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What is the American tradition in architecture? Judging from what may be seen in the vast majority of suburban residential developments, office parks, or university campuses, the "traditional" American architecture that we have inherited exhibits a kind of schizophrenia, presenting to the street a thin veneer of "Victorian," or "Mediterranean," or some other cannibalized "historical" style (creating what is called "curb appeal"), which is totally unrelated to the thoroughly modern open-plan residential or office spaces to be found inside. What has happened to our traditional concept of American character and integrity, to "what you see is what you get," to the idea that internal values are more important than external appearances?
While this ideal of integrity has disappeared from the vast majority of our buildings today, it lies at the very heart of the uniquely American tradition of modern architecture embodied in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Louis Isidore Kahn (1901-1974). Wright and Kahn are arguably the greatest of all American architects, and they are without question the only ones ever to reverse the traditional "trade deficit" with Europe and the world with respect to architectural ideas of consequence.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
AS Horatio Greenough noted even as early as 1852, fifteen years before Wright's birth, Americans tend to accept all their styles - of clothing, entertainment, and architecture - from Europe. Yet Frank Lloyd Wright's early work was without question the first true manifestation of what has come to be called Modern architecture, and Wright's architecture had enormous and far-reaching influence on architects and artists all over the world, from the emergence of the Prairie House in 1900 until his death in 1959. Today, forty-four years after his death, Wright is the only architect who can be named by virtually every first-year student entering American universities, and the number of books published on Wright and his work continues to escalate. In today's newspaper, Jeff MacNelly's nationally-syndicated cartoon "Shoe," depicted a young schoolboy answering the exam question "Name the Wright brothers," with "Frank and Lloyd." Wright's influence also extends to his own profession, American architects having named Wright's 1936 Kaufmann House, called "Fallingwater," the most important building in the United States of the last 150 years.
But what exactly is it that...