Houses were Frank Lloyd Wright’s favourite building type from the beginning to the end of his seventy-year career as an architect. To him the house was the centre of family life, symbolized by a warming hearth, and above all a place of repose. As 50 Favourite Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright shows, his ideal home took on an amazing variety of forms.
Here, from the architect’s first period, is his own home and studio in Oak Park, Illinois, an architectural laboratory for him over two decades. His 1920s California works, built of textured concrete blocks, were revolutionary, his 1930s houses, Fallingwater and Taliesin West, internationally renowned. From then until his death in 1959, Wright took on the designed simplified residences, such as the honeycomb-shaped Hanna House, that helped change the look of the modern home.
Each of the examples shown exemplifies Wright’s never-changing principles that a house should be built with nature, achieve harmony through unity and be a work of art — not just a house.