The lasting influence of Japanese philosophy and architecture on the iconic work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the legacy he left behind in Japan.

There is a certain kind of lamp you may come across in Japan’s classiest hotels. It looks like a flower stalk or skinny tree trunk bedecked with polygonal leaves, each one set at a 90-degree angle to the ones above and below it. There is method to the lamp’s unusual design, which reflects light in the same fashion that sunlight filters through a forest canopy. So considered is it, in fact, the longer you look at the lamp the more sense it makes and those peculiar first impressions soon morph into something that strikes you as genius.

Called Taliesin, from a Welsh word meaning “shining brow,” the lamps are exclusive and expensive (often selling for thousands of dollars) and are widely seen as emblematic of high art. Perhaps more importantly, they’re physical reminders of their creator, a man whose relationship with Japan bloomed into one of history’s great architectural love stories. That man, of course, was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Born in 1867 in Richland Center, a small city in the prairie lands of Wisconsin, Wright’s childhood was itinerant and impoverished, owing to his father’s unstable income as a musician and preacher. Despite the family’s hardships, his mother Anna believed Frank, who’d shown an early interest in geometric shapes and how they fit together, would grow up to build great things.

But, surely, she could never have guessed that her son would one day be the most influential architect of his age. That Japan, a country literally and figuratively a world away from the parochial towns of the American Midwest, would play such an important role in his life and work would’ve seemed equally implausible.

But then again, Wright came of age during the Meiji era (1868-1912), when Europeans and Americans of means and learning were traveling to Japan in droves. After two centuries of national isolation, Japan had opened its doors to the outside world, hoping to catch up with the pace of “progress” in the industrialized West, welcoming foreign engineers, economists, educators, scientists, and designers to its shores.

The travelers arrived with grand expectations, enchanted by tales of the exotic and rumors of a country so aesthetically minded that even kitchen utensils were works of unerring beauty. It was these travelers and aesthetes of the early Meiji era – Edward Morse, Arthur Dow, and most notably, Ernest Fenollosa – that sparked Wright’s fascination with Japan and Japanese design.

Wright and Organic Architecture

While working as a draftsman in the 1880s and ‘90s and devouring the writings of Fenollosa et al., particularly The Nature of Fine Art (Fenollosa) and Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (Morse), Wright began to flesh out his vision of what architecture ought to be. Nature, he came to believe, was the architect’s chief mentor – “the only body of God that we shall ever see” – and a building, therefore, should not be erected on the land but appear to arise from it.

It should be of its environment, intertwined with it, blurring the boundary between the natural and the manmade – tenets that sound suspiciously like those found in Shinto and Buddhist beliefs.

Fallingwater, built between 1936 and ’38, is regarded as Wright’s opus and evinces the nature-first principles that defined his work. Constructed over a waterfall in the highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, the home-turned-museum let nature dictate its form, marrying rocky foundations and the raw power of rushing water with cantilevered terraces, ribboned windows, and a central hearth made of locally quarried sandstone.

The continuity is seamless: there is no such thing as indoor space and outdoor space at Fallingwater, only space and the enigmatic ways in which the design binds it. The framing and layered horizontality are important, too, evoking a Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print, of which Wright was an ardent fan and lifelong collector. “If Japanese prints were deducted from my education,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I don’t know what direction the whole might have taken.”

But Wright also insisted Japanese aesthetic ideals were not so much inspiration for his designs as confirmation of his worldview. To that end, Wright scholars would argue that he was simply primed to see things in Japan that others weren’t, which served as validation of the philosophy already underpinning his work. He called this philosophy, quite appropriately, “organic architecture,” which is still considered a cornerstone of contemporary design.

To Wright, the world was a matrix of interdependent parts, any of which could be joined through overlap and interlock. The idea was to design buildings composed of what Fenollosa might have called “organic wholes,” forms that expressed unity, rhythm, and spirit, and were aesthetically pleasing, irrespective of their purpose or context. Granted, you could crudely call that art for art’s sake, but in Wright’s estimation that was a “philosophy for the well-fed” and architecture, artistic though it may be, still had to serve life; it had to be rooted in purpose, place, and the human experience.

He didn’t always succeed in this respect – for all the shapeliness and atavistic beauty of his buildings, “comfort” is not the first word that comes to mind – but harmony between people and nature was a constant guiding principle.

While most of his designs carry echoes of Japan, there were times when Wright borrowed more liberally from Japanese architecture, using the foundational shape of homes, temples, and mausoleums as guidance for his blueprints. In the Unitarian Meeting House he designed in Madison, Wisconsin, for example, Wright took cues from the gassho-zukuri-style homes in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, famed for their large, thatched roofs shaped like praying hands.

He also used shakkei, or “borrowed scenery,” in his work, a recurring feature of Japanese landscape gardening, where the environment is worked into the overall composition so that it becomes unclear where one ends and the other begins. By incorporating shakkei, Wright-designed homes became living paintings, where nature uses architecture as the canvas on which it paints its desires.

Great artists, as they say, steal. But interestingly, Wright’s works don’t often scream Japan. His Prairie-style houses, with their flat planes and complex geometry, look like the remnants of a Mesoamerican civilization, while the spiral homes of his later years, inspired by curvilinear shapes in nature like rounded hills or the arcs of the moon and sun, have more in common with fantastical spaceships than a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple.

This is because Wright didn’t simply copy and paste what he liked about Japanese design but used parts of the design language and translated it into his own.

Wright’s Influence on Japanese Architecture

It’s fair to say Wright’s fondness for Japan was reciprocated. He spent significant periods of the early 20th century there, developing his philosophy of organic architecture, buying prints for his ukiyo-e collection, and designing 14 buildings, six of which were constructed. Most famously, he designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was supposed to mark Japan’s birth as a true industrial powerhouse. It was a marvel of geometry and spatial drama – a low, dark entrance gave way to a soaring, light-drenched lobby (a technique Wright called “compression and release”) – all upheld by “pillars of light,” structural columns inspired by flames flickering on a shoji screen.

The hotel opened on September 1st, 1923, the same day as the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed 100,000 people and left millions homeless. Amidst the chaos, Wright’s hotel, the so-called “Jewel of the Orient,” stood mostly unscathed. It’s often said that Japanese businessman Kishichiro Okura soon sent Wright a telegram: “Hotel stands undamaged as a monument to your genius.” Though some, including his biographer Brendan Gill, believed the telegram to be apocryphal, an egocentric act of Wright’s own devising.

During his years in Japan, Wright garnered a coterie of Japanese disciples, like Arata Endo, who worked with Wright on the Jiyu Gakuen (“Freedom School”) in Tokyo, and Yoshiya Tanoue, designer of the Sakaushi Residence in Otaru, Hokkaido. There were also notes of his philosophy in the metabolism architectural movement, a response to rapid urbanization in postwar Japan and the lingering trauma of the Second World War. Its principal players – Fumihiko Maki, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa– believed cities needed to be more livable, so they took their inspiration from the living: nature, plants, fungi, and biomes.

They saw buildings as living organisms, cities as ecosystems, and paired this with industrial materials and brutalism, leading to unusual constructions like the recently demolished Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo’s Ginza district and the Yamanashi Culture Hall (formerly the Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Center) in Kofu City.

But curiously, the imprint of other Western architects is more prevalent than Wright’s in Japanese cityscapes. Le Corbusier, despite designing only one building in Japan (the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo), left a legion of brutalist postwar architects in his wake, most notably Kenzo Tange, the godfather of modern Japanese architecture, and Tadao Ando, the undisputed King of Concrete. So it’s a shame that beyond a few protected structures, and a preponderance of fancy lamps in glamorous hotel rooms, that Wright doesn’t have a greater material presence in Japan today.

Even the Imperial Hotel was demolished to make way for a new design in 1968, and while Wright’s original wall relief in the bar and some pieces of furniture remain, his show-stopping entrance and lobby have been moved to Meiji Mura, a museum of Meiji-era architecture in Aichi Prefecture.

The Legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright

Whether Wright gets his due in contemporary discourse is a matter of debate. Some Japanese still speak of him as though he were a national hero – an honor afforded to few foreigners – while others scarcely acknowledge him at all (perhaps because he tarnished his reputation with his prickly, self-aggrandizing nature).

But personal foibles aside, Wright’s work embodied Japanese aesthetic ideals: the oneness with nature, the emphasis on space, the use of natural materials, and the sense of framing and perspective. And it's for this that his legacy in Japan will endure.

About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and editor based in Tokyo and the UK. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, politics and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.