Chicago is a good and honest city, with good and honest people doing a good and honest day’s work. The Chicago towers are good in the manner of a collection, the high-architecture playthings of rich individuals, the city centre as a place to stack their property assets, showing off their wealth by thrusting height, but kept firmly rooted by the ring of the L, the good people rattling around and between the edifices on their leg iron railroad structures, a reminder at who’s in charge.
I’m here to see Mies van der Rohe in the city and the campus and Frank Lloyd Wright in the baronial suburbs and out into the country, on my way to catch up on my EW work in Toronto.
I’m here to see Mies van der Rohe in the city and the campus and Frank Lloyd Wright in the baronial suburbs and out into the country, on my way to catch up on my EW work in Toronto.
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Oak Park is largely the source and product of FLW’s architectural specialism, the prairie style emerging from the arts and crafts as he peppered the suburb with houses for increasingly wealthy patrons. From the outside the photographs don’t lie, and aside from the context there is little extra understanding to be gained from the visit.
Oak Park is a pristine neighbourhood of corralled wealth and well-spaced affluence, where the barons are protected behind their doors and walls, entry being arranged rather than welcomed, and there are few better at configuring such a device than FLW. Despite the promoted storyline, FLW does not appear to be engaged with the landscape as it is understood today, but rather with crafted interiors from which to view the landscape beyond, particularly when that landscape is the verdant backwoods carefully retained to enhance the view. These are not houses for or by gardeners, or buildings that benefit from external spaces within nature, but from spaces next to and protected from nature, viewed from the richly crafted tamed-wood ornament of the interiors, nature as a wallpaper print through the oiled timber window frames, owned and overlooked from protected patios. |
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In the city Mies makes no attempt to engage in the green landscape conversation. In the city Mies has the plaza, an uncompromising space that passes beneath the detailed sterility of the commercial floors, these being an inconvenient necessity above his interest in the pavilion, impinging on the pavilion space with lift shafts that simplicity of form and material seek to minimize.
Mies knows what he likes, a door top level glazing bar being a certain percentage less high that the glazing above, the structure and the glazing bars barely distinguishable, the floor running from inside to out barely changing. Refined in detail and either without informing use or enabling a multitude of uses, depending on your position on these things. The Illinois campus is Mies’ Oak Park, a collection of buildings mostly by Mies and his acolytes, a record of architectural development, a test bed for the practicality of the Bauhaus transitioning to the international style. The development is in material and detail, the simplicity of form and the quality of junctions are already established. And yet within so much similarity of typology, which might otherwise lead to ennui, it is a surprise to meet the SR Crown Hall pavilion, where the absolute refinement of the recipe begets such a developed sense of quiet accomplishment. It’s a place ideal for architectural study, a civic square for the coming together of people and the exchange of ideas, engaged with external nature and activity. |
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In the midst of all this architectural simplicity sits Rem Koolhas, looking for all the world like a poorly detailed Walmart squashed by the crinkly tin-wrapped metro, with cracked interiors forming loose and randomly geometric spaces well-inhabited by students, a brave extension to a Mies refectory and a recognition that enabling spaces don’t have to be simple and without influence, but that activity can be nudged by architecture, the opportunities for interaction and separation being encouraged by the diversity of the built form.
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North from Chicago lies FLW’s Johnson Wax.
Johnson Wax has long been on the must-see list, a much sought after departure from all those houses, and it does not disappoint. It’s smaller than expected, a scale or two less than the photographs indicate, and today’s safety and communication requirements would dictate. And in part because of this it is no longer used, the research tower inescapable and the administration uncabled. But the company keeps it all in aspic and it’s a joy to observe the unerring detail and the unique design features that support a clear diagram of function in its form, along with furniture that pre-dates pretty much every modern office system. Sadly, the security does a zealous job of preventing internal photographs (and indeed, absent minded wandering) for no reason that they can understand, but those are the rules. There’s the Foster Fortaleza building too, equally elegantly detailed but with too thin a purpose to give it much merit.
Johnson Wax has long been on the must-see list, a much sought after departure from all those houses, and it does not disappoint. It’s smaller than expected, a scale or two less than the photographs indicate, and today’s safety and communication requirements would dictate. And in part because of this it is no longer used, the research tower inescapable and the administration uncabled. But the company keeps it all in aspic and it’s a joy to observe the unerring detail and the unique design features that support a clear diagram of function in its form, along with furniture that pre-dates pretty much every modern office system. Sadly, the security does a zealous job of preventing internal photographs (and indeed, absent minded wandering) for no reason that they can understand, but those are the rules. There’s the Foster Fortaleza building too, equally elegantly detailed but with too thin a purpose to give it much merit.
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FLW’s Unitarian Meeting House in Madison is fine enough from the outside, well positioned on its little hill but locked, a head-scalping triangular glazed entrance showing his continued interest in uncomfortable clearances and offering little by way of understanding of the internal spaces.
A large expanse of roof notable for an absence of gutters, with intriguing consequences for a sudden downpour. |
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Taleisin East, FLWs family land and occasional home provides a tour of FLW’s life and his architectural explorations, and they show distinct parallels. A complex man, seeking perfection with no expense spared, either human or financial, vilified for his wanton personal activities and lauded for his spatial beliefs. His house and his life a collection of distinct parts, some more successful than others.
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The Pettit Chapel east of Rockford is FLW without learned pretentions, an early, small building with a serious role and a simple, elegant plan. Nothing more, and absolutely enough. A good piece.
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The Laurent House north of Rockford is also a competent solution to a scope with one overriding constraint, a wheelchair bound client, and all the more satisfactory for the limitations applied. FLW is better with a few chains to bind him.
There have been changes made to the house as the family grew, changes that are more successful internally than externally, and finally those made after FLW had died, by the Taliesin Associated Architects who have taken on the role of adapting his buildings without taking on the same care for detail. |
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Mies’ Farnsworth house is closed and barely visible through the trees across the Fox River.
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The Westcott House at Springfield is the best FLW house so far. As is their way, the enthusiastic tour guide gives a family storyline to accompany the architectural explanation, and between the lines there is a strong woman in Mrs Westcott, with an egalitarian view of how you treat space and visitors and staff, and possibly business (for the Westcott fortunes wither after she dies), and that FLW is guided by her beliefs to create elegant, unusually generous connections and volumes throughout a simple and well-proportioned house.
FLW still has his moments, but they are harnessed to the practical, quietened by purpose and an avoidance of ostentation. FLW has his instructions, and the results are clear and positive. |
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Fallingwater, the purposefully last of the FLW visits and presumed to be the highlight of the selection.
And of course, it’s good, it would be hard to fail in such an evocative setting, a building where the qualities of air and sound pass through, where the criss-crossing waterfalls are reflected in the criss-crossing balconies that float above, where the primary structure is developed from the local rock. But these natural joys conceal a troublesome plan. A complexity of spaces and functions, of convoluted passageways and unnatural relationships was not expected behind the clarity of the cantilevers. And while the unerring attention to the detail of every component is pointed out, so is the leaking roof and walls that are not a new phenomenon but arrived on site shortly after FLW left. The tour guide proffers amused patter about this being an example of how FLW allowed the space and nature to flow together. So Fallingwater is a slight disappointment, but it’s been set a very high bar. |
There is no doubt that in a time of otherwise Edwardian styling, the early FLW houses were a desirable departure to those with the wealth to project their cultured modernism and up-country living.
But in the early/mid 20C the ‘country’ is still to be controlled, and in each of the FLW houses visited there are framed views of nature, patios with walls to nature, stone slabs and woods in abundance, honed and polished to a precision that extracts the raw character of the natural. Even daylight is scarce in many of these spaces, sunlight making its way under balconies or through stained glass rather than being allowed to lift the heart and scorch the furnishings.
And it is not only nature that must be kept at a distance. There is also a demotion of ‘entrance’ to the prominence of the sculpted edifice, street doors concealed and reduced, around the corner and off to the side of bastion blocks. The wealthy American’s home as a castle, dominant or reclusive, but always unassailable.
And all this is planned within the oft-discussed FLW principle of interconnected volumes. The consequent open plan nature of the living areas is valuable to the broad views from linear windows and accentuated by the consistent attention to the horizontal in the wall linings and the furnishings. This is most often a horizontal device, and in the vertical it is less convincing, the strategy of ‘compression and release’ has its place, but there’s a small man complex here too that suggests the over-repetition of the effect may have a deeper purpose and few rooms exceed a modern standard.
This isolation from the harsh unmanageable reality of nature and people appears to have been the preference for those of wealth in the first half of 20C America. There was a need for an architect who revels in control and defence while promoting a landscape embracing typology. FLW was very good at these things.
But who was the competition? FLW appears to be an architect with few American counterparts to compare and challenge his work. The process of architect selection is by ‘wanting something like the house in the Ladies’ Home Journal’ and the consequence is largely repetition. Europe at the time, with its cauldron of competitive talents and social upheavals, was seeing more interesting and original work, work that made great strides from the arts and crafts to the Bauhaus and then to the architecture epitomised by the likes of Mies van der Rohe. America in the first half of the 20C was comfortable in its skin, gently moving forward but with more than one eye on the past. It is not until FLW secures a bespoke scope for some new technology or passing cult that his skills are properly tested, and in these buildings FLW is more successful, more original, and more unique.
But in the early/mid 20C the ‘country’ is still to be controlled, and in each of the FLW houses visited there are framed views of nature, patios with walls to nature, stone slabs and woods in abundance, honed and polished to a precision that extracts the raw character of the natural. Even daylight is scarce in many of these spaces, sunlight making its way under balconies or through stained glass rather than being allowed to lift the heart and scorch the furnishings.
And it is not only nature that must be kept at a distance. There is also a demotion of ‘entrance’ to the prominence of the sculpted edifice, street doors concealed and reduced, around the corner and off to the side of bastion blocks. The wealthy American’s home as a castle, dominant or reclusive, but always unassailable.
And all this is planned within the oft-discussed FLW principle of interconnected volumes. The consequent open plan nature of the living areas is valuable to the broad views from linear windows and accentuated by the consistent attention to the horizontal in the wall linings and the furnishings. This is most often a horizontal device, and in the vertical it is less convincing, the strategy of ‘compression and release’ has its place, but there’s a small man complex here too that suggests the over-repetition of the effect may have a deeper purpose and few rooms exceed a modern standard.
This isolation from the harsh unmanageable reality of nature and people appears to have been the preference for those of wealth in the first half of 20C America. There was a need for an architect who revels in control and defence while promoting a landscape embracing typology. FLW was very good at these things.
But who was the competition? FLW appears to be an architect with few American counterparts to compare and challenge his work. The process of architect selection is by ‘wanting something like the house in the Ladies’ Home Journal’ and the consequence is largely repetition. Europe at the time, with its cauldron of competitive talents and social upheavals, was seeing more interesting and original work, work that made great strides from the arts and crafts to the Bauhaus and then to the architecture epitomised by the likes of Mies van der Rohe. America in the first half of the 20C was comfortable in its skin, gently moving forward but with more than one eye on the past. It is not until FLW secures a bespoke scope for some new technology or passing cult that his skills are properly tested, and in these buildings FLW is more successful, more original, and more unique.