Presentation drawing by LaVerne Lantz
Nothing speaks to the Great American Ideal as beautifully as the art it has inspired. Artists and musicians have absorbed America, the Beautiful and reimagined it in paintings, sculpture, and music throughout our storied history. But the way architects have reimagined and reproduced our America is particularly meaningful. With their craft, architects have shaped the very spaces we exist in. The feeling of walking into a room that was created out of a vision anchored in the natural world surrounding it is special and particularly American.
That a building should be integrated into, and shaped by its natural environment was central to the principles set out by perhaps the greatest architect of all time, Frank Lloyd Wright. Inspired by the prairies of his boyhood in Western Wisconsin, his designs featured long horizontal lines and a muted pallet of golds, reds and browns. His placement of windows was deliberate to lead the eye from the inside to the outside, connecting the two and expanding space outside instead of constraining it into boxes. Wright's vision changed the way future generations of architects approached their craft, not only through the schools he started, but by architects who understood this philosophy and adopted it as their own. These students of Wright, whether official or not, contributed to the growth of organic architecture; architecture that is one with the natural world.
If you travel through the Midwest on any winding, sunbaked country road you will likely drive past a house that speaks to this aesthetic. There were probably dozens of quiet architects who worked designing and building these organic homes in the 20th century in the Midwest. No other place in the world exhibits such a concentrated growth of an architectural aesthetic that was not designed for mass production. We should cherish and recognize these unheralded original organic architects who worked to bring their craft into the American consciousness. So who were they and what stories do their buildings tell?
Presentation drawing by LaVerne Lantz
A particularly brilliant architect that belonged to this assorted group of quiet organic architects was LaVerne Lantz. Lantz practiced his principled, inspiring and surprising talents from the 1960s into the late 90's. He practiced his craft mainly in Wisconsin, the warm heart of America's Midwest. It was this land of dynamic, dramatic weather; rolling hills; densely green forests and those wide stretches of prairie grass that so inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. Lantz was a Wright enthusiast who amassed a library of every book ever written on Wright and visited every Wright building he could. But in his art, Lantz was no Wright copyist; he channeled his inspiration, taking off from the principles he learned through a careful study of Wright and producing 150 commissions that bore his own unique signature in the Midwest.
LaVerne Lantz, client handbook
