Who the Hell Were Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier?

Howdy, howdy friends. For this installment of What the Hell Is..? we ask, instead, Who the Hell Was…? for two of the most influential architects of the 20th Century: Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. 

Despite being somewhat contemporaries, (Wright lived from 1867 to 1959, and Corbu from 1887 to 1965, placing him a generation after Wright) the two were incredibly different from each other. However, each impacted the field of architecture deeply and permanently. 

One was quintessentially American (Hint: It’s not the French guy), and the other quintessentially European. Both of them were total assholes personality-wise, but Frank wins out on still being the biggest asshole known to architecture. 

This post isn’t so much a personal biography of these two architects, but more of an examination of their similarities and differences, especially in their formative development as artists. Before I start this comparison, I want to say a couple of things about FLW the man. 

A Note On “The Greatest American Architect”

Let me start by saying this: Frank Lloyd Wright was a huge asshole. He was a terrible husband, an egotist and a notorious homewrecker, despite being America’s most famous and beloved architect. Wright’s architecture is worthy of great praise. Wright himself isn’t. 

He treated his colleagues like garbage, and illegally worked under the table during his time at Louis Sullivan’s firm. He broke up the marriages of three women, treated his first wife horribly, abandoned his family to run off with a mistress who abandoned hers, and even though a crazed servant murdered his mistress and children with an axe and burned his house down, it still doesn’t excuse his reprehensible behavior.

The hero-worship of such a vile person is problematic in many ways, and many architects can’t stand Wright because of his personal ethics, which are rarely mentioned except for in fun anecdotes about his sassiness. I want to say here, that, though I love Wright’s work, the worst thing about it was the man himself. 

 Two Lives, Side by Side: Early Years

Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier didn’t take up his pseudonym, French for “the Raven”, until 1920) both grew up in rural towns, but beside that they couldn’t be more different: Wright’s childhood was agrarian America at its most cliched- he worked on a farm in Wisconsin throughout his younger years - perhaps why he developed such a profound love for nature. 

Jeanneret, born in Switzerland, went to fancy art school, where he learned the art of watchmaking (which explains Corb’s love of machinery and efficiency) and is the perhaps the most stereotypically Swiss upbringing, like, ever. 

Somehow, both men were lucky enough to escape their dull, rural lives to apprentice at two of the most super influential firms of the late 1800s. 

Wright worked with Adler & Sullivan, the firm of Louis Sullivan, one of the fathers of modern architecture, whose steel skyscrapers rocked the landscape of a then-mostly burned down Chicago. Sullivan was probably one of the only people in the history of the world who ever earned the acknowledgement of Frank “I’m a freaking genius who had no help from anyone” Lloyd Wright, who, by the way, paid Sullivan back for his mentorship by blowing his money, arguing with his colleagues, working under the table illegally, and forever making Sullivan known to laypeople as “that guy who helped Frank Lloyd Wright.” 

Jeanneret apprenticed with Auguste Perret, who was to reinforced concrete what Sullivan was to steel. Unlike Wright, Jeanneret was kind to his mentor, whom Wright also hated. 

First Houses

Wright and Jeanneret’s early houses both followed the tradition of 19th century eclectic architecture, that is, combining influences from a variety of styles and integrating them in interesting ways. 

Wright’s early houses were heavily influenced by architecture from England (such as the Colonial and Tudor styles - see: the Smith House and Moore House, in Oak Park IL) as well as the Italian Renaissance (as evidenced by the Winslow House in River Forest, IL, with its wall-driven rationality). 

Moore House Photo Credit: J. Crocker. Others: Wikimedia Commons.

Jeanneret’s first houses, however, took more of a local approach, building in the Chalet style of his native Switzerland. Two of his most promising early houses were the house he designed for his family, the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, whose roof-driven structure and massing is reminiscent of some of Wrights early work, and the Villa Schwob, which predicts Jeanneret’s future use of flat roofs. 

Also notable is both architects’ decisions to leave their parent firms (or, in Wright’s case, telling the most influential architect in Chicago, (Daniel Burnham) basically “up yours” when Burnham offered to send Wright to the Ecoles des Beaux Arts, the world’s most renowned architecture school) to start independent careers relatively early in life (e.g. in their thirties rather than fifties.) 

Aesthetic Experimentation

It was during this period of the first years of the 20th century that Wright developed his Prairie Style, which took its name from the flat prairies of Illinois, where Wright almost exclusively worked at the time. Like its namesake, the Prairie Style emphasized the horizontal: the buildings were low, with shallow-pitched rooflines and long overhangs. 

Wright at this point, had developed his ideas regarding the relationship of the house to its surroundings - the Prairie houses were designed to blend in with the landscape itself - as well as welcome it inside via long and low windows, which flooded the interiors with natural light. 

Frank Lloyd Wright is also responsible a) the attached garage, and b) for the “open plan” or “open concept” (so if you want to blame someone for the insane proliferation of “open concept” all over HGTV, you can blame Frank.) 

Jeanneret’s early career was put on hold because of WWI, during which he worked in a brick factory, further grooming his love of efficiency and technology. Already, Jeanneret was thinking about low-cost housing and how mass production could achieve it. During this time, he developed his idea of the Dom-Ino construction system, which used pillars and slabs of reinforced concrete to create efficient structures that could be quickly built. His most important house of this period, the Maison Citrohan (1920) was a prototype of these ideas. 

Fame

By the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, Wright had immortalized his Prairie aesthetic in two of his most iconic houses: the Robie House (1906) (top) and the Coonley House (1907)(bottom), in Chicago, and River Forest respectively. Wright built each with the utmost care for every detail, from the furniture to the meticulous and delicate stained glass windows. At this point, he was already well known by the architectural press, and his work had already been overseas, where it attracted the attention of influential architects such as Peter Behrens. 

Le Corbusier, as he now called himself, was now part of an established avant garde in Paris, which titled itself the “Purist” movement, influenced by both the Dutch de Stijl painters, and the Cubism. Corbu believed that a house was “a machine for living in,” and was designing on that principle. 

He built his two most famous houses at this point in his career: Villa Stein at Garches (1927) and Villa Savoy at Poissy (1929). At this point, his machine aesthetic, with its minimal, clean lines and open interiors, was nearing perfection. During this time, he began writing books, one of the most famous being Vers Une Architecture, which was reviewed by Wright himself (who basically said “it’s whatever.”) 

In the 1930s, Wright began thinking about low-cost housing, leading to the development of what would later be called his Usonian houses, which, perhaps as a response to the International Style promoted in Europe by the Germans and our friend Corbu, focused less on the factory/machine aesthetic, and more on the ability of normal Americans to put them together with little more than hand tools and a table saw. 

The McBean House, one of two surviving Wright Prefab houses. 

Still, the aesthetics of Wright’s architecture took influence from the Europeans: he began using exclusively flat roofs with strong cantilevers, larger windows, and less ornament. The epitome of this influence is, of course, the Kaufmann House, otherwise known as Fallingwater, which was built in 1935. 

By this point, the two architects have designed their most iconic buildings, but as I said, this is not a biography, merely a comparison of how each evolved their artistic maturity.  

Both of these architects were more similar than they were different, despite the fact that architecture writers have been pitting them against each others as nemeses, and dividing modernism into “Wright’s” modernism and “Corbu’s” modernism. 

Yes, Wright was more rural, and Corbu more urban, as evidenced by their failed ideas of city planning: Wright’s unbuilt suburban utopia Broadacre City, vs Corbu’s unbuilt Radiant City, which involved razing entire swathes of Paris. 

Yes, Wright emphasized the natural, and Corbu the machine, but both worked with the idea of prefabrication, and both believed in the importance of material selection to communicate ideas. 

Both were Renaissance men: writers, designers, decorative artists, and visual artists in their own right, though Corbu’s artistic success extended beyond the scope of architecture - his furniture continues to be popular even today, and he was also a highly respected painter, notorious for making art in the nude.  

We’ll come back to Corbu next week, because his late work is definitely within the realm of Mid-Century Modernism, and his city planning deserves an in-depth look because of its influence on planners such as Robert Moses. 

I hope you enjoyed this little historical interlude - the scope of both of these architects goes far beyond what I’ve said here, but that’s what the future is for. Perhaps there will be a part two to this post, if it gains enough traction. 

Still, Thursday, we look at a gem in Michigan, and next Sunday, it’s going to get hella mod in here, with What the Hell is Mid-Century Modernism? (I recommend watching Mad Men, because it is the only TV show I have successfully completed from start to finish - I’m not a TV person at all.)

If you liked this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! (Especially now, as my position at work got cut, effectively plunging me into the uncertain realm of full-time writer.) 

Copyright Disclaimer: All images are from Wikimedia Commons and follow the guidelines set by Creative Commons 3.0, unless otherwise credited.