Sublimely Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright
by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Taschen, 2015, 504 pages, $130

Frank Lloyd Wright was famous. The murder at Taliesin in Wisconsin on August 15, 1914, of Mamah Cheney, her two children, a draftsman and three workmen by a crazed black servant who set the Wright residence on fire, captured national attention. Before this calamity, Wright had scandalised Chicago society when he abandoned his wife and ran off to Europe with Mamah, the free-thinking wife of a client.

Wright’s residential designs were a favourite of Hollywood, which did much to fix his architecture in the American imagination. His houses appeared in movies such as the 1959 romance A Summer Place, which used the Clinton Walker beach house at Carmel, California, as the setting for its final scene, where the lovers are finally reunited under its protective spreading copper roof beside the murmuring ocean.

Popular culture brought Wright to national attention, notably the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1947 novel The Fountainhead. Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, is a thinly disguised portrait of Wright, who emerges as a quintessentially American hero. Paul Simon’s 1970 song “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” is less a celebration of Wright than a concealed farewell to Art Garfunkel, who had studied to become an architect. In the tense final scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, filmed the year Wright died, in which Cary Grant on the outside of the overhanging clifftop residence looks inside at the conspirators, the inspiration from Wright is obvious.

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation archives in Arizona, joined Wright in the early 1950s. The Library of Congress listed 433 books on Wright in 2013—Pfeiffer alone contributed over forty. The most recent is Taschen’s massive folio edition with English, German and French texts.

There have been sumptuous large-format books on Wright before this, but what distinguishes Taschen is its comprehensiveness in what can only be described as the best authoritative account to date. Pfeiffer is a proven paragon of accuracy and probity. As the unimpeachable gatekeeper of the Taliesin archive, he is the one Wright authority who can be trusted to dispense with myth. Apart from the fascinating images of Wright, family photos and gatherings of the Fellowship, we get an extended visual record of his life besides the architecture, and a wealth of previously unpublished drawings by Wright.

Wright was seemingly unstoppable, despite the many personal setbacks. Aged ninety, he flew to Baghdad to prepare a plan for the city. Observing an island in the Tigris River as his plane approached, he met King Faisal II, who gave permission to site the new opera house there. Such was the force of Wright’s personality, he further persuaded the Development Board to commission him to design a museum, a grand bazaar, a casino, an art gallery and a university for Greater Baghdad on the adjacent peninsula. In 2003, President Bush declared, “Mission accomplished,” at the end of his destructive intervention in Iraq. Wright, by contrast, made his project a celebration of Baghdad’s glorious ancient history and culture. This is Wright at his best: what might easily have resulted in an unconvincing Western interpretation instead is elevated to a new transcendental level.

A year afterwards, Wright designed a house for the playwright Arthur Miller at Roxbury, Connecticut. Its two wings intersect with a large circular living room at its centre, with on one side a projection booth for showing Marilyn Monroe’s films on a screen near the fireplace cove. The form is a play of circles. Wright’s mother was obsessed by architecture, and to encourage her son she gave him a Froebel kindergarten construction kit, which helps to explain his lifelong fascination with geometry. The Miller house is pure Hollywood, a Baghdad in miniature, with its triangular swimming pool uniting the living room and card room/pavilion.

Wright encapsulated the American psyche as few others have done before or since, with the possible exception of Howard Hughes. Not only is he America’s greatest architect, his creative genius and extraordinary life personify American exceptionalism. Wright did not suffer from false modesty—he firmly believed in his genius and demanded his patrons’ and clients’ indulgence.

Such was Wright’s fame that in 1968, when I entered the US at Buffalo, all I had to say in response to the routine immigration query, “What is the purpose of your visit to the US?” was to answer, “To visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater”, to be waved through. Wright’s fame was not confined to the US; in 1911, Ernst Wasmuth published a two-volume portfolio of his work that introduced him to German and Dutch admirers.

Wright had little impact on Australian architecture before the Second World War. In 1912, his office manager, Walter Burley Griffin, won the international design competition for Canberra, which early on subjected it to ideas stemming from the Chicago School, if not directly from Wright.

Before Wright, American architects had overwhelmingly followed Europe’s lead, with the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris setting standards of excellence and taste. This was especially the true on the East Coast, which was most exposed to European influences, and to a lesser degree, on the West Coast, where Asian influences came into play, especially from Japan. Wright was from Wisconsin, the American heartland, where he was effectively insulated by geography.

Isolation, an enforced separation from external influences, can be productive inasmuch as it functions as an incubator of native feeling. Chicago was the leading commercial capital of the Mid-West, distant from the East and the West coasts. It was Chicago that birthed that most typical of American architectural innovations, the skyscraper. Wright established himself in Oak Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, where a mood of self-reliant individualism prevailed. Ernest Hemingway, who grew up in Oak Park, exhibits similar American attributes.

Wright’s prairie houses, with their open plans and extended horizontal cantilevered roofs, express the flatness and horizontal immensity of the prairie landscape. They were the first of their kind and owed little to European models, whilst they are rooted in the classic American values of individuality of the nineteenth-century transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Wright is their architectural counterpart. His 1932 scheme for a dispersed living city model, Broadacre, manifests the same rural democratic tradition going back to Jefferson.

Whereas European culture after the Renaissance is centred on man, the transcendentalists shifted their emphasis away and enlarged their vision to include nature as an informing counterpoint to man: nature is viewed as a window, opening up vast new horizons for human endeavour that release new energies and potentialities. The New World is filled with possibilities and is less constrained by history. Coming from the Mid-West, Wright was received as truly American, more authentically so than the Eastern acolytes and followers of European fashion. For the first time American architecture could be acclaimed as expressive of the real America. The country saw itself validated by Wright as truly exceptional, defiantly original and new.

Wright self-consciously offered something different, which he termed organic architecture in opposition to classical. He was never able to tie down a precise definition, instead relying on metaphor and vague, if colourful, comparisons, describing organic architecture as a “ten-finger grasp of reality”. He would frequently resort to hand gestures to indicate his meaning, words seemingly proving inadequate to convey such profound thought. His architecture was grounded in nature, in the ingenious solutions thrown up by evolution, as opposed to le Corbusier’s reliance on the machine analogy in the move to replace handcraft by an industrial architecture produced in factories.

To understand Wright’s importance, we need to see how he changed architecture and its assumptions, not solely in America, but beyond in Europe. Western architecture unfolded as a series of interrupted, sometimes abrupt, stylistic jumps that can be traced back to ancient Greece and even farther. Architecture was an elaborate symbolic system founded on classical order, at least till the Gothic, which arose around Paris in opposition to the classicism of the Mediterranean world. Wright changed this dual polarity of Western custom by shifting the focus to nature. While not denying the centrality of the human, the emphasis now moved to mankind’s relationship with nature, represented by the immediate landscape. Wright was anti-city and viewed the city as anti-democratic and evil.

Fallingwater, the house he designed in Pennsylvania in 1935, is in all the standard histories of Western art from Helen Gardner on. Her chapter “Twentieth-Century Art”, opens with the classic Hedrich-Blessing image of projecting balconies that echo the horizontal rock formation of the waterfall in the foreground. Wright’s 1935 masterpiece warrants such prominence in art history because it is indicative of a significant realignment in Western consciousness and heightened awareness of landscape, a corollary of our recent recognition resulting from climate change, reminding us that humans, as the dominant species on earth, are not separate from or above nature.

There is a widely shared tendency to regard the American Mid-West as dull and agricultural. Most attention centres on the big cities on the East and West coasts—the Mid-West is the boring part in between. Wright resisted this perception—for him, the prairie represented the true America, while the East Coast and New York were false pastiches of Europe, shallow imitations that were anything but the real America. His apparent xenophobia is more superficial than real: he borrowed widely from Japanese sources, especially their tradition of woodblock prints, and later in the 1930s, with the arrival of such European rivals as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, he deployed modern concrete technology to masterly effect.

America has a diverse range of landscapes ranging from the spreading prairie to the prickly Arizona desert outside Scottsdale, the Los Angles canyon country, and the richly romantic landscape of Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands. Even when dealing with such unfamiliar settings as the Grand Canal in Venice, or Baghdad, Wright is wonderfully evocative. He never seems to lose touch with landscape. Nature never ceases to inspire him, and for that reason alone his architecture contains at its core a strong underlying validity. Like landscape itself, Wright’s architecture often surprises us and challenges convention.

Wright’s forebears were Welsh—his Spring Green and Scottsdale residences are named after the sixth-century Welsh bard Taliesin. His maternal grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones, was a commanding preacher who fled Wales when accused of heresy. This explains Wright’s contempt for convention and his rebellious independence. The Welsh were a difficult people to subdue, as Edward I’s chain of magnificent castles from Harlech to Conway testifies.

Wright’s impact on Australian architecture in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in Sydney, was considerable. It is interesting to see how outsiders interpreted Australia from a distance and the formal motifs they employed in coming to grips with our landscapes. Typically, we are seen as having an affinity with Mayan and Greek architecture: Griffin’s concept for our national capital adopted mountain foci to frame the city geometry, with the parliamentary triangle set out as a series of stepped monumental Mayan terraces. Utzon, in his 1956 Opera House competition entry, is far more explicit: on Bennelong Point, the two roof shells of the main halls float weightless above a rising terrain of Mayan platforms and monumental staircases.

The effort to redeploy Wright in Australia in large measure misunderstood the highly specific nature of his response to landscape. His forms do not suit Sydney’s North Shore; attempts to repeat Wright’s architectural mannerisms were at best misguided. North Sydney, with its indigenous dry-woodland flora and rugged sandstone topography, is anything but Oak Park. Wright’s Australian imitators—Peter Muller, Bruce Rickard, Neville Gruzman and others—failed to acknowledge the difference. They were too involved, too focused, on finding a way through to forms keyed to the landscape and they saw Wright as somehow pointing in the right direction.

Had Wright visited Australia, and been asked to design for Sydney landscapes, his treatment, one supposes, would be as different from his Oak Park residential designs as was his work for Los Angeles and Arizona. Australian architects have long been trapped in a process of iterating fashionable European or English styles. Wright offered something different, a lesson in how to inflect architecture so it expresses place, thereby ensuring it was not out of place, but belongs, and is in keeping with the genius of landscape.

In Landscape and Character, Lawrence Durrell points to the crucial influence of landscape on culture: “But as you get to know Europe slowly, tasting the wines, cheeses and characters of the different countries, you begin to realize that the important determinant of any culture is, after all—the spirit of place.”

Perhaps because Australia is a country composed chiefly of migrants, newcomers settling in, the unmistakable signature of place is largely absent. Architecture, which should be one of place’s highest registers, manifests that failure. Simple-minded copying of a great master of landscape like Wright was no solution; at best, he offers the promise of a beginning.

Walter Burley Griffin, his former office manager, won the international competition for the design of Canberra in 1911, supported by perspectives executed by Marion Mahony, Wright’s favourite renderer. The most notable feature of Griffin’s plan for Canberra is the way that it deferred to the surrounding landscape; its geometrical framework derives from the topography in a manner few cities do. What developed later, like the later withdrawal of Utzon from the Opera House, left the capital in the hands of mediocrities. It would be a considerable time, not till Glenn Murcutt in the late 1970s, before architecture achieved a genuine, deeply felt response to nature that, in every respect, differed enormously from these earlier neo-Wrightian formulations.

This Taschen volume is a magnificent introduction, magisterial in scope and filled with treasures. The quality and range of its illustrative content make it easily the best book to start with on Wright.