ARCHITECTURE

Eclecticism

Although he was already America's most interesting and innovative architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1869—1959) produced no public architecture in the United States during the 1920s. His concept of organic integrity was significant in the California houses he designed, but his major work of the decade was the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (having survived earthquake and fire in 1922, it was demolished in 1946); and he spent much of the decade in Japan. Important public architecture in the United States during the decade was relentlessly eclectic. (Built in 1922, Henry Bacon's Lincoln Memorial was a monument for neoclassic architecture, as its seated figure of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French was for academic sculpture.) The 1922 competition for the design of the Tribune Tower in Chicago was won by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood; not until the end of the decade did they eschew eclectic embellishment. The second-place Tribune Tower design by Eliel Saarinen and Walter Gropius, though not built, attracted more attention than HoweUs and Hood's and proved of greater influence on urban architecture, the most important derivative being the Empire State Building.