Diane Maddex

50 Favourite Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright

Houses - not skyscrapers, museums or schools - remained Frank Lloyd Wright's favourite building type from the beginning to the end of his seventy-year career as an architect.When he started his practice near the close of the 19th century, he saw a house as the embodiment of democracy and individual freedom.Your home had more capacity to spread well-being, he said, than any cathedral or palace.To him it was the centre of all family life. As 50 Favourite Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright shows, his ideal home took on an amazing variety of forms. From Wright's 300 house designs that were eventually built, this book visits fifty that have become world-wide favourites. Here, from the young architect's first period, is his own home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois, an architectural laboratory for him over two decades.Wright next ushered in the 20th century with his Prairie House, whose sheltering roofs and horizontal lines linked them to the earth; classics such as the Willits, Dana Thomas and Robie Houses. In the 1920s came revolutionary design in California built of textured concrete, followed in the 1930s by the internationally renowned Fallingwater and Taliesin West. Each of the examples featured grew from Wright's never-changing principles that a house should be built with nature, use materials and colours, be designed from within, have the consistency of a finely woven fabric, achieve harmony through unity, and be a work of art - not just a house.