One of the unbuilt projects highlighted in the expansive Guggenheim exhibit "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward" is the surprising Plan For Greater Baghdad. Seems Frank Lloyd Wright dreamed up an architectural "Eden" for the spot where the famous Garden was said to have been located. Such a pity this could not have been the American legacy imparted on Iraq. Read all about this amazing project here.
Image copyright The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
It seems that the reward for sticking it out through an especially brutal winter for the people of Chicago is the visual symphony and sweet perfume that only spring flowers can bring. This is especially true in the Chicago suburb of Lombard, where the aptly named (and Jens Jensen-designed) Lilacia Park is quite possibly the best smelling place in the Midwest right now. If you're close by or passing through, take a moment to stop and smell the Lilacs! Read more here.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
April 9, 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Frank Lloyd Wright. Many argue that no other American architect/designer has had as lasting an impact on so many aspects of our modern world. But confronted with stories of his ego, his scandals, his leaky buildings, his lack of financial discipline--is Wright really relevant? Continue reading after the jump...
The Robin Boyd Award (the top honor for residential
architecture in Australia) was recently bestowed upon the Klein Bottle House,
an odd origami-like home on the Mornington Peninsula of Brisbane. I think I would take one of Walter Burley Griffin's Organic Architecture designs for an Australian home any day of the week. You can read more about the Bottle House here.
Bottle House image courtesy of WAtoday.com; The Barbette Residence drawing copyright the National Library of Australia
So, I'm at home this evening surfing the web on my laptop while my wife is in our workout room on the treadmill, watching TV......when all of the sudden our power goes out during a springtime lightning storm! It stayed out for almost an hour. The wireless internet was cut, the dryer stopped tumbling, the dishwasher became calm, the heater shut-off, no TV, no treadmill....our digital, mechanical modern life came to a screeching halt.
Continue reading "Sharing a Personal Experience: Disconnect to Reconnect in a Modern World" »
Proof that you never know where and when you'll run into Frank Lloyd Wright. I was out to dinner the other night at a restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes (kind of a salad bar sort of place). We sat down to eat and I smiled when I glanced over at the far wall of the room. This is what I saw:
The only quote found on the walls in the building and it's one by Wright. If you have a hard time reading it in the fuzzy photo it says: "Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity." Bon appetit!
A worrisome trend has precipitated with the advent of ebay. With the rise in popularity of Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings and decor over the decades, the separating and selling off of Wright-related items has also risen. When furniture, windows, sconces etc. are sold-off from the site they were integrally meant for, that site is diminished in a way that it may never recover from.
Continue reading "A Legacy For Sale: The Wright Thing To Do?" »
We we're recently asked our thoughts on the questions "What makes a great architect? And do they have a responsibility of keeping a project within budget?" by reader Adam Marquart of offbeathomes.com. These interesting questions were raised specifically in regards to Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by many to be the greatest American architect of all time, who was also criticized for being over budget on plenty of projects. So what makes an architect great and is minding the project budget a factor?
The PrairieMod Squad wishes all of our readers Happy Holidays. As a special holiday treat, we thought we'd link up to the Flickr page of photographer Hypno+Raygun. He's taken some pretty sweet photos of Springfield, Illinois' Susan Lawrence Dana House all decked out for Christmas. Enjoy!
Image copyright 2006 Hypno+Raygun
A few weeks back I recorded a show on the DVR about Amazing Vacation Homes from The Travel Channel. In this particular episode, they featured two prefab homes. The second of the two, was the Desert Hot Springs, CA prefab weekend home of Leo Marmol, Managing Principal of Marmol Radziner and Associates. It's the prototype for the prefabricated, custom steel frame residences that Marmol Radziner and Associates began designing in 2002 when Dwell magazine launched a competition to produce a prototype for a contemporary prefab home. There is a whole website dedicated to this particular architectural option at www.marmolradzinerprefab.com.
I'll avoid spewing philosophy for one evening, but it's interesting to note that many of the elements that comprise this particular prefab are rooted in Wright's Usonian architectural works.
Marmol Radziner and Associates are also noted with the restoration of the Palm Springs Kaufmann House that Richard Neutra (FLW apprentice) designed for the Kaufmann's a decade after Wright built them Fallingwater.
Photo credit: Benny Chan
If you grew up in the city of Chicago you most likely went to a school that looked like the high school to the left.
If you or your children went to a high school in the suburbs, then those structures most likely look like the high school below.
Now I'm well aware of the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright designed a decent number of educational structures. There's the Hillside School in WI, the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago, the Wyoming Valley Grammar School in WI, the Juvenile Cultural Center in KS, the Jiyu Gauken Girls School in Japan and even the Coonley Playhouse in IL. Yet, what if Wright designed an American High School? Would he have influenced the way high schools are built today? How would form and function play out in these structures?
My personal experience was class in a "warehouse" with minimal windows. The entire campus looked like a compound. All I can remember is thinking how nice it would be to graduate and never have to set foot inside that building again.
Don't even get me started on collegiate architecture! (Note: Wright did some interesting things at Florida Southern College).
On the CD-ROM titled, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, FLWF Archives Director Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer eloquently comments on the ever increasing popularity of Mr. Wright's work. He begins by presenting a question. Why is there now this consuming passion for Frank Lloyd Wright's work almost 50 years after his death? He then answers...
"What he did, what he built, what he promulgated, what he believed in, was timeless. He upheld principles that don't know the manner of time. More and more people are being drawn to his work because these principles are as pertinent today as they were 100 years ago."
Mr. Pfeiffer's astute observation accurately captures the reason behind this global phenomena. Many of us connect with Frank Lloyd Wright's work simply because it is timeless. It doesn't matter if you step into an early Prairie home, a California block house, Fallingwater, a Usonian or the Guggenheim. These structures were all built at different times over a 60 year period, but each one evokes a similar feeling of wonder. If we seek out those principles and understand the how and why, we can take that same profound knowledge with us as we move through the 21st century.
In the current Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Style 1900, Editor-in-Chief, Marilyn Fish made some intriguing comments in her editorial. These remarks are relevant to those of us who appreciate and respect historic ideals about interior design, but are seeking ways to individually express those tried and true principles. You can find a sampling of her editorial below, but go pick a up copy at your local bookseller and read for yourself.
"One of the key principles of Arts and Crafts design is the unification of the home, from landscape and siting to furniture and lighting. For example, if you look at Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin complex, you'll see the architect's hand in everything. Gustav Stickley, the Greene brothers, Charles Mackintosh and others advocated the same brand of harmony. But we live in an era of self-confident individualism."
I recently hunted down and purchased an often read and well worn copy of the January 1938 Architectural Forum. It is an important issue in the Frank Lloyd Wright published canon and is peppered with fantastic historical photographs, Walt Whitman quotations and Wright soliloquies on life, culture and of course...architecture. I found the section highlighting the first Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin especially enlightening and I wanted to share it with all of you. Mr. Wright stated:
"In our country the chief obstacle to any real solution of the moderate-cost house-problem is the fact that our people do not really know how to live, imagining their idiosyncrasies to be their "tastes," their prejudices to be their predilections and their ignorance to be virtue where any beauty of living is concerned."
This struck me as something as painfully true today as it was in 1938. All one has to do is drive down any street in America to come face-to-face with what passes for the "home" today. Obscenely large, inefficient, ugly boxes with ridiculous amalgamations of gables for roofs and windows pointlessly punched out of walls. The American public is hypnotized into believing that these vinyl-sided monstrosities are a symbol of affluence and success. The bigger and more ghastly a home can be, the assumption is the better life will be. No thought is given to how a family actually functions, or what a home should really symbolize and thus be designed to function as. So, they build energy-gobbling super-structures filled with empty, pointless rooms that reflect the empty, pointless lives of the people that inhabit them.
I think our society would do well to stop and reflect inward on what our priorities really are. Spiraling property costs coupled with record foreclosures and bankruptcies should be the wake-up call we all heed. We need to ask ourselves: What should a house really be about? Are we living for a house or in a house?
Frank Lloyd Wright goes on to say in that issue of The Forum: "I am certain that any approach to the new house...must be a pattern for more simple and, at the same time, more gracious living: new but suitable to living conditions as they might so well be in the country we live in today. This needed house of moderate cost must sometime face reality. Why not now? The houses built by the million...do no such thing. To me such houses are "escapist" houses, putting on some style or other, really having none. Style is important. A style is not. There is all the difference when we work with style and not for a style."
Now, one could argue that the very name of this blog invites criticism on being slavish to "A style." Not so. We at PrairieMod aren't suggesting that we all try and ape the historical Prairie Style in our lives and homes. Instead, we suggest focusing in on the ideas and ideals of what the progenitors of the Prairie School and the Craftsman Movement were practicing in those "styles" and find ways to incorporate them into our modern world. It's not the quarter-sawn wood table that is important...it's what that table says about the individual environment that one integrates it within. It doesn't have to be a faithful replica of a Niedecken style table, or an expensive Stickley style table. So long as the table is chosen to harmonize in some way with it's environment and is beautiful and well crafted it will exemplify the styles championed by the Prairie School and Craftsman Movement.
Styles come and go, but the ideas of some transcend the items and structures they are associated with. "Prairie" and "Modern" are just words that in and of themselves don't mean too much. As "styles" they evolve into each other historically (Prairie, USONIAN, Modern...they are all interrelated in some way) and fall in and out of vogue. Instead, we at PrairieMod want to keep the focus on the ideas and less on a particular "style". We will try and make this a 21st century forum to showcase books, art, products, places and ideas that fit with our own particular take on the new cultural movement we affectionately refer to as "Prairie Modern." Hopefully we'll do it in style.
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
