How Frank Lloyd Wright Let Nature Shape His Homes

[gentle music]

[Narrator] Frank Lloyd Wright

designed over 500 buildings across 33 states.

His work helped define modern living

and gave America its own architectural voice.

Wright's philosophy of organic architecture

aimed to unite structure and landscape.

A home, he believed, should not be placed upon the land

but grow from it, natural, intentional

and inseparable from the environment around it.

From the rolling planes of his youth,

to the vast silence of the Sonoran desert,

working until his death at the age of 91,

Wright spent much of his life's work trying to define,

elaborate and sharpen his philosophy.

In this video, we explore selection

of Frank Lloyd Wright's projects that demonstrate

how he treated the landscape, not as a backdrop,

but as a collaborator.

Spaces that invite the outside in

and express the essential principles

of organic architecture.

While not a complete portrait of his philosophy,

these works offer a window into his enduring vision

of harmony between the built and the natural.

We begin in Arizona where he spent his later years.

Drawn by its harsh climate and rich natural materials,

he found the perfect setting to test his ideas

of organic architecture.

As Phoenix's population grew rapidly,

Wright became concerned

about what he called the ever advancing human threat

to the integral beauty of Arizona.

In turn, he crafted designs that embraced the desert,

shaping a civic identity

grounded in the landscape itself.

Project 5011.

How to Live in the Southwest, known as the David

and Gladys Wright house is a clear expression

of Wright's desert mission

to design in harmony with the land.

[gentle music]

[Narrator 2] When your father's

the most celebrated architect

in America, the greatest gift he can give you is a house.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house for his son, David

and daughter-in-law Gladys using many of the same ideas

that he was building into the Guggenheim Museum.

Spirals are fascinating forms.

They can symbolize the infinite or longevity.

David and Gladys Wright, they both lived

to be more than 100 years old.

At the David and Gladys Wright House,

the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity

as it moves from one generation father

to the next generation son,

and even today as it moves between father

and daughter working on this restoration.

Located in the Arcadian neighborhood

of Phoenix, Arizona,

this neighborhood was once filled with orange groves.

Today it's a residential neighborhood.

It's a special place.

It's unlike anything else

that Frank Lloyd Wright did in the course of his career

and we're so excited to show it to you.

The entry to this house really begins here

at the bottom of a spiral ramp.

This whole experience coming up the ramp,

it's this little journey that Wright's taking you on.

The movement through space

is something that Wright calls the continual becoming.

This idea that space is constantly unfolding

and revealing itself, and you really see that

as you climb up the ramp and come up here to the entry.

Now that we're at the top of the ramp,

we see this beautiful landscape.

We're out in this bright sun

and Wright wants to create a juxtaposition,

so he's gonna take us in under a low ceiling

and sort of a shaded, darkened space.

Wright has this technique

that he calls compression and release.

Being enveloping, darker space,

and then opening up into a lighter,

brighter, more expansive space.

This is very similar to taking a walk through nature

where you might be walking on a forest path,

nature's embracing you,

and then suddenly you're in a clearing

or you're open to the sky,

there's bright light all around you.

It is an emotional journey that we take.

Much of the work on this house,

the delineation, the renderings

and the design of the rug were done by a Wright apprentice

from China named Ling Poe.

Ling came over from China in the 1940s

and worked with Wright

and worked at the foundation for many decades

after Wright died in 1959.

There's another important sense

of intergenerational continuity

that's reflected in this house.

Frank Lloyd Wright designs this house

for his son David and David's family.

Today, the current owners are being Bing Hu,

who has brought his daughter, a newly minted architect,

into the restoration of this house.

On this property,

David Gladys Wright a house come to my attention,

a spec builder bought a property from the family

with the intention to demolish the house

and created two spec houses.

So the first I learned that is like we got the rescue this.

My dad called me

and asked me if I would consider leaving my job

to come work with him

to restore the David and Gladys Wright House.

[gentle music]

It means a lot for my parents to come as Chinese immigrants

and sort of be here preserving the legacy

of American architecture as well.

This ceiling is constructed of Philippine mahogany.

It's a wood species that you can't get today, unfortunately,

because the roof leaks into this room

for many years, this mahogany ceiling became stained

and because you can't get this wood anymore,

cleaning and removing that staining is a meticulous craft.

If any board gets destroyed, you actually have

to replace the whole ceiling

and indeed all the wood in the house

because it's all one species.

So one of the things that I love about this restoration

is the very careful attention to detail

Because the house hasn't been properly maintained,

especially in the most beautiful wood you can see.

If you see before, there was night and day difference.

When we started to dig to uncover it,

there were like three or four layers

of spray foam insulation up there.

Anytime there was a big storm,

I think the owners were just like, go spray up another layer

and hopefully it'll do it this time.

Embarking on this journey kind of felt

like we were able to uncover history

of the past that wasn't written.

Beyond the look of the ceiling,

it also has a really interesting function.

Wright loved to connect interiors and exteriors.

You have a piano here in the room.

Wright loved the piano.

Everybody in his family was musical.

Music was something that they gravitated to.

Well, how do you get your musical performances outdoors?

You create a ceiling that will reflect the sound

out through these doors

and down into the courtyard where you might be gathering

for a party or just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon.

Wright had learned about acoustics

in his first apprenticeship in Chicago

with Dankmar Adler, one of the great acousticians

in American architectural history,

and he brought that into his practice and used it everywhere

but seldom with such dramatic effect

as you see in this house.

[gentle music]

Up here on the rooftop terrace,

we can really see Wright's intention,

how he connects the building with the landscape.

Out to our southeast, we see the Papago Buttes

and behind me in the other direction,

the head of the camel of Camelback Mountain.

By firmly centering this building

between these two landmarks that nature provided,

Wright gives us the sense of being part of this world

and not merely on it, but at one with it.

You'll notice that we're actually walking under the house

because the house is elevated.

This courtyard is an outdoor room,

but it wasn't just a room to gather in,

maybe have a picnic in.

It also originally had a pool.

Also because the pool itself being constructed

out of concrete block slowly over time

begins to disintegrate, something that Wright

didn't anticipate when he built the house.

So today we just have the memory of the pool reflected here.

David Wright worked for the Besser Manufacturing Company

and they made concrete block molds,

and so David insisted that his company's molds

and concrete block be used for the construction

and design of this house.

And for Wright, concrete block

wasn't simply an industrial material.

He saw it as elevated

and this particular block I think he really enjoyed,

and so you'll see that at the end

of wherever there was a concrete slab,

he included this decorative block with a circular motif

and then this piece coming out of it.

It also shows something

that Wright really enjoyed about working with concrete,

which is called an architecture terms plasticity,

meaning that it's moldable.

[gentle music]

The plan for the future of this property,

I want it become my architecture design studio.

I can open my door to let my client come,

so that's kind of indirect way

to welcome the public to able to see this masterpiece.

[Narrator] In Arizona, Wright's vision deepened

amid the beauty of the desert,

but it wasn't his first exploration of how nature

and community could coexist.

In 1948 in the wooded hills of Pleasantville, New York,

he helped create Usonia, a cooperative neighborhood

that embodied his belief in affordable, well-designed homes,

rooted in nature and free from urban congestion.

[birds chirping]

Frank Lloyd Wright designed these houses

with the objective of making them out of natural products

and providing people an opportunity to be close with nature.

Fairly simple structures

and yet one that was special, not like a cookie cutter house

that everybody else had.

My name's Brian Renz, my family and I

are owners of the Frank Lloyd Wright

Bertha and Saul Friedman house, also known as Toy Hill

here in a community called Usonia,

which is part of Pleasantville, New York.

Usonia as a community started way back in the 40s

when two architects in the city

decided to be interested in a cooperative community.

Frank Lloyd Wright assisted in this.

He helped lay out the roads,

he helped lay out plans for the properties.

We've had the opportunity to meet the Freedman family,

and as a matter of fact, we even have a video.

It showed this house being built

and other neighborhood houses,

including Frank Lloyd Wright being present

and active on the site.

Because of the peculiar nature of the community

and the fact that it had the cooperative ownership,

it was a very novel concept at the time.

People in the surrounding community

are said to have referred to it

instead of Usonia, that they referred to it as Insania.

The first thing you'll notice as we walk up

to the house is this most unusual carport.

It said that Frank Lloyd Wright was the first person

to put car and port together,

something he did throughout the country.

His homes rarely had garages.

This particular carport is most unique.

It's a single pillar of concrete

with a 20 sided polygon of concrete

that some people have described as a mushroom.

The experts on Wright will suggest

that he probably thought of it as more of a tree.

Other people look at it and see a concrete spaceship.

[gentle music]

The geometry of the building is peculiar

in that it's two cylinders.

It's not exactly circles.

It's a 20 side polygon, which is called an icosagon,

and indeed I did have to look that up.

The main material of the house is concrete,

along with locally sourced stone.

There are a number of quarries near here.

This is compression that Wright uses.

It's a standard thing and virtually all of his buildings,

so as we enter, we're still compressed.

We can already see

that there's massive natural stone

just like in the exterior on the interior also.

One of those things he'll do to make the inside

much like the outside.

Welcome to the main living area in the house.

What I'm gonna show you first is the geometric center

of the first floor of the house.

So this is the exact center of it all the way down

to the floor and up to the ceiling.

We have radial lines in the floor

that go along with the 20 sided polygon.

Each section is 18 degrees.

That's the geometry throughout the house.

My daughter will irreverently call the house, pizza house.

Everything in the house is laid out like a piece of pizza,

and that includes the bedding upstairs.

T his little corner, this we call our library.

Wright's idea on living determine very much

how he designed the furniture and the built-ins.

Very, very little furniture, everything's built in.

When I was speaking with the prior owner,

his advice was, only bring a toothbrush

because there's no room for anything else.

When we moved into the house, one of the first things

I wanted to do was get these two chairs.

They're a long time personal favorite of mine.

These were first designed at Frank Lloyd Wright's studio.

They're called Origami

and they're seen in a lot of Wright homes.

To me, they were just perfect for the spot.

These tables are red oak and they're original to the house.

They have part of the geometry

of each room built into the table.

Next we have a classic floor lamp from Taliesin.

This was purchased by a prior owner.

It's been here for at least 25 years.

It's present in very many of the homes in our community,

but especially in Frank Lloyd Wright properties.

It's a very popular lamp.

One of the early clients

in the cooperative was Roland Reisley.

He has recently turned 100

and he still lives in the same house

that he hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build for him

when he was just 26 years old.

And he's the oldest living Frank Lloyd Wright client

in the entire world.

[gentle music]

[birds chirping]

I'm Roland Reisley and I'm the owner of this house

known as the Reisley House, which was designed

for me by Frank Lloyd Wright.

My wife and I actually met at Cornell.

In 1950 we married.

At that point, we were wanting to build a home

and put down roots for a family,

and we were told there's a community

building affordable homes

supervised by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Well, let's go take a look.

And it was a cooperative that was really an idealistic,

egalitarian cooperative.

We liked that idea, we liked the land.

We liked the community, the people who joined Usonia,

everybody accepted the idea of Wright and his disciples

and Wright approving on the design.

To show you the second floor, we need

to go up Frank Lloyd Wright's circular stairway.

One of the key things here

is always having a hold of the handrail.

They do look a little bit dangerous.

Welcome to the second floor.

Here at the top of the stairs,

there's a couple of interesting things.

We have three vent holes that are very strange.

They're at the top of each of the three bedrooms.

They provide ventilation to be able to flow through,

but they're one of the sources

of one of the big problems in the house

when we have guests, I always have to warn a guest

that there are no secrets here

because you can hear everything.

As we head back to the primary bedroom,

compared to a typical suburban home, it is quite small,

but you have to remember everything is built in.

The double dresser is of particular interest

because of some of the special things

the cabinet maker had to think of.

Notice the scroll cutting along the edge

of the natural stone.

The shape of the cabinet is an irregular piece of pizza,

and all of the drawers have to be custom made

to shape to fit that.

Here's an example of that.

So it's not rectangular, it's not square,

and it would be something that they would definitely

have to pay a lot of attention to.

People are always shocked by the size and shape of the bed.

Basically, it's the size of a queen mattress at the top,

and it works out that it's the size

of a twin bed at the bottom.

Again, it has the same geometry

as all of the rooms in the house.

This bed has never been moved.

The wooden boards in the base

of the bed are nailed to the floor.

It's always been here.

It's always been the same size, and surprisingly, it works.

When quizzed about this, Wright would respond.

Everyone he ever knew was wider at their shoulders

than at their feet, so he didn't think it was a problem.

When we make changes in the houses,

we do get input from other people in the community.

There's a lot of history in the neighborhood.

We would discuss it with neighbors, especially those

who have a long historical stake in the community.

The community feeling that they've had

from the early part of the history

of the community even continues today.

We could not possibly have anticipated

how the house would influence our lives.

The whole experience would become a central part of my life.

A long life, I just turned 100

and there's now widespread scientific belief.

Beauty in one's environment does reduce stress.

I realize that not a day of my life

that I fail to see something beautiful here.

The light off the stone, I look at the grain of the wood.

Little things that just, it's beautiful.

[gentle music]

The cooperative nature

of the community back in the late forties

and the early fifties

is hard to reproduce in modern America.

There's no question about that.

But here we still have much more

than the normal commitment between residents.

[gentle music]

[birds chirping]

[Narrator] Across state lines in New Canaan

and Connecticut sits Tirranna,

one of Wright's largest private homes.

Set beside a waterfall and pond,

the land itself shaped his vision.

Its sweeping curve, red concrete

and warm mahogany echo the rhythm of the natural world.

[water flowing]

One of my favorite quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright is this,

Nature is the only body of God we see.

What he's saying is that nature has the sacred quality.

It's something that we need to take care of,

that we need to treat with respect and dignity.

And because we are a part of nature, we also need

to treat each other with respect and dignity.

This connection that Wright

is trying to build into his buildings with nature,

in fact make our lives better.

[birds chirping]

Tirranna was commissioned by John Ward in 1955,

and it's among the last of the houses

that Frank Lloyd Wright built since he died in 1959.

While Tirranna was being built,

Wright was in New York City

working on his largest commission, the Guggenheim Museum.

During that time, Wright fled his suite in the Plaza Hotel

and came up here to Connecticut

because he enjoyed this house's connection with nature.

This is one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright designs,

but I've only ever seen it in photographs

and in the drawings that Frank Lloyd Wright

and his apprentices created.

When I walked into the space,

it really made my heart race a little bit

because it's this beautiful intersection

of this sweeping curve of the solar hemi cycle

and this rectilinear design.

I don't think I've seen that

in any other Frank Lloyd Wright property in the same way,

and it's this beautiful expression of material

in one of the most breathtaking settings

of all of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings.

The setting rivals even perhaps Wright's most famous work,

falling water, in the way that the house engages nature.

The curve in this house is what Wright called

a solar hemi cycle.

What that means is that the curve follows the movement

of the sun through the day.

So the curve out here faces east.

That means it's gathering the morning light,

and as the sun moves through the sky,

the light in the room continuously spreads

and expands, illuminating the space,

not only with that natural light,

but with the warmth of the sun.

It's even an early form of sustainable design

because the sun is being used to heat the space,

especially in winter.

Wright loved materials, the integrity of materials,

the intrinsic character of materials

and bringing that out was something that was a central part

of his organic architecture.

Even humble material like this concrete block,

Wright left it exposed not only to show

what the house was built from,

but also to show how the concrete itself was made.

But he does something unusual with it.

The horizontal joints

between concrete block units are deeply raked.

You see that horizontality expressed

because that horizontality is the relationship

with the earth itself.

The vertical joints are raised a little bit

so that they're flush with the concrete mason unit.

Those two things together underscore this horizontality

and the relationship of building people and the land itself.

He juxtaposes this material with this really warm,

wonderful Philippine mahogany,

and you put these two things together, sort of the coolness

of the block and the warmth of the wood,

and once again, we get a bit of an emotional experience

just by the juxtaposition of materials themselves.

And if you imagine a walk through the woods,

you don't just see one thing, you see different kinds

of trees, shrubs, and bushes and other plants.

Nature does not like a monoculture

that actually doesn't really work very well.

Wright is replicating that experience on interiors.

By creating these juxtapositions of material.

The material that starts inside the house extends outside.

There's this continuity of material broken

only by this thin pane of glass that draws your eye outward

and inside and outside start to become a bit blurred.

[gentle music]

This is the primary suite, today it's used as an office.

It's a small space and there's a reason for that.

Wright wanted to connect people

with other people even within a family.

And so he creates these designs to push you outwards.

The concrete block of the wall lines up

in an exterior planter so that there's nature

within the walls of the building,

even though it's outside

and you also encounter the pool, you'd start your day

with this connection with water,

and that's important in this house

because the name Tirranna was selected by Wright

to signify the relationship of this house

to the Norton River right outside the window here.

And that swimming pool really floats out over a pond

that he's created by damning that river.

And then you have the river itself.

So there's always this connection with running water.

Tirranna being an aboriginal word for running water.

[gentle music]

You'll know will notice how narrow this hallway is.

There's a reason for that.

We don't spend time in hallways,

and Wright doesn't want you to spend time in this hallway

as you emerge from the bedrooms that line the space,

he really wants you to move out,

but head directly to that living space,

that big open floor plan that's connected

with that primary view, that setting above the river

and into the forest.

[gentle music]

This is now one of the many bedrooms that exist in Tirranna

because that primary bedroom that Wright had designed

for the Raywards was quite small.

They came back to him a few years after

the house was initially built

and asked him to design a more expansive

primary suite for them.

A much larger bedroom, still having a connection

with the natural world,

but also a huge primary bathroom suite.

And here in the bedroom,

a circular dressing area and closet.

There's even an observatory above this bedroom suite

so that at night Mr. Rayward could go up

and through a telescope gaze at the stars.

[birds chirping]

Because the house had such a beautiful setting,

Wright designed it in a way that would take advantage

of the natural landscape.

He left the natural stones in situ

just where the river had placed them

hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

And he gives the house this great sense of repose.

The gray of the concrete withdrawing,

the warmth of the wood emerging so that the building seems

to have always belonged in this setting.

[gentle music]

When I first encountered Wright's work

as an eight-year-old boy,

it was the space in the light that got me all excited

'cause I'd never seen anything like it.

Today, the space in the light still excites me

because I now understand why that gives us the feeling

that it does, why we feel different

in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,

and that's because he uses space

and light to create this sense of intimacy

with the world around us.

It concerns me that there's so much bland architecture,

it's just functional, when what we could do

and what we should do

is take that inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright

to give their clients a gracious way to live

as part of the world around them, connected with everybody

and everything that will make their lives better.

[gentle music]