Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

At 20, he moved to Chicago and designed for six years individual housing projects for three architecture firms: L. Silsbee, Adler and Louis Sullivan. After going to Japan and a brief partnership with Cecil Corwing (1893-1896), with whom he developed his projects of Prairie houses, Franck Lloyd Wright created his own agency in 1896. For the architect, the ideal detached house is first and foremost a shelter. Asymmetric and horizontally stretched, it has to easily blend into nature (very few of his constructions are in urban environment), and be made out of natural rocks but also of more recent materials (steel, metal, terracotta). These houses must have discreet entry, European leaves, big central chimney and cantilevered and low slope roof. From 1908, Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the concept of “organic architecture”: the form of each room of the house must easily result from its function. In other words, “form and function are only one thing”. Aiming at discovering new horizons, Frank Lloyd Wright lived in Europe from 1909 to 1911. He spent time with German, Austrian and Dutch avant-gardists (Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe…) and influenced a great number of future architects during his exhibition of projects in Berlin in 1910. “What is architecture anyway? Is it the vast collection of the various buildings, which have been built to please the varying tastes of the various lords of mankind? I think not. No, I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived…So, architecture I know to be a Great Spirit.” — Frank Lloyd Wright ©Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
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