Recognising that sister organisations at times host talks potentially of interest to our members, occasionally we will link to what will be labelled as External Events. Clicking the link will take you through to third parties - in this case to the Victorian Society - where you can find more information and register here. 

Henry Hobson Richardson: Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1888

Frank Lloyd Wright: Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1893

Louis Sullivan: Charnley House, Chicago, Illinois, 1891

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) form a triumvirate of American architects whose work can be best referred to as Organic Architecture. Born of the years following the Civil War and of the great expansion west, its genesis had been in books like Henry David Thoreau’s 'Walden; or Life in the Woods' (1854) and George Perkins Marsh’s 'Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action' (1864).

Theirs was an architecture which aimed to save the landscape from despoliation, an architecture which was, at times, literally hewn out of the ground on which it stood. Yet there was much more to it than that. Both Richardson and Sullivan had trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and brought back with them from France the influence of the Romanesque and Classicism. When offered the opportunity to study there, Wright declined, but nevertheless learnt from Sullivan, for whom he worked, the principles of Classical planning which, overlaid with the influence of Japanese architecture, allowed him to ‘explode the box’. This online lecture will examine a selection of buildings by the three architects from the time following Richardson’s return from Paris in 1865 to Wright’s departure for Europe in 1909 (when he eloped with his client’s wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney) and the subsequent publication the following year, by Ernst Wasmuth of Berlin, of his monumental 'Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright'.

Neil Jackson taught for a number of years in Kansas and California and has published widely on American Architecture. He is President of the SAHGB and chairs the Victorian Society Events Committee.