In the Millard house, particularly, the scale of the moulded blocks and the ingenious inclusion of pierced units—very similar to the pre-cast elements that Perret was using for the screen walls of his Le Raincy church at just this time—produced a masterpiece (Plate [144]). This house, however, is not solely of interest for its construction and its decoration. In contrast to the horizontal composition of almost all his earlier houses except that in Racine for the Hardys, this is a tall vertical block, entered at the middle level, with the dining room and kitchen below and the two-storey living room opening out to a balcony at the front (Figure [40]). The main bedroom is reached from a gallery overhanging the rear of the living-room. Both organizationally and visually this represents a surprising change, and the result closely resembled what a leading architect of the second generation had just then been proposing in Europe (Figure [45]). There are, for instance, no hovering eaves here; instead a parapet continues the wall plane upwards and confines a roof terrace. This is as close as Wright ever came to building a ‘box-on-stilts’, his term of abuse for the advanced European houses of the twenties. It was as if, after the expansiveness of his work from the Midway Gardens to Hollyhock House, Wright wished to prove here his capacity to produce a house modest in scale and compact in section as well as in plan.
In the next decade, from 1924 to 1934, Wright’s actual production declined almost to zero although he was working on a series of important projects, some of which later provided the basis for executed buildings. Taliesin was rebuilt after a fire in 1925, however—it had already been rebuilt once before after an earlier fire in 1914—and a large house of concrete blocks, with almost no use of pattern except for occasional pierced grilles, was erected for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones in 1929 at 3700 Birmingham Road in Tulsa, Okla. That is about all.
The small M. C. Willey house of 1934 at 255 Bedford Street, S.E., in Minneapolis marked the beginning of what proved to be almost a second career for Wright. Low and L-shaped, with practically no ornament whatsoever, this modest brick house introduced a major change in domestic planning. Not only are the living room and the dining room completely unified, as was first done at the Glasner house in 1905, but the kitchen—now re-christened ‘work-space’—opens into the main living area behind a range of glazed shelves (Figure [41]). Thirty years later the full implications of this development are still not quite digested in America or even fully apprehended abroad; on the contrary, a reaction from open planning has perhaps begun.
It was not the Willey house, however, modest in size and very quiet in expression for all its revolutionary plan, that signalized the renewal of Wright’s activity. That he could take up his career again at the highest level of creativity became apparent to everyone with the construction of two much larger buildings both designed in 1936. Falling Water, a large house in the Pennsylvania woods, is cantilevered over a waterfall with a sense of drama even Wright had never hitherto approached. The Administration Building for the S. C. Johnson Wax Company at 1525 Howe Street in Racine, Wis., his first semi-industrial commission since the Larkin Building of 1904, was built in 1937-9. Both are as remarkable for the technical boldness of their use of concrete—totally different in the two cases—as for their design.
Figure 41. Frank Lloyd Wright: Minneapolis, M. C. Willey house, 1934, plan
Falling Water has a rear section built of rough stone which rises like a tower from the native rock on the banks of Bear Run. From this solid vertical core are cantilevered out a series of concrete slabs bounded by plain parapets at their edges. This produces a very complex horizontal composition related to, but infinitely elaborated from, that of the Gale house of 1909 (Plate [145A]). The completely unified living space is closed in by stone walls on the inner or dining side. It also extends out over the waterfall; the all-glass walls on that side, with their thin metal mullions, hardly seem to separate the interior space at all from that of the open terraces outside. A similar relationship exists between the bedrooms and their terraces on the upper floors.
Never before had Wright exploited the structural possibilities of concrete so boldly. In this amazingly plastic composition—if ‘plastic’ be the word for anything so light and suspended in appearance—it seems as if he had determined to outbid the European architects of the second modern generation at their own games (see Chapter [22]). His early work has, in the clarity and axial character of the organization and the serenity of its expression, a classic if hardly a Classical quality; his work of 1914-24 shows a Baroque exuberance in the proliferation of the ornament. Now that he was approaching seventy his Romantic or anti-Classical tendencies—call them what you will—reached an intensity of purely architectonic expression comparable to the musical intensity of the late quartets of Beethoven that Wright so much admired. Falling Water, which might easily have been the swan song of Wright’s career, soon to be halted again by a second World War, proved in fact but the opening allegro in a new period of innovation and experiment.
The Johnson Building is very different from Falling Water. In it the curve rather than the cantilever provides the principal theme, and enclosure rather than interpenetration of exterior and interior space controls both the planning and the design (Plate [146A]). The main office area is tall and unified, but it is filled with a forest of inverse-tapered concrete piers rising from tiny bronze shoes to carry circular slabs of concrete whose edges all but touch. The spaces between these lilypad-like disks were filled with tubes of Pyrex glass, and bands of similar tubes are carried around the building below the balcony and at the top of the plain red brick walls to provide additional natural light. In the more specialized adjuncts to the general office area curved and diagonal plan-elements lend a machine-like elegance to the shape of the building as a whole. Additional bands of glass tubing interrupt the smooth and continuous masonry surfaces at intervals, thus clearly indicating that these portions are of several storeys.
Falling Water and the Johnson Building were large and expensive structures; so also was Wingspread, the H. F. Johnson house that Wright built in Racine at the same time. This is zoned in the manner of the Booth project of 1911 around a tall central core. But in 1937 Wright also erected the first of what he called his ‘Usonian’ houses, the Herbert Jacobs house at Westmorland, near Madison, Wis. This modest L-shaped dwelling, with wooden ‘sandwich’ walls and a flat wooden slab roof, carried farther than the Willey house the integration of the ‘work-space’ or kitchen with the main living area. Here this rises in a masonry tower and is lighted by a clerestory, yet it is closely related to the space of the interior as a whole. A very considerable range of Wright’s later houses are variants of the Usonian model. Some were built before the War, even more in the last decade; some are of modest dimensions like the Jacobs house, others much larger. They exist in all parts of the United States, including the East, where he had hardly worked at all before this time.