America's
greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright led a truly epic life ---
success, scandal, exile, devastating tragedy, and renewed glory
--- in pursuit of his precedent-shattering vision. Nearly 40
years after Wright's death, KEN BURNS assesses the monumental,
intimate brilliance of structures such as New York's Guggenheim
Museum, Fallingwater, and the Johnson Wax Building; the
emotional wreckage left by Wright's abandonment of his first
wife and six children; the subsequent horror of the murder of
his mistress and six luncheon guests; the cult like Fellowship
of his disciples; and the messy, glorious nature of genius
itself.
In
the mid-1930s, at the age of 66, when most of his modernist
rivals --- who openly disdained what they saw as his hopelessly
antiquated ideas --- assumed he was safely out of the picture,
Frank Lloyd Wright landed a relatively small commission. He was
hired to build a weekend home for a wealthy Pittsburgh
department-stare owner named Edgar J. Kaufmann on a beautiful
piece of land deep in the western-Pennsylvania woods along a
little creek called Bear run.
He might not have gotten
even that job had Kaufmann's son not attended the architecture
school-cum-spiritual foundation that Wright and his third wife,
Olgivanna, had set up to help pay the bills in the midst of the
Great Depression. Olgivanna, a striking Eastern European dancer,
was a disciple (as Wright himself would also become) of the
charismatic Greco-American mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff,
who had attracted a devoted following among the intelligentsia
of England, France, and most recently the United States.
Gurdjieff believed that human beings spend most of their lives
asleep, unaware of themselves, subject to too many natural
"laws." These notions fit right in with everything the great but
down-on-his-luck Wright had been saying for years. The
Fellowship, as he called the school, was an amalgam of hands-on
architectural work, manual labor, esoteric philosophy, and the
brilliant, if offbeat, ideas of its founder himself.
The senior Kaufmann was
irresistibly drawn to Wright's charming personality and
mesmerizing sermons about buildings. In the summer of 1935, the
architect visited the site of the proposed home, with its
stunning waterfall and dramatic vistas, and supervised the
production of a "plot plan," which showed the topography of the
land and precise location of trees and rocks. But Wright, in
typical fashion, did nothing further for several months,
ignoring the cautions inquiries of the apprentices who worried
that even this modest commission might slip through their hands.
The, in the fall, Wright
got a telephone call from Kaufmann, who was in Milwaukee, just
140 miles from Wright's studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Kaufmann said he was on his way --- and he wanted to see the
design for his house. Though Wright has as yet committed nothing
to paper, he remained completely calm. :Come along, E. J.
. . . . Your house is finished." Then Wright hung up.
A hush descended on the
cavernous drafting studio as word went out that Wright had begun
to draw. For more than two hours, anxious apprentices handed him
pencil after pencil, quieted those acolytes who walked in
unaware of the unfolding drama, and watched transfixed as the
Great Master summoned up, in a remarkable moment of
architectural alchemy, the designs he had obviously been
thinking about for some time.
"[Wright] draws the
first-floor plan," Edgar Tafel, an architect and student at the
time, remembers, "and he draws a second-floor plan and he . . .
shows how the balconies are . . . and he says, 'And we'll have a
bridge across, so that E. J. and Liliane' --- that was
[Kaufmann's wife's] name ---'can walk out . . . from the
bedrooms . . . and have a picnic up above.' "
The apprentices were
amazed as Wright continued his work. "And he's putting the trees
in," Tafel exclaims. "He knows where every damned tree is." A
few minutes later, a secretary announced Kaufmann's arrival.
Wright dramatically ushered him in. "Welcome, E. J.!" he siad
expensively. "We've been waiting for you!"
Frank Lloyd Wright named
the Kaufmann home Fallingwater. It would eventually
become the most famous modern house in the world --- and he had
drawn it all in less than three hours. But to do it, to make the
drawings, he had brought himself to the edge, forced himself
into a nearly impossible situation. It was something he had done
since his earliest days, something he would do until he died.
"Trying to find the genius
of a man like that, who you realize is a genius when you're
talking to him, and more a genius as you get to know his work,
is one of those things that probably doesn't go into words,"
says the architect Philip Johnson, sitting in the Glass House,
his own modernist masterpiece. "It's probably a matter of how
moved are you by his work and by his personality. In this case,
both. He . . . I hated him, of course, but that's only normal
when a man is so great. It's a combination of hatred, envy,
contempt, and misunderstanding. All of which gets mixed up with
his genius."
Frank
Lloyd Wright came out of an era of big ideas and grand ambition,
and he somehow managed to survive well into an age both those
things had long since fallen out of fashion. The buildings he
left, still among the greatest of all American architecture,
bear witness to the originality of a man who thought it his duty
to convert all of humanity to his way of designing things, who
tried passionately and wholeheartedly to do so, offering his
compelling Prairie houses, Usonian buildings, and other works as
evidence of a new, "organic architecture" which would awaken
people as well as provide shelter.
During his more than
70-year career, Wright created a staggering and prodigious
output: banks and businesses, resorts and churches, a filling
station and a synagogue, a European-style beer garden and an art
museum --- nearly 800 works in all. But he was never satisfied;
all his life Wright was looking, searching constantly for his
own way to build. It was a uniquely American style that he was
after, growing naturally out of local conditions, not based on
models from the Old World. "Every great county as it emerges
into greatness develops its own architectures," said the late
critic and Wright biographer Brendan Gill, "it goes beyond
style, it goes beyond fashion . . . . There should be
something coming out of the ground that says, 'This is the way
we build in this particular culture.' . . . Frank was
trying to say, ' We deserve an American architecture.' "
Wright
challenged, indeed demanded, all those who came in contact with
him to see all of architecture anew; to understand how a house
"works"; to rethink the role of home, family, and automobile in
an increasingly complicated modern world. Finally, he wanted to
impart his almost Emersonian sensitivity and reverence for
nature, which was, in Wright's view, the supreme architect of
the universe. He had developed this deeply held respect during
the summers he spent as a boy in the exquisite and idyllic
Wisconsin countryside, and it never left him.
"For [Wright], what an
artist is," the historian William Cronon says, "is a person who
transforms nature by looking at nature, passing it through the
soul, and in the expression of what the soul experiences is
nature, something more natural than nature itself emerges. Which
is as we get to God."
The long, dramatic,
challenging, tragic, and inspiring life of Frank Lloyd Wright is
a paradox. Despite his rich legacy of creation, there is
something inexcusable about Wright. A true and accurate
rendering of his story must necessarily take in the clutter that
the great man left wherever he went. All building leaves much
material unused, like the sculptors pile of rubble when the
statue is finished. This scaffolding and false work, the crude
residue of intention, are usually discarded at the end. The true
artist, however, always appreciates what is left behind, for it
has been a part of the process of creation. In the end, that
"rubble" always speaks volumes. Frank Lloyd Wright left a big
mess.
Those closest to Wright
--- his family, friends, professional associates --- suffered
what we routinely excuse as the necessary by-products of
artistic success and celebrity: his relentless self-promotion
and narcissistic self-absorption, his overweening ambition and
periodic silly philosophizing, and his lifelong inability to
live within his means. Wright abandoned his family with hardly a
backward glance, took credit for work his mentor Louis Sullivan
had done with his partner, Dankmar Adler, borrowed money and
rarely paid it back. (The sheriff of Oak Park, Illinois, once
had to spend a night in Wright's home waiting while Wright
scraped together the money to pay an outstanding debt.)
Wright's
greatest biographer, Meryle Secrest, is both troubled by and
attracted to the contradictions Wright manifested in nearly
every gesture. "One can look at him and be awed by the
dimensions of . . . the achievement," she says. "Because we are
looking at something we very seldom see in real life, which is a
genius. On the other hand, when you look at who he was a a human
being, he was so incredibly at the mercy of his emotions, he's
at the other end of the spectrum. He's barely a human being."
His ego never diminished.
He would constantly and unhesitatingly confess to his own
brilliance, boasting to Mike Wallace in a famous televised
interview in 1957 that, given time, he would completely rebuild
this entire country. "He had to be onstage," Gill remembered,
"and not only onstage, but he had to be in the center of the
stage . . . . When he would be described, as he often was,
as the greatest living American architect, he would say, 'What's
that about America?' and he would say, 'What's that about
living?' He said, 'I am the greatest architect that has ever
lived. Forget American. Forget living.' He knew, or thought he
knew, or pretended he knew, where his place was going to be in
the world."
Wright admitted, "I had to
choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. O
chose honest arrogance."
Frank Lloyd Wright was
celebrated, then ridiculed and forgotten, then celebrated again,
as no other American architect has ever been. His life was a
roller-coaster ride of stunning success and fame, vilification
and exile, public humiliation and devastating personal tragedy.
He was controversial, notorious, provocative, and above all
unpredictable, an epitome of excess in an age of propriety.
There is a sense among the survivors that he was always trying
to prevent, whether knowingly or not, his life from becoming
normal. He wanted to keep things vital, sustaining, hot. Brendan
Gill believed that Wright "felt so good on the edge, the edge is
. . . what gave him the stimulus. Plainly his adrenaline was
filling him up to the brim when he was in desperate trouble."
Though
it certainly occupies a respectable place in the pantheon of
celebrated human endeavor, architecture is hardly the best-known
or most respected of the fine or performance arts. Yet it may be
possible to argue that, despite its less eminent position,
architecture is the most important and influential of all art
forms simply because it works on us at all times.
We notice our
surroundings, sometimes, but usually fail to understand the
combination of oppressive and exhilarating forces that speak to
us, and change us daily through the choices that architects,
past and present, have made. If we care to pay attention to the
backstage drama of the form, it's also clear that most, if not
all, architects build for money, prestige, and a place in
posterity's ranking. Frank Lloyd Wright, without a doubt our
greatest architect, was no different.
But unlike most of the
others, he had an idea --- arrogant at times, overreaching, but
always passionately held --- that architecture could teach,
enlighten, and even transform the lives of everyone who came in
contact with it. In the humblest of private homes to the
grandest of public spaces, he worked to achieve the tangible
manifestation of his continually developing ideas, ideas that
ask as much where our place is in the grand scheme of things as
about where we want our closets. It was a startling naive view
for the most part. But it was one that Wright held for 75 years.
"Every house is a
missionary," Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote. "I don't build a
house without predicting the end of the present social order."
There is a cartoon many
saw during childhood in which Popeye approaches a very small
conical tent in the desert. When he sticks his head inside, he
is amazed to see the interior of a huge Arabian palace, filled
with sheiks, harems, and countless retainers. Stunned, Popeye
immediately pulls his head out and sends it (as one can do only
in cartoons) around the entire tent as if to confirm to himself
that this is the structure he first encountered. He then enters
the still-gigantic space, and the inane plot continues. It's a
great moment, and it comes to mind as one tours many of Frank
Lloyd Wright's best private homes (and to a lesser extent other,
more public works). The sensation is especially there in the
textile-block houses in Los Angeles/ The Millard House in
Pasadena and the movie producer Joel Silver's exquisite home in
Hollywood (the Storer House) are perfect examples. They are
always much bigger inside than out, an infinite expansion of
finite space. There are half-floors, cul-de-sacs, surprising and
unexpected porches and patios; places to get lost in. After a
walk through, one has to go outside and, as in the old cartoon,
send one's mind around the whole thing.
In the best of the public
buildings, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the
Unity Temple in Oak Park, and the Johnson Wax Building in
Racine, Wisconsin (to name only three), a curious corollary is
evident. These structures are simultaneously monumental and
intimate. The Guggenheim, when one first enters it, seems
smaller than imagined; personal, familiar. After a few minutes
alone on the ramp, one marvels at the infinite complexity of the
building, but in another instant it seems small and knowable.
Of the Unity Temple,
designed by Wright to replace his own Unitarian Church (which
had been destroyed by fire), Vincent Scully, Yale's acclaimed
architectural historian and critic, says, "It's not a big
building, but I think it's the biggest space in America." It is
an architectural experience achieved in very few other
buildings.
With a Frank Lloyd Wright
building, one is always struck by how different it is from other
architecture. There is an intentionality in every gesture, every
moment, every choice, every corner. A Wright building wakes you
up, asks you to consider things such as moldings, color,
entrances, light, stairs, proportions, windows, rooms, beds,
even flat walls, in a new way. And it doesn't ever leave you
alone. You never forget where you are in his buildings; some
feel this makes the prospect of actually living in a Wright
space daunting, if not exhausting in the extreme.
Wright honed his skills at
the firm of Louis Sullivan, who revolutionized urban
architecture. During the course of his career, Wright explored
the idea of what a home had been by opening up the entire lower
floor of his Prairie houses, eliminating walls to create spaces
that appeared to have no boundaries: big, evolving rooms that
"seem to go on forever," Vincent Scully says.
"When Wright began to be
an architect," Robert A. M. Stern --- one of today's pre-
eminent postmodernists --- says of the Prairie-house days, in
the first decade of the 20th century, "the typical house, say in
Oak Park, where he lived, was on a relatively narrow lot, maybe
60 or 70 feet wide, maybe 100 or 125 feet deep. It had a front
porch where people could gather in a kind of semi-public
relationship to the street . . . . Wright took that model
and --- recognizing in part that the automobile changed the
nature of street life, that while you sat on a porch and talked
to people walking by or in a slow-moving carriage, an automobile
destroyed that relationship --- he turned the house 90 degrees
to the street."
It was a revolution. He
would eliminate front porches, conceal his entrances, build
sequestered private gardens in back, forcing the families who
lived in his houses to turn inward, away from the street and
community life. He often would design all the furniture and
house wares that would go into his houses, as well: dining-room
tables with austere high-backed chairs, candlesticks and vases,
sofas, even napkin rings and the hostess's gown. To his
well-to-do clients, his houses offered what one critic called a
"safe and secure harbor to the family battered about on the
uncharted seas of modern life."
Wright's
own modern life was hardly safe and secure. Despite a doting
mother who lavished praise and encouragement on him ("yours was
a prophetic birth," she had told him), he was the deeply scarred
survivor of his parents' stormy marriage and tempestuous
divorce. He sided with his mother, never again speaking to his
father, whom he blamed for the separation. By his early 20s,
when he was an up-and-coming architect living in Chicago, Wright
seemed determined to avoid his parents' unhappy example and
devoted himself to becoming a model middle-class gentility. He
had married well, to Catherine Tobin (called Kitty), a beautiful
18-year-old from a prosperous South Side family. Within a few
short years, there would be six children, four boys and two
girls, as well as his thriving practice in the booming suburbs
outside of Chicago.
After nearly 20 years of
marriage, Wright inevitably became restless. He and Kitty were
growing apart. Although he emphasized that the children were
her job, he had come to resent the amount of attention she
paid to them. He hated being called "Papa" and was ineffective
at disciplining his children, complaining when they interrupted
his work. Wright later admitted that "I have been the
father-feeling . . . for one of my buildings
. . . but I never had it for my children."
Finally, in 1909, he ran
away to Europe with the woman with whom he had been carrying on
an affair for years, Mamah Cheney, the wife of a friend and
client. Kitty and the children were devastated. Mamah would, in
the end, be the love of Wright's life, but in the ensuing
scandal, which made the front page in papers around the Midwest,
his practice was nearly wrecked, and he was forced to move his
base of operations out of Chicago, to his family's ancestral
land in Wisconsin.
Driving west from Madison,
you pass through the village of Cross Plains, Black Earth,
Mazomanie, and Arena before you reach the little town of Spring
Green, nestled among a particularly stunning set of gently
rolling hills in south-central Wisconsin. Geologists call the
Helena Valley and its surroundings a "driftless area" because it
was untouched by a glacier that scoured the land as it retreated
at the end of the last ice age.
The place does have a
distinct feel: sheltered, intimate, graceful, and reflective. It
was in this valley that Wright's maternal grandparents, the
Lloyd-Joneses, settled and prospered in the early 19th century.
The neighbors called them the God-Almighty Joneses because of
their piety and the extreme seriousness with which they took
themselves.
The young Frank Lloyd
Wright has visited the valley frequently in the years after the
Civil War. There he soaked up his relatives' radical Unitarian
faith, read Ralph Waldo Emerson, learned to hate farmwork, and
eventually fell in love with the surrounding landscape. It was a
place he would return to again and again for protection and
escape, solace and inspiration. "I feel roots in these
hillsides," he once said. "Every time I come back here it is
with feeling there is nothing anywhere better than this."
In 1911, just a mile south
of Spring Green, Wright, who was 44 years old now, started
building a large, rambling house on the side (never the top, he
always insisted) of a beautiful rise high above the Wisconsin
River. He named it Taliesin, Welsh for "shining brow," and it is
Wright's personal masterpiece, his statement to the world, his
home and headquarters for nearly half a century. Its outside
walls and distinctive chimneys were built from limestone
quarried a few miles away; inner and outer walls were covered
with plaster made with sand from the banks of the Wisconsin; the
finished wood outside was meant to be the color of tree trunks
at dusk. "I wish to be part of my beloved Wisconsin," he wrote.
"My house is made out of the rocks and trees of the region"; it
is "part of the hill on which it stands."
To Wright, Taliesin was
the perfect embodiment of what he liked to call "organic
architecture." Cronon believes we are likely to misunderstand
what Wright meant when he used the word "organic"; he fears we
will think that it is something taken right out of nature. But,
argues Cronon, that's not at all what Wright meant. Nature was
meant to inspire the artist "to see beyond those natural forms,
to some ideal, almost divine form that lies behind the natural
form."
For Frank Lloyd Wright, at
Taliesin, architecture would be worship: "Architecture, I have
learned . . . is no less a weaving and a fabric than the trees."
There were no formal plans
for Taliesin; it just grew. Wright pointed his cane and the work
was done. Over the years, he added wings to his already
meandering designs, built barns and other outbuildings, and
completed a massive studio and dormitories for his Fellowship,
all distinctively Wrightian in their design and function.
Initially, there is a
closeness, sometimes a claustrophobia, to the plan, with its
unusually low ceilings imparting a kind of mystery, an urge to
follow, to discover. Then, suddenly, the corridors open up to a
room two stories high, with large windows commanding a view of
the Valley. Each new moment has a significance both temporal and
architectural, a gravity filled with intention. All the while,
Wright never leaves you; you feel viscerally his intensity, his
obsession, his art. Entering a Frank Lloyd Wright house is an
exercise in obeisance; one bows literally to the low ceiling and
then again, perpetually, to the Master and his vision.
But if his building was
meant to symbolize the highest potential of the human spirit, to
transcend the ordinary laws most mortals are subject to, life
within the walls at Taliesin rarely cooperated. Over the years,
the building would survive devastating fires and foreclosures,
scandal and controversy, and mass murder.
Frank
Lloyd Wright met and fell in love with Olgivanna Ivanovna
Milanoff Hinzenberg in 1924. As they embarked on a passionate
affair, his career went into a tailspin. The Prairie houses,
which had brought him acclaim in Europe and respect, notoriety,
and a thriving practice in the U.S., were 15 to 20 years in the
past, and though his magnificent Imperial Hotel in Japan had
gloriously withstood a devastating earthquake in 1923, adding
greatly to his fame, he had very few clients and even fewer
prospects. Many critics dismissed him as out-of-date. And,
indeed, he seemed to be. The Imperial Hotel, one of the last
great handmade buildings of the 20th century, as well as most of
his other works and projects in progress, seemed romantic, from
another time.
His personal life was in
no better shape. He had lost Mamah and his beloved mother had
died, and he was trying desperately to separate from his second
wife, Miriam Noel, a wealthy widow who had become infatuated
with him: she called him "Lord of my waking drams," Miriam
turned out to be violent, unstable, addicted to morphine, and
they quarreled from the first.
Olgivanna moved into
Taliesin, bore him a daughter, his seventh child, Iovanna, and
helped to settle Wright down. She never flagged in her devotion
to her husband, never wavered in her belief that he was a great
man. She was formidable, intimidating, and essential to his
later success.
In 1932, Wright was 65.
But he had no plans to slow down; in fact, the next 25 years
would prove to be his most creative. The Wright's immediate
problem, however, was survival; the Depression was ravaging the
country, and though some buildings were going up in the big
cities, few companies were willing to trust an architect who was
notorious for going over budget, and who had a reputation for
being difficult and overbearing.
Olgivanna suggested that
they start the apprenticeship program. It would attract eager
and admiring students who would each pay $650 a year to live and
work alongside the great man. The Taliesin Fellowship was born.
The Wrights hoped it would become a truly self-sufficient
community. In addition to working in the studio with the Master,
all apprentices were required to do at least four hours a day of
physical labor in the fields, tending gardens, repairing
buildings, and cooking. Olgivanna supervised everything: she
planned the menus, picked the music that was piped into the
workroom and over loudspeakers in the fields, even chose socks
the apprentices wore. She controlled many of the students'
private lives, deciding who could have a sexual relationship
with whom. She also arranged marriages and divorce. One female
apprentice remembered Olgivanna as "the Queen Bee," who killed
everyone around her.
Critics
charged that Wright gave no formal architectural instruction at
his school, that the students were little more than slaves. But
Wright insisted that the apprentices would learn by doing. "They
were all working from 7 in the morning till 10 at night and they
were all very happy about it." Meryle Secrest says, "I think
that Wright had a lovely idea in his mind of a command lifestyle
. . . which actually never quite transpired. I think that he
really wasn't capable of living the kind of . . . simple
farmer's life that he was so tirelessly promoting. He wanted to
be the head of an enterprise, and he was.
"They had hundreds and
hundreds of acres; they had all kinds of people who were
constantly working the place. And they had their own rather
nice, elegant quarters. They decided that they liked the idea of
eating on a dais, a little bit above everybody else . . . .
They liked the idea of hearing concerts on Saturday nights, and
just ever so slightly raised above everybody else."
Vincent Scully saw the
early days of the Fellowship for what they sere, and he gets to
the heart of Wright's outsize, 19th-century Romantic bluster:
"Wright wanted to be the chief. Wright created a situation at
Taliesin where he was the chieftain surrounded by his followers,
surrounded by his army. And it regarded itself as an army under
siege. The rest of the world was wrong, the rest of the world
didn't understand them. They had the right way of doing it. The
Master was always right. It's not a civilized situation, it's a
heroic one."
Whether
it was the success of Fallingwater, which effectively answered
the modernists' criticism that Wright was no longer relevant, or
the "heroic" satisfaction of being master of all he surveyed in
his Taliesin fiefdom, Wright's career was reinvigorated, and new
work began to come in. (Before that resurrection, Philip
Johnson, then a young architectural critic, sarcastically
suggested that Wright might already be dead. Wright gave as good
as he got, accusing the American followers of modernism of being
salves to Europe. He named the flies that buzzed around his
drafting tables Mies, Gropius, Corbusier --- before killing them
with a swatter.)
After Fallingwater came
the Usonian houses, Wright's attempt at making affordable
housing ($5,500) that would be just as elegant as the work he
did for well-heeled clients. They were to be single-story homes,
built on monolithic concrete slabs and joined to a carport. Much
of the furniture was designed by Wright. ("it was like moving
into a motel room for good," one early owner said.)
The architect was sure
these "houses for the masses" could be constructed all across
the country. The Usonians (named for the U.S.) were a noble
failure; Wright never seemed able to resist adding details that
drove up the price, and most people didn't rush to buy Frank
Lloyd Wright's ultimately controlling vision of how they should
live.
In the end, only 60
Usonians were built, and Wright took to calling the ordinary
people who had rejected them "the mobocracy." They were
destroying the country with their lack of taste, he said. He was
partly right: lesser architects, inspired by his designs, would
spread the single-story ranch house all across the country. "He
was trying to pull the masses above themselves," Cronon says,
"and as a result there's something deeply impractical, and in
some ways anti-democratic, about his democratic vision." Still,
he tried to do something egalitarian, something for the people
who weren't wealthy. "How many other serious architects ever
bothered?" asks Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The
New Yorker.
In
1936, Wright was commissioned to build what would become one of
his greatest masterpieces, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine,
Wisconsin. Herbert Johnson, president of the progressive
company, wanted a new administration building, and Wright leapt
at the chance.
Wright would bring two
innovations to the new work: specially manufactured Pyrex glass
tubing (43 miles of it) to be used as skylights, and hollow
reinforced-concrete columns of astonishing slenderness to
support the great ceiling. The columns presented certain
problems. Nervous state inspectors insisted that they could not
possibly bear the weight that Wright's plan called for.
Insulted, the architect arranged a public demonstration. Wright
piled on 10 times the weight required before the column cracked.
All of it took far more
time and money than Herbert Johnson bargained for. "At first Mr.
Wright was working foe me," he said. "Then we were working
together. From now on I'm working for him." But it was worth it.
The Great Workroom, still used by dozens of clerical workers
more than 60 years after its completion, reverberates with a
silence usually found in the great cathedrals. And it looks new,
or, more precisely, timeless. The "lily-pad" columns are wonders
of the modern world, magical when light enters through the
tubing. It would be "like working in a glade in a pine forest,"
Wright said as he declared his finished building a masterpiece.
He got no argument from
his old modernist adversary: "my favorite building of Wright's
is the great Racine Johnson Wax offices," Philip Johnson says.
"What he did was something that's unheard of in the business
world . . . . What did he do? . . . He built a
palace, he built a church. He built something that just soared.
It's the finest room, maybe, in the United States."
After the building that
Edgar Tafel, echoing those who have compared Wright's unruly
talent to Beethoven's, called "his Ninth Symphony," there was no
stopping Wright. He set up a second Taliesin in the Arizona
desert outside Phoenix, where he would move his Fellowship
during the winter, and over the next 20 years he and his
apprentices turned out drawings and plans for more than 350
buildings. Some would not be built. Some would not be completed
until after he died. But all would be provocative and
controversial, and all would bear the unmistakable stamp of
Frank Lloyd Wright. Asked once how he could possibly conceive
and oversee so many different projects --- more than at any
other time in his career --- Wright just smiled and said, "I
can't get it out fast enough."
His ego and his ambition
never diminished. "Wright was a media figure before there were
media figures," Goldberger says. "He got himself out there to
keep his name in front of people all the time."
He was a relentless
self-promoter, grabbing the spotlight whenever he could find one
(he was one of the first serious artists ever to be interviewed
on television), delighting in shocking everyone around him with
the outrageous and the controversial. "I defy anyone." he once
said, "to name a single aspect of the best contemporary
architecture that wasn't first done by me."
'I
went out into the unknown," Wright said many years after he had
abandoned Kitty and the children in 1909 for Mamah Cheney, "to
test faith in Freedom. Test my faith in life, as I had already
proved faith in work." His family was destroyed. All he left,
Wright's son David remembered, were bills to be paid.
Frank Lloyd Wright had
never forgiven his father for deserting his family; now, at age
42, after nearly two decades of marriage, at what seemed like
the height of his success, he did precisely the same thing. One
son attacked Wright as he tried to leave, all the children were
damaged in some way, and Kitty spent the rest of her life
dreaming that he would come back. He never did.
The lovers fled to Europe
for a year, leaving in their wake a massive and very public
scandal. Newspapers published editorials condemning them. The
Chicago Tribune held Wright responsible for what it called
"an affinity tangle . . . unparalleled even in the checkered
history of soul mating." In Oak Park, a Presbyterian minister
preached that such a man as Wright has "lost all sense of
mortality and religion and is damnably to be blamed." Frank
Lloyd Wright was stunned by the ferocity of the attacks, but he
never gave up. Mamah was his true partner.
In Berlin, he found some
interest in his work; his Prairie houses seemed refreshing to a
handful of young architects, and he prepared a portfolio of his
drawings for publication by the German house of Ernst Wasmuth.
He then traveled to Italy, where he drank in architectural
history.
In 1910, Wright abruptly
returned to Oak Park. He was out of money and eager to see his
children. Mamah stayed in Europe. Kitty desperately hoped for a
reconciliation, but Wright would not consider it. He began work
on Taliesin, which he intended to share with Mamah once she was
divorced. Besides, with the notoriety the scandal had brought,
he could not possibly live in Oak Park, and so he found himself
back in the Valley of his ancestors, building his most personal
and, from some, best work, fortress sequestered form the storms
of his own making.
Mamah Cheney got her
divorce in the summer of 1911 and moved into Taliesin, igniting
the scandal once again. A reporter noted that Wright had been
spotted carrying Cheney across a stream and that she had
exhibited "a good deal of lingerie of a quality not often on
display in that part of Wisconsin." Finally, on Christmas Day, a
defiant Wright held a press conference to explain his actions to
the world. "The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide
his conduct," he said. But he, Frank Lloyd Wright, was not
ordinary.
The lovers would live
together at Taliesin for three years. She worked on her own
writings and enjoyed her children's periodic visits. He tried to
make amends with his own children, and struggled to rebuild his
practice. Wright managed to land the commission for the Midway
Gardens on Chicago's South Side --- a whole block to be
transformed into a European-style pleasure garden. Assisted by
his son John, Wright hurled himself into the construction.
What
happened next, on an August weekend in 1914, while Frank was in
Chicago and Mamah was entertaining her children and dealing with
some workmen at Taliesin, is almost unspeakable. Wright had
hired a West Indian named Julian Carlton to serve as butler and
handyman at Taliesen; Carlton's wife was to be the cook. Then
something went wrong; no one would ever know precisely what.
Mamah may have told them they would have to leave. Meryle
Secrest describes it best: "The final meal that they were to
serve was lunch on Saturday . . . . Julian Carlton
appeared in his white jacket and served lunch as usual. He then
asked permission to clean some carpets with gasoline. He was
given permission; he went outside, and instead of pouring it on
the carpets, poured it all the way around the outside of the
windows and doors."
As Mamah and the others
continued lunch, Carlton quietly bolted the doors and windows.
Then he lit the gasoline. in seconds the house was engulfed in
flames. When those inside tried to flee, Carlton hacked them to
death with an ax. "If you can imagine, this all happened in a
fraction of a second," Secrest continues. "He had killed Mamah
. . . by splitting her skull. He also did the same with her son.
He attacked her daughter. Everything was in disarray, people
were screaming, trying to jumo out of windows, [but] they were a
story and a half above the ground. One man jumped out, brole his
arm, was in flames, was rolling on the ground. Other men were
being butchered . . . . Of the nine people who had sat
down to luncheon, seven were dead or dying."
In his grief, Wright
refused to let the undertaker touch the body of the woman he had
loved. Instead, he had his own carpenters fashion a simple
wooden box for her. There was no funeral either. The coffin was
placed on a plain farm wagon, covered with flowers, and drawn by
horses. Wright's son John and two cousins helped him bury her in
the little cemetery behind his mother's family chapel. "I wanted
to fill the grave myself," Wright remembered. "No monument yet
marks the spot where she was buried . . . . Why mark the
spot where desolation ended and began?"
"It wasn't his nature to
suffer prolonged bouts of whatever cause," Gill said. "He
bounced back. He liked to be on the edge and this was another
case where tragedy provided an edge and then he came back and
started life over."
As Wright would say, "in
action there is release from anguish of mind." Taliesin would be
rebuilt.
But he never forgot the
woman who inspired it. Nobody, not Olgivanna and certainly not
Miriam Noel, could make him do that. Today, a small stone
against a protecting tree modestly marks the grave of Mamah
Cheney. It is in view of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen, which
continues to obstinately survey the Valley from its spectacular
perch a half-mile away. Just a few yards from Mamah's is
Wright's own impressive grave site
--- only, the grave is empty.
We
study the past not to undo it. No amount of study can change the
strange days and hard events of Wright's life. We are drawn
particularly to biography. which Thomas Carlyle described as
history, because we sense that in the pursuit and investigation
of those who have gone before us lies example. Frank Lloyd
Wright's life and work, the intimacy and grandiosity, bombast
and wisdom, triumph and tragedy, are suffused with his outsize
heroic example.
Our own age mistakenly
sees the hero as perfect, delighting --- indeed, salivating ---
over the prospect of error and fault, forgetting what history
has always told us: that in the hero we find a perverse and
utterly fascinating study of strength and weakness, a riveting
psychological drama in which contradictory, opposing, even
warring traits negotiate for supremacy and ultimate authorship.
We are in a sense privileged to accompany such a great man as he
makes so many mistakes. It is in the frustrating and sublime
interplay of art and mess that the real lessons of Frank Lloyd
Wright begin to emerge.
In 1943, Wright got his
most difficult and most important commission: designing a museum
in New York City to house the vast collection of nonobjective
paintings amassed by the copper king Solomon R. Guggenheim. It
was his first great commission in a great American city, and
Wright was all of 76 years old. Perversely, perhaps to distance
himself even farther from his betrayed mentor, Louis Sullivan,
Write has openly but rather disingenuously disdained the city
all his life: it was, he said, "a place for for banking and
prostitution and not much else . . . a prison-house for the
soul." The dominance of the modernists further fanned the flames
of his apparent disgust. Striding along Fifth Avenue, gesturing
with his cane, Wright was happy to dismiss everything he saw,
especially when reporters, whom he had learned to manipulate
with startling aplomb, were nearby. The Manhattan skyline was
merely "Boxes next to boxes . . . a glassified landscape . . .
style for style's sake by the glass-box boys."
The glass-box boys, their
painter friends, and the critics were hardly enthusiastic about
Wright's great plan for the Guggenheim, a gigantic spiral (a
design he had flirted with for years), an American ziggurat,
where the interior was to be one continuous ramp. Visitors would
start at the top and work their way down. On writer called the
architect "Frank Lloyd Wrong." Twenty-one well-known artists,
including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, opposed the
design, arguing that it would be impossible to display their
work properly on the museum's curved, sloping walls. Wright
replied by denouncing the "incubus of habit" that beset their
minds; painters would produce finer art, he said, if they knew
it would be in his museum.
In the end, Robert Moses,
the man in charge of all major construction in New York City,
would have to exert his considerable influence to get a
recalcitrant board of standards and appeals to go along with
Wright's unorthodox design. ("I want the Guggenheim built" was
Moses's alleged commandment to the board.) In 1956, 13 years
after it was purposed, with Wright nearing 90, ground was broken
for what some still described as "a washing machine" by the
park.
By the spring of 1959 the
Guggenheim was almost complete, and Wright was supervising the
final details from his studio at Taliesin West in Arizona.
Though his eyesight had begun to fail, he still rose every
morning eager to get back to the drafting table.
When his first wife,
Kitty, died that spring, his son David withheld the news from
his father for a day. Wright wept when he finally heard what had
happened to the woman he had abandoned half a century earlier.
"Why didn't you tell me as soon as you
knew?" he asked. "Why should I have bothered?" David answered.
"you never gave a goddamn for her when she was alive."
Not long after, Wright
complained of stomach pains and was hospitalized in Phoenix.
Surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction was successful, but
five days later, on April 9, 1959, Wright died quietly in his
sleep. He was 91, and no one in the immediate family could quite
believe him gone. "My feeling towards my grandfather, " Eric
Lloyd Wright says, "was that he was . . . almost immortal."
Wright's disciples loaded
his coffin into a pickup truck and drove for 28 hours to
Wisconsin. At Taliesin, he was carried on a flower-strewn farm
wagon, just as Mamah Cheney had been. He was laid to rest within
yards of her, and not far from his mother. A Unitarian clergyman
read one of Wright's favorite passages from Emerson: "Whoso
would be a man must be a nonconformist . . . . Nothing is
at last sacred but the integrity of you own mind."
Olgivanna, his third wife,
died in 1985, and her ashes were placed at Taliesin West. Her
followers, granting her dying wish, secretly exhumed the body of
her husband, had it cremated, and had the ashes transported back
to Arizona, where to this day they rest next to hers in a garden
wall. Many family members and associates were outraged; David
Wright, the son who had struggled for so long to understand the
difficult man who was his father, called it "grave robbing."
Even in death, Frank Lloyd Wright was at the center of
controversy.
'My
father, taught me," Wright once said, "that a symphony was an
edifice of sound. And I learned pretty soon that it was built by
the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building is
built. And when that came to me I used to sit and listen to
Beethoven. He was a great architect. The two minds are quite
similar because they arrange and build . . . plot and plan in
very much the same way."
Frank Lloyd Wright was
sui generis, and critics, family members, historians, and
apprentices have noticed the similarities between Wright and
Beethoven. They both seem to have sprung up relatively
unconnected to discernible, inheritable schools of influence,
both lives were filled with perhaps unnecessary Sturm and Drang,
and both left few clues as to how one might follow in their
footsteps. The architecture lived heroically, monumentally,
flitting imperiously among the mere and leaving a legacy of
stunning art and conflicting emotion.
Cronon finds the key to
coming to terms with Wright in his lifelong passion for nature
and in Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental vision: "There's a
wonderful passage from Emerson, which seems to me to come closer
to capturing Frank Lloyd Wright than any other . . . in which he
says, 'Every spirit builds a house; and beyond its house a
world; and beyond its world a heaven. Known then, that the world
exists for you: build, therefore, your own world.' And that
vision of the Romantic genius, the artist, taking the world and
reinventing it, making it in its own right --- following that
personal idiosyncratic vision is utterly what Frank Lloyd Wright
is about."
Brendan Gill understood:
"What an architect is said to be about: provide your fellow
human beings with the best possible shelter at the lowest
possible cost. Frank usually believed that, and then in the
making of temples, very ambitious temples, true temples like the
[Beth Sholom] Synagogue [near Philadelphia] of the Unity Temple
in Oak Park, other temples of art, like the Guggenheim, . . . he
was able . . . out of his arrogance to create something which is
selfless. Of course, he designed those things, but they are
purged of him. They are not his monuments, they are monuments
for all of us and all of us gain from these monuments in a way
that is not that simple act of egoism on the part of a great
man."
__________
Burns, Ken.
"The Master Builder." Vanity Fair. 459 (November
1998, pp. 302-318.