Between 1923 and 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright he made four extraordinary homes in the Los Angeles region: the Millard Housethe Storer Housethe Ennis House And The Freeman House. The experimental constructive method developed by Wright, architect of the famous house on the Mill Run (Pennsylvania) cascade: the Textile Block System o Wins block system. The procedure provided for the use of Prefabricated concrete fellowfull and perforated, decorated with pre -Columbian geometric motifs.
With the help of wooden matrices, the blocks were stacked one on the other and “woven” with an warp of steel, vertical and horizontal bars; In the grooves, the liquid mortar was then poured to tie the entire structure. Everything is fine standardized module It was designed to be raised and laid by a single person, allowing a simple, fast and cheap assembly, without resorting to specialized labor. A sort of architectural “lego” ante litteramable to resist earthquakes and fires, and become iconic for the singular style aesthetic Revival Maya. The four Wrightian houses have in fact appeared in films and TV series including Blade Runner And Westworldand inspired the scenography of game of Thrones.
Modularity prefabrication: Wright houses inspired by the Maya
After the experience of Prairie Housesthe “houses on the prairie”, the 1929 crisis pushed Frank Lloyd Wright to explore cheaper solutions, exploiting prefabrication And modularity To create accessible but aesthetically refined houses. Thus was born the Textile Block Systema construction model based on the overlap of standardized blocks of decorated concrete blocks, armed with a steel bar grill. The system combined structure and formal language in a single solution, both inside and outside, and was designed to respond effectively to Criticality of the Californian territorysubject to earthquakes and fires.
Unlike unarmed, rigid, heavy and therefore fragile masonry in the event of an earthquake, the reinforced concrete offered greater stability and heat resistance. Wright was perfectly aware of it, since in 1923 he had just completed theImperial Hotel in Tokyowhich resisted the devastating Kantō earthquake. In the same year he started the construction of the Millard House In Pasadena, also known as miniature, in the county of Los Angeles. However, as Professor observes Edward R. Ford from the School of Architecture of the University of Virginiathis house did not yet present a fully mature textile block structure: instead of the nired concrete steel rowiculus, it included a ½ -inch Malta escape reinforced with ironed metal. The first real Textile Block House, according to the construction criteria that Wright would then develop, would instead be the Storer House (1923-24), located at 8161 in Hollywood Boulevard, in the Hollywood Hills district in Los Angeles. Built on a steep hill, immersed in a lush landscape that enhances it exoticismthe house appears as an ancient ruin that emerges between the lush vegetation. To make it, Wright employed Four different models of decorative blocks.
In perfecting the system, Wright adopted a mixture composed of a part of Portland cement and four parts of sand and gravel, materials found directly on site. In some cases – as for the subsequent Ennis House and Freeman House – it is believed that concrete has also been added to the concrete land of the site To obtain a characteristic ocher shade, in harmony with the surrounding environment. The blocks were formed under pressure inside worked and reusable metal codscapable of precisely playing any type of decorative texture. They were smaller than 1/8 compared to the module of 16 x 16 x 3.5 inches of the molds, so as to leave enough space for the grooves along the edges, where the steel bars were laid, both horizontally and vertically. Finally, these were sealed with wire mortar to protect the armor. The system allowed Wright to carry out directly on site, without specialized labor and in content timesmonolithic, solid and waterproof walls, free of joints and joints in standing.
In the Ennis House (The largest and most scenic of the four, and more inspired in the aesthetic to the Mayan temples) Wright, free from budget constraints, experienced the potential of the system to the maximum. He used staggered blocks to create inclined walls (beat walls) and used the interprets not only for the walls, but also for floors and ceilings. The latter, explains the architect-engineer Edward D. Losch, acting as a shocks to lose for the reinforced concrete jets, while columns and beams were coated with decorative blocks, creating the illusion of a continuous modular system. Also in the Freeman Housethe last of the series placed along a slope of one of the Hollywood hills, the supporting structure is made up of blocks filled with concrete, willing to form a system of beams and pillars that approaches the conception, to the classic frame.
Why do they look like Mayan temples?
When Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in California in the early 1920s, he found a cultural environment strongly attracted by ancient civilizations and, in particular, from those pre -Columbian. It was no coincidence: the Spanish colonial heritage was well rooted, as well as the influences from nearby Mexico and Central America. To strengthen this interest contributed the Panama-California Exposition From 1915 to San Diego – celebratory event for the opening of the Panama channel – which Wright visited personally. In addition to the Spanish colonial style buildings, the exhibition presented models and photographs of Mayan and Azteche architectureoffering the public (and to the architects) a close look on a powerful and out of time formal repertoire.
Among the sources of inspiration there was also the figure of John Lloyd Stephensexplorer and writer who became famous for the discovery of the archaeological remains of the ancient Mayan civilization, a company documented in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán. Of those ruins Wright admired the consistency between form, matter and ornament: a principle that tried to reinterpret in a modern key through “organic” architecture, rooted in the context, and that it was at the same time decorative, economic and functional on the structural level. It is in this picture that the adoption of the style Mayan Revivalalready very popular in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and clearly recognizable in the Ennis House of Los Feliz in Los Angeles. Here, the blocks willing to form inclined walls, the steel podium and the surfaces rich in bas -reliefs, evoke, with stage force, the monumentality of a colossal Mayan Temple.
However, Wright’s interest in the iconography of pre -Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, in particular for the pyramids of Yucatan and the archaeological sites of Palenque and Uxmal in Mexico, had already occurred in architectural form – even without the use of the Textile Block System – in the Hollyhock House (1918–1921), residence registered on the UNESCO list built on the Hill Olive hill, in Los Angeles. Considering a transition work between the Prairie style and the modular buildings of the 1920s, it anticipates many of the suggestions, formal and symbolic, which will find full expression in the Textile Block Houses, in turn considered an important precedent for Usonian Houses of the second post -war period.
Criticality of the Textile Block System
Despite the conceptual audacity and the innovative charge, the system Textile Block it did not reveal a success nor from an economic-construction-to-site point of view. Wright’s idea to use a prefabricated decorated form, simple to produce, assemble and move, even by non -expert workers, he collided with numerous practical obstacles. The standardization, which should have been one of the strengths of the system, proved to be almost always impractical: each building required in fact dozens of different blocks By shape. Just think of the freeman house, which had only two types (one of molding and one ornamental), and which came to use it well 56 differentmaking the procedure complex and onerous. For this house, as Jeffrey M. Chusid reconstructs in theHistoric Structure Report: Samuel and Harriet Freeman House of 1989, Wright had estimated the use of 9,000 blocks at a cost of 30 cents each. In reality, 11,000 were used, at an almost doubled price (66 cents each), for a total of 7,260 dollars: over 4,500 dollars more than the initial budget.
On site, the absence of dimensional tolerances imposed absolute precision, difficult to reach by means of the time. The joints between the elements did not foresee traditional mortar but grooves to be constipated with cement bodia to incorporate the steel armor: joints that often were poorly filled, compromising the rigidity of the structure. The most serious problems emerged over time, with water infiltrations, flaking, degradation of cement and cracks. The concrete used – very dry and made with non -industrial and unsuccessful materials, such as sand or clay taken on the construction site – was excessively porous and consequently absorbed a lot of humidity. To affect poor thermal efficiency and on waterproofing problems They were also the cavities, designed for insulation but poorly sized and not equipped with adequate drainage systems. The executive difficulties, combined with the poor knowledge of the behavior of the materials, led to the corrosion of the internal armor, causing detachments and structural damage that, over time, have made it necessary to be delicate Restoration interventions. However, the failure of the system was not due to intrinsic defects, as regards the impossibility of reconciling the ambitious vision of Frank Lloyd Wright with the Technological and production limits of the time.
The archaic and future charm of these architectures has not escaped directors, scenographers and location managers. The most famous, Ennis House, has become a film icon: it inspired the interiors of theDeckard apartment in Blade Runner (1982), The Meereen throne room in game of Throneshe appeared in The Day of the locust, Mulholland Drive, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Twin Peaks, Predator 2, only a few of the many films and TV series. There Millard House It is no less. Renamed “the miniature” for its contained scale and the refinement of the decorations, appeared in Westworld As ownership of the character Arnold Weber and in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the “Blood Oath” episode, as a home on Secarus IV. The musical world also paid tribute to these architecture: video clips like 3t (with Michael Jackson), Have You Ever of the S Club 7 and Vuelve by Ricky Martin were shot among the intended blocks of Ennis House.
