Bildiri Kitabı - Kitap3

These famous lines belong to Wright himself. They are part of the working
manuscripts about his life and the beginning of his architectural education.
Froebel gifts were strong effect on Wright’s architectural career. Strong will of
his mother Anna affects Wright’s architectural education as an unusual way. As
is known today, Anna was a former teacher and had a deep respect for
education. She had a chance to come across the Froebel gifts and met the
forerunners of the Froebel training.
As argued by Stiny “the gifts are perfectly suited to explore possibilities of
spatial design. But more than this the kindergarten method itself suggests the
studio method, the most successful paradigm used in architecture and design
schools today” (Stiny, 1980, 413.)
Kindergarten gifts invoke possibilities of space with the elements in its
vocabulary. The building gifts mainly consist of cubes, and cube parts these are:
smaller cubes, oblong bricks and triangular pieces in different sizes. In the
following part, figures 1-2 and 3 show plan schemes and main spatial
characteristics of Wright’s Prairie and the Usonian houses. The present study
argues that elements, rules and transformations of space in Wirght’s design
process, can easily be detected with the help of his froebelian roots.
One of the first detailed analyses of the Prairie style houses was done by H.
Koning and J. Eisenberg in 1981. In their article “The Language of the Prairie:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses” they focus on to define function zones
and basic compositions of the Prairie-style houses (Figure 2). They carefully
analyze the prairie houses as follows:
The main vocabulary elements of the grammar are threedimensional
Froebel-like blocks that correspond to the volumetric
spaces in prairie-style houses…the height of the blocks is fixed,
but their length and width may vary (Koning & Eizenberg, 1981,
298)
They make a list of principles about basic Prairie composition. According to
these principles, in the Prairie houses:
• Fireplace is the logical center of the design.
• Functional and spatial organization and its requisite composition
follow from a simplification and consolidation of areas.
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4. ULUSLARARASI ESKİŞEHİR PİŞMİŞ TOPRAK SEMPOZYUMU 443