Frank Lloyd Wright On The West Coast, Mark Anthony Wilson, c. 2014.
Coffee table book in our apartment on Brazos Blvd, Euless, TX.
Chapter 1: A Prairie Among the Palms: The Stewart House, Santa Barbara County, 1909
Chapter 2: A Mayan Temple in Hollywood: The Barnsdall (Hollyhock) House, Los Angeles, 1917 - 21
Chapter 3: Pre-Columbian Monuments in Concrete: Four Southern California Houses, 1923 - 25
Chapter 4: From the Coast to the Desert: Other Southern California Houses
Chapter 5: A Unique Usonian: The Buehler House, Orinda, California, 1948 - 49 (Orinda, CA: just a few miles east of Oakland, CA)
Chapter 6: From Carmel to the Central Valley: Other Northern California Houses
Chapter 7: A Gift to These Golden Hills: The Marin County Civic Center, 1957 - 69
Chapter 8: From Commerce to Religion: Other Public Buildings in California
Chapter 9: North by Northwest: Houses in Oregon and Washington
Appendix: List of Frank Lloyd Wright's West Coast Buildings Open to the Public
Photographs:
- Frank Lloyd Wright, office, at Taliesin West, c. 1958, p. 9.
- Millard House, Pasadena, CA, 1923 - 24, view from garden with guesthouse toward mainhouse.
- Robie House
- Marin County Civic Center
Usonian: Wright's name for his simple modular type of housing he promoted as being adaptable to varied environments and affordable for the average middle-class family in the Northwest (Washington state and Oregon). Usonian homes all built in the 1950s during the last decade of his life.
Most of his California houses were also built in the Usonian style, between 1938 - 1958.
Taliesin: his home in Wisconsin. Link here.
Chicago's Hyde Park. Prairie School homes, the first modern homes.
"Breaking the box," page 10.
Notes will be continued elsewhere.
The Robie House, 5757 South Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park.
Frank Lloyd Wright: 1867 - 1959.
Born just after the US Civil War; 48y/o during WWI; and 78 years old in 1945, WWII.
Whitefish, Montana, link here.
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Now, To Explore FLW
Nice place to start: an overview of his original home.
His home in Wisconsin, a "woke" statement, LOL
The Home and Studio sits on the ancestral lands of the Potawatomi, Miami, Kickapoo, and Peoria Nations. Today, Native peoples from over 100 tribes live in the Chicago area, one of the largest urban American Indian communities in the United States.
But I'm also in my Native American phase so it was fun to see these tribes / nations named. Amazing all the US place names that come from Indian names. Peoria was a new one for me. And I'm always reminded why there is a "Miami" outside of Florida. Which begs the question: why is there a "Miami" in Florida?
Timeline:
- b. 1867, just after the US Civil War
- raised in Wisconsin
- Unitarian faith
- mother: member of Lloyd Jones clan; Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Unitarian faith in the Midwest
- University of Wisconsin
- apprenticed in Chicago
- opened his own successful Chicago practice in 1893 (age 26)
- by 1901 (age 34), had completed 50 projects: have since been identified as the onset of the "Prairie Style"
- left first wife Catherine "Kitty" Tobin for Mamah Cheney in 1909 (FLW - age 42)
- to Europe, 1909, for one year, the Wasmuth Portfolio
- the murder of Mamah and her children and others at his Taliesin estate by a staff member in 1914 (FLW - age 47)
- notable public works, 1900 - 1917: Cornell University; Hillside Home School; Unity Temple
- Japan, 1917 - 1922; the Imperial Hotel, completed in 1923
- 1922: Kitty Wright finally granted FLW a divorce; required to wait one year before marrying Maude "Miriam" Noel; her addiction to morphine led to failure of marriage
- 1924: FLW met Olga; child born, 1925
- early 1920s: the textile concrete block system: first -- the Millard House in Pasadena, CA, 1923; Ennis House, Samuel Freeman House, both 1923;
- after WWII, the concrete block system updated --> the Usonian Automatic system
- tempestuous marriage with second wife Miriam Noel (m. 1923 - 1927)
- 1925; another fire destroyed the bungalow at Taliesin; rebuilt, named Taliesin III
- 1926: Olga and FLW accused of violating the Mann Act; arrested in Tonka Bay, MN; charges dropped. Story here.
- divorce from Miriam Noel finalized in 1927; again, had to wait one year to re-marry
- third wife, Olgivanna Lazović (m. 1928 - 1959)
- Taliesin West (Scottsdale, Arizona): winter home and studio in the desert from 1937 until his death
- 1959: died at 91 years of age;
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To explore:
the Taliesin Fellowship;
Fallingwater (1935): "the best all-time work of American architecture."
Prairie School movement of architecture;
Usonian home in Broadacre City;
Chapter 1: A Prairie Among the Palms: The Stewart House, Santa Barbara County, 1909.
It begins:
By 1909, at the age of 42, Frank Lloyd Wright had earned a solid reputation as America's most innovative architect. During his 16 years of private practice he had created an impressive body of work in dozens of cities across the Midwest and the Northeast, and his articles and essays on architectural theory had gained the respect of architects and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. His design for the Prairie-style Robie House in Chicago three years earlier was hailed as the prototype for twentieth-century residences. Yet in the fall of that year, Wright risked everything he had achieved by running off to Europe with Mamah Cheney, the wife of one of his cliets, leaving behind his wife and six children. But shortly before he left, he completed the design for his first building on the West Coast, the George and Emily Stewart House in Santa Barbara County. This house remains standing today nearly as he designd it, and is one of only two examples of Wright's Prairie-style houses ever built on the West Coast (the other is on the grounds of Hollyhock House in Los Angeles).
Chapter 2: A Mayan Temple in Hollywood: The Barnsdall (Hollyhock) House, Los Angeles, 1917 - 21
It begins:
The Hollywood Hills were still mostly open grassland in 1919, the year Los Angeles oil heiressAline Barnsdall bought a 36-acre tract called Olive Hill on a hilltop above Hollywood Boulevard, just west of Vermont Avenue. The village of Hollywood had been incorporated into the city of Los Angeles in 1910, andthe first movie to be filmed there by D. W. Griffith, working for the Biograph Company,had begun production that same year. But the hills remained largely undeveloped, until the first major hilside residential tract was laid out in 1918.
Chapter 3: Pre-Columbian Monuments in Concrete: Four Southern California Houses, 1923 - 25
It begins:
Concrete was a material that Frank Lloyd Wright began experimenting with in (sic) the early 1900s.
Chapter 4: From the Coast to the Desert: Other Southern California Houses
It begins:
After completing. his last textile block house int eh 1920s, Wright never used this method again on any of his houses in California. Instead, between 1939 and 1959, he designed four very different homes in Southern California that are as varied as theunique landscapes they occupy. These house range from a magnificent retreat perched atop the mountains above Malibu to a spacious and light-filled family home on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
Chapter 5: A Unique Usonian: The Buehler House, Orinda, California, 1948 - 49 (Orinda, CA: just a few miles east of Oakland, CA)
It begins:
The phone call came quite unexpectedly early one morning As Maynard and Katherine Buehler later recalled, it was an unusual conversation. When they picked up the phone, a man with a confident tone in his voice said, "This is your architect calling. I'm going to be in San Francisco for a while (sic). I'll be staying at the St Francis Hotel. Let's there for breakfast tomorrow at 8 a.m." It was Frank Lloyd Wright.....Orinda, CA.
Chapter 6: From Carmel to the Central Valley: Other Northern California Houses
It begins:
During the 50 years Frank Lloyd Wright was designing buildings in California, he spent much more time in Southern California than Northern California. In fact, Wright moved his office to Los Angeles in 1923, and lived in that city for the next two years before moving to the Midwest (see Chapter 2). However, he designed a total of seven houses and three public buildings in Northern California between 1936 and 1959. Wright also had a office in San Francisco from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, during the time he was designing the V. C. Morris Gift Shop and later the Marin County Civic Center. During those years he often spent a few weeks at a time staying at hotels in San Francisco, and occasionally with clients were were also friends. Though he once disparagingly described San Franciso as a "city made of shanties," there is plenty of evidence from letters and interviews that he actually liked the City by the Bay, as well as the rest of Northern California. He also occasionally had kind words for some local architects, wuch as Gardner Daily and William Wurster, although he never praised the region's most respected architect, Bernard Maybeck, for whom he seemed to feel a keen sense of rivalry.
Chapter 7: A Gift to These Golden Hills: The Marin County Civic Center, 1957 - 69
It begins:
The hills in the eastern part of Marin County take on a golden yellow hue for most of the year. their soft, rounded contours, sprinkled with scrub brush and clusters of live oaks, rise and fall in gentle waves as they undulate across the landscape. This is the setting for the most distinctive government complex in the United States, and the only government complex in the United States, and the only government project designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that was ever built. The story of how it came to be, and the heated controversy it created when Wright first proposed his design, is one of the most interesting stories in the history of American architecture.
Chapter 8: From Commerce to Religion: Other Public Buildings in California
It begins:
Chapter 9: North by Northwest: Houses in Oregon and Washington
It begins:
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