Frank Lloyd Wright

Ward Willits House

Front view of the Ward Willits House

• Built between 1900-1902.
• Wright designed this house with influence from Japanese architecture.
• This house broke the rules of the normal suburban home.
• Ward Willits House is located in Highland Park, Illinois.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a designer who supported English arts and the Crafts movement. A lot of the suburban homes that were being built around this time contained this idea. When Wright begin to build suburban homes he broke the rules by opening up more space within the houses he was designing. Wright played with horizontal lines and contrast while designing the Ward Willits House. The horizontal lines in the design add more space to the outside of the house as well as the inside. The dark stained wooden members contrast the white stucco on the walls.(Roth, 497).

Ward Willits House Floor Plan

Wright was famous for hiding things such as water heaters and regular heaters within structures he placed in the rooms or in the structure itself. He felt that they we not aesthetically pleasing. As you can see in the floor plan the Ward Willits house is built in a landscape principle, but also has that cross mid section where spaces contributed around within the structure.

Present day: Falling Water

There are a lot of similarities and differences between Falling Water and the Ward Willits House. These houses were both built in the 1900s. When looking at the environment or starting places of both designs you can see that they are drastically different. Falling water starting place was on a stream bed in the middle of the Pennsylvania woods. Wright's principle for Falling water was to incorporate nature into the structure rather than leveling it out and building something on top of it. For the Ward Willits house Wright designed these structure on a flat suburban area in Illinois.

The similarities of both these designs mainly have to do with the idea Wright had for both of them. First, both designs had Japanese influence. Secondly these designs both contain a lot of contrast. With the Ward Willits House it's more in the color of the structure on the outside. In Falling Water the balconies in the structure overlap and cross each other. Lastly the most important similarity in my opinion was Wright's idea of opening up the space. The spaces Wright created were multi functional and no space went without purpose.

Sources

delmars.com

m.eb.com

wright-house.com