What were Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophies regarding architecture?

I was born in the town, Cloquet, MN, that has the only service station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. While it is still an attractive building, it has survived only because of FLW's name attached to it. Designed with space only for a single pump, it looks dated and quaint. Because it only has the one pump area, the prices are always above market. Were it not designed by Wright, it would have long-since been razed. In the city where I now live much of my life, Minneapolis, we were a bit surprised when a Frank Gehry designed art museum, The Weisman Art Center, arrived in 1993 with very little fanfare on the campus of the University of Minnesota next to the Washington Avenue Bridge (from which the poet John Berryman plunged to his death). Like most Gehry stuctures, it is visuallly jarring but interesting with its mixture of geometric shapes combined into what looks like a stainless steel three dimensional design problem. Gehry came to the museum for an artist's talk about ten years ago and I was in the audience as he talked about the fact that he is not terribly interested in a lasting legacy and that he fully expects most of his buildings to be replaced eventually. That is in striking contrast to Wright, who seemed terribly interested in his legacy. In fact, I think that Gehry's self-effacing demeanor hides the fact that his artistic vision has left many of the world's cities with visually striking monuments. My friends in Prague are more than happy, for instance, to show visitors the Dancing House. In my travels in Germany, I was surprised to find a Gehry designed Energy Center in the spa town of Bad Oeyenhausen. While Wright's reputation is as an architect, Gehry seems to have added a visual element in his highly imaginative buildings that allows one to consider them alongside the best of the major scuptors of the twentieth century, like Claes Oldenburg's Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis. Not surprisingly, Frank Gehry's Standing Glass Fish is in a glass building in the same garden as the Oldenburg. What I am saying is that the legacy of Wright and the legacy of Gehry are of a different nature. While the latter is strictly an architect for architects, Gehry has been a visual artist working in design, largely of large public buildings. I think it is a significant legacy.

Frank Lloyd Wright did not have one signature answer to all of these. This is what made him distinct and certainly a pioneer in architecture. His designs are all influenced by their own individual circumstances. For instance, "Falling Water" is completely influenced by its natural habitat. His entire design was based off of how NOT to disturb its environment. He was not simply following a style, but rather answering the questions and challenges that his projects posed, and designing around these.

Flat roofs that perpetually leak, no ceilings that afforded clearance greater than FLW's height, wasting only minimal space on such "boring" features as kitchens and bathrooms, building housing for the "common man" that could only be afforded by the wealthy. Be welcoming and accomodating to the faithful corps of FLW fans from all over the world who will most assuredly beat a path to your door 24/7/365, expecting a complimentary guided tour of your FLW house!

He hated cities and believed that mankind's utopian future lay in agrarian communes where structures and nature would be one. He wanted what he built to essentially blend in with nature. He was always itching to found a bona fide "movement"-Prairie Style, Organic Style, Usonian Style. He once said, No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it.

Usonian was a term he used (though likely did not invent) to encompass his ideals on "people's housing." Fortunately, he died before seeing his dream of affordable people's housing personified in the mobile home industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usonia

Wright developed an original, complete and substantive re-conception of domestic architecture with a large body of built work and unbuilt designs in the period between 1893 and 1909. This oeuvre constitutes a single artistic achievement elucidating an architectural language, a typology of form and plan and expressed the authenticity of great architecture. 1. Wrights conception of interior space as defined as something other than the box-like room was a new direction in architecture.  Interior space, became, for Wright, a collection of intersecting functional and symbolic spaces interconnected horizontally with a new sense of freedom and openness.  It seemed a very American idea of openness and expansiveness. (I will not speak of 'breaking the box' and space on the move, flowing here and there. Wright spoke in those terms but repetition has made that language meaningless.) 2. Wright's much mumbled over and somewhat incomprehensible notion of 'organic architecture' was a vision of architecture as a total work of art fully in harmony with nature, fully integrated with all its constituent parts, fully embodying American society from the inside out.  If you will, there are, in a sense, two kinds of modern architecture.  One is made up of fully integrated, interrelated, harmonized elements.  Each part genetically related to the whole. This is organic architecture. The other utilizes contrast and difference to create meaning and aesthetic presence. It is in bold contrast to nature. Charles Edouard Jeanneret (alias Le Corbusier) and his white cube set in the landscape is the epitome of this classical notion in modern architecture. And, Wright had an uncanny knack for anticipating trends in 20th century American architecture, for good or ill. The attached garage, the carport, the single story home, the open kitchen, the insular, inwardly focused home (unlike front porch living) the back yard deck, suburban sprawl, the architectural use of concrete block, the low slope hip roof.