Usonian Evolution

Up to last week, the only comprehensive book on the life work of the most famed living U.S. architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, has been a monumental, professorial volume written more than 30 years ago in German (Frank Lloyd Wright, ausgefuehrte Bauten und Entwuerfe, by Kuno Francke; Berlin; 1910). Last week the U.S. got its first thorough native survey of Architect Wright's restless, productive development.

The survey (In the Nature of Materials; Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $5) is by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a red-bearded Wesleyan University professor of art and architecture, who culled most of his material from a quarter-ton of plans and photographs that Wright had accumulated for years in his Wisconsin studio, Taliesin. Crammed with photographs and descriptions of nearly every building Wright ever built or even thought up, Hitchcock's book reaches the conclusion that Wright, often considered an eccentric and an unpractical dreamer, has actually followed the most direct and logical of careers.

Wisconsin-born Architect Wright went to Chicago as an apprentice draftsman in 1887, just when the first modern skyscrapers in the world were abuilding in that brawny city. While the rest of the U.S. was content with old-fashioned imitation Greek pillars and Victorian knickknacks, Chicago Architects William Le Baron Jenney, Louis Sullivan and John Root had thought out a new, austere type of building that was to dominate U.S. big-city architecture for half a century.

For more than a decade Chicago* led the world, architecturally, its steel-framed, many-storied and many-windowed office buildings setting new standards of functionalism and honesty. In the offices of the great Louis Sullivan, budding Architect Wright learned the famed Sullivan dictum, "form follows function," helped design some of Sullivan's biggest projects, ended by influencing Sullivan himself.

Leaving Sullivan in the 1890s, Wright rapidly evolved a style of his own, a spacious, low-slung type of building, whose simple planes and monolithic unity of design were to remain constant features of Wright houses for many years. A tireless experimenter with new materials and bold forms, he invented and evolved new structural uses for everything from concrete to plywood, built houses that challenged every conventional rule of the architect's art. By 1910, his new ideas had spread from suburban Oak Park, Ill., where he lived, to Holland and Germany, where a whole school of modern architecture grew up from seeds Architect Wright had planted.

But though theoretical Europeans acclaim his work as one of the most important influences on the "international" style of modern architecture, exuberant Architect Wright has always steered clear of the mechanical extremes which made much "modern" European building look cold and inhuman. Curiously, though he was trained in the Chicago school that invented the skyscraper, and became the most famous architect in a nation famed for its skyscrapers, Frank Lloyd Wright has never built a skyscraper himself.

One reason may be his hatred of cities, which has, in recent years, made him an eloquent advocate of decentralization. During the past ten years, one of Wright's most cherished projects for "Usonia" (his name for the U.S.-as-it-should-be) has been an enormous housing-development plan known as Broadacre City, in which the occupations of modern city life, dispersed with the help of modern transportation, can be carried on in a gigantic rural area where each dwelling is surrounded by acres of parks and fields.

* Finest study to date of the Chicago school is included in the monumental book, Space, Time & Architecture by Swiss-born Architectural Critic Sigfried Giedion, which has just reached its third printing (Harvard University Press; $5). Giedion finds the roots of the Jenney and Sullivan skyscraper, not in the showpieces of past European and U.S. architecture, but in such useful and noble feats of engineering as glass-surfaced markets and department stores, or the cast-iron-pillared warehouses of the St. Louis water front.

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