Fifty years after his death and with a retrospective of his work opening in New York this month, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright continues to inspire.
Decades before Frank Gehry turned the spanish town of bilbao into a major tourist attraction with his flamboyant Guggenheim building, Frank Lloyd Wright was already turning heads with his design of the New York Guggenheim and a cache of other notable edifices. It has been 50 years since Wright died and the work of arguably the world’s first “starchitect” is celebrated this month in the US with a major retrospective at his seminal Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (commissioned in 1943) and a sprucing up of key Wright buildings.
Known for his radical rethinking of the family home and bold departure from public building traditions, Wright’s influence remains stronger than ever. Witty, eccentric and almost as well-known for his tumultuous personal life as his designs, Wright was destined to be a renegade. Born in rural Wisconsin in 1867, two years after the American Civil War ended, he grew up in an era of rapid political change. Dropping out of the University of Wisconsin, Wright made his way to the boomtown of Chicago. Under influential architect Louis Sullivan, he became, in his own words, “the pencil in Sullivan’s hand”. After several years with the firm, Wright founded his own architectural practice in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park at the age of 26.
Chicago in the late 19th century provided fertile ground for the young architect, whose influence later inspired the Prairie School, recognised as the first truly American style of architecture. Thought to mirror the flat pastoral landscape of the Midwest, the Prairie style sought to eliminate basements and attics, dramatically lower overall heights and introduce free-flowing interiors. Wright also designed the fixtures, furniture and interiors of his homes. A radical departure from anything built at the time, his vision was to create a harmonious living environment that promoted social engagement as well as appreciation of the natural world.
After a string of revolutionary Prairie-style homes, notably Robie House, Wright was commissioned to design a number of large-scale public buildings including Oak Park’s Unity Temple and Buffalo’s Larkin Building.
Despite his considerable fame and influence, Wright’s personal life was the antithesis of his signature smooth facades. Nearly two decades after establishing his home and studio, he stunned Oak Park when he left his wife and their six children for Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a wealthy client. The scandal sounded the death knell for his Oak Park practice and in 1909 the couple fled to Europe.
Returning to the united States in 1911, Wright built Taliesin, a residence and studio near his boyhood home of Spring Green, Wisconsin. The site made grisly headlines when a servant set fire to the property and brutally murdered seven people, including Cheney and her two children. The story of this tragedy, and Wright’s womanising. has inspired numerous writers, including TC Boyle (The Women) and Nancy Horan, whose Loving Frank, which explores the relationship between Wright and Cheney, is being made into a feature film.
After a brief stint in Japan, where he designed Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel (a reconstruction of the now-demolished building’s lobby is on display at the Meiji-Mura museum in Inuyama), Wright returned to residential architecture, this time in the 1920s frontier of California. There he designed the Ennis and Hollyhock Houses using a radical cast stone method of construction that gave both homes the look of Mayan temples. Ennis House was a suitably apocalyptic backdrop in the 1982 film Blade Runner.
But Wright’s residential renaissance really took flight with Fallingwater, considered to be his finest house and one of 10 Wright buildings under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage protection. The residence finally brought Wright back into favour with the international design community – who had fallen hard for modernists such as Le Corbusier – and eventually led to the 1943 commission of New York’s Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.
Fifty years after it was completed, the Guggenheim New York will celebrate its architect with a major exhibition, opening on May 15. When Wright was commissioned, museum director Hilla Rebay instructed the architect: “I want a temple of spirit, a monument.” Wright certainly delivered: he eschewed the traditional museum model and created an inverted ziggurat with a wide spiral ramp and a soaring, light-filled atrium. After a recent facelift, the building looks as timeless as ever, proof positive of Wright’s observation that “youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstance”.
As Wright’s life and work are feted once more, the Guggenheim endures as a fitting legacy for America’s most captivating iconoclast.
America: The Wright way
Oak Park, the home of Prairie Style
Just outside of Chicago, Illinois.
Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio
951 Chicago Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois.
+1 708 848 1976.
Unity Temple
875 Lake Street, Oak Park, Illinois.
+1 708 383 8873.
Robie House
5757 S Woodlawn Avenue, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Fallingwater
1491 Mill Run Road, Mill Run, Pennsylvania.
+1 724 329 8501.
Hollyhock House
4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, California.
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.
+1 212 423 3618.
Taliesin West
12,621 N Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, Scottsdale, Arizona.
+1 480 860 2700.
Source: Qantas The Australian Way May 2009