Over the past half a century, many have erroneously
agreed that there is a chasm in Frank Lloyd Wright’s work,
an unbridgeable gap between his residential and
commercial buildings. In fact, all of his architectural designs
show off his belief in a world governed by technology but
indebted to nature, and all his buildings are really
monuments to man’s place in the natural world.
In his domestic homes, Wright seems to emphasize a
blending of the artificial and the natural, with an emphasis
on low-pitched roofs, asymmetry, natural light, and hidden
entrances that would require a visitor to search for a way in.
These obscured entrances also make the visitor confront
the landscape in a way he or she would not have to if he or
she entered merely from the urban street the house would be located on (in the case of houses such
as the Winslow House in Illinois and other suburban houses). In his own house at Taliesien, in
Wisconsin, the visitor must travel a winding driveway uphill to the back of the house and literally
confront a panoramic vista of green hills and woods, rather than merely entering the house. In this
way, then, one is forced to acknowledge both the artificial and the natural at once and cannot merely
observe the home as one thing alone.