Taliesin, combining a house, drawing-office, living accommodation for apprentices, and even farm buildings, had from almost the first a complex plan not readily definable as square, cruciform, or unilinear. But in a project of the same year 1911 in which Taliesin was originally built, that for the S. M. Booth house at Glencoe, Ill.—never executed, unfortunately, according to these plans—a new sort of organization appeared, related to the elaborated cube of the Gale house and also to the ‘zoned’ scheme of the Coonley house. A two-storey living-room was to provide both the spatial and the plastic core; from this wings serving different purposes would shoot out swastika-like.
The relative homogeneity of Wright’s production in the first decade of the century, following after the gradual convergence of his early work during the nineties, is explained by the nearly identical problems and sites that he faced in designing the houses mentioned so far. This homogeneity now gave way to an increasing variety that makes it difficult to summarize the work of these years. The Coonley Playhouse, built on the Coonley estate at Riverside in 1912, bears little resemblance to the original house of four years earlier. The plan is cruciform and symmetrical; but what is new here is the way the slab roofs, set at two different levels and pierced through their wide projections in order to let light reach the windows below, were used to achieve an even more boldly sculptural quality than in the project of 1902 for the Yahara Boat Club or the Gale house of 1909. Wright’s mastery of abstract decoration was wholly mature by this time. From the first he had used leaded glass in simple geometrical patterns in his windows,[[408]] but the windows in this playhouse are the finest of all. Moreover, these festive compositions of circles of coloured glass arranged asymmetrically resemble quite closely the abstract paintings that such artists as Kupka, Delaunay, and the Constructivists would shortly be producing in Europe.
Northome, the F. W. Little house at Wayzata, Minn., of 1913, is also quite different from all the earlier houses, yet not at all similar to the Coonley Playhouse. Raised on a ridge above the southern shore of Lake Minnetonka, this house consists of a series of pavilions—some open, some closed—strung along a single axis parallel to the water’s edge. That containing the living room, which is of almost monumental size and scale, dominates the whole. Wright seemed able now to invent a new mode almost with every individual commission, each one with potentialities as great as those of the Prairie Houses he had so thoroughly exploited in the decade before 1910.
The major work of the immediate pre-war years, the Midway Gardens of 1913-14 on the Midway south of Chicago, is rather hard to define precisely. Not quite a beer or Heuriger garden, nor yet a music-hall or cabaret in the ordinary European sense, the establishment consisted of a large outdoor dining and entertainment area with raised terraces on two sides, a stage and orchestra shed at the far end, and a closed restaurant block towards the street. Here Wright’s ambitions as a decorative artist could have free play. Abstract compositions of coloured circles like those in the windows of the Coonley Playhouse appeared here as wall-high murals at the ends of the covered restaurant. Moreover, the sculptural implications of the general composition of the playhouse were carried farther in the openwork ‘constructions’ that he set on the tops of the towers. At the same time he introduced a great deal of figurative sculpture stylized in a rather Cubist way. Thus several different aspects of the abstract and near-abstract art which was just coming into independent existence in Europe were closely paralleled in the adjuncts to Wright’s architecture here.
More architectonic patterns produced by simple geometrical means also ran riot at the Midway Gardens. Notable and significant was the use of extensive areas of patterned concrete blocks; these were somewhat like the patterned upper walls of the Coonley house of 1908 but all monochrome. The early demolition of the Midway Gardens makes it difficult to know whether this tremendous elaboration of the decorative aspects of Wright’s architecture was symphonic or cacophonous in total effect. Whatever the degree of their success or their failure, however, they opened a sort of ‘Mannerist’ or ‘Baroque’[[409]] period in his career that was destined to last for more than a decade.
During the First World War, in 1915, Wright was approached by emissaries of the Japanese Imperial Household to design and build the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Proceeding to Japan, Wright was largely concerned with this commission for the next seven years, finally bringing it to completion in 1922. This is the principal production of his ‘Baroque’ phase. It was also a notable engineering triumph, for his ingenious use of concrete slabs carried on a multitude of concrete piles brought it safely through the earthquake of 1923. Paul Mueller, the engineer of the old Adler & Sullivan office, was his collaborator here.
Abstract ornament proliferated on the hotel; some of it, carved in greenish lava, elaborates the garden courts of the vast H-shaped plan; still more is painted in gold and colour on the ceilings of the principal interiors. Moreover, the massive proportions of the masonry walls produce an effect of castle-like solidity wholly inexpressive of the method of their support and very far removed from the light and floating character of the Prairie Houses. On the whole this hotel represents, far more than the Midway Gardens, a cul-de-sac in Wright’s development.
Overlapping the period of construction of the Imperial Hotel came a series of houses in southern California in which the ‘Baroque’ element was gradually restrained. The earliest of these, Hollyhock House in Los Angeles and two smaller houses near by, were built for Aline Barnsdall in 1920 on a large estate bounded by Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, Edgemont Street, and Vermont Avenue. These are of poured concrete very massively handled and carry considerable abstract sculptural ornamentation. For a slightly later series of four houses around Los Angeles, beginning with the house of 1923 for Mrs G. M. Millard at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, Wright developed a type of concrete-block construction with reinforcement in the joints that was of considerable technical interest and also offered special decorative possibilities. The idea of using concrete blocks cast with relief patterns of geometrical character goes back to the Midway Gardens, however, and walls covered with repeating ornamental units had first appeared at the Coonley house.
Figure 40. Frank Lloyd Wright: Pasadena, Cal., Mrs G. M. Millard house, 1923, plans