Wrights Principles For Organic Architecture example essay topic

In 1867 when Frank Lloyd Wright was born into this world, the history of architecture from all over the world was forever changed in many ways. Frank Lloyd Wright always had a reverence for nature and preached the beauty of native materials and insisted that buildings grow naturally from their surroundings. Wright always had a positive perspective on all his designs. He was never a destructive architect and just wiped out all the trees and landscape to create a house. Frank Lloyd Wright designed his buildings to be lived in and experienced in person, not to be seen in drawings and photographs.

All of Wrights's styles including the Prairie, International United States of North America and Guggenheim all had a quality of conservation, preservation, and modernism that would support nature and the home and office buyers in the 20th century. The buildings that Wright built over his career vary so drastically from one another that it is difficult to describe exactly what the "Wright style" is. This is because there is no real style, but a design principal that they are all based on. It is the embodiment of Wright's principles that are seen, and the principle of organic design is the tread binding them all together He extolled human values, and his architecture did likewise. However different each of his works is from any other, however unique in beauty and originality, they have grown out of certain basic principles. Organic architecture- natural to the time and place for which it is designed, natural to the man for whom it is built- is in fact architecture of basic principles.

All of his styles that he created were so modern and ahead of his time. In addition to all of his modern designs, he was the first architect to design a house with plumbing installed and a extensive use of electricity throughout his designs. Without the contribution of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs of houses, offices, furniture, fabrics, textiles and graphic arts we wouldn't be where we are today in modernized architecture and wouldn't have a basis of today's homes and offices all around America. There is no other architecture that took greater advantage of setting and environment. When Wright himself stated he was the greatest architect of all time, no one came up with an opposing argument. Wright not only produced more buildings than nearly every architect, but he also produced more unquestionable masterpieces than any single practitioner.

No other architect glorified the sense of "shelter" as did Frank Lloyd Wright. "A building is not just a place to be. It is a way to be", he said. That's why Frank Lloyd Wright's importance in history cannot be overstated, because of his ideas in architecture; he brought every facet of the industrial revolution into the basic design of business complex's and homes, changing the lifestyle of America for the 20th century.

Wright only word to describe all of his architecture was the word "organic". He formulated six major design principles in defining organic architecture. The first was that simplicity and repose should be the measure of art. Achieving these qualities required the elimination of all that is unnecessary, including interior walls. Wrights second principle called for as many different styles of house as there were styles of people. Having multiple styles obviated the perennial question of historical styles, which had preoccupied many architects throughout the 19th century.

The third principle correlated nature, topography, and architecture. Wright said "A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings". If a building had no natural features to draw upon, he believed it should be as unobtrusive as possible. Wright's fourth principle called for taking the colors of buildings from nature and adapting them to fit harmoniously with the materials of buildings. Wright applied the term conventionalism, a method of abstracting form to its essentials, to color and to plant forms as sources of design motifs. The fifth principle called for expressing "the nature of materials".

He meant that wood should look like wood, showing its grain and natural color, with the same verity applying to brick, stone, and plaster. Wright considered these materials inherently "friendly and beautiful". Wright's final principle called for a spiritual integrity in architecture. He believed buildings should have qualities analogous to the human qualities of sincerity, truth, and graciousness. Reflecting ideas current in the Arts and Crafts movement, Wright unabashedly stated that buildings should be loveable and bring joy to people. These traits in architecture would produce, over time, a far more important value than the expression of a style in fashion.

Wright maintained that integrity of human values and architecture could only be achieved by the use of the machine, "the normal tool of our civilization", for which new "industrial ideas" would be required. Wrights organic principles provide the fundamental links between him and other modern architects. They establish the basic tenets of his architecture: technology, metaphysics, social purpose, and an evolving language of architectural forms. Wrights principles for organic architecture were not the same for hos whole career; they shifted, sometimes subtly, during his career, and to speak of them precisely we must time them down in time. By 1909 they had provided verbal formulations of some of Wright's great contributions to architecture: open interior planning; emphasis on the horizontal; masterful play of plastic compositions; integration of structure, material, and site into a symbolic representation of dwelling; a new sense of space; and the celebration of the freedom of the individual and new social patterns The diversity of Wright's work over the span of his life is well represented in the eastern United States, from the masterful Prairie era Darwin D. Martin House of Buffalo, built in 1905 to the spiraling Guggenheim Museum of New York City, completed after his death in 1959. The east also contains the most famous of all of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs, the Falling water.

Consider Wrights impact on American architecture, and try to imagine how this country would look had Wright not existed. Among his innovations are the open-plan house with no attic of basement and the carport. Imagine suburbs without those staples. Wright was a pioneer in the use of air conditioning, in fireproof construction, in passive solar design, in the use of indirect lighting, and in the use of plate glass, plywood, reinforced concrete, and other new materials. Wright's love of new technologies was matched by a desire to use old technologies in new ways. His fascination for the new and his need to show off his unsurpassed talents as an architectural virtuoso undoubtedly help explain his tendency to demand so much of his materials, daring to test their limits almost to the point of failure if it meant achieving effects he could claim uniquely his own.

The sags in Wright's cantilevers are but the logical complement to his perennial testing of limits in the search for new expression. Wright's defenders sometimes claim that he was simply ahead of his time, that the materials did not yet exist that could do what he wished them to do, and that this explains some of the problems with his buildings. Nothing in Wright's career supports this argument. So modern and appealing are Wrights designs that even thirty years after his death, many of his inbuilt designs are being used and hauled out of the Taliesin archives to be built.

Had he lived to be able to take advantage of the newer technologies and stronger materials of our own day, he would have of surely pushed them to their limits as well. The proof he demanded of his genius was to go where no architect has gone before, and that meant accepting risks that few others were willing to take. If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs, badly heated rooms, sagging cantilevers, and unhappy clients then Wright was more willing to pay the price. Wright combined all these creative qualities- his exploration of new technologies, his invention of new styles, his striving for maximum expressive effect and his search for grammatical consistency in all his buildings-with a remarkable playfulness. There was something child-like about the man even in his later years. On top of all these characteristics Wright had one that no other architect could have.

It was the romantic spirit that Wright brought to all his buildings that point at once to the deepest secret of his architecture and the most profound reason for his leaky roofs. In the end, the leaks and sags did not much matter to him. Although his practical goal was to strive as hard as he could to make his structures conform to the vision in his mind, form mattered more than function for him, and the vision behind form mattered most of all, for more than did its physical incarnation. The building itself would invariably fall short, and could be an approximation of the Platonic ideal that lay behind it. This may explain why Wright was so willing to modify his buildings even when they were under construction, and why he apparently felt no compunction about altering them once they were complete. No building felt permanent to Wright, because none could reflect for more than an instant the multifaceted geometric ideal that was in his mind.

Perhaps this is why he was apparently so undisturbed when one or another of his buildings was torn down. The late 19th century was a time of massive social change in the United States. The population was growing rapidly. The economy was changing from agriculture to industrial, with the concomitant growth of cities. An urban middle class was forming, and moving to the suburbs, which were a new phenomenon created by the development of streetcars, trolleys, and other mass transit. Labor-saving devices, electricity, increasingly and opportunities for work in factories and offices, giving them options beyond domestic service.

The number of servants declined precipitously. After the Civil War, and the United States becoming a world power, Americans increasingly withdrew from European influence and began to search for things uniquely American- whether in our character, in our business and social activities, or in architecture and art. In the late 19th century, several trends in art and in architecture emerged. Architects, social commentators, and home decoration magazines led a rebellion against the cluttered and fuzzy Victorian housing styles of this period. The search for a uniquely American architecture, one not associated with the historical Europeans styles had begun with H.H. Richardson and other architects on the east coast, and the spread to Chicago, where Louis Sullivan led to the development of the "Chicago School" of commercial architecture. The Arts and Crafts Movement, which had began in England, had decorative items.

Chicago became the center of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States. That when Frank Lloyd Wright decided to change the world for the good of all Americans. His earliest influences on his style of work were his clergyman father's playing of Bach and Beethoven and his mother's gift of geometric blocks. Also, From 1878 Wright began to spend the summer with his mother's family.

He came to know the valley close to Spring Green, Wisconsin intimately, and both the area and the family who had lived in it had a profound influence on him. These influential experiences and gifts led to Wright's future as inspirational architect, a prolific writer, an educator, and a philosopher. Both of these inspirational gifts and experiences drew Wright to his future of creating over a thousand architectural items including: dwellings and skyscrapers, offices industrial plants and housing projects, hotels theaters, schools, churches, museums, furniture, fabrics, art glass, lamps dinnerware and graphic arts that have all enriched the world beyond measure, hardly a structure is now built anywhere that does not in the same way bear the mark of his genius. Throughout his whole career his parents supported him in all he did and both were very proud in what he had accomplished.

Although his parents died not to long after he had just started to make an affect on the world of architecture, still he continued his work and decided to be even more optimistic on his architecture. Wright's career began with designs for the Queen Anne and Shingle style buildings- the sort that home-owners and builders of the late 19th century expected. Wright's first distinctive buildings were homes designed in his famous Prairie style. Wright stayed with this period for about twenty years (1900-1920). All the Prairie style houses were usually characterized as low, horizontal lines that were meant to blend in with the landscape around them, and deliberately blurred the distinction between interior space and the surrounding terrain. By 1900 his Prairie houses had begun to open up the plan of the house, with living and dining spaces flowing together, frequently around a central fireplace, and lots of glass in rows of windows and in doors to minimize the difference between indoors and outdoors.

Also, when Wright designed a prairie style house, he had the spaces inside the home expand into the outdoors through porches and terraces. Whenever he designed a prairie house he typically used a massive amount of wood and other materials as they appear in the nature. Of course, in his first style he was certainly conservative and didn't even consider destroying the nature and landscape. Instead, Wright decided to follow his characteristic of reverence for nature and adapt the house in the setting and take advantage of the environment. Many prairie style houses have no known interior photos, no drawings, and nothing to indicate whether or not Wright created furniture for them He looked at the setting an environment in a positive perspective and saw all the trees and hills as a good thing for his designs. He was very optimistic and decided to have all the trees and hills and have them as a part of his design and use them for a part of his style.

Being able to adapt and create a house in any environment or any terrain should be considered an outstanding architect.