Frank Lloyd Wright
"...having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the greatest architect of all time." -Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was one of the most prominent and influential architects of the first half of the 20th century. He not only developed a series of highly individual styles over his extraordinarily long architectural career (spanning the years 1887-1959), he influenced the whole course of American architecture and building. To this day he probably remains America's most famous architect.
Wright responded to the transformation of domestic life that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, when servants became a less prominent or completely absent feature of most American households, by developing homes with progressively more open plans. This allowed the woman of the house to work in her 'workplace', as he often called the kitchen, yet keep track of and be available for the children and/or guests in the dining room. Much of modern architecture, including the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright's innovative work.
His 'Usonian' homes set a new style for suburban design that was followed by countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright; open plans, slab-on-grade footings, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization or at least efficiency in building are amongst his innovations.
Fallingwater, also known as the Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Residence, is a house on Bear Run at Rural Route 1 in Mill Run, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains. The house was designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. Completed in 1939, Fallingwater is recognized as one of the most important examples of 20th century architecture in the world. Frank Lloyd Wright originally designed the sprawling house built on top of a waterfall for Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner. The house was used as a family retreat for over 25 years before it was turned over to its current owner, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.
The key to the setting of the house is the waterfall over which it is built. The falls had been a focal point of the Kaufmann's activities, and the family had indicated the area around the falls as the location for a home. They were unprepared for Wright's suggestion that the house rise over the waterfall, rather than face it. But the architect's original scheme was adopted almost without change.
In 1986, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote: "This is a house that summed up the 20th century and then thrust it forward still further. Within this remarkable building Frank Lloyd Wright recapitulated themes that had preoccupied him since his career began a half-century earlier, but he did not reproduce them literally. Instead, he cast his net wider, integrating European modernism and his own love of nature and of structural daring, and pulled it all together into a brilliantly resolved totality. Fallingwater is Wright's greatest essay in horizontal space; it is his most powerful piece of structural drama; it is his most sublime integration of man and nature."