Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
b. Richland Center, Wisconsin, 1867;
d. Phoenix, Arizona, 1959.
Frank Lloyd Wright was the most talented famous architect of the c20; an American with Welsh ancestry. He was inspired by his mother to become an architect. Boyhood summers on his uncle’s farm embued a love of nature. Wright’s first building dates from 1886. In that year, as a young man, he was cited as job architect of Unity Chapel, Helena Valley, Wisc., designed by J. L. Silsbee. From then until his death he produced countless architectural projects; in 1974 it was estimated that some 433 buildings remained extant. His own publication output was phenomenal and he and his pupils, admirers, writers and critics produced about 2000 noteworthy items. Wright became a legend in his own lifetime; his lifestyle and extra-marital affairs scandalized America. He was claimed as the model for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead; it was also rumoured that he was a near communist. He had to fall back on farming as a way of surviving during lean times. The first period of his career was connected to the indigenous Prairie School and followed his short apprenticeship to his Lieber Meister Louis Sullivan of Adler & Sullivan. Wright’s family houses for middle-class businessmen, with “gently sloping rooves, low proportions, quiet skylines”, initiated a spatial revolution, where rooms were not box containers but were volumes overlapped and interpenetrated. In 1909, with his lover Mrs Mamah Cheney (n?e Borthwick), Wright travelled to Europe, where his early work was published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth (1910-11). It had a profound influence on continental architects. In 1913 Wright was in Japan, where he secured the Imperial Hotel commission. It brought him fame when it failed to collapse in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Wright’s own world, however, had collapsed in 1914 in the most appalling circumstances when he was building Midway Gardens, Chicago; Mrs Cheney and her two children were murdered. Apart from the Imperial Hotel he did little work until the textile block houses for the Los Angeles area of the mid-1920s. These include the famous Millard House. Some of the West Coast houses were supervised during construction by his son, Lloyd Wright. A year later he began the most important relationship of his life with Olgivanna Hinzenberg, a Gurdejieff disciple, whom he married in 1928. The second most successful period of Wright’s career followed, with many important houses, including the two Taliesins, Kaufmann’s “Fallingwater” and the Johnson Wax Company offices in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Johnson house, “Wingspread”. Wright believed in and promoted an “organic” architecture and way of life within a framework that was democratic, even at times utopian (e.g. the Broadacre City and Mile High projects, and his “Usonian” houses - a concept of modest dwellings close to earth, for the average American). During his “international” period of the 1930s, he visited the USSR and gave the Princeton and Sulgrave Manor lectures, which effectively summarized his philosophy. In 1941 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. In the post-war period large-scale projects followed, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Marin County Court and offices as well as more houses, theatres, churches, and auditoria.
Major buildings /works:
Prairie School houses in and around Chicago, Illinois, including Oak Park (Unity Temple, Own Studio and House (now museum), Fricke, Martin Gale and Cheney Houses etc.); River Forest (Winslow, Roberts Houses etc.) and Riverside (Coonley Residence etc.), from 1890. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1915 (Annexe, 1916). Millard House “La Miniatura”, Pasadena, California, 1923. Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wise., from 1925; Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1937. S. C. Johnson and Son Offices, Racine, Wise., 1934 (Research Tower, 1944). Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr Residence “Falling Water”, Bear Run, Penn., 1935 (Guest House, 1938). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue, New York, 1956. Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, ASU, Tempe, Arizona, 1959.
Bibliography:
F. L. Wright, An Autobiography, London, New York and Toronto, 1932 (new eds. 1943, 1977).
On Architecture, 1941, and The Future of Architecture, 1953 (his major lectures).
W. A. Storer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
R. L. Sweeny, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography, Los Angeles, 1978.
Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1979 (now reissued as Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York).
Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1987.
Filed Under W on June 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
J?rn Utzon
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J?rn Utzon
b. Copenhagen, 1918.
J?rn Utzon, a Danish Modern architect studied at the Academy of Arts, Copenhagen, under Kay Fisker and Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1937-42), and spent the war years 1942-5 with Gunnar Asplund. In 1946, J?rn Utzon visited Alvar Aalto in Helsinki. He travelled in Europe (1947-8) and the USA and Mexico (1949), then established his practice in Copenhagen (1950) working with other architects on competitions. In 1956 his design for the Sydney Opera House won first prize. Utzon worked from Hellebaek until 1962 when he moved to Sydney, Australia; in 1966 he returned to Denmark following his resignation from the project, which was completed by others. In 1972 Utzon moved permanently to Mallorca in Spain. He is at his best when designing structures beside the water, as with the Sydney Opera House (1956-73) and his own magnificent house, “Can Lis”, on Mallorca (1971). The Kuwait National Assembly Complex (1971-9, completed 1983), his most important work after the Opera House, uses the forms of the bedouin black tent for its monumental concrete hanging roofs. The Bagsvaerd Church hides its voluptuous shell vaults behind austere concrete and white-tiled stepped facades crowned by triangular skylights. The humanism and sensitivity of Utzon’s domestic architecture are best expressed in the anonymous, self-effacing but subtle group housing of the late 1950s and his own house on Mallorca. J?rn Utzon, a famous modern architect gave Modern architecture a new poetic dimension that marked an influential departure from the functionalism of the 1950s while it built on the broad Scandinavian foundation of Asplund, Jacobsen and Aalto, by adding the quality of “cultivated intimacy”.
List of major buildings / works
IA Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, 1956-73
Kingohusene Housing Estate, near Elsinore, Denmark, 1957-60
Architect’s house, Santanyi, Mallorca, Spain, 1971
Kuwait National Assembly Complex, 1971-83
Bagsvaerd Church, Copenhagen, 1976.
Bibliography
J?rn Utzon, “Additive Architecture”, Arkitektur 1, 1970.
J?rn Utzon, ?J?rn Utzon and the Third Generation” in S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th ed., 1966
P. Drew, Third Generation, Stuttgart, 1972.
“Can Lis” and “J?rn Utzon on Architecture”, Living Architecture, No. 8, 1989.
Filed Under U on June 26, 2008 | 1 Comment
Antonio Sant’Elia
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Antonio Sant’Elia
b. Como, 1888;
d. Monfalcone, 1916. I
Only two years before his tragic death in the First World War, a famous architect, Antonio Sant’Elia had published a spirited manifesto accompanied by a collection of visionary drawings which were to become some of the most potent architectural images of the Twentieth Century. He studied architecture in Como, receiving a diploma in 1905, at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and subsequently at the Scuola di Belle Arti in Bologna, where he received his diploma in 1912. Early influences included both Vienna Secession and Stile Liberty architects, but it was a fasci?nation for the soaring skyscrapers of Chicago and New York which provided the inspiration for the drawings of Sant’Elia’s utopian metropolis ? the Citt? Nuova. His drawings evoke a Brave New World where the machine is omnipotent and the city consists of monumental tow?ers and stark abstract forms. In 1912 he joined with several radical Milanese architects, including Mario Chiattone and Marcello Nizzoli, to form the Nuove Tendenze group, which rejected the dogma of history in order to embrace technology and the future. Sant’Elia contributed to the group’s first exhibition some two years later. His preface to the catalogue, entitled the Messaggio, was slightly reworked and published under the title Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. This seminal document echoed much of the Futurists’ propaganda by attacking the anachronisms of the past and calling for a new order focused on the machine age.
List of major buildings / works by Antonio Sant’elia:
Memorial to the War Dead (designed, after a sketch by Sant’Elia, by Enrico Prampolini, completed by Giuseppe Terragni and Enrico Prampolini, Como, 1933). Almost 300 drawings and projects.
Bibliography
Eric Langenskiold, Michele Sanmicheli, the architect of Verona, Uppsala, 1938.
L. Puppi, Michele Sanmicheli, Padua, 1971.
Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, Cambridge, 1970.
Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London, 1977.
Luciano Caramel and Alberto Longatti, Antonio Sant’Elia ? The Complete Works, New York, 1987.
Filed Under S on June 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Paolo Soleri
Paolo Soleri
b. Turin, 1919.
Paolo Soleri - Visionary Italian architect and planner who has created the word “arcology”, combining architecture and ecology. Educated in Italy between the world wars, Soleri graduated as a Dottore in Architettura from the Turin Politecnico in 1946. Apprenticeship for sixteen months with Frank Lloyd Wright followed. His first building, the Dome House at Cave Creek, Arizona (1949), was designed and constructed in collaboration with Mark Mills. In Italy from 1950, Soleri worked in Turin and on the Amalfi coast before returning to the USA in 1955. Since 1956 he has worked alone from “Cosanti” studios at 6433 Doubletree Road, Scottsdale, Arizona, with the continuing assistance of apprentices. Soleri’s naive but telling penetrations into the conventions of society are a particular response to the horizontal suburban consumptive culture of the surrounding Phoenix metropolitan area. Although early projects were based on bioclimatic principles and later proposals insist on energy and ecological responsibility, these techniques are less visible than Soleri’s Utopian “megastructure” ideas, best seen at Arcosanti, his ongoing urban experiment in Arizona. He is exceptional in expanding the dimensions of design responsibility. Yet with single structure urbane visions for millions Soleri insists on “miniaturization”. In a spiritual quest inspired by Teilhard de Chardin he pursues imploded human and social intensity through three-dimensional density in experimental buildings, visionary proposals and inspired writing and lecturing. His Architectural Vision exhibitions were seen in major N American cities in 1970.
List of major buildings / works:
Ceramica Artistica Solinene, Vietri sul Mare, Italy, 1953.
Cosanti Studios, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1956-74.
Proposals for Luxembourg Bridges, 1958; and Space for Peace since 1980.
“Arcosanti” under construction since 1970.
Bibliography:
Paolo Soleri, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, MIT, 1969;
Paolo Soleri, The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri, MIT, 1971;
Paolo Soleri, The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit, 1973. JC
Filed Under S on April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
b. Kraljevec, Austria, 1861;
d. Dornach, Switzerland, 1925.
Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher and spiritual teacher who developed a new style of architecture for his Anthroposophical Society. He was a Goethe and Nietzsche scholar, largely self-educated, who developed an interest in the polarity between science and nature. Educated at the Vienna Technical College, he embarked on a lifetime’s search to bridge the knowledge gap between matter and spirit, an idea that was thoroughly explored in his unconventional architecture towards the end of his life. He admired the German architect Gottfried Semper, having been taught by one of his disciples, Josef Baier, but he viewed Semper also as a material functionalist and one who “led everything artistic back to technique”. Steiner was more interested in intuition, creativity and clairvoyance. He gave a series of lectures on architecture at Dornach in 1914 during the building of the First Goetheanum, which was destroyed by fire (1921-2). These and subsequent talks form the basis of Steiner’s new style in architecture, which his followers adhere to. There has been a revival of interest recently in Steiner’s ideas which is closely associated with “organic architecture”.
Filed Under S on April 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Robert Adam
Robert Adam
b. Kirkcaldy, Fife, 1728;
d. London, 1792.
Unquestionably Scotland’s most famous architect and one of the most celebrated of British architects. He formed a fertile repertory of new ideas on a visit to Italy (1754-8), and at his return to London he was determined to become the leader of classical revival in England in architecture and decoration. His ability to select and use motifs from the classical antique in an original way led to his success, and his interior designs are one of the finest expressions of C18 artistic achievement. Adam had decided, whilst still in Italy, to measure the ruins of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro. This experience helped him to abstract the essential details of antiquity, and then infuse them with a personal slant composed of many component pieces. Robert was the second surviving son of William Adam (1689-1748). Himself the son of a builder, William had become one of the first strictly classical architects working in Scotland. He owed a little to the two principal architects of the previous generation, Sir William Bruce (c.1630-1710) and James Smith (c.1645-1731), and he used architectural forms as they did, from a wide variety of sources. This gave a “vigorous and sometimes over-dressed character” to the facades of his houses. The same might, unfairly, be said of his son’s interior schemes. The most unusual of the interior wall treatments Robert created were those which were based on Etruscan vase decoration. The Etruscan Dressing Room at Osterley Park, Middlesex (1775-6), is the only substantial survival of at least eight such rooms; its fans, palmettes, painted pedestals, urns, sphinxes and roundels of disporting classical figures make a unique pattern. It breaks with the servitude to antiquity in an original way. Adam decorative schemes are associated with a lavish use of colour. This can be observed not only in the actual settings but in their surviving drawings. Some nine thousand of these survive (Sir John Soane’s Museum, London), and often surprise by their strength and clarity of colour. The Adam style was created by a true eclectic who incorporated lightness, smallness of ornament, colour, and archaeological, Italian, French and Renaissance influences. That it has enjoyed lasting approval is due to the quality of Robert Adam’s directing, if ruthless, mind, which was backed by superb craftsmen and, thanks to his acute business sense, by a family firm to supply all the building materials needed.
List of major buildings / works
Hatchlands, Surrey, 1758-61.
Harewood House, Yorks., 1759-71.
Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1760-70.
Osterley Park, Middx, 1761-80.
Syon House, Middx, 1762-9.
Nostell Priory, Yorks., 1766-70.
Newby Hall, Yorks., 1767-80.
Saltram, Devon, 1768-9.
Chandos House, 2 Queen Anne Street, London, 1771.
Royal Society of Arts, London, 1772-4.
20 St James’s Square, London, 1772-4.
20 Portman Square, London, 1775-7.
Bibliography
Robert Adam, The Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, 1764.
Robert Adam, The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1773-9, 1822.
William Adam, Vitruvius Scoticus, 1810.
John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, London, 1962. Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Robert Adam, London, 1978.
John Gifford, William Adam, Edinburgh, 1989. GB
Filed Under A on April 20, 2008 | 1 Comment
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