Frank Lloyd Wright

1 Pages 328 Words

I have chosen to critique one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s well-known homes, the Kaufmann House. It sits on a wooded terrain in Bear Run, PA and was built in 1936. The principle building material used here is reinforced concrete and stone. This home is also a perfect example of Wright’s naturalistic style of integrating modern materials into a serene natural landscape. In the case of the Kaufmann House, the positioning of the house nearly on top of a small waterfall marries the house and landscape in an aesthetically exciting and mysterious way.
I am a true fan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. In addition to a naturalistic style, which is my taste in homes, he has designed other homes such as a home with a distinguished sense of privacy in a busy downtown area. Unfortunately, I forget the name of the home at the moment and lack the literature at hand. Regardless, Wright’s designs focus on clean visual lines and integration of a home to its site. His use of modern materials such as reinforced concrete and traditional materials such as stone also marries today’s technology with the aesthetically pleasing feeling of days gone by.
I do not feel that Wright’s work was necessarily representative of its time because Wright was creating homes that had no contemporary equal. I truly believe he was ahead of his time. I do, on the other hand, feel that his work was representative of the place and culture it was completed. The Kaufmann House, for example, works well with its site and has the subdued feeling of the Pennsylvania countryside. Because Wright was sensitive to the area in which his designs were to take form, it is hard to imagine the waterfall without the house and the house without the waterfall. In my opinion, this is what makes the Kaufmann House such a successful piece of architecture...