Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel Was a Trial by Fire, But It Sparked His Most Famous Homes

Frank Lloyd Wright had been working on the Imperial Hotel for nearly a decade before it was finally scheduled to open on September 1, 1923. The redesign of the famous Tokyo building had been punishing: behind schedule and over budget, Wright had navigated on-site fires, an earthquake, and illness, not to mention upheaval and grief in his personal life, including the arson at Taliesin and murder of his mistress, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and her two children, all at the hands of a disgruntled worker. Given the hotel’s inauspicious start, its grand opening was eagerly anticipated.

But it famously never happened. Another seismic event, the Great Kantō Earthquake, struck Tokyo minutes before, lasting for an excruciating 14 seconds. The quake, followed by fires and a tsunami, left much of its capital city in ruins. Wright’s hotel, however, survived, largely undamaged. The "Imperial stands square and straight. Congratulations," an associate in Tokyo cabled Wright, who left Japan in 1922, eager to return to commissions in the states.

Though it persevered thanks to an innovative floating foundation and reinforced steel design, officially opening at a later date, it did not meet the demanding pace of Tokyo’s twentieth-century development and was torn down in 1968. But in designing the hotel, a then-young Wright would crystalize aesthetic ideas that endure today in the homes he built across the U.S.

Fragments of them are now on display at the Martin House in Buffalo, New York, designed by Wright some 20 years before the Imperial. Thought-Built displays surviving pieces of the hotel, including volcanic rock oya blocks, clay tiles, a copper roof cornice, and an art glass window with gold leaf accents. These join Japanese ukiyo-e prints Wright collected and sold, and correspondence with wealthy businessman Darwin Martin, patron of the Martin House, who was an influential force in the architect’s career.

The collection illuminates connections Wright was forming between East and West, which began with Martin’s Buffalo home, finished in 1905. Wright designed the palatial, Prairie-style residence in tandem with his newfound interest in Japanese prints, an affinity he shared with Martin, and why he was recommended to design the Imperial Hotel. He first saw examples at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, admiring their minimalism in particular. "They pair things down to the most essential and eliminate anything extraneous," says Thought-Built curator Susana Tejada. Wright made his first trip to Japan the same year the home was finished, bringing back a large collection of ukiyo-e, some of which was hung in the residence.

Though different in scope, elements of the Martin House are echoed in the Imperial. In one example, the geometric pattern of the hotel’s art glass window appears on large-scale urns on the exterior of the home. "When we think about the type of vocabulary Wright’s using, there’s an evolution happening, but there’s also these motifs that carry through Wright’s career," Tejada says.

Though Wright returned to the same ones across his oeuvre, particularly with his art glass, the hotel represents a dramatic aesthetic shift away from the Prairie-style homes of his early Oak Park years with its distinctive Mayan patterning; Wright was exposed to pre-Columbian architecture, too, at the World’s Columbia Exposition. The Imperial features interlocking tiles and ornate blocks patterned after ancient textiles he saw at the fair.

Similar themes appear in four Southern California homes that Wright designed in the Mayan Revival style. Los Angeles’s Ennis House, completed in 1924, is unquestionably the most famous of the group with its massive walls and textile-block construction that echoes the interlocking system of the hotel. Around the same time was the Hollyhock House, finished in 1921, that shares the same design language, but with a greater range of international stylings that Wright referred to as California Romanza.

The Imperial stayed on Wright’s mind long after he’d left Japan and the hotel finally opened to the public. He wrote eight essays on the building, more than he had on any other of his works. But before the earthquake, around the time of the hotel’s planned opening, he wrote to Darwin Martin: "My experience in the building of the great buildings in Japan has taught me how difficult of realization my ideal Architecture is."

Top photo courtesy of Hulton Archive

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