Ask someone to name an American architect and it is almost certain that, if he can think of one, he will instantly say ”Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Can you imagine a more powerful test of fame in any of the arts? Public familiarity with Wright is really quite astonishing, and still growing more than three decades after his death.
Wright`s work is today an inspiration to young architects, a scholar`s challenge, a magnet for tourists, an art dealer`s joy and a sales gimmick for real estate developers. Wright is, to put it bluntly, a posthumous industry.
The Wright publicity engine, fueled by many interests, will soon begin making a marvelous racket because this is the 125th anniversary year of the architect`s birth. That event occurred in Richland Center, Wis., on June 8, 1867.
It is thus an appropriate time to attempt a balanced appraisal of Wright`s career, avoiding the blind hero worship that colors some such critiques and the gossipy fixation on Wright`s cranky eccentricity that warps others.
Most Americans probably carry a blindered vision of Wright as a brilliant, womanizing, sharp-tongued old goat (it is hard to imagine him young) who designed Robie House, Falling Water, the Imperial Hotel and a mile- high skyscraper-much of it while working in something called the ”Prairie Style.”
But there was a good deal more to Wright than that. And a good deal less, too, to put it gently, since his final years of practice produced some embarrassingly limp architecture.
Wright entered architecture at a time when it was efflorescing into turn- of-the-century loveliness and innovation embracing Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, Cubism and other styles and forces that loosely linked everyone from Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow to Otto Wagner in Vienna to Louis Sullivan in Chicago.
Pinning down the precise effects of these forces still defies the best scholarship. Yet it is clear that together, around 1900, they created the beginnings of the modern movement. This was a freshened way of thinking about architecture that acknowleged the new age of technology and the role of architects in meeting social challenges. Wright was an important part of this process.
Stylistic influences on Wright were many. He had a long and intricate set of guiding design principles and a huge gift for invention, but he could take any existing style and strike brilliantly creative sparks from it.
The swooping rooflines and precision carpentry of many Wright houses reflect the architect`s long-time interest in Japanese design, which in turn sprang from his authoritative knowledge of Japanese prints. Wright made his first visit to Japan in 1905 and returned many times later when he designed Tokyo`s earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel built in 1915.
European architects also influenced Wright. Indeed, when he visited Germany in 1910, some writers there backhandedly called him ”the American Olbrich,” a reference to Austrian architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, whose form- making was akin to Wright`s. The trip to Germany marked the publication there of a large portfolio illustrating Wright`s work. Those drawings influenced an entire generation of European designers.
Some of Wright`s earliest efforts proved he could slap out Colonial Revival and Tudor-styled houses as well as anyone. Much is made of his youthful Chicago stint under the great Louis Sullivan, whom he respected as his ”master” even after moving out on his own. Certainly Wright learned from Sullivan and under him produced some notable work including Charnley House.
Still, the Wright who would become best remembered for his residential architecture did not begin moving into a trajectory of fame until 1893, when he left Sullivan`s firm and turned out Winslow House, still one of the most distinguished residences in the nationally unsurpassed lode of his work in Oak Park and adjoining River Forest.
Some of the stylistic traits seen in Winslow House became Wright favorites, but it was not until the early 1900s that Wright brought his Prairie Style to bloom with such masterpieces as the Willits, Robie, Fricke, Dana and Heurtley Houses. By 1910, Wright had designed some 60 Prairie Style houses in Illinois alone (Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan boast the greatest concentration of Wright work, and only a few states are unblessed by his labors.)
Wright announced his Prairie Style in a 1901 Ladies` Home Journal article, calling it a ”city man`s country house on the prairie.”
The prairie house quickly identifies itself by its ground-hugging horizontal lines, widely projecting eaves, casement windows with stained glass and interior spaces that often focus on cozy fireplaces but flow into one another in a manner that destroys the old compartmented-box notion of a house. Wright`s decorative motifs for his ”organically” inspired prairie houses were drawn from flowers and other botanical forms which he modified by the application of geometric principles.
Yet knowing these and other Prairie Style details does not prepare a first-time visitor for the almost mystical experience of exploring a Wright house, including the famous one the architect built in Oak Park for himself and his family beginning in 1889.
Visiting a Wright house, the newcomer`s point of view shifts as he approaches, enters and is affected by processions of spaces that change in height, width and shape under varying conditions of light, materials, color and furnishings.
Spatial changes are found in every building, of course, but in Wright`s they are almost magical. The unfoldings are beyond ordinary technique and reflect a wizardry that cannot be described with mere words, photographs, or even tricked-up computer images. The work of other great architects challenges orthodox description, but none more strongly. Wright`s ability to render three-dimensional experiences on a two-dimensional sheet of drafting paper was awesome-not unlike a Beethoven or a Mozart hearing an orchestra in his head while jotting notes on a staff.
The basics of the Prairie Style-minus the touch of Wright`s genius-led to a whole new stylistic movement that flourished particularly well in the Midwest. Some architects short on creative talent of their own simply copied Wright and made a good living at it. Other famous Wright disciples, such as Bruce Goff and Barry Byrne, were strong enough to use Wright as a departure point for their personal design explorations.
Yet if Wright`s houses collectively guaranteed his fame, commissions for a wide range of other buildings occasionally came his way almost from the beginning.
Among the first was the since-demolished Larkin Building, a dramatic 1903 Buffalo office structure enhanced by a skylighted atrium that was surrounded by balconies filled with workers at desks. A year later, Wright designed Oak Park`s landmark Unity Temple, whose cubistic but classically roofed exterior only hints at an extraordinary spatial experience to be had within.
Both the Larkin and Unity also speak of Wright`s sometimes pioneering uses of technology. For the building in Buffalo, Wright invented the wall-hung toilet, a prosaic but ingeniously improved fixture that has since made work easier and more effective for armies of maintenance personnel. With Unity, Wright created America`s first reinforced concrete structure of any consequence-a daring risk at the time and also a cheap way to build for a church with a modest construction budget.
Many scholars date the beginning of Wright`s professionally mature period as 1910, just a year after he abandoned his first wife, Catherine, and their six children to run away with one of his client`s wives, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mrs. Cheney and her two children were murdered in 1914 by an insane servant at Taliesin, the new home and studio retreat Wright had built near Spring Green, Wisc.
The thrice-married Wright was stalked for much of his life by luckless romance, serious debt, lawsuits and bad publicity springing from his outspokenness and sexual peccadillos. Newspapers including the Tribune dispensed purple prose about the Taliesin ”love bungalow” and Wright`s legal troubles (Clarence Darrow was one of his lawyers).
Still, Wright`s fame as a designer spread and the tumult of his private life failed to erode the quality of his work. On the eve of World War I, Wright designed Midway Gardens, a lovely indoor-outdoor pleasure dome on Chicago`s South Side, which informed his plan for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Both were eventually torn down in similar displays of cultural barbarity.
Wright was hit as strongly as most architects by the economic Depression of the 1930s. During the lean years, he expanded Taliesin as an architectural teaching center and spent time on utopian schemes for model cities and prefabricated houses.
The astonishing span of Wright`s career is evident when you consider that when he turned 65 in 1932, he began approaching a whole new period of creativity that was to bring him still broader recognition.
And while Wright`s Depression-era commissions were few, many were prime. For a millionaire client in Pennsylvania, Wright designed Falling Water, a house cantilevered magnificently over a waterfall. For the Johnson Wax Co. in Racine, Wis., Wright created a much-honored office and research complex that proved he could still borrow deftly from styles not his own. The facades of the Johnson buildings are practically unadulterated Art Moderne.
Wright also used the late 1930s to begin designing Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz., a ”branch” of his Wisconsin headquarters. The Scottsdale outpost today dominates activity by Wright`s successors, who cater to tourists, preserve the old archives and run a school of architecture as well as a rather lacklustre design practice. The Wisconsin buildings have been restored after years of neglect.
In 1938, Wright engaged in his only lengthy encounter with another of the 20th century`s architectural colossi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies had just arrived from Germany to make his home in Chicago. He cheerfully accepted an invitation to drive up to Taliesin for lunch one Friday and wound up spending four days with Wright.
One can find a few stylistic commonalities between the two architects
(Did not Mies adopt Wrightian ideas for his Barcelona pavilion?). Yet while the men held each other in mutual respect, Wright never accepted Mies`s less- is-more philosophy.
Wright`s best known and most overpraised building of the post-World War II years is New York`s Guggenheim Museum, which employs a spiral form proposed by Wright earlier for a civic center, a parking garage and a planetarium. The Guggenheim`s interior is undeniably lovely, but senseless as a venue for the display of art. Even The New York Times once called the museum ”an indigestible hot cross bun.”
Much of the Wisconsin architect`s postwar work was in other respects uneven, or worse, in the years before his death in 1959. His buildings at Southern Florida College are keenly disappointing and his Gammage Memorial Auditorium at Arizona State University is a scalloped, almost Disney-like confection of surprising insubstantiality.
Some say Wright actually played little hand in his firm`s final works, and even stronger doubt has been cast on works attributed to him but built posthumously.
For all that, the Wright oeuvre`s relapses tend to be totally ignored, particularly because the white-maned designer has become an American arts deity.
If anyone needed further persuasion about Wright`s status, it arrived last September in the form of a national poll of American Institute of Architects members. They ranked Wright as the greatest American architect of all time and listed Robie House and Falling Water as among the 10 all-time best works of American architecture.
The Postmodern architecture movement that began in the 1970s revived interest in styles from the past, and Wright`s work became swept up and elevated in the search for historic riches.
By the 1980s, museums were installing whole rooms from Wright houses and holding elaborate Wright exhibitions; art dealers` prices for Wright-designed furniture and windows moved up to the six-figure bracket; and architects began finding inspiration in Wright`s designs. Some of the Wrightian influence turned up in the work of distinguished practitioners and bright architecture students. Other gropings trickled down to the level of conspicuously unlovely tract housing.
The interest also generated support for the costly restoration of such treasures as Wright`s own home and studio in Oak Park. That structure and some 50 others around the nation are open to the public and attract crowds of tourists from all over the world.
And out of this late 20th Century renaissance rose one man who became the biggest-spending architecture buff in American history: Thomas Monaghan, millionaire founder of Domino`s Pizza and worshipper of Wright.
Monaghan hired veteran architect Gunnar Birkerts to design a so-called
”Prairie Style” Domino`s headquarters building near Ann Arbor, Mich., and Birkerts produced a four-story, half-mile-long office structure that looks like the result of a gargantuan taffy-pulling contest.
In fairly short order, Monaghan also put together the world`s largest collection of furniture and other decorative works by Wright, worth an astonishing $12 million.
One might conjure the stereotyped old image of a man spinning around in his grave on the occasion of such fickle fanaticism and commercialization. Yet surely any remaining spirit long ago departed the Wright remains. They were dug up from their grave in Wisconsin in 1985 and moved to Taliesin West in fulfillment of a dying wish expressed by the architect`s third wife and widow, the imperious Olgivanna Wright.
But if Wright got headlines for peculiar goings-on even long after he had any hand in them, they in no way diminished his stature as an American architectural genius.
More than 400 of his buildings survive. Each year, the 50 that are open to the public are toured by people who with an expert or an ordinary eye seek to experience the often breathtaking Wright magic. Few are disappointed.
It is thus hardly extravagant, in this 125th anniversary birthday year, to be unstinting with one`s accolades.
How many architectural giants can America be said to have had in the 20th century? Three, I think: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. And of these, it is easy to say that Wright was the greatest of all.
