After the “Starchitect:” Wright Finds his Voice after Being Fired

Abstract

The term “Starchitect” seems to have originated in the 1940’s to describe a “film star who has designed a house” but of late has been understood as an architect who has risen to celebrity status in the general culture. Louis Sullivan, like Daniel Burnham, might have been considered a “starchitect.” Starchitects are frequently associated with a unique style or approach to architecture and all who work for them, adopt this style as their own as a matter of employment. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of these architects, working under and in the idiom of Louis Sullivan for six years, learning to draw and develop motifs in the style of Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright’s firing by Louis Sullivan in 1893 and his rapidly growing family set him on an urgent course to seek his own voice. The bootleg houses, designed outside the contract terms Wright had with Adler and Sullivan caused the separation, likely fueled by both Sullivan and Wright’s ego, which left Wright alone, separated from his “Lieber Meister” or “Beloved Master.” These early houses by Wright were adaptations of various styles popular in the times, Neo-Colonial for Blossom, Victorian for Parker and Gale, each, as Wright explained were not “radical” because “I could not follow up on them.” Wright, like many young architects, had not yet codified his ideas and strategies for activating space and form. How does one undertake the search for one’s language of these architectural essentials? Does one randomly pursue a course of trial and error casting about through images that capture one’s attention? Do we restrict our voice to that which has already been voiced in history? Wright’s agenda would have included the merging of space and enclosure with site and nature structured as he understood it from Sullivan’s Ornament. While the houses that followed Wright’s departure from Sullivan lack the formal coherence of the skillfully adapted “Bootleg” houses, these transitional houses constitute important markers of Wright’s practice-based research towards finding a harmonious relation between plan and section, space and mass, a structure for form and space. Practice based design research is essential to architects and architecture and can offer students and new practitioners a strategy to accelerate their own growth. Frank Lloyd Wright’s hundreds of houses offer a unique glimpse into the development of an expression of beliefs in form and space. This paper will present a timeline and study of Wright’s earliest, sometimes awkward steps, and propose that it is an ornamental structure, learned by Wright at the desk of Sullivan, was the catalytic force that freed Wright from historicism and set him on a path of clear principle that would deeply influence the works that have made him a Master.

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