Buffalo, the home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style

When I joined my architectural degree course many moons ago, the first solo project required a presentation on an architect of one’s choosing. I mumbled the only architect’s name I knew: Frank Lloyd Wright.

Born in 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Wright was renowned for his key role in the architectural movements of the 20th century. Recognised in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time”, Wright pioneered the Prairie School movement, the indigenous style of architecture inspired by the flat landscape of America’s Midwest and spotlighting a new vocabulary of space and form.

Wright’s work reflected his philosophy of “organic architecture”, which was intrinsic to the environment and “a product of its place, purpose, and time”. “Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders’ spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground,” said the master architect, who spent his formative years in the Midwest and began his career as a draftsman at an architectural firm in Chicago.

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Wright’s Prairie homes, which he built between 1900-14, helped develop a distinctly American architectural style, one rooted in the site and surroundings. Characterised by an open floor plan, low-pitched roofs and natural materials like wood and stone, the wide, flat buildings aimed to mimic the prairie landscape.

Wright perfected his Prairie style in the city of Buffalo, New York State, which has more of his buildings than any other city except Chicago. Buffalo mostly serves as a pit stop while travelling up to the spectacular Niagara Falls. The city has a radial street plan, and was designed to be an “Americanised Paris”, complete with radiating boulevards. A lesser known facet of the Queen City of the Great Lakes is that it’s “a textbook in modern American architecture”, according to The New York Times. I am quite surprised to learn this and find that Explore Buffalo Tours offers guided tours, focusing on Wright’s legacy. Wright’s architectural legacy in Buffalo has its roots in his friendship with Darwin D. Martin, who began working for the Larkin Company, a soap and mail-order operation, at the age of 14 and worked his way up to the board.

“Martin thought of Wright when he had to employ an architect to design the firm’s new headquarters. Wright’s work was till then limited to Wisconsin and Illinois, but Martin ended up engaging him for a personal project as well—his home,” says Richard Garcia, the guide on the two-hour Martin House Plus tour.

Wright worked on Martin House, set on a 1.5-acre residential estate in the Parkside neighbourhood of Buffalo, from 1903-05. The project features six distinct, interconnected structures—Martin House, Barton House (built for his sister), a carriage house, a gardener’s cottage, a conservatory, and a 100-foot-long pergola—and is woven together with the landscape.

The estate showcases Wright’s signature style—horizontal planes, spatial openness, pier and cantilever construction, and palette of natural colours and materials. The Martin House, listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1986, cost over $175,000 (around ₹1.5 crore now) to build, with the Martins spending nearly 40 times what the average American house cost at the time.

I’m particularly taken by the iridescent stained glass windows, designed to act as “light screens” to visually connect exterior views with the interior spaces. “Wright designed 394 stained glass windows, with 15 distinctive patterns and 750 jewel-like pieces, for the complex...,” Garcia reveals.

The Martins were so pleased with their home that they soon commissioned a summer home. Located 17 miles south-west of Buffalo, Graycliff was built from 1926-31 on an 8.5-acre-plot located perched atop a cliff overlooking Lake Erie. The complex has three buildings: the 5,800 sq. ft Isabelle R Martin House, the 3,100 sq. ft Foster House, and the small Heat Hut set amid verdant gardens.

Graycliff’s design showcases elements that found fuller expression a few years later in 1935’s Fallingwater. Designed to serve as a weekend retreat for the owner of Pittsburgh’s Kaufmann’s Department Store, it is often called “the best all-time work of American architecture”. Large ribbons of glass windows and broadly cantilevered balconies invite the lake breezes in and frame stunning views.

One of his earlier works is the Larkin Administrative Building, a five-storey red-brick structure with steel-frame construction, which Wright designed in 1903.

“The ahead-of-its-time office building had innovations like central air-conditioning, built-in desk furniture, and suspended toilet partitions and bowls,” Laura McGrath, the docent, says.

In 1937, the building had to be sold when the Larkin Company went out of business. The City of Buffalo took control. “Despite a public outcry, it committed Buffalo’s biggest demolishing blunders in 1950: bringing down the structure for a trucking plaza that was never constructed,” McGrath says. In 2015, the new owners of the site created a “ghost” pier of etched glass the same size as the earlier brick fence pier.

Buffalo has three more Wright sites, all built after his death: the Fontana Boathouse, the Buffalo Filling Station and the Blue Sky Mausoleum.

The Filling Station was designed in the 1920s for a Buffalo oil company, but was built just 10 years ago. The two-storey, 1,600 sq. ft building is now an exhibit in the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum. The Fontana boathouse was commissioned in 1905 for the University of Wisconsin crew team. It was never built due to lack of funds, and the efforts of rowing and architecture enthusiast Charles Fontana brought the design alive in 2007.

My tour ends at Blue Sky, the only mausoleum Wright ever designed and the last of four projects Martin personally commissioned. Martin died in 1935, and the 1928 design stayed on paper. The structure was finally completed by Anthony Puttnam, once a Wright apprentice, in 2004.

The granite monument stands tall, an integral part of the landscape, with a stone monolith and broad staircase overlooking a tranquil pond. The monument is fittingly etched with a quote from the correspondence between Wright and Martin: “…a burial facing the open sky. The whole could not fail of noble effect.”

I had studied Wright and his works while at college, but seeing and walking through his designs revealed what I had only read about: his approach to creating architecture true to its surroundings, his emphasis on designing a complete environment, and his celebration of the human scale. I realised what he meant when he said that a good building “is the greatest of poems when it is organic architecture”.

Teja Lele writes on travel and lifestyle.

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