For more than 70 years, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) dedicated himself to architecture. More than 1,100 designs and 535 built works endorse the prolific career of one of the most influential architects of the first half of the twentieth century. With a personal style in which he combines the perfection and function of buildings with their surroundings, Lloyd Wright managed to pave the way for “organic architecture”. He was also the driving force behind open spaces, known as “open floor plans”. His work was totally disassociated from the predominantly European architecture of those times to create the American style. He was born in Wisconsin surrounded by nature, so it is not surprising that his work took on that natural aspect. After finishing his engineering studies he moved to Chicago where he worked in two studios as a cartoonist and then began his solo career.
In 1892 he completed his first work as an architect, the Charnley House in Chicago. This was followed by a series of single-family homes characterised by a compact and austere style, opposite to what was done at the time. He also made the so-called “houses of the prairies”. In them we can already see some characteristics of his conception of architecture: horizontality, the interior organized in two crossed axes and the prolongation of the roofs in the form of porticoes.
A detailed review of his work would be impossible. From Chicago we choose La Robie House, in the Hyde Park neighborhood, designed with horizontal lines and wide spaces. Also the Unity Temple and Wright’s Studio House, in Oak Park, where he began to develop the use of helical forms.
Forms that achieved worldwide fame in one of his masterpieces: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The museum was one of his last projects as an architect. There he experimented with a new conception of space, based on the natural development of curved plants in continuum. In the first decade of the twentieth century, and after trips to Japan and Europe, he built the Taliesin I house in his native Wisconsin for his family. However, it was tragically destroyed by a fire that killed his family. This affected him so much that for a few years he left the United States and moved to Japan, where he worked in the style of traditional Japanese palaces at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. In 1921 he returned to America and rebuilt Taliesin twice. In the following years he focused on more theoretical work. He returned to practice with works in which reinforced concrete played an important role. From this moment arises another of his most outstanding works, the Kaufmann House or Waterfall House, which adapts perfectly to the staggering of the terrain and extends the interior space outwards in a search for integration between architecture and nature.
We cannot fail to highlight the Taliesin West complex, in Phoenix, where he managed to unite all the formal elements of his work.
From Wright’s legacy, subsequent architecture has received a source of inspiration to harmonize the continuity of the environment with the exterior of the buildings, uniting nature and architecture and creating an expressive space inside that gives prominence to abstract volume.
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