What Makes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture So Iconic?

Hey there fellow travelers, Jocelyn with Walter's World. And this video today is about arguably the United States' most known architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a thousand buildings, 400 of which, I should say structures, not just buildings. Anyway, 400 of those were built and one of those is behind me. This is actually one of the last four that was built in his lifetime. This is a Usonian house and it reflects sort of more modest, middle-class American environment for a home and we're going to talk a little bit more about that. So come join me inside, I'll show you around and talk about Frank Lloyd Wright and the architecture of the Usonian home. Welcome to Woodside, built in 1955 for Dr. Richard Davis and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. So this house is, as I said, a Usonian house and Usonian houses were meant to be for the more normal people, middle-class people, not just the wealthy, which was a really cool thing for somebody like Frank Lloyd Wright, who is this prolific, high architect, right? I mean, he's sort of the king of architects for most common people. We all sort of know who he is, right? And we know his work, but for him to be designing for the average American is really like a big thing. And so the Usonian house sort of reflects those values. It's simple, they're smaller than his, like we think of his prairie style and falling water and those things that are just big homes. This is much more simple, it has less ornamentation. I say that as you look at all of this, right? But this is pretty much all there is. It's all about the details with Frank Lloyd Wright and he was sort of a control freak. It was whole house design. Literally, there are trash cans that mimic this diamond shape that is repeated in the floors and in door pulls. I mean, literally, it's all over the place, even in the steps going up the hallway. In relation to things like door pulls and lights and things like that, right, the things we think of as fixtures, he said they're of the building, not fixtures on the building. So they were part of this whole design thing and like I said, he was kind of a control freak. But in that, we get these amazing, brilliant, whole house designs. And so with that Usonian thing, his whole house design, the idea of it actually, in his mind, went into design for cities too. It was everything should be cohesive, not necessarily the same, but one great thing instead of a quarreling collection of so many things is how he would describe his vision for Usonian America. And that's definitely reflected in these houses. Everything goes together. These houses were designed in zones rather than separate rooms. So this is the living room, right, that's what we would call it, but it easily flows into the dining room and into the kitchen. But then you have the living wing. Actually there are two in this house. The first one was built with this house and then the other was an addition in 1960, so it was built five years later and it is absolutely seamless with the rest of the design. But you have those two bedroom wings, those are zones for sleeping and the private areas, right? But the rest was very open and open concept was very new at this time. We all want open concept now, right? He divided those zones not by walls, which was new. They're visually divided. For instance, as you go around this corner, you'll come into the dining area and it's separate but it's still the same room. So again, zones, not so much rooms. Like most of his houses, this is built out of masonry and wood and glass. Those were his three main things. The masonry in this house is really cool because it's these big like cinder blocks, right? They're massive. They're not just like little bricks, right? All of the vertical joints where they meet have been made flush so you don't see them but all the horizontal ones have been raked. And they go in like about an inch, maybe three quarters. And they create those horizontal lines and those horizontal lines, as you can see from the outside, this whole house has this massive, perfect horizontal line that comes out from the hill behind the house. And then in the middle, it's broken up by that teepee shade. And the teepee, I kind of want to talk about that. He was inspired by the teepees of the Sioux and in this teepee, you can see it right here behind me, is the fireplace, which in a teepee is where you would build the fire so that the smoke would rise and not, you know, make everybody cough and gag all night long. So he kept that same thing and it totally breaks up this long, linear line and I love it. So as I talk about like wood and glass and masonry, all of these red columns, I'm going to use that term for everybody, it makes it easier. All of these, they look like they're steel but they're not. They're all wood and I just think that's really cool. Also on the roof, all of that is board. Again, he's using wood and there are these long, linear boards, not like, you know, asphalt shingles and things like that because those would totally break up his perfect design. Typically, the Usonian house is more L-shaped so you have like the, like I said, the public area and the private area so those zones were separated with that geometrical sort of shape for the whole house. And as you can see as we walk down the hallways and we look in the bedrooms, it's very much on a human scale except for this room with this teepee thing and it gets all echoey and it's very big and it's, but you don't ever feel like you're in a space that is super voluminous. You get the idea of it but it's not overwhelming and that's due to all of these cantilever pieces coming down. They kind of bring down that soaring space at the top and it still feels like it's a very human sort of space. I think Frank Lloyd Wright was a little bit ahead of his time. So he is known for these cantilevered eaves and they are on his prairie style but they're also, he carried them over into Usonian houses and they're great because they help with passive solar heat. They also kind of give natural cooling during the summer. They also oddly bring in a lot of light. You would think that with those eaves and these cantilevered windows that you wouldn't get a ton of light but this house is full of light all the time. Until it gets completely dark, you're pulling light in everywhere and it doesn't feel like you're going to have a lot but right now I don't have a single light on in this house. The sun is directly overhead. It's not coming in directly in any one of these windows but we still have a ton of natural light. You don't have to hardly turn on a light at all except in the hallways. In those hallways, I feel like I'm on an airplane when I'm in them. This house particularly has very narrow halls but they still have these windows all along the top that bring in light. It's just that the other side is completely dark because that's where the bedrooms and things are and it's also very narrow but again on human scale. So most of these houses have large fireplaces. One house he built actually had like a two-story straight up tall fireplace so you could put whole logs like you didn't have to cut the branch into logs. It was just like 10 feet tall and you just throw it in there. Not a good practical design on his part but it looked really cool. So this large fireplace is wide and not tall so it actually functions and it has a stove in it. I don't actually know if that stove, I think that stove is a recent addition. I don't think that was his design but it actually fits his space pretty well. Along with the big fireplaces and he's thinking about heat and you know the passive solar things and he's really smart about energy, right? So ahead of his time. There is hot water heated coils underneath these very cool concrete floors so you have radiant heat. Radiant heat, I feel like we think of as such a new thing you know in the most recent century, right? But he was doing this in the 1950s and man we should kind of like pay more attention to the great architects of the past because they were sort of ahead of their time and could probably teach us a little something about energy consumption. Well at least Frank Lloyd Wright could. So this house is only one of 60 Usonian houses. The budget for them was typically about $10,000. Remember this is the 1950s, you can't get anything for $10,000 anymore let alone one designed by one of the country's greatest architects. So $10,000. Like most of Wright's projects, they always went over budget and I don't know what this one is entirely finished for but it wasn't $10,000 because I did find something that said it went over budget. It just didn't say by how much. So I'm not sure that I would have loved to work with Frank Lloyd Wright and some of these buildings as a preservationist, it's kind of tough to work on them because there is so much masonry, it makes the job a little bit harder and the wood, water and wood don't mix folks and there is a lot to always be fixed on these things because of that. But you want to stick with it, right? So I don't know, he made the life of preservationist a little bit more difficult but totally worth saving because these things are so unique and they were so thoughtful about the people living in them. Dr. Davis met Frank Lloyd Wright as a doc and patient sort of thing and that's how he got into this and they sat and they talked about what he wanted and how he wanted things built and I'm sure builders and architects do that but Frank Lloyd Wright took that and then made it his vision in such a big way. He stayed true to his design and his ideals but he gave the Davises what they needed in their home on a daily basis. So I'm just going to take you around and show you some more shots of this great place and I kind of want to just go outside to the back where you can see how Frank Lloyd Wright used this sense of place. He was very big on sites and you can see from the hill at the back where the roof where the master bedroom is almost meets that hill and then keeps that linear, that horizontal line going all the way through to the front of the house but he uses the land and doesn't interrupt it although he's put something on it and it's sitting above it, it still melds into it because of that line and he's left trees and things really close to the house that are just absolutely beautiful and it's kind of embracing it, it stands out but it also melds in beautifully and I just want you to see that outside because his sense of place was such a big thing to him. One thing I'd like to add is that you can rent this house, you can actually stay in the Frank Lloyd Wright house and it has sort of been one of the joys of my architectural life to stay in this home and as I started digging on that, there are actually a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright houses that you can rent. You can also do that with other architects so if you're really into this, go take a weekend like we have and go spend a couple days in an architectural masterpiece and really get the sense of what those great architects wanted us to understand and feel about their work. So you can find quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright all over the internet, the man was prolific in his talking, kind of like I have been in this video. Anyway, there is one that always sort of hits me as a traveler and I just want to share this with you and I don't want to get it wrong because I'm using my phone and I took this, it's actually a picture from a book called Programs and Manifestos of 20th Century Architecture so I know that it's good. Avoid like poison the American idea of quick returns. Take plenty of time and go as far away as possible from home. That, go as far away from possible as home. He meant that to go to young architects so that they would go and explore and see things and look at sites and buildings and be inspired and also see what they wanted to change but I think for me as a traveler that speaks, you know, I love my country and I love my home and I love to go to other places and learn about their culture and let it influence me in my daily life and I think that's definitely what he meant for young architects but to influence their building. Anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed this. I'd like to kind of continue this series with Frank Lloyd Wright but also talk about architecture because our built environment is such a big part of what we do when we travel. You go and you see buildings and museums and churches and, you know, homes and all sorts of things and our built environment is a reflection of us as people and who we are and what we're doing at the time that it was built so I think I'd like to continue this a little bit. Let me know what you think. You can put all the comments in below and just be kind and I hope that you've enjoyed this. So, bye from Woodside in Marion, Indiana.