The architect-philosopher
What allowed the maverick Frank Lloyd Wright to become, without even seeking it, the leader of modern American architecture, were the values he carried with the fervor of a missionary. Wright always rejected all forms of academicism. He trained on the job with Louis Sullivan, one of the masters of the Chicago School. Both shared the same vision of an architecture in harmony with nature and resolutely American (Wright was often inspired by pre-Columbian motifs for his massive facades). He was also the defender of an egalitarian society where architecture would be designed for all. Everything must be designed with the human being as a standard. This is why he gives so much importance to interior spaces that are like the projection of each person's inner world, rich and unique. He also defends an honest architecture, based on the intrinsic qualities of the materials he works with like a craftsman. Wood, stone, brick, cement, glass - under Wright's gesture, often described as expressionist, the materials come alive, notably thanks to the light, which seems to be integrated into the materials. This is particularly the case in his California Villas. This importance given to light and interior spaces is found in his forays into the architecture of administrative buildings. In 1905, he revolutionized the genre with the Larkin Company building, a fortress housing a large interior volume bathed in zenithal light. thirty years later, he took this concept a step further with the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, which houses an incredible interior space punctuated by mushroom-tree-like pillars with illuminated buttonholes at the corners. Wright abhorred the city, yet it inspired him to create amazing buildings that broke with urban monotony, like his most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a spiral walk through art history and the embodiment of a democratic idea of artistic enjoyment. This philosophy of architecture was spread by Wright in the two communities he created, first in Wisconsin and then in Arizona, which he named Taliesin. Manifestations of harmony with nature and the fight against urban corruption, these communities were the first manifestations of a thought that he would later develop in his Usonian houses, houses that brought together the individual and the landscape in an organic unity of life and symbols of the American Way of Life. These houses were the starting point for Broadacre City, his utopian city project. An optimistic and democratic city, Broadacre is the epitome of the paradox that is Wright. Centered on the work of the earth, thought in unity with nature, Broadacre nevertheless makes a great deal of room for the car, an indispensable condition for its proper functioning. Wright was therefore not the romantic that was sometimes decried, but a visionary who had already understood the future upheavals that the great metropolises would experience. His hundreds of achievements attest to Wright's prolific genius as he fulfilled his mother's dream of seeing her son become the greatest architect in the United States.
Prairie Houses
At the end of the 19th century, the first residential suburbs of Chicago were still surrounded by vast expanses of nature. These "prairies" inspired Wright's Prairie Houses. These detached houses are the emblem of the organic architecture he championed. For Wright, a building is organic when the exterior and interior are in harmony and when they are in keeping with the character and nature of its use, design and site. The rooms are no longer simple closed boxes that fit together, but large, flowing spaces that allow air and light to enter; horizontal lines parallel to the ground are favoured so that each house fits its location; the roofs are wide and slightly pitched with projecting eaves to protect the openings; the substructure is raised to serve as a pedestal; the general plan is liberal and generous, giving the human element its full place; the use of ornamentation based solely on the nature of the materials used ensures overall harmony; the organic ideal is pushed to the point of including the heating-lighting-plumbing elements and the furniture as architectural elements that become one with the whole building. All these houses are also built around a key element: the chimney, whose verticality creates a dynamic asymmetry. Wright thus invents a warm and luminous way of living. His Oak Park studio home (Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio) is one of his first attempts, and it is already showing all the sober elegance that characterizes Prairie Houses. But it is undoubtedly the Frederick C. Robie House in Hyde Park that represents the quintessence of this style, with its long living room and its articulation in stepped progression towards the central hearth. In Riverside, Illinois, Coonley House is one of the largest Prairie Houses ever built. It is in fact a complex of several houses laid out according to an aggregated plan where all the spaces interpenetrate. Other famous Prairie Houses include Willits House (Highland Park, Illinois), with its cross-shaped plan around a large fireplace, and Roberts House (River Forest, Illinois), with its large living room connecting the two levels of the house. But the building that Wright considered "his jewel" is the Unity Temple in Oak Park. He did absolutely everything there, including the stained glass windows and furniture. The temple shines with fluidity, harmony and balance. Finally, even though it was built nearly 30 years after the first Prairie Houses, one could not finish this overview without mentioning the most legendary of all Wright's houses, the House on the Waterfall or Fallingwater (Bear Run, Pennsylvania), a masterpiece of organic architecture.
The Prairie Houses are a poetic reinterpretation of the family home and an expression of Wright's sincere and harmonious architecture.
In 2019, UNESCO classifies eight emblematic achievements of the architect's work as World Heritage Sites, including the Unity Temple and Robie House in Chicago, Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison and Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
