Exhibition Catalog - Lawrence Technological University

evealing, inaccurate, but compelling book” about
Wright’s life and philosophy. 8 An Autobiography was
reviewed and praised in many leading journals. The
second book, The Disappearing City, was Wright’s tirade
against urbanization; it contained his first discussion
of Broadacre City, the agrarian utopia that he
intended as the replacement for the modern city.
3
In the next five years, Wright reemerged on the national
architectural scene with such renowned designs
as the Kaufmann “Fallingwater” House (1935),
the Jacobs House (1936), the Johnson Wax Administration
Building (1936), and his second home, Taliesin
West (1937). His star shone brighter than ever, and
more commissions began to arrive at Taliesin. Wright
appeared on the cover of Time in January, 1938,
and in nearly thirty articles during that year, from
such popular fare as Life and The New Yorker to a remarkable
special issue of Architectural Forum (also in
January) devoted entirely to his architecture. 9 And
the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an
exhibition on Fallingwater in January, the first time
that institution ever held a major one-building exhibit
on a living architect. Wright would continue to work
on a seemingly endless stream of compositions until
his death in 1959 at the age of ninety-one.
Usonian Houses
The major project of the last two decades of Frank
Lloyd Wright’s life was the creation and promotion
of “Usonian” houses. Wright conceived the Usonian
project as an extension of the principles first developed
in his Prairie-style houses of the 1900s-1910s.
“Usonia” was a word coined by Wright to represent
“The United States of America” – inspired by his perception
that the moniker “America” was too vague,
arguably including countries beyond the U.S.A. His
intention was to build on the basic elements of the
Prairie houses – natural materials, harmony with nature,
open plans, and a uniquely American idiom
– by utilizing mass production technology to produce
affordable single-family housing for all socioeconomic
classes. The Usonians would achieve their
inexpensiveness through prefabricated parts, paring
the house down to basics, and using a new method
for constructing walls. Conceived as an antidote to
the social and economic realities of the Great Depression,
eighteen Usonian houses were built between
1939 and 1941; the Usonian program eventually
produced over 100 houses before Wright’s death
in 1959.
Wright was not alone in turning to mass production as
a means to stimulate housing construction during the
Depression. Although prefabricated housing dates
back to the nineteenth century, conditions in Europe
after World War I, and around the world in the thirties,
drove architects of all persuasions to tackle the
challenge of designing cost-efficient houses, leading
Photograph by Balthazar Korab