Frank Lloyd Wright design
Frank Lloyd Wright’s design was pure; it came from the bottom of his heart. For him it didn’t matter the location of the building. Moreover, it was a challenge for him to design a building on an island or upon a rock on that island. It seemed that water was inspiring for him.
Once he was asked to design a house on an island. An architect, Thomas Heinz offered him five sketches in 1950. They were drawn in pencil. All that those sketches contained were some plans of the flooring, three elevation images, viewed in perspective and in section. He didn’t receive any instructions, or dimensions or material. Wright had designed before, houses following a square or rectangular grid, but this time the grid were triangular, and in the middle of the location the rock was 60 foot long. Of course, it was a special design, a challenging one, for the architect. We all know that any architect knows very well each detail of his work. After everything is clear in his mind, he has to put it down on paper. After this step, the architect must distribute the work to other experts who help him. The plan of this building was based on an equilateral triangle, each side having five feet. That site was located between Vermont and New York. Frank Lloyd Wright designed furniture too, which because of the aspect can be integrated in a special category with difficulty, because it depends a lot on the design of the entire building. Wright introduced the concept of embedded furniture, in architecture. More than 70 years ago, Japanese government asked Frank Lloyd Wright, to design a great hotel in Tokyo, which could resist during the greatest earthquakes. When the architect got to Tokyo to inspect the land where he was to build the Imperial Hotel, he noticed that the soil was hard only on the surface, but if he dug deeper, he would realize that there was a mud layer, like gelatin. During the tests, each hole that the architect dug filled immediately with water. Given this structure of the land, another architect would have given up working for them, or he would have asked them to change the site. But it wasn’t Lloyd’s case. Being aware that the hotel would be built on a swampy land, he designed it like a boat. Instead of building a rigid structure, deeply fixed in the soil, he designed a mobile one, which was able to take over the shock of the earthquakes. Even if the hotel had moved more than other buildings during an earthquake, it would have remained intact at the earthquake shock waves, as being mobile, the waves passed under the boat, like a water flow. We offered you this example in order to inform you about this great architect, for whom imagination, creativity was an essential issue of his design, of his entire work. Apart from intelligence and creativity he was able to work with different kinds of people too, and he always adapted his style to their demands.
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