Storer House, view of north façade with poolPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
As a new book on his West Coast architecture is released, we reveal ten facts about the father of organic architecture
This week marks the release of a brilliant new book shedding light on the West Coast architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Much has been written about the revered American's buildings in the Midwest and on the East Coast but very little exists in print about his 36 structures dotted along the west, from Seattle to Southern California. Filled with over 200 dreamy colour images by veteran architectural photographer Joel Puliatti as well as archive sketches, the tome offers an extensive exploration of each of the buildings, from the iconic Ennis House and the Marin County Civic Center to lesser-known gems, such as the 1909 Stewart House near Santa Barbara. Here in celebration of the book and of Wright himself, we present ten things you might not know about the (American Institute of Architects-named) "greatest American architect of all time."
"Study Nature, love Nature, stay close to Nature, it will never fail you" – Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright worked two jobs... In addition to his architectural role, Wright was also an active dealer in Japanese art. When Wright passed away at the age of 91, there were approximately 6000 Japanese color ukiyoe (woodblock) prints in his personal collection. Making several trips to Japan from 1905 onwards, from 1917 to 1922 Wright temporarily lived in Tokyo while building the Imperial Hotel, during which time his buying and selling of Japanese prints increased rapidly. Upon returning to the US, Wright sold Japanese prints, predominantly traditional bird and flower images, to clients claiming they complemented his streamlined interiors. During the Depression, he made more money selling art than from his work as an architect. Wright was also influential in cultivating American interest in Japanese prints, exhibiting his collection of Hiroshige prints in 1906 at the Art institute.
Ennis House, south façadePhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings have appeared in many films, but not North by Northwest... Wright's Mayan Revival masterpiece Ennis House has featured in over a dozen films – most famously as bounty hunter Rick Deckhard’s cyberpunk apartment in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner – as has his John Storer House. One house that is frequently, and incorrectly, attributed to Wright however, is The Vanndamm house in Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Much to the dismay of architecture fanatics, the house doesn't exist at all, but was in fact a temporary structure created by the film's set designers, who were instructed by the director to make a Wright-like home because hiring Wright himself was prohibitively expensive. So expensive in fact that he never designed anything for a Hollywood film, despite multiple approaches.
Millard House, view from guesthouse to main housePhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a hippie... "[He was] one of the original hippies, a touchstone figure who brought us out from behind the walls of closed-in rooms and back into the embrace of nature," wrote T.C. Boyle of Wright's earth-loving legacy. Nature was an endless surce of inspiration for Wright, who famously declared, "Study Nature, love Nature, stay close to Nature, it will never fail you." A prime example of this is the Guggenheim museum, the galleries of which are divided like the mebranes in citrus fruit, with self-contained yet interdependent sections, while the building's spiral design recalls a nautilus shell with continuous spaces flowing freely into each other.
Ablin House, kitchenPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings were a landlord’s nightmare... Wright's buildings were, and remain, notorious for their maintenance difficulties. The Johnson Administration Building, Wingspread and Fallingwater all exhibited problems after they were built, from leaking roofs to door frames too narrow for furniture to fit through, but Wright remained indifferent to any such complaints during his lifetime, deeming them the inevitable shortfalls of serious experimentation. An important client of Wright's, Herbert Johnson, called him outraged to report that at a dinner party in his new house, "water from a leaky roof was dripping on his head." Wright suggested he move his chair.
Berger House, south façadePhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright devised the utopian single-family home... At the end of the 1930s, Wright began to explore the concept of the single-family home for the average citizen. ‘Usonian’ architecture developed from Wright's earlier, revolutionary ‘horizontal’ designs for Prairie-style homes. Designing the Usonian Houses (an urban city of approximately 60 houses) in 1936, Wright devised a way to let families get good design on a budget. These stripped-down single-story dwellings represented the democratic ideals of the United States. Designed to control costs they had no attics, no basements, and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and natural cooling.
Sturges House, west façade view of entrancePhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a poet... A great fan of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wright himself can be vieed as a pot of sorts. As photographer Edmund Teske, a friend of Wright's, once remarked, "Frank Lloyd Wright was not first of all an architect, he was first of all a poet, expressing himself in terms of architecture, and so a building becomes a poetic statement." Wright was obsessed by forging a harmonious relationship between his architecture and its surrroundings, declaring "Each real building, like every musical pitch, has its core, its flows and sits harmoniously in its place like a swan on a lake." He dubbed his California residential architecture 'Romanza', denoting his intention that the buildings should blend in with their romantic settings, taking into account the unique beauty of each site. In this vein, wherever feasible, Wright sought to use site-specific, natural materials, from Pink Sonoma stone to kiln-dried redwood clapboarding.
Anderton Court ShopsPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a shape shifter... Wright loved geometrics. As a child of the late 1800s, Fröbel’s educational blocks apparently encouraged young Frank’s enquiries of cardboard geometric shapes and small maple wood blocks coloured in primary hues. By the 1940s triangular, circular, hexagonal, and spiral forms derived from nature, were common in much of Wright’s work. Wrights’ unique take on modernist architecture's rigid geometry, combined triangles, ovals, arcs, circles, and squares, echo one another throughout the Barnsdall House. Rhythmic geometric patterns on many of the casement and bay windows of the home combine zigzag and chevron patterns, which were ‘several years ahead of their time in their Art Deco–like geometric lines.
Arch Oboler Compound, Malibu, California (1940–55), guesthouPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright was not a fan of New York City... Or any city for that matter. He felt that they were cramped and crowded, lacking in cultural and social enrichment, and more over, badly designed. He once wrote, "To look at the plan of a great city, is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumour." Wright was particularly disenchanted with Solomon R. Guggenheim's choice of New York City as the location for his iconic museum. He described the city as possessing "a parasite of the spirit" and in 1949 wrote to Arthur Holden saying, "I can think of several more desirable places in the world to build this great museum, but we will have to try New York." Ironically the museum, completed six months after his death, went on to become Wright's most famous large-scale building.
Hollyhock House, Los Angeles (1917–21), detail of living rooPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright hated the sound of the word 'papa'... Despite being dubbed ‘the father of organic architecture’, Wright confessed to never having felt "the father feeling for my children. I only had it for my buildings." In his 1932 biography, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography, Wright wrote that he "hated the sound of the word papa." With a deep ambivalence toward family life (much like his own father), Wright’s personal life was tumultuous; his dissatisfaction with domesticity led to romantic relations with Mamah Cheney, an Oak Park neighbor and wife of client Edwin Cheney. In June 1909, Mamah Cheney would leave her husband and joining Wright in Germany, where he was preparing a book on his work. Wright’s wife Catherine labeled her a ‘vampire seductress,’ according to The Chicago Tribune. Despite an attempted reconciliation with Catherine in 1910, he resolved to live with Cheney, retreating to the Wisconsin valley of the Lloyd Joneses.
Walker House, kitchenPhotographs by Joel Puliatti from Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast by Mark Anthony Wilson, reprinted with permission of Gibbs Smith.
Frank Lloyd Wright was bankrupt for a time... In 1911, Wright built a home for himself, Cheney and her two children, at Spring Green in Wisconsin on land given to him by his mother. He named the property ‘Taliesin’, a Welsh word meaning ‘shining brow.’ In 1914, while Wright was away giving a lecture in Milwaukee, deranged servant Julian Carleton brutally murdered Mamah Cheney, her two children and four of Wright’s apprentices at the Taliesin home. Killing his victims with a hatchet, Carleton then set fire to the property. In 1925, another fire, this time accidental, destroyed much of Taliesin, throwing Wright into terrible debt.
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