FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT(1887-1959)

Was one of the most noticeable and significant architects of the first half of the 20° century.

He spent a great deal of time playing with the kindergarten educational blocks by Friedrich Frobel given by his mother.

Wright talkes about the influence of these exercises on his approach to design.

He had completed around fifty projects by 1901 including many houses in his home-town.

“Prairie houses” extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces , using unfinished materials.

These houses are credited with being the first examples of the “open plan”.

The houses considered the masterpieces of the late Prairie perid (1907-1909) are the Friederick Robie House and the Avery and Queene Coonley House both in chicago.

EUROPEAN PERIOD AND PERSONAL TROUBLES

In 1904, Wright designed a house for a neighbour in Oak Park. Wright’s wife would not grant him a divorce however, and neither would Edwin Cheney to Mamah. In 1909 Wright and Mamah run away to Europe

Architectural historiance have speculated on why Wright decided to turn his life upside-down. It has been said that he enjoyed living on the edge. He probably felt that he had done everything he could do with the Prairie Style, particulary from the standpoint of the one-family house.

He remaind in europe for two years and set up home in Fiesole.

In 1911 he moved to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to the land that was held by his mother’s family, and began to build himself a new home, wich he called Taliesin.

Wright wed Miriam Noel, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separiation, Wright met Olga Lazovich Hinzenburg. In Minnesota they were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested.

ENDURING LEGACY

Wright is responsible for a series of extremely original

concepts of suburban development united under the

term “Broad-acre City”.

He proposed the idea in his book “ The Disappearing City”, and unveiled a very large model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years.

It was also in the 1930s that Wright was designed “Usonian houses”, for middle-class clients. The designs were based on a simple, yet elegant geometry.

His most famous private residence the so- called “Falling-water” was constructed from 1935 to 1939 at Bear Run, Pennsylvania.

It was designed according to Wright’s desire to place the occupants close to the natural sourrandings, with a stream and waterfall runing under parte of the building. The costruction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. He sent out free-floating platforms audaciously over a small waterfall and anchored them in the natural rock and the house is thoroughly fused with its site and , inside, the rough stone walls and the flagged floors are of an elemental ruggedness. The house cost $155000 , including the architect’s fee of $8000.

LAST PERIOD Wright died on April 9, 1959, having

designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, a building which occupied him for 16 years (1943-1959) and others significant projects.

The building rises as a twining beige spiral from its site on Fifth Avenue.

Its interior is similar to the inside of a seashell. Visitors going up with an elevator and view the collection of non-objective geometric paintings getting down with a central spiral ramp which features a floor embledded with circular shapes and triangural light fixtures.

THE INTERIOR

Unfortunately, when the museum was completed, a number of important details of Wright’s design were ignored, including his desire for the interior to be painted off-white. Furthermore, the Museum currently designs exhibits to be viewed by walking up the curved walkway.

While a number of Wright’s houses are preserved as museum pieces, others showed structural deficiencies over the years.

This is a video about the fallingwater house. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu

cKaICHi4g