Frank Lloyd Wright planned circular one acre housing plots surrounded by playgrounds, swimming pools, gardens, ball courts and community centers.
Each single family house on this 100 acres at Mount Pleasant, New York was designed or approved by Wright following his Usonian architectural style.
Wright created the word carport for this low cost innovation of his Usonian homes.The development by Wright of the use of the circle, culminated in his Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Wright wrote an article in 1935 for the Architectural Record describing the emerging technologies behind his vision for this new utopia. It would be a feat of modern technology, built upon some of America’s greatest strengths:
The motor car: general mobilization of the human being.
Radio, telephone and telegraph: electrical communication becoming complete.
Standardized machine production: machine invention plus scientific discovery.
Who needed to rush into the city for work, commerce or entertainment, when the wonders of radio and telephone made things like telecommuting and remote concerts available? People could retreat to something that was not quite urban, and not quite rural.
Frank Lloyd Wright described his architectural style as “organic”, in harmony with nature.
Wright provided the Jacobs with an open floor plan, laid out on a grid of two by four foot units.
The term carport was coined by Frank Lloyd Wright. In describing the carport, he said: “A car is not a horse, and it doesn’t need a barn. Cars are built well enough now so that they do not require elaborate shelter.”
The two wings of the Jacobs House houses extend to embrace the garden. The more public living room on one side and the more private bedrooms on the other meet at a service core comprising kitchen, bath and hearth.
The masonry “core” of the house defines a small cellar which, in addition to laundry space, contains two small boilers serving the radiant heating system that circulates water through the eight inch concrete floor slab resting on packed sand. Above the cellar are the bathroom, the open kitchen, and a fireplace, the focus of the living room.
The ceiling of the bedroom wing drops down to 7.5 feet from the 11.5 foot ceilings of the kitchen and bathroom and the 9.5 foot height of the living room and gallery.
“We can never make the living room big enough, the fireplace important enough, or the sense of relationship between exterior, interior and environment close enough, or get enough of these good things I’ve just mentioned. A Usonian house is always hungry for the ground, lives by it, becoming an integral feature of it.” — Frank Lloyd Wright. “Frank Lloyd Wright”, The Architectural Forum, January, 1948, Vol 88 Number 1. p71.
The direct relationship of the eating area to the kitchen eliminates a separate dining room.
Like many contemporary social reformers, Wright believed in the moral and political values exemplified by home ownership and believed that well designed, tasteful dwellings would produce a happier, more harmonious and enlightened society.
Wright set out in 1936 to build a number of Usonian houses, well designed, low cost dwellings, set on concrete slabs with piping for radiant heat beneath.
The materials of the Usonian house were to be recognized as nature’s own: wood, stone, or baked clay in the form of bricks, and glass curtain walls, clerestories, and casement windows sheltered under overhanging soffits.
“There in a beautiful forest was a solid, high rock ledge rising beside a waterfall, and the natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from that rock bank over the falling water.” Frank Lloyd Wright in an interview with Hugh Downs, 1954.
A most sublime integration of architecture and nature, Fallingwater nestled among the rocky woodlands of Pennsylvania is the focal point for every discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s inspired siting, use of organic materials, and employment of decorative motifs derived from nature and translated into glass, stone, and wood.
The construction began in 1936 was finished in 1939. The building is revolutionary and iconic for its bold horizontal and vertical lines built over a running waterfall.
To create a unified and organic composition, two colors were used throughout: a light ochre for the concrete and his signature Cherokee red for the steel.
Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone, when he got the commission to design the house. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world famous work of architecture. The two men collaborated to produce an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance, that brought international fame to them both and confirmed Wright’s position as the greatest architect of the twentieth century.
Fallingwater Rising shows how E. J. Kaufmann’s house became not just Wright’s masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life. One of the pleasures of the book is its rich evocation of the upper crust society of Pittsburgh; Carnegie, Frick, the Mellons. A society that was socially reactionary but luxury loving and baronial in its tastes. Key figures include Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Ayn Rand, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Fallingwater is the only major Wright designed house to open to the public with its furnishings, artwork, and setting intact.
Built in 1924 for Charles Ennis and his wife Mabel, the Ennis House was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built by his son, architect Lloyd Wright.
The house is the last and largest of four “textile block” houses in Los Angeles area, which feature patterned and perforated concrete blocks that give a unique textural appearance to both their exteriors and interiors. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a custom pattern for each of the houses built with concrete blocks.
The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand cast in aluminum molds to create a block 16 inches wide, 16 inches tall and 3 1/2 inches thick.
It was an experiment in the functional and artistic possibilities of concrete, which was still considered a new material, especially for home construction. The phrase “textile block” came from the way vertical and horizontal steel rods were woven through channels in the concrete to keep the blocks knitted together and held in position.
“One gets to experience the changes of light throughout the day and how that impacts interior spaces on a large scale. By walking a few feet, one can be in a completely different environment.”
“My grandfather designed homes to be occupied by people. His homes are works of art. He created the space, but the space becomes a creative force and uplifts when it is lived in every day.” Eric Lloyd Wright
By the time he designed the Ennis house in 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright had lived and worked in Tokyo and built several houses in Los Angeles. He was more cosmopolitan and less afraid of sunlight. The Ennis House is monumental with double and triple height rooms.
Between 1909 and 1959, Wright designed a total of 38 structures up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to Southern California. These include the Marin County Civic Center and Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.
The Queen and her three heirs, Charles, William and George, in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace.
This special four stamp Miniature Sheet features a striking portrait by Ranald Mackechnie, exclusively commissioned by Royal Mail for the Queen’s 90th birthday.
Silver medal issued on the occasion of a Kulturbund coin show in 1976 in Neuhaus, today in the state of Thuringia. It was designed by Helmut König and minted by a company named Bittner in Gotha.
“Mein Streben sei: Die Menschen ihnen selbst zu geben” is a Fröbel quote. In a note to a friend, he wrote: “Be they aim to give bread to people; let my striving be to give each person to themself..”
The chance discovery of a mosaic 18 inches below the surface led to the discovery of one of the largest Roman Villas ever found in the UK, similar in size to the great Roman villa at Chedworth.
The villa, which had around 20 to 25 rooms on the ground floor alone, was built between 175 AD and 220 AD, and repeatedly remodelled right up until the mid 4th century.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, one of Britain’s leading historians said: “This remarkable Roman villa, with its baths and mosaics uncovered by chance, is a large, important and very exciting discovery that reveals so much about the luxurious lifestyle of a rich Romano British family at the height of the empire.
“It is an amazing thought that so much has survived almost two millennia.”
An artist’s impression of how the site would have looked
“This site has not been touched since its collapse 1400 years ago and, as such, is of enormous importance. Without question, this is a hugely valuable site in terms of research, with incredible potential.
“The discovery of such an elaborate and extraordinarily well preserved villa, undamaged by agriculture for over 1500 years, is unparalleled in recent years. Overall, the excellent preservation, large scale and complexity of this site present a unique opportunity to understand Roman and post-Roman Britain.”
