Chapter 13: ). But when Burnham at this point offered to send Wright to

Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and then to the new American Academy which he and McKim were planning to start in Rome, in preparation for taking him on as designing partner, the young architect turned the opportunity down.

The W. H. Winslow house of 1893 in Auvergne Place in River Forest, Ill., always considered by Wright his ‘first’, shares many qualities with the Blossom and Harlan houses, but is altogether a much more mature and original work (Plate 128A). The front is completely symmetrical and as formal as that of the Charnley house of two years before.[344] Broad and low, of fine Roman brickwork with a rich band of moulded terracotta the full depth of the upper-storey windows below the wide eaves, the general effect of this has usually been considered very Sullivanian. But as Wright himself was responsible for the Adler & Sullivan work that this house most resembles—the Charnley house, certainly; and the Victoria Hotel of 1892 at Chicago Heights, probably—it is more accurate to consider that the Winslow house represents a continuation of his own manner of the previous year or two. The plan is more axial and less open than that of the Blossom house, the still rather Richardsonian dining room with its rounded bay being placed here at the centre of the rear. The staircase, still so prominent in the Shingle Style way at the Blossom house, is here pushed out of sight between walls.

Figure 29. Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, Isidore Heller house, 1897,
plan
]

Wright’s next important house, that of 1897 for Isidore Heller at 5132 Woodlawn Avenue on the south side of Chicago, perhaps shows some Japanese[345] influence in the succession of eaves-lines, one above the other. It is the development of the plan, however, that is most significant, as also the effect of the planning on the treatment of the exterior (Figure 29). The two principal living rooms are linked by a stair-hall into which they both open through wide apertures—no more mere doorways than in his own house of 1889, but tall breaks in the continuity of the walls. Although these rooms have ingle-nooks, they are not casual and cosy in the Shingle Style way but carefully ordered; both, indeed, are of regular cruciform shape. This shape, moreover, is given external expression in the plastic articulation of the external massing, an articulation that the multiple eaves echo above.

Two years later, in the Joseph W. Husser house, now destroyed, in Buena Park on the north side of Chicago, Wright’s personal development of domestic planning was carried much farther (Figure 30). Here the main living rooms were all raised to the first storey in order to have a good view of Lake Michigan, and the interior space was continued uninterrupted along the main axis of the house from the dining-room fireplace across the landing and through to the living-room fireplace. But the dining room was also articulated along a cross axis, extending outward into a large polygonal bay facing the lake, somewhat like the more Richardsonian bays of the Blossom and Winslow dining rooms.

Figure 30. Frank Lloyd Wright: Chicago, J. W. Husser house, 1899, plan
]

Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front wing of this, built in 1898,[346] showed a comparable maturing of his vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale. Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in the original spirit (Plate 128B).

In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the _Ladies Home Journal_ ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February 1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate 142A). The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms, extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the uncovered terrace (Figure 31). Here the articulated but unified space of the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential internationally (see Chapter 22). Towards that new concept much of the development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.

Figure 31. Frank Lloyd Wright: Kankakee, Ill., Warren Hickox house,
1900, plan
]

The _Ladies Home Journal_ project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated. In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the _Ladies Home Journal_ house was intended to be stuccoed like the Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the _porte-cochère_ on one side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.

In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses, the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different. So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses, the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.

Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)[347] was ten years older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.[348] In 1883 Voysey sold his first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were published in the _British Architect_; of these the one for a house[349] at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.

By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field, rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known, but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an Artist’ that he published in his magazine _The Hobby Horse_ in 1888 was of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant influence was probably abroad (see Chapter 16).

The existence of an earlier project dated 1888 for Voysey’s house for J. W. Forster at Bedford Park has led to some confusion. The executed house dates from 1891. Sometimes known as the Grey House, it is very different indeed from its neighbours, by this time some fifteen or more years old, by Godwin, Shaw, and their pupils. For one thing, its walls are covered with roughcast, already used by Voysey on The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington; for another, it is a three-storey rectangular box, severe and rather formal beneath its low hipped roof, not quaint and irregular like even the simplest of the earlier houses. The casement windows are arranged in bands between stone mullions, regularly but not symmetrically, and the eaves troughs are supported by delicately curved iron brackets. Otherwise there is no external detail.

The plan of the Forster house is also compact and regular, with entrance on the left side and living room across the front. In other words this house represents as much of a reaction against the picturesqueness of the earlier Queen Anne as does Shaw’s Fred White house, yet is quite without eighteenth-century reminiscence.[350]

More interesting and more prominent than the contemporary storey-and-a-half house known as The Studio at 17 St Dunstan’s Road in West Kensington are a pair of terrace-houses, also designed in 1891 but begun only the next year, at 14-16 Hans Road off the Brompton Road in London. Here Voysey dropped the roughcast he had originally proposed and used Webb-like red brickwork with the windows characteristically arranged in bands between plain stone mullions. The elegantly original detailing of the projecting stone porches and the curved line of the parapets at the top are related to his contemporary decorative work and in notable contrast to the almost ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ treatment of Mackmurdo’s slightly later house next door at No. 12.

A moderate-sized country house, Perrycroft, Colwall, near Malvern, begun in 1893, may be considered Voysey’s first mature production, introducing in executed work the personal mode of design for which the Ward project of 1890 had already shown the way, and from which he never moved very far in later years. This is comparable, not to Wright’s ‘first’ house in River Forest of the same date, but to his more advanced work of the end of the decade, the River Forest Golf Club and the Hickox house. Roughcast walls, windows arranged in bands between plain mullions,[351] a regular composition approaching but not quite reaching symmetry, these all follow from the Grey House and the Studio. But, being in the country, the house could spread out more. Moreover, the roofs were raised to a medieval pitch—45 degrees—so that their conspicuously heavy slating is as much a part of Voysey’s simple craftsman-like mode as are the off-white roughcast walls. The planning is closer to Webb’s than to Wright’s, the rooms being less symmetrically shaped and not opening at all into one another in the way of the Ward project.

A rather larger house, begun in 1896 on the Hog’s Back near Guildford in Surrey for the American Julian Sturgis, presumptive original of Santayana’s _Last Puritan_, has a somewhat less balanced composition with a prominent cross gable near one end (Plate 129A). The characteristic stone-mullioned lights of several of the rooms are here so extensive in their grouping as to constitute window-walls of the earlier Shavian sort.

In what is doubtless Voysey’s finest work, Broadleys on Lake Windermere, designed in 1898, the roofs are lower once more, and the window-walls are concentrated in three rounded bays along the lakeside terrace (Plate 129B). Here the hall in the middle is carried up two storeys, quite as Wright proposed to do in one version of his first _Ladies Home Journal_ house (Figure 32). In its horizontality, its concentration of fenestration, and its avoidance of medieval feeling, this house represents the extreme point of innovation and originality in Voysey’s work.

His own house, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was completed in 1900. Externally this resembles closely his earlier houses, but The Orchard has two cross gables and hence a stronger feeling of symmetry. Towards this the more regular and carefully balanced spacing of the window bands further conduces. In studying the vocabulary of this house, a vocabulary destined to be parodied _ad infinitum_ by architects and then by builders in the next twenty-five years, one can understand his feeling that he was a reformer not an innovator—the last disciple of Pugin, so to say, to whose secular work a line can be traced back via Webb, Street, and Butterfield. In Voysey’s special sense of continuity, which grew on him in later years, lies his great difference from Wright; for Wright was certainly determined, from the time he designed the Winslow house, to be as great an innovator—as much of an architectural creator—as was Sullivan in his skyscrapers. None the less, to look forward a little, such a house by Voysey as that now called Little Court at Pyrford Common in Surrey, built in 1902, is quite worthy of comparison with Wright’s masterpieces of that year (see Chapter 19). It shows little further development beyond his houses of the late nineties, however, except for a certain increase in horizontal emphasis.

Figure 32. C. F. A. Voysey: Lake Windermere, Broadleys, 1898-9, plan
]

Just before and just after 1900, Voysey’s work was very much better known and more influential in England, and increasingly in other countries,[352] than was Wright’s either at home or abroad at that time. Moreover, many contemporaries in England were building rather similar houses. One of them, M. H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who also worked a good deal on the Continent, developed his planning much farther in the direction of Wright-like openness along the lines suggested by Voysey’s project of 1890 for the Ward house. The many houses, both executed and projected, that Baillie Scott published in _Houses and Gardens_ in 1906 made his planning known to the young architects of the Continent (Figure 33). Characteristic is his Blackwell house on Lake Windermere of about 1900 with an enormous two-storey living-hall elaborated spatially by various ingle-nooks and so forth. The plan was published by Muthesius in 1904, and may well have influenced Adolf Loos in Vienna and other Europeans even before his own book appeared (see Chapters 20 and 21). After 1906 Baillie Scott’s work became quite ‘traditional’, and it is hard to believe that the projects published in the later version of his _Houses and Gardens_ in 1933 are by the same man.

Figure 33. M. H. Baillie Scott: Trevista, _c._ 1905, plan
]

The name of W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), later the biographer of Webb and an influential writer on architecture, should also be at least mentioned here. When Lethaby left Shaw’s office, where he had been chief assistant, he began his career by building Avon Tyrrell in Hampshire in 1891, a large brick country house closer to Webb’s than to Shaw’s in character. But his main contribution was not in the field of domestic architecture.[353]

Already by the mid nineties, the most successful English house-builder, more than rivalling Voysey in the quantity and occasionally even in the quality of his domestic work, was Sir Edwin L. Lutyens (1869-1944). Beginning like Voysey in the late eighties by building cottages, his first house of real distinction was the one he built for his cousin and frequent collaborator, the garden-designer Gertrude Jekyll, at Munstead Wood near Godalming in 1896. Several other good houses followed shortly, including notably The Orchards, Godalming, in 1898; but this early period of his work really culminates in Deanery Gardens at Sonning in Berkshire of 1901 (Plate 182B). In these houses are preserved all the best of the Shavian Manorial—the great timber-framed bay-window of the two-storeyed hall at Deanery Gardens is exemplary—simplifying and regularizing that mode under the influence of Webb and even approaching Webb’s standards of craftsmanship in the execution.

Like Webb in his later work, Lutyens used almost from the first a good deal of stylistic detail in interiors; he also turned back towards the ‘traditional’ in his exteriors considerably earlier than Baillie Scott when designing such houses as Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Tigbourne Court at Witley in Surrey, both built in 1899 two years before Deanery Gardens. Lutyens became from about 1906 the leading architect of his generation in England, and his later work will be treated elsewhere (see