America through the Work of its Greatest Architect: 9 Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings

“Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.”

Frank lloyd wright – In the Cause of Architecture

So goes the cliff-notes philosophy of the great Frank Lloyd Wright – likely the single architect that even people who know or care nothing about architecture can’t help but have heard of. He’s been called America’s most famous architect and – 61 years since his death – is internationally regarded as an innovator ahead of his time, a forerunner of modern and contemporary design, and a control freak and egotist to boot. All the makings of a true legend.

I myself became acquainted with the man and his far-reaching legacy as a college junior, learning, as do all good students of Survey of Art II, about the design titan’s most iconic works, the Fallingwater house outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. I sadly have not yet had the opportunity to visit the former, and from the latter I dimly recollect only that I was not very impressed – of the building or much of the contemporary artwork enclosed – but that visit was a number of years ago and, notably, before I had developed any kind of appreciation for any sort of Modern architecture.

From that first introduction, I’m not sure how or at what point I began developing more interest in and knowledge of Wright’s work. However it happened, it has since evolved into a full on architecture nerd crush. Over the past couple years, I have sought out his buildings in both places where I’ve lived and cities that I’ve visited. And as my list of FLW site visits nears a whopping ten (never mind that the man has roughly 500 buildings to his name), I wanted to share some photos from my visits to these historically and architecturally significant sites.

House on the suburban prairie

A couple weeks ago I posted about stumbling across Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home in Oak Park on a recent trip to Chicago. The reason we had made the trek out from the city to the suburbs, however, was to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio just down the road. This is the first house that Wright built for himself and his growing family (with his first of three wives) and where he lived from completed construction in 1889, through remodels in the 1890s (including the addition of the studio in 1898), until he left Oak Park in 1909. It was during this time that Wright produced more than a third of his work, much of which can be seen within less than a square mile of his former home.

In fact, the surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright/Prairie School of Architecture Historic District of Oak Park is home to more than 80 Wright-designed houses and buildings. Many of these are in his seminal Prairie style, which is exemplified by its long horizontal, rather than vertical lines, low, flat roofs with overhanging eaves, and integration with the natural landscape, which extends to using high-quality materials and fine craftsmanship. Below are some pictures that I took of the interior and exterior of the FLW house and a few of his neighboring designs from a quick walk around the area.

Acts two and three

Following his Prairie School years (1890-1914), Wright continued to explore new architectural forms and experiment with systems of building. These later years are often broken into two periods (with his Prairie days being considered the first). The second period, from 1914 to 1935, was characterized by experimentation, particularly in his use of textile concrete block designs.

In the third period (1936-59), we can see both the outgrowth of the Prairie house in Wright’s Usonian designs – low-slung, modestly-sized houses meant to shelter the middle class in affordable style – as well as in the evolution of the textile blocks in his Usonian Automatic houses, which utilized modular concrete blocks designed for easy and cost-efficient construction. This third and final period is also when Wright designed some of his best known and most radical buildings – most notably Fallingwater and the Guggenheim, but also the Price Tower (his only realized high-rise project) and the Johnson Wax Building.

Without even stepping foot inside, the care and consideration for beauty that went into the creation of these buildings is obvious, as is the joy and wonder visitors and their fortunate few residents must feel in their presence. As for me, I will continue to seek out and visit Wright’s work wherever I go, finding inspiration there and an evolving understanding of what it means to build and live beautifully.

These nine buildings, alongside the information that I have presented here, of course hardly scratch the surface of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prolific, turbulent life and diverse body of work. So much has been written about the man and his impact on architecture and design – I’ll not attempt to do it justice in the space that I have here. But if this post has piqued your interest, and you’d like to go down the Wright rabbit hole, I’ll help you break ground with some additional reading material:

• Curbed’s “An illustrated guide to Frank Lloyd Wright”
• Plus Curbed’s map of “Frank Lloyd Wright in 45 essential works”
• The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation maintain Wright’s legacy through education and preservation
• A collection of articles from Architectural Digest in celebration of Wright’s 150th birthday
• The Wright Library – An encyclopedic collection of archives published by and relating to Wright
• The Art Story’s FLW bio gives a quick look at important terms and concepts
• “Art History: The Iconic Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright” – An overview of Wright’s greatest hits and design periods
• Wright’s eight buildings designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites
• Explore “the lesser-known mecca of Frank Lloyd Wright’s” designs with AD’s “This Smaller U.S. City Is Filled With Frank Lloyd Wright Gems”
• Bloomberg’s “Frank Lloyd Wright Is Not Who You Think He Is” – Presents a slightly different perspective of Wright, as told by a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
• The Smithsonian’s “The Triumph of Frank Lloyd Wright” – On the Guggenheim and Wright’s philosophy of architecture
• More on Wright’s overarching philosophy and principles of design