Organic Architecture

Organic architecture is a way of designing in which a building is shaped by its site, its materials and the space inside it, rather than by a historical style. Frank Lloyd Wright coined the term, building on Louis Sullivan's principle that form follows function. There is no fixed set of features, but common ones are local stone left with its texture, terraces and rooms that extend into the landscape, and curved or domed plans.

Fallingwater (1936-1937) in Pennsylvania extends concrete terraces over a waterfall, and Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona has walls of local rock and concrete slanted at 15 degrees. Bruce Goff's Ford House in Aurora, Illinois (1949-1950) is a dome framed with Quonset hut ribs. Reima and Raili Pietilä's Tampere Central Library in Finland (1986) is faced in granite and copper. Prairie School houses (about 1900-1920) share low roofs, broad overhanging eaves and bands of windows. Organic buildings have no such common set; their forms differ with the site.

Frank Lloyd Wright coined the term organic architecture, extending the principle of his master Louis Sullivan that form follows function. Wright had designed Prairie houses from about 1900. In the 1930s he applied the idea to Fallingwater (1936-1937), Taliesin West (begun 1937) and the Usonian houses, small homes with open plans and in-floor heating, of which the Jacobs First House (1937) is often called the first. In Germany, Hugo Häring and Hans Scharoun developed a related approach, and Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonie opened in 1963.

Bruce Goff designed the Ford House in Aurora, Illinois (1949-1950) and the Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma (1950-1955). The Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz (1935-2011) drew on Wright, Rudolf Steiner and Hungarian tradition, and designed the Hungarian pavilion at Expo '92 in Seville. Reima and Raili Pietilä completed Tampere Central Library in 1986. The Bavinger House was demolished in 2016.