An architecture that treats the building as a living whole grown from its site, its materials and its use: low, spreading and bound to the landscape in Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, softly curved and humane in Alvar Aalto’s.
The phrase belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright, who took it from his master Louis Sullivan and used it for sixty years. For Wright, architecture was organic when every part related to the whole as the parts of a plant do, when the building belonged to its site, and when each material was used according to its nature. In his Prairie houses of 1900–1910 (the Willits House, the Robie House), low hipped roofs with deep overhangs, bands of windows, raised terraces and a central hearth replaced the tall, boxy Victorian house. Their plans are cruciform or pinwheel, with rooms flowing into one another around the fireplace.
Wright’s second great period began with Fallingwater (1936–39), built over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods. A core of local sandstone anchors the house to the rock; reinforced-concrete terraces cantilever over the stream in layers like the ledges below. In the same years he designed the Johnson Wax offices, with their mushroom columns, and the first Usonian houses, and later the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum (1956–59).
In Finland, Alvar Aalto turned the International Style toward the organic: at the Paimio Sanatorium (1929–33) and the Villa Mairea (1938–39) he used timber, brick and undulating forms to temper the machine aesthetic with warmth and a relation to the forest. Hans Scharoun in Germany shaped buildings from the movement and gathering of people, most famously the Berlin Philharmonie (1956–63), whose audience sits in terraces around the orchestra.
Organic architecture never became a single style. It survives as a strand of thought: in Imre Makovecz’s timber buildings in Hungary, in the parametric curves of recent decades, and in the ecological architecture that shapes buildings to sun, wind and landscape.