In a 1908 speech, architect Frank Lloyd Wright offered this assessment of Victorian domestic architecture:
“The invariably tall interiors were cut up into box-like compartments, the more
boxes the finer the house, and “Architecture” chiefly consisted in healing over the edges of the curious concoction of holes that had to be cut in the walls for light and air and to permit the occupant to get in or out.”
One hundred years later, Architectural Record has compiled a “world tour” of eight distinguished homes in Portugal, Peru, Arizona, Japan, Colorado and New England. Almost all of them are boxes. They show almost no indigenous design or relation to the country where they were constructed.
If architecture is somehow built upon logic and need, then why does every era produce a stultifying conformity of style? What would FLW say about these houses?
Here in Van Nuys 
That’s a hard one. Because I don’t think that FLW was just about indigenous design (although he certainly used it to great advantage with the amazing Taliesin West). I think for him, function and flow were very important, hence his dislike of the boxy, unnatural Victorian houses he grew up around in Oak Park. The flow of some of the “box” houses is ingenious (lots of glass), and some of them even use environmentally appropriate materials.
Would I like to live in one? I don’t think so. They’re a bit like glass cages. One thing FLW would have hated: those tall ceilings. He was short, and a fan of scalp-scraping ceilings, especially in the foyer, to introduce intimacy. And although I like a nice 8’2″ ceiling, I tend to agree — I’ve been in houses where the bedroom feels like a giant meeting room.
I’m sure FLW is too busy spinning in his grave over how close the stamped-out rows of tract houses are coming to Taliesin West. Talk about a weird juxtaposition.
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Andrew, your questions are fair. One way to answer it short and sweet would be that keep in mind, it’s only Architectural Record. There are quite a few other periodicals that cover contemporary house designs. In another bigger direction to appraoch your questions would be to understand fasion design. By that, I do not mean anything derogatory or trivializing.
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