The Unit in Wright’s Scientific Method
Discussion by Brett Holverstott,
Excerpts and floor plans from "Frank Lloyd Wright" by Robert McCarter.
Fredrich Frobel was a German educationalist who founded a series of educational tools, one of which was a set of geometric blocks that could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions.
Wright was himself educated in the Frobel system as a child. But, early in his career, when he began having children of his own and teaching them the Frobel method, he began re-reading the instructional material and teacher handbook. This helped him to realize a methodology he would use throughout his life.
As Robert McCarter explains in Frank Lloyd Wright:
"We should remember that the Frobel system is, among other things, directed towards the development of a limited group of generative geometric and spatial forms, which are both discerned in nature and to be utilized as repetitive typological elements of composition. This view of natural order is totally opposed to the primary idea upon which Wright had become fixated in his earliest domestic design work - that each individual client requires a unique design: 'There should be as many kinds of houses as there are kinds of people and as many differentiations as there are different individuals.' This self-imposed demand for endless formal invention in Wright's work had clearly reached a crisis point by 1897, and the perceived need to make something totally new and unique for each client was straining even Wright's prodigious formal capacities." (pg 40)"While at times Wright seems to have despaired of succeeding in his search for a systematic design process, in looking at his designs from this period in sequence, we are today able to see the influence and critical aid provided by the design and analysis logic implied in the Frobel training: by the architectural conceptions of type, variation on a theme and the use of a limited number of forms that were imbedded in it." (pg 41)
After Wright revisited the Frobel method, he turned to the cruciform (two elongated interlocking spaces in the shape of a cross) as a fundamental floor-plan unit. By unit, I mean a basic entity that is manipulated according to context. It may be stretched, contorted, and multiplied to construct higher-order compositions. A unit is also a pathway to knowledge, a systematic method of conceptualizing a problem, and may lead to the discovery of radically new pathways that may, in turn, become units in themselves. In Wright’s case, the turn to the cruciform led to the Prairie House, a “type of house characterized by a degree of both spatial freedom and formal order previously unknown in either the Old or New World” (pg 43).
Wright’s acceptance of the cruciform plan as a unit is due to the experience of the occupant within the cruciform space: a large, unified yet differentiated space, with light entering from multiple sides. Thus, the cruciform is derived from nature—it is not purely formal or mathematical, but derived from perceptual observation. This is evident from the many other interconnected elements of a Prairie House that are nested within the cruciform design and, probably, from which the design is born.
Thus, the cruciform served the aesthetic and ultimately thematic purpose of the Prairie House. The many elements that articulated it became more potent as the Prairie House matured, climaxing as McCarter suggests in the Darwin Martin House of 1904. It is unlikely that these elements were clear in Wright’s mind when he first turned to the cruciform, but they fermented in time as he used the cruciform to explore them systematically.
A unit is useful because it may be modified in a variety of ways to fit a context. Its features may be systematically explored. For instance, a wing of the cruciform may become a staircase and closet, or it may be divided into two bedrooms, or it may be pushed up along one side of the plan and made into a cantilevered dining room, or it may be stretched out to form a living room with a series of windows looking out to a garden.
Darwin Martin Housefloor plan
By acknowledging the limitations provided by context, a creative choice may be made. The needs of the occupants, the shape of the landscape, the orientation of the house for proper seasonal lighting, the ordinances of the neighborhood, the materials of construction, etc, all come into play. There is no simple formula for the proper marriage of contextual factors to a unit—that is not its purpose. It is meant to be the starting point of a thoughtful exploration of the problem. It allowed Wright to conceptualize and systematize a method of coping with limitations.
Often craftsman look to historical precedents: What was done in this context before? How is my task now different? What should be changed? They are using the historical precedent as the starting point, in place of the unit. The downside to this is how it limits the craftsman’s freedom; they are using a highly articulated plan (grounded concretely in a context) as a unit for analysis. Unless they fully understand why each decision was made in the precedent, they may end up adding extraneous features to the modified design. Since every process of thought must have some starting point, in the lack of a unit a historical precedent (or better, the consideration of several precedents) is often the best way to begin.
Under-articulated, generic spaces such as those offered by the Chicago School were also rejected by Wright as a useful unit.
“Wright clearly understood that the systematic production of a universal space could not give form to monumental public buildings, and in his Waller Amusement Park project of 1895 he developed his own alternative: the systematic composition of unique places. In what may also be seen as Wright’s answer to the ‘White City’ of the 1892 Chicago Exposition, this project for Wolf Lake proposed a series of pavilions arranged around a semicircular canal and on the circular island at the center. Close examination of these pavilions, as Wright designed them in plan and perspective, reveals plan fragments matching Unity Temple, the Martin House, the Ullman House, and even a small Imperial Hotel. Here in 1895, almost the entire set of plan types that Wright would utilize in the Prairie Period were projected in the pavilions of this unbuilt design, as numerous geometrically rigorous and systematically developed variations on the theme of the cruciforminterlocking of spaces and the rhythmic disposition of pier groups. This astonishing project may be considered as Wright’s equivalent of Piranesi’s ‘Campo Marzio’ etching; the repository and record for all manner of speculative forms to be utilized and realized in later designs.” (pg 67)
Thus a proper unit is useful both in its adaptability to a wide variety of contexts; yet, it must be articulated enough to provide for unique, individualized spaces when systematically explored and married to a context. Regardless, the Chicago tradition continues today:
“Almost without exception, the design of high-rise office buildings today eliminates the possibility for place, determined by the character of the building’s construction and structure, in favor of universal ‘flexible’ space; often less flexible in its servicing that Wright’s design, but much more flexible in its ability to accommodate the style imposed by the interior decorator, hired separately by each tenant after leasing. Wright’s vision of a comprehensive design for building, services, partitions, storage and furnishings, and his emphasis on the creation of vertical social spaces that link the anonymous horizontal office floors, is directly opposed to the endless generation of space for speculative purposes, to be subdivided and decorated according to the latest fashion, that has dominated the recent design and construction of high-rise office buildings, with previous few exceptions.” (pg 193)As Wright’s architecture evolved, he began multiplying his unit horizontally:
“Beginning with the Darwin Martin House of 1904, Wright developed for his larger house commissions a more open, less compact spatial order, involving the interlocking and interweaving on larger sites of a series of cruciform spatial focal points or pavilions, rather than the singular pyramidal form more typical of the smaller Prairie Houses.” (pg 111)And vertically:
“Rowe has noted that all other skyscrapers typically had been rendered as solid, single volumes, with static structural frames, while the National Insurance Company Building Wright designed for A M Johnson in 1923-4 is composed of transparent, layered, interlocking volumes, with the dynamic structural solution of the cantilevered slab and curtain wall: ‘both its construction and its curtain wall constitute an innovation in the Chicago tradition.’ ” (pg 191)Eventually the cruciform gave rise to a radically new pathway which, in itself became a unit: the Usonian House:
“The plan of the Darwin Martin House hung in the Taliesin drafting room for fifty years, representing both the perfection of plan-making Wright always sought and serving as a generative source. …It is perhaps not surprising, then, that close approximations of the Usonian House plans may be derived by folding the plan of the [Darwin] Martin House along its symmetrical axes, suggesting that Wright saw the Usonian Houses as asymmetrical quadrants of the larger symmetrical Prairie Houses.” (pg 249)Born of an early marriage of the Prairie House with a courtyard dwelling, the central feature of the Usonian House is an L-shaped plan wrapped about a garden, instead of a courtyard. Its central motivation was, like the cruciform, also aesthetic and ultimately thematic:
“In the Jacobs House, as in all the Usonians, the spaces of the site are experienced as being ‘interior’ so that both exterior and interior space were conceived by Wright as being ‘inside’. Wright said that ‘in integral architecture the room space itself must come through. We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside, and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other’ and ‘The materials of the outside walls came inside just as appropriately and freely as those of the inside walls went outside. Intimate harmony was thus established not only in the house but with its site.’ ” (pg 257)Herbert Jacobs Housefloor plan
Here we see how the construction of a unit and its systematic exploration is a program that provides for growth, variability, and scientific creativity. Unlike clinging to traditional forms for the sake of tradition, a unit may lead to its own abandonment in favor of a new unit that, while very different, grows conceptually from its predecessor. It may retain qualities in the previous unit seen to be good, while altering other qualities seen to be bad, or not as fully developed. These qualities may not have been clear at the time of the formation of the initial unit, but became clear as the unit was systematically explored.
Afterward
Wright's tradition continued with Louis Kahn, who often used the square, the cruciform-in-square, and the rotated-square. His design of the Trenton Bath House, the first building in which he "found himself," is a cruciform in plan, paying due homage to Wright. But whereas Wright often used repetitions of the cruciform theme throughout each room, Kahn pioneered giving each element of the plan a unique geometry that respond to the needs of each individual space, yet fits within the overall plan. This is evident in the Capital of Bangladesh:
Capital of Bangladeshfloor plan
Brett Holverstott
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