https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist
Look up the word architecture in the dictionary, and though you won’t actually find a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright, it may feel as if you should. Or at least it will feel that way if you’re looking in an American dictionary, given that Wright has been regarded as the personification of American architecture longer than any of us have been alive. Exactly when he gained that status isn’t easy to pin down. Like all architects, he began his career unknown; only later did even his early solo works from around the turn of the twentieth century, like his private home and studio and the Unity Temple, both in Oak Park, Illinois, become sites of pilgrimage. By 1935, however, Wright’s name had long since been internationally made — and unmade.
Fortunately for him, that was the year he designed the Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. House, better known as Fallingwater, which is now widely considered his masterpiece. Naturally, Fallingwater appears in one of the videos included in the playlist of short documentaries on Wright’s houses from Architectural Digest at the top of the post.
It could hardly have been otherwise; nearly as unignorable are his Arizona home and studio and his much-filmed Maya revival Ennis House in Los Angeles. Through these videos, you can also get tours of his lesser-known works like Toy Hill House in Pleasantville, New York; Tirranna in New Canaan, Connecticut; and the Circular Sun House in Phoenix, Arizona, his final realized home design.
For all the varied interests he pursued and influences he absorbed, Wright did stick to certain philosophical principles, some of which Architectural Digest has traced in its videos. Using three different houses, the one just above illuminates perhaps Wright’s single most important guiding idea: “A home, he believed, should not be placed upon the land, but grow from it, natural, intentional, and inseparable from the environment around it.” As his architecture evolved, he increasingly “treated the landscape not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator,” creating “spaces that invite the outside in and express the essential principles of organic architecture.” Wright’s houses can thus be stunning in a way we might’ve only thought possible in a natural landscape — and, as generations of buyers have found out by now, just as unruly and demanding as any purely organic cultivation.
Related content:
Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Greatest Architect? — A Free Streaming Documentary
A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpiece
What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius
That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles — A Free Online Documentary
Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketches of Broadacre City (1932)
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.
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