1.7
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Use of Movement
‘Ground plan and perspective view of Ward W. Willits’ villa, Highland Park, Ill’, Plate XXV in the Wasmuth portfolio of Wright’s work to 1910, must be one the twentieth century’s most compressed and beautiful renderings (Figure 1.7.1). Wright had developed the aesthetic of a central loggia flanked by twin masses and far-flying roofs in this well-known Prairie house of 1901. He had taken the quasi-sacred pinwheel hearth of his own Oak Park house (1896) and placed it centrally, to disturb and enrich a cross-shaped plan: a form of overpowering horizontality nailed by its chimney into the prairie. It offered a sense of place in contrast to the rush, noise and coal smoke of the Loop; apparent security in the face of contemporary social and technical change: Chicago ‘born in a flash . . .’ in the stark prairie.1
The classical gesture of welcome given by the Willits loggia is firmly rejected by a defensive balustrade, and you must slide along the eastern boundary to the protective shelter of the porte cochère. From your vehicle, you turn left and climb four steps to the front door, still under this great roof (Figure 1.7.2). You are welcomed, there is a seat before you, and you turn into the stair hall, which opens vertically above you. If it is not a personal visit, you enter the reception room to your right, overlooking where you started. Otherwise, you are invited to turn left and mount five broad steps, where progress is blocked by a slatted oak screen, the back of an unseen inglenook seat, but through it is glimpsed a 60-feet (18-metre) vista through dining room to porch and garden beyond. You enter a richly ambiguous space: still within the entry sequence, but unknowingly also in the corner of the living room. You are also in a subspace of its own. You turn left to face the street you have left and spiral around the room, before turning left at the hearth, where the sequence is repeated down the back of the second inglenook seat into the dining room. As you take a seat, you have completed ten turns.
In 10 intensive years up to leaving Chicago for Florence in 1910 to complete the drawings for the Wasmuth, Wright probably felt that he had extracted almost every possible variation from his Prairie idiom. In a remarkable series of houses, he had explored every imaginable permutation of plan arrangement, of ambiguously overlapping sequences of spaces, of setting up rooms with respect to hearth, sideboard or staircase, and of gradual movement from public to private territory. At their heart was always a binding and releasing, a grounding at the
Figure 1.7.1 Ward Willitts House, 1901, Highland Park, IL. Plans and perspective. The route processes through reception to the ‘conspicuous consumption’ (cf. Thorstein Veblen) of the dining room via the more informal living room
Source: Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University). All rights reserved. All drawings in this section are reproduced from the original German book
Wright took a remarkable, intuitive leap in realising these projects. The formal properties, the tartan strips of the Froebel grid that the visitor traverses, have been extensively analysed by MacCormac (1968) and others, but they did not remark on the meandering or spiralling movement, which is widely thought to have originated in Wright’s exposure to Japanese culture.2 He did not visit Japan until 1905, but he experienced the Japanese Pavilion, the Ho-o-Den, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Its symmetrical form suggested an axial entrance, like the Willits House, but this was denied by a rope across the axial steps. Visitors had to move one way, as they always do at world fairs.3 Before 1893, Wright was probably the foremost Western expert on the Japanese print: ikoye-i. By 1905, he had assimilated the seeming simplicity and sense of progressive discovery found in the Japanese building tradition.
Wright learned from both tea-house and temple complex. Both have an indirect and shifting approach. In the first, small changes of direction are carefully orchestrated to direct attention to a tree, rock or garden feature; they are indicated by the paving or arrangement of stones and measured to the kimono-encumbered step and wooden clog (see Chapter 3.4, p. 178). It is a sequential process of renunciation, of withdrawal from daily cares, and at small scale. In the second, these changes of direction operate at the scale of landscape, making connections with the world beyond as part of a narrative. A stroll-garden, as at Katsura, is a literal representation of the inner sea, lost memory. Nitschke (1966) has shown how movement over an entire complex is worked into the form of a site, reserving its finest features for places of repose or surprise.4 Kyu-misu-Dera, in the south-eastern hills of Kyoto, is typical (Figures 1.7.3 and 1.7.4). Arrival at a great outer portal leads up the contours and past a glowing-red pagoda. Further up, you may purchase offerings or deposit prayers, before reaching a water basin filled by a cosmic dragon, symbolising and offering cleansing. You continue to find yourself high on a cliff, as if on a stage: to the left is the great Buddha Hall, to the right a view across the mountain towards the distant city. Your feet echo on wood, for a mighty timber platform intercedes between earth and sky. Beyond are three small temples and forest. Below, in a defile, at the foot of a great flight of steps, is a fountain, the purest water in Japan. The temple is dedicated to safety in motherhood; the woods above are wilder, animist: a place of spirits. You descend, drink or collect your water, and traverse the contours to leave by the gate where you arrived.
Figure 1.7.4 Kyu-misu-dera Temple, plan. Building dispositions are intimately linked to the site, developed organically from walking it. Key: 1 portal; 2 pagoda; 3 Buddha Hall; 4 Shinto shrines; 5 fountain
Source: Redrawn by John Sergeant
Japan 1917–22
Figure 1.7.5 Yamamura House, 1918–23, Ashiya, near Kobe, Japan. Exploded isometric
Source: Drawing by John Sergeant. Key: 1 entry; 2 living room; 3 Japanese-style rooms; 4 dining room
The commission for the Imperial Hotel provided Wright with an opportunity for more detailed study and to undertake smaller works, among them the Yamamura House of 1918–23, completed by Arata Endo (Figure 1.7.5). It has not been explored by Wright scholars, but I see it as a crucial link between the movement patterns of his Prairie houses and the subtle interplay with greater landscape of his later work. Sited in Ashiya, the building lies on the urban periphery, south east of Kobe. The Ashiyagawa River gushes down out of the hills, beautifully embanked in diagonally set stone, and the house crowns the ridge above. Wright ran the driveway along the contours up to the top of the ridge, which dominates the view of valley and sea. Poised there, with its service wing set higher, the house is angled to follow the lie of the land. Because of the slope, car arrival is restricted to a small rectangular forecourt, and the building takes the form of a series of single-storey set backs, like a stair up the ridge. The first element, the living room, spans the court, making a powerful threshold marked by four piers, through two of which the view can be glimpsed: opposite, a fountain drops water into a basin, and beside it, the door faces the mountain. The obvious, and grander, manoeuvre for the car to drop off passengers and then continue around the contours was impossible, as the land to the north west drops steeply; instead, it must execute a two-point turn and leave as it came. Garages are elsewhere. On entering, there is only a vestibule, and you ascend, to your left, the first of two stairs. This sets up a spiral that arrives in the reception room, a powerful space, anchored by its fire, aligned to the view, with built-in seats each side, poised above the land, which falls away on three sides. This would surely be enough, but Wright continues. You return to the stair and ascend one more level, stepping this time to the left, up the ridge, where you are confronted by a grand gallery, with views to the north west. It passes along the whole length of a three-room enfilade set three steps higher: Japanese-style rooms, linked by sliding doors and able to serve many functions, including sleeping. They lack paper screens, shoji, but have floor mats, tatami, to bestow a cultural authenticity. You become aware that the gallery is also a kind of internal verandah, engawa, signalling threshold to a Japanese person, a barrier between the boarded exterior and tatami-floored interior, traditionally never crossed without shoes being removed.5 Passing, perhaps hungrily, along the gallery, you ascend a second stair to the dining room, the goal of the promenade. The square table is offset under a pyramidal ceiling, and a loggia overlooks the entire length of the house and ridge beyond. Servants could produce a meal as if magically, for there has been no hint of the service wing hidden behind this highest level. Yet even this is not all, because the composition possesses an architectural coda: after eating, you stroll on to the stepped terraces of the roofs, feel the evening air and observe the sunset.6