 Frank Lloyd Wright is known as one of the first green architects. He was well ahead of his time in the early twentieth century. Already well-known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as "the greatest American architect of all time."
He constructed places to fit with their surroundings and treated the building as a living organism, which had to be intentionally thought out through every detail.
Between 1900 and 1917, his residential designs were "Prairie Houses", so-called because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses featured extended low buildings with shallow, sloped roofs, overhangs and terraces, using unfinished materials. His manipulation of interior space in residential and public buildings is a mark of his style.
In the 1930s, Wright first designed Usonian houses. Intended to be highly practical houses for middle-class clients, the designs were based on a simple but elegant geometry. Wright is responsible for a series of extremely original concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City. He proposed the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932, and unveiled a 12-foot square model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years. He went on developing the idea until his death. His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that was a feature of countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright-open plans, special foundations and simplified construction techniques that allowed more efficiency in building by the design of the building itself.
Wright practiced what is known as organic architecture, which most importantly for him was the relationship between the site and the building and the needs of the client. For example, houses in wooded regions made heavy use of wood, desert houses had rambling floor plans and heavy use of stone, and houses in rocky areas such as Los Angeles were built mainly of cinder block.
Wright's creations took his concern with organic architecture down to the smallest details. From his largest commercial commissions to the relatively modest Usonian houses, Wright conceived virtually every detail of both the external design and the internal fixtures, including furniture, carpets, windows, doors, tables and chairs, light fittings and decorative elements. He was one of the first architects to design and supply custom-made, purpose-built furniture and fittings that functioned as integrated parts of the whole design, and he often returned to earlier commissions to redesign internal fittings.
Wright used local materials as part of his organic architecture. EnviroCitizen.org recognizes this as green thinking even before the issue became noticed. Wright certainly was a part of beginning the green architectural revolution.
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