For a guy who has been dead since 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright is having one fabulous year.
An opera based on his operatic life – marked by adulterous affairs and fires that severely damaged his hillside Wisconsin home – made its Chicago debut in July. The same month witnessed the opening of a convention center in Madison, Wis., that was based on his design but was long delayed by political opponents who accurately called Wright a deadbeat and falsely accused him of being a communist sympathizer.
Then, last Saturday, a fascinating exercise in intellectual cross-pollination began in north suburban Glencoe when the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation teamed up to put Wright’s architecture in the context of the Midwestern landscape that inspired it.
The list could go on.
And on.
Suffice it to say that a new book, show or profit-making scheme that takes advantage of Wright’s enormous popularity surfaces practically every week.
In death, Wright has become even larger than he was in life: a cultural giant, an artist who transcends his art. Put his name on just about anything and it draws a crowd or pushes a product, whether it’s T-shirts, jewelry or suburban houses that bear only the faintest resemblance to his earth-hugging Prairie Style homes.
He clearly stands for something that strikes a deep chord in people today.
But what?
My take is that Wright was green before green was cool. Nature was the springboard from which he soared to artistic heights, and – this is the key – he kept reinterpreting nature throughout his prolific eight-decade career, tailoring his architecture to suit an ever-changing American culture.
Midwesterners tend to freeze Wright in the Prairie Style period at the turn of the last century, when he revolutionized the American home by breaking open the boxlike rooms that constrained the Victorian house and created the free-flowing interiors that made possible today’s informal living spaces.
But the revolution never stopped; it went on till the day he died.
In other words, Wright gave expression to two quintessential American ideals: the desire to put down roots and the even stronger tendency, in this restless society, to pull up stakes and start fresh. He powerfully articulated those conflicting impulses in his 1935 masterpiece, the Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pa., its stone walls anchored to the rock above a waterfall, its cantilevered terraces exploding into space.
What draws us to Wright, then, runs much deeper than his extraordinary personality. We respond to the architecture as much as the genius at the drafting board.
The genius, of course, seemed right out of central casting, with his porkpie hat, flowing cape and jaunty cane. Yet the recent opera, titled “Shining Brow” (an English translation of “Taliesin,” the Welsh name Wright gave to his Wisconsin home), pierced this carefully crafted image to reveal the contradictions between his art and life.
Wright ran off to Europe in 1909 with the wife of one of his Oak Park clients, leaving behind his wife and six children. The same architect who glorified the family with his cozy inglenooks and cavelike hearths, then, broke up his own family.
And yet, of course, other American architects have led outlandish lives.
The sexually voracious Stanford White, designer of choice for the newly wealthy of America’s Gilded Age, was shot to death in 1906 by the husband of one of his former lovers in the White-designed Madison Square Garden. But though White has been the subject of books and the 1955 film “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing,” Wright’s star easily outshines his. Their work accounts for the difference — White’s classical mansions looked backward to the Renaissance; Wright’s sleek Prairie homes gazed forward, using the Midwestern landscape as their point of departure.
The story is more complicated than that, however, and one of the strengths of “Frank Lloyd Wright: Drawing Inspiration From Nature,” which runs through Nov. 9 at the Botanic Garden’s Education Center, is that it spells out the myriad sources of Wright’s pathbreaking designs for living.
His Welsh family adopted the Emersonian credo “Truth Against the World.” His mentor, Louis Sullivan, crafted a stunningly original ornament based on the credo that natural forms serve as a model for architecture. From Japanese art, Wright learned to eliminate non-essential features to achieve a Zen-like serenity. The English Arts and Crafts movement, which rebelled against industrial society by promoting simple, handcrafted objects, taught him how to turn natural forms into colorful, abstract patterns.
Wright, in short, did not start from zero, as co-curators Roger Vandiver of the Botanic Garden and Cheryl Bachand of the Oak Park-based Wright Foundation point out in their lucid, if encyclopedic, wall text. But in contrast to the Arts and Crafts movement, he embraced emerging technologies (steel-reinforced concrete block, for example) and his aesthetic, unlike Sullivan’s, became ever more abstract and geometric.
That becomes clear as the visitor moves from the show’s introductory section, in which faint yellow text panels are handsomely displayed in a rectangular, skylit hallway, to the show’s second part, a gallery off one end of the hallway that has been turned into a Prairie Style stage set.
One side of the room holds an octagonal table lamp whose shape reflects the octagonal configuration of the library in Wright’s Home and Studio. Dating from 1899, its metal surfaces are decorated with stylized trees that seem hammered by hand in the Arts and Craft manner.
Across the room hangs the “Tree of Life Window” from Wright’s Darwin Martin House in Buffalo. Completed five years after the table lamp, its clear, opaque and colored rectangles of glass suggest the trunk, branches and roots of a tree. They reveal Wright’s leap to abstraction, his transition from the 19th Century to the 20th, yet they delight us in a way that the reductivist steel and glass boxes of International Style modernism do not.
Pieces like these alone make the Botanic Garden show worth seeing; others in the modestly scaled exhibition, which has about 60 objects, include Wright’s collection of Japanese art and his photographs of plants.
But what sets the show apart, even if it breaks no new intellectual ground, is the chance it offers the visitor to take in Wright’s work alongside the landscape — or more properly, the landscapes — on which it is based: Japanese gardens, a Wisconsin woodland and the prairie itself. The Botanic Garden has examples of them all.
Such a comparison plainly shows that Wright approached the prairie less as a botanist than as an artist. Amid gently waving big bluestem, goldenrod, asters and black-eyed Susans, and in the silence punctuated by buzzing insects, the visitor experiences the spectacular beauty of the prairie and may taste, too, its unremitting harshness — frigid winter winds, soaking spring rains and an unrelenting summer sun.
So did Wright take artistic license? Of course.
He was searching for a visual metaphor, a way to create a sense of place, and America’s vanishing frontier was where he found it, although, in truth, the Prairie Style emerged from the drafting rooms of Chicago’s Loop, and its characteristic building type was the single-family suburban home.
“We of the Middle West are living on the prairie,” Wright says, ever so mythically, in a quotation that appears in the show’s wall text. “The prairie has a beauty of its own and we should recognize and accentuate this natural beauty, its quiet level.”
What this exhibition, like all others, can only hint at is Wright’s astonishing manipulation of three-dimensional space, the way he folded buildings into layers, as though they were origami. It also could have done more to show how Wright moved beyond the Prairie Style, creating new forms in response to the new technologies of glass and concrete.
The corkscrewing rotunda of his 1959 Guggenheim Museum in New York City — vertical, not horizontal like the Prairie houses — provides the most obvious example. But one also can see Wright’s evolution by contrasting the new Madison convention center, which was shaped by three Wisconsin firms that followed Wright’s 1959 design for the project, with the 1905 Thomas Hardy House in Racine, Wis., a drawing of which appears in the Botanic Garden show.
Both buildings are arranged as a series of terraces that gracefully meld with their steeply pitched lakefront sites. But whereas the Hardy House grows out of the ground in accord with the Prairie Style, Monona Terrace is something else altogether — a concrete megastructure, its bowed lakeside facade marked by thin, double-curved columns that seem more of the sky than the earth.
It’s a back-to-the-future building that looks as though it were designed by George Jetson, a relic from the era of the Hula-Hoop.
Yet even if the superlong building’s flanks consist of parking lots that reflect the realities of the automotive age, Wright’s reverence for nature comes through in its audacious organization: a grand public park atop a multitiered convention hall.
Nothing could be more different from Chicago’s McCormick Place, which walls off the city from the lakefront.
All this suggests that Wright was onto something long before the environmental movement: Nature ought to be as much a part of our world as steel and glass and concrete. In a rootless culture, his buildings offer a reassuring continuity and a sense of permanence, yet they symbolize flux and freedom. At an urban scale, they suggest Wright’s vision of a middle landscape that would marry the modern mobility of the automobile with the Jeffersonian ideal of the self-sufficient farmer. How different, of course, is the hideous reality of strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions.
Wright’s buildings are who we are.
Or more accurately, they present a tantalizing image of who we’d like to be.
