Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [112]
Mies is equally famous for another saying: “God dwells in the details.” In the Seagram Building, despite its thirty-eight-story scale, he showed his superb craftsmanship by custom-designing details like lettering on lobby mailboxes. “A beautiful lady with hidden corsets,” American architect Louis Kahn called the Seagram Building. Although it seems light and simple structurally, its bronze sheathing covers a skeleton of steel.
LE CORBUSIER: A MACHINE FOR LIVING. The third International Style pioneer was Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965), known for defining a house as “a machine for living.” From the 1920s through the forties, Le Corbusier designed homes to resemble the machines he so admired and Cubist art he formerly painted. His clean, precise, boxy houses had machine-planed surfaces and ribbonlike strips of windows. They illustrate the International Style trademark of flow — with interior and exterior mingling in an open floor plan.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT. “Not only do I intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived,” Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) once said, “but the greatest architect of all time.” He may well have achieved his ambition, for this American architect designed some of the most original and beautiful structures in history. Among Wright’s gifts to the American home are cathedral ceilings, built-in furniture and lighting fixtures, casement windows, carports, the massive fireplace, and split-level ranches. His most far-reaching contributions were busting wide open boxy floor plans and designing site-specific buildings that seem to grow naturally out of their location.
GO WITH THE FLOW. Wright drew layouts with continuity in mind, so that walls, ceilings, and floors flow seamlessly just as rooms merge with each other and the outside environment. He wanted “no posts, no columns” because “the new reality,” he said, “is space instead of matter.” The International Style architects borrowed this concept of flowing space from Wright, as well as his clean-cut rectangular shapes radiating from a central core (often a massive hearth).
Wright differed from the International Style in his insistence on natural forms and materials and his respect for the environment. In fact, his early “Prairie Houses” designed for the Midwest got their name because of their low-slung, horizontal lines that hug the flat land and blend with the natural setting.
Wright’s style is impossible to categorize, for he skipped from Japanese to Aztec to purely imaginative motifs, as inspiration and whim dictated. Opposed to the worship of technology, Wright celebrated the individual. Claiming the prerogative of genius, he insisted on designing every last detail of his work. He created stained glass windows, dishes, fabrics, furniture, rugs, drapes — he even designed gowns for one client’s wife.
Unfortunately, some of his designs were too abstract for, quite literally, comfort. Executives of the Wright-designed Price Tower said his chairs “make you feel like you are about to fall on your face.” Wright himself admitted, “I have been black and blue in some spot, almost all my life from too intimate contact with my own furniture.”
Wright, “Fallingwater” (Kaufmann House), 1936, Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Illustrating Wright’s “organic architecture, ” this house seems to sprout out of living rock. Built mostly of rough stone, the house’s form echoes the native rock ledges. Cantilevered terraces hover over a rushing waterfall. The house’s irregular spaces flow as easily as water, illustrating Wright’s adage: “No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house should live together and each be happier for the other.”
A GENIUS IN HIS OWN MIND
The only thing frank Lloyd Wright, child of the Midwest prairie, remembered about elementary school was building with blocks. At age 18, with innovative Chicago architect Louis Sullivan,