The Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York, is one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s earliest and most important masterpieces. Built in the prairie style, this large residential complex was designed, landscaped, and extensively furnished by the architect. The history of its creation, recorded in over 400 letters exchanged between Wright and Martin, forms a fascinating biography not only of the house but of its architect and client. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture by Jack Quinan is a detailed account of the Martin House commission. This excerpt examines the way Wright’s design philosophy evolved and influenced his work for Darwin D. Martin.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, domestic architecture in the United States drew inspiration from two venerable historical traditions — the classical and the picturesque. The latter — irregular, romantic, calculated to appeal to the imagination — grew out of ideas developed in English landscape design in the eighteenth century and was reinforced in the nineteenth century by Gothic revivalism and the writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900), Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852), A. J. Downing (1815–1852), and others. The S. Bayard Dod House in East Orange, New Jersey, designed by Arthur B. Jennings in 1885, with its complex massing, irregular profile, rich surface detail, and aggregation of living spaces around a spacious central hall, is a conspicuous example of picturesque ideals adapted to American domestic taste in the 1880s.
Classical alternatives to the picturesque derived their inspiration from the houses of eighteenth-century colonial governors, wealthy merchants, and plantation owners and were descended from ideals developed during the Italian Renaissance transmitted to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Inaugurated around the time of the American centennial, the colonial revival in the United States was reinforced by the classically based teachings at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where many American architects were trained in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial revival houses such as the circa 1890 Edward Hayes House in Buffalo, New York, designed by the local firm of E. B. Green and William Wicks, employ the formal vocabulary of classicism (columns, moldings, pediments, balustrades, etc.), bilateral symmetry, and harmonic proportions. They were typically rectangular in plan with a central stair hall dividing the house, front to back, into two equal halves.
Frank Lloyd Wright explored both of these approaches briefly during his formative years. The first Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, designed by Wright in 1887, is a picturesque, shingle-style design; the George Blossom House, built in Chicago around 1892, is colonial revival. But Wright apparently found the colonial style too staid and constraining, the picturesque style too arbitrary, and both “sentimental.” He absorbed their lessons but moved swiftly beyond them in search of something less derivative of historical precedent, more modern, and more authentically American.
Wright often characterized his intentions in architecture as “breaking the box,” by which he meant freeing his spaces from the confining corners of traditional architecture in pursuit of a greater unity between the interior of the building and the external world of nature. This impulse, which reflects his youthful exposure to Unitarian-Transcendentalist thought, was first manifested in the pinwheel configuration of his own house in Oak Park of 1889. Wright’s ability to pursue this ideal was curtailed, however, during his years in the office of Adler & Sullivan (1887–93), when he was obliged to shroud his after-hours commissions in a cloak of convention.
After parting ways with Adler & Sullivan, Wright abandoned compact plans based on Queen Anne and classical precedents in favor of linear plans consisting of elongated rectangles joined in various ways to octagons, as in his A. C. McAfee (1895), Chauncey Williams (1892), George Furbeck (1899), and Joseph Husser (1899) houses. Wright’s preoccupation with the octagon during the mid-1890s is consistent with a growing ambition on his part to break the box of conventional architecture; but despite the apparent spatial freedom of the octagon (each of the corners represents a 135-degree angle), octagons are hermetic and inward-turning and they resist a fluid integration with other geometric forms and with nature. The Joseph Husser House plan, the last of Wright’s linear plans of the 1890s, is awkwardly conceived but rich in potential. Its incipient cross-axiality anticipates the plan of “A Home in a Prairie Town” of the following year; the double prows leading onto its east porch foreshadow the prow tucked under the great cantilever of the Robie House porch; and the radial buttresses of the breakfast room prefigure the directional piers that will eventually terminate the unit room of the Martin House.
In his “Home in a Prairie Town” of 1901, Wright struck upon a radical solution for integrating the space of the house with the space beyond, which took the form of a cross-axial plan with a substantial chimney and fireplace at the intersection of the axes. By locating the hearth at the crossing of axes that lead outward in the four cardinal directions, Wright achieved a powerfully symbolic plan grounded in the experience of the American landscape and an organic scheme in which the chimney mass stands as the nexus of a structural-spatial system opening progressively outward along the axes. Wright’s desire to “break the box” and transcend the conventional distinctions between indoors and outdoors was accomplished by the extension of the axes and the use of terminals that provided a more fluid transition into nature than a simple window wall could ever achieve. In the fifteen-odd prairie houses designed in 1901 and 1902, Wright employed cruciform, L-shaped, T-shaped, and in-line plans with five types of terminals: the simple squared end; the extruded square bay; the extruded half octagon; the half octagon; and the prow. Among these, the squared end was the least dynamic. The others, which created pockets of space that were variously cupped onto the buildings, hardly represent integral solutions. Wright achieved the most effective synthesis of structure and space in the Darwin D. Martin House, but the solution required nearly fifteen months of work on his part.
As crude as Wright’s May 1903 sketch of the Martin complex is, it represents the formation of an idea in the mind of the architect. The drawings and letters pertaining to the building of the Martin complex indicate that the program that materialized between May 1903 and the summer of 1904 included a house for Darwin and Isabelle Martin, their two children, and several live-in servants; a house for the Bartons; a greenhouse; a pergola connecting the Martin House to the greenhouse; and a garage with a chauffeur’s apartment above and a stable to the rear. Plans for a gardener’s cottage were first discussed in 1905, but the building was not constructed until 1908. As the greenhouse took shape, Darwin complained to Wright that it was more a conservatory than a “growing house,” so he purchased a 60-foot-long, commercially designed greenhouse and had it installed west of the garage/stable structure. Wary of the intrusion, Wright offered to “put a little architecture on it.”
Wright’s May 1903 sketch contains only the Martin and Barton houses, the garage/stable, and a pergola that leads northward from the main house to no specific structure. An additional appendage to the main house, the only structure drawn without cross-hatching, may represent a greenhouse. The cross-axial plan of the Martin House is recognizable in this sketch, but the house is rotated 90 degrees from its eventual alignment with Jewett Parkway, and the entire building complex is rotated 90 degrees to align the principal facade of the main house with the driveway Wright used to delineate the west boundary of the site. Darwin was quick to correct Wright’s misunderstanding of the relationship of the houses on Jewett Parkway to the street but otherwise gave short shrift to Wright’s sketch, owing to his preoccupation with progress on the Barton House and the Larkin Building.
Wright completed a more fully developed preliminary plan of the Martin complex sometime late in the fall of 1903, when the Barton House construction was well in hand | fig. 40. On December 26, 1903, Darwin wrote to Wright, “Mrs. Martin says if we are to build we may as well have done with it. It don’t seem as though our little house will hold us come another Christmas.”
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture is available from:
Jack Quinan is one of the most important scholars working today on Frank Lloyd Wright. He lives in Buffalo, NY.
