THE CALIFORNIA SCHOOL——RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE FRUITFUL YEARS Wright settled on the family farm, near Spring Green, Wisconsin, and in 1911 began to build his often-remodeled home and studio, Taliesin. In Chicago he erected Midway Gardens (1913), a kind of pleasure arcade, and a few years later he was occupied with designing the earthquake-resistant Imperial Hotel for Tokyo. In the 1920s, Wright produced a number of homes in California, working there as he stopped off on his return trips from Japan. The Millard House (1923) in Pasadena, with its walls treated as decorative screens, is perhaps the bestknown of these. In the mid-1930s, Wright was concerned with the development of what he called his Usonian homes-modest and relatively inexpensive residences in which parts were often prefabricated and assembly was a do-it-yourself project. The first Herbert Jacobs House (1936) in Madison, Wisconsin, is a good example.49040
FALLINGWATER
In spite of the generally stultifying effect of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the career of Frank Lloyd Wright experienced a resurgence in 1937 with the creation of Fallingwater-or the Kaufmann House-one of his master-pieces.
Rising beside Bear Run Creek, an outcropping of natural bedrock emerges in front of the fireplace in the living room, emphasizing the organic quality of the house (Fig. 2716). Around a huge, central fireplace made of local stones, open spaces sweep freely. Texturally, the natural stone of the fireplace offers an interesting contrast to the concrete forms. Walls of glass give a feeling of oneness between the interior of the house and its wooded environment. While a decided horizontality of lines, geometric planes, and concrete forms anchors the building to its site, a rich interplay of architectural form and space is created through cross-axes and cantilevering. Cantilevered balconies jut out into the wooded space so that one feels as if one were standing in the woods or above the little waterfall, while still within the Structure of the house.
There were few other houses in America that departed so radically from traditional house designs, and seldom had such a mature form of the modern house been achieved. The warm, humanistic quality of Wright's work becomes evident if, for example, Fallingwater is compared to a Bauhaus design of the 1930s, or with Le Corbusier's "machine for living' in the Villa Savoye (1929) at Poissy-sur-Seine in France.
COMMERCIAL INNOVATION
In commercial architecture, Wright's triumph of these years was the S.C. Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine. Wisconsin, erected in 1936-9. As in the Larkin building and Unity Church, the outside world is ignored and he building is turned in upon itself. The most distinctive feature of the interior is the large, open secretarial section with its unique, tapering "toadstool" columns (Fig. 2717). The geometric shape of the circle became the leitmotif of the design, as seen in the flaring disks that crown each column. Indirect lighting from skylights positioned between the great disks fills the room. Wright designed the steel furniture as well. and to achieve his desired unity of building and furnishings he made desks with rounded ends, echoing the rounded comers of the exterior of the building (Fig. 33.2).
By the late 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright was recognized internationally as one of the primary luminaries of modern architecture, and he began to have a considerable following. By 1940, architecture was significantly changed from when Wright had started his career nearly sixty years earlier. And he had played a major role in effecting this change.
Just as a school of American architecture arose in and around Chicago, another appeared in California, the early leaders of which were Bernard Maybeck and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, While there was no single master to act as a unifying catalyst. a distinctive style evolved in response to the lifestyle, climate, and local building materials of California.