other tradition of American architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn, The

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2003 by McCarter, Robert

* modest in size (1200-1500 square feet) and affordable (cost-per-square-foot consistently below market housing), being designed largely for the American working class;

* energy-efficient, using a small fraction of the energy required by a similar-sized house today;

* oriented to the sun to give the inhabitants daylight throughout the day and year, solar warming in the winter, and cool shade and through-ventilation in the summer;

* and constructed with modular, standardized components and labor.

These amazing houses were characterized by both astonishing quality of interior space and intimate relations to courtyard gardens, and they set a standard that has never been matched by the universally similar and experientially vacuous developer products that have typified the American homebuilding industry since Wright's death.

It is one of the bitterest ironies of American pretensions to having developed an indigenous "culture" that Wright, without question the first modern architect, and arguably the greatest architect in the modern world, was given so few public commissions in the United States - barely 10 percent of his 470 built works and more than 1200 designs. Proving the adage that "a prophet is never honored in his own country," Wright in his seventy-two-year career never received a single commission from the American government. Yet the relatively few public commissions that he did receive resulted in buildings that now stand among the greatest monuments of architectural history, among which are the Larkin Building of 1902 in Buffalo, New York; the Unity Temple of 1906 in Oak Park, Illinois; the Bank and hotel of 1909 in Mason City, Iowa; the Midway Gardens of 1913 in Chicago; the Imperial hotel of 1919 in Tokyo, Japan; the Johnson Wax Building of 1936 in Racine, Wisconsin; the Florida Southern College buildings of 1938 in Lakeland; the Beth Sholom Synagogue of 1954 in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, unfinished at the time of Wright's death in 1959.

LOUIS I. KAHN

In one of the ironies of history, it was in the same year as Wright's death that Louis I. Kahn first began to gain international attention for his work, which was to be almost entirely comprised of public commissions. In 1959 he received commissions that would result in his influential built works, the SaIk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York; his first major unbuilt works, the U.S. Embassy in Luanda, Angola, and the Fine Arts Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Kahn saw completed his Richards Medical Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania. Having realized his first major built work, the Yale Art Gallery, in 1953, Kahn, in a building career of only twenty years' duration, would nevertheless become the most influential architect in the world during the second half of the twentieth century - this despite the fact that he did not live to see the century's final quarter, dying in 1974.

Kahn was influenced in his student days in the 1920s by Wright's great Unity Temple, with its square-and-cruciform plan and cubic central volume, and from this building Kahn developed his practice of starting every design with the square in plan. However, in the 1950s Kahn had grown more distant from Wright, disturbed by many of Wright's larger late projects, which Kahn felt were "arbitrary, personal, experimental, and disdainful of tradition. " Yet in 1959, upon learning of Wright's death, Kahn felt obligated to pay homage to this greatest American architect and visited the Johnson Wax Building (1936) for the first time. The great central workroom, with its grid of concrete columns supporting circular roof elements that floated in a glass-tube ceiling, the whole flooded by sunlight from above, was the most astounding revelation for Kahn - he was, "to the depths of his soul, overwhelmed," as Vincent Scully recalls.