BACK TO NATURE
At the end of the 19th century, American architecture still tended to reference Neo-Classical, Baroque and Renaissance styles from Europe. A small group of architects, the most prominent of whom was Frank Lloyd Wright, was determined to find a non-derivative architectural language inspired instead by the wide open expanses of the American Midwest – Prairie Style.
Along with Wright, architects including Robert Spencer, Myron Hunt, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin, the first licensed female architect in the USA, shared a loft studio in Chicago from which they developed Prairie Style. Their use of low, long, horizontals and shallow, hipped or flat roofs, broad overhangs, cantilevered levels and linear strings of windows was in deliberate contrast to the taller-is-better architecture dominating Chicago at the time. Prairie Style buildings referenced the natural landscapes that inspired them. They were, as Wright put it, “married to the ground”.
A connection with European ideas did still exist, specifically with the Arts & Crafts movement and its faith in simplicity and
finely crafted detail. The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson also influenced the young architects, who believed that better designed homes led to better quality lives.
The Oak Park district of Chicago has the highest concentration of Prairie Style homes in America, yet the high point of Prairie Style is found in Mill Run in rural Pennsylvania. Fallingwater, 1936–39, designed by Wright for the Kaufmann family as a weekend home, takes the connection with the land to heart, with cantilivered concrete terraces stretching out above a crashing waterfall that runs underneath the house.
The asymmetrical interior layout pivots around the hearth, which is built around a protruding rock from the waterfall. Low ceilings and deliberately dark corridors lead the eye out to the woodland beyond, keeping the connection between nature and architecture ever-present.
Fallingwater, Pennsylvania, is a National Historic Monument and is open to the public.
www.fallingwater.org
Architectural Traveller | Page 45
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