Critical events in architectural history are most often scripted in stylistic or purely formal terms. Yet for architects practicing in America in the latter decades of the 19th century, another definition of the discipline of architecture was foremost in their minds—a definition much less concerned with fashion and form, and much more concerned with the tradition of building and the making of places. To understand the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, I believe we must better understand this tradition in which he began his life work. The tradition of building, largely lost today in America, is concerned not with what a building looks like, but with how it is built and how this affects what is experienced.
Horatio Greenough, American transcendentalist philosopher, defined what he first called “organic architecture” in his influential 1852 essay entitled “Form and Function,” written 15 years before Wright’s birth. He also issued a challenge that was later taken up Sullivan and Wright: “The mind of our country has never been seriously applied to the subject of building… We have been content to receive our notions of architecture as we have received the fashions of our garments and the forms of our entertainments, from Europe.”[1] Please note Greenough’s use of terms such as “fashions,” “forms,” and “entertainment” to describe what is not involved in “the subject of building.”
Louis Sullivan, from whom Wright received his training in architecture, keenly felt “the absence of a style, distinctly American,” yet warned against efforts to speed its arrival by “grafting or transplanting” historical styles from other cultures onto the American continent.[2] In this same article, written and delivered as a speech in 1885 (two years before Wright first arrived in Chicago), Sullivan characterized architectural education of his day, dominated by the Ecole des Beaux Arts, as not cultivating either the common sense of analytical thinking or the individual insight of each student. Rather, architectural education promoted the classical styles as fashionable form, not as a part of the tradition of building.
Sullivan characterized the teaching in American architecture schools as being “dependent upon the verbal explanation and comment of its exponents. A knowledge of their vocabulary is often of assistance in disclosing softness and refinement in many primitive expedients, and revealing beauty in barren places. Familiarity with the phraseology of the applied arts is also useful in assisting the student to a comprehension of many things apparently incomprehensible. Metaphor and simile are rampant in this connection, a well-chosen word often serving to justify an architectural absurdity.”[3]
I should point out that this scathing criticism is equally applicable to much contemporary architectural education and design; that it is a frighteningly accurate description of recently fashionable forms documented and disseminated in the architectural media; and that it reminds us how, to this day, we Americans are still prone to believe that form alone is sufficient. And for this reason, I believe Frank Lloyd Wright’s effort to arrive at an American architecture by different route, one altogether opposed to the trading in styles, forms and fashions, has important implications for architectural education and practice today.
What tradition, other than this still-dominant American obsession with form alone, did Wright engage in his search for an appropriate American architecture?—the tradition of building, for which Greenough had first called in 1852. Here it is important to remember that Wright’s training to be an architect was not the academic training of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but rather was apprenticeship training, largely in the office of Adler and Sullivan, and quite literally “on the job.” This apprenticeship method of becoming an architect derived from the medieval guild tradition of craft training, which until only little more than 100 years ago was the only way one could become an architect.
Apprenticeship training in the craft of architecture, being literally “hands-on,” required learning by making, and is in many ways the exact opposite of the distanced, objective methods of knowing architecture later developed in the American university. Based upon formal comparisons and universal systems of both signification and construction, academic training has in this century redefined the relation between students and their designs, resulting in an ever-increasing separation from the tradition of practice.
Today I would argue that this tradition of practice, of learning to be an architect by (as Greenough said) seriously applying one’s mind to “the subject of building,” has for all intents and purposes ceased to exist in American schools of architecture, and that is has therefore inevitably vanished from our professional practices, which are today made up entirely of architecture school graduates.
Due to this blind spot on our part, in order to discern the Frank Lloyd Wright whom Otto Graf has called the “most traditional architect,”[4] and the manner in which Wright’s work exemplifies and extends the tradition of building into our time, we must look very carefully at aspects of Wright’s work that have either been ignored altogether or “interpreted” into the dominant formal and stylistic logic that rules the discipline of architectural history.
While the field of architectural history has from its beginning (at the same moment as the founding of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts) been dominated by those trained in the formal and stylistic mechanisms of art history, the practicing profession has increasingly been effected by the writings of those trained as architects in the tradition of building—among whom I would note Reyner Banham, Aldo Van Eyck, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Jorn Utzon, Aldo Rossi, Vittorio Gregotti, Alvaro Siza, Colin St. John Wilson, David Chipperfield, and Juhani Pallasmaa.
Above all I would point to the enormous recent influence on practitioners of the writings of Kenneth Frampton, whose 1995 Studies in Tectonic Culture constitutes an entire “other” or alternative, making-based history of architecture, one based neither on stylistic definitions and symbolic interpretations, nor on the formal concerns of the theorist or historian, but instead on the tradition of building, the poetics of construction, and the matters of making with which architecture as a métier is inextricably intertwined in its practice in the lifeworld.[5]
In 1887, the year Wright arrived in Chicago at age 20, Sullivan gave a public lecture in which he defined—in terms strikingly similar to Frampton’s “tectonic culture” and “critical regionalism”—what was needed for the development of an appropriate American architecture. According to Sullivan, such an architecture would only develop on a regional basis, with variations dependent not upon stylistic or formal preconceptions, but rather due to the influence of local climate, topography, available construction materials and methods of building.[6] Sullivan summarized this as a well-trained “curiosity with regard to what may be done,” and the young Wright took this definition as his personal charge.
Throughout his life as an architect, Frank Lloyd Wright attempted to relate the spaces and forms of his designs to the structures and materials with which they were made—as he said, he worked “in the nature of materials.” [7] Wright believed this was essential if his buildings were to be edifying for those who inhabited them. Aedificare, the ancient word for building, means both to edify, to instruct, and to build, to construct—and both understood to be undertaken with ethical intention.
Construction test of reinforced concrete “petal” column, Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Wright appears at right. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
Wright engaged in a constant search for a comprehensive order that would encompass both composition and construction, an order similar to the fusion of structure, material, form and function that he had found in his studies of nature. Wright attempted to develop forms from the rhythm inherent in each particular system of construction he employed, so that the construction might in turn be integrated with and responsive to the spatial idea—achieving what he termed “simplicity:” “There is only one way to get that simplicity. And that way is, on principle, by way of construction developed as architecture.” [8] [ 1 ]
Essential to Wright’s architecture was his understanding that the way a space is made or constructed is directly related to the way it is experienced. Thus for Wright, construction was never simply a means to some end; it was an essential part of the final experience of life that took place within, and thus was required to be fully integrated in the process of design.
From the very beginning of his career, Wright utilized what he called “the unit system” of square-grid planning, a “highly developed expression of structure” which provided the “sympathetic frame for the life going on within.” [9] The square grid or unit system that underlay all of Wright’s designs operated as both an essential compositional and scaling device, and as a measure and organizational method for construction—the formal and economic control required to achieve integral order and organic rhythm.
Early examples of this would include the wood board and batten houses of the Prairie Period, such as the Walter Gerts Cottage, Whitehall, Michigan, of 1902, where the plan is rigorously structured on a 2 foot square construction grid, and the elevations are structured on a 1 foot (board) and 1 inch (batten) horizontal grid. Less obvious is the square structural plan grid of balloon frame wood studs underlying the plastered facades of the Ward Willits House, Highland Park, Illinois, of 1901, where the 3 foot, 3 inch grid is revealed only in the banks of glass window and doors. As with most of Wright’s larger houses of this period, the Willits House also has hidden steel beams at the first floor and roof, allowing their generous flow of spaces.
As Wright put it: “All the buildings I have ever built, large and small, are fabricated upon a unit system—as the pile of a rug is stitched into the warp. Thus each structure is an ordered fabric. Rhythm, consistent scale of parts, and the economy of construction are greatly facilitated by this simple expedient—a mechanical one absorbed in the final result to which it has given more consistent texture.” [10] While it is typical to relate architecture first to sculpture among the other arts, it is of the utmost importance to note that Wright refers to himself not as a sculptor, but as “the weaver.” [11]
Wright engaged geometry for both its poetic and practical capacities. In describing the square geometry underlying Unity Temple, Wright quoted Walt Whitman:
“Chanting the square deific,
out of the One advancing, out of the sides,
Out of the old and the new,
out of the square entirely divine,
Solid, four-sided, all sides needed”[12]
Yet in his integrated design process, Wright employed the very same geometry in the most practical manner; as David van Zanten has noted, in the Chicago School in which Wright had apprenticed, “the foremost issue was always how one put things together,” and Wright’s “geometric purity was a means to expedite assembly, achieving a kind of mechanical self-generation in architectural composition.”[13]
Robie House, Chicago, Illinois, 1908, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
Therefore, for Wright, the nature of architecture was closely related to the nature of its construction, and the nature of its materials. But we need to take care not to impose our own contemporary interpretations on Wright. Louis Kahn, in so many ways Wright’s best disciple, was most definitely not in this case. Kahn called for the exposure of structure in buildings as an ethical imperative—concealing structure was, for Kahn, absolutely wrong. The hidden steel beams in the extraordinary roof cantilevers and brick balcony of Wright’s 1909 Robie House would fail Kahn’s test. Yet Wright received and addressed this same criticism in his own time: “Why should you always expose structure? I call it indecent exposure.” [14] [ 2 ]
Wright’s understanding of “the nature of materials” was determined by the task at hand, rather than any rationale arising from outside the work. For Wright, materials and construction were to be ordered and detailed to characterize the spatial experience of inhabitation, and “the nature of materials” was profoundly inflected by the overall spatial and experiential intention of the design. Like geometry, for Wright, materials played their part in a design process that brought the poetic (sacred) and the practical (mundane) together without contradiction, creating a work that operated on several levels simultaneously to enrich the experience in a way that any single interpretation alone could not.
Interior of Larkin Building, Buffalo, New York, 1903, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
It is important to note that Wright most typically engaged materials—including concrete—in hybrid systems of construction, employing two or more structural materials in any design. To conclude the example of the Robie House, Chicago, Illinois, 1909, I would point out how the steel that frames all the horizontal planes is never exposed; it is revealed through the spatial freedom it allows the inhabitants. Other examples from this period would include the two great hybrid constructions in Buffalo, New York, the Larkin Building of 1903, and the Darwin Martin House of 1904. The Larkin Building has interior columns of steel, clad in brick, and exterior columns of load-bearing brick, with cast concrete floors supported on steel beams, clad in cement plaster. The Martin House has load-bearing brick piers supporting steel beams, clad in cement plaster, and reinforced concrete lintel-beams, which in turn carry reinforced concrete floors. [ 3 ]
Yet the structural steel that made Wright’s open, flowing spaces possible was never revealed to the eye—it could only be sensed as a fully integrated part of the larger experience. And while I have noted the differences in interpretation between Wright and Kahn on the issue of exposing structure, I should also point out that these great Prairie Period works of Wright’s are experienced as places made of masonry and concrete—exactly the materials Kahn, at the age of 50, chose to engage exclusively in his architecture. Kahn’s decision to abandon lightweight steel, and to employ only heavy concrete and masonry, marked his emergence as a great architect, for all of his now-famous buildings came after this decision as to the nature of materials—a nature discovered by Kahn in the early works of Frank Lloyd Wright, and most tellingly in Unity Temple.
After this extended preamble, we now arrive to the topic of this essay: Frank Lloyd Wright and the nature of concrete. Why concrete? Wright considered reinforced concrete to be the one truly modern material—“modern” for Wright because concrete was entirely “plastic,” able to be formed into any conceivable shape, fully fireproof and self-supporting. Reinforced concrete was also the construction material with which Wright had both his greatest difficulties and his greatest successes. An examination of Wright’s efforts to appropriately employ reinforced concrete also illustrates the tradition of building as Wright redefined it in the 20th century.
Wright’s Unity Temple is often cited as the first exposed concrete public building in the US, but technically this is not correct. More than 20 years before, Carrere and Hastings, along with their young on-site project architect Bernard Maybeck, built two extraordinary hotels in Saint Augustine, Florida for the railroad tycoon Henry Flagler; the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar Hotels of 1885. However, Wright’s Unity Temple may rightly be considered the first exposed reinforced concrete public building in the US, for the Florida hotels were built of unreinforced mass concrete, the only steel being railroad ties cast in place over the window openings.
While he has often been reputed to be “ahead of his time,” in both spatial composition and building construction, the fact is that Wright was rarely “the first” architect to engage any particular material or method of construction. What makes Wright’s work an important precedent was his astonishing ability to discover new spatial and experiential potentialities in every material he engaged.
What is apparently Wright’s first design to exclusively employ reinforced concrete was the Monolithic Concrete Bank project of 1894, ironically published in Brickbuilder magazine. This project, though small, could not be more monumental—its façade was directly related to Egyptian temple fronts, and its piers emerged from the wall “in eminently plastic fashion,” as Wright said.[15] Designed one year after Wright left the Sullivan office, the whole has a singularity of space, born of the fusion of form, structure, and material that is exactly the opposite of the Chicago steel frame skyscraper.
Interior of Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1906, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
In Unity Temple, designed in late 1905 and completed construction in 1908 in Oak Park, Illinois, Wright employed reinforced concrete, inside and out, because of the manner in which its monolithic, homogenous nature matched the program of Unitarian worship. The uniquely synthetic conception of unity—the fusion of space, material and experience—which Wright sought to embody in Unity Temple, required a similar fusion in its material: “there was only one material to choose…concrete.” Reinforced concrete would be used throughout, for both vertical and horizontal surfaces and structures, “nothing else if the building was to be thoroughbred, meaning built in character out of one material.”[16] [ 4 ]
Exterior of Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1906, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Period photograph from 1908, copyright by FLW Archives.
Intending a fusion of construction and composition, Wright wrote: “Why not make the wooden boxes or forms so that the concrete could be cast in them as separate blocks and masses grouped about an interior space in some such way as to preserve this desired sense of the interior space in the appearance of the whole building. And the block-masses would be left as themselves with no facing. That would be cheap and permanent…” “Too monumental, all this? It would be nobly simple. The wooden forms or molds in which the concrete must at that time be cast were always the chief item of expense, so to repeat the use of a simple form as often as possible was necessary. Therefore a building, all four sides alike, looked like the thing. This, in simplest terms, meant a building square in plan. That would make their temple a cube—a noble form.” [17] For Wright, there was no contradiction in noting in the same phrase both the poetic (“noble” and “permanent”) and practical (reuse of “a single form as often as possible” so as to be “cheap”) characteristics of concrete as a construction material. [ 5 ]
Wright cast the concrete in repeating formwork so that the 7 foot module of the square plan grid would be expressed in the “separate blocks and masses” of the finished building. Period photographs also reveal the fine horizontal texture that the wooden board forms originally imprinted on the surface of the concrete, leading some publications whose writers did not visit the building in person, but only saw photographs, to claim that Unity Temple was constructed of brick. In these ways we see how Unity Temple was both conceived and constructed as a woven fabric, “fabricated upon a unit system.”
Construction photograph, late 1907, Unity Temple, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
Here we might note, in the construction sequence of Unity Temple as documented in the period photograph taken in early 1907, the interesting premonition of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Only one set of wood formwork was made for each of the four sides of Unity Temple, with the wall being cast first; the wall forms being moved around to the next side and the column forms being set up on top of the completed wall; the column forms being moved around to the next side and the roof forms being set up on top of the completed columns; and so on until the cubic volume of Unity Temple had been completed. I have described an upward spiraling sequence of construction—a sequence Wright reinterpreted fifty years later in the Guggenheim’s upward spiraling sequence of movement in space. [ 6 ]
Reinforced concrete’s attributes appealed to Wright’s client, the Reverend Rodney Johonnot, who wrote that the concrete of Unity Temple was to be “poured and stamped in forms, making a structural monolith of the whole, thus in another way, typifying unity.” [18] Wright’s uncle, the reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the leading Unitarian in Chicago, praised Unity Temple as “one solid monolith. It is not only built on a rock but it is a rock-built church.” [19] In this way, concrete allowed Wright to achieve both the most modern integrated construction and the most ancient sacred foundation.
Interior of Unity Temple, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
Even Wright, perhaps the most gifted maker of form in modern times, was unable to foresee completely the liberative spatial potential of monolithic reinforced concrete construction. As can be seen in the difference between the final construction drawings and the building as realized, Wright’s conception of the interior wood trim details of Unity Temple changed—from “framing” edges and corners to “folding” across and around them—remarkably late, in fact only occurring during construction itself. Today this “folding” effect is so important to our experience of Unity Temple that we can hardly imagine it was not part of Wright’s original conception. Yet this is one of numerous examples of Wright continuing to design during construction, in this case seeking a way to express the almost limitless potential of reinforced concrete to shape space. [ 7 ]
Having achieved such a perfect synthesis in Unity Temple, it is interesting to note that Wright remained critical of concrete as a building material. While the walls of Unity Temple were cast in repetitively-used wooden forms, Wright noted the inherent lack of constructive order or “unit system” in cast-in-place concrete, and sought a more direct revelation of the construction module and the rhythm of the (necessarily) hidden steel reinforcing bars—the internal balance between the tensile (steel) and the compressive (concrete) components.
Harry Brown House project, 1906, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Drawing copyright FLW Archives.
It is hardly coincidental that in 1906, the same year that construction began on Unity Temple, Wright designed the Harry Brown House project, which he would later title “the first block house”—the concrete block system of construction appears here fully articulated. In 1908, as Unity Temple was being completed, Wright wrote: “As for the future—the work shall grow more truly simple; more expressive with fewer lines, fewer forms; more articulate with less labor; more plastic; more fluent, although more coherent; more organic. It shall grow not only to fit more perfectly the methods and processes that are called upon to produce it, but shall further find whatever is lovely or of good repute in method or process, and idealize it.”[20] [ 8 ]
Exterior of Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois, 1913, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
Before Wright was able to employ his concrete block system, he would return to employing concrete in hybrid construction systems, in such buildings as the Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois of 1913, which had reinforced concrete cast into hollow brick and concrete masonry piers and walls, reinforced concrete floors, and concealed steel trusses spanning the largest interior volume, the Winter Garden. At the Midway Gardens we also find Wright’s first extensive use of patterned precast concrete masonry blocks. The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, of 1917–21 employed reinforced concrete cast into hollow cut stone and brick walls, with reinforced concrete floors and beams. [ 9 ]
Yet Wright yearned to again engage reinforced concrete as a monolithic material. He employed reinforced concrete in the 1910 Universal Portland Cement Exhibit structure in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and proposed it for the unbuilt 1912 project for the San Francisco Call Press building.
The Barnsdall “Hollyhock” House, Olive Hill, Los Angeles, California, of 1919 was intended by Wright to be built in cast reinforced concrete, like Unity Temple. Whether this was ever a real possibility, or simply Wright’s hope, is not clear. In any event, the house was actually built using wood studs and stucco, wood roof beams, and precast concrete decorative elements. Wright’s frustration in not being able to build this project in the material of his choice may be sensed in the caption he placed under a photograph of one of the wood and stucco Barnsdall buildings on Olive Hill, published in the July 1928 issue of Architectural Record, which misleadingly reads “Glass and concrete.”[21]
Interior of Millard House, “La Miniatura,” Los Angeles, California, 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo by author.
Upon his return from Japan and the completion of the Imperial Hotel, Wright built four houses in Los Angeles, each constructed using his “concrete block system:” the Millard House, the Storer House, the Ennis House, and the Freeman House, all completed in 1923. “We would take the despised outcast of the building industry—the concrete block—out from underfoot or from the gutter—find a hitherto unexpected soul in it—make it live as a thing of beauty—textured like the trees. All we would have to do would be to educate the concrete block, refine it and knit it together with steel in the joints and so construct the joints that they could be poured full of concrete after they were set up and steel strand laid in them. The walls would thus become thin but solid reinforced slabs and yield to any desire for form imaginable. And common labor could do it all. We would make the walls double, of course, one wall facing inward and the other facing outward, thus getting continuous hollow spaces between, so the house would be cool in summer, warm in winter, and dry always.”[22] [ 10 ]
Interior of Storer House, Los Angeles, California, 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo by author.
Wright did not mention the horizontal structure of floors and roofs in this description, for in these first concrete block houses they were constructed in wood, and thus constituted hybrid, not monolithic structures. Yet Wright had achieved his intent to give a “unit system,” a construction module, to reinforced concrete, by turning it into an extraordinarily flexible masonry unit. “I finally had found simple mechanical means to produce a complete building that looks the way the machine made it, as much as any fabric need look. Tough, light, but not thin; imperishable; plastic; no necessary lie about it anywhere and yet machine-made, mechanically perfect. Standardization as the soul of the machine here for the first time may be seen in the hand of the architect, put squarely up to imagination, the limits of imagination the only limits of building.”[23] [ 11 ]
Despite this second success, Wright remained critical of reinforced concrete as a monolithic building material, and he touched upon the reason in praising the material, above, noting that it will “yield to any desire for form imaginable.” In 1928, 20 years after the completion of Unity Temple, 5 years after completion of the California concrete block houses, and during construction of the concrete block Lloyd Jones House in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Wright made the following scathing critique of reinforced concrete:
“Aesthetically [concrete] has neither song nor story. Nor is it easy to see in this conglomerate, this mud pie, a high aesthetic property, because, in itself it is an amalgam, aggregate, compound. And cement, the binding medium, is characterless.” “Here in a conglomerate named concrete we find a plastic material that as yet has found no medium of expression that will allow it to take plastic form.” “[Concrete’s] form is a matter of this process of casting rather than a matter of anything at all derived from its own nature.”[24]
Wright’s design process, as we have seen, involved the engagement of the character—the nature—of the materials in the experience of space. Thus Wright’s condemnation of reinforced concrete as being bereft of character, scale and rhythm—the essential aspects necessary for architectural design as he defined it—makes his continued efforts to employ concrete all the more illuminating. His reasons? “I should say that in this plasticity of concrete lies its aesthetic value… And there remain to be developed those higher values—non-mechanical, plastic in method, treatment and mass.”[25]
Wright himself had indicated the danger that awaited him in using reinforced concrete in this entirely “plastic” way—without the benefit of the ordering systems he had developed in Unity Temple and the concrete block houses—when he noted above that, in using reinforced concrete, “the limits of imagination” are “the only limits of building.”
Wright experimented with a variety of geometries in his effort to harness the unlimited form-making potential of reinforced concrete as a construction material. In his 1924 design for the “Automobile Objective” on Sugarloaf Mountain, Maryland, he first employed the spiral to house a planetarium within an automobile ramp. In 1943, Wright began working on the commission for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Five years later, in 1948, his V. C. Morris Store was built on Maiden Lane in San Francisco, and this spiral concrete ramp contained in an urbane brick box is one of his most intriguing designs. While it is clearly a precursor for the Guggenheim, at least in its interior experience, it is also a hybrid construction, with the brick acting to scale and measure the concrete ramp.
Exterior of Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, 1943-59, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
Interior of Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, 1943-59, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo copyright FLW Archives.
After more than a dozen years of design, Wright’s Guggenheim Museum began construction in 1956, and was not completed until after his death in 1959. During its design, Wright’s struggles to find the appropriate form may be noted in a series of designs proposed to be built of concrete, but clad in either red or white marble, with the ramping volume contracting or expanding, octagonal or circular. The final design, a ramp that gently expands as one moves up it, culminating in a skylight, was conceived by Wright as a self-supporting reinforced concrete spiral—something like a spring. As built, the Guggenheim Museum employs a series of piers that are cleverly concealed on the exterior and from the initial view upwards upon entry. The ramps of the Guggenheim were built of reinforced concrete, but its walls were not cast in forms, rather concrete was sprayed onto a metal lath in the form of the spiraling exterior curve. [ 12 ][ 13 ]
Huntington Hartford Resort project, Los Angeles, California, 1947, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Drawing copyright FLW Archives.
A series of projects Wright proposed to be built in reinforced concrete show a steady deterioration of his own design principles, eroded by the limitless form-making capacity of concrete. The enormous foundations of the V. C. Morris House, designed for a cliff-side in San Francisco, make a mockery of the subtlety of the buttresses hidden in the shadow of Fallingwater’s cantilevers. The series of drawings for the Huntington Hartford Resort, designed for the arid canyons beyond Hollywood, are among Wright’s most beautiful. But the designs, when studied, are shockingly disengaged from their natural environment. The main clubhouse, where water from the pools is made to spill into the arid canyon below, is a particularly arrogant gesture, seeming to consist of a set of “flying saucers” only temporarily moored to the mountaintop—a location heretofore always avoided by Wright in preference for building into the hill, never on its top. [ 14 ]
Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
The Arthur Miller House project of 1957, the Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa of 1957, the Grady Auditorium at the University of Arizona of 1957, and the Ellis Island proposal of 1959 all exhibit Wright’s unfettered imagination characteristic of his later work in reinforced concrete. Perhaps the most disappointing design of this period in Wright’s career is the Marin County Civic Center of 1957. Begun with one of Wright’s greatest site designs—to build the civic center as a bridge between the hill-tops, recalling the ancient Roman aqueducts—Wright inexplicably decorated, rather than constructed, the building’s exterior, employing false arches that render the built work a parody of his own brilliant initial concept. [ 15 ]
The conclusion I will draw from all this might best be titled, “limits and the imagination.” The almost total lack of spatial order, human scale, and formal control, which characterizes Wright’s late public buildings and more extravagant private commissions, is unquestionably related to the unlimited formal capacity and lack of modular order of the reinforced concrete used in their construction—characteristics he himself had identified as early as 1928. In many of these cases, Wright seemed unwilling or unable to impose his own limitations upon either his imagination or this inherently order-less method of construction.
Hoult Usonian House project, 1936, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Drawing copyright FLW Archives.
Interior, Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1936, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photo by author.
Meanwhile, the balance of invention, order and scale maintained by Wright’s Usonian Houses designed in the same period must be related to the modular order characteristic of their major materials: concrete block, brick, and wood. Only when he combined reinforced concrete with modular materials—or turned reinforced concrete into a modular material—was Wright able to attain the same balance in his larger buildings that he continually achieved in the Usonian Houses. [ 16 ][ 17 ]
The National Insurance Company, designed for a site on Michigan Avenue in 1923—the same year as the California concrete block houses were in construction—is perhaps the first true “curtain wall” high-rise, with reinforced concrete columns and floors cantilevering out from a central core to carry a copper and glass skin. This design was the basis for all of Wright’s later high-rise designs, including St. Marks in New York of 1929, the Johnson Wax Research Tower in Racine of 1944, and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma of 1952.
Exterior of “Fallingwater,” Kaufmann House, Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
A particularly elegant and effective use of reinforced concrete in a hybrid construction is the great Fallingwater, Edgar Kaufmann’s house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, designed in 1935 when Wright was age 68. The dialogue between the vertical rock walls and horizontal concrete slabs of the house, echoing that between the rocks and water of the falls, makes the whole experience of inhabitation perhaps the most powerful of modern times. [ 18 ]
Interior of Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph copyright FLW Archives.
At Taliesin West, begun by Wright outside Scottsdale, Arizona in 1937, Wright develops a completely different way of using concrete to engage the natural site. Deriving from a 1928 project for a small house Wright designed for himself in the Mojave Desert, Taliesin West is constructed massive “desert stone” walls, with boulders from the site were stacked in forms and cast in unreinforced concrete. These support the wooden framed folded roofs, clad in canvas that could originally be opened using sailing cords and pulleys, to be changed as a part of the annual migration from north to south of the Fellowship. [ 19 ]
Wright’s 1938 Anne Pfeiffer Chapel, part of Florida Southern College, employs concrete blocks at the base, where pedestrians originally engaged their delicately scaled patterns in the shadow of the citrus trees, while the smooth, rendered concrete walls rose above the trees to capture the sunlight and announce the campus within the grove. The chapel’s two forms of reinforced concrete make the building something we might call a monolithic hybrid.
The Beth Sholom Synagogue, built in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania in 1954, develops a similar dialogue between base and top, but is experienced as a place made between the reinforced concrete base, set into the ground and containing the seating, and the plastic, glass and metal roof structure rising like a great tent above the congregation.
Interior of Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. Photograph by author.
Finally, in addition to the use of brick and glass tubing “masonry,” the excellence of the Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin, of 1936, originates in the fact that its reinforced concrete columns are themselves cast as modular repetitive elements, rather than as part of a monolithic mass. This building, which Kenneth Frampton has rightly called the greatest work of American art of the 20th century,[26] epitomizes Wright’s best work in reinforced concrete—work where concrete is engaged in a dialogue with other, modular materials, and where concrete itself becomes modular. [ 20 ]
In conclusion, we recognize the critical importance of limitations in Wright’s work: the Usonian Houses’ inherent economic, material and spatial limits are the reason they remain more true to Wright’s own principles than did his larger later commissions. When monolithic reinforced concrete was employed, only Wright’s self-imposed limitations could insure that his own fundamental principles would be honored. In 1937, while Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Building were in construction, Wright spoke of the positive power of economy, the beauty of the minimal, the need for limits, and their relation to the imagination: “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and, therefore, when most was required of imagination in order to build at all. Limitations seem to have always been the best friends of architecture.”[27]