United States 1867 - 1959 Wishlist

Widely celebrated as one of the most influential American architects of the 20th century, Wright also played an important role as a furniture designer and design theorist. After studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin (1885-7) in 1888 he joined the architectural office of Louis Sullivan, an influential figure in the development of Modernism in architecture and design. In 1893 Wright established his own practice and began to evolve his principles of organic architecture in a series of low, horizontal, asymmetrically planned houses. Commissioned between the 1890s and early 1900s they became known as the Prairie School style on account of their influence on many of Wright's American contemporaries working in the Midwest. In 1897 Wright became a founder member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, reflecting an outlook which influenced many of his early furniture and interior designs although, unlike many associated with the Arts and Crafts, he was more unequivocally committed to ideas of machine production. This was particularly evident in the rectilinear metal office furniture for his Larkin Company Administration Building (1904) in Buffalo, New York. The painted metal desks and swivelling chairs were conceived as integral both to the aesthetic and function of the building as whole. In 1909 he went to Europe, where he was influenced by first-hand experience of Viennese and other avant-garde European design which he had for the most part previously encountered in published form. This was perhaps reflected in his abstract rectilinear stained glass designs for the Avery Coonley Playhouse (1912) and the lighter, more geometric forms of his furniture for the Little House in Wayzata, Minnesota (1913). However, Wright's influence was also felt in Europe, as in the work of Hendrik Berlage and Gerrit Rietveld. The ways in which he sought to unify designs from building to detail was evident in his Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1915-22), where he designed everything from furniture to tableware. A different aesthetic, though still essentially organic, approach was evident rather later in his career, as at the Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin (1936-9), for which he designed painted aluminium and steel furniture that embraced, like its architectural surroundings, something of the quality of contemporary streamlined forms. In 1955 Wright sought to capture new, essentially middle-class, markets with his Taliesin Line furniture (named after his homes in Arizona and Wisconsin) for the Heritage Henredon Company of North Carolina. Similarly, in the same year, a Taliesin Line series of thirteen Wright textiles and four wallpapers was manufactured in a variety of colours by the New York firm F. Schumacher & Co. Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful, has been credited with the idea for the scheme when preparing an issue of the magazine devoted to Wright's work. However, the Taliesin range failed to sell in large quantities. Nonetheless, Wright's influence on 20th-century design and architecture was profound, both in terms of practical work and his many writings.