Figure 30. Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, J. W. Husser house, 1899, plan

Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front wing of this, built in 1898,[[346]] showed a comparable maturing of his vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale. Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in the original spirit (Plate [128B]).

In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the Ladies Home Journal ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February 1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate [142A]). The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms, extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the uncovered terrace (Figure [31]). Here the articulated but unified space of the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential internationally (see Chapter [22]). Towards that new concept much of the development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.

Figure 31. Frank Lloyd Wright: Kankakee, Ill., Warren Hickox house, 1900, plan

The Ladies Home Journal project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated. In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the Ladies Home Journal house was intended to be stuccoed like the Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the porte-cochère on one side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.

In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses, the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different. So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses, the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.

Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)[[347]] was ten years older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.[[348]] In 1883 Voysey sold his first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were published in the British Architect; of these the one for a house[[349]] at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.

By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field, rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known, but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an Artist’ that he published in his magazine The Hobby Horse in 1888 was of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant influence was probably abroad (see Chapter [16]).