GROUP-4

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

SHREYA SINGH - 09
APARNA GUPTA - 22
ANVI TOMAR - 32
Introduction

1. ARCHITECTURE STYLE FOLLOWED-

● PRAIRIE STYLE
● USONIAN STYLE
● ORGANIC STYLE
1. MAJORLY WORKED IN NYC, CHICAGO, FLORIDA (USA)
2. MAJORLY WORKED ON RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS
3. ICONIC WORKS - Falling Water, Guggenheim Museum, Robbie House
4. Principles • Natural materials • Skylights • Organic • Unified design of an enclosed space • Open plan
and flowing spaces divided by screens and planes • No applied articulation • Integrated openings •
Horizontal lines integrated with each other.
Prairies - The rolling grasslands
Prairies are enormous stretches of flat grassland with
moderate temperatures, moderate rainfall, and few trees.
When people talk about the prairie, they are usually
referring to the golden, wheat-covered land in the middle of
North America.

The U.S. states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana,

Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado,
parts of Chicago and New Mexico, and the Canadian
provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan make up
the Great Plains.
Frank Lloyd Wright Studio, Oak Park
Renowned American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most
ground-breaking design was infact for his own Home and Studio in
Oak Park, Illinois, built at the age of 22.
Wright’s furniture designs were used and presented harmoniously
with the architecture; the design of the table and chairs remain part
of Wright’s organic architecture philosophy, with their fluidity
working in tandem with the home. Wright’s Egyptian pendant lights
were the same, and his influences were experienced also by guests,
with design detailing signifying his travels. For instance, Japanese
ceramics and small Greek sculpture replicas were displayed on
window ledges, with Japanese rice paper used to dim the lights
above the main dinner table.
The central fireplace design with seating right next
to it can also be found in most of Wrights’ other
designs. There was always a play with the flow of
space.

The Children’s Playroom is another key example of

Wright’s organic architecture. This room was
designed to be multi-purpose, allowing the children
to do as they pleased in the large open space. It
could hold performances, small theatre shows, and
Wright even taught kindergarten in the children’s
Playroom. Lotus lamps were also added to the
Playroom after the Wrights returned from Japan,
and their design compliments the strikingly colourful
stained glass windows.
The bathroom currently displayed in the Wright
House is the original from 1889. At the time, it was
unusual for a middle class home to have such a
bathroom design, yet Wright designed it for
functionality and practicality.

The house continued to change and evolve, and in

1911 Wright even installed a two-car garage next to
the house.
Prairie Style Architects
● Percy Dwight Bentley ● George Washington
● John S. Van Bergen Maher
● Lawrence Buck ● John Randal McDonald
● Ransom Buffalo ● Dwight Heald Perkins
● Barry Byrne ● William Gray Purcell
● Alfred Caldwell ● Isabel Roberts
● Alden B. Dow ● Robert C. Spencer
● William Drummond ● Francis Conroy Sullivan
● George Grant Elmslie ● Claude and Starck
● Marion Mahony Griffin ● William LaBarthe Steele
● Walter Burley Griffin ● Trost & Trost
● Edward Humrich ● Andrew Willatzen
● E. Fay Jones ● Taylor Woolley
● Henry John Klutho ● Frank Lloyd Wright
Organic
Architecture
and
Usonian Style
 USONIAN & ORGANIC DESIGN BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
● Wright started a trend
known as Usonian, which is a
type of organic design.
● What is Usonia?
● Design elements of Usonian
houses

Wright’s living room of his home in

Usonia | Photo: Rich L. Wang &
Architectural Digest Seven Hidden Gems from Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Period
Usonian Houses

Hanna House

https://in.pinterest.com/pin/720435271631273330/
 Usonian Houses
Tonkens House

https://www.modernnati.com/single-post/2018/04/30/tonkens-house
 The term "Organic Architecture" was coined by the famous
architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), though never well
articulated by his cryptic style of writing:

"So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture:

declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the
teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to
now serve the whole of life, holding no traditions essential to the
great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form xing upon
us either past, present or future, but instead exalting the simple
laws of common sense or of super-sense if you prefer determining
form by way of the nature of materials..."
- Frank Lloyd Wright, an Organic Architecture, 1939.

● (PDF) "Organic Architecture"

● History
Falling Water

https://www.archdaily.com/60022/ad-classics-fallingwater-frank-lloyd-wright
https://www.archdaily.com/60022/ad-classics-fallingwater-frank-lloyd-wright
https://www.archdaily.com/60022/ad-classics-fallingwater-frank-lloyd-wright
Falling Water
Materials in Constructions

Steel, glass, stone, wood, concrete

Furniture
• Built-in and freestanding furniture.
• The furniture was constructed of plywood and veneered with North Carolina
black walnut.
Kitchen
Kitchen included steel cabinets
Tower windows
The floor-to-ceiling windows minimize the boundary between interior and
exterior space.
Canopy
The floating and cascading character of the canopy echoes those same rhythms in
the house.
Colour
Two colors- light ochre for the concrete and Cherokee red for the steel.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Design
Problems
Taliesin West

AD Classics: Taliesin West / Frank Lloyd Wright

AD Classics: Taliesin West / Frank Lloyd Wright
AD Classics: Taliesin West / Frank Lloyd Wright
Materials
Local rock set in wooden forms and bound by a mixture of cement and desert
sand.
Roofs
Roofs were made out of sheets of canvas that were stretched over large redwood
trusses.
Style
• Microcosm of his Usonian community
 • Location-Tokyo, Japan
• Construction System-masonry
• Style-Early Modern
• Built from 1917 through 1923,
Wright’s Imperial Hotel was a
testament to the architect’s
enduring appreciation of
Japanese art and culture. The
architect wrote that his design
reflected neither American nor
Japanese architecture, rather it
was, “an architect’s sincere
tribute to a unique nation, a
building that respects Oriental
tradition, at the same time that
it keeps its own individuality as
a sympathetic friend on
Japanese soil.”
Imperial Hotel
Built on a far grander scale than any of Wright’s previous commissions, the 250-room
hotel was approximately H-shaped in plan, arranged around a large courtyard and
reflecting pool. Wings containing guest rooms flanked either side and extended towards
the rear of the site. In order to combat the dangers of Japan’s frequent earthquakes, the
building was engineered on a floating foundation with reinforced steel.
Wright chose a mix of materials, including reinforced concrete and brickwork. Ōya stone,
a Japanese volcanic tuff rock featuring hues of grey and green, also featured and was
carved into decorative patterns by local craftsman to reference traditional Mayan designs.
However, the building's ornamentation and interlocking planes were also suggestive of
historic Japanese architecture.
These materials remained exposed inside the three-storey lobby area, which featured a
central atrium wrapped by two floors of balconies that host socialising areas.
Light filtered in through long, vertical windows that were placed to offer different views of
the garden and the city beyond.As a result, the hotel is one of the earliest examples of
Mayan Revival, a modern architectural style that took cues from the architecture and
iconography of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures.
• Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in
Tokyo was renowned for withstanding the
earthquake of 1923 (Great Kantō
Earthquake), when nearly all other
important buildings were destroyed by
seismic activity or fire.
• The building also withstood the American
bombing of the city during the second
world war, but its foundations were left
damaged. It was demolished in 1976 to
make way for a new, modern high-rise
structure.
Characteristics of Usonian Houses
Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian Houses - A look at the Rosenbaum House
Classification of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buildings

S. No. Building Name Style Type

1 Robie House Prairie Residential

2 Hanna’s House Usonian Residential

3 Guggenheim Museum Organic Museum

4 Falling Water Organic Residential

5 Taliesin West Organic Former residence, presently a Historical Landmark

 A Definitive Statement: Organicity as
Intrinsic and Integrated
Clearly frustrated by the misuse and

Wright’s misunderstanding of the ideas underlying

organic architecture, Wright wrote in 1953 a
Square Paper on the “Language of an Organic
Principles Architecture.” Starting with the observation that
“organic (or intrinsic) architecture is the free
architecture of ideal democracy,” he established
a lexicon to explain his meaning (with the bold
text emphasized in the original):
 NATURE
More than clouds, trees, terrain, and animal life, Wright intended for
nature to refer to the nature of these things as well as the nature of
materials, the nature of a plan, a sentiment, a tool “from within”—an
“interior nature” or inherent principle around which everything is
composed or defined.
 Wright looked at this term in a
technical rather than vernacular
ORGANIC sense, with reference to an entity or
an integrated relationship among
partners. “Organic means
Part-to-Whole-as-Whole-is-to-Part.
So Entity as integral is what is really
meant by the word Organic.”
 FORM Elaborating on his numerous earlier
pronouncements on this relationship,
FOLLOWS Wright observed that “Form is predicated
FUNCTION on function but, so far as poetic
imagination can go with it without
destruction, transcends it… Only when we
say or write ‘Form and Function are One’
is the slogan significant.”
•
 Wright hated the sentimentalization of
romance and beauty, calling it
reactionary. Instead, his romance
referred to the creativity, the act of
creation, and in particular the creation of
“humane expressions of form” in contrast
to inanimate facades. “Poetry of Form is
ROMANCE as necessary to great architecture as
foliage is to the tree, blossoms to the
plant or flesh to the body.” He eschewed
the “mechanization of building,” by which
he seems to refer to the stripped bare
work of Corbusier and other practitioners
of the International Style, unless it serves
creative architecture.
 This Wright relates to “Truth,” by which he
refers to a principle of universal applicability.
Wright compares the idea of Truth to a genus
(bird), from which may flow many species
(“flocks of infinitely differing birds of almost
unimaginable variety”); he states that “flocks
TRADITION of traditions may proceed to fly from generic
tradition into the unimaginable many,” but that
they lack creative capacity because they are
“only derivative.” “Truth is a divinity in
architecture.”
ORNAMENT

Wright believed that integral ornamentation

was to architecture what efflorescence of a
tree or plant is to its structure—“of the thing,
not on it.” Ornament was emotional in its
nature, emerging from “the character of
structure revealed and enhanced.”
SPIRIT
“Spirit grows upward from within and outward,” existing “within a thing itself as its very
life.” The quality of spirituality in a building, Wright believed, could not be bestowed
externally.

THIRD DIMENSION
Here Wright distinguished a spiritual quality from physical existence, observing that the third
dimension is not thickness but rather “a sense of depth which issues as of the thing not on
it,” intrinsic to a structure. It is a depth of character in a sense, rather than a physical
dimension.
SPACE/STYLE

Perhaps the most elusive of Wright’s definitions, he refers to

space not as a fixed quantity or volume, but rather as an action, a
motivating force, “the continual becoming: invisible fountain from
which all rhythms flow to which they must pass. Beyond time or
infinity.” In Wright’s organic architecture, space is “the breath of a
work of art.”
The notion of organic not as a thing, but as the character of a thing, living
and active as an intrinsic quality that emerges in varied forms responsive to
the surrounding environment—this becomes Wright’s essential principle. As
any living thing grows from within and adapts to its environment in that it
may thrive, so Wright appears to have believed that buildings should grow
from within and be adapted to its environment.

Wright’s work embraced qualities of living based on the relationship with nature.
Expressed not only in ribbons of windows, but in the use of natural light to
illuminate and warm spaces, the creation of temperature gradients and Venturi
structures to accelerate airflow for natural cooling, and the creation of structures
inspired by plants to support great mass with grace, Wright saw the means by
which we could use nature’s influence to improve the quality of our built
environment, without the use of brute force that would harm the surrounding
world or make humanity insignificant.
 Organic Architecture and
the Sustaining Ecosystem
• Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation President and CEO
Stuart Graff identifies how Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic
architecture translates to the call for a more sustainable
built environment.
• Perhaps the most elusive concept in all of Frank
Lloyd Wright’s work is the notion of “organic
architecture,” a thing that Wright struggled to define
(and redefine) through his lifetime. For Wright,
organic architecture was the essence of his
creativity—the thing that made his work distinct,
superior, and unquestionably American—and also
a thing that responded to the challenges of
modernity, technological advance, and social
change.
 The Early Concept of Wright’s Organic
Architecture

“A knowledge of the relations of form and function lies at the root” of the architect’s work, Wright wrote in In the Cause of
Architecture (1908), and this he would formulate into six core propositions of organicity:
• Simplicity and repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work. From this, Wright saw the need to simplify the
design of a structure, reducing the number of distinct rooms and rethinking them as open spaces, including even those to be
contained within a single room. Windows and doors should be treated as part of the ornamentation of a structure, and even
furnishings be made a part of the structural whole. In true democratic fashion, the style of a building should respond to the
unique personality of the individual with which it is associated.
• A building should appear to grow easily from its site, and be shaped as if it was itself created by nature for and from that
landscape.
• Color should derive from fields and woods to fit with these natural forms.
• The nature of the materials from which a building is constructed should be expressed freely.
• Buildings must be sincere, true, gracious, loving, and filled with integrity.
Thank
You!

Presentation by:
Shreya Singh (09)
Aparna Gupta (22)
Anvi Tomar (32)