How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed America

In the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Michael Wyet­zn­er talks about a fair few build­ings we’ve fea­tured over the years here on Open Cul­ture: the Impe­r­i­al Hotel, the Ennis House, Tal­iesin, Falling­wa­ter. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still stands as the embod­i­ment of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture more than 65 years after his death. That’s a fair­ly long stretch by mod­ern stan­dards, but nev­er­the­less a short­er one than Wright’s career, which ran over 70 years. Dur­ing his long life, Wyet­zn­er explains, Wright wit­nessed the intro­duc­tion of indoor plumb­ing, elec­tric­i­ty, the tele­phone, the auto­mo­bile, the air­plane, the radio, tele­vi­sion, and space trav­el — and even giv­en that, his archi­tec­ture shows a dra­mat­ic evo­lu­tion.

Begin­ning with Wright’s appren­tice­ship in Chica­go under Louis Sul­li­van, “the father of mod­ernism,” Wyet­zn­er con­tin­ues on to his devel­op­ment of the hor­i­zon­tal indoor-out­door “Prairie Style” house; his Japan­ese com­mis­sions and sub­se­quent much-pho­tographed Los Ange­les hous­es; the emer­gence of his phi­los­o­phy of “organ­ic archi­tec­ture” meant to uni­fy the build­ing with its site and nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment; his dis­cov­ery of the desert; and his Depres­sion-era con­cep­tion of the “Uson­ian house,” which adapt­ed his refined spa­tial sen­si­bil­i­ty for Amer­i­can-style mass pro­duc­tion. This would be more than enough for even the most dis­tin­guished archi­tec­t’s career. Yet it does­n’t even get around to such projects as the Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters, the R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, or his first and last dog­house.

No mat­ter which peri­od of Wright’s career you exam­ine, you can find evi­dence for his belief in the inspi­ra­tion of place, in organ­ic aes­thet­ics, in struc­tur­al expres­sive­ness, and even in indi­rect moral instruc­tion. Yet it’s also pos­si­ble to imag­ine that, in some sense, a series of dif­fer­ent Frank Lloyd Wrights exist­ed, repeat­ed­ly destroyed and recre­at­ed by pro­fes­sion­al set­back, per­son­al dis­as­ter, for­eign sojourn, immer­sion in a new land­scape, or even acquain­tance with a new tech­nol­o­gy. Sure­ly no one could remain pro­duc­tive to the end of his 92 years with­out a lit­tle re-inven­tion. Dur­ing that time, he designed more than 1,000 projects, only about half of which were ever built. Young archi­tects who idol­ize Frank Lloyd Wright would do well to remem­ber that he, too, knew full well the sting of nev­er mak­ing it to con­struc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Great­est Archi­tect? – A Free Stream­ing Doc­u­men­tary

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.