Wright in America found himself, in his seventies, as generally accepted a master as did Perret in France, but his influence never became at all academic in the way of Perret’s after 1930. There could hardly be a greater contrast between the careers of two contemporaries in the same field. Both were very productive over a length of time that is more than a third of the whole period covered by this book, but this is about all that they did have in common. Perret’s career progressed gradually over several decades to general and even official acceptance. Wright’s career, on the other hand, had very notable ups and downs, and he only once received a governmental commission.

After the years of preparation discussed earlier (see Chapter [15]) there followed some ten years of great success. But this success was largely restricted to a particular region, the Middle West, and to a particular field, the building of good-sized suburban houses. Following that, in a decade interrupted by the First World War, Wright’s influence rapidly increased, not at home but abroad, although he had considerably fewer, if much larger, commissions. Then, paradoxically, in the twenties, while the United States swung into the biggest building boom in history, there began a decade in which Wright’s production all but ceased. Many assumed that his career had closed and that his work had passed into history as had Voysey’s and Mackintosh’s by that time. This, of course, was not at all true. In the mid thirties Wright’s activity revived, and his production continued at a rising rate until his death. Moreover, there was little sign of any decline into personal academicism such as marked the late work of Perret in the same decades.

Where Perret had, in effect, only a double architectural career, being largely occupied on the one hand with industrial commissions close to the dividing line between architecture and engineering, and on the other hand with public buildings, Wright’s career was increasingly multifarious. Beginning chiefly as a domestic architect, he never ceased to build houses; but by the 1950s there were few fields, including that of urbanism, which he had not entered, if only to present challenging projects and announce controversial theses. Disciple of a great skyscraper architect, author of a succession of skyscraper projects, Wright had to wait a full half century after Sullivan completed his last skyscraper in Chicago before he built his first, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1953-5. Some of his planning projects may yet come to posthumous execution, and his work at Florida Southern College at least was of urbanistic scope.

Perret consciously summarized and continued earlier French tradition; but Wright wished to initiate a new tradition, one which he preferred to call ‘Usonian’ rather than American. Perret’s disciples, emulators, and imitators in his later years were able to take control of French architecture to a quite considerable extent. Wright’s disciples, despite the fifty years during which he maintained offices that were also training ateliers in Oak Park, in Chicago, in Tokyo, in Wisconsin, and in Arizona, have only rarely made any significant mark of their own; nor has his influence had much more specific effect on the character of modern architecture in America than it has had generically on that of the world outside. Where Perret’s influence, particularly outside France, has been largely restricted to architects working with ferro-concrete, the material that he was the first to master architecturally—and even in concrete construction this influence has inhibited as often as it has liberated—Wright’s influence has been protean on the international scene. From the day when the German publisher Wasmuth first made Wright’s work available to Europeans at the opening of the second decade of the century this has been true, down to the time, a decade ago, when the Italian architect, critic, and historian Bruno Zevi (b. 1918) tried to invert chronology so that Wright’s ‘architettura organica’[[407]] might seem to succeed rather than to precede the ‘funzionalismo’ or ‘International Style’ of the second generation of modern architects.

Before turning to a more detailed consideration of Wright’s work after 1900 one further comparison with the œuvre of Perret may be made. Although Wright never confined himself to one material or to one method of construction—indeed, his versatility in this respect continued to increase right down to his death—he was from the first especially interested in the possibilities of concrete. He published in The Brickbuilder for August 1901 a project for a small village bank, still very Sullivanian in its rich detailing, that was intended to be executed entirely in concrete. This was only two years after Perret had first used the material with little or no attempt to develop its architectural possibilities and a year before his block of flats in the Rue Franklin was designed. His E.-Z. Polish Factory of 1905 at 3005-17 West Carroll Avenue in Chicago has already been mentioned. The Unity Church in Oak Park of 1906 (Plate [143B]), entirely of concrete surfaced with a special pebble aggregate and decorated with integral ornament, precedes by many years Perret’s church at Le Raincy (Plate [141]). Perret’s ultimate development of various refined finishes for exposed concrete came still later. Admittedly, however, the Oak Park church is a much smaller and less striking edifice than Perret’s; and the work of Kahn and other industrial architects soon overshadowed Wright’s modest factory. Moreover, it was only with the twenties that Wright, like the Europeans, really gave major attention to building in concrete.

Wright’s creative powers in the first decade of this century were largely concentrated on his ‘Prairie Houses’. Their essentials were already present in the two Kankakee houses of 1900 (Plate [142A]) and the first house designed for the Ladies Home Journal (see Chapter 15). But these essentials received more masterly—one might well say more classic—expression two years later. The large W. W. Willitts house at 715 South Sheridan Road in Highland Park, Ill., of 1902 is of wooden-stud construction, but covered like the Kankakee houses with stucco (Plate [142B]). The C. S. Ross house off the South Shore Road on Lake Delavan in Wisconsin, also of 1902, has the rough board-and-batten sheathing of the River Forest Golf Club ([Plates 143A] and [128B]). Both offer versions of the cruciform plan (Figure [38]) with the interior space ‘flowing’ round a central chimney core and also extended outward on to covered verandas and open terraces quite as in Price’s Tuxedo Park houses of fifteen years earlier (Figure [28]).

Figure 38. Frank Lloyd Wright: Highland Park, Ill., W. W. Willitts house, 1902, plan

Another major work of 1902 is the Arthur Heurtley house at 318 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill. There the principal living areas, which are on the upper floor as in the Husser house of 1899, form an articulated L-shaped within the basic square that is defined by the overhanging roof. The brick walls of the lower storey have broad projecting horizontal bands and the wide, low entrance arch remains quite Richardsonian. The upper storey consists largely of continuous ranges of wooden-mullioned casement windows.

No notable progression is observable in the series of suburban houses built during the remainder of this decade before Wright went to Europe in 1909; but he produced many other brilliant illustrations of both the cruciform and the square plan as well as a more elongated sort extending along a single axis. Of the many fine examples of the Willitts or Ross type around Chicago, the small house for Isabel Roberts at 603 Edgewood Place in River Forest of 1908 is one of the best; there the living room in the front wing is carried up two storeys, as was proposed for one version of the Ladies Home Journal house. The larger F. J. Baker house at 507 Lake Avenue in Wilmette of 1909 also has a two-storeyed living room; but here the tall cross element of the plan which this feature provides was moved to one end of the house so that the plan is of a T or L shape rather than cruciform.