The earlier Usonian houses were designed on a square module. This is true, for example, of the version that he prepared for Life magazine in 1938,[[410]] which thereby received the same sort of national circulation that the Ladies Home Journal gave to three of his projects more than a generation earlier.[[411]] But Wright was now interested also in developing the hexagon and the triangle as basic units. Beginning with the Hanna house of 1937 at 737 Coronado Street in Palo Alto, Cal., he continued in many others to explore the possibilities of planning based on 60-30-degree angles.
In the most extraordinary house that he built in these pre-war years, his own winter residence, Taliesin West, begun in 1938 in the desert outside Phoenix, Ariz., 45-degree diagonals are used in the planning and almost all the structural elements are battered or canted. However, it is the materials which give this edifice—like Taliesin itself at once a house, a working place, and a school—its unique qualities. The substructure is of ‘desert concrete’, that is great rough blocks of tawny local stone placed in forms and loosely stuck together, so to say, with concrete; the superstructure is of dark-stained timber frames mostly filled only with canvas to allow a maximum flow of air. As at the original Taliesin in Wisconsin, Wright kept on enlarging Taliesin West, not always to its advantage. Another example of ‘desert-concrete’ construction, the Rose Pauson house of 1940 in Phoenix, was destroyed by fire. It was, in its very sculptural way, a masterpiece of this period unlike anything else he ever built and is still an impressive ruin.
It was characteristic of Wright’s activity in his ‘second’ career that the versatility of his invention knew no bounds. Many earlier ideas that had existed only in projects could come to fruition now that his services were in such demand. At the same time it is hard to believe that in the plain white stucco walls, extensive window bands, and thin roof slab of the E. J. Kaufmann guest house, built just above Falling Water in 1939, or in the G. D. Sturges house of the same year at 449 Skyway Road in Brentwood Heights near Los Angeles, cantilevered out from a hill-slope, Wright was not consciously rivalling the effects of the European architects of the second generation whom he professed to scorn—rivalling them, but also making very much his own such of their effects as he cared to emulate.
Wright did not drop the novel methods of construction that he had developed earlier as he tried out new ones. In his most extensive late commission, the layout of a new campus for Florida Southern College at Lakeland in Florida, begun in 1938, the plan is highly formal at the same time that it is markedly asymmetrical. It thus elaborates upon the angular themes of his project of 1927 for a desert resort at Chandler, Arizona—incidentally the point at which his interest in 60-30-degree angles began. The buildings at Florida Southern, starting with the Ann Pfeiffer Chapel of 1940 to which many more were later added, are mostly of concrete-block construction, but with much less use of patterned elements than in the executed work and projects of the twenties.
The Second World War interrupted Wright’s career less than the First. Various projects initiated in the war years came to fruition soon after the war was over and gave evidence of the continuing vitality of his powers of invention. The second house for Herbert Jacobs at Middleton in the country west of Madison, Wis., was very different from the Usonian one of 1937. Ever since an unexecuted house project of 1938 Wright had been fascinated by the possibilities of using the circle in planning. While he had tried out the form in the Florida Southern Library before the war, the Jacobs house of 1948 was the first of a series of houses that he built with curved plans. Its two-storey living area bends around a circular sunken garden court with the bedrooms opening off a balcony above (Figure [42]). On the other side the house is half buried in the hill-top, above which rise its walls of coursed rubble. A tower-like circular core near one end of the convex side provides a strong vertical accent.
Another house of the post-war years, also based on the circle, is quite different in character. The Sol Friedman house in Pleasantville, N.Y., is roofed with mushroom-like concrete slabs; the two intersecting closed circles of the actual dwelling are balanced at the end of a straight terrace parapet by the open circle of the carport (Plate [145B]). This was completed in 1949 with battered walls of almost Richardsonian random ashlar masonry below a strip of metal-framed windows. A still later ‘house of circles’ for his son David J. Wright was built near Phoenix, Ariz., in 1952. This is of concrete blocks and raised off the ground, with the approach up a gently sloping helical ramp to the various curved rooms on the first storey. The circle and the helix appear also in an urban building of these years, the shop for V. C. Morris in Maiden Lane, San Francisco, completed in 1949. Here the street façade is a sheer plane of yellow brick broken only by the entrance, which is a Sullivanian—or Richardsonian—arch like that of the Heurtley house of 1902. Inside, a helical ramp rises around the central circular area beneath a ceiling made of bubble-like elements executed in plastics.
Figure 42. Frank Lloyd Wright: Middleton, Wis., Herbert Jacobs house, 1948, plan
A major work of these years, the extension of the Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wis., also completed in 1949, makes much use of circles also (Plate [146A]). North of the existing office building Wright surrounded a square court with open carports whose outer walls of solid brickwork shut out the surrounding city; inside these walls are ranged short concrete columns with lily-pad tops like those in the section that he built ten years earlier. In the centre of the ‘piazza’ thus defined rises a laboratory tower of tree-like structure. The upper floors of this, alternately square with rounded corners and circular, are all cantilevered out from a central cylindrical core which contains the lift and the vertical canalizations. Alternate bands of brickwork and Pyrex tubing, such as were used on the original building, enclose the tower except at ground level; there the space of the court continues under the cantilevered floors above as far as the solid central core.
This relatively modest tower prepared the way for Wright’s skyscraper in Bartlesville, Okla., of 1953-5, which has been mentioned earlier. Actually, however, this Price Tower,[[412]] which is partly occupied by offices and partly by flats, is the final realization of a project originally prepared in 1929 for a block of flats for St Mark’s Church in New York. This he had elaborated in the intervening years in projects for blocks of flats in Chicago and for a hotel in Washington.