Having left the midwest and arrived last night in the Boston area, the Architecture Greatest Hits tour moves along from FLW to Richardson.  Before I dive into the Richardson trove that is Boston, I think I’d better get the Richardson outliers to the west out of the way.

The Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh is one of his most complete, extended and perfect buildings.  In previous visits, I’d focused most on the courthouse itself, with its solid mass, beautiful tower, commodious entry and stair, etc. 

This trip we spent more time looking at the jail.  We often speak about Richardson as a proto-modernist, looking at the rationality of his planning, structural bays, how he led directly to Sullivan, etc.  But in the jail there are other elements at play that we would now regard as quite current – the play between order and disorder, symmetry vs. asymmetry, colliding grids and organizational systems.

The site is irregular, but Richardson drops some axial, rectilinear volumes onto it, as if the site weren’t an issue.  Then he wraps all of this in a wall that addresses the streets.  Sometimes this is just a wall, and there are courtyards behind it,

and sometimes the wall becomes a building, with a whole different geometry.

For formal entries and foci, symmetry is used to emphasize the center

but in other areas, an asymmetrical  composition is made of the facade, tying into the field of the wall, but existing on its own terms.  

A building you can study for a long time, or as I pointed out in Minneapolis, you can just copy it.

The psychiatric hospital complex in Buffalo is more conventional than this, and at first glance, it is one in a long line of buildings that might not be the most comforting for people having mental problems.  

It is a really large complex, with multiple pavilions and wings.  The central piece is very formal, establishing a clear hierarchy for a large building which rambles around.

but Richardson breaks down the scale nicely in the repetitive wings, each of which reads as a building (again, symmetry and asymmetry):

which are then linked by little connector pieces, and step back to form a series of open spaces.

In Albany we saw the city hall, a well-balanced exterior massing, with a simple, straightforward interior.

and the State capitol.  It’s hard to understand exactly what Richardson is responsible for here, as quite a few architects worked on it throughout a few decades.  However, he is generally given credit for the overall design of the elevations.

It seems that this massive exterior stair exists primarily to buttress the east facade, which started subsiding down the hill:

He also completed much of the interior planning, and the basic design for the over-the-top western stair.

This is truly the most extraordinary stair I’ve ever seen.   The space and procession are incredible, 

The detailing is insane, but apparently much of that was added by a later architect.

Albany is a place that is disdained (or more usually ignored) by downstaters, but this stair alone is worth the trip.  Beaux Arts planning meets Piranesi.

We now head into Boston, and more Richardson will follow, next week.

In the past two weeks we visited two of FLW’s masterpieces – Fallingwater and the Darwin D. Martin house in Buffalo.  They are both so well known and documented that I don’t what I can add beyond a few photos and comments.  (Neither of them allows photos inside under normal circumstances, so all my pictures are of the exteriors).

Fallingwater is considered the great house of Wright’s middle period, and it is a tour-de-force.  Every inch has been designed and detailed to perfection.  I must admit that despite years of looking at books about it, I didn’t have a very good idea of its spatial arrangement.  After visiting it, the reason for that is now clear to me – it doesn’t have one big spatial organization, it is rather a series of perfect parts that are really quite isolated from one another

the little entry door on the left

For each part, the big move is the connection between the interior space and the exterior terrace/tray.  These are then pinwheeled around the central mass.  One moves between the parts on very tight stairways attached to the mass.  From the outside, the parti of cantilevered trays is obvious; from the inside, you can understand the logic of each part, but never comprehend the whole.

the concrete trays

the swimming hole

the beams anchored in the native rock

We now live in age where the open plan (and open section) are dominant;  it is instructive to see how fantastic a house can be when it is divided up into discrete parts.

looking into the living room from the a terrace

Edgar Kaufman Jr. was an apprentice of Wright’s, and convinced his parents to hire Wright to design Fallingwater.  In the 1980s he was one of my professors, co-teaching a seminar on Wright at Columbia.  It was a great course, and he was a lovely man, with a courtly manner, a beautiful voice, great reminiscences and insights into Wright, and the best wardrobe of anyone I knew in New York.  In homage to him, I wore a nice tweed jacket while touring the house (instead of the normal tourist garb), and as I paused besides the tray of cocktail ingredients by the fireplace, I felt that he would have approved.

Why don’t they have tours where they let you mix a drink and sit by the fireplace?

The Darwin Martin house has been restored by a non-profit over the past two decades or so.  The main house had survived in bad condition, as had the Barton house (built for Martin’s sister) and the gardener’s house.  But the carriage house and pergola had been demolished long ago, so the foundation undertook the complete reconstruction of them based upon Wright’s original drawings and photographic documentation.  All of this work is painstaking and beautifully done, as is the restoration of the main house.

the complex, Barton house on the right

front elevation

the main terrace

We had an excellent docent on the tour, who spoke of how Wright regarded this as his summa project, the one that accomplished everything he wanted.  Having seen many other early Wright houses, I’d agree.  He had an unlimited budget, and he used it to pursue every idea and piece to its most developed state.  Nothing that could be developed or elaborated has been left alone.  Sometimes it’s a bit much – there are just so many idea and moves and articulations.  But it all fits together seamlessly – the underlying logic of the overall scheme is always apparent, and the development at successive scales reads perfectly – it’s like a rectilinear fractal.

the service entry

the backyard seen through the porte-cochere

The Barton and gardener’s houses are much smaller and simpler, and the contrast with the main house was intriguing, as one could see the bare bones spatial organization without the endless development.

The Barton house

the gardener’s house

Toshiko Mori designed the adjoining visitors’ center, which plays with some of Wright’s ideas (cantilevered roof, rigid modular plan) with very different materials and tectonics.  It’s a fine little building, one which doesn’t compete with the house, but which has its own integrity and logic.

the introductory video is projected onto the glass panels on the left

The houses confirmed my opinion that you can’t really understand a great building until you visit it.