Content area
Full Text
An overview of Frank Lloyd Wright's mono-material concepts for middleincome housing
Although Frank Lloyd Wright is well known for his iconic works such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum and being a major proponent of Prairie School Architecture, his textile block system is perhaps less well known. This system arose from Wright's desire to wed machine-age production techniques with organic architecture-the principle that a structure should look as though it naturally grew on a site-so as to make his designs affordable to people of modest means.
This article explores a few of his textile block homes designed in accordance with Wright's Usonian concepts for middle-income housing: many were small, single-story dwellings without a garage and were generally L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace. Usonian homes were also constructed with native materials and had flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs, clerestory windows to provide daylighting, and radiant-floor heating. Most of the houses were built in the 1920s through the 1950s throughout the U.S., but the plans for one are being used to construct a modern building on the Florida Southern College campus, Lakeland, FL, a setting with a number of other Wright textile block structures.
Modularity, Simplicity, and Integrity
From early on in his career, Wright designed within a module. The base module varied according to the particular project, but once set, all dimensions were tied to it. Because a plan could be laid out quickly on grid paper without dimensions, the module was as much a design shortcut as an organic principle.
The module helped facilitate other ideals, such as providing a unified appearance, simplicity, and affordability through prefabrication and ease of construction. The basic module dimension, whether 4 ft (1.22 m) for the Usonian houses or 6 ft (1.82 m) for the Florida Southern College campus, was struck into the base concrete floor slab. These joints were left visible as a reminder of the organization of the building units into a unified whole.
According to Wright's organic theory, all components of the building should appear unified, as though they belong together. Nothing should be attached to it without considering the effect on the whole. To unify the house to its site, Wright often used large expanses of glass to blur the boundary...