Word: wrighting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...years he designed and built, for clients scattered throughout the Midwest, nearly 100 houses for which no precedent existed anywhere. In leafy suburbs of Chicago these houses still look strangely civilized and sheltered, with low vistas and wide-spreading eaves. "Taking a human being for my 'scale,' " Wright has said, "I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one-ergo, 5' 8" tall, say. ... I broadened the mass out all I possibly could, brought it down into spaciousness. ... I was working toward the elimination of the wall as a wall to reach...
...type of public architecture which Sullivan had made powerful was sidetracked by the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Eastern conservatives turned the fair into a magnificent tour de force of neoclassic buildings, and for a quarter-century eclecticism held the stage in U. S. public architecture. Wright kept off the stage. In 1905 he produced, in protest, a well-lighted administration building for the Larkin Co. in Buffalo, severely without ornament, the first office building in the U. S. to use 1) metal-bound, plate-glass doors and windows, 2) all-metal furniture, 3) air conditioning, 4) magnesite...
...Change. Wright had a lifetime's hard work, several lifetimes' invention behind him at 40. He had carried out a great adventure in building. But though Wright had freed domestic architecture he did not feel himself free. Making what provision he could for his wife and six children, he went to Italy with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were never married. Wright thus broke with personal convention as he had long since broken with artistic convention. On their return in 1911, he put all he knew of architecture into the building of Taliesin...
Genius. After 1915, Wright's rebirth in architecture took the form of creative audacity on a grand scale. Commissioned in 1916 to build the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, he produced one of the marvels of modern construction. A vast, low building on a symmetrical plan, it was Wright's first ambitious use of the cantilever principle, which allowed him to rest each concrete floor slab on a central support, like a tray on a waiter's fingers. He roofed the building with light copper sheathing, made the centre of gravity low as a ship...
...Wright finished his work in 1920. He was in Los Angeles when the big quake hit Tokyo three years later. After ten days of anxious waiting, Wright learned by cable from his friend and client, Baron Okura, that the building had ridden out the quake unharmed while other modern buildings were shaking their masonry into the streets...