Frank Lloyd Wright Week (part 1)

Yesterday, on Frank Lloyd Wright's 143rd birthday, I sent out a reprise of my original post on the man I introduce as "America's first green Architect." Of course, as Mr. Wright admitted (at least on one occasion in the Mike Wallace interview), some phrases are thrown out there for calculated effect. Of course, before the industrial revolution, everyone practiced green design and construction - out of necessity. Build without taking the climate and landforms into consideration and you were doomed with Darwinian consequences.

This week I'll be posting links to photo essays of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Why not start out with Mr. Wright's Wisconsin home - Taliesin.

Taliesin (part 1)

Taliesin (part 2)

Romeo and Juliet Windmill (act 1)

Romeo and Juliet Windmill (act 2)

Romeo and Juliet Windmill (act 3)

Romeo and Juliet Windmill, Act 3

A couple of fascinating video clips:

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, a long-time senior apprentice (he was at Taliesin long before Wright died) tells the history of Romeo and Juliet Windmill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKo161waeiM


A short documentary of erecting the rebuilt tower.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peAF2_9siuA&feature=related

Romeo and Juliet, Act 2

...a couple of additional pictures of Romeo and Juliet.

This early Frank Lloyd Wright work almost didn't get built. Wright's aunts lobbied for it as his uncles incessantly threw out reasons why this particular design should not be erected.

The aunts stuck to their guns. In his autobiography, Wright recalls a letter written to him by the aunts relating the uncles' fears of the tower's inherent instability which would surely,they thought, soon lead to its demise.

Wright wrote back assuring them of the structure's integrity and instructed them to tell the uncles to "use more nails." He ended the letter by insisting that of course they would build it, and he would come (from to Chicago) to see it.

They did, and the young Frank Lloyd Wright did too - with cape, hat, and cane.

Romeo and Juliet Windmill

Romeo and Juliet Windmill sits atop a hill behind Hillside Home School, now the part of the Taliesin estate.

In the 1890's, when a young Frank Lloyd Wright was in the early years of his practice, his aunts had him design a windmill for pumping water to their progressive boarding school.

Wright's uncles argued that the aunts should order a prefabricated metal windmill from Sears Roebuck, but the aunts insisted that their creative nephew could build them something beautiful as well as functional.

So Wright designed Romeo and Juliet - two forms, the masculine and taller diamond plan element and the more demure, rounded shape (octagonal, actually) caressing each other. The two forms together provided resulted in a much stronger structure than either of the forms individually could.

That's organic architecture.

The uncles, until their deaths, would rush out on their porches when a thunderstorm came across the valley fully expecting the tower to crash down on itself. But it never did. It lasted almost a century until it was fully renovated in the 1990's.

The uncle's obviously did not understand the power of natural geometries.