Frank Lloyd Wright was born to a determent woman, her husband left her with three small children in a small town in Wisconsin, she decided even before her first child was born that he will be a great architect. She taught herself new means of education, ordered by mail for him an innovative leaning kit that included blocks and paper cuttings, this taught young F.L.W the sense for clean forms, lines and special combinations of volumes. He worked in his uncles farm for two years where he absorbed organic forms & a feeling of being close to the nature. He arrived in Chicago at 18, and started working in an Architecture firm as a drawer/sketcher. The third inspiration source was Japanese art that he saw at an international fair at 1893 in Chicago. He absorbed the rules of Japanese architecture, that include, and inner skeleton of pillars, low roof that extends beyond the walls of the structure, division of the inner space by moving partitions and large panels that slide to the side & open the house to the garden surrounding it. All these are Japanese influences that he incorporates into the prairie houses he planed and built in the first two decades of the 20th century. The Prairie houses have totally changed the face of architecture.
Wright felt that an affinity exists between architecture and nature that harmony can be expressed only by the horizontal line that expresses mans proximity to the earth as appose to the vertical line that is preferred in neo-classical architecture and that distances man from earth. Another feature of neo-classic architecture that Wright abolished was the strict symmetry- he changed it into dynamic dissymmetry. The prairie house hugs the ripples of the earth and pull to the horizon with their low lines, giving a sense of forward movement. The division of the inner space to small cubicles was transformed onto continuance open space that its different functions are defined by the partial parting the window strips that surround the house, allow for continues viewing of the landscape and merge the outside and the inside of the house. Ceilings the prelude out side the house, create open terraces that again merge nature with the house.
Another idea that Wright created was a service core in the middle of the house that includes all utility roles; the fire and water elements were the center of the house like a mystic force.
Ruby house, built in Chicago in 1909. The house is retreating from the street in series of horizontal lines protecting the privacy of his residents, while opening to the private garden surrounding it.
Falling Waters house, 1936, Pennsylvania., was built for the Kaufman family as a weekend retreat , it is perhaps the highlight of the prairie houses. The house in part extends beyond the cliff it is built on one side and retreats into the cliff like a natural cave on its other side. An original bolder of the mountain is incorporated into the living room as a fireplace.
"Every great architect is also a great poet, he has to understand the spirit of his generation". (Frank Lloyd Wright, London, 1939)
Scully, Vincent, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: George Braziller Inc., 1960
Blake, Peter, Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space, Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc., 1965
Wright, Frank Lloyd, The Art and Craft of the Machine, 1901
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