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.

The Wright Brothers: They Showed the World How to Fly

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Source: Welcome to Voice of America Special English

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 PEOPLE IN AMERICA from VOA Special English.  Today, Sarah Long and Rich Kleinfeldt tell the story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.  The Wright brothers made a small engine-powered flying machine and proved that it was possible for humans to really fly.

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Wilbur Wright was born in eighteen sixty-seven near Melville,  Indiana.  His brother Orville was born four years later in Dayton, Ohio.  Throughout their lives, they were best friends.  As Wilbur once said: "From the time we were little children, Orville and I lived together, played together, worked together and thought together."

Wilbur and Orville's father was a bishop, an official of the United Brethren Church.  He traveled a lot on church business.  Their mother was unusual for a woman of the nineteenth century.  She had completed college.  She was especially good at mathematics and science.  And she was good at using tools to fix things or make things.

One winter day when the Wright brothers were young, all their  friends were outside sliding down a hill on wooden sleds.  The Wright brothers were sad, because they did not have a sled.  So, Mrs. Wright said she would make one for them.  She drew a picture of a sled.  It did not look like other sleds.  It was lower to the ground and not as wide.  She told the boys it would be faster, because there would be less resistance from the wind when they rode on it.  Mrs. Wright was correct.  When the sled was finished, it was the fastest one around.  Wilbur and Orville felt like they were flying.

The sled project taught the Wright brothers two important rules.  They learned they could increase speed by reducing wind resistance.  And they learned the importance of drawing a design.  Mrs. Wright said: "If you draw it correctly on paper, it will be right when you build it."

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When Wilbur was eleven years old and Orville seven, Bishop Wright  brought home a gift for them.  It was a small flying machine that  flew like helicopters of today.  It was made of paper, bamboo and  cork.

The motor was a rubber band that had to be turned many times until it was tight.  When the person holding the toy helicopter let go, it rose straight up.  It stayed in the air for a few seconds.  Then it floated down to the floor.

Wilbur and Orville played and played with their new toy.  Finally, the paper tore and the rubber band broke.  They made another one.  But it was too heavy to fly.  Their first flying machine failed.

Their attempts to make the toy gave them a new idea.  They would  make kites to fly and sell to their friends.  They made many designs and tested them.  Finally, they had the right design.  The kites flew as though they had wings.

The Wright brothers continued to experiment with mechanical  things.  Orville started a printing business when he was in high  school.  He used a small printing machine to publish a newspaper.  He sold copies of the newspaper to the other children in school, but he did not earn much money from the project.

Wilbur offered some advice to his younger brother.  Make the  printing press bigger and publish a bigger newspaper, he said.  So, together, they designed and built one.  The machine looked strange.  Yet it worked perfectly.  Soon, Orville and Wilbur were publishing a weekly newspaper.

They also printed materials for local businessmen.  They were finally earning money.  Wilbur was twenty-five years old and Orville twenty-one when they began to sell and repair bicycles.  Then they began to make them.  But the Wright brothers never stopped thinking about flying machines.

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In eighteen ninety-nine, Wilbur decided to learn about all the  different kinds of flying machines that had been designed and tested through the years.  Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  He asked for all the information it had on flying.

The Wright brothers read everything they could about people who  sailed through the air under huge balloons.  They also read about  people who tried to fly on gliders -- planes with wings, but no  motors.

Then the Wright brothers began to design their own flying machine.  They used the ideas they had developed from their earlier experiments with the toy helicopter, kites, printing machine and bicycles.

Soon, they needed a place to test their ideas about flight.  They  wrote to the Weather Bureau in Washington to find the place with  the best wind conditions.  The best place seemed to be a thin piece of sandy land in North Carolina along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.  It was called Kill Devil Hill, near the town of Kitty Hawk.  It had the right wind and open space.  Best of all, it was private.

In nineteen hundred, the Wright brothers tested a glider that could carry a person.  But neither the first or second glider they built had the lifting power needed for real flight.  Wilbur and Orville decided that what they had read about air pressure on curved surfaces was wrong.  So they built a wind tunnel two meters long in their bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio.  They tested more than two hundred designs of wings.  These tests gave them the correct information about air pressure on curved surfaces.  Now it was possible for them to design a machine that could fly.

The Wright brothers built a third glider.  They took it to Kitty Hawk in the summer of nineteen-oh-two.  They made almost one thousand flights with the glider.  Some covered more than one hundred eighty meters.  This glider proved that they had solved most of the problems of balance in flight.  By the autumn of nineteen-oh-three, Wilbur and Orville had designed and built an airplane powered by a gasoline engine.  The plane had wings twelve meters across.  It weighed about  three hundred forty kilograms, including the pilot.

The Wright brothers returned to Kitty Hawk.  On December  seventeen, nineteen-oh-three, they made the world's first flight  in a machine that was heavier than air and powered by an engine.  Orville flew the plane thirty-seven meters.  He was in the air for twelve seconds.  The two brothers made three more flights that day.  The longest was made by Wilbur.  He flew two hundred sixty meters in fifty-nine seconds.  Four other men watched the Wright brothers' first flights.  One of the men took pictures.  Few newspapers, however, noted the event.

Wilbur and Orville returned home to Ohio.  They built more powerful engines and flew better airplanes.  But their success was almost unknown.  Most people still did not believe flying was possible.  It was almost five years before the Wright brothers became famous.  In nineteen-oh-eight, Wilbur went to France.  He gave demonstration flights at heights of ninety meters.  A French company agreed to begin making the Wright brothers' flying machine.

Orville made successful flights in the United States at the time Wilbur was in France.  One lasted an hour.  Orville also made fifty-seven complete circles over a field at Fort Myer, Virginia.  The United States War Department agreed to buy a Wright brothers' plane.  Wilbur and Orville suddenly became world heroes.  Newspapers wrote long stories about them.  Crowds followed them.  But they were not seeking fame.  They returned to Dayton where they continued to improve their airplanes.  They taught many others how to fly.

Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever in nineteen twelve.  Orville  Wright continued designing and inventing until he died many years  later, in nineteen forty-eight.

Today, the Wright brothers' first airplane is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  Visitors to the museum look at the Wright brothers' small plane with its cloth wings, wooden controls and tiny engine.  Then they see space vehicles and a rock collected from the moon.  This is striking evidence of the changes in the world since Wilbur and Orville Wright began the modern age of flight, one hundred years ago.

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This program was written by Marilyn Rice Christiano and produced by Paul Thompson.  Your announcers were Sarah Long and Rich Kleinfeldt.  I'm Faith Lapidus.  Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA from VOA Special English.