Dieselpunk + Steampunk Culture
ART HISTORY - Frank Lloyd Wright and the Parasite of the Spirit
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Parasite of the Spirit
The 1920s were difficult for Wright, who turned sixty in 1927. He had few major commissions, resulting in financial hardships, underwent a difficult divorce, and subsequently remarried. He spent time lecturing and writing his autobiography, and in 1932 he began a fellowship for apprentices at Taliesin, his home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Despite these numerous setbacks and activities, Wright was entering the most creative phase of career. He continued to experiment with new architectural forms, including precast concrete block, primary in his house designs.
During the 1930s, despite the Great Depression, Wright began to secure important commissions and also to make a contribution to the field of low-cost, prefabricated housing (the Usonian houses), as well as to city planning. During the the first half of the 1930s, when commissions were few, he developed his plan for Broadacre City, his ideal concept for an integrated and self-sufficient community of parks, farms, schools, and detached homes made of prefabricated materials to be assembled by each family. Like most such projects, Broadacre City was never realized, but it did enable Wright to clarify his alternatives to current city planning. He felt the modern city destroyed the social fabric, calling it a "parasite of the spirit." While Wright's reformist side motivated him to envision low-cost, prefabricated designs, many of the custom homes he built were for wealthy customers.
His most important realized structures of the 1930s were the Kaufmann House, Fallingwater, at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, and the Administration Building of the S. C. Johnson and Son Company, Racine, Wisconsin. The Edgar J. Kaufmann House, sited dramatically on a hillside over a waterfall, is one of Wright's most stunning conceptions. Designed as a vacation home for the family of a wealthy merchant and art patron from Pittsburgh, the Kaufmann House was voted the best building in the United States in 1991 by members of the American Institute of Architects.
In the use of ferroconcrete for the cantilevered terraces and the sense of planar abstraction, the Kaufimmn House has a superficial affinity to the International Style. It is a basic Wright conception, however, for Wright was scornful of much of the machine-inspired architecture of the European modernists who had shaped the International Style (many of whom had been influenced by him). According to Wright, their modern houses "manage to look as though cut from cardboard with scissors... glued together in box-like forms - in a childish attempt to make buildings resemble steamships, flying machines or locomotives." Though he embraced the machine and modern materials and technology, Wright designed a house to be, as he said, a "natural feature of the environment."
At Fallingwater, the adaptation to the landscape exemplifies one of Wright's greatest abilities: to use all the implications of a site, no matter how difficult it might seem. The house was almost literally what Wright called an "extension of the cliff," for it is constructed around several large boulders that are on the site. The boulders, which act as fulcrums helping to secure the house into the hillside, actually penetrate the walls and were incorporated by Wright as design features inside the house. The central, vertical mass of utilities and chimneys is made of rough, local stone courses (used inside the house as well). It anchors the suspended horizontal forms and contrasts with the smooth, beige-colored concrete of the parapets. The building is particularly effective in its integration of the exterior natural world with the interior living quarters. For example, a glass panel in the living room slides back to access a stairway that leads directly to the stream below the house. With its open plan, low ceilings, and polished flagstone flooring, the interior of Faliingwater is like a welcoming cave in the middle of the woods. Wright designed virtually every detail inside the house, including most of the furnishings, both built-in and freestanding. The main structure was completed in 1937, and in 1939 a second house for guests and servants was begun. It is connected to the main house by a covered stairway.
The 1920s were difficult for Wright, who turned sixty in 1927. He had few major commissions, resulting in financial hardships, underwent a difficult divorce, and subsequently remarried. He spent time lecturing and writing his autobiography, and in 1932 he began a fellowship for apprentices at Taliesin, his home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Despite these numerous setbacks and activities, Wright was entering the most creative phase of career. He continued to experiment with new architectural forms, including precast concrete block, primary in his house designs.
During the 1930s, despite the Great Depression, Wright began to secure important commissions and also to make a contribution to the field of low-cost, prefabricated housing (the Usonian houses), as well as to city planning. During the the first half of the 1930s, when commissions were few, he developed his plan for Broadacre City, his ideal concept for an integrated and self-sufficient community of parks, farms, schools, and detached homes made of prefabricated materials to be assembled by each family. Like most such projects, Broadacre City was never realized, but it did enable Wright to clarify his alternatives to current city planning. He felt the modern city destroyed the social fabric, calling it a "parasite of the spirit." While Wright's reformist side motivated him to envision low-cost, prefabricated designs, many of the custom homes he built were for wealthy customers.
His most important realized structures of the 1930s were the Kaufmann House, Fallingwater, at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, and the Administration Building of the S. C. Johnson and Son Company, Racine, Wisconsin. The Edgar J. Kaufmann House, sited dramatically on a hillside over a waterfall, is one of Wright's most stunning conceptions. Designed as a vacation home for the family of a wealthy merchant and art patron from Pittsburgh, the Kaufmann House was voted the best building in the United States in 1991 by members of the American Institute of Architects.
In the use of ferroconcrete for the cantilevered terraces and the sense of planar abstraction, the Kaufimmn House has a superficial affinity to the International Style. It is a basic Wright conception, however, for Wright was scornful of much of the machine-inspired architecture of the European modernists who had shaped the International Style (many of whom had been influenced by him). According to Wright, their modern houses "manage to look as though cut from cardboard with scissors... glued together in box-like forms - in a childish attempt to make buildings resemble steamships, flying machines or locomotives." Though he embraced the machine and modern materials and technology, Wright designed a house to be, as he said, a "natural feature of the environment."
At Fallingwater, the adaptation to the landscape exemplifies one of Wright's greatest abilities: to use all the implications of a site, no matter how difficult it might seem. The house was almost literally what Wright called an "extension of the cliff," for it is constructed around several large boulders that are on the site. The boulders, which act as fulcrums helping to secure the house into the hillside, actually penetrate the walls and were incorporated by Wright as design features inside the house. The central, vertical mass of utilities and chimneys is made of rough, local stone courses (used inside the house as well). It anchors the suspended horizontal forms and contrasts with the smooth, beige-colored concrete of the parapets. The building is particularly effective in its integration of the exterior natural world with the interior living quarters. For example, a glass panel in the living room slides back to access a stairway that leads directly to the stream below the house. With its open plan, low ceilings, and polished flagstone flooring, the interior of Faliingwater is like a welcoming cave in the middle of the woods. Wright designed virtually every detail inside the house, including most of the furnishings, both built-in and freestanding. The main structure was completed in 1937, and in 1939 a second house for guests and servants was begun. It is connected to the main house by a covered stairway.
Comment
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Comment by Larry on December 11, 2009 at 2:11pm -
Wright's Fallingwater House is a work of art, imho, just as Michelangelo's "David."
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