page_title: Larkin Administration Building
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Larkin Administration Building / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: What remains of the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo NY
context_page_description: The Larkin Building was an early 20th century building. It was designed in 1903 by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1904-1906 for the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York. The five story dark red brick building used pink tinted mortar and utilized steel frame construction. It was noted for many innovations, including air conditioning, built-in desk furniture, and suspended toilet partitions and bowls. Though this was an office building, it still caught the essence of Frank Lloyd Wright's type of architecture. Sculptor Richard Bock provided ornamentation for the building.
  Located at 680 Seneca Street, the Larkin Building was demolished in 1950.
context_section_description: Exterior details of the 200-foot-long (61 m) by 134-foot-wide (41 m) building were executed in red sandstone; the entrance doors, windows, and skylights were of glass. Floors, stairs, doors, window sills, partitions, desk tops and plumbing slabs were used with   magnesite for sound absorption.  For floors, cement  was mixed with excelsior and poured, over a layer of felt to impart its resiliency.  Magnesite was also used for sculptural decoration on the piers surrounding the light court and for panels and beams around the executive offices at the south end of the main floor.  Wright designed much of the furniture, the chairs were made out of steel and hung from the tables to make cleaning the floors easy. The interior walls were made of semi-vitreous, hard, cream colored brick. A 76-foot-tall (23 m) light court was located in the center of the building which provided natural sunlight to all of the floors.  Between its support piers ran fourteen sets of three inspiration words each, such as: GENEROSITY ALTRUISM SACRIFICE, INTEGRITY LOYALTY FIDELITY, IMAGINATION JUDGEMENT INITIATIVE, INTELLIGENCE ENTHUSIASM CONTROL, CO-OPERATION ECONOMY INDUSTRY.
  Architectural historian Vincent Scully, Jr. wrote of the structure: 
  Vertical brick piers and wall planes ... made possible the splendid integration of space, structure, and massing which Wright achieved in the Larkin Company Office Building at Buffalo, of 1904. In space the building was conceived of as facing inward, with a glass-roofed central hall rising the entire height and with horizontal office floors woven around it. The pattern of piers and walls which makes these spaces is clearly unified in both plan and section. The vertical piers rise uninterruptedly inside, and the horizontal planes of the office floors are kept back from their edges, so that they seem, once more, to be woven through them. ... At the same time, the stiff verticals of the interior of the Larkin Building continued to recall the challenge of the exterior, so that the occupant could not feel himself to be simply inside a shell. The sequence was an emotional one and a progress: challenge, bafflement, compression, search, and finally, surprise, release, transformation, and recall. It was almost a Baroque progression, but its methods were stiffer and harder, befitting the industrial program which they praised. Significantly enough, the building also recalled the Romantic-Classic projects of the first revolutionary architects of the later eighteenth century, particularly in the harshness of its forms but even in the rather underscaled world globes which were flaunted upon its exterior.
  Wright said of the building: 
  It is interesting that I, an architect supposed to be concerned with the aesthetic sense of the building, should have invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under), and adopted many other innovations like the glass door, steel furniture, air-conditioning and radiant or 'gravity heat'. Nearly every technological innovation used today was suggested in the Larkin Building in 1904.
  — Frank Lloyd Wright as quoted by Kaufmann, Edgar, ed. An American Architecture, pp. 137–138.
caption: The site of The Larkin Administration Building in 2011
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