"When asked what was his best design, Frank Lloyd Wright would frequently reply, 'The next one.'"

During his lifetime, Frank Lloyd Wright designed roofs of almost any style and pitch, including the

• steeply gabled roof on his Oak Park Home (1889)
• gambrel roofed MacArhur House (1892) in Hyde Park
• double hipped roofs on several Oak Park homes (1892-1906)
• shallow hipped and shallow gabled "Prairie" houses (1901-1917)
• varied roof styles of "Usonian" houses (1936-1959)
  

  The Goodrich Residence, Oak Park, IL (1896) displays a steeply pitched gable roof combined with shallower pitched hip design to suit the site.
  
  
  
  

  The Adams Residence, Oak Park, IL (1913) is Wright's last executed home in Oak Park. The structure shows a low-pitched hip roof which appropriately sets off the massing of this large, private home.

  
  

  The John E. Christian Residence, West Lafayette, IN (1954) is one of Wright's last Usonian designs. Named SAMARA, this pristine example of Usonian architecture has two large, flat roofs.

  Was any roof better than any other? That depends on the application. In the case of SAMARA, in my opinion, the selection of two flat roofs was appropriate for the site because it allowed light to enter the interior of the house through clerestory windows located between the upper and lower roofs.

  The placement of the house to the high side of a severely sloping lot, with other houses higher up the slope than SAMARA, dictated a low-pitched or flat roof to keep from blocking the view of the other houses. In addition, if the house was not to be hidden entirely by its landscaping, and the landscaping on surrounding lots, the lower roof needed to have a dominant feature - a massive fascia.

  The copper fascia designed for SAMARA gives the house an almost cave-like appearance from the south, but lets anyone who looked know that there is a house on its one acre building site. Had a low-pitched roof been used instead, the fascia would, as a design characteristic, been more knife-edged and less massive.
  
  

  Historical Perspectives
  Overview | Breaking the Box | A Roof to Fit the Site | A Fascia to Tickle the Eye | Storage for the Beast - and More
  Overviews of Construction Innovations
  [ Nature of Materials ]   [ Building on a Unit ]   [ The Owner's View ]   [ Building the Wright Way ]
  [ Historical Perspectives ]   [ Manipulating the Spaces ]   [ Oriental Influence ]