement and that he is sensitive to a certain extent to the Ruskinian
refusal of industrial mechanization.
It is also important to note Wright's strong references to Thomas Jefferson's
founding ideal of rural democracy and the continuing influence of the poets Whitman,
Emerson, and Thoreau, from which his preoccupation with the organic relationship
between nature and architecture and his conception of a living, organic architecture
that creates space, not facade. For him, the art of construction remains that of
assembling diverse elements into a harmonious whole to enclose a space.
This conception contradicts functionalism and exceeds it by its ambitions: the
deconstruction of the box gives rise to spatial research and inventions among others,
of the free and open plan, of the integrated furniture and corner windows, of the
relations of integration to the site by the continuous interior / exterior space and by
the relations of the natural and the constructed. Yet this deconstruction is done in the
name of the primacy of the individual and the refusal of the concentrationary
dimension of the functionalist box, of the machine of habitation that Wright would
later denounce vehemently, violently opposing the CIAM (International Congress of

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Modern Architecture), thus Giedion and the Athens Charter and Le Corbusier's
Unités d'habitation.
Another conception of modernity thus emerges in Wright, less collectivist, less
programmatic and less dependent on progressive and universalist ideology, because
it is more oriented towards individualism and individualization and towards
reconciling nature and culture. The vernacular sources of this are not insignificant:
the importance of the materials, which favors wood, natural stone and bare brick; the
free and flexible plan, with the non-partitioned interior space and the symbolic role of
the central hearth, the relationship to the environment and the integration with the
site.

Frank Lloyd WRIGHT: Maison Kaufmann, 1936

Maison Sturgess, 1939.

Connecting Richardson and Wright is also essential. Indeed, Richardson's

Shingle Style houses, such as the Hay House in Washington DC, and the Paine
House in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1886, developed open floor plans from

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sumptuous staircases. In addition, Richardson preceded Wright in his interest in
traditional Japanese architecture and interior design.
Wright's later expansion of scale, increasing the horizontal dimension while
raising the apparent height, to give monumentality to the building, as he first
experienced in the Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois, 1893, is already present in
Richardson's and Price's work, another architect of the "Schingle Style" that inspired
Wright's first Oak Park house in 1889.
It is therefore certain that despite his indisputable personal genius, Wright
owes an immense debt to these architects of the "Shingle Style", such as Stanfort
White, Wilson Eyrec and Bruce Price, and of course Henry Richardson, from whom,
according to Vincent Scully, the whole "Prairie Style" is derived.
On the other hand, the influence of traditional architecture and traditional
Japanese spatial design has an important place in Wright's work. He saw the HO- O-
Den Temple, built by the Japanese government for the Colombian Exposition of
1893. The encounter with Japanese architecture exerted a decisive impulse on
Wright's career according to Grant Carpenter Manson, an American art historian.
Thus, the Takonama, center of contemplation and center of the Japanese house,
became for Wright the Oversized Soul, animist place and center of the Usonian
house. The open relation inside/outside, the non-partitioning of the interior space, the
extension of the eaves, all this was present in the HO-O-Den Temple.

7) Transfer to Europe :
It is interesting to mention how the transfer of this conception of modernity
took place between the two shores of the Atlantic:
In 1908, the German professor Kuno Francke, seconded teacher at Harvard
University met Wright and invited him to go to Germany, which Wright refused. Later,
Francke interested the Berlin publisher Wasmuth in Wright's work on the condition
that the latter would come to Berlin to oversee its publication, which was done:
Wright spent a year in Berlin and two theoretical volumes were published in 1910-
1911, under the title : Towards an Organic Architecture. In addition, Wright gave
lectures in Holland at the same time and an exhibition in Berlin that directly
influenced Berlage and Rietvelt's spatial conceptions.

The two volumes were quickly sold out, but it is indisputable that Gropius, and
later the German Bauhaus, Rietveld and the Dutch Stijl, and some French
individuals, including Le Corbusier, were inspired by these writings, plans and
concepts, just as they were inspired by those of Sullivan.
This took place while decontextualizing these concepts and re-articulating
them in ideologically and socially oriented theories, those of the Bauhaus and Stijl,
and those of the Ciam (Congress of International Modern Architecture). It is thus
evident that Rietveld literally applied a number of Wright's inventions in the Schröder
House in Utrecht in 1924: for example, the famous corner windows and the principles
of box deconstruction. However, is the most important dimension, the organic
dimension, present there? Isn't there a loss of coherence in the partial appropriation
in favor of a polychrome dressing inspired by the Stijl?

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Gerrit Rietvelt : Schröder House, 1924

But there is more: the internal logic of organic architecture such as Wright's
practice exceeds by certain aspects of anticipation, the whole theoretical body of one
or the other of the European movements, and so it is with the "Orthogonal
Decomposition" claimed by the Stijl. Wright's desire to pursue the destruction of the
box and integration into the site took on different forms as he moved away from the
Prairie Cycle.
Corbelled terraces and balconies radiating at right angles from a central pivot
appeared as early as 1909 in the Gale House in Oakland Park, and the notion of
cantilever was later systematized by Wright and generalized spectacularly. Wright's
resonance was undeniably enormous in Europe through the Berlin exhibition in 1910
and through the plans presented in Towards an Organic Architecture, and Bruno Zevi
is quite right to see there the source of the "Orthogonal Decomposition" claimed by
the Stijl through Rietveld's Schröder House in 1924, and this is all the more certain as
the deconstruction of the box initiated by Wright will be continued and completed by
his later cantilevered, cantilevered constructions in the Sturges House in Brentwood
Heights and especially in the Waterfall's House in 1934 (house on the waterfall).

Gerrit Rietvelt : Schröder House, 1924

In the same way, Bruno Zevi is no doubt right to see in Wright's project for the
Yahara Yacht Club, developed in 1902, the anticipation of the German Pavilion
designed by Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 Barcelona World's Fair.
Finally, Frank Lloyd Wright anticipates the Deconstructivism movement in
architecture that will appear at the end of the 20th century, to solve a certain number
of fundamental theoretical problems in archtecture and urbanism linked to the failures
and impasses of modernity and postmodernity.

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