Between 1919 and 1924, Wright designed five houses in Southern California. The first, for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, was a transitional design; it marked the end of the Prairie Style, the possibilities of which Wright had largely exhausted by 1909, and incorporated, along with pre-Columbian elements and hints of the Midway Gardens design, influences he’d picked up during his European sojourn, most notably the Viennese Modernism of Otto Wagner and others. Colin Rowe called the result “so very Wagnerschule.”

The four houses that followed were something new, a clean break and a fresh chapter: experiments in modular construction that featured concrete blocks stacked in rows, threaded through with steel rods and stamped with a variety of ornamental patterns, most of them derived from Mayan ruins and other pre-Columbian sources. (Wright referred to this structural strategy as a kind of weaving, hence the phrase “textile-block houses.”) These crypt-like houses are hardly welcoming or especially domestic—Brendan Gill, one of Wright’s most perceptive biographers, called them “better suited to sheltering a Mayan god than an American family”—but are doubtless full of experimental energy.

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These Southern California houses, monumental and largely windowless as they face the street, are also primordial in tone and inspiration. The historian Thomas Hines has called them “aloof and impregnable bastions [with] fortress-like façades.” It’s here that we can begin to see some links between Wright and contemporary architecture. Whenever architecture becomes concerned with history—as was true in the 1920s, when Wright lived in a revivalism-crazed Los Angeles; in the 1980s, with Postmodernism’s ascent; and again today—there is nearly always a related effort to go back to prehistory, or a kind or primitivism. Wright examined the eclecticism rampant in Los Angeles and found it repulsed him; he tried to look deeper into history and produce an indigenous architecture authentic to the southwest, even if his quotations of pre-Columbian forms were sometimes scattershot or naive. Today, architects such as Chile’s Pezo von Ellrichshausen and Smiljan Radic and Switzerland’s Christ & Gantenbein and Herzog & de Meuron are similarly building an archaism into their work, a solid, Platonic kind of form-making that looks not to direct historical reference as much as architecture’s deep memory and archetypal forms.

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