Frank Lloyd Wright’s Corner Window
Written in March of 2000, twenty-five years ago, but still remember it as if it were yesterday.
Just recently I was given the golden opportunity to travel to Pittsburgh for work and honestly, I could not have been more incited. There will be some wondering why I would phrase a trip to Pittsburgh as “golden”, but they should understand the reason for my excitement was knowing that Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, “Falling Water” just south of the city. And with that, I immediately began making travel plans, with the first decision being to arrange to have Scott fly there with me, which actually was preordained in all truth, because as I’ve mentioned many times before, I equate part of my job as his father to that of being a farmer; meaning that I plant seeds, and what better seeds are there than the ones that hold the potential to expand and sculpt heart and mind.
Wright’s unique aesthetic vision has been a favorite of mine for several years now, and as an added slice of synchronism, a few months ago at Christmas I was given a book specifically on Wright’s “Falling Water” called, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Romance with Nature.” It’s a small, eloquent little book of visual poetry, meaning the poetry of the stunning Falling Water. Additionally, on every page, opposite of some poignant photo, there were quotes from Thoreau, Emerson (two of the three giants of American Transcendentalism, with Whitman being the third), as well as others, each were included to properly frame the theme Wright strove for with his design, which aimed to blur the line between living space and nature.
With Falling Water, Wright captured that ideal with a design that stunned everyone who saw it and was hailed as Wright’s masterpiece as soon as it was unveiled. I clearly remember standing in that spacious living room, with a view of the surrounding trees beyond, and being not quite able to discern where the house ended and nature began. Even the floor beneath my feet had been integrated into the theme with the stone quarried from the site, then laid in place and coated with a glossy sheen, giving one the feeling of standing in a creek bed. But Falling Water is far more than a high-end tree house, for the exterior design was incredibly modern at the time (1935) yet sits among the surrounding wilderness with a repose that feels utterly at peace. Not only did his design not do injury to the site but rather enhanced it. What may have been a concerning juxtaposition on paper, almost surreal in conception, looks and feels as if nature had divinely birthed it.
It was while thumbing through the book that I came across a photo of a “corner window”, peering out from inside an upstairs study, overlooking the creek below. Allow me to restate that, because that “window” actually stretched from floor to ceiling, precisely where a wall typically would have been, and on the opposite page was a quote by Wright himself, explaining his intuition.
“The corner-window is indicative of an idea conceived, early in my work, that the box is a Fascist symbol, and the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something basically better than the box. So, I started to destroy the box as a building. Well, the corner-window came in as all the comprehension that was ever given to that act of destruction of the box. The light now came in where it had never come in before and vision went out. You had screens for walls instead of box walls – here the walls vanished as walls, the box vanished as a box.”
I sat stunned, even lightheaded at the thought, not only for American architecture, but for the ideal of creativity as a whole. One of the main reasons I first gravitated to Wright was the recognition that he wasn’t merely an architect, but a visionary artist. His medium was mortar and brick, certainly, but his creations had a fluid composition to them, like that of a master painter, no different than Degas, Monet, or Gauguin. He created spaces that inspired rather than merely existed. One of his consistent themes, as he repeatedly stated, was to expand the experience of the homeowner, to enhance the day-to-day experience of simply walking into their kitchen, for example, and as a consequence elevated the ideal of “home” into high art.
I have such a clear memory of standing there, looking out of that corner window, with my twelve-year-old son standing next to me, gazing out at the scenery beyond and sensing the light coming in as it had never done before, and feeling my vision going out in a near euphoric sense of mutual understanding with Wright’s intuition. It was a moment I will always treasure, standing there deep inside Wright’s masterpiece and able to plant such an exquisite seed.
“The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life” -Frank Lloyd Wright
