Week 2

After studying how Frank Lloyd Wright used the cube as the basis of his design for Unity Temple last week, I pursued the theme of deconstructing a box this week and unwittingly opened up a Pandora’s Box of cultural and intellectual crosscurrents in the early 20th century. I knew that Wright’s architecture would invoke art, design, math, and science, but the sociological, religious, and psychological ramifications of his organic architecture philosophy surprised me—I even stumbled into the fourth dimension!

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UNITY TEMPLE

Before I even dip a toe into the space-time continuum, I first will finish up my discussion of Unity Temple from my last post. While choosing to design a building using a cube, at first glance, does not seem particularly groundbreaking, the shape held significance for Wright. According to Eugenia Victoria Ellis's "Space of Continuity: Frank Lloyd Wright's Destruction of the Box and Modern Conceptions of Space," Wright’s first symbol for his architect practice was a red square composed of two parts: a circle inscribed within a square superimposed on an equilateral cross. Instead of being oriented to the north like a compass, this circle orients to the sun and was used by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. 

Frank Lloyd Wright early logo. Source: Association of Architecture Organizations

At the turn of the 20th century, theosophy was a philosophy in vogue that combined Eastern metaphysics with western culture to emphasize the inner self. Considering that theosophy was included in the World's Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (the Chicago World Fair), and that Wright had designed interiors for some buildings at the fair, the philosophy’s mixture of science and religion seemed to affect his work as well as that of other European artists, such as the cube-obsessed Piet Mondrian. Wright’s forte—his brilliant sense of interior space, the interiority, of a building—harkens back to theosophy’s spiritual focus on inner space and its Eastern influence (Ellis). 

Wright's organic architecture sought to bring out the spirituality of living spaces by diminishing the divide between outside and inside. In fact, Wright found spirituality in Nature. In a famous interview with Mike Wallace in 1957, when asked what church he attended, Wright replied: “Yes, I occasionally go to this one, and then sometimes to that one, but my church I put a capital N on Nature and go there,” like others “spell God with a G.” For Wright, Nature and God were synonymous. Nature was not to be copied but to be inspired by—Nature was the ultimate teacher.

Other artists, like the cubist Picasso, and later physicists, like Einstein, studying relativity were all using contemplating how light and geometry could replicate or expose a cosmic order. Within this milieu, it is not surprising that Wright decided to deconstruct the box: demolish boxlike rooms from the interior and expand the cube on the exterior. As in science, form follows function. Before Wright, the European model of architecture relied on proportion and geometry, focusing more on the exterior space, with interiors of boxy rooms. Wright turned that philosophy on its head and designed from the inside outwards, expanding a square beyond its cubic parameters, cutting off the corners to free the box to a new dimension.  The Unity Temple was a concrete expression of Wright's aspiration (Ellis).

To do this, Wright seemed to conceive of the infinity of the x-y-z axes, to draw the eye outward at the edges of a building to unite the inside and outside worlds. Often, the center of the axes—spiritual and physical—was the nave for Unity Temple and the hearth for homes (Ellis).

To design Unity Temple in 1905, these notions of using the interior to define a space, rather than the traditional dominance of the exterior dictating form, seemed to fit the spiritual purpose of the building. To appreciation how revolutionary this idea was, contemporary architecture at this time epitomized the Beaux Arts style—heavily ornamented and focused on form. Wright’s Unity Temple, on the contrary, designed space, not form. In Wright’s own words, “Unity Temple is where I thought I had it, this idea that the reality of a building no longer consisted in the walls and the roof…space not walled in now but more or less free to appear. In Unity Temple, you will find the walls actually disappearing” (Ellis).

Unity Temple (top left), Hypercube (top right), Wright's Unity Temple floor plan (bottom left)
Source: Ellis

Wright turned the square of Unity Temple’s central nave into a cube and then thrusted the cube outward one more time in attempt to create a three-dimensional rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube—exploding the box. By using cantilevers, the support moved inside the building rather than at the corners, thereby liberating the corners. Consequently, the building is a cube at its center and negative space at its corners (Ellis).

While students will not be able to build a hypercube, they can play with deconstructing a box to visualize architecture. Here is a rough outline of a lesson plan for high school students on manipulating a cube, inspired by Unity Temple.

1. Every student makes a six-sided cube out of paper

Source: Annenberg Learner

2. Divided into groups, students will explore the eleven hexominoes: ways of unfolding a cube so that all six sides are connected.

Source: Kadon Enterprises

3. Students will be given irregular site plans—such as a sloping hillside, a trapezoidal plot,  a valley—and have to match one of these cube-based designs to maximize the functionality of building and location.
4. To explore properties of the three-dimensional further, students can cut the cube to find the hexagon shape. This is easiest to do if you hang it by a string from one of its vertices. Then cut horizontally through its center to see its cross section. The intersection of the plane and the cube is a regular hexagon.

Source: Queen's University

5. Students can then incorporate the hexagon, along with the cube, within their building designs.

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ROBIE HOUSE

According to "Key Works of Modern Architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright," the second of Wright’s ten nominated works of modern architecture, the Frederick C. Robie House (1908-1910), represents the pinnacle of Wright’s Prairie style homes prevalent during the first ten years of the 20th century. Built in Chicago, Illinois near the University of Chicago campus in a mixed-use urban location, the house sits on a flat site, facing a tree-lined street. The Robie House not only mimics the low, horizontal lines of the Midwestern Prairie, but boldly initiated an open floor plan between living and dining rooms, dissolving traditional walls and boxed rooms. Wright designed the residence to be a single entity, from the exterior to the furniture ("Key Works"). 

My Sketch of Robie House

Layering red Roman bricks and cream-colored mortar to emphasize the horizontal design, the home appears low to the ground, despite being three levels. Furthermore, Wright stressed the idea of shelter with shadowy recesses underlying the strong horizontal lines of the low-hipped roofs. Balconies wrap around the main and upper levels, sporting colorful art glass casement windows. A short brick wall separates the house from the street, while exterior planters along the balconies integrate the house with its urban setting, while still providing privacy through the screened windows and walls ("Key Works"). 

Robie House Exterior. Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Inside, oak strips mimic the window casings across the ceiling, and the lighting fixtures shaped like globes within wooden cubes dot the ceiling. An astounding 175 leaded-glass doors and windows adorn Robie House. A 47-foot span of leaded-glass casement doors visually connects the living and dining rooms, creating an elongated, open space defined only by light from the windows and a two-way hearth in its center. Remember, most buildings at this time were filled with boxy rooms, so this was a radical design departure by Wright. The third floor contains bedrooms maximizing the view and privacy from the street. The inclusion of an attached, three-car garage was pioneering for this time, where most garages were separate from the home (“Key Works”). 

Robie House Interior. Source: Architecture Daily

Wright’s design certainly was modern. However, Wright had just returned home from visiting Japan, where he discovered that traditional Japanese architecture expressed his aesthetic ideals. According to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fifty Views of Japan: The 1905 Photo Album by the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation, Frank Lloyd called Japan “the most romantic, artistic country on earth.” He praised the Japanese sense of harmonious spirituality “expressed in bold and simple forms and flat colors, whether in woodblock prints or the materials of buildings” (Frank Lloyd Wright's Fifty Views of Japan). In Japan, he saw the unity of art, craft, and nature. For example, the eaves of main hall of the Higashi-Honganji Temple are over-hanging like those in the Robie House. Moreover, he was struck by how Japanese buildings blended so well with their surroundings (Frank Lloyd Wright's Fifty Views of Japan).

Higashi-Honganji Temple in Nagoya, Japan. Source: Wikipedia

For my lesson plan, I will focus on the leaded-glass windows to explore geometric design and the artistic elements of color, shape, space, and form.

Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Trust

Source: Scholastic

Source: Jhennifer A. Amundson