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Most Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Designs
I moved from an excruciatingly small town (population 1,000) when I was nineteen. With two suitcases and 300 dollars, I flew to California to go to college and to finish growing up with my new best friend whom I had met back East. The first impressive sight I saw was the giant neon Carol Doda sign on Broadway. The next was the Golden Gate Bridge. Within a couple of days, then, the next awesome sight was what locals call the Blue Roof Inn—one of the most famous of Frank Lloyd Wright designs, the Marin County Civic Center. The building, created in 1957, is stunning in its uniqueness. Long facades of modern style are arcaded; the building is, as typical to Frank Lloyd Wright designs, merged with rather than intruding on the natural hillsides; and the roof and centralized dome are in stucco (as is the whole exterior of the building) and are painted a moderately bright blue--which is rare even in California.
It is because California was so open to creativity and extended visions that Wright did much of his work. According to John King writing a Frank Lloyd Wright designs feature article for Via: The AAA Travel Companion and quoting UCLA history professor Thomas Hines, Wright appreciated designing in California for it was here he was allowed to experiment “with different forces in a way he hadn’t done before….” As well, Wright made creative use of the land and landscape of California, basing his architecture on and including the earth, stone, and other matter of nature and combining them with man-made materials.
Frank Lloyd Wright designs such as Taliesin West also include natural substances from other locations, the latter built with Arizona desert sand and rocks, for instance. The history, culture, and influence of alternate civilizations also impacts the aesthetics of his work: The Ennis Brown House is what writer King calls “a cross between a Maya temple and a men’s club;” and Hollyhock House, renowned as a an architectural school now was built with artistic and emotional responses to tragic murders of seven people by an unbalanced employee at Taliesin West.
In essence, Frank Lloyd Wright designs were built about and for the people of the land on which they now stand. Wright spoke to his goal to build his structures in accordance with building a culture. That is, he said, “We will never have a culture of our until we have an architecture of our own.” Whether creating out of the land, because of the (beauty of) the land, or in spite of the changes on the land by peoples out of whack with the rest, Frank Lloyd Wright transcended the typical and the ordinary…from cement block walkways to blue-roofed inns.
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