Wright in America found himself, in his seventies, as generally accepted a master as did Perret in France, but his influence never became at all academic in the way of Perret’s after 1930. There could hardly be a greater contrast between the careers of two contemporaries in the same field. Both were very productive over a length of time that is more than a third of the whole period covered by this book, but this is about all that they did have in common. Perret’s career progressed gradually over several decades to general and even official acceptance. Wright’s career, on the other hand, had very notable ups and downs, and he only once received a governmental commission.

After the years of preparation discussed earlier (see Chapter 15) there followed some ten years of great success. But this success was largely restricted to a particular region, the Middle West, and to a particular field, the building of good-sized suburban houses. Following that, in a decade interrupted by the First World War, Wright’s influence rapidly increased, not at home but abroad, although he had considerably fewer, if much larger, commissions. Then, paradoxically, in the twenties, while the United States swung into the biggest building boom in history, there began a decade in which Wright’s production all but ceased. Many assumed that his career had closed and that his work had passed into history as had Voysey’s and Mackintosh’s by that time. This, of course, was not at all true. In the mid thirties Wright’s activity revived, and his production continued at a rising rate until his death. Moreover, there was little sign of any decline into personal academicism such as marked the late work of Perret in the same decades.

Where Perret had, in effect, only a double architectural career, being largely occupied on the one hand with industrial commissions close to the dividing line between architecture and engineering, and on the other hand with public buildings, Wright’s career was increasingly multifarious. Beginning chiefly as a domestic architect, he never ceased to build houses; but by the 1950s there were few fields, including that of urbanism, which he had not entered, if only to present challenging projects and announce controversial theses. Disciple of a great skyscraper architect, author of a succession of skyscraper projects, Wright had to wait a full half century after Sullivan completed his last skyscraper in Chicago before he built his first, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1953-5. Some of his planning projects may yet come to posthumous execution, and his work at Florida Southern College at least was of urbanistic scope.

Perret consciously summarized and continued earlier French tradition; but Wright wished to initiate a new tradition, one which he preferred to call ‘Usonian’ rather than American. Perret’s disciples, emulators, and imitators in his later years were able to take control of French architecture to a quite considerable extent. Wright’s disciples, despite the fifty years during which he maintained offices that were also training ateliers in Oak Park, in Chicago, in Tokyo, in Wisconsin, and in Arizona, have only rarely made any significant mark of their own; nor has his influence had much more specific effect on the character of modern architecture in America than it has had generically on that of the world outside. Where Perret’s influence, particularly outside France, has been largely restricted to architects working with ferro-concrete, the material that he was the first to master architecturally—and even in concrete construction this influence has inhibited as often as it has liberated—Wright’s influence has been protean on the international scene. From the day when the German publisher Wasmuth first made Wright’s work available to Europeans at the opening of the second decade of the century this has been true, down to the time, a decade ago, when the Italian architect, critic, and historian Bruno Zevi (b. 1918) tried to invert chronology so that Wright’s ‘architettura organica’^[407] might seem to succeed rather than to precede the ‘funzionalismo’ or ‘International Style’ of the second generation of modern architects.

Before turning to a more detailed consideration of Wright’s work after 1900 one further comparison with the œuvre of Perret may be made. Although Wright never confined himself to one material or to one method of construction—indeed, his versatility in this respect continued to increase right down to his death—he was from the first especially interested in the possibilities of concrete. He published in The Brickbuilder for August 1901 a project for a small village bank, still very Sullivanian in its rich detailing, that was intended to be executed entirely in concrete. This was only two years after Perret had first used the material with little or no attempt to develop its architectural possibilities and a year before his block of flats in the Rue Franklin was designed. His E.-Z. Polish Factory of 1905 at 3005-17 West Carroll Avenue in Chicago has already been mentioned. The Unity Church in Oak Park of 1906 (Plate 143B), entirely of concrete surfaced with a special pebble aggregate and decorated with integral ornament, precedes by many years Perret’s church at Le Raincy (Plate 141). Perret’s ultimate development of various refined finishes for exposed concrete came still later. Admittedly, however, the Oak Park church is a much smaller and less striking edifice than Perret’s; and the work of Kahn and other industrial architects soon overshadowed Wright’s modest factory. Moreover, it was only with the twenties that Wright, like the Europeans, really gave major attention to building in concrete.

Wright’s creative powers in the first decade of this century were largely concentrated on his ‘Prairie Houses’. Their essentials were already present in the two Kankakee houses of 1900 (Plate 142A) and the first house designed for the Ladies Home Journal (see Chapter 15). But these essentials received more masterly—one might well say more classic—expression two years later. The large W. W. Willitts house at 715 South Sheridan Road in Highland Park, Ill., of 1902 is of wooden-stud construction, but covered like the Kankakee houses with stucco (Plate 142B). The C. S. Ross house off the South Shore Road on Lake Delavan in Wisconsin, also of 1902, has the rough board-and-batten sheathing of the River Forest Golf Club (Plates 143A and 128B). Both offer versions of the cruciform plan (Figure 38) with the interior space ‘flowing’ round a central chimney core and also extended outward on to covered verandas and open terraces quite as in Price’s Tuxedo Park houses of fifteen years earlier (Figure 28).

Another major work of 1902 is the Arthur Heurtley house at 318 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill. There the principal living areas, which are on the upper floor as in the Husser house of 1899, form an articulated L-shaped within the basic square that is defined by the overhanging roof. The brick walls of the lower storey have broad projecting horizontal bands and the wide, low entrance arch remains quite Richardsonian. The upper storey consists largely of continuous ranges of wooden-mullioned casement windows.

No notable progression is observable in the series of suburban houses built during the remainder of this decade before Wright went to Europe in 1909; but he produced many other brilliant illustrations of both the cruciform and the square plan as well as a more elongated sort extending along a single axis. Of the many fine examples of the Willitts or Ross type around Chicago, the small house for Isabel Roberts at 603 Edgewood Place in River Forest of 1908 is one of the best; there the living room in the front wing is carried up two storeys, as was proposed for one version of the Ladies Home Journal house. The larger F. J. Baker house at 507 Lake Avenue in Wilmette of 1909 also has a two-storeyed living room; but here the tall cross element of the plan which this feature provides was moved to one end of the house so that the plan is of a T or L shape rather than cruciform.

The E. H. Cheney house at 520 North East Avenue in Oak Park of 1904 is square like the Heurtley house near by. It is raised off the ground on a sort of extended square stylobate so that the living area, which runs all across the front as at the Hickox house, can open freely through french doors on to the walled terrace in front. In the T. P. Hardy house at 1319 South Main Street in Racine, Wis., of 1905 a declivitous lakeside site encouraged a vertical rather than a horizontal organization of the interior with a two-storey living room as the spatial core.

A very different feeling pervades the small, squarish house at 6 Elizabeth Court in Oak Park that Wright built for Mrs Thomas Gale in 1909. Here flat slabs—which had been proposed as early as 1902 in a project (perhaps for execution in concrete) for the Yahara Boat Club in Madison, Wis.—replace the low-pitched hip or gable roofs of the characteristic Prairie Houses. Moreover, parapeted balconies and other simple rectangular features elaborate plastically the composition in a fashion that suggests the abstract sculpture of a decade later in Europe (see Chapter 21).

The W. A. Glasner house of 1905 at 850 Sheridan Road in Glencoe, Ill., on the contrary was extended longitudinally and the living area for the first time not at all articulated but completely unified (Figure 39). Something of the same longitudinal extension marks the much larger F. C. Robie house at 5757 Woodlawn Avenue in Chicago of 1909. But there the living room and dining room are separated by the chimney core and raised above the ground level. Built of fine Roman brick, this is the most monumental of these early houses. The long horizontal lines of the balcony below and the roof above dominate the composition; yet a cross element comes forward in the upper storeys to provide, less symmetrically than in his houses of cruciform plan, something of the abstract plasticity of the Gale house.

Another large house of the end of the decade, the Avery Coonley house at 300 Scottswood Road in Riverside, Ill., of 1908, offers a quite different and much more extended plan. The square block containing the living room rises above a terrace and a reflecting pool as the main element of the design, but from this block two long wings project. That to the left includes a large dining room and also very extensive service facilities at the rear; in the one to the right are the master’s suite and other bedrooms. Thus the house is, in a later phrase of Wright’s, ‘zoned’ according to function. The upper walls of this house are covered with a geometrical pattern produced by setting coloured tiles into the stucco. Wright never did quite the same thing again, but this led the way to his use of patterned concrete blocks a few years later.

Two of Wright’s non-domestic works of this period are of considerable importance. Unity Church in Oak Park has already been mentioned; the other was the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1904. Massive and even sculptural externally, particularly at the ends, this had a tall glass-roofed court running down the centre, around which the upper ranges of offices extended on galleries carried by somewhat Sullivanian piers. All the fittings of the offices, including the steel furniture—probably the first to be designed by an architect—were Wright’s. Thus he set here a wholly new standard of elegance, consistency, and coherence in semi-industrial building.

Within the massive slab-roofed block of the Unity Temple (Plate 143B), which is echoed beyond a low entrance link by the smaller block of the Sunday School, Wright achieved even more notably than inside the Larkin Building a new sort of monumental space-composition such as even his biggest houses hardly provided room for. The square auditorium with incut corners has double galleries on three sides and a pulpit platform on the fourth, behind which rises the organ. The multiple spatial elements seem to cross one another at different levels in a sort of three-dimensional plaid. Moreover, this theme is echoed in all the minor features, such as the wood stripping of the sand-finished plaster walls and the prominent lighting fixtures. Of this spatial development there had been some premonition in the auditorium block at one end of the Hillside House School that he built for his aunts outside Spring Green, Wis., in 1902; but there the masonry of the exterior walls and piers was still rather Richardsonian and the internal gallery consisted of a square set lozenge-wise.

Wright’s work down to 1910 was made available to Europeans by two publications of Wasmuth, the Berlin publisher; and the end of the first decade of the century does, coincidentally, mark a real turning point in his career. He would not be so prolific again before the forties; and henceforth, although he never ceased to build houses, these would no longer constitute the bulk of his production.

The production of the next decade, after his return from Europe in 1911, opens with two houses, however. Taliesin, which he built outside Spring Green for his mother in 1911, was soon much enlarged when he moved there himself and it always remained his principal residence. As a result of the growing needs of his family and of his school—not to speak of two major fires in 1914 and 1925—the Taliesin of today is very different, above all in its endless ramification, from what he planned in 1911; but the vocabulary of materials and design stayed more or less constant through all the years. Where the Prairie Houses echoed in their horizontal lines the flat Illinois terrain on which most of them were set, Taliesin is wrapped around a hill-top just below the crest. The use of various levels in the interior and a landscape-like elaboration of the low-pitched roofs represent his response to this more interesting site; after that the ‘Prairie’ master avoided flat sites for houses whenever he could!

Taliesin, combining a house, drawing-office, living accommodation for apprentices, and even farm buildings, had from almost the first a complex plan not readily definable as square, cruciform, or unilinear. But in a project of the same year 1911 in which Taliesin was originally built, that for the S. M. Booth house at Glencoe, Ill.—never executed, unfortunately, according to these plans—a new sort of organization appeared, related to the elaborated cube of the Gale house and also to the ‘zoned’ scheme of the Coonley house. A two-storey living-room was to provide both the spatial and the plastic core; from this wings serving different purposes would shoot out swastika-like.

The relative homogeneity of Wright’s production in the first decade of the century, following after the gradual convergence of his early work during the nineties, is explained by the nearly identical problems and sites that he faced in designing the houses mentioned so far. This homogeneity now gave way to an increasing variety that makes it difficult to summarize the work of these years. The Coonley Playhouse, built on the Coonley estate at Riverside in 1912, bears little resemblance to the original house of four years earlier. The plan is cruciform and symmetrical; but what is new here is the way the slab roofs, set at two different levels and pierced through their wide projections in order to let light reach the windows below, were used to achieve an even more boldly sculptural quality than in the project of 1902 for the Yahara Boat Club or the Gale house of 1909. Wright’s mastery of abstract decoration was wholly mature by this time. From the first he had used leaded glass in simple geometrical patterns in his windows,^[408] but the windows in this playhouse are the finest of all. Moreover, these festive compositions of circles of coloured glass arranged asymmetrically resemble quite closely the abstract paintings that such artists as Kupka, Delaunay, and the Constructivists would shortly be producing in Europe.

Northome, the F. W. Little house at Wayzata, Minn., of 1913, is also quite different from all the earlier houses, yet not at all similar to the Coonley Playhouse. Raised on a ridge above the southern shore of Lake Minnetonka, this house consists of a series of pavilions—some open, some closed—strung along a single axis parallel to the water’s edge. That containing the living room, which is of almost monumental size and scale, dominates the whole. Wright seemed able now to invent a new mode almost with every individual commission, each one with potentialities as great as those of the Prairie Houses he had so thoroughly exploited in the decade before 1910.

The major work of the immediate pre-war years, the Midway Gardens of 1913-14 on the Midway south of Chicago, is rather hard to define precisely. Not quite a beer or Heuriger garden, nor yet a music-hall or cabaret in the ordinary European sense, the establishment consisted of a large outdoor dining and entertainment area with raised terraces on two sides, a stage and orchestra shed at the far end, and a closed restaurant block towards the street. Here Wright’s ambitions as a decorative artist could have free play. Abstract compositions of coloured circles like those in the windows of the Coonley Playhouse appeared here as wall-high murals at the ends of the covered restaurant. Moreover, the sculptural implications of the general composition of the playhouse were carried farther in the openwork ‘constructions’ that he set on the tops of the towers. At the same time he introduced a great deal of figurative sculpture stylized in a rather Cubist way. Thus several different aspects of the abstract and near-abstract art which was just coming into independent existence in Europe were closely paralleled in the adjuncts to Wright’s architecture here.

More architectonic patterns produced by simple geometrical means also ran riot at the Midway Gardens. Notable and significant was the use of extensive areas of patterned concrete blocks; these were somewhat like the patterned upper walls of the Coonley house of 1908 but all monochrome. The early demolition of the Midway Gardens makes it difficult to know whether this tremendous elaboration of the decorative aspects of Wright’s architecture was symphonic or cacophonous in total effect. Whatever the degree of their success or their failure, however, they opened a sort of ‘Mannerist’ or ‘Baroque’^[409] period in his career that was destined to last for more than a decade.

During the First World War, in 1915, Wright was approached by emissaries of the Japanese Imperial Household to design and build the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Proceeding to Japan, Wright was largely concerned with this commission for the next seven years, finally bringing it to completion in 1922. This is the principal production of his ‘Baroque’ phase. It was also a notable engineering triumph, for his ingenious use of concrete slabs carried on a multitude of concrete piles brought it safely through the earthquake of 1923. Paul Mueller, the engineer of the old Adler & Sullivan office, was his collaborator here.

Abstract ornament proliferated on the hotel; some of it, carved in greenish lava, elaborates the garden courts of the vast H-shaped plan; still more is painted in gold and colour on the ceilings of the principal interiors. Moreover, the massive proportions of the masonry walls produce an effect of castle-like solidity wholly inexpressive of the method of their support and very far removed from the light and floating character of the Prairie Houses. On the whole this hotel represents, far more than the Midway Gardens, a cul-de-sac in Wright’s development.

Overlapping the period of construction of the Imperial Hotel came a series of houses in southern California in which the ‘Baroque’ element was gradually restrained. The earliest of these, Hollyhock House in Los Angeles and two smaller houses near by, were built for Aline Barnsdall in 1920 on a large estate bounded by Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, Edgemont Street, and Vermont Avenue. These are of poured concrete very massively handled and carry considerable abstract sculptural ornamentation. For a slightly later series of four houses around Los Angeles, beginning with the house of 1923 for Mrs G. M. Millard at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, Wright developed a type of concrete-block construction with reinforcement in the joints that was of considerable technical interest and also offered special decorative possibilities. The idea of using concrete blocks cast with relief patterns of geometrical character goes back to the Midway Gardens, however, and walls covered with repeating ornamental units had first appeared at the Coonley house.

In the Millard house, particularly, the scale of the moulded blocks and the ingenious inclusion of pierced units—very similar to the pre-cast elements that Perret was using for the screen walls of his Le Raincy church at just this time—produced a masterpiece (Plate 144). This house, however, is not solely of interest for its construction and its decoration. In contrast to the horizontal composition of almost all his earlier houses except that in Racine for the Hardys, this is a tall vertical block, entered at the middle level, with the dining room and kitchen below and the two-storey living room opening out to a balcony at the front (Figure 40). The main bedroom is reached from a gallery overhanging the rear of the living-room. Both organizationally and visually this represents a surprising change, and the result closely resembled what a leading architect of the second generation had just then been proposing in Europe (Figure 45). There are, for instance, no hovering eaves here; instead a parapet continues the wall plane upwards and confines a roof terrace. This is as close as Wright ever came to building a ‘box-on-stilts’, his term of abuse for the advanced European houses of the twenties. It was as if, after the expansiveness of his work from the Midway Gardens to Hollyhock House, Wright wished to prove here his capacity to produce a house modest in scale and compact in section as well as in plan.

In the next decade, from 1924 to 1934, Wright’s actual production declined almost to zero although he was working on a series of important projects, some of which later provided the basis for executed buildings. Taliesin was rebuilt after a fire in 1925, however—it had already been rebuilt once before after an earlier fire in 1914—and a large house of concrete blocks, with almost no use of pattern except for occasional pierced grilles, was erected for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones in 1929 at 3700 Birmingham Road in Tulsa, Okla. That is about all.

The small M. C. Willey house of 1934 at 255 Bedford Street, S.E., in Minneapolis marked the beginning of what proved to be almost a second career for Wright. Low and L-shaped, with practically no ornament whatsoever, this modest brick house introduced a major change in domestic planning. Not only are the living room and the dining room completely unified, as was first done at the Glasner house in 1905, but the kitchen—now re-christened ‘work-space’—opens into the main living area behind a range of glazed shelves (Figure 41). Thirty years later the full implications of this development are still not quite digested in America or even fully apprehended abroad; on the contrary, a reaction from open planning has perhaps begun.

It was not the Willey house, however, modest in size and very quiet in expression for all its revolutionary plan, that signalized the renewal of Wright’s activity. That he could take up his career again at the highest level of creativity became apparent to everyone with the construction of two much larger buildings both designed in 1936. Falling Water, a large house in the Pennsylvania woods, is cantilevered over a waterfall with a sense of drama even Wright had never hitherto approached. The Administration Building for the S. C. Johnson Wax Company at 1525 Howe Street in Racine, Wis., his first semi-industrial commission since the Larkin Building of 1904, was built in 1937-9. Both are as remarkable for the technical boldness of their use of concrete—totally different in the two cases—as for their design.

Falling Water has a rear section built of rough stone which rises like a tower from the native rock on the banks of Bear Run. From this solid vertical core are cantilevered out a series of concrete slabs bounded by plain parapets at their edges. This produces a very complex horizontal composition related to, but infinitely elaborated from, that of the Gale house of 1909 (Plate 145A). The completely unified living space is closed in by stone walls on the inner or dining side. It also extends out over the waterfall; the all-glass walls on that side, with their thin metal mullions, hardly seem to separate the interior space at all from that of the open terraces outside. A similar relationship exists between the bedrooms and their terraces on the upper floors.

Never before had Wright exploited the structural possibilities of concrete so boldly. In this amazingly plastic composition—if ‘plastic’ be the word for anything so light and suspended in appearance—it seems as if he had determined to outbid the European architects of the second modern generation at their own games (see Chapter 22). His early work has, in the clarity and axial character of the organization and the serenity of its expression, a classic if hardly a Classical quality; his work of 1914-24 shows a Baroque exuberance in the proliferation of the ornament. Now that he was approaching seventy his Romantic or anti-Classical tendencies—call them what you will—reached an intensity of purely architectonic expression comparable to the musical intensity of the late quartets of Beethoven that Wright so much admired. Falling Water, which might easily have been the swan song of Wright’s career, soon to be halted again by a second World War, proved in fact but the opening allegro in a new period of innovation and experiment.

The Johnson Building is very different from Falling Water. In it the curve rather than the cantilever provides the principal theme, and enclosure rather than interpenetration of exterior and interior space controls both the planning and the design (Plate 146A). The main office area is tall and unified, but it is filled with a forest of inverse-tapered concrete piers rising from tiny bronze shoes to carry circular slabs of concrete whose edges all but touch. The spaces between these lilypad-like disks were filled with tubes of Pyrex glass, and bands of similar tubes are carried around the building below the balcony and at the top of the plain red brick walls to provide additional natural light. In the more specialized adjuncts to the general office area curved and diagonal plan-elements lend a machine-like elegance to the shape of the building as a whole. Additional bands of glass tubing interrupt the smooth and continuous masonry surfaces at intervals, thus clearly indicating that these portions are of several storeys.

Falling Water and the Johnson Building were large and expensive structures; so also was Wingspread, the H. F. Johnson house that Wright built in Racine at the same time. This is zoned in the manner of the Booth project of 1911 around a tall central core. But in 1937 Wright also erected the first of what he called his ‘Usonian’ houses, the Herbert Jacobs house at Westmorland, near Madison, Wis. This modest L-shaped dwelling, with wooden ‘sandwich’ walls and a flat wooden slab roof, carried farther than the Willey house the integration of the ‘work-space’ or kitchen with the main living area. Here this rises in a masonry tower and is lighted by a clerestory, yet it is closely related to the space of the interior as a whole. A very considerable range of Wright’s later houses are variants of the Usonian model. Some were built before the War, even more in the last decade; some are of modest dimensions like the Jacobs house, others much larger. They exist in all parts of the United States, including the East, where he had hardly worked at all before this time.

The earlier Usonian houses were designed on a square module. This is true, for example, of the version that he prepared for Life magazine in 1938,^[410] which thereby received the same sort of national circulation that the Ladies Home Journal gave to three of his projects more than a generation earlier.^[411] But Wright was now interested also in developing the hexagon and the triangle as basic units. Beginning with the Hanna house of 1937 at 737 Coronado Street in Palo Alto, Cal., he continued in many others to explore the possibilities of planning based on 60-30-degree angles.

In the most extraordinary house that he built in these pre-war years, his own winter residence, Taliesin West, begun in 1938 in the desert outside Phoenix, Ariz., 45-degree diagonals are used in the planning and almost all the structural elements are battered or canted. However, it is the materials which give this edifice—like Taliesin itself at once a house, a working place, and a school—its unique qualities. The substructure is of ‘desert concrete’, that is great rough blocks of tawny local stone placed in forms and loosely stuck together, so to say, with concrete; the superstructure is of dark-stained timber frames mostly filled only with canvas to allow a maximum flow of air. As at the original Taliesin in Wisconsin, Wright kept on enlarging Taliesin West, not always to its advantage. Another example of ‘desert-concrete’ construction, the Rose Pauson house of 1940 in Phoenix, was destroyed by fire. It was, in its very sculptural way, a masterpiece of this period unlike anything else he ever built and is still an impressive ruin.

It was characteristic of Wright’s activity in his ‘second’ career that the versatility of his invention knew no bounds. Many earlier ideas that had existed only in projects could come to fruition now that his services were in such demand. At the same time it is hard to believe that in the plain white stucco walls, extensive window bands, and thin roof slab of the E. J. Kaufmann guest house, built just above Falling Water in 1939, or in the G. D. Sturges house of the same year at 449 Skyway Road in Brentwood Heights near Los Angeles, cantilevered out from a hill-slope, Wright was not consciously rivalling the effects of the European architects of the second generation whom he professed to scorn—rivalling them, but also making very much his own such of their effects as he cared to emulate.

Wright did not drop the novel methods of construction that he had developed earlier as he tried out new ones. In his most extensive late commission, the layout of a new campus for Florida Southern College at Lakeland in Florida, begun in 1938, the plan is highly formal at the same time that it is markedly asymmetrical. It thus elaborates upon the angular themes of his project of 1927 for a desert resort at Chandler, Arizona—incidentally the point at which his interest in 60-30-degree angles began. The buildings at Florida Southern, starting with the Ann Pfeiffer Chapel of 1940 to which many more were later added, are mostly of concrete-block construction, but with much less use of patterned elements than in the executed work and projects of the twenties.

The Second World War interrupted Wright’s career less than the First. Various projects initiated in the war years came to fruition soon after the war was over and gave evidence of the continuing vitality of his powers of invention. The second house for Herbert Jacobs at Middleton in the country west of Madison, Wis., was very different from the Usonian one of 1937. Ever since an unexecuted house project of 1938 Wright had been fascinated by the possibilities of using the circle in planning. While he had tried out the form in the Florida Southern Library before the war, the Jacobs house of 1948 was the first of a series of houses that he built with curved plans. Its two-storey living area bends around a circular sunken garden court with the bedrooms opening off a balcony above (Figure 42). On the other side the house is half buried in the hill-top, above which rise its walls of coursed rubble. A tower-like circular core near one end of the convex side provides a strong vertical accent.

Another house of the post-war years, also based on the circle, is quite different in character. The Sol Friedman house in Pleasantville, N.Y., is roofed with mushroom-like concrete slabs; the two intersecting closed circles of the actual dwelling are balanced at the end of a straight terrace parapet by the open circle of the carport (Plate 145B). This was completed in 1949 with battered walls of almost Richardsonian random ashlar masonry below a strip of metal-framed windows. A still later ‘house of circles’ for his son David J. Wright was built near Phoenix, Ariz., in 1952. This is of concrete blocks and raised off the ground, with the approach up a gently sloping helical ramp to the various curved rooms on the first storey. The circle and the helix appear also in an urban building of these years, the shop for V. C. Morris in Maiden Lane, San Francisco, completed in 1949. Here the street façade is a sheer plane of yellow brick broken only by the entrance, which is a Sullivanian—or Richardsonian—arch like that of the Heurtley house of 1902. Inside, a helical ramp rises around the central circular area beneath a ceiling made of bubble-like elements executed in plastics.

A major work of these years, the extension of the Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wis., also completed in 1949, makes much use of circles also (Plate 146A). North of the existing office building Wright surrounded a square court with open carports whose outer walls of solid brickwork shut out the surrounding city; inside these walls are ranged short concrete columns with lily-pad tops like those in the section that he built ten years earlier. In the centre of the ‘piazza’ thus defined rises a laboratory tower of tree-like structure. The upper floors of this, alternately square with rounded corners and circular, are all cantilevered out from a central cylindrical core which contains the lift and the vertical canalizations. Alternate bands of brickwork and Pyrex tubing, such as were used on the original building, enclose the tower except at ground level; there the space of the court continues under the cantilevered floors above as far as the solid central core.

This relatively modest tower prepared the way for Wright’s skyscraper in Bartlesville, Okla., of 1953-5, which has been mentioned earlier. Actually, however, this Price Tower,^[412] which is partly occupied by offices and partly by flats, is the final realization of a project originally prepared in 1929 for a block of flats for St Mark’s Church in New York. This he had elaborated in the intervening years in projects for blocks of flats in Chicago and for a hotel in Washington.

While Wright was continuing to employ in his houses of the late forties and early fifties a variety of modes of design that go back to the thirties, and also developing at Florida Southern and in Bartlesville ideas dating from his inactive period in the late twenties, he continued to strike out in other directions too. The Neils house at 2801 Burnham Boulevard on Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, Minn., completed in 1951, is all of coloured marble rubble provided by the client; the Walker house at Carmel, Cal., completed in 1952, is a glazed polygonal pavilion overhanging the sea. Where the Prairie Houses of the first decade of Wright’s mature career may all seem in retrospect to have come out of the same, or nearly identical, moulds, the many houses designed in his seventies and eighties are notable for the great variety of their siting, their materials, and the geometrical themes of their planning.

Nor was the domestic field anything like the sole area of his activity. In addition to the college buildings, the shop, the skyscraper, and the laboratory that have been mentioned, Wright built during the years 1947-52 a Unitarian church in Madison, Wis., of very original character. The products of his multifarious activity in these years include, moreover, many projects for all sorts of structures, some of which have been completed—notably the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (Plate 188). A decade and more of designing and redesigning preceded the initiation of this remarkable helical concrete building in 1956. Of three other late projects, those for an opera-house in Baghdad and for an Arizona state capitol in Phoenix, dating from 1957, are unlikely to be built; but the county buildings for Marin County, Cal., are now well advanced.

In spite of so much late activity, greater than that of his early maturity, in spite (or perhaps, in part, because) of its kaleidoscopic variety, Wright’s actual influence was less significant than forty years before; at least it was of a very different order. He still outpaced his juniors both of the next generation and the one after; but few if any were able to follow with any success along the intensely personal paths he opened.^[413] Like Perret to the end of his life, Wright continued at ninety to offer an inspiration to all architects, but there has risen no school of imitators to vulgarize his manner as there was long a school of imitators of Perret in France.

In creative power, in productivity, and, over the forty years and more since 1910, in influence, Wright overshadowed all the other American architects of his generation. Inspired by Wright as well as by Sullivan, there flourished for a while a sort of ‘Second Chicago School’ to which Purcell & Elmslie; George W. Maher (1864-1926); Schmidt, Garden & Martin, and several other architects who were active in the Middle West before the First World War may be considered to belong.^[414] But this school flickered out in the twenties as most of its members succumbed to the dominant ‘traditionalism’ of the day or else ceased to find clients.^[415] Four rather more vital and original architects appeared shortly after 1900 in California: the brothers Greene (Charles S., 1868-1957, and Henry M., 1867-1954), Irving Gill (1870-1936), and Bernard R. Maybeck (1862-1957).^[416] But the productive careers of the Greenes, of Gill, and, to a lesser extent, that of Maybeck came pretty much to a close, like those of the Chicagoans, around 1915 with the resounding success of the ‘traditional’ buildings designed by Bertram G. Goodhue (1869-1924) for the San Diego Exhibition of that year.^[417] These were in the most ornate sort of Spanish Baroque, quite archaeologically handled; and the emulation of them, which at once became endemic in California, turned most local architects away from innovation for almost twenty years.

Maybeck, who had been a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in the eighties, contributed to the San Francisco Exhibition^[418] of the same year the still extant Fine Arts Building in an equally ‘traditional’ but more Classical vein. Partly ruined today, his tawny stucco columns and entablatures have the air of a painting by Pannini or Hubert Robert. For all its charm, this was a surprising work to come from a man who had earlier shown himself, in the Christian Science Church of 1910 in Berkeley, Cal., almost as bold an innovator as Wright even though he employed for that a fantastically eclectic vocabulary of reminiscent forms (Plate 146B). Many Berkeley houses, moreover, ranging over several decades in date, also prove Maybeck to have been an architect of great originality and surprising versatility.

In Berkeley also are several houses by John Galen Howard (1864-1931) as well as his building for the University of California’s School of Architecture, of which he was for long the Dean. His building at the University (which has in addition a Faculty Club and one or two other things by Maybeck), the Gregory house of about 1904, and the architect’s own house of 1912 are also notable examples of free design dating from the first decades of the century. Howard’s informal work is more directly related than are Wright’s houses to the Shingle Style of the preceding period, though not specifically to that of Richardson, for whom, however, Howard had actually worked in the mid eighties before he came to California. Most of his work at the University, in fact, is in an Italianate vein, and the campus is dominated by his tall, campanile-like clock tower.

The production of the Greene brothers in this period, entirely domestic and largely in Pasadena, offers a more coherent corpus than that of any modern American architect of their generation except Wright. Related, like the work of Howard, to the Shingle Style, which had been brought to Pasadena and Los Angeles by Eastern architects in the eighties and nineties, the Greenes’ houses are most interesting for their successful assimilation of oriental influences. The best example is the Gamble house at 4 Westmorland Street in Pasadena of 1908-9 (Plate 147A). But the Pitcairn house of 1906 and the Blacker house of 1907, at 289 West State Street and at 1157 Hillcrest respectively, as well as the later Thorsen house of 1909, at 2307 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, now a fraternity house, are also excellent.

Shingled walls, low-pitched and wide-spreading gables, and extensive porte-cochères and verandas of stick-work surpassing in virtuosity those of the Stick Style, were combined by the Greenes in rather loosely organized compositions. Less formal and regular than Wright’s Prairie Houses, theirs are executed throughout with a craftsmanship in wood rivalling that of the Japanese, whom they, like Wright, so much admired. The Greenes’ plans are less open than Wright’s, but they made more use of verandas and balconies than he. Superb woodwork and fine stained glass combine with the specially designed furniture in the interiors to produce ensembles of a sturdy elegance hardly matched by any of Wright’s. Those in the Blacker and Thorsen houses, whose clients were both in the lumber business, are especially rich.

Moreover, a ‘California Bungalow’ mode^[419]—at worst but a parody at small scale of the Greenes’ expensive mansions, at best sharing many of their virtues of directness and simplicity if not of imaginative craftsmanship—became widely popular thanks to national magazines, pattern-books, and the activities of many builders. This was true not alone in the West but throughout the country in the very years after 1910 when ‘traditionalism’, usually in Neo-Colonial guise, closed in most completely on American domestic architecture.

The reputation of the Greenes today is less than that of the more articulate but less consistent Maybeck. But when modern architecture revived in California in the thirties the new men were fully aware of what the Greenes had accomplished. Thus their work provided, together with that of Maybeck and Howard, a background and a tradition for the local development of a largely autochthonous domestic architecture in the San Francisco Bay area. This was a truly living tradition^[420] quite unlike the abortive revival of the architecture of the Spanish Missions, which it has now almost completely displaced. But the Mission influence was not altogether a negative one in early twentieth-century California, as the work of Irving Gill illustrates.

Gill was less prolific than the Greene brothers, and most of what he built is less striking. Like Voysey, he was in principle a reformer not a revolutionary, finding his inspiration consciously in the local structural tradition of the early Spanish Missions and haciendas. As a result some of his buildings, such as the First Church of Christ Scientist of 1904-7 in San Diego or in Los Angeles the Laughlan house of 1907 and the Banning house of 1911, at 666 West 28th Street and 503 South Commonwealth Avenue respectively, with their elliptically arched loggias and their grilles of ornamental ironwork, are almost as ‘Spanish Colonial’ as the work of the outright traditionalists around him.

Gill’s most interesting and mature houses, thanks to their smooth stucco walls, large window areas, and avoidance of stylistic detail, can also have a deceptive air of being European rather than American and of a period some years later than that in which they were actually built. In his best work, such as the Dodge house (Plate 147B) of 1915-16 at 950 North Kings Road in Los Angeles or the Scripps house at La Jolla of 1917, now the Art Centre, the asymmetrically organized blocks, crisply cut by large windows of various sizes carefully sashed and disposed, with roof terraces or flat roofs above, more than rival the contemporary houses of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (Plate 155A) in the abstract distinction of the composition. They even approach rather closely the most advanced European houses of the next decade (see Chapters 21 and 22).

Gill’s interiors are especially fine and also quite like Loos’s. Very different from the rich orientalizing rooms designed by the Greenes, they are in fact more similar to real Japanese interiors in their severe elegance. The walls of fine smooth cabinet woods, with no mouldings at all, are warm in colour, and Voysey-like wooden grilles of plain square spindles give human scale. The whole effect, in its clarity of form and simplicity of means, is certainly more premonitory of the next stage of modern architecture than any other American work of its period.

Gill continued to practise intermittently down into the thirties, but his finest work was done in the second decade of the century. He had little influence locally and still less nationally, yet his best houses extend very notably the range of achievement of the first generation of modern architects in America, even though his later production declined sadly in quantity and even in quality. Wright alone was able to renew his career successfully after the reaction against modern architecture that dominated America from coast to coast during the twenty years from the First World War to the mid thirties finally came to an end.