Frank Lloyd Wright:  A Golden Anniversary?

Anthony Alofsin © 2010

            “…Wright still stands alone as the American modern Architect in relation to the achievements of his own generation abroad, and even of most of the next except for Le Corbusier. A hundred years after his birth, however, we may most properly see him as belonging now to the past, if in a rank to which only the greatest have ever attained. No longer is he a contemporary figure, no longer the subject of controversy as he was as regards the Guggenheim Museum down to the day of his death, but an architect for the ages.” 

 

 

So concluded Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the eminent historian of modern architecture, in 1967 at the centennial of Wright’s birth and eight years after the architect’s death.[1] While Hitchcock was correct in suggesting that history will determine if Wright is an architect for the ages, he was wrong in other respects: in the decades since this appraisal, Wright has become not only more famous than at any time during his career, but the images of his work are features of global culture, and his life is as controversial as ever. [2]  The route of this acclaim has been complex, contradictory, and worth examining in detail.  

At the time of his assessment Hitchcock was still riding on the triumph of the modernist functional line of architecture that he and Philip Johnson had helped bring to America in the 1930s.[3]  In Hitchcock’s defense, Wright would have appeared passé and irrelevant to all architectural commentators in the 1960s. From their perspective, Wright’s organic architecture was too idiosyncratic to fit the modernist canon, except for the icons of his early Prairie Period before 1910---Unity Temple,  Larkin Building,  Coonley House, and Robie house—and the monumental works of the late  1930s and 1940s—the Johnson Wax Administration Building and the  Guggenheim Museum. 

PHASE I

The perception of the Prairie Period master works and the big monuments of the late 1930s and 1940s as Wright’s legacy persisted in the first phase of his afterlife, from his death in 1959 up to the early 1980s.  His work was seen as a testament to the inevitable triumph of modernism that had positioned him as an American precursor to the International Style, but it lead to a dead end and offered nothing for the future.  Though he had achieved broad international acclaim by the time of his death, his reputation quickly declined in the early 1960s, the halcyon years of corporate modernism. Not only was his name and work absent from architectural discourse, but respect for his great buildings had already diminished. Even while he was alive the destruction of the Larkin Building in Buffalo in 1950 signified one of the great tragedies of twentieth century architecture, and the tearing down of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1967 marked the nadir for Wright’s extant buildings.  With the rare exception of Edgar Kaufmann jr’s seminar at Columbia University, Wright’s work was not taught in schools of architecture, and, if mentioned, studio teachers generally dismissed him as a genius whose unique methods precluded him from study.  Prudish librarians even hid his books in reaction to his scandalous private behavior.   

            The reasons for Wright’s decline were manifold.  Many artistic reputations dip shortly after the artist dies. A great master’s death can cast a penumbra on the next generation of artists, such as the aura Michelangelo left over his followers, so that successors are only too willing to ignore or to deny the genius who preceded them.  Even the myth of genius did not serve to propagate Wright’s ideas, but only to isolate him and enshrine him among his close followers.  Those followers were lead by Olgivanna Wright, the architect’s widow, who as president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation maintained  close control over access to Wright’s archives at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a careful eye on who said what about him. Until her death in 1988 she also perpetuated and ran Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship—the communal cadre of former apprentices who produced his designs--despite the fact that the number of architects who had worked under Wright could only diminish over time. 

In addition to the limiting and reductive ideology of the late Modern Movement, another factor played a role in the decline of the architect’s reputation: Wright’s inability, or unwillingness, to articulate in pragmatic and insightful ways to other designers the methods of organic architecture that he had spent his career promoting.  Those few assistants who did grasp his methods (like Walter Burley Griffin, Antonin Raymond, Richard Neutra, and Rudolf Schindler) and who left to work on their own, became targets for Wright’s scorn. Most apprentices who stayed learned to execute his designs and copy his motifs, but they did not produce independently creative buildings. Also, a supply of overwrought, inadequately edited, and redundant publications with relentless references to Nature as his model encouraged either the copying of his style by his followers, or the bewildered abandonment of those who sought to grasp his design methods, but could not. It took a skillful and sensitive architect, like Faye Jones, decades to move beyond copying Wright’s idioms before he could conceive his own organic style.[4]  Despite Wright’s claim to propagate organic architecture as the architecture of American democracy, the iconic work and methods of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German architect who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, were more accessible; Mies’s aesthetic, not Wright’s, became from the 1950s through the 1970s the leading architectural standard, though often debased, of the American corporation.[5]

PHASE II

            The second phase of Wright’s post-mortem reception began quietly in the early 1980s as his legacy began to have commercial value.  Owners of Wright-designed houses, who had struggled to maintain them, discovered that the architectural elements of their homes were worth a lot of money.  They began to pry art glass windows from their walls, and along with furniture and artifacts, put them up for sale.  The auctions of Wright’s furniture and fragments began at Christie’s in 1983, a phenomenon that was stimulated by the first sales of selected drawings from Wright’s archive.[6]  Intense reactions against the International Style and functionalism had led to postmodernism. It brought an appreciation of history and architectural representation, which in turn augmented the perception of architectural drawings as valuable commodities. A drawing boom emerged in the market place, and Wright’s stunning renderings and conceptual drawings, many of which had never been published, were objects of beauty and artistic vitality. Mrs. Wright had sanctioned the drawing sales as a means of raising needed funds for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; these deaccessions were justified by the assertion that the funds would create an endowment. Instead, the windfall was used for operating expenses and other purposes. The price of objects and artifacts also shot up.   By 1988 an art glass lamp from the Robie House in Chicago sold at auction for $706,000. At these prices even some of Wright’s children and family members sold their paternal inheritance.

PHASE III

While the market for Wright’s drawings and artifacts rose, a third phase began to emerge that saw wider public awareness about the architect and an astounding expansion of the marketing of the man and his work.  The “branding” of Wright continues up to the present and shows few signs of abating.  A number of factors stimulated this broadening appeal. 

In the aftermath of postmodernism, the flop of deconstruction, and building replacing theory, a vacuum emerged that soon led to a revival of modernism. Architects and critics began to look not at its political and social agendas, which were out of tune with the acquisitive values of the period, but at the images and practitioners of the International Style, who, formerly reviled, were now rehabilitated in what I call a neo-Modernism. This rehabilitation occurred simultaneously with the rise of star architects in the boom decades of 1990s and early 2000s. Frank Lloyd Wright now fit perfectly. After all he had been the first great American star in what was becoming an unprecedented cult of a small handful of architects who dominated the press and became not only promoters of architecture as commodity but commodities themselves. Regardless of mini revivals of other modernists, Wright arose phoenix-like from the ashes of modernism with a persona that melded with the grandiose times.  He also had a complex and rich oeuvre. Some of the intrinsic qualities of his best buildings spoke to people as if they could provide something missing from contemporary architecture. His work’s orientation towards materials and nature appeared appropriate for the moment. And his buildings were highly photogenic. 

            Wright’s architecture also became more accessible because the Wright Archives at Taliesin West went from being a private holding to an accessible research center.  This opening, along with the publication of the indices of Wright’s immense corpus of letters, consisting of 100,000 microfilmed documents, allowed scientific research on Wright, his clients, and projects.[7]  The Wright Archives began producing books of unpublished material from its vast holdings, and eventually new mass audience and trade publications began to appear featuring dramatic color photography.  The old standard texts on Wright only had black and white images. While many modernist buildings appeared flat and lifeless, Wright’s buildings, newly photographed, had rich appeal in their color, texture, their integration of interior elements, and landscape treatments.

            The plethora of picture books not merely caters to the new hunger for images of Wright’s buildings, but expands it.  Although the picture books get bigger and bigger, they have less and less insightful content.  The pictures have taken on a life of their own, and Wright’s graphics, when published by the Wright Foundation, are digitally enhanced so the images appear more striking than the actual drawings.  There are also reprints of reprints of reprints. And the thirst for these books seems unquenchable. At present the on-line world catalogue of the Library of Congress lists over 6,500 book entries for Wright; Frank Gehry has 2,000.[8]

Central to the dissemination of Wright’s images and his widening public recognition was the licensing of his designs. One form of licensing occurred when the Wright Foundation allowed people to construct projects designed by Wright but not built during his lifetime. Charging a substantial fee, this procedure provided work for Wright’s successor firm, Taliesin Associated Architects.[9]  But more extensive was the licensing of designs for the production of artifacts and objects with broad marketability.   No such merchandizing could have occurred without the approval and participation of the Wright Foundation which claims extensive copyrights over all the architect’s designs. No use of Wright’s red square logo is legal without their permission. Though some licensing agreements to sell Wright designed furniture and fabrics had existed earlier during his lifetime, they were minor compared to the licensing arrangements that began in the mid-1980s and have expanded into a multi-million dollar growth industry.[10]

Wright may now be the most licensed architect in history.  In 2008 the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation had approximately forty separate licensees, and two full-time staff members for its licensing program. While it would be easy to criticize these efforts as crass exploitation, the revenue the license program provides is critical for the Foundation’s survival.   Other museum shops support their programs with sales of licensed Wright objects; many produce lavish mail order catalogues and sell objects at retail to visitors, and those proceeds often support educational and maintenance programs. We can buy door mats and ties adapted from Robie house windows, high ball glasses and money clips taken from art glass designs for the Coonley Playhouse. We can purchase greeting cards and rugs based on designs for magazine covers. We can buy votive candles, wrapping paper, bookmarks, and neck ties as hundreds of items are available.

The production of these objects requires taking a design made for a specific situation and applying it to something for which it was never originally intended.  Sometimes these designs are not Wright’s, but those of his apprentices and, in particular, Eugene Massalenk, Wright’s secretary who was also a talented graphic artist. Wright claimed as early as 1908 that organic design must be site specific, adhering to the particular demands of its location and to each client’s distinct needs.  But in the world of licensing, organic does not mean an object tied to one place at one time for a specific purpose and specific client.  Organic now means anything connected to Wright that is transportable to any medium that sells. Would Wright have been horrified at the commercialization of his designs into fodder for a capitalist system that he attacked, or would he have relished the income, as if the means justified the more glorious ends of creating organic architecture in America?

            While the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, publishers, and museums benefit from the architect’s popular appeal, others have also profited from the marketing of Wright.  Academics have cashed in on the Wright craze. For some, stalled in their careers, Wright has been a salvation. Others, coming from fields that are boring by comparison, have gained a visibility otherwise unavailable. Even some Wright scholars, lured by mass market appeal, have become pundits, providing perfunctory squibs for picture books.   Journalists and so-called professional biographers have particularly benefited from the exploitation of Wright’s life.  Often purloining the work of scholars or just skimming the surface of secondary literature, they have sensationalized Wright, made him a best seller, but have added little insight. The exploitation of Wright began with Brendan Gill’s biography, Many Masks (1987).  Claiming to be Wright’s personal friend, Gill accepted the hospitality of Wright’s fellows at Taliesin, took them into his confidence, and then ridiculed them in print while setting up Wright as a narcissistic con man.[11]  More recently, a spate of exposés has appeared.  Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship has been outed, two books have exploited the murder of Wrights lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, at their home Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and a third has focused exclusively on Wright’s women.[12]

By far the most egregious of the biographies is Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, which looks at Borthwick and the Taliesin tragedy of 1914 when Borthwick and others were killed by a servant, Julian Carlton.  Horan ripped off research by scholars—my own work in particular--which she then distorted in the context of an invented historical dialogue.  It’s a good thing that the book claims to be historical fiction because as history it is redolent with factual errors.  The accuracy of most of the minor details may be irrelevant to average readers of romance novels.  There is, however, a major distortion of historical fact that it is a travesty: the motive for the murders themselves.  In the final scene when Carlton has gone berserk and sets Taliesin on fire with Mamah and others inside, Horan writes, “Julian was upon her. Grabbing her throat. Hands reeking of gasoline. ‘Whore!’ He was screaming, eyes insane. ‘Whore!” (337) Horan portrays the murderer as an avenging angel seeking retribution on an immoral sinner.  He may have been insane, but there is no evidence he thought Mamah was a whore or that moral condemnation of her relationship with Wright was a factor in the tragedy.  Actually Carlton was suffering from paranoid delusions and had a violent, ongoing conflict with Emile Brodelle, one of Wright’s draftsmen. When Brodelle called Carlton “a black son of a bitch,” Carlton snapped and began his plan of murderous revenge.[13]  Brodelle was the target, but Borthwick and the others, including two of her children, were more likely innocent bystanders.  Horan’s version makes sensational melodrama, but she has done Borthwick and Wright as well as her readers a disservice.   In an interview Horan stated “I think fiction can get at some truths that strictly historical accounts cannot.”[14]  But in this instance the real historical account provided the truth, and her account, a lie.[15] 

           

            So what have we gained in the fifty years since Wright’s death?  We certainly have gained an immense celebrity in Frank Lloyd Wright. Architects now have a figure who is recognizable in pop culture, and that visibility may allow people to see the role of the architect as valuable in our culture and not merely that of an irrelevant egotist who ignores their clients while bankrupting them.  Just as media exposure to fashion designers via a cable show like Project Runway has made the fashion industry and its creators appear closer to everyday life and less an elitist mystery, so Wright’s popularity may help bridge the chasm between what architects do and the public’s perception of them.   We have also gained much visual pleasure in the sensuality of unlimited digital reproductions of Wright’s buildings; the images wed texture, color, and nature in ways rarely represented in conventional architecture, either modernist or traditional.  And let’s not forget: we can now accessorize our homes and our bodies with Wrightiana.

            But what have we lost in the euphoria of this last phase of Wright’s post-mortem career?  While there maybe nothing morally wrong with exploiting human tragedy to sell books, there has been a down side to the commercialization of Wright over the recent decades.  Wright has indeed become immensely familiar to the American public, but he has also become a reviled personality.   We have swung from the hagiography promoted by his widow and closest followers to iconoclasm.  His biographers constantly portray him as an egomaniac, selfish, and grandiose.  Ironically, these castigations are not only the instinct to knock a superior being off his pedestal, but they also follow the paradigm Wright himself set up in a self-created myth as arrogance personified.  He took pleasure in touting his arrogance, and the results were even self-destructive when he harshly criticized the very people who alone could hire him to fulfill his dreams.[16]

But why did Wright create a force field of arrogance around himself?  Bitterness and resentment often compromised the grace and dignity of the man. When, where, and why did this character flaw develop?  Did Wright always feel that he was neglected, regardless of publicity, that he was deprived of opportunity, that he was the only genius of modern architecture, even while competing with Le Corbusier, the other lion of the Modern Movement? What caused that huge chip on his shoulder? The answers reside in his psychological formation and in the mid-life crises that began in his early forties right in Oak Park. 

The product of a dysfunctional family, an insecure boy, over dependent on his mother, and miscast as having an artistic sensibility in the context of transplanted Welsh farmers and zealots, he emerged in the 1890s as a fresh local phenomenon on the Chicago architectural scene.  His regional reputation widened not only through his work but through his writings.  In both we sense ardor, ambition, and enthusiasm, but none of the anger that emerged later.   However, around 1905 his marriage was disintegrating as he had fallen in love with a client, and his work was becoming stale as he himself recounted in his Autobiography.[17] He and Mamah Borthwick Cheney deserted their families here in 1909 and fled to Europe where Wright prepared drawings for his Wasmuth folios, and Mamah became the translator of Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist.  They were discovered, and inevitable scandal followed with pain for all involved.  (The factual details of these episodes are found in my book, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lost Years.) When Wright and Mamah returned from Europe and moved to Taliesin in Spring Green, they vigorously presented themselves to the public as a pair, sanctioned by love, who sought honesty and not hypocrisy.  Wright viewed himself on a quest for individual integrity over conventional mores.  The couple collaborated on the translations of Ellen Key’s writings, as Wright’s architectural practice slowly began to resume. Relying on Key’s philosophy, they championed, in the full naive idealism of lovers, that marriage should be determined by love, that children were the hope of the future. They set themselves up as a model, but they were met with hostility and rejection from their neighbors and were vilified by the local press. This tension between idealistic effort and angry rejection provided the context in which the Taliesin murders took place. 

Public ridicule and the spurning of Wright and Mamah Borthwick upon their return scarred the man, and Mamah’s death in 1914 only imbedded the rejection more deeply into Wright’s psyche.   From this point forward Wright’s defensive arrogance emerged, and the rebuffs he would experience in the coming decades fueled it.  Now set, this behavioral pattern was reinforced by the woman who would become his third wife, Olgivanna Hinzenburg; she was twenty-six, he was fifty seven when they met in 1924.[18]

            So, if we ask what we have lost, we can say that in the first place we have settled for a superficial portrait and lost a more complex understanding of Wright the man.

            In the second place, all these pretty images of Wright’s buildings have so charmed us that we have lost the critical objectivity to ask why his dream failed. He claimed ardently that he wanted to create organic architecture as the optimal housing solution for the American middle class, but it has not succeeded. If his movement had been effective, then why would most Americans still live in track houses instead of Usonian homes? Why would the affluent still select McMansions or Tuscan Villas that come from the plan factories instead of Wrightian architecture?  And, more broadly, why is it that architects in this country design a miniscule proportion of what gets built?  In answering these questions we could learn a lot about how the public perceives architects, how the housing market operates, and the power of developers to control and dictate the forms of our cities.

In the third place, the frenzy of commercialism has deflected us from our grasping the essence of Wright’s goal: organic architecture .[19]  Instead of attempting to understand the complexities of his organicism, we have settled for simplistic notions: anything curved is organic, or anything that aspires to Nature or the natural environment is organic, or any roof with overhanging eaves is organic.  We have vague associations of organic architecture with the buzzword of “sustainability,” the next big thing in architecture, the rallying cry that replaced the outmoded term, ecology.  But we lack a deep understanding Wright’s philosophy and how it operated in practice.

            Wright’s concept of organic architecture was complex, and it evolved over time.  He used the term organic, as early as 1894 in an unpublished speech and developed it in the seminal statement of his theory, published in Architectural Record in 1908.[20] He further elaborated it in the same journal in 1914, noting: “By organic architecture I mean an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being as distinguished from one that is applied without.”[21]  In 1930 Wright pronounced  “The word [organic] applies to ‘living’ structure—a structure or concept wherein features or parts are so organized in form and substance as to be, applied to purpose, integral.”[22]  In 1953: “As originally used in architecture, organic means part-to-whole-as-whole-is-to-part.  So entity as integral is what [is] really meant by the word organic. INTRINSIC.”[23] In 1954:  “[I]t is in the nature of any organic building to grow from its site, [to] come out of the ground into the light—the ground itself held always as a component basic part of the building itself…A building dignified as a tree in the midst of nature.” 

            If organic architecture is ever to be more successful, we will have to examine and understand what lies behind these appealing sound bites. A detailed discussion of the meanings of organic architecture and Wright’s design process would require at least a whole lecture itself, but we can synthesize some of its core concepts: Wright did see a connection between architecture and Nature, not the copying of Nature, but the abstraction of its principles; and an organic architecture does respond to the specifics of its site, including orientation to the sun, winds, and weather, as well as the distinctive needs of clients. But Wright’s organicism was more than that: it required total design so that furnishings, furniture, architecture, and site were an integral whole. The vehicle of that integration was a pattern language that conventional thinking dismissed as ornament.  An organic architecture is an architecture of ornament: it is unified by motifs existing at different scales, just in the way a Bach fugue is united by the occurrence and variation of a few notes.  Organic ornament is not just surface treatment, but it animates the dynamics of space through what Wright called “plasticity” and “continuity.” Furthermore, an organic architecture is constantly informed by the evolution of materials and technology. 

            Ironically, while Wright made pronouncements about organic architecture, these statements were inadequate as a basis for generating form.  Wright dealt in generalities, allowing few to truly grasp how to put theory into practice.[24] He dazzled his young apprentices, but few could use this theory to generate original work. And despite his denials, like those of all modern architects, Wright’s organicism became an identifiable style that was easily copied. 

            Finally, in the frenzy of popularity and merchandizing of Frank Lloyd Wright, we have forgotten the idealism and purest motivations driving his work. Regardless of personal weakness or naïve idealism, Wright ardently believed in a social vision of architecture.  We can agree or disagree on the viability of that vision, but having that vision guided him.  It appears that these days we have lost the conviction that architecture can represent the best values of American democracy.  Does it even make sense anymore to talk about achieving an architecture of American democracy, an architecture that symbolically represents the greatest values of our culture: liberty, fairness, individual rights, respect for differences, and concern for others in the world?  Or are we too fragmented, too divisive, too multicultural, too vengeful, and too selfish to even consider that architecture should foster social responsibility?  Perhaps architecture has hit its stride and, without hypocrisy, happily accepts its role as a very powerful tool of marketing and branding, a purveyor of endless museums, boutique apartments, patterned ties, and calendars of colored drawings.[25]

            If the tone of much of what I have said rings in the nature of a Jeremiad, the biblical prophecy of doom, there is room for optimism.  The pendulum can swing from a focus on superficiality to a more substantive interest in Wright’s contributions to American culture.  The core concepts of his philosophy can inspire the future of architecture, yet if this is to happen, then we must understand not only his philosophy, but the design processes he used in creating organic form.  His methods can not only be deciphered, they can be applied to generate a creative new architecture.  In these challenging times we might even benefit from Wright at his most idealistic when he claimed: the individual’s quest for integrity is only the true hope of the future.