This is the second article of the tour report. This time, I will introduce several works I was impressed with among nine private houses. First, let me begin with the representative work, "Robie House," one of many "prairie houses" designed around the Chicago area. "Prairie house" is a house style that Wright suggested as appropriate for the Great Plains in the Midwest. The horizontally long building was too innovative and it is said that neighbors made fun of such houses as "steamboat." However, they were gradually recognized by the public through various publications and became well known as an advanced architectural design. The idea of coexistence with nature is still applicable to the present day. The house was donated to the University of Chicago in 1963, and is presently undergoing restoration by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. I felt an affinity with the house since it had many common points with YODOKO Guest House-an exterior design with its horizontal lines enhanced, open space with lots of windows and balconies, and on top of it all, it was open to the public to let people freely study Wright's architecture.

In Detroit and New York, I visited several residential houses that Wright designed in his later years after completing "Fallingwater" (1936). Wright named these houses "Usonia House" (house for ordinary people) and earnestly tackled the creation of a low-cost and comfortable house. He made ingenious designs by utilizing prefabricated materials and adopted floor heating. One such Usonia house was the "Reisley House," which was designed to include an extension plan, considering the future increase in family members. At the "Palmer House," a small building and garden, designed by Wright's disciple, Mr. Howe, constructed from the image of a Japanese tea ceremony room melted my heart. We were offered tea and handmade sweets by the lady of the house and had a wonderful time, treasuring a great moment in my lifetime.

Among many distinctive characteristic points in Wright's architecture, I was interested in the low ceilings, because many visitors to YODOKO Guest House ask me about the low ceilings. They say, "Are these ceilings made low, according to the height of Japanese people?" In YODOKO Guest House, the place with the lowest ceiling measures less than 2 m. The houses I visited in the U.S. also had the ceiling height of approximately 2.2 m. As it turned out, the ceiling heights were not designed low for Japanese people. *2 I was told that Wright reduced the height of the ceilings based on the height of a standard person (approximately 173 cm). After passing through such low ceilings, he usually put long eaves or a high open porch to represent an extension of space. Moreover, I felt each room and interior was so vivid and exciting, while at the same time the harmony as a whole was maintained. Bearing in mind that this must have been part of Wright's slogan, "Organic architecture," we headed off to Spring Green, our final destination, to visit the holy place of the Wright tour, "Taliesin."