THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK
On a hot August evening in 1906, America's premier inventor, Thomas Edison, stood up to give a short, impromptu speech at a dinner reception held in his honor in New York City. Edison was asked what new marvel he would present to the world. After a moment's hesitation, he said, “Concrete houses.” After all, he told the rapt audience, concrete was fireproof, termite-proof, immune to mildew and dry rot, and would stand up well to most natural disasters. The very recent San Francisco earthquake was still fresh in everyone's mind, and concrete structures had reportedly performed better during the disaster than those built of wood or masonry. Although houses had been constructed of reinforced concrete for several decades (e.g., Ward's Castle), they had usually been expensive, custom-built affairs. Now Edison was asserting that roomy concrete houses could be built on an industrial scale so that the cost of each would be “about one thousand dollars,” less than the price for most modest homes in 1906.1
Edison's pronouncement made headlines the following day. Edison seemed to be earnest, for he was then in the final stages of constructing the world's largest concrete cement plant in Stewartsville, New Jersey.
Edison's involvement in the cement business came about accidentally. Long fascinated by ore-refining equipment, he had patented an iron-ore processor in 1881 that used powerful electromagnets to separate the higher-yield iron ores from the lower-grade variety. Rich deposits in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey were being depleted toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the price of steel had risen as a result. Not unreasonably, Edison believed that his new process would make him a fortune. Shortly after filing his patent, Edison formed the Edison Ore Mining Company. The company purchased ore-bearing land in northern New Jersey, and a couple of years later it opened its processing plant near the mines and town of Ogdensburg. From the beginning, things did not go as planned. Edison's ore separator did not work as well in reality as it did on paper and frequently broke down. Undaunted by repeated failures and soaring costs, Edison continued to improve the processes and design new equipment. It wasn't long before the Ogdensburg operation had morphed into an investment pit that sucked in money like a black hole does stars. By the end of the century, Edison had fixed most of the bugs, and the ore separators were finally refining quality iron ore from poorer stock. Unfortunately, the fixes had come too late: vast iron-ore deposits had been discovered on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota that were so pure they required little or no processing; steam shovels just scooped up the ore and dumped it into open-top railroad freight wagons that transported it to the eastern steel furnaces. As a result, the price of quality iron ore dropped precipitously, and there was simply no way that Edison could provide the same product at equivalent prices. The Wizard—and the extraordinarily patient stockholders of the Edison Ore Mining Company—lost millions.
Nevertheless, Edison still had the ability to turn lemons into lemonade. As he was recovering from his ore-processing fiasco, he watched the meteoric rise of reinforced concrete and realized that his huge ore crushers were perfect for reducing limestone to the consistency needed to make cement. Coincidentally, there was a limestone quarry just a few miles from Ogdensburg, near Stewartsville. It was a perfect match. The Wizard bought the quarry and formed the Edison Portland Cement Company in 1902. The heavy ore equipment was disassembled, packed up, and moved to the new site. Since Edison never did anything by half measures, he also designed and built a one-hundred-fifty-foot-long rotary kiln—a colossus that was almost double the size of the largest rotary kilns then in existence. By August 1906, when Edison announced his intent to produce cheap concrete houses, his massive Stewartsville plant was close to completion.
To this day, we do not know whether Edison was really serious about his proposal in 1906 to manufacture concrete houses. He was certainly serious about producing Portland cement, but the banquet announcement was probably nothing more than a trial balloon sent aloft to judge public reaction to the idea. He certainly had not lifted a finger to advance such a project, nor have we been able to find any plans he might have made before his dinner speech. We do know that he did take the project seriously after thousands of letters poured in from excited would-be home buyers. Even Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sent a letter to the Wizard eagerly requesting details. Edison, chastened by his previous failures, was reluctant to invest in anything that did not have an existing market. The positive response to his announcement signified to him that the market did exist. Whatever his thoughts may have been beforehand, Edison was now determined to manufacture inexpensive reinforced concrete houses—and lots of them.
Even as Edison continued to push concrete houses publicly, he was too busy with other inventions to devote any of his immediate time to the project. Initial work did not begin until 1908, when he constructed a model of his concrete house based on a design he had commissioned from the New York architectural firm Mann & MacNeille. Edison was determined that his homes not look plain and told the firm's architects to make the structure as attractive as possible. The firm came up with a two-story design described as being in the style of “Francis I.” In reality, the architecture would be best described as a version of the “craftsman house” that was then so popular. The model home impressed no one, and Edison's employees jokingly referred to it as the “chicken coop.”2
That same year, Edison began conducting his first serious experiments in reinforced concrete construction. Large wooden molds were created, and the pouring and setting properties of Portland cement were then examined. Apparently, Edison believed that concrete could be poured into molds designed for houses in much the same way as it was done for much larger structures, such as the Ingalls Building. However, molds for skyscrapers are obviously far larger than those for houses, and so pouring the concrete for larger structures is a relatively easy operation. In the case of the Ingalls Building, the pour was performed slowly, and each layer of concrete was allowed to set before more was added. However, Edison wanted to create his two-story house, both frame and walls, in a single pour. This presented problems: the mold dimensions for his house were considerably smaller and thinner, making it difficult for the lumpy concrete to wrap around the interior rebar and flow into all the cavities. Modern cement also has a tendency to set rapidly, usually within an hour, unless a setting retardant (usually gypsum) is added to the mix. Since Edison estimated that he would need at least six hours to complete a pour for each house, this presented some difficulties. He also discovered another problem with the single-pour method: the heavier aggregate tended to drift toward the bottom of the molds if it flowed beyond a certain distance, creating an unstable mix. Edison was also not happy with the wooden forms that served as the molds: they tended to warp and left unsightly marks on the concrete's surface after they were removed.
If Edison had read the existing technical papers or talked to people in the concrete industry, he would have discovered that increasing the amount of gypsum in the cement would have prolonged the setting period and given him the extra hours he needed. He would have also learned how to fix the problem of aggregate settling in a long flow—gravity versus viscosity—by simply switching to two different flow points. Also, others had solved the wooden mold problems. To prevent warping, the current custom was to securely brace the wooden mold with crosshatched boards. Sanding and coating the surface where the concrete came into contact with the mold also eliminated the aesthetic imperfections. Yet, instead of following these established and field-proven construction practices, Edison decided to invent a new formula for making the cement and sought a better material for creating the molds.
If these problems all had ready solutions, why didn't the Wizard make use of them? Edison often refused to learn from others and frequently had to discover things for himself. If pressed, Edison might have said that he was always looking for a better solution, but in this case, his refusal to seek help from others was due to stubbornness. While stubbornness is often useful—as it was in Edison's exhaustive search to find the right material for his electric lightbulb filaments—it sometimes blinded him to relevant facts or possible remedies. For example, Edison was so absorbed in fixing the problems of his ore-refining equipment in Ogdensburg that he ignored the news coming out of Minnesota about the rich iron deposits discovered there and the implications this would have for his mining operation.
As the Wizard hunkered down to solve the already-solved problems of his concrete houses, it seemed to some like another fiasco in the making.
A couple of years passed, with more experiments, formulas, and processes being tried. And all the while, Edison continued to promote the concrete houses that he would “shortly” release to the world. He also added a humanitarian touch by proclaiming that his concrete houses would represent “the salvation of the slum dweller,” and that tenement housing would soon be “a thing of the past.” Edison also announced that he would make no profit in the venture; he would freely license the technology to anyone who agreed that the majority of the concrete houses so constructed be reserved for the working classes and that the profits realized not exceed 10 percent. By this time, Edison had patented a new concrete formula with bentonite clay that purportedly made the casting process for houses easier. (In truth, most of the improvements had probably been achieved when Edison reduced the size of the aggregate and used more gypsum to lengthen the setting time.) Licensing issues aside, if the Wizard could convince Americans to switch from wood to concrete houses, he would still stand to make a tidy profit with his newly patented cement.
One of Edison's neighbors, Frank D. Lambie, an expert in designing assembly line machinery, was so excited by the idea of concrete houses that he offered to fabricate the molds at his own expense. Lambie knew that many prominent industrialists were looking for decent yet inexpensive housing for their workers, and Edison's concrete homes seemed to provide the perfect solution. Unfortunately, the Wizard decided that the molds for his houses needed to be constructed of cast iron, not wood. Even though the switch to cast iron would drive up the mold's costs and weight considerably, Lambie evidently decided that the scheme would still be practical if he could obtain a large enough construction contract.
It took Lambie most of a year—and his savings—to create the huge cast-iron molds for the Mann & MacNeille-designed house. By the time he was finished, the mold set contained between 2,300 and 2,500 parts (the final number depending on the options exercised by the buyer) and weighed more than 450,000 pounds—this, at a time when heavy loads could be transported only by rail or large wagons drawn by teams of Clydesdale horses.
As a working exercise, Lambie built two of the houses in Montclair, New Jersey, near the Wizard's Menlo Park facility. The construction work did not go smoothly; the operation took weeks instead of days, and Lambie was forced to fill the molds one story at a time instead of through Edison's “single-pour-for-both-stories” procedure. After discussing his problems with Edison, the latter decided that the Mann & MacNeille design was too complicated, and he turned to his own company draftsmen to draw up plans for a smaller house with a simpler building plan.3 We do not know what Lambie's reaction was to the sudden realization that his expensive and elaborately machined cast-iron molds were now probably worthless, but it could not have been a happy one.
Edison's new house design also proved disappointing. It was a very simple and unadorned two-story affair that was little more than an upright rectangular box with windows. Edison's houses would be plain after all. The first story consisted of a living room and kitchen, with a small cellar below. The second story included two bedrooms and the home's only bathroom. On the practical side, the new house would be easier to build, and its cast-iron molds would consist of just 500 parts and weigh only 250,000 pounds. (Edison still refused to reconsider employing wooden forms, though everyone else in the concrete industry was using them effectively and without problems.) Once the new cast-iron molds were ready, Lambie and his crew built a house of the new design in South Orange, New Jersey. Aside from a few minor hiccups, the concrete castings went well.
By 1911, the public was losing interest in Edison's concrete houses. Five years had passed, and, aside from a few model homes, the project had yet to be realized on an appreciable scale. Still, the Wizard remained an inventor as well as a major cement producer (his product was now being used throughout New York City), and he therefore felt that he had to come up with something soon that was made of concrete. He decided that it would be furniture, which could be produced relatively quickly and required far simpler molds, and using heavy aggregates could be skipped entirely. In December 1911, Edison unveiled a concrete phonograph cabinet before members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. After extolling the allegedly superior acoustics of concrete, he went on to describe his pre-IKEA Arcadia:
I'm going to have concrete furniture on the market in the near future that will make it possible for the laboring man to put furniture in his home more artistic and more durable than is now to be found in the palatial residences in Paris or along the Rhine.
And will it be cheap? Of course it will. If I couldn't put out my concrete furniture cheaper than the oak [furniture] that comes from Grand Rapids I wouldn't go into the business. If a newlywed, say, now starts out with $450 worth of furniture on the installment plan I feel confident that we can give him more artistic and more durable furniture for $200. I'll also be able to put out a whole bedroom set for five or six dollars.4
When quizzed about the heavy weight of concrete, Edison made the incredible claim that his concrete furniture would be only “33.3 percent heavier” than its oak counterparts, although he could probably reduce the difference to “25 percent.”5 Edison's claim that his concrete furniture would be only 25 percent heavier was rather amazing, considering that a cubic square foot (ca. .0283 cubic m) of concrete tips the scales at 150 pounds (ca. 68 kg), while the same volume of the oak is 59 lbs (ca. 26.7 kg). Although Edison told reporters that the furniture would be built using a proprietary “concrete foam,” it could not have been radically lighter than the standard mix, since air entrainment only marginally reduces concrete's weight, usually by 3 to 9 percent.
To prove the durability of his concrete furniture, the Wizard packed up his phonograph cabinet and sent it on a round-trip journey that included stops at New Orleans and Chicago before finally returning home to the Big Apple, where the cabinet would be unveiled at a cement industry show. Edison affixed signs on the shipping crate that read “Please drop and abuse this package.” However, after the crate had returned to New York, Edison canceled a scheduled press conference to show off the cabinet's resilience to abuse. We do not know what transpired, but it seems probable that the package had arrived in a damaged state—the transport handlers may have accepted Edison's dare with relish. Edison no longer spoke of the advantages of concrete furniture and stopped all efforts to produce it. A thousand people in the cement industry could have told Edison that dropping anything made of concrete was a bad idea, but Edison, as usual, had to first learn it for himself.
The furniture fiasco apparently also dampened Edison's enthusiasm for concrete houses, for he now divorced himself from the project, declaring that he had already “shown the way,” and it was up to others to “fulfill the promise.” Poor Frank Lambie was in a quandary. Having invested so much of his fortune in the concrete molds, he could hardly have had much leftover to fulfill the promise. (Lambie had already moved into one of the two original Mann & MacNeille houses to save money.)
Shaking off his despondency, Lambie became a salesman, with all the energy, aggression, and desperation emblematic of a struggling one-man company. He began approaching the titans of industry to promote his low-cost concrete housing for their employees. Lambie pressed Henry Ford especially hard when he learned in the summer of 1914 that the carmaker was considering building two thousand houses for his autoworkers. Lambie sent blueprints, photographs, and brochures of his houses to Ford, and in his accompanying letters he emphasized his friendship with Thomas Edison, whom he knew Ford admired. Ford considered Lambie's proposal and, as was typical of him, took his time. After months had passed with no answer from Ford, Lambie put forward an extremely attractive price for a single-family house: $525 each, “about the price of one of your automobiles.” Fancier houses for middle management could be had for $1,025, and spacious villas for upper-echelon executives would be only a couple thousand more (Lambie had apparently not scrapped the molds for the Mann & MacNeille house).
The low prices caught the thrifty automaker's attention. Ford sent the blueprints for the $1,025 home to an architect friend, Albert Kahn, for comment. After perusing the blueprints, Kahn told Ford that such a house could not be built for less than $1,500. When Ford passed Kahn's remarks on to Lambie, the latter wired back that the Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company of Midland, Pennsylvania, was pouring that very design for $200 less than the original quoted price of $1,025. By the early summer of 1915, Ford began negotiating with Lambie in earnest and even released a press bulletin announcing his intention to build two thousand concrete homes for his employees.6
Lambie, swept up by his success, overreached himself: he now attempted to convince Ford to build one million concrete homes. All Ford had to do was invest one hundred million dollars (roughly two billion in today's inflation-adjusted dollars) in the project, for which he would eventually reap three hundred million dollars in profits. No one knew more about the savings that could be accrued through mass production than Henry Ford, and he could usually perform a rough cost-benefit analysis in his head without resorting to a calculator or slide rule. Ford did not need to consult Kahn a second time to know that Lambie's revenue claims for his grandiose million-home project were nonsense. It was probably at this point that the carmaker also began to question Lambie's projected costs for the two thousand concrete homes planned for his employees. Ford withdrew from the housing deal just before the contract was to be signed, and Lambie was back to square one.7
Yet Lambie persevered, barely sustaining himself with the thin profits earned through small concrete construction projects. In late 1916, he was able to convince Charles Ingersoll, who had made millions with his reliable one-dollar pocket watch, to invest in the Lambie Concrete House Corporation. The two men decided on a pilot project in the growing community of Union, New Jersey. Forty houses were planned, the first eleven of which were built in late July 1917 on a street named Ingersoll Terrace, in honor of Lambie's new partner.
The eleven homes were constructed with little trouble. Lambie had learned much in the past several years and by now probably knew more about building concrete houses than anyone else. Though Lambie made sure that the project on Ingersoll Terrace received maximum publicity, only a few reporters showed up on the day they were unveiled. Concrete houses were now “old news.” Worse, Lambie and Ingersoll had difficulties finding buyers for them. Although somewhat plain, the homes were certainly no uglier than others in their price range. Why were the houses not selling?
The reason Lambie and Ingersoll had trouble moving the houses was likely due to Edison: for years the Wizard had trumpeted concrete homes as the salvation of the slum dweller—and who wanted to be known as a rescued slum dweller? Edison's insistence on restricting the profit margins probably rankled contractors as well. In effect, Edison had dampened most people's enthusiasm for either purchasing or building concrete houses. Ingersoll quickly lost interest in the Union project and withdrew from his partnership with Lambie. The remaining twenty-nine homes were never built.
Frank Lambie would continue building concrete houses, but on a scale much smaller than he had originally envisioned. By 1920, Lambie was selling houses of the simplified Edison design for three thousand dollars each, more than the cost of a comparable wood-frame house. He had apparently given up the dream of low-cost concrete homes through mass production and instead emphasized the advantages of concrete over wood construction. Had Edison done the same and skipped his pitch about saving the slum dweller, most of our houses today might well have been built of Portland cement instead of pine and plaster.
When Thomas Edison announced his intention to build concrete houses in 1906, a thirty-eight-year-old architect in Oak Park, Illinois, had already been designing extraordinary buildings constructed of the material. And by 1917, when Frank Lambie was finally putting up his Edison homes in Union, New Jersey, this same architect was using the properties of reinforced concrete to create buildings, the likes of which had never been seen before. The architect's name was Frank Lloyd Wright.
Until Wright came along, reinforced concrete structures appeared no different from their wood or masonry counterparts, for they were essentially modeled on them. Wright was the first architect since Roman times to recognize that concrete allowed for the creation of completely new forms. Whereas the Romans used unreinforced concrete to create soaring ceiling vaults and domes, Wright employed the great tensile strength of reinforced concrete to build amazing cantilevered structures. He would rewrite the rules of structural design, and his reputation and work would be forever tied to his imaginative use of concrete. As a result, the visual landscape of our world would never look the same.
Wright's contributions deserve a closer examination than those of most other architects of his period. Besides his original and pioneering use of concrete, and the enormous influence his work has had on modern architecture, most of his buildings have also withstood the test of time, at least from the standpoint of aesthetics, far better than the creations of most of his contemporaries, many of which now appear dated, ugly, or both. And, contrary to most geniuses, who usually produce their best work in youth or early middle age, Wright's considerable gifts seem to have blossomed more with each passing decade, reaching full flower in his senior years.
Frank Lincoln Wright was born in Greenfield, Wisconsin, in 1867. His father, William Carey Wright, was an itinerant minister and music teacher with three children who was widowed shortly before meeting Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones. Anna was a former schoolteacher who belonged to a close-knit Welsh family. Wright's parents quarreled frequently. William's mood swings suggest bipolar disorder, and Anna may have suffered from the same affliction. It was not a happy household. Frank frequently escaped the hostile home environment by withdrawing into a more perfect imaginary world. Bipolar disorder is often a hereditary disease, and Frank's parents may have passed it on to him. It would explain both his brilliance and occasional social disconnectedness.8 They divorced several years later, while Frank was still in his teens.
Wright strongly identified with his mother's branch of the family and would later change his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd in honor of them. The Lloyd-Joneses had converted to the Unitarian branch of Protestantism over a century earlier in the old country and had remained true to both their faith and a long tradition of progressive politics (they were fervent foes of slavery and early champions of women's emancipation).
In his biography, Wright asserts that he “had no choice” but to take up the profession that would later make him famous. His loving, though strong-willed, mother had declared that her only son would be an architect while the lad was still an infant. To help direct his young mind toward that goal, she put up prints of the great cathedrals on the walls around his crib and encouraged him to play with elaborate building blocks invented by the German educator Friedrich Fröbel.9 Wright never questioned his mother's career choice for him, for it proved a perfect fit for his innate talents as an artist, draftsman, and dreamer. He would take great pleasure in designing unique and beautiful buildings until the last days of his very long life.
Wright also possessed an extraordinarily rare gift: an eidetic imagination, the ability to visualize in his mind a complex three-dimensional object in all its details and then view it correctly from all angles—a remarkable attribute he shared with his near-contemporary, the inventor Nikola Tesla. An incredible but well-authenticated story illustrates this exceptional faculty. One day, when an impatient client had called Wright about a long-overdue home design, the architect told him that the plans were ready and that he could come over to look at them. In truth, aside from visualizing the plans in his mind, Wright had yet to do any work on the project. Knowing that it would take his client several hours to reach his office, Wright called in his staff, pulled out three large sheets of drafting paper—one for each story of the large residence—and proceeded to draw the blueprints, explaining to his staff the purpose of each feature as he worked. He drew so fast that his employees had to constantly sharpen pencils as he wore down each to its wooden nub. Wright finished his design within a couple of hours, a feat that most would have deemed impossible were it not witnessed by a half dozen people.10 The house was the famous Fallingwater, consistently ranked by many architects as the most beautiful home designed in the twentieth century.
In this youth, Wright's lack of academic achievement seemed to cast doubts on his prospects. He never finished high school, he attended college for only a couple of semesters, and he ignored subjects that bored him or had no relevance to architecture. With the possible exception of his adoring mother, few members of Wright's family or small circle of early friends recognized his special qualities. Many suspected that he would, like his father, wind up a shiftless charmer. Shiftless he was not. Armed with nothing more than a few sketches, and all the cheeky courage and boundless determination of youth, Wright went to Chicago and promptly got a job as a draftsman in Joseph Lyman Silsbee's architectural firm. Wright was just twenty years old.
Silsbee was one of Chicago's most successful architects. Though his work generally conformed to the prevailing conservatism of his clients, Silsbee could also design daring buildings when given the freedom to do so, such as Chicago's Lincoln Park Conservatory. To most aspiring architects, the opportunity to work for such a prestigious firm would have seemed like a gift from heaven, but Wright was not like most aspiring architects. A year after being hired, he jumped ship and went to work for an even more prestigious firm: Adler and Sullivan, whose chief architect, Louis Sullivan, had been making waves in his profession for almost a decade.
The Great Fire of 1871 had leveled most of Chicago. The rebuilding of America's second-largest city had required the work of not only thousands of carpenters and brick masons but of hundreds of architects as well. Instead of the gradual permeation of new architectural styles to replace the old, a fresh generation of architects would leave their imprint throughout the Windy City. From this new breed would arise the “Chicago School” of architecture, and Louis Sullivan was at the forefront of this new movement.
When Wright came to his firm, Sullivan was at the apex of his career and busy creating a novel and uniquely American architectural form: the skyscraper. The tremendous drop in iron-ore prices that had ruined Edison's mining venture allowed Sullivan to build tall, sturdy buildings utilizing steel frames. It was Sullivan who made the famous remark that “form ever follows function.”11 (That dictum would be taken to extremes by a few later architects who eliminated all ornament from their buildings, insisting that pure functionality was its own beauty.) Some architects would later call Sullivan the “Father of Modernism,” but others have argued that it was really Wright's work that represented the first complete break from nineteenth-century stylistic conventions. At the very least, Sullivan was the essential bridge between the old and new forms. Wright could not have chosen a better mentor.
As before, when he had applied for the draftsman's position at Silsbee's firm, Wright brought some of his drawings—now more accomplished—to his interview with Sullivan. Sullivan was struck by the young man's charm, vision, and almost religious reverence for architecture, which Wright saw as the highest expression of all the arts. The young architect's designs were still somewhat derivative, yet Sullivan also detected in them a striking originality. Wright was hired on the spot. Sullivan and Wright had much in common: both men were transcendentalists who had read Emerson and Thoreau and felt a kinship with the German romantics (both revered Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther).12 Wright always looked back with fondness to his days at Adler and Sullivan and would often refer to Sullivan as his lieber Meister (beloved master). He kept in touch with his master long after he became an independent architect, and he would one day write a biography of Sullivan noted for its spirited defense of its subject's work against the criticisms of the “mobocracy.”13
Wright rose quickly at Sullivan and Adler. Sullivan recognized Wright's inventiveness with house designs and put the young man in charge of all residential work. Wright had a special knack for houses, and the vast majority of his work over the next six decades would be from designing and building homes. His residential work would always provide Wright with a dependable source of income between major projects.
In 1893, Sullivan discovered to his dismay that Wright was accepting private commissions on the side. Wright would later claim that it had been necessary to do some moonlighting in order to support his wife and growing family. (Wright had married Catherine “Kitty” Tobin in 1889 and had two children by this time.) Sullivan regretfully fired Wright.
Wright started his own firm and began working out of his self-designed home in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. His reputation as a gifted architect grew, as did his client list. The first exhibition of Wright's work was held the following year (1894) at the Chicago Architectural Club, where he received some favorable notices. Soon he had so many commissions that he was forced to hire other architects to help with the workload. It was during this period that he developed his famed “Prairie house,” a style that emphasized expanded living space. Living rooms and dining rooms were especially enlarged. To achieve this spaciousness, Wright expanded the horizontal axis of the structure. Flattened cantilevered roofs projecting out from the main building blocked direct sunlight and offered inviting shelter from the elements. The Prairie home was in stark contrast to the then-popular—and unambiguously vertical—Victorian house.
WRIGHT AND CONCRETE
As was typical for his time, Wright's first use of concrete was as a foundation material. Having designed homes for some years, Wright probably knew that most people were not attracted to the material (a fact that Edison and Lambie would learn the hard way). Still, he was fascinated by the potential of reinforced concrete: its tensile strength was ideal for cantilevered designs, and it could be poured into molds to create structural adornments that had the appearance of sculpted stone. Wright probably began creatively experimenting with the material around 1900, but he could not find a way to use reinforced concrete for his early cantilevered houses: a wooden beam more economically addressed the modest load demands of the Prairie home.
The cast-concrete exhibit Wright designed for the Universal Portland Cement Company and displayed at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, is the only work by the architect of which no photo, image, or even description survives. Architectural historians have combed through surviving company records (consisting of just three folders held by Indiana University) and thousands of private and commercial photographs from the Pan-American Exposition in hopes of uncovering this “lost” treasure, but all such efforts have so far failed.
We do have a photograph of an exhibit Wright designed for the same company at an industry show held in New York City in 1910, showing two cast-concrete stelae, or building ornaments, and what appears to be a bench in the background. All display the strong Mayan influence that would characterize much of Wright's work in his middle period. Still, so much had changed between 1901 and 1910, both in the architect's personal life and in his artistic endeavors, that many Wright enthusiasts have naturally assumed that the vanished 1901 exhibit would have looked quite different from the 1910 version.
Or would it? The Mayan influence appears shortly after the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in the design of the Robert M. Lamp House (1903) and in Wright's cast-concrete decorative panels in the central court of the Larkin Administration building (1904). Clearly, Wright was exploring the plastic attributes of concrete to create Mesoamerican motifs long before 1910. It is conceivable that Wright simply employed the same molds used for the 1901 exhibit for the 1910 show. Although the Universal Portland Cement Company was a major player in the concrete business (its Indiana Harbor factory would soon surpass Edison's New Jersey operation as “the largest cement plant in the world”), the modest castings at the 1910 show seem more like something a small concrete contractor would cobble together than an exhibit sponsored by one of the world's largest cement manufacturers. It is quite possible that the company asked Wright to design another exhibit for them but allotted only a modest budget for it. Wright agreed and simply used the old 1901 castings; Universal got what it paid for. Unless a photo surfaces from the 1901 show that displays Wright's original exhibit, the matter will remain shrouded in mystery. My guess is that there is no lost treasure, only an old curiosity that had been pulled out of storage and dusted off.
In any case, the years between 1901 and 1910 were Wright's watershed years in regard to his use of concrete. During those years, he would use the material for his first cast ornamentation and, in an odd throwback to classical times, employ ancient Roman concrete wall-building techniques to create some of his most original structures. Most notable of all his achievements during this time was his first monolithic reinforced concrete building.
THE UNITY TEMPLE
In late 1905, members of Oak Park's Unitarian congregation approached Wright about designing a new church to replace the one that had been lost to fire a couple of months earlier. Wright's wife had taught Sunday school at the church, and a prominent member of the congregation, Charles E. Roberts, was one of Wright's clients. Roberts liked the architect's work, and he also knew that Wright, while not a regular churchgoer, had grown up in the Unitarian faith. Wright was awarded the commission.
Although monolithic concrete construction was certainly gathering steam by 1905, it was still relativity uncommon. Since Wright's writings preclude any suggestion of outside influences, it is worth examining why the architect chose to build the Unity Temple using this method.
Wright avidly read the industry journals to keep abreast of new developments in building techniques and materials. He knew of the pioneering work being performed with concrete elsewhere, especially in the nearby state of Ohio. As mentioned earlier, the most notable cutting-edge application of concrete up to that time had been the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, Ohio. Although the skyscraper's design was hardly daring, it did represent the most dramatic leap of faith yet for the material and evidently provided proof to Wright that reinforced concrete had shown itself to be a suitable building material for erecting whole structures.
The building site for the Unity Temple was difficult. The lot was narrow and long, and the quiet country lane that had bordered the first church when it was erected in 1871 had now become a busy street. Sermons were often interrupted by the noise of clanging streetcars and honking automobile horns. The modest budget for the temple was also a challenge: $40,000 (roughly $800,000 in today's inflation-adjusted dollars). This limited outlay included not just the building but the furniture and stained-glass windows that Wright was also expected to design. Many nearby homes had cost more to build. That he was able to accomplish so much, and within such limited means, is another remarkable aspect of the temple and of Wright's resourcefulness.
Wright accepted the commission just a few weeks after returning from Japan, where he had spent some of his time studying the magnificent mausoleums of two Tokugawa shoguns in the city of Nikko. These temple tombs had a gongen-style floor plan, a bipartite design that separated the main sanctuary from the worship hall via a kind of loggia called an ainoma. Wright liked the arrangement and used a similar floor plan for the Unity Temple, while incorporating a few distinctive touches of his own as well.
The first step was the creation of elaborate forms into which the rebar was placed before the concrete was poured. Careful sanding and bracing of the wood prevented any major blemishes from appearing after the concrete had set. To keep the costs of the molds down, the only concrete ornamentation was a stylized Mayan-like design on the upper half of the exterior pillars. Wright deliberately chose to expose the aggregate of the main walls, which gave their surfaces a pebbly texture. (This was partially obscured after a 1971 renovation that also repaired the aging concrete.) Unlike the Edison homes or the Ingalls Building, the interior concrete casting of the Unity Temple was even more complicated than that of the building's exterior. This is perhaps why the temple took almost three years to construct, instead of the one year originally specified.
Once the concrete had set and the forms were removed, Wright installed the stained-glass windows, painted the interior in attractive pastel colors, and, as a final touch, brought in his custom-designed wooden chairs. The stained-glass windows were exclusively colored with earth tones: natural greens, yellows, and browns. Less successful were the visually appealing but very uncomfortable chairs. (The church would sell off the chairs a few years later—probably at cost—an unwise move, since each now fetches thousands of dollars at auction).
When Wright finished the Unity Temple in 1908, everyone agreed that it was a remarkable achievement, but few would have guessed that the humble church would one day become an icon of twentieth-century architecture.
The temple's exterior had an austere, solemn appearance and provided no hint about the revolutionary nature of the building. One entered the loggia at the street level, but unlike the open ainoma, the visitor was required to make a series of right-hand turns to reach the chapel. The circuitous nature of the entrance was reminiscent of prayer mazes and suggested a refuge from the outside world. It also served as a sound barrier to keep street noise to a minimum. Also unlike an ainoma, the loggia was divided into two sections: one directed worshipers to the church chapel, while the other led visitors to its community center, Unity House. Since the entrances to each section were on opposite sides of the building, people coming to one function never met those arriving for the other. To further reduce noise in the chapel, Wright eliminated windows on the lower levels. Natural sunlight came through the stained-glass windows in the ceiling and upper-level clerestories. The latter were deeply recessed behind ornamental pillars, further buffeting any unwelcome street clatter. The recessed panels below the ceiling windows were painted gold, which gently diffused the other colors and imparted a relaxing yellow light that gave warmth to the interior. As with his Prairie homes, Wright had taken sharp angular patterns (normally unpleasing to the eye) and arranged them in such an ingenious way as to present a ravishing whole. Although many other architects have tried to imitate this angular technique, none have equaled Wright's mastery. It was sui generis.
Imaginative use of space was also what set the Unity Temple apart from other churches of its day. It was especially evident in the chapel, where worshipers were seated on two elevated reinforced concrete tiers to each side, facing one another across a floor section where the seating was arranged in the standard front-to-pulpit manner. In this way, no member of the congregation was more than forty feet away from the pulpit, and the superb acoustics ensured that the minister's every word was clearly heard.
Since Wright had united a new aesthetic with a new building material, steel reinforced concrete, Unity Temple is considered by many architectural historians to be the world's first modern building. Wright's imaginative design, creative use of interior space, and his thoughtful and quite original solutions in meeting practical needs (sound abatement, lighting, and so on) made Unity Temple one of the first significant architectural achievements of the new century.
Visiting Unity Temple is an experience not easily forgotten. While it lacks the majestic scale of the Pantheon, the temple displays a harmony of form and color that is rarely matched elsewhere. The wonderful orchestration of the horizontal and vertical planes would become a trademark of Wright's work until his autumn years, when a curvilinear style arose unexpectedly from his pen and asserted itself with equal mastery.
WRIGHT'S EMBRACE OF ROMAN WALLS AND HIS TALIESIN RETREAT
After completing Unity Temple, Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew from monolithic concrete construction, at least for the creation of whole buildings, for a number of years. Although the reason for this withdrawal is unknown, it is quite likely that Wright, like many people, did not like the appearance of set concrete. Even though his greatest works are inseparably tied to the material, he often tried or suggested ways to cover or obscure its unpleasantly dull, washed-out gray color. Exposed concrete surfaces in a building's interior could be painted, or their blanched appearance could be masked by clever lighting. Exterior concrete surfaces were trickier. This is perhaps one reason why Wright deliberately chose to expose the aggregate on Unity Temple's exterior walls: it offered the authenticity of real stone versus its bland binding agent. While he continued to expand his use of concrete, for the next two decades Wright mostly restricted the exposed concrete exterior surfaces of his buildings to cast ornamental embellishments.
Much has been written of the Japanese and Mayan influences on Wright's work, but little is known of the inspiration he gleaned from the engineers of ancient Rome. While stylistic influences were predominately Japanese or Mesoamerican, the engineering techniques Wright employed between 1905 and 1925 for building the walls of some of his most important buildings were pure Vitruvian. That his biographers have not discussed this aspect of his work suggests that they have long depended on the architect's own writings to explore his intentions, and Wright was silent on this subject. One must be cautious or even skeptical when reading Wright's two autobiographies and numerous articles. He wrote primarily to promote his work and to project the image of a pure artist blazing a new path, uninfluenced and unencumbered by the aesthetics of the past. Since he opposed the neoclassicism of the Beaux-Arts school, it would hardly make any sense for him to mention that he was successfully employing Roman concrete wall-building techniques to create some of his most striking structures. If we consider that Wright possessed an expansive library, it is almost inconceivable that he did not own one of the several English translations of Vitruvius's On Architecture then available.
For some reason, Wright was drawn to Roman bricks, which are flatter and wider than standard bricks. He used them for the first time in his design of the William H. Winslow House (1894) in River Forest, near Oak Park. The Winslow house was Wright's first major commission after leaving Adler and Sullivan, and the broad building with its cantilevered roof is rightly considered the prototype for his celebrated Prairie homes. Wright liked the look of Roman brick masonry on the Winslow house and would henceforth prefer it to standard brick masonry until the 1930s, when production of Roman bricks ceased due to the Depression and a lack of demand. Perhaps the flatter profile of the blocks, combined with the thin mortar lines that Wright insisted on, gave the masonry more of the organic look that he was striving for. Sometimes he would subtly alternate between darker and lighter shades of various Roman bricks within the wall, which suggested the textured appearance of red sandstone.
Wright's Roman concrete-cored masonry wall building technique came later, sometime after the turn of the twentieth century. As discussed in chapter 3, the Romans laid twin courses of mortared brick perhaps a dozen layers in height and separated by a distance of one to several feet. Concrete was then poured between the two courses and tamped down. Another two courses of brick were laid on the older layers, and concrete was again poured between them; the process continued until the desired height of the wall was reached. The bricks were thus securely embedded into the wall's structure. The process was unlike the modern method of first constructing a concrete wall and then adding a veneer of thin brick to cover its surface. Time and weathering can dislodge brick veneers, but it is virtually impossible for the elements alone to dislodge the embedded bricks of a concrete Roman wall. Wright did use brick-veneered walls on one occasion during this time. In 1904, he surrounded the Larkin office building (his first major commercial commission) with a concrete perimeter wall covered with a veneer of brick, the terminus at each end capped by a large brick masonry pier. The Larkin building was torn down in 1950, but one portion of the perimeter wall remains. Virtually all the brick veneer of the concrete wall has vanished (the lone surviving brick masonry pier has been restored). Even if souvenir-seeking scavengers had removed some of the veneer bricks, little effort was needed for the task: lime mortar degrades significantly with age, especially if it is used as a vertical adhesive. Wright probably recognized this shortcoming, and so preferred the Roman masonry-embedded concrete walls.
Wright initially employed Roman walls for his later Prairie houses, the most notable exemplar being the famous Frederick C. Robie House (1906) in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. The only difference between Wright's Roman walls and those of his ancient predecessors was the vertical insertion of steel rebar in the concrete core. Wright no doubt liked these masonry-embedded concrete walls for the same reason the Romans did: the technique produced a stout wall for less cost than a purely brick one of the same thickness. Satisfied with the results of using Roman walls for houses, he then adapted them for his more ambitious buildings.
Shortly after putting together the Universal Portland Cement Company exhibit in 1910, Wright left his wife and children and took an extended trip to Europe accompanied by his mistress, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of his clients. He spent much of his time in Europe preparing a lavishly illustrated volume with a German publisher on his work. To disguise the fact that it was a vanity book, Wright underwrote the publishing costs by paying an enormous fee for the American distribution rights. Titled Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright), it greatly furthered Wright's reputation in Europe. The book profoundly influenced a new generation of architects on the Continent, including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Richard Neutra.
The press eventually found out about the Wright-Cheney affair—it was initially kept secret by embarrassed family members—and a major scandal ensued. Wright's reputation and once-thriving architectural firm suffered as a result. He returned to the United States and affected reconciliation with his wife, while covertly building a large house in the Wisconsin countryside near the town of Spring Green for himself and Mamah. He called the house Taliesin, Welsh for “shining brow” and also the name of a famous Celtic bard. Appropriately, the estate sits on the brow of a hill overlooking a beautiful green valley. The newspapers learned of the construction of Wright's “love nest,” and another scandal broke out, again sullying the architect's character and turning off many potential clients. Wright moved into Taliesin with Mamah and simply ignored the moral outcry.14
The Taliesin estate was larger than any of the homes Wright had previously designed. He wanted it to be not only a residence but also a state-of-the-art workplace where he and his apprentices could draw inspiration from the pastoral surroundings. Wright designed the estate to include offices, conference rooms, a small theater, and a large drafting studio where a dozen or more architects could work on designs and blueprints under his direction. Local wood and limestone were used in its construction. Two years before building Taliesin, Wright wrote an article in which he outlined his theories of “organic architecture.” Briefly, the principles of Wright's organic style called for a building's design and construction materials to conform to its site. Only colors found in nature were to be used, and the structure itself should possess a “spiritual integrity.”15 Of course, Wright felt free to modify these somewhat vague parameters, but beautiful Taliesin fully conformed to all the elements of organic architecture. It seemed to blend into its surroundings, appearing almost like a rocky outcrop of the hill on which it sat. Taliesin burned down twice but was quickly rebuilt each time. As with all his residences, Wright could never stop from making improvements, renovations, or expansions of one kind or another. Taliesin also served as a test bed for many of his design experiments. As long as Wright lived at Taliesin, the estate would never be truly finished but was always exist in a state of becoming. Becoming what, only Wright knew at any given time.
Two major commissions kept Wright occupied and somewhat financially secure (the architect was, like his father, a notorious spendthrift) between 1913 and 1923: the Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan. Both would share striking stylistic similarities and would incorporate Wright's concrete Roman walls and cast-concrete ornamentation.
The first project, Midway Gardens, was a major entertainment complex in Chicago that would cover a small city block and include restaurants, a beer garden, a large cocktail lounge, and a concert stage for big bands or polka ensembles for Oktoberfest. The Midway Gardens project was awarded to Wright in 1913 and came at a desperate time in the architect's career. Because of the scandals that sprang from his turbulent domestic life, Wright received only two other commissions that year: one for a house, the other for small warehouse. Fortunately, the Gardens project was the largest and most lucrative assignment he had yet received.
A tall, rectangular wall of brick encasing a reinforced concrete core surrounded the Gardens. Strange, cantilevered concrete buildings with a floor plan describing a cross occupied each end of the rectangle and vaguely suggest one of Wright's Prairie homes. A third building, the largest, sat in the center of the complex, with courtyards at each end. Rising above each corner of this central building were four very odd-looking towers capped by crosshatched projections that appeared as if they served some technological purpose, like broadcast aerials, but were really just ornamental flourishes. Upon entering Midway Gardens, the visitor was confronted by a riotous medley of decoration that encompassed Mayan, cubist, and Oriental influences, as well as statues of “sprites” carved by Alfonso Iannelli that could best be described as “proto-Art Deco.” The predominating stylistic influence of the Gardens is Mayan, which was especially evident in the rectangular layout of the courtyard and structures and in the cast-concrete decorations that adorned the buildings' interiors, exteriors, and open spaces. Indeed, it was difficult to find a spot that was without a cast-concrete embellishment made to appear like sculpted stone. Since most contemporary observers were not yet familiar with the Mesoamerican influence in Wright's work, they assumed the Gardens to be a cubist creation.16 It was easily one of the most flamboyant reinforced concrete construction projects the world had seen up to that time.
Although many people—especially Wright—held that architecture was a deeply serious business, there must have been at least a few discerning individuals who took notice of one obvious aspect about the Gardens: one could have fun with concrete. Short of hiring hundreds of stonemasons and sculptors at horrific cost, Wright could not have conceived of the Midway Gardens were it not for the special qualities of concrete. A few years later in Nashville, Tennessee, a full-scale replica of the Parthenon would be built from concrete at a fraction of the manpower, time, and relative cost that had been required for the original.17 Want a somber church? A pagan temple? A Mayan plaza? Concrete allowed you to construct almost anything you desired—and at a discount, too.
The Midway Gardens project was a definite triumph for Wright. About two hundred thousand people had flocked there within three months of its opening, and the complex quickly paid back its construction costs.
Sadly, Prohibition would make futile the whole purpose behind the Midway Gardens. Fifteen years after the heralded opening in 1914, the magnificent Gardens were torn down, and the rubble was used to create a breakwater in Lake Michigan. Wright took grim satisfaction in learning that the contractor who won the bid to tear down the complex lost money in the venture. Apparently, the stout Roman walls were extraordinarily difficult to demolish.
However, none of this mattered in 1914. While the Gardens project certainly restored Wright's fortunes, its impact on the architect went beyond financial and career considerations: the project, in a way, also saved his life.
On August 15, 1914, while Wright was overseeing some final touch-up work at the Midway Gardens—which had officially opened six weeks earlier—Mamah was playing host to her eleven-year-old son, John, and nine-year-old daughter, Martha. (The Cheneys had amicably divorced, and Mamah had been allowed visitation rights.) After serving lunch to Mamah and the children in the dining room, one of Wright's servants, Julian Carlton, who had been exhibiting strange behavior of late, splashed gasoline around the entrances of the buildings. Armed with an axe, he went into the dining room and killed Mamah and her children, then ignited the gasoline and positioned himself at the outside of the adjoining room. As workers and guests began jumping out the windows—some with clothes on fire—Carlton hacked at them with his axe. In all, Carlton killed seven people and severely wounded two others. Taliesin burned to the ground. Carlton tried to commit suicide by swallowing hydrochloric acid, but he succeeded only in burning the lining of his throat and stomach and was taken into custody. He went on a hunger strike while in jail and died several weeks later.18
Although Wright was devastated by the murders, he channeled his grief through work and began rebuilding Taliesin soon after the funerals. In 1916, shortly after completing Taliesin II—though no place where Wright resided could ever truly be called “completed”—another important commission arrived for him: the contract for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan.
THE LEGENDARY HOTEL
Frank Lloyd Wright, accompanied by his new mistress, Miriam Noel (Kitty still refused to grant him a divorce), boarded a Japan-bound steamer in December 1916 to begin work on the Imperial Hotel. It was a project that he had been angling for since 1911, when he first learned that the Japanese were considering replacing the outdated and overcrowded Imperial Hotel in Tokyo with a grander edifice equipped with modern conveniences and many more rooms. He had spent several months in Japan in early 1913, showing his designs to Japanese officials and going over the details with them. Although Wright spoke no Japanese, his deep familiarity with the country's art and culture made a favorable impression on his prospective clients. He left the country confident that he had an excellent chance of being awarded the project. His confidence was presumably well founded—three years later the commission for the Imperial Hotel was his.
Wright went to work almost immediately after his arrival in Japan. He met with hotel officials the following day to discuss the logistics of the project, and began making arrangements to set up a Tokyo office through which he could seek other local commissions (he obtained only a few, and all but one were for private residences). Wright estimated that he needed a year to consult with officials and draw up the more detailed blueprints, and a couple more years to oversee the construction work. That would turn out to be an optimistic estimate. In all, Wright would spend over six years in Japan working on the hotel, interspersed by brief trips back to the United States to oversee projects there.
One of the reasons why the Imperial Hotel project was so complicated and took so long to construct was Wright's near obsession about its ability to stand up to an earthquake. When he had submitted his design for the hotel, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was still a fresh memory. At the same time, an intense controversy had been brewing between two Japanese seismologists. In 1904, Akitsune Imamura, a young seismologist at Tokyo University, believed that a powerful earthquake would likely strike the Tokyo-Yokohama region sometime in the near future. He came to this conclusion after studying historical records going back several centuries and noting a pattern of regularly occurring major earthquakes in the region. Imamura took his findings to his superior at the university, Dr. Fusakichi Omori, at that time the most respected and well-known seismologist in the world. When it came to earthquakes, he was The Man. His Bosch-Omori seismograph (built by the German firm Bosch to Omori's exacting standards) was used throughout the world, and his formula for calculating the strength of earthquake aftershocks, called Omori's law, is still used today. Imamura went through his findings with Omori, as well as the probable consequences. The young seismologist estimated that between the earthquake and subsequent fires, the number of casualties could be as high as 150,000, with hundreds of thousands of people injured. Omori was not impressed by Imamura's data, though his counterarguments are unknown. Based on the then-prevailing theories, it is possible that the elder seismologist pointed out that the earthquake groupings may have been coincidental, or perhaps that the groupings themselves were representative of swarms that occurred in cycles that popped up every few thousand years and had already passed for the foreseeable future. To be fair to Omori, seismology was then still in its infancy, and the precise cause of earthquakes had yet to be definitively explained. Disappointed, Imamura mulled over his options and decided that the safety of thousands of Japanese citizens took precedence over other considerations. The young seismologist went over Omori's head and made his findings public. Omori was furious and denounced Imamura's data as flimsy, his findings as unsubstantiated, and his prediction of an imminent major earthquake as alarmist. Imamura was reassigned to a remote back office and given work assignments so elementary that they would have insulted a graduate student. For the next nineteen years, Imamura existed in a professional limbo, chiefly remembered as the fellow who made all those wild earthquake predictions, rather than the once-promising protégé of the revered Dr. Omori.19
Though Japanese officials dismissed the notion of an imminent earthquake, the recent disaster in San Francisco reminded them that such an event was certainly within the realm of possibility. Building codes for the many major buildings then going up in Tokyo were strengthened, requiring that large structures be built of either steel frame or reinforced concrete. Unfortunately, these new building codes did not address one obvious issue: the tens of thousands of flimsy wooden homes and apartment houses inhabited by Tokyo's poor and lower-middle classes. These dwellings dominated all the districts, save the city's financial center and the region around the Imperial Palace. Officials felt that to condemn these buildings would inflict too great an economic hardship on the buildings' occupants or landlords, and so nothing was done.
Either Wright had a preternatural sense that a future major tremor might strike Tokyo, or he realized the bad public relations that would result if his building came tumbling down in such a disaster. In any event, he went far beyond the existing building codes to ensure that the Imperial Hotel would be seismically robust. Wright read all he could on the effects of earthquakes on structures. He essentially thought “outside the box.” Noting that pipes and wiring conduits were often ripped open by seismic stresses, Wright decided not to follow the standard procedure of embedding them in concrete but instead designed a hollow shaft where they were placed in a loose fashion, giving them the additional “wiggle room” to prevent them from snapping apart during an earthquake. Wright also installed what we would call today “seismic separation joints” every twenty to sixty feet. In other words, the buildings were sectionalized, and each unit was quasi-independent of the others. The units were connected to one another via a lead sleeve that would bend under seismic stress. For instance, if one end of a wing were to sink a foot in an earthquake, it would do so in a benign manner and not cause the rest of the wing to collapse. He also observed that roof tiles—a standard feature of traditional East Asian architecture—were often shaken loose and tossed to the ground by tremors, killing or injuring the hapless people below. He eliminated the tiles and in their place installed thin copper sheets that were nailed to the roof.
Finally, Wright's design called for the hotel to be low to the ground. One of the dangers posed by an earthquake are the lateral forces that can violently shake a structure. To see this phenomenon in action, take two building blocks and put one on top of the other. Then gently move the lower block back and forth. The top block should remain in position. Now try it again with seven blocks stacked one on top of the other, the result of which will likely be the toppling of the stacked blocks. The energy caused by the shaking accumulates as it rises, causing the upper portion of a tall building to sway more than its base. The Imperial Hotel's guest rooms were situated in wings that did not exceed two stories. These wings flanked a slightly taller building that housed the lobby and administration offices. Wright reasoned that the hotel's low stature would keep the lateral forces experienced during an earthquake to a minimum.
When he submitted his designs for the Imperial Hotel in 1913, many engineers in the United States and Japan were stressing the importance of rigidity in taller buildings to counter the forces of a seismic event, not elasticity, as is the case today. Wright addressed both the rigidity and elasticity issues by applying the simplest remedies: keep the buildings low, rigid, and sectionalized.
He also understood that the hotel would be built on soft clay soil, so instead of laying down deep piles for the hotel's foundation, he decided to do something entirely different. He later explained that “[d]eep foundations would oscillate and rock the structure. That mud seemed a merciful provision—a good cushion to relieve the terrible shocks.”20
In other words, the hotel would ride out the earthquake like a ship in a stormy sea. Wright had recognized the process of soft-soil liquefaction in an earthquake some fifty years before it was described and given a name. He did sink relatively shallow pilings beneath the hotel, but these were meant to stabilize the building and keep it upright during a quake.
The additional work arising from all these safety measures, plus the complexity of the hotel itself, caused numerous delays. It was plain by the end of 1919 that the hotel's original opening date of October 1920 would not be met. The Japanese displayed extraordinary patience, but by 1922, their patience in the face of Wright's repeated postponements was becoming exhausted. That same year, the original Imperial had burned down, and the shortage of adequate hotel rooms in the city had become an urgent issue. The architect reassessed the amount of work still to be completed and then provided a “firm” completion date: the Imperial Hotel could officially open its doors to the public at noon on September 1, 1923.
In August 1923, Wright toured the hotel grounds one last time to inspect his work before returning to the United States. Construction crews were adding a few finishing touches and installing the furniture in the rooms and suites. The same Mesoamerican influences found in the Midway Gardens buildings were here as well, though stronger. Besides the cast-concrete ornamentation, the hotel's Peacock Room, a huge salon for dining and dancing, was directly derived from Mayan architecture. Its contours could best be described as an upended pentagon—what one might imagine a royal audience hall at Chichen Itza would look like. The Peacock Room was Wright's first use of monolithic concrete construction since Unity Temple over a decade earlier. The concrete was painted white and bordered in red. The bases of the pentagonal supports were faced with red brick with additional detailing made from sculpted oya, a soft rock similar to soapstone.
From the air, the hotel formed an “H” with a high cross-stroke. The flanks of the H consisted of long two-story wings that held the guest rooms. Between these wings were majestic gardens sporting cast-concrete stelae that stood guard over fishponds stocked with brightly colored koi. The high cross-stroke joining the wings held the lobby, the Peacock Room, and administration offices. The hotel was an extravagant jewel that delighted the eye and offered fresh surprises with every turn of the head.
After inspecting the almost-finished hotel, Wright sailed back to the United States, exhausted but thoroughly pleased with the result and happy that the six-year-long project was finally completed. On the day of its official opening, the Imperial Hotel would become a legend, but not for any of the expected reasons.
DOOMSDAY AT NOON
Shortly before noon on September 1, 1923, as dozens of officials and hundreds of guests, spectators, and reporters gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the new Imperial Hotel, the Kanto fault that traverses the Japanese island of Honshu suddenly and violently shifted, causing a massive earthquake that seismologists would later estimate was a magnitude 8.4 on the Richter scale (7.9 on today's moment magnitude scale). Tokyo, Yokohama, and scores of smaller cities and towns suffered widespread damage from the quake and the fires that arose afterward. The rickety wood-frame houses and apartment buildings that officials had not wanted to address in their building codes collapsed by the thousands, killing or injuring their occupants. Innumerable small cooking braziers used to prepare lunchtime meals overturned in the quake, spilling their red-hot coals among the wood rubble and starting perhaps as many as several hundred widely scattered fires in the span of just a few minutes. Many of the people who could extricate themselves from the wreckage tried to flee the flames, but they found their way blocked by other fires and succumbed to burns or smoke inhalation. An estimated 140,000 people died in the disaster.21 Imamura's warnings had been vindicated, but at a terrible price.
Coincidently, Dr. Omori was visiting a seismic monitoring station in Australia when the quake struck. As he was examining the station's seismograph, its needle began registering a distant tremor. It took only a short time for the Australian scientists to triangulate the data registered on their machine. They turned with ashen faces to Omori and informed him that a powerful earthquake had struck the area around Tokyo and Yokohama. The seismologist was staggered by the news and immediately returned to Japan. In a noble and touching gesture, Omori apologized to Imamura and recommended him for a key position on the scientific committee that was being formed to study the earthquake and the damage it caused. Omori felt partly responsible for the many deaths and injuries caused by the disaster. He died a few months later, a broken man.
The Imperial Hotel survived, however, and none of its guests or staff were killed or seriously injured. The hotel sank a little, and some flooring was warped in one section, but otherwise the buildings remained intact. Firemen were also able to pump water out of the fishponds to hold off the inferno that arose after the earthquake. A photograph taken shortly after the disaster shows the hotel standing as a kind of island among the blackened rubble. The limited damage was quickly repaired, and the hotel continued to remain in business while much of the city still languished in ruins.
The Imperial Hotel fell to the wrecker's ball in 1968: the large area of real estate in central Tokyo across which it sprawled had simply become too valuable. The facade of the Imperial Hotel's central lobby has been preserved in an open-air architectural park outside Nagoya, Japan.
The Imperial Hotel represented a fine marriage of Wright's skills as architect and engineer. Unfortunately, its value as a positive object lesson in seismic design was never fully appreciated.
Wright made brief trips back to the United States during the construction of the Imperial Hotel to oversee the progress of his projects there. Most of these were palatial residences in Southern California designed in a style that architectural historians would soon call the “Mayan Revival” movement.
Wright strongly objected to any suggestion that his work was influenced by another culture, saying that if Oriental or Mesoamerican architecture bore any resemblance to his designs, it simply confirmed their adherence to the same universal aesthetic that all great artists, poets, and architects followed. This was preposterous dissembling. The houses he designed in the Los Angeles area are less “influenced by” and more “imitative of” Mayan architecture.
Nevertheless, these residences are marvelous concrete creations. Some were built using a combination of monolithic concrete and cast-concrete blocks (the Hollyhock House) or constructed almost entirely of the latter (the Ennis House). These fantastical homes are a visual treat, but they represent a kind of dead-end for Wright. While he scorned the Western neo-classicism of the Beaux-Arts school, perceiving it as a creative straitjacket, his inordinate attachment to classical Mayan architecture in the 1920s constrained him artistically as well. The only difference was that one form of neoclassicism was more exotic than the other.
One frustrating problem in discussing Wright's use of concrete in the early and middle periods of his career is the paucity of information that exists on the subject. The architect rarely revealed the nitty-gritty technical details of his work. He was like an artist who enjoys talking about the meaning of his painting but refuses to reveal his brush techniques or the kinds of paints he employs. Still, a careful examination of Wright's structures can lead to some rational, though imperfect, assumptions. For instance, did Wright intentionally expose the heavy aggregate of Unity Temple's concrete walls as an aesthetic statement, or did he simply use too much aggregate? The fine detailing of his cast-concrete ornamentation obviously precluded the use of heavy aggregate, so we know that Wright used only Portland cement and sand (light aggregate) in the mix. The concrete of Wright's Mayan Revival houses is quite white and not the usual faded battleship-gray that he evidently found so distasteful. Titanium oxide is added to concrete mixes today to give it a white appearance, but this technique was unknown in the 1920s. Wright either used extra lime in the mix or very white sand, or both. For the Mayan block homes, like the Ennis House, the relatively small size of the blocks would have ruled out heavy aggregate, so he likely used Portland cement, white sand, and perhaps a little extra lime. Using marble dust instead of sand was another method employed to whiten concrete at this time, but that would have negatively affected the already marginal load-bearing characteristics of the blocks. (Concrete block construction of the kind Wright used in the 1920s is now banned in California for seismic safety reasons.)
Perhaps no other architect performed so much experimentation with concrete—or likely had as much fun doing so—as Frank Lloyd Wright.
By the beginning of the 1930s, Wright was mainly perceived as an architect whose best years were behind him. Many believed that Wright, like his mentors Louis Sullivan and Joseph Silsbee, had advanced his craft to a certain point, after which he had to yield the torch to a younger generation of architects. Few suspected that Wright still had some surprises up his sleeve, or that these surprises would rely on pushing the astonishing properties of reinforced concrete to their limit.