| Before Frank Lloyd Wright's eccentric personality and self- proclaimed genius elevated him to his present status as an American icon, he gained worldwide praise by 1905 as the inventor of the Prairie Home. The prairie house refigured the nature of American family life, and offered an environment which strengthened the workings of family life. Wright's upper-middle class clients generated the majority of his popularity. They approved of Wright's new invention because it preserved their social status from the impending forces of urbanism and family disintegration. In selling his idea to the urban gentry, Wright purveyed in solid form his ideology of the American family and its relation to the surrounding society. Wright emphasized the house as a means of strengthening the family against increased social disorder. Chicago residents had witnessed some of the worst labor disputes in the nation's history, the Pullman Strike and the Haymarket Riot. Wright's success in marketing his social ideology stemmed from his ability to allay through his architecture the apprehensions generated by such events.
Wright's prairie homes embody a multitude of dualities which serve to blur his ideology. Wright attempted to provide a shelter for modern family life while at the same time conforming to Victorian notions of order and social hospitality.
A primary
goal of the prairie house was to offer protection from the
threatening evils of society. Even in the early Winslow House,
Wright's defensive posture begins to emerge. The disproportionate
smallness of its front door and the concealment of windows
underneath the wide overhang of the roof suggests the values
of privacy and seclusion. And the Willett House looks forward
to the Robie House, Wright's cantilevered fortress
in the heart of Chicago through its "setback" stance
toward the street. Wright positioned the house at the rear
of the lot, while the Robie House accomplishes this stance
of defensiveness with a brick wall facing the sidewalk on
all sides. Wright intends in both sites to establish a buffer
zone between the family and the larger society. The front
facades of Wright's prairie homes reveal a duality of purpose,
a simultaneous attempt at Victorian decorum and social withdrawal.
According to Twombley:
The prairie house drew on the newer metropolitan notions that
home life was not to be intruded upon except by invitation,
that it was separate though not totally withdrawn from the
rest of the community, and that contact with the outside world
should be at the residents' discretion.
Relating to the front facade's balance between withdrawal
and social acceptance, the rear facade contradicts the order
of the front facade in its disorder. The Winslow House's street
facade reveals a component of its character which is formal
and ordered. The informality of the opposite side of the house
says something quite different. Thus, we see a duality of
purpose in Wright's design, an order and a disorder counterbalanced.
This duality can be viewed as either Wright's confusion of
motives or his attempt to meet the pluralistic demands of
his clients.
Wright's exteriors reveal his desire to integrate the house
with its natural surroundings. The prairies were flat, so
Wright "brought the whole house down to scale . . . .
The house began to associate with the ground, and became natural
to the prairie site." The wide-sweeping horizontal lines
and the articulated overhang of the roof illustrated the importance
of horizontal components in Wright's prairie exteriors.
Wright himself claimed that the interior of the prairie house
held the greatest significance, and the outside "was
there, chiefly because of what happened inside." With
his "open plan" ,he sought to "beat the box,"
to escape the Victorian compartmentalization which he claimed
was stifling the American family. The archetypal vision of
the Victorian home, with mother entertaining the ladies over
tea in the parlor, the father smoking cigars in the study,
and the children banished to the nursery upstairs, was Wright's
nemesis. To avoid this subdivision of space, Wright did away
with the conventional divisions between spaces on the lower
floors of his prairie homes. Rather than setting rooms in
the house apart in its space and function, he unified them
into one common space.
Rather than use walls and doors, Wright separated rooms through
permeable partitions which preserved a sense of progression
through space without enclosure. The Winslow House floor plan
flows into the library to the left and the living room to
the right, then proceeds into the dining room. This "open
plan" provides for greater circulation through the space,
an intertwining, commingling of spaces.
Prairie house space was multipurpose. It minimized the singularity
of the event's location . . . . With the floor plan more open,
children could not be isolated . . . nor could household functions
be kept apart . . . The dining area might become a sewing
room between meals and the parlor a noisy playroom all day
(11).
Thus, the "open plan" works against a rigidly defined
set of behavioral and social patterns within its spaces, and
increases the potential for family interaction.
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