Birthday boy of the day. What did Frank Lloyd Wright invent?

/ Architecture /

June 8 marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 1114 architectural projects, 532 of which have been implemented, and approximately 300 have reached our days - he left a colossal legacy in his 72 years of professional activity.

Someone noticed that Frank Lloyd Wright began his career in the year when Thomas Edison built the first film studio in America, and in the year of his death (1959) an automatic interplanetary station landed on the moon for the first time in human history. "The architect's mission is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful and the world better for living, how to give it meaning, rhythm, significance," he believed. He always aspired to this. What do we owe to the great master?

Frank Lloyd Wright. Project House over the waterfall (Kaufman House) in Pennsylvania. 1934–1937. Crayon. Photo: MoMA

Organic architecture

Let's start with the main thing. Wright is considered the founder of the organic style in architecture. Unlike all other directions, the architectural object in it is not opposed to the landscape, but strives for complete fusion with it. It should not be confused with biomorphic architecture, when the author repeats the form of living beings or nature in his creations. In Wright's buildings, the main dominant feature is horizontal lines, which limit the volume above and below, but not inside, allowing the space to flow freely.

The landscape tells the architect the shape and structure of the building and determines the choice of building materials. The concept is partly based on the traditions of Far Eastern architecture and worldview, and in the case of Wright, specifically Japan, where he spent a lot of time and it was there that he gleaned the ideas of unity with nature. By the way, he was an avid collector of Japanese art, including ukiyo-e engravings and prints, and even traded them. Rumor has it that he earned much more as an art dealer.

Frank Lloyd Wright. East view of Concord Unitarian Church in Oak Park. 1905–1908. Watercolor. Photo: MoMA

Prairie style

The concept of the harmony of nature and architecture was embodied in the "prairie houses" invented by Wright. They were low-rise oblong houses with flat roofs and ribbon glazing, without basements and attics. The material for them was chosen in accordance with the characteristic features of the area, so that the erected buildings were not an extraneous body against the background of the landscape, but something "native". The house should "grow from it like a plant and blend harmoniously with the environment, as if nature itself created it." Therefore, Wright often collaborated with local sawmills and stoneworks.

However, he tried to use materials so that they did not compete with each other, in the most natural form, and if it was appropriate, he also used modern ones: metal structures, reinforced concrete, bricks. Various natural textures and ornaments in the decoration of facades and interiors become the main decorative attribute. A striking example of such a "prairie house" dissolved in the landscape is the Unitarian Church in Oak Park. Later it will be considered one of the first examples of modernism in the world, and nowadays it will appear in the famous American television saga "Game of Thrones".

Frank Lloyd Wright. Plan of the site and house of Darwin Martin in Buffalo. 1903–1906. Ink drawing. Photo: MoMA

Human size

Long before Le Corbusier developed his famous "Modulor" calculation system, Wright repeatedly stated that the proportions of the building and furniture should be determined by the proportions of the human body, that is, be proportionate to it. "A person's interaction with architecture should not only be convenient, but also pleasant," he believed.

Therefore, his buildings are mostly low-rise, they do not have huge ceilings, and large spaces are divided into rooms of appropriate scale, in which you feel comfortable, and not as if you have to live in a large museum hall or palace rooms, where scale is rather a symbol of grandeur and state scale, rather than a strict vital necessity.

Frank Lloyd Wright. One of the "American prefabricated houses". Project. 1915–1917. Lithography. Photo: MoMA

Eusonian houses

Wright does not have a single repeated object: each of them is created for specific people and a specific landscape. Outside of these conditions, their entire semantic "superstructure" crumbles. In other words, he did not engage in typical residential construction. The only exceptions are the "Hussonian houses" - affordable housing for Americans, which arose as a response to the economic crisis that broke out in 1930. Wright built more than fifty such houses.

The name itself comes from the abbreviation USONA (United States of Northern America). However, even they completely fit into the paradigm of Wright's philosophy, because they are designed for a certain area with a general context. Compact, technological, with a frame structure, at the same time affordable, convenient and attractive, they became a symbol of truly American architecture and in many ways defined the appearance of modern single-story suburbs of the country.

Presentation of the Illinois skyscraper project at a press conference on October 16, 1956 in Chicago. Wright designed it a mile high, with 56 nuclear-powered elevators and two helipads. Photo: MoMA

Acrocity

Wright was a convinced anti-urbanist, and if he lived in our time, he would also be anti-globalist. He was categorically against the idea of ​​a metropolis. He proposed the concept of a city in which each family has its own house with a plot of land the size of an acre - Akromisto. And although he himself started in the workshop of Louis Sullivan, a representative of the Chicago school of architecture and the author of the world's first skyscrapers, he compared Chicago and New York to growing monsters.

He believed that such a city could be contained in just a few giant skyscrapers surrounded by lush greenery instead of streets. For him, densifying and limiting the modern city was a way to save nature. This is how the idea of ​​the "Illinois" project was born - a 528-story skyscraper with 56 elevators powered by atomic energy, designed for 130 residents, equipped with a garage for 15 cars and a double platform for 100 helicopters.

Frank Lloyd Wright. Gordon Strong Planetarium Project in Maryland. 1924–1925. Colored pencil on tracing paper. Photo: MoMA

The first marketing strategy for an architect

Wright is called a "great propagandist" of his architecture and his name as a brand, and for good reason. To promote his own ideas, he used all available means, from crayon drawings to books, magazines, exhibitions, monographs, films, radio and television appearances. He even took part in the popular TV quiz "What's My Line?".

However, he had another unique gift — the ability to gather gifted students around him. Many of Wright's exemplary sketches were created by his assistants, for example, Jack Howe, who, by the way, worked as the chief draftsman of the workshop during the construction of the House over the Falls - one of the most famous buildings in America. Wright's assistant, Marion Mahoney, produced impeccable drawings and watercolors for him.

When Wright released a two-volume set of lithographs of the plans and perspectives of his own buildings from the Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth, Mahoney was the author of more than half of these images, made in a single "brand" style.