How do you sustain a friendship with a genius?
”I was spunky, and he was spunky,” writer Brendan Gill said, describing his long and warm association with Frank Lloyd Wright. It began in the early 1940s with the then-young reporter`s coverage of the architect`s plans for the Guggenheim Museum.
It flourished until Wright`s death in 1959 at age 92, and it shines today in ”Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright” (G.P. Putnam, $24.95), a biography of the renowned architect.
”He knew I was amused by him, but he also knew I had a reverence for him,” said Gill, now 73, graying and renowned for his own 50 years as a New Yorker magazine staff member, the author of 15 books and an arts and architectural preservation activist.
Gill chose the book`s title to explain the lifetime that ”this dynamic, infuriating and single-minded genius” spent inventing and discarding facades.
”It is obvious he lived behind a series of many masks, but he was always moving toward greatness. He is now at the apex of his fame, but I feel it is a lasting fame,” Gill said.
Wright is secure in his own claim to being the greatest of American architects, he said. ”I would call Thomas Jefferson the second greatest, and I don`t think Wright would mind that company.”
SO MUCH TO SAY
Over the years Wright was featured in many New Yorker articles.
”I have always known I would write a book about him,” Gill said. ”I thought of something shorter, but once I got started on Frank there was so much to say, I wrote 185,000 words.”
Gill continued his friendship with Wright`s third wife, the formidable Olgivanna, and his chief disciple, architect William Wesley Peters, and had their cooperation in his research.
”I perhaps waited until Olgivanna`s death two years ago to finish it. She was a determined keeper of the shrine,” Gill said. ”I have sympathy for her. She had to struggle to accommodate the genius. She tried to seek some identification as a separate person, but it was not possible to keep from getting swallowed up.”
The biographer has concern for the Wright ”cult.”
”I feel a little worried about hurt-ing some feelings, but I have to tell the truth. I feel Taliesin (the Wright center) was sadly mismanaged and did not produce any really good architects.”
He also complained that, ”All of Wright`s work is used as a quarry, being mined and taken away. His drawings, designs, papers are going out of the country, his works plundered and taken away. We are the only country with no rules about protecting our art.”
BEAUTIFUL HOUSE
The writer, who has studied many of Wright`s buildings, identifies his favorite as La Miniatura, built in Pasadena in 1923. An example of early use of reinforced concrete ”textile” block walls, it is ”a wonderful house. Every inch is made use of esthetically as well as in a homey, domestic manner.”
Although Gill called La Miniatura ”assuredly among the most beautiful houses to be found anywhere in the world,” it always leaked and ”presumably leaks to this day.” The writer chuckled at the memory of being a house guest of Wright, whose own house leaked. ”He never could get roofs. He always demanded technology that had not yet been arrived at.”
It is important, Gill said, that the greatest consistency in Wright`s architecture was the attempt to provide shelter for ordinary people. ”He built low-cost houses all his life. It is rare today for the big architect to develop houses for ordinary folk, but shelter ought to be the basic moral concern of architecture.”
Gill considered Wright`s larger works: ”I strongly dislike the Marin Civic Center (in California). My favorite is the Beth Sholom Synagogue (in suburban Philadelphia). Wright`s giant ego was submerged. There is a sense of sacredness in the building, a lot of true religious feeling.” –
