Gwyn Lloyd Jones traces Frank Lloyd Wright’s foreign tours for his study of ‘the first global architect’

Buildings.

The June publication of my book ‘Travels with Frank Lloyd Wright’ coincides with the 150th anniversary of Wright’s birth. It looks beyond the American masterpieces to consider Wright as the first global architect, and took me on a journey, following Wright’s footsteps around six very different countries, to reflect on how personal encounters with new cultures moved him, and how he in turn might have disturbed these indigenous settings. Some places clearly displayed a range of Wright motifs, while in others the influence was more nuanced and cultural.

Masieri Memorial Student Library, Venice, by Frank Lloyd Wright (1954, ph: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation); above: Robert Harvey’s Frog Orchard House, Ilmington (1959, ph: GLJ)

In 1909 Wright visited Germany. Later historians suggested that his trip was to prepare the Wasmuth folio of lithographs that would consolidate his conquest of Europe. In reality, however, the folio was intended as a primer for the new American architecture, and only a relatively small number were made available in Europe. While retracing Wright’s route in Germany, however, I diverted to Holland where his work had been widely debated by both the expressionist Amsterdam School and the rationalist De Stijl movement.

Wright’s Imperial Hotel lobby, Tokyo (ph: Cary James)

Wright had considerable influence in Holland, as local architects adopted the Prairie idiom to design houses that combined the dynamism of the Robie House (1910) with traditional materials. Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium (1928) features Wrightian characteristics in its strong horizontality coupled with expressive projecting forms and deep cuts; and Hilversum Town Hall (1931), in its powerful cubic overlapping volumes, reinterprets his Larkin Administration Building (1906).

Ampetheatre

Romanelli Villa, Udine, by Carlo Scarpa and Angelo Masieri (1955, ph: GLJ)

In 1939 Wright was invited by Sulgrave Manor Board, established to promote transatlantic cultural exchange, to present four lectures at the RIBA. After criticising the formality of the event and castigating the prevailing classical tradition, he presented his plan for ‘Broadacre’, a dispersed urban settlement that he claimed was “everywhere and nowhere”. While the idea was not fully implemented anywhere, its impact was far-reaching, not least in the planning of the new town of Milton Keynes (1962-7). Wright’s assertion that Broadacre derived from three modern inventions – the motor car, electrical communications and machine-shop production – resonates in the work of Melvin Webber, the American urban theorist and design adviser to Milton Keynes, who claimed that the car and information technology were instruments that should shape the modern city.

In 1957, towards the end of his career, Wright was commissioned to build an opera house in Baghdad. Iraq was too unstable for a research trip so I visited Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates instead. Despite my the fact that Kuwait was planned around a ‘garden city’, its urban form felt more like a Wrightian city on a highway, and its remarkable Friday Market (Souk al Jumma), located near a major motorway, seems a realisation of his Broadacre roadside market.

In Dubai, I was struck by similarities between the landmark Burj Khalifa tower and Wright’s unbuilt Mile High Tower (1957), with its triangulated plan, diminishing mass and a stepped profile. Wright’s idealistic tower now seems undoubtedly prophetic of the present urge to build ever-higher, and its symbolic height – implying infinity and immortality – make it a prototypical ‘icon’.

My six journeys suggest an alternative way of reading Wright’s influence by considering globalising trends. New connections are made across different cultural fields that disrupt the conventional tools of architectural history, perhaps making it more fluid and informed, and in turn more real.