Architect Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to AD to break down the extraordinary 70-year career of Frank Lloyd Wright. From the groundbreaking Prairie style homes that redefined American domestic architecture to his visionary organic architecture and innovative Usonian houses, Wright designed over 1,000 buildings–532 of which were built. Wyetzner explores how Wright reinvented his architectural voice across decades to become one of the most influential architects in history.
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00:00Frank Lloyd Wright designed over 1,000 buildings during a career that spanned more than 70 years
00:05and was constantly reinventing himself.
00:08From developing his philosophy of organic architecture to his famous prairie-style houses,
00:13he even created a type of home specifically intended to make great design affordable to
00:17the average American, which we'll talk about at the end of this video.
00:20Hi, I'm Michael Weitzner, I'm an architect, and today we're going to break down the many styles
00:24of Frank Lloyd Wright and see how his work evolved over time.
00:30Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War.
00:37He died in 1959, shortly after the U.S. sent troops into Vietnam.
00:42In that 92-year lifespan, he would witness a giant leap in technology.
00:46The implementation of indoor plumbing, electricity, the invention of the telephone,
00:51the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, and the dawn of space travel.
00:57Of the 1,000 buildings he designed in his lifetime, 532 of them were built, an astounding number.
01:05But to understand how his style evolved over his career, we need to go back to one of his very first jobs.
01:13At age 20, Wright joined the office of Adler and Sullivan, a prominent and important practice in
01:18Chicago, whose ideas of skyscraper design are still in practice today.
01:22Louis Sullivan was known as the father of modernism. Sullivan believed that first and foremost,
01:26the building should be functional. In fact, he coined the term, form follows function,
01:30which would inspire architects of skyscrapers and modern buildings for generations to come,
01:35including Frank Lloyd Wright. While working for Sullivan, Wright quickly rose to be relied upon as
01:39a prominent designer. So much so that when one looks at a floor plan of their new offices in the
01:44auditorium building, along with Sullivan and Adler's offices, there is an office labeled Mr. Wright's
01:50room. He was only 22 at the time. Two years later, at age 24, Frank Lloyd Wright contributed significantly
01:56to the design of the Charlie House in collaboration with Louis Sullivan.
02:00This is the Charlie House on what is called the Gold Coast of Chicago, the northeast section near the lake.
02:06This house foreshadows many of his design ideas that were to come. You can also see Sullivan's presence
02:11here as it bears the hallmarks of the Chicago school style of early modernism.
02:15So what you see in this photograph is the building resembles very strongly an Italianate palazzo.
02:21It's got this veranda that sticks off the front with this Sullivan-esque kind of ornamentation
02:27that he was known for. And it's got this band at the top, sort of the beginnings
02:34of the Clara story that Wright would later go on to use quite often. And it's got this prominent
02:40entrance that Sullivan used quite often. So what's interesting about this is that a lot of the
02:44hallmarks that Sullivan used in his skyscrapers are actually evident here. Sullivan's ideas of
02:49skyscraper design were actually inspired by a column, believe it or not, where there's a base,
02:54there's a shaft, and there's a capitol. So the other thing that I find really interesting about this
02:58photograph, there's also sort of the beginnings of what we'll see later in Wright's prairie style.
03:04And we'll see later in examples how Wright takes this and expands on it even further.
03:09Soon after this building was built, Wright took on some after hours freelance work because he was
03:13in need of some extra money. When Sullivan found out, he was enraged because it was specifically
03:18stated in his contract that Wright would not do any freelance work. And so Wright left the company
03:24to strike out on his own. Whether he was fired or quit remains a mystery. At the age of 26,
03:29Wright's solo career was underway. He had a wife, Catherine, and two children to support,
03:34and another one on the way. One of his first commissions was for a friend in River Forest,
03:38near Oak Park, where he and his family lived, just outside of Chicago. It's here that we see the
03:43beginning of a style that he would truly make his own, and one that he is possibly most remembered
03:47for, the prairie style. The prairie style is known for horizontal lines being parallel to the earth,
03:54open floor plans, low pitched roofs, strong overhanging eaves, and a strong connection to nature,
04:01among other things. And while Wright was a pioneer of the prairie style, and its most famous
04:05practitioner, he was not alone in developing it. A group of architects that Wright referred to as
04:10the New School of the Middle West were embarking on a journey to create a new American architectural
04:15style together, distinct from the traditional European influences. Inspired by the sweeping
04:21plains of the western U.S., this group included architects such as George Elmsley, Myron Hunt,
04:27and George Washington Mayer. While they all contributed to the shared American language of architecture,
04:31it was undoubtedly Wright who would take these ideas to their fullest expression.
04:37This is the Winslow House, which reveals the nascent ideas of the prairie style. So here's
04:42everything that jumps out at me. One thing he does, which is very reminiscent of Sullivan,
04:47is he creates that same sort of strong entrance made out of stone with ornamentation around it,
04:54and these square windows. But now you can see, instead of this tripartite layout, he actually only has
05:00two sort of levels in this building. He's got this base, which the entrance is worked into,
05:07out of Roman brick. And then above that, he's got this frieze. You see the beginnings of what he
05:12would later refer to as his clerestory windows with this strong overhang of a hip roof. So that dark
05:18material below the roof makes it act like a void. And here it actually reads as if the roof were floating
05:24above this base piece at the bottom. So the other thing that makes this very distinctive from the
05:29Charlie House is how horizontal it is. And he articulates that by breaking up the mass into
05:35these long, low horizontal pieces. So this house is not yet fully in the prairie style. Wright would
05:40receive many, many more commissions in the following years. These included the Willits House,
05:45the Susan Dana Lawrence House, the Heller House. One of the most notable was the homey design for
05:52Darwin D. Martin in Buffalo. The Martin House takes the prairie style to a new level. This is a full-on
05:58prairie style house compared to the Winslow House. Wright does a number of things to increase the
06:02horizontality and make it more parallel to the earth. And one of the things he liked to do was
06:07create these planters so that the house sort of stepped up from the earth up to the roof. And the
06:14other thing that you could see very strongly is there's no longer any symmetry. Where the Winslow House
06:20was clearly a rectangle with a roof on top of it, this you don't read the rectangle at all. One of the core
06:27principles of Wright's architecture was the open plan and breaking open the box. Where most architects
06:33would create a rectangular room and plan, Wright would actually break this room up and break the
06:39corners away. So essentially what you'd get are these open corners. And he would also do that in
06:46the vertical direction. He would take the roof and he would bring the wall only up a certain distance
06:54so that the roof appears to hover over the wall. Then he would just infill that with a piece of
07:00glass. So he liked to break open the corners, essentially. That's how he felt the box gets
07:05broken open. And you could see that right here, right? So you could see these windows and the roof
07:10above floating above. You could see it over there as well. So instead of a full wall coming up and meeting
07:16the eave of the roof, what he does here is he just brings these piers up and then he fills in between
07:22the piers with a spandrel, which creates a terrace. And then he pushes that wall back further. And he
07:28all of a sudden gets this whole different reading of in and out where the exterior and the interior
07:36become blurred. So these windows are breaking the box vertically. And these piers are breaking the
07:43box horizontally. A few years later, he would take the prairie style to its pinnacle with his design
07:49for the Robie House on the south side of Chicago. Okay, this is the Robie House. This was completed
07:54in 1910. And it still looks as striking today, a hundred and something years later, as it did back
08:00then. What he's done is he's gone even more horizontal than he did at the Martin House. So now he's lowered
08:07these hip roofs so they're even more shallow. They extend even further. Look how far this roof extends
08:13out over this terrace. He pulls the brick of the terrace further out. He has this longer line of windows
08:21under this roof eve. But now you can see the total separation between roof and form below as if the roof
08:29hovers. And these windows are what fills that gap. Wright was very inspired by nature. And so by
08:35breaking the box, it was his way of bringing more of the outdoors inside the house. He wanted to blur
08:43the boundary between the inside of the house and the outdoors. Let's take a look at how these windows
08:50relate to the inside of the house. So this row of windows that you see right here along the street
08:56are actually this row of windows on the inside. And the other thing he does is the idea of the open
09:03plan. So he has a hearth or a fireplace in the center of the room. And that's the only divider
09:11between what's the living room and what's the dining room on the other side of that hearth. It's just a
09:17fragment of a wall. So the corners are removed and one central element makes the division between two
09:24rooms. All the hallmarks of the prairie style are here. It's low and horizontal. It's made out of
09:29Roman brick. He has these huge roof overhangs. Walls that rise up from the landscape as planters
09:35and then become the house. So the building transitions from the earth to the roof. And of course the
09:41blending of interior and exterior materials. So he brings the brick that he builds the house out of
09:46into the interior. It is in many ways the most elegant example of the prairie houses. So at this point
09:51in time there are a series of radical changes in Wright's personal life. These would lead him to
09:56uproot his life and reinvent himself as well as his architectural style in new surroundings. He left
10:02his wife and six children and left the United States to go to Europe with Martha Borthwick Cheney,
10:07known as Mema. Cheney was a translator and an early figure in the feminist movement who Wright considered
10:13his intellectual equal. After two years in Europe, Wright returns in 1911 and settles in Spring Green,
10:18Wisconsin, where he builds himself a new house that he called Taliesin, which means shining
10:23brow in Welsh, Wright's ancestral home. So it employs sort of all his ideas of the prairie style.
10:30In 1914, while Wright was in Chicago overseeing the Midway Gardens construction,
10:35tragedy would befall Taliesin. A deranged worker murdered Cheney and her two children,
10:40along with four others, and set the house on fire. Wright would rebuild, but the tragic incident left a deep
10:46wound and effectively marks the end of Wright's works in the prairie style.
10:52Shortly after, Wright was invited to Japan to design the Imperial Hotel. Wright was strongly
10:57influenced by Japanese art and architecture and was an avid collector of Japanese prints and
11:02sculptures. And so it is ironic that when he received his first commission in Japan,
11:06he looked to other cultures for inspiration for the design. It seems to be somewhat inspired by Mayan
11:12and Native American art and architectural forms, which would continue to influence his work going
11:17forward. In 1919, a new period of Wright's architecture began, this time in Los Angeles.
11:24So this is the Hollyhock House. And there are still many elements of the prairie style here,
11:29where it spreads out horizontally along the land. And he keeps these low walls that act as planters in
11:36some cases, and others, terraces. But obviously, Wright is looking at something new. And he's created these
11:43heavy roof forms that clearly appear to be Mayan in their influence. So now, instead of using brick,
11:52he's using stucco, which changes the whole flavor of the house. Instead of having a base, and then a freeze,
12:00and then a roof, now the roof sits directly on the base. There's no intermediate zone of the facades.
12:08The other thing Wright does, because now we're in a very warm climate, is he has a lot of the windows
12:15facing inward towards an interior courtyard instead of along the exterior. So he takes another idea of
12:23bringing nature and the outdoors to the interior. But here, he borrows from the Spanish colonial, and he
12:31actually creates a courtyard with gardens and hanging plants, then wraps the house around that. So the
12:38Hollyhock House is named for the flowers that grow wild on Olive Hill, where the house was built. This
12:43house, with its massive roof and Mayan-inspired forms, would lead to a new period for Wright, one based on
12:49innovation and technology. So this Mayan-influenced design continued with the textile block houses
12:54in the Hollywood Hills, which we talked about in our Haunted House video. These houses employed
12:59blocks cast in concrete with ornamental designs in the mold, and were connected with steel reinforcing
13:05rods to create these elaborate and intricate designs. These included the Ennis House, the Freeman House,
13:11the Stora House, and the Millard House, known as La Miniatura, which is in Pasadena. These blocks were
13:17sometimes perforated and sometimes opaque, and the textile blocks were created on the site where the
13:22house was built, using the earth and sand and stones from the ground on which they were constructed.
13:27This was core to an idea that Wright had been exploring since the early days of the Prairie
13:32style, a guiding design philosophy which he called organic architecture. In his own words, he said,
13:39no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. Hill and house
13:46should live together, each the happier for the other. And although the idea of organic architecture
13:51had informed his entire career since he first conceived of it in 1894, he would continue to hone
13:57this idea even further in two of his most famous houses, Taliesin West and Falling Water. With the
14:04onset of the depression after the crash of 1929, Wright found himself without any work, and he decided to
14:10create a fellowship where he taught his ideas and principles of organic architecture. Edgar Tafel wrote a
14:15terrific book on the fellowship called Apprentice to Genius. I always encourage aspiring architects
14:20to read it. If after they read it they're not inspired, I tell them they should consider a
14:24different profession. So in 1927, Wright goes to Arizona. He gets a commission to collaborate on a
14:30design for a hotel in Phoenix, designed for the Biltmore Company with one of his former students.
14:35There he discovered the dry arid landscape appealed to him and decided to purchase land outside of Phoenix
14:41in Scottsdale. It was here that he would design and build Taliesin West, which would both embody his
14:46ideas of organic architecture and serve as a place where he could teach them to a new generation of
14:51American architects. In fact, the apprentices participating in Wright's Taliesin Fellowship
14:56contributed greatly to the creation of the estate, not only contributing to its design, but also taking
15:02part in its fabrication and construction, mixing cement, installing frameworks, and even quarrying
15:07stones. The finished estate was called Taliesin West, and it is now the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright
15:14Foundation. So this is Taliesin West, and what I find remarkable about it is how it echoes the forms of
15:20the hill behind it. This is a great example of Wright's maxim to build of the hill and not on the hill. So you
15:27can see he's still using elements from the prairie style, he's using materials from the site like he
15:34did in the Los Angeles houses, and it's all coming together to form this new kind of organic architecture,
15:40one that echoes the desert landscape. But now he's trying to shield the really hot desert sun, and so he
15:47does a few interesting things. Over here on the right, he creates these exterior beams that sit above the roof
15:56and are angled up. He hangs what was originally canvas from it, but is now a sort of polycarbonate
16:03plastic material. The idea being that it would allow the light in, but without too much heat.
16:08Let's take a look at the house from another side. I love how he echoes the hill in a number of
16:13different ways. He echoes the hill by canting the concrete walls of the base. He echoes the hill by the
16:19slope of the wooden beams on this roof, and he echoes the hill with these stairs that gradually,
16:28very gradually, make their way up with these very short risers and deep treads. So that again, it looks
16:35like part of the landscape has just come right down through the building. So the other thing is the way,
16:41you know, this wooden roof hovers above the stone base. And his same idea as he had with the prairie
16:49style where in that gap he puts glass so that the roof appears to hover. So what really shows his
16:55ideas of organic architecture at play here are the materials. He's doing something really special here
17:00with the concrete, and he's doing it on the exterior as well as on the interior of the house. So concrete
17:07is essentially three ingredients. It's cement, which acts as glue, it's water, and it's aggregate. And the
17:14aggregate is typically gravel-sized stones that are quite often not even exposed. But in this case,
17:22Wright is doing something radically different. And he's taking stones and rocks and boulders even that
17:29he finds on the site around the building, and he's inserting them into the concrete so in effect
17:36they're acting like aggregate. And what I love about this is the aggregate here is so big that it's sort of
17:44going right up to the point where, is this a stone wall with like excessive amounts of mortar? Or is it
17:51a concrete wall with really huge aggregate? And I love that there's sort of an ambiguity about that.
17:57He's using what he finds at the site to reinforce his idea of organic architecture. And the other thing
18:03it does in Wright's ideas about organic architecture is it brings the outside in. So the materials he uses
18:10on the exterior are used on the interior. So Taliesin West stands today as an incredible example of Wright's
18:15philosophy of organic architecture. But the next house we're going to look at is considered by many
18:21to be his greatest work. This is falling water. There was an apprentice at the Taliesin Fellowship,
18:27Edgar Kaufman Jr., whose father was a department store magnate. Edgar Kaufman Sr., known as E.J.,
18:34asked Wright to design a country house for him in the woods about an hour south of Pittsburgh. This
18:40house, arguably one of the most famous in the world, would bring Wright, at almost 70 years old,
18:46a new wave of notoriety. Considered a modern masterpiece, the house is composed of a series
18:52of stacked balconies like concrete trays cantilevering out over a waterfall. Glass fills the horizontal
18:59voids between the trays. So one way to look at this is that these trays move up the mountain from the
19:05falls. But the other way to look at it is they actually cascade down the mountain just like the
19:11waterfalls. So most architects would have placed the house with a view of the falls, but not Wright.
19:18Wright puts the house on top of the falls. He basically asks E.J., the owner of the house,
19:25where do you sit? And he said, well, I sit on this rock. And he built the house around that rock on top
19:31of the falls. In fact, the rock surface is visible coming through the floor of the living room inside
19:38the house. He was bringing the idea of organic architecture to a whole other level. It becomes
19:43one with the falls, a unified whole. Architecture and nature acting together. And the other thing he does
19:50is these windows actually open from the corner. So again, he's still with his idea of breaking the box
19:56and opening up the corners. So we're going to look at another angle of the house, which really shows
20:01how the house is an evolution from his early prairie style designs. What's great about this image is you
20:09really feel the cantilevers of these concrete terraces. And the other thing I really like about it is you could
20:15see the trellis that he created that's half inside and half outside. You could see how he brings a stair
20:22right down to the falls so you could actually sit on this lower landing and dangle your feet into the
20:28water. I have visited this house twice over the years, and it's an incredible revelation just how
20:35melded together he makes the architecture with the surrounding natural landscape. So modernism had been
20:41flourishing in Europe for almost 20 years with architects like Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and
20:47Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And Wright was not a fan of this group. The house is an astonishing example of
20:52modern architecture. It was almost as if Wright, contemptuous of the European architects, said,
20:58you want to see a modern house? I'll show you a modern house. After falling water, Wright starts to look at
21:02other building arrangements. He is expanding his ideas about plan, using new shapes, hexagons and triangles and
21:09circles to create new kinds of layouts and spaces. But the next notable evolution of his style was less
21:16focused on novel compositions and more focused on the needs of everyday people.
21:23So at the same time that falling water is being built, Wright is approached by an old friend who
21:29was a journalist from Wisconsin, who asked if he could design an affordable house for the everyman,
21:34not just the wealthy, one that would cost $5,000. Wright embraced that challenge and set out some
21:41guidelines for what he called his Usonian houses. The term is an acronym for the United States of
21:46North America and was another advancement in Wright's quest to create a uniquely American style of
21:52architecture. So this is the Herbert Jacobs House, the first Usonian that Wright built. And we're looking
21:58at a view from the rear of the house, but a lot of things are evident when you view it. So the Usonian
22:03house has the following characteristics. Natural materials, wood, stone and brick. Flat roofs with
22:10extended overhangs to shade windows. Parallel to the earth, a companion to the horizon. No gutters or
22:16downspouts. Claristory windows for natural lighting. L-shaped plants to fit around a garden in harmony
22:22with nature, designed to blend with the surrounding landscape. Built-ins to reduce furniture and clutter.
22:28No painting. Cover the walls in wood and oil the wood as necessary. No plastering. Interior trim is
22:34eliminated. There's no basement. It's just a slab on grade. And in that concrete slab, he actually put
22:39heating coils so that he created a radiant floor for a very affordable house, which is kind of incredible.
22:45He was an early adapter of that innovative technology.
22:50Okay, so this is the front of the house, which has a completely different feel. So I love the contrast
22:55between the two sides of the house. So you can see that the rear of the house has a ton of glass
22:59to let the nature come inside. But the front of the house is much more concealed. The side that faces
23:06the street has very few windows, just this line of Claristory windows under the roof overhang.
23:11So instead of lots of glass along the street where everybody could look in, Wright was basically
23:16advocating, put all the glass on the back of the house where it's more private. The house ended up costing
23:22$5,500, including the architect's fee of $450. He imagined these houses being built in bulk to bring
23:28the cost down even further. Wright would design over a hundred Usonian houses scattered all over the
23:34country. And he did this after the age of 70. He never stopped exploring. He never stopped trying
23:40to create new things. And he never stopped evolving his style. Frank Lloyd Wright's career in many ways
23:46defies categorization. There's simply no way we could unpack the entirety of Wright's work in a single
23:51video. In this video, we focused primarily on his residential projects. But we've left out many of
23:57his other works, including Unity Temple, the Larkin Building, the Price Tower, the Johnson Wax Headquarters,
24:03Midway Gardens, the Guggenheim, the Marin County Center, the Synagogue in Elkins Park outside of
24:10Philadelphia, Florida Southern College, and the list just keeps on going. It's really a remarkable career,
24:17and in many ways unmatched by any other architect ever. What is your favorite Frank Lloyd Wright
24:21building? And let us know what other architects you'd like to learn more about.