Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Frank Lloyd Wright
American; 20th-century
Mason City, IA: 15 West State Street
85%
Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank. 1910
You can see Sullivan's influence all through these two interconnected buildings, especially in the front face of the bank segment with its massive monochrome surfaces set off by delicately patterned portions of brick. Wright, however, had long been fully formed by 1910, and there's plenty here that surpasses his teacher. Namely, the airiness and the openness of the building's exterior (the three massive slabs of a tripartite roof keep things from dissipating), plus Wright's inclusion of appendage-like spaces that refuse to resolve into the building's overall order in any clean or immediate way (there's a second storey porch that comes from nowhere is one of the most exciting single spaces by Wright I've ever encountered). Notably, the hotel rooms themselves verge on the unexceptional, as if Wright sensed that full-spectrum design would take away from the solace your living quarters are meant to provide. It's a rare bit of beneficence from the otherwise inhuman designer. (TFS, 2025)
Mill Run, PA: 1491 Mill Run Road
84%
Fallingwater. 1936
One of the great things about this building is how deftly it mingles materials. I think of Wright as someone (like Pollock and plenty of other modern masters in America) who had fundamentally bad taste but knew just how to deploy it, which you can see in Fallingwater's stuccos in tans and reds and in its copious exposed stone. These things are invested with intense purpose not only by the way they've all been juxtaposed (there's always just enough wood or ochre around to keep a big dull plane from growing monotonous, just enough stone to pepper the prevailing flatness), but also by the way they manage to accentuate or even constitute spatial relationships (the masses on the waterside, especially, manage to break away as boldly as they do from the building's core because they're made of smooth and solid stucco, against the central verticals in choppy rock). There is, admittedly, a virtuosic quality to this building which, while breathtaking, can make one long for the quieter achievements of, say, Wright's Usonian Homes, and the later addition makes the whole thing sprawl unnecessarily. (TFS, 2025)
Racine, WI: Johnson Wax Headquarters
69%
Administration Building and Research Tower. 1939, 1950
This is among Wright's more ambitious projects, but not one of his higher achievements. Its successes are small, its problems are legion. The tower has an extraordinary stairwell, but the lab spaces it leads to lack those characteristically Wrightian moments of design ingenuity that manage both to serve some mechanical or spatial necessity and, simultaneously, to transcend function completely. The main office space in the administrative building is overdetermined by a grid of these weird fungiform columns, smaller versions of which also uphold the low ceiling immediately outside the building. These columns have an almost representational, even symbolic, flavor that seems at odds with Wright's usual program; they stymie the development of any spatial or visual relationships that don't include them. (Wright's genius is often in how the parts of his buildings are capable of relating to each other both within the whole of the aesthetic structure but also minutely, at every level, and irrespective of any higher order.) There is significant handsomeness in this complex, but insufficient synthesis of its many parts. (A parapet on the interior second floor of the administration building borrows its form from a similar exterior guardrail at Fallingwater, which Wright had designed three years before.) (TFS, 2025)