9781422271834

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

Originality in architecture is the creative aesthetic element. In this, as the reader will probably have already anticipated, Frank Lloyd Wright was a master for whom the aesthetic inspiration was the prime mover: Wright’s own contention was that designing a house is like painting a portrait. The historic and stylistic character of architecture in America had, for obvious reasons, originated in the prevailing European models of the time. Insofar as the first colonists had experience of architectural style, it would have been an awareness of Renaissance forms, developed from the original inspiration of the Classical architecture of Greece and Rome, or from the architectural forms that emerged during the early growth of Christianity in the extraordinarily creative period known as the Medieval or the Middle Ages. It would be true to say that the character of European architecture derives from one or the other of these two sources or has been a composite of the two for almost the whole course of its history. From the sixteenth century, when the extent of Eastern civilizations increasingly came to be discovered, there was some reflection of these sources in a number of exotic buildings, but they remained essentially a peripheral influence. It remains true that, from the sixth century BCE , the highest point of Greek culture, to the nineteenth century throughout Europe, a strength and creative energy existed that produced the styles that have dominated architectural history (invading even Eastern societies in turn) and have provided the criteria by which the form of Western architectural quality has been established.

PLATES 6 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Own House and Studio, Oak Park, Chicago, Illinois 1889–1909

As the Wright family became larger, it was necessary to build a bigger dining room, and the original dining room became the children’s playroom. Above: One of four columns designed to form an imposing and decorative entrance to the house.

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