Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford:
Thirty Years of Correspondence
Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz
Princeton Architectural Press, 294 pages, $27.50
Frank Lloyd Wright was prolific and promiscuous in his work, personal life and correspondence, all of which resulted in a lifelong testament to his sense of his own importance to the world. Previous compilations of his letters have been organized according to the various types of his correspondents: clients, architects and apprentices. With “Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence,” we witness a sustained dialogue between the 20th Century’s preeminent architect and probably its most prolific social critic and historian.
Wright considers Mumford an important ally in his personal rehabilitation to the pantheon of American culture. When the correspondence begins in 1926, Wright is 59, and 17 years past the abandonment of his first architectural practice and family in Oak Park. He’s increasingly seen as a historical figure; few major commissions came his way during the 1910s and 1920s. Mumford, who is completing his third book at just age 30, shares wide-ranging interests that are close to Wright’s heart, including Emerson, Thoreau, American architecture and organic design. Mumford clearly sees the strength and originality in these ideas and their still-fertile potential for greater creative activities in America, even when most of his contemporaries view them as antiquated and culture becomes globalized with a strong European flavor.
The relationship between Wright and Mumford exists almost entirely in the content of the letters. Though they occasionally met, usually in Mumford’s native New York City, their digressing work and travel schedules often see them just missing each other at various far-flung locales. The recurring comedy of the correspondence is Wright’s seemingly endless invitations for Mumford to visit — and, at one point, even take up residence — at his Wisconsin home, Taliesin. Mumford apologetically declines time after time, citing every possible excuse, from work and travel to family and personal health.
The invitations are the strongest symptom of seduction, as the old architect tries to develop a closer relationship with the rising young cultural critic. “I intend to keep on the good side of you,” he writes in 1931 after he has read Mumford’s review of other architects’ work. But Wright’s legendary egotism leads him to considerable consternation when Mumford, who is extraordinarily appreciative of Wright’s architectural talents, makes the occasional criticism of him in his public writings.
Their strongest disagreement is a private one, due to their strong differences over Wright’s isolationist views prior to the U.S.’s entering World War II. A 10-year gap in communications occurs following an incendiary series of letters on the subject in 1941. Though the two mend some fences and resume their correspondence in 1951, much of the earlier exchange of ideas is replaced by mutual pleasantries as Wright enters the twilight of his career. The invitations to Taliesin continue, but after 33 years of friendship, Wright dies in 1959 without ever welcoming Mumford into his home.
Building a Legacy:
The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Home and Studio
Edited by Zarine Weil
Pomegranate, 150 pages, $30 paper
It’s unusual to find a good detective story that’s about a house and packed with compelling photographs. But “Building a Legacy: The Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Home and Studio” can be read as just that.
The book documents the Oak Park house’s century-long saga, from a small home for a 20-something Chicago architect and his family to an architectural shrine that today fuels that suburb’s Wright-based tourism industry. For almost 20 years, from 1889 to 1909, the home and studio was Wright’s personal laboratory as he continually built and remodeled the structure to meet the needs of his growing family and increasingly successful architectural practice. Even after he abandoned his family to run off to Europe with the wife of a client, Wright made architectural modifications to the property, creating a series of rather-undistinguished apartments that housed his ex-wife and children while producing rental income.
When a group of Wright aficionados helped rally the local community and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to buy the house in 1974, it was a quirky, run-down, 85-year-old home whose original purpose and architectural significance were hidden beneath a patchwork of modifications. Just figuring out which portions of the structure should be restored for public display was a difficult task that matched scholars, community activists and even Wright family members in an engaging dialogue.
“Building a Legacy” documents these travails and the various incarnations that the structure had during its original development and took during the 20 years of restoration. It’s part “This Old House,” part Martha Stewart and part historic documentary about a consensus building exercise that seeks to restore a unique and sometimes-bewildering legacy. Through it all, a devoted cast of volunteers, professionals and Wright descendants discovers the multiple personalities of the architect they find hidden behind years of various paint, plaster and shingles.
The final result is the restoration of the structure as it existed in 1909, the last year Wright lived and worked there, and the conclusion of the first chapter of his prolific career. Though occasionally a tad too technical for the general reader, “Building a Legacy” is a comprehensive and engaging companion to anybody’s visit to the Oak Park home and studio.
Churches
By Judith Dupre
HarperCollins, 176 pages, $35
Judith Dupre is an accomplished anecdotist who has a fondness for built things and some clever friends in the graphics department. Her previous books are best-known for their interesting formats: narrow and vertical for “Skyscrapers,” long and horizontal for “Bridges.” With the more-formally ambiguous yet equally engaging topic of churches, Dupre’s packaging has become forced and gimmicky.
The oversize format challenges a small coffee table. The book sports a clever front-door design that opens at the center. Thus “Churches” requires a significant amount of real estate to lay flat and is even clumsier when placed in the lap. I often found myself wrestling with the book’s odd physical shape rather than enjoying its lush photography.
“Churches” seems knowingly designed to be the perfect gift book: large and lavish about a clearly important and inspirational topic. But Dupre brings only a layman’s enthusiasm to the topic and covers two millenniums of Christian church history with representative examples that are chosen by no clearly discernable criteria.
Oddly, she begins her tale with Rome’s Pantheon, designed not as a church but as an ancient pagan temple that was converted to Christian use. Centuries of important church designs are given scant attention. She includes H.H. Richardson’s important Romanesque-inspired Trinity Church in Boston, but authentic Romanesque work, which spans several hundred years of architectural development across Europe, is painfully missing. And while most of the “greatest hits” make the cut, it’s hard to understand Dupre’s relegation of Paris’ Notre Dame to a single interior photograph and caption.
Organizing such diverse material poses challenges. Different styles, regional variations, even each of the Christian denominations that are represented could have been used as strategies for categorization. But Dupre organizes her two- and four-page essays chronologically, based on each structure’s start of construction. This leads to some incongruous groupings because many important churches took centuries to build, and their final forms have little in common with other churches started at the same time.
Dupre includes her own parish church in a disingenuous attempt to invite readers to evoke reflections on their own churches. Given the wide variety of styles the book documents, most readers will see something of their own local churches without reading the author’s gratuitous first-person account of her own. While it’s a perfectly pleasant Gothic Revival affair, she tries to raise its modest profile through mentions of former congregation members James Fenimore Cooper and Norman Rockwell.
Dupre can seem a bit starry-eyed, particularly in her introductory interview with well-known architect Mario Botta. While he has completed several contemporary church commissions, a broader approach could have included other notable voices to survey current ideas about ecclesiastic design. Dupre lavishly praises Botta’s bold, geometrically inspired work but fails to see the irony that his churches are aesthetically indistinguishable from his museum, office-building and house designs.
No doubt “Churches” will prove popular with a broad audience of architecture enthusiasts, people of faith and the general reader. And while it will serve as a useful accessory to the coffee tables of these purchasers, it’s too bad it couldn’t have been a more-thorough reference as well.
Powell/Kleinschmidt Interior Architecture
By Werner Blaser
Birkhauser, 176 pages, $65
The work of 25-year-old Chicago-based Powell/Kleinschmidt is scarcely known to the general audience because of its partners’ devoted limitation to interior architecture — those internal spaces that fill the public containers designed by building architects. “Powell/Kleinschmidt Interior Architecture” makes their usually private acts of design available for our scrutiny.
Donald D. Powell and Robert D. Kleinschmidt have practiced in a consistent modernist style for so long that their work is back in fashion today. But their monograph’s geometric format — square — could easily have been used to describe their work for much of the firm’s history. Unmoved by the trends and fancies of contemporary architecture and design, Powell/Kleinschmidt has stayed the course with elegant and simple solutions to the problems faced by its clients, mostly corporate chieftains and upscale apartment dwellers.
If anything, the work is too hard-edged, with a seemingly ever-present palette of expensive stones and woods. Presumably people inhabit these pristine spaces, though it’s hard to say for sure from the extensive, occupant-free photographs that are the book’s greatest strength. P/K’s interior architecture seems as wearable to the average person as most designer duds.
The influence of Powell and Kleinschmidt’s professional muse, Mies van der Rohe, is evident on every page. Mies is well-known for his taciturn personality and the famous dictum, “Build, don’t talk.” It’s thus appropriate to skip the book’s turgid prose, which presents each of almost 50 projects in a perpetual past tense with a dull drumbeat of each space’s functional requirements and myriad materials. Studded with big words and awkward turns of self-congratulatory praise, these descriptions provide a curious contrast with the beautifully photographed designs, which remain lucid and fresh whether they’re old or new.
