More Frank Lloyd Wright, with hollyhocks
Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with architectural styles all his life. The cement block houses of Los Angeles were intriguing but apparently are not surviving nature very well.
Wright came up with an interesting representation of the hollyhock flower in the decor of this house. The hollyhock was the favorite flower of the woman who commissioned the house to be built. There's even a feeling of the old millefiore style in this house.
Wright hyper-designed his houses - the inside, the outside, the furniture, the lampposts. In the lamppost one can even see the same hollyhock pattern.
Another of Wright's methods was to narrow down the entrance as one approached until the visitor was in a small space. That way, the contrast was even greater when the visitor would suddenly enter an open, well-lighted space. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the house, but the entryway was intriguing.
Sadly, the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles has serious roof problems. The carpet got destroyed by rain. According to the guide, most FLW houses seem to have serious roof problems. He didn't work well with engineers. Too bad, because if there was one thing that FLW wanted it was a legacy, but if more of his houses start falling down, there goes the legacy.
William Morris, Recycler
Design: we cycle through phases, then later recycle again. Clothes from the 70s and 80s are becoming popular again. The cycle of rebirth of design trends seems to have speeded up in my own lifetime, but certainly it's been going on for centuries.
In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris, a British novelist, artist, designer, and perhaps not coincidentally socialist, was an early adopter of Gothic Revival, the trend that brought about Victorian Gothic style. Morris became a key person in the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement. His own designs for textiles and wallpaper were replete with flora and fauna. He was fascinated with the natural world. And his designs were very like medieval millefleurs (thousand flowers in French) tapestries.
And those tapestries were very like the famous rosette windows in Middle Ages cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. Which again were like millefiori (thousand flowers in Italian) glasswork.
Morris was recycling a trend, but updating it and making it his own. In the same way, Candace Bahouth, a needlepoint and mosaic artist working in Britain in 2009, has updated the millefleurs look in her tapestries and pillow designs.
And just to bring it ALL up to date, in the past several years, the design world has been enamored of floral flourishes in design. So everything old does become new again.
