The E. H. Cheney house at 520 North East Avenue in Oak Park of 1904 is square like the Heurtley house near by. It is raised off the ground on a sort of extended square stylobate so that the living area, which runs all across the front as at the Hickox house, can open freely through french doors on to the walled terrace in front. In the T. P. Hardy house at 1319 South Main Street in Racine, Wis., of 1905 a declivitous lakeside site encouraged a vertical rather than a horizontal organization of the interior with a two-storey living room as the spatial core.
A very different feeling pervades the small, squarish house at 6 Elizabeth Court in Oak Park that Wright built for Mrs Thomas Gale in 1909. Here flat slabs—which had been proposed as early as 1902 in a project (perhaps for execution in concrete) for the Yahara Boat Club in Madison, Wis.—replace the low-pitched hip or gable roofs of the characteristic Prairie Houses. Moreover, parapeted balconies and other simple rectangular features elaborate plastically the composition in a fashion that suggests the abstract sculpture of a decade later in Europe (see Chapter [21]).
The W. A. Glasner house of 1905 at 850 Sheridan Road in Glencoe, Ill., on the contrary was extended longitudinally and the living area for the first time not at all articulated but completely unified (Figure [39]). Something of the same longitudinal extension marks the much larger F. C. Robie house at 5757 Woodlawn Avenue in Chicago of 1909. But there the living room and dining room are separated by the chimney core and raised above the ground level. Built of fine Roman brick, this is the most monumental of these early houses. The long horizontal lines of the balcony below and the roof above dominate the composition; yet a cross element comes forward in the upper storeys to provide, less symmetrically than in his houses of cruciform plan, something of the abstract plasticity of the Gale house.
Figure 39. Frank Lloyd Wright: Glencoe, Ill., W. A. Glasner house, 1905, plan
Another large house of the end of the decade, the Avery Coonley house at 300 Scottswood Road in Riverside, Ill., of 1908, offers a quite different and much more extended plan. The square block containing the living room rises above a terrace and a reflecting pool as the main element of the design, but from this block two long wings project. That to the left includes a large dining room and also very extensive service facilities at the rear; in the one to the right are the master’s suite and other bedrooms. Thus the house is, in a later phrase of Wright’s, ‘zoned’ according to function. The upper walls of this house are covered with a geometrical pattern produced by setting coloured tiles into the stucco. Wright never did quite the same thing again, but this led the way to his use of patterned concrete blocks a few years later.
Two of Wright’s non-domestic works of this period are of considerable importance. Unity Church in Oak Park has already been mentioned; the other was the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of 1904. Massive and even sculptural externally, particularly at the ends, this had a tall glass-roofed court running down the centre, around which the upper ranges of offices extended on galleries carried by somewhat Sullivanian piers. All the fittings of the offices, including the steel furniture—probably the first to be designed by an architect—were Wright’s. Thus he set here a wholly new standard of elegance, consistency, and coherence in semi-industrial building.
Within the massive slab-roofed block of the Unity Temple (Plate [143B]), which is echoed beyond a low entrance link by the smaller block of the Sunday School, Wright achieved even more notably than inside the Larkin Building a new sort of monumental space-composition such as even his biggest houses hardly provided room for. The square auditorium with incut corners has double galleries on three sides and a pulpit platform on the fourth, behind which rises the organ. The multiple spatial elements seem to cross one another at different levels in a sort of three-dimensional plaid. Moreover, this theme is echoed in all the minor features, such as the wood stripping of the sand-finished plaster walls and the prominent lighting fixtures. Of this spatial development there had been some premonition in the auditorium block at one end of the Hillside House School that he built for his aunts outside Spring Green, Wis., in 1902; but there the masonry of the exterior walls and piers was still rather Richardsonian and the internal gallery consisted of a square set lozenge-wise.
Wright’s work down to 1910 was made available to Europeans by two publications of Wasmuth, the Berlin publisher; and the end of the first decade of the century does, coincidentally, mark a real turning point in his career. He would not be so prolific again before the forties; and henceforth, although he never ceased to build houses, these would no longer constitute the bulk of his production.
The production of the next decade, after his return from Europe in 1911, opens with two houses, however. Taliesin, which he built outside Spring Green for his mother in 1911, was soon much enlarged when he moved there himself and it always remained his principal residence. As a result of the growing needs of his family and of his school—not to speak of two major fires in 1914 and 1925—the Taliesin of today is very different, above all in its endless ramification, from what he planned in 1911; but the vocabulary of materials and design stayed more or less constant through all the years. Where the Prairie Houses echoed in their horizontal lines the flat Illinois terrain on which most of them were set, Taliesin is wrapped around a hill-top just below the crest. The use of various levels in the interior and a landscape-like elaboration of the low-pitched roofs represent his response to this more interesting site; after that the ‘Prairie’ master avoided flat sites for houses whenever he could!