The
Wrights found what they were looking for in the oceanside town of Del Mar,
just outside San Diego, in the classic rocky, scrub-covered landscape
of coastal southern California. There they bought a well-forested hillside
lot where, in 1947, they built a combined house and studio. They settled
into a community of recent arrivals like them¨ selves, many from the Midwest.
Wright would draw most of the commissions of the remaining twenty-five years
of his
life from such clients. This fluid postwar society, often self-conscious,
often fickle in its tastes, but full of people looking for an image of something
that they could call home, would reward Wright with far more work than he
had
had in Long Beach: more than sixty projects between 1947 and 1972 (though
only about half were constructed). But Del Mar would never be his Taliesin.
The character of Wright's work in California was less experimental than that
of his Long Beach years. He continued to be guided by his father's philosophy
of organic architecture, with a particular emphasis on materials that were
compatible with the climate and the traditional ranch and mission architecture
of the region. Thus natural wood and stucco served as his principal media.
He also continued to try to achieve unity of design through the use of built-in
furniture and generally devoted more attention to designing the interior decor
of his houses.
Most of Wright's commissions were for houses of relatively small size, ranging
from the tiny studio residency of the Earl McPhersons (1947) to a variety of
two-bedroom houses like that for the B.W. Wrights (1951). In some cases these
homes were set into hillsides and split into two stories banked into the site;
more often, they were confined to one level and arranged around two or three
sides of a courtyard. The courtyard house was, of course, a traditional Spanish
colonial and ranch type popular in California, and Wright often took it as
a model for small homes when he wished to create a variety of interior and
exterior spaces and enhance the relationship of building to site.
Many of these designs resemble Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses of the
1930s and '40s: small dwellings of moderate cost with very open plans laid
out on a regular module, natural wood walls both inside and out, and technical
innovations like radiant heating in the floor slab. The elder Wright conceived
of these houses as prototypical dwellings for Americans of the mid-twentieth
century. John Lloyd Wright never built a true Usonian house but adapted certain
features of the type to his work.
To his dismay, though, he found that his California houses were frequently
taken for the work of his father. No sooner had John tried to free himself
of the burden of his father's influence through writing My Father Who is on
Earth than he found the burden redoubled by the public's heightened awareness
of the phenomenon of Frank Lloyd Wright. For his part, the elder Wright was
happy to foster the impression that the buildings designed by John and his
brother Lloyd, who also practiced in the Los Angeles area, were merely poor
substitutes for their father's work. John nonetheless persevered in trying
to develop his own interpretation of organic architecture in the southern California
setting.
The house that John Lloyd Wright built for himself at Del Mar is one of the
best of his California works. A masterly combination of the hillside and courtyard
types, it is a kind of pledge to the California ideal that John and Frances
Wright had embraced. The house is set into a hill and comprises a high-ceilinged
living, dining, and study area adjoined by a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath.
A studio opens onto the living area from a balcony. But these interior spaces
are treated as only part of the house, for one approaches the building through
a series of outdoor living areas laid out on terraces and overlooking a pool.
Indeed, there is an intimate relationship between interior and exterior space
which could only be achieved in the sympathetic climate of that region. The
exterior of the house is brick, stucco, and wood, while the interior finish
is mostly rough lumber stained in rosy tints with watercolors. The house was
furnished simply by the Wrights, but with a great range of textures and colors
produced by fabrics, art objects, and natural forms like pine cones and grasses,
thus emulating, in a southern ^ California guise, the nature of Wright's boyhood
home in Oak Park.
As with his buildings in Long Beach, one of the strengths of Wright's best
houses from his California period was their siting. Wright's principal reason
for preferring not to carry too heavy a load of commissions was his love of
spending time at the building sites, from walking the ground over and over
while he plotted his design, to finishing watercolor stains or wood-block ornament
himself as a house neared completion. Thus he was sensitive to the nuances
of topography of a site like that of the B.W. Wright house in La Jolla. The
house wraps protectively around its entrance court while offering a panoramic
view across the steep ravine behind it. A series of brick terraces anchors
the structure to the hillside. And he made the most of his project for the
Page house in Lake County, Illinois (1952), by letting it ramble across the
creek that ran through the middle of its site, treating the living room as
a bridge between the public and private wings of the residence. These are not
dramatic solutions but comfortable ones which put the houses at ease with the
ground they stood on.
The principal shift in Wright's architecture which took place after his move
to California was toward a greater use of ornament and built-in or freestanding
furniture which he designed himself. In Long Beach, Wright had often worked
with designers, notably Alfonso lannelli, to produce sculptural reliefs, art
glass, lighting fixtures, and garden fountains to embellish his residential
work. But by the late 1940s, he had begun to feel that for both artistic and
economic reasons, the architect should be responsible for ornament and furnishings,
and he closely supervised their fabrication. In this respect he was moving
closer to his father's precepts, for since the first years of the century Frank
Lloyd Wright had been designing furniture, rugs, glass, and other decorative
and utilitarian objects for his buildings.
Since most of his California houses were of wood, and the interior wall surfaces
usually pine or fir plywood, Wright used plywood for his furniture and for
the ornamental cornices and block murals with which he decorated many of his
houses. The furniture consisted of geometric plywood shapes attached to solid
wood frames by plywood gussets which prevented the parts from torquing under
stress. Usually, the plywood and frames were stained different colors. Wright
used this system for chairs, tables, and plant stands for a number of his California
houses. In their unrelieved and somewhat awkward angularity, these pieces resembled
some of the furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1930s and
'40s but had a more homemade look.
For some projects, Wright fashioned
small pieces of plywood into what he called "lichen- aceous ornament," drawing a parallel between the almost symbiotic
relationship of rock and lichen and the nature of ornament which adheres to
the structure of a building. A number of his designs include chain and fret
patterns worked into the undersides of roof overhangs as well as interior panels
of geometric and floral ornament. The most extensive use of plywood block ornament
appears in "Brickwood," the large house which Wright designed and helped decorate
at Rancho Santa Fe, California, between 1964 and 1968. Here plywood pieces
were laminated in as many as three layers to give depth, and then painted in
intense colors—or even gilded—to create elaborate block murals. The most
effective of these featured running geometrical patterns generated by the
play of basic
shapes which they included. Of all Wright's work, this ornament is the part
which is the hardest for tastes of twenty years later to accept. Nonetheless,
it was consistent with the tastes of the period, as one is reminded by reading
descriptions in society columns of the dresses women wore when they partied
in Wright's houses.
In the early 1950s Wright also experimented with producing patterns for rugs
and fabric to complete his conception of integral interior design, just as
his father had done. His schemes for rugs were rectilinear, in patterns ranging
from modified Greek frets to more abstract arrangements in earth tones. Wright
had some of these rugs made up by Navajo weavers for his own house. His fabric
designs played lines and geometric solids off against strips of bright color.
None of these seems to have been printed and marketed.
At the same time that he increased
his attention to furnishings and ornamentation, Wright renewed his activities
as a toy designer, now concentrating on construction
block sets. In late 1949 he patented—and in 1950 began to sell—a new version
of his Wright Blocks, an interlocking block set which he had first patented
in 1933. These were rectilinear, cross-grooved wooden blocks packaged in "No.
1" and "No. 2" sets of 36 and 70 pieces respectively, which differed slightly
in the types of pieces they included and in the materials used. Some sets
were in a variety of natural woods while others were colored with watercolor
stains.
The Wright Blocks were not only more abstract and modern than Lincoln Logs,
but they were also more versatile and could be assembled into lighter, more
open structures. Nevertheless, they failed to catch the public's fancy to
the same extent as their log cabin predecessors and were not produced in
any great
quantity.
Probably some time in the mid-1950s,
Wright developed a prototype for another toy construction block set, the "Timber Toy" (no specific date for the toy
has come to light in the Wright papers). This was the most ambitious of his
construction sets, comprising seventeen different shapes which included both
interlocking wood blocks and flat wood strips designed to serve as "floor" and "wall" elements,
all stored in a partitioned wooden box mounted on casters. To demonstrate their
versatility, Wright built and photographed a wide variety of block towers,
bridges, small houses, and even a "cathedral," but he did not succeed in
having them fabricated and marketed. Both the Wright Blocks and the Timber
Toy resembled
much of Wright's geometric wood ornament; and indeed, over the years the
design of these toys had gradually become an integral part of his architectural
thinking
rather than an entirely separate activity. Stymied in his attempts to develop
prefabricated and standardized buildings, he found an outlet for these interests
in developing his toy blocks.
Wright did not, however, lose interest
in projects of larger scope than single-family houses. During the first half
of the 1960s, he dabbled unsuccessfully in
working with developers. In 1960 he did a jazzy design for a small chain of
restaurants
with deep, zigzagging overhangs representing a pun on the name of one of
the owners, a Mrs. Eaves. The project conjured up in a lighthearted way the
spirit
of the American strip, and it is disappointing that it was never built. A
project for a theater followed. In 1962, Wright drew up a number of plans and
elevations
for a tract house development entitled "University City." He introduced variety
into the humdrum of the subdivision by such devices as putting a forty-five
degree rotation on one or more stories of a plain square house, partially
raising houses on piers, adding balconies, and changing roof lines. The results
are
indeed lively but often eccentric. Still more unconventional was Wright's
design (drawn in 1965) for a developer, Coy Burnett, for a huge apartment
and shopping
complex in Del Mar. The apartment building which dominates a ridge-top site
has some of the futuristic flamboyance of the late designs of Frank Lloyd
Wright and John's brother, Lloyd.
The quantity of commissions that Wright received in California should have
been cause for satisfaction, but there were other, frustrating difficulties
in his career there. Just as Wright's architectural practice was expanding
rapidly in the early 1950s, he became entangled in a lengthy legal battle over
his eligibility to design buildings in California. Upon arriving on the West
Coast in 1946, Wright, who was a licensed architect in Indiana, had failed
to pass a civil engineering section of the California licensing examination
and was therefore denied a state license. But by law he was nonetheless allowed
to design dwellings of up to two stories as well as one-story commercial buildings
with less than 25 feet between bearing walls.
When Wright went ahead and established
a practice as a building designer, he ran up against opposition from the
State Board of Examiners and the local
chapter of the American Institute of Architects. After Wright taught a course
for the San Diego Extension of the University of California in 1948, the
local AIA objected to its being included under the heading of "architecture," so
Wright withdrew from the school. In 1950, when he brought suit against a
client for payment for services rendered, an architect testified that Wright's
plans
were improperly prepared. Although Wright subsequently succeeded in having
the man reprimanded by the national AIA, of which he was a member through
his Indiana license, Frances Wright claimed that the State Board of Examiners
suggested
to some of Wright's clients that they sue him for having handled their commissions
without a license.
Finally, in 1954, Wright was arrested
and charged with four misdemeanor violations of the California business and
professional code stemming from his design
for a clothing store in Oceanside, California. Three of the charges were thrown
out by the judge, but the fourth- that Wright had advertised himself as an
architect because his professional sign bore the letters "AIA" after his name-
was pressed as an amended complaint. Wright was convicted of unlicensed practice
in May 1955 and was given a suspended sentence by a judge who criticized the
statute under which the charge was brought. The San Diego appellate court overturned
the conviction in February 1956 on the grounds that the AIA was a national,
not local, organization and that membership did not imply possession of a local
license. Wright was otherwise perfectly within the law in calling himself a "designer." The
uproar seems not to have significantly affected the volume of Wright's practice,
but it must have marred his contentment with his adopted state, where architects
felt obliged to adopt protectionist tactics against builders lured by the
postwar real estate boom.
Still, on the whole the Del Mar community regarded John Lloyd Wright as a
kind of local treasure. They made him part of the local planning commission,
included his houses on benefit tours, invited him to give lectures, sent him
Christmas cards full of testimonials to their enduring pleasure in his designs-
and, when he wrote a profile of his father for the magazine Architectural Design
in 1960- snapped up all the copies in the local bookstores. And most important,
they gave him work. For a son who did not crave the kind of adulation that
his father had always needed, it was a pleasant enough place to live out one's
last years.
John Lloyd Wright died eight days after his eightieth birthday, on December
20, 1972. Frank Lloyd Wright had by then been dead for thirteen years, but
John had still not outlived being his son. He knew this, and expressed mixed
feelings about it. Architect Bruce Goff, who knew both the elder Wright and
his two architect sons, wrote that John had been the more favored by his father;
and indeed, it was John whom the father took on as an apprentice, and to John
that he revealed some of his innermost feelings. Yet in favoring him, Frank
Lloyd Wright very nearly crushed the spirit out of his son, as he did out of
some of his other followers. John sensed early on that he had to get off on
his own, but spent the rest of his life both prizing the association of the
name Wright with genius and resenting the fact that many of his own creative
acts were taken for hand-me-downs from his father. Because he believed in his
father's architectural philosophy, much of his work depended upon the elder
Wright's; but particularly a the height of his career in Long Beach, John did
some promisingly original designs. Yet his father's ever-dominant presence
on the American architectural scene, and the upheavals in John's own life in
mid-career that almost uncannily replicated some of his father's personal entanglements,
dulled that promise.
John Lloyd Wright continued to do competent, often sensitive, work in his
later career but rarely work of marked distinction. The one place where he
successfully gave leash to the inventiveness and wit that friends saw in his
personality was in his design of toys. There he did not have to compete with
his father. Yet aside from that one brief period in the late 1910s and early
1920s, he could never give himself over completely to toys because the romance
of architecture was too strong for him. Rather than give up what he most loved
doing, he was willing to bear the burden of being his father's son.
John
Lloyd Wright first experimented with the notion of standardization in planning
his toy construction block sets. Limited in the range of elements they comprised,
they lent themselves easily to mass production from the drawings that Wright
prepared. But by the 1930s Wright also sought to adapt varying degrees of
standardization to architectural design. For example, his Arcade Cabins Hotel
(1930) for the
Indiana Dunes State Park was framed with steel elements made up into 24-foot
units, two rooms long, which were fabricated at the mill and put together
at the site. This approach proved to be less expensive than conventional
wood
framing and may have inspired Wright to use steel "lumber" in the Burnham
house. Most of his projects for standardization and prefabrication, however,
were
never built.
