Japan Was Also in His Soul
In his 1943 autobiography, Wright described Japan as “the most romantic, artistic, nature-inspired country on earth.” He had studied the culture through its art for years, since his earliest exposure to its woodblock art. Wright went to Japan in 1905, 1913, and in 1917 was able to spend three years in Japan to design and develop the New Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. To his delight, Japan was everything he pictured in his mind, and more. He loved the structural elegance and honest forms of Japanese art and design of the buildings and streetscape. He appreciated the way each element contributed to the whole design, a harmonious blending of form and function. His Prairie Style was based on this Japanese-style appreciation of form and function working together. Each element of the building, each line of the aesthetic had purpose, a strong reaction to the overblown wedding cakes seen in Victorian architecture.