20th Century and Designs Essay

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Frank Lloyd's Prairie And Usonian Style

Few architects in the 1900s compare to Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 -- April 9, 1959) who was also an interior designer and writer. Throughout his lifetime, Wright was credited with over a thousand designs and over half of these constructed. Wright who was a famous lover of organic architecture was in the forefront of the Prairie School architectural movement and invented the Usonian home model. Many office buildings, schools and even museums were designed with the unique style of Prairie School Architecture by him (Prairie School Architecture).

Wright was born in 1867 into the family of William Carey Wright (1825 -- 1904) and Anna Lloyd Jones (1838 -- 1923) who resided in the agricultural settlement of Richland Centre, Wisconsin. Both of his parents were teachers although his father was politically and legally inclined. When Wright came of age, he travelled to Chicago -which was in the midst of a revival after the Great Chicago fire incident of 1871- in search of a job. In a short while, he got employed as a designer in a design firm owned by Joseph Lyman Silsbee. While there, he met a fellow designer, George G. Elmslie, who would later be converted to Prairie style architecture by Wright. Due to a clash of interest, Wright left Silsbee and joined the Adler & Sullivan Company in less than a year. Sullivan admired the qualities of Wright and they struck up a good relationship. Wright took advantage of this rapport to persuade Sullivan to employ his friend Elmslie and they both shared Wright's new hard-earned office space. Wright's career experienced continual successes until he was named head draftsman, a position where he oversaw all residential designs carried out in Sullivan's company.

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Wright worked on five projects which were developed and two of those houses still exist today.

Wright lived an extravagant life, spending his money on costly cars and apparel, causing him to accept about nine separate projects to shore up his finances. The houses were designed in the Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles and eight of them still stand today. Wright's designs in those days were majorly in Sullivanesque or the conservative Dutch Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, and Queen Anne styles. By the beginning of the 20th century, Wright held claim to over 50 designs.

The Prairie

Wright fully developed the Prairie School style in 1900 and 1901. He worked on four projects which are widely regarded to as the pioneer designs of this style. Wright also put his ideas in writing and published them in the Ladies Home Journal in response to a request from Curtis Publishing Company's President, Edward Bok, for better house designs. Wright's designs "A Home in a Prairie Town" and "A Small House with Lots of Room in it" were published in February and June 1901 respectively and after an initial delay, people fell in love with the idea.

Wright's houses called "Prairie Houses" were low structures with slightly sloping roofs, simple features. They were constructed with special materials and were built to fit in with the unique Chicago landscape.

Wright established his status as a world class draftsman with the unique designs of these structures which were quite distinct when compared to the then conventional houses. These buildings had typical horizontal features which made them fit in perfectly with the Midwestern landscape. Wright called the underlying philosophy….....

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