Organic Architecture Essays

Organic Architecture Essays Organic Architecture Essay Organic Architecture Essay One of the most striking personalities in the development of early-twentieth century architecture was Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). Wright attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison before moving to Chicago, where he eventually joined the firm headed by Louis Sullivan. Wright set out to create architecture of democracy. Early influences were the volumetric shapes in a set of educational blocks the German educator Friedrich Froebel designed, the organic unity of a Japanese building Wright saw at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a Jeffersonian belief in individualism and populism. Always a believer in architecture as natural and organic, Wright saw it as serving free individuals who have the right to move within a free space, envisioned as a nonsymmetrical design interacting spatially with its natural surroundings. He sought to develop an organic unity of planning, structure, materials, and site. Wright identified the principle of continuity as fundamental to understanding his view of organic unity: Classic architecture was all fixation. . . . Now why not let walls, ceilings, floors become seen as component parts of each other? . . This ideal, profound in its architectural implications . . . I called . . . continuity. Wright manifested his vigorous originality early, and by 1900 he had arrived at a style entirely his own. In his work during the first decade of the twentieth century, his cross-axial plan and his fabric of continuous roof planes and screens defined a new domestic architecture. Wright fully expressed these elements and concepts in Robie House, b uilt between 1907 and 1909. Like other buildings in the Chicago area he designed at about the same time, this was called a prairie house. Wright conceived the long, sweeping ground-hugging lines, unconfined by abrupt wall limits, as reaching out toward and capturing the expansiveness of the Midwest’s great flatlands. Abandoning all symmetry, the architect eliminated a facade, extended the roofs far beyond the walls, and all but concealed the entrance. Wright filled the wandering plan of the Robie House with intricately joined spaces (some large and open, others closed), grouped freely around a great central fireplace. (He believed strongly in the hearth’s age-old domestic significance. Wright designed enclosed patios, overhanging roofs, and strip windows to provide unexpected light sources and glimpses of the outdoors as people move through the interior space. These elements, together with the open ground plan, create a sense of space-in-motion inside and out. He set m asses and voids in equilibrium; the flow of interior space determined the exterior wall placement. The exterior’s sharp angular planes meet at apparently odd angles, matching the complex play of interior solids, which function not as inert containing surfaces but as elements equivalent in role to the design’s spaces. The Robie House is a good example of Wright’s naturalism, his adjusting of a building to its site. However, in this particular case, the confines of the city lot constrained the building-to-site relationship more than did the sites of some of Wright’s more expansive suburban and country homes. The Kaufmann House, nicknamed Fallingwater and designed as a weekend retreat at Bear Run near Pittsburgh, is a prime example of the latter. Perched on a rocky hillside over a small waterfall, this structure extends the Robie House’s blocky masses in all four directions. The contrast in textures between concrete, painted metal, and natural stones in its walls enliven its shapes, as does Wright’s use of full-length strip windows to create a stunning interweaving of interior and exterior space. The implied message of Wright’s new architecture was space, not mass- a space designed to fit the patron’s life and enclosed and divided as required. Wright took special pains to meet his client’s requirements, often designing all the accessories of a house. In the late 1930s, he acted on a cherished dream to provide good architectural design for less prosperous people by adapting the ideas of his prairie house to plans for smaller, less expensive dwellings. The publication of Wright’s plans brought him a measure of fame in Europe, especially in Holland and Germany. The issuance in Berlin in 1910 of a portfolio of his work and an exhibition of his designs the following year stimulated younger architects to adopt some of his ideas about open plans. Some forty years before his career ended, his work was already of revolutionary significance.