"Through Martin, Wright got the job of designing the Larkin Company administration building, the first entirely air-conditioned modern office building on record....[I]t is blocklike and extremely simple in its forms, and has very little ornamentation....the Larkin building was decisively vertical...Indeed, it was the first consciously architectural expression of the kind of American structure which Europeans were beginning to discover to their delight: the great clusters of grain silos and similar industrial monuments that men like Corbu and Gropius found so exciting in the early 1920s..."

— Peter Blake. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. p54-56.

The Creator's Words

"I think I first consciously began to try to beat the box in the Larkin building [Wright said years later]. I found a natural opening to the liberation I sought when [after a great struggle] I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into freestanding, individual features."

— Frank Lloyd Wright. from Peter Blake. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. p55.

"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. from Frank Lloyd Wright, Edgar Kaufmann, Ed. An American Architecture. p137-138.