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	title of this thread your message enough of this pleasant banter. As promised earlier, here are more of the man's words, from the autobiography. Wright here gives, in a couple of pages, virtually the only description he was ever to provide, of how the Prairie House, his first significant body of work (so named after the fact, by others) came into being. He is writing c. 1932, about events of the late 1890s. These words will have meaning to anyone interested in modernist architecture, I think: BUILDING THE NEW HOUSE FIRST thing in building the new house, get rid of the attic, therefore the dormer. Get rid of the useless false heights below it. Next, get rid of the unwholesome basement, yes absolutely -- in any house built on the prairie. Instead of lean, brick chimneys bristling up everywhere to hint at Judgment, I could see necessity for one chimney only. A broad generous one, or at most two. These kept low-down on gently sloping roofs or perhaps fiat roofs. The big fireplace in the house below became now a place for a real fire. A real fireplace at that time was extraordinary. There were mantels instead. A mantel was a marble frame for a few coals in a grate. Or it was a piece of wooden furniture with tile stuck in it around the grate, the whole set slam up against the plastered, papered wall. Insult to comfort. So the [i]integral[/i] fireplace became an important part of the building itself in the houses I was allowed to build out there on the prairie. It comforted me to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself. A feeling that came to stay. TAKING a human being for my scale, I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one -- ergo, 5' 8 1/2" tall, say. This is my own height. Believing in no other scale than the human being I broadened the mass out all I possibly could to bring it down into spaciousness. It has been said that were I three inches taller than 5' 8 1/2" all my houses would have been quite different in proportion. Probably. House walls were now started at the ground on a cement or stone water table that looked like a low platform under the building, and usually was. But the house walls were stopped at the second-story windowsill level to let the bedrooms come through above in a continuous window series below the broad eaves of a gently sloping, overhanging roof. In this new house the wall was beginning to go as an impediment to outside light and air and beauty. Walls had been the great fact about the box in which holes had to be punched. It was still this conception of a wall-building which was with me when I designed the Winslow house. But after that my conception began to change. associated web images (optional) associated web link (optional) your email your password create a forums account \| you forgot your password?