Showing posts with label Sears Roebuck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sears Roebuck. Show all posts

Monday, August 4, 2008

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.