Architectural Movements of Yesteryear 7: Frank Lloyd Wright Part 1: Influences
Yes that is a double coloned title.
Everyone knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is and what his major works include. Falling Water, the Guggenheim, The Robie House, are all masterworks and they are important, but the greater story of Frank Lloyd Wright is far more interesting than his works. I’m going to start with his influences and early years.
FLW had many influences, whether his ego would let him give credit to other architects or not. There are a few that encompass a lot of them in one way or another:
Froebel’s gifts
Louis Sullivan and “Organic Architecture”
Japanese prints (Hokusai, etc.)
Let’s touch on each quickly to set a base for talking about FLW’s architecture in the following parts.
1. Froebel’s Gifts
Froebel’s gifts are covered in depth in this 99% Invisible Podcast. To summarize, they are a set of “gifts” given to children to spur their creative/learning capabilities. Several of these gifts are wooden blocks of varying shapes and sizes.
It’s easy to see how long thin blocks could have inspired FLW’s aesthetic composition. Many geometries from the Robie House share proportions with many of the blocks.
2. Louis Sullivan and “Organic Architecture”
FLW worked for Sullivan and Adler early on in his career and it is easy to see how Sullivan’s design theories worked their way into FLW’s. The most obvious is Sullivan’s “organic” architecture (which borrowed many ideas on natural iconography from the Arts and Crafts movement). The concept of “organic” architecture at the time is vastly different than what modern architects mean by “organic” architecture. While architects today use organic to mean biomimicry or energy efficiency or any number of other natural feeling, FLW and Sullivan meant that the architecture is in harmony with nature; borrowing elements in the architecture into the architecture itself. The natural site should be respected.
3. Japanese Prints (Hokusai, etc.)
FLW was influenced by many different art styles from many different cultures, none more so than Japanese wood prints. The compositions often reduced the noise around nature to focus on specific elements. The organization of buildings in nature shown in these wood prints rarely isolate the building, but show it engaging with nature instead of appearing above it in some sort of hierarchy.
This could honestly be a list longer than 50 influences, but these are elements I think that guided nearly every single project Wright worked on. Some other notable influences include the Arts and Crafts movement and his deep hatred of the International Style, which I’m sure I’ll touch on later.