Born in Richland Center, Wisconsin in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright
(June
8,
1867 –
April 9,
1959)
was an American
architect, interior designer, and
educator who designed more than 1,000 projects in his lifetime, turning
more than 500 of those into completed works.
In 1940, he established The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to protect,
preserve and administer his life’s work. In 1991, Architectural Record
magazine published a list of the 100 most significant buildings in the
world - 11 were by Frank Lloyd Wright. His legacy is one of
America’s foremost cultural treasures, and was recognized by the
American Institute of
Architects in 1991 as "the greatest American architect of all time".
Between 1900 and 1917, his
residential designs were considered "Prairie
Houses", a style known for its horizontal lines, flat or low,
sloping roofs with broad overhangs, windows in horizontal clusters,
integration with the landscape, solid construction, and unfinished
materials. He also had an affinity for traditional Japanese art
and design, which made it's first appearance in his work with the
Wescott House (built between 1907 and 1908), in Springfield, Ohio.
Other notable structures of this period include the Avery
Coonley House in
Riverside, Illinois,
and the Frederick C.
Robie House in
Chicago.
During the 1920's, he
designed many innovative structures, beginning with Graycliff. The
Graycliff estate was a complex design that incorporated three buildings
and expansive grounds that featured cantilevered balconies, and a
transparent "screen" of windows that allows views of the lake through
Graycliff's largest building, the Isabelle R. Martin House. Perched atop
Lake Erie, Wright's designs for Graycliff's grounds incorporated
features that echo it's watery setting: a pond, a fountain, sunken
gardens and stone walls in a waterfall pattern that surround the
property. Always being one to add a
unique touch to his work, Graycliff aligns with the setting sun on the
Summer Solstice.
One of Wright's most famous private residences was constructed from 1935
to 1939 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -
Fallingwater. It was designed
according to Wright's desire to place the occupants closer to natural
surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the
building. The buyers own engineers argued that the design was not
sound, and though they were overruled by Wright, the contractor
secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. In 1994,
the building was examined by Robert Silman and Associates, and a plan
was developed to restore the structure. In the late 1990s, steel
supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed
analysis could be done. In March 2002,
post-tensioning of the lowest terrace
was completed.
Wright's most recognized masterpiece, The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is a
building that Wright worked on for over 15 years (1943–1959), and is one
of the best known museums in New York City. The building rises as
a off-white spiral from its site on
Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park.
The interior twists from the ground floor to the top of the building,
with paintings displayed along the walls of the spiral and supplemented
by viewing rooms along the way. Its unique central geometry was
meant to allow visitors to experience
Guggenheim's collection of
"non-objective" paintings with ease by taking an elevator to the top
level and then viewing artworks by walking down the slowly descending,
central spiral ramp, which features a floor embedded with circular
shapes and triangular light fixtures, complementing the geometric nature
of the structure.
The
Price Tower is a nineteen story,
221-foot high tower in
Bartlesville,
Oklahoma, and is also the inspiration
for the Hexagon 12" tabletop globe. It is
the only realized skyscraper by Wright, and is one of only two
vertically-oriented Wright structures (the other is the
S.C. Johnson Wax Research Tower in
Racine,
Wisconsin). It opened to the
public in February 1956, and was occupied by the H.C. Price company
until it was sold to Phillips Petroleum in 1981. In 2000, the
building was donated to the Price Tower Arts Center, a museum of art,
architecture, and design. Along with the Arts Center, the
Inn at Price Tower,
Copper Restaurant & Bar, and the
Wright Place museum store are the
current major tenants. In 2002,
Pritzker Prize winning architect,
Zaha Hadid was commissioned to design a
museum expansion for the Price Tower Arts Center - a project that was
included in the 2006 retrospective exhibition of Hadid's work at the
Guggenheim Museum. On
March 29,
2007, Price Tower was designated a
National Historic Landmark by the
United States Department of the Interior.
In addition to the many buildings and designs
that he has left us, Frank Lloyd Wright's views on architectural space,
ornamentation, relationship to site, concerning the place of
architecture in art, life and philosophy have inspired generations of
architects and artists all over the world, and for that we are a much
better place. |
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1-World Global Gifts
