Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867-1959: A Building Designer Ahead of His Time

Source: Voice of America Special English http://www.voanews.com www.manythings.org/voa/people 

I'm Phoebe Zimmerman. And I'm Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA.  Today we tell about the life and work of the greatest American building designer of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings for more than seventy years. He did most of his work from nineteen hundred through the nineteen fifties.  He designed houses, schools, churches, public buildings, and office buildings.

Critics say Frank Lloyd Wright was one of America's most creative architects. One critic said his ideas were fifty years ahead of the time in which he lived.

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Frank Lloyd Wright was born in eighteen­ sixty‑seven in the middle western state of Wisconsin. He studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin. In eighteen eighty‑seven, he went to the city of Chicago. He got a job in the office of the famous architects, Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler.

Several years later, Wright established his own building design business. He began by designing homes for people living in and near Chicago. These homes were called "prairie houses."

Prairie houses were long and low. They seemed to grow out of the ground. They were built of wood and other natural materials. The indoors expanded to the outdoors by extending the floor. This created what seemed like a room without walls or a roof.

In nineteen-oh-two, Wright designed one prairie house, called the Willits House, in the town of Highland Park. The house was shaped like a cross. It was built around a huge fireplace. The rooms were designed so they seemed to flow into each other.

Visitors to Chicago can see another of Wright's prairie houses.  It is called the Robie House.  It looks like a series of long, low rooms on different levels.  The rooms seem to float over the ground.  Wright designed everything in the house, including the furniture and floor coverings.

Wright's prairie houses had a great influence on home design in America. Even today, one hundred years later, his prairie houses appear very modern.

In the nineteen thirties, Wright developed what he called "Usonian" houses.  Usonia was his name for a perfect, democratic United States of America. Usonian houses were planned to be low cost. Wright designed them for the American middle class. These are the majority of Americans who are neither very rich nor very poor.

Frank Lloyd Wright believed that all middle class families in America should be able to own a house that was designed well. He believed that the United States could not be a true democracy if people did not own their own house on their own piece of land.

Usonian houses were built on a flat base of concrete. The base was level with the ground. Wright believed that was better and less costly than the common method of digging a hole in the ground for the base. Low‑cost houses based on the Usonian idea became very popular in America in the nineteen fifties. Visitors can see one of Wright's Usonian homes near Washington, D. C.  It is the Pope-Leighy House in Alexandria, Virginia.

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Frank Lloyd Wright believed in spreading his ideas to young building designers. In nineteen thirty‑two, he established a school called the Taliesin Fellowship. Architectural students paid to live and work with him.

During the summer, they worked at his home near Spring Green, Wisconsin.  Wright called this house "Taliesin." That is a Welsh name meaning "shining brow." It was built of stone and wood into the top of a hill.

During the winter, they worked at Taliesin West. This was Wright's home and architecture office near Phoenix, Arizona. Wright and his students started building it in nineteen thirty-seven in the Sonoran Desert.

Taliesin West is an example of Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas of organic architecture taking root in the desert.  He believed that architecture should have life and spirit.  He said a building should appear to grow naturally and easily from its base into its surroundings.  Selecting the best place to put a building became a most important first step in the design process.

Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered the beauty of the desert in nineteen twenty-seven when he was asked to help with the design of the Arizona Biltmore hotel.  He continued to return to the desert with his students to escape the harsh winters in Wisconsin.

Ten years later he found a perfect place for his winter home and school.  He bought about three hundred hectares of desert land at the foot of the McDowell Mountains near Scottsdale, Arizona.

Wright said: " I was struck by the beauty of the desert, by the dry, clear sun-filled air, by the stark geometry of the mountains."  He wanted everyone who visited Taliesin West to feel this same sense of place.

His architecture students helped him gather rocks and sand from the desert floor to use as building materials.  They began a series of buildings that became home, office and school.  Wright kept working on and changing what he called a building made of many buildings for twenty years.

Today, Taliesin West has many low stone buildings linked together by walkways and courtyards.  It is still very much alive with activity.  About seventy people live, work and study there.  Guides take visitors through what is one of America's most important cultural treasures.

In nineteen thirty‑seven, Wright designed a house near the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  It is a fine example of his idea of organic architecture. The house is called "Fallingwater." It sits on huge rocks next to a small river.  It extends over a waterfall.  From one part of the house, a person can step down a stairway over the water.

"Fallingwater" is so unusual and so beautiful that it came to represent modern American architecture. One critic calls it the greatest house of the twentieth century. Like Taliesin West, "Fallingwater" is open to the public.

Frank Lloyd Wright also is famous for designing imaginative public buildings.  In nineteen‑oh‑four, he designed an office building for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York.  The offices were organized around a tall open space.  At the top was a glass roof to let sunlight into the center.

In the late nineteen thirties, Wright designed an office building for the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin.  It also had one great room without traditional walls or windows.  The outside of the building was made of smooth, curved brick and glass.

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In nineteen forty‑three, Frank Lloyd Wright designed one of his most famous projects: the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City. The building was completed in nineteen sixty, the year following his death.

The Guggenheim is unusual because it is a circle.   Inside the museum, a walkway rises in a circle from the lowest floor almost to the top.  Visitors move along this walkway to see the artwork on the walls.

The Guggenheim museum was very different from Wright's other designs.  It even violated one of his own rules of design: the Guggenheim's shape is completely different from any of the buildings around it.

When Wright was a very old man, he designed the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California, near San Francisco.  The Civic Center project was one of his most imaginative designs.  It is a series of long buildings between two hills.

Frank Lloyd Wright believed that architecture is life itself taking form.  "Therefore," he said, "it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today, or ever will be lived."

Frank Lloyd Wright died in nineteen fifty-nine, in Phoenix, Arizona.  He was ninety‑one years old.  His buildings remain a record of the best of American Twentieth Century culture.

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This Special English program was written by Shelley Gollust and Marilyn Christiano.  It was produced by Lawan Davis. Our studio engineer was Max Carroll.  I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Phoebe Zimmerman. Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.

Buckminster Fuller, 1895-1983: Building Designer, Inventor, Poet

Source: Voice of America Special English

www.manythings.org/voa/people 

I'm Phoebe Zimmermann. And I'm Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA.  Today we tell about an unusual man who had many abilities.

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Building designer. Engineer. Inventor. Thinker. Poet. Not five people. Just one: Richard Buckminster Fuller.  "Bucky" Fuller, as he was known, was one of the most unusual thinkers of the twentieth century. His aim in life was to make the human race a success in the universe.

Bucky Fuller spent most of his life searching for new ideas. He also searched for unusual connections between existing ideas. He described himself in these words: "A complete, future-thinking design-science explorer."

Fuller believed deeply in technology. Through technology, he said, people can do anything they need to do.

R. Buckminster Fuller died in nineteen eighty-three at the age of eighty-seven. During his long life, he discussed his idea about technology and human survival. He called his idea "dymaxion." It came from three words. Dynamic, meaning a force. Maximum, meaning the most. And ion, which is an atom or group of atoms with an electrical charge.

Fuller explained the word dymaxion as a method of doing more with less. Everything he did was guided by this idea. He designed a dymaxion car, a dymaxion house, and a dymaxion map of the world. But he probably is known best for another invention -- the geodesic dome. A geodesic dome is a round building made of many straight-sided pieces.

Talking about R. Buckminster Fuller means using strange words. This is because Fuller himself invented words to describe his ideas and designs. His designs were way ahead of his time. They still are.

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R. Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts, in eighteen ninety-five. Bucky could not see clearly, because his eyes did not point straight ahead. So, his world was filled with masses of color without clear shapes.

When he was four years old, he got eyeglasses to correct the problem. Suddenly, he could see the shapes of people's faces. He could see stars in the sky and leaves on the trees. He never lost his joy at the beauty he discovered in the world.

As a child, Bucky Fuller questioned everything. He was a very independent thinker at an early age. His refusal to accept other people's ideas and rules continued as he grew older. One result was that he never completed his university studies. He was expelled two times from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He thought his time was better spent having fun than studying.

Yet Bucky Fuller was very serious about learning. He proved this when he joined the American Navy during World War One.

In the navy, he learned all about navigation, mathematics, mechanics, communications and electronics engineering. He loved this world of modern technology. Soon after he joined the Navy, he designed new rescue equipment. It helped save the lives of some pilots during training. Fuller's good Navy record won him a short-term appointment to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It was there he first developed two ideas that were important for the rest of his life.

While studying warships, Fuller realized that they weighed much less than buildings, yet were able to do much more. He decided better designs could also help humans do more, using fewer materials.

In nineteen seventeen, Bucky Fuller married Anne Hewlett. Their daughter, Alexandra, was born about a year later. Bucky was a very emotional man, as well as an intellectual one. He loved his little daughter. She was the wonder of his world. Then Alexandra became very sick. The medicine to cure her had not been invented yet. She died at the age of four.

Bucky Fuller blamed himself, although he had done everything he could to save her. His sorrow overcame him. He began to drink too much alcohol. Yet he continued to work hard.

Fuller was head of a company that made a light-weight building material. He was not a successful businessman, however. And the company began to fail. He was dismissed by the owners.  It was nineteen twenty-seven. His wife had just given birth to another baby girl. They were living in Chicago, Illinois. He had no job and no money. He felt he was a complete failure.

Bucky Fuller walked through the streets of Chicago along lake Michigan. He stood silently on the shore. He considered killing himself. Then, as he explained later, he realized he did not have the right to kill himself. He said he had felt something inside him that day. He called it the Greater Intelligence or God. It told him he belonged to the universe. So Bucky Fuller decided to live. And he would live the way he thought best. He promised to spend his remaining years in search of designs that could make human existence on Earth easier. This began his great creative period.

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Fuller's first design was the dymaxion house. It was not built at the place it would stand. It was built in a factory, then moved. It did not cost much to build. And it did not look like a traditional house in America. Its roof hung from a huge stick in the center. Its walls were made of glass. It contained everything needed for people to live. Power came from the sun. Water was cleaned and re-used.

Fuller then designed and built the dymaxion car. It looked a little like the body of an airplane. It had three wheels instead of four. It could go as fast as one hundred eighty kilometers an hour. It carried up to twelve passengers.

Several companies were interested in building and selling Fuller's house and car. But his designs were so different, so extreme, that banks were not willing to lend money for the projects. So the dymaxion house -- which could have provided low-cost housing for everyone -- was never built. And the dymaxion car -- which could have provided safe, pollution-free transportation using little gasoline -- was never produced.

Bucky Fuller did not give up his idea of doing more with less. He had an idea for another building design. It would provide the most strength with the least amount of material. He began looking for the perfect shape.

Fuller found it in nature. It appeared in the shapes of organic compounds and metals. The main part of his design is a four-sided pyramid. To create a building, many pyramids are connected to each other. The connecting piece has eight sides.

Together, these two shapes create a very strong, light-weight rounded structure. The structure can be covered with any kind of material. And it can stand without any supports inside. Fuller named this structure the geodesic dome. It covers more space with less material than any other building ever designed.

After a number of experimental geodesic domes were built, industry began to understand the value of the design. Today, there are about one hundred thousand different large and small geodesic domes in use around the world. However, no one yet has acted on one of Fuller's ideas for the geodesic dome.

There are no limits to the size of a geodesic dome. So Fuller proposed using them over cities or over areas that had severe weather. A geodesic dome that size would make it possible to have complete control over the environment inside it.

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Most of Bucky Fuller's inventions did not earn him much money. A lot of what he did earn he spent travelling around the world. He told anyone who would listen about his ideas for human life on this planet.  He called the planet "Spaceship Earth." Humans, he said, are astronauts on Spaceship Earth. They are travelling one hundred thousand kilometers an hour around the sun. He said the Earth is like a large mechanical device that will survive only if people living on it know how to operate it correctly.

People must live on Earth just as astronauts live in a spaceship. They must use their supplies wisely, and re-use them. Buckminster Fuller said humans are able, through planning and wise use of natural supplies, to feed and house themselves forever.

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This VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA, was written by Marilyn Rice Christiano. It was produced by Lawan Davis. Our studio engineer was Sulaiman Tarawaley.  I'm Phoebe Zimmerman. And I'm Steve Ember.  Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.