Frank Lloyd Wright: Robie House and the Guggenheim

Introduction: Wright as American Enigma

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect of the modern era — an architect who, not unlike Marcel Breuer, was as modern in his ideas as the age that saw him create his most acclaimed works. For Wright, "Love of an idea [was] love of God" (Secrest 4) — a caption that covers his grave and neatly encapsulates his life's philosophy and the ideal that shaped his work. Wright was a craftsman, an idealist, and a modernist. He was the Kandinsky of architecture — the zeitgeist of naturalism — and in one regard the anti-brutalist architect of the 20th century. Yet in another way, his architecture, despite its grand intentions, is dated by its adherence to the briefly emancipating ideals of an era — a passing philosophical impulse that failed to find roots in any traditional structure.

In this sense, Wright resembled Breuer: a man whose ideas were novel and destined to be outdated in time. Nonetheless, Wright attempted to capture a transcendental quality completely absent in Breuer's brutalist works. Wright's Guggenheim is a representation of the spirit of nature, and his Robie House is a kind of rebuke against the vertical high-rises of the modern landscape. Wright defined his own rules, yet he relished a love of nature and observed the infinite. This paper describes, analyzes, and interprets two works by Wright — the Guggenheim Museum and Robie House — and shows how both reflect aspects of the man who made them.

Wright's philosophy and worldview are readily apparent in his definition of architecture, which he called "the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods and men, to put man into possession of his own earth" (Pfeiffer, Nordland 48). This was a far cry from the medieval concept of architecture which, in the glorious age of cathedrals, was a way of giving glory to God. The modern age broke with the old-world relationship to architecture just as it broke with everything else: everything became man-centered. Yet Wright's work raises an interesting curiosity — it was obviously introverted and full of self, and yet it offered glimpses through windows into the soul of nature and the infinite spirit of creation.

Wright's Philosophy, Background, and Influences

Wright's background was as prosaic as his Prairie Style Robie House — nomadic in spirit, rootless in terms of tradition: "Like the wandering pioneer of American folklore, Frank Lloyd Wright's father willingly subordinated family stability and familiar surroundings to a relentless search for personal fulfillment" (Twombly 1), and Frank proved to be no different. His religious beliefs were formed in childhood by his parents' Unitarianism. As Wright remarks in his autobiography: "The Unitarianism of the Lloyd-Joneses...was an attempt to amplify in the confusion of the creeds of their day, the idea of life as a gift from the Divine Source, one God omnipotent, all things at one with HIM. UNITY was their watchword, the sign and symbol that thrilled them, the UNITY of all things!" (Wright 16). That same obsession with unity would shape the way Wright built — from the uniformity of line in Robie House to the uniformity of curve and color in the Guggenheim Museum. Wright was keenly aware of all things working and fitting together. It was not repetition he was after — it was unity.

Under the tutelage of Louis Sullivan, Wright absorbed his mentor's famous wisdom regarding art. Sullivan's dictum "Form follows Function" became for Wright a characteristically Unitarian expression: "Form and Function are One" ("Frank Lloyd Wright Biography"). "It was Sullivan's belief that American architecture should be based on American function, not European traditions, a theory which Wright later developed further. Throughout his life, Wright acknowledged very few influences but credits Sullivan as a primary influence on his career" ("Frank Lloyd Wright Biography"). American function — an offshoot of the American Protestant ethos — would become part of Wright's doctrine, and despite his insistence on Americanisms, it would connect him to European Protestantism and to the "functionalism" of Breuer that got coined as "brutal." Wright's own functionalism, however, was identified less critically as "American" — a term that is, in practice, as ambiguous as the dogma that governed the American religious spirit.

That spirit is plain enough in Wright's works. In Robie House (1909) — Wright's finest example of the American Prairie Style — Wright laid bare the essence of American Unitarianism: flat, homogenous, unorthodox, and introverted. What the Prairie Style lacked in ornament, it made up for in horizontality.

Horizontal planes dominate Robie House, giving it a low, flat, stark, and spare appearance. It attempts to resemble the Midwestern landscape surrounding it; however, all it really does is draw attention to itself — as all of Wright's works do — in a way that is nearly indefinable. The viewer hardly knows whether he is attracted or repulsed. One thing is certain: there is a peculiar singularity about it.

Robie House and the Prairie Style

The floor plan of Robie House is open, with a generous amount of interior space, and everything from the landscape outside to the furniture inside is integrated into a single, unified design. Here is Wright's spirituality made concrete: everything must be one. There is a certain aching formalism in Robie House that feels confining, even as Wright strives to utilize space to the utmost and mimic the expansiveness of the Midwest landscape.

Wright's attention to craftsmanship and detail is what makes him beloved by many, but his architectural ode to American style feels dwarfed by the giant steel structures of the industrial age. It may be quaint and homey on the inside, but its exterior lacks the wit and style of Art Nouveau. What Robie House is, essentially, is a kind of self-expression of Wright's attitude toward the complex industrial age: here, in the Prairie Style, was simplicity, elegance, refinement, and soul — at least, that appears to be the intention.

Wright essentially broke with every other European architectural movement by building in the Prairie Style — a style that had no European forerunners, but which definitely owed something to the emptiness of the great Midwest and which responded, in a kind of anti-verticality gesture, to the gargantuan high-rises of America's metropolises. Wright would deliver another similar rebuke to the American high-rise with the Guggenheim Museum — and he would do it in the heart of New York City itself, on 5th Avenue across from Central Park.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum (1959) is precisely that rebuke. Set in the midst of the hustle and bustle of urban density, Wright's architecture blossoms like a flower in the modern metropolis — a place of respite against the noise and machinery of the white-collar world around it, a structure that draws one in because, for a moment, it reflects something found in nature. The line, the contour, the unexpected angles, the pure white: there is an aspect of otherworldliness to it.

Conclusion: Wright's Architectural Legacy

Wright's Robie House and Guggenheim are architectural works that surprise and yet do not shock; that confound and yet do not offend. They draw one to a sense of the spiritual — and yet reject the traditional definitions and rigors of medieval faith. They draw attention to themselves and their individuality and invite an introspective gaze, but they also appear to be perpetually running from definition, from any definite answer. They evoke the mysterious, and yet they are trapped by a time and place: by 20th-century kitsch, Midwest sentimentality, and the glamour and brutalism of New York's 5th Avenue.