I had the great pleasure of visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Kraus House in St. Louis, recently restored to its full glory. Uniquely, this house still has all of the original FLW furniture, fittings, lights, and fabrics giving you the total Usonian experience.
The design of the house was based upon a 4' x 4' trapazoid, which became the planning and thematic grid for the house, much in the same way the Wright used triangles, hexagons, circles and other determinist geometry to organically 'grow' a building. The trapazoid here is expressed throughout, leading to the most extreme expression of a trapazoidal double bed which either shows a high level of creative mastery, or an absurd obsessiveness.
I'm wondering about the validity or ethic of forcing everything in the house to obey an
arbitrary design theme? Obviously it's been a favorite of modernists using grids (Mies) or tartan patterns or what have you, and applauded for their un-wavering adherence to their self-
inflicted order. This 'Theory of Everything' has not been unique to architects as the utopian tendencies of religion, physics, and all reason would like the idea that we can explain everything with one unifying group of ideas. Wright forced everything in this house into the same trapazoid, making every design question answerable with the same set of solutions. Is design stronger when it's forced into this artifice or is this just another excuse to pretend that humans have all the answers?
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