Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an architect and a progressive theorist who made a great impact on Dutch designers of the De Stijl era during the years following the Second World War. He studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin, but he decided to stand out as an architect and went to Chicago in 1887. 

In 1889 began working in the office of Dankmar Alder and Louis Sullivan. In 1896 he opened his own studio. He designed in 1900 a type of independent housing called "houses on the prairie", it is influenced by Japanese principles that guide the relationship between interiors and exteriors and the symbolism of spaces open. The main feature of the Prairie Houses was the emphasis on horizontal lines, asymmetrical planes, and natural materials such as wood.

He wanted to create an "organic architecture". He has a concept about this architecture that is to create buildings that seem to have arisen from nature or landscape. He use furniture instead of walls to separate two spaces. For example, in the Ward Villits home, he added construction seating around the fireplace to highlight the horizontal lines. 

Wright, was in Japan and when he returned to the United States he created the so-called Fallingwater between 1935 to 1939. It was an order in which he integrated a house in the landscape, with vertical elements and located on a waterfall.

The Fallingwater house in northwestern Pennsylvania was ordered by Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann.

The house was structured in a series of reinforced concrete overhangs from a rock overhang near the stream and were supported by orthogonal columns and load-bearing walls.

 These walls were made of local stone, one of the most notable features of organic design, and they were placed in horizontal irregular stripes, this irregularity represents the spontaneity of nature. The plant was organized around a "large room" that ran from the entrance to the fireplace, the glass screens and the open terraces, towards which the sound of the waterfall led the visitor. The chimney emerges from the ground in the same way that rocks rise above the water of a stream. 

Wright gave great importance to the symbolic connection between the house and the stream, we can clearly see it in the concrete staircase and hanging steel bars that led to the stream, which Wright intended to deepen so that tenants could bathe.

Another Wright obsession was to integrate the house into the environment, a typical feature of organic design, this can be seen in the way that some beams surround the trees that interrupt its direction.

Once finished, Lewis Mumford said “The stones represent, because they were, the subject of the earth; the concrete slabs, the water. " Thus, the inspiration in nature and the influences of organic design are clear.

Wright's interest in geometric shapes and the intersection of various planes is what led him to apply his design to furniture. Furthermore, he often used furniture instead of walls to separate two spaces.

These furnitures were simple, mostly wooden, with straight lines and shaped like a box. For example, the Tonel chair was designed for the Darwin D. Martin house between 1904 and 1905.

In addition, he used painted steel chairs with leather seats, their swivel bases were also made of steel and the backs were rigid and geometric, with square holes. This was a radical proposal both in the material used and in its geometric style. These types of chairs were used in 1904 for the Buffalo building.

Finally, other of his designs were stained glass windows, glass objects, ceramics metal and fabrics.

For example, the stained glass window created between 1904 and 1905 for the Darwin D. Martin house in Buffalo.

The importance of vertical lines is reminds of the work of Charles Reniee, it was a resource widely used by Wright in his window designs of the early twentieth century.