‘Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you’ – Frank Lloyd Wright
The NGV Collection contains three works by celebrated twentieth-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright, including two recent acquisitions supported by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, and the Joe White Bequest that reveal his humanist approach to light-filled, liveable architecture and design. Discover what influenced Wright the most, from nature to Japanese art, with a closer look at these works.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is one of the most universally acclaimed architect-designers of the twentieth century. He grew up in a late nineteenth-century United States still very much influenced by the ideal of an agrarian, or agricultural, society. In many ways Wright remained of the nineteenth century, with a great love for nature. His abiding feeling for the land and his belief in humankind’s need for a direct relationship with nature were essential to his concept of an ‘organic architecture’ – what Wright envisioned as an American architecture distinct from European Classical and Renaissance traditions. His antipathy toward historical European design was matched by a love for non-Western art, particularly that of Japan.
In his search for a uniquely American style of architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century, Wright pioneered what he called the Prairie style, inspired by the broad sweeping landscapes of the Midwest. His houses were characterised by a strong horizontal linearity, with overhanging hipped roofs and semi–open plan interiors that were designed to be adaptable to the changing needs of families, yet to also retain a unified and harmonious aesthetic. One of Wright’s most distinguished houses of the period was the Avery Coonley House, a two-storey family home in Riverside, Illinois that was one of his most elaborate Prairie-style designs. With a desire to unify the interior and exterior, Wright incorporated rows of clerestory windows around the upper walls of many of the rooms, with each room’s windows having their own geometric design. The NGV’s Window from the Avery Coonley House, Riverside, Illinois, c.1906–08, generously gifted by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, comes from the family room of the house. Its deceptively simple geometric formalism is closely aligned with the work of Viennese designers Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, who were working at the same time, as well as that of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. All of these designers were inspired by the principles of Japanese design, with its visual play and careful balancing of solid and void spaces.
Just a few years earlier in 1903 Wright was engaged to design the administration building and interior furnishings for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York. The building contained many innovations, not least of which was the enormous central court surrounded by balconies, which introduced abundant natural light into all parts of the building. Wright also introduced the concept of the open-plan office and designed much of the office furniture in metal to address fire-hazard concerns.
The perforated backrest of his Office chair, from the Larkin Company Administration Building, New York, 1904–06, reflects the preoccupations of Wright and other designers of the time with the possibilities of grid-form geometry, and reveals his familiarity with contemporary design trends in Europe. The chair represents one of the first modern office-chair designs, the functional elements of which have been continuously interpreted by designers ever since.
In 1916 Wright was commissioned by the Japanese government to design the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The commission was one of the largest of his career and represented a new phase, as he moved away from the Prairie style towards a more organic architectural style. With his deep regard for Japanese design philosophies Wright conceived the hotel as acting as a bridge between the East and the West, and as symbolic of the emergence of Japan as a modern nation. Wright wrote in his autobiography,
Japanese fine-art traditions are among the noblest and purest in this world …The West has much to learn from the East – and Japan was the gateway to that great East of which I had been dreaming since I had seen my first Japanese prints, and read my first Laotze.
Along with the architecture, Wright was commissioned to design the hotel’s interiors and furnishings. It was the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. One of his key furniture designs was Peacock chair from the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, 1921, from the Peacock Banquet Room; it also featured in several public spaces around the hotel. A recent addition to the NGV Collection, through the leadership support of Joe White Bequest and donors to the Frank Lloyd Wright Appeal, the bold, angular design of the chair has been variously interpreted as showing the influences of Art Deco, and as well as referencing Mayan Revival aspects of the building’s architecture. But regardless of these varying interpretations, the chair illustrates signature aspects of Wright’s design aesthetic in its use of solid oak, and the celebration rather than the concealing of the chair’s construction.
The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1968 having sustained damage to its foundations during the Second World War and by the 1960s under pressure from high rise development. The Peacock chair has come to symbolise one of Wrights greatest accomplishments and a significant moment in his career when he was able to marry his own cultural background with his longstanding fascination for Japan and its artistic traditions.
Amanda Dunsmore is NGV Senior Curator, International Decorative Arts & Antiquities.
This essay was commissioned for NGV Magazine, Issue 29 Jul–Aug 2020.