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What one building design of Mr Wright bridges the gap between Taliesin (1911) and the suburban ranch house -- in one detail, at least ?
Aren't those windows cute ? The "concrete block" or asbestos shingle siding, and the window muntins and decorative "shutters," go nicely with the long low profile, and even the linear foliage speaks to the suburban ideal: Close to nature -- but not too close . . .
Then, elsewhere in the same Wrightian opus, we find the robust ghost of Talesin's signature window sash, with its double-rhythm muntins as a different sort of accompaniment to the window proper.
Well done -- but no, it wasn't a contest. I merely sought to spark discussion, about appearances, about symbol, about coincidence, about scale.
At the scale of these drawings -- greatly enlarged here -- specific detail can be hard to decipher, or even guess at. But is there anything to the idea that, for instance, window openings cry out for articulation, and bracketing, to distinguish them as they float in a facade ? Do symbols for "window," "door," "roof" operate at different scales, and do they convey meaning in the same way both on drawings and on buildings ?
More to the point, perhaps, do Wright's thoughts about such details span the decades of his performance with some sort of consistency ?
First, they are not shutters; they are parts of the windows.
House on the Mesa was the scheme that led to Wingspread. That particular elevation was a rough image, similar to those FLW drew for "An American Architecture" of schemes for skyscrapers (pp 126-131) and the Zoned House (pp 179-180). More elegant images of HOTM can be found in Drexler's book, "The Drawings Of Frank Lloyd Wright" (pp 126-131). None of them was a specific project.
An interesting suggestion I heard from a docent at the Home & Studio is that Wright typically hid his doors from the street because he liked to make his buildings look bigger than they were, and a door is an unmistakable clue to size.
In a few houses he disguised multi-story windows as a single-story interior: the bedroom wing of Hollyhock, the main facade of Storer and the corner windows at Freeman and Fallingwater. This strikes me as untrue to his esthetic of revealing interior space from the outside, but there it is.
The "double rhythm" in the second drawing above also shows up in the Freeman living room, with eight-inch panels (two per block course) abutting sixteen-inch (one) (e.g in Sweeney, Wright in Hollywood fig. 81 p. 77). The Ennis drawings show the eight-inch pattern for the dining room mitered windows (fig. 86, p. 81, fig. 90, p. 85). When he published a photo of this part of the house a few years later in In The Cause of Architecture, he penciled in sixteen-inch panels instead. (The Ennises had built solid plate glass with no muntins.)
This does not add up to a thesis, but I hope that it at least addresses the same topic.
Last edited by Reidy on Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thank you; the topic is certainly broad enough to include any portion of my rather vague and ill-defined original statement(s).
Yes, they aren't shutters; that's why the word is in quotation marks. But the error in understanding speaks to the very idea of misinterpretation of symbols. The fact that those window divisions are present even in the most elemental of line drawings tells us that they are an important part of the picture, to the architect.
Wright is full of self-contradiction; after all, you can't pretend that your work is aesthetically grounded in function while simultaneously giving in to the temptations placed before every stylist. Rather than an either/or world, Mr Wright quite correctly (I believe) chose to live in a both/and one -- a life choice we might all adopt to our benefit -- and that of the world around us ?
Thus his (and Sullivan's) redirection of the maxim "Form follows function," into the more inclusive "Form and function are one." Wright seems aways to have believed that function could, on any given occasion, take a back seat to form; the growth in his work over time includes the ever more subtle and effective integration of useful room division behind idealized exterior expression, as I see it.
As to the enclosure of multiple floors behind single heights of glazing, Fallingwater was a late example, in spades. But isn't that inherent in the idea of the curtain wall, which was born early in the modern era and continues today ?
There you go: Not all docents who think for themselves make up tales . . . !
The double-rhythm window muntins which appear first (?) at Taliesin were taken up by R Schindler for a bit, before he moved on -- in the Monolith Home project with Wright (1919), and as late as his own Packard house of 1924. And, in modified form, in a design for the Bergen branch of the Jersey City Public Library (1920) and the Lovell Beach house of 1925-6.. I wonder where else in the world they might be seen . . .
I would imagine that the House on the Mesa (above) would be the last Wright design to use a version of the Taliesin sash detail. But I'd be interested to be corrected. I wonder if Mr Wright saw this sash somewhere before using it himself.
