THE NATURALH

When Frank Lloyd Wright turns his attention to ©

most important personal problems now facing
everyone in our society — it is a time for rejoicing.

The world’s greatest architect here meets the urgent prob-

lem of suitable shelter for The Family in a democracy, in a
magnificent and — as was — challenging
to be expected
book. Here, presented at last in full detail, is the natural
house.

The moderate cost houses described in this book and

profusely illustrated with 116 photographs, plans and draw-
ings, are houses — of infinite variety for people of limited
means — in which living has become for their owners a
purposeful new adventure in freedom and dignity.

Mr. Wright tells the story of the world famous “‘Usonian”’

houses, so that we now see, in text and illustrations, how
they have evolved from original conception to final execution.

He has also written a step-by-step description of the

‘‘Usonian Automatic,”’ explaining just how that remarkable
house is built —a simplified method of construction so de-
vised that the owners themselves can build it with great
economy and beauty. For this purpose, there are, in addition
to Mr. Wright's text, special photographs and drawings of
the method and materials, showing clearly how the Usonian
Automatic is built.

For more than a half century Frank Lloyd Wright has been
the prophet of a new idea in architecture. It is called “‘or-
ganic architecture.” It has spread throughout the world. Its
liberating influence now appears — or semblances of it
appear — in nearly every structure being built.

During this period of incomparable achievement, there

has been a profoundly mistaken notion that Mr. Wright has
built only for the rich. This book is convincing evidence of
the error of that notion.

(continued on b
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

THE NATURAL HOUSE

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Copyright 1954
Horizon Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 54-12278
ISBN 0-8 180-0007-4
CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: 1936-1953

3 ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE
37 BUILDING THE NEW HOUSE
Al Simplicity
44 Plasticity
49 IN THE NATURE OF MATERIALS: A PHILOSOPHY
oye} A New Reality: Glass
54 Another Reality: Continuity
59 Materials for Their Own Sake
62 The New Integrity
63 Integral Ornament At Last!
67 Great Power
79 THE USONIAN HOUSE |
a7 THE USONIAN HOUSE II
98 Gravity Heat
115 CONCERNING THE USONIAN HOUSE

BOOK TWO: 1954

129 INTEGRITY: IN A HOUSE AS IN AN INDIVIDUAL

139 FROM THE GROUND UP
139 Where to Build
142 What Kind of Land
142 A Suitable Foundation
148 Advantages of the Berm-Type
154 How to Light the House
154 The Great Luminary
155 Steel and Glass
158 The Basement
158 Insulation and Heating
160 The Kind of Roof
161 The Attic
165 Size of Kitchen
166 The Client and the House
167 Expanding for the Growing Family
168 Children’s Rooms
170 Furnishings
170 Chairs
174 Paint
IVES: Air Conditioning?
178 The Contractor
181 GRAMMAR: THE HOUSE AS A WORK OF ART
186 The Architect of the Future
187 It is Valiant to be Simple
Lo, THE USONIAN AUTOMATIC
eed Reducing the Costs
199 How the “Usonian Automatic” is Built
215 ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE AND THE ORIENT
218 The Philosophy and the Deed
Ppa) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sources
Photographers’ Credits
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FRONTISPIECE—FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

WILLEY HOUSE, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

First design for house
Plan
Exterior from south
Interior: Work-unit
Interior: Corridor
Interior: Dining table arrangement
Interior: Living room
Exterior looking to north
JACOBS HOUSE, WESTMORLAND, WISCONSIN
Preliminary sketch
Preliminary sketch
Plan
Exterior
Exterior
Exterior
Interior: Living room
Interior: Living room
Exterior from the garden
STURGES HOUSE, BRENTWOOD HEIGHTS, CALIFORNIA
Plan
Exterior facing southwest
Interior: Dining table arrangement
Exterior
GOETSCH-WINKLER HOUSE, OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
Plan
Exterior from northeast
104 Exterior detail
105 Exterior from southeast
106 SUNTOP HOMES, ARDMORE, PENNSYLVANIA
106 Plan
107 Exterior
108 Exterior
109 HOUSING PROJECT NEAR PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
109 Plan
110 ROSENBAUM HOUSE, FLORENCE, ALABAMA
110 Plan
ela Exterior
Tale2 Exterior: Rear view
Pi Interior: Dining table arrangement
bis Exterior: Detail of corner
113 Interior: Living room
LZ USONIAN EXHIBITION HOUSE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
WA Exterior with exhibition pavilion
118 Exterior: Entrance
119 Plan
120 Interior: Living room seen from kitchen
1241 Interior: Living room seen from entry
122 View from terrace
123 Interior: Living room
124 Interior: Gallery
124 Interior: Kitchen workspace
125 Interior: Master bedroom
131 PEW HOUSE, NEAR MADISON, WISCONSIN
131 Plan
od Exterior
Unexg) Interior: Living room
134 Exterior
135 Interior: Living room
136 Exterior
key Interior: Workspace
137 Interior: Living room
143 POPE HOUSE, FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA
143 Preliminary sketch
144 Plan
145 Exterior looking toward southwest
146 Exterior: Rear view
148 COOPERATIVE HOMESTEADS: PROJECT
149 Drawing
150 Drawing
151 Plan
2 KEYES HOUSE, ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA
152 Plan
153 Exterior
OS Exterior
153 Exterior
156 BRAUNER HOUSE, OKEMOS, MICHIGAN
156 Plan
157 Exterior
161 CARLSON HOUSE, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
161 Exterior: Detail of clerestory
162 Plan
163 Exterior: View toward southeast
163 Interior: Workspace
163 Interior: Dining area
164 Exterior: View from the east
7a CHAIRS
17] Hassock, living room chair, table
17] Upholstered benches and seats
171 Occasional chairs
172 Dining chairs
E72 Living room chairs
73 Dining chairs
174 Corner of living room, Taliesin West
176 TALIESIN WEST, PARADISE VALLEY, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
176 Exterior
MAA TALIESIN NORTH, SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN
WZ Exterior
183 LAURENT HOUSE, ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS
183 Drawing
184 Plan
185 Exterior
188 MILLER HOUSE, CHARLES CITY, IOWA
188 Plan
189 Exterior and garden: View from river bank
190 View toward river
191 Exterior: View toward south
$o2 Interior: Living room
193 Interior: View from entry toward workspace
Los Interior: Living room
194 Exterior: View toward northeast
194 Exterior: Southeast view from entrance court
199 USONIAN AUTOMATIC HOUSE
199 Concrete block
200 Concrete blocks with rods
201 Drawing of construction of blocks
203 Drawing of construction with measurements
204 ADELMAN HOUSE, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
204 Plan
205 Exterior
206 Interior: Dining area
206 Exterior: View toward south
207 Interior: Gallery
207 Exterior: View toward south
208 BOOMER HOUSE, PHOENIX, ARIZONA
208 Plan
209 Exterior: View toward west
210 Exterior: View from northeast
210 Exterior: View toward south
FANN Exterior: View from southwest
211 Exterior: Carport, seen from west
PSH Exterior: View from southeast
Pee © K Oe Nee ET: eel yee On al) 299 573
Orr Ra G Ar Nain G A Ro GH I ol EC) 7 (Umea
The typical American dwelling of 1893 was crowding in upon itself
all over the Chicago prairies as I used to go home from my work
with Adler and Sullivan in Chicago to Oak Park, a Chicago
suburb. That dwelling had somehow become typical American
architecture but by any faith in nature implicit or explicit it did
not belong anywhere. I was in my sixth year with Adler and
Sullivan then, and they had completed the Wainwright Building
in St. Louis, the first expression of the skyscraper as a fall building.
But after building the great Auditorium the firm did not build
residences because they got in the way of larger, more important
work. I had taken over dwellings, Mr. Sullivan’s own house among
them, whenever a client came to them for a house. The Charnley
house was done in this way. I longed for a chance to build a
sensible house and (1893) soon free to build one, I furnished an
office in the Schiller Building and began my own practice of archi-
tecture. The first real chance came by way of Herman Winslow
for client. I was not the only one then sick of hypocrisy and
hungry for reality. Winslow was something of an artist himself,
sick of it all.
 What was the matter with the typical American house? Well,
just for an honest beginning, it lied about everything. It had no
sense of unity at all nor any such sense of space as should belong
to a free people. It was stuck up in thoughtless fashion. It had no
more sense of earth than a ““modernistic” house. And it was stuck
up on wherever it happened to be. To take any one of these
so-called “homes” away would have improved the landscape and
helped to clear the atmosphere. The thing was more a hive than
a home just as ““modernistic” houses are more boxes than houses.
But these “homes” were very like the homes Americans were
making for themselves elsewhere, all over their new country.
Nor, where the human being was concerned, had this typical
dwelling any appropriate sense of proportion whatever. It began
somewhere way down in the wet and ended as high up as it could
get in the high and narrow. All materials looked alike to it or to
anything or anybody in it. Essentially, whether of brick or wood
or stone, this “house” was a bedeviled box with a fussy lid; a
complex box that had to be cut up by all kinds of holes made in
it to let in light and air, with an especially ugly hole to go in and
come out of. The holes were all “trimmed”; the doors and win-
dows themselves trimmed; the roofs trimmed; the walls trimmed.
Architecture seemed to consist in what was done to these holes.
“Joinery” everywhere reigned supreme in the pattern and as the
soul of it all. Floors were the only part of the house left plain after
“Queen Anne” had swept past. The “joiner” recommended
“narquetry” but usually the housewife and the fashionable
decorator covered these surfaces down underfoot with a tangled
rug collection because otherwise the floors would be “bare.” They
were ‘“‘bare” only because one could not very well walk on jig-
sawing or turned spindles or plaster ornament. This last limitation
must have seemed somehow unkind.

14
 It is not too much to say that as a young architect, by inheri-
tance and training a radical, my lot was cast with an inebriate lot
of criminals called builders; sinners hardened by habit against
every human significance except one, vulgarity. The one touch of
nature that makes the whole world kin. And I will venture to say,
too, that the aggregation was at the lowest aesthetic level in all
history. Steam heat, plumbing, and electric light were the only
redeeming features and these new features were hard put to it to
function in the circumstances. Bowels, circulation, and nerves were
new in buildings. But they had come to stay and a building could
not longer remain a mere shell in which life was somehow to
make shift as it might.
When I was 11 years old I was sent to a Wisconsin farm to
learn how to really work. So all this I saw around me seemed
affectation, nonsense, or profane. The first feeling was hunger for
reality, for sincerity. A desire for simplicity that would yield a
broader, deeper comfort was natural, too, to this first feeling. A
growing idea of simplicity as organic, as I had been born into it
and trained in it, was new as a quality of thought, able to strengthen
and refresh the spirit in any circumstances. Organic simplicity
might everywhere be seen producing significant character in the
ruthless but harmonious order I was taught to call nature. I was
more than familiar with it on the farm. All around me, I, or any-
one for that matter, might see beauty in growing things and, by a
little painstaking, learn how they grew to be “beautiful.” None
was ever insignificant. I loved the prairie by instinct as itself a
great simplicity; the trees, flowers, and sky were thrilling by con-
trast. And I saw that a little of height on the prairie was enough
to look like much more. Notice how every detail as to height
becomes intensely significant and how breadths all fall short.
Here was a tremendous spaciousness needlessly sacrificed, all cut
up crosswise or lengthwise into 50-foot lots, or would you have
25 feet? Reduced to a money-matter, salesmanship kept on parcel-
ing out the ground, selling it with no restrictions. Everywhere, in
a great new, free country, I could see only this mean tendency to
tip everything in the way of human occupation or habitation up
edgewise instead of letting it lie comfortably flatwise with the
ground where spaciousness was a virtue. Nor has this changed
much since automobilization has made it no genuine economic
issue at all but has made it a social crime to crowd in upon
one another.
By now I had committed the indiscretion that was eventually
to leave me no peace and keep me from ever finding satisfaction
in anything superficial. That indiscretion was a determination to
search for the qualities in all things.
I had an idea (it still seems to be my own) that the planes
parallel to the earth in buildings identify themselves with the
ground, do most to make the buildings belong to the ground.
(Unluckily they defy the photographer.) At any rate, independently
I perceived this fact and put it to work. I had an idea that every
house in that low region should begin on the ground, not in it as
they then began, with damp cellars. This feeling became an idea
also; eliminated the “basement.” I devised one at ground level.
And the feeling that the house should /ook as though it began
there at the ground put a projecting base course as a visible edge
to this foundation where, as a platform, it was evident preparation
for the building itself and welded the structure to the ground.
An idea (probably rooted deep in racial instinct) that shelter
should be the essential look of any dweiling, put the low spread-
ing roof, flat or hipped or low gabled, with generously projecting
eaves over the whole. I began to see a building primarily not as
a cave but as broad shelter in the open, related to vista; vista
without and vista within. You may see in these various feelings all
taking the same direction that I was born an American child of
the ground and of space, welcoming spaciousness as a modern
human need as well as learning to see it as the natural human
opportunity. The farm had no negligible share in developing this
sense of things in me, I am sure.
Before this, by way of innate sense of comfort, had come the
idea that the size of the human figure should fix every proportion
of a dwelling or of anything in it. Human scale was true building
scale. Why not, then, the scale fixing the proportions of all build-
ings whatsoever? What other scale could I use? This was not a
canon taught me by anyone. So I accommodated heights in the
new buildings to no exaggerated established order nor to impress
the beholder (I hated grandomania then as much as I hate it now)
but only to comfort the human being. I knew the house dweller
could seldom afford enough freedom to move about in built-in
or built-over space, so, perceiving the horizontal line as the earth
line of human life (the line of repose), this, as an individual sense
of the thing, began to bear fruit. I first extended horizontal spacing
without enlarging the building by cutting out all the room parti-
tions that did not serve the kitchen or give needed privacy for
sleeping apartments or (as in the day of the parlor) serve to pre-
vent some formal intrusion into the intimacy of the family circle.
The small social office I set aside as a necessary evil to receive
“callers,” for instance. Even this one concession soon disappeared
as a relic of the barbarism called “fashion”; the “parlor.”
To get the house down to the horizontal in appropriate propor-
tion and into quiet relationship with the ground and as a more
humane consideration anyway, the servants had to come down
out of the.complicated attic and go into a separate unit of their
own attached to the kitchen on the ground floor. They liked this
compulsion, though the housewife worried. Closets disappeared
as unsanitary boxes wasteful of room and airy wardrobes in the
rooms served instead.
Freedom of floor space and elimination of useless heights
worked a miracle in the new dwelling place. A sense of appro-
priate freedom had changed its whole aspect. The dwelling became
more fit for human habitation on modern terms and far more
natural to its site. An entirely new sense of space values in archi-
tecture began to come home. It now appears that, self-conscious
of architectural implications, they first came into the architecture
of the modern world. This was about 1893. Certainly something
of the kind was due.
A new sense of repose in flat planes and quiet “streamline”
effects had thereby and then found its way into building, as we
can now see it admirably in steamships, airplanes and motorcars.
The age came into its own and the “‘age” did not know its own.
There had been nothing at all from overseas to help in getting
this new architecture planted on American soil. From 1893 to
1910 these prairie houses had planted it there. No, my dear “Mrs.
Gablemore,” “Mrs. Plasterbilt,” and especially, no, “Miss Flat-
top,” nothing from “Japan” had helped at all, except the marvel
of Japanese color prints. They were a lesson in elimination of the
insignificant and in the beauty of the natural use of materials.
But more important than all, rising to greater dignity as idea,
the ideal of plasticity was now to be developed and emphasized in
the treatment of the building as a whole. Plasticity was a familiar
term but something I had seen in no buildings whatsoever. I had
seen it in *Lieber Meister’s ornament only. It had not found its
way into his buildings otherwise. It might now be seen creeping
into the expressive lines and surfaces ofthe buildings I was building.
You may see the appearance of the thing in the surface of your
*Louis Sullivan

18
hand as contrasted with the articulation of the bony skeleton itself.
This ideal, profound in its architectural implications, soon took
another conscious stride forward in the form of a new aesthetic.
I called it continuity. (It is easy to see it in the “folded plane.”)
Continuity in this aesthetic sense appeared to me as the natural
means to achieve truly organic architecture by machine technique
or by any other natural technique. Here was direct means, the
only means I could then see or can now see to express, objectify
and again bring natural form to architecture. Here by instinct at
first (all ideas germinate) principle had entered into building as
the new aesthetic, “continuity.” It went abroad as “plasticity.”
They began to call it, as I myself often did then, “the third dimen-
sion.” It was only a single phase of “continuity” but a phase that
has come back home again to go to work on the surface and upon
the novice. It will do him no harm as it is. But were the full import
of continuity in architecture to be grasped, aesthetic and structure
become completely one, it would continue to revolutionize the use
and wont of our machine age architecture, making it superior in
harmony and beauty to any architecture, Gothic or Greek. This
ideal at work upon materials by nature of the process or tools
used means a living architecture in a new age, organic architec-
ture, the only architecture that can live and let live because it never
can become a mere style. Nor can it ever become a formula for
the tyro. Where principle is put to work, not as recipe or as
formula, there will always be style and no need to bury it as
a styles”

Although the wrap-around window, originally a minor outward

expression of the interior folded plane in my own buildings, and
various other minor features of the work of this period intended to
simplify and eliminate “parts” are now scattered around the world

19
 and have become the rather senseless features of various attempts
at formula, such as the sporadic “international” and other attempts
characterized by plain surfaces cut into patterns by simple large
openings, nevertheless the ideas behind these earlier appearances,
the fundamental ideas that made them genuine expressions of
architecture, have been altogether missed. The nature of materials
is ignored in these imitations to get block mass outlines. The
reverse of the period wherein mass material outlines tried to ignore
the materials. But it is the same mistake.
The word “plastic” was a word Louis Sullivan himself was fond
of using in reference to his scheme of ornamentation as dis-
tinguished from all other or any applied ornament. But now, and
not merely as “form following function,” came a larger application
of the element called plasticity. “Form follows function” is mere
dogma until you realize the higher truth that form and function
are one.
Why any principle working in the part if not working in
the whole?
I promoted plasticity as conceived by Lieber Meister to conti-
nuity in the concept of the building as a whole. If the dictum,
“form follows function,” had any bearing at all on building it
could take form in architecture only by means of plasticity when
seen at work as complete continuity. So why not throw away
entirely all implications of post and beam construction? Have no
posts, no columns, no pilasters, cornices or moldings or ornament;
no divisions of the sort nor allow any fixtures whatever to enter as
something added to the structure. Any building should be com-
plete, including all within itself. Instead of many things, one thing.
The folded plane enters here with the merging lines, walls and
ceilings made one. Let walls, ceilings, floors now become not only
party to each other but part of each other, reacting upon and

20
within one another; continuity in all, eliminating any merely con-
structed features as such, or any fixture or appliance whatsoever
as such.
When Louis Sullivan had eliminated background in his system
of ornament in favor of an integral sense of the whole he had
implied this larger sense of the thing. I now began to achieve it.
Conceive that here came a new sense of building on American
soil that could grow building forms not only true to function but
expressive far beyond mere function in the realm of the human
spirit. Our new country might now have a true architecture hitherto
unknown. Yes, architectural forms by this interior means might
now grow up to express a deeper sense of human life values than
any existing before. Architecture might extend the bounds of
human individuality indefinitely by way of safe interior discipline.
Not only had space come upon a new technique of its own but
every material and every method might now speak for itself in
objective terms of human life. Architects were no longer tied to
Greek space but were free to enter into the space of Einstein.

Architectural forms might grow up? Yes, but grow up in what

image? Here came concentrated appeal to pure imagination.
Gradually proceeding from generals to particulars in the field of
work with materials and machines, “plasticity” (become “conti-
nuity”) began to grip me and work its own will in architecture. I
would watch sequences fascinated, seeing other sequences in those
consequences already in evidence. I occasionally look through
such early studies as I made at this period (a number of them still
remain), fascinated by implications. They seem, even now, generic.
The old architecture, always dead for me so far as its grammar
went, began literally to disappear. As if by magic new effects came
to life as though by themselves and I could draw inspiration from

21
nature herself. I was beholden to no man for the look of anything.
Textbook for me? “The book of creation.” No longer need any
more to be a wanderer among the objects and traditions of the
past, picking and choosing his way by the personal idiosyncrasy
of taste, guided only by personal predilection. From this hell I had
been saved. The world lost an eclectic and gained an interpreter.
If I did not like the Gods now I could make better ones.
Visions of simplicities so broad and far reaching would open to
me and such building harmonies appear that I was tireless in search
of new ones. In various form researches, with all my energy I con-
centrated upon the principle of plasticity working as continuity.
Soon a practical working technique evolved and a new scale within
the buildings I was building in the endeavor to more sensibly and
sensitively accomplish this thing we call architecture. Here at work
was something that would change and deepen the thinking and
culture of the modern world. So I believed. ...
From some laboratory experiments at Princeton by Professor
Beggs which I saw while there delivering the Kahn Lectures in
1930, it appears that aesthetic “continuity” at work in the practice
of physical structure is concrete proof of the practical usefulness
of the aesthetic ideal in designing architectural forms and, I hope,
may soon be available as structural formula in some handbook.
Welding instead of riveting steel is one new means to this new end
and other plastic methods are constantly coming into use. But that
and other possibilities (they will, I hope and believe, never need)
are ahead of our story.
There were then no symbols at all for these ideas. But I have
already objectified most of them. Were architecture bricks, my
hands were in the mud of which bricks were made.

An idea soon came from this stimulating simplifying ideal

22
(ideas breed, especially in actually making them work) that in
order to be consistent, or indeed if all were to be put to work as
architecture successfully, this new element of plasticity should
have a new sense as well as a new science of materials.
It may interest you to know (it surprised me) that there 1s
nothing in the literature of the civilized world upon that subject.
Nothing I could find as interpretation in this sense of the nature of
materials. Here was another great field for concrete endeavor,
neglected. So I began, in my fashion, to study the nature of materi-
als. Life is short. Lieber Meister had not reached this study. All
materials alike were to receive the impress of his imagination. I
began to learn to see brick as brick. I learned to see wood as wood
and learned to see concrete or glass or metal each for itself and all
as themselves. Strange to say this required uncommon sustained
concentration of uncommon imagination (we call it vision),
demanded not only a new conscious approach to building but
opened a new world of thought that would certainly tear down the
old world completely. Each different material required a different
handling, and each different handling as well as the material itself
had new possibilities of use peculiar to the nature of each. Appro-
priate designs for one material would not be at all appropriate for
any other material. In the light of this ideal of building form as an
organic simplicity almost all architecture fell to the ground. That
is to say, ancient buildings were obsolete in the light of the idea
of space determining form from within, all materials modifying if
indeed they did not create the “form” when used with understand-
ing according to the limitations of process and purpose.
Architecture might, and did, begin life anew.
Had steel, concrete, and glass existed in the ancient order we
could have had nothing like our ponderous, senseless “‘classic”
architecture. No, nothing even at Washington. Such betrayal of

23
 new life and new opportunities as ours has been would have been
impossible to the ancients, the Greeks excepted, and we should
have had a practice of architecture by the eclectic wherein tradi-
tion was not a parasite nor an enemy but a friend because the
ancestors would have done the necessary work for us that we seem
unable to do for ourselves. We would then have been able to copy
the antique with sense and safety. Myself with the others.
Now there can be no organic architecture where the nature of
synthetic materials or the nature of nature materials either is
ignored or misunderstood. How can there be? Perfect correlation,
integration, is life. It is the first principle of any growth that the
thing grown be no mere aggregation. Integration as entity is first
essential. And integration means that no part of anything is of any
great value in itself except as it be integrate part of the harmoni-
ous whole. Even my great old master designed for materials all
alike. All were grist for his rich imagination and he lived com-
pletely as artist, all to the contrary notwithstanding, only with his
sentient ornament. Contrary to the ideas formed of him by word-
wise but superficial critics, in this he created out of himself a world
of his own, not yet appreciated at its true worth. How could
it be yet? In this expression he went beyond the capacities of any
individual before him. But all materials were only one material
to him in which to weave the stuff of his dreams. Terra cotta was
that one material. Terra cotta was his material, the one he loved
most and served best. There he was master. But I honored him
when I carried his work and thought further along by acting upon
this new train of ideas, and the acts soon brought work sharply
and immediately up against the tools that could be found to get
these ideas put into new forms of building.
What a man does—rhat he has. You may find other things on
him but they are not his.

24
 What were the tools in use in the building trades everywhere?
Machines and the automatic process, all too many of them. Stone
or wood planers, stone and wood molding shapers, various lathes,
presses, and power saws, the casting of metals and glass; all in
commercially organized mills. The kiln; sheet-metal breakers;
presses; shears; cutting, molding, and stamping machines in
foundries and rolling mills; commercialized machine “shops”;

concrete mixers; clay breakers; casters; glassmakers themselves;

and the trade-unions versus capital; all laborers’ or employers’
units in a more or less highly commercialized greater union in
which craftsmanship had no place except as survival for burial by
standardization. Quantity production or standardization was
already inflexible necessity either as enemy or friend. You might
choose. And as you chose you became master and useful, or a
luxury and eventually the more or less elegant parasite we call an
“eclectic”; a man guided only by instinct of choice called “taste.”
By now I did not choose by instinct. I felt, yes, but I knew now
what it was I felt concerning architecture.

Already, when I began to build, commercial machine stand-

ardization had taken the life of handicraft. But outworn handicraft

had never troubled me. To make the new forms living expression
of the new order of the machine and continue what was noble
in tradition did trouble me. I wanted to realize genuine new forms
true to the spirit of great tradition and found I should have to
make them; not only make forms appropriate to the old (natural)
and to new (synthetic) materials, but I should have to so design
them that the machine (or process) that must make them could
and would make them better than anything could possibly be made
by hand. But now with this sense of integral order in architecture

25
supreme in my mind I could have done nothing less unless I could
have commanded armies of craftsmen as later I did command them
in the building of the Imperial Hotel: a building in no sense a prod-
uct of machine method. By now, safe inner discipline had come
to me: the interior discipline of a great ideal. There is none so
severe. But no other discipline yields such rich rewards in work,
nor is there any man so safe and sure of results as the man disci-
plined from within by this ideal of the integration that is organic.
Experience is this man’s “school.” It is yet his only school.
As I put these ideas to work in materials, lesser ideas took
flight from this exacting ideal. But always in the same direction.
They went farther on each occasion for flight, which was each new
building I built, until great goals were in sight. Some few of the
goals have been partially realized. You may see the “signs and
portents” gathered together in various exhibition galleries if you
can read drawings and models. The photographs are poor because
the depth planes cannot be rendered by photography. But a num-
ber of the buildings are scattered or mutilated and unfortunately
most of the best drawings are gone. The best buildings, too, were
never built and may only be studied by the record. But later de-
signs and models all exemplify in some material or grouping of
materials, or idea of arrangement, these early objectives. Lieber
Meister had been searching for “the rule so broad as to admit of
no exception.” For the life of me I could not help being most in-
terested in the exception that proved the rule. This may explain
“inconsistency” in performance and apparent departure from
original objectives.
A group of young Chicago architects were gathered about me
as disciples and friends in the early days, about 1893. They were
my contemporaries and all learned from me to speak the new
language. I wrote a little and later I tried to stem the tide ofimita-

26
tion. An instance was the paper read at Hull House in 1904 on
“The Art and Craft of the Machine.” Occasionally, then an indif-
ferent lecturer, I lectured. But talking isn’t building, as I soon saw
where any “school” as they called it (and later had names for the
branches) had actually to build. Among these contemporaries the
more ambitious began to call the new dwellings that appeared
upon the prairies from 1893 to 1910 “the prairie school.” I sup-
pose this was modern architecture’s first gallery. None knew much
of Louis Sullivan, then, except by such work as he had done. And
to a certain extent they imitated him too; imitating his individual
ornamentation as the feature most in view. Some years later C. R.
Ashbee came over to the United States and Kuno Francke of
Harvard came to Oak Park. Both, in turn, saw the new work

on the prairies and carried the tale of it to Europe in 1908. Some

15 or 20 years later a Swiss (in France) was to rediscover a

familiar preliminary aesthetic; the affirmative negation declared by

the Larkin Building, widely published at the time when it was
built and recorded by an article in the Architectural Record, March
1908. But already (1910) in my own work the ideal of an organic
architecture as affirmation had gone far beyond that belated
negation that was at work in Europe itself.

Before trying to put down more in detail concerning goals now

in sight, popular reaction to this new endeavor might be interesting.
After the first “prairie house” was built, the Winslow house in
1893, which only in the matter of ornamentation bore resemblance
in respect to the master (in the Charnley house I had stated, for
the first time so far as I know, the thesis of the plain wall given
the nature of decoration by a well-placed single opening which is
also a feature of the Winslow house), my next client said he did
not want a house “so different that he would have to go down the

27.
 back way to his morning train to avoid being laughed at.” That
was one popular consequence. There were many others; bankers
at first refused to loan money on the “queer” houses, so friends
had to be found to finance the early buildings. Millmen would
soon look for the name on the plans when the plans were presented
for estimates, read the name of the architect and roll up the draw-
ings again, handing them back with the remark that “they were
not hunting for trouble”; contractors more often than not failed
to read the plans correctly, so much had to be left off the buildings.
The buildings were already off the main track. The clients them-
selves usually stood by interested and excited, often way beyond
their means. So, when they moved into their new house, quite fre-
quently they had no money left, had borrowed all they could and
had to drag their old furniture into their new world. Seldom
could I complete an interior because the ideal of “organic simplic-
ity” seen as the countenance of perfect integration (as you have
already read) naturally abolished all fixtures, rejected the old fur-
niture, all carpets and most hangings, declaring them to be irrele-
vant or superficial decoration. The new practice made all furnish-
ings so far as possible (certainly the electric lighting and heating
Systems) integral parts of the architecture. So far as possible ali
furniture was to be designed in place as part of the building.
Hangings, rugs, carpets, were they to be used (as they might be if
properly designed), all came into the same category. But the money
matter generally crippled this particular feature of the original
scheme, as I have said, and made trouble in this process of
elimination and integration.
Nor, theoretically, was any planting to be done about the
houses without cooperating with the architect. But, of course, it
was done more often than not. But no sculpture, no painting was
let in unless cooperating with the architect, although more often

28
than not pictures were “hung.” This made trouble. For no decora-
tion, as such, was to be seen anywhere. Sculpture and painting
were to be likewise of the building itself. In the Midway Gardens
built in Chicago in 1913 I tried to complete the synthesis: planting,
furnishings, music, painting, and sculpture, all to be one. But I
found musicians, painters, and sculptors were unable to rise at that
time to any such synthesis. Only in a grudging and dim way did
most of them even understand it as an idea. So I made the designs
for all to harmonize with the architecture; crude as any sketch is
crude, incomplete as to execution, but in effect sufficiently complete
to show the immense importance of any such attempt on any archi-
tect’s part and show, indeed, that only so does architecture com-
pletely live. A new ideal of ornamentation had by now arrived
that wiped out all ornament unless it, too, was an integral feature
of the whole. True ornament became more desirable than ever but
it had to “mean something”; in other words be something organic
in character. Decorators hunting a job would visit the owners and,
learning the name of the architect, lift their hats, turn on their
heels, leaving with the curt and sarcastic “good day!” meaning
1?

really what the slang “good night!” of the period meant. This
matter of integral ornament is the rock upon which a later genera-
tion of young architects splits and wisely decides to let it alone
for the time being.
The owners of the early houses were, of course, all subjected
to curiosity, sometimes to admiration, but were submitted most
often to the ridicule of the “middle of the road egotist.” To that
ubiquitous egotist there was something about the owner too, now,
when he had a house like that, “the rope tie around the monkey’s
Beck.”
Well, I soon had to face the fact that a different choice of mate-
rials would mean a different building altogether. Concrete was

29
just coming into use and Unity Temple became the first concrete
monolith in the world, that is to say, the first building complete as
monolithic architecture when the wooden forms in which it was
cast were taken away. No critic has yet seen it as it is for what it
is except to realize that here, at least, was something. They might
not like the temple but they were “impressed” by it. Meanwhile,
the Larkin Building at Buffalo had just been built, a consciously
important challenge to the empty ornamentality of the old order.
The phrases I myself used concerning it in the issue of the Archi-
tectural Record in 1908 devoted to my work, put it on record as
such. “Here again most of the critic’s architecture has been left
out. Therefore, the work may have the same claim to consideration
as a work of art, as an ocean liner, a locomotive, or a battleship.”
The words may have escaped the Swiss “discoverer”; he was young
at the time.
Plastered houses were then new. Casement windows were new.
So many things were new. Nearly everything was new but the law
of gravity and the idiosyncrasy of the client.
And simple as the buildings seemed and seem to be to this day
because all had character and the countenance of principle, only
the outward countenance of their simplicity has ever taken effect
and that countenance is now being variously exaggerated by con-
firmed eclectics for the sake of the effect of a style. The innate
simplicity that enabled them and enables them to multiply in
infinite variety has not been practiced. I had built 187 buildings,
planned and detailed about 37 more that had not been built, and
all together they did not classify as a style. Nevertheless, all
hades style”

As reward for independent thinking put into action as build-

ing and first plainly shown in the constitution and profiles of the

30
prairie houses of Oak Park, Riverside, and other suburbs and

Chicago and other cities, Unity Temple at Oak Park and the Larkin
Administration Building in Buffalo, an entirely new sense of archi-
tecture for anyone who could read architecture had emerged. A
higher concept of architecture. Architecture not alone as “form
following function” in Lieber Meister’s sense but architecture for
the spirit of man, for life as life must be lived today; architecture
spiritually (virtually) conceived as appropriate enclosure of interior
space to be lived in. Form and function made one. The enclosed
space within them is the reality of the building. The enclosed space
comes through as architecture and may be seen in these exteriors
I have built as the reality of the building I wanted to build and did
build and am still building in spite of ail opposition and the supreme
obstacle, pretentious ignorance. This sense of the “within” or the
room itself (or the rooms themselves) I see as the great thing to be
realized and that may take the new forms we need as architecture.
Such a source would never stultify itself as a mere style. This sense
of interior space made ex/erior as architecture, working out by way
of the nature of materials and tools, transcends, as a fertilizing
motive, all that has ever gone before in architecture. This clarify-
ing motive of the whole makes previous ideas useful only as a
means to the realization of this far greater concept of architecture.
But if the buildings I have conceived upon this basis still seem
enigmatical, most of all they must seem so to those who profess
the “modernistic.” A chasm exists between the usual professsion
and performance, because growth, where the quality we now call
take
organic is concerned, must be slow growth. Eclecticism may
place overnight but organic architecture must come from the
ground up into the light by gradual erowth. It will itself be the
ground of a better way of life; it is not only the beautifier of the
building; it is, as a circumstance in itself, becoming the blessing

34
of the occupants. All building construction naturally becomes
lighter and stronger as fibrous “integument” takes the place of
“solid mass.” Our arboreal ancestors in their trees seem more likely
precedent for us at the present time than savage animals who “hole
in” for protection. But to properly put it on a human level, a
higher order of the spirit has dawned for modern life in this interior
concept of lived-in space playing with light, taking organic form as
the reality of building; a building now an entity by way of native
materials and natural methods of structure; forms becoming more
naturally significant of ideal and purpose, ultimate in economy
and strength. We have, now coming clear, an ideal the core of
which must soon pervade the whole realm of creative man and one
that, I know now, dates back to Laotse 500 B.c., and, later, to Jesus
himself. The building era that Louis Sullivan ushered in is develop-
ing beyond the limitations that marked it, aside from his splendid
elemental fluorescence, into the higher realm where as a human
creative ideal throughout all culture it will make all form and
function one.

Not much yet exists in our country—no, nor in any country

outside plans and models—to exemplify steel and glass at its best
in the light of this new sense of building. But a new countenance
—it is the countenance of principle—has already appeared around
the world. A new architectural language is being brokenly, vari-
ously, and often falsely spoken by youths, with perspicacity and
some breadth of view but with too little depth of knowledge that
can only come from continued experience. Unfortunately, aca-
demic training and current criticism have no penetration to this
inner world. The old academic order is bulging with its own
important impotence. Society is cracking under the strain of a
sterility education imposes far beyond capacity; exaggerated capi-

32
talism has left all this as academic heritage to its own youth.
General cultural sterility, the cause of the unrest of this uncreative
moment that now stalls the world, might be saved and fructified by
this ideal of an organic architecture: led from shallow troubled
muddy water into deeper clearer pools of thought. Life needs these
deeper fresher pools into which youth may plunge to come
out refreshed.

More and more, so it seems to me, light is the beautifier of the

building. Light always was the beautifier of the building in the
matter of shadows but now especially needs these deeper satis-
factions; needs a more worthy human ego for that tomorrow that
is always today because of yesterday.

Inevitably this deeper sense of building as integral produce of

the spirit of man is to construct the physical body of our machine
age. But that in itself will not be enough. Unless this construction
were to enable a broader, finer sense of life as something to be
lived in to the full, all resources of time, place, and man in place
to give us an architecture that is inspiring environment at the same
time that it is a true expression ofthat life itself, the ideal will again
have failed.
These gestures being lightly called “modernistic,” what then is
this new lip service, in shops, studios and schoolrooms? What are
these pretentious gestures, this superficial association of ideas or
this attempted academic rationalizing of this new work of mine?
Why is the true content or motivating inner thought of this new
architecture as organic architecture so confused in their hypocritical
manifestations? Why is there so little modest, earnest effort to
profit honestly by cooperation in these researches and, understand-
ing such proofs as we have, honestly use them, such as they are?

33
Why not go ahead with them for growth instead of continuing
to exploit them for a living or for a passing name? This self-seek-
ing of some transient fame? “Publicity” is the only fame such
shallow ambition may know, and like all such ambitions only the
“advertising” that will be dead with yesterday’s newspaper.

34
B U ED N G H E N E—E W H O U “Sie
First thing in building the new house, get rid of the attic, therefore
the dormer. Get rid of the useless false heights below it. Next, get
tid of the unwholesome basement, yes absolutely—in any house
built on the prairie. Instead of lean, brick chimneys bristling up
everywhere to hint at Judgment, I could see necessity for one chim-
ney only. A broad generous one, or at most two. These kept low
down on gently sloping roofs or perhaps flat roofs. The big fire-
place in the house below became now a place for a real fire. A real
fireplace at that time was extraordinary. There were mantels
instead. A mantel was a marble frame for a few coals in a grate.
Or it was a piece of wooden furniture with tile stuck in it around
the grate, the whole set slam up against the plastered, papered
wall. Insult to comfort. So the integral fireplace became an
important part of the building itself in the houses I was allowed to
build out there on the prairie.
It comforted me to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry
of the house itself. A feeling that came to stay.
Taking a human being for my scale, I brought the whole house
down in height to fit a normal one—ergo, 5’ 8%” tall, say. This is

a7,
my own height. Believing in no other scale than the human being
I broadened the mass out all I possibly could to bring it down into
spaciousness. It has been said that were I three inches taller than
5’ 8%” all my houses would have been quite different in pro-
portion. Probably.
House walls were now started at the ground on a cement or
stone water table that looked like a low platform under the build-
ing, and usually was. But the house walls were stopped at the
second-story windowsill level to let the bedrooms come through
above in a continuous window series below the broad eaves of a
gently sloping, overhanging roof. In this new house the wall was
beginning to go as an impediment to outside light and air and
beauty. Walls had been the great fact about the box in which holes
had to be punched. It was still this conception of a wall-building
which was with me when I designed the Winslow house. But after
that my conception began to change.
My sense of “wall” was no longer the side of a box. It was
enclosure of space affording protection against storm or heat only
when needed. But it was also to bring the outside world into the
house and let the inside of the house go outside. In this sense I was
working away at the wall as a wall and bringing it towards the
function of a screen, a means of opening up space which, as con-
trol of building-materials improved, would finally permit the free
use of the whole space without affecting the soundness of the
structure.
The climate being what it was, violent in extremes of heat and
cold, damp and dry, dark and bright, I gave broad protecting roof-
shelter to the whole, getting back to the purpose for which the
cornice was originally designed. The underside of roof-projections
was flat and usually light in color to create a glow of reflected light
that softly brightened the upper rooms. Overhangs had double

38
value: shelter and preservation for the walls of the house, as well
as this diffusion of reflected light for the upper story through the
“light screens” that took the place of the walls and were now often
the windows in long series.

And at this time I saw a house, primarily, as livable interior

space under ample shelter. I liked the sense of shelter in the look
of the building. I still like it.
The house began to associate with the ground and become
natural to its prairie site.
And would the young man in Architecture believe that this was
all “new” then? Yes—not only new, but destructive heresy—ridicu-
lous eccentricity. All somewhat so today. Stranger still, but then it
was all so new that what prospect I had of ever earning a liveli-
hood by making houses was nearly wrecked. At first, “they” called
the houses “dress reform’ houses because Society was just then
excited about that particular reform. This simplification looked
like some kind of reform to the provincials.
What I have just described was on the outside of the house. But
it was all there, chiefly because of what had happened inside.
Dwellings of that period were cut up, advisedly and completely,
with the grim determination that should go with any cutting proc-
ess. The interiors consisted of boxes beside boxes or inside boxes,
called rooms. All boxes were inside a complicated outside boxing.
Each domestic function was properly box to box.
I could see little sense in this inhibition, this cellular sequestra-
tion that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions, except
for the privacy of bedrooms on the upper floor. They were perhaps
all right as sleeping boxes. So I declared the whole lower floor as
one room, cutting off the kitchen as a laboratory, putting the serv-

39,
ants’ sleeping and living quarters next to the kitchen but semi-
detached, on the ground floor. Then I screened various portions of
the big room for certain domestic purposes like dining and reading.
There were no plans in existence like these at the time. But my
clients were all pushed toward these ideas as helpful to a solution
of the vexed servant problem. Scores of unnecessary doors disap-
peared and no end of partition. Both clients and servants liked
the new freedom. The house became more free as space and more
livable too. Interior spaciousness began to dawn.
Thus came an end to the cluttered house. Fewer doors; fewer
window holes though much greater window area; windows and
doors lowered to convenient human heights. These changes once
made, the ceilings of the rooms could be brought down over on to
the walls by way of the horizontal broad bands of plaster on the
walls themselves above the windows and colored the same as the
room-ceilings. This would bring ceiling-surface and color down to
the very window tops. Ceilings thus expanded by way of the wall
band above the windows gave generous overhead even to small
rooms. The sense of the whole broadened, made plastic by
this means.
Here entered the important new element of plasticity—as I saw
it. And I saw it as indispensable element to the successful use of
the machine. The windows would sometimes be wrapped around
the building corners as inside emphasis of plasticity and to increase
the sense of interior space. I fought for outswinging windows
because the casement window associated house with the out-of-
doors, gave free openings outward. In other words, the so-called
casement was not only simple but more human in use and effect.
So more natural. If it had not existed I should have invented it.
But it was not used at that time in the United States so I lost many
clients because I insisted upon it. The client usually wanted the

40
double-hung (the guillotine window) in use then, although it was
neither simple nor human. It was only expedient. I used it once, in
the Winslow house, and rejected it forever thereafter. Nor at that
time did I entirely eliminate the wooden trim. I did make the “trim”
plastic, that is to say, light and continuously flowing instead of the
prevailing heavy “cut and butt” carpenter work. No longer did
trim, so-called, look like carpenter work. The machine could do
it all perfectly well as I laid it out, in this search for quiet. This
plastic trim enabled poor workmanship to be concealed. There
was need of that much trim then to conceal much in the way of
craftsmanship because the battle between the machines and the
union had already begun to demoralize workmen.
Machine resources of this period were so little understood that
extensive drawings had to be made merely to show the mill-man
what to leave off. Not alone in the trim but in numerous ways too
tedious to describe in words, this revolutionary sense of the plastic
whole began to work more and more intelligently and have fasci-
nating unforeseen consequences. Nearly everyone had endured
the house of the period as long as possible, judging by the appreci-
ation of the change. Here was an ideal of organic simplicity put
to work, with historical consequences not only in this country but
especially in the thought of the civilized world.

SIMPLICITY

Organic Simplicity—in this early constructive effort—I soon

found depended upon the sympathy with which such co-ordina-
tion as I have described might be effected. Plainness was not nec-
essarily simplicity. That was evident. Crude furniture of the
Roycroft-Stickley- Mission style, which came along later, was

4]
offensively plain, plain as a barn door—but was never simple in
any true sense. Nor, I found, were merely machine-made things in
themselves necessarily simple. “To think,” as the Master used to
say, “is to deal in simples.” And that means with an eye single to
the altogether.
This is, I believe, the single secret of simplicity: that we may
truly regard nothing at all as simple in itself. I believe that no one
thing in itself is ever so, but must achieve simplicity—as an artist
should use the term—as a perfectly realized part of some organic
whole. Only as a feature or any part becomes harmonious element
in the harmonious whole does it arrive at the state of simplicity.
Any wild flower is truly simple but double the same wild flower
by cultivation and it ceases to be so. The scheme of the original is
no longer clear. Clarity of design and perfect significance both are
first essentials of the spontaneous born simplicity of the lilies of
the field. “They toil not, neither do they spin.” Jesus wrote the
supreme essay on simplicity in this, “Consider the lilies ofthe field.”
Five lines where three are enough is always stupidity. Nine
pounds where three are sufficient is obesity. But to eliminate
expressive words in speaking or writing—words that intensify or
vivify meaning—is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination in
architecture simplicity. It may be, and usually is, stupidity.
In architecture, expressive changes of surface, emphasis ofline
and especially textures of material or imaginative pattern, may go
to make facts more eloquent—forms more significant. Elimination,
therefore, may be just as meaningless as elaboration, perhaps more
often is so. To know what to leave out and what to put in; just
where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowl-
edge of simplicity—toward ultimate freedom of expression.
As for objects of art in the house, even in that early day they
were bétes noires of the new simplicity. If well chosen, all right.

42
But only if each were properly digested by the whole. Antique or
modern sculpture, paintings, pottery, might well enough become
objectives in the architectural scheme. And I accepted them, aimed
at them often but assimilated them. Such precious things may often
take their places as elements in the design of any house, be gra-
cious and good to live with. But such assimilation is extraordi-
narily difficult. Better in general to design all as integral features.
I tried to make my clients see that furniture and furnishings
that were not built in as integral features of the building should
be designed as attributes of whatever furniture was built in and
should be seen as a minor part of the building itself even if
detached or kept aside to be employed only on occasion.
But when the building itself was finished the old furniture they
already possessed usually went in with the clients to await the time
when the interior might be completed in this sense. Very few of
the houses, therefore, were anything but painful to me after the
clients brought in their belongings.
Soon I found it difficult, anyway, to make some ofthe furniture
in the abstract. That is, to design it as architecture and make it
human at the same time—fit for human use. I have been black
and blue insome spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too
intimate contact with my own early furniture.
Human beings must group, sit or recline, confound them, and
they must dine—but dining is much easier to manage and always
a great artistic opportunity. Arrangements for the informality of
sitting in comfort singly or in groups still belonging in disarray to
the scheme as a whole: that is a matter difficult to accomplish. But
it can be done now and should be done, because only those attri-
butes of human comfort and convenience should be in order
which belong to the whole in this modern integrated sense.

43
 Human use and comfort should not be taxed to pay dividends
on any designer’s idiosyncrasy. Human use and comfort should
have intimate possession of every interior—should be felt in every
exterior. Decoration is intended to make use more charming and
comfort more appropriate, or else a privilege has been abused.
As these ideals worked away from house to house, finally free-
dom of floor space and elimination of useless heights worked a
miracle in the new dwelling place. A sense of appropriate freedom
had changed its whole aspect. The whole became different but
more fit for human habitation and more natural on its site. It was
impossible to imagine a house once built on these principles some-
where else. An entirely new sense of space-values in architecture
came home. It now appears these new values came into the archi-
tecture of the world. New sense of repose in quiet streamline effects
had arrived. The streamline and the plain surface seen as the flat
plane had then and there, some thirty-seven years ago, found their
way into buildings as we see them in steamships, aeroplanes and
motorcars, although they were intimately related to building
materials, environment and the human being.
But, more important than all beside, still rising to greater dig-
nity as an idea as it goes on working, was the ideal of plasticity.
That ideal now began to emerge as a means to achieve an organic
architecture.

PLASTICITY

Plasticity may be seen in the expressive flesh-covering of the

skeleton as contrasted with the articulation of the skeleton itself.
If form really “followed function’”—as the Master declared—here
was the direct means of expression of the more spiritual idea that

44
form and function are one: the only true means I could see then
or can see now to eliminate the separation and complication of
cut-and-butt joinery in favor of the expressive flow of continuous
surface. Here, by instinct at first—all ideas germinate—a principle
entered into building that has since gone on developing. In my
work the idea of plasticity may now be seen as the element
of continuity.

In architecture, plasticity is only the modern expression of an

ancient thought. But the thought taken into structure and through-
out human affairs will re-create in a badly “disjointed,” distracted
world the entire fabric of human society. This magic word “plastic”
was a word Louis Sullivan himself was fond of using in reference
to his idea of ornamentation as distinguished from all other or
applied ornament. But now, why not the larger application in the
structure of the building itself in this sense?
Why a principle working in the part if not living in the whole?
If form really followed function—it did in a material sense by
means of this ideal of plasticity, the spiritual concept of form and
function as one—why not throw away the implications of post or
upright and beam or horizontal entirely? Have no beams or col-
umns piling up as “joinery.” Nor any cornices. Nor any “features”
as fixtures. No. Have no appliances of any kind at all, such as
pilasters, entablatures and cornices. Nor put into the building any
fixtures whatsoever as “fixtures.” Eliminate the separations and
separate joints. Classic architecture was all fixation-of-the-fixture.
Yes, entirely so. Now why not let walls, ceilings, floors become
seen as component parts of each other, their surfaces flowing into
each other. To get continuity in the whole, eliminating all con-
structed features just as Louis Sullivan had eliminated background

A5
in his ornament in favor of an integral sense of the whole. Here the
promotion of an idea from the material to the spiritual plane began
to have consequences. Conceive now that an entire building might
grow up out of conditions as a plant grows up out of soil and yet
be free to be itself, to “live its own life according to Man’s Nature.”
Dignified as a tree in the midst of nature but a child of the spirit
of man.
I now propose an ideal for the architecture of the machine age,
for the ideal American building. Let it grow up in that image.
Ther tree:
But I do not mean to suggest the imitation of the tree.

Proceeding, then, step by step from generals to particulars,

plasticity as a large means in architecture began to grip me and to
work its own will. Fascinated I would watch its sequences, seeing
other sequences in those consequences already in evidence: as in
the Heurtley, Martin, Heath, Thomas, Tomek, Coonley and dozens
of other houses.
The old architecture, so far as its grammar went, for me began,
literally, to disappear. As if by magic new architectural effects
came to life—effects genuinely new in the whole cycle of archi-
tecture owing simply to the working of this spiritual principle.
Vistas of inevitable simplicity and ineffable harmonies would open,
so beautiful to me that I was not only delighted, but often startled.
Yes, sometimes amazed.
I have since concentrated on plasticity as physical continuity,
using it as a practical working principle within the very nature of
the building itself in the effort to accomplish this great thing
called architecture. Every true esthetic is an implication of nature,
so it was inevitable that this esthetic ideal should be found to enter

46
into the actual building of the building itself as a principle of
construction.
But later on I found that in the effort to actually eliminate the
post and beam in favor of structural continuity, that is to say,
making the two things one thing instead of two separate things, |
could get no help at all from regular engineers. By habit, the eng-
neer reduced everything in the field of calculation to the post and
the beam resting upon it before he could calculate and tell you
where and just how much for either. He had no other data. Walls
made one with floors and ceilings, merging together yet reacting
upon each other, the engineer had never met. And the engineer
has not yet enough scientific formulae to enable him to calculate
for continuity. Floor slabs stiffened and extended as cantilevers
over centered supports, as a waiter’s tray rests upon his upturned
fingers, such as I now began to use in order to get planes parallel
to the earth to emphasize the third dimension, were new, as I used
them, especially in the Imperial Hotel. But the engineer soon
mastered the element of continuity in floor slabs, with such for-
mulae as he had. The cantilever thus became a new feature of
design in architecture. As used in the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo it
was the most important ofthe features of construction that insured
the life of that building in the terrific temblor of 1922. So, not only
a new esthetic but proving the esthetic as scientifically sound, a
great new economic “stability,” derived from steel in tension, was
able now to enter into building construction.

47
t
H E NATURE OO} |F MATERIALS:

A PH©IL
S$ © PREY
Our vast resources are yet new; new only because architecture as
“rebirth” (perennial Renaissance) has, after five centuries of decline,
culminated in the imitation of imitations, seen in our Mrs. Plaster-
built, Mrs. Gablemore, and Miss Flat-top American architecture.
In general, and especially officially, our architecture is at long last
completely significant of insignificance only. We do not longer
have architecture. At least no buildings with integrity. We have
only economic crimes in its name. No, our greatest buildings are
not qualified as great art, my dear Mrs. Davies, although you do
admire Washington.
If you will yet be patient for a little while—a scientist, Ein-
stein, asked for three days to explain the far less pressing and prac-
tical matter of “Relativity” —we will take each of the five new
resources in order, as with the five fingers of the hand. All are new
integrities to be used if we will to make living easier and better
today.
The first great integrity is a deeper, more intimate sense of
reality in building than was ever pagan—that is to say, than was
ever “Classic.” More human than was any building ever realized

49
 in the Christian Middle Ages. This is true although the though
t
that may ennoble it now has been living in civilization for more
than twenty centuries back. Later it was innate in the simplicities
of Jesus as it was organic 500 years earlier in the natural philos-
ophy, Tao (The Way), of the Chinese philosopher Laotse. But not
only is the new architecture sound philosophy. It is poetry.
Said Ong Giao Ki, Chinese sage, “Poetry is the sound of
the
heart.”
Well, like poetry, this sense of architecture is the sound
of the
“within.” We might call that “within,” the heart.
Architecture now becomes integral, the expression of a new-
old reality: the livable interior space of the room itself. In inte-
gral architecture the room-space itself must come through. The room
must be seen as architecture, or we have no architecture. We have
no longer an outside as outside. We have no longer an outside and
an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside,
and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other.
Form and function thus become one in design and execut
ion if
the nature of materials and method and purpose are all in unison.
This interior-space concept, the first broad integrity, is the
first
great resource. It is also true basis for general significance of form.
Add to this for the sake of clarity that (although the general inte-
gration is implied in the first integrity) it is in the nature of
any
organic building to grow from its site, come out ofthe ground
into
the light—the ground itself held always as a component
basic part
of the building itself. And then we have primarily the new ideal
of
building as organic. A building dignified as a tree in the
midst of
nature.

This new ideal for architecture is, as well, an adequate

ideal

50
for our general culture. In any final result there can be no separa-
tion between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation
of either from our happiness. Nor any separation from our work.
Thus in this rise of organic integration you see the means to
end the petty agglomerations miscalled civilization. By way of this
old yet new and deeper sense of reality we may have a civiliza-
tion. In this sense we now recognize and may declare by way of
plan and building—the natural. Faith in the natural is the faith
we now need to grow up on in this coming age of our culturally
confused, backward twentieth century. But instead of “organic”
we might well say “natural” building. Or we might say integral
building.
So let us now consider the second of the five new resources:
glass. This second resource is new and a ‘“‘super-material” only
because it holds such amazing means in modern life for awakened
sensibilities. It amounts to a new qualification of life in itself. If
known in ancient times glass would then and there have abolished
the ancient architecture we know, and completely. This super-
material GLASS as we now use it is a miracle. Air in air to keep
air out or keep it in. Light itself in light, to diffuse or PeMeCt On
refract light itself.
By means of glass, then, the first great integrity may find prime
means of realization. Open reaches of the ground may enter as the
building and the building interior may reach out and associate
with these vistas of the ground. Ground and building will thus
become more and more obvious as directly related to each other
in openness and intimacy; not only as environment but also as a
good pattern for the good life lived in the building. Realizing the
benefits to human life of the far-reaching implications and effects
of the first great integrity, let us call it the interior-space concept.
This interior-space realization is possible and it is desirable in all

a
 the vast variety of characteristic buildings needed by civilized
life
in our complex age.
By means of glass something of the freedom of our arboreal
ancestors living in their trees becomes a more likely precedent
for
freedom in twentieth-century life, than the cave.
Savage animals “holing in” for protection were more charac-
teristic of life based upon the might of feudal times or based upon
the so-called “classical” in architecture, which were in turn based
upon the labor of the chattel slave. In a free country, were we
our-
selves free by way of organic thought, buildings might come
out
into the light without more animal fear: come entirely away
from
the pagan ideals of form we dote upon as “Classic.” Or
what
Freedom have we?
Perhaps more important than all beside, it is by way of glass
that the sunlit space as a reality becomes the most useful servan
t
of a higher order of the human spirit. It is first aid to the
sense of
cleanliness of form and idea when directly related to free living
in
air and sunlight. It is this that is coming in the new architecture
.
And with the integral character of extended vistas
gained by
marrying buildings with ground levels, or blending them
with
slopes and gardens; yes, it is in this new sense of earth
as a great
human good that we will move forward in the building of
our new
homes and great public buildings.
I am certain we will desire the sun, spaciousness and integri
ty
of means-to-ends more year by year as we become aware
of the
possibilities I have outlined. The more we desire the sun, the
more
we will desire the freedom of the good ground and the sooner
we
will learn to understand it. The more we value integrity,
the more
securely we will find and keep a worthwhile civilization
to set
against prevalent abuse and ruin.
Congestion will no longer encourage the “space-makers for

52
rent.” The “space-maker for rent” will himself be “for rent” or let
us hope “vacant.” Give him ten years.
These new space values are entering into our ideas of life. All
are appropriate to the ideal that is our own, the ideal we call
Democracy.

A NEW REALITY: GLASS

A resource to liberate this new sense ofinterior space as reality

is this new qualification called glass: a super-material qualified to
qualify us; qualify us not only to escape from the prettified cavern
of our present domestic life as also from the cave of our past, but
competent actually to awaken in us the desire for such far-reaching
simplicities of life as we may see in the clear countenance of
nature. Good building must ever be seen as in the nature of good
construction, but a higher development of this “seeing” will be
construction seen as nature-pattern. That seeing, only, is inspired
architecture.
This dawning sense of the Within as reality when it is clearly
seen as Nature will by way of glass make the garden be the build-
ing as much as the building will be the garden: the sky as treasured
a feature of daily indoor life as the ground itself.
You may see that walls are vanishing. The cave for human
dwelling purposes is at last disappearing.
Walls themselves because of glass will become windows and
windows as we used to know them as holes in walls will be seen
no more. Ceilings will often become as window-walls, too. The
textile may soon be used as a beautiful overhead for space, the
textile an attribute of genuine architecture instead of decoration
by way of hangings and upholstery. The usual camouflage of the

53
 old order. Modern integral floor heating will follow integral
light-
ing and standardized unitary sanitation. All this makes
it rea-
sonable and good economy to abolish building as either
a
hyper-boxment or a super-borough.
Haven’t senseless elaboration and false mass become sufficiently
insulting and oppressive to our intelligence as a people? And yet,
senseless elaboration and false mass were tyrannical as “‘con-
spicuous waste” in all of our nineteenth-century architecture either
public or private! Wherever the American architect, as scholar,
went he “succeeded” to that extent.

ANOTHER REALITY: CONTINUITY

But now, as third resource, the resource essential to modern

architecture destined to cut down this outrageous mass-waste and
mass-lying, is the principle of continuity. I have called it tenuity.
Steel is its prophet and master. You must come with me for a
moment into “engineering” so called. This is to be an unavoidable
strain upon your kind attention. Because, unfortunately, gentle
reader, you cannot understand architecture as modern unless you
do come, and—paradox—you can’t come if you are too well edu-
cated as an engineer or as an architect either. So your common
sense is needed more than your erudition.
However, to begin this argument for steel: classic architecture
knew only the post as an upright. Call it a column. The classics
knew only the beam as a horizontal. Call it a beam. The beam
resting upon the upright, or column, was structure throughout, to
them. Two things, you see, one thing set on top of another thing
in various materials and put there in various ways. Ancient, and
nineteenth-century building science too, even building a la mode,

54
consisted simply in reducing the various stresses of all materials
and their uses to these two things: post and beam. Really, con-
struction used to be just sticking up something in wood or stone
and putting something else in wood or stone (maybe iron) on top
of it: simple super-imposition, you see? You should know that all
“Classic” architecture was and still is some such form of direct
super-imposition. The arch is a little less so, but even that must be
so “figured” by the structural engineer if you ask him to “figure” it.
Now the Greeks developed this simple act of super-imposition
pretty far by way of innate tasteful refinement. The Greeks were
true estheticians. Roman builders too, when they forgot the Greeks
and brought the beam over as a curve by way of the arch, did
something somewhat new but with consequences still of the same
sort. But observe, all architectural features made by such “Classic”
agglomeration were killed for us by cold steel. And though millions
of classic corpses yet encumber American ground unburied, they
are ready now for burial.
Of course this primitive post-and-beam construction will always
be valid, but both support and supported may now by means of
inserted and welded steel strands or especially woven filaments of
steel and modern concrete casting be plaited and united as one
physical body: ceilings and walls made one with floors and
reinforcing each other by making them continue into one another.
This Continuity is made possible by the tenuity of steel.
So the new order wherever steel or plastics enter construction
says: weid these two things, post and beam (wall and ceiling)
together by means of steel strands buried and stressed within the
mass material itself, the steel strands electric-welded where steel
meets steel within the mass. In other words the upright and hori-
zontal may now be made to work together as one. A new world of
form opens inevitably.

50
 Where the beam leaves off and the post begins is no longer
important nor need it be seen at all because it no longer actually
is. Steel in tension enables the support to slide into the supported,
or the supported to grow into the support somewhat as a tree-
branch glides out of its tree trunk. Therefrom arises the new series
of interior physical reactions I am calling “Continuity.” As natural
consequence the new esthetic or appearance we call Plasticity (and
plasticity is peculiarly “modern”) is no longer a mere appearance.
Plasticity actually becomes the normal countenance, the true
esthetic of genuine structural reality. These interwoven steel strands
may so lie in so many directions in any extended member that the
extensions may all be economical of material and though much
lighter, be safer construction than ever before. There as in the
branch of the tree you may see the cantilever. The cantilever is
the simplest one of the important phases of this third new struc-
tural resource now demanding new significance. It has yet had
little attention in architecture. It can do remarkable things to
liberate space.
But plasticity was modest new countenance in our American
architecture at least thirty-five years ago in my own work, but
then denied such simple means as welding and the mesh. It had
already eliminated all the separate identities of post and beam in
architecture. Steel in tension enters now by way of mesh and
welding to arrive at actual, total plasticity if and when desired by
the architect. And to prove the philosophy of organic architecture,
form and function are one, it now enters architecture as the esthetic
countenance ofphysical reality.
To further illustrate this magic simplifier we call “plasticity”:
see it as flexibility similar to that of your own hand. What makes
your hand expressive? Flowing continuous line and continuous
surfaces seen continually mobile of the articulate articulated struc-

56
ture of the hand as a whole. The line is seen as “hand” line. The
varying planes seen as “hand” surface. Strip the hand to the
separate structural identities of joined bones (post and beam) and
plasticity as an expression of the hand would disappear. We would
be then getting back to the joinings, breaks, jolts, and joints of
ancient, or “Classic,” architecture: thing to thing; feature to feature.
But plasticity is the reverse of that ancient agglomeration and is
the ideal means behind these simplified free new effects of straight
line and flat plane.
I have just said that plasticity in this sense for thirty-five years
or more has been the recognized esthetic ideal for such simplifica-
tion as was required by the machine to do organic work. And it is
true of my own work.
As significant outline and expressive surface, this new esthetic
of plasticity (physical continuity) is now a useful means to form
the supreme physical body of an organic, or integral, American
Architecture.
Of course, it is just as easy to cheat by simplicity as it is to
cheat with “classical” structure. So, unluckily, here again is the
“modernistic” architectural picture-maker’s deadly facility for
imitation at ease and again too happy with fresh opportunity to
“fake effects.” Probably another Renaissance is here imminent.
Architecture is now integral architecture only when Plasticity
just as the articulate
is a genuine expression of actual construction
line and surface of the hand is articulate of the structure of the
hand. Arriving at steel, I first used Continuity as actual stabilizing
principle in concrete slabs, and in the concrete ferro-block system
I devised in Los Angeles.
In the form of the cantilever or as horizontal continuity this
new economy by means of tenuity is what saved the Imperial
Hotel from destruction, but it did not appear in the grammar of

57
the building for various reasons, chiefly because the building was
to look somewhat as though it belonged to Tokyo.
Later, in the new design for St. Mark’s Tower, New York City,
this new working principle economized material, labor, and liber-
ated or liberalized space in a more developed sense. It gave to the
structure the significant outlines of remarkable stability and instead
of false masonry-mass significant outlines came out. The abstract
pattern of the structure as a complete structurai-integrity of Form
and Idea may be seen fused as in any tree but with nothing
imitating a tree.
Continuity invariably realized remarkable economy of labor
and building materials as well as space. Unfortunately there is yet
little or no data to use as tabulation. Tests will have to be made
continually for many years to make the record available to
slide-rule engineers.
In the ancient order there was little thought of economy of
materials. The more massive the whole structure looked, the better
it looked to the ancients. But seen in the light of these new eco-
nomic interior forces conserved by the tensile strength of a sheet
of plastic or any interweaving of strands of steel in this machine
age, the old order was as sick with weight as the Buonarotti dome.
Weak ... because there could be no co-interrelation between the
two elements of support and supported to reinforce each other as
a whole under stress or elemental disturbance.
So this tremendous new resource of tenuity—a quality of steel
—this quality of pu// in a building (you may see it ushering in a
new era in John Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge) was definitely lack-
ing in all ancient architecture because steel had not been born
into building.
The tenuous strand or slab as a common means of strength
had yet to come. Here today this element of continuity may cut

58
structural substance nearly in two. It may cut the one half in two
again by elimination of needless features, such elimination being
entirely due to the simplification I have been calling “plasticity.”
It is by utilizing mass production in the factory in this connec-
tion that some idea of the remarkable new economics possible to
modern architecture may be seen approaching those realized in
any well-built machine. If standardization can be humanized and
made flexible in design and the economics brought to the home
owner, the greatest service will be rendered to our modern way of
life. It may be really born—this democracy, | mean.
Involved as a matter of design in this mass production, how-
ever, are the involute, all but involuntary reactions to which I

have just referred: the ipso facto building code and the fact that
the building engineer as now trained knows so little about them.
However, the engineer is learning to calculate by model-making
in some instances—notably Professor Beggs at Princeton.
The codes so far as I can see will have to die on the vine with
the men who made them.

MATERIALS FOR THEIR OWN SAKE

As the first integrity and the two first new resources appeared
out of the interior nature of the kind of building, called Archi-
tecture—so now, naturally, interior to the true nature of any good
building, comes the fourth new resource. This is found by rec-
ognizing the nature of the materials used in construction.
Just as many fascinating different properties as there are differ-
ent materials that may be used to build a building will continually
and naturally qualify, modify and utterly change all architectural
form whatsoever.

hey
 A stone building will no more be nor will it /ook like a steel
building. A pottery, or terra cotta building, will not be nor should
it look like a stone building. A wood building will look like none
other, for it will glorify the stick. A steel and glass building could
not possibly look like anything but itself. It will glorify steel and
glass. And so on all the way down the long list of available riches
in materials: Stone, Wood, Concrete, Metals, Glass, Textiles, Pulp
and Plastics; riches so great to our hand today that no comparison
with Ancient Architecture is at all sensible or anything but
obstruction to our Modern Architecture.
In this particular, as you may see, architecture is going back to
learn from the natural source of all natural things.
In order to get Organic Architecture born, intelligent architects
will be forced to turn their backs on antique rubbish heaps with
which Classic eclecticism has encumbered our new ground. So far
as architecture has gone in my own thought it is first of all a char-
acter and quality of mind that may enter also into human conduct
with social implications that might, at first, confound or astound
you. But the only basis for any fear of them lies in the fact that
they are all sanely and thoroughly constructive.

Instinctively all forms of pretense fear and hate reality. THE

HYPOCRITE MUST ALWAYS HATE THE RADICAL.

This potent fourth new resource—the Nature of Materials—

gets at the common center of every material in relation to the
work it is required to do. This means that the architect must again
begin at the very beginning. Proceeding according to Nature now
he must sensibly go through with whatever material may be in
hand for his purpose according to the methods and sensibilities of
a man in this age. And when I say Nature, I mean inherent

60
structure seen always by the architect as a matter of complete
design. It is in itself, always, nature-pattern. \t is this profound
internal sense of materials that enters in as Architecture now. It is
the mind
this, the fifth new resource, that must captivate and hold
of the modern architect to creative work. The fifth will give new
life to his imagination if it has not been already killed at school.
And, inevitable implication! New machine-age resources re-
quire that all buildings do not resemble each other. The new ideal
does not require that all buildings be of steel, concrete or glass.
Often that might be idiotic waste.
Nor do the resources even imply that mass is no longer a
beautiful attribute of masonry materials when they are genuinely
age
used. We are entitled to a vast variety of form in our complex
so long as the form be genuine—serves Architecture and Archi-
tecture serves life.
new
But in this land of ours, richest on earth of all in old and
see
materials, architects must exercise well-trained imagination to
in each material, either natural or compounded plastics, their own
much
inherent style. All materials may be beautiful, their beauty
or entirely depending upon how well they are used by the Architect.
In our modern building we have the Stick. Stone. Steel. Pottery.
since this
Concrete. Glass. Yes, Pulp, too, as well as plastics. And
dawning sense of the “within” is the new reality, these will all give
the main motif for any real building made from them. The
its
materials of which the building is built will go far to determine
appropriate mass, its outline and, especially, proportion. Character
is criterion in the form of any and every building or industrial
of
product we can call Architecture in the light of this new ideal
the new order.

61
 THE NEW INTEGRITY

Strange! At this late date, it is modern architecture that wants

life to learn to see life as life, because architecture must learn to
see brick as brick, learn to see steel as steel, see glass as glass. So
modern thought urges all of life to demand that a bank look like
a bank (bad thought though a bank might become) and not depend
upon false columns for credit. The new architecture urges all of
life to demand that an office building look like an office building,
even if it should resemble the cross section of a bee-hive. Life
itself should sensibly insist in self-defense that a hotel look and
conduct itself like a hotel and not like some office building. Life
should declare, too, that the railroad station look like a railroad
station and not try so hard to look like an ancient temple or some
monarchic palazzo. And while we are on this subject, why not a
place for opera that would look something like a place for opera
—if we must have opera, and not look so much like a gilded,
crimsoned bagnio. Life declares that a filling station should stick
to its work as a filling station: look the part becomingly. Why try
to look like some Colonial diminutive or remain just a pump on
the street. Although “just a pump” on the street is better than the
Colonial imitation. The good Life itself demands that the school
be as generously spaced and a thought-built good-time place for
happy children: a building no more than one story high—with
some light overhead, the school building should regard the children
as a garden in sun. Life itself demands of Modern Architecture
that the house of a man who knows what home is should have his
own home his own way if we have any man left in that connection
after F.H.A. is done trying to put them, all of them it can, into the

62
 nment
case of a man who builds a home only to sell it. Our Gover
a
forces the home-maker into the real-estate business if he wants
home at all.
n
Well, after all, this line of thought was all new-type commo
began to
sense in architecture in Chicago only thirty years ago. It
and
grow up in my own work as it is continuing to grow up more
as it may
more widely in the work of all the world. But, insulting
think-
seem to say so, nor is it merely arrogant to say that the actual
strange
ing in that connection is still a novelty, only a little less
rapidly
today than it was then, although the appearances do
increase.

INTEGRAL ORNAMENT AT LAST!

At last, is this fifth resource, so old yet now demanding fresh

-
significance. We have arrived at integral ornament—the nature
al
pattern of actual construction. Here, confessed as the spiritu
t in
demand for true significance, comes this subjective elemen
that
modern architecture. An element so hard to understand
well of
modern architects themselves seem to understand it least
as 1S
all and most of them have turned against it with such fury
born only of impotence.
1s
And it is true that this vast, intensely human significance
e mind not
really no matter at all for any but the most imaginativ
a sense of
without some development in artistry and the gift of
of imagina-
proportion. Certainly we must go higher in the realm
Poetry.
tion when we presume to enter here, because we go into
poetry at
Now, very many write good prose who cannot write
fashion, just
all. And although staccato specification is the present
writing—
as “functionalist” happens to be the present style in

63
 poetic prose will never be undesirable. But who condones prosaic
poetry? None. Not even those fatuously condemned to
write it.

So, I say this fourth new resource and the fifth demand for new
significance and integrity is ornament integral to building as
itself
poetry. Rash use of a dangerous word. The word Poetry
ssa
dangerous word.
Heretofore, I have used the word “pattern” instead of the word
ornament to avoid confusion or to escape the passing prejudice.
But here now ornament is in its place. Ornament meaning
not
only surface qualified by human imagination but imagination giving
natural pattern to structure. Perhaps this phrase says it all withou
t
further explanation. This resource—integral ornament—is new
in
the architecture of the world, at least insofar not only as imagin
a-
tion qualifying a surface—a valuable resource—but as a greate
r
means than that: imagination giving natural pattern to structu
re
itself. Here we have new significance, indeed! Long ago this signifi-
cance was lost to the scholarly architect. A man of taste. He,
too
soon, became content with symbols.
Evidently then, this expression of structure as a pattern true
to
the nature of the materials out of which it was made, may be
taken
much further along than physical need alone would dictate?
“If
you have a loaf of bread break the loaf in two and give the half
of
it for some flowers of the Narcissus, for the bread feeds the body
indeed but the flowers feed the soul.”

Into these higher realms of imagination associated

in the
popular mind as sculpture and painting, buildings may
be as fully
taken by modern means today as they ever were by
craftsmen of
the antique order.

64
 It is by this last and poetic resource that we may give greater
structural entity and greater human significance to the whole build-
ing than could ever be done otherwise. This statement is heresy at
this left-wing moment, so—we ask, “taken how and when taken?”
I confess you may well ask by whom? The answer is, taken by the
true poet. And where is this Poet today? Time will answer.
Yet again in this connection let us remember Ong’s Chinese
observation, ‘“‘Poetry is the sound of the heart.’ So, in the same
uncommon sense integral ornament is the developed sense of the
building as a whole, or the manifest abstract pattern of structure
itself, Interpreted. Integral ornament is simply s¢ructure-pattern
made visibly articulate and seen in the building as it is seen articu-
late in the structure of the trees or a lily of the fields. It is the
expression of inner rhythm of Form. Are we talking about Style?
Pretty nearly. At any rate, we are talking about the qualities that
make essential architecture as distinguished from any mere act of
building whatsoever.
What I am here calling integral ornament is founded upon the
same organic simplicities as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that
amazing revolution in tumult and splendor of sound built on four
tones based upon a rhythm a child could play on the piano with
one finger. Supreme imagination reared the four repeated tones,
simple rhythms, into a great symphonic poem that is probably the
noblest thought-built edifice in our world. And Architecture is like
Music in this capacity for the symphony.

But concerning higher development of building to more com-

pletely express its life principle as significant and beautiful, let us
say at once by way of warning: it is better to die by the wayside
of left-wing Ornaphobia than it is to build any more merely orna-

65
mented buildings, as such; or to see right-wing architects die any
more ignoble deaths of Ornamentia. All period and pseudo-classic
buildings whatever, and (although their authors do not seem to
know it) most protestant buildings, they call themselves interna-
tionalist, are really ornamental in definitely objectionable sense. A
plain flat surface cut to shape for its own sake, however large or
plain the shape, is, the moment it is sophisticatedly so cut, no less
ornamental than egg-and-dart. All such buildings are objection-
ably “ornamental,” because like any buildings of the old classical
order both wholly ignore the nature of the first integrity. Both also
ignore the four resources and both neglect the nature of machines
at work on materials. Incidentally and as a matter of course both
misjudge the nature of time, place and the modern life of man.
Here in this new leftish emulation as we now have it, is only
the “istic,” ignoring principle merely to get the “look” of the
machine or something that looks “new.” The province of the “ite.”
In most so-called “internationalist” or “modernistic” building
therefore we have no true approach to organic architecture: we
have again merely a new, superficial esthetic trading upon that
architecture because such education as most of our architects
possess qualifies them for only some kind of eclecticism past,
passing, or to pass.
Nevertheless I say, if we can’t have buildings with integrity we
would better have more imitation machines for buildings until we
can have truly sentient architecture. ““The machine for living in”
is sterile, but therefore it is safer, I believe, than the festering mass
of ancient styles.

66
GREAT POWER

A far greater power than slavery, even the intellectual slavery

as in the school of the Greeks, is back of these five demands for
machine-age significance and integrity. Stupendous and stupefying
power. That power is the leverage of the machine itself. As now
set up in all its powers the machine will confirm these new implic-
ities and complicities in architecture at every point, but will destroy
them soon if not checked by a new simplicity.
The proper use of these new resources demands that we use
them all together with integrity for mankind if we are to realize
the finer significances of life. The finer significance, prophesied if
not realized by organic architecture. It is reasonable to believe
that life in our country will be lived in full enjoyment of this new
freedom of the extended horizontal line because the horizontal
line now becomes the great architectural highway. The flat plane
now becomes the regional field. And integral-pattern becomes
“the sound of the Usonian®™ heart.”
I see this extended horizontal line as the true earth-line of
human life, indicative of freedom. Always.
The broad expanded plane is the horizontal plane infinitely
extended. In that lies such freedom for man on this earth as he
may call his.

This new sense of Architecture as integral-pattern of that type

and kind may awaken these United States to fresh beauty, and the
Usonian horizon of the individual will be immeasurably extended
by enlightened use of this great lever, the machine. But only if it

gets into creative hands loyal to humanity.

*Usonia was Samuel Butler’s name for the United States.

67
68
First design for Dean Malcolm Willey House in Minneapolis. Living
room and kitchen workspace on roof-deck, bedroom on the garden
level. Cost in 1934: $16,000.

The plan and photographs shown on the following pages are of ‘The
Garden Wall’: house built in 1934 for Dean Malcolm Willey—Nancy
Willey, Superintendent. Cost: $10,000. A well-protected brick house
built upon a brick paved 3 in. concrete mat laid down over well drained
bed of cinders and sand—the concrete mat jointed at partitions. To
develop the nature of the materials a sand mold brick course alter-
nates with a course of paving brick, the exterior cypress is left to
weather and the interior cypress is only waxed.
The house wraps around the northwest corner of a lot sloping to the
south—a fine vista in that direction. The plan protects the Willeys
from the neighbors, sequesters a small garden and realizes the view
to the utmost under good substantial shelter. Notwithstanding the
protests of the builder and unusually many kind friends, the fireplace
draws perfectly and the mat is perfectly comfortable in 30° below
zero weather. Nor does the frost show upon the inside of the outside
walls. The house emphasizes the modern sense of space by vista
inside and outside, without getting at all ‘‘modernistic.'’ There is a
well balanced interpenetration (that is to say, sense of proportion) of
the sense of shelter with this sense of space, the sense of materials
and the purpose of the whole structure in this dwelling. It is well con-
structed for a life of several centuries if the shingle roof is renewed
in twenty-five years or tile is substituted. Perhaps this northern house
comes as near to being permanent human shelter as any family of
this transitory period is entitled to expect.
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dining area and living room fireplace
beyond.

72
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The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architec-
tural problem but the problem most difficult for her major archi-
tects. As for me, I would rather solve it with satisfaction to myself
and Usonia, than build anything I can think of at the moment
except the modern theater now needed by the legitimate drama
unless the stage is to be done to death by “the movies.” In our
country the chief obstacle to any real solution of the moderate-
cost house problem is the fact that our people do not really know
how to live. They imagine their idiosyncrasies to be their “tastes,”
their prejudices to be their predilections, and their ignorance to be
virtue—where any beauty of living is concerned.
To be more specific, a small house on the side street might
have charm if it didn’t ape the big house on the Avenue, just as
ape
the Usonian village itself might have a great charm if it didn’t
g
the big town. Likewise, Marybud on the old farm, a jewel hangin
from the tip of her pretty nose on a cold, cold day, might be charm-
in
ing in clothes befitting her state and her work, but is only silly
the Sears-Roebuck finery that imitates the clothes of her city sis-
heels, silk
ters who imitate Hollywood stars: lipstick, rouge, high

79
stockings, bell skirt, cockeyed hat, and all. Exactly that kind of
“monkey-fied” business is the obstacle to architectural achievement
in our U.S.A. This provincial “culture-lag” in favor of the lag which
does not allow the person, thing, or thought to be simple and
naturally itself. It is the real obstacle to a genuine Usonian culture.
I am certain that any approach to the new house needed by
indigenous culture—why worry about the house wanted by pro-
vincial “tasteful” ignorance!—is fundamentally different. That
house must be a pattern for more simplified and, at the same time,
more gracious living: necessarily new, but suitable to living condi-
tions as they might so well be in this country we live in today.
This need of a house of moderate cost must sometime face not
only expedients but Reality. Why not face it now? The expedient
houses built by the million, which journals propagate, and govern-
ment builds, do no such thing.
To me such houses are stupid makeshifts, putting on some style
or other, really having no integrity. Style is important. A style is
not. There is all the difference when we work with style and not
for a style.
I have insisted on that point for forty-five years.

Notwithstanding all efforts to improve the product, the Ameri-

can “small house” problem is still a pressing, needy, hungry, con-
fused issue. But where is a better thing to come from while
Authority has pitched into perpetuating the old supidities? I do
not believe the needed house can come from current education, or
from big business. It isn’t coming by way of smart advertising
experts either. Or professional streamliners. It is only super-
common-sense that can take us along the road to the better thing
in building.

80
 What would be really sensible in this matter of the modest
dwelling for our time and place? Let’s see how far the first Herbert
Jacobs house at Madison, Wisconsin, is a sensible house. This
house for a young journalist, his wife, and small daughter, was
built in 1937. Cost: Fifty-five hundred dollars, including architect’s
fee of four hundred and fifty. Contract let to P. B. Grove.
To give the small Jacobs family the benefit of the advantages
of the era in which they live, many simplifications must take place.
Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs must themselves see life in somewhat simpli-
fied terms. What are essentials in their case, a typical case? It is
not only necessary to get rid of all unnecessary complications in
construction, necessary to use work in the mill to good advantage,
necessary to eliminate, so far as possible, field labor which is
always expensive: it is necessary to consolidate and simplify the
three appurtenance systems—heating, lighting, and sanitation. At
least this must be our economy if we are to achieve the sense of
spaciousness and vista we desire in order to liberate the people
living in the house. And it would be ideal to complete the building
in one operation as it goes along. Inside and outside should be
complete in one operation. The house finished inside as it is com-
pleted outside. There should be no complicated roofs.
Every time a hip or a valley or a dormer window is allowed to
ruffle a roof the life of the building is threatened.
The way the windows are used is naturally a most useful
resource to achieve the new characteristic sense of space. All this
fenestration can be made ready at the factory and set up as the
walls. But there is no longer sense in speaking of doors and win-
dows. These walls are largely a system of fenestration having its
own part in the building scheme—the system being as much a
part of the design as eyes are part of the face.

81
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| First Herbert Jacobs House, Westmorland, near Madison, Wisconsin.

_ Cost in 1937: $5500 including architect’s fee.
 To assist in general planning, what must or may we use in our
new construction? In this case five materials: wood, brick, cement,
paper, glass. To simplify fabrication we must use our horizontal-
unit system in construction. We must also use a vertical-unit system
which will be the widths of the boards and batten-bands them-
selves, interlocking with the brick courses. Although it is getting
to be a luxury material, the walls will be wood board-walls the same

Jacobs house. This Usoni

inside as outside—three thicknesses of boards with paper placed house turns its back on 1
street, to secure privc
between them, the boards fastened together with screws. These for the indwellers.
slab-walls of boards—a kind of plywood construction on a large
scale can be high in insulating value, vermin-proof, and practically
fireproof. These walls like the fenestration may be prefabricated
on the floor, with any degree of insulation we can afford, and
raised into place, or they may be made at the mill and shipped to

85
 the site in sections. The roof can be built first on props and these
walls shoved into place under them.
The appurtenance systems, to avoid cutting and complications,
must be an organic part of construction but independent of the

walls. Yes, we must have polished plate glass. It is one of the

things we have at hand to gratify the designer of the truly modern
house and bless its occupants.
The roof framing in this instance is laminated of three 2 x 4’s

86
in depth easily making the three offsets seen outside in the eaves
of the roof, and enabling the roof span of 2 x 12” to be sufficiently
pitched without the expense of “building up” the pitches. The
middle offset may be left open at the eaves and fitted with flaps

used to ventilate the roof spaces in summer. These 2 x 4’s sheathed

and insulated, then covered with a good asphalt roof, are the top
of the house, shelter gratifying to the sense of shelter because of
the generous eaves.

87
 All this is in hand—no, it is in mind, as we plan the disposition
of the rooms.

What must we consider essential now? We have a corner lot—

Say, an acre or two— with a south and west exposure? We will
have a good garden. The house is planned to wrap around two
sides of this garden.
1. We must have as big a living room with as much vista and
garden coming in as we can afford, with a fireplace in it,

and open bookshelves, a dining table in the alcove, benches,

and living-room tables built in; a quiet rug on the floor.
2. Convenient cooking and dining space adjacent to if not a
part of the living room. This space may be set away from the
outside walls within the living area to make work easy. This
is the new thought concerning a kitchen—to take it away

88
 from outside walls and let it turn up into overhead space
within the chimney; thus connection to dining space is made
immediate without unpleasant features and no outside wall
space lost to the principal rooms. A natural current of air
is thus set up toward the kitchen as toward a chimney, no
cooking odors escaping back into the house. There are steps
leading down from this space to a small cellar below for
heater, fuel, and laundry, although no basement at all is
necessary if the plan should be so made. The bathroom is
usually next so that plumbing features of heating kitchen
and bath may be economically combined.
. In this case (two bedrooms and a workshop which may
become a future bedroom) the single bathroom for the sake
of privacy is not immediately connected to any single bed-
room. Bathrooms opening directly into a bedroom occupied
by more than one person or two bedrooms opening into a
single bathroom have been badly overdone. We will have
as much garden and space in all these space appropriations
as our money allows after we have simplified construction
by way of the technique we have tried out.

A modest house, this Usonian house, a dwelling place that has

no feeling at all for the “grand” except as the house extends itself
in the flat parallel to the ground. It will be a companion to the
horizon. With floor-heating that kind of extension on the ground
can hardly go too far for comfort or beauty of proportion, provided
it does not cost too much in upkeep. As a matter of course a home
like this is an architect’s creation. It is not a builder’s nor an ama-
teur’s effort. There is considerable risk in exposing the scheme to
imitation or emulation.

89
 This is true because a house of this type could not be well built
and achieve its design except as an architect oversees the building.
And the building would fail of proper effect unless the furnish-
ing and planting were all done by advice of the architect.
Thus briefly these few descriptive paragraphs together with the
plan may help to indicate how stuffy and stifling the little colonial
hot-boxes, hallowed by government or not, really are where
Usonian family life is concerned. You might easily put two of them,
each costing more, into the living space of this one and not go
much outside the walls. Here is a moderate-cost brick-and-wood
house that by our new technology has been greatly extended both
in scale and comfort: a single house suited to prefabrication because
the factory can go to the house.
Imagine how the costs would come down were the technique a
familiar matter or if many houses were to be executed at one time

_ ,IHE JACOBS HOUSE FROM THE INTE

4
—probably down to forty-five hundred dollars, according to
number built and location.
There is a freedom of movement, and a privacy too, afforded
by the general arrangement here that is unknown to the current
“boxment.” Let us say nothing about beauty. Beauty is an ambig-
uous term concerning an affair of taste in the provinces of which
our big cities are the largest.
But I think a cultured American, we say Usonian, housewife
will look well in it. The now inevitable car will seem a part of it.
Where does the garden leave off and the house begin? Where
the garden begins and the house leaves off.
Withal, this Usonian dwelling seems a thing loving the ground
with the new sense of space, light, and freedom—to which our
U.S.A. is entitled.
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We have built over a hundred of them now in nearly all our states.
Building costs in general in the U.S.A. were rising and are rising
still.* We find that twenty thousand dollars is about the sum
needed to do what the Jacobs bought for fifty-five hundred. The
Usonian house would have cost from twelve, and in some certain
extensive programs, on up to seventy-five thousand dollars. We
have built several extended in every way that cost more than one
hundred thousand.
The houses cost a good deal more to build now than when we
started to build them in 1938. But this holds true—any comparison
with the “regular” houses around them shows that they are more
for the money physically for the sums they cost than the “regulars”
around about them. Their freedom, distinction, and individuality
are not a feature of that cost except as it does, by elimination,
put the expenditure where it liberates the occupant in a new
spaciousness. A new freedom.
It is true however that no man can have the liberation one of
these houses affords with liberal outside views on three sides be-
coming a part of the interior, without incurring extra fuel—say
* Brought up to date by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954

ee
twenty per cent more. Double windows cut this down—but also
cost money.

GRAVITY HEAT

Concerning floor heating. Heated air naturally rises. We call it

gravity heat because the pipes filled with steam or hot water are
all in a rock ballast bed beneath the concrete floor—we call the
ballast with concrete top, the floor mat. If the floor is above the
ground it is made of two-inch-square wood strips spaced 3’ 8”
apart. The heating pipes are in that case set between the floor joists.

It came to me in this way: In Japan to commence building the

new Imperial Hotel, winter of 1914, we were invited to dine with
Baron Okura, one of my patrons. It is desperately cold in Tokyo
in winter—a damp clammy cold that almost never amounts to freez-
ing or frost, but it is harder to keep warm there than anywhere else
I have been, unless in Italy. The universal heater is the hibachi—a
round vessel sitting on the floor filled with white ashes, several
sticks of charcoal thrust down into the ashes all but a few inches.
This projecting charcoal is lighted and glows—incandescent. Every-
one sits around the hibachi, every now and then stretching out the
hand over it for a moment—closing the hand as though grasping
at something. The result is very unsatisfactory. To us. I marveled
at Japanese fortitude until I caught sight of the typical underwear
—heavy woolens, long sleeves, long legs, which they wear beneath
the series of padded flowing kimono. But as they are acclimated
and toughened to this native condition they suffer far less than
we do.

98
 Well, although we knew we should shiver, we accepted the invi-
tation to dine at Baron Okura’s Tokyo house—he had a number of
houses scattered around the Empire. As expected, the dining room
was so cold that I couldn’t eat—pretending to eat only and for
some nineteen courses. After dinner the Baron led the way below
to the “Korean room,” as it was called. This room was about eleven
by fifteen, ceiling seven feet, I should say. A red-felt drugget covered
the floor mats. The walls were severely plain, a soft pale yellow in
color. We knelt there for conversation and Turkish coffee.
The climate seemed to have changed. No, it wasn’t the coffee;
it was Spring. We were soon warm and happy again—kneeling
there on the floor, an indescribable warmth. No heating was visible
nor was it felt directly as such. It was really a matter not of heating at
all but an affair of climate.
The Harvard graduate who interpreted for the Baron explained:
the Korean room meant a room heated under the floor. The heat of
a fire outside at one corner ofthe floor drawn back and forth under-
neath the floor in and between tile ducts, the floor forming the top
of the flues (or ducts) made by the partitions, the smoke and heat
going up and out of a tall chimney at the corner opposite the
corner where the fire was burning.
The indescribable comfort of being warmed from below was a
discovery.
I immediately arranged for electric heating elements beneath
the bathrooms in the Imperial Hotel—dropping the ceiling of the
bathrooms to create a space beneath each in which to generate
the heat. The tile floor and built-in tile baths were thus always
warm. It was pleasant to go in one’s bare feet into the bath. This
experiment was a success. All ugly electric heat fixtures (danger-
ous too ina bathroom) were eliminated. I’ve always hated fixtures
—radiators especially. Here was the complete opportunity to digest

8)
all that paraphernalia in the building—creating not a heated
interior but creating climate—healthful, dustless, serene. And also,
the presence of heat thus integral and beneath makes lower tem-
peratures desirable. Sixty-five degrees seems for normal human
beings sufficient. But neighbors coming in from super-heated houses
would feel the cold at first. It is true that a natural climate is gener-
ated instead of an artificial forced condition—the natural con-
dition much more healthful, as a matter of course.

I determined to try it out at home at the first opportunity. That

opportunity seemed to be the Nakoma Country Club but that
Indianesque affair stayed in the form of a beautiful plan.
Then came the Johnson Administration Building. Just the thing
for that and we proceeded with the installation, but all the profes-
sional heating contractors except one (Westerlin and Campbell)
scoffed, refusing to have anything to do with the idea. But as
chance had it, the little Jacobs House turned up meantime and
was completed before that greater venture got into operation.
So the Jacobs House was the first installation to go into effect.
There was great excitement and curiosity on the part of the “pro-
fession.” Crane Company officials came in, dove beneath the rugs,
put their hands on the concrete in places remote from the heater,
got up and looked at one another as though they had seen a ghost.
My God! It works. Where were radiators now?
As usual.
Articles on “radiant heat” began to appear in testimonial jour-
nals. But it was in no sense “radiant heat” or panel heating or any
of the things they called it that I was now interested in. It was
simply gravity heat—heat coming up from beneath as naturally as
heat rises.

100
 Many of the Usonian buildings now have floor heating. We
have had to learn to proportion the heat correctly for varying
climates and conditions. We have accumulated some data that is
useful.
There is no other “‘ideal”’ heat. Not even the heat of the sun.

101
 CARPORT

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CONCERNING THE USONIAN HOUSE

This statement was written by Mr. Wright for the opening of

the Usonian House in the exhibition, Sixty Years of Living
Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, at The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, November 1953.
To say the house planted by myself on the good earth of the Chicago
prairie as early as 1900, or earlier, was the first truly democratic
expression of our democracy in Architecture would start a contro-
versy with professional addicts who believe Architecture has no
political (therefore no social) significance. So, let’s say that the spirit
of democracy—freedom ofthe individual as an individual—took
hold of the house as it then was, took off the attic and the porch,
pulled out the basement, and made a single spacious, harmonious
unit of living room, dining room and kitchen, with appropriate
entry conveniences. The sleeping rooms were convenient to baths
approached in a segregated, separate extended wing and the whole
place was flooded with sunlight from floor to ceiling with glass.
The materials of the outside walls came inside just as appro-
priately and freely as those of the inside walls went outside.
Intimate harmony was thus established not only in the house but
with its site. Came the “Open Plan.” The housewife herself thus
planned for became the central figure in her menage and her
housewifery a more charming feature (according to her ability) of
her domestic establishment.

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 She was now more hostess “officio,” operating in gracious rela-
tion to her own home, instead of being a kitchen-mechanic behind
closed doors.
Nobody need care now how this thing happened. It may not
be important. But if not—what is?
In addition to this new freedom with its implication of fresh
responsibility for the individual homester came a technical recogni-
tion of the new materials and means by which the house was to be
built. Materials were now so used as to bring out their natural
beauty of character. The construction was made suitable to the
appropriate use of machinery—because the machine had already
become the appropriate tool of our civilization. (See essays written
by myself at that time.)
To use our new materials—concrete, steel and glass, and the
old ones—stone and wood—in ways that were not only expedient
but beautiful was Culture now. So many new forms of treating
them were devised out of the working of a new principle of
building. I called it “organic.”
Moreover, the house itself was so proportioned that people
looked well in it as a part of them and their friends looked better
in it than when they were outside it.
Thus a basic change came about in this affair of a culture for
the civilization of these United States. What then took place has
since floundered, flourished and faded under different names by
different architects in an endless procession of expedients.
Here the original comes back to say hello to you afresh and to
see if you recognize it for what it was and still is—a home for our
people in the spirit in which our Democracy was conceived: the
individual integrate and free in an environment of his own, appro-
priate to his circumstances—a life beautiful as he can make it—
with her, of course.

116
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 T
Ni Us 15 (Gn Ik Nene A H O USRSEEE

N N D V DUA L
W hat is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that
is most needed in life—Integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so
integrity is the deepest quality in a building; but it is a quality not
much demanded of any building since very ancient times when it
was natural. It is no longer the first demand for a human being
either, because “Success” is now so immediately necessary. If you
are a success, people will not want to “look the gift horse in the
mouth.” No. But then if “success” should happen today some-
thing precious has been lost from life.
Somebody has described a man of this period as one through
the memory of whom you could too easily pass your hand. Had
there been true quality in the man the hand could not so easily
pass. That quality in the memory of him would probably have
been “Integrity.” :
In speaking of integrity in architecture, | mean much the same
thing that you would mean were you speaking of an individual.
Integrity is not something to be put on and taken off like a gar-
ment. Integrity is a quality within and of the man himself. So it is
in a building. It cannot be changed by any other person either nor

129
by the exterior pressures of any outward circumstances; integrity
cannot change except from within because it is that in you which
is you—and due to which you will try to live your life (as you
would build your building) in the best possible way. To build a
man or building from within is always difficult to do because
deeper is not so easy as shallow.
Naturally should you want to really live in a way and in a
place which is true to this deeper thing in you, which you honor,
the house you build to live in as a home should be (so far as it is
possible to make it so) integral in every sense. Integral to site, to
purpose, and to you. The house would then be a home in the best
sense of that word. This we seem to have forgotten if ever we
learned it. Houses have become a series of anonymous boxes that
go into a row on row upon row of bigger boxes either merely nega-
tive or a mass nuisance. But now the house in this interior or
deeper organic sense may come alive as organic architecture.

We are now trying to bring integrity into building. If we suc-

ceed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature—the
psyche—of our democratic society. Integrity would become more
natural. Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for
integrity not only in the life of those who did the building but
socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable. An irresponsible,
flashy, pretentious or dishonest individual would never be happy in
such a house as we now call organic because of this quality
of integrity. The one who will live in it will be he who will grow
with living in it. So it is the “job” of any true architect to envision
and make this human relationship—so far as lies in his power—
a reality.
Living within a house wherein everything is genuine and har-

150
monious, a new sense of freedom gives one a new sense of life—as
contrasted with the usual existence in the house indiscriminately
planned and where Life is contained within a series of confining
boxes, all put within the general box. Such life is bound to be in-
ferior to life lived in this new integrity—the Usonian Home.
In designing the Usonian house, as I have said, I have always
proportioned it to the human figure in point of scale; that 1s, to the
scale of the human figure to occupy it. The old idea in most build-

Pew House, living room.

“|... probably the only
house in Madison, Wis:
consin, that recognizes
beautiful Lake Men:
dota, my boyhood lake
..a house actually
built by the Taliesin
Fellowship.”

133
ings was to make the human being feel rather insignificant—
developing an inferiority complex in him if possible. The higher
the ceilings were then the greater the building was. This empty
grandeur was considered to be human luxury. Of course, great,
high ceilings had a certain utility in those days, because of bad
planning and awkward construction. (The volume of contained
air was about all the air to be had without violence.)
The Usonian house, then, aims to be a natural performance, one
that is integral to site; integral to environment; integral to the life
of the inhabitants. A house integral with the nature of materials—
wherein glass is used as glass, stone as stone, wood as wood—and
all the elements of environment go into and throughout the house.

The Pew House is a two-story wood

and stone house built of lapped
cypress boards inside and out.
Into this new integrity, once there, those who live in it will take
root and grow. And most of all belonging by nature to the nature
of its being.

Living room, lookir

out over Lake Mendot

Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually

derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘“‘atmosphere” of the
things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant
is in the soil in which it is planted. For instance, we receive many
letters from people who sing praises for what has happened to
them as a consequence; telling us how their house has affected
their lives. They now have a certain dignity and pride in their
environment; they see it has a meaning or purpose which they
share as a family or feel as individuals.
We all know the feeling we have when we are well-dressed and
like the consciousness that results from it. It affects our conduct
and you should have the same feeling regarding the home you live

135
 in. It has a salutary effect morally, to put it on a lower plane than
it deserves, but there are higher results above that sure one. If you
feel yourself becomingly housed, know that you are living accord-
ing to the higher demands of good society, and of your own con-
science, then you are free from embarrassment and not poor in
spirit but rich—in the right way. I have always believed in being
careful about my clothes; getting well-dressed because I could
then forget all about them. That is what should happen to you
with a good house that is a home. When you are conscious that
the house is right and is honestly becoming to you, and feel you
are living in it beautifully, you need no longer be concerned about
it. It is no tax upon your conduct, nor a nag upon your self-
respect, because it is featuring you as you like to see yourself.

Space flows uninterrupted below

this two-story house lifted by stone
columns at one end of hilly site.
 Workspace merges into dining area.

Living room fireplace, dining table

arrangement beyond.
 t
F
R O -M H G R O U N OD U
WHERE TO BUILD

When selecting a site for your house, there is always the question
of how close to the city you should be and that depends on what
kind of slave you are. The best thing to do is go as far out as you
can get. Avoid the suburbs—dormitory towns—by all means. Go
way out into the country—what you regard as “too far”—and when
others follow, as they will (if procreation keeps up), move on.
Of course it all depends on how much time you have to get there
and how much time you can afford to lose, going and coming. But
Decentralization is under way. You may see it everywhere. Los
Angeles is a conspicuous example of it. There the powers that be
are trying to hold it downtown. Robert Moses is struggling to
release New York to the country. He thinks he is doing the opposite.
But he isn’t. New York’s Moses is another kind of Moses leading
his people out from the congestion rather than into it—leading the
people from the city.
So go out with these big ferry-boats gnashing their chromium
teeth at you as they come around the corner. But don’t buy the

139
huge American car with protruding corners but buy the smaller
one, such as Nash has produced, and go thirty or forty miles to
the gallon. A gallon of gas is not so expensive that you cannot
afford to pay for the gas it takes to get pretty far from the city.
The cost of transportation has been greatly decreased by way of
the smaller car. In this way, decentralization has found aid, and
the easier the means of egress gets to be, the further you can go
out from the city.
I tried to get a congregation out of the city when we built the
Unitarian Church in Wisconsin, but before it was finished, a half
dozen buildings had sprung up around it. Now it is merely suburban
instead ofin the country. In Arizona we went twenty-six miles from
the center of town to build Taliesin West; and are now there where
we will soon be suburban, too. Clients have asked me: “How far
should we go out, Mr. Wright?” I say: “Just ten times as far as
you think you ought to go.” So my suggestion would be to go just
as far as you can go—and go soon and go fast.
There is only one solution, one principle, one proceeding which
can rid the city of its congestion—decentralization. Go out,
un-divide the division, un-subdivide the division, and then sub-
divide the un-subdivision. The only answer to life today is to get
back to the good ground, or rather I should say, to get forward to
it, because now instead of going back, we can go foward to the
ground: not the city going to the country but the country and city
becoming one. We have the means to go, a means that is entirely
adequate to human purposes where life is now most concerned.
Because we have the automobile, we can go far and fast and when
we get there, we have other machines to use—the tractor or what-
ever else you may want to use.

140
 We have all the means to live free and independent, far apart—
as we choose—still retaining all the social relationships and advan-
tages we ever had, even to have them greatly multiplied. No matter
if we do have houses a quarter of a mile apart. You would enjoy
all that you used to enjoy when you were ten to a block, and think
of the immense advantages for your children and for yourself: free-
dom to use the ground, relationship with all kinds ofliving growth.
There is no sense in herding any more. It went out when we
got cheap and quick transportation. When we got a kind of build-
ing, too, that requires more space. The old building was a box—
a fortification more or less. It was a box which could be put close
to other boxes so that you could live as close together as possible
—and you did. You lived so close together in houses of the Middle
Ages because you had to walk to communicate. You were con-
centrated for safety also. So there was ground only for you to get
into a huddle upon. Also, one town was liable to be attacked by
townsfolk coming in from the North or from somewhere else to
conquer you and take your ground away. You were forced to live
compactly. Every little village in the old days was a fortress.
Today there is no such condition, nor is there ever going to be
such again in our country or in any other country as far as I know.
Today the threat is from the sky in the form of an atom bomb (or
an even more destructive bomb), and the more you are divided
and scattered, the less temptation to the bomb—the less harm the
bomb could do. The more you herd now the more damage to you,
as conditions now are.
Looking at it from any standpoint, decentralization is the order
of this day. So go far from the city, much farther than you think
you can afford. You will soon find you never can go quite
far enough.

14]
WHAT KIND OF LAND

With a small budget the best kind of land to build on is flat

land. Of course, if you can get a gentle slope, the building will be
more interesting, more satisfactory. But changes of ground surface
make building much more expensive.
It is also cheaper to build in the South where no deep founda-
tions or insulation are necessary, rather than in the North where
Summers are short and you have to prepare for them in air-
conditioning a house, and for the long winters: piling up firewood,
putting away food, etc., etc., etc.
But it is because of this need for resourcefulness that the man
of the North has traditionally and actually conquered the man
softened by the South; and then, these comforts thus won, the
Northern man has himself grown soft only to be re-conquered. So
it seems to go on ceaselessly.

A SUITABLE FOUNDATION

The sort of foundation that should be used for a house depends

upon the place where you are going to build the house. If you are
building in the desert, the best foundation is right on the desert.
Don’t dig into it and break it.
One ofthe best foundations I know of, suitable to many places
(particularly to frost regions), was devised by the old Welsh stone-
mason who put the foundations in for buildings now used by
Taliesin North. Instead of digging down three and a half feet or
four feet below the frost line, as was standard practice in Wis-
consin, not only terribly expensive but rendering capillary attrac-

142
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tion a threat to the upper wall, he dug shallow trenches about
sixteen inches deep and slightly pitched them to a drain. These
trenches he filled with broken stone about the size of your fist.
Broken stone does not clog up, and provides the drainage beneath
the wall that saves it from being lifted by the frost.
I have called it the “dry wall footing,” because if the wall stayed
dry the frost could not affect it. In a region of deep cold to keepa
building from moving it is necessary to get all water (or moisture)
from underneath it. If there is no water there to freeze, the founda-
tion cannot be lifted.
All those footings at Taliesin have been perfectly static. Ever
since I discovered the dry wall footing—about 1902—I have been
building houses that way. Occasionally there has been trouble
getting the system authorized by building commissions. A recent
encounter was with the Lake Forest Building Department of
linois. It refused to allow the building to be so built. The Madi-
son, Wisconsin, experts also refused to let me use the system on the
hillsides above the lake. When the experts do not accept it, they
will not accept the idea of saving the builders of the house many
thousands of dollars. But we have in all but eight or ten cases put
it through now, thereby saving the client excess waste of money
below ground for no good purpose.
That type of footing, however, is not applicable to treacherous
sub-soils where the problem is entirely different. For example, the
Imperial Hotel was built on soil about the consistency of cheese,
some eight feet thick, and a foundation for that particular soil had
to be devised to bear the load of any building we wanted to build.
I remembered I had bored holes with an auger on the Oak Park
prairie. So I had driven into the soil a tapered pile eight feet long
which punched a hole. I made tests to determine how far apart
each of these piles would have to be to carry the necessary load

147
 and found that centers, two feet apart, were far enough—had they
been further apart, not all of the ground would have been utilized.
We punched these holes and filled them with concrete. We had to
do it quickly, because, since we were almost down to water level,
the water might come right up. On these tapered concrete piles we
spread a thin plate of concrete slab, or beam, which gathered all
these little pins in the pin cushion together and added up to enough
resistance to carry the walls.
No one foundation, then, is suitable for all soils; the type of
foundation used must be applicable to the particular site.

ADVANTAGES OF THE BERM-TYPE

The berm-type house, with walls of earth, is practical—a nice

form of building anywhere: north, south, east or west—depending
upon the soil and climate as well as the nature of the site. If your
site contains a lot of boulders or rock ledges it is impossible. In
the berm-type house the bulldozer comes along, pushes the dirt up
against the outsides of the building as high as you want it to go
and you may carry the earth banking as far around the structure
as you please. Here you have good insulation—great protection
from the elements; a possible economy, too, because you do not
have to finish any outside below the window level. You do not have
to finish the inside walls either if not so inclined. I
think it an
excellent form for certain regions and conditions. An actual °
economy and preservation of the landscape.

The drawings and plan of the Cooperative Homesteads on the following pages are of a low
cost scheme for group housing. This berm-type project was begun with the assumption that the
work upon the buildings would be done by the Detroit auto workers who intended to live there.
It was mainly a drainage and landscape problem. But the times were such that the group could
never get together with much effect on progress. Cost in 1942: $4000. The nature of the
scheme is apropos to so much of the building problem in our country that it is on record here
for what it may be worth.
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HOW TO LIGHT THE HOUSE

The best way to light a house is God’s way—the natural way,

as nearly as possible in the daytime and at night as nearly like the
day as may be, or better.
Cities are commonly laid out north, south, east and west. This
was just to save the surveyor trouble, I imagine. Anyway that
happened without much thought for the human beings compelled
to build homes on those lines. This inevitably results in every
house having a “dark side.”
Surveyors do not seem to have learned that the south is the
comforter of life, the south side of the house the “living” side.
Ordinarily the house should be set 30-60 to the south, well back
on its site so that every room in the house might have sunlight some
time in the day. If, however, owing to the surveyor the house must
face square north, we always place the clerestory (which serves as
a lantern) to the south so that no house need lack sunlight. It is a
somewhat expensive way to overcome the surveyor’s ruse.

THE GREAT LUMINARY

Proper orientation of the house, then, is the first condition of

the lighting of that house; and artificial lighting is nearly as im-
portant as daylight. Day lighting can be beautifully managed by
the architect if he has a feeling for the course of the sun as it goes
from east to west and at the inevitable angle to the south. The sun
is the great luminary of all life. It should serve as such in the build-
ing of any house. There is, however, the danger of taking “light”
too far and leaving you, “the inmate,” defenseless in a glass cage

154
—which is somewhat silly. You must control light in the plan-
ning of your home so that light most naturally serves your needs
without too much artificial production and consequent control—
putting light in only to block it out.
As for all artificial lighting, it too should be integral part of the
house—be as near daylighting as possible. In 1893, I began to get
rid of the bare light-bulb and have ever since been concealing it
on interior decks or placing it in recesses in such a way that it comes
from the building itself; the effect should be that it comes from
the same source as natural light. Sometimes we light the grounds
about the house putting outside light so that it lights the interior
of the rooms.
Wiring for lights, as piping for plumbing and heating, should
not show all over the house unless by special design—any more
than you would have organs of your body on the outside of your
skin. Lighting fixtures should (as should all others) be absorbed
in the structure, so that their office is of the structure. All this after
the building has been properly orientated.

STEEL AND GLASS

There is much new good in houses being built today and chiefly
on account of the new freedoms afforded organic architecture by
the uses of steel and glass; miraculous materials. As a result of
these space is now freer, wider spans are easier; therefore more
open spaces, made possible owing to steel in tension, and a closer
relation to nature (environment) owing to the use of glass. These
materials, everywhere to be seen now, are enabling building to go
in varied directions with more ease; to go beyond the traditional
constraint of the box with economy.

155
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 THE BASEMENT

A house should—ordinarily—not have a basement. In spite

of
everything you may do, a basement is a noisome, gaseou
s damp
place. From it come damp atmospheres and unhealthful condit
ions.
Because people rarely go there—and certainly not to live there—
it
is almost always sure to be an ugly place. The family tenden
cy is
to throw things into it, leave them there and forget them. It usuall
y
becomes—as it became when I began to build—a great,
furtive
underground for the house in order to enable the occupants
to live
in it disreputably. Also, so many good housewives, even their
lords
and masters, used to tumble downstairs into the basement
and go
on insurance for some time, if not make it all immediately
collectible.
Another objection to the basement is that it is relatively
ex-
pensive. It has to be some six to eight feet below grade and
so you
have to get big digging going. It is a great inhibition in any
build-
ing because you must construct a floor over it and the space
it pro-
vides you with is, as I have said, usually disreputabiy occupi
ed.
Of course, a basement often is a certain convenience,
but these
conveniences can now be supplied otherwise. Mechanical
equip-
ment is now so compact and good-looking. So we decide
d to
eliminate it wherever possible and provide for its equivalent
up on
the ground level with modern equipment.

INSULATION AND HEATING

In either a very cold or a very hot climate, the overhead is

where
insulation should occur in any building. There you can
spend
money for insulation with very good effect, whereas the insula
tion

158
of the walls and the air space within the walls becomes less and
less important. With modern systems of air conditioning and heat-
ing you can manage almost any condition.
But the best insulation for a roof and walls in a hot climate is
nearly the same as the best insulation for a roof and walls in a
cold region. Resistance to heat in a building is much the same as
resistance to cold, although of course the exact specifications should
vary according to circumstances. In a warm region it is important
that the overhead not get overheated. You have to use a very
tough cover for roof insulation or the sun will take the life out of
it quickly. We have never found a roofing that lasts as long as we
would like in a hot climate like the desert—but a white-top is eco-
nomical partly because white, of course, reflects heat rather than
absorbs it.
But in a cold climate like southern Wisconsin the real basis for
purposeful insulation is floor heating. When you have the floor
warm—heat by gravity—insulation of the walls becomes compara-
tively insignificant. You may open the windows in cold weather
and still be comfortable, because, if your feet are warm and you
sit warm, you are warm. In this case overhead insulation is ex-
tremely important: heat rises and ifit finds a place overhead where
it can be cooled off and dropped, you have to continuously supply
a lot of heat. If, however, the overhead is reasonably defensive
against cold, you can heat your house very economically, more so
than by any other system.
On the other hand, snow is the best kind of insulation. You do
not have to buy it. In northern climates you can see how well a
house is insulated by noticing how quickly the snow melts off the
roof. If the snow stays for some time, the roof is pretty well in-
sulated. If you get insulation up to a certain point, snow will come
and give you more. To hold snow on the roof is always a good,

159
 wise provision and a good argument
for a flat roof. I have seen
people shovelling snow off the roof
and I never could understand
why—unless the snow was creating
a load that the roof could not
bear or the roof was steep and the
snow load might slide down
and injure someone or something.

THE KIND OF ROOF

Now the shape of roof—whether

a Shed roof, a hip roof or a
flat roof—depends in Part on expedi
ency and in part on your per-
sonal taste or knowledge as to
what is appropriate in the
circumstances.
One of the advantages of the sloping
roof is that it gives you a
sense of spaciousness inside, a sens
e of overhead uplift which I
often feel to be very good. The flat
roof also has advantages in
construction. It is easy to do, of cour
se. But with the flat roof, you
must devise ways and means of gett
ing rid of the water. One way
to do this is to build, on top of the
flat, a slight pitch to the eaves.
This may be done by “furring.” Ther
e are various ways of getting
water off a flat roof. But it must be
done.
The cheapest roof, however, is the
shed roof—the roof sloping
One way, more or less. There you
get more for your money than
you can get from any other form of
roof. There is no water prob-
lem with a shed roof because the
water goes down to the lower
side and drops away. With a hip roof
the water runs two ways into
a natural valley, so there is not muc
h problem there either.
Suitable to flat roof construction in
many locations is the flat
roof covered with a body of good
earth—what I call the “berm
type” roof. On top of the building
there will be—say—about six-
teen inches of good fertile earth in
which may be planted grass or

160
whatever you please to plant. There is the most natural insulation
that can be devised. Probably the cheapest. Always I like the feel-
ing you have when beneath it. The house I will build for my son,
Llewellyn, in Virginia has a flat roof with earth to be placed on top.
I have also sometimes pitched roofs from high on the sides to
low in the center. You can do with a roof almost anything you like.
But the type of roof you choose must not only deal with the ele-
ments in your region but be appropriate to the circumstances,
according to your personal preference—perhaps.

THE ATTIC

Why waste good livable space with an attic any more than
with a basement? And never plan waste space in a house with the
idea of eventually converting it into rooms. A house that is planned
for a lot of problematical space or space unused to be used some
other day is not likely to be a well-planned house. In fact, if you
deliberately planned waste space, the architect would be wasted,
the people in the house would be wasted. Everything would
probably go to waste.
If, however, in future you are going to need more room for
more children and you wish to provide that room it need not be
waste space if properly conceived. But the attic, now, should
always come into the house to beautify it. Sunlight otherwise
impossible may be got into the house through the attic by way of
what we call a lantern or clerestory. And that should also give you
the sense of lift and beauty that comes in so many of our plans at
this time.
We use all “waste” space: make it part of the house; make it so
beautiful that as waste space it is inconceivable. It is something
Detail. Clerestory for penthouse
study on upper floor of Raymond
Carlson House, Phoenix, Ariz.
161
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like the little boy eating an apple, and another little boy ranges up
alongside and wants to know if he can have the core, but the apple-
eater says—“Sorry, there ain’t gonna be no core.”

SIZE OF KITCHEN

In the Usonian house the size of the kitchen depends largely

on the home-maker’s personal preference. Some homesters like to
get a lot of exercise in the homestead—walking from place to place.
Some women want things on ball bearings. Some don’t want to
bend over; they like to stand up when they work: for them we put
everything high: ovens up in the wall, etc. Women who do not
mind bending over like things more compact; they do not want to
waste their substance going to and fro. For them we put things on
ball bearings as you may easily do now that modern gadgetry is
so well designed.
So we like to make kitchens small, and put things on ball
bearings. We have more money to spend on spaciousness for the
rest of the house. Sometimes we are caught making a kitchen too
small, and then the woman of the house comes in and asks us to
make it bigger; sometimes they get this but sometimes they do
not—it depends on the good proportions of the design as a whole.
But I believe in having a kitchen featured as the work space in
the Usonian house and a becoming part of the living room—a
weicome feature. Back in farm days there was but one big living
room, a stove in it, and Ma was there cooking—looking after the
children and talking to Pa—dogs and cats and tobacco smoke too
—all gemutlich if all was orderly, but it seldom was; and the
children were there playing around. It created a certain atmos-
phere of a domestic nature which had charm and which is not, I

165
think, a good thing to lose altogether. Consequently, in the
Usonian plan the kitchen was called “workspace” and identified
largely with the living room. As a matter of fact, it became an
alcove of the living room but higher for good ventilation and
spaciousness.
The kitchen being one of the places where smells originated,
we made that the ventilating flue of the whole house by carrying
it up higher than the living room. All the air from the surrounding
house was thus drawn up through the kitchen itself. You might
have liver and onions for dinner and never know it in the living
room, until it was served to you at the table. The same is true of
other smells and conditions in the way the bathrooms were made.
We were never by this means able to eliminate noise. So in a
Usonian house a needlessly noisy kitchen is a bad thing.
Everything in the Usonian kitchen should be (as it may so
easily be) modern and attractive as such. Because it is incorporated
into the living room, the kitchen (workspace) should bejust as
charming to be in or look at as the living room—perhaps more so.
When we built the Usonian house in the New York Exhibition
(fall of 1953) the kitchen was a delightful little place to look at, no
less so as a “work place.”

THE CLIENT AND THE HOUSE

The needs and demands of the average client should affect

every feature of a house but only insofar as the clients do manifest
intelligence instead of exert mere personal idiosyncrasy. This mani-
festation of intelligence is not so rare. Yet when a man has “made
his money”—is therefore a “success”—he then thinks, because of
this “success,” 99
that he can tell you, or anybody else, all about

166
things of which he really knows nothing at all—a house in par-
ticular. His success as a maker-of-money makes him a universal
expert. So he begins to exercise his idiosyncrasies as this universal
expert.
But I’ve really had little enough trouble with good business-
men or their wives. They do have what we call “common sense.”
A man does have to have common sense to make any sort of for-
tune in this country dedicated to ruthless competition—and you
can usually explain the subtle inner nature of things to a man of
good sense who has never thought about them—but must now
go in for them.
But, the wife? Well, too often she is quite another matter, having
made him what he is today. Although the wives we encounter are
so often far wiser in this affair of home making than their husbands.
The peripatetic marriage is the enemy of good architecture—as a
matter of course.

EXPANDING FOR GROWING FAMILY

A Usonian house if built for a young couple, can, without

deformity, be expanded, later, for the needs of a growing family.
As you see from the plans, Usonian houses are shaped like polli-
wogs—a house with a shorter or longer tail. The body of the
polliwog is the living room and the adjoining kitchen—or work
space—and the whole Usonian concentration of conveniences.
From there it starts out, with a tail: in the proper direction, say,
one bedroom, two bedrooms, three, four, five, six bedrooms long;
provision between each two rooms for a convenient bathroom. We
sometimes separate this tail from the living room wing with a
loggia—for quiet, etc.; especially grace.

167
 The size of the polliwog’s tail depends on the number of children
and the size of the family budget. If the tail gets too long, it may
curve like a centipede. Or you might break it, make it angular.
The wing can go on for as many children as you can afford to put
in it. A good Usonian house seems to be no less but more adapted
to be an ideal breeding stable than the box.

CHILDREN’S ROOMS

People who have many children want to build a house usually,

but do not have enough money to do justice to the children. As a
rule, they do not have any on account of the children. But they
keep on having children just the same no matter what else they
may do or not do. So you see their architect has to tuck the extra
children in somehow; and the idea seems to be to give them the
smallest possible sleeping space with double deckers but to try
also to give them a playroom. If possible this should be apart from
sleeping quarters. Or build a separate section entirely for progeny.
For the children’s bedrooms, then, we introduced the double-
decker bed. We put two children in a small room next to a bath—
two children high is the limit in most of our houses. But you could
put in a third. The boys and girls still have to be separated, for
some mysterious reason. So the compact three-bedroom house is
about the minimum now.
The playroom is planned as part outdoors and part indoors
and so gives children a little liberty for play, ete. Usually, of course,
they now play in the living room and the house is a bedlam. Every-
thing loose is likely to be turned inside out or upside down, and
there is not much use trying to do anything about them at that.
Building a house for the average family (children and their adults)

168
is a pretty rough extravaganza. Either the children get left or must
get spanked into place, else they have the whole house and the
grown-ups do what they can do to make themselves as comfortable
as they may be able.

It is more important for the child to live in an appropriate,

well-considered home development than it is for the grown-ups,
because the grown-ups are halfway through and consequently do
not have so much to lose or gain from the home atmosphere. The
child, however, is a beginning; he has the whole way to go and he
may go a lot further in the course of time than Pa and Ma ever
had a chance to go. But after forty—even thirty-five—the home is
not so important for the parents as for the child, as the case may
be, although they leave soon for homes of their own. The Catho-
lics say, “Give me a child up to the age of seven, and who cares
who takes the child after that.” This is because it is in childhood
that impressions become most indelible.
For these and many unmentioned reasons it is peculiarly
important that a child should grow up in building conditions that
are harmonious, live in an atmosphere that contributes to serenity
and wellbeing and to the consciousness of those things which are
more excellent, in childhood. What a pity that parents have children
so fast, so inconsiderately, that their architect must put them into
little cells, double-decker them, and shove them off into the tail of
the house where life becomes one certain round of washing diapers.

169
FURNISHINGS

Rugs, draperies and furnishings that are suitable for a Usonian

house are those, too, that are organic in character; that is, textures
and patterns that sympathize in their own design and construction
with the design and construction of the particular house they
occupy and embellish (or befoul). A mobile, for instance, should
be composed of the design elements of the room it hangs in.
Out of the nature of the materials used in building a house come
these new effects. The “effect” is not all that the artist-architect
gives you. He not only sees more or less clearly the nature of the
materials but, in his own trained imagination and by virtue of his
own feeling, he qualifies it all as a whole. You can only choose the
result that is sympathetic to you.
The range of choice is growing wider now. But it is extraordinary
still to see how the manufacturer is trying to burn the candle at both
ends, still hanging on to the old William Morris era and old rococo
fabrics. You may—at your own peril—get L’art Nouveaux, rococo,
Morris, ancient and modern in the same store for the same purpose
for the same price. -

CHAIRS

My early approach to the chair was something between con-

tempt and a desperation. Because I believe sitting to be in itself
an unfortunate necessity not quite elegant yet, I do not yet believe
in any such thing as a “natural” chair for an unnatural posture.
The only attractive posture of relaxation is that of reclining. So I
think the ideal chair is one which would allow the would-be “sitter”
to gracefully recline. Even the newest market chairs are the usual

170
 machines-for-sitting. Now I do not know if whatever God may be
ever intended you or me to fold up on one of these—but, if so,
let’s say that fold-up or double-up ought to make you look more
graceful. It ought to look as though it were intended for you to
look and be just that.
We now build well-upholstered benches and seats in our houses,

Hassock,
living room }
air, table—
at Taliesin
West,
Arizona.
Upholstered benches

trying to make them all part of the building. But still you must Suh Sie ed lee
living room at Taliesin
bring in and pull up the casual chair. There are many kinds of West.
“pull-up” chairs to perch upon—lightly. They’re more easy. They’re
light. But the big chair wherein you may fold up and go to sleep
reading a newspaper (all that kind of thing) is still difficult. I have
done the best I could with this “living room chair” but, of course,
you have to call for somebody to help you move it. All my life my
 legs have been banged up somewhere by the chairs I have designed.
But we are accomplishing it now. Someday it will be well done.
But it will not have metal spider-legs nor look the way most of the
steel furniture these days looks to me. No—it will not be a case
of “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating of curds and whey,
when up beside her came a great black spider and frightened Miss
Muffet away.” I am for “Little Miss Muffet” frightened by the
spider—away.
Yet every chair must eventually be designed for the building it
is to be used in. Organic architecture calls for this chair which will
not look like an apparatus but instead be seen as a gracious fea-
eran
M oa

Dining chairs.
ture of its environment which can only be the building itself. So Taliesin West.

the stuffed-box-for-sitting-in is not much better than the machine-

for-setting-it-in.
No doubt most practical sitters are troubled by these chairs,
too. Finding a good comfortable chair in which to place one’s trunk
is never quite easy and so most sitting to date still lacks dignity
and repose. But it is possible now to design a chair in which any
sitter is compelled to look comfortable whether he is so or not.

173
And there is no reason why he, or she, should not be comfortable
in mind as well as body folded up or down.
When the house-interior absorbs the chair as in perfect har-
mony, then we will have achieved not so minor a symptom of a
culture of our own.

Corner of living room, Taliesin West.

PAINT

In organic architecture there is little or no room for appliqué

of any kind. I have never been fond of paints or of wallpaper or
anything which must be applied fo other things as a surface. If
you can put something by skill on the thing that becomes part of
it and still have that thing retain its original character that may be
good. But when you gloss it over, lose its nature—enamel it, and

174
so change the character of its natural expression, you have com-
mitted a violation according to the ideals of organic architecture.
We use nothing applied which tends to eliminate the true char-
acter of what is beneath, or which may become a substitute for
whatever that may be. Wood is wood, concrete is concrete, stone
is stone. We like to have whatever we choose to use demonstrate
the beauty of its own character, as itself.
The only treatment we aim to give to any material is to preserve
it pretty much as it is. A strange fallacy has developed that to
paint wood preserves it. The reverse is true. Wood must breathe
just as you must breathe. When you seal wood off from this innate
need to breathe, you have not lengthened its life at all, you have
done just the opposite. Merely staining wood is one thing; paint-
ing is quite another. When you coat anything in the way of a
natural material you are likely to shorten its life, not preserve it.

AIR CONDITIONING?

To me air conditioning is a dangerous circumstance. The

extreme changes in temperature that tear down a building also
tear down the human body. Building is difficult in a temperate
zone, where you have extreme heat and extreme cold. For instance
—the boards in the ceiling over my bedroom at Taliesin West,
overheated during the day, begin to pull and crack and miniature
explosions occur at about three o’clock in the cool of the morning.
Owing to changes of temperature nothing in construction is ever
completely still.
The human body, although more flexible, is framed and con-
structed upon much the same principles as a building. I can sit in
my shirt sleeves at eighty degrees, or seventy-five, and be cool;

175
then go outside to 118 degrees, take a guarded breath or two
around and soon get accustomed to the change. The human body
is able continually to adjust itself—to and fro. But if you carry
these contrasts too far too often, when you are cooled the heat
becomes more unendurable; it becomes hotter and hotter outside
as you get cooler and cooler inside. Finally, Nature will give up.
She will just say for you, “Well, what’s the use?” Even Nature
can’t please everybody all the time.
So air conditioning has to be done with a good deal of intelli-
gent care. The less the degree of temperature difference you live
in, the better for your constitutional welfare. If one may have air
and feel the current of air moving in on one’s face and hands and
feet one can take almost any degree of heat. But as for myself if
I feel close and hot, I cannot well take it. Neither can anybody
else, I believe.
So, in a very hot climate, the way to deal with air conditioning
best would be to have a thorough protection overhead and the rest
of the building as open to the breezes as it possibly can be made.
On the desert slopes at Taliesin West there is always a breeze. But
when we first went there, and spent a summer in town, I had to
wrap myselfin wet sheets to get to sleep. Being a man from the
North, I was unaccustomed to such heat as came from living in a
bake-oven. But if I lived there all year round—and could get air
by breezes—I would soon get accustomed to it.
Another way of dealing with air conditioning in a humid, hot
climate is the “fireplace” as I devised it for a house in tropical
Acapulco, Mexico. In this “fireplace” the air came down the flue
instead of going out, and the hearth was a pool of cool water as
artificial rain poured down the chimney and the pool was cooled
by one of the devices designed for air conditioning. You could sit
around the “fireplace” and be especially cool but the rooms were
each cooled. The chimney now did not stick up much above the
roof—it was just rounded up to keep the water from running in—
just a low little exuberance on the roof.
Even in cold climates air conditioning has now caught on be-
cause the aim now is to maintain the degree of humidity for comfort
within, no matter what is going on outside. I do not much believe
in that. I think it far better to go with the natural climate than try
to fix a special artificial climate of your own. Climate means some-
thing to man. It means something in relation to one’s life in it.
Nature makes the body flexible and so the life of the individual
invariably becomes adapted to environment and circumstance.
The color and texture of the human skin, for an example—dark or
bright—is a climatic adaptation—nothing else. Climate makes the
human skin. The further north you go, the more bleached the hair
and the whiter the skin, even the eyes; everything becomes pallid.
The further south, the darker everything gets. It is climatic condi-
tion that does the protective coloring. I doubt that you can ignore
climate completely, by reversal make a climate of your own and
get away with it without harm to yourself.

THE CONTRACTOR

In choosing a contractor, the only way to judge him is to look

carefully into his previous work. You should be able to tell fairly
well from what he has done what he may do.
Dankmar Adler—the old Chief—used to say that he would
rather give work to a crook who does know how to build than to
an honest man who does not know how to build. He had this to
say about that: “I can police a crook, but if a man doesn’t know
good work, how am I to get it out of him?” Remember also what
Shakespeare said about one’s not being able to make a silk purse
out of a sow’s ear?

178
Every house worth considering as a work of art must have a
grammar of its own. “Grammar,” in this sense, means the same
thing in any construction—whether it be of words or of stone or
wood. It is the shape-relationship between the various elements
that enter into the constitution of the thing. The “grammar” of the
house is its manifest articulation of all its parts. This will be the
“speech” it uses. To be achieved, construction must be grammatical.
Your limitations of feeling about what you are doing, your
choice of materials for the doing (and your budget of course)
determine largely what grammar your building will use. It is largely
inhibited (or expanded) by the amount of money you have to spend,
a feature only of the latitude you have. When the chosen grammar
is finally adopted (you go almost indefinitely with it into everything
you do) walls, ceilings, furniture, etc., become inspired by it. Every-
thing has a related articulation in relation to the whole and all
belongs together; looks well together because all together are
speaking the same language. If one part of your house spoke
Choctaw, another French, another English, and another some sort
of gibberish, you would have what you mostly have now—not a

181
very beautiful result. Thus, when you do adopt the “grammar” of
your house—it will be the way the house is to be “spoken,”
“uttered.” You must be consistently grammatical for it to be
understood as a work of Art.
Consistency in grammar is therefore the property—solely—of
a well-developed artist-architect. Without that property of the
artist-architect not much can be done about your abode as a work
of Art. Grammar is no property for the usual owner or the occu-
pant of the house. But the man who designs the house must,
inevitably, speak a consistent thought-language in his design. It
properly may be and should be a language of his own if appro-
priate. If he has no language, so no grammar, of his own, he must
adopt one; he will speak some language or other whether he so
chooses or not. It will usually be some kind of argot.
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THE ARCHITECT OF THE FUTURE

The first thing to do to get a Usonian house is to go to a Usonian

architect! That is to say, go to some architect who has been trained
from the ground up in consistent organic construction and has
lived in it as a natural circumstance. He may have absorbed it only
intellectually. But through the pores of his skin, his soul becomes
awakened and aware of it (he will say instinctively) by his own
experience.
I doubt that this affair can be taught to anyone. It does not
come from a university with some degree or other. You cannot get
it from books alone and certainly no conditioned Harvard man
would be likely to have it. Harvard seems degraded to believe in
the work of the committee-meeting instead of the inspired indi-
vidual. But I know you can never get it through any form of
collectivism. A true work of art must be induced as inspiration
and cannot be induced or inspired through “teamwork.” So it will
not come through communism or fascism or any ism—only as
slow growth by way of Democracy.
I doubt if there is much hope for the present generation’s ever
learning to discriminate surely between what makes a building
good or what it is that makes a bad one. Hope lies within the next
generation now in high school.
It is necessary for the child to grow up in an atmosphere con-
ducive to the absorption of true esthetic values. It is necessary to
study building as a kind of doing called Architecture. Not merely
is Architecture made at the drafting board, but Architecture in all
of its aspects is to be studied as environment, as the nature of
materials to be used, as the forms and proportions of Nature itself
in all her forms—sequences and consequences. Nature is the great
teacher—man can only receive and respond to her teaching.

186
IT IS VALIANT TO BE SIMPLE

One of the essential characteristics of organic architecture is a

natural simplicity. I don’t mean the side of a barn door. Plainness,
although simple, is not what I mean by simplicity. Simplicity is a
clean, direct expression of that essential quality of the thing which
is in the nature of the thing itself. The innate or organic pattern of
the form of anything is that form which is thus truly simple. Culti-
vation seems to go against simplicity in the flower, as it does
much the same thing in human life with the human being.
As we live and as we are, Simplicity—with a capital “S’—is
difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple.
We no longer live in simple terms, in simple times or places. Life
is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple; a
courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing
to comprehend what simplicity means.
In attempting to arrive at definitions of these matters, we
invariably get into the spirit. The head alone cannot do enough.
We have overrated what the head can do, consequently we now
are confused and in a dangerous situation where our future is con-
cerned. We have given up those things that are leading lights to
the spirit of man; they are unfortunately no longer sufficiently
important to us for us to pay for them what they cost.

This architecture we call organic is an architecture upon which

true American society will eventually be based if we survive at all.
An architecture upon and within which the common man is given
freedom to realize his potentialities as an individual—himself
unique, creative, free.

187
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We are often asked how a young couple, with a limited budget,
can afford to build a house designed on these basic principles of
organic architecture. What couple does not have a limited budget?
It is within limitations that we have to work in designing houses
for the upper middle third of the democratic strata in our country.
Our clients come from that strata. We are often asked: “Will you
build a house for us for $15,000;” or “Will you build us a house
for $25,000;” sometimes for $75,000 or even $200,000.
The other day someone came with $250,000. He embarrassed
me. Very wealthy people usually go to some fashionable architect,
not to a known radical who is never fashionable if he can help it.

REDUCING THE COSTS

How then, you may ask, can people with even more limited
means experience the liberation, the sense of freedom that comes
with true architecture? This problem will probably always exist in
one direction or another. But we have gone far in solving this

197,
 generic problem by the natural concrete block house we call the
“Usonian Automatic.” This Usonian house incorporates innova-
tions which reduce most of the heavier building costs, labor in
particular. The earlier verisions of these concrete block houses built
in Los Angeles about 1921-24 may also be seen in the Arizona-
Biltmore cottages. The Millard house in Pasadena was first; then
the Storer and Freeman and last—the Ennis house in Los Angeles.
Among recent examples are the Adelman cottage and Pieper cot-
tage in Phoenix, Arizona.
With the limited budget of a G. I. you cannot pay a plasterer,
mason, bricklayer, carpenter, etc., twenty-nine dollars a day (and
at that never be sure whether the work is done well). To build a
low cost house you must eliminate, so far as possible, the use of
skilled labor, now so expensive. The Usonian Automatic house
therefore is built of shells made up of pre-cast concrete blocks
about 1’ 0” x 2’ 0” or larger and so designed that, grooved as they
are on their edges, they can be made and also set up with small
steel horizontal and vertical reinforcing rods in the joints, by the
owners themselves, each course being grouted (poured) as it is laid
upon the one beneath; the rods meantime projecting above for the
next course.

198
HOW THE “USONIAN AUTOMATIC”’ IS BUILT

The Usonian Automatic system is capable of infinite modifi-

cations of form, pattern and application, and to any extent. The
original blocks are made on the site by ramming concrete into

may be patterned), and one rear or inside face, generally coffered,

for lightness.

199
 All edges of the blocks, having a semi-circular groove (verti-
cally and horizontally), admit the steel rods. When blocks are
placed, edges closely adjoining, cylindrical hollow spaces are
formed between them in which the light steel “pencil” rods are set
and into which semi-liquid Portland cement grout is poured.

Walls may be either single (one layer of blocks), the coffered

back-face forming the interior wall surface, or double with two
layers of blocks, with an interior insulating air space between.

200
Ordinarily the procedure of erection of walls is as follows:
a) Vertical reinforcing bars or dowels are set on unit intervals
in slab or in footing which is to receive the block wall-
construction.
b) The blocks are set between these rods so that one vertical
rod falls in the round cylindrical groove between
each two blocks.

FLOOR SLAB

201
 c) Grout, formed of one part cement and two parts sand, is
then poured into the vertical groove at joints, running into
the horizontal groove at joints locking all into a solid mass.
d) Horizontal rods are laid in horizontal grooves as the courses
are laid up.
e) If double walls are planned, galvanized U-shaped wall tie-
rods are set at each joint to anchor outer and inner block-
walls to each other.
f) Another course of blocks is set upon the one now already
poured.
g) As each course is added, grout is again poured into vertical
joints, automatically filling the previous horizontal joint at
the same time. Etc. Etc.
The pattern, design and size of the blocks may vary greatly. In
some cases blocks have been made with patterned holes into which
glass (sometimes colored) is set. When these glazed perforated
units are assembled they form a translucent grille or screen of con-
crete, glass and steel.
At corners special monolithic corner blocks are used; in the
case of double walls inside and outside corner blocks are required.
About nine various types of block are needed to complete the house,
most of them made from the same mold. For ceilings the same
block units have been employed to cast horizontal ceiling and roof
slabs, the same reinforcing rods forming a reinforced slab on which
to put built up roofing above.
In this “Usonian Automatic” we have eliminated the need for
skilled labor by prefabricating all plumbing, heating and wiring,
so each appurtenance system may come into the building in a
factory-made package, easily installed by making several simple
connections provided during block-construction.

202
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 Here then, within moderate means for the free man of our
democracy, with some intelligence and by his own energy, comes
a natural house designed in accordance with the principles of or-
ganic architecture. A house that may be put to work in our society
and give us an architecture for “housing” which is becoming toa
free society because, though standardized fully, it yet establishes
the democratic ideal of variety—the sovereignty of the individual.
A true architecture may evolve. As a consequence conformation
does not mean stultification but with it imagination may devise
and build freely for residential purposes an immensely flexible
varied building in groups never lacking in grace or desirable
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205
 Dining area and workspace beyond, seen from
living room. Glazed doors to garden on right.

4 (below) View toward south from garden court of

Adelman House. Glazed doors to living room at
left, glazed concrete screen along gallery to guest
wing at right.

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Detail. Gallery in guest wing. Entry to guest sitting room at far end.

(below) View toward south over garden wall, living room at left,
guest sitting room at right.
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mountain view.
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windows of dining area and workspace.

Carport, seen from west. Entrance to chauffeur’s

quarters below wide overhanging eaves.
BOOMER HOUSE, PHOENIX, ARIZONA.
When I built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan, I tried to make
a coherent link between what the Japanese then were on their knees
and what they now wanted to be on their feet. Every civilization
that had gone to Japan had looted their culture. Because it was
the only such genuine culture, coming from their own ground as it
did, I was determined as an American to take off my hat to that
extraordinary culture. At the same time I was now faced with the
problem of how to build a modern building earthquake-proof.
This was mainly the Mikado’s building. So I had also to con-
sider the Mikado’s needs for a social clearing house for the official
life that would inevitably now come to Japan. So the Impeho
would have to be comfortable enough for foreigners, although
primarily it would need to serve the needs of the Japanese.
That became quite a problem—in addition to the earthquake
which we never lost sight of day or night. The seismograph in
Japan is never still. At night you have the feeling that the bed is
going down under you and you are lost. You never get rid of that
nice feeling. \

But across the moat just beyond, there was the Emperor’s

215
 Palace, and since I was the Emperor’s “Kenchikaho” (High
Builder) and he was really my client, I felt impelled to devise ways
and means not too far removed from what would be becoming to
that palace of his across the moat. I think I succeeded. It is all
there so far as it could be done at the time.
Of course, when I wanted to use native materials for the
building—the common stone that was underfoot in Tokyo, called
oya, which is something like travertine with big, burned, brown
spots in it— there was a terrific objection by the building com-
mittee. Too common. But I liked the material and finally won. We
built with “oya.” We could use it by the acre—which we proceeded
to do. We bought whole quarries far up at Nikko, so we quarried
it there and floated it down to the site—in great barges.
The problem was how to help the Japanese people up from
their knees and onto their feet. That problem still remained. When
the Japanese had selected foreign things to live with, they had
taken our most obvious forms which are our worst. They were
uncomfortable at awkward high tables, and when sitting on the
high chairs suitable to us their short legs would dangle. The first
thing to do then was to get everything down to their own human-
scale so that they could sit on a chair with their feet on the floor,
eat at tables that did not require them to sit with food just under
their chins. Sleep in beds up off the floor. Thus, to start with, the
whole scale of the building became Japanese.
The next problem was how to devise things that were in
reasonable accord with their high state of civilization. Instead of
making so many things that would simply stand around, the way
we have them, everything began to have its own place in its own
way—to be put away out of sight when not wanted—the living
areas kept clear. For example, the dressing table became just a
mirror against the wall with a little movable cabinet against the
wall beside it. It could be moved around and a chair belonging to
the room could be brought up to sit there beside it. All such things
I simplified in accordance with Japanese culture so far as possible,
making them easy and natural for Japanese use. At the same time,
everything must have true esthetic effect and be not too imprac-
tical for the foreigner.
The Japanese had never had interior bathrooms or toilets. They
had what they called the “benjo,” and the benjo had to be kept
out of the “devil’s corner.” What was the devil’s corner? It was
only that corner from which the prevailing winds blew, bringing
the scent from the benjo. But now in the Imperial Hotel these little
detached toilet rooms became organic features of the building.
And in these little bathrooms, floor heat was born. The tub was
of tiles and sunk in the floor; the tile was a small vitreous mosaic
and you would come out of the tub with a print of the mosaic
designs on your backside. But that didn’t matter.
Anyhow, it was all becoming one thing—the things within it
in relation to each other—organic. The heating pipes ran across
the wall above the tubs and so became a gleaming hot towel rack
on which the towel would naturally dry very quickly. It was a very
pretty thing to look at too, one of those bathrooms, modern but
also quite in the Japanese way of doing things.
Their way of doing things was always more or less organic.
The Japanese house is the closest thing to our organic house of
anything ever built. They already had the instinct of adapting and
incorporating everything, so that is one reason why I brought into
the Imperial Hotel this incorporation of everything in it. The heat-
ing was in the center of the room in a little hand-wrought filigree
copper tower, on top of which was a light fixture that spread light
over the ceiling —indirect lighting. The beds were one this way
and one that way, at right angles, and to one side in their center

217
was a nest of small tables that could be decentralized and spread
around the room—all more or less organic in itself, again like their
own arrangements at home.
Finally we used to go around to determine the impact of the
building on “the foreign guest.” We would see these fellows come
in with their trunks and bags—accompanied by the timid little
Japanese house-boy—the boy apologetic and bowing them in,
trying to show them everything (how this should be, how they
should do that). The “guest” would come up and perhaps kick the
table nest in the center and say, ““What the hell do you call this?”
and “Where is the telephone?” and “Where do these things go?”
Well, the utility all went into appropriate closets provided for
them. Everything was there but everything was absorbed, and so
puzzled them. The little Japanese boy would be very kindly and
apologetic for everything that existed. But the whole attitude of
the American tourist was: “Well, what do you know? Now, what
the hell do you call this?” Etc., etc., etc.

THE PHILOSOPHY AND THE DEED

Many people have wondered about an Oriental quality they

see in my work. I suppose it is true that when we speak of organic
architecture, we are speaking of something that is more Oriental
than Western. The answer is: my work is, in that deeper philo-
sophic sense, Oriental. These ideals have not been common to the
whole people of the Orient; but there was Laotse, for instance.
Our society has never known the deeper Taoist mind. The Orientals
must have had the sense of it, whatever may have been their con-
sideration for it, and they instinctively built that way. Their instinct
was right. So this gospel of organic architecture still has more in

218
sympathy and in common with Oriental thought than it has with
any other thing the West has ever confessed.
The West as “the West” had never known or cared to know
much about it. Ancient Greece came nearest—perhaps—but not
very Close, and since the later Western civilizations in Italy, France,
England and the United States went heavily—stupidly—Greek in
their architecture, the West could not easily have seen an indigenous
organic architecture. The civilizations of India, Persia, China and
Japan are all based on the same central source of cultural inspira-
tion, chiefly Buddhist, stemming from the original inspiration of
his faith. But it is not so much the principles of this faith which
underlie organic architecture, as the faith of Laotse—the Chinese
philosopher—his annals preserved in Tibet. But I became con-
scious of these only after I had found and built it for myself.
And yet the West cannot hope to have anything original unless
by individual inspiration. Our culture is so far junior and so far
outclassed in time by all that we call Oriental. You will surely find
that nearly everything we stand for today, everything we think of
as originated by us, is thus old. To make matters in our new
nation worse, America has always assumed that culture, to be
culture, had to come from European sources—be imported. The
idea of an organic architecture, therefore, coming from the tall
grass of the Midwestern American prairie, was regarded at home
as unacceptable. So it went around the world to find recognition
and then to be “imported” to its own home as a thing to be
imitated everywhere, though the understanding of its principles
has never yet really caught up with the penetration of the original
deed at home.
It cannot truthfully be said, however, that organic architecture
was derived from the Orient. We have our own way of putting
these elemental (so ancient) ideals into practical effect. Although

219
 Laotse, as far as we know, first enunciated the philosophy, it
probably preceded him but was never built by him or any Oriental.
The idea of organic architecture that the reality of the building
lies in the space within to be lived in, the feeling that we must not
enclose ourselves in an envelope which is the building, is not alone
Oriental. Democracy, proclaiming the integrity of the individual
per se, had the feeling if not the words. Nothing else Western except
the act of an organic architecture had ever happened to declare
that Laotsian philosophic principle which was declared by him
500 years before our Jesus. It is true that the wiser, older civiliza-
tions of the world had a quiescent sense of this long before we of
the West came to it.
For a long time, I thought I had “discovered” it, only to find
after all that this idea of the interior space being the reality of the
building was ancient and Oriental. It came to me quite naturally
from my Unitarian ancestry and the Froebelian kindergarten
training in the deeper primal sense of the form of the interior or
heart of the appearance of “things.” I was entitled to it by the way
I happened to come up along the line—perhaps. I don’t really
know. Chesty with all this, I was in danger of thinking of myself
as, more or less, a prophet. When building Unity Temple at Oak
Park and the Larkin Building in Buffalo, I was making the first
great protest I knew anything about against the building coming
up on you from the outside as enclosure. I reversed that old idiom
in idea and in fact.
When pretty well puffed up by this I received a little book by
Okakura Kakuzo, entitled The Book of Tea, sent to me by the
ambassador from Japan to the United States. Reading it, I came
across this sentence: “The reality of a room was to be found in
the space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and
walls themselves.”

220
 Well, there was I. Instead of being the cake I was not even
dough. Closing the little book I went out to break stone on the
road, trying to get my interior self together. I was like a sail com-
ing down; I had thought of myself as an original, but was not. It
took me days to swell up again. But I began to swell up again when
I thought, “After all, who built it? Who put that thought into
buildings? Laotse nor anyone had consciously built it.” When I
thought ofthat, naturally enough I thought, “Well then, everything
is all right, we can still go along with head up.” I have been going
along—head up—ever since.

221
 ae 0

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCES
The first chapter, on Organic Architecture, appeared originally in The
Architect’s Journal of London, 1936. The chapters, Building the New
House, In the Nature of Materials: A Philosophy, The Usonian House |
and II, are quoted from “An Autobiography,” published by Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, copyright 1943 by Frank Lloyd Wright. Concerning the
Usonian House was written in 1953; all other chapters written for this
book by Mr. Wright in 1954.

PHOTOGRAPHERS’ CREDITS
Pe CUNEO: 85, 87
DAVID DAVISON: 153, 171 (top), 173, 174
DAVID DODGE: 163, 201, 205
PaeaGUERRERO: 88) 90, 117, 118, 124, 134, 176
HE DRICH-BLESSING; 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 103, 145, 146
TACK HOWE: 157, 185
ROBERT IMANDT: 93, 94, 95
Cae KIDDER-SMITH: 111,112, 113
HERMAN KROLL: 171 (bottom), 172
LEAVENWORTH’S: 105
HELEN LEVITT: Portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright, 199, 200
JOE MUNROE: 104
MARC NEUHOF: 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194
ieee TOLLER 2120122, 1239125, 132,133, 135,.137
EDMUND TESKE: 136
to. WILLIS: 107

Taliesin team of apprentices on construction of Usonian Exhibition House:

John de Koven Hill, Curtis Besinger, Kenn Lockhart, John Geiger, Robin
Molny, Kelly Oliver, Edmund Thomas Casey, Morton Delson, John Ratten-
bury, Edward Thurman, James Pfefferkorn, George Thompson, Herbert De
Levie, David Wheatley.

223
 >, ’

>

Wright 728.081
Wr
Caz
The natural house

MARINER HIGH SCHOOL

3551 McKnight Road
White Bear Lake, Minn. 55110

{4
 ved from front flap)

y years, Mr. Wright has been enriching the lives

fr) t number of people with his moderate cost houses
—each house individually designed, according to circum-
stances, for its owner and his family.

All of these houses exemplify what Frank Lloyd Wright

declares as the essential quality of organic architecture:
Integrity — from within — as true, potentially, in a house as
in a human being.

“The Usonian house,” he writes, ‘‘aims to be a natural

performance, one that is integral to site, to environment, to
the life of the inhabitants, integral with the nature of the
materials ... into this new integrity, once there, those who
live in it will take root and grow.

This book not only brings together for the first time Mr.
Wright's earlier writings on the house of moderate cost; it
also contains a great deal of new material, never before
published, which he has just written specifically to answer
such important practical questions, asked by everyone inter-
ested in building his own house, as:

How can it be done with a limited budget? What kind of

land, and where? What materials to use? What is the best
kind of roof? What about insulation and what kind of heat?
What about an attic, a basement, expanding a house? The
best way to build a foundation? What about children’s
rooms? What kind of furnishings, rugs, draperies? Etc., etc.

In THE NATURAL HOUSE we see at work the principles

by which these problems are solved. They are the principles
which have given a new birth to architecture in this century;
from which has arisen, as Frank Lloyd Wright says: ‘‘A home
for our people in the spirit in which our Democracy was con-
ceived: the individual integrate and free in an environment
of his own, appropriate to his circumstances — a life beauti-
ful as he can make it — with her, of course.”’

(ON PRESS inc,

itth Avenue, New York
[OR a ee FUTURE O F
ARCHITECT
U Ra
Frank Lloyd Wright’s previous book has been wel-
comed, by those familiar with the work of the world’s
greatest architect, as one of the important books of
our time. 2

To the growing number of people throughout ‘ite )

world now eagerly becoming acquainted with Mr.
Wright's vast achievement, this volume, containing his
major statements on architecture during the past quar-
ter century, serves as an indispensable survey. |
It begins with the long, widely discussed ‘‘Conver-
sation” in which Mr. Wright explains his aims and
contributions in architecture. He here brings home to
us in the most graphic and exciting way the essence
of his masterwork which has dominated the world of
architecture in the twentieth century.
This section, uniquely illustrated with his buildings
and the gestures of his hands running parallel with the
accompanying text, renders his concepts vividly alive.
Even for those who have had the experience of seeing
or moving about in his buildings, Mr. Wright's creative
imagination becomes manifest in a new way.
THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE also brings to-
gether, for the first time in one volume, several rare
works originally published in separate editions which
have been unavailable and in intense demand for
years.
And in a challenging document, invaluable to every
student of creative building, Mr. Wright defines the
Language of Organic Architecture as he has employed
it throughout a lifetime of work. )
With this definitive volume the reader gets a new
sense of architecture, not merely as one phase of our
life concerned with shelter and comfort, but as a basic,
organic necessity for a true democracy.
Illustrated throughout with photographs of Mr.
Wright’s epoch-making buildings.

HORIZON PRESS 156 Fifth Avenue, New York v4