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THE WRIGHT STYLE 

CARLA LIND     Archetype Press     Simon & Schuster 
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Introduction 

Frank Lloyd Wright was America's very own architect. He was a product of the country's 
pioneer, can-do spirit who revolutionized the way Americans thought about their 
buildings and towns. Drawing inspiration from his native midwestern prairie, he coaxed 
Americans out of their boxlike houses and into wide-open living spaces that suited the 
American lifestyle. He rejected the classical designs borrowed from other worlds that so 
dominated the architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead, he 
gave America a blueprint for its own architecture, one based on simplicity and the lessons 
of nature. He called it organic architecture. 

His career spanned seven decades and two centuries. From 1885 until his death in 1959, 
he received more than a thousand commissions, nearly half of which resulted in completed 
structures. Six out of every seven of these still stand. Wright remains the most prolific 
architect America has ever known. His buildings are scattered from coast to coast, in 
thirty-six states and three foreign countries. Nestled into woods, projecting from 
mountaintops, stretched over suburban acres, sculpted from hillsides, defining city blocks, 
or blending with the desert floor, nearly every building is a unique response to the client 
and the site for which it was designed. Equally diverse are their functions. The versatility 
of Wright's talent resulted in masterpieces for living, working, worshipping, learning, 
performing, and even a plan for an entire city. Their beauty stems from the essence, the 
very nature, of each individual project. The architecture was not imposed on the building's 
purpose but was a response to it. 

Wright's greatest contribution was his fresh look at residential architecture, the focus of 
this book. Throughout his career, he was obsessed with defining the perfect living space 
for contemporary life. In fact, an overwhelming majority of his commissions-eighty 
percent of his more than four hundred surviving buildings-are residences or their 
outbuildings. He carefully studied society, its innovations, its absurdities, and its 
relationship with the natural world. He saw an America that was informal, independent, 
asymmetrical. Yet it was housed in confined, formal, symmetrical boxes that were adorned 
with elements drawn from European history. He sought to give America its own 
architectural identity that fit its people, landscapes, and technologies. And what an impact 
he had. 

Wright's ideas have so permeated our architectural world that we have lost track of the 
source. His open floor plans led to family rooms, kitchens open to living areas, indoor 
spaces open to outdoor living spaces, garden rooms, decks, and carports. His use of glass 
opened window walls and brought generous amounts of light and inspiring vistas into 
rooms. He altered America's collective subconscious. By bringing together many elements 
and inspirations, most neither new nor original, he was able to synthesize fresh new forms 
that reflected the character of the nation. 

His productivity appears even greater when each commission is analyzed. Every one of the 
more than three hundred residences he designed was a complex composition of numerous 
interrelated elements. He created not merely the shell of a building but its decorative arts 
as well. The art glass windows and skylights, furniture, light fixtures, textiles, carpets, 
fireplace andirons, wall murals, wall finishes, any integral ornament, and landscaping all 
were part of the unified design he envisioned for a client. This approach resulted in 
thousands of individual designs. Fortunately, he was always surrounded by devoted 
apprentices and artisans who could interpret and execute his design ideology in its many 
manifestations. Although he tried, it was humanly impossible for one person to follow 
through on each detail of every job. By necessity, his apprentices became 
ambassadors-extra hands-enabling Wright's genius to have an even deeper and broader 
impact. 

Wright's need to communicate his revolutionary vision was insatiable. But so is the 
public's hunger for his ideas. Those who came in contact with him, whether in an 
audience, on a street, or in his office, were left with an indelible memory that they would 
speak of for years to come. Periodic surveys still rate him as America's greatest architect, 
despite the fact that he has been dead for more than thirty years. 

His words, as well as the beauty of his designs, have gradually sensitized more and more 
American families so that when they look for a home or discuss plans with an architect, 
they have the courage to express what they want and need, expecting a sensitive, 
meaningful response. He brought architecture to the people. Wright made us feel that good 
residential architecture was within our reach. 


The Wright Style 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S ARCHITECTURE WAS ROOTED IN NATURE; HE 
CALLED IT ORGANIC. AT THE HEART OF HIS WORK WAS SIMPLICITY, 
HARMONY, UNITY, AND INTEGRITY. HE TOSSED OUT OUR BOXLIKE SPACES, 
FOREVER CHANGING THE IDEA OF WHAT A HOUSE COULD BE. 


ORIGINS 

There is a certain irony in talking about a "Wright style," because the uniformity this term 
implies probably would be viewed negatively by Wright himself. To Wright, the inherent 
differences in each building, designed to fit the needs of each client and the attributes of 
each site, defied grouping it into a category. The only "style" involved was how well a 
building was designed to serve its own purpose. Wright suggested that "as humanity 
develops, there will be less recourse to the 'styles' and more style . . . that quality in each 
that was once painfully achieved by the whole." His own work clearly reflected this 
attitude. Each Wright-designed structure was unique and vital. That was his style. Yet 
there is an undeniable commonality about the vast number of designs that burst forth from 
this artistic genius. 

Frank Lloyd Wright's creations were based on a life philosophy that was undeniably rooted 
in his childhood. Further shaped by his life experiences, his designs developed distinct 
attributes that, when repeated, pushed some of his buildings helplessly into substyles such 
as Prairie (1901-1913), textile block (1917-1924), and Usonian (1936-1959), terms 
used by Wright himself. While useful, these terms do not do justice to the individuality of 
each building, and they do not describe many of his designs that cannot be neatly labeled. 
Like any great artist, his work has been grouped into periods to denote shifts in his 
personal and professional direction. Such categories, like his buildings, are not boxes; 
instead, they are open and informal shelters. Wright called the totality of his work organic 
architecture. This concept provides the breadth and flexibility required to define Wright's 
style as he and his followers have practiced it for the past century. It is far more enduring 
than the term "style" implies. 

To Wright, standardization was useful but should not limit the architect's vision. In fact, 
his fascination with technology and his desire to bring good design into the homes of 
average Americans led to several production-line projects, for prefabricated houses, 
glassware, fabrics, wallpapers, and furniture. By agreeing to design lines of interior 
furnishings, he was certainly selling his "style," because for the most part they would not 
be used in buildings he designed. 

Many fibers in Wright's life were woven together to create a unified, ideological tapestry 
just as all of the elements in his buildings were combined and interrelated to yield a 
complete composition for living. Wright acknowledged that some of the fibers contributed 
more to the ultimate fabric than others. 


UNITY 

The origins of Frank Lloyd Wright's aesthetic sensitivity can be traced to his youth. His 
mother, Anna Lloyd Wright, the child of tough, Unitarian, Welsh farmers, introduced her 
son to many of the experiences that shaped his life. Anna Lloyd-Jones was raised in the 
Wisconsin River Valley near Spring Green, Wisconsin, and she loved the earth. Wright 
described her as being "in league with the stones of the field." Anna had a vision for her 
son-that he would become a great architect. Thus, his early education, at home and at 
school, was directed toward this goal. She provided a simple but stimulating environment 
for his learning. Her maternal influence was augmented by the dominating Lloyd-Jones 
family. Wright frequently visited the Wisconsin farms of his uncles and learned firsthand 
about hard work, simplicity, and self-confidence. 

The concept of unity was a compelling early lesson. So intrinsic was it to the Unitarianism 
of his family that it must have played an indelible role in creating his world view. As he 
recalled in his autobiography, "Unity was their watchword, the sign and symbol that 
thrilled them, the Unity of all things!" Wright's grandfather, father, and uncles were 
powerful preachers who pounded the concepts of their faith into the depths of the soul of 
the child. Unity-a oneness with the world, with God, with all forms of life. Truth, truth 
above all, truth against the world, the beauty of truth. This refrain also echoed in Wright's 
young world. How could these concepts be forgotten as he forged his own philosophy? 
They could not. They became its foundation. 


MUSIC 

Wright's father made a lasting impact on the architect's aesthetics, although some 
historians have considered him, unlike Wright's mother, an insignificant and somewhat 
temporary influence. Like the Lloyd-Jones family, William Russell Cary Wright also was 
a Unitarian, a minister as well as a lawyer and musician . From him, Wright discovered 
his passion for Baroque music. As a child, he would lay awake listening to his father 
playing Beethoven on the piano. The interplay of the notes, the minor themes and major 
themes, the harmony, the building, the movement from general to particulars, all deeply 
affected the way he viewed his world. Music did not merely entertain him but also 
enriched his life in many ways. It provided an analogous system that he could use to help 
translate his ideas into another art form, architecture. In his autobiography, Wright 
described the commonalities between an architect and a musician: "the striving for entity, 
oneness in diversity, depth in design, repose in the final expression of the whole. I am 
going to a delightful inspiring school when I listen to Beethoven's music." 

In a special edition of House Beautiful magazine published in 1955, Wright, then 
eighty-eight, wrote:  What I call integral ornament is founded upon the same organic 
simplicities as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, that amazing revolution in tumult and 
splendor of sound built upon four tones, based upon a rhythm a child could play on the 
piano with one finger. Supreme imagination reared the four repeated tones, simple 
rhythms, into a great symphonic poem that is probably the noblest thought-built edifice 
in our world. And architecture is like music in this capacity for the symphony.  To Wright, 
both music and architecture were sublimated mathematics. He credited his father with 
making the comparison by referring to a symphony as an "edifice of sound." 


NATURE 

Nature, above all else, was Wright's most inspirational force. He advised his students to 
"study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you." His childhood 
experiences on the family homesteads in the rugged, driftless area of southwestern 
Wisconsin put him in touch with the rhythms, patterns, colors, and systems of nature. The 
simple concept of the interdependence of all living things was absorbed at an early age. 
Nature was synonymous with God to Wright, and it was his greatest teacher. Through his 
mother, Wright also learned to appreciate the work of the naturalist writers of the time: 
Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, Blake, and Thoreau. Their writings encouraged him to find 
wisdom in the natural world. 

In 1953, in one of his Sunday morning spontaneous talks to his students, Wright advised 
them:  The place for an architect to study construction first of all, before he gets into the 
theory of the various formulas that exist in connection with steel beams, girders, and 
reinforced concrete, is the study of Nature . In Nature you will find everything 
exemplified, from the blade of grass to the tree, from the tree to the geological formations 
to the procession of the eras beginning with the first from the sea downwards. . . .  That 
doesn't mean you are to go out and just look at the hills and the ways the animals conduct 
themselves. . . . The study of Nature, Nature with a capital N, Nature, inner Nature, Nature 
of the hand, of this apparatus, of this glass. The truth concerning all those things is 
architectural study. 

He did not suggest copying nature but, instead, allowing it to be an inspiration, 
understanding the fundamental principles and elements-its essence. The visual delights 
that nature provides became a part of his designs as well. The sympathetic relationship 
between site and building, the easy transitions from the inside to the outside, the gardens 
and planters all illustrate a respect for the natural world that is compelling. It is difficult to 
visit one of Wright's buildings and not interact, in a memorable way, with its setting. He 
built homes around trees, rather than remove them. He used the sun's power to help warm 
the rooms and provide an ever-changing pattern of light and shadow. He framed views, 
both nearby and distant. He borrowed nature's devices to provide repose using the line of 
the horizon, to extend reach using the cantilever like a branch, to create protective shelter 
like a natural cave. The interplay of people, building, and site was harmonious and 
masterful. 


GEOMETRY 

As a result of Anna Lloyd Wright's continuous search for educational techniques that 
would encourage young Frank's creative skills, she discovered the Froebel blocks. These 
teaching tools for Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten education program introduced Wright 
to geometry, spatial relationships, and systems in a fundamental way. The program's basic 
theme was that child's play could be gently guided, using specific techniques, toward a 
greater appreciation for the elements and laws of nature. The tools were simple, pure 
shapes, unlike the gaudy, frivolous toys of the period. 

It is from the Froebel "gifts," as they were called, that he learned the basic forms of 
nature-geometric forms-in two and three dimensions. First, he worked with colored 
yarn shapes, then smooth maple blocks in cubes, spheres, and triangles, then colorful 
cardboard shapes made into patterns on a tabletop grid. Each exercise was a new problem 
that challenged the budding designer. As a child, he spent hours with these gifts, later 
attributing to them a formative and lasting influence on his architecture. Their impact was 
apparent in every building Wright ever designed. 

From nature and elemental geometry grew Wright's ability to abstract natural 
forms-reducing a flower or leaf to pure geometric shapes. This pattern could then be 
manipulated in various combinations into a new composition. These geometric exercises 
became the sources of floor plans, elevations, and decorative arts, each element generated 
from the same design theme. Once converted into three-dimensional forms, the elements 
would all work together in harmony like the natural shapes that were their source. Each 
building was given its own lexicon of forms, a language then used throughout the design. 
The art glass related to the furniture, which related to the moldings, which related to the 
floor plan, which related to the site plan. They became inextricably linked through 
geometry. 

Abstracted natural motifs were used for art glass window designs in the early houses. 
Sometimes, a specific plant was selected, such as the tulip in the 1895 playroom of his own 
home in Oak Park or the sumac in the Dana-Thomas house of 1904. But in other 
commissions, such as the May house of 1908 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a more generic 
plant form appears to be the source. 

A thematic, geometric design was cast into the concrete blocks that Wright first introduced 
in California about 1920. In the Freeman house alone are fifty-two versions of the block 
design, which apparently is based on an abstraction of the site plan with a grove of 
eucalyptus. The variations of this basic design were repeated over and over and when 
massed into walls create a pattern and rhythm of their own. 

In 1936 Wright designed his first Usonian house, a word he used to describe buildings 
uniquely suitable for life in the United States. In these houses, the abstractions are even 
clearer than in his early Prairie Style designs. Each home was based on a geometric grid 
used both in plan and in elevation. The two-by-four-foot rectangular module of the 
first Jacobs residence in Madison, Wisconsin, was drawn on the architectural plans as well 
as scored into the concrete floor. The module, or unit of design, selected for a particular 
building would twist and turn and be repeated over and over in the floor plan and 
elevations. Squares, hexagons, circles, parallelograms, and triangles also were used at 
different times as the basis for building designs. 


LOUIS SULLIVAN 

Wright moved to Chicago from his native Wisconsin in 1887, leaving the University of 
Wisconsin after only two semesters. He first apprenticed with Joseph Lyman Silsbee, who 
was actively introducing the Shingle Style to the Midwest. Within a year, Wright began 
his tenure at the side of Louis Sullivan, whom he would thereafter refer to as his lieber 
Meister (beloved master). Sullivan also inspired Wright to look at nature's rhythms and 
processes and to create architecture that related to contemporary life. Sullivan, the 
philosophical father of what became known as the Prairie School, provided the rhetoric 
that called for an American architecture that was not bound by tradition. More practically, 
he taught Wright about ornament. Rather than applied, he believed, it should be integral to 
the building itself. Wright learned from Sullivan that the elements of a building could 
provide all of the ornamentation that was needed. Again the refrain that governed Wright's 
work-simplicity, unity, nature. 


JAPANESE DESIGN 

Wright also was profoundly influenced by Japanese design. His first exposure was the 
imperial Japanese exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. 
Known as the Ho-ho-den, its fluid spaces were covered by a broad, sheltering roof, with 
generous overhanging eaves. Light poured in from all sides. The walls moved, opening up 
spaces, releasing the box. This experience provided more data for Wright's creative mind 
to devour and synthesize. 

The simplicity of Japanese design also revealed itself in Japanese wood-block prints, 
which combined his love of nature and the pureness of geometry. His fascination with 
them began as a young man. When he and his first wife, Catherine, visited Japan for the 
first time in 1905, he was able to study Japanese architecture and roam the back alleys in 
search of prints. At various times in his life, his impressive collection of Japanese art was 
sold to pay debts, and at other periods it grew to include screens, kimonos, ceramics, and 
textiles. But the print remained as a symbol of simplicity and elimination of all that was 
unnecessary. This quality provided such a pivotal impact on his design aesthetic that he 
published his first book, The Japanese Print, on the subject in 1910. 


ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

Through years of careful, intuitive observation, study, and experimentation, Wright was 
able to translate his unique concept of architecture into a total design ideology that he 
called organic architecture. He welcomed opportunities to articulate this ideology in 
lectures and publications throughout his life. Perhaps the act of organizing his thoughts 
and communicating them so frequently helped instill them so securely in his own behavior 
that the architectural consistency was sure to follow-it may have been the synthesizing 
process that pulled it all together. His work embodied his ideals. He truly created a new 
architectural language. 

In 1894, at age twenty-seven, he is thought to have conceived a famous essay, "In the 
Cause of Architecture," that was ultimately published in The Architectural Record in 
1908. In the essay, he set forth propositions that established an enduring grammar for his 
work and that of his followers. Here is a summary of this advice, which included some 
very specific suggestions:-"Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true 
value of any work of art." Limit the number of rooms and spaces to only what is needed. 
Openings should be seen as part of the structure. Eliminate unnecessary detail and 
ornament (for example, use a piece of wood without an extra molding, a plain wooden slat 
rather than a turned baluster, plain fabrics and floor coverings). Build in unsightly 
appliances and equipment. Use pictures only as part of an overall scheme. Build in as 
much furniture as possible. Consider the whole as an integral unit. Use simple unbroken 
wall surfaces from the water table to the roof (or the frieze below the roof).  -Each home 
should express the owners' individuality and be unique.  -A building should appear to 
grow easily from its site. Design gently sloping roofs (low-pitch hipped, unbroken; low 
with pediments on long ridges; or a simple slab). Keep proportions low. Use suppressed 
heavy chimneys. Build sheltering overhangs. Include low terraces. Construct garden walls 
that reach out.  -Use natural colors. "Go to the woods and fields for color schemes." 
Choose warm, soft tones of earth and autumn. Do not select pessimistic blues, purples, or 
cool colors of the "ribbon counter."-Bring out the nature of materials. Use natural wood 
finishes. Show the natural texture of plaster with stain applied to it. Reveal the friendly 
and beautiful nature of all materials.  -Put the machine to work to serve civilization. 
Maximize its usefulness (for example, use furniture with clean-cut, straight-line forms).  
-Eliminate the boxlike compartments we live in. Open up the spaces.  -Group windows 
in a rhythmic way. Use casement windows, not double-hung, guillotine-style windows.  
-Create floor plans in an axial and balanced order. Conceive room designs in three 
dimensions.  -Provide a place for natural foliage or flowers. Use urns, planters, garden 
walls.  -Use ornamentation that is of the building. Ornament is "constitutional" and 
begins with the building's conception. Create art glass windows with straight-line 
patterns that suit the characteristics of the glass and metal components.  -Determine one 
form for a particular building and adhere to that motif throughout the building, designing 
every detail of the whole.  -As it grows older, a house with character will grow more 
valuable than one that is merely in "fashion."-Above all, strive for integrity. 

These concepts were the fundamentals of Wright's style. Certainly, they were the marks of 
his Prairie Style houses, designed from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-teens. 
For six decades, Wright articulated these same principles in varying ways, but he never 
deviated from them. In May 1952 he defined the terms of organic architecture for 
Architectural Record once again. He reiterated his principles, but this time the specifics 
related more to his Usonian houses than to their Prairie Style predecessors.  Organic 
architecture was definitely a new sense of shelter for humane life. Shelter, broad and low. 
Roofs, either flat or pitched, hipped or gabled, but always comprehensive Shelter. Wide 
flat eaves were sometimes perforated to let trellised light through upon characteristic 
ranges of windows below. Ornament was nonexistent unless integral. Walls became 
screens, often glass screens, and the new open-plan spread space upon a concrete ground 
mat: the whole structure intimate and wide upon and of the ground itself. This 
ground-mat floor eventually contained the gravity-heating system (heat rises naturally 
as water falls) of the spaces to be lived in: forced circulation of hot water in pipes 
embedded in a broken stone bed beneath the floor slabs (soon misnamed "radiant heat"). 
Other new techniques, new forms adapted to our inevitable machine-methods appeared 
in these new structures. The economics of continuity and cantilevered structure were 
realized. Even the walls played a new role or disappeared altogether. A new sense of space 
in appropriate human scale pervaded not only the structure but the life itself lived in it was 
broadened, made more free because of sympathetic freedom of plan and structure. The 
interior space to be lived in became the reality of the whole performance. Building as a 
box, was gone. The integral character of the third dimension was born to architecture. 

How did Wright's philosophy translate into actual buildings? What are the unique 
attributes that have become so identified with him? The following sections provide an 
overview of the elements that define his work. At the root of each was simplicity, and from 
simplicity came the harmony, unity, and integrity that we today identify as Wright's own 
style. 


THE SITE 

A Wright building and its site are wedded-one cannot be considered without the other. 
The most committed marriage of house to site is Fallingwater near Mill Run, 
Pennsylvania; cantilevered over a waterfall, the house is one with the rocky terrain. 
Similarly, the topography, the flora and fauna, and the other natural attributes of a location 
as well as the characteristics of the region influenced the appearance of Wright's other 
buildings. Houses built on the prairie, for example, reflected the whole area's horizontality, 
not just aspects of the specific site. In Wright's opinion, the horizontal line was the line of 
repose, tranquillity, and domesticity. Each building, he proclaimed, should be of the earth, 
not perched on it. 


SPACE 

"The room within is the great fact about the building," wrote Wright in 1928. This space, 
the reason for the building itself, dictates the exterior shape. To Wright, spaces were 
meant to be fluid, free flowing, and informal like the American lifestyle. In Wright houses, 
living spaces tend to blend together. Closed rooms are limited to bathrooms and bedrooms. 
He beckoned Americans to break out of their boxes, reach outside-visually, through 
window walls, and actually, using terraces, porches, and sensitive site planning. He also 
used space as a technique for controlling experiences within a building. Entrances and 
rooms were often narrow and confining so that the space at the end would feel more 
expansive. Confine-and-release proved an effective exercise in contrasts, one that 
provokes a subliminal awe in those who experience Wright's spaces firsthand. 


SCALE 

The logical source of scale in his residences was, of course, the humans who inhabited 
them. More often than not, however, the scale he used was his own, five feet, eight inches. 
The structure's proposed use and building materials also contributed to the scale chosen, 
but once a unit of measure was determined it became the standard for the entire building 
and from it grew the proportions. Doorways and ceiling heights were brought down to a 
more human scale, creating a feeling of comfort and oneness with the architecture. 


MATERIALS 

Natural materials in their natural condition and place provided inspiration for Wright's 
buildings. To be most effective, the number of materials was limited. Once again, 
simplicity. One material was always primary, while others were merely supplementary. 
Exterior and interior materials were often the same, just as the exterior was an expression 
of the interior space. Wright explored the very essence and capabilities of each type of 
building material so it could be most expressive in his final design. The texture inherent in 
the dominant material provided a "feeling," an identity. The context of a building certainly 
played an important role in what was chosen. City and suburban dwellings were more 
likely to be built of even, level, brick; asymmetrical stone was more appropriate for the 
countryside.  

Stone. Of all the materials Wright used, he probably spoke about stone the most. He had 
great appreciation for this ancient building material and built Taliesin, his own home in 
Spring Green, Wisconsin, from native limestone carried from a nearby quarry and Taliesin 
West from the boulders found on the Arizona desert floor. 

He looked to the quarry itself for guidance on how to lay up stone. "The rock ledges of a 
stone-quarry are a story and a longing to me. There is a suggestion in the strata and 
character in the formations," he wrote in 1928. A local stonemason who worked for 
Wright at Taliesin for fourteen years stated it in a different way: "Frank liked that 
stick-out stuff," he said, referring to the alternate layers of projecting stones with barely 
visible mortar that mimicked the quarry strata. For nearly fifty years, Wright continued to 
shape, mold, expand, and define Taliesin using stone. The apprentices who studied with 
him learned about its properties by building walls there. Local indigenous stone was 
specified for numerous commissions in different areas of the country. The results were 
houses clearly in sympathy with their setting.    

Brick. Brick in a variety of colors, finishes, and dimensions was specified throughout 
Wright's career and was not limited to use as an exterior building material. He saw no 
need to hide what many regarded as too crude a material for the living room. He not only 
left it exposed inside but liberally used it to define the central core of his buildings. 
Whether he used brick of standard proportions or the flatter, Roman style, Wright often 
accented the horizontality of a building by requesting custom tooling and coloring of the 
mortar. Vertical joints were cut flush with the brick face and colored to match the brick, 
but horizontal joints were deeply raked to create a long shadow. A massive masonry 
chimney stood at the core of the majority of his residences and served as a the focal point 
for family life as well as the design itself.  

Wood. Before advances in steel fabrication technology, Wright depended primarily on 
wood as his principal structural element. Those currently restoring his early homes are 
amazed at the confidence he had in the material. Its properties were certainly stretched as 
his bold new designs sometimes outpaced technology. But machine technologies were put 
to use to cut costs and enhance the qualities of wood. Using veneers helped reduce the 
ecological impact on forests and saved money. 

For interiors, Wright favored certain woods during different periods of his career, but they 
were always used with great respect for their inherent beauty. He abhorred covering the 
intricate, luscious patterns of wood grain with paint or concealing its linear power with 
curvaceous turning or scrollwork. Stains and shellacs were sometimes used to enhance the 
color of the wood, and waxes and oils were preferred over varnishes. In the early years, 
oak, particularly quartersawn, was dominant, although he also used other woods such as 
birch, walnut, and maple. Later, cypress and Philippine mahogany were used extensively. 
A few of the early residences and numerous Usonian houses used broad boards and 
battens, often of cypress, as the principal building material both inside and out. The 
introduction of plywood offered new possibilities, because it, too, was inexpensive, 
durable, and flexible. 

Simple bands of wood trim, sometimes called marking strips, inside and out defined 
surface planes and led the eye. This technique accented the horizontality and fluidity of the 
open spaces Wright created, which in turn helped relate a building's scale to the 
inhabitants. 

Plaster. Plaster finishes typically had a sand float and were sometimes stained or colored, 
rather than painted. Wright also used special painting techniques called stippling and 
scumbling to further enhance wall textures; these somewhat mottled finishes tended to 
dissolve the solidity of the wall, giving the illusion of more openness. Additionally, he cast 
plaster in molds with elaborate Sullivanesque patterns and integrated these panels into 
several of his early buildings, designs that frequently were mistaken for terra cotta. The 
stork panels outside his own studio in Oak Park, Illinois, and the roofline friezes on homes 
such as the Winslow, Dana, Heller, and Husser houses in Illinois were some of his 
significant decorative elements. 

Stucco. This durable, inexpensive building material was repeatedly used during the Prairie 
Style period. While it was most often seen in Wright's designs for affordable housing such 
as the "Fireproof House for $5,000" of 1906 and the Richards American System Built 
Homes of 1916, it was employed also in numerous larger commissions, such as the 
William Martin and Fricke houses in Oak Park. 

Concrete. Once again, Wright looked at a lowly construction material, studied its 
properties, and made it beautiful. Lacking the inherent beauty of other materials, concrete 
was redeemed by its plasticity. It was poured into monolithic walls and cantilevered 
terraces. It was molded into tactile blocks. It was combined with steel to create a solid 
fabric. It was mixed with fine sand and large rocks to create natural panels. It was colored. 
It was poured as a floor, covering radiant heating systems. It was used as a roof. Wright 
shaped it and stretched it in countless ways in his buildings for more than fifty years. 

Copper. The decorative potential of copper, previously viewed primarily as a durable sheet 
metal, included color (from blue-green to bronze) and an inherent plasticity. Beginning 
with the horizontal stretch of the eaves, Wright wrapped this ancient material around other 
features, particularly near window expanses. Its liberal use in the Coonley house in 
Riverside, Illinois, and May house in Grand Rapids, Michigan, emphasized certain motifs 
and added richness to the overall designs. Pleated copper roofs were specified on several 
commissions, but they were not always built because of the cost and availability. 

Glass. Advances in glass technology, more than any other innovation, permitted Wright to 
break open the box. A foil for the texture and weight of other building materials, glass 
served to lighten Wright's designs. It enabled him to balance solid screens with light 
screens so that the building would no longer have to be confining. In the Prairie Style 
years, his intricate, geometric art glass designs repeated building colors and patterns and 
provided a privacy screen for the family within. The different facets of the glass reflected 
light in such a way that window coverings were unnecessary in the daytime. He discovered 
that when mitered at a corner, glass actually dissolved the intersection. When butted into a 
stone wall, glass served as protection from the weather while accenting the strength and 
texture of the stone. Used generously, glass allowed Wright to integrate inside and outside 
spaces, blurring the distinction between them. 


COLOR 

Wright selectively drew his color schemes from nature, leaning more towards the colors of 
autumn in the Midwest. The inherent colors of the building materials certainly dominated 
and set the tone for all of his decorative schemes. The warm tans and browns of the brick, 
stone, and wood usually were combined with varying shades of their component hues, 
from red to yellow-green, producing an analogous color scheme. Most often they ranged 
from a warm reddish gold to a muted yellow-green. Creams, beiges, warm grays, and 
browns were suitable additions. The colors were relatively intense but toned down enough 
not to be harsh. The appearance of an organic home was harmonious and restful, a unity of 
form and color. The palette might include several shades of the same basic colors that were 
varied throughout the house. There is a noticeable absence in Wright's repertoire of pure 
black and white; they seem to be in bold violation of his thesis of harmony and unity. 
Characteristic colors remained warm and autumnal for decades. Only in his later years, 
when others became more involved in the interiors, did occasional clear blues and 
chartreuse begin to appear in his homes. 

Wright's use of red became his signature. In fact, red was the color of the square signature 
tile that he began to place on his houses in the 1930s. His long-time associate John Howe 
remembers that a client, one of the Pauson sisters, was a potter and suggested creating 
such a tile. Wright was delighted with the idea. While many reds were used in his 
schemes, he preferred a warm, brownish red that he called Cherokee red. Some say the 
color came from a favorite native American pot, but it could just as well have been 
inspired by the warm red barns that dotted his rural Wisconsin homeland. That red, 
actually an iron oxide mixture, was used to help preserve the wood in the barn. It was a 
familiar and natural companion to the colors of the foliage. Wright colored his own 
Midway farm buildings at Taliesin Cherokee red, as well as his fleet of cars, his roofs, his 
gates, and his signs. It was specified as the accent color in many of his buildings and 
continues to be generously used by his followers. Even concrete floors were integrally 
colored and waxed with a warm red. 

The particular shade and intensity of red vary from site to site and use to use depending on 
the light, the building materials, and the setting. In practice, Cherokee red is not just one 
color but has become a range of hues. For instance, Taliesin West, Wright's home in 
Scottsdale, Arizona, uses a lighter value than Taliesin in Wisconsin. Paint pigmentation 
and composition have changed so dramatically since Wright first began his practice that 
now there is a hundred times more variety than before. For environmental and stability 
reasons, many of the natural pigments have been replaced with synthetics. But the ability 
to create a rich, brownish red is still a challenge. 

Wright also experimented with metallic paints and gold leaf. Walls in his own Oak Park 
studio entrance were painted with a bronze paint; he even proposed gold leaf for the 
exterior of his masterpiece, Fallingwater. He was particularly fond of gold during his 
Imperial Hotel era in the late teens and 1920s, no doubt borrowing it from the Japanese 
screens he loved. Using different methods, he laid gold in the mortar joints of the brick 
fireplaces of the Martin house in Buffalo, May house in Grand Rapids, and Allen house in 
Wichita. Certainly a product of the earth, it added a richness, an elegance, that other 
materials could not. 


LIGHT 

Both natural and artificial light were partners in Wright's harmonious whole. Houses were 
sited to make the most of the sun's powers. Window walls were most likely on the south 
elevation allowing the sun to flood the rooms with light and warmth. Skylights and 
clerestory windows brought natural light into rooms away from open window walls. The 
changing quality of light in different seasons and different times of day, controlled by the 
shape and location of his light screens, affected life in the home. 

Electricity, introduced to the Chicago area at about the time Wright was building his first 
home in Oak Park, offered new opportunities for integrating lighting. It was now safe to 
conceal light behind grillework and art glass, reflect it off ceilings, and hang it over 
furniture. It could augment the sun's ability to create shadows and texture. For most of his 
career, Wright was fond of using decks-long, deep shelves that seemed to float below the 
ceiling-to hide indirect light fixtures, create spatial variety, and reduce the perceived 
height in a room to human scale. These decks, constructed of the same material as the 
ceiling, usually are on the perimeter of a space, but sometimes they span openings from 
one room to another. 


DECORATIVE ARTS 

The majority of the decorative elements in a Wright environment are designed to be part of 
the unified whole. Wright liked to integrate all of the arts. Furniture, light fixtures, 
carpets, fireplace andirons, sometimes linens and china often were augmented by 
sculpture, decorative grilles, screens, and murals designed for that particular site. George 
Niedecken, who coordinated many of Wright's interiors during the heyday of the Prairie 
Style years, began working with Wright as a muralist. His paintings of plants and flowers 
were used on the upper walls of several major commissions including the Dana, Coonley, 
and May residences. Marion Mahony, the only woman designer in the Oak Park studio, 
also was responsible for many of the early decorative art designs. Later, Gene Masselink 
provided masterful geometric murals that became focal points of Wright interiors. 
Japanese screens were sometimes recommended to clients and would be attached to or 
built into a wall. Perforated wood panels or concrete blocks in abstracted nature patterns 
were used as screens for natural and artificial light. Two outstanding examples of ceiling 
grilles are in Wright's Oak Park home, one in the playroom and the other in the dining 
room (page 17). Nearly every Usonian house had its own geometric, perforated grille 
pattern that created shadows in the appropriate motif throughout the home. 


FURNITURE 

Wright began to design furniture for his buildings as he was formulating his concepts of 
organic architecture . First, in the 1880s and 1890s, he adopted the conventional mode by 
building in some cabinets and shelving. Soon he added seating units around fireplaces and 
in hallways. Then in 1895 he designed his own dining room table and chairs, possibly his 
first free-standing furniture. His concept of a totally integrated, harmonious interior 
required that he design more and more furniture for his buildings, because there was little 
on the market that had the rectilinear simplicity required to fulfill his vision. But the 
extent to which Wright actually designed pieces for the early houses varied, probably based 
on the willingness of clients to either spend the money or submit to his ideas. 

In some of the Prairie houses, he designed built-in cabinets and possibly a bench, a large 
dining or library table, and maybe some chairs. These would be mixed with more ornate 
pieces owned by the client. As his concepts and his ability to persuade clients matured, he 
was able to design more and more elements so that the furniture was barely distinguishable 
from the building itself, as can be seen in the later Prairie and Usonian houses; the 
furniture was made of the same materials, same finishes, same details and proportions. 
The clients who moved into his houses often were forced to leave their old furniture 
behind. They neither needed it nor wanted it to interfere with the unity of their new 
homes. 

His furniture styles thus evolved, just as his architectural vocabulary changed. The solid 
rectilinear oak pieces of the Prairie era became lighter and then more Oriental in feeling as 
his architectural interests shifted. The economical simplicity of the Usonian houses called 
for basic furniture, built of plywood, presumably constructed on site by the carpenters but 
usually by local cabinetmakers. The versatility of the pieces, in addition to their inherent 
suitability to the spaces, makes it hard to imagine one without the other. 

In 1955 Wright created a line of furniture for the Heritage-Henredon Furniture 
Company, thus opening his creativity to those who did not own a Wright-designed home. 
While this may seem to be a compromise in his ideals, the line was based on the same 
principles as his house-specific furniture. Using basic circular, rectilinear, and triangular 
shapes, most of the seventy-five mahogany pieces were modular, so that they could adapt 
to different settings. They were simple and functional, with the ornament integral-not 
applied to it. 


TEXTILES 

Textiles that Wright selected were simple and natural-no heavy brocades or elaborate 
floral prints. Instead, he preferred simple linens, cottons, and wools in flat weaves or fine, 
short-napped velvets. He was known to assist in the actual design of a particular weave of 
upholstery or drapery fabric. Textiles were used to complement or accentuate the 
surrounding texture of a room. In the first few decades, satin-weave wools, velvets, and 
tightly woven linens seemed to be the dominant choices. Eventually, more handwoven and 
nubbier textures provided contrast for the smoother Usonian houses. When a pattern was 
used, it was geometric and related to the overall motif of the building. Leather was a 
popular chair covering, and an occasional animal skin was added to provide variety in 
textures. Each textile became one more unit that contributed to the integrity of the whole. 

Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement near the turn of the century, and encouraged 
by the needlework ability of the wife of one of his designers, George Niedecken, Wright 
included custom designed linens in several of his Prairie Style houses. Patterns used in the 
table and bed scarves again were drawn from the house's dominating geometric motif. 

Carpets and floor coverings also were simple and made of natural fibers. Wright or one of 
his associates, such as George Niedecken or Marion Mahony, custom designed woven 
carpets for some of the Prairie houses. As part of the unified whole, they served to pull 
together the geometric motifs and colors that were used elsewhere in the home. Current 
reproductions are often tufted but, if properly done, can provide the same appearance as 
the historic weaves. In some of the later homes, woven linen, jute, and wool mats were 
chosen, providing a textured foil for the smooth concrete floors. Geometric Oriental, native 
American, and Scandinavian rugs and weavings also were widely used, allowing owners to 
personalize their homes with their textile collections. 


ACCESSORIES 

Free-standing accessories most compatible with Wright interiors tend to be somewhat 
geometric and nature oriented. Tree branches and boughs, usually evergreens, are brought 
inside and spread overhead across light decks, on shelves, and on tabletops in both of 
Wright's Taliesins. Simple, natural bouquets of seasonal flowers or dried weeds fill 
geometric vases. Arts and Crafts, native American, pre-Columbian, and contemporary 
pottery fit easily into his geometric schemes. Certain Arts and Crafts ceramics and 
metalware also work comfortably in a Wright interior. Items with solid matte finishes and 
geometric shapes are most compatible. The blue-green color of Teco pottery is a nice 
complement to the warm tones preferred by the architect. 

Wright-designed spaces can accommodate sculptures more readily than paintings 
because of the limited amount of open wall space. This deliberate rejection of most 
two-dimensional art excluded his beloved Japanese prints, which he stored and exhibited 
on specially designed print tables or easels. 

Wright's care in selecting accessories was the culmination of the attention he gave to every 
aspect of his houses, from fitting the form to the site, selecting the materials, and using 
natural inspirations wherever he found them. His organic architecture speaks to the values 
of today's society even more accurately than it did at the turn of the century. In a hectic, 
complex, impersonal world that is being forced to look at the lessons of nature to save the 
planet, there is great relevance in Wright's teachings. His designs were based on 
simplicity, the dignity of the individual, and, above all, an abiding respect for nature. 


Wright's Own Homes 

THERE IS NO BETTER WAY TO EXPERIENCE THE GENIUS OF WRIGHT'S 
DESIGN ABILITY THAN TO EXPLORE THE PLACES IN WHICH HE LIVED. HIS 
THREE HOMES STAND AS COMPLETE EXPRESSIONS OF ORGANIC 
ARCHITECTURE-FROM THREE PERSPECTIVES OF THE MASTER HIMSELF. 


HOME AND STUDIO 

In 1889 twenty-one-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright borrowed $5,000 from his employer, 
Louis Sullivan, to build a six-room bungalow for himself and his new 
eighteen-year-old bride, Catherine Tobin. For the next twenty years, he shaped this 
building in Oak Park, Illinois, in response to the changing needs of his family and his 
emerging design philosophy. Like his future homes, Taliesin and Taliesin West, it became 
his laboratory. Here he could safely experiment with new concepts that he further 
developed in his commissions. 

While compact, the house already discloses Wright's desire to break out of traditional 
boxlike rooms. Doorways were widened or eliminated so space could flow freely, allowing 
the rooms to seem larger and less confining. Simple oak bands wrap around the walls, 
leading the eye from room to room and providing a human scale. 

The walls of the house conveyed the feeling of movable screens rather than solid walls, 
even before the Japanese pavilion at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 could have affected 
his attitude toward space. These solid screens, contrasted with window groupings that 
serve as light screens, make the living spaces feel flexible and open, suitable for a growing 
family's needs. Wright had not begun to design his own art glass windows when the house 
was built. Thus, he selected a simple geometric diamond pattern that created only a minor 
transitional barrier between the inside and the outside. The walls were starting to dissolve. 

Frank and Catherine furnished their home with antiques bought at auctions in the area 
until Wright began to design his own furniture. A mixture of exotic wood tables and 
cabinets, an upright piano, palms, and a patchwork of Oriental rugs fill the rooms. Velvet 
upholstered built-in seating areas are beneath the windows. The family's exuberance was 
apparent in their unconventional home. 

By 1895 the Wrights had four active children who needed more space. A large addition 
was built adjoining the east side of the house. It includes two brilliantly articulated and 
integrated spaces: the barrel-vaulted playroom (pages 6-7) and a new dining room 
(page 17) where the former kitchen had been. These new rooms demonstrated how far 
Wright had come artistically in just six years. His principles of organic architecture, 
written the year before, were firmly in place. The rooms were functionally responsive, 
geometrically pure, and partners with nature. Both have wooden fretwork panels in the 
ceiling in abstracted nature patterns. The playroom screen has a skylight, and the dining 
room has a recessed electric light, a first. Like branches overhead, they shelter but open 
the spaces above. The light fixtures and furniture were built as components of the 
architecture. It is a totally unified environment. Other spaces on both floors shifted their 
uses slightly now that the family could stretch out a bit. The old dining room became the 
study. Wright's studio became the bedroom for all of the children. 

Within three years Wright decided to integrate his work and home life. The studio 
addition was constructed, advertising his revolutionary ideas to all. To the 
triangular-shaped home he added a complex, geometric composition of rectangles, 
octagons, and squares. It includes a drafting room with a balcony, his office, a library, and 
an impressive reception hall. Long, low brick walls stretch across the entire facade, 
unifying all of the elements. Two sculptures of bent human figures, columns with 
integrated molded plaster panels, and huge planted urns designate the mazelike entrance 
(page 35). 

The richness continues inside the studio. The low ceiling of the metallic bronze-colored 
reception hall includes three long, intricate art glass panels (page 44). Light filters through 
their gold and green geometric designs, abstractions from nature. To the left is the 
octagonal drafting room, and to the right is the octagonal library. Straight ahead is 
Wright's office, where art glass panels filter natural light from overhead and frame a 
garden view. Everywhere one looks are stimulating new architectural ideas and lush 
decorative arts. 

Today, the restored spaces appear just as they were when Wright lived and worked there. 
The building now is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and operated by 
the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation. 


TALIESIN 

Wright left the Oak Park home in 1909, first traveling to Europe to assist with the 
publication of his work by German publisher Ernst Wasmuth. A former client, Mamah 
Borthwick Cheney, accompanied him. Both had decided to leave their spouses and begin a 
new chapter in their lives. On his return to the United States two years later, Anna Lloyd 
Wright convinced her son that he should take over her property near the family enclave in 
Spring Green, Wisconsin. 

In 1911 he began plans for a home there that would be "of the hill, not on the hill," one 
that overlooked the Wisconsin River and the land of his Welsh forebears. He named it 
Taliesin, which means "shining brow" in Welsh and was also the name of a famous Welsh 
poet. Taliesin was designed to be a self-sufficient farm, not just a home. The limestone 
and sand-colored stucco walls stretched across the hill, enclosing farm buildings, studio 
space, and courtyards as well as living space. This was the beginning of a remarkable 
complex that suffered several major fires and was rebuilt and remodeled continuously as 
Wright perfected his own environment over the next forty-eight years. 

Today, Taliesin is a beautifully created community of organic buildings. The original 
home and studio of approximately 7,000 square feet have grown to some 37,000 square 
feet, plus three-quarters as much in gardens, courts, and terraces. Nestled neatly, under 
broad sheltering roofs, on other parts of the 600 rolling acres are the Hillside Home School 
buildings, Tan-y-deri (his sister's house), several other smaller residences, the Midway 
farm buildings, and the Romeo and Juliet windmill (a Wright design from 1896). A 
dammed-up stream on the valley floor creates a waterfall and pond 100 feet below the 
home. Surrounding vegetable gardens provide food for the Taliesin Fellowship, an 
apprenticeship-based architecture school that still resides at Taliesin, particularly during 
the warm months. 

The house is really a series of connected buildings joined by roofed passageways and 
courtyards. The transition from outside to inside is smooth and deliberate. The covered 
courtyard at the entrance gradually becomes the foyer within the home, the limestone floor 
continuing. Once inside, the compressed foyer space is released into the great expanse of 
the living room to the left. The ceiling follows the roofline two stories up, but the room is 
decidedly horizontal and tranquil in feeling. The interplay of spaces, textures, light, and 
color draws one into the room. New discoveries are around each corner: a massive 
fireplace, a tiny alcove, a place to sit and reflect, a place to listen to music, a place to visit 
with friends. 

A narrow, forty-foot balcony is cantilevered into the treetops for better viewing of the 
natural life below. The limestone walls, where exposed, are laid with alternating rows of 
projecting stones, like the quarries from which they came. The sand and golden plaster 
walls are divided by cypress bands into horizontal panels that serve as backdrops for a 
panoply of decorative arts. The geometry of the custom-designed furniture, art glass, and 
carpets complements the natural vistas framed by the windows (pages 4-5). Selected 
pieces of Oriental art are scattered throughout Taliesin, some actually cemented into place 
as permanent, integral parts of the building. 

To the right of the foyer flow a guest room, a loggia, a garden room, and private bedrooms 
of the Wrights. Above and below are more guest quarters. Each room has a thoughtfully 
crafted fireplace on a principal wall. These are the only heat sources for most of the 
building but serve to radiate the essential beauty of the stone as much as the heat. Most of 
the openings are vertical or oversized. In some the top stone is laid on its side; others are 
open from two sides. Ceiling heights change from room to room, redefining the spaces for 
their particular use. Doors and windows frequently open onto balconies, cantilevered 
observation decks, or terraces, continuing the flow of space. Most of the rooms are oriented 
to the east, bringing the morning light into the composition. The harmony within each 
room and among rooms leaves a feeling of inner tranquillity. 


TALIESIN WEST 

By 1932 Wright had founded the Taliesin Fellowship, whose apprentices shared all aspects 
of life at Taliesin. Cooking, gardening, scrubbing, partying, playing music, and 
entertaining were all as much a part of the communal life as the architectural tasks. Like 
Wright's spaces, his unified lifestyle did not compartmentalize daily life. Wright and his 
third wife, Olgivanna, decided in 1937 that the Wisconsin winters were too unbearable for 
year-round occupancy. Taliesin was not centrally heated and thus was insufferable in the 
subzero cold. 

In 1928 Wright and some apprentices built near Phoenix, Arizona, a canvas-covered 
camp, Ocatillo, that in some ways became the prototype for Taliesin West. They later 
found a beautiful mesa just below McDowell Peak near Scottsdale that was perfect for their 
permanent architectural camp. Construction of the winter home for the fellowship, which 
then numbered about thirty people, began in 1937. 

Wright described Taliesin West in his 1943 autobiography.  Plans were inspired by the 
character and beauty of that wonderful site. . . . Just imagine what it would be like on top 
of the world looking over the Universe at sunrise or at sunset with clear sky in between. 
Light and air bathing all the worlds of creation in all the color that ever was-all the 
shapes and outlines ever devised . . . all beyond the reach of the human mind. . . . For the 
designing of our buildings, certain forms already abounded. There were simple 
characteristic silhouettes to go by, tremendous drifts and heaps of sunburned desert rocks 
were nearby to be used. . . . From first to last, thousands of cords of stone, carloads of 
cement, carloads of redwood, acres of stout white canvas doubled over wood frames four 
feet by eight feet. . . . We devised a light canvas covered redwood framework resting upon 
this massive stone masonry that belonged to the mountain slopes all around. On a fair day, 
when these white tops and side flaps were flung open, the desert air and the birds flew 
clear through. 

Like Taliesin, Taliesin West was ever-evolving and changed as the needs of the 
fellowship changed. The canvas roofs were rearranged, rebuilt, and eventually replaced 
with various synthetic materials that were more durable but permitted the same translucent 
light. Glass, not allowed in the early plans, was added in greater and greater quantities 
beginning in 1945. Spaces were added and made more permanent. Three rooms-Wright's 
private office, the drafting room, and the garden room-were the original canvas covered 
spaces. They joined a dining room, a kitchen, Wright's private quarters to the east, and an 
apprentices court to the north. 

Also like Taliesin, Taliesin West is actually many separate buildings linked together by 
partially covered walkways, courtyards, and terraces, all surrounded by native vegetation. 
Moving through the complex, one is guided, but not controlled. Even the steps are gentle, 
broad, and shallow, more horizontal than vertical. Shadows link the architectural elements 
and furniture, repeating the angular, rhythmic lines of the mountains behind. The trellised 
pergola along the drafting room leaves a pattern on the ground below. The natural colors, 
from mauve to an orange-red, are accentuated by the blooming vegetation. This does not 
appear to be a barren desert but a lush one, rich with natural wonders, enhanced by skillful 
management of its resources. 

Everywhere, breathtaking vistas and fascinating close-up views are framed. The rugged 
textures and open informal spaces seem both primitive, like the original camp, and yet 
sophisticated. The contrasts abound: the simplicity and the grandeur; the smooth and the 
rough; the light and the heavy; the narrow and the expansive; the regular and the 
irregular, the natural and the built; cool blue with warm pinks. Each element was made 
greater by the other.     


Classic Wright Houses 

WHETHER DESIGNED TO ALIGN WITH THE PRAIRIE, PROJECT OVER A 
WATERFALL, RECALL ANCIENT MAYANS, OR PROVIDE AN ECONOMICAL 
HOME PERFECT FOR AMERICAN LIVING-THESE CLASSIC HOUSES CONVEY 
THE ESSENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENTS WRIGHT CREATED. 


PRAIRIE STYLE 

Wright's early experiments with historic styles and his life experiences coalesced into a 
grammar of forms that became known as the Prairie School of architecture-not an 
education center but a school of thought. The Prairie Style was an attempt by Wright and a 
group of other young Chicago architects to create an architecture that suited the American 
lifestyle and landscape. Louis Sullivan contributed much of the initial philosophical 
enthusiasm, but Wright was the most famous Prairie School practitioner. 

Some say that the style was definitively launched by the publication of Wright's design for 
"A Home in a Prairie Town" in the Ladies' Home Journal in February 1901. This strongly 
horizontal plan for a house with a low sheltering roof, bands of art glass windows, stucco 
walls with wood banding, and outreaching garden walls had many of the features that 
characterized this version of Wright's organic architecture. In one of his first commissions 
after this plan was published, the house for Susan Lawrence Dana, Wright brought to bear 
most of the devices he ultimately used to express organic architecture. For the next ten 
years he refined, refitted, and reinterpreted this memorable style in scores of residences. 
After that, it no longer dominated his architectural designs, but the grammar was not lost. 
Even Lucille and Isadore Zimmerman's house of 1950 exhibits many Prairie Style 
elements. 

Over time most of the following Prairie Style houses, designed in Wright's early years, 
have maintained, or retained through authentic restorations, their purity and unity. 


DANA-THOMAS HOUSE 

Susan Lawrence Dana, a wealthy heiress and recent widow, commissioned Wright to 
create an extravagant place for living and entertaining in Springfield, Illinois. The 
resulting thirty-five-room mansion, completed in 1904, was an imaginative and 
complex symphony of color and form. 

Strong geometric shapes introduced outside (pages 26-27) are a preview of the varied 
spaces on the interior. And varied they are: ceiling levels that change dramatically within 
rooms, compressing then releasing; balconies to look up at and down from; hidden alcoves 
and nooks to be discovered; stages for musicians; a bowling alley and a billiard room. 
Imagination and adventure are everywhere. Generous wood bands wrap up, down, and 
around the walls and sometimes span spaces as light decks to further define and unite the 
areas. Every space, every surface, every view is carefully composed to be a unified part of 
the luscious whole. 

Inside is a magical kingdom. Intricate art glass sparkles all around, creating subtle 
screens. The complex interplay of thousands of facets of glass produces a reflected light 
that makes the house appear jewel-like. Autumnal colors used in the glass were applied 
also to the textured plaster walls with a multiple-step process called scumbling, which 
left the walls mottled like dappled sunlight, intensifying the glow of the spaces (page 9). 
Tawny golds, olive greens, and burnished oranges are paired with an unusually reddish 
stain on the wood. It is polychromatic yet retains a unified tonal quality like a forest on a 
sunny fall day. In the absence of natural vegetation on the site, Wright chose to be 
particularly effusive with his ornament. 

Dana left her home in 1928, and it remained empty until purchased by the Thomas 
Publishing Company in 1944. Now owned by the state of Illinois, it has been meticulously 
brought back to life. 


MARTIN HOUSE 

Between 1902 and 1904, Wright managed to break away from Sullivanesque 
ornamentation and simplify his designs even more. The Darwin D. Martin residence in 
Buffalo, New York, while a more elaborate commission than the Dana house, was less 
lavishly ornamented. This entire complex for the president of the Larkin Company 
included a house for his sister and brother-in-law, as well as the Martins' home, garage, 
and conservatory. Introduced to Wright by his brother, William Martin, an Oak Park 
client, Darwin Martin became one of Wright's greatest patrons. Over the years, the Martin 
brothers were responsible for nine major commissions. Darwin Martin also responded to 
Wright's periodic financial troubles with some desperately needed cash at crucial times. 

The Martin house spaces are purely rectilinear, based on a strict, rectangular unit of 
design. Every element of the composition-windows, walls, furniture, floor plan, piers, 
moldings-repeats the same proportions, creating an internal, harmonious rhythm. Here 
Wright truly broke out of the box. Only the lower half of the exterior window walls 
outlines the building's shape. The low-pitch, hipped roofs float above, with only a 
shadow leading to the set-back windows beneath them. Strong vertical brick piers on the 
facade support the broad stretches of roof, freeing the walls from any structural 
responsibility. Standing like sentinels, they point to the dominant horizontality of the 
design. 

Inside, more Roman brick piers support light decks that stretch from room to room, 
passing and intersecting the complex pattern of finely detailed wood moldings (page 33). 
The gold-filled, deeply raked mortar joints of the brickwork reflect light, floating the 
courses of brick one above the other. All first-floor living spaces open generously into 
each other, offering long views from one to another. Through exquisite geometric 
windows, natural life in the garden, oversized planters, and the conservatory could be 
viewed-some nearby, some at a distance. 

Wright produced dozens of custom furnishing designs for the Martins, including light 
fixtures, rugs, and even a grand piano. Most of the sturdy oak pieces repeated the 
dominant rectangular theme, but the circle became an important counterpoint. While loyal 
to his rectangular module, Wright had an uncanny sense about the need for variety and 
contrast to provide relief. 


MAY HOUSE 

Wright's commissions were not all as grand as the Dana and Martin houses. Most were for 
middle-class business people who had a sense of adventure but a more modest budget. 
When Grand Rapids, Michigan, clothier Meyer May and his wife, Sophie, contracted with 
Wright to design them a home in 1908, they were rewarded with a Prairie Style gem. In 
part because of the able assistance of designer George Niedecken, it was as thoroughly 
detailed as any of the larger residences. 

Sunlight pours into the living areas through generous banks of art glass windows all across 
the southern facade, throwing geometric light patterns into the room (pages 42-43). The 
interior spaces open freely, one to another, with interesting transitions. They practically 
glow. The rich, golden tones-dominated by the natural color of the oak trim, floors, and 
furniture-are totally harmonious. Values shift easily from tan to brownish orange to 
tawny golds to pale yellow-greens. But there is relief from this limited palette. A bit of 
gray-blue sets off the carpet colors, and an uncharacteristic pink is offered in a Niedecken 
mural (page 39). The art glass in the windows, ceiling panels, cabinet doors, and even the 
fireplace mortar joints (page 45) continue the golden theme. The mass glistens and 
lightens with the reflection from the windows across the room. 

Squares and abstracted leaf forms are repeated in the carpet patterns, art glass, and 
embroidered linen patterns. Like members of a family, they all share a genetic 
commonality. Wright-designed furniture was supplemented in the bedrooms by Arts and 
Crafts pieces, especially Stickley items. The simple, sturdy shapes blend easily with the 
spaces and the Wright components. 

Light fixtures also were specially designed to be part of the unified whole. Wall sconces 
like those in other Prairie Style homes are placed in banded panels throughout the main 
floor, but custom lamps for particular spaces also were fabricated. All use the colored art 
glass found in the windows. In the living room, cove lighting reflected off the ceiling 
provides a soft light for a harmonious room. 

Within fourteen years of its construction, a large addition became the first of many 
changes that drastically altered the house over the years. In 1985 it was authentically 
restored by its new owner, Steelcase Inc. Today, it is possible to experience once again 
Wright's perfectly unified living environment. 


LITTLE HOUSE II 

Wright had already designed another home for Mr. and Mrs. Francis W. Little in Peoria, 
Illinois, when they approached him about a new house on Lake Minnetonka in Wayzata, 
outside Minneapolis. Northome became one of his last Prairie Style houses when it was 
completed in 1914. 

The living room, by far the dominant space in the house, is nearly fifty feet long. Mrs. 
Little was an accomplished musician and wanted the room to double as a recital space. 
The height of the ceiling adds to the room's grandeur. Flanked by two long walls with 
more than a dozen art glass windows on two levels, the room has the lightness of an 
outdoor pavilion. Clear glass was used in the leaded panels so that the magnificent 
views-the lake was to one side and the woods to the other-would not be obstructed. The 
delicate designs of lines and triangles, concentrated on the outer edges of the window, 
reach across several panels, creating a larger composition than on just the one window. 
The art glass skylights, an intricate checkerboard of tiny squares and triangles, are framed 
by heavy wood moldings. 

The Littles brought some furniture from their 1903 house to their new home, and Wright 
augmented it with additional designs. The rectilinear Prairie Style furniture had changed 
little over the decade, so that the sturdy oak shapes of tables, cabinets, and chairs adapted 
easily to the house's scale. The vertical spindles of the radiator covers are repeated in the 
base of the print table and seem to capture the rhythm of the wood marking strips across 
the ceiling. The strong horizontality of the entire house and the room itself pulls the scale 
back down to a more human level. 

Foliage of the season is brought inside to fill oversized vases. Winged Victory, Wright's 
favorite classical sculpture, rises from a table top. Oriental carpets were used occasionally 
to add pattern to otherwise solid tones of golds and browns. Each detail contributed to the 
serenity of the home. 

In 1972 the Little family decided to build a new house on the site. Learning that the 
original home would be demolished, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered 
to document the dismantling and purchase the parts. The living room was then rebuilt as 
part of the museum's American Wing. Other rooms were sold to museums and collectors. 
While this fragmentation is tragic and antithetical to Wright's concept of unity, it does 
provide an opportunity for millions of visitors to experience the interior of a Wright house. 


CALIFORNIA HOUSES 

The 1920s were sparse years for Wright's career. His private life was chaotic, and between 
1916 and 1922 he traveled back and forth to Japan, living there for long periods while 
supervising construction of the Imperial Hotel and a few other commissions. Despite his 
inattention to his practice in the United States, Wright created a group of exciting 
buildings in California, hoping for a while to establish a permanent office there. These 
California houses were inspired by the materials and spirit of the area and were built 
primarily of concrete. 

Wright viewed concrete as an inexpensive, durable, and, most important, malleable 
building material without a personality of its own. His pursuit of its full potential began 
with Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1904 and continued with intermittent periods 
of obsession. Because concrete submits itself so willingly to whatever an architect desires, 
Wright sought ways to take advantage of its plasticity. The sunny California climate 
seemed the perfect place to do so. 

After flirting with concrete ornament in the Hollyhock house in 1917, Wright designed 
four concrete textile block houses in the Los Angeles area between 1922 and 1926. Lloyd 
Wright, the architect's oldest son, actually supervised the construction of most of them 
after his father returned to the Midwest. 

The houses recall Mayan and Japanese influences but relied heavily on American 
technology of the twentieth century. To create the decorative textile blocks, concrete was 
precast into hollow blocks on site by unskilled workers, using local rock and sand. Steel 
rods were then interwoven in the hollow chambers of the blocks, which were set with no 
mortar joints; instead, they were filled with grout or concrete to give them strength. 
Intended to be built inexpensively, the textile block houses proved quite the opposite. The 
blocks were not uniform and required tedious adaptation to lay evenly. Wright was busy in 
Japan and was not available to solve problems. 

The geometric blocks nonetheless created striking patterns when laid up in walls. The 
result was cool edifices of contemporary forms, nestled into the hills overlooking Los 
Angeles. Their sandy texture and sculpted shapes rise like sand castles on a dune. 


HOLLYHOCK HOUSE 

High atop Hollywood's Olive Hill, Wright sculpted a home in 1917 for oil heiress and 
theater devotee Aline Barnsdall. The architect responded to the barren site with a new 
interpretation of his organic architecture that marked the beginning of his California 
concrete era. Although planned for reinforced, poured concrete, it is mostly stucco on 
wood frame, but it still incorporates specially cast concrete ornament. The hollyhock 
flower, the client's favorite, was the inspiration for the abstracted decorative patterns in the 
concrete, art glass, and oak furniture. 

Only one building of a planned performing arts complex, the house is oriented toward a 
center garden court and punctuated by several geometric pools. The design creates a 
private world where guests can freely circulate throughout the living spaces and gallery, 
into the gardens, and even up to the rooftop terraces for a longer view of the city. 

Inside, the monochromatic, even surfaces come alive with color. The recently restored 
living room is another exercise in shades of gold and green. Custom oak furniture 
completes the inviting spaces, for which carpets also were designed. The incredibly 
complex, mirror-image table, lamp, and sofas that have been recreated draw guests 
around the central fireplace. Between the hearth and the sofas is a reflecting pool, a 
cooling contrast to the warm room. Over the fireplace, lattice grillework directs sunlight 
into the room like a theater spotlight on a star. Japanese decorative arts fit comfortably 
into the room, which was designed while Wright was working on the Imperial Hotel. 

In 1927 Barnsdall donated the home and grounds to the city of Los Angeles, which 
continues to be responsible for its care and public access. 


FREEMAN HOUSE 

The concrete house that Wright created in Los Angeles in 1923 for Samuel and Harriet 
Freeman is, at 1,200 square feet, a compact and pure example of his textile block system of 
construction. The various geometric designs cast into the blocks create a texture that 
dominates the feel of the building. This tactile quality gives the cool concrete material an 
earthy appeal. 

The dominant building material is also the dominant interior design element-yet another 
expression of Wright's quest for unity. The geometric masses that result from stacking 
these sixteen-inch-square blocks express the efficient, open spaces within the home. 
The square is most certainly the unit of design for the building. Some of the blocks are 
perforated to let light filter in through the pattern; others are solid, providing a 
counterpoint to the texture. Some are filled with glass to create windows; others are 
structurally supporting. Some are grouped to create a ceiling; others are widely spaced to 
provide doorways. Some are stacked thirty feet high; others reach out over the hill on 
terrace walls. 

Approaching the house, only the closed side of the second story is visible. Yet variety and 
imagination are apparent. Entering through a compressed hallway, the living room 
explodes right in front. Light, shadows, and texture are everywhere. Wright conjured up a 
cool, protected place out of the sun's burning rays. 

The furniture, which was not designed by Wright but by a one-time Wright apprentice 
and friend of the Freemans, Rudolph Schindler, is as unique as the building. The versatile 
upholstered and cabinet pieces capture the intimacy and simplicity of the spaces; some 
convert to various uses. Cool concrete meets warm wood tones and golden upholstery 
fabrics. Pottery, native American textiles, archaeological fragments, and wooden 
sculptures reinforce the primitive, cavelike feeling within the home. By day, the large glass 
expanse draws one to the light and the city below. But at night, the fireplace in the 
opposite wall beckons to the protected center, a place to reflect and share ideas. It is a 
refuge. 

For sixty years, this house was a popular gathering place for artists, actors, dancers, and 
musicians. In 1983 Harriet Freeman donated it to the University of Southern California, 
whose care and study of the building are shedding new light on Wright's novel textile 
block design form. 


1930s DESIGNS 

The late 1920s and early 1930s were the most barren years of Wright's long career, in 
terms of the number of commissions. At age sixty-five, many men would have accepted 
this drought as a natural call to retirement. Not Wright. Never unchallenged, 
Wright-the-architect called on Wright-the-author and Wright-the-teacher to lead 
him out of financial hard times. 

As a means of sorting out his life and promoting his self-proclaimed genius, Wright 
wrote An Autobiography, which was first published in 1932. This popular book, reprinted 
several times, inspired new interest in his work and consequently new clients. Soon 
afterward, he and his new wife, Olgivanna, founded the Taliesin Fellowship and began to 
build Taliesin West. Among the early apprentices there was Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., the 
twenty-four-year-old son of a wealthy Pittsburgh merchant. While he stayed at 
Taliesin for only a few months, Kaufmann, inspired by the autobiography and his 
experiences, introduced his father to the work of Wright, thus instigating a patronage that 
gave new life to the architect's career. Fallingwater, a revolutionary country house that 
Wright designed for the Kaufmanns, was without a doubt a powerful response to those 
espousing the new European International Style. 

The other pivotal patron to appear in the 1930s was Herbert Johnson, president of the 
Johnson Wax Company. Wright's streamlined design for the firm's 1939 administration 
building in Racine, Wisconsin, with its lily-pad-like columns, confirmed that Wright's 
genius had not tired but had new energy. Wright was later asked to add a research tower to 
the building and design homes for Johnson and his daughter. 

In these years of introspection, Wright created his two most celebrated works: Fallingwater 
and the Johnson Wax Administration Building. But there was plenty of time left to create 
his master plan for American cities, Broadacre City. The huge model, which the 
apprentices built, and the book and lectures he wrote about it were the subject of numerous 
assessments and diverse opinions. Interest blossomed in Wright's ideas. From 1935 to his 
death in 1959, Wright completed nearly two hundred more buildings. 


FALLINGWATER 

In late 1934 Wright visited a waterfall near Mill Run, Pennsylvania, where Liliane and 
Edgar J. Kaufmann hoped to build a weekend retreat. Wright was moved by the beauty of 
its rock ledges, lush foliage, and rushing waters over Bear Run. The native vegetation, 
especially the rhododendron and mountain laurel, flourished in the moist shade. Sandstone 
boulders marked the prehistoric landscape that had been a favorite preserve for the 
Kaufmanns and their employees. When he received a detailed topographical map, Wright 
set about designing Fallingwater, which became the most renowned building of his career. 
Built into the side of the hill, and over-not across from-the picturesque waterfall, its 
design was a celebration of the site (pages 2-3). When it was completed in 1935, the 
Kaufmanns truly had a home where they could entertain their friends and commune with 
the wonders of nature. In 1963 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., donated the house and 1,500 acres to 
the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy so that it would be protected and enjoyed by 
others. 

Like a giant tree, Fallingwater grew from the site. The roots are the boulders on the valley 
floor. The trunk is a thirty-foot-tall layered sandstone chimney core. Its branches are 
low cantilevered terraces of reinforced concrete, the first-floor slab reaching eighteen feet 
beyond the stone piers. The rock ledges were the inspiration and became part of the 
composition: the four largest boulders are so integrated into the building's structure that 
the pivotal one is exposed in the living room as the hearth. The stream is so much a part of 
the house that a suspended stairway leads directly into it. 

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., described Fallingwater's relationship to the surrounding forest.  The 
materials of the structure blend with the colorings of the rocks and trees, while occasional 
accents are provided by bright furnishings, like the wildflowers or birds outside. The paths 
within the house, stairs and passages, meander without formality or urgency, and the 
house hardly has a main entrance; there are many ways in and out. Sociability and privacy 
are both available, as are the comforts of home and the adventures of the seasons. So 
people are cosseted into relaxing, into exploring the enjoyment of life refreshed in nature. 

The living room, roughly 1,800 square feet of flexible space, is masterfully shaped into 
more intimate areas for dining and relaxing. Ceiling levels, lighting, masonry piers, and 
furniture groupings work together to focus attention on a certain spot, the waxed flagstone 
floor stretching beneath all. Upstairs, both master and guest bedrooms open to private 
terraces (pages 12-13). Each has its own fireplace. The third-floor study and gallery are 
connected to two more terraces and a tiny treetop nook. 

From the highest balcony to the plunge pool beneath the living room terrace, the diverse 
spaces offer opportunities for privacy or sociability. The refinements of a cultured life are 
accentuated by the simplicity of the natural setting. At Fallingwater, Wright's imagination 
and coordination set new highs. 


WINGSPREAD 

Just north of Racine, Wisconsin, Wright orchestrated another house totally at one with its 
site. Only a half mile from Lake Michigan, the spot now occupied by Wingspread was 
once a nature preserve. It is lush with mature pines, arborvitae, wooded areas, ponds, and 
lagoons. The house shares thirty acres with an abundance of waterfowl and wildlife. 

Wright called Wingspread another Prairie Style house, because it was similar to the zoned 
plans of earlier commissions such as the Coonley house of 1908. However, it is a bolder, 
freer interpretation that is quite different from its older siblings and in many ways more 
like a Usonian. The house was created for Herbert F. Johnson, president of the Johnson 
Wax Company, shortly after Wright designed the company's noted administration 
building. Before the house was completed in 1939, Mrs. Johnson died. Johnson moved in 
nonetheless and continued to live in the spacious house for twenty years. It now serves as a 
conference center and the home of the Johnson Foundation. 

Wingspread is built on a square grid, which is incised into the highly waxed, red concrete 
floors, and accented with powerful diagonal lines. At the center is a monumental, 
curvilinear fireplace core. Around this gracefully articulated central mass are all of the 
living and entertaining spaces. Each has its own fireplace. Wright called this 
thirty-foot-high area a wigwam. Shallow steps and ceiling heights define the shift from 
one area of the space to another. Wings spread out in four directions like a pinwheel. One 
is for the master bedroom suite, one for the children's bedrooms; another is the guest wing, 
and the fourth is the service area. 

The craftsmanship is exemplary. The only ornament is the careful handling of the building 
materials themselves: flawless Cherokee red brick masses; great expanses of smooth, 
seemingly nail-less bands of oak veneer; perfectly cut sandstone slabs; and meticulously 
crafted furniture. 

Despite the grandeur of the spaces, the power of the horizontal line dominates. The 
wooden light decks and tiers of clerestory windows join the deeply raked horizontal mortar 
joints to create a visual unity. The eye is drawn to the people level. There, clusters of 
simple, comfortable furniture invite visitors to enjoy the variety of indoor and outdoor 
spaces-at the fireplace, by the pool, in the library. A few well-selected works of art 
complement the spaces but do not detract from their simple elegance. 


USONIAN HOUSES 

Shifts in American lifestyles and the need for economical housing challenged Wright 
throughout his career, particularly in the late 1930s and the 1940s when Wright observed 
changes in American families. Most of them owned automobiles; they were home less 
often; more women were working; most families had no servants; time spent in the kitchen 
was also family socialization time; life was more and more informal. Wright's solution was 
Usonian houses, a term he used to describe buildings uniquely suitable for life in the 
United States of North America (USONA). His concepts were a part of his larger vision for 
a decentralized Broadacre City Wright developed a pattern, a way of building, that would 
respond to these shifts in society. The kitchen was open to the dining area at the core of 
the house. Spacious living areas opened in one direction; bedrooms extended in the other 
direction and were small with many built-ins to conserve space. The homes usually had 
flat or shallow-pitched roofs and were one story. They stretched sensitively across their 
suburban lots, offering a private street side with few windows and an open garden side 
with generous terraces. Built on concrete slabs, the houses were heated by water pipes 
buried in the floor. Each house had a module, or unit system, that formed the basis for its 
construction; this unit was incised into the wet concrete floors and served as a grid on 
which the house was built. The square, rectangle, hexagon, and triangle took their turns as 
these modules. 

One of the fundamental principles of Usonian architecture was that it should be affordable. 
Throughout his career Wright experimented with new ways of building to eliminate costly 
skilled craftspeople and expensive materials. He felt most challenged by clients who had 
big desires but a small pocketbook. He encouraged them to participate in the building 
themselves. Wright developed efficiencies in design that produced efficiencies in 
construction and lower costs, without compromising beauty-instead, reframing it. The 
methods were applied to small houses as well as to larger commissions and became the 
framework for his remaining designs. 


HANNA HOUSE 

Moved by Wright's philosophy of architecture, Jean and Paul Hanna, a young professor at 
Stanford University, approached Wright with their ideas and budget. His response was a 
magnificent design in Palo Alto, California, based on a hexagonal module, like a bee's 
honeycomb-thus giving the home its name, Honeycomb house. Wright opted for a 
120-degree angle over his favored 90-degree angle, demonstrating yet another method 
of breaking out of boxlike rooms. 

The house for Catherine and Herbert Jacobs, then under way in Madison, Wisconsin, 
established Wright's vision of a Usonian house. The 1936 house for the Hannas was a 
larger interpretation of the same concept, but its hexagonal module differed from the 
Jacobses' four-by-two-foot rectangle. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly for Wright, 
the house far exceeded the Hannas'  modest budget. Somehow, it got built. 

The house adapted easily to the changes in the family's needs for more than thirty-five 
years. During that time, they added a guest house and a hobby shop as well as a garden 
house. Their extensive landscaping enhanced the building's relationship to the gently 
sloping site. In 1974 the Hannas donated their beloved home to Stanford University. 
Before suffering extensive earthquake damage in 1989, it served as the home of the 
university's provost. 

Wright's use of flexible, mostly movable, interior and exterior walls gives the home a 
Japanese feeling. Entire window walls swing open, allowing the living spaces to flow out 
onto the concrete terraces. It also permitted the couple to convert many of the spaces to 
new shapes and uses when the children left home. The vertical module of the redwood 
board-and-batten walls relates to the horizontal module. The rooms casually wrap 
around the contours of the site to form spaces that slowly reveal themselves. The 
hexagonal unit creates a natural gentleness in the meander of the spaces. The trellislike 
windows frame garden views in all directions. The inner court with a cascading pool 
provides an embracing garden refuge. 

Inside, the original furnishings repeat the hexagonal motif. Interesting patterns are created 
when right-angled brick joins at 120-degree angled corners. A tall fireplace reaches out 
of its pit and into the living room. Grass matting covers the ceiling and adds a natural 
texture next to the smooth wood surfaces. The home is breezy, sheltered, cool in the 
summer heat. Radiant-heated floors are partially covered with neutral-colored, 
simple-textured carpets. 

In the Honeycomb house, obtuse angles seem to accept and respond to human activities 
more naturally than abrupt right angles. This is one of Wright's most welcoming interiors. 


ROSENBAUM HOUSE 

When Mildred and Stanley Rosenbaum were married in 1938, the groom's parents lured 
them back to Florence, Alabama, with the promise of an architect-designed home. 
Learning of Wright's work, the young couple eagerly sought his help. They became early 
pioneers of his Usonian concept of moderate-price housing for American families. Their 
1,540-square-foot house, built in 1939 for $12,000, was one of Wright's finest. 

Sensitively sited on two acres overlooking the Tennessee River, it is a simple horizontal 
statement. The cypress and brick home is based on a rectangular module and is placed on 
a concrete slab with heating beneath it. All walls and windows are aligned with a grid that 
is incised into the floor. The L-shaped plan is typically private on the street side and open 
at the back. Behind the entry, at the core of the house, is an open kitchen and dining area, 
which Wright called the workspace. One wing provides three bedrooms and two baths. 
The other includes an ample living room and library. A later courtyard addition, also 
designed by Wright, increased the bedroom area needed for the family's four sons and 
changed the plan to a T shape. 

All rooms open freely to the outdoors through floor-to-ceiling doors and windows, 
borrowing space, light, and color from nature. Rows and rows of multicolored books line 
the walls. Clerestory windows with perforated panels bring light into the closed side of the 
house. While many pieces of built-in and free-standing furniture were designed for the 
home using the same two-by-four-foot module, as well as the same cypress, the owners 
felt free to restructure the various components and to select other furniture. Charles 
Eames's molded plywood chairs and rectilinear upholstered pieces are compatible with the 
Wright tables and cabinets. Mildred Rosenbaum's favorite color, teal blue, complements 
the warm tones of the board-and batten walls. 

For fifty years, the home has successfully responded to the changing needs of the original 
family. The playground has become a Japanese garden. A bunk room has become a 
weaving studio. And now it is open to the public by appointment. 


POPE-LEIGHEY HOUSE 

"Will you create a house for us? Will you?" newspaperman Loren Pope wrote to Wright in 
1939.  There are certain things a man wants during life, and, of life. Material things and 
things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is for a house 
created by you. Created is the proper word. Many another architect might be able to plan 
or design a house. But only you can create one that will become for us a home.  Two weeks 
later came the reply from Wright: "Of course I am ready to give you a house." 

Simply built of cypress boards sandwiched over a plywood core, brick, and glass on a 
concrete pad, the house that Wright gave to Loren and Charlotte Pope in Falls Church, 
Virginia, eliminated all that was not essential. Another of Wright's L-shaped Usonian 
plans, built around a large tulip poplar tree, the 1941 house was a modest 1,200 square 
feet. Its flexibility meant that less space was needed. The ornament came from the 
materials themselves: the placement of windows, wood joinery and cutouts, patterns of the 
masonry. Simple linen and jute mats in a biscuit color covered the red floors. 

The living and dining areas are a few steps down from the entry level, so that the changing 
planes define activities, create interest, and adapt the building to its site. A sanctum or 
study is to the right of the entry. Opening to the outside on two sides, the house is filled 
with light and changing shadows all day. Despite the simplicity of the economical 
two-bedroom home, it is visually stimulating in every direction. The component seating 
and table groups can be gathered into various compositions for dining, conversation, 
lounging, or bridge parties. Again, Wright designed for efficiency and flexibility as well as 
aesthetics. One naturally followed the other. 

The Popes sold their house to Marjorie and Robert Leighey in 1946. After living there for 
eighteen years, the Leigheys learned that a planned interstate highway was destined to go 
right through their living room. Rather than see it demolished, Marjorie Leighey donated 
the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It was then dismantled, 
relocated, and rebuilt on the grounds of another National Trust property, the early 
nineteenth-century Woodlawn Plantation, in Mount Vernon, Virginia-a study in 
residential contrasts. While house moving is not the best way to save a building, it may, in 
some cases, be the only way. 


WALTER HOUSE 

After selling his road-building company in 1944, Lowell Walter sought to build a 
retirement home. Rather than move to Florida or California, he selected a site on a family 
farm in Quasqueton, lowa, where his family had lived for generations. Walter wanted an 
architect who would be sensitive to the beauties of the Midwest. What Wright produced 
the following year was a complex of buildings, including the house, a two-story river 
pavilion, and an outdoor hearth called "council fires," all suited to the informal lifestyle of 
the countryside. The eleven-acre site is now operated by the lowa Department of Natural 
Resources, to which Walter bequeathed it in 1981. 

One enters the estate through Wright-designed iron gates, down a drive lined with 
evergreens of many varieties, including local cedars. Only low shrubberies were planted 
near the house itself, creating a soft mat for its base. Gradually, the house, called Cedar 
Rock, is approached across a terrace, past flower planters. Sited on a hill overlooking a 
bend in the Wapsipinicon River, the house is built of red brick and based on a square 
five-foot, three-inch module. Massive masonry walls lift the home above the hillside, 
create delicate grilles, and define indoor and outdoor spaces. The roof is reinforced 
concrete, cantilevering out beyond the walls but pierced over the windows. 

The living room, or garden room, is actually a rotated square projecting out from the 
bedroom wing like a flower on a stem. Waxed walnut boards run the length of the gallery 
and are used in the shelves, defining the room's shape. Pieces of the beautifully crafted 
walnut furniture can be fitted together in various arrangements. The curved edges, either 
concave or convex, like that of the wood moldings, repeat the curve of the roof edge. A 
fireplace, large enough to accommodate five-foot logs, rises from its shallow pit. Tropical 
plants hang from planters above the soffit and fill planters built into the red concrete floor. 
The ceiling is pierced with square skylights to nourish the interior gardens. The walls are 
glass on three sides, mitered at the corners, and mirrored on the fourth. The room is an 
open garden pavilion with only a roof for shelter. 


ZIMMERMAN HOUSE 

Dr. Isadore Zimmerman and his wife, Lucille, a nurse, were one of many of Wright's 
clients who were drawn to his work through his autobiography. They were delighted with 
the opportunity to let Wright transform their personal interests and lifestyle into a concrete 
statement that suited their site. In that they allowed Wright a free rein and also shared his 
love of music , they were ideal clients. Isadore Zimmerman was an accomplished violinist 
who also studied and played the piano, and Lucille played the piano and cello. 

While considered a Usonian design because of its chronological age and construction style, 
the Zimmerman house, built in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1950, recalls Wright's 
earlier Prairie Style period as well. Its concept was economical, but the execution was 
more extravagant because of the selection of materials and the owners' demand for 
first-class craftsmanship. 

The broad, sheltering, gently sloped roof and horizontal profile nestle the home quietly 
into its wooded lot. Although Wright specified wood shingles, red clay tiles were 
ultimately used on the roof but have since been replaced with asphalt. The street elevation 
is private, with only a strip of special perforated concrete blocks framing small windows 
above the red brick base. This combination of materials was new for Wright. Specially 
beveled, carefully selected cypress boards were screwed into place, then the hole was 
plugged, making it invisible. A four-foot-square grid was incised into the concrete 
floor, but the vertical unit used throughout the house was thirteen inches. 

The garden room, the main living area, doubled as a concert space for the Zimmermans' 
friends, who gathered to share their love of music. The quartet stand is based on the one 
used at Taliesin. The southwest exposure opens to a beautifully landscaped garden 
abundant with rhododendron and punctuated with oak, pine, ash, and maple trees. Golden 
light fills the space on cold winter evenings. Five brick piers, with glass between, create a 
structural rhythm. Planters extend from one side of the glass to the other, blurring the 
distinction between inside and out. The other rooms are small to accommodate the 
generous living room within the limits of the 1,458 square feet of the entire house. 

A high-back bench, chairs, and hassocks are upholstered in handwoven fabrics, selected 
by Wright, in golds and rusts. A six-panel Japanese screen is attached to the end wall. 
Lamps have Japanese paper inserts. Over the years, the Zimmermans became avid art 
collectors. While they could not display paintings, their home became a personal gallery 
for their collection of three-dimensional art. They were especially fond of the pottery of 
Edwin Scheier but also collected sculpture by others. 

Consequently, they developed a close relationship with the Currier Gallery of Art. On 
Lucille Zimmerman's death in 1988, her home was bequeathed to the gallery, which has 
undertaken its restoration and provides guided tours. 


Living With Wright 

LIVING WITH WRIGHT'S EXTRAORDINARILY INTEGRATED VISION OF WHAT 
A HOUSE SHOULD BE POSES REAL CHALLENGES. WHAT CAN CHANGE? 
WHAT SHOULD STAY THE SAME? MANY PRIVATE OWNERS HAVE MET THIS 
CHALLENGE WITH RESPECT-AND SOME PATIENCE.    THE CHALLENGE 

The vast majority of Wright's residences, 269, are still privately owned by individuals or 
families. They are not museums. They are lived in by people who may have growing 
children, or hobbies, or pets. And living in a house designed by a world-renowned 
architect presents some difficult choices when one wants to update or adapt to new life 
patterns. The inherent public responsibility of owning such a house is, one hopes, repaid 
by the daily rewards of living in the harmonious environments that Wright created. 

Reflected Marjorie Leighey about the Pope-Leighey house:  At first there is quiet pleasure 
and thankfulness for being surrounded by something so admirable to look upon. Then 
comes the business of living. . . . Comes a time of rebellion, an anger at any 
dwelling-place that presumes to dictate how its occupants live. . . . Comes the time for 
decision. Do we truly like the house? Would we rather live here than anywhere else? 
Again the beauty spoke. . . . Intelligence was put to work to see how to live within the 
now-accepted limitations. 

Private owners like Marjorie Leighey, especially those who are not the original clients, 
have had to determine how their homes can best respond to their needs and their tastes and 
yet not upset the integrity of Wright's masterful spaces. Some have indiscriminately altered 
their buildings, tragically ignoring the original design intent and leaving great challenges 
for future preservationists. Others have carefully and sensitively made alterations. Some of 
these changes have been restorations, reversing inappropriate renovations. 

Still other homeowners have not made architectural changes but have, for one reason or 
another, furnished their homes, at least partially, with items that were not specifically 
designed for them but that are perfectly compatible. These owners have been able to 
respond to the powerful expectations of Wright's legacy without sacrificing their own 
individuality. In fact, each is enhanced. 

The owners of the homes shown here are representative of many who have successfully 
personalized their Wright houses. They have often gone to extraordinary lengths to do so 
and are to be commended for their investment in America's architectural heritage. 


HENDERSON HOUSE 

One of the earliest Prairie Style designs, the F. B. Henderson home in Elmhurst, Illinois, is 
often compared to the Hickox house built the previous year, 1900, in Kankakee. The 
similar floor plans include an elongated octagon that is shared by the living room, dining 
room, and library. The hipped roof and ribbons of art glass windows beneath broad 
sheltering eaves clearly reflect Wright's style of the decade. The space flows freely through 
the house, which is anchored by a broad, central chimney. The subtle design of the 
brickwork gives an illusion of a concave arch over the hearth, drawing one to the center. 

The current owners compare their home to a city loft space because of the openness of the 
first floor. A myriad of white and clear windows in simple compositions of squares and 
rectangles further extend the rooms into the garden and adjoining veranda. Original colors 
have been returned to the walls. The characteristic autumnal scheme has pumpkin walls 
below, with a stippled, light maize color above the russet-stained birch wood banding. 

Lacking information about the original furnishings, the family has sought reproductions of 
other Prairie Style and Arts and Crafts furniture. Some are custom designs; others were 
mass-produced. They blend smoothly and compatibly with the architecture of the rooms. 
The caramel leather seat covering of the settle, which is a reproduction of a Wright design 
for the Greene house in Aurora, Illinois, draws its color from the brick. A Stickley rocker 
echoes the rectilinear forms. The oak dining room furniture, recently custom made, was 
inspired by similar designs for the William Martin house in Oak Park and the Barton 
house in Buffalo. The octagonal posts of the chairs and table base repeat the octagonal bay 
in which they rest. Beneath, Oriental and Turkish carpets in geometric designs tie together 
groupings of furniture within the larger spaces. 

When family members turned their attention to renovating the landscape, they sought to 
complement the rigidity of the house's geometry with a natural, prairie garden. The 
undulating curves of the garden beds lead to protected play areas and quiet places to rest. 
Perennials, trees, and shrubs, particularly ones native to the midwestern prairie, were 
selected to provide a continuously changing display of colors and textures throughout the 
seasons. The bone stucco walls, trimmed with brown and capped with a cedar-shingled 
roof, provide a neutral background for the magnificent natural forms from which the house 
was born. 


BOYNTON HOUSE 

It is curious that a house built for a widower and his teenage daughter would have such 
generous dining and kitchen facilities. A cook and a maid also lived in the home, but it is 
not known if the businessman, Edward E. Boynton, or in future years his married 
daughter, were avid entertainers. Wright beautifully articulated and carefully supervised 
the construction in 1908 of this classic Prairie Style home in Rochester, New York. So, it 
is assumed that the attention he paid to the food preparation and serving areas was a 
reflection of the client's interest. 

The spacious dining room has two tables. The larger one has low lamp columns near each 
corner that also serve as flower holders. Not as high or obtrusive as those on the tables of 
the Robie or May houses, they focus the diners' attention on the intimacy of the table 
gathering. The smaller table near the expansive window bay overlooks the garden and 
would have been perfect for the two Boyntons dining alone. The room is further 
highlighted by art glass-covered ceiling lights and a band of clerestory windows over the 
light screen on the south wall. The dominant motif in the plentiful art glass is the square. 

The kitchen retains the original, simple pine cabinets, which have been restored by the 
current owners. A wood-color laminate now covers the counter tops, replacing the 
original wood, but the center island is still topped with hard maple. A commercial range 
and a restaurant rack above the island are practical additions. The maple floor, covered 
with linoleum by a previous owner, has been restored. Storage space is augmented by an 
adjoining pantry, now a gallery for the owners' handmade pottery collection, as well as a 
huge basement pantry. Baskets and other pieces of favorite art collected at art fairs around 
the country add to the personality of the home. 

The two principal bedroom suites clearly respond to the desires of the two original 
occupants. The master suite has simple built-in cabinets but minimal closets in the 
dressing room. It is spacious yet simply appointed, perfect for a man. Young Beulah's 
rooms, on the other hand, have generous closets and built-in cabinets in the dressing 
room, ample space for many dresses and gowns. Mirrors around the dressing table fold 
open for a complete viewing. 

The care and spirit with which the Boynton house was built are matched by the attention 
of the conscientious current owners. 


INGALLS HOUSE 

The projecting porch, cantilevered balconies, and simple, stucco surfaces of this 1909 
house in River Forest, Illinois, are reminiscent of the house Wright designed for Elizabeth 
Gale in Oak Park the same year. However, the symmetry and formality of the street facade 
are somewhat unusual for Wright. Even the art glass window designs are symmetrical, a 
bow of triangles above a rectangle with a low hipped roof like the house's own profile. 
Resting far back on its generous suburban lot, the house appears tranquil. 

First-floor spaces radiate from a central Roman brick fireplace, with smooth oak 
moldings linking and defining the various planes. Upstairs, four bedrooms and one 
bathroom surround the central hall. It was a simple but compact plan that fulfilled the 
desire of the clients, Mr. and Mrs. J. Kibben Ingalls, for maximum ventilation. 

But the present owners wished to stretch out and increase their living area as their family 
needs grew. The tiny, outdated kitchen was a particular concern. Inspired by Wright's own 
symmetry, they saw an opportunity to expand the home without altering the primary 
spaces or the street facade. They nearly mirrored the east elevation on the west side. 
Additions to Wright's buildings, usually discouraged, require courage as well as a total 
understanding of and respect for the original design intention. The result here is a unified 
plan that enhances rather than diminishes the house's harmony. 

The original kitchen and a 1926 porch addition by Wright apprentice William Drummond 
were removed, and a large, modern kitchen-family room was added. Matching Wright's 
plan for the front of the house, the back includes a terrace with a cantilevered roof. A bit 
more width was achieved by making the north and south bays added on the west slightly 
larger than those on the east. The new informal cooking and gathering space nearly 
doubles in size in warmer months when activities reach out onto the terrace overlooking 
the garden. Upstairs, a small bedroom was enlarged, and a ribbon of windows replaced the 
single original one. In total, twenty-one new art glass windows and doors were fabricated 
to match the originals. 

All of the changes were carefully documented, leaving a complete historical record. Every 
detail, every molding, every finish, and, most important, the scale and open plan are in 
keeping with Wright's grammar for the house. 


COONLEY PLAY HOUSE 

When their glorious, pavilioned estate, the Coonley house, was completed in 1908, Mr. 
and Mrs. Avery Coonley were so energized that they decided to build a school in 
Riverside, Illinois, to further their ideals of progressive education. In 1912 Wright 
produced a cubist composition reminiscent of a Froebel block construction from his 
childhood. Dozens of colorful art glass windows, inspired by the balloons, flags, and 
confetti of parades, lined the walls. Their bright primary colors and lively geometric 
designs make them some of Wright's most famous windows. Sadly, the building served as 
a primary school only for a few years. Over the next sixty years, it was remodeled 
extensively, and most of the windows were sold. 

Energetic new owners have thoughtfully restored the Coonley playhouse, including 
meticulously reproducing most of the windows using photographs and existing examples 
as their guide. While the open plan serves their needs as a home, it is also a splendid 
gallery space for their extraordinary collection of decorative arts. Fused glass is displayed 
in and on Arts and Crafts cabinets, illuminated by light from the three tall front windows. 
Ribbons of clerestory windows allow treetop views but no distractions. 

In the other direction, one is drawn to the fireplace, three steps up on a stage. Nearby, 
chairs and tables designed by noted furniture designer George Nakashima work as 
components much like Wright's Usonian furniture. They can be regrouped easily for 
different purposes. All are constructed of walnut to match the extensive millwork in the 
room. Handwoven fabrics, some with colorful, geometric designs inspired by the windows 
and subtle grillework patterns, cover the seat cushions and stools.     


BOGK HOUSE 

Born in 1916 while Wright was immersed in the construction of the Imperial Hotel, this 
town house in Milwaukee was an artistic amalgam of various inspirational sources. It was 
built for the family of F. C. Bogk, a civic leader and banker. Whether seen as a transitional 
design or as a unique statement of its own, the house is unquestionably successful. A low 
hipped roof shelters the richly ornamented brick cube. Like a treasure box, it holds many 
jewels. 

The living room, one and a half stories high, bestows its magical gifts. Originally painted 
metallic gold with a celadon-colored ceiling, it has a distinct Oriental flavor. Fortunately, 
the clients shared Wright's fascination with Japanese art. George Niedecken, Wright's able 
associate in Milwaukee, coordinated the interiors. Small squares of golden glass sparkle in 
the windows. More small squares march around the edges of the cabinetry, adding to the 
rhythm. Multiple custom carpets with medallions composed of squares in a variety of sizes 
and colors were designed to unify the spaces and confirm the color scheme. Attached and 
free-standing furniture expresses the grammar of the Prairie School but has a subtle 
Japanese feeling. 

Walnut moldings wrap the walls, leading the eye from one interesting space to the next. 
Passing a fish pond, one is drawn up three stairs, beyond a planter with lanterns in a 
garden alcove, to the dining room. A wall of vertical art glass windows opens the room to 
the garden. At the center is another version of Wright's well-known straight-back chairs 
and rectangular table. These pieces, however, are partially caned, a unique and possibly 
Japanese variation. Custom light fixtures and a buffet complete the unified environment. 

In the early 1960s the current owners commissioned Wright's followers at Taliesin to 
refresh the home's interiors. The soft earthen color scheme was changed to jewel tones of 
turquoise, carnelian, and citron. Carpets were rewoven in the original patterns but in the 
new colors; the originals were given to a museum. Furniture that remained has been 
augmented with pieces Wright designed for the Heritage-Henredon Furniture Company 
in the 1950s and with others designed by the Taliesin architects. New upholstery fabrics 
were selected. The house became a brighter version of its former self. 


STORER HOUSE 

John Storer's 1923 house in Hollywood became the manifestation of Wright's newest 
synthesis of experiences and influences-a textile block house. Built for a retired doctor, 
the house encountered innumerable problems during construction, as did the other textile 
block houses. The cost overruns were enormous. Sadly, Storer died, bankrupt, in 1927. His 
dream home passed from hand to hand until 1984, when it was purchased by a film 
producer, who has now completed a comprehensive restoration enhanced by his own 
collections. 

In a most unusual plan, two bedrooms are on the first floor, and others are above them on 
the main floor along with the dining room and kitchen, which open onto garden terraces. 
The living room rests immediately above the dining room, on the top floor, like a watch 
tower, with verandas for scanning vistas. Columns of glass and textile blocks rise two 
stories on both sides of the living-dining core. 

Four geometric block designs are rhythmically intermixed in vertical and horizontal 
patterns, forming solid walls, windows, grilles, fireplaces, terraces, and pools. They sculpt 
imaginative and mysterious indoor and outdoor rooms from the earth. 

The home is furnished with an extraordinary collection of Wright and Arts and Crafts 
decorative objects. Because no furniture was custom designed, the owner has blended 
pieces made for other Wright buildings: a Prairie Style chair comfortably shares space 
with a Usonian chair, related by their rectilinear origins. Designed in the center of 
Wright's career, the house seems to serve as a bridge between his various furniture styles 
now seen within its walls. 

While generally faithful to the original plan, the owner and his architect, Eric Lloyd 
Wright, grandson of Wright, made two sensitive changes. They added a swimming pool, 
edged in matching textile blocks, that fits neatly into the back of the tight hillside lot. A 
modern kitchen also was installed without disturbing the historic architecture but deriving 
its forms and inspiration from it. 


AULDBRASS 

Wright was soon given an opportunity to apply his Usonian concepts to a southern 
plantation. The result was a rambling, informal complex of residential and farm buildings 
in Yemassee, South Carolina, that was far from the formality of the traditional southern 
mansion. The Leigh Stevens family occupied Auldbrass plantation beginning in 1939 and 
owned the home for more than thirty years. 

Based on a hexagonal module, thirty inches on a side, the spaces take on an undulating 
openness. Wright reacted to the ubiquitous live oak trees and the sway of the Spanish moss 
by adopting their angle for the house's walls. All of the walls thus are sloped inward nine 
degrees, as well as from left to right-certainly creating a complex composition of angles 
to challenge the masons and carpenters. An abstracted version of moss is the basis for the 
downspout designs that fall from the corners. The pattern in the glass doors recalls a live 
oak branch. Tidewater cypress planks form the walls around the radiant-heated Cherokee 
red slab floor. Overhead, 33,000 square feet of new pleated copper roof shelters all. 

As in antebellum days, the kitchen was placed in a separate building connected to the 
main house by an open pergola, which isolated the cooking heat; the connecting space has 
now been enclosed, creating a long dining room between the areas. A modular table of 
three five-foot hexagons, two parallelograms, and three triangles can be arranged in a 
variety of patterns suitable for up to eighteen guests. A breakfast room overlooks the pool. 
Cool breezes are invited in through dozens of french doors opening to terraces on all sides. 

The complexity of this angular puzzle continues. Perforated screens above are cut in 
diagonal patterns inspired by the Yemassee Indians, creating a shadow stencil for the 
light. Only a few pieces of the cypress plywood furniture that Wright designed still remain 
in the home. They have been restored, and dozens of new pieces were constructed from 
original designs, all of which are based on a hexagonal unit. Triangular hassocks (partial 
hexagons) are clustered in various patterns; benches, shelving, and counter tops wrap 
around hexagonal walls; chair legs angle out beyond chair backs; hexagonal beds have 
adjoining triangular tables. Textured upholstery fabrics and soft blue-greens complement 
the warm tones of the wood, brick, leather, and colored floor. Despite the complexity, the 
abiding feeling is tranquillity. 

Wright was called back to make modifications in 1951, but the years that followed took 
their toll on the property. In 1987 it was rescued by a new owner, who has worked 
diligently to recapture the original spirit. Since then, all of the buildings, furnishings, and 
grounds have been meticulously restored. Auldbrass is again a collector's hospitable retreat 
that provides an alternative to our right-angled world. 


BROWN HOUSE 

In designs for several cooperative residential subdivisions, Wright combined his interest in 
affordable housing with his ideas for community planning. One such project was the 1947 
plan for Parkwyn Village in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which laid out dozens of circular lots 
around a small lake. The common area between the circles was planted with native 
vegetation. 

In 1949 Eric and Ann Brown built one of four Wright-designed homes that were 
completed on a gracefully flowing street. Like the others, it was constructed of specially 
designed blocks of cast concrete, a readily available and economical material in the 
postwar era. Using a square module, the house extended 135 feet to include five bedrooms 
for the couple's three children, father-in-law, and housekeeper, but it still maintained 
the intended benefits of simplicity. The shallow-pitched roof with a fine gravel cover 
nearly blends into the gravel driveway, presenting a sheltering entrance. 

The fireplace-with its surrounding pool, a dramatic feature of the spacious living 
room-has a six-foot-wide opening to accommodate extra-large logs. All rooms but 
one face the southwest to maximize the sun's warmth in this northern climate. A 
complementary color scheme arose from the architect's desire to use gold and the client's 
fondness for blue-green. Brightly colored pillows, nubby textured fabrics, and ceilings of 
Honduran mahogany bring additional warmth into the cool gray rooms. 

For four decades the home has successfully adapted to the changing needs of the family. 
Ann Brown's interest in the arts was considered in the early plans and continues to be 
served by the spaces. The living room converts to a concert hall when the two pianos are 
surrounded by the numerous modular seating pieces. The fine acoustics needed for her 
piano classes also manage to protect the bedrooms from excessive noise. The children's 
bunk room has recently become her painting studio. And the desire for space in which to 
exhibit her work and their collection of paintings found a creative solution: wide shelves 
were placed along one of the few plain walls, and paintings are stacked several deep on 
each. Those visible on top are rotated to provide a personal gallery with any number of 
changing exhibitions. 

The simple, neutral concrete surfaces serve as a canvas for the family, their activities, and 
their art. 


LOVNESS STUDIO 

In his Usonian period, Wright was particularly challenged by prospective clients who 
approached him with overwhelming enthusiasm but a small budget. Such was the case 
with Donald and Virginia Lovness of Stillwater, Minnesota. Wright encouraged them to 
undertake a "do-it-yourself" house to save money, as he did with many other clients in 
the postwar years. 

The house that had been estimated at $83,000 cost them only $20,000 in 1955-plus, of 
course, a treasury of personal commitment and two years of back-breaking effort. 
Originally conceived as a Usonian Automatic, Wright's experimental system using 
specially cast concrete blocks, the design evolved into a stone structure at the owners' 
insistence. Stone by stone, the young Lovnesses built their home according to Wright's 
design. 

What they call their studio is a compact plan based on a simple four-foot-square 
module. Dolomite masonry piers support a cantilevered flat roof above a concrete slab 
floor. The open side of the house has floor-to-ceiling doors and windows, mitered at the 
corners, welcoming nature inside. Light is drawn into the house's closed side through 
square clerestory windows in the workspace. The geometric elements overlap and 
interrelate with each other and with the stone columns and decks of the building itself, 
creating a multidimensional sculpture. Donald Lovness, an accomplished wood-worker, 
has continued to build, including numerous pieces of oak furniture designed by Wright for 
their home; Virginia Lovness does the finishing and upholstery. Together, architect and 
clients created a home with the richness and serenity of a temple. 

Situated on a wooded hill above a small semiprivate lake, the house is a restful, artful 
retreat. Its low profile, not visible from the street, emerges at the end of a narrow drive 
with a pond on one side and a lake on the other. The 26,000 pine trees planted on the 
former pasture land have matured into a surrounding forest. 

In 1972, after four years of work, one of four cottages that Wright designed for their 
lakefront was completed. Nestled into its lot, the cottage contributes to the harmony of the 
setting, repeating many of the house's elements and sharing the beauty of the site. 


PALMER HOUSE 

Wright often attracted clients who shared his interests as much as they liked his 
architecture. They hoped that their home would be more than a shelter from the elements, 
just a place to sleep and eat-that it would be a life-enriching environment. They were 
rewarded with homes that nourished their interests and their spirits. 

When Mary Palmer, a graduate in music theory, visited her first Wright home, she later 
wrote, "His architecture is like a Beethoven quartet. It is vibrant. It is exciting. It is 
harmonious." She related to Wright's ability to compose a building. Together, Mary and 
William Palmer worked with Wright to create a new opus that has become more beautiful 
every year. 

A triangular module was the basis for their home in Ann Arbor, which was built in 1952 
on a protected hillside near the University of Michigan, where William Palmer taught 
economics. Entering from the carport, one gradually ascends a dozen broad, shallow stairs 
in a long, open corridor of russet brick with bands of perforated ceramic blocks, their 
pattern reflecting the house's floor plan. To the left, toward the light, the space of the 
living area bursts forth. Straight ahead, a narrow passageway leads to the bedroom wing, 
located in a second triangle. 

The primary room is a large triangle that projects dramatically into a meticulously 
landscaped garden. Clear-grained, red tidewater cypress boards rise to the ceiling above. 
Ambers, mossy greens, and rusts, inspired by the tones of the cypress boards, have been 
used for upholstery fabrics and cushions. Handwoven throws, scarves, and Japanese 
textiles add counterpoints. A delicate pattern covers, then hangs, like an obi, from the 
backs of the dining chairs, softening the edges of the cypress. Down several shallow stairs, 
broad eaves provide shelter to the terrace, an extension of the indoor space. 

The Palmers' interest in gardening and Japanese culture intensified in their new home. 
Japanese floral arrangements inside lead the eye beyond, to a garden that has been 
gradually, naturally, evolving for four decades. 


The Wright Influence 

WRIGHT INSPIRED SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF ARCHITECTS. FORSEVENTY 
YEARS, HE TAUGHT ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE, AND YOUNG ARCHITECTS 
LISTENED. THOSE COMMITTED TO HIS DEEPLY HELD PRINCIPLES CONTINUE 
TO RESIST FASHIONS AND PROVIDE UNIQUE AMERICAN DESIGNS. 


WRIGHT'S ASSOCIATES 

Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to American architecture did not end with his death in 
1959. It is alive and well. He directly inspired hundreds of apprentices who worked at his 
side in his Oak Park studio and, later, at the two Taliesins. The Taliesin Fellowship, which 
began accepting students in 1932, provided a hands-on apprenticeship in designing, 
building, and artful living. Some stayed for only a few weeks, others for decades, a few for 
a lifetime. Many carried Wright's principles with them as they established their own 
practices and developed their own admirers. With Taliesin Architects, Ltd., a for-profit 
subsidiary of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the fellowship continues to teach 
through practical experience. 

Wright taught principles, not a style to be slavishly imitated. The degree to which the 
former associates have individualized their interpretation of those principles of organic 
architecture varies greatly. Some of the early draftsmen in the Oak Park studio deviated 
little from Wright's actual Prairie Style designs. In fact, their buildings are often mistaken 
for his. Wright depended on his architects to be extensions of his hand-as he was a 
"pencil" in Louis Sullivan's hand-to produce thousands of drawings and make on-site 
decisions. This expectation of fidelity became a privilege and a burden. 

In contrast, some who studied with Wright in the later years at Taliesin, such as John 
Lautner, have strongly resisted being categorized as practicing a Wright style, despite 
Wright's profound impact. "Architecture in its truest sense," said Lautner, "may not be 
academically defined. If it is, it becomes a dead, non-growing entity or cliche." The 
majority of the former apprentices still practicing today would no doubt agree. Countless 
other architects never worked in Wright's studio but had parallel careers or studied his 
work thoughtfully from afar. It would be futile to estimate the impact of this one man on 
the architecture profession during the past century-as well as on all of us whose 
perceptions of architecture have been irrevocably changed. 

The houses that follow are a small sample of the work of some of those whose response to 
the needs of their clients was based on their experience with Frank Lloyd Wright. 


BARR HOUSE 

During the twelve active years of Wright's Oak Park studio, some two dozen draftsmen 
and one woman moved in and out through its doors. Many came for only a few weeks to 
work on a project; others were more steady assistants. Among the latter was William 
Drummond, who came to Wright in 1899 and stayed for most of the next decade. On 
leaving Wright's studio, not long before Wright himself left to go to Europe in 1909, 
Drummond established himself as a less troublesome alternative to Wright. Many 
opportunities came his way from past and potential Wright clients, Mrs. Avery Coonley 
among them. He was particularly well received in River Forest, where he completed 
sixteen commissions, including his own home next door to his coworker lsabel Roberts. 

This stucco, board-and-batten house designed for librarian Charles Barr in River Forest 
in 1912 was a typical commission. Although it was prepared during his three-year 
partnership with Louis Guenzel, it is distinctly from Drummond's hand. The indirect side 
entrance is gracefully sheltered and defined by the landscaping and a small projecting 
wall. The crisp, clean-edged lines and angles are characteristic of his version of the 
Prairie Style. The horizontal emphasis in the bands of art glass windows, shallow hipped 
roof, wide overhangs, and simple geometric forms are similar to those from Wright's 
office. Drummond was adept at the grammar of the Prairie Style, borrowing from Wright 
without actually copying him. 

The differences are most apparent inside. A bold fireplace mass anchors the house at its 
center and opens on three sides to the living room, dining room, and hallway. The living 
room gives way to a projecting front porch and adjoins the dining room in a compact but 
seemingly spacious plan. The simple lines and neutral color of the owners' furniture 
permit an uninterrupted appreciation of the architectural elements. The geometric 
compositions drawn by the intersection of lines and planes are defined by extensive wood 
moldings and decks. This bright, open interior is an efficient manipulation of a 
forty-foot-square plan into interesting and adaptable spaces. 

A later addition on the back of the house has recently been reworked so that it is more in 
keeping with the original designs and proportions. The roof pitch, cantilever, and art glass 
windows now echo the original elements. 


PURCELL-CUTTS HOUSE 

William Gray Purcell grew up not far from Wright's studio in Oak Park but never actually 
worked there. He did, however, work for Wright's teacher, Louis Sullivan, for a few 
months in 1903; there, he met George Grant Elmslie, who served as chief draftsman for 
nearly twenty years. After forming a partnership in Minneapolis in 1907, Purcell and 
Elmslie became the most prolific of the Prairie School architects, continuing to design in 
the style after World War I. 

Composed for Purcell's own family in 1913, this house in Minneapolis was one of their 
finest. In 1985 the Anson Cutts family, which had owned it for sixty-six years, 
bequeathed it to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which has undertaken a thorough 
restoration and opened it to the public. 

Elmslie brought a hand well schooled in interior ornamentation to the partnership. The 
fluid, nature-inspired art glass, stencils, murals, furniture, and carpet designs in their 
projects were largely his work. Purcell's genius was evident in the layout of their houses. 
They, too, sought an American architecture that responded to the openness and flexibility 
of its lifestyle and natural beauty. While it is hard to calculate Wright's influence on their 
work, Sullivan's inspiration is an undeniable common thread linking them. 

A variety of spaces in the long, narrow stucco house are found on several levels. A vaulted 
ceiling spans the ground-level living room and the second-level dining room before it 
gives way to the projecting terrace ceiling. Beneath are finely detailed and sometimes 
whimsical components that all neatly interrelate. A tiny writing nook in a corner of the 
living room provides a personal space with its own desk. But the fireplace wall was given 
the greatest attention. The naturalist and the craftsman worked together in wood and brick, 
paint and glass to accentuate the quiet power of the horizontal line. A triangle motif is 
repeated in all of the art glass and in some of the furniture. Stencil designs ring the 
ceiling, some resurrecting the triangle theme. Even the globes of the lights are 
sponge-painted to blend with the mottled rosy sand walls. 

The varied, integral ornament and the extraordinary craftsmanship enhance the function 
and warmth of the home. The feeling is mellow and unified but more delicate than 
Wright's interiors. 


ERSKINE HOUSE 

John S. Van Bergen, an Oak Park native, was one of the last to join Wright's Oak Park 
studio. He arrived in early 1909 after apprenticing for two years with Walter Burley 
Griffin, another Wright protg. Van Bergen also was the last to leave, staying on until 1911 
with Isabel Roberts to complete the work that Wright had abandoned when he went to 
Europe in 1909. After opening his own office in Oak Park, Van Bergen continued to 
design Prairie Style houses until they went out of fashion during World War I. He is 
credited with eighteen houses in Oak Park alone between 1912 and 1926, most of them 
Prairie. Van Bergen was so extremely faithful to the language Wright devised that little of 
his own creativity is apparent in many of his works. After the war, a return to more 
traditional styles left most designers who had been seeking a new American architecture 
scrambling for work. Van Bergen moved to Chicago's north shore, where he designed 
many interesting houses, and eventually went to California, where he practiced until he 
was eighty years old. 

Van Bergen drew heavily on Wright's design for a "Fireproof House for $5,000," which 
was published in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1906. Later, he borrowed ideas from the 
American System Built Homes that Wright designed for the Richards Company in 
Milwaukee. The 1913 house in Oak Park built for lawyer Robert Erskine and his family 
was typical of Van Bergen's versions of the "Fireproof House." Intended to be poured 
concrete, it was stucco on wood frame instead. Its compact, thirty-foot-square plan fits 
neatly on the urban grid for which it was designed. Beneath a low hipped roof are a living 
room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor and three bedrooms and a bathroom on 
the second. An early addition included a first-floor den and bathroom and an extra 
bedroom to the rear. 

No space is wasted. It is efficient and economical yet offers many of the distinctive features 
of larger Prairie Style houses. A sheltering porch provides a welcome at the side entrance, 
easing the transition inside. Van Bergen varied the plan by placing the entrance between 
the living and dining areas rather than between the kitchen and living room. A large, 
rectilinear fireplace marks the center of the house, with bands of art glass windows 
defining the perimeters. The wood stripping on the exterior and interior walls emphasizes 
the rectangular forms that are repeated throughout. Leading the eye horizontally from one 
space to another, they attempt to destroy the box as much as possible, giving the illusion of 
much grander spaces. 


SCHINDLER HOUSE 

One of the few apprentices who worked with Wright during the transition between the Oak 
Park studio and the Taliesin Fellowship was Viennese architect Rudolph M. Schindler. 
Schindler and his wife, Pauline, were inspired by Taliesin's unified experience of work and 
play in a natural setting. In 1920 Schindler went to Los Angeles to supervise the Barnsdall 
projects for Wright, but by 1921 he had established his own practice. Its base until his 
death in 1953 was this innovative home and studio in West Hollywood. 

Designed and built that first year jointly by the Schindlers and their close friends, Clyde 
and Marian Chase, the complex incorporates some distinct Wright influences as well as 
new poured-concrete technologies with which Chase was familiar. Like Wright's 
buildings, it is based on a unit system organized into flexible, inspiring spaces and is 
intimately related to its site. While the use of walls of doors that open to outside gardens is 
similar to Wright's treatment of the Hollyhock house, many of the Schindler house's 
techniques predate applications by Wright in his later Usonian designs. 

The most radical departure from traditional plans was the owners' scheme for cooperative 
living. As Schindler described it:  The basic idea was to give each person his own 
room-instead of the usual distribution-and to do most of the cooking right at the 
table-making it more a social "campfire" affair, than the disagreeable burden to one 
member of the family. . . . Each room represents a variation on one structural and 
architectural theme. . . . the basic requirement for a camper's shelter: a protected back, an 
open front, a fireplace and a roof.  Open-air sleeping was accommodated by a rooftop 
porch, and a guest wing was included to provide rental income. 

The house is built of durable and easy-to-maintain concrete and has a gravel roof. 
Employing what Schindler called his slab-tilt system, the forms were constructed 
horizontally; then the concrete was poured, finished, and left to dry, following which the 
slabs were tilted into vertical positions with a block and tackle. The spaces left when the 
forms were removed were filled with concrete or glass. 

The couples built their own furniture over several years, then the Chases left in 1924 and 
were replaced by the family of Richard Neutra, another Viennese architect who also had 
worked briefly with Wright. For a long time, this communal home typified the creative, 
progressive ideologies discussed within its walls. 


DOW STUDIO 

Early in life, Alden Dow, son of the founder of the Dow Chemical Company, demonstrated 
a fondness for and a sensitivity to design. In fact, he was drawn to architecture when he 
stayed at Wright's Imperial Hotel as a child, visiting Japan with his parents. Like Wright, 
he dabbled in photography as a means of recording the images of life in a composed 
format. Soon after graduation from Columbia University's school of architecture, he and 
his wife, Vada, spent a memorable five months at Taliesin in 1933. There, Dow found 
someone who shared his interest in nature, in the relationship of a building's materials to 
its design, and in the impact of a building on its occupants-a kindred spirit. 

He soon opened his own studio in Midland, Michigan, where he practiced architecture 
until his death in 1983. Dow named his design philosophy "composed order." It 
recognized, he explained, "that there may be many good answers put together in a variety 
of ways and that truly great results come from an organic or growable idea on which 
smaller contributions can develop. The ideal is to achieve harmony among the people, 
materials and ideas involved." He was so admired for his contribution to his home state 
that he was named its architect laureate in 1983. The Alden B. Dow Creativity Center was 
founded to perpetuate his commitment to quality and innovation. 

Like Wright, Dow focused his career on residential architecture. Over the years he 
designed sixty homes in Midland and many others elsewhere in the country. During the 
1930s he built thirteen houses using a patented system called Unit Blocks. Among them 
was his own home and studio in Midland, built between 1937 and 1940. There is no better 
example of his philosophy or his ability to intermingle nature and architecture than this 
inspiring composition. 

The one-foot-square Unit Blocks were cast from recycled cinders from the Dow 
Chemical Company. He used them not only to form walls and terraces beneath the broad 
copper roof; they also took their place ornamentally in the surrounding pond, like stepping 
stones. Water is often an integral part of Dow's designs. Here, the pond he created stops 
just short of his studio, separated only by two layers of blocks. A conference room in the 
reception area, often called the submarine room, is actually two feet below the pond's 
surface. When the suns reflects off the water into the room, it dances on the walls. The 
porch and other rooms overlook the pond. Interior spaces flow quietly into the garden. 
There is hardly a pause where one meets the other. 

Custom built-in furniture and other decorative arts that were designed or selected for the 
rooms maintain the geometry and the rhythm of the building. Modular stools can be pulled 
out from beneath multilevel tables to provide extra seating. Woven plastic strips conceal 
lighting in the living room ceiling. Unlike Wright, Dow used generous amounts of bright 
colors. Vibrant, clear hues contrast with white-painted cinder blocks throughout the 
complex, creating an excitement that challenges the serenity of the gracious spaces. The 
bright green carpet in one living room area yields to red in the next. Multicolored cushions 
dot the sofa. In Dow's office, multiple planes overlap in the ceiling, each another pure 
color-red, green, hot pink, purple, yellow. As Dow urged, "Separate parts put together so 
each part contributes the most to the others." 


BOWLER HOUSE 

Lloyd Wright, actually Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., the oldest child of the Oak Park family, 
was born the year in which Catherine and Frank moved into their home, 1889. As a young 
man he traveled to Italy to help his father prepare the drawings for the famous German 
publication of Wright's work produced by Ernst Wasmuth in 1910-1911. He was trained 
as a landscape architect in the office of the noted landscape architects Olmsted and 
Olmsted and later worked for Irving Gill, a California architect who did pioneering work 
in concrete technology. 

From 1920 to 1925, while his father was traveling back and forth to Japan and later to the 
Midwest, Lloyd Wright supervised most of the California concrete block commissions then 
under construction, a project that proved frustrating given the elder Wright's 
inaccessibility. However, Lloyd Wright continued to experiment with concrete construction 
throughout the 1920s. His designs were often richly ornamented and imaginative, well 
suited to his California clientele. He practiced architecture and landscape design in the Los 
Angeles area until his death in 1978. His most well-known commission was the 
Wayfarers Chapel of 1951 in Palos Verdes. 

John Bowler, a contractor for industrial buildings, had heard of Lloyd Wright through 
another client. Bowler needed a large family home for his four growing boys in Palos 
Verdes. In 1963 Lloyd Wright produced a fanciful form, somewhat like an exotic bird that 
has just landed on a rock ledge. Its reinforced concrete deck and slab, together with the 
wood-frame and stucco walls, establish a solid base for the complex plan, which is based 
on a diamond module. An unusual roof system of built-up roofing on a wood frame, with 
a thin layer of pumice concrete on top to protect it, has proven to be durable while 
maintaining the uniform texture of the walls. 

Lloyd Wright, of course, beautifully landscaped the entire site and designed all of the 
furniture for the living and dining rooms. Velveteen upholstery on the seating pieces 
repeats the yellow-green tones of a geometric-patterned screen in the living room. 
Angles continue throughout the home. Mirrors in the bathroom are faceted like a crystal. 
The fireplace and rhythmic columns are a tan Arizona sandstone. The travertine floor was 
a later, but compatible, addition. 

In the Bowler house, the architect was given the opportunity and freedom to create a total 
unity, inside and out, providing a durable and inspiring home base for the venturesome 
family. 


HOWE HOUSE 

For twenty-seven years John Howe worked at the side of Frank Lloyd Wright, directing 
the activities of his drafting room and completing many of Wright's presentation drawings. 
As one of the first members of the Taliesin Fellowship, he was well schooled in the 
principles of organic architecture. After Wright's death, he established a successful 
practice in Minneapolis, where, like Wright, he has focused on houses. 

John and Lu Howe's own 1971 home, Sankaku, the Japanese term for an equilateral 
triangle, is nestled in a hillside overlooking a small wooded lake in Burnsville. The 
triangle gives the home not just its name but also its energy and repose. The approach to 
the concealed front door is down a naturally landscaped path, onto a deck, across a bridge. 
Inside, a narrow hallway leads at an angle to open, multilevel spaces that embrace their 
natural setting. Down a few stairs, the living, dining, and kitchen areas open to the lake 
view. Porches enhance the rooms spatially and aesthetically, drawing one's vision and 
activities beyond the walls. The two bedrooms are on the entry level, and a sanctum-like 
a treehouse-rests among the branches at the top. Half walls are used when full-height 
walls are not needed, opening the spaces one to another. 

While compact, the house feels spacious because it borrows space, visually, from outside 
and is not compartmentalized. Soft light reflecting from light decks adds to the serenity of 
the living room. The triangle reappears like an old friend in light fixtures, art glass, 
furniture, stairway treads, and porches. It is reformulated into hexagons for tables and 
cutout designs in the light deck. 

All of the furniture was designed by Howe, but it bears a close resemblance to familiar 
Wright designs. The long bench, triangular lounge chairs, and straight dining chairs all 
are scaled perfectly to suit their purpose and their space. The gold and tangerine 
upholstery is a nubby, basket weave in contrast to the hard, clean lines and smooth 
Philippine mahogany surfaces. Carefully selected accessories project a love for fine 
craftsmanship and a respect for the artisan. Simple Japanese art draws attention to a wall 
or a shelf. The efficiency of the spaces is so enhanced by the personal interests of the 
owners that the house radiates an inherent glow of harmony. 


GERINGER HOUSE 

Arthur Dyson apprenticed with architects Bruce Goff and William Gray Purcell as well as 
Frank Lloyd Wright. From them he extracted a personal style that enables him to create 
original spaces from the unique needs and characters of his clients. Like Wright, the dry 
inventory of clients' needs is not as important as knowing what gives them pleasure, what 
aspects of nature they admire, and what the attributes of their site are. "Architecture is a 
philosophy towards life," he says, "an avenue which originates with living individuals and 
their requirements-incorporating everything from the pragmatism of resisting the 
elements to the poetry of ideals and dreams, and undertakes to provide a setting to awaken 
senses, to stimulate imagination and to expand consciousness in a world in harmony with 
its environment." 

When asked to design a house in Kerman, California, for Ralph and Nancy Geringer, 
Dyson, now based in Fresno, found that this young farming couple with two sons wanted a 
home that would separate them from the fields of grapes that dominated their days. They 
desired a private shelter, horizontal and rustic in feeling, that would give them visual 
access to the views but protect them from the sun and wind and farm activities. 

What they got, in 1979, was a farmhouse-in-the-round. The circular home, raised 
above the land, makes room for a lush oasis in its center court. A swimming pool, spa, and 
generous plantings on surrounding terraces contrast with the dusty fields outside their 
walls. All division walls radiate from the center. 

The kitchen opens to the game room and overlooks the pool. An overhead trellis holds pots 
and pans and repeats the trellises that are used elsewhere to filter light and link areas. 
Generous windows open the home to the center, offering terraces for indoor-outdoor 
living. Interior spaces are varied, some with high, soaring ceilings, others with low, 
intimate ones. Hidden corners throughout the house offer special views. Light streams 
through clerestory windows but allows privacy. The trellises and low roofs intensify 
movement in some areas, while others, such as the living rooms, emerge as open pools of 
space. The board-and-batten walls and cedar-shingled roof create interesting 
compositions as they curve and turn and shelter from the sun. 


EDMONDSON HOUSE 

The short time E. Fay Jones spent at Taliesin in 1953 left an indelible imprint on his life's 
work. As an apprentice who was a graduate of Rice University's architecture school, he 
quickly absorbed Wright's principles of organic architecture; they have guided his work 
into breathtaking directions. He has inspired emerging architects at the University of 
Arkansas for nearly forty years. His understanding of nature's systems and materials, his 
ability to translate them into forms responding to a client's needs, and his meticulous 
attention to detail have produced an abundance of award-winning buildings and the Gold 
Medal of the American Institute of Architects for himself. 

The house Jones designed in 1979 for Don and Ellen Edmondson in Forest City, Arkansas, 
not far from the architect's office in Fayetteville, came about from careful analysis of the 
clients' desires and the potential of the dramatic site. The mutual trust among clients, 
architect, and an able builder produced a magnificent house that rises four levels within 
the trees on Crowley's Ridge, high above a lake. 

Gracefully rooted to its site, the house is layered into the hillside like the dogwood that 
surrounds it. Broad horizontal tile roofs anchor the building, while creamy stucco walls 
and rich redwood details reach for the treetops. The clients preferred a more tailored look 
than stone would have given. They chose stucco, which offers a canvas for patterns cast by 
branches and leaves-using the trees to provide natural ornamentation. 

Jones, with his associate on the house, Maurice Jennings, designed the outdoor sculptures, 
furniture, lamps, pottery, table linens, and even stationery so that the experience of living 
in the home would be harmonious. An E-shaped motif emerged from the structural 
elements and became an abstract pattern that reappears in various places such as the 
clerestory windows and the intricate trellis that connects the house to the guest house, a 
recent addition. 

The living room is actually a series of indoor and outdoor spaces including a screened 
porch and a large deck. Ceiling levels reach up two stories, then drop down over more 
intimate areas. Accents of color-red, orange, blue-dot all of the rooms in pillows and 
cushions, like wildflowers in a meadow. Mirrors echo the natural light and subtle details, 
multiplying their effect. In the same way, the house serves as a mirror, echoing the 
fundamental geometry and simplicity of nature. 


SEGEL HOUSE 

Since studying with Wright for six years at Taliesin, John Lautner has earned international 
acclaim for his individualized architectural solutions. According to Lautner, the purpose of 
architecture is to improve human life, not to promote a particular style. He points to 
Gottfried Semper's "Four Elements of Architecture": the moral and spiritual element; the 
roof; the enclosure; the mound or foundation. From them Lautner creates sculptural forms 
for living. Based in Los Angeles for the past fifty years, his designs-often exciting 
engineering feats as well as artistic compositions-are concentrated on the West Coast. 

Gil and Joanne Segel, a dance therapist, wanted something soaring, yet of the ground. It 
was to be solid and free, built of wood. Joanne Segel's collaboration with the architect 
yielded an undulating beach cave of wood, glass, and stone. The cooperation between 
client and architect is apparent in the unity of this design in Malibu, California, completed 
in 1979. 

The orientation is up and down the beach, not a flat, panoramic view out to sea like many 
of its neighbors. The sweep of the sandy beach on one side, seen through an uninterrupted 
curved wall of glass, and the private garden on the other lift the spirit while rooting it to 
the earth. The three-inch edges of Douglas fir timbers that form the partially 
hyperbolic-shaped roof create a rhythm in the ceiling of the living room that appears to 
radiate from the round, poured-concrete fireplace at the corner. Boulders rising from the 
rock floor are mimicked by the soft irregular forms of the sofas the owner had fabricated. 
Natural cottons and linens in light creams and beiges provide the neutrality 
desired-because nature provides so many colors through the windows. The motor court 
adjoining the living room is designed so that when the cars are removed, it becomes a 
stone-floored entertainment area. 

Upstairs, the dance studio is a celebration of curves accentuated by light patterns from 
trellised ceiling panels. Walls of concrete, which was used for soundproofing, have been 
covered with wood. 

Every room has a view of the ocean. To improve the bedroom view, the roof of the living 
room was covered with green grass, concealing the roofing material. It is no wonder that 
Lautner refers to his practice as "mostly private homes hidden from sight." 


BENTON HOUSE 

A community of architects who apprenticed with Wright until his death in 1959 continues 
to practice organic architecture, under the name Taliesin Architects, Ltd., from bases in 
Wisconsin and Arizona. Organized as a subsidiary of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 
they carry on the tradition of teaching while working. Over the past thirty years Taliesin 
Architects has completed hundreds of projects scattered throughout the world. William 
Wesley Peters, the first Taliesin apprentice, served as the senior architect until his death in 
1991. He also was the designer for the finely composed Benton house in Malibu, 
California, begun in 1981. 

John Benton was a long-time friend of the Wright family when he commissioned a new 
home for his wife, Melinda, and family that also had to accommodate their extensive 
collection of American art. Their five-acre, sloping site ends abruptly at a bluff 
overlooking the Pacific Ocean, projecting out beyond the adjoining land. 

The architect's response was an L-shaped plan that placed all living spaces-the 
living-dining room, the study, and four bedrooms-parallel to the cliff edge, offering free 
views of the beach and the ocean to the south. Perpendicular to this sixty-foot wing is the 
service area, which includes a garage, entry, kitchen, maid's room, and office. Long, broad 
stairs drop slowly toward the cliff edge on one side. A curved terrace projects over the 
ledge on the other side. 

Although based on a sixteen-inch grid (used alternately with a four-foot variation), the 
design is marked by a forceful triangular motif that is articulated in the pitch and jagged 
edges of the roof, garden shapes, lights, window and door mullions, and projections at 
either end of the plan. A third shape, a circle, creates garden motifs, a pool at the entrance, 
a terrace wall, and the roof tiles. The interplay of geometric shapes is skillfully composed. 


FISHER HOUSE 

Originally from Wright's native Wisconsin, Milton Stricker joined the Taliesin Fellowship 
in 1952 after studying architecture at Carnegie-Mellon University. From Wright he 
learned the language of organic architecture, which he has practiced from Seattle for 
nearly forty years. The simplicity of his forms has allowed him to produce exquisite 
residences that respond to the site and the client's distinctive requirements yet are 
economical. 

One of Stricker's larger commissions is the 1989 retirement home for Jean and Frank 
Fisher. They selected a site in a newly subdivided area that had been a ranch in Sisters, 
Oregon. Wagon trains once passed by on the nearby Oregon Trail. The area's history and 
Jean Fisher's native American ancestry led the architect to create a design symbolically 
reflecting this combined heritage. He proposed a teepee-shaped living area in a plan 
based on a hexigonal module. 

The 3,200 square feet of space is enveloped in beveled cedar siding that alternates wide 
and narrow bands. The broad cedarshake roof is an earthy companion to the rock-strewn 
terrain, marked by tall ponderosa pines and sagebrush. An old pine snag, or stump, on the 
site became the source of the house's color scheme; within its weathered rings were shades 
of tan and gold, orange, and even red. A local salishan stone was massed for the towering 
central fireplace and supporting piers. 

An angled garage wing joins the house to create the entrance. Inside, the open plan reveals 
itself. No corridors waste space. The living room reaches to the top of the teepee shape, 
anchored by the fireplace. Built-in and free-standing furniture designed for the home 
continues the flow. It is a complete design, one Wright would no doubt have recognized as 
grown from the seeds he planted so long ago.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WRIGHT SPACE 
Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses 

GRANT HILDEBRAND     University of Washington Press Seattle 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Preface 

Thanks are owed to many. Domino's Farms Activities invited me to give a talk in Ann 
Arbor in April 1986, in which these thoughts first acquired some semblance of 
organization. Since that time Domino's, and especially archivist Kathryn Crawley, have 
been helpful beyond measure. 

Monetary support was extended by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning and 
the Graduate School Research Fund of the University of Washington. 

Lydia Miner typed the earliest versions of this and then, perhaps in desperation, taught me 
to do it myself by introducing me to the mysteries of the Macintosh. 

Photographers Ann Eaton, Pedro Guerrero, Mike Hulahan of Hedrich-Blessing, David 
Kapps, Balthazar Korab, Scott Leff, Ellen Nibbelink, Julius Shulman, Christian Staub, and 
Ezra Stoller/ESTO have been most graciously helpful. My sons Peter and Matthew have 
also assisted with various photographic tasks. 

Shirley Courtois, Ann and Leonard Eaton, Norman Johnston, Douglas Kelbaugh, Peter 
Miller, Jeff Ochsner, and Claus Seligmann slogged through the manuscript at various 
stages, offering advice and encouragement. Joseph Clark, friend and biologist, patiently 
endured what must have seemed to him some very amateurish discussions on principles of 
evolution. I should also thank those readers who most helpfully responded to the Press. 
Such persons are supposedly anonymous, but three of them-Jay Appleton, John Savo, and 
Henry Matthews-discarded their anonymity to talk to me about the work directly and 
most helpfully. I thank them all for their gracious counsel. 

Another reader suggested that all plans of Wright's houses ought to be drawn anew for this 
book. I regarded that suggestion without enthusiasm; some forty-odd plans were at issue, 
and Wright's plans are of a wondrous complexity. But I owe that still-anonymous reader 
real thanks; an arduous task was also a blessing. Many previously published plans of the 
houses discussed herein are inaccurate, occasionally severely so; redrawing thus has meant 
some detective work, but it has provided an opportunity to correct at least some of the 
more glaring problems. Still, these plans are by no means the equivalent of measured 
drawings of the houses as built. That task still needs doing but is entirely beyond the scope 
of this book, and is in some cases, e.g., Taliesin, simply impossible. In that case, and in 
others as well, there is often an element of conjecture, and no doubt errors remain; I can 
only hope they are minor. I believe these plans to be more nearly accurate than any similar 
published collection, but it would be wrong to make any further claim. In all cases except 
the Coonley house, the intention has been to show the design as it existed at the time of 
first occupancy; features proposed but not originally built, as for example the pool at the 
Hanna house, are omitted, as are subsequent changes. Scale and compass indications, rare 
in published plans, are given, except that compass indications are omitted for three unbuilt 
projects. 

In addition, however, the redrawing of these plans brought home, as nothing else could 
have done, the full range of spatial and formal characteristics this book describes. On 
many occasions I found myself fleshing out the text and even making major changes and 
additions as a result of the drafting. 

It was clear early on, however, that drawings of a more diagrammatic sort would be 
enormously useful to an understanding of Wright's spaces, and for that task I was entirely 
out of my depth. William Hook, a friend, an architect, and a delineator of wonderful 
artistry, took time away from his livelihood to create the diagrammatic drawings of the key 
houses, and participated in the detective work and graphic decisions for the plan drawings 
as well. He has contributed research, perception, criticism, and artistry to this work; I owe 
him thanks beyond measure. 

In the winter of 1988 two colleagues, psychologist Judy Heerwagen and zoologist Gordon 
Orians, allowed me to join them in offering a seminar on aesthetics and evolution, in 
which we developed many of the thoughts that underpin this book. We were doubly 
fortunate in having Jay Appleton as a participant at several of the sessions. I thank all 
three for stimulation and support. Warren Lloyd was a graduate student in that seminar; 
he contributed a paper on the Japanese house,  which was helpful to that discussion as it 
appears in chapter 1, and he and Jan Fredrickson assisted William Hook and myself with 
several plans and diagrammatic drawings. Patrick O'Hare, in the same seminar, developed 
a paper on the Alhambra that brought the appropriateness of that structure to my attention. 

The cooperation of owners and curators of the houses has been most helpful. I particularly 
thank Edith Anderson, Gus Brown, Jeff Chusid, and William and Mary Palmer. Virginia 
Ernst Kazor, curator of Hollyhock House, generously made the house available; she also 
read the manuscript and offered many factual clarifications. The Affleck house is now 
owned by Lawrence Technical University; Dean Karl Greimel kindly provided 
photographs, and several years ago hosted an open house there for the Cranbrook ACSA 
seminar, at which time I was able to renew my familiarity with the house. I also thank Mr. 
and Mrs. Stuart Roberts, wherever they may now be. Years ago, as owners of the Cheney 
house, they were warmly hospitable when two colleagues and I were doing an 
NSF-funded movie of the Robie house; Christian Staub's photographs of the Cheney 
interior were taken at that time. 

Naomi Pascal, Julidta Tarver, and Audrey Meyer of the University of Washington Press 
have been wonderful all along. Not the least of their contributions was to put the 
manuscript in the hands of Lorna Price, the most patient and skillful editor one could hope 
for. 

The problem in having all this splendid help is that there can now be no one but myself to 
blame for errors and omissions.  Introduction  This book comes from the chance meeting 
of two thoughts. The first has to do with a problem-a lingering question, really-about 
Frank Lloyd Wright's houses. 

In both early and late life Wright had an enormous number of domestic clients; among 
noted architects almost certainly a record number by a wide margin. They came to his 
drawing board in droves, and, having seen through to completion their adventure with 
him, they were, by and large, ecstatic about what they got. Evidence of this, and not the 
sole evidence, is that many of these clients subsequently returned to Wright for another 
house, and sometimes more than one. In An Autobiography Wright even tells of two 
houses that "were bought back again by the same people who had built them and sold 
them, because they said they could not feel at home in any other."{Frank Lloyd Wright, 
An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1943), p. 253.} Given the 
source, one might approach the comment with caution, yet Robert Twombly, a careful and 
balanced biographer of Wright, notes that "as questionnaires and interviews establish 
again and again, his clients love their homes, indeed, are more than ordinarily 
enthusiastic, and leave, if they have to, with considerable reluctance."{Robert Twombly, 
Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979), p. 260.} 

And then there is the response of the general public, harder to document but sometimes 
brought home with dramatic clarity. Anyone who has taught or attended an introductory 
class in modern architectural history for a lay audience will know that when a slide of Le 
Corbusier's Villa Savoye or Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House goes on the screen, 
some explaining is in store, but when Fallingwater appears, the class is all attention 
within, quite literally, one second. The appeal is immediate and pervasive, and the same 
observation can be made of on-site responses to this house, as is suggested by Edgar 
Kaufmann Jr.'s query: "Why does a house designed by an architectural individualist for the 
special purposes of a special client appeal so much to the public in general?"{Kaufmann, 
Fallingwater (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 31. Wright, and others, have 
sometimes maintained that there has been considerable public antipathy to his work: see 
for example Wright, Autobiography, 1943, pp. 128, 132ff, 149-50, etc., or Donald 
Hoffman, Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House (New York: Dover, 1984), p. 9, quoting 
Frederick Robie on this point. Such accounts need to be approached with caution, as in 
each case there is a self-serving motivation in emphasizing a Sturm und Drang view of 
Wright's career and in dramatizing the radical nature of his work. The Robie interview 
raises other questions as well; see Chap. 3, n. 32.} 

And there is, of course, an enormous body of attention to Wright at the professional and 
critical level. The literature on his houses is voluminous, and almost without exception it 
gives them a monumental place in the story of architecture, both for their revolutionary 
formal, spatial, and technical inventiveness, and for their sheer evocative magic. 

Yet few houses of equal fame have embodied more conspicuous faults. Many of Wright's 
plans defy reasonable furniture arrangements,{The Glasner house of 1905, an early 
example, has five openings into the living room, with traffic in all directions, and the 
fireplace adjacent to the kitchen door. The Roberts and Robie houses, La Miniatura, and 
many of the Usonians have similar problems, and all photos I have ever seen of these 
houses, under various owners, fail to show convincing conversational groupings, nor do 
such groupings seem easily obtained, at least to me. John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Usonian Houses (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1984), p. 30, discusses like 
problems with kitchen arrangements.} many frustrate even the storage of reasonable and 
treasured possessions.{See H. Allen Brooks, Writings on Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 
Press, 1981), p. 66, in which Marjorie Leighey, at one time owner of a well-known 
Usonian, states, "The need for more storage space is felt almost to desperation." 
Nevertheless, Mrs. Leighey loved the house despite its problems. Twombly, Life, p. 243, 
argues that the Usonians had ample storage space, but a look at typical plans, for instance 
the first Jacobs house, more than confirms the observation quoted in Brooks. In 1934 
Wright proposed a house (never built) for Stanley Marcus, with no closets at all. Marcus 
predictably enough objected, to which Wright replied: "Closets are rotten. They just 
accumulate junk" (Brendan Gill, Many Masks [New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987], p. 
341). In fairness Wright seems to have practiced what he preached: the first Taliesin had 
just one bank of closets for the whole house. Where did he keep his capes, berets, ascots, 
scarves, white suits, and Cuban shoes?} In many cases, severe problems afflict the 
architectural fabric: leaking roofs, unserviceable detailing, even structural 
inadequacies.{Regarding leaking roofs, there is on record Wright's reply to Herbert 
Johnson to move his chair. A wittier comment was offered by Mrs. Richard Lloyd Jones, 
wife of one of Wright's distant cousins and owner of a Wright house in Tulsa, who 
explained a leak to a guest: "This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the 
rain." Of examples of unserviceable detailing, the roof edge of Fallingwater is the most 
notable among many; as illustration see Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Fallingwater (New York: 
Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 132-33 and 148-49. Regarding structural inadequacies see 
Chap. 6, n. 13.} A number of the houses were over budget to a degree that challenges 
belief.{Such examples as the Robie and first Jacobs house were close to budget, but these 
seem to have been as much the exception as the rule. The Hanna house was to have had a 
1936 budget of $15,000; it cost $37,000. Fallingwater was to have been done for $25,000 
and cost $150,000. Wright promised that the closetless house for Stanley Marcus (n. 5 
above) would cost $10,000, though he later claimed he had said $25,000. No matter; bids 
came in at $150,000. Nor are such overages confined to domestic work; the Johnson's Wax 
building was originally estimated by Wright at $250,000; it cost $3,000,000, or twelve 
times the estimate. There are many other instances, and despite apologists, they are hardly 
trivial.} And, one must add, there were problems of personality as well: it is a matter of 
record that many of Wright's clients found him arrogant, careless, slow, and misleading, 
and were not by any means always amused by his temperament.{Lest this be thought to 
overstate the case, see e.g. Gill, Masks, pp. 148-63, 186-87, 248-50, 262-64, 
274-84, 322-23; Herbert Jacobs with Katherine Jacobs, Building with Frank Lloyd 
Wright (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1978), pp. 90-97; Paul R. and Jean S. Hanna, 
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 24-25, 47, 
48; or Kaufmann, Fallingwater, pp. 46-47. Nevertheless these clients, too, forgave 
Wright in the end and came to love what he had built for them.} And there are more vague 
and subjective difficulties, for the sheer power of these houses as dramatic exercises in 
space and form can intimidate the more varied and spontaneous acts of ordinary daily life: 
how does one have a casual conversation in the Robie house dining room, or hang a 
cherished delicate picture in a Usonian? 

Normally such pervasive problems would finish an architect's career almost before it 
started. Yet Wright's houses have offered some quality capable not only of transcending 
their formidable shortcomings but of engendering a uniquely widespread devotion. 
Something about them, obviously, has more than redeemed their multitudes of sins. 

The conventional wisdom is that the houses have been liked, even loved, because they have 
been found to be in some way extraordinarily beautiful; attention has then turned to an 
interpretation of the ways in which that beauty has evolved and been manifested. Wright 
himself tried at great length to explain that evolution and manifestation through references 
to a belief in the organic, a sympathy with nature, the art and craft of the machine, the 
countenance of principle, the sense of shelter, the destruction of the box. Art historians 
have proposed analogies to natural forms or to contemporary, primordial, or exotic 
architectural examples; they have analyzed abstract compositional processes and devices; 
they have offered explanations about the liberation of space; they have suggested the 
metaphor of expansive democratic life. Such studies have helped us to grasp the 
characteristics of Wright's houses, and to speculate about how they came to be; thus they 
have assisted our understanding of the creative process and the resultant artifact. But they 
have not been of equal help in explaining the appeal, and especially the lay appeal, of 
Wright's houses, because the characteristics they describe have never been shown to 
account for the compelling, pervasive, and immediate responses that the houses engender. 
Do any of those characteristics have such power? If so how, and why? If not, what does, 
since something obviously does? 

That, then, was the first thought.  The second thought seems, on the face of it, quite 
unrelated. 

Since 1978, when Jay Appleton spoke at the University of Washington, I have been 
intrigued by his work in theory of landscape aesthetics. Appleton is an English 
geographer; with debts to John Dewey and others, he is the author of what he calls a 
theory of prospect and refuge, which he most fully presented some fifteen years ago in a 
book entitled The Experience of Landscape.{Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape 
(London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975). This edition is now out of print, but a paperback 
edition, a reprint of the original, is available from Hull University Press (1986). 

Appleton  is a graduate of Oxford and King's College, New-castle, at which he took his 
degree in geography. He has spent his entire teaching career in that field at the University 
of Hull. 

Typically he says of his intentions (p. ix): "I seek to prove nothing-merely to suggest." 
Nevertheless the suggestions put forward in The Experience of Landscape have been 
fruitful ones. Although less well known than it deserves to be, it has been able to claim 
both respect and durability. It has been the foundation of an important body of theory in 
landscape  architecture; it has proven capable of suggesting related extensions of its 
fundamental ideas; and it has generated criticism and controversy. To respond 
constructively to this latter point Appleton wrote "Prospect and Refuge Revisited," 
(published in Landscape Journal 1984, pp. 91-103, and reprinted in Jack L. Nasar, ed., 
Environmental Aesthetics: Theory, Research, and Applications [Cambridge, England: 
Cambridge University Press, 1988], pp. 27-48). In that essay he addressed the various 
critiques generated by The Experience of Landscape during its first decade. One critique, 
however, that so far as I know did not emerge there, but has come out in seminars on the 
subject, has to do with the role of individual differences as they modify responses to 
genetically driven stimuli. Appleton, I believe, would not claim that such differences are 
less than vital. His autobiographical manuscript, "How I Made the World," is a major and 
extensive examination of the issue of varying individual predilections within a more 
universal preferential framework.} Put in inadequately brief terms, Appleton's argument is 
that there is a deeply seated, genetically driven, human predilection for conditions of 
prospect and refuge within landscape settings. By prospect Appleton means a condition in 
which one can see over a considerable distance, and by refuge he means a place where one 
can hide; in combination they reinforce one another, creating the ability to see without 
being seen. This combination once had survival value, for in choosing it Homo sapiens 
could hunt successfully without being, in turn, successfully hunted. But as with other 
survival behaviors, eating and copulation being the obvious examples, this 
habitat-selecting is enacted just for the inherent pleasure it yields, without conscious 
recognition of survival function. Thus Appleton argues that a juxtaposition of prospect and 
refuge conditions is basically and of itself pleasurable to our species, and so occurs 
repeatedly as a condition of choice in landscape settings. 

Though Appleton has made no extended attempt to apply his theory to architecture, such 
an attempt has long seemed to me to offer a rich field for further work, since it holds the 
possibility of describing and exploring issues of spatial choice at a more significant level 
than has been offered by any other design-related theory. It can also make the enviable 
claim that in the years since its first appearance, it has received a fair amount of empirical 
substantiation;{See for example Stephen Kaplan, "Aesthetics, Affect, and Cognition: 
Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary Perspective," Environment and Behavior, 
19:1 (Jan. 1987), pp. 3-32; D. M. Woodcock, "A Functionalist Approach to 
Environmental Preference" (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1982), or J. 
Archea, "Visual Access and Exposure: An Architectural Basis for Interpersonal Behavior" 
(doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1984).} thus, while no one, least of 
all Appleton himself, would wish to claim that it represents immutable truth, nevertheless 
it has been carried somewhat beyond the stage of speculation.  With the lingering question 
of the attraction of Wright's houses on the one hand, and Appleton's work on the other, it 
occurred to me that the properties of the one seemed to reflect the properties of the other. I 
recalled that some of Wright's houses contained architectural dispositions analogous to the 
preferred landscape dispositions discussed by Appleton. A closer reexamination led me to 
believe that of the houses Wright designed after 1902 almost all held an extraordinarily 
rich array of these analogies, at several hierarchical levels-and did so through a complex 
and repetitive composition of elements unique to him in his time. I began to recognize that 
Wright had developed with consistency and richness an architecture that stimulated 
powerful, genetically driven responses of Homo sapiens. 

At that point it seemed worthwhile to consider relevant literature of the last decade or two 
that has examined other preferred conditions of aesthetic experience. This literature is 
extensive and not always conclusive.  But one position, current for a long time as an 
undemonstrated theoretical stance, now seems to be garnering empirical support. It is that 
preferred aesthetic experiences of many sorts, including preferred architectural 
experiences, tend to be relatively rich in both complexity and order.{See for example 
Daniel E. Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 
1971), pp. 143-57); John R. Platt, "Beauty: Pattern and Change," in D. W. Fishe and S. 
R. Madde, eds., Functions of Varied Experience (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1961); or 
Nicholas Humphrey, "Natural Aesthetics," and Peter F. Smith, "Urban Aesthetics," in 
Byron Mikellides, ed., Architecture for People (London: Studio Vista, 1980).} And this 
conjunction of characteristics has also proven receptive to a biological rationale similar to 
that offered by Appleton; it has a survival value together with an inferred a priori pleasure 
stimulus. Exactly what order and complexity mean in a specific architectural application is 
not entirely clear, since they are relative, but they are, at least on the face of it, terms that 
are eminently applicable to Wright's houses. To these characteristics I would add only two 
others that play a minor and less frequent role in Wright's work. These are what Appleton 
refers to as hazard, and what Stephen Kaplan, especially, has termed mystery.{Kaplan, 
"Aesthetics," pp. 3-32.} 

Therefore, in this book I am going to consider the ways in which Wright's houses offer a 
uniquely rich array of fundamentally appealing conditions of prospect, refuge, complexity, 
order, and, to a much lesser extent, hazard and mystery. I believe that an understanding of 
the ways in which Wright's houses manifest these conditions helps to explain the devotion 
they have engendered. I emphasize that I offer this not as the sole explanation of their 
appeal, but as one way of thinking about that appeal. It is a truism, but true nevertheless, 
that a work of art is amenable to more than one interpretation. This one can coexist 
peacefully with others; I would hope it might complement and enrich them. I would 
further maintain that the characteristics of prospect, refuge, complexity, and order are 
illustrated with sufficient profusion and regularity in Wright's houses to constitute a 
defensible and internally consistent argument, while his remarkably prolific domestic 
practice-over 300 executed houses{An exact number is hard to determine; does one count 
remodelings, additions, gardeners' cottages? Does Taliesin count as one house, or three, or 
twenty? Are the cluster houses-Suntop, etc.  -one unit or many? What of apartment 
buildings? The phrase "over 300 executed houses" arises from counting buildings cited as 
"residences" in William Allin Storrer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright 
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1978), and trying to apply common sense in answer to the above 
questions. Storrer is generally taken to be the most nearly complete available inventory of 
Wright's built work.}-offers an unusually extensive range of examples and, through their 
sheer numbers and popularity, some corroboration of their configurational value. 

The interpretation that follows, then, seems to me to be largely defensible and helpful, and 
is one in which I have a degree of belief. As to purpose, I cannot do better than to 
paraphrase Appleton's purposes of more than a decade ago: I seek to bring the argument to 
a level of plausibility at which other scholars competent to pursue further inquiry, 
including a wealth of empirical inquiry, might find here a framework based on sufficient 
prima facie evidence to warrant their attention. 

Wright's life was long, complex, rich, multifaceted, uneven, and endlessly fascinating. A 
book purporting to deal, in any finite way, with the effects of his work rather than its 
causes must keep a steady focus. I am more concerned with the values that may accrue to 
Wright's configurations than with the origins of those configurations. Therefore I have 
generally avoided the large causal issues of his sources and motivations, about which, in 
any event, a great deal has been said already. I make no attempt to recount material from 
the vast number of personal and professional biographies he has engendered (more, I 
believe, than any other architect) except as such recounting is necessary to the reasonable 
flow of the argument. At the same time I must admit that I have found it hard to be an 
absolute purist in this regard: in the case of Taliesin, and to a lesser extent the California 
work, some reference to personal circumstances has seemed unavoidable, and the 
discussion of Wright's pattern seemed incomplete without at least a brief outline of where 
it may or may not have come from. 

Does this interpretation have a creative dimension? Are the characteristics of Wright's 
work described here capable of further creative exploration? In the last chapter I discuss 
some ways in which this may be possible and attempt to illustrate the point through a few 
pertinent examples selected from the apparently quite different work of some current 
architects-although these examples, and many others, deserve far greater attention than I 
can give here. Nevertheless, Wright's houses seem to me to be the place to begin, because 
the correspondence between prospect and refuge, complexity and order, seems to be 
evinced in them with unique strength and consistency. 


1. The Pattern 

In 1893, at the age of twenty-six, Frank Lloyd Wright left the offices of Adler and 
Sullivan to launch his own practice. Over the next seven years he produced a number of 
houses that demonstrated his already considerable abilities: the Winslow house of 1893, 
the Williams house of 1895, the Heller house of 1897, the Husser house of 1899, and at 
least two ventures in period styles, the Blossom house of 1893, and the Moore house of 
1895. All were adept pieces of design and have long been so recognized. But in the context 
of his long career, these houses are atypical in that they do not represent variations on any 
established theme, but rather are autonomous individual designs in which Wright seems to 
have been investigating a wide variety of spatial arrangements and formal treatments. 
These early houses were more a search than a discovery.{Classic sources for this period of 
Wright's career are Henry-Russell Hitchcock In The Nature of Materials (New York: Da 
Capo Press, 1982, a reprinting of the 1942 edition) and Grant Manson, Frank Lloyd 
Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (New York: Reinhold, 1958). More recently the 
pertinent volumes of the Frank Lloyd Wright monograph series by Yukio Futagawa, editor 
and photographer; text by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1986-), offer an 
unprecedented wealth of drawings and photographs; hereafter this series is cited under 
Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright. . . .} 

Then, in 1900, Wright began to develop in his houses a particular repetitive configuration 
of their key elements: the entry, the fireplace, ceilings, solid and glazed walls, openings to 
adjacent interior and exterior spaces, and terraces. Within two years, he developed this 
configuration to a canonical state that informed the vast majority of his residential work 
for the rest of his life. For lack of a better term, I would like to call this repetitive 
configuration of domestic architectural elements Wright's pattern. Wright's reasons for 
creating and then remaining loyal to this pattern were almost certainly intuitive, but recent 
work in many related fields now enables us to ascribe to it an explicit humanistic worth.  
In 1900 Wright produced four house designs of extraordinary interest. Three, the Warren 
Hickox and Harley Bradley houses in Kankakee, Illinois, and the first Ladies' Home 
Journal project{Published in February of 1901.} (figs. 1.1-1.3) each have a single 
fireplace at the center of the plan. Wright had done this before; the Winslow house is an 
example. But he had not done it consistently: the Husser and Heller houses, for instance, 
each had two noncentral fireplaces, and in both, the living room fireplace was on an 
outside wall. In the three houses of 1900 Wright handled the fireplace in a repetitive way. 
It is at the center of the house; it also establishes and opens to the internal edge of the 
living room. On each flank the living room opens to the contiguous spaces: dining and 
music, dining and reception, and dining and library respectively. Opposite the fireplace in 
each scheme is a wall of windows and french doors; beyond is a terrace of generous size 
serving both as an extension of the living room and as a viewing platform for the land 
beyond.  In the fourth important design of 1900, a second house for Ladies' Home Journal 
called "A Small House with Lots of Room in It" (fig. 1.4), Wright enriched the 
arrangement by providing two fireplaces, one for the living room, one for 
dining.{Published in July of 1901.} As in the other three houses, these fireplaces are 
located at the center of the plan and at the internal edges of the rooms they serve. Each has 
an adjacent screen and seat on the flank which creates a kind of half-inglenook; the 
sectional perspective of this house published at the time showed a lowered ceiling over this 
area. The organization is asymmetrical. The openings to contiguous spaces are more 
complex; the dining room and the entry seem to slide away from the edges of the living 
room fireplace. Terraces are shown opening from both living and dining rooms.  An 
almost identical organization of elements appears in the house actually constructed for 
Ward W. Willits{Spellings vary; I follow that of William Allin Storrer, The Architecture 
of Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978).} in 1901-1902 in 
Highland Park, Illinois (fig. 1.5A). Differences in plan from the second Ladies' Home 
Journal scheme are primarily in nuance: Wright has given up the polygonal projection of 
the living room; vast rows of casements and french doors are used from both the living and 
dining rooms to their terraces; ceilings are lowered over both fireplaces; and the terrace off 
the dining room has a more complex and dramatic geometry. On the upper floor of the 
Willits house (fig. 1.5B), the master bedroom repeats the organization yet again. A 
fireplace lies at the inner edge of the space, with a half-inglenook seat to one side; as in 
the major spaces below, a low ceiling occurs over this area with a higher ceiling forward of 
it. Glass and french doors are opposite, and a terrace lies beyond.  Thus, the Ladies' Home 
Journal projects and the Hickox, Bradley, and Willits houses show the evolution of a 
spatial and formal theme in which architectural elements are repetitively composed in 
similar ways. Nevertheless they, as well as Wright's earlier houses, still lack a 
characteristic vital not only to his subsequent houses but to virtually all his subsequent 
architecture, domestic and otherwise. 

The major spaces of these five houses, like those of most other multistory houses, 
including all of Wright's earlier ones, are surmounted by a floor directly above, on which 
bedrooms and baths are located. For this reason, and given Wright's fondness for 
proportions that emphasized the horizontal (see fig. 1.6), the ceilings of the major spaces 
on the lower floor had to be relatively low and more or less flat. Some modest 
manipulation of the ceiling plane is possible in such a situation, and in fact Wright did so 
in each of these houses, but the ability to juxtapose and dramatize low and high spaces is 
necessarily limited by the floors above. The result is clearly evident in the low, 
flat-ceilinged living rooms of the Bradley and Willits houses (figs. 1.7-1.8). Wright's 
next major house (and the work of his entire subsequent career) suggests that he could not 
accept this limitation, and was determined to find a means for a much more dramatic 
modeling of the ceiling plane.  In a scheme such as the Willits house he might have found 
that means by omitting the front upstairs bedroom and opening the living room right up to 
the roof, thus making it a two-story space-although to give the dining room a similar 
opportunity, another bedroom would have had to be sacrificed. (In fact Wright proposed 
just such an alternative for the first Ladies' Home Journal scheme, noting the loss of the 
two bedrooms, but he did not use this approach in actual constructed work until several 
years later.{Subsequent examples of this approach include the Isabel Roberts house of 
1908 in River Forest and its elegant close cousin, the Frank Baker house of 1909 in 
Wilmette.}) He might also have found his way by simply increasing the height of the main 
floor, to give a larger vertical dimension within which to model the ceilings. But such an 
increase would have compromised the horizontal emphasis of the overall composition, and 
so cannot have had much appeal for him. 

Instead he approached the problem by a radically different path. In the design of the house 
for Arthur Heurtley in Oak Park, done perhaps just a few months after the Willits house, 
he took the first and decisive step by reversing the overwhelmingly prevalent organization 
of multistory houses. At the Heurtley house, the entry occurs on a floor given over not to 
the major spaces of the house but to bedrooms and a children's playroom (fig. 1.9A). 
Wright has located the major spaces, the living and dining rooms, on the floor above, 
which is the topmost floor of the house. These spaces, substantially elevated above the 
surrounding terrain, are reached by a twisting stair ascending a full story. By this radical 
means, and for the first time in his work, Wright placed the major spaces of the house 
directly under the roof, with no superimposed floor. This condition became all but 
universal for him. In work done over the next four years of his career there were a few 
exceptions; thereafter, it is almost axiomatic that if the major spaces are not directly under 
the roof the building is not by Wright.{The few exceptions in major houses from 1902 to 
1906 are: the Dana house of 1903, the Gale house of 1904 (built 1909) and the Darwin 
Martin house of 1906; see Chap. 3. Thereafter the condition is virtually universal, the sole 
major exception, and that only a partial one, being Fallingwater; see Chap. 6. 
Furthermore, the condition is pervasive not only in Wright's houses; it is also a 
distinguishing characteristic of his nondomestic work. It occurs at Unity Temple, and at 
the later Madison First Unitarian Society and the Beth Sholem synagogue, although of 
course in religious buildings the condition is usual throughout history. But the condition 
also occurs at the Larkin Administration Building, the Imperial Hotel, the Johnson's Wax 
Corporate Headquarters, the Morris Gift Shop, the Arizona State Capitol project, the 
Guggenheim Museum, and the Marin County Civic Center, and these are building types in 
which it is not usual at all.}  The advantage of this condition is apparent in its first 
usage.{Wright's handling of the Heurtley house confers another important advantage as 
well, in providing a more dramatic viewing platform as a direct result of the elevated 
living floor. The advantage of height per se is better taken up in Chap. 3.} For while still 
keeping the low horizontality of each stratum of the Heurtley elevation, it gave Wright his 
chance to model the upper surfaces of its major spaces in a really significant way. These 
spaces, the living and dining rooms, open into the roof's volume and borrow their 
configuration from it. In this way they achieve a drama of contrast between low edges and 
high center not attained by Wright in any earlier work. He has called attention to the 
condition in this first application by picking out the geometry of the roof planes with a 
wood trim, unusually heavy even for Wright, and by marking the apex with a false 
skylight leaded in shapes emphasizing the diagonals that result.{Vincent Scully, Frank 
Lloyd Wright (New York: George Braziller, 1960), p. 19, refers to the "taut, 
wood-stripped ceiling" as "a tent." This is a plausible interpretation, but is more 
appropriate to later versions of the device as it appears at Taliesin and Hollyhock House, 
where the wood trim is much more delicate. See Chaps. 4 and 5. As Chap. 4 notes, Wright 
himself referred to Taliesin's ceilings as "tent-like."}  The dining room and stairhead are 
to the left; the terrace (now enclosed) is beyond the windows at far right. 

The upper floor plan of the Heurtley house in other respects roughly derives from the main 
floor plan of the Willits house. The single fireplace, in the living room, is in a like 
location, and is flanked on the south by a similar half-inglenook seating promontory 
whose enclosing character is emphasized by tall terminating cabinetwork. The living room 
terrace is laterally displaced, lying south of the seating promontory, and is seen through 
windows and is accessible through french doors from the flank of the room.{At some 
subsequent date the Heurtley terrace was enclosed by glazing and thus is no longer an 
outdoor space. In discussing the Heurtley house here and in Chap. 3, I deal with the 
characteristics presented by its original condition, and unless otherwise noted this will 
generally be the case with other examples as well.} The dining room has been moved 
forward in plan so that it becomes a part of the street facade; it therefore lacks a separate 
terrace, but opens through a colonnaded, glazed wall to the living room. But the location 
of these major spaces on the upper floor has led Wright to make the path to them much 
more elaborate than at the Willits house; one enters into the porch itself, then a dogleg to 
the front door, then several more turns up a twisting stair, then more turns at the top. 

What, then, are the fundamental compositional characteristics of the Heurtley house? The 
major spaces are elevated well above the terrain they overlook. The fireplace is withdrawn 
to the heart of the house and to the internal edge of the room it serves. Its withdrawal is 
emphasized by a low ceiling edge and flanking built-in seating and cabinetwork. The 
ceiling forward of the fireplace zone sweeps upward into the roof, echoing its form. The 
distant edges of the ceiling then return to a low elevation like that near the fire. There are 
interior views to contiguous spaces seen beyond architectural screening devices. Glass and 
glazed doors are located on walls distant from the fire. A generous elevated terrace lies 
beyond. The exterior consists of deep overhanging eaves, an evident central chimney, 
broad horizontal groupings of window bands, and conspicuous balconies or terraces. The 
connection from exterior to interior is by means of a long and circuitous path. 

This is Wright's pattern. It occurs in its entirety for the first time in the Heurtley house, 
and is comprised of those thirteen characteristics. It would be wrong to claim that all these 
characteristics are found in all of Wright's subsequent houses, but the truth is not far short 
of that: for the next fifty years all his major houses, except only the Ocatillo camp and 
Taliesin West, will have at least ten of these characteristics; many will have all thirteen. 
Thus, this pattern in various permutations is the informing arrangement of all the great 
Prairie houses, Taliesin, the California houses of the 1920s, Fallingwater, and the 
Usonians.  Are there other domestic architectural precedents known to Wright that could 
have suggested to him either the totality of this pattern or individual aspects of it? 

Wright's organization of the house around the central fire is analogous to that of many 
simple dwellings before the days of central heating systems. An apposite example likely to 
have loomed large in Wright's mind would be the early colonial American house. But such 
an example offers a precedent only in bald terms, for in the colonial house, the fireplace 
was a simple practical urgency, and all characteristics of its treatment were driven by that 
urgency. Thus, the fire was central in order to distribute the heat to surrounding occupied 
spaces, and the seating was often contiguous with the fire to gather the family close to the 
heat source. And beyond those elementary similarities to Wright's configuration, there are 
no others, nor can it be pretended that Wright was in any way driven by the same practical 
motivations. 

A more recent and more specific fireplace-laden American house, probably known to 
Wright through his employer and hero Louis Sullivan, was H. H. Richardson's Watts 
Sherman house of 1874, at Newport, Rhode Island. That house has several fireplaces, and 
all are dominant features of the interior, modeled with the energy that Richardson could so 
wonderfully summon; they are fitting inspirations for Wright's own dominant fireplaces. 
Yet that house also has limitations as a precedent for Wright, since its main fireplace is in 
the very high living hall, and each of the others is at the end of the room it serves, under a 
ceiling undifferentiated from that of the rest of the room. 

Fireplaces were also emphatic features in houses of the Shingle Style. Wright had been 
introduced to this style through the Lloyd-Jones family chapel at Spring Green by Lyman 
Silsbee, and even more directly, a year or two later, through his first architectural 
employment with Silsbee in Chicago, before his years with Adler and Sullivan. Wright 
drew a lot from the Shingle Style in his early years; a number of the houses he did for 
Adler and Sullivan derive from it, as does his first house for himself, in 1889, in Oak Park. 
But the Shingle Style also has limitations as a source for Wright's treatment of the 
fireplace. Occasionally, as for example at "Shingleside" of 1880-81 in Swampscott, 
Massachusetts, by Arthur Little, the fireplace is withdrawn into a low-ceilinged space 
with an inglenook of built-in seating to one or both sides;{The fundamental work on the 
Shingle Style is Vincent J. Scully, Jr., The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (New Haven 
and London: Yale University Press, 1976); see especially pp. 155-64. A detailed 
discussion of the sources for the inglenook in Wright's work is in Edgar Kaufmann Jr., 
"Precedent and Progress in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians 39:2 (May 1980), pp. 145-49.} and such an example might well 
have suggested a markedly similar treatment early in Wright's career in his own Oak Park 
house. But in the Shingle Style, the fireplace is often located within a high space, as in the 
Robert Goelet house of 1882-83 in Newport, by McKim, Mead and White. 

So while Wright may have got the general idea of the central fireplace from its practical 
location in colonial American houses, and may have picked up the idea of the inglenook 
from occasional examples in the Shingle Style, neither offered any pervasive, compelling, 
or specific model for his way of handling its context, nor his ubiquitous use of it long after 
it had lost its earlier utilitarian purpose. 

What of the heavy overhanging eaves? The early colonial American house certainly did 
not offer any model for these. Nor did the houses of the Shingle Style; quite the opposite, 
in fact, for one of their most characteristic features is a closely tailored eave line which 
interrupts as little as possible the expression of a continuous surface of wall and roof. 
Similar points might be made regarding the broad horizontal expanses of window. 

Nor is there a single example in the Shingle Style of major living spaces directly under the 
roof. One can argue of this feature, of course, that any house of one story automatically 
possesses it, including some of the simpler smaller houses of colonial America (or 
anywhere else, for that matter), and therefore its source is obvious and ubiquitous. But 
Wright did not come to it by that path. From 1893 to 1911, every one of his major houses 
is multistoried;{Including even the seemingly one-story Cheney house of 1904; see Chap. 
3.} and a multistory house with major living spaces located on the uppermost floor directly 
under the roof is as rare in the general realm of Americandomestic architecture as it is in 
examples in the Shingle Style specifically. It is equally rare in the broader spectrum of 
Western domestic architecture generally.{Meredith Clausen, "Frank Lloyd Wright, 
Vertical Space, and the Chicago School's Quest for Light," Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians 44:1 (Mar. 1985), argues that Wright's skylit spaces in public 
buildings, as for example the Larkin Building, Unity Temple, and the much later 
Johnson's Wax, were influenced by the skylit lobbies at the bases of light wells in 
Chicago's commercial buildings of Wright's early years. This is a valuable insight in terms 
of Wright's institutional and commercial buildings, but the houses seem to me to demand a 
different analysis. The Heurtley house was done in the same year as the Larkin Building, 
and Heurtley has a false skylight (not open to the sky) in the living room, but immediately 
thereafter even this feature is largely given up, as at the Cheney, Robie, and Roberts 
houses, Taliesin, the California series, Fallingwater, and others. There are skylights in the 
stairwells of Coonley and one above the fireplace at Hollyhock, and clearly Ocatillo and 
Taliesin West are brilliantly skylit-but generally, Wright's ceilings yield a sense of 
containment that is stronger than that of release, and with their opacity and their deep 
eaves, they create a notably dark space rather than a brightly lit one.} Nor does the Italian 
piano nobile arrangement work very well as a source. It might just possibly have 
stimulated in Wright the idea of an elevated living floor, although even that is not likely, 
given his transparent hostility to the Renaissance. But what argues against it even more 
strongly is that the piano nobile scheme normally carries a third floor of rooms above the 
main floor, and so neither provides nor suggests the advantage of dramatic spatial 
modeling that Wright sought and obtained by elevating the living floor to a position 
directly under the roof.{When Wright fled from Oak Park in 1909 he went to Fiesole in 
the hills above Florence, in the heart of the piano nobile tradition of the elevated living 
floor. But this was long after he had found his own format, whose primary importance is 
in getting the rooms under the roof for spatial drama, a characteristic the Italian piano 
nobile does not share.} 

The generous elevated terrace of the pattern finds some precedent in the "piazzas" of the 
houses of the Shingle Style, and for that matter simply in the general American tradition 
of the front porch. Yet here, too, there are essential differences. Wright's terraces 
invariably open quite broadly and directly from the spaces they serve, and invariably they 
are kept entirely separate from the entry sequence by the interposition of a considerable 
distance.{The Glasner house of 1905 is a maverick on this point, if one accepts that its 
entry porch is a terrace of sorts-an interpretation I will offer in Chap. 3, but would not 
want to defend to the death. Before 1900 Wright used the conventional 
terrace/porch/piazza more commonly as entry, as for example in his own house of 1889 in 
Oak Park. Yet even by 1892, in the Allison W. Harlan house in Chicago, done while he 
was with Adler and Sullivan, Wright had set the terrace firmly apart from the entry 
sequence.} In these respects they differ from the piazzas of the Shingle Style and from the 
conventional American front porch as well. In fact they are more like the verandas of the 
traditional Japanese house  than they are like any Western precedent. 

And here we open up once again the old question of Wright's relationship to Japan.{When 
this issue arises, there is often an inference that Wright's attraction to Japan was in some 
way unusual. It was not. Bruce Price, whose Shingle Style houses were a model for 
Wright's own house, was a Japanophile; so was Lyman Silsbee, Wright's first employer, 
through whom Wright probably was first introduced to Japanese tastes and artifacts. One 
could also cite Whistler, Wilde, and many others. It could be argued that Wright was 
rather late on the scene, for even by 1881 Japanophilia was sufficiently common that 
Gilbert and Sullivan could satirize it in Patience-"I do not long for all one sees that's 
Japanese" and expect to be widely understood.} Do any of the features of Wright's pattern, 
or any of his canonical relationships among these features, find parallels in Japanese 
architecture? Crisp conclusions remain elusive, but putting the question in this way may at 
least yield some fresh observations. 

Wright's personal architectural practice had been under way for twelve years before he 
actually visited Japan in 1905. But it has long been recognized that in 1893, the very year 
in which he launched his practice, he could have seen and probably did see Japan's 
Ho-oden pavilion at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. Of this structure Grant 
Manson long ago observed that "beneath an ample roof-a powerful expression of 
shelter-and above the platform on which the temple stood, was the area of human 
activity."{Manson, Golden Age, p. 31 (see n. 1).} Here clearly is a possible precedent for 
Wright's own "ample roof" at least, and perhaps more as well-though it should be noted 
that the pavilion did not offer a precedent for a ceiling rising into the volumes of the roof, 
because it had flat false ceilings. Dimitri Tselos has also noted the possible importance of 
the Nippon Tea House at the exposition, whose roof forms may have suggested those of the 
Prairie house.{Dimitri Tselos, "Exotic Influences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd 
Wright," Magazine of Art 46 (Apr. 1953), pp. 160-84.} As far as we know, these are the 
only two instances of Japanese architecture that Wright could have seen before 1905. 

But at another and admittedly far more speculative level, there is a relationship between 
Wright's pattern and the architecture of Japan-for if we take the broader context of 
Japanese architecture generally, and compare it with Wright's pattern in all its 
characteristics, striking parallels emerge. The tokonoma, the most cherished element of 
the Japanese house, often bears analogies to Wright's fireplaces. Both are usually at the 
heart of the house, enclosed within clay walls; both are typically under a low ceiling; and 
the management of the surrounding spatial configuration is also similar. The floor is 
typically elevated above the terrain it overlooks. Views are available between contiguous 
interior spaces. Forward of the Tokonoma, as of the fireplace, the ceiling rises, often into 
the roof's volume. Opposite in each case, under a low ceiling edge, is a broad horizontal 
expanse of transparent surface, which opens to an elevated terrace or veranda over which 
the heavy eaves loom. And there are other parallels between much of Japanese architecture 
and some less frequent characteristics of Wright's houses (which, therefore, I have not 
included within the pattern): the framing of white or near-white panels with dark, 
naturally finished wood trim, the subdued quality of the light; the absence of 
ornamentation deriving from historic, or at least western, precedent. But I have 
particularly used the word "parallels," not "sources," in dealing with this subject. In spite 
of a lot of work on the question over many years and by many scholars,{See for example 
Manson, Golden Age, pp. 34-40. The most recent discussion, however, and also the most 
perceptive, is that of David B. Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture 
(Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1987), pp. 63-76. On Wright's 
involvement with the Japanese print see Julia Meech-Pekarik, "Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Other Passion" in Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, eds., The Nature of 
Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 125-53.} we still 
do not know, and may never know, just what of Japanese architecture was familiar to 
Wright through publications, drawings, or descriptions, when in 1902 the juxtaposition of 
the above characteristics appeared for the first time in his work.{See also Stewart, The 
Making, p. 10.} Thus we simply cannot say whether Wright's affection for Japan was 
based in part on a sympathy for spatial configurations he found by happenstance to be 
analogous to his own, or whether his pattern was in part inspired from those Japanese 
configurations in some occasional or indirect way. 

In any event, that pattern has no American precedent whatever, nor for that matter any 
precedent in the Western world. Nor is it found in the work of others during Wright's 
lifetime, not even among his colleagues and disciples including those of the Prairie School 
.{I will develop this point at greater length in Chap. 9.} Therefore, it seems fair to say that 
as a totality, it is particular to Wright, and is either of his own devising or was, perhaps, in 
part a remarkable reinterpretation of Japanese precedent occasionally and distantly seen 
but profoundly comprehended. 

Nowhere in his voluminous writings did Wright describe the pattern specifically. This is 
not especially surprising. Such things develop as often by intuition as by conscious intent, 
and even when they are as pervasive as this, they may remain in the realm of the 
designer's subconscious. There is no evidence that the pattern was other than just such a 
subconscious predilection for Wright. He did on occasion touch on some elements of it: he 
wrote of his pleasure in seeing "the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house 
itself,"{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 
1943), p. 141. This comment is repeated elsewhere in his writings.} and of a "sense of 
shelter"{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Horizon, 1977), p. 166.}-in 
italics-with the broad overhanging eaves no doubt in mind. He often referred to his work 
as the destruction of "the box,"{E.g., Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 142.} by which he 
meant the opening of vistas between rooms, and likewise to the outdoors by means of the 
broad horizontal expanses of window. And he noted the enrichment of prospect to be had 
from an elevated viewpoint, presumably something like the raised living spaces and 
terraces of these early houses: "And I saw that a little height on the prairie was enough to 
look like much more. Notice how every detail as to height becomes intensely significant. . . 
."{Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), p. 15.} But 
that is about all. Nor have historians on Wright mentioned the pattern in any specific way, 
though many describe something of its general character. A comment by Christian 
Norberg-Schulz is typical:  Traditionally the human dwelling had been a refuge for the 
individual and the family. Wright wanted rootedness and freedom, and thus he destroyed 
the traditional 'box' and created a new interaction between inside and outside. . . 
.{Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 192-94.}  
And so he is led to conclude that Wright "opened up his plans to make them interact with 
the environment, at the same time as he created an inner world of protection and 
comfort."{Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 99.} 

But if we are to ask why this duality of effect that the pattern provides should be of any 
humanistic importance-and that is a question worth asking-then another comment by 
Norberg-Schulz is more suggestive of a fruitful line of inquiry:  Figural architecture, 
then, does not consist of casual inventions, but of typical elements which may be repeated, 
combined and varied. We have already suggested that the typical elements are not just a 
matter of convention, but represent basic ways of being between earth and sky. They are 
given with the world. . . .{Ibid., pp. 128-29.}  Is this true of the repeated, combined, and 
varied elements of Wright's pattern? Can they be shown to represent "basic ways of being 
between earth and sky"; are they in some describable sense "given with the world"? 


2. Complexity and Order, Prospect and Refuge 

Whatever the words human and nature may mean, they have often been used in discussing 
Wright's architecture. I intend to use them too, but not in the customary way. By relating 
his architecture to things human I do not intend a vague romanticism. Nor in the use of 
the word "nature" do I suggest what biologist Nicholas Humphrey calls "naive 
naturalism,"{Nicholas Humphrey, "Natural Aesthetics," in Byron Mikellides, ed., 
Architecture for People (London, Studio Vista, 1980), p. 73.} that is, I will not infer that 
parts of Wright's buildings resemble specific forms found in nature, nor emphasize that he 
wove plant materials into his architectural configurations. 

I mean something broader but also more specific. I want to examine correspondences 
between Wright's pattern and the characteristics that we now believe human beings, 
preconditioned by nature, select in their habitations. To do this it is necessary to consider 
what particular characteristics human beings select-to examine if and how, in 
Norberg-Schulz's words, there are conditions of some sort that are "given with the world" 
as "basic ways of being between earth and sky." 

Can any such conditions be identified? Do they exist? Not everyone will agree on this; one 
writer has recently put forward this view:  The establishment of society can be seen as the 
establishment of order through conventions, or more specifically, the establishment of a 
language through symbolic codes. Before order, before language, there exists a primal 
chaos where there are no rules for marrying, building, eating.{Mario Gandelsonas, in the 
introduction to Peter Eisenman, House X (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 
Inc., 1982), p. 7.}  But I would argue, and I think most biologists and anthropologists 
would agree, that this cannot be entirely true. Obviously in the lower animals, in the 
absence of language, there exist quite indispensable "rules" for "marrying, building, 
eating," to ensure survival. This is equally true of Homo sapiens, and with us, too, such 
rules functioned to ensure basic survival in those generations-who knows how 
many?-that preceded language.{Discussion throughout this chapter and throughout this 
book presumes some primordial state of Homo sapiens. How deep in time was this state? 
Although "Lucy" appears to be dated to three million years ago, our current brain 
configuration and character appear to have much later origins. John R. Platt, "Beauty: 
Pattern and Change," in D. W. Fishe and S. R. Maddi, eds., Functions of Varied 
Experience (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1961), p. 411, cites views given at the 1959 Darwin 
Centennial Celebration at Chicago that the development of the brain "may have occurred 
in much less than 500,000 years." Other more recent work may reduce even that brief 
figure substantially; the current "Eve" theory holds that our particular genetic makeup had 
its origins about 200,000 years ago, and probably in the West African Savannah. On an 
evolutionary calendar, and given the relatively long human generational interval, this is a 
very brief period indeed. That our instinctual reactions have remained virtually unchanged 
over that period is highly probable.} Nor can it be maintained that our emotional makeup 
is dependent on either learning or language: "One does not learn to feel afraid or to cry 
any more than one learns to feel pain or to gasp for air. . . . Five emotions can be elicited 
at birth. . . . There is no evidence to suggest that feelings are necessarily preceded by a 
cognitive process."{Roger S. Ulrich, "Aesthetic and Affective Response to Natural 
Environment," in I. Altman and J. F. Wohlwill, eds., Behavior and the Natural 
Environment (New York: Plenum, 1983), p. 87.} Language clearly follows upon such 
predetermined behaviors but does not precede them. For to argue that man in his earliest 
moments acquired, used, and linguistically transferred information about what to eat, how 
to procreate, and-more to our purpose-what to select as appropriate habitation, clearly is 
not credible. Such prelinguistic predilections, furthermore, "given with the world" and 
dependent upon genetic determination, persist quite independently of their survival value; 
they inform responses throughout the history of a species. This point is clearly expressed 
by Peter F. Smith: "We come into the world already equipped with an elaborate set of 
mental programmes which establish probabilities as to the way we shall react within given 
environmental situations."{Peter F. Smith, "Urban Aesthetics," in Mikellides, Architecture 
for People, p. 74.} In Homo sapiens the responses that are informed by such prelinguistic 
or nonlinguistic programs include some responses that we commonly think of as aesthetic 
in nature ..., responses that underlie the beauty we find in many art forms. 

As recently as 1984 the distinguished art historian E. H. Gombrich endorsed the 
application of just such a point of view in dealing with some pervasive characteristics of 
the decorative arts: "My belief in a 'Sense of Order' . . . is based on an evolutionist view of 
the mind. I believe . . . that such a view has become inescapable since the days of 
Darwin."{E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative 
Art (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), p. 1. Gombrich continues: "Thanks to the researches of 
ethologists during the last few decades more is known about inborn reactions for which 
animals are undoubtedly 'programmed' than even Darwin could have surmised. To speak 
schematically, an organism to survive must be equipped to solve two basic problems. It 
must be able to answer the questions 'what?' and 'where?' . . . . It goes without saying that 
in the lower stages of evolution these capacities cannot depend on that elusive entity we 
call consciousness. Even in man they are not so coupled." And on p. 6 he notes, "It is 
never without danger to draw analogies between nature and culture, but I believe that here, 
as elsewhere, such dangers must be faced if progress is to be made."} Yet the idea that our 
sense of beauty might have a biological basis apparently even predates Darwin. Humphrey 
notes what he believes to be its origins:  Seventy years before Darwin published The 
Origin of Species, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, in 1785, suggested how a 
modern biologist might proceed:  "By a careful examination of the objects which Nature 
hath given this amiable quality [of beauty], we may perhaps discover some real excellence 
in the object, or at least some valuable purpose that is served by the effect it produces upon 
us. This instinctive sense of beauty, in different species of animals, may differ as much as 
the external sense of taste, and in each species be adapted to its manner of 
life."{Humphrey, "Natural Aesthetics," p. 59.} 

And this same line of thought was pursued at eloquent length early in the twentieth 
century by John Dewey, especially in his Art as Experience of 1934:  The nature of 
experience is determined by the essential conditions of life. While man is other than bird 
and beast, he shares basic vital functions with them and has to make the same basal 
adjustments if he is to continue the process of living. Having the same vital needs, man 
derives the means by which he breathes, moves, looks and listens, the very brain with 
which he coordinates his senses and his movements, from his animal forebears. . . . 
Human beings . . . had needs that were a demand for the building and were carried to 
fulfillment in it; . . . the one who sets out to theorize about the esthetic experience 
embodied . . . must begin with it in the raw.{John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: 
Pentagon Books, 1934), pp. 4, 13.} 

That one can "theorize about the aesthetic experience" by beginning "in the raw" depends 
on and derives from an obvious fundamental principle of evolution implicit in the above 
paragraphs. Species, including our own, have survived by engaging in behaviors 
contributory and essential to survival. Eating appropriate foods, copulating and caring for 
offspring, and selecting appropriate habitation are all instances of this. But such activities 
are not undertaken as strategies consciously thought through for survival objectives. 
Rather, survival results through natural selection of species which find an intrinsic 
pleasure in a preponderance of activities with survival value. The English geographer Jay 
Appleton puts this point very well:  [The creature] enters the world "programmed," as it 
were, to seize the advantages offered by the environment while avoiding its disadvantages. 
. . . This pattern of actions is indispensable. They must be put into operation if the creature 
is to survive, and this means that there must be some mechanism which ensures that they 
are. That mechanism is what we call, for want of a better word, "pleasure." There are 
plenty of other words like "desire," "drive," or "libido" which one may find employed in 
the literature. In plain language we do all these things on which our survival depends 
because we want to. That is the force which impels us.{Jay Appleton, "How I Made the 
World," unpublished MS, pp. 338-39, quoted by permission of the author.}  Therefore, as 
a generality, it can be said that if one can identify unlearned behaviors with survival value, 
one can also reasonably postulate that such unlearned behaviors are based on equally 
unlearned, genetically determined pleasure stimuli. 

In recent decades, increasing attempts have been made to identify characteristics that 
humans innately prefer in natural and manmade environments, and to understand these 
characteristics in terms of some biological basis derived from the above rationale. These 
attempts have been made in many fields: behavioral and environmental psychology, 
biology, philosophy of aesthetics,  anthropology, geography, and perhaps others, the 
different fields losing their distinctions in this context.{But not becoming very well 
integrated with either criticism or practice in the environmental arts, with the exception, 
perhaps, of the field of landscape architecture.} Presumably there are an indeterminate 
number of such innately preferred characteristics. Those that have engendered widest 
agreement to date are given different terms by different scholars; it seems to me they can 
be reasonably grouped under the headings complexity and order, prospect and refuge, 
hazard, and mystery. Of these, complexity and order constitute a mutually complementary 
pair, as do prospect and refuge, and these two pairs of characteristics are the ones I want to 
introduce in this chapter; hazard and mystery can be more easily dealt with separately at a 
later point.  There is now considerable empirical evidence to corroborate the 
long-standing belief that aesthetic experiences, including those of preferred 
environments, seem to exhibit some combination of "diversity, structural complexity, 
novelty, incongruity, or surprisingness,"{Joachim Wohlwill, citing the position of Daniel 
Berlyne, in "Environmental Aesthetics," in Human Behavior and Environment (New 
York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 41.} in conjunction with some perceived order or 
resolution. Appleton says that "there seems to be a dichotomy [in preferred environments], 
which I think is found in all the arts, between, on the one side, order, regularity, simplicity 
and harmony, and, on the other, disorder, irregularity, complexity and discord."{Appleton, 
"How I Made the World," draft p. 331.} Peter F. Smith puts the same point crisply: "It is 
now widely accepted that the basis of aesthetic experience stems from the interaction 
between chance and order, complexity and redundancy."{Smith, "Urban Aesthetics," p. 
84. See also Ulrich, "Aesthetic and Affective Response," pp. 95-97, and Daniel E. 
Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), 
pp. 143-57.} The point is easily illustrated in music or poetry, and also in architecture. 
Many explanations have been offered for the Parthenon's appeal; the 
complexity-and-order approach works as well as any, and perhaps better than most. 
Like all Greek temples, the Parthenon has an obvious and pervasive order; yet it is the only 
Doric temple to bring into play the complexity of all the so-called "refinements"-double 
contraction, curvature of both stylobate and entablature, entasis, enlargement of corner 
column diameters, and inward inclination of all four facades-whose presence, I think 
most would agree, is essential to the appeal we find in it. One could equally well illustrate 
the point with the Gothic 1126  cathedral, whose form was contrived, if analogies to 
scholasticism have any validity, especially to cohere a rich complexity within a pervasive 
order. 

What biological argument can explain the appeal of this conjunction? One of the earlier 
ones of which I am aware is John R. Platt's article of 1961 entitled "Beauty: Pattern  and 
Change";{Platt, "Beauty: Pattern and Change" (see n. 3).} a more recent and particularly 
lucid discussion is found in an essay of 1980 entitled "Natural Aesthetics," by Nicholas 
Humphrey.{Humphrey, "Natural Aesthetics," pp. 59-73.} 

Humphrey's rationale uses rhyme as a starting point. Rhyme, Humphrey says, can be 
described as "likeness tempered with difference";{Ibid., p. 63, referring to a phrase from 
the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.} Jill, in rhyming with hill, is like hill in some 
ways, different in others. This, Humphrey argues, is exactly what we like about rhymes, 
and at a more sophisticated level is why, in part, we enjoy poetry as an aesthetic 
experience. Humphrey notes that music, in its repetition and variation of melodic themes, 
can be analyzed in a similar way as a structure of likenesses and differences, as can many 
other aesthetic experiences. He further argues that our predilection for this "likeness 
tempered with difference" has a biological basis; there is a survival value, indeed an 
imperative, in the ability to discern categories of things on the one hand, and differences 
within them on the other. Animals (including the human animal) must be able to 
recognize their own species to survive, but within their own species must be able to 
recognize mother, brother, male, female, friend, and enemy. Species success also depends 
on an ability to recognize a general group of environments capable of sustaining life needs; 
within this large group it is helpful to distinguish between those that can sustain such 
needs especially well and those whose sustaining potential is weak. At a more specific 
level, one must be able to distinguish from the general type of habitation one's own 
personal habitat and the habitats of a number of other known individuals of one's species. 
Humphrey argues that given the pleasure basis of survival behaviors we, as a surviving 
species, derive a built-in delight in such categorizing and differentiating. He extends this 
notion to explain, among other human oddities, the collector, who finds pleasure in 
accumulating endless variations of a particular stimulus type, and can be shown to do so 
just for the sake of the variations and the commonalities.{Ibid., pp. 63-71. This may have 
something to do with the tendency for architectural historians to specialize. Far more 
importantly, it may be fundamental to the whole phenomenon of cultural preference and 
bias.} 

From this, it is a short step to an explanation of the familiar observation that experiences 
or artifacts consistently ranked very high in aesthetic value usually exhibit high levels of 
both complexity and order. The complexity engages our search for variations of stimuli; 
the order reassures us that these stimuli share a commonality; and we find in the 
juxtaposition an enduring aesthetic delight, whether in poetry, music, or architecture. 
Architectural examples such as the Parthenon or Chartres are usually considered "high 
art." But vernacular or popular examples that are used most often to demonstrate aesthetic 
value can also be shown to possess a large measure of the same duality of characteristics. 

Thus complexity and order, found in or designed into our surroundings, allow us to act as 
collectors of a large variety of phenomena which are also perceived as cohering. As we 
both order our collection and distinguish within it, we satisfy instincts that, from the 
beginning of our species, have been pleasurable. The reader familiar with Wright's work 
will already have seen correlations that deserve some examination.  Another body of 
thought in a cognate design field has an even more central relation to Wright's work. I 
have already cited two comments on complexity and order by the English geographer Jay 
Appleton, but the focus of his attention has been directed toward a different issue. While 
complexity and order are common to many of the arts, Appleton's main theoretical thrust 
has been toward a matter pertinent only to the spatial arts and their surrogates. There, 
however, he finds it to be of considerable, even essential value:  If I looked at a park laid 
out by Capability Brown and compared it with one of the great set-pieces of Andre le 
Notre or one of his followers, or with the near-wilderness exploration-grounds of the 
Picturesque, it became clear that the basic dichotomy between order and regularity on the 
one hand and disorder and irregularity on the other was of immense importance, but 
equally that this dichotomy could not alone explain my preferences.{Appleton, "How I 
Made the World," draft p. 332.}  Thus, in 1975, in a book entitled The Experience of 
Landscape, Appleton outlined what he has called prospect refuge theory.{Jay Appleton, 
The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley, 1975). Appleton presents his position 
in 262 pages of closely reasoned argument. What follows here can only be a brief synopsis, 
and one necessarily focusing on those aspects most clearly pertinent to architecture.} In 
developing his position Appleton has drawn on various sources including the writings of 
John Dewey mentioned above. As the title of his book indicates, Appleton began with 
landscape as a vehicle for analysis; to that end he has explored a vast resource of landscape 
design, landscape painting, and landscape literature. He argues that these evidences of 
pleasurable response to landscape conditions consistently illustrate certain repetitive 
characteristics. These repetitive characteristics he calls prospect, by which he means a 
place with unimpeded opportunity to see; and refuge, by which he means a place of 
concealment. These are mutually complementary, and can be summed up as the dual 
characteristics in the phrase "to see without being seen." The essential conditions are that 
the setting must suggest and provide a refuge in which the occupant cannot easily be seen; 
that from the refuge the occupant must be able to identify and move to a prospect setting; 
and that the prospect setting must suggest and provide an unimpeded outlook over a 
considerable distance. Though Appleton did not at the time try to develop empirical 
verification for this theory, others have since done so.{See especially D. M. Woodcock, "A 
Functionalist Approach to Environmental Preference" (doctoral dissertation, University of 
Michigan, 1982), especially Chap. 5, "Environmental Preference Theory: An Evolutionary 
Perspective." Woodcock breaks down Appleton's terms into primary and secondary 
prospect and refuge, in each case the primary being a condition actually occupied by the 
viewer, secondary being conditions apprehended at some distance. In architectural 
application, one is generally dealing with primary conditions; therefore, though 
Woodcock's terms are useful for landscape, I do not use them here. See also J. Archea, 
"Visual Access and Exposure: An Architectural Basis for Interpersonal Behavior" 
(doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1984). Archea approaches his study 
from a quite different direction and nowhere uses the terms aesthetics or pleasure; it is 
therefore all the more significant that his work leads to conclusions virtually identical to 
those of Appleton.} 

Appleton also offers a biological rationale, for he points out that as with complexity and 
order, the selection of juxtaposed conditions of prospect and refuge confers a vital 
advantage in species survival. Species, Homo sapiens included, that intuitively choose 
settings which allow seeing without being seen are thereby enabled to hunt successfully 
without being successfully hunted, and so survive and flourish. But, again, the intuitive 
pleasure motive that drives such a choice must logically precede any grasp of its functional 
value. The choosing of such settings, then, must be driven by an intuitive, immediate 
pleasure that is felt in the command of prospect and the containment of refuge. Such a 
pleasure, genetic to our species, is therefore independent of the functional utility of the 
setting and persists quite independently of our need to call on that utility.{Mary Ann 
Kirkby, in an unpublished paper, "A Natural Place to Play: The Use of Refuge in a 
Pre-School Play Yard" (University of Washington Department of Landscape 
Architecture, 1984), in which she was investigating prospect and refuge behaviors in 
children's playground activities, cited an interview with a four-year-old boy who put the 
whole matter very tersely: "When asked why his hiding spot should have an opening, 
Ryan, age four, answered 'Because I would need to see if you were coming.' And on 
another occasion, when asked twice why he preferred one landscape over another, he 
answered, very matter of factly, 'Because I could see.' When asked why it was important to 
see he responded, without hesitating, 'Because there might be wolves out there.'"} 

Since this pleasure in prospect and refuge settings is a continuing part of our genetic 
heritage, Appleton is able to draw on recent poetry, literature, and painting to illustrate 
such settings. Examples of prospect in poetry or painting are often broad meadows or great 
sweeps of water, invariably relatively brightly lit. In one exquisite poem cited by Appleton, 
Sidney Lanier's "The Marshes of Glynn," the poet is drawn to "the edge of the wood"  
where prospect appears as "the vast sweet visage of space," the "world of marsh that 
borders a world of sea."{Appleton, Experience of Landscape, p. 148.} But prospect may 
also be found in views across uneven terrain, whose hills may suggest other powerful 
prospect-claiming viewpoints. Seen from such elevations, prospects become especially 
strong, as view is extended to a more distant horizon and the viewer perceives the prospect 
from a dominant position. Thus prospect is intensified not only by sweep of view but by 
elevated vantage point. Manmade features, towers especially, may also symbolize prospect 
by offering a dominant position and extended view. Towers on hills thus offer two 
mutually reinforcing prospect symbols; Appletion calls such mutual reinforcement by like 
symbols the condition of reduplication. 

As the complement of prospect, the refuge concept is of paramount importance, "one of the 
most fundamental in the symbolism of environmental perception. It finds extreme 
expression in the search for the nesting-place. If safety can't be secured, and if in 
consequence, the individual organism ceases to function biologically, then all other desires 
become, for that individual, biologically irrelevant."{Appleton, "How I Made the World," 
draft p. 356.} In Lanier's poem, refuge is the deep wood that precedes the "visage of 
space," the wood of "Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,-/ Wildwood 
privacies, closets of lone desire,/ Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of 
leaves-." Such refuge conditions-Lanier's shadowy grove, or pocketed, contained spaces 
such as ravines, or in the extreme case caves, all of these always in relatively subdued 
light-such conditions hold an extraordinary power in conveying the possibility for hiding 
and, therefore, for safety. 

Though Appleton does not cite it, one of the tidiest literary descriptions of the joining of 
prospect and refuge conditions is found in Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Like Lanier, 
Dickens establishes his setting near the edge of a wood, one of the most prevalent of 
natural prospect-refuge conjunctions:  We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and last 
year's leaves, where there were some felled trees from which the bark was all stripped off. 
Seated among these, we looked through a green vista supported by thousands of natural 
columns, the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so radiant by its 
contrast with the shade in which we sat, and made so precious by the arched perspective 
through which we saw it, that it was like a glimpse of the better land.{Charles Dickens, 
Bleak House (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), p. 228. But note that the currently 
handiest   edition (New York: Bantam Classics, 1985), which unfortunately is the one on 
my own shelves, contains a bad typo in this passage, omitting two grammatically essential 
words (p. 236).}  All the elements are here: the sheltering grove, with its subdued light 
and its screen of "columns," all keeping the viewer unseen; the "arched perspective" 
through which is seen the contrasting open and brightly lit expanse beyond, for which 
Dickens even uses the term "prospect"-and the intensely pleasurable human response to it 
all, "like a glimpse of the better land." 

In the next paragraph of this narrative, however, we are introduced to a firmer refuge, and 
one which brings into the argument an architectural example:  . . . the storm broke so 
suddenly-upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot-that before we reached the outskirts of 
the wood, the thunder and lightning were frequent, and the rain came plunging through 
the leaves, as if every drop were a great leaden bead. . . . As it was not a time for standing 
among trees, we ran out of the wood. . . . and made for a keeper's lodge which was close at 
hand. We had often noticed the dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of 
trees, and how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow near, where we 
had once seen the keeper's dog dive down into the fern.  Thus this lodge offers a haven 
against heat and cold, sun and, in this case, storm. In so doing it takes us back to 
primordial purposes, for architecture, and particularly the dwelling, has its very 
beginnings in refuge, was invented most fundamentally for that purpose. It also serves to 
protect the inhabitant's privacy, and his possessions including food stores. Such is the 
essential function of the dwelling. 

But the lodge in this narrative not only shelters Dickens's heroes. It appears to them as a 
symbol of its ability to do so long before their practical need of it; "standing in a deep 
twilight of trees," its symbolism reduplicated by the "steep hollow near," it is a thing of 
"dark beauty" to them. So we can make a distinction between practical utility and symbolic 
or aesthetic value-for as an aesthetic experience, "what matters is not the actual potential 
of the environment, to furnish the necessities for survival, but its apparent potential as 
apprehended immediately rather than calculated rationally."{Appleton, Experience of 
Landscape, p. 69.} 

The building by its very existence conveys a signal of its refuge potential, thus is more or 
less automatically not only refuge-provision but also refuge-symbol; Appleton mentions 
buildings as universally carrying this symbolism. But as a totality, a building can present 
additional clues that enrich its capacity to be read as refuge. Appleton notes particular 
features that serve as refuge-clues: "windows, alcoves, recesses, balconies, heavy 
overhanging eaves, all these suggest a facility of penetration into the refuge. Even if actual 
access is not practicable the suggestion of accessibility can stimulate the idea of 
refuge."{Ibid., p. 105.} As a building presents these and perhaps other refuge-clues, it 
not only provides refuge but conveys in enriched terms its pleasure-arousing potential for 
doing so. And refuge-clues are not limited to the exterior. Spaces within the building that 
impart a strong feeling of containment contribute to a sense of refuge. Windowless 
corners, spaces closed on three sides, spaces of small dimension with low ceilings and 
prevalent solid walls, declare themselves as protective pockets of retreat. Halls and 
stairways, especially when narrow and low, bring wall and ceiling surfaces close to the 
body and so suggest protection and enclosure. 

And yet the building, like its predecessors the grove and the cave, is not refuge alone. 
Almost always, in one way and another, it will offer some suggestion of prospect as 
well-will be not only a haven, but one from which one can survey the surrounding 
terrain. Prospect from within a building must be obtained by some kind of opening. Here, 
too, the functional provision operates automatically as symbol or clue; a window 
unavoidably announces the potential of prospect from within. But this bald clue also can 
be enriched, thereby enlarging its aesthetic value. Some means for doing so are those 
already mentioned for clueing penetrability into refuge: balconies or terraces outside 
windows are immediately understood as prospect-providing platforms; heavy 
overhanging eaves suggest leading the eye to view, pointing the way outward to horizon; 
windows of unusual width or occurring in groups signal the availability of panoramic 
prospect across a broad arc of terrain. 

And just as refuge can be a characteristic of not only the house as a whole but also its 
interior parts, so too with prospect. The opening of one room to another provides an 
interior prospect; it is clarified, signaled, and enriched when there is some marking of the 
distinction between the spaces, a reminder that one is looking not just across one space but 
from one space into and perhaps through another. Vistas through hallways opening to 
more distant windowed spaces can also provide related conditions of interior prospect. 

Thus, when a house combines strong refuge signals, inside and out, with strong prospect 
signals, inside and out, it may be argued that it provides conditions that human beings are 
preconditioned by nature to select as pleasurable in their habitations. It is in this sense that 
the words human and nature can have more than romanticist value. 

One can find examples of these conditions in houses throughout history. The Mycenaean 
megardon comes to mind: its cella, windowless on three walls and with central hearth, 
provides an internal refuge-space from which one sees through the column screen the 
more brightly lit porch which in turn opens toward the court-yard and, in the distance, 
the prospect of the Argive plain. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles is a famous and extreme 
example of a prospect-claiming room, while the bedrooms of this same building, as 
refuge spaces, typically contain the bed within a windowless low alcove. The Elizabethan 
country house with its projecting glazed bays suggests rich panoramic prospect from 
within, while the terraces of later English houses, Harewood for example, are dramatic 
external prospect-claiming features. 

The Alhambra offers an extraordinarily clear example of the juxtaposition of prospect and 
refuge in its well-known and well-loved Court of the Lions. From the deeply shadowed, 
surrounding arcades whose columns can be understood as the tree trunks of Dickens's 
narrative, and whose spandrels above invoke the leafy bowers of a glade, one looks out to 
the contained meadow where-and here the example is almost too literal-the animals are 
gathered around the water source. One looks from the dark concealing refuge to the 
brightly lit hunting ground, seeing without being seen. Behind is the even more secure 
refuge of the darker interior recesses under the muqarnas glades. The Alhambra is an 
especially interesting example because, from a certain point of view, it is a building with 
unusually specific meaning: it incorporates symbols and messages exclusively pertinent to 
Islam and the history of Islam. And yet-and this is the intriguing point-at another level, 
its appeal can be felt without knowing anything at all about its culturally specific meaning. 
For as an eloquent example of prospect-and-refuge juxtaposition, its beauty is not a 
matter of acculturation or cognitive reasoning but rather of universal and immediate 
emotional response. In this sense its appeal is not to Moslem but to Homo sapiens.  All 
this, of course, assumes that characteristics of value in landscape analysis can have 
architectural analogies. This assumption perhaps cannot be proved-indeed, as Appleton 
points out, his arguments can hardly be proved in the usual sense, even in the case of 
landscape. But the idea of an architectural analogy is, on the face of it, a hypothesis worth 
pursuing. Surely if it is to be tried, the house is the building type with which to begin, 
since selection of prospect and refuge conditions is, after all, selection of habitat, and that 
is what houses are. And surely among houses, those of Frank Lloyd Wright are the ideal 
starting point. For as Walter Creese has recently observed, "among American architects of 
any time, Frank Lloyd Wright was the most committed to architecture as it applied to 
nature and the landscape."{Walter Creese, The Crowning of the American Landscape 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 241.} Thomas Beeby echoes this: "It is 
commonly held that the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright fuse with their specific sites and 
demonstrate an organic link with the forces of nature. Wright himself suggests that the 
forms of the landscape are mysteriously related to the configuration of his 
buildings."{Thomas H. Beeby, "Wright and Landscape: A Mythical Interpretation," in 
Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, eds., The Nature of Frank Lloyd 
Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 144. An example of the sort of 
thing Beeby may be referring to can be found in Wright, "In the Cause of Architecture," 
Architectural Record 23:3 (March 1908), p. 155: "[Nature's] wealth of suggestion is 
inexhaustible; her riches are greater than any man's desire," but there are innumerable 
instances of the theme in his writings.} It may be possible to make the relation ship less 
mysterious. For in Wright's houses, the features that signal and provide refuge and 
prospect are consistently deployed with richness and emphasis. Furthermore while the 
megaron, Versailles, Harewood, and the Alhambra include a few such features, Wright's 
work, even at an early date, included a unique profusion of them, usually reduplicated and 
at several hierarchical levels, and this proved to be true of his entire career. 

That Wright was intuitively especially attuned to prospect and refuge juxtapositions is 
suggested by one of his early works, the Romeo and Juliet windmill done in 1897{Other 
dates are commonly given, e.g., Grant Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First 
Golden Age (New York: Reinhold, 1957), p. 93, gives 1895; Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In 
the Nature of Materials (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), p. 29, gives 1896. Robert 
Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: John Wiley & 
Sons, 1979), p. 27, has traced local primary sources which tie the date to September 
1897.} on the hilltop above what later became his home, Taliesin, near his birthplace in 
central Wisconsin. Its hilltop location, natural enough for a windmill, carries with it the 
potential for dramatic prospect. It is also an instance of reduplication, since both hilltop 
and tower suggest and offer the prospect condition. All this is, so far, more or less 
unavoidable and therefore unremarkable. But the way in which Wright seized the prospect 
potential and at the same time provided refuge clues and opportunity takes this structure 
entirely out of the usual family of windmills. Appleton maintains that the "sense of 
exposure is dominant in the windmill, invariably a prospect symbol because it is 
functionally required to reach upwards into the moving air. . . . The refuge aspect, though 
present, is suppressed."{Appleton, Experience of Landscape, pp. 125-27.} But this is not 
the case at Romeo and Juliet. As its eminence declares its prospect role, so the deep roof 
near the top, sheltering a dark void, signals refuge. Thus, in addition to its windmill 
function, Romeo and Juliet is a climbable and habitable tower, at the top of which is the 
belvedere,{Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), p. 
136.} within which the human observer, obscured within the shadows of the deeply eaved 
roof, looks outward from the magnificent prospect-enhancing elevation, seeing without 
being seen.{An anonymous reader has kindly pointed out that this is true of "hundreds of 
'eye-catchers' in 18th century gardens." But in those instances the notion of a climbable 
and habitable tower, or a symbol thereof, was the whole purpose. Wright's task, on the 
other hand, was to provide a working windmill for farm use. That he modified the 
program in this way suggests the importance to him of doing so. Another reader has 
suggested that the source of the windmill's name lies in analogies between the belvedere 
and Juliet's balcony, and that therefore the occupant of that balcony was intended to be 
seen, not hidden. But in Wright's lengthy discussion of the structure he nowhere uses the 
term "balcony," though he refers to "the little belvedere-named for Juliet" (Frank Lloyd 
Wright, An Autobiography [New York: Horizon, 1977], p. 160). But this seems not to 
have been the primary source, for he says at greater length (p. 159) "Romeo, as you will 
see, will do all the work and Juliet will cuddle alongside to support and exalt him. Romeo 
takes the side of the blast and Juliet will entertain the school children. Let's let it go at 
that. No symbol should ever be taken too far."} Thus Romeo and Juliet provides actual 
conditions of both prospect and refuge and also provides strong architectural signals of its 
ability to do so. This dual symbolic and operational provision would seem to overshadow 
entirely its windmill function. 

But whatever Wright's emphasis on it, this structure was a minor opus in his career. It 
serves only as an introduction to the characteristics that underlie his architecture, and it 
reveals them in ways that are simplistic by comparison with what was to come. To develop 
the issues of complexity and order, prospect and refuge, in a more substantial way we have 
to begin again with Wright's pattern, and with the building that first embodies it, the 
Heurtley house. 


3. The Prairie Houses 

The houses Wright designed in the Oak Park years, and especially those done between 
1901 and his departure for Europe in 1909, have long been known as the Prairie houses; 
the term can be debated, but it has found its way into common usage. The Ladies' Home 
Journal schemes, the Hickox and Bradley houses, and especially the Willits house have 
each been put forward at one time or another as the first example of the type.{See, e.g., 
Grant Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (New York: Reinhold, 
1958), pp. 103-108, in which he calls the Ladies' Home Journal houses "full-fledged 
Prairie Houses" and Bradley and Hickox "the first Prairie Houses to be erected." 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials (New York: Duell, Sloane, and 
Pearce, 1942, reprint, 1982), caption to fig. 73, and Vincent Scully, in Hitchcock et al., 
The Rise of an American Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 188, give the Willits 
house the honor.} But the configuration I have called Wright's pattern, which is vital to all 
his Prairie houses after Willits and in fact to all Wright's subsequent houses throughout his 
career, first appears in its entirety at the Heurtley house. Therefore there is good reason for 
taking it as the first fully mature Prairie house; it is also the obvious starting point for 
probing the value of the pattern. 

As seen from the sidewalk the Heurtley house presents clear signals of refuge. The dual 
bands of windows, the deep overhanging roof, and the "balconies," that is, the terrace at 
upper right, the loggia at lower center, and the porch with its promontory, all clearly and 
strongly modeled features, are ideal instances of the those suggested by Appleton as 
stimulating the idea of refuge. And so is the arched entry; carrying an unavoidable 
suggestion of a cave mouth, its refuge inference is reduplicated by the protective masonry 
porch and the screening plantings in the urns at the porch corners. Yet several of these 
features also signal prospect. The "balconies," the horizontally prolonged window bands, 
even the prowlike modeling of the generous elevated porch, all clearly convey the 
availability of a multitude of panoramic outlooks. 

One enters the Heurtley house by moving toward the rear of the lot, turning sharply right 
and ascending the porch with its planted urns. One then turns to the left to pass through 
the cave-mouth entry into the protective masonry mass of the house, then up the twisting 
ascent of the stair to the major spaces of the upper floor, having negotiated from the 
sidewalk ten right-angle turnings, a 9-foot change of vertical elevation, and a 
considerable horizontal distance. And here it may be worth noting that at least two of the 
turnings and 25 feet or so of horizontal distance could easily have been avoided had 
Wright chosen to do so, for the entry walk could have led straight to the front door, as it 
had at the earlier Winslow, Williams, and Thomas houses, as well as Wright's own Oak 
Park house. Thus, the entry to the Heurtley house is not only long and complex, it is 
deliberately so. Such an entry experience is analogous to the entries of the earliest known 
special human habitations, for the prehistoric caves of Spain and France have just such 
lengthy and circuitous routes to set their special chambers at a distance from the outer 
world of hunter and hunted. 

Having pursued this elaborate path to the special place, one arrives at the massive fireplace 
with its flanking built-in seating. It is tempting to continue to use the cave analogy to 
describe this fireplace zone, and there is strong precedent for doing so. Vincent Scully, 
among others, has especially reiterated it: "The Heurtley house is an earth-pressing mass 
and a dark cave, with a deep, low entrance whose arch is echoed by that of the central 
fireplace within. The interior space is a cave."{Vincent Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright (New 
York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960), p. 19.} Thomas Beeby makes some related 
observations with reference not only to the Heurtley house but to the Prairie house 
generally: 

The dim light of the interior also suggests the perpetual twilight of the underworld or that 
of a shallow cave. The entire arrangement heightens this sense, for the continuous flow of 
space is detailed to accentuate the horizontality of the surfaces, evoking the stratification of 
the rock walls of a cave formed by erosion. The continuity of finish between wall and 
ceiling approaches the monolithic material distribution familiar in caves. This illusion is 
further heightened by the rising slope of the ceiling planes toward the center of the rooms. 
The overall impression is that of the sheltering confines of the prenatal condition of the 
womb that is symbolized by the void of a cave.{Thomas H. Beeby, "Wright and 
Landscape: A Mythical Interpretation," in Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda 
Seidel, eds., The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1988), p. 170.} 

Such a term, and such a space, are of themselves powerfully suggestive of refuge: "Caves, 
chasms, ravines, in short any orifices which allow a creature to enter physically into the 
fabric of the earth, are obviously potent refuge symbols . . . the cave is the most complete 
general purpose sanctuary provided by nature."{Jay Appleton, The Experience of 
Landscape (London: John Wiley, 1975), p. 103.} But the word "cave" can suggest not only 
a refuge but also a cold, damp, and even terrifying setting. What is essential to overcome 
these associations and make the cave amenable to human refuge is the potential for light 
and warmth, for which an indication of some provision for fire is an obvious means. 

Obvious, yet not so obvious. Heretofore we have been discussing responses which, so the 
argument has gone, are intuitive, genetically programmed into our being; we do not learn 
them, nor is rational reflection involved when those responses come into play. But is the 
choosing of a space with the potential for a fire also intuitive? That is harder to show. But 
in Wright's houses the potential for fire is invariably indicated by a fireplace, as at the 
Heurtley house-and here, in terms of the intuitive and the learned, the issue is clear. An 
understanding that the typical western fireplace is actually a place for a fire certainly must 
be learned-surely only a person who knows western architectural conventions could 
interpret it for what it is. Nevertheless, within western tradition, there is equally no doubt 
that the meaning of the form is learned by virtually everyone, and at a very early age. It is 
likely, therefore, that in the western world the fireplace is pervasively understood, on an all 
but intuitive level, as a valued complement to the refuge, of which the cave or its 
architectural surrogate is an example. Probably largely for this reason fireplaces have a 
widespread popularity, not only in Wright's work, where they are universal, but in western 
dwellings generally, long after the loss of their practical value as an essential heat source. 

What distinguishes Wright's work in this regard is the unusually emphatic declaration of 
the potential for fire. For just as the cave inference at the Heurtley house is strongly 
declared both inside and out, so the potential for fire is also strongly declared, on the 
exterior by the overscaled dominant chimney, on the interior by the strong modeling and 
generous dimensions given to the fireplace. It is also strengthened by reduplication, since 
it is held within a containing pocket of space, withdrawn to the low zone of the ceiling and 
with the half-inglenook seating alongide. The fireplace and its setting thus mutually 
reinforce the refuge condition. "An inglenook creates the image of a special warm enclave, 
for its function is intuitively clear: with seats built in along the walls, it is just large 
enough for a few people to gather close to the fire's radiant warmth."{Lisa Heschong, 
Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), p. 34.} This area, 
treated in this way, thus becomes at small scale an interior refuge zone, contrasting with 
the remainder of the room of which it is a part. 

Forward of the fireplace the ceiling rises into the volume of the roof. This is the key to 
Wright's modeling of spaces as juxtapositions of low and high volumes: by making the 
major spaces contiguous with the roof at the Heurtley house, he changed the ceiling planes 
in a really significant way. And this in turn gave him a spatial device of considerable 
value. Our perception of degree of spatial enclosure is affected more by the proximity of 
the ceiling plane than by any other characteristic: bringing it down generates a sense of 
containment; moving it up generates a sense of release, and it is more effective for either 
purpose than like movements of wall planes.{On this point see Philip Thiel, Ean Duane 
Harrison, and Richard S. Alden, "Perception of Spatial Enclosure as a Function of the 
Position of the Architectural Surfaces," Environment and Behavior 18:2 (March 1986), pp. 
227-45, in which they make a convincing empirical demonstration of this point.} Thus, 
at the Heurtley house, the low ceiling edges contain, the high center releases, and the 
effect is gained by the most powerful means for doing so; the refuge of the low, contained 
fireplace zone is powerfully complemented by the open field of space forward of it. In spite 
of Wright's emphasis on the importance of the horizontal, he perceived the value of this 
vertical spatial manipulation, so much so that it became a nearly universal feature of his 
work. 

In the Heurtley house, as in Wright's houses from 1900 onward, the living room is opened 
to contiguous spaces, in this case the dining room and the entry hall. This kind of 
arrangement is generally called an open plan, and Wright, it is generally agreed, 
originated it. In so doing he invented an important means for the manipulation of prospect 
and refuge. Appleton notes: "If the eye makes a spontaneous assessment of the 
environment as a strategic theatre for survival, this must include some assessment of the 
opportunity for movement between the various key positions in the prospect-refuge 
complex."{Jay Appleton, Experience of Landscape, pp. 118-19.} Wright's open plan is 
the essential device-and a device unavailable to prior domestic architecture-that makes 
possible the offering of such an assessment within a residential interior of modest size. But 
in his work, with the Heurtley house as a good early example, the open plan is not just a 
larger unarticulated space. To the north, the edge of the living room is marked out by four 
columnar elements. Through three of the resultant intervening spaces, views are available 
into the dining room; the remaining two spaces open into the entry hall. These columnar 
elements and the views they frame between them bear noting. They make the interior 
experience analogous to that of looking past the trees at the edge of the forest to view the 
meadow or the grove beyond. For in looking from the stairhead toward the living room, or 
from living to dining room, one does not just look across different zones of a single space, 
but rather from one demarcated space into another, the columnar elements establishing the 
boundary through which vista is seen. I would like to call this condition, and permutations 
of it, interior prospect.{H. Allen Brooks, "Wright and the Destruction of the Box," Journal 
of the Society of Architectural Historians 38:2 (March 1979), pp. 7-14, notes also the 
importance of articulating elements between spaces. The article is an extremely important 
one for its vanguard discussion of Wright's spaces but is in some ways misleading. Brooks 
calls attention to rooms which join diagonally at the corners, implying that this was a 
condition of choice with Wright, and illustrating the Ross house of 1902 as an example. In 
fact in many of the great subsequent houses (Heurtley, Cheney, Coonley, Roberts, Robie, 
Taliesin I, Hollyhock, La Miniatura, and Fallingwater), the condition doesn't really occur 
in quite that way. It is a pervasive and effective feature of the Usonians, however; see 
Chap. 7. Brooks also emphasizes conditions where trim continues through a change of 
plane. He is entirely correct in noting that this is often done, but oddly enough it does not 
happen in what we have to assume were Wright's two early favorites, the Coonley house 
and Taliesin I. Finally, the first Taliesin and its contemporaries restate the box; see Chap. 
4.} It provides yet another powerful complement to the containing characteristics, the 
interior refuge, of the fireplace zone. 

At all edges of each of the spaces, the ceiling returns to a low elevation, which is 
emphasized by a continuous band of dark trim. These continuous low edges reassert the 
idea of the totality of the house as a refuge. At this level of interpretation, the bands of 
windows and the french doors are a release to the larger external prospect. In this release, 
the terrace south of the living room has a dual role. Terraces in Wright's work are typically 
generous; thus they symbolize prospects in themselves, understood from the interior as 
external architectural meadows open to light and air. At the same time, they are viewing 
platforms for the landscape prospect beyond. From just such a platform, the inhabitant of 
the Heurtley house, seeing without being seen, commands the vast midwestern prairie-or, 
more realistically, as much of it as can be symbolized by the suburban lawns and trees of 
Oak Park. It is the Romeo and Juliet condition carried to an infinitely richer state. 

And here, of course, is another advantage Wright gained in putting the major spaces, 
including the terrace, directly under the roof, for they are thereby elevated above the level 
of the prairie's surrogate, the Oak Park lawns. Wright often expressed a fondness for being 
close to the plane of the earth, and in many of his houses before Heurtley, the main floor 
really is: this is true of the Winslow house, the two Ladies' Home Journal schemes, the 
Hickox and Bradley houses, and to a lesser degree the Willits house. But it is the exception 
after Heurtley. Typically thereafter, either the main floor is in some way elevated within 
the house (as at Heurtley), or the house itself is placed on elevated ground, so that the view 
outward is toward a landscape well below floor level.{There is a practical reason for 
having the ground slope away from the house, as it minimizes the problem of foundation 
drainage, but this does not explain Wright's predilection. Many of his houses have floors at 
or below grade, e.g., the Cheney and Robie houses, but not the main living floors; and 
after 1902, in cases where such subordinate floors do not occur, the differential of 
elevation between Wright's main living floors and the overlooked terrain is usually far 
greater than is useful for drainage.} Such an elevated platform implies a considerable and 
intuitively understood strategic advantage, since one looks down upon the surrounding 
terrain and anything that inhabits it. Elevation also offers an enrichment of prospect value, 
since it increases the distance to the horizon and thereby the depth of view. Grant Manson 
has put the point beautifully, specifically with regard to the Heurtley house: "The 
occupants look out over the landscape with that sense, so agreeable in a flat country, of 
having a vantage point."{Manson, Golden Age, p. 127.} Appleton agrees: he says of 
landscape conditions that "elevation of the viewpoint also enhances its prospect 
value."{Appleton, Experience of Landscape, p. 95.} But Wright himself hinted at much 
the same point: "I saw that a little height on the Prairie was enough to look like much 
more. Notice how every detail as to height becomes intensely significant."{Frank Lloyd 
Wright, The Natural House (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), p. 15.}  The Edwin Cheney 
house of 1903-1904, also in Oak Park, offers to the street prospect and refuge clues 
similar to those of the Heurtley house: the deep eaves, the glass, and the "balcony," the 
terrace with its flanking walls, which in its own way proclaims both prospect and refuge, 
and which, as we will see, is an essential element for both. 

At the Cheney house, however, there is no indication whatever of the location of the front 
door, the first instance of an extraordinary downplaying that marked Wright's houses from 
this date onward. Previously he often had done a splendid job of giving architectural 
presence to the front door; even at the Heurtley house this is true.{Other particularly clear 
instances: the Winslow, Williams, Thomas, and Dana houses.} At the Cheney house, the 
glass and the overhangs may suggest penetrability, but the house protects its actual access 
through ambiguity (the dual walkways), masking (the screening of view to the door from 
the street), and convolution. Turning 90 degrees off the sidewalk and taking the proper 
right-hand walkway, one ascends five steps. Ahead is a walk of perhaps 30 feet, heading 
straight to the back yard, then a right angle turn to the left, up three steps, a walk of 12 
feet or so, but still not directly toward the door, then up two more steps and under the eave.  
Another right-angle turn and another, and the door-an unassuming door-is reached. 
The approach has entailed perhaps 75 feet of walking, eleven risers, and 360 degrees of 
turning. Having traversed this long sequence one arrives, again, at the very heart and core 
of the house. The secure haven has been penetrated to its very center by circuitous 
processes of transition navigable, or so it seems, only by the initiated, and no threat will 
ever find the way.{Although from Edwin Cheney's point of view, a threat did find the way: 
the architect knew where the front door was.} As in the Heurtley house, the Cheney house 
entrance has analogies to the entry sequences of prehistoric caves, in which the 
ornamented ceremonial chamber was also reached by long convoluted passageways that 
ensured and dramatized the privacy and remoteness of the special place.  One reaches this 
special place to discover its fireplace, representing warmth and light, ahead on the right. 
Withdrawn behind the edges of the adjacent dining room and library, it lies under a low 
flat ceiling of considerable extent. To right and left, this zone is flanked by book-lined 
walls (though there are small "windows" to the hall); these walls and the extensive low 
ceiling define an interior refuge more firmly contained and therefore stronger than at 
Heurtley.  Interior refuge: the living room fireplace area. The fireplace is deeply recessed 
under the low ceiling and is pocketed by book-lined walls to either side. The entry is at 
right. 

The ceiling planes of the living room forward of the fireplace refuge again echo those of 
the roof above. But unlike Heurtley, these ceiling planes continue uninterrupted to right 
and left into dining room and library, uniting the three spaces and inviting the eye into 
them, enriching the reading of an interior prospect condition between them. Vertical and 
horizontal articulating elements again appear, and their role, already noted at the Heurtley 
house, is important. They serve as reminders that one is not simply in an oversized space, 
but looks from one defined space toward another. At the edges of the ceiling, and 
especially in the zone of the french doors leading out from the living room, the height 
returns to that of the fireplace refuge and, like the fireplace refuge, includes an area of flat 
ceiling. The continuous low edge is again emphasized by heavy trim. Thus, within the 
house itself, as at the Heurtley house, there is a microcosm of the refuge-prospect 
sequence, while in a larger sense the whole interior, with its emphatic low edges all 
around, is declared as a refuge.  Living room from the fireplace toward the terrace. The 
terrace is reached through the leaded french doors under the lowered ceiling edge. 

The sense of the entire house as a refuge is reinforced by the leaded and stained windows, 
used here and in most of Wright's houses of the Prairie period. Plain unornamented glass, 
when seen from the exterior in typical daylight conditions, is opaque; therefore the 
occupant within the building cannot be seen from outside.{This is less true of buildings in 
recent years because of increased interior light levels; as the amount of light on the interior 
approaches that of the exterior the glass becomes transparent from either side.} 
Nevertheless, one feels exposed behind a wall of glass, no matter what the intellect says is 
the case. Hence the importance of the leaded and stained glass of the Cheney house, and 
the other Prairie houses that precede and follow: it conveys immediately and without 
cognitive intervention the sense that one is hidden from view. Thus it converts the 
screening characteristic of the glass from a phenomenon understood through reasoned 
cognition, over time, to a phenomenon grasped intuitively and immediately. One senses 
that one is hidden in the dark recesses behind the foliage and the branches of a grove. 

If the house as a totality is to be understood as refuge, the french doors opposite the fire 
open out to an undeniable prospect condition, that of the elevated exterior terrace as an 
architectural meadow. Here, too, there is a development beyond that of the Heurtley 
condition. At Heurtley the terrace is entirely covered by the great roof whose eaves project 
well beyond; at Cheney the roof, a concise square, overhangs the french doors only 
slightly. As one moves out onto the terrace, therefore, the prospect is expanded not only 
laterally but vertically. And this also yields a contrast in light quality not available at 
Heurtley: as one moves from the Cheney living room out onto the terrace one moves from 
dark to light. Darkness, as Appleton notes,{Appleton, Experience of Landscape, pp. 
111-12.} is associated with not being seen and therefore with refuge, while light is 
associated with seeing and therefore with prospect. Thus this manipulation of the roof not 
only releases sky views as one moves forward onto the terrace; it also intensifies the 
contrast in light quality between the darker interior refuge and this more brilliant exterior 
prospect. Here, too, Wright had an intuitive sensitivity to the value of this condition; 
hereafter his terraces typically will be partly roofed , partly open to the sky. 

It also bears noting that this terrace is not directly analogous to the typical American front 
porch. This observation holds true for the Heurtley terrace and those of many of Wright's 
previous houses as well. But at the Cheney house the difference is less obvious, and 
therefore more in need of discussion, since at Cheney the terrace occupies a location, in 
relation to both house and site, that is clearly similar to that of the typical porch. The 
difference, and it is an important one, is that the terrace is in no way a part of the entry 
sequence; its surface is in fact withheld from view until the completion of a long path of 
penetration through the very heart of the house. Thus the terrace, as an architectural 
surrogate of the meadow, is not entirely like its natural prototype. It, like the rest of the 
house, is removed, bounded, and protected, clearly but subtly set apart from the world of 
the chase; it is a symbol of that world, yet is itself safe and secure. This lengthy separation 
of the terrace from the entry path will be found in all of Wright's subsequent major 
houses.{Except the Glasner house, in which Wright took care to provide two equally 
removed surrogates in the veranda and the unbuilt tea house.} 

Having pushed the major spaces up under the roof at the Heurtley house, Wright brought 
the pattern closer to the earth at the Cheney house. The house has a basement, but it is 
recessed in the earth, visible only at the back. The main floor is established at about five 
feet above sidewalk grade; in spite of its low, earth-hugging appearance, the main spaces 
of the Cheney house are substantially elevated above the surrounding terrain to garner the 
prospect enhancement that condition provides. But since the Cheney house is nearer to the 
sidewalk than either the Willits or Heurtley houses, and since, like them, its street-facing 
wall is largely glass, Wright here had to solve a problem of privacy. By bringing the 
terrace wall out toward the sidewalk, and by locating the coping of its solid brick parapet 
over seven feet above sidewalk level,{The working drawings for the Cheney house show 
that the dimension from grade to parapet was originally indicated as 10 feet.} Wright 
controlled the sight line from the near sidewalk so that it intercepts the lower edge of the 
leaded glass in the french doors to the terrace. This brick parapet wall originally extended 
across the entire lot, ensuring privacy to the whole house and from diagonal as well as 
frontal views. This was essential, of course, to the development of refuge within a small, 
low house near a city street. Yet, standing anywhere in the living room, one sees the trees 
and houses on the opposite side of the street, so that prospect is retained. The occupant 
sees without being seen.{Except by the houses across the street of course, but three 
conditions intervene: distance, foliage, and the upper zone of stained and leaded glass in 
the doors and windows, all of which mask such intrusions. 

For his own work Wright was the measure of all things; see e.g., An Autobiography (New 
York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1943), p. 141. Accordingly, in this sectional diagram and 
that of the Robie house, I have drawn all human figures at 5 feet 8 inches. (Concerning 
Wright's own figure of 5 feet 8<?> inches see Chap. 9, n. 4, though a half-inch at the 
scale of this drawing is meaningless.) For a more detailed discussion of Wright's sectional 
manipulation of sight lines, see Grant Hildebrand, "Privacy and Participation: Frank Lloyd 
Wright and the City Street," The Frank Lloyd Wright Newsletter 3.3 (third quarter 1980), 
pp. 4-9.} Appleton has said:  The modern, centrally heated flat or maisonette affords a 
far better protection against meteorological hazard than the more primitive shelters of 
earlier days. But where large windows face streets, squares or public open spaces, and 
especially if the internal structure of the house is based on the "open plan," the physical 
protection provided against the weather may not be matched by the visual protection 
against the eye of the intruder. The refuge may be effective as "shelter" but ineffective as 
"hide."{Appleton, Experience of Landscape, p. 175.}  This is not true of the Cheney 
house, even though it is an early example of the open plan and has large windows facing 
the street. Wright manages to have it both ways. In so doing he realizes a condition 
described by Colin St. John Wilson, who, paraphrasing Adrian Stokes, says: "It is uniquely 
the role of the masterpiece to make possible the simultaneous experience of these two polar 
modes; enjoyment at the same time of intense sensations of being inside and outside, of 
envelopment and detachment, of oneness and separateness."{Colin St. John Wilson, "The 
Natural Imagination," The Architectural Review 185:1103 (Jan. 1989), p. 66.} 

There is still more to be said of the configuration of this house, and especially as Wright 
portrayed it in relation to the site. The exquisite rendering by Marion Mahony is an 
excellent example of the way Wright chose to have his houses portrayed. Norris Kelley 
Smith has observed that "a spacious openness exists around and in front of the building 
but not . . . behind and beyond it. The house is made to appear at once embraced by its 
natural setting and opened to it."{Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in 
Architectural Content (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 77.} There is a certain 
obviousness in making a presentation drawing this way, as it shows the building clearly 
and sets it against an appealing ground, and for this reason many architects will show 
siting in a roughly similar way. But Smith is correct in calling attention to it in Wright's 
case, for with Wright the characteristic is unusually strong and consistent, especially after 
1902. And for him it was more than just a convention of presentation. Wright meant it as 
an indication of how vegetation was actually to be managed. With the later Hollyhock 
House, sited on a rather bare Los Angeles hill, such a planting program was carried out by 
the owner, with Wright's enthusiastic approval, to make the building look like the 
drawing; still later he urged just such a planting scheme on Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hanna, 
without success. 

The Cheney rendering shows plantings that no doubt in part preexisted. But the effect in 
all cases is to enfold the refuge portions of the house in the primordial refuge of nature, the 
grove at the edge of the meadow, while the prospect components of the house reach 
forward from the hiding place to project into the prospect space of the meadow. Thus, 
Wright's preferred rendering of siting locates the inhabitant, at least in intention, at "the 
edge of the wood" to which Sidney Lanier was drawn, and to the place where Dickens 
placed his characters (see p. 31). It is also exactly the location that Stephen Kaplan's 
recent empirical studies identify as the place of intuitive human choice: "It becomes clear 
that neither being out in the open nor being in the woods is favored. These opposing 
vectors would tend to place the individual right at the forest edge. Ecologists point out that 
such an area is the richest in terms of life forms; it is likely to be the safest as 
well."{"Aesthetics, Affect, and Cognition: Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary 
Perspective," Environment and Behavior 19:1 (Jan. 1987), p. 3.}  Let us for a moment 
regard the Cheney house from another point of view. In chapter 2 I noted that in the study 
of environmental aesthetics there is some degree of agreement about preferences for some 
combination of complexity and order, and that this can be accounted for in part, at least, as 
a manifestation of survival behaviors genetic to our species. 

Complexity clearly is a characteristic that can be found in the path of movement into and 
through the Cheney house. The path toward the front door is far more complex than that 
of the ordinary house its size. Four right-angle turnings must be negotiated to reach the 
front door; once inside, another three occur before one faces the fire or the terrace. Yet this 
point lies on the centerline of a symmetrical composition, and one is conscious of its doing 
so. In addition, the numerous turnings all have been of 90 degrees, and have been 
indicated as such by architectural emphases at every point. The ceiling planes, whose slope 
is exactly that of the external roof planes, recall the first views of the house. The trim at 
the ceiling edge is of the same height and dimension as the external eave under which one 
passed on entry. Thus, this complex path also possesses and declares an order and 
culminates in a resolution and reestablished clarity of orientation. 

Complexity can also be regarded spatially: are we in a single, bounded space or is there a 
complex and ambiguous relationship of spatial interpretations? Clearly the Cheney 
organization is the latter. The living room is declared by the fire recess and by the range of 
french doors, and by the paired columns that intervene between it and the dining room and 
library, leading us to regard those rooms as subspaces to the living room. But as the eye 
moves to the ceiling, dining room, living room, and library are one; the subspaces, which 
do not partake of this ceiling volume, are the fire nook and the french-doors bay. Yet all 
are bound together by the heavy dark wood trim at the ceiling edge, the thickest trim of the 
entire interior, which both integrates and articulates. Thus, an extraordinarily complex 
spatial organization is seen to possess an extraordinary order. This is architectural 
rhyming, to use Humphrey's term, the repetition of like characteristics joined with unlike.  
The house for the Avery Coonleys was done perhaps three years later than the Cheney 
house. It is much larger, and its plan far more extensive. As at Heurtley and Cheney, 
Wright has raised the main floor, which is reached by the usual twisting passage and 
ascent. One enters this rather grand palazzo under the porte-cochere through a door of 
utter modesty. A stair lies ahead, and above it light filters in from the sky, drawing the eye 
upward. At the top of this stair vistas open to left and right, down narrow low passages 
leading to pavilions of light. One turns to the left, then navigates two more left turns, to 
arrive at the living pavilion. The fireplace, off the left flank, is at the living room's inner 
edge, and in this case is pocketed by the high railings that edge the stairs to either side. 
The pocket thus created is lined with books below and (originally) the arboreal mural on 
either side of the brick fireplace. From this, the grand ceiling rises, congruent with the roof 
planes above.{When the ceiling planes are designed to be the undersurface of a hipped or 
gabled roof, a structural issue arises. Since Wright was the first to design houses with this 
characteristic feature, he had to work out the structural issue for himself, and a brief 
discussion may help in understanding some of his problems and choices. 

In the usual house with a gable or hip roof there is a flat ceiling suspended below 
horizontal cross-ties; occasionally, as in the case of the English cottage, the cross-tie 
structure may be left uncovered. Such cross-ties form chords that, in effect, make the 
gable or hip structure act as a truss that rests on the walls, exerting no lateral thrust. But 
when the ceiling ascends into the volume of the roof, as Wright had it do, the gable or hip 
is denied the horizontal cross-tie. The gable then acts approximately as an arch, and the 
hip as a dome-and as in an arch or a dome, a lateral thrust results, inducing a tendency to 
spread where the roof edge meets the wall. Wright had an uneven record in understanding 
this problem and devising measures to deal with it. In the Glasner house of 1905 and the 
Como Orchards cottages of 1909, he made no provision, and the consequent spreading has 
required expedient remedies: steel tie-rods at Glasner, 2-4s at Como Orchards. At the 
Heurtley and Cheney houses the problem does not arise because the chimney mass makes a 
formidable support at the apex of the roof. At the Coonley house the area of roof over the 
living room is large, while the chimney mass is far from the roof apex and therefore less 
efficient as support. Given the configuration of the scheme, and the obvious fact that the 
house has been stable and secure, it is reasonable to infer that each corner of the Coonley 
roof structure is very securely tied, and the horizontal "beams" at the open corners of the 
living room assist in maintaining a tension ring around the roof's perimeter. This tension 
ring, in combination with a degree of support from the fireplace mass and the intersecting 
corridor roofs to either side, would secure the diagonal ridge rafters against spreading, and 
they in turn would secure the remainder of the structure. Though all this would have had 
to be thought through pretty carefully, the whole thing would have been fairly simple to 
construct, and has obviously been durable. In this sense, and provided both the problem 
and the solution are properly understood, a hipped roof without crossties can be easier to 
manage than a gable, for which there are no equally tidy answers-with a gable, corner 
ties and tension rings are virtually useless. This in turn may help to explain, in part, 
Wright's loyalty to hipped roofs, and his avoidance of gables, once he had adopted the 
device of ceiling planes ascending deeply into the roof's volume. (If the roof is flat, of 
course, no such problem arises since no lateral thrust is generated.)} Walter Creese has 
recently remarked that "the ceiling panels may represent the spreading clouds of the 
prairie sky, or the branches of Olmsted's trees."{Walter Creese, The Crowning of the 
American Landscape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 237.} Perhaps they 
are both. The space, considered as a hierarchical enlargement of the fireplace 
cave-refuge, thus becomes, as a totality, a gentler grove-refuge, in which the lighted 
edge panels and the skylights of the adjacent hall ceilings suggest the light of the sky sifted 
through the branches of the grove. Such an interpretation is conveyed from within by the 
house itself, for the ceiling planes are felt to be only inches away from the leaves and 
branches, the sun and the rain. Here we can feel, perhaps more clearly than before, another 
reason for Wright's placement of the major rooms directly under the roof. Within this 
interpretation, the appropriateness of the arboreal mural flanking the fireplace is obvious. 

Like the preceding houses, the Coonley house has an open plan; the eye is easily carried 
outward from the living room to the extended hallways and skylit stairwells, although 
actual movement is held away from the fireplace pocket. The hallways articulate the 
linkage between spaces, as did the horizontal and vertical dividing elements of the 
Heurtley and Cheney houses. Vincent Scully has described the sense of movement through 
the Coonley house: "The separate pavilions are interwoven by long, heavily framed 
corridors, and the low ceilings sail on seemingly endlessly . . . ,"{Vincent Scully in 
Hitchcock et al., The Rise, p. 193 (see n. 1).} a description that recalls yet another 
comment by Appleton:  The interior refuge of the fireplace is at right; interior prospect to 
the dining room is straight ahead. Views to the pool and garden open at left.  The rich 
alleys and byways provide us with vistas which every now and then widen into little 
panoramas . . . like woodland paths leading between glades, each of which, as soon as we 
enter it, becomes yet another vista leading on to the next opening. . . . Here we are back 
with Konrad Lorenz in the Vienna Woods, pausing before we ". . . break through the last 
bushes and out of cover on to the free expanse of the meadow" to gain "the advantage 
which it can offer to hunter and hunted-namely, to see without being seen."{Appleton, 
Experience of Landscape, p. 196.} 

Opposite the fire, at the edge of the ceiling, three walls of the usual leaded and stained 
glass open from the prospect-enhancing elevation of the living room to the extensive 
grounds, with Olmsted's Riverside beyond. Yet originally there were windows beyond, not 
french doors, and only modest planting boxes beyond, and no terraces. It has always 
seemed to me that as the exterior of the house appears in its original form in early photos, 
the terraces are much missed; and lacking french doors to open the space, the refuge 
induced in the interior by the usual means must have been inadequately countered by 
prospect symbols and opportunities. Wright may have felt this, too, because eventually he 
added the pergola to suggest horizontal extension of the floor plane toward the horizon, 
and later still he removed the planting boxes and replaced the windows with 
floor-to-eave french doors leading to a real, although small, terrace. Thus the final 
version realizes the pattern completely and with unprecedented richness.  

The master bedroom at the terminus of the long bedroom wing is, like that at Willits, a 
miniature version of the pattern. This master bedroom was the one space of the original 
scheme to have had a terrace, in early drawings called a porch, which, like Cheney, is 
open to the prospect enrichment of the sky. 

Thomas Beeby has recently discussed the relationship of Wright's work to nature, and in 
particular nature as found in the central Wisconsin valley of his childhood. Beeby 
mentions no specific house as an example; but one passage seems to have the Coonley 
house in mind. His description complements those of Scully and Creese and is also 
consistent with a prospect and refuge interpretation: 

The house is lifted out of the dampness of the Earth, with the living areas on the second 
level. This allows views from the house above the ornamental plantings of the understory 
and through the open tree trunks, passing below the canopy of leaves overhead. The 
experience of entry is the equivalent of climbing above the thicket that grows along the 
river's edge, escaping the brambles and insects, to catch the breeze and look down on the 
smothering lushness of the valley. The plants growing on the ledges along the house bring 
to mind the vines growing among the trees and provide the sense of being hidden in a 
secret overlook, buried in vegetation. The space on the exterior that is formed between the 
understory and the forest canopy is carried inside the house through the vertical mullions 
that signify tree trunks and the lineal trim that defines the interior space of the house. The 
glazing is broken down into ornamental leaded casements that obscure vision. Colored 
glass patterns represent the leaves and flowers of the shrubbery that is found at the edge of 
a forest or grove where the added light there creates a wall of foliage. Skylights are also 
cut through the ceiling volumes allowing filtered sunlight to flicker into the hollow of the 
house. The entire structure becomes a grove surrounding the masonry altar of the hearth. 
The canopy of trees protects its initiates from the burning sun and devastating winds of the 
prairie, where there is no shelter from nature.{Beeby, "Landscape," p. 171 (see n. 3).} 

The complexity of the Coonley house is evident in most of its characteristics: the circuitous 
entry path exceeds by far the complication of Cheney; the geometrically involved ceilings 
are articulated with a maze of trim; the plan itself is a profusion of zigzagged corridors 
and discrete pavilions. Yet the order is equally evident and similar to that of Cheney. All 
ceiling planes, whatever their configuration or complexity, share a continuous and 
common lower edge emphasized by continuous and emphatic dark trim. As at Cheney, this 
trim is at exactly the height of the external eave and is of similar dimension and 
coloration, so that it not only coheres the interior experience but refers it to a dominant 
exterior feature as well. The sill line is also repetitive and is emphasized, and many other 
horizontals repeat and interweave. The plan of the Coonley house also reveals another 
order, that of a controlling grid of squares which establishes all major locations and 
dimensions.{See for example Hitchcock, Nature, fig. 147 (see n. 1). This grid is of 
4-foot-11-inch squares.} The role this grid plays is not perceivable in all cases in the 
finished building. But it is clearly evident as the module that determines dimensions of 
windows and doors, and since those elements are repetitive and profuse, one is 
continuously reminded of the underlying modular order of the house. Thus the Coonley 
house is an especially rich example of the architectural rhyming already illustrated at 
Cheney, a measured encountering of experiences which share some characteristics and 
differs in others-a set of variations on repetitive stimuli.  Wright's other great terminal 
masterpiece of his early period is generally taken to be the Frederick Robie house of 
1908-1909 in Chicago.{Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 
1902-1906 (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1986-) gives the date of the house as 1906, a date that 
appears occasionally elsewhere as well. One rendering of the house does boldly carry this 
date, but the drawing is from many years later and is known to have been dated by Wright 
at the time it was done. Robie bought the property in May of 1908, and the house could 
hardly have been done before; of all Wright's designs it is perhaps the most site-specific, 
coming right to the lot lines on two sides. Wright developed the design late in 1908, and 
working drawings were completed and signed in March 1909. The house was essentially 
completed late that year, although some minor work, especially furnishings, continued 
after Wright's departure for Europe in September (see Donald Hoffman, Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Robie House [New York: Dover, 1984], pp. 6, 19, 21, 25, 27). The date in this 
case has some importance in establishing the relationship to the Coonley house, and even 
more importantly to the Tomek house in Riverside, long agreed to date to 1907; see n. 32 
below.} In it the pattern recurs, although it lacks one interior element, and from the 
prospect-refuge point of view is less rewarding than Coonley. 

The Robie house exterior maximizes prospect-refuge clues. Balconies and terraces run 
the length of the house and beyond; alcoves and recesses abound; overhangs are enormous; 
glazing appears as if continuous. The chimney  mass, more evident and more massive than 
at Heurtley, Cheney, or Coonley, signals the presence of the refuge fire at the core. But 
none of the street frontage is really penetrable. Like the Cheney house, one has to find a 
hidden entry; like the Heurtley and Coonley houses, one has to ascend to the heart of the 
refuge.{Vincent Scully's description of entry to the house is apt: "The Robie house rises, 
heavy as a mountain, buoyant as an airplane. Its interior spaces are caverns in the ground, 
platforms in the air. We find the entrance with some difficulty, enter into constriction and 
darkness, and are carried forward and upward to the light. . . ." (in Bolon et al., eds., The 
Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, p. xiii, see n. 3).}.  Wright used free-standing fireplaces 
rather often in his early period; other examples are the Gridley, Evans, Hardy, Martin, and 
Tomek houses, the latter a prototype of the Robie house. The effect in all such cases is to 
weaken somewhat the refuge characteristic, as it is more difficult to group sitting 
provisions around the fire. But at the Robie house, the urge toward spatial unification, 
presumably, also led Wright to continue the living room ceiling and south wall conditions 
through to the dining room without interruption, even parting the fireplace mass itself to 
allow the ceiling plane to be seen as continuous. This meant that the usual lower ceiling 
edge over the fireplace could not happen here. And therefore the fireplace is doubly 
limited in its ability to suggest a refuge. Perhaps as an attempt at compensation, Wright 
provided his by now familiar seating promontory, projecting from the north pier of the 
fireplace and creating, as usual, a kind of half-inglenook. Today this half-inglenook is 
gone, but even when in place, it cannot have been fully effective, as it faced, and was 
rather close to, the continuous glazed french doors to the south. In the dining room, the 
enclosing character of the high-backed chairs and pylon-cornered table is partial 
compensation, and perhaps intuitively was intended to be so, creating a room within a 
room, a refuge within openness for the family at mealtime. 

The containing ceiling rises, as usual, at the center, with low edges. The french doors to 
the south and the prowlike projection to the west lead to the terraces. Both of these are, as 
usual, only partly roofed, and one of the memorable experiences at the Robie house is to go 
out to either of these and feel the power of release from the pressure of the low soffits to 
the expanse of the sky and trees. This experience must have been even more powerful in 
1909, when the planter boxes, now empty and forlorn, would have softened a prospect 
which in those early days extended all the way to the old Exposition midway two blocks to 
the south. 

Like the Cheney  house, the Robie house is close to a city street. Thus privacy, provided at 
Coonley by the sheer size of the site, here had to be dealt with again by manipulation of 
the architectural material. Robie himself put it tersely: "I wanted to be able to look out and 
down the street to my neighbors without having them invade my privacy."{As quoted in 
"Mr. Robie Knew What He Wanted," Architectural Forum, 109 (October 1958), p. 126. 
Hoffman, Robie House, pp. 8-9, excerpts the original tape of this interview, which in 
terms of the comment above gives a slightly different wording, although the meaning is 
unchanged. In either version this interview cannot be taken at face value. The meshing of 
the actual form of the house with Robie's supposed predesign envisioning of it is so close 
that it leaves the impression that all Wright had to do was just draw the thing up. This 
must surely be Monday morning quarterbacking on Robie's part, especially since Wright 
had already (1907) done the similar Tomek house in Riverside. Hoffman (p. 9) makes the 
same point: "Robie so thoroughly absorbed Wright's views that when he looked back half a 
century later his mind wandered from memories of what he had asked for to memories of 
what Wright designed."} Wright, working again through careful attention to section, 
managed this issue with precision and elegance. The parapet wall of the south terrace, 
solid as at Cheney but unlike Coonley, is disposed to intercept exactly a sight line from the 
center of the near sidewalk; a view from that position reveals only the wood trim of the 
tops of the french doors, and no glass at all of the main floor spaces. This can hardly be 
accidental, as the planter forward of the upstairs bedroom does exactly the same thing, to 
the inch.{Other evidence also indicates that Wright considered such conditions in 
designing. A section through his project for Thaxter Shaw of 1906 reveals a line drawn to 
indicate and ensure just such a sight line from an upper bedroom across living room and 
terrace to a garden fountain. Serious attention to such sectional conditions was a constant 
with Wright; at a much later date, correspondence between Wright and Lloyd Lewis, 
quoted by Brendan Gill (Many Masks [New York: G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1987, p. 409), 
concerns sight lines established by balcony parapets. One phrase by Wright is especially 
germane: "I lifted the parapets to give you privacy from people entering from the road." 
With designs such as the Coonley house, however, where privacy was ensured by an 
extensive site, Wright did not hesitate to use open balcony rails.} 

The Robie house, then, was an exquisite platform for prospect, and, taken as a whole, was 
meticulously managed to provide refuge from a busy public thoroughfare. But the smaller 
refuge within the house, the zone around the fireplace, is atypically weak in the context of 
Wright's work generally. Gaston Bachelard, writing before Appleton, describes the mood 
of refuge in his book, The Poetics of Space. He first quotes Henri Bachelin, describing his 
childhood house:  At these moments, I felt strongly-and I swear to this-that we were cut 
off from the little town, from the rest of France, and from the entire world. I delighted in 
imagining . . . that we were living in the heart of the wood, in the well-heated hut of 
charcoal burners; I even hoped to hear wolves sharpening their claws on the heavy granite 
slab that formed our doorstep. But our house replaced the hut for me, it sheltered me from 
hunger and cold; and if I shivered, it was merely from well-being.  Bachelard himself 
continues:  Thus, the author attracts us to the center of the house as though to a center of 
magnetic force, into a major zone of protection. . . . He has only to give a few touches to 
the spectacle of the family sitting-room, only to listen to the stove roaring in the evening 
stillness, while an icy wind blows against the house, to know that at the house's center, in 
the circle of light shed by the lamp, he is living in the round house, the primitive hut, of 
prehistoric man.{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: 
Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 30-31.}  It is just this sensation that is so easy to project into the 
Cheney and Coonley houses, and so difficult to feel at the Robie house. The fireplace zone 
is too open, an island rather than a cave. 

Nor is there the fluid ambiance of Coonley. It is a cliche that the Robie house is a free and 
open spatial exercise, and from one point of view there is truth in this. But it is a stiff 
freedom, more rigorous and more relentless than at Coonley. Few discussions of the Robie 
house consider its interior as a setting for human living. It is to William Jordy's credit that 
he does so, and he hints briefly at its difficulty: "Of all his [Wright's] interiors, that of the 
Robie house is one of the more difficult for many to appreciate. A little cramped, and 
among the most insistently modeled, it is difficult to imagine it congenially 
furnished."{William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 4 (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 214.} Nor is it possible to experience the Coonley 
sensation of moving along woodland paths from glade or glade, since the theme of 
corridors and pavilions does not occur, and the hardlined rectangularity of the 
living-dining ceiling is not softened by dappled light from the sky as it is in the corridor 
extensions of the Coonley ceiling (though the electric lighting at the edges of the Robie 
ceiling, behind the grilles, has a little of the same effect). Nor does the Robie master 
bedroom have the experiential richness of that of the Coonley house. It is reached by an 
uninteresting stairway; the bedroom fireplace is bald by comparison, and the actual terrace 
is almost an afterthought, tucked behind the scenes on the west of the chimney mass, 
neither seen from nor enriching the room itself.{Hoffman, Robie House, gives the fullest 
available portrayal of Robie as person and client. What emerges is not altogether 
appealing. Robie's own father apparently distrusted him, his wife divorced him less than 
three years after the house was finished because he was something of a libertine, and for 
the last fifty years of his life he avoided contact with his daughter, apparently deliberately 
(see Hoffman pp. 5, 89, and 12). But I do not think we have enough information to 
speculate whether Robie's character accounts for the contrast of mood between the Coonley 
and Robie houses, and furthermore I am inclined to agree with Norris Kelly Smith (A 
Study, p. 58) that Wright's houses really were created for himself.} 

Was it for these reasons that, in spite of the unmatched drama of the Robie exterior, 
Wright claimed the Coonley house as his own favorite of those early years, the "most 
successful of my houses from my standpoint"?{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 161. 
Wright continues "descriptions of ideals and the nature of my creative effort in house 
building already given apply particularly to this characteristic dwelling."} This comment 
may puzzle those who have not examined the interior conditions of the two houses closely. 
But seen in terms of complexity and order, prospect and refuge, Wright was right: the 
Coonley house is the perfection of his early pattern.  A related series of houses of this 
period, all on steep hillside sites, have a story of their own in modifying the pattern. The 
first of them, the Thomas Hardy house of 1905, in Racine, is the subject of one of the most 
famous of Wright's drawings, the orientalized view from the lake, which so dramatizes the 
precipitous character of the site. Such a site meant a real problem for the pattern: the 
terrace could not extend from the living room opposite the fireplace without cutting off the 
view downward, in this case to the lake. The Hardy house is a wonderfully vertical 
composition of spaces, unusual in Wright's domestic work and especially so at this early 
date. He modified the pattern in a way that is exactly appropriate. The terrace is displaced 
downward in the spatial stacking, opening opposite the fireplace of the lower dining room 
rather than that of the living room, and so more or less maintaining the pattern. The living 
room lacks the horizontal extension of its floor plane, but since the terrace is seen from 
any point near the windows, there is partial compensation, and the prospect to the lake is 
ensured.  The W. A. Glasner house of about the same year, in Glencoe, also dealt with the 
problem of a hillside view toward which the living room faces. But unlike the Hardy 
house, all major spaces of the Glasner house are more or less axially disposed on one level. 
The Glasner house therefore uses a terrace displaced to the east as an entry porch, 
although it is unsatisfactory-awkward, almost grotesque as entry, and so small that it has 
no hope of counting as prospect. Its only redeeming feature is that it avoids blocking the 
living room view. There is also a much larger "veranda" opening from the opposite end of 
the living room, but it is reached by a long corridor, and is not sensed as an extension of 
the living spaces-nor does it garner a similar view. The intended but unexecuted "tea 
house" surely was Wright's attempt to provide a vital, alternate, prospect-claiming 
feature to counter the inadequacies of the terrace and veranda, though the tea house also 
would have failed to provide Wright's usual contiguity between terrace and major space.  
Unsatisfactory as the Glasner approach is, it leads on to a number of houses which use a 
lateral disposition advantageously. The well-known Isable Roberts house of 1908 in 
River Forest, and its larger progeny, the Frank Baker house of 1909 in Wilmette, both use 
a lateral terrace to keep distance from the street; unlike the Cheney or Robie houses, both 
have floor levels near grade, so that privacy could not be had by parapet manipulations. 

A laterally disposed terrace was also proposed for the great McCormick project of about 
1907. The site, a magnificent lakeside bluff, was similar to that of the Hardy house. 
Blockage of views from main spaces would have been unthinkable. The enormous terrace 
was therefore to have been placed between the living and dining pavilions, with access 
from each through the connecting loggia. 

This configuration of terrace conditions can be compared with that of the Cheney, 
Coonley, and Robie houses as evidence of Wright's site-specific management of prospect.  
Thus, in the years from 1900 to 1902 Wright resolved, and from 1902 pervasively 
employed, a typical composition of domestic architectural elements consisting of both 
exterior and interior repetitive features. Nine houses manifesting this pattern, and five 
more that show its development, have been cited. They include all those commonly 
considered to be Wright's major houses of that period, with just three exceptions, the 
Susan Lawrence Dana house of 1903, in Springfield, the Darwin Martin house of 1906, in 
Buffalo, and the Mrs. Thomas Gale house of 1904-1909, in Oak Park. In all three, the 
living room lies under a second story of rooms above (which in the case of the Martin 
house yields a decidedly low living room ceiling)-and the Dana house presents a 
straightforward entry from the sidewalk. Otherwise the pattern typical of Wright's houses 
after 1902 occurs in these houses as well. In various permutations this pattern continued to 
inform his work after his flight from Oak Park in 1909, and remained a constant through 
his career. 

Why was this pattern pervasive in Wright's work? Was he not, after all, designing for a 
variety of clients, and should this not have yielded alternate patterns quite different from 
this repetitive one? In fact, few architects design in radically different ways; almost all 
compose in ways that persist from one client to another despite personal differences among 
clients. There is nothing particularly insidious about this. An architect is usually chosen 
because of his way of designing, and this is especially true when that architect has a strong 
personal direction. With Wright, however, we have a special case in which this 
phenomenon is intensified. For Wright was consciously aiming for an archetypal model of 
dwelling-his innumerable references to the typical conditions and aims of the Prairie 
house type make this unarguable{See, for example, Wright, Autobiography, 1943, pp. 
141-48. The notion of the typical preoccupied Wright. He would later write of the 
Usonian as a type also, see ibid., pp. 489-96.}-and such an archetype can only be sought 
through development of such repetitive characteristics. Norris Kelly Smith makes a similar 
point in observing that Wright's houses were really for himself,{Smith, A Study, p. 58.} 
for in the sense that he was defining the archetype in his own terms, this is true. 

The extraordinary value of this pattern, I am suggesting, lies in its uniquely close, rich, 
and complex correspondence to fundamental human spatial and formal preferences, "given 
with the world," in Norberg-Schulz's phrase, as "basic ways of being between earth and 
sky." 

Was Wright conscious that he consistently deployed the characteristics on which this 
correspondence depends? 

He often and eloquently alluded to his interest in the relationship between order and 
complexity: "Truly ordered simplicity in the hands of the great artist may flower into a 
bewildering profusion, exquisitely exuberant, and render all more clear than ever."{From 
"Modern Architecture" as quoted in Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn, Frank Lloyd 
Wright: Buildings and Writings (New York: World Publishing, 1960), p. 53.} This kind of 
comment occurs with sufficient frequency in his writings to indicate that it was a 
continuing and conscious foundation for his designing, though there is no evidence-as 
indeed one would not expect any-that he understood the fundamental biological basis of 
its wider appeal. 

On his feelings about prospect and refuge conditions in his work, there is less to go on. He 
did write of a sense of shelter, and of the value of the fire, and of elevation above the 
prairie (as noted in chapter 1), and on one obscure occasion commented that man "first 
lived sometimes in trees and sometimes in stone caves."{Baker Brownell and Frank Lloyd 
Wright, Architecture and Modern Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 23. For 
this point I am indebted to Neil Levine's essay "Frank Lloyd Wright's Own Houses . . ." in 
Bolon et al., eds., The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 63 (see n. 3).} But nowhere did 
he bring these characteristics together in a cohesive statement of spatial intentions in 
approximately these terms; he is silent on the value of the long and circuitous entry, the 
lowered ceiling over the fire, the raised ceiling forward of it, the views to contiguous 
spaces, the terrace, the glazing that links it to the major spaces. We are left to conclude 
that he believed these characteristics were essential-our evidence for this, of course, lies 
in their consistent deployment-but that he understood this importance intuitively rather 
than consciously. 

It seems most reasonable, therefore, to believe that Wright found, through the pattern, a 
way of embodying almost to perfection characteristics for which he had a strong but 
primarily intuitive affinity.{Some may infer that this position diminishes the significance 
of Wright's achievement. I think the opposite is true. A strong intention in architecture, 
whether conscious or not, is no guarantee of effective design, though generally, other 
things being equal, the ability consciously to articulate such an intention is often helpful to 
the designer. But the fundamental issue is that in either case one must have the talent to 
compose spaces and solids to achieve the intention. Wright was a spatial composer of 
enormous talent, and the probability that he used this talent to compose with astonishing 
effectiveness intentions only intuitively perceived is perhaps the greatest of all tributes.} 
He was an unparalleled composer of spaces, and in a series of designs from 1900 to 1902, 
he discovered such a satisfying way of composing them that it became thereafter his 
canonical way. The pattern became for him a repetitive device whose appeal, he seems 
correctly to have sensed, would be both widespread and powerful. 


4. Taliesin 

In September of 1909 Wright left his wife Catherine and their six children, and with Mrs. 
Cheney went to Europe, to Fiesole, to see through its Berlin publication the monumental 
Wasmuth portfolio of his work. On his return in October of 1910, he began to build near 
his Wisconsin birthplace a home for himself and Mrs. Cheney (soon divorced, to live the 
brief remainder of her life as Mamah Borthwick). He named this new home Taliesin, after 
the Welsh boy-hero-bard whose name derived from his "radiant brow."{The most 
readily available account of the Taliesin tale is in the Lady Charlotte Guest translation of 
The Mabinogion, available in facsimile edition by Academy Press, Chicago, 1978. The 
current Penguin edition does not include the Taliesin story. Taliesin as mythical hero also 
figures in Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1949, 1968), much of which suggests Wright's own amazing life: "The 
hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and 
local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms" (pp. 19-20).}  
A house is always a refuge against two generalized and impersonal threats. One is climate, 
against which the house protects by means of its walls and roof, its hearth, and its 
ventilating sash (and the less symbolic modern surrogates, central heat and air 
conditioning). The other threat is the intrusiveness of communal society. The house 
protects against this by the obvious means of walls, roof, and doors and also by subdued 
interior light conditions, by curtains, and often, in Wright's case, by leaded and faceted 
stained glass window. Trees and shrubs can also be means to protect against societal 
intrusion, and were often exploited by Wright. The extensive site of the Coonley house and 
the sight-line manipulations of the Cheney and Robie houses are other sophisticated 
means to the same ends. 

Wright built Taliesin as refuge against these universal threats; he also built it as refuge 
against two threats which were more specific and personal. The first of these was external, 
a focused societal hostility, as he saw it, toward himself. The second was internal, an inner 
sense of disorientation and confusion. 

Our evidence for Wright's state of mind at this time is a series of conferences and 
correspondences with the press,{The most completely researched account of these is in 
Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: John 
Wiley, 1979), pp. 119-43.} and his recollections as they appear in An Autobiography . 
The latter have the disadvantage that they were written down some two decades after the 
event, and with Wright the passage of time typically did not lend accuracy. But Norris 
Kelly Smith argues, I think correctly, that in this case distance was necessary, and that we 
are justified in taking seriously Wright's later reflections.{Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd 
Wright: A Study in Architectural Content (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 
104-106.} In any event, what emerges at this time in Wright's life is a mixture of many 
feelings. Defensiveness is paramount but is heavily laced with his usual combativeness. 
(At this time he had cast, as a mantelpiece for Taliesin, the symbol of that oddly 
chipon-shoulder family motto of the Lloyd-Joneses: "Truth Against the World.") One 
can also find in his words guilt,{On this point see some of the most moving of Wright's 
prose, not his defense of his departure in An Autobiography, but pp. 392-93 of the 1977 
edition (New York: Horizon). Under the headings "Memories" and "I Remember" occur, 
in reference to 1910-1913, such phrases as ". . . the familiar strains now gave me one of 
those moments of interior anguish when I would have given all I had lived to be able to 
begin reliving the old strains again . . . with such longing and sorrow as a man seldom 
knows, I hope. . . . whenever I would go to Chicago to keep track of my work I would take 
time somehow to go out to Oak Park: go there after dark, not wishing to be seen. Go to 
reassure myself that all was well there." But Wright's comments on this, as on other 
matters, must be approached with caution. If he retained a concern for the family, he failed 
to convince all of them that this was so. Brendan Gill (Many Masks [New York: G. P. 
Putnam's Sons, 1987], p. 499) quotes son David as saying to his father after the death of 
Catherine, David's mother and the woman to whom the above quotes refer: "You never 
gave a god-damn for her while she was alive." Wright's comments are to a degree 
self-serving, intending to show us a touching and endearing humility; but equally David's 
include an element of bitterness and were certainly spoken under stress.} isolation, 
frustration, pride, and confusion. Through it all is a poignant need to be understood, 
poignant because of its obsessive repetition, and also because he understood himself least 
well at this time. Twenty years later he could say as much: "Weary, I was losing grip on 
my work and even my interest in it . . . now it seemed to leave me up against a dead wall. I 
could see no way out. . . . I did not know what I wanted."{Frank Lloyd Wright, An 
Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1943), p. 162.}  So Taliesin had to 
be refuge against more immediate threats than those facing the usual house. It is not 
surprising that refuge symbols and refuge provisions are dominant in it. It was to be a 
retreat, tranquil, deep-rooted, unassailable, where Wright could pursue a new life with 
his beloved and could also rethink his professional and philosophic stance. In his own 
description of the homecoming, Wright used the word "refuge" and a number of 
synonyms:  My mother foreseeing the plight I would be in had bought the low hill on 
which Taliesin now stands. She offered it to me as refuge. Yes, a retreat when I returned 
from Europe in 1911. I began to build Taliesin to get my back against the wall. . . . I 
turned to this hill in the Valley as my Grandfather before me had turned to America-as a 
hope and haven.{Ibid., pp. 167-68. The date is obviously in conflict with the 1910 date of 
the previous paragraph. Twombly, whose research is detailed, notes (Life, p. 122) that 
Wright sailed from Europe on Sept. 20, 1910, and arrived Oak Park Oct. 8. John Sergeant 
(Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses [New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1984] 
p. 175, n. 5), raises another question about this quote: "What evidence there is suggests 
that Mrs. Wright was at this time supported by her three children, Jane, Maginel, and 
Frank. It does not seem then that she was in a position to buy property." But she did, 
nevertheless: see Walter Creese, The Crowning of the American Landscape (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 250, n. 18, "[Anna Wright] bought the land . . . from 
Joseph Rieder on April 10, 1911, for $2,274.88 (Iowa County Registry of Deeds, 
Dodgeville, Wisconsin)." Wright's earliest extant drawing of Taliesin is of the same month 
and is titled "Cottage for Mrs. Anna Lloyd Wright."} 

The house was built encircling the side of the hill, getting its own back to the wall. 
Wright's comment about Taliesin's hillside siting is famous: "I knew well that no house 
should ever be on a hill or on anything."{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 168. Italics are 
in the original.} What often passes unnoticed is that he was inconsistent about this.{One 
writer who has noticed is Reyner Banham, who discusses the hilltop site of the Ennis 
house in particular in "The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright," Royal Institute of 
British Architects Journal 76:12 (Dec. 1969), p. 515. See also Gill, Masks, pp. 252, 279.} 
The Romeo and Juliet windmill at Taliesin, which Wright himself said "took its place on 
the hill,"{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 137.} is a trivial exception and not a house, 
anyway-but the same cannot be said of Hollyhock House of 1920, "in full stature on its 
hill,"{Wright, Autobiography, 1977, p. 254.} nor of the Hardy, Little, Ennis, Pauson, or 
Morris houses among others. Obviously the issue was one of circumstance, not of canon. 
At Taliesin the hilltop was inappropriate, perhaps partly because of Wright's sense of its 
sanctity, but partly because at that time he needed to have his-and therefore its-back to 
the wall, for which purpose the hilltop could not work. Therefore he chose the hillside 
around which the living spaces were ranged.  The house built on this hillside changed over 
time, especially after 1925, when Wright's changed personal circumstances led to major 
alterations. Thus few living observers have experienced the early Taliesin. In 
understanding it we are dependent on plans and photographs, tricky evidence for any 
architecture and especially for Wright's.{Nine photos of Taliesin, all exteriors, without 
text, were published in Architectural Record 33:1 (Jan. 1913), pp. 45-54. The other 
major source for exterior views is The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Wendingen 
Edition (1925, reissued 1965 with text additions by Bramhall and Horizon, New York). 
This includes ten exteriors of the house before the fire of 1925, at which time the portions 
described here were little changed from the 1911 scheme. For interiors see Henry-Russell 
Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), fig. 177, and 
Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 111. 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Frank Lloyd Wright (Paris: Editions Cahiers d'Art, 1928), also 
includes four helpful exteriors. For plans and an unraveling of chronology, I am indebted 
to Sidney Robinson, Life Imitates Architecture: Taliesin and Alden Dow's Studio (Ann 
Arbor: Architectural Research Laboratory, University of Michigan, 1980).} But if we are 
to understand this most important building in his career, these are the evidences we must 
use. They tell us of a building consistent, rich, and appropriate in its management of 
prospect but far more importantly of refuge. It is also a gentler, more intimate, and more 
freely composed house than any other of Wright's work. 

A clear reading of the total form of the exterior is precluded at Taliesin by its own 
complexity and by the dense vegetation of the hillside into which this complexity is 
interwoven: "The finished wood outside was the color of gray tree-trunks in violet light. 
The shingles of the roof surfaces were left to weather silver-gray like the tree branches 
spreading below them."{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 171.} The dominant image at 
Taliesin always has been an image of roofs, roofs emerging randomly from the hillside 
vegetation, a repetition of gentle shingled surfaces, "the slope of the hills their 
slopes."{Ibid., p. 171.} The deep overhanging eaves were all at a uniform level (except, of 
course, the monitors perched on the ridges), forming an absolutely continuous eave line, 
and one very close to the earth on the hillward side. The eave fascia was deeper and 
simpler than in previous work, emphasizing its continuity. Whatever else the original 
Taliesin was, gliding over all were these insistently sheltering roofs ranged along the hill 
among the trees. 

The only competing features were the vertical masses of stone. These were the chimneys, 
which reduplicated the refuge symbolism. Wright eloquently described their 
refuge-signaling role: "The chimneys of the great stone fireplaces rose heavily through 
all, wherever there was a gathering place within, and there were many such places."{Ibid.}  
Prospect signals, on the other hand, were almost nonexistent until one moved forward, 
under the low porte-cochere, at which point there was a contained vista to the left, 
although it was a restatement: stone fireplace pylon and continuous eave to the right, 
stratified stone walls reiterating the hillside to the left. Ahead, framed by stone pylons and 
the refuge of the ever-present low roof, was the distant horizon of the valley, with the 
magnetic inference of intervening prospect. One moved forward, then up four low steps 
between the pylons, and under the darkness of the low roof. Then, beyond the release of its 
northern eave, lay a broad stone terrace open to the sky, splendidly presenting the prospect 
of Wright's ancestral valley. Yet even here one would have been able to see without being 
seen, for intervening between terrace and view was a grove of mature trees-analogous 
perhaps to the articulating features of interior prospect at the Cheney house, but at Taliesin 
also hiding the viewer from the valley below. 

Thus, this condition was unlike that indicated in the drawing of the Cheney house, in 
which the house, in Wright's perception, is placed at the very edge of the forest, with its 
prospect features projecting into the meadow. At Taliesin the house is withdrawn behind 
the forest edge; the forest closes around it and the hiding place is itself hidden.  The entry 
sequence of Taliesin, from the southernmost approach to the final screened view of the 
valley, would have been a rich one for any who experienced it. We have the comments of 
visitors as diverse as Eric Mendelsohn and Alexander Woollcott, who were profoundly 
moved by the early Taliesin and whose reactions would have been molded by this first 
spatial sequence.{See H. Allen Brooks, Writings on Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 
Press, 1981), pp. 5-11.} But it was likely to have been seen as most extraordinarily 
meaningful to Wright himself, not only by being the refuge he needed but by richly 
seeming to be so, holding the participant through a series of refuge-signaling forms until 
the prospect was reached-a prospect, framed and filtered through the old trees, of the 
hill-contained valley of Wright's clan, itself a refuge in a still larger sense. 

At the right edge of this terrace, tucked deeply under the low eave, was the entry to the 
living room, behind the fireplace mass and its seating promontory which together 
immediately reasserted refuge once again.  Living room looking toward the fireplace. The 
entry is at left, behind the half-inglenook seat. 

This fireplace was one of four included in the original scheme, a number equaled only in 
the Dana house among Wright's executed houses up to this time. All of Taliesin's 
fireplaces tucked their backs to the hillside-oriented wall. They are the first fireplaces in 
which Wright used stone, a natural choice since, as Wright says, it was the constituent of 
"the hills around about"; it "lay in strata like outcropping ledges in facades of the 
hills."{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, pp. 170-71.} Still, in this refuge which he built for 
himself at a time in life when he felt embattled, the choice was especially appropriate. 
Stone may be used in a rough near-natural state, less modeled by the hand of the 
workman than brick and therefore capable of an even stronger suggestion of cave-refuge, 
recalling our earliest habitats. At Taliesin it associates, as Wright clearly wanted it to, with 
the tan sandstone strata of the nearby hills and river valleys from which it was extracted. It 
was least worked in the fireplace breasts, great slabs of irregular outline and surface that 
appear as primeval dolmens, spanning what seem, even more than in Wright's earlier 
work, to be cave fires. (Thomas Beeby cites a number of dolmen-suggestive features at 
Taliesin, including the heavy roofs of the entry sequence, poised on stone piers, as well as 
the fireplaces. He considers the entire house analogous to a dolmen, "man's first spatial 
construction-a fabricated cave."{Thomas Beeby, "The Song of Taliesin," Modulus, The 
University of Virginia School of Architecture Review (1980-81), p. 7.}) 

The living room fireplace, under the low ceiling edge, is flanked by the seating 
promontory with partial wall, the primary "gathering place within." The stone hearth 
extends forward of the fire the full length of this promontory, comprising a floor area of 
about 7 by 8 feet. It, too, is of roughly hewn stone, its dimensions and texture reinforcing 
the image of a cave fire. 

Old photographs show the seating promontory ending in two light wooden pylons on 
which are hung Japanese prints or scrolls, their long vertical format carrying the eye 
toward the ceiling. Today, after many remodelings, this ceiling is congruent with the 
now-raised roof plane, but originally it was much lower and its central portion was flat 
because of collar-ties to the roof joists to eliminate thrust against outer walls. Both the 
sloping and the horizontal planes of the early ceiling were framed with "marking-strips 
of waxed, soft wood" which expressed the ceiling as rising "into the roof, 
tent-like."{Wright, Autobiography, 1943, p. 173.} The tent analogy was rather 
consistently held. Unlike the Heurtley, Coonley, or Robie houses, there were neither 
skylights nor artificial lighting systems built into this ceiling. And its marking-strips 
were far more delicate than in any prior work; the suggestion was quite genuinely of a 
tent. As well as rising, however, the sense was equally of its descending, enveloping the 
gathering within. This was due to the location of the most dominant trim piece, the edge of 
the continuous dish shelf, at exactly the elevation of its exterior counterpart, the eave, and 
of about the same dimension. It established an emphatically intimate scale and a 
containment as well.  Another aspect of Taliesin also addressed containment. Wright 
argued on many occasions that he was trying to destroy the "box," by which he meant the 
self-contained wall-bounded room of traditional domestic architecture.{Among many 
instances, see Autobiography, 1943, p. 142.} In this effort he was remarkably successful in 
the open plans of the Prairie houses of 1902 to 1909; and later in his career he was also 
notably successful in this regard. But not at Taliesin. In spite of the fluid disposition of its 
rooms, it was in no sense an open plan. Each room was an utterly self-contained 
box-rich and complex but a box nevertheless. Dining was included within the living 
space, but unlike the entire family of houses from 1902 to 1909, this living space did not 
open through articulating devices to any contiguous space, nor did any other rooms do so. 
This condition also obtained in the few other houses and projects of this time, the Angster 
house of 1911 in Lake Bluff, Illinois, for example, or the Vosburgh house of 1916 at 
Grand Beach, Michigan.{Hitchcock, Nature (see n. 11), in the caption to fig. 179, says, 
"The late Prairie houses as a group are less interesting than those before 1910, nor are 
there many of them. The best, such as the Angster house, are more like Taliesin itself than 
like the earlier houses, with very open plans." The statement is ambiguous, but if 
Hitchcock means that Taliesin and the few other houses Wright did from 1911 to 1914 
have "very open plans" this is simply not true, as a close look at the plans cited will 
reveal.} The well-known Francis Little house of 1913 in Wayzata, Minnesota, now 
demolished,  also shared this condition of self-contained rooms, though the condition was 
less apparent because of the enormous size of the living room and its exposure to views on 
both flanks. Even the elaborate Sherman Booth project of 1911 for Glencoe had no rooms 
actually open to one another. The effect was that interior prospect, so skillfully developed 
at Cheney and so elaborately at Coonley, did not occur at all in these buildings, nor at 
Taliesin. This was appropriate at Taliesin, at least, where containment was deliberately 
sought and consistently developed in so many other ways. 

The seating promontory and fireplace conjunction as used at Taliesin had by this time 
become a repetitive feature with Wright. It implies a diagonal axis from the fire, and at 
Taliesin this implication was realized. The room opened diagonally: the center of 
panorama was at the opposite corner of the living room. The view was similar to that 
obtained from the stone terrace before entering, a panorama north and east across the 
valley. 

The terrace did not extend from either range of the windows that released this view. It lay 
rather behind the scenes, south, not east, of the fire. To reach it one passed under the dish 
shelf and an adjacent bit of very low flat ceiling, then out under an equally low roof 
soffit-a wing of roof projecting outward from the house for this purpose-and then to the 
release of the sky and the prospect across the valley, again seen through the trees. Why 
was the pattern modified to place the terrace as a removed lateral extension of the plan, 
rather than as a straightforward extension of the interior prospect condition? Had the 
terrace been done in the typical way, it would have required (almost certainly) a cantilever, 
as the hill falls away at that point and a perimeter foundation would be awkward. But 
Wright was no stranger to cantilevers even at this date. More probably the issue was the 
provision of view downward to the valley from the living room. This view would have 
been frustrated by a terrace, especially by one with a solid plastered rail, the usual 
below-sill condition at Taliesin. So the terrace was displaced as in the Glasner and 
McCormick schemes. 

The valley to which the Taliesin view was released, as Walter Creese has eloquently 
observed, was then bounded at its distant edges by hills comparable in height to that under 
which the house nestled. (The post-1925 remodeling raised the roof of the main body of 
the house, compromising its original pervasive subservience to the hill.) Here too the 
choice of the hillside siting enhanced the sense of refuge, allowing Taliesin to be contained 
within the valley's boundaries rather than transcending them; its world was a finite one, 
the valley which Wright called "the beloved ancestral valley . . . my Grandfather's 
ground."{Wright, Autobiography, 1977, pp. 191, 194. Alexander Woollcott's comment on 
all this, following a visit to Taliesin in 1925, is a tribute of special pertinence here: "Of 
course that is the peculiar gift of Wright and his like in this world-to build freshly as 
though we had all just come out of Eden" (quoted in Brooks, Writings, p. 11).}  Thus in 
1910 Wright created in Taliesin a particularly firm but gentle refuge. Four years later he 
would need it much more. On August 15, 1914, a deranged employee at Taliesin murdered 
Mamah Borthwick, her children, and several others, and burned the house. Wright 
described the tragedy in what Scully has called "some of the most restrained and moving 
writing ever done in America,"{Vincent Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: George 
Braziller, Inc., 1960), p. 22.} to which Wright's son adds, "something in him died with 
her."{John Lloyd Wright, My Father Who Is on Earth (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 
1946, p. 86.} He rebuilt the house much as it had been before; its gentle refuge was then 
even more desperately appropriate. 

But the model of refuge that this early Taliesin provided was a limited one, and indeed 
Wright found it so. In later years he remodeled it to open the plan and to give far greater 
emphasis to interior and exterior prospect; and when, in the late 1930s, he built Taliesin 
West, he developed grand prospect conditions indeed. Thus, in less threatening times, he 
returned to a more even balance between refuge and prospect-but with a difference. 
Taliesin marks a turning point. In his houses of the period from 1902 to 1909, refuge and 
prospect were secured without loss of communality. Most of those early houses offered the 
inhabitant, at his choice and control, both a refuge from and a participation in the 
community's space, the city or suburban street. After Taliesin, that clever and effective 
relationship would rarely recur. 


5. The California Houses 

Wright's next important houses are a distinctive group of five structures in and around Los 
Angeles. The first is the stuccoed tile and frame Hollyhock House of 1917-21 on Olive 
Hill in Los Angeles, built for theater patron Aline Barnsdall. The other four, all done from 
1921 to 1924, are notable for their specially cast, square, concrete block bearing walls and 
piers.{Wright first studied the idea of the concrete block house in 1906 in an unbuilt 
project for Harry E. Brown, to have been located in Genesco, Illinois. Among the 
California series the Storer, Freeman, and Ennis houses occasioned some shockingly 
acrimonious correspondence between Wright and his son Lloyd, who supervised them all 
during Wright's peregrinations. Lloyd deserves credit in architectural history for having 
played a vital, difficult, and thankless role in bringing to fruition these important houses.} 
Wright was enormously proud of the first of the concrete block series, La Miniatura, in 
Pasadena, for Mrs. George Madison Millard, a house that has been admired in other 
quarters as well. But these houses, and the concrete block ones especially, have had a bad 
press.{See, e.g., Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, an Interpretive Biography (New 
York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 157: "[One] might easily imagine their interiors as silent 
mausoleums or eerie covens," and p. 159: "The concrete homes of the 1920s . . . were . . . 
meticulously executed essays in solitude and isolation."} They do appear as formidable 
bastioned retreats, in part at least as a result of the sense of weight imparted by the 
material, which has led many critics to comment on their forbidding character. But they 
are an important chapter in the story of Wright's pattern. And one of them, the Charles 
Ennis house-paradoxically and in my view unfairly the most castigated of the lot{See 
Brendan Gill, Many Masks (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987), p. 268, referring to 
"the barbaric arrogance with which the Ennis house imposes itself between earth and sky . 
. . [threatening] to crush the hilltop on which it sprawls." Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd 
Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979), p. 196, mentions its use 
as a setting for a 1958 horror movie. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials 
(New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1942, reprint 1982), writing with Wright at his 
side, is more restrained, but still calls it "rather undomestic" (caption to fig. 
257).}-introduces not only an unprecedented manipulation of interior prospect but also 
the phenomenon Stephen Kaplan calls mystery.  All these California houses are 
contemporary with the worst period of Wright's relationship with the volatile Miriam 
Noel, which followed the Taliesin disaster. The earlier ones are also contemporary with 
Wright's last travels in Japan, during which he was "exhausted and sick, weakened by the 
climate, and quite lonely."{Twombly, Life, p. 182.} Reyner Banham has observed,  These 
were the years also of his spiritual wilderness. Beginning in August 1914 . . . Wright 
suffered a psychological battering that would surely have unhinged lesser men. The whole 
incredible story-a cross between King Lear and Peyton Place, with additional dialogue by 
August Strindberg-was to last for all of 15 years. Throughout that decade and a half, 
psychological uprootings alternated with physical displacements each exacerbating the 
effects of the other.{Reyner Banham, "The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright," 
Royal Institute of British Architects Journal 76:12 (Dec. 1969), p. 514.} 

In An Autobiography, Wright could describe the earlier building of Taliesin in lucid and 
flowing terms. His descriptions of the California houses of the troubled times are in sharp 
contrast; they are turgid, confused, almost unreadable. There can be no doubt that these 
houses coincided with the most threatened and unstable period of Wright's entire life.{In 
addition, in 1922, just as the Storer, Freeman, and Ennis houses were being started, 
Wright's extraordinarily doting mother entered a sanatorium, where in February of 1923 
she died . Whether Wright was additionally distressed by this, or simply relieved, is hard 
to say; although he was in the United States at the time he seems not to have attended the 
funeral.} It is easy enough to suggest that their protective character arose not only from his 
interest in concrete as a material but also in part from his own embattled state. 

It is also true, however, that all of these California houses except La Miniatura occupy 
what Appleton would call prospect-dominant sites, hilltops or hillsides that command 
tremendous panoramic views. If any sense of secure haven were to be had on such sites, it 
could only be gained by an architecture with emphatic refuge connotations.  Aline 
Barnsdall's Hollyhock House, in its setting on Olive Hill, is an example of this emphasis 
on refuge. Olive Hill towers above its environs, commanding views in all directions to 
dramatic distant horizons. Though Wright had said that no house should ever be "on" a 
hill, exclusion of any of these views was, at least on the face of it, unthinkable. So he 
deliberately located Hollyhock exactly on the crown; he referred to it as "in full stature on 
its hill," adorning "that hill crown."{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: 
Horizon, 1977), p. 254.} 

Therefore, Wright faced a dilemma: his preoccupation with refuge was understandably 
paramount, yet he was designing for a site which, unlike the Taliesin valley, offered none. 
Refuge could be attained only by recourse to the architecture, and he shaped Hollyhock to 
provide it. The gentle roof pitches of the Prairie houses and Taliesin are gone. The steep 
slablike faces of the roof mass-there is no other word for it-reinforce most urgently the 
idea of a protective cave within. In this and in some other respects as well Hollyhock 
House does not precisely deploy all the features of the pattern on its external facades. 
Heavy overhangs occur, but not on the outward-facing elevations. Windows are punched 
into the mass below, having nothing like the horizontal sweep of his work of 1902 to 1914.  
The original dry moat, clearly visible in early photographs, is now filled in but lay just 
outside the present flower border surrounding the pool. Entry is via the long pergola 
stretching out to the left.  The massive walls, not the constrained windows, are in control 
here, holding the hill crown like a fortress bastion.{Twombly (Life, p. 197) has said of the 
California houses that they "elevate detachment into seclusion and retreat into escape"; see 
also p. 192: "The few designs he did manage to execute from 1915 through the 1920s 
reflected the suspicion, frustration, and need for privacy in his personal life."} Unlike the 
Coonley house, or Taliesin, these walls are also entirely monochromatic, encouraging us to 
read them as a continuous thick shell. Beyond the west wall with its tiny terrace is a pool, 
now edged with flowers but originally surrounded by wide ditch, a dry moat. Refuge 
signals predominate. 

Unlike Wright's typical entries, that of Hollyhock House is not particularly circuitous; 
length and spatial compression are made to serve the same purpose. One first passes a 
concrete pylon on the right, looking rather like a guard tower, then under a fantastically 
extended peninsula of roof. A few feet ahead, a run of steps brings one's head close to the 
ceiling of this extended roof; one then moves forward through three long bays of the 
pergola, with parapet walls to either side. At the end of this pergola the facade of the house 
is finally reached, but not the front doors; they lie many steps beyond, at the end of a 
narrow and dark corbeled tunnel. These doors-there are two of them-are low narrow 
valves of solid concrete. As one swings their palpable weight and moves through them, the 
sense is of entry into a vault.  Inside and ahead lie a profusion of pylonlike masses between 
which are glimpses of the major spaces. Significantly, one such glimpse reveals the 
fireplace of the living room, toward which one is drawn, though the path to it is indirect; 
one must go by way of either the loggia or the music room. The massive fireplace 
dominates the living room. Its hearth extends fully a third of the room's width, as did the 
one at Taliesin, but the hearth at Hollyhock House is otherwise quite different. An 
octagonal island serves as a floor for the fire; it is surrounded by a pool, the conjunction of 
the two conjuring up one of Wright's strongest images of a subterranean cave. And this 
suggestion is made by more than just the pool at the fireplace, for the water-course that 
feeds it begins at the circular fountain-pool at the east boundary of the garden court, 
moving from there in an underground stream to the fireplace, and thence, underground 
again, to the square pool west of the living room.{I am grateful to Kathryn Smith, "Frank 
Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House, and Olive Hill, 1914-1924," Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians 38:1 (March 1979), p. 23, for describing this watercourse, and to 
Virginia Ernst Kazor, curator of the house, for pointing out that the water flows not as Ms. 
Smith describes it but as described here.}  The original seating shown here-two massive 
sofas contained by elaborate cabinetwork-echoed the diagonal faces of the octagonal 
fireplace hearth toward which they fronted.  And yet, surprisingly, aside from the 
fireplace, the interior sense of a contained fortress or cave is less firm by far than was 
suggested by the exterior. Forward of the fireplace the ceiling rises to its center. On the 
exterior the roof zone that contains this ceiling is ponderously weighty; the actual interior 
ceiling seems totally unrelated; it is light, tentlike, a descendant of the ceiling at Taliesin. 
The skylight over the fireplace does wonders to relieve the mass of both fireplace and 
ceiling. East of the fireplace, voids rather than masses are paramount: interior prospect is 
available to the contiguous loggia and music room, and there is a lush exterior prospect to 
the garden court and its distant pool. Even the west window of the living room, which had 
seemed so constrained from the outside, from the interior seems to encompass much of the 
west wall. 

Nevertheless, most of the openness of Hollyhock House is to a small world, bounded, one 
feels, by the massive architecture of the house itself, and focused not outward but toward 
the interior garden. Despite the breadth of the living room's west window, there is only 
limited exterior prospect to the magnificent panoramas of Olive Hill; the feeling, and the 
fact as well, of the living room is that its orientation is eastward, to the garden court. The 
tiny terrace to the west can be reached through the french doors, but the terraces to north 
and south are blocked from the living room by solid walls, and must be reached by leaving 
the living room. (A small glazed door to the south terrace opens to the right of the 
fireplace, but it seems a minor passage, unrelated to the generous terrace accesses of 
Wright's work from the Cheney house onward.) Only from those north and south terraces 
can one really sense the prospect-dominant drama of the site, at which point one feels 
strangely outside the composition, entirely cut off from the major spaces of the house. 
Otherwise the perceived limits are the pool to the west, the garden pool and the 
pine/eucalyptus grove to the east, and the very solid north and south wings of the house 
itself. In this sense Hollyhock turns even more to its garden and less to its distant prospects 
than Taliesin. And only on the garden facades do the familiar deep eaves, shadowed 
windows, alcoves, and recesses of Wright's pattern appear in full measure. They convey 
from within this courtyard the penetrability that is denied by the external facades.  The 
living room lies beyond the dark recess under the deep eave. 

This introversion evolved with the design. Early studies show the west condition of the 
house as being rather different, and its evolution to final form is illuminating. A drawing 
from the middle stages of the design, when the Mayan roof form was fixed but the 
Hollyhock ornament not yet developed,{The best readily available reproduction of this 
drawing is in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Preliminary Studies 1917-1932 
(Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1986), p. 1. The drawing is also reproduced in Arthur Drexler, The 
Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Horizon and Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 
fig. 63).} showed glazed french doors from the west end of the living room opening out to 
a genuine and generous terrace, in east-to-west dimension about as deep as the living 
room itself, and extending north-to-south the full width of the main house. Though its 
west central boundary was marked by a planter, it had no other railing or parapet; it was 
edged only by broad steps to the lawn, falling away below. Such a condition was consistent 
with Wright's typical pattern, and would have introduced a dramatic element of prospect 
into the scheme. But as studies advanced, the living room seems to have been pushed 
forward onto this terrace, which in the process was reduced to a vestige only about 2 feet 
deep, while the north and south portions, cut off from view from the living room, were 
given solid parapet walls. 

This early drawing and all subsequent ones show a range of tall and dense plantings 
immediately east of the house. This is typical of Wright's drawings; usually they indicate 
dense verdure behind the building represented, with open space to the front. Such 
indications intensify the prospect-refuge duality: open space, prospect, is toward the 
viewer; closed vegetation, refuge, is beyond. The famous drawing of the Cheney house is 
one such example among many.{I am indebted to Norris Kelly Smith, Frank Lloyd 
Wright: A Study in Architectural Content (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 77, 
for the observation on Wright's rendering style quoted on p. 44.} Often the vegetation 
seems to have been a preexisting part of the site condition, but it was not at Hollyhock.{A 
parallel instance occurred with the Paul Hanna house of 1936-37: perspectives showed 
plantings behind the house, open vista to the front: "Mr. Wright suggested that we 
establish a line of tall conifers along the rear of the property, but we rejected the idea." 
Paul R. and Jean S. Hanna, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 
Press, 1982), p. 142.} Photographs of the house taken shortly after completion show new 
saplings to the east, and Wright himself says Aline Barnsdall planted them: "She planted 
pine-groves behind on the hill and great masses of the Eucalyptus to enclose the 
pines."{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 
1943), p. 231.} These plantings exactly correspond to Wright's drawings; clearly Miss 
Barnsdall was carrying out Wright's own intentions. These plantings to the east, together 
with the foreclosure of prospect conditions to the west, are the means by which Hollyhock's 
world was turned inward. Although there is openness within these bounds, the grand 
prospect-dominant site is nowhere allowed to vitiate the sense of containment.  La 
Miniatura was done in 1921-22, in Pasadena, for Mrs. George Madison Millard, for 
whom Wright had done a house in 1906 in Highland Park. The site for La Miniatura is 
intensely refuge dominant, a tiny ravine with lush vegetation. Significantly Wright, not 
Mrs. Millard, chose the site; he steered her away from one she had already purchased 
which was apparently prospect-dominant.  Meantime we had rejected the treeless lot 
originally purchased by Mrs. Millard, as my eyes had fallen upon a ravishing ravine near 
by, in which stood two beautiful eucalyptus trees. The ravine was reached from the rear by 
Circle Drive. Aristocratic Lester Avenue passed across the front. 

No one would want to build down in a ravine out there. They all got out onto the top of 
everything or anything to build and preferably in the middle of the top. It was a habit. I 
considered it a bad habit . . . [although he had done just this at Hollyhock, and rejoiced in 
doing so]. 

We would head the ravine at the rear on Circle Drive with the house, thus retaining the 
ravine as . . . a sunken garden.{Ibid., p. 244.} 

Like most of Wright's houses of the Oak Park days, La Miniatura fronts directly on a city 
street. Unlike most of them, it directs the views of its major spaces emphatically toward the 
rear of the site, making of the street facade a series of richly modeled but closed surfaces.  
The composition of La Miniatura's main spaces is similar to the Hardy house, from which 
it clearly derives. The only spatially fundamental changes are the balcony projecting from 
the south facade of the living room, the perforated screen over the top half of that same 
facade, and the flat ceiling and roof. The balcony cuts off some view to the pond in the 
ravine beyond; but the balcony is shallow, therefore of minimal obstruction, and its 
inclusion must have seemed more irresistible in Southern California than in Wisconsin. 
The perforated block screen is also appropriate in the Southern California climate, serving 
as a light filter, softening and dappling the sunlight. The glass is carried up to the ceiling 
inside this screen, allowing it to act in this way.  As the Hardy house, unusually for its 
period, turned away from the street, so does La Miniatura, although the thick concrete 
walls of La Miniatura make a more forbidding barrier. But on the opposite side the Hardy 
house had opened to the extended prospect of its lake; La Miniatura's vista on the side 
opposite the street facade is short and tight. It is edged by the ravine of Wright's choice, 
the earth itself, all around, and above is vegetation of unusual density. At the Hardy house 
the living room windows turned the corners to release the view and destroy the box. At La 
Miniatura the corners are of fortresslike solidity, while the absence of eaves reinforces our 
interpretation of the building as a box. At Hardy the living room glass extends upward to 
the eave; at La Miniatura the textile block occupies the upper half of the wall, and though 
it is pierced for dappled sunlight, it can hardly be understood as a grove, for the block has 
the lavalike weight of Wright's Imperial Hotel.{John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Usonian Houses (New York: Watson-Guptill Publicaons, 1984), p. 185, calls this a 
"diaphanous membrane"; in an otherwise perceptive discussion this phrase seems entirely 
wrong to me.} Hitchcock calls La Miniatura and its setting "marvellously 
beautiful,"{Hitchcock, Nature, p. 76.} while Gill says it is "among the most beautiful 
houses to be found anywhere in the world."{Gill, Masks, p. 268.} Both comments are 
just-yet La Miniatura's beauty is that of a richly introverted megaron enfronting and 
tentatively peering out to the hollow of the earth, an architecture of exquisite containment.  
With the next three houses, Wright's pattern began to open up once again. The John Storer 
house of 1923-24 presents Wright's usual circuitous entry: one wends one's way up to and 
across the entry court, and into the second-from-left of the range of doors ahead, then 
up a full flight of stairs and through five right-angle turnings-to arrive at the living 
room fireplace. This fireplace is the anchor of a magnificent elevated pavilion, the only 
room on the upper floor, with views to north and south, and terraces to both east and west. 
Eaves have been reintroduced as well, reinforcing the dramatic sense of outlook. Interior 
prospect, however, is limited to a view up to and across the balcony leading to the west 
terrace. 

To the right of the fireplace is the stair by which this elevated pavilion is reached. 

The Samuel Freeman house of the same years also has a plan with limited interior 
prospect. The Freeman house is unique among the California series in having a 
concrete-beamed roof structure: two great north-south beams, over 1 foot wide and 4 
feet deep, ponderously divide the room into three compartments. But this house also has a 
lot of glass, encompassing nearly half the perimeter of the living room, and for the first 
time Wright has made it meet at the corners without a mullion, glass butting directly to 
glass to make the most box-destroying corner imaginable.{Sergeant, Usonian, p. 185, 
notes the "glass-to-glass" corner of the Freeman house without noting this as its first 
usage, a point missed by others as well, but correctly noted by Gill, Masks, p. 282.} The 
balcony off the living room, with a deep overhanging eave above, is lowered by three steps 
to release a stunning view south across Los Angeles. The configuration of the Freeman 
house is strikingly similar to that of the Cheney house, including the entry sliding into the 
corner of the living room next to the fireplace, the tripartite division of the major space, 
and the assignment of its central portion to the fireplace on the one side and the terrace 
access on the other.  The contemporary Charles Ennis house is often considered the most 
overpowering of the California group. Certainly the blockwork, inside and out, is deployed 
with an overwhelmingly elaborate textural richness, while the absence of eaves, one of the 
strongest symbols of protective haven, leaves it devoid of that clue to domesticity. Yet the 
Ennis house is a building of enormous importance, one of the key buildings of Wright's 
career. It deserves a more detailed spatial analysis than it has yet received.  Ascending the 
stair to the main floor. 

Some moves have been made to offer exterior prospect conditions: both corners of the 
dining room have been opened with butted glazing like that of the Freeman house; the 
french doors from the living room swing outward to a small balcony with a magnificent 
panoramic view; and the loggia, a glazed reinterpretation of that of the Martin house of 
1906, is a wonderfully open phenomenon with splendid views both north and south.{The 
Ennis house looks outward to two other architectural masterpieces, Hollyhock House to the 
south, and Richard Neutra's Lovell house to the north.}  The manipulation of the interior, 
however, is the really creative aspect of the Ennis house. If we can shift our attention from 
the richness of the solids to the configuration of the voids-and admittedly, this is not 
easy-we find that this house reintroduces Wright's mastery of the open plan and interior 
prospect, and does so with a stunning virtuosity that includes the mature deployment of a 
powerful and heretofore unexplored spatial characteristic. 

Typically in Wright's houses after 1904 the entry has been architecturally 
suppressed-hidden from immediate view, with a small, plain door opening into a low, 
plain vestibule. At the Ennis house  the whole entry configuration is so understated that it 
seems out of key. One enters via a low and unimpressive door into a low and unimpressive 
entry hall, only 6 feet 8 inches from floor to ceiling. This hall offers no clue to the 
grandiose scheme beyond it. To the left is a stair. Lacking other options, and drawn by the 
light above, one ascends it, turns right at the top (again for lack of options), ascends two 
more steps and moves forward into the main floor spaces of the Ennis interior. Brendan 
Gill has described the entry sequence to the Cheney house as "transforming the simple act 
of entering a building into a complex rite, with overtones of the sacred."{Gill, Masks, p. 
199.} This is even more true of the Ennis house. The sense of sanctity is palpable, but the 
mood is primordial, recalling Rachel Levy's description of entries to the Aurignacian 
caves:  The stair to the upper (main) floor is at left.  . . . These defenses of twisting, often 
very narrow, always slippery corridors, along which the intruders groped their way, 
clinging to curtains of stalactite, descending into chasms . . . whose dimensions their tiny 
lamps could never have revealed . . . and beyond these to desired recesses . . . to the 
painted hall with its rock-cut "throne," "a mystery desired and sought" as its discoverers 
describe it, "in an arcanum forbidden to the profane."{Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn 
(London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 11.}  The entry to the Ennis house is as close to this 
experience as one can come in a twentieth-century American house on a sun-drenched 
California hillside. 

One arrives, then, at the main floor, and enters the stalactite-curtained richness of the 
loggia, which, as the plan reveals, is the conceptual basis of the entire scheme, the river of 
space and light from which the other spaces, like eddying pools, depend. To left and right 
the loggia extends for all of nineteen bays. So powerful is this space that one feels the need 
to step out of its velocity into one of those eddies; the first one available is the living room. 

The view is back toward the entry stair. Up the short run of stairs to the left is the gallery 
that leads, at center, to the kitchen.  This living room is fully 21 feet in height.{The 
present ceilings throughout are flat with a dark exposed wood structure. Wright's original 
drawings show sloped ceilings not unlike those of Hollyhock House, which would have 
yielded a quite different mood. Virginia Ernst Kazor believes Mr. Ennis ordered the 
change against Wright's wishes. I am grateful to her for this and much other information 
on the California group.} The moment one steps into it, the simple but enormously 
powerful axial prospect of the loggia is replaced by something much more complicated. 

To the west the living room opens to the dining space via the wonderful transition of the 
stair and the screen of columns. At the southeast corner of the living room is the deep 
recess leading to Mrs. Ennis's bedroom suite; the upper part of the living room continues 
as a kind of deep minstrel gallery over the bathroom of this suite. To the north is the rich 
opening through the colonnade into the loggia, with its complex vistas to northeast and 
northwest, to sky, stairs, and the terminals of the loggia itself. The dining space shares all 
these vistas and looks back to and across the entry stair as well, whose fenestration mirrors 
and is on axis with that of the dining space. This is some of the most splendid interior 
prospect in Wright's career, perhaps in all architecture. At its present height of 13 feet 4 
inches the ceiling is hardly low by Wright's usual standards, his original drawings of this 
area show a very low ceiling indeed, at the height of the present loggia ceiling to east and 
west). Another reason for the odd fireplace location may have been to encourage an 
understanding of the loggia as being a part of the living room. In this it is not very 
successful; the tall intervening piers keep both fireplace and loggia distinct from the living 
room proper. (The early drawings convey the impression that the relationship would have 
been more successful with the original lower ceiling, making the fireplace seem to lie 
within a more typically Wrightian alcove.) But the fireplace succeeds in calling attention 
to the importance that the loggia seems to have had in Wright's mind-for the loggia is the 
key to the openness of the plan, and to almost all of its vista richness. Its open relationship 
to the major spaces is what determines many of the vistas and a majority of the most 
interesting ones. 

The loggia is also the key to a characteristic in these vista conditions that differentiates 
them from Wright's previous work. The plan arrangement of the Ennis house is similar to 
Coonley. The important difference is that at the Coonley house the hallway was separate 
from the major spaces, while at the Ennis house the hallway (loggia) and the major spaces 
are joined. This condition alone yields considerable spatial enrichment-but more can be 
said of it. Since the loggia lies to one side of the spaces it serves, views into or from it are 
on diagonal axes. Thus while at the Coonley house there were tentative inferences of 
diagonal vistas, at Ennis these diagonal vistas are paramount. They are reinforced by the 
elevated floor of the dining space, which yields upward and downward views rather than 
horizontal ones, and by the unprecedented variety of ceiling heights. The high glazing in 
the loggia north and south of the fireplace has a similar effect, as does the upward view to 
the "minstrel gallery" of the living room. 

The diagonal vistas of the Ennis house also increase the characteristic of complexity, since 
vistas open not only in orthogonal directions but in all directions, thereby teasing our 
tendencies to seek further variations of experience stimuli. And this leads to a 
consideration of other complexities of the Ennis house: the changing floor and ceiling 
elevations, much more varied than is usual even for Wright; the changing textures of the 
blocks; and above all the ever-shifting quality of the light, from the brilliance of the 
loggia to the gloom of the entry stair and the kitchen hall. All this is held in control by 
ordering elements of enormous power. Most obvious of these is the reiterated and absolute 
module of the blocks themselves, which ensures modular relationships of all other 
surfaces. The piers of the loggia also establish a forceful rhythm, and since the loggia 
opens to all contiguous spaces, that rhythm informs them as well. And the exotic 
Mayan-Palladian window motif, a large central panel of leaded glass flanked by lower 
narrow panels, is repeated at five key locations: dining space, living space, entry hall, and 
both main floor bedrooms. The dining and entry windows, furthermore, lie exactly on axis 
with one another and each is visible from the other through the open stair colonnade. 
These characteristics speak to our fundamental predilections for ordered complexity.  The 
spatial organization of the Ennis house marks another development, for it introduces yet 
another condition of fundamental human appeal, that of mystery. 

In Wright's work generally, there is a sense that spaces lie beyond spaces. This is true even 
as early as the Heurtley house, since the entry stair and dining room are both visible 
through, but set off by, the screen of columns that articulates the seam between them. At 
the Cheney house this same phenomenon occurs through a similar instance of interior 
prospect: one sees spaces beyond spaces. 

At the Coonley house, largely because of its horizontal extension, this characteristic is 
exaggerated, but is also slightly different. For there, in a modest way, the zigzags of the 
corridor system create a condition in which one is aware that there is a more distant space, 
but unlike the Heurtley and Cheney houses, one cannot precisely see into it without 
moving toward and into it. Thus, if more information about that sensed but unseen space is 
sought, it cannot be had without investigation. 

This phenomenon of distant spaces suggested but not immediately revealed is carried very 
much farther at the Ennis house. From either the dining or living space, one has an 
extensive view into the loggia. But from the dining space, one cannot see the 
bedroom-accessing portion of the loggia, nor the spaces to which it leads, while from the 
living room one is conscious of that bedroomward extension but also cannot see it. Nor, 
because of the mass of the piers and the deepening light, can one grasp the limits of the 
loggia's extension toward the kitchen. Likewise, the beginning of the stair down to the 
entry is visible, but the destination is concealed. Thus, the diagonal axes of vista at the 
Ennis house are repeatedly accompanied by a sense that spaces exist beyond one's field of 
vision, and can only be understood by investigation. 

This is not a trivial point. Stephen Kaplan has described an empirically validated 
preference for similar conditions in nature: 

The most preferred scenes tended to be of two kinds. They either contained a trail that 
disappeared around a bend or they depicted a brightly lit clearing partially obscured from 
view by intervening foliage. In both cases the scenes appeared to promise that more 
information could be gained by moving deeper into the depicted setting. This promise of 
additional information tentatively was labeled "mystery."{Stephen Kaplan, "Aesthetics, 
Affect, and Cognition: Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary Perspective," 
Environment and Behavior 19:1 (Jan. 1987), pp. 3-32.}  If we replace the natural 
features of this description by architectural ones-textured columns for trees and foliage, 
brightly lit loggia for clearing-this description is close to the conditions of the Ennis 
house, and the condition of mystery fits as well. The appeal of such a sequence of 
conditions appears to have its basis once again in biology. For the behavior induced has a 
survival value. Either danger or delight may lurk in the suggested but unseen environment, 
and it is useful to the creature to find out which it is. The stimulus is the suggestion but not 
the immediate revelation of distant spaces. The response is exploration to seek knowledge 
or information about those spaces. Thus the information-seeking component of our 
makeup is brought into play, driven and rewarded by the pleasure we find in deploying it. 
The Ennis house possesses this characteristic of spatial appeal at a far more developed 
level than any of Wright's prior work.  So these California houses are significant. They 
are, by and large, compositions within formidably closed envelopes, and they all, one way 
and another, deploy Wright's pattern in most of its characteristics. And yet, done at a time 
when Wright was under considerable stress, their inventiveness is 
remarkable-remarkable, in fact, by any standard. While some of them draw their 
direction from some previous examples by Wright-La Miniatura from the Hardy house , 
Freeman from Cheney, Ennis from Coonley-they are all not only significantly different 
from their prototypes but also radically different from one another. They mark for Wright 
not only growth from the Prairie house model, but development in his management of 
space. One instance of this is found in the Freeman house , in which Wright carved away 
the solid wall, and especially the corner of that solid wall, to an unprecedented degree; an 
even more important example is the Ennis house, in which he interwove interior spaces 
with a stunning and unprecedented complexity. 

These developments did not immediately bear much fruit. There was very little chance for 
them to do so, as Wright was desperately short of commissions for many subsequent 
years.{Twombly, Life, p. 192, says that between 1925 and 1932 Wright did only five 
executed buildings.} One result, however, can be seen in changes made at Taliesin itself. 
Taliesin burned again in 1925, just a few months after Wright had embarked on the 
relationship with Olgivanna Milanoff that was to bring some stability to his life. In the 
rebuilding after the fire, more rooms were needed for Olgivanna's daughter from a 
previous marriage, and for the daughter born to her and Wright. For this reason he added 
a second floor of bedrooms over the central portion of the living wing, and raised the 
living room ceiling dramatically to interweave with this second floor hallway by way of a 
balcony. An adjacent clerestory was included to bring in western light. These changes, 
progeny of the Ennis interior, yielded a limited but exquisitely orchestrated diagonal 
interior prospect from Taliesin's living room to the upper hall. At the same time this living 
room, heretofore relatively small, was considerably expanded to the east by a large and 
entirely glazed alcove with a sill significantly lower than that of the early windows. These 
changes roughly doubled the volume of the room. Equally important is the fact that they 
gave it vast gains in both interior and exterior prospect. After serving as refuge for 
fourteen years, Taliesin after 1925 began to open both to itself and to its site. 


6. Fallingwater 

In 1936, after a decade of busywork, failed projects, and sheer inactivity, Wright designed 
for Edgar Kaufmann a weekend house over a waterfall, on a stream called Bear Run in 
rural western Pennsylvania. Wright had long since acquired the habit of naming houses; 
this one he called Fallingwater. 

In discussing the idea of house as refuge, I noted earlier the threats against which it more 
or less universally protects, those of climate and of societal intrusion. Such threats have no 
permanent visible manifestation; one cannot normally see their presence. In this sense, this 
discussion of architectural examples and settings differs from Appleton's discussion of 
landscape painting and literature, in which he often finds such threat conditions actually 
portrayed as storms, cliff faces, heavy seas, or waterfalls. These portrayed threats he 
groups under the term hazard.{See Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: 
John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp. 95 ff.} This term has seemed to me to have too much 
inference of apparent physical danger to be appropriate for a discussion of residential 
architecture as refuge. Therefore I have used the term threat. But Fallingwater is a house 
confronting a natural threat condition with dramatic visible manifestation, and a house 
that, furthermore, complements this with an architecture of calculated hazardous daring. 
The management of this complementary confrontation is, in fact, the fundamental point of 
the whole architectural exercise. Reference to Appleton's categorization of hazards, and 
use of his terms, become, in this instance, appropriate and useful. 

Appleton groups hazards under three main headings: incident, impediment, and 
deficiency. Of these only the first two concern us here, but they concern us intensely. 

Under incident hazards Appleton lists two major subheadings, animate and inanimate. 
Within the animate, in turn, he cites human and nonhuman hazards. The nonhuman, I 
think, can be ignored for our purposes. Human hazards constitute the threats of societal 
intrusiveness already mentioned in connection with the Illinois houses, or the more 
specific sense of hostility germane to Taliesin and, to a lesser extent, the California work. 

Appleton's second category of incident hazards is the inanimate. This is a large group, the 
largest of his listings in fact, consisting of meteorological, instability, aquatic, fire, and 
locomotion hazards. The meteorological I have already touched on under the near 
synonym of threats of climate. Instability hazards are earthquakes, landslides, and 
avalanches. These affected Wright's work in Tokyo dramatically, and in California more 
subtly, but they are not issues in Illinois, Wisconsin, or rural Pennsylvania. As for fire, it 
twice destroyed Taliesin, and Wright was conscious of its threat in his working out of the 
California houses, of whose fireproof qualities he was proud. None of these hazards, it 
should be noted, is for our purposes necessarily tangibly apparent. 

This leaves us, under Appleton's heading of incident hazards, with aquatic hazards and 
those of locomotion. Both of these categories, as we will see, differ from those above in 
that in relation to architecture, they will always have a tangible and apparent presence. Of 
the aquatic Appleton says:  Even calm water can be a fatal hazard to a victim who cannot 
swim, but the destructive potential of water is more eloquently expressed when it is 
moving, and waterfalls, rapids, and storm waves figure consistently in the landscape 
furniture of the Sublime. Falling water can symbolize the power of the forces of nature 
whether in Niagara or in the absurdly genteel "cascade" of the eighteenth-century 
landscape gardeners.{Ibid., pp. 98 and 118.}  And of hazards of locomotion:  One of the 
most prevalent is that of falling. We all know that fatal falls can be sustained even on level 
surfaces, but generally serious falls are associated with high elevations, and it is these 
which have the power of suggesting danger and arousing fear for those who encounter 
them. Here again, those landscape features which display this property, "beetling cliffs," 
chasms, precipices of all sorts, are among the hallmarks of the Sublime.{Ibid., p. 99.} 

These are obviously pertinent issues with regard to the Kaufmann house, although it 
remains to see how Wright exploits their symbolic potential. But before leaving Appleton 
and turning to Wright, it is necessary to refer to Appleton's second broad category of 
hazards. All the above he calls incident hazards; he lists a second smaller group of 
impediment hazards, the most important of which, for our purposes, are natural and also 
tangibly apparent:  In nature dense vegetation, cliffs, ravines, etc., may impede movement, 
as also may waterbodies of all sorts. . . . Rivers play a particular role in this respect, 
because under normal conditions they continue as lines of physical separation over long 
distances. . . . particular significance attaches to those places where such a hazard is 
terminated or interrupted. A crossing-place of a river, for instance, by a bridge or a ford, 
focuses the attention on the opportunity which it presents for circumventing or 
surmounting the hazard.{Ibid., pp. 99-100.} 

Why should representations of hazard in Appleton's studies, or the architectural 
confrontation of tangible hazard conditions, be of importance? One answer to this, surely, 
is that the apparent presence of such hazard conditions intensifies the emotional value of 
the refuge by giving an apparent evidence of the conditions against which refuge is 
secured. But there is a deeper reason too, for Appleton argues that survival requires 
sensitivity to danger signals, and this point once again invokes the pleasure-response 
rationale:  If we were to be interested only in those features of our environment which are 
suggestive of safety, cosiness and comfort, and not at all concerned with those which 
suggest danger, what sort of recipe for survival would that be? Seeking the assurance that 
we can handle danger by actually experiencing it is therefore itself a source of 
pleasure.{Jay Appleton, "How I Made the World," unpublished MS, p. 352, quoted by 
permission of the author.}  Herein lies the appeal of strolls along cliff edges, or of sailing 
in choppy seas. More to our purposes, we all know the intensification of pleasure brought 
about by rain pounding on the roof while we are tucked up safe in bed, or by the storm 
raging outside while we are gathered around a fire. In each case we are programmed to 
find excitement in the presence of discomfort and even danger; we also find an intuitive 
pleasure in its dramatization of the value of security. The comments of Bachelard, cited in 
Chapter 3 in the context of the Robie house, illustrate the same point. Melville writes of a 
similar phenomenon in Moby Dick:  We felt nice and snug, the more so since it was so 
chilly out of doors; indeed out of bedclothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. 
The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be 
cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing 
exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a 
long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and 
me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, 
indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. . . 
. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.{My edition is 
New York: Random House, 1930, in which this passage is on pp. 76-77.}  It is time now 
to look at the Kaufmann house itself, to push through the dense vegetation and enter the 
ravine, traverse the bridge across the river, and consider the man-made beetling cliffs 
overhanging the rapids and the falling water. That sentence names fully six physically 
apparent hazard symbols; yet these are the actual conditions as they are perceived on 
approach to the Kaufmann house, and none of them is timidly presented. These are hazard 
symbols reduplicated with a vengeance. And they yield both values. They are intensely 
pleasurable in themselves, and they powerfully intensify the refuge and prospect symbols 
also present from this view. The familiar symbols are all here: deep overhanging eaves, 
windows, alcoves, recesses, conspicuous balconies. All are profuse. Overhanging eaves are 
in places so deep they mask entirely the recesses underneath; this is especially true of those 
portions of the house nearest the bridge. Yet in certain lights the house is all balconies. 
And in yet other lights, the bands of windows, more continuous and extensive than in any 
other of Wright's work, equally seem dominant. Alcoves and recesses likewise are 
everywhere. Inferences of penetrability and of protection thus are extraordinarily strong, 
yet almost every one of these features conveys the potential for sweeping outlook as well. 
Here are signals that this is the epitome of the place to see without being seen, its appeal 
made more intense through the dramatic confrontation of a setting against which warmth 
and comfort find a complementary measure. We are invited to savor danger from a haven 
of safety. 

Complexity reveals itself in the multiple possible interpretations mentioned above. There 
is also an obvious geometric complexity; probably no house since the Palace of Minos has 
had so complex a configuration. Twombly says that "Fallingwater seems to take flight 
every way at once, making it exceptionally difficult to analyze or to describe."{Robert 
Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979), 
P. 277.} But if the eye wants resolution, that too is easily had. All the verticals are stone; 
from them the tan trays pinwheel, all in rectilinear shapes, all of identical vertical 
dimension, identical detail, and identical coloration, all separated by an identically 
dimensioned stratum of void. 

Even from the bridge, then, the house offers an extraordinary linkage with our inherent 
habitational preferences. Within symbols of nature's hazard reduplicated by its own 
audacious precariousness, it tells us with unequaled richness of its potential for refuge and 
prospect, has given us a complexity inviting of further exploration, and yet has given 
immediate clues of order. 

Beyond the bridge, refuge symbols follow immediately. Within 20 feet of the bridge head 
and closing its vista is the heavily overgrown hillside, its formations reminiscent of 
primordial refuge places, the ravine walls penetrated by early man for his cave dwellings. 
One turns left along this bank, which thus becomes a wall on the right flank. Within 
another 20 feet one is embraced by the rock pylons of the house on the left; at the same 
time the overhead closure of a glade is suggested through its abstraction in the concrete 
trellis. 

The entry lies within the stone masses at lower left, behind the rhododendron. 

One walks between two of the rock pylons to find yet another rock face ahead, and then the 
main entry, rock-floored and clamped between two rock masses only 4 feet apart. 
Immediately inside, one is in an antechamber surrounded by these rock masses, with rock 
still underfoot, the sense of cave reinforced still more by the depressed floor. One must 
climb out of this antechamber.  And then, having done so, quite suddenly all is prospect. 
The single-minded emphasis on refuge so dominant at the early Taliesin and at La 
Miniatura has no place here. Every condition at Fallingwater is presented with a drama 
unique even in Wright's work. This prospect condition, suddenly come upon, is no 
exception. Glass is everywhere. In no earlier building, and in few subsequent ones, did 
Wright open panorama to this extent. The prototype of this extensive corner-turning 
transparency is the Freeman house, but the massive piers in this case are withdrawn from 
the plane of the glass; although the window mullions of Fallingwater do actually support 
the floor above, the impression is of a continuous panorama under a floating plane of 
ceiling. The verdure of the glen surrounds us. The foliate leaded glass of the prairie houses 
is replaced by the actual foliage of the glen, visible through something like a 180-degree 
sweep occupying our entire range of peripheral vision. Diagonally opposite the entry, to 
the southwest, is the most extended vista, the long reach down the axis of Bear Run.  
Again there is complexity and order. The route to this spot has been a complicated one, 
and having arrived at this point we are confronted with the usual complexities of 
Wrightian space. What shape is the room? Is it one room or several? But the central part is 
nearly square in plan and is so marked out by the stone pylons, and we are given a clear 
clue to this by the geometry of the ceiling pattern. The sill line is either at floor level or at 
the level of the terrace parapets which, seen beyond, recall the order perceived externally. 
The upper edge of glass is at a constant height everywhere. 

Behind to the right is the fireplace. It is a half-cylindrical void formed of the roughly 
coursed rock, with the same material to right and left. The void is high, going right up to 
the ceiling edge; it seems eroded from the rock masses of the ravine. Its hearth is the 
unworked surface of the living rock, two peninsulas of an undisturbed boulder which rise 
out of the stonesurfaced floor a foot and more.  On either side of the fire to west and north 
conditions occur which are a departure from the usual pattern. A seat lies to the south and 
a buffet to the north-these are predictable and canonical-but over each is glass. 
Normally Wright's fireplace pockets, as interior refuge, are bounded by opaque surfaces, as 
we have seen. Yet at Fallingwater he has been able to make the glass serve the refuge 
pocket because of the unique site. How so? From the window over the seat the foliage is 
near and dense. The hill bank rises to the right, anchored by the enormous body of rock 
whose eastern tip is the fireplace hearth. Downward are the cleavages of the glen's rock 
strata. Thus the glass looks out to a terrain of grove and cave, reduplicating the refuge 
character of the fire area. The glass to north over the buffet is even more effective; it looks 
to the cave-suggesting hillside hardly more than 10 feet away. (In this area, and in fact 
throughout the house, the refuge characteristics of Fallingwater are especially dependent 
on relationships to the foliage of the site. Thus in winter, when the deciduous foliage is 
absent, the house is prospect-dominant to a degree unusual in Wright's work. In that 
sense, it is indeed a summer house, engaged in a dialog with its site which is not only 
formal but temporal as well.) 

Window seat south of the fire, looking west. The earth bank seen on entry reappears as the 
view through this window. 

The ceiling of the living room makes another departure from the pattern. Its upward 
extension is modest by comparison with Wright's typical living rooms. There are habitable 
spaces above-the master bedroom and its terrace. This location for these spaces, as we 
have seen, is highly unusual in Wright's work, but is necessitated in this case by the 
configuration of the site. These superimposed habitable spaces prevent the usual upward 
expansion of the living room ceiling. Yet even had they not been there, it is hard to see 
how Wright could really have pushed the ceiling upward very much, given the vocabulary 
of flat concrete trays poised in space; the two ideas are incommensurable. That said, 
Wright took all the upward spatial expansion he could get by pushing the slab upward to 
the very underside of floor and terrace above. It is not enough; there is not here the 
exhilarating sense of release usual in Wright's grander high-ceilinged spaces; but it 
indicates Wright's determination to provide what he can of this feature, even when 
circumstances are against it. 

The master bedroom repeats in its interior not just the pattern but its particular 
configuration as in the living room below. The fireplace is similarly located, and eroded 
from shelves of rock. The prospect, as in the living room, is the long reach of vista 
diagonally down the glen. The enormous terrace, however, is dramatically different. It 
extends toward the south, unlike the east and west terraces of the living room. This is the 
most dramatic prospect-platform of the entire composition. It is the Cheney terrace, in a 
way, yet so much more dramatic. It reaches out to the south beyond the living room below, 
hovering over the falls, while its greater elevation lengthens the views and includes within 
them the terraces below. And from it, because of prior knowledge but also because its 
hovering character is recalled by the forms all around, there is the perceived hazard of 
falling, as there is to a lesser degree from the living room terraces. Thus, the 
prospect-claiming meadow with refuge behind is at the same time a precipice over space 
and over the reduplicating hazard symbols of rapids and falling water. 

As one moves from the interior spaces outward onto the many terraces of Fallingwater, it 
is always by way of a transitional experience provided by a deeply overhanging eave. So 
far as I know, no one has ever commented on the strange eaves of Fallingwater. They play 
a role analogous to the one they play in all of Wright's work; therefore they are worth some 
discussion. And Fallingwater is the place to discuss them because here, unlike the easily 
built eaves of much of his other work, they were a far from easy matter, and the effort 
Wright put into their provision underscores their importance. Except at the south edge of 
the living room, they are not like the parapets; they are thin slabs cantilevered from the 
bottom edge of the parapet. Now this is a particularly difficult way to do an eave. Structure 
is not a problem, as the steel reinforcing in the slab beyond, also on the underside of the 
parapet, can just be continued into the eave. But making a practical roof over the eave, and 
especially flashing it both effectively and tidily where it meets the parapet wall-these are 
really hard problems. Then why is the eave done this way? The answer is complex. 

The parapets generally act approximately as beams for Fallingwater's 
cantilevers,{According to Kaufmann, Fallingwater (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 
51, "Wright himself after much deliberation believed [the parapets] helped carry the load, 
but not so effectively as he had hoped."} and if they lie in the plane of the wall below, they 
gain a tremendous and probably essential advantage through being placed directly over the 
obvious line of support. (The parapet over the south edge of the living room happens to be 
an exception, since it is perpendicular to the direction of the cantilever and therefore acts 
only to stiffen the edge of the slab.) But if these parapets lie in the plane of the wall below, 
then obviously they cannot overhang that wall; therefore they cannot themselves become 
overhanging eaves. A false second parapet could have been cantilevered beyond to provide 
such an overhang, but it would have been heavy, and the sheer physical weight of the 
concrete work at Fallingwater was seen as a problem by all concerned. So the eaves more 
or less had to be done as they were. But if they were all this bother, why have them at all? 
It isn't likely that they are there-either at Fallingwater or in any other example-to 
protect the windows from the weather, for Wright could be appallingly casual about 
weather and weathering for both the architecture and its occupants. So why the eaves? 
They perform three interrelated roles, all explicable within a prospect and refuge 
interpretation. 

The first, the exterior signaling of refuge and prospect, I have already mentioned in 
numerous examples. 

The second has to do with the shading the eaves provide, and the consequent difference in 
light condition between interior and exterior. For eaves such as these largely prevent direct 
light from striking the interior.  Thus the interiors of Fallingwater, like those of all of 
Wright's houses, are cast into shadow by the eaves, making the interior at all points darker 
than the exterior in daylight conditions. This is essential if the interior is to provide a clear 
signal of refuge, for the grove or cave to whose refuge we were primordially attracted 
would always have had just such a subdued light quality as one of its essential 
distinguishing characteristics. The eaves at Fallingwater, therefore, as elsewhere in 
Wright's pattern, provide an architectural replica of this contrast in light condition 
between sheltering grove or cave, and meadow or savannah beyond, and in so doing make 
available the appeal such settings have always had for us. For this condition to obtain, 
then, these eaves are crucial. 

The eaves also modulate the transition between interior and exterior. As one moves from 
living room or bedroom to terrace at Fallingwater, or in any other of Wright's houses, one 
emerges from the darker refuge to the brighter prospect, but not abruptly; movement is 
through the french doors outward under the architectural bower of the eaves, and thence to 
the brighter light of release to the sky, as though one were gradually emerging from under 
the foliage of a dense forest grove into an open meadow. And for this condition also to 
obtain, these eaves are crucial.{Fallingwater has occasionally been compared with Le 
Corbusier's Villa Savoye of 1929, the argument generally being that Wright did or did not 
derive something from it. Whatever his debt to Le Corbusier, on the question of refuge the 
two houses are worlds apart. Many differences contribute to this; the enclosed versus the 
free-standing fireplace, and the simple versus the complex outline of the architectural 
envelope are two that come easily to mind. Another is this eave condition. In each feature, 
the Villa Savoye emerges as the more dramatic prospect symbol and provision, but as far 
weaker in refuge than Fallingwater. The Villa Savoye conveys the magnificent excitement 
of an architecture open to light, the epitome of a dramatic seeing-but one is also seen. 
Given Wright's invariable provision of emphatic refuge conditions, and his well-known 
hostility to Le Corbusier's work, it is easy to speculate that he was actually offended by a 
habitation weak, and even deficient, in refuge symbols and provisions.}  The sense of 
refuge at Fallingwater is, for some, compromised a bit by a sense of precariousness, which 
is not only thrilling but also occasionally disturbing. In the southern portions of the house 
there is a discomforting sense that it really might pitch forward into the stream. This is not 
all paranoid imagination. The house has not broken, as Wright said it would not, but it has 
bent, outward and downward. 

Bending and breaking are independent considerations in engineering, based on different 
theory and different calculations; both have a role to play in the design of structures. A 
trained professional engineer will design a structure not only to prevent breaking (failure) 
but also to prevent excessive bending (deflection), and often it is the concern over 
deflection, not failure, that will drive the structural solution.{In very tall buildings subject 
to seismic and wind loads, for example, the structure is often made far stiffer than is 
necessary for prevention of absolute collapse in order that occupants are not made 
uncomfortable by lateral movement or whip. Thus structure in tall buildings is in part 
determined by prevention of psychological discomfort that might arise from excessive 
deflection.} Wright, as an intuitive and largely self-trained engineer,{Such a phrase, I 
realize, does not do justice to those from whose expertise Wright no doubt learned a great 
deal, especially, in early years, Paul Mueller at Adler and Sullivan and, of course, 
Dankmar Adler himself. Mueller was also with Wright during many of the Oak Park years 
and during design of the Imperial Hotel.} was often brilliant in his invention of original 
and failure-safe structures. But time and again he seems to have taken the issue of 
deflection lightly. His own account of Romeo and Juliet reveals as much. He wrote with 
pride about its survival against collapse. Yet he admitted that the workmen came down 
from the work in high winds and said that "the tower swayed in the wind several 
inches."{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Horizon, 1977), p. 160.} 
This kind of problem plagued much of his work throughout his career; both the Prairie 
houses of his early years and the Usonians of his later life often show extreme deflection 
both in main spans and in cantilevers. This deflection on occasion considerably disfigures 
the intended elegance of the otherwise magnificent horizontals.{Few of Wright's buildings 
have ever been at the threshold of actual collapse (although an exact number is impossible 
to determine because of revision during or after construction). An unusually large number, 
however, were genuinely and even necessarily innovative in structural concept (see, e.g., n. 
24, Chap. 3) and the record is a strong testimony to his brilliance in understanding failure 
resistance. But many are badly flawed in deflection. A cursory sampling: 

The roof projecting at third floor level west from the chimney of the Robie house droops 
many inches. When the Roberts house was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, the eaves were 
sagging a foot and more. On deflection in the eaves of the Adams house of 1913 in Oak 
Park see Gill, Many Masks (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1987), p. 215; on p. 193 Gill also 
illustrates expedient props for the sagging eaves of the Gilmore house of 1908 in Madison. 
I have never seen the interior of the Glasner house, but an illustration in William J. R. 
Curtis, Modern Architecture  Since 1900 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 83, 
shows steel tie-rods installed in the living room to prevent deflection of the roof due to an 
unresisted spreading force concentrated at the eaves. A similar problem demanded a 
similar expedient remedy-in this case rough 2-4s-at the one remaining cottage of the 
Como Orchards project of 1909; see Grant Hildebrand and Thomas Bosworth, "The Last 
Cottage of Wright's Como Orchards Complex," Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians 41:4 (Dec. 1982), pp. 326-27. Wright's predilection for omitting cross-ties in 
structures with a tendency to spread persisted throughout his life, and for good spatial 
reasons; sometimes he obtained secure structural provisions without tie members and 
sometimes not. Gill (Masks, 1987, p. 451) cites an instance in the construction of the 
house for Wright's son David near Phoenix in the 1950s: "While the wooden roof was in 
the course of being framed, Wright dropped in for a visit, glanced up at the short 
cross-pieces that conventionally stiffen rafters, and, pointing with his cane, said, 'Those 
braces must go.' David Wright looked at his father and said coolly, 'I don't think so.' And 
the braces remained." Apprentice Edgar Tafel (Apprentice to Genius [New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 1979], pp. 190-91) added steel to the roof structure of the Schwartz 
house out of obvious necessity. Wright was furious, but Tafel says that failure to do 
likewise for a house in "the South" (the Rosenbaum house?) actually did result in collapse. 
(John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses [New York: Watson-Guptill 
Publications, 1984], p. 112, cites "an embarrassing sag" for that house but not collapse.) 
The carport of the Goetsch-Winckler house sags about three inches; this is clearly shown 
in Sergeant, Usonian, p. 54. On p. 118, he says of the Rosenbaum house: ". . . the long, 
48-ft north wall could be made to bow by hand pressure." The Lewis house shows severe 
deflections in the roofs east and west of the living room; see Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank 
Lloyd Wright Monograph 1937-1941 (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1986), p. 172; p. 181 also 
shows obvious deflections in the Sondern house, another Usonian. In 1955 I visited the 
then eight-year-old Unitarian Church in Madison; repairs were underway to correct 
what, in distant memory, I recall as an appalling deflection of 18 inches or so in the 
balcony. Taliesin itself has innumerable disfiguring deflections; for an illustration of some 
of them, see Gill, Masks, p. 333. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 
1914-1923 (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 1986), p. 383, illustrates the retaining wall of the Ennis 
house which can be seen to be buckling severely. Apparently this condition is of long 
standing: in 1940 the then-owner of this house, John Nesbitt, corresponded with Wright 
about repairs to what was then a 100-foot-long bulge in the southern retaining wall 
(Gill, Masks, p. 279). There is considerable deflection in the trellis of Fallingwater, 
although this is not the crucial problem area. Many more examples in other of Wright's 
structures could be cited.} 

Wright was advised at the time of Fallingwater's construction , by engineers retained by 
the client, that more strength was needed through adding reinforcing of the concrete trays 
and increased substructure. These suggestions, I surmise, were put forward out of concern 
for deflection as well as failure. Wright seems to have mistaken them as addressing the 
question of collapse, and exulted over the fact that, contrary to those views as he 
understood them, the building did not fall down. But it has deflected, obviously and 
precariously. 

And yet, in studying the plan, one realizes that Wright had no real choices. The key matter 
is that of the withdrawn pylons under the living room and its terraces, where the deflection 
is most crucial and disturbing. This part of the building is responsible not only to itself, but 
also carries at its southern edge the entire weight of the upper floor as well. Therefore its 
own support condition is vital, and it is here that there are precious few options. The stair 
from the living room down to the rapids, most would agree, is an important element of the 
scheme, and its northern edge is what determines the limit of the adjacent pylon, which 
therefore cannot be prolonged. The others could have been, of course, but to little purpose, 
as a cantilever system, like a chain, is not much stronger than its weakest condition. Nor 
could the terrace edge be withdrawn northward, since passage to the terrace south of the 
stair is already more or less minimal. Nor would one want to run deep beams under the 
slab; these would destroy the smooth underside of the terrace at considerable aesthetic cost. 
So the problem was inherent in the concept, with no easy answers. 

Despite his bravado about the house even Wright may have realized that he was pushing 
the structure very far indeed. Edgar Kaufmann Jr. recounts a moment when Wright, sick 
and delirious, was heard muttering "too heavy," apparently in reference to the balconies of 
Fallingwater.{Kaufmann, Fallingwater, p. 49. Kaufmann points out that there were 
engineers in Wright's service. This is true, but there are two points of qualification: like all 
other staff at Taliesin they were dominated by Wright's will; and Wright's structures were 
genuinely innovative.} Edgar Kaufmann Sr. worried about the problem for the rest of his 
life, with some cause.{Donald Hoffman, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (New York: 
Dover Publications, 1978), p. 34.}  The classic view of the house is from across Bear Run 
and down the ravine to the southwest. Apparently this is more or less the spot where 
Kaufmann had originally imagined the house itself would be located.{Hoffman, Wright's 
Fallingwater, pp. 13-14, 18. See also Kaufmann, Fallingwater, p. 31.} It is the obvious 
location, since from it the waterfall of which Kaufmann was fond can be seen, as it cannot 
from the house as built. Almost any other architect, following Kaufmann's lead, would 
have chosen this as the place. Yet Wright rejected it, choosing instead the small plateau of 
the falls itself and the bouldered area directly above.{Wright claimed that his choice for 
the location of the fireplace (and therefore the house itself) was based on the fact that the 
boulder that is its hearth had been one of Kaufmann's favorite spots from which to enjoy 
the falls. That explanation can hardly be taken at face value. In building the house outward 
from that spot, Wright sacrificed the very view that Kaufmann valued. Furthermore, it can 
hardly be denied that had Wright wanted the house somewhere else, he could equally have 
used Kaufmann's predilection as support for an alternate location that would leave the 
chosen spot untouched. Therefore it seems reasonable to look on Wright's rationale as 
clever justification for a choice made for other reasons.} In doing so he realized several 
advantages. 

The most obvious advantage is that the site over the falls allowed him to bring direct 
sunlight into the major rooms, as he could not have done downstream. This is because of 
the greater elevation of the chosen site, and its location on the north bank, which means 
that rooms looking out to the ravine, and to the slight clearing it provides, face south 
rather than north. 

The chosen site also allowed Wright to provide his typical condition of prospect, in which 
the view from the living spaces is toward lower or falling terrain. The downstream site 
could not have offered this unless the house had looked west, away from the waterfall, in 
which case the whole point of that location would have been lost. Yet had the house looked 
toward the waterfall, and therefore toward rising terrain, the intuitive strategic advantage 
of a commanding elevated position would have been unavailable, and the view toward the 
falls above would have been overwhelming rather than stimulating; one would have felt 
more at the mercy of nature than in rapport with it. Thus in terms of prospect positioning, 
and of relationship to hazard, Wright's decision to build directly above the waterfall itself 
was appropriate. 

Another advantage of this site has to do with the degree to which the sound of the 
waterfall infuses the house. It is a commonplace that the waterfall is heard throughout; it is 
less commonly observed that its sound is muted by the masses of concrete that intervene 
between the waterfall and the living spaces. Had the house been located at the spot of 
Kaufmann's choice, the only intervening material, presumably, would have been the glass 
of the overlooking windows, and glass is far less effective than concrete in dampening 
sound; what counts is mass, and the stone-floored concrete trays, with their concrete 
parapets, are ideal in providing mass, while glass is not.{If one also assumes, as Wright 
clearly did, that doors and windows would often stand open, this argument becomes even 
stronger.} Wright seems to have had a grasp of such issues of acoustical control from an 
early date; of the design of Unity Temple in 1904, he said: "The site was noisy, by the 
Lake Street [trolley] car-tracks. Therefore it seemed best to keep the building closed on 
the three front sides."{Wright, Autobiography (1977), p. 179.} At Fallingwater, because 
he chose the site as he did, he could interpose the concrete trays between the sound source 
and the habitable spaces, with the consequence that the sound is heard throughout, but 
softly. One is continually reminded of the presence of nature's hazard while aware that one 
rests within a haven of security. 

And yet, all these advantages could have been achieved without putting the house exactly 
where it is. The key is the north bank, and any other location on it would have done as 
well. Wright's audacious decision to put the house directly over the waterfall, however, 
confers a final advantage-subtle but of paramount importance-that is unique to the 
chosen spot: for had he chosen any other site, the house's relationship to the symbol of 
nature's hazards would necessarily have been passive; at any other location the house 
would have been, unavoidably, a composition standing apart from the waterfall rather than 
wedded to it. And in view of what was actually done, this can be seen as a crucial issue. 
For the house as built does not simply overlook nature's drama, it participates in it, and 
can only do so located as it is. And this helps us to understand the importance of the trays 
cantilevered into space over the water, for they are the essential elements on which this 
architectural participation depends. Their daring is obvious to anyone; echoing the 
overhanging rock strata of the falls in dimension, coloration, and geometry, their hovering 
precipices match and complement the hazard of the site. The hazard, thus reduplicated, 
intensifies to an unprecedented degree the refuge and prospect messages of the house 
itself. This is the genius of the relationship between the house and its waterfall.  A few 
years before Fallingwater's design John Dewey had written: "There are stirred into activity 
resonances of dispositions acquired in primitive relationships of the living being to its 
surroundings."{John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Pentagon Books, 1934), p. 
29.} These words seem especially appropriate to this house. For at Fallingwater human 
habitation is configured to provide with unique intensity symbols of prospect, refuge, and 
hazard, and conditions of complexity and order, to which the human species is genetically 
attuned. Critics often regard this house as Wright's most accomplished feat. It is also quite 
possibly architecture's most accomplished manifestation of our fundamental choices of 
pleasurable setting. 


7. Taliesin West 

In 1928 Wright, on honeymoon with Olgivanna, had gone to Arizona as a consultant on 
the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix; the architect was a former employee of Oak Park 
days, Albert McArthur, who sought Wright's help. In January of the following year Wright 
returned to Arizona to work on a project for a large resort, 
San-Marcos-in-the-Desert, near Chandler.{Other dates are given elsewhere, but 
Robert Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 
1979), has traced primary source accounts for the 1929 date; see p. 238, n. 15. See also 
Neil Levine, "Frank Lloyd Wright's Own Houses and His Changing Concept of 
Representation," in Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, eds., The Nature 
of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 67, n. 44.} To do 
the work he built a desert studio and residence nearby, which he named Ocatillo, after the 
flowering cactus.{Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 
p. 131. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials (New York: Duell, Sloane, 
and Pearce, 1942, reprinted 1982), illustrates this as figs. 276-80, but refers to it as 
"Ocotillo." No one in fact seems agreed on the spelling: in Frank Lloyd Wright, An 
Autobiography (New York: Horizon, 1977), it occurs as both "Ocatillo" (p. 335) and 
"Ocatilla" (p. 479). I have simply used the first of Wright's spellings.} This temporary 
structure, which Wright called an ephemera,{Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography 
(New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1943), p. 311.} was an open campus of dispersed 
pavilions defined and joined by continuous lightweight board-and-batten walls. The 
pavilions and walls encircled a low mound in the desert; the entire complex, however, lay 
well below the elevation of the horizon and therefore was contained within the landscape's 
edges, suggesting a stark version of the site relationships of Taliesin on its hillside within 
the hill-edged Wisconsin valley. Above Ocatillo's light wood walls perched spiky 
triangular wooden frames, asymmetrical in their pitch; of them, Wright observed: "The 
one-two [30/60 degree] triangle used . . . is made by the mountain ranges 
themselves."{Ibid.} These frames supported tented canvas, the only roof, which both shed 
the rain and softened the desert sun. "We painted the horizontal boards . . . dry rose as the 
color to match the light on the desert floor. . . . We will paint the canvas eccentric 
one-two triangles in the gables scarlet. The one-two triangles of the ocatillo bloom itself 
are scarlet." {Wright, Autobiography, 1977, p. 335.}  The wood walls that bounded the 
complex were only infrequently interrupted for small windows and for the entry; thus 
refuge from the desert's almost limitless expanse was lightly but firmly declared 
throughout. In the center was the camp fire, a surrogate of the fire-place at the center of 
Wright's more typical houses. Wright's own living room within Ocatillo was a microcosm 
of the familiar pattern. Turning away from the rest of the complex, its fireplace was 
located within three blank walls, the fire thus becoming the focus of a refuge not only from 
the desert but from the remainder of the complex as well. Opposite was the largest external 
opening of the entire complex, leading to the predictable terrace, sheltered from the desert 
by the continuous wooden wall. 

Wright was not always the most lighthearted of architects, yet the distinguishing and 
wonderfully appealing characteristic of Ocatillo was exactly its fresh lightheartedness. As 
Reyner Banham has observed,{Reyner Banham, "The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd 
Wright," Royal Institute of British Architects Journal 76:12 (Dec. 1969), p. 516.} this was 
true not only of the camp but of Wright's prose describing it: 

A group of gigantic butterflies with scarlet wingspots, conforming gracefully to the crown 
of the outcropping of black splintered rock gently uprising from the desert floor. . . . A 
human gaiety in the desert is under way. . . . Now, when all these white canvas 
flaps-wings like sails, are spread, the buildings. . . will look something like ships coming 
down the mesa, rigged like ships well balanced in the circumstances. The little camp 
finished, we love it.{Wright, Autobiography, 1977, pp. 334-37.} 

Ocatillo turned out to be quite literally ephemeral. The stock market crash of 1929 killed 
the Chandler project, the camp was abandoned as a result, and some time thereafter it was 
dismantled by local Indians. Wright later remarked: "I have learned not to grieve long now 
that some work of mine has met its end; has had its short life, as we say."{Ibid., p. 335, in 
which Wright says the structure was dismantled the following winter. Levine, in Bolon et 
al., Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 67, n. 44, indicates that the archaeologist Margerie 
Green, in discussion with a former apprentice, has discovered that the camp may have 
stood in place for many years. A probable scenario is not hard to imagine, the camp 
deteriorating and being slowly dismantled over the years, Wright returning in 1937 to find 
it almost all gone, and taking the most dramatic interpretation of its demise.} But one can 
grieve a little about the Ocatillo camp's demise; it was one of Wright's most delightful 
creations.  Seven years later Wright had a severe bout of pneumonia, the cause of the 
delirium that revealed his worries about Fallingwater. His doctor advised him to spend no 
more winters in Wisconsin. Accordingly, in 1937 he went again to Arizona. But it is easy 
to suspect that there was more motivation for the trip than just doctor's orders, for his 
response to this terrain was as enthusiastic in 1937 as it seems to have been in 1929. He 
wandered the barren landscape to his chosen spot, "a great mesa in the mountains. On the 
mesa ["on," once again] just below McDowell Peak we stopped, turned and looked around. 
The top of the world. . . . The desert seems vast but the seeming is nothing compared to 
the reality."{Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1937-1941 (Tokyo: 
ADA Edita, 1986), quotes this comment by Wright on p. 45.} Here, on land fifteen miles 
outside Scottsdale (then no more than a crossroads), he began the design of a new winter 
home and studio. It was to be a structure marrying the ephemeral character of Ocatillo 
with the eternity of the pyramids, for Wright would merge the idea of the Ocatillo 
wood-and-canvas superstructure with a substructure of concrete-held boulders, a 
massive abstraction of the desert's geological depths. After some fumbling for a 
name-Aladdin and Rockledge were tried{Tafel, Apprentice, pp. 199-200.}-he did the 
obvious and named it Taliesin West. 

The site is utterly prospect-dominant. The grand sweep of desert is punctuated only by 
scrub growth and cactus and, the building aside, lacks any hint of refuge. The only 
possible inference of containment is in the distant mountain ranges, upscaled surrogates of 
Taliesin's hills, which are the visual horizons of the plateau. But this desert is not only 
prospect; in its harsh aridity it is also imbued with hazard, and is immediately and 
intuitively understood to be so. For in our earliest environments, the wooded edges of the 
savannah and later the tighter security of the cave, a part of our pleasure-driven selecting 
mechanisms must necessarily have been attuned to the appeal of water; had this not been 
so we would have perished. John Ruskin notes the presence of this feature-and of 
prospect and refuge as well-in the earliest literature of the Western world: "As far as I 
recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is 
composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove."{Cited by Jay Appleton, The 
Experience of landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 1, from Modern Painters; 
see the edition of Cook and Wedderburn, 1903-12, v. 5, p. 234.} There is also sound 
empirical evidence to show that a pleasurable response to water is still an intact part of our 
makeup.{Among a wealth of such evidence, see the summarizing position of E. H. Zube, 
D. G. Pitt, and T. W. Anderson, Landscape Assessment: Values, Perceptions and 
Resources (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1975), pp. 151-67.} 
Furthermore, there is good reason to think that it was important to Wright throughout his 
life, since many of his major houses go to great lengths to include water.{The Coonley 
house has an extensive pool; at Taliesin, Wright built a dam at considerable expense to 
widen the river in view to the east; Hollyhock has both a subterranean cave pool around 
the fireplace and the far larger exterior pools on axis in the garden and to the west; La 
Miniatura has its pool in the ravine; the Storer house includes a pool as part of the entry 
terraces; the second Jacobs house has a pool that is both interior and exterior; and of 
course there is the obvious example of Fallingwater.} But the Arizona desert, except for its 
brittle scrub growth, gives no clue to the presence of water: no trees, no rivers, no snow on 
the distant mountains, not even a fair-sized arroyo to record the former presence of some 
now-vanished watercourse. 

Appleton considers this kind of landscape as one that presents a hazard of deficiency, in 
that characteristics crucial to survival are conspicuously absent. He quotes a passage from 
Ole Rolvaag's novel, Giants in the Earth, which describes just such a landscape: 

The broad expanse stretching away endlessly in every direction, seemed almost like the 
ocean . . . the nearest dwelling places of men were far away. Here no warbling birds rose 
on the air, no buzzing of insects sounded; even the wind had died away; the waving blades 
of grass that trembled to the faintest breath now stood erect and quiet, as if listening, in the 
hush of the evening . . . the stillness had grown depressing, the farther west they 
journeyed. . . . Had they traveled into some nameless, abandoned region? Could no living 
thing exist out here, in the empty, desolate wastes? If life is to thrive and endure, it must at 
least have something to hide behind!{Appleton, Experience, pp. 153-54.} 

Why then would Wright have chosen such a site? Perhaps just for the challenge of it? For 
surely to the old master refuge-maker, this must have seemed a foe eminently worthy of 
his genius. At the age of seventy, did he perhaps envision an architectural confrontation 
with this dramatic desert as his last and greatest challenge? Certainly Taliesin West 
conveys the drama and tension that any single building, symbolizing a lone refuge, must 
unavoidably assume within such a site. 

But there is, of course, far more to it than this. To approach and enter Taliesin West we 
are led, as usual, through a processional path of maximum length and complexity, to 
remove our consciousness, as in those prehistoric caves, far from the setting of hunter and 
hunted, to the secure tranquillity of the special inner place. The first stage of this path 
takes us through the mesalike outposts of the concrete and boulder podium that is the 
substructure of the complex. Wending our way through these, we approach the pergola 
which, like the trellis of Fallingwater, gently suggests a tenuous refuge. As we move 
forward a few more steps, this sense of refuge is reinforced by the now-complete 
architectural containment; all views of the hazardous desert are momentarily blocked from 
view. Then ahead, through a slightly deflected axis, across the pool by the "hogan," the 
desert is allowed to appear once more in a constricted view. Controlled by human agency, 
its hazard is now held at bay because it is contained by the flanking masses; we peek out at 
it through the surrogate cave mouth, seeing without being seen. Then we turn right, into 
the loggia, with another contained cave mouth view to desert and mountains. Then finally, 
through the usual low-key entries known, or so it would seem, only to the initiate, we 
enter the interiors, the secret and special places. These also open to the desert-but not 
from areas around the fireplaces.  The entry approach begins at far left.  The architecture 
now surrounds, and the desert is momentarily lost to view. It reappears ahead, after a 
dogleg to the right at the end of the pergola. 

These fireplaces, in the workroom and Wright's own more private garden room, are at the 
ends of the spaces, and forward of these Wright has used screening devices of great 
cleverness to ensure that the fire-refuge is uncompromised. Masonry walls whose long 
dimension is at right angles to that of the room mask the exterior view from the fireplace 
zone. The perception of these rooms from their fireplaces, therefore, is one of enclosure, a 
perception reinforced by the more conventional opaque ceilings near the fireplaces, which 
replace the wood and canvas ceilings/roofs typical elsewhere at Taliesin West. Then as we 
move forward along the axis of the room the space between the masonry pylons makes 
itself brilliantly, overwhelmingly evident-we look out again to that prospect and hazard 
from which we have been so lengthily parted, and against which refuge has been so 
primordially declared.  The entry is at left, with the fireplace alcove behind the wood 
structure at center.  The alcove with its massive cave-fireplace, and seating beyond.  The 
view from the fireplace alcove, with screening pylons at left, and canvas overhead. 

The entire lower portion of the building is a manmade mesa of terraces, steps, and 
retaining walls formed of concrete poured around large native boulders. This same 
material is carried upward to form, typically, three walls of each of the functioning spaces 
of the superstructure. Four fireplaces integral with the walls are cast in the same material: 
one in the workroom, one in the space romantically named the hogan, and two in Wright's 
own quarters. This entire composition of masonry, grand in extent, thick in dimension, 
and massive in scale, echoes the rock plateau that is the mesa. Wright noted, "Olgivanna 
said the whole opus looked like something we had not been building but 
excavating."{Wright, Autobiography, 1977, p. 480.} This masonry eruption from the 
desert floor has been shaped to create and become all the refuge spaces of Taliesin West. 
Thus refuge associates with the earth, as it usually does in Wright's work, but more 
strongly here than in any earlier example. This is especially true of the masonry cove off 
the garden room in Wright's own quarters. Withdrawn behind the light of the garden room 
proper, anchored by the enormous breadth of the dark low fireplace whose hearth merges 
with the floor, this is a huddling cave-refuge against the desert's barren expanse. In such 
an interpretation-and such an interpretation is unavoidable-the desert as hazard symbol 
is analogous to and as powerful as the rapids at Fallingwater, intensifying the aesthetic 
value of the refuge. But unlike Falling-water, refuge at Taliesin West is entirely up to the 
architecture; the site has nothing whatever to offer in that category; hence these resolute 
masses which, quite apart from their ability to blend with the geology, are the only 
possible refuges strong enough to count in this refugeless expanse. At three key points the 
rock base enframes the water feature essential to an acceptance of the site. For pools are 
provided at the end of the pergola, at the edge of Wright's "green garden," and-the 
largest and most dramatic-in the prow off the workroom, where it is sensed from the 
dining space as well. 

Above this geological base, which holds the waterpools, is the superstructure, a vast tent of 
redwood and canvas. {In the late 1960s or early 1970s the superstructure was replaced by 
one of glass fiber panels and red-painted steel, apparently for maintenance reasons.} 

Wright had said that he liked "the sense of shelter in the look of the building".{Wright, 
Autobiography, 1977, p. 166}-both the words and the italics are his-and he did, after 
all, design those magnificent sense-of-shelter roofs not only of the Robie house and the 
Wisconsin Taliesin, but also of the later Usonians. Yet in Arizona he could say: "I found 
that the white luminous canvas overhead and canvas flaps used instead of window glass 
afforded such agreeable diffusion of light within, was so enjoyable and sympathetic to the 
desert, that I now felt more than ever oppressed [sic] by the thought of the opaque solid 
overhead of the much too heavy midwestern houses."{Ibid., p. 335.} Where is the 
resolution to this apparent dichotomy? 

In fact one could argue that Wright had been working toward the idea of such a tent above 
a massive earthbound base almost from the beginning. In the verdant sites of the early 
midwestern Prairie houses, the climate had demanded a more or less conventional roof. 
Yet Wright made some modification to the convention, for the roof of the Prairie house, 
with its echoing ceiling underneath, assumed at least something of the character of a tent 
within the verdure around and overhead. The roof sheltered a seemingly continuous band 
of windows; under this was the solid lower stratum of the house, its tie to the earth 
typically emphasized by an advancing wall plane just above grade, forming a weighty, 
anchoring plinth. The fire, associated with the earth, grew out of this grounded base, 
focusing and anchoring the composition at its center. Wright's own favorite work of the 
Prairie School period, the Coonley house, is the epitomizing example. The floating roof 
ceiling, moored by the masonry core and punctuated by bowerlike skylights, carries the 
suggestion of a tent in a grove; it hovers over its earthbound base as an obviously thin 
membrane between architectural space and nature. At the early Taliesin such a tent 
inference became more explicit; Wright referred to that ceiling as "tent-like," and so it 
seems a few years later at Hollyhock. In Arizona, the great rock and concrete base of 
Taliesin West, with its integral fire-holding towers, is associated with the earth even 
more closely than in Wright's previous work; it seems a permutation of the desert floor 
itself. But what to do above? The desert offered no groves around or overhead, as most of 
Wright's previous sites had done; no architectural evocation of them could properly belong 
to this site. And yet, here was the chance to fully realize his tentdream-and this may be 
the key to the appeal Arizona held for Wright-for the climate allowed an actual canvas 
ceiling-roof. 

Thus the geologically associated earth-evoking refuge is overpowered only by the 
redwood beams holding the diaphanous and movable canvas; otherwise all above is sky 
and only sky, filtered only to the extent required for human life. And with the roof 
genuinely of canvas, another supportive characteristic became for the first time fully 
attainable. For if prospect is associated with seeing and therefore with light, then the skylit 
ceilings of the Heurtley, Coonley, and Hollyhock houses, the clerestories of the Freeman 
and Ennis houses, and the luminous panels of Fallingwater, hardly anticipate the 
effulgence of prospect-suggesting light that transpires through the canvas of Taliesin 
West. 

Where does Wright's familiar pattern figure in all of this? There are bits and pieces of 
it-the fireplaces, the high ceilings (if we can call them that), the openings to generous 
contiguous terraces-but so much is missing that trying to find the pattern here is really 
just grasping at straws. At both Ocatillo and Taliesin West, the whole approach is so 
radical that the pattern just doesn't work: how can we talk about heavy overhanging eaves 
with a tent? or broad horizontal expanses of glass when we have movable canvas flaps? 
This absence of the pattern did not mark anything like a permanent shift for Wright; the 
Usonian houses, which began at about the same time as Taliesin West and continued as a 
type for the next fifteen years, exploited the pattern in all its constituent features. Thus its 
absence at Ocatillo and Taliesin West is a particular and not a generalizable matter.  The 
refuges of Taliesin West are embedded in massive rock abstractions of the desert itself; the 
prospects open horizontally between the masonry walls across the barren mesa to the 
mountain ranges, to Sidney Lanier's "vast sweet visage of space," and vertically through 
the redwood and canvas to the filtered qualities of the sky above-an eternal substructure 
plays against the most ephemeral superstructure appropriate to human shelter. Thus the 
drama of Taliesin West: a tension between refuge below and prospect above, each inferred 
through a material as extreme in character as possible. This was a bold realization, 
exquisitely appropriate only to the desert and not used elsewhere: "Our new desert camp 
belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there during creation."{Ibid., p. 
480.} One can argue of Taliesin West whether refuge or prospect is dominant-but unlike 
the original Taliesin, it is an argument. And yet it is an argument that doesn't matter; all 
that is important lies in the fresh and vital tension between two powerful symbols of 
fundamental human appeal. 


8. The Usonians 

From 1936 onward Wright produced a series of houses which for unknown reasons he 
called Usonians.{Wright claimed to have taken the name from the word "Usonia" in 
Samuel Butler's Erewhon, but no one has been able to find the word there.} The Usonian 
house was intended as a revolutionary approach to the ultra-low-cost single-family 
detached dwelling, and its low cost was attempted in part by the conventional means of 
reduction in size. As a consequence, the Usonians typically have small kitchens and often 
very minimal storage; as a group, they are the smallest houses Wright ever did. 

Wright's attack on cost, however, also involved a number of distinctly novel features. The 
first Usonian to be built, and therefore the first to demonstrate these features, was the 
Herbert Jacobs house, built in 1936 in Westmorland, Wisconsin, for $5,500.{The figure 
included the architect's fee of $450. The figure does not represent such a dramatic bargain 
when transferred to 1936 buying power; nevertheless for a custom house it was low at the 
time. Herbert Jacobs wrote a book about this and the second Jacobs house, the "solar 
hemicycle" of 1943-48; see Herbert Jacobs with Katherine Jacobs, Building with Frank 
Lloyd Wright (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1978).} It was built with no basement 
(there is a tiny subterranean room for heating equipment) and hardly any foundations in 
the conventional sense; it was built on a thin concrete pad or slab placed directly on the 
earth.{This is one of the better-known features of the Usonians, but many, e.g., the 
Lewis, Pew, and Affleck houses, do not use it because of site conditions.} Heat was 
delivered to living spaces by water-circulating pipes contained within the slab. This slab 
was inscribed with the modular grid that determined all plan dimensions of the 
superstructure. With this grid as a guide, and working without conventional dimensions, 
the upper walls were erected. Some were of brick, in particular those surrounding the 
kitchen (called by Wright the workspace), those flanking the carport (also so named by 
Wright), and those marking the ends of living and dining spaces. The remaining walls 
were a thin and light prefabricated composite consisting of a double layer of boards with 
insulation between. These were intended to be easy and inexpensive to build, although in 
practice they often were neither. But they saved space: in the Jacobs house they mean an 
additional 40 square feet of usable space as compared with conventional construction, and 
when one is planning on a small scale, this kind of economy counts.{The house area is 
about 1,350 square feet, therefore the saving is on the order of 3 percent, a seemingly 
insignificant figure. But leveraging is at work here. He saving is mostly in the bedroom 
wing, which is about half the house, or ca. 700 square feet. Much of this area however, is 
committed to fixed-size requirements: beds, bathtubs, toilets, and closets, which in turn 
take up, at a rough guess, half of that area. The corridor likewise has a fixed dimension. 
So the gain of 40 square feet is, in the end, apportioned to otherwise uncommitted room 
space, of which it represents upwards of 15 percent, a really sizable gain. Whether it 
offsets the cost of building the extra 40 square feet by conventional methods, however, is 
the crucial issue, to which there is no simple answer.} There was no attic; the ceiling and 
roof were one, as in Wright's work from 1902 onward. But in the Jacobs house, as in most 
subsequent Usonians, the roof was flat. 

For all its technical originality the Jacobs house perpetuates Wright's familiar pattern. On 
the exterior are the deep overhanging roof, the evident and generous central chimney, 
broad horizontal groupings of window bands, and conspicuous terraces; in all these 
respects this structure is the legitimate descendant of the Heurtley house. 

Yet there is a difference, and it is one that will be found in most of the Usonians. For while 
all the typical features are found on the Jacobs exterior, the latter two, the bands of window 
and the terraces, are not visible on approach. From the street one sees an almost entirely 
closed facade. There are reasons for this. Since the Jacobs house has its floor slab and 
therefore its main floor level at grade, privacy for the occupants could not have been 
obtained by the Cheney-Robie approach, which depended on a main floor elevated above 
street level. Nor would the budget allow the stained and leaded glass that contributed to a 
sense of privacy in the Prairie houses. Nor does the Jacobs house have the extensive site of, 
for example, the Coonley house, Taliesin,  or Fallingwater, in which privacy was 
augmented by distance and vegetation. Therefore privacy had to be obtained by some other 
design means, and that was the closing of the street facade. Still, it is fair to note that there 
were instances in Wright's early career in which the lot was small and flat, and the main 
floor was not elevated much above street level, but in which there still was a more open 
relationship to community: the Roberts, Baker, and Gale houses are examples. Neither the 
Jacobs house nor any later Usonian explores this approach. The consequence, whether 
intended or not, is a loss of communality; the sense of rejection that the house conveys is 
almost palpable. Yet paradoxically this sense of rejection is coupled with a mysterious 
magnetism, due, I suspect, to the considerable drama, and therefore power, of the 
refuge-signaling characteristics: Appleton's "alcoves, recesses, heavy overhanging 
eaves," perhaps even the narrow band of window that invites us to peek over at the same 
time it prevents us from doing so. 

If the Jacobs house were to follow the familiar Wrightian pattern in all other respects, it 
would have us reach the interior by means of a long and circuitous path. The actual entry 
is not quite that, but given the site limitations and the budget, it is as close a simulation as 
can be had. One walks under the very low carport roof, then along the brick flank of the 
carport toward a blank brick wall; then a 90-degree right turn between two brick jambs, 
still under that very low roof. One then walks forward perhaps three feet between the brick 
walls, now on both flanks, at which point the front door is reached. Within is a narrow 
entry corridor about ten feet in length. And then the space opens out and away as view is 
released diagonally to the left through a great sweep of floor-to-ceiling glass in the 
distance, while immediately on the left is the fireplace. One always expects this sequence 
in a house by Wright-and yet, even expecting it, it always surprises and delights. 

And so here again we are brought back to the pattern. The fire is in the heart of the 
building and at the internal edge of the space it serves. The living space has a relatively 
high ceiling which is the underside of the higher roof. There are interior views to 
contiguous spaces. Glass and glazed doors are located on walls distant from the fire. A 
generous elevated terrace lies beyond (though it is "elevated" in this case only by grading 
the site to lower the level of the garden). Two characteristics of the pattern are missing, 
however: the ceiling is not lowered over the fireplace, nor over the glazed exterior wall 
opposite. It seems a reasonable guess that their absence was a result of the impact of the 
budget on the roof structure; many later Usonians with more elastic budgets would repeat 
the familiar lowered conditions. 

Like the Usonians that followed it, the Jacobs house has a considerable length of corridor. 
Like the entry it is narrow; it is also low. The walls, textured in natural wood, press in on 
either side; the ceiling presses down overhead. The compression engendered is a powerful 
device for intensifying the sense of release on arrival at the spaces the corridor serves. 
These spaces, then, are found on arrival to have generous floor-to-ceiling french doors 
opening to the vista of terrace and garden, and, in the case of the living space, there is a 
higher ceiling as well. Thus the tight closure of refuge in the entry and corridor 
complements the openness of the prospect conditions in the major rooms. This familiar 
principle with Wright is here employed in exaggerated form and at diminutive scale, and 
is especially effective for just this reason. One of the great successes of this house, as of all 
the later Usonians, is that it provides this intensification of spatial contrast within what is 
really a very small building. 

The rooms themselves also contain interior refuge conditions. In the living space this is, of 
course, the area around the fire, although it shares with the Robie house the problem of 
having circulation to either side. But Wright has also provided the L-shaped brick nook 
at the end of the room opposite the fire, which creates a secondary zone of refuge. In the 
bedrooms, the beds are all pocketed within a U-shaped configuration of solid wall. 

Interior prospect is provided by opening living and dining space, kitchen, entry, and 
bedroom corridor to each other, the openings always articulated by wall returns and 
built-in furnishings. It bears noting that these interior prospect conditions are invariably 
given complexity through diagonality. In no instance is any interior prospect condition 
related to anything else in an axial way-always the view opens across a diagonal. This 
diagonality is emphasized as well by the twists of the corridor. Even more important is the 
displacement of the dining space so that it opens from a corner, not a side, of the living 
space; it does a kind of double side-step to become an extension of diagonal rather than 
rectilinear spatial boundaries. {On this point see also the extended discussion by H. Allen 
Brooks, "Wright and the Destruction of the Box," Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians 38:1 (March 1979), pp. 7-14, reprinted in Brooks, Writings on Wright 
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). Brooks notes an early instance of this condition at 
the Charles S. Ross house, Delavan Lake, Wisconsin, of 1902. After a long hiatus the 
condition reappears as a very common feature of the Usonians.} 

The spaces of the Jacobs house are articulated by a means latent in Wright's previous 
work, which hereafter appears more explicitly. This means is the use of a wall plane, very 
much like a stage flat, projecting into the space to mark a spatial distinction; we have 
already seen something closely analogous to it in the pylons of Taliesin West of the year 
following the Jacobs house. Such projecting planes are used at the Jacobs house to define 
the nook at the end of the living space; the table indicated there, though not a wall, also 
plays a similar role. A similar projection separates the dining room from the living space. 
These walls suggest another feature described by Appleton, the coulisse.  The coulisse . . . 
in its original usage denotes the side-pieces of scenery used on the stage. They serve a 
dual function in the stagecraft of the theatre. In the first place they can help to create an 
impression of three-dimensional space . . . they not only look nearer than objects in the 
distance, they are nearer, and they can therefore be used to accentuate the impression of 
perspective created by scenery on the backcloth. 

The coulisse, however, has another function; . . . by projecting on to the stage it extends 
the area of concealment provided by wings into the scene of the action and, because the 
actors can normally pass either in front or behind, it suggests more than one place where 
escape from view is possible. The use of more than one coulisse accentuates even further 
the idea of refuge.{Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley, 
1975), p. 105.} 

Thus the coulisse, explicitly deployed for the first time in Wright's work in the Jacobs 
house, contributes both to an intensification of perspective and to the signaling of 
subordinate internal refuge conditions.  Subsequent Usonians usually regarded as typical 
examples are, chronologically: the Stanley Rosenbaum house of 1939, in Florence, 
Alabama; the Bernard Schwartz house of 1939, in Two Rivers, Wisconsin; the Alma 
Goetsch and Katherine Winckler house of 1939, in Okemos, Michigan; the Lloyd Lewis 
house of 1940, in Libertyville, Illinois; the Clarence Pew house of 1940, in Madison, 
Wisconsin; and the Gregor Affleck house of 1941, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As a 
group, these houses are more nearly alike in size, configuration, and general appearance 
than the Prairie houses of 1902-1910 or the California houses of the 1920s. 

Of this group, the Rosenbaum house is most similar to the Jacobs house, of which it is a 
refinement. The exterior is longer and seems lower, since the high central volume of the 
living room is well back from the street facade. The lower roof over the study, makes 
possible a handsome reiteration of the horizontals, and brings the eye nearer the plane of 
the earth. The resultant proportions are especially satisfying; no street facade since the 
Robie house has had such a wonderful sweep of line. On the interior, the central clerestory 
allows greater spatial contrast, since both the book-lined wall toward the street and the 
glazed wall of french doors to the garden are under lowered ceilings. Otherwise the spatial 
and formal characteristics of the Jacobs house are generally repeated. 

The Schwartz house is an extended version of a project for Life magazine, "A House for a 
Family of $5,000-6,000 Income" (Sept. 26, 1938).{The scheme for Life included a wood 
wall flanking the carport, prolonging the long axis of the house, and a swimming pool off 
the living room. Both were omitted from the Schwartz house, while the kitchen was 
enlarged, and the balcony, with its stepped edge, was introduced to overlook the living 
room. Otherwise the two schemes are virtually identical.} Part of the scheme is of two 
stories; therefore the portion of the house nearest the street does not have the dramatic 
horizontality of the Rosenbaum house. One enters this house at the right rear edge of the 
carport, and since this is the two-story part of the house, the entry path is under a very 
low ceiling which is the floor of the bedrooms and balcony above. 

Forward of this lies a spatial composition which is in some ways unique. The major space 
is noted not as the expected "living room" but as "recreation room." Wright in the 
mid-1930s had a fondness for renaming things; "workspace" for "kitchen" is one 
instance, and at the same time he was beginning to call the study a "sanctum." Renaming 
is a means for conceptual liberation, of course, and it probably served something of this 
purpose for Wright. In the case of the Schwartz "recreation room," however, the term was 
not a generic one; Wright's other and later houses continued to have "living rooms." The 
renaming in this case may have hinged on a different issue, for the space is in some key 
ways unlike Wright's typical living rooms. It is open to terraces on both of its long walls, 
for example, and both walls have glazed french doors. This is not entirely unprecedented 
in Wright's living rooms-that of the Francis Little house of 1913 is surely the 
best-known previous instance, and the condition occurs in the Storer house of 1923 in 
Los Angeles, and in a second house of 1927 for Darwin D. Martin at Derby, New York, 
whose plan configuration is roughly similar to the Schwartz house. But the condition is 
unusual in Wright's work. Furthermore the Schwartz recreation room fireplace occurs 
under a very high ceiling indeed, and seems more monumental than cozy. The 
consequence of these characteristics is that there is in this space no refuge condition. 
Would Wright have found the term "living room" impossible for just that reason? In any 
event the more usual Wrightian refuge conditions are found in a subspace, the "lounge," 
set off by the coulisse of the fireplace masonry. In this lounge are a second fireplace, with a 
low ceiling above, a higher ceiling beyond, and glass opposite leading to a terrace-in 
short, the conditions of the pattern. Why, then, not call this the living room? Because it 
was a subspace? Dining is provided by the side-stepped space off the recreation room, 
demarked by a brick coulisse.  The Jacobs, Rosenbaum, and Schwartz houses also illustrate 
the conditions of complexity and order. Order is established in an obvious way by the 
modular grid easily discerned on all plans. Such a grid was no new thing to Wright, of 
course; it goes back at least to the Coonley house. In these Usonians, as at Coonley, the 
grid is evident in the actual experience of movement through the house, in the rhythms of 
wall locations, window and door mullions, and often in decorative details. And like 
Coonley, the Usonians are designed to a vertical module as well, the dimension of the 
horizontal board-and-batten unit used for all wood walls. This module determines all 
eave, ceiling, and sill heights, and all shelving. The complexity of the plan configurations, 
extraordinary for such small houses, teases this order. Special enrichment is provided by 
the pervasive diagonality of interior prospect which, as in its origins at the Ennis house, 
adds yet another layer of complexity, demanding from the occupant continual exploration 
and discovery. It also contributes to the illusion that these houses are larger than they 
really are, since the space in its permutations and extensions can never be wholly 
apprehended from any one point; movement is necessary to discovery and clarification. 
One owner has said that the Usonian house offers "a continuing succession of mysteries 
leading you on beyond what your eyes could see. The house gives you a sense of 
protection, but never of being closed in."{Loren Pope, quoted in Robert Twombly, Frank 
Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (New York: Wiley, 1979), p. 256.} 

The Usonians have Wright's usual coy and understated entries; in the three so far 
discussed, the front door is tucked away in an unassuming corner of the carport. At the 
Goetsch-Winckler house one walks under the incredible length of the low cantilevered 
carport roof, then along at least half of the long facade toward the brick coulisse ahead, to 
enter through a random choice of one of the eight french doors. This house is about the 
same size as the Jacobs house, and Wright has again condensed all his spatial and formal 
devices. A low roof, an extension of that of the carport, glides over the gallery, workspace, 
bedrooms, and alcove; the higher roof occurs over the living room-studio. The alcove 
here becomes the refuge, with low ceiling and fire, and with book shelves on the 
remaining two walls. The living room-studio's glazed walls are opposite, with french 
doors leading to the grass lanai, a surrogate for the terrace. Beyond this lanai, and beyond 
the glazing of the living space, the site falls away rather steeply to a wooded glade, so that, 
as usual, the living spaces lie well above the landscape they overlook. 

The Lloyd Lewis house is again a two-story scheme, but one which, unlike the Schwartz 
house, elevates the main floor; "I knew it was so damp and hot out there on the prairie by 
the Des Plaines River where he wanted to build that I set Lloyd well up off the ground to 
keep him high and dry in Spring, Fall and Summer."{Frank Lloyd Wright, An 
Autobiography (New York: Horizon, 1977), p. 522.} So again, the approach facade is tall. 
And the circuitous entrance has returned with a vengeance: one has to move through the 
full depth of the carport, then traverse the length of a dark and rather dank loggia to enter 
the low and dark vestibule whose flanking stair, like that of the Ennis house, leads we 
know not where. The Lewis entry, like the Ennis one, recalls those primordial cave entries 
of dark, lengthy corridors meandering through their mystical courses to the special place.  
Yet once beyond the entry, circulation through the Lewis house evokes another and quite 
different image. The paths through the Coonley house were earlier considered as 
analogous to forest paths leading from glade to glade, the effect reinforced by the dappled 
light of the skylights. Such an effect was also latent in the Usonians from the beginning, in 
the usual long, low, and narrow corridors. At the Lewis house, this effect has been realized 
and emphasized by opening the upper parts of corridor and entry walls to a similar 
phenomenon of dappled light, filtered through a fretwork pattern. {This is also a feature of 
the Rosenbaum and Schwartz houses and a number of others not discussed here, as, for 
example, the Loren Pope (Pope-Leighey) house of 1939 at Falls Church (now at Mt. 
Vernon), Virginia, or that for Melvyn Maxwell Smith of 1949, in Bloomfield Hills, 
Michigan.} Thus, as at the Coonley house, one ascends from darkness to light, from 
closure to expanse; and as at Coonley, one arrives at the broad masonry fireplace contained 
within its pocket of sanctum wall and seating peninsula. Forward of the fireplace the 
ceiling ascends-or seems to: in fact the impression of a hipped Coonley-like ceiling is 
an illusion, although a powerful one, created by the lapped boards of which the Lewis 
ceiling is made. Opposite the fireplace, at the seemingly lower distant ceiling edge, are the 
glazed walls and terrace of the elevated pavilion, within the forest by the riverside.  In 
another respect, too, the Lewis house is a descendant of the Coonley house. One exits the 
living room to go to the bedroom wing by moving to the right of the fireplace, then down 
that long, low, light-dappled forest path to reach, finally, the glade, a master bedroom, 
that is an elegant microcosm of the pattern. For here is the fireplace refuge yet again, 
pocketed by a brick wall of four enclosing planes, one side of which contains the familiar 
half-inglenook seat. Opposite are the french doors opening to the balcony, and the 
prospect of the river beyond. 

Wright seems to have been especially fond of both the Coonley and the Lewis houses.{His 
comments on the Coonley house have been noted in Chap. 3; in Autobiography, 1977, pp. 
522-24, he devotes several pages to the Lewis house, pages which include a rare apology 
for shortcomings, especially with regard to the fireplace, which did not draw.} Both 
presented him with congenial client relationships. The Coonleys were open and uncritical 
admirers with a lot of money; Lewis was a long-standing personal friend; and perhaps 
this congeniality brought out the best in Wright, or at the least supplied the best memories. 
He created for them two of his best houses, the one a later and far more economical 
version of the other, and each within its type and time especially rich in its evocation of 
prospect and refuge. 

The Lewis house uniquely among the Usonians makes a tentative gesture toward opening 
up the approach facade by facing the sanctum and its balcony in that direction. In this 
instance Wright deployed his old parapets-and-sight-lines devices: there is on record 
correspondence between Wright and Lewis in which, Lewis having complained about high 
balcony parapets, Wright responded "I lifted the parapets to give you privacy from the 
road." But Wright's justification applies only to the sanctum. The other spaces open only to 
the opposite side, away from road and entry; and, oddly, these spaces also have the same 
high parapets as the sanctum though the justification no longer applies; in fact as Lewis 
forcefully pointed out they deny the occupant a view of the river. (Wright offered to Lewis 
the additional argument that it was all a matter of proportion, and this seems to have 
carried the day, though in looking at the house in actuality the justification is 
unconvincing).{For correspondence on this point from both parties see Brendan Gill, 
Many Masks (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987), pp. 408-409. Edgar Tafel, 
Apprentice to Genius (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 190, says that Wright finally 
acquiesced to Lewis's wishes. But if so, that acquiescence somehow came to nothing. The 
parapets exist at the 3-foot height shown on working drawings (a more usual figure 
would be 2 feet 6 inches, roughly table-top height), and this cannot be a revision, as a 
higher location would have created an impossible juncture with the body of the house at 
either end. With Lloyd Lewis as with Edgar Kaufmann, Wright seems to have found his 
match for bons mots. The correspondence in each case is fascinating not only for its 
mutual feistiness but also for its mutually transparent affection, which says something 
about both clients, and something about Wright as well.} 

If the Lewis house is a descendant of Coonley, the Clarence Pew house of 1940, in 
Madison, has a different ancestry. To enter the Pew house, one has to wander to the far 
side of the carport, then around the corner and under the deep roof overhang, to find the 
doorway to the stone-flagged hall. The sequence suggests a mirror-image of the entry to 
Fallingwater. 

Nor is this the only parallel, for the roofs and terraces of the Pew house cantilever over the 
hillside in a similar fashion and even manage to suggest through their height a modest 
sense of hazard. There is also a genuine second floor which, like that of Fallingwater, is 
perched over the uphill portion of the house, and opens to a grand terrace which is, again, 
the living room roof. But this is as far as the analogy can be stretched; beyond this, the 
Pew house is a Usonian, and the smallest of those discussed here.{At 1,200 square feet. 
The smallest of them all, according to Sergeant's figures, is the atypical George Sturgis 
house of 1939 in Brentwood Heights near Los Angeles, at a mere 850 square feet. Sergeant 
suggests a parallel between Fallingwater and the Sturgis house but there are more 
analogies to the Pew house.} Perhaps because of its small size its allegiance to a module, 
both horizontal and vertical, is even more evident than in other Usonians. Its dining space 
not only side-steps but does so twice; and the preoccupation with diagonality extends 
even to locating the fireplace off the axis of the living room, whose grand ceiling coffer 
emphasizes the eccentricity. 

The Gregor Affleck house of 1941 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is another example of a 
house built with a congenial client relationship. Affleck had also spent his boyhood in 
Spring Green, Wisconsin, and although this was just after Wright's departure for Chicago, 
Affleck seems to have held Wright as a hero-figure from those early days. On the face of 
it, the Affleck house is a two-story scheme, but the lower level in fact has little to do with 
family living spaces; under the guise of utilities and servant accommodation, it really is a 
pylon to perch the house over the steep wooded hillside site. The organization of exterior 
and interior conforms to Wright's pattern in all respects except that the fireplace is within 
the zone of the high ceiling. The Affleck house shares with the Lewis house an in-line 
arrangement of living and dining spaces rather than the usual Usonian 
double-side-stepped relationship. 

In the Affleck house, however, prospect and refuge are augmented by a number of highly 
effective means. The range of french doors to east and south turns the corner more 
emphatically than in other Usonians, opening to a terrace which, like that of the Pew 
house, also turns the corner; both door and terrace configurations thereby enlarge the 
sweep of prospect. At the opposite end of the space, Wright's old habit of built-in seating 
is used to create a giant inglenook opposite the fire. This seating, which also serves dining, 
turns the corner as do the french doors opposite, but since the walls are solid the effect 
here is to create the embracing enclosure of refuge. This emphasis on corners reinforces 
the sense of diagonal orientation common to the Usonians, although that characteristic is 
less evident in the Affleck house than in other examples. A vertical diagonality is also 
introduced by the various floor levels, to which is added the enrichment of a more 
dramatic vertical dimension: at the center of the house the living room, entry, and guest 
room merge into a higher atriumlike  space opening to the sky above, and to a sunken 
garden with pool below.  Here perhaps a word or two should be said about dining spaces. 
In the Usonians, they are never an afterthought. In all the examples so far discussed, and 
in all other Usonians as well, dining has been given a space architecturally articulated and 
dedicated specifically to this function. The furniture appropriate to it was indicated by 
Wright on the plan and is closely integrated with the architectural provision. With the 
exception only of the Goetsch-Winckler house, an elegant outlook has also been 
developed for dining that is at least equal to that of any other space in the house: in the 
Lewis house, for example, the dining space is the only one from which the river can be 
seen while one is seated. This ceremonial treatment of the dining space, of course, is a 
very old habit with Wright; in his entire career, there is hardly a house in which it is not 
treated in a similarly considered way (with two surprising exceptions, Taliesin and 
Fallingwater). The Usonians raise the point in a special way, however. While Wright's 
houses before 1935 emphasized dining, so did most houses of the time and of comparable 
cost. But the Usonians were small, inexpensive houses, and by their time, that is the mid to 
late 1930s, small low-budget houses typically either offered no separate dining space, or 
provided it through an undistinguished extrusion of the living room. By comparison the 
dining space in the Usonians is always a clearly defined space handled with emphasis, and 
even ceremony. 

Like prospect and refuge, complexity and order, the significance of this emphasis on 
dining as ritual goes back very far. Clearly there is strong precedent in the western 
world-not only architectural precedent in such spaces as the British great hall, but 
precedent in the practices of human life. Even today, almost all social interaction includes 
the sharing of food and drink, and this was true even at the threshold of western 
consciousness; every important social encounter in Homer, for example, is accompanied by 
feasting. Nor is this only a western issue: in Japan, whose image certainly loomed large 
with Wright, even the most casual encounter is accompanied by tea, at least, without fail. 

These customs, too, may have a biological basis. Chromosomally we are differentiated 
from the great apes most significantly by our protracted adolescence; we take a long time, 
in terms of the animal world, to mature. During this protracted adolescence, the crucial 
thing is that we be fed not by our own efforts but by the efforts of our parents; we are the 
only species in which the parents feed the offspring for ten to twenty years. This, of course, 
is what has allowed us to develop tools, language, and all that follows therefrom. And this 
activity, this sharing of food, like prospect and refuge, complexity and order, cannot 
logically have been a behavior chosen out of conscious recognition of its species value. 
Like those other characteristics, it must have been something in which we found 
enjoyment from the beginning. Wright's emphasis on the specialness of dining, then, 
represents another instance of his intuitive sensitivity to a fundamentally human 
predilection, and one of such pervasive importance to him that he would not relinquish it 
even in these small houses where space was at a premium.  The Usonians command 
attention. This is their joy, and sometimes their problem. For buildings of such small size, 
Wright has provided an extraordinary complexity, which is relentlessly enriching, 
relentlessly tantalizing. It in turn requires an extraordinary order, which Wright has also 
provided, and which is relentlessly cohering, relentlessly controlling. It is exhilarating to 
contemplate the relationship between such a forceful order and such a rich complexity, but 
often there is little opportunity for the occupant's intervention. And yet the experience is 
magnetic and mesmerizing: there is always the sense of being in a building which is, in 
the end, quite small but quite irresistible in both the good and bad senses of the term, 
charged with vigor, presence, warmth, and above all an absolutely indomitable will. 

Questions of craftsmanship, maintenance, and durability, often issues in Wright's work, 
also loom large in the case of the Usonians. They attempted a lot for a little. There are 
those who would defend them as finely constructed buildings, and in some cases this may 
well be true. But tight budgets and tricky site conditions, in conjunction with the novel 
features of innovative and lightweight construction, nonvertical walls, extravagant 
cantilevers, and radiant heat-all described to the builder through meagre and 
undimensioned working drawings, with inexperienced apprentices supervising-these are 
formidable challenges to craftsmanship. Most of the Usonians bear at least some witness to 
the effects of these challenges.{See chap. 6, n. 13, which lists such problems for the 
Schwartz, Rosenbaum, Goetsch-Winckler, Lewis, and Sondern houses; one could easily 
add to the list.}  The rectilinear plan configurations represented in these examples were 
not the only configurations explored by Wright within the Usonian type. In 1936, the year 
of the Jacobs house, Wright also did a house for Paul R. and Jean S. Hanna, to be built in 
Palo Alto, California, the plan for which is generated by a hexagonal module.{Other 
houses using Usonian features with a hexagonal plan grid include those for Leigh Stevens 
in Yamasee, South Carolina, and Sidney Bazett in Hillsborough, California, both of 1940, 
and the Carl Wall house of 1941 in Plymouth, Michigan. All are far smaller than the 
Hanna house . The Bazett house approaches, though it does not nearly equal, the spatial 
richness of the Hanna house. The Wall house, which Wright named "Snowflake," has an 
exquisite plan seen as pattern in two dimensions, and photographs beautifully from a 
distance, but the need for more spaciousness is felt in the interior.} The Hanna house is 
usually considered a Usonian, as it utilizes the heated slab on grade, the absolutely 
modular plan and elevation, and prefabricated sandwich walls. Its ambiance, however, is 
quite different. Though originally intended to have been built on a budget of $15,000, it 
cost in the end well over twice that, and thus, although contemporary with the Jacobs 
house, was seven times more costly.{Wright seems to have taken the Jacobses' pleas for 
economy seriously, but not those of the Hannas. Yet the Hannas were equally eloquent 
about their monetary constraints, as is painfully documented in Paul R. and Jean S. Hanna, 
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1982). The only conclusion I 
can draw is that with the Jacobs house Wright wanted to see what he could do with 
$5,500; with the Hanna house he wanted to see what he could do with a hexagonal 
module.} The expense is evident in the far greater size of the Hanna house,{About 3,000 
square feet originally in the house proper, as compared to 1,350 for Jacobs and 
Goetsch-Winckler and a mere 1,200 for the Pew house.} its pitched roof and the resultant 
more complex ceiling planes underneath, the extensive brick-parapeted terraces, and 
above all the hexagonal module, for the Hanna house is the first, although by no means the 
last, of Wright's houses to use such a module to generate the entire plan configuration in 
all its details.  Nevertheless the pattern remains. On the exterior are the familiar features: 
the deep overhanging eaves, alcoves, recesses, broad expanses of glass, and large 
conspicuous terraces. Inside is the central fire-place at the inner edge of the living room, 
under a low ceiling (although a token one) and flanked by a seating promontory; beyond 
this the ceiling rises, echoing the roof's form, then returns to a low outer edge. Interior 
vistas open in profusion. At the low outer edge of the ceiling are extensive glass and 
glazed french doors opening to the broad terraces and to landscape prospect beyond. 
Exactly similar conditions are found in the sanctum. This is the classic Wright pattern in 
its entirety, the repetitive configuration that allies this house with the Heurtley, Cheney, 
and Coonley houses, Taliesin, and Fallingwater. 

The interior, like those of the other Usonians, is impossible to apprehend in its entirety 
from any single viewpoint; one must experience it through motion, each change of 
viewpoint yielding different spatial understandings. The greater size of the Hanna house, 
however, and especially its hexagonal grid, offer a special enrichment to this phenomenon, 
in making the interior prospect conditions extraordinarily fluid. One is continually led on 
to further exploration of more distant spaces through the promise of additional 
experiences, the promise that Stephen Kaplan has called mystery, and which Wright had 
previously deployed with unprecedented richness in the Ennis house.{"Aesthetics, Affect, 
and Cognition: Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary Perspective," 
Environment and Behavior 19:1 (Jan. 1987), p. 8. See also Roger S. Ulrich, "Aesthetic and 
Affective Response to Natural Environment," in I. Altman and J. F. Wohlwill, Behavior 
and the Natural Environment (New York: Plenum, 1983), pp. 103-104, in which he 
maintains that the appeal of a deflected vista or "mystery condition" governs only when 
there is understood to be a high probability of delight rather than danger. The caveat is 
unimportant to the case of the Hanna house because there is obviously a very high 
probability that the space to which the vista leads is danger-free; but as a larger design 
consideration the point needs to be kept in mind.} At the Hanna house, this promise is 
even more richly suggested, and yet more gently too. For following the obtuse angle of the 
module, the vistas of the Hanna house are comprised of grand but gentle sweeps of 
bending space sometimes leading to light, sometimes to darkness, always accompanied on 
the flank by the dappled light from the glazed walls. Because of the diagonal component of 
the module, these glazed walls, and the solid surfaces too, for that matter, have the 
magical characteristic of deflecting these grand sweeps of space without terminating them. 
This is the particular quality which accounts for the special appeal of the Hanna house, 
surely one of Wright's loveliest and most intriguing creations. The diagonal vistas of the 
Ennis house have here become the entire spatial concept. 

The plan has been bent to follow roughly the contour of the hill. In this feature, the plan is 
analogous to that of Taliesin. In each case, the fireplace is located at what one might call 
the hinge of the bend. Within the Hanna house configuration, this has a not entirely 
fortunate consequence. It means that the fireplace occupies the external corner of its 
chimney mass and forms the hinge between the two wings of the main space, each of 
which seems to retreat from it. Therefore the fireplace focuses on neither. Consequently, 
furniture groupings around it also seem to be in neither wing, while at the same time, the 
fireplace seems to turn its back on the seating promontory that flanks it. 

The siting condition of the Hanna house, and Wright's management of it, are unusual in 
his late career. The land slopes toward the street rather than away from it. It is also a site 
that was not chosen by Wright. He has opened the main spaces toward the fall of land, as 
he had to do if they were to overlook falling terrain. But this also means that they open 
toward the street; he has therefore buffered the street exposure by masonry terraces that 
recall such early examples as the Cheney house. They are much shallower front to back, 
and so do not generate the privacy that was ensured by the Cheney configuration-but then 
they do not need to, for this idyllic extensive site in hilly Palo Alto is in no way like the 
communal coziness of Oak Park, and privacy is easily provided by distance and vegetation. 

In 1943 Wright began the design of a second house (the third, actually, a second scheme 
having gone unbuilt) for the clients of the first Usonian, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Jacobs; this 
was built, after nearly four years' delay, at a site in rural Wisconsin near Madison. This 
house is hardly a Usonian by any stretch of the term. Its plan is a hemicycle, the outer arc 
of which is of stonework buried to half its height in a berm of earth. This masonry arc 
contains utilities and, of course, a sizeable fireplace, and embraces two stories of 
space-living-dining-workspace below, bedrooms above. But Wright did not relinquish 
the idea of the major spaces lying right under the roof, because the suspended bedroom 
floor is in fact a balcony whose edge is an arc concentric with the masonry hemicycle. 
Forward of this is a two-story portion, the edge of the major ground-floor spaces whose 
ceiling in that zone is, of course, the underside of the roof. The exterior wall of glass, two 
stories high, is also an arc; beyond it lies a narrow concentric stone terrace, then a sharp 
slope downward to a lower circular garden. In short, all the familiar features are here, too, 
in a house that seems radically different from anything Wright had done before. The 
almost unrelieved stone wall, the fire burning deep within it below the grade of the earth 
berm outside, and the ceiling under the second floor area, low even for Wright, give the 
second Jacobs house a mood more palpably cavelike than any other of his work. And yet, 
as always, opposite is the grand elevated prospect of the expansive meadow, seen through 
the unusually high and continuous sweep of glass that complements the otherwise 
claustrophobic refuge by the fire. 

The pattern continued to inform the work of Wright's late years. A particularly elegant 
example of those years is the William and Mary Palmer house of 1950-51, in Ann Arbor, 
Michigan, in which Wright's personal involvement is known to have been central and 
extensive. This is sometimes considered to be a Usonian,{John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Usonian Houses (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1984), pp. 86-87, 
includes the Palmer house among the Usonians but is not explicit about categorizing it as 
one.} and it does have the slab-on-grade feature, although in other respects it is quite 
different. Most of the exterior walls are of a particularly beautiful soft tan brickwork; 
inter-spersed are strata of specially cast ceramic elements of identical coloration, which 
have glazed openings to admit light to the kitchen and the bedroom corridor. The exterior 
is marked by deeply overhanging eaves, an evident central chimney, broad horizontal 
groupings of window bands, and conspicuous terrace-like projections. The roof is hipped. 
The plan derives from a module of equilateral triangles.  Entry to the Palmer house is by 
way of a flight of steps along the flank of one of the brick and pierced ceramic walls; 
ascending these steps, with the earth of the hill-mound on the right, one is brought ever 
closer to the low eave overhead. Moving fully under it for a distance of perhaps fifteen 
feet, and ascending another short flight of steps that tuck one firmly and tightly under that 
eave, there is a turn through a slight angle, and then one enters the body of the house. To 
the right lies the corridor to the bedrooms: ascending a few steps past a coulisse, one 
encounters a complex dogleg jog to the right, then moves along the corridor, the forest 
path, with dappled light entering through the pierced ceramic units. After a while this path 
widens, then, finally, opens to the glades that are the bedrooms, whose glazing in turn 
reveals and frames the prospect of the falling landscape beyond. 

Retracing one's steps back toward the major spaces, one finds, at the end of the corridor 
sequence, a vista toward the terrace. Turning 120 degrees back to the right, around the 
coulisse of the seating promontory, one finally faces the fireplace; the heart of the secret 
and special place has been reached. The fireplace is pocketed in the contained and 
withdrawn far corner of the living room, at the distant low edge of the ceiling. The living 
room opens to contiguous spaces set off by articulating architectural features: the dining 
table, the old familiar seating promontory, and the half-hexagonal coulisses of the hall 
and kitchen end walls. By these means, and within a quite small house, extraordinarily 
complex vistas of interior prospect are made available; bending as they do at the Hanna 
house, they hold the mystery of distant spaces suggested but not revealed without 
exploration. Forward of the fireplace, toward the center of the living room, the ceiling 
rises following the planes of the roof above, then descends, at its edges, to the 
above-fireplace height. The low circumferential ceiling edge occurs at exactly the height 
of the exterior eave and is detailed similarly. At this edge are the windows and french 
doors which open to the terrace, elevated above and surveying the rolling landscape 
beyond, commanding its prospect from a strategically advantageous height. 

The spatial description could be that of the Heurtley or the Cheney house. The Palmer 
house is a beautifully crafted encapsulation of a half-century of Wright's pattern; it brings 
us full circle. 


9. Some Conclusions 

Wright's houses hypnotize. Though beset with problems, irritations, willfulnesses, and 
eccentricities, whether pristine or shabby, and whether we wish it or not, they bring us 
under their spell. I have suggested that their effect is more than an esoteric phenomenon, 
that it has to do with some fundamental human attractions to characteristics of prospect 
and refuge, complexity and order. Wright had an intuitive but uniquely firm grasp of the 
shaping of habitation as an interweaving of these characteristics. From 1902 onward this 
was embodied in his particular and repetitive way of configuring space that I have called 
his pattern. Taliesin West and its precursor, the Ocatillo camp, are exceptions, although by 
other more radical and specialized means they, too, achieve similar purposes. But among 
major houses by Wright's hand from 1902 through the early 1950s, they are the only 
exceptions; otherwise his work pervasively shows the familiar pattern, which in turn yields 
its repetitive characteristics. 

In the last years of Wright's life, from the early 1950s to his death in 1959, the pattern is 
much less consistently found, and this is also the period in which increasing numbers of 
the houses are designs of exotic and even bizarre fantasy. There are at least two possible 
reasons for this, and they are not mutually exclusive; indeed they may be closely 
intertwined. The first, of course, has to do with Wright's extreme age. In 1950 he was 
eighty-three; he must have known that he had little time left to him. It should not be 
surprising that he felt driven to attempt grand last gestures. And it may also be realistic to 
suggest that there was a diminution in his control of these late gestures. It is also likely, 
however, that the energy he could contribute in these last years was also sharply 
diminished-how could it be otherwise? Thus, increasingly, the work must have fallen to 
what one client has called "the busy pencils of Taliesin,"{The phrase is quoted in John 
Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian  Houses (New York: Watson-Guptill 
Publications, 1984), p. 86, from a client's comment in the New York Times of Feb. 6, 
1972. Wright was by this time a walking illustration of Proust's observation: ". . . that is 
the age at which a great artist prefers to the company of original minds that of pupils who 
have nothing in common with him save the letter of his doctrine, who listen to him and 
offer incense"-but that had been the case for at least twenty years, and there is no 
indication that of itself it caused any waning of Wright's abilities.} with a consequent 
distancing of each design from Wright's own involvement. I have already noted, and will 
note again later in this chapter, that there is no evidence that Wright ever brought his 
deployment of the pattern to a conscious level. Therefore he can hardly have explained it 
to those "busy pencils" to whom the work increasingly fell. Lacking Wright's intuitive 
grasp of the power of this configuration, they carried on the work as best they could in the 
late 1950s by emulating other of his characteristic devices-but they could neither perceive 
nor reinvent the configuration that was the real key to his architectural power. Thus, the 
pattern seems to hold in Wright's houses with some consistency until the very early 1950s, 
but much less so thereafter. 

The Palmer house serves as an appropriate concluding example of Wright's pattern and of 
the characteristics of psychobiological appeal that pattern provides. At this point it might 
be useful to attempt to clarify and perhaps even to quantify some general aspects of those 
characteristics.  Some terms used to describe architectural form and space, such as low and 
tall, or closed and open, represent mutually exclusive conditions. But the terms that have 
dominated this discussion of Wright's houses are not of that sort. An increase in 
complexity need not mean a decrease in order, nor does an increase in prospect have to be 
accompanied by a decrease in refuge. As we have seen, those houses possess a great deal of 
both complexity and order, and numerous and rich reduplications of both prospect and 
refuge. If one is to compare Wright's houses with other domestic architectures, or to evolve 
a general view toward the inclusion of these characteristics in design, it is good to keep in 
mind that there are considerations of degree but not of trade-off. Thus, degree is a key 
issue. It is evident, and has been pointed out, that the familiar characteristics of prospect  
and refuge, complexity and order, can be found in quite elemental domestic architectures, 
and certainly to some greater degree in all sophisticated ones. But the thesis here is that 
the degree to which they are present in Wright's work appears to be unique. If Wright has 
a claim, and there is wide agreement that he does, to a quite extraordinary significance in 
architectural history and especially that of the dwelling, this seems to me to be an essential 
part of its foundation. 

But here we open important questions which lead to further useful observations. For given 
the above paragraph, it is fair to ask: how much of each condition is enough-and how 
much is too little, and how much is too much? The answers to such questions will vary 
depending on the predilections of the person making the judgment. For in spite of what 
seems to me to be the fact that these conditions are present in Wright's houses to a unique 
degree, not all will agree that his houses represent an ideal of the dwelling. A little more 
discussion of this issue may prove rewarding. 

In the introduction I spoke of the "sheer power" of some of Wright's spaces, that can 
"intimidate the more varied and spontaneous acts of ordinary daily life." Vincent Scully 
once made a similar point with regard to the Coonley house: "It was a kind of freedom and 
there being, as it were, no end to it, it was also a kind of death; underneath everything, 
how great and terrible an architecture it was. We ask ourselves about the clients. Did they 
know what they had, or what had swallowed them?"{Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Albert 
Fein, Winston Weisman, Vincent Scully, The Rise of an American Architecture (New 
York: Praeger, 1970), p. 193.} And I have revealed some of my own quite personal 
reactions in saying of the Usonians that there is a lot going on in them and not much 
ground left over for the occupant. Is there more to be said on this point? 

The complexity-order and prospect-refuge model of analysis put forward here may be of 
help in understanding such negative reactions. For I suggest that such reactions probably 
arise from an overload of the first of the two pairs of conditions. There is little doubt that 
the high levels of complexity and order that these houses exhibit make them 
extraordinarily intriguing as works of art. But these same high levels of complexity and 
order can also make these houses inhospitable to the various incursions of individual lives, 
whose differing and more personal complexities and orders have little chance against the 
already rich conditions of the architecture. And typically in Wright's houses, there is no 
real way to modify one's exposure; complexity and order are not only typically strong, they 
are also typically pervasive. One can neither escape them nor mute their intensity. 

But if we turn from conditions of complexity and order to those of prospect and refuge, we 
find that the analytical model used here leads to a helpful distinction. Although the 
occupant must confront high levels of both complexity and order in whatever part of the 
space he occupies, on the other hand movement to various positions within the space 
clearly yields a wide range of choice between various degrees of prospect or refuge. Thus 
the degree of refuge or of prospect is subject to infinite variety and can be manipulated by 
the occupant at will simply by moving to the condition he wishes to enjoy at any moment. 
We move around, we take our pick, we suit our mood. And when our mood changes we 
know there are other spaces in the house that can suit the new mood too. That Wright was 
able to provide not only a rich array of these conditions, but also a range of choice with 
regard to them, is an extraordinarily important legacy of his work. It is exactly this issue of 
choice that makes all the difference between a dictatorial surrounding and a malleable one. 

Many persons who have, or have once had, an unequivocal love affair with Wright's work 
also possess, I suspect, a high tolerance for, or a deep attraction to, rich portions of both 
dualities of conditions. But the many whose responses to his work are more complex may 
be repelled by the compulsive grip of an inescapable and titanic complexity and order, yet 
at the same time feel the much more supple but equally powerful appeal of the prospect 
and refuge choices.  Is it possible to describe more closely the manipulations of 
architectural material by which Wright achieved his particularly effective prospect-refuge 
juxtapositions? 

Refuge conditions are fundamentally created by generating a sense of containment. This 
can be done by using wall planes to create or infer pockets of space of relatively small 
dimension, such as the fireplace zones of the Cheney and Goetsch-Winckler houses, or 
the typical narrow Wrightian corridor. Wright's typical built-in seating, often treated as 
an embracing promontory next to the fire, is also wonderfully effective in reinforcing a 
sense of containment. But of even greater importance is the height of the ceiling plane in 
such areas, as Thiel et al. have shown.{Philip Thiel, Ean Duane Harrison, and Richard S. 
Alden, "Perception of Spatial Enclosure . . .," Environment and Behavior 18:2 (Mar. 
1986), pp. 227-45.} In the refuge areas of his houses Wright generally used either a low 
ceiling or a low ceiling edge, and he admitted that he derived its height from his own. 
Now the dimension from top of head to ceiling is a sensitive one. Wright was about 5 feet 
8 inches tall{He claimed to be 5 feet <?> inches; Gill (Masks, p. 47) thinks that like many 
of Wright's claims this was exaggerated, and that he was probably an inch or two shorter. 
The figure of 5 feet 8 inches seems to me to be as good as any other, although as the text 
indicates, a difference of even an inch would be of some importance in relation to a low 
ceiling dimension.} and on occasion used floor-to-ceiling heights as low as 6 feet 1 
inch, which for him would have meant about a 5-inch head clearance. Obviously, 
increasing the floor-to-ceiling dimension by just 5 inches would double the clearance 
for anyone of Wright's stature, though for the person who stands 6 feet 6 inches there will 
be no headroom at all even at this more "generous" dimension. Therefore this dimension 
more than any other must be tailored to the individual client if one wants to manipulate 
with maximum effectiveness the sense of containment engendered by it. Wright generally 
did not do this; instead he tailored this dimension to his own stature, no matter how tall 
the client.{And blatantly said as much: see Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New 
York: Horizon, 1977), p. 165.} Nevertheless, perhaps a general observation can be made, 
which is simply that the achievement of a sense of containment as powerful as Wright's 
depends at least in part upon lowering the ceiling plane to a level something less than a 
foot from the top of the subject's head. Most modern residential codes in fact do not allow 
ceiling heights of less than 7 feet 6 inches; Wright's work suggests that such codes might 
benefit from a finer tuning.{It would be interesting to know the various heights of Wright's 
clients-difficult information to obtain-and which of them were happiest in the spaces for 
which he used his own dimension as the measure-impossible information to obtain. Still, 
there are a few things that can be said. Mamah Borthwick Cheney lived with Wright as his 
wife, and commonly in America the wife is no taller than the husband. If this were true in 
her case, then presumably the scale of ceiling dimension of her Oak Park house, and the 
early Taliesin as well, were pleasurable and effective for her. Early photographs of the 
Coonleys suggest Mrs. Coonley was of modest height. Both Aline Barnsdall of Hollyhock 
and Mrs. Millard of La Miniatura were petite, though the Barnsdall case tells us less than 
nothing since she was admittedly unhappy with the house. The Hannas, too, are small, and 
from all one can gather were enormously happy with the spaces they occupied, though in 
design stages they objected to many dimensions that seemed undersized to them. The 
Palmers also are of about Wright's stature, and are yet another instance of extraordinarily 
content owners.} 

Prospect conditions are essentially conditions of release, demanding, and in Wright's case 
receiving, higher ceilings. The head-to-ceiling dimension is of itself less important, 
there being automatically a far greater and therefore less critical distance; what counts is 
the contrast between low and high. One of the major watersheds of Wright's career, as we 
have seen, was to ensure opportunity for dramatic contrast between low and high spaces by 
locating the major spaces directly under the roof, a characteristic that began with the 
Heurtley house of 1902 and was used almost without exception thereafter. Here, too, it is 
hard to find a precise conclusion about how much contrast is enough-but it may be 
possible to delineate some kind of approximate range of conditions that Wright used. In 
his major houses, with one exception, the ratio between the height of the low ceiling and 
that of the high one (taken at its highest point) never seems to be less than about 1:1.25; 
this is true, for example, in the living rooms of the Robie and Affleck houses and the first 
Jacobs house. The ratio at the Cheney house is about 1:1.3, and this figure is a common 
one, occurring in many of the Prairie houses and the Hanna and Goetsch-Winckler 
houses. At Coonley, the first Taliesin, and Hollyhock, the ratio is about 1:1.7-while at the 
post-1925 Taliesin it is in the order of 1:2. That ratio, or a little more, is also found at the 
Hardy and Roberts houses, La Miniatura, and the second Jacobs house, for the obvious 
reason that each has a living room that interlocks with two floors of contiguous space.{The 
Lewis house is difficult to discuss in simple ratios because the floor plane changes as well 
as the ceiling. The same is true of the Ennis house which, in addition, presents a very wide 
range of ceiling heights from 6 feet 8 inches to 21 feet.} Thus we might be led to a 
tentative conclusion: Wright's work suggests that ratios between low and high spaces lying 
in the range from 1:1.25 to 1:2 or more are effective in developing a contrast between a 
sense of containment and one of release. 

Fallingwater is the notable exception; its low and high ceiling dimensions are in a ratio of 
about 1:1.15. In my view, this figure is inadequate, and although the building presents 
unequaled drama in other ways, many who experience Fallingwater's spaces are far less 
conscious of contrast between low and high than in Wright's other buildings-although I 
recognize that this issue is subject to individual judgment and needs much more empirical 
work to justify a norm. In any event, Fallingwater is the lone major exception to the higher 
figures. 

Another key element in the provision of the prospect condition is, of course, the terrace as 
the external prospect-claiming platform. I have characterized Wright's terraces as being 
generous. How large is "generous"? In many of the houses, a firm figure is hard to come 
by. At the Jacobs, Goetsch-Winckler, and Palmer houses, for example, the lawn beyond 
the paved surface is clearly a part of the prospect-claiming expanse. Some examples, 
again, defy a crisp figure for other reasons: many have multiple terraces-a point that 
needs separate attention-and what, exactly, one should count at houses such as Robie or 
Ennis is unclear. To make the matter still more complex, both Fallingwater and the Pew 
house have terraces off the bedrooms rivaling or exceeding in size those from the main 
spaces. 

Nevertheless a few generalities emerge. Wright's terraces are usually at least one-third 
the square footage of the space they serve, and this is true whether they serve major spaces 
or bedrooms. In many instances, as for example Cheney, Hollyhock, La Miniatura, 
Fallingwater (main floor), Pew (main floor), Affleck, and Hanna, the size of the terrace is 
about equal to that of the space served. In at least two dramatic instances, the second floors 
of the Pew house and Fallingwater, the terraces are actually much larger than the spaces 
from which they open. And in many cases-for example the Cheney, Coonley, Robie, 
Lewis, Hanna, and second Jacobs houses, the terrace extends across an entire facade of the 
space from which it opens. Wright's terraces are also generous in number. In these 
chapters, plans of the Willits, Heurtley, Cheney, Coonley, Robie, Hardy (counting the 
lanais off the bedrooms), Glasner, McCormick, Taliesin, Hollyhock, La Miniatura, Storer, 
Freeman, Ennis, Fallingwater, Taliesin West, Schwartz, Lewis, Pew, and Affleck houses 
illustrate this. Among these twenty houses I count sixty-one terraces; in fact, among 
Wright's houses, examples having only one terrace are more the exception than the rule. I 
have also pointed out that from the Cheney house onward Wright's terraces are partly 
covered by roof, partly open to the sky. How much is covered? If we ignore the Cheney 
house as the first instance, and Hollyhock and Ennis because they have no eaves, the 
answer is typically between 20 and 33 percent. (La Miniatura is also eaveless, but its living 
room balcony, covering 31 percent of the terrace below, nicely brings it into the typical 
group). 

Therefore of Wright's ubiquitous and "generous" terraces we can say that they are usually 
at least a third the size of the space they serve and often much more than that; from 
one-fifth to one-third of their area is under a roof, and a majority of the houses include 
several of them. Such quantifications are inexact and will have to remain so; they depend 
on what one counts and the examples one picks. What seems undeniable is that Wright 
consistently enriched his houses with prospect claiming extensions of significant area and 
unusual profusion. 

These quantifications only attempt to describe more closely characteristics that have had 
an unequaled appeal to both a lay and a professional audience over a long period of time, 
an appeal explicable in terms of a theoretical foundation of which it seems to be an 
extraordinarily rich manifestation.  Throughout this book I have maintained that this 
degree of manifestation is particular to Wright. That point now surely needs some 
substantiation. For if the characteristics attributed to Wright's houses are found in houses 
generally, or even on a widespread basis, then no discriminating purpose has been served. 
But I think this is not the case. Let us make a few of the more obvious comparisons. 

The well-known Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an almost exact 
contemporary of Wright. Though Mackintosh did far fewer houses, they comprised an 
important part of his practice; and like Wright he sought to design the totality of these 
houses including glazing and furnishings (indeed, unlike Wright, a measure of 
Mackintosh's reputation is based on his furnishings per se). But none of his houses 
develops interior prospect through manipulation of an articulated open plan. Nor is there a 
significant manipulation of the ceiling plane to reinforce interior prospect, because the 
major spaces do not lie immediately under the roof.{There is an interesting side issue here, 
however. Occasionally some rooms in Mackintosh's houses, e.g., the living room of Hill 
House, Helensburgh, have the upper wall and ceiling painted black, which at least to my 
eye creates an illusion of a more distant ceiling plane, and thus an effect similar to the 
elevated ceilings of Wright's houses.} Nor do generously proportioned terraces open from 
extensive glazed walls opposite a firefocused refuge. Therefore Mackintosh's houses do not 
present the range of prospect-and-refuge characteristics of Wright's typical work, nor 
the powerful magnetism that such characteristics hold. 

Similar observations might also be made about the work of two American contemporaries 
of Wright, the California architects Henry Mather and Charles Sumner Greene. Their 
work may have a special claim to discussion in this context, because while possessing a 
richness equal to Wright's and an unequaled quality of craftsmanship, it also comes close 
to the power of Wright's spatial model. The inglenook-contained fireplace areas have all 
the refuge appeal of Wright's and, because of the magically tactile qualities of the details, 
sometimes more so. From the exterior, the recesses, the deep eaves, and the conspicuous 
balconies carry the familiar messages. And although the entries to the houses of Greene 
and Greene are usually straightforward, the passage into the depths of the dark interior can 
be nearly as effective in conveying the sense of entry into the protective refuge, removed 
from the world of the chase. But Wright's early use of strongly modeled ceilings rising into 
the contiguous roof, the invariable opening of rooms to adjacent rooms, and the elevation 
of main floor and terrace substantially above the level of the surrounding terrain-all these 
devices give Wright's houses a richer and more complex sequence of prospect features than 
those of Greene and Greene, and therefore a more powerful complementary juxtaposition 
with the refuge features. 

That this richness of manifestation is particular to Wright can also be illustrated by 
comparison to the most obvious body of work of all, that of Wright's early colleagues, the 
architects of the Prairie School.{Fundamental references for the work of the Prairie School 
are all by H. Allen Brooks. They are: The Prairie School (Toronto: University of Toronto 
Press, 1972); Prairie School Architecture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); 
and Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School (New York: Braziller, 1984). But see also 
Mark L. Peisch, The Chicago School of Architecture (London: Phaidon, 1964).} 

The Prairie School comprised a group of architects who found their inspiration and focus 
in Wright and whose own independent work is marked by obvious similarities to his. Their 
practices were most productive in the early decades of the century, and especially in those 
years just after Wright's departure for Europe in 1909. The major architects were Walter 
Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony, Barry Byrne, William Purcell, George Elmslie, William 
Drummond, John S. van Bergen, and perhaps Andrew Willatsen.{Willatsen (who also 
spelled his name Willatzen) left Oak Park to open a practice in Seattle with Byrne; the two 
worked together from 1908 to early 1914. During this period they did some work of high 
quality, the best known examples of which are the C. H. Clarke house of 1909 and the A. 
S. Kerry house of 1910-11, both in the Highlands, although the J. C. Black house in 
Seattle proper is perhaps finer than either. After Byrne's departure for independent 
practice in 1914, the quality of Willatsen's work slowly declined; by the mid-1930s he 
was producing work of absolutely no interest whatever, while Byrne went on to a career of 
considerable distinction. Therefore I am inclined to think that Byrne was the leader in the 
partnership.} All except Purcell and Elmslie{Purcell had worked for a short time, Elmslie 
for a very long and poignantly loyal time, with Louis Sullivan.} had worked with Wright 
at the Oak Park Studio for varying lengths of time between 1900 and 1909, the crucial 
period for the emergence of Wright's own pattern of spatial organization. All of them drew 
on many characteristics of Wright's manner: broad window bands, deep eaves, prominent 
fireplaces, dark trim, and absence of historically derived ornament; and many drew on 
Wright's devices for allowing spaces to flow into each other. But in the entire corpus of 
their work there are, so far as I am able to discover, no examples that deploy Wright's 
spatial pattern in its totality. 

Walter Burley Griffin's work might perhaps be taken as representative.{The choice of 
Griffin is not entirely arbitrary. Of all employees at the Oak Park Studio, Griffin may well 
have carried the largest range of responsibility apart from Wright himself, and Griffin's 
subsequent career was one of considerable distinction. Peisch begins Chicago School by 
referring to "the pivotal character in our study . . . Walter Burley Griffin," and later (p. 62) 
says, "In developing a livable, economical, and aesthetically sound, small house, Griffin 
was more successful than most of his colleagues in the Chicago School, with, of course, 
the one great exception."} Griffin's Frederick B. Carter house of 1909, in Evanston, 
Illinois, locates the bedrooms on the upper floor, and one of these bedrooms partakes of the 
roof's volume for its ceiling, but the living room is on the lower floor with a flat ceiling. 
His next work, the B. J. Ricker house in Grinnell, Iowa, also has living and dining rooms 
with flat ceilings that are the undersurface of an upper bedroom floor. Of that upper floor 
H. Allen Brooks says, "The doublepitch ceilings (like the underside of a gable roof) of the 
bedrooms give an amazing sense of spaciousness-weightless like a tent and high above 
the head,"{The Prairie School, p. 173.} which is true, but is exactly the spatial 
characteristic that Wright was able to provide, not only in bedrooms, but far more 
importantly in the major spaces of the house. Griffin's "Solid Rock" house of 1911 does, at 
last, have the living and dining spaces under the roof, nine years after Wright had done 
this at the Heurtley house, but Griffin takes no advantage of this whatever: the ceilings of 
those spaces are as low and flat as though there were a superimposed floor.  Thus Griffin's 
work forgoes the opportunity for spatial contrast that marks Wright's work, and also 
forgoes the reinforcement that contrast would give to conditions of interior refuge and 
prospect. Nor do Griffin's houses consistently provide an exterior prospect feature as 
effective as Wright's. The Carter house has a veranda, closed to the sky, off the dining 
room, but none from the living room. The Ricker house has a veranda off the living room, 
also entirely closed to the sky. Thus, both examples provide for exterior prospect from a 
major space, but neither uses sky exposure to develop contrast between light and dark 
which would intensify the juxtaposition of refuge and prospect as Wright had done from 
the Cheney house onward. Solid Rock, furthermore, has no veranda or terrace that is 
linked to any major space. Of all of Griffin's work, his projected house of 1912, in 
Winnetka, Illinois, for himself and his bride Marion Mahony, comes closest to realizing 
the pattern. The ceiling of the one and one-half story living room echoes the roof planes; 
the fireplace is withdrawn to the far corner; the entry has the ambiguity of that of the 
Cheney house. And yet even here important elements are unrealized: the fireplace is 
located under a very high ceiling edge, and there is no orchestration of exterior prospect 
conditions at all: no french doors, no terrace, no external balcony. 

Similar comparisons can be made regarding issues of complexity and order, using the 
same examples. Typically with Griffin, a major space will open to one other major space, 
though even this is not really true of the Carter house. But neither the Carter nor Ricker 
houses, Solid Rock, nor Griffin's own house present the opportunities for multiple spatial 
interpretations that can be found in the Cheney or Coonley houses, for example. Therefore 
the degree of spatial complexity in Griffin's work is considerably less than in Wright's. 
Furthermore, in Griffin's work the linkages between joined spaces lack the refinement of, 
say, Wright's Cheney house, in which connections from the living room to two contiguous 
spaces, not one, are clarified by the organizing architectural features, the dark columns 
and the horizontal trim above. 

This observation introduces the issue of order. For just as Griffin's houses are less 
complex, their order is also less firm. Wright's Cheney house uses an absolutely 
continuous ceiling edge trim, located at the same height as the exterior eave and of similar 
dimension, to cohere the complex interior and to relate it to the exterior; and this device is 
used in many of his other houses, as we have seen. Griffin uses a similar horizontal 
interior trim, as for example in the Carter house, but since the ceiling is flat, the trim does 
not edge it. This trim correlates with the exterior trim of the veranda eave, but it is not 
continuous: it is interrupted by the rising masonry of the fireplace, which robs the fireplace 
of a refuge reinforcement and robs the trim of its ordering value. At Solid Rock a similar 
trim line is continuous but is not related to an external eave because there isn't one. 

Similar points could be made in equal detail of the work of Mahony, Byrne, Purcell, 
Elmslie, Drummond, van Bergen,{Brooks, The Prairie School, p. 279, says that van 
Bergen "came close, perhaps closer than anyone, to actually imitating Wright's designs." A 
glance at van Bergen's work will confirm that this is true, but van Bergen also misses the 
point of Wright's pattern and therefore does not deploy its necessary features. In none of 
his homes, for example, are interior prospect conditions developed. Van Bergen, however, 
was one of the few Prairie School architects other than Wright to use porches and terraces 
consistently.} and Willatsen, though separate mention should be made of Purcell, Feick, 
and Elmslie's magnificent Bradley bungalow of 1911-12 at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 
It has many features of considerable interest to a prospect-and-refuge interpretation: a 
fireplace at the heart of the house and at the interior edge of the living space, under a low 
ceiling; a ceiling forward of it rising into the roof; a wonderfully broad sweep of windows 
opposite overlooking falling terrain and a magnificent view. But one cannot move from the 
living room onto a terrace: the windows toward the view are simply windows, while the 
actual terraces are small, are at a considerable remove from the living space, and are not 
visible from it. Nor is there any but a modest development of interior prospect; interior 
views open only to the hall, and that lies behind the fireplace. 

None of this is meant to suggest that the work of any of these other architects was of poor 
quality. By many measures they were in fact superb architects, architects of talent and 
dedication, many of whom have garnered their own particular fame-and I have the sense 
that in many respects they may well have served their clients far better than Wright served 
his. The point is that in spite of evident similarities, and even superiorities to Wright's 
work, they did not organize space in his way, and in the end this is the crucial matter. 
Wright's way has had the stronger and more enduring value. In viewing work of the 
Prairie School, after even a little experience one knows instinctively whether the work is 
by Wright or one of the others. It is a question of whether we sense, intuitively and 
immediately, that the building draws us in; that having been drawn in, we perceive that 
there are warmly containing spaces juxtaposed with a grandeur of release; whether we feel 
that we hold the option of seeing without being seen, whether we enjoy the choice of 
prospect and refuge; whether we are led to explore inexhaustible complexities because we 
see them as variations within an evident and pervasive order. It is the uniquely rich and 
pervasive presence of these characteristics that sets Wright's work above that of his Prairie 
School colleagues.  In later years Wright continued to have colleagues, employees, and, 
increasingly, students. In the 1920s they included Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and 
Wright's son Lloyd Wright, all of whom developed careers of importance. Within those 
later careers the story is similar to that of the Prairie School; Wright's pattern, and with it 
the characteristics that constitute its value, rarely appear. The best known work of any of 
the three is Neutra's magnificent Philip Lovell house in Los Angeles of 1927-29. Here 
Neutra pursued a direction of his own which eventually yielded its own progeny, and for 
which Wright's pattern could only be incidental; was in fact set aside in almost all 
respects.{Neutra and his work are the subjects of many books including the recent and 
definitive work by Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern 
Architecture (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).} The overhanging eaves 
are gone, the fireplace is at the edge of the house rather than in its center, the main spaces 
are on the middle floor with bedrooms generally above, and terraces from major spaces are 
tiny. As a consequence of the absence of overhangs, the thin steel mullions of the 
windows, and the extent of glass area (far greater than Wright had dared to this date), 
emphasis is all on prospect. There is little to distract the eye as it glides along the sleek 
surfaces and out to stunning views beyond, in which it is unimpeded by deep terraces. The 
absence of eaves also admits a far greater quantity of light into the house than is at all 
common in Wright's work. In all these characteristics, Neutra's Lovell house is similar to 
Le Corbusier's slightly later Villa Savoye at Poissy-sur-Seine. Each house creates a 
breathtakingly liberating prospect-claiming setting, but to do so, each sets aside many of 
the symbols and provisions of refuge. This alternative pattern, if we can consider it to be 
that, yields prospect characteristics of extraordinary strength at the expense of a more 
catholic range of experiential possibilities.{In somewhat later years, others who had 
trained under Wright would also find careers of note, though none achieved a place in the 
literature equal to that held by Schindler and Neutra. This group includes Bruce Goff and 
Alden Dow, among others. I am also unable to see within this group a consistent 
deployment of the pattern, but have not extended the text to a case-by-case examination, 
to avoid the tedium of what seems to me unnecessary repetition of argument. 

One instance, however, strikes a personal note. The house Alden Dow did for A. W. 
Hodgkiss in 1939, in Petoskey, Michigan, was somewhat familiar to me as a child and 
adolescent, as the Hodgkisses were friends of my family. On reexamination, that house 
seems to me to more nearly replicate Wright's pattern than any other of Dow's work, and 
more nearly so than most work by others of Taliesin training. It was a house of some fame 
and distinction within that small and modest town, and I was thrilled by it on the few 
visits I paid there early in life. During the writing of this book I have wondered more than 
once whether my decades-long interest in Wright, and my current interest in an 
Appleton-based interpretation of Wright, are related to clear and vivid memories of that 
house as I encountered it at an impressionable age. This raises the larger point about the 
role of individual experience and memory in modifying our intuitive predilections, a point 
tackled straightforwardly by Appleton in "How I Made the World" (unpublished 
autobiography) and inferentially by Thomas H. Beeby in his essay "Wright and Landscape: 
A Mythical Interpretation" in Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, eds., 
The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).}  
Wright's followers, then, more or less consistently did not adopt his way of composing 
spatial experiences, although they might or might not adopt other characteristics of his 
manner. It follows that his way of composing those spatial experiences is to some extent 
independent of the other characteristics of his manner. Can cases be cited which illustrate 
an opposite situation, that is, a situation in which his other characteristics do not appear, 
but which demonstrate the adoption or independent discovery of like ways of composing 
spatial experiences? The question is an important one. For the other characteristics of 
Wright's manner are by no means appropriate to all tastes, and are as much a part of 
history as those of Brunelleschi or Michelangelo or Soane, while his larger compositional 
values may well be universal and timeless. Can these values of his work be drawn upon 
without simply cloning? 

No doubt there are many answers to this; one lies in the work of the Seattle architect 
Wendell Lovett. Lovett, even more than Wright, has been an architect of houses, and also 
commands a dedicated and enthusiastic clientele. Typical of his best work is the Max 
Scofield house of 1980, on Mercer Island, Washington. Lovett is not an architect who sees 
Wright as one of his heroes; therefore it is not surprising that the Scofield house is not 
Wrightian in any obvious way. Few, looking at it, would see any connection whatever. Its 
external configuration is complex, with many recesses and alcoves, but like Neutra's 
Lovell house half a century earlier, the Scofield house has no heavy overhanging eaves; the 
entry sequence, furthermore, is in its exterior portion fairly straightforward. What makes 
the house of interest in this context, and differentiates it from Neutra's Lovell house, is that 
the interior repeats many of the characteristics of Wright's pattern, and does so with 
conscious intention on Lovett's part to create juxtapositions of prospect and refuge or, as 
Lovett would put it, cave and meadow. For once inside the house, the path to the living 
room has a Wrightian circuitousness, which takes one through several turns, a 
considerable horizontal distance, and a vertical change of one full floor. Having reached 
the living room we are, as so often in Wright's pattern, on axis with the fire, in view 
straight ahead. The fireplace, a ubiquitous feature with Lovett as with Wright, is located 
under a low ceiling. Forward of it the ceiling rises and in doing so becomes the 
undersurface of the roof. Opposite the fireplace, expanses of glass lead to the deck, which 
is partly roofed, partly open to the sky. This deck, analogous to Wright's elevated terraces 
and, like them, distant from the entry, in turn commands an extensive prospect, the 
wooded hillsides of Mercer Island, with the expanse of Lake Washington beyond.  The 
Swiss architect Mario Botta in recent years has attained a fame comparable to that of 
Wright in his Oak Park period. Like Wright, Botta has done a large number of houses on 
which much of his fame rests. These houses also do not in any immediately obvious way 
resemble Wright's work. So far as I know no critic has ever linked the two, nor does Botta 
claim Wright as model or influence; his inspirations are, on the face of it, Le Corbusier, 
Palladio, and most of all Louis I. Kahn , for whom Botta once worked. It is all the more 
surprising, then, that the way he composes the features of his domestic spaces is similar to 
Wright's. In recent years Botta seems to have discovered, quite independently, a pattern of 
domestic composition which in almost all its characteristics is describable in the same 
terms, and is equally hospitable to a prospect and refuge interpretation. 

Like Wright, Botta spent a number of years trying different themes. His counterpart to 
Wright's Heurtley house is the round house or rotunda of 1980-81 at Stabio, 
Switzerland,{Christian Norberg-Schulz, in the introduction of Mirko Zardini, The 
Architecture of Mario Botta (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 12, cites the 1979 house in 
Pregassona as introducing Botta's "theme." It comes close, but it does not provide an 
elevated terrace off the major spaces. This, the last feature of Botta's pattern, appears at the 
Stabio house and is characteristic of his houses thereafter.} in which his mature pattern 
appears in all its constituent characteristics for the first time. What is that pattern? On the 
exterior there are alcoves, recesses, and conspicuous bands of windows. There are no deep 
overhanging eaves in the usual sense, but the window areas are cut so deeply into the 
volume of the building that the effect is the same: shelter is inferred in the deeply pocketed 
voids within which the glass resides, while the overhanging brows also communicate that, 
from inside, there is abundant opportunity for panoramic outlook. Thus the house 
forcefully conveys that, within its accessible refuge, one can see without being seen. 

From the ground floor vestibule, one doubles back and up the dramatically towered 
stair-whose configuration and fenestration suggest a castle-to arrive on the elevated first 
or main floor near the fireplace, under a low ceiling. Beyond is the curved wall that is part 
of the cylindrical masonry shell of the house; this adeptly creates a partial pocket of space 
of which the fireplace is the focus. In the center of the house the ceiling rises, opening 
through the glass to the sky above. Opposite the fireplace is an extensive area of window, 
with a generous elevated terrace beyond looking out over a gentle fall of land to a meadow 
and a distant rising horizon. The forms and spaces of Botta's house of 1982 at Viganello, 
Switzerland, can be described in almost exactly the same way, except only that a pair of 
orthogonal walls are substituted for the curved wall of the Stabio house. 

The pattern is epitomized in Botta's work in an unbuilt project of 1984 for Bellinzona, 
Switzerland. The project is for a steep hillside. One approaches by a long sequence of 
steps, and penetrates the entire depth of the house to a cylindrically walled stair at the 
back, a stair literally buried in the hill. One twists up this dark shaft to arrive at the first 
floor, on the flank of the fireplace, also buried in the hill, its back to the wall as were 
Wright's fireplaces at Taliesin. And as at the second Jacobs house, this recessing of the 
fireplace in the earth, even more literal and more extreme with Botta than with Wright, is 
appropriate to the role of the fire as the focus of the cave-refuge. Beyond is the living 
space, at the opposite side of which is a wall of glass leading to the terminal experience of 
the spatial sequence, the two elevated terraces that look out over falling land to the valley 
beyond. Only two aspects of these descriptions differ from those that describe Wright's 
pattern: Botta's main spaces typically have a bedroom floor above; and, for that reason, 
there is a very considerable expanse of low, flat ceiling forward of the fireplace, much 
greater than in Wright's houses.{This in fact seems to me to be the spatial flaw in Botta's 
houses, for these large flat ceilings seem oppressive. But they are certainly forcefully 
countered by the high volumes which, typically skylit, contrast and release in the boldest 
way imaginable.} 

Botta's houses are of special interest in this discussion because on the surface they seem so 
different from Wright's work, yet at the same time they are so similarly organized. They 
are also of interest because Botta has come so close to describing his goals for these houses 
in prospect and refuge terms. He has said: "I believe that the primary need of the house is 
one of protection, but I also believe that the need exists, inside the house, to project 
outward. This is perhaps why, in my work, the two things coexist-that is, the need to 
enclose and the need to thrust outward."{Stuart Wrede, Mario Botta (New York: Museum 
of Modern Art, 1986), p. 68.} And Christian Norberg-Schulz also comes tantalizingly 
close to the issue when he says, "The importance of the houses of Mario Botta resides in 
their having revived archetypal forms of the human dwelling. Thus they represent 
reinterpretations of the original cave-like enclosure, the interior 'hall' as well as the 
extrovert 'veranda.' A spontaneous feeling of coming close to the essence of house is thus 
created."{Zardini, Botta, pp. 15-16.} 

In these houses by Lovett and Botta, the major spaces are elevated well above the terrain 
they overlook. The fireplace, withdrawn into the house, is at the internal edge of the space 
it serves. Above it is a low ceiling. Forward of the fireplace zone the ceiling rises 
(although in Botta's work this happens at some remove), at the same time becoming the 
undersurface of the roof. Interior views are developed between contiguous spaces. Glass 
and glazed doors comprise walls distant from the fire; these glazed surfaces open to a 
generous elevated terrace. The exterior has deep overhangs casting the broad expanses of 
glass in deep shadow (more strongly in Botta's case than in Lovett's). The path from the 
exterior to the major interior spaces is relatively lengthy and convoluted. The only 
elements from Wright's pattern that are absent are the externally conspicuous chimney and 
the lowering of the window head toward the terrace. Thus the work of these two architects 
demonstrates that the pattern vital to Wright's work can have a larger creative application.  
This inquiry into the meaning of architectural configuration has emphasized the 
single-family detached dwelling, since this is the obvious building type in which to 
expect habitat choices to have importance.{The Taliesins offer some provision for small 
communities; still, their uses seem close enough to include them within the type. 

It would also be worthwhile to weigh the question of whether the pattern and its attributes 
have anything to offer multiple-dwelling buildings, and especially high-rise buildings, 
an idea that I earlier tried to address. It proved unwieldy in this context, and I concluded 
that it needed a separate and more extensive treatment. But I might here at least mention 
Wright's own major work of that type, the H. C. Price Tower of 1953-55, in Bartlesville, 
Oklahoma. 

The tower originally included eight dwelling units (now, I understand, remodeled to office 
space). Each of these units had a fireplace at the inner edge of the living room, under a 
low ceiling, with a built-in seating unit on the flank. Forward of the fire, the ceiling 
ascended to a double-story space like that of the Hardy house or La Miniatura. Opposite 
the fire was a vast expanse of glass. On the other hand, there were neither heavy 
overhanging eaves nor a conspicuous chimney-one could hardly expect them on such a 
building-but more was missing than that. The entry to each unit was straightforward. 
The ceiling did not return to the over-fireplace height at the windows. Nor was there a 
terrace from the major space. And the tightness of the plan denied it any real interior 
prospect, and certainly any component of mystery. 

I do not think this means the pattern is incapable of multistory application (in fact it 
occurs in almost its entirety in my own condominium in downtown Seattle, though not by 
conscious intention, and not in other units in the same building), but clearly the issue is a 
large one and deserves to be carried to a considerable level of detail in its own right.} This 
building type was also the one most frequently addressed by Wright in his professional 
career. Within that body of work, I have discussed all those examples commonly thought 
to comprise his major houses, those on which his significance fundamentally rests. All of 
them except only Ocatillo and Taliesin West share the repetitive spatial and formal 
configuration that I have called his pattern. Perhaps at this point it might also be fair to 
put the case in the opposite way-to say that those of his houses that embody the pattern in 
its strongest, clearest manifestations are exactly the ones that have come to be regarded as 
his most significant works.{There are, however, several others of almost this rank. Among 
these one might wish to include the Herbert Johnson house, "Wingspread," of 1937, and 
perhaps the Ralph Jester project of about the same year. Typically, within this second rank 
of Wright's work the pattern is also found, as it is in these two examples (although 
Wingspread has one atypical characteristic: the fireplaces-four of them grouped into one 
chimney mass at the center of the "great hall"-occur under a very high ceiling indeed).} 

The pattern, as exemplified in these and the many other houses by Wright that embody it, 
works its hypnotism by presenting conditions of habitation like those which, as a species, 
we have from our earliest beginnings found to be magnetically appealing. The exteriors of 
his houses convey rich symbols of both refuge and prospect, which irresistibly draw us to 
their interiors. They are reached by the narrow passageways through which, in our deepest 
ancestry, we withdrew from the world of the chase into the cave or grove, the protected 
and protecting sanctum. There, gathered around the fire hearth, seeing without being seen, 
we viewed and view the hunting ground beyond, and move from chamber to chamber 
within the filtered light of the narrow, overpowered forest path. Both the forms and the 
spaces are complex, far more so than in usual dwellings of similar size. But the 
relationships that reveal themselves around us, although atypical in terms of usual 
architectural experience, are intrinsically repetitive. The constant ceiling edges recall the 
external eaves under which we passed on entry-and so on, through the whole series of 
irresistible manipulations. Through half a century Wright continued to use, through 
endless permutations, these devices of prospect and refuge, complexity and order. They 
worked, and still work, with enormous effectiveness, because they stimulate those 
responses that are a part of why we are here. 

The characteristics embodied in the pattern clearly varied in emphasis at different points 
in Wright's life. The work from 1902 to 1909 in the suburbs of Chicago represented a 
remarkable balance of both refuge from the community and contact with it. At Taliesin the 
role of refuge was paramount; Wright himself used the word in reference to its site. In the 
California houses of the 1920s this emphasis on refuge became still stronger. Yet in these 
same houses he began to create internal prospect conditions of unprecedented richness. 
Thus, at Fallingwater a balance was again struck in a rural, not urban, dwelling, but one 
blending conditions of refuge and prospect, complexity and order, with natural and 
manmade symbols of hazard, to create an unequaled drama of human appeal. At about this 
same time Wright, in old age, turned to the Arizona desert to build at Taliesin West the 
prospect-dominant creation one would have been tempted to associate with youth. At this 
time he also embarked on the Usonian houses, which embodied the familiar characteristics 
intensely, perhaps almost too intensely, in a series of quite small dwellings. And later still, 
at about the time of the Palmer house, he added to the Wisconsin Taliesin the cantilevered 
"bird walk" which, like the balconies of Fallingwater, hovers over space in a bold 
juxtaposition of prospect and hazard. It has been easy enough to point out that these 
changing emphases often bore some correspondence to the changing conditions of 
Wright's own life. 

Wright's pattern and the attributes that accrue to it explain why his popularity as an 
architect of houses persisted, and in a sense still persists, in spite of arrogance, outrageous 
budget excesses, leaking roofs, inadequate closets, late schedules, high maintenance, and 
all the rest of it. Wright's clients might claim that they put up with it all for the sake of 
beauty. But our current understanding of what that term means suggests that at least in 
domestic architecture, beauty in a fundamental sense is related to characteristics of 
prospect and refuge, complexity and order. Yet we have been able to make a distinction 
between these pairs of characteristics. Rich ladings of complexity and order, pervasive and 
inescapable, ally Wright's work with great art. Rich ladings of prospect and refuge, 
between which one can choose and adjust at will, make his houses continually magical 
spaces. And in the end it is this latter achievement, rather than the former, that gives 
Wright his place not only in history but in our continually astonished affection. 


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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT BETWEEN PRINCIPLE AND FORM 

PAUL LASEAU     JAMES TICE      Van Nostrand Reinhold 
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Forward 

There are many ways to look at architecture, and certainly the works of Frank Lloyd 
Wright have been subjected to them all. It would seem, therefore, that our understanding 
of his architecture should be especially profound. For most of us, however, an 
understanding of Wright's architecture is clouded by details of his life, his clients, the 
times in which he worked, his own misleading rhetoric, and by an elaborate taxonomy of 
his stylistic inventions and their subsequent influences on later architects and architecture. 
This is not to say that the setting for his practice or the influence of his architecture is 
irrelevant or even unimportant, but, if it is the timeless and universal qualities of his 
architecture that we are after, its more temporal circumstances inevitably deflect our 
attention. Therefore, it is gratifying to see such a focused research into Wright's 
architecture as the one conducted here by James Tice and Paul Laseau. 

Although this study is limited to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, its real 
significance lies not in what it tells us about his works so much as what it reveals about 
architecture itself. By distilling and comparing Wright's buildings, and stripping away the 
extraneous and peripheral circumstances of their creation, we are shown universal 
principles involved in design of buildings, and their universality invites comparison to 
other buildings far removed in time and place. Through the application of a particularly 
incisive set of analytical tools, we are given an excellent example of a means to 
architectural analysis, one which may be used with equal facility to better understand any 
work of architecture that is rich enough to sustain a concentrated inquiry. So we begin 
with a focused look at the works of one architect and we discover in the process a kind of 
cosmology for the art of architecture. 

Because this study goes beyond the immediate problem of Wright's architecture to address 
what are seen as the universalities it embodies, its usefulness will likely be as significant 
outside the study of Wright's work as within it. Most studies aimed at articulating 
fundamental architectural principles do so by employing a broad range of diverse examples 
of varied authorship selected from all of historical time, rather than by concentrating upon 
the works of a single architect. Indeed, several current studies, including careful works by 
Thiis-Evensen and by Rob Krier, do explore principles of architecture through sets of 
diverse examples, each example selected to illustrate a particular quality or important 
architectonic principle. And there were popular 19th-century works, such as those by 
Auguste Choisy, J.N.L. Durand, and Julien Guadet, which did the same things, each in its 
own way. But the work of a single architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, compared and analyzed 
as it has been here, provides us with a glimpse into the active process of designing, a 
process involving thought and experimentation developed over a long and prolific career. 
The book reveals that Wright's creativity, and by extension all high-level creative 
processes, are founded upon first principles, the result of "a patient search", to use Le 
Corbusier's term. 

A further word ought also to be said about the graphic techniques applied here to the 
problem of architectural analysis. The drawings demonstrate, I believe, how visual 
information techniques can be as eloquent as written and spoken language in 
communicating complex and subtle ideas. Most literature on architecture presents us with 
a variety of photographic views and drawings reproduced from unrelated sources and at 
unrelated scales. So it is indeed refreshing when we are presented with a consistency in 
graphic expression, drawings created specifically to facilitate comparative evaluation and 
to describe succinctly the particular theoretical principle which the authors intend for us to 
see. It is perhaps in the role of analysis that computer graphics, as were employed here, 
will come of age as a useful aid to architectural publication and, consequently, to 
architectural understanding. 

Analysis, of course, can be a dangerous thing. It dissects to understand and thereby tends 
to discourage a more holistic view. But if analysis is seen as only half of a quest of 
understanding, with the other half as its opposite, then the quest can come full circle. 
Taking Wright's ingenious architecture apart, then putting it back together again, provides 
us with insights into the range of possibilities for richness inherent in architecture 
everywhere. 

N. Crowe 


Preface 

To provide a fresh look at the rich heritage of ideas that Frank Lloyd Wright contributed to 
the theory and practice of architecture, this book brings together our research and that of 
several scholars. We put special emphasis on the interaction of principle and form and on 
the role of formal order in architectural experience. 

Most writing about Wright's architectural design suffers from preoccupation with his 
personality, and understanding of his design methodology is often blurred by his own 
writing. In contrast, this book attempts to convey an understanding of Wright's 
contributions through a direct analysis of his designs. This alternative view of Wright's 
work is undertaken in a search for its broader implications for architectural design. 

Analytical illustrations are used extensively to reveal the conceptual and experiential order 
of the architecture, and the book is organized and written to provide easy access for 
readers. We emphasize a close tie between verbal and visual communication. 

Excellence in architectural design, as exemplified in the designs of Wright, integrates the 
designer's intuitive and intellectual grasp of architecture. Too often, critical discourse sets 
emotion and intellect in opposition to each other. With some promotion by Wright 
himself, his designs are largely accepted on an emotional level that avoids the scrutiny of 
their intellectual roots. Students and architects need to become more aware of the sound, 
rational, and coherent basis of his architecture and the symbiotic relationship with its 
emotional, qualitative reality. 

The book should be useful and appealing to students, educators, and professionals. It 
should also attract the general reading public, which exhibits an increasing appetite for an 
understanding of architecture and architects as well as a curiosity about creativity. This 
book presents an extensively illustrated analysis of selected works of architecture by Frank 
Lloyd Wright. It is intended to provide a clearer understanding of his designs as well as 
architecture in general. 

We have attempted to provide architectural practitioners with a fresh look at the best 
known and least understood of American architects. We hope that students will gain an 
understanding of the conceptual power of Wright's work independent of its stylistic 
qualities and that researchers and educators will be encouraged to undertake alternative 
approaches to the study of the work of Wright and other architects. We also hope that due 
to Wright's prominence as an architect this book will promote a deeper public 
understanding of architecture. We see this effort as a complement to the current 
resurgence of interest in Frank Lloyd Wright as a person and an architect. The perspective 
of almost thirty years and the profusion of theoretical studies in recent years provide an 
opportunity to gain new insights into Wright's contributions to architectural design. 


Acknowledgments 

This book is the result of our association of almost twenty years during which we have 
shared our interests in design research and architectural theory. The three years of writing 
and illustrating this book have been challenging and enriching due to the complementary 
nature of our respective careers. In dedicating this book each of us has a number of people 
to thank for providing background that is essential for a book of this scope: 

My interest in Wright began as a student at Cornell where my teachers, Lee Hodgedon, 
Werner Seligman, Colin Rowe, and Bernhard Hoesli opened my eyes to his work in the 
studio. Thanks to a grant from the Graham Foundation, I was able to tour the United 
States in 1965, which further nurtured my interest through the direct experience of his 
work. Over the years I have had the good fortune to share insights about Wright's 
architecture with colleagues and students. I have exchanged ideas about Wright's theories 
and work with Leonard Eaton, Charles Calvo, Narcisco Menocal, and Jeffrey Chusit who 
have generously offered critiques of my intuitions and have helped give form to my 
thoughts. I am also indebted to Ohio University, the University of Southern California, 
Columbia University, and the University of Oregon for providing support and a setting for 
my courses which either focused on Wright's architecture or included his work as a major 
component. The emphasis of all these classes was formal analysis founded on the premise 
that an understanding of principles is a primary means of understanding architectural 
intentions and is essential for a deep meaning of the work. I am particularly grateful to my 
students, whose keen visual thinking, expressed through insightful analytical drawings, 
acted as a direct inspiration for this book. J. T. 

My appreciation of the role of architectural theory began with the innovative graduate 
architectural program at the State University of New York at Buffalo which was led by 
John Eberhard and Michael Brill. Through Forrest Wilson's example and encouragement 
at Ohio University, I developed an interest in writing about research and theory so as to 
make it useful to architectural students and practitioners. My understanding of both theory 
and writing has grown in large part through exchanges with a diverse group of 
researchers, teachers, and practitioners; I am especially indebted to David Stieglitz, Kirby 
Lockard, Steve Oles, Frank Ching, Rob Woodbury, Tony Costello, and Bruce Meyer. I am 
grateful to Ball State University and particularly to the College of Architecture and 
Planning for the environment and encouragement that make my research and writing 
possible. Finally, my thanks go to the many students who have inspired and challenged me 
to clarify ideas we have shared about architecture. P.L. 

For the realization of this book we are grateful to Everett Smethurst, former senior editor 
at Van Nostrand/Reinhold, for his enthusiastic promotion of the project, and Wendy 
Lochner, Ken Allen, and Monika Keano of Van Nostrand for their patient support. We 
wish to thank Janet Parks, curator of drawings at the Avery Library, for providing access 
to its Frank Lloyd Wright collection, Wayne Meyer and Barbara Ballinger of the Ball State 
University Architectural Library for their advice and assistance and Becky Amato for her 
help with the text production. We are grateful to Mike Bartlein, a graduate research 
student at the University of Oregon, for his tireless assistance and many thoughtful 
drawings, and to Paul Lew, Xuan Fu, Julia Maciel, Bill Brown, Somsri Kraiwattanapong, 
Don Rife, and Andrew Alphonse, students at Ball State University, for their help in 
producing on computer an extensive array of original drawings that are included in this 
book. 


Seeking an Understanding of Wright's Architecture 

"Do not try to teach design. Teach principles."{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1936. Recollections. 
The United States: 1893-1920. Architect's Journal of London: July 16-August 6, quoted 
in Kaufmann, Edgar Jr., ed. 1955. Frank Lloyd Wright: An American Architecture. 
Horizon Press; p. 258} 

"Wright's output was so varied over the years that to try to define any underlying principle 
would be presumptuous."{Storrer, William Allin. 1978. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd 
Wright, A Complete Catalog. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press; Introduction} 

Frank Lloyd Wright said that architecture should be taught by its principles, yet discerning 
the principles underlying his diverse work has been difficult. How can education proceed if 
it depends on understanding principles that cannot be defined? We believe that the study 
of Wright's work must begin with the premise that knowledge is attainable, important to 
the practice of architecture, and not, in itself, the enemy of creativity and quality. 

Our purpose in this book is to derive a practical understanding of Wright's architecture 
through observing and analyzing his buildings. We believe the cause of architecture is 
better served by going beyond Wrightian mythologies that may prolong the inaccessibility 
of his work. Focusing on the glamour of individual creativity has tended to downplay the 
important role of a collective body of architectural knowledge. To draw a parallel, the 
scientific revolution has perhaps diminished our appreciation of the traditional skills of the 
craftsman, but few of us would suggest abandoning modern manufacturing; although the 
feats of individual scientists provide high drama, the foundation of the "miracle" of science 
has been the collection of individual insights into a shared body of knowledge. 

During his long career, Frank Lloyd Wright displayed a passion for a highly developed 
and personal architectural vocabulary. This world of form was not to be concerned with 
superficial effect, as Wright often reminded us, but was to be animated by principle. This 
belief suggests a profound attachment to values that were beyond question. For Wright 
these principles transcended the particulars of program, client, materials, and even site. He 
rather elusively described those truths as "democratic" and "organic." The challenge for 
students of his work seems to have been to reveal the underlying "democratic" and 
"organic" forces in a Fallingwater or a Guggenheim Museum. Consequently, the emphasis 
has been on the symbolic meaning of his architecture rather than on an understanding of 
its intrinsic formal structure.{For a discussion of this term and its meaning see Herdeg, 
Klaus. 1983. The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the 
Bauhaus Legacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press} The assumed split between idea and form, 
with the higher valuation usually given to the former, has made achieving the necessary 
connection between the two more difficult. 

To address the important issue of the relationship between principle and form, this book 
introduces an alternative to a stylistic or symbolic approach to Wright's work, one focusing 
on the structure of form. We may posit that the world of form is not arbitrary but displays 
an internal logic that has the capacity to convey meaning. We believe Wright to be a 
supreme example of the artist who understands the principles of form and is able to imbue 
his creations with profound meaning precisely because of that critical mastery. 

Although recognizing that any analysis of works of architecture risks losing touch with 
some of its integrative forces, we feel the resulting extension of our understanding justifies 
the effort. Creativity is enhanced by a deeper, more articulated comprehension of design 
that provides multiple views of architectural phenomena. The challenge is to go beyond a 
romantic view that stresses the individuality and isolated action of the heroic architect, a 
view that tends to discourage research and communication as important supports for 
design. 


FORM AND MEANING 

Perhaps the clearest and most charming explanation of the relationship between principle 
and form advocated by Wright is found in a transcript of his conversation with students at 
Taliesin. 

Look carefully at these hundreds of beautiful, infinitely varied little houses [a tray of 
seashells]. Here you see housing on a lower level, it is true, but isn't this humble instance a 
marvelous manifestation of life? Now where in all this bewildering variety of form is the 
idea? Is there not just one idea or principle here? But where is the limitation to variety? 
There is none... There is no reason why our buildings and the housing of human beings, 
which we so stupidly perpetuate all alike as two peas in a pod, shouldn't be quite as fertile 
and imaginative a resource as these little shells.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1955. Faith in Your 
Own Individuality. House Beautiful November: 270-271} 

The higher value given to underlying cause over superficial effect is a persistent theme for 
Wright. Although it may have first surfaced as an indictment of academic eclecticism 
during his Oak Park years, it remained as a test of architectural and artistic integrity 
throughout his career. He admonished would-be followers to "emulate rather than 
imitate." The message was simple but elusive: those who understand his principles need 
not worry about generating appropriate architectural forms. In a slightly different context 
he defined architecture as a "fine spirit" and not a collection of "objects, soon to decay." 
This statement focuses on the contrast between continuity and change: animating 
principles never change even though their physical manifestation must necessarily change 
to reflect the changing temporal conditions in which it is created. The connection between 
principle and form is reaffirmed, but the means of achieving it remain elusive. We are 
implored to discover universals, but we are required to remain relatively ignorant about the 
means of expressing them. Our studies depart from traditional analyses of Wright's work 
particularly in our examination of the origins of his assertions of a dichotomy between 
underlying principle (spirit) and superficial effect (form) and its impact on the study of his 
architecture. Our purpose is not to explore in depth the origins of his theories, which 
indeed form a tangled web, but to speak about them only insofar as they have 
consequences for our study of Wright's formal and spatial ideas as demonstrated by his 
works. 

Wright's posture seems to be derived from the traditions of Platonic thought and Christian 
belief. Plato's description of the tangible world as the "mere shadow" of reality establishes 
a distinction between the ideal and material worlds and affirms the superiority of the 
former. The New Testament message that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" 
echoes this opposition theme and introduces a moral imperative as well. In this case the 
transcendent ideal is contrasted to a transient, corruptible physical state. As adopted by 
Wright, Platonism and Christianity have conspired to value intangible spirit over material 
form. A style of criticism that focuses on this duality to describe Wright's architecture 
tends to avoid study of the specific intrinsic qualities of his forms and their meanings in 
favor of a general discussion of motivations and beliefs; it treats form as an effect rather 
than as a cause. Our premise is that form and principle are integral in Wright's 
architecture and that both are fully understandable only in light of their interactions. 


APPROACHES TO WRIGHT AND HIS WORK 

Following Wright's lead, past studies of his work seem to share a set of biases. Emphasis 
has been placed on a narrow view of principles, the architect, the chronology of his works, 
and his concept of "organic architecture." These approaches have relegated Wright's actual 
designs to a kind of shadow of some higher essence; they have not speculated upon his 
design methodology, perhaps on the assumption that it was ultimately too mysterious to 
unravel or too personal to be of any relevance. The "spirit"-a timeless, transcendent 
value-is thereby contrasted with the "flesh"-a transient, corruptible state. This 
interpretation appeals to our curiosity about Wright's colorful and sometimes tragic life 
and sheds light on his cultural heritage, which was profoundly influenced by the thought 
of Whitman, Thoreau, and Jefferson. Although this approach reveals a strong sense of 
Wright's motivations, it relegates the physical manifestation of his ideas to a secondary 
status. Architectural forms have meaning only when seen in the light of a higher 
theoretical order. The direct appreciation of his form, and the meaning thereby derived, is 
of less import. This mind-set over-looks the possibility that form may precede meaning 
and even shape its content. We contend that Wright developed his architectural concepts 
through exercises in visual form and pattern, subsequently integrating meaning with those 
forms. Principle may have grown out of practice, inherent in the form-generating systems 
that Wright had adopted. 

A number of historians have wondered why so few architects have consciously emulated 
Wright's architecture, whereas the architectural works and theories of Mies van der Rohe, 
Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto have received broad following. Although the influence of 
Wright can be seen in many works of modern architecture, leading architects more 
frequently acknowledge the influence or inspiration of other twentieth-century masters. 
This condition may be partially attributable to a respect for Wright's well-known distaste 
for academia and its methods; some architects may believe that to follow Wright's example 
would be to destroy the very principles of individual creativity he stood for. However, we 
believe the strongest cause of the absence of an informed Wrightian following is the 
impact of the prevailing means of exposure to Wright, the literature. Not only has the 
majority of the traditional literature about Wright illuminated the man more than the 
work, but also it has tended to insert the personality of Wright between the reader and the 
work. Wright's remarks seem to spring to mind as readily as the specific images of his 
architecture. Some may even admire and seek to adhere to Wright's principles without 
recognizing the significance of their architectural consequences. 

Much of the discussion of Wright's work relies heavily upon a chronological explanation 
that treats his forms as evolutionary, as if the buildings were fruit on a simplistic 
genealogical tree. However, human behavior is not necessarily analogous to biological 
evolution. As Geoffrey Scott demonstrated, early Renaissance architecture was not 
necessarily immature, high Renaissance not always refined, and architecture in the 
twilight of the Renaissance not predictably feeble or decadent.{Scott, Geoffrey. 1974. The 
Architecture of Humanism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.; see especially 
chapter 6, "The Biological Fallacy"} Wright's career also defies simple explanations or the 
application of ready-made patterns. Who could have predicted the sudden appearance of 
the fully developed Prairie House at the turn of the century? What were the chances of 
Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater, appearing when the architect was close to seventy 
years old? 

There is a tendency to seek a dogmatic interpretation of Wright and his work. Words such 
as organic become so much a part of the vocabulary that we may cease to wonder if they 
are truly descriptive and, if so, descriptive of precisely what. Over time these words may 
have become more like mantras than illuminating vocabulary. Rather than building a 
bridge of understanding between us and the architecture, they appear as a form of 
"newspeak." 

In 1939 Wright stressed the "organic" or "natural" role of his theoretical basis for design 
by stating, "organic architecture is a natural architecture, the architecture of nature, for 
nature." Not "cherishing any preconceived form... exalting the simple laws of common 
sense... independence from all imposition from without..." and "resolute independence of 
any academic aesthetic."{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1953. The Future of Architecture. New 
York: Horizon Press} 

Organic (or intrinsic) architecture is the free architecture of ideal democracy.{Wright, 
Frank Lloyd. 1953. The Future of Architecture. New York: Horizon Press} 

The word organic refers to entity; perhaps integral or intrinsic would therefore be a better 
word to use. 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.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1953. The Future of Architecture.I New York: Horizon 
Press} 

I am trying to present that architecture here in words as architecture "organic": the living 
expression of living human spirit.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1953. The Future of 
Architecture.I New York: Horizon Press} 

Even as expressed by Wright, the term organic has so many definitions that it becomes the 
equivalent of "good" architecture. In an attempt to be all encompassing, organic sacrifices 
specific definition. We find in these statements by Wright a search for the dimensions of 
architecture and not the absolutes that will assure success. 


Formal Analysis as an Approach to Wright's Architecture 

We undertake a formal analysis of Wright's architecture with the belief that neither 
academicism nor self-reliance is the hero or the villain; they are interdependent and as 
good or bad as the uses to which we put them. The fruit of academicism is theory. Theory 
becomes tyranny when it degenerates into unquestioned dogma of the type that Wright 
detested. However, theory can also be used as a powerful force for growth and 
understanding if it is seen as principle, a path to ideas, rather than as a solution that 
dismisses further question and exploration. 

The loose association of the themes of cause and effect, idea and matter, and change and 
continuity seems to have formed the basis for Wright's architectural theories. The 
sophistication of Wright's architecture evidently extends well beyond his ability to 
elucidate its theoretical constructs with the written or spoken word. Therefore, we look 
directly to his work for a broader understanding of what and how he designed. His work is 
our primary text. 

The emphasis of our approach is on the interaction of form and principle: the architecture 
rather than the architect, typological rather than chronological relationships, and the 
search for design knowledge rather than dogmas. The most helpful analytical approach to 
the study of architecture seems to us to emphasize the relationship between form and 
principle rather than their distinctions. The division of the spiritual or transcendental from 
the concrete or tangible is a theme that has dominated the development of philosophical 
thought. In recent times philosophical stances such as phenomenology and systems theory 
have challenged these traditions by asserting the importance of the interaction or 
communication between distinct categories of experience, including that between the 
spiritual and physical worlds. In this view principles and form are seen as a dynamic, 
interactive unity rather than as separate mechanisms in a cause-and-effect relationship. 
Just as designed form responds to underlying principles, it is also the prime means by 
which the existence of these principles is revealed. 

If in Wright's terms principles are the servants of function (the principles of growth and 
the form of the seashell are responses to internal and external needs or functions), then his 
conclusion that "form and function are one" must imply that form and principle are one as 
well. Wright claimed a kinship between his concept of organic architecture and the Taoist 
philosophy. 

It was Lao-Tze...who...first declared that the reality of the building consisted not in the 
four walls but inhered in the space within, the space to be lived in.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 
1953. The Future of Architecture.I New York: Horizon Press, quoted from Sergeant, John. 
1976. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture.I New 
York: Whitney Library of Design, p. 220} 

Taoism also calls for a balance between the world of spirit and the world of substance, an 
interdependence rather than the dominance of one over the other. 

Formal analysis also has roots in the tradition of artistic criticism that employs observation 
of the artifact rather than the intentions of the artist as the basis of its search for 
understanding.{See Feldman, Edmund B. 1967. Art as lmage and Idea.  Englewood Cliffs, 
NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.} This tradition, which holds that the purpose of criticism is 
insight, starts with the observation of artifacts followed by formal analysis. Following this 
method, buildings are treated as found objects whose special qualities we wish to explore. 

Typology Formal analysis of architecture treats form much as early biologists such as 
Darwin treated animals and plants, first describing their forms and then categorizing them 
according to the formal distinctions. D'Arcy Thompson, a twentieth-century biologist, 
undertook a comparative analysis of the forms of a broad range of natural 
forms.{Thompson, D'Arcy, On Growth and Form. 1952. J.T. Bonner, ed. (abridged 
edition) Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press} Typical of his approach, his 
descriptions of seashells went beyond Wright's observations of a typology of seashells to 
describe the geometric variables of angles of spiral, envelopment, and retardation. His 
descriptions take us beyond a general wonder at natural variety to a more precise 
understanding of the formal variables involved that enabled speculation about how and 
why that variety is achieved. We approach the typological study of Wright's work with 
similar objectives. 

The study of architectural form types accepts observable phenomena and, at its best, avoids 
dogmatic simplifications for the sake of making a point. The typology diagram comparing 
the plan compositions of several of Wright's buildings provides an understanding of some 
of the variables that the employed in search of variety and individuality. Through typology 
we can often see beyond the particular unique forms of buildings such as the David Wright 
and Lloyd Lewis houses to the formal understanding of underlying principles of design. 

Search In the spirit of research, formal analysis is focused on the pursuit of questions 
rather than the packaging of answers. It welcomes complexity and the aberration instead 
of ignoring them. In the hands of the researcher, typology is a framework for 
understanding and communicating; in the hands of the designer, typology can be the 
framework for invention. French cuisine provides an excellent model. The initial 
description and structure of the French meal has led to the development of subtypes of 
everything from appetizers to desserts, distinguishing hundreds of wines, and inventing 
more than four hundred types of goat cheese. Typological categorization was not the 
conclusion of French cuisine but the doorway to limitless invention. 


The Typological Approach 

The principal form of research employed in the preparation of this book is typological 
analysis. Insofar as they are involved with problem solving, architectural or other types of 
design are attempts to create a fit between need, context, and form where such a fit is 
lacking{Rittle, Horst. 1970. Some Principles for the Design of an Educational System for 
Design. Part 1, DMG Newsletter. December}. In the process of design, architects 
experiment, through drawings, with several variations of form to arrive at a fit with need 
and context. The study of types is pursued to provide designers with an understanding of 
the scope and nature of the variations in form evidenced in built architecture and to 
provide a framework for further exploration. The study of typology attempts to distinguish 
between the inherent, consistent characteristics of forms and those that are superficial or 
circumstantial.{See Colquhoun, Alan. 1969. Typology and the Design Method. Perspecta 
12:71-74; and Moneo, Rafael. 1978. On Typology. Oppositions 13:23-45} 

The basic underlying method of typological studies is comparison. These comparisons can 
range from the simplest verbal or graphic descriptions to geometrical, topographical, or 
mathematical descriptions of increasing complexity. The process involves observation and 
speculation throughout, often affecting the direction in which the typological study will 
proceed. 

The basic objective of the study of form is insight. Even the simplest of techniques, 
graphic description, can reveal important insights. To demonstrate this assertion, let us 
consider the Winslow House, whose three-part vertical composition can be considered to 
be derived from the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. At first view, the 
middle horizontal window band would seem to imitate the horizontal void between the 
roof and the exterior screens of the Japanese Pavilion. However, drawing (graphically 
describing) the profile of the exterior of the Winslow house reveals that the window band 
protrudes rather than recedes from the face of the lower wall. Closer inspection indicates 
that the dark sections between the windows are relief sculpted friezes that were probably 
originally a light color to help reveal their patterns. The attempt at graphic description has 
led to new insights and questions. Was the three-part vertical organization of the facade 
initially inspired by classical precedent, only to be transformed later by an emerging 
perception inspired by an exotic, nonclassical source? 

Careful comparative graphic description can also uncover or sharpen perceptions about a 
range of familiar forms. Consider the study of railway engines. The typological study 
begins with comparable, representative views of the engines. For purposes of facilitating 
comparisons, some variables-color, level of detail, and scale-are held constant. In 
subsequent steps, composition of elements and proportions are graphically emphasized. At 
each of these steps, attention is drawn to parallel features of the two engines, and insights 
are provided into the contexts within which the engines were designed. 


IMPLICATIONS 

Assembling Wright's work for comparative analysis has enhanced our understanding of it. 
The complete array of Wright's architecture overwhelms us by its quantity, diversity, and 
quality. Confronted with this awe-inspiring production of one man, we are tempted 
simply to admire his genius. Both the whole body of his work and the unique, 
nonrepeating examples seem to defy analysis. 

Yet if we subject a complete set of his architectural work to even a cursory examination, 
we can find some striking similarities. Some family resemblances are well known, such as 
the cruciform plan of the Prairie years. Others are more subtle and require a bit of 
detective work. Taliesins East and West, upon closer scrutiny, exhibit similar plans and 
identical planning strategies, although one is a mirrored image of the other, making them 
appear to be quite different on paper. The formal characteristics these examples hold in 
common establish groupings that define a type. Obviously, we have no absolute measure 
by which to determine type in this manner, for it is a matter of interpretation rather than 
mathematical precision. Upon sustained investigation, however, plan composition and 
patterns emerge with rather startling clarity to provide a taxonomy of his work. 

These observed phenomena provide a basis for further investigation and speculation about 
the meaning of his work. In some cases plan groupings consist of buildings separated in 
time and place (for example, the Larkin Building and Guggenheim Museum) and do not 
necessarily share a common program in the narrow sense of that word. In other examples 
buildings that appear superficially dissimilar in external expression have similar plans 
(such as the Freeman House and Fallingwater). The comparative analysis of these 
juxtapositions provokes questions about Wright's architectural ideas and his creative 
methods. The intention then is to speculate upon the nature and meaning of these 
groupings. The fruits of this exercise constitute the substance of our exploration. 

Two objects that at first seem dissimilar, as in the previous case, may share upon closer 
examination a deeper, less obvious relationship. Through formal analysis we can discover 
transformations, formal changes from one state to another. This ability to see connections 
between apparently dissimilar phenomena is one of the key traits of creative insight. 
Wright's work demonstrates a proclivity for transformational rather than radical change, 
which demonstrates his allegiance to the type; ultimately his work unfolds as variations on 
a theme. Outlining these themes can provide a richer set of perceptions about his 
architecture. The implications of formal analysis for the architectural designer relate 
directly to the usual pattern of design study. The design process normally includes the 
consideration of many variations of form, only a few of which will reside in the final 
design. This sifting would be a loss if the discarded ideas were never put to use, but master 
architects such as Wright tend to carry a residue of these ideas forward to other projects 
over many years, often in the form of themes that they might pursue for the rest of their 
careers. 


ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK 

Our approach will be to focus on Wright's architectural form as a basis for our 
speculations. His work, not the man, will serve as our primary source. In a sense, we 
intend to interpret his architecture as a landscape containing a marvelous collection of 
"found objects" whose meaning can unfold from a direct analysis of those objects and their 
context. By replacing chronology as the chief critical framework with the notion of 
typology, we hope to provide a fresh look at his work through a set of studied comparative 
analyses, the focus of which is the meaning and structure of form. 

In our research we have relied heavily on the study of plan drawings. Wright often drew a 
distinction between the architectural plan and its expression. For him the one precedes the 
other and is the generator of the architectural idea. The plan is the "seed," the origin of the 
structure that could, in the hands of a master, develop into a three-dimensional reality. 
Wright seems to have been saying that the chain of creation is from idea to plan to 
expression. Although all three are inextricably intertwined, clearly Wright places a higher 
value on the plan form than on its possible picturesque expression and a higher value on 
the plan than on perspective, which he claimed could be proof of, but could never nurture, 
the plan. This interpretation of cause and effect suggests a high valuation of form insofar 
as it concerns the plan and not merely the superficial aspects of style. If this notion of plan 
form as underlying cause is valid, then a formal analysis based on plan is an examination 
of a central aspect of his architecture. 

Through this method we hope to provide insights into Wright's work and pose questions 
that will contribute to a better understanding of his architecture. Using the visual logic of 
the thinking eye, we separate his buildings into their constituent elements. In the process, 
unifying ideas and principles emerge with astonishing clarity. The nature of the analytical 
enterprise is to be sustained and rigorous but also speculative and intuitive; in short, the 
method of study is scientific. The process recognizes the capacity of building to embody 
cultural ideals through sign and symbol, whose reality is no less crucial than the substance 
of brick and stone. This work sees architecture as something more than a lockstep 
technological process or an inconsequential exercise in scenography. Instead, it reveals the 
unfolding complexity and richness of architecture and can serve as a challenge and 
inspiration for the future. 

We see this book as one alternative way of understanding Wright's work. It is an attempt 
to add other dimensions to the explanation of Wright's architecture. We also hope that our 
approach will suggest alternative ways of seeking an understanding of architecture in 
general. 


The Sources and Influences 

Had he designed and built nothing else after 1924, Frank Lloyd Wright would still rank as 
one of the greatest architects in history. 

Alone and unaided, he had created organic architecture, that profound and yet simple 
concept that buildings must develop naturally out of their environment, reflect their central 
purpose, and use building materials best suited to those two factors.{Pfeiffer, Bruce 
Brooks, and Nordland, G. eds. 1988. Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas. 
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press; p. 165} (italics ours) 

Like Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, one of Wright's principal virtues, as 
portrayed by many writers including himself, is absolute originality achieved in complete 
isolation from others.{For an opposing point of view see Smith, Norris Kelly. 1966. Frank 
Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prenctice Hall, 
Inc.} Not surprisingly, this perception of Wright's work as completely original has tended 
to make more difficult relating it to other important architecture. We believe his work will 
become more accessible by emphasizing that Wright and other architects have shared 
common values and the means for expressing them. Our task is to remove barriers that 
would separate his work from the culture from which it springs. 

Although Wright may have portrayed himself as a heroic loner at odds with the world 
around him, he was not a cultural hermit, isolated from that world and its history. Wright 
was a keen observer of the natural and cultural landscapes of his time. He was a 
disciplined artist who had an extraordinary ability to understand both the goals of 
architectural design and the means by which they could be addressed. His unique synthesis 
of architectural design is built upon sources to which he was exposed and that he actively 
sought out. His intuition was developed as a critical response to his environment, not in 
spite of it. 

We reject the notion that Wright's unique talents flowed exclusively from a mysterious, 
unfathomable inner core of his being. He certainly had a unique sensitivity to environment 
and peoples' needs and a special interest in finding a fresh and appropriate architecture. 
However, we believe his talents were wrought from a long struggle with the questions of 
design. To categorize Wright as a natural genius and to hitch that genius to independence 
from the world fails to give him credit for the determination and hard work by which he 
achieved his successes. In a rare, unguarded moment, Wright spoke of his design of the 
community hall for Unity Temple: 

To vex the architect, this minor element becomes a major problem. How many schemes 
have I thrown away because some minor feature would not come true to form. Thirty-four 
studies were necessary to arrive at this as it is now seen.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. An 
Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press quoted in Broadbent, Geoffrey. 1973. Design in 
Architecture. London: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. p. 42} 

These are not the observations of a spontaneous genius! 

As Vincent Scully has pointed out: 

Wright's work was directly and indirectly influenced by all the architectures mentioned 
above [Cretan, Japanese, Mayan, Greek, and Roman], but, unlike Le Corbusier with his 
own influences, Wright consistently refused to acknowledge the fact. His refusal to do so 
was partly based upon his own tragic need, which was to keep the romantic myth of the 
artist as isolated creator and superman alive in himself.{Scully, Vincent. 1960. Frank 
Lloyd Wright. New York: George Braziller, Inc. p. 13} 

The recognition of diverse influences in Wright's work should in no way diminish the 
significance of his architecture or our admiration of his accomplishments. These same 
sources were available to other architects who lacked his capacity to assimilate them into a 
personal vision through concentrated labor. An understanding of these influences helps us 
to better appreciate Wright's virtuosity in building upon them an architecture of 
extraordinary depth and variety. 


RESEARCH INTO THE STRUCTURE OF FORM 

Froebel Games 
Wright wrote about the profound influence of his early childhood experiences with Froebel 
games: 

For several years I sat at the little kindergarten tabletop ruled by lines about four inches 
apart each way making four-inch squares; and, among other things, played upon these 
"unit-lines" with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or 
tripod)-these were smooth maple-wood blocks. Scarlet cardboard triangle (60 
degrees-30 degrees) two inches on the short side, and one side white, were smooth 
triangular sections with which to come by pattern-design-by my own imagination. 

Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. But the smooth cardboard 
triangles and maple-wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this 
day.{Wright, Frank Lloyd, A Testament, Horizon Press, 1957, quoted in Kaufmann, Edgar 
Jr. and Raeburn, Ben, eds. 1964. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: 
Meridian Books; pp. 18, 19} 

The Froebel games were one of the inventions of Friedrich Froebel that grew out of his 
development of a revolutionary method of kindergarten education in which play was 
designed to expose children to concepts underlying nature and human endeavor. This 
experience was important to Wright for it helped instill (1) an awareness of geometrical 
systems and their design properties(2) sensitivity to three-dimensional solids and voids, 
(3) an appreciation of the compositional possibilities of diverse elements, (4) fascination 
with the "weaving" of complex two-dimensional patterns and three-dimensional spatial 
volumes, (5) ability to visualize the three-dimensional implications of patterns inscribed 
on the two-dimensional surface of his drawing board. 

The influence of the volumetric qualities of the Froebel games on Wright's architecture is 
readily discernible, particularly in the Unity Temple, the Larkin Building, and other 
designs of that era. Moreover, the Froebel influence extends even deeper, beyond design 
output, to his processes of design and visualization. The underlying organizational 
patterns, such as the "unit system" or grid, seem to be forever present, regardless of the 
geometry or composition employed in a particular design. Looking to Wright's building 
plans, we can also see the influence of the Froebel weaving exercises in the complex 
integration of space and structure as a unified fabric. These methods of design helped 
inform every scale of his work right down to furniture, tile, and textile designs. 


Owen Jones 

The Grammar of Ornament, by Owen Jones, first published in 1865, provided a rich 
source of visual ideas for Wright. In commenting upon this nineteenth century standard 
text, Wright said, "I...traced the multi-fold design, I traced evenings and Sunday 
mornings until the packet of one hundred sheets was gone and I needed exercise to 
straighten up from this application."{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. An Autobiography. New 
York: Horizon Press; p. 75} As we will discuss in more detail later, Wright seems to have 
been particularly fascinated with two pattern systems about which Jones had written: 

The number of patterns that can be produced by these two systems would appear to be 
infinite; and it will be seen... that the variety may be still further increased by the mode of 
coloring the ground or the surface lines. Any one of these patterns which we have 
engraved might be made to change its aspect, by bringing into prominence different chains 
or other general masses.{Jones, Owen. 1856. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day 
and Sons; p. 73} 

Jones had revealed a different way to look at ornament: as ordering system rather than 
caprice, as process rather than mere artifact. The discovery that an infinite variety of 
shapes and patterns might be developed within the context of a single underlying order 
must have reinforced Wright's belief that underlying principles could generate a wealth of 
specific expressions. Throughout his architecture the influence of 36, 45, and 60 degree 
angles can be detected either as an ordering datum or as a defining edge, producing a 
variety of plan forms including octagons, diamonds, and lozenges. It is also probable that 
the potential for generating different scaled shapes within these pattern systems inspired 
Wright's adoption of the "tartan" planning grid in much of his work, especially during his 
Oak Park years. 


Louis Sullivan 

Of all the influences that Louis Sullivan had on Wright, one seems particularly prominent. 
Sullivan's explorations of ornamental schemes demonstrated the capacity for invention 
inherent in basic geometry's. Exercises such as his "development of a blank block through 
a series of mechanical manipulations" support the validity of approaching design by way of 
explorations of form. At first, this may seem in conflict with his often-quoted dictum that 
"form follows function," but Sullivan never intended the narrow interpretation of this 
statement, namely, that form is to be largely derived from building program. "Function" 
for Sullivan could include physical, social, psychological, and even political needs as well 
as the programmatic needs. 

As Thomas Beeby convincingly illustrated in The Grammar of Ornament/Ornament as 
Grammar, "The process of design in Wright's Unity Temple and in Sullivan's development 
of ornament are clearly analogous."{Beeby, Thomas H. 1977. The Grammar of 
Ornament/Ornament as Grammar. Via III Ornament 3:10-28 p. 20} Wright continued to 
use similar techniques to develop his designs at all levels of scale while maintaining their 
aesthetic unity. We are convinced that Wright conceived and developed his architecture 
principally through the exploration of form and that he employed geometrically based 
planning systems that provided the necessary flexibility to accommodate and enrich the 
"functions" of his buildings. The quality of his architecture is derived from the depth and 
complexity of his understanding of both form and function. 


WESTERN ARCHITECTURAL INFLUENCES 

H. H. Richardson: Space and Composition 
The architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson was another important source for Wright. 
Richardson typically captured his flowing, volumetric forms within an informal, 
Romanesque vocabulary; his plans were derived from an understanding of residential 
English planning on the one hand and formal French academic planning for large public 
buildings on the other. He anticipated the freedom with which Wright was later to 
juxtapose abstract symmetries and natural, organic rhythms. In the Winn Library at 
Woburn, Richardson explored the interpenetration of interior volumes and their expression 
in the exterior shell of the building. The juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal volumes 
was employed in a more compact way in Richardson's Glessner House in Chicago. The 
Winn Library and this house seem clearly to have influenced Wright's designs for the 
McAfee and Husser houses. Although subsequent Wright buildings were not so obviously 
derived from Richardson's design, properties such as extended space, asymmetrical 
three-dimensional composition, local axes, strong horizontal elevations punctuated by 
repetitive vertical elements, and a strong articulation of volume profoundly influenced 
Wright's architecture throughout his career. 


The Academic Tradition 

Our review of the plan compositions of Wright's buildings reveals convincing evidence 
that Wright was aware of and influenced by examples of architecture developed within the 
classical Beaux Arts tradition. Although he decisively rejected the classical vocabulary of 
the "orders" after 1893, he assimilated classical composition. 

Viollet-le-Duc's prescription for the architectural design process needs little alteration 
to serve as a description of Wright's approach to design: 

The true architect does not allow his mind to be preoccupied by these monuments of the 
past. His plan settled upon, his elevations are a part and expression of them; he sees how 
he should construct them, and the dominating idea of the plan becomes the principal 
feature of the facades.{Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel. 1879. Discourses on 
Architecture, translated by Henry Van Brunt, Boston. Quoted in Hoffmann, Donald. 1969. 
Frank Lloyd Wright and Viollet-le-Duc. Journal of the Architectural Historians 
28(3):176, 177} 

Referring to his own building plans, Wright wrote that: 

No man ever built a building worthy of the name architecture who fashioned it in a 
perspective sketch to his taste and then fudged the plan to suit.... A perspective may be 
proof but it is no nurture.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1908. In the Cause of Architecture. 
Quoted in Wijdeveld, Henricus T. ed. 1925. The Life Work of the American Architect, 
Frank Lloyd Wright, Santpoort Holland: Wendingen, p. 18, 19} 

Henry-Russell Hitchcock and other scholars have cited the Blossom House as Colonial 
Palladian revival. We can see in this rather conventional design the early stirrings of 
Wright's trademark spatial extensions, interlocking spaces, and asymmetrical composition. 
Equally important, we can also trace the impact of the Palladian footprint in many of 
Wright's subsequent building designs, such as the Willitts House. As we will see in detail 
later, the centering, stabilizing power of the square became a dominant feature of his 
plans. Classical, academic traditions also are present in the plan for Midway Gardens, 
which is as accomplished a work as any of the Prix de Rome projects of the period.{See 
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. 1944. Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the 
Early Eighteen-Nineties. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 
7(1-2):46-63.} 


NON-WESTERN TRADITIONS 

In Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910, Grant Manson provides us with ample reason to believe 
that early in his career Wright was fully aware of Japanese architecture. Manson 
specifically points out that while working on Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at 
the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Wright became aware of the Ho-o-den 
Shrine at the imperial Japanese exhibit. While recognizing possible influences of form, 
including the large overhang roofs and the dissolution of the exterior walls, we are 
particularly struck by the compositional features of the plan of the shrine in light of the 
house plans Wright developed over the following decades. First is the cruciform aspect of 
the plan, with the central hall forming one axis and the two tea rooms forming the cross 
axis. Second is the repeated use of the square as a basis for the proportions of the spaces. 
Finally the anchoring element, the shrine altar, is preceded by a central space that reaches 
out to the exterior. Many of Wright's building designs suggest that he sustained an interest 
in Oriental architecture throughout his life. Without asserting any direct connection, we 
can observe a similarity of intention between other Wright works and Japanese buildings. 
His tower projects such as St. Mark's could refer to the Japanese pagoda by serving 
similarly as a vertical marker in the landscape. Wright's Fallingwater house of 1937 and 
the Katsura Palace in Kyoto provide another instance for comparison. In these latter 
examples, abstract form is juxtaposed with natural form to achieve a dynamic balance in 
the Taoist tradition of yin and yang. 

Other important Eastern influences can be found in the consistent way in which Wright 
emphasizes the extension of space from building interior to exterior and how he organizes 
the entry sequence to his houses. The skillful way in which he redirects movement, slows 
the pace, and prepares one for the climactic experience of arrival at the central space of the 
house is reminiscent of both the Japanese garden and the entry sequence to a Japanese 
temple. 

As intriguing as we may find the life of Wright as lone creator, we are more fascinated by 
the way Wright skillfully incorporated and synthesized concepts of form from a variety of 
sources. These special processes of incorporation and synthesis are what we seek to 
understand in looking more closely at his work. 


Wright's Work Typologically Considered 

During Frank Lloyd Wright's long career he produced more than four hundred completed 
works and at least as many unexecuted projects.{The following provide an exhaustive 
chronology of Wright's work: Wright, Olgivanna Lloyd. 1966. Frank Lloyd Wright: His 
Life, His Work, His Words. New York: Horizon Press; Storrer, William Allin. 1978. The 
Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, A Complete Catalog. Cambridge MA: MIT Press} 
Almost all of his works have an irreducible essence that distinguishes them as unique, 
nonrepeatable works of art. Indeed the rich array of Wright's architecture seems to defy 
categories. It embodies a bias toward approaching each work as a unique, free-standing 
manifestation-albeit an expression of a constant principle. 

Yet this approach has limits. It tends to emphasize what is formally unique over what is 
formally shared. By establishing the specificity of each work over the general body of 
work, it tends to deny the evolutionary nature of Wright's architecture and makes difficult 
connecting work that may spring from the same source but superficially appears to be 
different. This view encourages us to believe that Wright arrived at form in a purely 
empirical, inductive way and changed his approach with each new problem. Seeing each 
work in isolation obscures another aspect of his methodology, that suggests a strong 
deductive approach to form, emanating from favored form types, a repertoire Wright 
referred to as his "portfolio." The unique object d'art approach generally avoids plan 
analysis and instead concentrates on details and stylistic expression through a study of 
evocative photographs and perspective drawings. This tendency overlooks what could be 
the strongest form determinant in Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture: the plan. 

Our contention is that formal groups do exist and that they are inextricably woven into the 
very essence of Wright's approach to architecture. Strong evidence suggests that even in 
his early work Wright began his architectural investigations in light of known form types 
that evolved from his own radical exploration of form and his knowledge of architectural 
and artistic precedents. 

However, these form types guided and did not dictate the final solution. Although the 
designs may have remained within defined boundaries, they were also in a constant state 
of transformation. Given Wright's probable working method, we think that establishing a 
typology based on the formal structure of his work is a particularly appropriate critical 
device. In this manner comparisons can be made and the unique and shared characteristics 
of each design can be better understood. This method of critical inquiry attempts to 
analyze architectural form systematically and then derive meaning from an understanding 
of that form in both its architectural and cultural contexts. The development of definitions, 
a taxonomy of types, formal comparisons, and attention to transformations (structured 
change) constitute the backbone of this methodology. 


A TYPOLOGICAL OVERVIEW 

The Atrium embodies an idea of community and shared purpose. It is typically an 
introverted, centralized space filled with light from above. The Atrium type is divided into 
two sub-tracks: the upper consisting of plans based on a simple geometric shape such as a 
square or circle; the lower including plans based on a cruciform with a more horizontal 
extension of space and light. 

The Tower embodies an idea of place making within the larger natural or urban landscape 
typically marking the horizon with a vertical axis and outwardly oriented to the four 
compass points. Tower programs include housing, offices and laboratories. It shares the 
hearth type's central core, extending it vertically and anchoring to the earth with a 
structural "tap root" 

The Hearth embodies an idea of domestic life with its central core rooted to the earth. It 
also embodies the idea of personal identity and freedom with its outward extensions into 
the landscape. The Hearth type is divided into four sub-tracks: the upper consisting of 
compacted plans, the second including cruciform "L" and "T" plans, the third tending 
toward a pinwheel plan, and the lower track consisting of plans with a linear composition. 


THREE ARCHETYPES: THE HEARTH, THE ATRIUM AND THE TOWER 

The bulk of Wright's architecture can be seen as derivative of three archetypes based on 
consistent relationships between program and form types: residential/hearth, 
communal/atrium, and landmark/tower. 

Mircea Eliade has observed in The Sacred & the Profane that religious man feels 
compelled to create a sacred place by making it observable.{Eliade, Mircea. 1957. The 
Sacred & the Profane: The Nature of Religion. (translated by Willard R. Trask). San 
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; see especially chapter 1} This sacred place may be 
accomplished by marking a point, bounding a space, or erecting a vertical axis mundi. We 
might see Wright's architecture as an affirmation of such primordial place making. The 
Prairie House, which embodies perfectly the notion of the hearth type, centers its energy 
around the most sacred place in the house, namely, the hearth, which fixes it in space and 
anchors the house to the earth. The atrium or bounded space of Unity Temple shuts out the 
profane world from an inner court of tranquil harmony filled with light from above. The 
tower, whether it be the diminutive Romeo and Juliet Windmill or the gigantic 
Mile-High Skyscraper, marks a place on the horizon and with its vertical axis establishes 
a connection between heaven and earth. All three provide orientation within the physical 
and psychic landscape of man. 


The Hearth Type 

The first and largest form type, the hearth, includes virtually all of Wright's residential 
designs. The ideal realization of the hearth type can be represented by a square and an 
overlapping, extended cruciform emanating from and anchored to its center by a solid. 
Although the hearth type is reserved for the everyday needs of the individual and the 
family, its dimensions include the ritualized aspects of family life symbolized by the hearth 
itself. It is private in nature and extraurban in its setting. Its compositional characteristics 
are usually asymmetrical, qualified by important areas of local symmetry that tend to 
stabilize the otherwise informal composition. It exhibits a dual tendency toward 
horizontal, centrifugal extension in the form of porches and terraces and a pyramidal 
buildup of its core, which is invariably anchored by the hearth. The actual fireplace core is 
offset from the exact geometric center to allow for the space directly in front of the 
fireplace (usually an inglenook or alcove) to occupy the most sacred place. The connection 
to the earth and the ground plane is its most important site attribute. 

The idealized cruciform type makes its first significant appearance in the Willitts House of 
1902. Its geometric and spatial themes continued to inspire Wright throughout his career. 
Once the type had been articulated, the strategy seemed to be to transform the ideal rather 
than dispensing with it altogether. The succession of plans based on the cruciform is a 
virtuoso display of variations on a theme paralleled by few architects in history. The hearth 
type and the cruciform, as well as many variations, are discussed in chapters 4 and 5. 


The Atrium Type 

The atrium form type is defined by buildings in which a sense of collectivity was extracted 
from (or imposed upon) the program. They include projects dedicated to public communal 
gatherings, whether religious or secular in nature. This category can be described by a 
square inscribed by a cruciform yielding, in its ideal form, a classic nine-square 
organization with a void at the center. The atrium type further embodies a notion of 
compacted centrality rather than peripheral extension. 

The idealization of the Atrium type becomes apparent in the Unity Temple of 1906, 
although the Larkin Building of two years earlier is very similar in parti. It is public in 
nature and urban in its setting. Its compositional characteristics are centralized and 
symmetrical about one or more axes. The type usually-but not always-divides into a 
binuclear parti of major and minor volumes with entry in between. The type exhibits a 
tendency toward inward centripetal movement that culminates in a major central volume 
with an upward orientation to a skylight or clerestory. Unlike the hearth type, the sacred 
space is to be found at its center, which is always left open, by implication, to the sky. The 
atrium type is discussed at more length in chapter 6. 


The Tower Type 

The third grouping, the tower, includes housing and a variety of other programs. The 
high-rise structure acts as a landmark within the natural or urban landscape, similar to 
the campanile in the medieval city or perhaps a Japanese pagoda. 

Compared to the two previous examples, this type presents a different but related notion of 
form and space. Its abstraction yields a square and an inscribed cross, resulting in a 
quadrant or four-square organization with vertical extension implied. This grouping is 
usually expressed as the high-rise structure, which acts as an orienting point on the 
horizon. 

The tower or spire form has a more ambivalent programmatic meaning than the other two 
types, but it is often used for dwelling units stacked and isolated from one another about a 
central core. The office space finds an application here, as well as the laboratory. In the 
last analysis, however, the "purpose" of the tower may be its role as symbol or orientation 
for the surrounding landscape rather than its response to a specific program. The tower is 
both public and private, its public aspect contrasting with a private prospect. Its 
composition is centralized; it is stabilized both compositionally and structurally by its 
central mast, which subdivides each floor into quadrants in its residential applications. In 
these instances, it further acquires a pinwheel composition that has a disorienting effect. 
The outward spin appears to dematerialize the edges into the atmosphere. The vertical 
extension of its spirelike massing contrasts to the rhythmic enclosures at its sides, which 
project like ribs. If the hearth type is earthbound, following the horizon, then the tower 
type is clearly skybound, in opposition to the horizon. The tower type and its variations are 
discussed in chapter 7. 

When confronted by large-scale projects and the development of housing, Wright often 
created hybrids of the three principal archetypes, always in such a way that the primary 
type and its meaning were left intact. Wright explored the combination of his form types to 
address the issues of site planning and urban design in projects such as the East and West 
Taliesins and Broadacre City and to address the issues of collective form in multiple 
housing (including the hotel). 


FORMAL AND PROGRAMMATIC THEMES 

Although much of the variety of Wright's architecture can be traced to his specific 
responses to the peculiarities of building sites or programs, variations are also the result of 
his continuing exploration of several themes. 

Formal and Informal 
Norris Kelly Smith has pointed out an important link between generic program and 
formal-geometric type in Wright's work from 1892 to 1909: 

At one extreme we find a formal and geometrical mode of relatedness which the architect 
associates with the city and with institutional order, with stability and with the submission 
of parts to a clearly defined whole; and at the other, a casual and irregular mode which 
connotes personal freedom and the repudiation of institutional conformity. While his 
public buildings all lie at the formal end of the scale, his private homes are distributed 
from one end of the scale to the other, with respect to the whole design and to the ordering 
of individual rooms and lesser details.{Smith, Norris Kelly. 1966. Frank Lloyd Wright: A 
Study in Architectural Content. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:   Prenctice Hall; p. 77} 

The pattern of public-formal, private-informal is not unlike that demonstrated in the 
work of Wright's nineteenth century predecessors. The origins of this approach derive 
from the notion of decorum that required a building's demeanor to be appropriately suited 
for its intended use. As Colin Rowe has pointed out in his discussion of 
nineteenth-century criticism, composition was a value associated with the academic 
establishment. It resulted in symmetrical, axially planned buildings, usually in a classical 
mode, light in color, and refined in texture. In contrast, character was a term that grew out 
of a romantic notion of building. Formally it translated into a freer, picturesque 
arrangement of darker values and rustic finishes that celebrated rather than denied the 
nature of materials.{Rowe, Colin. 1978. Character and Composition. In Mathematics of 
the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; pp. 60-87} H. H. 
Richardson, whom Wright greatly admired, generally conformed to this formula, as his 
public and private buildings prove, although his rugged use of materials and picturesque 
composition tended to invade the public sphere as well as the private. 

In a like manner, Wright's work operates between these two poles of formality and 
informality. We can easily demonstrate that this principle guides his work to a large 
extent. For example, the Imperial Hotel exhibits the formal values of "composition;" the 
Coonley House might be said to demonstrate the informal virtues of "character." The 
reasons for this polarity seem to be that the public world requires an order and hierarchy 
that would be oppressive or inappropriate in the more intimate milieu of the individual and 
the family. 


SYMMETRY AND ASYMMETRY 

Wright employs two basic strategies to create a dynamic but balanced plan organization. 
The first is to create an overall asymmetry that is stabilized by one or more local 
symmetries. The Martin House is an example of this principle. Wright carefully chose a 
hierarchically significant space for his compositional "stabilizer," which is typically the 
living-dining areas but frequently includes bedroom suites at terminal projections. 
Wright tends to dispense with axial symmetry in his late houses, but in his nondomestic 
work it makes a regular and even exaggerated appearance. Given Wright's polemical 
position against composition and the academy, his debt to its principles of axial planning 
and symmetrical design is astonishing. 

Another means of creating a dynamic relationship among plan elements is to employ 
rotational symmetry, frequently producing a pinwheel effect. Wright seems to have found 
this dynamic shift particularly appealing, judging from his early architectural and 
ornamental designs. As Thomas Beeby has pointed out, the lessons of composition gleaned 
from Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament could have been the source of inspiration for 
this compositional strategy. The pinwheel occurs in pure form in the Quadruple Block 
project of 1900 and the Suntop Homes of 1939 and in a modified form accommodates site 
or programmatic requirements into a more subtle arrangement. His studio house project of 
1903 and the Walter Gerts House of three years later are beautiful examples of the latter. 

Wright did not openly acknowledge his debt to academic planning, even though he 
mastered its principles as early as 1893. He mentioned composition only in disparaging 
terms.{Rowe quotes Wright as saying "composition is dead," p. 78 (above reference)} 
When Wright employed biaxial symmetry in his compositions, his presentation of the plan 
is frequently quartered or halved (see, for example, the published plans of Unity Temple), 
ostensibly to show more floors in a single drawing. However, It also has the effect of 
disguising the biaxial symmetry of the composition. Wright may have chosen this graphic 
device to downplay his dependence on formal academic composition. Yet the academic 
planning principles of major and minor axes, carefully devised proportional systems, and a 
developed sense of hierarchy are clearly evident in his work. 


EMBRACING AND EXTENDING 

Some of Wright's buildings are distinctive for the way they embrace the landscape in a 
manner similar to Italian or French country estates. Buildings such as the Midway 
Gardens, the Coonley House, and the Lloyd Jones House claim and stabilize a portion of 
the landscape. In contrast, buildings such as the Marin County Civic Center and the 
Martin and Barton houses act more like a series of epicenters with extended linkages. 


The Unit System 

Besides his treatment of various forms of symmetry, Wright used the grid or "unit system," 
as he preferred to call it. This simple device provided a structure to unify the parts into a 
larger whole. The reasons for Wright's fascination with this ordering device may stem 
from his exposure to the "unit line" system of Froebel blocks. According to Wright, his 
early Froebel experience gave him an aesthetic appreciation of simple primary shapes such 
as the square, circle, and triangle. These shapes form the basic triad of "units" for his 
designs with a tendency for the stricter limitations of the square being replaced by the 
diamond, triangle, and circle in his later work. 

Interestingly, the Froebel unit module was four inches on a side, and Wright's favorite 
planning module was four feet, with four 12-inch and three 16-inch subdivisions 
possible. Throughout his career he was preoccupied with this module. For example, his 
textile block system adhered to the sixteen-inch unit measurement, and his Usonian 
homes were usually planned on a four-foot module. These measurements had the virtue 
of conforming to the American construction system of four-foot and sixteen-inch wood 
and masonry units. 

The relative simplicity or complexity of the grid could vary as the occasion warranted. By 
overlapping or shifting grids, new relationships could be achieved. As the discussion of 
Owen Jones has shown, the alternation of narrow and wide patterned grids (the tartan 
plaid) could sort out structure and movement and otherwise qualify and enrich the 
neutrality of the square grid. The rotated grid could increase the complexity of the 
geometry as in the thirty-and sixty-degree shifts in the St. Mark's Tower project of 1929 
and the forty-five-degree shifts in Taliesin West a few years later. The geometric 
virtuosity Wright exhibits in this particular mode is nothing short of awe inspiring. 

Wright's early preference for oblique views, in both plan and section, and his penchant for 
the octagon and diamond demonstrate a deep, abiding affinity for the diagonal. As Neil 
Levine has pointed out, the virtual oblique becomes a literal oblique in his later work with 
a plethora of hexagonal designs initiated by the Hanna House of 1939.{Levine, Neil. 1982. 
Frank Lloyd Wright's Diagonal Planning. In Search of Modern Architecture: A Tribute to 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Searing, Helen, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press} 


TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES: STRUCTURED CHANGE 

True to his philosophy, Wright did not settle for mere imitation of the ornamental design 
heritage from Owen Jones and Louis Sullivan. In these systems of ornamental design he 
saw strategies for structured change that could be applied to architectural forms at every 
scale, from furnishings to an entire building site. These strategies include form repetition, 
shifting, rotation, and scaling. 

Finally we return to the central questions raised at the beginning of this book. Is seeking 
further definition of the underlying principles of Wright's output presumptuous? Does 
great artistic work defy analysis? The insights scholars developed into the complexity and 
variety of the music of Bach and Mozart give us hope that a similar understanding can be 
developed for the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Our enthusiasm for seeking such an 
understanding is fueled by the observation that study of the art of Bach and Mozart has 
enhanced rather than diminished our appreciation of their music while in no way 
obscuring its beauty. We hope that through the discussions in the remainder of this book 
we can share the bases of our enthusiasm. 


The Hearth Type 

Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to twentieth-century residential architecture is 
acknowledged by even his severest critics. Scale, proportion, the tactile qualities of 
material and light, the relationship to the natural environment, and his masterful handling 
of space distinguish Wright's work as the most appreciated residential architecture of his 
era. In general, modern architecture has been concerned with universals and emphasized 
the need to come to terms with mass society. Its tendency has been to see the house as only 
part of the larger issue of housing-an attitude that dominated every aspect of design. The 
house was seen as an endlessly repetitive unit whose identity was sacrificed to the whole. 
That the house was mass-produced was not enough; it had to look mass produced. This 
approach was antithetical to Wright's belief in the supremacy of the individual. Although 
Wright was preoccupied with the problem of the house in society and saw it as a vehicle 
toward social amelioration, as did European moderns, with Wright this concept took a 
radically different form. 

His first concern for the house as a prototypic solution dates back to his Ladies' Home 
Journal{See Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1901. A Home in a Prairie Town. Ladies' Home Journal 
18 February: 17; and Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1901. A Small House with 'Lots of Room in It'. 
Ladies' Home Journal 18 July: 15} projects at the turn of the century. Both versions were 
architectural achievements toward that exploration of space and planning that 
characterized his Prairie houses for the next ten years. In addition to the architectural 
design, however, Wright was also concerned with the sociology of the house, its cost, and 
its place within a larger context, albeit a suburban one. The Usonian house-efficient, low 
cost, and modeled on a simple lifestyle-was a new vehicle for exploring older problems 
that Wright had studied at the turn of the century. 

Postdepression America needed this vision, so Wright felt, of a new, uncomplicated way to 
live and build. They needed to escape from the city to the country, rediscover their roots in 
the good earth, and thereby develop the innate democratic values of self-reliance. The 
Usonian House, set in the dispersed, agrarian-based community of Broadacre City, was a 
solution Wright believed would simultaneously liberate the individual economically, 
politically, socially, and morally. In this sense the house-and specifically the Usonian 
House-was the most important building block in his projected scheme for a better 
American future. 

Although he designed important housing projects, Wright focused on the individual 
dwelling and sought to express the transcendent values of the home. He consistently 
denied the hegemony of the collective and the anonymity that it implies. In the process 
Wright has been accused of retreating to nineteenth-century values. This accusation may 
be true, but in his houses he was able to embody enduring human values that make his 
works as vital today as the day they were built. 


THE IMAGE OF THE HOUSE 

There should be as many kinds of houses as there are kinds of people and as many 
differentiations as there are different individuals.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1908. In the Cause 
of Architecture. Architectural Record 23:155-222, quoted in Sergeant, John. 1976. Frank 
Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses: the Case for Organic Architecture. New York: Whitney 
Library of Design} 

In confronting Wright's house designs, we are overwhelmed by the variety and quantity of 
work. Yet we have a sense of Wright's hand in all-like that of a portrait painter whose 
work identifies the artist as much as it does his subjects. 

Then, if the architect is what he ought to be, with his ready technique he conscientiously 
works for the client, idealizes his client's character and his tastes and makes him feel that 
the building is his as it really is to such an extent that he can truly say that he would rather 
have his own house than any he has seen. Is a portrait, say by Sargent, any less a 
revelation of the character of the subject because it bears his stamp and is easily recognized 
as a Sargent?{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1925. In the Cause of Architecture in The Life Work 
of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, p.20-21, Wijdeveld, Henricus T. ed. 
Santpoort Holland: Wendingen} 

Like the good portrait artist, Wright attempted to represent his subject faithfully and 
capture his ineffable character. Like all great artists, he was even more concerned with the 
manifestation of an ideal that would transcend the individual and hold true for all people. 
"To believe that what is true for you in your own heart is true for all men-that is 
genius"{From Emerson's essay, Self Reliance, discussed in Smith, Norris Kelly. 1966. 
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prenctice 
Hall, Inc.} sums up his attitude and illuminates an otherwise paradoxical concern for 
himself as an individual seeking expression for other individuals. Was Wright a great 
portrait artist, or was he in some sense a great self-portrait artist? Do we have a 
succession of carefully rendered clients' houses, or do we have different views of the same 
house inhabited by Wright himself? 

If we imagine Wright as a great portrait architect, effectively rendering his clients' 
characters and wishes with brick and stone, we should recognize that this achievement is 
only part of his agenda. Even more important to him was rendering the universals 
embodying the ideal house, a house that would be capable of transcending the particular. 


OVERVIEW OF RESIDENTIAL WORK 

With the design of the Winslow House in 1893, Wright's career as an independent 
architect began. For the next sixty-six years he was to design many different kinds of 
buildings, but the house occupied most of his creative energy, and he always seemed to 
return to it for inspiration. The house is Wright's chief vehicle for his most important 
architectural ideas and as such deserves our closest attention. Wright's residential designs 
include such memorable episodes as his Prairie houses, the concrete textile block houses 
and other regional experiments during the twenties, and his later Usonian houses of the 
thirties, forties, and fifties for suburban America. 


The Midwest Prairie House (1900-1917) 

The Prairie House-predominantly cruciform in plan with classically informed axes but 
open in composition and to the site-pivots horizontally about its hearth, which anchors it 
to the earth and symbolically enshrines domestic values. The cruciform might be 
symmetrically disposed (Willitts and Hardy houses), asymmetrical (the McAfee and Robie 
houses), or part of more complex compositions (the Martin and Coonley houses). 


The Wilderness House (1917-1936) 

The desert, mountain, and forest houses of Wright's middle period, the "wilderness 
houses,"{This term is borrowed from Reyner Banham's article; see Banham, Reyner. 1969. 
The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright. Journal of the Royal Institute of British 
Architects 76:512-519} show a simultaneous reliance on past work, particularly in the 
Hollyhock House, and a search for new possibilities in planning, materials, and 
expression. The California venture looks to Mesoamerican precedents and new building 
technology for inspiration. The Arizona desert houses especially explore the 
diagonal-both literal and phenomenal-with increased intensity. This emphasis may 
express itself in planning ideas (Cudney House, Lake Tahoe Cabins) or in the "diagonal" 
of the sloping site itself (the Freeman, Storer, and Doheny Ranch houses). The open 
horizontal extension of the Prairie House is exchanged in the desert houses for a more 
introverted, oasislike quality that filters the harsh environment through its semipermeable 
skin. The desert plan results in a higher degree of containment, and the expression is cubic 
rather than planar. The forest houses at Lake Tahoe explore the power of the roof form as 
a distinctive feature in the landscape and forge links to Native American architecture. 


The Suburban Usonian House (1936-1959) 

The Usonian House-modest in size, efficiently planned, and economically constructed 
(for example the Jacobs House)-displays a degree of informality only implied in Wright's 
earlier houses. Their "meaning" was to be understood in the larger economic, political, 
and moral context of post-Depression America; they carry an implicit polemic for 
individuality, self-reliance, and escape from the evils of the city and a society profoundly 
out of line with human needs. More deluxe versions that inspire or capitalize upon this 
work display an increasing drama in their use of form and space (Fallingwater) with a 
concomitant interest in diagonal and circular planning (the Hanna and David Wright 
houses). 

Although Wright's work with houses thus categorized gives some idea of breadth and 
scope, it does not necessarily provide the only valid grouping or yield insights into the 
subtleties of his domestic designs. The breakdown by period also has the effect of 
disconnecting his work from one phase to the next, although in many ways the most 
revealing or at least interesting aspects of the work are not the obvious differences but the 
more subtle continuities. Our premise is that the hidden themes of Wright's work, like the 
brush strokes, color palette, and compositional preferences of the portrait painter, can 
reveal the artist's intentions even more than the objective likeness to his subject. 


THE ORIGINS OF THE CRUCIFORM HEARTH PLAN 

The cruciform plan and its transformations serve to inform almost all of Frank Lloyd 
Wright's domestic work from the Prairie years to the Usonian House. The first 
accomplished building using this schema is the Willitts House of 1902. Its seemingly 
sudden appearance may obscure its many precedents, both external and internal, to 
Wright's work, which gave it birth. 

One of the sources of the cruciform in domestic planning can be specifically traced to 
American vernacular housing. Cottage builders and Shingle Style architects based many of 
their plans on a cross shape with a high degree of open planning. The Kent House at 
Tuxedo Park of 1885-86 by Bruce Price is a prime example of the type. Its openness, 
ability to capture the sun through ideal exposure, and suggested extension of space to the 
outside via an oversized porch made it particularly attractive and inviting in natural 
contexts. As we have seen, Richardson's Romanesque planning, both domestic and public, 
influenced Wright's development of the cross plan. 

Another source of the cruciform plan is Japanese design, specifically as expressed in the 
Ho-o-den Shrine at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.{See both Manson, Grant 
Carpenter. 1958. Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910, The First Golden Age. New York: Van 
Nostrand Reinhold Company, and Nute, K. Horwood. 1990. Frank Lloyd Wright & the 
Arts of Japan. Architecture + Urbanism February:26-33} Its simple cross shape, with two 
interpenetrating volumes, articulated structure, and shrine on axis, is perhaps the most 
important precedent with which Wright was directly familiar. The lightness of the 
structure, its overhanging eaves, clarity of form, and absence of historical reference, 
particularly the classical orders, must have been a compelling model for Wright. Another 
possible non-Western influence, coming by way of Europe, is a small Chinese hut 
illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc's Habitations.{Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel. 
1876, (Facsimile) The Habitations of Man In All Ages. translated by Benjamin Bucknall. 
Ann Arbor, MI: Gryphon Books; pp. 29, 30} The hut is cruciform with a stepped 
pyramidal roof at the crossing and is connected to outbuildings in a manner that directly 
foreshadows the Martin-Barton Complex of 1904. 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE CRUCIFORM 

To fully understand the development of the cruciform plan at Wright's hand, we need to 
look at a third source. Although Palladianism was anathema to Wright, his design for the 
Blossom House of 1892 shows a clear Palladian influence. In this unlikely setting we can 
already see the stirrings of a major revolution in the way Wright conceived his houses. The 
influence of Palladio comes through the filter of late nineteenth-century colonial revival 
houses, such as the Taylor House by McKim, Mead, and White. This episode of 
Palladianism in American architecture was viewed as a return to cultural roots perhaps 
best expressed by Jefferson's Monticello, which in turn was based on Palladio's Villa 
Rotunda as seen through the eyes of English architects. 

Writers such as Vincent Scully have emphasized the differences between Palladio and 
Wright while drawing connections to Jefferson.{Scully, Vincent. 1960. Frank Lloyd 
Wright. New York: George Braziller, (See especially pages 17 and 18)} A comparison of 
all these structures might reveal Wright's degree of indebtedness to both Palladio and 
Jefferson. A remarkable similarity between Palladio and Wright that stylistic analysis 
alone cannot reveal is apparent in certain plan abstractions. A comparison of the Villa 
Rotunda, Blossom House, Monticello, and the Willitts House demonstrates that Wright 
was aware of his culture to an extraordinary degree and that he had the ability to 
synthesize seemingly diametrically opposed tendencies into a new whole. A more extended 
comparison can serve to acknowledge more fully Wright's debt to the classical tradition in 
America. 

The plans of the Villa Rotunda and the Blossom House reveal a simple geometry of a 
square inscribed by a cruciform. However, the absolute bilateral symmetry of the Rotunda 
and its strong, centralized dome contrast with the Blossom's inflected plan, which 
nonetheless is ordered about two centralizing axes. The extensions to the Rotunda's square 
plan occur in the form of four identical, axially disposed porches that continue the 
transparency of the inscribed cruciform. The porches dematerialize the building wall and 
make a transition to the landscape beyond. It has a consistent theme of concentric energy 
that is concentrated at the center and dissipated at the edges along its two axes. Energies 
are stable and axially balanced. 

In the Blossom House the absence of a dome as a central stabilizing force releases a 
peripheral outward movement. It has a single semicircular entry porch on its exterior axis 
that is countered by the semicircular conservatory placed in an opposing and non-axial 
position, causing a rotational movement in the plan. The indentation in the living room is 
countered with a small terrace that is pushed forward from the main block. Both the 
fireplace and stair define the central crossing without occupying it, and their asymmetric 
relationship further enforces the secondary dynamic theme of rotational energy. Also 
important, however, is the stabilizing effect of the four corner blocks, which are articulated 
to suggest four discrete volumes. The major reading of the Rotunda is as a cube with four 
discrete porch projections. The Blossom's major reading is ambivalent. The initial reading 
of a single cubic volume has a very strong secondary reading of a cruciform contained 
within four corner pavilions. 

The latent cruciform in the Rotunda, which became more apparent in the Blossom House 
and emerged as a more explicit feature in Jefferson's Monticello, finally reveals itself with 
unequivocal clarity in Wright's Willitts House. 

Interpreting the geometry of Palladio's Villa Rotunda in a new cultural context, Monticello 
describes an idea of the house in the landscape that Wright was to explore as a key theme 
in many of his residences. At Monticello we can see precursors of Wright's work in the 
embryonic cruciform, the asymmetrical distribution of the core, the hierarchical expression 
of the extending wings, and the exaggerated extension of spaces into the landscape. 
Extended porches and split octagonal bays distend the cubic, compact Palladian plan into 
two cross volumes that mark a center that significantly lacks the domed centralizing space 
of Palladio's model. Wright's Willitts House can be seen as a further logical development 
of this theme of extended periphery and concomitant decentering at the crossing. In the 
Willitts, the corner volumes of the Blossom that acted to buttress the internal space have 
been removed like form work to reveal cruciform volumes they have molded. The plan 
abstractions of the four buildings reveal a remarkable similarity, suggesting a 
transformation (changed emphasis) from one to the next rather than any radical 
reformulation. Although the cruciform has found complete expression in the Willitts 
House, the cubic volume is now implied rather than explicit. It is described by the outer 
edges of the living, dining, and reception rooms (excluding their prowlike bay windows) 
and the inner edge of the paired maids' rooms, which are articulated with a step back in 
the building line. The centralized dome space of the Rotunda, de-emphasized as a mere 
intersection in the Blossom House, is replaced by the insertion of a fireplace at the center 
of the Willitts House. Like the Rotunda, Willitts has a strong concentric organization, but 
it is that of a solid that disintegrates with centrifugal force toward the four outstretched 
arms of the cruciform rather than the centripetal force that climaxes upward into the 
centralized dome. 

An analysis of the four building elevations reveals similar themes. The underlying 
cruciform organization yields a tripartite composition on all four facades. The emphasis on 
the central bay is clear for each, as is a lateral extension. The cross plan has an equivalent 
and complementary elevation. Moving from Rotunda to Blossom to Monticello to Willitts, 
we can observe the cross becoming a more dominant theme until it seems to completely 
deny any bounding cubic volume. The relationship between plan and elevation, interior 
space and exterior form is complete and unambiguous. The perfect synthesis or "plasticity" 
that Wright strove for has been achieved. 

Wright's use of the cruciform suggests first and foremost a preference for a peculiar spatial 
"weaving" and a compositional preference for additive rather than subtractive plastic form. 
The cross-axial plan releases energy to the four compass points and simultaneously 
anchors the composition to the earth at one point. The cruciform house has both fluid 
movement and stability, change and continuity wrapped up in a form that enshrines the 
hearth, symbol of the family, and the four open arms that extend outward toward the 
landscape and toward freedom for the individual. The plasticity was achieved by unifying 
and expressing the interior volume with exterior form. 


The Cruciform Plan 

In 1900 and 1901 Wright published two projects for the Ladies Home Journal. The first 
was called "A Home in a Prairie Town," the second, "A Small House with 'Lots of Room 
in It.'" These unbuilt projects were the first "unveiling of the Prairie House"{Manson, 
Grant Carpenter. 1958. Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910, The First Golden Age. New York: 
Van Nostrand Reinhold Company; pp. 99-137} and were to establish two distinct types 
of cruciform plan: formal frontality with a T-shaped arrangement of major living spaces 
and informal asymmetry with an L-shaped arrangement of these same spaces. Wright's 
work for the next ten years developed different versions of these two basic cruciform types, 
and traces of them can be found in later residential designs through and beyond the 
Usonian houses. 

The first of the Journal houses to be published was the more deluxe version. It has a plan 
configuration that resembles an airplane: a linear body, two symmetrical wings, and a tail. 
The hearth occupies the cockpit location, along with a stair and a passageway that link the 
front and tail portions. The front end consists of a formal T-shaped suite of rooms, the 
central living room flanked by the dining room and library in symmetrical wings. The tail 
end has a less formal arrangement of spaces, including a porte cochere, reception area, 
kitchen, and service area. Bedrooms are located on the second level above the living and 
dining rooms and the library. In the published version of this type, Wright proposed two 
variations of this second level. One included a pair of bedrooms over the living room; the 
other shows them removed, creating a grand living space with mezzanine above. 

Siting, approach, and entry sequence to the house are important considerations for Wright. 
The house is oriented with its main axis parallel to the street; a dynamic effect is 
introduced through the overall asymmetry of the street facade in tension with the localized 
symmetry of each of the forward wings. The approach by car is also asymmetric and on the 
periphery; likewise, by foot a person moves off center and is required to turn no fewer than 
six times to arrive at the living room space facing the hearth. The movement pattern and 
entry is clearly a foil to a more structured architectural composition that can be described 
in terms of major and minor axes with secondary shifts. Houses incorporating this formal 
type include the Cheney, Hardy, Martin, and Hollyhock. 

The second cruciform plan, more modest in size, incorporates more asymmetries, 
increasing the spatial dynamics. The overall composition is again organized by 
cross-axes that intersect at the fireplace core. However, there is no overall symmetrical 
grouping of wings, although each of the four wings show traces of local symmetry. The 
axes of the living room and dining room are resolved within the hearth core. The axis of 
the entry, suggested by a small octagonal reception space, is shifted slightly off the axis of 
the roof and its support piers, which constitute the port cochere. The kitchen axis, 
expressed in the exterior windows, is also shifted from the axis of the "tail" of the house. 
Among the houses based on this informal type are the Willitts, Roberts, Coonley, and 
Usonian first Jacobs. 

With these two types of the cruciform plan in mind, we will now examine four major 
groups of houses that represent major variations in Wright's residential designs: the classic 
cruciform house, the hillside house, the in-line house and the pinwheel house. We chose 
these groups for more detailed study to facilitate both an overview of the transformations 
of concepts and the comparative analysis of specific designs. 


THE CLASSIC CRUCIFORM HOUSES 


The Willitts House 

Built in 1902, the Willitts House is the first clear, comprehensive embodiment of the 
cruciform Prairie residence. The two major intersecting spatial volumes are clearly 
expressed in the exterior massing of the building. The continuity and extension of spaces 
are emphasized by the horizontal lines of the large overhanging roofs and the low parapet 
walls. The hierarchy of spaces and overall stability of the three-dimensional composition 
of volumes are supported by the symmetry of the facade of the forward living wing and the 
nearly symmetrical disposition of wings extending to either side. In this house Wright 
converts the average program of a house of that time into a formal composition of 
tremendous visual impact, in the tradition of the Palladian-style English manor house or 
the nineteenth-century French chateau. 

The Willitts House was enclosed with a simple, controlled skin of wood frame and stucco 
that clearly reveals the distinct volumes of the house. Articulation consisted of the large 
overhanging roofs and the arrangement of windows. By the time he designed the Martin 
House, Wright had experimented with expressing the extension of space through exterior 
walls while maintaining a strong sense of enclosure in a number of ways, including 
parapets and piers. 


The Martin House 

The Martin House of 1904 is the earliest example of a deluxe Prairie house in which 
budget was no constraint. It provides the most extensive and refined example of the 
development of his ideas about the Prairie type. This house incorporated a sophisticated 
orchestration of solids and voids, animating in an unprecedented way the exterior and 
interior of the house. The availability of expert furniture carpenters in Buffalo enabled 
Wright to extend the vocabulary established in these plans to a complete set of details for 
the woodwork. 


The Coonley House 

The Avery Coonley House of 1908 was built the year before the Robie House. The most 
lavish of the Prairie houses ever to be executed, it was a favorite of the architect. Its site is 
a large parcel of flat land next to the Des Plaines River. The house presents a more 
informal, less imposing exterior that blends into the natural landscape, almost as if hiding 
its size. The concern for simple aesthetic unity shown in the Willitts design gives way to 
variety, experimentation, and idiosyncrasies at Coonley, and the architecture is enriched 
by extensive ornamental design. 


The Hollyhock House 

The Hollyhock design recalls some of the feeling of Willitts. It returns to the imposing, 
symmetrical expression reminiscent of Beaux Arts compositions. The rather simplistic 
rendition of stripped-down Mayan style on the outside shell hides a more subtle, 
animated, but serene set of encircled spaces, including the garden court. Possibly because 
of the limitations of poured-in-place concrete, as Wright saw them, ornament seems 
more applied than integral to the architecture. Soon after this project he addressed this 
problem with his California "textile" concrete block house designs, including the Millard, 
Storer, Ennis, and Freeman houses. 

In the plan of the Willitts House, the long volume parallel to the street and the shorter 
perpendicular volume intersect to form four wings. Although the exterior expression of the 
wings appears balanced and formal, the distribution of interior functions is informal, based 
on the L-shaped plan of the Ladies Home Journal "Little House." Principal functions, the 
living and dining rooms, are placed in two of the front wings, a porte cochere, entry, and 
reception occupy the other front wing, and the service functions are placed in the back 
wing behind the central volume of the hearth. The house is approached on foot or by car 
from the front, although the visitor spirals into the entry off the axis in a more dynamic 
apprehension of the building's composition. The entry to the house seems purposely 
de-emphasized in order to preserve the balance of the facade composition. 

Located on a corner site, the Martin House derives its layout from the more formal type of 
cruciform house that was first revealed in the Ladies Home Journal. The T-shaped suite 
of principal living areas faces one street, and entry from the other street is inserted in a slot 
between the living suite and a less symmetrical grouping of support spaces. This slot of 
space is extended as a pergola that acts as an organizing spine for a complex of structures, 
including the smaller Barton House, a garage, and a conservatory. The organization of the 
volumes of the Martin House are more formal than the Willitts, and the exterior 
expression emphasizes this quality. 

The composition of the Coonley House is a looser version of the informal cruciform type, 
with a nucleus that consists of a living room core lifted above a playroom, formal terrace, 
and reflecting pool. The dining room wing extends to one side, with the bedroom wing 
opposite. The service wing, containing kitchen and servant quarters, extends to the back 
behind the hearth. Structures at the Martin House were composed to punctuate rather than 
explicitly define exterior space. The Coonley House captures and dominates exterior space 
by its composition of forms, including the U-shaped residence proper, guest house, 
gardener's house, garage, and other outbuildings that form a compound. The drive and 
approach are not frontal to the formal cross-axis of living room but perpendicular to it 
behind and under the kitchen wing that serves as a porte cochere. 

In closely associating the cruciform plan with Wright's Prairie houses, we could miss its 
strong role in buildings of a different time or style. The Hollyhock House is a brilliant 
extension and transformation of the formal version of the cruciform plan as found in the 
Martin House. In one of his clearest expressions of extended, interlocking space, Wright 
moves the hearth off axis and splits the back wing to create a strong linear exterior space 
that in effect becomes the fourth leg of the cruciform. Because the hearth as core and 
anchor was the theme of most of Wright's houses, this departure at Hollyhock had to have 
a compelling reason. Perhaps it is a recognition of the unifying role of the central court 
tradition in the warm climates of southern California and the Mediterranean. It may also 
derive from his exposure to enclosed exterior spaces in the Orient. In any case, the creation 
of an "oasis" protected by fortresslike walls seems to make a lot of sense on this exposed 
hill site in the desert setting of Los Angeles. 

Analysis of the Willitts House plan reveals that its dynamism is counterbalanced by the 
clear expression of several local symmetries, the most important being the projecting 
living room wing. Interior spaces are organized around axes implied by the octagonal 
protrusion in the reception area, diamond protrusions in the dining area, and the five part 
composition of the principal fenestration of the living room. Additional symmetries are 
expressed in pairings of exterior piers at the porch and porte cochere and other landscape 
features. At the Martin House a complex interweaving of local symmetries is achieved 
through an extensive set of clustered piers, mullions, and planters. The result is a strong 
sense of spatial definition and richness throughout the house. Although local symmetry is 
strongly reinforced in some areas of the Coonley House, particularly the living room 
nucleus, which includes the lower terrace and reflecting pool, it is generally employed in a 
looser, incidental manner overall. Internal generation of spaces seems tempered by the 
concern for definition of exterior spaces. At Hollyhock local symmetries again appear to be 
integrated with the major axial composition of the house even more emphatically than at 
the Martin House. The effect is one of a more controlled, unified plan, and it is perhaps 
one of Wright's most classicized later designs. 

The persistence of compositional themes underlying the exploitation of form and context 
in these four houses suggests a parallel continuity of design approach. In approaching each 
new design, Wright seemed to build upon previous plan concepts that embodied his 
fundamental concerns: sense of the hearth, zoning, hierarchy of spaces, relationship to 
site, and sequence of entry. In the Prairie houses, Wright fine tuned the role of the 
cruciform configuration of spaces. Upon this experience he built a career of continuing 
discovery in which the cruciform would be stretched, shifted, and otherwise distorted 
without losing its power to act as a solid formal means to order and identity. 


THE HILLSIDE HOUSES 

This structure might serve to indicate that the sense of shelter-the sense of space where 
used with sound structural sense-has no limitations as to form except the materials used 
and the methods by which they are employed for what purpose. The ideas involved here 
are in no way changed from those of early work. The materials and methods of 
construction come through them, here, as they may and will always come through 
everywhere. That is all. The effects you see in this house are not superficial 
effects.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1938. The Architectural Forum from Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. 
and Raeburn, Ben., eds. 1964. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: 
Meridian Books; p. 276} 

That each of Wright's buildings is unique and without precedent within architecture in 
general or within Wright's own work is often asserted. However, we have seen his debt to 
the architecture of H. H. Richardson and Japan, among others. Likewise, we realize that 
this contention does not account for the many themes Wright developed in his early years 
that remained immensely important to him throughout his career. No greater error could 
be made in the study of Wright's work than to believe that he had no "memory" of his 
previously executed designs. Like the Heraclitian metaphor of the constantly changing 
stream that is always the same, Wright worked within an evolving set of principles; even if 
their outward manifestation changed, the principles followed a defined course. 

This phenomenon becomes more readily apparent when we compare Wright's architectural 
response to similar sites. Our task will be to recognize the variations while trying to 
understand the shared intentions and organizational ideas underlying each work. We will 
focus on the plan and section and their three-dimensional realization in form and space. 
We will then attempt to demonstrate the interrelatedness between each pair of houses, to 
show how certain ideas become developed and elaborated, others are transformed, and still 
others disappear only to recur. An examination of these four houses provides a good 
example of Wright's working methodology, demonstrating not only his tenacious hold on 
organizational ideas but also his ability to transform those principles into a new and 
creative work. 


FROM THE HARDY HOUSE TO FALLINGWATER 

The Hardy House from 1905 seems unrelated to Fallingwater, which was designed thirty 
years later. The symmetrical plan and rather monumental aspect of the first contrasts 
strongly with the asymmetrical, seemingly casual organization of the second. The 
three-dimensional massing and use of materials makes these differences even more 
apparent. The stepped-earth terraces of the Hardy House contrast with Fallingwater's 
cantilevered concrete balconies, which seem to float above the land. One accepts gravity; 
the other defies it. The stucco and wood structure of the Hardy House is expressed on the 
exterior in simple, unadorned volumes, revealing in the glazed sections a species of 
"half-timbering." The only cantilevered element is the low hip roof that hovers above like 
a canopy. Fallingwater's smooth concrete trays in tension and the massive stone walls in 
compression express an "appropriate" use of materials and develop a poetic sensibility in 
accordance with Wright's idea of the nature of materials and their structural potential. 

During the early twenties, Wright built two works in southern California that can help 
establish a link between the Hardy House and Fallingwater. Along with the other three 
houses from this region, La Miniatura of 1921 and the Freeman House of 1923 are 
buildings that usually claim an independence from Wright's larger output. Both projects 
employ a vaguely Mesoamerican style and use precast concrete textile blocks designed by 
Wright. The romantic response that each house evokes springs from the remarkable degree 
to which it acknowledges a cultural and landscape context. These characteristics suggest a 
clear break with the Prairie houses and seem to predate but not envisage the streamlined 
modernity of his late work. Yet comparing the characteristic relationship to the larger 
landscape issues of site and topography and studying the architectural plan and sectional 
development enable us to see all four works as a series of variations on a theme. 

Both the Hardy House and Fallingwater are situated on a dramatic sloping site overlooking 
a water element (the Hardy House overlooks Lake Michigan, Fallingwater a mountain 
stream). Wright's favored renderings of each building-perspective views taken from 
downhill-reveal his desire to exploit the drama of the setting. These views, oblique both 
in plan and section, are not easily experienced by the visitor; taken from off the beaten 
path, they are not an integral part of the entry sequence experience. The perspective view 
of the Hardy House (rendered by Marion Mahoney) places the structure in an exaggerated 
position near the top of the vertically elongated picture frame. A carefully rendered 
dogwood blossom is in the right foreground, and a distant tree is silhouetted in the upper 
left corner. Faint diagonal lines indicating the sloping bluff move in an opposing direction 
from upper right to lower left. The dynamic tension thus created between images near and 
low and high and far are the reverse of the accustomed experience in Western landscape 
painting. The composition is based on Japanese prints and lends a shifting, dynamic frame 
of reference that belies the symmetrical order of the structure itself. Whereas the means of 
presentation of the Hardy House is dynamic, the building itself is static; with Fallingwater, 
both the means of presentation and the object itself are consistently dynamic compositions. 
The Hardy House rendering is a graphic premonition of an idea that was to be fulfilled by 
the architecture of Fallingwater. 

Like the Hardy House, published views of the La Miniatura emphasize its setting, 
featuring both a water element and a downward cascade of terraces. The Freeman House 
lacks an immediate water element such as La Miniatura, but perhaps the Pacific Ocean 
itself fills this role, for the house is directed toward a magnificent vista of the ocean to the 
south. The hillside site is no less dramatic than the others; quite predictably the preferred 
perspective and photographic views are from an oblique angle from below. 

In addition to adopting a strong point of view about the dramatic possibilities of their sites, 
Wright imbues these four houses with a consistent approach to the scale and hierarchy of 
their spaces. Here again, as with his other buildings, Wright has employed a grid as the 
vehicle for translating principle into a course of action that governs his approach to 
creating and refining spaces. Our analysis of the plans of the four houses shows the 
influence of the tartan grid. At the most general level the broad zones of the grid define 
spaces for congregation or rest, and the narrow zones define spaces for circulation. 
Furthermore, the broad zones define exterior extensions of space, and the narrow zones 
define residual or transitional spaces, such as storage or roof eaves, that is, transitions 
between inside and outside space. Although the tartan grid appears to provide a strong 
foundation for generating designs, Wright doe not allow his plans to become slaves of the 
grid. The ordering potential of the grid is always balanced by the search for dynamic 
experiences of space in harmony with the site. 

Our first view of the footprints of these houses reveals how the site conditions play an 
important role in varying the interpretations of the grid to create distinctive buildings out 
of a common base. The major axis of the Hardy House is described by the living room at 
the top of the bluff and the lake at the bottom. The looser organization of La Miniatura 
and the Freeman House reflect a more irregular topography further tensioned by 
conflicting demands for entry and view; however, each establishes a major axis between 
living and water. The footprint of Fallingwater creates a dynamic tension through the 
juxtaposition of the grid and a strong diagonal edge of the natural site that approximates a 
thirty-degree angle.{See Levine, Neil. 1982. Frank Lloyd Wright's Diagonal Planning. in 
Helen Searing, ed., In Search of Modern Architecture: A Tribute to Henry-Russell 
Hitchcock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The angle was no doubt suggested by the earlier 
wooden bridge as well.} 

The T-shaped configuration of Hardy is contrasted to a more compact cubelike volume of 
La Miniatura, with a smaller garage volume pulled away to form a kind of porte cochere in 
the connecting link. The resultant L-building footprint might be seen as a distortion of 
the more Platonic Hardy plan. We could also see the symmetrical "saddlebags" on either 
side of the living room-dining room space of the Hardy House pivoted to a back position 
in La Miniatura to transform the plan into a casual, site-specific structure. The Freeman 
House footprint is similar to La Miniatura and has a version of its porte cochere garage 
arrangement. The house portion, although based on a square, is less enclosed as a cubic 
volume and more expressed as an open composition of intersecting planes above and 
rather massive volumes below, with stepped terraces in the manner of the Hardy House. 

The Fallingwater footprint exhibits a modified cruciform plan not unlike the earlier houses 
of the Prairie school. The overall configuration is obviously not regular and, unlike the 
more simplified arrangements of Millard and Freeman, has a fractured, stepping system of 
walls and volumes that roughly follow the line of the rock ledge to the rear. The porte 
cochere makes its required appearance, but it is attached to the rear ledge of rock, which 
acts formally and spatially in a similar manner to both Millard and Freeman. The 
interweave of space and form precisely at the point of entry creates an explosive release 
that recalls the same theme in the earlier houses. 

A cursory examination of the plan of La Miniatura reveals an important link to that of the 
Hardy House. Despite the overall asymmetry of La Miniatura, it possesses a strong local 
symmetry about the main living room volume that projects down the curved, sloping site 
and approximately at right angles to it in the manner of Hardy. Furthermore, the fireplace 
and stair elements retain their dominant position as core elements within the structure and 
serve to stabilize the structure with an articulated inner core. 

The Freeman House displays similar themes. The symmetrical living room, with a 
downhill view perpendicular to the slope and axially opposed hearth, recalls a similar 
motif found in both Hardy and La Miniatura. The kitchen and stair are wrenched 
asymmetrically to one side to accommodate entry and a secondary view along the site's 
corner position. On the lower level a symmetrical pair of bedrooms occurs directly below 
the living room, thereby enforcing this axis, and opens onto the lower terrace. The 
"pouches" of storage that frame the Hardy and La Miniatura living rooms are now joined 
together along the central axis on the lower level. This coupling into a single volume stops 
at the living level to provide an axial terrace. The resultant dissolution of the corners 
suggests a more dynamic and oblique aspect than the bracketed condition of Hardy and 
Millard. The oblique view thus afforded capitalizes on the panoramic setting and is more 
consistent with Wright's preference for the diagonal. The overall composition and 
disposition of the functional elements have changed radically from the previous examples, 
and yet the local symmetry of the living room provides the key to the transformations that 
have taken place. 

The plan of Fallingwater, despite its seeming inexhaustible movement and overwhelming 
dynamism, contains symmetrical volumes that provide stabilizing elements similar to the 
earlier houses. The main living room space, for example, is nearly symmetrical, with the 
most symmetrically disposed portion toward the front and dissolving into a more casual 
arrangement toward the rear and sides. It is emphasized by the carefully designed glazing, 
built-in seating, and recessed ceiling cove and lighting, all of which align perfectly with 
the main living room axis. The sides are allowed more freedom, as the fireplace on one 
side opposite the entry, water stair, and study demonstrate. Despite the overall asymmetry, 
the localized symmetry acts as a counterpoint to define a hierarchy of spaces and stabilize 
the composition. The bedrooms, study, and kitchen have been disposed in an asymmetrical 
manner, complementing and expressing the diagonal rock ledge to the rear. The overall 
effect is informal and "natural" and results in a mastery of dynamic building elements that 
disguises their carefully disciplined order. 

A comparison of the sectional disposition of these four houses is particularly revealing. In 
the Hardy House and La Miniatura the same double-volume living room exists, each with 
upper balcony connecting to sleeping quarters. The lowest level, directly below the living 
room, is reserved for the dining room; similar connections exist between its relationship to 
the kitchen area and, more important, to its terrace. 

All of these similarities, despite the obvious superficial differences, suggest that Wright 
was enlisting his known earlier work to formulate a solution to a new situation. Although 
changes that respond to materials, to regional imperatives and perhaps even to a changing, 
more casual temperament are apparent, the parti has remained essentially the same. 

Fallingwater stands apart from these earlier examples in its use of concrete-reinforced 
terraces that dramatically hover over the waterfall that gives it its name. Several houses 
among Wright's earlier work could provide plausible prototypes for Fallingwater, and our 
intention is not to suggest that only one source or linear development of its genesis is 
possible. The early Charnley House uses a modest, although distinctive, balcony over the 
front entrance that establishes Wright's predisposition toward a vocabulary of 
interpenetrating and sliding volumes. A more striking example would be the Gale House, 
dated 1909 (but perhaps designed as early as 1905). Wright specifically cites this house as 
a premonition of Fallingwater. Its oblique perspective in the Wasmuth portfolio features a 
prescient series of balconies and terraces stabilized by a vertical chimney mass placed in a 
shifted asymmetrical arrangement that produces a strong rotating movement and sense of 
dynamism. Given this dynamic view, we are surprised to discover the strict symmetry of 
the forward portion, which includes the typical living room and terrace and symmetrically 
paired bedrooms and balcony above in a manner to be followed by the Freeman House, but 
with the levels simply inverted. 


THE IN-LINE HOUSE 

The in-line house, as Wright sometimes referred to it, is a variation on the cruciform 
theme and one of his most important residential plan types. The plan of the in-line house 
is established by a baseline. This horizontal axis determines the disposition of a primary 
longitudinal volume and serves as a foil for one or more secondary cross-axes. It initiates 
the design and becomes an organizational armature for its development. 

The relationship between building form and land form, always a prime concern for 
Wright, is an especially important aspect of this house type. The nature of the landscape 
helps to define two versions of the in-line house. The flat site variant, exemplified in the 
Husser House of 1897, elevates the main living area above grade on a high podium of 
secondary spaces to create a kind of piano nobile. The hillside or hillcrest variant, 
illustrated by the Francis Little House of 1913, develops the house and its site in response 
to a more varied landscape that offers an opportunity to elevate the house naturally. In 
either case the main living level is raised to enjoy a privileged position from which to view 
the landscape, which unfolds on one or more sides. The reason for the extreme proportions 
of the type can be found in the building's relationship to the site, but they also seem to be 
generated by Wright's formal and spatial predilection for horizontal lines and levitating 
volumes, which climax in the Robie House of 1909. 

Many examples of the in-line type appear consistently throughout his career. Besides the 
Husser and Robie houses, some of the more significant instances of the raised living room 
variety include the Tomek House of 1907, the Lloyd Lewis House of 1940, and the David 
Wright House of 1950. The last example is a member of this family, even though it 
appears in an unsuspecting circular guise. Its plan and curved ramp of a "tail" can best be 
understood as a raised in-line house that curls around itself like an armadillo. In addition 
to the Little House, the hillside and hillcrest in-line house type appears in important 
buildings such as the diminutive Usonian Goetsch-Winckler House of 1939 and the 
commanding Rose Pauson House of 1940. Both the flat and hill landscape variations 
display similar planning themes, and both can serve to illuminate different aspects of 
Wright's architectural principles. 


The Development of the In-Line House 

The first example of the in-line type is the unexecuted McAfee House of 1894. The site 
was to be a narrow flat strip on the shore of Lake Michigan. The elongated plan responds 
to this site constraint but in such a manner as to attempt to make a virtue of the extreme 
proportions. The house is raised on a shallow terrace plinth with living level below and 
bedrooms above. The interiors of the house are strangely unrelated to this lavish treatment 
at the base. A dense wall opens only occasionally to relieve its massive surface. The 
octagonal library and porte cochere fall in line with and articulate one end of the volume; 
at the other a blocklike kitchen and dining room is turned ninety degrees to the main axis. 
The contrast in treatment implies a dynamic movement from one end to the other, but 
whether the closed-to-open movement is dictated by the view and proximity to the lake 
(the published perspective suggests that the denser block and not the octagonal end 
actually enjoys the preferred view) or by some less site-inspired compositional motive is 
not clear. In any event it lacks the logic and assured expression that was to become 
apparent in the Husser House five years later. The entry is not integrated into the plan with 
conviction, as it occurs in a difficult knot of contrived diagonal spaces. Despite these 
shortcomings, the McAfee House sets the stage for the Husser House. Its similar elongated 
plan but raised living level demonstrates Wright's ability to critique his former work and to 
synthesize and edit ideas with a growing assurance. The Heeler House is a critical 
transitional work between these two that helps to clarify planning themes. 

The Insider Heeler House of 1897 represents another stage in the development of the type. 
This building on a narrow site might be seen as a more inflected, stretched version of the 
tripartite Charnley House turned ninety degrees to the street. The Heeler House is sited on 
a slight rise and approached by a generous stepped terrace that runs perpendicular to the 
street and parallel to the main axis of the house. The entry occurs off this terrace at ninety 
degrees to the body of the house and intersects it at a midway point. The resulting tripartite 
arrangement is not unlike the Charnley House. The living area is situated on one side and 
the dining and service area on the other, with a stair hall in between. The hall acts as a 
universal joint that connects the fore and aft portions of the house, and the stair provides a 
reciprocating vertical connection through the house, that weaves the movement pattern 
three-dimensionally. The elongated building form articulated with a symmetrical and 
hierarchical living room terminus, an entry approached off the primary axis and to one 
side, and an internal tripartite division are themes Wright continued to develop for the 
next several decades in the context of the in-line house. 


From Husser House to Robie House 

The Husser House is an extension of ideas first articulated in the McAfee House, which in 
turn was closely modeled on H. H. Richardson's plan for the Winn Memorial Library of 
1877-78. Wright's Husser House was built on the shores of Lake Michigan, and its raised 
living level was designed to capitalize on the view that such an elevated position could 
afford. Its extreme longitudinal plan and its pronounced horizontal aspect make it the first 
mature example of the in-line type. The linear deployment of the main body of the 
Husser House can be traced back to the McAfee House, but the cross-axial entry achieved 
by sliding along its side to a vertical circulation zone that bifurcates the house into living 
and dining zones is presumably the theme that Wright was to extract from the Heeler 
House. 

The Tomek House is of the raised living room type with entry below. It is located on an 
oblong corner site with driveway entry on the rear flank and a frontal pedestrian approach 
on the opposing side. The structure is an important transitional link between the Husser 
and Robie houses. Its elongated plan is modeled on the Husser type but with significant 
differences in its volumetric expression. On the exterior it plays to the street. Its entire 
length is unbroken along this side, acquiring a pavilion-like aspect that belies the 
complication to the rear of the attached service wing. Its extreme linear proportions are 
made more emphatic by continuous ribbon windows and deep, cantilevered eaves. The 
plastic unity is emphasized by similar treatment at both of the narrow ends in the form of 
alcoves and dramatic cantilevered roofs that enforce the notion of a pavilion. 

Next to Fallingwater, the Robie House{See both Connors, Joseph. 1984. The Robie House 
of Frank Lloyd Wright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Hoffmann, Donald. 
1984. Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House. New York:Dover} is perhaps Wright's most 
famous residential design. It has an immediately appealing unity and drama with sufficient 
incident and detail to qualify and give scale to an otherwise overwhelming singularity. Its 
unrelenting horizontal composition is reiterated at every level of detail. The roof overhang, 
raked Roman brick, cantilevered terrace, continuous stone coping, and continuous ribbon 
windows conspire to give a dynamic sense of movement and even levitation. Wright is 
claimed to have invented the term streamline, and surely this work more than any other 
from this period embodies the kinesthetic that term evokes. The Robie House is, above all, 
the fruits of the disciplined development of an idea that seems to unfold with an irresistible 
scientific logic from the McAfee House onward. Even though its dynamic form, as 
portrayed in perspective and countless photographs, is its best-known aspect, its final 
resolution is generated at least as much from Wright's attention to the plan. 

The house, which is located on an elongated corner site on the south side of Chicago, has 
its broad face open toward the south with a view of the park beyond from its raised living 
level. Significantly, Wright decided not to make the major entry frontal from its broad side 
but rather indirect from the less narrow frontage to the west. Service yard and garage 
occupy the extreme eastern edge of the site to the south. 

The Husser House plan organization is established by the typical baseline axis. It becomes 
the first step in the design of the plan and acts as a datum for its development. The 
ensuing longitudinal volume built around it comprises the major elements of the house. 
The two different ends of the structure suggest a dynamic directionality. At one pole the 
living room terminates in an outward burst formed by an octagonal porch-a typical motif 
for Wright during this period. The other pole ends in a service zone comprised of kitchen, 
servants' rooms, and a stable, which tends to stop the building like a bookend. Projecting 
from and opposing the linear treatment are two secondary axes. One is formed by the stair 
and its attendant entry zone, the other by the dining room and its projecting octagonal bay. 
These secondary volumes are shifted off-axis so that they do not align in plan. 
Furthermore, their extensions occur on opposite sides of the house, the dining bay toward 
the lake and the stair toward the landward side. Both of these factors induce a dynamic 
pinwheel motion, a preferred compositional mode for nearly all of Wright's mature 
domestic work. The opposing volumes are stabilized by the in-line volume itself, which is 
interpenetrated by yet another bounding volume defined by the alcove dining in the 
kitchen zone and the stair landing and its entry hall. From here the long extension toward 
the porch is punctuated with a living room bay. The system creates a complex weave of 
overlapping planes and interpenetrating volumes that could be elaborated ad infinitum. 

This compositional approach allows for great continuity in the major living spaces but also 
acts to give a degree of definition to each minor space. The seemingly contradictory need 
for individuality of part and unity of the whole is here brilliantly resolved and is a 
premonition of what was to follow in Wright's other domestic work. The interior-exterior 
relationship is such that every internal volume finds its external expression. The 
equilibrium Wright has been able to establish in this manner was a step forward in his 
quest to unify interior space and achieve a plasticity in the whole. 

The Tomek House plan is also organized along a baseline, but here the service zone is 
placed to one side to create a continuity of major interior spaces and exterior spaces 
projecting from both ends of the baseline. The living room and dining room on the main 
level seem to have been conceived as one large room, in contrast to the more incidental 
spatial treatment of the Husser House. The fireplace and stair have been moved to the 
center of the living space to punctuate it rather than separate it into two distinct rooms. 
The hearth at the center simultaneously anchors the house to the land and suggests vertical 
spatial continuity between levels. The rotational crossarms and bookend garage of the 
Husser disappear to be replaced by a disengaged garage and cubic service wing that 
interlocks the main living level and is completed three-dimensionally by the action of the 
bedrooms on the level above. The stair volume of the Husser has been withdrawn into the 
body of the Tomek like a retracted tongue, leaving only a vestige in the form of an entry 
terrace. The extreme formal and spatial unity of the Tomek House becomes the measure by 
which Wright develops his ultimate, bold statement along this theme embodied in the 
Robie House. 

The Robie House footprint reveals a longitudinal volume similar to that of the Husser and 
Tomek houses. This house, however, is even more articulated than either of them and 
gives the sense of an explicit pavilion that is about to disengage itself from its service 
wing. This effect is most apparent from the oblique vantage point of the southwest, which 
effectively obscures the service wing's presence. This vantage point is Wright's classic 
perspective and photographic view of the house, which underscores his concern about the 
"photogenic" aspect of his designs. The two prowlike end bays of the pavilion support this 
reading and suggest an overall shape and proportion akin to that of a sailing vessel. As at 
the Tomek House, the hearth pierces the center space like a ship's mast. Both the living 
and ground floor levels are conceived as continuous spaces punctuated and not separated 
by the hearth. The continuity of space achieved in the plan is elaborated through consistent 
secondary themes that are particularly apparent at the living room level. The pierced 
opening in the chimney above the mantel and the stepped ceiling, which gives the 
impression of an inverted ship's hull, act to unify and express the space. 

The proportion and unity of the space thus achieved on the living level of the Robie house 
are remarkably similar to those of the River Forest Tennis Club of 1906. Its prowlike ends 
display a similar formal treatment, and its broad terrace facing the tennis courts parallels a 
similar motif in the Robie so much so that it looks as if the two plans were made in collage 
fashion. The tennis club is only slightly lifted above grade and its plan opens to a central 
space for gatherings. The Robie, it might be imagined, takes this theme and 
simultaneously elevates the main level and collapses the central space by fusing the three 
peripheral fireplaces into a single central core. 

The main pavilion seems to be docked alongside its service wing. The kitchen, servants' 
rooms, garage and other secondary spaces have been so condensed and positioned in 
parallel orientation that they emphasize rather than counter the movement implied by the 
primary volume. However, the two volumes do not simply slide by one another. A 
cross-axial movement appears in the form of the stair and circulation, which literally 
help to knit the two sides together. Stabilizing their relationship, the bedroom level above 
interlocks both the living pavilion and the service wing. It is based on a square in plan like 
that of the Tomek House and is almost symmetrical about the cross-axis, which is further 
developed formally and spatially to the south with a symmetrical raised terrace and a lower 
garden that are articulated with extended walls and capped off by broad urns. The fireplace 
is centered on the principal axis described by the living pavilion. This axis is further 
reinforced by the symmetrical composition of the cantilevered terrace, doors, garden walls, 
and urns. 

The Robie House represents the climax of Wright's first career and comes at a time when 
his mastery of an architectonic language was at its peak. Although other projects of the 
in-line type followed, none captured the imagination of the twentieth-century like the 
Robie House. Wright subsequently designed versions of the in-line house, but none 
parallels the Robie House in the same direct way that the Johnson Wax Administration 
Building parallels the Larkin Building. 


OTHER VARIATIONS 

Characteristically, whenever Wright found a solution to a problem, he embodied it in a 
formal concept. These concepts frequently reemerged in other designs, strongly etched on 
the house plan, whereas the expressions in three-dimensional form might be considerably 
varied. The following pairings of houses help to illustrate some of these formal concepts 
that provide added dimensions to his work. 


The Pinwheel Plan 

Precursors of the pinwheel composition can be found in Wright's early house plans in 
which offset parallel axes induce a dynamic 'twist'. In breaking out of Palladian inspired 
symmetry the Blossom house plan extends offset axes in the form of semicircle enclosures 
of the entry porch and the conservatory to the rear. The Winslow house plan, especially the 
version showing the unexecuted octagonal tea pavilion, also shows divergent 'twists' of 
elements. The opposing driveway and dining axes are shifted along the 'x' axis, and the 
porte cochere and tea house extensions suggest a near equivalent shift along the 'y' axis. 
The beautifully proportioned and symmetrical street facade belies a much more dynamic 
garden facade. From the rear the rotational movement of the plan is revealed as the 
opposing volumes of tea house, dining room, porte cochere and even the vertical octagonal 
stair hall make clear. 

There are two different strategies for resolving the confluence of these axes, both of which 
produce a vertical 'z' axis. The Heurtly House demonstrates the strategy of joining the 
horizontal axes at a space. Its central stair hall is the vortex of a pinwheeling movement 
which joins living, dining, kitchen and bedrooms on the upper level. On the exterior, the 
prow-shaped bay windows and entry porch express this movement pattern; while the 
symmetrical arrangement of the large veranda acts to stabilize the spinning. 

The second strategy receives the pinwheel movement of the horizontal axes in a solid 
vertical core rather than open space. The first house designed in this manner is Wright's 
simple house in Oak Park of 1889. Although based on Bruce Price's shingle style work, the 
plan shows distinct tendencies away from the stability and containment implied in that 
prototype. The curved terraces, extended dining room, rear service stair and porch extend 
beyond the basic square of the structure in a clear rotational manner. The theme is picked 
up at the hearth and inglenook which seems to extend rotating arms to embrace a dynamic 
composition of space. Rotation is also implied by the shifted axes of the hearth and bay 
window at opposite corners of the living room. 

This strategy is continued in Wright's 1903 project for a studio house. It exhibits a 
complex set of tendencies which might be said to fluctuate between the closed 
compositional mode with defined central axes and a more open peripheral composition 
with shifted axes. This plan is interesting because of the ambiguity of incorporating both 
compositional strategies. The hearth marks the center of a square that acts as the unifying, 
stabilizing force in the plan. Dynamic rotation is induced by extending arms on shifted 
axes. The prowshaped porch is opposed by the bedroom and the studio opposed by the 
sitting porch. 

The pinwheel appears first in its pure form as a site plan. The Quadruple Block houses of 
1901 show a square land parcel divided into four equal parts. Each house is oriented and 
approached in a consistent but rotated manner. This organizational device results in a 
series of rotationally symmetrical groupings. Wright claims that this composition insures 
variety and privacy. Wright's belief in the possibility of infinite variety through mechanical 
means is here demonstrated in an example which was to inform all his late housing 
projects. St. Mark's Tower, Price Tower, and Suntop Homes develop this theme of 
rotational symmetry in individual buildings for multiple housing. 

A literal use of the symmetrical plan for the individual dwelling is rare. The Johnson 
house, 'Wingspread' is the exception that proves the rule. It is modeled on the earlier 
Booth house which sits on a ridge surround by ravines that are crossed by the entry bridge 
and bedroom wing. The spatial arms extend into the landscape but converge at the center 
living room space which is developed as a large volume with its own vertical axis. 
Although these arms are shifted they still develop along two primary axes. The Johnson 
house is more emphatic. It is organized around a central living room 'teepee' space similar 
in scale to that of the Booth; its bedroom and service wings rotate around this center like 
an enormous windmill. 


Hearth Themes and Variations 

Because residential design accounts for the largest portion of Wright's work, that he would 
address his principal concerns and evolve most of his concepts within the realm of the 
hearth type is understandable. In the previous chapter we reviewed the basic variations of 
the hearth type: the cruciform, hillside, in-line, and pinwheel. These examples illustrate 
the persistence of organizational concepts throughout Wright's career and the flexibility 
and inventiveness with which he addressed changes in needs, context, and time. This 
compact overview represents the trunk and branches of the tree of his thinking as 
embodied in his designs for the hearth. In this chapter we look at the continuing themes 
that distinguish his residential architecture, the principles of growth for this tree. We also 
focus on specific variations or elaborations on Wright's domestic themes. 

The relationship between variation and theme is an important part of the realization of the 
art of architecture just as the successful integration of personal expression and universal 
concepts lies at the heart of poetry or music. The themes connect Wright's designs with the 
known, shared world of architectural ideas including determinants of form such as order, 
unity, geometry, proportion, and hierarchy. The variations on themes connect his designs 
to the special features or qualities of the site, the client, and the architect. The theme 
relates to an intellectual, abstract realm; the variations relate to the emotional, experiential 
realm. However, in the juxtaposition of theme and variation we can fully appreciate the 
value of both. 

In the first part of this chapter we examine a few of Wright's basic themes about the 
realization and experience of three-dimensional space that consistently place a unique 
stamp on his domestic work. The themes include space, spatial weave, zoning, siting, unit 
system, structure, construction, and materials. Wright's persistent point of view about these 
features of defined space are the source of the energy and sophistication we experience 
upon entering his houses and a critical part of the means by which he translated principles 
into forms. The second part of the chapter reviews variations on these themes by 
comparative analysis of the plans of several pairs of houses: Coonley and Lloyd Lewis, 
Studio House of 1903, and the second Malcolm Wiley, Glasner and Goetsch-Winckler, 
Francis Little and Rose Pauson, Robie and Hanna, and Jacobs and Jester houses. Each of 
the pairs illustrates that even in variations on themes design concepts might reemerge at 
distant points in Wright's career. 


DOMESTIC THEMES 

What are the themes Wright pursued in his house designs? Foremost was a notion of 
centering, with the earth symbolized by the hearth at the core of the dwelling. The hearth 
provides the focus for the interior space and anchors the house in the landscape. Although 
drawn to the hearth (and its architectural adjunct, the inglenook) for warmth, shelter, and 
fellowship, the inhabitant can never occupy its center. Horizontal spaces extend and 
expand outward from the hearth toward the light and views at the perimeter of the house 
to suggest continuities with the landscape. Wright's houses have this quality not simply 
because they have a fireplace. The hearth, at the center of gravity of the dwelling within its 
dark, intimate recesses, acquires an intimacy and mystery akin to that of a shrine. In this 
way Wright's hearth echoes themes found in other architectural traditions, such as the 
tokonoma of the Japanese house and the tablinum of the Roman house. 


SPACE 

A unifying theme in all of Wright's houses is his distinctive idea of space.{See Brooks, H. 
Allen. 1979. Wright and the Destruction of the Box. Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians 38 (1):7-14} Within the context of domestic design, this development had two 
interrelated expressions. The first was to conceive of interior and exterior space as a single 
phenomenon that could move with an unimpeded horizontal extension into the landscape. 
Glass screens and enclosing walls fracture like louvres pivoted outward to direct the space 
to the landscape. The second was to minimize or eliminate altogether the interior divisions 
of the house. They act more like screens than solid walls. The traditional 
compartmentalization of interior rooms is replaced with a continuity of space that unifies 
living rather than segregating it into discrete parts. The realization that the essence of 
architecture was the space contained and not the container is akin to Lao-Tzu's dictum 
about the reality of space.{See Okakura, Kakuzo. 1964. The Book of Tea. New York 
Dover (originally published 1904, New York:Fos, Duffield & Co.).} Wright's architecture 
is above all generated by an inner spatial sense seeking expression on the exterior. This 
quality is the sense of plasticity that Wright so often mentioned. 


THE SPATIAL WEAVE 

Space described in such terms can still be inert or yield indifferent results. Wright's fertile 
imagination, aided by his training in abstract design, seized upon the metaphor of weaving 
to describe and perhaps help to formulate his ideas about space. Even a casual look at one 
of his early Prairie houses such as the Ullman House of 1905 reveals a complexity of 
overlapping, interweaving spaces. The two-dimensional plan overlap becomes a 
three-dimensional volumetric interpenetration. These volumes are not described literally 
by four walls but are only implied, sometimes to a greater or lesser extent, with piers, roof 
overhangs, ceiling recesses, terraces, garden walls, plantings, paving, and so forth. "True 
beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete" is the 
essence of this attitude, an attitude foreign to the classical tradition but embraced in 
Eastern philosophy by Lao-Tzu and Okakura.{See Sergeant, John. 1976. Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture. New York: Whitney Library 
of Design; p. 76} Within this world of multivalent space, we can experience a multiplicity 
of events simultaneously. All Wright's houses, including those from his Prairie, 
Wilderness, and Usonian periods, possess this dynamic weave that renders a shimmering 
spatial fabric rare in the history of architecture. 

The great variety, which is an irrefutable aspect of Wright's work, when over-emphasized 
can mask the underlying order that is common to the work and an integral part of his 
approach to creativity. This order at its simplest level can be reduced to a systematic 
development of major and minor cross-axes. These become the armature or 
"seed-germ" for the spatial volumes or other architectural elements they describe. To 
describe this system of crossed axis upon axis, Wright used the verb weave and called 
himself "the weaver." This textile analogy is perhaps a more descriptive term, for it 
captures the essence of what Wright had in mind: the continuity of space passing over and 
under and through other space. Axis was perhaps too architectural a term for Wright and 
conjured up negative associations with classicism and the Beaux Arts method of 
composition. Furthermore, it may have suggested a less continuous relationship, one with 
terminations and crosses rather than the fluidity suggested by the woven thread. 

In applying axes to the design process, Wright seems to follow the advice of Louis 
Sullivan: "There is always supposed to be a main axis: however much it may be overgrown 
or over-whelmed by the vitality of its sub-axes. Herein lies the challenge to the 
imagination."{Sullivan, Louis H. 1924. System of Architectural Ornament. New York: 
Press of the American Institute of Architects, Inc.; plate 5} The establishment of a 
horizontal axis, referred to as the base line by Wright, was the very first primal step in the 
design process. It may take the role of the centerline for a primary spatial volume, an edge, 
or another key organizing element, such as a terrace, drive, or pathway. Its placement in 
context was important and usually influenced by the natural site features, including 
topography and view. Wright could then proceed to cross or weave other volumes with this 
primary one. In the design process the original primary axis might be eclipsed by one or 
more of its cross-axes, thus rotating the plane of reference by ninety degrees. This 
changed orientation seems to be a common trait in his work, and some plans of this type 
can be oriented about one of two plausible primary axes. 

Wright's axes were not just "built axes"; they did not necessarily all occur in the same 
plane, and often they were layered or stacked vertically. His driveways and paths and even 
natural elements such as ravines or streambeds could assist in describing axes and 
corresponding shafts of space that became integral parts of the spatial weave, often 
occurring in layers below, above, or through the main house. In some house designs 
Wright's predominantly horizontal spatial weave was complemented by a vertical spatial 
weave where vertical spaces, chimneys, or other building elements expressed vertical axes. 

The most splendid example of this kind is to be found in Fallingwater, where the 
landscape is beautifully woven into the structure. A visitor encounters this theme 
immediately upon approaching the house. The drive crosses the entry bridge spanning the 
mountain stream and connecting to the main house by low retaining walls. The drive 
continues up a gentle slope between the structure and the rock ledge. At this point visitors 
may enter underneath a porte cochere formed by concrete beams spanning the gap between 
house and natural hillside. Continuing ahead, the visitor drives through and around to the 
upper-level garage and guest house. From here the visitor continues across a second 
bridge, which reiterates the theme of the lower. It spans the drive and ties the house back 
to the rock ledge. The visitor has just experienced a rhythmic spatial weave of movement 
over, under, and through that was accomplished with a mixture of architectural, 
architectonic, and natural elements. The resultant composition effectively unites 
architecture and nature as one. 


THE ZONED HOUSE 

During the Prairie years Wright tended to separate and articulate program elements into 
distinct volumes that were expressed as such on the exterior. The houses usually have 
three distinct zones: living and dining, private and sleeping, and service, including garage 
and outbuildings. Besides formal living and dining rooms, the first zone often contained a 
range of other minor spaces. Typically a study, library, or similar intimately scaled space 
would be found in addition to a reception area or entry hall. The inglenook was a 
prominent feature positioned next to the massive fireplace it embraced. All spaces in the 
living zone were usually on the same level or separated by a few steps. When the living 
level is raised, the ground floor directly beneath usually contains a playroom or other 
common room. Rather than being assigned to separate rooms, living functions were 
interconnected as a single spatial continuum. When a greater degree of privacy was 
necessary, screens were used. Wright had banished the door from the living area forever. 

The service zone consisted of the kitchen, pantry storage, and so forth, along with servants' 
rooms; sometimes a garage or stable was included in this zone as well. Often the services 
occupied an entire wing and therefore were expressed as separate and less hierarchically 
important elements. The disposition of these rooms was straight-forward and efficient 
and lacked any special architectural treatment. The services could occupy one or more 
levels, although they usually were clustered on the living level but separated from the rest 
of the family activities; a separate service stair linked all levels of the house. The garage or 
stable might be attached to the house, but even when detached these structures were 
integrated into the design. Often they were connected to the house by garden wall, 
pergolas, or another landscape element that defined exterior space. Sometimes the 
automobile is recognized by a porte cochere, typically integrated into the main house, as a 
continuation of the broad cantilevered eaves that provide protected entry to the house for 
passengers. 

The bedroom and private zone was frequently lifted to an upper level and connected to the 
ground floor by the primary family stair. The bedrooms were usually given less attention 
than the living zone in terms of their accommodation and architectural design, and some 
display clumsy planning. Relatively few plans of the upper sleeping levels were published 
by Wright, perhaps an indication of his view of their importance. Typically he imposed a 
compact symmetrical arrangement on this level, modified by the stair and hearth core. The 
expression on the exterior was carefully controlled, however, and the symmetry of the 
upper plan was brought into harmony with the rest of the design. The Willitts House is a 
good example of this programmatic arrangement, but the later Coonley House shows to 
what extent the theme could be extended and proliferated across the landscape. 

During the middle years and especially during the Usonian period, Wright reduced the 
number of program elements in his house designs to reflect his interest in the changing 
living patterns in the American household. Consequently, the house is developed in 
simpler terms than the Prairie House. It typically consists of two rather than three zones. 
The living zone contains a living area focused on the hearth, a dining alcove integral with 
the larger space, and a "work space," or kitchen, defined as a prominent volume attached 
to the hearth. The kitchen behind closed doors, serviced by the main and butler, was 
replaced with a more democratic system; the Usonian House had no "menials." The garage 
was replaced by a carport to eliminate the gaping hole of the garage door. The private zone 
might include a study, guest room, or workshop in addition to the bedrooms. Usually these 
spaces are treated as cells and efficiently lined up along a single loaded gallery or corridor. 
The end of the wing is articulated as a special formal event and may contain the master 
bedroom or other specialized program element. 


SITING 

Wright's ideas about siting the house in the landscape are among his most poignant 
architectural observations. Contained within this seemingly neutral preference for seeing 
building in the round is a deep antiurban bias. Buildings that lack frontality can be said to 
be incapable of defining the space associated with the traditional city, such as streets, 
squares, and open space. They are conceived more as objects to be placed within space or 
alternatively to generate space rather than define its edges. Wright's houses were 
conceived without the context of corridor street in mind; the closest he gets is the rather 
loose alignment along suburban sites such as Oak Park that do acknowledge front and 
back to a limited degree by the location of services toward the rear and major rooms 
toward the street. However, Wright's Usonian houses deliberately turn their backs to the 
street and open instead to a rear garden. The gaping carport, a remnant of the porte 
cochere, seems to inhale its visitors like a vacuum. The statement is emphatic: The 
relationship to the private world and the landscape is to be cultivated. The public world of 
the street (or what is left of it) is to be denied. 

Although Wright's houses do not normally configure space at the scale of urban form, they 
are crafted supremely well to modulate exterior space associated with the individual 
dwelling. Courts, gardens, terraces, fountains, and the like form an integral part of the 
dwelling and become extensions of it. The entry court at Taliesin and the cantilevered 
terraces of Fallingwater are only two of the more conspicuous examples. Even the modest 
Usonian houses never lose their intimate connection with the exterior, as both the 
Goetsch-Winckler House and the first Jacobs House demonstrate so well. 

The spatial connectedness to landscape is further enforced by its grounding on the earth 
itself. The building grows out of the earth; it does not levitate above like a Villa Savoye. 
Even though dramatic cantilevers are prominent from time to time, they are carried back 
to the ground on sturdy supports. The earth, whether flat or sloped, high or low, is 
embraced. Wright said of Taliesin West that he did not so much build it as "dig it up." 


UNIT SYSTEM 

All the buildings I have ever built, large and small, are fabricated upon a unit system as 
the pile of a rug is stitched into the warp. Thus each structure is an ordered fabric; rhythm, 
consistent scale of parts, and economy of construction are greatly facilitated by this simple 
expedient-a mechanical one absorbed in a final result to which it has given more 
consistent texture, a more tenuous quality as a whole.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1925. In the 
Cause of Architecture. The Third Dimension. Quoted in Wijdeveld, Henricus T., ed. 1925. 
The Life Work of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, Santpoort Holland: 
Wendingen. p. 57} 

The importance of the grid, or "unit system," as Wright preferred to call it, provides an 
important underlying structure that has profound consequences for his architecture. His 
preoccupation with this method of design probably stems from his early Froebel training, 
as Richard MacCormac has convincingly demonstrated.{See pivotal essays by 
MacCormac, Richard C. 1968. The Anatomy of Wright's Aesthetic. Architectural Review 
143:143-146; and MacCormac, Richard C. 1974. Froebel's Kindergarten Training and 
the Early Work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Environment and Planning B, 1:29-50} Once 
implanted in Wright's fertile imagination, this idea flowered under the tutelage of 
Sullivan, as Wright's designs, especially for tile, prove. His interest was further supported 
by Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament, a pivotal text that demonstrated that an infinite 
wealth of design riches could be created based on a simple system of grids and overlapping 
grids. These examples proved to Wright that "mechanical means to infinite variety" was 
not an impractical dream. 

The term "unit system" is more descriptive than grid and more inclusive in its meaning. 
Not only is there a pejorative cast to the term grid that associates it with inflexible 
monotony but also it implies a purely two-dimensional understanding. The unit system 
can imply a three-dimensional spatial weave whereby elements appear and disappear and 
then reappear through spatial manipulation of elements. This is the warp and woof of 
which Wright so often spoke. 

The practical dividend of this system was to allow for standardized planning and building 
construction procedures and parts that were to result in economic advantages, at least in 
theory. The horizontal module was often four feet by four feet or four feet by two feet, thus 
capitalizing on the building industry's standardized dimensions in wood and masonry. The 
vertical module, also based on wood and masonry practices but less directly so, was more 
varied in treatment. The Usonian homes were based on a one-foot, one-inch 
stratification that cut through the entire house like an egg slicer, governing mullion 
placement, sill and door heights, and built-in furniture and bookshelves. 


STRUCTURE AND CONSTRUCTION 

When viewed in a technologically deterministic way, Wright's houses occasionally embody 
engineering or construction innovations; the mechanical systems at the Martin House and 
the structural design at Fallingwater stand out. However, technology was not the ultimate 
determinant of form. Occasional forays into innovative structure and construction such as 
his textile block houses result in serious technical shortcomings, no matter how intriguing 
the initial premise may have been in the abstract. The plastic results are always more 
satisfying than the pragmatic necessities. We look to the Robie House for reasons other 
than structural or constructional methods. Even though Fallingwater makes a conspicuous 
show of structure, it is always in the service of a larger idea-which is why Fallingwater is 
more interesting than a simple collection of dramatically cantilevered trays. 


MATERIALS 

Wright's sense of materials lent a special flavor to his vocabulary of abstract forms and 
interpenetrating space. The "nature of materials" expressed an attitude that attempted to 
harmonize all aspects of the design with nature or, paradoxically, the machine. Its message 
was not to fight the material at hand by making it behave like another; therefore, wrought 
iron should not be made to look like stone and stone should not be asked to behave like 
iron. The inherent qualities of each material should be understood and allowed to govern 
an appropriate expression. His houses give a good indication of where this approach leads 
and perhaps reveal some of its contradictions. Fallingwater is no doubt the supreme 
example of the synthesis of materials and architectural expression. Nevertheless, many of 
Wright's identical plan types are executed in a variety of materials. The Martin-Barton 
House in brick and wood served as the plan type for the Holly-hock House, which was 
built in stud and stucco but was really intended to be built of reinforced concrete. The 
Prairie house could switch from wood and stucco to masonry and hidden steel without 
markedly influencing the form and certainly without changing spatial qualities. Although 
undoubtedly stimulating Wright to new invention, the materials seem to aid rather than 
rigidly determine any given design. 


ORGANIC VERSUS CLASSICAL 

For Wright, organic form did not mean the literal imitation of nature but an abstraction 
based on an understanding of natural principles. In his usage of the word to describe 
organic design, he seems to have relied on two very different traditions. One is linked to a 
nineteenth-century idea of growth expressed by Herbert Spencer.{See Spencer, Herbert. 
1864. Principles of Biology.} He could liken animal or vegetable growth to mathematics 
and specifically makes an analogy to crystals and their formation. The other notion of 
organic design has a classical base. When Wright insists on a relation between the part 
and the whole and the whole and the part, he is simply paraphrasing Alberti and other 
Renaissance theorists.{Alberti, L. B. 1966. Ten Books on Architecture. New York: 
Transatlantic Arts; and Wittkower, Rudolph. 1952. Architectural Principles in the Age of 
Humanism. London: Tiranti} 

Wright's domestic architecture is usually characterized as informal. For the most part this 
observation is correct. Wright cherished this quality as a distinct virtue in his houses and 
never tired of comparing his "organic" informal approach to the rigid symmetries and axes 
of classical design and Palladianism. In contrast, his public buildings were often rigidly 
symmetrical and organized about one or more major and minor axes. However, a strict, 
informal classification of Wright's residential work fails to acknowledge the more complex 
attitude toward classicism that this work exhibits. 

Wright was not an advocate of the picturesque, even though many of his admirers have 
tried to label him as such. He made his position clear when he discussed his perspective 
representation of his designs: 

The schemes are conceived in three dimensions as organic entities, let the picturesque 
perspective fall how it will. While a sense of the incidental perspectives the design will 
develop is always present, I have great faith that if the thing is rightly put together in true 
organic sense with proportions actually right the picturesque will take care of 
itself.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1908. In the Cause of Architecture. Quoted in Wijdeveld, 
Henricus T., ed. 1925. The Life Work of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, 
Santpoort Holland:Wendingen. pp. 18-19} 


CLASSICISM 

Almost all the Prairie houses exhibit a debt to classical precepts of design. The Willitts 
House, for example, is neatly organized about two major axes with minor cross-axes 
occurring at intervals. Each end of the resultant cruciform is carefully designed with a 
symmetrical terminus emphasizing the axiality of each. These precepts are evident not 
only in the hierarchically important spaces such as the living room, porte cochere, dining 
room, and porch, but also in the service wing, where twin maids' rooms are expressed as a 
symmetrical volume on the exterior. The building is further divided into a tripartite 
organization in both plan and elevation. In general, local symmetries can be discovered in 
Wright's work at any period, although Wright's domestic work tends to become more 
asymmetric over time, climaxing in his Usonian homes, which almost, but never quite, 
relinquish classical principles. 

The classical base, shaft, and capital organization appears in Wright's work as well. 
Wright's "water table" or raised podium was rationalized in practical terms as a means to 
combat moisture, but it also provided a visual base on which to place his building, a kind 
of stylobate. The middle section of horizontally banded walls and ribbons of glass were 
then emphatically capped off by the deep, overhanging eaves. The proportions evident in 
the plan and elevations employ simple whole-number relationships and especially make 
use of the square. It reveals a mastery of proportion that went far beyond his more overtly 
classical contemporaries. Wright's buildings always acknowledge gravity, even though 
they may display a derring-do attitude with cantilevered members. Unlike De Stijl 
examples, his building elevations do not make sense turned on their 90 or 180 degrees. 
Gerit Rietveld's Schroeder house, for example, would be able to sustain such an 
interpretation, but even Wright's most abstract houses, such as the Gale, could not. Gravity 
is a law that Wright chose not to transgress. 


FRONTALITY AND ROTATION 

Wright's houses do not have a facade in any ordinary sense of the word, and almost no 
elevations of his work were published during his lifetime. No elevations appear in the one 
hundred plates of drawings in his international debut.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1910. 
Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth. 
There is a partial elevation of the Winslow House.} Hitchcock's classic study, In the 
Nature of Materials, which was prepared with Wright's assistance, has more than four 
hundred illustrations. The preponderance consists of photographs, perspective drawings, 
plans, occasional sections, but only one elevation, the McCormick House project of 1907, 
is included.{Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. 1942. In The Nature of Materials. The Buildings 
of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887-1941. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce (the 
McCormick Residence is figure 139)} Only since documents from Taliesin have been 
made available have we seen that elevations were not simply the literal translation of the 
plan but an important part of Wright's design process. His deliberate use of studied 
proportions and vertical axial relationships would have been impossible to achieve in 
perspective. Considering that other architects such as Le Corbusier make a conspicuous 
display of the facade in both drawings and photographs, why are they not illustrated in 
Wright's publications? Obviously Wright did not want his buildings to be understood as 
flattened planes but rather as plastic volumes, which is in keeping with his well-known 
disdain for the "paperthin cardboard box" of modern European architecture. Virtually all 
his perspectives and photographs are taken from diagonal vantage points that emphasize 
the volumetric quality of the building. Wright's preference for the oblique view expressed 
his desire for dynamic formal and spatial relationships instead of the static relationship 
that he felt was implied by frontality. Seeing Wright's buildings in elevation is often a 
visual shock, and we might not immediately recognize even a familiar work such as the 
Robie House or Fallingwater. 


THE VARIATIONS ON DOMESTIC THEMES 

To further illustrate the potential of the domestic themes and Wright's creative approach to 
architectural design, we have selected a number of examples of residential designs to 
demonstrate variations on some of the themes previously discussed. 

Spatial Weave: The Francis Little and Rose Pauson Houses 
In their materials and construction, the Francis Little House of 1913 in Minnesota and the 
Rose Pauson House of 1940 in the Arizona desert demonstrate Wright's regional approach 
to design. However, their plans reveal strong similarities in interpretation to the in-line 
hearth type. Both exhibit a dynamic interpretation of Wright's concept of spatial weave. 
The Little House crowns the ridge of a gentle rise in the landscape. A large terrace acts as 
a focus and organizational datum for the house, which is conceived as a collection of more 
or less discrete elements that straddle the spine of the hill in a stepped diagonal line. A 
closer inspection reveals a clear progression from the contained bedroom wing at one end 
to the living volume at the other that becomes progressively more open and disengaged. 
The theme culminates in the screened pavilion, which completes the movement by turning 
its axis ninety degrees to the main terrace. An informal trail of garden terraces and stairs 
carries the system into the landscape. This movement is countered by a formal entry stair 
and terrace perpendicular to the main terrace but parallel to the screened pavilion. These 
elements are set off axis from one another to suggest a rotational shift not unlike that of 
the Husser house entry stair and dining bay. 

The entry axis thus established intersects the composition at the critical joint between 
living room volume and screened pavilion. This vantage point offers a view of the 
landscape beyond, and the visitor is made to prepare to spiral off axis into the great living 
room to the left or the screened pavilion to the right. The diagonal axis of the site is 
continued through the living room and dining hall by a movement system that connects 
diagonally opposite corners. A fireplace acts as a hinge between these spaces and stabilizes 
the main axis of the living room. The open terrace enjoys an oblique view to one side of 
the ridge, and the dining hall offers an equivalent diagonal prospect to the other side. The 
diagonal is continued to the elaborated bedroom wing that features a pavilionlike terminus 
at either end; kitchen services are below. 

The tripartite division on the first level of the Rose Pauson House of 1940 and the 
cross-axial movement of the entry sequence recall similar themes in the Little House. 
The Pauson House responds to an entirely different regional context and employs radically 
different architectural vocabulary and materials. Desert stone fused by concrete into 
massive battered pylons and stepped terraces acts as an armature for the wood-sheathed 
volumes that support and define interior space. The structure straddles a low ridge that 
affords spectacular views of the vast desert plain and the mountains beyond. The entry 
sequence begins at the base of its hill at the carport and gate and seems to harpoon the 
broad flank of the structure above and pierce through its skin to the other side. At this 
point the visitor becomes aware of the mountain range that was partially hidden by the 
wall-like structure. Almost immediately the visitor turns ninety degrees to finally 
encounter the entry. Underscaled and unexpected, the threshold passes through a dark, 
compressed gallery that finally climaxes in the two-story living room, which affords a 
magnificent framed view of the mountains beyond. 

The living room is orthogonal in plan, but it is defined by a dynamic arrangement of solids 
and voids that conspire to give a strong diagonal axis. The visitor enters at the angle of the 
dining room and the fireplace mass, which turns as it meets its far corner. Diagonally 
opposite the entry is a glazed, two-story glass wall that also turns its corner. The 
resulting shift twists the space along an oblique axis. On the first level the entry 
passageway separates the house into a service core and a living, dining, and kitchen core. 
The upper-level bedroom and balcony bridge the gap like a giant beam to provide a 
visual and formal link of the two sides. 


Zoning 

Early in his career Wright's project for a studio house (1903) demonstrates his desire to 
explore new interpretations of the zoning of domestic functions, particularly in the 
principal living areas. An unimpeded flow of space is created between the living, dining, 
and studio zones. Even the small bedroom can share in the dynamic configuration of 
space. 

In 1934, Wright's design for the second Malcolm Willey House, on a gently sloping site in 
Minneapolis, combines living and dining in one large space with a separate, articulated 
bedroom wing. The entry through the living room wing makes through circulation 
necessary to the bedroom, a planning flaw that Wright later corrected in similar houses by 
placing the entry at the joint between the two wings. The organization could be seen as a 
"bent" in-line house because the bedroom wing makes a hook to enclose the yard like a 
garden wall. The innovation in the planning of the combined living-dining room 
arrangement with simplified kitchen and services, which was to lead to his Usonian 
House, stemmed from Wright's determination to build an economic and simplified 
program for the average American family. 

Siting: The Avery Coonley and Lloyd Lewis Houses 
Important departures from the antiurban residential object floating in the landscape can be 
found in the plan compositions of the Coonley and Lloyd Lewis houses. Both designs 
capture and cultivate the landscape in the form of exterior spaces partially enclosed by 
building components. These exterior courts become principal organizers of the houses 
while preserving extensions of space into the natural landscape. 

The wall-like Lloyd Lewis house faces toward the river and turns its back toward the 
land. This duality between its two long sides is qualified by the narrow ends, which 
terminate in pavilion-like cantilevers. The living, dining, and kitchen work space occupy 
an elevated position in the "head" with servant and guest quarters at the same grade as the 
entry below. The "tail," located a half level above the ground plane, contains bedrooms 
and is accessed by a long, single-loaded gallery corridor. The resulting split-level 
section is connected by a stair that connects the two parts and is accessed through the 
entrance loggia. The ensemble resembles a steam engine pulling a coal tender with the 
stair acting as the coupler. Although some similarities to the Robie House should be 
immediately apparent, a third example from Wright's Prairie years can make a connection 
to both the Robie and Lloyd Lewis houses. 

Both the core portion of the Coonley complex and the Lloyd Lewis House display a similar 
disposition of functional elements. The living rooms act as the key to the plan. Although 
that of the Coonley is T-shaped and the Lloyd Lewis is oblong, both define a hierarchical 
locus of activity. Both act as a compositional lens that focuses energy outward toward the 
landscape. In both houses the axis originates in the hearth and expands into the living 
area, then to its terrace planting area, and then to the natural landscape beyond. The 
compression and closure at one pole transform into expansion and openness at the other. 
The analogous organization of the two buildings includes the water element; the formal 
pool in the Coonley has its equivalent in the flowing river of the Lloyd Lewis. Both water 
elements-one placid and the other dynamic-relate back to the hearth, which enshrines 
the household flame. The hearth is rooted to the earth but lifted into the air overlooking 
the water. The orchestration of the four primary elements in these two buildings defines a 
cosmological significance for Wright that is apparent in many of his houses, Fallingwater 
being perhaps the most striking example of a grounded hearth and airborne space over 
flowing water. The dining service and bedroom wings that attach to the living room help 
to define Wright's changing ideas about the programmatic nature of the house and his 
concomitant transformed notion of formal to informal composition. 

A less symmetrical development of the Coonley unfolds as the visitor moves further away 
from the axis defined by the hearth and the reflecting pool. The paired symmetrical stairs 
at the edge of the living room act as hinges. One connects to the entry porte cochere below 
and the dining and service wing above. The other connects the playroom directly below 
and the bedroom wing above. All parts of the house are linked both vertically and 
horizontally to the living room by the stairs and by a narrow passageway behind the 
fireplace and its flanking screen walls. Although the overall organization is asymmetrical, 
individual and coupled instances of symmetrical rooms are imbedded within its length, a 
typical treatment for Wright in many of his linear plan elements. Similarly the bedroom 
wing is an asymmetrical, rambling, L-shaped wing. Here as well, however, symmetrical 
events punctuate its ends and midpoints. 

The Lloyd Lewis House lacks paired symmetrical stairs, an elaborated service wing, and a 
separate dining room. Yet all these elements are present as vestiges and can be thought of 
as being partially absorbed elements in a new ensemble. This formulation allows a simple 
transformation process to explain the change. A simple attenuation of the Coonley 
bedroom wing would yield a similar plan. 

The point of this analysis is not to insist that Wright used the Coonley as a specific model 
for the Lloyd Lewis. It is rather to serve as a vehicle that will allow us to speculate on 
Wright's design method and ultimately the buildings themselves. It suggests that even late 
in his career Wright valued the themes in his earlier work and was able to continue those 
themes in a transformed state. Novelty per se was less important to Wright than rendering 
appropriate form to the conditions at hand. In this sense, then, all his buildings were 
transitional buildings. 


UNIT SYSTEM: DIAGONAL AND CIRCULAR GEOMETRIES 

Although the orthogonal grid or unit system dominated the bulk of Wright's residential 
designs, he explored a significant number of applications of diagonal and circular-based 
grids as well. These grids provided many new opportunities, but they also presented him 
with several problems, including the integration of major building components and the 
application of diagonal and circular geometries at different scales from site to interior 
furnishings. The following examples provide some insights to the challenges of these 
major variations on the orthogonal unit system. 

Diagonal Grid: The Robie and Hanna Houses 
Although Wright had used diagonal forms from the start, during the middle of his career 
he became enamored with the thirty-degree angle as a basis for planning grids. His desert 
projects of the twenties demonstrate several variations on the application of this diagonal, 
and it is integrated with orthogonal geometries in the St. Mark's Tower project of 1929. 
The Hanna House of 1937 is probably the best example of the application of the 
thirty-degree angle to a house plan. The dominance of this geometry leaves us with the 
impression of an isometric view of a basic in-line house plan; the rotation of some of the 
building components adds an effect like that of an Escher drawing. In the Hanna plan we 
can see the composition concepts Wright developed in his orthogonal, in-line houses. 
Spaces are organized about a longitudinal baseline in a way that recalls the Robie House 
plan; to one side of the baseline, major living areas are gathered in a continuous space 
punctuated by the hearth, and bedrooms and services form a group on the other side. 
Transformations from the Robie to the Hanna plan include wrapping the living room 
around the bent form of the hearth and the insertion of the kitchen into the living zone as 
part of the house. In an extension of the basic diagonal geometry, Wright overlaid the plan 
with a hexagonal grid to determine the shape and relationship of building elements at all 
scales to achieve a unifying aesthetic. 

As we have seen in the massing of forms in the hillside houses and the shifting axes of the 
in-line houses, the diagonal was often implicit in the composition of plans for orthogonal 
buildings. Wright's later work reveals more explicit diagonal forms; that which had been 
an instrument of principle became expressed as form. We can speculate that this trend was 
a result of both a response to the more rural sites of his later houses and a determined 
effort to break away from orthogonal geometry in order to explore the possibilities of 
transcending geometric type. 

Circular Grid: The Jester and Jacobs Houses 
From the beginning, Wright often used semicircular forms in his houses. At the Blossom, 
Winslow, and Tomek houses the semicircle defines alcoves, porches, and terraces. It is 
used to organize landscape at the Martin, Hollyhock, and Millard houses. However, his 
first attempts to develop house plans based on a vocabulary of circular forms emerge after 
the Johnson Wax Building of 1936, his first design that totally integrated linear and 
curvilinear forms. At first, curves are applied as a sort of streamlining of interior forms in 
the Johnson House in 1937 but are proposed as the dominant geometry for the Jester House 
project in 1938. 

In the Jester design, several separate circular forms define areas for discrete functions 
including lounge and living, dining, sleeping, cooking, breakfast, hearth, and bathing. The 
loose collection of circles is held together by an orthogonal grid in the form of a flat roof 
that protects both the enclosed spaces and a central exterior patio. The total composition is 
anchored and the geometric theme reinforced through the dominant circular form of the 
swimming pool. In the strict sense, the Jester House plan does not employ a circular 
version of the unit system; rather, it derives its sense of order from the thematic unity of 
the circular forms. 

When Wright pursued a curvilinear grid in designs such as those for the David Wright 
House and the second Jacobs House, his self-imposed constraints appear to be 
counterproductive. He seems to have had a fixation on the static aspects of the curve with 
its single central point of origin generating concentric rings or radial lines. This rigid 
system is univalent, seeing variations only in terms of itself. In his public buildings such as 
the Strong Planetarium project and the Guggenheim Museum, this approach was able to 
reinforce the idea of continuity by wrapping around a single unified space that could 
dominate all aspects of the design. Its unitary movement system seemed well suited for a 
single-goal processional experience. In the David Wright House, the circle simply 
provides a radial grid for transformation of the in-line type plan. Here the processional 
curve could lead only to the entry door or to a master bedroom suite, where the continuity 
came to an abrupt halt. The unifying curve in the house might smooth over the cellular 
nature of its parts without spatially unifying interior space, as was possible in his public 
buildings. The scale of the move-the large, generous sweep of the Guggenheim climbing 
upward within and creating a large void-could not be matched in a small building where 
the gesture seems like overkill. 

Wright's vocabulary of curves also avoided the true or "natural" free forms used by other 
modern architects such as Aalto or Le Corbusier. Instead, his plans were based on 
complete circles or segments of circles. When Wright drew driveways and pathways that 
seem to demand continuity with natural landscape contours, he combined circle segments 
and diagonals to approximate but never mimic the land form. These forms are particularly 
noticeable in the semicircular pathway between the Kaufman House and its guest house or 
in the awkward use of circles at the Hanna House. That Wright, the father of "organic" 
architecture, did not include biomorphic shapes in his work may seem strange, but Wright 
often stated that he sought to emulate nature's principles rather than imitate its external 
forms. No matter what the ultimate complexity of his buildings might be, the formal 
vocabulary was simple geometric shapes-the square, triangle, and circle-that are clearly 
discernible in the finished work. 

Classicism: The Glasner and Goetsch-Winckler Houses 

A comparison of the early Glasner House and the Usonian Goetsch-Winckler House 
provides important clues to the essence of Wright's integration of classical and natural 
forms to create organic plan composition, and it suggests how his approach might be 
extended and reinterpreted in a broad range of architectural styles. 

The Glasner House of 1905 is an elongated structure sited on sloping land. It was 
originally designed to bridge an adjacent ravine with a connecting tea house that would 
have allowed the ravine itself to participate in the cross-weave of spaces. The extreme 
elongation of the plan, terminated by identical octagonal ends and shifted cross-axes of 
living room and bedrooms, recalls compositional themes of the Husser House but with a 
new programmatic interpretation: it has a unified living and dining room. In this plan we 
can find the basic compositional moves that would be developed in another modest but 
influential one-story house completed by Wright more than three decades later. 

If there is an equivalent to the Barcelona Pavilion in Wright's work in terms of scale, 
siting, materials, structure, and spatial informality, it could be his gem in abstract planar 
composition, the Goetsch-Winckler. This diminutive structure is situated on a hillcrest 
overlooking a hollow. The approach to the house is via a broad, cantilevered carport and 
entry porch at one of its narrow ends. The entry is through one of several French doors on 
the long side of the house that faces up the hill. The plan consists of basically one open 
living space or "studio" with recesses for kitchen, dining, and alcove areas around the 
hearth. The bedroom wing is connected by a gallery. The compositions of both houses treat 
the baseline and the cross-axis as data for contrasting treatments of different sides of the 
plan. In both designs the symmetry of treatment of one side of the baseline contrasts with 
the dynamic informality of the spatial arrangement on the opposite side. The other 
contrast, about the shorter cross-axis, is that between the simplicity and larger scale of 
the living areas versus the relatively smaller and more complex bedroom suite. In both 
cases the siting of the houses on hills creates a dynamic relationship that seems to lift these 
modest structures into a realm of significance usually occupied by buildings of more 
imposing size. 

These designs responded to functional programs embedded in two very different social 
contexts. The formal transitions between the two designs suggest how Wright's organic 
concepts might transcend future changes in time and place. With this expectation in our 
grasp we will now consider Wright's other major types, the atrium and the tower. 


The Atrium Type 

Frank Lloyd Wright's non-domestic work displays a consistent approach to architectural 
issues involving the larger social world beyond the family. The atrium type describes his 
structures that serve a communal purpose. The concentrated development of the type 
throughout Wright's career suggests his deep commitment to communal values that he 
undoubtedly saw as a complement to the private aspect of his residential architecture. 
Although differing in formal and spatial precepts, the atrium type is no less important an 
embodiment of ideas; it equals the brilliance of his residential work. 

The Atrium category embraces any of Wright's structures that are intended to provide for 
gatherings that could engender a sense of community and shared purpose. In this 
definition, structures with diverse specific programs can be easily linked together. For 
example, the Unity Temple and Larkin Building present us with two differing "functions," 
namely, a place of worship and an office building. Yet each is clearly conceived as a 
spatial unit that encourages an extraordinary degree of community and shared purpose. 
Although the religious and secular distinctions between the two are obvious enough, the 
setting each suggests is that of an architecture that seems intent on confounding our 
conventional notions of worship and work. Unity Temple, displaying no overt reference to 
religious prototypes, seems rather secular, and just as assuredly the Larkin Building, with 
its towering cathedral-like central space, seems surprisingly sacred. A narrow 
form-follows-function argument, when applied to Wright's architecture, ignores these 
facts. Our thesis is that he formulated his architectural solutions according to program 
types rather than to specific literal programs. Formal and spatial ideas seemed to be as 
much cause as effect in this design process. Form could precede function. Form and 
program are linked, but only in a general way; once a program could be interpreted as 
"communal," then further design connected this function and the atrium form in a 
harmonious manner. 

The distinguishing architectural impulse behind the atrium type is to provide an ample, 
light-filled space to preside at the core of the structure. Unlike the hearth type with its 
chimney core at the center illumined with the flickering glow of fire, the atrium building 
enshrines a central space ideally illuminated with light filtered from above. It shares the 
gathering and anchoring impulse of the hearth type but uses a contrasting composition of 
forms to express it. The space-centered rather than solid-centered organization is the 
central theme that motivates all of Wright's atrium work. 

The formal and spatial characteristics of the type are easy to define. Unlike the suburban 
house, the atrium type is most often set within an urban context (no matter how sparse that 
may be), and its natural tendency is to turn in on itself and embrace a protected, 
inward-looking space that essentially turns its back on its surroundings. The spreading 
peripheral energy of the Martin House seems to have its perfect and opposite counterpart 
in the compact, centralized organization of Unity Temple. Three decades later 
Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Administration Building serve to illustrate the staying 
power of the same dialogue. If we assume that each of these two pairs exemplifies this 
condition, then clearly the anchoring core of both hearth configurations is opposed by the 
centralizing space of both atrium examples. The central stabilizing core that excludes 
humans has been exchanged for the central vortex of space that willingly accepts them. 

The formal composition of the atrium type characteristically employs symmetry about 
major and minor axes. The more formal public building is thereby contrasted with the 
asymmetrical planning of the more informal private dwelling, thus keeping alive the 
nineteenth-century notion of decorum. Wright has been commonly regarded as the 
twentieth-century architect most facile with inflected asymmetrical planning schemes 
that rejected the "rigid" planning principles of the academic tradition. The atrium type 
demonstrates beyond any doubt that Wright relied on the academic planning tradition 
when he thought doing so was appropriate to the program type. 


ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ATRIUM TYPE 

Wright's first serious study of the atrium type was probably his own studio in Oak Park. 
The structure, which was added to his house in 1895, occupies a prominent corner site. It 
consists of three parts, including a double-volume studio space on the east side of the 
structure, an octagonal library to the west, and a reception hall and private office "bridge" 
that connects the other two spaces. Significantly, the arrangement of this building exhibits 
virtually all the basic elements of the atrium type that would be used in future buildings. 
Although the elements of the studio do not show the marvelous integration of a Unity 
Temple, they nonetheless suggest that Wright was searching for answers to the problem of 
the communal structure and that he saw his studio as an architectural laboratory in this 
pursuit. 

That Wright would interpret an architect's studio in such a spatially extravagant manner is 
worth comment. Unquestionably, this studio was to be an advertisement of his 
architectural wares. Beyond this consideration-and more germane to our present 
interests-Wright used the project to address both practical and symbolic concerns. The 
design of the major studio space seems to synthesize these concerns. Occupied as it was by 
Wright's staff, he has given them pride of place. Perhaps by sharing a large single volume, 
they would be better able to share a single higher purpose, namely, the realization of their 
master's ideas. Assuming that this arrangement symbolized a "democratic" workplace for 
Wright's charges might be an exaggeration, but the design does suggest a benevolent, if 
paternalistic, common setting for work ennobled by space and light. 

The tripartite disposition of the volumes with the special articulation of the two "nuclei" at 
either side of the entry obviously envisages this building type. Both the studio and the 
library are developed as large spatial volumes that contrast markedly with the spatially 
compressed reception hall. The experience of these end spaces is thereby dramatized by 
contrast in much the same way that the main congregation space in Unity Temple is 
experienced after passage through its extremely low entry hall. Light also plays an 
important part in the architectural organization. It streams into each of the end spaces 
from high clerestory windows, with particularly dramatic effect in the studio. The studio 
has an additional feature that was to play a major role in Wright's atrium buildings, 
namely, the balconied upper level, supported in this case by chains. The resulting layering 
of space serves to increase the impact of the atrium. The fluidity of space is supported at 
ground floor in the library nucleus and at the balcony level in the studio nucleus by an 
octagonal geometry. The off-axis entry into the studio exerts a kind of rotational spin that 
contributes to the overall dynamic effect. 

Despite these precocious developments, the three parts of Wright's studio lack an overall 
unity, for they seem to be butted next to one another with little regard for the spatial and 
formal continuities that characterize his mature work. Yet, even with their obvious 
differences in architectural vocabulary and their separation by more than half a century, 
the Oak Park studio contains in embryo the constituent elements of the Guggenheim 
Museum. The Guggenheim Museum is also a bi-nuclear scheme with an entry bridge 
connecting articulated balconied volumes lit from above that "revolve" within a dynamic, 
fluid architectural whole. 

Between the Oak Park studio and the first masterwork of the atrium type, the Larkin 
Building, were two important efforts that contributed to the development of the atrium 
type. The first was the Lincoln School, a disappointing episode in Wright's career that 
remains only partially realized because it was not constructed with the architect's 
supervision. However, the four-square theme with articulated corner towers and the large 
central volume are a preview of both the Larkin building and Unity Temple. The second 
project, the small, gemlike Yahara Boat Club, is Wright's earliest essay in an abstract 
Froebelian vocabulary, a means of expression that in one form or another was to remain 
with him throughout his career. Its formal organization is that of a set of elongated, 
bilaterally symmetrical volumes with articulated corner elements surmounted by a unifying 
cantilevered roof and pseudo clerestory. Principles of this design can be seen at work in 
diverse examples, such as the Larkin Building, Unity Temple, and Midway Gardens. They 
also make an appearance in domestic work such as the Richard Bach House and again in 
high-rise structures such as the San Francisco Press Club, the latter seemingly grown 
from Yahara like an overwatered plant. 


THE BINUCLEAR TYPOLOGY 

Because the binuclear composition is an important subtheme that embraces all of Wright's 
major atrium types and demonstrates his career-long preoccupation with the problem, the 
binuclear subtype serves as the chapter's extended analysis of the atrium type. Key 
buildings employing the binuclear organization include the Larkin Building, Unity 
Temple, the Johnson Wax Administration Building, and the Guggenheim Museum. The 
following discussion considers these four works as a distinct category and compares their 
characteristics. The single-nucleus variation of the type is discussed at the end of this 
chapter. 

The Larkin Building and Unity Temple clearly establish the binuclear composition that 
was to dominate most of Wright's designs for public buildings. Whereas the two nuclei 
appear almost fused together in the Larkin building, they are clearly separated in the Unity 
Temple as active members of a dynamic balance. In both buildings the connecting element 
between the two nodes plays an important role in the reception of people into the building. 

Compositionally the Johnson Wax Administration Building also conforms to the 
bi-nuclear arrangement of the type and exhibits a completely symmetrical composition of 
the large office nucleus with major and minor axes. The exception to this symmetry is to 
be found in the other nucleus, where special offices and employee space are located. The 
entry sequence, although analogous to Larkin and Unity, provides for continuous through 
movement so that the connector bridge entry becomes a porte cochere for pedestrians and 
automobiles and occurs directly below the theater space. The entry proceeds from this 
drive through to an articulated lobby volume that is skylighted from above and encircled 
by balconies. This preamble to the larger space acts as an effective transition and provides 
a distribution zone to sort out movement into the building. The staged rhythmic sequence 
of compression and release, becoming greater through the axis of movement, provides a 
stunning climax to the sequence in the great office room. 

With the Guggenheim Museum, the binuclear organization makes its appearance in what 
now must be seen as a canonical approach to such designs. The entry bridge or porte 
cochere recalls earlier examples, but the original plans for an automobile drop-off seems 
to make specific reference to Johnson Wax. The overall composition is not symmetrical, 
although each nucleus has strong axes of symmetry. The smaller volume, the 
administration monitor, is a self-contained unit with its own central space and should be 
seen as a version of the larger. The main gallery space is, of course, defined by the spiral 
ramp, which both defines its edges and provides for the means of experiencing the space 
and the art work. A diamond-shaped "rudder" intersects the main volume and provides 
for services, elevators, and the like. It tends to stabilize the rotation of the spiral by 
providing a degree of orientation within the cylinder, just as the diamond pump element 
provides stability for the octagonal tower in the Romeo and Juliet Windmill. The entry 
sequence recalls that of the other buildings in the category. The visitor enters the 
connecting bridge in a low compressed space and then breaks out into the larger central 
volume. The intended sequence was to take the elevator to the top and then spiral down. 
The resulting orchestration of movement (horizontal, vertical, and spiral) suggests a 
fluidity in perfect harmony with Wright's ideas of continuity of form and space. 

Both the Larkin Building and Unity Temple share formal and spatial organizations that 
promote meaning at the highest level. They are both bilaterally symmetrical and composed 
about major and minor axes, underscoring Wright's unacknowledged debt to academic 
planning. The orchestration of carefully devised proportion systems for both buildings is 
nothing short of awe inspiring and would please the most classically minded of Wright's 
contemporaries. Despite these characteristics, neither Larkin nor Unity Temple looks like 
a classical building. They lack any stylistic reference to the orders, and where ornament is 
used it is largely of Wright's own invention, without any suggestion of conventional 
systems of ornament. 

The Johnson Wax Administration Building further demonstrates both the staying power of 
the atrium type and Wright's ability to take a fresh look at the formal expression of his 
architecture. In this building he explores the interaction of circular geometry and the 
rectilinear organization of the plan. The novelty of this space is that it is punctuated by a 
regular gridded forest of slender mushroom columns whose circular caps modulate the 
natural light from above. Nothing could be more different from the Corbusian, Cartesian 
grid or free plan, with its continuous floor and ceiling planes and cylindrical rather than 
tapered columns. The dominant horizontal spatial continuity of the Corbusian model is 
replaced by a very different system in which each column suggests a pool of space about 
itself generated by the central column shaft. Far from being a system of neutral elements 
subservient to larger continuities, the Johnson Wax columns retain their identity. They act 
more like an aggregate of independent elements like so many tree trunks, making the 
forest analogy particularly apt. The effect is that of a nonhierarchical but consistently 
modulated space reminiscent of the Great Mosque at Cordoba. 

Surrounded by controversy, the Guggenheim Museum is often seen as Frank Lloyd 
Wright's most radical statement. Its most distinguishing features, namely, its cylindrical 
form and spiraling ramp, make it seem completely unlike anything that preceded it in 
Wright's work. When discussing this work, critics, with few exceptions,{For the exception, 
see Jordy, William. 1972. The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth 
Century. pp. 279-359, American Buildings and Their Architects. New York, Oxford: 
Oxford University Press} concentrate on what is unique rather than what is similar to 
other Wright buildings. 

The Guggenheim stands as a monument to Wright's tenacious hold on his architectural 
principles and a disciplined transformation of themes developed throughout his career. 
Wright had experimented with nonorthogonal geometries before, but in this building he 
brought this fluid geometry fully under the control of guilding principles and emulated his 
example of the seashells that was discussed in chapter 1. The museum looks new and in 
many ways it is, but the structure is also part of that exploration of form and space that 
began for Wright in Oak Park many years before. Our contention is that the Guggenheim 
Museum shares the basic principles of other atrium buildings. Therefore, we feel that 
confronting Wright's final masterpiece within the context of other atrium buildings whose 
themes and continuities it shares is especially appropriate. 


SITING 

The Larkin Building is set within an industrial zone. Little in the site per se could have 
appealed to Wright; consequently, the structure mainly turns inward for its sustenance. 
The severe exterior contrasts with the soaring light-filled atrium within, and this 
dichotomy imbues this scheme and others of the type with an extraordinary power. The 
Larkin Building was designed for a progressive Buffalo mail order house and was to 
contain their office headquarters. The selection of this parti for an office building is 
unusual. We may be justified in attributing part of the decision for a large central atrium to 
consideration for illumination and perhaps even efficiencies in office management. More 
likely Wright's wish for such a commanding interior was akin to that for his own small 
office. He wished to make a large unitary space to emphasize and express the shared 
purpose of those within. In Sullivanian terms this statement could possibly be about the 
broad economic forces at work within American society. The European visitor Henrik 
Berlage interpreted this space as an expression of American democratic values.{See 
Banham, Reyner. 1960. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: The 
Architectural Press; p. 145, 146} 

Unity Temple's parti is identical to that of the Larkin Building. Although it is set within a 
suburban context, it is located on the corner of a busy street. Its inward orientation can be 
partly explained by the site; obviously, the requirements for a quiet, reflective atmosphere 
were uppermost in the minds of Wright's clients. The clerestory windows and skylights 
allow ample light to penetrate but maintain privacy. The sacred quality of the auditorium 
space depends on its ability to shut out the mundane distractions of the everyday. The 
common purpose of the congregation and the "unity" it so aptly symbolizes contribute to 
the appropriateness of this spatial organization. Similar to the Renaissance centrally 
planned church and unlike the Latin cross plan with its implied hierarchies of authority, 
the Unity Temple's central space is the focus and anchor of the building. Occupying this 
privileged space, the congregation rather than the preacher dominates the action. 

The Johnson Wax Administration Building conforms in many particulars to the Larkin 
and Unity buildings. It occupies a full block site next to a series of factory buildings and 
small houses that impart no special contextual pressures. The introverted character of the 
office building could therefore be justified with the same site argument as the previous 
examples. Similarly, the interior contains a large central volume surrounded by a 
balconied space illuminated from above by linear strips of clerestory lighting and 
skylights. The programmatic reasons for this space must rely, as they have with our 
previous examples, on questions of symbolic intent rather than practical necessity. 

The urban setting for the Guggenheim is unique in that it is located on New York City's 
Fifth Avenue facing the open space of Central Park to the west. No industrial zone or 
derelict neighborhood can explain its introverted nature. Rather, we must try to understand 
this solution in light of the program and Wright's ideas about appropriate exterior 
expression for the museum building type. The museum program was new for Wright; 
given that the Guggenheim was specifically to house contemporary art, Wright may have 
been inspired to seek a new solution to the problem of "museum" to measure up to the 
novelty of the works to be contained therein. The main gallery volume provides a clear 
hierarchical focus for the entire museum; it underscores the unity of the composition, 
always relating the part back to the greater whole. Its engulfing volume, balconied 
galleries, and skylighted space are all features that recall other examples of the atrium type 
going back to the Larkin Building. 


THE DYNAMICS OF MOVEMENT 

Another important departure from the classical tradition is that a visitor never enters a 
Wright atrium building on axis but instead is directed off axis in a spiraling movement 
pattern. Asymmetrical movement is played against a symmetrical composition. This aspect 
of Wright's nondomestic architecture recalls his residential work, which similarly favors 
an elaborated spiral entry. Both the Larkin Building and Unity Temple structures have 
been designed with two identical entries that could be justified by through-block sites. 
However, both sides of the sites are not equal, having in each case major and minor streets 
that the rigid symmetry and identical entrances do not acknowledge. This discrepancy 
could have been solved by providing one entrance on a central axis rather than two 
entrances off axis, but to do so would have sacrificed the integrity of the central volume 
and the entry sequence to it. Furthermore, the side, spiraling entry encourages the visitor 
to take in the building from a diagonal viewpoint and better experience the plastic 
excitement of interpenetrating volumes. The net effect of such an approach is to increase 
the dynamic aspect of the building that, if approached frontally, would seem static. The 
spiraling motion generated by the approach could also result in two identical but opposing 
systems of circulation within the building, one left-handed and the other right-handed. 

The curving theme is obviously a part of the Johnson Wax parti, echoed in the columns 
and in many details, including the furniture design. The implied fluidity may be taken as a 
more literal manifestation of the spiraling movement noticed in the earlier examples. The 
nonorthogonal geometry is a particularly effective promoter of this increased sense of 
mobility. The later additions, including the laboratory tower, reinforce these earlier ideas. 
Finally, the striking geometry of the Guggenheim Museum witnesses the literal 
transformation of the spiral movement into primary form. 


VOLUME 

A section of the four buildings we have been discussing reveals Wright's special sensitivity 
to the connection between interior space and exterior form. It is particularly evident in the 
resolution of the stair volumes. In commenting about the Larkin Building, Wright was to 
remark that the major breakthrough in the planning process of the building came when he 
realized that the stairs should be pushed to the exterior and expressed as separate, 
articulated volumes. Not only could this deft move express the interior and therefore make 
the building more perfectly an integration of parts (organic) but also it could serve to break 
down the overall mass of the structure into a series of articulated volumes. The scale of the 
structure was thus modulated from large block to intermediate and smaller volumes, all of 
which were ordered by the strict discipline imparted by the geometry and composition. 

The Guggenheim section further reveals that its volume slants outward on the exterior and 
tilts forward on the interior. The resulting section is that formed by the intersection of two 
cones. The tilted surface with its dynamic aspect is not a new feature in Wright's work. It 
occurs in his tower designs for St. Mark's and interestingly in a small, centrally planned 
gallery for the Spaulding Print Shop. The sloped display surfaces imply a funnelshaped 
space and open it to the skylight above. The Guggenheim's intersecting section also recalls 
similar triangular intersections, including the Mile-High Skyscraper and Beth Shalom 
Synagogue. All seem to have at least partial structural rationale based on triangulation, but 
all enjoy an increased dynamism that avoids the static "butt and join" approach of a 
trabeated system-a system Wright was to reject in principle in his work in the forties and 
fifties. 


OTHER ATRIUM BUILDINGS 

Wright employed the single-nucleus atrium type on numerous occasions in diverse 
settings and programs throughout his career. Although it is more varied in some respects 
than the binuclear version, definite patterns emerge and help to define subthemes within 
the grouping. For example, two basic strategies seem to characterize the type. The 
cruciform and modified cruciform constitute one evolutionary branch of the tree. Early 
projects such as the Belvedere Chapel of 1906 and the Coonley Playhouse of 1912 
exemplify the type. Both were to be sited in park-like settings and were apparently 
conceived as a species of garden pavilion. This introverted, centralized version of the 
typical atrium type lacks clerestory lighting and instead is tensioned by a strong horizontal 
extension into a lush green landscape. Obviously the type is informed by Wright's Prairie 
houses of the period but shifts the solid hearth focus out of the center to allow the central 
space to dominate. The opposing centrifugal-centripetal pull results in a hybrid 
somewhere between the hearth and atrium types. 

During the twenties Wright conducted a number of experiments that explored the dynamic 
potential of non-orthogonal plans. The Auto Object of 1925 and the Steel Cathedral of 
1926 illustrate this tendency. Both suggest an important departure from Wright's earlier 
work but emphasizing the differences too much would be a mistake. Each of these works 
continues to develop planning themes articulated earlier, namely, centralized symmetrical 
planning with spiral movement systems implicit, all organized by a large central unitary 
space. The Auto Object scheme, turned on its "head," becomes a close approximation of 
the Guggenheim Museum. Likewise, the Steel Cathedral previews a number of religious 
projects, including the Florida Southern Chapel (with its cruciform plan) and the Beth 
Shalom Synagogue, based on a hexagonal geometric system. The circular theme explored 
in the Auto Object appeared two years earlier in the Little Dipper project for Aline 
Barnsdall and reappears with a kind of baroque flourish in Wright's Greek Orthodox 
Church of 1956. 

In the design of his communal structures, Wright provided inspiring evidence of the power 
of the clear, unifying building concept when it is anchored in a fundamental understanding 
of the human condition. In characteristic fashion Wright pursued the complete realization 
of the concept through the highly disciplined orchestration of construction, detail, and 
ornament in each building. Whereas the "originality" of some of Wright's ideas might be 
questioned, his tenacious professional perseverance is not in doubt. 


The Tower Type 

Even though Frank Lloyd Wright realized only two tower buildings during his career (the 
Johnson Research Tower of 1947 and the Price Tower of 1956), his many unexecuted 
projects on the theme demonstrate his fascination with the problem of the tall building. If 
we include his early Romeo and Juliet Windmill of 1896 and the Mile-High Skyscraper 
project designed three years before his death, we see that Wright explored this theme in a 
variety of building contexts and programs. 

Wright's changing approach to the design of the tall building became a vehicle to clarify 
his ideas about the landscape and the city as well as his notions of structural and spatial 
integration. His investigations into this problem indicate a determined search to discover 
the essence of the tall structure as form and meaning and to define a type that would once 
and for all settle the architectural problems involved. Its verticality should be viewed as a 
complement to the horizontality of his domestic work and the spatial centering of his 
congregational work. The St. Mark's Tower project of 1929 embodies meaning no less 
potent or distinctive than the Willitts House and Unity Temple. We shall see that the tower 
is linked to his other work and yet retains its identity as a unique expression in Wright's 
architecture. 


FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 

That Wright, Chicago's most famous architect, should treat the high-rise building seems 
logical enough. What is quite extraordinary, however, is his ambivalence toward and final 
rejection of virtually all the lessons of the Chicago frame.{Rowe, Colin. 1978. Chicago 
Frame, pp. 90-117 In Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, 
MA:MIT Press (see especially pp. 93-98)} In formulating his personal vision of the 
high-rise building, he ultimately shunned the cues of urban context and insisted on a 
synthesis that unified structure and space instead of a dialectic that separated them into 
distinct elements. Although the product of his research may seem inevitable, these 
explorations did not unfold with the inexorable momentum that characterized the 
evolution of the Prairie House or the development of the binuclear plan. Wright's search 
for an appropriate form for the tall building found resolution rather late in his career and 
only after a series of detours and long periods when the problem remained dormant. When 
clarity of the type was finally established in the St. Mark's Tower, his interest in the tall 
building accelerated, and he never tired of using the type or its principles.{Mostoller, 
Michael. 1985. The Towers of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Journal of Architectural 
Education 38(2):13-17} 


TWO TYPES OF TALL BUILDINGS: THE URBAN BLOCK AND THE TOWER 

The Luxfer Prism Building of 1895 and the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, built a year later, 
illustrate Wright's contrasting approaches to the problem of the tall building. These two 
themes, the urban block and the free-standing tower, occupied distinct phases in Wright's 
development. The urban block theme was the focus of his studies during the Oak Park 
years and the teens and finally climaxed in the National Life Insurance Skyscraper project 
of 1924. At this critical juncture his interest in the urban block waned and was replaced by 
the tower theme. By the late twenties the tower became the exclusive means by which 
Wright explored the problem of the tall building. It reappeared in various transformations 
for the next thirty years and capped off his career. 


The Evolution of the Urban Block 

The tall building as urban block began as a classicized cubic volume, picking up cues, no 
doubt, from Sullivan. The initial compact statement transformed into an increasingly 
complex series of interpenetrating volumes within a Froebel vocabulary. Neither his 
approach to composition nor structural expression was challenged, however, until the 
design of the remarkable National Life Insurance skyscraper. 

Wright's first skyscraper project was barely ten stories tall. The Luxfer Prism Building was 
to house offices for a glass manufacturer, which may explain the extensive use of glass on 
the exterior but cannot explain the specific resolution. Given that Luxfer followed the 
important achievements of the Chicago School and Sullivan's Wainwright and Guaranty 
buildings, it is curious that Wright seems to have rejected these lessons in a setting that 
seems to demand them. The expression of the frame (if indeed there is one-no plans of 
the project apparently exist) is ambiguous; the three-bay structure implied at the base is 
surmounted by a six-bay division above. The doubling of vertical elements could be 
connected to Sullivan's treatment of the Wainwright, and yet Wright is both more 
ambiguous and more consistent than Sullivan. Whereas Sullivan implies a structural role 
for all piers even though in reality it is only true for every other pier, Wright makes no 
such commitment; both vertical and horizontal framing elements are treated identically. 
The result suggests a weightless screen and implies separation between structure and 
surface. The glass panels, which may have at first appeared to be a version of the Chicago 
window type set within the structural frame, now seem to be following other rules. 

A closer inspection of the wall section reveals that the glass sections actually project in 
front of the framing elements to create the impression of volume rather than infill. The 
picture-frame-like border enclosing the glazed portion of the facade is another 
important departure from Sullivan's pseudostructural expressionism and further 
contributes to our impression of a weightless, omnidirectional glazed membrane, a kind of 
proto-curtain wall. The volumetric glazing of Luxfer is further enlivened with the 
operable tilted glass panes at the center of each bay; in the perspective drawing of the 
project, each unit is opened to the same angle, which, coincidentally, is the identical angle 
of the entry canopy. The resulting play of light suggests a special sensitivity to the material 
qualities of glass and its ability to dematerialize structure by reflection and refraction. The 
Luxfer Prism Building should be considered as an early essay on the possibilities of glass 
as a building skin and not as a comment on the tectonics and expression of the structural 
frame. 

The Lincoln School. The urban block type as seen in the Lincoln School is characterized 
by a heavy masonry wall that folds into external volumes of closure. Glazing recedes both 
literally and metaphorically as mere background so that the major exterior element, the 
masonry wall, can find expression. The corners in particular are emphasized, suggesting a 
compositional if not structural stabilizing role. 

San Francisco Press Building. The conclusion to the urban block approach is the San 
Francisco Press Building of 1912. This building was to occupy a dense urban site in the 
center of the city and reach over twenty-five stories in height. Its soaring aspect, 
elongated plan, and dramatic play of form should not obscure the fact that these qualities 
are derived from earlier experiments in the Froebel manner. The masonry structure, heavy 
corner piers, and exaggerated cantilever at the top seem to emanate from much smaller 
buildings, such as the Larkin Building and Unity Temple. Their structure, the overt 
symmetry of their plans, and the classical interpretation of their vertical extension into 
capital, shaft, and base are not challenged. In the end we are left with the feeling that 
Wright had the uncomfortable realization that he had created a stretch-limo version of 
the Yahara Boat Club. 

The National Life Insurance Company Building of 1924 was an important turning point 
for Wright in his formulation of the tall building and a crucial step toward his eventual 
development of the tower. The project was to embody a radical reevaluation of the type in 
terms of urbanism, architectural form, and structure. Although this Chicago building 
represents an important transitional phase in Wright's development, it is a significant 
achievement in its own right, one that was to inform his explorations into other building 
types as well. 

The insurance building emphatically dispenses with Sullivan's concept of a unitary 
classical volume in favor of an assemblage of interlocking volumes. As a result the 
building loses the frontality and wall-like continuity that normally helps to define the 
street. The bilaterally symmetrical plan favored until now disappears, along with the 
classical tripartite vertical formula. Although the project retains a strict symmetry along its 
broad surface, the irregular massing as seen from an oblique vantage point dominates our 
overall impression. The building is conceived as a series of five transparent volumes. The 
highest volume acts as a continuous datum for four fingerlike projecting volumes that form 
entry "courts" on street level. These volumes are made increasingly sculptural as they rise 
skyward, finally shedding their skin of glass to reveal the structure beneath. The intricate 
texture of the overall facade and the ornamental enrichment toward the top remind us of 
Wright's decorative designs, especially his compositions for leaded glass windows. 

The National Life project rejects the Press Building's approach of heavy masonry walls and 
piers with cantilevered roof in favor of a weightless skin of glass in which virtually every 
floor is cantilevered. The building skin, dematerialized by glazing, is free of the outer 
masonry shell that is conspicuous in the San Francisco Press and Larkin buildings. The 
simple device that makes it possible is the structural cantilever. Wright attributes this 
innovation to lessons he learned while building the Imperial Hotel in Japan. He describes 
the system as "Floor slabs stiffened and extended as cantilevers over centered supports, as 
a waiter's tray rests upon his upturned fingers."{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. An 
Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press.} The glazing no longer acts as a passive infill 
but as the principal player in an architectural drama. The curtain wall is delicately 
suspended as a thin membrane in front of the structure. In the process the glass develops 
qualities of volume and prismatic luminescence reminiscent of the Luxfer Prism Project. 
The liberation of the skin from structural necessity-"the free facade"-did not have the 
same meaning for Wright as for Le Corbusier; Wright's facade never became completely 
disconnected from the building surface or the internal spatial subdivisions within. Wright 
always insisted that the interior and exterior "organically" relate, unlike the dialectical 
contrast of Le Corbusier. 

The National Life Insurance Company design shows Wright critically reappraising the 
urban block type. He was able to embody new ideas of structure and resuscitate earlier 
ideas about glazing that allowed him to achieve a startling new architectural expression. 
His dynamic mastery of form and increasing tendency toward highly articulated volumes 
in space hint at his growing impatience with the constraints implied by the city. That this 
building was never realized is unfortunate. Wright did not have further opportunities to 
explore this potential form prototype and its response to specific urban contexts. Such 
exploration might have led to an explosion of creativity equal to or exceeding his Prairie 
school houses. Instead, we find Wright extending his experimentation with the issues of 
structure, enclosure, and composition within his approach to the St. Mark's Tower 
commission. 


The Urban Implications of the Block and the Tower 

Wright abandoned the block type and embraced the tower at the moment in his career 
when his vision of the city changed into the "disappearing city" of Broadacres. The urban 
block building suggests an urban setting; it acknowledges the possibility of front, side, and 
rear. These hierarchical properties condition the space around it and imply continuities 
that could reinforce the spatial volume of the street corridor. The tower, especially in 
Wright's hands, lacks preferential treatment on any side. Furthermore, Wright's tendency 
toward rotational or diagonal composition promotes a spinning spatial vortex that requires 
a degree of breathing room around the building that a dense urban setting could not 
provide. The exurban setting demanded finds its first tentative application at St. Mark's 
Tower in a miniature park in New York City and later in the more spacious and rural 
setting of Broadacre City, where the irregularly spaced towers seem to spin like tops on a 
table. This condition of isolation is apparently necessary for the single tower; whether at 
the scale of Johnson Wax or the Mile-High Skyscraper, each tower operates as a 
centering instrument rather than a defining edge. Wright's tacit acknowledgment of the 
problem of adapting the tower to the city is demonstrated later in his grouped apartment 
towers for Chicago and his Crystal Heights project for Washington, D.C. In each of these 
instances, the towers form a glass palisade wall, thus implying an urban spatial role. 


The Development of the Tower 

Given Wright's well-known aversion to the city, we may ask why he was interested in 
pursuing a building form that grew out of a cultural and economic milieu to which he so 
frequently objected. The answer lies less in his endorsement of density and the open space 
rationalizations of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and more in his romantic notion of the 
tall building as a symbolic marker in the landscape. The Romeo and Juliet Windmill 
provides an initial clue to this notion. 

The Romeo and Juliet structure stands on a hilltop overlooking Wright's ancestral 
landscape of rolling hills, cultivated fields, and winding streams. Later the Hillside Home 
School and then Taliesin were to unfold beneath its raking shadow. It thus came 
increasingly to fulfill its role as a marker in the landscape, suggesting, like the medieval 
tower, dynastic dominion over all it surveyed. For Wright the tower was a potent symbol of 
place and meaning that transcended the specifics of site and program. 

Although Wright's first mature essay on the type is the St. Mark's Tower project of 1929, 
the Romeo and Juliet Windmill executed three decades earlier seems to have conditioned 
his response to the problem. The windmill is octagonal in plan, intersected by a rhomboid 
core. The octagon and the intersecting rhomboid are extruded upward and capped with a 
sheltered lookout and rotating blades. The plasticity of the interpenetrating forms and 
exuberant top presents a set of formal preoccupations that continued to be developed 
throughout Wright's studies of the tower. The triangulation and the resultant structural 
dependence of the two forms provide lateral stability that resists wind loads and any 
tendency for twisting or distortion. The one form, lofty, strong, and erect, embraces the 
other, which is lower, passive, and open. The decisive expression of supporting structure 
as solid vertical wedge and supported space as open surrounding volume is a theme that 
reappears in virtually all of Wright's tower schemes, including St. Mark's Tower. 

The St. Mark's Tower embodies many of the ideas that were to characterize Wright's 
mature designs of the tower type during the following three decades. Wright has often 
likened his tower designs to that of a tree. It is rooted in the ground and springs upward 
with cantilevered arms emanating from its trunklike branches. The density of the core 
dematerializes toward the edges of the tower into crystalline surfaces of glazing. The 
bottom and top are likewise differentiated from the repetitive ribs in the midportion of the 
structure. The void of the lobby below emphasizes the cantilever, and the exuberant top 
emphatically crowns the structure as it pierces the sky. A further subtlety is the outward 
taper of the sides, which makes the upper floors cantilever slightly in front of the floors 
below. Wright has rationalized this feature as a natural means for self-cleaning the glass 
with rain. However, the recurrence of the outward tilt in other structures where no such 
rationalization exists (the Guggenheim, for example) suggests that Wright was more 
interested in creating a hovering, dynamic effect. The St. Mark's project consisted of nine 
levels of two-story maisonettes. The three towers (more towers were projected in another 
scheme) were to stand rather close to one another in the small green surrounding St. 
Mark's in the Bowery Church. 

The Johnson Wax Laboratory Tower is similarly scaled to St. Mark's. It has seven stories 
and a system of mezzanine spaces comparable to the duplex arrangement of St. Mark's. 
The Johnson Wax Tower has a relatively subdued formal and spatial complexity compared 
to the explosive themes of the New York project. The structural system is directly 
analogous, with a single mastlike core and projecting cantilevered trays; however, the 
fragmentation into four separate quadrants and corresponding structural pylons vanishes. 
Obviously, the need for continuous, more flexible laboratory space dictated this more open 
approach. The integrity of the structure is ingeniously expressed, and the effect of 
streamlined corners and circular stacks deserves our admiration for the continuity of 
formal themes related back to the main building. However, we are left with the impression 
that once again Wright selected the tower as an a priori form type for reasons that went 
beyond functional necessity. The tower serves as a marker or beacon, especially at night. 
The Johnson Wax Laboratory Tower is surely less a statement of fact about the modern, 
efficient laboratory than it is a highly visible symbol for the enlightened and progressive 
values of the client. 

The Mile-High Skyscraper is above all a public relations achievement proving that 
Wright could be as modern and daring as any member of the younger generation of 
architects nurtured by modernist schools such as the Bauhaus. In approaching such a 
monumental work, we are inclined to treat it as such. Its "function" is beside the point and 
no more important as an issue than it would be for the Eiffel Tower. Wright's list of facts 
does little to help us take the project seriously: 5,280 feet high with a 400-foot aerial, 528 
stories, elevators "propelled with atomic power," parking for 15,000 cars and landing pads 
for 150 helicopters. If the Mile-High is a parody of a peculiar modernist folly, it 
nonetheless presents an interesting comment on Wright's development of the tower type, of 
which it is most defiantly a conspicuous member. 

This building's cantilevered structure has a symmetrical, kite-shaped plan with a 
centralized tripod system of structural walls. The body of the building is further subdivided 
by an elevator core that pierces its center and breaks through the sloping sides of the 
building as it moves upward. The tapering needle-like structure is reminiscent of an 
upside-down icicle, the kind that scalloped the roof eaves at Taliesin in the winter. The 
triangular structure overwhelms us with a dynamic, faceted aspect of shimmering glass 
disappearing into infinity but recalling, nonetheless, the smaller-scaled faceted surfaces 
of St. Mark's. 

The dematerialization of structure into space and the conquest of the sky with lightweight 
luminescent surfaces springing from the ground present a romantic vision of the 
high-rise building that elicits a feeling of awe and mystery. The tiny Romeo and Juliet 
Windmill and the polished Luxfer Prism Building are here reconstituted at a heroic scale. 
Wright proposed a complex interlock of prisms that overcame technical difficulties with a 
bold but simple structural concept that could serve as a marker in the sweeping landscape; 
it suggests dominion over all that it surveys. 

Seen as a group, Wright's towers share a number of formal characteristics. All embrace the 
diagonal as a compositional motif. The plan of the Romeo and Juliet Tower, with its 
octagon and interpenetrating rhomboid, introduce the theme at a forty-five degree angle. 
The St. Mark's Tower scheme and others of its type, including the Price Tower and Crystal 
Heights, use a complex overlapping and shifting system of orthogonal and thirty-and 
sixty-degree diagonal grids. This complex pattern is based on simple overlapping grid 
systems and no doubt was influenced by Islamic tile design that was well known to Wright 
through Owen Jones and other sources. The St. Mark's rotated triangular pylons penetrate 
the basic building cube in a manner similar to the Romeo and Juliet Windmill. Although 
more subtly expressed, the plan geometry of the Johnson Wax Tower shares some of the 
consistencies of the tower prototype. The vertical support elements are aligned with the 
central core to create a forty-five-degree diagonal across the square plan. The plan 
geometry of the Mile-High Skyscraper also relates to the earlier experiments. The basic 
organization is that of a rhomboid or alternatively an equilateral triangle with one 
inflected side. This form, with its strong sense of the diagonal, is also found in the Boomer 
House in Phoenix, the Unitarian Church in Madison, and the stabilizing pier of the Romeo 
and Juliet Windmill. 

The St. Mark's Tower best exhibits the possibilities for intricate manipulation of plan 
geometries. The tower has the spatial complexity of a Chinese puzzle, initiated by a shifted 
and overlapping thirty-and sixty-degree grid. The angle may have been prompted as a 
response to the site but, given Wright's predisposition toward experiments in diagonal 
geometries, it was more likely a felicitous opportunity upon which he was prepared to 
capitalize. A typical living level plan of the tower can be described as a square that has 
been divided into four equal quadrants by cross-walls that almost meet at the center. The 
square is then sheared in both directions to accommodate fire stairs, access corridors, and 
services. The stair volumes project beyond the perimeter of the square in opposing 
directions to accentuate the pinwheel effect. 

A second square is laid over the first at a thirty-and sixty-degree angle and serves as a 
foil to the first, increasing the velocity of the pinwheel spin. The space between the grid 
shift is not only a plan manipulation but also an important three-dimensional volume that 
serves spatially to link both floors of the unit. Both space and cross-walls are inflected in 
a rotational fashion to contain elevators and services. Secondary partitions respond to 
either grid as required while maintaining the integrity of the two overlapping systems. The 
formal and spatial virtuosity of the scheme comes through at every level of detail so that 
even paving, furniture, and open balconies and planters on the perimeter serve to articulate 
and clarify the complex interpenetration of the two systems, systems that in the last 
analysis are built up of very simple geometries. 

The cross-wall-pier arrangement serves as the only vertical structure and provides the 
necessary stability for the dramatic cantilevers. The glazing is a curtain wall that projects 
in front of the floor slabs in the manner of the National Life Insurance Building and allows 
it to maintain its crystalline quality. The intersection of triangulated core with central 
volume recalls the same motif in Romeo and Juliet, where the roles of structural stabilizer 
and spatial volume are similar. Wright's expressed wish to integrate structure, space, and 
form are perhaps synthesized more successfully in St. Mark's Tower than in any other of 
his works. 


Housing and the Tower 

Unlike all of Wright's previous experiments with the tall building, the St. Mark's Tower is 
a residential complex with four duplex units on each major level. Until that point, Wright 
had conceived and executed a number of important low-rise housing schemes, especially 
if we consider the hotel as a member of this grouping. From the Francisco Terrace to the 
Imperial Hotel, these plans tended toward a distinctive spatial type, namely, the courtyard. 
In either square, doughnut, U-, or H-shaped plans, a strong sense of spatial enclosure 
always created a central community space. His housing in this vein should be seen as a 
larger-scale version of the atrium building type, with masonry walls replaced by "room 
walls." Wright's eventual rejection of courtyard housing in favor of the tower might 
suggest a changed attitude toward individual housing residents and their relationship to 
the community. The quadrant plan of the tower appears to shift the orientation of the 
housing units from the man-made communal setting to the surrounding landscape. 

The direct transition from Wright's courtyard type to the tower type seems unlikely. We 
are rather inclined to see this development as a complete break with Wright's earlier 
housing projects and indeed all his work up to that point. Housing in the form of a tower 
was new to Wright. We might find causes for his adoption of this form in such precedents 
as the American and European cross-shaped apartment towers. Did Wright conceive a 
diminutive version of the Plan Voisin, a kind of miniature tower in the park scheme, or do 
we have a constantly evolving synthesis of Wright's attitudes about architecture and the 
city suddenly crystallizing? Wright may have been influenced by a contemporary sketch 
made by Buckminster Fuller of a high-rise building organized around a mastlike core 
with projecting trays. Realizing Wright's tenacious hold on ideas once articulated, 
however, we are inclined to place more weight on sources from within Wright's own world 
of form. 

The tower shares a formal and spatial kinship with the hearth type. The tower possesses a 
solid core that acts to root the building to the earth much as the fireplace and chimney 
serve to anchor the house to the land. Its solid center and dematerialized edges provide for 
an open horizontal extension of space that connects interior space with the exterior and 
stretches its sphere of influence, by implication, to the horizon beyond. Nevertheless, the 
tower is more centralized as a composition than the hearth type; it displays little, if any, 
preferential treatment of front, side, and rear. 


Quadruple Block Housing 

Another source of the tower form is the unexecuted Quadruple Block Housing project that 
occupied Wright for more than a decade beginning in 1900. It was published the next year 
in the Ladies Home Journal,{Manson, Grant Carpenter. 1958. Frank Lloyd Wright to 
1910, The First Golden Age. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company; p. 206; see 
also Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1916. A Non-Competitive Plan. City Residential Land 
Development.  Alfred Yeomans, ed., University of Chicago Press. pp. 95-102} along 
with two prototypic Prairie House designs. This experiment provides a link between 
Wright's designs for the individual house and his concern for multiple housing and the 
prototypic form it could take. In the Ladies Home Journal version, which was to be 
repeated in almost identical detail numerous times, his Prairie houses were interpreted as 
clusters of four identical units occupying a square parcel of land divided into four equal 
quadrants. The clusters were of two types. One type oriented front yard and house to the 
street, while the side yard enfronted a linear park. The second type arranged the four 
houses as a pinwheel. The linear street orientation of the former type contrasts with the 
centered, rotated symmetry of the latter. The theme was developed by Wright in a more 
compact version in 1939 with his Suntop Homes. In that instance the central service space 
is compacted into two cross-walls that provide separation between the four equal but 
pinwheeling units. 

St. Mark's, the recognized tower prototype, appears to be a direct, vertical extension of the 
Suntop Homes concept. The rotational geometry evident in both projects recalls Wright's 
decorative designs, which, no doubt, served to inform these experiments. Rotational 
symmetry provided a dynamic aspect to the composition of identical units, and overcame 
the monotony of simple repetition. In St. Mark's, Wright demonstrates again that his 
variety-in-unity theme was more than a polemic; it was a design objective that could be 
realized through form manipulation informed by the principles of ornamental design. 


Seeking a Context for the Tower Prototype 

After St. Mark's, Wright rejected his earlier experiments with the urban block building in 
favor of the tall building as tower or sometimes linked towers. His fixation on the tower 
image is so complete that he often imposes the tower form on projects in defiance of the 
logic of either the building program or the context. The following year, Wright designed a 
project for grouped apartment towers in Chicago and repeated the theme ten years later in 
the Crystal Heights project in Washington, D.C. Both schemes are virtually identical to St. 
Mark's, although the projecting stairs have been used to join the towers on either side and 
thus provide for certain economies. The resultant wall made of individual towers has 
minimal horizontal continuity either in fact or in plastic expression. True to Wright's 
analogy, each is rooted like a tree to the earth independent of its neighbor in spite of the 
social or economic advantages that horizontally integrated floors might have provided. 
Another strategy for modifying the tower is shown in the Rogers Lacy Hotel, where one of 
the four pylons is enlarged to contain services. The hotel's base is implanted in a lower 
range and takes on a courtyard configuration. Later projects such as Broadacre City and 
the Golden Beacon in Chicago also follow closely the tenets of St. Mark's, with some 
minor variations. 


The Price Tower 

None of the apartment or hotel tower designs were realized, but in 1956, with the 
construction of the Price Tower, Wright was finally able to test his ideas in reality. His 
task was to design an office building, and he seems to have talked his client into 
increasing the scope of the project to include housing and to adopt the unexpected form of 
a tower. It was unexpected in that inexpensive land for horizontal development was not 
scarce. The Price Tower had a mixed program of offices and duplex apartments with a 
lower zone of shops and a pair of courtyards, one for the office portion of the tower and the 
other for residents. The typical upper-level plan displays a subdivision similar to that of 
St. Mark's, but with only one of the four quadrants reserved for a duplex apartment. The 
contrasting form and orientation of the apartment section lock the tower into the site and 
street grid at ground level while developing a special corner "rudder" that tends to stabilize 
the tower's pinwheeling movement and provide clearer orientation in the landscape. 

At the Johnson Wax headquarters, Wright again imposes the tower scheme on the design 
of research laboratories and dismisses conflicts between function and form in favor of 
landscape and image objectives. The conflict between laboratory functions and their 
vertical disposition is perhaps more evident since Louis Kahn's attempt to house 
laboratories in similarly configured towers. The Richards Medical Center proved that a 
series of small floor spaces stacked vertically leaves fewer options for the flexible 
arrangements of labs. The Salk Institute's open horizontal loft space is an implicit critique 
of the earlier tower approach and provides for much more flexible laboratory space. If 
Kahn's lesson is valid for the Johnson Wax Research Tower, Wright's motivation for the 
use of the tower type is again called into question. 

Wright's tower designs seem to illustrate the difficulties, shared with many architects of 
the twentieth century, of dealing with the urban condition. Like Le Corbusier, Wright 
seems to oversimplify or sidestep the issues of high-density habitation and the 
accompanying difficulties of resolving conflicts between individual and community 
identities. The insular quality of radially generated forms such as Wright's towers and 
Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes is the source of their attraction and dynamics and is 
also the cause of the difficulty of integrating these structures with a larger built 
environment. Although his Mile-high Skyscraper seems to shun any pretensions of 
integration with an urban setting, Wright's incorporation of traditional linear geometries 
within his typical tower plan holds out the possibility of successfully integrating it with a 
clear community context. In the following chapter we examine variations on Wright's 
approach to site design that might provide clues to the possible integration of individual, 
internally generated units and the formal representation of their interdependence as a 
group. 


Site Patterns 

Frank Lloyd Wright's intention was that his buildings grow out of the land rather than 
impose themselves upon it. His ability to design within a natural context makes his 
architectural contribution among the most important of the twentieth century and provides 
an important bridge to landscape architecture. Of all the modern masters, only he and 
Aalto embraced nature as the great form generator. In their designs, both managed to join 
oriental and occidental concepts relating the worlds of humans and nature. The Western 
tradition sees the person in contrast with nature, whereas Eastern tradition sees people and 
nature as integral. Aalto took the abstract, man-made forms of the International Style and 
the geomorphic, curvilinear forms in nature and synthesized them within the natural 
environment; Wright adopted the abstract geometries that he believed to be at the heart of 
all natural phenomena, no matter how complex their physical manifestations might be. His 
search for first principles focused on this Platonic understanding of reality, although it was 
embedded within a vitalistic philosophy. The poetry of his work is derived from his 
emulation of nature based on his understanding of hidden truth rather than on a literal 
imitation of its external forms. 

During his career Wright designed many large-scale projects: residential estates, housing 
groups and hotels, civic buildings, and urban design projects including the controversial 
Broadacre City. The compositions for these collective efforts exhibit many variations, but 
all occur within defined limits. These site plan strategies recognized critical issues such as 
the interface between man-made and natural form, the nature of growth and change, and 
scale and proportion relationships linking the part to the whole. An urban setting could 
dictate a different response than suburban or exurban sites; programs were organized 
differently for civic complex and group housing designs. All of these considerations 
evolved differently during the course of Wright's career. Generally the move was away 
from urban settings with collective exterior space to suburban groupings that only loosely 
defined place and usually did so in the private rather than the public realm. 


OVERVIEW 

The introductory chart shows an array of twelve building plans that represent a range of 
solution types Wright used at different times in his career and for different purposes. They 
suggest two major strategies for organization and growth at the site level: the closed 
system and the open system. In a closed system the formal organization of elements is 
fixed at the outset. It attempts to predict future needs in terms of itself and accepts growth 
only to the extent that it can be subsumed under the original pattern. Most automobiles are 
designed as closed systems; any options or accessories must be carefully integrated with 
the original form. In an open system, form is organized to accommodate growth and 
change. Future needs are assumed to be unpredictable; they will continue to influence the 
overall organization of the form. An open system is basically a kit of parts with a set of 
rules for their relationships. Barn construction is a good demonstration of an open system. 
The kit of parts contains all the materials and fasteners needed to build a barn, and the 
rules are the known methods of construction that assure structural stability and protection 
from the elements. Unlike the automobile, the barn allows a great deal of flexibility in how 
to build the original structure and how to make future additions or alterations. The overall 
organization of a barn complex can be adjusted to fit a specific site and may grow in 
unpredicted ways. 


CLOSED-SYSTEM SITE STRATEGY 

In Wright's hands the closed system approach to design characteristically produces formal, 
abstract compositions, predominantly in urban sites. The atrium type, as incorporated in 
the Francisco Terrace apartment block, is a clear early example of this approach. The 
disposition of all elements is set, and future growth is not a concern. The Francisco 
example is interesting for its two floors with upper-level galleried access flats 
surrounding a large garden. The units are paired with back-to-back services; corner 
towers, a projecting entrance canopy at the upper level, and the monumental entrance are 
the only embellishments. The McArthur concrete apartment house of 1906 represents an 
attempt at moderate-cost housing. The U-shaped footprint of the plan resembles the 
earlier Francis Apartments and continues the closed-system approach. Although the 
geometry was to vary, the basic tendencies of the closed system appeared in several 
large-scale site designs. 

The academically conceived Imperial Hotel was one of Wright's most treasured works, a 
building that he referred to throughout his career. Although the structural integrity of the 
construction and its miraculous survival of the Tokyo earthquake seem to have been the 
objective reason for Wright's pride, its organization is an intriguing resolution to a difficult 
space-packing problem. The organization of the hotel could be seen as a modification of 
the McArthur Apartments. Besides growing very large, the U-shaped configuration has 
been modified in two important ways. First the building court has been split by the 
insertion of a pavilion-like communal block that includes the main entrance hall, dining, 
cabaret, meeting rooms, and support spaces. The central building is embraced by the unit 
wings on either side, which are woven together with two interconnecting bridges and stairs 
that link the entire complex. The spaces between the outer wings and the inner pavilion 
become a series of intimate courtyards. The central pavilion opens out to the gardens with 
terraces in a continuous movement of space. Although symmetrically planned about the 
longitudinal axis, a slight weight is given to one long side that accommodates a second 
entry point. Units open to both sides, inside and out. The increased fenestration and 
balconies enhance the relationship to the garden, and their more circumspect use mutes 
the relationship to the street side. The introverted, completed aspect of the plan supports 
our view of the hotel plan as a closed system. Nevertheless, the lateral circulation passages 
and their visual extension through the outer wings suggest possibilities for growth, even 
though limited. 

The large building fragment conceived as a closed system is a characteristic urban strategy 
we associate with Wright's post-World War II work, although prominent earlier 
examples exist. Typically a large, inclusive organization is symmetrically organized about 
a major axis with one or more minor axes. It is usually a simple geometric form such as 
the square, triangle, or circle, precisely defined at its perimeter and tending toward a 
centripetal rather than centrifugal organization. His delightfully buoyant Wolf Lake 
project of 1895 proves Wright's mastery of academic planning. The play of major and 
minor axes, use of circular elements, mastery of circulation on both land and water, and 
the suggestion of spatial containment in the two extended pier arms with terminating 
towers create a richness of effect and spatial weave unparalleled in his early work. It is 
grounded in the urban academic tradition. What may Wright's work have been like had he 
taken this course at a truly urban scale during this period? The Midway Gardens picks up 
many of these themes, its large outdoor space being analogous to the water plaza of Wolf 
Lake. The terraced balconies, towers, tiled wall surfaces, decorative sculpture, furniture, 
and the like made the Midway a magical place that summed up the very best in Wright's 
academic mode. 

The later Monona Terrace is a more literal successor to Wolf Lake, and yet its net result is 
disappointing. The major difference between Monona and the two earlier projects is its 
object-centered rather than space-centered orientation. The generous relationship to the 
water suggested by the Wolf Lake structure is compromised by the broad parking terraces 
facing the lake in the Monoma project. The automobile cuts off the relationship between 
the internal building functions and the lake and results in a strangely introverted scheme 
for the given site. 

The Point Park Community Center project for Pittsburgh of 1947 again shows a single 
organism, an overlapping triangle and circle, now grown very large and engulfing an 
entire portion of the city. The dichotomy between inside and outside is a crucial issue for 
the community center as well. The geometric center, the "shopping space" encircled by a 
car garage, has only two radial links to the community in the form of bridges crossing the 
two rivers. The role of the automobile becomes more obtrusive and enshrouds the inner 
space not unlike Wright's Automobile Objective and Planetarium project of 1925. The 
closing off of major functions that seem to deserve an outward breath of fresh air is 
strange. Could Wright be deliberately turning his back on the city, especially a city that at 
that time was infamous for its coal smoke and industrial pollution? This approach tends to 
make the large, urban ensemble look as if it were really a small building grown very large, 
resulting in a crisis of scale. 

This problematic aspect of scale is most evident in his project for the Opera House and 
Gardens for Baghdad project in 1957, an example of his late rococo decorative tendencies. 
Throughout the project are problems of transition between different programmatic 
expressions in the closed-circle form and several awkward intersections. The initial 
circular opera house appears to have no graceful way to expand beyond its immediate 
boundary. 


OPEN-SYSTEM SITE STRATEGY 

This other strategy, which dominated most of his site designs, adopts a set of parts 
consisting of epicenters connected by corridors, pergolas, or building wings stretching out 
from center to center like tentacles. This approach has an accretive, episodic quality that 
pervades the whole and often results in a constellation of building fragments. The parts are 
organized by adherence to a consistent, pervasive unit system or grid that is inevitably 
based on forty-five or thirty-sixty-degree angles. 


From Hillside Home School to Taliesin West 

When compared with Unity Temple, Wright's building for his aunts, the Hillside Home 
School of 1902, demonstrates the basic distinction between the open-system and 
closed-system strategies. Although the assembly hall, gymnasium, and studio wing are 
each centers based on the same compositional order as the worship space and community 
hall at Unity, here the centers are separated by long galleries. They are conceived as a 
series of pavilions that could be extended through the addition of other connecting links. 
The orthogonal geometry holds the pieces together as a constellation. 

The Hillside Home School shows initial signs of integration with the natural site in the 
form of a horizontal shaft of space between the two major building masses. In a series of 
house designs, Wright exploited this orthogonal constellation strategy and gradually 
shifted the focus of the plan from the building to exterior space, with its definition 
becoming increasingly clear. The Martin House is perhaps the earliest accomplished essay 
in which the Prairie House could grow and "embrace" the landscape. The site is conceived 
as a series of pavilions, each of which is either explicitly or implicitly based on a 
cruciform. These pavilions are then linked through landscape elements such as the 
pergola, garden walls, and planting beds. The buildings and subsidiary elements define 
exterior space. Yet the definition of space is, to a certain extent, ambivalent, and in the end 
the building commands our primary attention. This attitude changes with the designs of 
both the Coonley House and the McCormick House project, which followed shortly 
afterwards. Both of these later examples still insist on a epicentric grouping of important 
program elements such as the living room (singular but weighted with an asymmetric 
dining room above in the Coonley House; doubled up in dumbbell fashion in the 
McCormick House, where its large terrace and not the building itself describes the center 
of the composition). 

The Coonley House has a preferred direction, which is outward; its back forms a large 
garden court that is loosely defined by its service and bedroom wings, as well as by a series 
of outbuildings. The McCormick project similarly displays an attitude toward defined open 
space, but in this case the weave of space is more complex. It includes a large entry court 
that simultaneously relates to the lakeside terrace and a secondary space at right angles to 
it that leaps across a ravine. The bedroom wing and services form a third, more private 
court that is bounded on three sides. The orchestration of public and private space woven 
through both the interior and exterior space allows the McCormick House to achieve a 
richness of site design unsurpassed by any of Wright's work up to that point. 

The Hollyhock House has been described in stylistic terms and as an example of Wright's 
fascination with Mesoamerican themes.{Tselos, D. T. 1953. Exotic Influences in the 
Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Magazine of Art 47(4):160-169, 184} Its planning 
has not been discussed or has been summarily dismissed as a new tendency toward 
classical precepts.{Banham, Reyner. 1969. The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright. 
Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 76:512-519} However, a closer 
inspection of the plan reveals a startling similarity to the Martin House complex. The key 
is the symmetrical triad of the formal living room suite, which duplicates those in the 
Martin complex. However, the fourth arm of the Martin House is compacted about the 
fireplace with flanking kitchen and reception rooms, whereas the Hollyhock is split open 
to form an oasis-like garden court. 

The Hillside Home School was his first in a series of special building categories which 
could be loosely termed educational. Taliesin East, the Ocotillo desert camp, and finally 
Taliesin West all served to house Wright and his architectural establishment. Taliesin East 
was the first in this group to challenge this object orientation seriously and transform it 
with a focus on the space itself. Taliesin, Welsh for "shining brow," was conceived as a 
compound surrounded on three sides by buildings, with the focus of the space and the 
symbolic center the hilltop rather than the building. The fourth side is closed off in the 
distance by the highest hill in the valley, on which is perched the Romeo and Juliet 
Windmill. The sitings of Taliesin East and Jefferson's Monticello show striking 
similarities.{See Creese, Walter L. 1985. The Crowning of the American Landscape: 
Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; see 
Jefferson's Charlottesville, pp. 29-42, and Wright's Taliesin and Beyond, pp. 241-165} 
Each encloses a rear garden with embracing arms, and the open side of each is closed with 
the distant landscape, Carter Mountain in the case of Monticello. 

The Ocotillo desert camp was designed as a temporary winter headquarters for Wright and 
his staff in 1927. The compound (formed to keep the rattlesnakes out) surrounded a small 
rise in the desert floor. It enclosed an irregular space with buildings made of wood and 
canvas canopies and diagonal wood walls. The plan, which at first looks haphazard, is 
actually formed with two primary grids, one shifted at a thirty-to sixty-degree angle to 
the other. Wright was to comment on the informality demanded by the setting: 

Out here in the great spaces obvious symmetry claims too much, I find, wearies the eye too 
soon and stultifies the imagination. Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it 
begins: so for me I felt there could be no obvious symmetry in any building in this great 
desert, one especially in this new camp.{Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1943. An Autobiography. 
New York: Horizon Press; p. 309} 

Taliesin West, similarly sited in the desert landscape, rests on a gently sloping incline 
facing a vast shallow valley and the city of Phoenix. To the rear the hill slopes gradually 
upward to the foothills and Camelback Mountain. Thus both building groups demonstrate 
a similar site strategy, Taliesin West's rear garden enclosure being provided by the distant 
mountain range. Both Taliesins display a similar program breakdown. Both separate 
Wright's private quarters at one end in a kind of T-shaped end pavilion. In Taliesin East 
it provides a splendid view over the valley and the artificial lake formed by Wright; in 
Taliesin West it terminates in an oasis-like desert garden compound that internalizes 
view rather than extending it into the distant landscape. The other major wing contains a 
variety of elements, but the major one in both cases is the studio and drafting room. The 
entrance for both Taliesins is circuitous and requires that the visitor take an indirect path. 
The visitor is provided with distant views of the complex that do not reveal entry. Only by 
moving from one entry cue to another-like hopping from one lily pad to the next-does 
the visitor finally arrive at the entry. Entry occurs precisely at the gap between Wright's 
living quarters and the work space thus providing a single entry point and functional link 
to both parts. The vertically compressed open loggia, a kind of porte cochere, presents a 
dramatic view of the landscape that one has just traversed. This spiraling theme-distant 
view, closer but mysterious entry, and final revelation back to from whence one came-is 
repeated countless times and is a theme present in his domestic work, as the Willitts house 
demonstrates. 

The Ennis house of 1924 and the Lloyd Jones houses of 1929 show a variation of the open 
system strategy based on 'field' organizations which reinforce the notion of a compound in 
a more explicit way. In both houses the 'field' consists of a simple square grid. The Jones 
house in particular suggests a deviation from the constellation approach. Its outer 
perimeter is bounded within a regular orthogonal field described by major living room, 
bedrooms, and garage. A swimming pool and hexagonal fountain mark the central space, 
the latter acting like the campfire of the Ocotillo desert camp, and suggest a similar 
"sacred" place making. 

The campus design for Florida Southern College is perhaps Wright's most poetic urban 
effort. The geometry of its plan is reminiscent of Wright's numerous decorative 
compositions employing circles, triangles, and squares, such as the mantel design of the 
Hollyhock House. The site plan suggests a largescale approach that is neither so 
fragmentary as to fall apart nor so unitary as to be overbearing. The composition is 
structured by a "field" of orange groves whose grid extends like a carpet across the site. It 
can be compared to earlier decorative designs such as the thirty-and sixty-degree tile 
pattern designed for the Coonley House but not used. Smaller building groupings and the 
axis of a major east-west path align with the pier on the water's edge which establish a 
connection between the heart of the complex and the campus chapel. The shifted 
thirty-and sixty-degree grid introduces a dynamic element within the grid and breaks 
the perimeter of the compound with its force, establishing a connection to the existing 
campus to the north. The multiple organizational readings suggest a layering transparent 
effect.{Hoesli, Bernhard. 1968. Transparenz. Basel und Stuggart: Birkhauser Verlag} 


THE SPINE 

This last variation of the open system, also accretive but more openly sensitive to the 
natural site, appears mostly in the latter part of Wright's career. The spine organizes 
elements into a linear building with a series of epicenters that designate important 
program space and usually signal a change in axis. The Nakoma Country Club of 1926, 
the San Marcos Hotel in the desert a year later, and the Marin County Civic Center of 
1959 all exhibit these traits. Enclosed space is only implied and less important than the 
wall itself, which may take on the form a bridge, dam, or aqueduct in the landscape. 

The Nakoma Country Club on the historic Winnebago Indian camping ground is 
organized on the brow of a hill; it stretches its one long arm along the brow to make a wall 
punctuated at one end by the large lodge or wigwam. The octagonal motif with nearly 
symmetrical flanking arms is apparent in the earlier River Forest Golf Club, which was 
executed by Wright around the turn of the century and is the obvious precedent. 
Organizationally the octagon provides a hinge for a secondary arm of services that pivots 
at forty-five degrees. This formula is repeated in the Unitarian Church in Madison, 
where a similar ridge conditions the architectural response. 

The San Marcos Hotel desert project of 1929 is a faceted linear arrangement that 
approximates the contours of the mountain slope on which it is sited, as well as miming 
the angle of repose of the distant mountain slopes.{Banham, Reyner. 1969. The 
Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright. Journal of the Royal Institute of British 
Architects 76:512-519} The center of the hotel complex is the dining room and other 
shared areas; they act as the pivot that links the arms radiating from its hub. The visitor 
passes through and under the major wing to arrive at an oasis-like court that is formed by 
the building and the hillside and is an intimate, luxuriant environment. The long wings 
extend out at a thirty-to sixty-degree angle and consist of units that step at a 
thirty-degree angle in section to pick up the theme of the plan. The units are connected 
by a single loaded corridor buried in the back toward the hill with storage. Pairs of units 
share plumbing services and steps, and each has a small pool. The overall effect is a 
careful marriage of site and building; the rather abrupt-looking angles effectively resolve 
themselves into the mountain landscape in perspective. 

Marin County Civic Center does not occur as an edge condition on the brow of a hill; 
neither does it follow the contours of a hillside against which it is placed. Instead, it acts 
like an aqueduct, leaping from one hill to the next, an image that may have inspired its 
pseudostructural arches. The main center occurs at the top of the larger hill and is reached 
from the major linear element. Similar to Nakoma it provides a hundred and 
thirty-five-degree angle relationship between the two wings. 

Wright is well known for his masterful integration of interior and exterior space. His 
residential designs are overwhelming evidence of his commitment to the continuity of 
space. They also show that he recognized a boundary between man-made form and 
nature, even if it is subtly expressed. Private houses such as Fallingwater, swimming in a 
sea of nature, terminate their ordering geometries at the edges of balconies, terraces, or 
parapets. The clean, abstract shapes quickly give way to materials derived from the 
surrounding environment, such as the rough-laid sandstone of the piers. In these houses 
we are positioned between the security and comfort of the hearth and the powerful sweep 
of nature. 

The resolution of human being and nature that was successful for the private building on a 
suburban or rural site was not easily transferred to largerscale public works in urban 
settings. Like many architects of his time, Wright struggled with the relationship of the 
realities of urban life and his appreciation of the nurturing qualities of the natural 
landscape. As public functions and the need to unify large complexes of buildings 
increased human domination of sites, Wright had to address the relationship between 
man-made and natural exterior environments. Early approaches to this problem, such as 
at the Hollyhock House, provide a man-made container for controlled landscape, with the 
building and its extensions employed as a boundary between this exterior court and the 
surrounding landscape. The next concession to nature was the modeling of the plan shape 
of this exterior court to reflect major features of the natural site. The Ocotillo compound 
exemplifies this approach. In the Nakoma and San Marcos projects, we see the ultimate 
recognition of nature in the acceptance of its features as the central organizing force of the 
site plan. 

Of Wright's two site-planning strategies, the open system is his most original and 
successful contribution. It recognizes both the interaction of human and natural 
environment and the realities of growth and change. The open system is reflective of 
oriental concepts of space and in sharp contrast with his closed-system strategy, which is 
rooted in classical Western composition. 


Between Principle and Form 

In the preceding chapters, we have observed, described, and analyzed the formal structure 
of Wright's architecture and attempted to add layers of meaning to a typological view of 
his work. We have focused on the specific manner in which form incorporates principle 
and is an expression of it. In this chapter we speculate more broadly about Wright's ability 
to bridge the gap between principle and form. We are looking for consistencies in the way 
Wright designed. We are interested in the practical concepts or devices he applied 
throughout his career to achieve a unity of principle and form. Our purpose is to explore 
these issues of form and principle in order to make his process of design more tangible and 
accessible to other architects. 

We have identified the following interrelated ideas that we believe played a major role in 
Wright's design process: type, order, space, and experience. Wright's conception of each 
seems to have originated in a deeply felt conviction that he then embodied in form. The 
means and devices that he used to explore these ideas in specific building designs reflect 
this larger frame of reference. Much emphasis has been placed upon Wright as a creative 
visionary, but another equally important side of Wright is the practical problem solver and 
strategic designer. Given his origins in crafts-oriented nineteenth-century culture and 
his prolific output, we can more easily see Wright as an architect committed to realizing 
his designs in built form, a creator who could invent practical, efficient ways to convert his 
principles into concrete forms of astonishing quality. 


TYPE 

Our contention is not only that formal groups or types exist in Wright's architecture but 
also that they constitute the essence of his approach to design. As we have seen in the 
previous chapters, the basic types of hearth, atrium, and tower are the starting points and 
guiding concepts for almost all of his designs. Wright spoke about function and form as a 
unity. Through the use of types, he is able to embody the idea of dwelling, community, and 
place that can transform to adopt a wide variety of expressions while retaining their basic 
integrity. 

Even in his earliest work we can see the emergence of the hearth type as a compelling 
idea. In both the Blossom and Winslow houses (1892-93), layered, interpenetrating space 
emanate from the hearth which is central to the resulting spatial dynamics. These 
innovations are trapped within a traditional housing volume for the most part with hints of 
the interior spatial dynamics beginning to poke through the shell. Over Wright's entire 
career, through the Prairie house years and on through the Usonian houses, the spatial 
energy of the hearth type is released to the exterior and into the surrounding landscape 
without abandoning its primary identity. The other two types are also revealed early: the 
atrium in Wright's studio at his Oak Park home (1895) and the Romeo and Juliet Tower at 
Taliesin East (1896). It is extraordinary that these types, invented by an architect in his 
twenties, would provide the foundation for a full lifetime of invention. 


ORDER 

I confess to a love for a clean arris; the cube I find comforting, the sphere inspiring. In the 
opposition of the circle and the square I find motives for architectural themes with all the 
sentiment of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": combining these with the octagon I find 
sufficient materials for symphonic development. I can marry these forms in various ways 
without adulterating them, but I love them pure, strong, and undefiled. The ellipse I 
despise; and so do I despise all perverted, equivocal versions of these pure forms. There is 
quite room enough within these limitations for one artist to work I am sure, and to accord 
well with the instinct for first principles.{In Wright's "Reply to Mr. Sturgis' Criticism" on 
the Larkin Building, from In the Cause of Architecture (Buffalo, New York, April 1909; 
cited in Quinan, Jack. 1987. Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building, Myth and Fact. 
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; p. 167} 

Even a cursory review of Wright's buildings reveals a consistent identity that avoids 
monotony. Using a set of primary forms and "first principles," Wright could create an 
overwhelming variety of building designs that shared the Wright "signature". Pursuing the 
expression of "organic" architecture, he achieved unity and diversity at the same time. A 
major source of this achievement was his mastery of two basic types of order: 
compositional and thematic. Compositional order supports both architectural unity and 
diversity by employing traditional elements of design such as balance, alignment, 
hierarchy, repetition, and rhythm. The binuclear composition of Unity Temple, for 
example, incorporates symmetry about a major longitudinal axis with additional cross axes 
defining local symmetries at multiple and diminishing scales. The large vertical volume of 
the main worship space is balanced by a set of lower horizontal elements including the 
Unity Temple house and entrance steps, terraces, and loggia. The compositional balance is 
further supported by the equilibrium of the vertical and horizontal elements, solid volumes 
and voids, and large-and small-scale building components. 

Thematic order consists of a continuity of formal themes at multiple scales, from site plan, 
to building plan, to ornamental details, often including furniture and furnishings, to create 
an order based on aesthetics. This order is such as can be found in nature in trees or rocks 
or in the visual profile of traditional Mediterranean hill towns. The dining room table in 
the Robie House can be seen as a miniature version of the larger house acting like a nested 
toy doll that recalls the larger. In Unity Temple, thematic order is established through the 
consistent use of orthogonal geometry and the controlled application of a specific set of 
ornamental manipulations from the building footprint to the chandeliers.{For similar 
comparisons see Hanks, David A. 1979. The Decorative Designs of Frank Loyd Wright, 
New York: E.P. Dutton} The theme is further supported by the use of characteristic 
proportions and rhythms in form, especially simple geometries such as the square nested 
many times within itself, like the example of the Robie House. 

Part of the thematic order in Wright's work can be traced to his acceptance of the 
geometric limits inherent in his drafting equipment: the T square, the forty-five degree 
and thirty-and sixty-degree triangles, and the compass. Unlike Le Corbusier or Alvar 
Aalto, who derived curvilinear forms from other designed objects or nature, Wright used 
his basic set of drafting tools to generate his forms, which are inevitably abstract despite 
the use of natural materials. 

Through the constant reliance on grids or a "unit system" as a structuring device, Wright 
incorporates both compositional and thematic order within the heart of his design process. 
The grid becomes an armature or framework for experimentation with both the 
relationships between building elements and the expression of their common aesthetic. 
Wright's attitude toward the unit system was similar to Le Corbusier's attitude to his 
"modular" grid, that is, not as a formula for design but as a context within which to pose 
questions. For Wright the grid was the start and not the end; its application always 
assumed the presence of an experienced designer with sophisticated sensitivities and 
judgment who was already in possession of an architectural idea. Employing the grid to 
generate the forms of Unity Temple did not automatically generate its final design. Wright 
had to struggle with many unknowns: the proportions and orientation of the site, the 
sequence of entry, the relationship between interior and exterior space, not to mention 
reconciling his clients' idea of a place of worship with his own. 

Within the geometric range of his drafting tools, Wright experimented with many 
variations of the grid based on the rectangle, triangle, and circle. Demonstrating his 
distinctive ability to "design" his method of designing, perhaps inherited from Sullivan 
and Owen Jones, he freely explored a variety of interpretations of these grids and further 
extended the range of possibilities.{See Menocal, Narcisco. 1983-84. Form and Content 
in Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Tree of Life' Window. Bulletin of the Elvehjem Museum of Art; 
and Castex, Jean. 1985. Frank Lloyd Wright, le Printemps de la Prarie House. Pierre 
Mardaga, editeur. Bruxelles.} 


SPACE 

One of Frank Lloyd Wright's most significant contributions to modern architecture is his 
understanding of the role of space in design. As he readily acknowledged, his ideas of 
space were closely related to the fundamental concepts of Taoist beliefs expressed by the 
Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, namely, that the essence of that which is seen is that 
which is not seen. Translated to architectural design, the essence of a building is not the 
visible construction but the invisible, "negative" space that is embodied within. In oriental 
architecture we see numerous expressions of this deference to the continuity of negative 
space: the overhanging roof's eaves that tip up at their edges, to the structural beams that 
extend beyond their supporting posts, the elevated platform at the base of the building, the 
transom space above the doorways, and moveable screens that extend throughout the 
house. These elements are most clearly seen in traditional Japanese temples and houses, 
where everything exudes the sense of temporariness. Moveable floor mats and furnishings 
emphasize architecture as settings rather than structures. Negative space is treated as a 
river that flows through the building, only temporarily defined for habitation. The impact 
of Taoist philosophy on oriental architecture and Wright's interpretation of this tradition 
seems especially disposed to engage the imaginations of people who experience them. 

Wright identified his concept of space as fundamental to the Prairie House and his break 
with the contemporary house design, which he expressed as "breaking out of the box."{See 
Brooks, H. Allen. 1979. Wright and the Destruction of the Box. Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians 38 (1):7-14} His architecture would not be limited to space 
enclosure but would emphasize the continuity of space from indoors to outdoors; it would 
replace a static notion with a dynamic one. Wright gave form to his sense of space through 
strategies that support consistent themes in his architecture: interpenetrating spaces, both 
vertical and horizontal, and the dissolution of fixed corners. The three-part vertical 
composition of the typical Prairie house seems to have evolved slowly in Wright's work, 
starting with the Winslow House. In this house we clearly see three divisions: a base, a 
middle section under the eaves, and the large overhanging roof. As discussed earlier, the 
definition of the middle section seems not as clear as in later houses where the horizontal 
strip is recessed and dominated by ribbon windows. As Wright explores the elaborations of 
the three-part scheme, continuity of horizontal planes and the sense of deep recess in the 
middle horizontal section become more clear. Characteristically this sense of penetration 
of space through surfaces is expressed in various parts of the house, including the interior 
coves and moldings. Ultimately it led to the disintegration of the corner, the strongest 
spatial defining element. 

The interpenetration of spaces emerges quite early in Wright's work, particularly in 
experiments in his own house and studio, which show a clear expression of spatial zones 
rather than rigid containers. A prime example of extended, overlapping space can be found 
in Wright's Unity Temple. The main worship structure is organized around a central cubic 
volume that extends upward through the skylighted roof that dominates the visitor's 
experience of the temple interior. Crossing horizontal shafts of space are defined by the 
four major vertical piers and the suspended balconies. The exterior extensions of the roof 
and large voids at the windows reinforce horizontal space, whereas the open gridded 
ceiling and skylight recognize the central cubic volume vertically. This centered, 
three-dimensional intersection of spaces provides the anchor and the theme for the rest of 
the building complex. 

Wright's desire to break the corners of the traditional box plan is expressed early on in his 
1892 design of the octagonal corner rooms for the Emmond House. The corners are further 
opened until they become dissolved in clusters of vertical piers in the Martin House of 
1904. In the Freeman House and later in the Johnson Wax Tower, the corners are wrapped 
in glass with no vertical mullion or support. In Fallingwater we see a highly developed 
integration of extended space in a house that features horizontal layering, interlocking 
spaces, and the dissolution of corners with mitered glass corners. The protruding balconies 
appear to float over the cascading stream to provide "steps" that link the waterfall's rock 
ledges to the building and ultimately move skyward. 


EXPERIENCE 

In this book we have explored the underlying formal order in the work of Frank Lloyd 
Wright. Thus far we have dealt with the formal composition and expression of space 
whose permanent, visible imprint on Wright's architecture can be described and analyzed. 
Now we look at the less tangible but equally powerful orchestrations of experience with 
which Wright energized his work. Without attributing specific motives to Wright, we can 
observe consistencies in his designs that suggest the ways he intended people to experience 
the architecture. 

Many sympathetic to Wright's architecture have commented that only through the direct 
experience of his buildings can his mastery as an architect be fully appreciated. We believe 
that his ability to orchestrate experience is the result of consistently applied principles. 
They were developed as a response to important psychological and symbolic human needs 
that promote spiritual transcendency and energize the imagination. 

The earliest artifacts of civilization record an awareness of an order or an entity larger and 
more powerful than the individual person. The desire to transcend the limits of a chaotic, 
finite existence and form a relationship to a more powerful, seemingly infinite, world is a 
strong force in all cultures but is often associated with more "primitive" civilizations in 
which celestial events involving the sun, moon, or a constellation of stars were particularly 
important. In Greek culture the link between the heavens and the human being was 
embodied in a pantheon of gods. The Greek myths consist largely of transactions and 
associations between these gods and mortal humans. Woven through these invented 
histories, we continually find tales of sacrifices made as a way of creating a bond between 
human beings and the supernatural. In architecture this spirit of sacrifice has often been 
expressed as space set aside exclusively for the gods, holy spaces from which humans are 
excluded. An example surviving to modern times is the large, solid block that occupies the 
center of the principal shrine of Islam at Mecca. This gigantic block sits in the middle of 
an open-air forum. Muslim worshippers walk in a circle around this space but they may 
not enter it. By being prohibited from reaching the center of the space, the devout 
surrender or sacrifice dominance of the space to the symbol of their god. Sacrificial space 
can also be found in churches, monuments, and even some public buildings. 

Similar transcendent spaces can be found in Wright's work, especially in his Prairie 
houses, where the great chimney and hearth fulfill this function. Although Wright extols 
the use of this device as a metaphor for kinship with natural organic form, we might also 
interpret it as a generator of the compelling intangible experience of sacrificial space. In 
his house designs Wright consistently forms a large solid area at the center, normally 
including the fireplace and hearth. This mass forms a dominant intrusion within the major 
space of the house so that the tension of being next to but never occupying the core of the 
house cannot be escaped. We are made to feel subservient to the architecture and to give 
the architecture a transcending sense of importance and permanence. In buildings such as 
Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Tower, the psychological or symbolic subservience is 
reinforced by a literal structural dependence. 

In this same tradition, the central atrium space at Unity Temple, for example, provides a 
clear expression of a sacrificial space. In deference to this unobstructed cube of space, 
much of the seating is tucked away in balconies couched between the four massive piers 
that mark the corners of the space. The vertical proportion of these piers and the 
skylighted ceiling reinforce the vertical, transcendental axis of the space. These spaces can 
also be found in other public buildings by Wright, including the Larkin Building and the 
Guggenheim Museum. 

Another experiential theme explored by Wright is that of mystery. Human imagination 
appears to crave the experience of mysteries as much as or more than their resolution. 
Wright takes advantage of our curiosity by creating environments that deliberately lack the 
predictable clarity important to the classical tradition. From many viewpoints his buildings 
seem incomplete to the viewer. The combination of large, overhanging roofs, deep 
parapets, and segmented stained glass windows provides us with an intriguing, almost 
impenetrable sense of space that heightens our anticipation. Light seems to penetrate deep 
into the recesses of the walls without revealing the inner sanctum of the building. In urban 
settings the use of an elevated first floor and outrigger parapet walls provides an added 
phenomenal distance between the exterior and interior that guards privacy as it provides 
the inhabitants with clear visual access to the exterior. 

Having created a "sacred" core and attendant central space for the building, Wright 
develops our sense of mystery to create a protective psychological distance between the 
building exterior and its interior. If we trace the typical route of entry to the core or central 
space of any of his mature buildings, we find a consistent pattern of sequential redirection, 
anticipation, and suspense, until the climax occurs upon arrival at the hearth or central 
space. To reinforce the sense of anticipation and heighten the impact upon reaching the 
main destination, Wright manipulates the height, scale, and intensity of light and carefully 
orchestrates experience through contrasts. This theme is related to the oriental conception 
that the essence of experience is not what is immediately evident but rather what is 
imagined or anticipated. In many of his houses and particularly in Unity Temple, Wright 
creates an experience much like a Japanese garden, where the complete scene is never 
evident. We cannot comprehend the total space at once; a part is always left around the 
corner to provoke the movement and the imagination. 

Most of Wright's work is distinctive for its intensity and vitality. Much of the energy in the 
architecture is derived from the dynamic tension he creates between opposing forces: the 
universal and the particular, the community and the individual, the prototypic and the 
contextual. 

The tension between the universal and the particular is represented by the juxtaposition of 
strong abstract geometries and the special, often natural characteristics of the site. The 
geometry, often in the form of a pervasive grid, acts as an anchoring or stabilizing element 
in tension with the fluid forms of nature. Fallingwater house most clearly demonstrates the 
manner in which Wright orchestrates the dynamic interplay of these two forces. 

The central tension of civilization, between the individual and the community, is another 
dynamic force played out in Wright's houses. Whereas the powerful expression of the 
hearth, central space, and dominating roof reinforce the social, communal nature of the 
family, the dynamic extensions of space, terraces, and roofs express the expansion of each 
individual's potential. The way these forces are resolved within the building creates unity 
and harmony without diminishing the importance of either the individuals or the 
community. 

Further examination of Wright's architecture will, no doubt, uncover additional bridges 
between principle and form. Our aim here is to demonstrate plausible connections and to 
suggest that their recognition may provide avenues for understanding Wright and avoiding 
"mere imitation." We hope to convey a richer understanding of Wright's means of joining 
of principle and form that might serve to inspire architects. 


Architectural Implications 

A book like this could have been written about any one of a number of architects. We 
chose Wright because of his recognized preeminence among American architects and his 
unmatched output of projects and completed buildings. We hope our typological approach 
will encourage researchers to study the designs of other architects in a similar way. As our 
investigation has provided a number of insights into the architecture of Frank Lloyd 
Wright, our understanding and appreciation of his accomplishments and the potentials of 
typological research has grown. In this chapter we share some of these insights in the 
belief that a lot more can be learned about both Wright's work and typological research. 


THE IMPLICATIONS OF WRIGHT'S WORK 

An overview of the architecture of the twentieth century, particularly in America, provides 
plausible evidence of Wright's broad influence. At first consideration, the dominant 
influence of his work appears to be the concept of thematic unity. We do not refer to the 
imitation of his specific aesthetic, but rather to the continuity of form at all scales of a 
building, irrespective of style. Much of the strength and integrity of designs by architects 
such as Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, Paul Rudolph, Mario , and Faye Jones hinges upon the 
refinement of forms in constant reference to a unifying theme. In this light, Wright 
contributed to the liberation of modern architecture (as distinguished from International 
Style) from dependence on one style or aesthetic. He promoted a method of form 
generation that could accept a range of formal or experiential preferences. 

Our comparative studies of Wright's building plans show that he also demonstrated the 
possibilities of integrating formal, academic composition and the informal fluidity of 
natural rhythms. The full potential of these plans was exploited through his adoption of 
oriental concepts of space. This "hidden dimension"{See Hall, Edward T. 1966. The 
Hidden Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday} of his architecture accounts for the 
undiminished experiential power of his best buildings. This approach introduced a 
dynamic mode of expression that has been pursued by many architects. 

However, Wright's architecture seems to have escaped the formal analysis accorded the 
works of several prominent contemporary architects. Several reasons for this situation 
could be offered. His work seems too personal and elusive. The romantic notion of a 
creative genius operating in a complete vacuum argues against the transferability of design 
ideas and creates a barrier between the student of architecture and Wright's designs. The 
discouragement of imitation and the rejection of formal analysis effectively closed off all 
avenues of access to his work. Finally, on the basis of its particular expression, the 
judgment that his architecture was inappropriate to the modern age has blocked analysis of 
his work. 

In summary, Wright's impact on architecture seems heavily influenced by his attitudes 
toward architectural education, namely, that design excellence was more an acquired skill 
than an intellectual pursuit. On the whole we have inherited an exposure to his 
architecture rather than an understanding. This inheritance is symptomatic of the 
profession of architecture that is only now emerging from a craft toward a body of 
knowledge. 

The principal characteristics of Wright's architecture reflect his concern for the central 
artistic question of the relationships between order and experience, the universal and the 
particular, or consistencies and variations. He juxtaposed abstract geometry with the 
special conditions of the building context to achieve consistencies and variety over a range 
of designs. The consistency of his vocabulary accounts for certain consistencies in the 
experience of his spaces: stability, security, comfort, relaxation, and familiarity. The 
vitality of his design invention seems to be related to the degree of limitation he placed on 
his design palette in terms of geometries, materials, and construction. Although the 
materials, construction, and sculpting of space and light may imitate nature, the 
geometries of the work make a direct appeal to the human intellect. 


THE IMPLICATIONS OF WRIGHT'S DESIGN PROCESS 

Within the extraordinary volume of literature on Wright is an amazing poverty of 
discourse on his design processes. Even colleagues who worked by his side for thirty years 
appear incapable of or reluctant to discuss his methods. Yet our studies indicate that a 
consistency of design process probably played a key role in the linkage he achieved 
between design principles and formal expression. On the basis of our studies, we offer the 
following observations regarding Wright's design processes. 

The popular notion of Wright as a creative genius operating in a vacuum could be 
sustained only by a narrow concept of design process that is limited to internal thought and 
discounts the acquisition of ideas or the processes of visual representation. He was a 
cultured individual able to absorb, critique, and transform what he saw into a new vision, 
and the expression of his vision was deeply influenced by the tools and formal concepts he 
relied on to represent form. Wright had the ability to transcend scales of concern. The 
design of a vase could be the inspiration for a skyscraper, the design of a dining room table 
could relate to the plan of a house, and a tile pattern could be enlarged to generate a 
housing pattern for many acres. Wright was able to learn from design in other media, such 
as the decorative arts (designs of tile patterns by Owen Jones, ornament by Louis Sullivan) 
or woven materials. Wright used ornamental design as a basis for his "formal research" 
throughout his career. 

Fundamental ideas about the individual in society and the human's relationship to nature 
were integrated with his design process through the use of types. Wright's process is a 
critique of the limits of pure inductive reasoning and an affirmation of the value of 
deductive reasoning that is framed by standard "type" as useful problem solving. 

Wright demonstrated that the knowledge of principle is no limit to form. form has logic, 
and the knowledge of structures "formal principles" that can guide and inform meaning 
without dictating or prescribing results. Wright was a great academic planner and had a 
highly developed knowledge of traditional compositional principles, including axes, 
symmetry, hierarchy, scale, and proportion, and he combined Western academic planning 
principles with Eastern sensibilities (such as the contrast of symmetrical axial composition 
with a spiraling movement pattern off axis); he looked to non-Western architecture but 
not in a simplistic or superficial sense. He increased the repertoire of Western architecture. 

Wright's achievements in design owe much to his mastery of a design process strongly 
driven by geometric order. His design approach proceeds from form as well as principle. 
He gave his design principles a formal expression through the use of the grids that 
integrated compositional structure and thematic unity. Wright provided an outstanding 
example of the potential of the building plan to embody basic principles that could guide 
the total development of the building design. In spite of the genius image that Wright 
projected, we believe that he struggled with the same problems and doubts as any designer, 
which he overcame through an extraordinary dedication and sense of purpose. Although 
judging the appropriateness of Wright's architecture for any era but his own is not 
necessary, his approach to design should provide lessons for many future generations. 


THE IMPLICATIONS FOR ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION AND RESEARCH 

Wright's work underlines the value of instilling a sensitivity to form and space through 
abstract hands-on means, the Froebel block approach tempered with a knowledge of types 
and historical precedents and Owen Jones exercises in manipulation and elaboration of 
form. It also shows the benefits of long-term exploration of form within clear constraints 
and the value of typology as a guide to creation, with the assumption that the architect is 
not required to invent out of thin air. 


TYPOLOGICAL RESEARCH 

The concept of type is in itself open to change insofar as it means a consciousness of actual 
facts, including, certainly, a recognition of the possibility of change. By looking at 
architectural objects as groups, as types, susceptible to differentiation in their secondary 
aspects, the partial obsolescences appearing in them can be appraised, and consequently 
one can act to change them. The type can thus be thought of as the frame within which 
change operates, a necessary term to the continuing dialectic required by history. From 
this point of view, the type, rather than being a "frozen mechanism" to produce 
architecture, becomes a way of denying the past, as well as a way of looking at the 
future.{Moneo, Rafael. 1978. On Typology. Oppositions 13:23-45.} 

As obvious as it may seem, we cannot overstate the importance of a basic premise of 
typological research, namely, that insights are to be derived from direct observation of the 
architectural work. For this reason description is one of the principal tasks of a researcher 
of types. Description is a process of noting what is immediately observable. The purpose is 
to identify what is present rather than our reactions or conjectures about the work. In 
description we are interested in accuracy and completeness appropriate to the features of 
the architecture being studied. For example, a typological study of building plans need not 
necessarily include detail drawings of carpentry or ornament. Description is a vital key to 
the research process because it provides the basic evidence upon which the other 
operations such as analysis, interpretation, and judgment will depend. 

For architecture, description is usually in two forms: graphic and verbal. Graphic 
description provides the primary visual evidence with which we can interact and explore 
clues to the underlying principles of form and process. Graphic description helps us to 
grasp parallels, patterns, tendencies, contradictions, and inconsistencies in the work. 
Graphic communication promotes simultaneous description of a wide range of features of 
architecture for comparison. Verbal description has an equally important role of naming 
and categorizing things we see. Through verbal language we can attach meaning to visual 
evidence, refine our perceptions, and evoke new concepts. The term hearth, for example, 
includes concepts of home, heart, core, enclave, identity, communion, warmth, sustenance, 
and security. The study of architectural types must combine graphic and verbal description 
to create a framework for research that is accessible and memorable. 

Formal analysis is a necessary complement to description. As we began to identify 
similarities and distinctions among Wright's building plans, descriptive categories 
emerged: hearth, congregation, tower. Each category, in turn, revealed further variations: 
compact, aligned, pinwheel, atrium, binuclear. This hierarchical arrangement of 
description provided a rudimentary map by which we could explore the broad range of 
Wright's work without getting lost or confused. 

The analysis of form highlights the presence and application of known dimensions of form 
creation: geometry, scale, proportion, balance, symmetry, rhythm, unity. Whereas design 
is mostly a process of integration of building elements, formal analysis usually involves the 
dissection of the building through drawings: plan, elevation, section, and perspective. 
Studies of different views of buildings can often lead to a range of different insights into 
the design. Selection of drawing type and dimensions of form to be examined should be 
carefully made in light of the specific purpose of the analysis. In our study, we focused on 
Wright's building plans as the most revealing view of the core of his design thinking. The 
plans can be seen as analogous to the skeletons of animals; they provide many important 
clues to the basic organization and variations in building designs. Analysis of plans did 
not address several dimensions of his work, but this limitation of view allowed us to focus 
on central issues while comparing a broad range of buildings. 

Graphic abstraction is an important tool for form analysis. It can be used as a special 
microscope that not only focuses on specific evidence but also subtracts nonessential 
information that might obscure our view, much like an x-ray. The plan views of 
buildings that we used throughout this book incorporate abstraction; the patterns of solid 
and void are emphasized, whereas descriptions of details, materials, and color are 
purposely subtracted from these views. Even more abstract drawings were used to feature 
more specialized concerns, such as spatial composition. Graphic abstraction can also be 
applied at a symbolic level to represent nonphysical patterns such as circulation 
preferences or priorities of needs. 

Any work of architecture is open to many interpretations; its meaning will vary somewhat 
for each person. To further strain matters, the meaning of a building will also differ for 
people in different historical eras; glass curtain wall skyscrapers that were once considered 
the image of a progressive, flexible corporate world have become the symbol of simplistic, 
impoverished, and oppressive institutions. In making our interpretations of Wright's work, 
we recognized three criteria: objectivity, that is, the interpretations had to be reasonable 
conclusions that most people could recognize; candor, that is, our biases and assumptions 
should be made as evident as possible; and relevance, that is, the interpretations should 
have application to contemporary discussions of architecture. 

Although judgment was not a major focus of our study, it is the component of critical 
research that is probably the least understood. When applied to design processes, emphasis 
is placed on the role of judgment in making decisions; within research processes the focus 
is on the role of judgment as a path to understanding. An important part of an articulation 
of design issues is embodied in design criteria, which describe the various relationships to 
be sought between architecture and its value to people. In architectural studies design 
criteria are often developed and refined through the process of making judgments. 

By making comparisons of different Wright designs, we believe we can point out relative 
strengths and weaknesses and begin to see the work apart from the architect as part of the 
body of general knowledge about design. We can also extend and enrich our repertoire of 
design criteria, become more sensitive to the formal implications of the design principles 
that Wright espoused, and recognize Wright's unique contributions to the architecture of 
this century and the future. 


FUTURE IMPLICATIONS 

Our experiences in studying the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright convince us of the 
utility and potential of typology as a means for analysis of form. Typological studies can 
help in achieving a grasp of a complex array of forms (such as those produced by Wright), 
fine-tuning perceptions of formal attributes, and developing a richer vocabulary with 
which to describe formal concepts. Wright's work provides clear evidence that typology 
can also be an important tool for design and creativity. He has demonstrated that the 
adoption of types need not be constraining and can instead focus energy and talent to 
produce architecture of richness and complexity as well as order and clarity. 

In our opinion formal analysis (typological or other) will play an important role in the 
future development of architectural research and design. Through formal analysis we treat 
architectural forms as found objects and open our investigations to a range of speculations 
that lie at the heart of developing theories about architectural design. The development of 
architectural design theory can play a critical part in meeting the ongoing need for 
building and sharing a body of knowledge within the profession of architecture. If, finally, 
the formal analysis of Wright's architecture can promote the cause of architectural 
knowledge, then we feel it adds an important dimension to his already extraordinary 
contributions to architecture. 


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THE SEVEN AGES OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, A New Appraisal 

DONALD W. HOPPEN     Capra Press     Santa Barbara 
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Author's Preface 

The English Village where I lived as a boy had beautiful old houses from the Middle Ages. 
They embodied the richness of medieval England, the feeling for the land, the nature of 
organic materials, a human sense of scale and intimacy. From Stonehenge to the village 
church and the great cathedrals, the British have expressed a marvelous earthiness, 
boldness, and power in their architecture. It is imbued, as with a Rembrandt painting, with 
a sense of mystery and presence. Yet to me, as a student in the early fifties, modern 
architecture seemed mechanical, sterile and boring. I was in a culture that had lost its roots 
and passion. 

On a rainy day in Tiranti's old book shop in London I idly picked up An Autobiography by 
Frank Lloyd Wright, and stood transfixed all afternoon reading this extraordinary journal 
of his life and philosophy. For the first time I saw illustrations of his work: buildings that 
came out of the earth, yet the roofs floated above with a magnificent sense of freedom and 
space. It was an architecture both old and new, with roots in the countryside, yet truly of 
the modern time. 


LETTER 

I rushed home and wrote a long letter to Wright, full of my ideas about architecture and 
life, and was astonished ten days later to receive a letter with the famous Taliesin red 
square on the envelope. It read: 


The fee for Taliesin was then $1,500 a year for tuition and living costs. I had barely $130 
to my name. I sent off another long letter to Wright with some photographs of my work, 
explaining my embarrassing lack of funds. Characteristically, he replied: "My dear Donald 
Hoppen, If you can get here, we will fit you in. Come." 


Visiting the U.S. Embassy in London for a student visa I discovered that Taliesin was not 
accredited and I would need a sponsor to provide a full financial statement, a requirement 
hardly calculated to appeal to Wright. I wrote to him again and there followed a long 
ominous silence. It took me over a year to find a sponsor and I had to settle for a visitor's 
visa. Then I sent a letter followed by a telegram, asking if I could still come. This time 
there was no reply. I sensed it was up to me to prove myself to him. I sold everything and 
bought a boat trip to America. 

Little did I realize that the voyage across the cold Atlantic to a foreign land was the 
beginning of an odyssey, a journey with genius into architecture. 


LAND 

From New York I hitchhiked a thousand miles to Spring Green, Wisconsin, home of 
Taliesin East. It was nine in the evening when I arrived at the "Dutch Kitchen," Hotel 
Spring Green. From a phone booth I nervously dialed Taliesin. Ling Po (a Chinese 
apprentice, I learned later) answered. When I asked if someone could pick me up, he 
replied sleepily, "Everyone has gone to bed. Why don't you call again tomorrow." (Taliesin 
kept "farm time," two hours later than "town time," a way of getting the most daylight 
from the working day.) I fell asleep depressed, thinking what an idiot I was to pursue this 
crazy dream, with no letter of acknowledgment, traveling all this way, spending all my 
money-and now being marooned in this tiny town. 

In the morning I called again and was told someone would come by for me later. During 
breakfast I met Giovanni Del Drago, a Taliesin apprentice and Italian aristocrat, just back 
from a party in New York, who was also waiting for a lift. We waited all morning, until at 
last we saw Wright-with his porkpie hat, cape and cane-walk past the coffee shop. 

I wanted to dash out immediately and introduce myself but Giovanni explained we could 
hardly ask Mr. Wright for a ride. I quickly learned that all apprentices, and most clients, 
not only addressed him as Mr. Wright, but also referred to him as such in conversation. It 
was afternoon before someone drove us to Taliesin. 


MEETING MR. WRIGHT 

When I arrived at Taliesin East I found Mr. Wright directing his apprentices in an 
ambitious tree-planting scheme. We were introduced and shook hands, then he took off 
to supervise the planting. Some apprentices were digging holes and I was requisitioned to 
move the big water truck to irrigate the new planting. I asked someone about the tree 
planting and was told that Mr. Wright had designed a lot of houses for the neighbors when 
he was young, and some of them he could no longer tolerate. If they were beyond help he 
tried to buy them, whereupon the Fellowship would throw a party and burn them to the 
ground, much to the annoyance of the local fire department. 

The farmer who lived just across the road from the entrance to Taliesin liked his house the 
way it was and had no intention of selling it. Every time Wright passed by he was pained 
at the sight of this early "mistakes" and could only hide it from view behind the trees we 
were planting. "A doctor can always bury his mistakes," he said, "but an architect can only 
plant vines." Or trees. 

Mr. Wright said, "Boys, always build your first projects far from home." It was my first 
lesson from the master and I couldn't be farther from home. 

Taliesin-meaning "shining brow," after a sixth-century Welsh bard-was Wright's 
boyhood home and school. When I first saw it I was reminded of the English Cotswolds 
and its soft, honey-colored stone, a landscape of rolling green with buildings tucked into 
the hillsides. Taliesin had a touch of Tibet, a serenity and sense of mystery, but it was a 
very human building as well, which gave me the feeling of being embraced and secure 
within its walls. Like an ancient cathedral there were layers of meaning appealing to the 
conscious and the unconscious. Oriental carvings adorned the entry doors, an enormous 
Buddha sat serenely in the garden opening upon an endless stone loggia, and Oriental rugs 
and Japanese prints were everywhere. I was amazed by the size and complexity of this 
building. Like an old oak tree, parts of the building had died and crumbled, giving way to 
new construction ideas. 

Everyone was friendly, assuming that I was a new apprentice, though I still had no 
confirmation. The next day I consulted the secretary, Gene Masselink, who said I must 
have an interview with Mr. Wright. But every time we set up an appointment, it fell 
through because of some emergency. After three days I couldn't take the suspense any 
longer and decided to sit in front of Mr. Wright's office all day until I had a decision. 
Along the walls was a continuous angled shelf on which sat numerous Japanese prints 
from Wright's collection (at one time it was the finest in America, before the Depression 
forced him to sell many). The assortment was changed weekly. 

Finally two hours later, Mr. Wright appeared and I showed him my portfolio (very 
Scandinavian in style). I was designing furniture in London as a living before I left 
England. With a smile he said, "This is all an affectation." 

The first thing I noticed on meeting Wright was an extraordinary sense of refinement: he 
seemed to express energy rather than mass. It seemed that everything heavy or coarse had 
been burnt away in a lifetime of creation. He was then 86 years old. 

He was cordial as we discussed Wales, England, and his Welsh ancestors. He told me that 
he had to make $50,000 a year (equivalent to $500,000 today) to run Taliesin and was not 
going to be able to give scholarships anymore. Suddenly, he looked at his watch and said 
he had an appointment, picked up his cloak and was gone. I walked out to Masselinck and 
told him we had our meeting, but what did it mean? Oh, he told me, he's opened the door. 
You're in. Mr. Wright likes you and has given you a scholarship. Later I was told by Mrs. 
Wright that he was deeply touched I had come all that way. (I didn't realize it at the time, 
but I had retraced the journey of his immigrant ancestors.) 

Wright was American in the tradition of Whitman and Thoreau, a mixture of aristocrat 
and Midwesterner. He was always immaculately dressed in good English tweeds, woolens, 
silk scarf, and cloak. He liked to wear French cuffs with elegant cufflinks terminating his 
sleeves. (In architecture terminals were important for him.) And although there were 
stories about his "arrogance and cantankerousness," I never knew him to be so. 

Sometimes Wright spoke so effortlessly in his soft Midwestern accent that I did not 
appreciate the depth of meaning behind his words until years later. I had not yet realized 
the lifetime of trial and suffering that had led him to the extraordinary secrets he had 
discovered in the deep springs of the unconscious. 

What struck me was Wright's youthful energy, his boundless enthusiasm, his capacity for 
endless renewal. Unlike other architects who developed and established their particular 
style, his work was forever changing and renewing itself. One day I idly sketched a chart 
of his life [page 00] showing the cycles of his work, punctuated by the disasters of his 
personal life. 

I was amazed by what I had discovered. Cycles of great creativity were followed by lean 
periods and even disaster; and from the ashes of each disaster, like the fabled phoenix, a 
new architecture was born. 

As I researched further into his roots I saw that Wright's life followed many myths: the 
ancient Greek myth of the tragic hero, the Welsh-Celtic myth of Taliesin, the 
shape-shifter able to take all form, and Merlin the alchemist, who transmuted the 
ordinary into the extraordinary. 

Myth is woven into the fabric of our psyche, providing the foundation for Freud's and 
Jung's psychological discoveries. The great myths describe man's deepest experience, his 
relationship with life and creation. Mythology is an ancient language-using art to 
communicate ageless truths. Great architecture manifests the invisible. 

Frank Lloyd Wright lived his myth, and the myth lived in him. The chronological 
biographies of Wright's complex life had failed to capture the essence and meaning of his 
genius. Only by going to the deepest level of human experience can the full meaning of his 
architecture be understood. This is the mythic story of his life. 

I have always been fascinated by the creative process; the sources of his inspiration. I 
observed Wright's working methods, his empathy for nature, his feeling for natural 
materials; wood, brick and stone. His gift of transmuting dreams into 
reality-transforming his interior primal energy into a living architectural experience. I 
sought to understand what he was trying to accomplish in the architecture unfolding 
within him: his insights, creations, successes, and failures. I felt like the apprentice offered 
work in Michelangelo's atelier. Fortunately, I had already met genius and knew that it 
clothes a very human personality. One apprentice observed that I seemed to be recording 
every word. 

Schopenhauer said that while we are living, our life seems to be a series of unrelated 
events. Only when we look back is a deeper life pattern revealed. With the advantage of 
time we can now distill the essence of Wright's art. 

Roots 

Frank Lloyd Wright's mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, came from one of the most legendary 
regions of Wales, a landscape adorned with mysterious standing stones and sacred dolmen, 
and bordered by the Prescelly Mountains whose great bluestones created Stonehenge. 

Its Welsh people are descendants of the Celts, who 2500 years ago migrated across Europe 
to Wales from a region near Persia. The Celts, a fertile Indo-European mixture, a union 
of East and West, were renowned for the richness and diversity of their changing forms. 
They were imbued with an extraordinary passion for life and the world of the spirit. With a 
deep affinity with the primal forces of the earth, the Celts were acutely sensitive to the 
genius loci, "spirit of place." They "knew" the sacred sites on which to build, and for their 
standing stones chose those special stones, imbued with presence, that express the arcane 
energy of the earth. Today a standing stone marks Frank Lloyd Wright's grave at the 
family cemetery at Taliesin East. 

"He was in league with the stones of the field." Wright said of his grandfather Richard 
Lloyd Jones, a passionately religious man. His family motto was the Druidic "Truth 
against the World." In the Druidic religion no word was permitted for "God the 
Immeasurable." Out of notches carved with an ax in wood or stone, they created a 
language. The symbolic form of the family motto is carved on the gate stone of the 
cemetery of Taliesin East. From the triangular three stones of a dolman to the bluestone 
circle of Stonehenge, the Druids (Celtic priests) communed with the gods, the sun and the 
earth. They communicated the unknown through legend and myth. Their sixth-century 
myths and legends reflect their relationship with nature, creation and art. 

The myth of Excalibur is emblematic of a people who, with a deep affinity to the earth, are 
able to tap its magical power. King Arthur is the chosen one who releases Excalibur, the 
energy imprisoned in matter. Merlin is the alchemist-wizard who draws his powers from 
a nature that timelessly renews herself. 

"Taliesin," Wright said, "was the bard prophet who sang the glories of art at King Arthur's 
court." Taliesin told the mythic tale of the shape-shifter who can take all form. His 
legendary cave tomb in Dyfed exists today. 

They each personify a quality: King Arthur, the enlightened consciousness of a Golden 
Age; Merlin, the alchemist who transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary; Taliesin, 
the artist who communicates, through form, the unknowable. 

With their rich imagination and psychic second sight the Celts are emblematic of the 
intuitive spirit and the language of the psyche: poetry, music, art, architecture, religion 
and myth. The myths describe humanity's deepest experiences. Wright's roots ran deep 
into this rich soil with its timeless archetypes, and the pattern of Wright's life followed its 
myths. 

Richard Jones's house was situated in a green valley near the village of Llandyssul. He was 
a freeholding farmer, a lay Unitarian preacher, and a hat maker of the conical "witches 
hats" the Welsh wore, who claimed his hats were so strong you could stand on one. 
(Wright would later make a similar claim for his buildings.) 

Richard married Mary (Mallie) Lloyd, daughter of a well-to-do Welsh family, and 
thereafter they called themselves Lloyd Jones. Including Anna they had seven children. 

Dyfed, a desperately poor area, was known as the "black spot" because of the rugged 
independence of its people. They were forbidden by the English to use their native Welsh 
language, in turn they refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the English King and his 
Anglican Church. Even in Dyfed Richard's new Unitarian religion was ahead of its time 
and unpopular because it taught the unity of all religions and a common god. 

Inwardly rich and outwardly poor, Richard Lloyd Jones and his wife looked to America for 
a release from poverty, freedom of religion and for the opportunity to realize their vision of 
a new Arcadia. 


EMIGRATION 

The mid-nineteenth century was the period of the mass migration of Europeans fleeing 
poverty and religious persecution, crossing the Atlantic, seeking the promised land. 

Richard's brother Jenkin Jones having earlier emigrated to America, now urged his brother 
to join him in Wisconsin where there was land for homesteading and tolerance for their 
religion. In 1844 the Lloyd Joneses and their seven children left Wales forever. They took 
a sailing ship from New Quay to America. At the beginning a storm forced them to turn 
back and take refuge in Liverpool. After a nightmarish journey they arrived in America. 

In New York Richard was cheated out of money. The family, with seven children, the 
youngest only two years old, had traveled some 4000 miles. Richard was tough. When 
their boat was locked in the ice for several weeks near Utica, he found work in the nearby 
mines. Later, on their trek to Wisconsin, the youngest daughter died and was buried by the 
roadside. 

The Lloyd Joneses finally found land to homestead near the village of Spring Green. The 
green valley with its strange rock outcroppings reminded them of their Welsh homeland. 
They felt their vision had at last been fulfilled. Thomas, the eldest son, built a small house 
of wood and covered its stables with a traditional Welsh thatched roof. Over the years 
other members of the Jones families arrived followed by Welsh craftsmen and 
stonemasons. 


PATRIARCH OF THE EARTH 

Developing the land, Richard Lloyd Jones, together with his sons and daughters, created 
the Arcadia of his dream in the Wisconsin landscape. Intelligent and hard-working, the 
family prospered. Jenkins became a charismatic Unitarian minister. The sisters Mary and 
Margaret founded a coeducational progressive school, while James became a farmer and 
Anna a teacher. 

The family was friendly with the Native American Indians who still lived in the area. The 
Welsh family shared the Indians' empathy with the spirit of the earth, that resonated and 
permeated the land. Wright was to inherit this feeling for the American landscape. 


FATHER 

Frank Lloyd Wright's great grandfather left the north of England for America and became 
a wealthy landowner in Connecticut. Wright's father, William Cary Wright, born in 1825, 
studied at Amherst and Yale, receiving the classic education of a gentleman. William 
Wright, lacking the wealth to support that lifestyle, worked his way through a diverse 
range of occupations. He was a renaissance man: lawyer, administrator, minister, teacher 
of music, piano and rhetoric, musician and organist, constantly changing job and places. 
William Wright was a product of the restless dream of immigrant forebears who had 
crossed an ocean searching for a dream, an impossible perfection. 

His son inherited this restless energy but harnessed it into a lifetime search for creation. 
Rather than seek a fantasy, he dreamed and built a reality and found the perfection which 
eluded his father. 

William Wright married and moved to the obscure town of Lone Rock, not far from Spring 
Green, Wisconsin. His wife took in paying guests, among them, Anna Lloyd Jones, a local 
teacher. When his wife died he became a most eligible man. 

Anna chose him to bequeath his gifts to her child. Even though he was seventeen years 
older, he was the man of her destiny: college-educated, a musician and minister. In 1866, 
over the protests of her own family, they were married. Their son was to be a product of 
father's classic education of order and logic and mother's Celtic insight and intuitive 
energy, a marriage of left and right brain. Architecture demands for its success a perfect 
marriage between practical order and timeless art. 


MOTHER 

With her Celtic gift of second sight, it is hardly surprising that when pregnant, Anna 
"knew" she would bear an architect son. She hung the walls of his future nursery with 
pictures of architecture to prepare him for his profession. "Believing in the power of mind 
... during the nine months she cut out every picture of a house that she could find and 
mounted them on the walls," wrote Pearlie Easterbrook, after a conversation with Anna, 
"Not a square inch of space was left uncovered. She left them there as the child grew ... To 
her delight when he was three he would stand fascinated in front of a picture. He would 
say, 'This is my favorite today' ... When he was six he would take a picture to her and say, 
'This is a mistake. This should not be'." 

She fed him with pictures, filling his imagination with a brew of myth and legend. What 
excited him were the stories of the Arabian Nights, the Bible, myths that described worlds 
beyond worlds and the infinite adventures of the human spirit. Frank's imagination was 
fired by such tales as "Aladdin and his Magic Lamp," "Ali Baba's Treasure Cave," and the 
ancient Welsh legends "The Knights of the Round Table," "Camelot," "Merlin" and what 
Wright would later call, "Taliesin the bard that sang the glory of art at King Arthur's 
court." This was the myth that shaped the course of his life. 

As Freud and Jung discovered, myths are metaphors that describe the processes of the 
psyche, the invisible realm beyond consciousness and reason, the uncharted world of the 
creative process. The elusive world that appears in dreams, visions and insights. 

"The lad was his mother's adoration. She lived much in him. After their son was born," 
Wright observed about his relationship with his mother, "something happened between 
mother and father ... Anna's extraordinary devotion to her child disconcerted the father. 
His wife loved him no less but now loved something more, something created out of her 
own fervor of love and desire, a means to realize her vision. The boy, she said, "was to 
build beautiful buildings." Anna had a passion for education and beauty. She became a 
teacher, riding her horse through the landscape to the school. 

His Welsh mother was a product of the soil, an earth mother, according to Wright, who 
"knew the ferns, the flowers, by name, the startled animals that ran along the road ... every 
berry." This "league with the stones of the field" must have imparted power to her 
"imaginative vision." 

She felt she had born a chosen one. Guiding, teaching, nurturing, Anna inspired, and 
protected her son. As matriarch, and mentor, she helped him survive the vicissitudes of his 
tumultuous life: tragedy, destruction, persecution, and trial. To the end of her days, if 
Frank became sick, she was there to shelter and nurse him back to health. 

Frank was raised by his extended Lloyd Jones family, including grandfather, uncles and 
aunts, many of whom were patrons of his progress and work. In later years he received 
family support for the projects Romeo and Juliet, Unity Temple and Hillside School. The 
family fed a far-reaching network for clients and work that continued to the end of his 
life. 

"In ancient Celtic fashion," wrote Emylin Hughes, "brought up by their mother's brothers 
... doted on by the women and cherished by the men, the elected repositories of age-old 
expectations. Through their families they had access to a magic more potent and more 
ancient than Merlin ... There can be no doubt of their sense of destiny." 


MODULAR GRID AND FROEBEL GEOMETRY 

In 1874 the family moved to Weymouth, near Boston. Wright, at age seven, was given the 
use of a drawing board subdivided into four-inch squares. This established in his 
consciousness the grid system that he later used to establish order and rhythm in his 
architecture. 

Anna introduced him at age nine to her discovery of the Froebel geometric building 
blocks, the archetypes of form. Froebel's philosophy that abstraction of form, not copying, 
is the prerequisite of education, helped develop Frank's understanding of 
three-dimensional form. 

"I sat at the little kindergarten table and played upon these 'unit lines' with the square 
(cube), the circle (sphere), and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)," Wright explained. 
"Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. But the smooth cardboard 
triangles and maplewood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day. In 
outline the square was significant of integrity; the circle-infinity, the 
triangle-aspiration; all of which to 'design' significant new forms." 

As a child he had begun his journey through the geometric archetypes that later as a man, 
he would realize in the forms of his architecture. 


INVENTOR 

As an adolescent, along with his crippled friend, Robie, Wright began to create his own 
inventions, including the water-velocipede, catamaran and the water wheel. He formed a 
partnership to set up a printing press, to be known as Wright, Doyon and Lamp, 
Publishers and Printers. Wright was fascinated with the press's capacity for cheap 
replication of a design. He invented a scroll newspaper, based on the principle of the 
spiral. He designed kites of colored paper. He was fascinated by great building projects of 
dams and bridges. His multiple interests were converging into architecture and would have 
an influence on his later work. 


NATURE, THE FARM 

The first page of Wright's autobiography tells it in words as his design shows it in form. 
Nine years old, he is walking in the snow with his Uncle John. His uncle, with purposeful 
strides, proudly points to the straight line he has cut through the snow. "He ran first left," 
Wright elaborated, putting himself in the third person, "to gather beads on stems and the 
beads and tassels on more stems. Then right, to gather prettier ones. Again-left to some 
darker and more brilliant-and beyond to a low spreading kind. Eager, trembling, he ran 
to and fro behind Uncle John, his arms full of weeds ... Uncle John points to the boy's 
wavering, searching line like a free vine running backward and forward across his own 
perfect path, with reproof. The boy was troubled. Uncle John had left out 
something-something that made all the difference to the boy." Wright rejected the 
straight path of the rational mind. What fascinated him was the diversity and richness of 
life, the uncharted journey into the unknown, the mysteries of nature's creations. 

Working on his uncle's farm, he received a lifelong lesson on the cycle of life and death, 
seed and harvest, fallow earth and its power of regeneration. He was opened to the holistic 
interrelationship of life and what he called," The rhythm of Life impelling itself to live." 

Wright's approach to nature was not the sentimental view of a romantic poet. Working 
each summer at his Uncle James's farm he experienced first hand the processes of nature. 
At times the work became so exhausting that he ran away. But this education provided 
him with the resilience and endurance he would later call upon to survive. 


THE SNAKE IN THE IDYLL 

Working at his uncle's harvest an exhausted Wright took a break. Out of the bundle on 
which he had been sitting, a rattlesnake slipped to the ground. Its tail began to rattle, 
hostile eyes gleaming, Wright said. Some fascination holds the lad, a sense of something 
predestined. To be lived again? Something in the far distant past comes near-as 
repetition? "Work-the plan," Wright perceived, "was interrupted by something ever a 
part of Life but ever a threat." 


EDUCATION 

Frank was surrounded by education. His parents were teachers, his aunts ran a progressive 
school and his uncle was a well-known minister. He had read most of the classics at 
home, small wonder that he was indifferent to a classroom education. William Wright's 
income was now so small that his family depended on help from the Lloyd Jones family to 
survive. 

When Frank was sixteen, his father walked away from his wife, their three children and 
most of his possessions, never to return. Was it a return of his restlessness or, jealous of his 
wife's preoccupation with Frank, had he finally given up an unequal competition? Even 
when his son became famous, years later, he made no attempt to make contact. 

Wright was forced to drop out of high school and go to work to help support his mother. 
With the help of his uncle, he found work with Professor Alan Conover, Dean of the 
Engineering School of the University of Wisconsin, who was also responsible for the 
construction of several major buildings. Wright's work included supervising projects under 
construction. It proved to be a valuable experience. Wright was able to attend classes in 
engineering but left before the second year. His education had developed by learning and 
doing. It was a good beginning: his architecture would always grow from a sound 
engineering concept. 

At age 18, Frank L. Wright, as he was then called, felt frustrated with his life in Madison. 
He felt he had reached an impasse and for him growth would always be more important 
than security. One morning, without a word to anyone, even his mother, he walked out of 
his house, his job, and his studies, leaving behind his former world. The journey became 
his rite of passage: the end of childhood, adolescence and family. He was venturing into 
the unknown where to survive he would need to find a job, money and a home. 


CHICAGO 

He knew his goal was to be an architect. He sold some books at a pawnshop, including 
Plutarch's Lives, his set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and a mink collar. By parting with 
the remnants of the past, he bankrolled his future and took off for the big city, Chicago. 

He arrived at the office of Joseph Silsbee, an architect with an excellent reputation who 
was influenced by the English architect Norman Shaw. Silsbee's natural architecture used 
wood shingles and stone. He had designed the new Unitarian Church for Wright's uncle 
Jenkins Lloyd Jones. Jenkins was instrumental in bringing Silsbee, also a Unitarian, to 
Chicago. Silsbee was impressed by the young man and his sample drawings. 

Wright served his apprenticeship, learning the basics of good building and eclectic design. 
After a year, looking for new worlds to conquer, he heard that the famous firm of Adler 
and Sullivan was looking for a draftsman. He sensed it was to be himself. Wright gathered 
together a selection of his best work, took the day off and went to see Louis Sullivan. 


THE MASTER 

Destiny had already opened the door. Louis Sullivan was the acknowledged master of the 
Chicago resurgence, educated in Paris at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Art. His flowing 
art nouveau decoration was legendary. His phrase, "form follows function" became the 
battle cry of the revolution in modern architecture. When young Wright entered his office, 
Sullivan "... took me in at a glance. Everything I felt, even to my secret thoughts." Sullivan 
asked to see his drawings. "You know what I want from you, do you? ... Make some 
drawings of ornament and bring them back.' ... He looked at me kindly and saw me. I was 
sure of that. The door of the drafting room was open ... I was going to make one more." 
Elated, Wright returned to Silsbee's office. "The job's mine," he said to his friend, Cecil. 
"He saw, I tell you, that I can do what he wants done. Making drawings is just a 
formality." Friday morning, having worked late, night after night, on the presentation 
drawings, Wright showed Sullivan his work. Sullivan thought he had traced over Silsbee's 
drawings. When Wright responded, "They were not traced, too much trouble," Sullivan 
looked at him, "with a glance that went clear through." He showed him his sketches done 
in the Sullivan style. And then some original work. "You've got the right kind of touch," 
Sullivan said, "You'll do." 

Sullivan had begun drawing and when Wright saw his work he gasped and thought, "If 
Silsbee's touch was like standing corn waving in the fields, Sullivan's was like the passion 
vine in full bloom." 

Wright was to begin work Monday morning but when he informed Silsbee he was quitting, 
the architect was not pleased. "This doesn't seem quite up to your standard, does it?" 
Silsbee said. Wright felt guilty, although most draftsmen would have done the same, 
seizing upon opportunity when it came. After his painful split, Wright wrote: "Has every 
forward movement in human lives as it is realized, its own peculiar pang, I wonder ... do 
the trees know pain when top branches...shut the sun from the branches below so those 
branches must die? ... Life is this urge to grow." 


WORLD ARCHITECTURE. CHICAGO FAIR, 1893 

Working for Sullivan, Wright was a frequent visitor to the Chicago Fair, 1893, where 
Sullivan's Transport Pavilion was under construction. There, for the first time, he was 
exposed to a panoply of world architecture including the Japanese Ho-o-den wooden 
temple, a replica of one in Japan from the Fujiwara period, the Turkish Pavilion with its 
great overhanging roof, and pictures of Mayan Temples. His imagination was ignited by 
the variety and power of ancient forms. 

Wright stayed with Sullivan for over six years. He was given his own room and soon 
promoted to the position of chief draftsman, entirely responsible for all of Adler and 
Sullivan's residential practice. As an architect, Sullivan paid Wright an unusual 
compliment: he asked Wright to design his new house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in 
1890. 

Sullivan came from Irish stock and shared with Wright a rich Celtic imagination. He 
sensed Wright's talents. "Sullivan, like Wright, was a latter-day Druid. He was also a 
mystic and a frustrated poet ... Wright is like-wise a romantic and a poet manque, 
drawing inspiration from a Celtic background," wrote Grant Mansom. "We are dealing, in 
this relationship, with an association of two highly-charged and unconventional Celts ... 
There are stories of conversations between Master and disciple that lasted throughout the 
night, discussions about Wagner, Herbert Spencer, Whitman, Richardson." 

"I believe," Wright said, "The Master used to talk to me to express his own feelings and 
thoughts, regardless, forgetting me often. But I could follow him. And the radical sense of 
things I had already formed got great encouragement from him. In fact, the very things I 
had been feeling as rebellion was-in him-at work." 

Sullivan saw Wright as the heir to his genius, who would carry the torch of architecture. 
For Wright, Sullivan was the father he had lost, a role model and teacher. But more than 
anything in this fertile atelier of genius something original began to germinate in Wright's 
being. 

If Wright was influenced by Sullivan, so Sullivan could not but help being influenced by 
his protege. Sullivan would criticize Wright's ornament as being too geometric. But if 
Sullivan had a more plastic sense of decoration so Wright had a better sense of integral 
structure. As time progressed the projects that Wright worked on began to exhibit original 
Wrightian forms: skyscrapers; Schiller, Meyer and Stock Exchange Building, and the 
Charnley House. 

"When in early years I looked south from the massive stone tower in the Auditorium 
Building, a pencil in hand," Wright said, "the red glare of the Bessemer steel converters to 
the south of Chicago would thrill me as pages of The Arabian Nights used to do with a 
sense of terror and romance." 

Technology had discovered Merlin's alchemy: releasing the iron from the stone. In the 
cauldrons of the furnace iron ore was transformed into the steel sinews that would make 
possible the new architecture. 

Sullivan, like many a genius, knew he was the best. "Proud and arrogant he did not so 
much walk, as strut," said Wright. "If a luckless draftsman displeased him he was fired on 
the spot." 

Wright, with his long hair and flowing tie, was already dressing in his own nonconformist 
way. Some of the draftsmen, jealous of his success, were provoked by his individualism 
and liked to tease him. On one occasion this got out of hand and developed into a fist fight 
during which Wright sensed he was winning; but suddenly, he said, "With a particularly 
animal scream-I've heard something like it since from a Japanese made with sake, but 
never else-he jumped for a knife, the scratch-blade with a wooden handle lying on his 
board. Half-blinded, he came at me with it!" Wright exclaimed. "He was stabbing away 
at the back of my neck and shoulders ... I could feel the blood running down my back ... I 
grabbed the long, broad-bladed T-square on my board by the end of the long blade, 
swung it with all my might, catching Ottie with the end of the blade ... He had intended to 
go to the Beaux Arts in Paris before long. He went without ever coming back to the office." 
It was the first time Wright had been attacked, but not the last. 


MARRIAGE 

At age 21 Wright married Catherine Tobin, three years younger than he. He would always 
be the man of her life and she was to remain forever loyal to him. After the wedding 
Wright asked Sullivan for help. Sullivan generously offered him a five year contract with a 
large advance, sufficient for Wright to acquire a piece of land in Oak Park and build his 
own house. 

In the following years, needing more money to support an expanding family, Wright began 
moonlighting, drawing plans late at night for clients and friends. When Sullivan found out 
he was both angry and hurt by what he saw as a betrayal of their contract. When Sullivan 
refused to give Wright the deed to his now paid-for property, the two had a row. "When I 
learned this from the Master himself in none too kindly terms and with the haughty air 
now turned toward me too much," Wright commented, "I threw my pencil down and 
walked out of the Adler and Sullivan office never to return." He was not to see the man he 
called his "Lieber-Meister" for nearly twenty years. 

"This bad end to a glorious relationship," Wright sadly reflected, "has been a dark shadow 
to stay with me the days of my life." 

It was Wright's first experience of guilt. Perhaps it was his first glimpse of his own 
ambition that shocked him. He felt he had betrayed his Lieber-Meister, the man he loved 
and respected more than any other. In fact he had done no more than any other young 
architect ready for independence, following his own Muse. 

The world Wright had for six years painstakingly built, collapsed around him in as many 
minutes. Rejected by his Master, broke and without a job, a married man with a family to 
support, he was once more back on the street where, seven years ago he had begun. 


The First Age, 
Square & Octagon 

Wright's early projects were sometimes marked by their use of tall conical and steep roofs 
which at times echoed the Welsh forms of his grandfather's conical hats. In his first 
architectural projects he was like an embryo undergoing an eclectic evolution. Rapidly he 
proceeded through traditional styles of Rustic, Shingle, Classical and Tudor, although each 
successive project displayed an indefinable originality seeking to take form. 


"I did not try anything radical because I could not follow up, I did not yet have the forms 
to express myself."-F. Ll. W. 


The first indisputable Wrightian presence appears in the Charnley House, Chicago, 1891, 
built while he was still with Sullivan. Wright proclaimed, "It is the first modern building." 
The decoration is Sullivanesque but the masses are his own. The roof plane with its 
geometric ornament and the subtle horizontal bands set in the wall indicate the forms of 
Wright that are later to emerge more strongly. The house is still a self-contained box 
with windows as pierced openings, reminiscent of an urban Florentine castello. 

The Harlan House, Chicago, 1892, was considered by Wright to be the beginning of his 
own practice. Perhaps it was no accident, that it caused the rift that broke him from 
Sullivan, for Sullivan must have seen that the apprentice had overtaken his 
Lieber-Meister. The projecting roof line, the cantilevered balcony and the form of the 
dormer herald new Wrightian forms and the beginning of his own original architecture. 

Wright opened his own office in Sullivan's Schiller Building. It was a good choice for he 
had supervised its design. He felt optimistic for the future of his new independent practice. 
Wright shared the office with his friend Cecil Corwin, who sensed Wright's talent. "You 
are going to go far. You'll have a kind of success; I believe the kind you want. Not 
everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work and human sacrifice you'll make 
for it though, my boy," said Cecil. "I'm afraid for what will be coming to you." Wright 
recalled, "I felt miserable. He was something of a prophet." 

Now increasingly aware of his Celtic roots, Wright did as his grandfather Richard Jones 
had done before him and added Lloyd to his name: Young Frank L. Wright, draftsman, 
was metamorphosing into Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect. 


OAK PARK, ILLINOIS 

Before Wright's marriage, Anna, sometimes behaving more like a wife than a mother, 
followed her son to Chicago where she found a home to share with him on Forest Avenue 
in Oak Park, a rural suburb at the edge of the prairie. Another of her intuitive moves 
placed her son in the right place at the right time. Oak Park was a burgeoning suburb for 
the new entrepreneur who was ready to build an architecture as a measure of his success 
and taste. She had brought him to fertile territory. 

The great fire in 1871 that destroyed much of Chicago fueled the careers of Sullivan and 
Wright and other architects in the rebuilding of the expanding city. Chicago, center of the 
midwest, was experiencing a great building boom. 

By moving to Oak Park, destiny had placed Wright in the center of a rich vein of potential 
clients: a new breed of self-made businessman, open to the new, with a nouveau riche 
need for personal expression. His first clients included Winslow, owner of Ornamental 
Iron Works and the magazine House Beautiful; W. E. Martin, who introduced Wright to 
his relatives who were owners of Larkin Soap, E. Z. Wax and other enterprises that led to 
a total of nine commissions. Wright's clients, respecting his genius and enjoying his 
personality, recommended him to their friends and colleagues as an excellent architect. 

The Winslow House, River Forest, Illinois, 1893, was a jewel of perfection that could have 
fitted in with a academic style, except that already the essential Wrightian elements were 
present. His design elevates the great roof above the wall mass. The window wall plane of 
ornament becomes a band defining the roof from the brick mass below and the break 
occurs, not at the usual floor level but at the window sill line. The front elevation and its 
entry are symmetrical and in perfect repose. The rear of the house with its diverse 
elements is less resolved, but it is a glimpse of a Wrightian repertoire yet to come. The 
freestanding bays with their interlaced brick corners anticipate future projects-like the 
Hanna House, four decades later. The octagonal brick stair tower with its stone cap 
presages his future architecture like a new shoot, thrusting out of the old. 


THE TEST 

Wright's friend and client, Edward C. Waller, lived across from the Winslow House. He 
was so enthusiastic about the burgeoning talent of young Wright that he was determined to 
help further his career. He invited Wright to meet his friend Daniel Burnham of the 
famous architectural office Burnham and Root, a powerful force in the Chicago world. 
Root, the partner, had recently died. 

Burnham was deeply impressed by the Winslow House and made Wright an incredible 
offer: He would support him and his family and pay for Wright to attend the Ecole de 
Beaux Art in Paris for four years with another two years of study in Rome. 

It would have meant eventual partnership and head of a major firm, financial success 
beyond Wright's wildest dreams. If he had been a socially ambitious man Wright would 
have seized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for guaranteed security and success. 

Wright perceptively saw it as a test of his integrity and confidence in his own vision. He 
didn't want or need a classical academic education. Nothing was going to divert his course. 

He was embarrassed; to say no made him appear ungrateful to Waller. Desperately, "He 
looked at the door, the window, for some avenue of escape," Wright observed, but there 
was none. He gathered up his courage, and said, "No. Thank you, but I'm going on as I've 
started." 

In the Chauncey Williams House, River Forest, Illinois, 1895, neighbor to the Winslow 
House, Wright and his clients chose and gathered boulders from the bed of the Des Plaines 
River; emblematic of the landscape's glaciation. Wright used them in a new style of 
stonework by the entry. He had now abandoned forever the old rustic stonework style for a 
new experiment in masonry. The dormer windows and steep roofs represent powerful 
Welsh forms not yet digested in his work. 


NATURE 

Wright could have been a great naturalist with his keen insight and understanding of 
nature who provided a fertile source for his creations. He derived the abstract forms for his 
ornament from the surrounding plants, flowers and efflorescent foliage: transforming 
nature's ornament, the flower into the abstract decoration for his colored glass doors and 
windows. 


ROMEO AND JULIET, 1896 

Wright's aunts asked him to design them a new windmill to pump water for their second 
Hillside Home School 1887 on the site of his grandfather's homestead. Wright's uncanny 
sense of structure found expression in his design, based on the principle of the bamboo, 
whose strength depends on the combination of an outer stressed skin reinforced by internal 
horizontal membranes. The outer skin was wood siding while the floors provided the 
horizontal diaphragms. Ahead of its time, the principle is used for the design of the 
modern steel box girder for bridges. 

The strength of the aerodynamic form that faces the prevailing wind is created, said 
Wright, by the embrace of Romeo, the masculine octagon, and Juliet, the feminine 
lozenge. Wright capped the tower with a conical roof, and thus echoed both his 
grandfather's design for his hats and his claim of their indestructibility. His uncles 
however, were not impressed by his unorthodox design and predicted it would be blown 
down by the first storm. The young Wright, reassuring his aunts, said, "I am afraid all of 
my uncles themselves may be gone before Romeo and Juliet." Recently refurbished, the 
tower has withstood the storms for 104 years and still stands, outliving the uncles and even 
its creator. 

In Wright's early projects the plan remained conventional and relatively untouched. With 
the Husser House, Chicago, 1899, the new energy begins to enter the plan itself, allowing 
the house to break out of the confined box to grow outward into the landscape in extended 
wings. 

Japanese art had come to the West and in 1900 Wright wrote an article on Japanese prints 
and culture. As with Van Gogh and other artists, he was inspired by the Japanese prints 
that confirmed his own discoveries. "They found the same source I did," said Wright. 

In the Warren Hickox House, Kankakee, Illinois, 1900, Wright discovered the principle of 
simplicity. He saw, "The removal of the superfluous intensifies the essential." 

The bold lines of the window elements, extending vertically and horizontally, and the 
defined roof, with its angular gable soaring roof planes, are predominant and powerful 
elements contrasted against a light plaster background. With its powerful framed images it 
is reminiscent of a Japanese Hiroshige print. 

The Ward Willits House, Highland Park, Illinois, 1901, expresses the new concept of 
organic architecture. The cruciform plan is beginning its transformation into the pinwheel. 

In the pinwheel plan for this house begins to emerge the truly Wrightian sense of 
movement and continuity. The spaces revolve like a galaxy around the pivotal mass of the 
masonry fireplace. 

With Wright's uncanny sense of the site, he perceived that the horizontal line resonates 
with the prairie, the genius loci, spirit of place. In the prairie house the horizontal line is 
expressed by the raised plinth foundation, the low walls, the bands of windows, and leads 
up to the low eave balanced by the hovering low hipped roofs. 

The powerful simplicity of the exterior, both vertically and horizontally, creates a great 
sense of repose while the expansive spread of the house seems to effortlessly belong to the 
endless prairie. 

The design introduces a new Wrightian element: in place of the usual center post to 
support the great roof above is glass. A continuous band of windows demonstrates the 
roof's new freedom to float above the structure of the building. The steep roof of his early 
houses has given way to the lowhip roof. The upper wall corners are recessed, anticipating 
similar glass openings yet to come. 


THE FIREPLACE 

In Wright's plans the fireplace becomes the sun, the solar plexus-the fire in the 
belly-around which the life of the house revolves. Often, as in the Heurtley House, it is 
framed by an enormous arch; in Hillside School, by an enormous stone lintel above a 
mysterious cavern. In the Coonley House the fireplace becomes a great cubistic series of 
interlocking masses. Always it is high and vast, reminiscent of ancient palaces. 

The fireplace represents an archetypal form celebrating mankind's discovery of fire (the 
pinwheel represents the archetypal sun-wheel). For Wright the burning fire was an 
important metaphor for creation, "the alchemist's fire of transformation," the crucible 
where the architect takes matter; brick, wood, steel and glass and transforms it into the 
forms of art. 

When Wright was blocked and unable to see the solution to a design, he found the roaring 
fire a stimulus for creativity. 

"Go make a blaze," Wright commanded, "... an aid to creative effort, the open fire." 
Relaxed, the changing flames of a fire awakened dreams, visions and new insights; 
invoked and illuminated images hidden in the darkness; opened doors to the imagination. 

In his architecture the fireplace became the vertical core of the house. Its foundation and 
masonry come from the earth, its chimney reaches to the heavens. For Wright art and craft 
were inseparable: the vertical chimney that provides the aesthetic balance to the horizontal 
roof line also provides the engineering mass that anchors the roof's cantilever. And within 
its walls he hid the flues, vent pipes, central heating and other unsightly accessories that 
destroy the simple roof line. 

Of the four elements-earth, water, air and fire-fire took a special place throughout 
Wright's life. 

In the Arthur Heurtley House, Oak Park, 1902, Wright demonstrates his extraordinary 
range and use of materials. The great arched entry is balanced by the stepped horizontal 
courses of the brick which in turn is balanced by the bands of plaster and windows above, 
and the whole is unified under the generous hip roof. The upper level permits extensive 
views across the prairie. On the outside the play of masses and voids gives a sense of 
mystery and excitement to a compact plan. Here also the fireplace is a cave: a great brick 
arch opening in a great masonry mass which seems to emerge from the very earth. 

The entry is partly screened from the street by a low brick wall and introduces a new 
Wrightian element: the indirect approach in which one is led to make a detour to reach the 
entry. 

At first Wright had accepted the traditional plans. Step by step he discarded the past to 
discover the present. First modifying, then changing, finally transforming his architecture 
into wholly new forms. This new energy first found expression in the exterior: the 
projecting balconies and receding wall planes, the forms of the alternately projecting and 
receding masses,  the play of light and shade, of space and mass. The heavy elements of 
the earth balanced by the hovering elements of the roof. Only after the transformation of 
the exterior did his attention turn to revolutionizing the plan. 


LARKIN BUILDING, BUFFALO, NEW YORK, 1903 

A group of Wright's clients formed part of the Larkin mail order company and 
commissioned him to design a building embodying the well-being of its workers. 


"I saw that a little height on the prairie was enough to look like much more ..."-F. Ll. W. 


The site chosen was cheap, next to the railway tracks and smoke in an industrial slum. In 
this district without redeeming views Wright designed an introverted building, an inner 
world complete within itself around its own internal space. 

Wright's discovery of vertical space began with his design for a house for the Ladies' Home 
Journal where the space of the living room ascends two stories. In Hillside School (1902) 
he opened up the first and second floors into one vertical space, experienced from below 
and from the mezzanine above. Wright's projects sometimes took a slow journey from first 
discovery and concept to final opportunity and realization. Here Wright seized the moment 
to create a great vertical space, a core of space ringed by the mezzanine workspaces. 

To the outer world Wright presented "a simple cliff of brick hermetically sealed." This 
great wall envelopes a vast vertical interior space, illuminated by an enormous skylight 
above. The plan is a rectangular doughnut, ascending five stories high; its core is space 
itself, released through the vast skylight above. Bands of high windows are set between 
brick columns around the outer wall of each floor. 

Just before construction began, something about the design seemed incomplete and 
troubled Wright: the correct relationship of the stairs and ventilation shafts to the central 
mass. He knew he was blocked. The contract to build had already been let. A sudden 
glance at the plaster model opened the door. Wright exclaimed, "The solution that had 
hung fire came in a flash. The stair towers must be separate from the main block." 

It would add $30,000 to the cost of the building. Taking the next train to Buffalo, and 
calling on all of his considerable charm, he persuaded Larkin of its necessity. 

The great shafts of masonry soar upwards as vertical towers. The elements are beautifully 
defined; combined stair and ventilation shafts at each corner and an entry wing servicing 
the mezzanine work areas around the great atrium space, with high bands of windows 
along the outer walls to balance the illumination. 

The masses are skillfully articulated and separated from the central mass by insets or 
windows. It was a geometric and monumental building, but its scale is human, serving all 
of its workers in a naturally lit environment. 

(This first celebration of vertical space presaged the evolution, half a century later, of one 
of his greatest buildings.) 

Wright was frequently ahead of the existing building technology. If the things he needed 
did not exist he invented them: the first fully air conditioned structure in America. The 
wall hung toilet. (They were cantilevered for easy cleaning beneath.) Architect-designed 
fireproof steel furniture (filing cabinets and desks). For the desks he designed cantilevered 
swing out seats, and created custom light fixtures and magnesite laundry sinks. 

Wright could have earned a lot of money on these inventions but told us, "I never patented 
and collected royalties for my designs since I felt that they should be available and free to 
all." 


SUSAN LAWRENCE DANA HOUSE, 1902 & 1905 

This demonstrates Wright's absolute mastery of materials, particularly brick and stone. 
Here he experienced the wealthy client of an architect's dreams and provided a setting for 
a social leader of the community. At first the existing house was preserved, but as Wright 
and his client progressed it was reduced to a vestigial element: the dynamic new 
supplanted the old architecture. The vaulted ceilings provide a soaring sense of space. 
furniture, light fittings, leaded glass and fittings were designed and chosen by the architect 
to create a profound sense of harmony. The entry arch demonstrates Wright's mastery of 
the arch with its great Roman brick fan; it was Wright's most beautiful arch. 


THE ARCHITECTURE OF MOVEMENT AND SPATIAL FLOW 

When Wright took away interior walls to allow for more freedom and spatial flow he 
modulated both the flow of space-and the flow of man-by a succession of architectural 
devices. 

A favorite is the screen wall which diverts traffic around it, creating a left turn, right turn, 
diversion in movement. The screen labyrinth contributes to the mystery of his spaces, 
making them seem endless. 

As with Unity Temple, rarely is the entry to his buildings direct. One critic remarked that 
it seems as if you are being deliberately slowed down. You are diverted around a low wall, 
required to ascend several steps, must turn again, are compressed beneath a low entry 
ceiling and turning, yet again, are suddenly released and expanded into the luminous 
splendor of a high, extraordinary space. 

Wright saw that architecture is an art in which movement is an essential element. He saw 
that the movement through its spaces is determined by the plan which becomes a magical 
labyrinth in which one journeys and experiences the arcane delights and range of the 
architect's creative imagination. In his plans the architect becomes a choreographer. 
(Sullivan was the son of a dance instructor, Wright's father a musician: both understood 
movement.) 

Movement enters a vertical dimension as stairs, ramps, mezzanines, galleries, balconies 
and vaulted ceilings open up new vistas of space and form. Space dissolves into space, 
rarely directly, but glimpsed through yet another offset turn in the plan. Wright's 
architecture expresses his own inner odyssey of discovery. 


UNITY TEMPLE, OAK PARK, 1906 

With a minimal budget Wright chose the cheapest and lowliest material 
available-concrete. He chose the simplest plan-the square, symbol of integrity and the 
earth. The roof was a simple flat plane. 

Wright, an earth sign, stood foursquare upon the earth. The building's relationship with 
the earth is expressed by its concrete foundation which emerges from the ground to form a 
plinth. (He invariably placed his buildings on a plinth.) Rising from its plinth, Unity 
Temple displays the raw power of its simplicity. The four faces of the roof move outward 
beyond the square to create a cross and within its corners-in inspired fashion-the stair 
towers become special elements, in which form and function are one. 

The leaded glass windows are continuous bands, set back behind the outer columns, which 
continue into the ceiling plane and become the matrix of the waffle grid of the amber 
skylights, so that both vertical and horizontal fenestration become one continuous element 
of light and space. The flat roof planes move out into the surrounding landscape. 

Both light and space flow from the interior into the exterior. The division of the 
self-contained box is finally destroyed. 

The various levels, the floating connecting bridges within, allow an interflow of space 
which moves throughout the building. Wright first inherited then understood the secrets of 
the box, and now he transformed it, opening it to the outside, releasing its component 
planes, which now effortlessly move out and up as unique elements defining, but no longer 
confining space. He raised and opened up the roof plane. Wright proclaimed "the 
destruction of the box." He had destroyed the box as a rigid container of space and opened 
it up to a rich continuity of space and light. 

Halfway through the design Wright's vision was blocked. Already he had gone through 
thirty-three studies in an effort to overcome his biggest obstacle; to integrate Unity 
House, the social hall into the main church. 

He complained, "Always, some minor concordance takes more time, taxes concentration 
more than all besides ... how many schemes I have thrown away." Wright needed to build 
up a powerful ambiance to break through to a solution. "Night labor at the drafting board 
is best for intensive creation." He shouted, "Make a blaze in the work room fireplace! 
...Ask if it's too late to have Baked Bermudas for supper! ... Ask mother to play ... Bach 
preferred, or Beethoven. To be an artist-to seize this essence ... just behind aspect." 

Wright found it easier to listen to the Muse than present and sell her unconventional 
creations to his clients. Now he had the difficult task to present this unusual design to the 
building committee, one of whose members wanted a conventional church spire. 

"The hardest of an architect's trials is to show his work for the first time to anyone not 
entirely competent or perhaps sympathetic. Already the architect begins to fear for the fate 
of his design," he rued. Wisely, Wright showed the plans first to the one member who was 
sympathetic and could understand what they meant. He was enthusiastic and able to swing 
the rest of the committee to approve the unorthodox design. 

Wright's discovery of space made him euphoric, until he discovered Lao Tse's remark 
2400 years before: "The reality of a building lies not in its walls but in the space contained 
within." He consoled himself that he had discovered his own way to a universal truth, but 
his growing understanding of the philosophy of the East encouraged him take his first trip 
to Japan. 

In 1905 Wright, and his client Ward Willits, together with their wives visited Japan and 
he began his collection of Japanese prints and other artifacts. He exhibited his Hiroshige 
prints at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. 

As usual, Wright was broke and had to borrow $5,000 from his draftsman Griffin to pay 
for the trip. Wright spent all his money buying Japanese prints and when he returned was 
unable to pay back his draftsman. After an almighty row Griffin settled for a range of 
Japanese prints. Like many artists Wright was hopeless about money. Not surprisingly, as 
an artist, his consuming interest was art, not the prosaic world of trade. What seized his 
imagination-and his checkbook-were works of art: Hiroshige prints, Oriental carpets, 
objects d'art, and sculpture. He was never enthusiastic about paying mundane grocery bills 
and ancient debts. 

In 1895 Wright added a studio and playhouse to the house he had built six years before. He 
said, "At last my work was alongside my home, where it has been ever since. I could work 
late and tumble into bed. Unable to sleep because of some idea, I could get up, go 
downstairs to the 'studio' by way of the connecting corridor, and work." 

The playhouse brought together three elements revealing Wright's relationship to the 
Muse, the realm of creation: the cave, the fire and the myth. The room with its barrel vault 
ceiling and warm red walls is a great cavern: Ali Baba's treasure cave. At the arched wall, 
like a shrine, is a fireplace surmounted by a large mural of The Genie and the Fisherman 
from The Arabian Nights. Wright's favorite stories show his love and understanding of 
myths that describe the creative process. 

In Jungian terms the Fisherman represents the artist who casts his net into the sea (the 
collective unconscious). He catches a bottle sealed by King Solomon. Finding the way to 
open the seal he releases the genie imprisoned within. The genie's energy is about to 
destroy the fisherman, who must rely on his trickster wits to survive. He says, "How could 
such a great one as you be contained in such a small bottle?" (I had the same thought 
looking at Wright: how could all of Taliesin have come from this small man?) When the 
genie returns inside the bottle the fisherman closes the seal and the genie is under his 
control. 

As the Druids long ago perceived, God and Creation come from a subtle, timeless 
dimension beyond the reach of rational words. Its arcane processes are communicated only 
through its own language: art, poetry, music and myth. 

In Unity Temple Wright "had discovered space." But space itself is as mysterious as the 
Druidic god of creation: it is invisible, infinite, immeasurable and timeless. It cannot be 
measured, photographed or seen. Equally remarkable is the function of space in the 
architecture of the psyche. In the silent, timeless moment between two thoughts, space is 
the womb in which creation takes form. Lao Tse, Buddha, Christ, Krishnamurti, Zen 
Masters and other teachers have pointed out that a cup is only useful when empty; a mind 
that is filled with the past is not open to the new. Unfettered by an classic academic 
education Wright was open to the new. In Greek myths the Muse is the goddess who 
inspires man. Feminine and unpredictable she eludes a direct approach. The artist seeks 
the Muse. Or is it that the Muse seeks the artist? Looking for an instrument receptive to 
her gifts, she seeks an imagination with the capacity to take her forms and an integrity not 
to change them. (Creation: In scientific terminology, a new impulse of energy causes a 
mutation in the brain cells.) 

In the Avery Coonley House, Riverside, Illinois, 1907, Wright, with a fine client, was able 
to design a prairie house filled with the exuberance and richness associated with the great 
architecture of the past. He demonstrates that modern organic architecture is free of the 
constraints of the rationalist modernist tradition; that honesty does not have to mean an 
austere Calvinistic minimalism. 

In 1907 Wright's life was showing the signs of success. In the Art Institute of Chicago the 
first show of his work received much acclaim. He was published in the magazines House 
Beautiful, 1906, and Architectural Record, 1908. 

Word of Wright's original architecture had reached Europe and C. R. Ashbee of the 
English arts and crafts movement, and the German professor Kuno Francke from Germany 
visited Wright. Francke had recommended Wright's work to the German publisher 
Wasmuth and was anxious to prepare a monograph of his work. 

Added to all this his work had attracted imitators. Most architects would take imitation as 
a compliment, but Wright saw it as against the very concept of original creation he 
preached. The truth repeated is a lie. 

In 1904 Wright had designed the Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York, complex 
to extend over a large site. Extensive walkways covered by a pergola connect the various 
units: main house, garage, stables, conservatory and daughters' house. The 'house' is no 
longer one entity; it has become a series of islands within the landscape. One travels 
through nature which now becomes an integral part of the plan. The old divisions of inside 
and outside have dissolved. The completed project was one of Wright's largest. Along with 
the Dana, Coonley, and other clients Wright had entered the world of the rich. 

The tide of fame was now lapping at Wright's feet. Even without Burnham's Beaux Arts 
help Wright was approaching social success and recognition. He was in danger of 
becoming a fashionable society architect. Henry Ford visited Wright regarding a proposed 
new residence. 

Harold McCormick, heir to the great tractor family fortune, admired Wright's work and 
asked him to submit a design for his new family seat on his property situated on the bluffs 
above Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1907. 

The dramatic site was a match for Wright's own rich imagination. His drawings show an 
extraordinary scheme, bridging the bluffs and ravines: a prairie palace. Wright took the 
discoveries of the Martin House, with its interconnected structures, even further, extending 
the complex laterally and vertically across the site. The wall between inside and outside 
has dissolved and bridges, walks, pergolas become the links between the architectural 
elements. Extraordinary and as subtle as an Oriental design, the architecture becomes part 
of the landscape, appearing and disappearing within the trees, reflected in the waters of 
the lake below. 

Mrs. McCormick, however, preferred a Renaissance fantasy to the Wrightian reality. By 
choosing a traditional architect to build a dead copy of an Italian villa, she helped bring to 
a close the Chicago Renaissance. 

The unique energy seeking expression in Wright reached its apotheosis with the Frederick 
Robie House, Chicago, 1909, appropriately the coda to his first golden age. Here 
everything came together into perfection-so that like some great ship from another world 
it floats serenely in the Chicago landscape. 

The great hovering roof, with its extraordinary cantilever was made possible through the 
client's new technique of welding the steel ridge beams into one continuous structure. 

The dramatic roofs of the Robie House hover and penetrate the environment like no others. 
They represent the most perfect statement of the prairie house. It seems also to represent a 
Wrightian restatement of the ancient archetypal Greek temple transformed and realized in 
contemporary materials and technology. 

The raised plinth-interfaced with the earth-is reached by ascending a series of 
monumental steps. The long rhythmic line of brick columns is reminiscent of Greek 
columns, and the great roof represents the Greek interface with heaven. In between is the 
sacred space for man, in the temple, totally secret and enclosed. But one thing the Greeks 
never experienced: the great interweaving space of the interior, flowing out into the 
landscape and expressing, as no other language can, the freedom of a new egalitarian age. 

The stories of Wright's clients often matched the architect's own colorful life. Frederick 
Robie, inventor and maker of bicycles seems to have existed for the sole purpose of siring 
the masterpiece. Within a few years of its completion his father, on his deathbed, extracted 
a promise from his son to pay all of his enormous debts. (In a vain attempt to fulfill his 
promise, his son had to sell the house and died a poor man.) 

Wright had traveled from apprentice to Master in less than fifteen years, designing some 
150 revolutionary projects. His energy broke the mold of nineteenth-century eclecticism 
to create a new architecture for the twentieth century. Master of continuous space and the 
horizontal plane, he created the new prairie school of architecture. Using the new, 
emerging technologies he transformed the rules of structure to achieve results never seen 
before in the history of architecture. He had given birth to his first golden age: the first 
meeting between architecture and technology. (It was as if the gods had given the architect 
of the Parthenon, the gifts of space, structure, transparency and luminosity.) 

With a wife and six children to support, Wright's days and nights were filled with creation, 
work and battle: battle with conservative builders who resisted his unconventional building 
techniques and battle to persuade his conservative clients and their wives that his new 
architecture was better than the old way. 

Wright was not always successful. He would sometimes supervise construction on his 
house. It is said that when he visited the A. P. Johnson House, Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, 
1905, and discovered the client had painted the wood exterior white, Wright rode away, 
never to return. In 1970 the building was restored and the siding given a darker stain. 

A new impulse of energy was transforming old rigid styles for living into a new sense of 
freedom and openness: transforming both architecture's form, and its social infrastructure 
from the conventional parameters of the Victorian age. Wright was opening the world of a 
repressed, closed society with its accent on propriety, morality, secrecy, privacy, and zones 
of social conduct: parlor, library, formal dining room. Wright, removing the basement and 
attic, dissolving the old class divisions, freed the servants from working in a dark 
basement kitchen and sleeping in a cold attic. He transformed the old work place and 
servants' quarters into the new architecture. 

He was attempting to move a society into accepting a new way of living, working and 
building. Wright took away not only the walls and doors, he liberated the lifestyle also. In 
the residence for Mr. and Mrs. Cheney, 1903, he omitted the interior walls between library 
and dining room to create one large open space. 

In his own life he took down the moral barriers of Victorian society. After twenty-one 
years his own marriage had drawn to its end and he fell in love with Mamah Borthwick 
Cheney, a married woman who, because of her love for him, also sought divorce and 
freedom. 

An independent woman, she was a free spirit who had outgrown her husband. Both 
Wright and Mamah were rebels, part of the new movement that demanded freedom from 
outmoded puritanical rules. (By challenging the old puritan order she would ultimately pay 
with her life.) 

At the age of 42, Wright, after the birth of a score of seminal buildings, was exhausted. 
With the culmination of his masterpiece the Robie House the cycle of the first age was 
completed and his credentials as a modern master established. For sixteen years he had 
ridden euphorically on the crest of a great wave of discovery and creation fueled by an 
energy, seemingly endless, but now exhausted. The cycle of the first age was entering its 
negative phase. The imagination that had held and born so many creations now sought 
renewal. Wright's confused state was demonstrated by his appointment of Holst, an 
unknown architect, to head the completion of Wright's last projects. 

Depleted and exhausted Wright was in the empty, painful void that follows a long period 
of creativity. 

"This absorbing, consuming phase of my experience as an architect ended about 1909," he 
wrote. "I had almost reached my fortieth (42nd) year. Weary, I was losing grip on my work 
and even my interest in it. Every day of every week and far into the night of nearly every 
day, Monday included, I had added 'tired unto tired ...' continuously thrilled by the effort 
but now it seemed to leave me up against a dead wall." Wright said, "I could see no way 
out. Because I did not know what I wanted, I wanted to go away. Why not go to Germany 
and prepare the material for the Wasmuth Monograph? I looked longingly in that 
direction." 

Wright saw that his twenty-one years of marriage had reached its end. By leaving his 
wife and family Wright committed a social, unpardonable sin. By leaving Oak Park with 
Mamah he irrevocably severed his connection with the old order and the resulting scandal 
would strike a mortal blow to his future practice. He would never regain his former 
preeminence as the Oak Park architect. He was walking away from a highly successful 
practice, the work he loved; sacrificing the secure domain of Oak Park, family and clients. 
In every way the cycle was finished: marriage, studio, the world of Oak Park. He had 
severed his connections with the past. 

Middle-aged, on the outside once again, he was voyaging into the unknown; crossing an 
ocean to a foreign shore to become a stranger in a strange land. 


The Second Age, 
Monumental Architecture 

THE JOURNEY TO THE WEST 

On the blank wall of Frank Lloyd Wright's frustration appeared a message from destiny, 
an invitation from the Wasmuth publishing house of Berlin to come to Europe to prepare a 
comprehensive book on his work. He was not fleeing, as the gossips claimed, but 
beginning a new odyssey. Retracing the ocean voyage of his Welsh immigrant grandfather 
60 years earlier, Wright was approaching both his own roots and the roots of architecture. 


"Architecture is life itself taking form."-F. LI. W. 


Arriving in Berlin he was hailed as the new master of modern architecture. Ludwig Mies 
van der Rohe said, "He was the personification of all we were seeking, a veritable 
fountainhead of the new architecture." H.T.H. Wijdeveld affirmed: "He is the chosen one." 

The Wright publication was to influence the whole modern movement. If Wright was 
reinvigorating European architecture he was equally, with his extraordinary insight, 
absorbing everything around him. Acutely sensitive to the genius loci in Italy he wrote: 
"No really Italian building seems ill-at-ease in Italy. All are happily content with what 
ornament and color they carry naturally." 

At Mamah Borthwick's suggestion (she had traveled in Italy before), they settled in 
Fiesole, a village in the hills above Florence. Freed from the pressure of work, Wright 
began his work for Wasmuth, preparing the drawings and writings on his fifteen years of 
architecture. 

He lay fallow, letting the rich energy of sun and landscape wash over him, recharging his 
body and spirit. Like countless architects before him he was reborn in the rich culture of 
Italy. Here in the cradle of the Renaissance, he was synchronistically in the place where 
earlier architects had discovered and been inspired by the ancient forms. But Wright saw 
"... the Renaissance as that setting sun all Europe mistook for dawn ..." He regarded 
eclectic architecture as an imitation of a dead past. 

What inspired him was not the old forms but the seminal energy that engendered and 
shaped them: it resonated with the forces that sired his work. He was enthralled by the 
sense of presence, the extraordinary timeless energy that permeated the ancient 
architecture. In France what held his attention was the Gothic cathedral. He marveled at 
the power and mystery of the Gothic and called it, "... the most truly organic 
architecture-where form, structure and integral ornament are as one." Made from the 
basic stone, form, structure and ornament were all of one piece. He envied the master 
builder's power over an army of skilled craftsmen. 

The pictures of temples and cathedrals that inspired him as a child had laid a seed, now 
germinating in his mind. He began to understand the arcane processes of creation and 
culture that gave birth to monumental architecture. Wright felt a new impulse of energy. 
He saw the beginnings of a new monumental architecture that would define the modern 
age. Flashes of revelation illuminated images not yet mature, and slowly these took form 
within his imagination. 

"We do not yet understand pattern for one thing because it is an attribute of a very high 
and older civilization," he said. "I had to break ground and make the forms I needed ... 
The old architecture, always dead for me so far as its grammar went, began literally to 
disappear. As if by magic new effects came to life as though by themselves and I could 
draw inspiration from nature herself ... No longer a wanderer among the objects and 
traditions of the past ... the world lost an eclectic and gained an interpreter. If I did not like 
the gods now I could make better ones." 

Inspired by the French writer Georges Clemenceau, Wright remarked that America may be 
the first society to go from barbarism to decadence without ever achieving a culture." 
However, Wright saw America not in shallow nationalistic terms but as a metaphor for a 
universal new age, a democratic way of life, with freedom, openness and honesty, a culture 
free of tyranny, elitism and secrecy. He saw the energy that is released in an open society. 
Was he not himself a product of this society, both child and prophet of the age? 

The mind that was once exhausted was now recharged. The new direction was clear: not a 
return to Chicago but to Spring Green, Wisconsin to build a house on the land of his 
forefathers. Why did he choose this particular place? There were virtually no clients in this 
rural region. Wright sensed the difficult times ahead. To assure his independence he 
needed to be rooted in the land and the farm. (To us he said, "Boys, first find yourself a 
piece of land, that way you will always have food.") 

It was to be a base from which the new architecture would spread, both through his 
buildings and philosophy. "My back against the wall," he wrote, "I turned to this hill in the 
Valley as my Grandfather before me had turned to America-as a hope and haven ..." 


TALIESIN 

As a child Wright had heard the legend of Taliesin from his family. His journey to the Old 
World had awakened him to his heritage and when he built his house on the brow of the 
hill, he named it Taliesin, the ancient Welsh name for "shining brow." 

He was still not fully aware of the deepest implications of the legend that was to give the 
name to his house and transform and shape his life. The essence of the long poem is as 
follows. 


THE MYTH OF TALIESIN: THE SHAPE-SHIFTER 

An ugly witch Caridwen wishes to bestow upon her ugly son the treasures of all wisdom, 
beauty and alchemy. She fills a cauldron with the magic ingredients of inspiration, 
prophecy and knowledge, places it over a fire and instructs her son to stir and guard the 
stew until it is ready to drink. 

The son falls asleep and a boy, Gwion Bach, discovers the stew and stirs the magic broth. 
Three drops splash onto his brow and give him all knowledge, beauty and the ability to 
transform himself into any form. 

The witch discovers and pursues the trickster boy. Just as she is about to catch him, he 
turns into a rabbit. She turns into a fox. He turns into a bird. She turns into a hawk. (They 
go on playing the game of shape-shifters.) Finally he turns into a seed of wheat and she 
eats him. 

He arrives in her womb. When the baby is born she cannot persuade herself to kill him and 
she covers him with a blanket, places him in a tiny boat and sets him adrift on the sea (a 
symbol for the collective unconscious). The boat is washed up on a beach and discovered 
by a fisherman. The fisherman pulls aside the blanket and sees, shining in the darkness, 
the child's magic radiant brow. He exclaims, "Taliesin," and the boy replies, "So be it." 
Taliesin grows into a man and becomes the druid bard-prophet who sings the glory of art 
at King Arthur's court, Camelot. 

According to Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, Taliesin was a sixth-century 
historical figure who took the ancient myth and name for himself. The myth goes beyond 
the Druids, back to the Greeks (Medea with her cauldron of rebirth becomes the witch 
Caridwen) and the Egyptians (Moses in the bullrushes becomes Taliesin). The Celts are 
thought to have come from a region near Persia. Gwion Bach represents the mortal who is 
transformed into the immortal Taliesin. It is the myth of life forever changing its form. 
Taliesin slowly takes form, stone by stone, beam by beam, on the brow of the Wisconsin 
hill. 

Taliesin is both ancient and modern, containing the primal elements of East and West, in 
harmony, a timeless architecture of life itself, springing out of the earth. The walls were 
made of the limestone taken out of the hill quarry and laid by the masons from the local 
Welsh community. 

Where he had played as a boy, absorbing the spirit of the site, he now returned as a man, 
master of his art, to make his stand, proclaiming his ancient family motto: "Truth against 
the world." Taliesin was to be his Camelot against the trials and tribulations that were to 
come. In Taliesin he was now lord of all he surveyed. This was the land of his Welsh 
forefathers, the world of his first projects-the windmill tower Romeo and Juliet and the 
Hillside Home School, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1902, he had designed for his aunts. 

Perhaps the softness of his recent Tuscany experience contributed to the mellowness of 
Taliesin, which seems to flow out of the hills of the Wisconsin landscape. He used the 
Italian technique of mixing earth colors with the plaster, giving a tawny gold color to the 
walls that allowed light to penetrate. Taliesin is like no other building of Frank Lloyd 
Wright. Most of Wright's buildings represent an architectural statement, but Taliesin, rich 
as the earth itself, stands unique with its sense of tranquillity and repose. Wisdom is 
implicit, not explicit, and there are no eclectic details. The ancient spirit of Tibet and the 
East mysteriously pervade the place, in harmony with the spirit of the New World. Like an 
ancient cathedral, Taliesin has layers of meaning. The mystery of Taliesin defies analysis. 

Chinese pottery and sculpture as well as Japanese prints and screens soon filled the rooms. 
"Hovering over these messengers to Taliesin from other civilizations ... must have been 
spirits of peace and good will." (The only picture Wright ever displayed by his desk was 
that of the Potola, the monumental architecture which defines the culture of Tibet, taken 
by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.) 

After his absence in Europe of nearly two years, as well as echoes of the former scandal, it 
was not easy to pick up the threads of his practice. Wright's old clients were loyal and saw 
the genius and generosity beneath his "honest arrogance." They lent him money when he 
needed it and provided a network to link him to new clients. The Coonley Playhouse,  
Riverside, Illinois, 1911, and the San Francisco Press Building, 1912, demonstrate a new 
direction in his work. Wright was seeking a project in order to express his new concept for 
a monumental architecture. It was to materialize when a former client, Edward Waller, 
recommended Wright to his son, Ed. 


MIDWAY GARDENS, FALL 1913 

Ed Waller came to see Wright. Young and inexperienced, Waller was excited with his 
concept for a great indoor-outdoor garden restaurant that would celebrate the arts: music, 
dance, painting, sculpture. It was to be something akin to what Wright had experienced in 
Germany. Waller, with the impatience of youth, was convinced that Wright had the power 
to create immediately the magical design he wished for. Wright said: "... come back 
Monday." 


ALADDIN AND THE Arabian Nights 

Wright was surprisingly open about his connection with the worlds of magic, myth and 
muse. He had commissioned the mural, The Genie and the Fisherman, for his own studio, 
as well as the statue, The Muse, for the Dana House. 

In his autobiography, Wright wrote: "As a boy Aladdin and his wonderful lamp had 
fascinated me. But by now I knew the enchanting young Arabian was really just a symbol 
for creative desire, his lamp intended for another symbol-imagination. As I sat listening I 
became Aladdin. Well, this might all be necromancy but I believed in magic. Had I not 
rubbed my lamp with what seemed wonderful effect before? I didn't hesitate. The thing 
had simply shaken itself out of my sleeve." 

In Aladdin's treasure cave of the imagination-the collective unconscious-Wright 
discovered the archetypal forms that fueled the great architecture of mankind, the world of 
abundance and exuberance, mass and ornament, form and complexity. In Midway Gardens 
and the Imperial Hotel he was moving in a magical world of rich encrustation, ornament 
and the decorative arts. Wright, like Picasso, had the gift to enter primitive and mythic 
worlds and transform them into modern form. 

Midway Gardens was his first opportunity to experiment with the rich textures of his new 
monumental architecture. This was to be a garden beyond anything ever created in 
Germany. His imagination was inspired for a "garden of rare delights," an architecture to 
celebrate all the arts. He created a Babylonia of brick, block and concrete, a symphony of 
texture, ornament and art to match his full, exuberant imagination. 

Wright, like the cubists, was exploring and celebrating the discovery of the geometric 
world. At Taliesin he had designed the limestone walls with alternating layers of 
projecting and receding stones, inspired, like Cezanne, by the cubistic geometry of a 
natural stone outcropping. For Midway Gardens he conceived the cubistic statues, 
including the marvelous "Goddess of Cubism" as it might be called; out of her outstretched 
hands spring endless cubes. He created the superb wall mural of circular and geometric 
design. It was a style that the painter Wassily Kandinsky would later make his trademark. 
But Wright characteristically proclaimed; "I made Kandinsky before Kandinsky was 
invented." 

Like Prometheus, who stole the sacred fire from the gods, so the artist brings back the fire 
of art to illuminate the human vision. The artist travels in the realm of the imagination. 
His odyssey moves into the psyche, a realm outside of time, beyond forms, boundaries and 
restraints, a world where everything is possible. 

Wright had a profound feeling for the energy of creation. He knew that within every great 
culture lies the sacred, the still center of energy from which creation takes form. He said: 
"In nature there is a continuous, ceaseless becoming ... the great in-between of which Lao 
Tse speaks, which is alive, which never ceases to be ... all rhythmical according to innate 
principles. And if you can tune in on those principles your hand will have direction and 
your mind will succeed in tracing something from within yourself that is there and alive 
and ready to become something when you call upon it properly ... when you become the 
pencil in the hand of the infinite, when you are truly creative ... design begins and never 
has an end. Once you are aware of the spirit living in nature, you will never have to copy 
nature. If you want to do a tree, you'll do your tree ... you could make a squash that might 
end all squashes ... because living in you is a higher form of feeling than can exist in the 
vegetable kingdom ... By way of it your own individuality will find its own fruition." 

At Christmas we apprentices had the opportunity of presenting our work to Mr. Wright for 
his criticism. It soon became a dialogue on the creative process. Wright told us that his 
inspiration might come at about two in the morning when he would have a "dream" about 
the building and walk through it, inside and out, observing details and spaces until he 
knew it intimately. Only when he knew this archetypal building entirely would he begin to 
draw. He would bang on the door of his head draftsman at 5 A.M. shouting, "Jack, wake 
up, I have a new idea I want you to draw up." 

The physicist C. P. Snow maintained that in the evolution of humanity only rare genius 
has the capacity for true three dimensional imagination; most people can only project two 
dimensional images. Wright was able to think in three, which accords with what he called 
"dreaming" a building. 

I had the opportunity to pursue this line of thought with the educator J. Krishnamurti, who 
said, "That in sleep for the first hour or so the brain is active making order and resolving 
the day's residue through dreams. When that is completed the brain is open to another 
kind of creative experience while the body is sleeping." 

Wright advocated: "Conceive the buildings in imagination not first on paper but in the 
mind, thoroughly, before touching paper. Let the building, living in imagination, develop 
gradually, taking more and more definite form before committing it to the drafting board. 
When the thing sufficiently lives for you then start to plan it with instruments, not before. 
To draw during the conception or "sketch," as we say, experimenting with practical 
adjustments to scale is well enough if the concept is clear enough to be firmly held 
meantime. But it is best always to thus cultivate the imagination from within." 

Wright's odyssey had brought him to that powerful and dangerous vortex of energy that 
fuels the forces of creation and destruction. The Hindu God Shiva represents both forces 
mirroring Picasso's affirmation, "... destruction precedes creation." The artist moves in a 
world of forces that, if uncontrolled, can overwhelm the mind, in the most extreme cases 
resulting in madness (Van Gogh, Nietzsche, or Schumann). For those who were close to 
Wright, it could inspire the best or awaken the worst. He would experience extraordinary 
insights into life, reaching the heights of creation, then plunge to the depths of despair, 
swept along by powerful and arcane forces. 

In 1914 Wright's turbulent life seemed finally to have settled down to a perfect idyll. His 
love for Mamah was complete. She radiated with the joy of life. It was said that when she 
entered a room she filled it with laughter.  She was a cultivated, cosmopolitan woman 
who, more than any other woman in Wright's life, understood him at every level. She 
furnished the house, entertained his clients and created an ambiance in harmony with his 
architecture. Wright had enjoyed five idyllic years with Mamah. His practice was growing 
again to its former preeminence. He now had the perfect house and the perfect woman. 
Later, he would recall the ancient Japanese proverb: "It is said that perfection invites 
disaster." 

The only flaw in their idyllic relationship (the flaw in which tragedy would take root) was 
that Wright was unable to marry Mamah. Catherine, his wife, refusing to let him go, 
denied him the divorce he wanted. In the Puritan society of 1914, Wright and Mamah 
were flouting the tribal taboo, openly living in sin. But this lifestyle, encouraged by his 
motto, "Truth against the World," was threatening to their secret enemies. In a corrupt 
world, the rebel is often persecuted and sacrificed for wielding revolutionary views. 
Contradicting Wright's creative energy was the dark side of Midwest society, its sexual 
repression, righteous judgment and demand for retribution. These were the dark 
destructive forces that would fuel the sick mind of a superstitious psychopath into 
justifying an act of punishment. 

When Wright left Taliesin to supervise the construction of Midway Gardens, he was never 
to see Mamah again. At lunch time of August 14, 1914 Wright's idyllic life was totally 
shattered, forever swept away. 

The psychopath was the newly hired Barbados servant, already living in Taliesin. 
Significantly it was when Wright was away from Taliesin that the servant exploded. The 
thin-lipped cook, inflamed by a fundamentalist sect's condemnation that he was working 
in "a house of sin," went mad. Possessed by demonic ferocity, he poured kerosene on the 
floor outside the dining room, locked all the exit doors except one and set the torch to 
Taliesin. At the door with an ax, he ambushed Mamah, her two children and four others as 
they tried to escape. He destroyed everyone and everything in his path in an orgy of 
destruction which ended only with his own suicide by poison. With righteous judgment, 
the tabloid press implied that the tragedy was Wright's own fault, a punishment for the sin 
of leading a "free" life. 

Wright was seized by "black despair ... she was buried next to Grandfather's grave ... I 
wanted to fill that grave myself ... I felt coming far-off shadows of the ages, struggling 
escape from consciousness ... The struggle for freedom that swept my former life away, 
had now been swept away ... I saw the black hole in the hillside, the black night over all as 
I moved about in sinister shadows ... Totally she was gone." 

As in a Greek tragedy, the power of destruction was terrifying. The structure of his world 
was demolished. Only his life was spared. 

In Greek myth jealous gods strike down the hero's overweening ego and destroy 
Prometheus's vision. For the first time in his life, Wright's powerful ego, with its fearless 
self-confidence and its mastery of all challenges was shattered. Even to his mother he 
could not speak. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he had to use glasses for the first 
time. He wrote: "... for a while it seemed that I might be going blind." 

He knew (like Orpheus) he must never look back. He said, "There is no past, there is no 
future ... unless we realize that the Now is Eternity ... time will desolate our hearts." 

Wright's son John was to say "Something in him died with her, something lovable and 
gentle ... that Mamah had nurtured." 

Wright must have asked himself the universal question: what is the meaning of such 
senseless tragedy? Is there utter perversity in the fabric of life that defies logic or justice? 
In every myth the hero needs to overcome the monster that blocks his progress, his growth. 
Only by understanding this, by going deeper, beyond the personal, can he transcend the 
challenge. The tragedy had broken his spirit, destroyed the mantle of his invulnerability. 
Traumatized, he was filled, "with a deep sense of impending disaster." 

Frank Lloyd Wright knew he might be destroyed, but the shock wave that destroyed his 
ego's mantle opened new fissures, revealing deep springs of primal energy. His despair 
took him to the deepest parts of his being, to the discovery of the doors that open to other 
worlds. In the depth of his psyche he found the alchemy which transmutes personal 
tragedy into objective art. 

"Perhaps a new consciousness had to grow as a green shoot will grow from a charred and 
blackened stump," he wrote. Like the phoenix, slowly out of the ashes of destruction, a 
new Taliesin took form. 


THE JOURNEY TO THE EAST: REBIRTH 

At the nadir of his despair Fate sends Wright a letter, an invitation to the East, 
transforming his life and work into a new and magical direction. He is sent across the 
ocean to another world, a radically different and ancient culture, with the simplicity and 
tranquillity of Shinto and Buddha. 

The letter from the commission of the Imperial Emperor of Japan awarded him the 
opportunity to design the new Imperial Hotel, 1914, 1915, in Tokyo. This was to represent 
Japan's new openness, a portal to the West. 

The Baron Okura, emissary of the Emperor, had traveled throughout the West looking for 
the best architect to design the hotel. What drew him to Wright was their affinity to 
nature. In the pantheistic tradition of Japan, the love of nature is fundamental. Every 
stone, every tree has its spirit and architecture is the art of being at one with nature. When 
they saw Wright's buildings, their extraordinary resonance with the landscape, they knew 
they had found the Western architect who could create a building in keeping with the 
genius loci. Writer D. H. Lawrence was known to absorb "the spirit of place" as well as 
any other writer. Wright too had this uncanny ability to sense the unique quality of place 
and design an appropriate architecture. 

He had long admired and been influenced by Oriental cultures and had first visited Japan 
in 1906 to collect Japanese prints. He described a Japanese print in which "the elimination 
of the insignificant intensifies its power," as almost "autobiographical." What excited him 
was the principle behind Japanese architecture: simplicity, open plan, direct structural 
expression, non-load-bearing screens, as well as the inner and outer relationship with 
nature. 

At the entry of the Oriental Temple sit two stone Temple Dogs. One breathes in, one 
breathes out. They symbolize the cycle of creation, Yin and Yang, the Feminine and 
Masculine principle. Wright had used Lao Tse's remark, "The reality of a building lies in 
the space contained within its walls to be lived in," to create the space in his Unity Temple 
building. The feminine principle is invisible, the understanding of the negative; the space 
between the walls, notes, words, contains an energy more significant than the positive. The 
feminine principle is to be flexible, to yield, to survive. 

Wright's personal tragedy opened him to foresee an even greater tragedy on the horizon 
and alerted him to a "deep sense of impending doom." He prepared a design that could 
withstand an earthquake. Alchemy is one of the gifts of genius with its power to 
transfigure personal tragedy into art. Wright wove his art into a structure that could 
survive doomsday. He used the feminine principle of flexibility to outwit the force of the 
trembler. He knew that a rigid building would break apart under the impact of a massive 
earthquake. 

The site was an old marsh. He conceived a structure that, like a great ship, would float on 
segmented, massive concrete slabs supported on deep concrete pilings tied by flexible 
joints. Symmetrical and balanced, like a waiter's tray, it was to return to equilibrium after 
the shock wave. 

In Europe Wright had envied the power of the master builders of the Middle Ages. Here in 
the last years of feudal Japan the Gods granted him his dream. Day after day some 600 
workers were under his command, cutting and carving the materials that would build his 
great edifice. Outside the city, a quarry supplied the great slabs of volcanic tuff stone, 
lightweight and rejected by the Japanese builders as an unworthy material. Kilns fired the 
Western style bricks he had specially designed while carpenters studied and copied the 
furniture he had shipped from Taliesin. Not only did he create the architecture but he had 
to design and build its Western style structure, while training and controlling an army of 
artisans. He traveled to Beijing to oversee the weaving of carpets of his own design. 
Watching the weavers at work was to lay the seed of an idea that would later germinate on 
his return to America in the "textile" concrete block structures. 

For relaxation he visited galleries and spent almost his entire fee collecting Oriental art 
treasures. Two freight cars were needed to ship them to Taliesin. His critics complained he 
was extravagant, more interested in buying art than paying his grocery bill. But to Wright 
these treasures were the vital food for his spirit. They contained the ageless secrets and 
discoveries of ancient artists that would provide him with an endless source of inspiration. 
He brought back ancient Chinese screens that became front doors for Taliesin. Henceforth, 
the entry to Taliesin was through the East, "the lands of my dreams-old Japan and old 
Germany." 

Wright was one of the men, like Gurdjieff, who provided an interface between East and 
West. Living in Taliesin, midway between Orient and Occident he was well situated to 
cross-pollinate three cultures. He had always admired the Gothic and its use of stone, 
"stretched to the limit." Chartres Cathedral transcends beauty by expressing in all its 
aspects the complex landscape of the mind. Wright's grief and search through the 
labyrinth of tragedy is exemplified in the dark cavernous spaces of the Imperial Hotel, an 
architecture of an almost gothic underworld. With its completion, his ghosts exorcised, 
came redemption. His later works in Japan took a wholly different and original turn, 
becoming lighter, more delicate and joyful-the Odawara Hotel, 1917, and the Jiyu 
Gakuen School, 1921, (School of the Free Spirit). 

After five years of continuous production, the gestation and building of the Imperial Hotel 
had left Wright exhausted and critically sick with pneumonia. His mother came to Tokyo 
to nurse him back to health. (Wright arranged for her invitation to the Emperor's garden 
party.) It was to be the last of many a journey in which she arrived to rescue her son. 


1923: DOOMSDAY ARRIVES 

Two years after Wright left Japan, Tokyo was demolished by the biggest earthquake of its 
history, 8.1 on the Richter scale. He was awakened by a telephone call in the middle of the 
night and was taunted by a tabloid press editor, who said: "The Imperial Hotel has been 
destroyed. A massive earthquake has destroyed all of Tokyo; 100,000 people are dead." 
(Actually, 180,000.) 

Wright asked, "Are you sure? Read me the list." The editor read out his list, "The Imperial 
Bank, The Imperial Offices ..." Wright responded, "You still haven't found the Imperial 
Hotel." Had it survived? Three days later the telegram came: "Congratulations! The 
Imperial Hotel is the only building to survive earthquake." Wright had won. 

The Imperial was finally destroyed in 1968, not by nature but by man's greed and 
indifference, replaced by a bland modern tower. When Wright was asked to support the 
movement fighting for preservation, he refused and said, "No, the Japan I knew and loved 
no longer exists." Perhaps by being General MacArthur's headquarters during the 
occupation it also symbolized something the country wished to forget. 


ECLIPSE 

Wright returned to California, after having been away from America for over five years. 
He was a forgotten man, his career in eclipse. He picked up one new project when a former 
client, Mrs. Millard, now living in Los Angeles, commissioned him to build her new 
house. He was looking for a project in which to realize the idea germinating in his mind. 
He knew that with the rising cost of skilled craftsmen in America, if he was to create a 
new monumental architecture, he must first invent the technology to build it cheaply. 


THE TEXTILE BLOCK HOUSES 

The alchemist of the Middle Ages sought to transform lead into gold, the ordinary into the 
extraordinary. Wright, the alchemist, turned his full attention to transforming the grey, 
utilitarian concrete block into an extraordinary magical, textured jewel. Taking small 
stones bound together with cement he created a modern version of the Gothic stone he had 
admired. Here integral ornament was cast into the form of every block. One basic block 
could do everything, perform multiple roles: structure, wall, integral ornament and even 
roof. Cast in a mold charged with granite dust with embossed design and glass inlay, each 
block was designed as a piece of intrinsic architecture. It expressed perfectly his definition 
of "organic architecture: where the part is to the whole as the whole is to the part." His 
designs were cast into a mold from which an endless array of blocks could be cheaply mass 
produced by unskilled labor. The imprint of his inspiration was manifest in every block. 

He had brought two distant worlds together. In Europe he had been inspired by the Gothic, 
in which the same stone provided wall, structure and ornament. In China overseeing the 
weaving of the carpets for the Imperial Hotel, he saw how the weft and warp provided the 
matrix upon which the rich texture of the carpet took form. These observations inspired 
him to use of a matrix of horizontal and vertical steel reinforcing rods to support the 
texture of the blocks. 

This technique produced a richness of texture and ornament unsurpassed since the Gothic. 
He called it the "Textile Block System." With it he could build a monumental architecture 
undreamed of in ancient times: the Millard House, Los Angeles, 1923, the Storer House, 
Los Angeles, 1923, and the Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1923. Freed from the constraints of 
stone, his architecture now had endless possibilities. 

He could strip away the keystones and make glass corners, as in the Freeman House, Los 
Angeles, 1923, or span large spaces and create great cantilevers. Of the architects of the 
twentieth century, only Wright could provide the rich geometric design of the ornament-a 
true language for the Modern Age. He continued this work for the rest of his life. One of 
his last projects was for the Arizona State Capitol, 1967, which would have given Phoenix 
the cultural identity it so sadly lacks. 

The Barnsdall House, Los Angeles, 1917, called "Hollyhock," was built for an 
individualistic, liberal heiress and used local structural techniques. Based on the cubistic 
abstraction of the hollyhock, the decorations were cast in concrete. The fireplace brings 
together Wright's favorite elements: fire and water, cosmos and art. In this romantic 
California extravaganza the opening in the roof reveals the stars and moon, which are 
reflected along with flames in the semicircular moat that rings the hearth. A beautiful 
geometric design by the architect is carved on the stone chimney breast. This extensive 
project contains several buildings. While Wright was away in Japan, supervision was 
accomplished by the Austrian architects, Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler. 

The three masters of decoration shared common Celtic roots: Wright (Welsh), Louis 
Sullivan (Irish) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Scottish). The latter two created unique 
and beautiful designs using the sensuous flowing line of the art nouveau and the Celtic 
tradition. But all three were going against the tide. Modern architecture, with a puritan 
zeal, was stripping away ornament, reducing architecture to a bare functionalism. 
Mackintosh and Sullivan died broken men, bypassed by the changing whims of fashion. 
Sullivan died in a dirty hotel room in Chicago. Only Wright had the physical and mental 
toughness to survive. He had finally reconciled with Sullivan and helped support his 
Lieber-Meister with both friendship and money. Sullivan was elated with the evolution of 
Wright's work and saw him as a natural successor, the keeper of the sacred flame of 
architecture. 


MIRIAM NOEL 

In the Greek myth of the twins, Castor and Pollux, Castor is mortal and Pollux is a god. 
Like every man Wright shared these dual roles. In the world of architecture Wright moved 
like a god but in the domain of woman he was all too mortal. He entered an alien world 
where the siren's call would lead him astray into a maelstrom of destructive forces and 
conflicting desires. 

Author's Note: Recently, I paid a visit to the Freeman House in Los Angeles. The building 
is being restored by its curator and USC. I sat with friends in the living room around the 
fireplace on furniture designed by Schindler. The best way to experience a building is to sit 
in it and absorb the spirit of the place. My eye was drawn to one of the concrete blocks cast 
for the restoration. I tried to understand the meaning behind Wright's matrix design but 
reason failed. The forms were in a nonverbal language as incomprehensible to me as an 
ancient hieroglyph. That night I had a vivid dream of sitting in an ancient Babylonian 
room. I could feel the life of the city around me. My unconscious mind had understood the 
forms imprinted on the block. Like the light seen from a long dead star, I was 
experiencing the energy from an architecture no longer in existence resonating with 
archetypal energy. Wright's discovery of the source had transported me to another culture, 
for the psyche moves outside of time. The artist opens up new trails to unknown worlds, 
like the explorer Burton who discovered the source of the Nile and blazed the trail that 
others could follow. So too can we follow Wright's journey to the source of architecture. 

While living in Europe and Japan, the boy from the Midwest had developed into a 
cosmopolitan gentleman. If Wright had a weakness for women, they, particularly as 
clients, had a weakness for him. For Wright was an attractive, handsome man, with the 
powerful ego fueled by charismatic energy and genius. He was at once visionary and 
practical, he built his dreams. 

Wright could be quite earthy. An apprentice friend, Edgar Tafel, about to get married, was 
vainly attempting to start a bonfire against the wind. Wright came up to him and said; 
"Son, if you don't know the right place to start a fire you will never succeed with a 
woman!" On the other hand at times he was on the verge of being prudish. At my first 
Taliesin dance, I was told that Mr. Wright was against dancing, which he called "vertical 
intercourse." Perhaps, as in his architecture, he preferred the horizontal line. 

It is not surprising that as the son of a minister whenever he strayed from the Puritan path 
he was predestined to be discovered. He only had to check into a Berlin hotel with a lady 
and it became a headline in Chicago. He wrote, "... but I was forgetful, for the time being, 
of grandfather's Isaiah. Hissmiting and his punishment." And later: "God might have been 
testing my character, but he knew that in architecture I always gave my best." 

The dark wave of tragedy continued to stain his life. It had thrown him off balance, 
clouded his vision. Without Mamah, he was desperately lonely. He prayed for a 
companion. He should have been wary of "answered prayers." His life had just been 
destroyed. In the darkness of despair, he answered the call of another. He was to describe 
his relationship with Noel as, "the blind leading the blind." 

It began with a letter of condolence from "someone who has also suffered," signed, Miriam 
Noel. Wright recalled, "She wore a bejeweled cross and carried a book on Christian 
Science ... Her health had been broken ... A trace of some illness seemed to cling to her in 
the continuous, slight but perceptible shaking of her head ... She was sensitive and 
clairvoyant, strange and violent things would occur around her ..." She was a 
middle-aged femme fatale, a witch who would cast him under her spell. 

They lived together, on and off, for several tumultuous years. In 1923 his mother died at 
age 81. He cried, "but she was so young." She had guided him throughout his life and 
supported him through every phase, every disaster. He was shattered by her death. He had 
lost the one person he could unquestionably trust. In desperation he married Noel. His wife 
Catherine, (with bad timing) finally granted him the divorce he had once sought to marry 
Mamah. He now thought that marriage would solve Noel's growing instability. Within the 
year, they had split forever. Freed of her spell, Wright was alone and at peace again in 
Taliesin. Visiting the ballet in Chicago, he became fascinated with the young woman in 
the next box. Her name was Olgivanna Lazovich. They soon became lovers. 

Jealous of Olgivanna, and rejected by Wright, Noel re-enacted the tale of Taliesin's 
revengeful witch Caridwen, pursuing the legendary Gwion Bach. Chased by the wrathful 
Noel, Wright and Olgivanna fled from city to city, from state to state, across the country to 
the west coast. They took refuge in the house of a friend, where they were betrayed by the 
son to the police and press and thrown in jail. Noel had pressed charges against him for 
"illegally crossing state borders for immoral purposes." In San Diego Noel broke into his 
house and smashed the furniture. She transported her rage to Chicago, where she threw 
Olgivanna and her baby out of a hospital and into the street. 

Frank Lloyd Wright had now become a favorite whipping boy of the tabloid press, 
scourged and crucified, photographed and pilloried. (It was the tabloid press that paid Noel 
to instigate the harassment.)  {The press had developed an appetite for scandal with 
famous architects in the Stanford White murder triangle earlier.} 

Noel overreacted, becoming a caricature of herself. Her spell was thus broken and the case 
against Wright was dismissed. Commenting on Noel, Wright said: "We came together 
under an evil star." 


THE SEVEN LEAN YEARS 

With the deaths of Mamah, his mother, and now Sullivan in 1924, the three most 
important people in his life were gone. He was alone in an increasingly hostile world. The 
twenties were to be the most difficult period of his life. 

The tragedy and turbulence of his private life had blown him off course. He was lost in a 
world of ghosts, separated in some strange way by an invisible barrier from the normal 
flow of wealthy clients and the tangible successes of Oak Park. His new clients were 
"phantoms who would finance schemes for skyscrapers, and then fade back into the 
shadows from which they came." His voyage was under a dark star. 

When Frederick Guthreim visited Wright he found him without work and studying large 
books of photos of plants and cells. Frank Lloyd Wright was preparing for the future. 
While his fortunes ran low, his imagination soared. He designed a pyramidal cathedral for 
a million people, a unique cantilevered tower for New York, a spiral observatory. (With 
time all these projects came to fulfillment.) This was the period for research and inner 
discovery: as with Leonardo da Vinci, his days were filled with sketches for visionary 
projects. There was little money but this fallow time provided the gestation for his greatest 
works. 

The fact that he would survive was due to his tough upbringing by his mother, aunts and 
uncles as well as his childhood experience on the farm, where he received his lifelong 
lesson: the cycle of life and death, seed and harvest, of patience and timing. He had 
developed an extraordinary resilience, a profound faith in life, the ability to regenerate 
after each disaster. 


OLGIVANNA 

In 1928 Wright finally got his divorce from Noel and married Olgivanna. (Their daughter 
was born in 1925; Wright was not built to be a Puritan.) He had chosen a Western wife 
with an Eastern philosophy. Olgivanna was born in Montenegro, Yugoslavia, and 
educated in Moscow and Fontainebleau, France by Gurdjieff, an Armenian Master. 
Wright's marriage represented a fusion of cultures and a new direction in his life. The ten 
lost years after the death of Mamah were over. 


TALIESIN AND ISAIAH. THE SECOND FIRE, 1925 

A year after Noel had left and Olgivanna had moved in, Taliesin returned to a tranquil 
state of being. One evening Wright was walking down from the hilltop when he saw the 
flames pouring out from Taliesin below. The fire, which was caused by an electrical fault 
by his bed was fanned by an approaching storm.{Lloyd Wright (his son) claimed that at 
least one fire was caused by his father's habit of smoking, and falling asleep, in bed.} He 
wrote: "For the second time Taliesin was in flames, the living quarters gone, and now the 
workspace was threatened! Suddenly, a tremendous pealing roll of thunder ... the clouds of 
smoke and sparks were swept the opposite way. It was as though some gigantic unseen 
hand had done it and that awed the spectators. Super-human Providence perhaps ..." 

All that remained was the workspace and the clothes on his back. He stood defeated. The 
treasures he had brought back from Japan-everything was gone. He refused the offers to 
save the things inside the house, shouting, "No, fight the fire. Fight! Fight, I tell you! Save 
Taliesin or let it all go! ... I stood up there-and fought. Isaiah?" Wright rejected Isaiah, 
the prophet of the moral god Jehovah with his Puritan sense of sin, guilt and righteous 
punishment. "Taliesin the gentler prophet of the Celts and of a more merciful god was 
tempted to lift an arm, to strike back in self-defense but suffered in silence and waited. 
But Taliesin lived wherever I stood! A figure crept forward to me from out of the shadows 
to say this ..." 

Wright lived his myth, and the myth lived in him. Taliesin was the myth that shaped 
Wright's life, powered the forms of his work and gave the names Taliesin East and 
Taliesin West to his house and Arizona work place. 

He saw that the second destruction of Taliesin was not an end. For as Taliesin, generator 
of forces and unlimited forms, he could create endlessly, a Taliesin III, and a Taliesin 
West, for the power of the shape-shifter is his ability to transform, to create the shape for 
every site, the form for every function. His more than 1000 different designs demonstrate 
his uncanny mastery in the art of form and transformation with the most diverse and 
extraordinary array of inspired solutions. The prairie house follows the horizontal line of 
the prairie, St. Mark's in the Bowery is a vertical tower for New York, Taliesin West 
adapts to the arid desert, Fallingwater matches the cascade in the forest, while Marin Civic 
Center echoes the rolling green hills of Marin County. 

Frank Lloyd Wright became the most prolific architectural shape-shifter of all time. 


The Third Age, 
Triangle in the Desert 

THE AUCTION OF TALIESIN 

Wright was heavily in debt. With no work coming in, the cost of rebuilding Taliesin and 
his legal battles with Noel left him broke, forced by the bank to sell his livestock and farm 
machinery to pay on his debt. He fought to save Taliesin, sacrificing one prized possession 
after another including his collection of Oriental objects d'art. Finally, he was forced to 
sacrifice his greatest possession, his lifelong collection of Japanese prints. Considered the 
best collection in America, it raised only half its value. 

In spite of all his desperate efforts, Taliesin, the land of his grandfather, Richard Lloyd 
Jones, was threatened by the bank with foreclosure. Two years before the 1929 crash, 
Wright's personal economic depression had reached its climax. 

The Bank of Wisconsin took possession of Taliesin and expelled Wright. But ironically, in 
the spirit of mammon, the bank, having no idea what to do with the most extraordinary 
house in America could think only to use it to store files. (As Joseph Campbell remarked, 
"The dragon guards the maiden, but is unable to use her gifts.") 

Taliesin was faced with the ultimate disaster, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. At 
the eleventh hour, Wright's friend and former client Darwin Martin, came up with a way 
to save Taliesin. Calling on his acumen as a businessman, he devised a scheme to outwit 
mammon. Forming a corporation called "Frank Lloyd Wright Incorporated," he issued 
stock on Wright's future earnings, no mean trick, considering the fact that Wright had no 
current work. Appropriately the stockholders included the playwrights Alexander 
Woollcott and Charles MacArthur, art patron and client, Mrs. Coonley, and Darwin 
Martin, Wright's sister and his attorney. The friends of the Muse raised $70,000. 

Put up for auction, Taliesin was successfully bid by "Frank Lloyd Wright Incorporated," 
for $40,000. With poetic symmetry the earnings of the Muse saved Taliesin. The investors 
must have suspected that they might never get paid for their investment. It didn't matter. 
By affirming their faith in the arts, Taliesin was saved. 


EXILE. WINTER, 1927-28 

While this financial drama was unfolding, Wright was in exile in La Jolla, California, 
awaiting a solution to his monetary and legal problems. 

A letter from Albert MacArthur inviting Wright to help him with his Arizona Biltmore 
Hotel project in Phoenix signaled a change in the direction of Wright's life. Albert had 
worked for Wright at the old Oak Park studio and his father was a former client. Along 
with his brother, the family had encountered problems and needed Wright's help and 
expertise in using his textile block system for their Arizona Biltmore Hotel project. Wary 
of Wright taking control of their project, they insisted he remain in the background, 
without credit for his work. Wright would be working under a man who had once been his 
draftsman. Fate thus presented him with an ironic challenge to his ego. The choice was 
work without name, or name without work. Certainly Wright needed money, but more 
than anything, he was desperate with the need to create again. What proved irresistible to 
him was the opportunity to use his textile block system in the largest block project yet to be 
built, and to bring monumental architecture to a desert environment. For the first time 
Wright's angular form appeared as the design on his textile block. Wright got his credit 
after all. 

The MacArthur brothers, admiring his work but lacking his artistry, changed ceiling 
heights and floor levels "for practical reasons," and thus destroyed Wright's subtle 
contrasts between low and high ceilings, intimate and expansive space. But Wright was 
never an easy man to work with, and to their credit, they brought to completion this 
amazing and complex project. Although scholars argue about authorship, Wright's 
signature is everywhere apparent, but the Hotel lacks the cohesion of his most personal 
and finest work. 

This first encounter with the desert presaged Wright's lifetime involvement. Destiny had 
always presented a jagged path to Wright's life. In Phoenix he was introduced to a Dr. 
Chandler, who wished to build a resort to be called San Marcos in the Desert. When 
Chandler took him out to see the site, Wright responded: "There could be nothing more 
inspiring to an architect on his earth than that spot of pure Arizona desert he took me out 
to see." Wright made preliminary sketches for San Marcos on his return to La Jolla and 
delivered them to Dr. Chandler while en route to Taliesin III. 

In the winter of 1928 Wright was able to return to Taliesin. He was still without funds, and 
the bank had been threatening to foreclose. 


FREEDOM AND RENEWAL 

The temperature outside Taliesin was 22 degrees below zero when the telegram arrived 
from Dr. Chandler, asking Wright to come and begin work on San Marcos. The future fee 
of $40,000 represented an end to Wright's financial problems. 

To escape from the rigors of the Wisconsin winter, Wright and his men had to first battle 
their way through a blizzard, a howling vortex of snow, ice and wind, on their journey to 
the hot Arizona desert. It was a seminal journey, emblematic of his escape from a decade 
of darkness beginning with the tragedy at Taliesin that plunged him into a labyrinth of 
death, suffering, fire, persecution, jail and bankruptcy. 

During this time his architecture reflected his own inner voyage through the labyrinth: the 
great cavern of the Imperial Hotel, the Arizona Biltmore banquet room, the dark ancient 
interiors of the textile block houses. The labyrinth became a decorative form on his blocks. 


THE DESERT ARCHITECTURE 

When Wright first saw the desert he had what was virtually a religious experience, a 
revelation that opened him to a totally new morphology of architecture. He said of his 
moment of insight, "Imagination of the mind is an awesome thing. Sight comes and goes 
in it as from an original source, illuminating life with involuntary light, as a flash of 
lightning brightens the landscape. So the desert seems vast but the seeming is nothing 
compared to the iridescent-effervescent reality." 


"The desert is where God is and man is not."-Victor Hugo, quoted by Wright 


It was no accident that mystics and artists found the desert landscape a place for 
inspiration, healing and regeneration. The Arizona desert is a landscape newly emerging 
from the chaos of cataclysmic upheavals. The primal forces of nature are expressed in the 
uneven and asymmetrical shapes of the mountains. 

The desert represents a world of untamed, primal energy, yet to be softened by the 
elements or tamed by order. The energy of the sun, the clear air and the magical light are 
all pervasive: recharging the body, renewing the spirit. 

The heat, the high blue sky and the ever-present sun combine with the primitive terrain 
to shock the visitor coming from the rich green world of the north. The Swiss painter Paul 
Klee exclaimed, "For the first time I understood color-color has me." 


THE TRIANGLE 

The angular desert mountains awakened latent images in his unconscious. In Wright's 
mind, new shapes began to germinate and take form. (As with the psychologist's 
Rorschach test where the conscious mind "sees" in the abstract pattern of an inkblot the 
image hidden in the unconscious, so the exterior image resonates and invokes unconscious 
form.) 


"The first thing I noticed was the angle of the mountains; everywhere the 30 and 
60-degree angle, broken only by the occasional equilateral triangle."-F. LI. W 


SAN MARCOS IN THE DESERT, CHANDLER, ARIZONA, 1927 

Situated on several thousand acres of pure mountain desert, San Marcos was envisioned by 
Chandler as a desert resort for wintering millionaires from the east coast. 

"Everywhere the jagged line, the primal mountains, the savage sun world, sun death," 
wrote Wright. "The desert abhors sun-defiance ... sun acceptance as a way of pattern is a 
condition of survival ... integral ornament in everything ... in building means dotted 
outlines and wall surfaces that eagerly take the light and play with it, break it up and 
render it harmless or drink it until sunlight blends the building into place with the creation 
around it." 

The principle manifest in the desert inspired Wright's design. He echoed the angular 
profile ribs of the saguaro in his design for the concrete blocks. The sunlight moving 
across the vertical ribbed surface was refracted and broken into a dotted line. The walls of 
San Marcos emerge from the desert floor as crystalline shafts thrusting out from the earth. 
The new emphasis is on the vertical rather than the horizontal line. The floor plan has 
undergone a profound mutation; shaped like a jagged, angular flash of lightning, its 
fundamental element is the triangle module. The dining room is a vast trapezoidal form. 
Here the monumental architecture was transformed into a new experience of light, space 
and openness. 

The materials of the desert provided the structural elements. The sand and gravel from the 
desert were mixed with cement and cast into molds to provide the basic, textile block 
system. He had created a passive solar system whereby the heat of the day was stored and 
released to warm the interior at night. During the hot day the walls provided a cool shelter 
without the need for air conditioning. A Czech architect (who had worked with Le 
Corbusier) recalled nearly fainting-along with others-in the 100-degree heat, while 
Wright drew away unperturbed. 

The saguaro cactus (the organ pipe) was the primary vegetation that adorned the 
landscape. The structural systems of nature were an important source for Wright's 
inspiration. Wright could have been a great naturalist with his extraordinary insight into 
the workings of nature and organic structure. The inner secrets of growth and structure in 
nature provided him with the fertile ground for his creations. 

Some years later I was at Taliesin West. One Sunday morning someone had placed a piece 
of saguaro cactus on the table in front of Wright, knowing how inspiring he found the 
nature around the camp. Wright said to us, "Nature builds in the desert, working with the 
minimum of materials in the most economical way: there is little water and hard, rocky 
soil. Building with the bare minimum is a good discipline for architects. With such scarce 
resources, plants have to develop a structural system that is very efficient; and in this, the 
tallest of the desert cacti, the plant uses a complex matrix of hollow fibers, with the outside 
of the column being a corrugated skin." 

The folded skin of the saguaro provides both shade from the hot sun and supports its great 
height for centuries, behaving as a structural folded plane column. He adopted this 
principle of the folded plane for his projects such as Fallingwater, and used it in the 
integral self-support structure for the zigzag fence of Ocotilla and the walls of the Hanna 
House. 

The rendering of San Marcos suggests one of the great Italian hill towns sitting perfectly 
at ease on its site at the base of the mountains. The entry road is skillfully set between two 
hills, like the entry to Ali Baba's cave. Here, we can glimpse what a Wrightian town might 
look like with its timeless sense of wholeness and tranquillity. Wright and his workers had 
completed the drawings, block molds and model. He was ready to begin construction. 

But it was not to be. The stockmarket crash in 1929 killed the project. Only later did 
Wright realize the severity of the Crash. Plaster models of the block system were left, 
sitting proudly in the center of the desert camp, never to be returned to. Over time the local 
Indians would slowly take away the camp and it disappeared into the sand. Dr. Chandler 
could pay only $2,500 of the promised fee and left Wright $19,000 in debt. 

Wright said, "I have found that when a scheme develops beyond a normal pitch of 
excellence, the hand of fate strikes it down. The Japanese made a superstition of the 
circumstance. Purposefully they leave some imperfection somewhere to appease the 
jealousy of the gods. I neglected this precaution and San Marcos was never built." A lesser 
man might have been irrevocably crushed by this, the latest of a long string of disasters 
over many years. But Wright's capacity for patience and regeneration would save him once 
again. He wrote, "Never mind. Something had started that was not stopping thus." 

Characteristically, his response was to purchase a magnificent, if used, Packard Phaeton 
convertible to take his new family back to Taliesin in, via a new client in the Bowery, New 
York. 

With his marriage to Olgivanna, the birth of Iovanna and the adoption of Svetlana, 
Olgivanna's daughter from her previous marriage, the circle of Wright's life was once 
again complete. He was back in the world of the family. For his ventures into the 
unknown, Wright needed a secure base, a ground to nourish his strength. Olgivanna 
supported him in every way: as a man, an architect and a prophet. His marriage to 
Olgivanna had exorcised,  at last, the ghosts of the past. The taint of scandal that had 
dogged him for so long was finally erased. Potential clients who had avoided him because 
of the stigma attached to his life were now replaced by a new breed of clients who sought 
him for his independent philosophy. Reborn in the desert, redeemed by marriage, he was 
back on the course of his destiny, his life moving powerfully in a new direction. 


LIGHT. OCOTILLA, 1929 

The extraordinary light of the desert was reflected from the vast dome of the sky. The 
quality of the soft light, filtered through canvas, awakened Wright to a new experience and 
the dark cave like interiors of the past were transformed into a new sense of openness to 
the world. 


"I found the white luminous canvas ... such agreeable diffusion of light within ... I now felt 
oppressed by the thought of the opaque solid overhead of the much too heavy midwestern 
houses."-F. LI. W. 


Ocotilla was Wright's desert encampment where he would develop and experiment with 
the design for San Marcos. He called the camp "Ephemera," for it sat on the desert floor 
like a butterfly and its physical life was brief. Its image, however, was published in the 
international magazines and achieved immortality. It was a spin-off from the San Marcos 
project, yet it represented the beginning of a whole new world. The floor plan for San 
Marcos was triangular. Wright easily crossed from one dimension to another, and moved 
the triangle from the plan into the elevation and section of Ocotilla. 


ASYMMETRY 

The asymmetrical form of the roof matched the surrounding mountains; 30 degrees on one 
side matched by 60 on the other, with a 90-degree ridge. Ocotilla was the seed that was 
to flower nine years later into Taliesin West in 1937. 


"Out here in the great spaces obvious symmetry ... wearies the eye ... closes the episode 
before it begins."-F. LI. W. 


Wright saw the world through the eye of a maker of forms. The asymmetrical mountains 
that emerge from the desert floor opened him to a new sense of freedom and introduced 
him to the dynamic power of asymmetry. The architecture of Ocotilla and Taliesin West 
reflected this new approach; gone was the symmetry and rigidity of the old classic order. 
Asymmetry expressed the freedom of the desert growth following its own "random" 
pattern. Perceiving the asymmetrical mountains of Arizona he was inspired to build 
Taliesin West in their image. 


TALIESIN WEST 

In subsequent years, Wright would continue his migration to the desert to escape the cold 
winter of Wisconsin. Asked, by a client, where was the location of his office Wright 
replied, "My office is wherever I am." Wright might well have called himself Taliesin after 
his Muse, but he chose to use it for his house, wherever that might be. After the two fires 
Taliesin had been rebuilt as Taliesin II and III. In 1937 he decided to create a new Taliesin 
in the desert and called his new camp Taliesin West. Built in a totally different form and 
grammar to Taliesin East it represented well his statement to us, "A great building is a 
cosmos unto itself, to be judged only by its own laws." 

He bought 400 acres of federal land and began building Taliesin West, this time in a form 
to complement and express the desert genius loci. With no money for masons and relying 
on unskilled labor he had to invent a simple system of construction. The alchemist sought 
a cheap material in which to hold his forms. He chose the materials of the desert itself. 
The hard, unworkable basalt stone was tied inside wood forms and a 12:1 mixture of desert 
sand and gravel was mixed with cement to create the concrete rubble walls. 

Once again he showed in the imagery of his forms that a cheap material could achieve new 
heights of architectural expression. The angular, battered walls, rhythmically defined by 
"pour line" battens inserted in the forms, created a powerful expression not seen since 
ancient architecture. The delicate canvas roofs held in wood frames were in perfect 
harmony with the massive masonry elements. With time and experience, the walls became 
more sophisticated. Enormous rocks, chosen for their magnificent orange, blue and purple 
coloration, were framed by smaller stones whose projection was allowed to penetrate 
through the form. 

Wright discovered, like Antoni Gaudi, "that light releases the energy trapped in matter," 
and designed skylights above the masonry fireplaces. Taliesin West was built by the 
apprentices in a surprisingly short time. In 1987 over 200 former apprentices returned to 
celebrate the 50th anniversary of Taliesin West. On a drafting table by the entry of the 
great drafting room, someone had pinned a large sheet of drafting paper. At the top was 
written: "Everything around you was built by us ... Please sign your name." Soon the entire 
page was filled with signatures. For the first time, I was aware that this entire marvelous 
complex was made by us. Unlike most university projects we had no support from 
government funding and no outside contractors. 

I arrived at Taliesin in 1954. When winter started to hit hard in Wisconsin, the Fellowship 
moved to Taliesin West. Two big trucks were packed with all the models and plans. The 
huge rounds of cheese, made on the farm as well as the farm-cured hams were loaded up 
too; we took all our farm supplies to the desert. Groups of three or four apprentices shared 
the available cars and we were allowed one or two weeks to make the trip. 

We left Taliesin East and first headed north to visit some Wright houses. As apprentices, 
we had easy access to most of Wright's buildings. We then turned south, covering about 
400 miles a day. We were following Mr. Wright's original journey from Taliesin East to 
Taliesin West, visiting many of his buildings along the way. 

We now headed for Taliesin West. Abstract signs (Wright's logo, the square spiral) led us 
along dirt roads, passing through forests of saguaro and cholla cactus and ironwood trees; 
and then suddenly we glimpsed the canvas roofs and outer walls of the camp. We left our 
auto in the large parking lot outside. Above loomed a large stone tower draped with red 
bougainvillea. On the wall was fastened a large metal disc, acquired by Wright during a 
visit to an aircraft factory, brimming and spilling water over its edge. We crossed the 
gravel "moat," a barrier to discourage rattlesnakes and ascended large steps to pass under a 
seemingly endless pergola of low beams (we six footers cocked our heads sideways) which 
ties the vast drafting room to the outer desert wall. Then you turn 90 degrees to the right, 
then 90 degrees to the left, down a dark, mysterious narrow corridor, like a labyrinth, and 
then turn yet again, finally emerging into a blaze of light and color, with brilliant 
bougainvillea growing in secret inner courtyards. 

You are led down narrow galleries, up steps barely wide enough to pass; you are restricted, 
pulled, pressed, and taken through every kind of experience: light/dark, narrow/wide, 
low/high, beneath/above, mystery/revelation. Surprises everywhere! Low beams and low 
ceilings, where one almost grazes one's head, opening out suddenly into vast magical 
spaces with vistas of long stretches of desert reaching out toward the high mountains 
beyond. Walking along a gallery, a small horizontal window at eye level, 6 � 24 inches 
long, frames an exquisite view of a peak of a Camelback Mountain. 

Years later in Knossos I recognized the same qualities of the palace in the desert 
embodying primary human experiences, a synthesis of king, priest, soldier, artist and 
worker: the summation of a culture. Here in another desert at another time is another 
palace, a celebration of architecture and democracy. In Knossos there was the sunken 
throne room; in Taliesin, the sunken fireplace and hearth by the drafting room: the hearth 
that can become a pool and the fire that can become water. (Wright, feeling that a fireplace 
should not be wasted in the summer, converted the flue into a waterfall and the sunken 
hearth into a pool.) Both Knossos and Taliesin West share a sense of mystery and primal 
energy. At Taliesin West, the soft organic light is filtered through the canvas above. 
Interior gutters run alongside the beams to catch the rain and return it outside. 

The massive walls of enormous basalt rock fragments, colored by the elements in brilliant 
oranges, reds, blacks and blues, are set in battered concrete, and ancient Indian 
petroglyphs figured on the boulders by the triangular pool. A tranquil Buddha sits in the 
theater entry where ancient Japanese and Chinese sculptures are embedded in the walls. 

Knossos celebrated the autocracy of a king over his people. Taliesin West celebrates the 
democracy of the individual and the birth of a new culture, drawing its power from the 
primal desert. Taliesin West is one of Wright's major and seminal buildings. In Arizona 
apprentices noted that Wright had a desert face. He wrote: "Olgivanna said the whole opus 
looked like something we had not been building but excavating." 

According to Jung, the conquerors of America inherited the collective unconscious of 
those they destroyed. Wright was a sorcerer who could conjure up and evoke forms from 
the earth. Wright had discovered and tapped the source, the ancient forces of the earth that 
had fueled the ancient architecture, the Mayan, Aztec and Pueblo. Wright was well placed, 
himself a product of the American melting pot. In the crucible of his alchemy he fused the 
diverse cultures of the past into new cultural forms. 

Wright incorporated the Native American spiral into his logo during the construction of 
Taliesin West and celebrated the Tepee form in projects like the Lake Tahoe Summer 
Colony, Lake Tahoe, 1922, the Nakoma Country Club and Winnebago Camping Ground 
Indian Memorial, Madison, Wisconsin,1924, the H. Johnson House, Windpoint, 
Wisconsin, 1938, "Wingspread," and the A. Friedman House, Pecos, New Mexico, 1945. 


"My tools: triangles and T-square-30, 60, 45 degrees: the three angles."-F. LI. W. 


Wright never used a modern drafting machine. He had a special reverence for his 
triangles, as if some ancient memory recalled the moment when the secrets of the triangle 
were first unlocked in the desert cultures of Babylon, Egypt and Greece. The Egyptians 
celebrated their discovery of the triangle by constructing the pyramids, the biggest triangle 
of mass ever built by man. Characteristically, Wright was challenged by this to design, an 
even larger pyramid of space, light and glass, "a steel cathedral for a million people," in 
New York, 1926, to celebrate the technological wonder of the twentieth century. 

In the past he had used the triangle in the decorative design of his murals, stained glass 
windows and light fixtures. He had used a diamond form in the plan of Romeo and Juliet. 
Wright could play with a form for years until a new challenge ignited in him a creative 
transformation. 

Wright discovered the full power and potential of the triangle as an archetypal form, 
generating a whole new world of architecture. Beginning as the design of the textile block 
for the Arizona Biltmore, it moved to the floor plan of San Marcos and the diamond grid 
of the Cudney House. The triangle took a leap into the section of Ocotilla, the crystalline 
facet forms of the San Marcos Water Gardens and the Cathedral for a Million People, 
which was finally consummated as the Beth Shalom Synagogue in 1954. The 
Rhododendron Chapel, 1953, Trinity Chapel Project, Norman, Oklahoma, 1958, and the 
Second Unitarian Church, Madison, 1947, represented other variations. 

In the Owen D. Young House, Chandler, Arizona, 1927, the angle moved into the 
elevation, and both the blocks, windows and profile are tilted at an angle of 45 degrees. 
Wright asked a lot, both from his clients and builders. 

Wright could be critical of his own work. When his very angular Boomer House, Phoenix, 
Arizona, 1953, was finished he said, "It lacks a sense of repose." Looking like a collision 
between two delta F-111 jets, one is left in awe of the spatial imagination that could hold 
such complex forms. 

In the desert he had discovered the angular world: of the mineral and crystal, the vector 
forces of molecular structures, the geometry of the spaceframe and truss. The triangle is a 
primal archetypal form of the psyche, Wright's symbol of aspiration, the Celtic form of the 
triad, the trinity of Christianity a recurring form in the sand paintings and ornament of the 
Native American. 

When Wright first used the equilateral triangle plan, he had trouble selling it to a client. 
The Sundt House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1941, with its triangular form and hexagon grid 
was considered too different, difficult and expensive to build. It was later built as the 
Richardson House, New Jersey, 1951. 

Wright had more success with the diamond form and used it for the McCartney House and 
the Anthony House, both built in Michigan, 1949. The most successful form was the 
hexagon. 


MOVEMENT 

In the first age Wright had "destroyed the box," releasing its trapped space by opening out 
its corners. Now he went further, replacing the old 90-degree angle of the plan with an 
angular module. He had broken the last vestige of the right angle system and opened the 
plan to a new sense of plastic flow and movement. He saw that it was easier to turn 120 
degrees than 90 degrees. (A diagonal short cut avoids the long right angle turn.) Wright 
had moved a step closer in his lifelong quest for a free-flowing plasticity of space. In the 
hexagon grid of the Hanna House, Palo Alto, California, 1936, he was able to put his 
discovery into action. Once he had built several buildings the way was opened for others to 
follow. The Bazett House, Hillsborough, California, 1940, and "Snowflake," the wall 
House, Michigan, 1941, which combined diamond grid with hexagon form, were other 
superb examples built. 


REVELATION AND EPIPHANY 

From the desert Wright received its secrets: Light, Triangle, Movement, Texture, 
Structure, Asymmetry, Economy, Simplicity and Taproot. They transformed his future 
work. 

He transmuted ancient archetypes into a new language for the age and raised the simple 
forms of the desert to a breathtaking morphology of form. As with every great culture that 
discovers the timeless and universal archetypes to generate its forms, Wright traveled to 
the deepest levels of human experience to discover the archetypal forms providing the 
profound resonances of his work. 


THE TAPROOT 

One of Wright's favorite metaphors was the taproot of a desert plant that provides stability 
and plunges deep into the earth to find a spring untouched by the arid years of the desert 
above. Wright was equally describing himself; his roots ran deep, into the very archetypal 
sources of architecture. He survived the lean years by tapping this prolific source endlessly 
when there was little work. It provided him with the energy to create his most audacious 
projects during the arid depression. 

In the twenties a truly modern architecture barely existed; no bank would provide 
financing since most architecture was conventional and eclectic. This was the greatest 
period of gestation and development of Wright's ideas. It was as if the gods had granted 
him a decade to play, with new concepts and techniques. These were the "dreaming years" 
in which he discovered the seminal concepts that would later blossom into a magnificent 
reality. 

His career had come perilously close, like Sullivan's, to a premature conclusion. The world 
might have written him off as a failure, but in these fallow years his consciousness was 
undergoing a profound transformation: his spatial perception was developing a 
four-dimensional awareness reaching out to new vistas. His imagination gained the 
capacity to divine, hold and express complex images and new concepts. 

All of the previous experiences of his life, the worlds of Oak Park, Europe, the Orient, 
were converging into a new synthesis. In the cauldron of inspiration a new architecture 
was taking form. Taliesin, the sleeping giant, was undergoing profound changes that 
would transform him into a protean giant that would emerge to astonish his critics and the 
world. 

As Wright grew older, Taliesin grew younger, crossing the old conceptual frontiers of 
architecture. His forms became ever more audacious, outpacing rival architects, going 
beyond the limitations of twentieth-century culture and technology. It was to lead to 
Wright's final Golden Age. 

Wright's move to Arizona presaged the population shift to the west in the decades to 
follow. He did not so much follow a trend as initiate it. 


The Fourth Age, 
Horizontal Planes 

In 1929 the dark cloud of the Depression was moving across America. The postwar "good 
time" era was drawing to a close. The desert years had taught Wright how to achieve the 
maximum utilization from the minimum of materials. In the economic desert of the 
Depression, it was necessary to invent new techniques for architectural survival. Wright 
had said that with the removal of the superfluous, "the Japanese print was almost 
biographical in its influence on me." He brought the lesson of simplicity to the age of 
economy. 


"When everything is removed, that which remains is all powerful."-Lao Tse, 600 B.C. 


That same year Wright designed a house for his cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa, 
Oklahoma. The first project, using a triangular plan, was not built. The second version 
was stark in its simplicity. A concrete block house, it is significant by the absence of any 
ornamental design on the face of the block. If the third age of monumental architecture 
had celebrated richness and complexity, the fourth age represented its opposite: economy 
and simplicity. 

Wright was always aware of the forces of change occurring in society around him, and 
equally he was a creator of changes. His anticipation of changes in American lifestyle to 
the servantless society led to the open kitchen: a new sense of family, in which the wife 
needed to see and talk to her husband and children and sped the debut of the carport, 
which made the automobile speedily accessible. 

The Malcolm Willey Project, Minneapolis, 1932, introduced a flat roof, an open kitchen 
plan and the beginning of the carport. 

The Second Willey House, 1934, shows the breakthrough in space that Wright was 
seeking. For the first time the kitchen opens directly into the dining-living room space. 
The kitchen-dining space is itself a classic of the new architecture, with its high 
asymmetrical window reflecting the roof-ceiling plane above. The kitchen, with its 
superb cabinetwork and fine detailing, no longer a homely utilitarian room, is transformed 
into an architecture equal in quality to the adjoining living spaces. With its pitched roof, 
the Willey house expresses the richness of the prairie house transformed into a new 
modernity. 

All this was to lead to a new architecture following the needs of the new man and the 
creation of the Usonian house, an open plan of continuous space. 

Impressed by Samuel Butler's visionary book on a new America, titled Usonia, Wright 
borrowed the name for his Usonian house. It was designed for an ideal democratic society 
in which every man could own and build his own house. Taking up this challenge, Wright 
completely rethought the structure of the American house. Stripping away everything 
superfluous, he reduced the house to its bare essentials, using basic plywood for the walls 
and roof structure. Beginning at the ground, he used the cheapest floor, a concrete slab on 
grade, omitting both basement and wood flooring. Aware that a concrete slab would be 
cold in the Wisconsin winter he invented a new heating system. In the East he had 
admired the warm floors provided by Korean hot air flues built under the floor. In his 
version, heating was supplied by hot water pipes embedded in the concrete slab. It was a 
first: Wright had invented the radiant heating system. 

The surface of the concrete floor slab was colored brick red and scored with the lines of the 
grid upon which the house was planned. It was sealed, waxed and polished. In place of the 
conventional 2 � 4 hollow stud wall the solid walls were laminated with a plywood inner 
structural core, covered with insulation board and finished with horizontal cypress, or 
redwood boards held in place by an inset pattern detail. 

The walls became a series of planes, locked to the floor with splines, used like Japanese 
screens to define spaces. The garage was replaced by his new invention the carport, which 
provided both a handsome porte-cochere for the entry and a third roof plane in the 
rhythm of interrelated horizontal planes. The complex of multilevel planes continues into 
the interior space with a low soffit which sets a measure for the internal scale and serves as 
a conduit for the utility services and integral lighting provided by simple porcelain lamp 
sockets set in wood boxes. 

The kitchen-workspace flows into the dining area, which in turn becomes part of the 
living room, creating one continuous flowing space. Corridors become well-lit galleries, 
connecting the major spaces with rooms. The continuity of the interior spaces enhances an 
awareness of the totality of the whole. 

Like a conjurer building a house of cards, Wright demonstrates the incredible power of the 
plane. Used horizontally it becomes roof, ceiling, soffit, and earth floor. Used as a vertical 
plane it becomes a series of screens defining and connecting interior spaces. Continuing 
into the landscape it creates a symbiotic relationship between inner and outer spaces. The 
screen walls stop at a band of clerestory glass which allows for the ceiling-roof plane to 
effortlessly float above. The roof planes enhance and resonate with the flat plane of the 
earth. 

The horizontal line is further developed by the raked horizontal courses of the brick with 
flush vertical joints and by the recessed battens of the wood siding. The balancing, vertical 
elements are provided by the brick chimney mass and the rhythmic succession of French 
doors and bands of casement windows. 

The brick fireplace utility core, with its central plumbing for kitchen, bathroom and boiler 
allows for an economic basic plumbing unit which can be factory made. 

The roof, no longer pitched, becomes a series of flat planes; made of plywood, it is covered 
with an asphalt composition roof. The flat roof is the cheapest, simplest and most 
problematic of all roofs, and has become almost a cliche-and a cross-for modern 
architecture. Its tendency to leak was to forever bedevil the architect's career. 

Wright discovered that by elevating and separating this "lid from the box," he had 
transformed it into a free floating horizontal plane. The inter-relationship of three or 
more planes generates an extraordinary sense of tension and energy. 

In the Usonian houses the hovering roof planes seem to float above the wall screens. With 
their successive rhythms they share an extraordinary affinity with the surrounding space. 
The overlapping planes with their subtle difference in heights combine into a magical 
order, like the pattern of three musical bars-or the vibrant brush strokes of a Zen 
Sumi-e painting. 

The roofs effortlessly cantilever out to interpenetrate the surrounding space. The roof 
system is constructed cheaply with three layers of 2 � 4 rafters. The layers progressively 
cantilever out in steps, each layer cantilevered from the one below, expressed as two steps 
terminating at a slender fascia. There are no gutters, only small leader pipes set into the 
roof. The 2 � 4 grid system allows the use of standard sheets of plywood and 16-inch 
spacing of roof joists. 

Ornament has dissolved and become integral with the very structure of the building: the 
pattern of the wood siding, the texture of the horizontal bricks, the stepped fascia of the 
roof, the rhythm of the fenestration. 

Throughout the house every detail becomes integral, economical ornament. The vertical 
grid that establishes the precise height of the wood siding, makes for the integral 
arrangement of bookshelves and built-in furniture. It defines organic architecture where 
"the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole." 

The Usonian house was planned for small economical lots. Unlike the tract house which 
spends much of its budget on the street facade to impress the neighbors, the Usonian house 
"turns its back to the street," and the neighbors. To achieve the maximum use of the land 
the house (with its fenestration) is oriented to the garden area. The high clerestory 
windows provide both light and privacy for the occupants. 

Wright eschewed expensive materials like marble, terrazzo and exotic woods, preferring to 
put the money where the architecture is. The ultimate test of an architect lies in his 
arrangement of the basic materials; the way the parts and spaces are put together 
demonstrates the depth and range of his imagination. 

The stunning simplicity of the Usonian roof lines was in startling contrast to the ugly 
roofscape of a typical builder's house with its proliferation of pipes, vents, air conditioners, 
and other appendages. 

The bill for the materials for the Jacobs's house was no more than the cost for the 
conventional house across the street. Wright demonstrates the mastery of his craft by 
making a work of art out of the simplest of building materials. 

As so often happened, the first project for a Usonian house, for Hoult in 1934, fell through 
for lack of funds. Nevertheless the basic research had been done and Wright now had to 
wait for a suitable client to take this concept into full realization. A first design was 
invariably a model, a precursor of what was to come. Whereas some architects make a 
house to order, as a tailor does, Wright looked for a suitable client to build his design 
discoveries. 

In 1936, Herb Jacobs, a young journalist, nervously wrote a letter to Wright asking if he 
would consider accepting a commission to design a small house to cost not more than 
$5,000. The architect seized the opportunity and in 1936 the first Usonian house was built. 


RULES 

My friend, Herb Jacobs, told me that when a critic complained about Wright's not 
matching a particular wall to the grid line, Wright responded: "If I can make the rules, 
then I can break the rules!" He saw the rule as something to work with, play against, and 
when necessary, go beyond. 

Herb recalled how for years, scholars had pondered over why there was a reduced roof 
cantilever on one side of his house. "It was simple: I didn't have the $15 to pay for the 
longer rafters." 

The Usonian house, in spite of its apparent simplicity, conveys a deep richness, a powerful 
sense of presence, warmth and humanity; the ineffable sense of life itself. Wright had 
released the energy contained in the space between walls and planes, between the inner 
and outer worlds. Although the Jacobs house was an aesthetic success, it netted Wright a 
fee of only $500. 

Along with the Usonian Automatic, a concrete block version, where the client could make 
his own blocks, over a hundred Usonian houses were built over the next decades. The 
Pauson House, Phoenix, Arizona, 1940, was a magnificent solution for a desert 
environment. 

Mies van der Rohe, whom Wright respected, and who understood Wright's use of the 
plane better than anyone, came to visit and admired both Taliesin and the Jacobs house, 
then under construction. 


THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE 

Although Wright and the modernists had certain elements in common-the flat roof, 
modern materials, honesty and absence of eclectic details-their approach to architecture 
was generally sterile and mechanical to Wright. 

The conflict was highlighted by Le Corbusier's phrase, "The house is a machine for 
living." When he wrote to Wright requesting an interview, he was rejected. Wright said, 
"at least with him I know who my enemy is." 

Corbusier responded by calling Wright, "The blue-eyed prairie dog." 

Wright saw Corbusier as the prophet of the rationalist and puritan movements which had 
found expression in a rigid, intellectual ideology for modern architecture. Corbusier was a 
dry, austere, intellectual Swiss architect whose theories, appealing to the intellectual 
architect, entered the mainstream of modern architecture to replace human insight with 
formula, dogma and rules. 

Corbusier was a prophet who achieved fame by preaching the formula the new mechanistic 
world was seeking. His City of the Future, with its rows of identical high rise apartments, 
resembles a computer circuit board, with its mechanical array of repetitive patterns. In one 
scheme he used the roofs of a series of apartments as a freeway. 

As a dry intellectual, he was poorly equipped to understand human needs. Nevertheless his 
concept was taken up by his followers to become the blueprint for new urban renewal in 
London, Paris, New York and other major cities. Its mechanical, dehumanizing effect is 
reflected by these projects slow degeneration into urban ghettos, a festering world of 
hopelessness and crime. Many of these buildings have had to be destroyed. 


BROADACRE CITY, 1932 

Wright's family had been members of Chicago's Hull House, abiding by its emphasis on 
social reform. Wright was attuned to "the spirit of the age," and in sympathy with 
Roosevelt's New Deal, with its emphasis on public works and cheap housing through the 
Federal Housing Authority. 

Broadacre City was Wright's reply to Corbusier's plan and his own version of the English 
Garden City. The Usonian house became the basic residential unit for Broadacre, where 
every person would have an acre of land and enjoy freedom and space, in a decentralized, 
human environment, combining the best of urban and rural worlds. 

In ancient cities, like Sienna, the city plan was as instinctive and organic as the arteries of 
a living organism. 

Man's internal shift from his instinctive center to the left brain was expressed by the 
nineteenth-century engineer-surveyor's invention of the modern gridiron plan, with its 
mechanical, repetitive city blocks-itself a negation of traffic flow. 

The modern city is a product of man's mind, a concrete example of greed, commerce and 
soulless efficiency. Overcrowded, its traffic reduced to gridlock, its air polluted, its ghettos 
breed crime and the homeless. 

Wright saw that Japan and China, as with all great cultures, drew their marvelous art from 
a profound rapport with nature. Now, divorced from their roots, they have lost it. When 
asked to help save his Imperial Hotel from being destroyed to make way for a bland 
International-style hotel, he said, "No, the Japan I loved no longer exists." 

Perhaps because modern man in the city is isolated from nature-his center moved from 
the intuitive to the rational-his ancient sensitivities for nature have atrophied. He has 
become alienated from the landscape and its gods. 


"God made the country, man made the city."-Spanish proverb 


As a product of nature, man's health and vision depend on his roots in the earth. Without 
nature man loses his balance. 

Broadacre would restore the balance-living in the country-working in a human scale 
natural environment. Now, at a time when there is a massive migration from the country 
to the city, Broadacre would restore the balance and provide a healthy alternative. 
Designed to take advantage of the mobility of the automobile, today it would be even more 
possible. With modern communications, computer, fax, and the advent of small 
high-tech industries, the decentralized city is possible and desirable. Already 
decentralized communities built around Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay 
successfully exist. In England, Finland and throughout the world, decentralized 
communities combining housing and light industry in a country setting are being built. 
Broadacre city is eminently possible today. 

Broadacre City proposed one-acre lots on a grid, but this was only a starting point. The 
model was designed as modular, both for convenience in its transportation and for 
flexibility for future developments. 

Wright saw that the unimaginative surveyor's gridiron plan was oriented to the north, not 
because of human needs, but to suit only the surveyor's convenience-his compass pointed 
north. Wright, perceiving that this denied the sun to everyone on a north-facing block, 
tilted the axis of Broadacre 30 degrees to admit sunlight to more rooms. In later years, as 
Wright continued his journey through the geometric archetypes his site plans changed to 
reflect their angular and circular forms. In the following years, the Usonia 1 Project, 
Lansing, Michigan, which included the Goetsch-Winckler House, was representative of 
several projected Usonian communities: Usonia Homes, Pleasantville, New York; 
Gatesburg Country Homes, and Parkwyn Village, near Kalamazoo, Michigan, were among 
other built or projected communities. The first task of the newly formed Fellowship was to 
build a giant model of Broadacre City which would be exhibited in Pittsburgh and 
Rockefeller Center, New York. 

Over his lifetime, Wright's prodigious output of some 1300 designs created all the vital 
elements to build Broadacre City, ranging from a simple gas station to a mile high tower. 
As with Rodin's Gates of Hell, Broadacre became emblematic of his oeuvre. Tafel says that 
Wright would ask him "to make a couple of prairie houses" to add to the model. 

The Usonian houses continued to evolve, becoming ever more perfect: the roots hovered 
without visible support while the cantilevers extended even further, challenging the limits 
of economical wood construction. Supervising one such house, Tafel secretly added a steel 
beam to the plans to stiffen the structure, but the preppy apprentice refused Tafel's advice 
and the wood beam collapsed. Wright responded, "It's not possible; it worked on the other 
house!" Whereupon, Edgar Tafel confessed. Wright was so irate he said "You're fired!" On 
the way to the train station, alone with Olgivanna, she said, "Oh, Edgar, how could you!" 
Tafel explained the situation, adding, "Better it collapse far away than locally." When Mr. 
Wright returned, Olgivanna said, "Frank, I don't want to hear any more about it, the 
matter is closed." 


THE ESTABLISHMENT AND THE REBEL 

In the great depression of 1929 Wright's name was rarely heard, his career was considered 
in eclipse. He was surviving through writing and lecturing. 

In 1930, Wright gave the Khan Lectures at Princeton. At age 62 he could have accepted 
his place as an icon in the pantheon of architecture, rested on his laurels and retired as a 
grand old man. Always the revolutionary, Wright refused to join the Establishment 
(academia or the American Institute of Architects), nor would he worship its gods. He paid 
the penalty and was ostracized. (When an A.I.A. fact-finding committee visited the 
aftermath of the Tokyo earthquake, its report omitted any mention of the survival of 
Wright's quakeproof Imperial Hotel.) As with Orestes in Sartre's The Flies who refused to 
worship the god Zeus and paid the penalty of persecution by the Furies, so Wright was 
denigrated by the media Furies with character assassination. The Establishment and the 
media would invariably describe and dismiss Wright as a good architect in his youth, but 
now an arrogant, cantankerous old man. 

But instead of retreating from the media, Wright had now discovered how to turn the 
tables on them, how to use the media to his own advantage as a ready-made megaphone, 
in order to reach the public. In the manner of another Celt, George Bernard Shaw, he 
could be counted on making witty and outrageous statements which appealed to the 
audience. Asked what he thought could be done to improve Boston, he replied, "Bury it!" 
The public enjoyed his candor. 

Under Olgivanna's influence, 1932 saw the creation of Wright's An Autobiography. She 
was a good psychologist. She knew the best way for him to exorcise the ghosts of the past 
was to write it all down. For the first time the world had the opportunity to read Wright's 
own version of the complex life he experienced from within. It is a remarkable book, filled 
with deep almost unfathomable insights into the creativity, complexity and tragedy of his 
life. In place of the worm's-eye view of the gossip press, this story of his life, thoughts 
and philosophy revealed his character and strength in a new light and attracted the 
attention of a new breed of individualistic clients who would choose him for his 
independent thought and integrity. 

Some of these personal insights can be found in his letter to Jens Jensen, 1928: "The only 
difference between Olgivanna and myself is that she believes that the creative instinct is 
the original birthright of mankind and in most of them it lies dead ... by proper treatment 
it may be revived. I too believe ... but that owing to his betrayal of himself, he has 
sterilized himself ... this creative instinct dead in most ... three-fifths of humanity lacks 
any power of that kind. Now I believe the creative instinct in Man is that quality ... of 
getting himself reborn into everything he does, everything he really works with. By means 
of it he has got the gods if not God. It is his imagination that is chiefly the tool with which 
this force or faculty in him works. 

"By putting a false premium upon will and intellect he has done this injury upon himself 
... Now how to get it back-this quality of Man-back again to men ... That, Jens, is why I 
am interested in this proposed school. I should like to be one to initiate steps that would 
put a little experimental station at work where this thing might be wooed and won, if only 
to a small extent. I know it cannot be taught." 

At the age of 64, then considered retirement age, with only three projects built in the last 
seven years, Wright was resigned to the fact that his career was over. He would start his 
own school. 


THE TALIESIN FELLOWSHIP, 1932 

Out of the influence of Olgivanna came the birth of the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, 
which used the old Hillside School for its first apprentice students. Although some of the 
new apprentices, like Edgar Tafel, could pay only part of their tuition fee, Wright accepted 
them. 

Wright wanted to develop architects who would understand, continue and expand the work 
of organic architecture. He sought a way to transmit his own discovery of the creative 
process to a new apprentice and that in the daily relationship with genius some invisible 
spark might ignite the sleeping potential of youth into a new creative individuality. 

Before he had married, Wright's organization had been rather like when he was working 
on Midway Gardens, with his son John, his draftsmen and others, who would all sleep in 
the construction shack, maintaining very much of a masculine architectural group. 

Wright's primary concern was architecture and he was too busy to handle the 
day-to-day activities of the Fellowship. The structure of the fellowship was in many 
ways the responsibility of Olgivanna. A confluence of two streams of energy, two different 
concepts of Taliesin led sometimes to certain contradictions in its operations. 

Olgivanna had been a member of Gurdjieff's School for the Harmonious Development of 
Man and her idea of the Fellowship was modeled on her own experience at Gurdjieff's 
Institute at the Prieure, outside Paris, in the early 1920s. Other members there included 
Peter Ivan Ouspenski, well known for his book Tertium Organum, and author Katherine 
Mansfield. 

Gurdjieff, an Armenian, was a remarkable teacher with an extraordinary insight into the 
human condition. The Zen teacher Alan Watts called him "the rogue saint." He was a 
shaman, trickster-a magician with a lust for life. One of the first westerners to visit the 
Potola monastery in Tibet, he had been deeply involved in Sufi and Oriental teachings on 
the development of human consciousness. He said that most people were mechanical, 
asleep, but in this dream state thought themselves awake. His teaching was to awaken the 
seven primary centers in the student into a heightened consciousness, to develop a true 
individuality. Gurdjieff differentiated between personality and essence: the former was a 
product of social and cultural conditioning which prevented the development of essence 
which was true individuality. 

At his school the students lived as a community, doing all the necessary work as a part of 
their education. An overdeveloped intellectual or aristocrat might find himself cleaning 
out the pigsties, or scrubbing the old floors with steel wool. (Or on the garbage detail, as 
happened to me at Taliesin.) In many ways the structure of the Taliesin Fellowship 
followed similar lines. 

Wright experienced firsthand Gurdjieff's methods at their first meeting in New York. 
Olgivanna arranged a meeting between the two most important men in her life, her teacher 
(Gurdjieff) and her husband. Arriving at Gurdjieff's apartment at the appointed hour, the 
Wrights were told by a secretary to wait, that Mr. Gurdjieff would be ready in a moment. 
Time passed and the secretary returned with yet another apology for the delay. Finally, 
Wright, not used to waiting, his patience exhausted, flew into a rage. At this moment 
Gurdjieff appeared. "I'm sorry," he said. "I had no idea you were here!" Wright looked at 
him, burst into laughter: "Thank you, I needed that!" 

Both Wright and Gurdjieff had been deeply influenced by the East and their philosophies 
were merged into the very structure of the Taliesin Fellowship. Wright called Gurdjieff "a 
truly organic man." When Wright suffered from kidney stones, Gurdjieff prepared him a 
meal composed of such hot spices that Wright told Olgivanna that this may be the last 
time she would see him. Next morning, however, he awakened cured. Later, when the 
doctor told Wright to give up coffee, Gurdjieff claimed it was safe if taken with lemon. 
Fellow architect Bruce Pfeiffer and I ordered coffee with lemon in a Scottsdale cafe. We 
discovered the lemon precipitated the caffeine to the bottom, but alas, it also destroyed the 
flavor. 


APPRENTICE LIFE AT TALIESIN 

Mrs. Wright was responsible for the day-to-day organization, the formation of work 
groups. Around her were the people interested in her philosophy as well as personal 
friends. Around Wright were Gene Masselink, secretary; Wes Peters, Wright's 
son-in-law, architect, engineer and a head man; Jack Howe, who was Wright's head 
draftsman for over twenty years, and about a dozen "senior apprentices." They had the 
authority to be in charge of work groups but it was all very informal. No one had an 
official title. 

Wright's idea of the apprentice was supposedly based on the Renaissance concept of 
master/apprentice, where learning is by doing (and perhaps also by osmosis). I suspect, 
though, that it was closer to the Zen master/disciple relationship, where individual 
creativity is awakened through the interaction with a remarkable presence. Certainly those 
apprentices who chose a literal copying of Wright's forms achieved little, while those 
whose creational genius was sparked off by Taliesin were the ones who achieved their own 
individual expression of architecture. Wright's holistic approach to education was that to 
be a good architect you must become a complete person. As with Jung's "integrated 
personality," intellect, emotion, intuition and sensation must all be activated. 

"Great architecture contains the masculine and feminine, all the aspects of man. A great 
building, like a great cathedral, expresses the full range of the human being," Wright said. 
(Although he would describe the Larkin Building as masculine, it sired the feminine 
Johnson Wax Building.) He saw the modern architect as fragmented. In many architects 
the intellect was overdeveloped, creating only ingenious systems and ideologies, which 
lacked human scale and needs. In no way was Taliesin similar to the contemporary, 
technocratic, systems-based architectural school. Man's centers include thinking, feeling, 
instinct, intuition, sex, rhythm and movement. 

What Wright was trying to convey to us-and to nurture-was his own insight and 
experience of nature that he had learned working on the farm: his sensibility for nature, 
the site and for the nature of materials. 

In one book on Wright, the writer dismisses the ancient Japanese affinity with nature as 
pantheism, thereby denying half the cultures of the world, including the Native American 
Indian, whose sacred regard for the earth preserved the American landscape. For every 
artist and architect, a sensitivity to the spirit of place, the site, the stone, the tree, is 
essential. 

During one Sunday talk, an apprentice asked Wright about his Welsh roots. Wright 
replied: "That old Welsh Mabinogion, the triad ... King Arthur's Round Table ... Genius 
means the inner nature of the thing. A genius is a man who has an eye to see nature ... A 
genius is a man with the heart to feel nature ... A genius is a man with the courage to 
follow nature." 

Ultimately the architect's expression depends on the depth of his sensibility and Taliesin 
was established to develop a fully balanced man in which working with the actual 
materials and processes of architecture was an essential part. Wright wanted us, by 
working with our hands, to experience the unique quality of materials: wood, brick and 
stone, being taught by Ed the old Welsh mason, how to feel the grain of the stone, and how 
to lay it. 

My first evening entering the famous drafting room at Taliesin East was quite dramatic. A 
dark forest of oak truss beams loomed above our heads and, suspended beneath them, 
hovered some Taliesin red (a terra cotta color) light tracks which Wright had acquired 
from the Museum of Modern Art when they had an exhibition of his work. 

So there were just these spots in the darkness directed down on onto the 40 drawing 
boards. At the end of the room was a big fire of oak logs burning, and on the stone lintel 
were inscriptions. There were maxims inscribed on the beams in the Hillside school also, 
and one of Wright's favorites was "As a man does, a man is." This was the cozy end of the 
room where Wright liked to work. In the mornings we would know he was approaching, 
because around 10 o'clock we would hear him as he came down the corridor, clearing his 
throat. It was the cue that the master was appearing. 


THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE 

One day I discovered a tiny secret staircase leading up to a mezzanine above the drafting 
room. One could look down through the forest of trusses. This became my private space, 
where I could leaf through the yellow tracing paper sketches by Wright. I had always taken 
for granted Wright's clean sweeping architectural roofs but became increasingly curious 
about what happened to the vent pipes, the furnace flues, gutters, and down-spouts which 
clutter ordinary buildings. Here were the archives containing the techniques, craft and 
magic of a lifetime: groupings of pipes, chimneys incorporating heating flues and ducts, 
steel "flitch" plates to stiffen timber beams and cantilevers. The apprentice was beginning 
to learn some of the sorcerer's secrets. 

In the drafting room there were rows of drafting tables for the Fellowship. The tables were 
Wright's design: very angular, simply constructed from a sheet of plywood, with crossed 
legs and plywood gussets which were painted red. The tops had a permanent slope and 
were just big enough for one large sheet of paper. Each of us had a toolbox under the table 
where we kept our drawing instruments. Wright was very critical of gadgetry; he believed 
in T-squares, not drafting machines. A 45-degree triangle and a 30/60-degree one was 
all that was needed, along with a circle template and a compass; and we used Fs, HBs, and 
a soft Eagle drafting pencil on yellow trace for all the sketches. 

In the studio were several lists of recommendations. One was for the colored pencils used 
in the Taliesin style of rendering which consisted mainly of horizontal lines. For the grass 
we were enjoined to use "grass green;" for the trees another green. There was also a 
technique that used dots to show the curves in a circular building. We were self-taught. 
That was the Taliesin way. If you didn't want to do anything, nobody would press you. We 
learned from our fellow apprentices, many of whom were very experienced as architects, 
and from the seniors-the half dozen or so architects who assisted Wright. A senior might 
come and ask you to help detail something, perhaps for a house which should have been 
ready that night. After a few months an apprentice could be working on details for live 
projects, but always as a junior member of a team. To work directly for Wright you had to 
be there for several years, unless you were highly qualified. 


WRIGHT'S WORKING METHOD 

Contractors were frequently ringing up to say, "How can I build this house? There are no 
dimensions." A typical Usonian house would be laid out on a module, maybe 3 � 6 feet or 
4-foot square, and the grid lines were numbered vertically in one direction and 
alphabetically in the other. All one had to do was to refer to and measure from the 
appropriate grid co-ordinate. However, a lot of contractors, and even some local 
architects, couldn't get the hang of a set of plans with few dimensions. 

Wright's details were bold and simple; he did not believe in endlessly complex details. At 
Taliesin, after breakfast, there would either be a list on the wall of things you were 
supposed to do for the next week, or else one of the seniors would be looking for volunteers 
to pour concrete or cope with one crisis or another. During my first week at Taliesin East I 
was assigned each morning to a work party. I didn't realize yet, that like the army, you 
have to learn to disappear to survive, because there is always one more emergency work 
party, and you would never have time to go to the drafting room or brush your teeth if you 
were always available. But being a new boy, and feeling fresh, I discovered that I was 
assigned to a work party down on the farm, and it was our job to repair the earth dam to 
the lake Wright had created. We went out in the cold wintry morning to cut rolls of turf to 
patch the erosion. I came from a big city; now I was experiencing directly the feeling of 
the grass, the nature of the earth. Each turf weighed about 100 pounds and it was hard 
work. Afterwards I said as much to one of the other apprentices. He laughed, and he told 
me how every year the dam leaks, and every year the new boys patch it up with turf. 


FIRE 

Shortly before I came to Taliesin, the Hillside School theater, an early progressive school 
Wright had built for his aunts, down the road from Taliesin East, now used as the 
Fellowship school of architecture, caught fire. Most of the apprentices were away on a 
farm project. Alarmed by a rising column of smoke, the apprentices ran towards the 
building to find the theater in flames. Nearby they found Mr. Wright sitting on a salvaged 
chair, already sketching the new theater design. With few regrets, he had seized the 
destruction of the old as the opportunity to design the new. 

A problem as first-year students was to find the time to get to the drafting room. One 
morning the word suddenly went round that the clay tiles had arrived: after the fire, the 
theater and dining areas needed a new roof. Wright, a masterly showman, had called up 
one of the tile manufacturers and persuaded them what an excellent advertisement it would 
be if their tiles were used on the roof. And he was prepared to do that for them if they 
would provide the tiles free. An enormous semi-trailer arrived, with thousands of tiles. 
We formed a human chain, probably 30 or 40 of us, catching and throwing on the stack of 
tiles from the stack right up to the roof. The new theater roof had an enormous cantilever 
which reached out to just touch a large tree: very romantic. Closer inspection, however, 
revealed that the cantilever was in fact nailed to the trunk of the tree. 

Taliesin was completely run by the apprentices. There were no servants, contractors, or 
state financing. The boys did every sort of building work for the school, and Taliesin was 
built and maintained by the apprentices. Some specialized in carpentry, joinery, plumbing, 
electrics, or in concrete work. 

The apprentices made the tables and furniture for Wright's Plaza Hotel apartment in New 
York. In the Taliesin workshop I was assigned to the group making the drafting tables and 
stools for this apartment. These were made from 3/4-inch Douglas fir plywood in the 
form intersecting planes, finished in matte black lacquer, which rather shocked me, 
preferring and expecting the expression of natural wood finish. Each coat of lacquer had to 
be rubbed down with steel wool. The steel wool got under my fingernails and was 
unpleasant. Was I getting the Gurdjieff treatment? 

I was busy working when suddenly, I had a premonition that I was going to see Mr. 
Wright! My conscious mind said no, there was no reason to see him, and at that moment 
an apprentice came and said, "Mr. and Mrs. Wright want to see you." I joined two other 
apprentices and we were nervous, not knowing what it was about, but suspecting it might 
have to do with our reputation for being a bit too rebellious and independent. Sure enough, 
when we reached the meeting we were roundly criticized for our behavior by Mrs. Wright: 
we were not showing the right attitude (specific charges were not leveled.) When she had 
finished, she looked to Mr. Wright, and obviously it was now his turn to discipline us. But 
equally obvious was that Mr. Wright was quite baffled about what the meeting was for. 
One of the boys said something about his being a conscientious objector against the army 
and authority, and Wright's face lit up with understanding. He boomed at us that he had 
been a conscientious objector all his life against the cultural establishment and authority. 
He spoke against the tyranny of easel painting and how a good architectural wall should 
never be cluttered by hanging Renaissance paintings on it. He talked about the correct 
relationship between the arts and the "Mother Art," architecture. We sat for an hour, 
enthralled by this private discourse on architecture. Everyone had long forgotten the 
original purpose of the meeting. 

I remember finishing the last piece of furniture, outside, just as the first snow was 
beginning to fall at Taliesin East. It was time for the migration to Taliesin West: already 
most people had left. We finally shipped them off and awaited Wright's comments. Word 
eventually filtered back: "OK, but we need more". What Wright did with all this stuff we 
never found out. Years later I saw photographs of the furniture in his Plaza apartment in a 
book on Wright's life in New York. 

One day I met Wright outside the drafting room. He had a keenly perceptive eye. 
Observing my English reserve, he said: "Son, to be an architect you can not be an 
introvert. An architect must be extrovert, salesman, psychologist, diplomat, designer and 
builder." He knew, painfully, how difficult it was to sell an avant-garde project to a new 
client. With an uncanny sense of timing, he could seduce any client with his charm and 
forceful aura. When all else failed, he could be alternately humble, arrogant, innocent, 
guileful and endlessly patient. Demanding perfection he could be as temperamental as a 
Von Karajan and had little tolerance for stupidity or incompetence. Anyone who tampered 
with his design would get short shrift, becoming the object of a powerful burst of anger. 

One of the secrets of his success was his immediate, unequivocal response to the false. 
With a quick temper, he had a tendency to say what he felt, to shoot from the hip. On one 
occasion some seniors decided that a kitchen in Taliesin East had become tacky and worn 
out. Someone had the bright idea to give Mr. Wright a surprise. They had completely 
rebuilt the kitchen in his private quarters, working day and night so the kitchen was 
exactly as they thought he would like it. When Mr. Wright returned, he walked into the 
kitchen, took one angry look, and rhetorically demanded: "Who is the goddamn architect 
around here, anyway? You're fired!" 

Olgivanna, in her feminine role as mother and peacemaker would calm him down. "Oh 
Frank," she would say, "You can't fire them, we need them, it was all a 
misunderstanding!" Mollified, his temper quickly evaporated. The next day he would have 
completely forgotten the incident. 

Even with his friend Alexander Woollcott, the playwright, he could get carried away in 
argument. The next day, filled with remorse, he would send a gift of some Japanese prints 
to Woollcott accompanied by a note and joke of apology. 


TRICKSTER 

No quotation of Wright does justice to, nor can it convey, his great sense of humor. The 
blood of the legendary trickster, Gwion Bach, still coursed in his veins, and particularly 
through the mischievous twinkle in his eye. (In American Indian myth, too, the trickster is 
an important character for change. Bach was Taliesin's original incarnation, the trickster 
who stole the witch's brew and was transformed by into a magician.) 

One afternoon Wright and apprentice Edgar Tafel were cutting branches from a street tree 
for decoration at Taliesin's Saturday night party. A woman came up to them and 
demanded to know what they were doing. "Madam," Wright replied. "We are taking 
samples for the department of agriculture!" 


THE APPRENTICE GAMBLER 

A rich man's son arrived at Taliesin in 1938 at a time when, as usual, there was a shortage 
of funds. Gene Masselink, the artist who also functioned as secretary and soulmate, asked 
him for the important $1500 for tuition. "I want to see Mr. Wright first," was the reply. 
"No, first the money and then Mr. Wright," said Masselink. Finally, Mr. Wright appeared 
and the young man told his story. "On the way here I passed through Las Vegas and I 
thought it would be fun to try a little gambling at the casino. Well first I won, but then I 
began to lose and I saw my tuition going down the drain so I made one last attempt to 
recover my money-and lost it all!" There was a pregnant pause. Mr. Wright said, "Son, 
tell me just one thing. If you had to do it all over again what would you do?" The young 
man thought for a moment, and said, "Well, I guess I would do it just the same way." Mr. 
Wright smiled and said, "OK, you're in." 


ANTHONY QUINN 

Anthony Quinn, as a young man, wanted to study architecture at Taliesin and had an 
interview with Wright who said, "You can never be a successful architect unless you can 
communicate well with a client and you have a speech defect. Your speech is unintelligible 
because of the ligaments tied beneath your tongue. I can give you the name of a surgeon 
who can fix them so that you can speak properly. (Wright was a fund of knowledge.) 
Quinn had the operation and afterward went to a voice therapy class to learn to speak 
properly. There he met several actors and realized he wanted to be one too. 


OLGIVANNA'S ROLE 

One weekend we were told that Henry and Claire Booth Luce, the publishers of Life and 
Time magazines, were coming. Possibly remembering some previous incident, Olgivanna 
warned us against attacking them with our liberal ideas. At the time we thought she was 
unduly apprehensive. Only later did I realize that her role at Taliesin was as both wife and 
mother. She had to see that the Fellowship kept going, could pay its bills and attract new 
clients. This meant entertaining prospective and important people, to ensure publicity and 
new projects. Wright told me he had to earn over $50,000 a year to run Taliesin 
(equivalent to $500,000 today). 

Some people found Olgivanna difficult. Probably her own early experiences fleeing the 
revolution in Russia, being jailed and threatened with deportation in the U.S., and vilified 
by the media as a foreign adventuress, had left her apprehensive and suspicious of 
strangers. 


RULES AGAIN 

The different approaches taken by Wright and Olgivanna were evident, for example, when 
apprentice Jeremy was called before them because she claimed he had a wrong attitude. 
Mr. Wright still seemed unclear as to what the problem was, so Mrs. Wright explained: 
"Frank, he doesn't want to follow the rules!" 

"Rules," boomed Mr. Wright, "there are no rules. When you have rules you start with 
policemen, judges and end up building jails! And there are not going to be any jails in 
Taliesin. There are no rules as long as I'm around." 

Although we sometimes worked hard, like humble "slaves," as some critics claimed, we 
were treated as part of Wright's extended family and felt privileged to work and learn from 
the Master himself. Even though I was on a scholarship, paying nothing for board and 
tuition, I was treated no differently than anyone else. Indeed, I doubt if anyone knew of my 
status. We were older than the average college student. A number of us were graduates or 
had already worked in architecture. Like most students we were a high-spirited bunch 
with minds of our own. If we felt like going to a late night movie or a local bar, we went. 
We didn't need to ask permission. 


CAMELOT 

During the summer Taliesin became an open house for musicians, writers and artists in 
residence. Frequent guests were the poet Carl Sandburg, the writer Alexander Woolcott, 
the actor Charles Laughton and the architect Erich Mendelsohn. Wright enjoyed the 
company of fertile minds. There were no barriers and we apprentices were considered a 
part of Wright's extended family. 

Taliesin had become a Camelot for architecture. Almost every major foreign architect 
visiting America made it a part of his pilgrimage. 

A Taliesin joke ran that if Wright was King Arthur, then certainly, Wes Peters, 6' 4" tall, 
and his favorite apprentice, was Sir Launcelot. In 1933, Wes fell in love with Wright's 
sixteen-year-old stepdaughter Svetlana. Forbidden by the Wrights to marry, they eloped 
one night and for two years were exiled from Taliesin. Life, with irony, had reversed 
Wright's roles; no longer the rebel he was now the authority. With the birth of their son, 
two years later they became reconciled with the Wrights and returned to Taliesin. 

Wright thought he had reached the end of his architectural career, but instead, the Usonian 
house, Broadacre City and the Fellowship heralded his hearty rebirth. Wright said, "A 
change is as good as a rest." When his mind was exhausted he turned to physical work and 
chopped wood. 


The Fifth Age, 
Tri-Axial Space 

FALLINGWATER, THE HILLSIDE CASCADE 

For over a decade Wright had remained submerged in the public consciousness. Now with 
the publicity created by his autobiography and the creation of the Taliesin Fellowship 
Wright's name was introduced to a new generation of Americans. 


"Fallingwater has always been rightly considered one of the complete masterpieces of 
twentieth century art."-Vincent Scully, Yale University 


Wright's clients came through an invisible network of friends, clients, family and 
admirers. Empathic with his work, they were a kind of collective unconscious. As in the 
allegorical The Fisherman and the Genie, it was a net that would trawl in a few new 
clients, and a genie. 

A friend introduced Wright's book to Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. By reading An Autobiography 
young Kaufmann opened the door to a totally new direction to his life and an 
extraordinary adventure into architecture. Soon after visiting Wright he joined the Taliesin 
Fellowship. Intelligent and open to the new, Edgar, in his incarnation as youth, was 
destined to be the genie who would make the miraculous possible. 

Edgar introduced Wright to his father, E. J. Kaufmann, Sr., wealthy owner of the 
Pittsburgh department store, not unlike a Venetian merchant prince-rich, successful and 
autocratic. Wright responded with an equally aristocratic manner. As equals they hit it off: 
Michelangelo had met his patron and shortly afterwards E. J. Kaufmann sponsored an 
exhibition of Broadacre City in New York and at his store in Pittsburgh. 

E. J. Kaufmann owned a 2000 acres of virgin land, some 60 miles south of Pittsburgh. 
Using it for a weekend retreat, his greatest pleasure was to walk and relax in nature. 
Taking Wright up to the site he asked him to design a second home. They hiked all over 
the hills, ravines and forest looking for a site until Wright asked E. J., "What is your 
favorite spot?" 

E. J. showed Wright the enormous boulder on which he liked to sit and meditate, looking 
down to the cascade and the glen below. Wright had found the key to E. J.'s world. 

Wright was presented with a landscape as dramatic and as beautiful as the failed 
McCormick project, which was an extraordinary site that challenged the full extent of his 
imagination. With his uncanny sense of the genius loci, his photographic eye for its 
contours and forms, his empathy with the landscape, he absorbed it all: trees, 
rhododendrons, rock ledges, and above all the primal element of water. Water cascading 
down its liquid stairway, interacting between rock and trees, refracting the forest light and 
the sky above. The silence of the forest glade broken by the sound of the stream and the 
cascade. 

"Can you say, when your building is complete, that the landscape is more beautiful than it 
was before?" Wright challenged us. 

Wright wanted a house that was not a conquest of nature but a symbiotic embrace, as 
integral a part of the landscape as the surrounding trees. 

On his return to Taliesin he requested Kaufmann to send him a site survey showing 
contours and the location of the waterfall and certain rocks and trees. For several months 
nothing was to happen. 


GERMINATION 

Wright scorned those architects who, designing elevations and plans on a 
two-dimensional drawing board, attempt to create three-dimensional space out of 
two-dimensional images. 

For Wright the inner vision of a project first took form in his mind. He said, "One must be 
able to walk around and inside the structure, know every detail, before putting pencil to 
paper ... I never sit down to a drawing board-and this has been a lifelong practice of 
mine-until I have the whole thing in my mind. I may alter it substantially, I may throw it 
away, I may find I'm up a blind alley; but unless I have the idea of the thing pretty well in 
shape, you won't see me at a drawing board with it. But all the time I have it, it's 
germinating, between three o'clock and four o'clock in the morning-somehow nature has 
provided me with an hour or more of what might be called insight ... so this design matter 
is not something to do with a drawing board. It is something that you do as you work, as 
you play. You may get it in the middle of the tennis court and drop your racket and run off 
and put it down. That is the kind of thing it is. It is fleeting, it is evanescent. It's up here 
where you have to be quick and take it." 

The whole complex tri-axial concept of Fallingwater, with all of its levels, cross 
cantilevers and interspatial relationships was taking form in his imagination before he put 
pencil to paper. It is a measure of the magnitude of his mind that he could hold this whole 
complex spatial structure in his imagination, adding to it day after day, clarifying the 
details, its relationship to the site, before committing it to paper. Wright, with cool head 
and incredible patience was waiting until his vision, complete in every detail, was ready 
for birth. Wright's associates were nervous. Since his trip to the site, the summer before, 
nothing had appeared on the drawing board. 

In the fall E. J. Kaufmann telephoned to say he would be traveling in the vicinity of 
Taliesin and asked Wright how the plans were progressing. Wright responded, "We are 
ready for you." A little later E. J. called from Milwaukee to say that in a few hours he 
would drop by to see the plans. 

With only a few hours left before Kaufmann was due, Wright sat down by the plot plan on 
the drafting board and began to draw. My friend, Edgar Tafel, was assisting apprentice, 
and describes the actual passage from Wright's imagination to the drawing board: "First 
floor plan. Second floor. Section, elevations. Side sketches of details, talking sotto voce all 
the while.  The design just poured out of him, 'Liliane and E. J. will have tea on the 
balcony ... they'll cross the bridge to walk into the woods ...' Pencils being used up as fast 
as we could sharpen them when broken-Hs, HBs, colored Castell's, again and again being 
worn down or broken. Erasures, overdrawing, modifying. Flipping sheets back and forth ... 
'The rock on which E. J. sits will be the hearth, coming right out of the floor, the fire 
burning just behind it'." Locked into the rock once again the fireplace becomes the  center 
around which the plan swings. "Then, the bold title across the bottom: Fallingwater. A 
house has to have a name." 

In front of the apprentices Fallingwater began to take shape. Entranced, to their 
amazement the building was cantilevered over the waterfall itself. Tiered balconies spread 
in all directions. The architecture seemed to be an extension of the natural rock ledges and 
the falling cascade. It was breathtaking. 

E. J. Kaufmann arrived just as Wright finished. Unaware of the drama that preceded him 
he studied the drawing. He said, "I didn't realize it would be so close to the waterfall." 

Wright responded, "I want you to be of the waterfall." He shrewdly invited Kaufmann off 
to lunch, giving the draftsman apprentices time to complete the other elevations. 

The vertical masonry mass emerging from the bedrock soars like an ascending tree to the 
sky above. From it, balanced and anchored in the rock, issues a succession of horizontal 
planes, roofs and balconies, like the branches of the surrounding trees. Wright had 
discovered that the relationship between horizontal planes generates energy, and now he 
discovered another energy, a different resonance, created by the counterpoint between the 
horizontal and vertical elements of tri-axial space. Fallingwater represents a quantum 
leap in Wright's understanding of space, the full flowering of Wright's spatial imagination. 

Drawing its inspiration from the stepped rock ledges that define the landscape, the stepped 
principle of the descending hillside cascade creates the form of Fallingwater, transforming 
its image into a multilayered structure of inner and outer space: becoming an integral part 
of the landscape, echoing the vertical trees, the horizontal branches, the ascending foliage, 
the descending cascade, the rhythm of the forest. A suspended stairway leads up from the 
stream below to the living room above. The structure steps back to match the hill, forming 
layers of terraces towards the sun. 

Wright wanted a "natural house," built in nature for the natural man, who himself, "shall 
be like a tree planted by the rivers of water." Playing his love of technology against his 
love of nature, a pergola of concrete beams ties the rear of the house to the hillside, a 
concrete beam detours around a tree. The corners of the concrete parapets are softly 
rounded. A balcony cantilever is pierced to incorporate three trees and receives additional 
support from a rock. The fireplace hearth is cut from the living rock, the fireplace walls 
made from the same stone. A hollow hemisphere of space is cut into the stone-work to 
receive a large spherical pot which swings out over a roaring fire. 

In a forest glen, a fire upon a rock. Was it Wright's token to Caridwen's cauldron of 
inspiration? 

In his own mind alchemy was transmuting ancient elements into new form. Wright 
worked in sudden bursts of quantum energy. When he ran out of inspiration, he lay down 
in front of the flames of drafting room fireplace and took a catnap. With a new insight he 
awakened refreshed and returned to complete the project. If creation is a quantum leap, the 
technical process is an uphill ramp of working drawings, details, calculations, 
engineering, and specifications. Wright, using the skills, crafts and tricks of a lifetime, 
labored to make Fallingwater a practical reality. 


CONSTRUCTION 

Now begins the complex process of translating the architect's vision into practical reality. 
At Taliesin working drawings were being completed, and from the site, stone quarried for 
the walls of the new structure. Using the native stone the horizontal layers of the 
ascending walls reflect the natural rock outcroppings. The house would truly be of the site. 

When the plans were sent to the steel company for determining the quantities of 
reinforcing rods required, the engineers were fascinated by the unusual balcony cantilever 
design. They were used to post and beam structures, where each element is calculated 
separately, and their figures for the stresses of the floor slab determined that the balcony 
cantilevers would not work. They sent a report to E. J. warning him that the house could 
not stand up. He immediately called Wright for his comments. Wright snorted, "Put that 
letter inside the wall and let posterity decide!" 

Analysis takes the whole to pieces to understand its parts. Using synthesis, by fusing the 
parts together, the whole is stronger than its parts. 

Wright used the three-foot high balcony parapet walls as structural concrete beams, 
reinforced by the floor diaphragms and cross walls, and by continuing the reinforcing steel 
into a three-dimensional matrix, combined floor and walls into one integral structure; 
employing the holistic principle of continuity to distribute the stresses through the 
structure, he folded the concrete slab under the living room to stiffen the cantilevers. 

Because of the isolated site E. J. was forced to employ a local builder with little experience 
in building a modern reinforced concrete structure. When the time came for the builder to 
remove the post supporting the forms of the large cantilever balcony, he was so nervous 
about his poor workmanship he refused. Exasperated, Wright, standing beneath the 
balcony, demonstrated his faith in his design, by grabbing a sledge hammer and knocking 
out the post. 

The audacity of Fallingwater expresses Wright's supreme self-confidence, the 
fearlessness of youth to challenge and explore the new. Like every champion, it was his 
faith in his own invincibility that made him invincible. Critics would read it as arrogance, 
but he was not alone: the architect Alvar Aalto said, "I'm the best!" The champion boxer, 
Muhamad Ali proclaimed, "I am the greatest!" Wright's belief in himself was a 
self-fulfilling prophecy, fueling his victories. 

Wright prided himself on his sense of engineering, and when he discovered that the job 
apprentice had added more steel to a cantilever, he was furious and sent him back to 
Taliesin. 


GRAVITY 

The cascade illustrates an invisible, but tangible force: gravity, the ancient nemesis of 
architecture. Fallingwater is about defying gravity. 

Like a chess master playing three-dimensional chess, Wright carefully placed his pieces 
on the board, playing gravity against gravity, cantilever against cantilever, horizontal by 
vertical mass, uplift by downlift. Maneuvering the forces of gravity into a balanced 
checkmate, Wright, like his 'namesake' brothers, demonstrates that architecture can defy 
gravity. In Fallingwater man hovers above the falling water. 

The reinforced concrete cantilever was born out of 19th-century technology and not every 
engineer approves of its use. The old, Ecole des Beaux Arts banned the use of the 
cantilever by students, but the Greek artist Yanko Varda claimed he only had to shout 
"cantilever!" for every architect in the room to experience an erection. 

The engineers, also apprehensive about the length of the main cantilever, recommended 
reducing its span by extending its base wall four feet. E. J. persuaded the apprentice to get 
the mason to extend the wall, without informing the architect. 

His son Edgar said, "Wright himself came around in due course of inspection and said 
nothing. Another month passed and Wright came again, went over the work with father, 
and no word of the wall. At the days' end, over a comfortable drink in the half-finished 
shell of the house, Father confessed to Wright and said, "If you've not noticed it in these 
last two days of inspection, there can't be anything very bad about it, architecturally." 

"E. J.," said Wright, "Come with me." They went out to the spot in question and, behold, 
the top four inches of the additional wall were gone! "When I was here last month," 
Wright continued, "I ordered the top layers of stone removed. Now, the terrace has shown 
no sign of falling. Shall we take down the extra four feet of wall?" 

Edgar was the genie that would make the miraculous possible and bring Fallingwater to a 
seamless perfection; smoothing father and Mr. Wright, oiling the wheels, shaking money 
out of the Kaufmann tree. His understanding of Wright's architecture made him the 
mediator, translating Wright's vision to E. J.'s practical mind. A battle arose with E. J. 
over the cost of the suspended stair to the stream. With its hatch doors, it was complex and 
expensive. But Edgar proved to his father that it was an essential element, linking interior 
space with the exterior stream below. 

On one occasion, Wright, exasperated by E. J.'s foot-dragging attitude exclaimed, 
"Fallingwater is too good for you; you don't deserve it!" 

E. J., once he understood what Wright was trying to achieve, could be helpful. Wright's 
concept that the masonry line should continue uninterrupted from interior to exterior 
appealed to him and Wright used his suggestion to set the glass flush into a slot in the 
masonry wall. 

To get Fallingwater built, Wright used all his charm, authority, guile and humor, but there 
was a limit to how far Wright could press E. J. When it came time to choose the color 
Wright suggested they cover the concrete in matte gold leaf, like the Golden Temple of 
Kyoto, Japan. It would have been hauntingly beautiful. E. J. couldn't go so far, and Wright 
dropped the suggestion and chose a light apricot color. 

Wright's mastery of tri-axial space is consummated at Fallingwater where architecture 
forever defies its former limitations and effortlessly moves into the planes and vertical axis 
of the forest. The horizontal planes, transverse cantilevers and vertical axis, fulfill 
Wright's vision of a tri-axial architecture penetrating space. 

Wright later said that Fallingwater "is a great blessing-one of the great blessings to be 
experienced here on earth." 


THE VERTICAL TOWERS 

Wright's journey to verticality began with his innovative stressed skin, the eighty-foot 
windmill tower, Romeo and Juliet, and progressed through the Luxfer Prism Project, 
which expressed the structural frame in its fenestration. It moved on to the thrusting, 
vertical ribs sweeping up to a great cantilevered roof, of the San Francisco Press Building 
Project. The openings in the great roof overhang, by freeing the flow of space, enhance the 
feeling of height. But Wright was moving away from the conventional post and beam 
frame skyscraper and seeking a new technology for spatial freedom. 


"Wright felt that the soaring vertical shaft-expressing a line radiating from the earth's 
center-both defines and defies gravity. In his vertical architecture he sought a new 
freedom to express Sullivan's, "sense of tallness."-D. W. Hoppen 


The National Life Insurance Company Skyscraper Project, Chicago, 1920-1924, for A. 
M. Johnson, provided Wright with the time and money to research a new system for a high 
rise building. 

The traditional building began from the outside facade. What he had done for horizontal 
architecture, Wright now did for the vertical, stripping away the old system of exterior 
load bearing walls and the post and beam box frame. 

Wright's design began, as he created, from the center, centrifugally, growing and moving 
out. From the vertical structural core, incorporating elevators, stairs, and services, the 
floors cantilever out, balanced by reverse cantilevers. 

He transformed the old massive exterior wall structural system into a transparent curtain 
wall of glass and lightweight copper panels, suspended from above. It is an major seminal 
concept and a beautiful design, a dramatic alternative to the conventional framed building. 

Wright's was able to show his drawings to his Lieber-Meister shortly before he died. 
Sullivan said, "I had faith that it would come. It is a work of great art. I knew what I was 
talking about all these years-you see? I could never had done this building myself, but I 
believe that, but for me, you could never have done it." Wright said, "I know I should 
never have reached it, but for what he was and what he himself did. This design is 
dedicated to him." 


CONTINUITY 

With the objective eye of a scientist, and the intuitive eye of an artist, Wright penetrated 
beyond outer beauty to observe the structural systems of nature. He saw in the tree a superb 
engineering. From its roots locked in the earth, a trunk can cantilever up over two hundred 
feet high, a branch can cantilever out forty feet. The tree achieves its strength through the 
continuity of its structural fibers, which growing along the stress lines, join root to trunk to 
branch into one indivisible process: the sum is greater than the parts. 

Wright used reinforcing rods as his steel fibers to carry the loads from cantilevered floor 
slabs to vertical core. These rods, bent and encased in concrete, became the tension fibers 
for the structural plasticity he sought. 


THE TRI-AXIAL TOWER 

Wright finally achieved the "verticality" he sought with St. Mark's in the Bowery, New 
York, 1929. Fresh from the desert, Wright used a triangular grid and Indian swastika plan, 
expressing centrifugal energy. Inspired by the tall saguaro cactus, he employs its structural 
ingenuity in the design of the structural folded plate core incorporating services and 
elevators. 

From its central trunk, cantilevered from the earth, with cross fin-walls, the concrete 
floors cantilever out, like branches from a tree. Now, freed from exterior structure, the 
outer skin becomes a suspended curtain wall of glass and copper panels. It is a true 
tri-axial structure, reaching out effortlessly in all dimensions, presaging a new approach 
and a new age in architecture. 

In the Chicago Towers, 1930, the Crystal Heights, Washington, D. C., 1939, and the 
Golden Beacon, Chicago, 1956, projects it evolved further.  It was finally realized as the 
Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1955. In this constructed version, the four elevations 
are different: determined by the pattern of the solar vertical and horizontal copper shading 
fins. 

Three of us apprentices, heading for Taliesin, decided to make a detour to visit the Price 
Tower, then under construction in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. We headed south, making 
about 400 miles a day along the straight monotonous roads. We arrived just as they had 
finished pouring the concrete for the Price Tower. Bartlesville at that time was a little 
town of wood frame houses in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly appeared this great 
concrete shaft soaring into the sky, looking like a science fiction rocket launching tower. 
Torroja, the Spanish engineer was there then, and Joe Price, the owner's son, was 
supervising, and he had a few problems. The balconies were cantilevered some 
considerable distance, and a three-foot wall provided part of the structural 
support-similar to Fallingwater. Where the wall emerged from the main fins of the 
central support column, some hairline cracks were appearing. Torroja said, "Oh that's 
nothing, it's just the steel taking up the slack." Joe told us that when they were pouring 
concrete into the foundation of the core, there was so much reinforcing steel that the 
problem was how to get the concrete around the steel. 

We shot up in the construction elevator on the side of the tower, and it was just as Wright 
had envisioned: first the town, its rooftops spread out around, then suddenly the freedom 
of the surrounding landscape and the view of the horizon for miles around. 

Joe Price was a good friend of Bruce Goff, and he had recommended Goff to his father to 
design a two-story office building for their company. Goff was busy and suggested 
Wright be asked to do it. So he introduced Price Sr. to Wright. He saw the small townsite 
as a perfect location for his St. Marks project which had never been built. He redesigned 
the plans as a combination office and apartment tower. The Price family-whose firm 
produced steel pipes for the oil industry-were very happy and gave Goff an office in it. 

Johnson Wax Research Tower, Racine, Wisconsin, 1944. Wright always wanted to 
complement the Johnson Wax Building with a vertical element and when asked to add a 
research facility he designed this 14-story tower. A hollow structural core contains the 
mechanical services, elevator and exhaust ducts. From this core, visible at the first story, 
cantilever the alternating circular mezzanines and square floors. Fenestration is provided 
by bands of continuous pyrex tubing which wraps around the curved corners. Wright's 
original scheme showed each floor stepping out beyond the one below to provide a 
self-cleaning function. As the tower ascends the structure grows outward, creating a 
dramatic perspective. 

Wright said, "one can see in the Japanese pagoda an abstraction of the pine tree." This 
structure represents his most perfect example of a tree and a taproot foundation. 

Rogers Lacy Hotel Project, Dallas, Texas, 1946. Wright, having used the inward sloping 
batter wall for Taliesin West, now reversed it to an outward slope. Sheathed in magnesium 
diagonal panels the Lacey Tower progressively becomes larger as it grows upwards from a 
large inner court. 

Olgivanna warned Wright that his design would be imitated and urged him to copyright 
his design but he didn't approve of copyright. It was later copied and vulgarized with great 
success. Edgar Tafel said that when Wright finished the stunning drawing he was 
overheard to say, sotto voce, "I am a genius." Critics say this proved his conceit, but who 
hasn't said the same when achieving a breakthrough? 

Another side of Wright was shown at the opening of one of his buildings. It rained, the 
roof leaked, and Wright was overheard saying, "Oh no, not again!" Water was his 
nemesis, the douche on his ego. 


DISCOVERIES 

The years of failure, the lean decade 1921-1931, allowed Wright to explore deeply the 
inner processes of architecture, structure and space. Rich in insights and visions, it was a 
fertile meditation that engendered his greatest successes. 

The Richard Lloyd Jones House 1 & 2, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1929. Fresh from the desert, 
Wright used the triangle for its angular plan. Too unorthodox for the client, its builder and 
its time, it was redesigned. Wright, looking for a way to convert the original angular plan 
to a more conventional right angle, transformed the angular line into a succession of 
digital steps: replacing the angular terminals of the first plan with a striking series of 
alternate glazed and masonry steps. 

"The serious architect comes closer to certain secrets of nature if he is master of organic 
form than most artists and even scientists."-F. LI. W. 

He had discovered the principle of the digital step, and he would take it further in the 
Elizabeth Noble Apartments, Los Angeles, 1929. Wright now moved the digital step into 
the fenestration elevation and plan, making the transition from large to small spaces 
through a series of layered steps. This window detail appeared in the R. Levin House, 
Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1948. 

It appears strongly in the upwardly expanding profile of The House on the Mesa, 1932. 
This design demonstrates a new openness to light and space.  A vast living room is 
contained within a great window, which in profile becomes a series of rising steps, 
projecting outward. This window detail was realized in the Walker House, Caramel, 
California, 1948. 


QUANTUM LEAP: DIGITAL STEP, ANALOG RAMP 

Man's discoveries in science and art seem to parallel one another, as if both aspects of the 
mind; the scientific and the artistic represent only different views of the same process. 

Wright discovered the digital step in architecture, shortly before science discovered the 
same principle in the architecture of subatomic physics: "That a linear increase (a ramp) of 
electric current produced a digital, (stepped) quantum increase in the resultant magnetic 
field." This discovery led to the Nobel Prize in science in 1933. 

These principles, digital and analog, step and ramp, represent two expressions of the same 
energy. 

H. Price, Sr., House, Paradise Valley, Arizona, 1954. A remarkable demonstration of a 
Roman villa reborn into the twentieth century. In the covered atrium with its central 
fountain, digital columns expand in a series of steps as they ascend. At the apex a slender 
steel shaft supports a vast, hovering roof plane. The materials are basic, 
twentieth-century: standard concrete block, steel I beams, Heraclith roof panels. Hinged 
decorative plywood screens allow the space to be closed when necessary. 


THE VERTICAL HILLSIDE HOUSE 

These converging discoveries: abstract form, structural core, cantilevered floor, roof, 
plane, balcony, and digital step, finally came together in the project of the first Malcolm 
Willey House, Minneapolis, 1932, revealing Wright's new solution for the hillside house. 

From a masonry mass emerging from the hillside cantilevers a large balcony. Continuous 
bands of windows and french doors open to the balcony and the view beyond. The balcony 
is framed by a band of stepped horizontal boards that progressively project outward. This 
detail of lapped digital boards appears here-after as virtually a standard detail both in the 
balcony and frequently the ceiling, in his residential projects. 

In his early work, as in the Ross House, Wright's solution for a house on a sloping lot was 
to extended its walls down, as skirts to the sloping terrain, or create a flat site through 
large retaining walls. Although this version of the Willey residence was not built, Wright, 
used its concept as the archetypal springboard for a whole new series of hillside houses. 

Wright said that the abstract Gale House, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904, originally conceived 
with reinforced concrete cantilevered balcony, was a discovery that led to Fallingwater. All 
of these different discoveries were converging into a new synergy, a tri-axial architecture, 
a structural wholeness greater than its parts. 


REDEMPTION 

Fallingwater received enormous publicity and soon became the most famous modern house 
in America. With this one building Wright, at age 67, was back at the top. 

Wright's projects would often take their owners for a rough ride, but equally transformed 
their lives, making their name famous. Among the guests who came to see the house were 
the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. They invited Edgar Kaufmann to visit 
them and they became friends. Edgar entered the architectural world and became the head 
of the Department of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Major architects are fiercely competitive and rarely admit they are influenced by another. 
In fact they always seem au fait with the latest development.  Alvar Aalto designed a house 
remarkably similar to Fallingwater, but he was never able to sell the idea of a forest 
location to his client. 


THE TRI-AXIAL HILLSIDE HOUSES 

There was never another Fallingwater, but a whole series of variations followed, usually in 
wood, frequently overlooking a stream, river, lake or ocean. 

The Pew House, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, 1939, shares the atmosphere and qualities of 
Taliesin East, with a similar great stone fireplace. It was built mainly with the fellowship 
labor and fits the forest glen as effortlessly and as magically as the surrounding trees. It is 
situated above a lake. The corner windows with their projecting plane roofs are striking 
and unique, an original concept that deserves further development. 

The George D. Sturgess House, Brentwood, 1939, with its great cantilever balcony 
projecting from an angular bracket from a brick mass, is one of his most abstract and 
striking houses. An asymmetrical pergola roof hovers over an extraordinary cantilevered 
balcony supported by a giant bracket. From the street one is confronted with a form as 
powerful as a Mayan temple. There is no sign it is a residence. Sheathed in digital lapped 
horizontal wood siding, it is one of his most remarkable houses. (When I worked nearby in 
an architect's office in the fifties I used to visit it during my lunch time to restore my 
confidence in the potential and greatness of architecture.) The rear is beautifully detailed 
in brick and wood. It is an exquisite architectural interplay of vertical and horizontal 
elements. 

The Gregor Affleck House, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1940, is elevated above the 
landscape and a small stream. An inner court looks down on a reflecting pool. The interior 
walls are sloped and covered with lapped siding. 

The Arch Obler House, "Eaglefeather," Malibu, California, 1940, is built on the side of a 
mountain top, with an extraordinary cantilevered balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean 
and a mountainous landscape. The center of the balcony is pierced with an opening, within 
which is planting. The axis of the house rotates around the mountain top in a play of 
geometric elements matched against the rugged landscape. 

The Ayn Rand House, Hollywood, California, Project 1947, is the closest design to 
Fallingwater, but lacks its coherence and finesse. Ayn Rand was a super-individualist 
and wrote the successful book, The Fountainhead, loosely based on Wright's career. It was 
turned into a movie, starring Gary Cooper. Wright was asked to design the architectural 
sets but the studio refused to pay his fee. Ayn Rand once asked to visit Taliesin East and 
when she arrived Wright send a message asking her to wait for him in the living room. So 
she stood by the fireplace waiting. Meanwhile, Wright called up Ed, the old Welsh 
stonemason who was more than 70, and told him the fireplace had a loose stone that 
needed fixing. Old Ed entered the living room and, finding only Ayn Rand there, asked 
her what exactly needed fixing in the fireplace. This was a rerun of the scene in the movie 
where Gary Cooper, playing the architect working as a stonemason, is called in by Patricia 
Neal to fix the fireplace. Ayn Rand evidently was not amused. She eventually bought a 
Neutra house. 

Chapel of the Soil, 1937. Wright designed this extraordinary chapel without a client. It 
expresses his own deep relationship with the earth. Here for the first time he scooped out 
the earth and sank the building into its embrace, berming the earth against its walls, as 
though he wanted the visitor to be in the earth, of the earth, and experience its arcane 
spirits and invisible forces. Strange decorative forms are cast into the concrete columns. 

The wall fenestration steps outward in a series of saw toothed, angled steps. A reflection 
pool introduces the element of water. It is a chapel for the forest glade, where a passing 
stranger can meditate and commune with his gods. (Wright's son Lloyd Wright designed 
the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, which in a different form follows the same 
function.) 


The Sixth Age. 
Curving Space 

IN 1931 WRIGHT crossed from the linear square to the analog circle with his project for 
the Capitol Journal Newspaper Plant in Salem, Oregon. Within the squares of a 20-foot 
grid were centered circular "mushroom columns." The printing presses were to be installed 
on the ground floor, with mezzanine offices upstairs. The columns would support the 
mezzanine, roof garden and two-story penthouse apartments above. The corners of the 
building were curved. 

There were two symmetrical entrances and behind each a circular stair led to the offices 
and roof garden above. A spiral service ramp at the rear ascended around a circular 
smokestack to the roof garden above. The outer fenestration of copper and glass was 
suspended from the roof slab above. The columns were visible from the outside. 

The client, unable to obtain financing, abandoned the project; but for Wright something 
new had been discovered and set in motion. 

In the spring of 1936 Taliesin had only a few residential jobs on the boards and was barely 
surviving. Not far away the Beaux Arts architect Matson was signing a contract for the 
new Johnson Wax Building. At this moment in time there seemed no connection between 
these events, but in Wright's life, events had a way of following a zigzag path. 

In early summer one of Wright's friends organized a weekend at Taliesin for the Art 
Director's Club. Present was Willis Jones, a young art director, who was deeply impressed 
by Taliesin East and Wright's work. When he returned to Racine he communicated his 
enthusiasm to his friend, W. Connolly, advertising manager of Johnson Wax, and showed 
him the Wasmuth book of Wright's work. 

Herb Johnson had taken over the family business, and in spite of the depression, the new 
discovery of carnuba wax polish followed by an audacious advertising campaign had been 
successful and the company was prosperous and rapidly expanding. 

Meanwhile, Matson's drawings for the new building were nearing completion and the 
company was acquiring more land for the new expansion. Matson presented his plans to 
the client. In the entry he had provided niches for the placement of several realistic 
sculptures. These included a boy waxing a table and a woman waxing a floor. 

When Johnson and his manager looked at the plans they were appalled, exclaiming, "It's 
just another building!" In an urgent search for a better architect they consulted Rafferty, a 
good architect of modern buildings and apparently something of a saint. He responded that 
certainly he would like a crack at it, but that such an exciting project belonged to the father 
of modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived not far away. 

Connolly and Ramsey asked Jones to set up a meeting with Wright. Ground for the new 
building was to be broken in July. Wright knew how to set the scene for an important 
potential client. Taliesin was spruced up for the visit of the Johnson Wax people. 

Jones arrived early to explain the situation with Wright. After meeting Wright, Connolly 
and Ramsey were impressed by his ideas, but now came the task of persuading Johnson to 
discard Matson for Wright. They arranged a meeting between the two. 

Johnson drove out to Taliesin to have a private lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Wright 
liked to be alone with the client during the first critical meeting. They met, argued and 
laughed. Johnson recalled, "He insulted me ... I insulted him ... I showed him pictures of 
the old office and he said it was awful ... I said if that guy can talk like that he must have 
something. He had a Lincoln Zephyr, and I had one-that was the only thing we agreed 
on." 

Wright described Matson's plan as a fancy crematorium. When Johnson suggested he did 
not want a building too unconventional, Wright replied, laughing, "You came to the 
wrong man ... the building is not going to be what you expect. But I assure you of one 
thing-you'll like it when it is put up." 

Beneath their jocularity lay a common bond: enlightened ideals to create a new kind of 
workspace for the workers. Johnson's family had a long tradition of concern for social 
progress. His father had introduced profit sharing, the 40-hour week and no layoffs. 

When the check and letter arrived jubilation rang through Taliesin. It was Wright's first 
big check in a decade, Taliesin's first major, solid project. "When the sky at Taliesin was 
dark ... Hib and Jack came like messengers riding on white steeds trumpeting glad tidings 
... the pie thus opened, the birds began to sing ... dry grass on the hillside waxed green ..." 
Wright said, "held back outside the current of building for seven years ... never ceasing to 
be glad that I have for friends the two men who came to see me that day. I knew the 
scheme I wanted to try ... when I drew the newspaper plant." 

Johnson recalled that as a child he lived only a few blocks from Wright's Hardy House. 
Perhaps something influenced him even then. He wanted Wright to begin drawing-as 
soon as possible. 

Edgar Tafel drove Wright out to Racine to see the site, already cleared and ready for 
construction. It sat in the middle of an industrial wasteland of factories, run-down houses 
and bars. The environment was so depressing that Wright wanted to move Johnson Wax 
out to the countryside and make it a part of a Broadacre City project, but Herb Johnson 
resisted all his pressures. After yet another big argument over the location, Olgivanna said, 
"Give them what they want, Frank, or you will lose the job." 

Wright realized that-like the Larkin Building-stuck with an ugly environment, he 
would need to create a luminous world within. He returned to Taliesin with his first 
conceptual sketch drawn on the back of Matson's discarded plans. 

Hib (as Wright called him) Johnson became a good friend of Wright and a frequent guest 
at Taliesin weekends. With his enthusiasm, energy and power he would back his architect 
to the very end. It was just as well Wright had his concept already in mind because Hib 
was impatient to begin construction immediately. 


THE S.C. JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION BUILDING, RACINE, WISCONSIN, 
1936-39 

Wright sought a streamlined continuity in which curvilinear walls, fenestration, and roof 
become one continuous structure; where the parts became one indivisible whole, a 
luminous workplace expressing a new sense of freedom, movement and flowing space. 
Like the physicist who designs a collision between two systems to create a new element 
and energy, so Wright employed the interaction between two different geometric systems, 
square and circle, to generate new forms and energy. Beginning as a right angle the brick 
corners metamorphose into a curved luminous cornice. Above, the brick wall, now curved, 
ascends to a curved, larger, glass cornice. 

The matrix of the glass tubes of the luminous ceiling follows the lines of the 20-foot 
square grid floor plan, and is framed by the circular petals of the columns. The ceiling 
becomes a pattern of circles played against luminous crosses. 

He was embarking on a new voyage of discovery into circular form, mass, space and light. 
Wes Peters said that Wright's progress evolved day after day as he discovered new ways to 
express fluid space. Each new discovery opened the door to another. From the moment the 
first concrete foundation was poured-one month later-Johnson Wax became an ongoing 
and ever-changing movement of creation, a fusion of discovery and invention. 

Wright's vision was of a great workplace supported by tall slender columns. But the first 
obstacle he encountered was the building regulations which called for a minimum 
30-inch diameter concrete column. He said, "so thick you wouldn't be able to see across 
the room." First he would have to reinvent the column. 


THE DENDRIFORM COLUMN 

Tree trunk and its foliage are circular. Observing that the trees in a forest generate space 
and create the magical light entering through the spaces between inspired Wright's design 
for the great workspace. Wright called his new columns dendriform (from the Greek akin 
to branched tree). 

Wright had designed a mushroom column for the Richland Center Warehouse, Wisconsin, 
1915. Based on the standard engineer's design for supporting heavy loads the thick cap 
transfers large shear loads. His version was 24 inches square, with the stresses transferred 
by an angular 6-foot square capital decorated with a triangular motif. 

The 18-foot high concrete columns for the Capitol Building were 24 inches in diameter 
at the top tapering to 18 inches at the bottom. To isolate the upper floors from the 
vibration and noise of the printing presses below, Wright placed the columns into a small 
metal shoe, resting on an independent foundation, to minimize contact with the ground 
floor slab. He carried this detail over into his dendriform column. 

Wright reinvented the column. Through structural continuity he transformed the massive 
shear cap into the 18-foot, 6-inch petal that cantilevers out to become the roof itself. 
The old elements of post-beam-joist-plank structure were rendered obsolete. The new 
column was 21 feet high-31 feet in the lobby-tapering from 22-inch diameter at the 
top to a 9-inch bronze crowsfoot base. (Within was hidden a rainwater pipe.) The 
transition from horizontal roof to the vertical column is made through a 'calyx-capital,' a 
series of digital stepped rings from 'petal to stem.' 

Wright intuitively drew the conoid forms that exactly follows the line of the stresses from 
roof to base. The continuity of structural steel makes roof and column one: the roof 
becomes the point. Form follows function, transferring 400 square feet of roof load, 20,000 
pounds, down to a 9-inch diameter bronze "tiptoe" point. An area ratio of 800:1. A 
graphic example that the form itself is as structurally potent as its materials. 


INVENTION 

As alchemist Wright transmuted new technologies and materials to create his dendriform 
column: the steel form, high strength 7000 p.s.i. pumped concrete with vibrator, expanded 
steel mesh shaped to the form, high strength steel, spiral reinforcement. He made the 
upper third of the column hollow, its walls only 3 1/2 inches thick and continued them 
into the 2 1/2-inch thick petal with its supporting ribs. 


THE TEST 

Although Johnson had a good relationship with the local officials they were anxious to 
cover their backs in case of failure. Refusing to accept the engineering calculations alone, 
the building department demanded the new column be tested with a load of 24,000 
pounds-twice the full design load. 

The foundations were in when Wright built his test column which would be loaded with 
pig iron to see if it could sustain the regulation load. 

It was not only the column that was being tested, but Wright's vision, the fate of the 
project. 

Surrounded by a crowd of officials, reporters, clients, and Taliesin workers a crane 
dumped load after load of pig iron on the column. Wright stood by the column, 
unperturbed by the mounting tension around him, periodically tapping it with his cane. 
When the load finally reached the 24,000 pounds required, everyone sighed with relief. 
But Wright insisted they keep going and see how far it could go before the point of 
destruction. By late afternoon there was no more room to add any pig iron. At 60 tons, it 
was carrying five times the test requirements. Wright seeing he had made his point, 
ordered the supporting braces removed. The calyx of the column broke, but the column 
stem itself was still intact. He had proved his vision in practice, and created a new column 
for the twentieth century. In the evolution of the column from the first simple tree trunk to 
Karnak, the Parthenon, through the Gothic fan vaults of Kings College Chapel, Wright 
had made a quantum leap. Wright said, "Greek or Egyptian found a revelation of the 
inmost life and character of the lotus and acanthus in terms of lotus or acanthus life." All 
this great architectural inspiration came from the understanding of nature. 

Wright, by metamorphosing the ugly mushroom into the graceful dendriform, had 
achieved the delicate tall slender column he envisioned, like a dancer poised on a point, 
balanced by the connecting arms between the petals. The dendriform columns became 
generators of space. There are no supporting walls, the free standing columns support the 
whole structure: roof, mezzanine and suspended cornices. 


THE LUMINOUS CORNICE 

Wright hated the "trapped space," the dark corner where the cornice joins vertical wall to 
horizontal ceiling in the traditional house. At one Sunday talk Mr. Wright said to us, 
"Boys, you must learn to avoid the re-entrant angle-the acute angle in a ceiling 
terminating against a wall-which traps space and avoid an angle in which space cannot 
be released through an opening or a skylight." 

The dark cornice has been transformed into a luminous cornice of light. Spliced 
transparent tubes allow an unbroken continuity of form. The suspended luminous cornice 
of glass tubing separates the non-load-bearing brick wall below from the ceiling plane 
above, allowing the ceiling planes to float above a continuous band of light. 

Wright achieved his streamlined sweeping curves by using special curved bricks. He 
rejected conventional windows and experimented with wedge-shaped glass blocks, but he 
found their joints broke the flowing continuity he sought. He needed a transparent material 
that could follow the curves, randomly spliced at the joints, to achieve a seamless 
perfection. He discovered it in the pyrex laboratory tubing that chemists use to transport 
liquids. He wrote to Corning Glass asking for samples and cost. Assembling a test section 
at Taliesin, he saw that through the glass tubing, a figure was transformed into a 
marvelous abstract, impressionist image. He had found his new medium. To make it 
watertight he designed a tube section indented top and bottom with a parallel groove for 
caulking. To support the stacked tubes he designed a curved metal casting. The 
extraordinary section of the luminous cornice shows it swelling out-like an eye-on the 
exterior. The rhythms of the glass tubing was varied by the use of different tube diameters. 

"That lifelong endeavor to demolish the box ... so I took the corners out. I came upon the 
elimination of the horizontal corner, the corner between walls and ceiling ... I took off the 
cornice ... thus light was let into the interior space where light had never been 
before."-F.LI.W. 

Flowing in continuous bands around the building, the crystal tubing clarifies and diffuses 
the light. It was the organic system he sought, an audacious, revolutionary system. 


THE GREAT WORKROOM 

The great workroom expresses a new sense of freedom and movement, a luminous and 
magical space, an interior oasis of space and light within an industrial desert. 

Beginning as points, the columns are so perfectly formed they seem to flow upwards on 
their own accord, as if seeking the light above, spilling over the petals, outlined against the 
sky. The linear grid of the building is reflected in the pyrex tubes, veins of light etched 
against the sky. The ceiling plane floats above the glass cornice, which suspends from the 
edges of the petals, flows in continuous bands of light. 

Extending around all four sides of the workspace the mezzanine is serviced by circular 
elevators. The ceiling beneath is illuminated by a second luminous cornice. Concealed 
lighting provides a diffused illumination that reinforces the natural light. 

Wright said that steel in tension makes "weight in this building appear to lift and float in 
light and air." 

The unbroken bands of light beneath roof, mezzanine and petals convey a sense of 
weightlessness, so that the individual elements seem to float suspended in space and time. 
Within this clear refracted light Wright has created a mythical world suffused with light, 
of circular lillypads floating against the sky. 

The curved form of the crystal tubes, refracting light as through the rippled surface of a 
stream, creates a pure and vibrant light. Johnson Wax takes its place among the great 
historic spaces of architecture. Now it is no longer a palace for an elite, but a 
twentieth-century celebration of democracy and the individual. The great workspace 
complements the Usonian house, bringing together the essential elements of Broadacre 
City. 

Wright said, "Johnson Wax is a feminine building sired by the masculine Larkin Building 
... a streamlined building." When the building opened in 1939 it received universal 
acclaim. Life magazine described the building, "It is like a woman swimming naked in a 
stream." Johnson Wax received more than $2,000,000 of free publicity. More than the 
$700,000 cost of the building. When Wes Peters took the Finnish architect and master of 
flowing space, Aalvar Aalto, to see the building he exclaimed, "This is greater than I." 


INNER AND OUTER WORLDS: INTERFLOWING LIGHT AND SPACE 

Night photos of Johnson Wax reveal light radiating from the cornices. In his renderings 
Wright would often have a reverse photostat made for a night view, which would show 
inner space-as light-streaming out of the windows and skylights. This picture showing 
the light streaming out from the interior was his graphic illustration, a metaphor of 
interior space flowing out to the exterior. 


SUNG VASE 

In a glass window in the corridor by the Taliesin West living room a Sung vase partly 
projects, through a circular hole cut in the glass, into the outside. The vase penetrates both 
worlds. It is a paradigm of Wright's insight into the relationship between inner and outer 
spaces. 

Wright was always fascinated by the relationship between two worlds, between the interior 
and exterior worlds of architecture. He saw it as emblematic of man, who stands at the 
threshold between two worlds, the interior world of the psyche and the exterior physical 
world. 

He saw, like Marshall McLuhan, that the body is an extension of the mind, the house an 
extension of the body, the window an extension of the eye. To Wright glass was a 
membrane separating inner and outer space: the regulator and modifier of the flow of 
energy, space and light, between inner and outer worlds. He saw that the window that 
admits light and space in was equally the opening that allowed space to flow out. 


THE GLASS HOUSE 

One day Wes Peters was driving Wright back from a conference when Wright said, "We 
must be near my architect friend's new glass house. If he ever heard I had passed nearby 
without visiting him, he would never forgive me. Let's see if we can find it." They found 
the all-glass house situated in the middle of a green lawn. Wright walked up to the house 
and, peering in the window, saw his friend in bed with his lover. Wright, laughing, 
exclaimed, "Still at it, I see!" The architect and his companion dashed to the bathroom, the 
only enclosed space in the house. Reappearing, wrapped in a robe, the architect came to 
the door and said, "Oh Mr. Wright, what a lovely surprise, do come in." Wright entered, 
paused, and said, "Wait a minute, am I outside or inside, where should I hang my coat?" 

Contrary to expectations, Wright rarely used large California style "picture windows." 
Like a weir controlling the flow of a river, Wright modulated the flow between inner and 
outer space by a variety of devices. The evolution of the window began with the 
elimination of the "hole punched in the wall," moved from double-hung to bands of 
casement, to awning, mitered glass corner, and up to clerestory, from leaded glass to the 
decorative windows of the prairie house, the inserts of the block houses, the glazing 
muntin pattern of the Usonian, pyrex tubing of Johnson, canvas roofs of Taliesin West, 
fret-work plywood screens (an economic version of decorative), glass spheres of the 
Greek Church to the suspended plastic hemispheres of the Morris Store. Always the 
interrelationship between inner and outer space is delicately balanced; in the Hanna House 
the windows are divided by several horizontal muntins to control the flow between inner 
and outer space. In the Llewellyn House he described the alternate vertical bands of wall 
and glazing, as a palisade. 


THE WINDOW 

One Sunday after Mr. Wright's breakfast talk I was standing in the Hillside school dining 
room fascinated by the original window treatment: a double casement window floated, 
surrounded by six inches of glass, within the limestone wall. Suddenly I was aware of Mr. 
Wright behind me. With the intimacy of a friend he said, "Son, all my life I have been 
trying to solve the problem of the window in the wall and here I thought I had it!" I was 
struck by the simple, direct way he said this, for he revealed to me his simple, inner face, 
forever open to the Muse, imbued with the quality of questing youth. 


SICKNESS 

With one of those fresh insights, the unexpected mutations, the delightful surprises, that 
prevent his buildings ever becoming mechanical or repetitive, Wright changed the column 
spacing for the more intimate spaces at the penthouse. And in the rear entry he created a 
breathtakingly different rhythm in the spacing of the carport, where he punched 
hemispheres of space into the concrete ceiling, reversing the plastic form of the petals into 
negative forms. 

Johnson's insistence to proceed with construction immediately before Taliesin had time to 
complete the drawings and details, put enormous pressure on Wright. At one point during 
the construction, changes and additions to the penthouse necessitated replacing its 
foundations with larger footings. The pressure of work became relentless. Endless journeys 
to the site-165 miles-were required. In December the Midwest winter was hitting hard. 
After spending another long day at the freezing site Wright came down with a bad cold. 
When it turned into pneumonia the doctor forbade him to work and ordered him to stay in 
bed. Peters, Tafel and the other workers were instructed to circumvent vital decisions until 
his recovery. Now 70 years old, the doctor advised Wright to go to the dry desert to 
recover. Wright, along with family and some apprentices, took off for Arizona, taking 
drawing boards and plans along with them. 


THE BIRTH OF TALIESIN WEST, PARADISE VALLEY, ARIZONA, 1937 

Whenever he was sick, Wright found renewal in the desert. There, while recovering his 
strength, Wright made the decision to build a new camp. With the money from Johnson's 
advance he bought cheaply 400 acres of virgin desert 15 miles outside Scottsdale. At $3.50 
per acre, it had no water, but Wright soon found it, and began to lay out the plan of 
Taliesin West directly on the site. 


"Living in the desert is the spiritual cathartic many people need. I am one of them."-F. 
LI. W. 


The first simple building was constructed of wood and canvas, "the Suntrap" for the 
Wrights. Olgivanna was quite tough, roughing it in the desert, with only the simplest of 
plumbing facilities. 

What is remarkable is that at the same time he was designing the most streamlined 
building in America, he was excavating a powerful, ancient vision. In the annals of 
architecture has there ever been an architect who simultaneously created two such totally 
different designs? 

Taliesin now took another, fourth, form. The tiny, nascent germ of an 
idea-Ocotilla-now bloomed into magnificent reality. 

When Edgar Tafel and some apprentices found a large boulder inscribed with Indian 
petroglyphs, Wright made sure they placed it at Taliesin in its original orientation. He 
said, "When the Indians come back 2000 years from now to claim their land, they will 
note we had respect for their orientation." 

If Wright could patiently wait for over a quarter of a century to see one of his designs built, 
he showed all the impatience of youth when it came to unwrapping the forms of his latest 
creation. A week after Tafel and others poured the concrete for the theater #1, Wright told 
him to take down the forms. Tafel reminded him that one is supposed to wait the standard 
28 days needed for concrete to set. "No matter," said Wright, "I have a client coming and I 
want him to see the new space." Since the walls step outward as they ascend-as with the 
Mesa house project-Tafel very gingerly removed the supports, and was relieved to find 
the structure remained standing. 

He was not always so successful. Wright's new idea was to go halfway up, reverse the 
usual backward slope of the wall to slope outwards. Wright invariably pushed his ideas to 
the limit. So impatient was he to see if his new concept was a success he ordered the form 
removed after only a few days. After viewing and approving the result, Wright and Tafel 
sat down for lunch. Suddenly they heard a roaring crash! The unsupported wall had 
collapsed. No matter, after lunch they began to put it back up again. 

When I arrived in 1954, Taliesin West looked as if it had existed forever. As a new 
apprentice, I inherited a pyramidal shepherd's tent to live in, eight feet square at the base. 
This I mounted on a revolving wooden platform, designed by Wright's grandson, Eric 
Lloyd Wright, allowing a diverse choice of views: primal mountain or distant city lights. 

The apprentices expressed considerable imagination in what they did with their pieces of 
canvas. One had built a massive stone base, another stretched the canvas by ropes from 
adjoining trees, creating a desert sheik effect. Around the camp about forty tents were 
scattered, some with pennants flying in the breeze. It looked like a scene from Henry V. 
One day, looking down on the camp from above, Wright observed that the tents looked 
like a bunch of chickens scattered across the landscape! Concerned about preserving the 
primal desert, he had them moved further away from the mountainside. 

We celebrated our reunion at Taliesin West with a party in J. R.'s tent. Drinking cheap 
Mexican rum brought back from El Paso, Bruce Pfeiffer and I drank toasts to Queen 
Victoria. After 2 A.M.., somewhat inebriated, I departed and lost my way and I seemed 
doomed to end up in the deadly embrace of a cholla cactus, but at the last minute, I saw my 
forlorn tent and was saved. 

It was quite a leap from a London flat. I had to learn to watch out for spiders and snakes 
and remember to shake out my sleeping bag each night to oust lurking scorpions. The 
three-foot high wall around the camp to discourage rattlesnakes was not always 
successful: Wes Peters, on entering his room one day, was confronted by a very big and 
angry one. Peters, a larger-than-life John Wayne character, simply grabbed his six 
shooter and blasted it. 

My first few nights were spent in the library, before my tent had been sorted out. The 
library was the former theater #1-there were finally three. Wright was always busy 
building a newer and bigger version. This was the earliest, a somewhat cubist structure of 
desert stone and concrete, unique in the way the outer walls step up and out. I was 
surprised to find several volumes of Edward Lutyens dedicated to his "Good friend, Frank 
Lloyd Wright." Wright's taste in literature included Whitman, Thoreau, Viollet-le-Duc, 
Kropotkin and Lao Tse. 

We were told to bring with us to Taliesin a sleeping bag, a T-square, hammer and a saw. 
I had borrowed an ancient army sleeping bag from a friend in England, but no one had 
told me that at night the temperature in the desert drops below freezing. The joke of the 
hammer was that I had brought one of the finest English hammers, with a beautiful ash 
handle, but in the extreme dryness of the Arizona desert the hammer head flew off at the 
first blow. 

I recall at Taliesin West getting up on the roof of the living room to replace some of the 
redwood beams-under the harsh desert sun the redwood just turns to papier-mache. I 
could pull the nails out with my fingers. 


WRIGHT'S WORKING METHOD 

The contract would be signed, the plot plans would arrive, and Wright would go off and 
see the site. A twenty-minute visit was often all he needed. There are numerous accounts 
of his uncanny ability to view a site briefly, absorbing every detail of its character, then 
being able to go back to Taliesin and draw up a building to suit the site exactly. He would 
just put a sheet of yellow tracing paper over the site plan and start to sketch the plans and 
elevations, and it would fit. This would usually take just a few hours, usually in short 
spurts of activity. 

Each day he would be in the drafting room for maybe an hour or two. Everyone was facing 
the fireplace in the drafting room, and he'd be sitting at the front with his back to you. He 
had his own drafting board just like the others. He'd come in with his porkpie hat, cane, 
and cloak; or if you came late and saw the cloak and cane on the bench by his drafting 
table, you knew he was there. He'd sit down, with Jack Howe standing on one side and 
Wes Peters on the other, and show them conceptual thumbnail sketches of his ideas. The 
original sketch Wright did for the Mile High skyscraper was on an ordinary sheet of office 
typing paper, handed over to Jack Howe and some of the other seniors who then worked it 
up. The original sketch for Trinity Chapel was made on the page of a brochure. They had 
an excellent relationship with Wright and an clear sense of what he wanted. He would get 
up after half an hour or so and leave them to begin drawing up his ideas. Jack Howe, who 
had been with Wright twenty years, would usually do the preliminary design from these 
sketches, spending the rest of the day on it. 

Meanwhile Wright would be off into town for appointments. After lunch he would be back 
to check over what Howe had been working on. Then you might get a rumor in the 
afternoon. "Mr. Wright has changed it all-he's had a new idea." 

The six or seven seniors would be doing working drawings and details-all for projects at 
various stages of development. If they needed help they would try to attract Wright's 
attention. If an apprentice was lucky, his project might also catch Wright's eagle eye while 
he was passing and he would stop off at your board. Howe usually went over the penciled 
working drawings and inked-in the things he considered important. He was incredibly 
helpful to new apprentices. 

Wright's details were bold and simple. His was a straightforward approach that also 
showed in his letters to clients which were very informative, often with a sketch. One 
client sent back the preliminary plans of her house with a list of nitpicking corrections. 
Wright sent her a telegram: "Do you want a chicken on the nest or an eagle in flight?" 

Towards the end of the year-if an apprentice showed any talent-he would be assigned, 
as clerk of the works, to coordinate with the contractor and ensure that he followed the 
drawings. This was excellent experience for the apprentice, and it ensured that the 
frequent unusual construction methods used by Wright were carried out. An apprentice did 
not dare change a detail. One day I was in the office when a telegram arrived from an 
anxious apprentice in another state: "CONCRETE BOND BEAM PASSES THRU 
CHIMNEY FLUE PERIOD WHAT SHALL I DO?" Someone on the drawing board, 
lacking the necessary three-dimensional perception, had got it wrong. 


ENTERTAINING MR. WRIGHT 

Wright had always enjoyed exotic cars. One day, exploring the garages of Taliesin East, I 
discovered his old Cord, a classic American car of the thirties. It looked as though Wright 
might have designed it himself, and with its horizontal grille, belonged alongside the 
architecture of Johnson Wax. It was sitting up on blocks and obviously needed a lot of 
attention. (The car has since been restored, and was listed for sale recently as Wright's 
automobile.) He insisted that apprentices park their cars as far away as possible, and 
disliked shiny chrome so much that most cars, including his Jaguars, were painted entirely 
with matte Taliesin red (an earth red). All the machines, steel and tools were given this 
treatment. He loved to be driven at high speed along the desert roads. One of the seniors 
had the job of also being Wright's chauffeur. Wright would suddenly announce that he 
wanted to see a John Ford movie in Phoenix-he particularly liked cowboy stories-and so 
they would jump in the Jag and take it up to 80 or 90 mph to get to the movie on time. 
Wright would spend the afternoon relaxing in front of the film. I remember one old 
English film based on a Dickens novel, in which, during a courtroom scene, the naive hero 
turns to his lawyer and says, "Don't worry, justice will prevail." The lawyer, turning, says, 
"Hm, that's an interesting idea." At this point Wright cracked up, roaring with laughter 
until tears ran down his face, remembering his own bouts with an unsympathetic law. 

Sometimes during his favorite movie-or with a new movie he didn't like-he would just 
get up in the middle and walk out. I suspect that watching films was not only his form of 
relaxation but also his form of thinking and meditating, and when the time came he would 
cut out. One of Wright's favorite films was Stagecoach, particularly the location shots in 
Monument Valley. He loved foreign movies, especially French ones. Some films, if he 
liked them enough, would be bought and became part of the film library. One such favorite 
was the Russian fairy tale The Magic Horse, the story of the mythic Firebird. Wright 
obviously enjoyed this story of renewal by fire, a Russian version of the phoenix myth. 

On Saturday nights dinner was served in the Cabaret Theater, which had benches for 
seating with a shelf at the back of the bench in front of you to hold your plate. After dinner 
a movie would be shown. Wright had the idea that watching the changing forms of the 
soundtrack of a movie was fun, and so this would appear on a vertical red screen alongside 
the film. Wright would be having dinner at the back of the theater, generally entertaining 
new clients, friends or visiting celebrities. 


DAILY LIFE 

We would buy cases of oranges from groves near Taliesin West. Wright had designed a 
shallow bowl from a harrow disc on a wooden pedestal with a low-level light bulb built 
into its base. We would pile these "lamps" high with oranges to be taken whenever we felt 
like one. Similar lights were set in the ceiling, walls, and in the floor, under toughened 
glass. Wright's approach to lighting was that it should be diffused like natural light: you 
should not be aware of a single source. 

Breakfast would consist of three or four oranges fed into the juicer, toast and brew from a 
marvelous coffee machine. Lunch was generally good, but it would depend on who was 
detailed to cook. Dinner was served at six in the evening. You could sit wherever you 
wished; the food was usually basic, no wine. One week I was assigned kitchen duty and 
found it grueling: up at five in the morning to prepare breakfast, and then working all day 
until midnight before cleaning the last of the sauce pans. It was like an initiation, a 
Taliesin rite of passage-I don't remember seeing the sun for a week. 

During the week, for five or six days, we all lived in blue jeans: we never knew whether we 
would be pouring concrete, cooking meals, or drafting. But a nice change came on 
Saturdays and Sundays, especially in the evenings, when we put on our Sunday clothes 
and suddenly were gentlemen and no longer proletarian worker/students. We would appear 
in the living room, and the string quartet would play some Mozart, and the choir would 
sing. Then drinks and dinner would be served. 

On Sunday mornings everyone dressed for a formal breakfast, and afterwards Wright 
would give a talk. 

There were always several cultural events going on. Boys were rehearsing a Shakespeare 
play; we could join the choir or the chamber quartet; there were dance movements; and for 
some the local bars or movie houses at Phoenix and Scottsdale were preferred. 

Wright was a collector of people and enjoyed helping the underdog. One old bum I knew 
asked Wright for help, and he said, "We are leaving for Wisconsin soon and you can be 
the caretaker of Taliesin West while we are away." My friend Roger Sommers told me that 
when he was unable to get an appointment to see Wright, he located his hotel, bribed the 
room service man to take his place and served Wright's breakfast in his suite. When he 
revealed his impersonation, Wright just roared with laughter. 


HERBERT JOHNSON HOUSE, WIND POINT, WISCONSIN, 1937, 
"WINGSPREAD," THE LAST PRAIRIE HOUSE 

Wright used the pinwheel plan-an ancient archetype of the sun wheel-for this residence 
for Herb Johnson. The house indeed revolves around the central fireplace. There are five in 
its brick core: grand hall, dining room, library, music room and mezzanine. What Wright 
called the "wigwam" core is surrounded by a continuous skylight. It was Wright's most 
expensive house, employing the finest workmanship, exotic wood veneers and a spiral stair 
to the roof belvedere. 

He called it, "the last prairie house." Certainly it is a prairie house transformed into 
modern form, floating above the landscape, but why "the last?" Wright implies that the 
cycle of energy that brought a generation of prairie houses had reached the final flowering. 

In his design, he kept extending the cantilever of the master bedroom, as if testing how far 
he could go. Edgar Tafel and Wes Peters were concerned because there was little mass to 
counterbalance the cantilever and Wright seemed quite uninterested in this problem. Tafel 
tried another approach. When Wright was away he casually told Johnson if he needed 
somewhere to store his trunks, there was a space beneath the bedroom wing that could be 
employed. Johnson said, "Tell Frank I like the idea." When Wright returned, Tafel relayed 
Johnson's message. "Good idea," said Wright. Tafel and Peters designed the foundation of 
the new trunk room as a massive concrete counterweight. The angular influence of the 
new Taliesin West can be seen in the forms of the playroom and carport. 

One day when the house was three quarters complete, a dove that had taken residence in 
the belvedere flew away. A carpenter saw it as an ill omen, and shortly afterwards 
Johnson's young bride died. 


THE SUNTOP HOMES, ARDMORE, PENNSYLVANIA, 1938-39 

This two-story quadruplex employed an Indian swastika plan. During the war Wright 
used the design for his housing project for a hundred units for the Federal Government 
near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A complaint from local architects that Wright was an 
out-of-state architect and the project belonged to local men resulted in him losing the 
job. 


JESTER HOUSE PROJECT, PALOS VERDES, CALIFORNIA, 1938 

In 1912 Wright designed a series of decorative windows for the Coonley Playhouse. 
Representing the forms of a children's parade the circles are abstractions of balloons 
floating on strings, amongst flags and pennants. 

In the unrestricted breadth of his imagination a form could effortlessly glide from vertical 
plane to horizontal plane, from two dimensions to three. He was well known for his gift to 
transpose an old form into a different context. Once, approaching the drawing board he 
observed a horizontal window design and remarked to the draftsman, "That would make a 
better form vertically." 

Wright had a direct access to every one of his past discoveries. These, like a seed, could 
remain dormant for years until some new challenge triggered them into the next stage of 
growth. Twenty-five years later, the circles and lines of the Coonley window are 
transformed into the plan for the Jester House; a play of circles set in a square matrix. 
Wright, with a new freedom, allowed the circles to become freestanding rooms of different 
diameters defined by use; living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bath, valet. Like 
balloons floating in space, the rooms are tethered to the lines of the pergola grid. The 
house is mirrored in its largest circle, the swimming pool, expressing the natural form of 
water. Wright always enjoyed challenging a site, and placed the pool in a natural gulley, 
instead of the usual hole in the ground. The outer edge wall of the pool is flush with the 
water level, allowing the water to cascade down to the gulley below. He has artfully 
created a circular Fallingwater. 

Wright was adept in grasping new technology to further his architectural reach. Now 
utilizing the curved strength of plywood when formed into a cylinder, he used it as the 
material for the circular walls of the Jester House. (Aircraft designers use the principle for 
the stressed skin fuselage.) 

The circles become vertical towers, arising out of the roof which is supported by stone 
columns. A master of textures, Wright contrasts the rough stone surface of the columns 
against the smooth, sensuous surface of the plywood, the plastic curves of the walls against 
the orthogonal matrix of the roof. The windows follow the curved walls as wide horizontal 
slots. The bachelor client was an assistant film director. The balmy site was perfect for an 
open living style. 

The project was a major, seminal work, but the design proved too challenging for the 
contractors of the time and was not built. Several variations followed, some with a 
pollywog bedroom extension. Fifteen years after Wright's death the house was finally built, 
in a modified form, for Bruce Pfeiffer and his father beside Taliesin West 1974. 

Ludd M. Spivey House Project, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1939. Spivey said to Wright, "We 
choose you as much for your philosophy as for your architecture." Wright designed a 
circular house for Spivey, President of Florida Southern College as well as the new campus 
in Lakeland in 1938, where the library is also a large circular structure. The great fountain 
generates a hemisphere of water above a circular pool. 

Herbert Jacobs House, "Solar Hemicycle," Middleton, Wisconsin, 1943, construction, 
1948-49. Stories that Wright would force his designs onto unwilling clients are untrue. If 
they rejected his design Wright would take a pause and begin again with an entirely new 
concept. (Although keeping the original aside, to await an appropriate client.) When Herb 
Jacobs rejected Wright's orthogonal design for his house as too large and expensive, 
Wright sent Jacobs a note a month later. "We are about ready to make you 'the goat' for a 
fresh enterprise in architecture ... if you don't get what is on the boards some other fellow 
will. So watch out. It's good. I think we have a real 'first' that you will like a lot. Only the 
picture remains to be done-suppose you come out next Sunday." 

In the Jacobs Hemicycle, earth, berm, site and house become one indivisible entity, 
oriented to the solar cycle. 

Taking his form from the shape and orbit of the sun, Wright designed the house as a part 
of a circle, completed by the earth itself, now an integral part of its architecture. His 
windows follow the orbit of the sun, the sunken garden becomes a sun trap, the concave 
form generates solar heating. 

Entry is through a cave penetrating the outer earth berm into the sunken garden within. 
Wright echoes the circular forms, earth berms and solar orientation of the first 
Stonehenge, 2700 B.C. Drawing upon ancient archetypes, druidic ancestors, he created a 
new architecture expressing the eternal relationship between man, earth and cosmos. (Both 
share a similar size diameter and spacing. The house columns are spaced at 6 degrees, the 
Stonehenge posts were 6.4 degrees.) 

The berm along the north wall and the sunken garden shield the structure from the cold 
winter winds of the rural hilltop location. It is a house for the north designed to utilize the 
maximum from the light and heat of the sun, and protected during the summer by a large 
roof overhang. The war introduced Wright to a world short of building materials. He used 
the most simple materials for the house: exposed post and beam construction, 2 � F roof 
deck, and beams laminated out of the available 1 � 12 lumber. The Jacobs, short of money, 
found a group of Swiss immigrant farmers who doubled as stonemasons. They lay the 
stones in the Tcino fashion of their native country. Someone told Wright that the 
stonework was terrible. It was not. Meanwhile, Wright took exception to a note by Jacobs 
that he had assisted him with the new addition to his autobiography. A chill descended on 
their relationship and for several months the Jacobs received no word from Taliesin. 

It was not unknown for clients to be awakened at home early in the morning by Wright 
touring a potential client through their house, so when the Jacobs heard Wright's voice 
extolling the beauty of their house to a prospective client one morning, they breathed a 
sigh of relief and knew all was well. Wright returned to supervise, along with his own 
bulldozer and operator, to form the earth berm to its correct 45-degree angle. 


PARTY 

Wright's relationship with his clients was generally as if they were part of his extended 
family. They would be invited to Taliesin, and if in turn they invited the Wrights to a 
party, it was assumed that his extended family, the sixty-man Fellowship was included. 

Arriving at one such party I entered through the cave to be met by Herb and Katherine 
Jacobs at the entry, and passed into the interior of the hemicycle. Across a sea of people I 
experienced my first vista of curved and endless space. The curve of the living room, 
continuing in a parabola, swept out of sight. Another spatial twist was provided by the 
curving mezzanine hovering above, it had no support. Wright didn't want cross beams 
marring the flow of space. Unconditioned by a conventional college education, Wright 
recognized no rules, freely moving through dimensions, up or down, hung the mezzanine 
bedrooms from the roof, using steel rods inside the walls to hold the floor beams below, 
which then double as cantilevers, to support the balcony. 

Wright provided a circular pool, half in the house and half outside. The glass window dips 
just below the water line, allowing the goldfish to pass from inside to the outside. During 
construction the Jacobs changed it to a plunge pool. 


THE ELEMENTS: EARTH 

Beginning with the Chapel of the Soil project, Wright moved into creating the forms of the 
surrounding earth: earth and shelter soon became one indivisible entity. The section of the 
bermed house for the Co-operative Homestead Project, Detroit, Michigan, 1942, is a 
classic pyramid form, the 45-degree angle of the roof planes continues in the earth berms 
each side. They provided added insulation to save fuel during the war years. The design 
was finally realized as the Thomas House, Rochester, Minnesota, 1950. 

The Cabaret Theater (#2) Taliesin West, 1949, is sunk three feet into the desert for 
insulation. Constructed out of monolithic reinforced concrete and desert stone, it features 
exterior ribbed, structural beams and a marvelous, intimate interior space. In the service 
kitchen the rubble stone wall is pierced by a circular three-foot hole. Crudely held in 
place in the hole-sealing is not a problem in the hot desert climate-is a large disc of 
glass. Standing three feet below the earth, Wright provides one of his surprising, intimate 
views of another world: the floor of the desert, as seen by the small creatures that live 
there, looking up to the desert vegetation above. 

The Friedman House, Pleasantville, New York, 1948-50, is built in a wooded hillside, a 
Wrightian community of houses. In this small house "for a toymaker," the plan is formed 
by two interlocking circles with a circular mezzanine overlooking the living room. It is an 
intimate house, the fireplace nook a cave. The circular carport roof is provided by a stone 
and concrete mushroom column. The rear of the house is dug into the hillside. 

The Gerald Loeb "Pergola," House Project, Reading, Connecticut, 1942, is one of Wright's 
most extraordinary projects. This represents the elongated evolution of the Jester House; a 
play of linear and circular elements. With its long colonnades of stone columns it echoes a 
Greek temple for contemplation. The long covered walkway connecting the various living 
elements was a recurring theme in his work, but rarely built. (The McCormick House 
project, among others.) Ours is not a contemplative society. 

The circle appears as both, a column of mass and a skylight. A new approach to the glass 
cornice is introduced: in the wall/ceiling corner are glass folded circles, which begin in the 
ceiling and, like a Salvador Dali watch, continue down the wall plane. This detail was 
later used in the rear of the Guggenheim Museum. The garden-living room, like an open 
glass Greek temple, hovers above the pool and is reflected in the underwater garden below. 
As with the Johnson House pool, the pool walls are undercut to make them invisible. 

Now, in the Loeb pool he goes further. The stone columns continue down into the pool to 
create a submarine garden world. It's like a submarine temple for Proteus, father of 
Taliesin. Water, Jung's symbol of the unconscious where all forms arise, was Wright's 
fountainhead. At this time his creative imagination was incandescent, centrifugally 
spinning off new ideas like solar flares, outpacing his critics, who could not understand 
new concepts, that broke the "rules" of modern architecture. 

Inspired by this submarine garden, former apprentice and architect, Alden Dow, 
submerged his new house three feet below the level of the lake outside. When Wright saw 
it he exclaimed, with a laugh, "This time I think we have gone too far!" 


THE ELEMENTS: WATER 

For Wright, water represented life. His love of water was expressed in the triangular pool 
and the cascading water at the entry to Taliesin West, where he converted the drafting 
room fireplace into a waterfall. 

In Johnson Wax, Wright created a mythical underwater palace beneath the sea. But water 
is not always easy to contain. With the advent of the first rain, the roof leaked in Herb 
Johnson's new office, right above where he was sitting. Furious, he called Wright, asking 
"What shall I do?" Wright, never at a loss for a one-liner replied, "Move your chair!" 
According to Taliesin legend, Wright followed this surrealistic scenario by designing 
special, "Taliesin red" colored buckets to be placed under future leaks. 

The Huntington Hartford House Project, Hollywood Hills, California, 1947. In this 
bachelor house the circle expands into the hemisphere, the upper portion formed by curved 
glass tubes. The living room becomes an atrium of light for entertaining guests. 

Other circular projects followed, including Park Point, 1947; Wierland Motor Hotel, 1955, 
with circular units arranged as a crescent necklace;Bramley Motor Hotel, 1957, with three 
circular towers arranged in a triangle, and Baghdad University Complex, 1957. 


A TOLSTOYAN ANARCHIST 

With the advent of World War II many apprentices were drafted, others were in the Spring 
Green jail as conscientious objectors. Wright was against the war. He didn't want his 
emergent democratic "Usonia" infected by the old world Imperialism. He feared that 
America would be dragged once more into the corruption of Europe, with its feudal 
hierarchies, its endless wars of empire. 

"Force and compulsion on the part of the State or any individual in it seemed hideous to 
me. Thoreau's 'That government is best government which governs not at all;' I accepted 
as a truism ..." Wright said, "The anarchist's idea, faith in the commonwealth based on 
voluntary instinctive respect for the other fellow's rights, I saw as the normal thing ..." He 
was a lifelong rebel along the lines of Tolstoy, Paul Goodman and Kropotkin. His 
opposition to the war made him unpopular. Even good friends, like Lewis Mumford, 
deserted him. There was little work, a shortage of building materials; construction was 
trickling to a halt. He retreated inside the two Taliesins, finding inspiration and sustenance 
in the land, the farm; walking and riding through the woods; rebuilding and reforming 
Taliesin. He published a monthly Taliesin News Letter, with comments on architecture, 
society and war. 

After the feverish pace of the last decade, in this fallow period, Wright had the time to 
reflect, to inwardly explore new worlds and experiment with new concepts, to plunge 
deeper into the meaning of architecture, space and form, and to prepare himself for the 
final flowering of his last visionary years. 

But for the outside world, occupied with war, his name was once more sinking into 
obscurity. 


The Seventh Age, 
A Spiral Space 

The Advent of World War II brought an end to the rich harvest of the thirties, but this last 
fallow period allowed the seeds of the new plasticity to germinate in Wright's creative 
mind and bring forth the fruits of his last golden age. 


"Architects were no longer tied to Greek space, but were free to enter into the space of 
Einstein."-F. Ll. W., 1936 


Shortly after I arrived at Taliesin, and after Mr. Wright had finished his Sunday talk, I was 
intrigued by a picture of the logo of his red double spiral. Mr. Wright came up behind me 
and with the relaxed familiarity he enjoyed with his students, explained-with his pencil," 
In the West, son, if you want to move from one point to another, you move in a straight 
line. But in the East no one ever moves in a direct line, so what you do is go past the thing, 
turn right and pass it again, and pass it again, until you have become the thing." 


SQUARE LOGO 

Wright incorporated the red square logo into his new double spiral logo. The Southwest 
Native American spiral used one continuous line that doubles back on itself, whereas 
Wright's version is of one continuous space. A centripetal, clockwise labyrinth that at the 
center becomes transformed into the counter-clockwise, centrifugal exodus. It is 
emblematic of the creative process, of the intake of energy that the artist transforms into 
art. 

The double spiral represents a vortex of energy. Wright had discover the eye of the storm, 
the still center from which creation springs. 

His sketch was complete. I think he picked up the design while in Japan. Wright began 
using this symbol as his logo about the time he was building Taliesin West in 1938, and 
the American Indian petroglyphs on the boulder by the entry displays a simplified form of 
the symbol. (It is also similar to an ancient picture of the labyrinth of Knossos.) The spiral 
is one of man's oldest universal symbols. Every seashell helix expresses it as an archetypal 
form of growth and the double helix is the DNA principle of organic life. In his first model 
of the Guggenheim Museum, Wright employed a double spiral. His interest in spiral 
architecture began with the Gordon Strong Planetarium Project, a ziggurat of concrete for 
the automobile. Sometime later, in 1929, he seemed prescient and asked the client for the 
return of the drawings, "For an art gallery to be built in Europe ..." 

In 1939, Wright designed the new Kaufmann guest house above Fallingwater. To cover 
the stairs down to the house below he designed a stepped, spiral roof, with almost no 
visible support. An astonishing tour de force, it presaged Wright's new entry into the world 
of spiral space. In keeping with the digital principle of Fallingwater it is composed only of 
horizontal and vertical elements, the latter cantilevered from slender steel posts and 
supported by the inner compression ring of the circular form. It was the bridge between the 
digital Fallingwater and the spiral plasticity of the Guggenheim, yet to come. 

In 1943, Wright's two large housing projects had been cancelled and there was little work 
on the boards. He was living a quiet life and the media no longer found him newsworthy. 
At age 76, with his opposition to the war, they chose to bury him in silence. 


DEATH AND RESURRECTION 

Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943-1959. In 1943 Solomon Guggenheim 
asked his curator, the German Baroness Hilla von Rebay, to select an architect to design a 
new museum to house his extensive collection of nonobjective art. She asked Laszlo 
Moholy-Nagy, a Bauhaus intellectual icon, to draw up a list of possible architects. His list 
included fellow modernists: Le Corbusier, Gropius, Neutra, Lescaze, Aalto, and himself. 
He omitted any mention of Wright, a founder of modern architecture. When Rebay told a 
friend she was disappointed with the response, they expressed surprise that Frank Lloyd 
Wright had not been included in the list of notable architects. "But surely he is dead!" 
Rebay exclaimed. When she was told that he was very much alive,  she immediately sent 
him a letter. "Dear Mr. Wright, could you ever come to New York and discuss with me a 
building for our collection of non-objective paintings. I feel that each of these great 
masterpieces should be organized into space and only you, so it seems to me, would test 
the possibilities to do so ... I need a fighter, a lover of space ... I want a temple of spirit ... 
Hilla Rebay, Curator." 


"But surely he is dead!"-Baroness Rebay 


In 1943, the middle of the war, there was virtually no work at Taliesin. The invitation was 
a gift from the gods. Wright, assuming Rebay was a man, replied with an invitation to visit 
Taliesin. "Bring your wife. We have room and the disposition to make you comfortable." 
Rebay met the Wrights and they soon became friends on a first name basis. As fellow 
Europeans, Olgivanna and Rebay shared much in common. After Wright met Guggenheim 
in New York, a contract rapidly followed. 

Wright did not like the proposed urban site on 39th Street, and a search was begun to find 
a better location. He wanted nature and space and found it on Fifth Avenue by Central 
Park. 


"I want something completely different."-Solomon Guggenheim 


It was a challenge guaranteed to invoke Wright's best work. His first designs were low and 
linear, following on the lines of Johnson Wax, but the move to the small, expensive site on 
Fifth Avenue indicated the building would go upward. A hexagonal tower appeared soon 
followed by a ziggurat. The tapered centripetal ziggurat was inverted to become the 
expanding spiral of the final scheme. 

The grid of the floor plan is an eight-foot square, infilled with circles, expressed in the 
surface of the terrazo floor. The plan, beginning as a circle, is transformed into a living, 
changing form as the great helical plane of the gallery coils slowly upwards, centrifugally 
expanding both outwards and inwards: an expanding vortex, coiling around, and 
generating the great, invisible, spiral space. 

Wright's experiment with structural continuity now advanced further. The concrete floor 
plane continues upward, becoming both parapet wall and outer wall-all three planes 
acting in unison become a structural U-channel, expanding, as it winds its way as a giant 
helical spring to the top. An unending flow of continuity spiralling from the ground to the 
great apex. (Wright said that if a bomb hit New York the structure would bounce back like 
a spring.) 

The coils were separated by a continuous spiral band of light-a luminous cornice of 
crystal tubing, similar to Johnson Wax-illuminating the paintings displayed on the tilted 
gallery wall. 

Wright has left behind the linear world and entered a spiral universe of space, filled with 
linear contradictions: the floor below where I stand is the ceiling plane above; each 
revolution returns to the beginning; far is close. Forward movement is transformed into 
centrifugal, helical movement; a warped, sloped, curving floor, steeper on the inside than 
the outside continues to the roof. 

Ascending the great ramp of the Guggenheim one is aware of different levels of subliminal 
experience, some verbal, and others nonverbal. Something is happening to one, but one 
cannot say what. One is in a great wave, moving simultaneously forward, and upward. 

Wright said, "The impression made upon one is of complete repose similar to that made by 
a still wave, never breaking." 

The great dome of crystal glass is extraordinary, diffusing the light to the galleries below. 
The double hollow glass tubing provided both thermal insulation and space for interior 
lighting. 

Entering the great space I look upwards and see concentric, expanding circles, the 
compounded curves of endless, unwinding waves, the tunnel of afterlife experience. 
Walking up the ramp, one ascends around six expanding circles. No simple geometry of 
parallel forms, but a spiral complexity of warped space and interacting curves moving 
outwards like the circles in the vortex of a pool or an expanding spiral universe. 


THE VORTEX 

The hollow dendriform column of Johnson Wax resembles a spinning top suspended in 
time; a Midwest twister, a cyclone, a vortex of spatial energy, which beginning as a point 
on the ground expands outward as it ascends. The linear centrifugal plans of the St. Mark's 
Tower and the Johnson House enter a new dimension of expression with the Guggenheim, 
a centrifugally expanding vortex revolving around a hollow core, without central support, 
only an invisible core of space. 

Wright drew on the ancient Persian ziggurat, a giant screw of adobe to heaven; turning it 
upside down and inside out, transforming its core of mass into a spiral gallery of space and 
light, a modern vortex of spatial energy, its structure cantilevered inward from its outer 
spiral shell. Within this vortex lies the still center, the eye of the storm. 

In the Guggenheim space and light flow in through the ground floor windows from 
outside, and are modulated by the spiral clerestory and released through the great dome 
skylight at the roof. Space is alternately compressed and expanded; released through 
windows, cornice and the great skylight above. The space is alive, charged with energy, by 
the spatial interflow between inner and outer worlds. (The night view of the building 
shows light-inner space-flowing from the cornice and skylight.) 

The conception of invisible space requires an extraordinarily subtle mind. Wright saw that 
space is not simply a negation of mass, but a form of energylike light, with which it has a 
deep affinity: that the architect determines spatial interflow by modulation, compression, 
expansion and release-its energy charged by the interflow between inner and outer 
polarities. 


SPACE 

"The building ... may only be seen 'by experience within' the actual structure ..." Wright 
said. "The depth-plane defies the flat camera eye ... The essence of organic building is 
space, space flowing outward, space flowing inward (not necessarily by the use of the 
picture window.) Only when the buildings are comprehended from within ... its own 
special environment ... are they really seen. If trees or mountains are round about, they 
will come to join and enrich the building ... any true sense of the whole edifice is seldom 
found in a photograph." Wright explained, "The ceaseless overtones and intones of space, 
when developed as the new reality in architecture, go on, tone upon tone, as they do in the 
music of Beethoven or Bach, Vivaldi or Palestrina." 

Music, as with architecture, depends on space: in wind instruments the form and volume 
of the pipe determine its harmonic resonance. In the Gothic church both the perfect 
architectural space and its acoustic resonance enhances the Gregorian chant of the monks. 
Architectural space has its own resonate energy. (As a child Wright worked the air bellows 
of the church organ, generating the invisible energy that his musician father transformed 
on the organ into Bach.) Music provided Wright both with relaxation and his profound 
insight into the architecture of space and depth. 

The first model of the Guggenheim was breathtaking-a vision of perfection from another 
world of being. When the working drawings were completed in 1946, Platonic perfection 
entered an imperfect world and began to make waves. 

"Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument."-Hamlet 

Today the Guggenheim is the most popular art museum in New York City. As many 
people come to experience the architecture as to see the art, making it difficult to realize 
the hostile opposition it received that almost prevented its ever being built. As soon as it 
became a viable package-perfect site, brilliant architecture, good collection and 
money-it became the target of power and controversy. Critics either loved or hated it with 
a passion. Mounting pressure forced Hilla Rebay, Wright's champion, to resign. 

The New York City Building Department lacked the flexibility and good will of Racine, 
which had allowed the Johnson Wax building to reach its full potential. New York's 
building code measured Wright's expanding spiral of space against an archaic list of 
regulations developed for traditional, rectangular structures. Their response to Wright's 
magnificent glass dome was to destroy it, demanding a large safety net be suspended 
beneath it, even though glass domes are in common use throughout the world. Suffering 
from this lack of communication, as with the Tower of Babel, Wright might have recalled 
Robert Graves's description of an earlier incarnation of Taliesin as Nimrod, its master 
builder, "One called for stones, they brought him tiles." 

The project was stalled, and neither side would make a compromise. Meantime building 
costs were going up and Guggenheim's budget of $2,000,000 was becoming pitifully 
inadequate for such a building. Contractors, with no precedents for building a helix 
design, raised their bids accordingly. 

In 1949, Solomon Guggenheim died. In an desperate effort to save the project Wright 
traveled to London to meet Guggenheim's daughter. 


"The rectilinear frame of a painting has more to do with the frame than the 
painting."-Solomon Guggenheim 

The development of the rational analytic brain led to the invention of the 
vertical/horizontal rectilinear frame of reference, the tri-axial coordinates of navigation 
and the laws of perspective to locate the position of any point in a three-dimensional 
framework. The master of linear building, Mies van der Rohe, confessed that he would 
never design a dome since he would never feel comfortable if he did not to know the 
position of every point and what sort of space he was creating. It says much for Wright's 
spatial imagination that in the Guggenheim the location of every point in space is unique. 


THE FLAT-EARTHERS 

Used to conventional rectangular galleries, artists and critics were unprepared for a 
revolutionary approach to a museum: a spiral with tilting floor and walls, suffused with 
natural light, where every painting was visible and part of one vast space. 

In every age there are those who feel threatened by the new. Critics of the Guggenheim 
fought Wright's tilted floor, with the hostility that flatearthers once reserved for those that 
discovered the world was round and revolved around the sun. Sweeney, the new, 
modernist curator who replaced Rebay, wanted a sterile, white interior. Wright's organic 
design called for a warm, light sand color. Wright tilted the outer wall to follow the angle 
of an easel, the way prints, drawings and paintings are best displayed. Sweeney wanted the 
pictures vertical, projected out on rods. Wright was himself an artist, with 60 years of 
experience in the display of his extensive collection of Japanese prints and sculpture. He 
was not against modern art and had long admired Picasso's ability to create a 
three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface. Wright said, "The trouble with 
Picasso is that he has no respect for humanity." 

A group of artists picketed the site of the Guggenheim to protest the design. At the age of 
ninety Wright was still fighting the battle of the box! A thousand miles away his 
supporters in Madison, Wisconsin, were picketing the capital to demand construction of 
his Monona Terrace project. 

Time was running out and costs were rising. To proceed Wright was forced to sacrifice the 
crystal glass tubing of the dome and cornice. But positive forces were also at work. He was 
related by marriage to Robert Moses, powerful commissioner of New York City. Moses 
called the head of the Building Department and said, "If those plans are not ready and 
upon my desk tomorrow you better start looking for a job!" The plans were approved. 

When the bids finally came in they were far over the budget. Wright called former 
apprentice Edgar Tafel for help. Tafel introduced him to the freeway builder George N. 
Cohen, who was familiar with constructing curved concrete forms. Cohen got the job and 
asked Wright for a favor, to place his name on the cornerstone. Wright replied, "A round 
building doesn't have a cornerstone, George." On a curved stone his name accompanied 
the architect's. 

"It breaks every rule. It is so astonishing as a piece of architecture, of course, that it makes 
you feel that rules hardly matter. But the very way in which Wright's building breaks the 
rules of urban design becomes its own rule," said Paul Goldberger in the New York Times 
in 1992. Every new culture brings its own rules, and Wright made his own. Those who 
measure his work with an outdated yardstick are unable to enter its world. 


THE FOURTH DIMENSION 

Like Einstein, Wright had left the old Newtonian concepts of three-dimensional space to 
move into a far-reaching understanding of the subtle relationships of mass, energy, 
vibration, light-and space; a new, mysterious universe of quantum mechanics, 
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, black holes, anti-gravity and spiral galaxies where, as 
Wright said, "Sometimes 6 plus 6 equals 36." 

In 1941, when asked if he had been influenced by Ouspenski and Gurdjieff's theory of the 
fourth dimension Wright replied, "No, three dimensions are enough for me." But in 1957 
his understanding of space had moved further, and he wrote, "To sum up, organic 
architecture sees the third dimension never as weight or mere thickness, but always as 
"depth". Depth an element of space: the third (or thickness) dimension transformed to a 
"space" dimension. A penetration of the inner depths of space in spaciousness becomes 
architectural and a valid motif in design. With this concept of interpenetrating depth 
comes flowering a freedom in design which architects have never known before but which 
they may now employ in their designs as a true liberation of life and light within walls." 

Perhaps only Wright could talk about "depth interpenetrating space" and explore further 
this new dimension. 

As Einstein was master of relativity, Wright was the master of space and continuity. 
Wright treated space as tangible, living, energy-a fourth dimension that can neither be 
measured or described in three-dimensional terms. No two-dimensional photograph can 
reveal the depth and quality of space. As Aalto said, "With instruments you can measure a 
building-but only man can experience its architecture." Man is the link that completes 
the circle of architecture, made by him and for him. 


EVOLUTION OF SPIRAL 

At a time when the Guggenheim project was mired down in a myriad conflicts, Wright 
continued his exploration of the spiral with projects like the Morris Shop, David Wright 
House and others. In the spiral Park Point Parking Garage Project, Pittsburgh, 1947, the 
ramps are cantilevered and suspended on steel cables from a central mast. It is an 
extraordinary project, deserving construction today. The adjacent Community Center is a 
visionary spiral, a megastructure of the future, incorporating symphony and opera halls, 
convention rooms, cinemas, an arena, restaurants, shops, parking and other facilities. 


V. C. MORRIS SHOP, MAIDEN LANE, SAN FRANCISCO, 1948 

An opportunity to test the spiral presented itself with a smaller project, when Mr. and Mrs. 
V. C. Morris asked Wright to design their new gallery for objets d'art. Maiden Lane is now 
a prestigious lane off Union Square, but its name evokes its history when treasures of a less 
reputable nature were available. 

The project involved the transformation of an existing building-which included an ugly 
skylight-into a gallery. The building was close to a cube. The opportunity to play the 
circle against the square, the spiral against the cube, proved irresistible. Most architects at 
that time would have made the facade one large piece of glass, but Wright did the reverse, 
making the entry a mysterious cave which would draw people's curiosity to explore within. 

In A Thousand and One Nights, Ali Baba discovers the "open sesame" to the magic 
treasure cave. It is a Sufi parable for man's discovery of his own rich inner world. In this 
design for a gallery of objets d'art Wright re-tells the myth eloquently through 
architecture, in symbol, form, and space. 

A great wall of golden Roman brick is pierced by a single arched opening, framed by four 
concentric, brick arches radiating out like the widening rings in a pool. One is drawn into 
a tapering, wondrous cave of paradoxical arches: the left side dark, the right side 
transmuted into transparent glass through which one glimpses, as in a revelation, the 
treasure cave beyond. From the compressive cave one enters the expansive space of a great 
circular shaft filled with exquisite treasures arrayed on circular and semicircular walnut 
tables, as at a feast. Within the circle, its walls filled with niches and art, a spiral ramp 
ascends, winding its way around the interior space up to the mezzanine above. The 
mezzanine, another circle set within a square, provides a superb overview of the great 
space below. Intimate displays are exhibited in fine walnut cabinetwork; the scale is 
intimate and exquisitely detailed. 

The luminous ceiling above is formed by a matrix of large and small translucent 
hemispheres suspended beneath an existing skylight, like the bubbles on the surface of a 
pool, seen from below. Descending the ramp around the shaft-as in Alice in 
Wonderland-one passes displays of objets d'art set in niches within the walls. 

The space is enhanced by a large, shallow bowl filled with plants, their foliage dripping 
over the edge, a hanging garden of Babylon, suspended over the ziggurat. The floor is 
covered with a square flagstone pattern like a medieval vault. 

Wright, drawing on the Sullivan and Dana arches of his beginning, developed further his 
entry design for the early Chauncey Williams House. 


THE BURLINGHAM HOUSE PROJECT, EL PASO, TEXAS, 1942 
A modified version was built in 1986 (C. Keotsche) Santa Fe, New Mexico 

Wright was inspired by the plastic, flowing forms of the shifting sands of the landscape. 
He liked to quote Heraclitus, "The only thing permanent is change," and expressed it in 
this pottery house, saying, "It will always be changing, like a stone emerging from shifting 
sands." 

The Burlinghams have a place near El Paso piled with sweeping sands, continually 
drifting in swirling lines that suggest waves of the sea ... This is a design for a pottery 
house, that is to say, adobe ... the walls are molded accordingly. 

The plan is turned in on itself, for protection from the elements, around an atrium garden 
court. Made from adobe brick, the freeform shape presaged the plasticity of the 
Guggenheim Museum yet to come. The plan is a reflex eclipse formed by two radii, like 
the shadow on the moon cast by the earth, also known as the ancient "Vesica of Pisces;" 
and when he used its form for the entry pool of the Guggenheim he used the Celtic 
description, "the seed form." The curved wall section of adobe brick employs the same 
form as the plan and is shaped like a pot. (Wright called Gaudi, the master architect of art 
nouveau plastic form, "the son of a potter.") 

This is a seminal building; here for the first time, plasticity expresses a continuous flow 
from floor to wall to roof. Wright, moving from the geometric circles of the Jester House 
into the freer form of the reflex eclipse, comes closer to his vision of plasticity. 

Benjamin Adleman Laundry Project, Milwaukee, 1945. The seed form moves into the roof 
section in this design for a laundry. Utilizing the form of the appropriate, bowstring truss, 
the upper curve becomes the roof and the lower curve the ceiling: the space within 
becomes a plenum for the air-conditioning system. Poised like an airfoil, above a 
continuous band of clerestory windows, the roof-ceiling seems to float in space and light, 
the curved ceiling diffusing the light into the great workspace below. The roof completes 
itself, as a semicircular form, at the ends, above the drive-in entry. 

In the Marin County Civic Center Post Office, San Rafael, California, 1957-62, the plan 
follows the seed form. A plexiglass globe of the earth is situated at the entry, half inside 
and half outside. (I know, I helped place the gold leaf map of the earth upon it.) It is 
Wright's only building constructed for the United States Government. 


SHALLOW DOMES 

Wright's journey through the world of plastic form took him from the saucer shaped petals 
of the Johnson Wax columns to the reflex eclipse of Burlingham and on to the shallow 
discs and domes of the Huntington Hartford Sports Complex project, a play of cantilevered 
saucers capped by tubular glass domes. This was followed by the Daphne Mortuary 
Project, San Francisco, 1948, where five chapels were capped by shallow domes arranged 
around a pentagram plan (in the Middle Ages it was used as a symbol of man, and the 
occult) and by the circular Greek Orthodox Church,  Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956, which 
is a clamshell sandwich, the upper dome supported on a continuous band of glass spheres 
floating on a luminous cornice. By taking a section out of the center of a 
sphere-transforming it into the form of a convex lens filled with space and light-he 
achieves a new dimension of spatial energy. The lower saucer is the mezzanine, open to 
the floor beneath. The 'seed form' section is created by two intersecting circles generated 
from two radii. Olgivanna was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and advised her 
husband on its symbolism which he used as an integral part of the form and structure of 
the building. Wright had always admired the Byzantine church of Hagan Sophia with its 
great dome. Here he used modern engineering to create a shallow concrete dome, 
supported by an extraordinary circular truss that wraps around the building; its arched 
openings providing the fenestration-an engineering tour de force. The four supporting 
columns form the Greek cross. Drawing on the richness of the Byzantine culture, Wright 
reaffirmed it in terms of the modern age. 

The Bailleres House Project, Acapulco, Mexico, 1952. An extension of the circles of the 
Jester House, it used a complex interplay of circle and dome forms. The chimney is the 
central pivotal mass of the structure. Wright reversed the fireplace, transforming it into a 
curved chamber of space, light-and water. The chimney scoops in fresh air which is 
cooled by passing across the waterfall pool set into the hearth and the element of fire is 
replaced by the element of water. 


"Sullivan said take care of the terminals and the rest will fall into place."-F.Ll.W. 


The Edgar Kaufmann House Project, Palm Springs, California, 1951, shows an 
asymmetrical copper shell roof over a crescent plan. The shell is a vertical reflex eclipse, 
creating a spinal ridge, and the articulated ribs of the copper roof seem to echo the curve 
and texture of some legendary creature. The spheroid boulders provide an appropriate 
material for this curved desert house. The "moat" that girdles the house is in fact a long 
"lap" slender pool requested by Mrs. Kaufmann for her morning swim. It anticipates a new 
freedom of residential design. 

Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1957-62. The rolling hills of Marin 
inspired his design to bridge the hills and express their form. The seed form provided the 
archetype: the form of the concrete barrel vault roofs, the great dome of the library, the 
recurring shallow arches, the section of the columns. (Some critics described the design, 
pejoratively, as looking like a Roman aqueduct, apparently unable to differentiate between 
load-bearing Roman masonry arches and the suspended "pendant crescent" arches of the 
Civic Center.) 

The great tapering spire provides a terminal, balanced by the hill where the structure 
begins and the prow where it ends. Wright designed sand color walls and a gold color roof 
matching the tawny gold hills of Marin. The manufacturer of the plastic roof membrane 
was unable to guarantee this color and a blue color was substituted. 

Wright finished the conceptual drawings and handed them to his seniors, saying, "Now 
you can fill in the offices." It was originally designed for poured concrete. Built very 
economically ($23/sq. ft.) of pre-stressed concrete elements and standard acoustic 
ceilings, the design incorporates movable partition walls for future departmental 
expansion. The second wing includes the Hall of Justice, Sheriff's Department and jail. 
Only democratic America has a Frank Lloyd Wright jail. 

V. C. Morris House Project, "Seacliff," San Francisco, 1945, 1955. Like some Arthurian 
watchtower, the house projects from a cliff, its floors descending to the sea. It is a stunning 
and visionary project, ahead of its age. 


TILTING FLOORS AND WALLS 

David Wright House, Phoenix, Arizona, 1950. Dismembering the last element of the "box" 
in 1943, Wright left the horizontal plane and began to move upward with the sloped, floor 
plane of the Guggenheim Museum. In this house for his son, David Wright, the floor is 
raised above the desert floor to capture the breeze and the view above the orange grove. 
The entry winds up a sloped spiral ramp. Matching this slope, the traditional "horizontal" 
courses of the concrete block wall system now leave the earth plane to follow both the 
angle of the ramp and the winding stair to the roof. When the house was completed 
Wright was not happy, he felt it seemed to be spinning, and added a linear horizontal wall 
to ground it. 

Anderton Court Shops, Beverly Hills, California, 1952. To overcome the limited street 
exposure of an expensive site Wright continued the street into the building, as a linear 
spiral ramp, to provide each shop with window frontage. Wright was away in Florence 
during its construction and it lacks his guiding eye. The elevation has been destroyed by a 
proliferation of L.A. signs. 

In the Trinity Chapel Project, Norman, Oklahoma, 1938, the floor has been elevated above 
the earth and is access is by six intersecting ramps. In the Greek Orthodox Church the 
floor is concave. Wright said, "One is held in the hand of God." The floor of the Beth 
Shalom Synagogue is a concave hexagon. 


TILTING WINDOWS 

In the D. M. Stromquist House, Bountiful, Utah, 1958, the window transom bars leave the 
horizontal plane to follow the sloping roof above. In the Taliesin West living room 
window the mullions leave the traditional, vertical axis and tilt 90 degrees to the sloping 
roof line. Together with the angled rafters of the projecting canvas screen, it creates an 
extraordinary perspective. 


WARPED SPACE 

Second Unitarian Church, Madison, Wisconsin, 1947. As the instrument of his creative 
power Wright's hands were eloquent, whether in drawing or describing his architecture. 
He derived the form for the Unitarian Church from observing his hands while held in 
prayer. The Unitarian Church does not use the steeple, but Wright saw that in prayer the 
hands themselves aspire to heaven: the angle beginning low, progressively rises to form 
two warped planes. 

In another departure from the linear past, Wright moved further into the world of plasticity 
with the warped plane, the form generated by the relationship between two planular 
systems. Photographs give a false impression of an A-frame roof, but in fact the roof has 
two ridges and three slopes. The roof is in the form of an offset pyramid with the top a 
sloping plane bordered on both sides by steep planes; the three planes converge at the 
apex. Below is the prow-shaped glass screen. The pitch of the gable ceiling, beginning 
low at the wide entry, increases as it proceeds towards the point of the prow, creating a 
warped surface. The two warped ceiling planes are created by the chords of a succession of 
trusses which support the roofs above. The angular glass screen is reflected in the pointed 
prow. 

When the client ran out of funds, Wright brought in the Fellowship to complete the 
building. 


VISIONARY PROJECTS: PLASTICITY AND SPIRAL SPACE 

Frequently, as in the Unitarian Church and The Mile High Building, an angular form 
penetrates and reforms space like the prow of a moving ship. Like a great space marker 
heralding the 21st century, The Mile High is a haunting image of a new age. The concept 
received enormous publicity, one of Wright's most audacious projects. 

Buildings such as the Lacy Tower, Park Point, Huntington Hartford Sports Complex, The 
Mile High, and Lenkurt were visions of the future, demanding the evolution of a culture 
and technology yet to come. 

In 1947, E. J. Kaufmann financed Wright to prepare some visionary concepts, as seeds to 
encourage the redevelopment of Park Point in Pittsburgh.  The Community Center, with 
its extraordinary domed caverns, is a visionary megastructure with its challenging, spiral 
form. The drawings of the adjacent twin suspension bridge, outpaces Leonardo da Vinci. 
This year saw the completion of the Huntington Hartford Sports Complex and other 
projects. Freed to stretch his imagination beyond limitation, Wright enjoyed a banner year, 
bringing forth many of his most visionary concepts. 


TRAGEDY 

In 1947 Taliesin was rocked by another tragedy. Svetlana Peters, accompanied by her two 
children and their kitten, was driving her jeep across a local bridge, when the cat lept on 
her causing her to lose control of the vehicle, which smashed through the guardrail into 
the icy river below. Only her son Brandock survived. Svetlana was Olgivanna's daughter 
from her first marriage and wife of Wes Peters. She had been closer to her sister, Iovanna, 
than anyone. It was a tragedy for all concerned. Wright designed a memorial fountain 
from three harrow discs mounted on a triangular concrete base, inset with a crystal. 

Looking at the fountain he transformed its simple form into the audacious design for the 
Huntington Hartford Sports Complex. A great crystal form emerges from the earth and 
from its triangular core three great saucer discs cantilever into space. Wright drew on an 
ancient Celtic archetype-three circles centered on the points of an equilateral triangle. 
Within the core of the crystalline pyramid are located elevators, services and 
accommodations. At the top is a circular sunbathing terrace, on the side the three 
saucer-discs, with crystal glass domes, contain respectively, lounge, cinema, dining room 
with dancing. The lower saucers contain gateway, tennis court and swimming pool, its 
water spilling over into the canyon below. In the alchemy of his art he transmuted tragedy 
into a celebration of life. 


THE ARCHETYPES 

"Primitive American architecture, Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, and Incan, stirred my wonder, 
excited my imagination. I wished I might someday go to Mexico, Guatemala and Peru to 
join in excavating those long slumbering remains of lost civilizations," Wright declared. In 
the great cultures of Greece, Egypt and the Gothic, architecture communicated easily 
through a language of sign and symbol, icon and myth. "You can't get into the riches and 
depths of human expression unless you're born with something that is rich enough and 
strong enough to get there," he said. He tapped the universal forms that provide the 
profound resonance to his buildings. 

Wright was unique in his capacity to encompass a universal array of forms. As Pygmalion, 
he brought to life the geometric archetype; square, triangle, circle and spiral. Forms that 
provide the armature around which, like a growing crystal, his art took form. The spiral 
and sun wheel are amongst man's earliest archetypal symbols. The Chinese Yin/Yang 
symbolizes the feminine/masculine principle, the energy generated by the polarities: "All 
that comes to be." Wright wove his architecture out of an epiphany of opposites such as 
Reason/Emotion, Analysis/Synthesis, Classical/Romantic, Order/Disorder, Mass/Space, 
Subjective/Objective, Gravity/Pendant. Wright's signs and symbols speak a visual language 
that preceded words. 


CREATION 

Perhaps the creative process must forever remain a mystery beyond the reach of reason. 
And it is shrouded in such mystery that Wright's best work lives. Of this process he said, 
"A thrilling moment in any architect's experience. He is about to see the countenance of 
something he is invoking with intense concentration. Out of this inner sense of order and 
love of the beauty of life something is to be born ... Reality is spirit, the essence brooding 
just behind all aspect. Seize it! ... the pattern of reality is super-geometric. Casting a spell 
or charm over any geometry." 

His friend, Gurdjieff said that there is creative energy that moves towards us, but when we 
lie, withdraws. No matter how outrageous his vision seemed, Wright was always true to 
the Muse, sharpening the cutting edge of his creativity with truth kept him youthful and 
renewed. 

Asked by an apprentice about the fire and tragedy of his early life Wright replied, "God 
may have been judging my character, but He knew that in architecture I always did my 
best." 

Early one morning, Wright knocked on Jack Howe's door, with sketches for three new 
projects that he had conceived during the night-the hat trick. 

As he grew older, like a movie played in reverse, his architecture became younger. (The 
opposite of the conventional architect, who beginning as an avant garde student becomes 
conservative with age, ending his career designing a classic villa-one of Wright's first 
works.) 

One day I saw the apprentices just completing the forms for the new Music Pavilion 
chimney and preparing to pour concrete when Mr. Wright appeared. Pointing with his 
cane (Shouldn't every architect have one?) he exclaimed, "It's too high, take it down three 
feet." At the age of 88 he was still working with the fine tuning of scale-the drawing 
board solution versus the reality of construction. Even when it was finished he was 
dissatisfied with the scale of the structure; he demanded perfection. 


TALIESIN 

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York had an exhibition of one of Wright's 
houses, he loaned them his two Oriental stone lions (which he had brought back from 
Japan) to decorate the entry. Wright arrived at the museum to discover that the lions had 
been put in the wrong positions, so he went across to some hefty workers and asked them 
to move them. The workers gave it a try and said the lions were much too heavy-it would 
take a forklift to shift them. Wright was furious and called for his apprentices. He roared, 
"Boys, move the lions here." To general amazement the lions moved. And the apprentices 
didn't know how or why they were able to budge them, but as someone remarked, you 
couldn't refuse Mr. Wright. 

A rich judge invited the Fellowship to his house near Phoenix. It was Saturday night, and 
beforehand we were admonished by Mrs. Wright not to make fools of ourselves or drink 
too much, for the Fellowship was on show. We all dressed up and endeavored to behave 
correctly when we arrived, although the waiters served us with large scoops of ice cream 
well spiked with brandy. Although the house was bourgeois by our standards, we enjoyed 
being in a luxurious house after our simple tents. 

I had the impression that the judge was more interested in being immersed in the unique 
Taliesin social scene than he was in commissioning a new house. Towards the end of the 
evening the word was passed that Mr. Wright was pressing for the grand piano. (He 
seemed addicted to grand pianos, and there were already two at Taliesin.) Eventually there 
was an announcement that the judge had kindly donated the grand piano to Taliesin. 

For Wright a piano was an essential instrument of inspiration and relaxation. The next day 
was spent in moving the three pianos to new locations in the library, theater and living 
room. At first twenty apprentices pitched in, but numbers dwindled as the day wore on. As 
we struggled with the last piano through a narrow doorway, there were only four of us, and 
with three holding it up, I slid underneath and screwed on the last of the legs. The judge 
would come to dinner maybe once a month. He never did get around to commissioning a 
house, but it did cost him a grand piano. 


YOUTH 

Asked by an apprentice if he was afraid of death, Wright replied, "Not at all. There is not 
much you can do about death. What is immortal will survive, but youth is a quality and 
once you have that it can never be lost." He shared the enthusiasm and openness of youth. 
He loved young students, and the best praise was when he said, "Son, I think we've got 
something there!" Although some apprentices saw Wright as a kind of god, he was 
endearingly human. Like many who suffered poverty in childhood, he would alternate 
between bouts of extravagance and a strong distaste for paying everyday bills. 
Temperamental and forgiving, he enjoyed jousting with his friends, teasing the pompous, 
but he was never vindictive, or mean spirited. Introduced as the speaker at the University 
of California, Berkeley by architect William Wurster, Wright saw hanging on the walls of 
the auditorium many large blow ups of the architect's work. Wright couldn't resist saying, 
"Still doing the same old stuff I see!" 


ARCHITECTURE FOR HEAVEN 

One Sunday morning in 1956 after Wright's breakfast talk, apprentice Nezam Khazal 
(who introduced Wright to the Baghdad project) found himself working alone in the 
drafting room. Mr. Wright entered the room and came down the aisle, jauntily tapping his 
cane, and came alongside his table. Rhythmically tapping his cane, he was speaking aloud 
to himself, "Today, (tap-tap) the architect will (tap) design his tomb. Nezam, fetch me a 
pencil and paper." 

Khazal laid out the paper, and enthralled, watched as Wright sat down at the drafting 
board and began drawing his own tomb-a square plan, with semicircular windows, under 
a large flat roof plane. The design included niches for the Lloyd Jones family. 


A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS 

This was the book that opened young Wright's imagination to mythic visions. Like 
Aladdin he too grew up in a poor family. In 1957 myth became reality when he was 
invited by the king to Baghdad to design the new opera house. The young king was 
determined to use the oil revenues to spark a renaissance, a new city of culture, and 
commissioned Wright to design the opera house. Like a modern Aladdin flying in an 
airplane over Baghdad, Wright chose the island site on the Tigris. Inspired by the ancient 
structures of Sumer, he created an architecture of myth and imagination; a giant ziggurat 
topped by the opera house. On the concave cone top Wright placed "a golden figure of 
Aladdin and his wonderful lamp, the symbol of human imagination." Included in his 
commission was the design of the new post office, Sumer Museum and university complex. 


"The Sculptor. Wind and water ceaselessly eroding ..."-F.Ll.W. 


Visiting the ancient buildings and museum, Wright felt a strong affinity with the ancient 
culture of Sumer. (The Celts are believed to have originated from around the region.) Four 
thousand years after the first ziggurat was built here, he returned the form to its beginning. 


REVOLUTION AND ASSASSINATION 

The completed presentation plans were delivered to the king in Baghdad in 1958. On the 
radio Wright heard his client had been assassinated. The revolution by Saddam Hussein 
had destroyed the regime and the project. The project itself endured, realized in a 
simplified form as the Gammage Memorial Auditorium, Arizona State University, Tempe, 
Arizona, 1959. The external crescent arches became pedestrian bridges that cross the 
parking area. 


NEGATIVE FORM 

In the Lenkurt Project, San Mateo, California, 1955, for an electronics factory, Wright 
developed further the dendriform columns of the Johnson Wax Building. Here the columns 
become a pure plastic form, flowing in one unbroken line from floor to roof. The ribbed 
calyx "capital" has disappeared within the pure form. 

In Johnson Wax the negative form of the multiple spatial domes, impressed in the carport 
ceiling, created an extraordinary effect, as if space itself was pressing up, seeming to 
support the thick concrete ceiling above. In the Lenkurt skylights he took the negative 
form further. The interstices between the quatrefoil circular petals rise upward into a 
quadrant, concave, skylight of pyrex tubes, where even the section is concave, as though 
the skylight was formed by the pressure of four invisible spheres pressing on its surface. 
From above, the skylights appear like waves, formed by a windswept sea. Here Wright 
defines form and space as an expression of outer and inner forces. From the apex of a giant 
skylight a tall spire expands, like the antennae of a butterfly. 

The west is a masculine culture, choosing convex forms of mass. Wright's experience in 
the east introduced him to the feminine form of space discovered by Lao Tse. The 
educator/architect Rudolf Steiner said that the form of a plant reflects the equilibrium 
between the inner forces of growth and the outer elements pressing in. In his design for the 
concrete Goetheanum, 1926, he expressed concave negative forms, as in the concave 
surfaces of Islamic and Baroque architecture. 

The Robert Llewellyn Wright House, Bethesda, Maryland, 1956, is a play between a 
concave plan and convex balconies. In one of Wright's last works, the Lykes House, 
Phoenix, Arizona, 1959, the balconies have become concave, and the prow is created by 
the meeting of two concave forms. While other architects were content to reshuffle the 
same basic elements, at the age of 91, Wright's exploration continued unabated into a new 
world of negative form and warped space. 


TALIESIN 

Wright seemed to embody several different architects, although he apparently had little 
trouble moving from one period to another. He would surprise us by sketching a detail 
straight out of a prairie house for Taliesin East, while in the same day be designing a 
futuristic civic center. 

In the last decade Wright had mellowed and had found the tranquil center, "the eye of the 
storm," within the vortex. He was enjoying his autumnal years and reaping the fruits of his 
fallow years; the harvest was coming in. The Monona Terrace Civic Center Project, 
Madison, Wisconsin, 1938, was again underway. A new vote on its construction was 
approaching. We were all enlisted for a charette to complete a new model for presentation 
to the city. I found myself carving arches and forming tunnels. (Currently due to begin 
construction in 1993.) 

Wright, at 88, was beginning to relax and enjoy the fruits of a lifetime struggle. In his 
living room he had a small pagoda-like structure of stacked boxes, each holding a gold 
medal (including the R.I.B.A. medal from King George VI, two from the A.I.A., the De 
Medici medal from the City of Florence, and the Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from 
Harvard, Princeton, Wisconsin and other Universities. There was never any display of his 
awards.) 

Returning to Taliesin, I came upon Mr. Wright opening his mail one morning, and he 
passed a letter for me to read. It was from the National Academy of Arts and Letters 
announcing that he had been elected a member of their elite fifty-member Academy. He 
said with a laugh, "Son, if you stick around long enough these things just come to you," 
and he tossed it in the waste basket. 

He was now in the final period of his work. The Guggenheim took much of his time and 
energy; he no longer had the raw physical energy to push through and supervise the 
execution of every complex structure, and some later works lacked the exquisite detailing 
of, say, the Johnson Wax Building done at the height of his power. 

Marin County Civic Center, California, 1957. Construction, 1962. Towards the end of his 
life Wright was chosen by the board of supervisors to do the Marin County Civic Center. 
He did the conceptual drawings and handed them over to the seniors. Unfortunately, he 
died before the building was finished, and it lacks his touch in the detailing. We missed 
Wright's genius for the unexpected; his setting up a module of rules and, just as you were 
getting used to it, breaking up the pattern with an inspired new direction. The real magic 
in the building resides in the spatial organization, particularly in the interior courts. 
Although it appears to be one building, it is actually two buildings in parallel, with a 
plexiglass-covered court between them, which is planted at the bottom-rather like a 
miniature Guggenheim: from the third or fourth floor one can look right down through the 
building. It is in fact a pair of gigantic bridges spanning the four hills of the site. Each 
floor becomes successively shorter as it ground against the grade of a hill. 

When I first visited Marin County I found the unfinished Civic Center becalmed amongst 
the hills. Certain supervisors opposed to its construction had brought work to a halt. 
Architects and their wives were picketing outside with signs reading, "Vote for Recall and 
Wright." The recall movement was successful and the new supervisors voted to resume 
construction. It was emblematic of Wright's concern: developers versus environment. 

In 1962 the Civic Center was nearing completion. The day before the grand opening, all 
the men in Aaron Green's office (Wright's representative, and the branch office in San 
Francisco) were on a crash program to help get the building finished. At midnight on the 
last evening the whole Civic Center was alive with activity. The great space made me feel 
I was inside a living organism, imbued with a dynamic sense of energy, filled with the 
sounds of hammering, power saws and whirring polishers. Two of us were given the job to 
fix the red square tile embossed with Wright's signature. He had signed "F.L.W." in the 
soft clay of a tile about four inches square, which was then fired and glazed in his favorite 
red. There was a large bronze plaque at the entry listing all the dignitaries and the prime 
contractor involved in the building; in the bottom corner was a small recess. So with a tube 
of epoxy glue we pressed the red tile into the plaque and Mr. Wright's building was 
graced. 


EDUCATION 

In the summer and at Christmas the apprentices had the opportunity to present their work 
to Mr. Wright for his criticism. Generally, there was a suggestion about what kind of 
scheme to present. This year it was the low-cost Usonian Automatic, a concrete block 
house-but in fact we were free to present whatever we felt was a good project. 

The Christmas Box (as it was called) took place at Taliesin West on Christmas Day, as 
though the projects were presents. Ideally, one would spend two or three months on the 
Christmas Box. However, everyone was geared to the idea of charettes, so it would all get 
completed in the last few days and nights. There was always a crisis in the drafting room 
the night before, and by 2 A.M. a tremendous clatter of colored pencils on paper as the 
apprentices practiced the Taliesin system of rendering, using many dotted textures to 
create shades and curved surfaces. 

The whole Fellowship gathered around Mr. Wright on Christmas Day as he went through 
the schemes and made his comments. He could be devastatingly honest. He would open up 
the plans an apprentice had spent months working on, and say, "Hm, looks kind of 
familiar"-which could be crushing to the student who expected praise for his homage. 

An Indian student presented a project which was a central building surrounded by twelve 
smaller ones connected by passageways, and he explained to Mr. Wright that this was a 
harem for an Indian prince: in each of the buildings was one of his concubines. Mr. 
Wright had a slow smile on his face, and he said, "Well boys, they have a different kind of 
culture to what we have here." As part of the Christmas celebrations, Mr. Wright gave 
each of the apprentices a present of locally made Indian silver jewelry, set with turquoise. 
In earlier eras apprentices would have been given one of his Japanese prints. 

The two Austrian architects, Neutra and Schindler, worked for Wright in the twenties on 
the Barnsdall house. 

When Wright was asked for permission to display his work at an exhibition of California 
architecture, he replied with a laugh, "As long as I am not hung between the two thieves!" 
(Neutra had taken two of his clients, E. J. Kaufmann and Ayn Rand.) But when Schindler 
asked for help to support his application for a license, and later when he was dying, 
Wright showed his affection and wrote two very good letters of support. 


THE WRIGHT STUFF 

"I still hope to see these basic principles more comprehended. No man's work need 
resemble mine. If he understands the working of the principles behind the effects he sees 
here, with similar integrity he will have his own way of building," said Wright in 
Architectural Forum in 1950. "Personally, I believe architects are born. And I don't think 
they can be made ... This is good soil in which it can sprout. Instead of imitating effects, 
search for the principle that made them original and own your own effects." Those that 
followed in his tradition became craftsmen continuing his work, while those that resonated 
with his energy, were awakened to discover their own Muse. Wright was direct with those 
who sought to work with him. He replied to architect H.T.H. Widjeveld, "You were right 
in your conclusion that I would be difficult to work with. In fact I am impossible to work 
with." It is significant to explore the spatial consciousness that creates great architecture. 


GRASS ROOTS 

In many offices architects waited eagerly for the next issue of Architectural Forum devoted 
to a new Wright building. In the "work horse" office churning out dull projects it would 
stimulate the creative juices, and some Wrightian detail would enter into the plans of a 
current project. 

In 1916 Bruce Goff, at the age of 12, was apprenticed to a big firm. He noticed that the 
chief designer would frequently refer, for inspiration, to a copy of a magazine he kept in a 
drawer of his desk. When he left for lunch Goff opened the drawer and discovered the 
work of Wright in the magazine, Architectural Record, 1908. Goff wrote to Wright for 
help and advice. Wright was always generous to youth and he sent the unknown teenager, 
as a gift, one of his few remaining copies of the Wasmuth Edition. Years later, Wright 
stated that Goff was the most imaginative architect of his time, one of the best American 
architects. Story has it that when Wright asked Goff to be his chief assistant, Goff turned 
him down, saying, "No, then I would become just another of your men." 


AMERICA 

Like Thoreau and Whitman, Wright was a quintessential American rebel who believed in 
freedom and democracy. He regretted that his country had never honored his work. (Some 
time after his death his portrait appeared on a U.S. postage stamp.) 

At one of Mr. Wright's Sunday morning talks I sensed he was upset. He said, "I have just 
heard that the government has given the commission for the new Air Force Academy to 
the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill-Skittles, Owes More and 
Sterile-the three blind mice." A pun on their tendency to follow the style of architect, 
Mies van der Rohe. 

But when an apprentice asked if he felt he was a prophet without honor in his own 
country, Mr. Wright replied, "Where else on this earth would I get to build some 600 
revolutionary buildings and design 1600 projects?" 

The new architectural fad of hanging all the air-conditioning ducts and utility pipes on 
the outside had made its appearance. Wright said, "The architecture of exposed pipes and 
ducts is like your lover wearing her entrails on the outside." 

Some wealthy clients might come for the weekend, and he would design them a house, but 
they would never build it. A few years later they might sell that site and buy another, and 
commission yet another design from him. They liked to be around the architect, but lacked 
the courage to go further. Some new clients arrived in a Rolls Royce. Precursors of the 
yuppies, I had the feeling they were more interested in prestige designer labels than in 
content. 

There were marvelous clients like the Kaufmann family, who would commission projects 
simply to engender extraordinary designs, much in the way Renaissance princes 
commissioned paintings and sculpture. 

Wright's directness and penchant for publicity brought him in contact with future clients 
and filtered out the people he would not want to work with. 

Wright had never been busier. Work was pouring in. The Guggenheim was nearing 
completion. 

The Mile High Project, Chicago, 1956. A Chicago promoter came to see Wright, and 
asked him if he could design a TV tower that could be used to beam TV over a vast area. 
"Pity to go all that height for an antenna," Wright replied. "Why not go all the way and 
make it a mile?" The drawing was so large that it had to be mounted on a 4' � 8' sheet of 
plywood and turned on its side so Wright could work on it! 

It could be any height, but he relished the challenge to devise a technology to make the 
ultimate verticality. Starting at the base with a kite shape plan, it changes to a triangle at 
its apex. Shaped like an upturned tapered rapier, with its hilt locked in the bedrock, its 
slender angular blade soars up into space. Along its sides, the external elevators emerge 
like gothic spires. 

Like a great space marker heralding the 21st century it is a haunting image that heralds a 
technology and culture yet to come. It is Wright's most audacious project. 


END OF AN ERA 

One weekend there was much activity because Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor were 
coming. Todd wanted to build a chain of cinemas to show his new widescreen process, and 
was trying to get Buckminster Fuller and Wright to team together. Fellowship was on TV, 
which had the camera crews cursing as there were no power lines or telephone lines at 
Taliesin West. 

The television interviewer was given the grand tour. Wright was incredibly gracious; he 
told some jokes, then showed him around the buildings, taking him finally into the 
drafting room where all the projects were out on the tables with everyone pretending to be 
at work on them. It was a funny sight. Out there in the hot desert climate sat the 
apprentices at the drafting tables, pencils poised, every one of them dressed in their 
Sunday best suit and tie. 

In the drafting room stood his latest work, a 10-foot high rendering of the Mile High 
skyscraper, ready for presentation to the TV cameras and the press. At the far end of the 
room were giant photo blow-ups of drawings of Mr. Wright's early projects. He had been 
busy correcting details directly on the photos-the body of his work had to be perfect from 
beginning to end. 

Being with Wright, like flying too close to the sun, could be dazzling, destroying one's 
individual expression. 


"A fine and good man has passed on. He was a genius not only of the building art of 
America but also in his life and art in general and has in his creations shown a passion for 
humanity. His forms in art will surely retain their greatness more than 100 years ahead. 
Personally I have lost a real friend."-Alvar Aalto, in a telegram sent to Architectural 
Forum 


A year after I left Taliesin I returned to visit Mr. Wright and showed him some photos of 
my first project. "Very good!" he said with a smile. Had I finally learned something during 
my time with him? 

Pete Guerrero said that shortly before Wright's death he was invited to lunch with the 
Wrights. Mr. Wright had not appeared and Mrs. Wright asked him to go and find bring 
him. 

Pete found Mr. Wright sitting on a bench in his room. Looking up he said, "Pete, I must be 
getting old, I seem to have trouble getting up. Give me a hand." 

Olgivanna had a wife's concern for her husband's health, saying, "Frank, take a nap, you 
look tired." The battles to save the Guggenheim were draining his health. To help him 
relax she took him out for Fellowship picnics in the desert he loved. 

On April 14, 1959 Mr. Wright complained of a pain and was taken to the local hospital for 
surgery for an abdominal blockage. Although the operation was deemed a success, a few 
days later on the evening of April 9, he died. 

He had once said to us, "I dare say an idea is as close to God as we are likely, on this earth, 
to come." 

By his grave in the family cemetery at Taliesin is a large standing stone, Celtic emblem of 
ancient Wales, and on his gravestone is inscribed his own words: 

"Love of an idea is the love of God." 


A New Appraisal 

In an age of cynicism Wright reaffirmed the power and range of the human spirit. He gave 
architecture back its soul once again, imbued with the energy of life. His work is as 
relevant today as ever. He traveled without charts into the unknown, a lifelong voyage of 
discovery. 

At the moment when both my money and visa were running out, fortune offered me work 
and a permanent visa through a friend in California. It meant leaving Taliesin. Working 
with someone as inspired as Wright could overwhelm one's individual expression and I felt 
the need for distance so I could observe Taliesin more objectively. 

As in the words of Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of 
infinite space," Wright expanded the spatial frontiers of architecture into curved and 
warped space. Gifted with an extraordinary four-dimensional imagination, he outpaced 
the modernists saying "They speak, think and work in two dimensions while idealizing the 
third, and vice versa." He discovered the interflow of inner and outer space as a flow of 
energy and used it as a generator of form. 

I went to say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Wright. They were sitting on their chairs in their 
magnificent living room, like a king with his queen. At the end of our talk came the 
fluttering of a bird trapped inside the room. I caught it in my hand and released it through 
the window and our meeting ended. I, too, was free. 


LIGHT 

Wright called light "the great beautifier," transforming the gloomy work-place into a 
crystal palace and the dark Victorian residence into a new luminosity. Discovering the 
extraordinary relationship between light and space, his lighting enhances the quality of 
space. This fusion of natural and interior lighting gave his architecture its unique 
luminosity: daylight, introduced through skylight and clerestory, from north and south was 
fused with interior lighting diffused through concealed lighting. Daylight and artificial 
light share a similar source. Every fixture matched the grammar of each project. 

He modulated light through every kind of material; evolving from decorative glass, 
through perforated concrete blocks and plywood grills. On the exterior he broke the light 
into a musical play of light and shadow, through ornament, texture, and mass. 

In California I found work and began freelancing to begin my own practice. Eventually, in 
San Francisco, I found work with Aaron Green, the only architect to share an office with 
Wright. Aaron was currently supervising the construction of Wright's Marin County Civic 
Center along with his own excellent projects, which included two hemicycle houses. I was 
back in the fold, and this time getting paid. It was good doing work of the highest quality. 
I soon discerned the two different types of offices: those that smelled of money and 
mediocrity-and those that smelled of architecture. At Aaron's, if he was dissatisfied with 
the finished design he would start all over again, so be it. There wasn't much profit. (It 
seems that on one occasion the night before the plans were to be submitted to the client, 
Mr. Wright arrived and had a sudden perception that the walls should be brick, not block. 
The office had to work all through the night to make the complex changes.) I was 
surprised to find how Wright's name could invoke either hostility-by those who felt he 
threatened the existing order-or respect among architects. Yet at the grass roots level he 
received enormous support; every school kid had heard the saga of the Imperial Hotel, 
making him a popular folk hero. 

His driving revolutionary energy, by breaking the mold of nineteenth-century eclecticism, 
created a new architecture for the twentieth century. Responding to every challenge in 
more than a thousand designs, he created a form for every function, a unique expression 
for every site. 

With his mastery of technology he transmuted ancient archetypes into a new language for 
the age. He transformed the masonry architecture of compression into a dynamic structure 
of tension. He replaced outer load-bearing walls with an inner structural core and 
cantilevered floors, and freed the outer walls into becoming lightweight, freestanding 
planes of glass and copper. Thus he replaced the old post-and-beam system with 
structural continuity. His architecture effortlessly seemed to defy gravity, as he removed 
the old boundaries between floor, wall and roof, anticipating man's move to outer space. 


IN THE NATURE OF MATERIALS 

Wright had an uncanny sense of the earth and the nature of its materials: stone, and brick; 
steel, copper and bronze; glass, wood and textile. He revealed the intrinsic nature of every 
material and with integrity celebrated its virtues. Nothing was ever faked. I am always 
surprised by the number of people who were awakened when they first saw a Wright 
building. He was a lens which brought into focus a whole new world of truth and beauty. 


INVENTIONS 

As with his radiant floor heating hidden in the floor, so many of Wright's 
inventions-air-conditioning, the wall-hung toilet, the mitered glass corner window 
(Freeman House)-have been so seamlessly incorporated into the mainstream of 
architecture that few remember their origin. Others, like Wright's removal of the 
traditional corner and ridge post, are conspicuous by their absence. Sixty years ago, his 
first triangular structures were rejected by the establishment. Now I.M.Pei and other avant 
garde architects employ the very forms he pioneered. 

Pioneer of energy conservation and passive solar energy, he introduced the first earth berm 
and energy efficient houses, passive solar energy architecture and the hemicycle house 
oriented to the solar cycle. 

Wright destroyed the prison of the "box" and liberated man from its prison transforming a 
closed system of compartments-and social classes-into a new sense of freedom and 
space. 

Some minds prefer a secure prison to the insecurity of freedom. When C. G. Jung, lying at 
the brink of death and experiencing a marvelous vision of heaven, was told he must return 
to earth, he complained, "Now I must return to the 'box system' again. For it seemed to me 
as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially 
built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box." 

In January 1957 Mr. Wright gave a talk at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara. The 
theater was packed and 300 extra seats were brought in. He seemed quite frail. Someone 
held his shoulders and gave him a gentle push towards the microphone. The audience was 
looking forward to some outrageous remarks about the local architecture, but when he was 
asked about Santa Barbara he was in a mellow mood and replied, "It's a lovely place, 
everything grows so well here." That was the last time I saw him. 


INTERNATIONAL MODERNISTS 

"Reason is modern man's most dangerous illusion."-C. G. Jung 

The international modernists cobbled together a curious amalgam of revolutionary 
movements: Calvinism's puritan morality with its distrust of beauty; rationalism's naive 
belief in scientific progress and its worship of the machine; and a Marxist style doctrine 
Wright called "left-wing modernists. The break between myself and them has widened." 

Reason is but one facet of man; acknowledged or denied, the deeper levels of the psyche 
are ever present. Architecture, once the product of passion and inspiration of giants like 
Gaudi, Mackintosh, Richardson and Sullivan,  became the provenance of clever intellects 
playing a "chess" game. When Wright's buildings conformed to their rules as with the 
Unity Temple and Fallingwater, he was admired. When he introduced myth and 
decoration, he was condemned. With the decline of international modernism, one 
postmodernist critic pronounced Wright a good postmodernist, in the manner of the Pope 
proclaiming Buddha a good pre-Christian. 


"THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE" 

"What use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the human cultural use of 
them? We do not wish to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man! Much 
of the 'modern,' makes factories of our studios, churches and schools."-F.LI.W. 

International architecture has become dominated by technology, emblematic of a 
mechanistic consumer society that threatens human values. Certain modernists create, like 
advertising, impersonal skyscrapers crowned by corporate logos. Stripped of human sign 
and symbol, much modern architecture presents a sleek facade of technical perfectionism. 
Its slick use of glass, plastic, and steel has created a bland world, an irredeemable 
Megalopolis. Its technological exhibitionism masks an absence of content by a virtuoso 
display of its parts; flaunting its pipes and entrails suspended from a circus of structural 
engineering. 

But where is man in all this? 

The dehumanization of man was anticipated by such as Goethe, Kafka, and Henry Miller. 
The exaggeration of the rational has left man out of touch with his feelings. Without a rich 
inner experience, unable to create, he has nothing to give. That technology has outstripped 
our art is evident by the emptiness of much of our architecture. Arthur Drexler said, "A 
skyscraper is a machine for making money." Today, as developers compress more and 
more boxes into high density structures. The box has become even more sterile, and man 
seems fated to spend his life living, working (and terminating) in a box. The horizontal 
ghetto is upended into the vertical tower. Wright called it, "The sanitary slum." Now, more 
than ever, Wright's work, with its all its richness and humanity, offers a hopeful 
significant alternative. 


THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE 

"A civilization is just a way of life, and there have been many thousands of them in the 
world. But a culture is the way of making that life beautiful, and that we haven't got. 
We've never even started on that road in this country."-F.LI.W. 

The International Style, by imposing its standard design throughout the world, ignores the 
uniqueness of local culture and geography. Its high rise towers dominate and destroy the 
fragile landscape, like the banners of medieval barons or multinational corporations, 
aggressive emblems of territorial conquest. Albert Camus said that certain cities, such as 
the ugly town of Oran in Algeria where he was born, "exorcised the landscape." 

Throughout the world, in New York, London, Paris and elsewhere, whole areas of 
redevelopment, high-rise office blocks and low cost housing have become wastelands 
devoid of spirit of place and human scale. 

Wright's Broadacre City is a solution more valid than ever, as it is inspired by the nature 
of the site. It is more than just another garden city. Its architecture, following the contours 
of the landscape, nourishes the ecological balance between man and nature. Man himself 
is as much a part of the genius loci as the geography and will reflect its presence or 
absence. With his love of the earth and nature, Wright built in harmony with the 
landscape: He called his architecture 'organic' because it was indeed a living element 
rooted in the landscape. In contrast to the white modernism that dominates and destroys 
the fabric of the landscape, organic architecture symbiotically enhances nature and allows 
nature to enhance the architecture. Modern architecture, by attempting to look forever 
young, ages badly, with its peeling white walls, cracking concrete and rust-streaked 
chromiumn. Its hard unremitting surfaces destroy the delicate aura of the land. 

If the chromium gloss of modernism is overstated, organic architecture achieves its power 
through subtlety and presence. Wright's buildings age and travel well with time. Cypress 
boards develop the silver glow of weathered wood. Nature claims it as one of her own; 
vine, plant and tree enwrap his buildings. Roof shingles turn silver, copper develops its 
green patina; reflecting the changing sky and the passage of seasons. An unseen presence 
fills the air, an interchange with nature, a sense of spirit from the natural world. 
Fashionable icons, such as modernism and postmodernism, may come and go; but time 
washes away the superficial; and Wright's work will continue to endure. 

At the age of 91, still the incarnation of Taliesin, his creativity reached its peak, as the 
fecundity and diversity of "the seventh age" testifies. The body of his work is awesome. He 
seemed like a force of nature, a four-dimensional visionary in a two-dimensional world. 
Like Proteus, historical father of Taliesin, maker of all form and Greek god of the sea, 
Wright was a giant without equal. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT REMEMBERED 

Patrick J. Meehan, AIA, Editor     The Preservation Press 

National Trust for Historic Preservation 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


To Karen, Ryan, Sean,  
and the young architects of the future-

The Nature of Man 
Can Be As Complex 
As Nature Itself 


Preface 

This book presents Frank Lloyd Wright from the perspective of those who knew him best: 
fellow architects, clients, apprentices, acquaintances and friends, and members of his 
immediate family. No other book on Wright reveals his personal side from so many 
differing points of view or levels of intimacy. 

Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered is the third transcribed volume of a predominantly oral 
trilogy concerning Wright that I have both edited and introduced. The first volume, The 
Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, presented 18 conversations 
between Wright and close friends, notable press personalities, and real estate developers. 
The second volume, Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic 
Architecture, provided the first comprehensive one-volume collection of Wright's most 
important speeches on architecture and contemporary society. 

This is my fourth book on Wright. My first, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Research Guide to 
Archival Sources, served as an introduction to the many well-known (and other 
lesser-known) manuscript materials on Wright available almost exclusively to the 
scholarly researcher. 

Similar to the sources used in compiling my earlier books, those used in the preparation of 
Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered were mostly rare and obscure publications, radio 
broadcasts, and public speeches and discussions. A few of the reminiscences were written 
especially for this book. 

The 42 chapters of Frank Lloyd Wright Remembered are divided into six parts, arranged 
in sequence to reveal Frank Lloyd Wright on an ever increasing personal level. The fond, 
and sometimes not so fond, remembrances of 40 people are included. Through this 
arrangement, the complex nature of Wright's personality emerges. And what emerges, 
ultimately, is a personality as complex as his genius. Since many of the people quoted are 
now deceased, a further intent of this book is to preserve these obscure oral records in 
published form so they are available to a wide audience and do not become lost. 

As during the conduct of my research for my earlier books on Wright, I have been 
fortunate in receiving considerable kind aid from others. I wish, therefore, to give thanks 
to the following persons for their help in providing me with materials and permissions that 
allowed me to complete this book: Patricia Akre, San Francisco Public Library; Jose C. 
Arroyo, Putman Publishing Group; William B. Babcock, Wisconsin Society of 
Architects/AIA; Robert M. Beckley, FAIA, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 
University of Michigan; John C. Brewer, New York Times Company; Katherine Burns, 
Reader's Digest; Carol Christiansen, Doubleday, a division of the Bantam, Doubleday, 
Dell Publishing Group; Richard M. Davis, M.D.; Barbara Dembski, Milwaukee Journal; 
Mr. and Mrs. James J. Edwards; John Geiger; Jack Golden, AIA, Friends of Kebyar; 
Randolph C. Henning, Architect, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina; John H. Howe, 
Architect, of Burnsville, Minnesota; Beate Johansen; Hoyt Johnson, Scottsdale Scene 
Magazine, Scottsdale, Arizona; Philip Johnson, Architect, of New York City; Gary F. 
Karner, Ph.D.; Rep. Gerald D. Kleczka, 4th District, Wisconsin; Meg Klinkow, Research 
Center, Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation, Oak Park, Illinois; Pamela L. 
Kortan, Documents Program, American Institute of Architects; Rev. Ernest O. Martin, 
The Wayfarer's Chapel of Rancho Palos Verdes, California; Diane Maddex, formerly of 
The Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation; Richard E. McCommons, 
Journal of Architectural Education; Robert S. McGonigal; Robert Meloon, Capital Times 
and Leigh A. Milner, formerly of the Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin; Lewis 
Mumford; Sophia Mumford; Nancy Nipp, Directorate of Public Affairs, United States Air 
Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado; Stephen E. Ostrow, Prints and Photographs 
Division, Library of Congress; Anne Palamaro, American Institute of Architects Library; 
Miriam E. Phelps, Research Librarian, Publishers Weekly; Loren B. Pope; Polly Povejsil, 
Washington Post; Cynthia C. Davidson-Powers, Inland Architect; Peter F. Schmid, 
Marriott Library, University of Utah; Edward Storin, Miami Herald; William Allin 
Storrer; Harvey A. Tafel, The Wayfarer's Chapel of Rancho Palos Verdes, California; Bill 
Thomas, Pacifica Program Service, Radio Archive, North Hollywood, California; Gavin 
Townwend, Architectural Drawing Collection, University of California, Santa Barbara, 
California; the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office of the Golda Meir Library at the 
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Philip B. Wargelin; Ron Wiener, Photography by 
Wiener; Myrna Williamson, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Nancy V. Young, 
Manuscripts Division, Marriott Library, University of Utah; Robert L. Ziegelman, FAIA; 
and Dave Zweifel, Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin. 

Special thanks are due to Buckley C. Jeppson, director; Janet Walker, managing editor; 
and Pamela Dwight, editorial assistant, of The Preservation Press, National Trust for 
Historic Preservation, for making this project a reality. 

PATRICK J. MEEHAN, AIA 


In His Own Words: Frank Lloyd Wright's Public Persona 


THE SHAPE OF THE CITY 

The modern city is the basis for banking and prostitution and very little else. 

On November 26, 1956, when Frank Lloyd Wright was in his 90th year, he addressed a 
meeting of the American Municipal Association in St. Louis, Missouri. The address was 
aptly titled "The Shape of the City." It was, in part, a response to a speech by the real 
estate magnate William Zeckendorf, then president of Webb & Knapp. One newspaper 
account of the event stated: 

{Frank Lloyd Wright's speech "The Shape of the City" was originally published in the 
American Municipal Association's Proceedings, 1956.} 


Dressed in a brown suit, porkpie hat and carrying a cane, Wright walked off the platform 
amidst a standing ovation after insulting city planning, suburban life and millionaire real 
estate men like William Zeckendorf, his debating opponent. . . . Wright said the modern 
city is the "basis for banking and prostitution and very little else." Later, at a press 
conference, Wright added real estate promoters to the list. 

Although Wright and Zeckendorf were pitted against each other on many occasions and in 
various public forums, they apparently remained friends through the years. "We had an 
undying friendship," Zeckendorf wrote in his autobiography. 

Before Wright rose to the podium, he was introduced by Robert F. Wagner, mayor of New 
York City and president of the American Municipal Association. 

MAYOR ROBERT F. WAGNER: Now we will hear from a gentleman who is one of the 
world's most renowned architects, and one who has recently again made news by his 
proposal to build a mile-high building in Chicago. Some of you may remember his debate 
on television with Mr. Zeckendorf on the shape of the city, and we are delighted that he is 
here with us today. I am very proud to introduce to you Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright. 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: "I study nature and from nature comes what little wisdom I 
can give you. I urge you to study the nature of this problem of the city in America." Frank 
Lloyd Wright in the mid-1950s. (Jun Fujita, Chicago Historical Society) 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, . . . you are up against something that 
is going to require from you something from the spirit rather than the pocket, something 
from your humanity and good will rather than scientific planning of any kind. This is 
deeper than a well and wider than any church door, and, as you decide it, we live as a 
democracy or we go down the river with the lowest form of socialism this world has ever 
seen. Now it is just as simple as that. 

I am what they call an engineering architect. I study nature, and from nature comes what 
little wisdom I can give you. I urge you to study the nature of this problem of the city in 
America; find out the conclusion of that octopus, that monstrosity, that little overgrown 
village in agony and dying of its own weight. 

I am not interested in redevelopment. I hate the term re-as a prefix for anything. What I 
would like to see in America is a genuine sense of development, some grasp of the 
fundamental idea of what the city now means to America itself. It does not mean what it 
used to mean any longer. 

The city once upon a time was the center of all culture available; without the city, no 
culture. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, now there is no culture with the city as it is. 
The city is the enemy of what indigenous cultures we ourselves are entitled to by way of 
our Declaration of Independence. We are a republic professing democracy, believing in 
it-a great many of us still-without knowing how we hang on to it, but still we do, and 
we love the idea of individual freedom. The sovereignty of the individual has come as a 
light to the world-if only we lived up to our profession of it, which we do not do. 

Now, what of the city of the future? Our cities are overgrown villages, like this agonized 
monster we call New York-garbage on the sidewalks, trucks off the railroads competing 
with solid-gold Cadillacs, everything mixed up in a mess. And New York is only an 
extravagant expression of nearly every city we've got. They would all do the same if they 
could. 

What is the common sense in this thing? Where does good sense lie? We won't talk about 
good taste, because taste is always a matter of ignorance. But where are we going to put 
our feet to consider the nature of this thing we are in? 

There is a good Welsh definition of genius that came down from King Arthur's Round 
Table. I am Welsh; my mother was a teacher and my father a preacher, and the whole 
family may have been preachers back to the days of the Reformation. Here come precious 
little nuggets of wisdom. What we need is American genius to the fore-and this is the 
Welsh definition of a genius: a man who has an eye for nature, a man who has a heart for 
nature, and a man who has the boldness to follow nature. 

Now that is the American genius. You can set him aside if you please, but there is the 
quality the Declaration of Independence intended to liberate in this nation, intended to put 
to work. It did not mean we were to have an architecture founded upon the past when we 
have everything new to do a new architecture with. We have steel tension, we have glass, 
we have entirely new opportunities to be ourselves. 

Well, that applies to the city, too. The city is utterly unplanned; no thought has ever been 
given to it except as a redevelopment. Why not give some thought to the affair as a 
development according to the nature of what we are, where we are, how we are, and what 
it is all about? 

Have you read anything on the subject? Have you ever given your own personal attention 
in detail to the problems of this thing as a fact of nature? What is the nature of this thing? 
What is it doing to us? Where is your teen-age problem coming from? Where is all this 
wasted time to and fro? Whence come all these silly designs for traffic and automobiles? 
There is nothing mobile about the automobile . . . except the name. It is still the old 
lumber wagon with an engine attached to a big platform, gnashing its teeth at you as it 
comes down the street. There is no sense in it, no sense at all. 

Bob Moses would agree with me now. Look at the taxicabs in New York City. What are 
they like? Imitations of Madam's little private car, and the average load of passengers is 
one and a half. They talk about the traffic problem, but they had better do something 
besides talk about it. 

The traffic problem, ladies and gentlemen: if you are going to have the car, you are not 
going to have the present city. You are just going to have to make up your minds to 
choose, which do you want? Do you want to keep your cars, or do you want to keep your 
city practically as it is? You have got to make up your minds. What you see in the streets is 
only a precursor, it is only the beginning. There is nothing down there yet compared to 
what is coming. That flood of traffic will be up at the level of the third story in five years' 
time, and nobody is doing anything about it. They are building still in New York 
City-take the "whiskey building" [the Seagram Building], a 50-story building. No one 
seems to have any sense of what constitutes the nature of the thing we are in. 

Now you can put a price tag on it, as Brother Zeckendorf has just done so well. He is the 
man to do it. He looks to me as though he has a million dollars in his pocket right now. I 
know how he gets it. He gets it out of the dying city. He gets it out of the thing that we've 
got to die with-or else raise hell with Mr. Zeckendorf and what he represents. Those are 
nice gentle words, Zeck, but they are true. You can't go on with this jockeying with 
investment in an overgrown situation that makes no sense, and culture now is independent 
of this thing. With television, radio, telephone, decentralization is inevitable, and I don't 
mean the suburb. 

We, unfortunately, when we camped down here on fresh new soil, brought over the 
dormitory town from England. We never got from England the great spacious love of 
country, the love of the green that existed and made England what she is today. We have 
never had it in our country. Somehow we skipped it. It has got to come back. We have got 
to deal with it now. We want life on the green. We don't want life on hard pavements. 

I have been reproached for this mile-high, 528-story skyscraper as going back on the 
thesis I have just uttered. It is not. I am saying with this building that if you want to 
centralize, here is the way to centralize for the "brain workers": get them all together. Two 
of those buildings would hold all there is in New York if they put them in Central Park. 
One of them would be over-size for St. Louis. You cannot have your commodities in the 
same area and under the same circumstances as you have your thinking apparatus. Nature 
does not do it that way. Study the human anatomy as it stands today and get from it a plan 
for your city. 

If I were to carry this forward even two jumps, I would be obscene. Your city is just as silly 
as that obscenity would be if I were to utter it. And you can imagine it; I don't have to go 
into details. 

This is not a question for Mr. Zeckendorf. This is not a question for government. 
Government should never be allowed to put a finger on housing for the American people. 
It is not in the nature of government. Culture and government are at odds, and always will 
be. And when you turn your affairs of culture over to government, well, you will deserve 
what you get. You will get what you deserve, too. 

This is an individual matter. This is a matter for the American family. The American 
family is the unit of our democracy, and I am not speaking of the slums. I am speaking of 
the better democratic American element, the American family of the upper and middle 
third; not mobocracy, not snobocracy, but the upper and middle third. 

Now let them consider this question, let them take it under advisement. Let's have some 
common sense spread on it, regardless of selfish political or financial interests. Let's think 
of it as we would think of any sensible proposition we were up against and had to decide 
on to save our lives. Because, you know, Brother Zeckendorf has not referred to the atom 
bomb, he has not referred to the fact that concentrations of the character of the city of New 
York and the big cities today are just plain "murder." And isn't it interesting that no 
newspaper report or analysis of the bomb ever gave us the nature of the bomb? It was left 
to a humorous magazine to do it, and that was The New Yorker. You remember? The New 
Yorker told us that it was out-and-out a poison bomb of the most desolating, damnable 
character ever conceived by the mind of men. We've lost sight of it, but you can't lose sight 
of it. To me, war is now unthinkable, as the president said it was in a speech I listened to 
over the radio. He said that war was now suicide and was unthinkable, and it is. But has it 
made any difference in our thinking and our lives as we live them? 

We just now heard a lot about water pollution. What about air pollution? What about smog 
out in Los Angeles? What about carbon monoxide on the streets of New York? You could 
not live there very long, unless you lived in a penthouse, without consulting a doctor. It is 
the same everywhere. It is a betrayal of the rights and privileges and opportunities of the 
individual. 

I am referred to often as an individualist. Well, I plead guilty to that soft impeachment. I 
believe in the Declaration of Independence, and I believe in the mission of this country 
among nations. I think everything we have here we are betraying instead of developing 
and emphasizing in the spirit of our forefathers and the things they sought to see happen. 
And they have not happened. Why? That is a question for you to answer, not for me, 
although I am doing it in my little way, too. 

I foresaw that the city and the country were going to marry and live happily together, and I 
worked out a scheme and a plan for it that some people said was communism, some said 
was fascism. But nobody understood what it was all about, not even Zeckendorf. I called it 
Broadacre City. It was the green city. The green city is now a possibility. All our 
advantages point to it, all the gifts of science. We need that. 

Another thing we need-and Zeckendorf was talking about the railroads-we need to take 
those railroads (that is, the vacant land on the sides of them) away from the railroaders. 
They are not using it, it is no good to them. Let them have their own little railway, and put 
the trucks on roads on each side of the railroad . . . and leave us the roadways. All the 
freeways we can build won't be enough just for Pa and Ma and Aunt Hattie. We've got to 
do this. It will help a lot. 

And another thing, we've got to talk about something besides suburbia. Suburbia is a 
degrading existence. It takes most of Father's time-and Mother's time, too, when she isn't 
busy with the children in the kitchen-going to and from the city. For what? What do you 
go to the city for anymore? What do you get there when you go? It is only because the 
"brain workers" have gathered together in the city, and you have to go and consult them. 
The modern city is the basis for banking and prostitution and very little else. 

Just as madam has demoralized the modern car and has a taste for the elegance which she 
thinks is in it (which isn't there), so these other things have happened. We have lost our 
grip on what should be our American genius. . . . We are selling it down the river on all 
sorts of pretexts, and today success is about the lowest form of excess that can be 
imagined. Beware of success! 

Well, I could go on for a long time, but I think I've said enough. 

WAGNER: Thank you very much, Mr. Wright. 

WRIGHT: You are entirely welcome, Mr. Mayor. 

WAGNER: You are going to say good-bye to Mr. Zeckendorf, aren't you? 

WRIGHT: Goodbye, Zeck. 

[Resounding applause-a standing ovation-as Wright walks off the platform] 


THE SHAPE OF MIAMI 

Nature must be ashamed of these hotels that you're building down here. Nature must be 
ashamed of the way this place has been laid out, and patterned after a checkerboard, and 
parceled out in little parcels where you stand on each other's toes, face the sidewalk, your 
elbows in the next neighbor's ribs. 

In 1984 the Miami Herald recalled a visit Frank Lloyd Wright had paid to the city nearly 
three decades earlier: 

{Frank Lloyd Wright's  "Straight Talk About Miami Architecture" was first published in 
the Miami Herald on April 1,  1984. Accompanying it was an article by Beth Dunlap 
entitled "An Original American Genius." Reprinted with permission.} 

Wright came to Miami only once, on November 3, 1955, to speak to the Fashion Group of 
Miami at the Balmoral Hotel. The Fashion Group still exists, but the Balmoral is long 
gone, razed to make way for the Sheraton Bal Harbour. He arrived late, sweeping into the 
ballroom wearing his red-lined cape and gaucho hat. It was all theatrics, as usual, but 
from the moment he arrived the crowd was his to amuse, abuse, accuse. 

The speech is pure Wright-he moves from worrying about the fate of civilization to 
fussing over the size of billboards. He had toured Miami with his host, architect Alfred 
Browning Parker, and he had been appalled by what he had seen-boxes on the beach, 
boxes on the Biscayne Boulevard. And he said so. 

Later, his wife told him that this was one of the best speeches he had ever given. And it is 
a delight. It is fresh and as rambunctious today as it was then. 

In the audience were architects and designers, mostly. 

He talked just less than half an hour, but that was long enough. Wright philosophized a 
bit, and excoriated the architecture he had seen. 

The audience's response to Wright as he delivered the speech is set forth in the text. 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: We were coming in on the plane looking over this great, 
marvelous, and very beautiful plateau, and what do we see? Little tiny subdivisions of 
squares, little pigeonholes, little lots, everything divided up into little lots, little boxes on 
little lots, little tacky things. 

And you come downtown and what's happening? Plenty of skyscrapers. You call them 
hotels. You can't tell whether they're hotels or office buildings or something in a cemetery. 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: They have no feeling, no richness, no sense of this region. 

And that, I think, is happening to the country. It's not alone your misfortune. 

But where you have all these exquisite, lovely, beautiful things with such charm, why don't 
you learn from them? Why don't you do something down here that belongs? 

You have nothing in Miami that belongs to Miami, practically. Miami has a character. It 
has charm. It has these beautiful coral reefs, this white sand, these palms, these flowers, 
this beautiful growth on so slender a soil, these things that [can] grow in salt water-trees. 
Think of it! 

You have all these marvelous natural resources, and [did] you go to school to learn what to 
do with them? You didn't. And why didn't you? There's no such school to go to. 

Why are we so ignorant that we live in little boxes, and Realtors can sell us something that 
a pig would be ashamed to live in, really, if a pig could talk and protest? 

And you don't protest. You buy. You're perfectly satisfied, apparently. They'll give you 
anything you'll take. They'll degrade you to the level of the pig if you don't look out. And 
you should look out. 

You should have something to say. They wouldn't sell these things. This wouldn't be going 
on if you had been properly educated. Because you have the feeling in your hearts, I know 
you have. You love beauty. You love beautiful things. 

You want to live in a way becoming to human beings with the spirit and a devotion to 
beauty, don't you? Well, why don't you? Why would you accept this sort of thing? Why 
would you let them put it over on you? You say, because of economic reasons. 

Well, if that's what this country talks about as the highest standard of living in the world, 
then I think it isn't at all the highest, it's only the biggest-and quite ignorant. . . . 

Nature must be ashamed of these hotels that you're building down here. Nature must be 
ashamed of the way this place has been laid out, and patterned after a checkerboard, and 
parceled out in little parcels where you stand on each other's toes, face the sidewalk, your 
elbows in the next neighbor's ribs. 

And the whole thing, demoralization; there is no inspiration there. There is no quality, 
nothing for a free people in a free nation. Nor are we free. 

What does freedom mean? You think that it's something that can be handed to you by a 
political cabal or group or a president or something official? No. It's something you are. 
It's something you've got under your vest, in here. It's something that you can be, but you 
earn it. 

We haven't stressed conscience enough in connection with freedom. Because you can be as 
free as we're free and land in jail pretty quick . . . unless growing up [alongside freedom] is 
this thing we call conscience. 

It seems to me that there is no conscience in our architecture. There is no conscience in 
this thing that is planted on Miami. Where did it come from? What is it? Have you ever 
analyzed it? Have you ever really looked it in the face? For what it is? Is that the best that 
human beings can imagine? The best they can do for humanity-pile people up in these 
great aggregations of boxes, these things that look like a diagram on the ground turned up 
edgewise for you to look at? 

And that's the man on the street. He's stuck in one of those windows, one of those holes. 
And you create terraced slabs running horizontally together. I think they call it the 
International Style, but it's no style at all. I don't care what you call it, as long as you don't 
call it architecture. 

AUDIENCE: [Slight laughter] 

WRIGHT: Architecture begins where the animal leaves off. Just as humanity begins where 
the animal leaves off. Architecture begins in the spirit of man; it begins where he begins to 
be somebody himself in his own right, and where he begins to sense his own freedom and 
know his power and his freedom and exercises them in the way he lives. 

What is a civilization? I don't want to talk as though I were angry. I'm not. I'm concerned, 
really. I'm saying the things I've said for the last 60 years, and they don't seem to be taking 
very much effect yet. But a little, enough to be encouraging, because we're going to have a 
life of the spirit in America. 

We're going to have an architecture of our own. That is the basis of a culture. You must 
understand that a civilization is nothing more than a way of life. The Indians had it before 
we got here-and, in some ways, a better one than we seem to be able to produce. 

What is culture? Culture is what makes that way of life a beautiful way of life. 

What have we done about it in Miami? What have we done about it anywhere? Miami is 
no worse than any other part of the country except that your opportunities were greater. 
Except that you've had a distinctive character of your own, except that things that grew 
here for you had a beauty-and a character, too, you'd say-of their own. 

I'm a great believer in so-called regional development. I don't believe you should have the 
same things in Miami that you have in the streets of New York City. I don't believe that 
New York is entitled to anything that Miami has naturally. 

Why can't Miami be Miami? Why can't you citizens of Miami not only boast but produce 
something really of your own? It's all here. Now what you need to do it-this is going to be 
personal-are architects. 

All that's the matter with Miami, of course, is the Miamians-you people. Nobody's done 
this thing to you; you've done it to yourselves. You've allowed it to happen to you, haven't 
you? Of course you have. 

Now why don't you get out of it? Why don't you turn about? Go up the other way. Refuse to 
register in any of these hotels! 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: Refuse to live in any of these boxes they offer you at a cheap price. As a matter 
of fact, they want at least three times what they're worth. Why pay it? 

No. This thing has to come from you people, come from the people, come from you, and 
nobody's going to do it for you. It imposes upon you all down the line. You live under a 
profit system, and a profit system consists of getting the sheep into condition where they 
can be sheared without too much fuss. 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

WRIGHT: I guess Miami has been sheared without too much fuss. 

AUDIENCE: [Continued laughter] 

WRIGHT: You know, why do you submit? 

Look at the flowers. Look at the trees. Look at the beauty of your coral reefs. Look at these 
outcroppings of your wonderful stone. Look what you've got! 

I'm not going to point to your architects. . . . Being in love with architecture, I've found 
that what's the matter with architecture is the architects who have hold of it. I think all 
that's the matter with Miami is the citizens who have hold of it. 

There was a preacher once, a very good preacher, Gerald Stanley Lee . . . who said that the 
only thing the matter with goodness in America was the people who had hold of it. And he 
was right. And we are right. . . . We've been busy down there on that little campus [at 
Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida], and it has something of these things in it. 
I beg you take a look at those buildings, and you'll see they respected these things that 
Florida can produce. Florida Southern is "Floridian," whether you recognize it or not. 

And so Miami is not in the least Floridian. 

I think Florida is a lovely name, isn't it? "Floridian" is something to be proud of, the 
flower region, the flower country-and such flowers and such forms and such inspiration 
are right at your door. 

I'm here because of [the] so-called Fashion Group, you know. 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

WRIGHT: Don't laugh, because in the sense that they should use the word and do use it, 
they don't mean just clothes. And they don't mean getting dressed up appropriately for a 
party-but fashioning. They should call themselves a fashioning group, designing group, 
shaping things, making things appropriate and not only appropriate to be worn, 
appropriate to be seen. 

Who knows now when we're looking at a building what it is for? You don't know whether 
it's an office building or a hotel, and I'm willing to go further and say a church or anything 
else, a night club, a restaurant, a motel. There seems to be no sense of proportion, no sense 
of the appropriate. It's been lost somewhere down the line. Now where is it? 

Well, let's bring it back. What's to hinder [you]? You. Only you, that's all. You folks are in 
the way. You folks are Miami, and that's the tragedy of it. We can't do anything with 
Miami until you change. Until you get something in your systems that you don't seem to 
have. 

What is that? I blame it on the fact that you're educated. If you were natural, if you had the 
instincts that God gave you and intended you to have, I'll bet that Miami would be 
beautiful today. I wouldn't stand here saying horrible, because it wouldn't be true. 

I didn't [mean] horrible. I [meant] something that was the equivalent, but horrible was the 
word that came out. 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: My own master Louis Sullivan's definition of a 'highbrow' was a man educated 
far beyond his capacity. 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: No doubt Miami has been educated far beyond its capacity. And that's what's 
the matter. You know too much and feel too little. This thing I'm talking about is a matter 
of the heart, of the spirit. It's a matter of love and a feeling for nature. . . . 

This thing is fundamental, elemental, and it's a question of art and religion. Now, of 
course, science has smashed religion for us, practically. We don't admit it and we don't 
like to talk about it. We have no religion now, really. And we have no art either. Then, 
without art and religion, we have no soul. We have nothing for the soul to feed upon. 

What are we going to do to get it? How is it going to come to us, this thing you call a 
culture of our own? I frequently have quoted this Frenchman who was witty. He was witty 
and he was correct when he said that we [Americans] were "the only great nation to have 
proceeded directly from barbarism to degeneracy with no culture of our own in between." 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

WRIGHT: That [is] the opinion with which we are regarded around the world. Did you 
know that? . . . 

We are considered to be the great nation of the substitute. An original is only good for the 
number of substitutes you can get out of it and sell. 

Yes, salesmanship is the great American art, and we are not so good even at that-not so 
good. I've just seen it coming down the street, seen signs the size of one of your 
skyscrapers standing along the street with names on it. And I remember suggesting in Los 
Angeles that the way now to build is to build a great sign the size of a lot in front, move in 
behind it, and do business. 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: That would apply to most of the things you see along the street. 

Well, you did it. That's the point you won't acknowledge. That's the point I'm here to drive 
home to you. You're to blame for it. You know better. If you take stock of what you really 
feel and know, you know better. 

You want this thing I'm talking about just as much as I want it, but you don't know how to 
get it. . . . 

If a civilization can't get something of beauty, something of concordant harmony, 
something admirable born, why should it ever have been? 

And when a thing goes wrong for the spirit, when the human element in it suffers 
degradation or denial as it does in these buildings you're building, what are you going to 
do? Put up with it? No. 

Well, now, this may all sound pessimistic. I talked . . . in New York, I guess about a week 
ago, to the interior decorators. I said something similar, and they were so offended they 
wouldn't allow the press to print anything concerning the interview. I think they were 
quite right. I think it ought to be concealed. 

AUDIENCE: [Loud Laughter] 

WRIGHT: I don't think anything that I've said here today ought to get out. 

AUDIENCE: [Continued laughter] 

WRIGHT: But I do think you ought to take it to heart because it's an old-timer, an old 
campaigner, talking to you. In 62 years now I have some 647 buildings built. And every 
one of them has been a tribute to the spirit of man. They haven't been throwaways and they 
haven't been expedient. . . So believe what I've said to you in the spirit in which I've said 
it. I do know something about what I'm talking about. And never have I stood up on a 
platform to talk to people about anything except what I myself experienced . . . but I know 
a bit about the thing I've done, and I'm passing it on to you for what it's worth. Good-bye. 

AUDIENCE: [Loud applause] 


ON THE DESIGN OF THE  

U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY 

It is an imitation thing. It is not genuine modern architecture. It is a glassified box on 
stilts, which is [an example of a style] practiced abroad [that] has now become fanatic with 
certain of our commercial architects. They are the ones that unfortunately succeed to 
government work. A man like myself would never be thought of in connection with a 
government job. 

Frank Lloyd Wright prepared designs for only a few government-related projects. These 
projects included the embassy for the United States (Tokyo, Japan) of 1914; the Monona 
Terrace Civic Center project (Madison, Wisconsin) of 1938; the Cloverleaf Housing 
project (Pittsfield, Massachusetts) of 1942; the Pittsfield Defense Plant (Pittsfield, 
Massachusetts) of 1942; the San Antonio Transit project (San Antonio, Texas) of 1946; 
the Butterfly Bridge (Spring Green, Wisconsin) of 1947; the San Francisco Bridge (San 
Francisco, California) of 1949; the restaurant for Yosemite National Park (Yosemite, 
California) of 1954; the second Monona Terrace Civic Center project (Madison, 
Wisconsin) of 1954; the Spring Green Post Office (Spring Green, Wisconsin) of 1956; the 
Arizona State Capitol "Oasis" project (Phoenix, Arizona) of 1957; the Marin County Fair 
Pavilion, Amphitheater, Health and Services Building, and Children's Pavilion (San 
Raphael, California) of 1957; and the Marin County Civic Center and Post Office (San 
Raphael, California) of 1957. Not until after Wright's death in 1959 did one of his designs 
for a governmental entity in the United States actually get built-the Marin County Civic 
Center and Post Office. The construction of Wright's few designs for government-related 
buildings in the United States was indeed elusive. This was the case even though Wright's 
career spanned more than 70 years and even though his architecture was a distinctly 
American architecture. 

So important to Wright was the design and construction of government buildings that he 
went out of his way to try to get such commissions. Two such government-related 
architectural commissions were the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, 
Colorado, and the "National Cultural Center" in Washington, D.C. 

In July 1955 Wright testified at hearings before a subcommittee of the 84th Congress on 
the Department of the Air Force's proposed Air Force Academy and, specifically, on the 
government's method of selecting an architect for the project. He urged the congressional 
subcommittee to postpone work on the design of the academy until new plans could be 
prepared. The design that Wright was critical of had been prepared by the firm of 
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). 

Nathaniel Alexander Owings, a founding principal of SOM, reflected on the design of the 
Air Force Academy and Frank Lloyd Wright's involvement in his book The Spaces in 
Between: An Architect's Journey: 

We went after the job hard, claiming full in-house competence, refusing association with 
other firms. As more of our competitors began urging us to join up with them, it was clear 
that the word had gone out that we had the job-and even clearer when Secretary Talbott 
invited Skid to lunch at The Brook . . . 

Shortly thereafter a ten member board of heavily starred generals, chaired by Jim Douglas, 
began interviewing at length some dozen of the three-hundred-odd architect-engineer 
firms competing, whose brochures had apparently been large enough to remain on top of 
the table. The contestants' offerings varied from vague promises of what they would do if 
awarded the job to actual designs and models. Our own presentation consisted of a 
15-foot-long, six-foot-high folding screen divided into three-foot panels, each 
devoted to one aspect of the total problem: research, programming, scheduling, and design 
of the academy. A different partner explained each section of the screen. After I had 
completed a summary of our proposal, I was asked by a four-star general if I proposed to 
design the academy in sandstone, as recommended by Frank Lloyd Wright. "General," I 
asked, "would you build an airplane of sandstone?" 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: ". . .the next thing I saw was this thing, and when I saw it I 
was shocked, because this is an abuse of the thing which we call modern architecture." 
One of the International Style buildings at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the academy's 
chapel. (Gary F. Karner) 

In the end, Wright's testimony fell upon deaf ears. The contract was awarded to SOM, 
which designed and built the U.S. Air Force Academy between 1956 and 1962. The 
constructed design featured teaching, residential, and administration buildings 
accommodating 8,000 people. The campus was set at an elevation of 6,500 feet in the 
Rockies. The basic exterior construction materials used by SOM were aluminum cladding 
and glass. 

REPRESENTATIVE MAHON: The committee will come to order. We are pleased to have 
with us this afternoon Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, who desires to testify with reference to the 
requested appropriation for the Air Force Academy. 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: Thank you, sir. 

MAHON: Mr. Wright, we have been requested to appropriate $76 million as a further 
expenditure for the Air Force Academy. 

WRIGHT: To find out why you should spend $576 million; is that it? 

MAHON: There is considerable dissatisfaction which has arisen over the proposed design 
of the academy. Of course, the design is not as yet fixed. 

WRIGHT: Accepted. 

MAHON: Accepted is right. 

WRIGHT: It has been presented. 

MAHON: A preliminary proposal, at least, has been presented. Are you familiar with the 
preliminary or with the proposal? 

WRIGHT: Yes; the young editor outside there sent me the number of his paper in which it 
appeared, and it was very well presented. That is why I spoke up, being an old stager [sic] 
here in this thing of modern architecture. I thought if that was to represent the nation for 
the next 300 years or more, as modern architecture, it was time for somebody to do 
something. So I spoke out, and here I am. 

I do not feel very comfortable here. 

MAHON: Well, be perfectly at ease. We want you to be comfortable, and we want you to 
give us any of your ideas which will be helpful. 

We are not architects, or engineers, or specialists. We are members who are charged with 
the responsibility of screening requests for funds. 

WRIGHT: That is an admission that I admire. I was not present when this matter was first 
decided. I thought Mr. Talbott was a very brave and rash man to have proceeded as he did. 

It seems to me that when a thing of this importance to the people and to the nation is 
under consideration, there is only one way of proceeding, and that is by inviting men of 
undoubted capacity by way of experience . . . to submit plans, and pay them for their 
services. You know, I have never joined the architectural profession, because they have 
never lived up to their so-called ethics. They will work for nothing. I think there were 
700 of them reaching for this in the first place, were there not? 

Anyway, it simmered down to two represented by commercial-or do you call them 
advertising-agencies in New York City, and myself, with no representation. When I saw 
how the thing was going, and that I had really signed into a competition which I had never 
believed in, I resigned and did not go down to sell myself to Mr. Talbott. 

Well, then, the next thing I saw was this thing, and when I saw it I was shocked, because 
this is an abuse of the thing which we call modern architecture. I have seen it referred to in 
your papers as experimental architecture. Well, that is a very nice, kind name for it, 
because there is no soul in it; there is no feeling for humanity in it. It is, shall I say, 
unhuman, or inhumane. You can take your choice. 

Now, the thing which I think they should have done is to have picked out, well, will we 
say, an old-timer like myself; and another, perhaps modernistic; and then one of the old 
school-three, at least, and probably five-and pay them $100,000 to take the overhead off 
them. Then, I think, the only fair judgment now would be to take and make a brochure out 
of it. Say three designs would be enough. I would be willing to put my thoughts on paper, 
for one. . . . Get them in and give a fair contrast. 

Now, who is going to judge? The tribunal is always the question, and a tribunal in 
architecture is very hard to find, because it is a tribunal's blind spot. Well, culture knows 
nothing of architecture yet, and inasmuch as it is the basis of a culture, I could come in 
here wearing gold medals and with citations behind me which would cover the wall. Why? 
Because America at last is seen by our neighbors to have something to say for itself in the 
way of a culture of its own; something to exploit besides dollars. That did not get into your 
competition here. I mean, it did not get into your Air Force Academy. 

MAHON: In specific terminology, what are some of the things which in your opinion are 
wrong with the proposed design? You said it had no soul, and I am inclined to agree with 
you. 

WRIGHT: The proposed design, in the first place, ignores entirely the nature of the site. 
Now in good architecture, in organic architecture, the first element is to put something 
there that looks as though it had always been there, and always ought to be there, and if 
you took it away it would spoil the landscape. 

REPRESENTATIVE SCRIVNER: In other words, something that fits, just naturally fits in 
its surroundings. 

WRIGHT: Yes, sir; something becoming and something suitable and-appropriate is the 
word. It is not appropriate to the character of the American people, except a certain gang 
getting too big in the country altogether who are commercializing everything and who now 
believe that architecture also is a business. This is a big factory which did this [design]. It 
is one of the biggest planning factories in the country. I think they have five or six hundred 
draftsmen. And the two men at the head of it, what do they know about architecture? 
There is a boy in the back room making designs for the magazine. That is more or less a 
deduction, but call it a deduction, and that is the worst name for it. 

MAHON: You are talking about Skidmore, Owings and Merrill? 

WRIGHT: I am; and they are friends of mine, too, besides. 

MAHON: Are they architects of considerable stature? 

WRIGHT: Are they? I would not use that word stature in regard to them. 

MAHON: I am asking you a serious question. 

WRIGHT: They are commercial artists, and they are very successful. They know how to 
sell themselves, by way of their advertising agency, to the big American businessman, who 
knows no more about architecture than his little girl, or his son who has not yet gone to 
school. 

MAHON: These people do commercial work, and you mean they build buildings for 
different concerns? 

WRIGHT: They do, and they do it well, and that is why they have got so much of it to do, 
but it is commercial. 

If you want something that represents feeling, spirit, and the future, they have not got it. 

MAHON: We want some dignity in the design and something that represents feeling. 

WRIGHT: Somebody said "appropriate" a little while ago, and that says the whole thing. 

MAHON: But we want it to be utilitarian also. Some of the present buildings, of course, 
are magnificent. They, like the United States Capitol, are wholly unsuited to the job which 
you are supposed to do in them. 

WRIGHT: Absolutely and certainly. My thesis in architecture is that those things are not 
incompatible. In the usefulness of the thing, and in its complete satisfaction of all the 
physical requirements, you will find the basis for the beauty that you are going to endow 
the thing with, as a rule. 

MAHON: Do you have a vision as to what the academy should look like, and, if so, about 
how would it look? 

WRIGHT: I have, and that is what hurts. I had a perfect vision of that building. I went out 
to the site, and I saw it, and it impressed me so much that I did not sleep at night for a 
long time. I have the design in the back of my head. 

MAHON: Does such design involve taller buildings than these, or some flat-topped 
buildings? 

WRIGHT: My dear Mr. Mahon, I could not describe it to you; it is woven right in with 
that site. The chapel is the apex of the thing, and the whole thing is wound down the side 
of that slope, until you get in the great field below. 

REPRESENTATIVE WHITTEN: Even as a layman, it strikes one as being odd to 
see-and I have been in that country years ago-the mountains and beautiful lines have 
some flat something such as this. 

WRIGHT: Yes. 

WHITTEN: In an area where the mountains stand out, and a place where you would look 
for at least spires or something that would blend in with the surroundings, this thing made 
like a pancake looks out of place even to a layman. 

WRIGHT: It is a factor moved into the wrong place. That was my first reaction. I think it 
should be something for the American people. 

I want to see it appropriate. Your chapel would be the crowning feature of it on top of the 
mountain, and the whole thing would go up this way [Wright indicates], and out from a 
central avenue running up the side of the mountain, with escalators taking you up as you 
please. The center line would run up to the chapel on top of the hill. I am not going to give 
the scheme away. 

REPRESENTATIVE DEANE: This thought occurs to me: How could you take a glass 
structure which has been created and then try to put more brick in it, or more stone in it, to 
take the glass effect out? It would be a worse monstrosity, would it not? 

WRIGHT: Absolutely. 

DEANE: How can that be done satisfactorily? I mean, unless you start from the bottom 
and create from the beginning? 

WRIGHT: That is what you must do. 

DEANE: That seems to me to be reasonable. It has been represented to us that we could 
take this and recast it. 

WRIGHT: What is lacking is the proper feeling for the concept of the structure. It is 
initially wrong. 

DEANE: I agree with you completely. It seems to me the chapel which they say they have 
not created-they just put it in there. 

WRIGHT: Chapel? 

DEANE: That chapel should be, as you indicated, the focal point in the whole plan. 

WRIGHT: It should be the apex, the sense of the whole thing coming into some spiritual 
idea of life and character. The academy should be a character builder for the young people 
who will be in it. It should not put them on a level with the butcher, the baker, and the 
candlestick maker, should it? 

DEANE: From your experience, what percentage of the architects of the country subscribe 
to that type of thinking? 

WRIGHT: A very small percentage. It is novel; it is new. It is a diversion from my own 
thought and feeling, as you see it spread over the country today. It is not architecture. I do 
not think you could call it architecture. It is a commercialization and an expedient use 
of-an exaggeration of the use of-glass. That is what started this, the Lever Building in 
New York City. 

SCRIVNER: In your vision, did you not see more use made of the natural stone that you 
have right there that would blend right in? 

WRIGHT: Of course, the red stone. I would have the whole thing red stone, with a great 
use of the modern materials of glass and steel. But it would be harmonious. It would not be 
a sacrifice to a commercial idea. It would still maintain the dignity and beauty of 
architecture. 

SCRIVNER: The name of Wright in architectural circles and elsewhere has been an 
outstanding name. My recollection is you used to be known as the father of modernistic 
architecture. 

WRIGHT: It is modern. 

DEANE: We understood you had a little hesitancy in coming here. 

WRIGHT: I did. 

DEANE: As one member of the committee, I would like to say that I am extremely 
grateful to you for coming, and I think that I speak for the other members. 

WRIGHT: There is not an architect in the United States who would do what I am doing 
here now. 

DEANE: It would probably be looked upon-

WRIGHT: As unprofessional and betraying a profession. 

DEANE: I think that you are rendering a distinct service. Do you know Mr. [Welton] 
Becket of Los Angeles? 

WRIGHT: I do not know him, but I know of him. I wish that something would happen to 
him soon. I would hate to see his things going as they are going now. 

DEANE: What do you have reference to? 

WRIGHT: That new hotel he has built out there. Why should not a hotel have something 
human and attractive in it? 

DEANE: Who is Mr. [Eero] Saarinen? 

WRIGHT: His father [Eliel Saarinen] wanted me to train him architecturally. That is the 
young boy. 

DEANE: How old is he? 

WRIGHT: Thirty-five or thirty-six. 

DEANE: Do you know Mr. [Pietro] Belluschi, the dean of the architecture school of MIT? 

WRIGHT: He is a teacher. He has done some very nice little houses, but he has had no 
experience as a builder. 

DEANE: It is generally known that the names I have mentioned have been asked to advise 
with Mr. Merrill of the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. These gentlemen that I 
have just mentioned have been asked to sit as consultants to reassess Skidmore, Owings 
and Merrill's plan. 

WRIGHT: I could not imagine anything that would [more readily] make a bad matter 
worse. There is not anything to assess. The start is wrong. The whole trend is wrong. 
There is nothing there to take hold of except something reprehensible to our nation. 

WHITTEN: Did I understand you to say that the firm that got the contract is a big 
commercial planner, and it was represented by two publicity firms . . . in New York City? 

WRIGHT: That is true. That is when I resigned. I gave up. I said, "What is the use of 
getting into a fracas of this sort?" 

WHITTEN: You had no idea of what fees they paid such publicity firms? 

WRIGHT: No. 

WHITTEN: The record shows the amount they have already received for the plans. 

WRIGHT: I think that you ought to leave them where they are with what they have. They 
have shot their bolt. Now I think that you should take a fresh start and pay some of us 
enough money to take the overhead off of us so that we would not have to spend any of our 
own money. I am willing to throw my time in for nothing. There would be other men who 
would do the same. 

WHITTEN: How much money has been spent on architectural fees to date? 

WRIGHT: I wonder! 

WHITTEN: Your idea is that about $100,000 ought to take care of the overhead? 

WRIGHT: Yes, and if a model were requested after you have seen the sketches, that should 
cost about $20,000. I just completed a model and that is what it cost me. My boys made it. 
We spent 3,500 man-hours on that model. 

This is the point that I have come here to labor and defend. architecture, after all, is the 
blind spot of our country. We do not know what constitutes a good building. Now we are 
going into it blind. We are having one of those planning factories do it. That is what we 
call them. There is a boy in the back room reading magazines who has a little flair for 
design; and then in the middle is the big boy who has club relations, and he is a good guy 
and he gets the thing over; and then there is the big fellow in the front office who gets the 
deal. The country is full of them; I have always deplored it. That is one reason why I have 
never joined the profession. They have given me their Gold Medal. I have never joined the 
profession because I believe that its dignity, its greatness, and what should lie in it for the 
American people now are not there. I think they are not there because everything is 
commercialized to such an extent. There is no poetry in it anymore. The poetic principle 
has left. They do not see the beauty. They do not understand what would . . . inspire the 
American people and the boys who go there. It should be like going to church. It could be 
like going into a great cathedral, only it would not be in those terms. It would be 
associated with nature, and the whole structure would be felt. 

DEANE: Are you in a position to comment upon the cost of a proposed scheme such as 
has been presented, as compared to a more substantial one such as you are thinking of? 

WRIGHT: I think of something of a more substantial nature because it would cost less 
than all this artificiality. The other has no true appropriateness. 

DEANE: You can take that one step further. The maintenance, likewise, would be much 
more expensive? 

WRIGHT: It is elemental. One does not plan programs without all that as synthesis in the 
mind of the architect. 

WHITTEN: You might be interested in this. I thought it odd, but when questioning the 
witnesses here about the flat roof, I asked if it was not unusual in that area. The Assistant 
Secretary said it was like a telephone building in Colorado Springs. 

WRIGHT: If the scheme was right, you would not think about the roof being flat. You 
would feel the whole thing was like a tree in the landscape; that it was natural to it and 
that it belonged there. 

WHITTEN: If it was good enough for the local telephone company building in Colorado 
Springs, it was good enough. 

WRIGHT: That is about the way the building looks. That is about the way it impressed me 
when I first saw it. It would make a good market out there somewhere on the plains near a 
big city, or on the outskirts of a city. 

WHITTEN: This will mean a lot to the young men who go there. Actually, for each 
American who perhaps will have a chance to go to see the interior, there will be 1,000 who 
will know it only by pictures. The point I make is the outside appearance of it as a public 
building will be the thing that will be known to millions of American people. If you leave 
that out, you are depriving the American people of everything. 

WRIGHT: That is why I am sitting here now talking to you gentlemen. I know that it is 
going to have a great effect upon the course of architecture in America, and I do not want 
it to go that way. 

I have fought it consistently now for a great many years. I do not want to see it go 
clumpety-clump all the way down the backstairs, which is the commercial stairs. That is 
the backstairs, no matter what you say, when it comes to art. 

DEANE: As I understand it, the contract has been entered into with this firm. They have 
people on the ground. How can you change the creative thinking of a man, or of a firm, or 
people that may be brought in to advertise? How could you get away from the course that it 
appears to be following? 

WRIGHT: You cannot. It is natural that the constructive interpretation of an idea at the 
beginning should enlist all these forces and activate them and direct them . . . toward a 
coherent, comprehensive scheme. 

DEANE: What can this committee do? What can the public do about this? As I see it, we 
are helpless. 

WRIGHT: Say that it did not have sufficient benefit of the clergy and that a 
reconsideration has been ordered, and give it a reconsideration. That is all you can do. It is 
an honorable state of mind. 

DEANE: If you had placed your name on a contract and then, for reasons comparable to 
what we are discussing here, the plans were pulled away, and someone else came into the 
picture, how would you feel? 

WRIGHT: I would feel if I had done anything of this kind . . . that if the hand of God was 
not sufficient, the hand of man should rise and execute justice. 

DEANE: Being a lawyer, I appreciate the validity of a contract. 

WRIGHT: But do not get the contract bigger than the man. 

DEANE: We wrote the law saying that there should be an Air Force Academy. We did not 
spell out the plans and the specifications. 

WRIGHT: There was not enough depth of consideration given. 

DEANE: It seems that the Congress will have to yield to the wishes of the defense 
establishment in arriving at the final plans, as much as we might regret it. We could refuse 
them money. I do not know whether that would be right or not. We need an academy. The 
first class has already been recruited. 

WRIGHT: It is the age-old dilemma, man versus the net which he weaves for himself 
and finally becomes entangled in and has to be rescued from. I do not know what method 
of procedure could be. My thought is, leave this as it is for the time being. Postpone it. Do 
not abrogate it. Let it lie. Let me show you what is in my mind and what I have been 
talking about. Get somebody else in and do the same thing with him you do with me. Get 
up a little brochure and get it to every high school in the nation, not to the architects, not 
to the prejudices of the people as they exist. This is a democratic process, and I would let 
them vote to see what the consensus of opinion of the nation is regarding this thing. It is 
not going to be ours. We will hardly see it. They are the ones who are going to live with it. 
Why not make a definite appeal to their sensibilities? They are fresh. They can be 
manipulated, too, and will be, and the idea is not perfect, but it is as near to it as you can 
get. 

You are in the realm of the spirit when you are in art, and when you are talking about a 
work of art that is where you are. 

The great difficulty is to get a conception worthy of execution and to get the thing right. 
None of those men that you have mentioned to me could ever conceive a thing, so what is 
the use of monkeying along with it? 

WHITTEN: Back in the days when the Capitol was built all of these modern things were 
not available, but in the new buildings you can adapt those things. 

WRIGHT: We do it every day. There is no trouble about that, even for the old-timer. We 
can do it. 

WHITTEN: That is the point that I made. 

WRIGHT: Who would be the outstanding concern now, the Richard Hunt of today? Do 
they exist? I do not know. 

WHITTEN: On behalf of the committee I wish to thank you. We have the mechanical 
problem of what we can do. But this type of expression and opinion is of value to the 
committee. It will be printed and will be of value to those who read it. 

WRIGHT: Do not say [the problem] is mechanical; it is moral. 

WHITTEN: How we can do it is a matter of mechanics. How we can get our hands again 
on it is another matter. 

WRIGHT: You have a lawyer at the head of the table. The lawyers have succeeded in 
doing this, that, and the other with the law. Now the law knows neither justice nor money, 
so he can do anything with the law he wants to. 

DEANE: The implication is we should ride herd on this and see if we can bring up 
something? 

WRIGHT: Postpone; wait and start this other thing in motion as a codicil. Wait to see 
what happens. If you see something that you should have had in the first place, then you 
will manage to get it. 

WHITTEN: If they do not have the money, it will hold them back. This is not a question of 
money. 

We appreciate your appearance, Mr. Wright. 

Later in July 1955 Wright testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: I am not here to ask for the appropriation of anything except 
a little uncommon common sense regarding the culture of this nation. I consider the action 
of your subcommittee recently on appropriations to be one of the most encouraging things 
and a salvation clause in the history of architecture. . . . 

It seems that the ways and means of communicating these commissions [for buildings] that 
characterize the appearance of the nation and the architecture of the nation for 300 years is 
somewhat remiss, commercialized, and in the hands of a small clique . . . the planning 
factory, the institution with 500 or 600 draftsmen, instead of the inspired individual. 

I suppose the whole country is drifting toward egalitarianism quite rapidly, but it is a pity 
to see it enter into architecture, which is an inspired region and should be. 

If we do not know a little better than we seem to in this Air Force Academy plan, I cannot 
say anything more for architecture along the line of modern architecture, which I 
represent. 

I refused to enter this competition for reasons I have stated and the statement I handed to 
the committee. I do not think I shall bother you with it. 

I have written certain things concerning the project as it stands, which are also readable, 
and I do not want to bother you with those. 

All I ask is that some real consideration be given by Congress, by our government, to these 
things that usually go by default. I regard this [proposed design] as it now stands as 
something that went by the usual default, expediency for the expedient. It has no virtue. 

SENATOR CHAVEZ: As a professional man of 60 years' experience, you would like to 
have the plans that would meet the atmosphere and the elements of the locale, while you 
may not do it. 

WRIGHT: Certainly; and some inspiration, something of the spirit and not be wholly a 
concession to the expediency of the time. Now, how to get it? I have outlined a little plan 
that takes it by democratic process to the young people of this nation, those unspoiled by 
the average conditioning which they receive concerning the arts. That plan I have also 
given to the committee, and I will not waste your time now. But it seems to me 
encouraging when our Congress will take a vital interest in the character of the whole 
thing that is going to characterize us for the next 300 years. 

CHAVEZ: I want to do it. I want to keep every section of the country intact; even the 
aesthetic end of it. I know a building that would fit Philadelphia would not fit Colorado 
Springs. 

WRIGHT: That is true. 

CHAVEZ: I know the one that would fit Colorado Springs probably would not suit Seattle, 
Washington, or Boston. 

WRIGHT: That is a very admirable statement. 

CHAVEZ: We just happen to have a particular atmosphere, some attitude, some 
mountains, some blue skies, and this and that. If I understand you correctly, you want 
whoever draws the plans to keep those things in mind. 

WRIGHT: I went to the city, was inspired by it, and thought it would be a shame to turn 
the average ambition loose in that magnificent opportunity where buildings and scenery 
and the countryside could be made one and express something noble, something worthy of 
our nation, something you could call American architecture. 

The present effort, as we see it, on the record, is said to be a picture of a picture of a 
picture. A picture of what? A picture of whom? Who paid for the picture? The American 
people. How much? For what purpose? 

I would like to know myself. 

SENATOR STENNIS: Mr. Chairman, may I ask a question? 

CHAVEZ: You certainly may, Senator. 

STENNIS: Mr. Wright, I have not had a chance to read your statements. I went out to the 
city with Senator Talbott about a month ago when these plans were first disclosed. That is, 
these pictures that you refer to. I was impressed with the city. I was disappointed with the 
plans in that they were a shocking contrast to the surroundings, as I saw it. 

WRIGHT: "Shocking" is the word. 

STENNIS: What do you suggest? I know Secretary Talbott is very much concerned about 
this. I judge he has never been completely pleased with those plans. 

WRIGHT: I think he ought to have it on his conscience. 

STENNIS: I am sure he does. I do not join in any reflections on Secretary Talbott at all on 
this matter because he is very much concerned about it. 

WRIGHT: There is no reflection upon anybody except the intelligence of the people of the 
United States in allowing a thing like this to happen continually. This is not the first time. 
This will not be the last time until [we devise] some better way of arriving at conclusions 
concerning what is characterizing the country culturally. 

STENNIS: I want to get down to a concrete suggestion from you if I can. I wrote Secretary 
Talbott when I got back, and from the layman's standpoint I suggested that a committee of 
educators be called in to pass on this matter from their viewpoint, in building buildings 
that inspire and of a cultural background, and appearance, along with the rugged beauty of 
the Rocky Mountains. 

That is as far as I could go. 

What do you suggest? 

WRIGHT: I suggest a fresh start and a paid competition, a nominal sum given to men 
chosen for their creative ability in the various strata of our life. We are passing away now 
from the old sort of thing that characterizes Washington. 

STENNIS: You mean a group of architects? 

WRIGHT: Say, three, selected for their capacity to put something into this besides 
mechanisms. 

STENNIS: Three architectural concepts? 

WRIGHT: Then I would suggest, as a tribunal, the young people of this nation. I would 
have the three designs made into brochures and sent to the principals of the high schools 
of the nation. Let the children-we won't call them children, I think they are referred to as 
teen-agers-vote on it, and you take that result and decide how it is to be executed. I 
would like to see some native appreciation concerning what we call architecture. It is the 
mother art. There is no culture without it as a basis. 

Why not make it educational? Why not get something out of this fiasco for the people of 
the United States, and that means the young people, doesn't it? 

STENNIS: As a general proposition, do you not think the architecture should blend with 
the surroundings of that area? 

WRIGHT: It has been the ambition of my life to make it come true. I think everything I 
have built you will see there. 

SENATOR SALTONSTALL: How were these plans conceived? 

WRIGHT: I did not quite understand. 

STENNIS: These pictures that are given to us, who drew these designs and how was the 
architecture chosen for them? 

WRIGHT: I am sure I do not know. 

STENNIS: You simply object to what they have done. 

CHAVEZ: To the style? 

WRIGHT: No; I think the thing is sort of a cliche. It is an imitation thing. It is not genuine 
modern architecture. It is a glassified box on stilts, which is [an example of a style] 
practiced abroad [that] has now become fanatic with certain of our commercial architects. 
They are the ones that unfortunately succeed to government work. A man like myself 
would never be thought of in connection with a government job. 

So it all goes to the busy architect, the plan factory, the five or six hundred draftsmen. No 
inspiration; � la mode. When things get � la mode in the fine arts and the soul of our 
nation, it is time to revolt. That is why I am here. I am uncomfortable being here. I 
suppose I have no business here. Yet I am here. I could not take this thing myself. 

CHAVEZ: I think you will find the committee most sympathetic to your general idea. 

WRIGHT: Good, sir. 

CHAVEZ: I do not want to have a brick building in Albuquerque for the federal building. 

WRIGHT: If the thing is suitable for a poster [advertising] something on Park Avenue, it 
is not suitable for . . . this glorious city in Colorado, and that is what has happened to it. 

In the first place, the thing on Park Avenue is not original. 

CHAVEZ: I wanted to get your views, and that is why I sent you a telegram inviting you to 
come before us. 

WRIGHT: I am honored to come. I came down here because, while they have said that I 
am disgruntled because I did not get the job, I am disgruntled because the thing is the way 
it is, regardless of any personal interest except for the cause of architecture. Whatever 
happens, for God's sake, let us have something superior to what now has been offered to 
characterize this nation for the next 300 years. We are not that low. We do have something 
under here, in our vests and our souls, and this does not express it. This is just about as 
high as a wayside market in the wrong place. 

STENNIS: Mr. Chairman, as I understand, these plans have not been approved by the 
Secretary. 

CHAVEZ: They have not. 

WRIGHT: Your Honor, it would be interesting to know how much this picture of a picture 
of a picture has cost the people of the United States already. I think the figures should be 
submitted. 

CHAVEZ: Do you care to have some of these associates of yours testify? 

WRIGHT: I have given these documents that I referred to Mr. Sarra here, and I have said 
clearly what I have only here hinted at and have not had the time to say. 

CHAVEZ: All right. . . . 

In the late 1950s there was a movement afoot in Washington, D.C., to construct what was 
then termed a "National Cultural Center" in the nation's capital. Ten acres of land on the 
Potomac River were set aside by the United States government to accommodate the center, 
which was intended to house and foster the various performing arts, including theater, 
opera, and symphony orchestra. Wright again became publicly involved in the process of 
selecting an architect for a government-related building. On October 3, 1958, he actually 
offered his services for free if awarded the commission to design this facility. 
Unfortunately, Wright died before the commission was awarded. In 1962 the architect 
Edward Durell Stone (see Chapter 10) was selected to design the cultural center, which 
was eventually renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 


Architects 

BRUCE GOFF 

Ever since I heard the name of Frank Lloyd Wright it's been very dear to me. . . . The first 
time I ever saw anything on Frank Lloyd Wright it was [in] the March 1908 issue of 
Architectural Record; the whole issue was devoted to his work . . . From that day on, I was 
a devout Wrightian. 

Like Wright himself, Bruce Goff (1904-82) was a true American architect. Some 
considered him to be a protege of Wright's, but both Wright and Goff would have said he 
was not. Each of Goff's buildings, projects, and decorative designs had a certain "organic" 
originality about it that was peculiar both to Goff and to the client for whom the design 
was intended. 

Goff's friendship with Wright began when, at age 12, Goff wrote to Wright to request 
information about his recent works. Wright responded by sending the young Goff a gratis 
copy of his famous Wasmuth portfolio. (The portfolio, a collection of Wright's drawings 
published in Germany as Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, 
represented Wright's work to 1910.) The friendship lasted until Wright's death in 1959. 

The following passages are derived from a talk Goff gave in October 1977 in Milwaukee, 
Wisconsin, at a conference entitled "An American Architecture: Its Roots, Growth, and 
Horizons." The editor was in attendance during Goff's insightful presentation to an 
audience of approximately 175 people. Goff's manner was relaxed and highly personable. 


ON ATTENDING ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL 

I had a chance to go to school when I was a young man. A wealthy family [that] had no 
children wanted to send me to MIT or the Beaux Arts, and they would pay my way. They 
said, "We know your parents aren't able to do this, and we want to help you." I asked the 
firm I was with if I should do it, and they said no. And some of them were school men. I 
didn't think I should either, but my parents were determined I should. I decided that there 
were only two people I could trust-[Louis] Sullivan and Wright. So I wrote to both of 
them. I stated the problem to Mr. Sullivan, asking what he would advise, and he wrote me 
back: "My Dear Young Friend, I had precisely that same kind of education you speak of 
and I've spent my entire lifetime trying to live it down and I don't see what anyone would 
want with it." And he put his signature at the bottom. So that was good. Mr. Wright 
answered in a single line: "If you want to lose Bruce Goff, go to school." Well, that was all 
I needed. I waved those [letters] in front of my parents. They didn't know much about 
either one of [the men], but they knew I thought they were gods, and they agreed to let me 
off the hook. 

BRUCE GOFF: "Ever since I heard the name of Frank Lloyd Wright it's been very dear to 
me. . . ." Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff (center) at the University of Oklahoma in 
1954. Students are presenting Wright with the gift of a 16-inch-square handmade box. 
(Friends of Kebyar Archives) 

So I'm still ignorant. And I think I know more and more what Mr. Wright meant [when] 
often he said, "I've been struggling all my life to maintain my amateur status." You'll 
remember when he got the AIA Gold Medal [in 1949] he said something to that effect. Not 
many people really realized what he meant, because most people would say, "Lord, he's no 
amateur, that's for sure!" But he wanted to believe he was. He wanted to believe there was 
still a lot to do in what he should do. Gertrude Stein [once] said, "We begin again and 
again," and I think that's the secret. We have to keep beginning again and again. Besides, 
it's exciting to see people doing that. It's like the Irishman said, "The only reason to keep 
on living is to see what in the hell is coming next!" I think that's a good reason. 


ON MEETING WRIGHT FOR THE FIRST TIME 

[The sculptor Alfonso Iannelli] took me up to meet Mr. Wright. We got along very nicely. 
Mr. Wright was very kind to me, and the first thing I noticed when I looked in where his 
desk was, here was a portfolio [of paintings] of [Gustav] Klimt's-volume one of the Klimt 
work-on his desk. I had already mortgaged my soul to buy it for $90, you see, and I was 
so surprised to see that on his desk. I don't know why, I shouldn't have been. And I said, 
"Oh, I see you have the book on Klimt." 

He gave me a real quick look and said, "Do you know Klimt?" 

"No, I don't know him, but I'm very interested in him." I said, "Do you feel that he's had 
any influence on you?" You know that old question people ask you. 

"Yes," he said, and then he caught himself. "Well, let's say I was refreshed by him." Mr. 
Wright said he met Klimt when he was in Vienna, when he'd gone over for the Wasmuth 
portfolio, and Klimt had invited him out to his studio. He described him to me and said, 
"He was the only one of those European painters worth a damn!" That was his comment 
then. He said, "He's marvelous. He wore a smock that he had designed himself-a very 
majestic man. . . . His work was just unbelievable, and I wanted every painting I saw. . . . 
The cheapest one was $300, and [I] didn't even have 300 cents. The best [I] could do was 
to get the portfolio." And I think Klimt gave him a little statue about this big. . . . Mr. 
Wright also described Klimt's garden. "It was just a riot of flowers." Mr. Wright said that 
he liked the way Klimt had planned the vines on his walls to get the same shapes he had in 
his paintings. Mr. Wright also commented, "Some of the rooms were painted orange, and 
we shared our interest in Japanese art, too." 

ON WRIGHT'S ARCHITECTURAL INFLUENCE 

I got to thinking [that] with all these loyalties which I still have, and probably always will, 
I have a need for a loyalty to myself, too. I can't be satisfied with doing something in the 
feeling or manner of somebody else, as much as I admire them. I have to do what comes 
naturally. 

One time I was showing Wright some of my work that had just been published-it was 
Baukunst, I believe. I was turning the pages and all of them that he could see his influence 
in he liked. "That's a good thing, Bruce, you should pursue that a little further; you've got 
hold of something there." All very kind remarks. Mr. Wright turned the page, saw 
[another house] . . . and he kind of snorted and said, "What are you trying to do, Bruce, 
scare somebody? 

"No, no more than you ever tried, Mr. Wright." He liked that. 

"Well, Bruce, I guess we do scare the hell out of them sometimes, don't we?" I don't think 
he really liked the design, but he was glad I would defend it; and he knew that wasn't my 
aim, I'm sure. I get accused of it all the time, but it's never the aim. It's the by-product a 
lot of times. 

I think being loyal to one's self is indispensable no matter how much you admire other 
people. No matter who you think is the greatest architect, that's fine, you should have some 
ideas on the subject. But when you go to do something, you're on your own. I don't think 
anyone can carry on a great architect's work. 

ON ANTONIO GAUDI 

"Mr. Wright, what do you think of Gaudi?" 

"Gaudi? Who's Gaudi?" 

"Oh, [don't] you know who Gaudi is? He was a contemporary [of yours], really." 

"Oh yes, he did that cathedral thing in Barcelona, didn't he?" 

"Yes, that's the man." 

"[Gaudi's] architecture was a laxative." 

"Is that your considered opinion, Mr. Wright?" 

"I'm afraid it is." 

"You value [Louis] Sullivan's opinions, don't you?" 

"Oh yes, he was a great mind, he had opinions, you know." Mr. Wright proceeded to give 
me a big sales pitch on Sullivan then and there. 

I said, "Well, you respect his opinions? [Then] how do you square what you just said with 
what he said about Gaudi?" 

"What did he say?" 

"Well, when Gaudi's work was first shown in the Western Architect in April 1919, they 
asked members of big firms with big names in architecture today what they thought of [his 
work]. Of course, it was nowhere near the stage it's in now, but enough of it was up [and] 
you could kind of get the message. They all said practically the same thing, except one. 
Most of them agreed that it was the work of a lunatic, or it was insane, or it was just 
completely an abortion or something like that. No one had a good word to say for it at all 
except Sullivan. And he said, 'It is poetry symbolized in stone, and the greatest flight of 
the creative spirit of our time.' Those were the exact words Sullivan said. Now, Mr. 
Wright, how do you square that with what you said?" 

"Well, Bruce, in his later years the master wasn't always responsible for some of the things 
he said." 

When Mr. Wright said that, I said, "You watch out, or I'll tell the boys that about you!" 

"Well, perhaps." 

So that was the story. But when [a magazine] asked me to write a dedication . . . article 
about Frank Lloyd Wright for an issue they were bringing out, I thought they'd be 
interested in his opinions of some of the European architects. And I quoted the story I just 
told you. . . . Then, when I was in France in 1939, a number of the architects took me off 
to the side and said, "We read your article about Wright, and we were very curious what he 
meant when you referred to this Gaudi business." I said, "What do you mean?" Well, the 
way it comes out in translation is that his remark was [Gaudi's] architecture was a 
suppository. And they couldn't quite figure out how that squared with the building. I 
learned then [that] it's very dangerous to be translated-and to stay away from puns. 


R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER 

In public, he had a histrionic sense. When he got on the stage he really enjoyed 
tremendously playing a part, and he enjoyed tremendously shocking people. . . . But when 
you were alone with Frank Lloyd Wright, in his own chambers, he became not only 
modest but really a very humble child. He was a very beautiful human being as I knew 
him. 

R Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller-designer, inventor, engineer, mathematician, architect, 
cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, choreographer, and visionary-was a close 
associate of Wright's for many years. Fuller, who developed the famous geodesic dome, 
was someone whom Wright respected-especially for his unique insights into engineering. 

Wright had the following to say about Fuller during a discussion with architecture students 
at the University of California-Berkeley on April 24, 1957: "We like Bucky. I know 
Bucky Fuller well. He's been one of my fans from the beginning. We've had a little 
something between us, but Bucky is a scientist; he's not an architect." 

{R. Buckminster Fuller's reminiscences were recorded in the late 1960s and were 
transcribed from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank 
Lloyd Wright: The Shining Brow." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 


ON WRIGHT'S KNOWLEDGE OF ENGINEERING 

He knew enough about engineering . . . but he didn't practice it anymore. [He began] to 
realize that it would be a good idea to ask me what he could do, because he found that I 
was working in every kind of advanced technology-following through on every alloy and 
trying to find out how we could increase performances. And so many of his ventures did 
start with [his] asking me questions [like] . . . (he was using his own intuition): "Could I 
do this?" And if he did it, quite often he'd be cautious about it and so forth. 

He became interested in a great stressed roof using the catenary form . . . having a ridge 
pole and then eaves, and just draping copper sheets and being able to solder up in the 
joints-would that be a practical matter? I'd say [to him] that the copper would have such 
low tensile [strength], it would pay for him to do the tensile work with steel and then put a 
copper skin on it. He followed that kind of advice. . . . The copper part . . . he didn't think 
about the low tensile capability, but it was a nice idea using the natural catenary sag . . . so 
the expansion and contraction was taken up in the sag. 

There was really quite a lot that came into Frank's thinking. For instance, the St. Mark's in 
the Bouwerie Towers, which he finally built [in Oklahoma as the Price Tower], was very 
much from that tower structure, if you look back in the designs [of St. Mark's]. Frank 
began to see that result. . . . He decided then [that] I was a scientist. . . . It was not 
plagiarism; he was taking a forward pass in a professional way and bringing it to fruition. 

The last time I visited him was at Taliesin West, and it was just before he died. Frank, on 
every occasion of my visiting him, would ask me if I wouldn't talk to his Fellows. The last 
time I was there he introduced me to his Fellows by saying, "I am an architect who is 
interested in science, and Buckminster is a scientist who is interested in architecture." 

Frank felt that anything that I did and developed as a science he could have the same 
attitude about as any engineer or architect could have about any other scientific finding: 
This is something of nature, and it is employable by the architect or the engineer. [He] did 
not feel that he was belittling his own accomplishment as an artist in employing a 
technology which I developed. He did not think of me, then, as a competitive designer. I 
felt he was complimentary. . . . [He had] good intuitions. 


ON WRIGHT'S PUBLIC APPEARANCES 

In public, he had a histrionic sense. When he got on the stage he really enjoyed 
tremendously playing a part, and he enjoyed tremendously shocking people. He knew that 
they liked to be shocked. So he would try to think up something, as if anything could come 
in the spur of the moment, that would shock people. He would say that thing, and he didn't 
even stop to think whether it fitted into his philosophy and things he had said before. He 
might make statements very contradictory to his own real thinking simply because he 
wanted to do the shocking thing. 

He was a brilliant writer and a brilliant formulator of words and thoughts, so he'd get very 
secure in his ways of getting this seemingly contradictory statement tied into the things he 
had already said. A lot of that was very elaborate. But when you were alone with Frank 
Lloyd Wright, in his own chambers, he became not only modest but really a very humble 
child. He was a very beautiful human being as I knew him. 


WALTER GROPIUS 

His self-centeredness was irritating and at the same time disarming, for he was hiding 
his hurt feelings behind a mask of haughty arrogance which gradually became his second 
nature. 

The German architect Walter Gropius founded the famous Bauhaus School in 1919. In 
1937 Gropius emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Harvard University's 
Graduate School of Design. In 1946 he founded the architectural firm The Architects 
Collaborative. Throughout his career, Gropius focused on and endorsed the team approach 
to architectural design. 

The team-approach philosophy, along with the Europeans' domination of modern 
architectural design and practice during the early to mid-20th century (not only abroad 
but also in the United States), was disconcerting to Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed 
firmly in the "sovereignty of the individual." Even more nettlesome to Wright was that 
many European architects of the so-called "modern" or "International" style claimed that 
they had been influenced by Wright, with whose work they were familiar through the 
Wasmuth portfolio. 

Wright and Gropius met for the first time in the mid-1930s. As part of a lecture tour 
Gropius was visiting Madison, Wisconsin, where Wright's design for the first Herbert 
Jacobs residence was under construction (page 142). Edgar Tafel, former apprentice to 
Wright, recalled the encounter in his book Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd 
Wright. 

{Most of Walter Gropius's reminiscences of Wright were previously published in Gropius's 
Apollo in the Democracy: The Cultural Obligation of the Architect, pp. 167-70. 
Reprinted with permission of Beate Johansen. The passage entitled "Architectural 
Individualism versus Teamwork" was transcribed from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM 
(Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank Lloyd Wright: The World's Greatest 
Architect." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 

There was a call [at Taliesin]: "Mr. Walter Gropius is here, and he would like very much 
to come out and meet you." . . . Mr. Wright was brusque: "I'm very sorry. I'm quite busy, 
and I have no desire to meet or entertain Herr Gropius. What he stands for and what I 
stand for are poles apart. Our ideas could never merge. In a sense, we're professional 
enemies-but he's an outside enemy. At least I'm staying in my own country". . . . Mr. 
Wright would then . . . say triumphantly, "Well, I told him!" 

Just after the phone call . . . Mr. Wright announced that we were driving to Racine on 
Johnson Building business. . . . 

So early that morning we left. . . . When we got near Madison, he said, "Go to the Jacobs 
house." . . . We parked the car in front, opposite the carport [of the Jacobs house]. As we 
drove up, out came a group of men, walking directly toward our car. They couldn't miss 
us. In the group was Herr Gropius. 

He recognized Mr. Wright at once and came right over. One of the men greeted Wright 
and said, "Mr. Wright, this is Dr. Gropius." And Gropius leaned down and said through 
the open window, "Mr. Wright, it's a pleasure to meet you. I have always admired your 
work." Mr. Wright, sitting calmly in the front seat, merely turned slightly to face Gropius 
and said, "Herr Gropius, you're a guest of the university here. I just want to tell you that 
they're as snobbish here as they are at Harvard only they don't have a New England 
accent." Turning to me, he continued jauntily, "Well, we have to get on, Edgar!" That was 
the signal. I put the car in gear and we were off, leaving Mr. Gropius and colleagues 
standing there. 

WALTER GROPIUS: "When the Academy of Arts in Berlin arranged an exhibition of 
Frank Lloyd Wright's work in 1911, and the publishing house of Wasmuth, Berlin, 
subsequently published a portfolio of it, I first became attracted to his strong, .imaginative 
approach." Drawing of the Frederick G. Robie residence (1906) in Chicago, Illinois, from 
Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. The residence is a massive 
brick masonry structure with dynamic, sweeping horizontal lines and cantilevered roof 
eaves along a single-plane axis. The horizontal masses of the building appear to be 
suspended, yet are at one with the ground plane. The Robie residence is an excellent 
example of Wright's work in an urban setting. 

Gropius himself later recalled other meetings with Wright. 

Frank Lloyd Wright was very well known and respected in Europe long before he gained a 
reputation in the United States. When the Academy of Arts in Berlin arranged an 
exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in 1911, and the publishing house of Wasmuth, 
Berlin, subsequently published a portfolio of it, I first became attracted to his strong, 
imaginative approach. I still remember that I was impressed by the Larkin Building in 
Buffalo and by the Robie House in Chicago, both of which were close to my own thinking 
and feeling. Their straight-forwardness of unconventional design fascinated me, while I 
was less attracted by the romanticism of many of his residential buildings. 

At this time I had just designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld a. d. Leine. My acquaintance 
with Wright's work clarified my own approach and helped me to become more articulate 
in defining my own design philosophy. 

When I came to the United States for the first time on a visit in 1928, almost nobody 
appreciated Wright's work except a few personal admirers. It was almost impossible even 
to start a conversation about him, because his architectural deeds were at that time 
completely overshadowed by scandalous newspaper gossip about his private life. In the 
AIA he was considered to be an "immoral crank." However, I managed to see and 
photograph quite a few of his buildings in Chicago and Los Angeles, which I then used 
frequently for my lectures on architecture in Germany. 

When I returned to the United States in 1937 to become chairman of the Department of 
Architecture of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I still found such a vast ignorance 
about Wright's work among my students and the public that I undertook to open their eyes 
to his brilliant work and to his historic importance, in public lectures and in discussions in 
the school. 

In 1940 Wright came to Boston to deliver a lecture. He accepted an invitation to my house 
in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and we had a few undisturbed hours of free conversation, 
during which he complained bitterly about the treatment he had received in his own 
country. He referred particularly to the fact that I had been made Chairman of the 
Department of Architecture at Harvard, whereas he himself had never been offered such a 
position of influence when he was younger. He believed seriously that I had been given in 
my life and career every advantage and every opportunity that anybody could wish for. He 
seemed quite baffled when I told him that the modern European architects, including 
myself, had run into much greater obstacles in obtaining any commissions at all than he 
ever had to contend with. 

WALTER GROPIUS: "I still remember that I was impressed by the Larkin Building in 
Buffalo and by the Robie House in Chicago, both of which were close to my own thinking 
and feeling." The Seneca Street elevation of the Larkin Company Administration Building 
(1903, demolished 1949-50), Buffalo, New York. Drawing from Ausgef�hrte Bauten 
und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. 

His self-centeredness was irritating and at the same time disarming, for he was hiding 
his hurt feelings behind a mask of haughty arrogance which gradually became his second 
nature. The students at Harvard who had hoped to have a question and answer period with 
him soon found that they were only at the receiving end. 

In subsequent years, Wright conducted an aggressive campaign against the so-called 
International Style, which he sensed to be a challenge to his own. 

In 1947 I met Wright again at Princeton University at the "Bicentennial Conference on 
Planning Man's Physical Surroundings" and again in Mexico City. The Mexican 
government had invited both of us to be present at the opening of their new university. The 
Mexican-German architect Max Cetto, with whom I was staying, gave an evening to 
which he invited leading Mexican architects and also Frank Lloyd Wright. Just before 
Wright arrived, I talked to my colleagues about collaborative teams in our profession. 
When Wright entered, he sat at my side and smilingly encouraged me to go ahead. When I 
had finished, he said, "But, Walter, when you want to make a child you don't ask for the 
help of your neighbor." Thinking fast, I countered, "If the neighbor happens to be a 
woman, I might." Frank laughed, and this was the only time I managed to have the last 
word in skirmishes with the quickwitted master. This was also my last personal meeting 
with him. 

Wright's notorious opposition to the Bauhaus had, I believe, its origin in their widely 
differing conceptions of the educational process. This may become evident when I compare 
our methods of approach in educating students. Wright, ingenious, inventive artist and full 
of stimulating ideas, followed his conception that a style of the century could be achieved 
by disseminating his own personal vocabulary of form. His school in Taliesin, Wisconsin, 
was meant to consolidate his own form pattern into a universal style. In 1961 I visited his 
school, which his widow valiantly carried on after his death. There I saw the work of 
several scores of students turning out, without exception, designs in the vocabulary of their 
great master. I did not see any independent design. The autocratic method of approach 
cannot be called creative, for it invites imitation; it results in training assistants, not 
independent artists. Surely the contact of the student with a radiating personality like 
Frank Lloyd Wright must have been an invaluable and unforgettable experience, but here I 
try to compare educational methods and goals, which must not be confounded with the 
artistic potency of the teacher. A great architect does not necessarily develop an effective 
educational method. 

Already in the Bauhaus I had come to the conclusion that an autocratic, subjective 
approach must block the innate, budding expression of differently gifted students if the 
teacher, even with the best intentions, imposes the results of his own thought and work on 
them. We tried, therefore, on the contrary, to discourage imitation of the teacher and to 
help the student observe and understand physical and psychological facts and from there 
let him find his own way. Here, then, I differ in principle from Wright's approach to 
education, which strikes me as being wholly egocentric. But from this strong emphasis on 
his ego originated also his superb if somewhat upsetting showmanship, which, there can 
be no doubt, has helped to bring the course of architecture into the public consciousness. 


ARCHITECTURAL INDIVIDUALISM V. TEAMWORK 

Fortunately, in my early times, I saw a lot of [the work] of Frank Lloyd Wright, who 
interested me very much. Of course, in the philosophy of architecture I am on another limb 
than he is. He is very strongly an individualist, whereas I am very much in favor of 
teamwork. I think that the field we have to see today is so large that it's impossible in one 
head to have everything. And I daresay that even a genius, if he understands to develop 
teams around himself and lead these teams, that the spark he can give . . . will be [better] 
used when he has many team helpers in the whole thing than when he is all alone in an 
ivory tower. 


PHILIP JOHNSON 

No one understands the third dimension as well as he, the capacity of architecture to be an 
experience in depth, rather than a mere facade. 

Philip Johnson-one of the foremost proponents of the 20th-century International Style 
of architecture-remarked in an interview conducted in the early 1980s, "Forty years ago 
Wright seemed like a very old character that was of no use anymore to our International 
Style orthodoxy . . . I wanted him out of the way. . . . Today I revere that man more than 
anybody else except H. H. Richardson." 

In truth, Johnson was not so dismissive of Wright in the 1940s. The following article from 
the August 1949 issue of Architectural Review (unlike most of the reflections in this book, 
this piece was written while Wright was still living) is marked by a tone of great respect 
for Wright and his contributions to architecture. Indeed, Johnson interprets "the movement 
away from the 'boxes' that Wright attacks [as bringing] the Internationalists nearer to 
Wright's position and further from their own position of 20 years ago." The evolution of 
the International Style is, of course, still debatable today. And it is interesting to note that 
Johnson himself, later in his architectural career, abandoned, to some degree, the 
International Style for more eclectic forms still further divergent from Wright's concept of 
"organic" architecture. 

{Philip Johnson's reflections on Wright originally appeared in an article entitled "The 
Frontiersman," Architectural Review (England), Vol. CVI, August 1949, pp. 105-06. 
Reprinted by permission of Philip Johnson.} 

In my opinion, Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest living architect, and for many reasons. 
He is the founder of modern architecture as we know it in the West, the originator of so 
many styles that his emulators are invariably a decade or so behind. All younger 
moderns-except perhaps Le Corbusier-acknowledge Wright's influence, though some 
may forget the debt in their later years. There can be no disagreement, however, that he is 
the most influential architect of our century. In the 1900s he originated the Prairie House, 
with its open plan, which through the Wasmuth publication of 1910 became the prototype 
of so much modern design. In the 1920s he outdid the massiveness of the Mayan with a 
new kind of ferro-concrete structure. In the 1930s and 1940s he has been and still is 
inventing new shapes: using circles, hexagons, and triangles to articulate space in new 
ways. 

But he is more than an inventor. No one understands the third dimension as well as he, the 
capacity of architecture to be an experience in depth, rather than a mere facade. His 
buildings can rarely be appreciated correctly except at first hand. A photograph can never 
relay the experience of being surrounded by one of them. Nor can a camera record the 
cumulative impact of moving through his organized spaces, the effect of passing through 
low space into high, from narrow to wide, from dark to light (Taliesin, Taliesin West 
[pages 139, 149, and 150], Johnson Wax Co.). 

Wright is also unique in his ability to adjust buildings to natural surroundings. Whether 
they rise from a hill (the Pauson House, the Loeb House, Hartford Tower) or hug the slopes 
(Taliesin, Taliesin West, and the Jacobs House) his structures always look rooted to the 
soil-in his words, "organic." 

It is of great importance, therefore, to listen to Wright's opinions-especially when 
expressed so violently-on the work of the architects whom he calls here 
"Internationalists," "stencilists," "functionalists." Since he refers twice to the exhibition 
which I organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 as the agent responsible for the 
introduction of these foreign "isms," perhaps a few notes on the intervening years would be 
appropriate. 

Wright would undoubtedly include in his list of "stencilists" most of the architects in our 
1932 catalogue. Besides himself, there were men like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, 
Gropius, Oud, Mendelsohn, Aalto, Neutra, Lescaze, and Stonorov. According to Wright, 
these are fascist inspired cliche artists, many of whom design two-dimensional 
flat-facade buildings because they are more interested in painting than architecture. 
Furthermore, they do not understand nature; in fact, they are anti-nature. 

There is a lot of meat in Wright's castigations, but he is wrong in attributing functionalist 
leanings to us at the Museum who have fought it for 20 years. There is also much doubt 
how many of these artists really believed in functionalism even though they sometimes 
give it lip service. Wright, for example, might better have remembered not only Le 
Corbusier's unfortunate propagandist "machine � habiter" but also his beautiful definition 
"L'architecture, c'est, avec des materiaux bruts, etablir des rapports emouvants," to which 
most architects, including Mr. Wright, would subscribe. 

When he writes that International architecture is "stencilist," and able to be repeated, 
taught, and learned so easily that our universities have adopted it rather than Wright's own 
"organic" architecture, he is correct. Le Corbusier, and perhaps latterly Mies van der Rohe, 
have indeed been too superficially adapted for teaching; Wright's principles, on the other 
hand, are impossible to teach in the conventional, institutional way. 

Again when he cites Le Corbusier for being two-dimensional in his approach he has a 
point. Le Corbusier's facades are often flat, those of his followers flatter. And certainly the 
group as a whole has been distinguished by its extraordinary interest in painting. Le 
Corbusier himself is an active and accomplished practitioner of the art, but it does not 
necessarily follow, as Wright implies, that because he is capable of creating in two 
dimensions he cannot create in three. A cube is undeniably three-dimensional. To raise it 
on stilts only serves to emphasize that fact. Such a purist concept is, of course, a far cry 
from the spatial complexity of a building by Wright, but the one does not necessarily 
negate the value of the other. 

Wright has often attacked the slick boxlike "negativities" of International work, the 
painted stucco, the boredom of repeated columns. But these objections have long since 
been met by the Internationalists themselves. They no longer use stucco, nor rely on paint. 
The smooth flatness is gone. Mies projects his windbraces and columns to get shadow; Le 
Corbusier complicates his facades with Mondrian-shaped mullion patterns and 
brise-soleils; Gropius,Breuer, and Neutra now use native wood, pitched roofs, and deep 
porchlike overhangs; Aalto curves entire buildings. The movement away from the "boxes" 
that Wright attacks brings the Internationalists nearer to Wright's position and further 
from their own position of 20 years ago. How much of this enrichment is caused by a 
reappreciation of Wright and how much by a natural reaction against bad material and 
lonely cubes would be hard to say. 

When Wright claims that the International movement is fascist inspired, he uses the word 
in two senses. He argues first that the "provincial art elite," the trustees and visitors of the 
Museum of Modern Art, being rich, are fascist-inclined because rich, and, second, that 
because Mussolini favored the stile razionale, therefore modern architects admired 
Mussolini. 

The New York rich, however, are demonstrably Republican and, as a class, are the best 
clients for Georgian and Elizabethan mansions in the world. But, more important, a large 
percentage of Wright's "foreigners" are refugees from Nazism and Fascism. It is hard to 
understand his argument. As a matter of fact, modern architecture has never flourished in 
any totalitarian country, whether communist or fascist. It is a true child of social 
democracy. 

It is on the question of nature and its relation to architecture that Wright is clearest. "We 
must learn to use the word nature in its proper romantic (i.e., integral) sense," he writes 
(italics mine), and he is indeed romantic about nature. He has proposed elsewhere that "the 
tree should be the inspiration for American architecture of the Machine Age." He speaks of 
his new Johnson Laboratory Tower as having a taproot and branches. His greatest 
objection to the Internationalists is their anti-nature stand. 

In his eyes Japanese and Mayan work are "organic" while Greek and Renaissance 
architecture are inorganic, opposed to nature. The Internationalists, he correctly points out, 
admire the Greeks and consequently conceive their work as a contrast to nature rather than 
a part of it. Like the Parthenon, their buildings are placed against nature. 

Mr. Wright's preference for regarding his buildings as identified with nature has inspired 
him to produce the most remarkable architectural creations of our time, but does this in 
itself invalidate the other point of view? Rather, is not the contrast between Le Corbusier's 
prisme pur and Wright's luxuriant forms but another manifestation of the 
Classic-Romantic dichotomy? Does not Le Corbusier's work symbolize Mediterranean 
culture today: the bright tight shapes of a static civilization, against a blue sky? And does 
not Wright's work typify the exuberant individualism of an ever-expanding frontier? 


LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE 

Wright had a great influence, but late in his life. But his influence on the face of America 
is quite modest. 

The great German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe first met Frank Lloyd 
Wright during a visit to Taliesin near Spring Green, Wisconsin, in September 1937. The 
two men became friends, and through the next decade they corresponded regularly, if 
infrequently. This correspondence ended, however, soon after Wright's attendance at an 
exhibition of Mies's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fall of 
1947-the first major exhibition of Mies's architectural work. While at this exhibition, 
Wright publicly attacked Mies's architectural philosophy of "less is more" and "doing next 
to nothing." 

Ten years later Wright mentioned Mies in a conversation with the poet Carl Sandburg: 

{Peter Blake's "A Conversation With Mies" was published in Four Great Makers of 
Modern Architecture: Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright.} 

And as for Mies-he is a very honest man and a very nice one, but he has a very scientific 
list to starboard and he has never gone sufficiently far left. He is still in the 19th century, 
doing the old steel frame that was the great contribution of the 19th-century engineers to 
building; he is trying to make the old box frame beautiful. He has come as near to it as 
anybody, but it can't be done. 

At the time of Wright's death in 1959 Mies was quoted as saying, "In his undiminishing 
power he resembles a giant tree in a wide landscape which year after year attains a more 
noble crown." 

In 1963 Mies spoke with Peter Blake, a noted architect, educator, and architectural 
historian. According to Blake: 

The great man sits close to a window. There is the sound of cars. Outside the window is 
Chicago. The Chicago of Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, William Le Baron 
Jenney, and now Mies van der Rohe. 

Mies is goaded into talk (for this man does not talk easily) by an interrogator who is 
purposely shadowy. From time to time there is a hearty laugh at campaigns remembered; 
there are simple sentences in a heavy German accent, a man more at home with building 
than with words. 

It is interesting to note the brevity Mies affords Wright. 

PETER BLAKE: It seems to me that in some of your early buildings like the Barcelona 
Pavilion, there are traces of Wright's principles. To what extent has Wright impressed you 
and influenced your work? 

LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE: For Philip Johnson's book [i.e., Philip Johnson's Mies 
van der Rohe], I wrote about Wright and the influence he had on us in Europe. Certainly I 
was very much impressed by the Robie house [page 45] and by the office building in 
Buffalo [page 46]. Who wouldn't be impressed? He was certainly a great genius-there is 
no question about that. You know, it is very difficult to go in his direction. You sense that 
his architecture is based on fantasy. You have to have fantasy in order to go in this 
direction, and if you have fantasy, you don't go in his direction, you go in your own! 
Wright had a great influence, but late in his life. But his influence on the face of America 
is quite modest. 


EERO SAARINEN 

I think it may well be that 50 years from now we will feel him stronger amongst us than 
right now. 

The American architect Eero Saarinen (1910-61) was the son of the equally famous 
Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950). Both architects' work owed much to Frank 
Lloyd Wright, and, indeed, both men knew Wright on a personal basis. (Eero Saarinen's 
wife, the architectural critic Aline B. Saarinen, describes a visit to Taliesin on page 178.) 

{Eero Saarinen's reminiscences, recorded in the late 1950s, were transcribed from Bruce 
Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank Lloyd Wright: The 
World's Greatest Architect."} 

Wright has given us the greatest inspiration about the use of space and has also shown us 
the plastic form of architecture in relation to nature, in relation to the material, and, to a 
certain degree, to structure. He has shown us also the dramatization of architecture, which 
I think is a very important thing. 

You know, some try in their work to be influenced by Wright directly. Now, I could never 
do that, and I think it's wrong. His influence on one is, and should be, not through the 
form itself but much more through the philosophy . . . and, maybe, the enthusiasm behind 
his forms. I think it may well be that 50 years from now we will feel him stronger amongst 
us than right now. We live too close to him now. That is the way I look at Wright, and I 
think of Wright as the greatest living architect. 

Well, I might add one little thing: that so much of Wright's forms are really of quite a 
different era. And the young architect and the student who isn't aware of that sort of slides 
right into it and wrongly so. 

But, boy, don't ever underestimate Wright! Wright hasn't really been integrated into 
[modern] architecture yet-and I think that's the wisest statement I've made today. I think 
Wright's contribution has not yet been integrated into modern architecture. 


EDWARD D. STONE 

No architect touches his pencil to paper today without subconsciously paying tribute to Mr. 
Wright. 

On February 15, 1960, Edward D. Stone delivered a brief speech at the groundbreaking 
ceremonies for the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin County Civic Center. Among the 
roughly 500 people in attendance, apart from citizens and officials of Marin County, were 
Wright's widow, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright; his son Lloyd Wright; his daughters Catherine 
Dorothy Wright Baxter and Iovanna Lloyd Wright; his grandson Eric Lloyd Wright; 
William Wesley Peters; Eugene Masselink; and Aaron Green. 

{Edward D. Stone's "Frank Lloyd Wright: A Tribute to a Personal Hero," was originally 
published in Pacific Architect and Builder, Vol. LXVI, March 1960, p. 20.} 


Mr. Wright was my personal friend and personal hero for the past 25 years, and I'm sure 
that this occasion would give him great pleasure wherever he is. To the best of my 
knowledge, this is the first opportunity he was given to completely design a government 
center. It speaks well for your wisdom, in this day when material considerations, 
standardization of ideas, and creature comforts seem to govern our daily lives. 

Fortunately, there is a great debate going on in Washington where one group maintains 
that we are wasting our efforts and our resources. The emphasis on creature comforts, etc., 
is dissipating our strength, and we are indeed a nation without a purpose. Emphasis on 
education, health, cultural and spiritual values, has given way to superficial luxuries. With 
our pioneering over and with our untold wealth, we should be turning our attention to 
cultural and spiritual values, and first among them would be the creation of a beautiful 
environment in which we can live and work. 

It has been said that in periods of prosperity and overabundance we seem to be able to 
afford everything but beauty. It is therefore inspiring that your community had the wisdom 
to accept this challenge and aspire to a great civic center designed by Mr. Wright, and 
carried through to completion by Mrs. Wright and his faithful colleagues. I predict that it 
will be a place of pilgrimage for generations to come, just as today the work of 
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci provides exultation for millions of visitors to Italy. 

EDWARD D. STONE: "I predict that it will be a place of pilgrimage for generations to 
come just as today the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci provides exultation 
for millions of visitors to Italy." The pattern on the light blue roof of the Marin County 
Administration Building (1957) in San Raphael, California. This view shows two office 
wings on the building's third level as viewed from the neighboring hillside. The filigreed 
half-domes are almost flush with the hillside. Housed beneath the left dome is the 
teacher's library; beneath the right dome is the Board of Education meeting room. Both 
domes open out onto a hill terrace. (Patrick J. Meehan) 

In New York today we are witnessing an example of this thirst for and appreciation of 
great architecture. There are groups standing in line three and four abreast to visit the 
great Guggenheim Museum designed by Wright. With a paid admission this has been a 
financial bonanza for the institution. That it has been a controversial building is good. It 
has stimulated great interest and, as a result, has attracted visitors who have never before 
set foot inside a museum. 

There was a time in our country when architects were content to copy monuments of the 
past. We're all familiar with the Greek chapel used as a bank, the Italian palazzo for a city 
hall, and the Renaissance dome of St. Peter's Cathedral for our state capitol buildings. This 
was a sad state of affairs. The creative talent of our country was repudiated, and we were 
renouncing our indigenous heritage. 

Mr. Wright had the vision to change all of this. His principles of modern architecture at 
first were slow to be accepted in this country, but were immediately adopted by the 
Europeans who came to this country and perpetuated them. So that today, thanks to Mr. 
Wright, we are developing an indigenous architecture based upon his principles. No 
architect touches his pencil to paper today without subconsciously paying tribute to Mr. 
Wright. 

Mr. Wright was certainly the greatest creative talent that this country ever produced and, 
in my opinion, the greatest architect the world has ever known. And I welcome this 
opportunity to pay homage to his memory. 

It has been said that all great periods of history were great only because of the arts they 
produced. You people here in Marin County will have a great work of art, the best that our 
times can produce. It will be a source of inspiration and pleasure for generations to come. I 
salute you in your wisdom. 


Clients 

SAMUEL FREEMAN 

I've heard people speak derogatorily of Mr. Wright and his financial dealings, and I don't 
think there is any truth in it! 

Because the last thing in this world that anybody could say about him was that he was a 
man looking for dollars. 

Samuel Freeman was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest clients in California and one of 
the first clients for whom Wright designed one of his famous textile-block-constructed 
houses. The Freeman residence In Los Angeles was designed in 1924. 

{Samuel Freeman's reminiscences, recorded in the late 1960s, were transcribed from 
Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio programs "Frank Lloyd Wright: 
Ask the Man Who Owns One," and "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Shining Brow." Printed 
with permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 


ON WORKING WITH WRIGHT 

SAMUEL FREEMAN: In our relationship with Mr. Wright, we told him simply the kind 
of life we thought we were going to live, and we left [the design] of the house completely 
to him. 

BRUCE RADDE: Did you make any requests as to what you wanted? That is, for example, 
after he came up with the drawings, if you didn't like something, could you change it? 

FREEMAN: Frankly, I wasn't capable of judging the drawings and I accepted them in 
total. I figured here was a very great man, a man who had much to give to the world, and I 
felt we were very fortunate to get his services. Of course, at that time, we thought we were 
going to build a house for $10,000. So we did not put any restrictions on its design or 
[show] favor in the building [for] our creative ideas because we didn't have any! So we 
went down and built the house and, as any type of house that deals with new ideas and 
new materials, we had difficulties and disappointments. But, all in all, considering that we 
were using new materials and new methods-I think we got along very well! Of course, 
the costs went up but as far Mr. Wright was concerned, he didn't profit. When the job was 
all done, [considering] all the aid he had given us, I think that Wright was actually out of 
pocket. I've heard people speak derogatorily of Mr. Wright and his financial dealings, and 
I don't think there is any truth in it! Because the last thing in this world that anybody could 
say about him was that he was a man looking for dollars. 

We were so glad that Mr. Wright would take on this modest house that we figured if we'd 
stay out of it we would be better off. And to this day I think that it was a very wise 
decision. Because I've run into so many people contemplating building a house, and they 
say to me, "I know exactly what I want." I always think that if a man is going to build a 
house for me, he better know an awful lot more than I! 


ON THE DESIGN OF THE HOUSE 

The highlight of my experience is that, after living in this house since 1923, the house 
does not bore me. It is always interesting-when I sit in the living room or in another part 
of the house-there's always something alive in the place. It isn't just a cubicle, as most 
houses are; there are four walls decorated with various drapes and pictures and such to 
make the place livable. When the house was finished enough so we could move in, we did 
not have a stick of furniture. We sat on boxes, and the house never seemed bare. Now you 
could take this room [the living room] and strip everything out of it, and you wouldn't feel 
that you were in an empty room. This room itself is a piece of sculpture. It has a life of its 
own. They say that a square room is an abomination . . . that you should never build a 
square room [and] you must build a rectangular room. Well, this room is square, but I 
can't find anything about the room that's anything but interesting. . . . It has broken planes, 
different heights . . . the whole thing [is] like music. I've sat in this room and used it since 
1923, and I'm never bored with the room. I can go to the average house and, after a few 
minutes, you've explored all its possibilities [and] there's nothing more for you to search or 
to explore; you've got it all. As long as I've lived in this house, this room was always 
exciting to me. It's almost alive, it's in motion. 

RADDE: After living in this particular house for about 45 years, do you think you could 
move into a regular plaster-built house? 

FREEMAN: No, if I had some choice I wouldn't want to [live in] that type of house which 
you describe. However, if you had no choice, you'd get used to it. 


ON WRIGHT THE MAN 

We found him very charming and, of course, I must say that he was always very sure of 
himself. My impression was that the man knew his stuff, and he knew that he knew it. . . . 
He was forthright, and this type of man I could always deal with very easily-never had 
any difficulty. 

He had a very great ego, but on him it looked good. You see so many people who have a 
very great ego but don't have any special legitimate reason for it; it's something that 
they've built up because they liked it. But this man was a great man. And, as I mentioned 
before, his forthrightness was very pleasant. Although he might not agree with you, you 
couldn't dislike him for it because there was an honesty with it. 

LOREN B. POPE 

The importance of Wright's architecture is that it speaks to the spirit. It is applied research 
on the way, the truth, and the light. . . . My friends began telling me I was a little giddy to 
think about approaching the great, expensive, and imperious Frank Lloyd Wright. . . . I 
decided that no matter how busy or important, the master would listen to someone who 
wanted one of his works so much. In due time, a letter was dispatched telling him how 
important was a house by him, along with a map of the site, contours and trees-some of 
the specifics a client would give his architect, all of it making an excess-postage 
envelope. It is very likely that no normally sensitive ego would have been unmoved by 
such a panegyric. 

In 1939 Loren B. Pope commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for him and 
his family. When the house was built the following year in Falls Church, Virginia, 
Wright's apprentice Gordon O. Chadwick supervised construction (see page 140). The 
Popes lived in the house until 1947, when it was sold to Robert and Marjorie Leighey. 

In 1962 Pope learned that his former home was threatened with destruction because it lay 
in the path of a proposed highway. He wrote a letter to the Washington Post that was 
printed on November 21, 1962, under the headline "Vandalism": 

{"After Fifty Years," the expanded text of a talk Pope gave to the Young Adult Class of St. 
Paul's Episcopal Church of Alexandria, Virginia, and delivered at the Pope-Leighey 
House in the spring of 1989, copyright � Loren B. Pope 1991. Used by permission of the 
author.} 

Although the fact that this work of art by my friend Frank Lloyd Wright was a home 
created for my family and me makes the deed that much more painful, that is irrelevant. 
What is relevant is the fact that a civilized society could even entertain a proposal to let a 
road threaten one of the three Wright houses in Virginia, much less approve it. 

The Mongols astride their wild ponies never constituted the threat to Western culture that 
do these Mongoloids astride their slide rules and T-squares. Equally chilling is a public 
ethos that is apparently undisturbed by this barbarian sense of values. 

As Mr. Wright said, America threatens to become the only society that ever went from 
infancy to decadence without a culture in between. 

The house eventually was saved through the efforts of Marjorie Leighey, who approached 
the U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The 
National Trust agreed to provide a location for the house, to maintain it, and to permit 
Mrs. Leighey to continue to live in the house during her lifetime. 

In the fall of 1964 the Pope-Leighey House, as it came to be called, was dismantled and 
moved in pieces to the site of Woodlawn Plantation, another National Trust property, in 
Mount Vernon, Virginia. Reassembled in 1965, the house was dedicated as a historic 
house museum and opened to the public. Mrs. Leighey resumed residency in 1969 until 
her death in 1984. 

In the following two passages-recorded 25 and 50 years, respectively, after the events 
they describe-Pope recalls the experience of commissioning, building, and living in a 
Wright-designed house. 


TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER: STILL A LOVE AFFAIR 

There was a temptation to describe the reopening of the Frank Lloyd Wright house at 
Woodlawn Plantation as a beautification, since the modest house was taking its place 
across the meadow from the stately mansion as a part of our cultural and artistic heritage. 
That would be superfluous; in its 25 years as a home, this house had already acquired a 
halo. The official recognition that put it in such famous and historic company was a meet 
and monumentally ironic culmination of events that moved to this climax with the 
inevitable justice of a Greek drama. 

Today it is de rigueur to regard Wright as a great master. During his life this greatest 
architect of modern times, a man whom British correspondent Henry Brandon aptly called 
"the most American," never received a commission from his own government. His one 
Washington project, Crystal City, was vetoed due to government zoning rules on height. 
Indeed, the usual story with Wright's works was one of trying to overcome the opposition 
of officialdom and the orthodoxy it represents. If planners and art commissioners can't 
recognize greatness or fear to employ it, it isn't surprising that the artist's radical ideas and 
forms unsettle the Establishment. 

Thus, in 1940, decades after his genius had been acknowledged around the world, building 
inspectors in the U.S. said his dendriform columns, cantilevered roofs and terraces, and 
sandwich walls wouldn't stand or that floor heating wouldn't heat. Lenders, federal 
housing agencies, and private firms branded the Wright house a bad risk financially, 
aesthetically, and architecturally. But it was built. Then, after a quarter-century of being 
loved by its owners and lionized by outsiders, the events that led to making it a piece of 
our cultural history were triggered by a government threat to destroy a work of art to make 
way for a road-a devastating comment on our society's scale of values. 

The genesis of this house is in the late 1930s, when a magazine article finally sparked the 
interest in Wright's An Autobiography that a friend had been vainly trying for a year to 
strike. I borrowed the book from the library, returned it the next day, bought my own copy, 
and soaked up every chapter two and three times before going on to the next one. Long 
before the book was finished, the light had become dazzling and I had become a true 
believer. 

Here was a contemporary American new testament that spoke with the same clarity and 
daring that Emerson had a century earlier in Nature or in the Harvard Divinity School 
Address. Wright applied some basic truths expressed by Jesus, by Emerson, and by Tao to 
the principal art and the principal influence in our environment. He said a building, like a 
life, should be a free and honest expression of purpose, done with all possible disciplined 
skill but without sham or pretense. The building should be itself and should unaffectedly 
and subtly reveal its structure; materials should be used naturally and should furnish their 
own decoration; the building, in short, should be organic, like a tree, a cactus, a man, or 
anything else in nature. Organic was a word whose connotation Emerson had developed, 
and here it fit perfectly. Wright also said a house should not only be one with nature in 
spirit but also function as a part of it. It must not only provide shelter but also impart a 
sense of freedom and of unity with nature by taking the indoors out and bringing the 
outside in. 

Compared with virtually everything ever built and most that is architect-designed, such 
organic architecture still is revolutionary . . . because it demonstrates Keats's maxim that 
"beauty is truth, truth beauty." 

The conversion was fundamentally philosophical because Wright would have been a 
prophet had he never built a building. He had not only the moral courage but also the 
artistic genius to make his family motto, "Truth against the world," an aesthetic as well as 
an intellectual force. 

In short, the importance of Wright's architecture is that it speaks to the spirit. It is applied 
research on the way, the truth, and the light. This is not to say that everyone likes Wright's 
phrasing or his applications, but this spiritual appeal is where the heart of the matter is, 
not in the corner window or door without a support, not in the sense of space or his ability 
to make it come alive, nor in any of his multitudinous innovations, brilliant or effective as 
they may be. 

From An Autobiography on, my bride and I stopped buying Colonial reproductions or 
thinking about the picket-fenced Cape Cod we were planning to build. Instead, my 
friends began telling me I was a little giddy to think about approaching the great, 
expensive, and imperious Frank Lloyd Wright. Faith filters out fear and some error, and 
with the encouragement of an artist friend, Edward Rowan, I decided that, no matter how 
busy or important, the master would listen to someone who wanted one of his works so 
much. In due time, a letter was dispatched telling him how important was a house by him, 
along with a map of the site, contours, and trees-some of the specifics a client would give 
his architect, all of it making an excess-postage envelope. It is very likely that no 
normally sensitive ego would have been unmoved by such a panegyric. 

Within three weeks I got a thin and terse reply: "Dear Loren, Of course I'm ready to give 
you a house. . . ." The excitement and difficulties of bringing it into being started. It's often 
said that building one's own house takes six months off one's life, and this venture had its 
full share of problems. 


AFTER FIFTY YEARS 

In 1939 when I wrote Frank Lloyd Wright a letter that no man with even a normal ego 
could say no to, and two and a half years later when we moved into this house, this 
country's level of consciousness had not been raised. Churches then espoused the 
brotherhood of man, and Virginia then practiced a limited sort of democracy, both of them 
apartheid-style. 

And in architecture it was a similar story, for Frank Lloyd Wright was considered a 
flamboyant eccentric who designed strange-looking buildings, demeaned his fellow 
architects, and had a life of adulterous notoriety and family tragedy. Not surprisingly, 
many of my friends and colleagues thought I was either teched or presumptuous to want 
him to design my house. My father would get a rise out of me by referring to him as 
Harold Bell Wright (a hack writer of Western potboilers). 

Wright was famous in Europe, and his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo [page 241] withstood the 
cataclysmic 1922 earthquake. But at home he was suspect, and largely ignored. One would 
never have known from reading the New York Times, for example, that he was a force in 
American architecture. I used to look in vain for any mention of him or his work. 

Passionate disciple though I was, I had not screwed up my courage to approach the master. 
I had no idea the great man was accepting any such insignificant commissions as ours. But 
a friend who headed the New Deal's Public Works of Art program assured me such an 
artist would respond to my appeal, that he had a normal ego. The panegyric I sent him is 
now included in the National Trust's book on the Pope-Leighey House. Two weeks after 
mailing my letter, my heart leaped when I saw in my post office box the buff envelope with 
the red square. It said, "Dear Loren, Of course I'm ready to give you a house. We'll see you 
and Ed Rowan on September 14." Euphoria would have been a euphemism for my state; 
ecstasy would have come a little closer. 

Incidentally, that is the only letter from him that I can't find. The National Trust says they 
don't have it either. 

In 1938 Architectural Forum did devote an entire issue to Wright when his design for 
Fallingwater [page 131], one of the great buildings of all time, made it impossible not to 
notice him. But even a decade later, House Beautiful held back for a year an article-"The 
Love Affair of a Man and His House"-I'd sent them on our house. When the article 
eventually did appear, an editor's preface explained that it took a year for "us to be brave 
enough to print it because we were afraid it would make many readers very angry. But 
because we thought the subject of what a modern house means to its owners is important 
we are printing it." Several months later the editor said the piece had been the most 
popular article they'd ever published. I got fan mail long afterward. 

Nevertheless, we could find no financing agency that would touch this stark-looking 
configuration of horizontal, flat-roofed rectangles set on a concrete mat over six inches of 
stone, with the heating pipes under the concrete, walls just over three inches thick with no 
studs, and, furthermore, with an eleven-and-a-half-foot ceiling. The retired diplomat 
who ran the savings and loan company in East Falls Church warned me, "Loren, this 
house will be a white elephant." His view was the conventional wisdom. Engineers said 
the heating system wouldn't work, the house would collapse under the first heavy snow, 
and the concrete floor would sweat. 

Builders also kept us at arm's length. They'd heard stories about Wright changing the 
plans or making contractors tear out work not to his liking. Consequently, the lowest bid 
we got on a house estimated to cost $5,000 was $12,500. For a copy editor making $50 
week, it might as well have been $125,000. 

Obviously, both problems were solved. My employer, the Evening Star, loaned us $5,700, 
to be paid back at $12 a week out of my pay envelope. And we had the blessed good 
fortune to find Howard Rickert, the consummate craftsman-who, incidentally, 
disassembled the house in 1965 . . . and rebuilt it in Mount Vernon, Virginia. But we had 
to hire him and his crew by the day, without the safety net of a contract. 

Don't put your handkerchiefs away just yet: On top of Wright's fee of ten percent, we had 
to give Taliesin apprentice Gordon Chadwick room and board and pay him $25 a 
week-half of what I was making. As you might imagine, I wondered at times whether I'd 
accepted an open-ended invitation to bankruptcy. My fingernails stayed short. When the 
house was about half-completed, and Wright had been engaged to design the Crystal City 
project in Washington, D.C., he said, "Loren, this house is costing you too much; forget 
about the rest of the fee." Crystal City was doomed by the city's zoning regulations on 
height, but Wright's expansive gesture held. 

(I have to interject the story of Gordon's first meeting with Wright. He arrived at Taliesin 
on a spring Saturday when all the members of the Fellowship were picnicking down by a 
stream. In due time, after he'd been given his plate, the great man came around. He shook 
Gordon's hand and asked him what he'd been doing. "I just graduated from Princeton," 
Gordon responded. "Just wasted four years," said Wright. "That's where I heard about 
you," said Gordon, picking up the marbles.) 

Construction started in May 1940, and we moved in the winter of 1941. In between was a 
series of adventures: first, Gordon's finding of Rickert, the only builder who understood 
the project. "This," he said of the set of plans, "is a logical house." As construction 
proceeded, he enlarged on that verdict: "This is the most logical house I ever built." 
Finding materials was another project. There was not a stock item anywhere. The 
wood-cypress-was shipped from Florida and was all milled to order. Prices often went 
up 30 percent between the time we inquired and the time we ordered. As an example of the 
cabinetwork character of the house: the boards were plowed out at the ends where they met 
doors so as to lap over and deemphasize the opening and accentuate the horizontal. 
Corners were mitered rather than butted. The screw slots were all horizontal. The plate 
glass was salvage to save money. Some was quarter-inch thick, some three-eighths, 
which meant each door sash was a new problem. And when humidity was high it was very 
clear whether in the glass's previous life its lettering had proclaimed a drugstore or a shoe 
shop. 

The carport of the house is a dramatic cantilever, and Gordon expended a great deal of 
mental sweat solving the problem of framing, even with a steel beam. He mailed Wright a 
drawing outlining his concerns, and several days later it came back with Wright's notation: 
"Gordon, I don't see your problem." Similarly, Gordon had to solve a lot of other details 
that architects often leave to the help; and he did a masterfully sensitive job, as the 
finished house attests. However, Gordon said Wright did spend a good deal of time 
working on the house plans, singing to himself, "This house for Loren Pope must have 
charm. This house for Loren Pope must have charm." 

When a house that's an architectural freedom rider is being hand-built, piece by 
handcrafted piece, and you have no contract, construction doesn't proceed; it drags, in 
excruciating slow motion. Then, when you yield to the entreaties of a friend who has no 
topic for her column and let her write about the house on condition she doesn't even tell 
what county it's in, and she does, a plague of visitors slows things even more. 

The Evening Star did have to lend me some more money, but we had a work of art, all 
furnished, for not much more than the price of any old house. . . . I would guess the house 
cost somewhere between $7,000 and $8,000. Not being much of a bookkeeper, that's about 
as close as I can come. 

On one of Mr. Wright's visits after the house was completed, I explained that Gordon had 
designed the fireplace grate to lift the fire a foot off the floor because the fireplace smoked. 
Mr. Wright said the grate was nice, but "overdesigned, a problem we all have." Then we 
walked through the house to the end bedroom where the perforated boards on the end wall 
were vertical rather than horizontal, as they were in all the clerestory windows. Mr. 
Wright said, "It is a mistake to introduce a second motif; it takes great skill to handle it." I 
observed that I thought Gordon had done pretty well. (The gift shop now at the house sells 
Pope-Leighey House T-shirts picturing in dramatic colors that second motif.) 

On another occasion when Mr. Wright visited the house I had started to lay the brick patio 
outside the dining area, using a 30-inch mason's level. The results hadn't been perfect, 
and Mr. Wright said, "Loren, use a string." I did. It worked. 

What was the house like to live in? It was a soaring experience of living in a work of art. (I 
have to explain that the [original] orientation was slightly different from this [Woodlawn 
Plantation orientation], which made the living area a good deal lighter and brighter.) First, 
it appealed to me as an expression of principle. It is honest, and, being honest, it is 
eloquent and it is quiet. The materials that do the work also furnish the decoration with 
their own soft charm. The house is free and open and gives a sense of unbounded yet 
sheltered space and release as the outdoors and the leaves and branches above are one with 
it or complement and extend it. 

Coming home tired after working on a half-dozen wartime editions a day, or two shifts 
on Saturday by reason of a Sunday paper, I could feel the dissolving of tensions as I 
walked in and came down those few steps into this high space. It gave a cathedral sense of 
release. The tawny horizontal patterns of the cypress imparted a feeling of repose. It was 
like living with a great and quiet soul. It did not intrude but was always there for comfort. 
To me it was an implicit sermon on truth and beauty. 

You think I'm going to avoid mention of that tiny kitchen, don't you? No, I have no choice. 
It was too small, but it sufficed for those days when I didn't have a copper pan to my name. 
We did a lot of entertaining, but don't press me for details; I simply don't remember how 
dinner for six guests got prepared in that space. Also, I had to build a shed out back to 
hold things such as a wheelbarrow and tools. 

Seven years later [in December 1946] we sold the house for $17,000 to the eager 
buyer-one of many-who we thought would most appreciate it. As you'll see in a 
moment, we chose well. We could have asked more. It all goes to show what faith will do. 

Why did we leave it? In the days of afternoon newspapers, the demagogues and the witch 
hunters who made their charges in congressional hearings in the morning got full play. 
But the rebuttals that followed were buried under the next day's overtaking events. I felt 
that newspapers were failing to inform, and that my professional role was something like 
sticking my finger in a cup of water and looking for the impression when I pulled it out. I 
was a constant reader of The New Yorker's E. B. White, who had just bought a farm in 
Maine. I had been raising pigs to beat the wartime meat shortage. So the solution seemed 
to be to farm, write on the side, and have a Wright pleasure palace in the country. Virginia 
hams were to pay for it. That was the dream. 

When we put the house up for sale, one tiny classified ad brought a swarm of a hundred or 
so prospective buyers. As the real estate agent said, "The buying public is way ahead of the 
lending public." 

Leaving the house was a wrench. On the last day I sat on the fireplace hob and wept. My 
five-year-old son came up and said, "Daddy, I don't want to leave our cozy little home." 

Mr. Wright did come out to the farm and, of course, spotted the perfect site for a new 
house-across a stream on a far slope. Even aside from the expense of bridging that 
stream, the cost of a Wright house on a farming and freelance-writing income was pure 
fantasy. Besides, I soon went to the New York Times, and Mr. Wright didn't live long 
enough. 

Mr. Wright's visit to the farm was in 1956 or 1957, when he was in his late eighties. On 
our route was a weeping willow tree I had long considered the most beautiful tree I'd ever 
seen. As we approached it, Mr. Wright sucked in his breath, grabbed my right wrist, and 
exclaimed, "Loren! You've got to get me a slip of that!" You may have heard a similar 
story that I was once told by some forgotten source. Mr. Wright was buying a tree, and the 
nurseryman protested that it wasn't a fast grower and that Mr. Wright was eighty years 
old. Mr. Wright is quoted as retorting to the nurseryman, "Then we'd better plant it 
today!" 

I occasionally had nightmares that I'd never have another Wright house. 

I've saved for last my best Wright remembrance. In the early fifties I had to go to New 
York on short notice, and I asked the office secretary to reserve me a room at the Plaza, 
where Mr. Wright was staying while the Guggenheim Museum was being built. She had to 
accept a much more lavish room than would have been customary. Conrad Hilton had 
recently bought the hotel and put his stamp on it. Opening the door to my room, I walked 
into what seemed like an acre of French gray carpeting, French gray walls with crystal 
light fixtures, and much plate-glass mirror. 

The next day when I'd finished my work I called Mr. Wright and he said to come on down 
to his room. There was no French gray anywhere. On the parquet wood floor of the hall 
was an elegant Oriental runner. In the great living room facing Central Park was another 
Oriental rug. The walls up to the wainscoting were a black hopsacking sort of material, 
with gilded walls above. The ceiling was white with a great gold sunburst from which 
hung the chandelier. There were low, Taliesin-style, black-lacquered tables (made of 
plywood, I divined) with Chinese red edges; an enormous wood couch in one corner with a 
giant bearskin rug flowing over it onto the floor; an easel with a rendering Wright had 
done for a projected Belmont Park racetrack grandstand; and, of course, flowers. 

"My God, Mr. Wright!" I said, "This sure doesn't look like my room." 

"Well, Loren," he said, "this guy Hilton's been running around the world buying up those 
dogs, and he didn't know how to treat an elegant hotel. So a few weeks ago I called in 
some of the boys from Taliesin and we de-Hiltonized it." 

Now, five decades later, Wright's artistic deification is a fact. The literature on him grows 
apace. Even a Wright-designed lamp or window will bring nearly half a million dollars. 
Throngs of tourists queue up to see the Wright exhibit house in front of the Smithsonian 
[part of the traveling "In the Realm of Ideas" exhibition, 1988-91]. Wright 
preservationists are nearly as rabid as right-to-lifers. The National Trust saved this one, 
thanks to Marjorie Leighey, who gave her $31,500 condemnation award toward the 
$48,000 cost of moving the house here [to Woodlawn Plantation]. And now the Trust is 
about to spend a quarter-million dollars to move it a hundred feet off the unstable marine 
clay it now sits on. 

What is so different about this house now that it has been beatified? What is so different 
about what Wright had to say half a century ago on how free people should live? By 1940, 
when he'd been practicing and preaching for more than a half a century, why had only 217 
people in a nation of 150,000,000 sought a home that, as one client, Mrs. Avery Coonley, 
said, revealed "the countenance of principle?" This wasn't some strange new music that 
could explain a cultural lag. And it wasn't because Wright was hard to get; he accepted 
every job that came along. In fact, two years after we'd moved in I received a letter from 
Gordon saying, "If you've got any money, send it. Things are bad here. Mr. Wright is stone 
broke." And believe it or not, it couldn't have been much more than a year earlier when 
Mr. Wright and I were having lunch together, as we did when he came to town, that he 
had boasted, "Loren, I think we'll make a half million dollars this year." 

To me what Wright has to say today is the same message that thrilled me 50 years ago, the 
one that blocked out fear of risks, uncertainties, or the opinions of others. 

What he had to say to me was a combination of Emerson, Tao, Christ, and Keats. I had 
never had an art history course, and about all I knew about architecture was that the 
buildings we live in influence us deeply and that I didn't like the buildings we lived in. 
Keats said beauty is truth and truth is beauty. Wright's buildings let materials be their own 
ornament. Form followed function, which helped make them organic, like a tree, a cactus, 
or a man. The outdoors and the indoors flowed into each other as one living space. To me 
they exemplified Keats's statement. It was the blinding light. 

I was a zealot. Today, however, I'm glad I don't know how many listeners' eyes I caused to 
glaze over. Finding out may be one of my hells. 

In the summer of 1990 I was asked to speak to the docents at the Pope-Leighey house, of 
whom there are about 30. One of them, Jerry McCoy, publishes a Wright flyer for admirers 
of the Pope-Leighey house and of Wright's work in general. After the talk, I was agog at 
the fervent dedication of these volunteers, as evinced in their discussions on improving 
their presentations and in their respect for the house almost as a holy place. I said, "When 
I was living in this house 50 years ago I had no idea that I'd be instrumental in starting a 
new religion." 


ARCH OBOLER 

"There are three stages in a man's career. I will speak of mine. First, they discover you and 
everything you do is wonderful. They hold you in the cup of their hand and print glowing 
words about you. Then you move into the second stage, when they start to look for feet of 
clay. They can no longer write how great you are because they have already done that. 
Now they are out to debunk you. And things that you do are no good. They're lesser than 
what you did before, and you're not up to the promise that you had, and so on. . . . If you 
live long enough, you live through that and you become an old master." He said, with a 
twinkle in his eye, "I am an old master." 

-quoting Frank Lloyd Wright 

Arch Oboler commissioned several residence designs by Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 
1940s. In the course of Wright's preparation of these designs, the two men became friends. 
The reader will note that Oboler's recollection of certain events differs significantly from 
the interpretation offered later in this book by Wright's apprentice Gordon O. Chadwick 
(page 144). 

{The untitled portion of Arch Oboler's reminiscences originally appeared in the February 
1958 issue of Reader's Digest. Copyright � 1958 by The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. 
Reprinted with permission. Arch Oboler's other reminiscences were transcribed from three 
of Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio programs from the late 1960s, 
"Frank Lloyd Wright: Ask the Man Who Owns One," "Frank Lloyd Wright: The World's 
Greatest Architect," and "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Outspoken Philosopher." Printed with 
permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 

It was raining in Southern California-one of those God's-tipped-the-bucket 
downpours we used to have back in 1940, before smog and spiraling tax rates dehydrated 
the climate. At an authoritative knock I opened the door of our rented house a crack. 
Through the sluicing rain I saw a soaked black Inverness cape and a water-streaming 
gray porkpie hat. Came a stentorian pronouncement: "I am Frank Lloyd Wright. You 
wrote me. May I come in?" 

Those simple words signaled the beginning of a drastic change in the life of the Oboler 
family. 

Years before, in my boyhood neighborhood in South Side Chicago, I had discovered a 
house which I thought was the most beautiful I had ever seen. This building was 
considered the neighborhood blight; its clean horizontal lines of wood and brick 
exasperated the owners of the surrounding multistoried, gingerbreaded homes. But as I 
grew older and the conventional houses grew uglier, the horizontal house, thanks to its 
simple loveliness of line and the harmony of its materials to its location, grew younger and 
more beautiful until it became our neighborhood's pride. And so had the revolutionary 
designer of the house grown in esteem, the world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

When the day came that I could build my own home, I wanted that architect. In the 
intervening years I had been amply forewarned about the man. This was a character, the 
printed word told me, who strode through his world with rapier tongue and flailing 
Malacca cane, striking down conventionalism, hesitant clients, and architectural 
committees with impartial gusto. Nevertheless, I wrote to Mr. Wright, then in his early 
seventies, asking if it would be possible for him to design a California home for us. 

Now, unexpectedly, he was here, eyes twinkling in leonine head as he met Mrs. Oboler 
and obviously approved. He proceeded to rapid-fire questions at us, prefaced with the 
statement, "I don't build houses for houses, I build them for human beings." 

From his probing it was obvious he was trying to find out what sort of human beings we 
were. 

"So you are a writer!" he said. "What do you write?" I told him I wrote plays for radio. 

"Are they good plays? I build good houses!" 

The fact that we had settled in the lower end of California was definitely not in our favor. 
"I suppose you'll want to build in that Beverly Hills!" he snorted. "Cardboard cracker 
boxes anointed with pink stucco!" 

We assured him that the neverland of the cinema stars was not for us. We wanted the 
country, the mountains. 

Mr. Wright grinned. "At least you've got that much sense!" Then his face lost its laughter. 
"You know, of course, the banks won't advance you a dime on one of my designs." 

I told him we would finance the house ourselves. Mr. Wright brightened. "And how much 
are you prepared to spend?" 

I told him. 

He sighed deeply and shook his head. "It will take at least twice that much," he informed 
us. 

Eleanor and I looked at each other. I got her telepathic nod, and took the plunge. "That 
will be all right," I said. 

Hours after Mr. Wright had left, my wife and I turned to each other simultaneously. "Do 
you realize . . ." we both began. Before discussing a single detail of our proposed house, 
Frank Lloyd Wright had doubled the price! 

(This man knew that over the years hundreds of his finest plans lay entombed in 
preliminary drawings-homes as exquisite as dream-remembered castles, 
glass-curtained skyscrapers prophetic of a time yet unborn, their bright hope destroyed by 
the harsh realities of economics. And so that our dream, too, might not end with a sheaf of 
drawings, he tried to dissuade us with the bitter truth.) 

After a weeks-long search, we found our mountaintop. It was late afternoon. The rugged 
backbones of the mountains purpled down to the great blue-green sweep of the ocean, 
with a backdrop of sunset almost overpowering in its intensity. I watched as Mr. Wright 
stood on the cliff edge, outlined against the sky like a stern god from Olympus. I waited for 
him to speak. 

And then his words came, strangely soft: "This is where we will build. And when I die, 
there will be something of me, because of you, on this mountain." 

Then he sort of clutched at me and I thought, "This is too sentimental too soon, but I will 
go along with it for his sake." So I murmured an appropriate response and clutched right 
back. 

Later I learned that Mr. Wright had described that scene to friends-the beautiful 
homesite, the dramatic sunset. Seeking to "meet each client on his own emotional level," 
he had decided that what client Oboler wanted was a sense of the eternal in relation to the 
building in the mountains. So (as Mr. Wright put it), reluctantly, because such 
sentimentality was foreign to his nature, he had made the speech for my sake, and had 
clutched me to his bosom! 

(He would have been a great actor-director-producer, this man. For the sense of the 
dramatic is there, not only in his person but in his creations. From Fallingwater [page 
131], the house perched over a stream at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, to the 
copper-and-plate-glass sheath of the Price skyscraper [page 41] on the Oklahoma 
flats, his is the brightest poetry of architectural literature.) 

When the plans were completed, Mr. Wright had a word of advice: "During the actual 
building of your house, get out of town!" 

Where clients wasted money, he went on to say, was in being around to make 
inconsequential changes in the original blueprints, to the great financial joy of the 
cost-plus contractor. Particularly when he himself would be too far away to protect the 
lambs from the slaughter. 

The two lambs stockpiled all the materials on the building site as per the blueprints and 
took a boat for New York via the Panama Canal on a long overdue vacation. I was draped 
over the ship's rail watching the first of the locks gurgle like a king-size bathtub when 
the ship's radio operator handed me a message. It was from the contractor. "MR. WRIGHT 
HAS CHANGED MIND. WANTS BUILDING MADE OUT OF PINE. PLEASE 
INSTRUCT AS TO DISPOSITION FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS REDWOOD 
ALREADY PURCHASED." 

Eleanor watched the anger-ripped radiogram fly overboard and listened to me dictate a 
vigorous reply that the original plans said redwood and I wanted redwood! "Remember, 
dear," she soothed, "and I quote: 'Where clients waste money is in being around to make 
inconsequential changes in the original blueprints. Get out of town!'" 

(The years have taught us one axiomatic truth: Never disagree with the man about the 
details of his own architecture. For here he is magnificently Wright. Sixteen years of 
corrosive salt-laden winds have driven up our mountainside. Now we know that for that 
site the wood should have been pine.) 

Back in California, we rushed anxiously to the mountain. The front elevation of the house 
was up in all its redwooded glory. That self-hypnosis of well-being peculiar to people 
viewing the birth of their first house swept over me-until I wandered out into the meadow 
behind. There, recumbent among the California poppies, lay what seemed to me an exact 
duplicate of the entire front end of the building! 

The contractor dodged my first wild onrush with practiced skill. After they had finished 
the original framing, he told me, Mr. Wright had come by and redesigned the front end on 
the spot. And when the contractor had protested, "But we have it finished, Mr. Wright!" 
the master had spoken three words sweet to art but bitter to the exchequer: "Rip it out!" 

The first section of the main building was done at expensive last, and we had moved in. 
The guesthouse nearby was finished. We were entertaining out guests with a barbecue 
when suddenly a long caravan of low-slung imported cars curved into our driveway and 
stopped in a draftsman's precise line. 

Out of the first car stepped the unmistakable, majestic figure of our architect. From the 
other small cars came 20 intense young men, his students. The master recognized our 
presence with a quick wave of hand, stalked forward, aimed his Malacca cane at the 
brand-new redwood fence that jutted out from the side of the house, and roared, "Rip it 
out!" 

I smiled knowingly at Mrs. O. This was Mr. Wright's joking reference to the 
front-end-of-our-house debacle. The smile froze on my face as 20 sets of eager 
muscles leaped and shoved. With a crackling and crunching of timbers, the fence was 
down! 

I found voice. "But Mr. Wright! We-we just finished that fence! You-you designed it 
yourself! It's on the blueprints! It cost a fortune!" 

Mr. Wright transfixed me with an imperious glance. "Dear friend," he demanded, "doesn't 
it look better without it?" I, with my checkbook still bleeding, had to admit that it did. 

"Then we are in complete agreement!" Doffing his cape, he beckoned his disciples to join 
the Obolers and guests at the barbecue. 

(He will destroy months of work on the drawing board, waive badly needed fees, turn his 
back on entire projects unless the work is good and true. He knows, from his experience of 
this amazing span of years, that the dollar is ephemeral but that the years of building are 
long.) 

That afternoon had another surprise. Mr. Wright strode up the hillside, followed by the 
long line of students. He returned shortly with the announcement that someone had made a 
blasted blunder. Instead of hanging our redwood-and-stone guesthouse atop the nearby 
mountainside, the contractor had placed it smack-dab on top of the mountain. 

"But-but it looks all right," I stuttered hastily, visualizing those 20 pairs of arms wielding 
house-wrecking crowbars and pickaxes. 

"I designed it so you would have the house and the mountain," the great man thundered. 
"Now you've just got a house on a mountain. But I'll fix it-and it won't cost you a cent!" 
A squad of his students would camp out for a few days, he explained, and right the 
architectural wrong. 

For 30 working days ten young men labored mightily, erecting a tremendous 
native-stone-and-concrete wall just off the peak of the mountain. Soon the little 
cantilevered guesthouse appeared to hang rather than sit. But ten gargantuan-appetited 
apprentices appeared three times a day for 30 days! I recall entering a steaming kitchen on 
the 28th day. A weary small wife glared at me over a Himalaya of pots and pans. She 
spoke with deadly emphasis. "I am not complaining," she said. "After all, it isn't costing us 
a cent!" 

(As I write this, I can see the guesthouse peeping through an embryo cumulus cloud, and 
the mountaintop changed without desecration of bulldozer. Stone and cement blended the 
man-made structure to the very nature of the mountain, and the house and the place are 
one.) 

It was raining again in California, the first rain since we had moved into the house. A fire 
crackled in the fireplace, and a cocker spaniel was snoring on the hearth. As I sat down to 
enjoy the drumming of the drops on my very own roof, the telephone rang. A feminine 
voice greeted me. 

"Are you the Mr. Oboler who is having a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright?" 

When I said I was, the woman burst into tears. 

She, too, was a Frank Lloyd Wright client, she told me. "I have been standing over the 
baby's crib with dishpans catching the water that's leaking in! Mr. Wright experimented 
on us with plywood. Mr. Oboler, I called to warn you!" 

I mumbled words of sympathy and hung up. I looked up smugly at my own high, lovely, 
matched-redwood, impenetrable ceiling-and a drop of water hit me squarely on the 
nose! 

(The flying squad of young apprentices descended and curbed the sprinkler tendencies of 
the experimental roofs. Since that time the building industry has widely copied the use of 
those plywood panels, as so many other of the maligned Wright innovations have been 
copied-from hollow stemmed piers and wraparound windows to radiant heating and 
kitchens wedded to living rooms; from carports and built-in furniture to ornamentation 
integrated within the materials themselves to continuity of interior surfaces, bringing the 
outdoors within and making the landscape a part of the living room.) 

A year ago I sat in the house Mr. Wright had built for us, and my heart was low. I had 
written my first play for Broadway, a prophetic play in blank verse about the coming race 
for outer space, but the New York critics had vigorously attacked both the writing and the 
content. As a result, the production had closed. After two years of work my message had 
reached only a few thousand people. 

Suddenly I remembered Frank Lloyd Wright's words years before when, sitting in front of 
that very fire, I had asked him how he had endured those long years of unremitting attacks 
on his own prophetic works. Mr. Wright had smiled. 

"The history of every artist is this," he said. "At first people discover you, and everything 
you do is wondrous. Then they begin to look for your feet of clay, and everything you do is 
berated. But if you live long enough you become an old master." Then his eyes twinkled. 
"Now I am an old master." 


MORE ON DISCOVERING AND FINDING WRIGHT 

It was in Chicago that I actually got interested in Mr. Wright. I was living near the 
University of Chicago, and there was a building there that I thought was the most beautiful 
in the world. I was one of the few who thought it was beautiful because the rest of the 
neighborhood thought it was a blight. It was the Robie House [page 45]. [It] rolled 
horizontal and built into the background of that Hyde Park-world sort of house that stood 
out like a sore thumb against the [houses] of that time-the early 1900s sort of the 
imitation of what people were building back in the turn-of-the-century houses-the 
gingerbread porches and the scrollword and all that. The neighborhood thought that the 
Robie House was a terrible thing; it should never have been there. Had the climate been as 
it is now, someone would have thrown a Molotov cocktail, but Mr. Molotov hadn't made 
his invention yet. So, as a boy, I liked to walk around that house and say that someday, 
someday I want to have either this house or something like it. I had no concept of the man. 
Years went by and, of course, I found out it was Frank Lloyd Wright. And as the years 
went by, of course, that house became more and more important to the neighborhood. The 
imitative gingerbread houses, the boxes with scrollwork, decayed and were torn down, but 
the Robie House got more and more beautiful and more and more accepted. I got older, 
too, and one day found that I had earned enough to buy a house and went looking for Mr. 
Wright-about 27 to 28 years ago. 

I wrote him a letter and . . . I told him about the Robie House and I heard nothing from the 
man, not a word-weeks went by. By this time I was in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. One 
day at our rented apartment, in the midst of a torrential rain, there was a knock at the 
door-a very important knock. I thought that it must be either God or a bill collector. I 
opened the door and there in the rain stood a man in a cape, with a white mane of hair (his 
only protection from the elements), and he said, "I am Frank Lloyd Wright, you wrote 
me." In he came. And that began a friendship (and it was a friendship) that lasted until the 
day of his death. At that time he was in his early seventies . . . no, he was in his late 
sixties. He seemed horribly aged to me at the time, but in five minutes I discovered he was 
the youngest man I'd ever met. 


MORE ON FINDING THE SITE FOR THE HOUSE 

Mr. Wright always fit the design to the temperament of his clients. He knew that I was a 
playwright, a dramatist, so to speak and therefore he wanted to design me a dramatic 
house. I'd been born in the canyons of Chicago and wanted a mountain house. After a 
great deal of exploring with Mr. Wright, driving around day after day through southern 
California, we found in the Santa Monica Mountains this absolutely virgin mountain peak. 
There wasn't a habitation within five miles, and that was the place where I wanted the 
house-on the top-and that is the one that Mr. Wright designed [for]. 

There is an amazing story about that location. We arrived at a cliff that looked out over a 
canyon toward that mountaintop just at sunset. It was a fantastic panorama-misty, 
Japanesy clouds, tinged by the setting sun; the sun itself falling off into the ocean; the 
endless serrations of the mountain range falling away from this mountaintop to the ocean. 
It was a fantastic scene and situation. Mr. Wright suddenly put his arm around me and, 
pointing to the mountaintop beyond, he said, "Arch Oboler, did you realize that when I am 
dead and gone, a part of me will hang from that cliff side?" And he started clutching me. I 
thought it was a little pathetic but I went along with it. I said, "Yes, Mr. Wright, a part of 
you will be there. And when I die, a part of me." 

Well, the next morning I got a telephone call from an actor by the name of Charles 
Laughton. Dear Charles said on the telephone to me, "Arch, old boy, I was at a dinner 
party last night and guess who the guest of honor was?" 

"Who was the guest of honor?" 

"Your friend, Mr. Wright. And, Arch, old boy, he told us the most amusing story. 
Someone said to Mr. Wright, 'How do you handle clients? How do you get along with 
them? Particularly the temperamental ones?' He said, 'I get along with them very well. . . . 
You see, I speak to them in their own terms.' He said, 'For example, this afternoon I was 
out with Arch Oboler. You know he's very emotional, dramatic, and so I put my arm 
around him. . . .'" And he told the story. In other words, dear Mr. Wright was, as we say in 
show biz, "hamming it up." 


ON THE EAGLEFEATHER DESIGN 

I would simply say that Mr. Wright had a very short temper and a very short shrift for 
stupidity. I bet those clients who had problems with Mr. Wright were clients who had 
problems. We never did. I would make suggestions and listen to Mr. Wright and he would 
make suggestions. It was in the manner of give and take. I quickly learned not to argue 
with him in areas of basic design. Our areas of discussion were those that every client has 
with an architect . . . but never basic design, because I liked very much what he did. The 
Eaglefeather design-the house he originally designed for the top of the mountain-was 
never built because we ran into a war [World War II], and we couldn't get the necessary 
steel. The only steel available to me from the rationing board was, to use their own words, 
"in a submarine sunk off the coast." 

When, after the war, I went to Mr. Wright and told him that I no longer wanted to build 
on the mountaintop but rather on the plateau below, his reaction was most interesting. He 
wasn't perturbed at all that I was rejecting the design. In fact, I looked him in the eye and 
said, "To tell the truth, Mr. Wright, I never did like the design." What I said in substance 
was that there were big mountain peaks around and that I didn't particularly want a house 
that tried to be imitative of a mountain peak. We knew each other well by that time, and he 
took it very quietly and said, "Why in hell didn't you come to me years ago and tell me you 
didn't like it?" 


ON WRIGHT AND MONEY 

I got a phone call from him. He said he was over at the Biltmore Hotel here in Los Angeles 
and [asked] would I come and visit him. So I went over and he said, "Arch, we're in dire 
need at the Fellowship. We need money. We're in an all-time low. We don't even have 
groceries. Dear boy, could you advance me something on my work?" Well, my own 
finances were a little low at the time, and I had paid him in full to that point for all the 
work he had done. But I pulled a deep breath and took out my checkbook and gave him a 
good part of the balance of my account, which was $500. 

About two weeks later . . . I went out rock hunting. Mrs. Oboler was with me; we were 
driving down to Phoenix, passing Taliesin. I said, "Let's stop in and say hello to the 
Wrights." This was in the days long before Taliesin had big signs of admission, visiting 
hours, gates, and all the rest of it. We drove in and we were greeted very nicely by Mr. 
Wright and Mrs. Wright. Mr. Wright was [all set] for a siesta, which he always took. I 
think it's one of the reasons that he was able to maintain such a high level of energy, 
because he knew when to stop. He said, "Arch, come on into the bedroom while I lie down 
and I'll talk to you." 

So he went into his room and he lay down on his bed. . . . On a table nearby there were a 
couple of vases. Now, I am no antiquarian, but I recognized immediately that these were 
Egyptian and very old and very beautiful; they were tiny little things. I said, "Frank, these 
are absolutely beautiful!" 

"Aren't they really!" 

"Yes, I've never seen these before." 

"No, no. I just got them. Don't you remember when I was down in Hollywood? I passed 
through Beverly Hills and I met this chap and I bought them." 

Surreptitiously, I turned [them] over, and on the base was written "$500." 

Well, what is the point of the story? That Mr. Wright took my money and used it for 
another purpose? Hardly. Mr. Wright could no more resist beauty than, shall we say, a 
lady of the evening can resist a check. He loved beauty, and there was no price on beauty. 
He would go hungry rather than miss getting this very beautiful vase. Of course, one might 
say, what about the Fellowship? Well, the Fellowship always managed to eat! 


MORE ON "THE OLD MASTER" 

Time magazine had taken one of my works and devoted three columns to tearing apart, not 
the work, but me personally. I was very young at the time, and I was terribly unhappy 
because only a month or two before Time magazine had said . . . very, very many nice 
things which I really wasn't that much [deserving] of. Wounded and hurt, I drove to 
Taliesin. I met with Mr. Wright and told him the sad story of what this national 
publication had done to me. He looked at me and he said, "Arch, I'm going to tell you 
something. There are three stages in a man's career. I will speak of mine. First, they 
discover you and everything you do is wonderful. They hold you in the cup of their hand 
and print glowing words about you. Then you move into the second stage, when they start 
to look for feet of clay. They can no longer write how great you are because they have 
already done that. Now they are out to debunk you. And things that you do are no good. 
They're lesser than you did before, and you're not up to the promise that you had, and so 
on. . . . If you live long enough, you live through that and you become an old master." He 
said, with a twinkle in his eye, "I am an old master." 

Frank Lloyd Wright was an old master. But in being an old master to the day of his death 
he was the youngest human being I ever met, because he had that great quality of realizing 
that you live in the day, that you live fully in that day, that you give of yourself and your 
art in that day, not in yesterday, not in tomorrow but in that day, that what happens to you 
personally, if you're truly an artist, has nothing to do with your art. You just accept it as 
part of the living process and go beyond it. But, most importantly, Mr. Wright had the 
quality of realizing that . . . life is a gift, that it is a wonder that the accident of creation is 
so fantastically beautiful, that we should use and revere every moment of life and look at it 
every day afresh, with young eyes. And so Frank Lloyd Wright, when he died in his 
nineties, was a young genius. 


"WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE, MR. WRIGHT?" 

I once asked him, "What happens when you die, Mr. Wright?"-we got to know each other 
well enough so he spoke of death as well as life. And, incidentally, as time went on he 
insisted that I call him Frank. Well, since there was a great deal of difference in our ages, 
and beyond that I truly felt and feel that this was the only genius that I met in all my life, 
each time that I had to call the great man "Frank" the word kind of stuck in my throat . . . 
it almost seemed sacrilegious. I had asked him the question about the future of his work, 
and all the animation and the fun he had in his face-he always had a sparkle in his eye 
when we talked because I quickly learned that what he liked about me was my 
"tongue-in-cheek" attitude about things. In this case, as I say, the fun went out of his 
face. He thought awhile and said, "I really don't know, I really don't know." Because he 
knew what I meant was not a continuation of his style of work but a continuation of his 
genius. And I knew before I asked the question that genius cannot be taught. It is not 
hereditary. I think the sum total of Mr. Wright's answer to me was that all the people he 
had taught had gotten pieces of his genius, but there really wasn't a genius among them. 


SARAH SMITH 

Neither one of us will ever forget that first beautiful meeting we had with Mr. Wright. . . . 
Frank Lloyd Wright was just the most humble person. His humility was so great, so 
different from what one heard about in the press. 

Melvyn Maxwell Smith was a high school social studies teacher who first learned about 
Frank Lloyd Wright in an art and architecture survey course at Wayne State University in 
Detroit. Sarah Smith was an elementary school teacher. When the Smiths first visited 
Taliesin on a vacation trip in 1941, they discussed with Wright the possibility of his 
designing a house for them. The outbreak of World War II forced postponement of any 
further discussions until Melvyn Smith's return from the service. In 1946 Frank Lloyd 
Wright designed the house that the Smiths subsequently built in Bloomfield Hills, 
Michigan. 

The Smith House is an excellent example of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian ideal. Like 
other Usonian houses, it is laid out using a 2' x 4' grid. The house has a 
board-and-batten wall system of cypress wood panels screwed, not nailed, together and 
is heated with a hot-water radiant-heat system embedded in the concrete floor slab. 

In 1984 John Donoian interviewed Sarah Smith as part of a research project for a course at 
Tulane University. 

{John Donoian and Dennis Doordan's "A Magnificent Adventure: An Interview with Mrs. 
Sarah (Melvyn) Maxwell Smith about the Smith House by Frank Lloyd Wright" was 
originally published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 39, No. 4, Summer 
1986, pp. 7-10. Reprinted with permission.} 

JOHN DONOIAN: When did you first consider commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to 
design a home for you? 

SARAH SMITH: When Smithy and I met, I had never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. 
Smithy told me all about Wright and said the girl that he would marry must want to live in 
a Frank Lloyd Wright home. Well, I was the type of girl that would have loved to live in a 
cabin someplace on top of a mountain. I did not care about a plush type of home. All I 
wanted was one great big room with a large fireplace and a stone floor. That fit in just 
great with a Frank Lloyd Wright home. Smithy and I were married on March 21, 1940. 

The following summer [1941], we took a beautiful trip west. We came to a place called the 
Dells, in Wisconsin. Spring Green-that is the summer home of Wright's studio-was not 
too far away. Smithy said, "Look at the map here. Oh, wonderful, why don't we go over 
and see Taliesin?" Well, we did. The people at Taliesin had their own time, and they were 
getting ready for dinner. We just walked right in towards the drafting room. A young man 
came up, greeted us, and he heard Smithy say to me, "One day we are going to have a 
Frank Lloyd Wright home." 

"Are you interested in building a Frank Lloyd Wright home?" 

"Oh yes, not right this minute, but we are going to have a Frank Lloyd Wright home 
someday." 

"Would you like to see and talk to Frank Lloyd Wright about your plans?" 

Smithy and I were just about bowled over. "Well, if it would be possible." 

"Just a moment, and I'll see if you can't have an interview with Frank Lloyd Wright."  


The young man jumped into his jeep and drove off. Smithy and I were absolutely 
overcome. In a short while he was back again. "Mr. Wright will see you." 

We jumped into the jeep, and when we got to the studio, there was Frank Lloyd Wright 
standing there, impeccably dressed, from his white hair down to his white shoes. He 
greeted us both very warmly. "Come, come in, do you have any babies?" He was already 
starting his interview. 

"Oh, no, you see we have only been married just a little over a year." We walked in, and 
what an interview we had! He told us to find a site that nobody else wanted. He said to 
look for land that had some drop to it. He told us to take a topographical picture of the site 
and send it to him, and he would design our home. Smithy said, "We don't have any 
money. We are going to have to save for this. I see that you built a home for the Jacobses 
for $5,000." 

Mr. Wright said, "Yes, I did." 

"Well if they can have a home for $5,000, I think we can afford a home for $5,000, too." 

Mr. Wright had quite a glint in his eye. He smiled at us both and said, "Well, that's one of 
the big problems in the architectural world, to build a home inexpensively enough so that 
people can afford it. It may cost you more than $5,000 now, for that was several years 
ago." 

Smithy said, "$8,000?" 

"Well, maybe, we'll just work it out." Then he asked us about our interests. We talked to 
him about the things we loved. Of course, Smithy and I were both great lovers of nature. 
Mr. Wright asked if we were planning to have a family, and we said yes, we were. We 
loved people and we wanted to entertain people in our home. We loved music, we loved 
the arts. Mr. Wright listened. We knew he knew just exactly what type of home to design 
for us. What a beautiful interview! I will never forget it. Neither one of us will ever forget 
that first beautiful meeting we had with Mr. Wright. 

DONOIAN: Sarah, how were you able to find this site? Did he help you with the selection 
of this site, or did you make it on your own? 

SMITH: Well, the minute Smithy got out of the service after the war, he started looking. 
Believe me, he looked and looked and looked. And he was led to find this site on Pon 
Valley Road in Bloomfield Hills. How my husband could see this site of all of the other 
sites, only God knows. Maybe God did know where he wanted us to be, because we were 
near a lake, and we were also near Cranbrook Educational Community. Our area looked 
like a wilderness then. There were a lot of trees, marshes, overgrown with greenery. I 
know this real estate agent was led to show us this land. Smithy had an eye for beauty, he 
had perception. He was able to see design when it wasn't there. What an imagination he 
had. Mr. Wright didn't have anything to do with picking the site. He just told us to go and 
find something that nobody else wanted, and Smithy did. It's important to note that the 
land had a slight hill on it-just what Mr. Wright wanted us to have on our property. So 
Smithy immediately wired Mr. Wright. "I have found the land, and I have the 'Wright' 
land, and all that we need is the 'Wright' architect." He received a telegram back. Mr. 
Wright said, "Come right away." 

MRS. MELVYN MAXWELL SMITH: ". . .we were all really intoxicated with all that 
beauty." An exterior view of the Gregor Affleck residence (1940) in Bloomfield Hills, 
Michigan. The house is sited on a sloping natural ravine. Wright designed a second house 
for the Afflecks in 1952, but the house was never constructed. (Patrick J. Meehan) 

This was over the Labor Day weekend, and Smithy had just a few days to spare. He 
immediately got a flight out. He took to Spring Green the material that was necessary for 
the planning of our home. They were so busy at Taliesin that weekend. Mr. Wright really 
did not even give Smithy the time of day, so to speak. That weekend so much was going 
on, and Smithy thought, "Good Heavens, he is not even going to say anything about my 
plans." But Monday morning Mr. Wright gathered his Fellowship around him. He said to 
the group, "Mr. Smith has given us a challenge. He has given us a commission to design 
his home." 

DONOIAN: Was there any problem with how the house would be situated on the property? 

SMITH: Oh, no problem whatsoever. Frank Lloyd Wright sited it perfectly. He situated the 
house into the hill so that the sun "poured" into the house in the wintertime-but not in the 
summertime. 

DONOIAN: How soon did he come up with the design? 

SMITH: I can't give you exactly the time, but I am sure it was close to Christmas of 1946. 
Smithy did ask in September when he would receive the plans. Mr. Wright said, "When 
the spirit moves me!" One day, while we were waiting for the plans to arrive, we took a 
drive to see the Affleck home. [The Gregor Affleck residence in Bloomfield Hills, 
Michigan, had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1940.] 

With us was a young gentleman named Larry Kunin. Now, Mr. Kunin had been a boy 
scout with Smithy in their youth, and he was very important in the building of our home. 
I'll talk about that in a little while. When Mr. Affleck greeted us and invited us in, I fell in 
love with the lighting of his home. It was so extraordinary and so different. Of course, we 
immediately became friends. When we returned from that visit, we were all really 
intoxicated with all that beauty. It was soon after that we did receive the plans. 

DONOIAN: Did Frank Lloyd Wright design any of the furnishing? 

SMITH: Oh, yes, he designed all the furniture in the house. Like, for instance, people have 
chifforobes in their bedrooms. We didn't have to put in chifforobes and dressers, etc. We 
had many built-in things. 

In the living room we have this lounge where we can seat 25 to 30 people; it all depends 
on the dimensions of the individuals. We can have 40 people in that living room, and it 
wouldn't be crowded. All of the hassocks, the dining room table and chairs, anything that 
is wood in the house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

This home was designed for us, Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Maxwell Smith. The proportions of 
the house are very interesting. Smithy would often go into the garden room and put his 
hand on the ceiling and he would say how great he felt, just as though he were a king! He 
could touch the low ceilings of his home. Now, of course, the ceilings were not all the 
same. They differed in height. In half of the living room we had a low ceiling and the 
other half just soared way, way up . . . so there was a variation to the heights in the house. 
Here's another interesting thought: Mr. Wright didn't think bedrooms should be very large; 
they were just to sleep in. So our bedrooms were moderate in size, they weren't huge. 
However, Mr. Wright knew that we wanted to entertain, so he gave us a great-sized 
living room, and right off the living room was the dining room. Often in Mr. Wright's 
smaller homes you didn't have a separate dining room; you would have a large living 
room, and part of that living room would be set up as a dining room. But in our home we 
did have a lovely dining room. 

Another thing is the lighting. Mr. Wright planned all flush lighting. I just fell in love with 
his lighting, and in our home we have such interesting lighting effects. Just by turning on 
certain lights it gave us such a romantic atmosphere. Even with all the lights off in the 
house, at night when the moon came up and we had a full moon, oh, what a beautiful, 
beautiful feeling it was to look out on the water and see the moon coming into the home 
with its reflection. It was just beautiful. 

DONOIAN: Did Frank Lloyd Wright urge special touches in the design of your home? 
What were they and how did they come about? 

SMITH: Well, let me start with this. Smithy looked the design over, got prices, and said, 
"Sarah, you and I can't build this home. We do not have the money for it." It was just 
impossible. So he went back to Mr. Wright and said, "Mr. Wright, I cannot afford to build 
this house, I do not have the money." 

"Smith, you can build this house. You go home and you study these plans and know these 
plans so that you can hire people who are interested in Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. 
You will be able to find people to work very reasonably. You can contract that house 
yourself . . . you can build that house." He gave Smithy much confidence, and Smithy 
came home. 

Smithy studied those plans from 1946 to almost 1949. He would stay up sometimes until 
two and three in the morning studying the plans. When we went back to Taliesin in 1949, 
Smithy said, "Mr. Wright, I am ready to build the home. But I have made a few changes in 
the plans. If you disapprove, though, Mr. Wright, we'll just forget about the changes I 
made." 

Mr. Wright took the plans. Smithy was sitting to his left, I was sitting to his right, and Mr. 
Wright sat there looking at the changes. Mr. Wright kept tapping his pencil, tapping it and 
tapping it. After a while he looked up at me and said, "Your husband would make a fine 
architect." Smithy said right then and there he felt he had received his degree in 
architecture. Mr. Wright called Jack Howe to come and take the plans and make the 
changes my husband suggested. 

DONOIAN: Did Frank Lloyd Wright have any supervisory role in the building or did he 
leave it up to Mr. Smith and you to take care of the construction? 

SMITH: He had nothing to do with the construction of the building, but he said to Smithy, 
"If you run into trouble, I will send one of my apprentices over to help you." Smithy did 
not run into trouble until the very end . . . and one of the disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright, 
Jack Howe, came and lived with us for two weeks and they settled the problem. I can't tell 
you exactly what the problem was. It had something to do with the roof. 

Larry Kunin and Smithy worked together on supplies for the house. Larry was in the 
sweeping compound business, and he had contacts in the lumber business. We finally 
ended up with Larry being able to get us a ridiculously cheap price for cypress. Everybody 
we contacted was able to do something for us. It was just amazing. The next thing we had 
to do was find people who would work for Smithy at a very low price. Larry was 
instrumental in getting Smithy two very fine people, Peter Turczyn and Steve Kovass, to 
work at something like two dollars per hour. These two very fine people had friends and 
relatives who also helped in the building of the home. They worked mostly at night 
because they had regular jobs during the day. The electrician, a brother of one of these 
men, would come at night and would stay until maybe twelve or one o'clock. The same 
thing happened with the plumber. What a dedicated group of people. A fine 
cabinetworker, George Woods, was absolutely terrific, and, of course, again, asked a 
minimum wage. Smithy had a brother-in-law in the cabinet manufacturing business 
who was a very great help because he was able to take the cypress and cut it all to 
size-and there wasn't a charge for that. He was also able to get all the screws and 
hardware. By the way, the Frank Lloyd Wright house, we might say in jest, was a "screwy" 
house because it was put together with screws. The hardware, of course, was all brass. 
Every single door in this home is piano-hinged. 

It was amazing how the house was built. There were many people who would walk 
through during construction. It was very amusing listening to people trying to figure out 
which room was a bedroom and what room was the kitchen, and invariably they would get 
it all wrong. Great hordes of people would come walking through, especially during the 
weekend. Smithy was always very cordial to anyone who stepped into this home. He had 
such patience with people. It was just beautiful to see his relationship with anybody who 
admired Frank Lloyd Wright homes. 

DONOIAN: Frank Lloyd Wright had a reputation for being arrogant. How did he treat 
you? 

SMITH: Oh, Frank Lloyd Wright was just the most humble person. His humility was so 
great, so different from what one heard about in the press. He came to our home several 
times. 

One time, when he came to Detroit to lecture to senior citizens, Mary Palmer, Elizabeth 
Affleck, and I got together and said let's have a luncheon for Mr. Wright. I said that we 
could have it at our home. Mary and Bill Palmer at that time were building their Frank 
Lloyd Wright home in Ann Arbor, and she wanted to invite her builder and some of the 
workers. Well, we had quite a group by the time we were through. Of course, Mr. Wright 
was delighted to come. We set up the buffet on this table in our living room. We invited 
Mr. Wright to be first at the buffet. He served himself and sat down on the lounge. No one 
went near him. Somehow or other people are afraid to approach geniuses. You rather 
stand in the background; you are sort of awed. Mr. Wright's voice came out loud and clear: 
"Isn't anybody going to sit near me?" Well, the minute he said that people approached him 
and he was certainly well-surrounded by other guests. 

I sat down and had the greatest conversation with him. I talked with him and we got [onto 
the subject of] time. He told me he could tell the time by the shadows on [the] wall. He 
could tell the seasons and anything about time just with the shadows. You know, you used 
to hear about his arrogance and about his not being able to get along with the press. But 
really knowing that man-he was so beautiful, so wonderful, so easy to talk to. I enjoyed 
every minute that I was with him. 

When Mr. Wright came here, he was so pleased with what Smithy had done with the 
house. Smithy followed Mr. Wright's plan to the nth degree. Mr. Wright said to Smithy, 
"You deserve one of my plaques." You see that plaque as you enter the house. He took the 
plaque, it was a little dusty, and he wiped it off on his trousers and gave it to Smithy. He 
did not give a signature plaque to many of his homes. So you see, Frank Lloyd Wright 
thought a great deal of this house. He called it his "little gem." 

I can tell you it has been a magnificent adventure to live in this house, "My Haven" (the 
name of our home). Smithy often quoted Emerson: "Nothing can be done without 
enthusiasm." Smithy was the most enthusiastic man I have ever known. The courage and 
determination Smithy expressed in building our home were some of the qualities that 
made this venture a successful one. 

MRS. MELVYN MAXWELL SMITH: "When Mr. Wright came here, he was so pleased 
with what Smithy had done with the house. . . .Mr. Wright said to Smithy, 'You deserve 
one of my plaques.'" Frank Lloyd Wright's famous red square tile symbol, signed "FLLW," 
attached to the exterior wall near the main entrance to the Melvyn Maxwell Smith 
residence (1946). (Patrick J. Meehan) 


NICHOLAS P. DAPHNE 

[The building] would have been a monument to San Francisco because San Francisco is 
such an artistic city. The art would have been a great thing for visitors. . . . Many, many 
times my wife and I talked about this. . . . God, I wish sometimes that we had it built. 

Many of Wright's designs for clients were never constructed. One such unbuilt project is 
Wright's 1948 design for the Nicholas P. Daphne Funeral Chapels in San Francisco. 
Shortly after Wright designed the chapels, he was quoted as saying: 

{Nicholas P. Daphne's reminiscences, recorded in the late 1960s, were transcribed from 
Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank Lloyd Wright: 
Ask the Man Who Owns One." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 

Nicholas P. Daphne called me after midnight a year or so ago to say that because he had 
bought the finest lot in San Francisco he wanted the best architect in the world to build a 
mortuary on it. Nick asked me if I'd ever built one. I said no, and I thought that was my 
best qualification for doing one. So he gave me the job. Of course, I had to "research" a 
good deal, and that nearly got me down. I would come back home now and then 
wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Nick had a way of referring to the deceased, 
always, as "the merchandise," and that would cheer me up. I pulled through.... 

The plan of the whole was an attempt to take some of the curse off the customary 
undertaker's official proceeding. I didn't expect to make even the funeral of one's enemies 
exactly cheerful, but I did think I could give the obsequies some beauty without destroying 
their integrity. . . . 

The period of mourning has been somewhat shortened and a colorful happy environment 
[provided] abundant with music; dignified, soundproofed, well-lit space and reasonable 
segregation for each occasion has been provided. Every possible convenience designed to 
make the place helpful to the bereaved is here incorporated. The emphasis is here laid not 
on Death but on Life. 

In May 1949, at the Southern Conference on Hospital Planning in Biloxi, Mississippi, 
Wright again briefly talked of the Daphne commission. This time, however, Wright struck 
a different tone with regard to both the project and his client: 

With us everything is merchandise. I have been planning a mortuary, of all things, and 
listened to the promulgator of the enterprise referring to the corpse as the "merchandise" . 
. . I'm not wasting my time designing a mortuary, because I have discovered that the 
proprietor of the merchandise wanted a gravedigger, not an architect. 

Wright carried the designs only as far as presentation drawings. 

In 1948 Wright also designed a house for Daphne to be built in San Francisco. Although 
the design was carried through the working drawings stage, the house was never 
constructed. Two decades later Daphne recalled working with Wright on the mortuary 
project. 

I heard a lot about Mr. Wright. I wanted to build a mortuary in this country, especially in 
San Francisco, that had practical ideas, [was] convenient to the public. I [sought] some of 
the finest architects in this country. I studied different plans and the different designs of 
different types of artists and architects and finally decided it was Frank Lloyd Wright I 
wanted. So about eleven o'clock at night I picked up the phone in my home and I called 
him back in Wisconsin. He often remarked about that, because it was about three o'clock in 
the morning when he got my message that I wanted to get together and have him design a 
mortuary for me. . . . 

I think I called for him at the airport and I brought him here to the site-this one on 
Church Street in San Francisco . . . at the time this property was a big hill of green 
serpentine rock. I know I was driving his car, he sat to my right in the front seat, and as 
we crossed . . . [this] street Mr. Wright said to me, "What is this building over here?" 
pointing at the U.S. Mint, a square granite building. . . . He said, "We'll make the mint 
look like a moth, and the moth look like a mint!" 

I had often told him that I wanted a mortuary with no steps for entering. For old people, to 
attend funerals is a lot, and I didn't want steps. There was a lot of perennial legwork done 
with Mr. Wright; I showed him about three or four mortuaries around the area. I followed 
him again when he was with his son, Mr. Lloyd Wright. I followed him in Los Angeles; 
we attended two or three other mortuaries there. Another comment he made to me that I 
never forgot: "I think I know the funeral business by now, I don't have to eat it!" 

I said, "Mr. Wright, I still [need] a very fine, organized plan that's practical to work with. 
I'm not worried about your design, it's having a plan that will work for the funeral 
business. I don't question your beautifulness of construction and colors and things, but I 
still have to have some of these bugs [worked] out before I go ahead with the plans." One 
was [that] he gave me steps, and one was that the showroom or display room for caskets 
was very, very small-instead of maybe showing 25 or 30 caskets, Frank Lloyd Wright 
only showed about seven or eight. Another thing is he left the somber rooms out-the 
visitation rooms-the small rooms . . . for one-night visiting before the remains go into 
the chapel. I went to Mr. Wright, and he refused to make these changes. He was pretty 
fixed. I think that this was one of the problems that Mr. Wright had in his lifetime. He 
knew himself [that his designs were] great, but contractors could not do his jobs when 
even the working drawings were finished. The working drawings were not complete where 
contractors could really bid on them. They said there were too many spaces [that] were 
open, they'd have to be decided on the scene; too time-consuming to make decisions; 
again, there were changes on the blueprint at the construction stage, and this would then 
result in bills [that] were high for the owner. 

I wanted a building-the building itself and the improvements on my land-to be simply 
$250,000 to $300,000 of construction. In those days that would be like a million dollars 
now. So when we brought those plans out for preliminary cost findings for the 
construction, when it was finally given out, the contractors came back and said it was 
going to cost about three-quarters of a million dollars. Of course, I know . . . it always 
runs over, and I figured it was someplace like a million [dollars] it would have cost then. I 
couldn't afford it. So I backed off for the time being. 

I know my feelings back then were sort of a little businessmanlike. But I would say if Mr. 
Wright had competent draftsmen who knew the construction business, who could take his 
ideas and really put them on paper, more of his buildings would have been built. They 
would have been an honor to him and his country, because he was the father of 
architecture in the United States and maybe the world in his time. . . . No businessman can 
endure four times [the cost] of what he asks for. . . . [The mortuary] would have been a 
monument to San Francisco because San Francisco is such an artistic city. The art would 
have been a great thing for visitors. . . . Many, many times my wife and I talked about this. 
. . . God, I wish sometimes that we had it built. 

JAMES EDWARDS 

Mr. Wright was great to work with. He treated us very well all of the time-our 
relationship was superb. 

The Mr. and Mrs. James Edwards residence in Okemos, Michigan, was designed by 
Wright in 1949. 

Mrs. Edwards-Dolores-who was rather deeply interested in architecture, gave me an 
article titled "The Love Affair of a Man and His House," which was published in House 
Beautiful just after World War II. She asked for my reaction to the article. At the time, we 
were vacationing in an old family log cabin house in northern Michigan. We never had a 
house of our own and looked forward to the time of designing and building something for 
us to start off in. 

I read the article and told her, "I'd like to call Mr. Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin." 
The next day I did. Mr. Wright was traveling at the time, and I reached Mr. Wright's 
secretary, Gene Masselink, instead. Mr. Masselink had come from Grand Rapids. After 
Mr. Masselink listened for some time, he said, "Put it all down in a letter, and let's see 
what Mr. Wright thinks." 

Well, I wrote and wrote, putting all of our plans down, and got the letter in the mail to Mr. 
Wright. Nothing came back-and I mean nothing. No mild answer and no comment one 
way or another. Finally, after about six weeks, a letter came with Mr. Wright's red square 
on the outside-his red square standing for integrity-and this is all it said: 

My dear Mr. Edwards: 
All right-let's see what I can do. 

FLW 

That was the only contact we ever had regarding his acceptance to design our 
house-NOTHING more written and nothing more verbally. We told him we could spend 
$16,000. However, we finally paid him more money than we originally agreed because our 
house cost more. After we sent him the additional money, he wrote back that it was the 
only time in his memory that he had a client forward a check without substantial proof that 
extra money was needed, and he thanked us for it. 

After the go-ahead letter came from Mr. Wright, Mrs. Edwards and I went to Taliesin to 
be on hand for a substantial Sunday morning breakfast with other clients and all the 
architects and architects-in-training. During our visit Mr. Wright introduced us to a 
client whose house would cost about $500,000-remember, this was about 1948. When 
Dolores got Mr. Wright to one side later in the morning, she said to him, "Mr. Wright, 
how can you do a house for $16,000 for us when clients are here planning a house for 
$500,000?" Mr. Wright replied, "Mrs. Edwards, I have to have these large projects so I 
can afford to do the jobs for the young people that I enjoy doing so much." Mr. Wright was 
great to work with. He treated us very well all of the time-our relationship was superb. 

We stopped one night at Taliesin West on our way to California and had dinner with Mr. 
and Mrs. Wright. Mrs. Wright had the responsibility for her daughter's introduction 
reception, and she kept this subject front and center that evening. Mr. Wright, however, 
knowing that I worked with the Oldsmobile division of General Motors, gave me his idea 
for the design of a New York cab, which was "narrow, high, and a little shorter than 
standard-the driver could see better and could wiggle through the cars." Mr. Wright's 
dining chair was an old one from the Taliesin West kitchen-the woven cane bottom long 
since gone, a big hole now in the chair bottom. Mr. Wright got up, found a pillow, stuffed 
it in the hole, and sat on it for a while. He'd get up occasionally and rearrange the pillow, 
and by this method he got through dinner. 

We had trouble raising the money to build the house-banker friends got it for us. 
Moneylenders were unlimited in their ability to guard the vault-with nothing of value in 
their "artistic" sense. There was nothing more serious than a lumberyard house design for 
them. Fortunately, our friends turned the whole thing around for us. 

Dolores was our family contractor. During her contracting activities she drove a handsome 
Oldsmobile convertible which had originally been made for the Oldsmobile division to 
display upcoming features. She was an excellent contractor. She would park the car out of 
sight around the corner in order to work with subcontractors on their bid and make sure 
that things were being done correctly. Dolores saved us a lot of money during construction. 
In one instance, she got $1,000 off the radiant hot-water heating system, which was 
installed in the floor, by driving to the next little town for a better price. 

Dolores could hardly wait for the flush miter glass to be delivered and installed. The owner 
of the yard where the glass was purchased came out to do the installation. Our interest was 
high with no thought of failure. The glass was perfect-a three-way miter in the 
quarter-inch glass. 

While the house was under construction, water poured off the roof onto the terrace when it 
rained, because no scuppers or downspouts had been provided. The water ran down the 
steps into the 40-foot-long living room. Mrs. Edwards took the huge rug and pad up the 
steps to the dining room-got them out of the way, because the wood in the fireplace 
floated out to the living room floor. Some problem! We fixed it by putting scuppers in the 
next day. 

We had a lot of fun building the whole program ourselves. 

One day I called Mr. Wright about something, and it took a long time for him to come to 
the phone. When we were all through with my part of the phone call he said, "What do 
you think of the offset I put in the wall supporting the living room and terrace?" I said, 
"It's great." Mr. Wright thought it did a lot for the wall, and it did-a great strength 
characteristic. 

During construction Mr. Wright's chief engineer, William Wesley Peters, came to review 
the progress and approved the work. 

We had a deluge of people come (as Mrs. Edwards expected), interested in seeing the 
house under construction. 

One Sunday morning while up on the roof nailing down shingles, I looked behind me and 
saw a man standing there. I said hello. He said he just wanted to see the house, and then 
he moved along and down to the ground. 

One night I took our German shepherd out for a little fresh air, and she held still for a 
moment. I could see two little figures in the dark walking slowly toward us, and I, holding 
the dog, waited until they were almost near and called to them, asking what it was they 
wanted. They asked, "Are you Mr. Edwards?" I said, "Yes." They said they were part of 
the group at Taliesin and had been given a car by Mr. Wright. They were touring around 
to see the houses designed by Mr. Wright that were available. They were Orientals 
(probably Chinese) and they came up to me. After much pleading on my part, they came in 
and saw the house. We found they had not had dinner (it was about midnight). They were 
planning on staying someplace along the highway. Good Lord! So we got out our own food 
and asked them to stay for the night, and they did. In the next hour or two we were 
entertained in the living room of our house by the most beautiful Oriental dancing you 
could imagine. They wrote their names in one of our Frank Lloyd Wright books. Early the 
next morning we got up to get their breakfast and found they had gone-they left a note, 
but there was no chance for us to see this great couple again. 

We were sorry not to be able to live in our house longer than a year and a half. We went to 
Texas with General Motors. However, we were glad to have the opportunity to live in a 
Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house. The last day we were there, as vans came into the 
yard to move us out, people came in by the busload from some university in St. Louis to 
see the structure. It was a house thrilling to build and gracious to live in, but, for a family, 
it would soon be too small and too much a work of art. 


ROBERT AND GLORIA BERGER 

I remember I had to ask him three times: "Does that mean you are going to design a house 
for me?" And he said yes and sort of laughed. 

The Mr. and Mrs. Robert Berger residence in San Anselmo, California, was designed in 
1950. Wright designed the house using a diamond shaped module as the basis for 
generating the floor plan. The house was also designed so that Mr. Berger, a mathematics 
teacher, could do the actual construction work himself. 

{Mr. and Mrs. Robert Berber's reminiscences, recorded in the late 1960s, were transcribed 
from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank Lloyd 
Wright: Ask the Man Who Owns One." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio 
Archive.} 

ON BECOMING INTERESTED IN WRIGHT 

ROBERT BERGER: I was trained as an engineer. I finished my training at Cal after the 
war [World War II]. That's when I started to teach. Of course, like any engineer, since they 
can draw lines and can compute, everyone thinks they can design a home. And a lot of 
people do. However, it's been my experience that most engineers essentially end up 
designing a box. I was dissatisfied with the box. Every time I would start with the design, 
I'd end up with a box. I'd get unhappy. I would pick up one of the new architectural 
magazines, like Architectural Forum, which at that time ran a lot of designs of the latest 
and best in architecture. Every time I'd see one of these I'd get more and more frustrated 
with what I was designing. 

But, finally, in 1948 Architectural Forum ran a whole issue devoted to Frank Lloyd 
Wright, and I just fell head over heels in love with the type of housing he was designing. 
Frank Lloyd Wright to me at that time was a far distant person-a world-famous 
personality-and the idea of having him design a house for me just never occurred. I 
continued to draw and had friends draw for me. In fact, I insulted a few friends by letting 
them know that I didn't like what they designed for me. I didn't like what I was designing! 


ON HIRING WRIGHT 

ROBERT BERGER: I remember distinctly coming home for lunch one day and having a 
cup of coffee with my wife. I suddenly put the cup of coffee down and said, "You know 
what I'm going to do? I'm going to ask Frank Lloyd Wright to design my house." My wife 
kind of laughed. That afternoon, when I went back to the school [where I was teaching], I 
immediately walked over to the library and went to Who's Who in America and looked up 
Frank Lloyd Wright and got his address: Paradise Valley in Arizona. I immediately wrote 
a handwritten letter, essentially telling him that I wanted him to design a house and that I 
wanted to build it myself. I knew that the longer I kept that letter in my hand the more I 
would talk myself out of writing to this famous person. So I got the letter in the mail just 
as fast as I could. In a very short while I got back a letter from Eugene Masselink, Mr. 
Wright's secretary, saying that Mr. Wright wanted the prospectus sent to him and 
essentially saying that I was to send a topo map [i.e., a topographic map of the proposed 
site of the house], and that was it. 

After a length of time-this was around April 1950-I received papers ordering me back 
to Aberdeen Proving Grounds for the summer. I was in the reserves at that time. While I 
was at Aberdeen, I wrote to Mr. Wright again. I told him that I was coming through 
Chicago on my way home in the latter part of August and asked whether it would be 
possible to drop up and see him at Spring Green. I took a train to Madison, a bus from 
Madison to Spring Green, and then I phoned out to the Wright house and asked them to 
send someone down to pick me up. They took me to Mr. Wright's home, and I remember 
distinctly looking at the model of the Guggenheim Museum when Mr. Wright came in. 

He was smaller than I expected. We sat down and he apologized: "I'm sorry, I haven't read 
your letter yet." He said very, very softly and very quietly that he had well over thirty 
buildings on the drawing boards at that time. I thought to myself, "Oh, here it comes-he's 
going to turn me down." And very, very softly and very quietly he said, "However, I think 
that I can work you in." I remember I had to ask him three times, "Does that mean you are 
going to design a house for me?" And he said yes and sort of laughed. I turned around and 
walked away after the interview was over, and just as I passed out of his sight, I said: "Mr. 
Wright, you are going to design a house for me?" 


ON THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DESIGN OF THE HOUSE 

ROBERT BERGER: The requirements were rather few: a house easy to build, low in cost, 
expandable, how many children we had-I think we asked for two bedrooms and a 
playroom, a place for a sewing machine for my wife, and essentially that was all. 

In starting this I was, in a way, rebelling against my engineering training. I had never 
been trained to design beauty-to this day I cannot design beauty. I can design for utility, 
but I have no feeling for beauty. I was determined that I wanted beauty first, utility second, 
and I was going to have a person who I knew could give me the beauty design the house. I 
was going to leave it completely in his hands, and I have done so. When it comes to the 
inner construction of the house, I will play around with that to my heart's content. When it 
comes to the furniture, I will do what I want to as far as the construction is 
concerned-how the stuff is put together. But as far as the appearance is concerned, I will 
have nothing whatsoever to do with this. To this day, if I need any details whatsoever I 
will go to the Wright Foundation, which is taken care of by Aaron Green in San Francisco. 
I will have nothing to do with the beauty of the house. We ask Aaron for details of 
anything that we see in the house. As I said, when I comes to construction-how many 
pieces of steel, how many screws, whether the screws go here, or whether it's nailed or 
screwed or however it's put together-I'll do that. As a result there are, lately, few 
blueprints. Most of the construction is done from sketches, and I translate these sketches 
directly into the finished product without going through any blueprints. 

These were essentially the requirements. I was so happy at getting something beautiful that 
I just didn't want to tell Mr. Wright in any way, shape, or form what to give me. This is 
probably the heaviest house in Marin County. I think I calculated at one time that I poured 
close to 750 tons of concrete. I probably lifted a couple million pounds. It's a very heavy, 
very massive house. It takes a long time to build. Aaron [Green] himself has said Mr. 
Wright kind of double-crossed me as far as the requirement "easy to build" is concerned. 


ON FINISHING THE HOUSE 

ROBERT BERGER: I have a photograph of myself with hair, a brand new pipe, a brand 
new pair of khakis, and a brand new shovel taken on April 1, 1953. That was the first 
shovelful of earth-that's when we broke ground, and I've been at it ever since. The house 
is not finished yet. I would say it's about 98-99 percent finished; the rest of the house is 
just minor details. We're very comfortable and very, very happy with it. That's perhaps 
why I've slowed down a little bit in building. 

I, of course, when I started the house, had a dream. I wanted something that was beautiful 
first and utilitarian second. I found that the utility followed right along with the beauty, but 
to get to the beauty . . . it's hard to talk about it. It's a very emotional thing. I'm absolutely 
crazy about the house. It's almost like my own child. I have sat here . . . and I've seen those 
rocks in the fireplace probably for the last fifteen years-I've lived in the house for about 
twelve years-and every time I look at them they look different. It's just a constant-the 
constant idea of beauty in the house. I feel as if I am surrounded by it. Sometimes [I] wake 
up at night and I'll walk around; sometimes I'll go out onto the terrace and look back at the 
house. I just can't walk around the house without seeing beauty. It's exceeded my fondest 
dreams. Because of this experience, I really feel sorry for people who live in a house that 
they are using strictly as a shelter from the elements. It's such a thrill to be feeling a work 
of art; actually living it. It's almost like a living thing. I'm just overjoyed with the place. 
My wife, of course, is mad at me because I never really want to go anywhere-I just want 
to stay home. I like to sit here on the couch and just look around. 


WRIGHT DESIGNS A DOGHOUSE 

ROBERT BERGER: Jim, my son, was asking me to design a doghouse. We had a dog who 
was kind of miserable outside, and Jim wanted a doghouse. He was twelve at the time. He 
came to me and, of course, I didn't want to design the doghouse. I knew nothing about 
artistic doghouses. Some friends who were Wright students happened to be visiting us one 
day. . . . Jim came in and started talking about designing the doghouse. I turned to my 
friend and asked if he could design it, and my friend said, "Well, why don't you have him 
write to Mr. Wright?" And I said, "That's it! Jimmy, write a letter to Mr. Wright and ask 
him to design your doghouse." So Jim wrote this charming little 12-year-old's letter 
[with] misspelled words, poor grammar, and all the rest of it, stating how high the dog 
was, how old he was in dog life, his name was Eddy, etc., etc. He asked Mr. Wright to 
design a doghouse to go with the house he designed for our family. The answer to this was 
one of the few letters that we received signed by Mr. Wright himself. It was a charming 
letter telling Jimmy that this was a real opportunity for him but that he was too busy at the 
present time to properly concentrate on it and that, if Jim would write him in November, 
he would possibly have something for him then. So on November 1 Jim sat down and 
wrote a letter: "Dear Mr. Wright: You told me to write in November, so I am writing. 
Please design me a doghouse." In about two to three weeks in come two blueprints of this 
gorgeous doghouse-shingle roof, mahogany sides, a perfect match to the house. It's quite 
an unusual thing to have a Frank Lloyd Wright doghouse! 


ON THE DESIGN OF THE KITCHEN 

GLORIA BERGER: When you look around you see lots of beauty. I'd say it's an easy 
house to keep up, with the exception of the floors-the chill traps [sic] quite a bit. There 
are no walls to wash because of the rockwork. There's a lot of cupboard space. Mr. Wright 
used to utilize the "galley," which he called it and which we call the "hallway," with the 
cupboards all the way down the side of the wall so I have lots of storage and bookcases 
which you don't find in the average home. [My friends] . . . would like a lot of the storage 
space, too, but I don't think they're exactly envious, because they know the work we've put 
into the house. But they admire it very much. My new friends might be inclined to be more 
envious, but a lot of them know how much work has gone into it. 

BRUCE RADDE: Mr. Wright conceived this house-as he did many of his homes in 
recent years, certainly-essentially as a one-room dwelling; that is, the living space apart 
from the bedroom wing for your children. The living room, the dining room, and the 
kitchen are all very closely integrated. Do you find this to be an advantage or a 
disadvantage in keeping house, entertaining, and so on? 

GLORIA BERGER: Well, it's definitely an advantage when you entertain. While 
everybody is in the living room or at the dining table I'm right in the middle of everything. 
Of course, my children are older now, and I find the fact that it's all one room is a little 
harder than when they were little because they're up so late. It has advantages in that 
you're able to know what's going on around [the house]. 

RADDE: Mr. Wright often designed houses with the kitchen located in the very center. 
Indeed, in your house the kitchen is a kind of island in the center of the house-an 
octagonal mass of stone which forms a kind of anchor for the whole building. . . . Do you 
find this at all difficult, depressive perhaps, because there are no outside windows? 

GLORIA BERGER: No! Oh, no! No, no! I love that! I do have a friend who says, "I 
couldn't stand it because there's no window to look out of." My feeling is that I'd rather 
have a cupboard where the window would be, especially since there is such a beautiful 
room, and there's a skylight above that gives me all the light that I need. As far as looking 
out a window, I just turn around and look out the living room windows and I can see all 
the view that I want. When I go into the kitchen, I go in to work; I don't go in to admire 
the outdoors. But my kitchen is a beautiful room in itself. I don't feel closed in at all. 

RADDE: It's a rather small kitchen. How does it work functionally? 

GLORIA BERGER: It works beautifully. Everything is handy to get to. 


RICHARD DAVIS 

For me [Mr. Wright] was a warm and understanding friend who was interested in what I 
was doing with my family, career, and future. He was always available when I telephoned 
or dropped by Taliesin with the kids . . . on many occasions. 

In 1950 Dr. and Mrs. Richard Davis commissioned Wright to design a residence for them 
for a site in Marion, Indiana. The residence was eventually built in 1953. A few years later 
Richard Davis worked with Wright again on Wright's preliminary hospital designs for the 
Davis Medical Foundation in Marion, Indiana. 

It is unfortunate that we never were able to arrive at a satisfactory solution with Mr. 
Wright. The technical problems of a hospital in the very complicated medical-and 
surgical-care situations of then and certainly today are highly specialized. Mr. Wright 
was not pliable enough, at that time in his career, in the "function" of this project to even 
get started. 

In the discussions with him and our main consultant, who was devoted to Mr. Wright and 
was also the leading hospital authority at the time-Dr. Carl Walters, of Harvard and the 
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston-it was most apparent that "form" was not related 
to "function" in his thinking. The clinic buildings that [Wright] did do . . . are, of course, 
superb. But there is a big difference between ambulatory care and the secondary and 
tertiary care that takes place in a hospital. 

Mr. Wright had a chronic gallbladder problem and spent a lot of time at Mayo Clinic (St. 
Mary's Hospital) and in the White Gleaming Cornell Medical Center in New York while 
he was building the Guggenheim, and, incidentally, my house. 

When I first met him in 1950, I was Dr. C. W. Mayo's assistant surgeon. We were all set 
to take out Mr. Wright's diseased gall bladder at Mayo. The night before [his scheduled 
surgery] he told me to forget it. He felt much better and had much too much work at 
Taliesin to do. 

He canceled, but had problems from then on. I kept reminding him over the next few years 
that we should take his gallbladder out, but he never had time for that. He did, however, 
develop very clear ideas on what the hospital room and environment should look like. 

Our preliminary design that he did looked like a high-speed photograph of a drop of 
water hitting a plate. It was a half-circle center with spokes radiating out to the pods, 
which were the rooms, all surrounded by glass and gardens. The horizontal flow of this 
structure for support areas, etc., was all secondary. It would have been a perfect nursing 
home setting but couldn't function as a specialized hospital. 

This hospital project was given to Eero Saarinen, who was in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 
He had just completed the General Motors Technical Center and was eager to do the new 
hospital design. He was very aware of the technical problems of the changing medical 
field. This was combined with superb talents in what Mr. Wright called "organic" 
architecture plus the fabulous new products that John Dinkeloo was rapidly becoming an 
expert in developing and using. John Dinkeloo was assigned to our project. 

Unfortunately, Eero's office became very busy with several projects that were pending at 
the time he accepted ours. They took priority over the hospital, which was well on its way. 
The St. Louis Arch, the London embassy, and married students' quarters at the University 
of Chicago all came into his office the same week. 

He transferred us to his good friend Harry Weese of Chicago, but left John Dinkeloo on the 
project as a consultant. Working with Harry Weese and John Dinkeloo was also a 
privilege. The hospital prototype was developed and exhibited at the AIA hospital 
convention in Atlantic City in 1958. It won first prize. It was on permanent exhibit at the 
Octagon Building in Washington, D.C., for several years. 

Although it was never built, it did start the trend for single rooms in a nursing tower over 
a two-or three-story podium for emergency room, X-ray, and other support facilities. It 
also included an outpatient group practice clinic building and a motel type facility for 
same-day ambulatory medical or surgical care that could also be used for ambulatory 
presurgical or medical care requiring one or two days' admission. 

This design was most cost-effective and is even today leading the way for the current 
health-delivery systems. It also pioneered the progressive concept of intensive care units, 
coronary care units, intermediate care, and then ambulatory units. The patient moved 
through the high-intensive nursing units to discharge, with each unit being staffed to fit 
the need. This, too, proves to be very cost-effective, providing excellent patient care, and 
certainly fits the current needs . . . 30 years after our presentation of the concept, which 
was interpreted as revolutionary at the time. It was published in several books and 
journals, including the Architectural Record in November 1958, as a "progressive hospital 
design." 


ON THE DESIGN OF THE DAVIS RESIDENCE 

With respect to my Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence . . . the contractor quit after 
the block work was done. He was supposed to build the roof sections in a cradle support, 
starting with the lower roof and then bringing the steep upper roof down to meet it. After 
it was all tied together, they took out the cradle holding the lower roof, and the balance of 
the upper roof at the clerestory junctions with the lower roof supported the entire structure. 
The contractor thought it would fall down, so he quit. When we finally took the cradle 
down, a transit was fixed on a pencil dot under the clerestory. It moved up the width of the 
dot. 

It was first beginning to snow when the contractor quit. Mr. Wright, who was in 
Scottsdale, said, "Wait till spring. Keep your subs [subcontractors]. Put a phone on the 
tree. I will send you one of our architects, and you and I will build it section by section." 
This I did, and one year later we moved in. I called Mr. Wright at 6:30 every Monday 
morning at his breakfast time. Gene Masselink was his secretary, and between the two of 
them and Allen Davidson, who was our personal supervisor, we did it. 

Mr. Wright gave us the plans for the "teen-age wing" to be added later. We had one child 
and [my wife was] pregnant at the time Mr. Wright did the plans in 1950. We started with, 
as he said, "one in the cabin." We later had two more [children], and that is when we 
added the "teen-age wing." It comes out along the driveway. We finished it in 1961, after 
he died, but it was just as he planned. 

The entire house plus plank roofing is in clear Tidewater cypress. The interior has all been 
matched as to color and grain. The counters and cabinets are cypress plywood with 
mahogany centers. 

At the time we built it, you could still get cypress boards 12 feet by 20 feet, and we could 
select and match. By the time we put on the "wing" we had to take what we got, and we 
used the unacceptable boards elsewhere. 

There were several problems that we had. There were several [architectural elements] that 
were not there [during construction]. For instance, the 40-foot center was up. The 
8-foot-by-6-foot fireplace was built with flu up the 40 feet. When the house was 
finally enclosed, the fireplace smoked like it had no chimney, which it did have. I took 
pictures of the construction to Taliesin, where Mr. Wright referred it to Wes Peters. There 
was no smoke shelf, no dampers, and they had built 24-inch-by-26-inch liners in two 
separate stacks 40 feet high. Wes said, "Take out the bottom, create a smoke shelf and 
space (10 feet by 8 feet), no damper, and it will work." It took one week. They tore it all 
out and put a man up in the area to build the shelf and "room." The fireplace lining was 
rebuilt. It all worked fine. 

For me [Mr. Wright] was a warm and understanding friend who was interested in what I 
was doing with my family, career, and future. He was always available when I telephoned 
or dropped by Taliesin with the kids on the way from Indiana to Rochester, Minnesota, on 
many occasions. 

One of my favorite pictures, which hangs in my office now, is of my two oldest children, at 
ages five and seven years, with Mr. Wright. We were in his studio just to say hello and be 
on our way. I asked if I could take a picture of him with the kids. He not only said yes but 
sat at his desk, put the kids to his left, and told me to focus and then hold the shutter open 
until he said close. The room was not too bright, but the windows were at the children's 
back. I did what he said. The negative is so light you can hardly see the image. A 
professional photographer developed and printed it for me. It is a work of art. A wonderful 
picture of Mr. Wright-left hand on chin, right hand on chair arm as he looks to the left, 
leaning just a bit to talk to the kids, whom he moved close so that there is a straight line of 
closely grouped heads in a full-length picture. He could do no wrong. 


Apprentices 

JOHN H. HOWE 

In coming to Taliesin what we were required to bring was no credentials, no diploma from 
any institution of learning, no books, just a willing spirit, a saw and a hammer, a 
T-square and triangles. 

John H. Howe became interested in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright while he was a high 
school student in Evanston, Illinois. Following his graduation from high school, Howe 
enrolled as a charter member of the Taliesin Fellowship in September 1932. 

In 1982 Howe recalled the events that led him to Taliesin: 

My mother's family were friends of the Lloyd Joneses, and my mother went to high school 
at the Hillside Home School. I was born and raised in Evanston. We lived in a 
neighborhood of Walter Burley Griffin houses and houses that Mr. Wright did. He'd send 
Walter Burley Griffin to help mother's uncle remodel there-they were sort of Victorian 
houses which tried to be horizontal but didn't quite succeed. . . . 

When I was 19 years old, my aunt took me to hear the Art Institute [of Chicago] lectures, 
and that's where I met Mr. Wright for the first time. Then Charlie Morgan, who was Mr. 
Wright's Chicago associate at the time, came to lecture at Evanston High School. He did a 
chalk talk on architecture. . . . Charlie told me that Mr. Wright had started the Taliesin 
Fellowship. It was my senior year in high school and I thought that I was doomed to go to 
the Armour Institute of Technology-a place that would shrivel any architectural interest. 
So I was "snatched from the jaws of defeat," as Mr. Wright would always say, by Charlie. 
He made arrangements for me to drive up to Taliesin with him and talk with Mr. Wright, 
and Mr. Wright accepted me into the Fellowship. . . . 

I had only $300-this was right in the middle of the Depression-that I had earned setting 
up pins at the Evanston Country Club bowling alley. Mr. Wright said, "Okay, good, fine." 
And it turns out to be the case that of the people who came to Taliesin at that time very 
few of us had any money. Mr. Wright just took us on faith. Of course, Mr. Wright wasn't 
making much money in those days. The only income he had was [from] his lectures. And 
he would drive! He would drive all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in his wonderful 
Cord car to give a lecture for which he got [only] $150. 

Howe became Wright's chief draftsman in 1937 and held that position until 1959. 
Following Wright's death, Howe remained at Taliesin for another five years as a member 
of the Taliesin Associated Architects. From 1964 to 1967 Howe worked in the San 
Francisco office of architect Aaron Green, another former Wright apprentice (see Chapter 
24). 

Howe's remembrances of Wright are presented here in two sections: the first section, "The 
Land Is the Beginning of Architecture," is in the form of an essay, based in part on an 
extemporaneous talk that Howe gave in October 1977 at a conference on "An American 
Architecture: Its Roots, Growth, and Horizons" and updated in 1989 especially for 
publication in this book; the second section, conference was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 
beginning on page 133, consists of transcriptions of Howe's remarks at a panel discussion, 
"I Remember Frank Lloyd Wright," held on May 11, 1982, at Unity Church in Oak Park, 
Illinois. 

The first section's essay not only presents a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright the man, but 
also describes Howe's thoughts on architectural design based upon his close association 
with Wright. Wright indeed had a profound influence upon Howe and his later 
architectural work. 


THE LAND IS THE BEGINNING OF ARCHITECTURE 

Frank Lloyd Wright was born from the soil of middle America. Mies van der Rohe, Walter 
Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and the others we think of as modern master architects were all of 
European birth. 

Mr. Wright often said, "The land is the beginning of architecture." In beginning my own 
architectural practice after leaving Taliesin in 1964, I took this as my "trademark." Mr. 
Wright also spoke of his own work as "out of the ground into the light." By the "ground" 
he was referring to the ethic, or principle of what he called "organic architecture." By "into 
the light" he was referring to buildings built according to this ethic. 

The older I get, the more grateful I feel for this architectural ethic which he has given me. 
I find it provides both a keel and a rudder in my own work, and I wish for it to provide the 
same for other architects. 

In associating with other architects who have been "educated" by the academic 
architectural schools, I have found that these architects tend to flounder, not knowing 
which direction to take or where to look for the solution to a design problem. They look in 
the current periodicals to see what other architects have done; or they have in mind some 
preconceived notion or sculptural form, the interior of which might somehow be made to 
accommodate the purposes of the building in question. It doesn't occur to them to look 
within the problem itself for the solution. It was Mr. Wright's teacher Louis Sullivan who 
first told him, "The solution to any problem lies within the problem itself." 

Organic architecture is an architecture of unity, where all parts are related to the whole 
and must be integrated into the whole. Therefore, the architect must proceed from the 
general to the particular; never the other way around. Organic architecture is an 
architecture of change or growth; it must be such to be organic. The ethic, however, 
remains constant; this means that all parts are integrated into one whole, as the branches 
are to a tree. 

Most succinctly stated, the ethic or principles of organic architecture are that a building, or 
group of buildings, should be suitable to, and in the nature of (1) the site or environment, 
(2) the use, (3) the building materials, and (4) the construction process. In following these 
principles we not only establish our continuity with the roots of American architecture but 
also hold a key to the future. 

We need to affirm architecture as primarily an art-although it also is a science, a 
profession, even a business to some extent. But if it isn't an art, it is nothing. In 
architecture a poetic sense is needed to accompany the practical sense, to provide comforts 
to the spirit as well as the creature comforts. For instance, the computer is useful as a tool 
but should not be expected to replace the mind and hand of the artist. 

In building these days we have to use ready-made components, and this requires more 
ingenuity and imagination than previously. During the years I worked with Mr. Wright, 
everything that went into a building was designed and specially made for the building. The 
Johnson Wax buildings [page 49] were prime examples of this, as was the [Annunciation] 
Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa [Wisconsin]. This was equally true regarding all 
the houses Mr. Wright designed. 

It is now 1989, 25 years since my wife and I left Taliesin, but I feel that my work 
constitutes a continuity with that done at Taliesin during Mr. Wright's lifetime. I wish 
other architects might have the wonderful experience that I had, or any of us had in 
associating with Mr. Wright. 

In the final years of the 20th century one cannot expect to build as one did in the middle 
portion of the century. The building trades are no longer equipped to build as they once 
did. . . . To the architect who follows the principles of organic architecture, this presents 
an added challenge. 

II 

In today's culture all of the arts have become brutalized. Nervousness and dissonance have 
replaced the kind of innate harmony that Mr. Wright's work achieved. All of the masters 
of modern architecture are gone, so we're left at the mercy of the "post-modernists," the 
"deconstructivists," etc. Almost everyone seems to be doing the trendy thing, and caprice 
has replaced principle as the basis for architectural design. Design by committee or team 
has often replaced the creativity and imagination of the individual. 

Throughout time we have seen that the enduring creative force, particularly in architecture 
and the other arts, is usually that of a single individual, rather than a group. This 
individual is spokesman or form-giver for the finest his era can produce, as Mr. Wright 
was. But he surpasses his era, projecting into the future. Though such an individual always 
has imitators, he also has followers who learn from him, understand the principles behind 
his work, and endeavor to give new expression to these principles. The imitators, on the 
other hand, always promote a "style" whose forms become cliches. In the search for new 
expression true followers realize that the solution to any problem must come from within 
the problem itself, not from copying what someone else has done. 

I believe that the only valid criterion for evaluating architecture, or perhaps any art, is one 
based upon an understanding of fundamental principles. One must consider the materials, 
the use, the users, and above all the process by which the creation is executed. This is what 
Mr. Wright called nature study: What is the nature of the material or materials? What is 
the nature of the use? What is the nature of the user? And what is the process by which 
this creation is to be built or made? Organic architecture is the result of such "nature 
study" by the architect. In the study of nature he looks for inner forces honestly expressed, 
leading to growth and resulting in beauty. 

Regarding nature study Mr. Wright wrote: 

We are led to observe a characteristic habit of growth and resultant nature of structure. 
This structure proceeds from the general to the particular in a most inevitable way, 
arriving at the blossom to proclaim to man its lines and form, the nature of the structure 
that bore it. It is an organic thing. Law and order are the basis of its finished grace and 
beauty. That which through the ages appears to us as beautiful does not ignore in its fiber 
the elements of law and order. It will appear from study of the forms or styles which 
mankind has considered beautiful that those which live longest are those which in greatest 
measure fulfill these conditions. Beauty in its essence is, for us, as mysterious as life. All 
attempts to say what it is are as foolish as cutting out the head of a drum to find whence 
comes the sound. But we may study with profit these truths of form and structure, facts of 
form as related to function, material traits of line determining character, laws of structure 
inherent in all natural growth. 

We all have a sense of proportion and appreciation of grace in varying degree, whether 
innate or cultivated. This is a deeper thing than good taste and has been at the heart of all 
cultures. Cultivation of the senses, if done with knowledge and understanding, results in 
culture. Unfortunately, human sensitivity is usually driven deep inside by the so-called 
realities of daily life and a lack of environment in which to grow. Inner growth has been 
postponed to a vague tomorrow, and a ready-made shallow "good taste" substituted. One 
falls in line with what is popular with the herd. 

As traditional building techniques and materials become more costly and unavailable, new 
techniques and materials present an ever-increasing challenge to architects who wish to 
follow the principles of organic architecture. However, one must use these new materials 
and techniques in a humane way; buildings are for people. As I stated, we live in a brutal 
time, when all forms of art reflect the brutality of life and tend to be nervous and noisy, 
seeking image rather than substance. The poetic and sensitive qualities are regarded as 
out-of-date, and dissonance has replaced harmony. Too often architects, in striving to 
be honest, expose structural members, ductwork, etc., in the crudest possible manner. This 
might be called "let-it-all-hang-out architecture." If architecture and art are not 
aesthetic expressions, what on earth are they? 

The architecture and sculpture of ancient civilizations are appreciated more later because 
they were high expressions of the human spirit and were based upon fundamental, timeless 
principles. Fundamental good design has always outlived the vagaries which know no 
discipline, not having the discipline of form, usage, or material. 

Certainly the creation of art must be conscious; it cannot be merely accidental, the result of 
unplanned actions or caprice. In much of the metal sculpture we have today the "sculptor" 
takes found materials, welds them all together, says, "Look what I have created," and ships 
the result to a modern art museum. 

Also, there is much misunderstanding about simplicity. Today dullness and sterility are 
mistaken for simplicity. Great architects achieve genuine simplicity as a result of the 
integrity of their work. Richness or ornament, if integral, need not compromise that 
fundamental simplicity. Indeed, such can be as blossoms on a tree. 

III 

I am not an architectural historian, but I had the delightful experience for many years, 
starting in 1932, of participating in architectural history as it was being made. I was one of 
about 20 charter members of the Taliesin Fellowship, and had recently graduated from the 
high school of Evanston, Illinois. Mr. Wright had been my idol, and here I was at Taliesin, 
very excited and learning architecture. I think almost all of the charter members were 
raised in cities or suburbs, so this living on a farm was a new experience for us. 

We helped quarry stone for the new Fellowship buildings, and we burned the local 
limestone to make lime for plaster. We had a sawmill on the hillside above the old Hillside 
Home School buildings, and we helped cut the timber for the additions and alterations to 
these buildings. So we were really learning architecture from the ground up. 

This was during the Great Depression, and the only income we had was from Mr. Wright's 
lecture fees. (With Gene Masselink at the wheel they would drive across three states to 
lecture for a few hundred dollars.) We grew most of our own food (especially tomatoes) 
and canned it. In those days Taliesin had an icehouse and a root cellar in which to keep 
food. 

In joining the Taliesin Fellowship, apprentices were required to bring a hammer, a saw, 
and a good spirit. All work was to be considered creative, not menial, whether one was 
working in the drafting room or in the kitchen. (Incidentally, Mr. Wright often swept the 
walks early in the morning.) 

All work was assigned by rotation, on weekly lists, to make things as equitable as possible. 
Mrs. Wright made the lists and was at Mr. Wright's side constantly in those days, to keep 
things running smoothly. I think Mr. Wright might have terminated the Fellowship before 
the first year was out if it hadn't been for Mrs. Wright's steadying hand. Mrs. Wright 
brought serenity and stimulation to Mr. Wright's life, and was his intellectual equal. She 
established an atmosphere conducive to a creative life after so many years of upheaval. 

Though Mr. Wright was in his sixties, he was truly young in spirit and bursting with 
energy. Having a young wife and being surrounded by devoted and eager apprentices no 
doubt contributed to his sense of well-being and creativity. 

At Taliesin we were back to the basics of creative life, away from what Mr. Wright called 
"the cash-and-carry system," and away from compartmentalization and specialization. 

Mr. and Mrs. Wright were concerned with all of life. Mr. Wright said, "To be an architect 
is not what someone does, it is what someone is." So we were learning to be, and learning 
architecture from the ground up. Our feet were on the ground in southern Wisconsin and, 
a little later, the Arizona desert. 

Our spiritual ground was the philosophy of organic architecture. In this we became rooted. 
. . . Sometimes [in the early morning] he would have a little sketch in his hand; other 
times he would sit down at the drafting table and start a drawing while an idea was still 
fresh in his mind. In either case he would ask me to carry on with the project. He would 
come back again in a couple of hours, or after he had read his morning's mail, to proceed 
with the project; and return again in the afternoon after his nap. 

There were eight drafting tables in the old Taliesin studio, and Mr. Wright would move 
from one to another of these, working with each apprentice on whatever projects were on 
each table. Mr. Wright usually started the design of a building on the surveyor's plan of the 
property, which showed the contours of the land, trees to be saved, rock outcroppings, or 
other natural features such as orientation, or points of the compass. So, again, the land was 
indeed the beginning of architecture. 

The floor plan was started first, followed by a cross section and an elevation. Mr. Wright's 
buildings were really designed from the inside out. He often said, "The reality of a building 
consists not in the walls and the roof, but in the space within." 

Mr. Wright's tools, other than his imagination, were the T-square, triangles, the 
compass, and a unit system that constituted the fabric (so to speak) with which the design 
of his buildings was woven. This unit system almost automatically accommodated the 
building and established proportions not only in plan, but also in cross section and 
elevation. As an example: In the plan for the original Johnson Wax building the interior 
columns were spaced sixteen feet on centers. Therefore the plan was laid out on a unit 
system of 8'-0" x 8'-0" squares. It was determined that the outer screen wall would be 
built of oversize three inch high bricks. With a half-inch added for the horizontal mortar 
joints the vertical module (or unit) would be three and one-half inches. The glass tubing 
above the screen wall that surrounded the building was made in sizes that conformed to 
the vertical module [page 49]. 

IV 

In 1932 and 1933, when the studio was still manned by faithful draftsmen who had been at 
Taliesin for a number of years, I began to put the drawing files in order. I also worked on 
whatever drawings these draftsmen would give me to do. The Malcolm Willey House for 
Minneapolis, new buildings for Hillside (the old Hillside Home School near Taliesin), 
Broadacre City, and the Two-Zone House were the projects on the drafting tables at that 
time. Subsequently, after these draftsmen had left Taliesin, I found myself more or less in 
charge of the studio for two reasons: one, I knew where the drawings were, thanks to my 
filing system; and two, I somehow managed to be there whenever Mr. Wright would come 
in. 

On entering the studio Mr. Wright often asked, "Where is everybody?" disregarding the 
fact that he had sent them out to build the dams, work on the construction of Hillside, or 
bring in the corn crop. He would then ask me why I wasn't out there helping them with 
these emergencies. 

Mr. Wright was always in a good humor when he entered the studio; he would hum a little 
tune or repeat the punch line of a favorite joke. He had about seven or eight favorite jokes. 
Often he would mount the stairs leading to the area above the vault in which the Japanese 
prints were kept, sit at the old Steinway piano that was there, and roll out a few bars of his 
Bach-Beethoven-type improvisations. Afterwards he'd descend the stairs and work on a 
drawing, charged by this experience. 

Mr. Wright taught me how to make the presentation drawings and how to color them with 
his favorite wax pencils. As I worked closely with him, I was trained to follow through 
with whatever he designed. Mr. Wright was receptive to any suggestions I made. He'd 
always explain if something wasn't a good idea, and he did the same with everyone with 
whom he worked. 

Mr. Wright had great patience at the drafting board (if not elsewhere). He would work 
tirelessly, often spending hours on certain presentation drawings, coming back to them 
again and again for a period of several days. An example of this would be the familiar 
presentation view of Fallingwater that was published as background for a color photograph 
of Mr. Wright on the cover of Time magazine [January 17, 1938, issue]. The presentation 
drawing for the Masieri Memorial for Venice is another example. (Mr. Wright was 
constantly concerned that the Grand Canal wasn't looking watery enough.) 

Although Mr. Wright seemed to have infinite patience in making presentation drawings, 
he had none at all for making working drawings. The reason was that the presentation 
drawings (floor plans, perspective views, elevations, and cross sections) completely 
expressed his design for the project, while the working drawings and specifications 
expressed only how his design was to be achieved. Mr. Wright abhorred efficiency and 
fought it whenever it appeared in the drafting room, not realizing that it was only by 
efficiency that his staff was able to keep up with him. 

It became my responsibility to assign the work to the younger apprentices and to help 
them. Mr. Wright particularly delighted in working with the foreign students. (I think we 
Midwesterners were not very interesting to him.) Invariably a group would gather around 
when Mr. Wright was working at the drafting board. Mr. Wright enjoyed an audience. He 
was a teacher, although he said he wasn't. (He loved to lecture and appear on television, 
would cross half a continent to talk about organic architecture on a talk show.) At times 
his explanation of what he was doing at the drafting board seemed to me a rationalization 
after the fact, for the creative process cannot be verbalized. I think that is one thing that 
the academic world finds hard to understand. 

Often these sessions would last too long and the staff would become nervous, because 
important decisions had to be made by Mr. Wright regarding other work. These decisions 
were necessary so we could proceed with working drawings, get drawings printed and 
buildings under construction. Mr. Wright's signature on the red square was required on all 
drawings before they were blueprinted. No drawing was made or sent from Taliesin that 
didn't have Mr. Wright's express approval. (Such a practice would likely be rare in most 
architectural offices.) 

We were all apprentices to Mr. Wright. The charter members, who came in 1932-33, 
were called Senior Apprentices. We received a stipend after a few years and became the 
instructors for the younger apprentices. Mr. Wright encouraged all of us to make drawings 
of projects of our own design. These were presented to him in a specially designed box 
twice a year: on his birth-day, June 8, and at Christmas time. (There was keen 
competition between Wes Peters and me as to who would put the most drawings in the 
box.) At the presentation Mr. Wright would discuss the merits and shortcomings of each 
project. This was done very constructively and with kindness. 

Drawings for an amazing number of great houses and buildings designed by Mr. Wright 
were produced in the old Taliesin drafting room (built in 1911 and subsequently enlarged). 
These would include Fallingwater [page 131], the Johnson Wax building [page 49], 
Wingspread [page 131], most of the Usonian houses [pages 67, 89, 91, 94, 141, 142, 145, 
151, and 209], Florida Southern College [page 12], Auldebrass, and the Community 
Church in Kansas City [page 132]. Approximately 10 years after the beginning of the 
Fellowship we were able to move into our new drafting room at Hillside. The number of 
apprentices had grown, and it was now possible to provide a drafting table for each 
apprentice, although some apprentices spent much less time at their tables and were less 
involved in the day-to-day architectural work than others. 

The weekday at Taliesin began with chorus rehearsal. During Wisconsin summers this 
was followed by garden period. Generally, out-door work (building construction, 
maintenance, etc.) predominated in the Hill Garden at Taliesin. Occasionally clients or 
guests were present and there was lively discussion. In cooler weather we gathered around 
the studio fireplace. In theory, those who had been doing outdoor work were to work in the 
studio during the period between afternoon tea and dinner (at 7:00 p.m.), but that was 
seldom practicable. . . . 

Mr. Wright felt that music was an important part of our lives, and we were all urged to 
sing in the chorus or play an instrument in the ensemble, or both. In actuality, the urgency 
of the task in Mr. Wright's mind determined where one was at any hour of the day. We 
were always in a state of emergency. Mr. Wright liked to be so, and we learned to 
understand the value of such momentum. The life that Mr. and Mrs. Wright shared with 
us was very exciting and stimulating. To have actively participated in the fruition of so 
many of Mr. Wright's now famous masterpieces was a privilege for which I am most 
grateful. 

From 1932 to the present time scores of talented apprentices have contributed to the life of 
Taliesin, producing drawings for and supervising construction of Mr. Wright's buildings. 
Despite Mr. Wright's strong distrust of efficiency, during the final years of his life a very 
efficient and harmonious architectural team developed in the drafting rooms of Taliesin 
and Taliesin West. 

I feel that things have worked out providentially for me. Taliesin was my province for 32 
years, making possible continuing fulfillment during the following 25 years, first in San 
Francisco and later in Minneapolis, where I have my own architectural practice. 

The ground is indeed the beginning of architecture, and therein lie our roots. 


WRIGHT AND THE DRAFTING ROOM 

It was hard getting Mr. Wright into the drafting room sometimes because he would be so 
fascinated with rebuilding the [Taliesin] dams, supervising farm work, or doing different 
things. Finally, after I'd go out about three times to tell him a client was waiting in the 
drafting room, [he'd come]. Architecture was just one part, although it was the essential 
part, of life at Taliesin . . .[which also included] our farm work, and the construction and 
reconstruction of the buildings, which went on all the time. As for drawings for these 
constructions and reconstructions, we drew them on big sheets of wrapping paper and, 
before they were even through, we would wrap them under our arms and carry them out to 
the site because the cement mixer was going. Keeping ahead of Mr. Wright was a real job. 

He was a marvelous draftsman. He'd color up his own drawings, and he had tremendous 
patience. He never slapped us down. We'd gather around [him] when he was [drawing] 
and, being young, we would offer suggestions on them-later on. But he never slapped us 
down. He would always say, "Well, now that's one way to do it. I think it would be better 
this way." In other words, he really made an educational experience out of it. He always 
claimed, "I'm not a teacher and I'm not a preacher." But he came from a long line of 
Unitarian teachers and preachers. He really was one! 

WHAT TO BRING TO TALIESIN 

In coming to Taliesin what we were required to bring was no credentials, no diploma from 
any institution of learning, no books, just a willing spirit, a saw and a hammer, a 
T-square and triangles. 


WRIGHT WITH HIS CLIENTS 

He had tremendous rapport with all his clients. Even though they would come for just a 
$5,000 house, he made each client feel as if it were the most important thing to him. Mr. 
Wright would always closet himself with them in his office because he liked to work with 
them in person. He didn't let us in on the conversations with the clients. And never were 
[the apprentices] asked to take care of the clients. So my problem, in particular, was to 
find out what Mr. Wright had promised them! 


ON WRIGHT'S NOTES AND INSTRUCTIONS TO THE DRAFTING ROOM 
FELLOWS 

His messages were marvelous because he would sit there at his desk and write notes [to be 
passed] around the corner. At first, when the studio was over at Taliesin, my drafting table 
was right around the corner. Later, when the large drafting room was over at Hillside, I 
was across the hill. . . . 

Then Mr. Wright would come by to see what we'd done and what we were working on. 
Mr. Wright came into the drafting room about the middle of the morning every morning . . 
. and then he would come again in about the middle of the afternoon. So we worked 
between these periods catching up, bringing things up-to-date with what he had told us 
in the morning or what he had told us the previous afternoon. 

Mr. Wright went to bed right after supper in the evenings. He thought the morning hours 
were the important ones, the creative ones. He would wake up at 4 or 4:30 in the morning. 
I'd be sleeping in the tower of Taliesin, up a steep flight of stairs. I'd hear him come with 
his cane on the floor and say, "Oh, Jack! Oh, Jack!" So he'd call me to the studio. He 
would wake up with an idea and he would sketch it out on a long roll of paper. He'd want 
to get it worked up in greater detail, but he was eager to get going on it. Then I would try 
to have that done, to some extent. . . . The more you'd put something down on paper, well, 
the more he knew that's what he didn't want! So then he would show what he did want. It 
was marvelous. 


ON THE TALIESIN CHORUS 

We started having chapel at the Lloyd Jones Chapel every Sunday and Mr. Wright. . 
.decided to have an ecumenical story. Our favorite speakers were the rabbi from Madison 
[Wisconsin] . . . and all of the others [from] there. We had a Fellowship hymn, "Joy and 
Work Is Man's Desire" . . . and we would stand up there and sing. That was the origin of 
the Taliesin Chorus. Afterwards we would go out into the chapel yard and have a picnic. 


ON DOING AWAY WITH LUNCH 

The worst thing that ever happened was when he decided to do away with lunch. Mrs. 
Wright had a wonderful way of setting things straight. She said to Mr. Wright, "Well, 
Frank, why don't we have just have bread and [milk]?" So, then we had bread and [milk], 
and later a few more things were introduced. 

JOHN H. HOWE: "We started having chapel at the Lloyd Jones Chapel every Sunday. . . 
.That was the origin of the Taliesin Chorus." Unity Chapel (1887) at Helena (near Spring 
Green), Wisconsin. This building was designed by Chicago architect Joseph Lyman 
Silsbee, for whom Frank Lloyd Wright worked as a draftsman at the time. Wright 
prepared drawings for this structure under Silsbee's guidance. The chapel is at the site of 
the Lloyd Jones family (Wright's maternal ancestors) cemetery, where Wright lay buried 
from 1959 until 1985 when his remains were moved to Taliesin West along with those of 
his wife Olgivanna. (Patrick J. Meehan) 


ON PACKING TO TRAVEL TO TALIESIN WEST 

We were packing all of our belongings into the Ford truck, and Mr. Wright decided that 
we could more efficiently load the truck if all the suitcases and luggage were emptied. . . . 
We could get so much more in, and we were only taking a little trip after all. Well, a 
couple of people went into the house and got Mrs. Wright, and Mrs. Wright took him out 
and said, "Frank, it's time for our coffee and cookies." Mr. Wright was hungry. So he went 
into the house for his coffee and cookies while we packed up the suitcases! 


WILLIAM BEYE FYFE 

The most thrilling and exciting experience in my short tenure there was to watch Mr. 
Wright do a building. 

William Beye Fyfe was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from June 1932 to October 
1934. Fyfe had come to the Taliesin Fellowship after receiving formal training at both 
Antioch College and the Yale University School of Architecture. 


ON WATCHING WRIGHT AT THE DRAFTING TABLE 

The most thrilling and exciting experience in my short tenure there was to watch Mr. 
Wright do a building. He just had it all in his head. He didn't touch pencil to paper until he 
knew exactly what he wanted to do, and then it just flowed out. If you were lucky enough 
to be in the studio at that time, it was a tremendous experience. The rest of us would do a 
plan, an elevation, and a section. He would go so fast at it that he would draw little details 
up here [on the paper] and a site plan down here, with the rest of it sort of spilling out. 
After about an hour he'd say, "Gee, I've done this so long I can shake them out of my 
sleeve!" His ability to work with the pencil was phenomenal. . . . 

Some of the most beautiful architectural drawings in the world would come out of his 
studio. Bob Goodall was just the best draftsman I've ever seen in my life. He would be 
working away and . . . Mr. Wright would come near him with a piece of paper or 
something. Mr. Wright wouldn't touch us because Bob was a faster draftsman. Mr. Wright 
had us create good drawings because he wanted us to think in three dimensions, evolving 
[into] a good architect and developing the structure in our heads rather than on paper. The 
only other person I know who could think that way was Eero Saarinen. 


WILLIAM WESLEY PETERS 

He was more available to people than any person that I know of. He was available to any 
apprentice, whether for talking or consultation or observation of his work. He'd thrill with 
people standing all around him looking over his shoulder. He enjoyed being surrounded by 
young people because he drew life from them as they drew life from him. 

William Wesley Peters was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from 1932 until 1959. 
Peters was also Wright's son-in-law; he married Wright's stepdaughter, Svetlana 
Hinzenberg Wright, in the 1930s. Following Wright's death, Peters became vice president 
of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin Associated Architects. And following 
Mrs. Wright's death in 1985, he became chairman of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. 
Peters died of a stroke at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1991. 

In An Autobiography Wright described Peters: 

Among the very first college graduates (engineering) to come to Fellowship was a tall 
dark-eyed young fellow who early turned up at Taliesin. . . .The lad was a fountain of 
energetic loyalty to the ideas for which Taliesin stood. He soon took a leading hand in 
whatever went on. Mind alert, his character independent and generous. 


On November 1, 1984, Peters spoke at the opening of an exhibition entitled "Frank Lloyd 
Wright and the Prairie School Collection" at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The installation 
was a formal occasion. For more than an hour, Peters showed slides and talked about 
Wright's projects before an audience of approximately 150 people. The following question 
was posed after Peter's presentation: "Much has been written on Frank Lloyd Wright as a 
man and as a human being. As his close friend and associate, would you care to comment 
on that?" Peters's response, as delivered, is given here. 

I think that Frank Lloyd Wright was a remarkable example of his own belief that you have 
to be an individual first-a fully rounded and developed individual. He was an example of 
that type of genius. There may be other geniuses, like Mozart, whom it's hard to explain 
coming full-blown into life. But Frank Lloyd Wright was [such] a person. He believed, as 
well, that a fully developed individual was the...direction [in] which he planned education. 
He himself certainly was this. 

There are many legends about Frank Lloyd Wright . . . for example, that he was arrogant 
to his clients, that he dictated to them. I don't know of any architect in the world who had 
more pleased clients or faithful and successful clients and had greater, more wonderful 
client relationships than he did. Certainly he was strong in preserving and fighting for 
what he believed was principle and was right. But as far as the client was concerned, he 
believed definitely that the architect shouldn't [and] wasn't in a position to tell a client 
what he shouldn't do, that the architect should try, primarily, to tell the client how he 
could get what he wanted or really needed. He often took part in analyzing and judging 
what the particular needs of the client were or would be. 

He often appeared in public life with an attitude of arrogance. He once said that if he had 
to early in life make a choice between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility, he 
would choose the honest arrogance. But I would say that people who lived and worked 
with him, although they sometimes were bitterly afraid of everything like that, were 
enriched. Frankly, everyone who worked and was close to him was enrichened. He was 
more available to people than any person that I know of. He was available to any 
apprentice, whether for talking or consultation or observation of his work. He'd thrill with 
people standing all around him looking over his shoulder. He enjoyed being surrounded by 
young people because he drew life from them as they drew life from him. 

I think that many of the legends that have grown up about Frank Lloyd Wright have been 
centered on the development of what were termed "eccentricities". . . . And there were 
those things that seemed eccentric. But I don't know of any person who lived, almost all of 
his life, closer to the idea of truth, as he saw and believed it, than Frank Lloyd Wright. I 
don't know of any person who was with him for years who didn't love and honor and 
respect him, although there were . . . stormy times, too. But that's part of human life. 


MARYA DE CZARNECKA LILIEN 

". . .I want to buy land for us."-quoting Frank Lloyd Wright 

Marya de Czarnecka Lilien was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from January 1936 
until the summer of 1937. She arrived at Taliesin with a master of architecture degree 
from the Polytechnic Institute of Lwow, Poland. 


ON FINDING THE LAND FOR TALIESIN WEST 

When I was in . . . the west, in Arizona, for the first time, Taliesin did not exist yet. We 
were staying at La Hacienda, which was given to Mr. Wright by Dr. Chandler, [who] was 
Mr. Wright's client. 

Mr. Wright went on a lecture tour and brought back a thousand dollars, which was an 
enormous sum. . . . He said, "This time I didn't bring you any gifts because I want to buy 
land for us." He went out with a real estate person . . . who took him out to the desert and 
showed him this marvelous valley and said, "You can have all this [land] for a thousand 
dollars, but there is no water." Mr. Wright said, "We will find water!" Scottsdale is there 
now. 


GORDON O. CHADWICK 

. . . knowing when to be inconsistent is one of the attributes of genius. 

Gordon O. Chadwick was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from 1938 to 1942. He 
came to the Fellowship with a degree from Princeton University. 

Chadwick supervised the construction of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Loren Pope 
residence in 1940 at Falls Church, Virginia [pages 67 and 145]. In 1969 Chadwick 
discussed his experiences as a Taliesin Fellow with John N. Pearce, who at the time of the 
interview was curator of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The interview took 
place in the Pope-Leighey House. 

JOHN N. PEARCE: How did you get the assignment to supervise the Loren Pope House? 

GORDON O. CHADWICK: I had gone to Taliesin in the summer of 1938. I think that 
Mr. Wright chose me in 1940 to supervise this house because I had worked on the 
construction of his camp in Phoenix, Arizona, for two winters. The second year I was in 
charge of part of the operation. Also, many of the Fellows at Taliesin were reluctant to go 
off on jobs; I was not. 

My experience in construction was very limited; everything I had done was at Taliesin 
itself. I learned the hard way on this job. 

The Pope House and the house in Baltimore for Joseph Euchtman were the first two houses 
I supervised. It was a coincidence that they were both ready to be built at the same time, 
and a good thing, since somebody from Taliesin had to be on hand at both sites every 
week. 

PEARCE: Were you involved in the design of the Loren Pope House? 

CHADWICK: No. I wasn't at all involved in the design. The original project had been 
designed before I ever saw it. 

PEARCE: What was the design process at Taliesin, once the client provided a general list 
of wants? What attention would Mr. Wright have given it? 

CHADWICK: This house was one in a series called Usonian houses that Mr. Wright 
designed to be built at modest cost. Each house was planned to fit a particular site and to 
conform to the client's needs. What they had in common was a structural system-Mr. 
Wright called it the "grammar"-which gave them a family resemblance despite their 
variety. Certain features, such as the slab floor with radiant heating, the three-layered 
sandwich wood walls combined with masonry masses, and the flat roofs with overhangs, 
were repeated in all of them. 

GORDON O. CHADWICK: "The Pope House and the house in Baltimore for Joseph 
Euchtman were the first two houses I supervised." Exterior view of the Joseph Euchtman 
residence (1939) in Baltimore, Maryland. (Patrick J. Meehan) 

The plans for each house were accompanied by a Standard Detail Sheet which was applied 
to all houses of this type and was used over and over again. It was developed, I believe, 
after the initial Usonian house-the first Herbert Jacobs House (in Madison, 
Wisconsin)-had been built in 1937. Mr. Wright's participation-even on small 
projects-was more than would be customary in many architectural offices. 

I remember watching him as he made revisions to the original plan for the Loren Pope 
House and worked out the pattern for the perforated boards, which varied from house to 
house. He was very fond of the recessed batten designs used in the Usonian houses. Mr. 
Wright had developed a similar detail for interior paneling when working for Louis 
Sullivan, and it had received Mr. Sullivan's blessing. 

PEARCE: What revisions were made to the original plan? 

CHADWICK: The size of the house was cut down in the interest of economy. Loren Pope 
told me later that he had been getting astronomical bids from contractors. The lowest was 
$12,000, which might as well have been $120,000, he said, to a man making $50 a week. 
He was getting panicky when, one night, he received a telephone call from Mr. Wright, 
who told him that he realized the house was too expensive and that he was going to 
redesign it. The revised plan cut at least $2,000 from the cost, possibly a great deal more. 

The original plan for the kitchen provided an interior room with three walls for cabinets, 
lighted from above by a clerestory. In the revision the kitchen has an outside wall. Just 
before I left Taliesin for Falls Church, Mr. Wright worked out the vertical slot window. It 
looked peculiar to him at first, but he made it acceptable by adding the window box at the 
bottom. 

PEARCE: Did Mr. Wright work out the detail of the mortar joint running parallel to the 
sides of the kitchen window, or did you? 

CHADWICK: I believe that was my interpretation of the way he drew it. 

PEARCE: How much detail was given on the plans? 

CHADWICK: Wright plans required interpretation. The Usonian plans were laid out in a 
two-by-four-foot module but without detailed dimensions. Every time you got to a 
doorway, a corner, or an intersection where special conditions prevailed, the dimensions 
had to be modified one way or another. Builders always wanted to know why they couldn't 
have been just like any other plans, i.e., worked out dimensionally. I think Mr. Wright 
wanted to emphasize the system concept; and the plans certainly looked prettier without 
dimensions! 

Detailed dimensions were given on the Standard Detail Sheet. You had to keep checking 
back and forth between it and the plans, which was trying for the builder. Of course, there 
were some things not included on the Standard Detail Sheet which I improvised on the 
job. 

PEARCE: Could you tell us about some of your own decisions? 

CHADWICK: I devised the corner detail of the rowlock brick course on top of the 
foundation wall, for instance. It was no more successful than anybody else's effort in this 
direction. 

Also, Howard [Rickert, woodwork contractor for the residence] objected to the detail for 
the doorjambs on the Standard Detail Sheet. He thought that the little piece of wood for the 
jamb was too thin and wanted to use a two-by-four section at the very least. We figured 
out a way of routing out the horizontal boards so that they overlapped the larger door jamb 
but still allowed the jamb to appear light, which is what Mr. Wright had wanted. It was 
one of the details he told me he liked. 

Mr. Wright raised quite a fuss about my use of firebrick in the back of the fireplace. The 
firebrick couldn't be bonded in with the other brick because it was much wider. I told Mr. 
Wright it was going to get black and become inconspicuous anyway. He said to paint it 
black immediately! 

I also designed a grate for logs instead of andirons, which Mr. Wright called much too 
heavy and overdesigned. "That is the trouble with all my boys," he said, "they overdesign. 
And," he continued, "that's my trouble, too." 

PEARCE: How often did Mr. Wright visit the site? 

CHADWICK: I believe he was there several times, although I wasn't present. One of his 
visits coincided with his presentation in Washington of the Crystal City apartments 
project, which was never built. William Wesley Peters . . . also came from Taliesin to visit 
the site and was very helpful, particularly in getting the approval of the Baltimore 
Building Department for the Joseph Euchtman House. 

PEARCE: Were there any major structural problems in building the Loren Pope House? 

CHADWICK: Mr. Wright had told me that we should put up the roof first to provide a 
workshop in which to construct the wall sections. They were supposed to be built on tables. 
Howard and I found that it was impossible to make the mitered corners of the walls fit 
when they were built on tables, aside from the problem of erecting and supporting the roof. 
Our solution was to build every other wall section on work tables and then to join them by 
a section built in place. This way we were able to make adjustments so that the horizontal 
boards and battens lined up at the corners. 

Mr. Wright had two sons living near Washington at that time and they came out to the site 
occasionally. I suspect that Mr. Wright got news from them of what was going on. I got a 
summons to go up to New York and see him because, he said, I was betraying him by not 
putting up the roof first. I don't know how I would have managed to wiggle out of it, but 
when I got there he didn't seem inclined to berate me too much for not following 
instructions. 

PEARCE: How were the furniture designs worked out? Did the client describe the pieces 
he wanted or did Mr. Wright decide what should be in a given space? 

CHADWICK: Furniture was fairly standard for the Usonian houses. For example, this 
modular chair design was used in a number of houses. Mr. Wright would prepare a 
furniture plan which showed the dining table, modular chairs, bed frames, and anything 
that was built in. It was almost essential to use Wright-designed furniture, since 
reproduction period furniture looked out of place and most upholstered furniture was out of 
scale with the houses. Sometimes the furniture plan included things which the client didn't 
require. Mr. Wright put a grand piano in every living room. That was not necessarily what 
the client wanted. 

PEARCE: Did he prescribe the standard Steinway in a mahogany case or did he design a 
piano case? 

CHADWICK: Mr. Wright modified some of the pianos at Taliesin and refinished the 
wood, but he didn't mind the look of the traditional piano, no matter how unlike the rest of 
the furniture it was. He just liked pianos and thought of them as part of family life. Of 
course, he enjoyed playing the piano himself. 

PEARCE: Did Mr. Wright try to keep in touch with his designs during their execution 
through visits and reports? 

CHADWICK: Well, I remember going out to California with him and several other 
apprentices once when Mr. Wright heard that his design for a house was being tinkered 
with by the owner. Mr. Wright wanted no part of this. The owner was eventually forced to 
submit to having me and three other apprentices rework his house. 

GORDON O. CHADWICK: "Mr. Wright would prepare a furniture plan which showed 
the dining table, modular chairs, bed frames and anything that was built in. It was almost 
essential to use Wright-designed furniture, since reproduction period furniture looked out 
of place and most upholstered furniture was out of scale with the houses." The dining 
room of the Loren Pope residence (1939) in Falls Church, Virginia. This view shows the 
plywood table and chairs specially designed and constructed for the house. (Patrick J. 
Meehan) 

I suppose this client was primarily interested in being able to say he had a Frank Lloyd 
Wright house. Mr. Wright had planned a large house for him, but until he could afford to 
build it, the client had completed the gatehouse and was living in that. 

The exterior was supposed to be of rough-sawn overlapping boards, about 12 inches wide 
and one inch thick, but the owner had gotten a bargain in beveled redwood siding that was 
less than half the specified width and thickness. He told Mr. Wright that the building code 
in his community wouldn't allow the seven-foot ceilings specified for some parts of the 
house and that consequently he had raised the ceiling height. The combination of narrow 
boards and higher ceilings ruined the scale of the house, of course. A former Taliesin 
apprentice who was then an architect in Los Angeles was supposed to supervise it, but the 
client wouldn't pay for his services. 

When Mr. Wright got this news, he took some of us to visit the site. There was a causeway 
crossing a ravine with a dry streambed way down below. The owner had outlined the sides 
of this causeway with stones, painted white. Mr. Wright told the fellow who was driving to 
stop the car. He got out, with his hat and his cane, and kicked all the stones off the 
driveway down into the ravine. 

Meanwhile the owner kept peering over the gate, which finally opened by some magical 
device. We drove up and Mr. Wright got out of the car. The owner was protesting that 
somebody was going to run over the side of the causeway and down into the ravine. Mr. 
Wright said he didn't care. 

On a level higher than the house, the client had built a free-form, kidney-shaped 
swimming pool (a shape Mr. Wright disliked), and between the pool and the house, a 
wooden retaining wall, which, of course, was not in the nature of materials (wood against 
earth equals rot). Mr. Wright went over to this wall and said, "Gordon, get the crowbar out 
of the car." I got it, and then he said, "Destroy that wall." 

The owner kept saying, "Mr. Wright, that wall cost me $500." Mr. Wright repeated, 
"Gordon, destroy that wall." Then the owner's wife, trying to save the situation, announced 
that lunch was ready. Mr. Wright said, "I won't eat a morsel of food until that wall is 
destroyed." So I finished destroying the wall and then we had lunch! 

Four of us boarded with this couple a month or so. There wasn't much that could be done 
about the siding, but we added a fascia about 18 inches deep at the overhang to lower the 
height of the walls visually. 

Another small house on the property, a guesthouse, was sited incorrectly, and this also had 
to be changed. We built, I recall, a 40-foot-long masonry wall next to it to tie it into the 
hill. Although it was a terrible job to make these alterations, Mr. Wright would not allow 
these little houses to remain as built. I suspect he especially wanted to establish that there 
were not to be any deviations from his design for the big house when it was built. 

PEARCE: Would you discuss Wright's historical innovations which are reflected in the 
Loren Pope House? 

CHADWICK: Radiant heating was a virtually unknown thing at that time. Everybody 
thought we were crazy to lay wrought iron pipes under the floor. They kept asking, "What 
if there is a leak? You would have to dig up the whole slab." However, all the pipes were 
tested for almost a week at approximately 120 pounds of pressure. The normal operating 
pressure of the system is only 11 pounds, so we had tested far above the maximum that 
would ever be required. Then we had crushed stone laid around the coils to prevent 
damage when the concrete was being poured. From a design standpoint, radiant heating 
was marvelous, because getting rid of radiators-then almost universal-reduced visual 
disturbance. 

Built-in lighting, cabinets, and bookcases have the same effect. The concrete slab 
continuing throughout the whole house also contributes to the sense of unity, as does the 
use of the same wall materials inside and out. In a small house you sense more space when 
not distracted by extraneous objects, especially here, where the interior is kept consistently 
to horizontal lines and soft natural colors. 

PEARCE: How do you think Mr. Wright would have treated the landscaping of this house 
at its second site, here in Woodlawn? 

CHADWICK: From a landscaping point of view, his primary concern in this house was 
the hemicycle, which should be duplicated, I think, at the second site. The land should be 
leveled off and given that half-circle shape as an architectural extension of the house. I 
also feel that the screened porch and terrace must be rebuilt. The close relationship 
between outdoors and indoors was one of the design principles involved. The slab of the 
concrete terrace was at the same level as the living room floor-unusual at that time. 

Mr. Wright's favorite plant material in Wisconsin was a spreading juniper, but not the 
kind that is normally obtainable at a nursery. At Taliesin we would transplant them from 
nearby pastures-the farmers were only too glad to get rid of them. I think his preference 
here would also have been for native planting. His aim was usually to be natural, although, 
interestingly enough, in Arizona, within the confines of the camp, he took native cactus 
and arranged it by species in a very organized way, in contrast to the desert, where species 
were mixed. This only proves that knowing when to be inconsistent is one of the attributes 
of genius. 

AARON G. GREEN 

He had no pedagogical method. . . . It was certainly a process of teaching, learning by 
participation and by absorption and by emulation and, I suppose, by osmosis. By being a 
part of [it], you were participating in his creative activities, in a sense: the development of 
the buildings directly under his thumb. 

Aaron G. Green was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from 1939 to 1943. He came to 
the Fellowship after studying architecture at several colleges, including Alabama State 
College, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and Cooper Union in New York City. 

Following his apprenticeship under Wright, Green opened his own architectural office in 
San Francisco. Through this office Green began in 1951 to serve on occasion as Wright's 
West Coast representative. After Wright's death, Green continued to act as West Coast 
representative for Taliesin Associated Architects until 1972. 

One major project in which Green played an important part during the late 1950s and 
early 1960s was Wright's design for the Marin County Administration Building in San 
Raphael, California. 

{Most of Aaron Green's reminiscences were recorded in the late 1960s and were 
transcribed from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio programs "Frank 
Lloyd Wright: The World's Greatest Architect," "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Outspoken 
Philosopher," and "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Shining Brow." Printed here by permission 
of Pacifica Radio Archive. Three passages at the end of this chapter were transcribed from 
the film Lewis Mumford: Toward a Human Architecture, produced by Ray Hubbard 
Associates, Inc. Printed courtesy of Unicorn Projects, Inc.} 


ON THE TALIESIN FELLOWSHIP 

I was in residence there for approximately three years. Prior to that, though, even before I 
met Mr. Wright, I had helped build one of his houses. I was practicing architecture a little 
bit during that period, and I gave Mr. Wright one of my clients. I got the client so involved 
and interested in Frank Lloyd Wright that I actually asked Mr. Wright to design the house. 
So that was a very friendly beginning-it was a professional beginning. 

When I went to Taliesin it was partly, in a sense, as a fellow professional. It was at Mr. 
Wright's invitation, which, as far as I was concerned, was the greatest thing that I could 
expect. Obviously, the thing that I was interested in most. It was, from the start, an 
extremely important consideration in my then life and everything that has come since. 

I was extremely stimulated by everything at Taliesin and by the very close association with 
Mr. Wright-particularly when the group was small, when there were about 25 of us. It 
was in the depths of the Depression, and anybody interested in architecture was, from the 
point of view of economics and making a living, . . . nuts. There was no building. We were 
surviving at Taliesin off the land, really. Growing the crops, at times eating bread and 
milk for lunch because we didn't have anything else-and enjoying it! We had tremendous 
spirit. 

Taliesin West had been under construction for just a year or so at that time. It was in the 
very early stages. I guess about three or four months after I was at Taliesin we moved 
down to Taliesin West for the winter. I remember we waited until the snow was so high we 
had to shovel our way out of Taliesin East, though. It was a kind of rigorous existence. We 
took turns staying up all night to stoke the furnace and things like that, chopping the 
wood. 

Soon the commissions began to come in. A $5,000 or $6,000 house was a good 
commission that we looked forward to with a great deal of interest [page 142]. And Florida 
Southern College [page 12] was just beginning. My first professional task at Taliesin was 
the responsibility to build one of the models for the Museum [of Modern Art] show at that 
time. That was the main effort; getting ready for the Modern museum show of Mr. 
Wright's in 1940. They were preparing lots of building models, which still exist. There 
was a great deal of interesting activity. . . . 

Since everyone lived together and worked together, we could hardly have been any closer. 
It was a 24-hour day. We would see Mr. Wright at mealtimes and at worktimes. It was an 
extremely intimate relationship. I always assumed that it was similar to the kind of 
apprenticeships that must have occurred in the Middle Ages with master artisans. It did 
truly seem to be an apprenticeship system. . . . 

Mr. Wright enjoyed talking to individuals and groups, and we would sit at his knee 
listening. Wherever we were-at lunch, in the drafting room, working in the fields-he 
came around. He was always around. . . . I've seen him get up on a tractor or a bulldozer 
for the hell of it; he loved to do that kind of thing. He directed everything . . . all in great 
detail. Whatever the activity, he had an interest in it, whether it was pulling weeds or 
mowing the hay or cleaning the barn or whatever it was. 

He had no pedagogical method in that sense. It was certainly a process of teaching, 
learning by participation and by absorption and by emulation and, I suppose, by osmosis. 
By being a part of [it], you were participating in his creative activities, in a sense: the 
development of the buildings directly under his thumb. This is a highly effective learning 
process, I think. There were no lectures or classes in any formal way. All the youngsters 
were so damn dedicated that I think they were really sponges absorbing everything that 
was around. There was more work to be done than anyone could possibly handle. There 
was never any necessity for making any kind of work for educational purposes. 


ON WRIGHT'S DESIGN METHOD 

At the risk of great oversimplification, you could synthesize Mr. Wright's 
philosophies-his philosophy of organic architecture (to use his term)-as being a very 
direct relationship, a common-sense logical relationship, of the factors which an architect 
really finds, if he looks for them, around any new project. These factors have always 
existed and they always will. It's just that a majority of designs don't sensitively relate 
them all. Organic architecture means that the building itself finally is an expression and a 
direct result of all these various factors. There are such things as the climate in which the 
building is placed-first the regional climate (look at Arizona versus Wisconsin) and the 
local climate-where the winds, the sun, and the views are. Other factors are the 
topography; the native materials; the functional needs of the [building] program; the kind 
of human being the client is; even the budget is an important part of the final result. 

Mr. Wright always started with the floor plan [when designing a building]. He felt this 
was the essence of the architectural scheme. I'm satisfied he had the whole thing in his 
mind when he did it. The whole three-dimensional aspect was all there in his mind. 
There's no doubt about it, because the cross sections that followed, and which he would 
always draw to indicate what his design was, were so directly related to a theme, a scheme 
he obviously-quite definitely-had in mind when he sat down. He's explained that to me 
as being true most of the time. He really designed on his walls, and before he got to the 
drawing board he pretty well had it worked out. 

For instance, I will never forget [the] Marin County project [page 57]. Mr. Wright came 
out [on August 2, 1957] to talk to the [county] supervisors, see the site, etc.  -his first 
trip. . . . [We] drove up to the top of one of the hills and [he] got out of the car. He hadn't 
experienced the site [for] more than 20 minutes when he turned to me and said, "I know 
what I'm going to do here!" He waved his hands, [made] a couple of gestures and said, "I'll 
bridge these hills with graceful arches." It wasn't until some months later that I saw him 
sit down at the drawing board and do just that-in a few minutes-and you can see it now 
[completed]. There was an aspect of inspiration in his designing-a kind of creative 
genius. But one that didn't require a lot of time at the site. It was pretty obvious that he 
very quickly knew what the main theme, the solution, would be. I certainly didn't 
understand it when he mentioned it. I didn't understand it until I saw him actually sketch 
it much later. 

It might appear that he shook the design out of his sleeve, but that doesn't mean it was 
effortless or that he hadn't been concentrating and thinking about it for days, or perhaps 
weeks, before he sat down to the drawing board. So that when he sat down, the kind of 
complex project that might take an architect's design staff three months, or six months in 
some cases, to work out, Mr. Wright might easily do in an hour and a half or two hours. 
When he'd turn the project over to the drafting staff, all of the basic design scheme was 
there. He'd continue to work over someone's drafting board from then on until it was 
finished, but there was little change from then on. The main structural scheme, the main 
physical characteristics of the thing, the functional aspects, all related as they were in his 
work, were well set up in that initial inspirational working drawing. It was quite 
remarkable to watch because, again, it was without hesitation. It was sitting down to a big 
fresh white sheet of paper on which someone had drawn the contours for the project, 
surrounded with some photographs of the site (as there practically always were), to start 
immediately, without any hesitation, slashing away with great speed to reach a solution. 
To see the solution unfold even in the rough sketch form which he used was always a 
remarkable experience. 


ON THE DIFFICULTY OF COPYING WRIGHT'S ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 

Too many critics take the term "critic" seriously, and when they don't have anything to 
criticize they create. The statement that Frank Lloyd Wright . . . is difficult to copy-and 
using that as a criticism of him-is quite ridiculous. It may be true as compared to Mies 
van der Rohe, whose work is the simplest kind of statement. Whether that reflects on Mies 
van der Rohe to his credit, or to Mr. Wright's discredit-I don't think it's pertinent one 
way or the other. As a comparison, it's simply a statement of fact, I guess. I don't think it 
makes either Mies van der Rohe's work better or Mr. Wright's work worse. Mr. Wright's 
followers, we might call them, persons who are affected by his architecture and who 
employ forms derivative of his, tend to be singled out more often than are those who might 
utilize, just as derivatively, the forms of Mies van der Rohe or some other architect, Le 
Corbusier . . . it's purely a matter of the fashion of the moment. . . . But I don't take this 
particular kind of criticism seriously. I don't see any point in dignifying it to that extent, 
because I don't think it really means very much. It's hardly intelligent. 


ON WRIGHT'S STANDARDS 

To him architecture was so important and so great that anyone who did not maintain a 
high-standard relationship to it was subject to criticism. His standards were high in every 
endeavor. . . . He had no tolerance for mediocrity in government, in architecture, [or] in 
human beings. He was very forthright in saying it, of course. 

He'd speak as critically, or more so [of his students]. Mr. Wright didn't like to think that 
anyone didn't understand his principles. But some, in lieu of understanding his principles 
and using them, appeared to copy his work. He had no patience for that. To him, that was 
mediocrity, too. He was probably more likely to criticize strongly his own apprentices and 
their work than anything else. 

He wasn't critical of everything. He was delighted whenever he could find something 
which he thought was good and which he could approve of. If you consider the age in 
which he lived-after all, 70 years of actual professional work is a long time-you realize 
that when he started there was nothing which related to his idiom of quality in building 
construction. He had to design all his own hardware, all his own furniture, all his own 
light fixtures, all the different portions of the building in his early years. Later on, when he 
could find something in a catalog that he thought was well designed [and] that he could 
specify, he got tremendous delight. And [that was also] true of other things. A piece of 
architecture-it might be a piece of architecture that was done by a carpenter without an 
architect being around. As you drove down a street he might say, "Stop the car, look at 
that. Isn't that a tremendously beautiful roofline? Look what it looks like up against that 
tree." And it might have been a tiny little cottage that didn't have an architect near it. It 
[was] just a thing of excellence. Sure, there weren't many examples of the product of 
architects that he could say that about, but if he saw one he was simply delighted. He 
wasn't always looking for something to criticize-quite the reverse-he was on the search 
for something that he didn't have to [criticize]. 


THE FALLACY OF THE LEGENDS 

I think that part of Mr. Wright's legend is unfortunate in the sense that, as he often said 
himself, the newspaper didn't print the twinkle in his eye, . . . And, with very few 
exceptions, it was always there-that twinkle-when he made the kind of statement that 
would later be offered as evidence of his irascibility or arbitrariness or difficulty to get 
along. All of which were ridiculously untrue. The people who knew him best-his clients, 
his family, and so on-all knew that those things were the farthest from the truth. 

[He was a] witty, personable, marvelous human being to be around and an extremely 
impressive one because of his tremendous strength of will, strength of character, strength 
of conviction, all of which were obvious. He wasn't going to hide anything that he felt, and 
in a very forthright way. Nor was he going to hide any criticism that he had of something 
that wasn't up to his idea of perfection. And those things very straightforward and, perhaps 
without that twinkle that we're speaking about, that wasn't fun [but] that was sincere 
conviction about life and everything in it, including architecture. That's where he didn't 
separate his philosophy of architecture from his philosophy of life. It was very strongly a 
matter of making decisions of all kinds based on principle. Damned few people are able to 
synthesize problems and come up with that kind of a solution-based on principle. 

In 1979 Ray Hubbard Associates, Inc., produced a 90-minute motion picture entitled 
Lewis Mumford: Toward a Human Architecture in which Aaron Green talked at some 
length about Wright. The following passages have been transcribed from the film. 


WRIGHT'S INFLUENCE ON DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE 

American domestic architecture, as we see it today [i.e., in the late 1970s] in its finest 
form-and I have to emphasize finest form, because the majority of domestic architecture 
today is not that-certainly owes everything to Frank Lloyd Wright. [It] was he alone 
[who] destroyed the traditional conditions that prevailed at the turn of the century and 
freed the architect, as well as the user, to an understanding of the advantages of space, of 
nature, of relating the inside of the building to the outside environment: the great 
emotional advantage of eliminating the claustrophobic boxes which were the rooms of the 
conventional houses; the advantage of using materials in their natural form, of creating a 
harmony of color and texture with consideration for the overall theme of an 
architecture-so prevalent in all his work, but particularly identifiable in the individual 
house. The custom house of contemporary architects is almost entirely due to Frank Lloyd 
Wright's influence, in my opinion, where it has become an object of fine art. 


WRIGHT'S DESIGN FOR THE HANNA RESIDENCE 

The Hanna House is certainly one of the most innovative and most beautiful expressions of 
Frank Lloyd Wright's artistry [page 209]. The ability to adapt to a hillside site in such a 
natural flowing, lovely, harmonious way is something that no one else has ever matched. 
Frank Lloyd Wright, of course, was [an] amazing genius and that was one of his main 
contributions. 

One of the most important architectural considerations, as I think about the Hanna House 
design, is the ease with which it converted itself to the changing pattern of use as the 
Hannas' family life changed-when the children grew up. This had been [included in] the 
initial conception of the design. They were astute enough, and Mr. Wright was genius 
enough, to design the house in such a way that it was easily adjusted in the remodeling 
process, which I oversaw many years after the house was built. With a few minor 
adjustments of partitions inside the house, small bedrooms were changed in[to] spacious 
studies and master bedroom suites were created. 


WRIGHT ON CRITICS 

It's my recollection that before the war [World War II] Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship 
with Lewis Mumford was a very warm friendship. I recall his saying that Mumford was 
the only critic; the others didn't exist at all as far as being architectural critics was 
concerned. He hated critics. 


JOHN GEIGER 

We had considerably more freedom of choice in our work assignments than scholars would 
have you believe. 

John Geiger was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright from June 1947 to June 1954. 
Geiger supervised the construction of the Wright-designed Zimmerman House 
(1952-53) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the "60 Years of Living Architecture" 
exhibition in New York (1953) and Los Angeles (1954). 

{John Geiger's reminiscences were adapted from an early draft of his "Recollection: A 
Summer's Work-Not in the Taliesin Drafting Room," which appeared in the Journal of 
the Taliesin Fellows, No. 2, Fall 1990, pp. 13-15. Copyright � Journal of the Taliesin 
Fellows, 1990. Reprinted with permission of the author.} 

The year was 1949, and I started the working drawings of the [Henry J.] Neils House [in 
Minneapolis, Minnesota] as a solo project; my first solo set of working drawings had been 
for the Melvyn Maxwell Smith House my first summer at the Fellowship in 1947 [see 
Chapter 14]. Jack Howe was the chief draftsman and had assigned this house to me. As I 
proceeded with the working drawings, it became evident that there were some serious 
problems with the planning of the house. The lower level, which included storage, bath, 
servant, and utility rooms, was confined to an area that was woefully inadequate in size 
and largely below grade, requiring an excavated area with a retaining wall to make it work 
at all. Meanwhile, the far end of the living room was a full story out of the ground and 
marked unexcavated. 

I struggled with the problem for a while but could not make it work. Finally, [I] went to 
Jack and told him the house needed Mr. Wright's help. His response was, "Don't bother 
Mr. Wright." I worked some more with no success and then went to Jack again with the 
same request and received the same response: "Don't bother Mr. Wright." So I said, 
"Okay, I won't, but I won't complete the working drawings either." 

The remainder of the summer was spent on the farm mowing hay, by choice. We had 
considerably more freedom of choice in our work assignments than scholars would have 
you believe. Wes Peters made all work assignments excepting household and kitchen 
chores. [He] was an easy taskmaster and was respected by all apprentices for his probity. 

It seemed that the entire summer was spent mowing that one large field across the 
highway from Taliesin. It extends from the [Unity] Chapel on the south on around the 
bend to what was then a coffee shop on the east, opposite the foot of the Wisconsin River 
bridge. The field was beautiful after mowing, with the concentric rows of mown hay 
diminishing to zero at the center. I was delighted to think that I had created all that beauty 
on such a vast scale with only a hay mower. The field was in full view from the Taliesin 
living room, and I thought afterwards that a similar view must have inspired [Wright's] 
abstraction that is the frontispiece for "Book Three � Work" of An Autobiography. (In case 
no one else made the connection, the frontispiece for "Book One � Family" is an 
abstraction of his trek with Uncle John described on page three [of that publication].) It 
was an altogether delightful summer. There was ample opportunity for reflection while 
riding the mower eight hours a day. It was not all peaches and cream, however. The first 
day or so out I bent the mower support arm trying to mow around edges of the field for a 
more manicured look. Ken Lockhart wasn't too happy about that but had the mower 
repaired after offering only a few pointed remarks. 

Meanwhile, back in the drafting room, the working drawings for the Neils House had been 
completed by Steve Oyakawa without any changes. It was Mr. Wright's practice to sign 
drawings in the drafting room after breakfast on Sunday morning, and on this one 
particular Sunday I was present. Needless to say, the Neils house working drawings came 
up for signature. So I said to myself, "This will be interesting." Mr. Wright leafed through 
the drawings, picked up a pencil, or maybe a pen, and redesigned the house on the 
completed set of working drawings. . . . All the lower level functions were moved [to] the 
upper level. The carpet swung around in line with the bedroom wing, and the roof changed 
from a hip roof to a gable roof. It was a total redesign and took less than half an hour. 
When he was finished, he stood up, tossed the pencil on the table, and said, "Well, 
occasionally one of these gets through without the benefit of clergy." The comment was 
accompanied by his wry smile. 

Curtis Besinger did the working drawings for the redesign. It was our general practice to 
make the corrections on the original drawings and erase Mr. Wright's work as we went 
along. If that was done in this case, there is no record of the original working drawing set 
completed by Steve; probably not even a set of prints. Such was our sense of history at the 
time. 

The Neils, because they owned the Flour City Ornamental Iron Company, produced the 
spherical fireplace kettle shown in the photograph. They made another in 1953 for the 
Usonian house at the "60 Years of Living Architecture" exhibition [of Wright's work] at 
the site of the Guggenheim Museum. This one was returned to Taliesin at the close of the 
show. The Neils also owned an abandoned marble quarry, accounting for the masonry 
material used for the walls of the house. 

How many other works got through "without the benefit of clergy" will be the subject [of] 
historical inquiry one day, and hopefully there will be some documentation of particular 
projects by former apprentices in the intervening years. The lack of monetary concern 
made it possible to redo the drawings for the Neils house with no consideration other than 
the quality of the project. It would be interesting to speculate what this total lack of 
monetary concern in the drafting room had on Mr. Wright's work in the halcyon, and 
hence productive, years following the founding of the Fellowship. 

The completed house was published in House & Home magazine in November 1953. 


FAY JONES 

"My name is Frank Lloyd Wright."-Frank Lloyd Wright to Fay Jones "My name is Fay 
Jones."-Fay Jones to Frank Lloyd Wright 

Fay Jones was a member of the Taliesin Fellowship from May to September of 1953. He 
entered the Fellowship after receiving a bachelor of architecture degree from the 
University of Arkansas and a master of architecture degree from Rice University. 

On April 15, 1958, during a lecture to architecture students at the University of 
Arkansas-Fayetteville where Jones was a professor, Wright made the following comment 
about Jones's work: 

{Fay Jones's reminiscences were recorded by Allen Freeman in Accent on Architecture: 
Honors 1990. Copyright � 1990 The American Institute of Architects. Reproduced with 
permission under license number 90089.} 


So, where is architecture today? Where do you see it? Fay Jones has built a little house 
over here with some of it in it. Go and look at it. And there are other little houses, there is 
a feeling coming. Join it, get wise to what the substance is in it, because it is not merely a 
matter of taste . . . it all begins back there with a study of nature-the study of nature. 

Although his tenure with the Fellowship was short, Jones's practice of creating organic 
architecture, under the principles established by Wright, has been remarkable. Jones was 
the 1990 recipient of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal-the Institute's 
highest honor and only the 48th such award to be presented by the institute. The AIA Gold 
Medal is one of the most important and prestigious awards that an architect can receive. 
Wright was the recipient of this same honor in 1949. Jones is the first of Wright's 
apprentices to be so distinguished. 

After receiving the AIA Gold Medal, Jones stated: "I never intended to be a small Frank 
Lloyd Wright, which I used to worry about until I was reminded that there is no such thing 
as a small Frank Lloyd Wright." 

The following passage is based on an interview in which Jones recalled his first meeting 
with Wright. 

[In 1938] a movie short about Wright's new Johnson Wax headquarters building in 
Racine, Wisconsin, convinced Jones, then 16 years old, that he wanted to be an architect. 
Today the Wright legacy imbues Jones's architecture. "Wright and the principles of 
organic architecture have had the greatest influence on my architecture," he says. 

Jones's first face-to-face encounter with Wright was in 1949 in Houston during the AIA 
convention at which Wright accepted the Institute's 16th Gold Medal and lectured its 
leaders for being so presumptuous as to call him a great architect. As a fourth-year 
student in the first architecture class at the University of Arkansas, Jones had driven to 
Houston with fellow students hoping to attend the ceremony. Jones was in a corridor of the 
new Shamrock Hotel just when Wright was looking for a way to escape a cocktail party in 
his honor. "The doors of the room burst open, and here's my first glimpse of Frank Lloyd 
Wright," Jones recalled years later in Arkansas Times magazine. "I just plastered myself 
up against the wall to leave him plenty of room to walk by. He must have seen my fright, 
because he came up to me and stuck out his hand and said, 'My name is Frank Lloyd 
Wright.' 

"'My name is Fay Jones.' 

"By this time the president of the AIA and two or three other people were trying to get Mr. 
Wright back into the party. He said, 'No. I've had enough of that. This young man and I 
are going to look at this hotel that we've been reading so much about.' So he took me by 
the arm like I was Charlie McCarthy, and I was a prop for about half an hour." 


VERNON D. SWABACK 

The greatest lesson to be learned from Frank Lloyd Wright is not to be found in the look of 
his buildings, no matter how exciting they may be. The lesson is that it is immensely 
rewarding to think independently, wherever that might take a person . . . and that to do 
otherwise is to waste the opportunity. 

Vernon D. Swaback, who was a teenager when he became an apprentice to Frank Lloyd 
Wright, was a member of the Taliesin Fellowship from 1957 to 1978. 

Now, more than 25 years after Wright's death, Swaback's work is flourishing. Swaback is 
president of a 12-person architectural and planning firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is a 
member of the Taliesin Council, a group that acts in an advisory capacity to the Frank 
Lloyd Wright Foundation. He is also on the advisory boards for both the College of 
Architecture and the Department of Planning at Arizona State University. His work has 
been widely published, both locally and nationally. 

The following interview was conducted by Hoyt Johnson, publisher of Scottsdale Scene 
Magazine, in 1986. 

{Hoyt Johnson's "Conversation with Vernon Swaback" was originally published in 
Scottsdale Scene Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 4, April 1986, pp. 102-08. Copyright � 1986 
Scottsdale Scene Magazine. Reprinted with permission.} 

HOYT JOHNSON: Vern, when was the first time that you met Frank Lloyd Wright? What 
were the circumstances that led to that memorable occasion, an event that so significantly 
influenced your life? 

VERNON SWABACK: I had wanted to meet Mr. Wright, and I had wanted to become a 
member of the Taliesin Fellowship, for as long as I could remember. I grew up near Oak 
Park, Illinois, where so many of Mr. Wright's first homes were built. I saw those homes, 
and I knew of Mr. Wright's work through architectural publications. 

For me, Taliesin had almost an unapproachable mystique. I knew that it existed but didn't 
know how to get to it, and somehow I had the feeling that people rarely entered or left 
Taliesin. 

JOHNSON: Vern, I'm sorry for interrupting, but let's establish when this was. I think you 
previously told me that it was in 1956, and that you were a first-year architecture student 
at the University of Illinois. Is that correct? 

VERNON D. SWABACK: "I had attended a celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright Day, 
proclaimed by the mayor of Chicago, and had the opportunity to meet a few people from 
Taliesin. Soon after that, I wrote a letter to Mr. Wright and boldly asked if I could come to 
Taliesin to be interviewed for the Fellowship." Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley (left), 
Madison's (Wisconsin) Mayor Ivan Nestingen (right), and Frank Lloyd Wright at a Frank 
Lloyd Wright Day testimonial dinner in Chicago on October 17, 1956. (Capital Times) 

SWABACK: Yes, that is correct. 

JOHNSON: Well, at that time, what did you know about Taliesin? Had you seen pictures 
of Mr. Wright's home in Spring Green, Wisconsin? 

SWABACK: I had attended a celebration of Frank Lloyd Wright Day, proclaimed by the 
mayor of Chicago, and had the opportunity to meet a few people from Taliesin. Soon after 
that, I wrote a letter to Mr. Wright and boldly asked if I could come to Taliesin to be 
interviewed for the Fellowship. I remember that I mailed the letter about noon, and two 
hours later I was so anxious that I called. Very fortunately, I was invited to come to 
Taliesin the next weekend. 

JOHNSON: How do you explain the fact that you were able to just make a phone call and 
arrange a visit with the world's most renowned architect? 

SWABACK: Actually, when I called I talked to Gene Masselink, who was Mr. Wright's 
secretary, and he made the appointment for me. 

JOHNSON: But, nonetheless, Vern, to be able to schedule an interview with Frank Lloyd 
Wright . . . most people perceived him as being almost untouchable . . . was a great stroke 
of good fortune. 

SWABACK: I was amazed-a bit bewildered, perhaps-and terribly excited. I believe it 
was fate . . . an inevitable course of events: writing the letter first, and then deciding to 
call; having Gene Masselink answer; finding Mr. Wright at Taliesin so he could approve 
the appointment. 

JOHNSON: Please tell me about your visit with Frank Lloyd Wright. 

SWABACK: My mother and father were with me. We were ushered into Mr. Wright's 
studio, and he was extremely simple about everything. He asked me why I wanted to come 
to Taliesin. I told him, "Because at the university they are beginning to teach preconceived 
solutions." Thereupon he turned to my mother and my father and asked, "Where does he 
get it? From you, or you?" And that was all there was to the interview. I told him I wanted 
to finish the semester at school and that I would journey to Arizona in January. 

That brief encounter set the course for my life. Please know, however, that my experience 
was not totally unique, because Mr. Wright was constantly alert to young, dedicated 
architectural students who wished to work and study at Taliesin. In fact, some people have 
referred to the creation of "little Frank Lloyd Wrights," but that is the farthest thing from 
what Mr. Wright wanted to do. 

I'm reminded of the first time I brought a design to show to Mr. Wright. He looked at it 
and said, "This all looks familiar to me. Next time, why don't you show me what you can 
do!" 

JOHNSON: Vern, when you finished the semester at the University of Illinois and boarded 
the train to travel to Taliesin West in Scottsdale, you were very young, perhaps 17. You 
had never been to Arizona before; you had only experienced one very short visit with Mr. 
Wright; you had never really been away from home before. My God, you must have been 
overdosed with emotion as that train creaked its way over the tracks heading west. 

SWABACK: It was eerie. I was thrilled and scared. I felt almost as though I was going to 
another planet, to a destination somewhere unknown. I arrived at Taliesin at night, and as 
I walked across the gravel courtyard I was mesmerized by the very romantic lights in the 
distance, and by the dreamlike awareness that I was at Frank Lloyd Wright's home in the 
desert. I had the feeling that I was being totally immersed in a sense of greatness. 

JOHNSON: Even though you were so young and so new, did you feel you were making a 
total commitment to Mr. Wright, to Taliesin . . . and did you plan to remain with the 
Taliesin Fellowship for the rest of your life? 

SWABACK: It was clear to me that I was making a total commitment to my life's work, 
but, strangely enough, I had been counseled by one of my professors at the University of 
Illinois not to get "too swallowed up" in the Taliesin situation. So I had sort of 
predetermined that I would remain for only one year. I never really changed my mind, but 
21 years later I was still there! The experience was constantly challenging and there was 
never a reason to leave. 

JOHNSON: Were there any immediate disappointments upon your arrival at Taliesin? Did 
you ever want to get back on the train and return home? 

SWABACK: The only disappointment I experienced was finding out that some of the new 
students were not as excited about, not as committed to, the program as I was. It surprised 
me greatly because, to me, being at Taliesin was a lifelong dream of immeasurable 
magnitude. I mean, what was powerful was just meeting Mr. Wright-nothing else 
mattered-so I didn't understand their attitude. Of course, they didn't last, they didn't stay, 
they didn't become part of the Fellowship. 

JOHNSON: Let's talk about Mr. Wright. Was there ever any disappointment regarding his 
professional and personal character? 

SWABACK: Never! Absolutely not! There's an old saying, "No man is a hero to his valet," 
that did not apply to Mr. Wright. The closer a person got to Frank Lloyd Wright, the more 
heroic he became. There was no "behind the scenes" about him that was a disappointment. 
Instead, he got better and better. 

JOHNSON: Was Frank Lloyd Wright really 100 percent Frank Lloyd Wright? Or was he a 
perpetrator of mystery, a man who enhanced his reputation as an architectural genius by 
wearing a cloak of personal mystique? 

SWABACK: I think he played "the role" to some extent. Early in his life he used to take 
his own picture; he created-or, perhaps better, cultivated-an image that he considered 
appropriate for his esteemed place in our society. 

I remember a conversation that took place when Mr. Wright and I were with movie 
producer Mike Todd and his wife at the time, Elizabeth Taylor. Todd, who had just 
completed filming Around the World in 80 Days, was surely one of the great Hollywood 
show people, and at one point during the conversation he turned to Mr. Wright and said, 
"Hell, Frank, you're the greatest showman of us all." Mr. Wright just laughed. 

I think that if he "acted" just a little, however, it was a legitimate part of the aesthetic 
sensitivity that he displayed for almost everything. He felt that we should not only design 
beautiful buildings, we should create beautiful dress, we should plan beautiful parties and 
dinners. He paid a lot of attention to the way he dressed-his tailor made his clothes-and 
the way he combed his hair. It was all consistent with the position of a great man at the 
helm of a legacy. 

In a 1932 essay on power, Charles de Gaulle wrote: "There can be no prestige without 
mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. In the designs, the demeanor, and the mental 
operations of a leader there must be always a 'something' which others cannot altogether 
fathom, which puzzles them, stirs them, and rivets their attention. Aloofness, character, 
and the personification of greatness, these qualities it is that surround with prestige those 
who are prepared to carry the burden which is too heavy for lesser mortals." 

Frank Lloyd Wright knew of that "something". . . 

JOHNSON: What do you consider to be the greatest lesson to be learned from the work of 
Frank Lloyd Wright? 

SWABACK: The man produced a great body of work, and there is a tendency to view that 
work as his greatest contribution. For followers of Mr. Wright it is very easy to fall too 
much in love with his work, however, and there is a danger in doing that because what he 
represented more than anything else was a discarding of the old classical order and the 
creation of what he called "thought-built" architecture. 

If the work he produced is loved too much, the result is a new classical order. More in 
keeping with what Mr. Wright was really all about in his admonishment to think for 
yourself, don't rest on your laurels, and don't look backwards. It is in the nature of 
architecture as he professed it that it must be continuously fresh, constantly new, or it isn't 
living up to its potential. 

JOHNSON: I think you just told me why you left Taliesin. 

SWABACK: Could be, could be. 

I don't think I love Mr. Wright's work any less than a person who is limited by that love. I 
simply cannot view the work that he did as a justification for the way that I do my work. 
That was his work, it is what he did, and I can't do what he did as well as he did, and if I 
tried, I wouldn't find out what kind of "music" I have within me. 

JOHNSON: And you wouldn't be doing what he taught you to do. 

SWABACK: Right. Now, on the other hand, to egotistically ignore the work of Mr. 
Wright is to turn your back on what has been this civilization's greatest single insight 
regarding what architecture can do for mankind. His teaching, his work, was a great 
contribution to making life more interesting, more beautiful, more stimulating, and more 
appropriate. 

If we can accept Mr. Wright's work as principle, look at circumstances entirely different 
from what he faced, and listen to clients who speak differently. . .our clients don't come in 
and say, "I love Frank Lloyd Wright, please do something for me." They come in and they 
want to make money, or they want to solve problems, or they want to achieve rezoning, or 
they want to do all kinds of other things that preclude having the initial presentation be a 
cultural statement because it is one of need, of self-interest, or whatever. . . . If we listen 
very carefully to what they say, we become so close that we share their problem, or their 
dream. In doing that, we get very close to what I think Frank Lloyd Wright was all about: 
that every new person, every new site, represents an opportunity which is new in nature, 
an opportunity that nobody has ever faced before. And if you give that person or that site 
what you did last, you are squandering that opportunity. 

JOHNSON: You certainly have alluded to your answer, but I repeat: What is the single 
greatest lesson to be learned from Mr. Wright? 

SWABACK: I think it is important to answer that question by defining what it isn't. The 
greatest lesson to be learned from Frank Lloyd Wright is not to be found in the look of his 
buildings, no matter how exciting they may be. The lesson is that it is immensely 
rewarding to think independently, wherever that might take a person . . . and that to do 
otherwise is to waste the opportunity. 

There is a second part of the lesson: that there has to be a consistent relationship between 
all the elements related to whatever a person is doing. Frank Lloyd Wright related 
furniture to the houses he designed, and the houses to their sites. 

In our current work, we've carried that concept further, relating the elements of entire 
communities. It's a powerful idea that has no bounds, and if we can just take any given 
assignment and forget everything we've seen that has been done before, we are then 
getting close to the great way that Mr. Wright saw things. There was nothing familiar to 
him; he regarded familiarity to be an enemy to artists. The more we can take on that 
freshness of interpretation, the closer we get to the greatest lesson that I think Mr. Wright 
offered to us. 


Friends And Acquaintances 

ALAN REIACH 

It was quite impossible not to be moved by his charm and sincerity. The last memory I 
have of him is of leaving Taliesin for the plane at eight o'clock on a brilliant sunny 
morning when the desert was fresh and the cacti cast long shadows. He waved me off at 
the door of his office. "Good-bye," he said, "and be a good boy!" I felt somehow that had 
I been a man of 70 he would have still said that, and that one would not have taken 
offense. 

Alan Reiach, senior partner of the Edinburgh architectural firm of Alan Reiach, Eric Hall 
& Partners, met Frank Lloyd Wright on three occasions and visited Taliesin twice. 

{Alan Reiach's "Meetings with Frank Lloyd Wright" originally appeared in Concrete 
Quarterly (England), No. 100, January/March 1974. Reprinted with permission of the 
British Cement Association.} 

I first met him in New York in 1935. He had been lecturing to a Women's Club and was 
surrounded by an ardent throng of admirers. 

Nothing daunted, I pressed forward and, after saying how much I had enjoyed his 
discourse, asked for some guidance in the New World! 

He looked at me, sized me up, and then came the inevitable pronouncement: "You want to 
see our great country?" 

"Yes," I replied. 

"Then buy a secondhand Ford and keep away from the schools!" Then, as an afterthought: 
"We will be glad to see you anytime at Taliesin." Be it said I didn't follow his advice 
implicitly. However, I duly presented myself some months later [in 1936] at Taliesin. 

It was dark, and the Master had gone to bed. I discovered afterwards that he almost 
invariably retired early. I was met at Spring Green  station by a young man who said he 
was his secretary. This was difficult to believe, as he appeared to be far from the 
commonly accepted ideas of a secretary-open-necked shirt and flannel trousers. Still, he 
was affable enough and drove me up to the house and showed me to my room. I was to be 
an honored guest and was in the Master's own quarters. Owing to some fault in the 
electrical generating system, the place was plunged in darkness and we were reduced to 
using candles-it all added up to the strangeness of my introduction to one of the 
fountainheads of architectural wisdom. 

I can remember there was a private shower off my room, but it didn't work-this was 
reassuring, and gradually one became aware that many things of that kind abounded. This 
to me, fresh from the old world, was comforting! 

In the morning, after early rising with the students and then breakfast, I was informed that 
the Master would expect me to breakfast privately with him and the family. So a second 
meal was to be faced! 

Afterwards we strolled through the gardens-me plying him with questions and F.L.W. 
answering, with majestic calm, the brash outpourings of a student! I can remember asking 
him his opinion of modern architects' work in Europe. Unhesitatingly he replied, "What 
modern architecture needs today, young man, is more love." This impressed me 
enormously at the time, as did his remark when, after saying that I hoped to see the Ford 
Works [automobile factory] at Detroit, he said, "Yes, see that . . . you will see what is 
wrong with us." And so we talked, or rather he talked and I listened, just dropping a word 
from time to time to let him expatiate on topics that ranged from literature to religions, 
from D. H. Lawrence to Buddhism. Suddenly in the midst of all this he said, "Well, I must 
be doing work-enjoy yourself," and with a wave he disappeared into his office. I was left 
to wander about the school, his house, and the gardens at will. Feeling rather tired and not 
a little overawed, I was glad of the day or two in such an atmosphere, an oasis in the 
middle of a continental trip. Notwithstanding the aura of hero worship that was 
everywhere evident, the sheer beauty of the place and the extraordinary sense of being at 
the source of such inspiration was itself immensely stimulating-if rather heady for an 
impressionable student. 

The next time we met was in London when he was giving his Sulgrave Manor lectures at 
the RIBA [Royal Institute of British Architects] in 1939. After one of these, I remember 
coming up to him and saying, "You won't remember me, but you were very kind to me at 
Taliesin in 1936 and let me stay with you when I was feeling rather tired and far from 
home." "Well," he replied, "you are looking better now." Another architect, Erno 
Goldfinger I think it was, told him by way of introduction that he had spent two years in 
the States, to which Wright answered laconically, "Oh, what did you leave us for?" 

We did not meet up again until 1957, and then only after two or three fruitless attempts to 
get in touch by letter. A reply eventually came from his secretary to say that the Master 
would not be in Wisconsin at the time I had proposed to come, but would be glad to see me 
next time I was that way again. The opportunity did, however, occur later on, and a stay 
with him at his desert home in Arizona became possible. 

I flew in from New Mexico, where I had been staying with friends, and took a chance on 
finding him at home despite no answer to my further letters. I had got quite used to this 
one-sided correspondence and took the situation as being normal. Taliesin West is some 
20 miles from Phoenix, and, as the Wrights had no telephone in their winter quarters, I 
had to take a taxi from the airport and drive up to the mountains armed with some money 
and a good deal of hope. After what seemed an interminably long distance from town, we 
picked up the trail on a dirt road through the cactus desert-a kind of treasure hunt, it 
seemed, whose clues were the Taliesin symbol signpost of Wright's own design. After we 
had carried around several sharp bends and left all trace of human life behind, we saw, on 
the horizon, an encampment [pages 139, 149, and 150]. I can only call it that; it gave the 
impression of a kind of caravanserai in the desert. In a few moments the driver set me 
down in the car park at the entrance to the estate. This was Taliesin West. 

Wright's Arizona school had, of course, become a mecca for the faithful long before, and it 
had all the appearance of such. It seemed more like a resort than the usually accepted 
notion of a school. One could not but be impressed by the extraordinary building forms 
that the students had evolved under his direction. 

Again, just as at my first visit 20 years before, it was evening, Wright had retired for the 
night, and his secretary (the same man as the first time, now grown old in service) said 
that he would be pleased to see me in the morning and wished me a pleasant stay. 

I was shown to my room on a balcony overlooking the desert and told that supper would be 
ready shortly. Afterwards, strolling around the encampment, one had time to admire at 
leisure the art works built into the walls of the buildings and the great variety of desert 
plants in the cactus garden. The Wrights' own quarters were set a little apart. There were 
several houses dotted about the landscape, as well as tents for the apprentices. 

Hours are long at the school, and we were wakened at six o'clock for a 6:30 breakfast. A 
Chinese gong was struck to summon "the faithful," and after a simple meal I was left to 
await the Master's pleasure. Just as in 1936, I had a second breakfast with the Wrights. 
The same almost ritualistic atmosphere was observed. This time, however, the old man 
seemed more mellow, especially in his relations with his colleagues. He talked freely and 
pleasantly about this and that and seemed especially moved by his recent visit to Wales 
(the land of his ancestors), where he had received an honorary degree at Aberystwyth the 
year before. The countryside had impressed him more than the Welsh, one gathered! 

He seemed to sense my unexpressed wonder at seeing him so active and in such fine fettle, 
and vouchsafed the view that perhaps one of the reasons for his fame (apart from the 
notoriety that had followed him through life, and which he hated) was the fact "that he had 
been here so long"-which of course was, I suppose, just the plain truth. After a short 
discussion, he had work to do and left me, as before, to my own devices to walk at leisure 
through the house, the gardens, and the studios. 

In the afternoon he held court for some young architects who had made the pilgrimage 
from the West Coast, and sat and talked at length of his early days in Chicago. It was quite 
impossible not to be moved by his charm and sincerity. The last memory I have of him is 
of leaving Taliesin for the plane at eight o'clock on a brilliant sunny morning when the 
desert was fresh and the cacti cast long shadows. He waved me off at the door of his office. 
"Good-bye," he said, "and be a good boy!" I felt somehow that had I been a man of 70 he 
would have still said that, and that one would not have taken offense. 


ROBERT L. ZIEGELMAN 

I contacted Mr. Wright, and he agreed to speak to the student body under one condition: 
the lecture was to be for students only; professors, spouses, and friends could not attend. 

Wright often lectured to students of architecture at universities across the country. These 
lectures were usually well attended by students and faculty alike. For the students, they 
tended to be special occasions indeed. 

In October 1957 Wright visited the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the 
University of Michigan. This visit was at the invitation of Robert L. Ziegelman [B. Arch., 
1958], who shares the following anecdote. 

{Robert L. Ziegelman's "Letter on Frank Lloyd Wright's Visit in October 1957" was 
originally published in Portico, Vol. 5, No. 3, Spring 1989. Reprinted by permission of the 
College of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Michigan; Robert L. 
Ziegelman, FAIA; and Philip B. Margelin.} 

At the time, I was a fifth-year senior and president of the Class of '58. My duties included 
responsibility for all lecturers coming to the Architecture School. I contacted Mr. Wright, 
and he agreed to speak to the student body under one condition: the lecture was to be for 
students only; professors, spouses, and friends could not attend. I, of course, agreed to this 
stipulation and posted the requirement along with the announcement of the upcoming 
lecture. 

A couple of classmates and I picked Mr. Wright up at a downtown Detroit hotel and had 
lunch with him at the house he had designed for William and Mary Palmer in Ann Arbor 
[page 95]. At the appropriate time, we proceeded to Room 215 in Lorch Hall. Every 
architecture student in the university was in attendance, as well as the entire faculty, and 
everyone's spouse and friend. There was one notable exception: my wife. 

She never forgave me. 


ALINE B. SAARINEN 

Then back to his bedroom-workroom, where he pulled toward him a skyscraperlike box 
with thin layers of cantilevered wood. In the core of each of the many "storeys" was a 
medal: he showed them off, commenting on the heaviness of the pure gold in the British 
RIA [Royal Institute of British Architects], the gaiety of the Mexican one, the de' Medici 
medal from Florence, an honor "Dante coveted." 

Aline B. Saarinen, wife of the architect Eero Saarinen, was an architecture critic and a 
friend of the Wrights. In August 1954 the New York Times published her account of a 
visit to Taliesin. 

{Aline B. Saarinen's "Taliesin Weekend: Frank Lloyd Wright, 85, Vitally Works On" 
appeared in the New York Times on August 8, 1954. Copyright � 1954 The New York 
Times Company. Reprinted by permission.} 


A dapper figure in white, from his flowing hair and immaculate suit to his socks and neat 
buckskin shoes, Frank Lloyd Wright walked debonairly into his living room. It was a 
sprightly entrance: his 85 years and one month sat lightly. 

The five expectant visitors-including two wide-eyed, T-shirted students from the 
Chicago Institute of Design and two respectfully silent Italian and American 
architects-made an intimate greenroom audience. This was prelude to the weekend's 
activities, when the entire Fellowship of about 60 apprentices would welcome "the Master" 
back, after a few weeks' absence, to Taliesin-"Shining Brow"-the house and buildings 
that sit on the hillside overlooking the lush green Wisconsin valley. 

Simultaneously he distributed the Los Angeles catalogs of his exhibition and the news that 
the building he had designed to shelter that show, along with the adjacent house he had 
built for Aline Barnsdall in 1913, would be permanently preserved as Los Angeles's first 
Municipal Center. 

But soon he warmed to the theme which was to sound like a threnody throughout the 
weekend: the loss of dignity in the architectural profession. His tone was haughty when he 
dealt with the denigrating rat race, but filled with humility when he spoke of architecture 
itself. 

"Architecture is a profession new in theory, not in practice," he said sternly. "The AIA let 
this happen. It should be a noble association of builders, men of ideas with respect for 
architecture in their own hearts as the greatest necessity, the highest need of a culture." 

Contemptuously he described many architects today scrambling after jobs "like donkeys 
with a bundle of grass dangled before them"; witheringly of how jobs are gotten through 
the influence and pressure of advertising agencies; scornfully of certain large firms as 
"plan factories." 

But then his mood mellowed, and he swept his guests into his bedroom-workroom [page 
173]. He showed the treasures he had brought back from New York, enhancing them with 
an agilely phrased commentary. 

There were splendid editions of prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige (smilingly, "Here, not in 
the International Style, 'less is more' is a virtue."); an austere Chinese seated figure 
("Rodin's 'Thinker' is a bit sentimental. This is really a thinker."); and a book on whose 
cardboard pages sections of a Chinese scroll had been pasted ("Look, look here at this 
palace. The terraces, the second floor when you went for this view with what is, I guess, 
the first picture window," unconcernedly ripping the pages apart. "Look how they did 
it-terrain, water, buildings, people, all one," then pulling at another page. "It's good to 
look at these lessons. They are so far from us you can't copy them."). 

At this point, Mrs. Wright, serene and stately, ushered the guests outside. Frank Lloyd 
Wright led the way through the profusely flowered inner court up the hillside, brandishing 
his cane as if it were "my extended forefinger," pausing to pose for a photograph and 
remark, "Oh dear, I've almost forgotten how to look arrogant!" stopping to ring boyishly 
the great Chinese temple bell on an enormous white oak. 

Thus summoned to his presence and to Saturday-night sweet punch, the apprentices 
appeared in groups of twos and threes. Some shyly, some reverentially, they paid their 
respects and then fell back. As dusk closed in, the architect led the procession down the 
hill into the main living room, expounding en route on such extraneous matters as the 
indestructibility of plastic drinking glasses, the cost of building the Guggenheim Museum, 
and the monogamy of swans. 

The flowing space of the living room seemed magically to contain the eighty-odd people 
in an orderly fashion as they ate at small tables. At dinner, prepared and served by several 
of the apprentices (who rotate the household and maintenance chores as a mandatory 
"privilege"), Frank Lloyd Wright talked to his guests of architecture. 

"Form follows function-that has been misunderstood," he said. "Form and function 
should be one, joined in a spiritual union." He mentioned a well-known architect. "He 
exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your 
entrails on top of your head." 

Then back to the theme of people shopping for architects. "As if you would telephone 
several doctors and ask each how he would treat you if he got the job," he said 
disdainfully. "That's what my mother does," one of the architect guests remarked. Mr. 
Wright's reply was rapid: "Then your whole family is depraved." 

There was breakfast in the main dining hall and then the Sunday morning 
"discussion"-at which Mr. Wright spoke exclusively. His talk was spontaneous but 
nonetheless peppered with epigrams. 

"Our new theater at Taliesin is an experiment, not experimental. Experiment-a man who 
knows certain factors to be true from experience and tries from there. Experimental-a 
man who is always interested in anything new no matter what it is. . . . An original idea in 
America is only good for the number of substitutes that can be born from it. . . . The heart 
is the chief feature of a functioning mind." 

He led the way to the new theater, explaining its ideas: the audience sitting on two sides of 
a 90-degree angle so everyone gets a three-quarter view of the performance: a wood 
floor with space beneath to act as a virtual drumhead, intended to give resonance without 
reverberation. 

Then back to his bedroom-workroom, where he pulled toward him a skyscraperlike box 
with thin layers of cantilevered wood. In the core of each of the many "storeys" was a 
medal: he showed them off commenting, on the heaviness of the pure gold in the British 
RIA [Royal Institute of British Architects], the gaiety of the Mexican one, the de' Medici 
medal from Florence, an honor "Dante coveted." 

We noticed a large Japanese scroll painting over a door. "People often ask why I, a modern 
architect, have so many old things around. Why not? I, too, belong to tradition-back to 
the oldest American architecture, that of the Mayans, and to the Japanese and others. All 
of them are brought into now." 

It was perhaps more than anything else the truth behind that statement that gives a 
Taliesin visit its special quality of enrichment. The buildings themselves-their design 
beginning in 1902 but announcing many principles and many of the details of modern 
architecture-and the man himself combine timelessness with contemporaneity. He 
belongs to the present, alive, vital, imaginative, and progressive, but in his work and in the 
standards and ideals he holds for his profession he is a link with the past. One feels all 
over again, both in the man and in his creations, a sense of neverending richness, 
potential, heart, and meaning. 


JOAN W. SALTZSTEIN 

I had first met Frank Lloyd Wright in 1930 at the University of Chicago, where I was a 
student and he a visiting lecturer. When I introduced myself as the granddaughter of 
Dankmar Adler, the architect with whom he had been associated in his youth, his face lit 
up, and in that warmly resonant voice he cried, "The Big Chief, your grandfather, how 
wonderful to find you! How is your mother? I must see her." 

Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, partners in the Chicago architectural firm of Adler 
and Sullivan, were Frank Lloyd Wright's employers in the early days of his career. Wright 
always had a particular fondness for Dankmar Adler. 

Joan W. Saltzstein, Adler's granddaughter, was a frequent visitor to Wright's home near 
Spring Green, Wisconsin-particularly during the early days of the Taliesin Fellowship. 

{Joan W. Saltzstein's "Taliesin Through the Years" originally appeared in Wisconsin 
Architect, Vol. XL, October 1969. Reprinted with permission.} 

It was in the thirties, the Depression years, that I first visited Taliesin East, Frank Lloyd 
Wright's lovely, peaceful Shangri-la at Spring Green, near Madison. Those were difficult 
times for Frank Lloyd Wright. He no longer had to face the confrontations with the 
authorities that had plagued the early years of his marriage, and his family life with his 
wife, Olgivanna, her little daughter by a previous marriage, Svetlana, and their baby, 
Iovanna, was tranquil and happy. But commissions were almost nonexistent, the creditors 
demanding, and public acclaim, at least in the United States, was slow in coming. 

I had first met Frank Lloyd Wright in 1930 at the University of Chicago, where I was a 
student and he a visiting lecturer. When I introduced myself as the granddaughter of 
Dankmar Adler, the architect with whom he had been associated in his youth, his face lit 
up, and in that warmly resonant voice he cried, "The Big Chief, your grandfather, how 
wonderful to find you! How is your mother? I must see her." 

It had been many years since he and my mother had met, but they had many delightful 
reminiscences to share of the Adler and Sullivan office in the old Borden Block, where, as 
a little girl, my mother used to stand at his elbow and adoringly watch him sketch, and he 
would give her little presents of paper clips and rubber bands to carry home. My mother 
followed his career with interest, but they did not meet again until I brought him to call on 
her that spring [1930]. Mr. Wright was in the process of writing his autobiography and 
was anxious to learn more about the personal life of his Big Chief. Soon we became 
frequent guests at Taliesin. 

By 1932 the Taliesin Fellowship was founded and students were enrolling in what Frank 
Lloyd Wright called a "direct work experience." That first year there were 23 apprentices 
working in the fields, gardens, and vineyards and helping to restore the long neglected 
buildings of the neighboring Hillside Home School that Wright had built in 1902 for his 
two aunts. Students came from all over the country and the world, willing to work with 
only limited time in the drafting room, for the privilege of sharing in this adventure with 
the man they considered to be the prophet of the new architecture. 

Eugene Masselink came among the first and stayed nearly 30 years, until his death, his 
own creative skills willingly sublimated to those of the Master. He was secretary, factotum, 
friend-a gentle, gifted, creative person. Many years later he was responsible for the icons 
in the Wright designed [Annunciation] Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa 
[Wisconsin]. Edgar Tafel, later to become one of the most successful of Wright's students, 
was there in those early years, and, for a short time, Edgar Kaufmann, whose father 
commissioned Fallingwater, the spectacular house constructed over a waterfall near 
Pittsburgh [page 131]. 

In 1932 William Wesley Peters arrived, a giant of a man who had to bend his huge frame 
to get through Taliesin's low doorways. Some years later he married Mrs. Wright's 
daughter, Svetlana, who, with one of their sons, met a tragic death in an automobile 
accident in 1946. Wes Peters went on to become a distinguished designer and the chief 
architect of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. 

There were girls in the Fellowship, too-a few as wives of the architects; others, like 
Cornelia Brierly, sharing the work both on the grounds and in the drafting room on equal 
footing with the men apprentices. 

Frances Coan joined the Fellowship in 1946, fresh from her job as acting director of the 
Milwaukee Art Institute. Her two children grew up at Taliesin. 

Those early years of the Fellowship were far from affluent ones. The students' tuition, 
which began at $650 and was later raised to $1,100, including board and lodging, barely 
covered expenses. Quite a few students who could not pay the full amount were enrolled 
anyway, because of their special ability. 

Lights were dimmed at 8:00 p.m. to save electricity. There was no outgoing telephone 
service and almost all food was homegrown and produced. There was no outside help of 
any kind, and the apprentices' day usually began at 5:00 a.m. But entertainment was 
plentiful. Students were expected to have some talents other than their ability as architects, 
and on Sunday nights the Fellowship String Quartet played in the living room, grouping 
themselves around the music stand that Mr. Wright had designed: four slanting wooden 
tracks surrounding a central lighted platform on which a bowl of flowers might rest. 

On Saturday nights neighbors and guests were invited to a movie in the theater at Hillside 
[pages 127, 128, and 182]. There was first a formal dinner for the Fellowship and guests, 
who were seated at small tables with gaily colored linens. The movies were usually foreign 
films, although the family had their favorite comedies and Westerns that were often 
repeated. Visitors were charged a dollar, and they came from nearby towns and from as far 
away as Madison. 

The story of the Fellowship had quickly become news, and, weekends, the curious would 
wind their way up the hill to see what was going on. It was decided to charge 25 cents a 
head to show them through the grounds, and the apprentices were allowed to keep what 
they collected. On Saturdays and Sundays they would station themselves on the hill 
overlooking the road so that they could spot and claim the cars as they drove in. 

There were always many children at Taliesin. The apprentices brought their families with 
them or married while they were there. The carriage house with its collection of old 
buggies and wagons that had been a part of the original farm was always a source of fun, 
and the windmill called Romeo and Juliet, which Mr. Wright had built for his aunts in 
1896 as his first architectural project, was a marvelous place for games of 
hide-and-seek. 

The annual Halloween masked ball became a tradition weeks-long in the planning, and 
the celebration of Mr. Wright's birthday on June 8 was a time for elaborate decorations, 
surprise gifts, and dance, music, and drama performances by the apprentices. 

Sunday picnics were a favorite recreation. Trucks would carry the supplies to selected 
spots, a fire would be laid, and pots of stew or corn and enormous bowls of homegrown 
tomatoes and lettuce would be readied. Gutzon Borglum Point was one of the popular 
spots, so named by the sculptor himself on one of his visits to Taliesin. Many celebrated 
guests came to Taliesin in those years, but there were also many lesser known people in 
whom Mr. Wright took an equal delight: a pixie of a woman who had written a book 
called Round the World on a Penny and who arrived with props, including a trunk on 
wheels; local masons, farmers, and carpenters; former pupils of the Hillside School; and 
others who asked to come. 

JOAN W. SALTZSTEIN: ". . .the windmill called Romeo and Juliet, which Mr. Wright 
had built for his aunts in 1896 as his first architectural project was a marvelous place for 
games of hide and seek." The Romeo and Juliet Windmill for Nell and Jane Lloyd Jones 
(1896) near Spring Green, Wisconsin. (Patrick J. Meehan) 

He loved to play with the children and there were always a few at his feet. 

Picnics were a gala event, and everyone was urged to dress accordingly. Mrs. Wright and 
Svetlana sometimes wore beautifully embroidered red suede jackets, and Iovanna a gaily 
decorated one from Mexico. Mr. Wright especially liked to see his wife in a large red hat 
that was particularly becoming to her, and the family resembled a royal procession as they 
came up the road to the picnic grounds, Mr. Wright in his flamboyant tweed cape, his 
beret and bright scarf, carrying a cane. After lunch everyone would rest under the trees or 
gather flowers for the house, Mr. Wright happily picking great armfuls. 

The house, with its beautiful living room dominated by a great stone fireplace, was the 
evening gathering place where Mr. Wright would often discuss his philosophy or we 
would listen to recordings on the Capehart phonograph. 

Sometimes the family and quests gathered in the smaller sitting room and Iovanna would 
peek down from her little room on the balcony above. She was her father's darling, and he 
admitted with pride that he spoiled her. His other children, frequent visitors to Taliesin, 
were all grown, with children of their own, and she was the adored child of his later years. 

Svetlana shared equally in his love. Gentle, dark-haired, and beautiful, she always 
seemed to be a uniting force at Taliesin. As a member of the family, an apprentice in the 
school, and a talented musician, she bound together all the elements that made up the 
Taliesin complex. When she was a little girl, she delighted in designing and making her 
own clothes. When her warm and glowing smile was gone, much of the light of Taliesin 
was forever dimmed. 

The first commission to break the Depression lull for the Fellowship was Fallingwater. It 
was followed by the administration building for the Johnson Wax Company in Racine 
[page 49]. 

Soon the huge drafting room, which the apprentices had rebuilt with their own hands at 
Hillside, was alive with activity. There were other commissions for the Johnson family, 
including Wingspread [page 131]. The huge Broadacre City plan, Mr. Wright's vision of 
an ideal city, was laid out on plywood and dramatically displayed in the small gallery next 
to the drafting room, where it still remains today [page 128]. 

Mr. Wright would talk about his work, explaining to his guests with great patience the 
plans, blueprints, and models. He made them feel that he was interested in them, in what 
they were doing and planning. When, in later years, I brought my family to see him, he 
would sit down with my children and talk to them as if they were as important to him as 
he to them. Fame had now come his way in full measure, and he seemed surprised to find 
himself swimming with the tide instead of fighting against it. 


EGON WEINER 

. . . deep down he was a modest man. Just look at his home at Taliesin. Instead of cutting 
down a tree, he built around it. He had a sensitive feeling to the creations of God. How 
could such a person be conceited? 

In the 1950s Egon Weiner sculpted a bust of Frank Lloyd Wright. The following passage 
is based on Weiner's own account of that experience. 

{"Weiner and Wright" was originally published in Inland Architect, Vol. XIV, May 1970. 
Reprinted with permission.} 

The intruder sat at the piano playing the Turkish March from Mozart's Sonata in A Major 
with Variations. Behind him suddenly he heard an impatient tapping. It was Frank Lloyd 
Wright striking his cane on the floor. 

The intruder was Egon Weiner, a vibrant Vienna-born sculptor who had finessed his way 
into Wright's Taliesin East home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With him he had brought a 
wood case with an unfinished bronze head of Wright. He was determined to finish the 
head. "I needed Frank Lloyd Wright himself to pose for me," Weiner recalls. "I would 
have gone disguised as the milkman!" 

Weiner, who teaches now at the Art Institute of Chicago, was given an "in" by a friend 
who arranged for him to be invited to Wright's home-but only by posing as an 
architecture student. 

The sculptor eagerly went up to Wisconsin, but had to walk the 20 miles from Madison 
carrying the heavy case, because a storm had washed out the roads. Wright was out when 
he arrived. 

"Once there," Weiner says, "I found the den, lifted the bust, and placed it on top of an 
imposing grand piano in the corner." Then he sat down to play the Mozart until he heard 
Wright's tapping. 

Weiner began to blurt out his reason for being there. Wright was just about to dismiss him, 
but looked at the sculpture. "All at once his face softened," Weiner says. "'That is a strong 
head,' he said. "'Very strong.'" 

Instead of throwing Weiner out, Wright invited him to stay around as long as necessary to 
complete the head. 

"By the way, sculptor," Wright said to Weiner while pointing to his own jaw, "was it 
exasperating working with this steel trap?" 

Weiner stayed at Wright's home to complete work on the head. Every morning for a week 
he and Wright met in the den. The very first morning Weiner found Wright sitting at the 
piano, playing powerfully. It was just what he wanted. 

"Don't movel!" Weiner said. 

"Hindemith?" asked Wright 

"Wright!" came the reply. 

Weiner completed the head in time for the great architect's 80th birthday, and in doing so 
reinforced his feelings about Wright's personality. "I have the impression that he had the 
inner dignity of an artist since his youth," Weiner says. "He didn't flatter people, and 
because of this some were against him. 

"But deep down he was a modest man. Just look at his home at Taliesin. Instead of cutting 
down a tree, he built around it. He had a sensitive feeling to the creations of God. How 
could such a person be conceited?" 


WILLIAM T. EVJUE 

I asked Mr. Wright about his concept of God. I asked this question in the midst of the 
flaming bougainvillea on the premises and the beautiful desert flowers which were 
beginning to appear. Mr. Wright said quickly, "Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to 
nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which 
nature has used in its domain." 

William T. Evjue was the editor of the Capital Times, a newspaper published in Madison, 
Wisconsin. Evjue was also a close friend of Frank Lloyd Wright. 

{William T. Evjue's "Two Men in Wisconsin Who Had Greatest Influence on Editor" was 
originally published in the Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) on June 9, 1959. 
Reprinted with permission.} 

In the 1930s Evjue invited Wright and his Taliesin Fellows to contribute to the Capital 
Times a series of newspaper columns called "At Taliesin"; these columns allowed Wright 
a regional forum for his ideas and opinions. Later, in the 1950s, Evjue afforded Olgivanna 
Lloyd Wright the same opportunity; the result was her "Our House" column. Evjue was 
also a staunch supporter of Wright's architectural projects in the Madison area, including 
the Monona Terrace Civic Center project of the late 1930s and the mid-1950s. 

Twice-in March 1958 and again in March 1959-I spent nearly five weeks at Taliesin 
West as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Wright. I rate these visits to Taliesin as among the 
greatest experiences of my life. 

We sat for an hour and a half at the breakfast table at times. At least three cups of coffee 
were poured while we discussed such subjects as the origin of the universe, the lack of 
culture in the United States, the persistence of war as the only method by which mankind 
could settle its disputes, the failure of education, the continued surrender of government to 
an alliance of big business and the military. There was also much talk in which the word 
organic was used. 

One morning at breakfast I asked Mr. Wright about the word organic. I said, "Mr. Wright, 
do you remember when we were on the Nakoma golf course years ago, after you had been 
invited to draw plans for a new Nakoma clubhouse? Do you remember that I asked you 
then to give me your definition of the word organic?" 

Mr. Wright had looked down the fairway on which we were standing, leaned over to pick 
up a handful of Nakoma soil, which he patted flat in the palm of his hand, and said, 
"That's what I mean when I use the word organic." 

It was about the time when he was contending that the United States should have a prairie 
architecture indigenous to its own soil and character, and that the use of the ancient forms 
of architecture in Italy, France, and England should not have priority in a great land like 
the United States. 

I asked Mr. Wright about his concept of God. I asked this question in the midst of the 
flaming bougainvillea on the premises and the beautiful desert flowers which were 
beginning to appear. Mr. Wright said quickly, "Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to 
nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which 
nature has used in its domain." 

Cassanova [Wright's dog] was there, too, and he stretched out in slumber as world 
problems were being solved at the breakfast table. 

Following Mr. Wright's death, the newspaper with which I am associated said: 

To Mr. Wright, nothing was more precious than freedom; nothing more hateful than the 
government or the social customs that bound the freedom of expressions and movements 
that he considered necessary to the development of human dignity. He fought his battles in 
the world of ideas; he never ducked a battle and never gave quarter. He despised the 
stupidity of war. It is in the world of ideas that his enduring monument will be found. His 
thought is part of the stream of human life and nothing but complete annihilation can 
remove it. 

There is nothing that can destroy an idea that has the power of truth and beauty. Frank 
Lloyd Wright gave the world some of those ideas, and he lived his life in the faith that 
only in leaving enduring ideas can man give the world a lasting heritage. 


BEN RAEBURN 

By 1950 I just about had the autobiography memorized. 

During a 1949 conversation with radio personality Mary Margaret McBride, Wright 
reflected briefly on his writing of An Autobiography: 

{Ben Raeburn's reminiscences first appeared in Publishers Weekly, July 25, 1977, 
published by R. R. Bowker Company, a Xerox company. Copyright � 1977 Xerox 
Corporation. Reprinted by permission.} 

I wrote that book that my little family might continue to eat. It was a purely defensive 
affair. I had never written a book and didn't want to write a book, but I thought that 
perhaps it was the only way I could get some money. . . . So I wrote the first An 
Autobiography under very trying circumstances . . . Well, I've read it recently 
again-portions of it-and I like a number of things in it." 

An Autobiography was first published in 1932. It was subsequently revised, and a new 
edition was published in 1943. For 16 years after that, Frank Lloyd Wright revised the 
book still further, and it was published once more in 1977, this time by Horizon Press. An 
Autobiography now stands as Wright's final effort to recount the experiences of his life 
and to make clear his revolutionary architectural philosophies. 

On the occasion of the third publication of An Autobiography, the magazine Publishers 
Weekly visited Ben Raeburn, president and editor of Horizon Press, in his office on lower 
Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Raeburn, who was Wright's publisher and close friend in the 
last years of his life, lit a cigarette as he reminisced about his association with Wright. 

"When I was in my early 20s," Ben Raeburn recalls, "I read one or two sentences that were 
quotes of Frank Lloyd Wright's. They were in the New York Telegram, I think. Wright 
said that the city will die unless it's decentralized." The quotes appeared sometime around 
1932, about the time the first version of the autobiography was to be published by 
Longman's, Green. Wright's words made a profound mark on the young Raeburn, who 
bought the autobiography as soon as it was published. As was his wont, Wright never 
ceased working, and he continued to rewrite and refine the published autobiography. In 
1943, Duell, Sloan & Pearce published the second version. 

"By 1950 I just about had the autobiography memorized," Raeburn comments now. 
Horizon Press was founded in 1951 and Raeburn's dream was to publish Wright's works. 
In 1952 he wrote the architect a letter, and apparently he composed it artfully, for Wright 
responded via telegram two days later. The following Sunday, Raeburn was summoned to 
the Plaza Hotel to meet Wright. The architect asked Raeburn why he should align himself 
with a fledgling publisher. Raeburn brashly said, "Because I know your work better than 
you do." Wright was soon convinced, and Horizon Press became his exclusive publisher. 

In 1953 The Future of Architecture was published, the first of the books by Wright to be 
published by Horizon. An Autobiography is the 17th title of his to appear from Raeburn's 
company. 

When Wright was alive, however, the autobiography eluded Raeburn. He knew that during 
the years after the second version had been released, Wright had not let up on revising the 
text. "It was not that mistakes needed correcting," says Raeburn, "but what concerned him 
was a constant clarification of his prose and his ideas of architecture." Working on a 
printed edition of the autobiography, Wright made linear alterations, crossing out words 
and sentences, adding new thoughts, reorganizing the material. He wrote in the margins 
and between the lines. (A facsimile of Wright's unorthodox manner of revision is reprinted 
as the front endpapers to the book.) 

"He did it all himself," Raeburn remarks. "He'd give it to me to read, and we would talk 
about what he might add." Early in 1959 (the year of his death) Wright handed the 
reworked autobiography to Raeburn, saying, "Here, Ben, it's yours." Raeburn put the 
manuscript in a vault. He felt hamstrung, he says, because the rights to the book were not 
his. 

At that time, rights to An Autobiography were still held by Duell, Sloan & Pearce. Later, 
Duell, Sloan & Pearce was no more, and the books under its imprint became a trade 
division of Meredith Press. In due course, the people at Meredith came to know the 
architect's widow, Olgivanna [Lloyd] Wright, and at last the property was relinquished to 
her and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. And then Raeburn received permission to go 
ahead. 

Not only does Horizon's edition of the work contain the entire book as originally published 
and subsequently emended by Wright, it also concludes with a section called "Broadacre 
City." It had been Wright's intention to append this to his autobiography. "Broadacre City" 
was first meant to be a pamphlet designed by Wright for his own use. It relates to his ideas 
of the future city, government, politics, and is much more a philosophical piece than the 
rest of the book. Photographs from the first 1932 edition are in the book (the 1943 version 
was unillustrated), as are additional photographs of Wright's work, even some taken after 
his death. 

Raeburn notes that there will be still other books: "There is no diminution of interest in 
Wright's work and thought," Raeburn says, snubbing out a cigarette. 


REV. JOSEPH A. VAUGHAN, S. J. 

When I returned the next morning, Mr. Wright was still hovering over the bed as if the 
dying man were his own son. 

The architect Francis C. Sullivan was a friend of Wright's who worked intermittently in 
Wright's studio at Taliesin. In the book The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His 
Midwest Contemporaries H. Allen Brooks writes: 

{"A Priest Tells of Wright" was published in the Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) on 
May 4, 1959. Reprinted with permission.} 

In 1916, at the age of 34, Sullivan found himself suddenly without work. . . . His health 
also failed. . . . In 1916 he had revisited Taliesin, where he worked on the drawings for the 
Imperial Hotel, but by 1917 he was back in Ottawa. . . . Again [in the late 1920s] 
Sullivan's health broke; he was operated on for throat cancer. Later Wright, himself beset 
with problems, mercifully took Sullivan to his winter camp, Ocatillo, in Arizona, and for 
over a year he remained with Wright, until his death in 1929. 

Following Wright's death in 1959, the Reverend Joseph A. Vaughan, S.J., recalled the 
occasion of Sullivan's death three decades earlier. 

About 30 years ago I was stationed at St. Francis Xavier Church in Phoenix, Arizona. A 
sick call came in from one of the many tubercular sanitoria scattered around the parish. As 
I entered the cabin, a distinguished looking gentleman in cardigan jacket and knickers 
welcomed me. A young man named Sullivan was lying in the bed. 

"Are you a relative of the sick man?" I asked. 

"No, Father, my name is Wright; I am working on a hotel in Chandler; this morning I was 
watching this man tottering with the weight of a wheelbarrow; suddenly he fell to the 
ground and spouted blood. So I picked him up and brought him here." 

Only late that night did it dawn on me that the good Samaritan was the internationally 
famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When I returned the next morning, Mr. Wright was 
still hovering over the bed as if the dying man were his own son. 

When Mr. Sullivan died about noon, Mr. Wright-there to the end-asked, "What do I do 
now, Father?" 

"Has he any relatives?" I asked. Mr. Wright answered that he had a wife in Chicago. I 
suggested that any mortician would ship the body. 

"I'll see it through, Father," said Mr. Wright. 

Did not Christ say something about a cup of water, etc., etc.? 


LOUISE MENDELSOHN 

My husband was greatly impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright-with his personality-greatly 
impressed. 

The German architect Eric Mendelsohn (1887-1953) initially visited Wright at Taliesin 
near Spring Green, Wisconsin, in November 1924. Wolf von Eckardt, in his book Eric 
Mendelsohn, reported on the visit: 

{Louise Mendelsohn's reminiscences were recorded in the late 1960s and were transcribed 
from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program "Frank Lloyd 
Wright: The World's Greatest Architect." Printed here by permission of Pacifica Radio 
Archive} 

Mendelsohn and Wright, it seems, agreed on the relationship between music and 
architecture but disagreed on American materialism. Mendelsohn defended his beloved 
Bach against Wright's partiality for Beethoven, and Wright defended his country against 
Mendelsohn's criticism. Since Mendelsohn spoke little English at the time, [Richard] 
Neutra, who was working with Wright, did the interpreting. He recalls that he 
considerably toned down both Mendelsohn's somewhat disparaging remarks and Wright's 
rather haughty retorts to the young German blade. "I am proud that my translating job 
cemented a lifelong sympathy between the two." 

The second morning of Mendelsohn's visit, a pleasant Sunday, was devoted to a walk 
along the Wisconsin River. According to the Swiss architect Werner M. Moser, who was 
also present, the smooth river bank tempted Wright to draw in sand, and he playfully 
suggested a contest. Mendelsohn, Moser remembers, drew one of his round, flowing 
fantasies, while Wright sketched an angular building, typical of his style at that time. 
Mercifully, there seems to have been no judgment to wreck Neutra's diplomacy. 

Wright and Mendelsohn became friends. Many years later Eric Mendelsohn's widow 
talked about her husband's opinion of Wright. 

My husband, was greatly impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright [in 1924]-with his 
personality-greatly impressed. I had the impression that they had much in common, very 
much in common their attitude toward architecture. He thought so highly of Frank Lloyd 
Wright-he thought he was the only great genius in all of America-an artistic genius. He 
always believed that there were great geniuses in [technology] and industry and all this, 
but not in an artistic way; and so he thought one should honor Frank Lloyd Wright. He 
suggested that [Wright take his work] to the Academy of Art; he had a heavy hand in this 
exhibition and [he] opened it. [The reaction among architects] was great interest [in 
Wright's work], great admiration. He was very much admired; he was actually much more 
known in Europe and in Germany and in Holland than [in] America. 


LEWIS MUMFORD 

One could not be in the presence of Wright for even half an hour without feeling the inner 
confidence bred by his genius. 

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was one of 20th-century America's premier social 
philosophers, historians, and urban-planning and architecture critics. He was a prolific 
writer-a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of more than 30 books. 
Influenced early in his career by the work of the English planner Patrick Geddes, 
Mumford became an advocate of creating regional cities with surrounding greenbelts as a 
solution to the congestion associated with today's cities. This was an idea not dissimilar to 
Wright's own philosophies. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters 
to Architects, states: "Lewis Mumford was the first American critic to see into the 
character of Organic Architecture, to perceive its significance, and to write well about it." 

The long, sometimes turbulent friendship between Wright and Mumford extended from 
about 1928 until Wright's death. Indeed, many of the characteristics inherent in both men 
were the source of the occasional turbulence in their relationship. The friendship was 
important enough to Mumford that he reflected upon it at some length in the later years of 
his life. 

{Lewis Mumford's untitled reminiscences were excerpted from his book Sketches from 
Life. Copyright � 1982 Lewis Mumford. Reprinted by permission of the Bantam, 
Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc. The titled reminiscences at the end of this chapter 
were transcribed from the 1979 film Lewis Mumford: Toward a Human Architecture, 
produced by Ray Hubbard Associates, Inc. Printed courtesy of Unicorn Projects, Inc.} 

I must say something about my encounters with Frank Lloyd Wright, that architect of 
genius who loomed so high above the American horizon between 1890 and 1950. In the 
twenties, when I became personally acquainted with him-indeed, before I had more than 
a fleeting glance at his buildings-his planet was in all but total eclipse. He was one of the 
handful of people I have known who, through the direct impact of their personalities, I 
would place at the same level as Patrick Geddes. Yet that very force, I must ruefully admit, 
remained at the end-as with Geddes-an obstacle to the deeper and closer attachment 
that both men at one time or another openly sought. 

Our first contact came about through my book Sticks and Stones, for Wright had written 
me, unexpectedly, an appreciative letter about it. At the time I wrote that book I was so 
little acquainted with Wright's buildings that I dared mention them only in passing. Even 
when in 1925 I had contributed a pathetically meager and tentative article on Wright's 
significance for Henric Wijdeveld's presentation of his work in Wijdeveld's Dutch 
architectural review, Wendigen, I still lacked even a literary acquaintance with Wright's 
work. But Wright himself opened the door to me; and he followed up his letter, in 1927, by 
inviting me to lunch with him alone in his favorite New York hotel, the Plaza. 

One could not be in the presence of Wright for even half an hour without feeling the inner 
confidence bred by his genius. Certainly it was no flattering appreciation of his work by 
me that had led him to seek me out. Nor had I approached him in turn with the handicap 
of being a worshipful disciple: we met under the sign of friendship, which erases 
distinctions and inequalities. There was, I found, a curious softness about Wright's face 
that somehow brought the word cornfed immediately to one's mind: a sort of family 
resemblance to Sherwood Anderson that increased my pleasure later when, at the 
Guggenheim Museum's big show of Wright's work, I discovered that while Anderson was 
still in a publicity agency in Chicago he had written the copy for an advertisement of a 
prefabriated house Wright had designed. 

Wright and I were never more friendly and at ease than we were at that first exploratory 
luncheon; he was disarmingly candid: almost painfully so, as sometimes happens more 
easily with a stranger than with an old friend or future associate. He confessed at the 
beginning that he was financially broke; indeed he had come to New York to find someone 
who would purchase his collection of Japanese prints, so as to stave off his 
ever-threatening creditors. But before long he was also unrolling the story of his second 
marriage, with the older woman who had rescued him from his desolation, indeed, 
restored him to life after that grim holocaust at Taliesin in which Mrs. Cheney, who had 
left her husband to live with Wright, was murdered with an ax wielded by a demented 
butler as she and her two children fled from the house he had set on fire. 

Wright survived the gruesome murder of his beloved mistress as he survived the shattering 
publicity that resulted from his later persecution by his second wife, who became an 
avenging angel when he left her for Olgivanna, his younger, final mate. None of the 
tragedies of his life, none of the harassing episodes that had followed, had corroded his 
spirit or sapped his energies: his face was unseamed, his air assured, indeed jaunty. Was 
he, then, lacking in sensitiveness or sensibility? Yes or no! More probably, I am driven to 
believe, his ego was so heavily armored that even the bursting shell of such disastrous 
events did not penetrate his vital organs. He lived from first to last like a God: one who 
acts but is not acted upon. 

Perhaps this explains why, for all the friendliness that developed between us, we never 
became intimate: strangely, neither of us ever saw the other in his own home, nor did we 
ever spend so much as a whole evening together in conversation. So I never had direct 
contact with the central creations of his family and working life: Taliesin East and 
Taliesin West. This was not for lack of good will on Wright's part-or on mine. In the 
early thirties he actually invited me to take up residence in Taliesin to help him run the 
school he had started there. This came after he had prudently withdrawn his earlier 
invitation to his admiring Dutch friend, Wijdeveld. With good reason, Wright suspected 
that "Dutchy's" ego and even his original talents in architecture, stage design, and 
typography were too insistently visible to blend with his own. 

Our relations were not merely friendly; in the early thirties, before I had begun to weigh 
Wright's work and his underlying philosophy more circumspectly, they were 
affectionate-as Wright's letters to me testify. But Wright could not understand my 
willingness to abandon my vocation as a writer to have the honor of serving his genius; 
and he was puzzled, almost nettled, over my unreadiness to break into my work at any 
given moment to be his guest. 

For all that, during the next dozen years I did my best to put forward Wright's name and 
extol his achievement, at a time when he was still being passed over for commissions only 
he could have audaciously filled-including the two world's fairs, Chicago in 1933 and 
New York in 1939. The failure then to turn even a single exhibition over to Wright, who 
was in every sense a great exhibitionist, was revelation of the limitations of fashionable 
taste in the thirties-both that of the exponents of the so-called International Style and 
that of Wright's more favored rivals, whose work now bears the derisory name of Art 
Deco. 

Though I never made an exhaustive firsthand study of Frank Lloyd Wright's entire work, I 
kept my eyes open for his buildings wherever I traveled, whether in Buffalo, Minneapolis, 
Los Angeles, or Palo Alto. And by good luck I had the opportunity to examine closely two 
of his most original structures-the Midway Gardens in Chicago [page 203] and the 
Larkin Building in Buffalo [page 46]-before both were torn down. The exuberance, the 
imaginative energy visible in these designs-even after the structures had been 
deserted-overweighed the chronic technical lapses and human oversights that had 
become as much a mark of Wright's character as is a mole on the cheek of a beautiful 
woman. 

With Wright's extravagant gestures, his princely airs, his confident dismissal of other 
historic architectural epochs, along with his open contempt for most of his peers-likewise 
his disgracefully unparental jealousy of younger followers as possible rivals-went an 
innate desire to dominate and subdue those around him. So after our early meetings, my 
relationship to him became one of wary mutual respect: the rebellious disciple who had 
refused to see the panorama of Edinburgh from Geddes's Outlook Tower through his 
master's eyes was equally rebellious, though smilingly so, when Wright reproached me at 
lunch for not following his example. He was pained, for example, one hot day, when I 
insisted on having my favorite Irish whiskey on ice rather than in plain water-or, at 
another time, for my not walking with my toes pointed outward-an old military style 
which Wright still favored against the more natural "Indian walk" of my generation! 

Yet Wright and I were both steeped in that part of the American tradition which had found 
literary expression in the culminating phase I had called the Golden Day: the period that 
found its voice in Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville, and that then, in the 
generation after the Civil War, found concrete expression in buildings, parks, and the 
suburban communities of Frederick Law Olmsted. For both Wright and me the source and 
exemplar of that indigenous culture was Emerson; and though our roots were in our native 
soil, we, no less than Emerson, drew spiritual nourishment from remote cultures and 
lands: Emerson himself from Persia and Brahmin India, Wright from the newly discovered 
architecture of the Aztecs and Mayans, I from China and pre-Platonic Greece. 

But if this common ancestry drew us together, between our conscious and political 
philosophies there were wide gaps. Like old Geddes, Wright demanded a complete, 
uncritical acceptance of his outlook and his way of life. To question his preeminence in 
any sphere was to become a defector. At an early stage I sensed that if our friendly 
relations became too close, I would surrender my right as a critic to pass an unfavorable 
judgment on any of his sacred beliefs or achievements. In certain vital places these 
differences in temperament and outlook went deep. So in time my relation to him was not 
a little like that of Chekhov to Tolstoy. In order to retain our admiration for the master, 
both Chekhov and I were forced out of self-respect to maintain a certain spatial and 
psychological distance. 

In the late thirties our different political views widened the gap between Wright and me; 
and over the issues raised by the Second World War, we, alas! inevitably parted company. 
Such fissures in friendship were not unusual then; for I lost more than one friend or 
associate, at least temporarily, through my militant opposition to Hitlerism and Stalinism, 
as well as to all other demoralizing later forms of dictatorship, including that of the 
Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission, the FBI, and the U.S. Central Intelligence 
Agency. And though I was able to remain friends with Robert Frost, who was as bitter an 
isolationist as Wright, this was possibly because we both discreetly smothered our 
differences in silence. 

To Wright's public denunciation of the handful of Americans like myself who at that time 
advocated active military resistance to Fascism and Nazism, I replied with a passionate 
counterindictment. In that crisis our friendship had come to an end; so much so that I did 
not open till years later the New Year's messages he continued to send me. But I smiled 
grimly when I received a greeting from him-sent at a time when there was a stringent 
paper shortage-in an envelope 18 inches long, containing a folded greeting on heavy 
paper twice the length of the envelope! During the early forties that insolent symbol 
seemed final. 

Happily, we came together again soon after Wright's great exhibition of his life work in 
Florence in 1950, the first of such choral triumphs punctuated by gold medals. He sent me 
a catalog inscribed, "In spite of all, your old F.Ll.W." When I saw this, I turned to Sophia 
and said, "I've just written a book in which I've said that without a great upsurgence of 
love we shall not be able to save the world from even greater orgies of extermination and 
destruction. If I haven't enough love left in me to answer Wright in the same fashion as 
this greeting, I'd better throw that book out the window." So I wrote him, repeating my 
words to Sophia; and he answered in his characteristically generous fashion by sending me 
an inscribed print of a winter scene by Hokusai. And neither of us referred to that breach 
thereafter. 

How consoling it would be to report that from this time on we drew closer, and that, as a 
by-product of our restored friendship, it would be I and not a young colleague, 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who would attempt the first definitive criticism of Wright's 
architecture, for by then Wright's imagination, released and exalted by the opportunities 
offered him after the Second World War, was enriching the vocabulary of modern forms. 
If at this time architecture had been my dominant concern, I might, perhaps, have been 
tempted to make such a study. But what had already happened to the world around us 
since 1935 made it clear by 1945 that, though Nazism had been undermined in the end by 
the delusions of its psychotic leaders, Hitler had nevertheless won the war. Well before the 
end, Nazism's methods had infiltrated the minds and plans of his enemies and had begun 
to dominate the science, the technology, and the politics of the so-called Nuclear Age. I 
did not think that architecture, as the favored masters of modern form still conceived it, 
would serve as an instrument in our salvation. But without such a change in the American 
political and moral climate, a closer relation with Wright would be impossible. By 1950 
we were each too firmly rooted in our individual allotments and commitments. 

My difficulty in doing complete justice to Wright's achievements in architecture was based 
on the fact that, the better I knew his work, the more I found in its whole span to 
admire-no one else could rival him in sheer fertility of imagination and constructive 
innovation-and the more I found to question in his unwillingness to admit, as copartners 
in shaping the design, his individual clients, the contributions of his disciples or rivals, or 
the communal traditions that support and enhance every work designed to meet the varied 
needs of life. Too often with Wright showmanship took precedence over workmanship, 
and dramatic originality often flouted tested experience. If, on my estimate of Wright's 
early buildings, the Cheney House shows Wright at his human best, was this perhaps, I 
have asked myself, due to the fact that in this building the client he passionately loved had 
an active influence over her lover's design? 

My reservations about Wright's most characteristic insignia came to a head in my response 
to the retrospective exhibition held on the site of the still unbuilt Guggenheim Museum, in 
a temporary building Wright himself designed. In viewing his whole life's work, I now had 
the good fortune to have Wright himself as my commentator and guide. But in seeing his 
life, so to say, spread before me, with his voice as a persistent undertone, I realized as 
never before how the insolence of his genius sometimes repelled me: notably in his 
transforming the tempting site of Pittsburgh's Triangle, a hillside plot formed by the 
dramatic juncture of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, into a typically Wrightian 
"fun" area. That exhibitionistic idea was hardly more worthy of so grand a site than the 
unplayful mass of mediocre buildings later erected there. 

Despite all such doubts and reservations, what remained, what indeed dominated this 
exhibition was, for me, still magnificent: so rich, so resourceful, that it seemed the work 
not of a single individual over a limited period of time but almost of a whole culture, over 
a century-long span. Not merely that, but Wright had met and conquered his rivals at 
their own game. In Fallingwater, designed for Edgar Kaufmann [page 131], he had created 
a dynamic multidimensional composition that made Le Corbusier's buildings seem flat 
cardboard compositions; while in the Johnson Wax Laboratory at Racine, Wisconsin [page 
49], he had experimented with untried glass forms that made Mies van der Rohe's blank 
glass facades blanker than ever. So I spelled out my critical evaluation of Wright's oeuvre 
in two New Yorker Sky Lines: the first favorable, the second tempering my praise with 
questions, though seeking to do justice, in spite of Wright's belligerent Americanism, to 
his truly universal bequest from other cultures and other ages. 

Wright read my first article in a plane; and he became so angry about it that he then and 
there wrote me a letter that trembled with rage as if from some mechanical vibration. His 
references to me were all in the third person-"He says that"-as if it were a Letter to the 
Editor. To settle matters, he dismissed me-whom he had once put on a par with his 
favorite writer, Emerson-as a "mere scribbler," an "ignoramus"; and he was sure, he said, 
that his clients would rise up in their wrath to denounce me. This looked like the second 
end of our friendship. 

When I answered him promptly, I told him that I respected his greatness too much to 
belittle it by sweetening my critical appreciation with undiluted praise; and that I had 
written about him in the same unsparing manner in which I had written in Green 
Memories about my young son's life, out of admiration and love. When I reached the end 
of the letter, I was about to sign it in my usual fashion, but a sudden impish impulse 
prompted me to sign it instead in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright himself: "With all 
respect and admiration, as from one Master to another, Ever yours . . ." 

Wright tacitly accepted that explanation and that declaration of equality. At all events, he 
made no comment on my second article, despite its unsparing severity. Possibly in the 
meantime too many of his admirers had praised my first article as a fine tribute to his life 
and work-which it actually was. 

At the end, alas! I missed my final chance for a warm reconciliation with Wright when he 
invited me to take Robert Moses's place at a dinner in Chicago where Wright himself was 
to be the chief speaker. As usual, I was reluctant to break into my work; but I had already 
drafted an acceptance when a closer reading of the invitation made me realize that this 
dinner was part of an effort to launch Wright's design for a "Skyscraper a Mile High." In 
that project all of Wright's egocentric weaknesses were crystallized in an ultimate fantasy, 
conceived as if by a lineal descendant of Kublai Khan. What a monument of futility-even 
more absurd, humanly speaking, if that were possible, than the later World Trade Center 
in New York. Naturally, I could not lend myself to a proposal that violated every canon of 
Wright's own conception of an organic architecture, as well as my own. If this was what 
old age had done to Wright, I had no desire to exalt his mummified remains. 

Not a long while after this I was scheduled to give a public lecture at the University of 
Pennsylvania, where I was then Ford Research Professor; but up to the last week I had 
hesitated to choose the theme of the lecture. Almost at the last hour, the theme announced 
itself. The news of Wright's death came to me that morning. On approaching the old 
building of the School of Design I saw that the flagpole above the entrance showed the 
American flag at half-mast; around the mast itself the students had suspended black 
streamers of mourning. The students' swift response touched me, and I realized that there 
was only one possible subject for the lecture that night-Frank Lloyd Wright's life and 
work. 

Though I have given many extemporary lectures, good and bad, I can remember only two 
in which all the deeper resources of my experience as well as self-knowledge were 
brought to bear. One of them was to a small class in biography at Dartmouth, under 
Professor Arthur Wilson: my subject was Vincent van Gogh. And the other, even fuller, 
profounder, and infinitely more audacious, was this lecture on Frank Lloyd Wright. In it I 
did something like justice to both his actual and his potential greatness; and at the same 
time I related his work to the vicissitudes of his personal life; and not least to the insidious 
temptations to which his success alike as a creative architect, as an outstanding public 
figure, as a seminal personality, had laid him open. 

Speaking to the young audience, especially about their future careers in architecture, I 
pointed out that Wright's expansive ego, his own uncritical self-love, his naive 
self-righteousness had made him too lenient toward his own weaknesses and errors, and 
too ready to transfer self-reproach to a hampering family, to jealous rivals, to 
unscrupulous imitators, to inefficient or recalcitrant workmen, to unimaginative clients. 
While he preached "democracy," his practice was that of a Renaissance despot; for he built 
himself into every building, and even in the intimacies of the marital bedroom of the 
Hanna House, Wright's presence was inescapable. What is more, he regarded the minimal 
modifications necessary to meet practical exigencies he had not foreseen as an insult to his 
genius. 

Though I never favored Walter Gropius's ambitious concept of "total architecture" in this 
increasingly totalitarian world, I must admit that my Wright lecture came near to being, in 
quite another sense, "total criticism," since I did not spare myself any more than I spared 
Wright. As with my van Gogh talk, there is no record of what I actually said: not so much 
as a penciled scribble. And even if the words had been recorded on tape, the lecture itself, 
with its passion, its exuberance, its harassing search for truth, likewise in my 
self-exposure and self-criticism, which underlay the very words I addressed to Wright, 
would all be missing. This was not a psychoanalytic diagnosis: it was a dramatic act, set 
within the vast theater of Wright's own genius. If that was not to be my last word on Frank 
Lloyd Wright, it deserved to be. And the highest honor my own life could possibly receive 
would be to serve as the subject for such a drastic, ego-transcending performance by a 
mind capable of meeting my work on equal terms-"As from one Master to another!" 


ON THE DIFFICULTY OF TALKING ABOUT WRIGHT 

It is difficult for me to talk with complete objectivity about Wright and to say all the 
negative things that I have observed and could dwell upon because we were friends. From 
the moment that he read The Golden Day, which came out in 1926, and wrote me a letter. 
. . . he saluted me as the real successor of Emerson. He could give no higher praise. 


ON WRIGHT'S CREATIVE MIND 

Wright was undoubtedly the most creative mind we have had in architecture. He could 
have created a dozen possible styles, all more or less in harmony with the life that we'd 
like to live in this culture, but that only a few, of course, can ever achieve. There is no 
doubt about the quality of his imagination. 


ON WRIGHT'S DESIGN FOR THE HANNA RESIDENCE 

I lived there [in the Hanna residence] for a week. Well, one learns a great deal about a 
house by living [in it] for a week. I learned a great deal about the Hannas, a great deal 
about Frank Lloyd Wright, and something about myself as well by living there. Outwardly, 
it's a very successful building [page 209]. [It is] beautifully sited on a hill and with a good 
landscape around it, with an excellent view from the main living room and from the bigger 
social room that adjoins the main room. [It] shows Wright, in some ways, at his very 
best.... 

On the other hand, he was not merely a man of genius but he had the effect of a genius, an 
overwhelming ego and an arrogance in thinking that his way of life was the only way of 
life, that what he wanted was right for everyone else. 

There was one part of him that had a great feeling for abstract form. In the Hanna House 
he seized upon the hexagon as a module for every room. Every room was to have six sides 
to it, not four. As a matter of fact, that's a much less adaptable room than a four-sided 
room given the equivalent amount of space. He was so rigorous in his logic that once he'd 
used a hexagon he kept on using it for every part of the house . . . [except] in an inner 
room, like the kitchen, which he made as much as possible like that of a drugstore lunch 
counter. In the bedroom, of course, you notice first of all the weakness of the hexagonal 
plan. The original beds he supplied had to be made to order, and they had to be made on 
hexagonal principles to fit with a hexagonal wall. Therefore, it had a very interesting 
effect on marital relations between husband and wife. Because the husband and the wife 
didn't sleep on the same level, and that was the least of it. As the house-keeper, Mrs. 
Hanna was faced with the problem of getting special sheets made to order that could be 
used on a hexagonal bed. Finally, after living in the house for awhile, they threw out the 
hexagonal beds and introduced two comfortable beds, side by side, where a decently 
married couple could enjoy all the pleasures of domesticity without one of them being out 
of reach of the other. This kind of arbitrariness on Wright's part was one of his great 
failings. 


Family 

OLGIVANNA LLOYD WRIGHT 

His whole life was truth, he was truth. 

Olga Iovanovna Lazovich Hinzenberg married Frank Lloyd Wright on August 25, 1928. 
She was his third and last wife. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright was born in Cetinje, Montenegro 
(now a part of Yugoslavia), in 1898. She was the daughter of a chief justice of the 
Montenegran Supreme Court. Her grandfather, Duke Marco Milianov, was a celebrated 
Balkan general and national hero. Olgivanna and Frank Lloyd Wright had one child 
together, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Together they also established the Taliesin Fellowship in 
1932. Following Wright's death, Mrs. Wright became the president and chairman of the 
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. 

In 1980, five years before her own death, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright was interviewed by 
James Auer. It is interesting to note that at the end of the interview, Mrs. Wright alludes to 
the autobiography she is writing. As of the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright 
Remembered, Mrs. Wright's autobiography remains unpublished. 

{James Auer's "Mrs. Wright Talks About the Man" was published in the Milwaukee 
Journal on August 24, 1980. Reprinted with permission.} 

JAMES AUER: Mrs. Wright, your husband was a man of genius and of many contrasts. Is 
there any way he can be summed up in a word? 

OLGIVANNA LLOYD WRIGHT: His whole life was truth, he was truth. 

AUER: He never dissimulated? 

WRIGHT: He did not conceal, he spoke as he believed. At the same time he had the ability 
to bring everybody to his level. He could talk to a 15-year-old or to a 70-year-old 
person with the same equality. I personally believe that to be a rare ability. People always 
try to gauge; he never gauged. Anything he said was absolute truth. 

What he accomplished is what is most important. As to his contrasting experiences, that is 
another matter altogether. He was a complex individual, and you cannot very well 
categorize him on any particular grade or level of life. 

AUER: Why can't you? 

WRIGHT: Because he is beyond those categories. For instance, his communion with 
nature was of such tremendous understanding-it seemed as though they were one, as 
though nature favored him and always gave him dramatic scenes. He told me that on the 
night he was born a terrible storm raged in Richland Center, Wisconsin. I said, "That's 
why your life, and mine with you, is stormy but interesting." 

AUER: He unified many gifts within himself, didn't he? 

WRIGHT: He was incredible. To describe him in any kind of conventional language seems 
an impossibility. Whatever he did, he did well-he was an avid reader, a wonderful 
speaker, a marvelous skater. He rode horseback as if the horse and he were one. 

AUER: His propensity for straight talking sometimes got him into difficulty, didn't it? 

WRIGHT: Yes, indeed it did. Great difficulty. He had many enemies because people were 
jealous or they did not understand him. If they really understood him, they would have 
supported him in his work. Only later in his life was he recognized by the intellectuals of 
the world as the great leader in living architecture-not dead architecture, but a living 
organism as Taliesin is-a living, breathing organism. 

AUER: How did he see his relationship to the environment? 

WRIGHT: He believed the influence of environment to be extremely important. No matter 
how low a man might feel, as everyone does at times, going back to his home he will be 
regenerated if that home has a harmonious atmosphere. 

AUER: Do you feel that architecture as a whole has improved as a result of Mr. Wright's 
life? 

WRIGHT: Yes, very much so. Architecture the world over has profited by his work, 
notwithstanding the truth that no other architect can possibly be on his level. He despised 
imitation-that was a falsehood to him. He said, "I hate to go around and see my own 
regurgitations. Why can't they do something with a little inspiration? I want people to be 
inspired, not to be imitators." 

AUER: Were other architects inclined to imitate the superficials of his life without 
accepting his principles? 

WRIGHT: Life is difficult; an architect has a wife and children to support. Sometimes he 
feels he must compromise simply to get the job. If he has been related in some way 
intellectually or emotionally to Frank Lloyd Wright, he will feel bad about the work he has 
done. Whenever I came across this instance, the architect always told me, "I had to do it." 

My husband felt very different about the same situation. When a young architect explained 
to him that he went against principle in a building he designed because he "had to earn his 
living," Mr. Wright would ask, "Why? If you cannot build buildings that are honest, then 
go and get a job digging ditches to support yourself." 

As to people who were of an older generation, there were very few that understood him. He 
mainly gave his inspiration to the young, hoping to establish a wonderful basis for them, 
which I try to carry on here at Taliesin, developing real architects. 

AUER: Are you pleased with what your students have produced over the years? 

WRIGHT: With some, yes. With others, no. It is the same as in everything else. Some 
have gone out and done very well. They have become successful without having to sell 
down the river this principle of integrity in building. 

There are architects who build on fine principles. We have trained many. They frequently 
return to visit us as to Mecca, in order to refresh themselves, to remember once more their 
youth at Taliesin and their experiences here. 

AUER: What was Mr. Wright's reaction to new building materials? Did he welcome them? 

WRIGHT: As civilization moves on, there come new materials such as steel, concrete, 
reinforced concrete, metals. Glass had existed as a material for centuries, but with the 
modern method of rolling it into large sheets, my husband saw it as a totally new material 
and used it accordingly. He used every material in the nature of its innate 
characteristics-stone, wood, brick, steel, textiles. 

He combined materials such as canvas and glass in a most beautiful way in our Taliesin 
West [pages 139, 149, and 150] on the Arizona desert. This might be rather difficult for 
some people to understand, but he made a beautiful combination of the two. He later 
replaced canvas with acrylic materials as they were developed. Whatever worthwhile new 
building products were being manufactured, he put into use in his buildings. If he were 
designing today, he would be using plastics, vinyls, and other materials in a harmonious 
way. He said that architecture is not just sticks and stones. It is much more than that, and 
he was able to put the breath of life in everything he built. 

AUER: Then he drew much from his study of nature? 

WRIGHT: Yes, he most certainly did. There was a bond between the two of them. 

He believed in moving with the time, but at the same time he was timeless. As you know, 
his buildings today are still 50, 100 years in advance of anything else that is being built. 

AUER: They're buildings like no one else's. 

WRIGHT: Yes, he showed that he knew how to make everything sing. His work always 
had a melody or was like a symphony. Take this house, Taliesin, for example-or any 
house that he has designed-it sings. His architecture is many-dimensional architecture, 
including the people, the terrain, the site, the sky, the climate-everything that goes into 
it. 

AUER: Do people experience a spiritual dimension, living with the architecture Mr. 
Wright created? 

WRIGHT: That would naturally depend upon the people themselves. But I personally 
believe that the world is filled with people who have some creative substance in them. 
They might be business executives or they might be humble laborers and workmen-it 
doesn't matter in what strata of society they are placed. A very humble farmer, living the 
hard way, came into Taliesin and said, "Mr. Wright, you live like a king." My husband 
was always pleased when things came to him from so-called "ordinary" people. Of 
course, no one ever admits to being ordinary, and there really is no such thing as an 
"ordinary man." I believe that to be true. 

AUER: He seems to exist in his buildings? 

WRIGHT: Yes, his presence is permeating everything. How can it be otherwise? He built 
every building with love. Once a client said to me, "Mr. Wright's buildings are-mystical. 
I believe Mr. Wright is a mystic, but he does not know it!" 

AUER: You are a mystic, are you not, Mrs. Wright? 

WRIGHT: How do you define "mystic?" That you live in another dimension? Yes, I 
believe that people either realize or fail to realize that a force exists which is superior to 
ours. If we believe in and adhere to that force instead of our purely animal natures, the 
whole body can be illumined by it. You ask difficult questions. 

AUER: You've been interested in metaphysics for a long time, haven't you? 

WRIGHT: I would not call it metaphysics. For me it started in my childhood in Europe. 
My whole life was very difficult from the typical life of the times. My father, who was 
blind, developed in me a great sense of deeper values. I always wondered how he could be 
so self-contained in the face of such a dreadful tragedy that all of a sudden struck him 
and deprived him of his eyesight. I was with him a great deal of the time and read to him 
whatever he wanted-newspapers, literature, poetry. Through that training, through 
reading books, through hearing him speak to me about the ballads and fairy tales of 
Montenegro, my native country, I grew somehow to believe that although information may 
be useful, it is interior content that is significant. 

AUER: It was your father, then, who planted in you the seeds of intellectual curiosity? 

WRIGHT: Yes, all that mixture made me interested in ideas. I read Nietzsche, I read 
Schopenhauer, I read Kant, I read Santayana-I read all the philosophers and studied all 
the philosophies. I wanted to discover how to achieve and develop these deeper qualities as 
a living part of my life. 

AUER: How did you happen to visit Taliesin? Had you known of it before? 

WRIGHT: Yes, I had met Mr. Wright in Chicago, and later he asked me to visit Taliesin 
here in Wisconsin. My life, in a worldly sense, started then. He told me, "Olgivanna, from 
this time on you won't be seen for the dust." He was right! It was a very stormy, difficult, 
and yet wonderful life. And I would not trade it for anything, ever. But now you are asking 
me questions which I am answering in my autobiography. Do you think it is fair that I tell 
you that which I am writing? 

LLOYD WRIGHT 

He was an archindividualist. The individual came first, last, and all the time. And I 
understand why now, as time passes and my experience enlarges in life; it is 
all-important. 

Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's eldest son, was born in Oak Park in 1890 and grew 
up in the environment of his father's Oak Park studio. As a boy Lloyd Wright occasionally 
worked for his father, and in 1910 he accompanied him and Taylor Woolley on a trip to 
Europe to help in the preparation of Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd 
Wright, also known as the Wasmuth portfolio. 

Lloyd Wright became a distinguished architect in his own right. Among his projects were 
the Swedenborg Memorial Wayfarer's (1946-71) Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, 
California, and two designs for the Hollywood Bowl (1924-25 and 1928) in Hollywood, 
California. During the 1940s and 1950s he collaborated with his father on several 
architectural projects in California. 

In October 1977 Lloyd Wright spoke at a conference entitled "An American Architecture: 
Its Roots, Growth, and Horizons" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time Lloyd Wright was 
already in his late eighties, and his voice and tone were strongly reminiscent of his 
father's. Eric Lloyd Wright, who is also an architect, assisted his father on this occasion. It 
was one of Lloyd Wright's last public appearances; he died of a stroke, following a bout 
with pneumonia, on May 31, 1978, in Santa Monica, California. 

{Lloyd Wright's reminiscences in the second part of this chapter were recorded in the late 
1960s and were transcribed from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio 
programs "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Outspoken Philosopher" and "Frank Lloyd Wright: 
The Shining Brow." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio Archive.} 

LLOYD WRIGHT: Now this is going to be too much off the cuff. I like the freedom of it 
and I need it. We all should have it. Winston Churchill was once asked, "Have you any 
geniuses in your country?" And he said, "Yes, one, Frank Lloyd Wright." So there now 
I've said it. You've asked me to talk about a genius-my father. And I shall do so-Wright 
on Wright. 

He was an archindividualist. The individual came first, last, and all the time. And I 
understand why now, as time passes and my experience enlarges in life; it is 
all-important. I used to think [the individual] was supposed to be 
self-centered-nothing of the sort. You couldn't begin to commence in architecture until 
you recognize the individual, and his quality is the essential matter. 

As time has gone on, [my father's] presence has become stronger. . . . His contribution has 
not yet been fully understood or comprehended, certainly not by his peers, the architects. 
I'm sorry to say they're awful backsliders in their recognition of this man's genius, 
capacity, and contribution. I won't explain why, all you need to do is research it yourselves 
and then try to help others see it for the good of the community, which is a unique 
one-that is, the new world of the U.S.A. to which he contributed so much. 

About 20 years ago he gave a talk to the USC in which he said, "I don't usually name my 
talks, they're usually ad-lib, but tonight I'm going to name it: 'What is the matter with 
America?'" America, whom he loved very much and for whom he had great respect and 
much concern. What is the matter with America? Twenty years later, what he said came to 
fruition in the Watergate, etc. America was losing its original courage and honesty, and it 
still is. It's a great shame. I think we're facing up to the question now more clearly than we 
have heretofore for decades. But we're still not answering the question, and we still have to 
find our original courage and honesty. 

The schools, unfortunately, do not seem to be able to help us. The academic runaround, 
bureaucracy, gets in the way. In this connection, and in connection with our performance 
in our professional fields, there are many, too many, coattail riders. I believe you 
understand what I'm referring to, and I don't want to waste time going into details which 
you're already aware of. 

I would like to tell you a little story. It isn't a story, it's a real experience of mine and my 
father's on the West Coast. He had finished the Imperial Hotel [page 241]. He had 
employed [Rudolph M.] Schindler and [Richard] Neutra to assist him; not so much Neutra 
as Schindler. And after he had returned [from Japan] and gone into the business on the 
Coast, these two, whom he had taken under his wing-because of troubles in Europe-and 
given jobs for several years, taking in their families, decided that they were geniuses, or at 
least that they were great architects-they had each built one building. They opened an 
office on Wilshire Boulevard, and they posted in the front of it three photographs: one of 
each of them on either side of Frank Lloyd Wright. And they proclaimed themselves the 
coming modern architects to the good U.S.A. Father heard about it, and he took with him 
Lewis Mumford. (You all know Lewis Mumford, or [have] heard of him. He's still 
alive-he'll verify this tale.) Father was fit to be tied. He didn't like that kind of thing. But 
Mumford came to his assistance and said, "Cheer up, Frank, Christ was crucified between 
two thieves!" 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter and applause] 

WRIGHT: So that was part, and is part and parcel of our problem today. And the sooner 
we face up to it, the better and the sooner we can take care of it. 

The Swedenborg for whom I built a retreat [Wayfarer's Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes] 
for the tourist-the passing man-had already formed and recounted and described the 
philosophy which I had understood. I hadn't understood that my father had been working 
with it and that it was his credo, too. I hit it on the head anyway, because I had been 
prepared for it by the man who understood it-Frank Lloyd Wright. Transcendentalism at 
its best, and it's still at work. We're going to have the day when we see as clearly as these 
two men saw, and as they worked with it, and as we in time, and in due course, [will] do 
the same. 

My son says it's about time for us to take questions from the audience. So we'll try-we 
have a little time. Where do I get one? You'll have to talk up because my hearing isn't 
good. 

QUESTIONER: Can you tell us something about the [Frank Lloyd Wright] Studio and 
House in Oak Park and what it was like to grow up in that house? 

WRIGHT: It was a very exciting experience. I must say so, all the time, and in all ways, 
and we had a large family-there were six children. There were also clients. And there 
were contributions which my father was making to the culture of our nation. It was very 
involved. It couldn't have been more interesting or more vivid. 

My father furnished us up with a beautiful room that brought to life the cultures of other 
nations-Japan, Germany, every part of the world. My mother took care of kindergarten 
groups from the neighborhood for years in that beautiful room-the playroom we called it. 

QUESTIONER: Did your father plan your career like his mother planned his? 

WRIGHT: If he did, he didn't let me know about it! 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

WRIGHT: Any more [questions]? 

QUESTIONER: Yes, Mr. Wright. When your mother was teaching you and other children 
in the playroom, did she use the Froebel toys? [It should be pointed out that the questioner 
was the former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.] 

WRIGHT: She certainly did, and if we didn't use the Froebel toys we made them "� la 
Froebel." The geometry of the Froebel system was essential to this transcendentalism, and 
the playroom floors, and the figures, the patterns on the floors and movement of the 
dancers, all of it [was] a coordinated, rhythmic concentration and discipline which we 
need now just as much as then, and which, maybe someday, we'll get generally in the 
education system. But we haven't got it yet. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, what is your comment on the apprenticeship training of your 
father? How were young architects trained in the studio in Oak Park? How were they 
trained when they came to work for him? 

WRIGHT: They weren't trained in the studio in Oak Park in the aesthetics; they learned 
from actual work on the project with him, as a pencil in his hand. That's what they came 
to him to do-be a pencil in his hand-and that's what he insisted on them being. He had 
no intention of formally educating them in any cultural development except as they found 
it out in the process with which he was involved and in which he involved them. 

QUESTIONER: How is it that you have applied yourself to architectural work? Are you 
still active? 

WRIGHT: Every moment of the day and night. 

QUESTIONER: What is your most recent project? 

WRIGHT: Well, there is one that fascinates me. It is a desert project to utilize what is 
known as wasteland, where the sun is its essence-sun power, solar energy. These 
magnificent deserts of ours on the West Coast are the center of my present interest, and 
they're most fascinating. They are getting their energy from the sun and converting it. 
They're the areas to drain, and I hope we can make them a suitable environment for 
humanity. 

QUESTIONER: I wonder if you can comment on Taliesin West and on what the people 
are doing out there. What I mean by that is replacing your father's two-by-two blocks 
with styrofoam blocks painted like wood, and the tract homes they have designed out 
there. 

WRIGHT: I think they are trying their best to follow his directions and his lead. 

QUESTIONER: What about the tract homes they designed? 

WRIGHT: Well, I haven't been critical of their work or their effort-that's theirs. You ask 
them! 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

QUESTIONER: I read your book several years ago. Do you know if that's still available? 

ERIC LLOYD WRIGHT [answering for Lloyd Wright]: What book are you referring to? 

QUESTIONER: My Father Who Is On Earth. 

ERIC LLOYD WRIGHT: That was by my father's brother, John Lloyd Wright. John 
passed away about two years ago. The book is not available unless you can find it in a used 
bookstore. I don't think it's been reprinted. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, what to you is your own greatest accomplishment? 

WRIGHT: To stay with this problem. 

AUDIENCE: [Loud applause] 

QUESTIONER: I understand, Mr. Wright, that you introduced your father to Alfonso 
Iannelli. 

WRIGHT: I did. I found a kindred soul in Alfonso in Los Angeles, and we spent nights 
and days together in his workshop on Spring Street. I saw a mark of genius there which I 
recognized and which was familiar to me. My father was building the Edelweiss Center 
[i.e., Midway Gardens in Chicago; see page 203] at that time, and I recommended that he 
get Iannelli to help him with the figures. Iannelli was having trouble getting the kind of 
stylization he needed. Dicky Bock [the sculptor Richard Bock] at that time had been doing 
things, but it was a little too much for Dicky-it was too abstract. And so Iannelli came on 
and never returned-he remained in Chicago. Iannelli and I were very close indeed. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, when you were growing up, did your father talk about his 
experiences on the Eastern seaboard when he was a child? 

WRIGHT: No. No, he didn't. He never referred to that. I think because of his mother, who 
didn't like to discuss it. It was painful for her, so he never talked about it to us. Now I still 
must visit Richland Center and acquaint myself with more of the details of that 
background, because it is important to me and to all of us. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, do you remember your grandmother? 

WRIGHT: Oh, quite well-she was a very strong woman! 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

QUESTIONER: Did she have the same perfected diction that both you and your father 
have? 

WRIGHT: Oh, I think that the diction was extremely clear-I never had any difficulty 
understanding it! 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

WRIGHT: And I loved her. But she was very definitive. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, was there ever any tension between your mother and your 
grandmother? 

WRIGHT: Well, there would naturally be . . . My grandmother had very definite opinions 
as to what she wanted to do; and my young mother, naturally, had her own concepts, 
which were not the same. 

QUESTIONER: Do you have any favorites among the works of your father? Did he ever 
express to you whether he did any work that he considered his best? 

WRIGHT: Yes, every time he built a building it was particularly great! 

AUDIENCE: [Loud laughter] 

QUESTIONER: Do you have any favorites? 

WRIGHT: No, I can't play them in my work or his. They're all different. They're all 
dealing with different situations, environmental and otherwise. And so they're not really 
comparable. Any other questions? 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, did you ever meet Louis Sullivan? 

WRIGHT: Yes, several times. 

QUESTIONER: Can you tell us something about that? 

WRIGHT: It was a great experience. My father saw to it that I saw him soon before he 
died. We had a luncheon at the Tip-Top Inn in Chicago. [It was] very moving. He was a 
very gentle person, suave, graceful, small, but wise. What else? 

QUESTIONER: Did you discuss your feelings of the Johnson Wax Building [page 49]? Do 
you have any memories of it-of Frank Lloyd Wright talking about it? 

WRIGHT: Well, I discussed all of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings with him at one time or 
another-upside-down and downside-up, and round and round. 

QUESTIONER: What sort of experiences did you have as a draftsman in your father's 
office? Were the other draftsmen resentful? Were there any problems? [The questioner, in 
this instance, was Patrick J. Meehan.] 

WRIGHT: Well, the other draftsmen were all interesting individuals. There was [William 
E.] Drummond and Marion Mahony [Griffin], and the secretary, Isabel Roberts Jones, and 
so on and on and on. They took good care of me, as a junior member, and they helped me 
up on the stools to make tracings of their glasswork for them. I commenced to do that 
when I was about seven or eight years old, and never quit thereafter. 

ERIC LLOYD WRIGHT: You know, it might be interesting to talk about the Ausgef�hrte 
Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright and when you were in Italy. 

WRIGHT: My father turned to me again and again. I was going to the University [of 
Wisconsin in Madison]. He took me out of the University to come and help him with the 
Ausgef�hrte Bauten. I stayed there [in Italy] almost a year, and it was a wonderful 
experience. He hired a villa, [the] Villa Fatuna [sic], just below the Plaza of Michelangelo, 
in Firenze. What an experience! I and the draftsman, [Taylor] Woolley, a Mormon from 
Salt Lake City, were my father's aides in that adventure. In the villa-we got there in the 
winter and it was cold-the floors were made of stone and there was no heating except 
braziers, and we warmed our hands and drew with cope felt [sic] pens. We made tracings 
of all the work he had done up to that time . . . It was a marvelous experience. We'd go 
down to town, in between sessions, and we'd discover the works of-what was his name at 
that time, the great sculptor of that time?-and we'd think we had discovered the works of 
Michelangelo! 

AUDIENCE: [Laughter] 

WRIGHT: Well, of course, we did have this figure of David just above us. 

So it was very complex and very interesting, and very vivid, and we were working all the 
time to good purpose, and the Germans took these drawings that we made with the cope 
felt [sic] pens over all sorts of pencil drawings, ink drawings, and watercolors, what have 
you, and Father put them in order, checked them, and did some of the drawing himself. 
They then coordinated with our stones-their photographic stones-into a marvelous work 
that isn't equaled anywhere to my knowledge, since or before. 

The Germans were marvelous technicians. They had invited him over there to do this work 
and he surely did it [pages 45 and 46]. This was the kind of man he was. He was indeed a 
genius. 

LLOYD WRIGHT: "He hired a villa, [the] Villa Fatuna [sic], just below the Plaza of 
Michelangelo, in Firenze. What an experience! . . . We got there in the winter and it was 
cold-the floors were made of stone. . ." The studio building in Florence, Italy, where 
Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, and Taylor Woolley produced the drawings for 
Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. (Clifford Evans Collection, 
University of Utah Libraries) 

AUDIENCE: [Loud applause for several minutes as Lloyd Wright leaves the podium] 

The following passages were transcribed from programs that aired on KPFA-FM radio 
(Berkeley, California) in the late 1960s. 


ON THE OAK PARK YEARS 

I remember my earliest experiences on Chicago Avenue in Oak Park. The feeling of 
mystery and awe and the possibilities-it felt like "Beauty and the Beast." I felt the beast 
was out there and might come in at any moment. Because my father had built this home 
with funds extended by the lieber Meister-his employer-Louis Sullivan. [My father] had 
his mother in the home right adjacent to him . . . which happened to be a landscape 
architect's home. And he had planted exotica in it-wonderful things. I can only liken it to 
the story of "Beauty and the Beast." The beast was there, the beauty was there, and it was 
eminent. It half frightened me, and yet it intrigued me, and yet it was marvelous. 

[Living in my father's house] was sort of a dream. His life was very quiet, relatively, in the 
home. The home, which at that time was . . . lovely, with aluminum ceilings and so forth; 
and his affection for beautiful things such as Oriental rugs. As a boy I helped him open up 
these Oriental rugs, studied them, saw them . . . and heard his reactions and [I] learned 
therefrom. But no, he went into the big city in the earlier days on the elevated trains, 
which were electrified at that time. That was the early beginnings of the modern 
technology. He would go and come back and the life went on very well, quietly that way. 
Occasionally we had visitors but not very often-he was too busy. He had too much to do 
to indulge in entertaining. If he did any, it might have been downtown. But, then, not 
much of that either because he had to earn a living and he had these children coming on. I 
was the first of six. My mother was very busy taking care [of us] and she didn't have time 
for social contacts. She was young and inexperienced and she wouldn't have known much 
what to do with [free time] even if she had it. So she was there and she was involved, 
deeply involved, with the children, and he let her be so because he was deeply involved 
with what he was doing. And he was doing a very creative thing indeed. I grew up and 
took it for granted [because] I wasn't aware-it was just soaked in like a sponge. 

Well, I got up on the [drafting] stool before I could hardly climb up on it. So I was in the 
studio [and] it was just part of the life . . . in line with this business of the individual 
artist's expression in his creative world. He abhorred the machine and the industrial thing 
that was showing its head in the restriction of creative action. Even though he worked in 
[Adler and] Sullivan's office, it was a factory and he didn't want a factory. He didn't want 
to extend that industrialization. So when he came out there to Oak Park he set up an 
establishment which was highly individualistic. He would have his studio where he could 
go to it at will and not have to travel the route down to the big city and back again, as he 
had for years, which consumed time and destroyed the continuity and progressive action. 
And he went about the business of creating a grammar-architectural grammar-for the 
new day, the new world, and he did it! I can remember night after night, when I was 
maybe six or seven [years old], or earlier than that because I went to Hillside [Home 
School at Spring Green] at that time. . . . He'd come up [to his room] dead tired, dead tired 
because he was struggling on the [drafting] board himself-nobody else-at night because 
there wouldn't be any interference. And it was right next to the home, and he could come 
up and go into bed . . . at two or three o'clock in the morning night after night, day after 
day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And he'd come up dead tired and 
I'd be lying in bed. His father taught him how to play [the piano] beautifully. Well, he 
could play [the piano] as well as he could draw. He did Schubert, it was a great favorite 
and, of course, [the] pieces of Beethoven. He would relax at the piano and I'd hear this; it 
was as though I could cry-it was beautiful. . . . 


ON HIS FATHER'S ARCHITECTUAL GRAMMAR 

This is not too good an example, but it will, in some way, indicate what he was doing. 
Now here you have the Japanese print-there was a high culture, great sophistication, 
beauty's essential best in human expression, highly organized, architectonically based, and 
disciplined, highly disciplined. Here we have the western Europeans . . . in [their] most 
sophisticated productive era. . . . Now here comes an abstract of Frank Lloyd Wright's 
small or simple, which is a square with a never-ending line which he adopted . . . Then 
there are these symbols [of the circle and triangle] into this composition, which is linear, 
and yet it is also in depth in its overlaying well with the other. So, in the development out 
of these primary considerations into the present and using the techniques of the trade-the 
triangle and the T-square-and the architectural approach, which meant correlation, 
integration, and ideas symbolized-the poetry of condensation and all the rest of it. And 
out comes this figure . . . here [he points to a design by his father]. Now this is neither 
European nor is it Japanese. It is U.S.A. 20th-century democracy. No other source! You 
will find this nowhere else! 

[Frank Lloyd Wright's use of the square as his autograph block] as a simple block, as a 
simple concept of architectonic incorporation. . . . went further than that as you see [in his 
buildings] based upon the primary forms. He went back to primaries, not to the cluttered 
and oversophisticated and weak products of the . . . European Renaissance, which to him 
was decadent; which to [Louis] Sullivan was decadent. They were creating something 
much stronger-based, more creative, not so imitative, not so bound to a weak and dying 
tradition, moving ahead on its own volition, with its own original contributions and with 
the guts to do it. And they gave themselves to it! And they died doing it! 


ON TEACHING 

He came, on one side, from a family of ministers (those who were dealing with the abstract 
and religious phenomena, human relationships) and, on the other side, from leading 
educators (they were professors)-families of teachers and preachers. If he had a contempt 
for it, the contempt was for those who abused the process of teaching and preaching. He 
was against teaching and preaching as a profession but not teaching and preaching as to 
the work that was to be done, because he was himself a teacher and a preacher. And every 
man has to be that, but he didn't put that first; he didn't make it professionalism and he 
didn't want to see it made a professionalism. He didn't want to see it become a fixed dead 
thing. It should be a living one. What bothered him about the academic world which he 
knew so well was the "dead fish" part of it; the thing that went dead because of the 
professional sterilization. One of the troubles with the academic world is that it gets 
ossified in this fashion and is not creative. It is responsible for the destruction of creation 
and the confusion of youth in its search for help in its creative efforts and growth. This is 
what he resented, and what he tried to do to the boys who came to him [at the Taliesin 
Fellowship] was to free them from these plecades [sic] of the academic fixation. . . . 

He would welcome revolution. He was a revolutionary himself. . . . He was interested in 
beauty. He was interested in the things that the establishment was not. He was an 
out-of-liner. The trouble with him was that he would never stay in line. He was not only 
a "drop out" but a "kick out." He proceeded to construct his world as he knew it should be 
and well could be constructed. And it took a great deal of courage, determination, and 
genius, which he had . . . . 

This thing of being fashionable, he fought fashion all his life because of its dead hand. 
Because it standardized and stopped growth. . . . 


ON HIS FATHER'S ONE MOST IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO ARCHITECTURE 

If I were to sum it up for you it would really be a poem. It would be an extreme abstract-it 
would have to be, because it would be a summation of many forces . . . and many 
interrelated parts. Now, of course, that's the business of the architect. So I ought to be able 
to give it to you in a package right now, maybe, if I wanted to. The question is whether I 
want to sew it up into a package; the question is whether I could! And I certainly don't 
want to. This business in . . . packaging everything is doing us in. Let's keep [the work of 
Frank Lloyd Wright] open and let's not frame it as being the end-all and 
complete-because it never is. It's always proceeding and, I hope, always enriching. 


CATHERINE DOROTHY WRIGHT BAXTER 

His drama was very evident, I felt, in projecting his thoughts, and [he was] fully aware of 
it-quite conscious of it. Quite conscious of it, I'm sure. He was very fond of theater. He 
probably would have been a great actor. . . . I don't know how many lecturers that you 
know in this past generation . . . who stomped onto the platform the way he did and gave a 
performance. But, along with the performance, he usually had something to say. Though 
I'm afraid at times I would shiver a little bit and feel a little bit embarrassed for him and 
for some of the things he would say that hurt others-actually they did at times. I felt that 
they could have [been] better left unsaid. But they suited the public. 

Catherine Dorothy Wright Baxter, Wright's eldest daughter, was born in 1894 and, like 
her brother Lloyd Wright, grew up in the environment of her father's Oak Park studio. 
Unlike her brothers Lloyd and John, she did not become an architect. Catherine, who had 
three children, among them the film actress Anne Baxter (see Chapter 42), died in 1979. 

{Catherine Dorothy Wright Baxter's reminiscences were recorded in the late 1960s and 
were transcribed from Bruce Radde's KPFA-FM (Berkeley, California) radio program 
"Frank Lloyd Wright: The Shining Brow." Printed with permission of Pacifica Radio 
Archive.} 


ON WRIGHT'S BIRTH DATE 

We still don't know why, but he took my aunt's-his sister's-birth year and just 
appropriated [it] as his own. He was actually born in 1867, and his sister's date was 1869. I 
researched a great deal on it, and the thing that finally settled it for me was that Aunt 
Jenny mentioned the fact that he had [also] changed his mother's birth date, which 
shocked me [to] no end. He said that it was a confession of the soul, and I didn't like to 
press him further. I still don't know why father did it. . . . The two years made very little 
difference. 


LIFE IN THE WRIGHT HOME AROUND 1900 

Of course, my only comparison was to see other peoples' homes, which were very 
conventional. I used to feel disturbed that ours was so different. . . . We had specially 
designed lamps and, of course, the . . . chair design was entirely different than the things 
we saw in other places, and we didn't have any cozy corner in our house. . . . The living 
room . . . in our first house was a little place . . . with seats facing each other. It was nice 
in our dating days-it was a nook then, but not a cozy corner. The cozy corner of my 
friend's [house] was hung with swords of Egyptian patterns and things of that kind . . . 
they were really something . . . the plush curtains and all that sort of thing [page 222]. 

We had scatter rugs over concrete . . . this was when the studio was built. It had concrete 
floors. The house was built in 1889, or 1890 perhaps, because mother and father were 
married in 1889, and they immediately had this house which, as I say, had to be 
remodeled. . . . 

I think that one of the things that always amused me was father having his room-a very 
beautiful room-with all built-in furniture. . . . It was quite unusual then for the dressers 
and all the different commodes to be built-in. His room was directly next to the bathroom 
and, of course, we children had to go to school. We were up at 6:30 in the morning after 
his working all night. It was a little bit harrowing for him to have to listen to a lot of 
chatter, with one bathroom for six children-five at least in those days! So it was a very 
annoying experience, but he lived through it and so did we. 

The passageway between our house, the original house, and the studio-father turned that 
into a kitchen. So mother and I, being the kitchen police of the family, used the kitchen. 
Father did not want to destroy the lovely willow tree, so he used that as a place for the ice 
box to be set. The ice box was set in between the two arms of the willow tree, and it was all 
very well until it rained; which it often did in the city. So mother and I very often did our 
kitchen police around puddles of water, which was not the concern of my father at all. . . . 
Even though the trunk of the tree had these sheet-metal things around it, when the tree 
began to weave back and forth it didn't do much to benefit the water coming down . . . 
[laughter]. The tree has very definite memories [for me] of being . . . a menace, but we 
circumvented it somehow. 

I do recall one of our loveliest rooms was our playroom [page 223]. As near as I can recall, 
it must have been [added to the house] close to 1900, maybe before then. But father's 
growing family felt that this was a room that could be a family room, and we didn't have 
very many family rooms. . . . It was one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever seen, 
proportionwise and any way. Of course, it was used by the six children as a gathering 
place. One of my vivid memories is the Christmas parties where the tree was in the center 
of the room. And, of course, the ceiling was vaulted with one of the most beautiful pieces 
of scrollwork I have ever seen; [it] was a very great disappointment when I returned to the 
house to find that it had disappeared. At the end of that room was a beautiful drawing-or 
a painting, rather-of "The Fisherman and the Genii." It was above the fireplace, which 
was usually going in the wintertime. At the opposite end [of the room] was a balcony and a 
small attic. The balcony was used as a gallery for plays that we performed. It provided 
many hiding places for hide-and-seek and what have you. In that room, too, in those 
days, father had a [statue of] the "Winged Victory" set up on a pedestal, and that was quite 
something. I recall it very vividly. Later, father never liked the looks of the grand piano, so 
he had it shoved underneath the back stairs [of the playroom] and you only saw the 
keyboard . . . . True to father's tradition, the fact that anybody over five-foot-three (but I 
mean the grown-ups) would bump their head on the back stairway didn't make any 
difference [to him] because we could use the front stairway if we wanted to. 

Father did play piano, but he loved the aeolian-that was one of his investments-which 
rolled up to the piano. Father used to work nights, and the piano would be going at all 
hours of the night-the roller-and he could express himself very beautifully, using these 
rollers to express himself loud . . . [laughter]. He had many sessions which could have 
bothered us to no end for noise, but it was a great outlet for him when he wasn't able to 
perform Mozart or Beethoven or what have you on the piano. 


ON WRIGHT'S DRAMATIC TALENTS 

His drama was very evident, I felt, in projecting his thoughts, and [he was] fully aware of 
it-quite conscious of it. Quite conscious of it, I'm sure. He was very fond of theater. He 
probably would have been a great actor. . . . He had very sane thoughts and projected them 
beautifully at times when he was not on stage. . . .I don't know how many lecturers that 
you know in this past generation, in the early 1900s, who stomped onto the platform the 
way he did and gave a performance. But, along with the performance, he usually had 
something to say. Though I'm afraid at times I would shiver a little bit and feel a little bit 
embarrassed for him and for some of the things he would say that hurt others-actually 
they did at times. I felt that they could have [been] better left unsaid. But they suited the 
public. Perhaps I was more sensitive because I was part of the family picture, and sensitive 
to criticism also because I had so much of it all my life. . . . I will never forget [that] . . . in 
San Francisco he waited about three-quarters of an hour to appear on the platform. Then 
he came swooping on because he had his cape on . . . the great dramatic entrance. I don't 
think it was unstudied. 


ROBERT LLEWELLYN WRIGHT 

It is nice having a house my father designed for us. Most fathers leave their children 
money. I'd rather have this house. 

In the years from 1955 through 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and completed 
construction of a house in Bethesda, Maryland, for his youngest son, Robert Llewellyn 
Wright. Robert Llewellyn once quipped: 

{Sarah Booth Conroy's "The Right Home for Wright's Son" was published in the 
Washington Post on July 13, 1974. Copyright � The Washington Post. Reprinted with 
permission.} 

I was an unusual client because I was never asked to pay for any of the extensive 
architectural services I received. My siblings always complained that my father was 
overgenerous with me. He did not make me earn money for a college education, for 
example-an indulgence my brothers, said was denied to them. I think he would have been 
delighted to design a house for any of his children. He did for my brother Dave. My 
architect brothers, Lloyd and John, designed their own houses, and my sisters, Frances and 
Catherine, never asked for a Frank Lloyd Wright house. 

ROBERT LLEWELLYN WRIGHT: "I don't think he really built for posterity. I think he 
thought everything would be rebuilt, better, by him." An exterior view of the Robert 
Llewellyn Wright residence (1953) in Bethesda, Maryland. (Patrick J. Meehan) 

In 1974 he was interviewed by the Washington Post. That interview follows: 

Robert Llewellyn Wright, a Washington lawyer, remembers a particular night his father, 
Frank Lloyd Wright, spent with the son's family. 

"Early in the morning my wife and I heard someone sawing. We quickly came down the 
stairs to see my father sawing off the back legs of a chair he'd designed and given us 20 
years ago. 'I thought about this chair for 20 years,' he said. 'And this morning I realized 
why it isn't comfortable. The back legs need to be shortened.' And he was right." 

From the suburban Maryland road, the only evidence of a house designed by the 
best-known American architect of the last 100 years is a mailbox set into an "FLLW" red 
square ("FLLW" was Wright's signature on his structures). The house itself is set below 
the hill's summit, snuggled into the slope. 

Visitors drive into an "arrival court" covered with gravel. From there, the guest sees the 
curve of the slag block wall, with a towerlike protuberance for the kitchen. 

Greeting visitors, a constant occurrence for the owner of any Wright house, is Robert, the 
youngest of the architect's children by his first wife. The son now is in his early seventies. 

ROBERT LLEWELLYN WRIGHT: ". . .my father would turn up at the house without 
notice and rearrange the furniture. I think he always did indeed feel that any house he had 
designed still belonged to him The David Wright residence (1950) in Phoenix, Arizona. 
Frank Lloyd Wright originally called this design for his son "How to Live in the 
Southwest." (Patrick J. Meehan) 

He pointed to the curve of the kitchen. "That was the biggest change my wife and I made 
in my father's plan. He had intended the kitchen to be two stories, but we felt we needed a 
second bathroom because the three children were home then. There should have been a 
tall, thin window going up two stories to light the kitchen." You could see that, after the 
years, the change still worried the son. 

"The Taliesin apprentice (Robert Beharka, now of Los Banos, California) who supervised 
our house was shocked that my father would let us make such a major change in the plan." 

"But I'm glad we did," Mrs. [Robert Llewellyn] Wright interrupted. 

"We found him very accommodating," his son said, "though everybody's heard stories 
about how he treated his clients. But, then, if you just wanted somebody to draw up your 
plans, you shouldn't pay the money to hire Frank Lloyd Wright. My sister Catherine, for 
instance, built four houses, none of them designed by my father, but then I think she 
always liked her own way better. 

"My brother David, who lived near my father in Arizona, not far from Taliesin, used to 
have a bit of trouble with him. Dave's wife was a meticulous housekeeper. But my father 
would turn up at the house without notice and rearrange the furniture. I think he always 
did indeed feel that any house he had designed still belonged to him. He liked change. He 
was always tearing down and rebuilding Taliesin. I don't think he really built for posterity. 
I think he thought everything would be rebuilt, better, by him." 

Today, Robert Wright worries about the fungus and the carpenter bees attacking the 
Philippine mahogany bent to girdle his house. 

"I would hate to have to find somebody today who would understand how to wet and bend 
the boards like these," he said. 

The house is shaped almost like an almond, opposing the hill's slope. The same curve, the 
house's basic module, is scored into the red concrete which forms the floors of the first 
story. Stools and a table in the living room all echo the house's shape. 

"It's funny how people are still afraid of anything unusual," Robert says. "I couldn't get an 
upholsterer to put new fabric on that stool. So I did it myself. That was why my father 
always had to send an apprentice to act as contractor-the workmen didn't know how to 
build his way. They always said those glass corners couldn't be done." (Most Wright 
corners are made of two pieces of glass butted against each other.) 

The apprentice cut the block himself in the fireplace to let heat from the chimney into the 
room. 

"It's strange now to remember that when we built this house in 1956, we couldn't get a 
bank loan on the design. We had put off having my father do us a house for years, because 
back then he insisted that we have at least an acre of land, and we couldn't afford it. 

"Finally, we took his advice and bought a two-acre lot the builders didn't want. It was his 
sort of site, on a slope with lots of natural planting. 

"We borrowed from a friend to get the house constructed. Then we had a time finding an 
appraiser who would say it was worth half what it cost. It cost $40,000, and we wanted a 
$20,000 mortgage. Well, it's all paid for now, anyway. The appraisers didn't like the site or 
the slag block, but they just weren't used to anything different." 

The only things the Wrights regret now are the places where the design had to be scaled 
down to fit the budget. 

"The dining area, for instance. When he came to stay with us, after the house was built, he 
thought it looked too cramped, so he put in wall-to-wall mirror to reflect the outside. 

"I think that the play of light and shadow was his greatest thing. He really understood it. 
It's a practical thing, too. The house is oriented south by southwest. In the winter the living 
room and the three bedrooms upstairs are flooded with light. In the summer, because of 
the overhang, the sun doesn't come in at all. It certainly saves on both heating and air 
conditioning. 

"We put in an attic fan, though my father said we wouldn't need it, and we didn't for 
cooling. We put the air conditioning in because of the humidity." 

Besides the light patterns, caused by the deep windows with their protruding mullions 
(framing pieces), the house has another Wright characteristic-the sand-colored, textured 
plaster ceilings Robert remembers from his childhood in the house in Oak Park, Illinois 
[page 222]. 

The fireplace, just the height of Mrs. Wright, is another Wright characteristic-the 
fireplace as the focal point. The Wrights admit this one sometimes bumps heads. 

The house has double decks. One extends the living room on the first floor, with a lily pool 
sunk into the center of the curve. On the second floor, the balcony curves off the master 
bedroom and the Wrights' daughter's room. (The three children are now grown and away 
from home.) 

The deck springs a bit as you walk on it. "A friend of mine used to tease me and say, 'If 
you jump up and down on it, you'll tip the house over.'" 

Robert, as did his father, enjoys repartee, but, though he jokes about the house, he's very 
serious about the pleasure in it. 

"It is nice having a house my father designed for us. Most fathers leave their children 
money. I'd rather have this house." 


ANNE BAXTER 

He enjoyed my career and I revered his genius. We laughed a lot together. He taught me to 
mistrust facades and always to observe life beneath the surfaces; to find excitement in a 
seed pod or beauty in a carpenter's hammer. He gave me other, inner eyes. I gave him 
pleasure as a lively audience and as his favorite Taffy's daughter. 

The Oscar-winning movie actress Anne Baxter (1923-85) was Frank Lloyd Wright's 
granddaughter. She was the daughter of Wright's eldest daughter, Catherine. 

Anne Baxter won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance in 
the 1946 adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. She was also nominated 
for an Oscar four years later for her portrayal of the scheming young actress in the film All 
About Eve. Her many other films include Angel on My Shoulder (1946), The Ten 
Commandments (1956), and Chase a Crooked Shadow (1957). 

Following her grandfather's death, Anne Baxter traveled to Australia and set aside her 
acting career for a significant period of time 

{Anne Baxter's reminiscences were excerpted from her book Intermission: A True Story. 
Copyright � 1976 Anne Baxter. Reprinted with permission of the Putman Publishing 
Group.} 

My suitcase was half-packed for the trip home tomorrow. I'd discovered that for an extra 
fifty dollars I could fly back to California through the Orient, a part of the world I'd never 
seen. Friends had armed me with letters of introduction, and I was hungry for the whole 
adventure. The high points would be Angkor Wat and a stay in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, 
which my grandfather had designed in [1915]. Frank Lloyd Wright was my mother's 
father. She was the favorite as a child and he used to call her "Taffy." She was beautiful 
and saucy and thoroughly individualistic, all of which he loved. But when the family broke 
apart she'd understandably sided with her mother and there had been many painful scenes. 
He and I had no such ravines between us and had discovered deep affection easily. He 
enjoyed my career and I revered his genius. We laughed a lot together. He taught me to 
mistrust facades and always to observe life beneath the surfaces; to find excitement in a 
seed pod or beauty in a carpenter's hammer. He gave me other, inner eyes. I gave him 
pleasure as a lively audience and as his favorite Taffy's daughter. . . . 

Japan was hovering on the brink of very early spring. I was ushered into the lobby of the 
hotel it had been my lifetime wish to see, only to find I'd been housed in the "new" 
non-Frank Lloyd Wright wing, a tasteless glass box. I threw a polite fit, and with abject 
apologies the management changed me to one of Grandfather's elegant small suites. Of 
course it was small-scaled. Grandfather had designed the whole place for the Japanese 
people, not rangy overgrown Americans, for God's sake. He always said anyone over 5'10" 
was a weed. Grandfather was 5'10". 

The army of occupation had painted cheap gold paint in between every poured-concrete 
design. Awful. What a legacy. Never mind, that romantic building still triumphed over 
earthquakes and armies. 

And now home. Home and Katrina, my seven-and-half-year-old. I wanted to have 
some days alone with her before we went to Grandfather's for Easter in Arizona. 

Taliesin means "shining brow" in Welsh; Grandfather had named both his homes Taliesin 
(Tal-ee-es-in). Easter celebrations at Taliesin West were unlike any in the world. 
Arizona is dramatically beautiful in spring, and Grandfather loved drama. He had 
designed a theater for me when I was three years old-sowing a potent seed. . . . 

We drove out across the Paradise Valley on the dirt road to Taliesin. That Easter morning 
was soaked in blinding desert sun. The sweep of buildings cut clean lines into an intense 
blue sky, as married to that rockstrewn desert floor as anything he'd ever built [pages 139, 
149, and 150]. 

"Look at the balloons!" cried Katrina, her green eyes flashing. They were marvelous, 
straining straight up on their strings, shouting with gay color in windless air. Everything 
and everyone formed kaleidoscopes of multi-color. Desert flowers festooned the long 
tables. Young men and women apprentices from the Fellowship moved to greet the 
arriving guests; we embraced other Wright family members; of the six in Grandfather's 
original family, three were there: David, Lloyd, and Mother, each with children and 
grandchildren to join the celebration-not only of Easter, but of their father. 

There he came, arm in arm with my step-grandmother, who wore a bright straw hat with 
flowers in her hair. Though almost 92, he walked with small panther-smooth steps, the 
most graceful man I ever knew. He was dressed in white linen, a dashing soft-brimmed 
straw hat shaded his merry eyes, and he exuded geniality and delight. 

We greeted one another with joy. The quality of our time together had been matchless, and 
we both savored that rare fact. 

The apprentices sang songs, from ancient Gregorian chants to spirituals, and we all deeply 
felt the perfection of those sun-drenched moments in another world. Or was it the 
quintessence of the best of this one: an atmosphere conceived by a magnificently creative 
spirit, whose explosive, husky laughter infected us all with ebullience? 

The day ended with more music; a concert by a fine young pianist named Carol Robinson. 
Music was something else my grandfather and I shared; it was a necessity to both of us. 
How he loved to play grandiose Beethoven-like chords on finely tuned pianos! . . . 

A few days later Grandfather fell dangerously ill. An operation was performed and he 
rallied with incredible stamina. Two nights later I wakened from a peculiarly distressing 
nightmare: in a vast twilight valley a great dark bird with mile-wide wings bore down 
upon me, roaring with speed. Cold with fright, I snapped on the light. It was three o'clock. 
I tried to calm myself reading, and as I turned out the light an hour later the phone rang; it 
was my mother. 

"Anne-Papa died an hour ago." I comforted her as best I could, put down the phone, and 
wept. 

A thousand comments were made about Grandfather's extraordinary genius, his stormy 
life, his work-all to do with his public self. San Francisco's educational television station 
planned a memorial show, as his last building was being completed just north of the city. 
They called and asked if I would talk informally about his more private self, his early 
family days. Mother and I discussed it, and it seemed to help her to talk about the 
helter-skelter Wright family and the fun they shared, as well as the hardships. With her 
blessing I said I'd contribute what I could to a truthful image. 

The show was beautifully done and very moving. Grandfather's roots were so vibrantly 
American that just speaking about him made you believe all over again in native American 
space and beauty and tenacity and daring. 

When it was over, I walked away shaken by emotion and oddly aimless. . . . 

[Later] I felt drawn there [to Taliesin West] by a yearning to once again be where his 
genius reverberated. The students would have gone north to Taliesin East in Wisconsin. 
Only a few hardy caretakers would be there. June could be fierce, and Grandfather never 
air-conditioned the free-flowing desert air at Taliesin. The three of us [Baxter, Katrina, 
and Baxter's husband Randolph ("Ran") Galt] took off for Arizona. . . . 

Taliesin [West] was unutterably depressing to me. He was gone. The spirit was gone. The 
genius loci had gone. Only the stones were warm from baking desert. Later I wandered off 
alone. Ran found me standing in the gloom of the empty theater where we all had supper 
and chamber music at Easter. He gathered me in his arms without a word. 

"We shouldn't have come," he said after a moment. 

"I'm OK," I muttered into his shirt. "I had to take one more look. Thank God you're with 
me." 

I took a farewell look, and never went back to Taliesin again. 

We'd rented a car and, sensing my solemn mood, Ran changed the subject as we drove 
back to the sprawl of Phoenix. 


Epilogue 

Arch Oboler, a client, once asked Wright about the future of his work after his death. 
Oboler reported the following response: 

. . . all the animation and the fun he had in his face-he always had a sparkle in his eye 
when we talked . . . the fun went out of his face. He thought a while and said, "I really 
don't know, I really don't know." Because he knew what I meant was not a continuation of 
his style of work but a continuation of his genius. 

Flying back from Wright's funeral in Wisconsin, John Noble Richards, then president of 
the American Institute of Architects, wrote the following: 

His continuing influence assured. 

This century's architectural achievements would be unthinkable without him. 

He has been a teacher to all of us. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD 

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT SPEAKS FOR AN ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE 

Patrick J. Meehan, AIA, Editor     The Preservation Press 

National Trust for Historic Preservation 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


To Karen, Ryan, Sean, and the young architects of the future-

There is no past we should long to resurrect, 
There is eternal newness only, reconstituting itself 
Out of the extended elements of the past 
and true yearning should always be towards productive ends 
Making some new, some better thing. 

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE 

The truth shall make you free. 

JOHN, 8:32 


Preface 

Frank Lloyd Wright once said that he did: 

not believe much in these events where a man stands up and makes a talk. There is a lot of 
that going on, and really it does not amount to very much. You can talk a lot about a great 
many things, but never get anywhere. . . . People talk more because they found out that 
they could do more of it than anything else. Now that they found out they could talk, they 
take it out in talking. They talk everything to death, talk the arm off of everybody. If I had 
to translate. . .(my) buildings into talk and persuade you to take them, I would have a hard 
time because other people talk too. 

I believe, however, that the readers of this collection of Wright's speeches will find this to 
be untrue in his case. In his prolific architectural career of more than seventy years he 
became the most famous architect of the twentieth century, if not of all time, by the 
creation of more than 900 architectural designs that follow his philosophy of organic 
architecture. 

Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture  
presents a major, extensively illustrated treatise on Wright's philosophy of architectural 
design through the presentation of thirty-two of his most significant speeches. Truth 
Against the World is my third book on Frank Lloyd Wright and the second volume in my 
predominantly oral trilogy concerning him. My first book, Frank Lloyd Wright: A 
Research Guide to Archival Sources (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983), served 
as my introduction to the many well-known as well as obscure published and unpublished 
Wright letters, manuscripts, speeches, and other related items that are available to the 
scholarly researcher. My second book, The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank 
Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984), the first volume of the oral trilogy, 
allowed me to preserve in one volume the illustrated texts of rare audio-and 
audiovisual-related conversations, which were destroyed, had deteriorated beyond further 
use, or just were no longer available to the public from any source. Frank Lloyd Wright 
Remembered (Washington, D.C.: The Preservation Press, 1991), the third volume of the 
oral trilogy, presents him from the perspective of those who knew him best: fellow 
architects, clients, apprentices, acquaintances and friends, and members of his immediate 
family. 

A Druid symbol of inverted rays of the sun was cut into a stone set in 1886 by an elderly 
Welsh mason into the wall of the Lloyd-Jones sisters' Home School near Spring Green, 
Wisconsin. Signifying the struggle of Truth Against the World, the symbol was placed 
there by Wright's maternal relations-the Lloyd-Jones family-and became the family 
crest, brought from Wales by his grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones. In part, the Druid 
symbol was the manifestation or embodiment of the liberal spirit of the Lloyd-Jones 
family and, most certainly, of Frank Lloyd Wright. Later this ancient Druid symbol was 
incised in the stone gate posts of Unity Chapel, the family chapel, also near Spring Green, 
Wisconsin. Still later, in 1902, the symbol appeared on the sandstone walls of another 
school run by Wright's aunts-the Hillside Home School, a building designed by him that 
in 1932 became a part of the Taliesin Fellowship Complex. 
Wright's own search for the truth in life represents a quest even more profound than his 
efforts to improve the human environment. Wright's speeches provide a clear-cut record 
of this relentless pursuit. In chapter one, Wright humorously quips: "Do you think he 
(grandfather) was thinking of me when he chose that motto?" 

Truth Against the World represents a goal not too dissimilar from that of the first and 
third books of the oral trilogy. The purpose of Truth Against the World is to provide the 
interested reader, for the first time, with a comprehensive collection of Mr. Wright's most 
important speeches on architecture and contemporary society in one generously illustrated 
volume. Truth Against the World adds considerably to the current body of literature about 
Frank Lloyd Wright, because it produces new insights into his thought processes and 
personality as well as his great architecture. 

Truth Against the World complements The Master Architect, which deals primarily with 
Wright's talks when he was in a more relaxed informal conversational setting, and Frank 
Lloyd Wright Remembered, which primarily presents the memories of others who knew 
him. Truth Against the World, on the other hand, presents Wright as a dynamic, seasoned, 
and polished orator, who, always in command of his subject, as well as his philosophy of 
organic architecture, spoke to and with large audiences in a public forum-audiences who 
sometimes rejected him and his revolutionary ideas. 

During many of his speeches he was outspoken, but on rare occasions there were also 
glimpses of a profound humility. Wright's 1949 acceptance speech for the Gold Medal of 
the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is one example of this (see chapter 16). For 
over a half century, the AIA and Wright openly did not get along. Finally, in 1949, the 
AIA awarded him its highest honor-the Gold Medal. During his acceptance of the medal, 
Wright eloquently commented: 

. . .no man climbs so high or sinks so low that he isn't eager to receive the good will and 
admiration of his fellowman. He may seem reprehensible in many ways; he may seem to 
care nothing about it; he may hitch his wagon to his star and, however he may be 
circumstanced or whatever his ideals or his actions, he never loses the desire for the 
appreciation of his kind. 

So I feel humble and grateful. I don't think humility is (a) very becoming state for me. . 
.but I really feel by this token of esteem from the home boys. . . 

. . .I don't know what change it's going to effect upon my course in the future. It's bound to 
have an effect! I am not going to be the same man when I walk out of here that I was when 
I came in. Because, by this little token in my pocket, it seems to me that a battle has been 
won. . . 


Mr. Wright was not only a master of architecture but also of public speaking. He spoke 
passionately. This quality is revealed in most of the speeches presented in this collection. 
This was particularly true when in 1957 he addressed his clients for the Marin County 
Civic Center (chapter 29): 

The carelessness with which our people get their buildings built, who they will let plan 
them, is almost as though anybody that could poke a fire could plan a building. It should 
take the greatest experience that can be had to so plan. The best is none too good! And 
when people choose an architect, they ought to go at it prayerfully and if necessary go on 
their hands and knees as far as they could go to get the best there is because in the realm of 
such planning none is good enough. 

Wright's passion for architecture came from his soul. 

The overwhelming majority of the thirty-two speeches in Truth Against the World are 
carefully selected from rare, obscure, and sometimes foreign publications, many of which 
have been out of print for half a century or longer. Several of them include Wright's 
personal and informal dialogue with his audiences after his formal speech presentation-a 
format he often used. Only on rare occasions would he read a prepared speech (such as his 
1947 address to Princeton University presented in chapter 21). In addition, three of the 
talks contained in this volume (see chapters 1, 29, and 30) have never been published as 
written documents, although they have appeared in other audio or audiovisual form. This 
comprehensive collection of speeches spans almost six of Wright's seven decades in 
architecture by covering the period from 1900 to 1958 (several months before his death). 
These speeches, organized into nine parts based on their themes and subject matter, fully 
reveal Frank Lloyd Wright, the master architect, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the man, in his 
relentless pursuit of truth in architecture and mankind. The general topical areas presented 
in the nine parts of the book include his ideas on organic architecture, the machine, 
improving the human condition, honor, education, democracy, city planning and, in 
particular, his Broadacre City and government. The reader should note the consistency of 
his philosophies expressed in his words. 

As in my past research in the study of Wright, a book like this would have been impossible 
to coordinate into an integrated organic whole without the kind assistance from many 
persons to whom I am especially indebted. I want to thank the following for their help in 
providing me with necessary materials and permissions to complete this work: Patricia 
Akre, photograph curator, San Francisco Public Library; Richard Alwood of American 
Commercial Photo, Detroit; Barbara Chapman, Billboard Publications; Dr. S. E. T. 
Cusdin, architect, of London, England; Elizabeth Dixon, librarian, and E. A. Underwood, 
Architectural Association of London; L. H. Falgie, managing editor, Journal of the 
Franklin Institute; Van Gillespie, clerk of the board, Board of Supervisors of Marin 
County, San Rafael, California; Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation; Randolph C. 
Henning, architect, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Ada Ishii of The New Yorker; Mrs. 
Robert Furneaux Jordan; Wendy A. Jordan, executive editor, Builder; Edward L. 
Kamarck, former editor, Arts in Society; Dr. Joseph K. Kugler, Hastings, Minnesota; 
Marta Ladd, director of public relations, and Brad Beck, photographer, Florida Southern 
College, Lakeland, Florida; Cynthia Lowry; Kristine MacCallum and Daniel J. May; 
Edwin M. Mathias and Emily Sieger, reference librarians, Motion Picture, Broadcasting 
and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress; Robert S. McGonigal; Robert Meloon, 
former executive publisher, and Leigh A. Milner, former librarian, The Capital Times, 
Madison, Wisconsin; Michigan Society of Architects Board of Directors and Rae Dumke, 
executive director; Margaret M. Mills, executive director, American Academy and 
Institute of Arts and Letters; Lynn Nesmith, director of research, Architecture (formerly 
the AIA Journal); June P. Payne, assistant director of University Publications, Arizona 
State University, Tempe, Arizona; Marilyn Pustay, librarian, The Sun/The Daily Herald, 
Biloxi, Mississippi; Kate Rafine, Illinois Department of Conservation; Frances Stafford, 
executive administrative assistant, WLOX-AM Radio, Biloxi, Mississippi; George Talbot 
and Myrna Williamson of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; William N. Thurston, 
historic preservation supervisor, Division of Archives, History and Records Management 
of the Florida Department of State; Gavin Townwend, Architectural Drawing Collection, 
University of California, Santa Barbara, California; the staff of the Interlibrary Loan 
Office, Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Kathryn Vaughn, 
reference librarian, Art Institute of Chicago; Sam Venturella, president, Henry George 
School of Social Science, Chicago; Coreen Wallace of WNET/Thirteen Television of New 
York; Wilsons Solicitors of Salisbury, England; and Tony P. Wrenn, archivist, American 
Institute of Architects Archives. 

I would also like to thank Buckley C. Jeppson, Janet Walker, and Margaret Gore of The 
Preservation Press for their valuable assistance in publishing this softcover edition of 
Truth Against the World. 

Journalist Clifford L. Helbert once said that 

three things distinguish the legacy of each man: his search for truth, chimerical and 
elusive as it is; his search for artistic integrity and the beauty and utility he achieves in 
things he makes; his search and response in love for his fellow man. To excel in one is 
amazing; to excel in two is astounding; to excel in all is the mark of genius. . .to strive in 
all is to live life to the fullest. 

Frank Lloyd Wright was such a genius. 

PATRICK J. MEEHAN, AIA 


Introduction 

A Talk with Mary Margaret McBride 

One should select one's grandparents with even greater care than one's parents. 

{The text of this heretofore unpublished conversation was transcribed by the editor from 
The Mary Margaret McBride Show, a radio program broadcast on December 2, 1949, from 
Radio City in New York and rebroadcast on March 14, 1950. The original recordings of 
these two programs are housed in the Motion Picture and Recorded Sound Division of the 
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Recordings and transcriptions are used by 
permission of the estate of the late Mary Margaret McBride, Cynthia Lowry legatee.} 

On Friday, December 2, 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared on The Mary Margaret 
McBride Show, a radio program broadcast over WEAF the New York station of the 
National Broadcasting Company (NBC), located at Radio City. In March of the same year 
Mr. Wright was the recipient of the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects 
(see Chapter 16). During the thirty-five-minute talk show Mr. Wright appeared to relax 
in the company of Ms. McBride, whose ability to make her guest feel at home by listening 
attentively and interjecting only an occasional question or comment encouraged him to 
expound at some length on his Welsh ancestors who brought with them to America their 
family motto-the Druid symbol that represented their strong belief in "Truth Against the 
World." It seems fitting that Frank Lloyd Wright's talk with Mary Margaret McBride 
should serve as the introduction to this book. 


MARY MARGARET McBRIDE: I wonder how people feel about age today, compared 
with fifty years ago? I think quite differently. 

VINCENT CONNOLLY (Ms. McBride's cohost): I would say so. You often hear people 
say: "When I was a child my grandmother, at fifty, was an old lady," or something of that 
sort. 

McBRIDE: Of course, as we get older, Vincent, fifty doesn't seem so old. 

CONNOLLY: Well, you have something there! 

McBRIDE: Yes. When you're a child, I suppose, it always would. What I was thinking was 
that there are so many older people doing such wonderful jobs and today on this program 
we have one of them. We have a man who is considered, perhaps, the world's greatest 
architect alive today-Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Well, Frank Lloyd Wright, you and I are both one-hundred percent American aren't we? 
You were born in Wisconsin. 

WRIGHT: I think that you are a hundred and one percent! (laughter) 

McBRIDE: (laughter) What are you? Seventy-five [percent]? 

WRIGHT: I'm probably ninety-seven and a half or something like that! 

McBRIDE: Ninety-seven and a half? Well, that voice is the voice of Frank Lloyd Wright, 
considered by many the most famous-the best-architect in the world. He is a congenital 
heretic. He says so himself in something I read that he wrote. He has been under fire a 
good many times from people who didn't agree with him. How is it now Frank Lloyd 
Wright? 

WRIGHT: Well, you know any good thing too-long continued becomes a heresy. 

McBRIDE: Why did they call you a heretic and why did you call yourself one? 

WRIGHT: Well, I'm just learning that they did call me a heretic! I didn't know they did! 

McBRIDE: Well, you called yourself one! 

WRIGHT: Have I called myself a heretic? 

McBRIDE: Yes, congenital and congenial. You were talking about your meeting with Mr. 
Sullivan [Louis H. Sullivan]. 

WRIGHT: Oh! 

McBRIDE: You said he was a heretic and you were also a heretic. That's what you said! 

WRIGHT: Did I say that? Well, I had forgotten. 

McBRIDE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: But, anyway, heretic or no heretic here we are! 

McBRIDE: Here we are! 

WRIGHT: Isn't that what the clown says in the circus when he comes on over-"Well, 
here we are again!"? 

McBRIDE: Here we are again-year after year. 

WRIGHT: But this is not again. This is the first time and I'm glad to see you taking up 
architecture. I wish the country would take it up. Can't you persuade the country to take up 
architecture and learn something about it? It's a fascinating study! 

McBRIDE: Well, isn't it rather difficult for a layman? How would I start taking it up? 

WRIGHT: Well, it's the most subjective of the arts, of course, and the one probably most 
difficult to learn about. But [it] seems to me it's the one most worthwhile, because if our 
environment is not important to us what is important? I don't think we can talk about a 
culture or pretend to have one until we are familiar with what makes environment 
admirable and what makes [it] educable or what makes a good building or a bad building. 
Wouldn't you say so? 

McBRIDE: I'd say so. I can't help wondering, what sort of building were you born in and 
did you live in when you were a little boy? 

WRIGHT: It was in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and I went to see it some years ago and it 
had disappeared-thank God! 

McBRIDE and WRIGHT: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I'm sure it was a hideous little box such as they build out there in the 
Middlewest . . . . 

McBRIDE: Do you remember it at all? 

WRIGHT: . . . these little imitations of the Cape Cod Colonial you know-siding, corner 
boards, . . . 

McBRIDE: What should they build out in the Middlewest? 

WRIGHT: What should it be? 

McBRIDE: Yes. 

WRIGHT: Well, it should be Middlewest, shouldn't it? 

McBRIDE: I know! But what is Middlewest? I don't know! 

WRIGHT: Middlewest now, I suppose, is anywhere west of where you're sitting! 
McBRIDE: Yes. I came from Missouri which I'm sure would be Middlewest. 

WRIGHT: Oh, that's Middlewest! That's still Middlewest. 

McBRIDE: What would the Middlewest be, expressed in architecture? 

WRIGHT: Well, we refer to it as the cradle of democracy. We refer to it as the heart of the 
nation. We refer to it as anything that's in the middle of things because that's where we 
are! 

McBRIDE: But I still don't know how you would express it architecturally! 

WRIGHT: Architecturally? Oh, it's something quiet and broad and sensible and belonging 
where it stood-belonging to the ground, you know? All those other little incidental things 
that buildings mostly miss. 

McBRIDE: That's what you believe about all houses people live in. 

WRIGHT: That's right. I think that when you're in the Middlewest you should particularly 
observe all those things. When you come East, of course, well that's different. 

McBRIDE: But a Middlewesterner in the East should conform to the East then, 
architecturally? 

WRIGHT: Yes. A Midwesterner in the East should still be true to the principles that made 
the Middlewest the heart of democracy. 

McBRIDE: Do you believe it really is? 

WRIGHT: I believe it is. 

McBRIDE: I know a lot . . . 

WRIGHT: If democracy has a heart, of course, that's the thing that particularly 
distinguishes it, isn't it, from other-isms? 

McBRIDE: Don't you think so? 

WRIGHT: The fact that it has a heart. The fact that it insists upon the individual as such 
and defends him. [It] has to live on genius-democracy. Democracy can't take the handrail 
down the stair. A democrat has to have courage-keep his hand off the handrail and take 
the steps down the middle. That's a democrat! 
McBRIDE: You're a democrat? 

WRIGHT: Well, I'd like to call myself one-look myself in the face. It's a very high faith! 

McBRIDE: Will democracy last in this world? 

WRIGHT: This world won't last unless democracy does! 

McBRIDE: I think you're right on that! 

STUDIO PERSONNEL: (loud applause) 

McBRIDE: I'd like, Frank Lloyd Wright, for you to go back to Wisconsin because you once 
wrote a charming little book about yourself as a little boy. Do you remember how you 
started the book? Do you remember telling about a walk you took with an uncle and the 
snow had just fallen . . . 

WRIGHT: Oh yes . . . I do remember and I remember that I wrote that book that my little 
family might continue to eat. It was a purely defensive affair. I had never written a book 
and didn't want to write a book but I thought that, perhaps, it was the only way I could get 
some money. 

McBRIDE: Did you? 

WRIGHT: So I wrote the first An Autobiography under very trying circumstances and it's 
more or less, of course, oh . . . what shall we say? You finish it! 

McBRIDE: I gather that you didn't care for it. I liked it. 

WRIGHT: Well, I've read it recently again-portions of it-and I like a number of things 
in it. I thought my "To Her" was rather good. 
People familiar with the situation at that time would naturally think that "To Her"  meant 
some charming young person. As a matter of fact, it was a cow! 

McBRIDE AND STUDIO PERSONNEL: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: "To Her" referred to the cow. And I do think that the cow has been neglected by 
the many singers down the ages and it was time that somebody sang the glory of the cow! 
The calf-bearing, cud-chewing, all-forbearing cow. 

McBRIDE: Who's always in the right position for pictures, you've also said. 

WRIGHT: That's right! That's true! You've read it I see! (laughter) 

McBRIDE: Oh dear me! (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, that's more than I could have expected! 

McBRIDE: It is? What do you expect now? 

WRIGHT: I received a letter from the north of Scotland-way up-from a woman who had 
three children and she had read An Autobiography and wanted to thank me for what it had 
done for her and her little children. It amazed me because I didn't know there was 
anything like that in it. 

McBRIDE: Maybe it gave her courage! 

WRIGHT: I don't know what it gave her, but she gave me quite a thrill when she wrote 
that little note to me. 

McBRIDE: Yes. You have a wonderful picture in there of your Welsh grandfather that I 
love. 

WRIGHT: Well, he was a wonderful man to picture! 

McBRIDE: He was a hat maker and he made a hat that looked a little like a witch's hat. 

WRIGHT: Well, you've seen them riding on broom-sticks-these witches with these 
pointed cone hats. 

McBRIDE: Yes. 

WRIGHT: They're Welsh hats. 

McBRIDE: But men wore them! 

WRIGHT: You can stand on them [and] throw them on the floor-he used to-and [he'd] 
say "stand [on] it" and if it would hold them up they'd buy the hat, I suppose. 

McBRIDE: (laughter) Was he the one that had the motto on his crest or was that the other 
grandfather? 

WRIGHT: The family, yes. Richard Lloyd Jones was a preacher and a hatter. He was a 
Unitarian in Wales and they were not very popular in those days, so he thought he'd come 
over here where men were free and thought was free. After he had been here for a few 
months they wanted to try him-he went to Ixonia [Wisconsin]. [He] had a church there 
and they wanted to try him for heresy. So that's what he got when he first got here. 

McBRIDE: But he preached anyhow? 

WRIGHT: But he preached anyhow and he survived. He came over here with that 
Druid-What shall we call it? The Japanese call it a "mawn" [sic]. We call it a motto. It's 
the Druid symbol-the inverted rays of the sun-and it signifies Truth Against the World. 
If that isn't enough trouble for one family! 

McBRIDE: I thought that it was very appropriate that your grandfather should have that 
because it seems to me, Frank Lloyd Wright, that you fought for that your entire eighty 
years. 

WRIGHT: Do you think that he was thinking of me when he chose that motto? 

McBRIDE: (laughter) No. I guess he didn't have you in [mind]. . . . Maybe he did! 

WRIGHT: Maybe I was thinking of him! 

McBRIDE: Yes, you never know about these things. No, he may have been thinking about 
his descendants. 

WRIGHT: One should select one's grandparents with even greater care than one's parents. 

McBRIDE: Your grandmother I thought you did select with great care. She was the 
one-the one that I'm talking about-the one that mended the tree. 

WRIGHT: Oh yes! Sewed a bandage around its trunk and there it stands today 
eighty-five feet tall. A beautiful pine. A beautiful white pine. 

McBRIDE: A pine tree and [she] took a little sewing box and put a bandage on it as if it 
were a human being. 

WRIGHT: A patch. A patch around the trunk and then wound a bandage around it to save 
the little tree and there it is. 

McBRIDE: And when this gentle woman died the prayer that grandfather sent up to 
heaven was the most beautiful and strongest anybody had ever heard him pray. 

WRIGHT: I've heard my uncles and my aunts and my mother say that and might I say it 
could be, from what I know of him. I was taught in my early days as a youngster to answer 
to: "well, whose farmer are you now?" And I was taught to say to him: "bora dake tadke 
[sic] good morning grandfather." And he would say "kiske salyong" [sic], which would 
mean: "Have you slept sound?" So that's about all I remember about grandfather except 
that his wife taught him to smoke for the asthma and he got rid of the asthma but he never 
got rid of the pipe after that. It was a great mortification to the family! 

McBRIDE: And he was the one who used to give tobacco to the Indians who came and 
brought venison. 

WRIGHT: That's right. Yes he did. He was one of the pioneers out there and he had his 
ten children-lost one coming over-there were nine survivors and there were four of 
those strong, tall fellows who began to civilize that neck of the woods. 

McBRIDE: And there was your mother. 

WRIGHT: My mother was one of them. 

McBRIDE: This mother who hung up. . . . Tell why you were an architect because your 
mother planned it. 

WRIGHT: Certainly I never had to choose a profession. I never could understand how one 
would conduct oneself in the direction of the choice of a profession. I was to be an 
architect when I was born-never had any other thought. [I] put up with an engineering 
coursein Wisconsin [University of Wisconsin-Madison] because they didn't have a course 
in architecture and then left three months before they would have given me a degree in 
engineering because I couldn't wait any longer to become an architect. 

McBRIDE: Tell about your mother hanging these woodcuts of the cathedrals. 

WRIGHT: My father was a preacher, of course, a musician, and he subscribed to a little 
magazine-not so little, it was a large one-called Old England and with each number 
came a wood engraving of one of the English cathedrals, so my mother hung them up 
around the room in which I was born and I came into that room where they were hung and 
that was her preparation for her architect. 

McBRIDE: (laughter) You recognized it early? 

WRIGHT: Well, I don't know what you mean about recognizing it? I accepted it as a 
foregone conclusion. 

McBRIDE: Now we have two gentlemen here [in the studio]-one is a physicist and one is 
a chemist-and they, I suppose, went through all the periods of "I'd like to be this or I'd 
like to be that" and I just wondered if you did, too? 

WRIGHT: No, never. 

McBRIDE: You just knew! 

WRIGHT: I never questioned it. I accepted it without question and I thought it was the 
finest thing in the world and I didn't believe that anybody had such a nobility of 
opportunity or character or purpose as an architect. My mother taught me that and she got 
me born into it, in that sense, and I used to be very proud of being an architect and I would 
expect a reaction when I told people that I was an architect. I'd expect to see them wilt a 
little bit and be a little more respectful but it never made much impression. 

McBRIDE AND OTHERS IN STUDIO: (laughter) 

McBRIDE: Maybe they agreed with Mr. Sullivan [Louis H. Sullivan, architect] about 
draftsmen? Mr. Sullivan . . . 

WRIGHT: Well, maybe they did! But I think most of them thought that an architect was 
just a case of a lot of mortar and some bricks and blueprints. I think they didn't think 
anything about him as anything else. 

McBRIDE: They probably didn't know that you had to be a . . . . Wasn't Mr. Sullivan a 
draftsman before he drew ornamentation sketches? 

WRIGHT: I don't think he ever regarded himself as such. 

McBRIDE: No. He only regarded you as such. 

WRIGHT: And I never regarded myself as such. 

McBRIDE: Well, he did when he lost his temper at you, though. 

WRIGHT: He could draw beautifully. So beautifully that he didn't have to regard himself 
as a draftsman. 

McBRIDE: No. Why did he say he couldn't get by [as] a draftsman? 

WRIGHT: Well, you see, a draftsman per se as such can never be an architect. He can 
never be anything but a draftsman. He becomes somehow habituated to the drawing board 
and the pencil and the triangle and eraser; that's his life. He does as he's told. He seldom 
emerges from draftsmanship. I hope that many of them aren't listening now! 

McBRIDE: (slight laughter) Well, if they are they have a lot of company because there are 
many jobs one gets into and ruts where one does the same thing; maybe not drawing lines 
but . . . 

WRIGHT: I wish we wouldn't use that word jobs so much in our country. 

McBRIDE: You do? 

WRIGHT: I don't like to think of them . . . 

McBRIDE: What should we call them? 

WRIGHT: . . . how the building that I am building is a job. I don't like to think of how the 
man that wants me to build one as a client, either! All these things get into categories with 
us and become standardized and somehow the life goes out of them. Don't you think so? 

McBRIDE: Yes, I certainly do think so. I remember Mr. Sullivan telling you in [what] 
you're doing-put life in it, make it live-and, if everything could, that would be best. 

WRIGHT: That's right. Make it come alive. Make it come alive! Well, he did-he could. 
There is more than one way of making things come alive. You could make them come 
alive in so many different styles and ways of being-don't you know? 

McBRIDE: Yes, that's true. Anything you do can come alive-don't you think? 

WRIGHT: He made it come alive his way and I was determined that someday I'd make it 
come alive my way. 

McBRIDE: What do you mean by USONIA? Is that the way you pronounce it? 

WRIGHT: Well, we are a country without a name really. We speak of America . . . well, 
when I was in Brazil some years ago-I think it was in thirty-nine [1939]-I used to 
speak of America as the place I came from but they were the Americans, not we. So then I 
thought-and I had been thinking of it before-it was rather unfair for us to take the name 
Americans to ourselves. So I was reading Samuel Butler's Erewhon-you ever read it? 

McBRIDE: Yes. 

WRIGHT: [It is] a very interesting, fascinating book by Samuel Butler . He was the father 
of the great English realistic novel. Well, 
he pitied us because we had no name and so he gave us one and he gave us USONIA. And 
USONIA, of course, means simply-well, it has its roots in union, of union, for 
union-USONIA. So, in the early days people used to ask me what style my houses were 
and I couldn't tell them, you know, and that didn't please them, so I was held back a good 
deal by not working in a style. Now if I could have said Usonian that would have satisfied 
them. 

McBRIDE: (laughter) They wouldn't have known what you meant! 

WRIGHT: They wouldn't have known the difference (laughter). 

McBRIDE: They would have been satisfied because that was a label. 

WRIGHT: Well, now we do Usonian houses. 

McBRIDE: But, Frank Lloyd Wright, you do have to have words to express ideas. Of 
course sometimes houses or churches express ideas but . . . 

WRIGHT: You have to have bad words to express certain states of feeling . . . 

McBRIDE: Yes. 

WRIGHT: . . . and you have to have good words to express other states of feeling and 
words are important-I guess. Too important! Or could they be? I don't know. 

McBRIDE: They are important but I am just trying to think about job, for instance, . . . 

WRIGHT: The word job . . . 

McBRIDE: . . . is overworked. 

WRIGHT: . . . has a vulgar sound, doesn't it? Job. 

McBRIDE: It is an ugly word when you come right to it. 

WRIGHT: For instance, a sailor is a gob, isn't he? 

McBRIDE: He was in the war before the last [i.e., World War I]. 

WRIGHT: Well gob and job and hob . . . well I don't know-let it stand. Of course it's 
English and . . . 

McBRIDE: But I thought perhaps you'd . . . 

WRIGHT: . . . we can't change language! 

McBRIDE: . . . help me and tell me what to do! 

WRIGHT: Well, I don't know what to do concerning the language. 

McBRIDE: It's been reported to me, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, that you said that in 
fifty-five years, at the very least, all these . . . this building we're sitting in right now 
would be condemned. 

WRIGHT: Fifty-five years? Yes, I think that would be about the life of the building. 

McBRIDE: Radio City? 

WRIGHT: Of course, it was dated when it was built; that is a great misfortune. I noticed 
coming in here this morning piles of this, that, and the other thing, and I had to make my 
way through and I suppose nobody ever thought of a storage space for a studio. Did they? 

McBRIDE: No (slight laughter). 

STUDIO PERSONNEL: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, perhaps you better call the fifty-five years up now and build another 
one. Build another building suitable to your purpose! 

McBRIDE and STUDIO PERSONNEL: (continued laughter) 

McBRIDE: What will happen now when this is condemned; they'll just put up another 
one? 

WRIGHT: Well, I suspect that Bob Moses will have to be called in to construct three 
bridges . . . 

McBRIDE and STUDIO PERSONNEL: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: . . . one below the Washington and two above the Washington to the other 
shore and the other shore will have to be annexed as New York [City] to the left. Or would 
it be to the right? It would depend on whether you were coming in or going out. But I 
think that would be a good move! 

McBRIDE: Yes. 

WRIGHT: Then I think above that the taxicabs in the street should be cut in two. The 
average fare on a taxicab would be one and a half passengers. Now why have a great place 
that you could really move into and keep house in just to tote that one and a half around 
the city? 

McBRIDE: (laughter) Well, what would you do with cities? 

WRIGHT: Oh! I, of course, am an advocate of Broadacre City [see Chapters 26 and 27], 
which is everywhere and no where. But I would have, of course, nature take her course, 
which she's doing-the city is disappearing. The city is going to the country whether we 
want it or not and, of course, you know that every city is a vampire. Don't you? 

McBRIDE: Is a vampire? 

WRIGHT: A vampire. 

McBRIDE: I think so. 

WRIGHT: It can't live on its own birthrate more than three years unless it's refreshed from 
the country-the villages-it's gone! And I was reading the other day that every city in the 
United States is insolvent-bankrupt. 

McBRIDE: And they'll just vanish? Won't they? 

WRIGHT: They will vanish all except places at the ports. Every port will be a city. Every 
center of distribution of natural materials-like great mines and great oil deposits-will 
have cities. But pretty soon we aren't going to know the city from the country. It's a terrible 
thing to think that we won't know the country from the city but the city won't be like the 
cities we see now. 

McBRIDE: What will they be like? 

WRIGHT: Well, something that we haven't yet recognized. Very beautiful and very, very 
much to be desired. It would be pretty hard to put it into words because I work with a 
pencil and a drawing board and triangles and so on. 

McBRIDE: There'll be space? 

WRIGHT: Well, it will recognize space as the reality of the building rather than walls and 
bricks and mortar and the shell of the thing. The spirit of the thing will come more and 
more into being and we'll come to love more and more the ground-realize that it is the 
basis of culture-and try to make up for lost time! 

McBRIDE: We've wasted a good deal of time! 

WRIGHT: We've wasted most of the time that we've been here on what we call 
merchandising, manufacturing, and money making and we've made nearly everything 
quite successfully except the thing that it would be worth making for-which would be a 
true culture of our own. That's something we've forgotten or never knew. Of course, we 
were originally colonials-weren't we? We came over here with customs and manners and 
pretty nearly everything set and we continued with it not realizing that now we had a 
chance to live in a greater and more satisfying way. So we continued to be English, I 
suppose. Of course, the English people are the most habituated people in the world-aren't 
they? Well, we've inherited that habituation, so we've been inhibited by that habituation. 

McBRIDE: I don't quite see why you think we'll get out of it though. 

WRIGHT: Because . . . things can't endure forever-even abuses! 

McBRIDE: (slight laughter) 

WRIGHT: And we've had almost enough and by now a great many of our people are 
awakening to the loss that we've sustained. They're awakening to the fact that we do not 
have culture of our own; that we are as that witty Frenchman said-I never could 
remember his name, if I ever knew it; I've used his quotation often-that "we were the only 
great nation in the world to have proceeded directly from barbarism to degeneracy with no 
civilization of our own in between." 

McBRIDE and STUDIO PERSONNEL: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, we laugh but it's true! We should weep and tear our hair and we should 
get busy and do something about it. Don't you think so? 

McBRIDE: It's chiefly because we've just imitated, isn't it? 

WRIGHT: Well, of course, that's the little book that I've just written-Genius and the 
Mobocracy. And the mobocracy-I meant by mobocracy-not what the critics that 
criticized the book seemed to think I meant. I meant the maintainers of mediocrity, not the 
workers, not the simple people, but those people who really are sitting in armchairs as 
professors and who function as critics and who sign the biggest checks-the people who 
really would not allow life to be lived, will not allow real building to occur. Like our 
insurance companies, [they] must always bank on yesterday; like our bankers looking ten 
years behind our times in order to be safe instead of ten years ahead in order to be safer. 
But we can't do anything about that except to do what we are doing-making life as 
uncomfortable for them as we can!!! 

McBRIDE: (loud laughter) Thank you very much! Who published your Genius and the 
Mobocracy? 

WRIGHT: Genius and the Mobocracy was published by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. 

McBRIDE: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce. 

WRIGHT: I don't think it would be such a good book to read because it's hard to read. 
Most people who have read it say they've read it a second time in order to understand what 
is was all about the first time [they read it]!! 

McBRIDE and STUDIO PERSONNEL: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: There is a book that I think you should know about and everybody in America 
should know about because, don't you see, we're getting to be the most arrogant people on 
earth. The most arrogant nation and we've been up against something now that . . . or we 
are up against something now that's going to be pretty serious for us if we don't cease our 
arrogance and become a little more understanding, and that is of the life of the Orient, the 
philosophy of the Orient, the Oriental peoples-that profound and deeper philosophy of 
the East of which we've allowed ourselves to learn nothing. But there was a great man who 
died just lately in Paris [and] he's been referred to in a book . . . his name was Gurdjieff. 
We who knew him called him "Gurdovanich" [sic]. Well, Kipling said, you know, that 
"the East and the West, these twain shall never meet." But in this philosopher-in this 
great scientist, because he's a greater scientist I think than perhaps any who now live or 
who have lived-he pursued this ancient culture even into the fastnesses of Tibet and he 
came out with the most profound analysis of our organic relationship to the cosmos. And 
we will learn from him and by way of a mind like his, which was superb, to be a little 
more careful of how we misjudge the philosophy and ideals of other people than our own 
and we need that. So read this book and read this man. I think the book, which is 
published now, is called In Search of the Miraculous, published by Harare and Bruce and I 
think the other book to be published soon will be published by them which is 
Gurdovanich's own book-the tale of his travels-and I think that he calls it "Tales of . . . 
to His Grandson" or something like that. 

McBRIDE: We'll look out for it. 

WRIGHT: Well, thank you very much. Good-bye. 

McBRIDE: Thank you Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a pleasure to have you here. 

WRIGHT: You've been very nice and it's been very pleasurable. 

McBRIDE: You didn't mind it? 

WRIGHT: Boys, you carry on! [Mr. Wright exits the studio] 

McBRIDE: (laughter) I didn't really spring on him two of the best little yarns I had about 
him. He had long golden curls until he was eleven years old when they were cut off [and] 
that's in his first An Autobiography. [He] used to get up at four o'clock in the morning to 
milk-he learned to milk very well and maybe that's why he had an ode "To the 
Cow"-and his family had on the farm in Wisconsin a chapel of their own with rocking 
chairs in the front of the chapel for uncles and aunts. Wasn't he an interesting man? 

You notice that he talked about where we were broadcasting from-well, it's Radio City in 
case you've wondered yourself. We're right in Radio City. 


This Is American Architecture 

. . . God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often 
by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only 
body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll 
find it in the nature of that thing. 

{Text of a speech, edited and reprinted with additional material, from Frank Lloyd 
Wright's "This Is American Architecture," Design, 
Vol. LIX, January/February 1958, pp. 112-113, 124, 127-128, by permission of the 
Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. The additional material is derived from a 
Pacifica Tape Library audio recording titled "Frank Lloyd Wright and His Impact" 
(Catalog #BB3612).} 


Introduction 

The text of the speech contained in this second introductory chapter was transcribed from 
a lecture Frank Lloyd Wright gave in 1957 to more than 1000 high school students at the 
former Fine Arts Building of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mr. Wright 
discusses with a quiet and reserved audience the definition of the word architect, the 
Beaux Arts architecture that permeated the 1893 Columbian Exposition and its later 
influence on architecture during the early part of the twentieth century, the Declaration of 
Independence and the sovereignty of the individual, related to the emergence of a free 
American architecture, nature study and its importance to architecture, and the concept of 
architectural principle opposed to architectural precedent. Mr. Wright always enjoyed 
talking to and with the youth of America and had a certain mystical rapport with the 
young, made obvious in this speech by the attentiveness of the large student audience. 

By the end of 1957, the year of this speech, Mr. Wright had already designed 864 projects, 
which represented about ninety percent of his lifework. In addition, 1957 was his most 
prolific year of architectural practice in terms of the number of projects created 
(forty-three). Before his death on April 9, 1959, one and one-half years after this 
speech, he was to design another ninety-two revolutionary projects in an astonishing 
lifetime achievement of 956, of which 448 were executed. 

The year 1957 was a busy one not only with respect to his prolific architectural outpouring 
but also to the frequency of his public appearances. In late April of 1957 he addressed 
another interested group of students who attended the Department of Architecture at the 
University of California, Berkeley. {For the complete text of these lectures and seminars 
see Patrick J. Meehan (Editor), The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd 
Wright (New York: John Wiley and Sons), 1984, pp. 185-228.} Mr. Wright was invited 
to give a number of lectures and seminars to that student group as a Bernard Maybeck 
Lecturer. On June 18 he spoke to the editors of Arts in Society regarding his philosophies 
of education and art (see Chapter 20), and on July 31 he stood before the Marin County 
[California] Board of Supervisors in regard to his commission to design the Marin County 
Civic Center (see Chapter 29). In September he was interviewed twice by Mike Wallace 
for the nationally televised The Mike Wallace Interview. {Ibid, pp. 291-310.} Mr. 
Wright was eighty-nine years old in 1957. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: Well, I suppose you're here-most of you-to hear something about 
architecture, aren't you? And, [do] you know, first of all, what architecture means? What 
the word architect means? How many of you know? Let's hear it! Can somebody tell me 
what the meaning of the word architect is really? I've asked so many young people and 
always got no for an answer. Then I would turn to the bellwether-the leader-who'd be 
standing by the window and I'd say "well, he knows!" No, rather embarrassed-red in the 
face-he doesn't know! Well, now It's strange that you should wear the name architect all 
your life and never know what the word means! Isn't it? Now, is there anybody here who 
can give me the meaning of the word architect? 

AUDIENCE: (no response) 

WRIGHT: Why surely this is not possible! You're all students of architecture, aren't you? 
You youngsters down there, are you seniors? Juniors? Or what? Seniors! Well, now, the 
word arch "the archbishop" arch means the top; it means way up above everything; really 
master. There you have arch! Now tect-what does tect mean? You know that! 
Technician, technology-it means know-how-knowing the way and the means-tect. 
Architect-there you have the master of the know-how. Well, now, if I've never done 
anything else for you, [I] came down here to tell you what the name that you wear, or [are] 
going to wear, means-I ought to get a posy for that, shouldn't I? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Isn't it strange, boys and girls, isn't it a little strange that things as fundamental, 
as elemental as all of that are escaped in your educational adventure? And you've escaped 
nearly everything else, I imagine, in much the same way! 

What is architecture, anyway? What does architecture mean to you? Is it, like the meaning 
of the word, also something you take for granted? An architect builds buildings, doesn't 
he? He is supposed to know why he builds those buildings. He is supposed to do something 
in the design and construction of those buildings that makes them eloquent of their 
purpose, that makes them features of their site so that they grace it and do not disgrace it. 
In other words, it's a great mother art-architecture. And for 500 years, of course, as you 
know, architecture has been more or less a cliche, more or less an exterior, not true to 
conditions, not true to life. And what we have here and what we're in today is 
characteristic, I think, of how the world got its architecture. 

Well now, it serves a purpose. I remember when this building was built the American 
people got their first impressive view of the classic at the Columbian Exposition, where 
this building was the [Fine] Arts Building. It was filled with paintings and sculpture and it 
came straight over from the Beaux Arts, where all of the architecture that we knew 
anything about in America-where the architects themselves-had come from. I don't 
suppose we had a real important architect in those days who was not a Beaux Arts 
graduate. And therefore he was inoculated with the major axis and the temple forms and 
the columns and all that-he came over here furnished forth [sic] to give to America what 
all the other civilizations and all the other cultures of the world had. But somehow that 
didn't square in my mind or in the mind of Louis [H.] Sullivan, in the minds of Dankmar 
Adler and a few other people at that time, with this Declaration of Independence. We had 
declared something new in the world and that was-what? The sovereignty of the 
individual and that was a very brave thing in government to do. Magna Charta in England 
was the nearest thing to it that had ever been proclaimed as government; we got something 
from that and France was toying with the idea. But we came out-our forefathers-with 
that declaration of the sovereignty of the individual per se as such. 

When all this architecture that we had to draw upon-if we were going to go on building 
buildings in the old way-were monarchic; they were all the product of authority, none of 
them were the children or the expression of freedom, freedom of spirit, freedom of soul.  
So, we were up against, as I saw it, the necessity for a culture of our own, an expression of 
our own, worthy of the greatest gift of ground the world has ever seen anywhere-most 
beautiful, most extensive, and all the riches beyond imagination. No nation ever inherited 
such a material wealth as we inherited! So what to do with it? 

We had no means of doing anything with it except as we tried to make over or in some 
way modify these old patterns, patterns of an old life and an old civilization not at all like 
ours. So something had to be born from within the man. Something had to be born in a 
new spirit and you had nothing to go by except principle. 

Now principle never changes. The expressions of principle do. Like morals, you see. 
Morality and ethics have only this in common: that in morals you're endeavoring to apply 
the principles of ethics and they may be very far wrong, and morals are no surer than the 
classic architecture was surer, or principle. In fact, morals are oftentimes not on speaking 
terms with ethics. So here was this proposition-let's call it a proposition: how are we 
going to satisfy the conditions of this new life? Here's the machine, here's quality now 
available, here are certain things that a new tool the world hadn't seen before could do very 
well-could do better than it could be done by hand. But still we had for a pattern to do 
those things with was what had been done by hand. So, first of all, the machine began 
imitating in architecture those things which had been done by hand. Well, they soon 
looked pretty dead and pretty tough and not worthy of man's time or a second look. So 
someone had to devise ways and means of building whereby the machine could render 
even more beautifully than ever before the nature of the material, the nature of steel. 

We didn't understand anything; we were taking everything on faith, by cliche, until we 
began to dig in and find out what the nature of these things really amounted to, 
architecturally-how to express wood as wood. Now, of course, wood is the tree-the 
greatest friend of man that he has-wood is very friendly to man, he feels it so! Stone is 
under his feet, the ribs of the earth he inhabits-stone. 
And here comes glass as an entirely new material to keep air out. And all these new things 
lying there [that] the Greeks never knew anything about. I'm sure that if the Greeks had 
known [or] had these materials that we've had we'd be copying the Greeks now! We 
wouldn't be building anything but Greek buildings. But they didn't have these things. So 
we've had to get forms that were new to express them. We've had to find integrity that was 
lacking in the Beaux Arts performance; it was lacking in this kind of building that we're in 
here now [i.e., the Fine Arts Building of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago]. 
And we had to come out with something that had a fresh new expression of continence, at 
least, if not integrity of feature, and we went in that direction; studied it; worked hard at it; 
came out with certain simple forms that belong to the prairie here. 

That's a feature of architecture, too-the thing has to belong there where it stands, as much 
of it as possible. It has to be true to the materials of which it is built-which may be 
what?-steel and glass largely now. And also various other things. 

Here comes the stature of the human being. Here comes the nature of the human being. 
For the first time we began to build according to a human scale. The old grandomania, as 
you know, took into effect only giving humanity an inferiority complex. That was the aim, 
of course, and the result of the old Gothic architecture. The old classic [style] was much 
the same-make a man feel small. And he was small in those days; the individual didn't 
amount to much. 

But now all that changed. Here [in America] the individual did amount to a great deal. So, 
we took the scale of the human being as the new scale. Well, we didn't get too far with this 
idea of principle instead of precedent before the World's Fair corrupted the whole taste of 
the nation [i.e., the Columbian Exposition of 1893] and we went back about fifty years to 
the old, old practices inculcated by the Beaux Arts. So, what [we] finally got out of the 
World's Fair was buildings like this [i.e., the Fine Arts Building of the Columbian 
Exposition of 1893 at Chicago]; buildings of this character. And the new was 
suspended-oh, I guess not for fifty years, say forty-we'll compromise for thirty-five. 

Then we began to have another influx [of], should we say, intelligence? Feeling a desire 
for something substantially our own; something that represented our civilization , our 
time, and our place, and our man. Well, that's what we've been working at now and, to the 
degree that we have succeeded, we are on the path of a great future and a great 
demonstration of what the human mind-if it's related to the human heart-can 
accomplish. But now we've arrived at a point where being lost out of this progress [or] 
progression is the nature of the human heart. 

We're getting to the point now where we're satisfied with the old steel framing, where we 
build a building with a wall and put the inside against it this way [Editor's note: Mr. 
Wright motions with his hands]; where the old ideals of principle which make a building 
like this [Editor's note: Mr. Wright again motions with his hands] one by way of steel in 
tension-that was the Imperial Hotel [and] that's what kept it from destruction [because] 
you couldn't pull it apart. Steel in tension first went into actual experience against the 
earthquake in the Imperial Hotel. 

Well it seems that, of course, the foundation was another feature but essentially it was 
tension-steel in tension-that saved the building and it's been saving it ever since. Just 
three weeks ago [there] was one of the greatest quakes they've [Tokyo] had; the Imperial 
[Hotel] does this thing-it goes this way and then it comes back again [Editor's note: Mr. 
Wright motions again with his hands] and everybody in it is perfectly safe. 

Steel in tension. Well, now, all these new things, like glass, have properties. Steel has a 
property. Now, of course, when we first got steel there was nothing to do. We had been 
using lumber, we had beams and we had posts, and so we rolled the steel into lumber 
[shapes] and we used the steel as beams and we used it as posts and we used all that sort of 
thing, just as though we were using wood. But here's [John] Roebling coming along and 
some of these minds that are based on principle-elemental thinkers-and Roebling said 
"but steel is strongest as a strand." You've got the properties of steel, [a] property used in 
construction is the strand like the spider, spinning. And there lies the secret of what steel 
can do for modern times. It can give indefinite span-indefinite lightness of span. 

And, here comes glass to use in large open surfaces filling these spans lightly and there 
you had an architecture that the Greeks knew nothing about-Gothic Goths knew nothing 
about. In fact, the Goths tried for this delicacy and width and span and everything by way 
of stone until the stone began to fall down-until the buildings began to fall! They carried 
it as far as it could be carried. 

Now we've started on a new course-new buildings and inasmuch as they had nothing in 
that time to use except steel lumber, they used the steel framing and they used steel the 
way lumber is to be used, you see? Now, of course, when you frame steel together like 
lumber and make a steel building like a lumber building the joints can never get the paint 
that is necessary to keep the building living. As long as you paint the steel, the steel will 
stand. But the paint doesn't get into the joints! So, [for] most of those nineteenth-century 
[buildings] . . . that was a cliche. That's what the nineteenth century produced by way of 
thinking for structure-the lumber-framed steel building! Well, now, the joints of course, 
were exposed and have been exposed and they're the only life the building had, and today, 
of course, our buildings are more or less dying of arthritis at the joints! I think that when 
they built the first skyscrapers in New York City they said they would stand for fifty-five 
years. Well, they'll stand a good deal longer than fifty-five years but they're only 
temporary. As compared with ancient buildings, we haven't built a building in America by 
way of steel construction that's going to last measurably long. So that was a wrong, wrong 
way to use steel if you wanted permanence! But, of course, the whole steel industry was set 
up on that basis and if you wanted to do something else it would be very troublesome and 
expensive. So, they made the best of the old steel framing and did pretty well with it. They 
reduced it to a facade and all you had to do with a facade after you got it was to devise 
some type of wallpaper pattern for the face of it and hang it there or plaster it on. So the 
architect became a facade mummer and a paper hanger, more or less, on a steel frame. 

Well, now, that's all right for nineteenth-century architecture and it's good enough for the 
city, probably because the city isn't going to last very long now with the car. You've got to 
choose between the car and the city and the choice about fifteen years from now is going to 
be quite evident that it is not going to be the city! They're doing everything possible to 
make it stand for the time being. 

Now all these elemental things are inherent in the nature of architecture today, and only as 
you study nature. And nature doesn't mean out-of-doors, you know-nature doesn't 
mean horses and cows and streams and storms only-that's only one little element. Nature 
means the essential significant life of the thing, whatever the thing is. That thumb of mine, 
what's the nature of the thumb? Why is this nail on the thumb? It's the why, the 
questioning concerned with the very life and character of whatever is, that is the study of 
nature. Now there's no architect possible for future use or who is able in the least to reckon 
with these terrific impulses released by the facilities of machinery and modern science, 
who can interpret them in terms of beauty, until he has mastered and become a master in 
the realm of the study of nature. That's why I think we made a great mistake when we took 
the capital "N" off nature and put it only on God. [Putting it] on God is all right-leave it 
there because God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature-and it has 
been said often by philosophers that nature is the will of God. And I prefer to say that 
nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth 
concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing. Now we've had great 
philosophers who are masters of what we call human nature; we've had great poets, and 
this is a matter for the poet: I think the nature of nature lies, so far as our grasp on it or our 
intimacy with it is concerned, is a matter of our learning from our great poets. 

Of course, when we made this great declaration in the face of the world of a new integrity 
that was going to come out of the freedom of the individual to be greatly himself, we had 
no religion to go with it, don't you see? The old religion was all gone and the only thing 
we had was the saying of Jesus himself, that the kingdom of God is within you! That we 
cling to now. That is what the great Declaration of Independence means: that the kingdom 
of God is within you and that's where you'll find it, and it's in the nature of what you are 
that this thing is going to come that we call appropriate architecture, that we call the 
nature of building beautifully man's life according to time, to place, and to man. And, of 
course, we have nothing that is it. We're working toward it by way of proper uses of 
materials. If we use steel as steel in strands, vary it so that it has a flesh of its own, so that 
it cannot degenerate, take the sheets, slit them, pull them open, make a net that can be 
buried in concrete. 

And we've given concrete a great deal of attention, too, because now concrete is practically 
strengthening, as it goes from year to year. The older the concrete is, if it's good concrete, 
the stronger it is! So it's practically imperishable. The old Roman cement today is there-it 
was magnesite; we used it; I used it in building the Larkin Building in Buffalo [New 
York]. They extract the carbonic acid gas from the soda water-fountain from it-and the 
residue is magnesite-that's the old Roman cement. Well it went very far with that in 
building. The Larkin Building was magnesite. So today we are pretty well in advance of 
nearly everything in this way of the flesh. Concrete becomes the flesh of our modern world 
and steel becomes the fibrous integument in the flesh just as it is in you, as it is in the tree; 
and now we build as nature builds-from the inside out. We no longer think of building 
frames such as you see all over the city, such as you see in every city in the United States, 
and then trying to do something with the exterior to make them attractive facades. So 
they're all today not buildings exactly, they are steel frames on the old lumber pattern of 
framing and they're all perishable and none of them permanent; all complex, expensive, 
except for the standardization that comes from the lumberizing of steel. And there you 
have a situation in the middle of the nineteenth century. Think of it, children, we're seven 
years past the center of the twentieth century [1957], building nineteenth-century 
buildings! In the nineteenth century way! 

Well, now, Adler and Sullivan built them that way. When I was a young architect that was 
all there was! And it's all there is now except for a voice in protest like mine here to you 
and others who feel as I feel. 

So, these things begin in and come out of the study of nature. It is out of the study of the 
nature of steel that you arrive at these conclusions which I'm giving you. It's out of the 
study of the nature of glass that I'm giving you what I'm giving you now. And that's where 
all the things will come from. That's your university; that's where you ought to go to 
school. 

Well, let's see now, we've had a demonstration of what I've been talking about in Mexico. 
You heard very little about it in this country. I don't think it was very welcomed news to 
the architects of the country-what the earthquake did to the steel framing filled with glass 
in Mexico. One poor architect committed suicide, three others went to jail, the frames were 
contorted, twisted, [and] the glass flew all over Mexico City. Because when you build a 
steel frame and gusset plate the joints, or do what you can to stiffen them, the slightest 
deviation from square will crack the glass. And, if the pressure is even almost invisible as 
this pressure [was], that will crack the glass; but if it becomes visible, it will explode the 
glass and that glass flew all over Mexico City from those so-called "modern buildings." 
Well, now, the buildings may be modern buildings but they were not new, they were the 
old thing carried to a long conclusion. Now, that we do; we're quite good at it. We'll take a 
thing and run it into the ground in a few decades. Now that's what we've done with the old 
steel-framed building-we've run it beyond its limitation, we've made a cliche out of it. 
You boys all laugh it up in the school. I went into the Beaux Arts in Paris about three 
months ago [and there were] 3500 students in the great hall where they were showing their 
cliched work and I walked down the aisles here and there [and] they gradually learned that 
I was there and became a big queue behind me and went along. [And they] saw nothing! 
Nothing but the facade-facade after facade after facade! Nothing below the curtain screen 
wall patterned in different ways-sometimes very elaborate now-some of them got quite 
gay! But it was all the same thing; there was no thought of structure. There was nothing 
there that gave you the evidence of understanding of how things were built! You see? 
Well, of course, you can't live on that in a country like ours. 

We're a great growing people with a great growing sense of life, and we're not satisfied 
with all these shallow cliches. We want something that expresses our own heart, our love 
of life, our own feeling for it. And, gracious! If we get into nature, out of nature can come 
miracles of structural integrity with an expression of beauty the world has never even 
dreamed of! 

It's gone wrong now; it's going cliche. It's going away from the standard that we started to 
raise here in Chicago. Chicago was the birthplace of what I'm talking about, and it went 
abroad and astonished Europe and came back and we've been importing it ever since, 
but it was originated here. This is where we began to think that way. And we found a 
poet-Walt Whitman. We read Emerson, Thoreau, and we found the thing that was truly 
in the spirit of our life here and of our nation and that we have still to go by. Every once a 
year I have the boys around me read Emerson's "American Scholar." Get it and read it if 
you haven't read it. I don't know whether you have or not. And he couldn't go back to 
Harvard for 23 years after he delivered that lecture there! So now you can read it and 
various other things down the line. We've had great Americans. We're going to have 
greater ones and they're going to come from the teenagers. I doubt if there [are] very many 
of them visible now above that area, above that grade. It's all with the young; it's all with 
the youngsters who have fresh minds, who can see in when they look at things, not just see 
at; who can learn by analysis, not only by comparison. You see, when you compare this 
with that and that with that, you're on the surface all around; you never get the real truth 
about anything and you never really know anything. It's only as you say, well, what is the 
nature and character of this man, nature and character of that man, and begin to know 
who's who, why is why, and what is what. Only then are you on the road to the future that 
this nation was established not merely to proclaim but to build! And architecture is the 
cornerstone of that culture of which we now have none or little, but we only have an 
amazing civilization. 

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our 
own civilization. Now, of course, architecture is a blind spot of our life in America today. 
How many millions of students go to the university to be educated? They come away 
conditioned, not enlightened, and they know nothing of architecture, although they have a 
department somewhere around-probably in the basement or maybe in some buildings 
outside there where they had soldiers at one time; but architecture has not received, and is 
not receiving now, its due, if we mean by way of the word democracy a genuine culture 
which can become the soul of our civilization. 


3 The Architect 
In the arts every problem carries within its own solution and the only way yet discovered to 
reach it is a very painstaking way-to sympathetically look within the thing itself, to 
proceed to analyze and sift it, to extract its own consistent and essential beauty, which 
means common sense truthfully idealized. That is the heart of the poetry that lives in 
architecture. 

{Text of a speech reprinted with minor editorial corrections from Frank Lloyd Wright's 
"The Architect," The Brickbuilder, Vol. 9, No. 6, June 1900, pp. 124-128.} 

Introduction 

Frank Lloyd Wright delivered "The Architect" on the morning of Friday, June 8, 1900, at 
the Second Annual Convention of the Architectural League of America at the Fullerton 
Memorial Hall of The Art Institute of Chicago . Mr. Wright's address followed a talk given 
at the convention by his Lieber Meister, Louis H. Sullivan, architect. Recounting Mr. 
Wright's delivery, one reviewer commented: 

. . . his long paper on "Architects" belabored every existing condition and every ordinary 
practitioner, right and left, up and down, front and back, without an exception either as to 
practice or design. It was at times quite bright and funny, but such an exaggeration and 
perversion of (undoubtedly occasionally existing) facts can give but little serious weight to 
his paper.{"Second Annual Convention of the Architectural League of America," The 
American Architect and Building News, Vol. 68, June 16, 1900, p. 87.} 
Another reviewer of Mr. Wright's speech had a different opinion and stated that it was 
carefully prepared: 

. . . he devoted himself to questions of professional practice mainly and did not spare the 
plan-factory magnate, the shyster, and the charlatan. He hit from the shoulder and hit 
hard. His paper was full of flashes of wit, which carried home to his hearers the points on 
which he dwelt. The man of-eminence-he showed up in his true colors, and he made a 
strong plea for the man of obscurity striving after an ideal other than money and a large 
practice. His paper was a fearless and outspoken utterance on a subject of moment to every 
person interested in architecture.{"Second Annual Convention of the Architectural League 
of America, held at Chicago, June 7-9," The Brick-builder, Vol. 9, No. 6, June 1900, 
pp. 112-115.} 

Regarding the Convention in general, another reviewer commented further: 

. . . delegates were a rather unusually sharp, bright and attractive looking set, and 
represented evidently very faithfully the general make-up of the clubs that they appeared 
for. The majority were unquestionably draughts men or young architects probably with 
comparatively limited practical experience but certainly with enormous and unbounded 
enthusiasm for their work and profession as they saw it. The impression (probably false) 
would be that many of them, or certainly of their constituents, were not the so-called 
school-trained men. Partially, probably, because of their enthusiasm, and partially 
because of their lack of such training, they frequently desired to break over the traces, and 
would receive with applause condemnation of all design, school, styles and general 
existing conditions; and yet when it came to a vote upon any particular and specific point, 
their good American common-sense generally brought them quite squarely to more 
conservative ideas of even design.{"Second Annual Convention of the Architectural 
League of America," The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 68, June 16, 1900, 
p. 87.} 

It is interesting to note that Mr. Wright opened his speech with the quotation "Liberal 
sects do their work not by growing strong, but by making all others more liberal." The 
following is the complete text of this important speech. 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that 
money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; 
to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, 
there is something beyond it and that is quality. 

When the practice of a profession touching the arts is assumed, certain obligations to the 
public concerning quality and beyond money making are also assumed, and without their 
faithful discharge the professional man degenerates to the weakest type of social menial in 
the entire system-an industrial parasite. An architect practices a fine art as a profession, 
with the commercial and the scientific of his time as his technique. Men are his tools. 

In this age of quantity there is a growing tendency on the part of the public to disregard 
the architect in favor of the plan-factory magnate or architectural broker, and there is 
consequent confusion in the mind of the young architect of today and tomorrow as to the 
sound constitution of his ideal, if that ideal is to be consistent with the success every man 
of him hopes to achieve. This confusion exists, and naturally enough, because the 
topography of his field of action has changed. It has changed to such an extent that in the 
letter, at least, the antique professional standard he may not recognize if he would. But the 
spirit of practice in the old field is still sound to the core-the spirit that made of the 
professional man a champion of finer forces in the lives of his people. 

The influence chiefly responsible for this change and most easily recognized is that of 
science and its commercialism. The tremendous forward march of scientific attainment, 
with attendant new forces and resources-cultivation of the head at the cost of the heart, of 
mind and matter at the expense of the emotions-has nevertheless given to him new and 
masterful tools that demand of him their proper use and have taken from him temporarily 
his power to so use them. Because he has failed to realize and grasp his situation in its new 
bearings, he is not quite like his brother the artist-a thing afraid of organization and its 
symbol the machine; but the architect, the master of creative effort whose province it was 
to make imperishable record of the noblest in the life of his race in his time, for the time 
being has been caught in the commercial rush and whirl and hypnotized into trying to be 
the commercial himself. He has dragged his ancient monuments to the market places, 
tortured them with ribs of steel, twisted and unstrung them, set them up on pins, and 
perforated them until he has left them-not a rag! He has degenerated to a fakir. A fakir 
who flatters thin business imbecility with "art architecture shop fronts," worn in the 
fashion of the old "dickie," or panders to silly women his little artistic sweets. His "art is 
upon the-town-to be chucked beneath the chin by every passing gallant, coaxed within 
the drawing room of the period, and there betrayed as a proof of culture and refinement." 

Do you wonder at the prestige of the plan factory when architecture has become a 
commodity-"a thing" to be applied like a poultice or a porous plaster? Do you wonder 
that architecture becomes of less and less consequence to the public and that the architect 
has small standing except as he measures his success by the volume of business he 
transacts? 

Divorced from fine art, the architect is something yet to be classified, though he is tagged 
with a license in Illinois. So is the banana peddler and the chiropodist. 

Do you wonder that his people demand that he be at least a good business man, a good 
salesman, as something that they can understand and appreciate-when as far as the 
commodity he is selling, it has been dead to them so long [so] as to be unrecognizable 
except by virtue of association with the dim past, and it is not quite respectable even yet to 
do without something of the sort. That commodity is as dead to the salesman as to the 
buyer, and to the fact that the thing is more easily handled dead than alive the salesman, 
captain of industry though he be, owes his existence. 

In business it is in the stock pattern that fortunes are made. So in architecture it is in the 
ready-made article that the money lies, altered to fit by any popular "sartorial artist" the 
less the alteration, the greater the profit-and the architect. 

The present generation of the successful architect has been submerged, overwhelmed by 
the commercialism of his time. He has yielded to the confusion and feverish demand of the 
moment and has become a high-grade salesman of a high-priced imported article. His 
duty to the public as professional man [has been] laid aside, if it was ever realized, and 
merely because the public was ignorant of its claim and willing to buy even if the paint 
came off and the features peeled. 

What has been gained by his feverish haste to offer his art on the altar of commercial 
sacrifice has been quantity at expense to quality-a general depreciation of architectural 
values and a corruption of the birthright of the buyers. In consequence, architecture today 
has not even commercial integrity; and the architect as he practices his profession is 
humiliated and craven. 

Robbed by his own cowardice and mediocrity of his former commanding position in the 
arts, he hesitates between stalking his victim outright or working wires-otherwise his 
friends-for the job, as his opportunity is now styled. 

He joins the club and poses, or hanging to the coat-tails of his friends he teases for the 
jobs they may carry in their pockets, his mouth sticky and his hands dirty, pulling and 
working for more. Then he starves in the lower ranks of a doubtful aristocracy unless he 
comes by influence in other than architectural ways-by inheritance, by marriage, or by 
politics. Does a sale of property appear in a trade journal, immediately the owner is 
besieged by ten "first-class architects," suing for the privilege of submitting "samples free 
of charge," assuring the owner, meanwhile, that he would be granting a personal favor in 
permitting them to do so; and if the samples were not what he wanted they would love 
each other none the less. Or his friend drops in shortly after the owner decides to build and 
incidentally mentions so and so as a good fellow and a winning architect. His wife, 
perhaps, has had influence brought to bear before he gets home, and while against the 
principles of the architect to work for nothing, yet the combination is of such a friendly 
nature as to form a special case, and "sketches," in this instance, in place of "samples" are 
finally submitted to all intents and purposes as before, but a little higher in the social scale, 
inasmuch as the method is less rude and abrupt. 

The latest development is the hiring of a professional promoter by the year to drum up 
"trade"-[to] mine and countermine the special system with pitfalls for the unwary to be 
ensured for the practice of his principal. And talk to the best of him concerning 
"professional" advertising, making capital of himself in subtle telling ways-poor devil, 
the na�vete of some of him would wring the tear of pity from commerce herself. How many 
architects would live-and they are just the number that should live-if they depended 
upon the work that came to them because of intelligent, critical appreciation of actual 
qualifications or work performed? There would be a good many, but probably about seven 
percent of the profession. There is usually the maneuver, the pull, sometimes methods 
more open, but no more weak and shameful. 

Because this matter of architecture itself has become of little moment to the average client, 
architecture as a fine art is really out of it, and for the present architecture as a commodity 
is a case of friendly favor and interference or a matter of fashion. The fact that all this has 
become so generally accepted as good form is proof of the architect's danger and the 
damnable weakness of his position. Another feature of his present plight is that, not wholly 
respecting himself-how can he?-he is apt to be a hypersensitive individual, and like 
other unfortunates who depend upon preeminence of personality to get in the way of "the 
choosers" he is interested in pretty much everything as long as he counts one, and at that 
No. 1; none of his bloom or luster is to be rubbed off by contact. So, concerted effort in 
matters touching the welfare of his profession is rare among him. 

Perhaps this is in the nature of the proposition. There are intelligent architects who argue 
that only the selfish few give value to art, the highlights only give value to the pattern of 
the fabric; but I believe it is because of warp and woof, undertone and motive, that he has 
any value as a "highlight," and that type of individualism is one of the superstitions he 
must shed before he comes to his own. 

The architect, so-called today, is struggling in a general depression in the level of his art 
owing to the unknown character of the country patiently awaiting his exploration, 
prophesied by the past, but of which no map may yet be made and of which no chart has 
been provided by the schools. He is complacent inanity personified and counts not at all; or 
blinded by the baser elements of commerce, choked by greed, goaded by ambition for 
"success" of the current type, the feverish unrest, common to false ideals, racks of bones 
and waste his substance [sic] until he finally settles, dazed and empty, in his muddy tracks, 
which amounts, I suppose, to giving the people what they want. 

For the generalization of the situation, then, the architect is rapidly accepted as a 
middleman, or broker, with the business instinct and ability, but who can have no business 
integrity because of the nature of his self-imposed occupation. He sells the public 
ready-made imported architecture that he himself buys in a job lot of unfortunates in a 
home which he establishes to protect them from a condition which he himself has 
developed and fostered. This architecture is applied to his client's condition as a poultice 
or porous plaster would be applied to his aching back and is accepted with a clamor for 
more through lack of acquaintance with the real thing, lack of an ideal and of educational 
force in the profession itself. Meanwhile the younger aspirant for better things is either 
assimilated by the winners, plucked and shoved behind the scenes with the unfortunate, or 
settles down to give the people what they want, which simply means producing more of the 
type the plan factory fashions. 

An example of a once-noble profession prostituted by the "commercial knight of untiring 
industry," abandoned to her fate by the "architect"-in quotation marks-who shrugs his 
shoulders, looks aghast, and contributes innocuous [sic] expectation of her ability "to pull 
out," and pull him out, too, to the general blight. 
And why this network of cross purposes? Is it because the architect is now confronted with 
a condition which they say demands a combination of two of him and a corps of trained 
experts, where before one was absolute? Is it because he is now in a position that demands 
that an intricate commercial machine be perfected to carry into effect an idea? Or is it 
because architecture is a great thing in small hands, and ideals, noble theories, if you will, 
"the rails of the track on which the car of progress runs," have fallen to disrepute? 

"Give me a great thought," cried the dying herder, "that I may refresh myself with it." He 
was the stuff from which an architect is made. 

The regeneration of architecture does not lie in the hands of [the] classicist, or 
fashion-monger, of the East nor of the West. Their work is almost written at its length, 
and no spark of life and but a shroud of artistic respectability will cling to it half a century 
hence. It is but archaeological dry bones bleaching in the sun! America will regard it as 
crude; Chicago, even now, regards her County Courthouse as something weak and servile, 
an insult to the people who entrusted to chosen ones the fruit of honest toil and were 
betrayed to perpetuate the degenerate art of a degenerate people. 

The American nation has a heart and backbone of its own and is rapidly forming a mind of 
its own. It has not yet been taught self-expression except in the matter of dollars and 
cents and recently of war [i.e., Spanish-American War]. Presently, light, grace, and 
ethics, true to as virile an individuality as history has known, will come as naturally to her 
as the breath of life that is already hers; and then, oh, ye 

Stuffed Prophets of Plethoric "Success," will she look with pride upon the time you 
bedizened her with borrowed finery; pierced her ears for borrowed ornaments; taught her 
to speak with a lisp and [put a] mince in her gait? No! Your very success was your 
undoing and her disgrace. 

In her new code no one man will be entrusted with the amount of work that occasioned the 
plan factory. As no Rockefeller may rise to a legitimate point of vantage that would justify 
the control of such a vast share of the earth's resources, how unspeakably vulgar and 
illegitimate will it be for one man to undertake in the fine arts more than he can 
characterize in noble fashion as a work of art! 

The plan factory is the product of a raw commercial state, perhaps a necessary evil to be 
passed through as we pass through the dark before the day. Perhaps the epidemic of 
Renaissance, French, Dutch, and English that encumbers the land was a contagious 
malady such as little children bring from school. Soonest over, soonest mended. 

It is argued that we are witnessing the same development in architecture that we see is 
legitimate enough as a means to an end in trade, as the department store and the trust. But 
it is not in architecture a development, but a reflection or reflex action that is passing but 
causing painful confusion. It is making of art a network of cross purposes, but temporarily. 
Art  will reign as long as life, and greater than ever her prestige when the harmony 
between commerce, science, and art is better understood. 

It is this harmony, this commercialism, that the younger architect should strive to 
understand and appreciate, for it is the measure of his technique in his new field; but he 
should strive to understand it as a master, not as a huckster; to poetize and deify it as an 
instrument in his hands. He should help his lame, halt, and blind profession again to its 
place by respecting his art and respecting himself; by making the solution of problems that 
come fairly his way such as will compel the recognition that there is no commercial 
dignity without that kind of art; that will make the man of business see that a Greek 
temple made over to trade is an unhallowed joke, and that he is the butt when genuine 
dignity and beauty might be his for less money; that will make the householder realize that 
if he would live in a Louis XV environment he is but a step removed from the savage, with 
a ring in his nose; and make it felt that architecture is not a matter of the scene painting of 
periods nor [a] mere matter of scene painting in any sense whatever. 

Give back the slogan "a good copy is better than a poor original" to those whose desire for 
success out measured their capacity to perform and who framed it in self-defense. "A 
poor thing but mine own" is better stuff for men when coupled with reverence and honesty 
and carries the fundamental principle of harmonious independence graven over the gate of 
the new country promised of old. 

The architect should help the people to feel that architecture is a destroyer of vulgarity, 
sham, and pretense, a benefactor of tired nerves and jaded souls, an educator in the higher 
ideals and better purposes of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

Such an art only is characteristic of the better phase of commercialism itself and is true to 
American independence, America's hatred of cant, hypocrisy, and base imitation. When 
once Americans are taught in terms of building construction the principles so dear to them 
at their firesides, the architect will have arrived. 

But his own education is a matter of the greatest concern. We all catch a glimpse of the 
magnificence awaiting him, but how to prepare him is a more difficult matter. It is for a 
higher law and more freedom in his architectural school that we plead, not anarchy-a 
deeper sense of the significance to his art of nature, manly independence, and vigorous 
imagination, a truer reverence for his precedent. He should learn a method of attack, have 
cultivated in him the quality that gets at an architectural proposition from the inside 
outward, for and by itself. He should be a thinking quantity when he leaves school, 
standing on his own legs-such as they are-with ears and eyes wide open, receptive, 
eager, and enthusiastic, his faculties sharpened by metaphysical drill, his heart wide open 
to beauty, whether of a specific brand or no, and a worker first, last, and all the time a 
worker, his mind alive to opportunity, knowing the direction in which it lies, gauging his 
own fitness in relation to it, far-sighted enough to decline the opportunity that he was 
unfitted to undertake if it should come to him-and many such do come to all 
architects-courageous enough to decline it and [to]wait for one "his size." And when it 
came he would make it count without making his client pay too large for a share of his 
education in the field. 

He would gain experience and strength and build up solidly, if slowly; and the respect and 
confidence would in time be his that would make his personality a power for the 
architectural good of his country. His experience is to be gained only by solving problems 
for and by themselves. Advice never built a character worth the name, though advice is 
good. 

So an architect may practice architecture extensively with book and precedent and die 
without experience, without a character. The man who has worked out the salvation of a 
summer cottage on his merits, held the conditions in rational solution, and expressed them 
in terms of wood and plaster, with beauty germane to the proposition, has more valuable 
experience than he who builds a city with the pomp and circumstance of established forms. 

The education of an architect should commence when he is two days old-three days is too 
much-and continue until he passes beyond, leaving his experiments by the wayside to 
serve his profession as warning signs or guideposts. The kindergarten circle of sympathetic 
discernment should be drawn about him when he is born, and he should be brought into 
contact with nature by prophet and seer until abiding sympathy with her is his. He should 
be a true child of hers, in touch with her moods, discerning her principles and harmonics 
until his soul overflows with love of nature in the highest and his mind is stored with a 
technical knowledge of her forms and processes. Braced and stayed by that, he should 
move into the thick of civilization to study man and his methods in the things that are his 
and the ways thereof, taking his averages and unraveling seeming inconsistencies, 
shoulder to shoulder with his fellow men as one with them. Meanwhile, as his discipline, 
he should acquire the technical skill of the mill, forge, and trypit of commerce in the light 
of science, study the beauty of the world as created by the hand of man as his birthright 
and his advantage, [and] finding his passion and delight in various initial steps of 
composition with the encouraging guidance of a catholic-minded, naturewise, and loving 
master. In short, a master that would make the distinction between fine arts and fine 
artisanship plain. 

Now he is taught certain architectural phraseology of form and color, dubbed "grammar" 
by his professors, and much foreign technique. 

If teaching him that minutes and modules of the architraves and cornices of one type in 
certain measure make Greek and of another type in combination make Roman and when 
they corrode each other the result is Renaissance-there he is taught grammar. I imagine it 
to be a more difficult matter to teach him the grammar of Goth and Moore. But 
architecture has no business primarily with this grammar, 
which, at its best, I suppose, might mean putting the architectural together correctly but as 
taught means putting the architectural together as predetermined by fashion of previous 
races and conditions. 

So the young student is eternally damned by the dogmas of Vignola and Vitruvius, 
provided with a fine repertoire of stock phrases as architectural capital, and technique 
enough to make them go if he is let alone and conditions are favorable, which he never is 
and they never are. He comes to think [that] these fine phrases and this technique are 
architecture and sells both in judicious mixture to the "buyers" as such with the 
circumstance of the "scholar" and the "classical," and he would be shocked if told that he 
is a swindler. He is sent out a callow, complacent fledgling, sure of his precedent, afraid of 
little but failure to succeed, puffed up with architectural excelsior and wadded with 
deafening, to become soaked and sodden in the field, hopelessly out of shape. The architect 
primarily should have something of his own to say or keep silence. There are more 
legitimate fields of action for him than the field of architecture. If he has that something to 
say in noble form, gracious line, and living color, each expression will have a grammar of 
its own, using the term in its best sense, and will speak the universal language of beauty in 
no circumscribed series of set architectural phrase as used by people in other times, 
although a language in harmony with elemental laws to be deduced from the beautiful of 
all peoples in all time. This elemental law and order of the beautiful is as much more 
profound than the accepted grammatical of phrase in architecture as nature is deeper than 
fashion. 

Let the young student add to his wisdom the strength and wisdom of past ages; that is his 
advantage. But let him live his own life, nor mistake for the Spirit the Letter. I would see 
him relieved of the unnatural, educational incubus that sowed the seed of the plan factory 
and nurtured the false ideals that enable it to exist. I would see him relieved of 
architectural lockjaw, not by prying the set of teeth of his art apart with a crowbar, nor by 
cracking its jaws with a sledge hammer, but by a realization that life was given the 
architect that architecture may grow and expand naturally as a noble fine art and as 
becomes a free-hearted, vigorous young people. It may be that the very cosmopolitan 
nature of our nation will prevent a narrow confirmation of any one type. 

I hope that we are destined to greater variety in unity than has yet existed in the art of a 
great people. The very strength of individuality developed in a free nation, and the 
richness of our inheritance, will find expression in more diverse and splendid ways than 
could be expected of a more narrowly nurtured race. Yet it will find expression in an art 
that is indigenous and characteristic as an architecture measured by the laws of fine art, 
the hardy grace of the wild flower, perhaps, rather than the cultivated richness of the rose, 
but a further contribution to the art of the world-not a servile extraction! 

The architect has a hard road to travel and far to go. He should know what he is to 
encounter in the field and be trained to meet it by men who have faced it in all its ugly 
significance with unconquerable soul and clear vision. He should understand that to go 
into the field penniless with a family to support means the ultimate addition of one more 
craven to the ranks, unless some chance saves him or his fortitude is of the stuff that will 
see his wife and children suffer for ideals that may seem ridiculous and are to the mind 
incomprehensible. If he goes single-handed, he must be content to walk behind, to work 
and wait. The work to be done by the young architect entering the lists would better be 
done by him whose board and lodging is assured for life and whose communication with 
his base of supplies is not apt to be cut off. He is going into a country almost abandoned to 
the enemy. 

Yet the hardy pioneer who takes his architectural life in hand and fares boldly forth in 
quest of his ideal, not scorning hardtack for food nor a plank for a bed-

Withal a soul like the bird, 

Who pausing in her flight 

Awhile on boughs too slight, 

Feels them give way beneath her and yet sings, Knowing that she hath wings-

is perhaps the stuff from which the missionary we need is to come-the spirit that 
conquered Western wilds and turned them to fallow fields transmuted to the realm of art, a 
boy with the heart of a king, the scent of the pine woods deep in his nostrils, sweetness and 
light in his soul, the erudition of the world at his fingers' ends. Will the flickering art spirit 
of this age produce him? If he is the stuff that architects are made of, he is not to be 
discouraged by limitations the limitations within which an artist works do grind him and 
sometimes seem insurmountable; yet without these very limitations there is no art. They 
are at once his problems and his best friends-his salvation in disguise. 

In the arts every problem carries within its own solution and the only way yet discovered to 
reach it is a very painstaking way-to sympathetically look within the thing itself, to 
proceed to analyze and sift it, to extract its own consistent and essential beauty, which 
means its common sense truthfully idealized. That is the heart of the poetry that lives in 
architecture. That is what they should teach the young architect in the schools, beginning 
early. But the schools will have to be taught before they will ever teach him. His scientific 
possibilities and demands have outrun his handmade art as planned for him in the school 
curriculum. He is without lettered precedent as he stands today on the threshold of great 
development in the industrial direction of the world. 

A highly organized, complex condition confronts him. He will understand it, learn the 
secret of its correspondences and their harmonics, and work with them, not against them. 
For art is of life itself; it will endure. Life is preparing the stuff to satisfy the coming 
demand; and the architect will know the capacities of modern methods, processes, and 
machines and become their master. He will sense the significance to his art of the new 
materials that are his, of which steel is but one. He will show in his work that he has been 
emancipated from the meager unit established by brick arch and stone lintel, and his 
imagination will transfigure to new beauty his primitive art. He will realize that the 
narrow limitations of structure outlined in his precedents are too mean and small to be 
longer useful or binding and that he is comparatively a free man to clothe new structural 
conditions in the living flesh of virile imagination. 

He will write large, in beautiful character, the song of steel and steam: 

Lord, thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream, 

And taught by time, I take it so, exceptin' always steam. 

Romance! Those first-class passengers, they like it very well, 

Printed and bound in little books, but why don't poets tell? 

I'm sick of all their quirks and turns, the loves and doves they dream. 

Lord! Send a man like Bobbie Burns to sing the song of steam, 

To match with Scotia's noblest speech, yon orchestra sublime, 

Whereto-uplifted like the Just-the tall rods mark the time, 

The crank-throws give the double bass, the feed-pump sobs and heaves; 

And now the main eccentric start their quarrel on the sheaves, 

Her time-her own appointed time-the rocking link-head bides. 

Till-hear that note-the rods return, wings glimmering through the guides. 
They're all away, true beat, full power, the clanging chorus goes 

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purring dynamos. 

Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed, 

To work ye'll note at any tilt, on any rate of speed, 

From skylight lift to furnace bars, backed, bolted, braced, and stayed. 

And singing like the morning stars for the joy that they are made; 

While, out o'touch of vanity, the sweating thrust-block says: 

Not unto us the praise, or man-not unto us the praise. 

Now all together, hear them lift their lessons, theirs and mine: 

Law, Order, Duty, and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline. 

Mill, forge, and try-pit taught them that when roaring they arose, 

And th' while I wonder if a soul was gied them wi' the blows. 

Oh for a man to weld if then in one trip-hammer strain, 

Till even first-class passengers could tell the meanin' plain. 

The architect will weld that strain and build that song in noble line and form. He will 
write that record for all time. He may not last to judge her line or take her curve, but he 
may say that he, too, has lived and worked; whether he has done well or ill, he will have 
worked as a man and given a shoulder to his fellows climbing after. 


PART TWO 

Organic Architecture and Some Elements 


4 Organic Architecture 

Nothing can live without entity. Now, organic architecture seeks entity, it seeks that 
completeness in idea in execution which is absolutely true to method, true to purpose, true 
to character, and is as much the man who lives in it as he is himself. . . . 

{Text of a speech taken from Frank Lloyd Wright's "On Organic Architecture," Michigan 
Society of Architects Weekly Bulletin, Vol. 19, April 10, 1945, pp. 8-9. Reprinted by 
permission of the Michigan Society of Architects.} 


Introduction 

In this chapter Frank Lloyd Wright describes organic architecture. His speech on the 
subject was delivered before the 31st Annual Meeting of the Michigan Society of 
Architects in Detroit on Thursday, March 22, 1945. In later years Mr. Wright was to 
address the Society a number of times; once on May 27, 1954 (see Chapter 25) and again 
on October 21, 1957 (see Chapter 11), among other occasions. 

In 1945 he was introduced to the Society by Michigan architect Alden B. Dow, an early 
participant in the Taliesin Fellowship for apprentice architects established by Wright in 
1932. Dow was a member for only a short period, from May of 1933 to the fall of that 
year, but Mr. Wright's profound influence on his later performance as an architect is 
evidenced by Dow's own organic architectural achievements.{Two publications that 
explore in detail the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Dow, his former 
apprentice, are Sidney K. Robinson's Life Imitates Architecture: Taliesin and Alden Dow's 
Studio, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Architectural Research Laboratory of the University of 
Michigan, 1980, and Sidney K. Robinson's The Architecture of Alden B. Dow, Detroit: 
Wayne State University Press, 1983.} 

In 1982 Dow was the recipient of the first Frank Lloyd Wright Creativity Award from the 
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation which recognizes persons whose creative achievements 
have changed the world and whose concerned efforts have helped others to realize their 
creative potential. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright (Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright), in presenting the 
award to Dow, stated that he had been selected because of "the celebrated creativity of his 
architecture and the effect it has on his community" [i.e., Midland, Michigan] and because 
of the "creative brilliance apparent in his landscape design, especially evident in the Dow 
Gardens."{"First Frank Lloyd Wright Award Goes to Alden Dow of Michigan," The AIA 
Journal, Vol. 71, No. 12, October 1982, pp. 20, 22.} Shortly before his death in 1983, 
Michigan Senate Resolution No. 117 named Alden B. Dow as the first Architect Laureate 
of Michigan.{"Michigan's Architect Laureate," Progressive Architecture, Vol. 64, No. 10,, 
October 1983, p. 45.} 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: I shall have to stick pretty closely to this microphone tonight. People are 
downstairs listening. 

Since this young man [Alden B. Dow, who is a highly gifted young man, has taken the 
liberty of talking to you about me, I think I shall talk to you a little about him. I was giving 
a Princeton lecture. I do not remember the date, it was so long ago. There was a young 
man sitting at the end of the front row, and through all six lectures he sat in the same 
place. 

After the lectures were over and the exhibition was on, he came to me and said, "Mr. 
Wright, I want to come to work for you." I said, "My dear boy, I have no work. If I had, I 
would be glad to take you." 

About a year later I thought of this plan which we call the Taliesin Fellowship for 
apprentices in architecture. We sent out a little circular to save ourselves from starvation 
and get a nickel to pay carfare. Then, up the steps comes Alden Dow, and Alden said, 
"You have got to take me now," so Alden was one of our first apprentices in [the] Taliesin 
Fellowship. He left too soon for him and for us, but we are proud of him. 

If I listened very carefully to what he said tonight, I know I would be very proud of that, 
too, but I have learned not to take anything of the sort too seriously because it does not 
really matter. 

And now it is remarkable, as I see all this tonight. It is very like a place in England where 
some lectures were given with equally young architects, I suppose, and that was a 
memorable English occasion [see Chapter 19]; everything we are, and everything we have, 
not alone architecturally, but in nearly every other way, we have inherited from the other 
side. 

I admire this building which you have devoted to yourselves and to your purposes; and it is 
inevitable, truly, but the same mistake was made-no recognition, no preparation was 
made for the poor devil of a speaker. He had no way to get in, independently of the 
audience. He has no rest room of his own, and he is not anybody, and I guess that is right. 
Anyway, that is the way it is in our country, because I have been around a lot and met with 
the same neglect everywhere. 

Now, I think that coming into the field a veteran-Alden said forty years, but he should 
have said fifty, because this architecture is about 125 years old, for I am sure I began to 
practice architecture long before I was born-now, here we are. You can best get from me 
something that I want to give you and you would want to have me give it to you by taking 
it out of me. 

I do not believe much in these events where a man stands up and makes a talk. There is a 
lot of that going on, and really it does not amount to very much. You can talk a lot about a 
great many things, but never get anywhere. 

If you knew how difficult it is to think about anything. We mistakenly call association of 
ideas and rationalization thinking. It is not. To think seven minutes a day, I do not think it 
would be possible. Some man has said that it could be done, but I doubt it. I think if you 
could take three minutes a day it would be wonderful for the human race, and I do not 
believe we can think except in flashes here and there, when we see and get something, and 
that is that. 

Now, we in this nation are at a point in our national life, which is your life and my life, 
where we have got to do some thinking. And the thing that we should do to get a great 
springboard to start from is to take architecture into account as the thing we are calling 
organic architecture. 

I wish you would stop speaking of architecture as modern architecture, because it does not 
mean a thing. Anything is modern that is built at the present time. I do not know how it 
ever got started, but I suppose because everything was antique, everything was from the 
antique shops. Even the things we wore came across in the same fashion, washed up on 
the shores of the nation, so we thought it was marvelous that we should have everything 
modern. Well, maybe it is. 

But as to modern architecture, let us drop it and let us take modernistic out and shoot it at 
sunrise, because there is a great travesty on a great idea. So do please refer to organic 
architecture. 

Organic can merely mean something biological, but if you are going to take the word 
organic into your consciousness as concerned with entities, something in which the part is 
to the whole as the whole is to the part, and which is all devoted to a purpose consistently, 
then you have something that can live, because that is vital. 

Nothing can live without entity. Now, organic architecture seeks entity, it seeks that 
completeness in idea in execution which is absolutely true to method, true to purpose, true 
to character, and is as much the man who lives in it as he is himself, so that he loves it, 
lives it, and boasts of the fact that his house is the only house ever built. And he believes it. 
And it is, for him, if organic architecture has done its proper work. 

So you see, here you have the centerline of something that goes back thousands of years. If 
was lost 500 years before Jesus, who enunciated the principles which we practice in 
building today, when he said that the reality of the building does not consist of four walls 
and a roof, but in the interior space. 

The significance of that is not apparent just by the dropping of a hat. It is an entire change 
in the whole thought of the western world. Because western architecture, and what we call 
classic architecture, was merely a block of building material sculptured into some kind of 
style or fashion from the outside. 

Well, here was something that rejected all that and got inside the thing, and when you get 
inside with that idea you are inside the man. You are seeking things of the spirit by way of 
the spirit, and you have a philosophy which can become the centerline of a culture of a 
great nation. It should become the culture of a democracy because it is the first statement 
of a democratic principle. 

If it should ever become recognized by education, poor backward education such as we 
have had in this nation, we would grow, we would live, we could not be destroyed as all 
these other civilizations have that were monarchic, that were founded upon dictatorships 
or state socialism, because there you have the core of a democratic faith in man, faith in 
the man as a man, in him as an individual, which we have confounded always with 
personality. We have so little faith in the individual, I think because we have confounded 
personality with individuality. Individuality is that thing which makes me, me, and makes 
you, you. Regardless of your idiosyncrasies and your personal appearance, something 
inside that stands up within and will not sell out, something within that gives the man 
faith in the within of all men, and makes him all men and all men himself. For others he 
wishes what he wishes for himself, and he will stand staunch and straight to get it for 
himself so that all men may have it. 

That is the essential phase of democracy, and it is what we had once upon a time set up as 
an ideal to follow. We had the men who had in the first days of the dawning of that 
conviction the courage to endeavor, in spite of perfidy, in spite of solicitations, in spite of 
self-interest, to make if the core of a great nation such as this one. 

I am getting away from architecture, am I? Not at all. That is the basis of this ideal of an 
organic architecture. Would the basis not be a recognition of the essential character of the 
endeavor? 

Now, we have never taken time out from making money and becoming Successful with a 
capital "S" to look ourselves in the face and demand of ourselves something better than 
anything we have got and something better than anything we have seen. Why, this nation 
is a neglected backyard from coast to coast and border to border. 

I have motored across it fifty times if once, and the buildings from coast to coast and 
border to border are such as the little carpenters built and little carpenter work 
transplanted from the Middlewest onto the great Western plains. Up north or down south, 
it does not make much difference. Out on the Kansas plains, what have you? The same 
thing, no thought, no feeling, nothing of the interior feeling of manhood we call 
democracy. Today democracy has built nothing, and I mean it, and I can prove it. 

When democracy builds it will be when we recognize the nature and character of this idea 
that we call an organic architecture. It is from within, and those of you who used to go to 
Sunday School, and who read the Sermon on the Mount, and who used to believe in the 
words of Jesus should have been prepared for it, but you were not. 

There was something missing in the Christian religion, something vitally missing, and it 
let the whole core of this ideal of a truly independent nation drift down the river as it has 
this faith in man which is essential to democracy. It is religion that has failed and failed 
just at the time when we need it most. But we are not going into that. 

You want to know what constitutes physically this thing we call organic architecture. I 
have been asked time and again to show examples and lantern slides and show you what 
the root of the thing is, but I am not going to do it and I have never done so. 

To show you something is very dangerous. I found it dangerous. Here I stand, having built, 
let us say the last opus, number 497. It went to the Ladies' Home Journal, because one 
went there forty-five years ago and they asked for another one now. 
But it is dangerous to show somebody something you have done because they think that is 
it. You show somebody a house totally unsuited to his wants and it is nothing he would 
care about, but there is something there if he would look for the basis for it or examine the 
circumstances which caused it to come into being. But, no, they look at it and say, "Would 
I like to live in that? No!" Stupid.  Perhaps that is a harsh word, but certainly ignorance. 

And so it is with everything else. You show them a church and they want you to build a 
museum. Well, they do not think that would make a good museum. They want to see a 
good museum in that building, and so they go to some other architect. Well, it is all 
extremely unfinished. There is no use calling names or using harsh words. You see, 
English is a great name-calling language. If you can get a name for anything in our 
language, you have got that thing practically if you will reiterate the name enough times. 

We pay a terrific price for speaking English. We do. We do not know how much, because 
it is not a language in which to tell the truth. Is that a vicious statement? No, it is not. 
English is not a language in which to tell the truth. It is a beautiful language for politicians 
to use. They could not have found a language superior to ours for their purpose. It is the 
great language of propaganda. 

But we speak it and we have got to sift it out. A young fellow, and I think he was Japanese, 
God help us all, in Chicago wrote a book on Semitics who made the idea profitable. 

You must get the meaning of words into your mind so when we do talk about something 
we are talking about the same thing. That seldom happens in English. It is a very slippery, 
ambiguous language, but there is much beauty in it, too, if you read Shakespeare, or some 
of our master columnists. 

Well, where were we? We were talking about architecture. And still, believe it or not, 
English is architecture. It should be and it is good architecture. If you get a proper 
definition of architecture in your mind, you will see how important this thing is to a nation 
that has no environment that is worthy of the nation or the people in it. You see, 
architecture rightly defined is the structure of whatever is. 

Your structure, a building? Yes. But music, no less. It is music, the structure of music in 
Beethoven and Bach. It is the structure of things that should interest us now and never has. 

We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not 
have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are 
architecturally. I think you can make it even more insulting than that, architecturally, 
although I do not know. For there we are. 

Now, why should not the professors do a little thinking? Why should not the schools go a 
little deeper into the basis for the thing which they talk about so glibly? They have a 
language of their own, and if you listen it sounds pretty well, sounds as though there was 
something in it, and there is nothing in it. You have to sift it. 

I went to school for three years and some months, would have graduated and got a degree 
in three months more, but I walked out three months before graduation. That is the way I 
feel about the whole business today, only more so. 

I think the time has come now when you youngsters, a lot of you here, and the young 
architects should begin to think for themselves. 
It is only by thinking and challenging the state of things at every step, at every point, that 
you can ever get anywhere, because you are imbedded today in the greatest conflicting 
mass of circumstantial evidence to the contrary that ever existed. It has been deplorably 
fostered and developed until you cannot trust anything you see or hear, unless you have 
had some contact and made some connection with this inner thing which is called the law 
of nature. 

Now, when you can make a proper study of the law of nature for yourselves, you do not 
take it as something that you know, that is handed to you by way of information. You 
know a lot of things and realize nothing. You can know all the books have to tell you and 
not be able to do one single thing. You have to acquire this intimacy by way of contact 
with doing and only by doing will you learn. Where you come into the drafting room, at 
the end, there are some letters carved in the wall, "It is what a man does that he has." And 
do you know that he has nothing else? You will find it out. I found it out, and I think to 
find that out is what is essential at this step in our dangerous, drifting career. 

Now, you think all this, perhaps, is sidestepping the issue of architecture. It is right to the 
point. It is right where we have got to begin, at the beginning, before we [can] ever have 
architecture. 

You know that architecture is the only proof of the quality of civilization that we have ever 
had, all we will ever have. There is nothing else. As a man builds, so he is. As a nation 
builds, so is that nation. 

Were we to be destroyed tomorrow, what would be found by the people who come after us 
centuries hence? What would they find? There would be nothing except water closets, 
bathtubs, and washbowls. Anything else? Perhaps some pieces of terra-cotta harkening 
back to every civilization that ever was, and they could not find one except as it might be 
called inferior and therefore a replica. 

We have nothing. Now, having nothing, why should we not be more humble? Why should 
we be so confoundedly arrogant? Was it not one of the great Greek philosophers who told 
us why nations perish? First success, then arrogance, then downfall, and such arrogance as 
ours cannot fail to be on the threshold of either an awakening or a downfall. 

Why not wake up? I believe we should, and I believe it lies in the hands of architecture to 
be the prophetic cornerstone of that awakening because, until you get down to first 
principles and get back willingly to the beginning of the thing you are interested in, you 
are not going to really learn anything about it, are you? 

I do not think so, and I have tried hard for a long time to learn. They have said of me that I 
was experimenting when I built something. It is true. I have never built a building that was 
not an honest experiment but an experiment in the interest of the man I built it for, which 
makes a difference. 

I make this difference between an honest experiment and something merely experimental; 
a genuine experiment is predicated upon something the man knows to be so by experience 
and believes that if it were just a little bit more so in that direction it would be better. And 
he tries it, but whenever he tries it he has got something that will save harmless himself 
and the people he is experimenting for. 

Now, when you are developing the ideas of an organic architecture, that is inevitable and it 
is good. So I always explain that I am an "experimenting architect." And I am not 
ashamed of the fact because I know it is inevitable and should be. 

Many a time I have notified a client that if he objected to paying for the education of a 
young architect-meaning myself-he had better not hire me! So I have been fair and 
square about it, too. That is one way to learn, an honest way to learn if you are honest 
about it. 

But the building codes now, as they are framed, all stand in your way. They all stand in the 
way of growth. Building codes are framed in the same spirit exactly that your university 
education has been framed and developed, with the same trouble with it all. It is the 
experience of a few men making statements which may be merely a mirror of their limited 
experience and may be entirely wrong. They stand across the way of progress, but they are 
the law. 

Well, in England I found they had done a wise thing where the code is concerned. They 
have set up a little court of independent thinkers, of really good men, to whom anybody 
with an idea rejected by the code may appeal. They are continually meeting with success in 
trying out new ideas. 

Although we are a nation absolutely the son or the daughter or the child of this older 
nation, I do not think we should be going back to mama for everything, but still they have 
some good things over there we have not tried yet. I recommend that as one thing to try. 

I say this most of all to the young architects. I do not think there is much use addressing 
the older ones. I do not mean that to be harsh because I am one of them. 


5 Ornamentation 

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it 
adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a 
realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented. 

{Text of a speech reprinted from "On Ornamentation: Frank Lloyd Wright Pleads for New 
Culture Before Nineteenth Century Club-Other Events," Oak Leaves (Oak Park, Illinois), 
January 16, 1909, p. 20. This speech later appeared as "Ethics of Ornament," The Prairie 
School Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, First Quarter 1967, pp. 16-17.} 

Introduction 

Frank Lloyd Wright spoke before the Nineteenth Century Club at Oak Park, Illinois, on 
the subject of ornamentation in January of 1909. It was reported in the local newspaper 
that 

he pointed out that the work of ornamenting the person and habitations of the people take 
up two-thirds of the economic resources of the country, and condemned practically all of 
this vast effort. Ornamentation is a problem before every woman every day, and for this 
reason the lecturer received close attention. He not only indicated existing ornament and 
the culture it suggests, but gave the cure. Many an old idol and deified curlicue was 
knocked over and room made for Mr. Wright's ideas of ornament, which have made him 
one of the most famous architects in the world.{As reported in Oak Leaves (Oak Park, 
Illinois), January 16, 1909, p. 20.} 

This chapter is a transcription of part of that speech. 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: The desire for works of ornament is coexistent with the earliest attempts of 
civilization of every people and today this desire is consuming at least two-thirds of our 
economic resources. Understanding is essential to a real sense of loveliness, but this we 
have lost; exaggeration serves us now instead of interpretation; imitation and prettifying 
externals combine in a masquerade of flimsy finery and affectation that outrages 
sensibility. 

Modern ornamentation is a burlesque of the beautiful, as pitiful as it is costly. We never 
will be civilized to any extent until we know what ornament means and use it sparingly 
and significantly. Possession without understanding and appreciation means either waste 
or corruption. With us almost all these things which ought to be proofs of spiritual culture 
go by default and are, so far as our real life is concerned, an ill-fitting garment. The 
environment reflects unerringly the society. 

If the environment is stupid and ugly or borrowed and false, one may assume that the 
substratum of its society is the same. The measure of man's culture is the measure of his 
appreciation. We are ourselves what we appreciate and no more. 

The matter of ornament is primarily a spiritual matter, a proof of culture, an expression of 
the quality of the soul in us, easily read and enjoyed by the enlightened when it is a real 
expression of ourselves. The greater the riches, it seems, the less poetry and less healthful 
significance. 

Many homes are the product of lust for possession and in no sense an expression of a 
sympathetic love for the beautiful. This is as true of the New York millionaire as of his 
more clumsy Chicago imitator. 

He who meddles with the aesthetic owes a duty to others as well as to himself. This is true 
not only where the result is to stand conspicuous before the public eye but also in regard to 
the personal belongings of the individual. Back of all our manners, customs, dogmas, and 
morals there is something preserved for its aesthetic worth and that is the soul of the thing. 

We are living today encrusted with dead things, forms from which the soul is gone, and we 
are devoted to them, trying to get joy out of them, trying to believe them still potent. It 
behooves us, as partially civilized beings, to find out what ornament means, and the first 
wholesome effects of this attitude of inquiry is to make us do away with most of it, to make 
us feel safer and more comfortable with plain things. Simple things are not necessarily 
plain, but plain things are all that most of us are really entitled to, in any spiritual 
reckoning, at present. 

True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it 
adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a 
realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented. Above all, it 
should possess fitness, proportion, harmony, the result of all of which is repose. So it is 
that structure should be decorated. 

Decoration should never be purposely constructed. True beauty results from that repose 
which the mind feels when the eye, the intellect, the affections, are satisfied from the 
absence of any want-in other words, when we take joy in the thing. 

Now to make application, I would impress upon you one law concerning which all great 
artists agreed and that has been universally observed in the best periods of the world's art  
and equally violated when art declined; it is fundamental, therefore inviolable. Flowers or 
other natural objects should not be used as ornaments but as conventional representations 
founded upon them, sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind 
without destroying the unity of the object decorated. With birds and flowers on hats, fruit 
pieces on the walls, imitation or realism in any form, ornamentation in art goes to the 
ground. 

This conventional representation must always be worked out in harmony with the nature of 
the materials used, to develop, if possible, some beauty peculiar to this material. Hence one 
must know materials and apprehend their nature before one can judge an ornament. 
Fitness to use and form adapted to function are part of the rule. 

Construction should be decorated. Decoration never should be purposely constructed, 
which would finally dispose of almost every ornamental thing one possesses. 

The principles discoverable in the works of the past belong to us. To take the results is 
taking the end for the means. 


6 Hardware 

. . . the architect must be a prophet . . . a prophet in the true sense of the term . . . if he 
can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect. 

{Text of a speech reprinted from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks On 
Hardware," Weekly Bulletin, Michigan Society of Architects, Vol. 23, No. 33, August 16, 
1949, pp. 1-3, by permission of the Michigan Society of Architects. This speech appeared 
first as Frank Lloyd Wright's "I Don't Like Hardware," in Hardware Consultant and 
Contractor, Vol. 13, May 1949, pp. 22, 24, 26, and 28.} 


Introduction 

The speech presented in this chapter is Frank Lloyd Wright's address before the Fourth 
Annual Pacific Coast Regional Conference of the National Contract Hardware 
Association. It was delivered in the ballroom of the Wright-designed Arizona Biltmore 
Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1949. A short time earlier, on March 17, 1949, Mr. Wright 
made his famous speech before the American Institute of Architects (AIA) at Houston, 
Texas, on receipt of the AIA Gold Medal for 1948 [see Chapter 16]. In this speech to these 
producers of hardware he tells them that "the less that is in evidence [in the building] the 
better . . ." and "the more you get the hardware out of sight, and make less of it, the more 
you are going to be modern. . . ." 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: This is about the first time, or one of the few times, that I've been taken in on 
the ground floor where things are really done and happening. An architect usually is 
offstage. I am sometimes afraid that the men who do the selling and producing, and who 
are making the things of today, don't generally consider the architect very much. 

I don't know who makes these designs for hardware or where you get them or how you 
come by them. Anyway, you don't keep up with the procession as I see it today. Hardware 
is still too ornamental-it isn't sufficiently simple. 

I remember my old master, Louis [H.] Sullivan, making designs for hardware and all he 
had anything to do with were the escutcheon plates, which in those days were very 
ornamental. Do you remember? The Yale and Towne people here will surely remember. 
Those were the Adler and Sullivan doorplates. And then the knob came in for a little 
dickering too. So the whole thing became a little ornamental touch on a plain door. And I 
think all the architect had to do with it was just a little effect on the surface of things, as it 
were. 

He really has never criticized hardware, properly speaking. My efforts ever since I've been 
practicing for myself is to get rid of it. The less hardware that is in evidence the better, or 
do you think so? Perhaps you feel the way the automobile manufacturers seem to feel about 
chromium. There must have been a great overstock of chromium in the country after the 
war. Anyway, they make all these cars look like jukeboxes and I've always felt I'd like to 
go up and drop in a nickel and see if they'd play. Well, hardware is a little like that, isn't 
it? 

I recall the days when the hardware and the plumbing were gold plated when the 
capitalists had money. As a matter of fact, the field of plumbing and hardware aren't so far 
apart. I remember, when designing the Imperial Hotel [Tokyo, Japan], I tried to get some 
union in the simplicity of the plumbing and the hardware. Why shouldn't it be done? Why 
don't you go into that more? It is a field that hasn't been overworked. 

The more you get the hardware out of sight and make less of it, the more you are going to 
be modern and in line with modern architecture. Whatever of it is in sight should be 
adapted to the land and feel right and commodious. Nothing is more annoying than to 
have to use several fingers on a lever handle designed to hurt those fingers. Have you ever 
thought seriously of criticizing your product on the basis of that simple standard of the use 
of the thing you make? 

Modern architecture is supposed to be based on form following function, but it isn't. It 
would be a good thing if that were the platform from which it could spring and until, we 
haven't got the thing we are really hoping for as modern architecture. When this is 
achieved, hardware is going to be very sensible, simple, and efficient. Does that cheer you 
up? 

I think, in a meeting like this, you should be chiefly interested in trends. You want to see 
what's ahead, don't you? You should get together to talk things over, swap experiences, 
and try to weed out the mistakes of the past. Plan the direction of your future. I am 
prophesying the future for you now as I have helped make that future and I am not 
finished yet. 

I came into architecture about fifty-six years ago when it was a pretty slim prophecy. 
Fifty-six years ago in selecting the hardware for a building the architect had a sense of 
frustration and usually a spell of prostration. Can you remember back to those days when 
hardware was not hardware but foolishness, aggravation, and extravagance? I can and I 
guess some of you can. What does it mean, then, to produce a good line of fine and 
effective hardware? Not what it used to mean-ornamental outside and then fix up the 
inside as best you can. Hardware should be something that really works and should be out 
of sight like a good floor hinge. Locks must be automatic and simple and mostly inside, 
and what does appear outside, easy to work with. That is an architect's point of view as to 
what the future of hardware should be like. 

Now as to the marketing of it, its handling, and selection. I suppose most of you men have 
plans submitted to you, and then you go over them, make a list, and bid on what you think 
would be appropriate for the doors, windows, and the various necessities of the job. Isn't 
that the way you do it? Or does the architect come down to the merchant's store and pick 
out this and that and tell you what you use on each door and window? Besides being 
concerned with that, some of this group are representatives from the producers who are 
really designing and producing hardware. Well, then that's a fine get-together because it 
will really be effective. You can then really arrive at some conclusions regarding your 
products and improve them, which should be the outcome of a meeting like this. 
Incidentally, I am speaking in a ballroom that I designed in 1927. A very nice little place, 
isn't it? 

Well, I came down here not to deliver a lecture to you but to talk the matter over and 
discuss hardware. This is not a formal occasion, mind you. What would you say, hardware 
man to architect, was your chief trouble today? What confuses you most? Perhaps it's a 
material affair-something regarding prices. Then my opinion wouldn't be worth 
anything. But, if you are really concerned with the character, usefulness, beauty, and 
appropriateness of your product, I am pretty valuable to you as I stand here. I think I have 
told you where you are heading. 

The poor devil of an architect has many subinterests and hardware always is a subinterest 
which he is awfully glad to get rid of. Thus he welcomes any help that a hardware man 
offers him. I think that is quite right. The average architect is floored by hardware. He 
hasn't the time, and do you know of anything in this world requiring more detailed 
knowledge, more finicky adjustments, and realizations than this hardware business? Of 
course, when an architect gets entangled in devices, he must rise superior to them in some 
sensible adjustment that he makes with the man who produces them or he's going to have 
an awful drain on his good nature, his resources, and his time. 

So I believe more and more that we're going to go into the hands of the hardware expert, 
and the hardware consultant will probably become a middleman between the hardware 
producer and the consumer. The consumer is always going to be mainly the architect. 
Perhaps the architects who devise and design the buildings that you men are going to 
hardware are going to be more and more the prey of your experts. I've hired and fired 
hundreds of experts myself because I know they can be pointed in any direction you want 
to point them. 
So I don't think highly of them and I don't employ many because to me an expert is a man 
who has stopped thinking. He thinks he knows everything. Now when a man gets to the 
point where he knows and is an authority he's finished, isn't he? There's no progress 
beyond that. 

Well, a good architect wants to remain an amateur as far as he can remain one. He doesn't 
wish to become an authority. He doesn't wish to call a turn beyond his own vision, and he 
doesn't wish his own vision to be curtailed by being regarded as an authority. Is this subtle 
or is it sensible? My feeling is that the architect must be a prophet. I don't mean with an 
"it" on the word, either, because he'll never be that, but a prophet in the true sense of the 
term. He must keep open-minded and he must keep his eyes on the future. To him, all 
that can be seen of the future is now. It's today, immediately, it's here. Sometimes we say 
this man sees fifty years ahead, or he sees at least ten, but if he can't see at least ten years 
ahead, don't call him an architect. 

There are three kinds of architects. I remember in my early days in Chicago hearing them 
referred to as ARCHitects. Then there were others who called them ARTitects, considered 
curious individuals. The ARCHITECT, pure and simple, was extremely rare. But he was 
somebody and he was a great guy, if you are old enough to remember that era. They were 
real characters and they were strong men. 

This is not true of the profession as I see it practicing today because there have been too 
many paper degrees handed out to the men more ambitious to become architects in four 
years. So, today, I don't think it's so much to be an architect and I think more and more 
he's going to be the kind of individual that's going to depend upon you fellows, the 
plumbers, the electricians, the engineers, and in fact depend on everybody but [himself]. 

I remember Adler of Adler and Sullivan was a perfect terror to every contractor on the job, 
no matter who he was. Before the contractor came in to see the old man, he'd take two or 
three drinks to keep his courage well jacked up but I've seen the old gentleman literally 
take him and shake him as a mastiff might shake a rat. He'd go out all crumpled up. It 
doesn't happen that way today; it's usually the other way around. The poor young architect 
will be the fellow that goes out with his tail between his legs. 

Have any of you ever stopped to think how much technique and how much knowledge 
have to enter into the life of a pretty good architect? It's a wonder he ever gets anything 
done at all in the way of design, which is the thing he's really supposed to contribute to 
society. 

To me, today, in looking over the situation, what we lack most is an environment. When 
art is mentioned, we think of what? The art museum or the art exhibition, what is it? It 
certainly isn't a building. Painting is pictures and to the American people, art means 
pictures. Yes, be honest about it. Did you ever think of buildings when you heard the term 
art in this country? Well, to me that's exactly like one of our good wives interested chiefly 
in a hat and not being so much concerned about clothing for her body. She has to have a 
hat and it has to be a beautiful hat, so she goes shopping for a hat without regard for the 
clothing for her body. She might wear an insinuating smile and a beautiful hat and that 
would be as far as she'd get where art is concerned. It's just like that with our civilization 
and architecture today. 

Art is not a matter of the actual clothing of our civilization, which must be buildings. It's 
more a question of environment which must be buildings, the way we live in them, and the 
way we furnish them, and all that. That should be our great art. Now, if we get to the point 
in our teaching and our schooling and if going to the university is a matter of becoming 
more and more developed in this way of art, it might be worthwhile. But unfortunately it 
all seems to be set up contrariwise. 

The very things that are important and should be connected with our everyday life are not 
matters of art. Then, what are they a matter of? I leave it to you to say. You meet each 
other, you visit each other's homes, and what's important there? 

To what can you point to prove that American civilization is really tops? That we really 
have a culture of our own; that we really know the difference between what is merely 
curious and what is truly beautiful. Where do we go to learn it? Who is teaching us? Are 
we asking for it or are we demanding it? My answer is, no. We are taking a lot of ugliness 
for granted. We only have left what we call eminent domain for a utility company that is 
going to give you electricity or water. It is something that can go anywhere it pleases and 
can destroy the beautiful landscapes and views that may exist. The utility companies and 
the politicians are our civilization and are as materialistic as anything that ever existed in 
the world. 

Now, that materialistic side is up against an enemy and the enemy is Russia. Two 
ideologies are clashing and are going to clash more and more. It is the doctrine of the 
have-nots coming against the doctrine of the haves and the haves endeavoring to justify 
having and the have-nots trying to get hold of a little something. It's been the same since 
the world started to become civilized. It hasn't changed but the issue has become 
concentrated. It has got down to brass tacks. 

All this is directly allied to the question of art  in our environment and of the architect in 
his relation to society. Because if we really are what we profess and if we really are a 
honest democracy we wouldn't be afraid of Communism. We could make it look so bald, 
bare, and forbidding nobody would ever think of bringing if forward. But you see we are 
guilty of not being a democracy but being an industrial plutocracy. Now, an industrial 
plutocracy can't meet Communism and stand. 

I went to Houston recently; I went down to be crowned titular head of the architectural 
profession [see Chapter 16]. I came back with a gold medal and a marvelously beautiful 
citation. While there, I went over to see the Shamrock [Hotel] open and view six carloads 
of movie stars in a monument to Frenchified American vulgarity. Or, if you wish, you can 
put it differently, but that is what essentially it was. And the city itself-to point the 
features of the thoughts I've just thrown at you-was a capitalistic city. Now what is a 
capitalistic city? Have any of you ever thought this out? A capitalistic city is a broad way 
paved with pretty much everything on it. At one end and usually at the center of it are 
downtown skyscrapers-tall buildings. On the other end, little or no paving and shanties. 
Well, that's Houston. Only Houston has done something very remarkable. Houston has 
extended the center avenue seven miles and built a skyscraper at the other end of it. On 
each side of it there are the shanties-and they are shanties-no pavements, and there is 
mud. That is your capitalistic city. 

Where is democracy and show me something in this nation that democracy has really 
built. Do you know of anything? Is the skyscraper democratic? Is this type of city that 
Houston represents-and it's pretty fairly indicative of most American cities-is that 
democratic? What is democracy? Have you ever come to any conclusion concerning it? 
Have you ever thought it over among yourselves? what it represents, what it stands for, and 
what it could accomplish were it a success? Well, a hardware conference is a good place 
maybe to think it over because it's a hard question. Harder than hardware-a lot! 


PART THREE 

The Machine and Architectural Production 

7 The Art and Craft of the Machine 
. . . in the Machine lies the only future of art and craft-as I believe, a glorious future. . . . 

{Text of a speech reprinted precisely without editing from Frank Lloyd Wright's "The Art 
and Craft of the Machine," in the Chicago Architectural Club's Catalogue of the 
Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club, Chicago: Architectural 
Club, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1901, unpaginated.} 
Introduction 

"The Art and Craft of the Machine" is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous speeches. 
His first presentation was made before the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House 
on Friday March 1, 1901;{The date of Mr. Wright's first presentation of this speech is 
often incorrectly given as March 6, 1901. However, based on the editorial that appeared in 
the March 4, 1901, issue of The Chicago Daily Tribune, which referenced this speech, the 
date of its first delivery now stands corrected to March 1, 1901.} the second delivery 
occurred before the Western Society of Engineers on March 20 of that year.{"The Art and 
Craft of the Machine" appeared in print for the first time in the Catalogue of the 
Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club (Chicago: Architectural 
Club, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1901): excerpts were printed in Brush and Pencil, Vol. 
8, May 1901, pp. 77-90 and a revised text appeared in the Daughters of the American 
Revolution (Illinois), The New Industrialism (Chicago: National League of Industrial Art, 
1902, Part III, pp. 79-111), excerpts and revised text in Frank Lloyd Wright's Frank 
Lloyd Wright On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (Chicago: Duell, Sloan, 
and Pearce, 1941, pp. 23-24, 26-28), in Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn (Editors), 
Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings (New York: Horizon Press, 1960, pp. 
52-73), and excerpts in William A. Coles and Henry Hope Reed, Jr., Architecture in 
America: A Battle of Styles (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1961, pp. 
51-57).} Later, in 1902, Mr. Wright read a slightly revised text to the Chicago Chapter 
of the Daughters of the American Revolution at the University Lecture Hall of the Fine 
Arts Building.{The text of this revised speech appeared in the Daughters of the American 
Revolution (Illinois), The New Industrialism (Chicago: National League of Industrial Art, 
1902, Part III, pp. 79-111), and was a limited edition of 500 copies.} On Monday, March 
4, 1901, the following editorial, which appeared in The Chicago Daily Tribune,{The 
editorial is reproduced here in its entirety from "Art and the Machine," The Chicago Daily 
Tribune, Vol. LX, No. 63, March 4, 1901, p. 6.} discussed the importance of Mr. Wright's 
first presentation of "The Art and Craft of the Machine": 

There has lately been set to music a translation of some termes [sic] entitled "The 
Sweatshop," by the Yiddish poet-himself a sweatshop employee-Morris Rosenfeld of 
New York. The impression from the song is that of clattering wheels which "cannot sleep 
or for a moment stay" and of "toiling and toiling and toiling-endless toil. "It is the picture 
of one of the most marvelous and presumably socially useful of modern inventions, the 
sewing machine, as the ally and instrument of unwholesome and revolting conditions of 
industry. 

A different view of "the machine" was presented in a paper read at the meeting of the Arts 
and Crafts society on Friday evening. It was heralded, not as the mere agent of modern 
commerce, but as potentially and prospectively the instrument of an entirely genuine and 
incomparably expanded art expression. The ugliness of the machine's products at present 
was attributed primarily to its prostitution to mere imitation of handiwork-as, for 
example, "pressed" chair back panels-and often imitation in one material of handiwork 
belonging to an entirely different material-as, for example, machine simulation in zinc of 
a carved stone cornice. 

It was accordingly insisted that the legitimacy of the machine should be frankly 
recognized; that its distinctive capabilities should, instead of being forced or distorted, be 
honestly adhered to, and that under these circumstances machine products would, in their 
individuality, have as true artistic character as do tool products. 

It is widely recognized that machine production-sometimes exhausting, often times 
monotonous, and nearly always highly subdivided in respect to labor-sometimes does 
sacrifice the workers so that they "sink into the night". The song of the Yiddish poet is 
realistic. Yet there is a conviction in the common mind that modern progress in mechanics 
should serve as a boon to society in general, and must somehow be made to do so. Indeed, 
the sweatshop is under the ban, and the law is demanding that the sewing machine be 
transferred to well-lighted rooms and be operated by power for reasonable hours only. 

That machine production itself, however-conformed not to the characteristics of 
handicraft, but to its own creative possibilities-can and is destined to become as 
genuinely worthy and as pleasing to the finer sensibilities as is the more subtle, though 
now almost obsolete, production of the hand, is an idea not only new but one apparently 
indigenous, as far as its plain statement goes, to this city. In place of Mr. C.R. Ashbee's 
suggestion that the machine should for the modern world take the place of the slave for the 
Greek, this idea-which has found expression in the Arts and Crafts Society since its 
organization three years ago-says that there should be neither slave nor slavish products. 
It asserts instead that machine production, at least in important subjects, can be and should 
be genuinely artistic. 

Indeed, as a modest but real step in this direction, two artists of the society named have 
recently, after studying the processes of lithographing, designed a picture for the 
decoration of school walls with special reference to the possibilities of those processes, 
rather than with reference to the qualities of some oil or water color painting sought to be 
imitated. 

It would seem that to the phrase and ideal, "Art and Labor," must now be added-and at 
the suggestion of Chicago-"Art and the Machine". 

Years later, after this editorial appeared, Mr. Wright quipped that "Jane Addams herself 
must have written it, I suspect. She sympathized with me, . . ."{See Frank Lloyd Wright's 
An Autobiography, New York: Horizon Press, 1977, pp. 155-156. See also, Mr. Wright's 
speech presented in Chapter 10 of this volume for another similar reference to Jane 
Addams.} 

"The Art and Craft of the Machine" is important because in this speech Mr. Wright was 
one of the first artists, if not the first, not only to feel but to express the thought that the 
"machine" could be seized by the creative artist and craftsman as a new, dynamic tool for 
creativity.{A detailed discussion of Mr. Wright's "The Art and Craft of the Machine" can 
be found in David A. Hanks' "Frank Lloyd Wright's "The Art and Craft of the Machine,"" 
The Frank Lloyd Wright Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 3, Second Quarter 1979, pp. 6-9,and 
also in David A. Hanks' The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: E.P. 
Dutton, 1979, pp. 64-66.} During this period the machine was more often feared by both 
as a potential threat to their true creativity. Mr. Wright later adapted this philosophy to his 
own architectural work and persisted in advancing the concept of the machine as a true, 
creative, artistic tool for almost sixty more years, as evidenced not only in his own 
architectural achievements but also in his speeches (Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11). 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, 
an ideal-something we are to become-some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to 
very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what 
we will accomplish. In the years which have been devoted in my own life to working out in 
stubborn materials a feeling for the beautiful, in the vortex of distorted complex 
conditions, a hope has grown stronger with the experience of each year, amounting now to 
a gradually deepening conviction that in the Machine lies the only future of art and 
craft-as I believe, a glorious future; that the Machine is, in fact, the metamorphosis of 
ancient art and craft; that we are at last face to face with the machine-the modern 
Sphinx-whose riddle the artist must solve if he would that art live-for his nature holds 
the key. For one, I promise "whatever gods may be" to lend such energy and purpose as I 
may possess to help make that meaning plain; to return again and again to the task 
whenever and wherever need be; for this plain duty is thus relentlessly marked out for the 
artist in this, the Machine Age, although there is involved an adjustment to cherished 
gods, perplexing and painful in the extreme; the fire of many long-honored ideals shall 
go down to ashes, to reappear, phoenixlike, with new purposes. 

The great ethics of the Machine are as yet, in the main, beyond the ken of the artist or 
student of sociology; but the artist's mind may now approach the nature of this thing from 
experience, which has become the commonplace of his field, to suggest, in time, I hope, to 
prove, that the machine is capable of carrying to fruition high ideals in art-higher than 
the world has yet seen! 

Disciples of William Morris cling to an opposite view. Yet William Morris, himself, 
deeply sensed the danger to art  of the transforming force whose sign and symbol is the 
machine, and though of the new art we eagerly seek he sometimes despaired he quickly 
renewed his hope. 

He plainly foresaw that a blank in the fine arts would follow the inevitable abuse of 
new-found power and threw himself body and soul into the work of bridging it over by 
bringing into our lives afresh the beauty of art as she had been, that the new art to come 
might not have dropped too many stitches nor have unraveled what would still be useful to 
her. 

That he had an abundant faith in the new art his every essay will testify. 

That he miscalculated the machine does not matter. He did sublime work for it when he 
pleaded so well for the process of elimination its abuses had made necessary, when he 
fought the innate vulgarity of theocratic impulse in art as opposed to democratic, and when 
he preached the gospel of simplicity. 

All artists love and honor William Morris. 

He did the best in his time for art and will live in history as the great socialist, together 
with Ruskin, the great moralist: a significant fact worth thinking about, that the two great 
reformers of modern times professed the artist. 
The machine these reformers protested because the sort of luxury which is born of greed 
had usurped it and made of it a terrible engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized 
world with a murderous ubiquity which plainly enough was the damnation of their art and 
craft. 

It had not then advanced to the point which now so plainly indicates that it will surely and 
swiftly, by its own momentum, undo the mischief it has made and the usurping vulgarians 
as well. 

Nor was it so grown as to become apparent to William Morris, the grand democrat, that 
the machine was the great forerunner of democracy. 

The ground plan of this thing is now to the point where the artist must take it up no longer 
as a protest: genius must progressively dominate the work of the contrivance it has created, 
to lend a useful hand in building afresh the "Fairness of the Earth." 

That the Machine has dealt Art in the grand old sense a deathblow none will deny. 

The evidence is too substantial. 

Art in the grand old sense-meaning Art in the sense of structural tradition, whose craft is 
fashioned upon the handicraft ideal, ancient and modern; an art  wherein this form and 
that form as structural parts were laboriously joined in such a way as to beautifully 
emphasize the manner of the joining: the million and one ways of beautifully satisfying 
bare structural necessities, which have come down to us chiefly through the books as 
"Art." 

For the purpose of suggesting hastily and therefore crudely wherein the machine has 
sapped the vitality of this art, let us assume Architecture in the old sense as a fitting 
representative of Traditional-art, and Printing as a fitting representation of the Machine. 

What printing-the machine-has done for architecture-the fine art-will have been 
done in measure of time for all art immediately fashioned upon the early handicraft ideal. 

With a masterful hand Victor Hugo, a noble lover and a great student of architecture, 
traces her fall in "Notre Dame." 

The prophecy of Frollo, that "The book will kill the edifice," I remember was to me as a 
boy one of the grandest sad things of the world. 

After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing 
how in the Middle Ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one 
point-architecture-he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became 
an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of 
architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the 
master, summed up in his person the sculpture that carved his facades, painting which 
illuminated his walls and windows, music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into 
his organs-there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself 
in that time, to come and frame itself in the edifice. 

Thus down to the time of Gutenberg architecture is the principal writing-the universal 
writing of humanity. 

In the great granite books begun by the Orient, continued by the Greek and Roman 
antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last page. 

So to enunciate here only summarily a process it would require volumes to develop; down 
to the fifteenth century the chief register of humanity is architecture. 

In the fifteenth century everything changes. 

Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more resisting than 
architecture, but still more simple and easy. 

Architecture is dethroned. 

Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus' letters of stone. 

The invention of printing was the greatest event in history. 

It was the first great machine, after the great city. 

It is human thought stripping off one form and donning another. 

Printed, thought is more imperishable than ever-it is volatile, indestructible. 

As architecture it was solid; it is now alive; it passes from duration in point of time to 
immortality. 

Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly, with a canal hollowed out beneath its level, and 
the river will desert its bed. 

See how architecture now withers away, how little by little it becomes lifeless and bare. 
How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and people 
withdrawing from it. The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century, the press is 
yet weak, and at most draws from architecture a superabundance of life, but with the 
beginning of the sixteenth century the malady of architecture is visible. It becomes classic 
art in a miserable manner; from being indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from 
being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. 

It is the decadence which we call the Renaissance. 

It is the setting sun which we mistake for dawn. 

It has no power to hold the other arts; so they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the 
architect, and take themselves off, each in its own direction. 

One would liken it to an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander and whose 
provinces become kingdoms. 

Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. 
Hence Raphael, Angelo, and those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century. 

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, architecture grows dim, 
becomes more and more effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks 
and devours it. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing. 

Reduced to itself, abandoned by other arts because human thought is abandoning it, it 
summons bunglers in the place of artists. It is miserably perishing. 

Meanwhile, what becomes of printing? 

All the life, leaving architecture, comes to it. In proportion, as architecture ebbs and flows, 
printing swells and grows. The capital of forces which human thought had been expending 
in building is hereafter to be expended in books; and architecture, as it was, is dead, 
irretrievably slain by the printed book; slain because it endures for a shorter time; slain 
because human thought has found a more simple medium of expression, which costs less 
in human effort; because human thought has been rendered volatile and indestructible, 
reaching uniformly and irresistibly the four corners of the earth and for all. 
Thenceforth, if architecture rises again, reconstructs, as Hugo prophesies she may begin to 
do in the latter days of the nineteenth century, she will no longer be mistress, she will be 
one of the arts, never again the art; and printing-the Machine-remains the second 
Tower of Babel of the human race. 

So the organic process, of which the majestic decline of Architecture is only one case in 
point, has steadily gone down to the present time, and still goes on, weakening the hold of 
the artist upon the people, drawing off from his rank poets and scientists until architecture 
is but a little, poor knowledge of archeology, and the average of art is reduced to the 
gasping poverty of imitative realism; until the whole letter of Tradition, the vast fabric of 
precedent, in the flesh, which has increasingly confused the art ideal while the machine 
has been growing to power, is a beautiful corpse from which the spirit has flown. The 
spirit that has flown is the spirit of the new art but has failed the modern artist, for he has 
lost it for hundreds of years in his lust for the letter, the beautiful body of art made too 
available by the machine. 

So the artist craft wanes. 

Craft that will not see that human thought is stripping off one form and donning another, 
and artists are everywhere, whether catering to the leisure class of old England or ground 
beneath the heel of the commercial abuse here in the great West, the unwilling symptoms 
of the inevitable, organic nature of the machine, they combat, the hell-smoke of the 
factories they scorn to understand. 

And, invincible, triumphant, the machine goes on, gathering force and knitting the 
material necessities of mankind ever closer into a universal automatic fabric; the engine, 
the motor, and the battleship, the works of art  of the century! 

The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that the plastic art may live; that 
the margin of leisure and strength by which man's life upon earth can be made beautiful, 
may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate human expression! 

It is a universal educator, surely raising the level of human intelligence, so carrying within 
itself the power to destroy, by its own momentum, the greed which in Morris' time and still 
in our own time turns it to a deadly engine of enslavement. The only comfort left the poor 
artist, sidetracked as he is, seemingly is a mean one; the thought that the very selfishness 
which man's early art idealized, now reduced to its lowest terms, is swiftly and surely 
destroying itself through the medium of the machine. 

The artist's present plight is a sad one, but may he truthfully say that society is less well off 
because Architecture, or even Art, 
as it was, is dead and printing, or the Machine, lives? 

Every age has done its work, produced its art with the best tools or contrivances it knew, 
the tools most successful in saving the most precious thing in the world-human effort. 
Greece used the chattel slave as the essential tool of its art and civilization. This tool we 
have discarded, and we would refuse the return of Greek art upon the terms of its 
restoration because we insist now upon a basis of Democracy. 

Is it not more likely that the medium of artistic expression itself has broadened and 
changed until a new definition and new direction must be given the art activity of the 
future and that the Machine has finally made for the artist, whether he will yet own it or 
not, a splendid distinction between the Art of old and the Art to come? A distinction made 
by the tool which frees human labor, lengthens and broadens the life of the simplest man, 
thereby the basis of the democracy upon which we insist. 

To shed some light upon this distinction, let us take an instance in the field naturally 
ripened first by the machine-the commercial field. 

The tall modern office building is the machine, pure and simple. 

We may here sense an advanced stage of a condition surely entering all art  for all time; its 
already triumphant glare in the deadly struggle taking place here between the machine and 
the art of structural tradition reveals "art" torn and hung upon the steel frame of 
commerce, a forlorn head upon a pike, a solemn warning to architects and artists the world 
over. 

We must walk blindfolded not to see that all that this magnificent resource of machine and 
material has brought us so far is a complete, broadcast degradation of every type and form 
sacred to the art of old; a pandemonium of tin masks, huddled deformities, and decayed 
methods; quarreling, lying, and cheating, with hands at each other's throats-or in each 
other's pockets; and none of the people who do these things, who pay for them or use them, 
knows what they mean, feeling only-when they feel at all-that what is most trulylike the 
past is the safest and therefore the best; as typical Marshall Field, speaking of his new 
building, has frankly said: "A good copy is the best we can do." 

A pitiful insult, art and craft! 

With this mine of industrial wealth at our feet we have no power to use it except to the 
perversion of our natural resources? A confession of shame which is the merciful 
ignorance of the yet material frame of things, mistakers for glorious achievement. 

We half believe in our artistic greatness ourselves when we toss up a pantheon to the god 
of money in a night or two or pile up a mammoth aggregation of Roman monuments, 
sarcophagi, and Greek temples for a post office [sic] in a year or two-the patient retinue 
of the machine pitching in with terrible effectiveness to consummate this unhallowed 
ambition-this insult to ancient gods. The delicate, 
impressionable facilities of terra cotta becoming imitative blocks and voussoirs of 
tool-marked stone, badgered into all manner of structural gymnastics or else ignored in 
vain endeavor to be honest; and granite blocks, cut in the fashion of the followers of 
Phidias, cunningly arranged about the steel beams and shafts, to look "real"-leaning 
heavily upon an inner skeleton of steel for support from floor to floor, which strains the 
"reality" and would fain, I think, lie down to die of shame. 

The "masters"-ergo, the fashionable followers of Phidias-have been trying to make this 
wily skeleton of steel seem seventeen sorts of "architecture" at once, when all the world 
knows-except the masters-that it is not one of them. 

See now, how an element-the vanguard of the new art-has entered here, which the 
structural-art equation cannot satisfy without downright lying and ignoble cheating. 

This element is the structural necessity reduced to a skeleton, complete in itself without the 
craftsman's touch. At once the million and one little ways of satisfying this necessity 
beautifully, coming to us chiefly through the books as the traditional art of building, 
vanish away-become history. 

The artist is emancipated to work his will with a rational freedom unknown to the 
laborious art of structural tradition-no longer tied to the meagre unit of brick arch and 
stone lintel, nor hampered by the grammatical phrase of their making-but he cannot use 
his freedom. 

His tradition cannot think. 

He will not think. 
His scientific brother has put it to him before he is ready. 

The modern tall office building problem is one representative problem of the machine. The 
only rational solutions it has received in the world may be counted upon the fingers of one 
hand. The fact that a great portion of our architects and artists are shocked by them to the 
point of offense is as valid an objection as that of a child refusing wholesome food because 
his stomach becomes dyspeptic from over-much unwholesome pastry-albeit he be the 
cook himself. 

We may object to the mannerism of these buildings, but we can take no exception to their 
manner nor hide from their evident truth. 

The steel frame has been recognized as a legitimate basis for a simple, sincere clothing of 
plastic material that idealizes its purpose without structural pretense. 

This principle has at last been recognized in architecture, and though the masters refuse to 
accept it as architecture at all it is a glimmer in a darkened field-the first sane word that 
has been said in Art for the Machine. 

The art of old idealized a Structural Necessity-now rendered obsolete and unnatural by 
the Machine-and accomplished it through man's joy in the labor of his hands. 

The new will weave for the necessities of mankind, which his Machine will have mastered, 
a robe of ideality no less truthful but more poetical, with a rational freedom made possible 
by the machine, beside which the art of old will be as the sweet, plaintive wail of the pipe 
to the outpouring of full orchestra. 

It will clothe Necessity with the living flesh of virile imagination, as the living flesh lends 
living grace to the hard and bony human skeleton. 

The new will pass from the possession of kings and classes to the everyday lives of 
all-from duration in point of time to immortality. 

This distinction is one to be felt now rather than clearly defined. 

The definition is the poetry of this Machine Age and will be written large in time; but the 
more we, as artists, examine into this premonition, the more we will find the utter 
helplessness of old forms to satisfy new conditions and the crying need of the machine for 
plastic treatment-a pliant, sympathetic treatment of its needs that the body of structural 
precedent cannot yield. 

To gain further suggestive evidence of this, let us turn to the Decorative Arts-the 
immense middle ground of all art now mortally sickened by the machine-sickened that it 
may slough the art ideal of the constructural [sic] art for the plasticity of the new art-the 
Art of Democracy. 

Here we find the most deadly perversion of all-the magnificent prowess of the machine 
bombarding the civilized world with the mangled corpses of strenuous horrors that once 
stood for cultivated luxury-standing now for a species of fatty degeneration, simply 
vulgar. 

Without regard to first principles or common decency, the whole letter of tradition-that 
is, ways of doing things rendered wholly obsolete and unnatural by the machine-is 
recklessly fed into its rapacious maw until you may buy reproductions for ninety-nine 
cents at "The Fair" that originally cost ages of toil and cultivation, worth now intrinsically 
nothing-that are harmful parasites befogging the sensibilities of our natures, belittling 
and falsifying any true perception of normal beauty the Creator may have seen fit to 
implant in us. 

The idea of fitness to purpose, harmony between form and use with regard to any of these 
things, is possessed by very few and utilized by them as a protest, chiefly-a protest 
against the machine! 

As well blame Richard Croker for the political iniquity of America. 

As "Croker is the creature and not the creator" of political evil, so the machine is the 
creature and not the creator of this iniquity; and with this difference-that the machine has 
noble possibilities unwillingly forced to degradation in the name of the artistic; 
the machine, as far as its artistic capacity is concerned, is itself the crazed victim of the 
artist who works while he waits and the artist who waits while he works. 

There is a nice distinction between the two. 

Neither class will unlock the secrets of the beauty of this time. 

They are clinging sadly to the old order and would wheedle the giant frame of things back 
to its childhood or forward to its second childhood, while this Machine Age is suffering for 
the artist who accepts, works, and sings as he works with the joy of the here and now! 

We want the man who eagerly seeks and finds, or blames himself if he fails to find, the 
beauty of this time, who distinctly accepts as a singer and a prophet, for no man may work 
while he waits or wait as he works in the sense that William Morris' great work was 
legitimately done-in the sense that most art and craft of today is an echo; the time when 
such work was useful has gone. 

Echoes are by nature decadent. 

Artists who feel toward Modernity and the Machine now as William Morris and Ruskin 
were justified in feeling then had best distinctly wait and work sociologically where great 
work may still be much miserable mischief. 

If the artist will only open his eyes he will see that the machine he dreads has made it 
possible to wipe out the mass of meaningless torture to which mankind, in the name of the 
artistic, has been more or less subjected since time began; for that matter, [he] has made 
possible a cleanly strength, an ideality, and a poetic fire that the art of the world has not 
yet seen; for the machine, the process now smooths away the necessity for pretty structural 
deceits, soothes this wearisome struggle to make things seem what they are not, and can 
never be, satisfies the simple term of the modern art equation as the ball of clay in the 
sculptor's hand yields to his desire-comforting forever this realistic, brain-sick 
masquerade we are wont to suppose art. 

William Morris pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art. Let us understand 
the significance to art of that word-SIMPLICITY-for it is vital to the art of the machine. 

We may find, in place of the genuine thing we have striven for, an affectation of the na�ve, 
which we should detest as we detest a full-grown woman with baby mannerisms. 

English art is saturated with it, from the brand-new imitation of the old house that grew 
and rambled from period to period to the rain-tub standing beneath the eaves. 

In fact, most simplicity following the doctrines of William Morris is a protest; as a protest, 
well enough, but the highest form of simplicity is not simple in the sense that the infant 
intelligence is simple-nor, for that matter, the side of a barn. 

A natural revulsion of feeling leads us from the meaningless elaboration of today to lay too 
great stress on mere platitudes, quite as a clean sheet of paper is a relief after looking at a 
series of bad drawings-but simplicity is not merely a neutral or a negative quality. 

Simplicity in art, rightly understood, is a synthetic, positive quality in which we may see 
evidence of mind, breadth of scheme, wealth of detail, and withal a sense of completeness 
found in a tree or a flower. A work may have the delicacies of a rare orchid or the staunch 
fortitude of the oak and still be simple. A thing to be simple needs only to be true to itself 
in organic sense. 

With this ideal of simplicity, let us glance hastily at a few instances of the machine and see 
how it has been forced by false ideals to do violence to this simplicity, how it has made 
possible the highest simplicity, rightly understood and so used. As perhaps wood is most 
available of all homely materials and therefore, naturally, the most abused-let us glance 
at wood. 

Machinery has been invented for no other purpose than to imitate, as closely as possible, 
the woodcarving of the early ideal-with the immediate result that no ninety-nine-cent 
piece of furniture is salable without some horrible botchwork meaning nothing unless it 
means that art and craft have combined to fix in the minds of the masses the old 
hand-carved chair as the ne plus ultra of the ideal. 

The miserable, lumpy tribute to this perversion which Grand Rapids [Michigan] alone 
yields would mar the face of Art beyond repair; to say nothing of the elaborate and fussy 
joinery of posts, spindles, jigsawed beams and braces, butted and strutted, to outdo the 
sentimentality of the already over-wrought antique product. 

Thus is the woodworking industry glutted, except in rarest instances. The whole sentiment 
of early craft degenerated to a sentimentality having no longer decent significance no 
commercial integrity; in fact all that is fussy, maudlin, and animal, basing its existence 
chiefly on vanity and ignorance. 

Now let us learn from the Machine. 

It teaches us that the beauty of wood lies first in its qualities as wood; no treatment that did 
not bring out these qualities all the time could be plastic, and therefore not appropriate-so 
not beautiful, the machine teaches us, if we have left it to the machine that certain simple 
forms and handling are suitable to bring out the beauty of wood and certain forms are not; 
that all woodcarving is apt to be a forcing of the material, an insult to its finer possibilities 
as a material having in itself intrinsically artistic properties, of which its beautiful 
markings is one, its texture another, its color a third. 

The machine, by its wonderful cutting, shaping, smoothing, and repetitive capacity, has 
made it possible to so use it without waste that the poor as well as the rich may enjoy today 
beautiful surface treatments of clean, strong forms that the branch veneers of Sheraton 
[furniture] and Chippendale [furniture] only hinted at, with dire extravagance, and which 
the Middle Ages utterly ignored. 

The machine has emancipated these beauties of nature in wood, made it possible to wipe 
out the mass of meaningless torture to which wood has been subjected since the world 
began, for it has been universally abused and maltreated by all peoples but the Japanese. 

Rightly appreciated, is not this the very process of elimination for which Morris pleaded? 

Not alone a protest, moreover, for the machine, considered only technically, if you please, 
has placed in artist hands the means of idealizing the true nature of wood harmoniously 
with man's spiritual and material needs, without waste, within reach of all. 

And how fares the troop of old materials galvanized into new life by the Machine? 

Our modern materials are these old materials in more plastic guise, rendered so by the 
Machine, itself creating the very quality needed in material to satisfy its own art equation. 

We have seen, in glancing at modern architecture, how they fare at the hands of Art and 
Craft, divided and sub-divided in orderly sequence with rank and file of obedient 
retainers awaiting the master's behest. 

Steel and iron, plastic cement and terra-cotta. 

Who can sound the possibilities of this old material, burned clay, which the modern 
machine has rendered as sensitive to the creative brain as a dry plate to the lens-a 
marvelous simplifier? And this plastic covering material, cement, another simplifier, 
enabling the artist to clothe the structural frame with [a] simple, modestly beautiful robe 
where before he dragged in, as he does still drag, five different kinds of material to 
compose one little cottage, pettily arranging it in an aggregation supposed to be 
picturesque-as a matter of fact, millinery [sic], to be warped and beaten by sun, wind, and 
rain into a variegated heap of trash. 

There is the process of modern casting in metal-one of the perfected modern machines, 
capable of any form to which fluid will flow, to perpetuate the imagery of the most 
delicately poetic mind without let or hindrance-within reach of everyone, therefore 
insulted and outraged by the bungler forcing it to a degraded seat at his degenerate 
festival. 

Multitudes of processes are expectantly awaiting the sympathetic interpretation of the 
master mind; the galvano-plastic and its electrical brethren, a prolific horde, now cheap 
fakirs imitating real bronzes and all manner of the antique, secretly damning it in their 
vitals. 

Electroglazing, a machine shunned because too cleanly and delicate for the clumsy hand of 
the traditional designer, who depends upon the mass and blur of leading to conceal his 
lack of touch. 

That delicate thing, the lithograph-the prince of a whole reproductive province of 
processes-see what this process becomes in the hands of a master like Whistler. He has 
sounded but one note in the gamut of its possibilities, but that product is intrinsically true 
of the process and as delicate as the butterfly's wing. Yet the most this particular machine 
did for us, until then in the hands of Art and Craft, was to give us a cheap, imitative effect 
of painting. 

So spins beyond our ability to follow tonight a rough, feeble thread of the evidence at large 
to the effect that the machine has weakened the artist, all but destroyed his handmade art, 
if not its ideals, although he has made enough miserable mischief meanwhile. 

These evident instances should serve to hint, at least to the thinking mind, that the 
Machine is a marvelous simplifier, the emancipator of the creative mind, and in time the 
regenerator of the creative conscience. We may see that this destructive process has begun 
and is taking place that Art might awaken to the power of fully developed senses promised 
by dreams of its childhood, even though that power may not come the way it was pictured 
in those dreams. 

Now, let us ask ourselves whether the fear of the higher artistic expression demanded by 
the Machine, so thoroughly grounded in the arts and crafts, is founded upon a finely 
guarded reticence, a recognition of inherent weakness or plain ignorance? 

Let us, to be just, assume that it is equal parts of all three and try to imagine an Arts and 
Crafts Society that may educate itself to prepare to make some good impression upon the 
Machine, the destroyer of their present ideals and tendencies, their salvation in disguise. 

Such a society will, of course, be a society for mutual education. 

Exhibitions will not be a feature of its programme for years, for there will be nothing to 
exhibit except the shortcomings of the society, and they will hardly prove either instructive 
or amusing at this stage of proceedings. This society must, from the very nature of the 
proposition, be made up of the people who are in the work-that is, the 
manufacturers-coming into touch with such of those who assume the practice of the fine 
arts and profess a fair sense of the obligation to the public such assumption carries with it, 
and sociological workers whose interests are ever closely allied with art, as their prophets 
Morris, Ruskin, and Tolstoy evince, and all those who have as personal graces and 
accomplishment perfected handicraft, whether fashion old or fashion new. 

Without the interest and cooperation of the manufacturers, the society cannot begin to do 
its work, for this is the cornerstone of its organization. 

All these elements should be brought together on a common ground of confessed 
ignorance, with a desire to be instructed, freely encouraging talk and opinion, and 
reaching out desperately for anyone who has special experience in any way connected to 
address them. 

I suppose, first of all, the thing would resemble a debating society, or something even less 
dignified, until someone should suggest that it was time to quit talking and proceed to do 
something, which in this case would not mean giving an exhibition, but rather excursions 
to factories and a study of processes in place-that is, the machine in processes too 
numerous to mention, at the factories with the men who organize and direct them, but not 
in the spirit of the idea that these things are all gone wrong, looking for that in them 
which would most nearly approximate the handicraft ideal; not looking into them with 
even the thought of handicraft, and not particularly looking for craftsmen, but getting a 
scientific ground plan of the process in minds, if possible, with a view to its natural bent 
and possibilities. 

Some processes and machines would naturally appeal to some and some to others; there 
would undoubtedly be among us those who would find little joy in any of them. 

This is, naturally, not child's play, but neither is the work expected of the modern artist. 

I will venture to say, from personal observation and some experience, that not one artist in 
one hundred has taken pains to thus educate himself. I will go further and say what I 
believe to be true, that not one educational institution in America has as yet attempted to 
force the connecting link between Science and Art by training the artist to his actual tools, 
or, by a process of nature study that develops in him the power of independent thought, 
fitting him to use them properly. 

Let us call these preliminaries, then, a process by which artists receive information 
nine-tenths of them lack concerning the tools they have to work with today-for tools 
today are processes and machines, where they were once a hammer and a gouge. 

The artist today is the leader of an orchestra, where he once was a star performer. 

Once the manufacturers are convinced of due respect and appreciation on the part of the 
artist, they will welcome him and his counsel gladly and make any experiments having a 
grain of apparent sense in them. 

They have little patience with a bothering about in endeavor to see what might be done to 
make their particular machine mediaeval and restore man's joy in the mere work of his 
hands-for this once lovely attribute is far behind. 

This proceeding doubtless would be of far more educational value to the artist than to the 
manufacturer, at least for some time to come, for there would be a difficult adjustment to 
make on the part of the artist and an attitude to change. So many artists are chiefly 
"attitude" that some would undoubtedly disappear with the attitude. 

But if out of twenty determined students a ray of light should come to one, to light up a 
single operation, it would have been worthwhile, for that would be fairly something; while 
joy in mere handicraft is like that of the man who played the piano for his own 
amusement-a pleasurable personal accomplishment without real relation to the grim 
condition confronting us. 

Granting that a determined, dauntless body of artist material could be brought together 
with sufficient persistent enthusiasm to grapple with the Machine, would not someone be 
found who would provide the suitable experimental station (which is what the modern Arts 
and crafts shop should be)-an experimental station that would represent in miniature the 
elements of this great pulsating web of the machine, where each pregnant process or 
significant tool in printing, lithography, galvanoelectro processes, wood-and 
steel-working machinery, muffles and kilns would have its place and where the best 
young scientific blood could mingle with the best and truest artistic inspiration, to sound 
the depths of these things, to accord them the patient, sympathetic treatment that is their 
due? 

Surely a thing like this would be worthwhile-to alleviate the insensate numbness of the 
poor fellows out in the cold, hard shops, who know not why nor understand, whose dutiful 
obedience is chained to botch work and bungler's ambition; surely this would be a practical 
means to make their dutiful obedience give us something we can all understand and that 
will be as normal to the best of this machine age as a ray of light to the healthy eye; a real 
help in adjusting the Man to a true sense of his importance as a factor in society, though 
he does tend a machine. 

Teach him that the machine is his best friend-will have widened the margin of his leisure 
until enlightenment shall bring him a further sense of the magnificent ground plan of 
progress in which he too justly plays his significant part. 

If the art of the Greek, produced at such cost of human life, was so noble and enduring, 
what limit dare we now imagine to an Art based upon an adequate life for the individual? 

The machine is his! 

In due time it will come to him! 

Meanwhile, who shall count the slain? 

From where are the trained nurses in this industrial hospital to come if not from the 
modern arts and crafts? 

Shelley says a man cannot say-"I will compose poetry." 

The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which 
some invisible influence, like an inconsistent wind awakens to transitory brightness; this 
power arises from within like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is 
developed, and the  conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach 
or its departure. 
And yet in the arts and crafts the problem is presented as a more or less fixed quantity, 
highly involved, requiring a surer touch, a more highly disciplined artistic nature to 
organize it as a work of art. 

The original impulses may reach as far inward as those of Shelley's poet, be quite as 
wayward a matter of pure sentiment, and yet after the thing is done, showing its rational 
qualities, is limited in completeness only by the capacity of whoever would show them or 
by the imperfection of the thing itself. 

This does not mean that Art may be shown to be an exact Science. 

"It is not pure reason, but it is always reasonable." 

It is a matter of perceiving and portraying the harmony of organic tendencies; is originally 
intuitive because the artist nature is a prophetic gift that may sense these qualities afar. 

To me, the artist is he who can truthfully idealize the common sense of these tendencies in 
his chosen way. 

So I feel conception and composition to be simply the essence of refinement in 
organization, the original impulse of which may be registered by the artistic nature as 
unconsciously as the magnetic needle vibrates to the magnetic law, but which is, in 
synthesis or analysis, organically consistent, given the power to see it or not. 

And I have come to believe that the world of Art, which we are so fond of calling the 
world outside of Science, is not so much outside as it is the very heart quality of this great 
material growth-as religion is its conscience. 

A foolish heart and a small conscience. 

A foolish heart, palpitating in alarm, mistaking the growing pains of its giant frame for 
approaching dissolution, whose sentimentality the lusty body of modern things has 
outgrown. 

Upon this faith in Art as the organic heart quality of the scientific frame of things I base a 
belief that we must look to the artist brain, of all brains, to grasp the significance to society 
of this thing we call the Machine, if that brain be not blinded, gagged, and bound by false 
tradition, the letter of precedent. For this thing we call Art, is it not as prophetic as a 
primrose or an oak? 
Therefore, of the essence of this thing we call the Machine, which is no more or less than 
the principle of organic growth working irresistibly the Will of Life through the medium 
of Man. 

Be gently lifted at nightfall to the top of a great downtown office building and you may see 
how in the image of material man, at once his glory and menace, is this thing we call a 
city. 

There, beneath, grown up in a night, is the monster leviathan, stretching acre upon acre 
into the far distance. High overhead hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened 
with the light from its myriad eyes, endlessly everywhere blinking. Ten thousand acres of 
cellular tissue, layer upon layer, the city's flesh, outspreads enmeshed by [an] intricate 
network of veins and arteries, radiating into the gloom, and there with muffled, persistent 
roar, pulses and circulates as the blood in your veins, the ceaseless beat of the activity to 
whose necessities it all conforms. 

Like to the sanitation of the human body is the drawing off of poisonous waste from the 
system of this enormous creature; absorbed first by the infinitely ramifying, threadlike 
ducts gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive to its life, hurrying it to 
millions of small intestines, to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewer, on 
to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean. 

This ten thousand acres of fleshlike tissue is again knit and interknit with a nervous 
system marvelously complete, delicate filaments for hearing, knowing, almost feeling the 
pulse of its organism, acting upon the ligaments and tendons for motive impulse, in all 
flowing the impelling fluid of man's own life. 

Its nerve ganglia!-the peerless Corliss tandems whirling their hundred-ton flywheels, 
fed by gigantic rows of water-tube boilers burning oil, a solitary man slowly pacing 
backward and forward, regulating here and there the little feed valves controlling the 
deafening roar of the flaming gas, while beyond, the incessant clicking, dropping, 
waiting-lifting, waiting, shifting of the governor gear controlling these modern Goliaths 
seems a visible brain in intelligent action, registered infallibly in the enormous magnets, 
purring in the giant embrace of great induction coils, generating the vital current meeting 
with instant response in the rolling cars on elevated tracks ten miles away, where the glare 
of the Bessemer steel converter makes conflagration of the clouds. 

More quietly still, whispering down the long, low rooms of factory buildings buried in the 
gloom beyond, range on range of stanch, beautifully perfected automatons, murmur 
contentedly with occasional click-clack, that would have the American manufacturing 
industry of five years ago by the throat today, manipulating steel as delicately as a mystical 
shuttle of the modern loom manipulates a silkthread in the shimmering pattern of a dainty 
gown. 

And the heavy breathing, the murmuring, the clangor, and the roar!-how the voice of this 
monstrous thing, this greatest of machines, 
a great city, rises to proclaim the marvel of the units of its structure, the ghastly warning 
boom from the deep throats of vessels heavily seeking inlet to the waterway below, 
answered by the echoing clangor of the bridge bells growing nearer and more ominous as 
the vessel cuts momentarily the flow of the nearer artery, warning the current from the 
swinging bridge now closing on its stately passage, just in time to receive in a rash of 
steam, as a streak of light, the avalanche of blood and metal hurled across it and gone, 
roaring into the night on its glittering bands of steel, ever faithfully encircled by the 
slender magic lines tick-tapping its invincible protection. 

Nearer, in the building ablaze with midnight activity, the wide, white band streams into 
the marvel of the multiple press, receiving unerringly the indelible impression of the 
human hopes, joys, and fears throbbing in the pulse of this great activity, as infallibly as 
the gray matter of the human brain receives the impression of the senses, to come forth 
millions of neatly folded, perfected news sheets, teaming with vivid appeals to passions, 
good or evil, weaving a web of intercommunication so far-reaching that distance becomes 
as nothing, the thought of one man in one corner of the earth one day visible to the naked 
eye of all men in the next, the doings of all the world reflected as in a glass, so 
marvelously sensitive this wide, white band streaming endlessly from day to day becomes 
in the grasp of the multiple press. 

If the pulse of activity in this great city, to which the tremor of the mammoth skeleton 
beneath our feet is but an awe-inspiring response, is thrilling, what of this prolific, silent 
obedience? 

And the texture of the tissue of this great thing, this Forerunner of Democracy, the 
Machine, has been deposited particle by particle, in blind obedience to organic law, the 
law to which the great solar universe is but an obedient machine. 

Thus is the thing into which the forces of Art are to breathe the thrill of ideality! A SOUL! 


8 The American System Ready-Cut House 
Now, in America, you understand that we have been, all of these years, borrowing bad 
forms. The result is that our buildings have no life, no meaning in them, and if we are ever 
going to have a living architecture again-an architecture in which there is really joy and 
which gives joy-we have got to go back to first principles. We have got to go beyond the 
"renaissance" to reality, to truth! 

{Text of a speech reprinted in its entirety from Frank Lloyd Wright's "The American 
System of House Building," The Western Architect, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 1916, pp. 
121-123.} 


Introduction 

In 1916 Frank Lloyd Wright made a major effort to apply the potential of the art and craft 
of the machine to the design of prefabricated or, in this case, precut housing for Arthur L. 
Richards, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area builder, and The Richards Company. Richards 
was a former client of Mr. Wright on the construction of the Lake Geneva Hotel at Lake 
Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1911 and the unbuilt Madison Hotel project at Madison, 
Wisconsin, also in that year. 

The Richards Company was organized on July 3, 1916, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with 
Richards as its president. Mr. Wright was not a company officer and it is not known 
whether he held any stock. The purpose of the company, outlined in its articles of 
incorporation, was to 

buy, sell, manufacture and deal in all kinds of lumber and all kinds and classes of building 
material which may be used oremployed in or about the construction of all kinds of 
buildings and structures; to buy and sell real estate for any and all purposes, especially, 
however, for the purpose f erecting thereon, or having erected thereon, so-called 
"Ready-Cut Houses."{Corporation File-975 in the Archives and Manuscripts Division 
of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at adison.} 

The American System Ready-Cut Houses venture was short-lived because only one 
annual report of the corporation was filed with the State of Wisconsin (for the year 1916). 
The Richards Company was formally dissolved on August 6, 1917, having constructed 
only a few buildings in its short thirteen-month existence.{Identified structures in 
American System Ready-Cut House design are a bungalow located at 1835 South Layton 
Boulevard, a small house at 2714 West Burnham Street, and four duplex apartment 
buildings at 2720 to 2732 West Burnham Street, all in Milwaukee, a small house located 
at 1165 Algoma Boulevard in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, houses located at 330 and 
336 Gregory Street in Wilmette, Illinois, and a small house located at 231 Prospect 
Avenue in Lake Bluff, Illinois. The Arthur Munkwitz Duplex Apartments, also an 
American System Ready-Cut House design and once located at 1102 to 1112 North 27th 
Street in Milwaukee, were demolished in the early 1970s. More recently, however, Shirley 
DuFresne McArthur, in her Frank Lloyd Wright American System-Built Homes in 
Milwaukee (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Northpoint Historical Society, 1985) identified 
another home in American System Built design at 104110 South Hoyne Avenue, Chicago. 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock has reported in his In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of 
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887-1941 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1942 and 1975, p. 122) that 
"Mr. Richards built other houses and duplexes from American System plans at this time 
[i.e., 1916] in several other cities and towns, but cannot remember exactly where."} 

As part of Richards'promotional effort for the American System Ready-Cut Houses a 
six-page booklet was printed in 1916 by The Richards Company, titled The American 
System-Built Houses, Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The following is the complete 
text of that booklet: 

what is a house anyway? Did you ever ask yourself that question? It isn't just a pile of 
brick, stone, wood and cement. It is a place for joy and peace-a place about which should 
move soft-voiced omen and earnest, thoughtful men. If you have any feeling about a 
home at all it probably gets deeper than just surface talk. If goes deep enough into your 
system to get hold of your desire for beauty, peace, sweetness in living. You want your 
home to have an air about it. You want to have something sound and right about the house 
in which you intend to live and raise your sons and daughters. A man's house should be, in 
some way, the expression of all that is best and sweetest in he lives of the people who live 
there-it should be beautiful. 

Now wait. Don't be afraid of that word "beauty." Perhaps you thought beauty was a thing 
that belonged only to the very rich. Is that the way you felt about it? 

Well, there is reason for you feeling that way. We who have built and sold homes have not 
talked about beauty and solid fine work. We have talked price. We admit that. 

It's a crying shame when you come to think if it-that men, real men, in this big free land 
should live their lives in houses not equal in beauty of the peasants' cottages in Europe. 

But things are going to change now. The genius of a really great man has been brought 
into the building trade in America. Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect America has 
known is pouring his genius into the creating of this great AMERICAN SYSTEM of 
houses for the people. We want you to see the models of these houses. We want you to 
understand how the genius of this man has made it possible for every home builder to 
build beautifully without spending more to achieve beauty than he now spends for 
senseless ugliness. 

Here is what Mr. Wright has done. As an American you ought to appreciate it. He has 
designed many types of houses, each of them beautiful beyond belief and each susceptible 
of infinite variation, and has worked out these designs so practically that they can be built 
by ordinary labor under ordinary conditions at from 10% to 20% less cost than the ugly 
houses we have all been building so long. 

How did Mr. Wright do this? 

It is really very simple. He has eliminated the ugly, meaningless furbelows. He has done 
away with the hideous twists and scrolls and other "fancy" work that has done more than 
anything else to make our house building so universally bad. He has used commercial 
engines to your advantage-used them for you, not against you. 

You see Mr. Wright is a really big artist as well as a big architect. He can afford to be 
simple and unpretentious. Think it over yourself. 

Builders haven't understood the strength and beauty of swift, straight lines. They put on 
fussiness. 

And fussiness isn't good home building. 

Let us tell you a little about Frank Lloyd Wright. He is an American boy like you and me. 
And here is the first American architect whose designs have been studied in every great 
city of the world. 

Why did the king's architect of one of the great old world empires say that he would be 
proud to have his son trained under this American? 

Because Wright is basic, he is sound. He builds houses that stand on the ground that have 
music and meaning in them. 

And this great Architect has devoted himself to designing the American System of houses; 
a system of house construction that can be used with infinite variety and effect without 
ugliness or waste. 

He hasn't done it half way either. When he designs a house that is to cost you a certain 
sum of money that's all it costs you. There are no extras. You know what you are going to 
buy and it is delivered to you complete-key in hand-ready to live in. 

And think what you have for your money. Not a hodge-podge but a really lovely 
home-one that you will be prouder of every day, one that will grow more and more 
beautiful and valuable as the years pass. 

Today, there is American Architecture. An architecture as brave as the country. It is a 
pioneer work. Frank Lloyd Wright has cut fresh trails as did the early American. He has 
forgotten the time-trodden roads of the older orders. 

America deserves an architecture. The English, German or French home is a part of the 
actual country, it belongs where it is built; it fits their respective styles of living. The 
Italian home built on the hill side becomes part of the hill. It grows out of it. The buildings 
express the life of their occupants, and are national in character. Consider, for example, 
the home in this country, built out of cement blocks with an imitation rock surface and an 
ornamental design, which is an exceedingly poor copy of what is really good in Europe. 
Such a house is not a genuine expression of our national feeling. Our buildings should 
reflect our life, mode of living and character. We do not want high walls, small windows 
or imitations of foreign designs. We want light, air, ventilation. We want utility, 
compactness. 

No longer do Americans have to satisfy themselves with homes that ape old world forms, 
that were never intended for the New America. The AMERICAN SYSTEM House voices 
American feeling. It is the expression of a national spirit. It is fresh, buoyant, vital. 

American Architecture has come naturally. It has sprung up from among us. It is big with 
power. There is nothing artificial about it. There is no straining for effect. An American 
House speaks to you. It says I am the beauty of perfect utility. The inner rightness of 
design and material finds utterance in my outward lines. 

Only a man who was a world-character in his knowledge and an American in feeling 
could have done this. 

In Frank Lloyd Wright the nation has found its interpreter. Through him America is no 
longer the copier. America is the originator. The American House is the creation. 

The American System makes the house a lasting structure. Frank Lloyd Wright was an 
engineer before he was an architect. His houses have the outward symmetry indicative of 
inward strength. 

Concrete; cypress, "the wood eternal"; water-proof, fire proof, cement plaster. The best 
classes of material-and the best grades in these classes. 

American System design and materials make these houses the soundest of investments. If 
at any time you decide to sell you will find that the depreciation will be negligible. The 
upkeep is extremely low. 

Quality materials-and larger sizes than most builders think necessary. You may have 
seen some of the old New England homesteads, standing firm after 150 or 200 years' use. 

The American System of construction partakes of the spirit of the old Colonial builders, 
combining with it modern scientific knowledge of stresses and strains, of the strength of 
materials and methods of building. 

For example, an American house is not cut to pieces to place the window frames. The 
studs run through from foundation to roof. No breaks except for the outside doors. The 
strength of the construction is unimpaired. 

An American House is as sound from the engineer's viewpoint as a great bridge or a 
skyscraper. 

Integrity of means to ends. Economy, beauty. Frank Lloyd Wright has no scorn of the 
practical thing. He seizes the convenient and permanent-and lets it express itself 
beautifully. 

It is no exaggeration to say that an American System-Built House is more durable than 
any other frame house ever built. 

The woman asks about the arrangement of American Dwellings. This is important to her 
as the arrangement of her husband's store, office or factory is to him. Whether she 
performs the household duties, or merely supervises them she demands convenience.  She 
finds it in the American Dwelling. 

Study the floor plan and you'll see. There are no unnecessary steps to be taken, no waste 
space, no dark corners. 

Then you will look at the placing of the windows. Note the cross-lighting. Even the 
kitchens and roof spaces are ventilated. 

The first day you enter an American House you find it generously equipped with furniture 
that is a unit with the structure itself. It is made an integral part of your home and 
harmonize with its lines and proportions. This furniture, depending on the design of the 
house, includes built-in wardrobe, kitchen cabinets, breakfast nook, living room 
bookcase, dining and living room tables. 

A combined beauty and usefulness makes the American House a most satisfying home. It 
is not a mass of gaudy, stuck-on decorations-not a jig-saw puzzle of unrelated parts. 

It speaks of sane, rational thinking. 

It belongs to the fine, straightforward thing that American home life is at its best. 

It is clean within and without, honest, without pretense, quiet. 

In this booklet we do not go into all of the mechanical details Mr. Wright has perfected to 
get his American System of houses ready to offer the public through us. 

He has really done what no other modern artist has even dared attempt to do. He has 
achieved the touch the old craftsman had-the beauty that cannot die, by the use of 
modern building material mills, modern labor and modern commercialism, the machine. 

The thing you want to know is that you get a beautiful house at less cost than an ugly one. 
We will prove that to you. 
Go to see our representatives. Talk to them. Look at the models of the houses. 

And remember the big story. Any AMERICAN SYSTEM built house you get will be 
designed for you by Frank Lloyd Wright. It will be beautiful. It will be built only of the 
finest grade material from cellar to roof. It will come to you intact, complete as it should 
be and the key handed over to you. There will be no extras.{The Richards Company. The 
American System-Built Houses, Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Milwaukee, 
Wisconsin: The Richards Company, 1916.} 

Antonin Raymond, an apprentice who joined the architectural practice at Taliesin near 
Spring Green, Wisconsin, in the early spring of 1916 while Mr. Wright was working on 
the American System designs, made the following remarks: 

The work he [Mr. Wright] performed on paper was tremendous, but actual building for 
clients was very scarce, practically nonexistent. We worked on a prefabricated scheme 
[American System Ready-Cut Houses] for small residences, which was a predecessor of 
so many projects done by others in later years. Although the work accomplished on this 
problem was prodigious, it never amounted to anything serious as far as actual execution 
was concerned. Wright visualized the component parts of the structure to be delivered on 
the job site, some pre-cut and some prefabricated. The module was three feet, an idea 
apparently originating from his experiences and observations on one of his previous trips 
to Japan. Two-by-four-inch planks, stucco and plaster were the basic materials. The 
prefabricated scheme shows Wright in the amazing capacity of combining the 
characteristics of [the] true artist with those of a shrewd businessman [Arthur L. 
Richards].{Extracted from Antonin Raymond's An Autobiography, Rutland, Vermont: 
Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1973, pp. 48-51.} 

Although no longer associated with Mr. Wright, Richards continued to pursue the 
construction of prefabricated or precut housing in the Milwaukee area during the later 
teens and early 1920s, based on another system designed by a local Milwaukee architect, 
Russell Barr Williamson. Williamson had worked at Taliesin as an apprentice at the time 
that the American System Ready-Cut House designs were under development. 
Williamson's system and its products strongly resembled Mr. Wright's American System 
as well as other Prairie-style houses by him and other Prairie School architects. 

The following is the text of a talk that Frank Lloyd Wright gave before a body of Chicago 
businessmen in mid-1916 on the American System Ready-Cut House designs he 
prepared for The Richards Company. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: I hesitated a long time before I decided that I would undertake a thing of this 
nature. It is something I have always believed could be done here in America better than 
anywhere else in the world. In all of my work from the beginning I have had faith in the 
machine as the characteristic tool of my times, therefore an artist's tool. I have believed 
that this tool put into an artist's hand could be a real benefit to our civilization. I believe 
that the architecture in America that fails to take into account the machine and modern 
organization tendencies is going to be of no great benefit to the people. Of course, I know 
that it is going to take a more subtle art within more severe limitations to build houses 
beautifully while utilizing the machine, but I believe this effort is the logical conclusion of 
my studies and my architectural practice. 

I believe the world will find in the American System of house construction the only 
instance in the world today of a work which has absolute individuality due to a central idea 
which is the organic integrity of the work. If the whole organization of the plan by which 
the American [System] models are to be merchandised is worked out in a broad, healthy 
way, great things will come of it. 

Naturally, I do not want it exploited like a "flash in the pan" nor do I want anything done 
that will make the plan seem an expedient of the moment. The idea back of the American 
System has been in my head for years. I have guarded it carefully. I wanted time to think 
in quiet of how the idea might be brought to the public without injury to the integrity of 
my own art. Any student of design will know that the designs of these houses are not 
architectural attempts at reform. They are developed according to a principle. They grow 
from the inside out, just as trees or flowers grow. They have that integrity. The difference 
between my work and the work of other men is all a difference in grasp and treatment of 
old principles. 

I do not want any mistake made about this new system. These buildings are not in any 
sense the ready-cut buildings we have all heard of where a little package of material is 
sold to be stuck together in any fashion. The American System-built house is not a 
ready-cut house but a house built by an organization systematized in such a way that the 
result is guaranteed the fellow that buys the house. I want to deliver beautiful houses to 
people at a certain price, key in packet. If I have made progress in the art of architecture, I 
want to be able to offer this to the people intact. I think the idea will appeal also to the 
man in the street. Every man would love to have a beautiful house if he could pay for the 
tremendous amount of waste usually involved in building such a house. The American 
[System] plan you see, simply cuts out the tremendous waste that has in the past made 
house building on a beautiful scale possible only to the very rich and any integrity in the 
result possible only to the especially enlightened individual. Unlimited money has failed 
there most loudly. 

Somehow in America, architecture has never been appreciated. We are perhaps the 
greatest nation of house builders in the world and the most slipshod nation of home 
builders. Architecture has, for the most part, been let go by the board because we have had 
to have buildings and have them quick. The result is that the old log cabin, built in the 
woods by the frontiersmen, is really much more beautiful than the modern house with all 
its affectation, fussiness, and ugly waste. 

Now, I believe that the coming of the machine has so altered the conditions of home 
building that something like this American System was inevitable but I have not borne in 
mind purely the economical side of it. I would like to explain to you men some of the 
impulses [in] back of my work in this direction. 

When I, as a young American architect, went abroad, I found many things that astonished 
me. I expected to find over there a great variety-great interest. I went from one city to 
another and for the most part found beauty in the very old buildings only. The Germans 
who really built German buildings and the Italians who built really Italian buildings built 
beautifully. I naturally came to the conclusion that much of the hideousness in the 
architecture of modern day was due to the academic "Renaissance" that Europe has so 
nearly standardized. To my mind, the Renaissance, although academic, never was organic. 
And for centuries architecture, like other arts touched by the Renaissance, had been 
divorced from life, divorced from any organic relation of cause and effect. 

Now, when we go back to the old architecture, we find something quite different. The 
Gothic, for example, was a true style. It was a real architecture. It was an organic 
architecture. In all my work I have always tried to make my work organic. 

Now, in America, you understand that we have been, all of these years, borrowing bad 
forms. The result is that our buildings have no life, no meaning in them, and if we are 
going to have a living architecture again-an architecture in which there is really joy and 
which gives joy-we have got to go back to first principles. We have got to go beyond the 
Renaissance to reality, to truth! 

And now there comes a thought which is really back of this whole effort and which to you 
businessmen, may sound like a highly sophisticated affair. You see, you in America have 
been led to believe that an artist is necessarily a queer fellow-one divorced from the life 
about him. The contrary is true. The perfect artist should be a better businessman than any 
of you here sitting before me and he would be if he had time and the need. 

In America, the natural tendency of our times is away from the old handcraft [sic]. The 
railroad locomotive, the great electrical dynamo-these are some of our truly beautiful 
products-beautiful because of their perfect adaptation of means to ends. Now, I do not 
believe any architecture in the time of commercialism, of industrialism, and of huge 
organization can be real architecture unless it uses beautifully all of these great tools of 
modern life. And that is just what the American System of building houses proposes to do. 

Of course, I realized the danger in all this. I would not dare go into it if I did not believe I 
could, in the midst of industrialism and commercialism, keep on top with my art. In the 
designing of all these houses, I have kept close to first principles but I look with horror at 
what might easily happen in spite of all the care with which I have handled this matter. I 
do not want to lose sight of the central idea of using the machine and all modern 
industrialism to produce beauty. I asked you men to be patient with me if I sometimes 
insisted upon things that you do not understand the meaning of. Simply selling houses at 
less cost means nothing at all to me. To sell beautiful houses at less cost means everything. 
A beautiful house means a truer, better house in every way. 


9 The Preassembled House 
. . . a good machine is good to look at. There is no reason why a house should look like a 
machine, but there is no reason why it should not be just as good to look at as a machine, 
and for the same reason. That is an entirely new basis for architecture and for thought and 
for life. 

{The text of the excerpts of this speech was edited and reproduced from Frank Lloyd 
Wright's "The House of the Future," National Real Estate Journal, Vol. 33, July 1932, pp. 
25-26. A condensed version of this article also appeared as Frank Lloyd Wright's "The 
House of the Future," National Real Estate and Building Journal, Vol. 58, No. 10, October 
1957, p. 43.} 


Introduction 

On Thursday June 30, 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared before more than 600 delegates 
to the 25th Annual Convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards held at 
the Netherland Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio, to deliver a speech entitled "Lower 
Construction Costs for Homes." One reviewer noted the following of this Depression-era 
convention: 

Absent from the convention this year was any note of whining about present conditions. 
Not that conditions were overlooked or ignored. The spirit of the convention was rather to 
face them squarely, to recognize that they are beyond the immediate control . . . and that 
the thing to do is to stop waiting for them to improve.{"Cincinnati Convention Charts 
Course for '32", National Real Estate Journal, Vol. 33, July 1932, p. 17.} 

As an answer to providing lower construction costs for homes, Mr. Wright's speech 
focused on a concept he termed "the assembled house," at which time he again discussed 
the application of the art and craft of the machine to the betterment of the human 
condition. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: I shall call the thing the "assembled house." I do not think there is a big 
concern in the United States that has not been flirting with it, more or less, that has not 
done some research work along the line of a standardized, machine-made house. 

At first, of course, the house itself is going to take on some of the characteristics that 
Henry's Model T took on when it was in Henry's hands, when it was in the inventor's 
hands. An inventor is not an architect. The house will be ugly in the beginning, but it will 
get into the hands of the creative architect or the artist who can evolve a scheme or a plan 
by which it can be made a harmonious whole. There is no reason why the assembled 
house, fabricated in the factory should not be made as beautiful and as efficient as the 
modern automobile. 

You will see a few appearing and will turn away from them and say: "My God, anything 
but that." But that is the way everything that is new and effective has found its way into 
civilization. When we have established a few models that are usable, beautiful, and livable, 
there is no question but that the people will like them. 

There will be a great difference between this new house and the old house as between the 
old caravel in which Columbus discovered America and a beautiful stream-lined rotor 
ship. You will see that a new element esthetically has entered into modern life by way of 
the very things that are now doing more to destroy that life than to make it. There will be a 
new simplicity, a machine-made simplicity. Now, a good machine is good to look at. 
There is no reason why a house should look like a machine, but there is no reason why it 
should not be just as good to look at as a machine and for just the same reason. That is an 
entirely new basis for architecture and for thought and for life. 

Now in working out this assembled house we have already the bathroom as a single unit to 
draw upon. We will call it unit No. 1. You can now get a bathroom with a bathtub and the 
bowl and the water closet in one fixture, and all that is to be done is to make the 
connection to the sewer we have provided and screw it up. There it is. 

Now, your kitchen has been worked out in many ways. I think there are at least five now 
available where you can get a complete and a more practical, a more beautiful kitchen than 
almost any architect could himself design-unit No. 2. And in connection with that unit 
you have the heating of the house-the heat which you use for your kitchen for 
cooking-an immense economy. All that needs is a single connection, screwing it up, and 
putting it together. 

The appurtenant systems in any house are more than one-third of the cost of the house. 
As the cost of the building comes down, the proportion rises. Once we have those things 
completely established as certain parts are established in your car, and they have nothing 
whatever to do with the general effect of the house as a whole, we have established one 
very essential economy, and we have then something at last toward the building of this 
modern house. 

Now, in addition to that, it is just as easy to standardize a bedroom unit which is ideal and 
which does not have the old stuffy closet. We do not have closets any more in the older 
sense. We architects, in spite of our impracticability, have seen the consequences of 
providing the housewife with a hole in which to chuck things. Our closet is not essential 
any more and we do not have it. We have the wardrobe instead, which is a ventilated 
affair, which can be easily kept in order. The bedroom unit can be in various sizes; it can 
be assembled in various ways with the other units. 

Then we can have a living room unit of two or three sizes. In fact, all the features which 
are characteristic of modern life and modern living we can buy on some standardized 
scheme of arrangement. These can be laid out on a unit system so that they all come 
together in an organic style, and the design of these things in the first place can be of such 
character that in the final assembly no wrong or bad thing can happen. 

In putting these units together according to your means, you may be able to have a 
three-unit house. You will probably have to have a bathroom, a kitchen unit, and a 
bedroom-three units at a minimum. Then you can go on and you can amplify that house 
until you have it surrounding an interior court. And this thing can all come knocked down 
to you in metal, metal slabs pressed on each side with some heat-resisting or 
cold-resisting insulation. In fact, you can have the slabs 10 feet or you can have them 
twelve feet long and eight to nine feet high in the knockdown shape and put together on 
the job with a BTU resistance equal to that of an eight-inch brick wall. 

Now, in connection with this assembled house a man need not go so heavily into debt to 
own his house as he has to do now. He will not have to encourage the mortgage banker to 
quite such an extent. As his means grow and his family grows, his house can grow. And I 
can demonstrate to you with perspectives and models which are being prepared that none 
of these houses in any way you can put them together will be other than good to look at. 

They are characteristic of the age. You can drive a car up to the door of one of these little 
houses, or big houses, however they may be extended, drive into the garage, and it will all 
look as though it belonged together-as the costume of the modern woman as she is 
dressed today also belongs to that house and to that car. The man's costume does not 
[change] simply because the women won't let us change. We ought to have something 
simpler than we are putting on in order to be modern. We are dreadfully old-fashioned 
when we hook up about forty-three buttons and go through all our pockets, and finally 
take stock of the gadgets which go to make us complete. "Simplification" is the slogan of 
the machine age, a new significance for the car, for the house, for madame's dress, for 
monsieur, eventually, but we have got to fight for that freedom; it is not coming unless we 
do fight for it. 

Well, now, I have laid before you a simple outline and the gist of this thing that we call 
modern. I have given you an outline here of the main characteristics and the thought 
behind modern architecture. It is not well to laugh at it, and it is not well to put it aside. 
You can't. I have seen it during the last thirty years which it has been my pleasure and 
privilege to try to build houses for people. I have seen it growing and growing, going 
abroad, becoming the characteristic thing in Holland, in Germany, in Switzerland,  
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France. Our own country has been the only country satisfied 
with its own little plaster caverns, its own gadgets, its own little pretty things which it is 
willing to set up in some style or other and try to live in. 

Now, it seems to me that the most valuable thing for a body of Realtors to get into their 
systems is the idea, first, that we have got to make spaciousness more characteristic of 
modern life. It is the natural thing for democracy to get space. The modern city works 
against it. All of you Realtors have worked against it all your lives. The finer you could get 
the thing, and the smaller the pieces you could pass around, why the more successful you 
were. That time has gone by, I believe. 

There is a lot of ground in this country. In fact, if all the people of the world were put on 
the Island of Bermuda, they would not cover it standing up-I do not know about sitting 
down. And there are just about fifty-three acres, at any rate about fifty acres in this 
country, for every man, woman, and child in it if it were to be divided up on that basis. 
Now, it is senseless getting the thing in a heap, pig-piling, to pig-pile some more. 
Believe me, it is old-fashioned. It is not in the keeping of our modern opportunities. It is 
not in the keeping of our modern thought. It is dead. 

Probably you do not even know now when you see the little gas station out there on the 
prairie that is the advance agent of decentralization. Distribution is changing. Your 
telephone poles could be down tomorrow if it was not for the investment in them. The 
whole expression and guide of modern living has gained fluidity, spontaneity. What before 
took ten years is now spontaneous. 

Have we got to go on building buildings, partitioning ground, setting up institutions along 
these dead old lines, and crucifying human life to make a little money? We are all where 
we are now, flat on our backs, gasping for a little sustenance-I guess we call it 
"cash"-just because we can't keep pace with the modern thought that is building the 
modern world. We have had before us a spectacle of what we call "depression." I suppose 
we call it a depression to be nice, just the way the car people when they take your car call it 
"repossession." But I do not believe that this is a depression. I believe that we are at the 
end of an epoch, and I believe that unless real estate men put their ears to their own 
ground and get this message-decentralization-reintegration-organic architecture-the 
use of our other resources-we are faced with a very serious situation. Those things seem 
insignificant, but God knows what they can do. Glass, steel, the automobile, mobilization 
of the whole community. Why, it has changed the entire face of civilization and the 
universe. And until we can grasp that, until we can interpret it, until we can capitalize it 
for the people, we have not got a civilization. 


10 The Marshall Erdman Prefabricated Houses 

This still new engine called "prefabrication" is, of course, a dangerous engine. Anything 
vital, living, and competent has a dangerous side. There is nothing more dangerous than 
truth, nothing more to be dreaded if you are in the wrong. 

{Reprinted by permission of Hanley-Wood, Inc., from Frank Lloyd Wright's "America's 
Foremost Architect Speaks On Prefabrication and the Role of Creative Man in the 
Machine Age: "Quality and Quantity Must Be Partners, Science and Art Must Live 
Together"-Frank Lloyd Wright," House and Home, Vol. 13, No. 4, April 1958, pp. 
120-122.} 


Introduction 

On Wednesday, January 22, 1958, Frank Lloyd Wright held a formal press conference in 
Chicago to introduce his designs for the prefabricated houses he had created for Marshall 
Erdman and Associates, builders of Madison, Wisconsin. Mr. Wright had designed four 
basic types of prefabricated housing-Pre-Fabs 1-4. Only Pre-Fabs 1 and 2, however, 
were ever constructed. {The six Marshall Erdman Pre-Fab 1 designs actually constructed 
were the William Cass residence, Richmond, New York, the Frank Iber residence, Stevens 
Point, Wisconsin, the Arnold Jackson residence (second design), Madison, Wisconsin, and 
later relocated in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin (see "Mid-'50s Frank Lloyd Wright Prefab 
House To Be Relocated," Architecture: The AIA Journal, Vol. 74, No. 3, March 1985, pp. 
32, 37, and 42. for a complete account of this relocation), the Joseph Mollica residence, in 
Bayside, Wisconsin, the Carl Post residence in Barrington Hills, Illinois, and the Eugene 
Van Tamelen residence, Madison. Only two Marshall Erdman Pre-Fab 2 designs were 
actually constructed-the James B. McBean residence, Rochester, Minnesota, and the 
Walter Rudin residence, Madison.} The first Pre-Fab 1-the Eugene Van Tamelen 
residence-was constructed in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1956. The first Pre-Fab 
2-the Walter Rudin residence-was designed by Mr. Wright in late 1958 or January 1959 
and was constructed in June 1959 (after Mr. Wright's death), also in Madison, in time for 
the Parade of Homes. {See "Ready for Parade of Homes Here: New Wright Prefab Home 
To Be Marketed in Spring," The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), February 9, 1959, 
and "At Parade of Homes: Wright House Draws Big Crowds at Show," The Capital Times 
(Madison, Wisconsin), June 22, 1959.} Briefly, Pre-Fab 1 was a one-story, 
three-bedroom structure that covered an area of about 2000 square feet. Pre-Fab 2 was a 
2200-square-foot, three-bedroom house with two bedrooms on a second-level that 
projected into a two-story living room, fourteen feet high. Both Pre-Fabs 1 and 2 had 
attached carports and outdoor patio or terrace areas. {For a detailed discussion and 
illustrations of Marshall Erdman Pre-Fab 1 see "Here Is Prefabrication's Biggest News 
for 1957," House and Home, Vol. 10, December 1956, pp. 117-121 and cover; and for a 
detailed discussion and illustrations of Marshall Erdman Pre-Fab 2 see "FLLW Designed 
This Big "One Space" Prefab," House and Home, Vol. 16, August 1959, pp. 176-177.} 

During his press conference Mr. Wright not only talked about his new Marshall Erdman 
prefabricated housing designs but also reflected on "The Art and Craft of the Machine" 
speech he had delivered at Hull House in Chicago in 1901, almost sixty years earlier (see 
Chapter 7). The optimism Mr. Wright had displayed then about the potential of the 
machine to be used as an artist's tool was somewhat tempered during this 1958 press talk, 
but the optimism expressed in regard to his new Pre-Fab designs was even greater. The 
text that follows is extracted from the talk concerning those designs. One reporter who 
attended the press conference commented that Mr. Wright was "well groomed as usual in a 
herringbone tweed, a flaring pointed collar and puffed tie; Wright was in fine fettle." 
{"Wright 
"Unveils" Prefab Houses," Chicago Sun-Times, January 22, 1958, p. 3.} 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: Way back in the days when Hull House was the cultural center of Chicago-say 
sixty-five years ago-William Morris, John Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelites were at the 
center of the stage in art and architecture. Handicraft societies were all over the United 
States. 

Hull House had called a meeting to found a similar crafts society in Chicago. I was invited 
by Jane Addams to put forward at this meeting a minority report. The minority report was: 
"what is the use in getting behind doors and pounding your fingers trying to make things, 
when the whole world of production is stalled and missing inspiration that really belongs 
to the machine!" 

In those days we hadn't reckoned with machines. We merely used them. The machine was 
new on the crafts horizon and it was murdering handicraft right and left. It had succeeded 
by way of Grand Rapids in turning out machine carving as well as other hand work. I 
made a proposition at the meeting that we quit all of that study of the crafts. 

I advocated the machine as an artist's tool and the machine, of course, meant 
prefabrication, reproduction, standardization. I suggested we go to work and investigate 
what it could do in Chicago, in the metal trades, what it could do with wood, what it could 
do with other building materials. But I was voted down and out. [The] Next day The 
Chicago Tribune published an editorial-I think Jane Addams wrote it-saying that for 
the first time in the history of art a Chicagoan had advocated the machine as an artist's 
tool. 

Since then my lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine" [see Chapter 7] has been 
translated into seven languages and gone around the world. It had long enough time to get 
around and come back and really nothing much has happened since. 

The ability to envision and make practical the uses and purposes of machines-to get what 
inspiration we can from on high to quality the machine product in a new way, to new 
purposes-is still way behind the lighthouse. As a matter of fact, our architects are today 
building nineteenth-century buildings. We are still building the old steel frames. In other 
words, people who were accustomed to building lumber buildings now build them out of 
steel lumber. All our architects who are famous as modernists are still building 
steel-lumber buildings! New York's full of them, Chicago's full of them. They are all 
dying of arthritis at the joints because you can't insure the life of a steel-frame building 
by insuring the life of the joint with paint. As wood was born to rot, steel is born to rust. 

That is only a little indication of our lack of education. I mention it here to show how slow 
it has been even to conceive the justice and the perfect common sense of the nature of 
materials and of making them beautiful in the way you work with them. 

Now, that means today, prefabrication, because you can prefabricate nearly everything in a 
house that doesn't give it individuality. 
The bathroom doesn't give the house much individuality. You can prefabricate it, take it to 
the job, make three connections. The heating system I brought over from Tokyo-gravity 
heat I called it because heat rises as surely as rainwater falls-is now called radiant heat 
for some curious reason. That's mechanical and that's prefabrication. It can all be made 
and brought to the building. 

Of course, anything done in the field has gone-laborwise [sic]-entirely out of all 
proportion. The cost of building used to be, for labor, about a third of the building's total. 
Today, labor is about one-half of the cost of the building. Architects-and they are all 
that is the matter with architecture, I assure you-have not given enough study to what can 
be done by modern machinery to the advantage of the well designed house. 

Now where you live, the living rooms, these places of warmth, proportion, and charm, 
have gone by the board because no one is willing to pay for good design. Designs are 
something you get out of magazines. The magazines get them from boys who are looking 
to make a reputation somehow for something they have gleaned somewhere. 

The so-called practical boys doing the housing now are not the real sinners. The real 
sinner today is education. Teachers have not placed the values in the right places and don't 
realize the value of good proportion and design. Without them there can be no real beauty 
in building except by rebellion. 

Without organic consistency of method to purpose, man's tool, there can be no great beauty 
in housing. Without all these high-minded things, difficult to come by, we have only a 
stupid procession of empty technology. What could be technology is really not technique at 
all, it is here habituation and has come by way of the Realtor. Our nation is unfortunate in 
this respect. The industrial revolution-production-controlling consumption-is making 
a cinder strip of the whole country, with little hot spots we call cities. Now, I don't think 
we were destined to wind up as an industrial cinder strip. I believe we were designed to 
give the beauty and freedom of the green earth as a heritage. Then came the Realtor, then 
came the developer-and God has not saved us from them. He won't, because He expects 
something of His children. He expects some intelligence on their part to stand up and say: 
"No, this is not living. This is not America. This is not sovereignty of the individual." All 
the freedom of life, and the beauty of it for the individual, is right there where you live, 
where your housing is. 

In building homes we have the key to, and the cornerstone of, whatever culture our nation 
is capable of. By its buildings every great civilization is judged. And most of them passed 
away just as we are going to pass away, only we are going to pass away sooner. We are not 
going to last quite as long as most of them did because we can go faster and the faster we 
go, the sooner we finish. So it is high time to pause and take stock of the things that 
constitute the spirit of true building. 

Good design is the spirit of man, the spirit of our times, the spirit of our nation made 
evident. There is nothing so valuable, nothing worth so much to a society, to its future, as 
the fine high quality of its living conditions! 

Now, living conditions don't consist only of kitchens, bathrooms, and standardizations of 
rooms to live and sleep in. You can't prefabricate the thing that gives life to the building. 
That is something that has to come by benefit of clergy, so to say. So this prefabricated 
house here, which we have launched in order to save a third of the cost-probably without 
damage to its character or its spirit-still has something that I have just called benefit of 
clergy. This makes sure that the house belongs where it's built, that it is adapted to the site 
where you put it, that nothing can be done to mar or destroy the harmony of its features. 
The house cannot be distorted nor can the house be misplaced. 

The sense of proportion is what put me into architecture in the first place. I was the man 
who declared that the human scale was the scale by which man should build. The old 
architectures were grandomaniac architectures and were intended to give man inferiority 
complexes. They did! But now we are entitled to give the American citizen something 
more in his own image, in his own right-in his own proportion, too. Something that 
came out of the everywhere to which he belongs and into the here in which he lives. Now 
that's quality. 

Quality and quantity need not be enemies, necessarily. They can be partners and in the 
prefabricated house that's what they'll be. That's why they are and what they should have 
been many, many years ago. 

Our trouble now lies mainly in lack of ground. There is no such thing as human habitation 
put on the ground; no such thing as human habitation placed center to center, blotting out 
the ground. Only if the ground space is developed into the spaces of the building and the 
building has enough ground space about it to characterize the building, and be 
characterized by it, have you got what we should dare to call American architecture. 

We used to say that an acre to the family was enough. Well, it should depend upon 
environment. It will all depend on where and how the building is built. Now, much of the 
money that goes into the building should go into the place where the building stands. That 
is where your realtor has to come in for a drubbing. Because it is his habit to run out ahead 
of the crowd, buy up the land, put up his little advertising paraphernalia, and sell land in 
little pieces-the smaller the piece, the bigger his profits. Why do you take it? Why now 
when the automobile is here and we have a new time scale? We plan by time scale-five 
minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. 

Now the automobile itself has changed everything in a building. We have made the car 
like a little horse and stabled it alongside the building where by nature it doesn't belong. If 
there is any companionship that is odious to a building, it is the motorcar of today. 
Gasoline, carbon monoxide, noise should be left outside somewhere. They are not fit for 
human companionship. And then if you look at the car itself, you can get an idea of what 
happens to buildings in the way of design. Who designs those cars? No student of nature! 
Well, now you can't get designs from any other source than from a deep sincere study of 
nature. 

What's the nature of our automobility [sic]? Is it that thing with fins sticking way up and 
out behind and all the rest of it like a raft or a ferryboat coming down the street gnashing 
its teeth at you? Well, now your houses are going in the same direction. You have your 
picture-window houses and you have all this glass you don't know what to do with. 
Perfectly indecent are most of these modern glassifications [sic] in subdivisions. I wouldn't 
be surprised if people began to commit suicide by the thousands on account of the way they 
have to live in their glasshouses! 

Why shouldn't you stand up on your hind legs and say: "No, we don't want that sort of 
thing. We know this isn't the right thing and we refuse to be jammed into a box, no matter 
how big the hole is in front. We know there is plenty of ground room in this country. We 
know that's one thing the country is long on. We know we don't have to pile up on 
half-acre lots, twenty of us to the acre." We don't have enough sense of our own dignity! 
We don't know who we are, really. We lack respect because we give no respect. Have we 
lost sight of the main thing we're here to get? 

There is no excuse for building poverty into the country as an institution as they've done in 
the big redbrick prisons of New York City. Those redbrick insurance investments, the 
money of the people put into building poverty into the nation as an institution! 

If you can see freedom, if you can see green fields, if you can see children playing in the 
sun, if you can see buildings that have charm, what a man is, what a woman is, then you 
want something more than you are getting today. Now believe me-no man's home, 
notwithstanding prefabrication, need be so like another man's home as to cheat him of his 
natural distinction. Good design qualifies it by the things done to live in it. If the living 
room is there and the people are where they belong and the things round about where that 
house stands are different and the client's things are where he put them, individuality will 
come through notwithstanding such prefabrication as is advantageous. 

Prefabrication and standardization are two different things and yet they belong together. 
They're going to stand together. We're going to have them together. 

You can standardize almost anything but unless you know how to keep life in it by good 
design it will be more or less a quantity thing. Now a quantity thing is never going to take 
the place of the quality thing. But we know well enough now-I, as an architect, say this to 
you advisedly-to put quality into quantity up to a certain point. It can be done only by an 
inspired sense of design. It's not common and never will be. It's not in the magazines. It's 
not something you pick up in the street. 

Good design is something you have to go in for carefully-not too sure of your own taste. 
Good design is something precious and rare. 
Of course, we're a taste-built culture. We have had no knowledge concerning taste. If you 
have been to a university or your children have been there, they have grown up in a 
haphazard environment. I think probably some regents should be taken out and shot just 
for their taste. University buildings were built by somebody's taste, nobody's knowledge. 

You are likely to get into the same rut by taste. This still new engine called 
"prefabrication" is, of course, an dangerous engine. Anything vital, living and competent 
has a dangerous side. There is nothing more dangerous than truth, nothing more to be 
dreaded if you are in the wrong. And here we are in our housing projects, the developers 
merry, ignorant of quality, desirous of quantity at so much per unit. But what of the human 
element-spiritual element-the element of the man himself? Look for it! Where do you 
find it? You won't see it in the big projects. It has been left out. Whose fault is that? It isn't 
the fault of the builder. It's the fault of the man who buys that project house and consents 
to live in it. He can groan and complain and think he might have had more for his money 
but there he is. It isn't how much house you get for your money, it's the quality of what you 
get. Now, if we could set that kind of thinking going we would really be what you might 
honestly call on an economic basis. 

We boast of having the highest standard of living in this world. I'm afraid that when we 
say the highest we can only claim the biggest. Quantity is not the same thing as quality. 
You can have the highest standard of living when it isn't half so big. Now the question 
should be how do we improve the quality? How do we preserve and then how may we use 
quality? 

Quality is a characteristic of the free man. Are buildings going to be subject to the deadly 
routine of conformity? The cheapest thing you can get in the cheapest way without 
consideration of quality and with no real knowledge of what constitutes quality? If so, then 
we are the biggest, shortest lived civilization in history. And the atom bomb-what do you 
call it now?-might as well drop because I don't see anything particularly admirable or 
desirable to stay here for. I think we might just as well kiss it all good-bye. 

There is only one thing that makes life worth living to an American and that is the 
highest, the bravest, and the best of everything there is available right down the line. Take 
no less, know what is the best, know what is really good, have knowledge. 

Know why a house is good, know that the proportions belong, know that the building 
looks as though it belonged there where it is and couldn't be seen anywhere else and 
shouldn't be. Know a building's charm-the kind of appeal that good comfortable clothes 
have, the way good shoes fit you. That's the good house. That is the quality house. That's 
organic architecture and it means according to nature, to the essential intrinsic character 
of everything. Not just trees, flowers, and out-of-doors but the actual inner life of 
everything. In man it would be soul. 

Only as science becomes as one with the spirit of man can a culture or a civilization live 
indefinitely. Science can take things apart, but only art and religion can put them together 
again-to live. 

This really is at the base and the very center of good design by prefabrication, which 
means the appropriate use of an enormously effective instrument, the machine as a tool to 
better the conditions of all human life. Our schools have to change their concept, training 
our architects to [do] deeper nature study. We can't blame the professions or the builders or 
the people who buy homes. The thing I am talking about has to come into society, has to 
come to us by way of a greater consecration to life itself, and by a deeper and more serious 
feeling for beauty. 

Henry Mencken said: "Americans seem to have a lust for ugliness." Look at the poles and 
wires devastating our landscape. See the buildings we build violated by them. Everything 
we have sees no consideration for beauty nor much for life. We need to join together to 
make environment beautiful. 

We have raised the flag to the spirit of man. Until science, vision and art become as one, 
there is no rest or peace for humanity. 


11 On Production 

. . . architecture is something profound. It is something in the human spirit and the human 
soul and it requires poetry. 

{Text of a speech reprinted from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Frank Lloyd Wright Townhall 
Lecture, Ford Auditorium, Detroit, October 21, 1957," Michigan Society of Architects 
Monthly Bulletin, Vol. 31, December 1957, pp. 23, 25, 27, 29, 31-32. Used by 
permission of the Michigan Society of Architects.} 


Introduction 

On Monday morning, October 21, 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright spoke before the Michigan 
Society of Architects at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit. He had already addressed that 
Society a number of times (see Chapters 4 and 25). On this occasion he talked about 
quantity production and the lack of quality in it. More than fifty-six years earlier he had 
delivered his famous speech "The Art and Craft of the Machine" (see Chapter 7) in which 
he expressed optimism for the use of the machine as an artist's tool in production. In this 
speech in Detroit in 1957 his optimism in regard to the machine and man's application of 
it to improve the quality of human life seems to be absent. Mr. Wright scolds the audience, 
composed primarily of architects, for allowing quantity production to rise above quality 
and asks: "Where are the architects? What are they doing all these years? They have been 
running an institute called AIA (i.e., American Institute of Architects), interested in 
architects, not architecture, and that is the great trouble we have now." 

Eight days later, on Tuesday October 29, 1957, Mr. Wright appeared with Carl Sandburg 
and Alistair Cooke on Chicago Dynamic, a WTTW-Chicago, Channel 11 television 
program, to discuss the dynamics of the City of Chicago and the skyscraper. {For a 
detailed discussion of this program, its complete text, and the events that followed it see 
Patrick J. Meehan (Editor), The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd 
Wright, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984, pp. 254-270.} In this conversation and 
the events that followed Mr. Wright chided the steel industry for the production of steel to 
construct buildings "just like the old log cabin . . . a box with steel for horizontals instead 
of lumber." 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: I have just come from Washington with very little voice. I came back with the 
golden keys to the City of Washington and a bad case of laryngitis, the Queen and I, but 
she does not have, so far as I know, a case of laryngitis. 

If I can be of any service and do myself a little pleasure, I would like to say what I think 
about the motorcars that these big boys, by their own choice, are feeding the American 
people by the millions. If ever there was an evidence of bad design, they are the present 
motorcars. I think in my life I have never seen such an ignorance of the nature of anything 
existing carried so far. You know, 
the thing is a ferryboat coming down the street, gnashing its teeth at you for no good 
reason, and it is more a platform trying to digest four wheels than it is anything mobile. To 
be frank, there is nothing mobile about it but the name and the engine. The engine is good. 
The American engine is all right. 

But I don't know where these big boys-I guess they call them hotshots-ever got the 
designs for these things; I suppose from some little boy in the back room who has combed 
the magazines and has some ideas of peculiarity and idiosyncrasy which he calls beauty. 
Anyhow, they don't know the difference-the big fellows-and I don't think they would 
care anyway. 

As things are, production is controlling consumption at the present time. Is the American 
public going to stand for that? You know, that is pretty serious. It isn't so light a matter as 
it seems at the present moment. When you look at those fantails on the cars, they look as 
though they were designed to fight each other in the street. A car is mobile. A school of 
fish is mobile, isn't it? You know, you have to get in and among a school. We say a school 
of fish. Well, we can say a school of cars. If a fish had all their corners extruded and 
lighted and emphasized and then guards for the lamps and the extrusions, they would all 
lie dead on the surface in a very short time. 

What is mobility but something to be considered when you are designing the thing and 
putting it into effect? I suppose the progenitors and promoters of it in ancient times would 
be taken out and hung or shot at sunrise, but we have no such provision. They can do with 
us as they damn please. Now isn't that too bad? 

It reminds me of Mr. [Louis H.] Sullivan. A lady came in to see him one day and wanted a 
colonial house. He said. "Madam, you will take what we give you." 

We are taking what they give us all right and trying to like it. 

What is the answer to all this? There is no study of nature. There is no study of the nature 
of mobility in a car. It is the old lumber wagon still trying to digest four wheels. 

Have you ever ridden in a New York taxicab? Any taxicab anywhere? Why, it has no 
respect for you. It has no respect for the circumstance of its existence. It is trying to imitate 
the boss car on the basis of one and a half passengers per trip. And why? What is this 
thing at the root of this? 

Somebody told me once upon a time they thought it was madam. They were trying to 
please madam. I don't believe they are. I don't think she is that bad. She can be diddled out 
of her eyeteeth but I don't think she is as foolish as that car would indicate that she is. 

I am interested in buildings, in the quiet beauty of environment. You drive one of these 
things in there and it shrieks to heaven and it gives the house the back of the hand. It has 
no respect for anything. So why do you put up with it? Why do you buy the things? Why 
do you go on from here to there with your streets becoming more and more crowded and 
your cars getting bigger and bigger and no consideration ever given to the nature of the 
thing? 

If I have any claim to respect from my own people, it is because I have been a profound, 
serious student of nature from the time I was born until now. When my mother, who is a 
teacher, put me down to the kindergarten table, there is where I started to learn the nature 
of nature, and ever since I have been working away at it, and it is now, standing here 
talking to you from this standpoint of the study of nature, that I am saying what I am 
saying. 

Detroit is the head of the inequity of the motorcar. I don't suppose if the big shots ever 
wanted to hire anybody that knew anything about designing a car that they could find one, 
but I am not sure that they would want to if they could, so I can't do anything about it and 
neither can you. 

Now America is in that state and that is what worries me, this drift toward conformity, 
conformity, conformity, whereas we, according to Thomas Jefferson, were expected to be 
the bravest and the best by way of the freedom declared by the Declaration of 
Independence. He thought education would qualify people for the vote and that mediocrity 
would not be rising into high places. But see how mediocrity is rising into high places. 
Mediocrity you see everywhere you go. 

This is the thing we have been talking about in the motorcar. What is it? Mediocrity, the 
lack of the higher intelligence, the lack of the vision and the perception that makes quality 
instead of quantity. No democracy can live on quantity. We have had all that sort of thing 
in the world before. We have got it in communism now. If we can't distinguish ourselves 
by way of a love for quality and really believing it, not only believing in it but producing in 
it, we are gone too. 

This drift toward conformity of the American people at the present time is an ominous 
thing. I can't think of anything in the history of civilizations-and there have been so 
many that have failed-that is anything nearly so tragic as this drift in America toward 
conformity. 

Of course, a man can't be elected to office unless he gets the biggest vote, unless he appeals 
to them asses. It was a printer who made an error that time by shoving the "m" over to the 
"e" so that it read "them asses" instead of "the masses." I don't hear very much reaction to 
that. Why? For the same reason. 

Mass is not the only consideration of democracy. Quality is. Distinction coming from 
actual experience and nature is the only salvation the common man has, and when he 
becomes jealous of it and when it becomes, as it is almost now in our country, 
unconstitutional, 
then it is time to protest. And I think that protest should rise in this nation now. 

There is no hope of its rising from the educational institution, and that is where Thomas 
Jefferson made his mistake on that. He thought that education would qualify the voter and 
make him fit to be free according to his own choice. 

Well, now, here we are, and that is a serious proposition for an architect because an 
architect builds free for a free people if he is an architect. If he is a conformist and if he 
also is doing the fantail on the car down the street, he is doing all those things that are 
now characteristic of production when it controls consumption. 

If consumption were in control of production, the people would have something to say 
about these things. The action of the intelligentsia would be registered and change the 
thing, wouldn't it? 

Can you change the car? 

Can you change anything in the car? No. And there isn't anything probably in our country 
anywhere in existence that you can change or have any effect upon now because we have 
the wrong end to. We have production in control of consumption. 

In order to do that, and keep it up, we have to go to work before long. We have to drop an 
atom bomb in order to keep these boys satisfied and busy in this debt system under which 
we live. The day of reckoning has got to come. What is the day of reckoning? You can't 
pass a car on the street that is owned by the man that drives it except perhaps one in 
fifteen. 

How are you going to get a house nowadays? How do you get them? Go and look at what 
you get, quantity production, quality gone, no distinction, no individuality, nothing of the 
sort that was declared by our forefathers to be the aim and end of the Declaration of 
Independence. 

Well, why? Now what has happened? What is it that has happened? Why has mass and the 
trembling [sic-trampling] of the herd in education, in production, and everything else 
written down the level of intelligence and character and beauty of what is produced by the 
American people? 

I came down here to say those things in connection with architecture-with the car and the 
car is architecture. There isn't a thing in connection with your lives that isn't architecture. 
Your clothes, the way you dress, the way you live, the way you sit down and eat and what 
you eat and the way you do it all is architecture. The car is architecture. 

Where are the architects? What are they doing all these years? They have been running an 
institute called AIA [American Institute of Architects], interested in architects, not in 
architecture, and that is the great trouble we have now. 

Well, all I could do about it I have done. Now why don't you do something about it? You 
sit there at home in your beautiful homes, luxury, not all of you, but most of you. You see 
the buildings that are built on this square. They are all in a mode. They are not built from 
the inside out. Architecture today is still nineteenth-century. It is still back there in the 
days when steel was discovered and they could do nothing with it but roll it into lumber. 
Don't you know what they did? We had steel beams like wooden beams and we put up 
posts and framed the beams and made a framework of steel just the way we would make it 
of wood. 

There came a dispensation early in the twentieth century where steel was seen to be what it 
was as steel and stranded and made so you could build on it this way. You couldn't pull it 
apart. And its great economy and beauty was its tensile strength. 

Then we got the Brooklyn Bridge, among other things. 

And that element in steel has been neglected to this day, and the buildings you have across 
the street are what? They are that old steel frame by the nineteenth-century bridge 
engineer. They are not from the inside out. They are merely paperhanger's facades. 

The building isn't built that way, and who cares how the building is built. If you hang a 
front on it that looks tasty, we'll say, and novel, that's all. But it is not enough for an 
architect. It may be enough for the car maker but architecture is something profound. It is 
something in the human spirit and the human soul and it requires poetry. The poetic 
principle is the heart of architecture, and if you are not inspired by the poetic principle to 
develop from the nature of the thing a beauty never seen before you are not an architect. 
You are not a poet, in other words. 

The word beauty is something we use with discretion or we are sorry in our country. We 
have science galore. We have all the things that science can give us. Science can take 
anything apart but it can't put anything together to live. 

That is why we have lost our art, architecture, and religion. Do you know we have no 
religion of our own now? The only thing we have left to go on after the Declaration of 
Independence was the declaration of Jesus who said: "The kingdom of God is within you." 

That, of course, is where we are as a nation by way of our Declaration of Independence. 
We have declared the sovereignty of the individual. Now what have we done to justify the 
Declaration? 

We should be the light of the world today. We should be the light of the world in this 
innate expression of human nature we call art, and we should have a religion of our own. 
We shouldn't still be [a] gambling, quarreling aggregation of sects. We might have lots of 
fun by differentiating a thing, but still we should have a core of faith, faith in man, faith in 
our own Declaration, in our own way of life, and we should find its beauty and it should be 
more beautiful than anything this world has ever seen. 

Well, is it? I think we have made some progress. I don't want to write this whole thing off 
because I know how earnest and how serious many of our people-most of our people, I 
will say-are in finding something good, something true, something that goes in and 
buttons back, something that really comes out from within with integrity, and it is that 
integrity that is lacking throughout the American fabric today and lacking in the car. 
There is no integrity  in the whole performance. There is no integrity anywhere in the 
housing that you see built. 

Where did we lose this contact with integrity when we declared the sovereignty of the 
individual? Where? In education? Yes. Thomas Jefferson felt that we would qualify the 
vote, temper this great unwieldy, unthinking, unfeeling mass by education. Well, look at 
the buildings first of all in which this education is administered. Has it any deep 
consideration and feeling for the impression that it would make upon the mind of the 
young by the integrity of its beauty and character? There is only one university in the 
United States that has an American campus and that is Florida Southern College [see 
Chapter 12]. Not one of the others has one that really represents the new thought, our 
thought, our belief in humanity. It is all handed to us as derelicts from the past, from 
civilizations that are either dead or doomed to die. Education has failed us, and it has. 

This car shows us up. Everything we do shows us up, shows that we have never learned 
the vital necessity of going into whatever the nature of the thing we do is. 

For instance, if you were to take the nature of a motorcar or the nature of the dwelling of 
the man without much money, what would the nature of the thing-if you yielded to it, 
developed it-bring you? If we really got into the nature of humanity and arranged things 
accordingly at the best level we could come to, what would we have? Would we have this 
Realtor? Would we have these cities we live in now? Would we have anything we've got 
which we practice as a leftover from the past? 

We got production so easy and in such volume that it could wipe out everything else except 
production. Now where are these things being reckoned with? It is not in architecture. 

You know, this is an architect's job. The architect is the form giver of his people in his 
time in his nation and he hasn't been present in ours. He has been educated first of all at 
the Beaux Arts at Paris and we have those architects. 

Then we got another kind, an import from abroad when the "Bah Houses" [Bauhaus] 
closed up, and now we are looking around to find out what really it is that has happened to 
us and what it is? 

How many of you have really ever given it a thought? We have got to think. We have got 
to wake up. We have got to make of this country a great beautiful civilization or we will be 
the shortest one in history because our scientific advantages have been so exaggerated; 
they have so far outrun our spiritual interpretations and so far gone ahead of everything 
that we know or feel within ourselves that we don't know where we are. 

We don't know what to do with the thing. It has got us. We haven't got it. We are not 
designing these things anymore. We are not building our buildings anymore. We are not 
designing our cars or designing anything anymore. Well, why aren't we? We, a free 
people-we, 
the people with the greatest gift of riches on earth, with the greatest expanse and beauty of 
ground-what have we done? It isn't a fair question. I'm sorry. I apologize. But I really 
haven't got very much to offer on the side of an apology. 

We now have reached the point where everything is publicity. Publicity is managed. 
Publicity, publicity, publicity; names, names, names. And when you go to school, it is not 
the nature of the thing your attention is directed to. It is again comparisons, comparisons, 
comparisons. Now, the inferior mind learns by comparison but how does the superior mind 
learn? By analysis! The superior mind doesn't ask who is this and who is that and what is 
this name and that name and that name. It says: "What is the nature of this one? What is 
the nature of that one?" And it goes inside and comes out with something. 

That is what is missing in our educational system. It is what is missing in our nation 
today. It is why these silly cars roam the streets. It is why these houses we live in are so 
lacking in harmony, beauty, and proportion. It is why your diet even, is a shame and not 
only a disgrace but it is practically going to destroy the nation if we don't do better than we 
are doing now. 

All these things should be related to something we don't seem to have, and that is the 
integrity that comes from knowledge of nature and nature study. 

What is nature? We don't mean horses, cows, streams, trees, or flowers only. We mean the 
nature of you, your nature-and other nature, the nature of this thumb of mine here. What 
is the nature of the thumb as compared with the other fingers? It means an interior sense 
of whatever is! 

And this architecture I have devoted my life to we call organic. What does organic mean? 
It doesn't mean something in a butcher shop. Necessarily, it is that, but that is the lowest 
form of it. Organic means something that has entity. Only entity can live. So when you get 
that into a building, you have got it into civilization, and, when you understand the nature 
of the term organic and the nature of nature study as I am advocating it to you now, you 
have the center line of the civilization that can preserve itself, that can persevere. 

Now, it is so near. Why don't we have it? What is the matter with these professors? What 
is the matter with these dignitaries? What is the matter with these big shots with millions 
to spend? They don't build that kind of building. They don't build that kind of car. They 
don't build that kind of life by way of their religion, etc. We haven't got the religion that 
presents it to the people as it should. 

Now, architecture presents man to man. Literature tells about man, but here the most 
fundamental thing we can have in our life, young as it is as a nation, is a fine architecture 
of our own, and that means we have got to have some knowledge, some sense of what 
makes this thing virtuous, which gives it to us right side up, and we know little or nothing 
about it. 

And if you ask me, if you were to go to the AIA and try to find out from them what I am 
talking about, they couldn't tell you and they are architects. I have never joined them and I 
never will because I think if they changed the name from American Institute of Architects 
to the American Institute of Architecture, I would. There is a difference. I think architects 
today are all that is the matter with architecture! 

Gerald Stanley Lee, a preacher who was very much worth listening to in his day, said that: 
"the only trouble with goodness in America were the people that had hold of it." Well, the 
only trouble with the cars today is not the people who run them, or is it? Maybe it is. I dare 
say that we are missing something here and that these cars wouldn't be there in the foolish 
fashion they are in unless it was for you. It is your responsibility and so is all the rest of 
this. 


QUESTIONER: [Mr. Wright, I would like to know if you designed the Arizona Biltmore 
Hotel?] 

WRIGHT: This lady wants to know if I designed the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, and I did. I 
spent a whole year at it. There was a young student of mine who had the commission. He 
never built anything but a house, so they sent for me to help out and I helped out. So that 
is the Arizona Biltmore. 

QUESTIONER: What kind of car do you drive? 

WRIGHT: Shall I confess? I do not drive an American car. 

I am building a house [the Maximillian Hoffman residence in Rye, New York] for the 
distributor of the Mercedes, Mr. Hoffman, and a beautiful house it is. And he had this car 
made for me in Stuttgart, the one I am driving, and brought over here. 

We have one other sports model, so we have the two Mercedes which today are probably as 
good as the Rolls Royce. Now, will that satisfy you? 

QUESTIONER: [Mr. Wright, should everybody design his or her own car?] 

WRIGHT: Here is a do-it-yourself girl in the audience who wants to know if she should 
design her own car. That is rather an embarrassing question because I wouldn't know. It 
would depend on how good she was. 

QUESTIONER: [What are the chances of building the Mile-High Illinois Skyscraper 
Project?] 

WRIGHT: This man wants to know what the chances are of building the Mile-High 
[Illinois skyscraper] building in Chicago. I think that it is inevitable. I have no doubt 
whatsoever that the mile-high building will be built and the sentiment of the whole 
region is similar to mine. 

You must understand the Mile-High to understand that it isn't spoofing. It is absolutely 
scientific, and it is a great economical project. It will end all this foolishness of 
skyscrapering [sic], you see. That is what I designed it for. 

Going home on the train the other day-Chicago had a Frank Lloyd Wright Day recently 
and there was an exhibition, and the evening of that day one of my friends was going out 
to the north side on a late train, you know, eleven o'clock, and there were four 
workmen-this just indicates the grass roots-playing cards in the back of the car. He was 
listening. One of them said, "Why, that thing will never be built. Tain't practical." Another 
workman stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a $10 bill and laid it on the table: 
"There," he said, "there is $10 to say it will be built within three years." And there were no 
takers. That is the way I feel about it. 

QUESTIONER: What do you think of the concrete shell medium in modern architecture? 

WRIGHT: Concrete reinforced with fibers of steel is the body of our modern world in any 
form. Concrete with steel fibers embedded in it, which is very like your own structure or 
the structure of a tree or any structure nature indulges in, is going to be the body of our 
modern world. This old lumbering with steel, building these frames and idealizing a 
facade on the frame and hanging wallpaper on it isn't going to last. That is not 
twentieth-century architecture; that is the old nineteenth-century bridge engineer's 
architecture. And, as for me, to hell with it! 

QUESTIONER: It has been said that music is architecture in a fluid state. 

WRIGHT: Well, now, ladies and gentlemen, it is perfectly true that music and architecture 
flower from the same stem. The composer has his score. The architect has his modular 
unit system on which he works, and the minds are very similar, practically, the same. My 
father was a musician and a preacher. He taught me to see a great symphony as an edifice, 
an edifice of sound, you see. So when I listen to Beethoven, who is the greatest architect 
who ever lived, I never fail to see buildings. He was building all the time. He was a great, 
competent builder and so was a great composer also. So never miss the idea that 
architecture and music belong together. They are practically one. 

QUESTIONER: What do you think about the interplanetary activity? 

WRIGHT: It amuses me somewhat, and I think it is of no very great significance except to 
win a race or something or other. I don't think that is the matter with us or what we need 
or that it is going to do anything for us. I think the planetary race that we should run is one 
under our vest, one inside our own hearts and minds. And all this scientific competition, 
what does it amount to anyhow?  Why such an excitement over it? 


Suppose we go to the moon? What is the moon but a carcass, and what is all this thing to 
do for us in the end except to maybe make if foolish to go to war again, in which case it is 
very well done. But I doubt if it will accomplish that. 

We are not in need of more science. We are not in need of more demonstrations of the 
ability of science. What we need now is some expression of the human heart, of human 
sympathies, of the human mind, of the poetic principles. The poetic principle is dying 
among us. If we let that die, we don't live, and that is true. 

QUESTIONER: Who is more guilty, the people who buy these cars or the people who 
make them? 

WRIGHT: That is a pertinent question. And the same with the houses. If the people aren't 
there, if they don't demand, if there isn't something in their own souls and hearts that says: 
we want something better and something right, you won't get it. And I don't think you can 
blame the big boys for putting it over on you. They will put it over on anybody. 

What are they interested in, these big fellows? Promoting anything spiritual? Promoting 
anything that comes from the interior of the human soul? 

No. They want the biggest and if it takes the best to get it they will give you the best. If 
they can get it cheap, they will get it cheap. They are not great crusaders for the soul of 
humanity, believe me. They may say they are. They may think they are. They will have to 
guess again one of these days and it is up to you to say what you will have and what you 
won't have. 

The other day I was talking about a terrible housing project in the region of Madison. It 
was a disgrace. I said so. And a woman got up and said, "But Mr. Wright, that's all we can 
buy." And I said, "Madam, but you bought it, didn't you? You are living in it, aren't you?" 
She said: "Yes." Well, is that excuse enough? She could have bought a tent. She could 
have gone out with her babies and lived in a tent and said: "I will not buy one of those 
stinking things!" 

That is the kind of spirit we need in America and that is the Declaration of Independence. 
That is the sovereignty of the individual. It isn't being herded. It isn't trembling in masses 
in universities and getting a lick and a promise of something in the future, being 
conditioned and sent home fooled, cheated, even worse than before. 

QUESTIONER: Will you speak about your Baghdad project? 

WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, I don't suppose I should talk about my clients much, but 
the Middle East, Baghdad, has always been a romance to me, "The Thousand and One 
Nights," you know and Haroun el Rashid and all that. 

So when it came to me to build the opera house for Baghdad, I was delighted, and I went 
over there enthusiastically and I have done an opera house which some day you will see. It 
is the Arabian Nights and it is Aladdin with his wonderful lamp and it is all that for 
Baghdad. 

But, in general, I saw the little King [Faisal] when we were coming down [to] an island in 
the Tigris. It was about a mile and a half long and about three-quarters of a mile wide, 
and there was not a thing on it, and it was in the middle of the river. So I wondered. So I 
asked the Development Board what about it, and they said, "Well, we can't do anything 
about that, Mr. Wright, nothing at all. It belongs to the Royal Household." 

Next day I was to meet the King, so I took with me a little sketch that I made showing 
what I wanted to do for Baghdad if I could have that little island to work on, and I told the 
little King about it. I say little-he is twenty-two years old now and he is going to be 
married next year. So he listened intelligently and appreciatively, and he knew what I was 
talking about. And when I finished, he stood up, pleasantly looked me in the face, put his 
hand on where I had been talking about and he said: "Mr. Wright, the island is yours." 

Well, I was converted to monarchy right there. You know in a democracy what it would 
have taken to get that island. It would have taken fifteen years or more and "mine and 
yours" and "where do you come in" and "what do I get?" and everything else. So we have 
that island now and we are working out on it a project, a nine-year project. 

And the Minister of the Development Board just left me. He was delighted with what I 
have done. I am reporting on the job. And you will see probably before very long what can 
be done with an ancient civilization that was the basis of all future civilization. You know, 
civilization was invented in lraq. The Samarian civilization was the first and the idea of a 
civilization occurred there. The Garden of Eden is only sixty miles away, and the Tower of 
Babylon is only about forty miles away. So there is Mesopotamia, the very center of all that 
has happened since. 

It is interesting to go back to a civilization and to the source of civilization with something 
as beautiful and strong in spirit as anything they ever had. That is what I am trying to do. 

So, good-bye. 


PART FOUR 

In the Cause of Improving the Human Condition 


12 An Adventure in the Realm of the Human Spirit 
. . . look upon these buildings . . . here as engaging in an adventure. The greatest, most 
important of all adventures: an adventure in the realm of the human spirit, searching for a 
greater harmony, a greater truth of being, and with it comes, God knows, a more blessed 
richer life. 

{Reprinted with editorial corrections from Frank Lloyd Wright's "An Adventure in the 
Human Spirit," Motive, Vol. XI, November 1950, pp. 30-31, and from the publication 
titled An Address by Frank Lloyd Wright: In Connection With Founders Week (Lakeland, 
Florida: Florida Southern College), 1950, pp. 1-5. Reprinted by permission of Florida 
Southern College.} 


Introduction 

The West Campus of Florida Southern College, which occupies about one hundred acres of 
a former orange grove overlooking Lake Hollingsworth in Lakeland, Florida, was designed 
by Frank Lloyd Wright over a twenty-year period, beginning in 1938. The campus, 
which contains ten designs by Mr. Wright, represents the world's largest single-built 
complex of his work. The idea of building the campus came in 1936 from Dr. Ludd M. 
Spivey, president of the college from 1925 to 1957. 

Dr. Spivey made the following comments in 1952 to the editors of the Architectural Forum 
on the architecture of Florida Southern College: 

When the college decided to use Mr. Wright's architecture, it didn't realize it was to 
benefit from a by-product of his buildings-student enrollment. This has long been a 
major problem with small private colleges such as ours, but the Frank Lloyd Wright 
architecture has made this college known all over America and much of the world. It has 
largely solved our enrollment problems . . . . 

It is also interesting that college presidents from all over the country are coming to the 
campus in increasing numbers to see what the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings do to and for 
education. 

I have seen a new spirit and a new attitude in the student body and the faculty since the 
coming of the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. It took a little time for the buildings to 
make an impact but they finally did, and one on the inside of the college finds a new 
stirring of minds all over the campus. {Extracted from "Florida Southern College 
Revisited for Glimpses of the Administration Group in Wright's Organic Campus," 
Architectural Forum, Vol. XCVII, No. 3, September 1952, p. 125.} 

In 1952 also Mr. Wright made the following remarks to the editors of Architectural Forum 
in regard to his designs for Florida Southern College: 

About fifteen years ago this spring [i.e., 1952], when Dr. Ludd M. Spivey, the presidential 
good-genius of Florida Southern College, flew north to Taliesin, he came with the 
express and avowed purpose of giving the United States at least one example of a college 
wherein modern life was to have the advantages of modern science and art in actual 
building construction. He said he wanted me as much for my philosophy as for my 
architecture. I assured him they were inseparable. 

And ever since, owing to Dr. Spivey's unremitting efforts, this collection of college 
buildings has been in a continuous state of growth. Their outdoor-garden character is 
intended to be an expression of Florida at its floral best. 

Study these buildings from the inside out if you would know something about the kind of 
building we call organic architecture . . . . 

So, as for these buildings in which a true portion of America moves, studies, works and 
has its being, if you would honestly try to understand these Florida Southern College 
buildings and would really know what they are all about (whether you like them or not), 
something important to our country's future as a democratic nation will transpire. Because 
not only do buildings last long but in these buildings here and now you may see something 
of your own tomorrow that is yours today. Yes-and maybe the day after the day after that. 

Because a preceptor in education like Dr. Ludd M. Spivey took thoughtful measure of his 
time and flew to Taliesin, you will see in these buildings now standing at Florida Southern 
College the sentiment of a true educational saga along the cultural lines of an indigenous 
architecture for our own country. {Ibid, p. 120.} 

Mr. Wright designed at least eleven structures for Florida Southern College between 1938 
and 1958. These, of course, did not include the Florida Southern College Development 
Plan of 1938 for an ultimate total of sixteen buildings on campus. Mr. Wright's ten 
constructed designs were the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel (1938), the Carter, 
Wallbridge, Hawkins Seminar Buildings (now one building-1940), the T.R. Roux 
Library (now Buckner Building-1941), the Ordway Industrial Arts Building (1942), the 
Emile E. Watson Administration Building (1945), the covered walkways or esplanades 
that connect many of the college facilities (1946), the Science and CosmographyBuilding 
(Polk Science Building-1953), and the William H. Danforth Chapel (Minor 
Chapel-1954). He also designed a music building, never constructed. In 1939 Mr. Wright 
designed a house for Dr. Spivey for a site at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but it was never 
built. 


This chapter presents the text of Mr. Wright's address at Florida Southern College on 
Friday, March 3, 1950, in connection with the College's "Founders Week." It was a short 
talk, only about fifteen minutes, that covered his philosophy of architecture-organic 
architecture-as-an adventure in the realm of the human spirit, searching for a greater 
harmony, a greater truth in being . . . ." Four months later Mr. Wright was in England for 
the presentation of prizes to the students of architecture at London's Architectural 
Association (see Chapter 19). Chapter 13 contains the text of another speech delivered by 
Mr. Wright at Florida Southern College on October 25, 1951. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here together on this most auspicious 
occasion to do honor to one whom it is a delight to honor, the president of your college-a 
hard worker, and believe me, a wise one in the vineyard of the Lord. 

Incidentally, we are to honor architecture and I think it's time we make some gesture, at 
least, in that direction because we're beginning to learn that the word of God is not 
something in books-we are beginning to learn that the highest and finest kind of morality 
is beauty and that there is no culture for a democracy, no culture for America until it has 
one of its own! 

You can't live your entire life on borrowed ideas, borrowed knowledge, a borrowed culture. 
We must evolve something from within ourselves. And what you see in the good doctor's 
[Dr. Ludd Spivey] effort here, and in the aid that I've given him, is really a sincere effort to 
realize this thing you call "the word of God" from within ourselves-for ourselves-and, of 
course, building is the natural way to do it. 

I don't see how we can consider ourselves as civilized, cultured people if we live ignorant 
of the nature of our environment; if we do not understand what we do to make it. Where 
the buildings that we live in are false, where they do not represent truth and beauty in any 
sense, where they are merely stupid or merely copying something that's not understood. 
Because, believe me, when you understand a thing you will not copy it. A copycat is a 
copycat because he does not understand. Now, understanding is love. If you don't 
understand, you don't love! 

And, out of an understanding of the beauties of nature, using the word Nature with a 
capital "N" in its true sense, not just out-of-doors but the nature of everything-of a 
book, of this hand, of anything at all-nature in that sense studied. And you'll find there 
the greatest and highest form of ethics. Now, of course, ethics, morality perhaps, at the 
present time has very little in common with ethics. Morality is seldom ethical-but beauty 
is ethics-a high and fine kind of ethics and so is good architecture. 

And, that's my message to you here today-that these little buildings on this campus are 
not extraneous to the thought of God, to the thought of good, to this thing you call 
religion. 

We need a new religion in this nation-or, at least, not a new one-we need one, and we're 
going to get it by practicing this thing that we call the love of beauty. Now we don't find 
it-can't find it-outside ourselves. We've got to find it coming out from within ourselves 
to an outside that we've learned to understand as harmonious and true and beautiful, true 
to the nature of materials, true to the methods of our day, true to the life of our time, true 
to the best of our sense of ourselves. 

Now, you know most of us have never even met ourselves. We can meet almost everybody 
else on, perhaps, their own terms or our own terms, but mighty few of us have ever had a 
good look at ourselves. 

Now, the type of architecture that you see standing around you can't mean much to you 
until you've had a good look at yourselves. Until you have tried to find within yourself 
what these buildings quite naturally represent-the laws of harmony, of construction, of 
rhythm, of all that is poetic and true to [the] best in human nature. 

Now, that's the new architecture! That's what we're learning to call organic architecture 
today. And it's quite proper that we should confess to you that the world has seen very little 
of it as yet-even when the time when architecture was greatest and highest and most 
important to human life-very little of it. It's like a little green shoot in a concrete 
pavement trying to take root, trying to be, and depending upon people who are also trying 
to be for its existence. 

I don't believe you can build beautiful buildings, that an edifice can rise, except as it comes 
from within a worthy source and that source is, inevitably, the human soul, the human 
heart. 

In all America today, especially in our educational institutions, you won't find that 
architecture coming from within the soul of man. You won't find an architecture with a 
soul, not one with a heart! In other words, you won't find a genuine expression of that 
thing that we talk about so glibly and think that we love to think that we have-which is 
democracy. 

Democracy needs a new gentleman-a new definition of a "gentleman." It needs a new 
alignment of ethics and it can get it by way of architecture because organic architecture 
has in it the principles; it is the center line of this thing which we would love to feel we 
had, were we a democracy. 

Now, democracy ceases to talk or feel much concerning the life of the common man. As a 
matter of fact, is there a common man? Have you ever met one? And as for a common 
woman? No. There is you-there is me and there's the other fellow, but I believe there is 
no common man, nor do I believe there is what we call a "public" either. 

And, I think we've wasted in all our efforts a great deal on this common man and a great 
deal on what we call the public and we've not been sufficiently meticulous concerning this 
fellow that is ourselves. We haven't been willing to take a good look at ourselves, so how 
can we have an architecture that grows from within the individual for the individual as a 
creative act. 

You see the cosmic ray hasn't yet reached us! The creative ray we don't yet know in our 
country, and until we do get in touch with it, until we do learn to understand its 
significance as we see it around us-by way of nature study, by way of getting inside, first 
ourselves and then what's around us-we aren't going to have a culture, we're not going to 
have an architecture-and without an architecture there is no culture. 

How can you have a culture living in squalid, untrue, blind conditions? You can't. So here, 
on this little campus, your Dr. Spivey has planted a little green shoot in the realm of the 
spirit; something that is true to itself, something that is true to mankind, something that 
insists upon integrity throughout. It's not sufficient that it should stand up. 

Anybody can put two sticks together and make a pile of building material that will stand 
up. But that which will stand there in accord with the nature of the circumstances which 
put it there and with all a grace of rhythm, a truth such as you see in your trees, fruits, and 
flowers-that is organic architecture! 

And that is what this campus is going to proclaim more and more to those who want to 
understand it. I think it will be regarded in years to come as a missionary, as a thought 
along the line of a culture which we narrowly missed. We have missed it to date. It is not 
in our great universities; it is not in our great churches; it is something that was lost long 
ago-at least 500 years ago. And it is now being brought again to the front-for a free 
people and a free nation, and I don't see any smile on your faces when I make those two 
references. Are we a free people? Is this a free country? Can it be said to be so when it 
can't build anything for itself of its own? I don't think so. If we are free and we haven't 
built-well then there's something very serious in the way of an indictment that can be 
brought against us-isn't there? 

Is it, perhaps, that we are all asleep-that we have never waked up to these things that we 
declare and that these things we profess and boast to profess? Have we never really had a 
good look at ourselves as a free people? 

We had a foolish president not so long ago who boasted of the four freedoms. Well, the 
very boast is in itself a confession that we are not free. When you begin to count the 
freedoms on the fingers of your hand-one, two, three, four, you're merely confessing that 
you are not free! And that went around the world and no one challenged it. Well, so it is 
we are not free and we have no free architecture and we have no culture of our own. 

And, you can go into the homes of this land from coast to coast-from border to 
border-and find so little manifestation of the truth of our own being-outside of the 
shops, outside of buying and selling, outside of eating and sleeping-that it's just pitiful. 

Now, look upon these buildings and look upon this little college and look upon the wise 
doctor [Dr. Ludd Spivey] here as engaging in an adventure. The greatest, most important 
of all adventures-an adventure in the realm of the human spirit, searching for a greater 
harmony, a greater truth of being, and with it comes, God knows, a more blessed richer 
life. 

Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

13 Quality and the Vision of the Superior Human Building 

A prophet said: "Where there is no vision the people perish." I say: Where there is no 
vision there are no people. 

{Reprinted with editing from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Quality, Not Quantity, Seen as Big 
Need by Mr. Wright," The Southern (Florida Southern College), Vol. 65, No. 7, November 
23, 1951, p. 2. Reprinted by permission of Florida Southern College.} 

Introduction 

The following short speech was delivered by Frank Lloyd Wright at a service held in the 
Wright-designed Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College at 10 A.M., 
Thursday, October 25, 1951. Three weeks earlier Mr. Wright spoke before the Henry 
George School of Social Science in Chicago on the topic of arts and industry in a 
democratic economy [see Chapter 24]. This speech is short but to the point in that it 
addresses the need for a "spiritual quality" in architecture before true architecture can exist 
and has a religious aura that is manifest in the beautiful chapel in which it was delivered. 
Mr. Wright had always considered himself a deeply religious person, not believing 
necessarily in organized religion, but truly believing in God and God as nature-nature 
was Mr. Wright's church. For this reason and its underlying belief Mr. Wright was able to 
design in a highly spiritual manner for many organized religions, evidenced by his prolific 
religious architecture. Once Mr. Wright commented: "If I belonged to any one church, 
they couldn't ask me to build a church for them. But because my church is elemental, 
fundamental, I can build for anybody a church."{See Patrick J. Meehan (Editor), The 
Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: John Wiley and 
Sons, 1984, pp. 292 and 307.} 

Mr. Wright designed or participated in the design of more than thirty religious-related 
buildings from 1887 to 1959, of which several were constructed after his death. The 
religious projects that were built to his specifications are Unity Chapel (with which he was 
intimately involved as an employee of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, architect), Helena, 
Wisconsin (near Spring Green), 1887, the Abraham Lincoln Center for the Reverend Mr. 
Jenkin Lloyd Jones (Mr. Wright's maternal uncle), Chicago, 1903, Unity Church, Oak 
Park, Illinois, 1905, the W.H. Pettit Mortuary Chapel, Belvedere, Illinois, 1906, the Annie 
Merner Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1938, Kansas City 
Community Christian Church, Kansas City, Missouri, 1940, the Unitarian Church, 
Madison, Wisconsin, 1947, the Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1954, 
the William H. Danforth "Minor" Chapel, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 
1954, the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, 1956, the 
Pilgrim Congregational Church, Redding, California, 1958, and the First Christian 
Church and Bell Tower, Phoenix, Arizona, 1971 and 1978, respectively. 

Mr. Wright's religious designs for buildings that have not been constructed are the 
Unitarian Chapel (also a Silsbee project), Sioux City, lowa, 1887, the All Souls Building 
Project, Chicago, 1897, the Abraham Lincoln Center Project, Chicago, 1901 (this design 
differed from that of the building ultimately constructed), the Christian Catholic Church 
Project, Zion, Illinois, 1911, the Steel Cathedral for William Norman Guthrie Project, New 
York, 1926, the Memorial Chapel Project for an unknown location, 1930, the "Memorial 
to the Soil" Chapel Project for southern Wisconsin, 1937, the Methodist Church Project, 
Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1940, the Southwest Christian Seminary University Project, 
Phoenix, Arizona, 1951 (portions of this project were constructed as the First Christian 
Church, 1971, and Bell Tower, 1978, at Phoenix), the "Rhododendron" Chapel Project for 
Edgar Kaufmann near Bear Run (Connellsville), Pennsylvania, 1953, the Christian 
Science Reading Room Project, Riverside, Illinois, 1954, the Christian Science Church 
Project, Bolinas (Marin County), California, 1955, the First Christian Church Master Plan 
Project, Phoenix, Arizona, 1957, the Wedding Chapel for the Claremont Hotel Project, 
Berkeley, California, 1957, the Trinity Chapel Project for the University of Oklahoma, 
Norman, 1958, the Unity Chapel Project for Taliesin Valley, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 
1958, the Christian Science Church Project, Chicago, 1959, and the Greek Orthodox 
Church Project, San Francisco, 1959. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: I want to congratulate you [Florida Southern College Choir] in the balcony. 
The acoustics are good. As Dr. Spivey [Dr. Ludd M. Spivey, president of Florida Southern 
College] said, the architecture speaks for itself, so I don't see why I should talk. How about 
it? This will be something like painting the lily or gilding the gold. When I stand here in 
my own work, is it necessary for me to say much? 

I suppose you all want to know how to build a building? Want a prescription for a house? 
All for the price of one admission? You seldom get it because it can't be had that way. The 
common things that you pick up in the street are easy to come by. That is why they are 
common. A superior thing is difficult to get. We are finding it in this nation of ours in 
building a superior building. What do you have to have? A superior human being. A 
builder to build. That means difficulty. All kinds of things come along to disappoint you. 
After awhile, though, it will all come out, a thing of beauty. 

This chapel [Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel] now is filled with flowers. Human beings in 
our buildings. It looks like buildings coming out of the people, people coming out of the 
buildings. That's new in the architectural world. For 500 years buildings have tended to 
make people feel inferior. Modify the human being. Buildings not built on the human 
scale. Buildings for human people that give joy to the occupants, simplicity in their own 
right. 

Want me to give you the secret of architecture? Architecture has a language. It can't be put 
into words. People talk more because they found out they could do it more than anything 
else. Now that they found out they could talk they take it out on talking. They talk 
everything to death, talk the arm off of everybody. If I had to translate these buildings into 
talk and persuade you to take them, 
I would have a hard time because other people talk, too. 

All you have to do is have a feeling about something in your mind. You have to learn 
it-it's a matter of the heart-a feeling that comes out as a matter of knowledge-then you 
can do something. When you started, you were mostly accidents. Personality is something 
you inherit, but by working on it and with help from your superiors you will perceive 
something which is you. You will become capable of seeing yourself as others see you. 

I have always thought that going to school meant going to find out about ourselves-a 
technique which would enable that inner being to begin something fine-the architecture 
or spirit-that which we call the soul. That has to take place before you can recognize a 
building when you see it. Shakespeare said: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's 
ear." Architecture is subjective. The known architectural things in the world are subjective 
also. People are rare who can interpret and understand a building. Architecture is a blind 
spot in our nation. You may have a smattering of things but you will be left ignorant about 
architecture. The good doctor [Dr. Ludd M. Spivey] has fixed this for you. At least he has 
placed you in a position so that you can find out about it. 

I would hate to start in now and have to ask you what it means to you. Word has come to 
me that some people have wept in here [the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel]. Is there 
nothing in these buildings which sings to you or makes a note of spiritual quality which 
can't be defined? Something deep inside of you which needs response? That's what we call 
appreciation. If we had appreciation and knew what architecture really means, we would 
have architecture. 

No one can refer to the buildings of colleges today as architecture. They are 
hangovers-no longer indicative of our times. That's why we are high and dry today. We 
must have a good feeling. We will talk of atmosphere. Here at Florida Southern College 
you will be educated in an atmosphere of truth. And if you can only see it, you have a 
better chance of growing into something fine spiritually as you are being educated in an 
atmosphere of truth. And if you can only see it, you have a better chance of growing into 
something fine spiritually as you are being educated in a good atmosphere. 

Some would inquire: What is [this] thing to us? What gives me this feeling? What exactly 
has happened in this field of architecture? 
Appreciation of architecture as such is an awakening. Almost everyone is asleep who 
doesn't have it. Some people never cease talking and come out of these buildings never 
having said anything. Three-fifths of the boys and girls keep on talking and never see 
anything here. It is a difficult thing to see. You look and you get a certain impression but 
you look and don't see. In other words, you lack what is called vision. How to develop 
vision? A prophet said, "Where there is no vision the people perish." I say: Where there is 
no vision there are no people. 

In other words, there is no life, no quality. What we need is quality-quality, not quantity. 
God, we have that running over. Where you can see quality, you can feel education is on 
speaking terms with culture. Students here will go out with a better sense of beauty than 
those at Harvard and Yale and other Gothic-designed colleges but it should be so, by all 
that's holy. The atmosphere in which you live and move and have your being; it should 
make quality. Quality is a matter of culture. Primarily, we start with a good animal, by way 
of environment, the most vital of all means by which we lift this animal to the spiritual. 
That is why I am so anxious to have better buildings built. I would not be a talker. So isn't 
this enough? 


14 Building for the Sick 

What is the nature of the hospital? First of all, it's a human problem. Disease is a human 
misfortune. . . . Out of your sense of humanity . . . as architects should come some great 
human beneficence for the desperate, for the ailing and the sick. . . . A hospital should be a 
blessing where sickness would seldom be seen, a place where you would never feel that a 
curse had descended upon your kind. 

{Text of a talk used by permission of WLOX-AM Radio, Biloxi, Mississippi, from a 
radio broadcast, dated May 20, 1949. The text of this talk was also published as part of the 
Proceedings of the Southern Conference on Hospital Planning, Hotel Buena Vista, Biloxi, 
Mississippi (Montgomery, Alabama: Southern Conference on Hospital Planning, February 
22, 1950, pp. 105-114.).} 


Introduction 

The Southern Conference on Hospital Planning was held in Biloxi, Mississippi, from May 
19 to 21, 1949, under the sponsorship of state chapters of the American Institute of 
Architects (AIA) from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, 
North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The purpose of 
the conference was to bring together architects in the southern states who were concerned 
with hospital design for a discussion of hospital-design fundamentals with certain 
persons in the hospital field. 

Frank Lloyd Wright spoke as guest of honor to more than 300 registrants of the conference 
at the Buena Vista Hotel on Friday evening, May 20. Two months before his speech at this 
conference he addressed the American Institute of Architects in Houston, Texas, as the 
recipient of the AIA Gold Medal for 1948 (see Chapter 16). His talk in Biloxi was 
broadcast over the local radio station of WLOX-AM and published later as part of the 
Proceedings of the Southern Conference on Hospital Planning. Hotel Buena Vista, Biloxi, 
Mississippi (Montgomery, Alabama: Southern Conference on Hospital Planning, February 
22, 1950, pp. 105-114). In addition, recordings of Mr. Wright's talk were made available 
to the general public by the sponsors of the conference. The text of the complete talk is 
contained in this chapter. 

In 1948 Mr. Wright was interviewed by the editors of Modern Hospital for his thoughts on 
hospital design: 

More people die of fright than for any other reason [in hospitals]. . . . Hospital patients 
should never be imbued with the idea that they are sick. . . . Health should be constantly 
before their eyes, and even injected into their dreams. . . The psychology of the sick man 
has not been studied sufficiently by doctors or builders of hospitals. The psyche in which 
he finds himself should be attuned to health. In short, the emphasis in the new hospital 
should be on normality, not on the paraphernalia of abnormality. Death's head shows at 
once in the present hospital; grins there incessantly at any and every unfortunate victim. 
As a result, more people die of the hospital than of the illness they bring to it! Why is a 
hospital not as humane in practical, esthetic effect as it is humane in purpose?{Extracted 
from "Frank Lloyd Wright On Hospital Design: A Modern Hospital Interview With the 
World-Famous Architect," Modern Hospital, Vol. 71, No. 3, September 1948, pp. 
51-54.} 

The interview in this very popular magazine may have led indirectly to his invitation to 
speak in Biloxi in the following year. 

Mr. Wright's speech was followed by an informal question-and-answer session, during 
both of which he not only talked about the architect's responsibility to design for the sick 
but also about the South, democracy, nature, organic architecture, truth, culture, and his 
own "Lieber Meister" Louis H. Sullivan, architect. He was well received by the audience 
and spoke at length throughout the evening. Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright was at his side 
during the speech and question period. 

On Saturday, May 21, 1949, the local Biloxi newspaper, The Daily Herald, reported the 
following: 

Today the conference . . . will conclude with the dedication of a memorial to Louis 
Sullivan, late famed architect and one of the teachers of Frank Lloyd Wright. St. John's 
Church has been chosen as the church building where the memorial tablet to Sullivan will 
be placed. The memorial service and dedication will take place at 3 P.M. Sullivan 
designed St. John's Church which was constructed 68 years ago. Sullivan was one of the 
outstanding architects produced by this country. His theories of design and ornamentations 
which he developed perhaps have influenced more architects than any other person, it was 
pointed out by officials of the planning conference. 

On Monday, May 23, 1949, The Daily Herald added: 

A simple ceremony at nearby Ocean Springs, Saturday afternoon in memory of the late 
Louis Sullivan, Mississippi architect terminated the three days of meetings. Moreland 
Griffith Smith, Architect of Montgomery, general chairman of the conference turned a 
spade of earth on the grounds of the Episcopal Church to mark the spot where a rose 
garden will be planted to the memory of Sullivan. 

The memorial plaque was reportedly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Mr. Wright spoke again on building for the sick at Salt Lake City on Monday, April 27, 
1953, before 1000 to 1500 members of the twenty-third annual convention of the 
Association of Western Hospitals. He again declared: 

We need a hospital with an atmosphere that is benign, one where a man couldn't believe 
himself sick, one where he is not forever seeing crowds of sick people.{"Hospitals Taken 
to Task-Frank Lloyd Wright Declares Most Are Monstrosities," The New York Times, 
April 28, 1953, p. 30.} 

He reportedly added that "he hoped to find a hospital of the kind he advocated before he 
himself needed bedding down."{"Wright is Right," Newsweek, Vol. XLI, May 11, 1953, 
pp. 97-98.} This attention brought Mr. Wright seven medically related projects between 
1954 and 1958{Before this national attention was received, Mr. Wright had designed only 
one medical building-the Rockefeller Foundation Chinese Hospital Project of 1915 
(unbuilt-location unknown to the editor).: the Dr. Alfons Tipshus Clinic Project, 
Stockton, California (unbuilt-1954), the Karl Kundert Medical Clinic, San Luis Obispo, 
California (constructed-1955), the "Neuroseum" Hospital and Clinic for the Wisconsin 
Neurological Society, Madison (unbuilt-1955), the Kenneth L. Meyers Medical Clinic, 
Dayton, Ohio (constructed-1956), the Herman T. Fasbender Medical Clinic, Hastings, 
Minnesota (constructed-1957), the Lockridge Medical Clinic, Whitefish, Montana 
(constructed-1958), and the Dr. Jarvis Leuchaner Clinic Project, Fresno, California 
(unbuilt-1958). 

The Speech 

MORELAND GRIFFITH SMITH: We are now gathered together in the Buena Vista 
Hotel, Biloxi, Mississippi, to hear Frank Lloyd Wright and to share his message with 
others over Radio Station WLOX. We have conducted a student competition among 
students of the southern schools of architecture and you have seen the results of this in the 
lobby. Through this medium we brought the best thinking of our youth to bear on this most 
interesting and vital problem. It is, therefore, fitting that we now turn to the experienced, 
and there is no one we could more fittingly turn to than Frank Lloyd Wright. I believe this 
because the most permanent things we have in this material world are [the] ideas which 
we bequeath to those who follow, and certainly Mr. Wright exemplifies the most masterful 
architectural ideas of our time. For a long time I was of the opinion that one's name was 
the most important thing to guard and, second, to strive to gain prestige, and I have 
worked toward that goal. Today I am satisfied that the promulgation of ideals is more 
important. 

It is proper and fitting when we are looking for [a] functional solution of hospitals that we 
look to the master architect of today for [the] establishment of ideas toward which we can 
work. Master of all architects in America-Frank Lloyd Wright. 

WRIGHT: Gentlemen and your ladies, I've just received a wifely admonition: "Don't pick 
on the audience!" and I might have said: "I'm afraid that the audience will be picking on 
me before I finish" because I've always had the dubious pleasure of making a minority 
report. I'm not quite so clearly a minority now and I'm a little uneasy concerning the whole 
thing. I don't know what's going to happen. But forgetting all that, here we are in the 
warm-hearted South. The warm-hearted, tragic South. I never come South that my 
conscience-as a man of the North-doesn't trouble me. I'm never quite clear as to the 
justice of the victory of the North over the South unless, perhaps, the victory of the South 
over the North might have been even more tragic. Napoleon, the greatest of all advocates 
of force, spent the last weeks of his life walking the floor trying to understand why force 
never could organize anything, had never organized anything, concluding that force never 
would organize anything. Every time I come South the South to me seems, oh, so tragic 
that I am unhappy and hope to some day see it again justify its existence by a superior 
culture. I think, so far as our architecture is concerned-and it is basic-that the South will 
have less trouble, as my friend here to the left has just remarked, coming to a new 
philosophy because it hasn't had either the means or the time to fuss with the in-between. 
The South will come directly from the old to the new and so, I hope, therefore will be 
saved a great deal of fustian plus bad imitation and bad politics. I hope it will come 
directly into this new thought, this new basis of democratic life, which the philosophy of 
an organic architecture will make clearer to us all as time goes on. 

We have just heard Louis Sullivan's name mentioned by our chairman. He was our great 
native genius. Primarily it was due to his thought that we are now on the track of a new 
life in architecture and a life to go with it which could be genuinely called democratic. I 
was reading the paper today, coming here on the train, to learn that our masterminds 
assembled in the East, upon being asked to define democracy, turned in eighty-five 
different answers, none of which agreed. So that is where we are in our international 
thinking on that subject. I don't believe the feeling-I think we only have the feeling for 
something that might be democracy-has ever come clear in our own thinking and 
certainly not in our recent politics or economies. So it would seem strange were we to turn 
to architecture to establish a center line for the democratic policies and thinking of our 
nation. But architecture could do just that for us because this search for the nature of 
things which it is, really and truly, is finding new form-although the form is so very old 
that it is now new-of, shall we say, nature worship. Nature study in that sense means that 
we are not going to be the gross materialistic nation we are now. It means that our 
architecture is not going to be the materialism it is now. 

It means, for instance, that doctors are not going to regard their patients as merchandise 
and standardize that merchandise in the type of hospital that we have pretty much built all 
over the country today, buildings and more like the office building, becoming less and less 
humane-less and less considerate of those qualities that really make us what we ought to 
be if we are ever to be a democracy. 

Now a democracy must live on genius. Democracy is the apotheosis of the individual as 
such; necessarily not mere personality, but the apotheosis of a gospel of individuality that 
means individual courage. That means no man [is] a coward. No moral cowardice can ever 
find, protect, or defend a democracy. It cannot disregard genius. I've always felt that 
Communism, Socialism, almost all the-isms and the-ites and all that went with them 
were cowardly, were the faith for cowards, while democracy was a challenge to the 
manhood of our race-the integrity of the world. I am now quite sure that if we should 
pursue that faith in mankind-if we have that faith in ourselves as individuals-we would 
have that faith in ourselves as a nation and I believe we would have no enemies. We would 
no more be scared by our politicians and huddle like a lot of sheep while they got from us 
anything they wanted to get. If we were properly agrarian according to the nature of our 
situation and opportunity instead of trying to give an imitation of a manufacturing island 
like England, for instance. If we would make the most of our agricultural opportunities in 
a great cultured agronomy, yes we would have no enemies. To keep going our present 
ideal of an industrial plutocracy we must continue to have war. We have to keep scaring 
the sheep. A politician today is that man among men who can scare them the worst and 
huddle them the fastest and the most, managing that way to get almost anything out of 
them. Now I don't know why it is so easy to stampede the American people. I don't 
understand just why it is so easy to scare us. What are we afraid of? Russia? I think that 
fear is utter nonsense. It is an affair of our own bad conscience, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, 
I am afraid fear of Russia is due to our own bad conscience. By now I think we have done 
nearly everything the forefathers we've lost sight of wished that we might never do, so I 
think we are in a position today where we could be justly blamed for going back upon the 
principles and the ideals which we originally held up to the world as democratic; we have 
sold them all down the river. 

What we should call organic architecture is an attempt, a sincere attempt, to get them back 
again. To get ourselves back to the ground, to get us back to the source of inspiration by 
what is really our new reality and what has been called, and what we-in architecture-are 
calling today the new "romance." Romance today is really the center line of a search for 
reality. The search for reality is now romance and the search for reality means the 
age-old search for truth. Unfortunately, today, the search for truth is dangerous. Genius 
today in our nation is much in the same position as criminality. A criminal gets the same 
consideration, is treated with the same care, and gets about the same break that a genius 
would get. Now, why? Louis Sullivan, himself, died penniless, alone, neglected by his 
profession, an outcast from a society, virtually, without a penny to his name, and that will 
pretty much be the fate of genius from now on unless something wakes up in the hearts of 
the American people to place appreciation where it belongs, to realize that no life can 
come to a people by way of democratic ideology without genius. 

We are mostly here to consider the modern hospital, a typical example of, so it seems to 
me, the whole tendency of our national materialism. God knows we are the most 
materialistic of all modern civilizations on earth today. We are looking too much down 
along our own noses and so we don't see very far into the future. But we've soon got to 
realize that this materialism we're championing, living upon, and calling success is not 
bona fide. It can't last and won't result in the happiness or growth of the soul of the human 
being. It's temporal beyond all words, menial in culture beyond anything the world has yet 
seen. Unless something happens to allow that to develop in us which I believe is there, I 
have faith in, and I know it's in these youngsters sitting here in front of me now, we shall 
be the shortest lived civilizationin all history. Young America may have it, but the 
present-day adult America-well, what has happened to it? I don't know. Something has 
gone wrong. It couldn't have been Franklin D. Roosevelt? No. It couldn't have been the 
leadership of any one man. I think it was chiefly the consequence of a false success ideal 
which the American people came to hold and it is that which has resulted in this terrific 
mercantile materialism, gross beyond anything Rome ever knew; more depraved, more 
selfish, more inconsequential where the soul of human life is concerned than any 
civilization that has ever happened. Haven't we made of all these so-called modern 
advantages a mere exploit-and so, a mockery? What have we today in all these great 
inventions from, well, we'll say, the internal combustion engine to the atom bomb, which 
is any guarantee at all of human usefulness and happiness, any guarantee of a great future 
for us as a united, happy people? Nothing! Speed is the new veracity, though the 
automobile is still a horse and buggy. The atom bomb is still in uniform. We haven't much 
to show for culture if we are serious and sincere with ourselves. If we do face ourselves, we 
haven't much of the spirit to travel into the problematical future. No, not much. And I 
think these hospitals of our nation, as well as most of the other buildings that we build are 
a confession of our tendency to regard everything in life as merchandise. 

With us, everything is merchandise. I have been planning a mortuary, of all things, and 
listened to the promulgator of the enterprise referring to the corpse as the "merchandise." 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, you laugh, but tell me, where in all this nation is anything going 
on-going anywhere-that doesn't regard its subject matter as "the merchandise"? Not the 
hospital industry. No. Not the professional doctors, a few of them individually-yes, 
certainly. But always in between only is there this glimmer and the gleam that holds hope 
for a more humane future. 

If you will look, by and large, at the present-day practice of any profession you will see a 
sordid picture. Absolutely a sordid picture. To stand up against any professionalism of this 
sort is the duty, the privilege, and the job of American youth because materiality is of the 
old-it is aged. When you once get its punctilio into your veins and therefore into your 
system you're old, you are aged. Yes, your life is done and you are finished. You may cling 
to your profits, you may even be, and probably will be, a great success, your name 
blazoned in lights or in the headlines in the daily newspapers. You may have all that they 
call success today and be really dead from the neck up! The best thing our harmful old 
Nicholas Murray Butler ever said-he was responsible for more ruination of men than he 
was for building men up: "Dead at thirty, buried at sixty." Do you remember that? Well, 
there is a lot of it in hospitals now by way of what we call "success." Now, in this idea of a 
hospital realm here tonight a new success ideal is absolutely necessary! In the building of 
our homes a new success ideal is necessary; in anything we do now, from now on. The 
architects know now we've got something we didn't have in our world before-we have a 
concrete, rational ideal. A new integrity has come into sight by way of the meeting of the 
philosophy of the Orient and of the West. It was Kipling who said: "these twain shall 
never meet," if you remember. But they have met in these new, old ideals of an organic 
architecture. They do meet. 

At Taliesin we have Turks, we have Hindus, Japanese, we have Chinese, we have 
Egyptians, we have Irishmen and Frenchmen. We have an international accord there-a 
coming together of minds upon an ideal which seems to be becoming common to the 
whole world. Yes-we've got that accord. It's ours, it came from us, back again to us. It 
began with Louis Sullivan and is actually our own-something that the world could well 
expect of a democracy. Something due from us to the modern world. We have it in this 
ideal of an organic architecture. 

Now, how much of organic architecture has ever appeared in our hospitals? How much has 
appeared in your houses, in your lives, or even in your own consciousness? Not much, but 
perhaps enough. A little is always eventually enough, but today I can see it extending all 
over this planet; around the coastlines of the whole world. These things we call organic 
buildings, here and there, and dotting the land more and more frequently everywhere you 
go, always with the countenance of a new existence for the individual as such. But it can 
go wrong. It's so easy for it to go wrong. It's so easy that I'm afraid it will always go wrong 
if you can't learn to differentiate between the individual and the mere person; between 
personality and individuality. These two terms are mixed in almost everything and anyone 
you meet or anything you can read. As a matter of fact, to get to the essential I-the 
individual-you must correlate three, five, or seven different people. All these in your own 
selves, yourselves becoming more and more mechanized-living a life as mechanized as a 
garage-especially in a hospital! All these people you are meeting, you don't know each 
other. But until they become one you are no individual. You're the usual number of 
personalities without unity. You're one thing in the morning, you're the next thing in the 
afternoon, and in the evening another person, and all of them, being expedient, can be 
bought. Until you have become, out of conflicting personalities, one unified individual, you 
are no democratic citizen. But when you are that thing, when you have honestly gone to 
work upon you, yourself, and by way of suffering and sacrifice have cultivated your 
individual "I," then willy-nilly you have it. 

Without that unity, [which] we should call individuality, you can't be trusted. You are 
really nobody. You don't deserve a good house; you can't deserve any position in authority; 
you won't deserve to be trusted because you can't be yourself. If a man can't be himself, 
who should trust him? Should anybody trust him? I say no! Until all of him comes together 
and becomes this individual "I" which is the unit in a democracy to build and build 
for-until he can trust himself and respect himself as himself, why should anyone trust 
him? You can't make the architect of a good hospital out of him. An architect is the 
pattern giver basic to any true civilization. It's true such as he [is]-that we must look for 
the civilization we haven't got yet because he's not been on the job! No, he, as all 
individuals, has not been on the job! He's gone to universities for an education where this 
doesn't exist. He can't get one out of books. We've all got to get it out of our own selves by 
way of our own honest experience with life itself. We have to face ourselves for it and no 
matter how it hurts us dig it out. 

Sounds like mere language, does it? All right, I know that architecture in that sense is a 
gray-headed profession. It's something we boys begin, enter into; if we have the basic 
ideas, we grow. Each one will get his own technique in time only as he digs it out for 
himself. The technique that matters can't be given to you. The techniques of another man 
will never serve you more than possibly as an entry into something of your own. It'll never 
make you great or enable you to do great work. Every man for himself. You've got to find 
your own technique, but you've got to get the proper direction first. First of all the meaning 
of the thing. 

What is the meaning of this thing we call the hospital? What is the nature of the hospital? 
First of all, it's a human problem. Disease is a human misfortune, isn't it? Out of your 
sense of humanity, then, out of your feeling for humanity and by way of your mastery of 
form and of ways and means as architects should come some great human beneficence for 
the desperate, for the ailing, and the sick. A hospital shouldn't be like an office building 
built downtown. A hospital should be a blessing where sickness would seldom be seen, a 
place where you would never feel that a curse had descended upon your kind. A hospital 
should be a comforting, joy-giving place. Yes-a happy place that you'd love to be in if 
you were well and not one to which you had been condemned because you were 
unfortunate. To me the spiritual side of this thing you call a hospital is the great and 
important side to build for, but it's lost sight of in anything I've yet seen built. We have one 
in our town of Madison [Wisconsin]; they're going to build another one in Madison 
probably even worse than the one they've got. Why? Just because that phase of a great, 
unsolved problem has not been touched upon by the creative artist and because they have 
instead consulted "experts." 

Now, an "expert" is a man who has stopped thinking. He has had to stop thinking or he 
would be no expert. You can't call a man an "authority" who is growing and so changing 
his mind about things, can you? No, the expert has got to know or profess he knows. He's 
got to stand there knowledgeable! Well, too bad, because there is no such human except he 
be somewhat a phoney. Inasmuch as nearly everything in our civilization is more or less 
phoney for profit, the hospital is probably phoney and for profit, too. So I don't trust one 
much. When building the Imperial Hotel, it was my happy fortune or misfortune to fire 
seven experts. During my brief experience of building 549 buildings in fifty-six years of 
practice I have had the dubious joy of firing hundreds of experts. Most of them were code 
makers, too. Well, they say confession is good for the soul. 

Now, as to Mrs. Wright's admonition: "Don't pick on the audience," I'm going to let this 
audience pick on me here, tonight. The best times in England, where we were lecturing 
not so long ago [see Chapter 19], came after the so-called lecture-the heckling period. 
The English love to heckle; they'll even get to heckling each other in heckling time before 
the evening is over. Often they forget all about the speaker and light into each other. Now, 
I like that. We don't often do it over here. It's awfully hard to get anything out of an 
audience in that way. Even some of those boys in Pittsburgh recently who wrote back to 
me-I did pick on the audience there, 
and that is why my wife is a little bit shy tonight about my picking on you-wrote back 
that they liked the amateur better than they did the professional. You may see that taking a 
gold medal from my profession [see Chapter 16] is going to have a bad effect. 

Now, speaking of hospitals, the South is sick-my heart is with the sick South, although I 
was taught in my youth that it was a disgrace to be sick. I was so taught coming from a 
family of iconoclasts. Unitarians they all were in a day when the Unitarian was the devil's 
own because he dared believe in the unity of all things, including himself, just as we now 
are coming to believe in the unity that is the individual as such; learning to regard him as 
the only basis for life or for a building or a cure for a disease. That basis is where we've got 
to begin here in the South. 

The South must change over from the old, dead, meaningless heresies now. You know, 
gentlemen, and your ladies, that when our discipline is too long continued, discipline that 
has outgrown its usefulness and significance, it becomes a heresy and impedes blossoming 
time which is not yet and may not be for many years. To avoid that heresy is the true 
course for you now to pursue. We can't expect the gallant old gentlemen and their fine old 
ladies to throw aside everything that they once fought for and have held dear. We'll have to 
treat them and their belongings with patience and with consideration. We'll have to treat 
them all the more gently and I think the best way to do that is to let their old heresies die 
on the vine. Like Napoleon, I don't think you can destroy error by force. I don't think you 
should try. Let's admit that was a great mistake the North made regarding the South. They 
tried to destroy something by force that they might better have let die on the vine. Now, 
I'm sure that modern architecture is in the position right now where it can afford to let 
whatever opposition it has die on the vine. 

We needn't fight much more. The fight, practically, is won. Nothing can now stop the 
feeling for this new thought in this new way of building, this new approach to any 
problem. Yes-either for a physician, an architect, or for anybody in the private ways of 
private life. It's the only ideal that has life in it now and thereafter, the only one that is of 
any consequence to the future. It's set against materialism; it's all for the spirit because it's 
all for that thing which really gives meaning and quality to a man as a man. 


SMITH: Mr. Wright, we thank you for bringing us this message. To all of us comes the 
opportunity of being in tune with the Master Spirit to some degree, lesser or greater, but 
very seldom in any generation do we have the opportunity of personally hearing a man 
who is in tune so completely with the Master Spirit as the one we have heard this evening. 
I believe that concludes the time on the air and I will mention here, because I think it is 
appropriate, we have made arrangements for the recording of this talk by Mr. Wright 
because we felt that we would have something that would not be possible for all of us to 
absorb at the time that we received it. We have made two recordings and the Executive 
Committee will decide which recording is the best and will make available reproductions 
of that recording to those who desire them. The price of reproduction will be announced 
later, and your orders can be given at your our discretion. 

We have had a very gracious offer by Mr. Wright for an opportunity to have a little 
heckling, and we hope that you will respond to that opportunity. I would like to say, 
though, before we start, Mrs. Wright, I hope you won't hold him back too much. That's 
what we've got him here for. We believe here that, although we move slowly and 
sometimes talk indistinctly, we need a little jog every once in a while to get along, and we 
want you not to hold him back too much. 
WRIGHT: Asking for punishment? 

SMITH: Mr. Wright, would you like to get started now or should we have a rest before we 
ask you some questions? 

WRIGHT: I feel very kindly toward this audience, so let's start. [pause] I don't want to be a 
hindrance to anybody. When an old veteran comes in from the field, you know, it's a pity 
to let him get away without heckling him a little, isn't it? 

SMITH: Have we any heckles ready? 

WRIGHT: I seem to have oppressed my audience tonight. 

SMITH: They do seem to be a wee bit embarrassed. Any questions? How about the 
students-after all, they always ask questions. Well, if the students won't start, let us start 
with Mr. E. Todd Wheeler from Chicago. 

E. TODD WHEELER: I want to know why Mr. Wright is wasting his time designing a 
mortuary? 

WRIGHT: Wheeler, I'm not wasting my time designing a mortuary because I have 
discovered that the proprietor of the merchandise wanted a grave digger, not an architect. 
And, I might add, that probably were somebody to ask me to design a hospital I should be 
careful to find out what the man really wanted. Or the committee. It's always the 
committee with a hospital, I believe. What the committee would probably desire would be 
one of these cellular office-building structures in which you could cram as much 
merchandise as possible and have it as convenient for the doctor as possible and to hell 
with the merchandise. 

SMITH: We are just warming up here now. How about some more questions? 

EARL L. MATHES [Fevrot & Reid, Architects]: Mr. Wright, I would like to ask you a 
question and I would like your candid opinion. Do you believe that modern architecture 
will come back to a time where we will have ornamentation? Not that we don't ornament 
the buildings now with steel, windows, or other various materials, but will we ever come 
back to a time when we will put on some ornamentation that is not needed structurally? 

WRIGHT: My dear boy, you must have been a victim of what is called, for the lack of a 
better term-and a phoney term it is-the "International Style." Isn't that it? 

MATHES: Do you think we will ever come back to it? 

WRIGHT: To ornament? I think that we have never left it. I am sure that integral 
ornament is as essential an expression of the human 
soul as music and I think that our buildings will never be lacking in that element once we 
better understand its nature. But we did have to pass through a period of negation because 
the whole thing became meaningless because it was overdone so badly. Ornament had lost 
all significance. So, we had to deny ourselves ornament for a time until we could get the 
meaning of it back again, until we could use it, intelligently and with feeling. Whenever 
you feel that way about ornament in designing your buildings you use it. It is coming alive 
again. No, [it] never was dead. I have written a little book coming out on the eighth of 
June [1949], so the publisher says, on the work-life of myself and [that of] Louis Sullivan 
called The Pencil In His Hand [Editor's Note: The book was actually published under the 
title of The Genius and the Mobocracy, New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1949] and it's 
illustrated by the master's own drawings, none of mine-they aren't necessary. That will be 
an answer to your question, I'm sure, and, the answer to many another one who may feel 
that modern architecture has gone away from what is justly called ornament. It's only gone 
away from frippery. It's only gone away from lace curtains, looped as these usually are, 
and all that sort of flubdubbery [sic]. You see, architecture has-for a time-only gone 
away from the artificial, meaningless, exaggeration of something that was not really 
understood. When you get an understanding of ornament as such, you will use it with 
understanding, and discretion, as you would music. Yes-boy, use it! Everybody loves 
good ornament because it's a language of the soul, like the language of sound. When true 
ornament speaks, it's the music of the soul. No-we're not going to let it go. Never! 

STUDENT QUESTIONER: In the beginning of the program you made some comments on 
competitions. Well, we've had some pretty stiff competition all the way through school and 
I would like to hear more about that idea. 

WRIGHT: Well, my boy, all competitions are likely to be vicious in their results. If you 
can point to one single consequence of a competition that is admirable, I'll abdicate. 
Competitions have never yet given the world anything worth having. Let's point to the 
Lincoln Memorial. Let's point to that public comfort station to the honor of Thomas 
Jefferson. Well, what have you? 

Point to anything down the line and see if you've got anything out of it. No! Now, the 
reason is this-one reason, this isn't the only reason, in every competition that goes 
through, the committee is first of all an average. The people or interests choose for 
committeemen those on whom the average can average. So your committee is an average 
to start with-excuse me, Ed [sic]. Then, the committee goes through the exhibit, picks out 
the best designs and the worst ones, and throws them out. Why? Because they can't get 
together on the best one. That one is always a minority report. You see? The best ones 
have to go. The worst ones have to go. Then there is the average. The average now 
proceeds to average upon the average, you see-and judges for what, for the average. So 
you have an averaging of averages for the average. 

STUDENT QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, how can the architect design for the client when 
the client does not know what is best for himself? 

WRIGHT: If the client doesn't know that his own architect is the best thing for him, he's 
hopeless. Don't try! A client who doesn't trust his architect and hasn't selected him for his 
qualities because of his belief in him has no right to an architect. Let him take what 
happens to him. It won't be a good architect. 

ARCH WINTER [Mobile, Alabama]: Mr. Wright spoke of the meeting of the two 
principal philosophies, Eastern and Western, and of the unity in architecture which might 
come out of that meeting. I would like to ask him to enlarge a little bit on that. Tell us 
what it might mean in the development of our form here in this country we would like to 
make democratic. 

WRIGHT: That's a large order, sir, for one evening. I've devoted a lifetime trying to 
answer that question to my own satisfaction. It is a very pertinent one and one that 
requires and deserves some attention. This idea of how the meeting of the East and the 
West is going to affect the lives and the architecture of the buildings that we build. For 
instance, space as the essential nature of the building-not the walls, not the roof seen as 
the reality of building-this is Oriental. That was the contribution of Laotse, you call him 
Lao-Tse, I believe, the greatest of Chinese philosophers. That sense of space as the reality 
of the building was in my mind when I built Unity Temple in Oak Park [Illinois]. 

To realize the big rooms within as the reality of the building is what I was trying to do. I 
felt that the room was the great essence of the whole thing and didn't want the walls to 
conceal that fact. There was a great room there within which was merely defined by the 
features I arranged about it and put the ceiling on it so that when you were within there 
seemed to be no limitation to the spaces of the room itself. Well, now here was the West 
building something in a way that the East had uttered the philosophy of, oh, say 500 years 
before Jesus. That's what I mean by the philosophy of organic architecture. I don't mean a 
modern architecture; the term has become so confused, let's drop it. Let's say organic 
architecture. Well, there is the heart and soul of organic architecture. Now it is very 
simple. The whole sense of reality has shifted. It so used to be that when you'd ask 
someone what the reality of this drinking glass was they would say-they would look at 
the glass itself, wouldn't they? They would say that this thing the glass man did was 
reality. But not so now. We know that the idea of the thing is the great thing about it: that 
this space within, into which you put something, is the reality of this glass-all the life it 
has. You see, that's the change. In that is where the East and the West now come together 
in this ideal of an organic architecture because that is what organic architecture is trying to 
do. It's the idea of the thing that is the soul of the thing and therefore counts and 
constitutes its reality. You see! Reality no longer consists in the materiality of the thing. 
The reality of the thing is the idea of that thing. As our good chairman [Moreland Griffith 
Smith] said a little while ago, that he believed in the idea and it was the idea that was 
consequential and important and nothing else beside mattered so much. That's what has 
happened. That's where now we stand together-East and West-in this new idea of what 
constitute a good building, a good life, a good man. Does this mean anything to you? 

WINTER: Yes, I think so, Mr. Wright. 

QUESTIONER: I would like to ask Mr. Wright what does he anticipate will be the end 
result of modular coordination? 

WRIGHT: Modular coordination, or coagulation if you like, is the material aspect of a 
great idea, and if the great idea is not clear, coordination will not take place. You cannot 
put technique before idea. There is the trouble with all our educational processes today. 
Boys go to get technique for something they don't understand. If they go and get the idea 
of the thing first by nature study and build themselves up in the idea by experience, they 
will find their own technique and we'll have an architecture. Until they do get modular 
coordination that way, we won't have one. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, one of the things we're not taught in school relates to our 
dealings with our clients. The few that I have had seem to want to know how much a 
building is going to cost. It is one of the things I had admired most about the way you have 
handled your work and I have wondered how you always got around the cost. 
WRIGHT: Or, how the cost got around me, you mean? 

QUESTIONER: No, I mean how you got around the client. 

WRIGHT: We had a little dinner club in Chicago when I was a young fellow like you and 
they used to heckle me and want to know what I did to my clients-how I ever "sold" 
them, as they said, those crazy ideas. I told them that I didn't try to sell them anything at 
all. I never could sell anything. I think, if I wanted to, but there is something about the 
truth that's hypnotic. If you know and if you feel that thing to be right, you become master 
of that thing and you can present it in a masterful fashion. Your client will be your client, 
you'll not be just his architect. You'll convince him by virtue of your own conviction. 
That's the only way you have any right to a client. No man should ever work for a client 
who doesn't have faith in him, one who doesn't believe that he is the man of all men to do 
his building for him, and if there ever appears any question put on your hat and walk out 
of the office. Leave him sitting there. 

QUESTIONER: Before I say this, I'd like to beg Mr. Wright's pardon, but ever since 
reading this book I have wanted to hear Mr. Wright on the subject of that great piece of 
American literature that Miss Ayn Rand wrote, The Fountainhead. 

WRIGHT: Well, that's very simple and as easily disposed of. I'm sure of this, because I 
haven't seen this movie which is forthcoming. Miss Ayn Rand has apparently played house 
with the idea which I have just expressed to you here tonight, of the individual, per se, as 
such. She has absolutely mistaken and abused the privilege which she took to herself and 
is going to get people very badly mixed up if they are already in the gutter. But I don't 
think it is going to hurt anybody who isn't in the gutter already. So I don't think you or I 
need worry much about it. I suspect it's a hideous deformation from any standpoint of a 
great philosophy. 

GEORGE J. WALLACE[Alabama Polytechnic Institute]: Mr. Wright, I would appreciate 
[it] if you would help me with my understanding of one term you use in most of your 
writings. You mentioned it here tonight but it is still floating around. It's your 
interpretation of organic. Is it structural growth or is it structure which makes the 
environment grow, or what is its true meaning? What inference do you put to it? 

WRIGHT: That's a good question. The man wants to know the true significance of my own 
use of the word organic. Well now, it might be used in a biological sense and you'd miss it. 
We use the word in a spiritual sense. We take the word from the realm of the body to the 
realm of the soul. That thing is organic which has entity, in which the part is to the whole 
as the whole is to the part, which is the condition of life in anything, even physically. 
Spiritually, it is the same. Only as the thing is complete as a whole and has the unity of 
part to whole, as whole is to part, have you got organic entity. That's the way the word 
organic is used by me in connection with architecture. Does that make it clear? If it 
doesn't, then ask me again because it's important that you get that straight. Organic 
architecture is a thing of the spirit and so it is a matter of the soul. Not necessarily 
although inevitable, I presume; also in the body it would be so and in the flesh [it] would 
also be organic. But that would be subordinate to the initial and a greater sense of the word 
organic that would get into the nature of the thing as a whole. You see as organic trees, 
flowers, and plants as growth from the soil, don't you? Well, they are organic but are so in 
a lower sense. Now, we want buildings as organic and as true to the spirit of man as those 
things are to the ground, you see? And have that same harmony, that same truth of 
spiritual being that you can easily see manifest in the physical world. So the word organic 
can't fail you if you use it in that sense of nature. Anyhow, it's a good thing to tie to. If you 
can't get into the spirit of it, why stick to its physiological sense and let's see what you do 
with it that way. 

DR. D. V. GALLOWAY [Jackson, Mississippi]: Mr. Wright, I would like for you to 
comment, if you please, sir, gently if you can, upon what you think may be the effect of 
government on the design of hospitals designed under the direction of one of these 
government agencies. One of these hospitals might be mine, and I'm afraid government 
might have some influence on it and I've been thinking that most of us have been hoping it 
would be good if you can comment on the influence of government on hospital design. 

WRIGHT: I can't be very gentle with that question! Because it's perfectly manifest, judging 
from performance, that government is unfit to handle anything in the realm of the soul, 
and a great building, any great enterprise in building, is nothing for government. 
Government is always ten years ago when it comes to anything in the performance we call 
building. Government is anterior to the next election. Government will never be just and 
has no true perception. Government, if it is good government, is executive. So, where are 
the ideas to be executed to come from? We've got into the habit of expecting ideas from an 
executive. How ridiculous! That's one of the abuses of democracy that's occurred and one 
of the bad things that's happened to us. Government executives have no business with 
ideas. They execute them but where do the ideas come from? Well, they have never come 
from organized government. What's more, here's a prophesy: they will never come from 
government because it is not in the nature of that animal. 

DR. JUAN A. PONS [San Juan, Puerto Rico]: Because of that answer and the statement 
that was made, I would like to ask Mr. Wright what suggestions would he offer to take the 
place of the function of government as we understand it today in the development of an 
appropriate place for human suffering? 

WRIGHT: I didn't quite understand. 

PONS: I was wondering if Mr. Wright has any suggestion to make as to what might take 
the place of the function of government in building as we have it today? 

WRIGHT: Bureaucracy cannot substitute for genius! When you build a hospital, you 
require genius. It must be so. If we are going to build hospitals in and for a democracy we 
cannot build dead or perfunctory buildings. We must build buildings that live for human 
life and that are the proper record of a civilization that is a great civilization. Government 
can't do that. It never has done it. It's a question for the democratic citizenry to nominate 
their builders and to do their own buildings and not expect or allow the government to do 
it for them the bureaucratic way. It's an individual matter-the affair of a good building, I 
mean. 

QUESTIONER: I'd like to ask Mr. Wright how he keeps himself abreast of new materials, 
the inventions, and ideas that are created and built by other men in other fields and how he 
relates those to his architecture? 

WRIGHT: Rather hind end to, son. Ought you not [to] put the other end around? [sic] 

QUESTIONER: I would like to have Mr. Wright talk a little more about his relation 
between the organic or the spiritual in architecture and the material and how it works. 

WRIGHT: Well, that's the heart of this whole matter of an organic architecture-hospitals 
for the unfortunate or dwellings for the fortunate. This young man wants me to go a little 
further into the relationship between spirit and matter. Matter meaning the materials with 
which you work and spirit meaning the way in which you work with them. You see! Does 
that answer you? It should, because that's the process. Now, when in the right spirit you 
work with the right materials in the right way, the result will be organic. When you are the 
master of the materials with which you work and that means you know their nature; when 
you thus know their honor, we say, 
and when your honor and the honor of the materials are one honor, you will have an 
organic result. Now, what is the honor of a brick? Hmm-what could be the honor of a 
brick? Being a good brick, wouldn't it? The brickness [sic] of the brick would be the honor 
of the brick, yes? Same with a board, wouldn't it? Same with anything-steel, glass, wood. 
How about a man? It would be his quality as an individual, wouldn't it? Well, now add that 
all up together and what have you got? What have you got when you add that all up? 

SMITH: Now, Mr. Wright, we do not want to impose on your good nature; you've had a 
long trip down here to be with us. 

WRIGHT: I am enjoying myself-just warming up. Go ahead, boys! 

WHEELER: This time I wish to ask Mr. Wright a serious question on education. I'd like to 
hear him say that the technique is to follow the idea. How does he suggest that we give our 
thousands of architectural students the idea so we may encourage them to learn the 
technique? 

WRIGHT: The answer ought to be very useful, very useful, indeed! Mr. Wheeler wants me 
to tell him how to found a university and that's all very simple. I tried to found one my 
way. I founded it on the farm, founded it on building buildings, founded it on really 
knowing what a design means because when you sit down at the drawing board and make 
it you get up and go out and execute it. That's what I think the university should be like. I 
believe you cannot grasp the idea without knowing the nature of the thing, and I don't 
believe you can know the nature of anything without getting into action with it. I don't 
think you can sit around on your fannies and study it much or get much of it from books. I 
think you've got to get in contact with it, get into it, and by way of such immediate 
experience comes some knowledge of the nature of the thing you want to do. There's no 
way to learn about building except by building. There's no way to learn about life except by 
living. There's no way to learn manhood except by being one. Experience is the only road. 
So, were I to found a university, I would close those that are now operating for at least ten 
years and I would have every student go back home and go to work trying to make his own 
neighborhood beautiful-more beautiful even-according to his way of thinking. 
I would have him pitch in and really build it up and he would build himself up thereby. It's 
a very distressing answer but I can't help it. My little wife hints that this is more than 
enough. She knows. 

SMITH: Mr. Wright, we want to thank you for your graciousness. 

WRIGHT: Oh, I have had a lot of fun, and please don't thank me. Good night to you all. 

SMITH: We've had a great deal more and we appreciate it. 

15 Architecture of the Dead for the Living 

I think these places we call cemeteries should be more pleasurable to the living as 
habitation for the dead-less dead to the living. 


{Text of a speech reprinted in its entirety from Frank Lloyd Wright's "At Taliesin," The 
Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 39, No. 70, February 26, 1937, p. 9, by 
permission of The Capital Times.} 


Introduction 

This chapter presents Frank Lloyd Wright's speech to the Chicago convention of the 
Memorial Craftsmen Union of America which he delivered in late 1936 or early 1937. 
During his talk he discussed the design of cemeteries and memorials to the dead. This 
speech appeared in published form for the first time in Frank Lloyd Wright's "At Taliesin" 
column, written for The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin (Vol. 39, No. 70, February 
26, 1937, p. 9.). A short excerpt appeared later in Frederick Gutheim (Editor), Frank 
Lloyd Wright On Architecture: Selected Writings, 1894-1940 (New York: Duell, Sloan, 
and Pearce, 1941, pp. 209--210). An original draft is housed in the Frank Lloyd Wright 
Papers Speech and Article File-1936 in the Manuscript Division of the Library of 
Congress, Washington, D.C. 

Throughout his career Mr. Wright designed only four projects related to the architecture of 
the dead: the W.H. Pettit Mortuary Chapel, Belvedere, Illinois (constructed-1906), the 
Darwin D. Martin Blue Sky Mausoleum Project, Buffalo, New York (unbuilt-1928), the 
Memorial Chapel Project (unbuilt-1930; location not known to the editor), and the 
Nicholas P. Daphne Funeral Chapels Project (unbuilt-1948), San Francisco. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: Concerning this business of dying and having to have "one of those things." I 
am glad you sent for an architect. You, Memorial Craftsmen of America, are chiefly 
occupied in distinguishing, or making distinguished, the houses of the dead, whereas the 
architect is busy-if he is busy at all-making the houses of the quick distinguished; some 
not so quick nor so distinguished; some "dead at thirty, awaiting burial at sixty." 

I think these places we call cemeteries should be more pleasurable to the living as 
habitation for the dead-less dead to the living. 

How to make them less dead? 

Let's talk it over. 

First, the first general curse on habitation for the living is placed there by the Realtor. It is 
the lot, the interminable row of lots, whereas an acre of ground to every house is [the] only 
sensible minimum now if it never was before. The Realtor comes first to the cemetery 
too-he seems to get everywhere first. The citizen alive gets a lot two by twice in some 
long row and dead he gets another-as long as he is tall and as wide as he is long-when 
he moves down and out or is moved out and down. 

There is no sense in this Realtor's curse in either case, and I believe if the resting places of 
the quick and dead are ever to be made more beautiful-ground, and plenty of it, must be 
more sensibly and generously used for that purpose. The matter of improvement begins 
right there and there is nothing much to do until the Realtors are rounded up and most of 
them taken out to be shot at sunrise. 

Now, we have several accepted ways of caring for our dead and there is much to be said for 
all three of them. The first and simplest of all is the grave in native ground, made as 
attractive and beautiful as possible. The second and most pretentious is the mausoleum, 
wherein the body reposes in [a] marble casket, enshrined in [a] fine building. The third 
and most scientific disposition of the whole matter is cremation-burning the flesh, 
grinding the bones to dust, and committing the dust to memorial urns, storing them in 
some grandiloquent columnarium [sic]. You memorial craftsmen are concerned with all 
three ways, according to the temperament of the deceased or the families. One of these 
ways is usually selected. 

Concerning the first and simplest-the grave-we have more than plenty of ground and 
more of it ought to be freely used for the living and also for the dead. This would enable us 
to use the horizontal headstone and the extended pavement of stone slabs inscribed or 
tableted [sic] with bronze and surrounded with appropriate gardening, appropriate flowers, 
trees, and shrubs. Make the city of the dead a proper memorial for the living. But where 
crowding has already taken place, I call to mind a design I made for the Martin family of 
Buffalo. I called it the Blue Sky Mausoleum because the sloping lot became a terraced 
series of marble sarcophagi, making a white marbled terraced pavement for the entire lot. 
And the pavement rose on either side of a central marble aisle to an exhedra [sic] or 
marble seat a half-hexagon in shape, in the center of which stood the family monument, 
suitably inscribed. The cover slabs of the concrete receptacles for the caskets, which made 
the terraced paving of the entire lot, were also inscribed, to be read from the central aisle. 
The whole structure thus rising in gentle elevations on the hill slope. Lead and sulfur 
made the joints waterproof. A small, tall group of conifers stood behind the exhedra to 
give relief and contrast to the white marble pavement of aisles; each slab was seven by 
three feet. 

I mention this merely as a possible use of ground in already overcrowded cemeteries; a 
dignified way of making the accursed small lot more endurable. And, if monuments must 
be, why not now extend the monument horizontally, keeping it broad and low instead of 
pushing it upward to make the usual inane forest of stone posts? Modern architecture 
declares this horizontal extension to be a better lead. 

I believe the monument should give away now to the memorial. There is an essential 
difference where the living are concerned, and inasmuch as tombstones are really for the 
living instead of for the dead I believe the monuments should give way to a sensible 
memorial. Monuments are merely a form of grandomania and grandomania has gone so 
far with us now that we really should take steps to see that it is discouraged. Provincial 
vainglory and selfish pride should have small place in the hamlets, villages, and cities of 
the dead but I know of no place in our civilized arrangements where we show all these to 
such bad advantage in respect to these qualities as in these poetry-crushing cemeteries of 
ours. The same thing is going on there between the Smiths, Joneses, and Robinsons that 
goes on in the towns. These burial places show how little real feeling or creative 
imagination the living have to make these abodes at all fit for the living or, for that matter, 
for the dead either. 

I can imagine the ideal burying ground chosen for its natural beauty; that beauty 
heightened by parklike spacing of broad and quiet memory stones or tablets of bronze or 
both together; mausoleums like the Getty Tomb at Graceland or the Ryerson Tomb there, 
or the beautiful Wainwright Tomb in St. Louis; beautiful appropriate edifices designed by 
my beloved master Louis Sullivan. These places we call burying grounds should be places 
to which we might look with no repulsion or dread, a blessing, too, instead of a curse on 
life. 
And, believe me, this is all a matter of design; appropriate spaciousness in the first place; 
an intelligent use of materials in the second place. A fine sense of the whole, dominant. If 
we are to be regimented in rows fifty feet o.c. [on center] while we are alive, for God's sake 
give us enough room to lie in, gracefully, separate, and beautifully informal when we are 
dead. This in order to have little freedom to look forward to and a better sentiment toward 
death than we now seem to have; not that this would do us any good after we are dead but 
because it would do us all good while we are alive to see our loved ones better treated at 
last. Finally, shouldn't every one of us be allowed a last line? The last line would shed 
much light upon the living, be a certain come-back from the dead. I have in mind 
Dorothy Parker's epitaph-she designed it for herself: 

"Excuse my dust." 

Everyone has a last line in him or her and the headstone or the pavement or the marker is 
a good place for it. Humanize the cemeteries, you memorializers [sic]! Humanize the 
burial places of your kind! They are now so much more dead than the dead can ever be 
dead! 


PART FIVE 

Honors, Awards, and Medals 

16 The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects  
I've heard myself referred to as a "great architect." I've heard myself referred to as the 
"greatest living architect." I've heard myself referred to as "the greatest architect who ever 
lived." Now, wouldn't you think that ought to move you? Well, it doesn't! Because in the 
first place they don't know! . . . What's the honor of a man? To be a true individual, to live 
up to his ideal of individuality rather than his sense of personality. 

{Reprinted with editor-transcribed corrections from a surviving audio recording of the 
event from "Citation with the Gold Medal to Frank Lloyd Wright," AIA Journal, Vol. XI, 
April 1949, p. 163, and "Acceptance Speech of Frank Lloyd Wright Upon Receiving the 
Gold Medal for 1948," AIA Journal, Vol. XI, May 1949, pp. 199-207. Reproduced by 
permission of the AIA Journal. Copyright The American Institute of Architects.} 
Introduction 

In his architectural career of more than seventy years, Frank Lloyd Wright was the 
recipient of at least thirty-one prestigious honorary degrees, honorary memberships, 
awards, and medals: 

1919 Kenchiko Ho (citation). Royal Household, Japan. Conferred by the Imperial 
Household, represented by Baron Okura. 

1927 Honorary Member. Academie Royale des Beaux Arts, Belgium. Conferred by the 
State. 

1929 Extraordinary Honorary Member. The Akademie der Kunst (Royal Academy), 
Berlin. Conferred by the Reich. 

1932 Honorary Member. National Academy of Brazil. 

1937 Honored Guest of the Soviet Union to attend the World Conference of Architects. 

1939 Honorary Degree. Master of Arts, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. 

1940 Honorary Member. American Institute of Decorators. 

1941 Honorary Member. Royal Institute of British Architects. Conferred by King George 
VI. 

1941 Sir John Watson Chair, The Royal Institute of British Architects. An academic honor 
by the Sulgrave Manor Board. 

1941 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). 
Conferred by King George VI. 

1942 Honorary Member. National Academy of Architects, Uruguay. 

1943 Honorary Member. National Academy of Architects, Mexico. Conferred by the State. 

1946 Honorary Member. The National Academy of Finland. Conferred by the State. 

1947 Honorary Degree. Doctor of Fine Arts, Princeton University. 

1948 Honorary Member. National Institute of Arts and Letters, United States of America. 
1949 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). 

1949 Gold Medal of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. 

1949 Peter Cooper Award for the Advancement of Art. The Cooper Union, United States 
of America. 

1950 Centennial Award. Popular Mechanics. 

1950 Honorary Degree. Doctor of Laws, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida. 

1951 de Medici Medal. City of Florence, Italy. 

1951 Star of Solidarity. City of Venice, Italy (one of Europe's most coveted awards given 
only once in one hundred years). 

1953 Honorary Member. Akademie Royale des Beaux Arts, Stockholm, Sweden. 
Conferred by the State. 

1953 Gold Medal for Architecture of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, United 
States of America. 

1953 Frank P. Brown Medal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia (awarded in 1953 
and presented in 1954). 

1954 Honorary Degree. Doctor of Fine Arts, Yale University. 

1955 Honorary Degree. The Technishe Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany. Conferred by 
the nation. 

1955 Honorary Degree. The Technische Hochschule of Zurich, Switzerland. Conferred by 
the nation. 

1956 Honorary Degree. Doctor of Fine Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

1956 Frank Lloyd Wright Day in Chicago, Illinois. Proclaimed by the City of Chicago for 
October 17,  1956. 

1956 Honorary Degree. Doctor of Philosophy, University of Wales. 

The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, however, was the most elusive 
award of all those bestowed on him in his lifetime and was, indeed, as Mr. Wright said "a 
long time coming from home." In 1949 he had already been the recipient of at least fifteen 
honors throughout the world for his architectural achievements and was approaching his 
eightieth birthday. Finally, on December 6, 1948, he received a letter from Douglas 
William Orr, then president of the AIA in which he was asked to accept the Gold Medal 
"in recognition of most distinguished service to the profession of architecture."{See Bruce 
Brooks Pfeiffer (Editor), Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Architects, Fresno: The Press at 
California State University-Fresno, 1984, p. 211.} 

Later, several regional and local chapters of the Institute voiced opposition to the 
Institute's selection by stating that "the qualification [sic] of Mr. Wright have been and 
still are subject to serious question." In the face of these protests Mr. Wright replied that 
"when a professional society dignifies itself by awarding the highest honor within its gift, 
regardless of affiliation, bias or rebellion, it shames non cooperation. My hat is off to the 
AIA."{See Sterling Sorensen's "Receipt of Architects' Award Is Highlight in Wright's 
Stormy Career," The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 63, No. 81, March 10, 
1949, p. 5.} 

Finally, on Thursday evening March 17, 1949, the award was made at the Rice Hotel in 
Houston, Texas, at the Institute's annual convention dinner. This chapter presents the 
complete text of introductory remarks by the president of the Institute, the presentation to 
Mr. Wright, the official citation of the medal, Mr. Wright's acceptance speech, and 
audience responses to his remarks.{Mr. Wright's acceptance speech for the AIA Gold 
Medal appeared in print on three previous occasions known to the editor (none of which 
presents the entire award event). These are "Acceptance Speech of Frank Lloyd Wright 
Upon Receiving the Gold Medal for 1948," AIA Journal, Vol. XI, May 1949, pp. 
199-207, "The Speech of Acceptance," A Taliesin Square-Paper: A Nonpolitical Voice 
from Our Democratic Minority, No. 13, 1949(?), pp. 2-7, and, more recently, in Bruce 
Brooks Pfeiffer (Editor), Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Architects, Fresno: The Press at 
California State University, Fresno, 1984, pp. 217-223.} 

Even after Mr. Wright's death in 1959 he continued to be honored. His posthumous honors 
include the following: 

1966 Frank Lloyd Wright two-cent ($0.02) United States postage stamp. 

1982 Architecture USA postage stamp series. A twenty-cent ($0.20) United States 
postage stamp that features Mr. Wright's famous Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. "Fallingwater" 
residence (1935), Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania. 

1983 American Arts Medallion (one-half ounce of gold). 

Introductory Remarks, The American Institute of Architects Citation, and the Acceptance 
Speech for the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects 

DOUGLAS WILLIAM ORR (President of the American Institute of Architects): It 
becomes my high privilege of my office tonight to introduce one who needs no 
introduction. Among the moving forces of the cosmos is mankind's urge to function as an 
individual; his yearning for freedom of mind and spirit-a constant quest for opportunity 
to advance a cause. These always have been attributes of man and without them he would 
have little. It is unwise to hamper or to destroy that individual initiative; to restrict 
individual freedom; to abolish opportunity for advancement. Perhaps there is no area in 
life's effort to which these truths are more germane than to architecture. Reliance on the 
security of forms of [the] past is just as deadening to progress as deadly as reliance on 
security-the ultimate goal of so many today. Through architecture, [it] has always been 
the expression of the social, economic, political, or religious idea of the time. For many 
years Frank Lloyd Wright has borne that urge to create; to find and follow truth; to carry 
forward alone the light struck by that brilliant group of Chicago architects of the last 
century. I present the citation for the award to Mr. Wright: 

Prometheus brought fire from Olympus and endured the wrath of Zeus for his daring; but 
his torch lit other fires and men lived more fully by their warmth. 

To see the beacon fires he has kindled is the greatest reward for one who has stolen fire 
from the gods. 

Frank Lloyd Wright has moved men's minds. 

People all over the world believe in the inherent beauty of architecture which grows from 
the need, from the soil, from the nature of materials. He was and is a titanic force in 
making them so believe. 

Frank Lloyd Wright has built buildings. 

Structure, in his hands, has thrown off stylistic fetters and taken its proper place as the 
dominant guiding force in the solution of man's creative physical problems. 

Frank Lloyd Wright has kindled men's hearts. 

An eager generation of architects stands today as his living monument. By precept and 
example he has imparted to them the courage to live an architectural ideal. They are 
reaching leadership in our profession, themselves dedicated to creating order and beauty, 
not as imitators, but as servants of the truth. 

It is for that courage, that flame, that high-hearted hope, that contribution to the 
advancement of architectural thought that this Gold Medal, the highest award of The 
American Institute of Architects, is presented to Frank Lloyd Wright. 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

WRIGHT: [A] Very fine citation! Ladies and gentlemen, no man climbs so high or sinks 
so low that he isn't eager to receive the good will and admiration of his fellowman. He may 
be reprehensible in many ways; he may seem to care nothing about it; he may hitch his 
wagon to his star and, however he may be circumstanced or whatever his ideals or his 
actions, he never loses the desire for the approbation of his kind. 

So I feel humble and grateful. I don't think humility is [a] very becoming state for me . . . 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: . . . but I really feel by this token of esteem from the home boys. 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 

WRIGHT: It has reached me from almost every great nation in the world. It's been a long 
time coming from home! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and loud applause) 

WRIGHT: But here it is at last, and very handsome indeed. And I am extremely grateful. 

I don't know what change it's going to effect upon my course in the future. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: It's bound to have an effect! I am not going to be the same man when I walk out 
of here that I was when I came in. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Because, by this little token in my pocket, it seems to me that a battle has been 
won. I felt that way . . . 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

WRIGHT: . . . [when] I was sitting in my little home in Arizona in '41 and the news came 
over the wire that the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects had fallen to 
a lad out there in the Middle West, in the tall grass. Well, I felt then that the youngsters 
who have held, we'll say, with me, who have worked with me, who have believed and 
made sacrifices and taken the gaff with me had won a worldwide fight. But it hadn't been 
won at home. The Cape Cod Colonial-by the way, have any of you observed what we 
fellows have done to the Colonial? Have you seen it come down, and its front open to the 
weather, and the wings extend and have it become more and more reconciled to the 
ground? It has; you notice it. 

Well, anyway, it is very unbecoming on an occasion like this to boast. But I do want to say 
something that may account in a measure for the fact that I have not been a member of 
your professional body, that I have consistently maintained an amateur status. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and slight applause) 

WRIGHT: Long ago, way back in the days of Oak Park, I set up a standard of payment for 
my services of ten percent. I have consistently maintained it. I have always felt a 
competition for the services of an architect, who to me is a great creative artist, was a 
sacrilege, a shame, and pointed to history that proved nothing good ever came of it. And I 
think nothing good ever will come of it! 

Also, I think that to make sketches for anybody for nothing, to tender your services, to 
hawk yourself on the curb-in any circumstances-is reprehensible. 

Now, I know the ideals of this Institute very well. I took them to heart years ago, and 
believe me, with this Medal in my pocket, I can assert truthfully that never have I 
sacrificed one iota of those ideals in any connection whatsoever! 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: The man does not live who can say that I sought his work. And I remember in 
the very early days, when the children were running around the streets without proper 
shoes, and Mr. Moore, across the way, wanted to build a house, a fine house; a fine man; a 
great opportunity for a youngster like me. Well, I had these ideals at heart even then, and I 
never went to see Mr. Moore and I never asked anybody to say a word for me because who 
was there who could say an honest one? They didn't know anything about me. 

AUDIENCE: (slight applause) 

WRIGHT: So I glanced up one day through the plate-glass door-and, by the way, I 
started the plate-glass door! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: . . . there was Mr. and Mrs. Moore. Well, you can imagine how that heart of 
mine went pitty-pat. [They] came in and sat down opposite me. 

"Now, Mr. Wright," he said, "I want to know why every architect I ever heard of, and a 
great many I never heard of, have come to ask me for the job of building my house?" 

"Well," I said, "I can't answer that question, but I'm curious to know did Mr. Patton 
come?" Mr. Patton was the President of the Institute-that is, of The AIA at that time. 

"Why," he said, "he was the first man to come!" 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: "Well now," Mr. Moore said, "why haven't you come to ask me to build my 
house? You live right across the road." 

"Well," I said, "you are a lawyer, aren't you, Mr. Moore? You're a professional man. If you 
heard that somebody was in trouble, would you go to him and offer him your services?" 

"Ah!" he said, "I thought that was it! You are going to build our house." 

Well it began that way, and it began to get noised about. The next man was Mr. Baldwin, 
who was also a lawyer, and wanted to build a house. Mr. Baldwin appeared several months 
afterward and laid a check on the table. It wasn't a big check. It was $350, but it would be 
$3500 now. 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 
WRIGHT: And you can imagine what that did to me and he said: "Here's your retainer, 
Mr. Wright!" 

Well, now, that's how it began, and it's been that way ever since, and I've never in my life 
asked a man to say a good word for me to another man who was going to build. Well, now, 
as a consequence, I've been sitting around-waiting. 

AUDIENCE: (mild uproar) 

WRIGHT: I've spent a good many years of my life hoping somebody would come and give 
me something to do. And every job I ever had hit me out of the blue on the back of the 
head. Now, that's true. So, this Gold Medal-let's forget all about design; let's forget all 
about contributions to construction and all the rest of it-I feel I can stick it in my pocket 
and walk away with it just because I sat there waiting for a job. 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

WRIGHT: Now, of course, architecture is in the gutter. 

AUDIENCE: (mild uproar) 

WRIGHT: It is. I've heard myself referred to as a "great architect." I've heard myself 
referred to as the "greatest living architect." I've heard myself referred to as the "greatest 
architect who ever lived." Now, wouldn't you think that ought to move you? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, it doesn't! Because in the first place they don't know! In the next place, 
no architect-in the sense that a man has now to be an architect-ever lived, and that's 
what these boys out in front of me here don't seem to know. 

Architects as they existed in the ancient times were in possession of a state of society, as 
an instrument to build with. The guilds were well organized. The predetermined styles 
were all well established, especially in the Gothic period. An architect in those days was 
pretty well furnished forth with everything he needed to work with. He didn't have to be a 
creator. He had to be a sentient artist, with a fine perception, let's say, and some 
knowledge of building, especially if he was going to be . . . especially if he was going to 
engage in some monumental enterprise. But he didn't have to create as he does now. 

Now we have an entirely different condition. We live by the machine. Most of us aren't 
much higher in our consciousness and mentality than the man in the garage, anyhow. We 
do live by the machine. We do have the great products of sciences as our toolbox, and as a 
matter of fact science has ruined us as it has ruined religion, as it has made a monkey of 
philosophy, as it has practically destroyed us and sent us into perpetual war. 

Now, that isn't our fault, but where, I ask you, were these new forms of building to come 
from that could make full use of these advantages that have proved to us so 
disadvantageous? Who is going to conceive these new buildings? Where from? How come? 

Now, it's a great pity that the Greeks didn't have glass. A great pity that they didn't have 
steel-the spider spinning-because if they had, we wouldn't have to do any thinking, even 
now. We would copy them with gratitude. No, not with gratitude. We wouldn't even know 
we were copying them! We would take it all for granted. We wouldn't have the least 
gratitude. 

But now what must an architect be if he really is going to be one worthwhile, if he's really 
going to be true to his profession? He must be a creator. He must perceive beyond the 
present. He must see pretty far ahead. Well, let's not say that, because we can all do that, 
but he must see into the life of things if he is going to build anything worth building in this 
day and generation. 

And, do you know, we ought to be the greatest builders the world has ever seen? We have 
the riches, we have the materials, we have the greatest release ever found by man in steel 
and in glass. We have everything, but. We have a freedom that never existed before. We 
profess democracy out of a mobocracy [sic] that is shocking, astounding, and arresting. 
But we have built nothing for democracy. We have built nothing in the spirit of the 
freedom that has been ours. No. Look at Washington. Look anywhere. You can even go 
out and see the Shamrock [Hotel]. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: And, by the way, I want it recorded right here and now that building is built in 
what is called the International Modern Style. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: Let's give the devil his due! Let's put it where it belongs. And, anyhow, while 
we are speaking of that exploit, why? It ought to be written in front of it, in great tall 
letters, in electric lights-W-H-Y-Why? 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

WRIGHT: Well, Houston has it! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: And Houston is a good example of the capitalistic city, the pattern of the 
capitalistic city-great one single great broad pavement, skyscrapers erected at one end 
and, way out in the country at the other end-skyscrapers! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: In between, out on the prairie and in the mud-the people! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: Well, now, we are prosecuting a cold war with people who declare with a 
fanatic faith that is pitiful in the have-nots. We declare a faith in the haves, when we act. 
We declare a faith in the union of something beneficial to both the haves and the 
have-nots when we talk. Now, when are we going to practice what we preach? When are 
we going to build for democracy? When are we going to understand the significance of the 
thing ourselves and live up to it? When are we going to be willing to sit and wait for 
success? When are we going to be willing to take the great will and the great desire for the 
deed? 

Now, we can do it. We have got enough "on the ball," as the slang phrase is, to go on with 
in that direction if we will. But to me the most serious lack, the thing we haven't got-and 
if you look over the political scene, of course, it's obscene-of all this thing we are talking 
about. Honor? Nowhere. Now, what is the sense of honor? What would it be in 
architecture? What would it be in the building of buildings? What would it be in the living 
of a life in a democracy under freedom? Not mistaking freedom [for] license for freedom, 
not mistaking individuality for personality, which is our great error and which 
characterizes us as a mobocracy instead of a true democracy. Now, what would a sense of 
honor be, that sense of honor that could save us now? As science has mowed us down and 
we are lying ready to be raked over the brink, what could save us but a sense of honor? 
And what would that sense of honor be? Well, what is the honor of a brick? What would 
be an honor of a brick? A brick, wouldn't it? A good brick. What would be the honor of a 
board? It would be a good board, wouldn't it? What's the honor of a man? To be a true 
individual, to live up to his ideal of individuality rather than his sense of personality. Now, 
if we get that distinction straight in our minds, we'll be able to go on. We will last some 
time. If we don't get it, we might as well prepare for the brink we're going over. 

Now, I've been right about a good many things-that's the basis of a good deal of my 
arrogance. And it has a basis, that's one thing I can say for my arrogance. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: We can save ourselves. We're smart. We have ratlike perspicacity. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: But we have the same courage and that's what's the matter. I don't know of any 
more cowardly-well, I'm getting too deep in here and I cannot swear. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Not tonight! But we are certainly a great brand of cowards in America. We've 
got all our great opportunities to live a spiritual life, with great interior strength and 
nobility of purpose, and minds go by the board. Why? I have asked myself all these 
years-why? You've all seen it. I am not telling you anything new. 
Churches-religion-what has it become? Philosophy-what is it? Education? 
What have you? Cowardice. What are the universities today? Overflowing with hungry 
minds and students. And yet, as I stand here now, I am perfectly willing to admit and to 
confess that it's not the fault of the universities. It's not the fault of education. None of this 
is the fault of the systems that exist among us. They are our own fault! We make these 
things what they are. We allow them to be as they are. We've got the kind of buildings we 
deserve. We've got the kind of cities that are becoming to us. This capitalist city, for 
instance, of which Houston is an example-we did it! It came to us because we are what 
we are and don't forget it. If we are ever going to get anything better, if we are going to 
come by a more honorable expression of a civilization such as the world is entitled to from 
us-we put ourselves on the hill here, in a highlight, we talk about the highest standard of 
living the world has ever seen, we profess all these things, and we don't deliver! 

Now, why we don't isn't the fault of any institutions. It isn't the fault of any class. It isn't 
the fault of the big boys that make the money and make the blunders and shove us over the 
brink, like this out here that we spoke of a minute ago. No. How would they learn better? 
How is a man like Mr. McCarthy [Senator Joseph McCarthy] going to know any better? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: How is the architect who built the building going to know any better? How are 
they going to find out? They can only find out by your disapproval. They can only find out 
by your telling the truth, first to yourselves and then out loud, wherever you can get a 
chance to tell it. Now, we have got to find honor! 

AUDIENCE: (loud applause) 

WRIGHT: You know the old sayings-we dislike them now because they are a reproach. 
We don't honor the people, really, the men who came over here with an ideal in their 
hearts and founded this basis, as they thought, for freedom. They couldn't foresee but by 
the way of sudden riches and these new scientific powers put into our hands that we would 
be so soon degenerate! No. 

Well now, I think if we were to wake up and take a good look at ourselves as ourselves, 
without trying to pass the buck, without trying to blame other people for what really is our 
own shortcoming and our own lack of character, we would be an example to the world that 
the world needs now. We wouldn't be pursuing a cold war. We would be pursuing a great 
endeavor to plant, rear, and nurture a civilization, and we would have a culture that would 
convince the whole world. We'd have all the Russians in here on us, working for us, with 
us, not afraid that we were going to destroy them or destroy anybody else. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: It's because of cowardice and political chicanery, because of the degradation to 
which we have fallen as men-well, a crack comes to mind, but I'll refrain. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: My wife knows what it is. I am not going to say it. 

Well, now, that's serious enough, and that is all that I think I ought to say. 

Now, I want to call your attention to one thing. I have built it. I have built it! Therein lies 
the source of my arrogance. Why I can stand here tonight, look you in the face and insult 
you-because, well, I don't think many of you realize what it is that has happened or is 
happening in the world that is now coming toward us. A little place where we live, with 
sixty youngsters-we turned away 400 in the past two years-and they come from 
twenty-six different nations. They all come as volunteers because this thought that we 
call organic architecture has gone abroad. It has won abroad-under different names. A 
singular thing. We will never take an original thought or an idea until we have diluted it, 
until we have passed it around and given it a good many names. After that takes place, 
then we can go, and we do go. Well, that has happened. This thing has been named 
different names all over the world. It's come back home and I use the word-I say come 
back home advisedly-because here is where it was born. Here it was born in this 
cradle-as we are fond of calling it-of liberty which has degenerated into license. Now, 
what are we going to do with it? Are we going to let it become a commonplace and shove 
it into the gutter or are we really going to look up to it, use it, honor it? And, believe me, if 
we do, we have found the centerline of a democracy. Because the principles of an organic 
architecture, once you comprehend them, naturally grow and expand into this great 
freedom that we hoped for when we founded this nation and that we call democracy. 

Well, it's enough, isn't it? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and loud applause) 


17 The Gold Medal for Architecture of the National Institute of Arts and Letters 

Now, the philosophy of democracy is a search for truth and . . . this thing that we call 
architecture, the true basis of culture. 

{Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 
National Institute of Arts and Letters, second series, number 4, New York, 1954, by 
permission of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.} 


The Questions and Answers 

QUESTIONER: Have you ever designed any low-cost houses, Mr. Wright? 

WRIGHT: I never designed anything else! 

QUESTIONER: Let me restate the question then: Have you ever designed any homes that 
would be available, say, to quite a few people, say, within the $10,000 to $15,000 bracket? 

WRIGHT: Yes, plenty of them. 

QUESTIONER: You have designed plenty of them? 

WRIGHT But not lately. 

QUESTIONER: That is very fine, sir, and I know you did. I have seen pictures of the 
homes you designed quite a few years ago in the $10,000 to $15,000 bracket, which I 
imagine now would cost $30,000 to $40,000, but I don't know. 

WRIGHT: $30,000 to $35,000. 

QUESTIONER: Unfortunately, there aren't too many people in this country who can afford 
homes like that. 

WRIGHT: They should wait. I don't think they should expend themselves in unbecoming 
ways just because they haven't got the money. 

QUESTIONER: That is very fine, but a lot of people would like to have them while they 
are still living! 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: I don't see why they should have them while they are still living if they don't 
deserve them. That is what is the matter with architecture now, largely. People want 
something they can't afford, they get it, it is unsightly, they live in it, and they are 
degraded by it. 

QUESTIONER: For a man who doesn't seem, to my mind, to think very much of 
businessmen you seem to think that the only man who deserves that type of home is the 
successful businessman or the one who has made enough money so he can afford the right 
type of home. 

WRIGHT: On the contrary, sir, such people don't come to me. I don't see the successful 
people. I am for the upper middle third of American life. I wouldn't build for the rich and I 
don't build for the very poor. 

QUESTIONER: I understand that, sir, but it seems to me that you are talking about 
success right now in a certain term which I don't feel that you agree with. 

WRIGHT: I don't agree with your disagreement with me. 

QUESTIONER: I didn't think you did, sir, to tell you the truth. 

WRIGHT: I think that what you are driving at is all right. I believe we should have ways 
and means by which young people can get together and get married, whether they deserve 
to be or not or whether they have got the wherewithal or not, just because they want to be. 
But is that a good enough reason? 

QUESTIONER: To get married? Well, can I ask you a question? 

WRIGHT: Yes. 

QUESTIONER: Why did you become an architect? And, if I may, I'd like to answer the 
question at the same time. I believe you became an architect because you wanted to become 
an architect. 

WRIGHT: On the contrary, I had no choice whatsoever. 

QUESTIONER: That is the same reason a few of us feel that we get married-because we 
had no choice whatsoever! 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: That isn't why you get married. You just get married because you want to be 
married, that is all. 

I became an architect because my mother was a teacher and she wanted an architect for a 
son. Tell me, why? I don't know. She felt that she was going to have a son, and so in the 
room where I was born, around the walls, were nine wood engravings by Timothy Cole of 
the cathedrals of England. She sent me down to the kindergarten table when I was six, she 
saw it at the centennial-it came over here from Germany [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright is 
speaking of the Froebel kindergarten toys]-and I am one of the white heads, perhaps the 
only one, that you know that had kindergarten training. My mother wanted an architect for 
a son, and my goodness, I never had a thought that I would be anything else. 

QUESTIONER: It happens that I read your [An] Autobiography and I found it very 
interesting. 

WRIGHT: I am glad to hear you say so. 

QUESTIONER: But, sincerely, getting away from the point . . . 

WRIGHT: What point? 

QUESTIONER: It may be a dull point, but it is a point, nevertheless. It is the very fact 
that, after all, you are just telling me and telling the rest of the audience that we are a 
by-product of our environment. I believe that is what you are telling us. 

WRIGHT: No. 

QUESTIONER: I thought that you said that you became an architect . . . 

WRIGHT: Our environment is a dreadful by-product of ourselves. We got just exactly 
what we earned and what we deserved. 

QUESTIONER: I happen to like it, as far as that is concerned. 

WRIGHT: You are welcome. 

QUESTIONER: But I would also like to live in one of your homes. 

WRIGHT: You are not entitled to it, I'm afraid, if you like what you are in now. 

QUESTIONER: I'm in life right now and I happen to like it. I would like one of your 
homes; I would appreciate it very much. However, 
if I can't have it at the present time, I am not going to drop dead over it. 

WRIGHT: I don't think you need to. I think you have a makeshift, poor fellow. I'd like to 
help you but I can't. 

QUESTIONER: Well, I didn't ask you this question because I wanted you to feel sorry for 
me, Mr. Wright, because I don't feel sorry for myself. The only thing I wanted to state is 
that I think everything you say is absolutely wonderful. 

WRIGHT: I don't think it is, but still . . . 

QUESTIONER: That is a difference of opinion. I happen to think it is. 

WRIGHT: Good. 

QUESTIONER: And I'd like to see everybody-not who deserves it but everybody who 
feels for it-to be able to take advantage of it. 

WRIGHT: I wouldn't. 

QUESTIONER: That is another difference of opinion. 

WRIGHT: I think you have to earn these things. I don't think you are entitled to a thing 
just because you want it. I don't think I was entitled to fame as an architect just because I 
want it-I had to earn it, and I think we have to earn everything in this life that is worth 
having. I think that the people today, young people, get too much for nothing. They expect 
too much. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: How many boys come and want me to take them in and educate them as 
architects, and have a wife and babies, and I have to take the whole damn family in order 
to get them? They want to be married. Now, how many people that you know want to have 
their apple and need to eat it, too? Do you know anybody such? 

QUESTIONER: I know quite a few. 

WRIGHT: Maybe you are one of them! 

QUESTIONER: Maybe I am. 

WRIGHT: Anyway, that is a great failing. It has put us where we are. We are all reaching 
way ahead of what we are entitled to. Most of us are living way beyond our means. I don't 
mean in just dollars and cents. We are living way beyond our means spiritually. We don't 
pay our way as we go. We don't want to put that wherewithal on the dotted line because it 
costs more than any money can pay for. 
It costs something here [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright points to his heart]. 

QUESTIONER: Was Mr. Kaufmann, in Philadelphia, more worthy of the house you built 
for him than your mother? 

WRIGHT: I don't see the connection. This man wants to know if Mr. Kaufmann was more 
worthy of his house than my mother? 

QUESTIONER: That is what I am asking. Was it because he had the money to buy it? 

WRIGHT: Mr. Kaufmann's having the money to buy the house was a fortunate incident to 
both him and me. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, may I ask a question? Can you hear me? 

WRIGHT: Isn't this a vast place? 

QUESTIONER: I have the feeling, as you talk, that you were talking to the average man 
and woman, and you said that a creative person is the person who is going to help us out of 
all of this. 

WRIGHT: Yes, certainly. 

QUESTIONER: If you are talking to the average man and woman, then, generally, in that 
field, there are a lot of rules and regulations that are generally given to the artist for the 
architect to follow. If you are speaking to the average man and woman, they have no rules 
to follow because they don't, for instance, go to college to study. So, from that I can only 
gather that there must be something beyond the rules and regulations that is necessary and 
creative, and I wonder if these rules taught in books are really necessary or is there 
something else basic? 

WRIGHT: I really didn't understand it. But I think what she is maybe saying is that there 
is an average person who is in betwixt and between opportunity of all kinds, who lives-I 
don't see why-and how is that person going to get this thing that I am talking about as a 
creative individual? 

QUESTIONER: That is right. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: Well, I'll tell you, my dear lady, that if she doesn't get it there is something the 
matter with her, not me. You see, this thing comes from the inside; the answer isn't on the 
outside. It is inside. 

QUESTIONER: Pardon me, I disagree with that. 

WRIGHT: There are many ways of getting this thing, as many as there are individuals on 
earth. My way wouldn't be your way; your way wouldn't be his or her way. But there is 
always a way, just as sure as can be. 

QUESTIONER: Why is it that we are not allowed to build something on property we own 
and pay taxes upon because it doesn't conform with the neighborhood? 

WRIGHT: You mean, my dear lady, that the rules and regulations are all against human 
beings having the things that they really ought to have or want to have. As an architect, I 
have found that the code and rules and regulations are all made by people who seem to 
have put them there to prevent progress, and I think that is the way they work. 

Godfrey [sic-Alfred] North Whitehead, one of the really good men Harvard ever had, 
said that in a democracy codes were justified only if they were fearlessly, continuously 
revised. It is the hardest thing in God's world to get one of our codes revised. They become 
laws and thousands of people are living under them. And by way of their enforcement and 
sustaining them to keep them in force and effect you deprive hundreds and thousands of 
people of their livelihood if you break the codes. So, the codes become an incubus. They 
become monstrosities. They defeat the very purpose for which they were made because, in 
the first place, they are made by experts. 

Now, who is an expert? What is an expert? An expert is a man who stopped thinking. 
Why? Because he knows. He is finished; he doesn't have to think anymore. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: So, experts will eventually be the death of the very thing they were intended to 
preserve, just like the letter of the law. The minute you begin to interpret the law according 
to the letter of the law that law will kill the very thing it was intended to conserve. That is 
going on all through the country today. The interpretation of the law according to the letter 
instead of the spirit. 
It is only the spirit of the law that counts. It is only the spirit of the code that counts. 

But we can't elect people to interpret those codes and laws according to their spirit because 
we are afraid they will be dishonest and they probably will be. So, there you have it. What 
is the answer? I was bringing it up a little while ago. Mediocrity is always dishonest. You 
may not think that is a true statement, but let's go it the other way around and say 
dishonesty is always mediocre. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, I think you can probably hear me. I am a schoolteacher in 
charge of forty-two kids. I saw your church you built in Madison, Wisconsin, the 
Unitarian Church. It was inspiring enough to me to make me want to join the church and I 
have never regretted it. I just want to know if you can interpret for me and the rest of the 
audience what it was in that structure that you conceived that provided the inspiration for 
not only me but others who have seen it to go away with that feeling. 
WRIGHT: Well, that is the thing I referred to when I was talking about getting away from 
the city, out into the country. What do you want to know about it? 

QUESTIONER: What in that building combines the inspiration which is in your 
architecture which is not found in these ordinary boxes that you have been talking about? 
Can you interpret for me what it was in this building that you have been expressing in 
bricks and stone and steel, that is not provided in these ordinary monstrosities? 

WRIGHT: I must have failed or he wouldn't be asking this question! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: You see, I am a Unitarian myself. I come of a long line of preachers, way back. 
My people were Unitarians. Now, Unitarian means what it says. The unity of all things is 
the thrill Unitarians get out of life. Thomas Jefferson was a great Unitarian. Nearly all the 
founders of our nation were Unitarians. 

Every Unitarian believes in that essential principle of oneness-overallness [sic], we would 
say. Here's a little building for that type and kind of society. Now, what would best express 
that feeling of oneness, of unity, of an overall sense of things and at the same time be 
reverential? In my kindergarten days I was taught that this meant reverence [Editor's Note: 
Mr. Wright puts his hands in prayer position]-an attitude of prayer. It does, instinctively. 
So I made a little building in that attitude that had an overall shelter for the secular and 
the religious performance of life. A oneness, the unity of all things, a building that had 
unity for its purpose-and it was at the same time in an attitude reverential. That was what 
I had in mind. I don't know if I got it. 

QUESTIONER: You did. 

WRIGHT: If I got it, you probably wouldn't be asking me this question. 

QUESTIONER: I'm glad that you interpreted it for me. Thank you. 

WRIGHT: Thank you. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, why is your faith in America increasing? 

WRIGHT: My faith in America is increasing and my understanding of America is 
improving. I know now what my America needs most. I never knew until I was of age. 
Now I am beginning to find out. 

There is nothing the matter with America except America itself. America is juvenile, not 
grown up. We don't have the adult mind in our country in politics, in business, in 
architecture, in anything. That doesn't mean that we are done for and we are going to bust 
and fail. It does mean that we need to wake up to what things are essential. 

Now, here we are like a kid with a pistol in his hand, loaded, and he doesn't know it's 
loaded, and he doesn't know what to do with it, and he runs around with it. What for? That 
is where we are as a people right now. We are just about as intelligent. We are just about 
as responsible as that boy would be who got hold of a gun he wasn't entitled to and didn't 
know how to handle. 

Now, does that mean that I don't believe in America? It means that I have a very deep 
concern for America, and that I am trying to understand America-and I think I do. If I 
don't, well, it is just too bad for me. 

QUESTIONER: Mr. Wright, you said you think you understand America and you have 
been very critical. You are probably the outstanding exponent in the field. What is your 
constructive criticism of America? What do you have to offer to these people who are 
willing to invest $15,000, who have only $15,000 to invest, and who believe in you and 
need you? You can't let it go by just saying that Mr. Kaufmann had the money? How about 
telling us what you would do for those of us who are only within that $15,000 bracket, and 
no more, at today's valuation? What can you give us that we need? 

WRIGHT: He is pleading with me for a $15,000 house! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Let me say this: I have given it to him and he doesn't know it. I have given it to 
him in what I call the Usonian Automatic, 
where the union has been eliminated; where masonry at twenty-nine dollars a day is out, 
where there are no plasterers at the same rate, where there are no carpenters at all. It is a 
block house. 

I did it for the Gl's. The Gl can go in his back road-he's got sand there-get himself some 
steel rods and cement, make the blocks, and put the blocks together. You can see two of 
those houses standing in Phoenix now. One is a very expensive one that cost $25,000. It 
would have cost $75,000. 

I have done that thing. Don't you know it? You can build your own house! You can go to 
that plan-we call it the Usonian plan-and you can buy the cement, the steel, and the 
sand somewhere and build your own house. 

Now, what is the consequence? I had to devise electrical lighting for that house that could 
go into it ready made, where the owner could turn up a connection and that would be all 
because the union wouldn't work on it. Then I had to design a bathroom for the house that 
made only three connections. The bowl was over the foot of the tub and the closet right 
beside it. It was all one fixture and all you had to do was connect three connections in 
order to make it. The union couldn't stop me. I expect to be shot from ambush one of these 
days just for that. And you don't know about it! Well, is that my fault? 

QUESTIONER: Where can you find out more about it, Mr. Wright? 

WRIGHT: There has been a lot printed about it in The Christian Science Monitor and, let 
me see, The Milwaukee Journal, and a half a dozen other papers around the country. 
Where have you been all this time? 

QUESTIONER: Send a reprint to Lillian Jackson Braun and we will get it. 

WRIGHT: I started this back in 1921-this system of construction. We called it the textile 
block system and it is earthquake proof. It will stay there hundreds of years. It is a masonry 
house-fireproof and vermin proof. 

I am a salesman now. I didn't come down here to sell you anything. I am surprised, I 
supposed everybody knew about it and was just too lazy to go to work at it. Well, I think 
that is enough. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 


PART EIGHT 

Broadacre City 


26 A New Freedom for Living in America 

. . . all true forms are born of some inner struggle. 


Introduction 

This chapter presents the text of a speech delivered by Frank Lloyd Wright on radio on 
Monday, April 15, 1935, at Rockefeller Center, New York, at the opening of the Industrial 
Arts Exposition of the National Alliance of Art and Industry. The text of this speech was 
published as "A New Freedom for Living in America" in Taliesin I, No. 1, October 1940, 
pp. 35-37. Mr. Wright's models for his Broadacre City were seen for the first time by a 
national audience at this exposition. His speech was intended to explain his new concept of 
the American democratic metropolis of the future. 

The Industrial Arts Exposition had an impressive presidential opening. By pressing a gold 
telegraph key in the Oval Room of the White House at 8:30 P.M. on April 15 President 
Roosevelt activated an electric impulse that set off 120 flashbulbs in the forum of 
Rockefeller Center, turned on fifty floodlights, started a siren, dropped an American flag, 
and turned on the current on an electric organ, all of which officially opened the 
exposition. {As reported in "Arts in Industry Glorified in Show," The New York Times, 
April 16, 1935, Section 1, p. 23, column 1.} In its arrangement the National Alliance of 
Art and Industry emphasized beauty of design in objects of mass production intended for 
the average consumer. The display remained at Rockefeller Center from April 15 to May 
15. At that time Mr. Wright was reported to have commented: 

A tragic breakdown stares us in the face. American leadership was too ignorant or is too 
blind to be entrusted with the might we got by way of machine success. Now, an architect, 
at least, should see life as a structure, taking outward forms from interior conditions. In 
official America, there is yet no such organic form. We live in economic as well as esthetic 
and partially moral chaos.{Ibid.} 

The main model of Broadacre City measured twelve by twelve feet, eight inches and was 
constructed of wood at a scale of one inch to seventy-five feet. This represented four 
square miles of land or, as defined more traditionally, four US Public Land Survey sections 
for a total of 2560 acres. This four-square-mile area, reportedly, would accommodate 
about 1400 families or dwelling units. {The 1400 total family figure was reported in 
"Architect Models New Type of City," The New York Times, March 27, 1935, p. 16, 
column 1. Later, on September 12, 1981, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation reported in a 
limited publication titled "The Living City: An Introduction to Broadacre City, Frank 
Lloyd Wright, Architect" that the total estimated number of dwelling units represented by 
the 1935 model of Broadacre City was 761. The more recent figure (1981) was developed 
in the Foundation's study of the surviving Broadacre City model (then housed at the 
Taliesin Fellowship Complex on the grounds of Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin) 
and of the historic photographs of that model.} 

Mr. Wright believed that Broadacre City, as the inevitable community of the future, was 
compelled by three major inventions-the automobile, electric-communication and 
power-transmission facilities, and standardized machine production. Significant elements 
of his plan included the correlated farm, the factory from which smoke and gases were 
eliminated by burning coal at the mine to create electric power, prefabricated housing, 
decentralized schools, home offices, safe traffic flow, and simplified government that 
retained the county as the only local governmental unit. Transportation at Broadacre City 
was shown on the model as a great arterial highway, which consisted of many lanes of 
traffic above, monorail speed trains in the center, and truck-related traffic on its lower 
lanes. Also within the structure of these highway facilities was storage space that 
eliminated unsightly accumulations of all raw materials. 

Land at Broadacre City was to be redistributed by the state by allotting at least one acre to 
childless families and more to larger family units, although Mr. Wright felt that the 
architect should be the agent of the state in all matters affecting its disposition. 

The philosophical and design themes established at Broadacre City recur throughout his 
subsequent architectural, urban planning, and literary works. In the 1950s he was to return 
formally to the Broadacre City concepts of the early 1930s and further refine them (see 
Patrick J. Meehan's The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New 
York: John Wiley and Sons, pp.117-152, for further discussions by Mr. Wright of his 
Broadacre City concept). 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: Upon an occasion like this to say that I love America and her ideal of 
democracy is to set myself down as the usual sentimentalist or as a mere politician. 
Nevertheless, I say it. It is my first line, as I believe it will be my last sentiment. But even 
if the first forefathers of our democracy could have foreseen the kind of success we were to 
have by way of the machine they could not have set up the necessary mechanism needed to 
defend their ideal of democracy. Let us admit it-our forefathers lacked the technique. 
Nor have the statesmen with the needed fundamental technique and the necessary nerve 
yet appeared. 
Meantime, what hope of democracy we have left to us goes from bad to worse, until almost 
no one now believes it practical. Here we are, an enormous nation of-ites,-istic with all 
the-isms which make the also-ran, busily inventing new-isms-tragic breakdown 
staring us in the face. The present success-ideal proves to be a bad one for all but the few. 

Now an architect should at least see life continually as [an] organic form. His work should 
take shape according to the fundamentals of human nature and nature otherwise. As an 
architect I can see no such organic form in the life of our people today, but I can see forces 
working together or separately in that direction. As everyone knows, we live in economic, 
aesthetic and moral chaos for the reason that American life has achieved no organic form. 
As our civilization moves on, it becomes more of an agonizing economic struggle than a 
happy realization. 

But this architect knows, too, that all true forms are born of some inner struggle. So far as 
our struggle has been, and is, sincere, we may hope to find the forms, architectural and 
economic, that will finally let democracy come through to us. 

Out of an experience somewhat extensive in getting organic forms evolved in our 
architecture it is with the great hope to make clear an organic form for the democratic city 
of the American future that I have tried to grasp and concretely interpret the whole drift of 
great change taking place in and around us in order to help create a human state more 
natural than the one that present cupidity and stupidity will allow. This means, of course, 
that through these models we have set up you may see a new success ideal for your own 
America. 

In Broadacres you will find not only a pattern for natural freedom for the individual as 
individual. You will find there structures based upon decentralization of nearly everything 
big business has built up to be big, and you will find an economic ground-structure aimed 
at more individuality and greater simplicity and at more direct responsibility of 
government where human individuality is not concerned. So, Broadacre City is no mere 
back-to-the-land idea but is, rather, a breaking down of the artificial divisions set up 
between urban and rural life. By a more intelligent use of our developed scientific powers 
we establish a practical way of life that will bring the arts, agriculture, and industry into a 
harmonious whole. And I believe that there are harmonious elements in any city that really 
has a democratic future. Whether we yet know it or not we are about ready to throw away 
the costly but ugly scaffolding of which present urban life is the worst example and let the 
horizontal city appear together with a system of creation and distribution corresponding 
more to the natural conditions to our life here on earth. Naturally, the new city will appear 
because of, and by way of, the great development in science that we have so dearly bought 
as the physical basis of our present life. We ought now to use that basis for the purpose of a 
greater freedom instead of our growth being hampered and our souls enslaved by its 
consequences. 

So here, in the entrails of final enormity, Rockefeller Center, New York City, you may see 
concrete ideas of a fresh way of life-man staying with the ground, his imagination 
creating new forms firmly based on the ideals that were intended to found this country in 
new freedom as a democracy. 

Certainly, the new forms that Broadacres proposes do represent a new success ideal, but 
the forms are not mere invention. By anyone inclined to patiently study them they will be 
found to be conservative interpretations of actual circumstances today. I do not say that 
Broadacre City is the ultimate form. But I say it might well be that if we could honestly 
call our lives our own we are going forward to the freedom of which the forefathers well 
dreamed. 

Great nature mocks man-made efforts, throws the man aside to take a little here and a 
little there to go on with her work. I could point to history to prove that to work with her is 
wisdom, to go against her is failure or, even worse, catastrophe. And it no longer requires 
a seer to realize that America now knows the punishments that are the result of going 
recklessly against nature. BroadacreCity not only perceives that failure but, with the belief 
that quantity can never be a satisfactory substitute for quality, gathers together the net 
result of our best world efforts to this time and goes forward to a new cultural form, a form 
more firmly and generously based upon enlightened human egoism than any yet 
conceived. Superficially you will see it as a form of architectural order, but you may see it 
as inherently a safer basis for our democratic society than the substitute for civilization we 
have achieved in our quite complete commercialization of life. 

It is high time that some fundamental radicals among us gathered together the loose ends 
of opportunity lying waste all about us, and instead of laying more by means of them 
project some such sensible plan for life as our forefathers hoped and believed would be 
ours. It is some organic sense of the whole seen as entity that is now the greatest social 
need. 
Because the psychological moment is here, the models are here to show you the future that 
is now. Really to grasp the significance of our work on this cross section of our civilization 
requires considerably more intelligent and unselfish application on your part than most of 
you will yet be either prepared or be willing to give. But the making of these models 
required just that kind of application for a lifetime and also the fruit of a lifetime of 
experience. Many months of devotion on the part of the Taliesin Fellowship-the young 
men and women who unselfishly made them-has brought the models here where their 
worth for the future may be judged. 

Text of a speech transcribed from a radio broadcast dated April 15, 1935, which originated 
from Rockefeller Center, New York, on the occasion of the opening of the Industrial Arts 
Exposition of the National Alliance of Art and Industry. 

27 Mr. Wright Talks on Broadacre City to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 

Only as we can plan to take advantage of the law of change in process of growth can we do 
justice to human nature. Through the law of cause and effect we must proceed to interpret 
the present in terms of the future. 

Introduction 

On Wednesday, September 8, 1937, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famous German architect, 
wired Frank Lloyd Wright at Spring Green, Wisconsin to ask if he might visit Taliesin. He 
expected to be in Chicago on Thursday, September 9.{A copy of this telegram appears in 
Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Editor), Frank Lloyd Wright: Letters to Architects, Fresno, 
California: The Press at California State University, 
1984, p. 98.} Permission was given for the visit and van der Rohe and an American 
architect who spoke fluent German and acted as translator arrived on Friday morning, 
September 10. Mies stayed with Mr. Wright until Monday, September 13, when all drove 
back to Chicago.{An account of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's September 10 to 13, 1937, 
visit with Mr. Wright is documented more fully by former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice 
Edgar Tafel in Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: 
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979, pp. 69-80.} During his visit to Taliesin van der 
Rohe viewed much of Mr. Wright's work, which included the model of Broadacre City. 
This chapter presents the text of a talk Mr. Wright gave on this occasion. He later had this 
to say: 

As the . . . matter went along it was translated into German for Mies van der Rohe, the 
distinguished European architect now in charge of the Armour Institute of Architecture at 
Chicago. Many young architects were gathered together about the [Broadacre City] model 
listening as many thousands have listened from first to last-eagerly and intelligently as 
subsequent questions would show. 

But, each time I attempt to put the scheme for Broadacres into words a new aspect of many 
details not considered before occurs to me. So no two discourses concerning the future 
have all in common. There is more between the lines still than appears in the 
lines.{Wright, Frank Lloyd,-Mr. Wright Talks On Broadacre City To Ludwig Mies van 
der Rohe,-Taliesin, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1940, p. 18.} 

The Talk 

WRIGHT: I am sorry, Mies, that we have no time to do more than touch upon the few 
features that may happen to come into my mind at this moment because we have here 
before us in these models a complete cross section of our entire USONIAN civilization as 
it might easily and soon be-I might say as it is going to be. The model section is taken at 
a typical county seat of government. This design presupposes that the city is going to the 
country and assumes the country to be a characteristic four square miles of some future 
American county where the hills come down to the plain and a river flows down and 
across the plain. As you see here in the model there is some high ground running down to 
the plain. A river or stream cuts its way across the plain. This, being fairly characteristic 
topography, is chosen to model the development you see here of a typical section of an 
American-or USONIAN-county. The ultimate Broadacre City would be made up of 
these counties as they are now but grouped into states; the counties and states would all be 
federated then just as they are now. Broadacre City is the entire country and predicated 
upon the basis that every man, woman, and child in America is entitled to own an acre of 
ground so long as they live on it or use it, and every man at least owning his own car or 
plane. So the portion we see here as a whole is really only a minute part of the future 
Broadacre City which eventually would include these United States. But in this small part 
you may find most of the ideas at work that would eventually shape the whole and hold it 
all together. 

Like every other architectural scheme which is real, Broadacre City as here presented is a 
transitional scheme. All genuinely great building is transition building. Only as we can 
plan to take advantage of the law of change in process of growth can we do justice to 
human nature. Through the law of cause and effect we must proceed to interpret the 
present in terms of the future. So this is not intended to be an ultimate pattern but one so 
free of major and minor axes as never to become the usual academic fixation and always to 
have sufficient reflex to accommodate inevitable organic change. In other words, it is not 
"classic." It is organic. 

Here the agrarian, the industrialist, the artist, the scientist, and the philosopher meet on 
the ground itself. It may not be logical. But is the rising sun logical? It is natural and that 
is better. What Broadacres proposes is psychological and natural-now. The social forces 
of mankind have been dammed up long enough to see what must be coming. 

All government services come from the county seat, from which postal deliveries are made 
and the necessary official distributions effected, direction and protection being given by 
aerator from the official field nearby the town hall; public utilities, like gas, light, water, 
and gasoline, conducted in channeled roadways, are available by meter at the curb. As to 
other utilities-telephone poles and telegraph wires are obsolete; our airplanes are still 
splendid stunts, our system of building utterly unscientific, and the poor old railroads 
out-of-date. We have had to find new ways to do what they did. The railroad is not 
adapted to the fluid traffic that is now a characteristic of modern life. So we have taken the 
railroad right-of-way, it belongs to the people anyway, and have made architecture out 
of its double-track, central speedway from coast to coast express traffic-a great 
triple-lane, two-way automobile highway, paralleled on either side by county highways 
connecting every half-mile with the countryside. Cars go one way only, in one portion; 
trucks go two ways lower down, one way in one portion but can take on or off every 
half-mile. These ideal hard roads without ditches or gutters support speeds up to one 
hundred miles per hour. At county seat intersections we find stations for aerator 
[helicopter] takeoffs and every half-mile you may see pass-overs and cross-unders for 
the main county crossroads. Beneath this road construction-probably federal-there is 
vast space for the continuous storage and delivery of building materials, fuel, etc. This 
main artery-the converted railroad-connects the counties of the states and the states 
themselves into the ultimate Broadacre City. All, of course, are owned and operated by the 
people's government. 

Now, the counties of the USA average from thirty to fifty square miles each-and each 
already has a county seat. No need to change the location of these county seats nor change 
much that of the railroads nor change much from the locations of the state and federal 
capitals. But we do abolish minor village governments to cut down minor officialdom. 
Government will be more highly centralized, the county government being more closely 
knit with federal administration, but there will be far less of it needed. State government 
still serves as an intermediary but becomes less and less needed as the process of 
government control becomes more organic because life is so. What is now the policeman is 
here automatic. Otherwise through this emphasis or government centralization of the 
common needs this is a decentralization of all man-made concerns, based upon the 
modern use of materials, glass, and steel, mobility, and electrification-all owned or 
controlled by the general people whom they serve. 

In determining the spacing of the city, we assume every man is to have a car-or two or 
four or five. So we can build one-car houses, 
two-car houses, or five-car houses. The space scale therefore has changed throughout, 
changed in the ground allotments as in the dwellings themselves. The planning norm has 
ceased to be a man on his feet or a man seated behind a horse in a buggy. A mile to our 
man with the motor or ten miles in the air makes only a moment's distance. Space can be 
reckoned by time rather than feet and inches. But as this particular model is laid out we 
are still space-crowded. 

On the basis of spacing shown here, the whole population of the USA could be 
accommodated in Texas alone. So let us consider this as a congested area, compared to 
what might actually take place. The fact is that the model shows here a condition not too 
unlike the development already taking place in the regional fields of our great cities 
themselves, except that the haphazard of that circumstance is here correlated and 
completed. 

To allow for growth of population we reserve at the beginning certain tree-covered areas, 
trees being valuable crops subsidized by state government. The government by setting 
aside, say, one-third of the tillable areas takes care of future growth by providing more 
ground to work, the trees being cut down as crops when needed, to provide for growth. 

These tree masses are a great landscape feature of Broadacres. Many kinds of useful 
trees-fine woods or nuts-all suited to the climate, may be planted by the acre. The 
ground thus conserved coming back into tillage when and as needed. Tilled ground could 
be returned to wooded area in this same way. In our model the tree areas bear too small a 
relation to the whole area because we want to show as many features as possible in the 
small space at our disposal. So you will see more taken up in houses and gardens than 
would really be necessary in actual development. 

In every society in Broadacre City there are certain special functions like the arts, art 
crafts, and small household manufactures such as weaving and dyeing and other small 
utilities. These are carried on in small factory units where the workers live. Everyone may 
live where he works if he wishes to do so. The function of education-now more devoted 
to true culture than the acquiring of information-is still found in what we call the new 
university. Radio is one of the city's active assets. But radio is built into Broadacres as one 
of the assets controlled by the people themselves. Related to the new university, a 
decentralized unit, are the arboretum, aquarium, and zoo. All phases of nature are to be 
collected here for special nature study. The university, as you will see, has changed its 
character. A "classical" education would be worse than useless, even more so than it is 
now. Instead, man studies man in relation to his birthright-the ground-and man in 
relation to men. 

He starts his earthy career with his feet on the ground, but his head may be in the clouds at 
times. When he is conceived in his mother's womb his place is ready here, as much ground 
as he can use is being reserved for him. Broadacres follows Henry George in the belief that 
a man should not only hold his land by way of his own use and improvements but dedicate 
himself to it in the best sense of the spirit. There can be no absentee ownership of land. 
But meantime we cannot expect everyone to become bona fide tillers of the soil, 
particularly not the citizens of such urbanized population as we have at present. So we 
have made provision for the people who have been divorced from nature by excessive 
urban idealism and parasitic living. As I said, this must be a transition scheme because we 
must provide for people whose education and way of life have unfitted them for the more 
rounded life planned for here. 

Understood rightly, industry, art, science, and agriculture all have a common basis. We 
have not seen in our age that common basis with any constructive vision. If we have seen 
it, we have not acted upon it. No sense of the whole is anywhere evident in our modern 
life; thus not only are all the many USONIAN industrial and social activities uncorrelated 
but every aspect of our activity there is a wasteful to and fro, relentless without purpose. 
Senseless concentrations are everywhere exaggerated. Concentrations are just as useless 
and meaningless as, for instance, the hauling of coal. One third of our yearly railroad 
tonnage is the coal haul. There is now no good reason why coal should not be burned at 
the mines and the resultant heat and light distributed from the place of origin. Nor is there 
good reason to separate agriculture and manufacturing from residence districts or from 
each other, provided we take the curse off these operations, as is done in Broadacre City. 
In Broadacre City every man is nearer every other man when he wants to be than he is in 
the present city. And the scaffolding still destroying our landscape-poles and wires, 
signboards, railroad and lumberyards, etc., etc., do not exist in Broadacres. 

Especially is the curse taken off farm and factory. The farm becomes a most desirable and 
lovable place in which to live, the most lovely to see. Animals are housed in fireproof 
sanitary quarters. The farmer is no longer an isolated human unit in the nonsocial 
hinterland. The curse has been taken off industry, as well. The curse has been taken off 
poverty of all kinds-except spiritual poverty-because there is the highest standard of 
quality in everything available for use and there is left no inferior way of using anything. 
Differences now are only a matter of extent or of character. There is, however, a double 
curse on disorder. 

Grouping may have true individuality, however. Both have been a blessing by three 
principal freedoms: free ground, free education, and a free medium of exchange for all 
labor or commodities. This means entire freedom from speculation. There can be no 
speculation in any three of these essentials to the commonwealth essentially by way of 
which the commonwealth lives. Broadacre City is still a true capitalist system but one 
wherein private ownership is based upon personal use and public service-genuine 
capitalism. Capitalism made organic, since it is broadly based upon the ground and the 
individual upon the ground. After meeting the needs of all, then, according to the 
contribution of each, so may each receive. And any man's contribution, whatever the 
character or extent it may assume, must here be integral with the life of the citizen, with 
the circumstances by and for which he lives, and concerning which he cannot lose the 
freedom of personal choice if he will work. If he will not work, he becomes a charge upon 
the state and treated accordingly. 

This, of course, is not the capitalism we have now, any more than it is communism. Let us 
call it Organic Capitalism, because a citizen of Broadacre City is an actual capitalist, not 
merely a potential one. He is no longer a mere gambler, although there is still romance 
with which he may gamble. The fact is he owns himself first of all-the first condition of 
an organic capitalist-and he may then choose and own if he pleases all that makes his life 
and the lives of those he loves worthwhile. He may own the fruit of his own labor or, 
adding his unit of effort to a whole effort, become entirely sympathetic and cooperative. He 
gives up to government only those matters into which no individuality can possibly enter, 
where there can be no question of sacrificing that in his nature which is himself. And that 
is the promise of true democracy. 

Government would especially be concerned with such things a public utilities. Government 
would be more an affair of business administration than meddling in politics. For instance, 
there is no longer need for one man to in some way regulate the money getting of the other 
four. Competitive concerns are not needed to employ the citizenry. For instance, in 
Broadacre City, gasoline is at the curb, 
so is water, gas, electricity, and compressed air. Sewage is handled on a nationwide basis 
to be redistributed to the soil as fertilizer. Any society is much better off if these material 
things are thus organized as features of government in which every man has a direct 
business interest. Government would not then be as now-a matter of politicians. This is a 
much more economic and effective basis for the development of industries and arts that are 
human and desirable, as well as the growth of efficiencies that have real and happy human 
value. The citizen would have about one-tenth of government which he has now, and that 
government would be the business administration of popular necessities, together with 
impersonal social affairs of a great nation. He would take active interest in such 
government because it would be his own business. 

The major problem of the means of distribution-mobility comes in here. We have to solve 
the vexing traffic problem. It is one of the most important problems. First, the speed 
involved in general automobile traffic requires much space. And in solving these various 
problems we have made architecture out of roads. We have turned the road the other way 
up. We have made it concave with no ditches, so that one may stay on it, instead of the 
usual convex road with ditches. The road also serves for good drainage with a single deep 
grating-covered gutter in the middle draining to a conduit below. Beside this central 
conduit are smaller ones which are the conduits for wires and service pipes-all easily 
reached by removing a section of the continuous iron grating at the center of the road. The 
grating takes the place of the white or yellow road line now on the highways. 

The top-turn intersection which we have devised, as architecture good to see, reduces the 
possibility of accident to pedestrian or motor traffic to one-tenth of one percent. Left 
turns overhead in full sight are this one-tenth and chance of accident there is small. 
Stop-and-go lights are eliminated. The road itself is lighted from the sides by low flood 
lights contained in floral features two feet above the ground, thus becoming a bright 
well-lighted ribbon with no lights glaring in the eyes of the driver. Wherever you see a 
road surface in Broadacre City it is a luminous surface at night and a dull red toned 
surface in the daytime. Steel in tension is extensively used for the pass-oversee and for all 
other construction where wide spans are desirable-and wide spans are now desirable 
everywhere. 

An interesting thing to consider in studying this model of Broadacres is the way 
distribution is effected. It is a fact that there is little or no back-and-forth haul and but 
little wasted to and fro. At the same time the scaffolding of our present social 
set-up-especially telephone wires and poles, billboards, storage yards for coal and 
building materials, etc.  -is all gone from this future city. To the ugly scaffolding of our 
present life the telephone and telegraph companies have contributed the worst features, 
and, no longer needed, they disappear in this city of the future. 

It follows naturally from all this genuinely constructive way of life that in the 
administration of Broadacre City the county architect is important. He has a certain 
disciplinary as well as cultural relationship to the whole, and since he maintains the 
harmony of the whole his must be one of the best minds the city has, and it will inevitably 
become the best trained. He could hardly be very young nor could he be much educated by 
present standards. With the necessary apprentices, the county architect is located in a work 
place which is also an exhibition gallery placed by or near the county seat. He and his staff 
design the new buildings, develop and preserve the landscape of the county, and decide all 
questions affecting such matters. Nothing is left without continual provision for a better 
plan, keeping the way open to consistent growth. For this purpose careful studies and 
designs are prepared in advance for the better thing-that which has truest relation to the 
whole. The people themselves would be likely to express an interest in these things 
because these future citizens of Broadacres would all be learning the features of that 
fundamental relationship at the university while young and are growing up in it here. So 
the county architect would never lack for effective criticism. Wherever there is a nature 
feature he would be sure to take advantage of it, as we have done here, and develop it 
through his knowledge of the principles and the way of life of an organic architecture. 

As to what is called landscape, here are the parks. Because Broadacre City is a different 
type of architectural expression, one much more abstract than usual, we now make a great 
rising tree wall for the park. The trees which make up the wall rise in height from the 
ground level inside, up and out toward the surrounding streets. The tree wall slopes 
upward from blossoming shrubs to higher blossoming trees, then to conifers, and finally to 
elms and on to the other majestic trees. Inside there is a more informal relationship. There 
are acres of flower beds, mosaics of color. At one end of these great spaces, thus 
sequestered, is a spacious out-of-doors music garden with enclosed spaces for dancing 
and refreshment. 

The blocklike effects seen in this model would not be so apparent as "blocklike" in reality. 
But, here we have presented everything in the abstract; it is the architect's way. But in the 
ultimate Broadacres it is true that landscape becomes architecture just as architecture 
becomes landscape. But both are integral with the ground and are an orchestration of form 
according to nature. Right in the midst of the future city we have fields of flowers and 
grain. Right in the farming section are the buildings of industry, culture, recreation, and 
residence. Right in the midst of all is the marketplace, a perpetual fair. And anywhere in it 
all folk may live happily at work. 

Most landscape architects would say: "But I love the natural scenery." Well, so do we. We 
augment natural "scenery." We develop for it by way of human nature, a collateral 
complementary scenery in the block of tree plantings in the ordered fields, even more 
beautiful than "nature." No, we outrage no scenery. We aim to make it complementary to 
whatever we do-or the other way round-adding the cleverest of human occupation as a 
feature in keeping with it. All the various features of life in Broadacres are appropriate to 
each other because the curse of ugliness and confusion has been removed from them all. 
Nothing can offend anything else, even if it would. There is nothing offensive to either the 
rich man or the farmer in the proximity of each to the other nor the proximity of industry. 
The spacing of all is ample for all purposes, and it is remarkable that it is all so simple and 
that it is, in the main, all so right here now. We need only the slight concerted political 
effort to remove the key logs from the jam. 

Of course there will be religion. Protestants, Catholics, Darkies [sic], and the Synagogue 
will be with us. Instead of each taking a little shovel full of coals and going off to start a 
little hell of his own discord, we have under construction-as always-the great cathedral, 
which is in fact a group of cathedrals. In the center there is a great concourse or meeting 
place where all groups gather together to worship by way of the elements-fire, music, 
water, and pageantry. In this way they might grow toward unity. But perhaps not. That 
depends more upon education as it would be in the future city where culture would largely 
take its place. 

Speaking of education, notice that the children go in toward the inner spaces away from 
the highways and find their way from peaceful homes to peaceful schools along peaceful 
byways. Each schoolboy and schoolgirl has his garden at school. Each has to begin with a 
hoe in his hand. In each one-story school place there is a little outdoor classroom, a little 
cinema, a little museum. But museums are all traveling museums. In Broadacre City you 
will find most things decentralized, traveling continually, kept in continual circulation. All 
the personal, individual concerns of life are decentralized wherever possible to be applied 
at the desirable places as time and circumstance may give opportunity or vary the need. 
We begin at the root of society with culture of the children. Everything here seeks to begin 
again at the beginning, hoping to avoid the mistakes that have all but put our democracy to 
flight by now. 

And the citizens must die here as elsewhere. Life is still a coming in and a going out. As 
man approaches death, he usually becomes sentimental. He likes to see where he is to lie. 
So the cemetery here is mainly another greater forest reservation adjoining the cathedral. 
When a man dies, the trees which cover the place in which he is to be buried are cut down. 
His plot may be then made into a flower bed or become a marble pavement-the choice 
being his or what may be in his mind. And the crematory and columbarium is nearby as 
another choice. Thus ends the exploitation by the monument makers in common with most 
forms of exploitation. We have planned to end it. 

Over here we have the commercial center"the market place"  a perpetual fair where the 
citizen and his wife come to buy and sell and see and learn. There is no reason why this 
still necessary barter function shouldn't be beautiful, too. Flowers and vegetables picked 
fresh every hour are displayed here. Meats, game, and fish are supplied fresh from farms 
and pools. And beside this market every little community center has its exhibition gallery 
where the finer things made by workers of all kinds are displayed to be sold. This market, 
as you see, is a perpetual functioning county fair of a finer sort. There would be 
demonstrations all the time of better ways of keeping house, planning, preserving, 
conserving. And there will be cultural exhibitions, examples of fine art and the universal 
crafts for sale. The curse is taken off commerce by its mutuality and here again-beauty. 
And I have not yet touched upon the beauty parlors, wayside inns, sanatoriums, hotels, 
skyscrapers in the country, various apartments, the clubs, cinema houses, race courses, 
aerodromes [airports] and various public memorials. 

The traffic problem being solved, Broadacre City is a delightfully safe place to live and to 
work in or go places near by or far away. Social intercourse is facilitated not impeded by 
the increased spacing and the freedom gained. Whatever you want to be or do, there is an 
appropriate place for either. But the greatest thing here is to be able to do them all in 
harmony with a great altogether. The way of life as planned here kills off the specialist, 
eventually. But there are little compounds, with clinics or studios in gardens for doctors, 
scientists, architects, and artists. Every professional man has his own little place of work 
and the people come to him. He does not waste his time and energy going to the city and 
back again as now. 

So here, in this little model and in its collaterals, you have a definite cross section and new 
form for everything needed for a complete modern USONIAN civilization. A true culture. 
But the model you see here is only for this particular type of ground in these particular 
circumstances. Never would the same plan be imposed on land that is otherwise or when 
the circumstance changed. Instead, the resources of the land would be brought out and new 
forms wrought according to the circumstances. 

Reprinted from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Mr. Wright Talks On Broadacre City To Ludwig 
Mies van der Rohe," Taliesin, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1940, pp. 10-18. 


PART NINE 

The Architecture of a Free Democratic Government 


28 Government and Architecture 

What can government do with an advanced idea? If it is still a controversial idea, and any 
good idea must be so, can government touch it without its eye on at least the next election? 
It cannot. 

{Text of a speech reprinted with minor editing from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Speech to the 
AFA," The Federal Architect, Vol. IX, January 1939, pp. 20-23.} 


Introduction 

This chapter presents Frank Lloyd Wright's speech to about 600 federal architects 
assembled in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, 
October 25, 1938. Many topical areas, including the architecture of historic Williamsburg, 
were addressed. Among his remarks was the following: 

Studying . . . Williamsburg closely . . . one may see why and how, now, this nation was 
contrived by the monied man for the monied man by the money-minded. . . . 

Mr. Wright also talked at length about organic architecture, culture, education, and 
Broadacre City (see also Chapters 26 and 27). The session closed with a brief 
question-and-answer period in which he solicited the audience's reactions and voiced 
strong views about government building and buildings. An original typescript copy of the 
text of this speech is housed in the Speech and Article File-1938 of the Frank Lloyd 
Wright Papers of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. In addition, an 
edited and somewhat revised version of this speech appeared in Frederick Gutheim 
(Editor), Frank Lloyd Wright On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940), New 
York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1941, pp. 241-246. 

At least twenty-eight government-related projects, not including those for public 
schools and university-related buildings, were designed by Mr. Wright between 1893 and 
1958. Unfortunately their construction eluded him for almost his entire career because 
only four were built; among them the grandest are the Marin County Administration 
Building, the Hall of Justice, and the Post Office for Marin County, California, San Rafeal 
(1957-see Chapter 29). 

Three other government-related designs (built) were the Banff National Park Pavilion 
(with Francis C. Sullivan, architect) at Alberta, Canada (1911), the Los Angeles 
Exhibition Pavilion for the display of Mr. Wright's traveling exhibition titled "Sixty Years 
of Living Architecture" at Los Angeles, California (1954), and the Dallas Theater Center 
at Dallas, Texas (1955). The twenty-four remaining unexecuted designs for 
government-related projects are the Municipal Boat House for the Madison Improvement 
Association for Madison, Wisconsin (1893), the competition for the City of Milwaukee 
Library and Museum for Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1893), Sherman Booth's Municipal Art 
Gallery for Chicago, (1907), Sherman Booth's Town Hall for Glencoe, Illinois (1909), the 
Post Office and Carnegie Library Project for Ottawa, Ontario (1913); the US Embassy for 
Tokyo (1914), the project for six playhouses for the Oak Park Playground Association at 
Oak Park, Illinois (1926), two designs for the Monona Terrace Madison Civic Center 
complex for Madison, Wisconsin (1938 and 1955), the US Government "Cloverleaf 
Quadruple" Housing Project for Pittsfield, Massachusetts (1941), two designs for the Point 
Park Community Center for Pittsburgh (1947 and 1948), a concrete "Butterfly" bridge over 
the Wisconsin River, Spring Green, Wisconsin (1947), twin suspension bridges at Point 
Park in Pittsburgh (1947), a concrete bridge for the San Francisco Bay Southern Crossing 
(1949), a bridge for Echo Park at Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin (1951), a restaurant for 
Yosemite National Park, California (1953), the Barnsdall Park Municipal Gallery for Los 
Angeles (1954), the Marin County Amphitheatre for the Marin County Civic Center at 
San Rafael, California (1957), the Arizona State Capital "Oasis" Project for the State of 
Arizona at Phoenix (1957), the Baghdad Art Museum, the Plan for Greater Baghdad, the 
Post and Telegraph Building, the Opera House and Gardens, and the University Complex 
and Gardens for Baghdad, Iraq (1957), and post office and community center/auditorium 
projects for Spring Green, Wisconsin (1957 and 1958, respectively). 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, I have often said that it is impossible for a man to be a 
good architect and a gentleman at the same time. But, there you are-out there-so let 
each man judge for himself of this introduction I have just received and the remarks I am 
about to make. 

I think the first thing we should, perhaps, do here tonight is to get this noisy Williamsburg 
matter-anyhow, in our own minds-on straight. Now, I did not say "Williamsburg is all 
wrong." I did say that it was-Eastern newspaper editorials to the contrary-"quite all 
right"; but I don't think I meant, when I said that it was quite all right, what Rockefeller 
meant when he restored Williamsburg. It is an admirable restoration-authentic replica of 
the setting of our early historic settler's life. As a museum piece it is invaluable to us 
because it is placed where we can see it and see through it. We may read-as I read 
there-something of what really was the matter with our forefathers when they got 
here-the men who came here, rebels against oppression later to become revolutionists, to 
find a new and better land. They came and lived within shooting distance of the Indians 
and brought that culture with them which we now see in detail at Williamsburg. We see 
that it was all just what they had there, "back home." Of course, "back home" is what all 
Englishmen in foreign lands wish for. If you watch Englishmen conduct their lives as their 
lives run around the whole world you will find them doing just what was done and just as 
near as possible as it was done back home, whether they are doing it in India, Africa, 
Australia, or at the North Pole. Whatever they did at home, that same thing they do so far 
as they can do it-south, north, east, or west in the new land in which they find 
themselves. 

Concerning Williamsburg . . . they there ran true to form. We must say that the restoration 
is a fine museum piece and as such valuable to Americans if they would only let it be a 
museum piece and not an illusion, studying it for what significance it has where our life is 
concerned, not attempting to live in it, still. As an object lesson to the nation in 
architecture, it is valuable. Studying the exhibit at Williamsburg closely-from the 
inside-one may see why and how, now, this nation was contrived by the monied man for 
the monied man by the money-minded; see why property was the criterion by means of 
which this union was to survive, if it could survive at all. You can read in this search for 
the elegant solution that the culture which the colonists had on them, or with them, when 
they arrived was French culture unified by a century or two of English taste. England had 
little elegance of her own, so turned to that of the French, imitated French culture, and, 
inevitably, brought the imitation to these shores. That is plain truth concerning the culture 
of our colonists. Now, why not, indeed, have a fine restoration of that culture where we 
can look it in the face for what it is today and see what the culture was that lay in behind 
the culture of a mixed nation such as this one of ours? That early culture, as you will see, 
had little of reality in it but did have a certain reticence, a fine cleanliness when in poverty 
and a finer simplicity in general than is generally practiced now. But, when, later, modern 
devotees of English colonial culture became rich and could spend money like drunken 
sailors, it is easy to see how and why we got Queen Anne, Medieval Gothic, General Grant 
Gothic, etc., etc.  -"the 57 varieties"-and easy to see why we have all these 
blind-as-a-bat government buildings to work in; why, and how, we got the kind of 
grandomania the government always so generously provides for us, for official purposes, 
especially, and for its popular heroes, regardless. 

Facing reality as it soon did, how in actuality could that colonial culture prove itself equal 
to the strain soon to be put upon it? You may see the consequences all around you here in 
Washington. Now, with deeper thought, ignoring colonial culture, you'll find something in 
the Colonial life of our forefathers that was clean, something sweet and straightforward, 
something out of the nature of the true liberal. The ideals of our forefathers were fine and 
high. And you will see that among them were great men-endowed with greatness and 
generosity, true aristocrats. That older nation from which they came knew that they were 
worth having but didn't know how to keep them. 

But unfortunately, for the ideals of freedom and democracy, old feudal hangovers from 
England came along with them. The colonials brought in the feudal land system, the 
feudal idea of money, the feudal notion of property rights in everything on earth as a 
speculative commodity. Among these high-minded men was one Tom Paine who did 
know something of a technical basis for the practice of individual human rights. But not 
until long after the colonial rebels had set up the constitution for this democracy was 
anything at all written into it concerned with the nature of human rights. 
Therefore-tonight-standing here, an architect, I want to speak of the culture of organic 
architecture as opposed to this culture, we call it "colonial," brought to the great 
experiment here by our forefathers. It would be silly for me to say "modern architecture a 
king to you because modern architecture means merely the architecture of today, or 
architecture a la mode. But, when you say organic architecture you immediately run up a 
flag to the masthead. You use a term that really compels thought. Now, of course, the 
architecture we had by way of the colonials nobody has been compelled to think much 
about. It has not demanded nor has it received any thought at all. Even they had ceased to 
think about it. Sometimes I think it has gone as far as it has gone only to give a break to 
the inferior desecrator and allow educated men to stop thinking, never allowing the nation 
to begin to make something of itself by way of its own life. Organic architecture a thing 
that must come out from the ground by way of the life of the people "not out of the 
universities. It comes out of the circumstances of the time, the place, and the man. 
Universities do not know it, yet. They do, however, begin to suspect. Organic architecture 
rejects art as a mere aesthetic and clings to the creative evolution of principle. 

So, today, organic architecture at during all these years we have suffered severely from a 
dreadful hangover-an illusory dream of culture-to such an extent that light and life have 
gone out of architecture, gone out of the building itself and the work that makes the 
building-perhaps for no better reason than because of the superficialities that came over 
to us in early days as culture,  borrowed as they were even then by way of our colonial 
forefathers. I am not one so silly as to suppose that a man of Thomas Jefferson's caliber, 
were he living today, would wear knee breeches, buckles on his shoes, powdered hair, lace 
at throat and wrists, and the other elegancies indulged in by gentlemen of his day. He was 
in advance of the thought of his time. He was leader of his kind in his day. He held in high 
esteem the generous, fine ideal called then, as now, democracy-an ideal that is about as 
far from realization now, as then, probably. Why has that ideal flourished so little here 
among us? Why have we so little of it that even England, from whom we received it as a 
reaction, now has more of it than we? Do we really know why? Can our universities tell 
us-do you imagine? 
Ask them! 

Because of this deadly cultural lag-for that is what all this is and it is precisely what we 
suffer from-we have allowed ourselves to learn nothing of architecture. So-we, at this 
late day, are now where we have to begin at the beginning because the boys whom we sent 
to be cultured as architects were never allowed to begin at the beginning. As though some 
man who wanted to learn to fly had gone to a high precipice to jump off so they went to 
the top of a tall building to jump off. Well-we have had to begin where they fell. 
Now organic architecture has come to you out of your own country by way of the 
circumstances in which our national flag was planted; something natural and genuine out 
of our own ground has come to be in spite of current education and foolish sentimentality. 
It is the new reality-and it is a demand for the finer integrity than business yet knows. 
You may treat it lightly; you may scoff; you may play horse with it if you wish-but it is 
the beginning, the rise of a centerline of true culture for America. 

I am talking of organic architecture for America. But America-I should say-now goes 
quite completely around the world; probably the America to which I refer can be found 
more abroad than found at home. This organic way is the spiritual way of doing things, a 
spirited way of being and doing that is already around the world. Sad to admit, however, 
that if organic architecture is to come home and now live here at home we must import 
what we exported. In this matter of architecture we have been turning to Europe for our 
own export because, it seems, the kind of eclecticism which has flourished so rankly 
among us can only get a genuine architecture that way. I am not reconciled to that. And 
yet I know it to be true. And I know that our learning is such that it can only arrive at the 
benefits which come from any true philosophy of building or being when some hallmark 
from abroad is upon it; Oxford once but Paris now preferred. Any country other than our 
own country might do for us to imitate in this matter of culture. Nothing our own, nothing 
true to ourselves coming from the tall grass out on our great Midwest prairies, could get 
much credence in our very best circles. It had to go abroad for recognition. So, our own 
creative effort in architecture has languished here in America as every great idea has 
languished or died as the price of too much learning where there should be vision. This 
peculiar trait of our kind of learning brings to mind Lieber Meister's [Louis H. Sullivan] 
definition of a highbrow: "a man educated far beyond his capacity." I think that we as a 
nation have now been educated far beyond our capacity; educated out of thinking for 
ourselves; educated away from the things that mean life to the American people. Of 
course, we have unemployment and misery because we have no ideas by way of which to 
utilize our sciences and mechanical inventions; no ideas by way of which we might use 
these newer riches-glass and steel, no honest ideas by way of which these things could 
come into the possession of the life of the American people. No. Our people today, being 
so badly overeducated still lack, most of all, what we properly call "culture." The same 
lack of culture-the cultural lag-is here that exists in Russia today, which does not flatter 
us. Russia-a great nation-ninety-one percent illiterate [and] mostly serfs who had far 
less than nothing, is now free. Eating during their lifetime, out of the hand of a superior 
class-seeing what culture the upper classes had-their tall ceilings, glittering glass 
chandeliers, sensual paintings, statues, with fountains playing on wide terraces: utter 
magnificence-now what? Can you talk to these freed serfs of simplicity? Can you talk to 
them of the things of the spirit and mind? You cannot. They want that which they did not 
have and were subject to when they were slaves-only now they want all of it twice as tall, 
want twice as many glittering chandeliers, more sensuality, more and bigger statues, more 
magnificence, in short. And today, in what we call culture, how much better are we where 
this cultural lag is concerned? May we look down on them do you think? Not while 
Williamsburg is [the] criterion. 

Unfortunately nothing in education today genuinely suffices as a solution for this deadly 
wasteful lag because nothing is being done from the inside out. What have we done with 
our cultural lag? We have had our way or will have it if the education of the corporate, by 
the corporate, for incorporation doesn't loosen up a little; and it still stands: we've got it to 
show for itself in the grandomania of our public buildings, in private palaces in these 
modern equivalents of barons, princes, and dukes, completely commercialized. And this 
deadly lag has not served life well in our case. We are bankrupt, culturally, by way of these 
hangovers from feudal times, impotent by a silly idealism, made ridiculous by a mawkish 
sentimentality that will keep on keeping men from demanding their own. The cultural 
influences in our country are like the floo-floo [sic] bird. I am referring to the peculiar 
and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just 
because it didn't give a darn where it was going but just had to see where it had been. 

Now, in the floo-floo bird you have the true symbol of our government architecture too, 
and in consequence how discredited American culture stands in the present time! All the 
world knows it to be funny except America. What prevented us and still prevents us from 
knowing it? Armchair education, let's say. Now, all this has parallels in history. The 
Romans were just as incognizant as we of the things of the spirit. They, too, had no culture 
of their own. England had none of her own and we, having none, got what we have as 
substitute second, third, or fourth hand from them all. Roman culture, for instance, was 
Greek. The Romans did have, however, great engineers-you have all heard of the 
arch-but what did the Romans do with their greatest invention-the arch? You know well 
enough that for centuries they wasted it by pasting a travesty of Greek tradition over it to 
conceal the truth of structure, until finally, some vulgar Roman, more uncultured than the 
rest, one day got up and said: "Hell! Take it all away! What's the matter with the arch? It's 
a genuine, beautiful and noble thing"-and finally they got it, got the common arch as 
indigenous architecture. We, the modern Romans, probably, are going to get architecture 
something like that the same way. We are going to have a true architecture of 
glass-steel-and the forms that gratify our new sense of space. We are going to have it. 
No colonial Eden is able-long-to say us nay. Culture, given time, will catch up and 
assert itself in spite of reaction-even if asserting itself as reaction itself. This thing which 
we call America, as I have said, goes around the world today. It is chiefly spirit as yet, but 
that spirit is reality. Not by way of government can we find encouragement of any help. 
No, we can have nothing by way of official government until the thing is at least ten years 
in the past. What can government do with an advanced idea? If it is still a controversial 
idea, and any good idea must be so, can government touch it without its eye on at least the 
next election? It cannot. I know of nothing more silly than to expect government to solve 
our advanced problems for us. If we have no ideas, how can government have any? That is 
a sensible question to ask, and the answer is that government as a majority affair can never 
have any. So, I see the tragedy of entrusting to government billions to spend on billions. 
Why should government ever be entrusted to build buildings? Inevitably buildings are for 
tomorrow. That is the last thing government should be expected or allowed to do because 
in entrusting building to government, we must go ten or one-hundred years backward 
instead of ten years ahead into the future. Tragic! But to talk against it is just so much 
water over the dam. The driver may not know where to go but he is in the driver's seat. So 
what? 

Perhaps you feel, as I feel in the circumstances, a burning indignation in my soul when I 
see the desecration everywhere with us in the name of culture and realize it as all our own 
fault. You know something of the degradation of the cultural fabric of your nation when 
you see our billions now being spent to give us human slums taken from the region of the 
body and poverty fixed as an institution in the realm of the American soul. That is what 
most of this so-called "housing" means to me and what it will come to mean to America 
in [the] future. I stand here and challenge our America to reflect that any honest, willing, 
busy workman of today with his family can own no home of his own at all unless by grace 
and beneficence of government. That should make it time to sit up and raise hell with what 
made it that way. At least, so I think and so you would think, if you thought about it at all. 
And I will tell you now that when any man in our nation has the courage to stand up and 
challenge the accustomed and is therefore accused of being a sensationalist do not trust 
that accusation. In the accusation there speaks, usually, the self-styled conservative in our 
country-than which I know of nothing more wearisome as obstruction to growth. By the 
term conservative as in popular use we've come to use it we mean-really, some 
stand-patter or a lid-sitter, some man who having got his, doesn't want and won't have a 
change. But, truly speaking, a conservative is a radical by nature and character. He can be 
nothing else. The word radical means of the root and the word conservative means keeping 
life in the thing conserved-keeping it growing in other words . . . And how can you do 
that unless you know and understand that thing at the beginning-at the root, that is. How 
can you consider yourselves conservative when you do not know that root or when you 
consider that root to be money-and, having made money, are determined by hook or 
crook to hang on to it? No . . . they so-minded have got it all-all wrong. They now 
remind me of the man who got the measure of a door by holding his hands just so wide 
apart. He ran down the street keeping his hands as he had them saying, "Get out de way, 
ev'ybody, I'se got de measure of a do'!" 

Well-yes, the would-be conservative has got the measure of a door-and everybody 
must get out [of] the way as best he can, but he hasn't the actual measure of the door. I 
suppose it is unbecoming, at least ungracious, to talk in this way about the people out of 
whose hands we must all eat as things are with us. I suppose standing here I am biting the 
hand that feeds me. But perhaps less so than any other architect in America. Nevertheless, 
directly or indirectly, we are all eating out of the hand of the man higher up, as he is 
eating out of the hand above him until finally government takes a hand. And we call it a 
system. Well, God knows it is no system. It is an adventitious hangover from feudal 
times-let's face it. If we had allowed ourselves to learn anything of culture or if we had a 
genuine American culture on the way, we would now insist upon a more organic structure 
for our society. 

I am not talking to you like this out of any books at all. I am speaking here as an architect 
who has built more than 200 buildings for his own people, every one of the buildings an 
honest experiment in behalf of the man it was built for-always building, professedly and 
openly, as an experiment. To what end? That I might become famous as an architect? That 
I might make a reputation for myself which I might follow up with profit? No! Not that-I 
persisted with will and patience because there is something compelling in this country and 
it is the people of the country. They are right-minded and sincere-at bottom, patient, 
long-suffering, generous, and wonderful. I love my people as I love architecture. You put 
those two loves together and what will you get? You will get a way of building born that is 
an honest way of building and a more genuine life by way of the building. You will see 
those things we call buildings blossoming into new forms, free patterns for new life, and a 
wider life for all. 

Every decent design for any building should be a design for better living-a better design 
for a richer, fairer way of life instead of being a shallow hangover from feudal times to 
please grandmother. 

Perhaps this is as good a place to stop as any. I've said very little of what I meant to say. 
But I do want to say to you that there was-once upon a time-a great modern who was 
less neglected in his time than he would be were he living among us now-Victor Hugo. 
Victor Hugo had a prophetic mind. He wrote in the great chapter on architecture, which is 
not in most editions of Notre Dame, included in some under the title "The Book Will Kill 
the Edifice," to the effect that late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth 
century architecture would come alive again into the world after having languished and all 
but died for 500 years. I think he based the prophesy on the fact that the nineteenth century 
would have given us the new means, new ways he foresaw as the machine, and that by that 
time-the twentieth century-life would be impassioned again, intolerant of the back drag 
of old unsuitable forms. Now, bearing him out-in the wake of the printing press-came 
mobilization, the motorcar, electrifications. The little village designed for horse and buggy 
or footwork, now gives over to a new scale at least one-hundred times that norm. 
Multiply the normal speed of movement today by God knows what, multiply-say steel 
and glass, the automobile, the radio, electrical communication-and what might we not 
have? And yet today the country is littered with the scaffolding of poles and wires, 
stumpage, dumpage [sic], and ghastly derelicts of all kinds. We might move freely and 
speak to each other a thousand miles away by a little thing fixed in our coat lapel, provided 
patents had not been bought up and suppressed. 

I wanted to put cool [fluorescent] light in my latest building. [I] offered the Johnson Wax 
building for a further experiment to an experiment already used successfully but I found I 
could not have it. General Electric had bought the patent and was not prepared to give it to 
the public for two years-or until the way to commercialize the idea could be economically 
squared. That same thing in more important ways has been going on by utility companies' 
making speculative commodities out of ideas by means of which society lives, moves, and 
has its being-and that way still is the only way our society has of getting these ideas at 
all. In fact, life itself is now a speculative commodity unless one has $2500 a year or more. 
Then how can you still think of this as a free country? Now, what do you, as architects, 
think of all this? 

The only justification I have for being here at all to talk is that I have earnestly tried to do 
something about it myself. The Broadacre City models were one of the things. And for that 
I asked for my country three things-three things I needed for Broadacre City-in order 
that it might go. 

First: Free land to those who could use it. No absentee ownership of land. The land to be 
held by the improvements, not the improvements held by some other holder of the land. 

Second: A free medium of exchange. No monster we call money to go on working while 
we sleep-no more of this thing called money as an accretion, working endlessly for any 
man, good or bad, who gets a little of it, regardless of his contribution to society. 
No-because here again is another speculative commodity so artificially set up that it can 
be thrown behind a vault door and still work for itself. That is wrong. That is a 
monstrosity. 

Third: Let us have done with this making of speculative commodities out of common 
human needs, this patenting and selling of human ideas-the basis of life itself-by way of 
which society lives, loves, and has its being. These three things we should ask, 
we-architects-I am talking as an architect still, and for my country and the people of 
this country-in order that we may live our own lives in deed as well as in theory. As it 
now stands-architects-I ask you to observe-this country of ours does not own its own 
ground, unless the banks and insurance companies that do own it are the country. A nation 
that does not own its own ground has gone far toward extinction as a civilization. We are 
going there too fast now. If that is not food for thought for any architect-if that does not 
start him trying to work something out, I do not know what could. 

All this may sound like socialism, communism, or what not. I am no student of socialism, 
but I am a student of organic; and in searching for it in the bases of our civilization today I 
could not find it. I have read Henry George, Kropotkin, Gesell Prondhon, Marx, Mazzini, 
Whitman, Thoreau, Veblen, and many other advocates of freedom, and most of the things 
that applied in those great minds in the direction of freedom as conditions exist for us 
today point to a great breakdown. Before the long depression we, as architects, did not 
think much of this-but this is no depression. It is certainly a breakdown. One that cannot 
be fixed by tinkering. Any architect speaking with understanding, making things stand up 
by way of the nature of materials and science of structure, his eyes open and on entity, 
must know in head and bones that this is so. Therefore these three freedoms-free land, 
free money, free ideas-we must have or there is no great life to come for this idea we love 
and are proud to call democracy. 

Questions and Answers 

QUESTIONER: Who should design government buildings-private architects or 
government employees? 

WRIGHT: Certainly no government employees because no employee is free to do creative 
work. And I am not so sure about private architects as they stand at present. I think if we 
could forget about official designing, allowing buildings to be built simply, naturally, by 
builders-their hands in the mud of the bricks of which the buildings are made, a lot 
would come out of the ground a little more simply for the honest purposes of 
life-forgetting entirely architecture as we have now come to know it from the books. I 
think something good might then happen. I think we could somehow get many traditions 
off our necks in order that the great traditions might live and we would learn to see that in 
truth the cultural lag persists and obstructs our path by way of too many little traditions 
with no great sense at all of tradition. Then I think what we call great building might live 
again among us. But what hope when building has been turned over lock, stock, and barrel 
to college boys who are now in training to the books? 

QUESTIONER: If private capital will only build for profit and government will not build 
except on the old lines, how shall we hope for change in building conditions? 

WRIGHT: That I leave up to you as it is now squarely up to all of us. 

QUESTIONER: You have made obvious criticism of conditions of today-have you 
anything constructive to offer? 

WRIGHT: I do not think what I have said has reached this gentleman behind the flag of 
December 7, 1887, hanging over the balcony over his head. So I ask you of what use for 
me to come here and speak to him? Perhaps he has not been listening. I have said 
constructive things but there must be a lot of destructive work, much satire before anything 
can be done in America today that is really constructive. I have planted organic buildings 
all around the world-over 200 of them, I said-themselves in the nature of the thing. If 
they mean nothing, then what can I say that would mean anything constructive? 

QUESTIONER: In domestic architecture, what do you say are the trends for small 
families? 

WRIGHT: Building small homes for the small families of little or no means is a very 
definite trend in the life of our country now. And-means or no means-I see that 
everybody is eager for space. The sense of space has become an American characteristic. 
Perhaps the new ideal of freedom we call democracy had something to do with it. We will 
no longer be pigeonholed by way of classic colonialisms or by anything else, I think. My 
prescription for a modern house? One-a good site. Pick that one at the most difficult 
spot-pick a site no one wants-one that has features making for character; trees, 
individuality, a fault of some kind in the Realtor mind. That means getting out of the city. 
Then-standing on that site-look about you so that you see what has charm. What is the 
reason you want to build there? Find out. Then build your house so that you may still look 
from where you stood upon all that charmed you and lose nothing of what you saw before 
the house was built. See that architectural association accentuates character. Now, if you 
want a diagram-just come in sometime! 

QUESTIONER: What do you think of the Jefferson Memorial? 

WRIGHT: Representative [Tom] Amlie asking the question and he knows damn well what 
I think of the memorial but thanks to him for the 
"come on." That belated monstrosity is obviously across the grain of indigenous American 
feeling for architecture. It is the greatest insult yet and pure extravagance as such. 

QUESTIONER: The highest culture has always been achieved by nations which are almost 
on the decline or at least have passed through the many stages of civilization. We are in 
that era now. Do you think we are justified in expecting the architects to do away with the 
culture lag? 

WRIGHT: You can wait for the lag to take itself off if you want to. I am not going to wait! 

29 Building for Local Government: The Marin County Civic Center 

The carelessness with which our people get their buildings built [and] who they will let 
plan them is almost as though anybody that could poke a fire could plan a building. It 
should take the greatest experience that can be had to so plan. The best is none too good! 
And when people choose an architect they ought to prayerfully go at it and if necessary go 
on their hands and knees as far as they could go to get the best there is. . . . 

{The text of Frank Lloyd Wright's public talk before the Marin County Board of 
Supervisors, Marin County, California, is reproduced with minor editing from the public 
record of published minutes of the Marin County Board of Supervisors public meeting on 
July 31, 1957.} 

Introduction 

In late April of 1957 Frank Lloyd Wright was invited to the University of California, 
Berkeley, to give a number of lectures and seminars to architecture students as a guest 
Bernard Maybeck Lecturer. {For the complete text of these lectures see Patrick J. Meehan 
(Editor) The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: John 
Wiley and Sons, 1984, pp. 185-228. These lectures took place on April 24 and 27, 1957.} 
It was during this trip to Berkeley that his creative genius was focused on the design of a 
new government complex for Marin County, California: 

A meeting was arranged with him privately at the Grant Avenue offices of the Frank Lloyd 
Wright Foundation in San Francisco on April 26, 1957 . . . four [Marin County] 
supervisors . . . along with the entire Civic Center Committee met with Frank Lloyd 
Wright and his associate, Aaron Green, that day and heard his lecture in Berkeley that 
night, and the Marinites came away convinced apostles of Louis Sullivan's "Spiritual 
Child." [Mr.] Wright is reported to have said, "So Marin County wants an architect!" . . . 
Wright's suggestion that the building should reflect the personality of the county was the 
magic that settled the issue. Marin County had an architect. {From Evelyn Morris 
Radford, The Genius and the County Building: How Frank Lloyd Wright Came to Marin 
County, California, and Glorified San Rafael, unpublished dissertation submitted to the 
Graduate Division of the University of Hawaii in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies, August 1972, pp. 128-130.} 

On June 27 the Marin County Board of Supervisors voted four to one to open negotiations 
with Mr. Wright for his architectural design services. He arrived in San Francisco on July 
31 and was disappointed when a welcoming committee met him with an automobile for 
his eighteen-mile trip north to San Rafael that Wednesday night. He was reported to have 
commented "I had rather hoped for a helicopter." {"Young at Heart," The Capital Times 
(Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 80, No. 26, August 1, 1957, p. 2.} Mr. Wright was scheduled 
to appear at the San Rafael High School. Regarding his first meeting with the citizenry of 
Marin County, the following has been reported: 

Everybody who was anybody attended. . . . "He talked for one and a half hours. He insulted 
everybody and they ate it up. . . ." After his usual explanation of organic architecture, 
Wright launched into a hefty attack on Realtors as the arch enemies of architecture. Many 
present that night remember the charisma of the man and the hero worship that developed 
from his first visit to Marin. The old Wright devotees and the new converts lined up 
solidly . . . in . . . determined drive for a Wright-designed building. 

But the detractors and dissidents were equally obdurate. A contract with Wright had been 
approved by the [Marin County] Board [of Supervisors] and was to be signed the next day 
[Thursday, August 1, 1957]. Having overheard a conversation . . . concerning the 
possibility of the contract being mislaid . . . [the Chairman] brought his copy to the San 
Rafael meeting with him which was signed by the four Board members present and by Mr. 
Wright in the hallway of the San Rafael High School on their way into the meeting. 

Mr. Wright remained in Marin [County] that night to be present at the formal Board 
meeting the next day in order to answer any questions concerning the contract. {Evelyn 
Morris Radford. The Genius and the County Building, pp. 130-131.} 

On the following Friday, August 2, in a brief but disquieting period at a meeting with the 
Marin County Board of Supervisors, Mr. Wright was accused by an irate citizen of being a 
Communist: 

He [Mr. Wright] walked out of a meeting . . . while the charges were being read. . . . 

"I am what I am", he told the supervisors. "If you don't like it, you can lump it. To hell 
with it all." 

He waved his cane angrily as he paused in his exit and upped with a tag line: 

"This is an absolute and utter insult and I will not be subject to it". . . . 

Two hours after his stormy exit from the courthouse, Wright had cooled sufficiently to sign 
the official contracts retaining him for the civic center project. 

But first, he lunched at the Meadow Club in Fairfax with several county officials and 
played the piano for their entertainment. . . . 

Wright . . . privately, defied anyone to prove he is or ever has been a Communist 
sympathizer. 

"I challenge any one to prove one act or one association of a character that could be called 
subversive," said Wright. "If the kind of belief I have is subversive, then I am the greatest 
subversive in America." {Francis B. O'Gara. "Red Charge Stirs Wright to a Boil," The San 
Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), August 3, 1957, p. 3, columns 1 and 2.} 

Later that same day Mr. Wright and members of the Marin County Board wandered 
through knee-high grass over the 130-acre proposed civic center building site: 

The spry old man explored the terrain with the eagerness of a child at a picnic. 

He ducked between the strands of barbed wire fence and climbed over another one, jumped 
across several ditches and fought his way through knee high grass and thistles. 

Finally, he rendered his appraisal. 

"Splendid," he said. "It's as beautiful as California can have." 

Two 15-year old Santa Venetia girls . . . asked Wright to pose for snapshots. He agreed 
amiably. 

"Are you going to knock down all these hills?" one girl inquired. 

"Not a single hill," said the master architect, now beaming with enthusiasm. 

Some one asked if he planned to make further site inspections before getting to work on 
the plans. Wright evidently considered that something of an insult too. 

"I don't have to drink a tub of dye to know what color it is," he replied. {Ibid.} 

As discussed earlier in the introduction to Chapter 28, Mr. Wright designed at least 
twenty-eight government-related projects, among which the Marin County Civic Center 
Administration Building, Hall of Justice, and Post Office at San Rafael were the grandest. 
Before his death in April 1959 he also designed the (unbuilt) Marin County Amphitheatre 
(1957). Construction of the Marin County Civic Center Administration Building began in 
1960 and was completed in 1962. Ground was broken for Marin County Hall of Justice in 
1967 and the building was occupied in 1969. The complex was located on a tract of 
wooded land in the hills of Marin County. 

This chapter presents the complete text of Mr. Wright's July 31, 1957, talk at the San 
Rafael High School, as recorded in the Marin County public record of minutes from that 
public meeting. In addition to the residents who were in attendance on this historic 
occasion, members of the Marin County Board of Supervisors were Walter Castro, Sr. 
(Chairman), Mrs. Vera Schultz, James Marshall, and William Gnoss. Other Marin County 
public officials were Mrs. Mary Summers (Planning Director), Leon de Lisle (County 
Auditor), Marvin Brigham (Director of Public Works), and Alan Bruce (Deputy County 
Administrator). Architect Henry Schubart, Jr., opened the meeting and introduced Mr. 
Wright to the citizens of Marin County. A short question-and-answer period followed 
his talk. 

The Talk 

HENRY SCHUBART, JR.: I would like to take a very few minutes to try to set the stage 
for tonight's meeting for you, if I may. If you 
[will] put yourselves in the position of being a member of the Board of Supervisors of 
Marin County, I think you will appreciate what a tremendously difficult job they have had 
to do and what enormous responsibility lies on their shoulders in making decisions for 
building and for plans that not only we will enjoy but our children and our children's 
children. I think that we all owe, if I can speak for myself and perhaps for most of you, a 
great debt of gratitude [to them] for having had the courage not to make small plans. We 
have a great tendency these days to do the expedient thing, to do the easy thing, and to 
select ways and means that will perhaps please everybody, and, as a result, in the process 
we often get mediocrity. I think [it was] for this reason that the Board has seen fit to make 
a bold decision to bring to Marin County one of the really great architects of all times. [It] 
is something that, in spite of [the] differences or fears we may have, certainly we must 
realize that they have made a very difficult and a very firm decision. 

All of us have a tendency to think of buildings and civic centers in terms of money [and] 
in terms of time. We want to build it cheaply, we want to build it quickly, and I think it is 
most important that we realize that this civic center is going to be the focus of our political 
and cultural life in this county for many, many years to come. I think for any man-and I 
speak here very personally as an architect-for any man to approach a project of this 
magnitude without fear and without trembling and to be able to bring a very personal and 
a very creative thing to the work he is doing it isn't just business. It isn't just a plan for 
money but it is something which will create a whole aura for our life in the county; and I 
think for such a project we need a very special man and I think perhaps this had 
something to do with the Board's decision. I think we need an innovative [man] and I 
think we need a great creative man and who is very fearless and who has always been. We 
also need an older man, because to plan a structure or group of structures of this 
magnitude requires great wisdom and great foresight and the architect we have with us 
tonight is a man who was able thirty, forty, fifty years ago to build and plan buildings 
which are satisfactory and beautiful and contemporary for our own life today. In 
introducing such a man I would also, especially for those of you who are not architects, try 
to convey to you the stature of this man. I don't want to embarrass Mr. Wright, but I feel 
personally that if I were to introduce a musician to you of the stature of a Bach or a 
scientist of the stature of a Pasteur or a Newton there would be no misunderstanding as to 
the man's stature. We don't have today as great an understanding of the art of architecture 
as we do have of some other fields of endeavor but I want you to know that throughout the 
world Mr. Wright is considered one of the greatest architects of all times. In introducing 
Mr. Wright to you, I would like to ask him to speak to you informally as he always does. 
He is always very much at ease and I would like him to talk to you, if he will, about what a 
civic center is, about what he thinks a civic center is, and what kind of life we may have 
here in Marin County. I think this is probably one of the most important and most honored 
moments as far as I am concerned. I would like to introduce Mr. Wright to you. 

WRIGHT: [Mr. Wright puts his arm around Mr. Schubart] Gentlemen! Gentlemen, little 
Hank has grown up and grown up, how nicely! [Editor's Note: Mr. Schubart was an 
apprentice of Mr. Wright's Taliesin Fellowship from July 1933 to August 1934.] 

Well, here you all are. Here I am. You wouldn't have [had] to go so far for an architect if 
you had waited until winter. I would then have been nearer to you in Arizona. This whole 
country of ours I had to cross today to get here three hours late. Well, here we all are. I feel 
as though I had come here on a mission to save Marin County! Because, as you know, of 
course you must know because most of you have been to school, that you learn nothing 
about architecture really worth knowing in school. And, as a consequence, architecture is 
the blind spot today in our culture as a nation. This is true. Look at our colleges, the 
buildings you went to, your children now go to school in; see the buildings still being built. 
These have little or no sense of architecture. Architecture [is] the cornerstone of any 
culture of our own. 

We will never have a culture of our own until we have an architecture of our own. Now an 
architecture of our own doesn't mean something that is ours by way of our own taste. It is 
something that we have knowledge concerning. We will have it only when we know what 
constitutes a good building and when we know that the good building is not one that hurts 
the landscape but is one that makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before that 
building was built. 

Now, in Marin County you have one of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen. I haven't 
seen Marin County before and I am proud to be here since I am here to help make the 
buildings of this county characteristic of the beauty of the county. 

Now we are going to learn, as we're learning a little I think all through the nation, that 
there is only one thing after all has been said and done that really is the "payoff" and that 
is beauty. If we don't succeed in developing beauty at home, this civilization is just another 
one of those that hasn't mattered much and goes to destruction with nobody's sorrow. The 
atom bomb might as well drop if by building for Marin County we can't show intelligence, 
sympathy, beauty, [and] understanding. I think most of our American towns would be 
beautiful if they had proper know-how; if only they knew how to do the things that all 
would love if their architects were as competent spiritually as they are technically. True 
education should have done that for them. Well, at least by now, this should have been 
done because we are already 165 years old [and it's] high time now that Marin County 
[and] all the other counties realized this. 

I don't think you can expect much from big cities now because they are doomed by excess. 
You see, it is true [that] our modern advantages are made, by them, totally 
disadvantageous so far as our big cities are concerned. Everyone of them is bankrupt-not 
solvent-if over 100,000 population. And a great rush is on just now by its owners to cash 
in before the crash comes. The cities are building broad freeways not for the people to get 
out but to get in, whereas they are only going to be used for the citizens to get out. I think 
getting out is inevitable and has started. I think that in 1921 to 1932 I was modeling this 
escape from the city to the country. And if the country was like Marin County I don't think 
it would be difficult at all to persuade most of the citizens that live in the city now to come 
to Marin County. 

What we now want to do, so I think and I may be wrong, is to get a real poetic expression 
of modern life here. Poetic is a dangerous word to use in this society at the present time 
because we have so far missed the poetic principle. Therein lies everything that endures, 
that comes from the human spirit to us in civilization. Now can we get that spirit into what 
we do to represent Marin County in these buildings that Marin County builds in the 
scheme that Marin County will adopt for its citizenry and its official life? If we do this, 
we'll have done something not only for Marin County but for this whole country. There is 
nothing yet built officially in this whole country that can be pointed to as adequately 
measuring up to these possibilities of our present life and time that hasn't been tainted and 
is soon to be destroyed by this universal traffic problem. 

Now, at present, I happen to be doing a cultural center for the place where civilization was 
invented-that is Iraq. Before Iraq was destroyed it was a beautiful circular city built by 
Harun al Rashid but the Mongols came from the north and practically destroyed it. Now 
what is left of the city has struck oil and they have immense sums of money. They can 
bring back the city of Harun al Rashid today. They are not likely to do it because a lot of 
western architects are in there already building skyscrapers all over the place and they are 
going to meet the destruction that is barging in on all big western cities. So it seems to me 
vital over there to try and make them see how foolish it is to join that western procession. 

I think it would be foolish, too, for Marin County to join that procession or one they will 
find calling itself "civic center" all over the country. Well, what is a civic center? In Marin 
County it would be something commensurate with the beauty of the county-wouldn't it? It 
would be something in harmony with the spirit of the people of the county [and] not 
necessarily displeasing the chief citizens of the county-who probably live in ugly 
buildings themselves-but something far ahead of Marin County at the present time; 
probably more commensurate with the ideas of the young people here. 

I am an architect who believes not implicitly but conservatively in the fresh mind of the 
young. I am for the teenagers. I think the teenager is often reprehensible as he is now seen 
but is so, largely, because the old people are stupid. If they were not, I think we might 
proceed in the direction of a beautiful architecture for a beautiful life with much more 
pleasure and a great deal more unhindered results. So here among you we have a great 
opportunity-I regard it as such. 

I am trying now to bring to Iraq the glory and beauty of that old Sumerian civilization 
which really left to the Greeks very little to do in the fine arts. There they are now in need 
of evidently everything they once had and I am proud to be able to help them get some of it 
back again. But Marin County is no similar case. Marin County has nearly everything that 
Iraq hasn't got-except oil! The county has beauty, whereas the only beauty that Iraq has 
left is the Tigris and the Euphrates-very muddy and the whole place is flat as a pancake. 
If the Iraqi could only see Marin County! I think they would all come over here and settle. 
Now having such beauty as a gift, loving it, I don't know that you have inherited a love for 
it, but have you? How did you all get it? But here it is and you are here and it is all yours to 
make or break. Now what is to be done with you in that connection and how? 

First of all, we've got to agree upon some way to take care of this confounding, insensible, 
immobile automobile. I think nothing is more degrading to the spirit of good design than 
the motorcar of today. I would refuse one as a gift. They tell me it was all done for 
"madam" but I don't believe that. They had to please her, of course, but that doesn't 
account for all this swank and style for a ferryboat instead of an automobile. 
She-madam-may have wanted to look long and stylish and as though designed to fight 
all the other cars behind her in the streets, but. . . . Well, anyway, we have to dispose, first 
of all, of this traffic problem in any planning for a civic center for Marin County. 

You can't dispose of it on any basis that we know anything about at the present time. No, 
you see, a man seated in his car requires today about twenty times [more space], at least, 
[than] anything he did in the foot-and-walker age or the horse-and-buggy era. Now, 
multiply him by twenty times and then consider the area movement to and fro which he 
has had to have in order not to kill his neighbor and the space his neighbor must have not 
to kill him and you will see that nowhere today is there any adequate consideration being 
given to the spacing in the architect's planning that is due to the absolute necessity the 
motorcar forces upon us even as the car exists now. And what you see running along the 
roads almost anywhere around Wisconsin-and I am sure it is the same here as in 
Milwaukee-you see new ones coming in by fives. They don't come in by threes anymore. 
They put five on one truck. And consider now that they are going to multiply three to five 
times in the next three years. So in area what that means is the doom of the big city-the 
city doomed by the machine! Citizens are going to give up their cars or they are going to 
give up the city. They will give up the city because the city doesn't mean much to them 
now when they can get everything they had in the old-time cities and stay right at home. 

The feudal city was built as a cultural necessity not a gregarious animal resource. There 
was then no way of humane culture otherwise. But not so now! Everything is in your own 
hands now. You can be an individual at home or abroad; you can be yourselves. But to be 
so what you need is space-broad spacing on the ground. This old habit of a little lot and a 
little house cheek by jowl with other little houses, each with neighboring elbows in its ribs, 
treading on each other's toes, all the time crowding. Why? Because crowding is so easily 
exploited! Freedom isn't! 

I see here in Marin County this new space opportunity and before you a great chance for 
free open spacing-groundroom. Let us start in with this general idea of a free ground 
plan, taking into account not only conditions as they are at present but looking at least ten 
years ahead. I believe that nobody has [a] right to build anything that he hasn't planned for 
ten years ahead. I have often told my clients when they come in to talk about things at the 
present time that is the way they should begin to plan how they should now be involved. 
Marin County should begin to plan this civic center for at least twenty years ahead because 
Marin County buildings should last about 300 years. 

The carelessness with which our people get their buildings built, who they will let plan 
them, is almost as though anybody that could poke a fire could plan a building. It should 
take the greatest experience that can be had to so plan. The best is none too good! And 
when people choose an architect, they ought to go at it prayerfully and if necessary go on 
their hands and knees as far as they could go to get the best there is because in the realm of 
such planning none is good enough because, as people, we are over technized [sic] and 
deficient in the spirit of architecture. Architecture is the blind spot of our nation. We have 
not grown the right kind of architects yet because their education is not on the side of 
proper growth. It is still cherishing the blind spot in our civilization. Hence the lust for 
ugliness of which [Henry] Mencken speaks. But now here comes a crucial opportunity to 
open the eyes not of Marin County alone but of the country to what officials gathering 
together might themselves do to broaden and beautify human lives, [to] make living 
fascinating, [to] bring to the life of the spirit that they can afford. So I do think that is 
exactly what we should aim to do in planning the scheme of your Marin County Civic 
Center. Your civic center should not have the usual kind of ominous ring. The sound of 
"civic center" now is a little bit like the center of business, you know, that looks as though 
everything was jammed to a concussion; as though everybody was going to get hit or be 
standing in everybody else's way. But let's avoid that kind of too much centering. Let us 
not-meaning expedient-be too practical. Let's be sensible and let's be understanding and 
have appreciation, sensitivity too, for it. You [will] really see the beauty of Marin County. 
You are really going to see the beauty of the buildings we're going to propose to build for 
you in the county. They are going to be built by and for the county landscape and to be 
built by and for you-no less! 

Well, organic architecture is new to you in that interior sense but it is only architecture 
humane; the architecture that is out of nature, for human nature. And that means great 
nature, nature with a capital "N." I guess I use the word nature, as I always have, in rather 
a confusing way because I always put a capital "N" on the word, and why? Because we 
write the word God with a capital "G" don't we? Now Nature is all the body of God we are 
ever going to see! As you study it, instead of looking at it, look into Nature. The reason is 
the why of this or that and by way of such interior Nature study, increase your knowledge 
of what constitutes truth. Do this concerning anything and you will soon find that it's 
Nature is the beauty of it. 

I'm not going to give you too long a lecture on the philosophy of architecture here now. I 
am here, just as one of the family, now that I have signed the contract with you, to try to 
do this thing I have been talking about. you are here now, but, where are we? Well, you are 
entitled to take me apart and find out what it is that I mean. If you don't yet understand 
me, I am happy to answer any questions even from the gallery-even especially from the 
gallery and I suppose the best ones usually come from the gallery, but I don't know. So 
who wants to know what I am able to tell them about what? Son Hank [Schubart] has 
given me a very nice introduction here tonight-please don't let it scare you! 

Now, after all, it's not so much to be [the] greatest architect in the world because there 
aren't great ones left. I never felt particularly flattered by such accusation because I wish 
there were more architects who understood the Nature of organic architecture. It's 
new-not very old yet but the principles are as old as Lao-tse, at least. Jesus was the 
original advocate when He said, "the Kingdom of God is within you"; from there could 
have come this idea of building from the inside out. That is what organic architecture 
is-building the way Nature builds. How does Nature build? Build you, for instance? How 
does she build a tree? How does she do this thing that is so marvelously deep but vague 
and beautiful, so expressive? She always builds from inside outward. Now, somehow or 
other, architecture has got the other way around. Some of this in my own name, too! Yes, 
the other way around. Architects build an outside steel frame structure and fill in the frame 
with glass. The rest of the building comes from outside in. So the old box frame is still 
nineteenth-century architecture. Whereas, now in mid-twentieth century it is the 
interior way of construction that stabilizes all and the walls are merely integuments-thin, 
light, and hang from the interior structure. In other words, organic means a very natural 
simple process. 

The old steel frame matches what we see in Mexico City just now. All of the so-called 
International Style structures have not only crashed the glass panels [but] the steel frames 
have exploded it-sent it flying. The steel frames themselves are twisted and wrecked. 
Conclusive enough evidence that when building, if you want to meet earthquakes, you 
cannot start from the outside and go inward but must start from the inside and go outward. 
Well, here at least you will have in Marin County what you'll safely call earthquakeproof 
buildings. I don't know that it is very important here, but [it's] a good thing to have. 

Is there anybody who really has an idea about what particular character this group of 
buildings for you should have? Because [it has] to be something altogether, a unit. You 
can't just build one building here and another building there and another one over there 
without reference to a great coherent scheme for the whole-a scheme, in itself like 
anything organic in Nature, coordinate. That scheme coordinate is what you expect from 
me. I hope. I know, in conceiving this, it would be greatly helpful to me to know if any of 
you have some particular feeling about what buildings or any particular building. I think 
my audience [is] not very articulate tonight! 


Introduction 

On Wednesday, May 27, 1953, in New York, the National Institute of Arts and Letters 
awarded their coveted Gold Medal for Architecture to Frank Lloyd Wright at their annual 
ceremonial with the affiliated American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ten days before 
delivery of his acceptance speech on Sunday, May 17, Mr. Wright received national 
attention when he appeared in conversation with Hugh Downs on the nationally televised, 
now famous NBC program, Wisdom: A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright discussion 
of this broadcast and its complete text see Patrick J. Meehan (Editor) The Master 
Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 
1984, pp. 31-56.] 

The Gold Medal award of the Institute that time, made twice annually for achievements in 
two different branches of the arts and had also been given for sculpture, music, history, 
biography, poetry, drama, and essays. Paul Manship, a sculptor and president of the 
Academy, presided over the presentation of Mr. Wright's medal. The actual award, 
however, was made by Ralph Walker, an architect and vice-President of the Institute. Mr. 
Wright was elected to the Institute in 1947 and to the Academy in 1951. In conjunction 
with the presentation of this award a small exhibition of his work was mounted in the 
gallery of the Institute. This chapter contains the text of Ralph Walker's presentation of the 
medal and Mr. Wright's short acceptance speech. 

The Presentation of the Gold Medal 

RALPH WALKER: Frank Lloyd Wright, you are part and parcel of the wonder-making 
pioneer spirit of our people. It is difficult to say something new about you, for in your long 
eventful life you have been called many things: a Prometheus bringing the stirring flame 
of a new architecture, a Moses leading an eclectic benighted into the Promised Land of 
organic creation, and long since as a prophet well honored in his own country. Certainly 
you are not a shy cowslip to be gathered casually on a lower pasture in Wisconsin; nor 
have you been a recluse cloistered in a garden high on Taliesin; on the contrary, you have 
built not one but many Emersonian mousetraps and the world has enthusiastically beaten a 
well worn and widening path in merited appreciation. This honor about to be given you is 
just another leaf added to an already glowing laurel chaplet and will render but a further 
luster to a brow that was never bowed. 

A true pioneer, you early set a course from which you have never swerved and along which 
as an octogenarian you still walk with the will and directness of youth. Your works, your 
thoughts ever soar above pedestrian paths. A blithe spirit,-with more Puck than of 
Ariel,-you design your buildings as if they were to take their place in a happier 
world-one of light, of grace, of gaiety-and for human beings who are not burdened with 
fear, for humans who live in a world where what seems possible is actually so, and where 
the pioneer concept of democracy seems a reality. All your life you have denied the 
minimum and have reached for the stars; a free man in a free land, you have asked a drab 
society to compromise with you on the basis of your ideals. 

You have created an architecture in which you have been thoughtfully aware of the 
powerful forces implicated in the new inventions, and though philosophically concerned 
with the machine you have never held that it should merely and heedlessly produce more 
machines or more machinelike objects, but that it should be used to make a world in which 
function may be controlled so as to emancipate enslaving form; and to increase the 
possibilities for new founded cities whose broad acres, as green as those beside the still 
waters, will furnish that beauty of life for which man has ever sought. In a world in which 
the architect is increasingly asked to sing in a guttural and meager Esperanto your voice is 
as warm and as native as Oh! Susanna. The National Institute of Arts and Letters here 
honors an American whose creative forces illustrate the anticipations of another great 
pioneer, Walt Whitman: 

I swear to you the architects will appear without fail, 

I announce them and lead them. 

I swear they will understand you and justify you. 

The Acceptance Speech 

WRIGHT: I had no idea how outrageously inadequate this introduction by Ralph Walker 
would be. Couldn't you do better than that? 

You see it is not so easy. I myself wrote something for this occasion and came to feel that 
it was so wretchedly inadequate also that I abandoned it and decided to say very little, if 
anything. 

As these honors have descended upon me one by one, somehow I expected each honor 
would add a certain luster, a certain brightness to the psyche which is mine. On the 
contrary, a shadow seems to fall with each one. I think it casts a shadow on my native 
arrogance, and for a moment I feel coming on this disease which is recommended so 
highly, of humility. So if this is to keep up, I am afraid that I am going to lose my 
usefulness to myself. 

However, it is a very happy occasion for me to be welcomed at home-a home boy come 
back-you know, when [a] home boy makes good there is nothing quite so good, is there? 

Perhaps, after all, there is something in an organic architecture that eventually will be 
understood, and all I have to say to you here today is simply this: of course the old Greek 
abstraction by way of our aesthetes, by way of aestheticism, by way of aesthetics has robbed 
us not only of an architecture but of all the things that go with it-all the things that 
should go with modern art. So let me say that if we are to have an architecture of our own 
that will be the basis of a culture of our own-if we ever have one-it will be based upon a 
sound philosophy. What we need now is that new philosophy. 

Now, the philosophy of democracy is a search for truth and aestheticism is a matter of 
taste; it is a matter of seeing and feeling what you like as you like it. But we know very 
little; we know nothing of the fundamentals underlying this thing that we call architecture, 
the true basis of culture. A civilization we have. It is a way of life, and that is all it is. But 
a culture would be a way of making, ways of making that life beautiful, and we have not 
begun upon it. We live in an incongruity and an inconsistency that is positively disgraceful 
and I think it is not too much to endorse that saying of the English poet: "Where every 
man . . ." what is it?" 

Where every prospect pleases And only man is vile. 

That is the office of architecture and of the architect. He is a poet-artists are poets or they 
are nothing, and it is poetry that is not valued as highly now as it should be. To say that 
you are a poet is to confess a certain measure of weakness, isn't it? To say that you are a 
poet and to lay claim to being a poet puts you rather in the backyard and out of things and 
the procession goes on without you. Now, we know that is wrong and we are not doing 
anything about it. 

And here I, among my fellows today, ask their cooperation to set aside for some years to 
come the aesthetic and to try and think a little deeper and get our feet down on the ground, 
on something that we really can feel is the truth. 

18 The Frank P. Brown Medal of the Franklin Institute 

Now I believe architecture to be the humanizing of building. The more humane, the more 
rich and significant, inviting, and charming your architecture becomes, the more truly is it 
the great basis of a true culture. Unless it is true architecture in this sense, the less it's 
architecture at all. 

{Text of the presentation and acceptance speech reprinted from "Presentation of the Frank 
P. Brown Medal," Journal of The Franklin Institute, Vol. CCLVII, September 1954, pp. 
217-218, and Frank Lloyd Wright's "American Architecture," Journal of The Franklin 
Institute, Vol. CCLVII, September 1954, pp. 219-224, by permission of the Journal of the 
Franklin Institute.} 

Introduction 

Frank Lloyd Wright was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal of The Franklin Institute of 
the State of Pennsylvania on Wednesday, October 
21, 1953; the medal was presented officially at the Institute's lecture hall in Philadelphia 
on Friday, June 4, 1954. Several days earlier, on Thursday, May 27, Mr. Wright addressed 
the Detroit Chapter of the American Institute of Architects on the subject of architecture in 
a democracy [see Chapter 25]. 

During his visit to Philadelphia, Mr. Wright also planned several meetings with Rabbi 
Mortimer J. Cohen and other members of the congregation of the Beth Shalom Synagogue. 
The purpose of these meetings was to discuss his proposals and plans for their new temple 
at Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, designed earlier in the year. The following is a brief account 
of Mr. Wright's arrival on June 4th to receive the Medal from The Franklin Institute: 

Finally, the great day arrived [i.e., June 4, 1954]. Dressed for the reception and dinner at 
the Franklin Institute, the Cohens arrived to escort [Mr.] Wright from the Barclay [Hotel]. 
. . . When they called the Wright suite they discovered that the guest of honor had arrived 
safely, registered, and settled in but in the meantime had also disappeared. Where was he? 
Remembering that despite his energy and vitality [Mr.] Wright was a man in his eighties, 
the Cohens worried that some accident had befallen him. None of his entourage seemed to 
know what had happened to him. He had departed the hotel. Within the hour he was due 
at the Institute reception. As . . . the Cohens waited in the [hotel] lobby, consumed with 
anxiety, a taxi pulled up to the entrance of the hotel and the unmistakable figure of the 
architect emerged.{Extracted from Patricia Talbot Davis' Together They Built a Mountain, 
Lititz, Pennsylvania: Sutter House, 1974, p. 55.} 

Mr. Wright had left the hotel to visit Oskar Stonorov, another Philadelphia architect, but 
he returned in time to receive the medal and address the awaiting audience. 

The Frank P. Brown Medal was awarded to Mr. Wright for his extensive contributions to 
the field of architecture. It was founded by the Institute in 1938 and was awarded to 
inventors for discoveries and inventions that involved meritorious improvements in the 
building and allied industries. 

The Presentation 

S. WYMAN ROLPH (President of the Institute): Ladies and gentlemen, we will now hear 
from Mr. Coleman Sellers, a member of the Science and Arts Committee, who will tell us 
why the Frank P. Brown Medal should be awarded to our distinguished guest Mr. Wright. 
Mr. Sellers-

COLEMAN SELLERS: Mr. President, I present Frank Lloyd Wright for an award. Our 
candidate is without question the dean of American architecture. His influence on the 
architectural thought of our times has been great and far-reaching, both in this country 
and abroad. His career is unmatched, extending over a period of sixty years and still going 
on. Mr. Wright has always insisted on a return to true basic architectural principles. In 
that sense he is a true traditionalist. He has consistently hewed to his own line and refused 
to be submerged by the architectural trends of the times. Our candidate has shown 
remarkable foresight, imagination, and a brilliant romanticism of his own. He has always 
contributed the sensitivity of an artist to the architectural problems that he solved. In 
addition, he has always had a strong idea of what the technological advancements of our 
times have meant to architecture and he has used, with great discernment, the many new 
inventions available in the field. 

The work of Mr. Wright is probably most generally known by his homes. He has designed 
buildings, however, of all types, including commercial, industrial, and civic. All have 
shown great originality. For instance, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, [New York], built in 
the nineties, a contemporary of the Flatiron Building in New York, had many advanced 
features for that time. In the first place, it contrasted sharply with the architecture of that 
period, which was tending more and more to elaboration. This office building was 
designed in the terms of straight lines and flat planes. The heart of the building was the 
many-galleried court, lighted from above and from windows on the sides that were sealed 
from dirt and noise of the nearby railroad yard. The furnishings and filing systems were 
built in of steel. This building had many firsts: the first metal furniture made in the United 
States, the first air-conditioned office building, the first use of magnesite as architectural 
material, the first metal-bound, plate-glass doors and windows, and so forth. 

Unity Temple, built in 1905, in Oak Park, [Illinois], was a Unitarian Church which was 
quite remarkable. Both outwardly and inwardly it went entirely contrary to anything ever 
constructed. Mr. Wright provided a quiet, simple, well lighted room, which gave the effect 
of a happy cloudless day as he predicted. This building was the first concrete monolith in 
the world. That is, it was the first building designed for and completed in the wooden 
forms into which the concrete was poured. Walls, roof, and floor were all made of this 
comparatively new building material. 

One of Mr. Wright's most famous buildings is the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. It was built to 
withstand earthquakes and went through the terrible quake of 1923 unscathed while 
practically all of Tokyo was in ruins. This was no mere chance, for the architect studied 
his problem most thoroughly and decided he would not fight the earthquake but make his 
building so that it could ride out the waves of the earth which he found were produced 
during quakes. Test borings showed him there were eight feet of topsoil resting on sixty to 
seventy feet of liquid mud. By carefully making concrete test piles and loading them with 
pig iron, he determined how much load they would support in various locations. The entire 
hotel was then designed on supporting piles about eight feet long. 

Mr. Wright has been the recipient of many honors and medals. Among these are the 
highest awards of such organizations as the American Institute of Architects and the Royal 
Institute of British Architects. He has had similar awards from a dozen different countries. 
I take great pleasure in presenting Frank Lloyd Wright, of Taliesin, Wisconsin, as a 
candidate for the Frank P. Brown Medal, in consideration of his very extensive 
contributions to the entire field of architecture over a period of more than half a century, 
by means of countless and varied buildings, by reason of his many writings and lectures, 
and through his Fellowship at Taliesin, Wisconsin. 

ROLPH: Mr. Wright, on behalf of The Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania, I 
present to you this Frank P. Brown Medal . . . 
WRIGHT: [holding the medal up] So you can all see it. 

ROLPH: . . . and this certificate goes with the medal and the report which also 
accompanies the medal. 

WRIGHT: What is this for? 

ROLPH: We are very happy to make this award to you, sir, for the reasons which Mr. 
Sellers has given to us. 

WRIGHT: A very fine medal indeed, Mr. Rolph! 

ROLPH: Now we hope, Mr. Wright, that this fine unusual audience which expresses its 
admiration for you . . . 

WRIGHT: Extraordinarily intelligent! 

ROLPH: . . . will have the pleasure of hearing more of your wit and wisdom, sir. 

WRIGHT: I don't know about the wisdom and I'm never sure of the wit! 

The Acceptance Speech 

WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a serious occasion. I was blamed for recently 
accepting, with lightness, and, I thought, some grace-a similar honor from the American 
Institute of Arts and Letters [see Chapter 17]. The comment upon the reception of the 
medal at that time was that mine was a cranky and cocky acceptance. I am not cranky now 
and I am not cocky. I am seriously gratified to have science thus recognize one in the field 
of art, which is, after all, rather low down at this time in the history of our world. So, I am 
glad to find myself here, a mere artist, in the presence of all that America knows anything 
about in the way of progress-in culture or anything else-and that is to say, science. You 
know very well, just as I know from a lot of experience during sixty years past, that science 
has given us all a magnificent toolbox full of splendid tools that we don't yet know how to 
use. Now, it is true that if we are ever going to learn how to use them it isn't going to be 
science that is going to teach us. At least, we are beginning to wake up to that fact and I 
suppose that here tonight an artist among scientists is something like a lady among 
lions-or is it a lion among ladies?; anyway, a terrible thing; I think I should owe what I 
do owe of distinction on this occasion to the fact that science is here awarding the medal to 
an artist. So I accept this token of honor in that unique spirit because I believe it is-it 
must be-unique. 

A civilization, ladies and gentlemen, what is a civilization? There have been so very many 
but where are they all now? You see-a civilization is only a way of life-that's all it is. 
And you'll have to forgive me for now reminding you of the fact that that's all we have-a 
way of life. A true culture would be one where religion and art come in together, hand in 
hand-as they must. It is the way of making that way of life a beautiful way of life. Have 
we begun on it? Look about you. It isn't necessary to point out our buildings, they are 
growing more and more negative and desolate and inhuman. What have we emphasized as 
the beautiful in our way of life? What have we in it all that we can point to with pride as 
an awakening of an indigenous culture of our own? Now-as I am-wouldn't you too be 
put to it to answer? You wouldn't say painting, would you? 

You see in me one of the few gray heads you'll see today that ever had the benefit of 
Froebel's wisdom when he was a youngster of six, seven, etc. Now it was Froebel's idea 
that no child should be allowed to draw directly from nature until he had mastered the 
rudimentary forms and elements of the various elemental forms in nature: the square, the 
triangle, the spheres, the circle, all forms that are basic to nature-primitive. Here is the 
square-symbol of integrity, the triangle-symbol of aspiration, the sphere or the 
circle-infinity-all forms in one dimension, the flat dimension. Then the forms go into 
the third dimension. Out of the circle you get the sphere; out of the square you get the 
cube; out of the triangle comes the tetrahedron. Well, that significance is merely a little 
indication of their importance in creation. We haven't time to talk much about this thing, 
but I've touched upon it to show how the elemental basis of thought in creative architecture 
goes back to these primary things, primarily. As a result, when I learned these things 
thoroughly, I didn't care to draw from nature, or to boondoggle with the surface-effects of 
anything at all. I wanted to combine, construct, to build, to create with these simple 
elements, and I believe that's where creation must begin in education. 

I cannot believe that you can make an artist creative the same way that you make a 
scientist or a businessman. I do not think that we as a people-I won't say as a culture but 
as a way of life-understand the difference between the artist and the scientist or art and 
science. Radically, they occupy different worlds at the present time, as always. But some 
day the synthesis will be made between them; and I believe that synthesis is one thing a 
great institute like this should be busy with and might accomplish. Perhaps, beyond any 
other thing that synthesis would be the missing synthesis. Standing before you here tonight 
speaking to you in this scientists' hall from this scientists' rostrum, that is one of the 
hopeful signs I can be cheered by, this evidence that science is awakening to the fact that 
although it can take things apart it can never put them together again without the creative 
artist. Now the more you think about it the more you'll see that in that missing synthesis is 
where our civilization is today. We worship this god science and not with un-reason. But 
with un-reason we have neglected art and religion, those two essentials which always 
have and always will constitute the soul of a civilization. Now, a scientist does not know 
how to draw the line between the curious and the beautiful. That's where your creative 
artist comes in and that's where our culture as a nation must come in when we really have 
one. Until we as a nation know how to draw that line between what is merely curious and 
what is truly beautiful we haven't a culture of our own and without that discrimination 
you're not cultured beings yourselves. 

It matters little how much education you've received in the backward and forward of our 
times or how much you may have been conditioned by favorable or unfavorable conditions 
or by the accepted educational conditioning of the mind; you are ignorant of that essence 
which is the only thing which can save a civilization as a culture for the future-if it is 
unknown to you. These are strong words, I suppose. You haven't heard them often. Why? 
You haven't heard them because all the education you know and all the educational 
systems established in our country today are based upon some scientific thesis of this or 
that and expounded by talk by men largely themselves-shall I say-mere scientists? 

We have largely imported the German ways of thought. The German idea of living things 
is essentially scientific, seldom or never deeply artistic; never can be creative in artistic 
sense because the German self wasn't born that way-Goethe and Beethoven excepted. Nor 
the English. But we Americans were born in so many different ways. All the ways there 
are. We are a mongrel civilization. Aren't we? There is no definite trend of thought which 
we have inherited outside the British and-God help us all-all we ever got from the 
British was the British dormitory town; we call it Old Colonial. No, we didn't get the 
beautiful old England. For instance, we didn't get the best of what England got from 
France-much of it. The Old Colonial, of course, we did get from England. Where did 
England get it? From France. And where did France get it? From Italy. Music still speak 
Italian. What is the Italian word chiaroscuro-painting speaks it. You know that it was 
Italian? So it goes. There was the great Dante, the great liberator of what we call literature. 
He, too, was Italian, wasn't he? Well, also from Italy, from the Italians came the soul this 
art we call "architecture" ever has had. 

Now it is the greatest of tragedies 500 years old now, at least, that the Italians thought art 
could be restated in the old Greek terms and then got what they called the Renaissance and 
we got this rebirth from them. If you go to Europe with love in your heart now, you'll see 
how all the great thought and feeling of the Middle Ages recorded there in stone, brick, 
and mortar was desecrated, yes demoralized by the academic sense of the old pictures 
made by Greek architecture made new. That, too, is when the painter first came in to curse 
architecture wherefrom we got the idea that a painter could see a building. He really 
cannot. Much less can he do one. But then and there Michelangelo gave us the symbol of 
authority-the dome in air on posts-then in common with other nations, we have 
adopted, which is, of course, completely bogus from any structural point of view-or 
standpoint with integrity; utterly phony-an arch up in the air on columns, on posts, a very 
fancy picture but nonsensical construction. Yet an anachronism became the symbol of 
authority for the whole world. And you can see how little organic thinking and how little 
deep feeling has gone into this matter of building if it is to be a quality in the life 
inhabiting that building. We might call that quality integrity? Now, it is that simple 
integrity that's lacking in our lives today-integrity and soul-no depth of feeling. 

We have developed insensate voracity by way of speed to a point dangerous to the future of 
our civilizations, such as it is. Science has aided and abetted the circumstance without 
conscience. By way of science we have all the means of rapacity, speed, and destruction. 
Where is salvation coming from? 

Well, we must again have recourse to those things of the spirit which have always borne 
the name art and religion. The two are as one. They work together or we cease to work at 
all, as a culture. No future. As a civilization-pretty close to the end. 

Now, who built the first city? I myself have just learned from Rabbi Cohen today. How 
many of you know who was the originator of what we call the modern city? Ladies and 
gentlemen, please speak up! Do you know? I didn't know. It was Cain, the murderer of his 
brother. He built the first city. He was the author of urbanism. In urbanism isn't Cain still 
murdering his brother? Who then is going to do something about that? Science? No. 
Science can keep on building these great inimical blocks of nonentity, these great 
negations of the richness and the joy of the humane life of the American individual; these 
great masses of what? They are built by the insurance companies of America-bless your 
money. The people's savings are entrusted to these merciless magnates, "safely" spent to be 
paid back in time of need. That's why I never would take out a dollar's worth of insurance! 
And do you know-sotto voce-I recommend to you the same thing. If that's the best 
insurance companies can do with money, then let's put an end to so-called insurance and 
pay for our own impotence or carelessness in our own way-every man responsible for his 
own mistakes and he be the profiteer of his own virtues. I'm just paying now for one of 
mine. 

Last spring I started a dried-grass fire at Taliesin with only one of my boys in sight. We 
hadn't yet opened the buildings. Suddenly-the wind changed and blew the well meant 
grass fire up against the building. We lost our theater. We also lost ten rooms and lost our 
dining room. There was not a dollar of insurance. But we are gradually making it much 
better now. The neighbors came, enjoyed the scene; they all came and sat on the grass and 
watched it-as they might-with pleasure? It wasn't costing them anything. There was no 
insurance. 

Pardon this poignant-perhaps pointless-digression. The point I came here to make to 
you tonight concerned science versus art. Until we-the people-make the needed 
synthesis between them and these two become as one-yes-until the religionist and the 
artist and the scientist can stand up, understanding each other to work together, the one 
unwilling to proceed without the other, then only will we have a culture worthy the name. 
Then only will we be somebody in our own right. We will not then be political in the 
nonsensical sense that we are now political-I'm from Wisconsin. So I think that the 
situation in which our America finds itself at the present time, though bad enough 
architecturally, bad enough artistically, is politically a profanity. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is a serious occasion. Here you come upon matter more 
serious than you may imagine. Here you really have come to put your own finger upon the 
center of our fault and upon the very center, too, of our hope. Because we do have hope in 
this nation today, although our hope has been superficially assumed and often mistaken, 
too often run off as some fashion in this or that direction or run off as a silly faction in that 
or another direction-still-I say, we do have the centerline of a true democratic culture in 
what is properly called organic architecture. That philosophy is something you may now 
learn to know. 

You have seen what is now called modern architecture. That is merely contemporary. It 
isn't truly modern, that is to say most of it isn't; very little of it is truly modern. Most of it 
is merely contemporary along the lines of prevalent fashion. Most of it, too, is going to 
disappear and be hateful tomorrow, generally speaking-even the better class of residence 
made in that vein is already hateful as those red groups of prison buildings in New York 
City, Los Angeles-I guess you've got them in Philadelphia, too-or soon will have them 
if you buy insurance. Hateful as they are and inhumane. 

Now I believe architecture to be the humanizing of building. The more humane, the rich 
and more significant, inviting, and charming your architecture becomes, the more truly is 
it the great basis of a true culture. Unless it is true architecture in this sense, the less it's 
architecture at all. May I ask you what those qualities in a building are that make that 
quality of humanity a possibility or probability? Certainly it would have nothing in 
common with what we call "housing," would it? It certainly would have nothing in 
common with anything we could properly call a "style." The Colonial style, of course, is 
not really a style, but it was colonial. Truth to say, it was Italian architecture Frenchified 
by English adoption and came over in the Mayflower to our shores. We got it as 
inheritance. So far, so good. Why not? We had no culture of our own whatsoever. It was 
the best thing we could get, probably, certainly the best thing we could do at the time. But 
why now? As a prosperous nation we have been "in business" some 160 years; isn't it time 
we got something finer, deeper, more characteristic, more truly democratic than the 
hangover of an old aristocracy? America must build and democracy must build if America 
builds. 

Now democracy has already started building. An organic architecture is ours. If you'll take 
time to study the centerline of the philosophy of an organic architecture, you will find 
you've got the centerline of the democratic faith and spirit of this nation. See how many of 
you know it already. But you are going to know more of it and you're going to know it 
soon. Knowledge of its principles must break into the ranks of education-somehow, 
somewhere. Now this may not be in our great universities. It may be that we'll have to take 
architecture away from the universities, even take it away from the professional architects, 
and turn it over to boys that really know how to build something-the contractors? Then 
God help architecture! 

Well, ladies and gentlemen of Philadelphia, I am extremely gratified-I was about to say 
honored but that word is of dubious origin. I won't use it. As an artist, I am pleased by this 
token of esteem by way of science. As an architect, I want to raise my hand to salute the 
memory of a great man-Benjamin Franklin! 

19 To the Students of London's Architectural Association 

In the giving of prizes it is just as it is in any competition. First of all, the judges are 
selected from amongst those . . . who . 
. . can agree so that you get the average of an average, and then they always go through 
them and throw out the best ones and the worst ones, and then they get together and 
average upon the average, so that the prize or the result of the competition is an average of 
an average of averages. 

{Section I of this chapter was edited and reproduced from "Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright at the 
AA," The Architectural Association Journal (London), Vol. 54, May 1939, pp. 268-269. 
Section II of this chapter was edited and reproduced from "Dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Frank 
Lloyd Wright," The Architectural Association Journal (London), Vol. 66, 
August/September 1950, pp. 44-46. Section III of this chapter was edited and reproduced 
from "Annual Prize-Giving: Presentations by Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright," The 
Architectural Association Journal (London), Vol. 66, August/September 1950, pp. 32-37. 
Reproduced by permission of The Architectural Association of London.} 

Introduction 

Frank Lloyd Wright visited London's Architectural Association (AA) in 1939 and again in 
1950. During these visits his talks with the students and faculty of the institution were 
recorded. Section I of this chapter presents his 1939 talk to the AA and Sections II and III 
contain two talks given in 1950, at which time he was to assist in awarding prizes to the 
architectural students as part of their annual prize giving. 

In 1939 Mr. Wright was able to visit the AA in conjunction with the Watson Lectures, a 
now famous series given at the Royal Institute of British Architects on May 2, 4, 9, and 11, 
1939, in London, at the invitation of the Sulgrave Manor Board. {These famous lectures 
have been published as Frank Lloyd Wright's An Organic Architecture: The Architecture 
of Democracy, London: Lund Humphries and Co., 1939, 1941, 1970, and later republished 
by The MIT Press at Cambridge in 1970.} The council of the AA invited Mr. Wright to be 
present at their general meeting on Tuesday, May 2, 1939, and to be the guest of the 
principal, staff, and students at a luncheon on Thursday, May 4. On that morning Mr. 
Wright showed a color motion picture film of his work to an interested AA school 
audience. After the lunch on May 4, Mr. Wright visited the school studios and later 
addressed the students. The complete text of this address is contained in Section I of this 
chapter. 
Mr. Wright returned to London to meet with the AA in the early part of July 1950 and to 
present prizes to students on the annual prize day of the AA School of Architecture. 
During this visit he spoke at a dinner in his honor on Friday, July 7; the text of this dinner 
talk appears in Section II of this chapter. He spoke again on Friday afternoon, July 14, 
under a large marquee in Bedford Square, London; the text of this presentation speech to 
the prize-winning students is reproduced in Section III of this chapter. {In addition to the 
reproduction of this speech in The Architectural Association Journal (Vol. 66, 
August/September 1950, pp. 32-37), the text has also appeared as "AA: Frank Lloyd 
Wright," The Architect's Journal (England), Vol. 112, July 27, 1950, pp. 86-87, as 
"Frank Lloyd Wright Addresses the Students of the Architectural Association," 
Architectural Design, Vol. 20, August 1950, pp. 219 and 232, and as "AA 125 Echoes 
from the Past: Frank Lloyd Wright-The Annual Distribution of Prizes-1950," 
Architectural Association Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, January/March 1973, pp. 46-47.} 

Reflecting on Mr. Wright's 1950 visit to the AA, Robert Furneaux Jordan (one of the hosts 
on that occasion) made the following statement shortly after Mr. Wright's departure: 
{Edited and excerpted from Robert Furneaux Jordan's "A Great Architect's Visit to 
Britain: Robert Furneaux Jordan on Frank Lloyd Wright," The Listener (London), Vol. 
XLIV, September 28, 1950, pp. A15-A16. Portions of this article also appeared later as 
"Lloyd Wright in Britain: Mr. R. Furneaux Jordan's Radio Talk," Builder: An Illustrated 
Weekly Magazine for the Architect (England), Vol. 179, No. 5653, November 24, 1950, p. 
540. Both articles cited here were transcribed from the BBC radio program titled Third 
Programme, broadcast on September 21, 1950. Text reprinted here by permission of Mrs. 
Robert Furneaux Jordan.} 

I think his visit was a symbol; he came perhaps because in the first half of this century 
he-in his way-went through just the same sort of fight with men and traditions that the 
young architects of today will-in their way-have to go through in the next half century. 
It will of course be a very far cry from the London of, say, 1990 to the Chicago of 1890; 
the conditions will be vastly different socially and technically, but it is evident that if a 
new visual and physical environment is to be created in our cities that the same old battle 
against obscurantism, philistinism, commercialism and academicism will have to be 
fought all over again. 

It is true that we, at the AA School, invited Frank Lloyd Wright to England for the same 
reason as one might have invited, say, William Morris (had he been alive)-not only for 
what he had done but for what he had stood for. In the end, however, it will be the charm 
and the kindness that remain as a memory. Interwoven with the charm, or perhaps they 
are really the ingredients, are other qualities-an insatiable curiosity, an incredible vitality 
and an altogether delightful vanity. From the moment of his arrival in this country there 
was nothing about people or agriculture or the economic system about which he did not 
want to know the answer. Of the Queen Elizabeth and its human cargo he held, on the 
whole, a poor view (as any man is entitled to do), and of the customs shed, its construction 
and organization his critical eye missed nothing. On the road from Southampton he noted 
the material of every cottage, the species of every cow and every piece of woodland, and 
then-at the end of a long day-he pushed all the furniture around to his better liking. 

His vanity might take some such innocent form as setting off to St. James' Street to buy top 
hats-in the plural. On the other hand, the experience of a lifetime was reflected in the 
self-assurance with which for two hours he gave the Chief Architect to the LCC a 
criticism of the Royal Festival Hall. He did not want to climb ladders, the drawings and 
models were good enough: "My boy, I can tell from those drawings what your building is 
like to the last gnat's heel." And at one point someone said, "So you fear, Mr. Wright, that 
we might get a little too much reverberation," he replied, "Fear! I don't fear, I know. I'm 
telling you. Sullivan and I built twenty-six concert halls and I know." In spite of his 
criticism, at the end came the smile and he asked for a box on the opening night of what, 
he admitted, would be a very great building. But he told me afterwards that criticism, a 
detailed technical analysis of a great building, had tired him more than anything else on 
his visit. 

With his Wisconsin and Arizona background it was difficult to make him realize fully the 
physical planning problems created by a population of fifty million in this small 
industrialized island. Finally, however, one did maneuver him in front of the great wall 
map of Greater London at the County Hall: "My God!" he said, "My God! What a 
morass!" 

It is in the potentialities of bare wood, of granite and stone, of the Japanese way of 
extending house into garden, of the vast open hearth, of the organic linking of building 
and site or in such romantic conceptions as the translucent canvas roofing of the Arizona 
studios that he has found his main inspiration. It is this feeling for the organic and the 
romantic, I think, that explains his ecstatic response to the English Cotswolds. This was 
certainly not just the response of the American tourist to bogus Tudor, it was the stone 
walls of the sheeplands [sic], the barns, the simpler cottages and smallest churches that 
excited him-these and the humanized English landscape. 
His dislike of the Renaissance sometimes led him to extremes; his comment while dining 
in the Goldsmiths Hall in the City-with its Corinthian columns, gilded ceiling and glass 
chandelier-"I acknowledge the dignity of this hall, but I deny that it has a soul"-fair 
comment, perhaps, but the slightest classical twirl on an Elizabethan doorway would also 
bring down fulminations upon foreign intrusions. He never saw that there was an 
Anglicized Renaissance no less native to us than the barn roof. I once said to him that 
Shakespeare, whom he loves, was part of that Renaissance, but his only comment was 
"Almost." 

However, his incurable romanticism, his love of the vernacular, the native and the organic 
must not be confused with any sham antiquarianism. In a Cotswold valley, he saw one of 
the loveliest of the smaller early manor houses together with the collections that may one 
day surprise the nation. This shook him a little-so clean outside the realm of ordinary 
tourism-but afterwards he had his comment: "There's medievalism, my boy, dead on your 
chest." His excitement returned when he got back to reality and to our welfare state at 
work; he went to see his ancestral Wales, and in Wales an industrial development 
area-new factories, new housing, new schools. This was real as well as romantic, and it 
belonged to the future, not to the past-it was more, it was his own decentralization at 
work, getting men out of dead cities. The factories and the houses might be good or bad, 
but here in the Welsh mountains where men had rotted in the 'thirties something was 
really happening, as real and practical as the Cotswold barn had once been-and FLW was 
really excited at last. 

And so back to London and to the students. They did not all understand or approve of what 
he was driving at. From his grandfather who preached hellfire a hundred years ago in 
those same Welsh valleys he has derived a messianic touch, and when a man has been 
preaching his philosophy for so long a good many of the thought processes, essential to the 
argument, tend to get jumped. But he understood the student. He must have done, for he 
has written of them when he wrote of his own youth when his grandfather had already 
given him the motto "Truth Against the World"-has written of himself as "the young 
sentimentalist in love with the truth!" And he added, "Is there a more tragic figure on 
earth-in any generation?" 

Section I: At the AA on May 4, 1939 

G.A. JELLICOE: Ladies and gentlemen, I feel we are extraordinarily honored to have Mr. 
Frank Lloyd Wright to address us. As I said in my talk to you this morning, I consider him 
to be the finest exponent of his particular approach to architecture in the world. He has 
held that position for a great number of years and I hope that he may continue to maintain 
it for a great number more. Mr. Wright is young in mind-perhaps he is younger than 
anyone of us here today. 

WRIGHT: I see you are ladies and gentlemen. Where I come from you would be just boys 
and girls. Well, I hope you will live up to it. 
I do not know what to say-talk is cheap, there is a lot of it, and by way of talk I have not 
seen very much happen in my time. What is needed is action, and with so many young 
architects sitting in front of me-oh, my goodness, how many!-I hope you will take heed. 

Were architects always creative; were they always animated by love of principles! If they 
knew the principles of building and did not care so much about types, shapes, and styles of 
buildings! What you need is no poring over scrappy styles, but to know a little more of the 
inside, what's going on, and not what circumstances have thrust upon you. After all, we 
are concerned with culture; architects should be the centerline of culture. You chaps and 
girls, too, are going to be the interpreters of your time. You are going to have to put things 
together. You have to form something suitable, for what we have-and, boys and girls, 
believe me-is like nothing that existed before. Concrete, steel-a few of the things-are 
the mixture of life that is changing its principles. Drive a motorcar up to the door of your 
style house-Tudor of what-not Georgian-what happens? That is what is happening in 
life every day. Cities, towns, built and established for conditions which are no longer there. 
Congestion, muddle, force of circumstances of herding together as we do for convenience 
of living. Where are we now? The more we get together, the more we destroy the whole. 

You have to interpret by way of new ideals, new character, new thoughts in building. What 
we call modern architecture is a change in that thought back to the basis of building. It 
isn't a change in styles of building or form by way of somebody's taste as it used to be, 
although it is still an aestheticism. I think you will see in Le Corbusier the statement of an 
aesthetic that is working itself up about machines, but if you take only that it is fatal. Now 
for a long, long time this thing we love called architecture has been pretty sick; for 500 
years at least. 

Principle went out of architecture; I think the Renaissance was a confusion that principle 
had left and the realm of aestheticism had begun. After all, the Renaissance is something 
out of life, not of it, and I presume you might say, because life was lacking, that building 
was lacking. They had no coherent sense of direction, no real culture of their own, and so 
the hybrid mass came about. 

Perhaps at the present time, having no clear idea of things, no clear idea as to where we 
are going, perhaps you think you can strive with all this and make good things and adapt 
and adopt. May be, but I do not-no-do not believe you can do it. I think you suffer from 
this congestion, this tastelessness, that is put upon you by these conditions of life, this 
hangover of today. It is up to youth to devise and put into effect better things, and where 
are you going to learn about them-not from books, not from others or armchairs, as the 
armchair itself is tired of this affectation. You've got to see how work is being done-off 
the hard pavements. Get a place out in the country, get a plan for building something to 
work, function, and live, and get down to work and build it yourself. Conscript nature. 
Nature study, believe me, is the proper study for an architect and not what other people are 
doing or have done. It may help, maybe, looking at others, but it may also hurt. You see, 
when young minds are seeking the way out, to show them another man's way out is likely 
to hypnotize and disturb rather than to inspire. You can all look at the work of the past; if 
you study those expressions in relation to the times existing they may be just too bad, like 
the baroque or the rococo, all bad and superficial. You may have learnt from them, but it is 
best to throw them overboard. Get down to trees, flowers, and plants; how things are made 
and grow, how they establish character, and how they develop individuality, and how 
building must do these, too. The real life of the building must develop a form and 
character, taking into account the nature of the materials. 

Things which are to be governed by machines have become a basis for a new eclecticism, 
all an exploitation with no understanding of [the] principles of life. That is what I object 
to, myself. It is the weakness of them. The era has bred a new influence which from my 
point of view has no creative characteristic and is by way of taste. I wish there were some 
way of heading you off from this practice of life or architecture. Of course, they have 
aesthetic principles, but until they have their feet on the ground-a good term that-they 
cannot get their heads in the clouds; and with their feet on the ground it is quite sensible 
[that] they should aspire. But before that they must create understanding, seeing it 
together; to think that landscape architecture, engineering, science of building, should be 
three separate things-it is ridiculous in itself. The architect we need is a master builder 
who will make a perfect welding between his building, trees, and life as well. This 
architecture I am talking about is organic architecture. Modern architecture is anything 
built today. Any building built now is modern, but you should learn to say organic if you 
are going that way. 

So it is rather a big old world you are getting into-I think you ought to get together and 
draw up some plan, some idea of what you are aiming at. Finally, there are masters like 
Mr. Jellicoe who will have to prune you and weed you thoroughly, perhaps five to one. 
I think architecture is going to have the master builder and sham architecture must go 
overboard. 

Well, it is a long subject and I could go on and on for a long time; but I did not know what 
to talk about and so there you have a few random thoughts. 

G.A. JELLICOE: We have heard a great address from a sincere master builder and a 
sincere man. All of you should weigh his words carefully, for the future of architecture in 
this country is concerned with what he has said this afternoon. 

At lunch I gathered an impression from Mr. Wright on the only point on which I would 
dare cross swords with him. He feels England is in rather a bad way at the moment [May 
4, 1939]; but I think you will agree with me, I can tell him right now we are not. I propose 
a hearty vote of thanks. 

Section II: At the AA on July 7, 1950 

DR. S.E.T. CUSDIN (President of the AA): It is my pleasure to extend a very sincere and 
heartfelt welcome to our distinguished visitors. In Frank Lloyd Wright's decision to come 
here at our invitation I think that we can recognize the evergreen and indomitable courage 
of the pioneer. 

Apart from my pleasure, I confess that I am extremely nervous-so nervous, indeed, that I 
might repeat the error of the student who, called upon to pay a tribute to another great 
man, said of Oliver Cromwell that he was a man with an iron will and a large red nose, 
and that underneath it was a deeply religious feeling, and that he won the Battle of 
Worcester on the anniversary of his death. For consolation I turn to Sir Eustace Peachtree's 
book The Dangers of this Mortal Life, in which he recalls that amongst the most noble 
dicta of ancient Rome there was the fancy that when men heard thunder on the left the 
Gods had some special advertisement to impart 
, and then the prudent laid down their affairs to study what Jove had intended. Though we 
no longer believe in these divinities, I hope that we shall be able to invoke a gentle peal 
from my right for our pleasure, instruction, and delight. 

WRIGHT: You will get more thunder from the left! 

CUSDIN: Since you were last here, sir, architecture has suffered a severe reverse, and I 
can now report that it is just recovering. After all your battles with Mistress Architecture, 
we are looking to you for wisdom and guidance. 

WRIGHT: Not for a good spanking? 

CUSDIN: Maybe that as well, sir. No one who has read-and who has not-his 
autobiography will have failed to recognize the tender and devoted affection that Mr. 
Frank Lloyd Wright has for Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, and it is now my pleasure to ask 
our hostess to present a bouquet to Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright as a token of our great 
respect. The response to the news of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright's arrival here has been 
overwhelming, and Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright have a very full program in front of 
them. I do not intend that they should be overburdened tonight, the first night of their stay 
in London, with a lot of speeches. It gives me great pleasure to propose [a toast to] the 
health of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright. 

ROBERT FURNEAUX JORDAN(Principal of the AA School): I shall have other 
opportunities during the week, in the presence of the students, of saying more about the 
greatness of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and the honor which we receive by his visiting us 
here, so that all I want to do tonight is to remind you that the AA has a department called 
the school, and that about a year ago Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, in Houston, when he 
received the AIA [Gold] Medal, said that medal was bound to affect his future [see 
Chapter 16]. He was right because shortly after that I decided that it was really time that 
the AA Prize giving was adorned by a great architect. There was only one great architect 
in the world, and so 500 students of the AA sent him a cable demanding his presence here 
this week, and here he is. He is extremely welcome as a very great architect, as a very 
great example in teaching, and as a symbol of what we want to do in the way of building 
and humanizing architecture and taking architecture back to nature and to the realities of 
humanity and to all that Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright has stood for. 

With those few words on behalf of the school, I give Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright a 
very hearty welcome. It is indeed a great honor to have them and I only hope that we shall 
not work them too hard. 

WRIGHT: Your Chairman asked me if I would say a few words. I should like to say a 
great many, and I thank you all. I remember a very charming occasion here when I sat 
over in the center of the room, how many years ago? It must be twelve years ago. I came 
over and did not have time then to discover America, but I have come this time really to 
discover America and England. It is a shame how we have abused time and how little we 
have done. 

Almost everything that there is anywhere in the country that I have seen lying around here 
has an establishment. Here we are with a new idea which we call democracy, which has 
never got any further in our own minds than a love of freedom; and if you were to ask 
most of us what we mean by freedom you would see that we mean license. 

I come over here and I find all this establishment, and what impresses me in your London 
is this feature and fact of establishment. To me it is amazing and I do not see how you ever 
get out from under. I think that if I had been born here in London you would never have 
heard of an organic architecture. I begin to feel that way when I look around and see how 
established everything is, how richly you have been done. 

But it is admirable in a way. I myself have enough of the British in me to be proud of your 
tenacity, to be proud of what you have done with your back to the wall-and I guess that is 
where you should always see a Britisher, with his back to the wall. 

There was one that I met coming across. I had always thought that the Britisher had good 
manners. I boasted of the companionship of a cultivated Britisher; I thought it was the 
finest company in the world. But there was my lord on the ship coming over. The purser 
was indiscreet and invited some of us to a little party in his cabin. It was a great big ship, 
so big that it effaced the ocean travel; you do not know that you are on the ocean and you 
do not care if you are. Here was this Britisher-"Britisher" was an honorary title, because 
in fact he was from Canada, which, of course, modifies the circumstance. He was also very 
rich; he was a mercantile lord-I suspect you have lots of them now. He monopolized the 
purser, who was giving this party. We were all sitting round the room, and my lord stood 
with his back to us, managing the purser in conversation the entire evening. All that we 
could see was the smoke rising from his cigarette over the purser's head. Well, now, is that 
English? Is that good manners? No, I do not think it is. I never saw anything like that 
when I was here; it must be just what happens coming over on the Queen Mary or the 
Queen Elizabeth from the other side. You will forgive me for this slam. I thought he 
deserved it. I shall not tell you his name and anyhow I do not know what it is. 

It is lovely to be here again. I enjoyed myself immensely in England when I was delivering 
the lectures for the Sulgrave Manor Board. People used to come to Mrs. Wright and ask 
her whether it was true that these lectures were extemporaneous and she assured them that 
it was. When they were brought to me by the old court reporter who had taken them all 
down I had nothing whatever to do to correct them; it was amazing and was the only time 
when a speech that I had made did not sound like the ravings of a drunken man. He had it 
straight and I had very little to do to it, and so it was published, when the bombs were 
falling on London, in one of the nicest little books I have seen. 

That was the souvenir of my last visit to London in 1938-or was it 1939? At that time, I 
think, Chamberlain was in Munich with his umbrella and you were posting the town here 
with appeals to join up with Russia-"Sign up with Russia"! Do you remember it? It was 
all part of that visit, and that visit is for me a beautiful memory. 

A few years after that we were sitting in our little home-that is not so little-in Arizona 
and listening to the radio, and in came the news that the Royal Institute of British 
Architects had recommended to the King that he should hand over the Gold Medal [of the 
Royal Institute of British Architects] to a boy out there in the tall grass of the western 
prairie, which he forthwith did, so that was added to the color of this previous experience. 

Now I am here again. I do not want to let you down, and least of all do I want to let myself 
down, and so I want to tell you, before I get through with this, what has happened since I 
was here before and how the hopes that I had concerning my influence in Britain have 
been rather damped by what I have seen, particularly in the replanning of London. If I had 
been successful, wherever a bomb hit you would have planted grass. Instead of that you 
have rebuilt London wherever there has been damage and wherever a hole has been 
punched in your establishment. You cannot let go of that establishment. Now the time has 
come when the city is a dated circumstance, and I suppose-I cannot prove it, I can only 
invite your attention to it-that the finest gesture which could ever be made by Great 
Britain on behalf of its future and to ennoble its own nature would be to plant grass 
wherever a bomb fell. I do not care where it fell, even if it was on Buckingham 
Palace-plant grass! 

That is, of course, spoken by an advocate of decentralization. Now, decentralization does 
not mean giving it all up; it means keeping it all in a better way for a better time and a 
better place. There are fifty million of you ganging up here in this establishment. 
To what end? What is your future? Have you a future? I wonder. Have any of us a future 
along the lines of this ganging up? Gangsterism is government now; the gang is in the 
saddle everywhere on earth. It is gang against gang. Where is the individual? Where is 
this thing that we profess, this democracy? In what does it consist? Are you democrats or 
are you democratic? Is Great Britain a democracy? Is the United States of America a 
democracy? I wonder. I think not. I do not believe that we know the meaning of that word; 
if we do, we are certainly renegades and traitorous in our attitude to it and in all that we 
have done of recent years, because if we have not betrayed democracy then democracy is 
not worth living for. 

But can you betray something that you do not know anything about? Can you betray 
something of which you are unaware, which you thoughtlessly destroy? You cannot be 
called a traitor when you do a thing like that-or can you? No, I think that to be traitorous, 
to betray, you have to know what it is that you are betraying and sell it down the river 
consciously. For that you can be hanged, but for this thing that we have done there is no 
punishment except victory-and it seems that victory is about the most terrible punishment 
that can be administered in modern circumstances. 

Architecture would seem to be extraneous to this circumstance and beside the mark in 
these circumstances. It is not. In the idea of an organic architecture we do have an 
interpretation of democracy; we do get nearer to the nature of it. This interpretation is the 
centerline of our future development; it means going from within outward, instead of 
gathering everything and putting it from the outside in, which is what we have been doing 
all over the world. We have been doing it especially in America, to such an extent that a 
Frenchman said that we were the only great nation that had proceeded from barbarism to 
degeneracy, with no civilization of our own in between. There it is, it is true. You laugh, 
and, of course, you English may laugh; but we Americans laugh, too. Why should we 
laugh? It is too true! 

By this ideal of an organic architecture, the building of the thought and the feeling of a 
nation into sustenance with rhythm, poetry, charm, truth, we shall get to this thing that we 
call democracy because the principles of an organic architecture are the centerline of a 
democracy. When they asked the United Nations for a definition of democracy-as they 
did not so long ago; I do not know whether it got into the papers here-the United Nations 
returned eighty-five different answers, no two of which agreed. Speaking to President 
Harry Truman a little later, I said: "Don't you think, Mr. President, it's high time that at 
least we, the American people, tried to define ourselves to ourselves and know what we are 
all about?" He laughed and said "Yes," and that was all there was to that and it is all that 
there ever will be to that. 

But what is this thing we call democracy in terms of actual performance? How are you 
going to actualize it? Great Britain has not got it. It does not lie in the direction of 
socialism or in the direction of communism or in the direction of any-ism or any-ist or 
any-ite. It is right within us, and that is where the ideals of an organic architecture are 
found-within us; the innate, integral actualization of human life and human nature, not 
pretending by way of some symbolism, not pretending by way of some effects, but that is if 
because it is it. It is something that comes out by way of nature as an innate expression of 
the human soul and do not be mistaken: there is a human soul. Notwithstanding all that 
we have seen and lived through, notwithstanding all that we see in the nature of 
establishment, there is a human soul, and that human soul survives, no matter what 
happens. There is a little something there which transforms it from one failure to the next 
failure, and then to the next failure, until ultimately the human race is going to succeed, 
and it will succeed. 

That is the message that organic architecture has to bring; but we cannot deal with it all in 
one evening, and so, good night, everybody! 

Section III: At the AA on July 14, 1950 

DR. S.E.T. CUSDIN (President of the Architectural Association): Once again we have a 
prize giving and frequently this ceremony, marked by too many backward glances, takes 
on a funeral air. I hope that I can disperse any lingering wisps of depression by declaring 
the end of the old academic year and, with the regal formula, continue with "Long live the 
new!" 

For your greater pleasure, I shall not indulge in any of the usual platitudes or old boys' 
stories, but it is necessary that I should express, on behalf of the council, our profound 
satisfaction at the achievements of the school and our gratitude to the students and to the 
teaching and administrative staff, with particular emphasis on the part played in that 
achievement by the principal, by his wise leadership and incredible scholarship. 

To add to our delight we have with us today Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, whose 
company confers upon us a great distinction. To them and to all our guests we extend a 
most sincere and hearty welcome. 

ROBERT FURNEAUX JORDAN (Principal of the Architectural Association School): A 
few months ago some of us on the AA [Architectural Association] staff listened to the 
speech which Frank Lloyd Wright made in Houston when-better late than never-he got 
the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects [see Chapter 16]. I sent him a cable 
next day saying that five hundred students demanded that he should be here this afternoon. 
If I didn't get permission from quite all the students to do this, I hope they have forgiven 
me. Anyway, back came the reply "Will be with you in the summer," for, after all, there 
wasn't much else that he could say. 

When he got that medal, Frank Lloyd Wright remarked that "it was bound to affect his 
future." And how right he was, for as you see it has brought him half across the world to 
Europe-the kid from the Middle West. May I add that I haven't all that much use for 
medals and, with it or without it, he would have had to come and would have been just as 
welcome. 

Well, here he is with a lifetime of experience, and here I am, feeling very humble and 
supposed to say a word about the AA School. Frank Lloyd Wright and the AA-what can 
they have in common? Away over there is Taliesin, with sixty boys from a dozen nations, 
working under one master, building their own studios deep in the spaces and colors of the 
desert; and here are we, a hundred yards from Oxford Street, our students converging 
every morning from 400 square miles of London's conurbation to cram 
themselves-somehow-into our four Georgian houses and a tin hut. 

However, Taliesin and the AA have at least three things in common. First and foremost, I 
hope, is a love of architecture. Second, Taliesin is called a fellowship and I should like to 
think that the AA was not just a school but a fellowship, where the minds of staff and 
students can work on each other in enthusiasm, like two cogs in a fast running machine. 
That isn't always easy, either for bewildered students or busy staff, but it is the only way 
that we shall ever get anywhere at all with architectural education. I said, however, that 
there were three things to link together the AA and Taliesin; a love of architecture, a sense 
of fellowship-and then there is a third. 

Frank Lloyd Wright, ladies and gentlemen, is here this afternoon not only as a very, very 
great architect indeed-though that, too, of course-but as a symbol of something in our 
policy, a symbol of the fact that architectural students must build, make things with their 
own hands and their own sweat as well as with their own brains. We are going to do 
something about that, for neither the brains nor the hands are either of them much use 
without each other. 

A year ago I dared to say that if ever, in the context of our own time, we are to build as 
gloriously as our forefathers, then architectural education must change beyond recognition. 
We don't want revolution for the sake of revolution, but the architect in this century has 
ranked as a mediocrity, and there seems to be little or no basis for a defense of the status 
quo. One day, I hope, in years to come, the AA may be seen as having been an instrument 
in this change. 

The general direction of the change must, I think, be away from the drawing board toward 
true technique of building, toward an understanding of man and of the whole fabric, urban 
and rural, of man and the visual world. Only thus can architecture once again take its 
place in our so-called culture. 

True, modern building technique is so complex that the precision drawing must remain 
one of our principal media. Never can there be golden ages, never can we dream William 
Morris dreams of new Lavenham towers and Chartres portals, but we must, we simply 
must, find our own equivalent. 

We shall never find that equivalent in a system which, however much style and context 
may have changed, is still basically that of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a system wherein 
recognized formal solutions to formal problems are presented on the drawing board for the 
hundredth time. To say this is not to flog a dead horse, and it is not merely a matter of 
being modern-it is very much more radical than that. Technically, perhaps, we have to 
put the clock on a hundred years, where aeronautics and biochemistry have got to; but 
emotionally and professionally we have to put it back 500 years to where the masons of 
Kings College Chapel were. 

Not an easy job, not a matter of curriculum, site work, or courses of lectures. These are 
part of it, but if the thing happens it will be partly through a whole series of such changes 
through many years, but mainly, I think, because the AA-graduate and 
postgraduate-can on a very big scale and in an English context be a Taliesin Fellowship. 
Our context is so different that our problems may not be those of Taliesin Fellowship, but 
the love and understanding of men and of real building-something far, far greater than a 
mere diploma to practice-are things that our fellowship can have too. All the forces of 
orthodoxy and common sense may be against us. Every profession is to some extent a 
conspiracy against the laity; every profession always was, but today those conspiracies 
have been crystallized into statutory forms. They never let Lethaby train architects; 
Gropius was thrown out of Germany and rejected in England. They were dangerous men. 
The AA fellowship might be more difficult to stop. No one ever stopped Frank Lloyd 
Wright. If all the rebel fire of the AA students of the 'thirties-some of them are helping to 
run the place now-which was sublimated then into the Spanish War and all that went 
with it, was sublimated now into architecture, anything might happen. 

The AA should, in my view, be a place where those who are going to be concerned with 
design and with building-architects and builders-can share together a liberal education; 
second, it must be a laboratory where students learn to experiment with form, color, 
structure. Some mistakes on paper, en route, matter comparatively little. Students should, 
of course, emerge with a sound and sensible outlook upon orthodox building, but not even 
that if the excitement, sensual enjoyment, curiosity, or poetry of the native mind and heart 
are blunted in the process. Thirdly, the AA must be a place where the designer is 
concerned with the real world; unlike the painter and the poet, the architect cannot live in 
an ivory tower. Not only has he to face the social and technical implications of his world, 
he has to seize upon them and transmute them into real building. And this, like 
experiments in form and color and structure, must also be a part of a graduate's training. 

In some ways, to me at any rate, this has been a rather fantastic year at the AA. I have 
known the AA for twenty years and more, and I can honestly say that never has the 
school-staff and students-worked so hard. There have been moments when I have found 
it almost terrifying, but that does not mean that I am not grateful-far, far more grateful 
than I can ever say, let alone explain in a short speech-to every single person concerned. 
Whether the hard work has been justified by the results is not for me to say. So far as we 
are concerned we are now planning and looking forward to a new session. 

Finally, on these occasions someone usually tries to define what a good architect should 
be. These definitions never get us very far. This afternoon, however, I have a pretty good 
one. The Welsh word "Lloyd" means "honest or undefiled"; let us put it between two 
Saxon words-Frank and Wright-of which we all know the meaning, and you have your 
definition-"a free and honest maker of things"-Frank Lloyd Wright. That is not such a 
bad definition of a great architect! 

CUSDIN: Though we were so slow in giving formal recognition to Frank Lloyd Wright, 
he has now become a legend. It is now my privilege to introduce you to the legend-Frank 
Lloyd Wright. 

WRIGHT: I have had experience of a great many imports in my own country, but I stand 
here today an import, by way of the AA, and a very happy thing I find it. It is a very nice 
thing to be an import as an architect, and I hope that all of you young people will some day 
grow up and be imported yourselves. 

I have seen a great deal of London this time. I came here before to deliver the Sulgrave 
Manor Board lectures. That was in 1939, just as the bombs were about to drop on London. 
I saw very little of London then, but this time I have seen a great deal more, thanks to 
Brother Jordan and our president, Mr. Cusdin, and I have been down in the country, where 
things were simple and natural and of the heart, unspoiled. 

Some of the young people who are starting out to practice architecture are receiving prizes 
today. In the giving of prizes it is just as it is in any competition. First of all, the judges are 
selected from amongst those upon whom the circumstances, whatever they may be, can 
agree, so that you get the average of an average, and then they always go through them 
and throw out the best ones and the worst ones, and then they get together and average 
upon the average, so that the prize or the result of the competition is an average of an 
average of averages. It does not matter if they throw out the best ones, but it is important 
that they should throw out the worst. 

You are coming into this field of architecture. I do not know what else to call it; I do not 
like to call it a profession because I think that the profession of architecture in our 
country-and it is probably the same in all other countries-is no longer the refuge of the 
great in experience and of really developed individuals which it was once upon a time. 
Perhaps the handing out of tickets to little boys to sit around for four years studying and 
reading about architecture may have something to do with it-a degree, I think they call it, 
saying that they are fit to practice architecture. That was the first blow that our profession 
got in our country, and another blow was that it is now considered a very nice occupation 
for a gentleman and the favored sons of fortune are barging in. I should like to see the 
profession, as a profession, honorably buried with due ceremony and the field left more 
open to youngsters who are willing to make the sacrifices that are essential to practice 
architecture. 

The architect is the form-giver of his civilization, of his society. There is no way of 
getting culture into shape except by way of this worker that we call an architect. It is 
essential, then, that the very best material we can find we send into the ranks of the 
architects. It is the blind spot of our civilization231 , the blind spot of our culture. No one 
knows anything about architecture; the thing is so confused. For 500 years the thing has 
been going downhill until it is all mixed and so much a matter of habit that I think no one 
knows a good building from a bad building. That must be, so long as it is a matter of taste, 
a matter of fashion, so long as we have the fifty-seven varieties to choose from and never 
do a thing for ourselves. 

Now it is my fear, as I stand here today before you, that the little prophetic insight into the 
nature of building which organic architecture represents, having produced effects at the 
beginning of an era which was ushered in, I think, by Mr. Louis H. Sullivan and alongside 
him, myself, may become, by way of these effects which were produced, another effect, 
another fact. I think that you can see all over the world today indications of a new style. 
But we do not want another style; we have had enough of styles in architecture. We want a 
new reality; we want to face reality. 

What would reality be in a civilization committed to the ideals of a democracy? What 
would it be? A style? No. That commitment would be a commitment to the ideal of 
freedom, would it not? Freedom in architecture-what would it be like? Every man for 
himself and the devil take the hindmost? No, that would be license. Where does this 
freedom come from that we profess as the normal aim of our democratic life? It comes 
from within you. It is not something that can be made for you, that can be handed to you, 
but it is something in which you can be allowed to develop and in which you can be 
protected, and that protection is what we need now for the individual. 

I think you will realize now that when you speak of individuality you are not speaking of 
personality. That distinction is usually missed. Our personalities we have nothing to do 
with; they are accidents. It is by what we do to develop our personality into a true 
individuality that we begin to differ from animals and become really manlike, really 
human beings, capable of being. Democracy is the championship and the protection of the 
individual per se, as such. That means that organic architecture is of the individual for the 
individual by way of individuals. There is lots of room for error, lots of room to go astray, 
very little to go upon except inner ideas, except that from within the I nature of everything 
must come whatever you do in the way of making a form or making a plan or whatever 
you do as an architect. 

Comes now the nature of materials, comes now the nature of the being inhabiting the 
building and the nature of the society and the circumstances for which the building is 
created in a free spirit. The most difficult thing of all is to keep the spirit free, not to 
imitate, not to copy, not to follow unreasonably and blindly and unthinkingly, but 
whenever you see an effect which appeals to you to get behind and inside that thing to try 
to find out why it is as it is; and, knowing that, from the inside out, you become a 
competent member of the society in which you live, and that should be your authorization 
to practice architecture. 

Now, of course, this inner ideal, this sense of what is within being projected into a 
harmonious and beautiful exterior as a circumstance, is, I suppose, a religion, is it not? I 
was talking to the boys over here the other day, and, as I was going out, one of the little 
boys said: "Mr. Wright, you believe this, that a good architect has to believe in Jesus?" 
Well, I knew what he meant, but he did not get what I meant. I said: "Yes, he must," but I 
added "but I do not know where he is going to find out about Jesus, how he is going to find 
out what it was that Jesus represented." What Jesus really represented has been lost by the 
Church and has been lost by modern practice. You will have to go back into that thought 
of Jesus from which we can say that we got our ideal of organic architecture-the 
Kingdom of God is within you! 

From within comes everything that you will ever have. From within comes that 
development which will make all the difference between you and an animal and therefore 
the core, the essence, of the new architecture for democracy. Up-to-date democracy has 
built nothing. We have talked about it and pretended to be democratic, but I do not think 
that any of us have looked that definition in the face or made one for ourselves; so let us 
say that democracy is the highest form of aristocracy that the world has ever seen because 
it is innate, it is of the individual. It cannot be transmitted; it cannot exist by privilege; it is 
the gospel of the doer and the be-er [sic]. 

Well, that is the new architecture; that is the spiritual basis of the new forms and the new 
life that we may gain when we have had enough of and become sick enough of the 
superficial pretense which surrounds us in the rubbish heaps in which we live, and we try 
to clear the decks and really live like men and women, like individuals, not mere 
personalities. 

That sounds rather heavy as a program, does it not? It insists on freedom, and will not 
stand the imitator. You cannot get to the goal which we are setting for ourselves now by 
way of imitation; you can get there only by yourself becoming something. You cannot get 
the kind of architecture that democracy needs now out of a cheapskate, out of a pretender, 
out of a coward-and especially a coward.  It is cowardice, I think, which ruins most of 
our efforts. The imitator is always a coward. I have heard it said that imitation is the 
sincerest form of flattery, but I assure you that by its very nature it is an insult. It is not 
flattery; it is only a confession on the part of the imitator that he did not understand; he 
admired, and he lost the significance of the thing that he admired. That is where most of 
us are today. 

First of all, let us have the human being capable of bossing himself around. To get that let 
us make use of the best material that we have in our social fabric today, and I think you 
will all agree with me that it will be none too good. Then let us work upon it by working 
with it, by not trying to teach it anything, by merely opening the doors and windows, with 
what vision we have, so that we do what is possible by way of encouragement; but only in 
one way can we get this thing which is so essential to the life of a democracy, and that is 
by experience-experience that you see, experience that you hear, experience that you feel. 

You can do it only by way of nature study. The books have a little of it; read the books and 
throw the books away. They cannot help you now-not along this road that we are 
going-because it is not in the books; it is out in the fields, in the trees, in the nature of 
things. That is another thing that you youngsters should bear in mind. When organic 
architecture speaks of nature, it uses the word with a capital "N." It does not mean out of 
doors; it means the inner nature and meaning of the thing as it exists. We might say that 
we use the word nature in a philosophic sense or differently from the use of the old word. 

Two words in this new religion which we are calling architecture are badly used-no, 
three. The word organic is another because ordinarily you use the word organic when 
speaking of something that you might see in a butcher's shop, something physical; but we 
use the word organic to mean imbued with that quality which can live, in which the part is 
to the whole as the whole is to the part, the entity-that is what we mean. 

Then there is individual. By that we do not mean a person; we do not mean personality; we 
mean that which you can develop by way of your work upon your personality. You will see 
that the meanings which we are after now are not those in the dictionary. They are interior 
interpretations; they come from the spirit; they are of the spirit. They mean freedom. All of 
that has to be learned. 

I stopped at St. Paul's as I came by and saw the effigy of Lord Kitchener, I think it is. I 
went inside and saw other mortuary relics, but I did not see anything in that building that 
was really genuine, that was really significant, that really portrayed from within the nature 
of the human soul. I do not know that the human soul is worth portraying, but, if it is not, 
what is the use of talking about architecture and why should we build? I believe, however, 
that it is essentially sound and coming to England now. I see how little effect all this 
messing up with bombs has had and that it has not mattered very much. I do not think 
wars have ever mattered very much as compared with getting hold of this inner thing by 
way of which we can have life in abundance, more life, true life, without war; for war 
could be no objective, war could be no circumstance if from within we got the individual, 
and, having the individual, we could build. 

Well, thank you very much. Usually the boys get up at the end and put questions. There 
are so many of you here today and not one of you will dare. The other day, over at the 
school, I was trying to show a smart youngster the nature of this new sense of space which 
characterizes the new architecture, which is a sense of the interior as the reality in which 
we live and which must give us the grammar and the forms of the new architecture which 
we desire. He put a pencil in my hand and said: "Mr. Wright, I cannot understand it. 
Everything in life that is worth knowing can be demonstrated mathematically." It is not 
much use trying to do anything with that; that is the exterior, it is-what is the word I 
want?-science? That is science speaking. Now science can give us the toolbox and the 
tools in it-and leave us there. We can have all the science that the scientists of the earth 
can for centuries bring us and have everything to live with and nothing to live for. That is 
where we are with regard to science. Let us forget science except as a mere technique to 
achieve the ends of the spirit; only the prophet, the poet, the philosopher can help us now. 
We want architects who are that, primarily, as a basis. 

Well, this cannot go on forever. I should add, however, that there is an exhibition here, 
and you might as well see it. It is not, believe me, of organic architecture, but something 
on the way to it! 

[Editor's Note: Mr. Robert Furneaux Jordan then read the list of awards for 1950 and 
introduced the prize winners to Mr. Wright, who presented the prizes. At the end of the 
prize giving Mr. Jordan added: "That, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the award of the 
prizes."] 

WRIGHT: And that is the first time that I have ever participated in anything of the kind! 

CUSDIN: I have now great pleasure in calling on Mr. Anthony Chitty to propose, and Mr. 
John Ambrose to second, a vote of thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright. 

ANTHONY CHITTY: Frank Lloyd Wright mentioned that five hundred years ago affairs 
in our profession started to go downhill in certain ways, but I would remind him that 
something else happened 500 years ago. Five hundred years ago there were persons in this 
town who were so ignorant that they thought the world was flat. To them the world was 
Europe. Europe spreading outward from the Mediterranean, a world with England at its 
outer fringe and beyond only mists and the stormy seas, stretching out to the edge of the 
world, where the waters went over and down into hell. However, when they did reach that 
horrible point in the sea where the waters went over they found, not hell, but America. 
Discoveries such as that, sudden, overwhelming, must at the same time have seemed 
fantastic and quite inconceivable, though now we look on them as orderly 
stepping-stones in the stream of history. 

In our small world of architecture it was with something of the same feeling of cataclysmic 
discovery that the works and ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright became known to the architects 
of my generation when we were students here in this square in the 'twenties and 'thirties. 
No single man had more effect upon us. At that time we were deep in the European study 
of over-abstract ideas, but he showed us a new world, a world of materials and their 
effect upon design. He taught us his special ideal, the integration of building with 
landscape, of material with the scene. He taught us these things not by words but by his 
works, by his example. 

There is nothing new to say about Frank Lloyd Wright; it has all been said before, and in 
any case it could not be repeated in the space of the five minutes allotted to me. I shall 
therefore confine myself to one thought only, and it is this. Let us thank God for great 
men, for their vision and imagination, for the color and excitement that they lend to drab 
days, for their honesty in an age when plain, good words have many meanings, for their 
courage and rebellion, for being different when all men are alike, and, in the case of this 
particular great man, for his long and fruitful life. 

I wish to propose a vote of thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright for his presence here today, and 
in doing so I will ask this distinguished company to join with me in giving thanks not only 
to Frank Lloyd Wright but also for Frank Lloyd Wright. 

JOHN AMBROSE (Chairman of the AA Students Committee): It has been remarked 
before now that, by comparison with his counterparts in Oxford and Cambridge, the 
London student is not vociferous. I do not think that we are ever actively discouraged from 
being so; it [is] due rather to genuine diffidence on our part to exhibiting in public, and, 
especially in London, students play a very small part in the life of the city. This is, in any 
case, the first time that I have ever been asked to speak in public, and the event is made 
pleasurable but slightly worrying for me on that account. On the one hand there are the 
students, who expect me to expound architectural theory to you, and on the other hand I 
have had the very good advice, which I propose to follow, to "keep it short." 

This occasion is doubly rare. It is rare indeed for most of us to hear a speech from Mr. 
Wright, and secondly it is a rare thing to listen to a forerunner, to a man individually 
unique in his day. Such individuality may well become more rare in the future because it is 
an effect of mass education to produce the mass individual, with nothing to distinguish 
from one another. 

On this point one is able to recognize, I believe, the real value of the AA in giving the 
individual a chance to develop. Fully to appreciate this, you must set the new student 
against his proper background of the school on the one hand and the forces, with their 
enforced discipline, on the other. In place of this enforced discipline, the school 
encourages the voluntary restraint of the artist, the craftsman, and the engineer. Perhaps 
those go to make the architect; I do not know. Therefore, while having the keenest 
pleasure in seconding the vote of thanks to Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, I am determined that 
this opportunity shall not pass without thanks being paid to the AA staff-thanks on behalf 
of all the students here and especially those who, like myself, are leaving today. 

[Editor's Note: The vote of thanks was then put by President Cusdin and carried by 
acclamation.] 

WRIGHT: I am sure it is a great thing to thank you and very heartfelt. We are leaving 
tomorrow and I hope that we shall see you all in America some time-over there where the 
water goes over the edge! 


PART SIX 

The Truth About Education 


20 Education and Art in Behalf of Life 

I believe now there is no school worth its existence except as it is a form of nature 
study-true nature study-dedicated to that first, foremost, and all the time. Man is a 
phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he really matter, is he of any 
account whatever, above the dust. 

{Text of a talk reprinted from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Education and Art in Behalf of Life," 
Arts in Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1958, pp. 5-10 by permission of the University of 
Wisconsin-Extension, Madison, Wisconsin.} 


Introduction 

The following, although not a speech per se, was recorded by the editors of Arts in Society 
(a publication of the University of Wisconsin, Madison) at Taliesin near Spring Green, 
Wisconsin, on Tuesday, June 18, 1957. In this talk Frank Lloyd Wright discusses his 
views not only on education in general but also on universities, his early educational 
experiences, nature, God, and Lao-tse. Although he never completed his college 
education, he, nevertheless, was the recipient of eight honorary degrees, of which seven 
were doctorates and one a master's degree as discussed and listed in Chapter 16. One of his 
doctorate degrees was in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, bestowed 
upon him on Friday, June 17, 1955, two years before the talk reproduced in this chapter 
was delivered. 

During his long architectural career Mr. Wright designed at least twenty-two 
education-related facilities, eleven of which were constructed. Among these buildings are 
the Nell and Jane Lloyd Jones Hillside Home School, Nos. 1 and 2, near Spring Green, 
Wisconsin (1887 and 1901, respectively), the Jiyu Gakuen Girls' School, Tokyo, Japan 
(1921), the Taliesin Fellowship Complex near Spring Green, Wisconsin (1933) and, later, 
Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona (1937), the Florida Southern College Plan of 1938, 
Lakeland, which included three seminar buildings (1940), the Ordway Industrial Arts 
Building (1942), the Science and Cosmography Building (1953), and several other 
collegiate buildings (see also Chapter 12), the Wyoming Valley Grammar School, 
Wyoming Valley, Wisconsin (1956), and the Juvenile Cultural Study Center for Wichita 
State University, Wichita, Kansas (1957). In addition, he designed at least eleven other 
education-related facilities which were not constructed: for example, a schoolhouse for 
Crosbyton, Texas (1900), the Avery Coonley Kindergarten for Riverside, Illinois (1911), 
the Kehl Dance Academy with shops and residence for Madison, Wisconsin (1912), a 
schoolhouse for LaGrange, Illinois (1912), the Aline Barnsdall Little Dipper Kindergarten 
for Los Angeles (1920), the Rosenwald Foundation School for Negro Children for La 
Jolla, California (1928), the Florida Southern College Music Building for Lakeland (1944 
and 1958), the Southwest Christian Seminary University for Phoenix, Arizona (1951), the 
Florida Southern College Outdoor Amphitheatre also for Lakeland (1955), the Baghdad 
University Complex and Gardens for Baghdad, Iraq (1957), and Building B of the Juvenile 
Cultural Study Center for the University of Wichita of Wichita, Kansas (1957). 

r. Wright's comments on education, contained in this chapter, were made to the editors of 
Arts in Society only about three weeks after completing an assignment as Bernard 
Maybeck Lecturer in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in late April, 
1957.{For a discussion of these important lectures and their complete text see Patrick J. 
Meehan (Editor), The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New 
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984, pp. 185-228.} Six weeks later, on Tuesday, July 31, 
1957, he returned to California to speak before the Marin County Board of Supervisors 
which had awarded him the contract to design the Marin County Civic Center (see 
Chapter 29). 

The Talk 

WRIGHT: What is education without enlightenment? It's a mere conditioning. And what 
is mere conditioning but maintaining mass ignorance, the poisonous and poisoning end of 
what we call civilization? There is nothing more dreadful, more dangerous, nothing to be 
more feared in this world, than plain or fancy ignorance. We can see this today in the drift 
toward conformity. We can see it in the education of modern mass-society. 

You can blame education for much of this because education has not seen what we have 
needed as a free people. It has not provided enlightenment. It has provided conditioning 
instead. Conditioning by way of books, by way of what has been-the past-by all 
habituations of the species to date. American education has not taken into account the 
views of men of vision capable of looking beyond today. But only such enlightened 
individuals can save the mass from itself. 

If our education-called conservative-is ever going to do anything for us it has to provide 
enlightenment by means of art, religion, and science. But until art, religion, and science 
stop disregarding each other, until they realize their interest is one and the source of their 
inspiration is one, and realize that they can't live apart, that union will not be possible. We 
teachers must teach men to seek enlightenment by means of the poetic principles of art, 
religion, and science. We must manifest these to them as spiritual guideposts, as true 
measures of understanding. That is what these youngsters thronging our 
campuses-teenagers going from pillar to post-need to know. 

Now, what does university mean? Our state university is chiefly a trade school. You go 
down there for some specialized training. You are there just in line to learn to make a 
living. You don't go to the university to learn about the verities of nature, the truths of the 
universal for which university is the name. True education is a matter of seeing in, not 
merely seeing at. Seeing in means seeing nature. Now, when popular education uses the 
word nature, it means just the out-of-doors; it may mean the elements; it may mean 
animal life; it means pretty much from the waist down; whereas nature with a capital 
"N"-I am talking about the inner meaning of the word Nature-is all the body of God 
we're ever going to see. It is practically the body of God for us. By studying that Nature we 
learn who we are, what we are, and how we are to be. 

I walked out of the university [the University of Wisconsin, Madison] three months before 
I would have graduated as an engineer. I got nothing. I studied all the things that were 
necessary-or so they thought-for an engineer to know. But through all my years none of 
that has been worth a dime. And education today is still very like that. 

My mother wanted an architect for a son; so, naturally, I wanted to be an architect. Never 
thought of being anything else. Never had to choose. My mother-she was a very 
wonderful woman-used to send me as a boy up here to help Uncle James on his farm. Her 
favorite brother was Uncle James. You see, my grandfather came here when the Indians 
were still around, and my uncles and aunts owned practically this whole region. I learned a 
lot out there in the pasture with the cows. I never would put on a pair of shoes-except 
Sundays-from the middle of April until about the middle of September and I used to 
really work hard on the farm. That's where I learned most from age eleven to eighteen on 
the farm, from the poets, and Louis Sullivan. 

I believe now there is no school worth its existence except as it is a form of nature 
study-true nature study-dedicated to that first, foremost, and all the time. Man is a 
phase of nature, and only as he is related to nature does he really matter, is he of any 
account whatever, above the dust. Otherwise he is offensive, vulgar. He may stink. 

It's about 2000 years now since Jesus said that the Kingdom of God-He meant the 
kingdom of nature's apprehension and application-was at hand. He meant it was in man's 
capacity to know this Kingdom of God. He was a prophet, a real poet, the greatest one. But 
our world got Him all wrong, doesn't preach Him, doesn't take His teaching-never did. 
The Christian religions got Him all balled up by way of disciples and we are no nearer to 
His Kingdom today than we were in His own time, are we? We go to war, we kill, we steal, 
we make a profession of all those things and other wholly artificial ones. 

The real body of our universe is spiritualities-the real body of the real life we live. From 
the waist up we're spiritual at least. Our true humanity begins from the belt up, doesn't it? 
Therein comes the difference between the animal and the man. Man is chiefly animal until 
he makes something of himself in the life of the Spirit so that he becomes spiritually 
inspired-spiritually aware. Until then he is not creative. He can't be. But education 
doesn't better him in that connection. It confuses him, tends to make him more of a thing 
than he really is, keeps him on the level of a thing instead of permitting him to become 
more a divinity. What makes man a divinity rather than a mere thing? Not only his 
intelligence, but his apprehension of what we call truth, and passion in his soul to serve it. 
That passion is what the universities should cultivate-culture of that sort instead of 
education. Isn't that it? 

To enlighten the young education must at least teach philosophy. Without a true 
philosophy there is no understanding of anything. Without your own philosophic 
resolution and analysis of pretended knowledge, as applied to life, what and where are 
you? Philosophy is the only realm wherein you can find understanding. Religion and the 
arts are all part of philosophy. There has never been a creative artist or poet, for instance, 
who wasn't deeply religious. Walt Whitman, the only poet we have who gave us anything 
in the way of poetry fit for the sovereignty of the individual-the theory of our 
democracy-was a deeply religious man. He believed, as Jesus said, that "the Kingdom of 
God is within you." Jesus was a poet/philosopher. Every great creative artist who ever 
lived was a poet and a philosopher. What there is good about me, and may remain, is my 
philosophy. My work is only great insofar as its philosophy is sound, and if my philosophy 
is unsound my work will not endure. The fact that it has endured, and now has a chance to 
continue beyond any lifetime, is simply due to the fact that the philosophy behind it all was 
a sound one. If that philosophy didn't inspire my work, it wouldn't exist very long. 

Lao-tse is the great philosopher [born 604? B.C.]. He revealed the reality of the nature 
and the life of a building. Lao-tse declared that the reality of a building consists in the 
space within-the space to be lived in-not the walls and the roof. I think you can see this 
truth by holding up a drinking glass. What is the real glass? What is the reality of the 
drinking glass? It's the space within in which you can put something, isn't it? Space that 
you use. That's the real thing about the glass, its reality. That is also the secret strength of 
organic architecture and where I come in as an architect. My philosophy concerning a 
building is that of Lao-tse. The same principles apply to you, as to me, in everything. Just 
as a building is a space within to be lived in, a man is a space within, in which a 
philosophy lives. 

What is really lacking in man today? He lacks the certainty that comes of a creative life. 
He plays no creative role in life but by way of art, religion, and science. Lacking that inner 
certainty of life, he feels insecure. We all walk and talk in insecurity. The condition of 
freedom is insecurity. Yet no man is free who is afraid. Only a creative life can make man 
really free. If the man is man, in the sense of a good philosophy of nature, he is inevitably 
creative; he can't exist unless he is. But then his inspiration is not only for him. It has been 
to him a gift to be realized and exercised in behalf of life itself. He is absolutely an apostle 
of life because he sees nature for life. If an artist is thus for life he is for the individual, and 
if he is for the individual he is not alone and never will be. His work will then be of 
consequence. He will be for democracy and democracy will be for him. 


21 To Princeton: Mimic No More 

I have the same nostalgic love for Princeton as for the great founders of our Republic, and 
yet I believe that were all education above the high school level suspended for ten years 
humanity would get a better chance to be what humanitarian Princeton itself could wish it 
to be. 

{Reprinted with minor editing from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Planning Man's Physical 
Environment," Berkeley-A Journal of Modern Culture, 
No. 1, 1947, pp. 5, 7, and from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Mimic No More," A Taliesin 
Square-Paper: A Nonpolitical Voice from Our Democratic Minority, No. 11, March 6, 
1947, entire issue (four pages). This speech was reprinted later as Frank Lloyd Wright's 
"Let Us Go Now and Mimic No More: An Address by Frank Lloyd Wright at Princeton 
University," The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 60, No. 65, August 17, 1947, 
editorial page, p. 1.} 


Introduction 

On Wednesday and Thursday, March 5th and 6th, 1947, Princeton University marked its 
200th year with a conference called "Planning Man's Physical Environment" to which 
about sixty of the foremost architects and planners of the time were invited to talk: Ralph 
Walker, Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Jose Luis Sert, Alvar Aalto, George Howe, 
Gyorgy Kepes, Konrad Wachsmann, G. E. Kidder Smith, Serge Chermayeff, Talbot F. 
Hamlin, Siegfried Giedion, George Fred Keck, Philip Johnson, and, of course, Frank 
Lloyd Wright were among them. The seven sessions held covered the physical possibilities 
and limitations of design and the visual, social, philosophical, and psychological aspects of 
the environment from city and regional planning perspectives to the perspective of the 
design of buildings and other small objects. 

Regarding the conference, Architectural Forum (Vol. LXXXVI, April 1947, pp. 12-14) 
reported the following: 

Princeton had done its scholarly best to assist the architects in pinning down their 
racketing Physical Environment to a feasible point for two days' discussion. It had 
distributed mimeographed lists of "axioms and assumptions." It had, with professional 
zeal, put mimeographed questions. . . . 

Princeton had also invited as talkative and brilliant and opinionated group as had ever sat 
down together. (Among them it had distributed honorary degrees: Alvar Aalto and Robert 
Moses got them, Frank Lloyd Wright did not arrive in time for the award.) Most regarded 
the occasion with an appropriate solemnity. Even the unimpressionable Mr. Wright told 
the group that he had prepared a manuscript for the first time in many years and he read it 
without interpolations. 

Frank Lloyd Wright was the recipient of the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from 
Princeton University in 1947. This chapter presents the complete text of his address before 
the Princeton University "Planning Man's Physical Environment" conference delivered at a 
dinner in Proctor Hall, Thursday, March 6, 1947 at 8:00 P.M. The conference concluded 
with Mr. Wright's address. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: My favorite university is Princeton. Memory of pleasant times here long ago 
while delivering the Kahn lectures [1930] brings me from Arizona-desert to Princetonian 
revels of intellectual fellowship. I have the same nostalgic love for Princeton as for the 
great founders of the Republic, and yet I believe that were all education above the high 
school level suspended for ten years humanity would get a better chance to be what 
humanitarian Princeton itself could wish it to be. Our thinking throughout the educational 
fabric has been so far departmentalized, over-standardized and so split that like a man 
facing a brick wall, counting bricks, we mistake the counting for reality-and so lose or 
ignore the perspective that would show us the nature and wherefore of the wall as a wall. 

As a people we are educated far beyond our capacity. 

And we have urbanized urbanism until it is a disease-the city a vampire-unable to live 
by its own birthrate, living upon the fresh blood of others, sterilizing the humanity for 
which you, Princeton, have always stood. And now this cataclysm, the atom bomb of 
science, has thrown us off our base, undoubtedly making all we have called progress 
obsolete overnight. Prone to our own destruction, we may be crucified upon our own cross! 
To me, an architect, the hide and seek we have played with, this further revelation of the 
nature of the universe we inhabit as parasites or gods-it is up to us-has been a ghastly 
revelation of the failure of our educational, economical, and political system. The 
push-button civilization over which we were gloating has suddenly become a terror. But, 
instead of the agony appropriate in the actual circumstances, we are even more smug and 
heedless than usual. A little flurry-that's all. The military mind is a dead mind-so no 
surprise to find that reaction as it was. The journalistic mind, a reporter's mind, left to the 
humorist the only real attempt to arouse the people to reality: not an explosive bomb only, 
but a fantastic poison-bomb that made their habitation in cities no safer than an anthill 
beneath a ploughshare in a field. 

So, my Princeton, I say, let's pause and consider this lack of vision that not only hides 
from us the better nature of ourselves but makes us unable to see further than our own 
furrow. Weighed down by our own armor, insatiate with this voracity we call speed, 
huddled the more-though not suitably in panic, it is conceivable that the country we now 
call ours may go back to the Indians. Escaping the bombing-the probable apex of our 
civilization, as they will, they might easily come and take it back again quietly in the 
night; 
proving that barbarism is, after all, better suited to human life here on earth than what we 
have too carelessly called civilization. 

In this fearful emergency the state as such has proved utterly unworthy of the allegiance 
accorded it by the sons and friends of American education. Politics, in any perspective 
afforded by this insensate clamor and clash of power seekers, is sadly in need not only of 
the brief recess of ten years or more but utter abolition of the State Department and the 
Presidency as it now exists. We should strip the Capitol from the periphery of our nation 
and plant it nearer the heart of the country. We must realize that there can be no real 
separation between religion, philosophy, science, and the great art of building. They are 
one or none. But in this petty partisan particularly now everywhere so prevalent we find 
education the more divided into petty specialties, and those most advantageous to the 
ignoble profit and party system we have so foolishly made the very core of our Republic 
life. 

So let us rise for a moment from the furrow to take the view, and soon, with disgust, we 
will dismiss petty politics for the prostitution it really is. Instead, let us view excess 
urbanism-this pig piling or human huddling we call the city. It is true that to every man 
the city is a stimulus similar to alcohol, ending in similar degeneracy or impotence-no 
city can maintain itself by way of its own birth rate, and a glance at history shows us that 
all civilizations have died of their cities. To others like our good old Doctor Johnson the 
city is a convenience because every man is so close to his burrow. But read "hole in the 
wall" now for "burrow." Nevertheless, American cities were dated for our humanity long 
before the cataclysmic poison-bomb of the Chemical Revolution appeared on the horizon. 

Then, how now? Are not concentrations of humanity madness or murder? We might 
remember the Hindu proverb, "A thousand years a city and a thousand years a forest." 
[The] UN [United Nations] is, of course, the present hope for escape and survival. [The] 
UN itself has taken refuge in a New York skyscraper. Can it make good? 

And we must view education, wherein this salt and savor of "work as gospel" is gone out. 
The gymnasium has taken its place. The higher education is busy taking everything apart 
and strewing the pieces about in the effort to find what makes it tick; failing to put it 
together again, it cannot make it click. It cannot because it cannot or will not go back with 
the organic point of view to begin anything at all. Education, like the city planning of 
short-haired experts for short-haired moles, is either a splash in the middle of 
something-or else, like some tangled skein of colored worsted, seeking any desired 
strand, it comes out only a short piece of any particular color. Continuity and unity? They 
are gone. So education is almost as helpless to confront this ghastly emergency we are 
blindly refusing to face as is the state. 

Next, if not in order, let us view our ethics. Men born free and equal? Before the law, yes, 
perhaps-but the coming man does not believe that all men are born free and equal 
because he cannot. As a millennial aspiration? Yes, but it is fanaticism here on earth. Such 
a world implies total death. Struggle makes our world what it is-not struggle for equality 
but for supremacy. That struggle is the process of creation: inequality is the very basis of 
creation. In the brain lies the chief difference between men. Only a state politician out for 
reelection at a Fourth of July picnic could say we are all born with the same brain power. 

Let us now glance askance at our own production. Naturally, everybody, everywhere, 
cannot be taught to love, appreciate, and assimilate art or religion. It is impossible to 
impact to any man one single grain of truth unless he has the undeveloped germs of it 
within him. Buddha said, "A spoon may lie in the soup for a thousand years and never 
know the flavor of the soup." Only when the heart is open is it fit to receive teaching quick 
with life. Eyes must be there and be opened first. Eyes must be there as well as ears and be 
opened first before illusion, superstition, or prejudice may be expelled. Architecture, the 
great Mother Art, is in itself the highest knowledge in action of which we have any 
knowledge and cannot be bought or even acquired from books. One good look at an actual 
building and a man has found what no reams of writing or years of teaching could give 
him-provided he has eyes to see. 

And what of our buildings? Education and two wars have all but killed this germ of 
creative thinking. And so creative work for us-especially in building-is all but 
destroyed. This amazing avalanche of material we call production seems to have its eyes 
shut to all but destruction. The standardization it practices are the death of the soul, just as 
habitation kills any imaginative spirit. So within this welter of the misapplied wealth of 
knowledge with so little realization-wherein consideration and kindness are so rare-why 
not develop a little integral know-how? Only spirit affords that. 

Now come our Gl's devastated by war to be further devastated by four more years of 
education. Why send more Gl's, by way of government money they will themselves repay 
or their children will repay, to school? Why not subsidize land and transportation for them 
to relieve intolerable immediate pressures instead of sending them back to hard pavements, 
to tramp or be trampled upon further by the herd? Why not get the boys out where they can 
get in touch with and be touched by their own birthright: the good ground? Give each man 
an open chance to make his own environment beautiful, if possible, and restore to him 
what he most needs: the right to be himself. 
If, owing to the false doctrines of artificial controls or of economic scarcity-making and 
maintaining black markets now, they are unable to build, why not throw natural roads 
open to immigration from countries where the skills have not been cut back by ignorant 
labor unions emulating still more ignorant employers? The only requirements for 
immigration to our democratic society should be common decency and trade skills. Then 
not only would the Gl learn from them and by the natural working of [the] law of supply 
and demand have a home, but all Americans would soon have better ones and have them 
by their own efforts. 

No, no assembly line is the answer either for him, for you, or for me-and that means not 
for our country. Decentralization of our American cities and intelligent utilization of our 
own ground, making natural resources more available to him, in his road, yours and mine, 
to any proper future as a democracy for which we may reasonably hope. Essentially, we are 
a mobocracy now. Our present extreme centralization is a bid to slavery all down the line, 
a bid-in by a shortsighted, all too plutocratic industrialism. 

But the right to strike still belongs to the American people as well as to American labor 
unions. The time has come for that strike. 
I find it increasingly hard to believe that a free people can be so blinded to the nature of 
their own power as our people have been by their own foolish credulity. Do they want to 
keep their eyes shut? Perhaps so. 

The remedy? No remedy will be found in more statism. That is more static, truly. No, the 
remedy is more freedom-greater growth of individuality-more men developed by the 
way of self-discipline from within the man. Today, especially, the most cowardly lie 
disseminated by the congenital cowards among us, as well as by the church, school, and 
state, is this lie that "I, the state, am the people!" 
In a democracy where the people means the people, the people do not understand the state 
any more than the superstition that the people call "money." In a true democracy the 
people are bound to suffer the state as against their own customs and natural rights. 
Democracy cannot love government! Government is its policemen, privileged by the 
people themselves to obstruct, expropriate, or punish. 
Under the watchful care of the people themselves, government must take its place down 
under, not up above the right of the individual to be himself. Let us mimic no more! 


22 Progress in Architectural Education 

As no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to 
architecture than you are. So go to work on yourselves to make yourselves be in quality 
what you would have your buildings be. {Text of speech excerpts reprinted with editing 
from Frank Lloyd Wright's "Progress in Architectural Education," Line Magazine, Vol. 2, 
No. 1, 1953, unpaginated (six pages).} 


Introduction 

At the 84th Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) held at the 
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on Wednesday, June 25, 1952, Frank Lloyd 
Wright addressed about two hundred student members of the student chapter of the AIA 
for a symposium titled "Progress in Architectural Education." Seven weeks earlier he 
addressed a similar crowd of architectural students and faculty, also on the topic of 
education, at the School of Architecture of the University of Oklahoma, Norman.{For a 
discussion of this speech and its complete text see Patrick J. Meehan (Editor) The Master 
Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 
1984, pp. 169-184.} The following is an account of the 84th Annual Convention of the 
AIA and of Mr. Wright's speech to its student chapter, reported by the editors of The New 
Yorker:{Edited and reprinted in its entirety from "Fighting the Box," The New Yorker, 
Vol. 28, July 5, 1952, pp. 16-17.  -1952, 1980, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. 
Reprinted in its entirety by the specific request of The New Yorker. Reprinted by 
permission.} 

We dropped in on the eighty-fourth annual convention of the American Institute of 
Architects, at the Waldorf one morning last week and, after receiving a program of events 
from an A.I.A. hostess, joined a knot of men whose lapel badges proclaimed them to be 
Arthur C. Holden, Wallace K. Harrison, William Lescaze, and Grosvenor Chapman. 

"If I go on the public-housing projects tour this afternoon, will I miss the U.N. tour?" Mr. 
Chapman asked. 

"No," said Mr. Harrison. 

We asked Mr. Lescaze what he was up to. 

"I'm busy with a hush-hush project." he said. 

We asked him what the convention was up to. 

"The usual talk is going on," he said. "Architects don't like to see the government bureaus 
doing too much building. They want to do it themselves." 

We wandered into the Basildon Room, where exhibits of Plexiglas, Arcadia Sliding Glass 
Doors, Aluminum Company of America aluminum, and Minneapolis-Honey-well 
regulator products abounded. 

"This is our latest electronic humidity control," a Honeywell man said to us. "The usual 
humidistat has blond hair, which absorbs moisture, but for a really sensitive control-for 
use, say, in a newsprint factory, where you have to control the humidity of paper-we use 
as a sensing device a gold-leaf grid embossed on a plastic base and treated with a special 
salt." 

"Must the hair be blond?" we asked, going back a couple of phrases. 

"Yes," said the Honeywell man firmly, and added, "Preferably female." 

We consulted our program in search of something more comprehensible and hit on a 
students' symposium, in the Empire Room, at which the chief speaker was to be Frank 
Lloyd Wright. Thither we repaired, arriving in the latter stages of a speech by Morris 
Ketchum. "We are a team," he was saying to an audience of several hundred young people. 
"You and I, the engineers, the legal lights, the real-estate lights, and other experts. You 
have to know not just architecture but the art of getting along with people." The next 
speaker, Bonnell Irvine, a student at Pratt Institute, brought up the problem of the Negro 
architect. Then Kenneth K. Stowell, who was presiding, said the Institute drew no color 
line and asked Ralph Walker, a former president of the Architectural League, for a word 
or two. "I'm glad to see a large sprinkling of young women here," said Mr. Walker, in part. 
"We have a very charming girl in my office. I first saw her crossing Forty-second Street 
with a portfolio, and thought, what a charming girl! Later, I saw her in my reception 
room. She is now a very vital part of our organization." Mr. Walker sat down amid 
tumultuous applause. 

A mirrored double door at the back of the room opened, several flashlight cameras flashed, 
and Mr. Wright, a fantastically distinguished figure at eighty-three, silver maned, erect, 
and sporting a golden-brown suit, a modified cowboy hat, a flamboyant bow tie, a pink 
silk handkerchief, and a Malacca cane, strode down the aisle. All rose. Mr. Wright doffed 
his hat, twirled his cane, and, gaining the platform, shook hands with Mr. [Kenneth K.] 
Stowell, who said, "You all know Mr. Wright." All sat down. 

"Boys," said Mr. Wright, ignoring the large sprinkling, "how do you do? I am going to 
talk to my heirs here this morning, believe it or not, like it or not. I started war on 
architecture as a box. A box is a containment; I tried to abolish the box." Mr. Stowell 
handed him a piece of chalk, and he drew a box on a blackboard. "Now, you see, boys, 
there is the box," he said.  He went on talking, the while demolishing the box with strokes 
of the chalk and smudgy erasures made with the handkerchief, which Stowell also gave 
him. "I had the feeling that the space within was the reality of a building," he said. "No 
longer the walls and the roof. Well, in Unity Temple I dealt with that problem. You will 
find a sense of space, not walled in. The walls become screens. What is the roof? An 
emphasized, splendid sense of shelter, a beneficent spread overhead; it doesn't shut you in. 
Of course, the box is a Fascist symbol. I felt it to be Fascist, undemocratic, and absolutely 
anti-individual." By this time the blackboard box had disappeared. 

"I have had a curious and very interesting time fighting the box," Mr. Wright went on. 
"Organic architecture is the architecture of democratic freedom. What is spiritual, boys?" 
No one answered. Mr. Wright explained what spiritual is, at some length, and held up a 
glass. "What is the reality of this glass, boys?" he asked. 

"The space within," someone said. 

Mr. Wright beamed, devoted another twenty minutes to talking and to answering questions 
from the floor ("The architect is the pattern-giver of civilization. . . . You know, I think 
to be an architect is much more than being a preacher of the gospel or a man who makes 
billions because it involves quality. .  . . Wasn't Jesus the first advocate of an organic 
architecture when he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you"? He was. . . . I think 
democracy is the highest form of aristocracy the world has ever seen. . . . Efficiency has 
become a hateful word to me. . . . Now think of this. When is a thing too big? When it's 
out of human scale. . . . I've heard about city planners recently. Who are they? Can a city 
be planned? I don't think so. . . .This country was never intended to become a great 
manufacturing nation. England had to be. We're a stooge of England"), concluded with a 
resounding anecdote censuring England and America alike, seized his cane, clapped his 
hat on his head, and began marching up the aisle. All rose and applauded. The great man 
went through the double door, followed by photographers and autograph seekers. 

The text of this chapter represents excerpts from this speech. Later, in 1953, a 
three-record set of 33-1/3 RPM, long-playing sound records titled Frank Lloyd Wright 
Talks To and With the Taliesin Fellowship was pressed by Columbia Records for the 
Frank Lloyd Wright Fellowship and was released for national distribution for a price of 
five dollars. Record three of this set included a much revised reading by Mr. Wright of this 
address at Taliesin in September 1952, about three months after the initial delivery of the 
speech to the student chapter of the AIA on June 25, 1952, in New York. Still later, 
another excerpt from this speech appeared as "Address at the Meeting of the Student 
Chapter Members, the American Institute of Architects," in William A. Coles and Henry 
Hope Reed, Jr. (Editors), Architecture in America: A Battle of Styles (New York: 
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961, pp. 350-351.). 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: As you see it going on today in universities, our education in architecture is far 
too easy. The education we practice takes things by choice from on the surface, passes 
them around upon ourselves-not within ourselves. Teaching today seldom gets down to 
the elemental bottom-the truth of anything. Why? Well, because teachers were taught 
facts, which is what they teach instead of truth. 

I am quite sure there is not a boy here today who could have told me what the corner 
window meant in architecture when he first saw one, except that it was an odd effect. As 
you all too well know now, architecture-modern architecture especially-is still chiefly 
concerned with effects. Effects are charming or they're ugly or they're desperate or 
despicable, but why? But, boys, why linger with effects you don't really understand? 
Education today is, as are all our rights and privileges-nearly everything that we have 
had or made-concerned with mere effects. Seldom is the endeavor of our day and time 
concerned with principles. They are concerned with causes but seldom, except in 
science-in art, never. 

Young artists aren't taught to ask why. You can ask what, when, and maybe where, but 
never why! That cannot be true education. Along that line of eclecticism you are soon 
educated far beyond capacity. There is no truly educated man who does not ask that 
question why, either to himself or aloud, immediately when anything arises to him 
unusual. The first thing he should want to know is "well, yes but why?" If you ask that of 
your professors you might embarrass them because they never asked the question at the 
right time of the right person in the right way, either. It is time that you did ask that 
question and keep it uppermost in what you call your minds. This will probably make of 
you a terrible nuisance whoever you are because you will find very few willing or 
competent answers. 

Now, here today I am giving you good answers. Let's go back with our profession of 
democracy to this simple little diagram of the box. [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright stands 
before a chalkboard drawing an illustration.] On stilts, yes. [The] Elimination of the box is 
the fact and figure of a building [and] is the true basis upon which the democratic spirit we 
covet could possibly flourish as genuine architecture today. The affirmation of this 
negation is flourishing more or less here and there. But more so abroad than here at home. 
Why? No basis at all for our own architecture today is this hanging from skyhooks by one's 
eyebrows without understanding why we should so hang or what it is we're hanging there 
for. Back of all this simple organic revolt in world architecture today comes another and 
much deeper sense of what constitutes truth: the constitution of principle. Principles are, 
yes always, spiritual, my boys! 
Science only concurs. Principle is always important; [it] is the soul of architecture-the 
great art of beautifully building beautiful buildings. Principle is especially important to you 
now. 

Do you think spirit is something you may see way up there? Do you really believe that 
spirit comes down to you this way [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright gestures] from above and 
that the more you are able to detach yourself from earth the more spiritual you become? Do 
you think so? I don't like to believe you are so foolish, but there is much evidence against 
you. As for me, I have never seen anything but human confusion as a result of that belief. 
We are in it-as Christianity-now. But no truly great art has ever or could ever flourish 
by way of that sentimentality. Only such superficial architecture as we now have and have 
had for 500 years could have come of it. But that sentimental realm is where most of us are 
still living in art by way of our emotions, taking for granted the mistaken tokens of the life 
of Jesus we call, for lack of a better name, Christianity; a subdivision of truth into various 
tokens of thought. We hang over earth from the sky by skyhooks by way of this mistaken 
idea of God which most of us wear as eyebrows. Now isn't that imagined elevation by 
detachment what they mostly mean by religion? 

Well, I have sometimes been called an "earth son." I plead guilty to the soft impeachment. 
Guilty, because I believe that only by having your feet firmly on good ground, that by way 
of your love of the stars [and] your love of great life, growth will come to you from within 
upward. If you would ever achieve spiritually in your architecture, that is to say, great good 
building, if your work ever represents the true spirit of you the man, it will be because your 
feet are firm there and within you has developed a sense of beauty [that is] no longer 
confused with the curious, to be achieved as an innate sensibility. A sense of what is God. 
By that simple but direct aspiration you will see the only God you will ever see. Your own 
ideal! Now, that is what organic architecture sees. That innate faith in the self-God is the 
core of it. 

Whenever you try to detach yourself from reality, say reality like this reality of the building 
which I've been trying to show you here-yes, we now know it to be the reality of any 
building we may call "architecture"-you will find that it goes as well all down the line of 
human thought and experience. Even as, in this glass of water standing here [Editor's 
Note: Mr. Wright points to a glass of water on the table near him] you have an instance. 
Here the familiar illustration-I hold up this glass of water before you and ask, what is 
reality here? Where does reality come in here boys? In the glass? In this? [Editor's Note: 
Mr. Wright taps the glass] No! With the lesson in mind I've just given you, you should see 
the answer. You do see, don't you? Well, again, just what is reality here in this so familiar 
object we call a drinking glass? The answer is the space within into which you can put 
something! In other words, the idea. And so it is with architecture; so it is with your lives; 
and so it is with everything you can experience as reality. You will soon find out 
yourselves if you begin to work with this principle in mind. Things will open to you. They 
will develop you and to you. You will soon see that many "grapes of wrath" have grown 
where none need have grown before. Therein lies the secret of the great peace missing in 
our western civilization as of today. 

Here now, I have divulged to you, my heirs, what seems to me the very simple but both 
fundamental and top secret of power in your profession. By intentional destruction of the 
box as architecture we open the road to a great future architecture. This secret is not my 
secret. It is simply the age-old philosophy of individuality; the entire core of the creative 
self; the entire spiritual world which you may enter only by way of the love of it which is 
the great understanding. Who then, think you, was the first great promulgator of an 
organic architecture? He was an architect because in His ancient day they called the 
carpenter, architect. Wasn't he Jesus-the first advocate of organic architecture when He 
said, "the Kingdom of God is within you"? He was. Now be both patient and wise and you 
can't miss the integrity of this innate thing. See it operating in nature everywhere! Go 
afield! Go along with or go against your fellow men. Go anywhere you please with eyes 
open to see. Ask this troublesome question why, and if you have a sincere wish to learn-it 
is a kind of prayer-you will get somewhere. But to go along the paths of book knowledge 
as earmarked for youth today by way of popular education-you will get nowhere. Is that 
blunt enough? 

As I am here with you today, boys, I would like to talk with each of you with illustrations 
by way of drafts on a blackboard more directly. Because every boy, every man, every other 
person living is an entity, as we ourselves are. The individual means a soul. His great 
misfortune today is that no matter who he is, how good he is, what he has to give to his 
fellow man, he might enlist the entire press of these United States, add radio, put in 
television, and write books about almost anything above the belt and never get anywhere at 
all. So it is with this spiritual principle concerning, fundamentally, the state of a great 
work of architecture. Why has this so happened to us in America? 

Having lately been abroad in Italy, Switzerland, and France, I have heard it said that 
America was too big for a democracy. Is it true? I am beginning to be afraid that there is 
too much truth in it. Mr. Big and the big thing which is a consuming desire to be big and 
our tendency to respect mass-the thing that is big just because it is big-this will ruin us 
as a democracy. It has mortified our great profession, too! Don't you think that probably 
Mr. Big is what is the matter with Usonian architecture as well as democracy today? Isn't 
he automatically the enemy of both when perhaps he desires to be a friend? At least you 
are never a true friend when you are ready to cash in on friendship, are you? So let's try for 
quality not quantity. Let's beware of being too big. Let's not give lip service to Mr. Big. 
Remember the sign that used to appear along the country roads: "Quality Knows No 
Substitute." You see it nowhere any more. Why? These merchant boys have probably 
grown too big. Quantity now is what counts with them now; not quality now. Both 
democracy and architecture die on that mobocratic platform! Both die because both are 
founded upon quality. Qualify is always some form of individuality. The nature of 
individual worth is always the basis of the thing of quality. Whenever mass enters into the 
soul of anything, quality disappears. So the big thing has seldom been or can ever be the 
living thing we need in an indigenous culture. Is there such a thing as a true culture not 
indigenous? The big thing cannot be the democratic thing anywhere above the basis of a 
bare civilization. 

Now what then is democracy? Have you ever thought about it for yourselves? Democracy 
is, I think, the highest form of aristocracy this world has ever seen. Why do we miss it as 
such? Well, for one thing, all the old aristocracies were founded upon privileges given to 
the overprivileged, most of whom hadn't earned them. But in democracy the form of 
aristocracy is innate. Nothing of it can be inherited. All has to be of the thing, not on it. 
Privilege is of the people for the people not on the people by way of somebody who has 
power and authority. So democratic or true aristocracy should be, and is, a cultural matter 
and affair of quality. Democracy is not to be ruined by any ambition for quantity. That 
ambition would be changed to mobocracy. 

So what are you incipient architects going to do about this new type of aristocracy? How 
do you feel about big housing, big buildings, big business? A little boy came to me out of 
the sticks some years ago and said, "Mr. Wright, I want to learn how to build big 
buildings." He had me. I didn't know how to build a big building except by learning how to 
build a little one well and then by making it big. Well, now we know that psychology is, of 
course, not universally applied. But, it is still growing there in our midst. This element of 
size, the big thing, the big listing, the hope of vast quantity production-because of 
that-we're really now all under the heel of the big man with the big machine. Efficiency 
has, therefore, become a hateful word to me. 

One thing more, boys: consider that you, as young architects, are to be the pattern givers of 
American civilization. There can be no other pattern givers than its architects. So, if we in 
America ever do have a culture of our own, you must be the way showers. A civilization is 
only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that civilization beautiful. So culture is 
your office here in America. As no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give 
no more or better to architecture than you are. So go to work on yourselves to make 
yourselves be in quality what you would have your buildings be. 


PART SEVEN 

Democracy 


23 Building a Democracy 

. . . our greatest lack as a civilization is the beauty of organic integrity and that beauty 
itself is the highest and finest kind of morality. 

{Text of a speech reprinted with minor editing from "Building a Democracy," A Taliesin 
Square-Paper, No. 10, October 29, 1946, pp. 1-4; "Wright Calls for Organic 
Architecture to Match Growth of Democracy," The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), 
Vol. 58, No. 150, November 10, 1946, p. 11; "The Right To Be One's Self," Husk (Mount 
Vernon, Iowa), Vol. XXVI, December 1946, pp. 37-40; "Frank Lloyd Wright On the 
Right To Be One's Self," Marg (Bombay, India), Vol. 1, No. 2, January 1947, pp. 20-24, 
47; and "Building A Democracy," Albright Art Gallery, Gallery Notes (Buffalo Fine Arts 
Gallery, Buffalo, New York), Vol. 11, June 1947, pp. 14-18.} 


Introduction 

This chapter presents the text of a speech delivered by Frank Lloyd Wright at the second 
session of the Fifteenth Annual New York Herald-Tribune Forum on Current Thought in 
the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, at 5:30 P.M., Tuesday, October 
29, 1946, in which he spoke not only of an organic democracy but of freedom and the right 
to be one's self-especially in relation to architectural design. 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: Democracy and architecture, if both are organic, cannot be two separate things. 
Neither can democracy nor architecture be enforced in any sense. Both must come from 
within, spontaneously. In architecture, as in democracy, this organic way is new to us only 
because the interior nature of man is still new to mankind and democracy is still a search 
for organic form. 

Democracy is not so much a form-even were we to find it-or a policy-even were we to 
make it-as it is [an] abiding faith in man's indivisible right to himself as himself. That 
faith is the natural essence of manhood and is therefore the only safe foundation for 
creative building. Insofar as the state is concerned, it is the same. It is only the man with 
self-respect who has any respect for others, and so is capable of faith in mankind and 
thus of constructing a government. Lacking this sound human foundation, no government 
can rise above servility and secret hate. Collective security without this foundation first is 
merely illusion. Internationalism without this foundation first is coercion. 
Man-made codes come in to obstruct, expropriate, or punish only when we lose sight of 
the way to live naturally as we build and build naturally as we live. 

Unfortunately for us, and the nature of democracy at this moment as well, the way of our 
literate official architecture is, owing to academic education, utterly inorganic. It is by 
code, and our way of life therefore is no longer free nor inspired by principle. How can a 
man's life keep its course if he will not let it flow from within. The democratic code must 
be designed to complete, not to prevent the man. 

The mass to which we belong calls itself "democracy" while betraying the courageous idea 
that the soulful source of all inspiring life flows from the individual. The other mass is 
obsessed by the cowardly idea of taking cover under a State supreme, with no individual 
responsibility whatever. 

To overcome false ideas, bad work, or violent men democracy has only to mind its own 
business, stand its own ground, build its own way, the natural or organic way. 

Were we genuinely a democracy, this violent division would be resolved and there would 
be no adversary. 

The structure democracy must know is the living kind, and that kind of structure is of life 
at its best for the best of life itself. 
In itself, organic character is sound social foundation. Integral or organic structure grown 
up from the ground into the light by way of the nature of man's life on earth, the method of 
building to show man to himself as nobly himself. The true architecture of democracy will 
be the externalizing of this inner seeing of the man as Jesus saw him, from within-not an 
animal or a robot, but a living soul. Organic life cannot grow from anything less than the 
independence of the individual as such-the independence of the individual, his freedom 
to be true to himself! And since that cannot be enforced it cannot even be standardized. 

Force is futile. It can organize nothing. Nor can science help us now. Science has put 
miraculous tools in our toolbox, but no science can ever show us how to use these tools for 
humanity. It is only natural or organic architecture, interior philosophy, and a living 
religion, not the institutionalized kind-I am talking now about the heart and the 
deep-seated instincts of man-it is these three alone, organic architecture, interior 
philosophy, and a living religion, that can make life again creative, make men as safe as is 
good for them, or ever make government tolerable. These three need each other at this 
crucial moment as never before. In the light of these three organic inspirations, revived 
and alive, we could build an organic democracy. 

Here in America, if we will only discover what our vast good ground is good for, and use it 
to build with and build upon, a native culture would come to us from loving our own 
ground and allowing our ground to love us. A great integrity! The integrity we lack! 

We have no good reason here in America to give an imitation of a little industrial nation 
confined to a small island like England, whose only way out is manufacturing. Our entire 
nation from border to border and coast to coast is still just a neglected backyard, while we 
have this cinder strip here in the East. A marvelous range of individual expression waits 
us as a people when we do discover our own ground. Why are houses alike all over 
America? Why do we think they have to be so? Why are we as a people inhibited so early? 
Because we build by code. Sometimes I think we were born, live, and die by code. Give us 
freedom! 

Let inspiration come to us the natural way. Why plant more Oxford Gothic on the plains of 
Oklahoma? Let us mimic no more. If we build in the desert, let the house know the desert 
and the desert be proud of the house by making the house an extension of the desert, 
so that when you're in the house the desert seems the house's own extension. The same 
thought, in the same feeling, goes for whatever we build, wherever we build it. Organic 
buildings are always of the land and for the life lived in the building. They are not merely 
on a site, they are of it! Native materials for native life where such exist are better than 
plastics which have to be brought in. According to circumstances, both may be equally 
desirable. 

And this idea that seems to have invaded our country from somewhere that architecture is 
one thing, landscape architecture another, and interior decoration a third is absurd. In 
organic architecture all three of these are one. 

Whether a structure be life, a building or a state, why buy more monstrosity? 

Look at Washington. Is there a single-minded democratic, that is to say, organic building 
there, one sincerely devoted to the nature of its purpose? Bureaucrats are there to work. 
How can they work in these miles of stone quarries erected to satisfy a grandomania as 
insatiable as it is insignificant? 

Not satisfied, look at Moscow. The case is much the same. A new civilization, unable to 
find a way of building that is its own, slavishly reproduces the buildings of the culture it 
overthrew. It overthrew the great high ceilings, high chandeliers, pornographic statues 
playing on grand terraces. Only now they want the ceilings higher, five chandeliers where 
there was one before, and they want it all everywhere, even in the subway! 

Not liking Moscow, see London! The greatest habitation on earth sunk in its own 
traditions, unable to see daylight anywhere-part of its charm, of course. 

If you see within at all, you will see the same degradation in all. You will find them 
poisoned for democracy, one and all militaristic, their columns marshaled like soldiers 
menacing the human spirit, their opposing major and minor centerlines of classic 
architecture-the true crucifixion. 

A democratic building is at ease; it stands relaxed. A democratic building, again, is for 
and belongs to the people. It is of human scale for men and women to live in and feel at 
home. 

No wonder we were bound as things were and must struggle to be unbound as things are. 

Were we to build a building for the United Nations, we could not build for an incongruous 
idea anything but incongruity. The attempt of the nations now to get together is a hopeful 
sign. All this struggle is good. I have a feeling-it is only a hunch-that we have to make 
some mistakes; we can't come upon the ideal thing right side up all at once. 

I do know that when the home of the United Nations is built it must be a modern 
high-spirited place of great repose, an unpretentious building, abandoning all spacious 
symbolism, having the integrity of the organic character in itself, an example of great faith 
in humanity. Let the assembly room be a place of light as wide open to the sky as 
possible-that influence is auspicious. Make it no screen to hide ignoble fears or cherish 
native hypocrisy cultured anywhere by any tradition. Like the human being it would 
prophesy-its basis the earth, its goal the universal. 

If the United Nations is to be a success, it is all up to each of us right where we now are, in 
the citadels of democracy, our own homes. We love to call them our own. We wish to live 
there the life of brotherly love and creative sensitivity with full individual responsibility. 
But we want to live as potent individuals craving immortality, believing in ourselves, and 
therefore in each other, as with worldwide hospitality we strive for the things that seem 
more fair to live with and to live for. 

When the organic architecture of democracy is allowed to build for democratic life the 
organic or natural way, we the American people will recover nobility. Our creative 
sensitivity will then learn from right-minded architecture to see a man noble as man, a 
brick that is a brick, see wood beautiful as wood not falsified by some demented painter. 
We will wish to have a board live as a board and use steel as steel-a spider spinning-and 
we want glass to be the miracle life itself is. We will see, by means of it, the interior space 
come alive as the reality of every building. We will learn that our greatest lack as a 
civilization is the beauty of organic integrity and that beauty itself is the highest and finest 
kind of morality. When democracy builds, it will build the organic way and every man's 
building-his chosen government no less-will be benign. 

If we love democracy, the way to do is to be. I can see no fight for freedoms. In a 
democracy there is only freedom. 


24 The Arts and Industry in a Democratic Economy 

Now, truly, democracy can only be one thing-the gospel of individualism. 

{Text of a speech and questions and answers reprinted with editing from the published 
Frank Lloyd Wright's The Arts and Industry in a Controlled Economy, Chicago: The 
Henry George School of Social Science, October 1951, pp. 1-7. Reprinted here by 
permission of The Henry George School of Social Science.} 


Introduction 

This speech which was followed by a short question-and-answer period, was delivered 
by Frank Lloyd Wright at the First 18th-Year Commerce and Industry Luncheon of the 
Henry George School of Social Science, held on Thursday, October 4, 1951, in the 
Wedgwood Room of Marshall Field and Company, Chicago. In his remarks, Mr. Wright 
discussed his ideas on democracy from an organic perspective, as in Chapter 23. In this 
chapter, however, he uses the work and ideas of Henry George as exemplar. Mr. Wright 
was introduced to the luncheon guests by Mrs. Paul S. Russell and their questions were 
read by C. Bayard Sheldon for Mr. Wright to address. These questions and Mr. Wright's 
answers to them are included in this chapter. Three weeks later Mr. Wright visited 
Lakeland, Florida, to speak on the subject of qualify and the vision of the superior human 
building at the Florida Southern College (see Chapter 13). 


The Speech 

WRIGHT: No man ever deserves much praise usually. No matter how good he may be, 
he's never as good as he thinks he is, possibly, but he's twice as good as other people think 
he is after all. 

I'm here today on this auspicious occasion because I believe in any man who has an 
organic basis for his thoughts, and the man we're honoring today has that basis for his 
thoughts and his actions. The word organic isn't very familiar. Certainly not in 
architecture. We live in the huts we live in and the way we live in them because we have 
no concept of what constitutes an organic thing. Now, when is a thing organic? When can 
you say that a building is organic? When it's natural, properly appropriate to whatever end 
it's put; where the part is to the whole as the whole is to the part. When you grasp the 
significance of that word organic and learn to apply it to life, to building, to what you 
do-then I think you have something in common with Henry George. 

I think that Henry George had that quality, the only quality that I honor in a human being. 
It's a most rare quality also. If it were a quality of government today, we wouldn't be at war 
with anybody and nobody would want to be at war with us. We would have our feet on 
something and we'd be going somewhere in the direction everybody would recognize as 
right, as normal, as natural, as belonging to the better aspirations of the human race. 

When the depression of 1929 fell on us and the architects, I didn't have a nickel to get 
from where I lived to where I had to go to get a job offered me. Nobody had anything. 
Nobody could do anything. There wasn't a hammer ringing in the State of Wisconsin. 

There was an idea for a school building and a place to which to take young people and 
condition them for building buildings and being something in their own right. So I got 
together about forty or fifty working men and their families in the poorhouse. I made an 
agreement with them to give them what money I could that had already come through and 
was brought in at that time to apply on their wages, and then we made an agreement that 
they should have their wages when I got the building that went with them. It went along 
all right for a couple of years and we were getting toward something when America went 
on relief, and all these men figured out that they could do better by two dollars a week by 
not doing anything at all. So we lost all except three. 

That isn't all. In Wisconsin, under LaFollette, they passed a law that no person had a right 
to sell his labor and go without pay for longer than two weeks. So I became a criminal. 
And all these men began standing around waiting for me to pay up. But what was I going 
to pay up with? Well, anyhow, that's the kind of thinking that we have been victims of. 

Now that's when I began to sit up and take notice of economics. I thought, my God, if an 
individual has an idea and he can't get that idea into effect by sharing with his fellowmen 
who are as desperate as he is and who have no more than he has and whose families are 
starving, what's the matter? Well, I'll tell you what's the matter. It's because we had no 
organic basis for our economic system. 
We had never listened to men like Henry George. We had never put the thing on a sound 
basis for human endeavor. We had never made any arrangement which was organic by 
way of which men can grow, by way of which human beings can come together, free to 
exercise their faculties and to prosecute their ideas by way of their own endeavors. It can't 
be done today. It can't be done today. 

We have all sorts of organizations, all sorts of insanities at once, all debating, debating, 
and doing nothing. I won't accuse this society of doing nothing because I don't know 
whether it's doing anything or not. But I'm speaking of societies formed for-what do we 
call it-advancement? The public good? Well, what have you? Anyway, they're doing 
nothing. [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright mentioned a book titled Equitable Commerce by 
Josiah Warren, recently called to his attention. He chided the audience on their 
unfamiliarity with the book and the author and went on to suggest that the Henry George 
Society republish that book. He was equally aghast at the audience's apparent ignorance of 
Robert Dale Owen, a contemporary of Josiah Warren.] Now, you know, Henry George was 
one of a great group who had preceded him and whose thought and feelings he carried 
further and made more sound. Now here are two of the men who preceded him and were 
in his class and not a member here ever heard of either one of them! 

Well, that's what's the matter with the whole thing-just ignorance! I don't believe there's 
enough intelligence concerning the thing we call democracy in the nation today. Who can 
give us a good definition of what constitutes democracy? What do we have today? What is 
democracy anyway? I had a half-hour with President Harry [Truman] last year. I had 
read in the papers the day before we met that the UN asked for a definition of democracy 
and that they turned in eighty-five different answers, no two of which agreed. So, I said 
to him, "President Harry, don't you think the first thing this country ought to do, you 
fellows down here running the show, would be to get together and find out what we're all 
about?" Well, you know it is difficult to define the mess we're in because if you judge us by 
our actions you get at it wrong-end-to. You can't judge us by what we're doing or what 
we've done or what it seems likely we are going to do. You've got to go back to the days 
before apologies. You've got to go back before Henry George. For the nexus of this thing 
we called democracy in the day of Madison you've got to go back to the men who framed 
an instrument which is probably the greatest and most effective protection for the growth 
of the individual in society-our Constitution. We've lost it. 

Now, I'd like to pursue this by trying to find somebody in this audience who can tell me 
what democracy really meant to him. Now, truly, democracy can be only one thing. A 
thing that would enable a man like Henry George to have had some effect in his day. 
Democracy is, of course-is inevitably-the gospel of individualism. It is the supreme 
encouragement and protection of the individual per se as such, first of all. And that's what 
the men who came over here and framed this document meant to embody in it. This 
document has been tampered with and fooled around with and almost destroyed when they 
made the Fourteenth Amendment to let the states languish so far as individual 
responsibility is concerned-you know-and federalized the whole thing, and made a hero 
of the president. Now democracy can't afford heroes. Democracy can't afford anything it's 
indulging in at the present time-not if it's genuine. 

Now, whether President Harry knows this or not there's no means of knowing. But surely 
this government must know, and we've got to take a stand on the side of the thing in which 
we believe! Now it's almost impossible, as I have myself found, for anybody in this country 
to believe that a man will do anything because he loves to do that thing. Now that's not 
democracy. Because in a democratic state of thought in society that's the very basis upon 
which a man puts in his efforts. Because he loves that kind of thing and that's what he's 
going to do. But have we got it? Have we got anything resembling it? No. Quite the 
contrary. We have unions. We have big shots. We have a capitalist system, we say-but we 
haven't got one. We don't have a capitalist system. We've got a system where capitalism 
has got its apex on the ground and its base in the air and all these artificial props to hold it 
there. But to get it over with its base on the ground we'd be in production way beyond 
anything required for war. If we skip the fact [that] the country's bankrupt, we would have 
everybody in this nation working his head off at something he was proud to do. We would 
be subscribing one hundred billions for a hundred years to assist the backward nations, the 
backward countries of this world, when they wanted it and asked for it. We wouldn't go 
and be murdering them to try and get them to believe as we believe. And on that basis 
capitalism would be true capitalism. It would be a great benefit to the world and out of it 
would come peace that we don't really want. 

Why don't we want it? Why don't we want peace? Well, it's a simple answer. We don't 
want peace because peace doesn't pay. With the system we've set up we've got to have more 
war-we've got to have orders to consume these goods that are so-so manifestly a surplus. 
We can't face it and we won't face it. We're afraid of it. And we've got so that fear is the 
characteristic thing in our midst today-fear in our position, fear in ideas-because we 
can't define our own. Well, hatred required cheered talk and denouncing your neighbor as 
a public virtue. Now what is that but Fascism, Hitlerism, Stalinism, and what a silly thing 
for the country to have started out attacking an ideology, attacking communism. We can't 
lick communism by democracy, so far as we've got it. But we could put Stalin out of 
business-we could put the abuses of communism out of business-if we really knew what 
we were all about and really meant what we have set up and if we understood where we 
were. 

Now it's perfectly true that in a democracy, where genius is neglected or feared-I don't 
think it's so much neglected as feared-fear seems to be the characteristic condition of 
mind of everybody that's got anything. Now, to have a "to-have-and-to-hold" religion 
on the basis of fear is contemptible. The profit motive on any basis of fear is contemptible. 
Without courage, without the resolution to be free, and without the endorsement of 
freedom as a great motive, well, what are we? I'd like to have somebody give me a 
sufficiently descriptive slogan. Well, I don't know that I'm going to get anything for the 
Henry George Society by trying to get down to the basis of anything. But this should be the 
place for it-with the men who honor this man who had organic character in his thought. 
The preface of his principal work is one of the finest things in the English language, and 
every child in school should be taught to recite it by heart so that the words and what it 
meant might sink into his little mind-and when he grew up, he would become a 
champion of the organic character in whatever might appear. 

Now, money, of course, is an abstraction, ladies and gentlemen. Civilization is an 
abstraction. You know what an abstraction is? You know the difference between 
abstraction and a definite picture of something? Well, now, an architect, an organic 
architect, has to know. Abstraction means essence. The essence of the thing is the proper 
abstract of that thing. What is essential, made evident as a pattern, is an abstraction in 
architecture. We need that type of thinking in government, we need that type of thinking 
socially, we need it educationally. We don't have it. We send these children of ours, good 
plums, to colleges and universities and we get back prunes. They're all . . . the freshness 
and the vitality and what you might call the juice in the plum is gone, and what we get 
back is unable to give us this thing we want. This thing we call democracy is killed right 
there. 

Well-so what? What are you going to do about it? What are we going to do about it as a 
nation? What are we as a people headed for with our ugliness-our ugly cities, our ugly 
cars, our ugly houses, the ugly way we live in them? We're not even aware of it. And that's 
the pity of it-so little do we know of what goes on in our own selves. Now I always 
thought that a young man was sent to college, for what? To learn about himself. "The 
proper study of mankind is man." That was said long ago. But he doesn't learn anything 
about himself at all. And very few men today, if they're in any degree successful, know 
anything at all about themselves. There's their personality, which was an accident. None of 
us is responsible for the shape of our heads, the ears, nose, our eyes, or the way we move, 
maybe. That we couldn't help. Personality was a gift or a curse to us. But, now, what do we 
do with it when we go to work upon it intelligently, ourselves-to produce something by 
way of our own thought and feeling in ourselves-then only are we fit subjects of a 
democracy. 

Now democracy is the highest and finest ideal. Men like Henry George knew what it 
meant and fought for a basis for it. It's the highest and finest ideal on earth today or in the 
mind of man because it is predicated on the basis of freedom. 

Now freedom is an interior thing. It isn't something Franklin D. Roosevelt hands you, nor 
Harry Truman, nor the senator you send down to Washington. It's something you've got 
and by way of which you send him and for which you send him. And if you haven't got it, 
you're going to have the kind of government we've got today. And it's because you haven't 
got it that we haven't got the government. 

And as for our houses and the pig piles we live in, the same to you! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: You've got them because you don't know any better. Now you don't learn better 
when you go to school. Why shouldn't you? Why shouldn't education be taking this thing 
in hand and conditioning the minds of these young people for freedom, teaching them to 
build upon themselves and from out [of] themselves that sense of responsibility and 
individuality which can stand up against anything that's not organic and not right? 

Well, where were we? There was a question and answer period after this, wasn't there? 
Anybody want to ask any questions? I don't think so. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Will you read it to me? What is it? 

C. BAYARD SHELDON: Here's one, right off the bat. Have you any comments, Mr. 
Wright, on building codes as an example of controls? 

WRIGHT: Well, of course, a democrat doesn't like controls from the outside. He likes to be 
put upon his own sense of honesty and responsibility and that's the difference between a 
Nazi and a democrat. You can illustrate it very nicely in this fashion. The difference 
between a democrat, generally, and a Nazi or a Communist or any of the other "ists" and 
"isms" confronted by the code-he would finger the pages of the code-the Nazi, the 
Communist, the Fascist-and he would say, "Well, I don't see this in the book. No, we 
can't do anything for you. No, this is wrong. No, we can't help you." And you go out to die. 

A democrat, fingering that code, would say, "Here, of course no rule, although it's made to 
be foolproof, can ever be more than a rule for fools. Here's a case that really was not 
considered and was overlooked. The rules don't apply." Throws it on the side. Says, "All 
right, you go ahead. That's the right thing to do and a good thing." Now there's your 
democrat! 

Now, how much of that have we got in this three million population of bureaucracy that 
we're up against? Codes, of course, are made by fools for fools. Like an expert. What is an 
expert? An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. He knows! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: That's true. It's an architect speaking-I ought to know! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: For fifty-nine years I've been practicing architecture and been absolutely all of 
the time and in every instance up against the codes. And yet I've built the buildings. So I 
ought to be good on codes. Anybody else? 

SHELDON: Would you like to see stricter licensing laws for architects? 

WRIGHT: I would like to see no licensing laws for architects whatever. 

AUDIENCE: (applause) 

WRIGHT: I think these controls and licensing laws for architects have put the inferior 
product in the field on a par with the better product and not one of them has to be an 
architect at all. All he has to do is hang out his shingle and say he's one. Well, that's not 
good enough. In a democracy you have to prove your case. You have to be the thing you 
pretend to be or you don't get a job. But that's all out now. So controls from without are, 
like the controls visited upon any individual in any society in any place anywhere, 
undemocratic. So-got another one? 

SHELDON: What effect, if any, do you expect on civilization with most women working 
out[side] of their homes? Is that progress or retrogression? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I should say that it's ultimate damnation. 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: There's a reason for that, too, ladies and gentlemen. What is home today? Is 
home democratic? Is home a democratic institution? And in a democracy the home is the 
unit upon which not only government but society is based. And anything depreciating the 
quality of the individual home and the individuals in it-well, it spells the end of anything 
democratic. Now what's good for the home is good for democracy and vice versa. I think 
we should build better homes, happier homes, houses where there would need be no 
division, where the man and the wife working together, feeling life together and 
understanding each other, could really do a great work at home. 

Well, you see the condition in which we live is ugly because it's sick. There seems to be 
very little health in this great new experiment in the direction of freedom. What has 
become of the vitality, what has become of the integrity of the individual in this great 
experiment, even at home? Especially at home. If it existed at home, it would be 
everywhere in the country. And I've wanted to build homes of the people rather than these 
public buildings, rather than great buildings for the public, because I believe that that's 
where culture, if it ever comes to us, is going to come from. A witty Frenchman has said 
that we were the only civilization, the only great nation on record, to have proceeded 
directly from barbarism to degeneracy with no culture of our own in between. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: Now I've been working on that line. I've been trying to give our people a culture 
of their own, and I know it begins with architecture. Basically, it is architecture we have to 
have. If we're ever going to have a culture of our own we'll have an architecture of our 
own. Now we started it. It's well on the way. I could hang gold medals all over the front 
here talking to you because America at last said something out of the freedom that foreign 
nations are bound to respect as culture. That's why I believe it could be done and I believe 
it would pay, it would pay out, I believe it would lick Communism. I think it would lick 
every other faith on earth if we only took it to our bosoms and had the courage to practice 
it. If we'd make some sacrifices for it. We won't. That all? 

SHELDON: Here's one I found on the table when we came up here. I understand that 
Frank Lloyd Wright homes have low ceilings. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

SHELDON: Before air-conditioning, did this low ceiling result in poor air when a 
number of people were in one room, such as a party? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: No. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: The infiltration was always something to be overcome. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: We couldn't build windows and doors tight enough to keep the air out. Ever 
since we discovered floor heating we can raise the ceilings, but before that time we had to 
keep them down in order to keep warm up north. We couldn't have a high ceiling and 
really be comfortable. Not only that, but the homes that I have built and the buildings I 
have built have high ceilings only as a dramatic contrast to the high one which follows 
very soon. It's a little trick, ladies and gentlemen, as well as economy. It's an artistic 
subterfuge if you want to call it that. Why not call it a refuge? Call it a poem. Because, 
after all, before we began building buildings to human scale the old classic idea was to 
mortify the individual-give him an inferiority complex-that was the first aim they had. 
That's why they built great high ceilings and high columns and made you rattle around in 
space you couldn't use. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, any more? 

SHELDON: Here's one. Do not people produce more and/or better when enslaved? For 
example, Michelangelo as "prisoner" of the Pope produced the murals of the Sistine 
Chapel. 

WRIGHT: Oh, he was no . . . that's all history that is garbled or distorted. Michelangelo 
was never anybody's slave, least of all the Pope's. There may have been some reason why 
the Pope wanted Michelangelo's services completely to himself. I don't know. Probably so. 
But Michelangelo was no slave of the Pope. The man that hurled the Pantheon on top of 
the Parthenon was nobody's slave. He made us all slaves! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: There isn't a thing done since in the name of authority that hasn't had that 
goddamned dome! 

AUDIENCE: (prolonged laughter) 

SHELDON: We're very pleased to have had Mr. Wright with us. It's been very wonderful. 
I'm sure all of us are going to grab our economics textbooks and find out about those two 
fellows he mentioned. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

25 Architecture in a Democracy 

Now, democracy can only live by way of its own genius. Democracy cannot live on 
anything borrowed. 

{Text edited and reprinted from "By Frank Lloyd Wright," Michigan Society of Architects 
Monthly Bulletin, Vol. 28, June 1954, pp. 9, 
11, 13, 15, 17, 19-21, and 23. Used by permission of the Michigan Society of 
Architects.} 

Introduction 

Mr. Wright spoke before the Detroit Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and 
the Michigan Society of Architects at the Masonic Temple in Detroit on Thursday 
evening, May 27, 1954. Shortly after tickets went on sale it was reported that: "Tickets to 
the Wright lecture are being sold rapidly, even before there is any promotion to speak of. 
Large blocks of tickets are being bought and . . . it is evident . . . the lecture will be sold 
out far in advance."{"Frank Lloyd Wright Lecture," Michigan Society of Architects 
Monthly Bulletin, Vol. 28, May 1954, p. 17. Used by permission of the Michigan Society 
of Architects.}Before his appearance on May 27 the editors of the Michigan Society of 
Architects Monthly Bulletin reflected upon Mr. Wright's past visits to Detroit:{"Frank 
Lloyd Wright Lecture," Michigan Society of Architects Monthly Bulletin, Vol. 28, May 
1954, p. 17. Used by permission of the Michigan Society of Architects.} 

On one of his former visits to Detroit the architects arranged a press luncheon for him at 
the Detroit Athletic Club. Everything was set, newsmen were present, and the cocktails 
were enjoyed-but no Mr. Wright. Next day one Detroit newspaper, whose editor didn't 
love Mr. Wright, front-paged the headline, "Two wrongs don't produce a Wright," and 
the article went on in disparaging terms, concluding that "your guess is as good as ours as 
to whether he will even show up for the lecture." 

The feat was accomplished, the place was mobbed, even by bobby-soxers-the kind who 
swoon for their favorite crooner-and when they had to be turned away they were asked 
why they didn't go down in the lounge and hear him over the public address system, they 
would say, "We want to see HIM." Had everything gone according to schedule, there 
wouldn't have been nearly the news value. 

Thinking to get some expression about our architecture and city planning problems, a 
reporter asked Mr. Wright what he thought of Detroit. His answer, "must I think of it?" 
This is somewhat typical, as he generally gets attention by insulting his fellow 
architects-but in a way that they like it . . . Mr. Wright is no stranger to Detroit where he 
has many friends. 

Chapters 4 and 11 present two other speeches delivered by Mr. Wright in Detroit-one on 
March 22, 1945, and the other on October 21, 1957. 
Mr. Wright did appear for his May 27th speech. He talked long on subjects that ranged 
from culture to McCarthyism but most of all on democracy and what it should mean to a 
free country and especially to the architecture of a free country. Mr. Wright's lengthy 
speech was followed by a question-and-answer period in which the audience 
participated. Several days later, on Friday, June 4, Mr. Wright delivered a speech in 
Philadelphia in acceptance of the Frank P. Brown Medal of the Franklin Institute (see 
Chapter 18). 

The Speech 

WRIGHT: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a feeling at this occasion that it is badly out of 
scale-I don't see that architecture is entitled to any such spaciousness as this or any such 
audience. I don't believe you are all interested in architecture. It is hard to believe it. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Architecture is the blindest spot of our culture. We know a little music 
now-not much. We know a little painting; we can see that has practically been 
demoralized and is practically gone. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Sculpture-who refers to sculpture as a culture nowadays? Anybody? 

You see, the arts in our nation are in a bad way. Somehow in previous cultures art and 
religion have been the soul of those cultures. 

We have a way of life that is called a civilization but lacking a culture, which is the way of 
making that way of life beautiful. Of course, we don't know much or hear much about the 
arts, with a capital "A." 

When we do have a culture of our own, architecture will be basic to that culture. As a 
matter of fact, what is wrong now with painting and with sculpture, chiefly, is that 
architecture being dead, with what they call the Renaissance lying moribund for 500 years, 
painting and sculpture took a little shovel full of coals and started little hells of their own 
and they haven't been able to make it. And they won't be able to make it until that great 
synthesis comes again, which once existed in the world, from all the arts with architecture 
fundamentally there. 

Let's put it the other way around because architecture, of course, is the greatest of all the 
arts when it is understood. We don't understand it because anybody can plan a house or 
build a fire, and a house is a piece of property anyway, isn't it? 

We are very careless about it, and what we see in our own nation is not a great congruity 
but a great incongruity, and, of course, it's a disgrace, provided we were a culture. Now, I 
don't mean culture as the Germans use the term at all. I mean culture as the Dutchmen 
used the term when they took the little flower out of the garden-the larkspur. 

That beautiful little thing. What a charming pattern it has! They didn't educate the 
larkspur; they didn't try to teach it anything. 
It was there. But with patient experimentation they found out what that little flower liked 
best, and then they gave it that. And it grew and grew-bigger. Then they gave it more, 
until finally what have you? You have the queen of the garden, the delphinium, out of the 
little larkspur. Well, now, that is culture. 

All we have had is what you call education. You cannot get the artist-an architect 
because an architect must be fundamentally a great artist-you cannot get one by the same 
methods you produce a scientist. You can't get one by the same methods used to produce a 
businessman. There is some confusion, I think, in the minds of the American public as to 
whether this creature we call an architect is a hybrid. I don't know what they think he is. I 
have been a practicing architect for sixty years myself and I don't know. There seems to be 
some confusion of ideas of what he is, really-who he is, how he is. 

Certainly the way they are trying to make them in our universities would seem to indicate 
they don't know much about it, which is an indictment I think I am entitled to bring 
because I am trying to do something about it. I believe that if we are going to have young 
men worthy of this great opportunity and a new civilization where time, place, and man 
are all in changed circumstances and nothing of the old philosophy of architecture-which 
really wasn't a philosophy at all-remains useful to us, we are at the point where we have 
to start practically from scratch. 

Steel and glass came in and you know the Greeks didn't have those two miraculous 
materials. Glass, to keep air in. Steel, the spider spinning. The ancient Greeks were never 
able to build buildings on which you could pull this way [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright 
gestures with his hands]. They'd all come apart and fall down. Now, we have this great 
element of tenuity, steel, an entirely new principle in construction. 

The principle has enabled the cantilever to come into being. You all know what a 
cantilever is, being here interested in architecture, and I shouldn't have to explain it. But I 
think I will have to and say to you it is merely an extended lever. 

This would be a cantilever, resting here [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright again gestures with his 
arms], and the distance that it projects over, it lists in this direction, so that a cantilever 
system enables the reduction of great spans and puts the support directly on the load. Now, 
that opportunity never existed in the world before. 

Let's get down to the simple structural basis of a thing. The old architecture has gone. You 
see, the old architecture was a box and the corners of that were the supports. This will 
probably bore you, but never mind-you may learn something! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: When you have to span from corner to corner, you see, you have a very big span 
to cover. It was very expensive. But, when we got the cantilever and the principle of steel, 
you could move those supports in and have the corner free, and the cantilever is created by 
that; reduced the spans, broke out the corner of the box, and let you look out where you 
never looked out before. 

Now, when that happened, the walls began to disappear. The walls were vanishing. Now, 
when the corners go and the walls vanish, what have you got? You certainly have a new 
freedom, haven't you? You have got a chance now to build buildings that are for a free life 
within the building; where the life within the building becomes more aware of and part of 
the outside world and the outside world can be used at convenience from the inside. 

So your walls become screens, and the box form is now the old thinking and the old 
thought, and what you hear of as the International Style is, of course, the old box with its 
face lifted. You make the box walls of glass and you look into the box. Has the thought 
changed? Never! The same old thought; no real dissidence. 

That is not modern architecture, that is only contemporary. There is a distinction I wish 
you'd remember because it's a valid one and it's a genuine basic structural reason for what 
we call organic architecture. 

Now, little things-and those are not little things-but that is the type of thing that has 
changed the civilization of the world. It has sometimes destroyed them. It has sometimes 
made them. 

By way of our Declaration of Independence and what we call democracy this gives 
America a chance to build a culture unparalleled in the history of the world. We don't have 
to follow the Greeks. We don't have to follow anybody. We have a new freedom that will 
enable, eventually, an architecture to appear that will astonish and delight the Greeks if 
they ever get a chance to see it. They would think: "How foolish and how silly we were to 
do what we have been doing all these years." 

But we have been doing it. We have been standing columns up just for the sake of 
columns. A bank didn't have credit unless it had columns up in front! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: To do honor to a great democratic president with columns we built a public 
comfort station to the greatest statesman we ever had with columns. We go back to the 
Greeks for dignity and honor. How long do you think a free people are going to stand for 
that? We have stood for it ever since we began. 

I hope you are aware of the fact that nearly everything we have got that could be named 
architecture or culture, or has been so named, came to us third hand. The French got it 
from the Italians, the English got it from the French, and we got it from the English. If we 
had only taken the best of it, we would have been better off. What we got is what the 
dormitory towns took from it; the big towns in London, for instance. We got a very much 
bastardized edition of original Italian architecture in what we call the Old Colonial. 

Now, I have given you the history, which is valid. You can't evade it. We are mongrel 
people and have borne with a mongrelized culture for how many years-a hundred and 
how many? 

The Declaration of Independence was unique, wasn't it? It was the first time in the history 
of the world that people stood up on their own feet and said: "Hell, let's be ourselves. Let's 
have individual responsibility as the basis of our personal freedom." 

We got democracy and that is where we are. Here we find ourselves doing everything we 
declared in that day and time we would not do and doing it for what? To save our own 
faces. Because we are scared, I guess, because we are congenital cowards; is that it? Well, 
why? Why have we denied and gone against every fundamental principle that we found 
our forefathers-or would have found if we studied it-declared as freedom? I can't 
understand it, unless it is that all our standards are so mixed, like our blood, that we have 
lost sight of anything straightforward, clean, true and original. 

Now, democracy can only live by way of its own genius. Democracy cannot live on 
anything borrowed. We have got a new work to do in the way of a new culture. 

We have gone about it in a way that is unthinkably disastrous. We send our young people 
now to learn how to characterize this freedom and this new life and to prophesy the 
individual as our forefathers claimed and desired would come true. We send them to these 
old rat traps-these old buildings-their own selves perfectly debased as far as culture is 
concerned; they are nothing. They form line associations with those buildings and they 
come back to us conditioned. 

Well, now, education in our country has become a kind of conditioning instead of 
enlightenment. Enlightenment is one thing; conditioning is another. We, as a people, are 
being conditioned. When you start looking a thing in the face for what it is, you will be 
just as displeased and shocked. 

I used to be angry about it. I am not anymore because I know it can't be helped, but it's 
there. We are not fundamentally ourselves. We are not fundamentally paying attention to 
the basis of our real democratic existence. 

When I was in Italy last year-or a few years ago-when this Italian show was on [Editor's 
Note: Mr. Wright's "Sixty Years of Living Architecture" exhibition], I talked with many 
Italians and, believe me, the Italians are the most intelligent artistically of all the people of 
Europe today, as they have always been. They said: 

Mr. Wright, your attempt at democracy is going to fail because you have not provided 
anything to prevent the rise of mediocrity into high places. Your design was to be ruled by 
the greatest and the best. How are you going to accomplish the greatest and the best when 
mediocrity can become your rulers? 

What is the answer? I wish you'd tell me. 

Our forefathers didn't care for it when they made a vote conditioned upon a stake in the 
country. You had to have something of it that you were in for and could protect and call 
your own before you could vote. But they destroyed that. 

Now, I don't think there is anything standing between our democracy-our freedom and 
our architecture and our life as a great culture-and destruction unless we can do a little 
thinking along with voting. A lot of us thought that when the women got the vote that 
would change things. Well, it didn't. The balance of power remained precisely as it was. 
You know that, don't you? It has been ascertained perfectly that when women got the vote 
nothing changed at all. But you might have expected that when she did get the vote culture 
would get a little better break. Finding that it hasn't worked that way, I decline to be 
booked to women's clubs to speak. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: When I didn't have a nickel to my own name, I went to an agent and became 
one of his trained seals. He said, "Mr. Wright, we want to bring lectures back. I want you 
to take your dress suit." I didn't have one but I got one and went out over the country. He 
put a joker in it. At the last lecture of the series I found myself in Richmond, Virginia, and 
I thought I was going to the Art Institute [of Chicago]. This was the last lecture of the 
series and he put one over on me. He booked me for the Richmond Women's Club. I got 
there and it was a handsome place. There were handsome women serving tea. The richest 
women's club in the world and there I was. Well, it was a great opportunity for revenge. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I told them why I didn't want to talk to women's clubs, because what was the 
use? There was no use at all. I went on at some length and explained why. 

After the lecture I was coming down into the audience to get out the back way and out 
comes a very handsome, tallish lady, beautifully dressed, with a beautiful young daughter 
on her arm. She slipped her arm in mine and said, "Now, are you real?" and pinched my 
arm. She said, "I never expected to live to see the day." Well, it was Cissie Patterson 
herself. She herself had troubles culturally, I guess. 

Why are all you women here now in this audience? Do you feel any individual 
responsibility toward the cultural side of life that your children are going to live hereafter? 
Now, when you got your foot on the bar rail and a cigarette hanging from your lip, you felt 
that was progress, I dare say! Well, it worked just the other way. You haven't progressed; 
you are now a liability rather than an asset. The question arises: What in the name of 
heaven are we going to do with you? 

Look at the magazines, television, radio, everything-is there anything from the belly 
button up? No, it's all from the belly button down. That is what you have done to us. What 
good did it do to let you have the vote? I think we ought to take it back! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: Now, of course, it is easy for me to stand here in this great vacuum and mention 
these unmentionable things. There is some satisfaction in just that, but not enough. I 
wouldn't have come down here just to mention these things unless I thought that by 
mentioning them, by calling your attention to them-and being an old veteran practicing 
architecture for sixty years, 647 buildings, and seeing some of you at home and in 
company-I have attended these cocktail parties, than which there is no worse ever, 
standing around with drinks, gassing away about nothing, and I tell you that the artistic 
sensibility of our people has practically gone to pot. Yes, it has and I don't see why it 
wouldn't be fit and meeting [for] our women's clubs to do a little something about it. And 
what are they doing about it? 

As for the men, well, in America it is a weakness to talk about the beautiful for a man who 
can really make money. Making money is the basic art, next to advertising-we'll have to 
cut that in-in the whole nation. 

We are a juvenile civilization, with our feminine angle, now able to drink and smoke, and 
where is our culture as a nation? What are we doing? How many of you here would know a 
good building from a bad one? How many would know why it was good or why it was bad? 
You can take a handful of you, say fifteen or twenty of you out there, if that many, and 
then you might be mistaken. 

But there is something elemental; there is something fundamental; there are principles in 
this life of ours. We don't see much of them. We don't hear much of them. 

You can get an angle of what we have by [the] trial that is just going on here by this 
mobocrat from Wisconsin. He used to be called 
[Senator Joseph] McCarthy. I have got another name for him, but I wouldn't dare mention 
it here tonight. But that is where we are. I spoke a little while ago about democracy arising 
into high places. There you have it. This man is a mob. There isn't anything there but 
McCarthy. That is enough for him. It is what the Germans invented a word for. Do you 
know that word?-to "Schriben" [sic]? You Germans know it. It means "written dead." In 
other words, let it drop-with a dull and sickening thud. 

Well, let's get back to architecture. See if it works. Another sad thing is that we don't get 
the good material in architecture that we used to have. The men we had building buildings 
when I was a youth came in the hard way. They made their reputations by sheer 
performance. They didn't get a little pink slip from a college and go out and practice 
architecture. They had to show something on the ball, what they were and had, and what 
they could do; and they did it. At least they were men. 

When I was a youth in Chicago, the Art Institute was built. When it was built, they 
wondered who was going to go to it and who would patronize it, if anybody. But they 
found a use for it. When papa and mama made a boy that was no good and they couldn't 
do anything with him-he wouldn't work and he wouldn't do anything-the cure for that 
was to send him to the Art Institute. And that is how the Art Institute was filled up. It was 
filled with that type of material. If he is no good for anything else, he might make an 
artist. 

That is where we are now, and that is why architecture is where it is-one reason. We 
don't have the men and it is because it has become useless, in a civilization as juvenile as 
ours is, to really become a great artist. 

How can you? They are not made, they are born-and they grow by encouragement. They 
grow by the opportunity to become great. Where are they going to get it now? 

Well, this is all very encouraging, but what I am driving at is this: It is time, high time, 
that you American women-and even you American men-woke up to the fact that a great 
civilization without a great culture is in great danger. It can commit suicide overnight. 
Science has driven us to a brink. All it would take would be an H-bomb or two and a 
black satchel with some insane person to drop it and the whole world would go to pieces. 
That is what science has done for us. Science can take things apart like that. What can put 
things together again? What? Science? No. Science can't even put together again what it 
takes apart. 
Creative art, the creative mind-the creative individual is the only one that can save this 
civilization from itself. That is not an overstatement. Isn't it time, instead of trying to make 
artists the way we make businessmen and the way we make chauffeurs and truck drivers, 
that we paid a little attention to the best way of getting something out of what we have? I 
think we have got it, and I believe it lies not with this generation that I belong, 
certainly-that is practically gone-nor to the generation after me-because that is entirely 
gone-nor the generation after that-that is going-but to the children that are now in 
high school. I get letters from those children all over this country, children in high school: 

Dear Mr. Wright: 

We have selected you for our thesis. Would you kindly send us some material? 

So I'm getting out a form letter. The secretary is going to send it when they write in, there 
are so many of them. 

Now, what occasion is there to awaken interest in a culture that is indigenous? I am at a 
loss; I am really asking you because I am sure I don't know. But it is there. I think it is 
there because I think it is time. You know, there is a right time in all this sort of thing. It 
goes down; it is like the weather, more or less, and it's on the grand average. In [the] 
course of time things come right side up. In [the] course of time the bad will subside and 
the good will arise. So there is hope in the young. 

Then, too, if you go far west, out to the far-western towns and cities like Barstow, 
California, or Phoenix, Arizona, the new ones where things are new, there is hope. You 
see, these middle-western towns like your town here and other towns grew up at the very 
worst possible time. They are, of course, now unable to overcome that period. But if you go 
where things are new, you see what we call modern architecture characterizing the whole 
place. You see people waking up and taking an interest. They are really very attractive, 
beautiful places. Then you come back to a middle-western city and what do you find? 
Well, you know. You live here. 

Now, that shouldn't be the case. You see, the Russians got one great break over us. When 
they started to build a great city, Moscow, 
do you know what they did the first thing? They blew up squares; they blew up old blocks. 
When I was there in 1939 I saw them going-up in the air. I don't know how they did it. 
They must have had the H-bomb then. 

But they cleared out the whole center of Moscow, except the Kremlin, and then they 
planted the tall buildings far out. The further out they went, the higher up they could go. 
But they couldn't come down to the center. That is what we call decentralization on a 
grand scale. 

We can't do that. Our property is too precious for us to ever do anything like that. We have 
got to hang onto it or die, if we don't look out. The owners of the city aren't going to let go 
voluntarily. They are going to build more and more, and higher and higher, and they are 
going to build great streets-great freeways that are going to enable you to get away from 
the city after a while. That is really what they are for. 

So there you are now and there is your opportunity. How many of the best people live in 
the cities now that you know of? Not many can get away and get out. How many great 
firms are inhabiting the city now? Aren't they going out? 

I built a little church in Madison. It was a Unitarian Church. They wanted to build it 
downtown. I persuaded them to go out into the country, so we went out about five miles, I 
think it was, or maybe four and a half. We thought it was far enough. Before we got the 
church finished the city was all around it, and Madison isn't growing very fast. 

So I think that to decentralize today you have not only got to go out as far as you dare go 
but five times as far. And the city then will get you before it passes away unless the blast 
released with the H-bomb happens along. Sometimes, don't you think that would be, 
perhaps, merciful? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: It would give us a chance to start all over again. You know, it wouldn't hurt. 
We wouldn't know it happened at all. Even if it were to drop tomorrow, I don't suppose 
any of us would suffer a pang-we'd just disappear. That is not a gloomy thought 
altogether, but still we don't want it to happen. 

When we were talking about architecture, and if you don't think this is architecture you are 
very much mistaken because architecture today, the central principle of it, is 
decentralization; now there is where the women could come in. Do you know what keeps 
the city alive, chiefly, today? It is the women. The women really are for the city, and they 
are going to keep the city alive until the last gasp. Why? For one basic reason-it is the 
best hunting ground there is! 
AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I think that eventually it is going to be a great house of prostitution. It will also 
be a gambling center and a place where you will find-well, let's change the subject. 

We can't get too flippant tonight. The occasion is too outstanding. I prefer the little 
gatherings so you can all get together and see each other, talk about things, and have fun. 
You can't have fun tonight! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: But here is something we must realize as a people-and this is serious. If we do 
not realize the nature of architecture as basic to culture and waken to the fact that we don't 
have one worthy of a free people, that we are living the lives of cowards in more than one 
sense, and reach for something even if it's a stiff drink, it will give us a little courage. That 
is what we lack. 

Now, I have often tried to figure out why we are so cowardly. What scared us so? What is 
it that has put us back on our haunches for nothing, no reason at all? Is it a bad 
conscience? Is it because we have lost all sense of proportion? Is it because we gave the 
women the vote? Could be. It could be a lot of things. I haven't been able to figure it out, 
and I don't think you will either, so let's drop it. 

Let's go forward to something where we can all realize that life is only worth living if you 
can make it more beautiful than it was when you found it. That is true. That is the only 
real life worthy of a man, and I have found in my own personal experience that what pride 
I have is where I have tried to make the life around me and the life of my people and my 
own life in connection with it more beautiful than it was. How do you do that? It's the only 
thing that is worth your time. 

We talk about the payoff. Everything in this country revolves around the question: Will it 
pay? What is the payoff? Where do I come in? All that sort of thing. 

Well now, cowardice is the death of all these things I am talking about. There is no beauty 
in cowardice and there is no beauty for cowardice. It is the very antithesis and death of the 
beautiful in every sense. It takes courage. It takes blood. It is only out of the heart that this 
thing comes of which I am talking about, not out of the hand. Architecture is a scientific 
art but primarily architecture is of the heart. It is here [Editor's Note: Mr. Wright places 
his hand over his heart]. It is love for the beautiful, for the truth, for integrity, for strength 
and purpose. 

Now, art and religion are the soul of a civilization. Science is nothing but the brains and 
the toolbox. When you are low on heart and low on religion, don't talk about a culture. 

You know, I believe too that it isn't much use to talk about manhood or womanhood either, 
because if that is not present and you are not aware of it and you are not cultivating it and 
you are not fighting for it and it isn't the most precious thing to you that is imaginable; you 
are not free. You are not individuals. You are not anything in your own right at all-you 
are just things. And you can be a thing to a certain extent. You can be conscripted and go 
to war and get killed or come back a hero, and what good is it? What good is any of it 
except that thing wherein you have the feeling in your heart that you are contributing, that 
you are developing and making this world a better place for those children that you caused 
to come into this world to live and their children, too? 

Now, there is where we got a culture and that is what culture means. That is why it is. 
That is why a civilization isn't good enough. 

Why, the Indians had a civilization. God knows, how many hundreds of them there were. 
Look how many have come and gone. What did they die of? Why did they die? Why aren't 
they here now? 

Where are the Romans, for instance? We are the modern Romans, of course. We put the 
razor on the scruff of our necks, expose our heads behind the ears, where there is no 
expression whatsoever, as the Romans did. Why do we do it? Because the Romans did it. 
We don't do it for any good reason that we know of. You get your hair cut today as the 
Romans got it cut, and God knows they were the ugliest people on the face of the world! 

The Greeks were a little better. The Greeks didn't have their hair cut. The Greeks were 
personable citizens, they were handsome. They were Negroid-they were black, brown and 
yellow-but they were good to look at and they dressed beautifully. 

The Greeks had great sculpture but they had no architecture. They again were degenerate 
where architecture was concerned, and that is something we have had to learn-I mean 
unlearn. The whole world has had to unlearn that. 

Another damage which is done to us continually, that we have had to unlearn, that a 
painter cannot make an architect, and a painter damages architecture. The greatest painter 
who ever lived, Michelangelo, did the most grievous error an architect ever committed 
when he did St. Peter's. Now, why? You all think that is your answer-that arch up in the 
sky standing on posts. Did you ever think what an anachronism it is? Did you ever think 
how false it is to construction? Did you ever learn that it would have fallen-great chunks 
of it were falling-and the call went out to all the blacksmiths in Rome to make a great 
chain to put around the base of it to hold it there, and it is there now? Otherwise, St. 
Peter's would have been down and out. 

We went on copying, we didn't care. Now, we build it with iron plates bolted together and 
imitate an arch. And there it is, sitting up on cast-iron pins purely a false form, purely an 
anachronism. Do any of you know it? No. Did the English know it when they copied it in 
St. Paul's? No. It has become the symbol of authority the world over, and that symbol of 
authority is essentially false. 

It is like the UN Building in New York City. That is also false in the same way. That is a 
great big box, a crate in which you could ship any number of people to here, there, and 
back again. It makes no sense except Fascism, Communism, and all the other-isms-it is 
utterly undemocratic in spirit. It is not free nor is it fault-free. 

Now, all these things you must know and you must know the reason why these things I am 
telling you are so. I am not going to answer it, and you must look into this thing a little 
deeper and you must get hold of something you don't have hold of now. I suggest that 
women's clubs of this country take it up and study it. 

Well, now, usually when I come in out of the field and I am still working-working 
hard-there are people in the audience who really want to know something that I could tell 
them. There are questions that I could answer, and the question and answer period when I 
was in England was really good. It was the best part of the evening, and I enjoyed it and 
they did, too. They got to heckling me to the point where they got to heckling each other, 
and the thing would break up almost in a row. But you don't get that out of an American 
audience and I don't know why. You won't fight. You won't come back. Why shouldn't 
you? I am not going to say things to you that are not very pretty. There may be another 
side to this that I don't understand and I am very willing to listen. So, now, you go on. 
Let's hear from the audience. Has anybody got a question? 


The Questions and Answers 

CARMEL BOOTH: Mr. Wright, I am Carmel Booth of San Anselmo. I do want to say that 
I am most happy that the County of Marin, particularly our Board of Supervisors, has seen 
fit to hire the services of one of the outstanding gentlemen of our age. We know that you 
will give us everything we want. I don't think we can tell you anything. We are so stupid 
you will have to tell us, Mr. Wright. 

WRIGHT: My dear lady, you shouldn't break down, weep, and confess in front of all these 
county people of yours, but even if what you say were not true I should much like to hear 
you say what you say, what you have just said. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Wright, I feel that within the next twenty 
years Marin County could very well have a population in excess of a million and a quarter 
people. . . . 

WRIGHT: I agree. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: . . . In San Francisco we have an area of 
twenty-six square miles . . . 

WRIGHT: Yes. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: . . . with 800,000 people, here we have 525 
square miles and the most beautiful county in all California . . . 

WRIGHT: Right! 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: . . . and I do claim that it is going to be 
recognized as the "jewel county" of the State of California. 

WRIGHT: And, therefore, be wrecked if you don't watch out! 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: . . . and you certainly should bear in mind that 
we want your kind of a building and I am sure you will follow it out. The shortage of time 
element is constantly getting shorter. We now cross the United States in three hours. We'll 
soon be able to cross the United States and the Pacific Ocean in less than three hours. The 
population is moving West . . . 

WRIGHT: It is going to be hard to keep up with all that. I'm booked as Admiral on the 
American Fleet for the first passage clear across the country within two years on a jet 
flight taking two hours and twenty minutes. Yes, sir . . . and it is not only time that flies! 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Wright, I would like to ask what have you 
to suggest so we can start at the present time to prevent further injurement from a 
cancerous growth of building developments that is completely spoiling our beautiful Marin 
County and that would spoil any of the things that you are standing for? How can we stop 
this thing? 

WRIGHT: Well, there is the atom bomb! And there is, of course, the virtue of what we call 
American freedom. We are not very well up on freedom in our country at the present time. 
We have taken license to a very great extent in the name of freedom and our towns which 
could be so beautiful and our village life could also be beautiful. But licentious-there are 
ugly poles and wires, roadside signs and buildings right on the sidewalks-no attention 
whatever paid to spacious ground plan because . . . why? Crowding! No space! No room! 
Who is responsible? Don't tell me that you people yourselves aren't responsible because 
really you are. Why are these poles and wires here with us now? Don't you all take them 
for granted? Who is complaining about them? I never hear anybody making a fuss about 
this mortgage on our native landscape but they do have a mortgage and have foreclosed it 
on our American landscape. That is most tragic. It is so in every region; not yet so bad 
here as it is elsewhere. 

But there is one bad thing we cannot seem to get rid of yet. Why? They are not needed 
now. And why can't we get rid of the fifty-foot lot or even the one-hundred-foot lot? 
Have we got to begin by abolishing the Realtor? Because as I understand him-I have 
hated him ever since the inception of my architectural career-he is the man who watches 
to see which way the crowd is going to go; is already moving and he'll run out there ahead, 
buy all the ground, and cut it up into little pieces, and sell a little piece at a time. The little 
pieces look smaller and smaller and smaller as the cars grow bigger. Well, we fall. Now 
the discouraging feature in all these situations, to me as an architect, is that you are 
yourselves so supine. You don't do anything about it! You don't even say anything! A 
woman got up the other day-[in an] audience in Madison [Wisconsin] where I was 
speaking-speaking of a terrible housing project [on] one side of town, suburban to 
Madison. I had never seen anything so benighted-so utterly regardless of the human 
interest. Well, the woman got up and said: "But Mr. Wright, what else can we do? We 
haven't anything else to buy." And I said, "My fair lady, do you know why you don't have 
anything else to buy? Have you ever asked for it out loud? Did you ever stand up for 
something better? Ever refuse to buy these damnable impoverishments? No. You bought 
one. You are paying for it now. You will buy another. And why? Why didn't you get a tent 
instead? Go out and live in it until you could get something decent you could approve. 
You'd soon get it." That's true, ladies and gentlemen, just so long as you will take this 
imposition without complaining. What shall I call it? There is a name for it but it isn't fit 
for this assembly. You will get it just so long as you let poles and wires murder your 
landscape and spoil the buildings you build. 

You'll have them so long as the cars come to you the way they're now so badly 
overdone-you'll get them. Who buys these cars now? We know hardly any of them are 
bought but just rented. But even so, who should want to even rent one? You must know 
that if you didn't rent them they would change. 

I am old enough now in the practice of architecture to know that the main, the basic fault 
of all the trouble lies in the eye of vox populi itself. Remember the July orator who said: 
"My friends, the eye of the vox populi is upon us?" Yes, the populi, the people, you, you 
Marin County people. Well at least you have now spoken up, lined up for something 
better. I say Marin County is going to get it but what a struggle it was for you. Wasn't it? 
Now why not line up to get better homes, line up to get more ground and better ground? 
More ground isn't worth what Realtors set for it just because of your own crowding. They 
make it cost you more by compressing you, the population, into a popular small package. 
Do you squawk? No sir, you mumble and mutter, but why don't you get up and act? Now 
what is true of you is true of nearly every abuse in our daily lives today. You people can 
change it! Have you tried to change it? If you really know what you want, then do your 
best to insist upon it. Throw the fellows out of office that officiously stand in your way and 
elect no more unconscientious objectors. They have become a political sect! 

So what of politics today? You all know it is the triumph of conformity to mediocrity or 
vice versa. You know that mediocrity-say the common man-was started on this way by 
our dearest, most devastating president Franklin D. Roosevelt in his fireside chats. There 
the common-man misnomer was told how great he was, and he became so conscious of 
himself that at the present time I would say that the uncommon man is unconstitutional 
and I wouldn't be surprised if pretty soon he will have to sue for a pardon. Now who is this 
common man? There is really no such man. Try and find one. When I think of the 
common man, I think of him as a character, perhaps, now high up in politics or driving a 
truck. He may be a rich man. He's one of the merchants of our success. He can be on the 
farm, be anywhere; that is my common man. My common man is mediocre because he is 
the man who believes only in what he can see and he can see only what he can put his 
hand on. Now there lies our political trouble. There is our mediocre man. He is all right, 
he is, maybe, the basis of things but without the uncommon man he has no vision-though 
he may not know it-without him, he is sunk. At the present time he seems to be getting 
jealous of the uncommon man. He says: "Well, what's the punk got we ain't got? He just 
got the breaks-that's all." Now that is no true American sentiment. He is the end of 
democracy-the end of rule by the bravest and the best. But he votes and so is catered to by 
the politician until mediocrity, a block to progress, has risen into high places. Look at this 
McCarthy thing in Wisconsin. You have it just as bad way out here in your state. So I dare 
say. The mediocre are all coming up but not from the grass roots. No root [do] they come 
from. It is only the mud-the scum of things. Well, I don't know. So I will get back to 
where I belong. I am not a politician. I have always distrusted politics and not justly, as I 
dare say, has this distrust been only a fault of mine because politics must enter into 
everything; you've been through all this to get me to build these buildings. I guess so. 

But what we are talking about now is something even closer to you. Until you see 
yourselves as individuals, what else does freedom in this country mean? What does our 
national freedom mean unless it means the sovereignty of the individual? For the 
individual who signs his sovereignty away under any circumstances I have no respect. Nor 
have you-really. We all have certain inalienable rights and as individuals they belong 
especially to us as Americans. But the most important privilege of all is opportunity to live 
beautifully in a way you like because it is suitable to you. The pursuit of happiness is not 
enough now-that will do for awhile but happiness consists in what I have just described. I 
can't bear to see us all sitting around here in our country in ugliness. My God, look at our 
national ugliness not only out here but look [at] any town in America! Look at these poles, 
look at the wires, look at the trucks on our highways-and look! Well, there are so many 
other things discordant. What are we all going to do? The railroads have died or are dying 
because the freight cars [that] have come off the rails now run on our streets. I've lost two 
members of my own family and a young Italian who came over to get me to do a building 
for him on the Grand Canal in Venice. He was killed near Pittsburgh by a truck and I 
know of five others. Why? Because nobody is saying anything. Have you ever heard 
anybody publicly complain? I haven't. Why don't you? Well, why don't we all? I don't 
know what is the matter with us. Perhaps too much to eat? Perhaps our mattresses are too 
soft? Perhaps we do live in too great comfort and all we're asking for is three squares a day 
and some kind of schooling for Min and Timmy and some fun. We let it go at that, but is it 
enough to amount to the pursuit of happiness? 

LADY FROM THE AUDIENCE: I have been away on vacation. May I inquire what these 
buildings are that are to be built? 

WRIGHT: Well, that is yet to be determined. Dear lady, the number of buildings and what 
buildings are to be included are probably those buildings that make your life better worth 
living and make the job of engineering the county, caring for the sick and disabled of the 
county, and interests of the individuals of the county fresh, convenient, and beautiful 
entertainment. Now [that's] what those buildings [are] like. 

LADY FROM THE AUDIENCE: Is there a recreation center as well as the government 
buildings? 

WRIGHT: Of course there will be a recreation center! Good buildings themselves are all 
recreation centers, too. Well, we shall see. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Wright, I would like to ask you about the 
sovereign rights of the individual and I would like to bring up one point. When you design 
these buildings, do you intend to furnish them with your own furniture and your own 
fabrics or is that going to be put out to open bids for other peoples' ideas? 

WRIGHT: Well, my buildings are always open to anything I can find which is better. If I 
can't find anything good enough, I'll do it myself. But if I am able to find something good 
enough I will be happy to use it. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: The Supervisors have selected you as the 
architect for the Civic Center. I believe they have selected the site prior to getting your 
services. [Let's] say that you do not agree that the site is the logical spot for this 
development; what will be the outcome? 

WRIGHT: The logical spot for this development, my dear sir, will be the most beautiful 
one that you have! 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: This has already been selected. 

WRIGHT: I think, from what I hear, that beautiful is the word, but I haven't seen your site 
yet. I am to see it on Friday [August 2, 
1957]. It is near water, as it should be, and what the environment is I don't know. But I am 
sure it is beautiful. All so tell me. What do you think? 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Well, if it isn't up to expectations, would you 
suggest shifting the site? 

WRIGHT: If it isn't, we would move [it] if I could have a hand in it. Marin County 
certainly shouldn't roost upon a spot unworthy of its character, unworthy of its beauty. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Wright, how many millions of dollars will 
this cost? 

WRIGHT: Who knows? That is always a more or less, ruinous question. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: I just made a comment. I thought that you 
might just bring some of those people from East India or the Near East with all the oil 
wells. Are you going to get them? 

WRIGHT: This young man is afraid Marin County, because of no oil, is going to be sunk! 
Is Marin County afraid that it's going to be pushed over its head? It need have no such 
fear. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: Mr. Wright, really, sincerely, with this 
spiraling cost of our economy, there must be some specific goal. In other words, is it going 
to cost two million, or one million, five million, fifty million? How will you be able to 
handle the spiraling cost of our economy? 

WRIGHT: My dear boy, we shall have to cut our cloth-I mean our suit according to our 
cloth, and what Marin County feels that it can afford is the perimeter of our endeavor; this 
and all together with what building intelligence we do have. No good architect sells 
buildings. He doesn't sell projects. He sells his services to help people get what they want 
in the best possible way. Now that is what I am going to do for Marin County. I'm going to 
find out what Marin County wants and, itself, feels it can afford. Then, within that I am 
going to try and give Marin County all that the economic laws allow. All we can get, but 
how much, specifically, who knows? 
We'll see. Those things are all as per trial, per cut, fit, and try. No man is enough of a 
scalawag-even if he is an architect-to tell any man that his house is going to cost him 
just so much money. Especially if it is an unusual house that has never been seen by man 
before. Also, if the man for whom he builds doesn't himself specifically know what he 
wants. I have never had much trouble in that respect, although houses often cost a lot more 
than the people wanted to pay for them but they have usually been responsible for that 
themselves. They want a lot more than they can afford at the time, and when they see how 
easy it is to get it now for their future they will have their architect get it for them now. 
None of them I know have turned and blamed me. Now maybe Marin County will. I don't 
know. 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: I would like to answer that question a little 
more specifically. A space study which has been made was before the County Board of 
Supervisors, who set aside, as a rough preliminary estimate, a total sum for the 
construction of the Civic Center of approximately five and a half million dollars. This was 
the original budget for a long-term program. 

WRIGHT: That does not include the site . . . 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: I believe that does not include the site. 

WRIGHT: . . . because we shall want lots of site! 

GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE: I believe that I might ask a question that some 
of you might ask if it crossed your mind. We all know that Mr. Wright is not going to 
build a building with stark columns. On the other hand, I think perhaps we all might be 
concerned with what his feelings are about monumentality, about the scale of a group of 
public buildings, about whether they will be on pedestals or whether they will be a place 
for people to wander in and out with their children. What kind of buildings? 

WRIGHT: Now you must know the answer to that? But why don't I just tell you that one of 
the manifestations of organic architecture is simplicity because it is of the quality of life 
itself. It is for your own life and will look that way. The buildings will feel to you that way. 
Could you see the letters written to me-someday we will publish many of them-you 
would get from them the feeling that the environment we made for them has changed life 
for the better for all those people [and] how the children seem to have taken an interest in 
these good things they never even thought of before. So it is. An organic building is a 
tremendously important basis of our future culture. You can't have a culture without this 
kind of building. You can't live life beautifully without living in a beautiful environment, 
and organic building is basic to environment. We can't live up to the top of our spiritual 
stature without such beautiful environment. Why do you all love Marin County? It is 
beautiful. Why are you here? Because here it is beautiful. Why are you going to have the 
Civic Center the way you want it? You fought to have it [as a] superior environment. 
Why? Because you love beauty. And the understanding of it finally is that it is the ultimate 
payoff, so-called, and is so, no matter how much you may value other things. Beauty is 
the moving cause of nearly every issue worth the civilization we have. And don't you know 
that a civilization without culture-such as ours-is like a man without a soul? Our 
civilization is only a civilization and fit to die, and die soon, unless it achieves for itself a 
culture-a soul-of its own! Culture consists of the expression by the human spirit of the 
love of beauty. Well, this sounds too much like a sermon. 

SCHUBART: Now that you have met Mr. Wright I would like you to meet a man who is 
going to do a lot of hard work, that is Mr. Aaron Green, who is Mr. Wright's 
representative in San Francisco and will be working with us on the Civic Center. Mr. 
Aaron Green. I would also like to ask Mr. Walter Castro, Chairman of the Board of 
Supervisors, to make a short announcement to you. 

WALTER CASTRO: Mr. Wright, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of [the] Marin County 
Board of Supervisors I want to thank you all for the fine attendance tonight to meet Mr. 
Wright. 


30 A National Cultural Center 

. . . I believe that government has no affair with culture. I think it should stay out of 
culture unless it can enable it. Any enabling act on the part of government toward the 
growth of a culture would be a welcome act on the part of government but any interference 
with it should be resented. 

{The text of this heretofore unpublished talk with Frank Lloyd Wright is reproduced in its 
entirety from the National Educational Television Film Service Platform series and the 
motion picture film titled A National Cultural Center by permission of WNET/Thirteen 
television of New York.} 


Introduction 

On Wednesday, September 24, 1958, Frank Lloyd Wright, accompanied by Mrs. Wright, 
left Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin, to embark on a ten-day trip to view progress 
at the Guggenheim Museum, under construction in New York City, to speak at a dinner on 
Thursday, October 2nd, given by the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce at 
Chevy Chase, to speak at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington on Friday, 
October 3rd, and to lecture at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, on Saturday, 
October 4th. This chapter presents Mr. Wright's complete talk on October 3 on the subject 
of the proposed National Cultural Center. 

On his arrival at the airport in Washington on October 2nd it was reported that Mr. 
Wright had "voiced his contempt for the architecture in the nation's capital. "I am going to 
stay away from the Capitol," he said, "I have seen it." Wright refused to be hurried by the 
welcoming committee and insisted on shaking hands and talking with his baggage man.  
-{"Gets Ovation At Chevy Chase: Wright Lashes at Suburban "Blight" and Universities," 
The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 82, No. 97, October 3, 1958, pp. 1, 4.} 

A short time later Mrs. Wright reflected: 

We arrived in the Washington Airport to the welcome of sunshine, reporters, 
photographers and Robert Richman, the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art. He 
and his wife worked for the development of culture in Washington for 12 years. 

"This town cared for nothing but politics a few years back," Mrs. Richman said, "and now 
people are beginning to be interested in art, poetry, literature, music, dance and the 
theater. We gradually gained wide membership [in the Institute of Contemporary 
Art]-beginning with a mere hundred, there are now 2000 members. This enables us to 
bring to Washington great men-leaders in their chosen field."{Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 
"Our House," The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 82, No. 103, October 10, 
1958, p. 3.} 

Mrs. Wright further described the circumstances relating to Mr. Wright's October 3rd talk 
to the Institute of Contemporary Art at George Washington University regarding the 
proposed National Cultural Center: 

Through the unceasing efforts of Robert Richman, the founder of the Institute of 
Contemporary Art, the United States government gave 10 acres of land on the Potomac 
River, evaluated at 1 1/2 million dollars for the building of the National Cultural Center, 
part of which will be the Institute of Contemporary Art. The approximate cost of this 
building will be about 27 million dollars. 

Mr. Richman asked Mr. Wright to speak on the subject of this proposed building. When 
we arrived at George Washington University an overflow audience had already gathered in 
the new auditorium. . . . 

During the discussion Mr. Wright and Robert Richman were televised on the platform by 
the Ford Foundation. The questions submitted were from prominent people involved, 
including engineers and architects. 

Mr. Richman introduced Mr. Wright as the one man whose opinion regarding the project 
would be most valuable.{Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, "Our House," The Capital Times 
(Madison, Wisconsin), Vol. 82, No. 105, October 13, 1958, p. 3.} 

Later that month Mr. Wright also participated in a two-part, hour-long television 
program for the WTTW-Chicago Channel 11 series called Heritage, which featured an 
in-depth interview in which he discussed his philosophy of organic architecture.{For a 
discussion of this program and its complete text see Patrick J. Meehan (Editor), The 
Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, NewYork: John Wiley and 
Sons, pp. 75-104. 

Mr. Wright's talk before the Institute was released as a motion picture in 1960 (a year after 
his death) by the National Educational Television (NET) Film Service. This motion 
picture, titled A National Cultural Center, included a filmed introduction to Mr. Wright's 
talk of October 3rd before the Institute of Contemporary Art by John Noble Richards, then 
president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). This chapter also presents the 
complete transcript of Mr. Richards' introductory statement. The proposed National 
Cultural Center was subsequently designed by architect Edward Durell Stone and later 
constructed and renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

In Mr. Wright's presentation before the Institute he talked a great deal on the design of 
theaters, opera houses, and symphony orchestra halls-an area of study in which he had 
considerable knowledge and experience from his past architectural projects. During his 
lengthy architectural career he designed at least thirty-four facilities for the performing 
arts, of which twelve were constructed. 

The built projects of this type are the Midway Gardens Orchestra Shell and Stage at 
Chicago, Illinois (1913), the Imperial Hotel Theater in Tokyo, (1915); the Arizona 
Biltmore Hotel Auditorium at Phoenix (1927); the Hillside Home School 
Theater/Playhouse at the Taliesin Fellowship Complex, Spring Green, Wisconsin (1933), 
the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel (used sometimes as a recital hall and for musical 
performances) at Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1938), the Ordway Industrial Arts 
Building Circle Theater also at Florida Southern College (1942 and 1950), the Taliesin 
West Cabaret Theater at Scottsdale, Arizona (1949), the Hillside Home School 
Theater/Playhouse Reconstruction, Spring Green, Wisconsin (1952), the Dallas Theater 
Center (sometimes known as the Kalita Humphreys Theatre), Dallas, Texas (1955), the 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Auditorium in New York City (1956), and the Grady 
Gammage Memorial Auditorium for Arizona State University at Tempe (1959). 

Twenty-two unbuilt project designs were made including designs for a motion picture 
theater at Los Angeles(?) (1897-1900), the Aline Barnsdall Residence and Theater 
Project, also at Los Angeles (1917-1920), a movie theater project in Tokyo (1918), a 
cinema and shops in collaboration with Mr. Wright's son John Lloyd Wright at Michigan 
City, Indiana (1932), the "New Theater" Project for Broadacre City (1932), two designs for 
the Madison Civic Center/Monona Terrace Project at Madison, Wisconsin (1938 and 
1955), the Crystal Heights Hotel, Theater, and Shops Project in Washington, D.C. (1940), 
the Arch Obler Residence (with small motion picture theater) at Malibu, California 
(1941-1956), the Music Building Complex with Symphony Hall and Stage Project at 
Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1944 and 1958), two designs for the Point Park 
Community Center Project at Pittsburgh (1947 and 1948), the Huntington Hartford 
Theatre Square Project in collaboration with Lloyd Wright in Hollywood, California 
(1949), the Huntington Hartford Vine Street Theatre Project (also in collaboration with 
Lloyd Wright) in Hollywood (1951), the Huntington Hartford Fine Arts Galleries, Outdoor 
Theater and Sculpture Gardens Project (again in collaboration with Lloyd Wright) in 
Hollywood (1953), the Marin County Amphitheatre  Project for the Marin County Civic 
Center at San Rafael, California (1957), the Baghdad Opera House and Gardens Project at 
Baghdad,  Iraq (1957), the Spring Green Auditorium Project at Spring Green, Wisconsin 
(1958), and two designs for the Michael Todd Universal Theater Project in Los Angeles 
(1958). 


AIA Introductory Statement 

ANNOUNCER: Appearing on Platform today is Frank Lloyd Wright who will speak of his 
convictions on a National Cultural Center. 

JOHN NOBLE RICHARDS: I am John Noble Richards, an architect and president of the 
American Institute of Architects (AIA). On April 8, 
1959, our profession and the world lost one of the truly great thinkers and creative 
designers of our age. Our organization honored itself in 1949 by adding to his many 
citations our highest award for architectural achievement-the Gold Medal of the 
American Institute of Architects [see Chapter 16]. Frank Lloyd Wright was and may 
remain controversial in the best and most stimulating sense. His ideas and his buildings 
are a challenge flung into the face of our time to arouse us and move us forward. You will 
witness some of his characteristic provocative candor in this interview, one of his last 
public appearances. The subject of this interview is the proposed new cultural center for 
Washington, D.C. We need this center, a proper setting for the presentation of music, 
opera, and other performing arts not only for the capital city itself but as a symbol of our 
national concern for culture and the arts. Frank Lloyd Wright also felt this need. He came 
to Washington to speak on the center, although in frail health he visited the site-a piece 
of land on the Potomac now [1960] partly occupied by an old brewery. The government 
will donate the land if enough money can be raised for the buildings. Mr. Wright studied 
the street plans drawn up by the Capital Parks and Planning Commission. In his own 
words he preferred-honest arrogance to hypocritical humility.  -He left little doubt as to 
who he thought should be the architect. In fact, he offered his services free. He once also 
said: "My best building is my next one"-it was not to be. 

We, of the AIA, feel that the architect of this important project should be selected in a 
national competition. I so testified before Congress. I am sure Frank Lloyd Wright's 
thoughts will stimulate whoever may be chosen as they do all who love architecture. Here 
he speaks before a large audience in the Lisner Auditorium [of George Washington 
University] in answer to questions raised by various citizens and put to him by Robert 
Richman, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. 


The Talk 

ROBERT RICHMAN: Dr. David Findlay who is Chairman of the Fine Arts Committee 
asked this question and Commissioner [Robert] McLaughlin-both district 
commissioners-has asked a corollary question. I thought I'd read them together, Mr. 
Wright, and have your opinion on that. The first is: "Do you think there is a satisfactory 
architectural solution in which all of the functions of the cultural center, as I mentioned, 
can take place under a single building and under one roof? For example, do you envision a 
large central stage in the middle of a structure that would be adaptable for symphony 
concerts, operas, ballets, or plays in an auditorium seating, say, 3000, whereupon another 
section of that stage might be used for a string quartet recital being played simultaneously 
before 800 in a small chamber theater?" President McLaughlin of the Commissioners has 
asked: "Do you feel that it's architecturally possible to incorporate in the National Cultural 
Center project a hall large enough to accommodate conventions of large national societies 
or organizations, in a sense taking the stage out and using the whole thing?" Well sir, 
those are two questions to start with. 

WRIGHT: Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is a whole lot to render for one admission but . 
. . 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: . . . let's go on with it. Of course it is! Of course, the single building for a 
multipurpose building is the modern thing. In Marin County we have substituted one 
building for thirteen [see Chapter 29] and I think possibly a cultural center would be more 
effective and certainly more a piece of architecture as one than as a dozen or more 
subsidiary things. The more we can concentrate, the more we can simplify, the more we 
can eliminate the unnecessary-that is what I would call modern. 

Now modern architecture, of course, has a great many misapplications. Anything built 
today is modern, isn't it? But I'm a representative of that thought in architecture which is 
organic and, of course, the organic thing in relation to a civic center for Washington 
would be as nearly one grand whole as possible. 

Now I suppose there will be other questions coming along, but fundamentally the traffic 
problem is the problem the architect must meet and solve first. Now in Baghdad there are 
already 30,000 motorcars. So in solving the Baghdad Cultural Center problem I began 
with the motorcar first. 

Now there's not much use in building a beautiful building and swamping it with a sea of 
motorcars. Unless the motorcar problem is first of all solved-approached and saved-I 
see no reason [to] build beautiful, expensive, monumental buildings. So, I think now the 
building level begins above the parking level and the entire area of this lot, as I've seen it 
with Robert Richman this afternoon, would seem to be already practically turned over to 
the car, already possessed by the automobile. The automobile runs the river front. The 
automobile comes in across and destroys the beautiful little island and altogether the 
trampling of the herd has practically made of this site a parking lot! 
AUDIENCE: (some hesitant laughter) 

WRIGHT: So what! Go on with your questions! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: That representative, Frank Thompson [sic] of New Jersey, who sponsored the 
bill in the House [of Representatives], asks a question: "What do you believe are the 
advantages of the waterfront site, aesthetically, for the National Cultural Center and 
should that be incorporated into the plan?" As it stands now, you remember, the parkway 
bounds it on the . . . 

WRIGHT: Well, this plan would take the building over to the parkway to the waterfront, 
which, of course, should be done, because if the building were cut off from the waterfront 
by a driveway with motor cars on it would be robbed of the greatest asset the site could 
give as it now stands. The building should extend to the water and, in some instances 
perhaps, over the water. Why not! But the concept of a noble building as a complete whole 
is not very simple and it's not easy. It might really degenerate into one of these 
. . . just one of those things, you know? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: I think that the question that Mr. Nordlinger [sic], Chairman of the 
Washington Ballet Company, asks-he asks three very good questions which will come 
later-but this [question] having to do with the large overall plan which would be, say, 
lifted above the entire site and go to the waterfront, says: "Realizing the financial problem 
is one of our most important considerations, what type of building . . ." 

WRIGHT: Why! 

RICHMAN: ". . . could be recommended to give us the utmost facilities for the smallest 
expenditure and could you sort of do it in part? That is . . ." 

WRIGHT: Well, here it is again! 

RICHMAN: ". . . add some each time?" 

WRIGHT: Is this political? 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I see no reason if you're going to Washington, the capital of the nation that's 
going to champion culture at this late date-160 years old . . . 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: . . . it had not ought to be a question of some thrifty businessman's idea of 
money! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well now, I don't know the gentleman that proposes the economical basis and I 
have no intention of slighting him! Because, of course, we know that money talks and I 
think it doesn't cease talking where culture is concerned but it's got to! 

RICHMAN: Well, in this particular case the bill calls for the funds to be raised from 
private sources and it sets up the . . . Board of Trustees. Representative Thompson [sic] 
says this: 

Should President Eisenhower, who has all the appointments to make under the National 
Cultural Center Act, appoint people like Andrew Mellon who donated the Mellon Gallery 
and John D. Rockefeller who is head of the Lincoln Square [Lincoln Center] Project in 
New York City? 

WRIGHT: There you have it! 

RICHMAN: The National Cultural Center . . . 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: . . . clearly does not add up to a federal subsidized center. You see, politically 
they've taken that stance. 

WRIGHT: It adds up to the trend of a nation, however! Toward being a great big 
corporation-the biggest corporation on earth! And I don't know how you're going to raise 
a culture in Washington-the center of the political drift and trend-to the basis where you 
can consider it a platform from which culture would emanate to the world under the 
Declaration of Independence, according to the sovereignty of the individual. Do you think 
you could? 

RICHMAN: Well, I'm going to ask you my one . . . 

WRIGHT: I'm going to ask you a question! 

RICHMAN AND AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

RICHMAN: I would like to answer that by asking this back: If this is conceived of in 
something like the Lincoln Square Center fund raising, which has raised 35 million 
dollars of their 75 million dollars and all from private sources, how would you square that 
with your remark to me the day before yesterday that you felt that the government, as a 
client in a building like this, is a rather dangerous client to deal with? 

WRIGHT: Well, I believe that government has no affair with culture. I think it should stay 
out of culture unless it can enable it. Any enabling act on the part of government toward 
the growth of a culture would be a welcome act on the part of government but any 
interference with it should be resented. I don't believe government is capable or ever will 
be capable now that the day of the aristocrat is over and we have a new type of 
aristocrat-one from within, outward. I think that the funds should come largely by aids of 
government and the will of the people who are truly interested in the continuation of the 
civilization of the United States. 

RICHMAN: To move now to the general problems of the design of the building and the 
engineering problems involved, we have some rather specific questions there and thought 
we might touch the engineering first. Dr. Paul Calloway [sic], the Conductor of the 
Washington Opera Society and the National Cathedral Choirs, has said that we have the 
following needs: 

The stage [to be] large enough for all opera and ballet, modern lighting and scene shifting 
mechanisms which are not built on the models of New York but look to the future, a pit 
large enough for an orchestra of 100 pieces, a large organ chamber located on or above the 
stage so that the organ can either be a solo instrument or a part of the orchestra . . . 

WRIGHT: . . .and equipment for stereophonic sound and all the modern ways of 
reproducing thought, ideas, music, [and] everything else-that's all detail; that's all 
automatic and goes taken really for granted. 

RICHMAN: All right now, in order to-for example, to get something to compare this 
with and I know that you met this problem in the Dallas Cultural Center [Dallas Theater 
Center]. 

Herman Kraowitz [sic] has told Mr. Patrick Hayes [sic], Washington's leading impresario, 
of the new dimensions for the Lincoln Center. They have asked for 115 feet from the stage 
to the grid for the new opera house, another fifteen feet clearance to the roof top, the 
architect at his own option may add twenty-five feet for a maximum height from the 
street to the top of the building of 140 feet. 
WRIGHT: Umm! 

RICHMAN: Well, this all seems to be envisioning the vertical use of scenery. How did you 
meet that problem in the Dallas Cultural Center? 

WRIGHT: It's all old stuff!!! I threw it all out to start with twenty-seven years ago! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I came to [the] conclusion that the proscenium was a thing of the past and that 
to force the performance through a hole in the wall to the audience in one room and the 
performance in another room was all that was the matter with drama, with stage, with the 
theater. And, if that were brought about . . . if it were brought about that the audience and 
the performance were sympathetically related to each other as one and the stage equipped 
so that transformations of scenery could be effected in an instant [so] that the drama would 
have new life and that's the Dallas Theater. And I think that if Washington ever built a 
theater along the old lines it would just serve it right! That's all! 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

RICHMAN: What you propose might be fine for, let's say, Greek drama. [It would] be 
excellent for contemporary drama. What about Mozart opera which itself was conceived 
behind the proscenium? 

WRIGHT: Well now, an opera house is not a theater! 

RICHMAN: Well I meant to point out, sir, that we very much want an opera house and I 
was giving the opera house dimensions of the new Metropolitan [Opera House in New 
York]. 

WRIGHT: Well the opera, of course, is pretty well standardized and all the operas have 
been scenarioed [sic] and those scenes are stored away in stock and an opera house would 
have to be so devised as to use stock stuff. So the opera house is not in the same plane or in 
the same case as the theater. A theater would be totally different. The opera house would 
be more or less standardized and more or less the old, old ritual. 

RICHMAN: So that would take the tall [proscenium] . . . 

WRIGHT: You'd have that for the scenery now in existence-you'd have to have the tall 
proscenium but no not as tall as usual because you must remember that the theater 
was-the height of the theater-the height of the proscenium was determined by the 
gallery. Now, no theater could make a living without the gallery and up in the gallery were 
the ten-centers and thirty-centers and so on and they were very high up. Now to get a 
view of the stage the proscenium had to be lifted high. Now a high proscenium is a very 
bad thing acoustically-nothing could be worse. But it had to be high and the scenery had 
to be tall and so the old theater and the old theatrical condition made a tall proscenium 
and a high overhead because when you pull the scenery up it had to be as high as the 
proscenium above the proscenium in order to get rid of the scenery! 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 

WRIGHT: Well, there's the origin of the present standardized opera house and theater. 
The gallery, the upper regions that have to be accommodated on the stage. Now once you 
eliminate from the audience or the idea of the audience the element of the gallery there's 
no need for the tallness of the stage. There's no need for the great overhead and the 
tremendously expansive arrangements for scenery that were occasioned by the tall house. 

The Dallas Theater is not going to be tall. The proscenium of the Dallas Theater is sixteen 
feet high as against, perhaps, sixty or forty or thirty, and there is no overhead except 
enough for a man to walk around above and shift the scenes such as they are. But the 
scenery changes. Now scenery becomes sculptural; it's in the open; it's as you are sitting in 
the audience. It's on the stage complete in itself and the stage revolves and is divided in the 
center so that the stage turns about and the new scene is right there. So the transportation 
of scenery-one scene from another-takes about counting ten and you don't have to wait. 
There are no waits between the scenes. 

Well, you have to have in Washington, no doubt, accommodation for all the old 
standardized operas and you would have to have a standardized opera house but not for the 
theater meant to be modern-[its] got to be advanced. I see no hope for modernizing 
opera, do you? 

RICHMAN: No sir. 

WRIGHT: All right. 

RICHMAN: Because, even now, opera is cast into-like new design of automobiles based 
on four wheels-new opera is based on that tradition certainly . . . 

WRIGHT: Yah. 

RICHMAN: . . . of the proscenium and the scene. That would mean, perhaps, then that we 
would need three different kinds of stages or auditoria [sic], as I see it now. The theater 
and symphony concert hall would have to double. An opera house for the opera, classical 
and modern, ballet, and modern dance and then the small chamber auditorium for poetry 
reading and chamber music and small chamber theater. 

WRIGHT: Or why not the ideal thing for each? 

RICHMAN: Under one roof? 

WRIGHT: It's limitless, isn't it? Of course under one roof. 

RICHMAN: Under one roof. Then that . . . 

WRIGHT: All this under one roof and what a roof!!! 

RICHMAN AND AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: And don't neglect the interior courts also, letting sunlight in behind on the 
court. An edifice of that description would be, of course, one of the grand things of earth 
and probably beyond anything ever yet built! Why not?! 

RICHMAN: Is acoustical engineering so advanced now that it's possible to have these 
large halls without sound reproduction? 

WRIGHT: Well, somebody asked me that long ago in New York what the difference was 
between an engineer and an architect and I said it was simple. The difference was that an 
engineer was a rudimentary undeveloped architect. 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: And you know, the engineers themselves liked the definition! (slight laughter) 

RICHMAN: So you're answering this question by hedging. You propose an acoustical 
architect to take care of the problem. 

WRIGHT: Well, acoustics is not where we've arrived at the point where it is an exact 
science. 

RICHMAN: I see. 

WRIGHT: You have to have had some experience in building buildings for sound in order 
to arrive at a good result. Dankmar Adler, who built the Chicago Auditorium, was called a 
great sound engineer. He himself knew by experience what he knew and he never had 
reduced it to a science and it never yet has been done, although they profess to have done 
so. He never built a bad house acoustically and Carnegie Hall in New York is one; the 
Auditorium in Chicago was the great demonstration of his power and prowess because 
even today it is the best room for opera in the world. 

RICHMAN: Well that seems to, as most of us knew, dictate the answer to the next 
question. But for various reasons this does present a considerable problem. For one thing, 
the Fine Arts Commission has to pass on the plans. For another thing, the National 
Capital Planning . . . 

WRIGHT: Now, now, there would be the problem!!! 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: That would be difficult-I know! Because in a fine arts commission I don't 
believe there would be a member who didn't know all about everything connected with the 
problem!!! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: And it's awfully hard to convince all people who are equally well educated 
about those specific details, certainly. 

WRIGHT: Architecture, being the blind spot of the nation-nobody who has been 
educated, at least, knows what constitutes the virtue of a building. Now how are you going 
to get judgment? You'll get damnation not judgment!!! 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: Well, as the Director of the National Capital Planning, Mr. Findlay, asks: 
"Does this not present a unique opportunity for such a building of unusual characteristics 
geared to the cultural needs of the people far into the next century?" and I'd like to 
combine that with a question by Representative Thompson: "Doesn't this mean that the 
building or buildings can be purely functional and not serve as decorative monuments 
related to the monuments and government buildings now existing in Washington?" 

WRIGHT: I don't blame the senators for being suspicious. 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

WRIGHT: I think that it would probably inevitably result in a fantastic phantasmagoria of 
this, that, and the other. But, if it were really organic in character and designed as a whole 
by the study of nature and according to its nature by someone who had studied nature to 
learn about architecture, it could have no such disastrous result! The study of nature has 
saved-is going to save-architecture; it would save politics; it has saved nearly 
everything human nature has committed itself to and it would save this project. Is that 
(slight laughter) a satisfactory answer? 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 

RICHMAN: Very decidedly. I should think that just a specific question might nail that 
down. Is it architecturally possible to relate this building, for example, to the architecture 
of the Lincoln Memorial which will be . ..? 

WRIGHT: It is not! The Lincoln Memorial is related to the toga and the civilization that 
wore it!!! 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 

WRIGHT: And I think it would be absurd to try and maintain the weakness and follies of 
the old lack of culture! Now, the Lincoln Memorial is not an indication of culture. It's an 
indication of the lack of it. The old Capitol is not an indication of culture, although I'm in 
favor of preserving these old mistakes-these old evidences of the old life in order that the 
new life may shine the brighter . . . 

AUDIENCE: (laughter) 

RICHMAN: Yes sir. 

WRIGHT: . . . and so forth. You know the story! 

AUDIENCE: (loud laughter and applause) 

WRIGHT: The question is, I imagine, if a man has made a mistake once, should he keep 
on making it? 

AUDIENCE: (slight laughter) 

RICHMAN: That's true. I'm sure that you envisioned just in the two times-three 
times-that you've seen the site-I'm sure you have seen some sort of vision of what that 
large multiple-unit building under one roof would be. Do you . . . 

WRIGHT: Could be! 

RICHMAN: Do you want to project that vision? Should I ask that question after I've asked 
whether you think that the selection of an architect, for example, or architects for it . . . 

WRIGHT: Now that's a very touchy question. You want to know . . . 

RICHMAN AND AUDIENCE: (loud laughter) 

WRIGHT: . . . You want to know if I'd contribute an idea of what I'm talking about on 
paper! And I would! Because my one real aim is not only to get better architects for 
America but to leave behind me some better architecture! And I believe I might suggest 
something that would amount to that and would never be paid for it in this world-I would 
have to give it!!! 

RICHMAN: Do I under . . . 

AUDIENCE: (very loud applause) 

WRIGHT: Democracy has yet to demonstrate it can serve the beauty of life and serve the 
culture of the nation by backing something genuinely noble, true, and beautiful! And it 
hasn't done it yet!!! [Mr. Wright rises from the table at which he was seated and walks 
toward the exit, waving and smiling at the audience as he leaves the stage.] 

AUDIENCE: (very loud applause) 

Epilogue 

. . . life is only worth living if you can make it more beautiful than it was when you found 
it. That is true. . . . 

. . . It is what a man does that he has. 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography 

by MERYLE SECREST     HarperPerennial 

A Division of Harper Collins Publishers 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In memory of my father, 
ALBERT EDWARD DOMAN (1904-1983) 
who wanted to be an architect 


Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist. 
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON


The text presented herein has been abridged. Original text by Meryle Secrest is here 
reproduced by permission of the author. 

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the letters of Frank Lloyd 
Wright, � the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation 1992, and courtesy of the Frank Lloyd 
Wright Archives; to Sophia Mumford for permission to quote from the letters of the late 
Lewis Mumford; to Robert, Oliver, and Nicholas Gillham for permission to quote from 
"The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses" by Maginel Wright Barney; to the Milwaukee 
Journal for permission to quote from "The Romance of Miriam Wright"; to Aimee 
Humphreys for permission to quote from an unpublished memoir by her mother, Babette 
Eddleston; to Alan Crawford, for permission to quote from his unpublished letter; to 
Mosette Broderick, executor of the estate, for permission to quote from an unpublished 
letter by Henry-Russell Hitchcock; to Felicity Ashbee, for permission to quote from the 
letters and journals of C. R. and Janet Ashbee; to Carter H. Manny, Jr., for permission to 
quote from his unpublished letter; to Eric Lloyd Wright, president of Unity Chapel, Inc., 
for permission to quote from "Trilogy" and "Heritage" and the unpublished letters of his 
father, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr.; to Mrs. Howard J. Barnett for permission to quote from 
"The Lloyd Letters and Memorial Book"; and to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for 
permission to quote from Olgivanna Lloyd Wright's letter to Mrs. Andrew Porter. 


Abbreviations (to notes found in the body of this abridgment) 

A1    An Autobiography, by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1932, 1938 
A2    An Autobiography, 1943 
A3    An Autobiography, 1977 
AP    Associated Press 
AR    An Autobiography, by Antonin Raymond 
ATL    The Art That Is Life 
BL    The Master Builders, Peter Blake 
BR     The Prairie School, by H. Allen Brooks 
CD    The Crowning Decade, 1949-1959 
CT    Madison Capital Times 
CU    Modern Architecture since 1900, by William J. R. Curtis 
DAV    They Thought for Themselves, by D. Elwyn Davies 
DDM    Darwin D. Martin Archives 
EB    Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1957 
EW    Eric Wright Archives 
EWH    Elizabeth Wright Heller memoir 
FP    Franklin Wright Porter archives 
GI    Space, Time and Architectural, by Sigfried Giedion, editions: 1941, 1967, and 1974 
HA    The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, by David A. Hanks 
HACat  Frank Lloyd Wright: Architectural Drawings and Decorative Art 
HER    Heritage: The Lloyd Jones Family 
HI    In the Nature of Materials, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock 
HLV     Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice 
JSAH    Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 
LAP    Letters to Apprentices 
LAR    Letters to Architects 
LCL    Letters to Clients 
LL    Lloyd Letters & Memorial Book 
MAG    The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses, by Maginel Wright Barney 
MAN  Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910, by Grant Carpenter Manson 
MJ    Milwaukee Journal 
MM    Many Masks, by Brendan Gill 
MOR    The Matter of Wales, by Jan Morris 
NE    Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, by Thomas S. Hines 
NYT    New York Times 
PSR    The Prairie School Review 
RR    The Rebecca Riots, by David Williams 
SC    Frank Lloyd Wright, by Vincent Scully, Jr. 
SM    Frank Lloyd Wright, A Study in Architectural Content, by Norris Kelly Smith 
SOT    The Song of Taliesin, by Thomas Beeby 
ST    The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, by William Allin Storrer 
SW    Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography, by Robert L. Sweeney 
T    Archives at Taliesin 
TAF    Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius, by Edgar Tafel 
TRIL    Trilogy: Through Their Eyes 
TW    Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture, by Robert C. Twombly 
WE    The Harmonious Circle, by James Webb 
WOW  Writings on Wright 


Acknowledgments 

This book's scope has been greatly enlarged by the new availability of the archive of 
photographs, drawings, letters, books and other materials assembled by Frank Lloyd 
Wright and inherited by members of his Memorial Foundation. 

Until recently this largest single source of information about the architect's life was, 
largely for practical reasons having to do with the size of the archive and the cost of 
maintaining a research facility, limited to specialists working in well-defined areas. 

As the result of a grant from the Getty Foundation, the total archive of over one hundred 
thousand letters, documents and other materials has been placed on microfiche and 
completely indexed. It is now available for study at the Getty Center Archives for the 
History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, which has a first-class 
research facility, as well as at the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation in Scottsdale, 
Arizona. Even though three volumes of the architect's letters are now in print, the size of 
the archive has meant that only highlights of the correspondence could be touched upon, 
leaving the vast majority unexplored until now. 

The collection, believed to be the largest of its kind assembled by an architect in modern 
times, begins in 1886 with a handwritten letter by Wright, then an apprentice architect 
aged nineteen, to his uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and ends shortly before his death in 1959. 
The archive is more complete after 1925, when Wright began to keep carbons of all his 
letters, than it is before that date, when he often wrote letters in longhand and kept no 
copies or, at best, retained only a draft of a letter, much amended and incomplete. 
Correspondence concerning his early architectural practice has also been lost, perhaps as a 
result of the many fires at Taliesin over the decades. Similarly, there are no letters to or 
from Wright's father,  William Carey Wright, or his side of the family. The archive does 
include a large group of letters from his mother and sisters, and letters from Lloyd Jones 
family members who played important roles in his life. There are several letters to him 
from his second wife, Miriam Noel Wright, but none by his first wife, Catherine, and only 
one or two by his third wife, Olgivanna. 

Wright was not only a dedicated letter keeper but also a talented letter writer, with a 
lifelong preference for paper rather than a telephone as a satisfying outlet for 
self-expression. Consequently his dispatches-on occasion, brickbats-paint a broad and 
vivid portrait of his thoughts and feelings over the decades. They also reveal the way he set 
about realizing his goals, demonstrating enormous resourcefulness and considerable 
advance planning. The tone was so idiosyncratic and singular that, paradoxically, it 
became predictable. One of the bons mots ascribed to Wright's principal secretary, Eugene 
Masselink, was that he could write as good a Wright letter as Wright himself. Be that as it 
may, the existence of this lively, opinionated and self-revelatory archive is the kind of 
treasure a biographer rarely encounters, as good a substitute for having known someone 
personally as could be hoped for. 

I am indebted to Dr. Nicholas Olsberg, then director of the Getty Center Archives for the 
History of Art, Gene Waddell, associate archivist, and their staff, for making my stay at 
Santa Monica and work in the archives so delightful and in offering me every kind of 
courtesy and help. I am equally grateful for the many courtesies extended me by Bruce 
Brooks Pfeiffer, archivist of the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation in Scottsdale. I 
particularly want to express my appreciation and thanks for the many hours spent on my 
behalf by Richard Carney, chief executive officer and managing trustee, who not only gave 
me numerous interviews but made introductions, wrote letters, offered suggestions and 
more than once treated me to the famous Taliesin hospitality. I would like to express my 
great gratitude to the Foundation for its generosity in granting me copyright permissions 
and for refraining from asking any conditions in return for this remarkable privilege. I am 
enormously indebted to it. I want especially to record my debt to the late William Wesley 
Peters, chairman of the board of trustees and raconteur par excellence, for his inimitable 
descriptions of the Fellowship's early days. I also wish to thank other members of the 
Taliesin Foundation who kindly allowed themselves to be interviewed: Cornelia Brierly, 
Tony Puttnam, Charles and Minerva Montooth, Joe Fabris, Dr. Joseph Rorke, Kenneth 
Burton Lockhart, Susan Jacobs Lockhart, Heloise Crista, Kay Rattenbury, E. Thomas 
Casey, Effi Bantzer Casey and the former development director, Elaine Freed. 

Members of Frank Lloyd Wright's family have been just  as generous with their time, 
granting interviews followed up by lengthy telephone discussions and letters, as well as 
giving me access to private family papers and photographs. I am most of all appreciative 
of the many kindnesses extended to me by Wright's son, David Samuel Wright, and his 
wife, Gladys, who is the family archivist and ultimate authority on these matters. They 
invited me to their home, showed me their archives and provided me with important 
materials. I am also indebted to Iovanna Lloyd Wright, who readily granted me interviews 
and spoke to me at length about her childhood and young womanhood. I wish to thank 
Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright, who also gave me interviews and went through her 
photographic and other files on my behalf with patience and good humor. I am especially 
grateful to Franklin Wright Porter and his charming wife, Mary, who were my hosts for a 
fascinating weekend spent in long conversations and a lengthy perusal of their own 
extensive files on his uncle's life; to Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, who also entertained me 
regally and patiently answered my endless questions; to Mr. and Mrs. Eric Lloyd Wright, 
for their invaluable insights and for making available copies of Wright's letters to Frank 
Lloyd Wright, Jr.; to Rupert Pole, another grandson, for his generous help and many 
kindnesses; to Jenkin Lloyd Jones, son of Richard Lloyd Jones, who stepped in with vital 
help at a crucial moment; to his sister, Florence L. J. ("Bisser") Barnett, who was equally 
indulgent about my demands upon her time and help; to her daughter, Heidi Kiser; and to 
Mrs. Stuart Natof, daughter of Frances Lloyd Wright Caro', who gave me important 
insights into her mother's life. 

I am also indebted to those men and women who knew Wright and whose memories 
stretched back many decades, including John H. Howe and Lu Sparks Howe, who have 
taken endless trouble on my behalf and read my manuscript at an early stage; to Edgar 
Tafel, another early apprentice, for his kindly encouragement and helpful suggestions; to 
yet another charter apprentice, Elizabeth Kassler, for her unique reminiscences and her 
extraordinary hospitality and many kindnesses; and to Wright's old friends in Spring 
Green, including Robert Graves, Herbert and Eloise Fritz, Frances and Cary Caraway, who 
were equally generous with their time and help. I am especially grateful to Mr. and Mrs. 
Robert Graves, who invariably found a place for me to stay in Spring Green, sometimes on 
very short notice. I want to give my special thanks to the author Svetlana Alliluyeva, the 
second Mrs. William Wesley Peters, with whom I spent several days and who was 
unstintingly generous with her time and help. If her memories play a minor part in the 
story, it is only because her appearance at Taliesin postdates the chronological scope of 
this book. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the extraordinarily generous attitude 
of other specialists in Wright's oeuvre, such as the biographer Robert Twombly, who gave 
me cordial advice and much encouragement; to William Allin Storrer, author of the  
definitive catalogue of Wright's works; to Robert L. Sweeney, author of another 
indispensable guide, an annotated bibliography; to Prof. Thomas S. Hines, an early 
investigator of the maze of Wright's life; to Jonathan Lipman, author of an authoritative 
study of Wright's Johnson Wax buildings, who listened to my ideas with endless patience 
and gave constructive criticisms; and to Kathryn Smith, author of essays on Fallingwater, 
the Imperial Hotel, Hollyhock House and many other landmark studies, who gave me the 
benefit of her meticulous expertise. I wish to record my special thanks to my former 
colleague at the Washington Post, Wolf von Eckardt, who encouraged me at an early stage 
and gave me valuable advice about what to look for; to another dear friend, Sarah Booth 
Conroy, the Washington Post's columnist and astute observer of the Taliesin scene; and to 
Arthur Colt Holden, who treated me to some wonderful reminiscences and a delightful 
weekend in the Connecticut countryside. I also want to thank Frederick Gutheim, the 
distinguished architectural historian and scholar, for his patient and generous help at every 
stage and for listening to my ideas with humor and insights. 

Invaluable help was given by those who were also willing to be interviewed, including 
Maria and Lynn A. Arbeen; Mrs. Russell Bletzer, niece of Wright's first wife, Catherine, 
who gave me important information; Mosette Broderick, executor of the Henry-Russell 
Hitchcock estate; Mrs. Joseph Brody and Mrs. Joy Corson, former residents of the Cheney 
House; Bill Calvert; Norma Noel Cawthon; Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Chalk of Blaenralltddu, 
Dyfed, Wales; Celia Clevenger; Mrs. Maurice J. Costello; Isabelle Doyle; Rod Duell; Jack 
Dunbar; Babette Eddleston, who provided me with a copy of her delightful memoir; Scott 
Elliott; Mrs. Charles Farnsley; Richard L. Feigen; Michael Findlay; Professor Kristine 
Ottesen Garrigan; Richard P. Goldman; Professor Thomas E. Graham; Professor Robert 
Gutman; Thomas Heath; David W. Hicks, Jr.; Virginia Kazor, curator of Hollyhock 
House; Sandra Wilcoxon, Donald Kalec and Meg Klinkow of the Frank Lloyd Wright 
Home and Studio; Mrs. Joseph F. Johnston; Anthony Jones; Lydia Kaim; Eleanor Tobin 
Kenney; Doris Murray Kuhns; Lawrence C. Lemmon; Professor Marya 
Czarnecka-Lilien; Garnett McCoy of the Archives of American Art; Elizabeth McKee; 
Randall L. Makinson; Rev. and Mrs. Aubrey J. Martin; Ben Masselink; Peter and Mary 
Matthews; Mrs. Ernest Meyer; Karl E. Meyer; Margaret M. Mills, executive director of the 
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Maya Moran; Mrs. Lewis Mumford; 
Jan Furey Muntz; Virginia Nix; Elizabeth Gordon; John O'Hern, resident curator, Darwin 
D. Martin residence; Verna Ross Orndorff; Mimi Perloff; Prof. Pat Pinnell; Loren B. Pope; 
Prof. Jack Quinan; Henry Hope Reed; Mr. and Mrs. O. P. Reed, Jr.; Hope Rogers; 
Nathaniel Sample; Frank Sanchis of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; William 
H. Short, F.A.I.A.; Louise Averill Svendsen; Jo Tartt; Lisa Suter Taylor, director of the 
Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Felicia Van Veen,  former director of the American Academy 
and Institute of Arts and Letters; Marcus Weston; Dr. F. Joseph Whelan; Richard Wolford; 
Jean Kennedy Wolford; Dr. Harry Wood; and Helmut Ziehe. 

I also wish to thank those who proffered help, sent me clippings, books, photographs, 
reminiscences, articles, and made themselves available in endless ways: Henry Allen; Dr. 
Anthony Alofsin; James Atlas; Felicity Ashbee; Carolyn Backlund; Barbara Ballinger; 
Loretta Barrett; Helen J. Bass; Marc C. Bellassai; Elizabeth Bennett; Prof. Barry Bergdoll; 
Prof. Curtis Besinger; Paul Bierman-Lytle; A. G. Blackmore; Barbara Branden; James 
Breslin; Prof. H. Allen Brooks; Sylvia Burack; Elsie Carper; Anthony Carroll; Mrs. 
William Cass; Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Cheek, Jr.; Emmett D. Chisum; Victor Cohn; Chuck 
Conconi; Henry F. S. Cooper; Alan Crawford; Dr. George Crile, Jr.; Nancy Davis; 
Mitchell H. Dazey; Marian A. Despres; Prof. Leonard Eaton; Ross Edman; Dr. Harvey 
Einbinder; Bob Eisenhardt; Anne Ellis; Cynthia Fokakis; Phil H. Feddersen; Ann ffolliott; 
Jeannette Fields; Benjamin Forgey; the late Peter Fuller; Rev. Neil W. Gerdes; Neil Giffe; 
Jackie Glidden; Rev. P. B. Godfrey; Herman Gordon; Pedro Guerrero; Peter Gubin; 
Frances Benn Hall; Dr. Donald Hallmark; Dr. Michael A. Halls; Mary Jane Hamilton; 
David A. Hanks; Georgiana Hansen; Lily Harmon; Kay Henriksen; Prof. Mark Heyman; 
Joseph Holland; Thomas Howarth; John Patrick Hunter, associate editor of the Madison 
Capital Times; William Jerousek; Prof. Ellen Johnson; Philip Johnson; Lewis Kachur; 
Prof. Vladimir Karfik; Dr. and Mrs. Louis Kaufman; the late Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.; Mr. 
and Mrs. Al Koch; the late David Lloyd Kreeger; Phyllis Lambert, director, Centre 
Canadien d'Architecture; David P. Lanferman; Esther M. Lloyd Jones; Ruth Lloyd Jones 
Leader; Jean Battey Lewis; Dr. E. James Lieberman; Dr. Vera Leikina-Svirskaya; Ron 
Larson; Lee Lescaze; Sherry Gillette Lewis; Serge Logan; Mrs. Mary Lutyens; Richard 
MacCormac, R.I.B.A.; the late Prof. Esther McCoy; Jerry and Nan McCoy; Carter Manny, 
Jr.; Grant Carpenter Manson; Luis Marden; William Marlin; R. Russell Maylone; Julia 
Meech-Pekarik; Prof. Narciso G. Menocal; Corinna Metcalf; R. Craig Miller; Waler 
Mocak; Prof. William Morgan; Jan Morris; Dorothy T. Mueller; the late Noverre Musson; 
Vincent Newton; Kenneth M. Nishimoto; Dr. Francis V. O'Connor; Leo Orso; Mrs. 
Dudley Owen; Peter Palumbo; Andrew Patrick; W. E. Pelegrino; Dr. and Mrs. Joseph 
Perloff; Mrs. Melva Phillips; Kathleen M. Raab; Proctor K. Raab; Mrs. Robert Richman; 
Rona Roob; Ruth A. Ruege; Richard W. Sackett; Helga Sandburg; Nils M. Schweizer, 
F.A.I.A.; Anita Shower; Gordon Sinykin of LaFollette and Sinykin Law Offices; Roy 
Slade, president, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Joan Shockey; Dale Smirl; Jeanne F. Smith; 
Mrs. Kenneth Paul Snoke; Prof. Paul Sprague; Gavin Stamp; Phil Stern; Audrey 
Stevenson; Mrs. Alexander Stoller; Diana Strazdes; Sean Sweeney; Roy R. Thomas; Anne 
Thompson; Prof. Franklin K. Toker; Mary C. Ternes; Harriet Tyson; John Vinci; Gretchen 
Wagner; William B. Walker, chief librarian,  Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan 
Museum of Art; Phyllis Wexler; Mary Lou White; David Wigdor; Burke Wilkinson; 
Michael Wilson; Marion V. Winters; Wim de Wit; Dr. Philip Zabriskie; and Madame 
Olivier Ziegel. 

Among those universities, newspaper archives, private galleries, historical societies, 
libraries, museums and like institutions that have made material available for this study I 
wish to extend a special word of gratitude to Dr. Harold L. Miller and the staff of the State 
Historical Society of Wisconsin for giving me access to that institution's archive, with its 
major collection of materials about Wright's life and times. I would also like to thank 
Shonnie Finnegan, archivist of the State University of New York at Buffalo for her many 
kindnesses while I was studying her archive's important collection of letters between W. E. 
and Darwin D. Martin and Frank Lloyd Wright. I would also like to thank Margaret J. 
Kimball, manuscript librarian at Stanford University, whose institution also owns part of 
this collection, for coming to my aid at a crucial moment. 

Other institutions that have permitted me to study in their archives, answered queries, sent 
material and helped in various ways are the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Allentown 
Art Museum, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American 
Institute of Architects Library, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Architectural 
Association (London) Library, the Architectural Record, the Architectural Review, the 
Archives of American Art, the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, the Art Institute of Chicago, the 
Arts Club of Chicago, the Avery Architectural Library (Columbia University), the 
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale), the Buffalo and Erie County 
Historical Society, the Carnegie Institute, the Chicago Tribune Library, the Chicago 
Historical Society, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Cornell University Libraries, the 
Courtauld Institute, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Dana-Thomas House, the Circuit 
Court of Dane County (Wisconsin), the Elvehjm Museum of Art, Fallingwater, the Fine 
Art Society, Florida Southern College, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Hirshl and Adler 
Modern Galleries, the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, the Home News of Spring 
Green, the Houghton Library (Harvard), the Houston Public Library, the Humanities 
Research Center (University of Texas), S. C. Johnson and Company, the Kelmscott 
Galleries, the Madison Capital Times Library, the Martin Luther King Library, the Los 
Angeles Public Library, the Library of Congress, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, 
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Meyer May House, the Milwaukee Journal Library, 
the Milwaukee Public Library, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Library, the Museum of 
Modern Art, the National Building Museum Archives, the National Gallery of Art Library, 
the National Portrait Gallery, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Nederlands  
Documentatiecentrum voor de Bouwkunst, the New York Public Library, Northwestern 
University Library, Oak Park Public Library, Princeton University Library, the Max 
Protetch Gallery, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Schindler House, Southern 
Illinois University, the State Historical Society of Iowa, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the 
Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, the University of California at 
Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago 
Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, the Kenneth Spencer 
Research Library (University of Kansas), the University of Leicester Library, the 
University of Oregon Library, the University of Rochester Library, the University of Wales 
Press, the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Wayne State University 
Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, the University of Wisconsin (Platteville) Library, the 
Washington Post Library and Photo Department, and the University of Wyoming Library. 

As I have discovered in the past, tackling some biographical subjects is rather like taking a 
firm grip on a fistful of nettles. This book, as I hope I have made clear, has been an 
unqualified joy to write, not just because I have been in the stimulating company of one of 
the world's great architects, but also because so many of his friends and specialists in his 
work went out of their way to help. I must also mention A. Douglas Jones, retired 
professor of architecture at Bristol University, twelve miles from my birthplace, whom I 
have not met but who took a benevolent interest in my work from the start. He and his son, 
David, a gifted photographer, made two trips to Wales to take pictures, on my behalf, of 
scenes I had hastily documented myself and with far less expertise. Several of them appear 
in this book, along with my warm thanks and deep appreciation. My researchers, Gene 
Gerard, Jennifer Baumann and Robin Weindruch, went out of their way to track down 
elusive materials and did so with tenacious zeal. This book would not have been written 
had it not been for my agent, Murray Pollinger, who would not let me give up hope, and 
upon whose sage advice I entirely rely. I am delighted that Robert A. Gottlieb took a 
kindly interest in my project before he left Alfred A. Knopf for The New Yorker. Victoria 
A. Wilson, my editor, has stimulated and encouraged me in what Bernard Berenson 
termed a "life enhancing" spirit, and Carmen Callil of Chatto and Windus has given me 
the benefit of her talent, energy and editorial intelligence. As for the of work itself, 
paraphrasing Somerset Maugham, there are three rules for writing biography but, 
unfortunately, no one knows what they are. So, while I have sobbed and struggled, my 
husband, Thomas G. Beveridge, has performed the inestimable service of listening. "And 
if my selfe have leave to see, I need not their light, having thee." 


Bedd Taliesin: Taliesin's Grave 

Fate has smashed these wonderful walls,  
This broken city, has crumbled the work  
Of giants. The roofs are gutted, the towers 
Fallen, the gates ripped off, frost 
In the mortar, everything moulded, gaping, 
Collapsed. 

"The Ruin" 
Poems from the Old English 

{Fate has smashed these wonderful walls:  Poems from the Old English, translated by 
Burton Raffel.  (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; 1960).} 

In a quiet family graveyard adjoining a field of Wisconsin corn, a tombstone marks the 
spot where Frank Lloyd Wright,architect, was buried in the spring of 1959. The grave is 
empty. 

All around it are the neatly tended graves of his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, his 
mother, his sons and daughters, his comrades and their dead. A stone marks the grave of 
Richard Lloyd Jones, "Ein Tad," founder of the clan, the grand old man who was born in 
Wales before the turn of the nineteenth century. There is an identical marker for his wife, 
Mary Thomas, "Mallie," known as "Ein Mam," mother of eleven children and 
grandmother, when she died in 1870, of the three-year-old named Frank Wright. All 
around these pioneer immigrants lie their children: Thomas, John, Margaret, Mary, James, 
Enos, Nell and Jen, whom everyone called "the Aunts," and "Our Jenkin," the son who 
became a famous Unitarian minister in Chicago. There is even a memorial for "Nanny," 
the little girl who died at the age of three as they made their way across the United States. 
The grave of Frank Wright's mother, Hannah, or Anna, as she preferred to be called, is 
also well marked. ("She loved the truth and sought it.") There are the graves of her two 
daughters, Maginel and Jane, of her grandchildren (most of Frank's children by his first 
wife, Catherine: John, Catherine, Frances and Robert Llewellyn). There is even a grave for 
Wright's murdered lover, a single stone under an immense evergreen, tilted and covered 
with moss. As for the  grave of the architect, it is more prominent than any of the others. A 
semicircle of flowers, neatly tended, surrounds a planting of shrubbery, a single marking 
stone and the words "Love of an idea is love of God." One might almost suspect a tacit 
agreement to continue treating this particular spot as if Wright's grave had never been 
opened and his mortal remains removed. 

Two stone pillars support a gate, and a path leads directly to the main entrance of the 
chapel beside the graveyard, hardly discernible beneath the penumbral shade of a heavy 
porch. Few come here nowadays, and perhaps no one remembers what happened to the 
fence, or wall, or whether there was a fence. No boundaries define the chapel's grounds. 
There is only a faint smell of mold; piles of wet clippings are left to decompose in matted 
clumps on the grass. 

Whenever one goes there, Unity Chapel always appears to be in shadow. The impression is 
perhaps attributable to the generous overhanging roof,which tends to dwarf the modest 
windows of the one-floor building, or perhaps to the matte texture of the wine-red 
shingled exterior, which seems to soak up and absorb light. Or perhaps the stands of 
motionless fir trees, with their ragged, entwining shapes, were planted by Uncle Thomas 
Lloyd Jones so as to deflect the sun's rays at any hour of day. Some stubborn trompe l'oeil 
factor is at work here, for Unity Chapel, standing as it does beside a road on open ground 
in the Helena Valley (usually known as "The Valley") in Iowa County near Spring Green, 
surrounded by fields, ought to be instantly identifiable. Nevertheless its features are as 
blurred and indistinct as those in a painting by Rene Magritte{A painting by Rene 
Magritte: Le Domaine Enchante, 1952.} in which, despite a sky of azure blue, buildings 
huddle in darkness on a deserted street. 

The valley to which Frank Lloyd Wright's grandparents came and settled is inside the 
"Driftless Area" of Wisconsin, so called because it was protected, by hills to the north, 
from the great Wisconsin Ice Sheet, which swept south from the Arctic during the glacial 
epoch. As a result, the vast plains and spectacular gorges left behind by the dwindling ice 
sheets are not characteristic of this particular landscape. Instead, there are the pianissimo 
charms of winding roads, closely linked hills and narrow valleys reminiscent of the tidy, 
neat little island from which the Lloyd Joneses had come. By the time they arrived in The 
Valley, many other Welsh, Cornish and Irish immigrants were already in the area, 
attracted by the fertile soils and "mineral" (galena, or lead ore) that had been found at 
Mineral Point in 1827. Some of the world's best hard-rock miners, the Cornish copper 
and tin workers, brought with them a knowledge of stonecutting and masonry that they put 
to use in building new cottages not very far from The Valley. There were Welsh 
settlements all about: in  Spring Green, Arena, Barneveld, Ridgeway, Dodgeville, Madison 
and Baraboo, to name a few. One of the first chapels, Peniel, in Pecatonica, near The 
Valley, was built in 1850. In the middle 1850s there were more Welsh, Scots and English 
in Milwaukee than Germans.  {More Welsh in Milwaukee in the middle 1850s than 
Germans: The Welsh in Wisconsin, Phillip G. Davies, p. 4.} 

What must have also looked familiar and reassuring to the early Welsh settlers in The 
Valley were the outcroppings of natural limestone on the crests of the hills. There were 
prairie grasses growing on open land, poplars and willows in the rich bottomland, and a 
forest of elm, maple, basswood, walnut, birch and hazel on the upper slopes.  As Wright 
was to recall, "[H]e went through the moist woods that in their shade were treasuring the 
rainfall for the sloping fields below or to feed the clear springs in the ravines, wending his 
way along the ridges of the hills gay with Indian-pinks or shooting stars, across wide 
meadows carpeted thick with tall grass on which the flowers seemed to float." {"[H]e went 
through the moist woods . . .": A2, p. 25.}  Two decades after the family had settled in The 
Valley, Anna's boy had found, as Mircea Eliade wrote, that "the place is never 'chosen' by 
man; it is merely discovered by him; . . . the sacred place in some way reveals itself." {"the 
sacred place": Patterns in Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade, p. 360.} 

For years before the chapel was built, the land on which it stands was a gathering place for 
birthday parties, weddings, funerals and Unitarian Grove meetings. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, 
the son who became a minister, might give the "Gospel for To-day," a professor from a 
church in Minneapolis might speak on "True Radicalism," and the editor of the magazine 
Unity might lecture about "Cups of Cold Water." Teams of horses would arrive until fifty 
or more were tethered under the trees. Soon all manner of prose tracts were being passed 
out, along with a hundred hymn books. Then enormously long pine-board tables would 
be set up, and each family would unload hampers filled to the brim with sumptuous 
offerings. In his autobiography Wright recalled with the nostalgia of an indomitable 
appetite all that wholesome, substantial country fare: the roasted, stuffed chickens, the 
boiled hams, the hardboiled eggs, the cucumbers you peeled and ate like bananas, the 
doughnuts smothered in sugar, the apple and pumpkin pies, the cakes and cookies of every 
scrumptious variety. All this was well  washed down with milk (if you were young) and 
coffee (if you were old enough). There were no hampers of beer, wine or the like for the 
Temperance Joneses. {Unitarian Grove meetings described: LL, p. 70.} 

Open-air meetings, however, would never be enough. As the Welsh in America used to 
say, "The first thing a Frenchman does in a new country is to build a trading post, an 
American builds a city, a German builds a beer hall, and a Welshman builds a church." 
And, although he does not mention it in his autobiography, Wright, a mere adolescent at 
that stage, was ambitiously determined to build a chapel for his family himself. In the 
summer of 1885, when it became clear that Richard Lloyd Jones, at age eighty-six, was 
failing, Uncle Jenkin began to organize a building campaign. The family planned to build 
a modest three-room church with a tiny kitchen in one corner, to hold two hundred souls 
at the maximum, something homelike and pretty that would not disfigure the hills with 
"another stiff church-box" and that could be erected for $1,000 to $1,200. 

Wright had just turned eighteen, was enrolled in the school of engineering at the 
University of Wisconsin in Madison, the state capital, some fifty miles away, and was 
apprenticed to an engineer specializing in heating, ventilation, sewers and drains. At once 
he sent off his sketches for the new building. Uncle Jenkin preferred the experienced 
pencil of his favorite architect, J. Lyman Silsbee,whom he had already engaged to build a 
new church, All Souls, for his Chicago parish. But F. Wright, young, eager, willing to 
learn, was allowed to help oversee construction of Unity Chapel. Once completed, the 
"cottage-church," as it was called, was a much-simplified version of the picturesque 
shingle style in which Silsbee specialized. Exterior shingles were a mottled brown, and the 
roof was dark red. Its two main rooms were an "audience room" to hear the sermons, with 
four rocking chairs thoughtfully provided for the older folk, and a "parlor" beyond to seat 
an overflow crowd, the two rooms separated only by a heavy curtain. It was said that the 
"boy architect" in the family had designed the interior decor. The ceilings were 
calcimined, one in terra-cotta and the other in olive green, colors that Wright much 
favored in later years.  

The chapel was opened in the summer of 1886, a few months after the death of Richard 
Lloyd Jones. {Date of the chapel's opening: August 15, 1886.} It was dedicated to 
"Freedom, Fellowship and Character in Religion." Henry M. Simmons gave the dedication 
address. Then Jenkin Lloyd Jones, speaking first in Welsh, then in English, recalled that, 
in his days at Meadville School, some eighteen years before, he had organized his first 
church in the schoolhouse nearby and had preached his first sermon there. Now at last he 
was speaking in their own church-home, and dedicating it to "the Truth which maketh 
free, to the Righteousness which maketh clean the heart . . . to the sanctity of home ties, to 
the honoring of our country, to an ever-growing Christianity, and to thanksgiving to the 
Father and his worship." {Jenkin Lloyd Jones dedicates the chapel: Unity magazine, vol. 
XVII, August 28, 1886, pp. 356-357.} 

After that, Wright recalled the long summer Sundays when he and his cousins would get 
up early to collect great armfuls of branches, grasses, ferns and wildflowers and transform 
the severely plain interior into a conservatory. He would sit in his city clothes watching his 
uncles and aunts, their hair now gray, rocking quietly in a circle around the pulpit. The 
windows would be wide open, and so would the doors. Uncle Jenkin would be reaching a 
climactic moment and his audience would be in tears, something that always puzzled him: 
"they weep most when everything is best!" he wrote. {Weeping for joy: A2, p. 310.} Then 
they would be singing a familiar Welsh hymn with the brave words "step by step since 
time began we see the steady gain of man." Wright would look out of the windows, 
imagining the words swelling out across The Valley, reaching over the hills into the 
distance. He thought of battles to come, of victory and exaltation, while the old people 
around him wept again, perhaps from hiraeth, or longing. 

To the visitor nowadays Unity Chapel is simply a melancholic stop on the compulsory tour 
of buildings and places in and around this verdant, still-unspoiled valley that mark the 
stages in Frank Lloyd Wright's life. As a boy he worked in and wandered over his uncles' 
farms; as a man, he built Taliesin, a grand-the grandest-house in The Valley, one that 
overlooked all of his land and theirs. To see the chapel as a relic is, however, to miss its 
importance in the life of the Lloyd Joneses and, also, in Wright's life. When he was born in 
1867, his mother's family had been in the United States just twenty-three years (they 
arrived in New York in December 1844), and his mother had been born in Wales.Like so 
many other Welsh families, the Lloyd Joneses shared a fierce attachment to yr hen wlad 
(the old country) and to one another. What they wanted was not so much to join forces 
with the New World as make another version of the one they had left-one that was better, 
truer, more their own. Building their chapel had a particular meaning for them all. In the 
bad old years when the Welsh had been persecuted for  worshipping outside the 
established church by the hated English, to be a freethinker, a Nonconformist, came to 
mean not only religious freedom but also political self-assertion. Every time a Welshman 
managed to worship as his conscience decreed-"Truth Against the World" was the Lloyd 
Jones motto-he furthered his country's cause of nationhood and independence. He had 
defied authority and triumphed. One might therefore make the fairly safe assumption that, 
in building Unity Chapel, the Lloyd Joneses were not only erecting a memorial to Richard 
Lloyd Jones, to their religious freedoms and to the blood links that united them, but 
asserting their right to be, not Americans, but Welsh. 

*  *  * 

Some scholars believe that Taliesin (or Taliessin),a Welsh bard of mythical stature, lived 
and wrote in the sixth century. This is contradicted by an equally reputable view that he 
lived in the Middle Ages. If one subscribes to the former view, one argues that this 
poet-hero was alluding to events of measureless antiquity in his celebrated verses, many 
of which record great battles. In any event it is agreed that Taliesin's poems were not 
written down until the thirteenth century and that they are allusive and difficult. Over the 
centuries, his heroic or mythical status has achieved formidable proportions. To the Welsh 
nowadays, it is said, Taliesin appears as "a characteristic hero figure of Celtic myth,the 
poet-prophet who enjoys a complex relationship with a sequence of levels of existence of 
which the physical world that surrounds and sustains us is only one numinous 
manifestation. . . . Taliesin carries with him something of the powers of the gods and 
spirits of the shape-shifting Celtic pantheon." Even his name is symbolic; it means 
"shining brow,"and in later years Wright would offer this as an explanation for choosing it 
to adorn the house he had built on the side of a hill, thereby finessing the more relevant 
question, i.e., whether some association was intended between himself and the 
poet-prophet in question. {"a characteristic hero figure of Celtic myth": The Taliesin 
Tradition, Ermy Humphreys, pp. 48-49.} It is certainly possible to perceive, in the siting 
of his famous home, now a vast, gently decaying complex of buildings, a Celtic reverence 
for the sacredness of place. When one also considers that the first version of 
Taliesin-constantly rebuilt, revised and expanded, the result of the artist's restless 
imagination as well as successive calamities-began in 1911, one begins to discern the 
qualities that set its creator apart from his contemporaries. To properly appreciate his 
contribution one should compare him with, for instance, John Wood the Elder and John 
Wood the Younger, who, in the eighteenth century, designed a harmonious succession of 
terraces for the gently rolling hills surrounding the English city of Bath. Like the Woods, 
Wright had grasped the importance of inserting his deft network of house, studio and farm 
buildings into the side of the hill, rather than imposing it on the landscape.  He, too, 
sensed the effects to be gained from the contrast between a sophisticated architectural style 
and a gentle, pastoral setting. In common with the Woods, Wright had a vision of Arcadia, 
of man living in harmony with nature. 

This chef d'oeuvre, this dream incarnate, this quintessential statement of the goals toward 
which Wright labored all his life, was designed, he later explained, after a study of those 
local outcroppings of rock that looked to be in such harmony with the dark red cedars and 
white birches surrounding them. So he engaged teams of neighboring farmers to haul 
loads of native stone from a quarry on a hill a mile away, and up his beloved hillside. "The 
stone went down for pavements of terraces and courts. Stone was sent along the slopes in 
great walls.  Stone stepped up like ledges on to the hill and flung long arms in any 
direction that brought the house to the ground. . . ." 

"Finally it was not so easy to tell where pavement and walls left off, and ground began. . . . 
A clump of fine oaks that grew on the hilltop stood untouched on one side above [a] court.  
A great curved stone-walled seat inclosed [sic]  the space just beneath them, and stone 
pavement stepped down to a spring or fountain that welled up into a pool at the center of 
the circle. 

"But in the constitution of the whole-in the way the walls rose from the plan and the 
spaces were roofed over-was the chief interest. It was all supremely natural. The rooms 
went up into the roof, tentlike, and ribbanded overhead with marking strips of waxed soft 
wood. The house was set so sun came through the openings into every room some time 
during the day. Walls opened everywhere to views as the windows swung out above the 
tree tops. . . ." {Wright describes the building of Taliesin: in Liberty, March 23, 1929.} 

Nowadays this most innovative of dwellings has an ancient, fortresslike aspect. This seems 
partly due to the extraordinary size and weight of the vast roof at Taliesin,which appears 
to have assumed the functions usually associated with walls. It is sheltering, all 
enveloping, impregnable. The impression is furthered by the flights of stone steps, worn 
and covered with lichen, and the low doors tucked inconspicuously into the sides of thick 
stone facades. The feeling that one has stumbled upon an ancient castle intensifies as one 
discovers that this seldom-used building is inhabited by thousands of swifts. They shoot 
across one's path, soar up into the branches and spiral around the massive chimneys 
making a characteristic, curious chittering sound as if repelling the casual visitor. And, 
although Taliesin has been rebuilt repeatedly, it is now sliding into decay. The stones 
making up the foundation are tilting. The plaster is crumbling. The floors have shifted. 
The stonework is obscured by decades of dirt and lichen. Mold is eating away at the old 
beams. Windows no longer fit their frames. Latches are sprung, toilets do not flush, and,  
everywhere, the birds are nesting in the chimneys. 

Taliesin may have been "supremely natural," as its creator claimed, but it is artful. 
Walking through the suite of rooms that made up the private quarters of the architect and 
his family makes the visitor realize that it is impossible to fully appreciate his achievement 
except by experiencing it. One then sees the intricacy of the overall concept: the way the 
low entrance hall gives one a glimpse of bright spaces beyond, the way the living room 
ceiling soars upward, the way banks of windows reveal panoramic views over The Valley 
and the way interior spaces are cunningly divided into nooks and crannies that tempt one 
to curl up with a book or engage in an intimate conversation. And, for all its complexity, 
this suite of rooms has an overall coherence. There are the same uses of 
stone,plaster,stucco,heavy wooden dark beams, low benches, built-in shelves, cabinets, 
oriental carpets, gold leaf wall coverings,Japanese screens, oriental pottery, porcelain and 
objets d'art of all descriptions; the same soft tans, bronzes, leaf greens and the omnipresent 
Taliesin reds. So one sits in the living room, watching shadows move across the floor, and 
the stream he dammed under the windows to make a lake is vastly still. Inside the room, 
there is a kind of concentrated silence that makes the sound of a bird and nearby voices 
seem to come from a great distance. "Again, Taliesin!" he also wrote.  "Three times built, 
twice destroyed, yet a place of great repose. When I am away from it, like some rubber 
band stretched out but ready to snap back immediately the pull is relaxed. . . . I get back to 
it happy to there again." {"I get back to it happy to be there . . .": A2, p. 368.} 

Although Frank Lloyd Wright had reached the advanced age of ninety-one when he died 
in the spring of 1959, his uncluttered spirit, zest and appetite for life seemed indomitable. 
Kay Rattenbury,a member of the Fellowship, recalled that, that Saturday, the group went 
on a picnic at Taliesin West,the architect's estate outside Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix, 
Arizona, where he spent his winters. Wright was looking a little pale but seemed fine. 
That night he was ill with stomach pains. When he did not improve, Wright's doctor 
decided he should go to St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix for tests. There, doctors 
discovered, and operated  to remove, an intestinal obstruction. No evidence of any 
malignancy was found, and Wright was recovering well. Two days after the operation, on 
Wednesday, April 8, doctors said that he was holding his own for a man of his age. His 
condition was described as "satisfactory." 

His third wife, Olgivanna, was staying at the hospital, where an impromptu bed had been 
made for her in a solarium. She sat beside her husband for two days as he lay in an oxygen 
tent, and visited him for the last time early on the morning of Thursday, April 9, at about 1 
A. M. Then she went to bed. Night nurse Jessie Boganno of Glendale, Arizona, was with 
him at the moment of death.   Wesley Peters, Wright's son-in-law, the late chairman of 
the board of trustees of the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation, Gene Masselink 
[Wright's personal secretary] and Dr. Joseph Rorke[his private physician] were in the 
hospital when Mr. Wright died.  Peters, Richard Carney, now managing trustee and 
treasurer for the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation, and another member of the 
Fellowship, Kenneth Burton Lockhart, immediately made plans to transport Wright back 
to Spring Green for burial at Unity Chapel.The suddenness of the event stunned them.  

Wright's body was laid in a metal-clad coffin on a cloth of Cherokeered velvet, the color 
he always chose. His coffin was placed in front of the great stone fireplace in Taliesin and 
filled with flowers; green sprigs had been placed in his hands. Then, at five o'clock on 
Sunday, April 12, just as the sun was setting, the old bell in Unity Chapel began to toll and 
kept on ringing. One of Wright's sons by his first marriage, Robert Llewellyn Wright, a 
Washington attorney, helped to carry the coffin down the steps to a waiting wagon, draped 
in more red velvet and covered with flowers. As the cameras clicked, Peters and Masselink 
began the drive to the chapel a half-mile away, pulled by a handsome pair of black 
Percheron horses named Bird and Chat, which had been lent by a neighbor. Olgivanna, 
Iovanna (Wright's seventh and last child) and other relatives and close friends followed on 
foot. 

Rev. Max D. Gaebler of Madison's Unitarian Church, where Wright was a member, read 
the familiar Psalm 121, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . . ," and then an extract 
from "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Whoso  would be a man must be a 
nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." As the 
coffin was lowered, Mrs. Wright sobbed and made the sign of the cross. The minister read 
two final selections from the Book of Job, ending with, "Thou shalt come to thy grave in a 
full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season." 

As soon as the news of Wright's death was announced, it was stated that the grave in 
which his body was to be placed would be a temporary one. Apprentices of the Taliesin 
Fellowship,those who had worked beside him, set up on end a large stone found in the 
quarry behind Taliesin, to mark the burial spot. A semicircle of the flowers Wright 
favored-daisies, the common tiger lilies of southern Wisconsin, peonies and the 
like-had been planted, but this was all by the way. 

His apprentices knew that the architect had been working for the past year and a half on a 
new chapel that would adjoin Unity Chapel,to serve as his memorial and final resting 
place. Design work on the building was almost complete in the fall of 1958, and color 
drawings were made. Wright was putting the finishing touches on his "Unity Temple," as 
he called it, as recently as two weeks before his death on April 9.  It was to have been high 
and square, each wall measuring thirty feet in length. He had designed stone piers 
interspersed by strips of glass for the walls, and a central skylight.The interior was without 
decoration, save for a stone fire-place. A row of stone sarcophagi, flush with the ground 
and facing south, would line one wall. The temple would serve for contemplation and 
meditation and would house not only his mortal remains but also those of his wife 
Olgivanna, their daughter, Iovanna, and members of the Taliesin Fellowship. 

Preliminary work had already begun. The footing was squared out, and blocks of stone to 
be used for the new chapel were hauled in from the Rock Springs Quarry, some twelve 
miles distant, and set up, ready for work, in neat piles. It is claimed that one can still see 
the outline on the ground marking the spot that Wright had chosen. {"I get back to it 
happy to be there . . .": A2, p. 368.} Perhaps anticipating family opposition, he had not let 
it be known that he planned to tear down the first Unity Chapel, by then seldom used and 
deteriorating. Arguments about its historical importance in his architectural oeuvre would 
not have swayed him.  

Robert Graves, who was landscape architectat Taliesin during the last four years of 
Wright's life, whose land in The Valley now adjoins the Taliesin estate, and who owns the 
farm that once belonged to Wright's favorite uncle, James, recalled that Wright asked him 
to oversee the planting of an allee of trees to complement the new building. The plantings 
were designed so as to link visually the Taliesin estate, on one side of Route 23, the main 
road running through The Valley, and Unity Chapel opposite, on a side road.   

Almost the first announcement from Wright's bereaved followers was that they intended to 
carry on his work. Among their first acts would be the fireproofing of a vault to house his 
precious drawings. The second would be to build the memorial chapel he had designed, 
and to move his remains there. {A memorial chapel would be built: NYT, April 19, 1959, 
p. 46.} Work, however, did not start, and those who lived in Spring Green began to realize 
that the Fellowship had shifted its emphasis from Wisconsin to Arizona. Some said that 
this was because Mrs. Wright felt far happier at Taliesin West, where she and her husband 
had spent their winters for decades, than she ever had in Wisconsin. So no one brought up 
the subject of the chapel. 

Then, on March 1, 1985, Olgivanna Wright died in Scottsdale. Although she had been in 
poor health for the past year and a half, her death, like that of her husband, took everyone 
by surprise. The only person with her was Wright's former physician, Dr. Rorke.He called 
a meeting of the Fellowship to tell them that Mrs. Wright's dying wish  was that she, her 
late husband and her daughter by her first marriage, the late Mrs. Wesley Peters, should 
all be cremated and removed to Scottsdale. The plan was to build a garden dedicated to all 
three and immure their ashes there. The wish was not stated in her will and appeared, to 
some members of the Fellowship, to have been a last-minute whim, and an 
ill-considered one at that. However, according to a former member, "The group had been 
totally emasculated over the years, and anything coming from Mrs. Wright had the aura of 
Holy Writ." In other words, save for the idea of exhuming and cremating Svetlana 
Peters,which was quietly dropped, there was no question in anyone's mind that Mrs. 
Wright's last wish would be honored. The only problem was exactly how this was to be 
accomplished. Anticipating some opposition, members of the Fellowship moved secretly 
and with dispatch. Wright's body was exhumed and cremated in Madison. before John 
Hunter, associate editor of the local paper, the Madison Capital Times, learned about it. "A 
coroner's authority was required," he said, "and the man had been pledged to secrecy, but 
he did confirm that this was true." Hunter published the article, and there was an outcry. 

"Oh, yes, that damn business," said Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, daughter of Wright's son 
John, an architect in her own right, and chairman of Unity Chapel, Inc.,a family 
corporation established to restore the chapel and tend the burial grounds. She explained 
that her organization had little power to refuse, since the necessary legal papers had been 
signed by Iovanna,Wright's only child by his third wife, Olgivanna, but Ingraham thought 
the chapel custodian appointed for the cemetery should have been notified. "I tried to sit on 
the fence, but I thought it was a gross miscalculation. One can say, 'Who cares where the 
body is?' but the actual act of taking a body out of a coffin is ghoulish. I asked the 
mortician, 'I suppose he's just bones, after twenty-six years?' and he said, 'Oh, no, he's 
marvelously intact.' I couldn't hear any more. 

"I truly believe Olgivanna felt my grandfather was actually down there, and Iovanna 
certainly did. She told me, 'Daddy gets cold up there in Wisconsin.' And you know, when 
Olgivanna told you to do something, you did it." 

Jack Howe, by then practicing architecture in Burnsville, Minnesota, was horrified, calling 
the exhumation an act of vandalism. He said, "The sneaky way it was done was 
particularly bad. They left the cemetery a mess, did not resod or level the ground, just 
threw some soil in the grave and replaced the stone marker. I was very angry when I saw 
it. . . . I think moving the body was inexcusable, even if Olgivanna did request it." {An act 
of vandalism: Inland Architect July/August 1985, p. 3.} 

"My husband thought it was a desecration," said Betty Wright,wife of the late Robert 
Llewellyn Wright, the son who had helped carry his father's body to his grave. "After  he 
was quoted in the newspapers, he had a telegram from Iovanna,who wrote, 'The heritage 
of Taliesin is not for the likes of you.'" This was a particularly low blow because everyone 
knew that Robert Llewellyn,along with Wright's other children by his first wife, had been 
disinherited years before, when Wright had established a nonprofit foundation, leaving all 
his worldly goods to those who would carry on his work. His will read, in part, "Having 
otherwise disposed of all my worldly goods I give and bequeath my love unto each of my 
beloved children . . . as a token of my affection for them." {Provisions of Wright's will: 
dated April 25, 1958.} 

The person most upset, however, was Wright's son David. He called the act "grave 
robbing." Mrs. Wright had wanted her husband's ashes beside her own for purely selfish 
reasons. "She'd be nobody without him," he said. Gladys Wright added that, when she 
went to Mrs. Wright's funeral, "No one approached me and told me they were going to do 
this." 

To those less immediately involved, there was a symbolic significance in the removal of 
Wright's remains that transcended sentimental considerations. Such an act, wrote Karl E. 
Meyer, a native of Wisconsin, was the equivalent of "uprooting Jefferson from Monticello 
for reburial in Beverly Hills." {"uprooting Jefferson": NYT, April 19, 1985.} No one could 
seriously argue that Wright really belonged in Arizona, given his origins, given all that he 
had written about The Valley, given the love and care he had lavished on Taliesin year 
after year, given the fact that he had rebuilt it and had always returned, and given that he 
had written, "I still feel myself as much a part of it as the trees and birds . . . and the red 
barns." {He still felt a part of it: A2, p. 167.} To remove Wright from his Wisconsin roots 
impoverished them all. Other natives of the state agreed. At the end of April the 
Wisconsin house approved a resolution protesting the body's removal and asking for the 
return of his ashes; the senate concurred two weeks later. The state representative for the 
district that includes The Valley explained, in a letter to Peters, "Much more than ashes 
have been taken from Wisconsin-the citizens of the state have lost one evidence of our 
histroy, spirit and genius." {"Much more than ashes have been taken": Inland Architect 
op. cit.} 

Wesley Peters was astonished and upset by the strength of the opposition. "Nobody here 
thought there would be such a violent feeling about it," he said.  "But I don't think Mr. 
Wright would have felt otherwise about it.  If it was what Mrs. Wright wished, I think he 
would have wanted it done." {"I think he would have wanted it done": NYT, April 10, 
1985.} Richard Carney added, "Mrs. Wright didn't actually specify this in her will, but she 
had been talking about it for several years. We should have done it sooner. She was always 
saying, 'When we go to Wisconsin, I am going to see about it.' There was always the desire 
to establish a burial ground at Taliesin West. Legally it is very complex, but you can have 
ashes there." To him, it was a simple matter: "If Mrs. Wright said that is the burying 
ground, we have to come here." {The ashes of Frank and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright have 
since been interred in a garden he designed at Taliesin West. Richard Carney to author, 
May 30, 1991.} Peters, who had driven day and night to get his beloved master back to 
Wisconsin, and then moved with alacrity to return him to Arizona, had the air of a man 
torn by conflicting loyalties who was being roundly condemned for trying to do what was 
expected of him. When he was asked why he had moved Wright in the first place, he 
looked at a loss for explanations. He said, "We didn't think of anything else at the time."  

When Wright's ashes were transported to Arizona it was announced that they would be 
moved to their final resting place within six months. A wall was to be built surrounding 
the memorial garden, and the remains of both Wrights would be immured within it. This 
was not done for several years. Richard Carney said that the original plans had been "too 
elaborate," and had been redrawn. In the interim, the ashes of both Wrights were "in 
storage," and there was speculation in some quarters that Wright's remains might be 
quietly transferred back to Wisconsin. Others thought this most unlikely. During this 
period, all that could be said for certain was that his mortal remains were in limbo, as a 
result, it would seem, of the conflicting loyalties, resentments and antagonisms that had 
followed him and made him, some thirty years after his death, still a subject of 
controversy. One wanted to agree with another granddaughter, the late Anne Baxter, the 
actress, that ". . . he may be laughing for all we know, because his spirit is much bigger 
than his bones." {"he may be laughing": NYT, op. cit.} As for the chapel he wanted as a 
memorial to himself, more than three decades later most people seemed to have brushed 
the fact aside. If there were a particular significance to the curious coincidence that 
Wright's architectural career began, and ended, with the same preoccupation-a chapel for 
the identical plot of ground in The Valley-it went unrecorded. 


The Black Spot 

Fate has opened 
A single port: memory. 

"The Wanderer" 
Poems from the Old English 

{Fate has opened: Poems from the Old English, p. 59.} 

Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, "Our Jenkin," never forgot Black Week. That mesmerizing 
preacher loved to reminisce about his Lincolnesque childhood in a log cabin, some time 
after his parents, Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones, had emigrated to the new country. Such 
was the power of his personality that however cliched and repetitive his 
reminiscences-and it must be admitted that the famous preacher tended to become  
tiresome about his childhood as he grew older-his ability to rivet his listeners' attention 
never palled. Perhaps the message he had to give was embellished by that special form of 
delivery, known as hwyl, that is unique to Welsh preachers. This chanting style of 
preaching involves an ability to deliver certain passages of particular poignancy almost as 
if they were being sung. The successful practitioner of hwyl would begin in a minor key, 
mounting by calculated effects to a triumphant climax in a major chord, one beautifully 
calculated to inspire his listeners with a passionate, not to say fervently religious, response. 
{A description of hwyl: Americans from Wales, Edward George Hartman, p. 105; Jenkin's 
sermons   described: MAG, p. 99.} One would not be surprised to find Rev. Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones a master of this difficult and delicate technique; he certainly was aware that no story 
is more powerful than the one about the little boy who begins life in a log cabin. And so he 
remembered: pulling a cow out of the marsh, clearing the forests with oxen, "working on 
the road" with a gang of boys and men, the picnics, the deep snows and Black Week. 

One day gentlemen in black coats assembled in the Wisconsin Welsh community in which 
he and his family were then living. These men, farmers from the surrounding hills, met 
each day at the primitive chapel the community had built over the hill, appearing for meals 
at the Lloyd Jones log-house, as Jenkin called it, the largest home thereabouts. That such 
generous hospitality was being offered to these anonymous, somewhat sinister figures, 
made a great impression on Jenkin once he understood the reason for their visits. They 
were about to condemn his parents of heresy. {Early memories of Jenkin Lloyd Jones: 
TRIL, pp. 1-25.} 

In order to properly appreciate the predictability of this charge, made against two perfectly 
moral and upright people, a digression is necessary. The reasons involve an understanding 
of the traditions the parents had inherited through their own forebears, beliefs sustained in 
the context of a past in which radical religious thought, political rebellion, emerging 
nationalism and the rediscovery of an ancient culture were intricately intertwined. As far 
back as one cares to look in the family background of Richard and Mallie, one finds 
educators and preachers, literate men and women prepared to challenge authority of any 
kind, and particularly the established church. They must have been 
Dissenters-Nonconformists-from the earliest days. As Jan Morris points out in The 
Matter of Wales, although Protestantism was established there by the eighteenth century, 
Methodism would transform it. 

"The growth of Nonconformism . . . , its tentative and daring beginnings, its phenomenal 
spread, its tremendous eruption of faith, hope and sacrifice, left an effect upon the country 
like the passing of a hurricane. . . . The Methodist Revival, Y Diwygiad, hurled everything 
topsy-turvy, demolishing the social structure, transforming the culture, shifting the 
self-image and the reputation of  the people, and eventually giving rise to a great 
convulsion of power that was truly a revolution." {"The Methodist Revival": MOR, p. 
110.} Hard on the heels of the Methodists came representatives of other Protestant 
denominations just as committed to freedom of thought and as prepared to be attacked by 
mobs, ducked in ponds and forbidden to assemble. 

"So severe were the punishments meted out to those who gathered together to worship 
outside the Church that they met secretly . . . in dingles in the hills, in barns, or in the 
homes of sympathizers who were prepared to take the risk of sheltering them," wrote 
Anthony Jones in a history of the early Welsh chapels. {Early history of the Welsh 
chapels: Welsh Chapels, Anthony Jones, p. 3.} One finds in the story of the Lloyd Joneses 
a consistent, stubborn insistence on their renegade opinions and a melancholic pride in 
being persecuted for them. As far back as 1696 one can find in their family a personage 
like Thomas David Rees, a farmer of some means, who was prepared to be disowned by 
his Church as long as he could worship according to his conscience. He founded the first 
Baptist congregation in Cardiganshire  on a farm he owned in the parish of Llandysul, the 
very same parish from which the Lloyd Jones family would emigrate a century and a half 
later. His grandson, Jenkin Jones (c. 1700-1742), was even more radical and newfangled 
in his beliefs, since he was an Arminian. That is to say, he was a follower of Jacobus 
Arminius (1560-1609), a Dutch theologian who partially denied the divinity of Christ. 
Jenkin Jones, already a Nonconformist, had joined a group of even more liberal thinkers 
who were questioning the divinity of Christ and the Calvinists' belief in predestination, 
and were placing their emphasis upon the importance of free will and human intervention. 
Some, called Socinians after Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604), even argued that the Holy 
Trinity was a fallacious concept. There was no Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but simply 
One God, and Christianity was one of many paths toward enlightenment. That such beliefs 
had been advanced since the sixteenth century did not seem to help much. Other Welsh 
Nonconformists-Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists-considered 
Arminians like Jenkin Jones to be dangerous when not positively heretical. Jones was 
barred from entering the pulpit of his own Independent church at Pantycreuddyn, and 
obliged to build a chapel on land he owned near Llwynrhydowen, four miles from 
Llandysul. There, he began to preach his "peculiar sentiments" with such fire that he 
terrified his listeners. Some thought these were the kind of beliefs one might expect of 
thieves and ruffians, since he dared to preach that everyone might enter heaven. Still 
others denounced his doctrine as a kind of poison that, if not immediately stamped out, 
would corrupt the country. {Early history of preachers in the Lloyd Jones family: DAV, p. 
34 ff.} 

One discovers that the forefathers of Frank Lloyd Wright were tenacious fighters, with a 
way of surmounting seemingly impossible odds. While still in his twenties, Rev. Jenkin 
Jones managed to convert enough parishioners to earn  the distinction of having 
established the first Arminian congregation in Wales.He built a second chapel at 
Llwynrhydowen and, before he died at a relatively early age, had the satisfaction of seeing 
a third Arminian church established in a nearby village, and of knowing that he had 
influenced several other ministers to follow his precepts. His nephew, David Lloyd, who 
succeeded him, was so successful at expanding the congregation that the chapel would no 
longer hold all the eager listeners. He was obliged to preach in the open air, sometimes to 
audiences of three thousand. 

That tiny Arminian, later Unitarian,congregation, founded a few miles from the village of 
Llandysul early in the eighteenth century, is the proper starting point from which to 
consider the emigration of Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones a century and a half later. A 
tradition had been established, and the family heritage inextricably linked, with men who 
fought for their right to think as they chose, no matter how heretical their notions, a trait 
that was to have some significance in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. No one ever accused 
the Lloyd Joneses of deserting their principles. Viewed from the perspective of their own 
history and the imperatives of their age, they were even admirably conformist. Inside their 
corner of old Cardiganshire, now West Dyfed, everyone felt as they did. Rev. Jenkin Jones 
had so successfully convinced his congregations of the rightness of his doctrines that their 
area became, forever afterward, synonymous with a certain kind of Unitarian intractability. 
When a Calvinistic Methodist, Rev. Daniel Rowland, living a few miles to the north of 
Llandysul, attempted to convert these Unitarian congregations later in the eighteenth 
century, his words were in vain. {History of Rev. Jenkin Jones: LL, p. 4.} Rev. Aubrey J. 
Martin, now retired as minister of the congregation that Jones had founded, explained, 
"The Methodists called our district the Black Spot of Socinianism because of their failure 
to convert us. To call someone a Socinian still has a sting to it." Within the walls of their 
faith, the Unitarians of Cardiganshire were united, clan-minded, tenaciously believing. 
Such unity had a defensive aspect: such absolute conviction of rightness was a 
psychological necessity since beyond their borders they were ostracized. {Success of David 
Lloyd: A History of Unitarianism, David Wilbur, p. 322.} To other Nonconformists they 
were a blight on the movement, an ineradicable stain. They were called "people without 
hope" and "utterly damned." {"utterly damned": DAV, p. 28.} 

From the careful description Jenkin Lloyd Jones gives of Black Week, one concludes that 
Richard and Mallie were as much outcasts in Wisconsin as they had been in 
Cardiganshire. However, the point is also made that they had  been invited to join the 
church from which they were now being expelled. In the early days, when settlements were 
tiny and to be Welsh, with the same language and background, mattered most, new 
immigrants usually agreed to disagree and worship together in what were called "union 
churches." {Named "union churches": Americans from Wales, p. 103.} An authority on 
the life of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Prof. Thomas E. Graham, observed, "It didn't seem to 
matter to them if a church were more 'orthodox' than they were. They attended whatever 
was at hand, and associated with any Christians who did not reject them." {To author, 
letter, July 15, 1989.} 

No doubt as the church grew, doctrinal differences began to assert themselves and 
members argued about such issues as baptism, the organization of the church and a host of 
other divisive issues. Most Nonconformists-Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists and 
Congregationalists-accepted the fundamental tenets of Calvinism rather than those of 
Arminianism and Socinianism. {Americans from Wales, p. 103.} This made being a 
Unitarian as lonely a business in Wisconsin as it had been in Wales. The visiting men in 
black coats discovered a "canker of heresy" at the heart of the backwoods church, where 
Richard Lloyd Jones, it was charged, was  "leading the young astray" at Bible class and 
Sunday school. 

Mallie Lloyd Jones was all for withdrawing from the church, to spare everyone the 
embarrassment of her family's being thrown out. His father defended himself so 
successfully that the men in black coats were at a loss. Unable to prove their point, they 
then brought charges against the minister who had invited the Lloyd Joneses to become 
members. At that critical stage, Richard Lloyd Jones voluntarily left the church rather than 
have the minister be made the scapegoat. The Lloyd Joneses as a clan had the good fortune 
to live in interesting times, at a moment when demands for religious freedom and political 
reforms became almost synonymous. One sees the Lloyd Joneses and their distinguished 
forebears as uncommonly representative of an ancient people who had been defeated but 
never conquered, who had lived for centuries with their backs to the sea. 

The very name of Wales is not Welsh, and for a reason. The Welsh call themselves Cymry 
(companions, comrades), their land Cymru and their language Cymraeg. The words Welsh 
and Wales were coined by the Teutonic invaders who fought to take over Britain in the 
centuries after the Roman  withdrawal; the derivation is from Walas (strangers). 

The Celts, by then well entrenched, had been strangers themselves centuries before. They, 
too, had migrated to the British Isles. One group is believed to have come from northern 
Europe, supposedly accounting for the tall, large-limbed Welshmen one finds in north 
Wales. As for the small, dark, stocky Welsh of the south, these are believed to be 
descended from a second wave of immigrants originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Each 
had colonized Britain by the third and fourth centuries before Christ, and all over Britain 
the language that was spoken now survives only in fragments: as Breton, as Scottish and 
Irish Gaelic and as modern Welsh, a language of poetry,legend and myth. The new 
invaders, the Romans, arriving in about A. D. 50, gradually pushed the Celts back to the 
farthest corners of Britain: to Cornwall in the southwestern tip, to the Highlands of 
Scotland, and to the mountainous peninsula of modern Wales, bordered on all sides by the 
Irish Sea. Finally the Welsh, too, were overrun. 

Celtic society was structured around family relationships, and even distant ones were 
identified and cultivated. Women in those early days enjoyed more rights and privileges 
than did their Roman counterparts, and a child belonged to his mother's side of the family 
rather than to his father's. This bond was strengthened by the practice of sending a 
youngster to live with his mother's family for a considerable period. The Celts were 
imaginative and lavish hosts and great givers of presents as well, although their code was 
so precise and elaborate one wonders whether it were motivated as much by social 
one-upmanship as kindness of heart. Clans were grouped into tribes and surprisingly 
well governed. The ancient legal code of Wales, derived from Celtic law, was remarkably 
advanced and equable for its time. Marriage was regarded as an agreement rather than a 
sacrament, and could be ended by mutual consent. Illegitimate children's rights were as 
well protected as those of lawful ones. In civil matters, the provisions of a contract had 
more weight than legislation, and criminal laws were aimed at monetary compensation 
and "reconciliation rather than revenge: the intention was to re-establish social harmony, 
and the more terrible penalties of English law, the torturings, the gibbetings, the 
disembowelments, were unknown in independent Wales-even public whippings entered 
the country only with the Tudors." {On the more benign Celtic laws: MOR, p. 223.} 

The heritage of Celtic art, poetry and literature is legendary. Welsh folk stories and poems 
in particular appear to have survived the centuries with their Celtic roots still recognizable 
even though they were not committed to paper until medieval times. {The Celts, Nora 
Chadwick, p. 284.} "Another detectably Celtic trait is a certain sense of the dream of 
things, a conviction that some other state of being exists, invisible but sensible, outside our 
own windows. To patriots of mystic tendency this is the  truest manifestation of the Welsh 
identity: . . . it can be traced soberly enough to the animism of Celtic thought, which found 
the divine in every leaf and tree, which knew the spirits of the running streams, and 
believed the next world, like the last, to be with us all the time." {MOR, p. 534.} 

In Gaul, the Druids supposedly believed the oak tree to have mystical powers and ate 
acorns and mistletoe to improve their powers of divination. In Ireland, the walnut and 
rowan trees were sacred. In Wales, the talisman was the apple tree, and a Welshman's 
favorite meal used to be pork with applesauce. Celts were notorious for their alcoholic 
intake, which supposedly accounted for their mercurial temperaments. In fact the tendency 
to fly off the handle at a moment's notice was considered a particular characteristic of the 
Celts. Today, observers believe they see "the same volatile mixture of flamboyance, wild 
courage and easy discouragement that the Roman writers reported among the Gallic tribes. 
The love of music, poetry and provocative conversation, are still readily apparent among 
the Welsh . . . and from their day until our own the learned man and the artist have been 
honoured in Welsh society as among few other peoples of the West." {MOR, p. 53.} 

In 1282, the Norman king of England overthrew the last and most powerful of the Welsh 
ruling families. Welsh self-government, the right to their own enlightened legal code, 
was extinguished, and with it a distinctive way of life. If this was the dominant mood, 
there were also some stubborn minor themes. The Welsh might be in political limbo, but 
they still had a language worth preserving and a rich cultural heritage; they had wonderful 
poets and authors, and they were still distinctively Welsh, despite the contaminating 
effects of English manners, mores and laws. To cherish their culture was the one thing 
they could still be proud of; it was "a type of cultural nationalism. . . ." 

David Lloyd, the preacher who had attracted crowds of thousands to hear his sermons at 
Llandysul, was Richard Lloyd Jones's grandfather. It would seem that he was  descended 
from a distinguished family, the Lloyds of Castell-hywel. Perhaps, if it had not been for 
the English rulers, the Lloyds would still be somebody. {LL, p. 8.} As it was, their name 
retained great cachet, and sometime after David Lloyd's daughter Margaret married John 
Enoch Jones, a young man of lesser status, the unhyphenated Lloyd Jones family name 
begins to appear. Their son Richard, a black-haired, handsome, vigorous-looking man 
of six-feet-two, may not have composed poems in Greek as his grandfather did, but he 
was a fine lay preacher, made hats part-time and was a tenant farmer on twenty-three 
acres in the parish of Llanwenog, with a yoke of oxen, some dairy cattle and a herd of 
sheep. There he and his wife, Mallie, began raising a brood of what would become eleven 
children (four more would be born in the United States): Thomas, born in 1830; John, 
1832; Margaret, 1835; Mary, 1836,* Hannah (later, Anna), 1838,* Nanny, 1840; and 
Jenkin, 1843. {Dates of birth given an asterisk in the text are based on those found in an 
old family Bible and cited in LL, p. 66.} 

Blaenralltddu, the old house (two bedrooms and a loft) in which Richard and Mallie Lloyd 
Jones lived, stands at the end of a dirt track off the road just outside Llandysul, now graced 
with a plaque identifying it as the birthplace of the famous Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Its nearest 
town, with a single climbing main street, is unremarkable except for a lovely old church 
with a Norman tower and painted arches dating from the reign of Henry III. In the wall of 
the choir vestry is an inscribed stone bearing a Latin memorial to Velloria, daughter of the 
old chieftain Brohomalgus; here, Richard's grandfather, Jenkin Jones, founder of the first 
Arminian congregation in Wales, is buried. But the area is full of churches and chapels 
with Lloyd Jones associations, many of them in partial ruins and with cousins and more 
distant relatives by the dozens buried in graveyards all around, at Pantydefaid and 
Llwynrhydowen. And Llandysul is one of the main centers of the Welsh wool industry, 
strategically situated on the banks of the Teifi where, in the old days, the river's boisterous 
waters drove the old waterwheels and where the mills still produce tweeds, flannels and 
some famous tapestries. Lampeter, a few miles east, is a charming small town, eerily quiet 
on Sunday mornings, where a retired minister out walking his dog might stop and chat 
with a stranger as if they had known each other for years. Then there is Pumpsaint and its 
pretty cottages, often built of flinty stone, the woodwork painted in primary reds and 
yellows, or stuccoed and washed in palest creams and yellows. The countryside around is 
steeply sloped, with patches of woodland threaded with clear streams and dotted here and 
there with small, whitewashed cottages, its scale intimate. It has the air of having been 
inhabited by meticulously neat, proud and possessive farmers for centuries. Life in this 
region, on what are called  "hill-land" farms, may seem idyllic and unspoiled, but it has 
never been easy. The soil is thin, more suitable for raising sheep and dairy cattle than for 
growing crops, requiring backbreaking work and long hours for meager results. In that 
inhospitable countryside, whole communities might depend on supplementing their 
earnings by whatever could be gained from the use of common lands-peat for their 
fireplaces, perhaps, or extra grazing for their cattle. Unfortunately, English law allowed 
landowners to add to their acreage by making a claim on common land. Permission was as 
good as automatic, and between 1760 and 1820, over two thousand individual Enclosure 
Acts were passed, affecting land all over the British Isles. Small farmers and 
"squatters"-families who had built makeshift cottages on this so-called derelict 
land-found themselves evicted without ceremony, and a vast increase in rural poverty 
was the result. 

They hang the man and flog the woman 
That steals the goose from off the common 
But leave the greater criminal loose 
That steals the common from the goose. 

{Effect of the Enclosure Acts and the poem, "They hang the man and flog the woman . . 
.": from A   Social History of England, Asa Briggs, pp. 172 and 174.} 

A ruling class of thirty to forty families effectively monopolized the Welsh parliamentary 
seats in the House of Commons and the local patronage that went with them; the lesser 
gentry filled the benches. These magistrates were often in the position of judging cases in 
which their own interests were involved. In any event, they were drawn from the 
privileged classes, making biased verdicts commonplace. Adding to the general sense of 
alienation was the fact that trials were conducted in English. It all lent fuel to the belief 
that, as Oliver Goldsmith observed, "laws grind the poor and the rich men grind the law." 
There were many other grievances: tithes, extortionate rents, evictions, the general 
hostility of landlords, gamekeepers and officialdom, the unfairness of life-and the high 
price of bread. People were ready to strike out blindly, and found an easy target. {RR, p. 
8.} 

Before the advent of canals and railways, roads in remote areas were little more than horse 
trails. Much of the economic backwardness and isolation of Wales was attributed to the 
difficulty of getting in or out, and once travelers began to use carts and coaches rather than 
packhorses, the need for better roads became urgent. The custom grew up of making 
landowners responsible for building and maintaining roads through their properties and of 
allowing them to charge fees, i.e., tolls. This rough-and-ready system worked 
reasonably well for centuries, but by the 1830s there were many abuses. A traveler might 
have to pay three or four tolls in the course of a single journey. Market towns were often 
bristling with tollgates. Small farmers were  particularly penalized, since they made 
constant trips to haul limestone, their only fertilizer, back and forth along the roads to 
their fields, in a period when harvests were poor. Individual payments were modest, but, 
collectively, they added their mite to the burden the small farmer carried: "The tolls . . . 
were an everyday, inescapable metaphor for the condition of their lives." {RR, p. 397.} 

In some parts of rural Wales there was a custom, on certain nights of the year, of lighting 
bonfires and organizing torchlight processions led by men dressed as women. This arcane 
tradition may have been the inspiration for what has been called "the strangest series of 
riots that has occurred in our time." {RR, p. vii.} Beginning in the summer of 1839 and 
reaching a peak some four years later, in 1843, bands of horsemen roamed the countryside 
after dark dressed in skirts and shawls, their faces blackened. They called themselves the 
Maids of Rebecca-no one really knows why-and their targets were the hated tollgates. 
In a surprise attack they would set the thatched roofs alight and then attack the keeper 
when he or she came running out. The raid was usually over in seconds. By the time an 
alarm was out, the raiders had vanished into the hills. They were disciplined, they acted 
with stealth and suddenness, and they were desperate. 

There were tollgates all over Wales, but the area in which these protests took place, in 
Cardigan and Carmarthen, is by an odd coincidence the part of Wales in which Richard 
and Mallie Lloyd Jones lived, the Black Spot of Unitarianism.The fact that the Lloyd Jones 
family left during the Rebecca Riots has not been remarked upon in family histories, but 
there is a close connection between the two dates. {HER, pp. 3 and 67.} The riots began in 
earnest in March 1843, and the Lloyd Joneses decided to emigrate six months later, in 
September of that year. {RR, p. 199.} It may be just a coincidence, but the Lloyd Joneses 
could hardly have been unaware that terrorists had the countryside in an uproar, because 
raids were happening all around them. One of the first gates to be attacked was in the 
parish of Conwil Elfed on the road to Llandysul from Carmarthen in the south. Another 
attack took place in the same area two months later, and then a tollgate in Llandysul itself 
was destroyed. Shortly after that, in June 1843, after another gate, this one four miles 
outside the village of Llandysul, had been burned down, a mob of two to three thousand 
rioters was there to celebrate. Several hundred of them marched on Llandysul, their target 
the gate that had been pulled down and just restored. The rioters seized the four special 
constables guarding the gate and forced the men to help them tear it down again. By the 
middle of June, hardly a gate anywhere around Llandysul was left standing. {RR, p. 199.} 

It is clear that no able-bodied man in Llandysul-a small village of perhaps a thousand 
souls-could have remained unaware or uninvolved. From the very beginning the  rioters 
had depended upon door-to-door collections, and no family dared refuse. It was more 
than a local farmer's life was worth to be absent from their secret meetings. All this was 
happening at a time when a Welshman might be sentenced to death for rioting over the 
high price of food. The fact that Llandysul, situated on the border between Cardiganshire 
and Carmarthenshire, was even more a center of protest than Conwil Elfed, where the riots 
began, makes it likely that Richard Lloyd Jones was probably an active rioter himself. 
Over a century later, his hatred of the immensely wealthy squire Charles Lloyd, from 
whom he rented his land, was still common knowledge-that gentleman having driven 
roughshod over his fields and crops whenever he felt like it-so he would have needed 
little urging. {Mrs. Aubrey Martin to author.} And if he were looking for a biblical 
precedent, he might have received it from one of the local leaders of the riots, Thomas 
Emlyn Thomas, a Unitarian minister from the nearby village of Cribyn; it was known that 
dissenting ministers commonly "provided their hearers with scriptural justification for 
their action, even if they did not actually incite them to violence." {People & Protest, 
Trevor Herbert and Gareth Elwyn Jones, p. 121.} 

From the start the Maids of Rebecca had much more than the high cost of tolls on their 
minds; they were rebelling against the whole structure of society. In their pointed use of 
that despised language, Welsh, and in their emphasis on Welsh manners and mores, they 
were demonstrating their common cause with the rise of nationalism, which had become a 
major movement, in admiration of the French and American revolutions. Welsh societies 
in London, the Gwyneddigion, provided the intellectual basis for a revival of interest in 
ancient Welsh manuscripts, in history, language, literature and the law. One man in 
particular, a marvelously flamboyant figure named Iolo Morgannwg, is responsible for 
having revived the idea of the ancient (perhaps tenth century) national festival of the 
Eisteddfod. Morgannwg's revived version, a contest of music and poetry,began in 1850. He 
then invented a Gorsedd, or Order of Bards of the Island of Britain, in imitation of the 
bardic assemblies of former days. "With revolution coming hard on the heels of revolution, 
and a Tom Paine in every parish asserting that men could start the world all over again, 
they were swept by the multiple millenarianisms of the age of revolution. . . ." {The Search 
for Beulah Land, Gwyn A. Williams, p. 11.} 

The Rebecca Riots, and the upheaval they caused, were probably the main reason why 
Richard and Mallie left. They were fleeing from something, but also toward a dream that 
had bewitched the Welsh for half a century: that of a national home for the Welsh people 
on the American frontier. Since the Middle Ages a legend had circulated that a medieval 
Welsh prince, Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, had sailed across the Atlantic in about A. D. 
1170 and somehow landed in America. His descendants were now Welsh-speaking 
American Indians, whom some explorers claimed to have met.  

The idea caused a sensation. Missionaries proclaimed their eagerness to find and convert 
the lost brothers. One Welsh explorer, John Evans, went looking for them (incidentally 
providing his future president, Thomas Jefferson, another American of Welsh descent, 
with the most accurate map then extant of the upper Missouri River Valley), and 
Welshmen at home, like William Jones (b. 1729), became authorities on the Land of 
Freedom. Jones, a self-taught, accomplished poet and musician, skilled antiquarian, 
amateur astronomer and physicist, brought the powers of his formidable personality to bear 
on organizing stock companies to promote emigration. The history of the Welshspeaking 
people, he concluded, was one long struggle against English oppression. Their only hope 
"lay in the New World alongside the Lost Brothers." {The Search for Beulah Land, Gwyn 
A. Williams, p. 40.} 

No one ever found the Madoc Indians of course, but this hardly mattered since the 
romantic possibility "reinforced a sense of identity, added something to the flavor of an 
Israel to be created in the wilderness. The Madoc myth ran as an insistent descant to the 
Welsh diaspora of the 1780s; John Evans was slogging his way up the Missouri in quest of 
the Madoc Indians even as projectors were scouring the American frontier for the site of a 
Gwladfa or National Home; . . . They were building a Kingdom of Wales, as many a 
Welsh applicant for American citizenship told the clerks in Philadelphia." {The Search for 
Beulah Land, Gwyn A. Williams, p. 38.} They also had a very clear idea of just what that 
new kingdom would be: exactly like the old one, but better and fairer. The free farmer, a 
minister wrote, would live on his own property, "and on his hearth the song of the harp 
and the company of the Welsh language. . . . There shall be there a chapel and school and 
a meeting house, and the old tongue as the means of worship and business, learning and 
government." {Welsh in Wisconsin, Phillip G. Davies, p. 5.} 

In the autumn of 1843 Mallie was pregnant again, which would have explained why the 
Lloyd Joneses waited a year before taking their momentous step. When the new baby 
arrived in the middle of November, it was named Jenkin, in honor of Richard's younger 
brother, who was already in the New World. His sister Rachel, her husband, Rees Beynon, 
and children and his sister Nell, with ten children, were all settled near one another in 
Wisconsin. Jenkin, a bachelor, had set sail a year before and, like his sisters before him, 
journeyed from one Welsh settlement to the next as he worked his way west in search of 
employment. He had visited Welsh communities in Utica and Steuben, New York, seen the 
slate quarries and coal mines of Pennsylvania where other Welshmen, with their special 
expertise, were in demand, traveling ever farther west across the Great Lakes to Galena 
and Mineral Point, that center of lead mining twenty miles or so to the south of the Lloyd 
Joneses' eventual home, The Valley. Jenkin's journey was typical of that made by other 
Welshmen, who had been warned not to remain in the East,  where land was expensive 
and not so productive. There was plenty of good land to be had at fair prices in Illinois, 
Iowa and Wisconsin, and early Welsh settlers to Wisconsin were ecstatic about the quality 
of soil and gave glowing reports on their crop yields. Jenkin had passed through some 
wonderful wooded countryside on his way toward Mineral Point, and although clearing 
would be hard work, he thought it would be worth the effort. He urged them to join him. 

Getting there, however, would be a nightmare. In the 1840s, most Welsh families 
emigrated from the port of Liverpool on sailing vessels, the new steam-powered and iron 
ships being considered useful only for river and coastal traffic. Richard and Mallie actually 
left for the New World from the back of their house. A long dirt track led over the hills for 
ten miles to the town of New Quay. They went in two hay wains, with the help of two 
cousins, sailing from that Welsh coastal town up the coast to Liverpool, and from there 
across the Atlantic. The length of the trip varied tremendously-from twenty days to six 
weeks-and although food was provided, travelers were advised to bring their own. Some 
endured terrifying crossings. Rev. John Jenkins, who preached in Wisconsin in the 1850s, 
spent three months on his crossing in 1841: "We had very stormy weather, and we were 
blown out of the Bay of Biscay and the Azore Islands; yes, we were nearly taken to 
Bermuda, and then back until we were in sight of New London. For eight days we were 
living on one biscuit a day along with a little water. Seven were buried at sea, and one may 
well imagine that we had a pretty bad look to us by the time we got to New York." {Welsh 
in Wisconsin, Phillip G. Davies, p. 9.} 

The Lloyd Joneses, crossing in the autumn of 1844, were almost as unlucky. The ship was 
small and uncomfortable and ran into heavy gales. The mainmast was carried away and 
the boat was forced to return to Liverpool, where they lived on board for two weeks while 
the necessary repairs were made. On the second voyage out, the boat took another 
battering. The sails were in shreds and the hull was leaking badly by the time they reached 
New York six weeks later. It was early December 1844. {Story of the Lloyd Jones family 
emigration drawn from an account, Youngest Son, written by Chester Lloyd Jones, and 
excerpted in HER.} 

Frank Lloyd Wright was almost ludicrously inept when it came to handling money, and it 
is instructive to see how soon this theme appears in the family history. The Lloyd Joneses 
are invariably prepared to trust a charming scoundrel, no matter how often they are 
warned to be on their guard. And when Welsh immigrants arrived at the New York docks, 
they received solemn warnings because, speaking little or no English, they were at the 
mercy of the first fast-talking stranger who came along. That was the trap, and Richard 
Lloyd Jones fell into it. He took the services of a Welsh-speaking "runner" to handle his 
baggage, allowed the man to escort them all to a seedy hotel and then to a money changer 
who unscrupulously fleeced him. Within seconds, the runner had disappeared, and 
Richard was left alone in a  strange city, speaking no English, with a handful of useless 
foreign coins in his pocket and only the vaguest idea of where his hotel was. 

That first scare was bad enough, but the family faced further hardships and real tragedy 
before they reached their Wisconsin destination a thousand miles farther west. Stuck for 
the winter in Utica because the lakes and canals were frozen, they set off dangerously early 
in the spring of 1845. The combined stresses were too much for the three-year-old 
Nanny. As they made their way by wagon from Utica to Rome, where they planned to pick 
up a canalboat, Nanny fell ill with a cold that rapidly became a high fever. The third 
morning on the road, she died in her mother's arms. They all stopped there and then, 
hollowing out a shallow grave in the bank by the roadside, which they lined with grass. As 
they were digging the grave, a group of canalboat men passed them, leading their mules to 
the boats in Rome. {Her American descendants: letter from Margaret Lloyd Jones to one of 
her sons (not identified), July 27, 1852, made available to author by Prof. A. Douglas 
Jones.} 

They traveled onward to Oconomowoc and thence to Ixonia, a neighboring Welsh 
settlement six miles from Watertown, where Jenkin, Rachel and Nell and their families 
had settled. Immigrant farmers of means usually bought established farms with buildings, 
cleared land and soil that had demonstrated its worth. Those less fortunate bought virgin 
land from the government, available in forty-acre parcels at the bargain price of $1.25 an 
acre. In making their choices, Richard and Jenkin repeated the error many of their 
countrymen would make, instinctively favoring a terrain that resembled the one they had 
left and that, in this case, presented identical disadvantages, with a few new ones thrown 
in. Not only was the land they chose stony and far less fertile than other land available, but 
it was heavily wooded, involving mammoth clearing problems. Newcomers, another 
immigrant wrote, would find "a country consisting of dreary forests, interspersed with 
settlements on the rudest scale, that the roads are generally in very bad condition, and, 
above all, that everyone must work hard with his own hands." {Letters from the 
Immigrants, Alan Conway, pp. 69-70.} They made a further mistake in buying some 
low-lying lands bordering their treed hillsides thinking that they would be 
"well-watered." That turned out to be truer than they knew. In summers the fields turned 
into marshes, fertile breeding grounds for mosquitoes, placing every new arrival in danger 
of contracting malaria. Brother Jenkin would die of what was then called "fever and ague." 
{Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 67, no. 2, Winter, 1983-84, p. 133.} 

It took the combined efforts of Jenkin and Richard, with the help of Thomas, now fifteen, 
John, thirteen, and no doubt Margaret and Mary as well, to clear the first lands and plant 
their first crops. Despite these handicaps and the birth of Elinor in 1845 (Jane, James and 
Enos were to follow in 1848, 1850 and 1853), Richard's farm prospered. In 1846 he 
bought his first two forty-acre parcels. He owned 110 acres when he left Ixonia, which he 
sold for the handsome price of $3,500. {Mary Jane Hamilton, foremost Wisconsin scholar 
on the early history of the Lloyd Jones family in America, is author of a paper, "The Lloyd 
Joneses in America: Their First Half Century," on which this account is based.} 

The Lloyd Jones children would grow up having learned all about pioneer farming, and 
such domestic necessities as spinning, weaving, baking, dipping candles, churning butter 
and the like would have been essential skills as well. They would also need to know how to 
drill a well, dig out a root cellar, construct a fireplace and build a Dutch oven. In short, 
someone had to learn everything about building a house: that role fell to the eldest son, 
Thomas. Given the battle for survival in which they were all engaged, it seems plausible 
that this choice was made for him. As soon as he could, Thomas trained as a carpenter . . . 
and by the time [he] was ready to marry, he had built himself a two-story house, and was 
accomplished enough to be in demand, building homes, schools and churches and the like 
throughout the countryside.  

In March 1856, ten years after they arrived in Ixonia, Richard and Mallie sold the farm. 
His brother Jenkin, who had bought land adjoining theirs, had died in the interim and a 
dispute arose between Richard and his sisters over its ownership (settled in Richard's 
favor). {MAG, p. 77-78.} There is no doubt that the constant fear of malaria, the 
ever-growing family and the disappointing crop yields would have been persuasive 
reasons to move. There is also the possibility, raised by Jenkin's memoir of Black Week, 
that Richard and Mallie were, by then, estranged from their neighbors. One notes that, 
having arrived in The Valley, Richard and his children never ran the risk of joining 
another congregation, preferring to worship collectively in the open air. The trauma of 
Black Week would add a special urgency to Richard's dearest wish, the chapel of his own 
that he would not live to see finished. {Mary Jane Hamilton chronology.} Everything that 
had happened would reinforce their Welsh clannishness, the impression they gave 
outsiders that they were enough unto themselves. If their area-at one time,  they 
collectively held 1,800 acres-came to be known as "The Valley of the God-Almighty 
Joneses," there are some good reasons why. {MAG, p. 19.} 

To the north of Mineral Point, where brother Jenkin had stayed, were the villages of 
Dodgeville and Spring Green, the fertile Helena Valley bordered on the north by the 
Wisconsin River, and several established Welsh settlements. In the settlement of Helena 
itself, on the southern banks of the Wisconsin River, a stopping place for men who floated 
the rafts of logs downstream to mills at St. Louis, a successful business for the making of 
lead shot had been established at Tower Hill. All this made the Helena Valley in Iowa 
County an up-and-coming place, but there were good enough reasons for wanting to 
remain in a countryside of such rich valleys, woods, streams and hills, and where there 
was plenty of government land available. {MAG, p. 49.} The Lloyd Jones family worked 
farms for a few years before settling in The Valley on their own land in April 1864. For a 
time they lived just outside the village of Spring Green, then lived for a couple of years 
(1862-64) in Bear Creek, a rental farm near Lone Rock, also on the north bank of the 
Wisconsin River, a move that was to have some consequences in the life of their daughter 
Anna. Once finally installed on their own property in The Valley, however, they stayed. 
Richard and Mallie's homestead, the biggest and best they would own, is no longer 
standing. Aunt Mary's fourteen-room farmhouse survived her, but was struck by 
lightning and burned to the ground in the early 1940s. Uncle Enos's house was 
demolished. However, Uncle John's old farm-house looks much as it did. Aunt 
Margaret's gambrel-roofed red cottage is still to be seen, as is Uncle Thomas's old house. 
Uncle Thomas built most of them, and a Welsh stonemason named Timothy carved the 
mantels of their fireplaces with mistletoe, holly and the family symbol, "Truth Against the 
World." The new land, with its homesteads, its fields and pastures, its streams with trout 
so tame they would feed from your hand, was the fulfillment of a dream for Richard and 
Mallie. 

It was a moment of utter perfection in the lives of Richard and Mallie but it came very late. 
Mallie, "Ein Mam," who had borne eleven children, who had cooked, canned, washed, 
cleaned, dyed, ironed, knitted, spun, mended, made clothes, tended the garden, and no 
doubt harvested, chopped  wood, carried fodder, fed and watered sheep, horses, pigs, cows 
and chickens as well, was worn out. She lived just five more years, dying in 1870 at the 
age of sixty-two or sixty-three. Her children remembered her as gentle and devoted, 
clairvoyant-she once had a vision in which she correctly saw her son Jenkin as wounded 
when he was fighting in the Civil War-a person who loved to tell about the old days in 
Wales and knew all the old fairy tales. To the end of her days, she spoke only Welsh. 

As for that old radical,Richard, there is a photograph taken of him in 1883, two years 
before he died, surrounded by all his children, their husbands and wives, and his 
grandchildren, with an empty chair beside him where "Ein Mam" would have sat. He has 
a stick lying across his knees, his elbows rest negligently on the carved walnut arms of his 
great armchair, and he has the fixed gaze of a man for whom the word compromise had 
long since ceased to have a meaning. Growing deaf, forgetful, baffled, he staggered on, 
saying little, his voice, the wonderfully deep and rolling voice of the born preacher, still 
surprisingly resonant. That last summer he weeded the vegetables in the kitchen garden 
against the doctor's orders. {MAG, p. 95.}  

The uncles were a handsome group. They resembled their father, being strongly built, with 
wide cheekbones and even features, shocks of dark curly hair and enormous beards, and 
James, at six-foot-two, was as tall as Richard had been.  

Young Jenkin, as has been noted, went off to fight in the Civil War-he and his family 
were united in opposition to slavery and passionate admirers of Lincoln-and, once the 
war was over, went to college in Meadville, Pennsylvania, following the example of his 
distinguished forebears and eponym. Uncle Thomas, making his mark as a country 
architect, could turn his hand at anything, whether it was the design of a new way to keep 
milk cool, which was much imitated, or the complete blueprints for a big new schoolhouse, 
which he would build for his clever sisters some years later. Uncle James, the tallest and 
most handsome, was set on his ambition to be a farmer; because there was not enough 
money for Uncle Enos to continue in  college, he would do likewise. Uncle John, like 
Uncle Thomas, had always worked; as a mere child in Wales he had tended sheep. Among 
the stories Mallie told were of setting out to visit little John and Thomas as they sat on the 
mountainside, taking along something good to eat and warm clothes as well as her 
knitting. For his part, John remembered reciting the hymns his mother had taught him, as 
he sat there alone, in an effort to keep awake. Uncle John became the family miller and 
ground wheat for everyone for miles around.  

She also recalled that when a piece of steel from a broken tool lodged in his hand, John 
refused to have it removed, shrugging off everyone's concern. Eventually his hand had to 
be amputated, but by then a cancer had started that would kill him. He would never allow 
painkillers because "they would blur my mind." {TRIL, p. 59.} 

This stoicism was much admired among the Lloyd Joneses. Like all farm  children, the 
boys were men by the ages of ten or eleven, expected to work long hours, to take on heavy 
responsibilities and to deal alone, somehow, with whatever emergency arose. Uncle James, 
riding old Kate in the early spring of 1862 when he was just twelve, was sent out to round 
up the work animals. Crossing a field he discovered a fine frozen pond and, although he 
might have known better, urged his horse to try the ice. The ice held, but the horse slipped, 
James fell, and Kate landed on his leg, breaking it. {MAG, p.47.} "Somehow he managed 
to haul himself back aboard the horse and get home, faint with pain." That would have 
been admired too. 

They had acquired an admirable fixity of purpose from having watched their parents 
struggle and surmount fearful odds. From Richard they would have learned the stance of 
the radical;a combination of prickly willingness to be insulted, belligerent readiness to 
strike back against real and imagined wrongs and, perhaps, far below the surface, an 
underdog's awful fear that he is as worthless as the rest of the world believes. In short, they 
were true descendants of Rev. Jenkin Jones, founder of the first Arminian church in 
Llandysul, proud of their religion, pious and moralistic, as fiercely willing to defend that 
as anything else, but also passionately partisan where other oppressed minorities were 
concerned: slaves in the South, or the broken, pathetic Indians they encountered. As young 
men they struggled manfully to become self-sufficient. Because they had learned to work 
so hard and long, "add tired to tired," as Frank Lloyd Wright never ceased to exhort 
others, they had great physical stamina. They were incredibly brave, and they all had 
disastrous accidents at one time or another, making it difficult to know how much to 
ascribe to a too-obsessive determination to succeed, how much to recklessness and  
fatigue and how much to sheer bad luck. As a young carpenter, Uncle Thomas set up in 
business with a young friend, had built his own shop and seemed well on his way. But one 
time he was in too much of a hurry to dry out some lumber and stacked it too close to the 
heating pipe. The shop was carelessly left unattended, some board ends and shavings in 
front of the stove caught on fire, and the whole building went up in smoke. Of course, he 
and his partner had no insurance. 

The biography of Enos, the youngest son, written by his son Chester, makes frequent 
references to accidents caused because one of the brothers was left alone with the sheep 
when an older one should have been there to help guard against wolves, and then the 
wolves descended, or other brothers thought it would be a lark to ride their horses into the 
river, and Enos almost drowned. And so the reminiscences go on. It is an odd coincidence 
that every Lloyd Jones brother but one, the preacher Jenkin, suffered a serious setback at 
some period or another of his life. In the spring of 1879, when he was forty-nine, 
Thomas fell from the second floor of a building, breaking two ribs and puncturing a lung, 
an injury from which he never fully recovered and which helped impoverish him. John's 
bad hand handicapped him for years. {TRIL, p. 51.} Enos had his share of childhood 
accidents, and was taken out of college when the family ran out of money. James, 
everyone's favorite and fond hope, was perhaps the most accident-prone of all. At least 
one other serious accident when he was young is recorded (he dropped an axe on his foot), 
and the circumstances of his death would bring them all down with him, but that is the 
subject for a later chapter. It is at least possible that Richard, in particular, was 
authoritarian and demanding, and that pressure to succeed was unwearying. In that case, a 
spectacular accident-totally outside conscious control-was the only way a driven Lloyd 
Jones son, or daughter, might lighten the load without recriminations. At that point they 
might decently retire from battle, but if they did not, there was only one end in sight.  

As one would expect, James was also a stern taskmaster, a fact his nephew Frank would 
remember all his life. This trait was much leavened by James's innate kindliness and 
generosity. His brothers were the same. They tried to be loving parents, always thinking of 
the next present, no matter how modest, and they loved picnics, usually initiated by Uncle 
Thomas. Enos remembered many family gatherings, bonfires, tramps through the woods 
and skating parties, fun at Hallowe'en and April Fools' Day and wonderful molasses taffy 
and cakes and cookies and pies. They all loved music, books and poetry. Thomas's son 
recalled that his father could make sense out of Shakespeare's most baffling  passages, 
which he loved to read aloud on the long winter evenings, as he did Longfellow. In the 
spring of 1862, when Jenkin was fighting in the Civil Warand it was believed that a 
generous supply of onions would prevent scurvy, the cause of Jenkin's comrades became 
the Lloyd Jones cause. The whole family planted enough onions for a regiment and bent 
their backs all summer long, weeding and hoeing to ensure a big crop. Months later the 
family was still receiving letters of thanks.  

As for the girls in the family, Jane (often called Jennie) was hauntingly beautiful when she 
was young. The other four tended to have long, thin, sensible faces, rather than 
high-cheekboned ones, and a spartan look about them. Three of them became 
teachers:Jennie, Elinor (called Nell) and Hannah (Anna); Margaret and Mary got married. 
The Lloyd Jones children still traced their ancestry-one recalls that there were ministers 
and educators on both sides-back through their paternal grandmother to the aristocratic 
Lloyd family. A remnant of the old Celtic emphasis on the superior claims of the mother's 
clan can be seen in some of the Lloyd Jones daughters when one considers that two of 
those who married achieved the feat of folding their husbands into their family circle, 
rather than vice versa. Maginel Wright Barney, one of the few sources of lore about the 
women in the family, believed that non-Welsh husbands or wives were never quite 
accepted.  

Aunt-Mary-who-married-the-Scot seems to have been the jolliest one. Aunt 
Margaret, four years Anna's senior, the first girl in the family, is generally described as the 
peacemaker. Nell and Jennie, who never married, becoming known to everyone as the 
Aunts, built Hillside, their unique boarding school, in The Valley. Jennie was everyone's 
favorite. Nell seemed to be sterner, sadder, less approachable. She had fallen in love with a 
handsome young man, and they were engaged to marry. Then she contracted smallpox. 
Her face became deeply scarred, and her hair went white. Her fiance came to visit her, was 
appalled, and never returned. It was, by chance, the summer of the onions, when she was 
just seventeen. {MAG, p. 119.} 

The Lloyd Jones girls, then, were expected to face disaster with the same stoicism as the 
boys, and they must have worked just as hard, or harder. That their epoch would have 
treated them as less important people than their brothers is too obvious to need emphasis. 
Nevertheless, they were not as downtrodden as their relatives in Wales, as Maginel 
discovered when she eventually went to visit a distant Welsh cousin in Landysul and 
witnessed the manner in which he bullied his wife and daughters. One would also expect 
them, as members of a large family, to have grown up with little individual attention. Jane 
wrote a revealing reminiscence that supports this thesis. Her greatest joy as a child was the 
summer she was kept at home to help her mother while the others went to school. One 
does not find a hint of reproach that she was losing out on the fun of being with her 
playmates, and not even a twinge of self-pity at the hard work involved. She was 
deliriously happy because she had been singled out as the favored one-she had her 
mother all to herself. It must have been the first and last time that this ever happened to 
her. {TRIL, p. 36.} 

Children who are inadequately nurtured are said to idealize their parents, and this 
certainly seems to have happened with the girls in the Lloyd Jones family. Maternal love is 
the theme of Jane's reminiscence; it almost seems to have been the highest possible good. 
Mother lived for her children, and, as a reward, they idealized her. She was guardian of 
the hearth and home, she transmitted the cultural values, she kept the family together, and, 
as we have seen, the children belonged most of all to her. She was literally their first 
teacher in the early pioneer years, and since teaching and mothering were so closely 
allied-perhaps even synonymous in the minds of "Ein Mam's" daughters-one is not 
surprised to find that three out of five became teachers.  

By the time Nell and Jennie were old enough to go to academy and college, the family 
could afford to help with the cost of their education. They soon held important teaching 
positions. Before they established their own school, Aunt Nell was head of the history 
department in the River Falls State Normal School in Wisconsin, while Aunt Jennie had 
become director of kindergarten training schools in St. Paul, Minnesota. Anna, who was 
seven years older than Nell and ten years older than Jennie, was just as interested in 
teaching, but not so fortunate in her training. She learned the way many young women 
could enter the profession in those days, i.e., she went from being a promising pupil in an 
elementary school to an assistant teacher. From that time onward, she taught herself. One 
must not forget that Anna's first language was Welsh, and although she learned to pen her 
letters to copperplate perfection, and her grammar was punctiliously correct, she never 
mastered spelling and would cheerfully write out a word phonetically, leading to some 
curiously original constructions. {MAG, pp. 93, and pp. 113; HER, p. 94.} 

As Maginel described her, Anna was tall (five-foot-eight) and handsome, with large 
brown eyes, a wide forehead and a mass of curly hair that she pulled to the back of her 
head, where it fell in ringlets in what was called "a waterfall." She never changed her 
hairstyle when it went out of style, just as she never wore corsets even when wasp waists 
were all the rage, and although she loved color, she would not wear it. One sees her in 
early photographs, her hair parted dead center and pulled back severely from her face, 
wearing a prim white collar and a cameo brooch. {MAG, p.62} 

Anna is often described as self-reliant, an idea much reinforced by her daughter's 
description of her as a fine horsewoman, out in all weather, a soldier's cape with hood and 
brass buttons slung over her shoulders. {MAG, p.62} Anna was a second mother to her 
younger brothers and sisters-Enos recalls how hard she tried to teach him to read and 
write-and Maginel remembered that "by the time she was fifteen she had acted as 
assistant to the midwife in half a dozen family births." {MAG, p. 61} Perhaps it was not 
unusual for a girl in a pioneer society to assist at her own mother's lyings-in (if this is the 
correct inference), but it presents a picture of someone who did not have much of a 
childhood, an impression reinforced by her comment in old age (to her son) that she had 
felt hemmed in all her life by circumstance. {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, 
January 24, 1921.} 

From an early account, which gives an excellent insight into Anna's character and, more 
particularly, from letters she wrote to her son that have recently been made available for 
study, Anna emerges as impulsive, erratic, headstrong and completely at the mercy of 
some very uncomfortable and conflicting emotions. To begin with, she believed with her 
sisters that she should be a model of maternal love and all the tender virtues, yet be stoical, 
self-sufficient, ride like a man and scorn feminine accoutrements. As a Lloyd, she should 
strive all her life to be worthy of that exalted name, and make others aware of her claim to 
superior social status while remaining proud of her humble farm origins. As a Lloyd Jones, 
and heir to a long tradition of religious radicalism, it was her obligation to fight against 
discrimination and bigotry, showing others the way by being better, truer and braver than 
they were-more like Lincoln, more like Jesus, even. In old age she was still talking about 
the cultivation of moral attributes, using a garden as her hackneyed metaphor. {from a 
letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, October 20, 1918.} Such pious moralizing and easy 
sentimentality came naturally to Victorians, but it is evident that Anna literally believed 
she should live up to her Bunyanesque ideals. But the situation was more complicated still, 
since, being a Lloyd Jones, a high premium was placed on combativeness, on prevailing 
against impossible odds: "Truth Against the World." Yet if she were to live up to her own 
perfectionistic standards, there was no room for anger and retaliation, since it was her 
Christian duty to suppress rancorous thoughts. Someone who is attempting to live up to 
such exacting standards of behavior may, sooner or later, despair of continually striving to 
"do better," and, indeed, Anna enraged was a reckless and obstinate fighter. Proud of her 
minority status, tenacious in her loyalties, emotionally unpredictable, torn by conflicting 
sets of obligations, aloof and stubborn, Anna was not an easy person to understand or 
ignore. 

Anna was sentimental about the past. She wrote about the travails her family had 
undergone in the early days and reminded her son of the role faith had played in 
sustaining them during those difficult times. She was equally sentimental about The 
Valley, where she had lived since the age of fourteen and which was the setting for her 
fondest memories. To The Valley had been transferred all of an uprooted child's longing to 
feel again the security of a loved and familiar landscape. For Anna it was a holy place; it 
was "consecrated ground." {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, April 11, 1916.} 

Her children have described Anna's sensitive love for nature, and it is one of her most 
marked characteristics. Such an awareness, she wrote, came from "Ein Mam," who taught 
them the traditional lore about plants, animals and flowers, linking those thoughts with 
ideas of religion. It was an old-fashioned idea of education now thought, she wrote in 
1919, to be modern and novel. At will she could lie  down, close her eyes, and see The 
Valley in all its splendor. She wrote of the first heralds of spring, the clumps of bright 
color underfoot, the boughs unveiling their first shoots, the return of migrant birds, and all 
those beloved and heartening demonstrations of life's rebirth that made her feel, then at 
least, that there was something to hope for. The Welsh concept of nature as one's fortress 
in adversity, and a salve to the soul, is evident here. She believed, in common with 
Juvenal, that "Nature and wisdom always say the same," and exhorted her son to study the 
natural world, to estimable effect. She might then link concepts of Truth,Beauty, 
Simplicity and Nature with the idea of a home, the perfect home, or just a single wonderful 
room, something that would have had a poignant symbolism for someone who might never 
have had a room of her own as a child. After one move into new quarters, and after the 
movers had placed a table in just the right corner of her bay window, she wrote feelingly 
about the reassurance of such familiar objects {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, 
January 26, 1919.} and how she felt restored to life almost, as if her room and her very 
existence were one and the same. {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, January 24, 
1921.} But perhaps her most telling comment to her son, often repeated, was the high and 
almost sacred importance she placed upon the role of architect. There was no distinction to 
be made between her brother Jenkin's role as a preacher for the Truth and the edifices her 
son was building. {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, January 18, 1921.} 

Here, then, is an emotionally troubled but intelligent, responsive, and gifted woman who 
might have made her mark, had she been given the educational opportunity, but who 
would stand back while her younger sisters received these advantages, leaving her own 
promise largely unfulfilled.  

Anna did not marry until she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, which would have been 
considered late, and nothing is known about her life as a young woman. The only safe 
guess is that she never taught too far from home, and would have returned to the family 
hearth each weekend, if not each evening. If they were teaching far from their homes, 
rural teachers customarily lodged with their pupils' families, the length of stay depending 
on the number of children enrolled in school. So it is conceivable, as is asserted in one 
account, that Anna met her future husband, William Carey Wright,when she went to board 
with him and his three children while his first wife, Permelia,was alive. {MM, p. 31.} The 
oldest child by that marriage, Charles William,could have been ready for school by then. 
One has to believe, however, that Anna's stay was brief, since the most reliable account of 
that period, written by one of William's children, makes no mention of her presence. 
Further, no  documentation to support this has ever been found, according to Mary Jane 
Hamilton, a Wisconsin scholar and expert  on the early history of the Lloyd Jones family. 

What is known is that Permelia Holcomb Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones had relatives in 
common. The Lloyd Joneses' move to Bear Creek, outside Lone Rock, made them near 
neighbors of a family named Thomas. Permelia Wright was related to the Thomases 
through her mother; Anna was also related to the same branch of Thomases through her 
mother. There is yet another way William Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones might have met: 
he was superintendent of the school district in which she worked. {Mary Jane Hamilton.} 

The Lloyd Jones family was building in The Valley, and living in Bear Creek in 1863, the 
year Permelia died in childbirth. Elizabeth Amelia, almost three, George Irving, five, and 
Charles William, seven, were put in the care of their maternal grandmother. {The family 
genealogist: Mrs. David Wright.} 

The date of Anna and William's marriage is variously given as 1865 or 1866 (the most 
authoritative being August 17, 1866), and it is possible that there might have been some 
connection between the move of Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones to The Valley and the 
marriage of their daughter Anna. One by one, the children were leaving. Jenkin had gone 
off to the Civil Warand then to college, and the Aunts, Nell and Jennie, were set in the 
direction of teaching careers. Thomas was living in the house he had built for his wife of 
three years. John was about to get married, Margaret had already married, and of the first 
five, those children born in Wales, only Mary and Anna remained unmarried. Mallie 
Lloyd Jones was still in her fifties but, as has been noted, did not have long to live. "Ein 
Mam" may have wanted to see Anna settled in a home of her own. For his part, William 
Wright was newly bereft and in need of a mother for his children without delay. The added 
factor of Anna's Thomas connections, making her almost a relative of Permelia's, could 
have made a favorable impression on William. 

What would certainly have been important to Anna was her future husband's pedigree, and 
this, he could claim, was more distinguished than her own. True, he was not Welsh, but it 
is said that his ancestor, a seventeenth century English noblewoman named Mabel 
Harlakenden, could trace her lineage back to William the Conqueror and even to Cardie 
the Saxon, A. D. 512. William Wright's father, David, was a Baptist minister, and he 
himself studied medicine and law before establishing himself as an organist and teacher of 
the pianoforte. When Anna met him, he was studying for the ministry. 

It is thought that William Wright married Anna strictly for practical reasons and that, for 
her part, the marriage offered a last chance to escape spinsterhood. No one has  considered 
the possibility that Anna might have been head over heels in love, though this could have 
been the simple truth. Over and over again one finds evidence that William was one of 
life's darlings:he never met a single person who did not like him. Arriving in Lone Rock 
in 1859, where he set up as a lawyer, although he never had a degree, he was appointed 
commissioner of the Richland County Circuit Court within a year. When he announced his 
candidacy for county school superintendent, a local newspaper editor wrote 
enthusiastically, "Probably no better man could be selected. His friends speak very highly 
of him." {TW, p. 2.} He was a mesmerizing lecturer. He gave the eulogy for Abraham 
Lincoln in Lone Rock in April 1865, and it was reported that he made "an appropriate and 
eloquent address which . . . was highly praised by all who heard it." {TW, p. 4-5.} If he 
gave concerts on the pianoforte, or recitals-he had a fine bass voice-these would be the 
best anyone had ever heard. When he wrote waltzes, polkas and gavottes in the popular, 
sentimental taste of the day, publishers magically appeared. When he tried his hand at 
business in a new town, he was certain to be described as up-and-coming, an asset to 
the community. It seems he had only to appear in order to be snapped up, made much of 
and offered tempting opportunities. Such a man, one would think, could not help 
succeeding. And yet no sooner had he arrived and conquered than he would mysteriously 
depart, sometimes within the year. Conventional accounts draw a polite veil over the likely 
reason for this pattern of striking success and collapse of hopes, which does, however, 
point to a defect of character that would not be immediately apparent. To Anna this 
divinely talented, literate, accomplished and alluring man must have seemed like a 
phenomenon, her tutelary escort to a wider and more wonderful world. He must have 
seemed to have all the attributes she felt herself to lack; and from envy to adoration is a 
short step. 

William Wright was fourteen years Anna's senior, and by 1883, standing in the back row 
of a family photograph, he, at fifty-eight years old, with white hair and beard, looks to be 
much older and bears an uncanny resemblance to Richard Lloyd Jones, identically 
bearded, in the front row. Pictures of him as a younger man show him to have been most 
handsome, with a broad forehead, finely formed features and a natty bow tie-he always 
was a jaunty dresser. One can imagine the objections of Richard and Mallie to an 
American of English stock, born and raised in New England, rather than a proper 
Welshman, although these might have been merely a matter of form. Anna could quickly 
point to her future husband's polish, culture and pronounced musical gifts, always a 
mitigating factor for the Lloyd Joneses. She could talk about the stir he made when he 
eulogized their hero, President Lincoln. She could dwell on the fact that he had recently 
been ordained a minister. Even if he were a Baptist, which certainly was a drawback, he 
had been "called" to preach, another persuasive argument. At any rate, they were married. 
In May 1867, William and Anna moved  from Lone Rock to Richland Center, where he 
would oversee construction of the Central Baptist Society's new building. {TW, p. 4.} One 
month later, on June 8, Anna gave birth to Frank Lincoln Wright. 


The Shining Brow 

Yet through his flight be could understand the twittering of the birds in the coppice, the 
thoughts of the little snakes darting from the brushwood, and the stir of life in the hidden 
centers of the ground. 

-THOMAS S. JONES, JR. 
Taliesin 

If Frank Lloyd Wright had wanted to be thought of as a chosen one, a savior, he could not 
have chosen a better mate than his third wife, Olgivanna.In the books and articles she 
wrote after his death, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright painted an exalted portrait of her beloved. 
"He can weave himself like a cobra around the mountain range and he can rear like a 
flying Pegasus ready to take off to the highest pinnacle" is a characteristic example. So it is 
not surprising to find her writing, with respect to the day he was born, that "he told me 
that he had made his entrance into the world on a stormy night and described it to me as 
though he had witnessed the prophetic initiation. 'The wind rose over the earth forcing 
trees low to the ground. Lightning ignited the clouds, and thunder struck like a great fury.' 
'Yours was a prophetic birth,' his mother told him." {Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life, His 
Work, His Words, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, p. 11.} 

Nor could he have improved on his mother, Anna Lloyd Jones Wright,whose fiercely 
partisan love for her son is almost a legend. On his twentieth birthday, June 8, 1887, Anna 
rose early as she had the day he was born. {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, June 8, 
1887.} He arrived at eight a.m. and she greeted him with rapture, she wrote; but then, the 
sanctity of Mother Love and the marvel and wonder of babies were subjects of which Anna 
never tired. {from a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, January 26. 1919.} Her son was her 
Prince, and whether she actually told him that his birth had been prophesied hardly needs 
to be proved. Given Anna Wright's convictions, tirelessly repeated, it is perfectly possible 
that, by adulthood if not before, Frank Lloyd Wright saw himself as predestined. It is also 
logical that he would look for metaphors in the rich tradition of fairy tales and pagan 
Celtic myths that had been handed on to him by Anna, believing as she did in the 
children's story hour, through her own mother. She would have told him about the sacred 
places in Wales connected by tradition to supernatural events: "Until recently, firm belief 
kept alive stories of the Telwyth Teg, or the fairy folk, whose kingdom is a place of great 
poetic power. This  is because the Heaven World of the Celts was not situated in some 
inhuman region of space, but was here on earth." {SOT, pp. 4-5.} 

The name Wright would choose for his home, Taliesin,betrays the force of this early 
indoctrination since Taliesin is not only an actual historical personage but also a 
poet-savior, magician, spinner of riddles, seer and supernatural being. Taliesin's story is 
cited in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as one more example of a 
legendary figure who, being made privy to supernatural knowledge, is destined to die and 
be reborn. {in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 198} In his original 
incarnation, Taliesin was Gwion Bach, a village boy who found himself charged by the 
goddess Caridwen (linked with crop fertility and also poetry and letters) to stir a vast kettle 
in which she was concocting a magical brew that would confer inspiration. By accident, 
three drops of the boiling liquid splashed on his finger and when, to stop the burning, he 
licked off the liquid, he suddenly "foresaw everything that was to come." What he also saw 
was that Caridwen meant to kill him. He fled, changing his shape in an effort to outwit 
her, but she was even faster and eventually caught and ate him. "And, as the story says, 
she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her 
heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast 
him into the sea to the mercy of God, on the twenty-ninth day of April." His bag washed 
up into a fish trap, where it was discovered next morning by Elphin, son of a wealthy 
landowner, and his men. On finding a beautiful baby boy, Elphin's men said, "Behold a 
radiant brow [taliesin]!" "Taliesin be he called," said Elphin. Elphin was at first 
disappointed with his catch, but was reassured by the magical child, already able to talk in 
rhyme, who explained, "Primary chief bard am I to Elphin/ And my original country is the 
region of the summer stars;/ Idno and Heinin called me Merddin,/ At length every king 
will call me Taliesin." {in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 
239-241} 

One can see how attractive this figure, with his seer's wand and magician's cape, would 
have seemed to Wright, born as he was into a Welsh family of radical thinkers, outcasts 
beyond their own small circle but privately convinced of their special, even exalted status. 
Such an identification with a miraculous and priestlike being can be seen as an immature 
attempt to compensate for an ignominious beginning and a felt lack of advantages. That 
his parents were povertystricken is evident from his mother's letters. For someone so 
exquisitely sensitive to the genius loci and with such a gift for celebrating it, Wright was 
laconic to the point of taciturnity about his birthplace, and discouraged anyone who 
inquired about it, even his sister Maginel. After his death, an abandoned bungalow in 
Richland Center that was scheduled for demolition briefly made the papers when it was 
said that, according to local tradition, it had been Wright's birthplace. It was in a ruinous 
state, with tilting floors and no doors, but a case for its preservation was  hard to make 
since it was clear that, architecturally speaking, there was nothing to save. {AP, April 11, 
1972. Patrick J. Meehan, in The Master Architect: Conversations   with Frank Lloyd 
Wright, published a photograph on p. 13 of Wright's purported birthplace in Richland 
Center and gives its address as 774 South Park Street. Date of move to Richland Center: 
based on a chronology by Mrs. David Wright and EWH, p. 7.} 

As has been noted, William and Anna had moved to the county seat of Richland Center a 
month before the birth of their first child where, as his daughter Elizabeth Wright Heller 
wrote, William had been "called to preach," as well as oversee construction of the new 
Central Baptist Society Building. In short, Anna was caring not only for a new baby but 
also for Lizzie, six, George Irving, eight, and Charles William, ten. 

William Carey Wright made an immediately favorable impression in Richland Center as 
preacher and musician-his first local concert was given in aid of the church building 
fund-and, predictably, was flatteringly reviewed by the local paper. {TW, p.5.} But 
Richland Center was a disappointment, and despite the "donation parties" organized to 
bring in some extra funds for the Wright household, and to help feed four children (with 
another on the way), William was chronically short of funds. So before long he was 
planning to move to McGregor, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. They arrived in March 
1869, just one month, perhaps by another coincidence, before the birth of Mary Jane, later 
known as Jennie. Again, Wright preached; he was given the post of temporary pastor for 
the Baptist Church, and tried to make some money as a businessman: he bought a part 
interest in the music department of a general store. {TW, p. 5.} Wherever he went, Wright 
demonstrated his dazzling gift for attracting the friendship of prominent local men and 
women, not to mention the town's newspaper editors. The flattering notices began, "Our 
city has reason to be glad that so valuable a gentleman has been added to its religious, 
musical and social lists," wrote the McGregor Times. His listeners came to "expect 
something original, practical and unhackneyed from Mr. Wright," the same newspaper 
commented. "He is a plain speaker and for that we like him." {TW, p. 5.} Another 
triumph, and another disappointment. Two years after their arrival, the Wrights again 
packed up and left. They were taken in by Anna's family at Hillside (Lizzie was sent to 
stay with her Grandmother Holcomb), while William prepared for his next move to 
Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he had been "called to preach" at the High Street Baptist 
Church. {TW, p. 5.} It might have seemed like a promotion, but, as has been observed, 
only someone as impractical as William Carey Wright could have thought so. The original 
church had burned down three years before. Arriving in December 1871, the Reverend Mr. 
Wright faced the enormous task of raising funds to rebuild his church and also clear up his 
congregation's past debts. 

Anna,facing her third move in five years of marriage, with five children in her charge, 
settled the family in  nearby Central Falls, where, for the first year, they were obliged to 
live on the first and third floors of a house, surely one of the most unpleasant living 
arrangements that can be imagined. {EWH, p. 12.} The situation improved slightly during 
their second year, Lizzie noted, when they had a whole house to themselves. {EWH, p. 
12.} William tackled his new role with his customary energy and zest. For three years he 
worked tirelessly, and although he did not succeed in rescuing the church (after he left, the 
property was sold to the town as a high school), no one thought him to blame. The task 
had been too difficult for any mortal, and the minister had been "earnest, unwearied, 
successful, as far as circumstances permitted." {TW, p.6.} His public appearances were, as 
usual, closely followed by the local newspapers and always favorably received. When not 
fund raising, William could be found making political speeches or lecturing on 
temperance, one of his favorite subjects, or talking about ancient Egypt, another specialty. 
The local Baptist societies snapped him up, and his congregation doted on him. They 
rallied around in a goodnatured, clumsy way to meet the family's pressing needs when the 
church, as often happened, could not pay his salary, arriving at the house with casseroles 
and some dollar bills as well. These "donation parties" were humorously recounted in the 
usual social columns. Two years later, William and Anna conceded defeat. Again, to judge 
from their actions, they left before they seemed to have anywhere else to go. He did not 
take up a new post until September 1874, but they left Pawtucket in December 1873. They 
waited out the intervening months at the home of his father, Rev. David Wright, in Essex, 
Connecticut. Then they moved once more, this time to Weymouth, Massachusetts, in the 
environs of Boston, where William had been "called to preach" at the First Baptist Church. 

William's predictable pattern of easy success followed by stunning disappointment makes 
only one conclusion evident: that he was wildly impractical about money.Even his 
daughter Lizzie, who adored him and defended his actions, wrote that "he had no financial 
sense whatever." {TW, p.5.}   Her explanation implied that her father was too rarefied a 
being to be concerned with such worldly matters. One guesses that this was probably quite 
true, and that William saw himself as someone of rare intellectual endowments and 
accomplishments: as a silver-tongued preacher, an irresistible singer and instrumentalist, 
an exemplary teacher and model citizen. He was showering his gifts on his community, 
and that was the end of his responsibility to life. The attitude seems familiar and reminds 
one, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote in his life of that eighteenth century arbiter of manners at 
Bath, Beau Nash, of "those young men who, by youth and too much money, are taught to 
look on extravagance as a virtue." {Beau Nash, Oliver Goldsmith, p. 16.} Living beyond 
one's income was proof of breeding, and so William Carey Wright, consistently charming, 
exhorting and dazzling, pursued the life of a gentleman and a scholar with a fine disdain 
for his  tradesmen's bills. Those with such a glowing conviction of others' obligations often 
have the happy knack of convincing society that it does, indeed, owe them a living, at least 
for a while. The one to be pitied is the partner, expected to forgive and forgive again, when 
there is nothing in the pantry and no money to buy shoes. She, at least, cannot support the 
delusion of grandeur, but neither can she voice her disapproval very freely when everyone 
else believes her husband to be so charming, so cultivated and so gifted-and when she 
also wishes secretly that the mirage of position were a reality. Behind closed doors her 
reproaches can be predicted, along with the kind of defense William would be expected to 
make. Besides, he was capable of fits of generosity, with a devilish willingness to clean out 
his pockets if, by some chance, there was money in them. When Lizzie got married, 
William helped her fiance pick out a lavish wedding gift: a Story and Camp organ. He 
even paid for the freight, his daughter noted with satisfaction. William never suspected 
that he might be playing a role in his own downfall. His daughter recalled that, as an old 
man, her father gloomily reviewed his past and concluded that he had never had a chance. 
{EWH, p. 167.}} 

If one accepts the possibility that money-how to get it and spend it-was one of the 
enduring battles raging between Anna and William, it becomes easier to see why the 
marriage failed. Anna would not have minded the hard work (after all, she was a farmer's 
daughter), but she would have minded the fact that life never seemed to get any easier. 
She, with three of her husband's children to take care of, would have resented his cavalier 
attitude toward feeding and clothing them. She would have been disappointed that she, 
with some social status in the community as the pastor's wife, did not have the house to go 
with it. She once told her daughter Jennie that she had lived for years in the hope that she 
might one day be able to indulge in her love for beautiful objects. {FP, November 24, 
1905} Against all the odds, she had made sure the children would not suffer. In old age 
her thoughts returned to the endless household work it had taken to bring up children and 
make them look tidy on no money at all. Of all the crosses she had to bear, cooking was 
perhaps the worst. {FP, November 14, 1898} She never had managed to like it. As for the 
times when they would have to pack up and leave, swallow their pride and beg their 
relatives for a roof over their heads, these were the unkindest of all. When Frank was 
apparently snubbed by a relative and complained about it to his mother, Anna replied that 
this was nothing new. She had suffered from the same treatment when she had been 
bundled off to her father's one summer because they were penniless. {undated} Anna did 
not reproach her relatives who, she implied, were justified. The person who had let them 
down was Frank's father.  

Money can often be a substitute for love, and perhaps it became such a central issue 
because Anna felt that William did not love her, or did not love her enough.She  had, after 
all, grown up in constant competition with her brothers and sisters for her parents' 
attention. She had, after all, married someone she might have expected to be paternal, 
someone much more outwardly self-assured, certainly more accomplished, than she was, 
someone she hoped would lift her to a higher social and intellectual plane. So he had 
disappointed her on this score. Furthermore, she apparently discovered very soon that 
William's heart still belonged, if not to Permelia,then certainly to Permelia's children and 
especially to Elizabeth. Elizabeth Wright Heller's memoir of her childhood paints a classic 
portrait of a hateful, vengeful, almost demonic stepmother, and one gains the impression 
that Anna was competing with her stepchildren for their father's attention as a child 
among children, while using an adult's unfair advantage. {EWH, p. 5.} When Anna went 
for her, Lizzie would run to hide behind her father, and Anna would have to stop, like a 
child caught misbehaving. Lizzie casually observed that her stepmother was actually 
jealous of her. Anna's fierce absorption in her firstborn begins to take on another aspect if 
one places it within the framework of her particular emotional dilemma: she was just one 
more in the crowd fighting a losing battle for love. Her husband might prefer his little girl 
(and, after all, those children belonged to the Holcomb family, not the Lloyd Joneses, if 
one accepts her Welsh reasoning), but her baby boy, and later her girls, were hers alone. 
Anna turned on Frank the full force of her starved emotional needs, and if there was a 
considerable element of primitive vindictiveness involved, and if she could get even with 
William by attacking Elizabeth and adoring Frank, so much the better. William had failed 
her in the most crucial way a husband can fail a wife. He had withheld the undivided love 
that was her due, and so he owed her money. 

Frank Lloyd Wright always explained that his choice of profession had been decided for 
him by his mother before he was born. The goodnatured way in which he seemed to imply 
that he had never had any alternative was, no doubt, perfectly true. But to believe that the 
choice of architecture was frivolously made would be to misunderstand Anna Lloyd 
Wright and her priorities as the pioneering daughter of Welsh immigrants. Her brothers 
had obediently made their own wishes subservient to the group's needs. Thomas, the 
firstborn, had painstakingly evolved from backwoods carpenter to a man who could design 
and build a house. At the time of Frank's birth, he was thirty-seven years old and in 
demand all over The Valley. That he might have served as an exemplary model is obvious; 
as Anna's eldest brother, his importance would have been second only to "Ein Tad's." 
What the family needed now was someone to build a church for them, the religious 
radicals and outcasts, in their adopted Valley. Erecting a building consecrated to their 
beliefs was their goal and passion in  the years when Frank was growing up and "Ein Tad" 
was still alive. There is reason to doubt whether the wood engravings of English cathedrals 
that Wright describes in his autobiography could have been hanging around his crib as 
early as he thought they were. {this point is made by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., in Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Mementos of Childhood, JSAH, vol. XLI, no. 3, October 1982, pp. 232-33.} 
The point at issue here surely is that this is what Wright thought he remembered. From 
Frank's earliest moments Anna had successfully managed to fix his gaze on the future 
work she had planned for him. Wright wrote in his autobiography, "The boy, she said, was 
to build beautiful buildings . . . she intended him to be an Architect." {A2, p.11} That he 
should capitalize the word also reflects her influence. "I had grown up from childhood 
with the idea that there was nothing quite so sacrosanct, so high, so sacred as an architect, 
a builder," he said in later years. {HLV, p. 20} Behind that belief was Anna's central 
philosophy, as summed up in her favorite quotation from Shakespeare, "And this our life, 
exempt from public haunt/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks/ Sermons 
in stones, and good in everything." {from As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1.} For "good in 
everything," Anna would have substituted the word God. So, to prepare her son for his 
elevated future role, Anna, believing in prenatal influences, tried to keep her thoughts on a 
higher plane. But she was also an experienced teacher, and the actual prospect of having a 
child could well have plunged her into her first real study of child development. Entirely 
self-educated, with no formal training to bias her responses, she was very receptive to 
new ideas. The summer of Frank's birth, her sister Nell, twenty-two, would have been 
finishing her studies, and sister Jennie, at nineteen, would have been starting her own. It 
seems possible, even likely, that whatever Nell and Jennie were learning at this 
impressionable stage would have been handed on to Anna; Jennie, after all, would become 
a director in charge of training techers in kindergarten methods. The link is a direct one 
through Jane Lloyd Jones to Anna Lloyd Wright and the teachings of the great Friedrich 
Froebel, a pioneer in the field of early child development and inventor of the kindergarten. 
{TRIL, p. 34.} 

The early life of Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, born in the small German principality 
of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Germany, late in the eighteenth century, has certain 
parallels with that of Anna Lloyd Wright and her sisters. He, too, was the child of a pastor 
(in his case, a Lutheran), and if the Lloyd Jones girls saw  little of their mother, he saw 
nothing at all, since his died when he was nine months old. Like them, he idealized her, 
"creating in his imagination an ideal mother who is the central figure in one of his most 
famous books, Mother Songs and Games, where she is virtually canonized as a saint," his 
biographer wrote. {Friedrich Froebel, p. 11} He was a solitary boy and spent much time, 
as they did, in direct contemplation of nature. He, too, felt he had gained an insight into 
the essential unity of things through such daily exposure. Like Froebel, Anna believed 
education must provide the child with an awareness of the natural law, so as to "develop 
the power of reason and convey a sense of harmony and order of God: 'God's works reflect 
the logic of his spirit and human education cannot do anything better than initate the logic 
of nature.'" {from "The Anatomy of Wright's Aesthetic," by Richard MacCormac, 
published in the Architectural Review, February 1968, pp. 143-46, in which the author 
discusses the extent to which Wright's three-dimensional way of seeing had been derived 
from Froebel's exercises}Anna's dictum that "education [was] the direct manifestation of 
God," as her son described it {A2, p. 9.}, would seem directly derived from Froebel; his 
belief in the "Divine Principle of Unity" would have had an irresistible appeal for her. As 
her son wrote of the Lloyd Joneses, "UNITY was their watchword, the sign and symbol 
thjrilled them, the UNITY of all things!" {A2, p. 16.} In his Rousseauian belief in the 
essential goodness of the human spirit, and his emphasis on nature and spirit as 
manifestations of an ultimate reality, Froebel was rebelling against the whole concept of 
education as it was then taught. Children were not, as they were being treated, inert lumps 
of clay to be imprinted with a teacher's stamp, but potentially creative, productive beings 
whose active wills should be encouraged, whose latent abilities studied and whose physical 
development carefully fostered. One dared not wait until school age, Froebel reasoned. 
One had to begin at the age of three or before; one had to educate the mother so that she, 
too, worked toward her child's harmonious unfolding. One started with the right clothes, 
the proper diet, the right influences, the correct games and exercises, and plenty of 
healthy, spontaneous contact with the natural world. Froebel's games and exercises-called 
"gifts"-are the area of his teachings most often mentioned in a discussion of Wright's 
development as an architect. Wright was already nine years old before he was introduced 
to these kindergarten training aids, the first textbook in English having been published two 
years before (in 1874). {MAN, pp. 5-6.} The main issue, however, should be how soon 
Anna was introduced to Froebel's ideas and how extensive his influence was. It seems 
likely that from Wright's earliest childhood she followed his precepts to the letter, and that 
a great deal of the successful nurturing of Wright's genius is due to the enlightened 
teachings of Friedrich Froebel. 

"At length every king will call me Taliesin. . . ." It is perfectly true that a broad high 
forehead was one of Wright's most telling physical characteristics. Apart from this 
distinctive feature, one would not have called him  handsome at any age. His face was too 
long and thin, his chin tended to recede, his nose was too prominent, and his mouth, 
full-lipped when he was young, pulled into a thin sharp line as he aged. He resembled his 
emphatically featured mother more than he did his debonair father or his Welsh uncles, 
with their even features, square cheekbones and impudent eyes. 

Conventions of the day ensured that no expression might animate the early portraits that 
have survived of Wright as a child and adolescent, and so evidence of the allure of his 
personality-the mercurial shifts of mood, the avid interest in ideas, the impudent wit and 
fierce enthusiasms-comes later. One sees only a look of earnest-one would have said, 
high-minded-purpose and some hint of the forcefulness of his character by the 
directness of his gaze. 

He was blessed all his life with a superb physical constitution. Contrary to some beliefs, 
Wright was perfectly capable of telling a story against himself, and liked to talk about the 
time when he thought he was really ill and needed a gallbladder operation. He sought the 
advice of G. I. Gurdjieff, philosopher and mystic, spiritual advisor to Olgivanna Wright, 
whom she also consulted about physical ailments. After a searching look at Wright's eyes, 
Gurdjieff invited the couple to dinner. He had prepared the most indigestible meal Wright 
had ever seen in his life. A succession of hot dishes (presumably curries) was followed by a 
salad tossed with mysterious ingredients and washed down with a large glass of 
Armagnac. Believing that he was in for it either way, Wright obediently swallowed the lot. 
That night he felt absolutely terrible. "Well I guess that settles it!" he told Olgivanna. 
"You're a widow now!" {HLV, pp. 44-45.} He finally managed to sleep and, in the 
morning, what had been "burned out" of him was the notion that there was anything 
wrong with his digestion. Credit for that enduring vitality can be given to Froebel if Anna 
had, indeed, learned anything from him, since her attitude toward nutrition was a model of 
enlightened thinking. There never was any nonsense about pies, cakes and store candies, 
or even fancy sauces and similar culinary elaborations. The stern emphasis was always on 
quality food and plenty of it, in its plainest possible guise: healthful stews, brown breads, 
unsweetened fruits, unadorned meats and the inclusion of the skins of fruits and vegetables 
for their sun-baked, life-giving qualities. She would have learned about the medicinal 
value of herbs from her mother, and certainly put more faith in natural remedies than 
store-bought ones. Elizabeth Wright Heller, who has almost nothing good to say about 
her stepmother, did concede that when she was ill with "inflammatory rheumatism," 
presumably rheumatoid arthritis, Anna gave her a series of water treatments that eased her 
pain when nothing else helped, and nursed her selflessly until she recovered. {EWH, p. 
12} In her memoir Lizzie was willing to give Anna credit where it was due. Anna's 
valuable legacy to her son was a lifelong preference  for simple, healthful dishes and a 
trust in the body's own recuperative powers. He knew it, although he could not resist 
reproaching her with these beliefs occasionally. "Bringing up your children on graham 
bread, porridge and religion, are you?" he would retort, and try to make it sting. {A2, p. 
15.} 

As for Wright's upbringing,it is always assumed that he was a mama's boy and that this 
pampering is responsible for certain shortcomings of character. As is usual with such 
conclusions there is a partial truth to the observation. One of his students wondered, in 
later years, how "Mr. Wright," as he was always called, could have lived even for a day 
without a wife. He never made his own bed, picked up his clothes or washed his socks. 
Shirts remained wherever he dropped them, and if there were no clean ones, he would just 
wear a dirty one again. {TAF, p. 127.} 

If being wholeheartedly for her child, encouraging him and giving him daily signs of her 
devotion, was spoiling him, then Anna indulged Frank to good effect. Her conviction that 
he was destined for greatness gave him, without a doubt, the fortitude he needed once he 
was launched into his precarious profession, the determination to do well and the air of 
assurance that caused closefisted businessmen to part with large sums without a murmur. 

Her partisanship, however, contained an element that was less constructive. It reinforced 
her son's belief that the feelings of others need not be taken into account, and discouraged 
any tendency to empathize. It also helped foster a feeling of guilt and challenged his innate 
sense of fairness. An incident from childhood, which he relates in his autobiography, 
illustrates this. He and his parents were spending a spring and summer in The Valley 
staying with his grandfather (this was probably 1878, when Frank was turning eleven). As 
he was playing in the fields with his cousins, none of whom he knew well, he got the idea 
that it would be great fun to have a party that evening. The more he imagined it, the more 
real it became. It is conceivable, though he does not mention it, that the party was his 
attempt to gain stature in the eyes of these cousins. At any rate he described the party in 
such vivid detail-the presents, the feast and the games-that he had them all convinced, 
and was half convinced himself. 

His cousins went home to get dressed, and he returned to the house, saying nothing. 
Evening came and the boys, all washed and brushed up, appeared at the door in their best 
clothes. To her son's great relief, Anna took in the situation at a glance. She made 
molasses candy, gave them popcorn and ginger cookies, persuaded her husband to play 
"Pop Goes the Weasel" on his violin and even found presents of a sort for the guests. In 
short, sensing his need to make an impression, she entered wholeheartedly into the game. 
Her  ability to empathize was admirable. However, she ruined the effect by what happened 
next. She asked him, "Why did you want to fool your cousins, Frank?" He started talking 
fast. Of course he had no intention of doing any such thing. They had spoiled it all by 
believing him. They should never have shown up expecting a party: the technique 
commonly known as blaming the victim. And Anna, instead of pointing out gently what 
was happening, allowed Frank to talk his way out of it. He wrote, "And Mother 
understood. Nobody else." {A2, p. 7.} 

What is interesting about this episode are the questions it raises as one sees Wright 
frantically trying to exonerate himself. As the French have it, Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, and 
the fear of being blamed runs parallel, in the Lloyd Jones family, with an image of God the 
Father that is much closer to the avenging God of the Old Testament than the forgiving 
God of the New. He makes this clear in the first pages of his autobiography, when he 
describes his terror of his grandfather, mixed up in his mind with the prophet Isaiah: 
"Isaiah's awful Lord smote the poor multitudes with a mighty continuous smite, never 
taking away the gory, dreadful hand outstretched to smite more. . . ." {A2, p. 7.} Terrible 
punishments awaited the wrongdoer unless he could somehow argue his way free. By the 
age of ten, Wright was already a master. That, however, meant he must forever live with 
the uncomfortable feeling that he was getting away with something. One of Wright's less 
amiable traits was his talent for bamboozling others and getting the better of them. That 
would give rise to severe self reproach as he weighed his own actions and found himself 
wanting.  

In short, Wright was in an emotional double bind: too frightened of the consequences to 
confess his wrongdoing, and too influenced by overly stringent standards of personal 
conduct to avoid the reproaches of a censorious conscience. His solution was to refine his 
techniques of avoiding the issues, and if he learned to be unscrupulous, and blame others 
for his own shortcomings, then he would worry about it later. In short, he was the victim 
of an upbringing that was erratic as well as arbitrary, sometimes believed to be the most 
difficult for any child to surmount. His parents' attitudes veered between being too lax and 
too rigid and coercive. Although Frank seldom experienced the rough side of Anna's 
tongue, he could not have avoided knowing that she, when aroused, could be a frightening 
figure, as Lizzie had learned to her cost. That was one more reason for keeping Anna 
placated and charmed, so that he would never be subjected to similar treatment. 

One sees similarly contradictory traits of behavior in what can be discerned about the 
complex personality of  William Carey Wright.One has seen how this model of bonhomie, 
learning and accomplishment, who began every new start with renewed hope and easy 
successes, always seemed to snatch failure from the jaws of victory. There was a strain of 
pessimism that underlay the sunny surface. In future years he would give his first 
family-Charles, George and Elizabeth-the uncritical love and support he withheld in 
some measure from Jennie and Maginel, and, it seems clear, denied his son Frank.While 
doing justice to his father as a musician and intellectual, Frank called him "irascible." 
Taking piano lessons was an ordeal. Resentful of Anna's preferential treatment, perhaps 
sensing the flaw in her handling of her son, William tried to overcompensate by not letting 
Frank get away with anything. In one famous episode, Frank describes the ordeal of 
pumping the bellows of the organ his father played in church and the agony of being 
forced to keep pumping, even when his arms felt as if they would fall off. He wrote, 
curiously in the third person, "The boy worked away for dear life to keep air in the 
bellows, knowing only too well what would happen to him should he give out." {A2, p. 
12} The inference was that he would be "taken to the woodshed," although, if one believes 
Lizzie, that did not happen often enough. And when Anna saw William rolling up his 
sleeves and heading for Frank, she would, like the tactician she was, pick a fight with 
Jennie so as to divert her husband's attention. {EWH, p. 277} Lizzie was already shrewdly 
aware of the manipulative moves of adults, and no doubt Frank learned once more that 
unscrupulous behavior was perfectly acceptable in the right cause. 

Another famous incident from Wright's autobiography describes his introduction to farm 
life-when he was sent to stay on Uncle James's farm in The Valley-and the 
backbreaking work involved. While one believes that farm work was just as arduous as 
Wright described it, the main reason for its detailed description would seem to be to arouse 
the reader's sympathy for the small victim. He, hardly more than a child, was actually 
being worked until he dropped, if one can believe him, under the unrelenting gaze of the 
adults. Whenever he protested, they simply told him to "add tired to tired" (that maxim he 
quoted so approvingly in later years). What appeared to make an indelible impression on 
him was that no matter how much he tried to wriggle his way out of the work, they would 
not let him get away. The first time he escaped he was discovered and treated with 
kindness by his Uncle Enos, and persuaded to return. The second time, Uncle James found 
him, and perhaps he was not so forgiving, because once inside the farm gate, his nephew 
disappeared once more. All night, he lay in a haystack, listening to the calls of his uncle 
and aunt and feeling triumphant. "An eye for an eye, and tooth for a  tooth," he exulted. It 
was "worthy of Isaiah." It was a temporary victory since he was back at work the next day. 
For once he had lost, or had he? That summer, whenever he could slip away, he would sit 
and daydream. Then Uncle James would call again, "Frank! Frank! Come back!"-and he 
would know he had won. {A2, p. 22-23} It is a very interesting episode since it 
demonstrates the solution he would choose, all his life, when faced with what seemed to be 
an intolerable situation. It also betrays a certain need for vindictive triumph that, as an 
adult, would reinforce his determination to win, whatever the cost. 

On the surface, then, adults in the Lloyd Jones and Wright branches of Frank Lloyd 
Wright's family tree tried to hold themselves and their offspring to exacting standards of 
morality. Obedience was stressed, but beneath the facade, these same grown-ups schemed 
and connived, hitting back when they were hurt, manipulating others, getting even, 
denying their true motives, showing themselves to be inconsistent and emotionally 
immature. As heirs to minority status, proud of their radical tradition and centuries of 
guerrilla resistance they, by accident or design, seemed to be training their children to be 
rebels. The memoirs of Elizabeth Heller and Frank Lloyd Wright both suggest this. Anna 
Lloyd Wright would fly at Elizabeth in a rage and, one gets the impression, use her as a 
substitute for the real target of her wrath. Once that pattern was clear, William sent his 
daughter to live with relatives and, during her years of transition from child to adolescent, 
Lizzie's feelings underwent a transformation from stark terror to a determination to get 
even. This transformation of attitude was helped by her discovery that at least one of 
Anna's daughters was not in the least scared of her mother, but talked back to her. Lizzie 
recalled that on one occasion when Anna was complaining unfairly about her husband, 
Jennie sharply reprimanded her. {EWH, p. 277.} To Lizzie's astonishment, nothing 
happened. Pretty soon Lizzie was bold enough to try the same tactic. One day, Anna 
observed her stepdaughter outside the house talking to a group of her school friends and 
wanted to know what they had been talking about. Anna was sure she was being criticized 
behind her back. Lizzie piped up boldly that Anna was about the last subject she ever 
wanted to bring up, and her stepmother, for once, could not think of a thing to say. {EWH, 
p. 45-46} 

There are similar parallels in the relationship between William Carey Wright and his 
son.That emotionally distant, demanding, secretly jealous parent presented essentially the 
same conundrum to his son that Anna Lloyd Wright had presented to her stepdaughter, 
and was offering a similar indoctrination. As a small child, Frank looked up to the 
formidable figure of his father in the Weymouth, Massachusetts, pulpit, from his seat 
below, in the front row of the church, with mingled respect and fear. But one Sunday 
morning, when the family was walking to church and Frank was  seven years old, his 
father discovered he had forgotten to put on a necktie. He ran back to get one, but the key 
to the house would not work, and he had to break through a window. Finally William 
Wright reappeared, wearing a necktie at last but with a bleeding finger. The discovery 
that, behind the august facade, was a flustered human being had an effect on Frank, young 
as he was. He explained, "I looked up at him and . . . saw him differently. . . . And do you 
know he didn't seem at all formidable after that." {HLV, p. 17.} By the time Frank had 
become an adolescent, he, too, saw his relationship with his father as a battle of wills, one 
he intended to win. Just before his father left home, he took Frank into the stable to be 
"thrashed." {A2, p. 49.} Wright wrote, ". . . the young rebel got his father down on the 
floor, held him there until his father promised to let him alone." He later explained to his 
mother that his father was to blame for thinking he could still use physical punishment on 
his son. What William Wright had to say was not recorded, but the main point was that he 
had allowed his son to prevail. Defiance, in other words, had been rewarded. 

The incident directly parallels the period when Wright, himself the father of adolescent 
sons, dealt with rebellion in an identical manner. He describes an occasion when Lloyd 
and John decided to soak him with a garden hose, on the front lawn, in full view of a 
group of neighbors. Despite his angry shouts they refused to stop. Wright finally "charged" 
them, soaking wet, while his neighbors roared. Authority, Wright noted ruefully, was 
"getting a bad break." Another lesson in outwitting the pendragon was being handed on, as 
no doubt it had been for centuries. It is significant that in describing the moment when he 
wrestled with and defeated his father, Frank Lloyd Wright called himself "the young 
rebel." {A2, p. 49.}  

"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. . . ." {The Renaissance, Walter 
Pater, p. 135.} He was proud of his father and particularly of his musical talent. Both he 
and Maginel have a similar memory of their father in the midst of composing a particular 
waltz, rondo, galop or polka, scurrying from his desk to piano and back again, his pen 
held crosswise in his mouth and ink on his whiskers. Maginel recalled him singing 
"Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," accompanying himself, with his white head thrown 
back. Frank remembered the evenings when, as he hovered between sleeping and waking, 
he heard his father playing the piano into the small hours, dreamily memorizing great 
stretches of Bach's preludes and Beethoven's symphonies, those great cathedrals of sound. 
He took up the piano eagerly and had learned many of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without 
Words" by heart by the time he was an adolescent, as well as Beethoven's Minuet in G. By 
his own account he would have to be prevented from showing off at every opportunity. 
What he remembered best were evenings when Jennie, equally  eager, would play and he 
and his friends would sing Gilbert and Sullivan-all the rage at the time-while Mother, 
with Maginel  on her lap, made an appreciative audience and Father's study door was open 
to "let in the fun." Those evenings, he wrote, "were no concerts. They were happy riots. No 
one could tell where laughter left off and singing began." {A1, p. 33.} His descriptions put 
one in mind of analyses of painting by Walter Pater (1839-1894), who was, with the 
great English art critic and writer John Ruskin,and with A. W. N. Pugin,an 
early-nineteenth-century British reformer, one of the leading theoreticians of the 
Aesthetic Movement in the arts, architecture and interior decor that was in vogue in the 
post-Civil War years when Wright was growing up. For Wright, music would become an 
integral part of a room, essential to his concept of harmonious living. Pater, too, seemed to 
conclude that the work of the artist Giorgione had reached particularly sublime heights for 
its ability to suggest that his scenes were filled with music, whether he was depicting a 
pastoral glade, a pool in which people were fishing or a moment "in the twilight, as one 
passes through an unfamiliar room." And Wright's comment "Living seemed a kind of 
listening to him-then" {A2, p. 13.} exactly mirrors Pater's "Life itself is conceived as a 
sort of listening." {The Renaissance, Walter Pater, p. 151.} 

The sensibility that Emerson said "distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter 
from the tree of the poet" is at work in Wright's reminiscences about his life on Uncle 
James's farm. Wright was never too exhausted or thirsty to miss, in the midst of taking a 
draft of cool water, the sound of a meadowlark. {A2, p. 121.} He was alert to the "world of 
daylight gold" {A2, p. 26.} that Pater, too, saw woven through every facet of the Italian 
landscape, even the blackest cypress. {The Renaissance, p. 153.} Wright delighted in 
"night shadows so wonderfully blue," {A2, p. 26.} in the "dark sprays of slender metallic 
straight lines," {A2, p. 3.} in "catkins cutting circles," {A2, p. 27.}  "milkweed 
blossoming to scatter its snowy fleece on every breeze" {A2, p. 26.} and even such humble 
and ignored sights as a patch of dead weeds glinting against a background of snow. {A2, 
p. 3.} His lyrical passages, self-conscious as they are, do give a vivid testimony to the fact 
that very little ever escaped his gaze. In fact, he had an extraordinary visual memory, and 
it is doubtful whether he ever forgot anything he saw. If, as he described his responses, he 
intended to explain the lessons he was learning from nature, then he had fastened on the 
first imperative, as Pater saw it, i.e., to experience the sensuous element of art. As for Mr. 
Emerson, whom "one's mother, father, aunts and uncles wsere always quoting," Maginel 
wrote, he believed that "such is . . . . the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary 
focus, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for 
themselves . . . ." {Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 14.} Such raw material then had to 
be transformed by what Pater called the "informing, artistic spirit." {The Renaissance, p. 
137} The subject matter of a poem, or the content of a painting and the circumstances that 
had brought them both  about, must be considered secondary to the "form, the spirit of the 
handling," Pater believed. This aspect "should become an end in itself, should penetrate 
every part of the matter." {The Renaissance, p. 125.} It was the final goal toward which 
all art was striving. One senses that Wright was groping toward a similar conclusion when 
he wrote that an architect needed to understand "the secret that gave character to the 
trees." {A2, p. 27.} 

Wright's descriptions of his Valley, which run like a leitmotif through his autobiography, 
to him an inexhaustible source of delight and the fulcrum of his artistic sensibility, have a 
quality of painted idylls, like those Giorgionesque landscapes depicting an enchanted, 
Arcadian world. Even at the age of sixty, when he was writing these memoirs, he still 
knew where the rare white and purple lady slippers grew, where one could catch sleek 
frogs, where one could find the homes of skunks and snakes, the quicksand in the streams 
and the secret nests of swallows. He had roamed over every inch of the shallow, sloping 
hillside on which he would build his house; The Valley had become, as Pater had written, 
"a country of the pure reason or half-imaginative memory." {The Renaissance, p. 137.} 
Wright gives an indication of the role this landscape, and art generally, would come to 
play in his emotional life by occasionally hinting at the feelings they evoked. Even while 
he was pumping the organ for his father, and in acute pain, he was still capable of 
forgetting what he was doing and becoming transported with delight by a particularly 
affecting passage. {A2, p. 12} Similarly, he never could look at the splash of red made by 
a lily against the green of a verdant pasture without being moved, he wrote. {A2, p. 27.} 
He had experienced that frisson of discovery that marks a true aesthete. 

Maginel Lloyd Wright (christened Margaret Ellen, shortened to Maggie Nell and thence 
the name she always used) has an early memory of the long parlor, the main living room 
in the house in Madison, Wisconsin, to which her family moved in 1879. {Date of the 
family's move to Madison has been established from the divorce testimony in the files of 
the Circuit Court of Dane County, Wisconsin, April 24, 1885} She made a point of 
describing it in her memoir, obviously much impressed by its restraint and refinement: 
gleaming maple hardwood floors, sheer white curtains, geraniums in pots on the 
windowsill, tasteful arrangements of branches and dried leaves in vases, oriental carpets in 
brilliant colors on a white ground, and unusual folding chairs upholstered in 
red-and-white and green-and-white carpeting, with wool fringes on the arms and 
seats. {MAG, p. 59.} Her brother remembered other rooms similarly furnished with Indian 
rugs,cream-colored net curtains, a few good engravings framed with narrow bands of 
maple, and books everywhere. {A2, p. 32.} 

Even though no photographs have survived, the unadorned curtains and Indian and 
oriental rugs serve to distinguish these rooms at once from those interiors one associates 
with  the period: clashing colors and patterns on oversize furniture and a clutter of fans, 
pottery, paintings, antimacassars, cushions and miscellaneous objets d'art so 
claustrophobic as to still bring a reaction when one looks at faded photographs. Maginel, 
who would become known for her delicate drawings and paintings, sensed instinctively 
that her mother had achieved a triumph in that house, given the small-town atmosphere 
in which they were living and the general level of public taste. How that transformation 
was achieved is not known, but one notes that the rooms in question were created a few 
years after Anna had visited the great Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of the summer 
of 1876. Wright has written that his mother's visit to the exhibition (whether he went 
himself is not known) introduced her, and then himself, to the Froebel games and 
exercises, or "gifts." {Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Taliesin archivist} Ambitious to have her son 
become an architect, she would also have paid close attention to the new ideas from 
Europe being advanced at that famous exhibition by means of the Aesthetic Movement. 
These ideas were adopted at once in the decade that followed, from the mid-1870s to the 
mid-1880s. New societies and clubs formed to bring standards of taste to bear on the 
appalling objects then being produced by the Industrial Revolution. The idea that the 
words artistic and  tasteful ought to be associated with china, glass, serving dishes, wall 
tiles,teaspoons and clocks, not to mention wallpaper and carpets, was one whose time had 
come. {In Pursuit of Beauty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 111.} The exhibition also 
served to introduce a newly moneyed class to the possibilities of not just Chinese and 
Japanese designs but also such exotica as Egyptian, Moorish and Indian. The evidence of 
the objects in the Madison home, as well as Wright's comment that his mother was 
following the then "modern" vogue for refinement, speaks for itself. {A2, p. 32.} Whether 
by accident or design, the rooms Anna created could not have been better suited to sharpen 
the artistic awareness of her future architect. 

The house in Madison where they were to live for the next several years, the first they were 
ever to own, made a similar impression on Frank Lloyd Wright. He goes into some detail 
about the property on the corner of Gorham and Livingston streets, which was very close 
to Lake Mendota, one of the four beautiful lakes around which the town had grown. 
{Actual location of the Madison house was established by Thomas S. Hines, Jr., in "Frank 
Lloyd Wright, The Madison Years: Records Versus Recollections" (Wisconsin Magazine 
of History, vol. 50, no. 2, winter 1967; pp. 109-119).} Madison was any Wisconsin 
village on a somewhat larger scale, Wright wrote, but the fact that it was the state's capital, 
had a dome of Michelangelesque appearance and was the seat of the state university gave 
it a cachet somewhat out of the ordinary. 

The Wright family had pursued its usual bumpy course before arriving at the 
Madisonhomestead. William Wright's period in Weymouth, Massachusetts, had been 
somewhat atypical in that he managed to stay there for three years. There his last child, 
Maginel, was born in the early summer of 1877. By October he and his family were back 
in Wisconsin and spending another stay of some months with Anna's Lloyd  Jones 
relatives. Anna's brother Jenkin, ordained in 1870, was already an influential Unitarian 
minister {TW, p. 9.}, the missionary secretary of the Western Union Conference, and 
perhaps his growing influence in the church and the chronically impoverished state of the 
Wrights had something to do with William Wright's decision {Mrs. David Wright 
chronology.}; at any rate, he left the Baptist Church and became a Unitarian. He soon 
became pastor of the Liberal (Unitarian) Church in the hamlet of Wyoming near The 
Valley, and was also made secretary of the Wisconsin Conference of Unitarians and 
Independent Societies. 

As usual, William Wright's Madison beginnings were as promising as all the others had 
been. "As a lecturer, Mr. Wright is one of the best," a local paper observed, "and none 
should fail to hear him." {TW, p. 10.} With his customary zest, William had also opened a 
Conservatory of Music above "some kind of store" on Pinckney Street and was trying to 
make it succeed. {A2, p. 31.} But Wright was getting older (he was then fifty-five), and 
the disappointments of the marriage must have been taking their toll. His son Frank 
nowhere mentions his father's three children by his first marriage, and the omission was 
certainly deliberate, but it is fair to say that by the Madison years, those of Frank's most 
complete childhood memories, these three children were gone. Charles William,"wild over 
machinery," according to his sister Lizzie, had become apprenticed to a machinist when 
they were still living in Pawtucket. He would follow his father into the ministry. The 
second son, George Irving,left to study law; he would eventually become a judge. By 1874 
Lizzie had been removed from the scene and sent to stay with her Holcomb relatives. That 
left Frank, Jane and Maginel, who was so fragile as a baby she had to be carried around on 
a pillow for months. {A2, p. 17.} The move to Madison, much closer to the beloved 
Valley, brought them into the Lloyd Jones sphere of influence and those particularly active 
men and women, Jenkin, James, Enos and the Aunts, Jennie and Nell. One believes that as 
Anna's disenchantment with her marriage became acute, she would have been bound to 
turn toward the people she could count on. Frank remembers Uncle James arriving at their 
Madison home one day with a wagon and a cow tied to the back. He had brought the 
animal all that distance just so that "Anna's children might have good fresh milk." {A2, p. 
17-18.} 

What Maginel and Frank remembered best about the Madison house was his bedroom, the 
door of which displayed a large sign on which was written from top to bottom: 

SANCTUM SANCTORUM 

with an additional (KEEP OUT) below. 

The room, up under the roof of the story-and-a-half house, was long and low, with 
sloping sides and dormer  windows.It must have been cold in winter and suffocatingly 
warm in summer, but what Maginel remembered was its distinctive smell. The Sanctum's 
uniqueness had to do with a mixture of printer's ink, oil paints, shellac and turpentine. 
Frank had installed a printing press, a scroll saw for making wall brackets, blocks of 
paper, numerous colored inks, pencils and oils-his first makeshift studio. He had painted 
some wall plaques, one depicting a "startled-looking" robin and nest of eggs, another a 
painting of an apple tree in blossom against a blue sky. {MAG, p. 75.} During the school 
year he went to the old Second Ward Grammar School on Gorham Street, and was 
admitted to the old Madison High School in the mid-1880s. Thomas S. Hines, Jr., in the 
first study of Wright's Madison years, established that the architect had poor to average 
grades in most of his subjects-algebra, rhetoric, botany and physics-during the 
1884-85 school year. There is no evidence that he ever graduated. 

When one considers that he had by then attended schools in Weymouth, Massachusetts, 
and, conceivably, Essex, Connecticut, and The Valley as well, before continuing in an 
elementary school in Madison, one can understand why his academic career was 
undistinguished. Moving from town to town was unsettling, and so much emotional 
energy would have been needed to cope with a whole new set of circumstances and 
personalities that one could predict the result: "aloneness, shyness, isolation and 
solitariness." {Acts of Will, James D. Lieberman, p. 403.}And, indeed, he was "afraid of 
people," he wrote. {A2, p. 48} So he played piano and viola, painted his earthenware 
churns, worked on his printing press and read Hans Brinker, Jules Verne's Michael 
Strogoff, Hector Servadac, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and tattered thrillers from the 
Nickel Library. His contact with other young males seems to have been limited to those 
occasions when he would attempt to dazzle them with imaginary parties or, as he also 
recalled, would bring down the contents of his parents' attic onto the sidewalk and proceed 
to give everything away. That lavish gifts and ostentatious spending became connected, in 
his mind, with ways to impress, make himself feel important, is contained in another 
incident in which he described buying stocks of candy for a group of older boys and, at 
their urging, telling the storekeeper to "charge it to the Town Pump." {A1, pp. 12-13} 
When he discovered how easy it was, he kept trotting back for more free candy, that is, 
until the end of the month when his father received the bill. 

He had found one close friend, a boy even more of an outsider than he obviously felt he 
was. Frank, then about fourteen, was coming home from school one autumn day shortly 
after they had moved to Madison when he encountered a group of boys tormenting a 
cripple, a boy who had lost both legs to polio. They had thrown his crutches out of reach 
and were attempting to bury him in a pile of leaves from which he  periodically emerged 
spluttering and crying. Frank got up his courage and drove the other boys off. Then he 
gave the cripple, Robie Lamp, his crutches and helped him up onto his feet. When he got 
home, indignant and close to tears, and described the incident to his mother, she readily 
agreed to allow him to bring Robie home. After that, Maginel observed, Robie spent 
almost as much time at their house as he did at his own. {A2, p. 32 and MAG, p. 75.} 

It was Robie with whom Frank shared his printing press, and it was their joint idea to form 
their own printing company and talk the wealthy father of another boy into advancing 
them two hundred dollars, a princely sum in those days, so that they could buy a larger 
press and more type. It was Robie to whom Frank told all his secrets, who helped him 
build his kites with incredible tails, with whom he designed his waterwheels, who sketched 
with him and studied music with him at his father's academy. (Robie took up the violin.) 
Their friendship went on into adulthood, and Frank designed a small, square brick house 
in Madison especially suited to Robie's physical needs, with its own roof garden. {A2, p. 
32.} Frank's indignation, when aroused, would forever be marshaled to defend society's 
underdogs, the impoverished and downtrodden. Although his relationship with his sister 
Jane was uneasy-they were too close in age for it to be otherwise-Maginel, who was ten 
years his junior, was another matter. He would toss her up in the air, defend her in 
arguments and comfort her in thunderstorms, which she hated. He was her wonderful, 
laughing, protective big brother. At about this time he became entranced by the Arabian 
Nights, those tales in Arabic that had been translated into French almost two centuries 
before and were being rediscovered because of new translations into English: a 
nine-volume edition appeared during the years 1882-84. No doubt he relished the tales 
of Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor, but it was Aladdin who held his interest, Aladdin, that 
clever, resourceful boy who triumphed over every obstacle because he had a magical lamp. 

Secret dreams of glory perhaps helped to compensate for his life's dreary reality and times 
when, required to recite before the whole class, he would be in an agony of embarrassment 
and apprehension. Those excruciating moments of adolescence were so vivid that when he 
came to write his memoir he complained they had prevented him from becoming a 
self-confident speaker, quite forgetting the progress he had made in that direction during 
the intervening years. {A1, p. 35.} 

On one occasion in particular, his mother made the choice of his recitation, a typical 
Victorian monologue that began, "Oh, sir, I am a poor widow with children." {A1, p. 35.} 
It was short enough and seemed to fit the bill. But he could not bring himself to learn it. 
He kept putting that off, "as though he sensed some evil in it," he wrote. He finally 
managed to become word-perfect at his mother's urging, but  when the time to deliver the 
monologue came he could not get beyond the first sentence. The whole thing suddenly 
struck him as ridiculous. Each time he began, he trailed away, until his classmates roared 
with laughter and he slunk back to his seat in acute mortification. Later that day, in the 
school yard, boys ran after him shouting, "Oh, sir, I am a widow with children. . . ." {A1, 
p. 36.} 

What Frank sensed but could not put into words was that he was somehow being made a 
pawn at a moment of crisis in his mother's life. In the autumn of 1881 {the exact date is 
October 21} his father's father, Rev. David Wright,who had married his parents, took a 
candle upstairs in his home in Essex, Connecticut, sat down and wrote a farewell letter to 
each of his three sons. Then he went to bed and quietly died. He had reached the great age 
of ninety-three. {MAG, p. 63} Perhaps his letter to his son William contained the news 
that William's inheritance would be a life insurance policy. Perhaps William and Anna 
already knew that the money was coming one day; in any event, it was heaven sent since it 
appeared to have been enough to pay off the debt on their Madison home and provide for 
some improvements as well. 

Two years later, in about February 1883, Anna stopped sharing her husband's bed. She 
took the room over the sitting room that was the warmer one, leaving him with the coldest 
room, he complained. When he repeatedly asked for the return of his marital rights, she 
said she no longer loved him, and hated the very ground he walked on.It seems fairly 
obvious that Anna saw this as the moment to force her husband out of her life, by any 
means, however unscrupulous, as his complaint to the Circuit Court of Dane County 
subsequently demonstrated.  She neglected her duties as a wife, he testified. Many times 
his bed went unmade even though he paid a hired girl to do such tasks. Anna ignored his 
wishes and comfort in respect to meals and obliged him to do his own mending, "because 
when I requested her to do anything it was often neglected" or badly done and thrown in 
his face or on the floor. He did concede that he might have made a mistake in asking some 
of her relatives whether there were any insanity in the family. {based on testimony filed by 
William Carey Wright during the divorce proceedings already described (Anna Wright did 
not testify).} 

In effect, Anna began her campaign sometime after her husband had inherited his money, 
and kept it up until he finally left and filed for divorce in the summer of 1884, about a year 
and a half later. Her resolve, however, went in fits and starts-periods at home were 
followed by so-called trips when she seems to have been wrestling with the idea of 
moving out herself. In August 1883, she made a visit to friends, and he went to see her in 
an effort to reconcile, but was rebuffed. 

Then Anna's brothers paid a call. They are not identified, but one can assume they 
probably included Jenkin, James and Enos. If William would agree to leave, and make 
over the house to Anna, they would do the rest, they said. In other words, they would take 
the financial responsibility off his hands if he would do what she wanted. William agreed. 
He moved out with a few sticks of furniture, his clothes, books, papers and musical 
instruments, and renewed his ties with his first family, leaving Jennie, Maginel and Frank 
with the inescapable conclusion that their only relatives were the Lloyd Joneses. The split 
this created led to complete loss of contact between the two sides of Frank Lloyd Wright's 
family and a kind of tacit agreement by everyone not to mention the other family and 
certainly not with approval. There is no evidence that Frank Lloyd Wright ever saw his 
father again, and he did not attend his father's funeral in Lone Rock in 1904. 

Leaving a wife and children without any means of support, even if her brothers did plan to 
take over, would make any man uncomfortable, let alone a minister of the cloth, unless he 
could convince himself that he had been very badly treated indeed. Forcing a husband out, 
even when the marriage had been unhappy for years, was another guarantee of a guilty 
conscience unless a wife could somehow make herself believe that he had deserted her. 
Even so, Anna and her daughters knew that she faced social disapproval, perhaps 
ostracism, as a divorced woman in the 1880s. Therefore Anna and William each fought to 
save face and, in a way, both won. The court decreed that Anna had "left" William because 
she had moved out of his bed, and she could honestly counter that he had walked out of the 
door.Behind the self-justifications, it is clear that William was relieved. He had remained 
married for the sake of his new family but at the cost of losing his first, which meant even 
more to him. He would soon be sixty and, no doubt, was tired out by emotional problems 
he could not solve. He testified that he tried to provide for Anna and the children to the 
best of his ability, and gave her the bulk of his income (one remembers that, in those days, 
a wife had only the money her husband cared to provide) and that this was never enough. 
In his view, she was extravagant; she angrily resisted his charges. The actual break seems 
to have been precipitated by one last quarrel over money, the fifty dollars left from his 
inheritance after all the bills were paid. She wanted him to give that to her; he wanted to 
keep it for "a rainy day." It was inconceivable to him that she would want the last penny he 
had; it was inconceivable to her that he would refuse. The wrangling reinforces one's 
suspicion that something else entirely was at stake here, a suspicion that is confirmed by 
an incident Maginel related. She stated that after her father had left home, he met her one 
afternoon coming home from kindergarten. He looked at her shabby clothes-she was 
wearing a pair of scuffed  slippers-took her into town and bought her a new pair of shoes 
and a hat. When she got back home wearing these objects, Anna calmly stuffed them into 
the old wood range in the kitchen and burned them. Maginel thought she understood. The 
problem was that the clothes were cheap and eye-catching, rather than sober and in good 
taste. This was only one element of the story, because Anna then took her daughter back to 
town and bought her "the finest pair of little French kid shoes she could find." {MAG, p. 
69.} It would have been Anna's Celtic tradition that one gave with an open hand, because 
tawdry gifts demeaned the recipient. The larger issue, here, however, had to do with 
William and the way in which he had failed her. 

The day her father left, when Maginel was seven, Anna closed the door and took her into 
the living room, where a coal fire flickered behind the isinglass window of the stove. Anna 
took out the old winecolored wallet she carried, opened it and showed Maginel a 
fifty-cent piece. "This," she said, "is all the money I have in the world." {MAG, p. 67.} 

Maginel's memoirs, and those of her brother, make the break look dramatic and final. If 
one can believe William's testimony, and it is plausible, this was not the case. He said that 
he went to see his wife afterward, and wrote three letters asking for a reconciliation before 
concluding that the cause was hopeless. One wonders whether Frank's laconic account 
masks a fear that his mother's love for him had been the cause of the rift. "She lived much 
in him," he wrote revealingly, speaking of himself. Perhaps this was why "the father never 
loved the son at any time." They had been rivals for Anna's love, and Frank had won.It 
was because of him that the divorce had happened. If this was what he really thought, it 
would explain the perfunctory tone of the memoir. He has more to say about the aftermath 
of the divorce: the social disgrace they all felt, though they did not understand why, and 
the effect it had on him, making him shyer, more sensitive, more distrustful. It was "one 
more handicap." {A2, p. 51} 

Maginel, too, felt uncomfortable. When she went to visit the family of four spinsters who 
lived next door, they badgered her with questions about her father. "Where's your father, 
dear?" they would ask, gently but relentlessly. "Tell us about your father." {MAG, p. 72} 
Maginel asked her mother what she should answer. Anna replied without hesitation, "Say 
he's dead." {MAG,  p. 72} 


Aladdin 

Old as man's moral life is this urge to grow. 

-FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 
An Autobiography {A2, p. 94.} 

Family stories about William Carey Wright frequently illustrate his happy ability to tackle 
a new craft or profession and quickly excel. The year he left home he was studying 
Sanskrit. No doubt he mastered that language as effortlessly as, it was said, he had 
mastered the art and craft of violin making and the teaching of musical instruments. The 
story is told that he came home one day and announced to Anna that he was about to teach 
the guitar. Anna protested, "You don't know how!" He answered, "I'll learn." {Eric 
Wright, interview with author.} 

One finds the same kind of sunny self-assurance in his son Frank. When it came to one's 
work, one had infinite options, and proficiency could always be acquired. In fairness to 
both men, they were prepared to work tirelessly to bring that about. Frank's sense of 
vocation, instilled by his mother, his amazing reserves of energy and the charming first 
impression he invariably made were important assets. If he already thought of himself as a 
superhero, the Aladdin with magical powers that he describes in his autobiography, it was 
a distinct advantage, contributing greatly to the allure of his personality. 

He was now eighteen and the head of his family. Anna's firstborn would be expected to set 
an example and establish himself in a profession as fast as possible. Early independence 
was, in short, encouraged and fostered. If he were secretly afraid of others and emotionally 
insecure in close relationships, then he had that in common with most adolescents. If he 
knew little about his own inner life and misinterpreted the little he did know, then he was 
typical of most American men of his generation. 

One finds him, in those summers of his adolescence, up with the lark on Sunday 
mornings, gathering flowers for church and, later, looking dreamily out of the open 
window and imagining the triumphs to come. Nature had given him less height and bulk 
than he would have preferred, had such decisions been up to him, but he made up for it by 
always presenting what Italians call a bella figura. His father had set him an early 
example; so did Anna. He hints, in his autobiography, that the grown-ups decided that all 
that poetry, music and painting were making him too effete and foppish, and this led to the 
decision to toughen him up on Uncle James's farm. Toughened he certainly became, but 
the masculine indoctrination had no effect on his choice of clothes, which, by the time he 
was middle-aged, would become positively bizarre. When he was barely twenty his 
mother was already begging him not to make a sartorial exhibition of himself. The idea of 
a stovepipe hat and a cane-such attire  would give people the wrong idea. He should 
present himself as a person of substance, not a dandy-advice that was certainly ignored. 
{to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, undated.} 

At about this time he changed his middle name from Lincoln to Lloyd. The Welsh family 
to which Frank Lloyd Wright belonged shared a casual attitude toward the picking up and 
dropping of names and nicknames. As has been noted, Hannah became Anna, Mary 
Thomas was Mallie, Jane was Jen or Jennie, and even Uncle Jenkin was usually known as 
Jenk. One might also change one's name to telegraph disapproval. Enos Lloyd Jones had 
originally been named for his uncle Enoch, but then the grown-ups had a falling out and 
he became Enos. Wright's sister Jane christened her son after her brother, but then the 
latter did something outrageous and Jane decreed that Frank would become Franklin ever 
after, and he did. It is a safe guess that the substitute of Lloyd for Lincoln was similarly 
motivated, but it also is a clear indication of the direction of Wright's sympathies. He also 
adopted the Lloyd Jones family motto. He chose to describe the symbol, Truth Against the 
World, picturesquely, as being immensely old and Celtic. {MOR, p. 155.} As Jan Morris 
has established, it was nothing of the kind, but had been invented early in the nineteenth 
century by Iolo Morgannwg, that Welshman who did more than almost anyone else to 
revive an interest in the Welsh heritage. Morgannwg's organization of bards, or Gorsedd, 
needed a bardic symbol and so Morgannwg created, with the explanation "And God 
vocalizing his name said, and with the Word all the world sprang into being, singing in an 
ecstasy of joy, and repeating the name of the Deity." The quotation reads in full: 

VOICE AGAINST RESOUNDING VOICE 

TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD 

GOD AND ALL GOODNESS, 

which the Lloyd Jones clan abbreviated to that manifesto most appropriate for a family of 
rebels and outcasts. 

Wright believed himself destined for greatness, but there was a dark side to the inner 
image, if one accepts the hypothesis that the early relationship between mother and child is 
pivotal. Anna's fiercely partisan love has obscured the fact that she was making some 
weighty demands upon her son, but her letters provide the clear evidence. Over and over 
again she presents Lincoln, and Christ himself, as examples that Frank must emulate. But, 
since she utterly believed in her son, she knew he was capable of such superhuman 
achievements. She added revealingly that, had she been born with the same advantages, 
there would have been  nothing she could not do-clear evidence that she had transferred 
to Frank her unfulfilled ambitions. {to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, October 12, 1918.} There 
was, in other words, an even more fundamental reason for his fear of being blamed and his 
inner conviction of being a confidence artist, a trickster, all surface and no substance, and 
that was the suspicion that he was not lovable for who he was but only for the person Anna 
wanted him to be. Since, by way of compensation, he had so many pressing reasons to 
think of himself as a perfect being, any awareness of his human imperfection was likely to 
shake the very foundations of his life. {Neurosis and Human Growth, Karen Horney, p. 
197.} At such moments he would show evidence of what has been called "the flight 
forward," an unconscious courting of catastrophe and ruin, one calculated to stop him in 
his tracks as spectacularly as possible, but one that would always look like an accident. By 
blaming the vengeful hand of fate, he could excuse his own conduct and protect himself 
from his overly severe conscience and a secret conviction of worthlessness. In his 
autobiography he describes an occasion when, as an adolescent on Uncle James's farm, he 
was judged to be "a man," old enough to be left alone in a field. He was given a team of 
horses hitched to a row of planks that, when dragged across the harrowed field, would 
smooth out the rows in preparation for planting corn. He was riding one of the planks 
when it jumped up unexpectedly, having hit an obstacle, throwing him forward onto the 
breeching of his pair of horses. The animals continued to trot, and he hung there 
helplessly, aware that if he fell the "plankers" would go over him. He was rescued by a 
hired man before he was seriously hurt. {A2, p. 38.} 

"In action," he wrote, "there is release from anguish of mind." {MAG, p. 147.} What 
photographs there are of the young Wright give an indication of an almost painful 
eagerness. He looks like a man poised to spring to his feet the second the shutter has 
clicked; there is nothing calm or relaxed about him. That tireless determination to succeed 
is evident in the chronicle of his life in the years following his father's departure. Anna 
may have looked mournfully at the single coin left in her old wine-colored wallet, but one 
guesses that, to her son, poverty was a minor detail, not worth a moment's concern. He 
immediately enrolled as a special student {on January 7, 1886}at the University of 
Wisconsin,taking courses in French, mathematics, English composition and 
engineering.With his mother's help, he obtained a part-time job with a professor of civil 
engineering at the university, Allan D. Conover, and was paid thirty-five dollars a 
month. As a junior draftsman he played a modest role during construction of the 
university's Science Hall,a large, neo-Richardsonian structure for which Conover was 
building supervisor. As has been noted, the moment he knew his family was building the 
chapel he proposed himself as architect and convinced himself that he, or at least his 
Uncle Jenkin, was fully qualified. {Thomas S. Hines, Jr.} 

Normally, the role of builder-architect would have gone to Thomas, Anna's eldest 
brother. But Thomas's fall from the second floor of the new home he was building for his 
family in the spring of 1879 turned him into a semi-invalid. By 1885, he had been 
obliged to give up much of his construction work and was attempting to recoup his losses 
by selling timber from a tract of land that he had bought in tandem with his brother James. 
{TRIL, p. 51.} He continued to advise, instruct and supervise to some extent, but his 
incapacity had effectively left the field open for the next architect in the family. Seeing his 
opportunity, Frank jumped in. 

University records show that Wright attended classes for two semesters, from January to 
December 1886. By early 1887 he was gone-out of school and in Chicago, where he had 
found a job in the office of J. Lyman Silsbee,the architect Jenkin Lloyd Jones 
commissioned to build the family chapel, as well as All Souls Unitarian Church for his 
Chicago congregation. Exactly when Wright went to Chicago is the kind of question that 
tantalizes scholars, but the best guess is that he was working for Silsbee by February 1887, 
since his Aunt Nell was writing in early March to ask how he liked it there; shortly after 
that, he published a drawing of Silsbee's completed Unity Chapel. {from "The Earliest 
Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," by Wilbert R. Hasbrouck, A.I.A., in PSR, vol. 7, no. 4, 
1970.} No one believes that Wright's account of his hiring at Silsbee's, in which he slipped 
in through the back door, not letting his identity be known, can possibly be true. He was 
very much on the scene during construction of the family chapel and must have met 
someone from Silsbee's office then, if not the architect himself. The chapel opened in the 
summer of 1886, and, a few months later, he was employed by its architect and making a 
drawing of that building for a magazine. He might not have wanted Uncle Jenk to know he 
had left school and taken that job, but that is another matter. 

The most puzzling issue is why Wright should be at pains to present himself as a 
struggling outsider, hired on merit alone, with no strings pulled by anyone. The account he 
gave was published in 1932, when he was in his sixties and, one believes, bent on 
fashioning a legend. By then he was unwilling to concede that he had ever been helped, or 
that anyone whose ideas predated his own could possibly have influenced him. He came 
from nowhere and out of nothing, a full-fledged genius; to have admitted to less would 
have threatened his grandiose inner image of Aladdin, the boy with a magical lamp. 
However, one guesses that the nineteen-year-old who had just landed a job in Chicago 
was thanking his lucky stars that he, through his influential uncle, had been given such a 
painless introduction to a powerful Chicago architect and such an open sesame to his 
chosen career. 

One can make another reasonable guess at the possible motive for his sudden departure 
from Madison after just one year in school. He had joined the university's Association of 
Engineers and Phi Delta Theta, a social fraternity. Somehow, he was finding money for 
tuition, clothes, books, social events and monthly fraternity dues at a time when his 
mother, with no income of her own, was most certainly being supported by her brothers 
and seems to have been taking in lodgers as well. That first or second Christmas on their 
own, possibly the Christmas of 1886-87, brother James helped out in another practical 
way. His wife was making an extended visit to relatives in California, and the decision was 
made to bring Anna and Maginel under his roof-Jane had begun her teaching 
career-where Anna could act as housekeeper and, incidentally, save on her own heating 
bills. Frank was sent to board with neighbors. That Christmas an avalanche of expensive 
gifts arrived from Frank, including a Shetland shawl and a photograph album for his 
mother and, for Maginel, an adorable crocheted basket containing a bouquet of skeins of 
brightly colored yarns, tied into the shape of flowers and scented with sachet, the most 
beautiful gift she had ever received. {MAG, p. 82} Maginel was in an ecstasy of delight; 
Anna wanted to know where Frank had found the money. That was easy; he had sold a 
number of his mother's most valuable books. {MAG, p. 82} He also wrote that he had 
pawned his father's and his favorite calfbound copy of Plutarch's Parallel Lives and a 
valuable set of Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well 
as a mink collar of his mother's. {A2, p. 60.} All of this was justified in pursuit of his 
determination to become an architect. 

Once he had arrived, at least three of Anna's letters in the spring and summer of 1887 are 
concerned with the debts he left behind in Madison. In May 1887, when he was not yet 
twenty, she was referring to his debts {T, May 28, 1887}and urging him not to spend any 
more money. Sometime later, she wrote to remind him that she was expecting some money 
so as to cover part of the bills he had left behind. There is a hint that he had concealed 
from her the extent of the problem, but she was confident that he would make good on his 
promises. {T, undated} Still later, she was harping on the theme of how to pay his 
Madison debts. It was high time he learned to manage money wisely. {T, June 26, 1887} 
She was almost at her wit's end. One day, when she went to pay Jennie's bill in a local 
store, she was handed another bill for Frank, seven dollars for some "dancing gaiters." The 
shock was almost too much to take. Finally, in September, she was begging him to settle 
up on the problems he had left behind, reminding him that she had gone to work (not 
explained in her letters) to help pay off his bills and that only ten days remained on the 
loan he had taken out from the bank. {T, September 7, 1887} It was now a question of his 
good name and hers as well; he could not let her down. If it had been William's role to 
spend money with gentlemanly unconcern and his wife's to fret and nag and agonize over 
unpaid bills, then that destructive pattern was being repeated with a vengeance by her son. 
His awful determination to live beyond his means, which he would attempt to turn into a 
virtue by saying that one should  pursue the luxuries and let the necessities take care of 
themselves, his lifelong spendthrift habits, which would have such disastrous 
consequences, had become firmly entrenched before he was twenty. Anna, while fussing, 
fretting, exhorting and begging, allowed him to continue believing that he could get away 
with it. Anna paid up. 

Uncle Jenkin had been opposed to Frank's abandoning his studies, not out of sheer 
perversity but, one suspects, because of genuine concern about his nephew's chances for a 
secure future. The role the remarkable Jenkin Lloyd Jones would play in Wright's life has 
been ignored, but family letters have established that he, now with a wife and two children 
of his own and actively engaged in what would become an international career, had taken 
over considerable financial and emotional responsibility for William's children. He had 
arranged William's transfer from the Baptist faith to Unitarianism, the main purpose of 
which seems to have been a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the family from 
bankruptcy. He watched William roll from job to job for twenty years, and saw him walk 
away from his marriage without a backward glance at his family. Jenkin must have come 
to some dour conclusions about William, in light of the emphasis he, and all the Lloyd 
Joneses, placed on self-discipline, integrity, altruism and endurance-all the sterling 
virtues William appeared to lack. Seeing Frank abandon his studies to try his luck in a 
new city must have sounded ominously familiar. Lloyd Joneses did not slither away at the 
first sign of trouble; they stood up and fought like men. Like the other males in his family, 
Jenkin might have seen his function in Frank's life as corrective. If he could make Frank 
toe the straight and narrow, he might be able to counteract William's example and lessen 
the effect of Anna's leniencies. But even if this were not a valid concern, he, like Anna and 
the rest of the family, placed an almost mystical emphasis on the importance of an 
education. Even when all hopes of college had been dashed, Anna still urged Frank to go 
on reading and studying, if only to make Uncle Jenkin happy. He would not regret it, she 
wrote. {T, undated.} 

Whenever an uncompromising stance was taken by an authoritative figure, Frank, 
characteristically, became automatically opposed as a matter of principle, whatever the 
merits of the argument; and he would always slip through every net. But it would be a 
mistake to assume that because he was now swinging a cane and running up some hefty 
debts, the only example he was emulating came from his foot-loose, spendthrift, 
engaging, emotionally elusive father. By being the man he was, "Uncle Jenk" provided 
Frank with a positive example of just what a bold and militant radical can accomplish 
when his or her reformist zeal is channeled into constructive directions. A distinguished 
family history of battling against odds for liberty, justice, fairness and truth had left its 
distinct mark on Jenkin's character. He had, while still an adolescent, served in the Civil 
War, an  experience that made him an ardent pacifist and admirer of Lincoln. After 
graduating from the Unitarian seminary in Meadville, Pennsylvania, he worked for several 
years as a pastor and missionary in Illinois and Wisconsin, where his exceptional gifts as 
an orator, his energy, endurance, idealism and ability to reach his audiences, were quickly 
recognized. He revitalized a Unitarian church that was about to close, created a Sunday 
school program, invented a "Unity Club" and helped start a Unitarian newspaper. He was 
soon given larger responsibilities, becoming, by 1881, the equivalent of a bishop for a 
Unitarian constituency that extended from western New York to the Rocky Mountains. 
{Graham article, op. cit., pp. 121-122} Some three years before, in 1878, he had 
demonstrated his ability to tackle a challenge of this dimension by traveling almost twelve 
thousand miles as he gave 184 speeches, taking night trains, cattle and freight trains, and 
bedding down between connections on depot floors. {from a dissertation, Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones: Lincoln's Soldier of Civic Righteousness, by Richard Harlan Thomas, 1967, p. 3.} 

Working with Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Edward Everett Hale, Booker T. 
Washington, William Jennings Bryan and a host of others, he espoused every progressive 
liberal position from prohibition, racial justice, education, women's rights,poverty relief 
and political reform to pacifism and the humane treatment of animals. One would have to 
compare him with General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, for his 
wide-ranging concerns and the persuasive influence of his personality. Although he was 
based in Chicago, Unity Chapel and its Valley were always his spiritual home, and he was 
constantly being called upon to bring the crowds into its two small rooms. When Maginel 
knew him, he was a handsome man of middle height and commanding presence, with a 
snow-white beard. Like many admirable people, Jenkin Lloyd Jones was not an easy 
person at close quarters, and could be stiff-necked and uncompromising. But he did have 
a wry sense of humor. In an attempt to bring World War I to an end, Rev. Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones sailed on the Ford Peace Ship with other American pacifists. On his return to New 
York, he was met at the pier by Robert Moses, a relative by marriage, who asked what he 
had accomplished. "Uncle Jenk stroked his white whiskers reflectively and replied, 'We 
made a deep impression in the neutral countries.'" {quoted by Robert Moses during 
inaugural proceedings of the Guggenheim Museum in 1960.} Jenkin stood for something 
admirable: for the continuity of the unshaken Lloyd Jones belief in personal integrity, 
universal liberty and their faith in a Divine Providence. A great many of Jenkin Lloyd 
Jones's beliefs, which were the topics of debate around the dinner table when Frank Lloyd 
Wright was an adolescent, would find their echoes in that architect's own speeches in later 
years. He spent many an evening at the parsonage, meeting some important and influential 
people: "Dr. Thomas, Rabbi Hirsh, Jane Addams, Mangasarian and others," he wrote. He 
added simply, "I enjoyed listening." {A2, p. 37} 

Listening: that was something he did well. His eager, retentive mind missed little, and 
perhaps because he felt the lack of formal schooling keenly-the fact that he lied about it 
all his life indicates that he did-and because he had such sterling examples all around 
him of self-educated men, he prospered. He had the very rare gift of knowing what he 
needed to learn at any particular moment and seeking out that knowledge. Then, too, life 
itself offered its lessons. One of the most harrowing came while he was still in Madison, 
working in Conover's office. The city was then building a wing onto its state capitol. The 
architect, a certain Mr. Jones, had laid the foundations well. Huge concrete piers in the 
basement had been built to support columns of cast iron. It was a very safe foundation, so 
secure, in fact, that the builder thought he could economize with barrows of broken brick 
and stone.All the walls and floors had been built, and the interior was pretty well 
completed when, one day, the whole wing collapsed. Wright was passing by when it 
happened. He heard the terrible roar, saw a cloud of dust "rising high into the summer 
air," heard the screams and saw the mangled bodies being extracted from the wreckage. He 
stood there, sickened, "clinging to the iron fence" and watching for hours, and dreamed of 
the haunting tragedy for days. {A2, p. 56.} Perhaps the fact that the architect's name was 
Jones (though they were not related) gave particular poignance to the terrible lesson he 
learned that day. In any event, not one Wright building ever collapsed, and at least one of 
them was notorious for the trouble it caused when the wreckers tried to pull it down. {the 
Midway Gardens} 

That ability to make the best possible use of every opportunity to learn never flagged. 
When he was in his sixties and lecturing in New York before World War II, one of the 
men in the audience was Arthur Holden, an architect who would eventually act as his 
liaison, facilitating construction of the Guggenheim Museum. At question time, Holden 
asked how long it had been since Wright had read Alexis de Tocqueville's book 
Democracy in America, and mentioned a particular passage. As it happened, Wright had 
never heard of Tocqueville, but when they met again some months later, Holden learned 
that Wright had immediately gone out and bought the book, and could cite the particular 
passage almost by heart. {Arthur Cort Holden to author.} Perhaps he no longer believed 
that education was salvation, but he seemed to be taking no chances. 

He had another gift that was almost as valuable. When one considers that, as an 
adolescent, he had beguiled a wealthy friend's father out of two hundred dollars, it is clear 
that he had already learned the value of ingratiating himself with important people, and 
that he had taken his lessons from a master. Thanks to Uncle Jenkin, he had superb 
opportunities; thanks to his father, he knew how to seize the initiative, and his secret sense 
of being permanently handicapped (because he lacked fortune or formal training  and was 
at a shameful disadvantage socially) would always spur him onward. In the future his 
attitude toward others, while it contained genuine appreciation, liking and even love, 
would be tempered by a shrewd assessment of that person's potential usefulness. As he 
wrote of his cousins, while he loved them he also "beguiled them, showed off for them, 
used them, fooled them. . . ." {A2, p. 37.} And, for those inevitable moments of doubt and 
discouragement, he had his mother.  

Joseph Lyman Silsbee(1845-1913), a fashionable architect for the nouveaux riches, in 
whose office Wright worked for about a year, was a minister's son, which may have 
explained his fondness for hiring the same: besides Wright, there were three others in the 
office. The fact that Wright had New England parentage probably also helped, since 
Silsbee had been born in Salem, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard and had practiced on 
the East Coast before moving to Chicago. He was also a Unitarian. He would have been in 
his early forties when he hired Wright, and had perfected a gift for spotting young talent. 
Two of his other draftsmen, George Washington Maher and George Grant Elmslie, would 
also have distinguished careers; Elmslie succeeded Wright as chief designer at Adler and 
Sullivan when the latter left to establish his own practice. That year, 1887, the situation in 
Silsbee's office, it has been noted, was analogous to that in the Berlin office of Peter 
Behrens, some three decades later, when Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le 
Corbusier were all on the staff. In any event, it was the best possible start for Wright even 
though Silsbee, whom he described as tall, aristocratic and wearing gold eyeglasses with a 
long gold chain dangling from his nose {A2, p. 68}, seemed unimpressed by the 
newcomer's "experience" and offered him tracer's wages of eight dollars a week, take it or 
leave it. Wright not only took it, but leapt at the opportunity to make friends with the 
draftsman who had helped hire him, Cecil Corwin, one of the minister's sons. With his 
idiosyncratic combination of genuine liking and unabashed guile, Wright wangled an 
invitation to dinner, then a room in Corwin's house, and even borrowed money, explaining 
that he needed it to send to his mother. It was ten dollars, more than a week's wages. 
Corwin handed it over without a word. It would be repaid, Wright promised, two dollars at 
a time. He noted that a "characteristic" pattern had begun. {A2, p. 69.} 

All Souls' Unitarian Church, which was receiving its finishing touches when Wright went 
to Silsbee's office {A2, p. 69, and MAN, p. 15}, was a curious structure for which only a 
few faded photographs and drawings survive. It markedly resembled a Queen Anne house, 
which was what Uncle Jenk wanted. When he had  persuaded Silsbee to move to Chicago 
and build his church some two years earlier, Uncle Jenk had been most approving of 
Silsbee's ability to create a "homey" look. If not particularly ecclesiastical in tone, Silsbee's 
designs were very much an outcome of the Aesthetic Movement, which had been 
introduced at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition a decade earlier. One of the first 
styles to reflect the new aesthetic, Queen Anne had been invented by the British architect 
Richard Norman Shaw. It was intended as a nationalistic revival of the vernacular, and 
something of a repudiation of the Gothic Revivalstyle then in vogue in England and the 
United States. Unfortunately, the style had little to do with the reign of Queen Anne in the 
early eighteenth century, but owed more to interpretations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
eras that had gone before. {in her essay for In Pursuit of Beauty (p. 66), Catherine Lynn 
noted, "Designs owing a debt to Tudor, Elizabethan, and later periods were sometimes 
called post-medieval. . . . In common and commercial parlance they usually bore the 
name Queen Anne, a confusing and (as Anne reigned for only twelve years, from 1702 to 
1714) historically almost irrelevant label."} A Queen Anne house's identifying 
characteristic was a steeply pitched roof of irregular outlines, usually with a dominant 
gable facing front, but there were many other characteristics, including the use of 
half-timbering, spindlework, classical columns, patterned masonry and the like. Intricate 
and eclectic though these houses might be, they still looked like models of restraint and 
refinement when contrasted with the ostentatious muddle presented by the average High 
Victorian Gothic house then in fashion. At the very least, the style represented a genuine 
effort to bring a cohesive artistic philosophy to bear on an epoch of almost stupefying taste, 
to marry house to landscape, to apply unifying principles of design and to explore 
neglected architectural periods. Leading American architects quickly joined the movement 
and began a study of their own colonial heritage, forging a path toward what they all felt 
to be the ultimate goal, a uniquely American architecture. This was essential because, as 
the American Architect commented in 1876, the year of the exposition, "our domestic life 
is a type by itself." {The Shingle Style and the Stick Style, Vincent Scully, Jr., p. 37.} 

On the East Coast, Henry Hobson Richardson,one of the giants of the new movement, 
made his own experiments in Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival buildings. He also 
helped launch a style that would be the height of fashion for the final two decades of the 
nineteenth century, the Shingle Style.Like Queen Anne, this was also an eclectic but 
quintessentially American melange of many different elements, united by the use of 
wooden shingles for walls and roof.It was, in the 1880s, becoming the fashion for the 
educated and well-to-do, and Richardson was in great demand, as well as very much 
admired by his contemporaries in Chicago as well as the East Coast. His masterpiece, the 
Marshall Field Wholesale Store, had just been built when Wright arrived there, and two 
mansions were under construction on the North and South sides. Silsbee, in his modest, 
conventional way, was one of Richardson's most devoted admirers, having followed his 
lead through the same experimentation in styles: from Queen Anne, Romanesque and 
Colonial Revival to the up-to-date Shingle Style. In fact,  Silsbee is given credit for 
introducing a mature version of that style to Chicago. {The Shingle Style and the Stick 
Style, Vincent Scully, Jr., p. 158, note 10.} Wright's transition, from a home in Madison 
decorated according to the principles of "art for art's sake"-that phrase popularized by the 
prophet of the Aesthetic Movement, Oscar Wilde-to the office of a well-established 
architect practicing what the movement preached, therefore seemed perfectly natural, if 
not inevitable. 

Most famous men like to mention how little money they once earned, but Wright, 
seemingly indifferent to such petty concerns by the time he wrote his reminiscences, makes 
a painstaking point of it. He started at eight dollars a week; in a few months, that had been 
raised to twelve dollars, but he was not satisfied. George Washington Maher had just been 
hired at eighteen dollars, so Wright did not see why he should not be paid as much, even 
though Maher was more experienced. He was better than Maher. One sees, in these 
rationalizations, a sense of grievance that must have sorely tried the patience of his 
employer. When he wanted to be raised from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars a matter of 
months after he had been hired for eight dollars, Silsbee refused and Wright walked out. 
He found another job for the wage he wanted, eighteen dollars. Exactly how long he stayed 
away is not known, but the interval must have been short, and he was soon back in the old 
office at the salary he had vowed to get. 

His account omits the probable cause of all this jockeying for money, one that is revealed 
in Anna's letters. He had left debts, and she was penniless-here is the reason behind the 
frantic determination to earn, and this has to be why, decades later, he could still feel 
indignation at the agony of pushing up his weekly wage by such painfully small 
increments. He was being driven by two imperatives: first, the need to dress in style, see 
and be seen, go to concerts, lectures and meetings, join clubs, buy theater tickets and 
books, visit "cozy restaurants," as he put it, and act like a young man-about-town, as he 
had seen his father do. But second, there had to be money left over to pay his debts and 
support his mother. He, as head of the family, was serious about that, and as soon as his 
salary stood at eighteen dollars he brought Anna and Maginel to Chicago, no doubt on the 
assumption that one establishment cost less than two. Uncle Jenkin was another presence 
looming in his life at that time, and All Souls, with its dozens of cultural events, its library 
and even a kindergarten, was a constant symbol of that man's achievements. Frank would 
have to prove himself, as Anna often reminded him. Uncle Jenkin might be his friend, but 
he did not approve of the direction Frank's life was taking. {T, August 12, 1887.} 

When Wright went to Silsbee's office the architect was designing Edgewater, a high-class 
subdivision in Chicago, and the young draftsman spent hours watching the master at  
work. {A2, p. 70} Using a soft black pencil, Silsbee would invent marvelous facades {A2, 
p. 70} composed of "gable, turret and hip, with broad porches quietly domestic," Wright 
wrote. He described those swift, freely drawn pencil strokes as reminding him of "standing 
corn in the field waving in the breeze." Later he called it the gift of making pictures, 
drawing a correct distinction between the two-dimensional, or picturesque, approach to 
architecture and the emphasis on its spatial and sculptural qualities, which he thought 
more important. At the time, however, Silsbee's mastery of drawing mesmerized him and 
he set about learning to do likewise. He may already have been contemplating his next 
move. He wrote that the new Chicago Auditorium was being built (1887-89), and the 
newspapers were full of articles about the architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan. He 
wondered how he could have missed that name when he was looking for work. {A2, p. 
70.} 

The books Wright studied in his search for mastery of drawing, ornamentation and design 
were, logically enough, works that reflected the central concepts of the Aesthetic 
Movement. He went first to The Grammar of Ornament,by Owen Jones, published in 
London some thirty years before. Following the lead of the British architects Augustus 
Welby Northmore Pugin and Henry Cole, as well as the writings of John Ruskin,Jones 
formulated the thirty-seven propositions that were needed to introduce aesthetic, i.e., 
artistic, concepts into contemporary design. In common with Pugin and Ruskin, Jones 
believed that the creative act must be true and good in order to be truly beautiful. The 
architect who would aspire to greatness must, in other words, be morally pure. 

The second principle of the theoreticians, one also advanced by Jones, was that nature 
must be the inspiration. The student must study the structural forms found in nature and 
teach himself how to conventionalize, or abstract, his designs from them. Those stylized 
images must adhere to an exacting standard. While suggesting the natural forms that were 
their inspiration, the designs must also have an exact relationship to the object they 
decorated so that they enhanced, and did not detract, from it. Nature as inspiration was, of 
course, another familiar theme for the young architect. To study nature, learn from her, 
extracting her secrets, finding "tongues in trees" and "books in the running brooks": 
Wright could hardly have avoided the lesson, coming as it did with a single voice from so 
many directions. It is clear, however, that it was one he was particularly fitted to take to 
heart. Although he came to reject and deride Renaissance architecture,his character had 
been formed by the Renaissance ideal of man as a noble player on life's stage; in the 
concept that "there is an all embracing destiny that gives high meaning to the course of a 
man's life. . . . In his deep sense of personal destiny {SM, p. 25}, in his faith in the power 
of an 'organic Divinity' in the world, in his strong feelings about the relation of  man to 
Nature, Wright revealed his complete devotion to that . . . image. . . ." 

The Grammar of Ornament espoused the further point that what made the ornamental 
designs of previous periods so unique was that they somehow reflected the needs and 
values of their times. It was an idea that freed students of the Aesthetic Movement to 
return to first principles, looking for clues, not by imitating past styles, but "by 
understanding the organic and natural laws that created them." {HA, p. 2} In short, Jones 
provided the theoretical framework that Wright would put to such good use as he mastered 
the task of transforming the structural forms found in nature into the alchemy of his art. 

Wherever the student looked, whether to The Grammar of Ornament or to Les Discours 
and the Dictionnaire raisonne of Eug�ne Viollet-le-Duc,a French contributor to the 
Arts and Crafts Movement who stressed the principles of design and whose work he also 
studied, he would have heard the same refrain. He set about imprinting these ideas on his 
mind by the time-honored method of the apprentice, that is, by imitation. He bought a 
packet of one hundred sheets of onionskin tracing paper and went to work on the designs 
of Owen Jones, incidentally gaining practice in the art of exact observation, which was to 
become an important asset. After he had used every sheet in the packet, working evenings 
and Sunday mornings, he "needed exercise to straighten up. . . ." {A2, p. 75.} 

Wright worked in Silsbee's office for less than a year, and it is hard to accept his claim 
that, by the end of this period, he could match Silsbee in freehand drawing and even rival 
the artistry of a Louis Sullivan,as Wright suggests in his autobiography. The drawings 
published during this period, 1887-88, in The Inland Architect and News Record, argue 
for the reverse. One would expect a student's first work to have a tentative quality, but his 
seems more timid than most. His renderings of Unity Chapel, the family church Silsbee 
designed, along with two of his own designs, one for a Unitarian chapel (never built) and 
another for his aunts' new school, have a stilted, agonized over feeling, the work of 
someone in terror of putting a mark in the wrong place, and are certainly not the work of 
an instinctive artist who boldly puts down his lines, knowing exactly where they have to go 
to achieve the desired effect. Wright's drawings are conventional, stiff and quite lifeless. 
{this point is persuasively made by Eileen Michels in "The Early Drawings of Frank Lloyd 
Wright Reconsidered," JSAH, vol. 30, no. 4, December 1971, pp. 294-303.} 

As a result, scholars have questioned the date of the drawing Wright published in Genius 
and the Mobocracy, his biography of Sullivan, which he states he drew in 1887 or 1888 
and which got him the job. {H. Allen Brooks, a noted authority on the dating of Wright's 
work, accepts it as correct, and so does the Taliesin achrivist, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (letter 
to author, June 24, 1989). Those supporting Eileen Michel's position have included Prof. 
Patrick Pinnell of the Yale School of Architecture, another authority on Wright's early 
work, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, JSAH, vol. XIX, no. 3, 1960, p. 129.} Those 
experienced in dating an artist's work cannot accept that this masterly and impressionistic 
study for a house in La Grange, Illinois, the work of a confident and skilled delineator, 
could possibly have been executed so early. The drawing  disqualifies itself on stylistic 
grounds also, being closer to the advanced and integrated designs of the late 1890s than 
the Silsbee-influenced Queen Anne and Shingle styles Wright was using in 1887-88. It 
stretches credulity to believe that Wright, who was able to draw and design with such skill 
at that period, would, once he had joined Sullivan's firm, go back to publishing more 
drawings in the same labored, clumsy, student's hand. {After presumably demonstrating 
his mastery of the technique, Wright reverted to his early student style, as demonstrated by 
Eileen Michels.} 

Wright came close to a confession of the truth in the same book, Genius and the 
Mobocracy, when he wrote, "Never having been a painter I had never drawn more than a 
little 'free-hand.'" {Genius and the Mobocracy, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 71.} It was a fault 
in him that he lacked the natural gift to emulate his master in designing ornamentation 
based on flowing, curvilinear forms abstracted from nature; whenever he felt himself on 
the defensive about this point, lacking such an essential talent, his first instinct was to 
deny the shortcoming and try to prove the reverse. But in fact, he eventually gave up the 
unequal struggle and forged his own style with a T square and triangle, creating those 
severe geometrical patterns based on the straight line and the rectangle that were to make 
him famous. 

Whatever signs of promise Silsbee and Sullivan saw in Wright, his superior skill with a 
pencil was unlikely to have been among them. What they appreciated, no doubt, were 
qualities Wright would have taken for granted: an acute visual memory, an innate grasp of 
form, a quick mind, a ready wit and a charming eagerness to learn. No one could have 
stopped Wright from becoming a success, because he refused to be discouraged. Rebuffed 
by Uncle Jenk when he tried to design his family's chapel, he bounced back with new 
proposals a few months later, offering to design buildings for his aunts' new school. This 
time he was more kindly received. 

The Hillside Home School, established in The Valley in 1886, was one more testimonial to 
the energy and initiative of the Lloyd Jones immigrants, not to mention their liberal, 
reformist and humanitarian views. The school had been conceived of by Nell and Jane, 
always called the Aunts, on the death of their father, Richard Lloyd Jones; as unmarried 
daughters, they had inherited his farm and homestead. By then, Nell was forty-one years 
old and Jane was thirty-eight. Both had made the transition to the more polished 
manners and mores of the city and must have looked like exotic beings to the country folk 
of The Valley. Both held themselves in the stylish swanlike manner, their waistlines 
corseted, wearing the ruffled trains and bustles, the silks and satins, that were all the rage 
in the 1880s. {MAG, p. 155.} In short, they were women of some consequence in the 
world, but they had lost none of their Lloyd Jones idealism and pursued the latest notions 
on child development, including those of Froebel. It must have been their dream to start a  
school, and inheriting the farm and some money gave them the opportunity. There was a 
ready supply of children, sons and daughters of their brothers and sisters, growing up in 
The Valley. 

From the first, the Aunts took children of all ages, from kindergarten through high school, 
providing a boarding school with a farm attached where each child, as a matter of course, 
had his own plot and knew each cow and horse by name. Nature walks were similarly 
stressed, and there were all manner of picnics and sports, including horseback riding, 
football and golf. Food was home-grown, and since the school was meant to be a home as 
well, such "homey" activities as sleigh rides, skating parties and theatricals were frequent. 
There were dances every weekend presided over by a dancing master from Madison who 
would arrive wearing tails and smelling of cloves and ballet slippers, an artificial rosebud 
in his lapel. {MAG, p. 116.} It was one of the first coeducational schools, and its concept, 
that boys should learn the womanly arts, was most controversial, but there are photographs 
of boys stitching seams and darning socks to prove it. {MJ, January 3, 1927.} 

As soon as Unity Chapel opened, the Aunts used it as a temporary school while they built 
larger quarters. They had decided to move their parents' cottage across the road and put 
their new building on its hillside site.Uncle Thomas was summoned to oversee the move, 
and a local contractor was hired to make the alterations and additions. As for their young 
nephew, by early March 1887 he had already been to Hillside to look the ground over, as 
Aunt Nell's letter establishes. {Aunt Nell to Frank Lloyd Wright, T, March 9, 1887.} The 
letter contains detailed instructions about floor plans-whether for the original Home 
Cottage or for the new building on the old site is not clear, but in any event she simply 
asked her young nephew to make a few sketches. She added that some of her friends were 
contributing their architectural notions. The nephew seems to have cut them all out fast. 
His resulting designs were evidently derived from those of Silsbee, and one of his 
authorized biographies more or less acknowledges that this architect played the largest 
role. {MAN, p. 18.} Wright dismissed this first attempt as "amateurish." {A2, p. 133.} 

Anna acted as matron of one of the dormitories the first year Hillside Home School was 
opened, and Maginel went to school there. Anna was somehow keeping the bills paid, and 
her son's great ambition, to become an architect, was already becoming a reality; by early 
1888 he was working for Adler and Sullivan {probably by February}, one of Chicago's 
largest firms. It must have seemed, to his mother, that she stood in real danger of losing 
him. She "worried about where he was living and what he was eating"; so Anna sold her 
house, and she and Maginel took the tedious, clattering train ride to Chicago. {MAG, p. 
127.} There was another reason why Anna may have thought the moment ripe to join 
Frank: he was in love. 

Catherine Lee Tobin,often called "Kitty," was sixteen years old when they first met. 
Wright described her as "gay-spirited, sunnyhaired," and with "a frank, handsome 
countenance," but this hardly does justice to her appearance when she was turning from 
girlhood to young womanhood. {A2, p. 77.} With her exquisite oval forehead, widely 
spaced eyes, straight nose and firm chin, she resembled the statuesque creatures inhabiting 
the imaginary world of the Victorian neoclassical painter Lord Leighton of Stretton. She 
could have posed for any of the three flowerlike figures in his Garden of the Hesperides 
(1892) or for the portraits of the clear-browed, dignified graces in The Days, by the 
American painter Thomas Dewing, painted in that year of 1887. She personified the 
emerging American type that would be celebrated in the World's Columbian Exposition in 
Chicago in 1893, that is to say, tall, with well-formed limbs, radiating good health, 
vigorous and suitably virginal, yet at some level aware of her budding sexuality. She was, 
in sum, "the girl" any aesthete would immediately recognize, and she must have resembled 
uncannily that "intimate fairy princess" about whom Wright had dreamed two or three 
years before, who was somewhere, preparing herself for their union, who would inspire 
him to great deeds and "unquenchable triumphs." {A2, p. 47.} 

These phrases point to his attitude toward women, one that remained remarkably 
consistent. The ideal woman, in his imagination, would have a grave, stately kind of 
beauty. Her hair might be glorious, as Catherine's was, a shining mass of red and gold, but 
it should be sedately, if not severely, dressed and kept close to the head. She should be 
elegantly slim and tolerably well educated and well bred. She should be interested in the 
arts and the finer things of life, active in her community, abstemious in her habits and 
careful with money. She should have views of her own, even aspirations, but none that 
would conflict with her major role of muse, inspiration, selfless helpmate and so on. 

Given his generation, it is almost axiomatic that Wright would look for a girl willing to 
live through him. However, the dictates of convention are less important in this case than 
his narcissistic need for total and unconditional adoration from his nearest and dearest. 
And in Catherine he had found a girl apparently prepared to devote  herself to these needs. 
To her children, she would be their all-in-all, and they the light of her existence;to her 
husband, she would be his emotional prop, support, uncritical encouragement, his "better 
half."She may have seemed to him to be charmingly unambitious and unfocused, the 
quintessence of feminine passivity, and there is an indication, during the two-year period 
they were obliged to wait before they could marry, that Catherine began to droop and sigh 
as convincingly as any princess locked up in an ivory tower. According to Jung, such a 
woman could well become the devoted and selfless companion of a man consumed by high 
ambition and the development of great talents; she might have valuable abilities of her 
own, but since she would be unaware of them, she would be likely to project, i.e., ascribe, 
them to her husband. The result would be to send him soaring "as if on a magic carpet to 
the highest summits of achievement." {Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, p. 97.} If 
Wright's narcissism led him more or less consciously to surround himself with those who 
would uncritically adore, it also guaranteed that he could have no real awareness of their 
needs, since they existed to serve him. And it is a safe guess that Catherine was far too 
immature to have any concept of the unequal bargain she was making. So the stage was set 
for future conflict, but none of that could have been predicted at the start. Wright was 
alone in a big city without his habitual emotional support and must have felt bereft. Within 
weeks of joining Silsbee's office, he was looking for consolation, and found it. 

Were you the one, his sister Jane asked him in a letter in the spring of 1887, who took Jean 
Hand to a freshman party? Jean told a mutual friend that her date had been a Mr. Wright, 
and he was the "stiffest, horridest thing she ever met. . . ." {sister Jane to Frank Lloyd 
Wright, T, April 10, 1887} Jane was in a teasing mood, and he had made no secret of the 
fact that girls terrified him, or so he said. However, he was an easy mark for some girls, if 
one can judge from a letter of his mother's, after he had moved to Chicago, asking if he 
still wrote to "Belle." What he apparently liked about Uncle Jenk's church were the 
opportunities for meeting attractive girls, especially when they "took him in hand," as he 
put it. {A2, p. 77.} He had already noticed Kitty in church and had been attracted to her 
some time before their unorthodox introduction. Both were attending a fancy dress party, 
costumed as characters out of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, when she, not looking where 
she was going, collided with him on the dance floor. They bumped foreheads and fell in a 
heap. As Dickens wrote, "The ceremony of introduction, under such circumstances, was 
very soon performed," and from that moment on they were inseparable. {Pickwick Papers, 
p. 388.} 

Catherinewas the oldest of four. She had twin brothers, Charlie and Robert, aged twelve, 
and Arthur, a charming seven-year-old. The Tobins were a prosperous and socially 
respectable family of Unitarians living on Chicago's fashionable South Side. Flora Parish 
Tobin came  from a family of merchandisers-her husband, Samuel Clark Tobin,was a 
wholesale salesman-and she had been a brilliant young teacher when they married, the 
first woman principal in the Chicago public school system. She had glorious red hair, 
usually wore a cameo with a lace fichu collar, was brisk, well organized and something of 
a disciplinarian. The future son-in-law correctly perceived that Samuel Clark Tobin, 
affable, emotional and outgoing, was content to be "managed" by his extremely capable 
wife. Samuel Tobin's great joy was his daughter, Kitty. As the only girl in a family of four, 
she was the center of attention, and such loving approval made her full of fun and good 
humor. She talked nonstop. She was devoted to her church and its pastor and was a 
confirmed nonsmoker and teetotaler. She was sensible.As soon as she discovered that 
Frank was helplessly bad with money, she resolved to help him manage it better. She was, 
her niece remembered, the greatest fun in the world, which did not prevent her from 
having decided opinions, ones she firmly voiced at the least provocation. That 
contentiousness was to have some consequences as she matured. But for the moment, she 
was young, terribly anxious to please, and it is clear she adored Frank. 

Wright's predilection for girls of superior social status has been remarked upon, and there 
is no doubt that his parents' divorce had given him a sense of his own inadequacy in this 
respect. But once in Chicago, such family skeletons were easier to keep hidden. In 
Chicago, he was Jenkin Lloyd Jones's nephew, therefore a prominent young Unitarian and 
quite a catch, with or without a fortune. So the argument that Wright married only to 
better himself socially cannot be taken too far. Neither can his own account, written after 
he was married to someone else, be completely relied upon. Catherine may, as he implies, 
have swept him off his feet, but on the other hand, one doubts whether anyone ever 
persuaded Wright to do something he positively would not do. 

There is also the matter of his mother's opposition, which would have deflected anyone 
less determined. Anna had, from the first, feared his roving eye. In one letter written just 
after he left Madison, she strenuously urged him not to trifle with the feelings of girls 
while, in the same sentence, forbidding him to take any particular girl seriously. {the letter 
has no actual date.} If she hoped to tie him in knots emotionally, her hopes were soon 
dashed. As soon as she learned of his new friendship, she launched an attack, but this led 
to an even more vigorous counter assault from her son. She switched tactics in the next 
round, telling him that she had burned his letter, that her feelings were hurt past repair, 
and that one day he would know what he had done. Anna was determined to remove Kitty 
from his life. 

Whenever Anna felt threatened, she was prepared to use any weapon, and in this case she 
had several. Kitty presented no real challenge; Anna was an old hand at unnerving 
adolescent girls. Frank was another matter. Her letter showed she knew that she could not 
take the direct approach much further. But there were other possibilities. In his 
autobiography, Wright reconstructed at some length the conversation he had with Cecil 
Corwin when the latter tried to argue him out of "getting serious" with Kitty. They were 
both just children, Corwin said. Frank ought to get some experience of women, become a 
man of the world. Corwin's arguments sounded so suspiciously adult that Wright soon 
guessed their origin. When he challenged his mother about that, she did not have the grace 
to apologize. She was maddeningly cool, even condescending. Anna was an absolute 
master of this kind of thrust and parry, and it seemed at first as if she had won, because 
she had also tackled Mrs. Tobin and obtained her agreement to send Catherine away for 
three months. But she had seriously antagonized her son, as his account reveals. He was 
rightly offended, and the more cleverly his mother played her cards, the more tenderly he 
began to think of the lovely and absent Catherine, the first girl, he told Corwin, he had felt 
"at home" with. {A2, p. 86.} 

At length Catherine returned. His autobiography relates that their friendship became more 
intimate, more ardent and more committed. Catherine reached her eighteenth birthday on 
March 25, 1889, and Frank was within a week of becoming twenty-two when, on June 1, 
1889, they were married.It rained the whole day. Samuel Clark Tobin burst into tears. At 
the right psychological moment, Anna fainted. 


Lieber Meister 

Life as it flows is so much time wasted, and nothing can ever be recovered or truly 
possessed save under the form of eternity, which is also the form of art. 

-GEORGE SANTAYANA 

John Dos Passos has left a vivid description of the city Wright found when he went to live 
in Chicago: "[C]rossing and recrossing the bridges over the Chicago river in the jingle and 
clatter of traffic, the rattle of vans and loaded wagons and the stamping of big 
dray-horses and the hooting of towboats with barges and the rumbling whistle of lake 
steamers waiting for the draw, he thought of the great continent stretching a thousand 
miles east and south and north, two thousand miles west. . . ." {CT, June 3, 1936.} 

When Wright arrived, the city that was to play a pivotal role in his career as an architect 
was, for all practical purposes, only half a century old. Up to the 1830s, Chicago had been 
little more than a fort surrounded by a few farmhouses containing a population of fewer 
than two hundred. Although it was situated at the head of Lake Michigan, it was blocked 
by a sandbar half a mile long, making it inaccessible for months of the year. But its 
potential importance as a marketplace for commerce for the West and Middle West was 
obvious, and once the federal government had built a canal and eliminated the need for 
portage, its future was secure. As early as 1848 it had become an important port. By 1887, 
eight hundred thousand people lived there, and by 1893, when Wright set up an 
independent practice, the population had grown to a million. Cyrus McCormick began the 
manufacture of his famous reaping machine there, George Pullman designed and built the 
first railway sleeping car, and great names of the stockyards and steel mills were 
established: Armour, Swift, Libby, Hutchinson and Morris. By the 1860s city streets had 
been lifted out of the mud, sometimes several feet above their old levels, and paved. 

All that energy and money brought about a spectacular building boom, and those architects 
not engaged in designing factories, offices, churches and stores were erecting palaces for 
the new millionaires. To add to the city's assets, from an architect's point of view, its 
famous calamity had taken place: a fire in 1871 that broke out in the lumber district and 
that, when it was finally contained twenty-seven hours later, had destroyed some 
seventeen thousand buildings and left one hundred thousand homeless. {Chicago Then 
and Now, p. 28.} Reconstruction began immediately, and Chicago risen from the ashes 
was richer, more energetic and more progressive than ever. Electric lights took the place of 
the old gas lamps, cable cars replaced the horse-drawn vehicles; the city became a hub 
for the nation's railways, and in 1881 received its first telephone. But perhaps the most 
spectacular developments of all were taking place in architecture, as the demand for a 
fireproof building that would also make profitable use of small lots brought about the 
invention of the structural iron skeleton and the first skyscrapers. 

One of the talented architects to be attracted by these stunning opportunities was Louis 
Sullivan. This towering figure, a prophet of modern American architecture, grew up in 
Boston, where he witnessed the construction of some of Henry Hobson Richardson's finest 
works, the Brattle Square and Trinity churches, firsthand. He studied at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology and in Paris with Emile Vaudremer, a leading figure of the Ecole 
des Beaux-Arts , but immediately rejected the French academic tradition, considering it 
basically flawed. He was much more influenced, according to the architectural historian 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, by Frank Furness, a Philadelphian for whom he briefly worked, 
creator of some Victorian Gothic buildings Hitchcock called "wildly original." 
{Henry-Russell Hitchcock, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the 
Early Eighteen-Nineties"; Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, vol. VII, 
January-June 1944, pp. 46-63; p. 58.} Sullivan then made his way west for some 
firsthand instruction in what was then called "Chicago construction." There he worked in 
the office of William Le Baron Jenny, an architect-engineer and leading figure in the 
design of the structural iron skeleton, along with the invention of a floating foundation 
that would answer the acute problems caused by Chicago's muddy soils. Sullivan then 
joined the firm of Dankmar Adler as chief designer in 1880. He was just twenty-four 
years old, but his remarkable gifts were already evident; three years later he had been 
made a partner. When Wright joined Adler and Sullivan, the man who would become his 
"Lieber Meister" was about to make a great breakthrough with the design, in 1890, of the 
Wainwright Building in St. Louis. Wright was there at the moment when Sullivan, who 
had been out for a walk in search of ideas, burst into the office and finished the sketch in a 
matter of minutes. Wright wrote, "I was perfectly aware of what had happened. This was 
Louis Sullivan's greatest moment-his greatest effort. The 'skyscraper' as a new thing 
under the sun, an entity with . . . beauty all its own, was born." {Louis Sullivan: His Life 
& Work, Robert C. Twombly, p. 285.} 

Not only was Sullivan a master of the new form; he was a theoretician of equal 
importance. He wrote widely about architecture, coining the famous phrase "form follows 
function," which would become the cornerstone of the new aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, 
since it was based on the belief that architectural considerations should be strictly 
utilitarian ones. Norris Kelly Smith has argued that this was a meaning Sullivan never 
intended, pointing out that Sullivan's text gives biological, or organic, forms as examples, 
not mechanical ones. In the natural world, the interrelationship of forms and functions 
stood for "relationships between the immaterial and the material, between the subjective 
and the objective-between the Infinite Spirit and the finite mind. . . ." Sullivan, in his 
famous dictum, {from Section XII, "Function and Form," Kindergarten Chats and Other 
Writings, Louis Sullivan, p. 45.} never implied that ornamentation should be eliminated. 
In fact, his buildings became famous for his distinctive use of flowing patterns, their 
intricate and intertwining arabesques based on natural forms in the manner of Art 
Nouveau. These additions were to be used with discrimination and have a direct 
relationship with the object being decorated, the dictum espoused by Owen Jones in The 
Grammar of Ornament. But Sullivan took the idea farther when he wrote that architecture 
ought to express the spirit of a building's function by the harmony of its form, and become 
that conjunction between the material and immaterial that one found in nature. A 
waterworks, for instance, should not simply be an efficient pumping machine; its design 
should also convey the abstract qualities, the very essence of flowing water. {The Function 
of Ornament, Wim deWit, p. 18.} In short, Sullivan's philosophy had more to do with the 
Aesthetic Movement than with modernism, and he was still less a proselytizer for a return 
to Greek and Roman classical forms. His designs and writings "monumentalized themes of 
central concern to the aesthetic architect." {"American Architecture and the Aesthetic 
Movement," by James D. Kornwolf, In Pursuit of Beauty, p. 367.} They also influenced 
Wright, as he wrote in his biography of his old mentor, Genius and the Mobocracy, 
published in 1949. It was an inspiration to watch Sullivan modeling and transforming his 
vision of an ideal into a reality, his "own soul's philosophy incarnate." Sullivan's belief in 
pure form "as integral rhythmic movement was what made him a lyric poet." {Genius and 
the Mobocracy, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 78.} 

If Sullivan, by then thirty-two years old, was the artist-in-residence, his partner, 
Dankmar Adler, in his forties when Wright arrived, was very much the practical mind, 
author of numerous articles on foundations, structural systems, vertical transportation, 
lighting, ventilation, acoustics and the nuts and bolts of the business. Wright recalled that 
Adler's "bushy brows . . . almost hid a pair of piercing grey eyes. His square grey beard 
and squarish head seemed square with the building and his personal solidity was a 
guarantee that out of all that confusion would issue the beauty of order." That team of 
efficient visionary and engineer-manager, two men with such expansive ideas who built 
so well, was an immediate success. During one eight-year period (1887-95) the firm 
received almost ninety commissions: everything from theaters and tombs to opera houses. 
{Louis Sullivan: His Life & Work, p. 229.} After 1891 they could afford to move into a 
brand-new office tower and rent two floors. The cause of the move had just been 
unveiled: a vast new building they had designed, the Auditorium Building. The main part 
of the complex was 10 stories high, contained 63,350 square feet of space and combined a 
400-room hotel with space for 136 offices and shops. It also contained a monumental, 
17-story tower that, in addition to the offices just mentioned, enclosed a 400-seat 
theater and the largest permanent concert hall built to that date. (It seated 4,000.) 
Sullivan's biographer wrote, "No wonder Chicago, as easily impressed by size as beauty, 
reeled at the achievement. . . ." {Louis Sullivan: His Life & Work, p. 161.} 

The Auditorium Building, generally recognized as a triumph of engineering for Adler and 
another feather in Sullivan's artistic cap, took four years to design and build (1886-90). 
Almost from the moment he arrived, Wright and the other young draftsmen in the office 
were taken up with the day-to-day details of designing and constructing the largest 
building in Chicago: invaluable practical experience. It was his good luck to be part of a 
rapidly expanding office; in such situations, being senior by a few months can make a 
difference, and Sullivan soon singled out Wright for the delicate work of faithfully 
transforming his own sketches for the building's actual structure, and its decorative details, 
into finished working drawings. Wright liked to say he had been the pencil in Sullivan's 
hand. He also claimed to have added some flourishes to the building himself. {Genius and 
the Mobocracy, pp. 63-64.} The night the building opened, Adelina Patti sang, and 
Benjamin Harrison, president of the United States, was in the audience. Wright noted, 
"The enthusiasm now evoked was contagious and we all floated upon it like small ships in 
a grand pageant." {Genius and the Mobocracy, p. 64.} 

There seems to have been nothing haphazard or fortuitous about the choices Wright was 
making in those first years after he arrived in Chicago. After talking his way into a job 
with the one architect to whom he already had an introduction, he was quick to isolate his 
next target, the firm most in the news in 1887-88. One hesitates to call him an 
opportunist, since no one could have risen so rapidly, even with Wright's confidence and 
charm, without exceptional promise. What he had to offer impressed everyone, but the fact 
that he made so few superfluous moves, and accomplished so much so soon, argues for a 
wonderfully shrewd and calculating nature. 

So one should look for the reason in his choice of Oak Park as his future home. Although 
Oak Park, ten miles to the west, resisted incorporation, it was essentially a suburb of 
Chicago and growing just as rapidly-its population of four thousand in 1889 would 
double in ten years-and was proclaiming, "We have reclaimed the wilderness. . . ." 
{Halley's Pictorial, p. 4.} Its new arrivals were the families of the Chicago stockbrokers, 
insurance executives, bankers, investors, department store magnates, manufacturers and 
the like who commuted each morning from the Oak Park railway station. The question 
often raised, why these prosperous and conservative men should become Wright's clients, 
has to be seen in the context of what was happening in their city at that time. These were 
the men making expansive decisions, gambling money on the radical use of new materials, 
erecting that astonishing new invention, the skyscraper, which would become imitated all 
over the United States. 

Wright would soon become a father, and Oak Park had an excellent reputation for its 
schools. He loved culture, and Oak Park's citizens were enthusiastic readers of great 
literature, participators in amateur theatricals and indefatigable givers of the musicale. 
They had formed all sorts of trios and quartets and, by 1902, had built their own opera 
house, seating over a thousand. The town managed to support the venture for a few years 
before tacitly conceding that the gesture was too grand even for Oak Park. So Wright's 
rather sardonic comment that his town was known as "Saint's Rest," because it had so 
many churches, {A2, p. 79.} is not meant to be taken too seriously, in light of his own 
intensely religious background and church-focused life at the time. What might seem 
stuffy, straitlaced and claustrophobic about the lives of Oak Park's citizens, with their big 
white houses on broad, leafy avenues was, after Spring Green and Madison, comfortable 
and reassuring to Wright and his family. They moved in. 

Wright had found a choice corner lot in the center of town, one side facing toward the 
main boulevard of Chicago Avenue and the other running along Forest Avenue, then only 
recently paved. It had once belonged to a landscape gardener, who had planted it with all 
manner of lilacs, snowballs and spireas, and in the spring it was vivid with white and blue 
violets, lilies of the valley and wild ginger. A white clapboard house, with scalloped eaves 
and a wooden teardrop at each corner, had recently been built on the Chicago Avenue side. 
On the Forest Avenue side, an old-fashioned barn still stood, vertically boarded and 
battened, with an interesting rusty color. Wright, in a more or less conscious echo of 
William Morris, wrote in 1932 that he had preferred the rustic picturesqueness of the barn 
to the contrived picturesqueness of the house. {A2, p. 80.} But neighbors were indignant 
that a barn had been left standing on "the best street in town," he wrote revealingly. {A2, 
p. 80.} 

If it were the prize location, Wright wanted it. He had been working for Adler and 
Sullivan for a year when he married Catherine, and he and his mother had agreed on a 
plan to buy the house and lot with money realized from the sale of her Madison house. 
However, this was not enough, and her son needed a lump sum for his share. 

Wright's habit of borrowing from people who liked him was so unvarying that one can 
safely infer that Sullivan soon liked him very much, since he advanced the money. In 
return, Wright allowed him to hold the mortgage and offered to bind himself to a 
five-year contract; this, at sixty dollars a week, was also generous; Adler said it made 
him the highest-paid draftsman in Chicago. {Genius and the Mobocracy, p. 56, and A2, 
p. 106.} It has been suggested that Sullivan's interest in Wright was sexual {MM, p. 63}, 
but there is no question that Wright's interest in Sullivan was strictly practical. It was 
almost a quid pro quo: if you like me, then lend me money-a kind of cheerful 
expectation, based on Anna's repeated capitulations and easy conquests like Corwin, that 
someone would always appear to assume his responsibilities; and his confident charm of 
manner must have been irresistible to certain people. For Wright, Sullivan was a poet, 
philosopher and beau ideal, which would not have prevented him from thinking about 
what Sullivan could do for him. But the situation was more complex than that, in the 
intricate web of expectations Wright would weave around those who belonged to him: they 
always had his unpredictable but enduring fealty. He and his sister Jane fought all their 
lives-they were too close in age, too opinionated, for it to be otherwise-which never 
prevented them from defending each other against the rest of the world when necessary. 
Wright's young male friends tended to be in the mold of Robie Lamp, Cecil Corwin and 
George Grant Elmslie, i.e., quiet, unassuming, devoted, sterling characters who needed 
championing. When they first met, Sullivan was too much the celebrated architect to be 
seen in this light, although in later years, when the situation was reversed, Wright 
eventually published a biography the main point of which seemed to be that Sullivan was a 
genius and his detractors less than rabble. So when some in Adler and Sullivan's office 
began to resent Wright's favored position and looked as if they were spoiling for a fight, 
Wright decided that he needed lessons in boxing. Then he fought two battles with three of 
his rivals who took the precaution of bringing knives. {A2, pp. 96-102} By his own 
account he was twice victorious, though badly cut in one fight, with multiple stab wounds. 
Also by his account, he fought with no holds barred. He was certainly defending his 
privileged position, and he relished the chance to get even, but since most of his 
adversaries were men Adler had hired, Wright conceivably thought he was defending 
Sullivan's honor, Sullivan's choices and Sullivan's ideals. It would then be a point of pride 
never to mention what had happened. {A2, p. 102} 

When Frank and Kitty got married, they lived with Anna for some months while waiting 
for their new house to be built: a smallish, two-bedrooms-plus-studio house with a 
large front veranda and back porch, positioned well back from Chicago Avenue, its main 
rooms facing west and south. Construction began in late August 1889 and was probably 
completed just before the birth of their first child, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., on March 31, 
1890. For most of her stay with Anna, Kitty was heavily pregnant and also depressed and 
miserable to find her mother-in-law still antagonistic. Their happiest times were spent 
in Kitty's room, sewing pincushions, needle books, pen wipers and the like from the 
sample books of pretty fabrics Kitty's father had given her. That is, until they overheard a 
stray comment from Anna to Jane or vice versa about the amateurish nature of their 
efforts, which would send them running to Kitty's room to collapse in tears. There is a 
family story that whenever she heard Anna coming, Kitty would hide in a closet. 

The situation improved somewhat when Kitty and Frank moved into their own house, 
which their neighbors considered charming and original. There is an early photograph 
taken on the steps of their home shortly after it was built. A handsome oriental rug has 
been spread out in front of the door. The beautiful Catherine, seated in the center, holds up 
her Titian-haired baby. Uncle Jenk is standing to the left; sister Jane, wearing a striped 
blazer, flourishes a tennis racket; sister Maginel, in the background, has both hands on her 
brother's shoulders; Anna, all in black, leans toward the camera with a too-knowing 
smile; and Frank, his hair fractionally longer than the fashion, sporting a mustache and 
wearing the well-tailored clothes of a young gentleman, shows off his profile. Maginel 
recalled vividly the day Lloyd was born, Kitty's agonized groans and then the moment 
when there were tears on her brothers face.   

The opening of the Auditorium Building late in 1889 and the move to new offices signaled 
a new stage in Wright's rapid advance at Adler and Sullivan. Years later, he published a 
diagram demonstrating that his had been the most important office, since it was right 
beside Sullivan's, more important even than Adler's or the office held by Paul Mueller, a 
young German engineer who handled all the mechanical details and worked directly under 
Adler. (Wright actually shared his office with Elmslie but omitted that fact.) {Genius and 
the Mobocracy, p. 62} As chief designer, Wright was in charge of a staff of thirty 
draftsmen and therefore in an excellent position to see how an architectural firm was 
structured. Being the person he was, he at once saw the point, or what Henry Hobson 
Richardson called the first rule of architecture, "Get the job." {Genius and the Mobocracy, 
p. 56} Most architectural firms of the day, he wrote, were composed of a successful senior 
partner whose name lent luster to the enterprise, then a man in the back room who did the 
real work and, third, someone with the right social connections, seen in all the right 
places, who knew where the next commission was coming from. In future years Wright 
would encompass all of these functions in his own tireless personality. But he never forgot 
the first rule of architecture. 

In the days following the success of the Auditorium Building there was a new mood in the 
office, a new display of earnest concentration and an afterglow that lingered because it was 
such a feather in one's cap to be working for Adler and Sullivan in any capacity at all.  
{Genius and the Mobocracy, p. 67} Eventually the firm settled into something like a 
routine as projects for loft buildings, skyscrapers, hotels, factories, theaters and opera 
houses came through in a steady stream.  {Genius and the Mobocracy, p. 68} 

Adler and Sullivan built very few private houses. The firm's wealth was based on the 
commissions it obtained-a percentage of total costs-for its large-scale designs. Yet the 
quick-witted Wright seemed curiously blind to this lucrative fact. Almost from the first, 
the kinds of structures he wanted to build were houses. Since he chose this path despite the 
dictates of good sense, one must assume that the house had a particular and overriding 
significance for him. As a young man he already had a fully formed vision of the kind of 
house he wanted. His later work would evolve far from this original realization, but in all 
essential ways he remained faithful to its concepts. One finds, in this precocious need to 
create an environment, an ambiance, some clues to his preoccupations. In common with 
other aesthetes-Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, to name two-Wright seemed 
incapable of any kind of work until he had created a harmonious atmosphere for himself. 
Wherever he was, all work stopped until he had built, or rebuilt, the room, changed the 
decor, moved the furniture, positioned his own talismanic images around him and found 
everything to his satisfaction. 

The reasons are hard to find, but a reading of his autobiography provides some clues. 
Houses of his period were cut up, cluttered, claustrophobic; they buzzed and hummed at 
him. He longed for opened spaces, serene vistas and "ineffable harmonies." {A2, p. 147} 
A house must be welcoming and encourage a feeling of well-being. {A2, p. 174} It 
should be "intensely human." It should be a natural house. It should be a part of nature and 
encompass it; the two should be seamlessly linked. It should give one a feeling of unity, a 
sense that its parts were essential components of a larger whole. It should "crown the 
exuberance of life." {A2, p. 170} Its roof should be low, wide and snug, a broad shelter. 
{A2, p. 174} It should exude peace and serenity; one should be able to rest there and feel 
at home. {A2, p. 175} 

In retrospect, Wright seemed to have been most at home when he was abroad. He later 
described his year of exile in Fiesole in the most lyric terms. He imagined himself 
returning home one perfect evening, entering "the small solid door framed in the solid 
white blank wall," {A2, p. 165} to find a wood fire burning and a delicious dinner 
waiting. Or, he and his love might be walking in the garden, admiring its pool and bower 
of yellow roses, with a small stone table set for two. It was "the house of houses." {A2, p. 
165} In other words, perfection to him was an entirely domestic scene, the felicity of two 
people in love, surrounded by beauty, in a hidden paradise. A home should be secretive 
and hold within it an ideal marriage, the one his mother never had. So perhaps a great 
deal of Wright's hopes and expectations were bound up with his mother's failed 
relationship. He would build anew, create a more perfect life to compensate them both for 
past unhappiness. He would put down his roots, just as that group of exiles, the Lloyd 
Joneses, had done as they attempted to create a better Wales, one more true to the ancestral 
dream image, in their Wisconsin valley. 

There were, perhaps, further inferences to be drawn. The fact that Wright always talked 
about the nine wood engravings of Gothic cathedrals his mother supposedly hung around 
his crib may have a bearing here, as one recalls that Uncle Jenkin wanted Silsbee for an 
architect because his designs looked homey. To that devout Unitarian, as to his family, the 
church had always been their refuge, their one true home and the link between church and 
home can be traced back through Protestant thought. That Wright thought the home must 
somehow be a bastion for morality is evident, given his comment that the American house 
"lied about everything." It was vulgar, wickedly extravagant, a nationwide waste, "a moral, 
social, aesthetic excrement." Commodity and delight, a serene sense of comfort and 
well-being, a close contact with nature, a homey feeling-all these attributes would take 
one only so far if, at the end, all that were expressed did not satisfy Wright's Puritan 
conscience. The first argument he and Kitty had came as they returned from their 
honeymoon. She objected to his plans to inscribe "mottoes" around their house, and he just 
as heatedly insisted. What he wanted were daily exhortations, reminders of right manners, 
right morals, right reflections upon the nature of things. Despite her, he managed to have 
"Truth Is Life!" carved over the fireplace in their first living room. Then he wondered 
whether it should have been "Life Is Truth!" 

Once Wright discovered that Sullivan was not interested in houses and had eagerly offered 
himself, he was given several commissions to play with by his indulgent "Lieber Meister." 
Sullivan even trusted Wright with two houses for himself, one a cottage in Ocean Springs, 
Mississippi, and the second a row house on Lake Avenue in Chicago, in which he lived for 
several years before relinquishing it to his brother Arthur. These and other designs were 
certainly in the manner of Sullivan, and the fact that Wright was chosen as designer must 
have meant that Sullivan had seen the gift that made Wright so exceptional: his precocious 
and almost uncanny ability to grasp a style. He perceived it and imitated it, but he often 
did more: at his best, he could cut through to its essence, interpreting it with a surer eye 
and a finer discrimination than anyone else. That versatile and fastidious eye was 
maturing rapidly as Wright designed his first houses in the Queen Anne and Shingle styles 
he had studied under Silsbee, as well as the Sullivanesque. After all, those were the kinds 
of houses then in demand, and Wright, who intended to set up his own practice, knew the 
first principle of architecture. 

Specialists in Wright's work have, in recent years, advanced the notion that his early 
designs were often derived from specific works by other architects. The Yale architectural 
historian Vincent Scully believes, for instance, that the house Wright designed for himself 
in 1889 was closely modeled on two houses built by another architect, Bruce Price, in 
Tuxedo Park, New York, three or four years before (1885-86). Professor Scully has 
published photographs to show the similarities between Wright's facade and that of Price's 
Kent house. {SC, plates 4 and 5.} Many of Wright's decorative designs are clearly 
modeled on those of Sullivan, particularly those for his Harlan and Winslow houses of 
1892 and 1894. A mere amateur at the game of architectural connoisseurship can see the 
links between the facade of the tomb Sullivan designed in 1892 and the front of Wright's 
Winslow house, built two years later. {see The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis Sullivan, 
plate 13, the tomb of Charlotte Dickson Wainwright; Wright executed tracings for the 
design of that tomb's ornamental gate: H. Allen Brooks, Frank Lloyd Wright and the 
Prairie School, plate 4.} Sullivan's massive entry portal is framed by a running frieze that 
forms squares on each side of it. Place windows in those blank spaces and one has the 
front door and adjoining windows of the Winslow house. The architectural historian 
Patrick Pinnell, also of Yale, believes that many other early designs are derived from 
house plans published by McKim, Mead and White, the famous New York architectural 
firm, notably Wright's Blossom house of 1892 and his design for an early client, Henry 
Cooper, the house with the controversial drawing date, which was never built. {Pinnell to 
author; clear resemblances: "Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the 
Early Eighteen-Nineties", p. 16.} The dean of American architectural historians, 
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, whose study, On the Nature of Materials, is one of the standard 
texts on Wright, has seen clear resemblances between Wright's first important design for 
Adler and Sullivan, the James Charnley house of 1891, and another McKim, Mead and 
White design, a New York town house, built seven years before. 

Yet another distinguished architectural historian, Professor H. Allen Brooks, has pointed 
out the parallels between one of Wright's best-known designs, that for a small "Prairie 
Town" house, first published in the Ladies' Home Journal of 1901, and a design for a 
house by Robert C. Spencer published earlier that year. (Professor Brooks concluded that 
since Wright's designs were so much better realized than Spencer's, the latter's work 
probably acted as a catalyst, helping him to achieve a synthesis.) {BR, p. 59.} Perhaps the 
most striking example of a direct steal, if it can be so termed, is the design Wright 
submitted in a competition for a new public library and museum in Milwaukee in 1893. 
(He did not win.) His drawing almost literally reproduces, point for point, that of another 
talented young architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh, then just a student, 
won a medal for his museum, and his drawing was published in the British Architect in 
1890-some three years before. {BR, p. 59.} But the point hardly needs further elaboration 
since Wright himself conceded it, albeit sotto voce. Referring to these early experiments, 
he wrote, "I suppose I stole them." It gave him, he added, a most uneasy conscience. 
{Genius and the Mobocracy, p. 78.} 

These examples illustrate an aspect of architectural practice well known at the time, one 
that persists to this day. Any first-rate architect's office carried, as a matter of course, 
copies of the latest professional magazines from New York, London and elsewhere. 
Knowing what was being built, or about to be built, was part of every architect's 
stock-in-trade, particularly if he could anticipate that moment when the wave might 
sweep him up with it. Far from being blind to other influences, as he claimed, one gains 
the distinct impression that Wright was influenced, all his life, by everything he ever saw, 
however much the original idea might be transmuted and transformed by the alchemy of 
his imagination. He may well have been in the position analogous to that of someone with 
a powerful musical memory, that is to say, haunted by images, if not actually hounded by 
them, until he had exhausted all their possibilities. He, too, would be the victim of similar 
borrowings, and quite soon, to judge from the suburbs of Oak Park and River Forest in 
Chicago, where it is sometimes difficult to identify Wright's houses from their many 
imitations. 

A further factor to consider is that Wright was never satisfied. Almost as soon as he had 
finished one design, he could see its flaws and invariably added, subtracted, simplified or 
elaborated upon it. Nowadays scholars have the baffling task of deciding how to restore 
those buildings on which he had the freest hand, i.e., his own home and studio at Oak Park 
and at Taliesin in Spring Green, since the master had remodeled, enlarged and obliterated 
with such gay abandon. At what point should they decide the house was "finished," since 
he never had? Wright lacked the slightest sentimental interest in a concept he had 
outgrown. Denied the option of tearing it down with respect to some of his amateurish 
early efforts, still stubbornly standing, Wright could at least obfuscate and camouflage. As 
he also said, "Doctors bury their mistakes; architects have to cover them with vines." 

Wright left Adler and Sullivan to go into private practice in the early summer of 1893. As 
he explained later, the reason for the break centered on the fact that, during the previous 
two or three years, he had been in private practice after hours. "Moonlighting," as it was 
called, was a common practice for young draftsmen ambitious to make a name for 
themselves, so common that Wright's five-year contract with the firm specifically ruled it 
out. A year before Wright signed it, in 1888, the Illinois State Association of Architects 
had met to consider the problem, which was thought to have reached epidemic 
proportions. It was even suggested that any architect who knowingly employed a 
moonlighting draftsman should be expelled. {American Architect & Building News, vol. 
XXIII, 1888, p. 277.} By the time he left, he and Kitty had two boys-Frank Lloyd 
Wright, Jr., always called Lloyd, then aged three, baby John, about seven months old-and 
were expecting their third child, daughter Catherine, who would be born early in 1894. 
{John was born December 12, 1892 and Catherine, January 12, 1894.} So Wright, as 
potential father of three, could be expected to be looking for more money, given his 
habitual readiness to spend and more and more reasons for doing so. His commissions for 
Adler and Sullivan had dried up by 1892, so he quietly took off in his own direction, 
designing a total of six moonlighting houses. Three of them were houses near Sullivan's 
Chicago home. This had obvious perils, so Wright took the precaution of persuading his 
friend Corwin to announce publicly that he was their architect. {Louis Sullivan : His Life 
& Work, p. 237}} But, some months later, the ruse was discovered, and Wright, with a 
year still to go on his contract, was dismissed. In other words, according to Wright's 
account, though he had admittedly violated the terms of his contract with Sullivan, his 
start in independent practice was involuntary. It came about because Adler and Sullivan 
kicked him out. 

No doubt, all of this was true so far as it went. Sullivan would have felt justifiably enraged, 
after all his efforts on Wright's behalf, the sums of money lent, the opportunities given and 
the handsome salary he was paying every week. The fact that Wright then set up an office 
with Corwin, who had also worked for the firm, would have given Sullivan further cause 
for indignation. As Sullivan's biographer put it, "They [Wright and Corwin] also shared 
the knowledge that they had offended the one man who had inspired them most." 
However, there is a fair possibility that Sullivan had a more pressing reason to believe that 
his prot�ge, perhaps the one he counted on most to carry his standard forward, had let 
him down. 

As has been noted, Sullivan had, from the start of his architectural career, rejected the 
training he had received in academic design from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, that is to 
say, the "academic discipline in architecture embodied in imitated Renaissance and 
classical forms," as Hitchcock has described it. Sullivan's position did not change even 
though a fashionable revival of that tradition was in the air. Eastern architects of the 
mid-1880s, led by the firm of McKim, Mead and White, were beginning to turn to the 
Renaissance for their inspiration. They were following the example of the British architect 
Norman Shaw, who had launched the Queen Anne style and was now championing a 
return to academic precepts. {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the 
Early Eighteen-Nineties," p. 47.} Shaw was, by general agreement, the most 
internationally influential architect of his time, setting styles from the late 1860s until the 
outbreak of World War I. According to Hitchcock, McKim, Mead and White soon 
outstripped Shaw in their elegant interpretations of the academic revival and, in particular, 
in their design for the H. A. C. Taylor house of 1885 in Newport, Rhode Island. Their 
success with this particular design, in other words, set a new mood. 

The evidence is that Wright began to venture in this direction almost as soon as he started 
working for Sullivan. One of the great surprises of the house he designed for himself in 
1889, which, as has been noted, was modeled on the Queen Anne designs of Bruce Price, 
is the frieze one encounters as soon as one enters the front door. The bas-relief, which 
depicts the eternal battle between evenly matched forces, the war of the gods, is taken from 
the alter of Pergamum, C. 200 B. C. Wright also makes use of dentil moldings in his 
living room. These Greek-derived details are unmistakable early signs of the direction of 
his thought. 

Two years later, in 1891, his first great breakthrough came about with a design for Adler 
and Sullivan, the James Charnley house in Chicago. This "urban palazzo," as Hitchcock 
termed it, described by Smith as the "work of a man of fastidious taste," with its severe, 
uncompromising facade, its symmetrically placed windows and Italianate balcony, is 
considered more than just an adaptation of Sullivan's large designs scaled down to 
domestic proportions; it is a classical design of almost precocious restraint, clarity and 
refinement. {HI, p. 12}  

If Charnley's housewas Wright's first great triumph, designed when he was just 
twenty-four years old, a second came just a year later, with a moonlighting commission 
for another client, George Blossom. This large, handsome, symmetrical house, with its 
Palladian window motifs and its interior rooms linked at the axes by arches, is seen by 
Hitchcock as "a personal application of academic discipline" to ideas inherited from 
Richardson and the Queen Anne style. {HI, p. 60} It is also cited as proof that Wright 
could have been one of the great academic architects. Wright's design for the Milwaukee 
Library and Museum competition, submitted late in 1893, is similarly derived. The third 
major breakthrough, the William Winslow house in River Forest, Wright's first 
commission after he left Sullivan, is yet another demonstration of his early mastery of 
classical form. Hitchcock cited the "serene horizontality of the design; the dignity, as 
urbane as that of the Charnley house, and the axial organization of the plan about the 
central chimney'" in support of his assertion that, with the Winslow house, Wright had 
become the ablest academic designer in Chicago. {HI, p. 62.} (The house has since been 
named by the American Institute of Architects as one of seventeen Wright houses worthy 
to be retained as examples of his art.) 

Since, in years to come, Wright would be considered a radical thinker in architecture, if 
not in most other areas of life, it seems anomalous, to say the least, that his first successes 
came within a highly conservative and stylized tradition. The reason, according to one 
theorist, has to do with the Froebel kindergarten training and, specifically, the exercises, 
or "games," that Anna brought home from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 
1876. Froebel's geometric blocks were designed to train children to make abstract patterns. 
These seemed simple, but were actually composed of many interlocking parts, the kind of 
training that seems heaven-sent for a future architect. Richard MacCormac, the British 
architect, further explained in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts, that Wright's early 
houses shared a common trait, that of an overall unity.This rigorous early training had, in 
other words, particularly suited Wright to understand the discipline of late eighteenth 
century French classicism and to adapt it in fresh new ways. 

Hitchcock dated Wright's great period of classical design to 1892-93, that is to say, in the 
final year of his employment with Sullivan. Although he continued to experiment with 
other styles, Wright, in other words, had triumphed with a style that, however much it 
trembled on the verge of being high fashion, was absolutely inimical to his mentor, who 
could have seen well enough where his pupil was heading. If Wright disliked talking about 
his Queen Anne period and preferred to say as little as possible, he was completely silent 
about his early mastery of academic design. In fact, he did not have a single good word to 
say about the subject, and to ask him about the Renaissance was to guarantee a diatribe 
about that phenomenon as a "false dawn" and the death of architecture. 

The event that actually precipitated the break between Wright and Sullivan was, in all 
likelihood, the great Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Almost as soon as it was decided that 
the booming city should be the site for this World's Columbian Exposition, architects were 
summoned to carry out the preliminary plan drafted by the famous landscape architects 
Frederick Law Olmsted and Henry Sargent Codman. They had decreed a group of 
harmonious buildings forming a court around a large lagoon. In Chicago, Adler and 
Sullivan was one of two prominent architectural firms; the other was that of Daniel H. 
Burnham and John Root. The plum position of coordinating the plans for the fair went to 
the latter. {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the Early 
Eighteen-Nineties," p. 56.} Very early in 1891 Burnham and Root, for whatever reason, 
selected its first group of five architects and architectural firms, all from the East Coast; 
among them was the firm of McKim, Mead and White. The decision came down in due 
course that the design of all the chief buildings would be Renaissance. Only then was a 
second group, of five Chicago firms, chosen. Among that group was the firm of Adler and 
Sullivan. 

Although Wright was already experimenting, he did not make ambitious use of the new 
style until his Charnley house of 1891. By then he would have known which way the wind 
was blowing at the World's Fair. Perhaps he already thought, correctly as it turned out, 
that this imprimatur by the World's Fair would be bound to lead to a surge of interest in 
neoclassicism. As Sigfried Giedion wrote in Space, Time and Architecture, "Public, artists 
and literary people believed themselves to be witnessing a splendid rebirth of the great 
traditions of past ages," and only a few American voices were raised against this 
"seduction of public taste." {GI, p. 316; marked his decline: ditto, p. 317.} Louis Sullivan's 
was one of them. His own design of the Transportation Building received mixed reviews, 
being criticized for its lack of neoclassicism, and, according to Giedion, it marked the start 
of his decline in popularity as an architect. 

If Wright's sympathies were now perfectly clear to Sullivan, and if his defection added, in 
years to come, to the latter's feelings of bitterness and betrayal, to Wright the situation 
must have seemed quite straightforward. When he joined Adler and Sullivan, the firm was 
approaching the height of its power and influence; by 1893, the fact that Sullivan had been 
denied an influential voice in planning for the fair could only mean that his star was on 
the decline. In the flush of his first enthusiasm for the new style, Wright might have seen 
himself as part of a vigorous new wave and Sullivan as a theoretician whose best days 
were behind him. Or perhaps it was necessary, even inevitable, that Wright should take the 
style seriously, since his livelihood depended upon it. The break was bound to come, and it 
was probably a relief to Wright to have Sullivan initiate it, given that the pupil's feelings 
were likely to be most uncomfortable. Wright's silence was broken only once, and one can 
gather something from his comment, made years later, that "this world's-fair wave of 
pseudo 'classic' now an 'ism, swept over and swept us all under." {The Future of 
Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 223} 

In any case Wright's adherence to the new movement was destined to be brief. Sometime 
after the fair, perhaps in the spring of 1894, the Wrights were invited to meet Daniel 
Burnham, chief organizer of the fair and new president of the American Institute of 
Architects, by their mutual friend Edward C. Waller. Waller's house was directly opposite 
the new house Wright had just built for Winslow. Burnham had seen it and had 
pronounced it "a gentleman's house from grade to coping." {A2, p. 125} 

What Wright did not know was that Burnham had been in contact with Charles F. 
McKim, whose own design for the World's Fair had been based on the Villa Medici in 
Rome, about the latter's great ambition, i.e., to found an American Academy in Rome to 
solidify American interest in the classical tradition. McKim wrote to Burnham early in 
April 1894 to tell him that the "atelier" in Rome was close to being established, and to ask 
for Burnham's help in setting up some Chicago fellowships. {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the 
'Academic Tradition' of the Early Eighteen-Nineties," p. 46.} It seems possible that 
Burnham's meeting with Wright took place soon afterward (Wright gives no date), since 
he had come to make Wright a generous proposal, all expenses paid: four years at 
the-cole des Beaux-Arts, a further two years in Rome at the new atelier and then a job 
in his office when he returned. Wright recreates the conversation that followed, always an 
indication of the importance he attached to an incident, and the attempt to set him on a 
course that, although he does not say so, he would have eagerly pursued just a year before. 
But by then Wright's instinct, which was unerring, had correctly seen that it was a false 
direction and would lead to a dead end. His refusal was nevertheless courageous, in light 
of his phenomenal successes to that date. He must have thought he had an even more 
fruitful avenue to pursue, and indeed he did. 


Sermons in Stones 

The law which it has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble 
design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form. 

-JOHN RUSKIN 
The Two Paths 

Frank Lloyd Wright's favorite occupation on a Sunday afternoon was to rearrange the 
furniture in his Oak Park house, and photographs of some of these experiments still exist, 
though they are seldom reproduced. They show that during his first six years there his 
living room, for instance, was filled with an eclectic assortment of furniture, bought at 
auctions, often grouped asymmetrically, so as to draw focus to one of the room's corners. 
There was a comfortable window seat, its bench well upholstered, equipped with plenty of 
cushions in contrasting colors and textures, an array of oriental area rugs, animal skins, 
large and luxuriant ferns, reproductions of Italian Renaissance paintings and other objects, 
shelves full of china and bric-a-brac and draped shawls and curtains-all of which 
demonstrated the continuing influence of the Aesthetic Movement on his taste. 

Six years later Wright had redesigned his dining room, and the transformation was 
marked. Gone were the bric-a-brac, the textile patterns and the genteel effects of 
artistically draped shawls and curtains, and in their place was a severely simplified decor 
emphasizing the horizontal, by means of wooden moldings running around the room, and 
the vertical, with much-elongated chairbacks composed of slats of wood that were his 
own design. The oak floor, finished in golden brown, was bare, and the only decorative 
elements in the room came from the leaded-glass windows in a pattern abstracted from a 
flower, a perforated wooden screen in the ceiling that provided diffused light, and vases of 
flowers. By 1895, in other words, Wright's taste had evolved from the consciously artistic 
toward a concept that was unified, pared down, bold and uncompromising. 

The year of 1895 is the earliest date one can give to this clear evidence of a departure in 
his philosophy, but certain themes can be discerned from fragments of his lectures of the 
year before, in which he is already railing against mindless decoration and the fondness of 
most housewives-this would be a lifelong theme-for dark and dingy places in which to 
store a clutter of objects that no one would ever use. He exhorted his listeners to build with 
an overall concept and a single unifying theme in mind in their choices of everything from 
materials to the designs of windows, roofs, doors and furnishings, to make the work 
"honest, true to itself. . . ." {in a speech to the University Guild of Evanston, Illinois, 1894 
(Library of Congress).} Consistency and order, the elimination of extraneous detail, a 
return to natural forms, respect for materials and unity of design: it sounded like the 
manifesto of a new order and it was. Like the Aesthetic Movement, its predecessor, the 
Arts and Crafts Movement as it evolved in Britain in the 1880s was a reaction against a 
century of mass production and the havoc it had wrought, and a revival of the concept of 
medieval guilds and handcrafted objects of lasting beauty and utility. These goals had been 
shared by the Aesthetic Movement's artists and architects, with the aim of simply 
reasserting an aesthetic of beauty and the value of self-expression. William Morris, 
acknowledged leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement, ultimately came to reject what he 
considered the limited philosophy of art for art's sake and devoted himself to the cause of 
social reform. He was, in this respect, a true follower of the man he admired and whose 
energies were also focused, at the end of his life, on the whole problem of laissez-faire 
economics and the ills it generated: the art critic and writer John Ruskin. So there was a 
strong political agendum in the Arts and Crafts Movement, but this seems to have 
interested the young Wright far less than other aspects of its credo, which was as idealistic 
and wide-ranging as Ruskin's writings. As Alan Crawford, biographer of C. R. Ashbee, 
another leader of the movement, wrote, "Ask any Arts and Crafts man to give an account 
of his work and he would talk not only about techniques and materials, but also about the 
status of the decorative arts, the uses of wealth, the Industrial Revolution, work, nature, the 
home, honesty, simplicity and the Middle Ages." {C. R. Ashbee, Alan Crawford, p. 207.} 

One can see why a member of the Lloyd Jones family would leap enthusiastically into a 
movement that offered him such an inviting platform; having acquired a taste for 
pontificating, Wright would go on doing so for the rest of his days. As Robert Stein wrote 
in John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900, Ruskin's beliefs had been 
widely debated since the mid-nineteenth century and, by the time he died, he was one of 
England's four most famous living authors, on a par with Scott and Dickens. {p. ix} While 
Wright was still an adolescent, he had been given Ruskin's first book on architecture, The 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, and had read its sequel, The Stones of Venice, the book 
Carlyle praised as "a sermon in stones." 

Ruskin's main thesis, that right emotion, true feeling and lofty thought were all included in 
concepts of what was beautiful, that, as Thoreau would write, "the perception of beauty is a 
moral test," was seized upon by Unitarians as they advanced their belief that man was a 
part of nature, not separate from it, and as they sought to teach a moral response to beauty 
based on an awareness of nature. If Ruskin thought that the pinnacle of architecture had 
been reached with the Gothic, then the Lloyd Joneses, and Anna among them, would also 
believe (hence the prints of cathedrals) that these great medieval edifices summed up all 
that an ennobled vision of art could achieve. Like Ruskin, Wright would come to declare 
that the Renaissance (since it represented a return to a heathen tradition) exemplified 
everything that was degenerate about architecture. Like Ruskin, Wright would wrestle 
with the secret that gave "character" to the trees, even the way in which architecture ought 
to be inspired by nature. Anna's belief that architecture was a high and noble calling seems 
directly derived from Ruskin's dictum that architecture had an obligation to improve 
society, even that beauty existed in order "to convey the absolute values upon which a 
sound society must rest." {John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, Robert Hewison, p. 
133.} As for Wright, the belief that the practice of true architecture ennobled its 
practitioner and set him apart from the common herd, would lead to some disastrous 
miscalculations in years to come. But, as he made common cause with the Arts and Crafts 
Movement, he set himself the daunting task of reflecting truth, beauty and moral feeling in 
his own work. Wright probably never realized the extent to which Ruskin's teachings had 
influenced him, but he clearly, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrated it. One of the terms 
most associated with his name is "organic architecture." He proselytized all his life for an 
architecture governed by the inner forces of nature and never realized, perhaps, that the 
term came directly from Ruskin. 

Today, the idea that an architect has an obligation to encompass the values of an ideal 
society in his work has been unfashionable for decades. But when Wright first began 
independent practice in Chicago, he was just one of a number of architects, most of them 
younger men with reputations unmade, who saw the possibilities offered by the new 
movement, which was as much Romantic as it was reformist and revivalist. The emphasis 
by British architects on the cottage and small manor house presented new possibilities for 
architects struggling to find an alternative to vulgar ostentation: those French chateaux, 
Italian palazzi and even the beaux-arts classicism in vogue with the newly rich. In 
championing a return to humbler styles notable for their beauty of fitness of purpose, 
young American architects could talk about a need for an architecture that was untainted 
by foreign influences, that was home-grown, a quintessentially American architecture 
that they all, in one way or another, were competing to invent. If city houses, lined up in a 
row on their rectangular lots, were ugly and inconvenient, they would build beautifully and 
conveniently; if houses of the rich were a soulless pastiche of fashionable styles, they 
would espouse a return to truer, more basic dwellings imbued with all the sympathetic 
qualities of place that these lacked. The fact that the Arts and Crafts 
Movement-advocating a set of principles, not a style-took hold so quickly in Chicago is 
an indication of how well its goals were suited to these peculiarly American circumstances. 

The English architect Philip Webb's design for William Morris's own home, the Red 
House (1859-60) is considered the prototype for the Arts and Crafts concept of the 
smaller, or artistic, house. {M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts & Crafts Movement, James D. 
Kornwolf, p. 11.} That early experiment would be an inspiration for a new generation of 
architects, among them C. F. A. Voysey, who started practicing in the early 1880s, and 
then for M. H. Baillie Scott, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, C. R. Ashbee, C. Harrison 
Townsend, Sir Edwin Lutyens and many others. Their work, Hitchcock wrote, "seemed to 
breathe the creative air in which Wright worked from the beginning of his independent 
practice." {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the 'Academic Tradition' of the Early 
Eighteen-Nineties": p. 50.} For Arts and Crafts architects, the fireplace was "a vital 
functional and symbolic feature: the 'hearth' to warm the home at the centre of home life, 
flame as the soul of the house," an old-fashioned and essentially Romantic view that they 
all espoused. {The English House 1860-1914: Gavin Stamp, p. 32} The concept of the 
inglenook (a recessed fireplace with built-in benches on each side), another antiquated 
notion, had been revived by Shaw in the 1860s and was still in use by Arts and Crafts 
architects half a century later. For these designers, renouncing ostentation meant a return 
to semi-austerity: plain, unadorned walls (Voysey even argued against wallpaper), simple 
oak furniture and a solitary vase of flowers as the only ornamentation. {The English House 
1860-1914: Gavin Stamp, p. 34} Arts and Crafts architects were meticulous about 
building well-no short cuts were tolerated-and about "truth to materials," i.e., using 
brick, stone, wood and the like so as to enhance their unique qualities. They took 
enormous pains to fit their buildings harmoniously into the landscape, achieving in their 
best work an inextricable melding of one with the other. {The English House 1860-1914: 
Gavin Stamp, p. 340} Voysey, one of the most influential members of the group, laid great 
stress on the enclosing and protective character of roofs. His hipped, pitched roofs swept 
almost to the ground, symbolizing spiritual as well as physical shelter.  

Like many seemingly chameleonlike personalities, Wright had a hidden aspect that 
showed him to be remarkably consistent and tenacious, particularly where some strongly 
held beliefs were concerned. One of his major themes, that of Unity, remains true of 
Wright, whether one sees this struggle from a purely aesthetic standpoint, or in terms of 
his quasi-mystical Celtic beliefs, or as stemming from the joint influence of his radical 
Unitarian background and Emersonian-Ruskinian ideals, or as the outward sign that he 
was seeking to resolve an inner conviction of being fragmented, incomplete, torn by 
conflicts and far from whole. 

That possibility is supported by a study of creativity, The Dynamics of Creation, by 
Anthony Storr, which explores some of the reasons why certain gifted men and women 
become creative artists while others with equal abilities do not. Storr's thesis is that the 
drive to create is often fueled by just such an awareness of inner fragmentation. "Creativity 
is one mode adopted by gifted people of coming to terms with, or finding symbolic 
solutions for, the internal tensions and dissociations {The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony 
Storr, p. 252} from which all human beings suffer in varying degree," and in fact some 
tests of creative individuals show that they exhibit more psychopathological traits than the 
average. {The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, p. 261} However, such studies also 
show as many strengths as weaknesses. To begin with, strongly creative people are much 
more independent-minded than their peers, finding it much less necessary to conform to 
generally accepted norms. They tend to be skeptical, even rebellious, and remarkably 
forceful advocates for their own views. The most creative of those among a group of 
architects "were primarily concerned with meeting an inner artistic standard of excellence 
which they discovered within themselves." {The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, p. 
235} 

Very creative men are aesthetically sensitive to a degree often labeled, in Western society, 
as "feminine," Storr writes, and are able to make contact with the intuitive and irrational 
side of themselves, the wellspring of their dreams, visions and poetic fantasies. Along with 
an appreciation for design and form goes a preference for complexity, asymmetry and 
incompleteness, rather than whatever is simple, straightforward and completed; in fact, the 
idea of a problem to resolve seems to be essential since it acts as a stimulus to their 
creativity. They are intensely motivated, endlessly curious people, with a breadth of 
interests; great talkers, impulsive and expansive by nature. {The Dynamics of Creation, 
Anthony Storr, p. 238} They have the ability to work over long periods toward complex 
goals with great tenacity of purpose. This inner strength has been remarked on down 
through the centuries. Hogarth, for instance, observed, "I know of no such thing as genius, 
genius is nothing but labour and diligence." {The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, p. 
255} In short, Storr's conclusion, that great gifts, unresolved emotional needs and 
determination are all involved, is important in helping to understand Wright's  creativity 
and the search for selfknowledge in which he, as a creator, was ultimately involved. 

Linking the real with the ideal, making symbolic representations of reality: one returns 
again to the concept of the home as sacred, which, one believes, had the largest single 
influence on Wright's decision to join the Arts and Crafts Movement. On the subject of his 
own work, what Wright had to say is far less self-revelatory than the symbols he chose, 
and the simpler they are, the more hidden meanings they can often be found to contain. 
One can therefore attach some importance to the symbol Wright designed for himself once 
he had set up as an independent architect and carved his name on a stone plaque beside his 
door. It was a square inside which was a cross inside a circle: the Celtic, or Iona, cross. 
Such antiquities, known for their great beauty and elaboration, were often used as markers, 
not only in the churchyard but also to proclaim the center of the village green and 
marketplace. On occasion they were used to mark boundaries or as totems to guide the 
traveler, and it is interesting to speculate that Wright may have employed his symbol with 
this in mind. {EB, vol. 6, p. 754.} One also wonders how much the circle could have had 
to do with the reconciliation of opposites already discussed, could in some sense have been 
a mandala, expressing the ultimate goal, to bring about a new center for the personality. 
{The Dynamics of Creation, p. 287.} For Wright, the cross inside a circle may also have 
been one more declaration of his mystical Celtic view of life, the sacred center of the 
cosmos, the infinite spirit and finite mind. He may have been referring here to yet another 
compelling psychic need, which was to see beyond outward forms and reach their spiritual 
essences, along with that magical and metaphysical moment when matter and spirit 
became one. 

Christmas was the best time. Daughter Catherine (later, Catherine Wright Baxter) 
remembered the huge tree that would be set up in the enormous playroom that Wright built 
onto the house the year after she was born, in 1895, to prepare for the arrival of their 
fourth child, David Samuel. {on September 26, 1895} Rather than add on new bedrooms, 
Wright decided to transform the studio he had been using on the second floor into a 
dormitory, split in half so that baby Catherine could have one side and his sons, Lloyd, 
John and David, the other. Then he added a handsome playroom, using a trick he would 
employ over and over again: one went through a long, narrow, low-ceilinged corridor 
and into a room that seemed, because of the height of its glorious barrelvaulted ceiling 
with a skylight in the center, to be far larger than it actually was. The entrance into a long, 
wide room, after the claustrophobia of the tunnel, gave one a feeling of expansiveness and 
release. The floor was bare of furniture, the walls were made of brick (Wright's first such 
use for interior walls), and there was an upper gallery that was ideal for puppet shows and 
other diversions, protected by a wooden balustrade and embellished with a copy of the 
Winged Victory, one of Wright's favorite statues. But there were also some low bay 
windows, just the right height for small children, cozy window seats and plenty of toy bins. 
The living room was kept for guests, the library was for reading, and the dining room was 
used only for meals. But the heart of the house, the room in which the children spent their 
early years, was this vast playroom, with its inviting spaces and its capacious fireplace 
crackling with five-foot logs. 

The playroom belonged to the children, but not exclusively. Kitty's brother, Arthur Colson 
Tobin, had many memories of Sunday afternoons and evenings when there would be a 
roaring fire going and his sister and her husband would entertain their friends, perhaps 
with an oyster bake. There was Richard Bach, a sculptor of some reputation; Lorado Taft, 
then a young man; Max Bendix, concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony; and J. Freeman, 
an old violin expert for Lyon and Healy's store; and any number of other figures from the 
literary, musical and architectural worlds. The lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose friendship 
would be so valuable to Wright in years to come, was often there. 

Arthur recalled one Sunday evening when an Italian expert in mosaics, Orlando Giannini, 
first came to visit the playroom and decided then and there that the half-circular space on 
the plaster wall above the fireplace was the perfect spot for a mural. So he improvised a 
scaffold and began to sketch. He drew and painted for many succeeding Sundays until he 
had completed his theme, doubtless one his host had suggested, "The Fisherman and the 
Genii" from the Arabian Nights. Exactly whose design it was is unclear. Tobin's memoir 
implies that it was Giannini's, while Wright called it "his first design in straightline 
pattern," but in any event, Tobin retained a vivid memory of the artist on his ladder while 
the party went on all around him, and the host, who was so good at putting guests at their 
ease, and got on with everyone, improvised at the piano. The playroom was where Frank 
kept his beloved player piano. {The Plan for Restoration and Adaptive Use of the Frank 
Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, p. 25.} 

Wright never learned to read music, but he had such a fine musical ear that it hardly 
mattered. Whenever he came into a room he would sit down and ripple off his version of 
the "Old Kent Road," the music hall song that became a kind of signature tune. He insisted 
that his children learn to play something, although Robert Llewellyn, who took mandolin 
lessons (an instrument, he later decided, good only for glee clubs and fado singers), 
wondered how serious his father really had been about their musical education. John 
played the violin, David had a flute, Catherine played the piano and sang, and Lloyd 
became a fine cellist. Wright's love of the classics is so well known that his weakness for 
Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as Victorian music hall ballads, has been obscured, as has his 
love for vaudeville and what Llewellyn called "nut comics." 

Both Llewellyn and John emphasized the gift their father had for charming anyone out of 
a bad mood, including a guest. He was a practical joker as well. {My Father Who Is on 
Earth, John Lloyd Wright, p. 31} John recalled the times when, seated beside his father at 
meals, he would see him swing an arm over his head. If John ducked, his father would 
pretend to be scratching his neck, but if John missed the maneuvre his father would "pop" 
him. John also told the story, perhaps apocryphal, about a burglary one night (Wright 
never carried keys and refused to lock doors). Wright turned on the lights so that the 
burglar could see better, then asked why "so handsome a fellow didn't get out and work in 
the light where he could be seen and appreciated." {My Father Who Is on Earth, John 
Lloyd Wright, p. 36} In short, he had that charm that was William Carey Wright's most 
priceless legacy, along with a sense of humor that was his strength and sometimes his 
defense.  

Lloyd wrote about his father's passion for oriental rugs. He, his father and John would 
open up great bales of dirty rugs bought at auction and scrub them with soap and water 
until their colors glowed. Soon there were Japanese prints as well, which Lloyd helped 
unwrap, unbook, clean and mount, providing his first aesthetic experience and inspiring a 
love of Japanese art that had a lifelong influence on his own career as architect and 
landscape designer. Their father was adorable; he was the life of the party; he was a great 
tease; he introduced them to music, poetry, art; he had a love of nature and a Welsh belief 
in spirits, "gnomes and undines," and yet. {My Father Who Is on Earth, p. 43.} One 
senses a note of sadness in these reminiscences. Wright was never unreservedly 
theirs-because he worked so hard, or because he was not quite fatherly enough, or 
because he loved them but could not show his feelings, or because his architectural 
creations were his real children. Perhaps there was an element of truth in all of these 
explanations; perhaps he could only be at his best with those who had no demands to 
make. One of the apprentices at Taliesin, years later, admired Wright's way with children. 
"He'd take my daughter by the thumb and lead her through the strawberry patch, giving 
her as many as she could eat." {Richard Wolford to author.} 

Father teased and played with and indulged his children, worked mysteriously late at night 
and yawned on holiday mornings, but Mother was always there. Mother lived for her 
children and was their disciplinarian when necessary, since Father never punished them. 
She picked up the theme of Froebel and had the playroom floor marked out in an 
arrangement of circles and squares derived from his ideas. Here she ran a kindergarten 
class to teach his precepts to her children and to the rest of the neighborhood as well. 
Jeanne T. Bletzer, one of her nieces, recalled that her Aunt Kitty would come and keep 
house when her parents-her father was Arthur, the youngest-were away. Kitty was, in 
many ways, very indulgent. She would let Jeanne play by the hour with her glorious red 
hair, taking it down and putting it back up again. She had given each of the children a 
"fairy book" of blank pages, and each night, when they were asleep, she would add a poem 
or an illustration to the pages and tuck it under their pillows, to be discovered in the 
morning. She had, Mrs. Bletzer thought, "a childlike quality." {to author} She could also 
be impossible. Jeanne's sister, Eleanor Tobin Kenney, recalled that one time their father 
had been making wine in the basement, and while Aunt Kitty was in charge, all the corks 
popped and the bottles overflowed. Aunt Kitty, being the stern teetotaler that she was, 
pretended to have heard nothing at all, and Eleanor, aged eleven, was left to clean up the 
mess. 

Aunt Kitty could also be thoughtless-she took Jeanne out on a streetcar ride one day 
when she had whooping cough-and there is some indication that she played favorites, 
making her sons feel more cherished than her daughters. Kitty was a teetotaler and had a 
terrific sweet tooth; she would not have coffee in the house and thought Coca-Cola was a 
drug, because it had "cocaine" in it. Contrary to some belief, she was not simply a 
compliant wife, although she was an adoring one. She was a woman of decided views 
("She talked faster than she listened," her niece said) and was always ready to argue a 
point. Her son David recalled, "As a family we got along very well, but we were all 
opinionated and hard on each other. A lot of criticisms. But we were united against the 
outside world. Fights? Oh, yes, there were plenty of those. I remember after Dad put us in 
the dormitory, there was a seven-foot partition dividing the girls' side from the boys', and 
when our sisters were having slumber parties we would throw a pillow over the partition. 
It took some skill." {to author} Jeanne recalled interminable wranglings at her parents' 
dinner table when her father, whose views differed sharply from his sister's, would say 
warningly, "Now, Kitty!" and she would retort, "Now, Arthur!" Jeanne thought that 
however much Kitty loved Frank, she would not suffer in martyrish silence. "If he was 
doing something wrong, she'd tell him so." {to author} 

Kitty, then, was a "woman of spirit," as she would have been described, but she certainly 
indulged her husband to a degree that would be considered heroic in today's world. After 
her first battle with him over the matter of mottoes to be emblazoned above doors, one she 
won (with the exception of the prominent statement over the fireplace), she seems to have 
relinquished any role in deciding what rooms should be built, what furnishings 
bought-one notes that Wright always decided on those-even how they should be placed. 
She tolerated the removal of draperies from windows, the covering of apertures said to be 
of such symbolic importance to women, confining herself to the areas of their life that he 
had left as her domain, i.e., running the household and bringing up their children. (One 
notes that they always had a cook and cleaning help.) She was the lady of the house, but it 
belonged to him, and as his passion for unity of design-first seen with the dining room of 
1895-grew in conviction, she let him make these choices without demur. Perhaps most 
revealing of her willingness to play Eliza to his Pygmalion-and there was a young 
autocrat beneath the veneer of charm-was the fact that she even wore the clothes he had 
designed. (They were always in neutrals, presumably so as not to detract from the decor.) 
Willing abdication of independence can go no further, but one finds additional proof of 
Kitty's compliance in the fact that she lived in misery with Anna while waiting for their 
house to be built and for Lloyd's birth; tolerated the uproar again when she was pregnant 
with David in 1895; and, in 1898, with four small children and Frances Barbara on the 
way, she somehow kept the household going while Frank knocked down walls and ripped 
out doors again, so as to add on a large studio for his growing practice. Throughout it all, 
she steadfastly affirmed her husband's greatness. 

As child bride, Kitty had been no match for her calculating mother-in-law. One of the 
most difficult aspects of marriage for Kitty must have been living next door to the one 
person who (as everyone knew) would always try to drive a wedge between her son and 
any woman perceived as a rival. At least Kitty had her own parents nearby. Her children 
loved their grandmother Tobin (called Blue Gramma because Lloyd was color-blind and 
thought, as a child, her red hair was blue), whose house was a well-ordered refuge always 
stocked with first-class food, and who was such a force in their lives. She was on quite 
another plane from her ineffectual, kindly, card-playing husband, who could not manage 
without her and died soon after she did. {Samuel Clark Tobin died soon after his wife: on 
December 5, 1916.} Flora Tobin never lost her temper, she was always calm, and she 
somehow organized everyone without making them feel controlled. It was a remarkable 
show of skill, one that Llewellyn never forgot. 

For Kitty and Frank, there were the obligatory trips to spend their vacations in Spring 
Green on one of the Lloyd Jones farms where, as any of Wright's sons would have joked, 
you only worked twice as hard as you did the rest of the year, and you sat on porches in the 
evenings listening to Uncle Enos plan his musicales and lectures to pay for the new piano 
in the chapel. {bought in 1902} Or you went to Unity Chapel with Uncle John (who fretted 
about the condition of the coffins), so that he could show you the new plantings and 
declare, "Now you will see that the little spot is dearer than ever." Or you might have 
listened to Uncle Thomas's complaining about his woodlot, the one he bought with Uncle 
James after he broke two ribs and punctured a lung, but which never paid for itself. Uncle 
James, that intrepid farmer, father of eight, who was superintendent of his sisters' farm at 
Hillside, who had been treasurer of the town of Wyoming and also its chairman, was 
always ready to buy land and had vastly increased his holdings. Letters from James to 
Jenkin indicate that he was also chronically short of money to pay taxes and other 
expenses. What the letters do not mention, since it went without saying, is that his 
relatives had cosigned on his mortgages. Most farm families expected that, since land, 
farm machinery, buildings and livestock were heavy investments. Such purchases were 
usually made when money was cheap and food prices high, and the more ambitious the 
farmer was, the more debts he was likely to carry. But one never knew when the prices 
might fall. Outwardly prosperous, James was facing an uncertain future-but so were the 
Aunts, who had signed over and over again for their favorite brother. 

If the Lloyd Joneses were, by and large, feckless when it came to money, there were a few 
members prudent to the point of miserliness. {Jenkin Lloyd Jones: Lincoln's Soldier of 
Civic Righteousness, Richard H. Thomas, p. 50.} Anna was one, and Jenkin was another. 
A study of the way he hoarded his tiny army wages during the Civil War demonstrates his 
ability to hold on to a dollar, which soon made him prosperous and the target of frequent 
appeals for money from his brothers and sisters. He had never yearned to farm, but he 
wanted his own piece of ground in the Helena Valley and soon saw his opportunity. His 
father had settled there partly because of Helena, that small settlement on the south bank 
of the Wisconsin River that grew up around the lead-shot business at Tower Hill (where, 
from a tower, molten lead was dropped into water below to form perfectly rounded shots). 
With the coming of the railroad, which bypassed Helena in favor of Spring Green on the 
other side of the river, and the decline of its one industry, Helena sank into decay. By 1889 
it had been abandoned, and Jenkin bought Tower Hill at a tax sale for sixty dollars. He 
then set up the Tower Hill School of Religion and Ethics as a summer Unitarian 
encampment, built a summer cottage, Westhope, for his family and, with his usual 
herculean energy, had soon attracted crowds to hear lectures by leading American writers, 
scientists, politicians and ministers. 

Jenkin, of course, was one of the chief draws. He had a limitless fund of topics, many 
centering on farm themes. One of his most celebrated sermons took as its theme the 
building of a barn and the work of their favorite stonemason, David Timothy, who had 
come from their area of Wales (where he had built the beautiful new chapel of 
Llwynrhydowen) and had stayed to build Unity Chapel and Hillside Home School, carving 
the family motto of "Truth Against the World" over doorways and fireplaces. When he 
died, his funeral took place in Unity Chapel, and Jenkin eulogized him as "a 
barn-builder, a cellar-maker, a shaper of stone walls, a builder of houses for men to 
dwell in. . . ." {Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 67, no.2, 1983-84, p. 128.} Another 
favorite theme of Jenkin's was the great benefit of the machine to mankind and, in 
particular, the American reaper, since it made possible the feeding of multitudes. 

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who loomed so large in his nephew's life where philosophy and ideals 
were concerned, whose friendships on the national and international scene would give him 
such an unparalleled opportunity to meet influential men, whose wealthy Chicago friends 
could be counted on to find work for an up-and-coming architect, was always a problem 
for Wright. One sees, to a certain extent, the same antagonisms among all the Lloyd Jones 
males, those strong-willed, energetic and highly competitive people who never could 
manage to like one another's concepts, no matter how stubbornly they would fight for those 
same ideas on the outside. There would always be a clash of wills, in this case accentuated 
by the fact that Jenkin may have doubted that Frank was as experienced as he claimed, and 
distrusted his nephew's glib sales patter. If this were so, Frank had not learned the lessons 
of Unity Chapel when, in 1894, hearing that Uncle Jenk planned to build once again, he 
pressed his services upon his uncle. Jenkin was not at all sure he wanted Frank either. 
What he did want, according to Professor Thomas E. Graham, "was to be his own 
architect. He kept trying to find people who would rubber-stamp what he wanted to do." 
{to author} That was not going to be Frank Lloyd Wright, and only deliberate delusion on 
both sides could have led to the decision to let Frank try his hand. Jenkin's concept was, 
even in this day and age, unusual. Not only did he want a larger building to house his 
growing congregation, not only did he no longer wish it to be "homey," much less 
decorated with spires, steeples and stained glass, but he also did not want it to look 
anything like a church. At about this time, Jenkin Lloyd Jones severed the connection 
between his congregation and the American Unitarian Association. It became just "All 
Souls' Church," and its pulpit was open to anyone, from the pope to a Brahman priest or a 
captain of the Salvation Army. {Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 67, no. 2, 1983-84, 
p. 123.} His goal, to build a seven-day-a-week institution that would minister to the 
whole person, now seemed a reality. The Abraham Lincoln Center (named for his hero) 
would contain a sanctuary, a gymnasium, classrooms, meeting rooms and a library as well 
as residents' quarters. Since its function had become that of a social service agency, its 
founder wanted no nonsense about the way it should look. His nephew designed an office 
building, a Sullivanesque rectangle several stories high, that was a model of function and 
rectitude. 

Uncle Jenk should have found it "a four-square building for a four-square gospel," as he 
put it, but he did not. {MAN, p. 158} He niggled and nagged and kept asking for 
revisions, made Wright collaborate with another architect (Dwight H. Perkins, who had 
just built a successful church) and even made his nephew submit his design to a New York 
architect for criticism. {BR, p. 28} Wright suffered the indignity with remarkable 
restraint-the process seems to have taken three or four years. He also tried to exercise that 
persuasive gift for which he became so rightly celebrated. Jenkin was not to be won over, 
and by the time the building was dedicated in 1905, Wright had long since left the project. 
It was one of the few battles he did not win. 

Jenkin's caution-his nephew would have used another word-was equally apparent in the 
matter of the windmill the Aunts wanted built to complete their new water system beside 
the reservoir on top of the hill above the Hillside Home School. The Aunts were all for 
letting Frank design something new, and the uncles, led by Jenkin, all for putting up 
something sensible, steel and cheap. The sisters prevailed, and Frank produced a 
sixty-foot wooden tower of a most radical and unusual design, an interlocking octagon 
and diamond (hence the name, the Romeo and Juliet windmill). It was to stand on a 
stone-and-concrete base, reinforced horizontally by a wooden platform every ten feet 
and clad in shingles, to match the building he had constructed for the Aunts a decade 
before. Nell and Jane thought it delightful. The uncles were sure it would fall down. The 
Aunts won again, and since, as Wright eventually wrote, their wonderful old stonemason 
was building the foundation, he knew that the tower would withstand any storm. One of 
the charming passages in Wright's autobiography describes the long vigil of the uncles as, 
one by one, growing old and going to their graves, they watched from their doorways 
whenever the wind came up to see the windmill fall, as they knew it must. Wright knew 
exactly what they would say. "Well, there it is-down at last! We thought so!" It was 
standing when he wrote those words in 1932, and is standing yet. {A2, p. 138.} 

Wright's Lincoln Center project was one of the few occasions in which he willingly 
collaborated with other architects. But during the early years, before he had arrived at that 
synthesis of ideals and forms that would set him apart from his peers, he was involved in 
several quasi-partnerships and informal associations with a group of extremely promising 
young men making their names in the rapidly developing city. His first move after leaving 
Sullivan was to set up an office in the Schiller Building with his friend Cecil Corwin. 
Then he learned that a group of architects was taking an office in common in Steinway 
Hall, a new eleven-story office and theater building that Dwight H. Perkins, his 
collaborator for the Lincoln Center, had designed. Perkins and his friends Myron Hunt and 
George W. Maher were moving in together, presumably to save on costs, and had set up a 
joint outer office, with separate quarters within. It seemed like an ideal arrangement for 
Wright and Corwin, who moved in, though Corwin would soon leave, having decided he 
was in the wrong profession. 

Wright already knew Maher, whom he had met when they both worked for Silsbee. Maher 
had left in 1888 to set up his own practice at the age of twenty-three, providing an 
example that would not have been lost on Wright, particularly since Maher was also 
making something of a name for himself as a theoretician. His particular interest was how 
to make a house look substantial, and he lectured frequently on ways to increase the effect 
of massiveness and solidity in design. {H. Allen Brooks, Jr.: "The Early Work of the 
Prairie Architects," JSAH, vol. XIX, March 1960, p. 3.} Hunt, another gifted young 
architect who eventually moved to Southern California, was a year younger than Wright. 
Robert Spencer, who was two years older, was yet another. He would also take his cue 
from Voysey and Scott, "reinterpreting and simplifying architecture from the medieval 
past." {BR, p. 91} Wright retained an office at Steinway Hall, even after he had built a 
studio onto his house and had attempted several partnerships with other young architects 
after Corwin, before deciding to take Sullivan's advice and "keep his office in his hat." 
{Genius and the Mobocracy, Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 87.} The members of the Steinway 
Hall group are now considered the founders of the New School of the Midwest, or Prairie 
school, attesting to the way in which these men exchanged ideas. Wright acknowledged 
the value of that association in 1908 when he wrote, "How I longed for companionship 
until I began to know the younger men and how welcome was Robert Spencer, and then 
Myron Hunt, and Dwight Perkins. . . . Inspiring days they were, I am sure, for us all." 
{Myron Hunt, 1868-1952: The Search for a Regional Architecture, Baxter Art Gallery, p. 
10.} 

Wright had five commissions the first year of his independence, an enviable start for a 
young man. From then until 1900 his yearly total went from a low of two to a high of nine. 
{from an informal chart made by John Lloyd Wright and now at the Avery Architectural 
Library, Columbia University.} The course, though bumpy, showed a steady advance, and 
as the jobs came in he added to his staff. By the time Charles E. White, Jr., a young and 
ambitious architect  from the hills of Vermont, joined Wright's studio in 1903, Wright was 
employing seven people. Numerous young men continually came and went, whether 
painters, designers, sculptors or architects in training. But those who had the longest 
associations with him were Marion Mahony, a gifted designer of tables, chairs, murals and 
mosaics, renowned for her renderings (many of which were later exhibited as by Wright) 
{BR, P. 80}; Walter Burley Griffin, whom she later married, at that time general practical 
man and writer of specifications; Barry Byrne, a young novice who quickly gained in 
expertise; William E. Drummond, another valuable assistant; Isabel Roberts, secretary, 
who also worked on ornamental glass and for whom Wright would design one of his best 
houses; and John Van Bergen, later architect of many Oak Park houses. George Willis, 
one of Wright's youngest and most promising draftsmen, had already left by the time 
White arrived, following Hunt to Los Angeles-but by then, they were all jumping from 
job to job around the country. 

As White had noticed, Frank Wright seemed to get many new commissions. Comments by 
some of his early clients show that they were often moved to hire him as architect not 
because of his buildings, which were considered bizarre by some of Chicago's staider 
citizens, but in spite of them. He was too delightful for words, according to an enthusiastic 
letter written by W. E. Martin to his younger brother, Darwin D. Martin, the man who 
would become Wright's lifelong patron and private Croesus. Another client, Arthur 
Heurtley, who in 1902 had commissioned one of Wright's most famous houses in Oak Park 
and also a cottage in northern Michigan, was, six years after construction, just as 
enthusiastic as Martin had been. Heurtley wrote to a German architect that Wright was 
one of the most remarkable men he had ever met. Not only was he a fine musician with a 
pronounced artistic sense in everything he did, but his character was impeccable, without a 
flaw. The man's work, in short, reflected the qualities of its creator, and he was proud to 
call that man his friend. {July 19, 1908, Archives of American Art.} 

Wright's gift for making a charming impression was just one of the attributes he used to 
such advantage during his Oak Park years. He seemed to have infinite spare time for 
writing speeches, usually embellished with many crossings-out and balloons and often in 
several versions, setting out his ideas about architecture at leisurely length. He looked for 
opportunities to exhibit his renderings and models, and showed almost every year at the 
Chicago Architectural Club, beginning after his first year of practice{1894}. For that 
event, the invitation he designed included a photograph of a winged cherub holding some 
stalks of goldenrod that turned out to be his red-headed son John. {My Father Who Is on 
Earth, pp. 23-24.} He was eager to lecture, not just about architecture. Returning from 
Japan after a three-month stay in 1905, he proceeded to give a talk on its art, and then he 
and Catherine held a "Japanese social" at their home. She was also doing some lecturing 
of her own, and kept their social contacts alive through her activities with the Oak Park 
women's club. 

By 1900 Wright's opinions on a number of topics were considered newsworthy enough to 
warrant prominence. If he had intended to live out his life in the columns of newspapers, 
he could not have acted any more effectively than he did in those first years, as he went 
about joining clubs, starting new ones, cultivating friendships, giving parties, advancing 
causes and, again and again, courting the press, just as his father had done. It is a measure 
of his success that, by July 1913, he had become a life member of the Press Club of 
Chicago. 

One of his earliest triumphs was the not inconsiderable feat of persuading a magazine 
editor not just to write about his work but to let him hand-pick the writer-indeed, he 
would come to expect it. An early example of this is given by White, who noted, when he 
first arrived in Wright's studio late in 1903, that Wright had chosen Russell Sturgis, a 
noted but elderly architectural critic, to prepare an article about his work for the 
Architectural Record. But after meeting him, Wright decided that Sturgis did not 
"understand" the studio's work and intended to look for a younger man. {White to 
Willcox, May 13, 1904.} 

Although Wright's appetite for whatever might further his career was gargantuan, it was 
not limitless. Wright left early in 1905 for Japan and returned with his energy and 
enthusiasm restored. To be in a severe slump did not happen often since he had the rare 
gift of being able to relax, take trips to the theater, give parties, spend time at the piano, or 
go riding on his favorite black horse, Kano, in the woods and fields of the adjoining 
countryside (what would become the suburb of River Forest). He needed those periods of 
furious movement to compensate for long hours spent hunched over a drawing board, 
making precise calculations and diagrams. Riding Kano at a gallop was succeeded by 
equally headlong bursts of speed in his new, four-cylinder Stoddard Dayton sportscar, 
one of the first three cars in Oak Park, custom-made to his specifications with a yellow 
exterior, brown seats and brass trimmings. The citizens of Oak Park called it the "Yellow 
Devil." It could do sixty miles an hour, and Wright would clamber into it, in a linen duster 
and goggles, and roar through the streets of Oak Park with his long hair streaming in the 
breeze, often accompanied by some charming friend. Since the Chicago speed limit was 
twenty-five miles an hour, he paid plenty of speeding tickets. {My Father Who Is on 
Earth, p. 51.} 

This hard-working, clean-living, upright citizen of Oak Park had one failing, one that 
might have been expected, and that is revealed in Charles White's comment that if you 
worked for him, you had to be willing to "hang on by the teeth" and get paid whenever 
your employer happened to think of it. {White to Willcox, March 4, 1906.} Wright wanted 
handmade cars and thoroughbred horses and beautiful surroundings; he needed to cut a 
bella figura, and so he spent too much. His checks were returned by the bank marked 
N.S.F., his bills for the butcher, baker, grocer and building supplier went unpaid for 
months, and though he confessed that this wildly improvident spending gave him anxious 
moments, he seemed unable to stop. Beyond the human need to impress, appear to be 
someone to reckon with and an aesthete's love of beautiful objects (convincing himself that 
because he was one of "nature's noblemen," he deserved them); behind all the 
rationalizations lay the scars of his long battles with Anna. And so, at night, the secret 
knowledge of heavy debts nagged at him like a remorseless conscience. {A2, p. 110} The 
more frantically Anna tried to urge him to reform (as she had tried, and failed, to do with 
William), the more determined her son became to prove her wrong. And since she 
vacillated between punitiveness and overindulgence-he knew that if he resisted long 
enough, she would solve his problems-he learned nothing, except to endure the anxiety 
and wait out the reproaches, pleas and verbal "punishment" from his nearest and dearest 
and from his own conscience, as the price to be paid. So much, he also learned, depended 
on how cleverly one could flatter, fool and cajole people into forgetting. That marvelous 
ability was highly refined by the time his son Llewellyn was twelve years old. In an 
unpublished memoir, Llewellyn recalled visiting his father in Chicago and seeing him 
charm a determined creditor so thoroughly that the man left laughing at his jokes. Wright 
told his son he had just had an object lesson in how to avoid paying a bill. Or, if an arm of 
the law were involved, such as the sheriff who appeared one day to collect on unpaid bills 
for the children's playroom, and the matter simply could not be evaded, Wright's panache 
could be counted on to win a partial reprieve. In this case, the sheriff stayed until next 
morning, when Wright scraped together the eighty-five dollars owed by getting another 
advance on his salary. Then there were times when the saintly forbearance of a particular 
creditor would appeal to Wright's better nature, and he would contritely make good. When 
all else failed, and his back was to the wall, Wright would go on the attack, blaming 
everyone (banks, moneylenders, unscrupulous creditors) for his predicament, and he was a 
dangerous adversary. {Robert Llewellyn Wright} It was never a good idea to try to coerce 
or shame him into making good, although Kitty may have tried. He writes that, one day 
little Catherine, dirty and chewing gum, appeared in his studio just as he was trying to 
impress a very fashionable client. She stuck out a dirty little hand and said that Mama 
wanted money. A dime! Just a dime. And he had to confess that he did not have even a 
dime in his pocket. {A2, pp. 116-117} It was a great joke, and eventually Mama 
appeared to take her insistent daughter away, having proved her point. 

There were disasters that would be self-inflicted (though they might not seem so to the 
person involved), and there were genuine catastrophes that struck at random; Wright was 
to have more than his share of both. Along with the consequences of extravagance, the 
theme of conflagration is almost a leitmotif of his life. If, as his son John wrote, Wright 
believed that the righteous God of Isaiah had struck him down with a merciless hand and 
if, at such moments, he saw himself as a character out of the Old Testament, then he might 
have been forgiven. In retrospect it is difficult not to see the Iroquois fire of 1903 as an 
omen, the precursor of another, greater and more terrible blaze that would leave his life in 
ruins.  

It all started innocently enough. Wright had bought tickets for a matinee performance of 
Mr. Blue Beard Jr., a Christmas play for children at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago. 
David had typhoid fever, so Mama, as usual, was homebound, but Lloyd, aged thirteen, 
and John, aged eleven, were allowed to attend in the company of Blue Gramma. On 
December 30, 1903, they sat in third row center. A cousin, Rosalind Parish, a pretty 
twenty-year-old, was up in the balcony with a group of Wisconsin college girls. The 
"Christmas extravaganza," as it was called, was one of the biggest events of the year. That 
particular matinee, every one of the 1,800 seats was filled, mostly with parents and 
children. All went well until an octet began to sing "In the Pale Moonlight." Then, 
according to a newspaper report, a calcium light on a six-foot stand on the stage 
exploded, setting a tinseled backdrop alight. Flames, sparks and burning draperies began 
to drop onto the stage, and in a second the whole stage was on fire. The play's star, a 
comedian named Eddy Foy, rushed out, half in costume and half out of it, pleading for 
calm and asking that the asbestos safety curtain, which would have contained the fire, be 
dropped. As luck would have it, the curtain stuck halfway down. 

One of the eyewitnesses, a professional ballplayer in an upper box, saw the fire's start and 
realized that fast action was called for. He ran down to an exit, but the usher refused to 
open the doors. The ballplayer threw him to one side and forced the locked doors open. By 
then there was a panicked crowd behind him. He was pushed against a second set of iron 
doors that were also locked. He managed to break that lock and freed up one of the exits. It 
was the same story at all the other exits from the theater; at one, a policeman actually tried 
to repel the crowd. In their panic, those behind forced those trapped by locked doors into a 
pyramid. More than six hundred men, women and children died, including Rosalind 
Parish-no one in the balcony escaped alive. 

Back in the third row center, Blue Gramma, showing her famous presence of mind, stood 
up, removing the long hatpins from her hat, held them high over her head, and inched 
John, Lloyd and herself toward the nearest exit. John was forced away from her by the 
crowd and pinned against a column. Blue Gramma had disappeared, and so had Lloyd. 
"No battlefield ever disclosed a more fearful scene," one journalist wrote. The bodies of 
women and children who had jumped, or been thrown, from windows were lying in the 
street; others were being carried out of the theater, and doctors were attending the 
wounded and dying. Suddenly, John caught sight of his father in the crowd. Then Blue 
Gramma appeared. She had become separated from Lloyd as well, but he had fought his 
way free and was at home.  {Account of the Iroquois Theater fire derived from My Father 
Who Is on Earth, pp. 45-48, and contemporary accounts including that of the  Chicago 
Record-Herald, December 31, 1903.} 

It has been suggested that the activities at Jane Addams's Hull House, a center for Arts and 
Crafts ideas in Chicago, played a role in calling Wright's attention to the movement. 
Wright refers to Hull House in his autobiography and would have known about events 
there through his uncle and also his wife, who was developing her interest in social issues. 
However, in those first years after Hull House was established in 1889, Jane Addams 
appears to have been more absorbed with the pressing issues of poverty, unemployment, 
sweat shops, child labor, truancy and lack of sanitation than with the arts and crafts. One 
concludes, from her reminiscences, that she did not turn her attention to these subjects 
much before 1895 or 1896, and by then Wright's interest was well established. 

It seems more likely that the galvanizing event in his life may have been the publication in 
1893, the year he left Sullivan, of a new magazine called the Studio, which first brought 
the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement to a wide audience. One does not know that he 
read the early issues, but it seems plausible, given his interest in trends, being published 
and his contacts with other young architects with similar enthusiasms. George Grant 
Elmslie, who stayed with Adler and Sullivan, reported that while the firm's office received 
the British Architect, it was seldom read, but the Studio and its American version, 
International Studio, were pounced upon. {"C.F.A. Voysey_To and From America," by 
David Gebhard, JSAH, vol. XXX, no. 4, December 1971, p. 307.} One can also deduce 
something from the fact that when, three years later, an American magazine was formed to 
promote the same concepts, Wright's hand was quickly evident. A year later he became 
one of the founding members of the Chicago society dedicated to the Arts and Crafts. 

Wright's early acceptance of the Arts and Crafts Movement led to an architectural 
philosophy that was formative. As he must have seen, its architects had found the way to 
make a practical application of those ideals of truth, beauty and moral feeling that he 
espoused. They were doing so in fresh and novel ways, and because large goals rather than 
a particular style were at issue, he was given the scope he needed to develop his distinctive 
talent and demonstrate the extent of his creativity and versatility, those attributes that were 
so much admired in the movement. The emphasis on studying the qualities that made a 
particular landscape unique was another gift from the Arts and Crafts theoreticians to 
Wright and his fellow architects, helping them focus on the way to achieve an architecture 
uniquely suited to its Illinois setting. The Arts and Crafts Movement was a manifesto, a set 
of principles, but because British architects were the precursors, by the late 1890s such 
architects as Voysey, Baillie Scott, Lutyens and Ashbee were a decade ahead of the 
Americans in the task of translating high ideals into actual bricks and mortar. As has been 
noted, the principle of a completely unified concept, from chimney trim to placemats, had 
been one of the ideas that immediately captivated Wright in designing the dining room 
and furnishings of his house; his ability to unify every detail of his architecture would 
become one of his major accomplishments. The idea was daring and novel for Chicago, 
but it had already been demonstrated with some success by Arts and Crafts architects and 
there were, also, many historical precedents. In the eighteenth century, one thinks of the 
designs by the British architect Robert Adam at Kedleston for everything from murals to 
plate warmers, and in the nineteenth, of the town houses and room furnishings designed 
by such Art Nouveau innovators as Victor Horta. That Wright should start with a dining 
room is particularly interesting since it was one of the rooms Arts and Crafts architects 
deemed most important. "In common with most nineteenth-and twentieth-century 
conservative reform movements, Arts and Crafts designers believed that industrialism had 
shattered the family, bringing rootlessness and a loss of tradition: hence, emphasis 
centered on the family and hearth," Richard Guy Wilson wrote. {ATL, p. 103.} Wright's 
design, with its severely high-backed chairs and uncompromisingly formal air, had an 
ecclesiastical look {SM, p. 74}, which was very much in harmony with the movement's 
emphasis upon the ceremonial, or ritualistic, aspect of breaking bread. 

Wright's designs in 1889 for his own living room gave it an inglenook fireplace, the 
symbolic way of stressing the importance of the hearth that he would use again and again 
in his early designs. In fact, the massive central chimney deep in the center of the house 
became an unvarying feature of his Prairie-school houses. Echoing the Arts and Crafts 
belief that the fireplace was the primeval center of the house, he would write, "The big 
fire[place in the house . . . became now a place for a real fire.  A real fireplace at that time 
was extraordinary. There were mantels instead. A mantel was a marble frame for a few 
coals in a grate . . . . So the integral fireplace became an important part of the building 
itself . . . . It comforted me to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house 
itself."{A2, p. 141.} 

Wright's early design also showed his first tentative attempt to experiment with an open 
floor plan, i.e., to dispense with an interior partitioned into boxlike rooms, each with its 
specific function, that had characterized the Victorian house and was becoming an 
anachronism in American life. He is usually given credit for having pioneered this idea 
even though others were using the same concepts before him, among them Baillie Scott. 
However, according to the writer James D. Kornwolf, the shift toward a feeling of 
spaciousness and greater internal flexibility began even earlier, in the 1870s, with the 
work of H. H. Richardson and other architects of the period. Not only did they create 
designs that were a revelation in showing the possibilities of this new idea, but they began 
to experiment in the use of movable partitions in place of walls, another innovation usually 
given to Wright. Wright is often the target of criticism for his low ceilings, a criticism he 
artlessly brought on his own head by his comment that he designed them to accommodate 
his own modest height of five feet eight and a half inches, but the truth is that he was a 
master of the theatrical manipulation of space, the idea he had first used with his 
children's playroom. Since he realized that the human eye cannot distinguish readily 
between slight differences in ceiling heights, he made them either very low or very 
high-sometimes, with virtuoso aplomb, in the same room-so as to intensify the dramatic 
effect. That kind of experimentation, of varying room heights and levels rather than floors, 
also came from Richardson and his contemporaries. {In Pursuit of Beauty, Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, pp. 350-351.} 

Wright would also become famous for his characteristically low, massive, 
all-encompassing roofs with broad overhangs, another concept that may have evolved 
from the work of Voysey and Baillie Scott, as seen in the Studio, Dekorative Kunst and 
American journals such as House Beautiful and Indoors and Out. {ATL, p. 83.} These 
roofs, symbolically protective and reassuring, also had immediate practical advantages in a 
region of harsh summers and bitterly cold winters. Other details, such as Wright's use of 
leaded casement windows, built-in furniture, art glass, broad and low doors, stained 
plaster walls edged with wood 2931 stripping and another very typical Wright touch, the 
hidden entrance, can also be seen in work of British architects of the movement. All this is 
not to imply, however, that Wright's designs were slavish imitations. Part of his strength 
lay in his ability to transform the ideas and concepts of others so that they looked 
distinctively new. And in absorbing the teachings of the movement, he particularly 
distinguished himself in the way he integrated his Prairie houses with the flat, unending 
American horizons of the Midwest-hence the name-stressing the horizontal with his 
spreading roofs and bands of windows, and stretching out porches and pergolas into the 
surrounding gardens so that the house and its setting would merge and blur into a single 
harmonious whole. Even his insistence on the use of natural materials inside and out, 
wood, brick and stone, following another Arts and Crafts dictum, with its overtones of the 
rural cottage or medieval castle, seemed peculiarly right, suggesting that the landscape's 
uncompromising vistas required a similarly direct, unadorned response. 

It has been argued that Wright quickly parted from the Arts and Crafts Movement because 
of its rejection of the machine (following the dictates of William Morris) and because of 
his own belief that the machine was a boon to mankind-as Jenkin Lloyd Jones had 
argued-provided that it remained in control of artists who designed with its strengths and 
weaknesses in mind. This difference is so central, it is said, that Wright cannot be called 
an Arts and Crafts architect. However, David A. Hanks, the authority on Wright's 
decorative designs, furniture and objets d'art has questioned in The Art and Craft of the 
Machine how much weight should be placed on this difference of opinion, which seems 
more apparent than real. Many of Wright's designs for machine-made furniture required 
extensive finishing by hand; conversely, many other Arts and Crafts architects did not 
subscribe to the strict belief that the machine should never be used. {{David Hanks, "The 
Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright," Frank Lloyd Wright Newsletter, vol. II, no. 3, 
second quarter 1979.} } The point is so often made that the fact that Wright had no 
quarrel with the movement's other beliefs, as was clear the year he made his famous 
speech, 1901, has been overlooked. To judge from Wright's description of his ideal, 
"organic" house, in a lecture he gave at Princeton University three decades later, he never 
deviated from those first principles. He set out nine points; six of them are quoted below. 
These six are identical to the goals set forth by Baillie Scott in the Studio thirty years 
before. {M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts and Crafts Movement, James D. Kornwolf, p. 
394, and The Future of Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, pp. 141-142.} 


1.  To reduce . . . the separate rooms to a minimum, and make all come together as 
enclosed space. 

2.  To associate the building as a whole with its site. 

3.  To eliminate the room as a box and the house as another. 

6.  To eliminate combinations of different materials in favor of mono-material . . . to use 
no ornament that did not come out of the nature of materials. 

8.  To incorporate as organic architecture . . . furnishings, making them all one with the 
building and designing them in simple terms for machine work. 

9.  Eliminate the decorator. He was all curves and all efflorescence, if not all period. 

Wright's felt lack of any drawing talent may have sent him in search of activities that did 
not require this particular ability. As an adolescent he had spent hours experimenting with 
an old printing press in the company of his devoted friend Robie. He would go on to 
become an accomplished graphics designer, inventing numerous variations for his own 
stationery, often ingeniously folded, his own posters, exhibition leaflets, brochures, 
programs and the like. His lifelong interest in graphics and typography was soon joined to 
an enthusiasm for amateur photography, and when an opportunity developed to use both, 
he seized it. That was provided by William Winslow, his first client after leaving Sullivan, 
and Chauncey Williams, for whom he had also built a house in River Forest, who joined 
forces in 1895 to found a small publishing firm. Winslow was an amateur and presumably 
chief financial backer. Williams was a publisher by profession, and Wright seems to have 
joined the firm immediately as chief designer. 

In 1895 the Auvergne Press, as it was called, printed its first book, an edition of Keats's 
The Eve of St. Agnes, for which Wright designed the title page. They then set to work on a 
second, Wright contributing photographic studies of dried weeds and several 
pen-and-ink designs of highly stylized flower patterns. The book's title was The House 
Beautiful, a reprint of a sermon by William C. Gannett, editor of Unity and close friend of 
Jenkin Lloyd Jones. Gannett's account of the construction of the Lloyd Jones family church 
made the first public mention of the family's "boy architect." Gannett's sermon is not 
inspired, but his title was most up-to-date and symbolic, echoing as it did the central 
concern of the Arts and Crafts Movement. (The concern was so central, in fact, that a 
magazine would be founded in Chicago of that same name the same winter of 1896-97, 
but by another publisher, to promote the ideals of the movement.) {BR, p. 24, note 39, and 
HA, pp. 200-201.} {Elizabeh Gordon, former editor of House Beautiful, and a friend of 
Wright's, believes that he was one of the ideological founders of the Chicago magazine. 
(Conversation, October 4, 1989.) Author was unable to verify.} 

The chance to experiment in a new field was obviously a great lure for Wright, but what 
seems to have meant most to him was the importance of the message being put forward by 
this old friend of his family, one that he could "clothe with chastity," as he noted in the 
book itself.  

When Wright referred to this publishing experiment years later, he confined himself to a 
dismissive reference to his design and did not have a word to say about its central message. 
{letter to Samuel R. Morrill, September 27, 1949, Houghton Library, Harvard University.} 
He must have liked it then; he must have felt that it expressed all that could be said about 
his own life at the time, and he must have shared the sentiment expressed by the 
sentimental poem Gannett quoted to close his book. The last stanza reads as follows: 

Together greet life's solemn real, 
Together own one glad ideal, 
Together laugh, together ache, 
And think one thought-"Each other's sake," 
And hope one hope-in new-world weather, 
To still go on, and go together. 


A House Divided 

See: this wood has come to make you  
Remember the hands that carved it, to take you  
Back to the love and the pledges you shared. . . . 

"The Husband's Message" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 22.} 

The broad-brimmed hat, the cane and the swirling cape with which Frank Lloyd Wright 
strode through life and which was the costume most people conjured up when they thought 
of him, was adopted during his first great period as an architect, from the turn of the 
century to the outbreak of World War I. The instincts of the aesthete would have led him 
to choose the hat most flattering to his rather elongated and aquiline features (the brim, 
pulled down snappily over one eye, looked so good in profile), along with the flaring cape 
that when photographed from below, a trick he eventually adopted, made him tower over 
the scenery, as if being viewed from front-row stalls. The effect was completed by the 
perfectly superfluous cane, which Wright used as a decorative adjunct and for making 
broad gestures that would outline a new scheme or jab home a point. No one who ever saw 
him make an entrance in that regalia ever forgot him, so it is not surprising that he should 
have capitalized on such a useful tool in the game of self-promotion. 

No one remembers nowadays, since it is so long ago, that the costume was not Wright's 
invention but came from another prominent member of the American Arts and Crafts 
Movement, Elbert Hubbard. This pioneer in advertising, cofounder of the Larkin 
Company, a mailorder soap company in Buffalo for which Wright would design a famous 
building, then leader of an Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, had 
joined forces with his British counterparts to reject the drab and sober uniformity of 
Victorian attire, establishing themselves as reformers in this field, as in everything else. 
Instead of the closely fitting suits of the businessman, they adopted looser, more 
comfortable country tweeds, such as the American craftsman's sack suit. There is a 
photograph, taken in 1904, of Hubbard wearing just such a tweedy outfit and the kind of 
expression designed to silence comment. With it, Hubbard also wears the black satin bow, 
dashingly tied at the neck, that was de rigueur for the artist, as may be seen from 
photographs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the same period, another sartorial flourish 
that Wright would adopt. Hubbard's hair, like Wright's, was rather longer than the fashion, 
which would have seemed more of an affront to American than to British sensibilities of 
the same period. He also wears the broad-brimmed, soft-crowned hat that Wright would 
make his own. In all essential ways, this is a close cousin of the flat, clerical soft bowler 
worn by Protestant clergymen of the time, although somewhat more exaggerated-a 
pardonable ostentation. Those Arts and Crafts men whom Hubbard emulated were 
campaigning for sanity in an age when women still endured the tortures of the whalebone 
corset, lending their influence to a movement for dress reform that had begun in the 1850s 
and was considerably enhanced when Oscar Wilde, that nonconformist in dress along with 
everything else, took to the platform for dresses that would allow ease of movement and 
normal waistlines. So to advocate what was radical, because it was so eminently sane-"'T' 
would ring the bells of Heaven / The wildest peal for years / If Parson lost his senses / And 
people came to theirs," as Hodgson wrote-would always have a great appeal for Wright. 
In years to come he would sport such novelties as trousers buttoned at the ankles for 
protective country wear, made to his own design. However, one has to believe that his 
main motive was to differentiate himself from the common herd by the shortest possible 
means. The hat, the cape, the flowing tie, the cane-all these labeled him as a presence, 
someone to contend with and, above all, an artist. 

Hubbard, a pioneer in mass-marketing techniques, was a singular entrepreneur whose 
gift for business and self-promotion was coupled with an interest in the arts and a belief 
in the need for the reforms the Arts and Crafts Movement advocated. He had made the 
pilgrimage to visit William Morris in 1893 and on his return set about establishing a 
model Arts and Crafts colony called the Roycrofters in East Aurora, New York, with its 
own English Tudor workshops and surrounding cottages of stone, to demonstrate what 
could be done with bookbinding, metalwork and furniture making if, as he liked to say, the 
aim were to provide the worker with real satisfactions rather than just a job. Like 
everything else he did, Hubbard was so successful in promoting his colony that the 
Roycrofters were obliged to build an inn to house all the people who wanted to buy their 
souvenirs: hammered copper trays, inkwells, leather bookends, stained-glass lamps and 
maple-sugar candy. There are some evident parallels between Hubbard's experiment at 
the turn of the century and Wright's own colony at Taliesin thirty years later. Both would 
emphasize the joys of work, both would advocate and teach a great number of arts and 
crafts, both would be successful at establishing a loyal community that was largely 
self-sufficient and even monkish, and both men benevolently and autocratically insisted 
on running the place themselves. Like Wright, Hubbard rather disliked being responsible 
for weekly wages, preferring to make things right with handsome presents at Christmas 
instead. Hubbard, with his dashing appearance, his conversational gifts, his eternal 
curiosity and his almost magical ability to capture the world's attention, was, John Lloyd 
Wright remembered, a frequent visitor at their Oak Park home. He and Wright talked art, 
poetry and philosophy by the hour. 

Another Arts and Crafts community with distinct resemblances to Wright's Taliesin 
Fellowship, the Guild of Handicrafts, was the invention of C. R. Ashbee in the late 1880s. 
The guild's reputation was soon established with some outstanding examples of 
metalwork, furniture and books that Ashbee had designed. (Some of these wonderful 
objects can now be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) Ashbee was a gifted 
designer, architect and leader, a devoted follower of William Morris's and advocate of the 
simple life in a bucolic setting, where one acquired skill in one's m-tier while 
participating in such activities as calisthenics, drama and music, a prescription that would 
be repeated at Taliesin. Ashbee's own contribution as an architect had begun in the 1880s, 
and he had shown a design for a chair at the first exhibition of the London Arts and Crafts 
Society in 1888. His gifts as a proselytizer for the movement, along with his tireless 
willingness to travel and lecture, made him a natural leader when William Morris, worn 
out by his own herculean efforts, died in 1896. That was the year, according to Wright's 
son Lloyd, that Ashbee and Wright had met while the former was making his first trip to 
the United States. Ashbee's biographer, Alan Crawford, could not confirm that Ashbee had 
visited Chicago on that trip, but was able to discount Ashbee's own claim, made in later 
years, that he and Wright had met as early as 1892. {to Linn Cowles, February 3, 1966.} 
The first real piece of evidence for the start of the Wright-Ashbee friendship is an entry 
in Ashbee's voluminous and famous Journal, in which he describes his meeting with 
Wright at a supper party given in Hull House in December 1900. 

Since the friendship was to endure for four decades, its origins are worth exploring. 
Whether they met in 1896 or 1900, it is clear that Wright recognized in Ashbee a kindred 
spirit dedicated to the same goals. Perhaps Wright saw, in his friendship with Ashbee, an 
entree into Europe and an introduction to other luminaries of the London scene. This 
would seem plausible, since Ashbee's letter to Wright in the spring of 1901 contains a 
cordial invitation to come and stay with them that summer. {C. R. Ashbee to Wright, 
April 2, 1901. Wright did not actually visit England until 1910.} Wright was certainly 
eager to be friendly, as his willingness to act as secretary of the Chicago committee for a 
new National Trust in America, a cause Ashbee was espousing, demonstrates. (It would 
seem most ironic in later years, given Wright's ruthless willingness to remove from his 
path whatever piece of flotsam history had left there.) And if they disagreed about the role 
to be played by the machine in the movement, the difference was not crucial because they 
were so much in agreement otherwise. 

On that first visit of the Ashbees to Oak Park, in 1896, according to Lloyd, because there 
were only four children then, Ashbee and his wife taught them morris songs and dances 
and old English rounds such as "Great Tom Is Cast," and spoke of the extraordinary work 
being done by the young Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In fact they both 
took a genuine interest in the Wright children and would eventually invite daughter 
Catherine to spend the summer with them in London. It was a splendid family, Janet 
Ashbee later wrote, and Kitty, with her wide-open gray eyes, wispy yellow hair and the 
exquisite poise of her head and neck, put one in mind of the young Ellen Terry. There was 
something endearingly tender about her, and she was so light on her feet, so youthful in 
her smiles and gestures, it was hard to believe she was the mother of six. That radical 
original thinker, her husband, was as prepared as ever to stick to his principles. As he 
approached his fortieth year, he seemed pursued by a sense of inadequacy: "How I have 
wasted half my day, / And left my work but just begun," as a poem of the period expressed 
it. {"A Last Prayer," a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson, Familiar Quotations, by John Bartlett, 
p. 652.} That haunting inner reproach began at an age when most people would have been 
well satisfied.  

If Wright looked fatigued, he had good reason. In retrospect it is hard to see how he could 
have advanced any more rapidly in his career than he did, or accomplished much more in 
terms of maturity of concept, completed buildings, staff, physical equipment and general 
acceptance. Between 1894 and 1911 he built 135 buildings. He lectured widely, published 
at least ten articles, was known nationally through his designs for the Ladies' Home 
Journal and major architectural magazines, was an acknowledged leader of the new 
Chicago, or Prairie school and, when his monumental work, the Ausgef�hrte Bauten und 
Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright was published in Berlin in 1910, would make his mark 
in Europe as well. Just nine years after he built a small house for his family, he had 
already enlarged it substantially and then, in 1898, doubled its first-floor space by adding 
a studio for himself and his staff. He had taken this obvious step because of the increasing 
pressure of work; having worked out this arrangement, he would incorporate it into all of 
his later designs for his homes in Wisconsin and Arizona. 

This first studio, comprising a reception hall, drafting room, library and private office, was 
placed along the Chicago Avenue side of his lot at right angles to his house and connected 
by a passage. It faced a street that was becoming commercialized and, since it had a 
streetcar, was much more heavily traveled than Forest Avenue, presenting him with the 
paradox of designing a building that would advertise itself as an architect's office while 
allowing privacy for the work being carried on inside. He solved this problem in an 
interesting way, one that he would often employ in designing houses facing busy streets. 
On the first floor his suite of rooms presents a largely impregnable facade; it is a locked 
series of angled walls, distinctive enough in appearance to look like an architect's office 
but quite private. All that changed at the second-floor level, with expanses of windows 
and skylights, and the architectural contrasts of solid masonry below and light and air 
above would be used to great effect in other designs. 

Unlike many of his later designs, in which the entrance to a building is almost perversely 
difficult to find, the studio's main door was prominent and centrally located, but, as one 
might expect of the master, it opened into a closed and mysterious space that seemed, in 
comparison to the busy street, almost muffled. It was low-ceilinged, and its heavy dark 
basswood trims emphasized the horizontal, further heightening the feeling of being in a 
sanctum, that is, until one caught sight of the ceiling's panels of art glass, geometrically 
patterned in green and gold and glittering with reflected light. To the right one entered an 
octagonal library, used usually to entertain clients, its windows set high enough to screen 
out the distractions of the street, and benefiting from the same use of skylighting; to the 
left, one found the dramatic open space of the handsome two-story drafting room, square 
on the first floor, changing to an octagonal drum on the upper level, and encircled by a 
balcony. Each direction contained its own surprise, in other words; but perhaps the most 
engaging room of the four was the architect's own office. This demonstrated the same use 
of horizontal bandings, matte-finish walls and exposed brick, the same groupings of 
oriental potteries and beautifully arranged dried flowers, the same severely simple effects, 
and the same jewel-like windows in geometric patterns abstracted from natural forms. 
The effect was universally admired, but so was what in lesser hands would have been a 
utilitarian corridor connecting the studio suite to the house. Finding his way barred by a 
willow tree, Wright simply built around it, allowing it adequate space to grow. The idea 
that one should incorporate a part of the natural world into one's dwelling, rather than 
destroy it, caused great comment and was certainly consistent with the values Wright was 
espousing. It was not, however, entirely original. A book about the Japanese house, 
published three years before, contains a drawing of a living room in which the trunk of a 
tree has been included in the design. Buildings spread out along the length of their lots, 
mysterious without and full of treasures within, horizontal emphases, unified concepts, 
discriminating use of wood, stone, brick and other materials , contrasting textures, delicate 
oriental touches, ceilings of dramatically different heights, earth tones, jewel-like 
glass-all these aspects would be incorporated into his first great houses. Almost from the 
start he seemed intent upon stating in symbolical terms what Ruskin had implied in his 
collection of essays, Sesame and Lilies, thirty years before. {Sesame and Lilies was 
published in 1865.} Proust would translate the essays into French, and Proust's biographer, 
Painter, wrote, "The most significant note, however, is on the organic unity which 
underlies the apparent deviousness of Ruskin's construction. In the last paragraph of 
King's Treasuries, Ruskin gathers together the diverse meanings latent in the Sesame of 
his title: it is a seed, a spiritual food, a magic word which opens a long-hidden, 
underground treasure-house. . . ." {Marcel Proust, A Biography, George Painter, vol. 2, 
p. 356.} Nothing about Wright's buildings is conceivable at first glance, as if he felt that 
the hidden treasure at their core was a prize that must be won. To that end he worked with 
the cunning of a watchmaker and the sleight of hand of a magician. The narrow entryways 
leading to vast rooms, the square room on one level that becomes an octagon on the 
second, the glimpses of deep perspectives and the obstacles presented by blank screens, the 
flash of light in a dark corner, the ability to conceal and reveal, the sense the viewer has of 
being drawn into an ever more mysterious exploration, mark aspects of his work that set it 
apart. When one considers that along with these great gifts was allied the eye of an 
aesthete, one begins to have some measure of the size of his achievement. 

To chart the evolution of every great house is beyond the scope of this book, and, in any 
case, Wright's architecture has been extensively studied and described. Most writers agree 
that, with the houses Wright built for Isidor Heller (1897) and Joseph W. Husser (1899), 
he was on the verge of a breakthrough. He was certainly proud of the Husser house since 
he took Ashbee all over it. Ashbee noted. Ashbee was suitably congratulatory. Wright's 
design for the Ladies' Home Journal, "A Home in a Prairie Town," published in 1901, 
seemed to have resolved something in his mind and released his energies for a decade of 
unparalleled creativity. That same year he designed his acknowledged masterpiece, the 
house, gardener's cottage and stables for Ward W. Willits, a wealthy client in Highland 
Park, another Chicago suburb. The house, although large, was split into four wings so as 
to minimize its bulk, and was sited behind trees so that, from the road, all that was visible 
was a series of rooflines and the chink of light in windows half-hidden under the eaves. 
As in all his Prairie houses, Wright set his massive fireplaces at the heart of the structure, 
with rooms flowing out from that central anchor to the four points of the compass, and he 
had arranged circulation inside the house so as to give a constantly changing kaleidoscope 
of views.  

As with the rooms in his studio, the walls were plastered and smooth and outlined with 
horizontal bands of wood that helped relate the scale of the house to its furnishings. These 
were all designed for that particular house. The house did not impose itself on the street so 
much as suggest its formidable presence by means of its extensive rooflines. The rooms, 
while restrained, were elegant, their details fastidiously thought out. The scale of the house 
was handsome, and its mien sober and discreet, without being spartan. It suggested, in 
short, a family so well established in prosperity and social status as to have no need to 
emblazon that fact; they have arrived, and arrived in grand style. Wright had, in other 
words, found a symbolic language for a particular amalgam of qualities, and done so in a 
way that his particular group of clients would find exactly right. 

The Willits house also has its appeal for theoreticians, who believe that its design 
demonstrates that a radical shift has occurred in man's relationship to his environment. In 
contrasting it with the Villa Rotunda of the sixteenth century, for instance, Vincent Scully 
points out that Palladio created a cylindrical void, a "stable, vertical volume of space 
which dramatizes the upright human being at its center and keeps him fixed where he is." 
Palladio was designing in a "preindustrial, humanistic world" where, as Kenneth Clark 
wrote, man was the measure of all things. By contrast, Wright's house, with its massive 
central chimney and elongated vistas leading the eye out to the horizon was, Scully wrote, 
"an image of modern man, caught up in constant change and flow, holding on . . . to 
whatever seems solid, but no longer regarding himself as the center of the world . . . a 
specifically American image. . . ." {SC, pp. 17-18} 

The theoretical basis for Wright's infinite number of themes has already been described. 
Since he always organized his floor plans using the intricate patterns he had learned from 
Froebel blocks-he once said that he saw the method's possibilities anew when his own 
children began playing with them, and, of course, his wife was also teaching Froebel's 
method-this gave his designs, however modest or ambitious, uniform dimensions and 
properly orchestrated axes and directions to his houses. {CU, p. 81.} When he came to 
design his justly renowned Darwin D. Martin house in Buffalo (1904), his sense of design 
had advanced so far that he could conceive of its surrounding lawns, pergolas and 
connecting spaces as another kind of abstract pattern that required a similarly 
sophisticated solution, and was able to weave house and grounds into a single flowing and 
interpenetrating design. Since the same principles lay behind all of these outwardly 
disparate houses it is possible to see the resemblances between, for instance, the small, 
enchanting Arthur Heurtley residence in Oak Park and the mansion Wright designed that 
same year (1902) for Susan Lawrence Dana, a wealthy socialite in Springfield, Illinois, the 
fa-ade of which is as imposing as the former's is understated and discreet. At this 
glorious moment in his life there seemed no end to the ideas, the inspired marriage of 
materials, the infinite ingenuity of the floor plans or the success of the results; he went 
from strength to strength. His comment that he could shake the designs out of his sleeve 
seems irrefutable, as if each new commission represented a new opportunity for fusing the 
real with the ideal. 

As has been noted, Wright was hardly the first to reject the idea of a house and rooms as a 
series of boxes, but he took its possibilities in new directions. By positioning his rooms on 
the diagonal he avoided the error of creating, by the simple removal of walls, a larger box 
in place of two smaller boxes, and went much further than his predecessors in replacing 
those divisions, which had formerly dictated the use of individual spaces, with screens or 
freestanding slabs that merely suggested them. "Destroying the box" in this way still did 
not go far enough to suit him; he wanted to achieve the same effect with exterior walls as 
well. His solution was, first, to expand vastly the size and numbers of windows and, then, 
by inventing a method of turning the corner with windows, placing the panes of glass edge 
to edge with no intervening supports, he created the trompe l'oeil effect of appearing to 
make the corner disappear. {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the Destruction of the Box" by H. 
Allen Brooks, JSAH, March 1979, p. 5.} But the less exterior walls were used as shelters 
from the weather meant, given the harsh Midwestern climate, a further shift of emphasis 
to the roof. Wright's roofs became ever longer and wider until, in the Robie house of 1906, 
he had built a cantilevered roof that extended twenty feet beyond the last masonry support. 
{The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Connors, p. 1.} 

Wright's practical solutions have been much admired and were advanced for his day. His 
roofs, for instance, were always angled so as to protect the house from the harsh summer 
sun while allowing winter sunlight to come in through the windows. Given these large 
expanses of glass, Wright's houses are remarkably livable, thanks to his central heating 
system using hot-water pipes that encircled the rooms and that were usually concealed in 
the wainscoting. If there were window seats, these would be warmed by a radiator 
positioned directly underneath them. In those days before air conditioning, Wright was 
scrupulous about providing cross-ventilation in summer and might compensate for the 
massive overhangs of his roofs and the danger of penumbral shade within by astute 
placement of clerestory windows, a trick hardly used since. One has to believe that, with 
Wright, aesthetic considerations always predominated, but these included the human fact 
of living in a house, not merely admiring its exquisite interiors. Wright's inner standard of 
excellence encompassed the healthful life, and that meant providing protection from 
sub-zero temperatures, creating between-season terraces sheltered from the wind and 
striking the right balance between the competing claims of spaciousness and privacy, 
adequate heat in winter and air circulation in summer. His final demand on himself was 
that these mechanics of living should be hidden if they were ugly or seamlessly 
incorporated into the room's design if they could not. A famous example of the latter is the 
way he has included a series of overhead electric light fixtures into the design of his Robie 
house sitting room. 

Once Wright's houses became low and spreading, and his roofs vast and overhanging, the 
idea of opening up the interior spaces to include cathedral-ceiling living rooms followed 
inevitably. It was too good to miss, as Wright remarked of his early design for such a 
living room for the Ladies' Home Journal. That meant the quiet demise of the traditional 
attic, and Wright's basements disappeared along with it. Wright never really explains why 
he thought this space, which is still an integral part of many American houses, {Reyner 
Banham in "The Well-Tempered Home," The Architecture of the Well-Tempered 
Environment, pp. 104-121.} should have been eliminated. He makes a passing reference 
to its unwholesomeness {A2, p. 141}, but his main objection appears to have been 
aesthetic. The universal cellar was an excrescence that stuck up above the ground for a 
foot or so, decorated with some halfhearted windows, making the house look as if it was 
sitting on a chair. {A2, p. 140} That would not do at all. What Wright wanted was a 
harmonious unity and so, beginning with the Winslow house, he developed, as Charles 
White explained, a "grammar"of exterior design, which he then used consistently. {White 
to Willcox, May 13, 1904.} This was to set his house on a base. The first-floor wall 
would extend to the second-story windowsills; from this point, Wright might use a frieze 
that would end at the roof, followed by a cornice and wide overhang. 

Wright's celebrated prejudice against storage space is harder to understand. One knows 
only that it was deeply rooted, since it is a theme of his speeches from the beginning. It is 
conceivable that he resented devoting to a utilitarian function the money and space that 
might be used to greater decorative effect. However, his antagonism seems so pronounced 
that it suggests he may have felt on the defensive about having invaded, in pursuit of his 
goal of total design, a traditional female province. No housewife in a cold climate will 
willingly dispense with curtains, as Wright's clients were obliged to do, and no seasoned 
city dweller will endure, after dark, the absence of blinds and the miserable feeling that 
she can be spied upon without her knowledge. 

The reminiscences of Frederick C. Robie, the prosperous young bicycle manufacturer who 
commissioned Wright to build his house, provide an excellent illustration of this point. 
When he chose Wright, Robie recalled that he wanted certain features, fireproofing for 
instance, and a living room that would allow him to look up and down the street without 
being seen by the neighbors, and separate quarters for his children, and a walled garden to 
keep them from wandering.  One notes that Robie's wife of five years is never mentioned. 
Like most wives of Wright's successful and opinionated businessmen clients, she 
presumably knew better than to interfere and, like Mrs. Darwin D. Martin, even appeared 
in clothes her architect had designed. {HA, p. 25.} The lady of the house might have been 
allowed a certain latitude for self-expression on the question of what was to be planted in 
the urns, boxes and planters, on steps, trailing from balconies and window ledges and 
enhancing the foundations of their houses, those accents of graceful greenery that did so 
much to soften the sometimes austere exteriors, that is, until Wright began to collaborate 
with landscape architects. Only a very headstrong female could have prevailed against a 
will like Wright's. One of the few, curiously enough, was his daughter Catherine Wright 
Baxter, mother of Anne, the late actress and film star. Catherine expressed her preference 
for frilly white curtains at an early age and clung to her antiquefilled interiors all her life, 
rejecting her father's efforts to inform her taste. 

Darwin D. Martin, that colossus in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, who would have such a 
pivotal role in sustaining that talent, was a prot-g-of Elbert Hubbard's; Hubbard had 
spotted Martin slaving away (every day from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m.) in the bookkeeping 
department of the Larkin Company. Martin had left school at age eleven and an awareness 
of his lack of education led him to compensate industriously for that shortcoming. This, 
along with his natural aptitude for business, made him a most valuable employee. He 
invented a system of bookkeeping, then took over a crucially important aspect of the 
mail-order business and, by the time he met Wright in 1902, had become a Larkin 
Company of Buffalo chief executive with the amazing annual salary of $25,000 a year. 
{Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building, Jack Quinan, p. 14.} 

Martin adored Elbert Hubbard, that free spirit who never seemed to need the stimulus of 
alcohol or tobacco, who bounced into the office each morning ready for a new day's work 
and had been known to enliven the atmosphere with an Indian war whoop. {Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Larkin Building, Jack Quinan, p. 12.} It must have been a blow to him when 
Hubbard, a major contributor to the success of the company, left to enroll in Harvard 
University and launch himself, at least temporarily, on a writing career. When Martin met 
Wright a decade later, he may have seen that architect, in the first flush of his creative 
powers, as filling the gap in his life that Hubbard had left. One is tempted to think so, 
since from the first, Martin's attitude toward Wright, two years his junior, is a model of 
admiration and fraternal forbearance. Whatever Wright proposed was sure of a 
sympathetic hearing from Martin, and although the latter sometimes made a show of 
exacting stringent conditions, these seldom survived the full force of Wright's charm. His 
indulgent attitude toward Wright was exceeded only by that of his brother, W. E. Martin of 
Oak Park, with whom he owned a small business in Chicago, the E-Z Polish Factory; the 
latter was the first member of the family to commission Wright. W. E. Martin liked to ride 
around with Wright looking at buildings in progress.  

Darwin D. Martin might have been prejudiced in favor of this young Chicago architect, 
but he was also prepared to make use of him. As he made his way up the corporate ladder, 
Martin was well aware that the company's founder, John D. Larkin, now manufacturing 
perfumes and powders as well as soap, and with offices in Pittsburgh, Boston and 
Philadelphia, was grooming his sons, Charles and John, Jr., to take over the 
manufacturing and mail-order divisions. There were plenty of heirs, because the upper 
echelons of the Larkin Company were linked by a series of intermarriages. John D. Larkin 
had married a sister of Elbert Hubbard's; W. R. Heath, the company's attorney, had 
married another; and even Darwin Martin's sister had married George Barton, who 
worked in the secretary's department. Sons, grandsons and nephews of the founder all 
worked together in reasonable harmony, but Darwin Martin, who had carelessly neglected 
to make the right marriage, knew that his continued prominence would depend on the 
extent to which he could consolidate his position. Once it became clear that Larkin 
intended to build a new headquarters beside his group of factory and warehouse buildings 
in a suburb of Buffalo, Martin was maneuvering to make that building a monument to 
himself and keep his rivals, chiefly Charles and John, Jr., out of it. {Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Larkin Building, p. 9} What he needed was an architect of attainment but not too much 
status who could be counted on to protect his interests and who would know to whom he 
owed his allegiance. In fact, not just an office building was being discussed, but a mansion 
for the Darwin D. Martin family. W. E. Martin, who had talked of Wright in the most 
effusive terms, calling him "one of nature's noblemen," knew just whom "Dar" wanted. 
{MM, p. 141} Wright, seeing the Larkin project as his chance to break into the world of 
large building commissions, was even surer. He shamelessly exaggerated the importance 
of his role at Adler and Sullivan, and showed himself eager to respond to every suggestion 
and meet every objection. For his part, Martin skillfully steered Wright through the 
politics of obtaining the commission and the many treacherous undercurrents. However 
much Wright may have accomplished for Martin by his design of the new Larkin 
Building, in years to come Martin would do immeasurably more for Wright and, as the 
latter knew, if one wants to be liked by a powerful man, one must be sure to place oneself 
forever in his debt. 

The Larkin Company Building no longer exists, a casualty of the zeal of the immediate 
postwar period to replace outmoded buildings with parking lots, and photographs alone are 
left to give some indication of its impressive scale and monumental effect once 
construction was completed in 1906. On the outside, its severe, almost fortresslike 
appearance (Jack Quinan, expert on the building's design and construction, believes that it 
may have been inspired by the grain elevators to be seen within a mile of the site) was a 
response to the need to screen out the noise and air pollution in this industrial area. From 
the outside, the building might present an impregnable fa-ade, but inside, its interior was 
a single vast rectangular space, an inner court rising to five stories and ringed by tiers of 
balconies, with stairwells at each corner. The space was lit from above by a skylight, and 
additional windows were positioned to provide natural light for the galleries. If the design 
spoke more or less clearly to the company's desire to have its employees feel a part of one 
united family, to European visitors the idea that the head of the office worked equably, side 
by side with everyone else, was most amazing of all. The building was technically 
advanced for its day, with central heating and also a form of air conditioning (using blocks 
of ice), and was furnished with metal desks and chairs now considered outstanding 
examples of Wright's ability to combine function and utility with sensitive use of materials. 
The Larkin Building's qualities were recognized by a few prescient critics at the time, and 
the building has acquired an almost legendary status; it has been called "one of the 
seminal works of the early modern movement." {CU, p. 42.} What Wright was 
demonstrating in terms of power and originality for his first office building he was also 
bringing to bear on the complex of buildings Darwin D. Martin wanted on his corner site 
along Summit Avenue in Buffalo. After some halfhearted objections, Martin provided 
almost unlimited funds to build a ten-thousand-square-foot house, greenhouse, 
two-story garage, stable and also a conservatory connected to the main house by a long 
pergola. As has been noted, the architect's ability to enlarge the scale of his Prairie Style 
house while keeping its proportions intact has been much admired. The Martin house is 
also an excellent example of a house that seems ostentatiously, almost aggressively, on 
display, while maintaining a paradoxical privacy for its owners. Those open porches and 
balconies are far less accessible than they appear at first glance, in part because of the 
wide, hovering roofs, but also because of walls calculated to screen from view whoever 
may be sitting there. Another curious aspect about the house is its apparent lack of a front 
door, putting one in mind of a castle the drawbridge of which is pulled up, and also 
making one think of Sullivan's comment to an imaginary listener in his book Kindergarten 
Chats: "Your suggestion that a building is a screen behind which a man is hiding is 
decidedly interesting and novel." {Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, Louis 
Sullivan, p. 25.} Yet another idiosyncrasy of the Martin house is the complexity of its 
silhouette, to some extent true for all of Wright's houses, but so marked in this case that, as 
might be predicted, the house is impossible to fully comprehend except by treating it as a 
mammoth piece of sculpture. Although the Martin house did not quite suffer the fate of the 
Larkin Building, it was badly neglected for years, part of its lot sold for apartment 
buildings and some of its buildings torn down. 

Symbols figure prominently in Wright's early work, as can be seen by his consistent and 
inspired use of the same motifs throughout the interior furnishings of his glorious early 
houses. The Celtic cross he used as his personal emblem has been mentioned earlier. It 
was accompanied by further symbols at the entrance to his studio: a pair of figures 
crouched over their knees (representing the struggles of creativity) and a bas-relief 
comprised of two storks, a book of knowledge, a tree of life and an architect's plans, 
perhaps meant to propitiate the passing gods. Wright took equal pains with his first 
business commission for John D. Larkin. Working with the sculptor Richard Bock he 
developed the motif of a globe of the world (held up by angelic figures), on which the 
name LARKIN was superimposed, to act as the chief ornament for the building's exterior. 
There were also intaglio reliefs on the outside walls with such messages as HONEST 
LABOR NEEDS NO MASTER and similar exhortations to right conduct around the 
balconies inside. Corporate pride was certainly a factor, but the desire to put it in writing 
as well as state it symbolically must have been uppermost in Wright's mind at the time, as 
if he was not entirely sure that the building alone could convey the message he intended. It 
is therefore fascinating to discover that by the time Wright designed Unity Temple, a new 
church for the Unitarian congregation of Oak Park a year later (1904), such statements of 
intent have all but disappeared. Cost could have been one factor, at least where the 
building's exterior is concerned, because the congregation was operating on a tight budget, 
but the fact that no words are inside either-and paint is cheap-suggests that the 
architect's confidence was advancing by leaps and bounds, and he was prepared to let his 
building speak for itself. 

Darwin Martin may have been the most prominent of Wright's sponsors, but he was not 
the first. Before Martin came into his life, Wright had been a prot-g-of a well-to-do 
inventor named Charles E. Roberts. It is thought that the Wrights met the Roberts family 
through the Aunts, Nell and Jane, and then became good friends of Anna, whom they 
knew as Madame Wright. They referred to her son as "Frank" or "Frank Wright." Roberts, 
who was of Welsh origin, had invented a machine that could make the tops and bottoms of 
screws in a single operation. He founded a machine company, and soon sold it for the 
handsome price of $1 million so as to devote his life to his other inventions. Despite the 
fact that one of them was an early horseless carriage (now in a museum), Roberts never 
managed to strike it rich again, and gradually lost his fortune. When he met the Wrights, 
however, he and his wife and children, among the earliest residents of Oak Park, were 
prominent there as members of the Unitarian congregation. (They were Universalists.) 
Being introduced around by someone like Charles Roberts would have been crucially 
important to Wright at the time when he was looking for clients and needed solid 
recommendations; in fact, Roberts paid him the further compliment of engaging him to do 
extensive remodeling of the interior of his own house in 1896. Mrs. Joseph F. Johnston, 
Roberts's grand-daughter, recalled that a master bedroom and bath were added to the first 
floor, the bed designed to fold into the wall by day so as to make a spacious sitting room; 
upstairs, there were a library, staircase, fire-places and extensive interior remodeling. 
Mrs. Johnston said that the outside of the house remained typically Victorian, but inside 
was "lovely, with a lot of Wright details." {to author} 

Roberts, his granddaughter said, was a gentle philanthropist who took a kindly interest in 
Wright's affairs and often lent him money-the total amount became a matter of dispute, 
but it was several thousand dollars. Once the Unitarian church decided to build, Roberts 
was named chairman of the building committee and appears to have gone straight to 
Madame Wright's son. The story becomes extremely interesting at this point because, if 
one posits that both Wright and Roberts would be disposed to consult Welsh  models, one 
would expect to find resemblances between the interior design of their new Unity Church 
(often called Unity Temple), and old-country prototypes. This is exactly the case, 
according to Anthony Jones, former director of the Glasgow School of Art, now director of 
the Art Institute of Chicago art school and author of a book about the Welsh chapel. The 
main concern of eighteenth and nineteenth century architects was to provide a church in 
which the minister could be in close and intimate contact with his audience. A 
cube-shaped building was considered especially appropriate, because of its good 
acoustical qualities; it also obeyed the scriptural injunction that ". . . the City of the Lord 
shall lie foresquare and the breadth shall be no greater than the width." {Revelations 21, 
verse 16.} By arranging the congregation around the room and in balconies on three sides, 
the minister might see each listener and he or she might be close enough to catch every 
inflection and nuance of feeling. This is, essentially, the design Wright chose for his 
building, and although there is no evidence to suggest that Wright ever did consult Welsh 
models, the coincidence is striking.  

It is, of course, a glorious interior, illuminated from above with ample skylights that flood 
it with light and also by clerestory windows embellished with his characteristic geometric 
designs. Architects admire the cunning of the raised auditorium space, the strong 
horizontal effects produced by the running bands of wood decorating every conceivable 
surface, and the way the architect has used his trompe l'oeil techniques to minimize the 
room's corners and further heighten the overall effect of his sanctuary as having been 
composed, like a jigsaw puzzle, of intricately locked blocks. It seems unique, yet as 
Jonathan Lipman, an architect and Wright scholar, has demonstrated, it shares common 
elements with Wright's design for his studio and other buildings in that it uses the same 
technique of dramatic surprise. {described in Consecrated Space, Jonathan Lipman, June 
5, 1989.} One enters Unity Temple by means of a colonnade that links the structure to a 
second, smaller building (to provide meeting rooms, a kitchen, space for a Sunday school 
and the like), presenting no easy path for the visitor. To call this access labyrinthine would 
be to overstate the case, yet the tenacity with which Wright clung to this device suggests 
that it satisfied his need to heighten the moment when, having threaded his way around all 
the obstacles put in his path, the visitor would at last find himself in a marvelous, serene 
inner space bathed in light. This same concept, according to Lipman, can be seen to have 
influenced the design of the Larkin Building and such later triumphs as Wright's great 
Japanese building, the Imperial Hotel. However, to explain the effect created by Wright's 
sanctuary as due to his theatrical manipulation of space alone would be to trivialize his 
achievement. He himself called the building a "temple," indicating how seriously he took 
the call to create a "true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit," as he wrote. "His 
building is therefore consecrated space wherein he seeks refuge . . . and repose for body, 
but especially mind." {A2, p. 156.} 

One writer has seen a resemblance between Wright's design for Unity Temple and the 
work of his contemporary, a Viennese architect named Jose Maria Olbrich. {A 
resemblance between Unity Temple and the work of Olbrich: first pointed out by Narciso 
G. Menocal in "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Question of Style," Journal of Decorative and 
Propaganda Arts, summer/fall 1986, p. 11.} Some believe they see the influence of 
pre-Columbian and Mayan architectural forms and motifs in Wright's work at an early 
stage, arguing that he would have seen such architecture on display at the World's 
Columbian Exposition in 1893 and that he consistently expressed his admiration for these 
cultures.  {"Frank Lloyd Wright and Pre-Columbian Art_The Background for his 
Architecture," by Gabriel Weisberg, The Art Quarterly, vol. 30, spring 1967; "Exotic 
Influences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright" by Dimitri Tselos in the Magazine 
of Art, vol. 46, no. 4, April 1953; and "Frank Lloyd Wright and World Architecture" by 
Dimitri Tselos in JSAH, vol. XXVIII, no. 1, March 1969.} Still others, notably David A. 
Hanks, the authority on Wright's decorative designs and objets d'art, have speculated that 
Wright, given American knowledge of each development in the British Arts and Crafts 
Movement, would have been aware of directions in taste from the start and used them as 
points of departure. The "presidential armchair" designed by Ashbee and shown at the first 
London Arts and Crafts Society exhibition in 1888, for instance, demonstrates the use of 
natural oak, rectilinear lines, slatted sides and high back that would be characteristic of 
Wright's early chairs. {HA, p. 9.} There are other interesting parallels between Wright's 
designs and those of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. Like Wright, Mackintosh 
parted from the Arts and Crafts Movement over the issue of handicrafts and traditional 
methods of construction, never hesitating to use unorthodox methods whenever necessary. 
He also shared Wright's fondness for linear, abstract design, in his case so heavily 
weighted with Gaelic symbolism and Celtic references that he and his circle became 
known as the "Spook School." {CU, p. 30.} At least one Mackintosh interior, the entrance 
hall for "Hill House" (1903-04), with its unified composition of carpets, woodwork, 
furniture and lighting fixtures, all of which repeat the motif of the square, could almost 
have come from the pencil of Wright himself. {ATL, p. 84, Figure 13.} Then there are the 
further parallels between Wright's high-backed, slatted chairs for the Willits dining room 
of 1902 and Mackintosh's similar designs of the year before. Most writers have given the 
edge to Mackintosh: "If there was any interchange of ideas through journals," Roger 
Billcliffe wrote, "it can only have been in one direction, because Wright's work was not 
published in Europe until 1910, while Mackintosh's work would have been known . . . 
through . . . The Studio. . . ." {Mackintosh Furniture, Roger Billcliffe, p. 10.}  

M. H. Baillie Scott and C. F. A. Voysey, the influential Arts and Crafts architects, also 
designed furniture that could be seen as having inspired specific designs by Wright. Hanks 
cited, for instance, a sofa by Voysey with broad armrests that is very like another sofa 
Wright designed a year later with the same kind of armrest, further exaggerated. Perhaps 
one of the most striking examples of Wright's omnivorous visual appetite and his 
responsiveness to the latest trends is given by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. 
Louis in 1904, at which a number of German designers showed complete room interiors. 
Wright went, and was fascinated. He must go to the fair, Wright told his new draftsman, 
Charles White, in May 1904. Among the objects on view were some unusual barrelshaped 
chairs by Jose Maria Olbrich. That same year Wright designed his first barrel-shaped 
armchair with upholstered seat, for Darwin D. Martin's new house. {HACat, p. 14.} 
Wright must have known that the lead in advanced design was moving from London to 
Germany and Austria, following the creation of the Viennese Wiener Werkst-tte in 1903, 
a center for the decorative arts that had been founded by Josef Hoffmann. Along with 
Olbrich, Adolf Loos and the older Otto Wagner, Hoffmann rejected both the Classical 
Academic tradition and also the influence of Art Nouveau, a movement that was sweeping 
Europe. These architects, however, shared the Arts and Crafts ideals of simplicity and 
integrity that Wright also espoused; in shifting his attention to these developments, in 
other words, Wright would not have been abandoning first principles. 

Evidence for a shift of interest by about 1904 comes from his personal symbol, always the 
most reliable of weather vanes. Wright was gradually substituting a new motif for the 
Celtic cross that had appeared on his earlier designs: that of a plain red square with an 
ocher outline. Letters from Wright now in the Darwin D. Martin archives {at the State 
University of New York, Buffalo.} date this shift fairly closely. From them, one finds that 
he was still using the Celtic cross until early in 1904 and that the plain red square came 
into use in the autumn of that same year. Most authorities on Wright agree that this new 
symbol owes its origins fairly directly to Japanese prints, in particular those of 
Hiroshige{in the opinion of Dr. Ross Edman of the University of Illinois in Chicago, an 
art historian specializing in oriental art, who has made a special study of Wright's personal 
symbols}, and that Wright was hardly the first to show an interest in this kind of 
signature, since many artists, among them Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were using 
pseudo-Japanese symbols that they had taken from the seals of Japanese censors. {in the 
opinion of Dr. Ross Edman of the University of Illinois in Chicago} What is interesting 
about this particular symbol is that Wright should begin to use it just a matter of months 
before his first trip overseas in February 1905: he, his wife and their friends and clients, 
Mr. and Mrs. Ward W. Willits, sailed for Japan. 

Most writers agree that Wright's interest in Japanese art probably began with the Chicago 
World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, if not before-one recalls that, as a member of 
Sullivan's office, he would have had detailed knowledge of the advance planning-and, in 
particular, with one of the most popular exhibits, "The Ho-o-den," a wooden temple of 
the Fujiwara Period, which the Japanese government erected on a small plot of ground set 
in an artificial lake. It was the first real introduction of Japanese art and architecture to the 
Middle West. {MAN, pp. 34-35.} In terms of the enormous interest in all things 
Japanese that had followed Commodore Matthew C. Perry's trip to Japan in 1845, this 
discovery must be considered rather late. Bronzes, lacquers, fans, ceramics and, above all, 
prints had been flooding to Europe for twenty or thirty years, and artists as disparate as 
Redon and Steinlen had drawn new inspiration from these exotic and unfamiliar objects, 
seizing on the lessons they had to teach as a way to revitalize their imagery. Architects 
were just as susceptible and, after the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, where 
Japanese pavilions had been built, and especially after publication of the first 
English-language book on Japanese architecture in 1886, they focused their attention on 
this aspect of Japanese culture. {ATL, p. 109}  For Americans oriented toward the Arts 
and Crafts Movement, Japan offered "the example of an indigenous culture that embodied 
the organic quality they found in the middle ages," as Richard Guy Wilson wrote. {ATL, 
p. 109} He added, "Japanese motifs, from curved gable ends to nearly wholesale 
replication of pagodas and torii gates, appeared in Arts and Crafts houses and bungalows 
from coast to coast." One believes Wright's new interest to have been at least partly 
connected with the exhaustion White had noticed and remarked upon just before his 
employer left for Japan. It began the year before, White wrote. However, in the last three 
months it had been impossible to get Wright to give his office any attention at all. {White 
to Willcox, February 14, 1905.} In fact, Wright had been confined to bed for several weeks 
that winter with a case of tonsillitis that had made its way around the family. {Wright to 
Darwin D. Martin, no date, DDM} He returned from Japan in May sounding more like his 
old self. His interest was, nevertheless, entirely genuine, and his visit would have a lasting 
influence. 

Several writers claim to see a more or less direct connection between the Japanese temple 
that Wright saw at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and some of his own 
buildings. Vincent Scully demonstrated that the treatment of exteriors in the Willits house 
resembled those of the Ho-o-den, and Wright's use of light-colored stucco panels 
edged with bands of darker wood seemed to suggest Japanese models as well. {SC, p. 17} 
Scully published copies of the two floor plans to support his assertion that the house 
Wright designed for Willits was modeled almost exactly on that of the Japanese shrine. 
{SC, p. 17} Another authority on Wright believed he had been most influenced by the 
Japanese print, and he had certainly begun to collect ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating 
world) sometime before his first visit to Japan, because photographs of his interiors 
showed such prints prominently displayed. {SM, p. 77.} He returned from Japan with over 
two hundred woodcuts by Hiroshige, considered the artist to have had the greatest 
influence on the West, and lent them to the Art Institute of Chicago a year later for the 
first ukiyo-e exhibition to be held in that museum. {"Frank Lloyd Wright's Other 
Passion" by Julia Meech-Pekarik, in The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bolon, Nelson 
and Seidel, editors, showing a photograph of the octagonal library c. 1902, p. 131, plate 
6.4.} He bought them as investments, making no bones about being a dealer, and was so 
successful that he had a sizable collection of Japanese prints on hand all his life, to be 
cashed in when necessary, and some famous collectors as clients. But he was also 
passionately interested in the subject, almost obsessed, and would talk endlessly about the 
exquisite qualities of these prints, their serenity, simplicity, sense of the natural world and 
reduction to essentials. While on that first trip he wore native robes and took extended 
trips into the interior to collect his prints and porcelains. All of this indicates that the 
feelings aroused by Japanese art were wholehearted, yet there is a suggestion that, at some 
level, Wright was made acutely uncomfortable by that most conformist, ordered and 
rigidly circumscribed culture that he apparently admired for its "spirituality."  

Their sixth and last child, Robert Llewellyn, always called Llewellyn in the family, was 
born in the autumn of 1903 and would have been walking and perhaps saying his first 
words when his parents left for Japan in February 1905. Robert Llewellyn Wright's widow 
states that, when his mother returned, Llewellyn did not recognize her, causing her much 
anguish. She also suggested that Kitty knew then that her marriage was in trouble, and 
had been driven to take the extreme step, for her, of leaving her baby for three months in 
an effort to save it. {to author} Those years from 1904 to 1909 were to be pivotal in 
Wright's life and so it is worthwhile examining fairly closely the chain of events during 
that five-or six-year period just before he decided to walk away from his wife, children, 
home, his flourishing architectural practice and the considerable reputation he had built 
for himself in Chicago, never to return. 

The fact that the Wrights had such a large family now seems like sheer carelessness, but 
one has to remember that methods of birth control were unreliable in those days, that both 
Frank and Kitty came from large and boisterous families, and that William Carey Wright 
also had six children (by two wives). Six may have seemed the right number, and the birth 
of the last child may-if there had been a suspicion in Wright's mind that he was destined 
to act out the role his father had played before him-have had an ominous finality to it. By 
the merest chance, William Wright died just seven months after the birth of this last child 
of Frank's, not one of which he had seen, on June 6, 1904. Elizabeth Wright Heller wrote 
in her memoir that one morning their father had just returned from the drugstore when 
they saw that he was pulling open his shirt in evident distress. He collapsed and died a few 
minutes later. {EWH, p. 242.} He was seventy-nine years old. His body was transported 
to Lone Rock, Wisconsin, and he was buried in Bear Valley Cemetery beside his first wife. 
Anna's children, Jennie, Maginel and Frank, were not at the funeral, and Lizzie wrote 
that, two decades later, Jennie told her that they had not known about it. Lizzie noted her 
belief that they had been informed, but the reference was casual enough to suggest that she 
and her brothers would have considered such notification to be a very low priority. One 
assumes that Frank learned of his father's death from a relative or friend. One notes that 
he inherited nothing. 

For a son who had been taught to think of his father as dead, it must still have been a jolt 
to have him actually die, a reminder that would be likely to release some long-repressed 
feelings of bitterness, along with self-reproach, a sense of lost opportunities and a host of 
buried memories. It is almost axiomatic that married couples in conflict will review the 
problems in their parents' marriages and begin to see some parallels. Wright gives some 
clues that one area of conflict in his marriage had to do with his wife's absorption in their 
children. They were never "our" children in his references, but always "hers," an echo, 
perhaps, of the old Celtic pattern and one that could have been reinforced by Kitty's 
enthusiasm for motherhood and child raising. One can hardly reproach a wife for being 
too good a mother, and Wright's carping on this score has been dismissed, but perhaps the 
criticism carried with it his feeling that he had been replaced. Given his emotional 
insecurity and undoubted narcissism, one can see what he expected from Catherine and 
understand how he might consider the normal distractibility of the mother of six as 
evidence of the withdrawal of love. That suspicion would have been intensified, given 
what he knew about his own parents. His mother had successfully pushed his father out 
and devoted herself to him and his sisters. He had won his mother's complete and 
unconditional love and must have expected that some day he would be ousted in his turn. 
He was also quite sincere in saying that he never felt like a father. What he meant, 
perhaps, was that in emotional terms he was still a child among children competing for 
love as his mother had competed in her marriage. In family photographs of that time 
(1904), Wright, who took the pictures, shows his mother, sister Maginel, wife, baby 
Llewellyn and other sons and daughters grouped along a wall of the house while he sits on 
the wall at a distinct distance. {TW, p. 112; and MM, p. 130.} Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., is 
much to the fore and dominates at least one of the poses. A family story has it that he and 
his father came to blows when he was an adolescent, just as his father and grandfather had 
done. {Eric Wright.} It is said that Lloyd won. The possibility that Wright saw himself, at 
some level, as fated to leave his marriage, just as his father had done, is also somewhat 
buttressed by the following curious parallel: when William Carey Wright left home, his 
last child, Maginel, was just six years old. When Wright left home, Llewellyn was about to 
celebrate his sixth birthday. {He would celebrate it on November 15, 1909.} 

Those years between Llewellyn's arrival and Wright's departure showed periods of calm 
and reconciliation, as well as renewed hopes. The return from Japan appears to have been 
such a time, to judge from a few clues in Wright's letters to Darwin Martin. One would 
expect his handling of money to be a continuing cause for conflict, somewhat mitigated 
perhaps by his fondness for giving extravagant presents. For Catherine however, what 
probably counted more than the lack of hard cash was the emotional accounting. At some 
point she seemed to be keeping a silent ledger and a tally of bills that would soon be 
presented. 

There is the further question of the normal changes that her development from enchanting 
adolescent to mother of six would have brought about in her personality. As she struggled 
heroically to make the transition from princess to chatelaine, following the example of her 
resourceful mother, in those long hours of her life when Frank was working all day and all 
night as well, being thrown back on her own resources was bound to develop in her a 
certain self-reliance. But it would be enough, for Frank, who had to manage and control 
every aspect of the life of someone close to him, to feel that Kitty was no longer so willing 
to let him dominate, or to feel hurt and neglected. Perhaps her attempts to assert herself 
were clumsy; she was known for her sharp and critical tongue. That normal part of 
maturing would have seemed, to Wright, evidence that his wife no longer loved him. He 
was in the curious position of finding himself intellectually attracted to clever women 
whom he wanted, once he had won them, to become extensions of himself, merging utterly 
with his ideas, his comforts, his goals, his achievements and his disappointments. What he 
was seeing was the normal development of a young woman from insecure adolescent into a 
confident matron who was becoming a leader in church and club activities, who gave 
speeches, organized play-schools, did volunteer work at Hull House and had her own 
friends. The fact that his own neglect might have brought this about would not have 
occurred to him. Kitty had her life and her children, and he, he told himself, had become 
the odd man out. If he left, she would not even miss him. 

Furthermore, one wonders how well suited they were after twenty years of marriage and 
the inevitable process of inner development. Whether he knew it or not, he was 
abandoning his stance of socially respectable man-about-town and, within the decade, 
would have become a genuine outcast. She, who had looked like a Pre-Raphaelite 
painter's vision when they met, had evolved into an entirely conventional matron with a 
fixed set of expectations. Having come to certain conclusions about how one lived one's 
life, and about obligations morally owed, she never altered her opinions, but nursed her 
grievances until they became self-wounding. Perhaps she felt cheated at every level, not 
just because she was being supplanted by another woman but because, in common with her 
generation, she expected that her reward for years of selfless devotion would be 
recognition and personal fulfillment. Instead, her own needs were ignored, her 
accomplishments went unrecognized, and she was about to lose her status as a person, a 
somebody, the wife of a famous man. The attitudes of her day would have heightened this 
sense of injury, since a married woman with six children whose husband had left her 
expected her life to be over-even if she were still only thirty-eight years old. It is a 
measure of her courage that she subsequently found a job and even a career, as a social 
worker. She was very much interested in the feminist movement in later years. During 
World War I she patrolled the city parks in order to warn adolescent girls against soldiers 
on the loose. {Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright to author.} 

She was, of course, still very beautiful when Frank's attention began to wander. Being the 
person she was, she would not have remained silent about the evidence of her own eyes. 
And, by the winter of 1908, overlooking certain developments would have been difficult. 
The underlying tone of Janet Ashbee's diary entry about the Wright marriage, which she 
observed then, was that it was under severe stress and that Catherine's mood was one of 
indignation, if not outrage. After all, Frank had helped publish that book about The House 
Beautiful, a paean to the ideal marriage, the union of two souls, bound together 
forevermore. How could he, how dared he, repudiate that? If Frank Lloyd Wright were 
withdrawing from Catherine emotionally, this was his characteristic solution for those 
moments when the women in his life began to criticize, reproach, find fault and place too 
much emotional pressure on him. Catherine, however, never seems to have understood 
this. Like Anna, and then his second wife, Miriam, she became anxious and clinging as 
she felt him slip away. There were, Mrs. Ashbee noted, lines of tension around the mouth 
of that exquisite face. {December 21, 1908.} 

Sometime in 1903 Frank Lloyd Wright began to design a singlestory brick house with 
wood trim for Edwin H. Cheney and his wife, Mamah (pronounced Maymah), and, as it 
happened, the building permit to begin work on the house at 520 North East Avenue in 
Oak Park was issued in June 1904, a week after William Carey Wright died. Edwin 
Cheney was an electrical engineer and shared Wright's enthusiasm for those new 
mechanical marvels, automobiles. His wife, intellectually adventurous and bookish, had a 
B.A. from the University of Michigan, where they met, and an M.A. She was born in June 
1869, making her exactly two years Wright's junior. She was one of three daughters of 
Marcus S. Borthwick, an employee of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, who held 
the position of superintendent of the repair department when he retired after forty years. 
After graduation, Mamah Borthwick seemed in no rush to marry, working as a librarian in 
Port Huron, Michigan. Her interests encompassed translations of Goethe and the writings 
of the Swedish feminist Ellen Key. She was thirty when she finally married Edwin in 1899 
and moved to Oak Park; their first child, John, was born in 1902. Some time after her 
arrival in Chicago, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and was a student under 
Robert Herrick. It was said that she aspired to be a writer. 

Although Mamah Borthwick Cheney was fairly reclusive, she did belong to the Nineteenth 
Century Women's Club, where she met Catherine Wright, then very much a leading light 
of that club along with Grace Hemingway, Ernest's mother. {Verna Ross Orndorff to 
author} Subsequently the two women were "much in each other's company," according to 
a newspaper account. It is conceivable that the commission for the house was an outgrowth 
of Catherine's friendship with Mamah. If so, it would help explain Catherine's eventual 
feelings of deep betrayal. If, in addition, Catherine Wright's marriage was in trouble by 
early 1905, as she believed, then the relationship between Frank and Mamah must have 
developed fairly rapidly. From the tantalizing and fragmentary memories of people in Oak 
Park who still remember them, one is given the impression that Edwin Cheney was far 
more popular than his wife. He was, by one account, "a prince of a man." As for Mamah, 
she was nice-looking without being glamorous. She has been described as capricious and 
temperamental, and perhaps she was, but she must have had some charms, judging from 
Wright's reactions. An element of that attraction may have been her guarded attitude 
toward her children. Mrs. Orndorff, who was once their playmate, had the impression that 
Mrs. Cheney was not a very devoted mother (in those days, any woman with intellectual 
ambitions would have been so judged), and she certainly gave Frank that impression, since 
he, according to one newspaper account, referred to her three children-as if he would 
rather not know how many she really had. 

As for the house he designed, it is now so overgrown that it is almost impossible to see 
from the sidewalk, but even before the forest had moved in, the home's air of discreet 
withdrawal had been remarked upon: one could, it was noted, see those in the road without 
being seen oneself. Mrs. Orndorff had a memory of dark and gloomy rooms decorated in 
green and brown and without curtains on the windows, another indication of Mamah's 
lack of interest in her traditional role. In Oak Park, where the only women Wright met 
would have conformed to social expectations, it must have been intriguing to meet 
someone so obviously apart from the crowd, almost an outsider, just as he was giving up 
the struggle to conform himself. Since Wright would subsequently choose partners who 
were distinctly different and individualistic, if not plainly eccentric by the standards of 
their day, it is safe to assume that this aspect of Mamah Borthwick had the most allure for 
him. Nevertheless, the affair might have come to a quiet end, bearing in mind that Mamah 
and Edwin did have a second child, Martha, in 1906, had it not been for another event that 
threatened Wright's emotional equilibrium and threw his Lloyd Jones family into an 
uproar: the death of Uncle James.  

He sank into a coma ten hours after an accident and died six days later, on October 22, 
1907, without ever regaining consciousness. He left a wife and seven children, four girls 
and three boys. Jenkin Lloyd Jones officiated at the funeral, and all those left alive-John, 
Margaret, Anna, Enos and the Aunts, Nell and Jane, along with their children and 
grand-children, their nephews, nieces and cousins-were surely at the funeral in Unity 
Chapel because, the Home News of Spring Green reported, "people from all over the state 
gathered in an assembly larger than has ever been seen on such an occasion in this portion 
of Wisconsin." 

Once the funeral was over and the Lloyd Joneses had assessed James's affairs, the true 
horror of the situation dawned on them all. In the years when James had been buying up 
small farms in the valley, his actions would have been seen as a progressive desire to 
improve and mechanize, farm on a cost-cutting scale and thereby increase his profits. For 
years his brothers and sisters, more prudent, one would have said, but certainly less 
adventurous, having declined to follow his example, suffered no losses for having made 
him loans. At first the crops were good and so were the prices. Other members of the 
family, finding no risk, joined the backers of James. But, during the depression years of 
the 1890s, prices began to fall. In 1890 a farmer could get fifty cents a bushel for corn; by 
1898 he was lucky to get half that. Mortgage payments were in arrears, and creditors were 
banging on James's door. What looked like prudence had become the rashest folly, and 
everyone in his family was at risk. 

Among those who had "signed" for James many times was brother Enos. He was forced to 
sell everything at a heavy loss, and was left with little more than his homestead. The 
others suffered to greater or lesser degrees. (Anna seems to have been the only one spared, 
having benefited more from James's largesse than the other way around.) The Aunts, 
James's other principal backers, were always ready to acknowledge they were not skilled 
businesswomen, and, no doubt, by 1907, they spent more than income from tuition fees 
provided; nevertheless, they had increased the school's size and outward prosperity. They 
had found the money to commission their nephew to build onto the property in 1901-03 
an assembly room (also serving as a chapel), space for a library, a manual-training room, 
a kitchen, an arts and science hall and a gymnasium. The Aunts instructed the architect to 
carve on the balcony a verse from Isaiah that had been their father's favorite: "They that 
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; 
they shall run and not weary; they shall walk and not faint." 

By 1907 Hillside was said to contain nearly a hundred teachers and pupils, most of them 
from Chicago. As an enterprise the school was flourishing, but by agreeing to back brother 
James, the Aunts had risked everything. Frank Lloyd Wright's brother-in-law, Andrew 
Taylor Porter, a Canadian who had met and married Wright's sister Jennie and had an 
import business in Montreal, where they lived, was drawn unwittingly into the middle of 
the crisis. He was persuaded to become business manager for the school in the summer of 
1907, and began his work there just before James died. It is conceivable, though nowhere 
stated, that Andrew Porter could have realized just how heavily involved the Aunts were, 
and how debt-ridden James was, that summer; Porter later revealed that James owed 
$65,000-an immense sum in those days. {Andrew Porter to Frank Lloyd Wright, 
December 21, 1919.} Whether Porter challenged James with this information will never be 
known; in any event, he worked without salary for two years in a desperate attempt to save 
the school. {Franklin Porter to author.} But by September 1909-interestingly, just a 
month before Wright left his wife and family-the Aunts declared bankruptcy, and 
Hillside was up for sale.  

In mid-December 1907, two months after James's death, Wright explained to Darwin 
Martin that he had been unable to work on plans for some of his buildings because of 
numerous petty details that had assaulted him like "an aftermath of ruthless fate."  

Why Wright, at the peak of his influence and success, should throw up his practice and 
leave Chicago forever, not to mention abandoning his wife and six children, is a 
conundrum that has defied analysis. Some authors have concluded that it was the result of 
his inability to receive the national recognition that he believed was his due, but others 
have questioned that this was true. Some have put it down to his own conviction that he 
was never meant to be a husband and father, but an unsuccessful marriage alone cannot 
account for his throwing over a successful practice as well; one would expect him to settle 
the one without completely jeopardizing the other if he were shrewd, and Wright was 
shrewd. Wright's failure to capture a prized commission, that of designing a mansion for 
Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, heirs to two of the country's greatest fortunes (it 
went instead to Charles A. Platt), is also given as a reason. This, too, seems inadequate, 
since Wright had designed many handsome houses that were never built. Wright himself 
is not very helpful. Writing about his flight, he omits all mention of one principal in the 
case, i.e., Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and acts as if explanations were inadequate: 
"Because I did not know what I wanted I wanted to go away." {A2, p. 162.} The only clue 
he gives is the title to this particular segment of his autobiography: "The Closed Road." 

It has been suggested that Wright's particular Welsh background, with its roots in the 
ancient animistic Celtic veneration for nature, along with his early indoctrination into 
radical Unitarian thought, had fitted him to be particularly receptive to Ruskin's ideas, i.e., 
that right emotion, true feeling and lofty thought were all included in the concept of what 
was beautiful, even that the perception of beauty was a test of one's morality and inner 
integrity. Added to this is the concept of the church as the true home, even one's only 
home (coming from the Welsh experience), and the Arts and Crafts manipulation of that 
thought into the idea of the home as a kind of church, a place in which to celebrate the 
sanctity of family life. Perhaps because of Wright's awareness of what a failed marriage 
meant, he was determined to make his own work, to make it into a perfect marriage. His 
whole architectural philosophy was based on the Arts and Crafts concept that a house 
should express an ideal of marriage and family life. No doubt he thought, sincerely, as had 
Ruskin, that "all architecture proposes an effect on the human mind, not merely the service 
of the human frame" {Ruskin Today, Kenneth Clark, p. 201.}; therefore the perfect house 
would bring forth the desired result, and if it did not there was something wrong with the 
house-or the architect. To reject the concept of marriage as a sacrament in favor of the 
radical notion that it was simply a convenient social arrangement was also to reject the 
Arts and Crafts Movement as well, since this belief was so central to its scale of values. He 
must also have felt that, as an artist, he had taken its concepts as far as he could go and 
that the movement was losing momentum. The road had come to a dead end-this 
particular road, at least. 

There are some useful clues to his feelings at the time in his letters to Darwin Martin. 
Perhaps in his heart of hearts he longed to be able to admit that he was not the colossus he 
aspired to be but simply a flawed human being who had made the same mistakes in his 
personal life as everyone else. Faced with a superhuman task, he did what he had done as a 
boy, left alone in a field to tackle a man's work, and what Uncle James had just done: he 
let the whole edifice come crashing down, taking him with it. 

His actions would be bound to have a major effect not just on his wife, children, clients 
and friends, but the whole Lloyd Jones clan as well. Jenkin Lloyd Jones might be 
particularly censorious-they had, after all, been estranged by the Lincoln Center 
fiasco-and ready to condemn this nephew about whom he had grave doubts. Wright was 
on the defensive, in view of the Lloyd Jones censoriousness, therefore taking pains to 
justify his acts and portray himself as a man obeying a higher law. The manner in which 
he condemns the hypocritical attitudes of his society is especially na-ve, and there is an 
element of wounded pride in the way he proposes himself as the model of a superior man, 
and something more ominous in his conclusions: at one time, he wrote to Martin, "I go to 
the cross. . . ." {DDM, November 1, 1910.} An even bolder theme can be discerned in an 
essay he wrote for an exhibition of Japanese prints four years before, in 1906. This essay 
has less to do with prints than it does with the role of the artist. If Wright's original idea of 
the architect had been in the terms proposed by his mother-"Jenkin preached; Frank 
builds"-then his abandonment of the Celtic cross for the pure square heralded a 
philosophical shift. It meant that he was rejecting the dictates of his religion and its 
morality and was preparing to place himself beyond their reach, on a pinnacle far removed 
from the world-as-it-is, a hero of mythical stature, a poet, a Druid.  

In taking this view, Wright may well have been attempting to relieve some inner 
pressures. Instead of seeing himself as ordained for an elevated, perhaps unattainable goal, 
he has shifted to the idea of Taliesin, the artist as Superman, divinely endowed, and 
therefore never to be challenged or questioned. Not only did this Romantic conception rid 
him of the weight of moral censure, but it lightened some impossible inner burdens. 
Whatever he did was a work of genius, because he did it. It was a very successful view 
from an emotional standpoint, and he held to it for the rest of his life, but it did contribute 
to the impression he gave of being impossibly stiff-necked and authoritarian, and his 
arrogance became legendary. Few people realized how compensatory those comments 
actually were. 

Wright's lonely conviction of righteousness-Truth Against the World-was to provide a 
source of strength in the difficult years ahead. But it had a dark side: the ideal of himself 
as misunderstood and persecuted genius encouraged him to see motes only in the eyes of 
others. He looked at life from a distorted perspective, and the picture he saw, or thought he 
saw, embittered him. 

Whatever else can be said about Wright's state of mind at this pivotal moment, it is safe to 
say that he was the most un-self-aware of men. The women who attracted him would, 
therefore, always seem to have a superior knowledge of human behavior-certainly, they 
were clever manipulators-and a way of making him feel at home with himself. This may 
have been Mamah Borthwick's great strength, and the evidence will show that Wright was 
incapable of living alone and would always look for an immediate replacement once "the 
woman" was out of his life.  [While in Europe in the summer of 1910, he had decided, at 
least temporarily, to return to his wife and children.] {FP, July 4, 1910.} 


Flower in the Crannied Wall 

Smoke leaps up,  
Grey like a wolf, and all the world  
Crackles with the sounds of pain and death. 

"Storm on Land" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 82.} 

By early 1909 Wright was looking for a pretext to make his first trip to Europe.He had 
been urged to visit London by Ashbee for several years. He was interested in the latest 
developments in Germany and Austria, and he also had the further encouragement of 
Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who had visited the Continent on her honeymoon and wanted 
to return to Berlin.Everything was conspiring in that direction and, as luck would have it, 
a German philosopher,Kuno Francke, in Boston for a year as visiting lecturer at 
Harvard,came to see Wright's work and subsequently put the architect in touch with a 
Berlin publisher, Ernst Wasmuth.This led to an invitation from Wasmuth. He intended to 
publish a complete folio of Wright's work to that date, a handsome edition known as the 
Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe that would become a collector's item. It was the first 
such invitation from any direction and it seemed heaven-sent. Wright would, ostensibly, 
go to Berlinto prepare this volume of drawings, photographs and floor plans, and only 
those close to him would know the true circumstances. As might be expected he entrusted 
the work of closing down the studio to the first likely candidate, a young architect named 
Herman von Holst,and spent his remaining time assembling his materials and working out 
a complex business arrangement with Wasmuth by which he would buy the American 
rights. To do this, he borrowed ten thousand dollars from Francis Little,a former client and 
dedicated collector of Japanese prints,at 6 percent interest. Little held a portfolio of prints 
as collateral. {established from the DDM correspondence.} 

Wright and Mrs. Cheney made their plans with care. Sometime in the summer of 1909 she 
went to Boulder, Colorado, to visit a friend, taking her children John,aged seven, and 
Martha,aged three. Her husband had his suspicions, he said later, but did not believe them 
until he received a letter from her asking him to come and get the children. {Chicago 
Tribune, November 9, 1909.} This version of events is contradicted by his testimony at the 
divorce proceedings, which was that she had left him in June of 1909 and had told him 
then that she did not intend to return. {Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1911.} Cheney  
arrived in Boulder in early October to find that his wife was gone. She had met Wright in 
New York and had embarked for Europe. {Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1909.} 

The lovers arrived in Berlin,giving as their mailing address Wasmuth's office on the 
Markgrafenstrasse, and took rooms in a hotel, registering as Mr. and Mrs. Wright. All this 
was discovered and became front-page news shortly afterward, two or three weeks at 
most, since it was published by the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, November 7. The 
ostensible explanation for the article was that an alert foreign correspondent had 
discovered the false hotel registration. Since the possibility of a newspaper reporter's 
scanning the hotel registers in any city in pursuit of irregularities is remote, one is left to 
conclude that someone in Chicago wanted the elopement exposed and told the newspaper 
where to start looking. It is the kind of maneuver Anna was capable of because, at least at 
first, she saw Mamah Cheney as more of a threat than Catherine,and took the latter's side. 
It is also possible that Edwin Cheney may have been looking for evidence, since he soon 
filed for divorce. As for the papers, ever since the architect Stanford White was shot and 
killed by Harry K. Thaw over a scandal involving the latter's wife in 1906, journalists had 
been alerted to the exciting possibilities provided by the world of architecture; here was an 
almost parallel case. The deserted wife and the deserted husband were subjected to almost 
daily grillings, and when these failed to solicit sufficient indignation and outrage, the 
writers of the articles themselves were obliged to fall back on their own speculations about 
"two abandoned homes where children play at the hearthsides," a "fly-by-night journey 
through Germany," "strange infatuations" and a love "now trampled upon and spurned." 

If the Cheney marriage was ending more or less by mutual consent the same cannot be 
said of the Wrights'. Catherine's early comments were that she and Frank were united in 
their determination to break the terrible hold of this "vampire." Her curious explanation 
was that he was the innocent victim, in other words, but with her help he would win out. 
She continued to believe with a faith that amounted to self-delusion that he would return, 
her son Llewellyn thought. {as he expressed it in "Letters to his Children on his 
Childhood."} During that year of 1909-10 she kept a "day book," marking each child's 
birthday with a lock of hair and a photograph and enclosing pictures cut from magazines, 
jokes, poems and the like, her theme being her love, her lonely vigil and her conviction 
that all would end happily. 

If Catherine was grieving she was also understandably angry and resentful. When Frank 
did return a year later and she discovered that the affair was not over, she gave vent to her 
feelings in a letter to the Ashbees.Her words reveal not only her sense of being the helpless 
pawn in a game played by others, but almost of being an object, something to be bartered 
and sold like a stock market commodity. {October 12, 1910.} Or, their marriage was a 
bank account and Frank was the banker.  Now some "upstart" had come along and closed 
out the account, the one that had been nurtured lovingly through the years-and with her 
husband's vigorous support. It was all too much. Not surprisingly, future arguments 
between Frank and Catherine would revolve around money.It was said that she refused to 
give Frank a divorce on her mother's advice, fearing that it would mean the end of any 
financial child support. Perhaps the best measure of Catherine's state of mind is provided 
by her son David. He recalled that when his father left, he, aged thirteen, was told he was 
now head of the household. They were left with a grocery bill of nine hundred dollars, he 
said. His indignation was still vivid some seventy years later. {interview with author.} 

There are no letters or diaries to chart the course of the love affair between Frank and 
Mamah,but, from the evidence, one can safely assume that he was blissfully happy. She 
seems to have decided on a divorce almost at once, and he, his zest for life renewed, threw 
himself into preparing the Wasmuth edition. They divided their time between Berlin and 
Fiesole, and when Lloyd was sent for, to join his father and a draftsman, Taylor Woolley, 
in preparing the new book, he found his father established in Florence. Italy had the 
predictable effect on Wright. He wrote lyrically to Ashbee about the beauty of the 
Florentine valley. He had been reading Howells, Ruskin and Vasari in Florence. Mamah 
had settled in Berlin and took a job teaching at a "young ladies seminary." {Chicago 
Examiner, September 8, 1911} Wright decided to return to his family, and his letter to his 
mother, that summer of 1910, was lengthy, justifying himself and accusing his family of 
failing to give him emotional support in his time of need. He enclosed with it a copy of his 
letter to Catherine that spelled out the terms of his return. 

Wright reached Chicago's Union Station at five o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 
October 8, 1910, from New York, where he had disembarked a few days before. He drove 
to his Oak Park home,which was ablaze with lights. "The faces of the younger Wright 
children were wreathed in smiles," a reporter wrote, "and Mrs. Wright's countenance 
reflected the pleasure. . . . She was in buoyant spirits and conveyed the impression that a 
burden of care had dropped from her shoulders. Her younger son threw his arms about her 
and laughed. . . ." {Chicago Examiner, September 8, 1911.} 

He looked much grayer, with long hair that just missed his shoulders, his manner had lost 
none of its mischievous charm, and he was wearing the kind of outfit Martin had not seen 
except on a Quaker Oats package: knee trousers, long stockings and broad-brimmed 
brown hat, worn with panache.Martin wrote that Wright had telephoned to ask if, as a test 
of his affection, he would drive Wright to the station to get his luggage? Martin 
compromised by agreeing to meet Wright at the station. The latter appeared promptly, 
apologizing for having put his client's friendship to so acid a test. Wright's mien, however, 
was hardly what one would expect of a repentant sinner. He called for his luggage in the 
loudest possible voice and made a perfect spectacle of himself shouting, "All aboard, all 
the way to Oak Park by auto!" Martin took the back streets home. 

As Bernard Shaw, writing in 1908, observed, ". . . open violation of the marriage laws 
means either downright ruin or such inconvenience and disablement as a prudent man or 
woman would get married ten times over rather than face." {"Getting Married" (1908), 
Prefaces, George Bernard Shaw, p. 1.} All those in Oak Park who had seen him hurtling 
down their streets in the "Yellow Devil," wearing "funny" clothes and his hair too long, or 
who had disliked his houses, or had painful financial dealings with him, rose up in 
righteous wrath. Mrs. Johnston, Charles Roberts's granddaughter, recalled, "It was the 
most awful scandal that ever happened. I was very young and they tried to keep it from 
me-'That wasn't nice'-but it really finished him in Oak Park.No one would have 
anything more to do with him."Her mother's, Mrs. Charles White's, explanation was that 
Wright had somehow got himself mixed up with Mrs. Cheney because he never had "a bit 
of sense" about women. That was the charitable view. That month Rev. George M. 
Luccock of First Presbyterian Church in Oak Park preached a sermon on the theme of 
adultery.  

Wright had expected criticism but seemed genuinely taken aback by its intensity. He had 
already lost some clients, and would lose others. Arthur Heurtley,who had written so 
glowingly about Wright to his German friend in 1908, had nothing but bad news to report 
by 1912. Wright's friends had all deserted him, and his future was in ruins. {August 11, 
1912, Archives of American Art.} His former draftsman, Charles White,who left to set up 
his own practice, wrote to his former employer to say he had heard about the exodus and 
asking him to send such clients his way. {in a letter dated December 30, 1911} (One 
assumes that the request was ignored.) 

The reason Wright gave for leaving Mamah,that he did not want the beauty of their 
relationship soiled by too much daily contact, sounds like a rationalization and a grossly 
unkind one at that. It seems more likely that Wright had worked out a careful strategy 
before he went home. This was that Mamah should stay in Germany until her divorce 
could be obtained, in the summer of 1911, on the grounds of a two-year separation. She 
could then discreetly return. Meantime he would remodel his home and studio, providing 
one-half for Catherine and the children and for income property in the other half. His 
mother, who had decided that the break was inevitable and had now thrown in her lot with 
her son, would cooperate by selling her Oak Park house and buying land in Spring Green 
on which to build anew. 

He had told his mother he was returning without hope, but this was hardly true. He was 
back full of dynamism and high spirits and prepared for battle. One guesses that he had 
chosen Darwin Martin as his next financial backer because of the large sums his ambitious 
plans required, but if he were going to persuade the hidebound Martin to play this role, 
Wright would need to present a facade of repentance and reform, at least for a few months. 
Since, of all people who might have helped him with his luggage, Wright telephoned 
Darwin Martin's brother, one assumes that his strategy began at the Oak Park train station. 
He wanted to make sure the right person had proof positive that he was not only back but 
also back in his own house. 

If this was the plan, it was brilliantly carried forward. Wright's first letter to Martin, 
written just four days after his return, was an artful amalgam of flattery, noble sentiments, 
feigned remorse and flowery vows to reform.  It was also clear from this letter that Wright 
was entirely in earnest about restoring his architectural practice. He could not let his work 
die, he wrote, and was prepared to fight for it. Meantime, Wright wrote to Larkin asking 
for the preposterous loan of twenty thousand dollars, which he must have known he stood 
no chance of getting. He spelled out his needs: money to pay a first installment on the 
Wasmuth publication,due in a month, money to repay Little and release his collection of 
prints, and money to remodel his house. Then he sat back and waited for Larkin to refuse, 
and Martin to unleash the predictable lecture. 

That soon arrived. "You see I am bad, bad to the core, so what's the use," Wright wrote to 
his "dear lecturer," nevertheless managing to defend himself nimbly. He sent Martin a 
copy of his letter to Larkin, merely to inform him about his financial position. {DDM, 
October 30, 1910} That was at the end of October. By mid-November Wright had not 
only extracted a loan from Martin to pay for the German publication installment but was 
talking him into settling the Little debt. Once the debt with Little had been settled, 
releasing a Japanese print collection that Wright soon claimed to have sold (for 
twenty-one thousand dollars), he moved into phase three of his plan. His mother had 
bought "a small farm up country," meaning Spring Green, and was pressed for cash, 
because she had not yet sold her house in Oak Park, he told Martin. Perhaps Martin could 
help? Martin obligingly assumed the mortgage on Anna's house. The next step was to 
finance the remodeling project for the home and studio. Martin allowed himself to be 
talked into giving Wright something called a "trust-deed" loan. He would discover that 
Wright had been cheerfully selling off bits of his equity in that property for some time, a 
practice he enjoyed, since he used it forever after, sometimes with such calamitous success 
that the legal knots thus tied were impossible to unravel. In this particular case it seemed 
Little had an interest, and so did Mrs. Wright, and there were mechanics' liens on the 
property; Martin was undeterred. By the autumn of 1911 Catherine was writing, not to her 
husband, but to their banker, asking for his help in settling persistent creditors who were 
besieging her hourly "by the phone and door-bell." {DDM to Wright, November 8, 
1911.} Wright eventually persuaded Martin to advance a total of twenty-five thousand 
dollars and was loud in his praise of the latter's sterling qualities.  

As for the borrower, he was in peak form, insisting that he never intended to see Mamah 
again while jumping on the first boat for Europe the moment he had some money in his 
pocket. {he returned in January 1911.} (The ostensible reason for the trip, he told Martin 
early in 1911, was to resolve some problems with the Wasmuth edition in Berlin.) There 
was some indication of the single-mindedness of his determination to establish his life on 
a new footing.  Only one indication survives that Wright could, just the same, have been 
experiencing some anxiety as his plan moved successfully forward. Mamah Borthwick 
Cheney was divorced in August-she then reverted to her maiden name-and a month 
beforehand, Wright had a car accident that injured his arm and made his hand useless for 
months. {April 18, 1912.} That, oddly enough, had happened just three months after he 
had determined to "die trying." As for Catherine,she vacillated between an uncomfortable 
awareness of the financial and emotional abyss and her typically obstinate belief in a 
happy ending. She just had a feeling, she told Martin, that it would all be over in two 
years' time. {DDM, December 20, 1912.} It was December 1912. 

In one of his letters to Martin, Wright mentioned that he would "see about building a small 
house" for his mother. That was in April 1911, and although he did not dare tell Martin, 
what he really had in mind was a house for himself. Anna was buying the hillside that she 
knew Frank loved, on land immediately adjoining the Hillside Home School,owned by one 
of the uncles. This would help to explain why Anna,that penny-pinching lady, had taken 
the highly imprudent step, for her, of buying a new home before she had sold the 
first-someone in the family must have urgently needed the money. The idea of Taliesin 
seems to have taken shape in her son's mind during his stay in Florence. In Fiesole, he had 
been much struck by the enchanting Villa Medici,which, according to Vasari,had been 
designed by Michelozzo for Giovanni, the son of Cosimo de' Medici. As Wright was 
admiring it, the house was being acquired by Lady Sybil Cutting, a socially prominent and 
wealthy widow and occasional writer, who would marry Geoffrey Scott, a brilliant young 
architectural historian, himself the future author of a classic, The Architecture of 
Humanism (1914). The Villa Medici, one of the great country houses of Italy, is situated 
on a hillside with commanding views of the Tuscan countryside and is terraced with 
gardens on the steep slopes around it. True to his nature whenever he was arrested by a 
vision of beauty, Wright spent part of his year designing his version of a Tuscan country 
house on the slopes around Florence. Surviving sketches show that while the overall 
feeling of the design, planned for Mamah and himself, is Prairie Style, it has been strongly 
influenced by classical dictates and surrounded by high walls enclosing secret gardens, in 
imitation of the Villa Medici. {The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, Bolon, Nelson and 
Seidel, editors, p. 33.} 

The Villa Medici was on the side of a hill; Wright placed his own Wisconsin country 
house in the same position and emphasized the importance of this choice forever 
afterward. The experience of designing for Fiesole seems to have galvanized his 
imagination and brought it to bear on the challenge of designing a house for himself that 
would express everything he thought and believed, the summit of his mature development 
as an architect. The passage describing the birth of the idea of Taliesin in An 
Autobiography gives a fascinating insight into the way his mind worked when stimulated 
to its finest achievements. "I saw the hill-crown back of the house as one mass of apple 
trees in bloom . . . I saw plum trees, fragrant drifts of snow-white in the spring . . . I saw 
thickly pendent clusters of rubies like tassels in the dark leaves of the currant bushes . . . I 
saw the vineyard . . . I saw the spirited, well-schooled horses. . . . I looked forward to 
peacocks Javanese and white on the low roofs of the buildings. . . . Yes, Taliesin should be 
a garden and a farm behind a real workshop and a good home. I saw it all. . . ." {A2, pp. 
169-170.} The maze of courtyards, terraces and flower borders interleaved within the 
Taliesin compound, with their unobtrusive retaining walls and shallow flights of steps, call 
to mind the hill gardens around Fiesole, as if the walls had always been there and the vines 
of ivy and low shrubs, the rock plants taking root in the crevices, had sprung from the 
stones themselves. At about this time Wright gave pride of place to a sculpture by Richard 
Bock, an artist with whom he often collaborated. The work, Flower in the Crannied Wall, 
named for the famous poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,{written in 1869} had originally 
been designed for the house Wright built for Susan L. Dana in Springfield, Illinois, some 
years before. It depicts a nude (presumably the muse of architecture) constructing a tower 
from geometric blocks. Both shapes-the delicately rounded upper body and arms of the 
nude, and the phalliclike tower she is building-are arising from the same piece of stone, 
presumably meant to be read as a statement of Wright's belief that architecture receives its 
power from the life-force and that both man and his creation are in an identical state of 
becoming. He placed the statue in a pivotal position, with the house below it, growing like 
a ledge in the rock, and the undisturbed hillside above. Neil Levine wrote, "The sculptured 
figure . . . no longer points to a distinction between geometry and nature, or abstraction 
and representation, but rather signifies a continuity or identity of the two." {The Nature of 
Frank Lloyd Wright, pp. 34-36.} To another observer, Wright's figure has a totemic 
significance. Thomas Beebe sees her as a kind of corn dolly, guardian of the garden, seated 
beneath the oaks reminiscent of Druid groves. He also pointed out that the sculpture is 
placed so as to face water spilling into a stone basin, originally designed to have a masonry 
circle. Exactly what Flower in the Crannied Wall meant to him was never spelled out by 
Wright, but then, none of the symbols that seemed to mean the most to him were ever 
explained and there is enough of a clue in the poem itself to make his reference clear. 
Speaking of the flower, Tennysonwrites, ". . . but if I could understand / What you are . . . 
/ I should know what God and man is." 

Wright was probably well aware that the construction of Taliesin must be kept secret 
because, if it were known, the news would threaten the shaky facade of his marriage, with 
unknown repercussions on Martin. It was his bad luck that the Chicago Examiner learned 
of its construction in the autumn of 1911 and published an article {on September 8, 1911} 
remarkable for its insinuations, portraying a man still maintaining a pretext of family 
harmony while actually preparing what would soon be called a "love nest" or "love 
cottage" for the new woman in his life.A similar accusation, containing numerous 
inaccuracies, appeared three months later in the Chicago Tribune under the headline 
ARCHITECT WRIGHT IN NEW ROMANCE WITH 'MRS. CHENEY.' The article 
claimed that Wright and Mamah Borthwick had been living quietly at the new bungalow 
for some months and that he had been seen fording a stream, up to his shoulders in icy 
water, carrying the lady aloft, who was exhibiting, the article continued, "a good deal of 
lingerie of a quality not often on display in that part of Wisconsin." {December 24, 1911} 
Back at Oak Park, questions were being adroitly fielded by his seventeen-year-old 
daughter, Catherine. It was a brave try, but unsuccessful. Two days later Wright was 
forced to make his first public statement, in which he went over the arguments that had 
been well aired in letters to Martin. {in the Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1911} His 
version of the story, which tended to be given in the third person as if he were retelling a 
universal legend, had to do with the fact that they had married too young, had grown 
apart, and he believed he could do more for his family by separating.  

If Wright thought this amiable description of the case would set everything to rights, he 
was to be disappointed. As transparently self-serving as his argument was, it did have a 
hidden motive: he had been goaded into it because of the effect his notoriety was having on 
the Lloyd Jones family and especially the Aunts. The Hillside Home School had been 
saved from ruin, but barely. At the bankruptcy proceedings two years before, an "unnamed 
friend" had come forward to buy the stock in the Aunts' interest; the friend turned out to be 
Jenkin Lloyd Jones.As Wright's affairs became front-page news, Nell and Jane  were 
attempting to buy back their lost control and argue their brother out of the conviction that 
they did not have enough business sense to run the school. {letter from C. E. Buell to 
Jenkin Lloyd Jones, April 20, 1912.} The last thing they needed at that moment was to 
lose money, and now one parent after another was withdrawing his or her children. As a 
Chicago businessman bluntly explained to Wright, he was a bad influence {from A. J. 
Cole, January 6, 1912.}, and unless he could be persuaded to move from Hillside the 
school would be ruined. Wright's solution was to carry forward the fiction that he was 
nowhere near Hillside, geographically speaking, and had nothing to do with the school. It 
was unfair that anyone should think so, he wrote in a public statement, which was then 
notarized. {February 12, 1912} Meantime the Lloyd Jones family leaked the news to the 
papers {Chicago Record-Herald, December 28, 1911} that it was about to sit in judgment 
on its erring member. In the middle of it all, the sheriff of Spring Green, W. L. Pengally, 
was under pressure to have Wright arrested. {Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1911} He 
refused, saying that he could not see that the architect was violating any state law. Mamah 
Borthwick said not a word for publication. Edwin Cheney quietly made plans to remarry. 
{Edwin Cheney's remarriage took place on August 5, 1912.} 

If Wright's public statements were designed to place his acts in the best possible light for 
his family's benefit, his letters to Martin were more revealing. After two years of delicate 
maneuvering, he had achieved all that he had set out to do when he returned to Oak Park, 
and felt free to let his defiance show. No doubt the immediate need to dissociate his 
address from that of the Hillside Home School played a role, but the declaration of 
independence must also be considered significant: he signed his address, that January of 
1912, as Taliesin. 

In 1905, at the peak of his success in Oak Park,Wright received thirteen commissions; 
when he left in 1909, he had ten. The following year it dropped to five, and then, in 1911, 
the number increased to eight. However, in the years 1912 and 1913 the total for each year 
dropped to three. One, however, was enormous: a project to design a "pleasure gardens" 
that would fill an entire city block in Chicago and serve all year-round as a center for 
concerts, dancing, drinking and dining. Work on the Midway Gardens,as it was called, 
came the same year that he was pursuing an even more tantalizing commission, that of 
designing a new hotel in Tokyo that would cost $7 million {SM, p. 298} and garner 
architects' fees of from $400,000 to $500,000 {DDM, January 10, 1913}. Wright's name 
had been put forward by Frederick W. Gookin, a prominent Chicago banker and print 
collector, who had bought from Wright and who had high connections in Japanese 
government circles. An invitation to submit preliminary plans followed in due course. 
Then Wright went to Japan with Mamah Borthwick in January 1913, staying for six 
months. While there he drew up preliminary plans, studied the soils and suggested some 
choices for building  materials, besides purchasing more prints. They returned in May, 
and, a month later, Wright was telling Martin he had won the prize, somewhat 
prematurely as it turned out, because he was not formally named as architect until 1916. 
{SM, pp. 298-299.} That year of 1913 went by in a predictable fashion. Wright was 
building a sumptuous new mansion for his former client Francis W. Little,his first in 
Minnesota, with a fifty-five-foot living room overlooking Robinson Bay on Lake 
Minnetonka, and a beautiful library. When the house was demolished, both rooms were 
spared and are now in museums. {The living room was put on exhibition at the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the library at the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Art 
Museum.} John and Lloyd had joined their father in partnership in his offices in Orchestra 
Hall, Chicago, and Wright was fending off demands from Martin for interest payments 
due on his various loans. {DDM, September 9, 1913.} 

As the pace of work on the Midway Gardens quickened in an effort to get the vast project 
opened by the summer of 1914, Wright was spending every waking moment on the site 
and, he wrote, had barely time to sleep or eat. He had somehow managed to arrange for an 
exhibition of his recent work at the Art Institute of Chicago as well. He had been trying to 
get the Oak Park property either rented or sold, and had asked Catherine for a divorce. A 
copy of his letter, dated November 22, 1914, is in the Taliesin Archive,but research has 
shown that the date was actually 1913 and has been altered. (No one knows why.) {Bruce 
Brooks Pfeiffer to author, September 3, 1988} Wright did his best to persuade her and 
suggested that she accept a share of the profits. He argued that if she used the grounds of 
desertion, the matter could be settled with discretion. He ended with the thought that her 
position was as demoralizing as his own and that her objections were no longer valid. 
Given Wright's usual eloquence, it was a surprisingly lame letter, and it had the 
predictable result: Catherine was not to set him free for another nine years. 

Catherine, at that period, was using every remaining card. Since "the woman" was still in 
Wright's life and was likely to remain so, Catherine's terms were that the children could 
see their father only if his mistress were not there. Frank considered that a rank injustice, 
she wrote in a letter to Janet Ashbee in the summer of 1913. She went on to describe 
complacently how distressed and agitated Frank was becoming and how (she had heard) 
the stress of his new situation was gradually undermining his self-confidence. It was 
awful to think of him in that predicament, but she knew how stubborn he could be once his 
mind was made up. It was the same confused mixture of sentimentality, unwarranted 
optimism and a kind of pious resentment. On the one hand, she felt as if her load was 
being lightened at last (while Frank sank deeper into his self-imposed morass); on the 
other hand, she never knew from one moment to the next what new disaster would bury 
them all. {July 23, 1913} 

Meantime Frank and Mamah were publishing her translations of writings by Ellen Key, 
the Swedish feminist, especially those having to do with free love and "The Woman 
Movement." Mamah was living quietly at Taliesin and was reported to be working on a 
book. She was no doubt delighted to leave household affairs to Frank, but was definitely 
interested in his projects. He was arranging a new exhibition of his work, to be held in San 
Francisco, and a number of his employees were living temporarily at Taliesin so as to 
make the work easier; Mamah was very much involved with their progress. For his part, 
Frank seems to have been genuinely proud of her attainments and was proposing to buy 
the local Spring Green paper, the Weekly Home News, and make her its editor. {SW, xxv, 
note 26} Andrew Porter and his wife, Jennie, Wright's sister, were spending the summer 
in Tan-y-Deri(Under the Oaks), the cottage beside Hillside school that Wright had built 
for them in 1907. With them were their two remaining children, Anna, aged eleven, and 
Frank Wright Porter(born in 1909 and loyally named for his uncle at the height of the 
crisis). James Andrew Porter, aged thirteen, had died two years before. 

Mamah Borthwick had her children there for a month every summer since, unlike the 
other injured spouse in the case, Edwin Cheney had not imposed conditions on her 
contacts with John and Martha. Judging from the reminiscences of Edna Meudt,their local 
playmate, a nine-year-old from Dodgeville who became a Wisconsin poet,Mamah 
Borthwick's children were frequent visitors. The story of that summer in 1914 belongs, in 
a way, to the children who witnessed it, or were its victims. Edna's special friend was 
Martha, who would be nine in September. She had a beautiful sapphire ring, to match her 
eyes, and the two of them liked to play house with their dolls between the triple trunks of a 
gnarled tree in Willow Walk. Edna recalled that neither John nor Martha liked Taliesin 
very much, and usually wanted to go home after a few days. Perhaps it was the strangeness 
of the house: "Incense, on the floors creamy bears with no insides, birds that talk back, 
showy flowers she never knew, wall-hangings to be put out of her country mind," Edna 
wrote in her poem A Summer Day That Changed the World. Or perhaps it was the 
undercurrent of gossip and disapproval from grown-ups who kept children away from 
Taliesin because of the "goings-on." This censorious attitude had certainly been the 
reason why their other friend, Verna Ross Orndorff, had not been allowed to join them that 
weekend. She had been invited, and her mother was prepared to let her visit, but her father 
refused. So she went with her parents and the second Mrs. Cheney, the former Elsie 
Millor, and a niece of the Cheneys', Jessie, on a two-day trip to Lake Delavan in 
Wisconsin, some sixty-five miles north of Chicago. Edwin Cheney was on a business trip 
that weekend. Frank Lloyd Wright had dashed back to Chicago in midweek for some 
last-minute work on the Midway Gardens. Mamah Borthwick and her children were at 
Taliesin along with a work crew that included William (Billy) Weston,thirty-five, a tall, 
spare man with a sandy mustache who had, as master carpenter, built Taliesin; his son, 
Ernest,aged thirteen; Thomas Brunker of Ridgeway, aged fifty-six, the foreman; Emil 
Brodelle, architectural draftsman, aged thirty; Herbert Fritz, another draftsman, aged 
nineteen; and David Lindblom,a landscape gardener. That day, August 15, 1914, was, 
Edna wrote, "Saturday, our Lady's Assumption in August, / Church again tomorrow. 
Oxeye daisies suggest / picking for the altar, gophers run a rickrack / across dusty roads. 
Their pretty valley / dozes that near-noon hour." Dressed in her best clothes, and astride 
the mare Beauty, Edna was on her way to Taliesin three miles distant to invite Martha and 
John back home to see the threshing. 

Julian Carlton and his wife, Gertrude, were originally from Barbados and had been 
recommended to Wright by John Vogelsang, the Chicago restaurateur who had the 
contract for the Midway Gardens. Carlton waited at table, did the work of the house and 
was general handyman; his wife did most of the cooking. He was young, of medium 
height, and slender, intelligent and quite well educated. He was not known to drink and 
appeared to have an equable disposition, but was nevertheless generally disliked and 
distrusted. Billy Weston had been overheard by a Spring Green tavern keeper to say, two 
weeks before, that Carlton was polite and smart, but "the most desperate, hotheaded 
fellow" he had ever met. A witness subsequently recalled Lindblom's saying that Carlton 
had given him an "awful calling-down." There was the further matter of a dispute that 
had taken place between Carlton and Brodelle a few days earlier. It was believed that 
Brodelle had called Carlton a "black son of a bitch" because he refused to saddle his horse. 
{Herb Fritz to author} Carlton subsequently referred to this argument with Brodelle and 
said he had to defend himself because everyone there (not only Brodelle) was "picking on 
him" and complaining about him to Wright. {Wisconsin State Journal, August 18, 1914, 
and Home News, August 20, 1914} 

As one newspaper account had it, the Carltons had been at Taliesin for only a few weeks 
when they gave two weeks' notice, the reason being that only Gertrude was homesick for 
Chicago. {Home News, August 20, 1914} This version is contradicted by that given in 
another local paper, the Dodgeville Chronicle, a day later, which seems more plausible. 
{on August 21, 1914.} According to this account the Carltons seemed ideal servants at 
first, "but something seemed to cause Mamah Borthwick to dislike Carlton. What it was 
may never be known. . . . One of the survivors of the tragedy said whatever happened had 
led Mamah Borthwick to tell the negro and his wife that their time would be up on 
Saturday night." Perhaps Mamah Borthwick sensed that something was going very wrong, 
that August Saturday morning. She is said to have sent a telegram to Wright, which 
arrived that afternoon at two o'clock. It read, "Come as quickly as you possibly can. 
Something terrible has happened." {Wisconsin State Journal, August 18, 1914.} Then 
there was the statement given by Carlton's wife. She said that for several days before their 
departure her husband had been acting strangely and slept with a hatchet in a bag beside 
his bed. She said, "De las' I seen he was runnin' round de house, actin' crazy and talkin' 
bout killin' folks." {Dodgeville Chronicle, August 21, 1914} 

The two draftsmen, Brodelle and Fritz, foreman Brunker, Billy Weston, his son, Ernest, 
and David Lindblom, the gardener, were all having lunch in the main dining room on the 
west side of the house, a small room about twelve feet square. Mamah Borthwick and her 
children were sitting elsewhere, in an enclosed screened porch over-looking the 
Wisconsin River. It was separated from the main dining room by a passageway some 
twenty-five feet long. 

Carlton, dressed in a white coat, saw both parties to their seats and served the meals. Once 
they were eating, he came to Weston and was given permission to get some gasoline that 
he needed, he said, to clean a rug. He then went quietly outside, bolted the doors and 
windows and splashed several buckets of gasoline on rugs inside the house and all around 
the outside. He seized his hatchet, warned his wife to flee and apparently-the exact 
sequence is unclear-set a blaze going and dashed to the screened porch. His very first 
victim was Mamah Borthwick. He plunged his hatchet into the center of her head as she 
sat. The weapon went through her skull into her brain just above her forehead, with one 
tremendous blow. She must have died instantly. He then attacked her son, John, who also 
died in his chair; his charred bones were all that could be found. It was theorized that 
Carlton may have doused both corpses with gasoline and set them ablaze. Martha was 
trying to escape when he caught up with her and landed at least three blows behind her 
right ear, one above the other; one penetrated her skull. There was also the imprint of the 
head of the hatchet under her right eye. She was found lying in the inner courtyard, her 
clothes burned off, with burns on her arms and legs. 

Herbert Fritz was able to give a detailed account of what happened in the main dining 
room. He recalled that there were two doors, one leading to the kitchen and the other 
opening onto the court. They had just been served and Carlton had just left the room when 
they noticed something flowing under the screen door that led to the courtyard. They 
thought it must be soapsuds. The liquid ran under his chair, and he suddenly smelled 
gasoline. Almost at the same moment, a streak of flame shot under his chair and the whole 
side of the room was ablaze. They all jumped up, and Fritz realized that his clothes were 
on fire. Since he was near a low window he plunged through it, landing on a rocky slope. 
His arm was broken by the fall, and flames were eating through his clothes and burning 
his body. He rolled over and over down the hill and managed to put the flames out. He 
scrambled to his feet and was about to start back up the hill when he saw Carlton running 
around the house with the hatchet in his hand. Emil Brodelle had also escaped through the 
window, but Carlton had buried his hatchet in his brain at the hairline. Brodelle staggered 
and fell to his knees. 

Meantime, Billy Weston was on his way through the same window when he was attacked. 
Interestingly, Carlton chose to use the back of his hatchet this time, catching Weston with 
two stunning blows that knocked him to the ground but did not kill him. Carlton, perhaps 
thinking him dead, raced off in search of another victim. He had already attacked David 
Lindblom,dealing him a hatchet wound to the back of the head that had not penetrated his 
skull, but Lindblom was suffering from severe burns over his back, arms, legs, head and 
neck. Thomas Brunker, whom Carlton caught as he burst through the door into the 
courtyard, received a lethal blow that penetrated his brain. He, too, was badly burned. As 
for the thirteen-year-old Ernest Weston, his skull had been beaten in with the hatchet 
and he had severe burns. 

By this time Taliesin was in flames.Despite two fierce blows to the head, Weston managed 
to get back onto his feet. He found Lindblom, bleeding and burned, and the two of them 
somehow ran half a mile to the nearest house with a telephone to call for help. Weston's 
actions that day were truly heroic. Wright wrote that, after giving the alarm, Weston went 
back to the house, "ran to where the fire hose was kept in a niche of the garden wall, . . . 
got the hose loose, staggered with it to the fire and with the playing hose stood against 
destruction until they led him away." {A2, p. 185.} The first to arrive on the scene were 
Frank Sliter, whose home was closest to the house, Jack Farries, Albert Beckley and Fred 
Hanke. Farries said he ran into the courtyard looking for Carlton. He did not find him but 
saw Brodelle on his hands and knees, on the point of collapse. He also found Ernest 
Weston, covered with blood but still on his feet. Ernest managed to walk a short distance 
and then fainted. Farries carried him into the shade of a tree. Then he found Martha 
Cheney, her clothing almost burned off her body. 

The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, which ran the first account of the disaster in its 
late editions Saturday night, reported that attendants from the Hillside Home School half a 
mile away had quickly reached the scene. The Spring Green fire department rushed across 
the three miles of prairie, and a bucket brigade of workers from Tower Hill was dispatched 
in an effort to save the house. Their work was in vain; by three o'clock that afternoon, it 
was reported, Taliesin was completely destroyed. Jenkin Lloyd Jones was directing the 
rescue and attempts to control the fire. The first person to reach Mamah Borthwick was 
Wright's brother-in-law Andrew Porter. He found her body ablaze and thought it had 
been saturated with gasoline. Her corpse was badly burned, and her hair almost completely 
burned off. It was then 12:45 p.m. He carried her, with the other dead and wounded, to a 
neighbor's cottage. When his wife first heard the news from the Wisconsin State Journal, 
she refused to believe it because, she said, Carlton was such a mild-mannered man. 

Edna was on the road to Taliesin when she saw a thin curl of smoke coming from the 
hillside. There was a scream. She heard men's shouts, and cries of children. She slid from 
her horse and looked at her trembling hands. She began to cry and pray, "Hail Mary, full 
of grace! The Lord is with thee. . . ." over and over again. Then she found herself climbing 
the stone steps up to Taliesin, into the courtyard. One of the victims was half-hidden 
under towels. Her hair was burned and her eyelashes were gone, but she was still 
conscious. The lips in that face moved to mouth her name. Edna stared at her silently, 
thinking,  as she recognized the ring on her playmate's swollen hand. Martha Cheney lived 
for only a few hours longer. Mamah Borthwick, John and Martha Cheney, Emil Brodelle 
and Thomas Brunker were dead or dying at the scene; Ernest Weston would die of his 
burns; so would David Lindblom. Of the nine who had sat down to lunch that Saturday, 
only two, Herbert Fritz and Billy Weston, survived. 

Within an hour after the murders, hundreds of farmers, their wives and their children had 
arrived to beat out the flames; others combed the cornfields looking for Carlton. He was 
found at about 5:30 that afternoon. He had crept down to the basement of the house and 
was hiding inside the unlit furnace, protected from the flames. It was thought that he had 
planned to slip away after the search had been called off, and make his escape during the 
night. He had swallowed some muriatic acid and was only semiconscious. Three carloads 
of men were instantly ready to "string him up," but the guns of the sheriff and his posse 
held them off. {Dodgeville Chronicle, August 21, 1914.} He was incarcerated in the 
Dodgeville County jail, where his mouth and throat were found to be badly burned. He 
died in jail two months later {on October 7, 1914}, not from the effects of the acid, which 
were not judged life-threatening, but from a successful attempt to starve himself; he had 
lost almost sixty pounds. There was no trial, but there were preliminary hearings at which 
evidence was given. The day before one of them, Carlton, sick as he was, made trouble for 
Sheriff John T. Williams. It was stated that he had tried to throw a glass tumbler and tin 
pail at Williams, and "in the scuffle which followed the negro grabbed hold of the sheriff's 
leg." Help soon arrived, and Carlton was thrown back into his cell. {Dodgeville Chronicle, 
August 28, 1914} 

John Lloyd Wright,who was superintending the work at Midway Gardens, was having 
lunch on a scaffold that Saturday. A sandwich in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, 
he was painting a mural for the tavern wall. His father was eating lunch at the other end of 
the room. The door opened, and an office secretary appeared to say that Mr. Wright was 
wanted on the telephone. Wright disappeared for a few moments, and when he returned, 
John, absorbed with his work, did not pause. He soon became aware of an unnatural 
silence, his father's labored breathing and then a groan. John spun around; Wright's face 
was white and he was clinging to the table for support. There had been a fire; John must 
get a taxi. They took the first train for Spring Green. It was a slow local, and, as luck 
would have it, Edwin Cheney was on the platform. The two men looked at each other and 
clasped hands in silent sympathy. John pushed them both into a compartment to save them 
from being crushed by reporters. Journalists would tell them both the frightful news as the 
train inched forward, and they would see the headline: TALIESIN BURNING TO THE 
GROUND, SEVEN SLAIN. {My Father Who Is on Earth, John Lloyd Wright, p. 82} The 
Aunts, Nell and Jane, were at the Madison station awaiting their nephew's arrival. So was 
Richard Lloyd Jones,Jenkin's son, by now a journalist with the Wisconsin State Journal. 
Wright had sagged visibly as the journey progressed and, by the time he arrived, seemed 
about to faint.  When the news came through to the parents of Verna Ross,vacationing in 
Lake Delavan, the second Mrs. Cheney collapsed and Mrs. Ross was up all night. All any 
of them could think of was that Verna might have been one more victim. Franklin 
Porter,then aged six, retains a confused memory of that day, of teams of horses rushing up 
the road from school and loud shouts as black clouds of smoke rose from Taliesin.  Cheney 
left the next day on a train for Chicago, accompanied by a single casket containing the 
remains of his two children. {The account of the fire and murders compiled from 
contemporary newspaper accounts (No state records of the preliminary trial testimony 
exist).} 

There was a hailstorm that weekend, resulting in much damage to corn and other crops in 
the towns of Spring Green, Wyoming, Arena and Dodgeville. That evening Wright's 
cousins, Orin and Ralph Lloyd Jones,and his son John, placed Mamah's body in a simple 
pine box. They loaded it onto a cart and drove it to Unity Church.It was then placed in a 
grave and heaped with zinnias, dahlias and nasturtiums from the Taliesin garden. A 
witness at the funeral said that, as the casket was lowered, the clouds opened and Wright 
asked everyone to leave. Looking back, he saw Wright standing alone in the rain. {as 
described by Cary Caraway to author} Wright later wrote, "All I had left to show for the 
struggle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away, had 
now been swept away." {A2, p. 186} However imperfectly, he had believed in the good, 
the true and the beautiful and had tried to incorporate those beliefs into his life, his work 
and his love. {A2, p. 189} Nevertheless he was being punished, by that same hand he had 
always feared, the wrathful God of Isaiah. "Fate has smashed these wonderful walls, / This 
broken city, has crumbled the work / Of giants. . . ." Boils broke out over his back and 
neck. As one more victim after another died, he stoically went to their funerals. That there 
might have been a powerful desire, at some level, to share Mamah's fate is suggested by a 
small item that appeared in a local newspaper the following week. It seemed that on 
Tuesday, August 18, the heavy rains of the weekend forced the dam of the artificial lake 
below the ruins of Taliesin to break.Wright was standing close to the edge when it 
happened-too close. A sudden rush of water thundered down the creek and swept him 
into it. {Dodgeville Chronicle, August 28, 1914} But then the shock of finding himself in 
actual physical danger brought about the moment of truth he had, perhaps unconsciously, 
courted, and he fought his way to the bank. He still, it seemed, wanted to live. 


Lord of Her Waking Dreams 

. . . while I  
Go struggling deep in the ocean, thrashing  
In its darkness. . . . 

"Storm at Sea" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 83} 

The persistence with which Wright would cling to his hill in The Valley for the next 
half-century ought to settle the issue of how much of a Welshman he really was. When 
the immigrants arrived in Wisconsin and claimed their newfound land, they set up an 
ideal to which at least one grandchild was forever faithful. It was the end of hiraeth and 
the beginning of fulfillment as human beings and representatives of an ancient and 
honorable culture. The terrible events of August 1914 might have sent some men to the 
other ends of the earth. Instead, the tragedy seemed to have sharpened his awareness of his 
Celtic heritage and to have drawn him closer to his companions in isolation, the Lloyd 
Jones family;it also reinforced his inner conviction of a special destiny. Two years before 
he had thrown in his lot with the name of Taliesin. Whatever could have caused him to 
choose the name, it provided an apt symbolism for the trial by fire through which he was 
passing. If something in him had died with Mamah, the legend of Taliesin offered the 
hope that what was imperishable in his nature might be born again. "The Prophet 
Johannes called me Merddin/But now all kings know me as Taliesin." He resolved almost 
immediately to rebuild. {"Having died to his personal ego, he arose again established in 
the Self," in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, p. 243.} 

That autumn of 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright might have been the Lloyd Jones who had met 
misfortune most spectacularly, but he was only the most obvious example. Not one 
member of his mother's generation had remained untouched by hardship and private 
tragedy, and as a result of the crisis of 1907, there had been a drastic dwindling of their 
collective land holdings in The Valley as well. As long as Wright remained on his hill he, 
as representative of the next generation, offered the best hope that the Lloyd Jones name 
might one day be restored to its old prominence. And, as companions in adversity, his 
relatives could not be improved upon. His son John, who had accompanied him on that 
terrible five-hour trip from Chicago, had quietly left after convincing himself that his 
father preferred to be alone. His sister Maginel, by then married and pursuing a successful 
career as an artist in New York, knew better. She returned to The Valley to be with her 
brother, taking long rides over the hills to Pleasant Ridge, Blue Mound and beyond.  

Maginel could be counted upon to find just the right note of encouragement, and she 
obviously believed there was something magical about his newest home. In it, she saw a 
subtle interplay between poetic, fanciful and very human qualities. To her, the house 
seemed both romantic and profound, full of unexpected and transient delights, yet 
somehow timeless. It always had a particular and distinctive smell.  Taliesin's living 
quarters were destroyed, but the studio remained, with a small bedroom behind it. This 
might have seemed an omen, a clear signal that Wright was meant to restore and redesign 
more wonderfully than before. If Maginel had spoken to him in this vein, she would 
merely have strengthened her brother's resolve. When she returned a few months later she 
found twenty-five workmen engaged in reconstruction.Their sister Jane, fed them all, 
providing gargantuan feasts that reminded Maginel of those she had seen at threshing 
time. The phoenix was rising, and whatever had been retrieved from its ashes-shards of 
porcelain, fragments of statuary-was being set into the cement of the stone piers. It was a 
triumph of imagination and will. 

Wright wrote that he had not, at first, wanted Anna's company and that she had been very 
much hurt. {A2,p. 188} This decision must have been short-lived, because she would 
seldom be far from her brilliant son's side from that time onward, until her death nine 
years later. She had become the formidable grande dame everyone had foreseen in Oak 
Park,model leader of the community-she was one of the founders of the Nineteenth 
Century Woman's Club and gave classes in Emerson and Browning and papers on one of 
her favorite authors, the naturalist John Burroughs. A scrapbook she kept late in life gives 
some indication of her interests in those years: clippings about Susan B. Anthony, Carrie 
Chapman Cott (president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association) and 
Rev. Anna Howard Shaw. There are photographs of her former homes, of Unity Temple, 
of David Lloyd George, as Member of Parliament, and of a meeting to celebrate the 
centenary of Ann Griffiths, Welsh writer of hymns. Anna also kept old letters from Jenkin 
when he was fighting in the Civil War, homespun homilies written by her in a shaky hand 
and poems exhorting the reader to remain steadfast in difficulty. Yet to her intimates, 
Anna remained the same volatile mixture of piety and capriciousness, aloofness and 
malleability, childlike delight and poetic responsiveness, as shifting in her moods as the 
weather. Wright had built living quarters for her at Taliesin and, during his absences, 
often left her in charge. 

At a moment when no expense was being spared to restore Taliesin, the fate of the Oak 
Park home and studio, now split into separate units, hung in the balance. Wright had 
somehow neglected to pay back taxes, and the town was about to foreclose. Wright still 
owed money to Little, the Forest Avenue unit remained unrented (Catherine and family 
having moved into the remodeled, studio side), and, as Darwin Martin was aware, his own 
financial share in the property, the result of his "trust-deed" loan of four years before, 
was jeopardized by Wright's irresponsible behavior. Martin scolded his architect for his 
frequent absences in Wisconsin, away from the path of duty, in pursuit of "dalliance and 
self-indulgence," but Wright, at this point, was immune. {DDM, October 29, 1914} He 
had taken the measure of his man and had perfected his defenses; besides, he had long 
since accepted such reproaches as the price he paid for never having to face a final 
accounting. Behind the clearly self-defeatist behavior were the instincts of a survivor, and 
these always surfaced when he most needed them; with his back to the wall, Wright was 
magnificent, unconquerable. As Taliesin was being rebuilt, Wright bent every nerve to 
compose masterpieces of placating prose, combining plausible explanations for past 
behavior with appeals to friendship and apparently genuine offers at quasisolutions that 
served his immediate purpose, the only one he cared about, of buying more time. {October 
20, 1914} 

Had Martin known just how ambitious the reconstruction was, and just how extensive a 
household Wright was now supporting, he would have been even angrier. Antonin 
Raymond,a young artist and future architect came to join the master's atelier as work was 
being completed. Raymond, a Czech who had been educated in Prague, studied painting in 
Italy and trained as an architectural draftsman in New York, provided a vivid account of 
the Taliesin household that he found when he arrived with his young French wife, 
Noemi,in the spring of 1916. They took the train to Spring Green, where they were met by 
the master himself in a handsome carriage, and taken to Taliesin, up and around the hill, 
through the porte cochare and into the inner courtyard.The building complex was 
extensive: not just an enlarged studio, with new living quarters for several draftsmen, 
newly erected farm buildings, stables, guest quarters, servants' quarters and so on, but also 
a handsome residence for the master. Several workmen were in permanent attendance, 
including a Czech stonemason, aged eighty, who spent his days building walls, refreshing 
his efforts with a flask containing pure alcohol.Raymond made a mental note of handsome 
horse carriages and a collection of horses-Wright was "an experienced and fearless 
rider"-including Kaiser, a large black horse with vicious yellow teeth that the architect 
alone could master, and Shots and Silver, two gentler animals.  

The main residence was a masterpiece. Wright had built it in his usual style, with 
immense roofs and massive fireplaces, of stucco and plaster,staining his lines of moldings 
with Cabot's stain or creosote, as a fitting backdrop for his extensive collection of furniture 
and ornaments. He had gilded the joints between bricks, made wide use of ornamentation, 
even around windows and doors, and incorporated numerous Japanese screens, sculptures, 
prints, lacquerware, statuary and other objects into his famous overall schemes. Rugs and 
upholstery were of the finest materials, and animal skins further embellished couches and 
floors; there were great bouquets of flowers everywhere. The host himself, then aged 
forty-eight and at the height of his mental and physical powers, put Raymond in mind of 
a latter-day Diamond Jim Brady: underwear of chamois leather, hats made to order, 
swirling capes, complete outfits handmade by the finest tailors. They were shown to a suite 
of guest rooms and entertained with panache by their cordial and generous host. A few 
days after Raymond arrived, he remarked that the studio in which the draftsmen worked 
was not well enough lit or large enough to permit seeing things from a distance. Their host 
promptly encouraged them to take down the roof and start again. Wright was planting 
fields, orchards and a new vineyard, but, the Raymonds noticed, as soon as these ambitious 
projects needed work, he would lose interest. His inventiveness and energy were 
prodigious and he worked ceaselessly, although the actual building for clients was almost 
nonexistent. His draftsmen were at work on his new idea for the mass manufacture of 
low-cost prefabricated houses, ingenious and practical and far ahead of its time: more 
evidence of his ability to combine artistry and shrewd business sense. Despite all of his 
imagination and energy, Raymond thought Wright's interest flagged whenever practical 
matters were concerned, at least in his own establishment. He had constructed a dam to 
generate electricity at the foot of Taliesin, one fed by a brook, and the equipment was 
always getting stuck.  

He was a man of prodigious courage, energy and imagination; he gave generously of 
himself, and he was a reliable friend. The Raymonds had met "Dan," a former schoolmate 
of the master's, now a jack-of-all-trades around the place who kept the complicated 
establishment functioning and took care of the horses, wagons and so-called farm. Dan 
was also a heavy drinker who would periodically disappear. Whenever that happened, 
Wright would go searching for him and bring him back in the buggy. That showed how 
charming he could be, and how loyal-too loyal. On one occasion, Wright forcefully 
criticized one of Antonin Raymond's paintings because it was clearly in the style of an 
experimental new school he happened to dislike-not, one would have thought, the tactful 
thing to do. 

The tact and diplomacy with which Wright had managed to gloss over differences between 
himself and his early clients and ease his upward struggle when he was making a name for 
himself seemed to have largely vanished, and in their place was a readiness to take sharp 
and sarcastic exception to people and actions whenever his feelings were hurt. One of the 
first-known examples of this can be traced to 1907, that year of tumult in his life, and an 
exchange of letters between himself and a Chicago poet and critic, Harriet Monroe, who 
was also sister-in-law of the architect John Welborn Root. She reviewed an exhibition 
of Wright's designs at the Chicago Art Institute in what one would have called a friendly 
way, but without the lavish approval and unqualified praise the architect plainly expected. 
{Chicago Examiner, April 13, 1907} Characteristically, he tore off a lengthy epistle, the 
gist of which was that she did not know anything about the noble cause he espoused. 
{April 18, 1907; University of Chicago Libraries} The two patched up their differences, 
but this experience no doubt influenced Monroe's final opinion of Wright's work. 
Summing it up in her book A Poet's Life, Monroe judged him to be far below Sullivan in 
stature, and a publicity hound to boot. {published by Macmillan, New York, in 1938} 

Wright's pattern, a belligerent willingness to strike back harder whenever he sensed 
hostility, followed at length by a temperate response, was unvarying. Some were able to 
shrug off his pique and remained to become good friends. Others were permanently 
offended. One of them appears to have been his gifted assistant, Marion Mahony Griffin, 
only the second woman to receive a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology. She joined Wright's Oak Park studio in 1895 and became indispensable as 
his delineator. Many have judged her to be more of an artist than an architect; at any 
event, it is known that many of the designs for Wright's 1910 Wasmuth portfolio were 
actually drawn by her, and Plates 14 and 15 bear her monogram, MLM. She was also a 
fine designer, and at least some of the designs for interior furnishings, mosaics, stained 
glass and murals for which Wright took complete credit are now thought to have been 
created by Mahony. When Wright left his family in 1909, Mahony stayed on in the office 
and was the creative force behind the completion of his projects. But the relationship 
ended badly. A letter from Wright, accusing Mahony of stealing his ideas, taking clients 
away, betraying him to the world at large and other words to that effect, has not survived, 
but her reply to it has. She was leaving Oak Park to join the office of Walter Burley 
Griffin, another Wright ex-apprentice, who was to have a distinguished Australian career 
as an architect, and a man she soon married. With a formal politeness that could not 
entirely conceal her sense of outrage, Mahony spiritedly defended her work while in 
Wright's employ, work that he was now attacking as inferior.  

He should have been slower to condemn: it was a fair comment. From about 1911 onward 
he was completely wrapped up in the resentful conviction that lesser men and women, 
many of them his former students, had broken away, taking his ideas with them, and were 
throwing up sordid little imitations of his work all over the Midwest, cheapening the ideas 
he had first formulated and, all alone, had championed. {Architectural Record, May 
1914.} This was of course a distorted view, but it did contain a germ of truth. It was a fact 
that a number of architects, now part of the New School of the Midwest, among them 
Walter Burley Griffin, George Grant Elmslie, Barry Byrne, George W. Maher, Robert C. 
Spencer, Jr., Eben E. Roberts, John S. Van Bergen, Charles E. White, and the 
architectural firm of Tallmadge and Watson, were designing in ways that, to the casual 
eye, looked Wright-inspired and influenced.  

He may also have felt, with more justification, that he was far too often praised, in 
American professional circles, with faint damns. That Harriet Monroe tendency, as he saw 
it, to commend with one sentence while removing the grounds for such approval with the 
next, had become a positive plague of dismissive articles. When his first really important 
publication, Ausgef�hrte Bauten und Entw�rfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, was published in 
1910, only one magazine published a review, and the noted critic Montgomery Schuyler, 
who wrote it, could not bring himself to praise the book unreservedly.  

All of this might not have mattered had Wright felt in his usual fettle, with all kinds of 
new tricks up his sleeve. As has been noted, he was seeking a source of inspiration in the 
Japanese as early as 1905, but there were, as might be predicted, myriads of strands, any 
one of which could be pursued with profit in the game of speculating about the particular 
influences on his work at any particular moment. It is known that, while in Europe that 
winter of 1909-10, he studied the new movements in art and interior design, and, as 
might have been expected, some of these elements crept into his work after his return. His 
designs for the Coonley Playhouse of 1912 are frequently compared, in their use of circular 
motifs, which had appeared in Wright's work for the first time, with the paintings of such 
European artists as Frantisek Kupka, Roger de la Fresnaye and Robert Delaunay, which 
predate them. {HACat, pp. 16-17} Other designs by Wright, including murals for the 
Midway Gardens, an intricate pattern of interlocked circles in floating configurations, and 
even the dinner service he used for the Imperial Hotel of 1916-22, show the same 
affinities with these European precursors. The influences, however, were far from being in 
one direction alone. As is evident, Wright inspired a host of sympathetic imitators, and his 
magnificent early designs in stained glass, with their geometrical formalism, would be 
enthusiastically rediscovered once the great Paris exhibition of 1925 brought about a rage 
for the Art Deco style. One would have to compare Wright with Picasso in his restless 
willingness to follow a radical path wherever it led, so long as it took him into a fertile 
field for experimentation. Other artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky, whose famous 
Improvisation No. 6 of 1913 directly predicted the coming upheaval, sensed that the world 
was moving inexorably toward famine, fire and death. Wright would not have been Wright 
if he had not, somehow, been thrown off stride by that sense of foreboding. 

As might be predicted, the great movement that had built on the teachings of Ruskin and 
Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, was coming to an end. H. Allen Brooks's history of 
the rise and fall of the Prairie school dates its waning influence very precisely. He wrote 
that, in 1914, the Prairie school was still a driving force in Chicago, and its work was well 
represented in an exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club. A year later, its architects 
were having difficulty obtaining commissions; by 1917, some of the most famous had 
moved into other fields and there was not one example of Prairie school work in the 
annual architectural exhibition at the Art Institute. Wright's position, as World War I 
began, was analogous to that of a theoretician whose main themes will soon be considered 
irrelevant and whose main body of work will soon be as outmoded as the Gibson Girl and 
the horse and carriage-left alone to preach a message no one, any longer, believed. 

What was equally distressing for Wright, perhaps, was a contemplation of the direction 
that modern art was clearly taking. If he had been following movements in Germany 
closely, as no doubt he had, he would have seen the similarities between the landscape 
Raymond had painted, to which he had taken such a dislike, and similar landscapes 
painted by Kandinsky in 1909. Raymond's exaggerated distortions of line and color and 
his radical simplification of the actual scene being illustrated, all of which were meant to 
produce a far greater emotional impact than, say, the serene and naturalistic landscapes of 
the Impressionists, were in the accepted manner of the new group of Expressionist 
painters. Kandinsky, a major theoretician of the movement, and one of the founders of the 
Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in 1911, had just published a book, The Art of Spiritual 
Harmony (1914), which would be the manifesto of the then-emerging style of 
Abstractionism. Kandinsky would go on to teach at the Bauhaus-the famous school of 
architecture, design and craftsmanship that was yet to be established. (It did not come into 
existence until 1919.) Yet with his uncanny prescience, Wright somehow knew that 
Expressionism and its closely related school, Abstractionism, were taking art, and 
architecture along with it, down a path to which he would become absolutely opposed. It 
gave Raymond great pause for thought. Was this man truly a part of the modern 
movement, or could it be that he did not understand what was coming, and was destined to 
be left behind? {AR.} 

Just as in England the Arts and Crafts Movement paved the way for Neo-Georgian, 
which became the conventional and preferred style for the middle-class suburban house, 
so in the United States the vogue for individuality and original design was being 
superseded by a revival of the colonial house, the new symbol of genteel culture. The last 
Prairie house designs were published in House Beautiful in 1914. That magazine was 
moving its offices from Chicago to New York, reflecting the growing influence of younger 
magazines already being published there: House and Garden (founded 1901) and 
American Homes and Gardens (1905). These publications lent editorial weight to the new 
view that the words Americanism and democracy could best be applied to the colonial 
style, which, some wrote, was the only distinctly American one. But in fact the trend was 
toward an eclectic romp of styles: Beaux Arts, Tudor, French Ch�teau, Italianate and the 
like, which would clutter up the domestic scene until World War II, bringing with it just 
that claustrophobic visual chaos Wright had so much abhorred and against which he had 
set his energies decades before. 

Wright's hostility to any interference from the lady of the house has already been 
described, and it would not have made his task any easier. The Darwin Martin 
correspondence provides some apt examples of Wright's readiness to flatten the first sign 
of feminine mutiny. He went on to do battle, that same March of 1903, with Mrs. Martin's 
expressed dislike of the kind of exterior he had in mind. Many other clients had been just 
as doubtful as Mrs. Martin was, until they had seen the results. She-and her 
husband-must learn to have faith. Two years later, when Mrs. Martin popped her head up 
again, it was with a meek little squeak. She wanted a round table, her husband said. 
{DDM, August 30, 1905} Perhaps the architect might be inclined to grant this request. 
Once Mrs. Martin had been put in her place Wright could afford to be generous, although 
his praise might sound offensive to some ears. A woman who knew her own mind was the 
kind of client Wright emphatically did not want, unless it was a special kind of woman 
(the kind he would have considered enlightened) who wanted exactly the kind of house he 
wanted. He found her in Mrs. Avery Coonley, the former Queene Ferry of Detroit. She 
came from a family that had made a fortune as early developers of seed companies, which 
ought to have made her a member of the idle rich. That she certainly was not. Shortly after 
graduating from Vassar she spent her first year doing volunteer work at one of the first 
Chicago settlement houses, then trained to be a kindergarten teacher. She took an 
advanced interest in progressive theories of child raising. She became interested in 
women's rights, a cause she shared with her husband, also the child of a wealthy, 
progressive and distinguished family. 

Naturally, both Coonleys took politically liberal positions, which would have endeared 
them to a Lloyd Jones, and they were also devout Christian Scientists. Queene Coonley's 
progressive views made her most receptive to Wright's innovative architecture and Wright 
responded with one of his most superb creations, called "the palazzo among prairie 
houses." {MAN, p. 188} Since one of Mrs. Coonley's great interests was early-childhood 
education (she had founded five schools in the Chicago area before she was forty-five), 
the idea of having Wright also build them a "playhouse," actually a school, on the grounds 
of their Riverside, Illinois, home was a natural extension of those interests. Her 
enthusiasm for Wright's ideas, and his character, never lessened, despite the fact that she 
was "straightlaced," her granddaughter said.  

Catherine's predication to Darwin Martin, in December 1912, that the Mamah Borthwick 
episode would end in two years, was uncannily prescient. But the reconciliation that was 
also foreseen by some of the Chicago papers during their coverage of the Taliesin murders 
had not taken place. Catherine seemed to have forgotten about her own prediction when 
she wrote to Janet Ashbee a month after the murders. Her letter was mostly taken up with 
the news that the children, whom she had prevented from seeing their father as long as 
Mamah was alive, were now staying with him, and daughter Catherine was even 
proposing to keep house for him. The tragedy had been traumatic, and they would have to 
wait for time to do its work. Catherine did not expect their marriage to be reestablished 
any time soon, but if that day ever came, she knew she would hear from him. {September 
18, 1914} That was enough for her. It was a new note of resignation, and there might have 
been a chance for a reconciliation, but a letter from Wright to his wife, sent in December 
1914, ruled it out. He enclosed his monthly check, and the manner in which he described 
the financial sparring with Darwin D. Martin in which he was then engaged suggests that 
the house had, in some sense, become a substitute for the battleground of their marriage 
and all of its lingering resentments. Their daughter would not do as a housekeeper. Quite 
soon thereafter, he hired a housekeeper for Spring Green. Her name was Nellie Breen. 

Two days after Wright wrote that letter to Catherine, and as Christmas Day, 1914, 
approached, a stranger wrote a letter of sympathy and commiseration. {T, December 12, 
1914} Knowing how acutely one felt such a loss during the holidays, she was writing to 
express her horror at the dimensions of his tragedy and tell him that she, too, had known 
such a loss. Several paragraphs followed having to do with learning to forget, consoling 
oneself with thoughts of the beloved's blissful present state and similar thoughts couched 
in phrases that made one think, as D. B. Wyndham Lewis wrote in his preface to his 
anthology of bad verse, of "the spinster lady coyly attuned to Life and Spring." All too 
soon such language and the sentiments it expressed would be ridiculed out of existence, 
but for the moment it was the height of fashion. The letter, which made a pleasing 
impression upon the recipient, was signed "Madame Noel." 

Maude Miriam Noel, who was forty-five when she met Frank Lloyd Wright, and two 
years his junior, was born in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, on May 9, 1869. She was 
descended from a distinguished family of Southerners whose origins went back to the 
1700s in colonial Virginia. Her father, Andrew J. Hicks, M.D., was son of one of the 
wealthiest plantation owners in western Tennessee, holder of several thousand acres and 
master of numerous slaves before the Civil War. Dr. Hicks was one of nine sons, all well 
educated. He studied medicine in Philadelphia and spent the greater part of his life in 
Texas and New Mexico. His daughter, called "Aunt Maude" by the family, preferred to be 
known as Miriam; she had married very young (she claimed she was fifteen) to Emil Noel, 
son of a wealthy Southern family. They moved to Chicago, where Noel became a 
department store executive with Marshall Field, and had three children, Norma, Thomas 
and Corinne. 

Miriam Noel probably never went to college. She was, however, accustomed to a 
comfortable, if not elegant, life, had excellent taste in furniture and objets d'art and was 
famous for her wardrobe. Whenever she traveled she took trunks full of clothes, probably 
custom-made, since she dressed for theatrical effect rather than style, wearing capes and 
turbans and all manner of chokers, necklaces, brooches, rings and a monocle suspended 
from her neck on a cord of white silk. When war broke out, she had been living in Paris 
for the past decade (to judge from her memoir), her husband having died three years 
before. {in 1911} It is a family belief that she was a sculptor of some accomplishment, 
although no samples of her work are known; it is said that one of her works, a pair of 
hands, was accepted for the collection at the Louvre. Whether or not this is true, the fact 
that she tied for first place in a Paris sculpture competition with Mrs. Harry Payne 
Whitney seems plausible. She was socially well placed and moved in a circle of American 
and British expatriates and dilettanti. 

To judge from Miriam Noel's account-she left Paris after war was declared to join her 
married daughter, Norma, in Chicago-she had been leading a life of refinement and 
luxury, surrounded by a circle of prominent friends including Leon Trotsky. Her house in 
Paris was full of treasures. {MJ, May 8, 1932}  

She was still beautiful, with a trim, erect figure, a mass of reddish brown hair, eyes with a 
greenish tinge and pale, unlined skin. Wright would call her "truly brilliant," and also 
clairvoyant. She was a follower of Mary Baker Eddy's, and it would later transpire that she 
was attracted to spiritualism and consulted mediums. {Jane Porter to Frank Lloyd Wright, 
undated letter.} He saw her remarkable qualities but would not have seen an aspect of her 
character that was not immediately apparent: she was dangerously self-delusory. She had 
a hidden script, a fantasy that she had woven around herself, in which she was destined to 
become the leading lady in a heroic, legendary romance. Being a woman of her 
generation, her own abilities and accomplishments would not have counted for much in 
her own estimation. She would have seen herself as, say, another Eleonora Duse, a woman 
of marked gifts who might only attain immortality if her name had been linked with that 
of a man of even more unique and remarkable gifts. In Duse's case it was the Italian 
dramatist and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, then at the height of his fame in Paris. To judge 
from her memoir, Miriam Noel had marked out Wright to play such a role in her life 
before she returned to Chicago. This fantasist quality, which would become so evident, is 
immediately apparent in her writings. In a scene so false as to be a parody of the genre, 
she describes the sorrow of the disappointed lover she leaves behind in Paris. Whether 
there really was such a suitor, and what actually happened is not known, but given Miriam 
Noel's predilections one may safely assume that it was probably the reverse of her account. 
The truth, the world as it is, facing facts: none of these necessities had any charm for 
Miriam Noel. Her mission in life was to mold the world closer to her own illusion. Given 
opposition, she would simply try harder, displaying a tenacity and conviction that were 
admirable, if one could overlook the fact that this herculean force of will was being exerted 
upon an unrealizable objective. 

The feelings of defeat, despair and worthlessness that may have fueled this manic fantasy 
world can only be guessed at, but that there was an air of tragedy about Miriam Noel was 
instantly communicated to Wright when they met. He noted that her head shook slightly 
but continuously. She talked about an unhappy love affair that, she said, paralleled his 
own; it had broken her health. {A2, p. 202} Perhaps inadvertently, she had hit upon the 
approach most calculated to bring forth Wright's indignant and warmest sympathies. He 
could not resist a victim of fate and, from Robie Lamp onward, could be counted upon to 
be loyal and fiercely defensive of anyone he thought had been unfairly treated. And 
Miriam's secret was that she had a severe handicap. For all her poise and authority, her 
refinement, social status and artistic accomplishment, she must have seemed as much an 
outsider and as emotionally adrift as he was. He would discover only later that she was a 
morphine addict. {As his letter to her reveals: MM, p. 255.} 

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was the only major Western nation 
to have no laws restricting narcotics. Opium and morphine were widely used, and in the 
mid-1880s it was perfectly legal to sniff, smoke, inject, rub, eat or drink cocaine. 
Morphine's value as a pain reliever and sedative was known long before its addictive 
qualities, as well as its undesirable side effects-circulatory, respiratory and 
gastrointestinal-were understood. It is also known to be a depressant. 

He was fated to like her and he wanted to like her; that much is clear. The next woman in 
his life had appeared before him, just as Kitty had done when she collided with him on the 
dance floor, without any effort on his part. He might, from the beginning, have had some 
reservations, but she never had a moment's doubt. She had angled for, and received, an 
invitation in just a few days, as the correspondence shows, and never looked back. She had 
gone to meet him in his studio, a mere pinpoint of light in the canyons of stone, brick and 
glass of downtown Chicago, and saw at a distance a short, stocky figure in the doorway, 
with a halo of almost white hair and a face as deeply lined as Holbein's portrait of 
Erasmus. This unprepossessing figure was a distinct disappointment, and she did not like 
his hands.  

A man with a marvelous gaze, instant, headlong capitulation: the plot had long been 
written in advance, but no first act could have played itself out more satisfactorily. But 
more was to come. At the end of the evening he had declared that he was in love with her, 
just like that! And she had, with eyes averted, blushingly and et cetera. Duse could have 
created no more palpitating portrait of a heroine responding to the ardor of a gallant new 
suitor, or shown more appreciation for the interior decorating talents of her D'Annunzio 
than Noel did for the modest little house Wright inhabited in Chicago. Her memoir 
describes the whirlwind of breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, drives into the country and 
visits to art exhibitions staged by Wright for her benefit. On that first Christmas at his 
house she wore a Paris gown of almond green velvet; he was in a black velvet dinner 
jacket and Chinese trousers. No heroine from D'Annunzio's romances could have been 
more fastidiously courted; nor found a more perfect setting for the drama of true love that 
was unfolding. 

They had met, she had been conquered, they had shared the midnight hours, and she, in 
perhaps unconscious imitation of "Perdita" (by Mary Robinson, a minor 
nineteenth-century poet), meant to do it full justice. "Piercing the air, a golden crescent 
towers / Veiled by transparent clouds; while smiling hours / Shake from their varying 
wings celestial joys!" Perdita wrote. It was precisely right, if one can judge from Miriam's 
winged phrases, scattered in girlish abundance over page after page as her pen raced to 
keep up with her tempestuous feelings. Exclamation marks were liberally employed. 
Multiple references were made to classical allusions that may have puzzled her classically 
illiterate swain. But all, no doubt, was forgiven in the avalanche of compliments that was 
descending upon him. Every fiber of her being ached with desire. He was her first true 
love. They had reached heights of bliss hitherto unknown to humankind, and she, an 
ardent slave to passion, writhed at his feet. But, no! There she need not stay. He would 
enfold her in his purple pinions and together they would soar starward where, entwined in 
chrysolite, they would find emblazoned the eternally conjoined names of Frank, and . . . 
Oh, by the way, would he mind calling her Miriam? she added. As posterity would 
demonstrate, Maude Miriam Noel did not have much of a sense of humor. 

Her letter reveals that they became lovers with a speed one would have thought breakneck 
for their times. It also suggests that Wright uncritically accepted her self-portrait along 
with her version of events, and complacently took as his due the cataract of compliments 
one might have expected him to write to her, rather than the reverse. By some uncanny 
sixth sense she had hit upon just the right note. As his adoring helpmeet she was prepared 
to provide as much approval and praise as he needed, or could stand. One must, of course, 
make allowance for the poetic conceits of the epoch as well as Noel's natural desire to 
apply balm to a wounded soul, but these reservations aside, one has to conclude that her 
panegyrics reached new heights, or depths, of hyperbole. Someone less gullible and 
self-absorbed than Wright would have been put on his guard very quickly, but Wright, 
sometimes so astute at discerning the motives of others, appeared not to suspect that her 
calls to noble conduct, some biblical citations, a highminded use of the words "spiritual" 
and "pure" and similar references were calculated to soothe his Puritan sensibilities. She 
was even prepared to accept an unconventional liaison, after learning that he was not free 
to marry, although with a kind of dignified recoil. In short, she gave an impression of 
being exquisitely cultured and refined, a woman of the world who was wise in the ways of 
the human soul yet still capable of living with passionate abandon, truly courageous and 
noble of heart. He must have thought her perfection itself. Had he looked beneath this 
shining surface he might have discovered a certain thread of pessimism that, even then, 
clouded her emotional horizon. Their love was, perhaps, doomed to be fleeting, she 
continued. He would be bound to tire of her. He would cast her away, with only her 
shattered hopes for companionship. It had happened before and would happen again. What 
was it about men that made them turn on their women and blame them for their own 
shortcomings? What agonies she had suffered before, and what an effort it had taken to 
drag herself from the abyss. There was a veiled reference to another lover whom she had 
forced to confront his "cowardice." Years later, Wright would learn that Miriam Noel was 
referring to a fracas in Paris in which she had been engaged. It seemed she had set out to 
wreak "vengeance" on someone who had wronged her, with such deadly intent that she 
had been arrested by the French police. {CT, September 1, 1926}  

However, if Wright had any reservations in 1914, these had less to do with Miriam's 
defects of character than his needs at the time. Five years later, he made an attempt at 
amends, in fact barely weeks after her ecstatic declaration of love, Miriam Noel had 
genuine cause for complaint, she later wrote. In those first days and weeks of their 
courtship she had taken extreme care with her appearance. Wright admired the results 
extravagantly, as he did everything else she wore, that is, until she had moved in with him 
at 25 East Cedar Street in Chicago. This meant, according to him, that they had "settled 
down," and he now began to complain that her clothes were far too conspicuous, worldly 
and sophisticated. Miriam Noel was taken aback, but since she had determined to "stay 
and do my best," she set about converting her wardrobe to satisfy his Puritan tastes. She 
also removed her family coat of arms from linen and stationery, which Wright thought 
un-American, and replaced it with his plain red square. 

Then there was the matter of their menus. He disliked her Continental dishes and 
disapproved of the use of wine at meals, preferring bananas, codfish, salt pork and "such 
foods," she wrote. He knew that she smoked, but now he began to condemn it "bitterly." 
He went to Taliesin without her. He said that this house must be kept pure and unsullied, 
in memory of Mamah Borthwick. {Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1915} That Wright 
might have balked at installing a new mistress in his "love bungalow," and cringed at the 
thought of yet another scandal, was an idea that came to her only belatedly. Wright may 
also have known about a recent act of Congress, the White Slave Traffic, or Mann Act, 
named for its sponsor, the Chicagoan James Robert Mann. It was passed in 1910 as part of 
an international effort to suppress the worldwide trade in prostitutes and provided stiff 
penalties for the interstate transportation of women for "immoral purposes." Anyone, in 
short, who took an unmarried woman across a state line-as Wright did every time he 
went from Chicago to Spring Green-could be placed in an embarrassing position if 
charges were brought. And, in fact, Wright really did not want to continue what he would 
term his "entanglement" with Miriam Noel. He took his personal effects and moved out of 
25 East Cedar Street. She conceded defeat. 

Early April of 1915 found her in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writing to "Dear Frank" 
instead of "Lord of my Waking Dreams!" He had returned to Taliesin and had been 
enjoying a visit from Llewellyn, Catherine, David and Frances, riding, singing, playing 
and having a good time. But he was troubled at the thought of her, left alone. He was 
sending her some money. 

It was the perfect moment for Wright to have ended a relationship he already knew could 
have only one outcome. Yet by the summer of 1915, Miriam Noel was living at Taliesin. 
The lightning shift of mood seems inexplicable without additional information, which has 
not been uncovered. Anna had an operation sometime in 1915-16, and it is conceivable 
that faced with the prospect of losing her, he moved toward the remaining woman in his 
life who offered some comfort, who was willing to lay her entire life on the altar of his 
needs, as she wrote. {T, April 8, 1915} 

Frank Lloyd Wright and Miriam Noel left Chicago on August 30, 1915, and went to 
Taliesin. They stayed for two weeks, returning to Chicago on September 12. After a week 
they were back again, on September 19. These dates are known from the testimony of 
Nellie Breen, the housekeeper Wright had unwisely put in charge of Taliesin that year. 
She was small and elderly, carried an ear trumpet and had a highly developed sense of 
propriety that Miriam Noel's arrival had offended. She later explained that duty forced her 
to protest, since Mr. Wright's children were also in the house. Her concern seems to have 
been somewhat forced given that, by then, Lloyd and John were married, Frances was in 
college, Catherine was taking a kindergarten course in Chicago and "cadeting" at Hull 
House and the baby of them all, Llewellyn, was in seventh grade. Nevertheless Mrs. 
Breen's displeasure was so marked that Miriam fled to her room and shut the door. Next 
morning Wright was singing hymns with his children and the crisis seemed to have 
passed. Miriam was delighted with the establishment and full of praise for its rare and 
valuable statuary, pictures and books. Nevertheless she found it somewhat stiff and formal. 
There were no curtains, cushions or comfortable chairs because Frank considered such 
embellishments "worldly." This did not suit her at all. She set about remedying the 
omissions, while Frank grumbled about the "effete" atmosphere she was creating. {MJ, 
May 8, 1932} 

Nellie Breen was dismissed in early October. Shortly thereafter she marched into the 
Department of Justice, claiming that Wright had violated the Mann Act by transporting a 
"sculptress of note" to and from Chicago and Spring Green during August and September. 
She handed the authorities a group of letters from the sculptress to Wright to bolster her 
case and demanded that deportation proceedings be begun against the lady since she was 
not an American citizen. {Chicago Examiner, November 4, 1915} Wright realized he was 
in trouble and engaged the services of Clarence Darrow, a lawyer already famous for his 
courtroom skills in defense of the underdog, and who would become nationally known in 
1925 when he would defend a schoolteacher who had taught Darwin's theories of evolution 
in defiance of a Tennessee statute. Darrow presented as evidence five letters written by 
Mrs. Breen to support his countercharge that Miriam Noel was being threatened by her 
with bodily harm. The deportation charges were soon dropped, and no formal charges 
were ever brought against Wright under the Mann Act. That suspicion, however, had been 
raised and would return to haunt him. 

Miriam Noel's memoir, understandably, does not mention this embarrassing episode or the 
fact that her letters had been stolen and subsequently published in a Chicago newspaper. 
At the time, however, she seemed charmed by the attention and even wrote a statement, 
published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, in which she denied that she had been a victim 
of unrequited love, as those letters suggested. In fact they both seemed to be enjoying the 
unusual opportunity to present themselves as the injured parties. A reporter who 
interviewed them in Taliesin noted, "Mrs. Noel appeared in a clinging gown of 
shimmering white. 'I have prepared a statement,' Mrs. Noel said, 'which embodies all I 
care to say about this affair. Mr. Wright and I have smoothed out all our little 
misunderstandings. I am here at Taliesin to stay. . . ." {Chicago Tribune, November 8, 
1915} 

She was there to stay, but to say that all their misunderstandings had been set at rest would 
be an overstatement. A great deal of them would arise from her emotional insecurities, 
making her hypersensitive to slights, real or imagined. She attacked the Darrows for not 
including her when they invited Frank Lloyd Wright to dinner, and even dared to suggest 
that Mrs. Darrow was being far too warm and friendly to him. These charges have been 
deduced from an undated reply by Ruby Darrow. Without the security of a socially 
sanctioned union, Noel was at the mercy of any sudden shift in her lover's affections and, 
in fact, had shown how fearful she was from the start by wearing the amulet Cleopatra had 
supposedly owned to guard against such a possibility. Wright had only to look at another 
woman, and he was always loudly appreciative of feminine beauty, for her to go into a 
panic. 

She knew from bitter experience just how unpredictable he could be. Once, when they 
were staying in a Chicago hotel, she had innocently gone off to a matinee of a play. He 
returned to the room in her absence and, angry and impatient to find her gone-Wright 
was incapable of waiting for anyone-threw their clothes into their suitcases and checked 
out. She, perfectly bewildered, not knowing of the change in plan, finally found him 
outside the hotel, one foot on the sidewalk and the other on the running board of a taxi. 
She was to get in the car; they must make a dash for it and catch a train; he had to be in 
Taliesin by nightfall. They roared to the station, arriving with seconds to spare.  

He was obviously furious, and she, rather than take offense, artfully launched into a 
charming account of the play she had just seen. {AR} What a pity he had missed it! He 
must be sure to see it next time. His anger immediately evaporated, and he was all eager 
desire to see the wonderful play now, that very day. They got off the train at the very next 
station, commandeered the only telephone, reserved tickets for that evening and hired a 
car to take them back to Chicago. He had a wonderful time at the theater. 

Wright adored the challenge of catching a train and took it as a personal test of his mettle. 
He also loved to entertain. When guests were expected, he was all over the house, 
demanding "upheavals" of cleaning, polishing and minute attention to the decor. Then he 
would dress himself in the very height of fashion, often in Japanese costume, and greet the 
arrivals with perfect courtesy. As Antonin Raymond confirmed, Taliesin was a heavenly 
place to visit-and yet. Wright was not an easy person at close quarters. If the day seemed 
to be proceeding calmly, Wright could be counted upon to stir things up. 

Noemi was a particular friend of Miriam's and, because of this, was privy to her 
confidences and knew more about her life with Wright than she was comfortable with. Bit 
by bit, Antonin and Noemi found themselves becoming sucked into the whirlpool of 
emotions, insinuations, charges and countercharges that swirled around the central 
characters. As an example, Antonin described an evening that took place not long 
afterward, when they all found themselves in Japan. He was working in Wright's office on 
construction of the Imperial Hotel, and he and Noemi occupied an apartment near that of 
Wright and Madame Noel, as he called her. 

In the middle of the night Miriam, in her nightclothes, "burst in" on them, crying 
hysterically. Frank had behaved badly, accusing her of heaven knows what in the crudest 
terms. She could not stand it a moment longer. They were calming her when Wright 
himself appeared, wearing an old-fashioned, short-sleeved nightshirt. He struck a 
dramatic pose, pointed his finger at Antonin and accused him of giving aid to "this 
creature," of being "a traitor" and more to this effect. Then he climbed into bed with the 
three of them, threw the bedcover over his shoulders and continued his caustic accusations. 
As Noemi began to crumple under the strain of such concentrated venom, Miriam, oddly 
enough, seemed to be feeling better. Whatever could be wrong, Miriam asked. Noemi was 
trembling! She began to console her. Wright calmed down. Miriam looked at him, and he 
looked at her; perhaps they smiled. Quite soon afterward, they left arm in arm. The 
Raymonds realized that in some way they did not understand, they had been made the 
cause of the quarrel. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. 


The Cauldron 

. . . I traveled 
Seeking the sun of protection and safety 
Accepting exile as payment for hope. 

"A Woman's Message" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 36} 

The studio in which Antonin Raymond worked when he arrived at Taliesin in 1916 had 
spacious windows with a view of magnificent birches and the broad sweep of the 
Wisconsin River valley. In the center of the room was a stone vault in which Wright kept 
his superb Japanese prints, so as to be available for inspection at a moment's notice and, in 
a mezzanine above the vault stood his precious Steinway grand. This had been dragged out 
of a window two years before to save it from the fire and had lost its legs; for years it stood 
on drafting stools. In those days a portrait of Anna, which Wright had commissioned, 
hung in the room. It was the one painting he would tolerate in it, and the motto he had 
placed on the wall for periodic contemplation was "What a Man Does, That He Has." Its 
blithe assumption spoke to the optimist in him, the one who believed he was capable of 
anything, and it is interesting to contrast this public statement with that made by another 
flamboyant extrovert, his contemporary, Gabriele D'Annunzio, at the entrance to his own 
estate: "I have that which I have given away." {Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian poet, 
dramatist and World War I hero, engraved the words Io ho quel che ho donato at the 
entrance to his estate and final resting place, Il Vittoriale, outside Gardone Rivera.} 

Work was far more than dutiful toil to Wright; it was the very stuff of living. In common 
with Arts and Crafts spokesmen from William Morris to William Price, Wright believed 
that work should be "the creative and joyful essence of daily life," {ATL, p. 223.} and he 
was his own best example of just how exhilarating and revivifying the right work-that 
which called forth the individual's gifts and spoke to his profoundest needs-could be. He 
even wrote a song to celebrate his theme, dating from the earliest days of his independent 
practice, that speaks volumes for his lifelong beliefs: 

I'll live as I work as I am  
No work for fashion in sham  
Nor to favor forsworn  
Wear mask crest or thorn  
My work as befitteth a man  
My work 
Work that befitteth the man. 

That defiant, here-I-am, take-it-or-leave-it quality that was his greatest strength 
and weakness finds clear expression here, and so does a Whitmanesque celebration of an 
individual's choices, his rights as a free man, along with the Romantic belief that fixity of 
purpose was the paramount virtue. It demonstrated an exuberant, unconquerably optimistic 
conviction that right attitudes would bring about the humanistic and organic architecture 
that was his lifelong obsession. 

He was an early riser and often at work long before breakfast. He often said his best ideas 
came on the farm, in the fields and woods or beside the stream banks. Or he might be 
there even earlier, carrying the back of an envelope on which he had sketched the germ of 
a new idea that had come to him in the middle of the night. 

He worked with enormous patience and concentration, giving extreme attention to detail, 
and the design inevitably went through innumerable revisions while he eliminated what 
might be "extraneous, discordant or capricious," Howe wrote. Such periods of concentrated 
effort would be interspersed with intervals at the keyboard playing Bach, Beethoven or his 
own improvisations. Or he might pull out a new group of Japanese prints to be admired at 
extravagant length. No matter how chaotic or tempestuous his personal life might be, 
Wright always stepped into the studio a happy man. One of Wright's many apprentices to 
study in that studio recalled that one day when he was buried underneath the Steinway 
making another of the innumerable attempts to restore its legs, he saw the master saunter 
into the room. Believing himself alone, Wright arranged three or four objects on the 
window ledge, then stood back admiringly. He walked over to the piano, still oblivious of 
the hidden observer, struck a few chords and pirouetted out of the room, singing to 
himself, "I am the greatest." {Jonathan Lipman.} 

One of Wright's charming qualities, Howe wrote, was his staunch championing of his 
clients. In the case of the Imperial Hotel, it took no great effort on his part to be excited 
and challenged by such a great Japanese commission, but it had taken considerable 
patience. From the first hint, in 1911, that there might be such an opportunity to the day 
when he actually set sail for Japan took five years. Wright pursued the tempting possibility 
with unflagging zeal, aware that it was the opportunity of a lifetime. 

The Imperial Hotel also presented an immediate objective along a path that was 
increasingly unclear. His Wasmuth portfolio, published in 1910 and 1911, had received far 
more attention and acclaim in Europe than in his own country. By that mental telepathy 
linking the best and brightest in any profession, young architects in Germany, France, 
Holland and elsewhere had immediately sensed the importance of Wright's ideas. The 
brilliant young German architect Georg Walter Adolf Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, 
had, by 1914, already built the "Fabrik," a model factory and office building at the 
Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, which was clearly influenced by Wright's designs for a 
bank and a boat club published by Wasmuth three years before. Dutch architects like Theo 
van Doesburg were turning to Wright for inspiration and, to at least one architectural 
historian, the Dutch De Stijl movement owed more to Wright's "interwoven stripping 
details and plastic masses" than to French Cubism, with which it is usually compared. 
{SC, p. 23} Another Dutch architect, Robert van t'Hoff, built two houses in 1914-15 that 
were a direct outgrowth of Wright's ideas, and H. P. Berlage, another well-known Dutch 
figure, introduced Wright's work in lectures and exhibitions. {GI, p. 426} 

Then there was the young French architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as 
Le Corbusier, who would become reluctant to acknowledge a debt to Wright. A letter of 
his, written in 1925, has been discovered in which he waxed eloquent about his first 
discovery of the latter's work: ". . . the sight of these several houses in 1914 strongly 
impressed me. I was totally unaware that there could be in America an architectural 
manifestation so purified and so innovative. . . . Wright introduced order, and he imposed 
himself as an architect. . . . Although I knew almost nothing about Wright, I still 
remember clearly the shock I felt at seeing these houses, spiritual and smiling. . . ." 
{JSAH, December 1983, pp. 350-359.} As for Richard Neutra, the young Viennese 
architect who would become one of Wright's assistants, the discovery of the Wasmuth 
portfolio was a revelation. "Whoever he was, Frank Lloyd Wright, the man far away, had 
done something momentous and rich in meaning. This miracle man instilled in me the 
conviction that, no matter what, I would have to go to the places where he walked and 
worked." {NE, p. 23} Germany was clearly the next adventure, but Europe was at war, and 
Wright wanted to go somewhere. "I still imagined one might get away from himself that 
way," he wrote wistfully. {A2, p. 193} The events of August 1914 had left him with a 
terrible sense of foreboding. As he wrote to his mother, "I feel the swerving of the financial 
helm occasionally, as I steer out of the dark that has always threatened to engulf my frail 
bark but I no longer feel the damp sweat on my forehead at night as I used to do at 
Taliesin waking in dread-of 'What now! I am at the bottom of my pile! The reserve that 
stood between me and utter defeat.' But that defeat was only material defeat out of which 
had it come at any time I might have won real success. So I do not really worry any 
more-although the habitual qualms of a lifetime echo and re-echo through me in this 
waking dream wherein we all seem somnambulists, walking innocently on the ridges of 
churches and the edges of precipitous banks-. . ." {May 13, 1919} 

The plural case was, no doubt, a reference to the Lloyd Jones family and the recent closing 
of the Hillside Home School. That distinguished institution never fully recovered from the 
combined shocks of Uncle James's bankruptcy, Wright's "love cottage" scandals and the 
terrible murder-fire of 1914. So many parents removed their children that autumn that 
the school did not complete its next term, and, in the spring of 1915, the Aunts were close 
to bankruptcy once more. This may have been the reason why a plan was worked out by 
which Hillside Home School, its gardens, acreage, outbuildings and all its furnishings, 
would be sold to Frank for one dollar. In exchange, he agreed to care for Aunts Nell and 
Jane by providing them with three rooms, bath and board, along with a small annual 
allowance. {May 10, 1915} This arrangement seems to have satisfied everyone at first. As 
Raymond had discovered, Wright was at his most expansive just then, in the middle of a 
dozen ambitious projects, and as early as 1916 seems to have entertained the idea of 
reviving the school. He was equally ready to sell it if the price was right, and thought he 
had a buyer a year later, although nothing came of that. {December 15, 1916.} The Aunts 
had moved out to Los Angeles, where Lloyd and his new wife were living, but they soon 
had a new complaint: Frank would not send them any money. Jane's  letters of the next 
two years become increasingly frantic. All too late she realized that Frank could not, or 
would not, provide a monthly check, and they had not insisted upon a penalty clause. The 
school's facilities had been deteriorating for some time and, when Antonin and Noemi 
found it, just a year after it had closed, Hillside was already in a bad state of disrepair. 
{AR} 

After some months, Wright agreed to let the Aunts return to Taliesin, where they were 
under his roof and at his table. They were grateful for that, but agonized by the daily sight 
of their ruined school. Aunt Nell, left at Taliesin, died there in 1919, but not before her 
nephew had been driven almost frantic by her daily fights with Anna. He wrote to his 
sister Jane Porter to say that he had been obliged to send Anna to visit her for a couple of 
weeks. It must have been clear to him that Anna and Miriam must be separated, and soon. 
Japan was the solution. 

The vast hotel Wright would spend the next six years of his life building (1916-22) 
belongs in concept to his Midway Gardens, rather than to any of his previous structures. It 
was to replace an older building that had outlived its usefulness, and it was basically 
designed in the form of an H, with a central block containing lobby, dining room, ballroom 
and other facilities. These public rooms were surrounded by large garden courts decorated 
with parapets and terraced with exquisitely selected plantings in the Japanese manner. 
Bedrooms were contained in the two long parallel wings. This was the plan in major 
outline, but so refined and elaborated that, at ground level, it seemed more like a 
Byzantine maze than a single building, and it was so ornamented and refined in finish that 
it strikes contemporary taste as far too "ornate and mannered." {CU, p. 337.} So cunningly 
was it put together that almost every guest room in the two enormous wings was different 
from every other bedroom. There were endless tiny terraces and miniature courts, tight 
passages opening into vast public areas, floors and ceilings of a bewildering number of 
heights, pools everywhere (not just for ornamental purposes, but in case of fire), windows 
in unexpected places, glazed doors leading to secluded balconies: it was all a stunning 
demonstration of spatial showmanship in the best Wright manner, brought to a high 
polish. For the hotel, which would eventually cost four and a half million dollars, was 
entirely under his control. He would design its every detail from exterior decoration to 
interior furnishings, right down to the plates and notepaper. One suspects that one 
explanation for this degree of fine detailing had to do with the architect's chronic shortage 
of funds. The exact amount of his fee is unknown, but if it was 10 percent, as is the case 
for another commission he received at this period, and not considered exorbitant, given the 
titanic amount of work undertaken, he stood to gain handsomely, even if his earnings were 
to be spread over a five-year period. {It was known that this was the fee he charged to 
Aline Barnsdall.} It was, in short, in Wright's prudent business interest to design with a 
lavish hand, and in years to come he would gain a well-deserved notoriety for the way his 
costs magically rose far beyond the original estimates. 

The Imperial Hotel was one of his favorite buildings, and he boasted about it all his life, 
whether because he believed it a milestone in his artistic development, or because it 
withstood a famous earthquake, is not clear. Norris Kelly Smith believed that, as a 
building, the Imperial Hotel was peripheral to Wright's main achievements, providing him 
with a challenge that "turned more upon an objective problem in engineering than upon 
metaphorical expression." {SM, p. 114} The comment refers to the fact that the hotel had 
to be built on a site that would slither like a jelly in an earthquake {A2, pp. 214-215}: 
eight feet of surface soil riding on sixty to seventy feet of soft mud. Traditional Japanese 
houses had been built of wood and anchored with individual posts that were designed to 
withstand such stresses, but a structure of brick, stone, steel and reinforced concrete was 
another matter. It was a tricky problem, but it is fair to say that Wright was not entirely 
unfamiliar with it, since the first architects who rebuilt Chicago following the great fire 
faced a similar situation. They knew that the mixture of sand, clay and boulders 
underlying the surface of the city was unstable, making it highly undesirable as a 
foundation for the new skyscrapers that they were then in the middle of constructing 
downtown. One of the architects of this new building style was William Le Baron Jenney, 
in whose office Louis Sullivan worked when he first arrived in Chicago. Jenney, whom 
Sullivan always described as more of an engineer than an architect, was a pioneer in the 
design of foundations for such soils. The methods developed as a result subsequently 
became famous as the Chicago "floating foundation." {GI, p. 381} Buildings were either 
supported by enormous pilings or caissons of concrete and steel or by "pads" of the same 
materials, resting, or "floating," on the clay, which would sustain and distribute the 
weight. {EB, vol. 5, p. 448.} 

Sullivan had worked for Jenney; Paul Mueller, Wright's contractor for a number of major 
projects as well as for the Imperial Hotel, had worked for Sullivan. So the line from Jenney 
to Wright is direct, and it is likely that Wright had learned something about the proper 
distribution of weight on an unstable surface from this Chicago experience. His solution 
for his hotel was to build concrete "posts," or "fingers," under the center of each section; 
the floors were cantilevered from these pivots so that each unit was supported as it 
"floated" on its unstable base. Similarly, the hotel's walls were supported with a 
complicated system of pins, or fingers, allowing each part of the building to jiggle 
independently and return to its original position once the earthquake was spent. But 
Wright went even further in his determination to build a hotel that would not one day be a 
death trap, perhaps in memory of the new wing to the State Capitol in Madison that he 
had watched collapse so many years before. Instead of the customary Japanese roof tiles, 
which turned into murderous projectiles during an earthquake, he ordered a 
hand-worked, green copper roof. To prevent the walls from collapsing, he kept the center 
of gravity low, designing his walls thicker at the base than at the top. Instead of piping and 
wiring laid within the structure, which an earthquake would rip apart to devastating effect, 
his would be protected by covered concrete trenches and laid separately, in the ground. In 
short, whatever could be done would be. These decisions, some made over the heated 
objections of the financiers, would prove their worth even before the hotel's doors opened 
for business. 


In the long years during which the new hotel was being built, Wright, always accompanied 
by Miriam, spent the bulk of his time in Japan, particularly from 1919 to 1922. {Wright's 
period in Japan has been exhaustively studied by Kathryn Smith and is described in "Frank 
Lloyd Wright and the Imperial Hotel: A Postscript," The Art Bulletin, vol. LXVII, no. 2, 
June 1985, pp. 296-310.} He liked to arrive early in the year, returning shortly after the 
annual Imperial Garden Party, held at the height of the cherry blossom season and before 
the rainy season (May and June). Wright also spent months at Taliesin, particularly in the 
early stages, preparing the working drawings. In Japan, the work was supervised by Arato 
Endo, a Japanese architect who was almost a collaborator on the project and was, in any 
case, absolutely indispensable as liaison since Wright spoke no Japanese. {John H. Howe} 
The hotel was to replace the first Imperial Hotel, then still in use, which had been the 
height of fashion in the 1880s: high ceilings, vast halls, immense staircases and numerous 
dark, gloomy passages. The humid Japanese climate had ensured that the hotel smelled 
constantly of mold, but it was the only place in Tokyo large enough for balls, banquets and 
weddings, and its accommodations had been improved by the addition of an annex. One of 
the reasons why Wright remained in Japan for so many years was not just because of the 
laborious nature of the construction but also because, in 1920, when work was in full 
swing, the annex burned to the ground, and the pressure for an immediate substitute 
became intense: Wright designed a new wing in eight days. (The first Imperial Hotel was 
also destroyed by fire two years later.) Wright's energy was, as always, prodigious, but 
even he required an enormous staff, and he engaged several promising young architects 
who could act as supervisors during his absences. One of them was his son John. He was 
married to an artist, "dramatic and musical."  {February 19, 1916} Antonin Raymond, 
promised a handsome salary and all expenses paid, was another, and a third was Rudolph 
Schindler, an attractive and highly cultured Austrian who had studied in Vienna with Otto 
Wagner and Adolph Loos and then emigrated to Chicago, where he had worked for 
several years with an architectural firm before being hired to work on drawings for the 
Imperial Hotel. He would settle in Los Angeles and, with Richard Neutra, who worked for 
Wright a few years later, would become a leading exponent of the International Style on 
the West Coast. 

As has been observed, it was characteristic of Wright to make himself entirely 
comfortable, no matter where he was, before any work could begin. At the old Imperial 
Hotel he was provided with a five-room apartment and a grand piano, and he had a car 
and chauffeur in constant attendance. After the new annex was built, he stayed in 
accommodations that he had thoughtfully designed for his own personal comfort. He 
called the suite "a modest little nook." {A2, p. 203.} No work began in the studio until a 
temporary office had been built at the job site; his staff was then put to work preparing 
detailed drawings and perspectives of the interiors and exteriors. The Raymonds, John and 
his wife, Wright and Miriam Noel, and Paul Mueller and his jolly, German-American 
wife were the only Westerners at the hotel. Most businessmen lived in the port cities of 
Yokohama, Kobe or Nagasaki, and the few Western diplomats and missionaries in Tokyo 
had their own compounds. Wright never altered his first impression of that city as ugly, 
redeemed by a few beauties hidden behind unpromising facades, and he moved up to the 
mountains at Karnizawa, where he would stay at local inns during the rainy season, 
making other trips to Kyoto, where the climate was better and temples and gardens purer 
in style. {a letter to Aline Barnsdall, March 14, 1934} For, busy as he was, he always had 
time to hunt for treasures. As notables, they were invited everywhere, and Madame Noel 
was always included-a factor that probably contributed to her favorable memories of 
these events, because an invitation, now in the Taliesin Archive, shows that she was styled 
as "Mrs. Wright." 

There were long intervals in Japan that seemed to go happily, perhaps because Miriam 
became so involved in Wright's work at an early stage. There is a tradition that she even 
helped design some of the textiles used in the hotel, but this has not been verified. What is 
clear is that she had abandoned any thought of resuming her own career as a sculptor 
(because he objected), and that she focused her energies on his movements, his goals, his 
aspirations and his well-being. An incident took place in the spring of 1922 {on April 
16, 1922}, shortly before they left Tokyo, that would have reinforced Wright's belief that 
Miriam had psychic powers. After saying, at first, that she wanted to attend the annual 
garden party at the American embassy, and becoming angry because Frank forgot to get 
tickets, on the day of the party Miriam could not bring herself to leave the hotel. One 
might think this was the result of pique but, no, a sense of foreboding made her stay, she 
told him when he came to collect her in the car to go for a drive in the country. So the 
chauffeur was dismissed and Frank left her alone. He returned in a panic some time later: 
the hotel was on fire. They must save everything they could. He rushed to rescue his 
collection of Japanese prints, worth at least $40,000, and other valuable items in his 
possession, and she took charge of their personal effects: clothes, rugs, furs, jewelry, 
throwing them out of the window to the chauffeur waiting below. Had she not refused to 
leave the hotel they would have lost a substantial part of the collection he had worked so 
many years to amass. He must have been limp with gratitude to think that, for once in his 
life, he had been spared from the fire. {MJ Magazine, April 29, 1932} 

She was, perhaps, a woman of mysterious gifts but not an easy person to live with. He 
wrote that for many years she had "been the victim of strange disturbances," when she 
would become ill and the prey to various kinds of symptoms. "Then peace again for some 
time and a charming life." {A2, p. 204} 

Miriam does not mention these "strange disturbances," and there are no other 
eyewitnesses. Ashbee did, however, provide a vivid portrait of the exotic Madame Noel, of 
whom he evidently disapproved, though he gave her a kind of grudging admiration. 
Writing to Janet, he noted that she used face powder, which he disliked, and wore clothes 
ten years too young for her, to put it mildly. But there was, just the same, something rather 
engaging about the amused look in her soft gray eyes, and she definitely had panache, in 
her curious and somewhat skimpy homespun dresses, wearing an embroidered Turkish 
towel, looking like a toque, around her hair. Ashbee also thought that Madame Noel had 
Wright "absolutely in the palm of her hand," {April 14, 1916} and was giving him a 
valuable introduction to the fine points of French manners and mores. As evidence of 
Miriam Noel's superior will, he recounted an incident that took place while he was at 
Taliesin. Wright had joked that she must not appear for lunch unless she changed her 
dress. She took him at his word, locked herself in her room and refused to emerge even 
though he made a personal appeal. "In the evening she appeared, radiant, in white silk, 
with a black velvet zuave and a diamond crescent-a sort of Diane de Poitiers. Then she 
made her conditions-publicly bringing him to heel before me. 

"'There's one thing I cannot allow-that you come to meals with me in your riding 
breeches!'" {April 14, 1916} Ashbee's comment was, "Chicago being whipped into grace." 

Frank and Miriam spent the remainder of the evening absorbed in designing a new dinner 
costume for him to be made of white linen. It was one more of the artistic costumes Wright 
would affect, while at home in Taliesin in those years, and was on a par with his all velvet 
suit, complete with lace collar and cuffs, in which he was photographed beside his 
immense living room fireplace, managing to look manly despite it, and decidedly 
aesthetical. The same cannot be said for the freakish clothes he affected in Tokyo: 
curiously shaped and draped hats, immense bows dangling from the neck, tasseled 
cummerbunds, trouser legs folded over and buttoned at the ankle to create a disconcerting, 
bloused effect, and high heels. It is likely that such sartorial excesses were encouraged not 
only by Miriam but also by his new friendship with Rudolf and Pauline Schindler, 
advocates of unfettered Bohemianism: nude sunbaths, fresh fruit and vegetables and loose 
garments of natural fibers, cut on the bias and anchored only with ties. 

Everyone knew that Wright was a pacifist. Ashbee listened tolerantly, merely suggesting 
that Wright be sure of his facts as the latter belligerently proclaimed his pro-German 
sympathies and attacked the British position {April 29, 1916}; Miriam, agonizingly 
concerned about Paris, was less diplomatic. Wright remained a convinced pacifist through 
both world wars, a belief that stemmed from his conviction that these wars were entirely 
due to British imperialism. This would have been perfectly consistent with a good 
Welshman's belief that any war the British aristocracy was fighting was bound to be wrong 
and therefore no concern of his. When his patriotism was later questioned, the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation concluded, according to a report in its files {No. 100-240585.}, 
that Mr. Wright was not un-American, just violently anti-English. Apart from his bias, 
it would be a point of pride for Wright to rally around that other noted pacifist in the 
family, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, as he sailed into the war zone trying valiantly to stop the 
conflict. Once it appeared that the United States was about to enter the war on the British 
side, Jenkin Lloyd Jones became the target of intense criticism and was even harassed by 
the United States government, which refused to accept his magazine, Unity, for the mails. 
{Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 67, no. 2, winter 1983-84, p. 123} It was Uncle 
Jenk's last, heroic cause, and it proved too much for him. As he fought to have the ban 
lifted, Jenkin Lloyd Jones was operated on for a hernia, then had a heart attack. He was 
recuperating when the news came that Unity could once more be mailed. His last act 
would be to read the proofs for the new issue. He died on September 12, 1918, not quite 
seventy-five years old, and two months short of the armistice. {Wisconsin Magazine of 
History, vol. 67, no. 2, winter 1983-84, p. 123}  

*  *  * 

With his design for the Imperial Hotel, Frank Lloyd Wright did everything possible to 
accommodate his building to the conditions of its site, and it is curious, given his 
adoration for all things Japanese, that the result is so un-Japanese in character. 
Numerous explanations have been advanced for this unsatisfactory state of affairs, but the 
most plausible is the most obvious, i.e., that for some time Wright's roving eye had been 
focused in a new direction, this time on other venerable cultures, the American Indian and 
pre-Columbian. {the A.D. German Warehouse in Richland Center, Wisconsin.} His 
interest in the former had been vivid since childhood, and the two murals he 
commissioned for the walls of his and Catherine's bedroom in Oak Park took the Indians 
of the Midwestern Plains as their subject. As has been noted, the World's Columbian 
Exposition provided a cornucopia of architectural ideas for a young man with Wright's 
impressionable tastes: not just the Japanese buildings, but everything from Persian bazaars 
to Lapland villages. Faint echoes of these diverse influences, what Vincent Scully has 
called Wright's "continual 'condensation' of multiple sources into 'new unities' with a 
special richness of their own," have been discerned in many of Wright's early designs, but 
the first clear evidence that he was now exploring pre-Columbian themes did not appear 
until 1915, with a warehouse design for his birthplace of Richland Center. This is 
evidently derived from the Temple of Three Lintels at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. 
{"Exotic Influences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright" by Dimitri Tselos, 
Magazine of Art, vol. 46, no. 4, April 1953, p. 164.} "What Wright wanted is . . . clear: 
maximum mass, sculptural weight, a monumentality even more dense and earth-pressing 
than he had achieved before-and one more primitive, separate from his earlier culture, 
exotic to his eyes, and deep in time." {SC, p. 24} Certain aspects of the Imperial 
Hotel-its scale, its monumental entrances and its particular kind of ornamentation-attest 
to the fact that Wright was continuing in this same direction, but another project that he 
undertook at the same time takes these ideas to a triumphant fulfillment. It was one of his 
most ambitious residential endeavors: Hollyhock House, built for a Los Angeles oil heiress, 
Aline Barnsdall. Once dismissed as hopelessly imitative and dated, Hollyhock House has 
been reconsidered in the light of postmodernism and is now seen as one of Wright's "most 
significant works and modern architecture's most splendid achievements," Neil Levine 
wrote. {Art in America, vol. 71, September 1983, p. 150.} 

Its owner, born Louise Aline Barnsdall in Bradford, Pennsylvania {on April 1, 1882}, was 
the granddaughter of a pre-Civil War oil pioneer and daughter of Theodore Barnsdall, an 
astute businessman who vastly increased the family's prosperity. From the start, her 
interests were cultural and intellectual: she spent her adolescence in Europe pursuing a 
career in theater and music. She then moved to Chicago during what has been called the 
"Chicago Renaissance," a period just before World War I when the newly established 
Little Theatre was a leader in the production of avant-garde plays, Harriet Monroe's 
Poetry magazine was publishing T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and a new literary magazine, 
The Little Review, with editorial direction from Pound, was serializing that shocking new 
book, James Joyce's Ulysses. Kathryn Smith, a Wright scholar who has written extensively 
on the early histories of the Imperial Hotel and Hollyhock House, found evidence that 
Barnsdall approached Wright at an early stage with the idea of designing a new and larger 
building for the Little Theatre. This idea fell through, perhaps because Barnsdall soon 
became eager to establish her own theater in Los Angeles and again approached Wright to 
design one. {A major source of information about this collaboration is Kathryn Smith's 
article, "Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House, and Olive Hill, 1914-1924", in JSAH, 
March 1979, pp. 15-33} The fact that he had never built a theater in his life would, of 
course, be a minor detail, one Wright would have dismissed as easily as he had turned 
aside objections from Uncle Jenk that he did not know how to design a church, all those 
years ago. 

Besides, he liked the site. In 1919, Aline Barnsdall bought a thirty-six acre tract of land 
in Los Angeles called Olive Hill, a prominent local landmark at the edge of the Los 
Angeles Basin, with unimpeded views of the city to the southeast, the San Gabriel 
Mountains to the north and the Pacific Ocean in the distance. It must have seemed like a 
golden opportunity to create a second Taliesin and, in fact, Wright's first sketches for 
Olive Hill are marked TANYDERI TALIESIN, Tany-deri being the house Wright had 
designed for his sister Jane on the family property. {Smith, p. 21.} Since Barnsdall, who 
had just inherited her father's fortune, was prepared to turn the whole hill into an artists' 
encampment, complete with a movie theater, stores and satellite residences as well as a 
handsome house for herself, the opportunity was too good to miss. The commission 
seemed to take Wright a step closer toward a move he had been considering intermittently. 
Years before, his daughter Catherine, newly arrived on the West Coast, had written to tell 
him that a development boom was on and he ought to come west to take advantage of it. 
{T, undated} This would become even truer during the postwar building boom of 
1919-22. Wright's eldest son, Lloyd, who had begun as a landscape draftsman in the 
Boston offices of Olmsted and Olmsted (1910-11), had moved out to the West Coast to 
join the offices of Irving J. Gill, a prominent architect, where he worked as a draftsman 
and delineator and established himself in independent practice in 1915. A year later he 
became head of the design department at Paramount Studios and would work closely with 
his father on the construction and landscaping for Hollyhock House and Olive Hill. Wright 
finally decided to move his own offices out to the West Coast in the spring of 1923, but the 
venture was short-lived, {Smith, p. 16, note 3. He returned to Chicago in January 1925. } 
and he returned to Chicago barely two years later. In the years 1914 to 1924, Smith writes, 
Barnsdall gave Wright commissions for forty-five buildings. {Smith, p. 33.} 

In our own age Aline Barnsdall would be remarkable enough; given her epoch, her 
attitudes, ambitions and independent life-style are little short of amazing. Long before it 
was intellectually fashionable she supported the Russian Revolution and had a close 
friendship with a Russian-born anarchist, Emma Goldman, who was deported from the 
United States in 1919. The theater company she formed in Los Angeles-unfortunately, it 
ran for only one season, 1916-17-attracted some first-rate talents. Among them were 
Kira Markham, formerly with Chicago's Little Theatre, who would marry Lloyd Wright; 
Norman Bel Geddes, a talented scene designer who would have a brilliant future; and an 
artistic director named Richard Ordynski. Barnsdall discreetly began living with Ordynski 
and shortly thereafter gave birth to her only child, Aline Elizabeth. Her daughter took her 
mother's surname and was known for years as "Sugar Top." 

The history of Olive Hill faithfully reflects the quixotic elements of Barnsdall's personality. 
She was, like her architect, living outside of conventional morality, as scornful of it as he 
was, freed by her wealth to build a community of her imagination on a tract of land that 
would conspicuously proclaim her freedom from petty constraints and flaunt her 
unconventionalism before the world. She was, however, a woman of as many facets and 
fleeting moods as the man whose talents she engaged; never quite able to build a theater, 
though she flirted with the idea for years; never there when she was needed during 
construction, always appearing at the worst moments; picking up new ideas and 
abandoning others with a speed and arbitrariness that matched Wright's. In the end, only 
Hollyhock House, two studio residences and a kindergarten were ever built, partly because 
of her inability to make decisions, the gradual decline in her income and a kind of final 
reluctance to have her dream of perfection become tainted by grubby reality. After building 
a magnificent house she hardly ever lived there and finally gave the whole property to the 
city of Los Angeles. {in 1927} If she thought he was spending too much money she was 
capable of stopping him in his tracks with a kindly reproof. Artists were perfectionists by 
nature. {T, May 30, 1920} In pursuit of beauty they would cheerfully bankrupt anyone, but 
she did not intend to allow that to happen to her. Since they were both Celts {T, May 30, 
1920} they were too much alike not to be at loggerheads, she concluded. This did not 
prevent her from admiring him enormously. She had never met anyone more delightful, 
fascinating, charming, gifted, and genuinely nice, she told him. {T, May 11, 1930} If only 
he were not so oldfashioned. It was high time he read George Bernard Shaw and realized 
that there was a new kind of woman in the world.  

As for Wright, after defending the completed Hollyhock House as a miracle that had 
somehow been built despite the obstreperous interference of his client and her staff, he was 
all too ready, a mere nine years later, to dismiss it. It seemed that Hollyhock House had an 
intractable roof problem. It insisted upon leaking (not that Wright blamed himself for that, 
of course).  

Almost anyone who visits Hollyhock House (named for the flowers found growing wild on 
Olive Hill) is irresistibly reminded of a Mayan temple deep in the Yucatan, imposing, 
awe-inspiring, monumental and forbidding. Its fortresslike appearance, however, 
conceals an inner courtyard in the local Spanish Colonial tradition, to which its numerous 
rooms, symmetrically organized, have easy access. A stream, wandering through lush 
foliage, connects circular and square reflecting pools, adding to the impression of an oasis 
in a desertlike climate-a secluded, precious refuge from the heat and the blare of a large 
modern city. The house is, as one would expect, extremely spacious and luxurious in 
feeling, with guest quarters, library, music room and a roof terrace, but its most dramatic 
space, the living room, is a symmetrical double square crowned by a tentlike ceiling; the 
room contains a massive fireplace actually surrounded by a miniature moat, or pool, and 
crowned with a skylight placed so as to reflect the starry sky and the flickering flames of 
the fire. Nothing, in short, could be more outre, more 
Hollywood-in-the-nineteen-twenties in its romantic symbolism, or, as it turns out, 
more poetic and mythmaking: "Fire and water emerge from the cracks and crevices of the 
earthy stone floor under the blistering sun of the California sky to condense in one 
complex form Wright's perception of the violent forces of nature," Levine wrote. {Art in 
America, vol. 71, September 1983, p. 160.} 

For years Hollyhock House was viewed as an aberration, a romantic and iconoclastic 
detour from the master's great purpose. It was thought that his career as an architect had 
reached its peak in 1910, with his great Prairie Style houses, and that everything that 
followed (at least before the 1930s) represented a falling-off of concentration and 
inspiration, attributable to the chaotic events in his personal life. Levine, however, is one 
of the authors to see Hollyhock House as further evidence of Wright's superb 
responsiveness to the natural world and the connotations of the site, in short, the spirit of 
place. In Wisconsin, nature was benevolent, lush and bucolic, but in Japan, where he 
would design much of Hollyhock House, he would have his first experience of another 
kind of nature, destructive, terrifying and awe-inspiring. That exquisite sensitivity made 
it inevitable that Wright would then begin designing in an entirely new way and one that, 
to him, summed up his instinctive response to life on the Pacific rim of the world, to its 
grandeur, its unpredictability and its implacable power. Wright, who had always 
emphasized that his goal was an "organic" architecture, however inadequately he might 
have defined the term, became, if possible, more emphatic about this as he aged. It was an 
important clue, if one believes, as does Levine, that he was remaining faithful to a classical 
view of architecture as an art of representation, or the imitation of nature. {The Nature of 
Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 21.} Seen in this light, there was nothing deviative about his 
design for Hollyhock House. Levine wrote, "It represents an abstraction and an 
idealization of the forces of nature through a form of expression that helped release 
Wright's architecture" from whatever limits the fashions of the moment might have 
imposed. {Art in America, vol. 71, September 1983, p. 162.} 

If one accepts the view that Wright had the rare gift of being able to experience moments 
of heightened perception, then one also has to suspect that he had another such "moment 
of vision," as such experiences were termed by Kenneth Clark, at some time during his 
stay in Japan. There are several reasons to think that this happened, and at least one of 
them is persuasive. To begin with, he is known to have designed yet another house for 
himself shortly after his return, this one for a site in the Mojave Desert, probably at a time 
when he was planning to move from Chicago to the West Coast. (The house was never 
built and exists only in a sketch.) It is a small building folded into the rear of an octagonal 
court, its walls as fortresslike as those of Hollyhock House and its interior rooms designed 
in the same manner, to face an inner courtyard and a circular pool. Its shape, however, 
was hardly Mayan. To find an analogy, Levine believes, one would have to look at the 
oriental cisterns, pots and jars he was collecting at this period. This itself is significant 
since Wright's designs for his own houses may safely be taken as primers for his most 
experimental thinking at any given point. But there is even stronger evidence for Levine's 
thesis {published in The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright.}, made in a fascinating essay, 
"Frank Lloyd Wright's Own Houses and His Changing Concept of Representation," that 
the shape of the vessel suddenly suggested, to Wright, a whole new way of looking at 
architecture. Indeed, one of the maxims he invariably quoted in later years, from 
Okakura's Book of Tea, was by Lao-tse and defined a building in terms of the space it 
enclosed. This definition clearly influenced Wright's subsequent description of his own 
buildings as "vessels of space" and his architecture as "architecture of the within." Once 
Wright returned to Taliesin he removed Flower in the Crannied Wall from its place of 
honor, replacing it with an enormous Ming tub, perhaps the clearest evidence that a 
momentous shift had taken place in his thinking. {Levine, in The Nature of Frank Lloyd 
Wright, p. 43.} Referring to the ability of artists like Thomas Bewick and Rembrandt to 
turn "human experiences directly into graphic symbols," Clark wrote, "We are reminded of 
the burning glass, casting its ray brighter and deadlier as its focus grows sharper, till 
suddenly a feather of smoke warns us that it has achieved, through intensity, a 
transformation of matter." {Moments of Vision, Kenneth Clark, p. 6.} 

The years during which Wright was working on the Barnsdall projects and the Imperial 
Hotel seem to have been one of the few periods during which his helter-skelter finances 
were almost under control. The Barnsdall correspondence shows that, by the end of 1921, 
he was expecting a total of $90,000 in commissions from that account alone, and had 
worked out an agreement with his client and the Bank of Wisconsin, the main mortgage 
holder for Taliesin, that future payments (with the exception of some $36,000 already 
received) would be sent directly to the bank in settlement of his debts. By the summer of 
the following year, he could tell Darwin Martin that Taliesin, with its two hundred acres, 
was now owned free and clear. All he owed at that point was his debt to Martin plus a 
$15,000 mortgage on Oak Park (or so he said). By his estimate he had amassed an 
extremely valuable collection of Orientalia, not just prints but gold screens, Chinese 
paintings, sculpture, antique rugs, bronzes, pottery and embroideries, to a total value of 
$60,000 to $70,000 and worth twice that on the New York market. {DDM 
correspondence, August 20, 1922} (One of his steady customers was the Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, {Julia Meech-Pekarik in The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 141.} 
which had acquired about $20,000 worth of Wright's prints between 1918 and 1922, but 
that source of sales dried up after a group of prints he had, in good faith, sold as genuine, 
were judged almost worthless because they had been reworked. {Smith article on the 
Imperial Hotel, p. 307, note 51; the date is 1921}) After a long round of negotiations of 
baffling complexity, Wright had wrested back control of the Oak Park property from his 
debtors. Both units had been renovated and rented out, and he would soon sell the entire 
property to a prominent real estate dealer in Chicago for $33,000. {based on Wright's 
letters to DDM, around May 8, 1924.} While he was still, with characteristic charm, 
beguiling his way out of repaying his remaining debt to Martin, he might have been 
perfectly able to do so, at that moment at least. What held him back could have been a 
divorce settlement, which seemed possible at last. Word had come through his daughter 
Catherine that Kitty was willing to agree to a quiet divorce (legally available on the 
grounds of five years' separation). Her terms were a cash settlement of $10,000 plus 
possession of the household furnishings, and $150 a month alimony. All this was signed 
and settled on November 13, 1922, the decree to become final one year later. Not 
surprisingly, he immediately felt poor again. {LAR, p. 20. Date of the letter is November 
30, 1922.} It must have been a relief, nevertheless, to have the reality of their 
estrangement acknowledged, after thirteen years. A year later, when the divorce became 
absolute, he expressed his satisfaction in a letter to his son John. That phase of his life, at 
least, was over. {The letter is undated but is probably November 1923.} 

Wright had created so much elaborate detailing for the Imperial Hotel's facade that the 
work could be guaranteed to creep along at a snail's pace. Raymond wrote that this was 
"the result of doodles over initial drawings by myself and other draftsmen, executed with 
amazing dexterity by Wright with the aid of triangles and a T-square." {AR} On the 
other hand he was also capable of complaining, as he did to Martin, that the Japanese 
project was not profitable. For despite, or because of, the skill of Japanese carpenters and 
masons, who were willing to spend months transferring Wright's designs into the intricate 
tracery that covered every square inch of the hotel, the patience of the backers was at an 
end. Raymond states that Wright was discharged before the building was finished; Wright 
states that he left because he was no longer needed. The truth is probably somewhere in 
between, the skyrocketing costs and a perpetually delayed opening having had the 
predictable results. {DDM, August 20, 1922} By April 1922, the month that the first 
Imperial Hotel burned down, the backers were mutinous. This must have been the moment 
at which he was called to a meeting and questioned relentlessly. He wrote, "The 
foundations. Always the foundations-and the money. The money!" {A2, p. 219.} 

Just as matters looked blackest, fate intervened to give the architect his first vote of 
confidence. Four days after the Imperial Hotel fire, on April 26, 1922, while Wright was 
working in his office on the top floor of the hotel's new left wing, Tokyo received the worst 
earthquake it had  for thirty years. He wrote, "The structure was literally in convulsions. I 
was knocked down by the rush of workmen and my own boys to save their own lives. . . ." 
{A2, p. 221.} He heard a fearful crash and was convinced that the new section, containing 
the banquet hall, had fallen. He discovered that what did fall were the five chimneys of the 
old hotel, all that remained from the fire. His building had stood and he could write, "The 
work had been proved." 

This put everyone back on speaking terms with the architect. He could now make a 
graceful exit and did so three months later, in the wake of much ceremony and expressions 
of genuine regret by his Japanese associates. It was a splendid victory, and it was only the 
first. The Great Kanto earthquake, the biggest to hit Japan in the twentieth century, took 
place a year and a half later, on September 1, 1923. By a perverse coincidence, this was 
the day that the hotel, now completely finished, was to be formally opened. An official 
luncheon had been planned for that noon and, a few minutes before, the earthquake struck. 
During the next twenty-four hours there were continuous aftershocks, winds of hurricane 
force and then the dreaded fires that destroyed nearly half the city. About 150,000 people 
lost their lives. {Columbia Encyclopedia.} All communication was cut off with the outside 
world, and when the first rumors reached the American newspapers it was reported that 
the Imperial Hotel was in ruins. In fact the building had been used as a home for refugees, 
where free meals had been dispensed to thousands, and it had become the temporary 
headquarters for embassies, public utilities and the press. "Within a matter of days," 
Kathryn Smith wrote, "the hotel became an object of praise for Japanese and foreigners 
alike and Wright was hailed as its architect." {MJ, May 29, 1932, p. 310} Now well into 
his fifties, Wright's oeuvre, hundreds of structures built or projected, his inventiveness, his 
methods and his skill, seemed to be crowned by the triumphant success of the Imperial 
Hotel. He had arrived, at last. {BL, p. 364} 

Young men, like the architects Schindler and Neutra, and the equally gifted German 
architect Erich Mendelsohn, were beginning to knock at his door and beg for the privilege 
of studying at the master's feet. After one such meeting in 1924 Mendelsohn, then at the 
start of his career, wrote that his conversation with Wright had ranged over every 
conceivable subject, from aesthetics,society and mankind to the future of religion. "He 
says," Mendelsohn wrote, "that the dualism of God and man is disappearing: man is 
himself a god; there is only one creator, just as there can only be one architecture, only one 
space. Am I a dreamer because I am younger, because I still believe, where he already 
knows?" {Letters of an Architect, Oskar Beyer, editor, pp. 71-74.} Next day, Mendelsohn 
left Taliesin in a daze of admiration. Wright's development as an architect, great as it was, 
had only just begun. "His genius is beyond doubt." The term began to enter descriptions of 
Wright.  

Without being ill, Wright was never really well during those years when he was traveling 
between Los Angeles, Tokyo and Spring Green. The sea voyage invariably upset him, 
which did not prevent him from hoping optimistically that the sea air would act as a 
restorative, on occasions when he was recovering from a bad cold or a bout of influenza. 
{undated letter to DDM.} He had at least one accident on the job.  

Despite the lighthearted tone, letters of this period indicate that Wright was experiencing, 
for the first time, an awareness of his own mortality. He wrote to his daughter Catherine 
and her new husband, Kenneth, "Once upon a time I never could strike the bottom of my 
physical resources-but now I find out that my grey hair and fifty three years-indicate 
something that I will have to pay attention to-." {February 7, 1921, Art Institute of 
Chicago.} Then there was the continual anxiety about Taliesin, left to the mercy of 
workmen, caretakers and friends, and his fears were sure to be reinforced by his mother's 
bulletins, which invariably contained some new complaint that an employee supposedly 
there to safeguard the property was loafing or neglecting a repair. He missed having a 
"good old-fashioned home," as he put it to Catherine. He was loneliest of all at 
Christmas, despite Miriam's company. Most of all, he was tired of being a perpetual exile. 
What he wanted and needed at this stage of his life was a loving relationship and a calm 
and tranquil home, the one boon, it seemed, that life withheld. 

For several years past he had been aware that his mother presented him with an almost 
insoluble dilemma. To turn her out of Taliesin was unthinkable. The best that could be 
hoped for was an occasional respite from her presence when she visited Jane or Maginel; 
yet to live with her was a guarantee of continual turmoil. She created so much dissension, 
suspicion and doubt around her and had such a way of interfering in his affairs that she 
was making his life unbearable. Yet, whenever he complained of this to his sisters he 
invariably provided Anna with a defense. She could not help being the way she was; she 
was made that way. Behind this reasoning can be seen a conviction that Anna was so 
much on his side and so fiercely loyal that, naturally, she would be bound to resent any 
other woman in his life and see her as a rival. That was forgivable, even lovable in a way, 
and her letters were so full of tender concern and affection that it was easy to forget how 
destructive she could be at close quarters. Besides, she was now very frail and subject to 
frequent fainting spells when she would fall, whatever she was doing, and be disoriented 
for days afterward so that she could no longer be left alone with any confidence. 

However, there was no doubt that a return to Taliesin meant trouble ahead, if Anna 
remained there. He and Miriam had managed to live together now for several years in 
occasional peace and harmony. Nevertheless, their relationship had been scarred by her 
pathological jealousy of any woman in whom he appeared to show an interest. Barely 
weeks after he wrote to his mother giving her this description of their tranquil life, Miriam 
Noel fled to a country inn outside Tokyo because, she claimed, Wright was attracted to 
Madame Krynska, a Russian friend of hers. No doubt he expressed his usual na�ve 
enthusiasm for an attractive personality, and, no doubt, Miriam Noel took it as proof that 
her precarious position in his life was about to be usurped. The rest was predictable; 
storms of reproaches and rage from her, after which she would throw her clothes into her 
suitcase and flee, composing a barrage of future letters as she went. The latest scene had 
taken place one terrible night when they were all together. Piecing together the evidence it 
appears that Miriam Noel had pulled out a gun, threatening to kill Madame Krynska or 
herself or both, and that Wright had wrestled it from her. (She, by her own admission, 
once threatened him with a knife.) He had, subsequently, intercepted a wounding letter she 
had written to the lady, defending that as his right as her "husband." {This information 
was made public when the letter was sold at auction in Chicago April 21, 1990, by the 
Leslie Hindman Auctioneers: no. 516 in the catalogue.} Interestingly, Wright nowhere 
reproaches Miriam Noel for her insane suspiciousness. Rather, it is his fault for his 
shameful behavior, for the suffering he has inflicted upon her, for his chicanery and innate 
crookedness. It was as if he took a kind of melancholic pride in their violent encounters. 
He needed such proof of the indispensable role he played in Miriam Noel's life, as he did 
in his mother's, to keep at bay some terrible inner insecurities. For, however irrational 
Miriam's behavior, it is clear that there was more than a core of justification for it. So long 
as they remained unmarried, she was socially as well as emotionally vulnerable, however 
much he might consider her his wife and style her as such in his letters. Ideals of free love 
were one thing; the reality of life in the straitlaced Middle West was something else. If 
they were to live together in Wisconsin and Illinois, nothing less than an old-fashioned 
marriage contract would do. 

She left him at least once more while they were in Japan, spending several weeks in a 
secluded village. This may have been the occasion when Wright wrote to tell Maginel that 
the affair was over and received her congratulations. The date was the spring of 1920, by 
coincidence the moment that Anna was visiting Frank in Tokyo. She had made the trip 
because one of Frank's attacks of a Japanese fever had proved intractable. For some weeks 
he seemed critically ill, and Anna insisted upon going to his side. (She found him much 
improved and immediately took to bed with an attack of sciatica.) Perhaps Anna's arrival 
was the reason for Miriam's departure, or perhaps she had left some weeks before, 
precipitating an emotional upheaval in Wright that expressed itself in physical terms. To 
judge from a fragmentary diary Anna wrote while in Japan, Frank had been alone for some 
time, and apart from a single reference to the "enraged woman," Anna makes no mention 
of her rival, though she goes into long descriptions of the life she observed, the drives 
through avenues of cherry blossoms, and magical garden parties. 

Maginel feared that the separation might not last, and this was well founded. Once at a 
distance, and under less emotional pressure, Wright felt his usual remorse and regret. He 
could then write to Miriam in the heartfelt and unguarded way in which he invariably 
wrote to Anna, judging from the handful of letters that has survived. One in particular is 
remarkable for its revelations about the extent of his sense of guilt and 
self-disparagement along with his resolutions to improve. He was prepared to do 
anything to win back the one who had become his ideal. 

The most likable aspect of Wright's nature, the one that was capable of admitting his faults 
and making a heroic effort to understand the feelings of his nearest and dearest, could 
have been counted upon to make major accommodations once Miriam was to be moved to 
Taliesin as its new chatelaine. The one factor over which he had no control was his 
mother's opposition, and that was relentless. It was obvious, she wrote to Jane soon after 
his affair began, that Madame Noel had changed Frank's whole nature. Anna was 
convinced that this lady was Russian, which would explain her "cruel, tyrannical" ways. 
{the letter is undated.} And now Frank was becoming a tyrant. She was very sad about 
that. To Miriam Noel, Anna was far more tactful but evidently not diplomatic enough, 
because Miriam soon attacked her on the most sacred grounds of all. Anna might have 
been Frank's confidante during his childhood and adolescence, but she did not seem to 
understand that things had changed. The person closest to Frank's heart nowadays was not 
Anna, but Miriam. {T, September 12, 1917} This letter, written barely two years after she 
had met Wright, was a clear provocation, and even sharper reproofs were to follow. The 
battle lines had been drawn at an early stage despite Anna's protestations to her son that 
she had gone out of her way to make Miriam feel accepted and at ease. {T, July 1, 1918} 

Frank and Miriam returned to Spring Green in mid-August of 1922, and a month later, 
Wright was writing to his sister Jane and begging her to do something about their mother. 
His suggestion was that she be installed at Tan-y-deri, with a woman to take care of 
her. Miriam was refusing to live at Taliesin, and he was forced to put her up in a hotel.  

Jane had suggested that Anna be moved to a sanitarium, and from the scanty evidence 
available it is clear that Anna's fate had been sealed, because Wright was, at the same 
time, writing to tell Darwin Martin that he would soon be all alone and inviting them to 
"run up" to Spring Green for a week to view his oriental treasures. The rare display of 
contrition, the warmth of the invitation and the picture of abandonment hinted at in the 
letter are all indications of the emotions that had been aroused by this latest crisis. And if 
Wright had managed to avoid choosing between Mother and Catherine, or Mother and 
Mamah, he could no longer evade the issue, because Miriam was determined to make him 
choose. He had, with no doubt an extremely uneasy conscience, taken sides with the 
woman he had treated in Japan as his wife.  

Anna Wright left Taliesin forever in September 1922. She knew that she had been exiled, 
and her last letters sound a new note of pathetic resignation, along with some 
half-hearted attempts to justify her past actions. {T, n.d.} Perhaps she stayed for a time 
with Andrew and Jane in Oak Park, and then, some weeks later, perhaps she had another 
crisis and needed around-the-clock nursing care. All that is known is that she was 
transferred to the Waldheim Sanitarium in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, a small hamlet about 
thirty-five miles due east of Madison, not far from Milwaukee, sometime that year. There 
she died on February 10, 1923, after a stay of three or four months. She was buried two 
days later in Unity Chapel, freshly decorated with pine boughs and spring flowers, and 
then laid to rest under the tall, dark pines she loved. Not one of the many obituaries makes 
any mention of her son's presence at the funeral, and it is known that the casket bearers 
were her nephews and one of her grandsons, not her own son. These clues would indicate 
that he was not there, and the available records suggest that he had left Chicago and 
returned to Los Angeles a few days before her death. {His sister's memoir, The Valley of 
the God-Almighty Joneses, states he was there, but she would have been likely to want to 
defend her brother against possible reproaches; his letters to Sullivan indicate that by then 
he was in Los Angeles and could not have returned in time. To add to the obstacles, there 
was a heavy snowstorm.} Miriam Noel, of course, did not attend either. Distance had 
separated them, and more than distance. The year before she died, Anna seemed to sum up 
the frustrations of a lifetime in her final words to her beloved son. Now she was old, and it 
made her sad to think that Frank, and Maginel as well, had not found happiness. She 
hoped her children would support each other and share each others' burdens. As for 
herself, she felt so alone. {T, January 1, 1922.} 

In November 1923, the month that Frank Lloyd Wright's divorce became final, he married 
Miriam Noel. {TW, p. 183} The ceremony took place secretly, at midnight, on a bridge 
over the Wisconsin River. He gave her a wedding ring inscribed, "Frank to Miriam." It 
was, she wrote, her most precious possession. 


The Cause Conservative 

It's easy to smash what never existed,  
You and I together. 

"Wulf and Eadwacer" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 64} 

In one of his letters, written soon after his relationship with Miriam Noel began, Wright 
called it an "entanglement," {DDM notes; the remark was made in 1917.} and this 
description, made in a moment of exasperation, was truer than he knew. A woman he had 
taken up because she was sexually available at the moment when he was at his most 
vulnerable had insinuated her way into his life by calculated degrees and had become 
indispensable to him. When they first met his needs were uppermost; she had, as Ashbee 
noted, brought him to heel. She had accomplished what two other women in his life had 
not: she had defeated Anna. She had finally married her longtime lover and was now the 
legal mistress of all he surveyed. She should have been savoring the victorious moment 
and perhaps she was, but the triumph was brief. 

They had only lived together as husband and wife for about six months when, in May 
1924, she left him. Something about the fact of being married was enough to overtax a 
stormy but enduring relationship, and it is tempting to speculate that, once securely 
installed, Miriam dropped a facade that she had intermittently maintained in the past, that 
of pretending to be all things to her lover. She would have been well aware that there was 
no end to his need for uncritical acceptance, praise and reassurance, and that any woman 
close to him had made a bargain: to give up her own sense of herself in order to live a life 
through him, have no thoughts but his, no needs but his, no life outside his own. 
Fortunately for her, the Imperial Hotel project was so lengthy and genuinely absorbing, 
their life in Japan so full of the delights of travel and connoisseurship, and her status, 
through him, so exalted, that the relationship had lived up to her demands upon it for a 
considerable time. Once back in the United States, Wright was no longer the master 
architect but a middle-aged figure thought to be out of step with his times, trying to drum 
up some work. Instead of a man in command of armies, he was to be found riding 
machinery on the farm around Taliesin. Instead of being socially courted, she was looked 
upon as simply the latest inhabitant of the infamous "love cottage," and was no doubt cut 
on the street by her social inferiors in Spring Green and marooned in the countryside miles 
from a decent art gallery. When she had left him in Tokyo, the letter he wrote then gave a 
vivid description of the ruthless Old Testament conscience lurking behind his apparent 
veneer of breezy self-confidence. This inner censor weighed his acts and found them 
wanting; it believed he had "no personal culture"; that he was selfish and made everyone 
else suffer; that he was self-deceptive; that he would always "slip and slide and cheat" to 
escape censure {MM, pp. 254-256}; that he would not hesitate to "slay or betray or 
desert"; that he was "crooked"; that he was weak; that he had pet vanities; and that he was 
a hypocrite. This lengthy accounting is further evidence of the insecurity behind that 
shield that Wright had successfully erected between himself and the world. Given Wright's 
typical reactions, one can make a safe guess that it would be one thing for him to accuse 
himself of failings, but quite another to have a once-adoring woman turn into an 
avenging angel. Nothing could be better guaranteed to arouse his defenses and make him 
reflect upon the folly of having made an honest woman out of her. 

As has been noted, even if Miriam had possessed the necessary insights, she was in the 
thrall of demons of her own. Morphine, so widely and casually available when she was a 
young woman, was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. A federal law to limit the use 
of morphine, cocaine, opium and heroin had been enacted in 1915 as a result of an 
increased awareness that drug addiction was a problem with no easy answers. Most 
physicians, believing that an addict was a moral reprobate, would not offer treatment; 
others tried to popularize questionable cures. International concern was growing 
throughout the 1920s, and the supply was tightening, but detoxification was uncertain and 
clinics were few. A morphine addict faced alone the terrors of withdrawal: ". . . frequent 
yawning, nasal discharge, tears, widening of the pupils, sweating, erection of the hair, and 
restlessness are usually observed 12 to 16 hours after the last dose. Later, muscular aches 
and twitches, abdominal cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, hypertension, insomnia, loss of 
appetite, agitation, profuse sweating and weight loss develop. . . ." {The American 
Disease, David F. Musto, p. 86} These symptoms of morphine withdrawal reached their 
peak after three days. If the addict took a single dose they subsided dramatically, but would 
be back with renewed ferocity as soon as four to six hours later. (It took at least six months 
for all symptoms to fully disappear.) 

This description provides explanation enough for those "strange disturbances" Wright 
described in his autobiography. That Wright wished to leave the reader with the belief that 
Miriam was insane is evident, and in fact it was a fashionable theory in the early 1920s 
that drug addiction did not have a physiological basis but was a symptom of a disordered 
libido, needing psychoanalytic help to channel it along "higher thought and emotional 
levels." {The date was 1920; omnia, loss of appetite, agitation, profuse sweating and 
weight loss develop. . . ." {The American Disease, David F. Musto, p. 83} So Wright was 
simply taking the course advanced by progressive thinking when he took Miriam to be 
examined by a Chicago psychiatrist, the best in the country, as he told his son Lloyd.  

The meaningless diagnosis cited: "defective affectivity," and the generally ambiguous tone 
of the remarks supports the theory that having convinced himself that Miriam's drug 
addiction was proof of severe emotional disturbance (at the very least), Wright could give 
up all hope of curing her himself. In short, he had accepted that he could not "save you for 
myself." She was beyond cure, beyond anyone's help. The explanation was useful indeed, 
because it shifted his dilemma-Miriam's addiction-from a subject that could not be 
discussed to one that would explain everything. It removed any possibility that he might be 
tarred with that execrable label, "moral reprobate," for living in proximity to her. And it 
made her restless wandering from town to town look like the dementia of a mentally 
disturbed woman instead of the likely search of an addict seeking a ready supply of 
morphine. 

It is easy to see Miriam Noel Wright as a physically addicted, deeply disturbed and 
vengeful woman, but to dismiss her as insane is harder. Her testimony in support of a 
divorce is far from that which one would expect of a madwoman; on the contrary, it 
portrays a calculating intelligence, one making adroit use of the very few legal avenues 
available. When she finally made her petition in 1927, she claimed that shortly after their 
marriage in November 1923, Wright began to be abusive. Court transcripts read, "That 
said treatment consisted in part of neglecting, ignoring plaintiff; calling her vile, vulgar, 
indecent, abusive and opprobrious names and epithets, and referring to her in such terms; 
unjustly, harshly and severely criticizing her; and by violence inflicted upon her person. . . 
. That on or about December 15, 1923, . . . the defendant, without cause or provocation, 
struck, beat, bruised and otherwise mistreated the plaintiff, bruising her flesh and causing 
black and blue abrasions thereon." {extracts from testimony on file in Circuit Court, vol. 
37, p. 229, drawer 574, May 19, 1927.} 

A wife suing for divorce naturally wants to paint the blackest possible picture. However, 
the fact that Wright did not challenge this testimony points to the possibility that it may be 
true. By her own admission, Miriam Noel had drawn a knife on Wright and had 
threatened to use a gun. Wright also admitted, all his life, to "hot flashes" of malicious and 
vindictive behavior {MM, p. 255}, and his actions, past and future, demonstrate that he 
was prepared to use his fists if pushed far enough. So one is inclined to believe Miriam 
Noel Wright's claim that he beat her, and surprised only that she does not mention this in 
her memoirs. [She writes that she decided to leave.] {MJ, June 5, 1932} Frank drove her 
as far as Chicago, and then sent emissaries asking her to return. She replied by saying she 
was going to Mexico City. He should give her six months, and then they might try again. 
She moved on to Los Angeles and heard nothing further until receiving a letter from his 
lawyer asking her for a divorce. {MJ, June 5, 1932} Miriam's actions during the years 
1924-28, when their divorce became final, have to be seen, just the same, as those of a 
wife who did not really want to leave her husband even if he was capable of covering her 
with bruises. That mention of an encounter with a guest was, no doubt, a discreet reference 
to yet one more explosion of jealous rage. But now that she was securely his wife, Miriam 
Noel may have taken less pains to arouse his contrition and become more openly sarcastic 
and derisive. There is some evidence that this may have been true. {item 518 in the 
Hindman catalogue} Perhaps he had hoped to inspire in her that deep love for Taliesin, 
which was his most cherished possession. All the blood, tears and pain extended had been 
in vain if, at the end of it all, Miriam refused to be happy there. Something finally changed 
in him. She had, in short, tested his love too far, and if she thought he would crawl back 
once more, she was wrong. She had predicted when they first met that he would eventually 
fall out of love with her, and it had become literally true. 

As has been suggested, the tremendous upheaval in the worlds of art and architecture that 
was ushered in with World War I had been sensed by Wright almost as it was being 
formed. In art, a new wave of Italian Futurists, in love with progress and technology, was 
celebrating the arrival of the train, the airplane and the motorcar in drawings whose 
attempts to portray movement were also being echoed by a famous Cubist painting of 
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), which caused an uproar at the 
famous New York Armory show a year later. Futurism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Abstract 
Expressionism, Dadaism-such developments were giving rise to an equal revolution in 
architecture as men like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Adolph Meyer and Ludwig Mies 
van der Rohe ushered in a new era. The machine age had arrived and turned upside down 
all the old values. Now what counted was the extent to which the architect could 
successfully adapt his metier to the requirements of the new materials and mass 
production, how well he could build for the new spirit of progress, revolution, 
industrialism and social betterment. The Bauhaus complex, as designed by Gropius and 
described by Sigfried Giedion, one of the principal exponents of the new architecture, in 
his famous book, Space, Time and Architecture, was built as an arrangement of cubes of 
differing sizes, materials and locations. "The aim is not to anchor them to the ground but 
to have them float or hover upon the site. This is the reason for the winglike connecting 
bridges and the liberal use of glass . . . called in for its dematerializing quality. . . ." {GI, 
pp. 496-497 (1974)} Giedion added that this was the first large building of its date 
(1926) to exemplify so completely "a crystallization of the new space concept." 

The new buildings, whether houses, apartments or commercial structures, shared the 
qualities of the ground-breaking Bauhaus complex; that is to say, they were 
uncompromisingly boxy, streamlined, uniform, regimented, looking like the factories in 
which they had probably been assembled and certainly like "machines for living," that 
phrase of Le Corbusier's that was to haunt him ever afterward. Ornamentation, whimsical 
shifts of direction, unexpected nooks and crannies-all these, being evidence of the bad old 
days, were abolished. The new architects espoused the doctrine of simplification, 
purification, the nobility of glass-curtain walls and transparent volumes, and dedicated 
themselves to a Utopian, technological and functional future swept clean of individual and 
idiosyncratic fantasies. In so doing they abandoned the aesthetic of beauty, as Ruskin had 
defined it-Duchamp, in fact, had discredited the very idea of a work of art. What these 
architects liked was Sullivan's phrase "form follows function," or their reductionist 
interpretation of that phrase, and they sought what has been called a "symbolic 
objectivity." As described by William Jordy, "The goal of symbolic objectivity was to align 
architecture with the pervasive factuality of modern existence, with that 'ineloquence' (to 
call up Bernard Berenson's tag) which characterizes the modern imagination. The aims of 
simplification and purification at the core of the movement, providing it with a morality of 
Calvinist austerity, actually stemmed from a diffuse convention on the part of many 
progressive designers and theorists during the nineteenth century to the effect that 
architecture should be 'honest,' 'truthful,' and 'real'. . . . During the twenties this moralistic 
heritage acquired an antiseptic cleanliness, and irreducible bareness. . . ." {CU, p. 182.} 
Future arbiters of taste, such as the critic Lewis Mumford, who would become one of 
Wright's staunchest supporters, would eventually criticize this very purism and 
impersonality: "Mies van der Rohe," Mumford wrote in 1964, "used the facilities offered 
by steel and glass to create some elegant monuments of nothingness. . . . His own chaste 
taste gave these hollow glass shells a crystalline purity of form; but they existed alone in 
the Platonic world of his imagination and had no relation to site, climate, insulation, 
function, or internal activity. . . ." {The Visual Arts, A History, Hugh Honour and John 
Fleming, p. 617.} 

These comments raise issues that touch directly on Wright's dilemma as he attempted to 
re-establish his reputation in the United States after having spent so many years in Japan 
and the Pacific Rim. Instead of being in the avant-garde, in courageous opposition to all 
that was specious, wasteful, inartistic and untruthful about architecture, carrying the flag 
for simplicity, truth to materials, relationship to site and a uniquely American vision, he 
returned to find himself relegated to the camp of those whose nineteenth century 
precursors practically guaranteed their eclipse. He might still see himself as a trailblazer, 
but to conventional opinion he was a distinguished American whose best work had been 
summed up, and ended with, the Wasmuth portfolio of 1910. Or he was considered a 
valiant forerunner for concepts that better men would bring to fruition, which was almost 
as insulting. 

On the other hand there was little point of contact between his own work and that of the 
European avant-garde. True, he shared their interest in the machine and experimented 
with new materials, as his work of the 1920s and 1930s would show. However, the point is 
not always made that Wright's advocacy of the machine was as one more tool to be placed 
at the command of the artist. Given this emphasis, he must have felt that the European 
modernists were taking a step beyond which he would not go: they were letting the 
machine dictate their art. This would have been absolute anathema to Wright, and their 
claim of "truth to materials" would have seemed like an empty boast to him. But the 
central conflict had to do with what Jordy and Mumford saw as the soulless materialism 
and "ineloquence" of the new imagination. Whatever one wanted to say about Wright's 
imagination, it was certainly eloquent. Soon there were two opposed camps: Wright in 
one, versus The Rest. That archaic notion that beauty existed to convey a society's absolute 
values had been thrown out, but Wright, to his cost, was irretrievably wedded to it. He was 
still a man with a mission and with a message left to preach, but he had lost his audience. 
He must have looked at these constructions of glass and steel and thought of Ruskin's 
succinct phrase: an "absence of grace." 

Norris Kelly Smith has perhaps best described Wright's position at that time. "He prided 
himself upon being a revolutionary trail blazer, responsible for the principal innovations 
that have determined the character of all modern architecture, but at the same time he 
regarded himself as the defender of a universal organic ideal whose nature has been 
misunderstood by virtually all modern architects." {SM, p. 46.} Wright wanted it all ways 
and would probably be most likely to accept the contemporary view that he was a "radical 
conservative," working in the classic architectural tradition of evolutionary change, as 
argued by the British architect and author Richard MacCormac. For, as Wright had 
declared in 1908, "radical though it may be, the work here illustrated is dedicated to a 
cause conservative in the best sense of the word. At no point does it involve denial of the 
elemental law and order inherent in all great architecture." {"In the Cause of 
Architecture," by Frank Lloyd Wright, The Architectural Record, vol. XXIII, no. 3, March 
1908.} In 1922 he would tell Dr. Hendrick P. Berlage, the state architect of Holland, "my 
heart is still where it was in 1908,"        {LAR, p. 54.} but Wright was not then using the 
term "radical conservative" for himself and might even have shied away from it. It might 
have seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of those eloquent Arts and Crafts spokesmen 
whose principal message had been a return to sensible values, sensible attitudes and 
conservative reform: and that had made it radical for their day and age. Even to breathe 
the term Arts and Crafts would, one guesses, reveal the kind of horrid secret concealed in 
the French phrase "femme d'un certain �ge." This may explain why Wright's writings 
from the 1920s onward make no reference to this formative influence and allude only to 
Louis Sullivan, who at least was kindly regarded by the modernists, since he had been so 
clever about skyscrapers. One concludes that as the decade of the 1920s progressed, 
Wright decided it was far better to present himself as so far ahead of the pack that no one 
had yet caught up with him, than to risk being seen as a relic whom the march of time had 
left behind. To be a radical, if not an outlaw, had the comfort of the familiar and held its 
own kind of allure. Had not Jenkin Lloyd Jones, "Lincoln's soldier of civic righteousness," 
as he was called, preached freedom of religion, harmony between nations, justice for the 
oppressed, equal rights for women and animals and all those other noble causes, however 
lonely and persecuted he might have been? Had not the Lloyd Joneses before him suffered 
ostracism in Wales for their high-minded beliefs? What was the world's antagonism and 
ridicule if, in your heart, you knew you were right? But, on the other hand, suppose you 
did not prevail? One of the stories Wright greatly liked and told to several people (he also 
used it in an article) concerned the fate of a certain monkey that had been caught by a 
planter and roped to his porch. The monkey escaped during the night and returned to the 
jungle. But, Wright continued, with obvious reference to his own "outsider" status, "there 
he was torn limb from limb because he was different: he had a rope around his belly no 
other monkey had." {NE, p. 53} Wright wrote in his article, "Our own tribe destroys on 
similar suspicion the man who might impart something of immense importance and value 
to his tribe such as this poor 'suspect' might have imparted: how to avoid being caught and 
tied up, say-or if tied up,-how to escape." {from an unpublished essay, "Salvation by 
Imagination," Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin Archives.} 

He was, he told his son Lloyd in the midsummer of 1924, learning to be alone, "by 
degrees. It is a long time since anything warm and human has transpired in my life with 
M-She left about May 5th but for years before that, really." {MM. p. 278.} To master the 
art of living required a technique, just as art did. "Let us learn it." In the meantime he was, 
as usual, acutely short of cash and in the hole to the tune of $47,000, but was determined 
to keep Taliesin a showplace so as to make it a "job-getter"; and he was on the job. 

His prospects would continue to look the same for the next six or seven years. That is to 
say, there were always a few large exciting commissions of potentially great promise that 
never quite came to fruition, while the actual buildings that he saw constructed were 
excruciatingly few. In the former category, he would soon be asked to design a 
thirty-two-story skyscraper on Chicago's Water Tower Place for the National Life 
Insurance Company. Although this project did not materialize, it resulted in a brilliant 
design that he would adapt later for an even more ambitious project in New York, his 
future St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie tower. At the same time he was working on another 
commission that was even more challenging. This was for a tourist attraction to be built on 
Sugarloaf Mountain in Frederick County, Maryland. Gordon Strong, a Chicagoan who had 
amassed a fortune in real estate, had bought the mountain and the three thousand acres 
surrounding it and proposed to maintain it as a nature park. His idea was that weekend 
drivers from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding area would drive up the 
mountain to park and enjoy the picturesque views from observation platforms while also 
patronizing the restaurants, gift shops, movie theater, planetarium and so on that Wright 
would design. It was an up-to-date idea for a brand-new age; Wright rose to the 
challenge with an equally daring concept based on the beehive, or ziggurat, shape 
(surrounded by tiers of driving ramps) and prepared hundreds of drawings in the months 
that followed. This work eventually resulted in some exquisite presentation drawings, 
strongly Japanese in feeling, and colored in purples, yellows, greens and blues-but no 
building. Strong never made up his mind whether he preferred Wright's concept or one of 
the other four ideas he had commissioned from other architects, which ranged from the 
most formal and eighteenth century to the most naturalistic. Another disappointment for 
Wright, but he put all that work to excellent use three decades later, as will be 
demonstrated. 

That neither of these potentially lucrative projects should come to completion must have 
been a severe disappointment, but at that period Wright was still looking hopefully toward 
Los Angeles, where Lloyd had successfully established himself. {EW, August 19, 1924.} 
The opportunity had to do with the four houses he built in 1923-24 in Los Angeles, 
Hollywood and Pasadena. In terms of their design, these exquisite small buildings-built 
for Alice Millard, a rare-book dealer, in Pasadena; Harriet and Sam Freeman (he was a 
jeweler, and she was a modern dancer); John Storer, a dentist; and Mr. and Mrs. Charles 
Ennis, a wealthy couple-are obviously closely related to Hollyhock House, that is to say, 
they are monumental, aloof and irresistibly Mayan in feeling. They are all, in fact, much 
smaller-the Freeman house is only 1,500 square feet-but so artfully proportioned that 
like the Millard house, known as La Miniatura, they present a teasing conundrum in 
photographs. Are they cottages or palaces? Only a human figure can establish the actual 
scale. All four are built on slopes, which gave Wright an opportunity to design an 
entrance, as in the Freeman house, that had an unobtrusive door in a garden wall facing 
the main rooms onto the glorious vistas hidden in the background. 

What also distinguishes these houses is their method of construction. Working with his 
son Lloyd, Wright had hammered out a variation on the design of the humble and 
inexpensive concrete block, which was easy to manufacture, easy to assemble and 
apparently easy to maintain: he called it the textile block system. It could be made in a 
variety of patterns, sizes and surfaces, and linked together with a method of horizontal and 
vertical steel rods that he and his son invented. The result was wonderfully solid and 
imposing inside and out, with an overtone of theatricality that seemed natural, if not 
required, for the Los Angeles of the 1920s, but the method was not as trouble-free as it 
looked. Recent study has established that the small Freeman house alone required over 
eleven thousand blocks and that the intricate patterns of the blocks, cast in a dry, porous 
concrete, did not usually come out cleanly on the first pass through the mold. As many as 
four stampings might be necessary before the results could be called satisfactory. In 
addition, far more patterns had been used than had first been thought (there were more 
than forty), and each block had to cure for twenty-eight days before it could be used. That 
was not the end of the matter. The material used meant that the resulting block, seemingly 
so solid, was actually very fragile and extremely vulnerable to chipping and crumbling. 
The concrete was also porous: the present curator of the Freeman house has declared that 
he can turn a water hose on full blast against a wall, stand there all day and not have a 
drop of water hit the ground. {curator Jeffrey M. Chusid to author} Being so porous means 
that these blocks have absorbed, along with the rainwater, the dissolved acids from Los 
Angeles's notorious smog: the blocks are now being literally eaten away. 

These disadvantages, along with the obvious problems of flat roofs-and Wright began to 
make extensive use of them in his designs-are evident nowadays, but even in his day 
Wright was on the defensive about them and eager to prove he had cured their drawbacks. 
{in letters to his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones.} Some historians have deduced a new note of 
austere turning away from the world in these California designs of Wright's, but, given the 
lack of a comment from the architect that would support this notion, one is inclined to 
believe that the seemingly fortresslike aspects of the textile block houses had more to do 
with the architect's superb sense of place. "Surely one reason for the thick walls and 
inwardturning courts was the climate of the south-west," Curtis wrote. "Wright's regional 
sensitivities required a new response, and he followed some of the cues supplied by 
traditional adobe structures with their thick sloping walls and flat roofs. . . ." {CU, p. 
154.} All four houses, as Hitchcock remarked, are further evidence of Wright's ability to 
"renew again and again his architectural imagination" with the stimulus of a new problem 
and new materials-in this case, the very last word in modern construction. {CU, p. 154.} 

Wright's contingent of young assistants on the West Coast, besides his son Lloyd, included 
Rudolf Michael Schindler, who had joined his office early in 1918, had worked on plans 
for the Imperial Hotel and was then dispatched to Los Angeles two years later to supervise 
Hollyhock House and its adjacent buildings. As one of the advance guard for the European 
modernists, Schindler was a remarkable figure, highly original and creator of a studio on 
Kings Road in Los Angeles for himself, his wife, Pauline, and another couple. The 
structure is now considered a landmark, not only for its radical design but also for the 
manner of living it imposed on its inhabitants: both bohemian and austerely demanding. 

Wright decided two years later, when, without any advance warning, Schindler allowed an 
art school at which he was teaching to publish in its catalogue that he had been in charge 
of Wright's Chicago architectural office for two years during his absence. Wright was 
livid. He wrote, "Get this: 

"Where I am my office is. My office is me. Frank Lloyd Wright has no other office, never 
had one and never will. . . ." {MM, p. 323} 

The real issue behind his rage seemed to be the added fact that Schindler was now 
claiming a substantial contribution to the design of the Imperial Hotel and, as he had told 
the state of California, Now, Schindler was actually having the gall to assert that without 
his work the hotel would not have withstood the earthquake. To Wright it must have 
seemed that Schindler was not only taking cheap advantage of his reputation but pushing 
him down a notch or two by attempting to steal credit that was his alone. That was 
unforgivable, and Wright would never forgive. 

In short, his former apprentices had to be extremely diplomatic if their genial "Lieber 
Meister," so capable of large generous gestures and paternal encouragement, were not to 
metamorphose into a monster. Even the tolerant and tactful Antonin Raymond had been 
dismissed from the Imperial Hotel project because, it would seem, he had set up an office 
of his own and now looked like a competitor. The ostensible cause for the break was a 
rendering he completed for Wright that the master called "hopeless" and "intended to 
resemble nothing so much as a dung hill in a mud puddle." Wright ended his letter with 
the comment "And to this I want to add that from now on I prefer your honest enmity to 
any friendship you . . . may profess. . . ." {AR.} There almost seemed to be a pattern to 
this sequence of friendships with all those talented young men and women that began with 
so much hope and goodwill and ended in such bitter partings. Wright's explanation, as he 
wrote to Mrs. Schindler in happier days, was that the fault lay in his own guileless nature.  

Part of the problem appeared to be that even when he and his assistants remained on 
excellent terms and there was no ostensible reason for a break, Wright could not bear to 
have anyone leave him. He would pretend it was not happening, load the favored one 
down with more work and eventually complain, "Anybody can leave, but only a few are 
allowed to stay. So why leave and not enjoy this place and this situation?" {Richard 
Neutra: Promise and Fulfillment, Dione Neutra, editor, p. 135} His was a fond, indulgent 
and seldom arbitrary love, for, as has been said of his clients, he was ready to see special 
qualities in anyone with the heartwarming ability to admire his work for the right reasons. 
Richard Neutra, the other young Viennese architect who would work for him, and a friend 
of Schindler's, had made a methodical pilgrimage to all of Wright's buildings in Chicago, 
finding them even more admirable than he had expected. In 1923 he was using Schindler 
as an intermediary to fulfill his ambition to work for Wright, despite his friend's warning 
that "he is devoid of consideration and has a blind spot regarding the qualities of other 
people." Schindler added, "I believe, however, that a year in his studio would be worth any 
sacrifice. . . ." {NE, p. 51} Neutra's first reaction on meeting Wright, that he was "truly a 
child but not a well-behaved one. God only knows," is evidence that his admiration for 
Wright's work did not blind him to Wright's possible shortcomings. {NE, p. 52} These 
reservations faded once Neutra and his young wife, Dione, were invited to visit Taliesin in 
the summer of 1924, and he was immediately invited to work for the master. 

They were met at the Spring Green station by Werner Moser, a Taliesin apprentice and 
son of the architect Karl Moser, under whom Neutra had briefly studied in Zurich, and had 
driven across the vast Wisconsin River and up the curving driveway. Arriving at the house 
Richard Neutra felt "as though I were in a Japanese temple district, whatever I thought 
that might look like." His wife was meeting Wright for the first time and was apprehensive 
about being introduced to a genius, but felt immediately at ease. Wright was at his most 
agreeable and winning, being "well built, elegant, of middle height, with a significant 
head, which could best be compared to that of Liszt." {Richard Neutra: Promise and 
Fulfillment, p. 126.} 

That evening they were conducted to the wonderful living room, "[v]ery low with a 
beautiful fireplace-corner and, above all, an indescribably magnificent view" to meet 
Albert Johnson and his superficial wife. He was an elderly, dull little man, whom everyone 
was most eager to please because he was about to award Wright the commission to design 
the skyscraper for the National Life Insurance Company in Chicago. It seemed painful to 
Dione Neutra that Wright, this "outstanding man," should have to abase himself before a 
boring little businessman because he needed the work. 

The Neutras woke up next morning to the chirping of brilliantly colored birds-"[I]t was a 
glorious day which seemed fabulously unreal. . . ."-and were taken on a tour of the house 
by Moser. {Richard Neutra: Promise and Fulfillment, p. 128} It had been built at different 
periods and contained innumerable nooks and crannies. In one of them the Neutras 
discovered stacks of copies-several hundred at least-of the famous Wasmuth edition of 
1910. Wright had bought up all the copies and had hoped to sell them but there they were, 
covered with mildew and literally rotting away. There was something equally sad about the 
discovery that Wright had become a tourist stop on the sight-seeing tour of the area. "We 
were told that on Sundays hordes of strangers come, go through all the rooms, sniff around 
everywhere, leave this famous house astonished. Long caravans of cars are standing on the 
street, even in the courtyard. According to his mood, Wright serves as guide, or is angered 
by them." 

Moser took them for a drive around the idyllic estate, and then they returned to Wright's 
room for a display of his drawings. "Moser had told us beforehand that he loses his 
drawings due to his disorderliness and carelessness, but supposes, nevertheless, that 
everybody robs him, so he is full of distrust. In fact, he began to search, became excited, 
rummaged in all drawers, and said helplessly: 'Everything is gone.'" He was wrong, of 
course; drawings were eventually produced, and the Neutras were eloquently silent. In the 
evening they all lay on the grass watching the fireflies while Wright talked on in his 
warm, caressing voice, and Dione was mesmerized even though she barely understood 
what he was saying. "In spite of the many . . . stories that are spread, his heart certainly 
seems pure. He can't be measured with the yardstick of the ordinary citizen. Those who 
condemn him are incapable of understanding his art. . . ." {Richard Neutra: Promise and 
Fulfillment, p. 128} 

Neutra spent nine happy and constructive months in Wright's studio working on drawings 
and design studies for Mr. Johnson's skyscraper and several other projects, including 
Wright's beehive for Sugarloaf Mountain and another extraordinary complex of buildings, 
never built, for the Edward H. Doheny  ranch in the Sierra Madre of California. They were 
ideal additions to life at Taliesin. Dione could play the cello and sing at the same time, an 
accomplishment Wright found quite astounding, and their evenings, spent artistically 
grouped around the living room fireplace, as seen in early photographs, are a model of the 
intellectual, bohemian way of living that Wright would perpetuate in his Taliesin 
Fellowship of a decade later. Despite Wright's protestations to Lloyd, so long as these 
charming young couples were in residence he could hardly be considered solitary, and 
indeed he recalled later that they kept up his spirits and became, in effect, his "immediate 
family. A happy one because they were all good to what was left of me at that bad time." 
{A3, pp. 530-531.} 

Lloyd Wright was a frequent visitor. When it came to dealing with the children of his first 
marriage, Frank Lloyd Wright managed a better accommodation with his eldest son, and 
also with John, David, Llewellyn, Catherine and Frances, than his father had done in his 
own case. True, he would always talk about them as Catherine's children, as if their 
existence had been no affair of his, and it seems clear, from family reminiscences, that 
Catherine tried to get her children to take her side, just as Anna had done, in the 
tug-of-war that continued for years after Wright left home. Lloyd and John, perhaps 
equally jolted, fared a little better than David had. For although Wright had told Lloyd, 
then in his first year at the University of Wisconsin, that he was on his own and it was up 
to him to support his mother-something he also seems to have told David and John-in 
fact, he soon coaxed Lloyd and John to Europe, paid their way, found them work, wrote 
cautious letters to them and kept in touch for the rest of his life; Llewellyn would 
eventually become Wright's lawyer. Given the destructive family patterns Wright had 
experienced, it has to be counted as a considerable achievement that he could maintain 
contact with his brood at all, and if his attentions were sporadic and his largesse 
undependable, he did his best for them after his fashion. 

This is not to say that relations were ever ideal, particularly with David-he and his father 
always seemed to be circling around each other-Llewellyn, John or, especially, Lloyd. As 
the firstborn, Lloyd carried the heaviest load of parental expectations, for it is axiomatic 
that a father's demands on his son will exactly mirror those he has of himself, and the 
harsher these are, the more exacting his attitude will be. And, for undoubtedly complex 
reasons, Lloyd chose to involve himself in his father's business affairs. He had built the 
first concrete block house-before his father's more famous houses were ever 
conceived-and took the role of intermediary between the clients and his peripatetic father. 
Under these circumstances something was bound to go wrong, and Wright aroused could 
be the wrath of Jove himself. There is, after all, nothing more exasperating for a father 
than to find in his son shortcomings he particularly detests. "You are 'spongy' and you 
don't know . . . why. But I will tell you why. It is because you are not really reliable. You 
will say a thing is so when you only think it is so. You will promise and not keep it. You 
will buy when you can't pay. You will attempt anything and blame failure on others. You 
will believe what you want to believe or think you ought to and never live up to either-. . . 
. It is hard work to overcome faults at your age. But it is the only man's work. Believe me. 

"Go to it-Stop preaching and practice-No one will be quicker to get the evidence or 
effects of improvement than your father. I see your hard work . . . and it makes me ache to 
see you get so little out of what you get for your work-The value of a dollar is a blank to 
your mind. Your sense of time is loose. Your step is loose-Your grasp of your work is 
loose-Your sense of Justice is loose-Your idea of right and wrong is loose-. . . Hell is 
paved with such as my son-'good intentions' loosely strung as selfishness and self 
indulgence and aborting at the end!" {MM, pp. 275-276} Most interesting of all, 
perhaps, Wright even accused his eldest son of doing exactly what he himself was in the 
very act of doing, perhaps the best evidence of his utter and complete inability to 
understand what was happening to him.  

Having thus demolished any hope Lloyd might have of joining the human race, Wright 
was then capable of adding that the lecture rose from a father's full and loving heart, and 
that it would do him good. It would not have helped that Lloyd, according to his son Eric, 
had no equivalent of Anna in his life to give him the necessary inner confidence and make 
him believe he was destined for great things; {Eric Wright, interview with author} but if 
he had compared notes with his brother John, as no doubt he did, he would have found 
that he was hardly alone in being singled out for criticism. For his father was far too 
judgmental; it would be fairer to say that he was too critical and too indulgent by turns, 
sometimes simultaneously, acting exactly as his own parents had acted toward him. And 
once the mood had passed, purged no doubt by these endless denunciations scrawled over 
pages of paper, Wright was impulsively warm and confiding, would address Lloyd or John 
as his "dear boy," inquire after their well being and press them to come to Taliesin for a 
long visit. And there was always that redeeming quality, his sense of fun.  

[One] of Wright's complaints about Lloyd-his "lackm of consideration or whatever it is 
that emanates from you"-was the one most often made about him by his children. {MM, 
p. 276} He seemed oblivious to the feelings of others and could exult, of a drawing, He 
praised himself once before Lloyd, forgetting that Lloyd had made that particular 
rendering. And by general agreement, Lloyd was the better artist. He was also the son who 
inherited a good deal of his father's talent. After moving to Los Angeles to design the 
gardens for Hollyhock House and Olive Hill, Lloyd took up architecture and, it is now 
said, if he had carried the name of Wright Lloyd instead of Lloyd Wright, his reputation 
might have been much greater. As it was, he was destined to be compared unfavorably 
with his father and to have his own work confused with that of the master's. One had to 
expect that, of course, if one were the son of a famous man, particularly one as insecure 
and reflexively competitive as Frank Lloyd Wright. Even John-everyone's favorite 
because he was so full of fun and good humor, whose way of dealing with conflict was to 
turn it aside with a quip, who had written the openly admiring memoir, My Father Who Is 
on Earth-having taken up architecture, found himself living in his father's shadow. It 
took years before he could let his father's derogatory remarks roll off his back. They parted 
once over a serious quarrel involving John's wages. {My Father Who Is on Earth, John 
Lloyd Wright, p. 102.} They eventually reconciled, but it had been a lifelong struggle to 
"avoid being destroyed." {"In My Father's Shadow," Esquire, vol. XLIX, February 1958, 
pp. 55-57.} 

Both Lloyd and John shared their father's delicate responsiveness to poetry and beautiful 
objects; they all loved The Valley and were as capable of being moved to tears by the first 
patch of violets in the grass as was Wright himself. But Lloyd, in particular, was not easy 
to deal with either, having acquired that ominous Lloyd Jones penchant for flying into a 
rage when crossed, and Eric recalled that his father would actually froth at the mouth. If 
Lloyd and his father were continually at loggerheads, some of the responsibility had to be 
laid at Lloyd's door.   

One by one they were all dying off, those mentors of former years. Elbert Hubbard and his 
wife had gone down with the Lusitania a year after World War I started (in 1915), and 
Louis Sullivan was in frail health. Although Wright stated that he and Sullivan did not 
meet for twenty years after their break in 1893, there are indications that they were 
reconciled, if not back on former terms, some seven years later. Ashbee's diary for 
December 1900 notes that Wright had introduced him to "his master, Sullivan," {the diary 
entry is December 8, 1900} and that same year Wright had (presumably) approved an 
article by his fellow architect, Robert C. Spencer, acknowledging the early influence of 
Sullivan on his work {"The Early Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," Robert C. Spencer, The 
Architectural Review, vol. VII, June 1900.}; Wright again made clear his debt to Sullivan 
in his essay of 1908, "In the Cause of Architecture." {published in The Architectural 
Record, vol. XXIII, no. 3, March 1908, p. 156.} Given these significant straws in the 
wind, it would be a fair guess that Wright was never completely out of touch after 1900, 
and that he was aware of the shift in Sullivan's fortunes. For, as Sullivan had predicted 
after the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the tide of architecture had moved away 
from him. The building boom in Chicago was over, and the decline in his practice was 
subsequently exacerbated by the dissolution of his partnership with Dankmar Adler. 
Curiously, the year of 1909 was as momentous for Sullivan as it was for Wright. Sullivan 
separated from his own wife and was forced to dismiss George Elmslie, his invaluable 
assistant for twenty years, for lack of work. 

By about 1920 Sullivan's reputation was international-Schindler and Neutra, recently 
arrived from Vienna, were going to enormous lengths to see his work and meet the great 
man in person-while his actual practice had dwindled to some remodeling and a few 
small banks. He was sometimes desperate for the fifty dollars a month he needed to keep 
his office going. Early in 1918 Sullivan made a telephone call to Wright in Taliesin, and 
that call re-established the friendship on a new and warmer footing, lasting for the 
remainder of Sullivan's life. Even at his most formidable, Sullivan had always shown an 
indulgent attitude toward his brilliant young assistant, and now that the tables were turned, 
the boy who had been called "Wright" was ready with numerous gifts of cash and visited 
him whenever he was in Chicago. The plight of his "Lieber Meister," rejected, ignored, his 
magnificent gifts scorned, had galvanized Wright to rush to his side. Now that Sullivan 
was penniless and friendless he could count on Wright to the end. He was determined that 
he would one day restore Sullivan to his rightful place. The biography Wright belatedly 
wrote (in 1949), made good on that promise and placed the blame where Wright felt it 
squarely belonged, on the "mobocracy," which was unable to appreciate a genius. Wright's 
description of Sullivan's last days is similarly indignant and heartfelt. Perhaps the truth 
was that Wright identified with Sullivan-he must have seen that the fate of his "Lieber 
Meister" could easily be his own-and the ordeal of watching Sullivan die must have been 
made more agonizing by the knowledge that his own marriage with Miriam Noel was 
disintegrating. Curiously enough, Miriam left Taliesin (on May 9, 1924) just three weeks 
after Sullivan died. {on April 20, 1924} 

The Oak Park home and studio sale had been settled in the summer of 1924; Catherine 
was well established in her career as a social worker and was, at that time, living 
elsewhere in Chicago and working as a juvenile protection officer. However, the papers 
were not drawn up until early in the new year. At the end of January Darwin D. Martin 
received a letter from a Chicago attorney involved in the proceedings who needed Miriam 
Noel Wright's signature on the deed of sale. The lawyer had written to her husband and 
found, to his surprise, that this gentleman did not know the whereabouts of the second 
Mrs. Wright. {F. W. Kraft to DDM, January 23, 1925.} 

Darwin Martin replied, and soon heard from Wright that the documents had finally 
reached Mrs. Wright in Los Angeles and were expected back soon. If he, Martin, knew 
anything at all about wives (and he did not, since he had only one), he would know that 
wives were not so easily mislaid, although their husbands might be misled.  

He had reason to be relieved. He had not seen Miriam for almost a year, and as far as he 
knew she had decided to settle at a safe distance. He felt free to start all over again and was 
engaging in a number of flirtations, including one with a Wisconsin author that may have 
been somewhat serious. Her name was Zona Gale. She was a member of a large family for 
whom Wright had designed some entirely conventional, Queen Anne style houses on 
Chicago Avenue in Oak Park before he left Sullivan {in 1892}, and she had worked her 
way up from jobs on Milwaukee and New York newspapers to become a famous novelist. 
Her satiric novel, Miss Lulu Bett, was a great success and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 
after the author turned it into a play. When Wright returned from Japan, she was at the 
height of her reputation; she was then in her mid-forties and had not married. (She 
married in 1928, ten years before she died.) 

When they first met, Zona was an adolescent living in Oak Park; finding her a woman of 
accomplishments, Wright decided to advance. He appeared at her home one day 
accompanied by two Japanese houseboys bearing gifts, and several armfuls of flowers 
including goldenrod. That, according to her biographer, was the beginning and end of her 
friendship with Wright, although the latter intimates it had more substance. {Still Small 
Voice, the Biography of Zona Gale, August Derleth, pp. 150-151.} He was in search of 
amorous conquest but, perhaps, not quite as indiscriminately as he had been after Mamah's 
death. He was, after all, surrounded every evening by charming young women, even if they 
were the wives of other men, and no one thought it too significant when, one evening 
during the visit of the Neutras to Taliesin, a young European made her appearance. Her 
name was Olgivanna Hinzenberg, she had recently arrived from France, and she danced 
before the fire while Dione Neutra played Schubert's setting of a poem by Goethe on the 
cello. It was "The Elf King." 


A Stern Chase 

How gaily, how often, we'd fashioned oaths  
Defying everything but death to endanger  
Our love. . . . 

"A Woman's Message" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 36} 

Olga Ivanovana Lazovich, who would play a central role in Frank Lloyd Wright's life until 
his death, and whose language, cultural background and upbringing were almost exotically 
alien to his own, might seem to have been a bizarre choice as the third official Mrs. 
Wright. She was more than thirty years his junior, having been born in Cetinje, 
Montenegro, on December 27, 1898, the ninth and last child of highly unusual parents. 
Her father, Ivan Lazovich, was chief justice of the tiny principality; her mother, Militza, 
was daughter of a famous general, Marco Miliyanov, or Milanoff, a man of almost 
legendary courage, who had been commander in chief of the Montenegrin army. 

Montenegro, on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, takes its name from the Venetian Monte 
Nero, or "Black Mountain," so called because of the dark-leaved shrubs that grow on the 
stony peaks of this geographical landmark, the historical center of the country. Nature has 
made it a natural fortress, and its statehood dates back to the fourteenth century and the 
dissolution of the Serbian Empire. From that time onward Montenegro was engaged in a 
continual battle to defend its autonomy. When the Turks fought their way into Albania and 
Hercegovina, Montenegro's ruler, Ivo the Black, was pushed back to the remote mountain 
village of Cetinje but not defeated. There, in the late fifteenth century he founded a 
monastery and bishopric and set up the first printing press in the Balkans. For centuries 
the mountaineers were subsequently ruled by bishops (vladikas) elected in popular 
assemblies, their statehood continually threatened by invasions of the Turks, whom they 
kept at bay for two centuries. Their success led to political recognition far out of proportion 
to their numbers. Early in the eighteenth century, Vladika Danilo I, the first hereditary 
vladika, was able to forge an enduring alliance with Russia; then, under Peter I, the 
Montenegrins cooperated with the British and Russians against Napoleon and won 
substantial additional territory. Peter I was succeeded in due course by Peter II, who 
became renowned in Montenegrin history as a soldier, statesman and the greatest of 
Serbian poets, and then by Nicholas I. In short, centuries of knowing themselves 
surrounded by hostile and well-armed armies had bred extraordinary resilience, cunning 
and self-reliance. Montenegrins were known in Europe for their innate dignity, love of 
poetry, willingness to use their fists and aversion to work (still a standard joke in 
Yugoslavia). Their successful resistance became, by the nineteenth century, almost a 
byword for guerrilla warfare. Tennyson wrote, "O smallest among peoples! rough 
rock-throne / Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm / Of Turkish Islam for five 
hundred years." Montenegro has been part of Yugoslavia since World War I, and its 
population is now three million. 

Louis Adamic, a Montenegrin author, left an eloquent description of Nicholas I, during 
whose reign Olgivanna was born, in his memoir, The Native's Return. He wrote that 
Nicholas "made the hamlet of Cetinye into a tidy little town and built himself a 'palace,' 
which still stands today and looks like a neglected town hall in a small American 
community. Every Sunday afternoon he dispensed patriarchal justice under an elm tree 
near the palace. . . . His subjects called him gospodar (boss) and he greeted them by their 
first names. . . . A tireless worker, he personally kept track of everything. If you, a 
foreigner, came to Cetinye and registered at the Grand Hotel, which he owned, he knew 
your name and business ten minutes later. If you wanted to send a registered letter, the 
clerk at the post-office . . . sent you over to the 'palace,' for the king kept all stamps of 
higher denomination in his private safe. . . . His wife, the queen, kept house. . . . 
Mornings, with her basket and petroleum-can, she went shopping in the market place. 
She bore him ten daughters and three sons. . . ." {The Native's Return, Louis Adamic, pp. 
136-137.} Given such a comic-opera setting, one would expect the Montenegrin 
dynasty to have quietly slid into obscurity. In fact, this stamp-dispensing king managed 
to marry off his daughters most advantageously and could, through them, claim dynastic 
links with the king of Serbia (Prince Peter Karagjorgjevic), the Russian aristocracy (two 
grand dukes) and the throne of Italy (his daughter, Princess Elena, married Victor 
Emmanuel). 

A small-town atmosphere, connections in high places, a physically arduous existence, a 
proud heritage, an embattled past-it is not difficult to see the points of contact that 
Wright found between his family's origins in rural Wales and this Serbian beauty from the 
shores of the Adriatic. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright subsequently wrote about her famous 
grandfather, but nowhere mentioned the even more astonishing fact that her mother was 
also a general in the Montenegrin army. She, too, gained such a reputation for ferocity 
that, it was said, the Turks declared if they ever caught her they would tie her between two 
horses. When Olgivanna left home to go to private school, her mother gave her a 
photograph of herself in uniform to take with her. She was too embarrassed to display it, 
so she kept the picture in a drawer. One day, a classmate found it and wanted to know who 
the military lady was. Olgivanna denied knowing who it was. Olgivanna also recalled that 
on another occasion she was riding on a streetcar with her mother when the latter caught 
sight of a man she believed to be a crooked politician, a few seats away. She stood up and 
launched into a denunciation then and there. {Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright to author.} 
That was Olgivanna's enduring memory of her mother: fierce, domineering, distant and 
almost recklessly brave. 

Olgivanna's way of doing things was very different. One sees her as a young girl, very 
beautiful in a grave and stately kind of way, with a slim figure, hair dressed very simply, 
head bent forward in studious attentiveness and, as the above makes clear, painfully shy. 
As the youngest in a large family she appears to have been brought up as much by her 
older sisters as by her mother; in any event, her memories of childhood seem to center on 
her father, Ivan Lazovich, who had become blind and had given her the task of reading 
aloud to him: everything from legal briefs to newspapers, poetry and philosophy. 

When Olgivanna was eleven, she was sent to live with her married sister in the port city of 
Batumi, in the Caucasus on the Black Sea. Olgivanna was enrolled in a private 
coeducational school that, according to another former pupil who knew her there, was 
considered most progressive for its day. It was particularly renowned for its teaching of 
foreign languages, perhaps because, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Black Sea 
"was an international highway which permitted free movement between Russia, Turkey 
and the Balkans," and its student body was a polyglot of Turks, Germans, Poles, Greeks 
and Armenians as well as Russians {Gurdjieff: Making a New World, J. G. Bennett, p. 
21.}; in such a setting, the arrival of a Serb would have caused little comment. Olgivanna 
was taught fluent French and learned her Russian from a distinguished man of letters who 
had written for a progressive magazine in the 1860s. Her friend Vera Leikina-Svirskaya, 
four years her junior, was one of the editors of a school magazine; Olgivanna was another. 
Together they laboriously wrote out the short stories and poems that filled its pages. 
Reckless confrontation was not Olgivanna's style; she preferred the tactics of psychological 
survival, that is to say, sharp attention, silent conclusions and the value of the surprise 
attack, followed by retreat into the darkness. She also learned the value of self-discipline. 

She later recalled, "I lived some very rich years with my sister, with so many servants I 
couldn't count . . . and I had everything one could desire. But my sister was a strong 
disciplinarian; . . . she made me do things, notwithstanding the luxuries that surrounded 
me-including the governesses and music teachers. . . . It was a very high society at the 
villa, with counts, countesses, princes, and princesses coming in from the villas around us. 
But my sister, who studied medicine, was a rather advanced person, and she said to me 
that work was the most important thing. . . ." {Arizona Living, May 1983.} 

Olgivanna's move to Russia appears to have coincided with a parental separation, since her 
father is known to have accompanied her, leaving her mother in Montenegro. All that is 
known about the latter is that she traveled widely in later years, lived to a great age and 
kept in touch with her last child. (Olgivanna periodically sent money, but the two never 
met again.) Olgivanna grew up with the concept of a mother for whom the career or the 
cause-both were probably interchangeable concepts-counted for more than the 
emotional needs of any individual, and of a father who perfectly fitted the traditional 
pattern of benevolent patriarch but made unusual demands upon her. A youthful marriage 
would have been expected for her, but she seems to have been bent upon making any kind 
of marriage as soon as possible. When her first love affair was thwarted by the boy's 
father-who sent him to Rome-she looked elsewhere and was soon being courted by a 
Russian architect ten years her senior, Vlademar Hinzenberg. {the early life of Olgivanna 
recalled by Kay Rattenbury} This shadowy figure said later that he was working in Tiflis 
in the central Caucasus when they met in 1916. He was slightly built, polite and well 
educated with a soft, calm voice, and was a chainsmoker. He seems to have pursued her 
impetuously; that winter, while he was courting her, he wired a bare tree outside her 
window full of hothouse flowers. {William Wesley Peters to author} She told a confidante 
that she had never loved him and married him when she was eighteen to fulfill a promise 
she had made to his dying mother. The explanation sounds a little too pat, and one 
wonders whether she might have been pregnant; their daughter, Svetlana, was born in 
1917, the year Hinzenberg said they were married. {CT, September 4, 1926} In any event, 
the marriage was not a success. 

By the time Svetlana was born, Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenberg had met a man destined 
to have a lasting influence on her life. He was Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, an intriguing 
and sphinxlike figure best known for having founded the Institute for the Harmonious 
Development of Man in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, in the early 1920s, to which 
Katherine Mansfield came at the end of her life and where she died. Gurdjieff's early life, 
his biographer has written, is almost as shadowy as that of the historical Moses. It is 
known, however, that he was the son of a Greek father and an Armenian mother, born in 
the town of Alexandropol (now Leninakan) on the Russo-Turkish border, in a part of the 
Caucasus perpetually fought over by Turkey, Russia and Persia. When shifts of allegiance 
were the rule, minority peoples, such as Armenians, were in particular danger of 
persecution, and the Gurdjieff family moved frequently. The Gurdjieffs were also poor and 
there was no hope of an advanced education for Georgei, but he was intellectually curious 
and ambitious to become, if not a philosopher, certainly someone skilled in esoteric 
knowledge. He studied Sufi and shamanistic teachings and, by early adulthood, was 
making his living as a professional hypnotist and teacher of the occult. But his main 
interest was in founding a philosophy of spiritual development, and by the time he was in 
his early forties, he had developed a highly idiosyncratic set of beliefs he called "The 
Work," which taught by means of cryptic and apparently contradictory directives in the 
tradition of Zen Buddhism. Gurdjieff's methods would eventually encompass exercise, 
dance, arduous physical labor and psychological disciplines designed to awaken his 
followers from what he called the profound slumber of humankind. Work, suffering, 
self-discipline, sacrifice, conscious effort and self-awareness-this was the path toward 
inner enlightenment, Gurdjieff believed. Years later Olgivanna Wright would publish a 
book, The Struggle Within (1955), and her reiteration of these goals would attest to the 
strength of Gurdjieff's influence. 

Numerous reminiscences from former devotees have described the allure of Gurdjieff's 
personality: his mesmerizing gaze, his ability to seemingly read others' thoughts and his 
superhuman strength, as well as his capricious shifts of mood, his dictatorial ways, 
deliberate obfuscations and the difficulty of ever really knowing who he was. Like Wright, 
he was at his most confiding and least elliptical with women, and there are some 
fascinating parallels between their two temperaments. Both were emotionally 
unpredictable, extremely loyal, family centered and generous; both were from militant 
minorities; both were pitiless with themselves and others; both were seignorial about 
money; both loved fast cars and pretty women and were extremely susceptible to flattery. 
Both presented themselves as authorities-Gurdjieff was almost the archetypal Magician; 
"the Man Who Knows," he was called-and there was no doubt that Olgivanna would be 
attracted to commanding figures, before she became one herself. As James Webb, the 
biographer, also said of Gurdjieff, he tended to attract men and women in search of "a pair 
of shoulders broad enough to carry their burdens," {WE, p. 259} and when Olgivanna first 
met Gurdjieff her marriage was failing, her father was ill or dying, her mother was far 
distant, and she was still an adolescent who had been catapulted into motherhood. Their 
immediate link was Gurdjieff's passionate interest in the music and dances he had learned 
in Turkestan, Belugistan and Tibet since, she wrote, "Turkish and Albanian music was the 
first I heard." {CT, April 18, 1960} Soon after they met, he asked her if there was 
something she really wanted from life. She replied, "I wish for immortality." {Teachings 
of Gurdjieff, C. S.Nott, p. 85.} 

In 1917, as the Bolshevik forces went into action, the political situation in Tiflis became 
confused and dangerous. Webb wrote, "In addition to the Soviet-inspired 
'Trans-Caucasian Commissariat,' the White forces had to contend with Caucasian 
separatists-Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis-who were not content with 
establishing claims to their resurrected nations, but vied incessantly with one another. In 
the south, the Turks, who were still at war with Russia, occupied Batum. {WE, p. 156.} 
The issue was further complicated by troops of the Allied Powers which were attempting to 
help the anti-Bolshevik elements and at the same time, prevent the Turks from advancing 
further into Russia." To his entourage, a sizable group composed of impoverished 
aristocrats and intellectuals, as well as refugee members of his own family, Gurdjieff must 
have looked like the one man with the necessary cunning and contacts in high places to 
conduct them all to relative safety, and they were right. In the summer of 1918 the group, 
cagily renamed the "International Idealistic Society," were temporarily living in Essentuki 
in the Caucasus. The town had a Bolshevik government, but White forces were on the 
offensive, and it seemed only a matter of time before they would invade Essentuki. Using 
his contacts, Gurdjieff adroitly secured permission for them all to leave on the pretext that 
they intended to make an archaeological expedition to the mountains. They immediately 
made for the port of Sochi on the Black Sea outside the battle zone and, after innumerable 
adventures, sailed for Constantinople, where they arrived in the early summer of 1920. A 
year later they had reached Berlin, and after examining the possibility of settling in 
Germany or  England, Gurdjieff decided upon France and Fontainebleau. {He arrived 
there in 1922.} 

For Olgivanna, a ch�teau outside Paris-reportedly built for Madame de Maintenon-in 
the idyllic French countryside must have seemed heaven-sent. Exactly when she and 
Hinzenberg separated is not clear, but it is apparent he felt that her intense involvement in 
the Gurdjieff movement and her unwillingness to set up a separate household with him 
had doomed their marriage from the start. {CT, September 4, 1926} In fact she was 
completely committed and, by dint of intense application, had become one of the master's 
best dancers. She spoke fluent French, there was even a kindergarten at the institute 
(where mothers took turns caring for the children), and by the time she arrived at Le 
Prieure, as it was called, she had become one of Gurdjieff's six assistant instructors. {Our 
Life with Mr. Gurdjieff, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, p. 114.} 

The members of the institute had already given a series of demonstrations in Paris, and 
Gurdjieff had resolved to take them to New York for another introductory group of 
performances, early in 1924. This would have been welcome news for Olgivanna, since 
Hinzenberg, who had immigrated into the United States in 1922, was practicing 
architecture in Chicago (they would soon agree to an American divorce), and her brother 
Vladimir, or "Vlado," an agent for the United States Lines, was living with his family in 
Hollis, a suburb of New York. 

They opened early in January with performances in Leslie Hall (260 West Eighty-third 
Street), the Lenox Theatre, the Neighborhood Playhouse and Carnegie Hall. Their 
reputation had preceded them, and the first audiences were packed with famous names: 
John O'Hara, Theodore Dreiser, Gloria Swanson, Rebecca West, Elinor Wylie and, 
strangely enough, Zona Gale, who became an enthusiastic supporter. They were all curious 
to see what superhuman feats this maguslike figure would devise, and they were not 
disappointed. One writer described in detail one of Gurdjieff's most celebrated exercises in 
which, on hearing a command that might come at any moment, the pupil had to instantly 
stop whatever he or she might be doing: one of his ways of waking people from the "sleep" 
of their automatic daily routine. This became the highlight of the evening. The troupe 
lined up at the back of the stage and began running full tilt toward the footlights. "We 
expected to see a wonderful exhibition of arrested motion," one observer wrote. "But 
instead Gurdjieff calmly turned his back, and was lighting a cigarette. In the next split 
second an aerial human avalanche was flying through the air, across the orchestra, down 
among empty chairs, on the floor, bodies pell-mell, piled on top of each other, arms and 
legs sticking out in weird postures-frozen there, fallen, in complete immobility and 
silence. 

"Only after it happened did Gurdjieff turn and look at them as they lay there, still 
immobile. When they presently arose . . . and it was evident that no arms, legs, or necks 
had been broken . . . there were storms of applause, mingled with a little protest. It had 
been almost too much." {WE, pp. 268-269.} Newspaper headlines stressed the 
sensational aspects of the demonstrations, and a British writer likened Gurdjieff to a riding 
master with curious and unsettling powers. Despite the note of repellent fascination in the 
reports, or perhaps because of it, Gurdjieff pronounced the debut a success and planned a 
sequel. Along with Gurdjieff and others in the troupe, Olgivanna Hinzenberg made her 
way back to Paris after she had, it is said, declined an invitation from Cecil B. DeMille to 
become a dancer in Hollywood. {Kay Rattenbury to author.} Plans were going ahead for 
the return visit. Then, on July 5, 1924, Gurdjieff, who was a notoriously bad driver and 
had been known to fall asleep at the wheel, was driving back from Paris after lunching in 
an Armenian restaurant when, one report had it, his steering failed and the car collided 
with a tree. According to some accounts, he was badly hurt. Another writer believed that 
he had staged the accident as a way of disbanding his institute, which had become 
tiresome. In any event, as soon as he could lift his head off the pillow, most of them were 
given two days to leave. Those in the inner circle, like Olgivanna Hinzenberg, were 
allowed a longer period of grace, but the day of reckoning could not be postponed for too 
long. Nott recalled that in the autumn of 1924, he and Olgivanna worked with a crosscut 
saw every day for two weeks, cutting up logs for the winter, and each day Gurdjieff came 
around to talk to her. "From what I could follow of the conversation it seemed to be about 
her plans for the future. . . ." {Teachings of Gurdjieff, p. 84.} 

Gurdjieff was suggesting that she and Svetlana return to the United States. He said that he 
had taught Olgivanna all he knew, and it was time for her to "go out and live." She: "But I 
don't want to leave," and "Where will I go?" She should go to her brother, Gurdjieff said, 
and that settled it. {Kay Rattenbury.} Exactly when she took that step is not clear, but she 
probably arrived in New York in late October or early November. Then she traveled on to 
Chicago, where her divorce from Hinzenberg was now in the courts. Besides, some 
Americans who had spent time at Le Prieure were living in Chicago, and it is conceivable 
that Olgivanna Hinzenberg had thoughts of helping them form a new center for the work 
there. {Arizona Living, May 1983.} She had been in the United States for three weeks 
when, one afternoon, she went to a ballet performance starring Tamara Karsavina. She 
had noticed Wright in the lobby crowd and been attracted to him; then, to her surprise, she 
found herself conducted to the same box as he. 

He wrote, "An usher quietly showed a dark, slender gentlewoman to the one empty seat in 
the house. Unobtrusive but lovely. I secretly observed her aristocratic bearing, no hat, her 
dark hair parted in the middle and smoothed down over her ears, a light small shawl over 
her shoulders, little or no makeup, very simply dressed. . . . I instantly liked her looks. . . ." 
{A2, p. 509} They began to talk, and Wright remarked casually that Karsavina, whom 
they had just seen perform, would not do. She was "dead." He gestured toward the 
audience below. "They are all dead: the dead is dancing to the dead." {A2, p. 509} He 
could not have known that this remark, of all those he might have made, was the one best 
calculated to have a dramatic effect on Olgivanna, recalling as it did one of Gurdjieff's 
major dicta. She gave him a "quick comprehending glance," he wrote; he felt a "strange 
elation." He invited her to a tea dance after the performance, and the conversation was as 
animated as that first celebrated meeting with Madame Noel had been, but this encounter 
was, by contrast, being described from his viewpoint. He liked the fact that, in a few 
words, she had dismissed Karsavina with the right kind of criticism; that she was perfectly 
straightforward and natural, yet diplomatic. He liked a certain severity about her manner. 
He liked the fact that she was well bred and sophisticated and had titled friends. Most of 
all he liked her "low musical voice" and her "sensitive feminine brow and dark eyes." As 
for Olgivanna, halfway through the encounter, the orchestra struck up a Strauss waltz and 
he invited her to dance. She later explained, "I fell in love . . . very simple . . . just like 
that." {Arizona Living, May 1983.} 

Given Wright's impulsiveness, one would have expected him to sweep the lady off her feet; 
this seems to have happened. He wrote that he was committed to make a trip east for a 
week, but contacted her after he returned and invited her to the theater. The next move 
was an invitation to Taliesin, which she accepted. That was the evening she danced before 
the fire, and the Neutras, the Mosers and the Tsuchiuras, from Zurich, Vienna and Tokyo, 
respectively, were enthusiastic. They were "sure" that Olgivanna would be a wonderful 
addition to Taliesin. Wright wrote, "none so sure as I." {A2, p. 512.} 

As for the actual date of their meeting, correspondence that autumn of 1924 in the form of 
telegrams between Wright and his son Lloyd in Los Angeles pinpoints Wright's 
movements fairly closely. Lloyd Wright was overseeing construction of the textile block 
houses for Storer, Freeman and Ennis, and Wright would make lightning trips to the West 
Coast in response to crises of one kind or another. He liked to take the Santa Fe California 
Limited. He could leave Chicago one evening and be in Los Angeles three days later. An 
analysis of his movements shows that he was in Chicago around November 22, when he 
could have met Olgivanna. He was off to New York on November 25 and back in Chicago, 
where he liked to stay in the Congress Hotel, by December 1, just long enough to take the 
fast train to Los Angeles. He had returned to Chicago by December 20, just in time for 
Christmas at Taliesin. It seems likely that Olgivanna had moved into the house that would 
be her home for the next sixty years early in the new year of 1925. 

This may be the moment to recall Wright's first meeting with Miriam Noel and that slight 
but perceptible trembling of her head that first aroused his compassion and concern. Here, 
now, was a woman just as cultured and elegant, while far younger and prettier, and 
perhaps more reminiscent of Anna in her simply dressed hair, her sharp-eyed 
attentiveness, her unsmiling gaze and her regal bearing. He would have discovered before 
long that this seemingly selfpossessed foreigner was as much at a loss as he was himself. 
The mainstay of her life had been pulled out from under her, and his indignation and 
sympathetic determination to take her side can be predicted. For, as he told Aline 
Barnsdall after she dreamed about him as a Roman singer in a Technicolor movie, that 
was not the right image at all. Could she not imagine a situation in which her house was 
about to collapse and he was standing over her, so as to take the falling beams on his own 
back? Or could she not see herself on a bark gliding down a stream, in an echo of John 
Everett Millais's painting of Ophelia perhaps, and then imagine him swimming to her 
rescue, so as to steer her boat into shallow waters where the lotuses grew. 

That message was a remarkably consistent one. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright described an 
incident that took place years later, one evening when they were staying in a luxurious 
suite in a hotel in Paris. He wanted to make love; she was too tired. So, by way of 
persuasion, he began to invent a hypothetical situation: she was out for a walk in Paris; 
before long, she discovered that she was being followed by a man. Then a second joined in 
the chase. She began to run faster and faster, but the men were gaining on her. All seemed 
lost; in her extremity, she called her husband's name. And suddenly, he was there. She 
flew into his arms, and, he concluded, there she found all the safety she needed. {CD, p. 
126.} He knew her well enough, in other words, to believe that the most seductive image 
he could paint of himself was as her defender, her savior.  

In a photograph taken in the early 1930s, a few years after their marriage, Wright is 
dressed in a dark suit, carrying a cane, with a pale, broad-brimmed hat pulled down over 
his forehead. He is seen in profile, looking at something over his right shoulder, his gray 
hair swept back behind his ears. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright stands beside him, her slender 
body folded around his left side, one arm tucked into his and the other hand placed 
possessively on his chest in a gesture that is both self-conscious and eloquent. She wears 
an identically shaped hat at the same angle, and she, too, is in profile, her hair swept back 
behind her ears. Wifely devotion and identification with the beloved can go no further. She 
had found her new reason for being. 

In his autobiography, Wright gave the impression that by the time Olgivanna and her 
daughter, Svetlana, had moved into Taliesin, he had filed for divorce from Miriam. He 
explained that he and Olgivanna felt morally free to live together; that he had filed for 
divorce was not quite true. Olgivanna had done so, but he did not until July 1925. His 
hesitation seems out of character, but there was at least one practical reason for the delay. 
The sale of Oak Park, so long postponed, was inching toward its conclusion in early 1925, 
and Wright needed the settlement and the cash. He dared not run the risk of antagonizing 
Miriam until he had, at least, obtained her signature on that deed, and, as has been noted, 
for a while she could not be found. She finally signed it in March 1925, the same month 
that Olgivanna obtained her divorce. There may have been, too, a certain suspicion in the 
back of his mind that getting Miriam to agree to a divorce might not be as painless as, no 
doubt, he made it appear. It was true that she had left him, but, on the other hand, he knew 
just how "tricky" she could be, how adept at emotional blackmail, how calculating and 
how vindictive. If he had ever thought about the matter, he must have been puzzled by the 
conundrum his relationships with women seemed to present: none of them ever wanted to 
let him go. His mother had clung to him through every vicissitude of his fortunes, and 
contemplating the final months of her life, when he finally shook her off, must have given 
him some very remorseful feelings. Catherine, blind to every rebuff, had been mesmerized 
by her obstinate conviction that he would one day return, and perhaps loved him still. Now 
there was Miriam; how would she jump? And if she did agree to a quiet divorce, there 
would be the problems of a financial settlement and alimony and another set of monthly 
payments to hound him. But if he wavered, it could not be for long. That same March of 
1925, perhaps in a mood of euphoria, he and Olgivanna made an impulsive decision to 
start a family of their own. By the time the last papers on Oak Park had been signed and 
he was free to file suit for divorce (he charged Miriam with desertion), she was four 
months pregnant. {DDM, July 21, 1925.} Olgivanna had assumed her mother's maiden 
name of Milanoff and perhaps it was then that Wright launched the transparent fiction 
that she was at Taliesin as his housekeeper. He had used this ruse with Miriam in 1918, 
even persuading her to sign a formal agreement to that effect (for sixty dollars-a-month 
salary). {dated February 1, 1918.} The new explanation seemed no more likely to work 
than had the first. 

The Oak Park sale was the chief reason for the delay, but there was another, this time a 
catastrophic piece of misfortune. It happened early one evening in April just as lightning 
began to flash in the sky; the wind was rising, and a heavy thunderstorm appeared 
imminent. Coming down from his evening meal, one he took in a small detached dining 
room on the hillside above the main house, Wright learned that something was wrong with 
the new system he had recently installed between his bedroom telephone and a buzzer in 
the kitchen. This, by itself, was nothing new since, as Raymond had observed ten years 
before, mechanical equipment frequently malfunctioned at Taliesin, but the buzzer would 
not stop ringing, and that was a nuisance. Wright went to his bedroom to investigate and 
discovered that the wall near the telephone was on fire, and a bed and curtains were 
blazing. Undoubtedly there was a short circuit in the wall, but there was no time to 
investigate because smoke was pouring out of the windows. Wright immediately organized 
a bucket brigade, and had just quelled the flames when he heard an ominous crackling 
noise above the bedroom ceiling, in the dead space beneath the roof: the fire had spread. 
He sent out a call for help to Spring Green, but by the time the fire brigade arrived, the fire 
was already out of control, spread by the high winds. Wright wrote, "Water! More water 
was the cry as more men came over the hills to fight the now roaring sea of devastation. 
Whipped by the big wind, great clouds of smoke and sparks drove straight down the length 
of Taliesin courts. The place seemed doomed. . . . That merciless wind! How cruel the 
wind may be, cruel as fire itself. {A2, p. 261.}  

"But I was on the smoking roofs, feet burned, lungs seared, hair and eyebrows gone, 
thunder rolling as the lightning flashed over the lurid scene. . . . I stood there-and 
fought." Their living quarters were doomed, and the next battle was to save his studio and 
workrooms. These, too, seemed lost. Then, almost on cue, a dramatic roll of thunder 
brought a deluge of rain and a shift in the direction of the wind. Suddenly, the 
conflagration was under control. It had all taken just twenty minutes, and in that time the 
heat was so intense that the plate glass in the windows had melted; it lay in pools among 
the ashes on the stone pavements. The loss of their house was a terrible blow, but the 
building, which he had insured for $39,000, could at least be rebuilt. What were not 
insured, but what were valued at half a million dollars by his estimate, were a number of 
priceless tapestries, screens, bronzes and other treasures. He still had his print collection, 
as he explained a few months later to the daughter of his old Oak Park patron, Charles 
Roberts. Those at least were safe, but the market for the moment was poor, since 
impoverished Europeans had been putting their collections up for sale at auction in New 
York for whatever prices they could get. Values would eventually return to their rightful 
levels, but for the moment he himself would have to borrow against his own collection and 
use it as a security. He might have been secretly pleased that newspaper accounts made no 
mention of his marriage to Miriam Noel; that did not become public knowledge until he 
filed to divorce her. Better yet, there was no mention of Olgivanna, although she was 
there. At the end of the terrible fire, she crept toward him from the shadows, with a 
splendid message: "Taliesin lived wherever I stood!" {A2, p. 262} He believed her. 

His indomitable spirit rose to the new challenge. He picked through the ruins of Taliesin, 
putting aside many of the stones along with the "partly calcined marble heads of the Tang 
Dynasty, fragments of the black basalt of a splendid Wei-stone, soft-clay Sung sculpture 
and gorgeous Ming pottery that had turned to the color of bronze by the intensity of the 
fire." {A2, p. 263} These would be lovingly incorporated into the new building. Taliesin 
had grown piecemeal, as the need to expand arose. This was his opportunity to design 
better than ever, to a unified, orderly plan. He made forty sheets of pencil studies in pursuit 
of his latest vision for Taliesin reborn: "Taliesin, gentler prophet of the Celts, and of a 
more merciful God. . . ." He was soon out walking again, swimming in the river and 
driving over the hills. His appetite for life was as good as ever; better in fact, because now 
he had Olgivanna and would soon be a father once more. He sent his usual group of 
masterly letters to Darwin Martin in search of the latest loan. Tiring, no doubt, of Wright's 
perennial ability to cast himself in the role of the injured party battered by a hostile fate, 
Martin relented, as he usually did, and revived a plan to have his architect design a 
summer cottage. It was not, of course, enough to pull Wright out of his latest financial 
hole. If he really hoped, as he wrote to Harriet Monroe a few months before the fire, that 
he would soon be free of debt, "in spite of the gift I have for increasing the load as I travel 
on-the gift amounts to genius-really," that blissful state seemed farther away than ever. 
{about November 18, 1924. University of Chicago.} But, as he said in his autobiography, 
cheerfully, "Life is like that!" {A2,p. 272.} There was, nevertheless, a limit even to his 
sunny ability to find a silver lining in every financial cloud.  

On the first of January 1925, Wright had moved his studio back to Chicago and announced 
the opening of an office at 19 Cedar Street. Commissions were scarce that year, but he did 
capture one exciting new project-it would take various shapes and appear in new guises 
for the next four years-commissioned by William Norman Guthrie, Episcopal minister of 
a small church in New York and a man he had known for years. Guthrie asked Wright to 
design a cathedral that would hold a million people in numerous churches and chapels, all 
under one roof. Wright set to work that year on his idea for a triangular glass-and-steel 
pyramid a thousand feet high, with cathedrals and chapels grouped around its base to form 
a hexagon. He called it the steel cathedral. {LAR, p. 58} He planned a new system of 
cantilevered floor construction resting on immense pylons, and an exterior of copper and 
glass, as he explained to the Dutch architect H. Th. Wijdeveld. They wrote to each other 
often that year, because the latter, who was founder and editor of an architectural 
magazine called Wendingen, was planning to publish a book about Wright's work. 

Wijdeveld had conceived the idea of devoting seven consecutive special issues of the 
magazine to Wright, and then binding them together to make a book. The issues contained 
essays by noted writers, including H. P. Berlage and J. J. P. Oud, an essay praising the 
Imperial Hotel written by Louis H. Sullivan shortly before his death, an essay on the social 
background of Wright by the interesting young critic named Lewis Mumford, and similar 
studies. The resulting book was prefaced with an introduction by Wijdeveld titled "Some 
Flowers for Architect Frank Lloyd Wright." After his death, his widow noted that, as he 
had done with any object that was particularly precious-a vase, a piece of sculpture or a 
Japanese lacquer box-Wright kept the Wendingen edition close by his side for the rest of 
his life. {introduction to The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, H. Th., Wijdeveld, editor.} 

After receiving word of the divorce suit, Miriam Noel Wright returned like a whirlwind 
with a cascade of letters and tearful, daily telephone calls. Her missives have not been 
recovered, but at least one letter from Wright, addressed to Judge Frederick S. Fake of 
Chicago in the summer of 1925, has survived, indicating the kinds of claims she was 
making. She was insisting that she wanted a reconciliation. She was making wild and 
unfounded charges, but the behavior, he believed, was simply evidence of "the usual 
rule-or-ruin tactics" that she always used; she was a desperate and dangerous woman. 
She sounded hysterical on the telephone. In short, he did not know how to calm her, but if 
money was what she wanted, he would make the best settlement he could, and even agree 
to let her bring the suit on a charge of desertion, if she preferred. {T, August 8, 1925.} 
After a few months they had agreed on $10,000 in cash, $250 a month and a half-interest 
in the Spring Green property. Wright was willing to throw in another $1,000 if Miriam 
went through with her implied intention to return to Paris. To get that money, he added 
cleverly, she had to leave within six weeks of the agreement, which was dated November 
18, 1925. It seemed as if the whole issue might be settled at the eleventh hour; the birth of 
Olgivanna and Wright's child was expected early in December. 

It seems fair to believe that Miriam was at first negotiating, one would have said, in good 
faith, i.e., ignorant of the real reason for Wright's uncharacteristic willingness to accept a 
hard financial bargain. Being cast off in this way hardly fitted her inner fantasy world. If 
anyone was going to do the leave-taking, that person was supposed to be she. It was not 
in the cards at all for him to be heartily glad to see her leave, and in such strange haste to 
repudiate those solemn vows said over water at midnight just two years before. It was 
hurtful. It offended her very delicate and sensitive amour propre. Such a man should not 
think he could get off scot-free, even if his financial terms are generous. He has to expect 
some public embarrassment; he has to understand that his wife is going to tell her version 
of events. She had a press conference two days before the agreement was to take effect. 
The reporters were most attentive. {November 17, 1925.} 

All this was bad enough from Wright's point of view, but worse was to come. It is perfectly 
likely that Miriam hired a private detective immediately. It was fashionable in the 1920s, a 
realistic way of ensuring that the financial settlement was exactly as you wished. 

You would not, of course, ever make this public. No, you would simply let your 
information leak out innocently, as if you had found out by chance. Miriam told the press 
that she had visited the Art Institute in Chicago and was passing by the Congress Hotel, at 
Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, when she happened to see Wright's car standing 
outside; his chauffeur, Billy, was at the wheel. Billy told her that his employer was staying 
at the hotel. Then Billy told her something else. 

Miriam Wright said that she then went to the manager's office and demanded to see the 
hotel register. The manager refused, so she called the police. Before they arrived, the man 
changed his mind and there, under her horrified eyes, was the incriminating evidence. 
{CT, November 17, 1925.} 

Did she really find out in this way, or was Wright being followed? At this point it hardly 
mattered. It was a gross miscalculation on his part to check in to his favorite hotel with 
Olgivanna, given his sorry experiences with Mamah Borthwick in an identical situation, 
given the vital importance, at that particular moment, of doing nothing to compromise 
some delicate negotiations and given what he knew about Miriam. This repetitious 
flaunting of convention was more than characteristic; at this point it had to be compulsive, 
so much so that the need to defy had blinded him to all other considerations. If there were 
any one point in this latest imbroglio at which Wright took a fatal wrong turn, this was it, 
and because Miriam Wright was so vengeful he could argue that she was responsible for 
wounds that were actually self-inflicted. 

Miriam began her press conference quietly and reasonably, by observing that it was quite 
wrong to say that she had left him. She had merely gone on a holiday to recover her 
health. He was the one who no longer wished to live with her. The fact that they had only 
been married for a few months before she left was similarly embellished, but in acting out 
her role of the wronged wife, Miriam was a past master of the art of putting herself in the 
best possible light, no matter how much glossing over of uncomfortable facts and 
invention of others might be required. 

Olgivanna's second child and Frank's seventh, a baby girl named Iovanna, was born less 
than a month later, on December 2. Any hope that a discreet veil could be drawn over this 
unhappy turn of events had long vanished. The local Spring Green newspaper noted that, 
for several days past, the road between the town and Taliesin had been "warmed" by 
reporters and photographers from Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, which had "had the 
world famous architect warmed up also." {Home News, December 3, 1925.} By December 
5 Miriam had tracked down mother and child in their Chicago hospital and raised such an 
uproar that they fled. Olgivanna said that she and her baby were taken to the train, bound 
for New York, on a stretcher. {CT, October 22, 1926.} 


Truth Against the World 

Alas, you glorious princes! All gone  
Lost in the night, as you had never lived. 
Fate blows hardest on a bleeding heart. 

"The Wanderer" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 61 and 59, respectively} 

The angry prophet had destroyed Taliesin twice and might smite again. "No doubt Isaiah 
still stood there in the storms that muttered, rolled and broke again over this low spreading 
shelter. . . ." {A1,p. 272.} Never mind. Let the worst happen, the thunder roll and 
lightning strike. He could face it, so long as he was behind his newly restored battlements 
and had the loving support of this unsmiling, self-possessed beauty who was as utterly 
devoted to him as he was to her. But how secure were they? If he had thought that 
Miriam's rage was assuaged by her moment in the limelight that autumn, he was soon 
disabused of that notion. Not only had she harassed Olgivanna in her hospital bed but also 
a few days before that, she had actually lodged a complaint with the immigration 
authorities. According to her testimony, "Olga" Milanoff "came to their home as a servant 
and has stayed on as Wright's sweetheart." Miriam added that he was the kind of man who 
would fall in love with any woman who flattered his art. {United News, November 29, 
1925.} If Miriam really intended to go on making trouble, he knew how easy it would be. 

Taliesin, that serene symbol of all that was safe and secure, his sacred place, his enchanted 
domain, now appeared to be the one place in which neither of them dared be found if 
Miriam were determined to pursue them. Building it for the third time was a constant 
drain, and being rebuffed by Darwin Martin was another unwelcome development. He 
wrote, in a last-ditch effort, to persuade Martin to take his print collection as collateral, 
something he always declined to do. He was pressing everyone he could think of, and had 
written so forcefully to Gordon Strong, his client for the Sugarloaf project, that Strong sent 
a check in an envelope without a covering letter. Wright replied that he hoped he had not 
offended him. Meantime he would have to make good on his first alimony payments to his 
wife. She claimed that there were no funds to cover his checks at his bank. {CT, 
November 17, 1925.} 

A note of panic was clearly evident, and as invariably happened when his back was to the 
wall, Wright turned on his tormentor. He had plenty of charges of his own to make early 
in February 1926, when a hearing was held in Dane County to have him explain why he 
should not pay his wife's attorney fees and personal expenses (of $1,500) until the divorce 
trial, planned for a month later. Wright's attorney, Levi H. Bancroft, said that his client 
had been tailed by "gunmen," an apparent reference to private detectives, and "dope 
addicts," a clear reference to Miriam herself. He said that he had copies of a hundred 
letters Mrs. Wright had written to bankers and creditors in an attempt to blacken her 
husband's name and destroy his reputation as an architect.  

For her part, Mrs. Wright claimed that since her husband had not paid any alimony, she 
had repudiated that contract and would not give him a divorce after all. What she wanted 
now was separate maintenance of $250 a month. Her husband could easily afford it; he 
was capable of earning between $10,000 and $25,000 a year, with an estate worth $50,000. 
Wright's attorney, per contra, argued that his client was insolvent. The architect's earning 
power, he said, had been destroyed by her attacks. 

Wright did not attend the hearing. His attorney stated that he was in hiding, claiming that 
he feared for his life. As for Olgivanna, she had also disappeared; it was rumored that 
immigration authorities were moving to deport her as an undesirable alien. From her 
expensive room in Chicago's Southmoor Hotel, Miriam Wright said complacently that the 
Russian "danseuse" had fled to Canada. Miriam had already succeeded in disrupting their 
lives and was the likely informant for yet another piece of mischief, this time a complaint 
lodged with the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation (later, the FBI). The files 
on this complaint reveal that someone, name deleted, who refused to give an address, had 
charged early in February 1926 that Frank Lloyd Wright (subject), and Olga "Millinoff" 
(victim), posing as a housekeeper, had actually been living together in Spring Green for at 
least a year. The subject had taken the victim on frequent trips between Spring Green and 
Chicago, making it a "possible violation of the White Slave Traffic Act": charges that 
Olgivanna should be deported and he thrown in jail under the Mann Act-it was all 
terribly familiar. It must have given Miriam Wright, now the oh-so-legal wife, all kinds 
of satisfaction to be adroitly turning the tables on her successor and making her suffer, just 
as she had been made to do a decade before. 

It is likely that Wright knew nothing, as yet, about the Justice Department's renewed 
interest in his movements, but he was rightly concerned about the possibility that 
Olgivanna might be deported. Since Miriam had forced mother and baby to leave, they 
might as well be conducted to Hollis and the relative safety of her brother and 
sister-in-law's home. They spent Christmas at "Vlado's" and he accompanied his 
almost-brother-in-law into New York every day. While Vlado worked, he walked the 
streets, jotting down impressions of the big city that he would eventually use in a series of 
articles. He had always lectured; now he began to teach himself to write, using 
stream-of-consciousness passages in which he tried to describe the visual bombardment 
that a walk along its streets represented. His solution when beset by a problem was to take 
instant refuge in a new challenge, one in which he could cheerfully become absorbed, one 
he could write about and pontificate about. Despite their present predicament (attorney 
Bancroft had urged that they disappear for three months while he worked out a solution), 
Wright was tolerably optimistic. Olgivanna, his temperamental opposite, was evidently 
reacting very differently. She was painfully thin and could not eat. She needed a warm 
climate, and he hit upon the idea of a trip to Puerto Rico. Since it was now a U.S. 
possession, there would be no awkward questions about passports; still, to be safe, they 
traveled in a first-class cabin under the pseudonym of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Richardson. 
This detail was of interest to the Bureau of Investigation, which compiled a list of 
"aliases"; its files read, "Frank Lloyd Wright, alias Frank Richardson, alias F. W. Wilson," 
and "Olga Hinzenberg, alias Milanoff, alias Anna Richardson, alias Emily Richardson. . . 
." According to these same files, the Richardsons were in Puerto Rico for about a month 
while an assistant U.S. attorney debated whether to press charges. After reviewing the files 
he advised that the evidence was insufficient to warrant an arrest. The case was closed. 
{Chicago File, no. 31-479.} The couple then went to Washington, perhaps in pursuit of 
some resolution for the immigration problem, though Wright does not mention this. 
Olgivanna did not improve and he became worried.  

By May, Wright's spirits were on the rise again, and he was inviting the Darwin Martins 
to come for a visit. The new house was in good shape and the countryside had never 
looked lovelier. The immigration proceedings, apparently, were in abeyance. Miriam had 
made the Chicago papers again, claiming that she faced eviction from her expensive hotel 
room because she could not pay her bill, and would be obliged to sell her valuable 
collection of pieces of jade, prints, shawls, fans, inlaid furniture and oriental trinkets, 
given by her husband in happier days. Meantime her suit for separate maintenance was 
still pending. Her lawyer advised her that Taliesin was community property, therefore her 
home. She had as much right to live there as her husband did. 

For once, Wright was ready for her. When she arrived (armed with a warrant for 
Olgivanna and a peace warrant for him, which she had obtained on a trip to Dodgeville), 
she found the front gate locked. William Weston, Wright's chief employee, explained that 
he had instructions to keep everyone off the premises. Miriam knew that there was also a 
back entrance, and she attempted to enter through this route but found that a truck had 
been wedged across the passageway, and there was another guard of men there. Her 
demands to talk to her husband were also fruitless. He was not at home, his daughter, 
Frances Wright Cuppley, declared. Newspaper accounts state that she proved "an efficient 
defender of the fort." Miriam Wright ripped a sign off the front gate stating No Visitors 
Allowed and flung it away, to the delight of watching reporters and cameramen. She 
discovered a second in a glass frame, took a rock to it and battered it to smithereens. It all 
made very good copy. {in the NYT, June 3, 1926.} 

She was back next day waving warrants and succeeded, for a few hours, in actually having 
her husband arrested. (He was soon released.) Olgivanna was nowhere to be found. On 
Miriam's third attempt, a county prosecutor intervened with the news that her husband 
would provide $125 a month if she would give up. It was hardly a victory, given the sum 
she was demanding, but it was better than nothing. Miriam Wright conceded defeat and 
left Madison on the 5:30 train. {CT, June 10, 1926} Wright felt a certain cautious hope. 
Now, if people would only let him alone, he wrote, in an article for the local Weekly Home 
News, he could get on with his life. 

Another hurricane was brewing, this one at the bank. Alerted, perhaps, by Bancroft's 
reluctant admission in February that his client was "insolvent," the Bank of Wisconsin 
took the matter in hand and found Wright's mortgage in arrears and his debts mounting. 
Although he had an estimated $150,000 invested in his house, outbuildings, farm and 193 
acres of land, he owed $25,000 on the mortgage, a further chattel mortgage of $1,500, and 
there were liens for unpaid bills of $17,000-for a grand total of $43,500. On the advice of 
his lawyer, and an old friend, Judge James Hill, Wright went to the bank to solicit a new 
mortgage that would cover everything he owned: plans, collections, drawing instruments, 
studio tools and farm implements. Although the bank's idea of the balance due to him was 
far less than he had hoped for, a measly $1,500, it did put his debts into a certain tidy 
order. {A1, p. 277.} The problem being shelved, as he thought, he characteristically forgot 
about it. He had started a correspondence with the young critic Mumford, who had written 
about him in Wendingen (Wright seems to have reproached him for not being more 
enthusiastic), and received a graceful reply in which Mumford explained that he had been 
hesitant because he had not yet seen Wright's work, but hoped to do so soon. He thought 
that foreign critics had misinterpreted these buildings by seeing in them more mechanistic 
rigor than was actually there. That summer of 1926 Darwin Martin sent him a handbook 
about Wales, annotated in Martin's characteristically firm hand. Meanwhile he was 
struggling to concentrate on Martin's new cottage and finding it difficult; it refused to 
"grow from the ground" but sat bolt upright on the landscape. He was, perhaps, too 
distracted by the relentless parade of bad news in his personal life to give the matter his 
full attention. Hill and Bancroft were urging him to leave Taliesin for another three 
months. He rather finesses the point in his autobiography, but no doubt they reasoned that 
if he were to cut a believable figure as persecuted spouse he could not go on living in 
flagrant adultery. Wright was all for staying and fighting it out; his legal advisors urged a 
discreet withdrawal, and, naturally, so did Olgivanna. The decision was made for them on 
August 30 when Miriam Wright made another lightning strike: an 
alienation-of-affection suit against Olgivanna for $100,000. After writing an "open 
letter" for the Capital Times saying he was going abroad, they packed up and left, so 
hastily that blueprints were scattered all over the floor of his studio and the table was still 
set for a meal. The second Mrs. Wright announced next day that she would move in. 

They were advised to go as far away as possible, Canada preferably, but Wright was afraid 
that if he and Olgivanna crossed the border, he might never get her back. Minneapolis 
seemed a good compromise. Autumn was beautiful there and they had friends staying in 
Wildhurst, an exclusive summer resort colony on Lake Minnetonka, twenty miles 
southwest of Minneapolis. On August 30 they set off in his Cadillac with a maid, Svetlana 
and Iovanna, following the Mississippi River and arriving in Minneapolis on September 2, 
where they stayed for a few days. Wright could not have known that his movements were 
being investigated by an agent for the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, and 
that by driving Olgivanna across the Wisconsin-Minnesota state line, instead of having 
her get out and walk (presumably to demonstrate that she was not a "victim") he had given 
the bureau new evidence under the White Slave Traffic Act. Meantime, warrants were 
made out in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for their arrest on charges of adultery. They had escaped 
just in time. 

A week after they left Taliesin, Miriam Wright appeared again at Taliesin's door. This 
time she was carrying a "writ of entrance" signed by a court commissioner in Dodgeville 
that essentially acknowledged her legal right to live there. The loyal William Weston tried 
to stop her but was forced to concede defeat. She entered the "love bungalow" for the first 
time in two years. 

Her Chicago attorney, Harold Jackson, said that his objective had been to demonstrate his 
client's legal right to return to Taliesin. He conceded that she could not expect to stay for 
long. As she walked through the front door, two bankers, H. H. Thomas of Madison and R. 
L. Hopkins, manager of the Bank of Wisconsin, drove up the hill. No doubt they had 
appeared in the hope that the joint owner of Taliesin would write them out a check. Wright 
had forgotten to pay his bills again-perhaps he was in arrears on the mortgage payments 
by a month or two. It seems likely that the bankers were tired of dealing with him and 
looking for a pretext to close the account and dispense with him as a client. In any event, 
Wright's indebtedness had the effect of checkmating any plan Miriam might have been 
concocting to take over Taliesin herself, unless, of course, she could immediately pay up. 
Since she evidently could not, Messrs. Thomas and Hopkins had the painful duty of 
informing her that a date for foreclosure proceedings would soon be fixed. Until this was 
announced there was very little Mrs. Wright could do. She certainly could not fire the 
servants. 

Jackson, the ace lawyer from Chicago, was, by an odd coincidence, also acting as counsel 
for Olgivanna's divorced husband. Miriam Wright's demonic determination to "hound" her 
husband to "the ends of the earth" and the news that Wright and his dancer planned to go 
abroad had their effect on the courtly Hinzenberg. {CT, October 28, 1926.} He was the 
one who had obtained adultery warrants for the arrest of Wright and his former wife, a 
writ of habeas corpus to secure Svetlana's custody, and was offering a $500 reward for 
information leading to Wright's capture. {on September 9, 1926.} Soon after that, he also 
sued Wright for $250,000 for alienating the affections of his ex-wife and daughter. 
Meanwhile, Mrs. Wright had initiated an involuntary bankruptcy suit against Wright. She 
also asked for his arrest on Mann Act charges. The sheriff of Sauk County, Wisconsin, 
circulated photographs of the fugitives. It seemed the right moment for a Madison, 
Wisconsin, construction firm to bring suit for $4,000 said to be owed for the latest 
rebuilding of Taliesin. Rumors spread that Wright and his companion, fugitives from the 
law, were in Europe, or in Mexico, or on their way to Seattle in their commodious 
Cadillac, about to embark for Japan. {compiled sources.} 

Wright, of course, was perfectly happy and in no rush to go anywhere. They took a friend's 
sailboat on the lake and went for walks in the countryside. Having all that free time and 
nothing to do with it, he thought he might as well write an autobiography, and hired a 
stenographer. It was going well and he was sure, he told Martin expansively, that it would 
sell for $50,000 and provide a steady income thereafter.  

The Bureau of Investigation agents had been patiently picking up clues. They learned that 
"Anna Richardson" and her two children had checked into a room of the Nicollet Hotel in 
Minneapolis, and a certain "F. W. Wilson" had taken another. Mr. Wilson had such a 
distinctive appearance-perhaps the first time in his life that he had cause to rue it-that 
an informant remembered him very clearly. The same kind of luck pursued them at Lake 
Minnetonka. No one suspected that "Mr. and Mrs. Frank Richardson" were not man and 
wife until someone happened to read an article in the Minneapolis paper, to the effect that 
Vlademar Hinzenberg was looking for his little girl, and had overheard the Richardsons 
calling their daughter "Svetlana." There was a Wisconsin license plate on the Cadillac, 
and, well, one thing led to another. An agent for the Bureau of Investigation wired the 
secretary of state for identification of the license plate number and was advised by return 
wire that it belonged to Frank Lloyd Wright of Spring Green. Although she was not there 
to experience that moment of triumph, it was Miriam Noel Wright's finest hour. 

*  *  * 

The law caught up with Wright, Madame Milanoff, Svetlana and baby Iovanna one 
October evening about a month after their arrival. There was a knock at the door, and a 
dozen burly characters, led by Miriam Wright's Chicago lawyer, Harold Jackson, burst into 
the room. They were placed under arrest, and they and the children were taken to the 
Hennepin County jail to spend the night. Next morning they were brought before county 
court, where they were charged with conspiracy to violate the Mann Act and required to 
post bonds of $12,500. They then went to municipal court, where Wright had to deposit 
another $3,000 to avoid spending further time in jail on the adultery warrant.  

The first person to see reason was Hinzenberg. Once he had been convinced that his 
daughter was in no danger of being kidnapped, he readily agreed to drop his charges of 
adultery and make arrangements with her mother for joint custody. The sheriff of Sauk 
County then released them from charges of being fugitives from justice. That left the 
Mann Act charges, which seemed serious, and all the suits Mrs. Wright was bringing, 
including her attorney's new insistence that there was something sinister about the 
murder-fire trial of 1914 and that the whole issue should be reopened. The "involuntary 
bankruptcy" charge had been dropped, apparently on the urging of Wright's principal 
creditor, that is, the Bank of Wisconsin, which managed to convince the implacable Mrs. 
Wright that her husband would never be able to support her, or pay off his debts, if she did 
not relent on this score at least. {CT, October, 28, 1926.} Most troubling for Wright, 
perhaps, was the discovery that the immigration authorities were taking a fresh interest in 
Olgivanna's case, and she had innocently given them information against herself by a 
reference to their trip to Puerto Rico. It could now be argued, he wrote, that he had brought 
her back to the mainland for "immoral purposes." {A2 p. 288.} As soon as they were 
released, Olgivanna and the children prudently moved in with friends, and another friend 
offered Wright the hospitality of the Minneapolis Athletic Club. 

"'Morally we are right, legally we are wrong.' 

"This statement has become more or less famous in Minneapolis since Frank Lloyd 
Wright, internationally famous architect, and his companion, Mme. Olga Milanoff, were 
arrested," said an editorial in a Minneapolis newspaper, the Twin City Reporter, a week 
later. The surprising fact was that most people agreed with the public position Wright was 
now taking. "Genius that he is in his chosen profession, his life so far as the married side 
is concerned has been one blunder after another. Perhaps it is the obvious mercenary 
attitude . . . Miriam Noel, of Chicago, is taking in her attitude toward Wright that has 
aroused so much sympathy." {published November 5, 1926.} The editorial added that her 
attorney's ruthless tactics had not endeared her either. "Ordinarily, a man in Wright's 
shoes would be condemned, but [this] is a strange case in which the sympathy of the 
people is with the man who has violated the social code. If he loves Mme. Milanoff, is 
willing to marry her and provide a home for her and the children . . . then why not make 
the road to happiness . . . easy? . . ." It was the first indication that opinion might be 
shifting from the victimized wife to the unfairly hounded husband, but there were others. It 
was considered a "moral" victory for Wright when the first Mrs. Wright telegrammed that 
she was prepared to come to Minneapolis if she could help him in any way. {CT, October 
28, 1926.} It was another victory of sorts when the lawyer for Miriam Wright resigned, in 
disgust, after having made three attempts to negotiate a monthly settlement for her, all of 
which she rejected. That there might be something irrational about Mrs. Wright's behavior 
began to be suspected. She actually brought suit against the Bank of Wisconsin on the 
ground that it had conspired with Wright to deny her access to Taliesin. The case was 
brought to court but considered so preposterous that it was expunged from the record. 
{TW, p. 190.} She was awarded fifty dollars in court costs. 

The cumulative effect of these attacks had their usual invigorating results on Wright's 
spirits, but the same could not be said for Olgivanna. Nothing Miriam Wright had said or 
done could destroy her love, but it had deeply shaken her faith in herself. She had not 
gained any weight since Iovanna's birth. Photographs of her, published at the time, show 
her thinner than ever, hollow-cheeked and grave of face. A week after she and Wright 
were arrested, and the day before she was to appear in court for preliminary hearings of 
the Mann Act charge, she collapsed and was taken to a Minneapolis sanatorium. {CT, 
October 26, 1926; NYT, October 30 and 31, 1926; November 2, 1926.} 

The problem seemed to be that, in contrast to her lover, who blamed everyone else when 
embattled, Olgivanna Milanoff blamed herself. A letter to Wright's sister, Mrs. Andrew 
Porter, addressed as "Sister Jane," written from Minneapolis in mid-November, makes it 
clear that what had unnerved her most was to find herself on the wrong side of the law, 
she who was the daughter of a dispenser of justice. What was equally mortifying was her 
inability to find the inner peace she needed, she who had helped so many in the past. 
Wright made a copy of this letter and sent it to friends. Among them was Alfred 
MacArthur, an old friend from his Oak Park days, now a publisher in Chicago. MacArthur 
had been one of the tenants in the rental part of the home and studio and, as general agent 
for the National Life Insurance Company, gave Wright some sage business advice, seldom 
followed. He had also been the lender of small sums. MacArthur was a brother of the 
famous playwright Charles MacArthur, who married Helen Hayes, and they were all 
friendly. Yet another brother, John, would establish the famous MacArthur Foundation in 
later years. No doubt Wright had a certain ulterior motive in passing along Olgivanna's 
letter, which he thought very fine. 

In fact, Wright's friends were beginning to rally to his defense. A group of architects, 
professors and writers that included MacArthur, the poet Carl Sandburg and Ferdinand 
Schevill, professor of history at the University of Chicago, had made an appeal to Lafayette 
French, Jr., the federal district attorney in Minneapolis, urging him not to press charges 
against Wright that were transparently instruments of "persecution and revenge." {NYT, 
October 29, 1926.} Even Aline Barnsdall, whom he had exasperated by threatening to sue 
over their latest fracas involving past business dealings, could separate her annoyance 
about that from her indignation at the unjust treatment Wright was receiving. How anyone 
could accuse a man like himself of such ridiculous, trumped-up charges was beyond her.  

The tide was turning in Wright's favor, and the next major battle would be the threatened 
foreclosure proceedings by the Bank of Wisconsin. Wright had attempted to bluster his 
way out of this and received a very tart reply from R. L. Hopkins, bank manager, early in 
November. {T, November 5, 1926.} It was not going to be easy. He had to concede that the 
bank had given him ample warning, but, from habits long ingrained, he had continued to 
think that the bill could be indefinitely postponed or that, when all else failed, someone 
else would pay it. In the old days that had been his mother. For many years now, it had 
been Darwin Martin. Some recent refusals ought to have given him pause. Wright had 
missed the emphasis on the past tense. In fact, Martin had retired the year before, was now 
living on a fixed income, and was ambitious to endow a chair at the University of Buffalo. 
{in September 1925.} (He accomplished this with a check for $100,000 in 1928.) His 
determination to leave this legacy gave him, for the first time, considerable immunity. {on 
February 22, 1928.} As before, Wright's reflex upon news of foreclosure proceedings was 
to write to him.  

At last, Wright faced reality. He might actually lose Taliesin! He must have thought it 
could never happen. It was about to happen unless he thought fast. 

Wright immediately began to negotiate with the bank using his last card, his precious 
collection of prints. These ought to be worth $250,000, as he assured Martin, but what 
they would actually fetch in the present depressed market was another matter. Still, an 
offer to arrange a New York exhibition and sale might stave off disaster for a few more 
months. Then what? It was at this point that Wright had his cleverest idea. He would sell 
shares in himself! In other words, he would mortgage his future by persuading a group of, 
say, ten wealthy people, to buy shares at $7,500 each. This would give him enough cash to 
pay his debts, satisfy the bank, get back on his feet, pay off Miriam and establish his career 
anew. It would all be above board, of course. There would be dividends perhaps; but this 
was an issue over which he tended to glide. Looking like a good prospect was what 
counted most. One of the first to be sounded out on the idea was, inevitably, Darwin 
Martin. He cautiously allowed that, under the proper circumstances, and if nine other 
backers could be found, he was willing to become the tenth. He had to hand it to Wright; 
the idea was "very ingenious." {DDM, November 24, 1926.} 

The question of why Wright, later in life, subtracted two years from his age, is often 
raised. The evidence suggests that the new birth year of 1869 did not come into use until 
November 1925. {CT, November 17, 1925.} Conceivably, the imminent arrival of his 
seventh child and the fact that Olgivanna was so much younger were the precipitating 
factors. However, a year later, when the idea of incorporating himself came to him, it 
would have occurred to the prudent side of his nature that it was far easier to sell shares on 
the future of a man still in his fifties than on one who is almost sixty. In any event, the 
1869 date was adhered to for the rest of his life. A few years later, he even joked about the 
subject with Darwin Martin (who knew the truth). {DDM, June 8, 1934.} 

The next person to be approached was the lawyer William R. Heath, another old friend 
from Oak Park days, former client and Larkin Company official, whose advice he had 
solicited as he negotiated his way through the complexities of divorcing Miriam. Finding 
himself in Buffalo at about that time, Wright had made an unannounced call on Heath but 
no one was at home. He left a note pinned to the door: "By the look of this house you need 
me as much as I need you!" {Thomas Heath to author.} In fact, he needed every good 
prospect, and Heath seemed especially promising. Wright sent him one of his most 
masterly appeals from the Hotel Brevoort in New York, where he was staying in 1927 to 
attend the auction sale of his more than three hundred prints at the  Anderson Galleries on 
January 6 and 7. Was Heath willing to put his shoulder to the wheel and protect Wright 
and his future?  

He conceded that his present misfortune was deserved though the punishment seemed 
harsh. But he was willing and eager now, with the help of friends like his dear "WR." He 
begged him to "try me out," and enclosed a photograph of Olgivanna and Iovanna for Mrs. 
Heath. It was masterly, but it failed. He longed, nevertheless, to see Wright's troubles 
ended and would help all he could. Similar expressions of reluctant but firm regret came 
from other quarters, but enough people-among them Professor Schevill, Darwin Martin, 
Wright's sister Jane, his former client Mrs.  Coonley, the designer Joseph Urban and 
others-were willing to risk their $7,500.  

He needed this encouragement because, as he had probably feared, the print sale was a 
disaster. Like a horrid dream it summed up and characterized so much of what was 
happening to him at this period: so many crises, most of his own making, to which he 
would rise heroically, inventing eleventh-hour solutions to snatch, as he liked to say, 
victory from the jaws of defeat, only to have his most ingenious efforts wiped out and 
destroyed by what must have seemed an especially virulent fate. The collection, valued at 
$100,000, was to be sold at the order of the Bank of Wisconsin to satisfy Wright's debts: a 
total of $52,576. What Wright probably neglected to mention until absolutely necessary 
was that the collection itself was mortgaged. The Anderson Galleries had first call on the 
proceeds, since he had borrowed $25,000 from them in 1925 and had used the collection 
as collateral. So, to pay off these immediate, pressing debts Wright needed to net $77,000 
from the proceeds. No doubt this was a reasonable expectation. One print alone, a 
two-color by Toyonobu dating back nearly two hundred years, was considered extremely 
valuable since it was very rare and in superb condition. {NYT, January 2, 1927.} There 
were many other beautiful specimens. There was an unusual number of Hiroshige prints, 
including the celebrated Monkey Bridge, of which only seven of this quality were known 
to exist, and a series of seven uncut sheets of a Korean wedding procession by Utamaro. A 
writer for the New York Times noted that Japanese prints of this quality would soon be 
unavailable since Japan was belatedly realizing that its national treasures had almost 
disappeared into European and American collections. 

The New York Times advance review was admiring, and the prospects looked good. Then, 
just before eight o'clock, when the auction was to begin, a New York lawyer representing 
Mrs. Miriam Noel Wright appeared on the scene with a warrant of attachment for the 
prints. Mrs. Wright argued that the proceeds should be diverted to herself, because, while 
living with Wright, she had advanced him $35,000 of her personal funds, which he never 
repaid. She further claimed that, under a recent separation agreement, he owed her a 
further $15,000. The gallery's lawyer made a counterclaim, and it looked as if the gallery's 
doors would not open. At the last possible moment, Mrs. Wright's lawyer agreed to let the 
disposition of the proceeds be decided by a New York court. 

This danger averted, the auction began. It was well attended but disappointing. The jewel 
of the collection, the two-color Toyonobu, valued at $10,000, went for $2,500, and other 
prices were far lower: the Hiroshige Monkey Bridge sold for a mere $1,500 and the 
Korean wedding procession for a paltry $900. At the end of two days the final total from 
this sale of Wright's treasures was $36,975. He never saw a penny of it, but neither did the 
bank or Miriam Wright. The state of New York decreed that the Anderson Galleries,which 
presented a final bill (loan plus costs) for slightly more than $37,000, should take the lot. 

The Mann Act charges were dropped in March. The federal district attorney, Lafayette 
French, Jr., perhaps influenced by the appeals of Wright's distinguished group of friends, 
finally removed that threat just as a grand jury was about to sit. He concluded that the 
evidence pointed to a "technical rather than a criminal violation." {NYT, March 5, 1927.} 
Miriam Wright's alienation-of-affection suit similarly petered out, and that lady went to 
the West Coast to recover from the exhaustion of her pursuit. She had not yet, however, 
run out of ideas. Shortly after her arrival, she filed a new suit asking for Wright's arrest on 
a charge of desertion. She was scraping the bottom of the barrel, legalistically speaking, 
and was quickly rebuffed on the ground that no crime had been committed in California. 
{MJ, February 2, 1927.} There was another reason for celebrating that spring: The 
Academie Royale des Beaux Arts of Holland had elected him a member. Wright dashed off 
an exultant letter to his friend Alexander Woollcott.  

Plenty of bad news continued to roll in. There had been another fire at Taliesin in 
February, fortunately minor-since the bank owned the chattels as well, everything of 
value had been removed-apparently again caused by faulty electric wiring. There was 
about three thousand dollars in damages, {CT, February 23, 1927.} and the fire had the 
unexpected but salutary effect of delaying foreclosure while the bank totaled up its losses 
and made a new appraisal. {TW, p. 191.} Miriam Wright still declared she would never 
agree to a divorce, and immigration authorities continued to display a sinister interest in 
Olgivanna. While Wright and Olgivanna were visiting Maginel in New York, officers 
actually appeared at the door of her apartment to arrest Olgivanna. {A2, p. 291} Wright 
cashed in his last Liberty bond to pay for her bail. It was all too much. "My sense of humor 
began to fade." {A2, p. 291} 

The new company, Frank Lloyd Wright, Inc., had been formed in January but no money 
had, as yet, changed hands. Nothing could be done until the divorce was final and a 
complete list had been compiled of all the creditors. While trying to stave off the 
approaching deportation proceedings, Wright was also (perhaps it was a reflex) trying to 
avoid knowing how much money he owed.  

For months Wright had been giving a spectacular imitation of a man riding a spinning log 
while it plunges headlong toward the rapids. For months his gaze had been steady, his 
steering agile, his demeanor loftily nonchalant and his balance impeccable. Nevertheless, 
he was only human. He confessed concern and wariness to his favorite correspondent, his 
"Dear DDM." His letter was received by that friend, always meticulous about recording 
such things, on the afternoon of April 21, 1927. The letter was, however, dated "May 21st 
1893." Such an amazing slip had never happened before, or ever did again, and cannot be 
explained by the usual reason, i.e. by an absentminded transposition of numbers. No, the 
21st of May 1893 had some powerful significance, but apart from its possible connection 
with his decision to leave Sullivan and strike out on his own, it has not been identified. 
One is tempted to think that as he faced the imminent prospect of losing Olgivanna-who 
was, after all, his reason for this long and gallant fight-he felt as jittery and frightened as 
he had all those years before. It is also possible, at some level, that he wished he were back 
in 1893, when life seemed so full of promise and so much simpler. 

The fact that a corporation of sponsors had been formed seemed to work its magic on the 
Bank of Wisconsin. Wright had taken the prudent step of engaging Philip F. La Follette, 
member of a prominent Wisconsin family, as his lawyer, and his astute advice came just in 
time. La Follette, who would serve two terms {1931-33 and 1935-39} as governor of 
Wisconsin, persuaded the bank to give Wright time to work out a financial settlement and 
won an agreement in May 1927 for a year's grace. This was fortunate for more than one 
reason. Wright could now return to Taliesin. He would be given access to his studio, so 
that he could work off his debts. Miriam was enjoined from entering. {TW, p. 191.} It had 
been a frightful struggle, but Miriam was close to conceding defeat for, as La Follette told 
Wright early in June, her children were urging her to settle and threatening to withdraw 
their financial support if she did not. 

Bargaining went on from day to day that July as they waited it out in Jane's cottage on the 
grounds of Taliesin. Miriam Wright made one final effort to punish Wright by proposing 
that she would agree to a divorce only if he did not marry again for five years and forever 
renounced Olga Milanoff, but her hopes were dashed. {CT, June 28, 1927.} She accepted 
$6,000 in cash, a trust fund of $30,000 and $250 a month for life. Judge A. Hoppman 
granted the decree in Madison on August 26, 1927.  

Two months before the divorce, the feared deportation proceedings had been averted. 
Wright wrote to tell Martin that his lawyer's father, the distinguished former governor of 
Wisconsin, now a U.S. senator, had intervened with the State Department using the 
argument that Olga Milanoff's "illegal" husband was doing his best to become a legal one. 
Wright's decision to choose La Follette as his lawyer had been most astute; the 
immigration authorities agreed not to interfere. {DDM correspondence, May 2, 1927} It 
was all a tremendous relief-Wright had even contemplated moving to Canada-but there 
was a catch. Until the decree became final in a year's time, Wright had pledged himself to 
lead a "moral" life and stood to lose everything if he gave Miriam reason to claim that he 
was defying the law. The voice of Philip La Follette is always the voice of reason in 
Wright's life, although the truth of what he had to say was sometimes more than his client 
could stomach. Wright was particularly incensed by La Follette's insistence that he and 
Olgivanna must not live together for a year. He absolutely refused to leave Taliesin again; 
no one was going to turn him out this time. He transferred his fury at the law to his lawyer, 
who was a more immediate target; as might be expected, however, La Follette was right 
and Wright was stubbornly and rashly wrong. All sentiment aside, he ought to have known 
how dangerous Miriam Wright was. According to his autobiography, at one point during 
divorce proceedings she "snatched a revolver from the district attorney's desk and telling 
the reporters to 'come on,' started for Taliesin." {A2, pp. 294-295.} Whether or not this 
is true, there is no doubt that she was not about to let a divorce decree deter her. 

Miriam Wright's next move was to send Wright a letter his lawyer gleefully claimed was 
so obscene it should not have been put through the mails. She had, in short, gone too far. 
She was arrested, charged with an offense and released on five hundred dollars bail. {CT, 
October 6, 1927.} At last, Wright had a bargaining position, and he used it. When the trial 
was held a few days later he refused to testify against her. He had agreed not to press 
charges if Miriam would leave them alone. {CT, October 8, 1927.} When she had failed to 
receive a sympathetic hearing, Miriam Wright had demanded an audience with the 
governor of Wisconsin, Fred R. Zimmerman, appealing to him to force the local 
authorities to act. Finding the governor in a Chicago hotel, where he was attending an 
advertising convention, Miriam Wright went in full pursuit. He beat an undignified exit 
through the hotel kitchen. 

Another setback! But she was not finished yet. In the months that followed, Frank and 
Olgivanna had moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he was acting as consulting architect for 
the construction of a new hotel. [Then] they moved on to La Jolla, California, where 
Wright immediately hired a Los Angeles attorney to protect him against his bloodhound, 
now in pursuit of a warrant for his arrest there on the charge that he and his lady were 
"lewd and dissolute persons." By chance the lawyer, James Farraher, arrived at the district 
attorney's office just before Mrs. Wright did, and the two met there. Farraher subsequently 
told his client that the lady jumped to the conclusion that he and the D.A. were conspiring 
against her and gave them some choice pieces of her mind. She then went on to describe 
all prosecuting officers and lawyers "crooks," which was a wonderful piece of luck for Mr. 
Wright. She then left in a huff, Farraher said. He added that, since Wright would marry 
the moment he legally could, he was confident that the authorities would not bring charges 
until they became moot. {T, July 17, 1928.} Eventually, she was tried and given a 
thirty-day suspended sentence. 

In September 1928, a month after the marriage, Miriam Wright, who had moved to 
Hollywood, announced plans to begin screen tests for a movie career. She also intended to 
return to her sculpture and would study philosophy in Paris. There was a new plan in 
October: now, she said, she was going to have her face lifted. But there was more. She had 
just given birth to a baby girl; the child's father was an heir to a throne of Europe and 
would soon marry her. {TW, p. 191.} Since she was fifty-nine years old, that latest report 
seemed to have stretched credulity as far as it would go, and no more was heard of Miriam 
Wright in the news columns. She was, whatever she told the papers, living very quietly 
and writing her memoirs. She was in bad health; her death certificate would list several 
degenerative diseases. Her account was published in 1932, two years after her death. 

It is difficult to reconcile the tone of her narrative, which is dignified and restrained, with 
the reality of her behavior during the three years she fought with Wright. The account is 
heavily edited, of course. That one would expect, but the story told sounds perfectly 
rational. The only safe conclusion is that Miriam remained consistent. She never really 
relinquished her inner image of her ideal mate. He was supposed to be the man she 
thought he was, and when she found out that this charismatic figure was, in reality, a 
flawed human being with all kinds of quirks and crotchets of his own, she could not deal 
with it. They were both, essentially, in the grip of a fantasy. Hers was that sheer willpower 
alone could bend life to her illusions; his, that whatever the reality of a situation, he could 
go on indefinitely defying the odds and getting away with it. 

Philip La Follette played a heroic and largely thankless role in Wright's life at this time. It 
was his painful duty to remind his client of all the things he could not do, restraining his 
spending while also bringing him face to face with a most unpleasant list of debts, one that 
kept growing. Among the young lawyer's most inspired contributions was his brilliant 
strategy at that delicate moment in Wright's life, when one false move could have 
destroyed the whole edifice he was painstakingly restoring. After much thought La Follette 
decided that Wright's debts must be liquidated first. If his creditors believed Wright was 
living in Arizona and unlikely to return to Wisconsin, they would be more likely to see 
reason and settle for a small cash settlement than if they believed Wright had a number of 
wealthy backers and would soon return to Taliesin, all expenses paid. That meant months 
of patient negotiating on the lawyer's part, followed by agreements drawn up and duly 
signed that the creditors either take a third (in the case of actual goods purchased, most of 
them construction materials) in payment or, in the case of labor costs, to accept further 
ten-year notes at 5 percent interest. {La Follette, DDM, October 2, 1928.} La Follette 
pursued a similar course with the Bank of Wisconsin, making promises designed to give 
that august institution some hope, but not too much. It was a clever strategy, the only one 
that could work. It was, of course, exactly the kind of cautious, deliberate approach Wright 
most hated. He sent periodic explosions of rage by way of epistles mailed from Arizona 
and California, asking how long he could be expected to live on a measly five hundred 
dollars a month while Taliesin stayed empty, in need of urgent repairs, etc., etc. La 
Follette was long-suffering but Darwin Martin and Professor Schevill, who were in close 
consultation with Wright, had less patience. Professor Schevill began by making a joke of 
Wright's indignation and the heroic effort he was making to be guided by La Follette. As 
to the future, they needed money urgently and were looking everywhere for backers, but 
finding them would not be easy. {DDM, October 20, 1928} Something about the mere 
mention of Wright's name put people instinctively on their guard. Never mind. They were 
all hard at work so as to put their architect back in his house and restore his career. 

The debts were staggering but, by October 1928, La Follette had reduced $30,000 in 
general claims to a cash settlement of $10,000 and continued credit on the remaining labor 
bills of $11,000. La Follette had also watched and waited while the Bank of Wisconsin put 
Taliesin up for sale. On July 30, 1928, the Chicago Tribune reported, "For sale: One 
romantic, rambling, famous picturesque home on a hill with 190 acres of farm and park, 
known as a 'love nest,' murder scene, fire scene, raid scene and showplace." {Chicago 
Tribune, July 31, 1928.} The sale took place and, since there were no other bidders, the 
bank bought the property itself for $25,000. For the next two months La Follette was 
negotiating to buy Taliesin back. The bank had added on all kinds of extra charges, and 
the bill was now close to $60,000, but La Follette whittled that down to $40,000 and 
arranged for a new mortgage of $25,000 plus a cash settlement of $15,000, provided by 
Martin and a newcomer to the group, a businessman named Ben Page. The corporation 
was reorganized under the new name of Wright, Inc., and Taliesin was reclaimed at last. 
Not quite two months after Olga Ivanovna Lazovich of Montenegro married Frank Lloyd 
Wright of Taliesin at Rancho Santa Fe, in San Diego (Martin did not know how Wright 
had managed to obtain permission for the California ceremony and hoped he had not 
"strong-armed" it), {DDM, August 28, 1928.} they were home at last. WRIGHT, OLGA, 
CHILDREN BACK TO 'LOVE NEST,' the Capital Times of Madison reported in 
mid-October. Kenneth F. Schmitt, staff reporter, wrote, "The patter of little children, the 
antics of a big Newfoundland dog, and the marital bliss of a happy pair of lovers has 
replaced the troublesome atmosphere at Taliesin-for Frank Lloyd Wright is back home." 

The great man himself appeared to greet the journalist. He looked very much better than 
he had the year before. His eyes were brighter, and although his hair was now silvery gray, 
he had all the enthusiasm of a man half his age.  

Wright was vague about just how this return to Taliesin had been accomplished. He 
certainly did not mention that, one way or another, it had taken almost $100,000 to clear 
his debts, or that everything he had was now owned by Wright, Inc., or that his financial 
transactions were being reported to La Follette and a certain Ben Page of Chicago. Page 
was disapproving {T, November 7, 1928.}; there were much better uses for that money, 
right then, than buying a new car, he wrote. He would have been equally disapproving had 
he seen the letter Wright had received from the N. Porter Saddle & Harness Co. (Silver 
Inlaid Bits and Spurs; Hand-made Harness a Specialty) of Phoenix, Arizona. The 
company was writing to thank him for the saddles, bridles and blankets ordered while Mr. 
Wright was in Phoenix. {The saddle had been sent C.O.D. when the letter was written, on 
October 4,1928. A month later Wright had not been to claim them and the N. Porter 
Saddle & Harness   Company sent him a telegram of reminder.} The writer was sorry 
there had been a slight misunderstanding about the price of Mr. Wright's new coat. As for 
his jacket and vest, the lady who was now making these was designing some hats and caps 
which they respectfully hoped would be to his liking. In the interim the writer wanted to 
thank Mr. Wright for this very nice piece of business. 


Work Song 

The funeral  
Pyre sprouts a rounded apple  
Out of a bed of ashes. . . . 

"The Phoenix" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 108} 

When E. L. Meyer, a columnist for the Madison Capital Times, and a colleague took a 
canoe trip down the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers in the summer of 1928, they stopped 
to see what the passage of time had done to The Valley. They went first to Shot Tower 
Hill, where, in Civil War days, a whole town had grown up to manufacture cannonballs 
and whence barges weighed down with their cargo made their way south. The shifting 
sands on the river bottom had effaced the channel, but the shot tower itself, a tunnel 
impressively constructed through two hundred feet of solid rock, was still intact, if 
beginning to decay. "Already the frosts and thaws are eating at its base. And here, in this 
vault, once vibrant with industry and the shouts of toiling men, there is no sound save the 
thin piping of a frog in a puddle. . . . So perished the war makers, with a croak for an 
epitaph." {CT, July 11, 1928.} 

Above the river, on the crest of Tower Hill, they found the forlorn relics of more recent 
undertakings, the encampment of cottages built by Jenkin Lloyd Jones, now deserted. That 
indomitable old preacher had built one for himself, which he named Westhope, and it, like 
the others, stood with its windows broken, its floors littered with old books and its walls 
fast disappearing behind vines and weeds. Moving on to Hillside, they found that the years 
had not dealt any more kindly with that building to which, long ago, young ladies came to 
be trained in deportment and recited poetry under the pines. As for Taliesin, that, too, had 
suffered. Its beautiful treasures were gone, its owner, the "romantic architect," was in exile 
and the "dust, mice and the moss are claiming empire over their invaded dominions." 

Meyer returned to Taliesin four years later to record an extraordinary transformation. "The 
fragrance of fresh-hewn wood is in the wind, the smell of plaster, and the pungency of 
stone-dust under the chisel. Here is the uncompleted and vast drafting room. . . . Here the 
dormitories. Here the public playhouse, newly built, and there the sculptors' studio, the 
painters' studio, the study hall. . . . Tradition, fealty to Welsh ancestors have, too, their 
place in the cloister. 'Gosod by Galon Ar Addysg,' reads the motto on the great stone 
fireplace in the playhouse, meaning, 'The Soul Without Knowledge Is Not Good.'" {CT, 
August 8, 1928.} 

A lesser man would have been defeated by the vandalism and neglect or, perhaps, fled 
superstitiously from "the dust of old tragedy that has settled" on the crests of the hills, as 
Meyer wrote four years before. But Wright's spirit was indomitable. Now that kind friends 
had restored Taliesin to him it might be, as he described himself to Mumford, "battered 
up," but it was still in the ring. {to Mumford, T, January 7, 1929.} The situation he found, 
however, was worse than Meyer had described. The main problem, he explained to Martin, 
was that a great deal of new construction had been left half-finished as a result of his 
forced departure the year before. For example, he had almost finished an upper terrace 
with rooms below it before he left. {in late December 1927.} It lacked only a coat of 
concrete that would have cost twenty-five dollars, but the bank refused to spend the 
money. As a result the rooms below were continually water-soaked during his absence. 
The furnishings they contained-rugs and furniture-had been left outside, at the mercy of 
the weather, and were ruined. In fact, all of the carpets and upholstery were soiled because 
the bank had so many parties there, or so he claimed. The telephone system had been 
destroyed, and the electric wiring throughout the house was in urgent need of an overhaul. 

All kinds of household linens were gone: sheets, pillowcases, bedcovers, towels and ten 
pairs of blankets. Almost every tool and all of his office equipment were gone from the 
property, including a valuable collection of colored pencils that he had begun in Germany 
in 1910 and had taken to Tokyo. A set of dishes from the Imperial Hotel that he had 
designed had been stolen, with the exception of three pieces. As for his pictures, these had 
been pulled off the walls, leaving the thumbtacks still in place. It was all very 
disheartening. 

His first priority was to stop the leaks, patch the broken plaster, restore the water system, 
fix the broken doors and get the long driveway, impassable in wet weather, back in 
operation. {to DDM, n.d., about November 19, 1928.} They were up every morning at 
6:00 and fell into bed every night at 9:30. But they were home at last. It was worth 
everything to be able to stand, barefoot, in the hill garden of Taliesin and see, below him, 
the clump of fir trees surrounding the chapel where his grandparents, his mother, his 
aunts, his uncles and his cousins were now buried; survey the same hills where he once 
went looking for cows and beyond them, the far fields where he had lain in a kind of 
trance while Uncle James called. 

And, as always when he had emerged victorious after tremendous effort, Wright was at his 
most affectionate, elegiac and contrite. Wright thought that the biggest lesson he had 
learned during the past four years was the value of friendship.  

As for their first Christmas at home, they had hardly been back in Taliesin for two months 
when Svetlana came down with the flu. Then Iovanna got sick. Olgivanna was next, and 
finally himself. It laid him low for a month. Now he and Olgivanna were recuperating, 
sitting up in bed reading Woollcott's book, Two Gentlemen and a Lady. He was aging, of 
course; about to be sixty, he said, perpetuating the myth. And, if he really had reached the 
age of wisdom, he kept forgetting to act that way. Isabelle Doyle, a native of Spring Green, 
started working evenings at Taliesin as a secretary at about that time. She had a full-time 
job at the State Bank of Spring Green, and recalled seeing Mr. Wright come sailing into 
the bank wearing his smartest outfit, topped by one of the big Stetson hats he favored, and 
swinging his cane. That particular day the bank manager looked him up and down, and 
said, "You certainly look comfortable."  Wright replied, "You could do this if you weren't 
so straitlaced."  It was then she realized that he was not wearing any shoes. {interview 
with author.} 

In those months when it became clear that Hillside Home School had failed and Aunt Nell, 
almost mad with worry, would moan aloud as she paced up and down, he had made a vow. 
He had promised the Aunts and he had promised his mother, somehow ". . . to see their 
educational work go on at beloved Hillside on the site of the pioneer homestead," he wrote. 
"That filial promise would go along with me wherever I went. If I settled down, it settled 
down with me." {A2, p. 387.} Almost as soon as he had walked through the doors of 
Taliesin, he was reviving the idea of Hillside. It was completely illogical to think of 
launching such an ambitious undertaking, but barely a month after his return he was 
describing to Professor Schevill his idea for a new school, one that he had been refining 
for some time past. (It would eventually be published as a booklet, The Hillside Home 
School of the Allied Arts, in 1931.) Wright's concept took as its starting point the idea of a 
co-educational boarding school dedicated to progressive ideas where students would also 
work on a farm. When he came into architecture as a young man, the debate over the 
relationship between the artist, artisan and the machine had been in full swing. He had 
declared then that the machine should be put to the service of art; thirty years later he still 
believed it. He proposed that a consortium of seven manufacturers-in glassmaking, 
pottery, textiles, the forge, casting in all materials, woodworking and sheet-metal 
working-come together to buy the land and buildings, hire him as architect to build anew 
and then run the school. This consortium would finance the venture until its 
artist-teachers and students had produced a sufficient body of work to be sold for mass 
production. He wrote, ". . . the nature of our livelihood, commercial industry . . . must be 
put into experimental stations where its many operations may come into the hands of 
sensitive, unspoiled students inspired by such creative artists as we can obtain to help 
them." The machines would be the tools of their study, and the new school would serve 
machinery "in order that machinery itself, in the future might honestly serve what is 
growing to be a beauty-loving and appreciative country now borrowing or faking its 
effects because it . . . has none other." {Design in America, Detroit Institute of Arts, p. 
145} 

It sounded hopelessly ambitious, but his idea was firmly grounded in the Arts and Crafts 
concept of workshops, which had flourished in the 1890s: Elbert Hubbard's colony of 
Roycrofters and also Ashbee's Guild of Handicrafts in the Cotswolds, both of them based 
on earlier experiments of William Morris. Hubbard's colony in East Aurora, New York, 
would have been on Wright's mind because he and Olgivanna had stayed there with the 
Heaths not long before. He would have been reminded that it was run as a school, a farm 
and a series of workshops. Hubbard had begun with a print shop, which led to a bindery, 
then to leather and copper crafts and cabinetmaking. His machine-made souvenirs, for 
sale in his hotel, were also obtainable through a mail-order catalogue. But there were 
more recent examples with which Wright would have been conversant. Walter Gropius's 
and school, the Bauhaus, which moved to Dessau in the late 1920s, was training its 
students in the use of machinery and new materials for household objects. Closer to home, 
the Cranbrook Academy, founded by George Booth, millionaire publisher, in Bloomfield 
Hills, Michigan, was conceived as a school, atelier and art colony with the same Arts and 
Crafts goal of producing tasteful designs to replace the shoddy objects in American homes. 
His Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen, with whom he joined forces in 1924, shared his goal 
of establishing an institution.In fact, Cranbrook would become famous in the 1950s for 
elegant, mass-produced objects based upon its original designs, the work of its 
artist-teachers, Saarinen and Charles Eames among them, and its metalwork, 
bookbinding, letterpress printing, carpentry shops, ceramic studios, textile workshops and 
so on. How soon Saarinen and Wright met is not known, but it is more than likely that 
Wright knew of the Cranbrook experiment when he planned his own, and Saarinen 
certainly knew about Hillside. His Kingswood School for Girls, built on the Cranbrook 
campus from 1929 to 1931, is generally acknowledged to have been inspired by the Prairie 
Style buildings Wright had built in Oak Park a quarter of a century before, and is also 
reminiscent of the design Wright made for Hillside in 1903. {Design in America, Detroit 
Institute of Arts, p. 145} 

Saarinen had found a millionaire philanthropist for his "experimental station." Whether 
Wright was likely to find manufacturers prepared to build and support a project along the 
same lines with uncertain financial returns seemed unlikely. He, however, had no doubts 
and thought he had already found his first sponsor, a Dutch glass manufacturer. He also 
wanted a connection with the University of Wisconsin and na�vely believed that this 
institution would be prepared to match the investment dollar for dollar. Professor Schevill 
quickly disabused him of this notion; on the contrary, the university would expect a 
handsome endowment if it took part, he explained to Wright. Nevertheless, he did not 
want to take the edge off Wright's enthusiasm. He thought it a splendid idea and urged 
him to take it further. While exhorting Schevill, Wright was also soliciting the advice and 
help of Jens Jensen, a distinguished landscape architect, and was even trying to interest 
Darwin Martin. Ever the pragmatist, Martin recommended that his efforts might be better 
employed with the work already at hand. {DDM, January 7, 1929.} 

As 1929 began, those prospects looked handsome, perhaps the best for several years. 
Wright was being commissioned by the Rosenwald Foundation to design one of the 
schoolhouses that this philanthropic organization was building for black children in La 
Jolla, and had signed a life contract with the Leerdam Glass-fabriek of Holland to design 
on a royalty basis. There was a commission for a 23-story copper-and-glass apartment 
tower in New York, called the St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie project, and Wright was 
using his design for the National Life building as the prototype for this new design. 
Wright's cousin Richard, Jenkin's son, was now a prosperous newspaper publisher in 
Tulsa, Oklahoma, and wanted him to build a $75,000 house. He also told Lewis Mumford 
in January 1929 that he had been working on a luxury hotel in the "Simon-pure Arizona 
desert" that would be built using his textile block construction method. There was yet 
another prospect in Arizona, this one for an even more lavish hotel, that would absorb 
months of his time. 

The textile block hotel, the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, was a project that appeared in 
February 1928, just as his prospects looked bleakest. He had been approached by Albert 
Chase McArthur (no relation to the Alfred MacArthur family), a former apprentice from 
Oak Park days, now established as an architect. McArthur's two brothers, Charles and 
Warren, owners of a successful car dealership, had bought several hundred acres of land 
eight miles northeast of Phoenix some years before, and had persuaded a hotel chain to 
build a winter resort and bungalow group on the site. The ambitious undertaking would be 
designed by McArthur, and the original cost was to be one million dollars. The architect 
decided that he wanted to use the textile block system Wright and his son Lloyd had 
successfully developed in California. Wright had designed four houses with this method, 
and since Lloyd had supervised their construction and built eleven block houses of his 
own, he had even more practical experience. As a method it was handsome and cheap; 
Lloyd estimated that Mexican labor, on a piecework basis, could make each block for an 
average of fifty-six cents. {EW, February 8, 1928.} Perhaps McArthur assumed that the 
Wrights had taken out a patent on the system. Perhaps he received such assurances from 
Wright. The latter is likely, since McArthur had assured the hotel corporation that the 
construction method he had contracted to use had been patented. {Gibson, Dunn & 
Crutcher to McArthur, T, January 16, 1930.} McArthur contacted Wright, who was very 
happy to be hired for a thousand dollars a month for seven months, with a further seven 
thousand dollars due when the hotel opened. {to DDM, March 25, 1928.} 

The building project in what was then the Arizona desert was unbelievably difficult and 
expensive, even in those days of cheap labor. The development needed its own water 
system, and the first underground electrical system in Arizona went to the Biltmore. A 
master plan to develop the site with a nursery, fruit orchards, a mile-long canal and an 
adjoining housing estate was also prepared. Then a large temporary tent community took 
over the site. An actual textile block factory worked around the clock to produce the 
250,000 blocks required. It was soon clear that the original cost estimates were inadequate; 
new backers were brought in to provide an additional million dollars. When the doors 
opened for the first time in February 1929, much comment was made about the hotel's 
luxurious and costly fittings-gold leaf ceilings, a roof made entirely of copper, uniquely 
designed furniture, murals, wrought-iron fixtures-and its air of refined opulence. But it 
was already in financial difficulties. Its principal backers had the bad luck to invest in the 
year of the great stock market crash. The McArthur brothers could not meet their financial 
obligations and were forced to sell out for a pittance to the one backer not affected by the 
crash, the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr. He was able to buy out other 
stockholders advantageously and continued to develop the property when the hotel 
reopened in November 1929. It survived the Great Depression and went on to become one 
of the nation's most famous hotels. 

To this day, it is stated in brochures published by the Arizona Biltmore that its architect 
was Albert Chase McArthur, and a statement made by Wright in 1930 is reprinted; in it, 
Wright disclaims authorship. Wright, McArthur maintained, licensed him to make use of 
the textile block method, acted as advisor during construction, criticized the plans and 
details, made sketches of the decorative designs and was paid for those services. 
{McArthur to Wright, T, May 23, 1920.} That was all. However, the low horizontal lines 
of the building, its complex silhouette, its Art Deco formalism and, in particular, its 
handling of interior space and idiosyncratic details bear the stamp of Wright's personality. 
For years it has been generally thought that Wright was the designer and that McArthur's 
role was confined to the working drawings. {see ST, nos. 221 and 222.} This theory is 
supported by references in Wright's letters to the fact that he was working on drawings, to 
the fact that McArthur commissioned him to make a set of presentation drawings, and to 
the fact that he spent so much time in Phoenix before construction began. If McArthur did 
design the building, he leaned very heavily on Wright's ideas and got them for a bargain 
price: a fraction of the fee Wright would have been paid had he been the official architect 
with his usual 10 percent commission. There is even clearer evidence that Wright 
considered himself its author. When McArthur died in 1951, his widow wrote to ask 
Wright to write an article praising McArthur's achievement in this building, which, it 
seemed evident, had been his major accomplishment. {her letter to Wright, T, April 16, 
1951.} Wright replied by saying that he regretted he had needed the money so much that 
he had allowed McArthur to call the hotel his own.  

The intriguing question is why Wright should voluntarily renounce this major 
accomplishment, his first hotel in the United States, at a time when he needed all the 
acclaim he could get. The correspondence of the period suggests that the answer is to be 
found in the textile block construction agreement. Early in 1930, McArthur received a 
letter from a Los Angeles law firm on behalf of another inventor of concrete blocks, 
William E. Nelson, holder of two U.S. patents, claiming that Wright's system violated his 
own. Shortly afterward Wright received a letter from a Phoenix law firm questioning him 
closely on his patent. {Stockton & Perry, T, January 20, 1930.} Wright conceded fairly 
readily that, for technical reasons, he had never quite managed to patent the method he 
had licensed McArthur to use. {Wright to Stockton & Perry, T, January 21, 1930.} At the 
same time McArthur was writing to Wright to say that rumors were flying around Phoenix 
that Wright had actually designed the Biltmore. McArthur was ambitious to get other hotel 
commissions, and these pernicious rumors were destroying his chances. {T, April 2, 
1930.} Exactly what agreement was hammered out between Wright and McArthur is not 
described in their correspondence. However, it seems clear that it was not to Wright's 
advantage to be seen as the "real" architect at a time when all kinds of lawsuits and 
countersuits seemed imminent and he had no real defense. By then, no doubt, he had  
enough of lawsuits. At any rate, letters from lawyers to Wright soon ceased, and a "To 
Whom It May Concern" statement by Wright soon appeared, giving credit for the Arizona 
Biltmore to Albert Chase McArthur. {dated June 2, 1930.} 

Wright was also working on San Marcos-in-the-Desert, another luxury resort hotel 
project near Chandler, Arizona, that would also have used his textile block system. The 
timing was such that, had it been built, he would almost certainly have faced the same 
patent-infringement charges there and with more serious consequences. Nevertheless it 
was unfortunate that this magnificent project was never built, because it provides an 
immediate refutation of the argument that, during the late 1920s, Wright's creativity was 
at a low ebb. Not only did the sizable project for a hotel complex give, according to 
Hitchcock, a convincing demonstration of the large-scale possibilities of the textile block 
system, but Wright's concept provided, "perhaps for the first time in history, an adequate 
expression specifically suited to a desert environment." {HI, p. 77.} 

As he could see, Wright told Lloyd, the whole idea was based on the triangle. He had 
already designed the simple geometric relief he wanted for his blocks, a modified zigzag 
that gave a fluted effect. {see HI, plate 282.} From a distance it looked like a dotted line, 
the line Wright thought typical of the desert. {HI, p. 78.} His surviving drawings show a 
building so spread out, its wings of private suites improbably attenuated, that it looks like a 
hill town. That he had a vivid internal picture of it in his mind is, however, clear. All these 
fascinating experiments of working on a vastly reduced scale would prove their worth ten 
years later when he came to design his first Usonian houses. In short, Wright was 
challenged and excited by the possibilities, and thought he had found in the scheme's 
promoter, A. J. Chandler, a former veterinarian turned hotelier and entrepreneur, the right 
man to bring the project to completion. The opportunity came at a pivotal moment, just as 
he most needed to prove to his corporation that his future prospects were bright. He wired 
to Martin, IDEAL COMMISSION SETTLED WILL BUILD AND FURNISH SAN 
MARCOS IN THE DESERT A PERFECTLY APPOINTED HALF MILLION DOLLAR 
HOTEL, in the spring of 1928, just a month before the Bank of Wisconsin put Taliesin up 
for sale. {DDM, April 6, 1928.} His choice of verbs, build and furnish, was pardonably 
optimistic but premature. At that moment, all he had was a commission to make the 
designs, prepare the working drawings and give an informed estimate of costs. 

Since he needed to see a full-fledged opportunity in what was, essentially, only an 
overture, he was in the unusual position, for him, of being at the mercy of his client. When 
Chandler, who lived in the town named for him, sent Wright an urgent wire in January 
1929 to return to Arizona-ostensibly to advise some newcomers who had bought part of 
the land and wanted to build on it-Wright took the summons as a command to begin 
work. He assembled an office staff with dispatch and by mid-January was ready to drive 
to Arizona with his band of fifteen. {by January 14, 1929} Once they arrived in Chandler 
there was nowhere to stay. Olgivanna Wright told Mrs. Darwin Martin that they spent a 
few days in a hotel, but could not continue to spend so much money so they decided to 
build a temporary camp on Chandler's land. The draftsmen were pressed into service as 
builders and carpenters, and, in less than two weeks, the little band had constructed a 
sizable camp complete with living room, guesthouse, dining room, draftsmen's offices, 
kitchen, court, garage and even an electrical plant, using battened lower walls and 
wood-frame roofs covered with canvas-a glorified tent city. Photographs of Ocatillo, as 
the camp came to be called, show low divans and floors covered with Navajo rugs, 
artistically draped greenery, a (rented) grand piano and a telephone. {HI, p. 280.} 

By February 1, the studio roof had been canvased over, and work on the hotel drawings 
could start. Back in Madison, Philip La Follette was infuriated. Just three months after 
Wright's return to Taliesin (and after endless loud complaints about being denied the right 
to live in his own house), after all that money and energy expended, Wright had gone off 
on some harebrained scheme to make drawings in the middle of the Arizona desert. But La 
Follette's principal concern was what the cost of transporting, housing and feeding fifteen 
people for this kind of expedition implied. It was clear to him that Wright must have 
received a sizable check from Chandler if he were now building a camp for himself. This 
really rankled because, a week before Wright left, La Follette had warned him that the 
Wright, Inc. account was down to its last two thousand dollars, and current bills, plus 
Wright's monthly salary of five hundred dollars, would wipe it out. {DDM, January 15, 
1929.} He made a point of stating that Wright had himself turned in bills for payment just 
that month. La Follette had put his finger on the issue and the reason why the Wright, Inc. 
arrangement would never work. Wright took the view that whatever money he earned was 
his, while the responsibility for meeting his monthly expenses belonged to his backers, 
indefinitely, or so it seemed. La Follette knew that he had to make an issue of this. As soon 
as he learned that Wright had decamped, he wrote again, insisting that Wright's earnings 
be placed in the corporation's account. He took steps to ensure that by contacting Chandler 
directly. 

Wright's reply, when it came, went on for five pages. After going over old ground and 
attacking La Follette's actions in his turn, he demanded that he be given the right to make 
whatever expenditures he saw fit. He intended, he said in a lordly way, to send La Follette 
money to cover the obligations due in April; meantime, he would have to go on expending 
thousands each month in pursuit of the fee he expected to get, $60,000. (This would come 
when and if construction began, a detail he omitted.) In short, instead of having La 
Follette, as chief officer of the corporation, control income and expenditures, Wright 
wanted this function returned to him. {DDM, March 4, 1929.} It was an impasse, and La 
Follette turned for support to Schevill and Martin. The latter obliged with a letter that 
began by lecturing Wright and reminding him of his contractual obligations, but that 
ended with an unsuccessful attempt at conciliation. {DDM, March 12, 1929.} If they 
would revise the terms of his contract Wright was prepared, he told La Follette in May, to 
give up Taliesin, the cause of all his problems. La Follette jumped on the idea. {DDM, 
May 22, 1929.} If he was really serious they could start selling the property immediately, 
he wrote. Wright hastily withdrew the offer, and, after more months of negotiation, he had 
won the right to amend his contract. La Follette conceded defeat. Some time after that, 
exactly as he had foreseen, Wright, Inc. was bankrupt and its shareholders had lost every 
penny. But reading between the lines, it is evident that Darwin Martin well knew (however 
convincingly he maintained the fiction that his frequent checks were simply loans) that he 
would never see his money again. Had he switched tactics and turned his loans into 
outright gifts, he might have aroused Wright's conscience and ensured that the money 
would be repaid. He was, however, by long habit and emotional predisposition fated to 
play out his role, and Wright was bound to cling to such an advantageous relationship. But 
perhaps Martin, with his indulgent view of the license due a great artist, had the larger 
vision. Something about the desert setting was acting on the master like an elixir. He was 
responding to its challenge with unusual zest and a heightened creativity. That camp of 
Ocatillo, such a seeming waste of time and money (and destined to be vandalized the 
moment his back was turned), had given him the germ of a new idea. It would be brought 
to a triumphant fulfillment a few years later when he built his masterpiece, Taliesin West.  

They were working at Ocatillo for five months. Back at Taliesin, his faith in the project 
was strong and he hoped building could begin that autumn. Chandler kept up a barrage of 
phone calls and telegrams, asking for more sketches and new estimates. Wright's hopes 
soared. Even in late October he believed Chandler was on the verge of putting together the 
$500,000 Wright estimated (although he told Martin privately he expected the cost to be 
closer to $750,000). This hopeful news was conveyed to Lloyd on the day of the stock 
market crash, October 29, 1929. Weeks later, he and Chandler continued to tell each other 
that the crash had been a good thing because it would release investment capital that had 
been diverted to speculations on the stock market. Wright went on assuring everyone that 
Chandler was just about to come up with the money, and Chandler, indefatigably 
optimistic, pursued his goal for the next eight years writing, as late as 1937, that the 
clouds were lifting. By then he sounded marginally less hopeful. {T, October, 1937} 

Wright, too, kept up a good front, but by the spring of 1930 he could no longer appease his 
creditors with incantations to Western deities. Not surprisingly, all work had also stopped 
on the St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie project, and the bank was about to foreclose, again. 
{August 11, 1930.} Meanwhile Wright was sending out appeals for more subscriptions to 
anyone he could think of, including the millionaire Harold McCormick, heir to a great 
farm-machinery fortune, and went on spending money like the trooper he was. {on 
February 4, 1930.}  

Miriam Noel, whom he fervently hoped had dropped out of his life after his marriage to 
Olgivanna, continued to make her baleful presence felt. As late as November 1929 she 
brought a new suit against him claiming unpaid alimony of seven thousand dollars. 
Wright refused to pay much attention to her Milwaukee lawyer's letter. He had learned that 
she was in the hospital and had only a few weeks to live. In fact, she had been operated on 
that month and seemed to be recovering when she had a relapse. She went into a coma and 
died at noon five days later, on Friday, January 3, 1930. Cause of death, according to the 
death certificate, was "exhaustion following delirium due to pelvic cellulitis, and chronic 
salpingitis with septic spleen and hypostatic pneumonia." She was not yet sixty-one. She 
was buried the next day in the Forest Home cemetery, Milwaukee, and her former husband 
did not attend the funeral. By the time her will was probated and the major claims against 
her estate had been made, the net value of it was about four dollars. {MJ, February 16, 
1930.} It was pathetic and sad, but Miriam Noel's death did have the effect of releasing 
what was left of the trust fund Wright had set up at the time of their divorce to pay her 
monthly alimony. The balance was now due to revert to him. Seeing his opportunity, 
Philip La Follette, whose bill Wright had indignantly refused to pay, presented it for 
settlement against the fund and was successful. Another creditor, the Wisconsin Foundry 
and Machine Company, saw its chance and jumped in with a bill for nine hundred dollars. 
Nevertheless, the balance due was over five thousand dollars and very welcome that 
February of 1930. 

Once Philip La Follette withdrew, the complex and thankless task of riding herd on 
Wright's finances was taken over by the corporation's treasurer, Benjamin Eldridge Page. 
Page was a Chicago businessman who still kept an office there although, having made his 
fortune, he had retired from active life five years before. He was comfortably off but not 
wealthy, a friend of Schevill's with, the professor thought, a talent for accounting. He was 
a widower with one son studying for his master's degree in philosophy at the University of 
Chicago, played a fast game of tennis and was proud owner of Speedwell Farm in the corn 
belt of Illinois, a historic property that had been owned by one family for a century and 
that he had recently bought. Wright found him agreeable enough. Page seemed more 
amenable to Wright's ingenious arguments (usually revolving around the wisdom of 
spending money now so as to save it later), and the two had a lively exchange of letters; 
Page was a welcome visitor at Taliesin whenever Wright was there. Another person on the 
fringes of Wright's life at that period was his first wife, Catherine. What had happened 
between them was ancient history, as far as Wright was concerned, and now that he had 
his freedom from her (and perhaps in light of his experiences with Miriam Noel), he was 
much more kindly disposed. He had commented in 1926-27, at the height of his troubles 
with Miriam, that he and Catherine would be friends if the world would let them, and even 
argued shamelessly that she was his prior responsibility when Miriam was in the middle of 
making her biggest financial demands. Catherine Wright's attitude is harder to gauge 
since she was much more cautious about revealing her feelings on paper, but she seemed 
genuinely concerned about him, or so she said. After Wright left her, and once the 
children began to need her less, she became increasingly involved in social work at Hull 
House. She moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in the early 1920s, where she worked for 
the Red Cross and the Juvenile Protective Association, then returned to Chicago (in 1924) 
to continue her social work there, with frequent trips to North Carolina and Knoxville, 
Tennessee. By 1929 the only child still living at home was her youngest, Robert Llewellyn. 
He had graduated from college a few years before and was working for a large law firm 
while studying for the bar. In the summer of 1930 he was due to take his state bar 
examinations and planned to move into an apartment of his own. Her lease would be up in 
the autumn of 1930. {to the Ashbees, July 16, 1930.} 

Catherine Wright was now fifty-nine. She met Ben Page at some point during the year 
1929-30, and a romance developed. Robert Llewellyn believed his mother's problem was 
her refusal to accept the reality of her situation and her delusory hope that his father would 
one day return. That hope must have vanished once they were divorced, but they kept 
abreast of each other's lives through their children, and if Catherine Wright harbored some 
lingering resentments-and money, or the lack of it, carries a heavy symbolic freight-the 
appearance of Ben Page in her life, with his hand on Wright's purse strings, would have 
presented an intriguing turn of events, a chance to savor a kind of advantage over Wright. 
There might even have seemed something retributive about it. If this were true, the 
triumph was destined to be short-lived. Like so many others, Page became a victim of the 
stock market crash and some poor investments. He soon lost his attraction for Wright, who 
did not want an insolvent businessman for a treasurer. (It looked bad.) After a year or so, 
Wright successfully maneuvered to have Page dropped from the inner circle, and 
Catherine found their tastes incompatible. Saying she did not enjoy her isolated life on a 
farm, she moved back to Chicago. (The Pages were divorced in 1937.) {David Wright, 
Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright, to author.} 

All this was to come. In the summer of 1930, Catherine Wright was facing the prospect of 
a lonely old age and knew she would soon have to renew the lease on her apartment or 
move. It is clear from a letter she wrote to the Ashbees that the strain of holding down a 
full-time job and running an apartment as well made the idea of marriage that much 
more attractive. {to the Ashbees, July 16, 1930.} They married in mid-June. The event 
took Wright by surprise, and he was most annoyed to find that Page had deducted a full 
month's alimony for June from his account-for a man who seemed to have no head for 
figures, Wright kept a surprisingly careful track of certain items, at least. He sent them a 
congratulatory telegram. {Wright to DDM, July 16, 1930.} 

The day of the stock market crash Wright was also writing to his lawyer in Washington in 
pursuit of a goal that had persistently eluded him, that of removing the threat to the 
immigrant status of Olgivanna and Svetlana. After believing that the deportation 
proceedings had been quashed, he was unpleasantly surprised to find that the whole issue 
had been renewed, the result of Miriam Noel's ceaseless complaints. The government now 
felt impelled to hold a pro forma hearing. It took place on Ellis Island in the summer of 
1928, and although no decision was made-to give him time to become legally 
married-the specter would not be lifted until Olgivanna Wright had been properly 
admitted to the United States. {CT, October 14, 1927.} This meant that she would have to 
go to Mexico and apply for re-entry as a non-quota immigrant. It was all just a 
formality but an expensive and time-consuming one. {Wright to Chandler, T, December 
28, 1929.} They made the trip early in January 1930, and their efforts were rewarded at 
last when, two months later, they finally received word that all proceedings had been 
dropped. {on February 14, 1929.} 

Among the very few building projects of Wright's that would not fall victim to the stock 
market crash was Darwin Martin's summer house, Graycliff, on Lake Erie, and the house 
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, founder and publisher of the 
Tulsa Tribune. Wright and Richard, who was six years his junior, had known each other 
since childhood. Like Frank, Richard was the only son of an adoring mother. He studied 
first for the law at the University of Wisconsin and at Chicago Law School, taking a 
master's degree, and then went into journalism. There he rose rapidly, first as editor of the 
Stamford (Connecticut) Telegram, editorial writer for the Washington Times, editor of 
Cosmopolitan magazine, editor of Collier's, editor and part owner of the Wisconsin State 
Journal in Madison and, after 1919, editor and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune. He married 
Georgia Hayden (always called George) when he was thirty-four, and they had three 
children, Richard, Jenkin and Florence. Richard was articulate, feisty, and a natural 
writer. Like his cousin Frank, he had an unusual ability to express himself on paper and 
was willing to spin out his thoughts endlessly to ensure that his reader knew exactly what 
he meant. This made him an eager correspondent and sometimes a formidable one. His 
letters as his house was being built provide an unvarnished account of the hopes, fears, 
disappointments, frustrations and satisfactions of a Wright client.  

Richard Lloyd Jones shared his father's veneration for Lincoln and went to Hodgenville, 
Kentucky, in 1905 to buy Lincoln's boyhood home when it was sold at public auction. He 
then launched a successful subscription drive (the contribution was twenty-five cents) to 
raise money for a granite memorial on the site and collected the amazing sum of $400,000. 
President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone. Richard was also a great collector of 
authentic Lincolniana and, at one time, owned Lincoln's death mask and the mold of his 
hand. He later became one of the organizers of the Grass Roots Republican convention 
(1935) in Springfield, Illinois, and ran the pre-convention campaign of Alfred M. 
Landon of Kansas for the Republican presidential nomination against Roosevelt. He held 
many committee appointments, including one on the Federal Prison Labor Committee 
(1905-11), and became something of a legend in his own time for his fearless editorials, 
staunch Republican views and moral probity. 

Richard Lloyd Jones had, in short, inherited all the Lloyd Jones intellectual energy and 
physical stamina (he lived to be ninety), along with the family's love of a pulpit and its 
combativeness. Since his political views were diametrically opposed to those of his cousin 
and since neither ever scrupled to spare the other's feelings, the battles were ferocious. 
There is some indication that Richard was jealous of Frank's greater eminence; having 
grown up in the shadow of one famous man, he had no intention of playing second fiddle 
to another. But it was more complicated than that. Richard genuinely admired Frank's art 
and liked his charm, his warmth, and his expansiveness and secretly knew that, for all his 
improvidence, he was the most generous of men. And to discover that a Lloyd Jones was in 
trouble was, for any other Lloyd Jones, a battle cry to the ramparts; the enemy's forces had 
to be bravely faced, even if the cause was hopeless. He also wrote that he would not 
disagree with Frank so much if he did not love him so much. This was probably perfectly 
true, but their relationship was put to its ultimate test with the building of the enormous 
(8,500 square feet) and very expensive house (named Westhope in honor of his father) that 
Richard had, in an indulgent moment, asked Frank to build-because he knew Frank 
needed the money. Finding himself in this sentimental trap seemed to arouse Richard's 
feelings of exasperation with his impossible cousin and reminded him of the disagreeable 
past. For instance, he was editor of the Madison paper when, in 1911, Wright had 
scandalized public opinion by moving Mamah Borthwick into the newly built Taliesin. 
Richard had been one of the principal backers of the family caucus and had written to tell 
his cousin the effect the scandal was having on the Aunts and the Hillside Home School. 
Frank was incorrigible; everybody knew that. Richard liked to tell the story about the time 
in 1905 when Wright appeared in his office at Collier's in New York asking for his rail 
fare back to Chicago. {Jenkin Lloyd Jones (Richard's son) in "A House for a Cousin:} 
Richard dug the sum up and, an hour later, Frank was back again. He was carrying a 
beautiful Japanese print that he had just bought, and he still needed his rail fare back to 
Chicago. 

The Lloyd Joneses had bought four acres of land on an open knoll on the outskirts of Tulsa 
and began leisurely negotiations about the kind of house they wanted sometime in 1928. 
Their son Jenkin believed that Wright's original sketch was for a rambling 
wood-and-stucco house around a courtyard with off-angled rooms and one of Wright's 
characteristically low-pitched roofs. {The Richard Lloyd Jones House," Frank Lloyd 
Wright Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 4, fourth quarter 1979, p. 1.} This would have been 
appropriate for the Oklahoma landscape and better attuned to the kind of comfortable, 
old-fashioned furniture Richard and George liked (wing chairs, for example) than the 
house Wright gave them. If there were any discussions these were on a very informal basis 
because sometime in November 1928 Wright fired off the first salvo.  

That did it. Richard tore off a nine-page letter, typed and single-spaced. He was 
outraged to be called a hypocrite, which he thought was name calling and unfair, 
unleashing a thunderbolt of criticism that would have done justice to Jove (or Wright) 
himself. {T, November 26, 1928.} If Wright found hypocrisy around him it was because of 
his grandiloquent, "I-own-the-world" ways, his outlandish appearance, his selfish 
determination to have his own way at all costs, his contempt for society, his lack of 
sympathy for others. 

This ferocious attack would have daunted anyone less thick-skinned (or less financially at 
his mercy) than his architect at that moment. Perhaps Richard Lloyd Jones knew that. At 
any rate it was accompanied by a second letter, which made it clear that he was serious 
about a new house. For his part Wright had decided that their house should be built of the 
textile blocks with which he had been working. He wanted this time to try a different 
effect, dispensing with Mayan themes altogether and emphasizing the vertical in a 
free-form composition that would also incorporate an up-to-date version of the 
conservatory, or sun room. He would build his blocks into pillars and intersperse them 
with columns of windows of the same width. It was the end result of his theoretical interest 
in dispensing with walls entirely since, as Hitchcock wrote, the result could hardly be 
called a wall at all. Instead, it was "a screen of closely spaced piers between which space 
flows . . . freely. . . ." {HI, p. 78.} Wright had already tried this effect for the living room 
of the Millard house a few years before, spacing his piers between double panes of glass. 
He increased the effect with his next attempt for the Storer house, moving the piers closer 
together, with a single rectangle of glass placed horizontally between them. Now he 
proposed to move them even closer, by positioning the rectangle of glass vertically. He had 
never tried for this particular effect before, but the more he thought about it, the more he 
wanted to design it whether Richard and George were enthusiastic, or not. 

Richard Lloyd Jones had immediate reservations about the blocks. A friend had told him 
that he had a house like this in New Mexico and liked it so much that he tried the same 
thing in Ohio but found that the blocks seemed to absorb moisture from the air because the 
house was always damp. It rained in Oklahoma, Richard reminded his cousin. He wanted 
to be sure that the blocks were moisture-proof before he approved them. Meantime 
Wright should give them a very rough floor plan, not even to scale, for them all to discuss. 
{T, November 26, 1928} If they approved, he could then go ahead with a detailed plan and 
they could begin to build. On the ground floor they wanted, in addition to a vestibule and 
living room, a dining room to accommodate twenty, a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot 
study for himself, a billiard room not less than twenty-two by sixteen, a kitchen, pantries 
and four-car garage. They wanted five bedrooms in all and a roof garden. There should 
be a courtyard for the cars. 

Wright's letter was reassuring. There would be two layers of blocks, an outer and inner, 
reinforced vertically and horizontally with steel joints. All the grooves would be poured 
with water-resisting cement, and the inner seams of the outside blocks would be coated 
with asphalt. He preferred this to using exterior waterproofing, which spoiled the color and 
texture of the blocks. A house like this might be somewhat harder to heat, but it would 
hold its heat, and the inside of the house would never be damp. It would also be fireproof. 
He described the usual schedule of payments for a total of 10 percent and smoothly 
interjected the idea that it was usual for the contract to include furnishings and plantings. 

Wright and party went off to Chandler, Arizona, early in 1929, and nothing much 
happened on the Lloyd Jones house for several months, except a call for money. Richard 
sent off a thousand dollars as an advance against fee and said he would be very glad to 
send more as needed. {T, March 8, 1929.} 

A month later Richard Lloyd Jones wrote again with a few alternative sketches, Plans A to 
D. His cousin might get a good laugh. In the first plan he had simply tried to take Wright's 
idea, square it and add a room he called the "Bissorium." This was a reference to his 
daughter, Florence, called "Bisser" by the family, who was ambitious to make botany her 
career, so he had added a flower room, or greenhouse, for her. On the second floor he was 
giving George a room with a south, west, east and northeast exposure, which should be 
delightful. 

In Plan B, he had put the study beside the living room and arranged the rest of the house 
accordingly. He thought that was the least successful. Plan C provided living room 
exposures to the west, south, east and north. But then he thought that the Bissorium had 
better have an eastern exposure so he switched to Plan D. They all liked this the best, apart 
from the placement of the swimming pool and lily pond. In short, he would see what his 
architect had to say. His only concern was that he had indicated a half-million-dollar 
house and his limit was $50,000. {T, April 15, 1929.} In fact, he would like the final price 
better if it were $48,865.45. 

By April it was possible to discern a strategy behind Wright's moves. He was working in 
his Chandler, Arizona, camp on the San Marcos project, but keeping a staff of fifteen 
housed and fed was a bigger financial drain than he had bargained for. Wright's court of 
last resort, Darwin Martin, was feeling the effect of the stock market crash and, in light of 
the dispute with La Follette, unlikely to slip Wright any money under the table. So Wright 
was transferring his hopes to his cousin, who was obliging by sending him checks directly. 
Richard was also dispensing free financial advice (get rid of La Follette) and even offering 
to act as a guarantor for 6 percent interest on money others might invest in Wright's 
corporation. {T, April 30, 1929.} Finding his cousin this amenable gave Wright the 
necessary tolerance for the inevitable sermons that accompanied the checks. Another 
advance of a thousand dollars (on April 19) was sent with an observation that Wright 
should be a millionaire by now and would be, were it not for his ability to shoot himself in 
the foot, the result of his self-centeredness, his arrogance, his intolerance of others and 
his vaingloriousness. Bit by bit Richard Lloyd Jones revealed the real reason for what he 
called his "vitriol." The Lloyd Joneses, he said, had been split between those who put on 
airs, wove fictional romances around themselves and thought themselves too good for the 
rest of the world and those, like Uncle Thomas and his father, who despised such 
posturing. If Frank would just drop the fake act and allow his achievements to speak for 
themselves he would be universally admired and respected instead of being an outlaw and 
outcast. And so on. Wright took the scolding with good humor, and Richard, all 
unsuspecting, went on sending money, unaware that his shrewd cousin was closing in for 
the kill. Wright finally wrote to say that Chandler had advanced $7,500, but that the desert 
adventure had actually cost about $12,600. He would soon have that money and more, he 
wrote, with a reference to November when construction on San Marcos was due to begin. 
In the meantime, if "Rich" could possibly advance a further $1,500 he would be happy to 
give him a few valuable Japanese prints, saved from the New York debacle, as collateral. 
{T, May 15, 1929.} 

The appeal was a success. More money came by return mail, although his cousin was 
aware that he had now sent the bulk of the $5,000 architectural fee for a $50,000 house 
($3,500) and had nothing to show for it and certainly not the choice of floor plans he had 
requested weeks before. He was beginning to doubt his cousin's motives, and that made 
him angry again. He did not want Japanese prints as collateral. He did not intend to 
continue advancing money, which his cousin would then treat as a gift. Frank was headed 
for total disaster unless, at the advanced age of sixty-five, said Rich, adding a few years 
(Wright was then sixty-two), he could make some basic changes in his character, 
renounce his false philosophy and stop expecting the world to serve him, or he might end 
up in jail. {T, May 25, 1929.} Four days later another thousand dollars was accompanied 
by a different kind of scolding. Cousin Rich was horrified to hear that on the return 
journey to Spring Green, Frank had let his police dog ride on the running board, at sixty 
miles an hour. {T, May 29, 1929.} No wonder the poor dog fell off. He could have been 
killed. Richard could not stand a man who treated dumb animals this way. It was one more 
example of Frank's general thoughtlessness. Richard had written a little tract, "My Dog's 
Bequest," which he was sending along. It had been translated into seven languages, 
including Chinese. 

The house project continued to be a battleground for old grievances and resentments. 
Richard continued to send money while working himself into a rage over any hint that 
Wright might be patronizing him or showing evidence of the same bad old habits. Wright, 
aware that he was walking a tightrope, kept his letters short and his response muted. Apart 
from his prudent business reasons for doing so, he appeared to know enough about his 
cousin to discount some of his more outrageous statements, waiting for the generous 
impulses that invariably followed the storm. At these moments Richard was at his most 
malleable, and Wright took full advantage. In fact he showed great restraint. With his 
sister he was less guarded. He was very sorry for his cousin, he told Jane, who was meeting 
the fate of all negatively good people. Then he added carelessly that he had always 
regarded his immediate relations as enemies, a comment hardly designed to endear 
himself to his sister. {T, March 7, 1929.} 

Richard and George spent the summer of 1929 in Europe. He returned as crotchety as ever, 
muttering imprecations about the average Welshman's level of intelligence, but he was still 
talking about building and wanted Frank's plans. {T, September 16, 1929.} However, 
Frank had tested their generosity too far. When he appealed again, in October, for a 
$7,500 subscription to his corporation (so as to finance another trip to Arizona), he came 
up against serious resistance. Richard and George were ready to throw in the towel 
because they were not convinced that the house Wright was offering them was the one they 
wanted. What gave rise to their gravest doubts was Richard's belated realization that his 
willingness to help Frank get back on his feet financially was being misread as a readiness 
to back one speculative project after another, in this case San Marcos: the leopard had not 
changed his spots in the slightest. Another reason for his unease was the suspicious way 
the price of his house kept jumping. First it was $65,000, and now it was $75,000 and 
maybe $80,000 or more. It was unnerving. He could not afford it. But if he did build he did 
not intend to cut corners, as Wright now suggested, doing without steel bindings for the 
blocks or steel frames for the glass. If Wright originally thought they were necessary, they 
were still necessary. Richard had a horrid feeling that Wright was making pictures for his 
own satisfaction and that he, as client, was expected to take a chance on an experimental 
house to accommodate his architect; it was an $80,000 bet. He absolutely insisted that his 
architect accommodate him instead. {T, October 8, 1929.} He also begged his artistic 
cousin to worry first about practicalities and let the aesthetics look after themselves. {T, 
June 12, 1929.} 

Wright responded with an eight-page letter. The San Marcos project was all but certain. 
He knew it would go through, but, to make his cousin feel better, he would not go back 
until it was definite. {T, October 10, 1929.} Meantime, like the superb salesman he was, 
he did his best to allay his cousin's reservations about investing in his corporation and to 
get him to continue with the house. Richard remained adamant on the former but was 
ready to concede the latter. Plans were sent and he was deeply disappointed. He had asked 
for several choices. Instead, he had received a completed plan that took no account of the 
requests they had made. He did not want a breakfast room, and he wanted that extra space 
thrown into the billiard room. He was specific about the way he wanted the ground floor 
rearranged. He wanted a servants' toilet in the main part of the house. He wanted five feet 
taken off the hall upstairs. He wanted a fourth bedroom and told Wright how to get it. He 
wanted the servants' quarters on the second floor over the garage, and he wanted a bigger 
garage. There were other details, but what worried him most was that Wright had ignored 
the evidence of his own eyes. The plan as presented would not go on their lot because it 
did not take account of the topography and the slope in the land toward the north corner. 
He reminded Wright that he had offered to provide a topographical survey, and Wright 
said it would not be necessary. As drawn, the garage and servants' quarters were going 
down a ten-foot incline. {T, November 12, 1929.} That was not good enough. 

Realizing he had made a mistake, Wright did his best to minimize it and make hasty 
adjustments, but he thought varying the floor levels would improve rather than hurt the 
design. However, he could not visualize it clearly and asked for a new set of photographs. 
Wright was amenable to most of the suggestions, though he advised against having 
servants' quarters adjoining the family bedrooms. Still, if that was what they wanted, he 
would give it to them. As for orientation, Rich ought to consider that the use of pillar and 
glass would make for an outlook in every direction. Question it his cousin did. He could 
not see how Wright's new vertical plan could possibly be an improvement on the strips of 
horizontal windows he used to build. {T, Lloyd Jones to Wright, November 21, 1929; 
Wright to Lloyd Jones, December 12, 1929.} He sent a drawing to illustrate his argument. 
He really wanted those nice old windows but that would, as his architect said, have 
required another kind of house, and Wright was not going to give it to him. 

Westhope, which is now on the National Register of historic buildings, has to be 
considered a mixed achievement. From the evidence it would appear that Wright was at 
his best when given a free hand artistically; thus the ideal client for him was sensitive to 
his special gifts, intelligently receptive to his ideas and raised a minimum of objections 
during its design. The relationship between the two cousins could never fit that model, 
despite Richard Lloyd Jones's genuine pride in Wright's achievements and his respect for 
his art. He was too suspicious, too distrustful and too prepared to pounce on what he 
perceived as Wright's personal shortcomings, and this biased him in the direction of seeing 
devious behavior where none was intended. His blanket denunciations had the predictable 
result of producing exactly the wrong kind of attitude in his architect. Wright, when 
convinced he was right, as has been noted, would persist blindly on a wrong course even 
when he knew better. If this thesis is valid, it would help to explain the disappointments of 
the experimental method of building textile blocks in vertical rows that he tried with 
Westhope and never repeated, a design that resulted in a house that was stripped-down, 
forbidding and almost belligerently lacking in charm. From certain aspects it still looks 
like an armed camp (the window slits acting as gun emplacements) or, as Hitchcock wrote, 
a penitentiary. {HI, p. 78.} Richard Lloyd Jones had opened the dialogue by stating that 
the house was being built for his wife, but he soon dropped this fiction, and if Westhope 
can be said to have been influenced by Richard Lloyd Jones's character, it mirrors his 
prickly exterior to perfection. Even the interior runs true to form, being vastly more 
comfortable, spacious and pleasing than its exterior would lead one to think, and that 
would have reflected its central character too. But, as Richard's daughter, Florence L. J. 
Barnett, commented, the house remains an anomaly since its vertical emphasis is 
perversely inappropriate to its setting and its method of construction made it the most 
uncomfortable house possible: too hot in summer and too cold in winter. The blocks went 
on absorbing water like a sponge as Richard Lloyd Jones knew they would, despite 
repeated attempts at waterproofing. {T, March 10, 1933.} His wife never liked it (she 
wanted a wood house and got a concrete one), and she gratefully surrendered it to a 
dedicated young architect and his family after her husband died. 

Richard Lloyd Jones was very happy there, which did not stop him from being fully aware 
of the unsatisfactory nature of the design. He saw that in the autumn of 1930, almost as 
soon as the house went up. He wrote to Wright that, now that he could see the wall taking 
shape, he realized how right he had been about the lack of a panoramic view from the 
interior and how wrong Wright had been. Once inside, he was not going to be able to see 
out unless he went right up to the window, and then he would have only a 
forty-five-degree-angle view. He felt like a horse wearing blinders. {T, September 19, 
1930.} Construction continued through the winter of 1930-31. Wright had recommended 
that Richard employ his favorite builder, Paul Mueller, the German-born engineer who 
had moved to Chicago and had begun working for Dankmar Adler(on the Chicago 
Auditorium project). He became foreman for Adler  and Sullivan shortly thereafter; he 
then joined a construction company as partner and rose to prominence in Chicago in the 
1890s when he built thirty-three of the Chicago World's Fair buildings. Besides the 
Imperial Hotel, he and Wright went on to collaborate on many of Wright's most notable 
projects, including Unity Temple, Midway Gardens, and the Larkin Building. He was, in 
short, vastly experienced and knowledgeable, and Richard Lloyd Jones, after objecting that 
he was being given no choice, was grateful for Mueller's patience and expertise. But at 
some point during construction, a problem developed. Various versions are given, but the 
most authoritative is that of Jenkin Lloyd Jones. He wrote that, halfway through 
construction, work almost ceased. His exasperated father demanded an explanation. 
Mueller, accompanied by a lawyer, appeared at his office in tears. He confessed that there 
had been cost overruns, that he had diverted a large part of his advance to pay off old debts 
and, in short, that he was out of funds. {"A House for a Cousin: The Richard Lloyd Jones 
House," Frank Lloyd Wright Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 4, fourth quarter 1979, p. 2} Richard 
Lloyd Jones very gamely refused to prosecute, but the result was to add $20,000 onto the 
final cost of the house, so that he could not afford the furniture and plantings that Wright 
had also designed. That might have been an advantage as, Mrs. Barnett said, they used 
family antiques instead, which helped to "warm up" the place. Perhaps this unfortunate 
episode is responsible for the name Richard Lloyd Jones used to describe it. His son wrote 
that his neighbors were increasingly baffled as the house took shape and wanted to know 
what it was.  

Westhope is probably the original setting for the anecdote that is linked with many other 
houses of Wright's flat-roof design. The roof, of course, leaked almost immediately. 
Roofers were summoned to give it yet another surface; it was all in vain.  

He was glad, Richard Lloyd Jones wrote at the height of the depression, that no one had 
any money. Now that they were all "busted," they were all on common ground. It gave him 
a virtuous democratic sort of feeling. He had heard good things about Wright's ambitious 
plans for a school. He did not know how in the devil Wright proposed to pull it off. That 
comment was made early in the 1930s, no doubt after one of those famous winters 
everyone remembered about Taliesin when, as another frequent visitor wrote, icicles as 
"big as your thigh" hung from the eaves and the hillside stood wrapped in snows as deep 
and profound as any Hans Christian Andersen had invented for his heroine in The Snow 
Queen. Frederick Gutheim, the distinguished architectural historian who was first taken to 
Taliesin by Philip La Follette in the winter of 1928, had a vivid memory of what he called 
Taliesin's rural poverty. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, another frequent visitor, remarked that the 
simple fare was served with panache, and the living room would be full of pussy willows 
or bouquets of wildflowers. That was Mrs. Wright's doing. When all the commissions 
dried up (and every architect one knew was out of work), she was the one who had 
encouraged her husband to turn to lecturing and writing and had given him such 
emotional support while he wrote An Autobiography. 

Dozens of Wright's early essays, some so annotated and vandalized that they never could 
be published, exist in fragmented manuscripts. He was obviously willing to abandon these 
trial efforts but was determined to have An Autobiography published and sent it to 
Woollcott for a reading at an early stage, in late 1927. Woollcott prudently replied that he 
had two cardinal rules, one being to refuse to join a committee, and the second, never to 
read other people's manuscripts. {T, December 3, 1927.} Wright replied by return mail 
with three sentences that are classic illustrations of the predictable train of his mercurial 
reactions. His first comment was to damn the manuscript. Woollcott could forget all about 
it and he liked him better for having pushed it away. His next response was to damn 
himself. He never would, or ever could, become a writer. Finally, a wave of self-pity 
struck him. If there was a certain pique to be discerned, that was effaced by a generous 
closing paragraph in which he told Woollcott how much he loved and admired him. {T, 
December 7, 1927} Unlike another friend of those years, the architectural critic Lewis 
Mumford, who could not be cajoled into visiting Taliesin, Woollcott could and did. Like 
many who came after him, Woollcott would perceive, from that serene and smiling vision, 
some rare qualities in its creator: "So good a mind, so leaping an imagination, . . . so fresh 
a sense of beauty," and had, it was clear, decided to like him before they met. {The New 
Yorker, July 19, 1930.} Under such circumstances Wright was at his very best, and the 
two became instant friends. They often traveled from New York to Chicago together in a 
Pullman car, and on one such occasion, Wright, who was on his way home from a 
speaking engagement, brought with him a small secondhand organ or melodeon that 
folded up into a small suitcase. It was the kind that traveling evangelists were wont to take 
to camp meetings and had become Wright's inseparable companion since he had found it 
in a secondhand shop in New York. 

On that particular occasion, other Pullman passengers were surprised and amused to see 
these two middle-aged gentlemen, obviously artistic and distinctly eccentric, with the 
melodeon set up in the aisle between them, regaling themselves with ditties and having a 
perfectly hilarious time about it. One, it was noted, was heavyset, with pendulous jaws and 
a shock of long, untidy brown hair. The other seemed older but "better preserved," had a 
handsome head of curly white locks, wore homespun clothes, a flowing black silk tie, and 
had a delightful twinkle in his gray-blue eyes. The consensus was that the two must be a 
pair of itinerant musicians, or religious fanatics having a weekend off. Not one person 
recognized the famous humorist, much less his companion, the world's most famous 
architect. And in fact, if that appellation was being used with increasing frequency, 
Woollcott was at least partly responsible. He had recently written an article about Frank 
Lloyd Wright for The New Yorker that closed with, "Indeed, if the editor of this journal 
were so to ration me that I were suffered to apply the word 'genius' to only one living 
American, I would have to save it up for Frank Lloyd Wright." {The New Yorker, July 19, 
1930.} That charming encomium may well account for the new note of aggressive 
self-confidence that can be discerned in Wright's letters shortly after the summer of 1930, 
when the article was written.  


The World's Greatest Architect 

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing 
or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the building 

-KENNETH CLARK 
Civilisation 

For all his professed lack of interest in himself-he once told his mother that he did not 
know himself, and did not care-Wright was intrigued by his own psyche; in fact, the 
criticism most often made about him is that Frank Lloyd Wright was the only person he 
was interested in. {FP, May 13, 1919.} Numerous comments at differing stages of his life 
confirm the impression that his view of himself remained that of a misunderstood genius, 
lonely and embattled, faithful to the truth though all the world should stand against him. 
Continuing evidence that he identified himself strongly, if not exclusively, with his Welsh 
heritage is as clear in his letters as elsewhere. At least one visitor to Taliesin described him 
as a "modern Druid"; {William Wesley Peters to author.} another, not Welsh herself, 
observed without rancor that anyone named Jones was accorded preferential treatment 
there. {Mrs. Ernest Meyer to author.} A broad hint that his sister Maginel considered him 
not only quintessentially Welsh but also a worthy descendant of his bellicose Unitarian 
ancestors is provided in her description of their forebear Dr. Charles Lloyd.  

Like many master salesmen and entrepreneurs of the business world, a crisis of any kind 
was a test of Wright's resilience and ability to triumph; it almost seemed a necessity. 
Wright was, at least in public, a model of brazen self-confidence. One of his 
characteristic quips, usually quoted with mingled disapproval and awe, is, "Early in life I 
had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance." On 
another occasion he referred to himself in court as the world's greatest architect. Asked if 
he did not think this self-assessment somewhat inflated, he replied, "Well, I was under 
oath, wasn't I?" {MJ, April 10, 1959.} That would have been said with just the right blend 
of effrontery and guile, with a suggestion of self-mockery thrown in; with Wright, one 
was never quite sure. He was equally able to joke about his braggadocio. Evidence that 
there was also a punitive and disparaging, if not pitiless, self-assessment behind the 
facade is equally consistent, down through the years. He also wrote, after meeting his 
Dutch admirer Wijdeveld, that the man was a bigger egotist than he was, which surprised 
him.  

One could easily have missed this muted minor theme, hidden as it was behind a barrage 
of charm . A man who can dissuade a thief in the act of burgling a house can do anything, 
and Wright invariably used his guile to extract himself from the hot water that he himself 
had brought to a rolling boil. For instance, when one of his early patrons, C. E. Roberts of 
Oak Park, wrote in 1906 to say that Wright still owed him $5,000, he replied with 
exquisite formality that he could not reconcile his own accounts with such a large figure. 
He ended his letter with the charming confession that he could not clear the debt as yet 
and asked for another loan, this time to help the Aunts and Hillside . The response to this 
piece of shamelessness is not known, but it was typical of him. It was almost beyond his 
control; he simply had to try his luck and did so with such success that, as on one occasion 
when he was invited to lecture at the University of Oregon, he not only wheedled a larger 
fee out of the administration but so touched the sympathy of the professor involved that he 
kept sending Wright money. Wright finally had to tell him to stop. {in 1931, W. Willcox 
papers.} The Roberts family, which was not repaid, took a slightly more jaundiced view of 
Wright's charm, but they kept the letter he wrote after his former benefactor died in 1934. 
It goes without saying that Wright could turn any incident to his advantage. A minor 
example of this was the occasion when, as he was lecturing in a college department of 
architecture, he was interrupted with cries to speak up. Some men might have been 
unnerved. Wright merely paused. 

He was interested in himself, but his comments to most of his friends are unrevealing. He 
usually explained that he was the way he was, and that was that. It is likely that he knew 
far more about "this inner chamber I call my heart" than he was willing to concede, and a 
certain formality in his manner kept at arm's length some who loved him and were baffled 
by him, men in particular. As the architect Edgar Tafel, who wrote a revealing book about 
his apprenticeship with Wright, commented, "I never had the courage to invade the 
privacy of his mind. I wish I had." {interview with author.} Only with women did Wright 
ever let down his guard and then only after their reproaches had pushed him into an agony 
of confession. Perhaps Taliesin, that cunning labyrinth, is the best metaphor for the 
personality of its creator, with its sunlit, expansive vistas and chiaroscuro, its wide-open 
windows and blank walls, its veiled allusions and sudden revelations, its perfectly 
composed and inviting rooms and its stiffly formal chairs. His impulsiveness, his 
mercurial shifts of mood and the complexity of his responses made him an easy man to 
misjudge. The immediate impression gained from his thousands of letters is that he 
reveled in handing out insults whenever he was infuriated (and that was as unpredictable 
as everything else about him). There are only a relatively few witnesses left alive to attest 
to his inability to state his grievances at close quarters. One of those friends, Professor 
Marya Lilien, who came to know him in the 1930s when she was an apprentice at 
Taliesin, said, "He never wanted to hurt anyone. I remember one time that Wright had a 
laborer in Spring Green who used to do odd jobs, but he was a real bum and he had never 
liked him. One day Wright was out digging in a field-he liked to work off his energy that 
way-when his secretary, Eugene Masselink, appeared with the man in tow, whose name 
was Joe. Could he get some work shearing sheep? Without looking up, Wright vehemently 
retorted that he never wanted to see the man again. Then he suddenly saw who was 
standing there. 'Oh, hello, Joe,' he said without missing a beat. 'What would you like to do 
for us?' {interview with author} That was one of Mr. Wright's most charming 
inconsistencies, very characteristic. He used to tell me, 'If you want something from me, 
come in person because it's terribly easy to say no in a letter.'" 

This taboo against being directly rude, if that is what it was, did not extend to lecturing, 
where his actor's instinct for the provocative statement, allied with his compulsive 
rebelliousness, ensured that he would take the offensive for, as he also said, "I've always 
wanted to take the dust off people." {The New Yorker, June 15, 1956} Or, as he explained 
to Lawrence C. Lemmon, another apprentice of the 1930s, "When I go out on a lecture 
tour I don't hand them a lot of bromides. I kick them in the shins and step on their feet and 
get them to listen to me." {interview with author.} His granddaughter, Nora Natof, 
Frances's daughter, thought he had no awareness of his effect on others. Once, when she 
was dining at Taliesin, her grandfather began to make rude remarks about the rapidity 
with which she was eating. She got up and left the table. He apologized for that later. 
"What some people called vindictiveness I simply think of as a lack of sensitivity to others' 
feelings," she said. {interview with author.} 

However, one makes this kind of generalization about Wright at one's peril, along with all 
the others. Just as many anecdotes are told about his delicacy of feeling . Elizabeth kassler, 
another early apprentice, recalled that on one occasion when she was in the middle of a 
divorce she wrote to ask whether she might come to Taliesin for a while with her young 
son, Fritz. She was in a state of emotional turmoil, but her letter was so discreet that, 
Olgivanna Wright said later, they had not realized how desperate she was. Kassler and her 
son took the train to Phoenix, where the Wrights were, by then, spending their winters, 
arriving at three in the morning. They were met, taken to the new Taliesin and slept late. 
When they came out onto the loggia it was a cool, crisp sunny morning. Wright looked at 
her penetratingly, then said, "Betty and Fritzli! You know I think what you should do for 
the next few days is paint the insides of your quarters white." He had, in other words, 
immediately sensed her need and was offering her his indefinite hospitality. That he had 
showed such generosity and understanding was still deeply moving to Mrs. Kassler forty 
years later. {interview with author.} 

Throughout his life many women found Wright irresistible, often in a way they could not 
really explain. Miriam Noel wrote about the allure of his fleetingly unguarded gaze, and so 
did Olgivanna Wright : "He gave me that wonderful swift look and there was an extremely 
brilliant sheen in his eyes," she wrote. {"Our House," CT, January 1, 1959.} His ability to 
be gallant was almost a reflex, though, one has to add, it trembled on the verge of being 
pornographic. Writing to Aline Saarinen, the writer, wife of Eero Saarinen, the famous 
architect, Wright, who was then in his eighties, thanked her for the bouquet of flowers 
"containing the baby-adder-I kiss you for the flowers and allowed the baby-adder to 
bite me on the lips. There is some swelling. . . ." {June 2, 1953, Archives of American 
Art.} As a rule he saved his best insults for men and, as might be gathered from his letter 
to Richard Lloyd Jones, easily descended to name calling. Writing to Oskar Stonorov, 
Wright made several references to the former's ample outlines. Examples of his ability to 
switch from malice to remorse are equally numerous. His way of apologizing was 
characteristic and showed a certain insight. To Aline Saarinen, referring to a similar 
occasion, he wrote, "Here is apology for breaking down when I could rightfully be 
expected to contribute a telling note to the occasion. . . . But it was either that or sobbing, 
and I chose to swear-the male substitute for tears. . . ." {October 26, 1956, Archives of 
American Art.} 

In many respects Wright was shrewd and calculating, and yet, the English writer C. S. 
Nott thought, he was essentially gullible. "Like all geniuses [he] . . . was . . . naive and 
would believe anyone who was nice to him and flattered him; he could not see through 
people." {Further Teachings of Gurdjieff, C. S. Nott, p. 153.} One day while Nott was 
staying at Taliesin, Wright came to him with a letter from a man in Mexico who claimed 
to know where a fortune was hidden (but who, for some reason, could not go there 
himself). Nevertheless he guaranteed that if Wright would advance him a thousand 
dollars, he would be repaid fivefold. Wright wanted to know whether Nott was willing to 
join him in the scheme. Nott continued, "After I had read the letter I said, 'You don't really 
believe this, do you?' 'Why not?' he said. 'It seems genuine to me.' 'It's one of the oldest 
swindles I know,' I said." Wright refused to believe him, and was with difficulty dissuaded 
from parting with his cash by another friend who happened to be staying there. The 
anecdote is revealing because it goes some distance toward explaining Wright's injured 
feelings when others were not as ready to accept his facile explanations as he wanted them 
to be, or to gamble their money on whatever getrich-quick scheme he had thought of that 
week. When rebuffed, his amour propre would become involved, and on that point he was, 
as Nott said, "prickly." Those who became close to him learned he had to be handled with 
care; "managed" is the word they used. {Eric Wright to author.} By all accounts one of the 
masters of this tightrope walking was his indispensable assistant Gene Masselink, another 
was his wife Olgivanna, and a third was Jack Howe .  

That he made severe demands on himself went without saying. The Lloyd Jones insistence 
that he, as a young farmhand in the summers, "add tired to tired," something he had so 
fiercely resented, became, as he aged, a maxim he quoted with relish and applied with 
most vigor to those who were his nearest and dearest. Frank Lloyd Wright insisted that 
they be as stoical as he was. One of the most vivid examples of this is given by Olgivanna 
Wright, who described an evening boat party that he had organized for the pond below 
their hill the first summer she went to live at Taliesin . He had draped their boat with 
mosquito netting, but it was not fine enough, and, as they got out into the middle of the 
lake, thousands of insects found their way under the net and began to persecute her and a 
visiting friend. {The Shining Brow, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, p. 89.} The women 
frantically begged him to make for the shoreline; he became more and more stubbornly 
determined to continue. It was up to them not to mind. By the time they reached dry land 
both women were covered with bites, and one of Olgivanna's eyes was completely closed 
from the swelling. They made up their differences later. His daughter Iovanna thought his 
ability to endure pain quite extraordinary. Perhaps most amusing, in retrospect, was his 
indomitable self-assurance.  

He had his own way of surviving: he never looked back. Howe said that he never 
reminisced about his past. He dismissed what he had once built, for the most part; what 
counted was whatever he was working on now. {to author.} And one never knew what he 
would do next. His close friends Herbert and Eloise Fritz of Spring Green, who went to 
many of his famous Sunday picnics, like to tell about the time he appeared wearing a 
beautiful white suit and a new set of false teeth. He presided benevolently over the meal 
and after it was over, took out his teeth and sat there, calmly cleaning them with an onion. 
Another former apprentice related an anecdote that had been told to him by Gene 
Masselink . It seemed that on one occasion in Madison, Wright went to a wholesale house 
to buy tumblers. As he walked through the store he was pursued by a persistent salesman 
who had a particular tumbler he wanted to sell because, he said, it could be dropped and 
would not break. He kept on demonstrating this. Wright ignored him for as long as he 
could, then turned to him and said, "Here, give me one and let me try." With that, he 
dropped the tumbler in the identical manner and it broke into a thousand pieces. Wright 
turned to the salesman and said, "Good. I'll take twelve dozen." Dorothy Meyer, wife of 
the Madison Capital Times columnist, refused to categorize him except to say, "One felt in 
the presence of a great man." Herb Fritz said, "He'd either shock you or amuse you. He was 
two hundred percent alive." {in an interview with author} 

Wright's autobiography first appeared in 1932, with the modest first printing of 2,500 
copies, the publisher having no confidence in his ability to sell, at the height of the 
depression, what are now collectors' items. He had started writing it in the autumn of 1926 
when he and Olgivanna were in hiding in their Lake Minnetonka cabin. He kept up his 
pace with his usual energy and persistence so that, well before a divorce from Miriam Noel 
seemed possible, he was fretting about how to copyright the book so that she could not 
claim part of the proceeds. (His sister Jane suggested that he put it in Olgivanna's name.) 
It has been written in a self-consciously "poetic" style that must have gone through many 
revisions before its author, self-taught as ever, had hammered out the kind of prose he 
wanted. He might have been influenced by Sullivan's The Autobiography of an Idea, in 
which Sullivan describes his childhood in the third person, since Wright also uses this 
device as if aiming for a certain mythological tone. He could also have been influenced by 
the highly mannered storyteller's tone Carl Sandburg adopted for his multivolume 
biography of Abraham Lincoln, the first volume of which was published that year, and 
which Wright would have known about since Sandburg was a friend of his. Typical of that 
tone is Sandburg's statement that "she believed in God, in the Bible, in mankind, in the 
past and future, in babies, people, animals, flowers, fishes, in foundations and roofs, in 
time and the eternities outside of time. . . ." {Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years: vol. 1, 
Carl Sandburg, p. 13.} He wrote, that is to say, in a seemingly simple statement of the 
eternal truths that now seems self-conscious and cliched, although it was once much 
admired. Woollcott seemed to believe Wright had been influenced in this direction since 
he grumbled about the latter's "Lincolnesque" writing style. The fact that Wright would 
adopt this particular tone is consistent with his desire to present himself as a homegrown 
product of the American Midwest, just like Sandburg, but his imitation stops short of 
parody and, to a surprising extent, conveys the dreaming image of a farm boy, moving 
through a magical world of exquisite sights and sounds intermittently interrupted by 
demands that he face the grim realities of a pioneer's life. These twin themes-the almost 
hypersensitive responsiveness to nature and the influence of his Welsh family's puritanical 
beliefs-along with his sense of rootedness in both, are conveyed with remarkable 
swiftness, clarity and economy, when one considers that this was the author's first attempt. 
One wag commented that the book reads as if it had been translated from the Welsh, and, 
indeed, the author's fondness for eliminating verbs (which became a mania as his book 
went through numerous revisions and reprintings) contributes to this effect. It is a safe 
guess that whenever the language becomes impenetrable it is either because Wright does 
not want to make a certain confession or because his thoughts are far more disorganized 
and unfocused than he would have it appear. In fact one can see a great many aspects of 
his character in his narrative's shifting tone, which tends to develop from melodically 
sustained passages of description to exhaustive recapitulations-of, for instance, the 
highminded reasons why he left his wife in 1909-to ingenious arguments in which he 
shifts the blame for his sensationally spendthrift ways onto all those who had made it so 
easy for him to borrow money. The poet, the aesthete, the dazzling creator, the scamp 
tirelessly bent on ways to excuse himself and accuse others, the Welsh moralist thundering 
from his pulpit-they are all here . Wright is at his best when he is content to describe the 
vivid past: his first memories of his parents, of his Welsh clan, of his early struggles, the 
chapel and, always, his beloved Valley. He divided his narrative into five sections or 
"books." Every one of them begins with a scene set in The Valley, as if that were the 
eternal point of return. 

Like all autobiographies, his glosses over some facts and misrepresents others. In common 
with Lloyd George, his truth seemed to be curved, and this casual attitude toward facts and 
figures made some uncomfortable, unsure whether to take it as evidence of a superior 
imagination or proof of severe personal shortcomings, on a par with having changed his 
middle name. {MOR, p. 169.} (At that time, too, he was experimenting with new initials, 
having hit upon the Welsh abbreviation for Lloyd as a double L, hence his signature of 
"F.LL.W" and, finally, "F.Ll.W.") There was something too unsettling about his airy 
refusal to be bound by other people's realities, something too mocking in his picaresque 
mood, so that it would be easy to miss the underlying seriousness of tone. If, early in the 
1930s, Wright felt embattled and alone, if he knew how drastically the tide of architecture 
had turned against him, leaving him in the position of lonely survivor of an outmoded 
aesthetic, then the only way to counteract that impression would be the energetic argument 
that he was the standard-bearer for a new, quintessentially American vision that owed 
nothing to European influences, particularly not those becoming admired in the early 
1930s. He needed to appear as an individualist, even an anarchist in architectural terms, 
and so, apart from the predictable references to his "Lieber Meister," and some safe 
comments about peripheral influences, Wright continued to avoid the dangerous subject of 
the Arts and Crafts Movement . He was perhaps aware that, by 1930, no one remembered 
that the concept of an organic architecture had originated with Ruskin, or even that the 
phrase "in the nature of materials," which became identified with him, had also been 
coined by someone else: in this case, the English architect Joseph Twyman, follower of 
William Morris, and one of the early proselytizers for that master's ideas in Chicago. {BR, 
p. 18.} As Albert Bush-Brown wrote in the Atlantic after Wright's death, "His themes are 
nineteenth-century themes. First there is the hero, of Wagnerian dimensions, capable of 
great public service, as Plutarch would have him, but a Carlylean hero forced to breast the 
wave of ignorance around him. This hero, a Messiah in the lineage of Christ, a 
philosopher like Lao-tse, owes his strength to nature; his parables come from the field; 
his metaphor is the root and flower, never the machine. . . ." {The Atlantic, August 1959, 
p. 24.} 

In Wright's narrative one could find all the themes that had been historically celebrated in 
American literature, i.e., that the true life was lived close to the soil, that small settlements 
were superior to large ones, that the city was the source of all evil, and that the purpose of 
American democracy was to create "an original form of natural life in which the 
individual stands supreme. . . ." Whatever the short-comings of Wright's buildings, and 
there were many, one had to concede (this author continued) that their creator had the 
courage of his high convictions and they reflected his belief that architecture's noblest 
function was to build memorable works of art. As Wright himself wrote, "Let us all 
willingly confess that modern architecture is, first of all, in the nature of a spiritual 
conviction-detail, curtail, appropriate or falsify it how you may. If the primal spiritual 
insight as conviction is lacking, no more than reiteration of certain bald, machine-age 
commonplaces will be the barren result of any devotion, however esthetic." That this 
notorious figure should turn out to be a man of courageous convictions, as well as someone 
with beguiling wit and charm and the gusto of a man half his age, was a distinct 
revelation. An Autobiography sold out its first printing almost at once, went to a second, 
was reprinted in 1938, revised and enlarged in 1943 and eventually published in a new, 
handsome edition some years after his death. {published in 1977.} Wright was at last 
telling his version of his "stormy life," and this was considered news enough to warrant 
half a column in The New York Times of March 30, 1932.  

In his famous book, Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion suggested that Wright's oeuvre 
was a quintessential example of the "irrational and organic" versus the rational and 
geometrical. {GI, p. 336 (1941).} The comment followed the general trend of seeing 
Wright, exemplified by Albert Bush-Brown, as exemplifying the great nineteenth century 
romantic tradition of those artists who had, as Kenneth Clark wrote, "appealed to our 
emotions by analogies, buried memories or the sensuous use of color. . . ." {The Romantic 
Rebellion, Kenneth Clark, p. 19} Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the great early 
theorists of classicism, had said, "Beauty resembles the most limpid water drawn from a 
pure source, which is all the healthier for being tasteless." {The Romantic Rebellion, 
Kenneth Clark, p. 19} The centuries-old dichotomy between those whose work called 
forth a passionate emotional response and those whose work had its primary appeal for the 
intellect and the logic of order seemed to be played out once again in the lonely fight 
Wright was waging against the European modernists, those architects whose work 
repeated the commonplaces of the machine age because it lacked "spiritual conviction," 
and that had absolutely no flavor whatsoever. Some sharpeyed observers of Wright's 
writings also thought they perceived a sanctimonious or "preachy" trace of Ruskin's baleful 
influence, and they were right. This was evident everywhere in the autobiography, as 
might be gathered from other references to the "soul" of a design and to his belief in art, 
like religion, as a form of inner experience. {A2, p. 158} Nature, truth, goodness, the 
"countenance of principle," the perception of beauty as a moral test, as Thoreau wrote-it 
was quite out of vogue to be talking in these terms, if not verging on the ridiculous. 

As James D. Kornwolf pointed out in his biography of M. H. Baillie Scott, there were 
other basic differences. The Arts and Crafts Movement had been, essentially, a British 
rebellion against the new industrial-economic system and a society that made the 
"ultimate goal of human endeavor-of civilization-not the welfare of man but the 
production of wealth." {M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts  & Crafts Movement, James D. 
Kornwolf, on p. 490} What made the Arts and Crafts Movement unique was its insistence 
upon a healthful and beautiful environment. It was also a revolutionary idea "because each 
man would share in it," and if the movement's attempts to ruralize the towns and their 
social structure failed, along with the equal attempt to "wrest the production of goods . . . 
and even building itself, from the control of industry," it was a noble failure. "For a short 
time it replaced the false aesthetic of greedy industry with a true one, creating new, living 
forms that are unsurpassed . . . for their formal and functional integrity." Like Morris, 
Baillie Scott and others, Wright placed his emphasis upon man as a being with emotional 
and spiritual needs that transcended his physical ones. Speaking of the dangers of 
materialism, of technological advance divorced from any other considerations, Aldous 
Huxley wrote, "The mortal peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences 
(with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming 
apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism . . . are that human beings are 
nothing but bodies, animals, mere machines. . . ." Huxley was not alone in believing that 
there was something remorseless and dehumanizing about the new movement, and what 
one of its leading figures had to say on the subject was not reassuring. Le Corbusier more 
or less consciously revealed his scale of values by the comment that "considerable 
sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitant of the machine in order that purely abstract 
formal development . . . might be carried as far as possible." For his part, Wright came to 
the crux of the argument quickly by asking, "Why should architecture or objects of art in 
the machine age, just because they are made by machines, have to resemble machinery?" 
{NYT Book Review, August 3, 1941.} That humanist position, which would receive 
belated recognition, was hardly fashionable in 1930 as those in the new wave in France 
and Germany joined the ranks of the new aestheticians. What must have been an added 
irritant to Wright was the assertion by the new generation that "complete renunciation of 
past architectural developments, both literary and stylistic, was a prerequisite for the 
creation of any valid new architecture and the parallel claim . . . that they had created that 
architecture," as Kornwolf observed. "Wright's generation was as shocked by the 
anarchism of the program as by the egotism of the claim of success. It countered with 
equal vehemence, asserting the importance of precedent for principles and forms in art ." 
{M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts  & Cafts Movement, p. 488.} As for that, Wright could 
be just as dogmatic and egotistical as they were.  

Perhaps by then he meant it, but, in 1930, comparisons with younger colleagues were 
exactly what he meant to make, and the obverse of his assertion of spiritual superiority was 
the suspicion that leaders of the new movement were forming a conspiracy against him. 
His letter to that effect has not survived, but his fears can be assumed based on a reply by 
Lewis Mumford that, if there were such a cabal, it was wholly unconscious. Wright's main 
cause for concern at that moment was the architectural historian Hitchcock, then an art 
instructor at Vassar, who had just published an essay {November 26, 1928.} on Wright's 
work for Cahiers d'Art that, while complimentary, had placed Wright as an old master of 
the period before World War I, too tied to old influences (such as Sullivan's regrettable 
penchant for ornamentation) and wedded to the picturesque. This last was perhaps the 
most "anti-architectural" of qualities, so that despite Wright's stature as an artist, 
architect and engineer, he lacked those "literary" influences that were so much more 
acceptable to contemporary taste. Hitchcock concluded, "He remains, it is time to say 
without reservation, the greatest architect and perhaps the greatest American of the early 
twentieth century." 

The tone was meant to be friendly, but for Wright there seemed a complete inability to 
understand the underlying principles of his work, no doubt judged on the basis of a few 
bad photographs. What perhaps rankled most was the compliment that relegated him to a 
defunct epoch (and there was worse to come, since he would soon be called the "greatest 
architect of the nineteenth century"). Wright's bravado may be taken as an indication of 
the threat he felt Hitchcock's views represented to his own position. Indeed, as Kornwolf 
observed, Hitchcock (and other critics) could hardly wait, in 1930, for the "immediate and 
total" acceptance of the new architecture, even though he might suspect that it lacked some 
"spiritual" qualities. {M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts & Crafts Movement, p. 507} 
Hitchcock tended to dismiss the problem: "If Humanism be not, so much the worse for it." 
Mumford tried to mediate by explaining that this young writer's sympathies would 
naturally tend toward the postwar generation.  

Lewis Mumford, the great American social philosopher, city planner and architectural 
critic, was, fortunately for Wright, an early champion in the face of what seemed an 
avalanche of approval for the new architecture. Long before he wrote his most influential 
books, such as Technics and Civilization(1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938), 
Mumford had seen the threat that uncritical adoption of the machine posed for modern 
man, and deplored the same dehumanizing trends that he also saw in the new architectural 
aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic. The very qualities now seemingly outmoded in Wright's 
work, the respect for materials, the reverence for place, the organic quality of the 
building's design and the architect's attempt to satisfy the emotional and spiritual needs of 
the occupants-all those qualities now dismissed by the new critics-were precisely those 
Mumford thought most worth having. Wright was suitably grateful: Mumford, he 
declared, had a mind of "Emersonian quality." He needed Mumford's ability to mediate 
with the opposition; most of all, he needed his generous encouragement. Mumford was 
Wright's great support during that period, but he was by no means the only writer to see 
his unique qualities. 

Fiske Kimball, then curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose sympathies were 
with the classicism Wright now deplored, had referred in his history of architecture 
(American Architecture, 1928) to the shameful neglect of this giant in the field. That led 
to a reply from Wright in Arizona. Fiske Kimball responded with a card containing a 
quotation from the German poet and dramatist Johann C. F. von Schiller-"Art is living, 
breathing form"-that Wright took everywhere. {as described in his review, New York 
Herald Tribune, May 29, 1941.} Then there was Douglas Haskell, at that time a writer for 
the Architectural Record, who published a spirited defense of Wright in the Nation in 
1930 when it seemed that plans for the building of the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 
would not include him. This was unconscionable, because it was perfectly obvious that 
Wright had, for thirty years, been sending "a powerful original impulse" around the world. 
His conceitedness might be hard to take and his views unpopular with some, but, in the 
ruthless game of architecture, it took someone as brash and rebellious as he was to "push a 
whole civilization in front of him." {the Nation, December 3, 1930.} But there was even 
better to come. In the late spring of 1930 Wright was invited to give the famous Kahn 
Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Architecture at Princeton (published in book form the 
following year), and with that great honor went the privilege of mounting an exhibition of 
his work that would then travel around the country. It arrived in New York in June 1930 at 
the Architectural League headquarters, 115 West Fortieth Street, the first time an 
exhibition of Wright's had been seen there. Time magazine noted that the East had now 
made common cause with the Midwest in acknowledging Frank Lloyd Wright as a 
"pioneer in modernism." It was "Wright's Time," the magazine stated. That exhibition led 
to a flurry of articles by authors rediscovering the home-grown talents of this neglected 
artist and writing admiring paragraphs, in particular, about the model on display for his 
office tower close beside St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie, which had been designed as a 
central trunk with reinforced concrete piers running up it and, like a tree, growing wider 
as it spread upward. It was now conceded that, as H. I. Brock wrote in the New York 
Times Magazine, "at the very beginning of the century he was doing those very 
flat-topped houses with horizontal bands of windows which are now being exploited by 
our most advanced young architects as the newest thing. . . ." {published on June 29, 
1930.} 

Yet another factor that may have educated critics' eyes to find new value in Wright's work 
was the arrival of the Art Deco style . Such geometrical and angular designs and 
decorative motifs, ostensibly inspired by Cubism, had their origins, according to some 
writers, at the turn of the century, in the work of the Vienna Secessionists, Charles Rennie 
Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Art Deco style had been introduced in a famous 
Paris exhibition, the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels 
Modernes" of 1925, hence its name. It would be followed four years later by another 
famous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Architect and the Industrial 
Arts,  " which introduced the new vogue to New York. Wright's early work had, it was 
noted, the "refined geometrical formalism" found in much later Art Deco, and his Los 
Angeles design, Hollyhock House in particular, was almost the prototype for the California 
Deco style-more than a decade before the East had discovered it. {In the Deco Style, 
Klein, McClelland and Haslam, p. 31, p. 162}  

This new flurry of interest was not confined to the East Coast. A few months later 
architects might be seen "snooping around" the houses he had built in Oak Park and 
taking copious notes, a lawyer in Racine, Wisconsin, reported. This was of a piece with 
another incident in which Wright took even greater pride. When the Illinois chapter of the 
American Institute of Architects decided to hold a banquet in his honor in late 1929, 105 
people bought tickets (55 being the most they had ever had before). There had never been 
such a gathering, and so it looked as if the profession no longer had any ill feeling toward 
him, Wright told Lloyd. {EW, October 29, 1929.} 

He kept his own pen sharpened to a fine point. When he learned that the Architectural 
Record planned to publish a review of Hitchcock's latest book, Modern Architecture, in 
late 1929, he shot off a telegram to its editor asking for the right to review it. The barb was 
unmistakable; the editor diplomatically replied that the review had already been assigned. 
Meantime there was the matter of an article about Wright's office tower for the Bouwerie, 
which the editor planned to give prominent mention. {A. Lawrence Kocher, managing 
editor, T, November 23, 1929.} Wright's doublesided approach: a flattering courtship of 
writers, editors and critics who favored his work and dogged pursuit of those who did not 
(in the hope of changing their minds) was the method he had developed for three decades. 
The value of manipulating the press was something he had learned from his father; those 
years of being pilloried in the papers had left an indelible scar. And when Vanity Fair 
published an article in December 1931 dismissing him as an "aging individualist," and 
calling Raymond Hood (then organizing the Chicago World's Fair, which had excluded 
Wright) the better architect, Wright thrashed around for a way to retaliate. He hit upon the 
idea of having the famous photographer Edward Steichen take his cause up with the 
magazine. Then he thought better of it. 

At a time when Wright was making such a valiant effort at a "come-back" and keeping 
his creditors placated. He had not yet settled on a phrase that successfully defined his own 
work and distinguished it from the rest. At times he called it "organic architecture"; at 
other times he appeared to speak of himself as a modernist, a term he would later drop and 
heatedly denounce. As for those exponents of the sleek, austere new steel-and-glass 
edifices, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. Oud, Walter Gropius and the like, 
Hitchcock had tried calling them the New Pioneers in his book Modern Architecture, and 
some other writers were using the term New Architecture, but both had their flaws. Alice 
Goldfarb Marquis, biographer of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founder of the newly formed Museum 
of Modern Art in New York {it opened on November 8, 1929.}, states that Barr was the 
one who came up with the label that would take hold, the International Style."His name 
was an echo of the fifteenth century's international style of painting, so called because 
artists in many European countries began to use oil paints, linear perspective, and secular 
subject matter as part of the High Renaissance." {Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Missionary for the 
Modern, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, p. 85} Philip Johnson later commented that he had 
taken on the work of publicizing the new style: "I was the drummer and 
screamer-arounder." 

Philip Johnson, an early collector of modern art, an intellectual and a wealthy connoisseur, 
had studied classics at Harvard and had become fascinated by the new European 
modernists, as exemplified by work at the Bauhaus, after reading an essay on the subject 
by Hitchcock. He met Barr at Wellesley, where the latter was then teaching, and happened 
to remark that he was thinking of founding a museum of modern art. Barr invited him to 
join it and take charge of the department of architecture. The two men made overtures to 
Hitchcock, and all three were soon planning their first exhibition of modern architecture, 
to feature the International Style they fervently admired. (It opened at MOMA on February 
10, 1932.) 

As soon as he knew, through Mumford, that plans were in the works, Wright was ready to 
denounce the whole process. The fact that Hitchcock was involved was enough, but he also 
doubted whether Johnson, that youthful unknown, would be sufficiently respectful; and his 
fears were well founded since Johnson is the one credited with the quip that Wright was 
"America's greatest nineteenth century architect." {NYT, April 20, 1979.} Although he 
was soon invited to exhibit, Wright was still on his guard against this small group of 
propagandists relentlessly promoting a narrow cause, as he called them, but he allowed 
Johnson to persuade him against his better judgment. {to Mumford, April 7, 1931.} 
Having agreed to cooperate, he very characteristically decided to pull out at the eleventh 
hour, that is to say, a month before the show was set to open. He explained to Johnson that 
he did not object to being seen beside Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, or even 
George Howe and William Lescaze, whom he respected and thought were "good men." 
What he did object to was the inclusion of Raymond Hood, that builder of mediocre 
skyscrapers, in the exhibition, and also Richard Neutra. 

By 1931 Wright had become as disenchanted with Neutra as he had with Schindler (the 
one Wright thought had traded so unscrupulously on his reputation). Fortunately for 
Wright, Schindler's work had not met with favor from Hitchcock and Johnson, and despite 
his pleas to be included Schindler at least was not going to be shown on an equal footing 
with his mentor, just a few years after he had been a lowly assistant (in Wright's view). 
{NE, p. 105.} But Neutra had been more fortunate. In common with Schindler, he was 
now considered one of the leading practitioners of the International Style on the West 
Coast. That would be enough to make Wright mutinous, but, as fate would have it, he had 
been further antagonized by an unfortunate incident involving another exhibition that 
Schindler's wife, Pauline, had organized in Los Angeles the year before. Wright agreed to 
be included and sent material, only to find that the exhibition was being titled "Three 
Architects of International Renown. That happened in the spring of 1930; he immediately 
demanded that his work be withdrawn. {It was not withdrawn for the Los Angeles 
showing but was removed for the subsequent tour.} It had been too big an affront to his 
pride, and the memory was green the following year when, it appeared, the same insult 
was about to be perpetrated all over again.  He wrote a very critical letter of protest to 
Johnson. 

Johnson was naturally horrified. He had gone to enormous pains to placate the prickly 
architect, and so had Hitchcock. Both men knew that they were skating on thin ice but 
were determined to have their old master; indeed, given Wright's prominence and his 
controversial status, they could hardly avoid including him. Two days later Johnson 
responded with an anguished telegram stating that they needed him and could not do 
without him. {T, January 21, 1932.} He had saved the day for the moment, at least. And it 
was a good thing that Wright would be included, Mumford told that architect a few days 
later. Despite Mumford's fervent hope that Wright would be glad he had been included, 
the architect could not have been very happy with the final outcome since the catalogue, as 
written by Alfred Barr, echoed Hitchcock's dictum that he was forerunner of a movement 
that younger men had now brought to a triumphant fulfillment. {NE, p. 102.} Wright's 
importance, in other words, was not on his own terms, for what he had thought and 
accomplished for forty years, but only in the context of a movement that he detested and 
believed wholly opposed to his central philosophy. The sop thrown to his pride, that he 
was "the embodiment of the romantic principle of individualism," whose work remained 
"a challenge to the classical austerity of the style of his best younger contemporaries," 
would not have given him much comfort. 

The damage had been done. The Museum of Modern Art's assessment of Wright became 
the one generally accepted by the proselytizers of the International Style, which did not 
mean that Wright ever accepted his subordinate status or ever stopped denouncing it and 
them. His relationship with the museum remained basically antagonistic, despite that 
institution's attempts to make amends with subsequent exhibitions. As late as 1953, 
Wright was charging that MOMA had made "a sinister attempt to betray American 
Organic Architecture."  {Architectural Record, September 1953, p. 12.} As for the young 
Philip Johnson, who would go on to become a famous architect himself, Wright's attitude 
veered between a willingness to let bygones be bygones and a mischievous impulse to get 
even with him for the exhibition of 1932. Years later, referring to the all-glass house 
Johnson built for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, just after World War II, and upon 
meeting Johnson again, Wright joked, "Ah yes! Philip Johnson! You're the man who 
builds those little houses and then leaves them out in the rain." {the remark sounds 
apocryphal but, according to Johnson, was actually made.} It became a famous anecdote, 
as well as a demonstration of Wright's adroit ability to make good use of a quip that, all 
those years before, had been used against him. As for the International Style itself, no 
words could express his contempt for this "evil crusade," this manifestation of 
"totalitarianism. . . ." {Architectural Record, September 1953, p. 12.} As the 1930s began, 
there was something admirable and even courageous about Wright's loyalty to those ideals 
that stood for sanity and humaneness in an increasingly uncertain world, and something 
wonderful about the fact that his imaginative gifts were still intact-ageless, almost. He 
was, as Harold Nicolson observed with great prescience of Churchill in 1931, a man who 
led forlorn hopes. There was every likelihood that when architecture became disenchanted 
with the new movement, as he knew it must, he would once again be accepted on his own 
terms and "summoned to leadership." {Vanity Fair, February 1931, p. 197.} 


Taliesin 

No colors fade, no leaves decay,  
No fires char that beauty nor ever  
Can until the world is changed  
And ended. 

"The Phoenix" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 108} 

The belief of the International Style's exponents that Wright, at the age of sixty-five, 
should be relegated to the background, while profoundly mistaken, was understandable 
given the circumstances. It was Wright's bad luck that two of his most brilliant designs, for 
St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie and San Marcos-in-the-Desert, would never be built. 
True, Wright had exhibited, along with his model for St. Mark's, another promising idea, 
for a modernistic-looking house on a western mesa, although this, too, would not be 
built. He had finished the design for another ambitious and unrealized project, a series of 
Chicago apartment towers. He did show at the Museum of Modern Art one house design 
that would become a reality, the Malcolm Willey house in Minneapolis, which, for all its 
scaled-down size and traditional materials (brick and wood), represented several 
important breakthroughs in terms of design that Wright would incorporate into his later 
houses: the first use of a kitchen work space that was part of the living room, the first use 
of a carport, the first use of radiant heating in the floors and the first use of a balcony 
parapet of lapped siding. But the most exciting works were his designs for St. Mark's and 
San Marcos. Had these been under construction when the MOMA exhibition opened, the 
tone might have been distinctly more respectful and Wright's "come-back" an 
accomplished fact. 

As it was, even admirers like Harold Sterner, a New York City architect, spoke in elegiac 
terms about him some years afterward. {in 1936} "In Europe the names of Sullivan and 
Wright are famous and respected, but both of these men were given relatively few 
opportunities to practice their genius, and now Sullivan is long since dead and Frank 
Lloyd Wright approaching the end of his career," he observed.  {Architectural Forum, 
February 1936, p. 7.} It did not help that Wright had steadfastly refused to join the 
professional organization of his peers, the American Institute of Architects. For whatever 
reasons, he dismissed it as a political body and, as a writer explained, "attacked their 
integrity, antagonized their officers, and defied their right to set fees, write codes of ethics 
and influence the centers of finance, government and education." {the Atlantic, August 
1959.} He liked to quip that the name should have been the "American Institute of 
Appearances," and called its members "old gentlemen afraid to go out without their 
rubbers." {Louisville Courier Journal, April 9, 1959.} These quips sound like vintage 
Wright and not particularly cutting ones at that, but his slights had the effect of 
maintaining the gulf between himself and other professionals and of adding further weight 
to the idea of himself as a gifted maverick, an iconoclast. At least one wag in Chicago 
called him "Frank Lloyd Wrong," and the nickname stuck. {Edgar Tafel to author.} These 
kinds of professional gibes would have further isolated him in his rural kingdom at a time 
when he was frantic for any help he could get. As it was, he faced the depression years 
with no money, no prospects (apart from the Willey house), a staff of seven or eight 
draftsmen, a farm to run, a wife, a stepdaughter and a little girl. 

Like his sister Maginel's, Wright's hair went gray at an early stage, so for a long time he 
looked every one of his years, and he eventually needed glasses, although he is seldom 
photographed wearing them. {Wright to DDM, 1929.} But his physical and creative 
energies had scarcely diminished. Two years before he died, when he was examined by a 
specialist in geriatrics, he was pronounced in such good health that he would live for 
another twenty years. (He was then eighty-nine.) He said he would settle for three more, 
and then added irritably, "I wish people wouldn't remind me of my age." {remark made to 
William H. Short.} That was characteristic. Mary Matthews, wife of a British architect 
who studied with Wright, recalled conducting a group of visitors around Taliesin. During 
the tour one guest exclaimed that he thought Wright was dead. She retold the anecdote to 
the architect, thinking it would give him a laugh, and was sent in disgrace to Mrs. 
Wright's room to be instructed about the taboo subject of death, because "he was so afraid 
of it." {interview with author} 

His Welsh family's straitlaced horror of tobacco-one of his grand-mother's regrets 
being, apparently, that she never persuaded "Ein Tad" to give up his pipe-ensured that 
Wright would similarly regard smoking as a moral flaw and become more vehement on 
the subject as he aged. Like the Lloyd Joneses, he regarded alcohol with disgust, although, 
in that respect, he mellowed slightly. He had established a vineyard, and Olgivanna 
succeeded in arguing that if they were going to grow grapes, they should make wine. After 
that he would partake occasionally, and he developed a taste for whiskey after Alexander 
Woollcott brought him a bottle of Bushmill's Old Irish. {John H. Howe to author.} Herbert 
Fritz recalled seeing him hold up a bottle with the words "Boys, you have your youth and I 
have this." {to author} But his conversion hardly amounted to capitulation; he might have 
a small glass once or twice a week. Plenty of exercise, afternoon naps and a lifetime spent 
eating homegrown food had sustained his health so that his bearing, mien, attitudes and 
robust appetite for life were those of a much younger man. 

He was without prospects, and the depression had hammered the final nail in the coffin of 
his corporation. Although "Uncle" Ben Page clung to his overseer's right to supervise 
Wright's spending, before long there was no more money to worry about, and that paragon 
of virtue, the long-suffering Darwin Martin, was as poor as everyone else. Martin wrote 
to say that he had seen Wright's autobiography for sale in the bookshops but, alas, could 
not afford to buy a copy. Wright replied it was hard to believe that the financially astute 
DDM could be down to carfare and lunch money. For Wright's part, his pockets were full 
of holes from carrying around [small change]. He apologized for not having written, that 
spring of 1932. He used the curious metaphor of hanging. His book and other work had 
netted him about $14,000 over the past two years, but even so he had been hit again.  

The calamity to which he referred was, no doubt, the very real threat that Taliesin would 
be sold again for unpaid insurance, mortgage and back taxes. For two years he had 
managed to stave off disaster at the eleventh hour, most recently by a last-minute appeal 
to his brother-in-law, Andrew Porter, for $500. {T, December 30, 1931.} But, as a 
general rule, the mortgage of time, as he wrote, was always threatening to foreclose on 
human fallibility. {A2, p. 31} His wonderful idea of founding a school for the applied arts 
had fallen flat, despite his clever use of the forum of his Princeton lectures to promote his 
concept. At that point he should have given up, but the Wrights were desperate. Sometime 
in 1931 it occurred to the Wrights that if they could attract twenty or thirty students at a 
tuition of $650 a year, a steady source of income would be provided for Taliesin, and his 
extra income as a writer and lecturer would make up the difference. Even after they had 
written and sent out a circular letter in the summer of 1932 they still hoped to get a 
prominent figure to run their school. Wijdeveld had inspected the premises but had not yet 
definitely declined, and when he did, Wright turned hopefully to Mumford. (He declined.) 
Jens Jensen, the distinguished landscape artist, leader of the movement to use native 
materials in landscaping, who had numbered the two Henry Fords, Sr. and Jr., among his 
clients, as well as Rockefeller, had been courted and had given liberal advice ("You cannot 
get away from yourself") but no commitment to actually teach. The brilliant woman artist, 
Georgia O'Keeffe, was then approached, and even Alexander Woollcott; both demurred. 

No one wanted to be ensnared in what must have seemed like one more of Wright's 
foolhardy schemes, particularly since, at some point in the discussion, he would have made 
it charmingly clear that he had no money. More to the point, perhaps, Wright's concept of 
what was basically an arts-and-crafts workshop was being launched at a moment when 
the concept of the architect was changing, in common with a general shift toward 
professionalism, from the idea of master builder and toward the theoretical and scholarly. 
His insistence upon the importance of direct experience and an apprenticeship to the 
master must have seemed almost an anachronism. Furthermore, he was continuing to 
place what must have seemed an old-fashioned emphasis upon beauty and creativity just 
as many were jettisoning such theories in favor of the idea of architecture as an activity 
that should be directed toward the pressing social and economic problems of the age. 
Wright's loud praises for the virtues of unpaid work, for early breakfasts, hand labor and 
long evenings in the drafting room must have sounded far too bracing to contemporary 
tastes, and later bulletins from the front were not reassuring, 

It should be noted that Taliesin's later emphasis upon spiritual development, or what might 
be called group therapy on the Gurdjieff model, was absent from the first manifesto, which 
still echoed the goals he had outlined for the revived Hillside Home School. He would take 
on the responsibility of instructing his students in the use of machinery, for furniture, 
textiles, metalwork and so on, and the actual products, including architectural models, 
would then be sent around on traveling exhibitions. He envisioned a flourishing cottage 
industry and still clung to the idea that industry would eventually be brought in to sponsor 
the work. {NYT, November 6, 1932} And, even at that early stage, he was thinking on an 
even grander scale, about the formation of an Arcadian community, his future "Broadacre 
City,  " an idea that would come to fruition three years later. As usual, Wright was full of 
expansive and optimistic goals for the future. There was just one hitch. If he could not get 
Wijdeveld, Mumford, Jensen or Woollcott, who would run the school? 

Olgivanna Wright was in poor health as 1932 began. She felt more and more tired, so 
exhausted that she could no longer climb up their hill. She went to Chicago for X-rays, 
and the doctor discovered several tubercular spots on her left lung and ordered her to gain 
weight. So she went on a regime of two quarts of milk a day, along with five raw eggs, raw 
cabbage and orange juice, and gained eight pounds in a month. Her energy returned, and 
that was good news because the Fellowship was due to begin in October and she was in 
charge. She was touring the countryside asking for donations of plates, cooking equipment 
and spare beds, anything she could find. Her husband had charmed twenty local workmen 
into making repairs at Hillside, with the promise of a share in tuition fees once the 
students arrived. Getting the necessary supplies was a little harder. In years to come 
Wright would boast that he had managed to circumvent the suspicious local merchants by 
ordering directly from wholesalers. {Sophia Mumford to author.} The school's kitchen had 
been restored, as had the dining room, and the workmen had been given sleeping quarters 
when Olgivanna Wright described their progress in a letter to Mrs. Martin in the summer 
of 1932. {to Jane Porter, March 19, 1932.} As for the enrollment, they had a number of 
students already, including five Vassar graduates.  

Herbert Fritz, the architect son of the man who survived the 1914 Taliesin fire, remembers 
going to Taliesin when he was about seven and Olgivanna Wright and daughter Svetlana 
had just come to live there: "I remember the sunny day, the stone walls, the beautiful 
spreading roofs, the hollyhocks and delphiniums. . . ." At the time of the murder-fire, his 
father had been working there as a draftsman and had  gymnastic training. This was what 
saved him because the window he crashed through was a story and a half above the 
ground. Even so, Fritz recalled, he had broken an arm. He said, "My father never talked 
about what he saw happening. I think he had emotional problems, because he would just 
stand and stare off into space." {interview with author.} His grandfather Alfred Larson 
had been a farmer-mason from Norway and had built most of Taliesin. Since his father's 
time, aunts, uncles, sisters, nieces, nephews and brothers-in-law had worked there; 
Aunts Emma and Mabel, Alfred's daughters, would become the cooks for the Fellowship. 
Fritz has another memory of Wright's riding horseback through the meadows and over the 
winding country roads. "Those were, in those days, scarcely wide enough for two buggies 
to pass, and one could reach up or down . . . and pick wild asters, ragged gypsy, 
brown-eyed susans, or wild plums from the branches of the thickets." Fritz had grown up 
with horses, and after his sister Frances had struck up a friendship with Svetlana, they 
visited Taliesin often, and he made himself useful by catching, saddling and harnessing 
the horses. Svetlana rode a spirited white horse, Beauty, which they talk about still. Beauty 
would occasionally allow herself to be used as a packhorse, so they took her on a picnic. 
Mr. and Mrs. Wright and the rest of them hiked past Phoebe Point and up into the hills 
above the river. The weather was perfect, the scene Arcadian. Wright sat down with his 
back against a tree and said, "Let us loaf and invite the soul." 

Fritz had found some elegant old carriages in the Hillside barn: a brougham, a victoria, 
and a wagonette that had been used to bring the Hillside students from the train in Spring 
Green. So he polished up the victoria and mended the cushions, hitched up Curly and 
Dick, the farming team, and he and the Wrights drove over to Cousin Dick's. That meant 
passing through the Rieder farmyard to get to the main road. Farmer Rieder had a 
barnyard on one side of what is now the present driveway and a pigpen on the other. 
Wright said he did not enjoy driving past the pigpen and would buy that farm one day. 

Taliesin was their playground, and Fritz, who loved the farm life, climbed trees, rowed 
boats and went swimming, as well as mowing, raking or pitching hay and cultivating corn. 
Not only did he love horses, but he was just as bedazzled by fine automobiles as Mr. 
Wright was. There was one Cord Phaeton in particular, a masterpiece of design, that was 
Wright's pride and joy. When the driveway had dissolved into liquid mud, the beautiful 
Cord would sink in up to its axles and Fritz and the other boys would get out the 
Caterpillar tractor from down near the dam and pull the Cord out of the mud. It seemed 
natural, once he became a high school sophomore, that he should work at Taliesin during 
the summer vacation. He and Frances also spent winter vacations at Taliesin, and he has 
an enduring memory of the living room, which seemed to radiate a light of its own, ". . . 
with the warm waxed cypress floor, the fire in the golden limestone fireplace, the view of 
the Wisconsin River and the hills beyond. . . ." There was always the faint smell of pearly 
everlasting or Indian tobacco and another aroma, indefinable but peculiar to Taliesin. 
They would play records on the Victrola-Wagner, Dvor-k and Spanish songs sung by 
Tito Schipa, a great favorite of Mr. Wright's-and examine his collection of musical 
instruments: a lute, a harpsichord, a balalaika and some Dushkin recorders. His eye was 
uncanny. He had bought an exquisite Storioni violin for Svetlana and would confound the 
experts with his knowledge of the size and proportion of a violin. On another occasion, 
Fritz remembered seeing him study the proportions of their two Lincoln Continentals and 
correctly conclude that one was two inches higher than the other. Wright also said he 
could identify the work of every mason who had ever built a wall at Taliesin, although, 
since the same stone had been used, it was impossible for an untutored eye to see the 
difference. 

That Christmas week ended with a New Year's party for Svetlana and her friends, and 
Fritz asked her mother to dance. Mrs. Wright answered, "No thank you. I only dance with 
Mr. Wright." As for her husband, he spent hours in the drafting room while the day 
slipped away. One evening Mrs. Wright took him to task, and he replied, "Well, who am I 
doing it for?" They played checkers and charades and games like "Coffee Pot" and 
"Ghosts." A few years after that, one of their favorite games became "Murder." Fritz and 
his sister had invited a group of apprentices, along with Iovanna, to their house and the 
game was in full swing that evening when Mrs. Wright arrived to get Iovanna. Just as she 
drove into their yard, all the lights went out and someone yelled "Murder!" It was a long 
time before Mrs. Wright could laugh about that. 

Herbert Fritz was, in other words, growing up at Taliesin just as the Fellowship was being 
organized, and sharing quarters with the pioneers, students like Rudolph Mock from 
Switzerland, and Wright's Danish secretary, Karl Jensen, who could not pronounce his r's 
and would say things like "wed stwing" and "womb." Wright's chief draftsman at that time 
was Henry Klumb, a native of Cologne who had joined him early in 1929 and worked on 
San Marcos, then supervised a traveling exhibition that went to Amsterdam, Berlin, 
Stuttgart, Antwerp and Brussels, the first such review of Wright's work in Europe since 
1909. Fritz watched the old laundry building at Hillside, made of green wood shingle, and 
the least vandalized, being transformed into a kitchen and dining room for the workmen. 
Pretty soon plowing corn lost its appeal, and he was given permission to dig foundation 
ditches. Mr. Wright always said yes. 

On a bright sunny morning in that summer of 1932, a gangling (six-foot-four) 
twenty-year-old college student who had been studying engineering in Evansville, 
Indiana, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge wandered into 
The Valley, having heard that Frank Lloyd Wright planned to open a school. His parents 
had driven him as far as Madison in the belief that he was about to enter the University of 
Wisconsin, but William Wesley Peters had other plans. He took the bus to Spring Green 
and walked the three and a half miles to Taliesin. Approaching the estate he saw a great 
many No Trespassing signs, so he went over to a farmhouse (one he would eventually 
own) to ask directions. He found the farmer sitting on the front porch in his underwear. 
"Oh, you mean the bungalow?" He should give the signs no mind, and just walk in. Peters 
was following this advice when he met up with Karl Jensen, who told him to return that 
afternoon. So, to fill the time, with the energy of a superb constitution, he ambled off for a 
ten-mile walk. (His physical prowess would become legendary; he said, modestly, "In 
those days when I pushed a piece of machinery I expected it to move.") Returning later in 
the day, he was finally ushered in to meet the architect. "I had thought he was tall and he 
wasn't, but he dominated the room. I can't explain what happened but something did. I felt 
my whole life would be changed." They discussed terms. Peters, son of a wealthy Indiana 
newspaper publisher, did not balk at the cost of tuition. The architect added engagingly 
that he needed seven hundred dollars right away to pay a road gang. Peters handed over a 
year's tuition in cash and moved right in. 

Despite Wright's well-deserved reputation for never paying anyone "except under the 
greatest duress," as Jack Howe put it, he had attracted some fine craftsmen because he was 
offering room and board and the promise of cash at a time of severe unemployment. There 
was Ole Anderson, a Norwegian carpenter; Bill Schwanke, a master carpenter from Spring 
Green; Charlie Curtis, a master mason from Mineral Point; Manuel Sandoval, a superb 
cabinetmaker from Nicaragua; and many others. They were quarrying rock to rebuild 
Hillside, and lime for the mortar was being burned at Will Rogers's farm some miles to the 
south. Men would take turns staying there all night to keep the kiln fires burning. Sand 
was hauled from the river, and a sawmill had been set up to cut the oak beams for a new, 
enlarged drafting room at Hillside. This would replace the architectural studio adjoining 
the main house, connected to it by an entrance loggia, which was now too small. (The new 
room would not finally open until 1942.) Peters-always called "Wes" because Wright 
already had too many "Bills" about the place-became a familiar figure, digging ditches, 
hauling buckets, fitting pipes and driving trucks, in his wrinkled overalls and with the hair 
over his eyes. He was given immediate responsibility for one of the major chores, i.e., 
providing wood for the three steam boilers, in a climate where it could get as cold as 
minus thirty or minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, in a desperate attempt to keep a house 
warm that was, despite its beauty, as flimsy as a stage set, with drafty floors, no storm 
windows and no insulation. In years to come Herb Fritz would be given the job of stoking 
the boiler underneath the Taliesin living room. His second day on the job he went to see a 
film and let the fire go out. He wrote, "I have never received such a lecture [from Mrs. 
Wright] before or since. I can't remember what she said, but I do know . . . no drill 
sergeant in the marines could have been more effective." 

Wright went out every day on a search for building lumber and wood for the fires, "often 
driving in an open car and wearing a magnificent black polar bear car-coat," Jack Howe 
recalled. Peters was in the forest felling oaks and putting them through a steam-driven 
saw. He said, "One of the heaviest jobs I ever had was carrying away those slabs of wood. I 
went from 190 pounds to 178, but it was all muscle." Very soon after Peters's arrival, 
Mendel Glickman joined the Fellowship as a teacher in structural engineering, having just 
returned from Stalingrad, where he had been chief American engineer at a tractor plant. 
He and Peters became fast friends, and they would devise ingenious strategies for hauling 
the wood across a local farmer's fields, in spite of his objections that the trucks made 
tracks in his soil. That winter of 1932, Svetlana, who was just fifteen, started riding along 
with Wes in the truck. She was a willing worker and could heave stones with the best of 
them. That was the winter they fell in love. 

Peters was famous for his practical jokes. {related to the author by William Wesley 
Peters.} Anyone who dared lie too long in bed ran the risk of being catapulted out of it by 
Wes with a bucket of water. He had the kind of humor, Howe recalled, that absolutely 
mystified Olgivanna. Wright thought he was hugely funny and egged him on. There was 
the time that Wes and Edgar Tafel, another early apprentice, led Iovanna's pony up the 
steep stairway to Jack Howe's bedroom and then hid in the room next door waiting for him 
to return. {John H. Howe to author.} Then there was the time Karl had a big party for 
several girls in his room. Once it was in full swing, with the drinks handed around and the 
fire blazing, Wes and Edgar crawled up on the roof and put a board across the chimney. 

Another of the major outdoor projects that first year of the Fellowship was working on the 
dam below Taliesin. It had been neglected for years, and Wright had brought in a power 
shovel to dig out the accumulated silt washed down from neighboring fields, and Blaine 
Drake and Cary Caraway, two new recruits, hauled the dirt back to the fields in dump 
trucks. A new concrete wall was poured, a new spillway built, and revisions were made to 
the masonry. Wright loved that kind of work and would supervise for hours. Then he 
installed a new turbine at the dam, which provided electricity for Taliesin, and each night 
one of the students would go down the steep path through the woods to turn it off. 
"Repairing this one time, Wes dropped a pipe wrench into the water; he told that while 
recovering it a snapping turtle struck at the wrench and actually dented it," Fritz wrote. "I 
know Wes believed that, but I never could." Another urgent project was replacing the 
woven-wire fences with electric ones, because Mr. Wright was always trying to do away 
with such visual barriers. There was, naturally, far more work to be done on the property 
than in the drafting room in those first years, and so the order of importance for the 
articles an apprentice was required to bring with him or her was a saw, a hammer, a 
pocket rule, T square and triangle. Similarly, enthusiastic youngsters who knew nothing 
about architecture were to be preferred-university training being considered a distinct 
drawback-and the younger the better. Young women were also accepted, reluctantly, but 
the main objective was to gather together an ambitious group of young men he called 
"sparks" willing, as Wright wrote, to get their hands dirty with the mud from which the 
bricks are made. He wanted a year's commitment from everyone but made some exceptions 
to that rule. If the applicant had written to say that he had been inspired by Mr. Wright's 
autobiography (no one ever called him Frank, not even Wes Peters, and when a few old 
farmers did, the Fellowship members bristled), that was an even better way to introduce 
oneself. A number of young idealists, fired with enthusiasm, would trudge up to his door 
with backpacks and their love of his books as their sole introduction. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., 
another early apprentice, wrote, "I had no inkling of the character of his art, and his story 
flowed into my mind like the first trickle of irrigation in a desert land." {Frank Lloyd 
Wright's Fallingwater, Donald Hoffmann, p. 11.} 

The enormous work of organizing the estate fell, from the first, on Olgivanna Wright . She 
considered herself co-founder of the Fellowship and was, by general agreement, the 
secret of its success: "He would have lost his patience and sent us home after the third 
week," Howe said. {John H. Howe to author.} She had charge of all the meals, and she 
was most particular about the food, which had to be well cooked and substantial. She made 
up the lists of activities to which all were assigned by rote: firing the boilers, cleaning the 
chicken house, scouring the pots, hoeing the fields, weeding, digging, carting, hauling, 
polishing, sweeping. It was hard physical labor. Her rugged experiences with Gurdjieff at 
Fontainebleau would stand her in good stead; she had mastered all kinds of practical tasks 
and did them well. She was the one who sent an apprentice away in disgrace; the Wrights 
were at their most unyielding about transgressions of sexual mores, something they might 
have been expected to be understanding about. But although she hired and fired with a free 
hand (and was expected to lecture when lecturing was called for), hers was not the court of 
last resort. On one occasion, a young offender was told to pack up and leave and, after 
making his farewells to Wright, was given a last-minute reprieve. Wright's explanation 
for that was, "Something in his smile reminded me of Louis Sullivan and I could not let 
him go." {Professor Lilien to author.} The day was planned with great care so that 
everyone was busy, from the time he or she awoke (Wright himself was an early riser, up 
at four-thirty or five at the latest) until the generator was turned off at ten in the evening. 
During the winter months, chorus rehearsal took place immediately after breakfast, even 
when it was still dark. In spring, everyone planted the garden, then went on to the drafting 
room, or put in some of the thousands of trees Wright was planting on the estate, or 
milked the cows, or arranged their rooms, rebuilding the interiors to their own design 
(which then had to be approved). Apprentices soon mastered one of the unwritten codes of 
Taliesin, which was to seem to be doing whatever Mr. Wright wanted to do next, 
preferably just before he did it. If he went to hoe, one should be hoeing; if he was going to 
work on the dam, one rushed there, and he had only to make steps for the drafting room 
for a crowd to appear in short order. Howe, who became chief draftsman, said, "Mr. 
Wright loved to show off. When he'd sit at the drafting table it was a production and the 
more people around him the better he liked it." This became fairly annoying to Howe in 
later years because "I knew how much work there was to get out. He was making a show of 
something that required solitude and concentration." {John H. Howe to author.} 

But, in the early days, one forgave a great deal because they were all doing it together, and 
the way to relax was not to "rest" but to switch activities, the way he did. Because he loved 
variety, there were plenty of parties, including picnic excursions every Saturday, usually to 
one of the many limestone outcroppings that crowned the hills, a foreign film every 
weekend, and services on Sunday mornings in the old Loyd Jones's Unity Chapel. (Wright 
had rewritten the words of Bach's "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" to read "Joy in Work is 
Man's Desiring," and it became the Fellowship hymn.) There were Halloween parties and 
birthday parties and boat trips and sleigh rides and charades; Wright was always ready for 
fun. He invented a game in which someone left the room and returned as another 
personality, and the other players had a limited time in which to guess who was being 
imitated. When it was his turn, he came back and started moving the furniture around. 
That was too easy, so they sent him out again; he returned with undulating hips, a leer and 
"Come up and see me sometime." {Professor Lilien to author.} In fact, he was so insistent 
on their not falling into a rut that he kept changing the time of the main midday meal, 
which caused havoc. Sunday evenings were great occasions, when everyone dressed 
formally, a stylish dinner was served on carefully decorated tables, and the Wrights sat on 
a dais like royalty, accompanied by Svetlana and Iovanna, for the entertainment afterward. 
In later years Iovanna performed on the harp; in the early days the musicians were Herbert 
Fritz on the cello, Svetlana on the violin, Jim Thompson on the recorder and Blaine Drake 
on the viola. Wright liked to call them the "Farmer-Labor Quartet." Believing that no 
one could ever have too much good music, Wright positioned speakers at strategic 
locations in the house, studio, garden and all over the countryside so that the joys of Bach, 
Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert might not be denied his students, wherever they were. 
Howe said, "There were amplifiers on the hill garden right next to my room. You couldn't 
get away from Beethoven and it's a wonder I can still listen to it." {John H. Howe to 
author.} 

The "sparks" were kept continually occupied for a reason: many were still minors, and 
Wright wanted them closely supervised. Young single women were chaperoned, at least in 
the early days. He did not want them wandering because they might make the wrong 
impression on Spring Green and vice versa. Isabelle Doyle, who grew up there, explained 
that the town was half Catholic and half Lutheran and divided between those who 
disapproved of Mr. Wright's personal peccadilloes and those to whom he still owed money. 
"They knew too much and did not appreciate his great gifts," she said. {interview with 
author} Olgivanna Wright believed, in the 1930s, that people crossed the road to avoid 
her. So, for whatever reasons, the Wrights were unyielding if any of their charges broke 
this rule, and their wrath was not limited to minors. Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, John's 
daughter, recalled visiting Taliesin with her parents when Aunt Maginel was there. They 
all heard a wonderful concert at Taliesin, and then trooped off to a local bar. Next morning 
they were summoned to Wright's studio to explain themselves. How could they possibly go 
off to a bar? Maginel told her brother they would go anywhere they "damn pleased." Mrs. 
Ingraham's comment was, "He had to have total control." 

In those early days, to be at Mr. Wright's elbow was to be in the most privileged position, 
but those who served in the kitchen regularly also had a certain insider status. Larry 
Lemmon, a practicing landscape architect with several years' experience, found himself 
out of work in 1937, with a wife and baby girl to support, and hit upon the idea of their 
applying for jobs as cooks at Taliesin. His brother thought he was making a great mistake. 
"I was going out there to waste my life with a crazy man," but Lemmon was optimistic and 
his application was accepted. The Lemmons arrived in East Coast clothes-he was 
wearing a suit and hat-and found girls in shorts and dirndl skirts and boys in overalls and 
wearing long hair, all very friendly and very much at home. The job was remarkably 
pleasant, even though kitchen facilities were primitive (an old wood-fired stove that also 
heated water), because there was plenty of help for the tedious work of preparing 
vegetables and considerable leeway for imaginative preparation of food. His whole-wheat 
bread made a great hit. Mrs. Wright would say, "Your bread is always so good because you 
have the strength to knead it." He always kept a pot of yogurt simmering, used plenty of 
paprika, and took the trouble to learn the special Russian dishes that Mrs. Wright liked: 
borscht and shish kebab. As for the menus, one day there would be steak and the next only 
cabbage, and Wright would start talking about new ways to cook radishes. 

Although in theory all work was rotated, to do one job well was a kind of guarantee that 
this was the one you would end up with. "I never looked at the lists because I knew what I 
was supposed to do and it was always the same," Fritz said with resignation. He became 
housekeeper for the Wrights, which meant making beds, building fires, waxing, dusting, 
tidying, vacuuming and arranging the floral decorations. They were both exacting to work 
for. He recalled that one time when they were camping out in Arizona, and had planned a 
special dinner, he set out white napkins instead of colored ones and incurred Wright's 
wrath: "Can't you see the tables need color?" One of Wright's biographers, Grant Manson, 
who was a guest in those days, learned that family and guest quarters were privileged 
accommodations, rather like first class on a ship, and off limits to everyone else, although 
he added dryly that the "roofs leaked equally upon all, and the facilities throughout were 
iffy. {Wisconsin Magazine of History, autumn 1989, p. 35.} It was mere guesswork as to 
what, if anything, would come forth out of faucets labeled 'hot' and 'cold.' . . ." A separate, 
well-trained group of students served these quarters, and one of them appeared at 
Manson's door each morning with a breakfast tray of ambrosial buckwheat pancakes 
cooked in the family's own kitchen. This is not to say that meals for the rest of the 
Fellowship were inferior. Herb Fritz's Aunts Emma and Mabel were in charge of the two 
kitchens at Hillside and Taliesin, and were engaged in a friendly rivalry to see who could 
cook the best meals. Both had their advocates, but only Wes Peters could polish off both 
meals at a single sitting, that is, until Wright found out about it. In those days Wes's 
appetite was as celebrated as his strength. Taliesin's telephone system was always 
rudimentary, and at that time Wright had a party line (which meant that all his farmer 
neighbors knew everything that was going on), served by Esther, the town's switchboard 
operator. Her office was located on a strategic corner, just above the drugstore, and so 
when Peters could not be found, someone would ask Esther if she had seen him and she 
would invariably reply, "Oh yes, he just went in to Pope's Cafe for some of their banana 
cream pie." {ohn H. Howe to author} 

That an intense loyalty and camaraderie should spring up in this motley band of people is 
a tribute to the Wrights' joint ability to make each member feel a part of the group. A new 
arrival, as Elizabeth Kassler found out, would be shown to his or her modest quarters, 
handed a paint brush and smilingly urged to go to work. Professor Lilien, exiled from 
Poland, called it her second home. Jack Howe said it was his substitute family. Kay 
Rattenbury began to think of herself as almost a daughter. Wesley Peters actually did 
become a son-in-law, after marrying Svetlana, whom Wright adopted. Edgar Tafel, 
another of the founding group of apprentices, signed himself, "Your adopted son." There 
was, of course, the comradeship in adversity that they shared as they wrestled with the 
challenge of turning trees into lumber or learning how to make cabinets, shelves, trim, 
doors and windows from scratch for, as Tafel wrote, workmen came and went, and they 
had to learn fast. They also had to become instant farmers. Once, when Wright told an 
apprentice to "slaughter a pig," he, not being a farm boy, went to his room to get his gun. 
{TAF, p. 161} Stopped toilets remained unusable until they fixed them. Tractors remained 
broken until their mechanisms had been mastered. It was one long, intense, backbreaking 
struggle to become self-sufficient, and it united them, although there were the inevitable 
accidents. Tafel wrote, "Apprentices were forever falling off horses, out of trees, down 
steps, off tractors . . . cutting themselves on saws, hammering their fingers. . . ." But 
miraculously, there were no severe injuries. And for the inevitable hangover, Wright 
would march them off to his bathroom and force a tablespoon of castor oil down their 
reluctant throats. {TAF, p. 161}  

It was communal living at its most idealistic, at a moment when the socialist system 
looked like the solution to the evils of capitalism, and the exploitation of labor, a new 
opportunity to rebuild the world along more equitable lines, which was not to say that this 
particular experiment, taking place in a setting of great natural beauty, was entirely 
equitable. Taliesin was more like a tiny principality presided over by a patriarch, or 
benevolent monarch, who had given each newcomer a share in his life and called them his 
boys and girls, just as the Aunts did at Hillside. Indeed, many of his own children would 
come to resent the special place held in their father's affections by these children of his 
imagination. There are many stories about his kindly manner, his patience in teaching, his 
willingness to praise and ability to criticize constructively, and it must be added that, at 
least in the early days, he worked beside them. Jack Howe said that one of the lessons he 
learned was the value of loving the work. "Mr. Wright played at working. He didn't do 
anything he didn't enjoy, but he enjoyed most everything. I remember that he and I waxed 
the wood floors on Saturday mornings. I put polish on the floor and he pushed the lead 
weights; it is one of my fondest memories of him." {John H. Howe to author} And when 
the inevitable mistakes were made Wright had a way of turning them into assets. Larry 
Lemmon recalled that his daughter, Ruthie, then just a toddler, had once found a bucket of 
red paint and had done her own fingerpainting all over a new redwood balustrade. 
Lemmon was vainly trying to clean it off with steel wool when Wright came along. "Don't 
touch it!" he was told. Ever afterward, Wright would point out the impromptu mural on 
the balustrade with a smile, calling it "the work of my youngest apprentice." {interview 
with author.} As Wright explained it, "our hopeless ship" was finally coming to port, and 
he could not have been happier. {to Mrs. Darwin D. Martin, DDM, December 6, 1935.} 
Herbert Fritz said, "After being at Taliesin, you never accept reality again. It's so perfect. 
You don't ever think the world is what it should be." {to author} 

They were unhesitatingly and ardently his-part of his truth, against the whole world if 
need be-and at a surprisingly early stage. That first autumn the loyalty of the Fellowship 
was put to the test almost at once. A running battle was in progress between Wright, who 
had promised his workment the balance of their wages once the buildings were complete 
and occupied, and those who wanted to leave and be paid. The law was on their side, since 
it stated that deferred wage payments were illegal; in addition, many of them wanted to 
quit since, as unemployed workers, they could now get far more on "relief" than from their 
impecunious employer. He argued that they had not yet fulfilled their contracts, since the 
buildings were unfinished. But in any event he had no money, and they probably knew it. 
His delaying tactics, aided and abetted by the nimble-minded Jensen, were ingenious, but 
a few men would not be put off much longer. One, named Jones, attacked him late one 
afternoon in his studio. Jones's hands were at his throat; Henry Klumb, who was also in 
the room, jumped up and yelled so loudly that Jones was scared off. 

Everywhere one looked there were half-completed projects, but that was consistent with 
the Taliesin that Antonin Raymond had found almost twenty years before, in a continual 
state of flux, half of it being built and the other half falling down. Herb Fritz wrote, "One 
Saturday evening Eloise [his wife] and I returned from Madison to find that a large part of 
Hillside had burned down-the theatre and the wing between it and the living room. Mr. 
Wright had lit a brush pile near the building. I thought he might be devastated by the loss, 
so I went to see him soon after. . . . He said, 'I thought you knew me better than that. I 
always wanted to remodel the theatre and that wing of the building. But thanks for your 
concern." {"At Taliesin," An Uplands Reader, April 1979, p. 147.} As the British 
architect Peter Matthews, a later apprentice, said, "The important point to grasp about 
Wright is that nothing was ever finished. It was the ideas that interested him; the actual 
building was secondary." {interview with author} Jack and Lu Howe soon learned, as so 
many others had before them, that the price of being part of Wright's inner circle was that 
one could not avoid being swept up in a maelstrom of activity, of last-minute deadlines, 
eleventh-hour crises and the constant need to escape from another looming catastrophe. 
Wright was the eye of calm in the center of this storm, the only one who never felt rushed, 
although, as they well knew, the crises were of his making. {Mr. and Mrs. Howe to 
author} 

Once commissions started coming in, Wright would sometimes offer his students practice 
in designing for a particular site. They would be given a topographical map and property 
survey and told to go to work. Herb Fritz remembered working on a design for the John C. 
Pew residence, subsequently built in Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, on a sharply descending 
hillside with a view over Lake Mendota. {in 1939.} The apprentices finished their designs 
and then gathered for a critique. Each apprentice allowed for setback requirements and 
had made fairly conventional designs. They were all found to be inadequate by the master, 
who produced his own version a few days later. He had, Fritz wrote, noticed a small ravine 
on the property and had designed the house as a bridge over it and cantilevered into the 
woods, close to the water's edge. This, he told them, was a lesson in taking advantage of a 
site's natural features, something they had ignored. Twice a year, at Christmas and on his 
birthday, each apprentice was expected to produce a design to be included in boxes that 
were built for the occasion, each one crafted with originality, with a unique hinge, or some 
kind of clever opening and closing device. {"At Taliesin," An Uplands Reader, April 
1979, p. 139.} These were important occasions, Howe noted, because students could 
seldom work on their own projects; as a rule, they were put to work on Wright's projects. 
Wright would review each work and make a constructive comment, as was his habit, 
giving each student a kindly pat on the back. He was always helpful, and yet there seemed 
to be an invisible hurdle that the beginner could not cross because, as one apprentice later 
observed, "If your designs were too much like those of Wright's, they were considered 
imitative, but if too different, people said, 'He didn't get it.'" {as related by his mother, 
Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright.} As in so many other areas of his life, Wright had mixed 
feelings about how good he wanted his students to be. He genuinely cared for them, and 
wanted them to learn. But if they were too good, that other side of his nature that feared 
and resented competition (with reason, since there was not enough work to go around) 
would rise to the surface and he would become resentful and dictatorial. 

One of the first to encounter this kind of opposition was Henry Klumb, his gifted assistant, 
who would go on to have a major career as an architect in Puerto Rico, as an urban 
planner and also designer of schools, shops, low-cost housing, health centers, libraries, 
government buildings, airports, residential developments and the University of Puerto 
Rico. Everyone already knew that he was an architect of promise and, after having worked 
at Wright's elbow for four years (1929-33) he was ready for something more challenging. 
Wright vacillated between encouraging Klumb to strike out on his own and trying to tempt 
him back to Taliesin. For his part, Klumb would have liked an informal liaison allowing 
him to do outside work while remaining connected with Wright's studio. Wright, however, 
had made up his mind that he would allow no "moonlighting." He decreed that any 
architect at Taliesin must agree to work as an anonymous member of the group and plow 
all profits back into the Fellowship (his own included, he said). It sounded logical, but in 
effect they were arguing at cross-purposes. {T, December 2, 1934.} Wright charged that 
Klumb only pretended to be a part of Taliesin but, like so many others, was merely 
awaiting his chance to make influential contacts through Wright and get his own work as 
fast as possible. {Wright to Klumb, T, December 9, 1934.} Klumb believed Wright was 
refusing to face the real issue, which was that he did not want his students to develop their 
own gifts. At a certain point, the student had to develop his own ideas if he was to make 
any contribution at all. Wright never would concede the point, and Klumb left Taliesin 
forever. But, as everyone knew, just to say you were going to leave, once you had been 
taken into the group, was "a betrayal; you had stepped off the end of the world," Howe 
said, an observation that was made by many others. The clever way to leave Taliesin was 
to do or say something outrageous so that the Wrights would make the decision for you. 
More than one apprentice made his or her escape in this fashion, by accident or design. 
Larry Lemmon was overheard in the kitchen one day complaining because, during a lean 
period, the only butter in the house went to the Wrights' table. He did not think that was 
very democratic and was openly critical. His remarks were reported to Mrs. Wright, who 
told him he and his family must leave. He said, "I hated to go away with her angry at me, 
but I had family reasons for wanting to go at the time, so I allowed it to happen." 
{interview with author.} They packed up their belongings and drove away with a clear 
conscience. 

Jack Howe entered the Taliesin circle in 1932 and soon became a vital member of Wright's 
drafting-room staff, taking over the position of chief draftsman from Henry Klumb in 
1934. Howe was extremely able and intelligent, and he had the gift of learning by close 
observation, which was the quality one needed most if one worked for Wright, because his 
methods of teaching were unorthodox. Another gifted apprentice who became 
disenchanted was Manuel Sandoval, the cabinetmaker from Nicaragua. He had come to 
study architecture with the great man, but instead of being instructed, he felt he was kept 
doing fine cabinetry for Wright, work for which he was being highly paid in the outside 
world-in other words, exploited. {Larry Lemmon to author.} Howe commented that 
Sandoval had expected an old-world, master-pupil relationship and did not understand 
that Wright taught nothing in the accepted sense. 

Howe had a natural artistic gift and the rare ability to perceive what Wright wanted from 
the sketchiest of outlines. Another apprentice from the early days said, "He could take a 
theme and play it like a piece of music." {Cary Caraway to author.} He became so good at 
this kind of interpretation that he was, in effect, the pencil in Wright's hand. Something 
like 90 percent of the drawings from the 1930s that are credited to Wright were actually 
made by Howe, a point he has never insisted upon. As was his custom, after approving the 
work, Wright affixed his own red square. 

Howe was extremely well organized and made sure that the work was finished on time. 
That was another indispensable attribute. He was so valuable in the drafting room that, 
other people said, Wright never wanted him to leave-not that Howe wanted to go. Those 
were the wonderful days when Wright, waking early, would have a new idea. He would go 
to Howe's bedroom and call softly up the stairs, "Oh, Jack!" and Howe would get his 
clothes on and go straight to the drafting room and, "I'd miss my breakfast again," Howe 
said with a rueful smile. "It was very demanding but it was a real challenge and I learned 
to work fast. It was always exciting. Right up to the end." 

Those who knew the inner workings of the drafting room placed great stress on Howe's 
ability to "manage" Wright in the nicest possible way and find solutions to the problems 
Wright himself would pose. After the drafting room had produced a complete set of 
working drawings, which could be as many as twenty or twenty-five sheets for a large 
building, the work would be presented to Wright for approval. True to form he would want 
extensive changes and would make marks all over the neat work. Then he would want a 
revised set in a hurry. 

So the drafting room's leaders hit upon the idea of making a duplicate set of drawings at 
the same time, keeping that fact a secret from Wright. He would make his changes, these 
would be transferred to the second set, and the neatly revised work would be presented for 
the architect's approval in record time. Wright never learned of the harmless deception. 

As for the clientele, it went without saying that Wright would promise them anything, 
always happily convinced that the building could be constructed for a fraction of its 
eventual cost. Then his staff would have to cope with the problem of trying to live up to his 
rash promises, which they had not been apprised of, since they were excluded from the 
client conferences. Fortunately, Gene Masselink, who replaced Jensen as Wright's 
secretary in 1933, and who had an office adjoining Wright's, was within earshot. 
Masselink would take notes on the conversation and brief the drafting room in detail 
later-another way of saving Wright, once again, from himself. 

Howe and Wright had their differences, as everyone did who worked on close terms with 
the master. Wright called Howe "the How" when he was not in a good mood, and if they 
had quarreled and he wanted to make amends, it would be "Jackie" or "Jackson." Howe 
was receiving such priceless training and loved his work so much that he was content for 
far longer than Klumb had been. The moment did come, however, when he wanted his 
chance to supervise the actual construction of a building, but Wright would not let him go. 
He finally won the master's grudging permission to oversee the building of a house for 
Herman T. Mossberg in South Bend, Indiana. {in 1948.} It was such an exhilarating 
experience that, once it was finished, Howe kept postponing his return and took a leisurely 
tour of other houses Wright was then building in Michigan, his first textile block designs 
in that state. Finally a telegram arrived from Wright: WHERE ARE YOU, AND WHY? It 
was as much of an overture as he was capable of making, and Jack Howe went back to the 
drafting room. 

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., had an interesting simile to describe the effect of Wright's work on 
his life-"The first trickle of irrigation in a desert land"-that seems curiously appropriate, 
given what followed. Kaufmann was the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh department store 
owner and must have been an early and persuasive advocate for his new mentor, because 
his father soon wrote to ask whether Wright would be interested in collaborating on a 
number of civic projects for Pittsburgh that were being planned at the end of 1934. Letters 
and contacts followed-Wright seems to have seen in Kaufmann, whom he called "EJ," a 
candidate to replace the impoverished and aging Darwin D. Martin-and before long, the 
Kaufmanns suggested that Wright build them a weekend cottage in the countryside, near a 
beautiful waterfall and ravine called Bear Run, in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. Years later, 
Wright recalled, "There in a beautiful forest was a solid, high rock ledge rising beside a 
waterfall, and the natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from that rock bank 
over the falling water. . . ."  {Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, pp. 17-18.} The 
Kaufmanns wanted their house to be placed on the other side of Bear Run, looking at the 
falls from below; Wright, as his description makes clear, had a very different idea from the 
start. However, he was in no hurry to talk about it or even commit it to paper, in common 
with his often-stated dictum that nothing ought to be attempted until an idea had taken 
clear shape in an architect's imagination. He had visited Bear Run for the second time by 
the summer of 1935, and his apprentices knew that the house had not yet been designed. 
Still, the weeks went by. Cary Caraway said, "At tea he'd talk about things and not setting 
them down until the idea was clear in his mind. As I remember it, Mr. Kaufmann came to 
Milwaukee for some other function and said, 'I'd like to know how you are doing, Mr. 
Wright,' and Wright replied calmly, 'Your house is finished,' and we knew nothing had 
happened. Then we heard that Kaufmann was about to drive the 140 miles from 
Milwaukee to Spring Green. It could have been the morning of that day when word went 
out, 'He's in the studio.' Then the next report was, 'He's sitting down!'" It was one of the 
most famous moments in architecture and one of the best documented-it was witnessed 
by Blaine Drake, Edgar Tafel, Bob Mosher, John Lautner, Jack Howe and others as well as 
Caraway-tantamount to being at Mozart's elbow the day he dipped his quill pen into the 
ink and began to compose The Magic Flute. They were waiting to see how this champion 
juggler, who had kept so many balls up in the air, would retrieve this one. Wright calmly 
began work, and, Caraway continued, "took three sheets of tracing paper in different 
colors, one for the basement, another for the first floor and a third for the second floor and 
sketched it to a scale of one-eighth inch equals one foot. We were all standing around 
him. I'd say it took two hours." Section, elevation and details: they were all pouring onto 
the paper, and pencils were being worn down and broken off as fast as they could be 
sharpened. As he worked, he kept up a running commentary: "The rock on which E.J. sits 
will be the hearth, coming right out of the floor, the fire burning just behind it. The 
warming kettle will fit into the wall here. . . . Steam will permeate the atmosphere. You'll 
hear the hiss. . . ." He had even decided upon the name of the house; it was a tour de force. 

Then Wright threw down his pencils, and two apprentices, Tafel and Mosher, stayed on to 
draw views, one of which Wright selected for presentation. Wright also worked on the 
perspective drawings later. Howe said, "I particularly remember Mr. Wright as he worked 
with relish early one morning on the perspective drawings . . . he was dressed in his 
bathrobe, seated at a table by the fire in his study-bedroom. I had brought the layouts in 
from the studio, and was standing by with a supply of colored pencils, while he worked on 
the drawings. The most satisfactory and beautifully executed of these drawings was later 
published on the cover of . . . Time magazine. . . . This drawing is one which was executed 
entirely by Mr. Wright himself." When the moment finally came to present the finished 
design to the client, Wright, as was his custom, would not allow any of his apprentices in 
the room. But, Caraway said, "he came out of the meeting all smiles. Kaufmann had said, 
'Don't change a thing.'"  {interview with author.} It was the genesis of one of the most 
beautiful houses in the world: Fallingwater . 


Broad Acres 

First the heavens were formed as a roof 
For men, and then the holy Creator 
Eternal Lord and protector of souls, 
Shaped our earth, prepared our home, 
The almighty Master, our Prince, our God. 

"Caedmon's Hymn" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 21} 

Edgar J. Kaufmann, president of Kaufmann Department Stores, Inc., in Pittsburgh, 
self-made son of an immigrant Jewish peddler was, when he met Wright, no stranger to 
the realms of architectural design. He had already commissioned and brought to 
completion at least ten building projects and would, by the time of his death in 1955, have 
commissioned half a dozen different architects. These projects not only included 
reconstruction of his own store and numerous civic projects like hospitals, museums, a 
planetarium and a public parking garage, but also six houses he built himself and nine 
others he bought or commissioned. One would have to compare him with Aline Barnsdall 
for the scope of his vision, his instinctive eye for quality and his restless imagination, 
which would ensure that he always had more projects in mind for himself, his store or his 
city than he could conceivably support or promote. As a human being he was forceful, 
commanding, the model of a farsighted entrepreneur, with a secret insecurity. He was, as 
the historian Franklin Toker has argued persuasively, aware of his socially inferior status 
and attempting to compensate for it by a civicminded largesse; and he was defensive and 
apologetic about his own metier.  

He was, one might say, a connoisseur of architects. He would commission and build a 
$400,000 Neutra-designed house in Palm Springs for himself, in spite of Wright's 
determined ridicule, and although he had confined himself to supporting conservative 
architectural design to this point, it is reasonable to suppose that his eye was now ready for 
something more daring, more contemporary and more American. Professor Toker has 
suggested that Kaufmann's reflexive competitiveness may have had something to do with 
it, since Stanley Marcus, owner of Neiman-Marcus, the famous Dallas department store, 
had just commissioned Wright to design a house for him. 

For whatever reasons, Kaufmann decided to make Wright "his" architect almost 
immediately, commissioning him not only to design the weekend house at Bear Run but 
also to remodel his own office and, later, to add further embellishments to Fallingwater in 
the way of a guesthouse and gate lodge. It is perfectly possible, given the rapidity of the 
commissions themselves, that Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., had been sent to Taliesin as a scout; 
he certainly did not stay there long, leaving, to Wright's clear disappointment, some 
months later to join his father's department store. There would be many more commissions 
from Kaufmann, something like twenty projects over the next two decades, most of them 
destined never to be built. Although Wright protested that he did not have much more time 
to spend on paper dreams, he never told his patron to go away, because Kaufmann had 
appeared in his life at an extraordinarily fortuitous moment. He arrived in September 
1935; that dear old former patron, Darwin D. Martin, had a stroke early in December of 
that year and died soon after, but not before calculating that Wright still owed him exactly 
$37,976.29, most of it, presumably, in the form of the Taliesin mortgage. Shortly after 
that, Edgar Tafel recalled visiting the Martin house with Wright. The family was no 
longer living there, but it was still in mint condition. This state of affairs was destined to 
be brief, since Martin's son, Darwin R., could not afford upkeep and taxes. He offered the 
house to the city or to the University of Buffalo as a branch library. Neither offer was 
accepted, and ten years later the house would be sold to recoup $75,000 in back taxes. 
{TAF, p. 92.} But his words lacked the note of despair one would have expected from 
someone who sees his last hope for a backer disappearing. In fact, he was very well suited 
with Kaufmann. It suited Wright to be designing for this daring Pittsburgh businessman; it 
suited him to be able to get another check on demand; it suited him to collect advances 
against a print collection, the usual ruse, and Kaufmann was as openhanded and less 
scrupulous about an exact accounting than Darwin D. Martin had been. For when it came 
to well-heeled clients, Wright's point of view had not varied much since the days when 
he and Aline Barnsdall were haggling (his version) over her costs compared with his 
optimistic estimates. Money was power, as he explained to her in 1927. A wealthy client 
would naturally want to live on a grand scale, as a way of demonstrating this power before 
all the world. So when money was there, he as an architect considered it almost a crime to 
use an inferior material when something perfect would make all the difference. {T, 
October 3, 1927.} By way of reply, Aline Barnsdall made a pointed reference to those 
indolent, spoiled figures of the nineteenth century such as Gordon Craig or Isadora 
Duncan, who let their patrons pay their bills. {T, November 16, 1927.} One never heard 
this same lament from Kaufmann, even though the house that he had told Wright must not 
exceed $35,000 eventually cost $75,000, {Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Donald 
Hoffmann, p. 52} not to mention further additions and embellishments for an additional 
$50,000. He did, it is true, balk at gold leaf for the walls, but only because that extra 
flourish seemed, to him, to take Fallingwater too far from the original concept of a cottage 
in the woods. {Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Donald Hoffmann, p. 52} 

Kaufmann's first idea had been of a place to entertain within sight of the falls. He did not 
get this once Wright had fixed on his idea of placing the house over the falls-one had to 
go out onto the terraces for that kind of view-but he did get the wonderful living room, 
thirty-five by forty-five feet, with views in all directions, that he had asked for. Wright's 
conception was to build Fallingwater as an interlapping series of reinforced concrete trays 
supported by piers and anchored to a central masonry core. The chimney was made from 
local stone laid rough, the floors were of quarried stone, and a rocky outcropping was 
incorporated into the hearth. There were no walls as such, just uninterrupted vistas of glass 
that repeated the horizontal and vertical rhythms. On that famous day when Wright 
committed his vision of Fallingwater to paper and talked about what one would hear as 
one sat by the fireplace (the hissing of steam), he, no doubt, was also thinking of the 
background splash of water, the rustle of wind moving through the boughs, the shifting 
patterns of dappled light and shade, the feeling of being deep in a cave, sheltered by low 
ceilings and overhanging eaves, and the sense of rocks behind, as one sat beside a vast and 
friendly fire. At the same time, the lack of any walls as such would give one the 
paradoxical feeling of living in a boundary-less world. "There was the sense of a vital, 
ever-changing order as elements and context shifted into new relationships. The spaces 
around the waterfall and the screens of the trees were all drawn into the composition: 
nature and art were made to complement one another." {CU, p. 199} And, as Edgar 
Kaufmann, Jr., would later write, "the materials of the structure blend with the colorings 
of the rocks and trees, while occasional accents are provided by bright furnishings, like the 
wildflowers or birds outside. The paths within the house, stairs and passages, meander 
without formality or urgency. . . . Sociability and privacy are both available. . . ." {CU, p. 
199} 

In feeling, Fallingwater most resembles Taliesin. All of Wright's interiors play with the 
contrasts between bold, dramatic textures and decorative elements of extreme subtlety and 
refinement, such as his beloved oriental prints, pottery, porcelain, statuary and the trailing 
tendrils of hanging plants, but here the contrast is marked, as if deliberately reminiscent of 
medieval great halls with their crude, massive walls and rude stone floors half-hidden 
behind tapestries and strewn with fur throws. Wright's hidden entrances with their curious, 
one might say perverse, angles, grow smaller and more mysterious at Fallingwater, as at 
Taliesin; they seem hewn out of the walls or the rocks themselves. Stairways are narrower 
and steeper, recalling flights of stone steps descending into the gloom of an ancient 
fortress. Garden paths, half overgrown, hug the steep hillsides or disappear into thickets of 
trees. Great pillars of stone are spaced at intervals throughout the house; desks, cupboards, 
tables and benches are welded into the design, and boulders jut out of unexpected corners. 
Cavernous depths and dazzling perspectives, the sense of an impregnable fortress, a house 
of limitless spaciousness-the comparisons are inevitable. It has been pointed out that 
Wright's favorite way of signing his initials is contained, by accident or design, in the 
name of FaLLing Water. {"Frank Lloyd Wright and the Origins of Fallingwater."} 

Fallingwater may, like Le Corbusier's masterpiece, the Villa Savoye, have made use of 
man-made materials and the machine, and, as John H. Howe recalled, Wright may have 
wanted to show advocates of the International School "a thing or two" when he designed 
it, but the building has only the most superficial resemblance to that school, as several 
writers have pointed out. Scully compares Fallingwater with an earlier design by Neutra, 
the Lovell house (1929-30) in Los Angeles, to demonstrate Wright's superior mastery of 
concept. For although Neutra's house makes a similar use of concrete trays cantilevered 
over a ravine, its silhouette is essentially that of a rectangular box imposed on a hillside, 
whereas Fallingwater is intricately united with its site, its shape is complex and 
asymmetrical, and its overall form is essentially that of a pyramid. {SC, pp. 26-27} Like 
Palladio's Villa Rotunda and the Villa Savoye, Fallingwater was the fruit of a mature 
creativity and a deeply felt aesthetic. If the Villa Rotunda expressed the Renaissance 
artist's confident belief that man was the measure of all things, if Le Corbusier's pure 
geometric forms summed up all that a classicist's severe poetic vision might bring to the 
challenge of expressing, with man-made materials and machine forms, the triumph of 
man over nature, then Wright's Fallingwater has to be viewed as the antithesis of that 
belief. Wright's houses, with their massive masonry centers and flowing balconies and 
terraces that blend with their surroundings, may well speak, as Vincent Scully believed, to 
modern man's belief that he is no longer the center of the world and must hold on to 
whatever seems solid. There is, nevertheless, an air of indomitable American optimism 
and expansiveness about these spacious dwellings, with their axes "like country cross 
roads in the boundless prairie. . . ." {SC, pp. 26-27} And one cannot visit Wright's 
buildings (looking at photographs of them is a poor substitute) without feeling that still 
more is implied in his best work. For, as Peter Blake observed, Wright's buildings were 
indicative of "the mysticism that has always governed northern man's relationship to 
nature. They hark back to the mounds that conceal the ancient graves of the Vikings, to 
Harlech castle growing out of a Welsh hilltop, to Mont St. Michel. . . ." {BL, p. 59.} The 
fact that he dared to place a house actually over a waterfall, the fact that he wrestled with 
the elemental forces of nature (forging fire and earth with water, as he had with Hollyhock 
House): the fact that he spoke in terms of "consecrated" spaces: these state more forcefully 
than words Wright's almost demonic determination to weld man (the newcomer in an 
alien land) to his environment, make him inextricably part of it. They also show what one 
can only call Wright's essentially religious impulses of respect, wonder and celebration of 
the natural world. Man in tune with the primal forces of nature, man partaking in the great 
creative impulse-these are two of the lessons one can perhaps draw from a work that was, 
almost from the first, recognized as a masterpiece. Fallingwater was a stunning synthesis 
of all Wright thought and believed and spectacular proof that, at the age of sixty-eight, 
when most men are ready to retire, Wright was launching himself on the final great phase 
of his astonishing career. 

As with all his patrons, whom he alternately charmed (in person) and castigated (on 
paper), Wright was invariably hospitable and ready with the usual unsolicited advice at 
moments of crises in their lives. After EJ's wife, Liliane, died-she committed suicide with 
a rifle, a short distance from Fallingwater-Wright solemnly warned Kaufmann against 
marrying again, since he was bound to be vulnerable to the first flattering female who 
came along. {T, October 15, 1952.} As usual he was making a fairly accurate assessment 
of the reason why so many of his own relationships had foundered. That he, with his 
spectacular lack of awareness and his own disastrous marital relationships, should be 
attempting to advise someone else, no doubt struck EJ as comical. For the fact was that 
Wright's attitudes toward women continued to reflect the clich-d thought of his 
generation, since the days that he had written (of the Romeo and Juliet windmill), "Romeo, 
as you will see, will do all the work and Juliet cuddle alongside to support and exalt him." 
{A2, p. 135.} A woman's success in life, in other words, depended upon how faithfully she 
reflected the light shining from the really important person in the marriage, as an article 
he wrote for Cosmopolitan in 1938 makes clear. When he listened to his wife as she 
worked and played "with such intense artistry," she was himself, he wrote. His daughter, 
Iovanna, was himself; his students were himself; Taliesin was himself. Others, in short, 
only existed to the extent that they reflected his personality, his ideas, his values, to the 
extent that they flattered and mirrored his image of himself. For someone as acutely aware, 
visually, as Wright, the myopia is terrifying, and since it was coupled with such a lack of 
awareness about his own motives, and a complete inability to admit a mistake, it did not 
bode well for any relationship. Once, when he was discussing the case of a man who had 
been divorced after a twenty-year marriage, Wright commented that he wished he could 
give that person some advice. "What would it be?" his friend asked. "I'd tell him that I was 
married three times, and each time they became Mrs. Wright." {Mrs. Ernest Meyer to 
author.} 

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright(she took his middle name) is often described as emotionally and 
spiritually advanced, but she was not a particularly easy person to deal with. One of 
Wright's biographers, Grant Manson, recalled that after his first visit to Taliesin in 1938, 
he had spent much time and thought deciding on just the right gift, and arranged to have a 
dozen exquisite and expensive Spode cups and saucers sent to Taliesin. Some months later 
he made a brief stop there and found the atmosphere distinctly chilly. Mrs. Wright finally 
told him, "I was never so insulted! Two weeks you lived with us last time and never so 
much as a word from you after you drove away!" Manson protested that he had written a 
letter of thanks; she insisted they had never received it. What about the gift he had sent? 
"Cups? From you? I know nossing of cups. I received no gift from you!" After careful 
investigation, it was clear that the china had been sent and delivered, but Mrs. Wright 
continued to disclaim all knowledge of it and hold it against the hapless visitor. 
{Wisconsin Magazine of History, autumn 1989, p. 41.} 

She could be stubborn, if not implacable. In one of her columns for the Madison Capital 
Times, she described a running battle she had with Elizabeth Enright Gillham, daughter of 
Maginel (always called "Bitsy"), a short story writer and author of children's books. The 
fight centered on an apron pocket. It seemed that Olgivanna had bought a green apron and 
did not like its pocket. She took it off and threw it away. Bitsy, for a joke, retrieved the 
object and pinned it to a flower and placed it where it would be found by Olgivanna: on 
her mirror. Olgivanna smiled and threw the pocket away again. She did not think about 
the subject until the next time she used the apron: the pocket had been neatly stitched back 
into place. So she took it off again, wrapped it in tissue, placed it in a large box, tied it 
with a yellow ribbon and sent it back to Bitsy with her compliments. The object of the 
game became to see who could be tricked into accepting the pocket under various disguises 
and which woman could outsmart the other. Each ingenious ruse simply spurred the 
receiver to invent more fiendish ways of returning the hated object: Olgivanna said, "Oh, 
to have fallen into such a masterful and well-timed trap set by my incomparable 
adversary!" The battle of the green pocket went on for years. 

Olgivanna Wright was equally capable of warmhearted sympathy, generosity and active 
help. Tales of her generous gestures are legion, along with those of her unpredictability. 
One simply never knew what to expect of her, which must have seemed familiar to her 
husband, part of the reason why each of his women seemed to become the same "Mrs. 
Wright." (One notes that he addressed Catherine and Olgivanna, at least, as "Mother," but 
that might simply have been the remnant of the old country form of address for the mother 
of one's children.) There are many accounts of Olgivanna's tender solicitude for him. She 
watched over his health, she supervised his day, she mediated in disputes, she soothed and 
supported him. Loren Pope thought Olgivanna regarded her husband as "something like a 
national treasure that she was protecting and she was extremely particular about having 
the proper deference shown. {Loren Pope to author} I remember he had lectured in 
Washington on a hot summer evening and I went to see him afterwards. I think my shirt 
was open and my tie undone, and I got the distinct impression that she did not approve, 
because she was not as gracious as he was." She also influenced him. Dr. Joseph Rorke, 
who became a Taliesin Fellow, observed that one of the first things Olgivanna did was to 
persuade Frank to abandon his flowing artist's tie and shorten his hair, presumably because 
he was beginning to look faintly quaint and old-fashioned. {Dr. Joseph Rorke to author.} 
After that, he switched to a regular tie, although he usually disdained the Windsor knot in 
favor of an intricate wrap-and-tie of his own invention, the ends tucked under his 
collar. Wesley Peters also noted that Olgivanna became adept at intervening in disputes 
and intercepting letters that Wright had written in a fury and would, she was convinced, 
regret once he had calmed down. {interview with author} 

Professor Lilien commented, "You know, she had this very delicate appearance. She 
looked like a Byzantine Madonna with narrow eyes, and she was very slender, with 
graceful movements, but with all this, she was as strong as steel. His first wife never had 
time for him, and this is what Olgivanna excelled in. She was always with him, and if he 
wanted to go anywhere, she went, even if it meant getting out of bed." Olgivanna Wright 
says much the same thing in her memoir of her years with Wright, The Shining Brow. For 
years she suffered from intermittent tachycardia (rapid heart beat), which might 
incapacitate her for hours. Wright was always solicitous, but as soon as the immediate 
danger was over he thought she should be ready to go back to whatever they were 
planning, a picnic, for instance. She, with knees buckling and fingers trembling, would get 
dressed and go out because he wanted her beside him and that was enough. 

He continued to flirt with women. She recalled an incident that was entirely typical of him. 
Once, going to the theater with a group of apprentices to see one of his favorite actresses, 
Lillian Harvey, Wright announced loudly, as they all took their seats, "Boys, she's mine!" 
It seemed grossly insensitive to her (he refused to apologize), but then, she was even 
jealous of his admiration for Marlene Dietrich. He was just as ready to suspect her of 
infidelity. Once he dreamed that he had found her in bed with a black, and was very huffy 
about it. She replied, "Frank, are you out of your mind? I'm not responsible for your 
dreams." But logic had nothing to do with the matter. It must be her fault, because "there 
must have been something in you that led me to the conclusion of such a dream." They 
went on arguing, and the subject was dropped, she thought, but he remained distant. 
Finally he said, "Well, how do I know that you are faithful to me?" He thought she had 
been looking at one of their visitors, Douglas Haskell, in far too friendly a way. He 
concluded, "You may be a woman of very easy conduct." {CD, pp. 109-110.} 


Wright apparently never discovered that she had become most adept at manipulating him. 
He took her to Madison and they spent a delightful afternoon. Like Miriam Noel, 
Olgivanna Wright had discovered how easily distractable Wright was and no doubt 
realized their marriage would last as long as she was prepared to manipulate him as one 
would a child, someone at the mercy of ambivalent and irrational swings of mood. This 
would mean subjecting her own feelings to an iron control. That might be difficult to do 
when, as often happened, Wright would submit her to his highly developed version of the 
double bind. He would argue a point vehemently until she, to end the fight, would drop her 
opposition. Sometime later, having changed his mind, he would chastise her for having 
allowed him to make such a fool of himself. One also believes that he also encouraged, by 
accident or design, a hierarchy of blaming others. If someone in his own life infuriated 
him but, for whatever reasons, he could not vent his anger on that person, he would pick a 
fight with Olgivanna. Even while she knew this was happening, she seemed helpless to 
prevent the chain reaction and would turn on someone else, often a junior apprentice, as a 
way of relieving her own feelings. Any woman who wanted to live with Wright, in other 
words, not only had to live up to his expectations of her and be prepared for unpredictable 
attacks and irrational scenes but also would be swept up in the roller-coaster atmosphere 
of crisis that surrounded him. It is not surprising that one of Iovanna Wright's early 
memories, of around November 1933, is of the night when her father almost left them. She 
wrote that it was a frosty evening, with a thin layer of snow on the ground. She had gone 
to bed but was not asleep when she overheard a loud argument between her parents. 

She rushed into her mother's room and found her opening her closet doors. Olgivanna's 
pulse was rapid and she was trembling. "I am leaving him," she said. "I cannot bear this 
abuse any longer." Then she saw her father going by the open door, wearing his hat and 
coat, carrying a cane and a small suitcase. Soon, they heard the front door bang. "Stop 
him, Iovanna!" her mother suddenly cried. It was an echo of the days when Catherine used 
to have her children write hearttugging letters to Fiesole, begging Daddy to come home. 
Iovanna ran out into the snow in her nightgown and bare feet. She continued, "'Please 
come back, Daddy,' I said. 'We love you-we need you. Mother is suffering-please don't 
go away.' He stopped, silent. . . . I said, 'You're my whole life-and you're Mother's life.' 
He was still silent. 'Daddy it's cold-the snow pains my feet-come back.' He turned 
around, and walking together we went into the house. I left them alone and went to my 
room, my whole body shivering. What makes them fight? I wondered then. I know they 
love each other. Why did this happen?" 

Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff first came to Taliesin in the summer of 1934. Up to that 
point, However remembers overhearing frequent "shouting matches" between these two 
strong-willed personalities, and after Gurdjieff had paid his lightning visit, the furious 
battles came to an end. "I am sure Gurdjieff told her to be devious, because it all changed," 
a friend said. It would have been like Olgivanna Wright to turn, in her moment of panic, 
to her old mentor and put her faith in whatever she might interpret as his methods. After 
his visit, her husband actually wrote a short essay about Gurdjieff, comparing him to 
Gandhi and Whitman and praising his solid, fatherly manner. It is entirely unrevealing. A 
more telling description of the encounter that took place between the two men came from 
Nott, who observed, when they met in London in May 1939, that Wright was behaving 
"rather like a brilliant undergraduate, and it was clear that of the ideas he understood 
nothing. He seemed to regard Gurdjieff as having achieved almost the same level as 
himself. . . ." On another occasion, just before World War II, when Gurdjieff was at 
Taliesin and they were all seated in the living room, drinking coffee, Wright grandly 
remarked that perhaps he should send some of his pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris. "'Then they 
can come back to me and I'll finish them off.' 

"'You finish! You are idiot,' said Gurdjieff angrily. 'You finish! No. You begin. I finish.'" 
It was clear that Wright had met his match. 

The apprentices at Taliesin were, Nott thought, fascinated by Gurdjieff's prowess as a 
cook. He could take a number of spices, peppers and herbs and produce a delicious meal 
from the toughest of chickens. That is Nott's version; Tafel had another story. He recalled 
that Gurdjieff told them all how to make vast quantities of sauerkraut using whole apples, 
including the cores, herbs, raisins and cabbage. It was horrible, and after making a 
pretense of eating, they were happy to throw the remains in the garbage. Unfortunately, 
mountains of sauerkraut were still left, and Mr. Wright insisted they take two fifty-gallon 
barrels of it to their desert camp in Arizona. Tafel and other members of the Fellowship 
loaded the barrels onto a truck and got as far as Iowa. Arriving in bitter cold, they 
perceived that the sauerkraut had frozen solid. "We loosened the tailgate ropes and 
dumped the barrels into a ditch." 

Making sure that Iovanna should be guided by, and properly respectful of, Gurdjieff's dicta 
was, naturally, much on her mother's mind. Luckily, the little girl whose arrival had 
thrown her parents' lives into so much turmoil, took an instinctive interest in music, was a 
natural dancer and loved poetry. {Olgivanna Wright to Mrs. Jane Porter: FP, March 24, 
1931.} She had, some people thought, a genuine poetic gift. Once she asked her mother 
when her favorite flower, jack-in-the-pulpit, preached. Her mother replied that he 
preached all day long to the other flowers. "Do all of them listen?" the little girl wanted to 
know. This child's poetic fancy-she appeared to have clear memories of having lived 
before as Jane Porter's son, and described it in enough detail for her mother to write a 
letter to her sister-in-law about it-was usually hidden behind the outward stance of the 
tomboy. Everyone remembers Iovanna's riding over the countryside, her head of golden 
curls bouncing, or clumping into the dining room smelling of manure. She was 
passionately interested in cowboy movies and "always impatient for the shooting to begin," 
her mother observed with distaste. Her favorite outfit was leather chaps over blue jeans, 
with a western hat, red kerchief, cowboy boots and a double-gun holster that she refused 
to remove, even while taking her obligatory lessons on the harp. 

She stayed at home for the first eight years. Her father built a miniature schoolhouse for 
her, and one of the apprentices, Philip L. Holliday, later a graphics designer, was elected 
to serve as a teacher. One would hear screams of laughter coming from the schoolroom as 
Iovanna pulled her teacher's hair, and he, feebly protesting, tried to prevent it. There are 
other stories of Iovanna's pounding over the hillside, beating her pony's flanks until the 
blood came. Around the Fellowship the consensus was that her parents did not discipline 
her. 

It is true that her father was soon referring to his baby in royal terms. Iovanna had 
recovered from a recent attack of scarlet fever "as a princess should," he told Darwin 
Martin in 1929. That was part of the problem, another observer thought. "Mrs. Wright put 
an image of greatness in front of her and expected her to conform to it." {Elizabeth 
Kassler to author.} Others believed the trouble was that the attitude of both Iovanna's 
parents was unpredictable and inconsistent, so that their daughter never knew what to 
expect from one moment to another. 

Iovanna's first memories of childhood are of sitting in her father's lap with her mother 
standing by, and she was brushing his hair over his face and calling him "Spider Man." 
{interviews with author.} She thinks she may have been about three and a half. Her next 
memory is of being given a doll when she was six. She had never had a doll and wanted 
one badly, but her father refused to allow it as it would spoil his architecture, he said. She 
chuckled about that. One day, her beloved Uncle Vlado brought her a beautiful baby doll 
dressed in pink gauze. That night, she left the doll outside on the porch. It rained in the 
night, and in the morning the doll's wax cheeks were covered with raindrops. She tried to 
grasp the doll's face and her fingers sank into the wax; she screamed with fright. Her 
father said, "Cheeky [the name he always called her], this is your first experience with 
death." She said, "I knew nothing about death then, but I always connected it with 
something horrible after that." Her next memory was of the time that she had been given 
Blackie, the Shetland pony of four and a half hands, was dressed up in riding clothes and 
placed in the saddle. Her father gave her a few instructions and slapped the animal's side. 
Startled, Blackie jumped over a puddle. Iovanna flew into the air and fell on her back in 
the water. She was screaming for help and her mother was concerned, but her father 
insisted that she get back in the saddle. He told her, "Life is like this. Learn how to fall, 
but keep at it." In retrospect she thought it had been a valuable lesson, if a hard one. 
"When it came to music I was forced to play an instrument. I had my choice, but I had to 
play something. You know, I am an ex-harpist. If you stop for a week, you have to begin 
all over again and I stopped several times, taking up the piano and recorder instead. 
Mother wanted me to play the cello. I used to sit there with tears streaming down my face. 
I did not want to displease anybody, but I couldn't stand it." Although these seemed to be 
painful memories, Iovanna refused to feel any anger or resentment, describing the 
experiences as good discipline, and praising what she saw as her parents' exalted 
standards. "I loved my father so dearly and deeply, as I do now. I used to kiss his hands. I 
equally loved my mother. She was extremely beautiful, highly talented and gifted. No one 
could have had a more wonderful mother, and Father was very indulgent, although he 
could lose his temper." What was he like then? "Like a torrent, a hurricane. I felt awful." 
People might not think so, but there were times when "I was bad." She smiled and looked 
roguish. She also remembered times when her father would point accusingly and say, 
"You sent me to jail." She added, "As I got older, I learned to say, 'You sent yourself.'" 

If Iovanna's childhood was troubled, Svetlana's seems to have been amazingly serene, 
given the chaotic events of her early life, the flight from Russia, the uproar over her 
supposed abduction and all the other crises she would have been old enough to understand. 
True, she had spent most of her time in private school or with Uncle Vlado and Aunt 
Sophie, generally considered to have been ideal parent figures. {William Wesley Peters to 
author.} She was a gifted and accomplished musician, leader in doing the chores, 
inventing games, even floral arrangements, and mature far beyond her years. Wesley 
Peters said, "She could talk to Mr. Wright and her mother when they quarreled and iron it 
out when she was only fifteen or sixteen." She was also gifted artistically, sensible and 
very well liked. "She shone in every way," he said. He called her "My Svet." The image of 
Svetlana, the girl who did everything right, became fixed in the lore of the Taliesin 
Fellowship. An apprentice recalled that when they were all in their twenties, Iovanna 
organized a surprise party for him. After all the guests left he had insisted on doing the 
dishes instead of what Iovanna wanted, which was to relax and have a good time. She said 
accusingly, "You're just like my sister!" and it suddenly dawned on him. "That's the 
answer! Cain and Abel." {William Calvert to author.} 

That first winter of his stay in Taliesin, when Svet and Wes fell in love, she was not yet 
sixteen. Olgivanna and Frank were, naturally, the last to find out. Wright wrote, "When 
we did wake up-there were some accusations and unkind words. Too soon! Both too 
young!" {A2, p. 466} It looked like a kind of treachery, he added. Peters said, "Mr. Wright 
thought I had deceived him. He was fonder of Svet than any of his children." (Wright had 
formally adopted her by then.) "Possibly, he was jealous. So I told him we were going to 
leave. Mrs. Wright was upset, but she had encouraged us. About June of 1933 I put all my 
stuff in my car and left. I went to my parents' home in southern Indiana and Svet had got a 
job in Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago. She moved in with the family of the first violinist of 
the Chicago Symphony, keeping house in exchange for violin lessons. She worked for over 
a year that way and she and I went on seeing each other. 

"Meantime Mr. Wright had written my father a very strong letter saying, 'By subterfuge he 
has betrayed me.' He intimated that I had attacked Svetlana, which certainly wasn't the 
case. It was a nasty letter and my father wrote back saying that he could not believe what 
Wright was saying about me. Mr. Wright thought about it for a while, then responded 
handsomely. He wrote, 'I wrote you a bad letter and you sent me a good one.'" 

They were married in Evansville, Indiana, on April 1, 1935. By then Peters had obtained 
his architect's license and was building two houses in Evanston, Illinois. About six months 
after that, overtures were made from Taliesin, and they returned for good. Then Wes's 
famous father, the publisher who had driven the Ku Klux Klan out of Indiana practically 
single-handedly, died, Wright wrote in his autobiography and Wes came into his 
inheritance. 

The original reasons for founding the Fellowship made a certain kind of sense for Wright 
at the height of the depression. Having twenty or thirty young men about gave him a 
steady pool of willing and enthusiastic, if unskilled, labor. So far so good, but given 
Wright's perennial expansiveness and improvidence, he was bound to overextend himself 
with the Fellowship as he did with everything else, and although there are no balance 
sheets for that period, the indications are that he was, as usual and if possible, more in debt 
than ever. He wrote, "But altogether thirty-five thousand dollars a year would not keep us 
going for materials-and Fellowship upkeep. I had found that I had got into something 
that only a multimillionaire should have attempted. . . . 'I don't know whether you are a 
saint or a fool,' said my lawyer. I said, 'Is there a difference?'" {A2, p. 435.} 

When Schevill, Martin, Page, La Follette et al. had saved Taliesin for Wright, 
consolidated his debts and paid off his creditors, they had also settled with the Bank of 
Wisconsin for a cash payment of $15,000 ($10,000 from Martin and $5,000 from Page) 
plus a note from Wright, Inc. of $23,500, essentially a first mortgage on the property for a 
period of five years. That took place in September 1928, and two months later, on 
November 9, 1928, ownership of the property was transferred to Martin (two-thirds) and 
Page (one-third). Since Wright had arranged to have these men take responsibility for 
mortgage payments, interest and taxes on Taliesin, he might have been forgiven for taking 
the lordly attitude that such financial matters were no longer his responsibility when he 
and La Follette had their famous fight. {Details of the financial arrangments involving 
Taliesin were sent to Edward H. Kavinoky, a Buffalo attorney representing Darwin D. 
Martin's son, Darwin R. Martin, by James E. Doyle of La Follette, Sinykin & Doyle of 
Madison, Wisconsin, DDM, March 30, 1949.} Very soon thereafter Page was penniless, 
and so was Darwin Martin. Given Wright's cheerful assumption that he did not have to 
worry about Taliesin anymore, it is not surprising that there were periodic threats of 
foreclosure and last-minute attempts by Wright to stave off disaster. Records showed that 
interest payments on the mortgage were not met from 1932 onward, and nothing was paid 
on the principal note when it came due in the autumn of 1933, nor thereafter. 

In 1932 the Bank of Wisconsin sold the Taliesin mortgage to the First Wisconsin National 
Bank of Milwaukee, and when Martin died in December 1935, Wright finally realized he 
had to act. Within days of Martin's death he had contacted Page and somehow charmed 
him into signing over his one-third interest in Taliesin for the sum of one dollar. {DDM, 
December 11, 1935} This was remarkable, and perhaps Wright thought it would be 
equally easy to wrestle the remaining two-thirds interest from Martin's widow and son. 
His position was that Martin had wrongly taken title, instead of leaving it with the 
corporation, and had allowed thousands of dollars of interest to accrue on the loan and 
back taxes at a time when he himself was "helpless to turn a penny from my work." 
{DDM, June 30, 1939.} That was his story, but it seems clear that it did not go down well 
with the Martins, who were in no hurry to make Wright a present of Taliesin when their 
own circumstances were almost as desperate. Still, they too could not protect their interest 
by paying its debts, and the bank was pressing to foreclose again. The situation was at a 
stalemate when Svetlana and Wes came back. About a year after Wes and Svet returned, 
on September 14, 1936, the First Wisconsin National Bank issued a mortgage in 
Olgivanna Wright's name. Somebody, in other words, had put up the money to buy out the 
Martin share. That someone could only have been William Wesley Peters since, twelve 
days later, the mortgage was transferred to him. {on September 26, 1936. Doyle to 
Kavinoky, op. cit.} It was an adroit move, born of Wright's long experience at evading the 
rightful claims of creditors. By making Peters the owner, he effectively blocked any 
attempt the Martins might have made to use their part ownership of Taliesin as a weapon 
to attempt to recover some of the $38,000 he owed. There was no great risk involved for 
Wright now that Peters was a relative, linked to him and his wife. Peters represented 
Wright's stake in the future, and Wright was prepared to do anything to save Taliesin. 

Martin's son had been outflanked, which did not prevent him from trying to get redress for 
years. There was another foreclosure threat in 1939, and perhaps this is the reason why 
Wright took the further step of transferring all of his personal property to the Frank Lloyd 
Wright Foundation, a nonprofit, educational Wisconsin corporation. {established 
November 29, 1940.} Martin continued to raise the issue periodically but had to concede 
defeat in 1949 when an exhaustive investigation by La Follette's old law firm regretfully 
concluded that, as his father's heir, he had no enforceable rights. {Doyle to Kavinoky, op. 
cit.} 

Wright's immediate objective was to add to the Taliesin holdings, which had dwindled to 
seventy acres by the time it was put up for sale in 1928. {NYT, July 31, 1928} Wright may 
have been motivated by a determination to recover the family land that had been sold off, 
farm by farm, all those years ago. In any event, one of the first acts was to buy farmer 
Rieder's property at the bottom of the driveway for the giveaway price of twelve thousand 
dollars. They then tore down the house and removed all traces of the barnyard and the 
abominable pigpens. This purchase also gave Taliesin 350 acres on the waterfront, its first 
direct access to the river. {Wright to H. F. Johnson, December 30, 1939.} Then Peters 
bought the farm at which he had made inquiries on that fateful morning in 1932. He 
bought Uncle Enos's old property, and the two-story house was demolished; so many of 
those old houses were in bad shape, he said. Perhaps the choicest purchase of all was 
Uncle James's farm across The Valley, comprising another 350 acres. During the next 
thirty years of his ownership, Peters enlarged and remodeled the old homestead, naming it 
"Aldebaran," one of the stars in the Taurus constellation meaning "follower." Once this 
property had been bought, Taliesin had assumed control of about a thousand acres 
including three miles of waterfront. {A2, p. 467.} The acquisitions did not end there. 
Wright wanted a gentleman's estate, to be owner of all he surveyed and beyond. They kept 
buying until Taliesin had acquired three thousand acres and its boundaries reached to the 
edges of State Highway 14 and Tower Hill, by now a state park, site of old Helena and so 
many Jenkin Lloyd Jones camp meetings. A few broken-down buildings, remnants of the 
old town, were on the land, including two clapboard farmhouses, c. 1850, about which 
local folk were becoming nostalgic. A few more black marks were added to Wright's name 
when he burned them down. {John H. Howe to author.} It has to be confessed that Wright 
could not resist a good fire. Another famous event of the postwar period took place at 
Stuffy's Bar, a disreputable building near the river that had become a hangout for Taliesin 
apprentices, who sneaked out after ten o'clock curfew for a few drinks. {CD, pp. 
158-159.} Once he found out, Wright naturally disapproved. So he bought the property 
(Stuffy was glad enough to sell) and announced a celebration. Everyone assembled with 
picnic baskets at a hillside spot that afforded an excellent view of the scene of so much 
illicit carousing. Then, without turning a hair, Wright gave the order to "pour the gasoline, 
boys!" and while the whole Fellowship watched, Stuffy's Bar went up with a roar. To put 
the final touch on the evening, Wright arranged to have John Amarantides, his star 
student musician, fiddling while Stuffy's burned. 

Jack and Lu Howe thought Wright's eventual ambition was to buy up enough land to make 
Taliesin a state park. He also encouraged some of his apprentices to buy land and settle in 
The Valley. Henning Waterston bought Uncle John's old farmhouse, which for many years 
served as the official post office for the town of Hillside. (John was the postmaster, and 
after his death, his wife carried on. {from 1889 to 1919.}) Frances and Cary Caraway took 
over the small, red gambrel-roofed cottage once owned by Margaret Lloyd (Evans) Jones 
and her widowed stepdaughter. Davy and Kay Davison bought half of the beautiful old 
property, all orchards, pines, vegetable and flower gardens and sweeping lawns, that had 
belonged to Aunt Mary and Uncle James Philips, and Herb and Eloise Fritz bought the 
other half. Eloise Fritz recalled that the Wrights came up to dinner one evening, and he 
was very complimentary. "My, Herbert, you have got this looking nice," he said. As he 
left, he proposed that his former student give his property to the Fellowship. Of course, 
they could go on living there during their lifetimes. Eloise said, "Herb's mother was so 
worried because she thought Herb would actually do it." He said, "Not quite." {Mr. and 
Mrs. Herbert Fritz to author} 

In the early 1930s lecturing was the chief source of Wright's income, before architectural 
commissions began to roll in. University engagements were particularly lucrative, 
according to Howe. He would usually be invited by the students, and Masselink, Fritz, 
Tafel or Howe would act as chauffeur for the Cord or the Lincoln Continental and make 
the trip while Wright napped in the back seat. As has been observed, he became very 
skilled at extemporaneous lectures, although his archives attest to the fact that he also 
spent hours writing speeches and laboriously amending them. Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, 
John's daughter, recalled that Wright once made a brilliant speech at a local school 
without using notes, and afterward she looked to see whether he had hidden notes on his 
cuff or written on his hand. He told her, "What notes I speak are from the heart and the 
head." She said, "I was very impressed." Sometimes he made the trip by train. Henry 
Sayles Francis, then a young curator, although acting director of the Cleveland Museum of 
Art, recalled having Wright to dinner in the spring of 1932, when he was on the lecture 
circuit to talk about his autobiography. 

"I went to meet him in the cavernous Cleveland depot and saw him approaching across the 
vast space in sombrero and sky-blue, silk-lined cape." Wright was not amused, they 
thought, to be received by such a junior member of the museum, and appeared to become 
more and more disapproving once they took him back to their modest home; "no pomp and 
no trustees," Francis explained. After dinner, Wright went to the bathroom to prepare for 
his lecture and was gone for some time. Finally he summoned his hostess. He had dropped 
a bridge of false teeth down the toilet. She arrived, and they peered down together but 
there was nothing they could do as he had already flushed it. {Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sayles 
Francis to author; Henry Sayles Francis to author, December 30, 1986.} 

The subject of Wright at train stations cannot be left without recounting another incident 
that took place some years later when a former mayor of Louisville, Charles Farnsley, 
invited Wright to lecture. Farnsley was unable to meet the distinguished visitor personally, 
so he sent two chauffeurs to the station. One of them happened to be a policeman, and 
when Wright, coming along the platform, saw the policeman approaching he got back on 
the train. {Prof. William Morgan to author.} 

Some of Wright's senior apprentices were occasionally engaged to make speeches of their 
own. Bob Mosher, whom Wright had placed in charge of Fallingwater and defended when 
his client protested that he deserved a more experienced overseer, told the story that he, 
Peters and Caraway were all in New York one time when an invitation came from the 
architectural department at Yale University. {A2, p. 448.} One of them was asked to make 
a speech; Mosher was elected. He went to New Haven, delivered his speech and was 
delighted to find that they were paying him twenty-five dollars. While he was away, 
Wright breezed into town, arriving unannounced as he liked to do. He immediately wanted 
to know where Mosher was. As luck would have it, Mosher returned at that moment and 
was obliged to confess that he had given a lecture. Mosher was no match for Wright's 
determined questioning and soon conceded that he had been paid. 

Wright said, "Bobbie, come with me for a moment." They walked up Fifth Avenue to a 
handsome store, the one from which Wright bought his ties and hats. "Let's step in here 
for a moment," Wright said. "I'm looking for a beret." He tried on several and then found a 
cap he liked. "How much is this?" The price was twenty-five dollars. 

"I think I can use it," Wright said. In a trice he had expertly ripped off the visor. He turned 
to Mosher. "Bobbie, can you lend me twenty-five dollars?" Mosher laughed and paid up. 
{anecdote from Mr. and Mrs. John H. Howe.} 

Everyone knew what a terror Wright was in a store: how he haggled over discounts, how 
he tried to beat down the merchant, using his characteristically shameless mixture of 
brashness and guile. Henry-Russell Hitchcock recalled accompanying Wright to 
Abercrombie and Fitch in New York, where Wright was drawn like a magnet to a rack of 
the most expensive men's coats. After settling on the one he wanted, Wright went into a 
brilliant monologue about the reasons why the store should give him a coat, since it would 
be so advantageous for them to have him, a famous man, as a walking advertisement. 
After twenty or thirty minutes of this kind of pressure, the manager finally agreed to waive 
the price. "Fine," said Wright briskly, "and I want one for my friend, too." {Mosette 
Broderick to author.} 

Part of his motivation, it was thought, had to do with his urge to reform his friends. If he 
particularly liked someone, he would attempt to take him or her in hand. Sophia Mumford 
recalled, "He was always trying to get Lewis to spell his name with a double L, in the 
Welsh fashion, and taking him to task over small things, such as the temperature of his 
whiskey or the way he walked." {Mrs. Mumford, interview with author.} Arthur Holden, 
the architect who worked closely with him when the Guggenheim Museum was being 
built, quipped that Wright's main motivation was his desire to improve the scenery: "One 
day he said to me, 'Arthur, why don't you wear your brown suit more often? You look your 
best in brown.' Then he took me into a store to buy me a tie, and when I chose one that had 
a connecting-rod design, he was very disapproving. {interview with author.} I was color 
blind, he said." Carl Sandburg, Lincoln's biographer and famous poet, with whom he was 
on distant but cordial terms for decades, grumbled that Wright once made him dress up in 
a velvet suit with a frilly shirt, and he was in an agony that someone might recognize him 
in that outfit. Wright later observed that he had tried to mold Carl but had to give up, 
because he was "too far gone on along the lines of Lincoln. . . . I couldn't do much with 
him." {The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Llyod Wright, Patrick J. Meehan, 
p. 243} As he liked to tell his appreciative audiences during his lecture tours and seminars 
on campuses all over the country, "First of all, my father was a preacher and his father was 
a preacher . . . and way back they're all preachers. . . ." 

As for his next great client of the 1930s, Herbert F. ("Hib") Johnson, Wright's approach 
was the same carefully calculated combination of flattery, impudence and guile. He knew 
that Hib Johnson, grandson of the founder of Johnson's Wax, had already chosen an 
architect to design a new administration building  for his Racine, Wisconsin, company, S. 
C. Johnson and Sons. Wright was determined to shake whatever confidence remained in 
the architect of choice and persuade Hib of his superior merits. As soon as word went out 
that the Johnson delegation was to appear, everyone was pressed into service for the 
newest emergency, washing windows, raking grounds, cleaning and waxing the floors and 
filling every room with great armfuls of flowers. {TAF, pp. 175-176.} The group was 
given the grand tour, followed by an elegant lunch, and then Wright went on the offensive. 
"He insulted me about everything," Johnson later recalled, "and I insulted him, but he did 
a better job. I showed him pictures of the old office, and he said it was awful. . . . He had a 
Lincoln-Zephyr, and I had one-that was the only thing we agreed on. On all other 
matters we were at each other's throats." {Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax 
Buildings, Jonathan Lipman, p. 13} Johnson nevertheless left thinking, "If that guy can 
talk like that he must have something." Having thoroughly unsettled Johnson, Wright 
exerted the full force of his charismatic personality in describing the kind of building he 
would design, unconventional, imaginative, trend-setting, a visual symbol of a great 
company. Alistair Cooke later described the special quality of Wright's speech, "delicate 
and warmly modulated," that voice that had "for 50 years seduced wax manufacturers, oil 
tycoons, bishops, university boards of trustees and at least one emperor of Japan. . . ." {the 
Washington Post, April 26, 1959.} They became enormously fond of each other despite, or 
perhaps because of, Johnson's conclusion that he was no match for Wright.  

Those who know Wright best have said that, in his art as in his life, the one constant was 
his mutability, his restless inventiveness. Perpetual renewal was the rallying cry for, as he 
told Tafel, "what we did yesterday we won't do today. And what we don't do tomorrow will 
not be what we'll be doing the day after." In that respect he was temperamentally at the 
opposite pole of an architect like Mies van der Rohe, someone he came to like personally, 
whose goal it was to polish his particular style to a high gloss. {LCL, p. 131.} It has also 
been suggested that Wright was capable of capitalizing upon whatever new movement was 
in the air. And, in 1936, when he came to design the S. C. Johnson and Sons 
Administration Building, the newest vogue was Streamlining. The style was an outgrowth 
of the development of the new field of industrial design and pioneered by men like 
Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes, whom Wright already knew since he had 
worked on theatrical productions with Aline Barnsdall. It expressed all that could be 
summed up in the glorification of speed and the machine, a kind of exultation of power 
itself, one that Marinetti, leader of the Italian Futurist movement, had celebrated twenty 
years before: "A roaring motorcar, which runs like a machine-gun." The ideal form, the 
ultimate symbol of efficiency and untrammeled movement, became that of the teardrop, or 
parabolic curve. Inevitably, the first industrial designs in the new style centered on such 
automobiles as the Lincoln Zephyr and the new locomotives, but the style caught on so 
rapidly that everything from radios to jukeboxes, cameras, lighters and cocktail cabinets 
was redesigned to reflect the sleek lines and rounded edges of this symbol of the new age, 
representing as it did "the machine and the hope it held for the future." {American Art 
Deco, Alistair Duncan, p. 271.} Given Wright's avid eye, not to mention his 
long-standing interest in the subject of art and the machine, it was only a matter of time 
before the streamlined curve would appear in his work, and the Johnson Administration 
Building was the obvious place to start. So one would expect to see, in its sleek horizontal 
lines and rounded corners, a new symbol of advanced and progressive ideas. 

In fact, the Johnson Corporation, with its liberal policy toward its employees (it was one of 
the first in the nation to institute profit sharing), must have put Wright in mind of the 
other company he had come to know so well and for which he had designed another 
precedent shattering building thirty years before. Benevolent paternalism: for the Larkin 
Company, that concept had been expressed by a single vast work space surrounded by 
balconies, and since the Johnson Corporation also wanted to portray "a sort of extended 
family under a beneficent patriarchy," Curtis wrote, it seemed logical that Wright would 
use the same design principle. {CU, p. 201} The flat lot in an ugly urban setting had no 
views worth exploiting, so Wright, as he had in Buffalo, designed a large, windowless 
rectangle decorated, at the roofline, with a frieze of glass tubing that admitted light but no 
view. The same glass tubing was used in the roof. Inside, the central work space was 
interspersed with rows of slender concrete columns sometimes described as mushroom or 
lilypad in shape; the whole was surrounded by curving tiers of balconies designed to 
accommodate the offices of middle management. Jonathan Lipman, the architect who 
organized the exhibition "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings," has 
observed that however up-to-the-minute Wright's design might appear, it actually had 
all major points in common, not only with the Larkin Building, but also a number of other 
public spaces Wright designed during his long career, including Unity Temple, the 
Imperial Hotel and others. For instance, Wright made sure that one entered through a low 
reception hall, which gave no hint of the interior drama and the superb, glowing, 
cathedral-like space that was to be discovered. It was a trick that had not failed to work 
since he first tried it out in Oak Park. As he had before, Wright built a smaller building 
beside it, connected by the common entrance, for utilitarian purposes: garage, exercise 
deck, squash court and so on. {as pointed out in "Consecrated Space," unpublished articled 
by Jonathan Lipman.} A dazzling variation on an unchanging theme: it was vintage 
Wright, and Wright at the top of his form. From the day the building opened, Samuel C. 
Johnson, Hib's son, wrote, "We achieved international attention because that building 
represented and symbolized the quality of everything we did. . . ." {American Institute of 
Architects Journal, January 1979.} 

Since, as Professor Jack Quinan has noted, Wright saved his most daring experiments with 
new materials for his largest and most important commissions, a number of the Johnson 
building's innovations presented the inevitable problems. Building permits were delayed 
because the authorities did not believe that the columns, as designed, would support the 
necessary loads until Wright, in a famous demonstration, proved that they could. The 
building made use of the new technique of air conditioning, then in its early design stages, 
which was never really satisfactory. As for the glass tubing in the walls and roof, Wright 
invented a new system of glazing that always leaked, Tafel wrote. As Samuel Johnson 
observed, the idea of having fifty typists at work in a vast, echoing space is one of those 
concepts that may look attractive on paper but which tends to grate on the nerves once it 
becomes a reality. Naturally, the building's cost had more than doubled over its projection, 
but none of that really mattered since it had become such a successful symbol for the 
company. Johnson went on to commission an addition, a research tower, ten years later. 
He also asked Wright to build him a house. 

As its name would imply, Wingspread was a one-floor house that isolated various 
activities into wings: one for sleeping, another for the kitchen quarters, a third for the 
children and so on, in a cruciform pattern, with an enormous, two-story, skylit living 
room in the center. It was the biggest house Wright ever built (fourteen thousand square 
feet), and most architectural historians consider it to be the last of his Prairie houses, 
although, like the Johnson building, it did usher in Wright's interest in curved and circular 
forms, shapes he had not entertained seriously to this point. (The centerpiece of 
Wingspread, for instance, is a horseshoe-shaped fireplace.) Although only in his twenties 
when he met Wright, Hib Johnson had already had a complicated marital life. He and his 
first wife were divorced when his firstborn, Samuel C. Johnson, was six years old, in 1934. 
Two years later he married Jane Roach, who had two boys of her own, leading him to 
commission the house. However, there were soon signs that all was not well, as the 
Wright-Johnson correspondence shows, despite Wright's cheerful comment that his 
design, which gave everyone privacy, as well as immediate access to the outdoors, would 
provide a basis for domestic tranquillity. A handwritten letter to Wright from Johnson on 
University of Michigan Union stationery stated that Jane had a terrible time following an 
unspecified hospital visit in the summer of 1937. Two months later she was at home 
recovering, but had expressed reservations about the design of the house as building began. 
Wright responded with the characteristic observation that Mrs. Johnson's reaction, of 
seeing the parts rather than the whole, was typical of a refined woman. Mrs. Johnson's 
ideas do not appear again in the correspondence, and there is only a terse note from 
Johnson thanking Wright for his condolences a year later. Wright wrote that before the 
house was completed, an old workman observed that a white dove, which had been 
frequenting a belvedere, had flown away. "The workman shook his head. . . . 'The young 
mistress will never live in this house,' he said." He was right; she died of alcoholism before 
it was completed. It is strange that both wives of clients with the money and will to build 
lavishly, who had commissioned Wright almost at the same moment, would take 
self-destructive paths. 

Johnson later married Irene Purcell, a film actress, and brought her to live at Wingspread. 
Samuel Johnson noted that Irene "did not relate" to the house and went to some lengths to 
redecorate the interiors and add paintings and objects d'art more to her taste. That gave 
rise to an incident that would be repeated often, whenever Wright returned to visit a house 
he had designed. Hib and Irene invited him to stay overnight a few years later. Wright was 
up with the lark at four in the morning and redecorated Irene's decorations. Johnson wrote, 
"He took some of the furniture that he didn't think was particularly appropriate and put it 
in a storeroom. He changed many of the paintings, and then waited for Irene to come down 
for breakfast. . . . I don't think she and Mr. Wright ever spoke {American Institute of 
Architects Journal.}  together after that. . . ." Of course the roof leaked. For the first year 
or so, Johnson had workmen at the ready with putty guns whenever it threatened to rain. 
Inevitably, the same story that was reported at Westhope became part of the lore at 
Wingspread: the same thunderstorm, the same outraged owner, the same telephone call, 
the same message-"Frank, . . . it is leaking right on top of my head!"-and the same 
reply, given with his usual insouciance. 

Wright almost lost the Johnson commission because he was close to insisting that Johnson 
abandon his ugly industrial site and relocate his entire business four or five miles out of 
town, to be serviced by a railway, and surrounded by a "Johnson Village" for his 
employees. It was, of course, far too ambitious and visionary, but entirely of a piece with 
Wright's new ideas, which centered on a concept he called Broadacre City, which he made 
into a model, exhibited widely and talked about for the rest of his life. Given his 
temperament and his penchant for telling people not only how to dress but how to arrange 
their furniture and what pictures to hang (if any), it was only a matter of time before he 
would become fascinated by the issue of social planning, which was, in any case, one of 
the central concerns of his day. Le Corbusier had introduced his concept, the Ville 
Radieuse, basically a series of apartment buildings and office towers grouped together in a 
park, and directed his entire architectural effort toward this vision of an idealized society. 
Wright's concept derived from entirely different models-inspired, perhaps, by the early 
garden cities of Morris and Sidney Webb, as interpreted by the famous English firm of 
Parker and Unwin-attempts to resettle city dwellers from the urban slums into healthier 
environments. Like these pioneering British concepts, Wright's was humanist, 
nature-oriented and artscentered. He envisioned whole communities where each family 
would live on an acre of land, hence the name. These new towns, more like expanded 
villages, would be self-contained and self-sufficient, with carefully planned centers for 
art and recreation, worship, education, instruction, relaxation; an idyllic life in an 
environmentally sound setting, one that the car and the railway had now made possible. 

Wright's social-planning ideas, after decades of being dismissed as freakish, have been 
reconsidered in recent years and, it is argued, were entirely in accord with the enlightened 
thought of his day. Lionel March, writing on Broadacre City in Writings on Wright, 
believed that Wright had been influenced by the ideas of the German author Silvio Gesell, 
who wrote that a new system of finance was needed if society were to avoid the pitfalls of 
monopoly capitalism and the credit system that had brought about economic collapse. 
Gesell's concept of a new system of "free-land" and "free-money," a currency that would 
lose its value over time, encouraging its use as soon as possible, was more than just a 
Utopian idea. During the early 1930s the free-money concept, one that Wright espoused 
for Broadacre City, was actually in use in many parts of the United States, and in 1933 a 
bill was presented in Congress "directing the Federal Treasury to issue a billion dollars 
worth of free-money,"  

In Wisconsin, a new political party, called the Progressive, had been formed by Robert La 
Follette's eldest son Bob, just elected senator from Wisconsin at the age of thirty, and 
Philip, that erstwhile secretary of Wright's corporation, was now governor of Wisconsin. 
The Progressives believed in the right of men and women to own their homes, farms and 
places of employment, opposing corporate and absentee ownership. They lobbied for the 
public ownership of utilities and banking, for social security, cooperative movements of all 
kinds, in short, for a broad-based democracy. This socialist manifesto was essentially that 
adopted by Wright.  

Just as the concept of the city itself needed to be redefined in the context of a reformed 
society so, too, the idea of the house needed revision to reflect the needs of the new age. 
During the same period, Wright was working intensively on his idea for a new kind of 
lowcost dwelling that he called the Usonian house, his attempt to bring designs of beauty 
and humanity within the range of ordinary people. He said he had taken that name, as 
John Sergeant writes in his excellent study of these houses, from a Utopian novel by 
Samuel Butler, Erewhon, of 1872, but no one has been able to find the reference. Whatever 
its origin, the term came to symbolize for Wright an idealized way of living in a 
landscape, a vision in miniature of what a perfectly designed house could be, despite the 
severe constraints on size and the shortage, at first, of materials and, later, in the face of 
continually rising costs. The modern house might be modest by Oak Park standards but 
would remain true to his concept of the Prairie house with its elongated, one-floor plan 
and its respectful relationship to its site. It would dispense with servants' quarters, and 
basements and attics had long since gone from Wright's houses. Carports would replace 
garages, and the separate dining room, that sanctum sanctorum for the Arts and Crafts 
architect, would be folded into a corner of the living room. The kitchen and laundry, once 
banished to a corner of the house, were now placed in a pivotal position so as to give the 
homemaker instant access to the living quarters. The fireplace was never abandoned, and 
Wright continued to play with an infinite number of variations on that theme as if aware 
that, whatever items the modern family might be willing to dispense with, the central 
hearth would never be one of them, as posterity has demonstrated. Wright's designs for the 
Willey, Hoult and Lusk houses were early experiments with the Usonian idea, which he 
brought to a triumphant fulfillment with his house for Herbert Jacobs, a Wisconsin 
journalist, and his family. Working with a budget of $5,500 and on a small suburban lot, 
Wright audaciously placed his building flush with the street but without windows, saving 
these for the garden area, and provided 1,500 square feet of living space in all. 

He redesigned everything, from a new system of central heating (in which hot-water 
pipes were inserted into a drained bed of cinders and sand, so as to warm the 
concrete-slab floors) to a wide overhanging roof made from a simple, insulated slab and 
containing a ventilation system, to a new method of prefabricating walls using three layers 
of board and two of tarpaper. During the next two decades he would continually 
experiment with better and cheaper methods of building, although radiant floor heat 
remained his method of choice. The Usonian house would, in short, be built with every 
possible labor and money-saving shortcut that ingenuity could devise. But since the 
house was the work of a master, it retained all the essential attributes: the same adroit use 
of space, the same quality of spatial surprise, the same aesthetic awareness and the same 
meticulous attention to the natural setting. The Jacobs house, built in the shape of an L, 
with its central kitchen work area, its abundant natural light provided by harmonious 
banks of floor-to-ceiling windows and doors opening onto terraces, and its sleek, 
distinctly Japanese lines, became one of Wright's favorite floor plans, and, Howe said, he 
was always looking for a way to use it again. The Jacobs house was economical if not 
spartan, but full of so many trend-setting ideas that it was an instant success. Herbert and 
Katherine Jacobs, who wrote a book about it, stated that almost from the first, they were 
besieged by visitors. They finally charged fifty cents to give a tour and calculated that, by 
the time they sold the house, this modest charge had paid back their architect's fee. Curtis 
wrote, "It was no accident that Wright's formula should have been adopted so rapidly by 
building contractors and cheap home catalogues. For its free-plan interiors and exterior 
patios captured precisely the ethos of an emergent middle-class suburban existence." 
{CU, p. 203.} Wright can hardly be blamed for the fact that the imitations "were all too 
often clumsy 'ranch-style' shoe-boxes, laid out in jerry-built monotony on the boom 
tracts of the 1950s." 

In the winter of 1936, however, plans for the Jacobs house had come to a temporary halt. 
Wright had a rare collapse. He had been in the middle of a resurgence as he fought with 
Kaufmann, the contractor and everyone else on the scene at Fallingwater; made weekly 
trips to Racine, Wisconsin, to supervise construction of the Johnson Administration 
Building and Wingspread; and negotiated with the Hannas, a prosperous new set of clients 
as well as the Jacobs family. He was, after all, about to be seventy, although, apart from the 
occasional accident (in June of that year he fell off the road grader as he was making a 
new road to Hillside, broke a couple of ribs and wrenched his neck and leg {LCL, p. 
120}), his physical stamina had seemed as good as ever. However, that winter his secretary 
Eugene Masselink wrote to tell one of his correspondents that, after returning late in the 
evening from Racine, he had contracted pneumonia in early December. {to E. Willis 
Jones, T, January 13, 1937.} Masselink made light of the illness but, in fact, it was 
serious. Wright ran a high temperature every day, was delirious, and it was a week before 
his temperature returned to normal and the doctor pronounced the crisis over. {Masselink 
to Carl Sandburg, T, December 17, 1936.} Iovanna said, "My mother pulled him through. 
He was in bed for a couple of weeks and finally asked for some speckled trout and a glass 
of champagne." {interview with author.} There were further setbacks early in January 
when he had phlebitis in his left leg. {LCL, p. 126.} Finally he was on the mend. 

By mid-January Masselink was able to report that Wright had emerged from his sickbed 
at last, was seated in front of his own fire and even playing the harpsichord occasionally. 
He had been given a radio as a Christmas present. Although he made a fine recovery, the 
effects took months to dissipate completely because, in May, after Johnson took 
photographs, Wright complained that he still looked "pretty ragged" from his bout with 
pneumonia. The illness was a reminder that, healthy as he was, he was not immortal. It 
was also a demonstration, if one were needed, that without him, nothing could be decided 
or accomplished. It seemed prudent, perhaps, to begin thinking seriously about spending 
winters in a warmer climate. 

Wright had, of course, been making forays to Arizona since he first began work on the 
Arizona Biltmore and San Marcos-in-the-Desert. Interestingly, as early as that, he was 
talking about the Ocatillo site as if it were a second Taliesin, as a letter to one of his "boys" 
in Switzerland, Werner Moser, shows: it was dated the summer of 1929. {LAR, p. 76.} By 
the summer of 1930 he was prepared to abandon what remained of the temporary Taliesin. 
That was not much, to judge from a report that the kitchen, dining room, cooks' dormitory 
and a cottage had gone up in flames. {T, June 3, 1930.} He offered the camp to Dr. 
Chandler, who declined politely, observing that the cost of keeping a caretaker on the 
premises would be more than the camp was worth. {T, June 6, 1930.} There matters stood, 
but Wright had not given up his idea of transferring operations for the winter months. It 
was becoming clear that the effort involved in keeping all those people warm within 
Taliesin's drafty walls was becoming more and more of an ordeal every year. If they could 
go south, he probably reasoned, they would save so much money that the trip would pay 
for itself. 

There was a further reason, as he told Cousin Richard. Olgivanna did not like the bleak 
Wisconsin winters and was drawn to the sand, stones and desert growth of the Arizona 
landscape. She recalls telling him, "I wish we had a home in Arizona. This is such a 
different world from Wisconsin-like another planet." {The Shining Brow, Olgivanna 
Lloyd Wright, p. 92.} He promised her that some day they would. He was, perhaps, 
looking for a reason to return, and the irrepressible Dr. Chandler was back in his life 
again, asking for a scaled-down version of the original plan, or a "Little San Marcos," as 
he called it. He thought he could now finance it with the aid of a government loan. 
Chandler offered them living quarters at a ranch complex, La Hacienda, on the edge of 
town, and they set out early in 1935. Howe wrote, "The sunny courtyard, upon which the 
various rooms opened, became our 'studio' and here we constructed the Broadacre City 
models. . . . The characteristic Taliesin life was transplanted to Arizona and we 
entertained guests from the nearby San Marcos hotel with Sunday evening dinner and . . . 
music. . . ." {"Reflections of Taliesin," John H. Howe, Northwest Architect, July-August 
1969.} The Fellowship spent a second winter at La Hacienda early in 1936. Again, 
Chandler had to concede defeat: the government had turned down his application to build 
San Marcos. {to Wright, T, April 25, 1936.} That should have ended the matter, but, after 
his illness, Wright was more determined than ever to find a permanent home in Arizona. 
Tafel recalled that, in 1937, Wright bought about eight hundred acres of land at $3.50 an 
acre on a southern slope of the McDowell Range overlooking Paradise Valley outside 
Scottsdale. {TAF, p. 453} In those days, hardly anyone lived there. It was perfect and 
unspoiled, but there was a hitch. The land had no history of water, the reason for its 
bargain price. Wright refused to be discouraged. He hired a well digger and kept spending 
money-the sizable sum of $10,000 in all. Finally the good news came that water had been 
found. Their desert camp could be built at last. 

Memories of what became an annual exodus to Arizona, beginning in January 1938, 
frequently focus on the vicissitudes of the trip, which took several days. Jack Howe 
recalled the earlier caravans to visit Dr. Chandler: "We always seemed to leave in the 
middle of a blizzard. Usually the big truck we needed would be in the garage with a 
broken axle waiting for repairs." They would drive as far south as Dodgeville, where lunch 
would be waiting for them provided by Etta Parsons, the wonderful, large-hearted owner 
of a grocery store who willingly extended infinite credit to Mr. Wright and, perhaps for 
that reason, was one of the few creditors whom he willingly repaid. On that particular trip, 
by dark they reached Iowa City, where a professor of architecture had agreed to give them 
beds for the night. Wright appeared, saying "Here we are!" with twenty-seven people 
behind him. The professor took a long look, then gamely put up all the men in a large attic 
room over his school (most of them having brought sleeping bags); the women slept in his 
classroom. Another night was spent camping out in Richard Lloyd Jones's new house in 
Tulsa. Howe said, "I slept on the pool table in the billiard room with one guy, and two 
others were underneath." The one unvarying rule of the trip was that all the trucks and 
cars, eight vehicles in all, would meet at the same service station in order to get their 
gasoline wholesale. For subsequent trips, Howe recalled, Wright bought them an English 
Bantam car designed as a mobile kitchen that became known as the Dinky Diner. It had 
been built to carry food in pots in the center, along with plates, cutlery and accoutrements. 
Mabel, the cook, was in attendance, and Howe recalled grumbling one time because there 
was no ketchup, which became a standing joke. "We had our favorite picnic spots," he 
said. "Usually a schoolyard was a good place because we could get water there. We'd pull 
our cars around into a circle and build a fire in the middle to cut down on the wind. 
{interviews with author.} 

"I remember one time that Mr. Wright decided to go by way of Death Valley. He had seen 
paintings in Germany of the Grand Canyon, giving the view from the north side where you 
can see for about a mile, and was ambitious to see it for himself. First we got into a 
sandstorm in Death Valley and could not move until all the carburetors had been cleaned 
out. Then we went onward until we were approaching the north rim in Utah at night. We 
had no headlights and did not know where we were, but Mr. Wright kept telling us to 
drive on. Finally he said, 'Better stop here,' and we all pulled up. When we got out we 
discovered we were fifteen feet away from the edge." 

Taliesin West took several years to build, and while waiting for more permanent quarters, 
apprentices took their sleeping bags and erected temporary structures for themselves and 
their families. Larry Lemmon, who was on the first expedition, recalled that each was 
issued enough canvas and lumber to build a temporary house. He built his against a 
paloverde tree but had to cut off one of its branches and received a stern lecture from 
Wright. As one of the cooks, he had constructed an earth closet in which to keep 
provisions and recalled cleaning maggots off a piece of meat. They had to eat it, so he 
disguised the meat with plenty of garlic and recalled, "It was one of the tastiest meals we 
ever had." At night there was the cry of coyotes. There were plagues of grasshoppers, 
scorpions and lizards. But the desert in spring was enchanting. Olgivanna Wright 
remembered the "staghorn cactus, prickly pear, saguaros, and the red feather-like cluster 
of ocotillo blossoms ending each angular branch. We often stopped to crush the leaves of 
the grease-bush and inhaled the sharp medicinal odor. . . . The desert floor was covered 
with tiny orange colored blossoms and silver grass disappeared into the golden sands. . . ." 
{"Our House," CT, February 1, 1958.} 

Work began at once. Fritz remembered seeing Wright draw the plans for the camp on 
brown wrapping paper, aided by Jack Howe. "No blueprints were ever made, and I think 
that sometimes what was drawn one day was built the next." {"Reflections of Taliesin," 
Northwest Architect, July-August 1969, p. 141.} Wright began by devising what he 
called "desert concrete," a combination of cement and large chunks of rock, poured into 
slanting walls and topped off with superstructures of redwood and canvas. Wright wanted 
massive walls, in those days before air conditioning, to keep rooms cool in the daytime and 
warmer at night. Blake wrote, "Through the canvas, light would filter and fill the interior 
with a lovely glow; just under the deeply cantilevered roof rafters, there would be viewing 
slots that opened up the great desert horizon; and all around the base of the 
concrete-and-rock parapets, there would be stepped-down terraces, pools, and gardens 
that made the entire group of buildings a dreamlike oasis in the desert." {BL, p. 385.} 

It was an oasis and it was dreamlike, but not achieved without an immense amount of 
work. The "desert concrete" walls were built throughout the camp, which became nine 
hundred feet long, and they did all the work themselves. It became a point of pride, Fritz 
wrote, to be able to take a wheelbarrow filled with rock or concrete up a plank runway to 
the top of a chimney, one pulling it up with a rope while the other pushed. He added, "Wes 
[Peters] greatly accelerated the construction time of some of these walls by promising the 
crew a dinner out if we reached a certain distance by a certain time. . . ." {"At Taliesin," 
An Uplands Reader, April 1979, p. 142} They transported interesting-looking boulders, 
perhaps four feet high, and covered with Indian petroglyphs, down to the camp as 
decorations, using Caterpillar tractors and a "stoneboat" made from a sheet of steel. They 
moved cacti to new locations and transplanted a saguaro that probably weighed a ton, 
using an improvised sling and plenty of ropes. They laid roads and wired up lights and 
sometimes found themselves in comical predicaments, as when Charles Samson, newly 
returned from New York, tried to jump over a cholla cactus in his beautiful new jodhpurs 
and riding boots and missed, covering his posterior with hundreds of painful burrs. 

Everyone developed an enormous respect for the desert depressions called arroyos, or 
"washes," that could turn into raging rivers, and there were many such between Taliesin 
West and Phoenix. Wright wrote that they might be marooned for days on end and, "At 
times on the way to and from Phoenix for supplies I would sit in the car, Olgivanna by my 
side, when my feet were on the brakes under water up to my knees." {A2, p. 454-455.} 
There was the famous occasion when Gene Masselink's parents, on their way out from 
Phoenix, were several hours late arriving at camp. One of the apprentices took a station 
wagon out to look for them. Fritz wrote, "He came to a flooded wash and decided to back 
up and cross it by sheer speed. He was soon adrift in five or six feet of water and had to 
swim for it." {"At Taliesin," An Uplands Reader, April 1979, p. 144.} There were 
disappointments and discouraging setbacks but, for most of them, the desert camp, as it 
was usually called during Wright's lifetime, was an escape and a release. 

From Wright's description it is clear that the great allure of his campsite was the dazzling, 
unobstructed view it offered in those early days, stretching for miles. He wrote, "Just 
imagine what it would be like on top of the world looking over the universe at sunrise or at 
sunset with clear sky in between. . . . An esthetic, even ascetic, idealization of space. . . ." 
{A2, p. 453.} As the grandson of pioneers, he was too close to the experience not to want a 
newfound land of his own. Living in the desert was a "spiritual cathartic." It swept one's 
character clean of old ways of thinking, and one was ready for "fresh adventure. 

By 1937 Wright had become known for his fearless attacks on such subjects as American 
politics, economics and the general level of architecture, not just his opposition to 
architects of the school favored by the Museum of Modern Art. When he arrived in 
Washington in the summer of 1935, where his model for Broadacre City went on view at 
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, he was pounced upon by journalists in the hope that he would 
say something controversial. Was it true, one asked, that he was against capitalism? {the 
Washington Post, July 2, 1935.} Wright was in a mellow mood that day. "I'm not against 
capitalism," he answered, smiling. "The time to hit capitalism is not when it's down. Let 
the dear old thing die." A statement of that kind might have led many an observer to 
conclude that he was anti-capitalist and perhaps anti-American as well. Writing about 
Broadacre City that same year, Stephan Alexander observed in New Masses that "the 
significance of Mr. Wright's project is that it points inexorably to the necessity for the 
removal of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society as the primary condition for 
the progressive development of architecture." 

On the other hand, Wright was perfectly capable of exclaiming that "I believe in a 
capitalist system. I only wish I could see it tried some time." {"Frank Lloyd Wright in 
Moscow: June 1937," by Donald Leslie Johnson, JSAH, March 1987, p. 65-79} The fact 
was that, where politics were involved, and as a loyal nephew of Jenkin Lloyd Jones's, he 
would always side instinctively with the most liberal position, and in the early 1930s, as 
has been noted, he was emphatically in favor of public ownership and the decline of big 
business without ever being a communist; he would, perhaps, have declined to be called a 
socialist as well. It would be a mistake to look for a consistent position about politics, in 
particular from someone as mercurial as Wright, given that it was far from being one of 
his major concerns. It would be fairer to say that he began the decade as an enthusiast and 
soon discovered some shortcomings that he, characteristically, committed to paper. But 
when he was invited to attend the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 
Moscow in June 1937, these reservations were not uppermost. He was ready to like the 
Russians themselves, out of loyalty, perhaps, to his wife and daughters. He had always 
been ready to go anywhere when the invitation was cordial enough, as might be gathered 
from his years in Japan and Germany, and was none too scrupulous about the 
shortcomings of a country's particular political system or the reasons why he might have 
been asked. He was actively engaged in furthering his "renaissance," and by 1937 was 
enjoying something of a revival elsewhere in Europe, where his architecture had been 
exhibited or his writings published in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Poland, 
Hungary and England, as well as Japan, although not east of Poland. The Moscow 
invitation presented new opportunities for self-promotion, and Wright was not loath. 
Besides, Olgivanna had not been to Russia since she had escaped twenty years earlier, and 
had relatives and friends still living there, including her mother. And, if there was an 
aspect of his nature that still courted the role of outsider, beyond the pale, this Russian trip 
would give it a new outlet. The idea that he and his Fellowship had elected themselves as 
part of some universal brotherhood, and were therefore outside the petty constraints of 
conventional mores or international boundaries, had a great attraction for Wright at this 
period. Holden recalls his boasting at about this time that he was the first American 
anarchist. He became quite deflated to learn that this was not the case, Josiah Warren 
having come first. Wright immediately took up the cause of Warren's life and began to 
lecture about him, Mrs. Wright told Holden later. They had attracted the attention of the 
FBI, she said, only half jokingly. 

There were six days of speeches. Wright's came at the end, giving it more the character of 
an "after-dinner" commentary than a keynote address, as Donald Leslie Johnson pointed 
out in his essay, "Frank Lloyd Wright in Moscow: June, 1937." All things considered, it 
was a carefully phrased statement of his own philosophy and one that Olgivanna had no 
doubt translated into Russian with even greater care. He cautioned that the new Soviet 
society should shun what he called "grandomania," i.e., the unthinking replication of 
outmoded European forms, just as much as the sterile reductionist approach of the "new" 
architects, both of which, he noted elsewhere, he found in Moscow but not much else. He 
urged them to build "organically" without describing what that meant, and spoke about 
their opportunity to plan for new societies without defining what kind of "correct" 
planning he had in mind. In short, he made a diplomatic speech into which official 
opinion could read anything it chose. It was received with somewhat less than the 
overwhelming ovation he describes in his autobiography.  {A2, p. 544; Johnson, "Frank 
Lloyd Wright in Moscow" June 1937," pp. 71-72.} However, he returned full of 
admiration and affection for the people he had met, and perhaps this new enthusiasm for 
what he called the "Russian spirit" accounts for the combative statements he made upon 
his return, centering on his claim that American journalists  had not been telling the truth 
about Russia. He also said, "Were I in Stalin's place I would kick them out, all 
correspondents, and for the good of everyone concerned." {A2, p. 542.} In that first flush 
of his ardor he also made the remark that "if Stalin has betrayed the Revolution, he has 
betrayed it into the hands of the Russian people," which led to some heated exchanges 
when he returned home. It was an early indication that Wright was slipping into a new 
role as senior statesman of the arts and that he was perfectly prepared to exploit every 
opportunity to make pronouncements on any and every subject, rashly made and soon 
regretted. By then he would have predicted, and rather enjoyed, the storm he stirred up, 
but he could not have dreamed that his family would one day be linked, through Wesley 
Peters, whose second wife was Svetlana Alliluyeva, to the great Stalin himself. Nor would 
he have liked very much the fact that the second Mrs. Peters would leave her marriage in 
part because of the stresses of the "psychological yoke" of the Fellowship he had founded. 

However, it seems clear that the trip to Moscow had the fairly immediate result of 
producing some serious reservations about Soviet Russia, as may be seen in the book 
Wright wrote with Baker Brownell, Architecture and Modern Life, published the following 
year. Both authors took the view that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Communist Russia 
were already demonstrating the evils of centralized government. Their emphasis was upon 
the opposite, i.e., decentralization, the disappearance of the city, and the return to a truly 
participatory democracy that would, by allowing individual liberties to flourish, also 
correct the evils of capitalism short of a revolution. That this remained Wright's view is 
suggested by an "Our House" column that Olgivanna Wright wrote some years after World 
War II. In it she told the detailed story of their arrival in Russia and the incident, one 
gathers, that helped bring about this change of attitude. 

They had crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, disembarking at Cherbourg, and 
traveled onward toward Paris and Berlin for short stays before taking the train for 
Moscow. Arriving at the Russian border, they got off the train at Njegorieloje for the 
obligatory customs inspection of luggage. Olgivanna Wright, acting as translator, began to 
open their trunk and suitcases while her husband walked around. He was carrying a roll of 
drawings under his arm, and one of the customs officials, a woman, showed a sudden 
interest in what might be concealed inside the roll. She demanded to see it. Wright looked 
at her and stated in plain terms that she was not to put her unclean hands on these 
architectural drawings, which he was taking to a convention in Moscow. The woman 
became red in the face, and another official, a man, became hostile. Wright, so ready in 
theory to find every virtue in Russian society, was just as prompt (in reality) to tell them all 
what they could do with their rules and regulations. He would never, ever release the 
drawings. They would have to remove them by force. Didn't they know who he was, and so 
on. 

Olgivanna Wright was becoming more and more apprehensive as she tried, on the one 
hand, to persuade the Russians to rescind their order while, on the other, attempting to 
reason with her outraged and pugnacious husband. She was convinced that it would end in 
an "international incident," and became even more frightened when Wright, who had 
stormed away from them across the platform, was escorted back by a soldier at riflepoint. 
The male official went to telephone. Olgivanna was trembling, and even the woman 
customs official seemed flustered. Only Wright, his usual magnificent self, was daring 
anyone to come an inch closer. After what seemed an age, word came to allow them to 
proceed. Once they arrived in Moscow they received a huge welcome and were shown 
every courtesy, but Olgivanna never forgot that frightening experience. Even her husband, 
as he wrote, could not repress an apprehensive "glance now and then at the walls" the day 
they lunched with the American ambassador and his wife after his firsthand experience of 
what lay beneath the surface of Soviet society. They never went back. 

One of the comments that received the most applause during Wright's speech in Moscow 
that summer of 1937 was his attack on the modern skyscraper, construction of which had, 
until the depression, boomed and which had transformed the profile of American cities. As 
Curtis wrote, this modern solution to the problem of cramming as many people as possible 
onto smaller and smaller parcels of land had led to "the rapid growth of highways, and the 
creation of suburban sprawl. {CU, p. 144.} The resultant pressures on urban services were 
overwhelming, but perceptions of this crisis of mechanization were far from most 
architects' minds," with the exception of Wright. He, it has been noted, had not benefited 
from that boom and disapproved of the architects most involved with such design, such as 
Raymond Hood, George Howe, William Lescaze and Walter Gropius. It is true that he 
himself had experimented with designing skyscrapers in Chicago and New York City, 
using his metaphor of a tree with a central trunk and cantilevered concrete slabs for 
branches, but by the 1930s he seemed convinced that the building style was doomed 
because the car would bring about the death of American cities. "Americans, he believes, 
want spaciousness. Their buildings should express that desire, instead of huddling 
together. Buildings, he insists, should be spread out horizontally, instead of being thrown 
toward the sky." {NYT, September 18, 1938} As for the "vainglorious skyscraper," that 
was one of the most abominable inventions of mankind. {NYT, September 15, 1938} 
Wright also liked to ask, "Who but the landlord and the bank are benefited by skyscrapers? 
They are Molochs raised for commercial greatness," and should be taxed out of existence. 
{NYT, November 4, 1931.} 

Denunciations were, of course, his specialty, the more sweeping the better. The state of 
New York was the most "provincial of all provinces." As for Pittsburgh, "It would be 
cheaper to abandon it." Speaking of Los Angeles, he said it was "the great American 
commonplace. It is as if you tipped the U.S. up so that all the commonplace people slid 
down here to Southern California." (He liked this so well that he kept polishing it and 
finally evolved the comment that, "You know, the U.S. tips as you go West and everything 
loose ends up in Los Angeles.") All American architecture was terrible, save for its 
industrial buildings; archaeologists of the future would excavate the ruins and find "only 
bathrooms." One notes the relish behind the condemnations, as well as a new note of 
respect that had crept into descriptions of his views in the newspapers. He was no longer 
so easy to dismiss as a crackpot. He was becoming someone to reckon with. He had 
designed the front cover for Town and Country, July 1937, and made the cover of Time 
magazine in 1938. {on January 17, 1938} His project of a house for a family with an 
income of five to six thousand dollars appeared on the cover of Life that same year {on 
September 26, 1938}, and, perhaps most significant of all, a complete issue of 
Architectural Forum (January 1938) was devoted to his work, and he was invited to design 
it himself. Universities like Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, began to confer 
honorary degrees upon him, and academies of art in unlikely places, Berlin, for instance, 
elected him an honorary member. {on February 2, 1932.} The winds of change were 
blowing, even at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Frank Lloyd Wright went to Middletown, Connecticut, to receive his honorary degree in 
June 1938. By a coincidence, Henry-Russell Hitchcock was teaching there. Wright's 
relationship with that architectural historian had not noticeably improved in the five or six 
years since they had met. The year before, in the summer of 1937, Hitchcock had written 
an article in the London Review that had prompted an angry letter from John E. Lautner, 
Jr., a Wright apprentice, because Hitchcock had referred to Wright in the past tense. 
Hitchcock wrote, "For, I suppose, there might conceivably grow up in a vacuum, without 
benefit of intention, a sense of form wholly of the twentieth century and wholly American, 
as was Wright's in the days when he was an active architect before the war." {July 21, 
1937.} Lautner pointed out that Wright was in the midst of building five major works and 
hardly qualified as a man who had faded into the background. It looked like another 
gratuitous snub from Hitchcock, and Wright could not help capitalizing upon it. He did 
not know how or why Hitchcock had managed to appoint himself the arbiter of taste in 
architectural matters, he wrote. However, he did recognize the depth of ignorance behind 
Hitchcock's dicta, and suggested that the latter join his Fellowship for a year or two.  

Hitchcock never answered that letter but, the following year, extended a polite invitation to 
the Wrights to stay with him during commencement. Wright promptly accepted. By then 
he knew that he had acted hastily. As usual, when faced with the prospect of meeting a 
living, breathing human being rather than an abstraction, Wright's anger evaporated. After 
their visit he wrote to thank his host. But Hitchcock, too, had decided to make his peace 
with Wright, as the fact of his invitation showed. Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian architect 
who founded the Techton group in London and went on to build High Point I in Highgate 
(1933-35), which Curtis called "an intelligent adaptation of Le Corbusier's white forms 
of the twenties," recalled that he and Hitchcock were traveling through France in the 
summer of 1937 when the latter received a letter from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. {CU, p. 
226.} The message was that the Museum of Modern Art's enthusiasm for the International 
Style was waning, and its new interest was the work of those homegrown American 
architects whom Hitchcock thought might, entirely by chance, have evolved something 
worth calling a native style. The shift to Wright, in other words, had taken place. 
Hitchcock's studied lack of interest in Wright, as his article showed, had been a tactical 
error, and he was about to be brought up to date by the museum itself. Its curator of 
architecture, John McAndrew, was one of the first visitors to spend a weekend at the 
curious new house the Kaufmanns had built at Bear Run. He went there in the autumn of 
1937 and returned full of praises for Fallingwater. A photographic exhibition was 
promptly organized. {Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Donald Hoffmann, pp. 69-70.} 
Of all the events that were conspiring to bring Wright back to the public eye, this shift of 
emphasis at the Museum of Modern Art has to be considered one of the most important. It 
gave Lewis Mumford, Wright's dedicated ally, the opportunity to praise him once more in 
print, as he did early in 1938. The structural elements of Fallingwater were part of its great 
appeal, Mumford wrote, but so were some of the telling details, such as the rectangular 
pool Wright had designed above the river level, "proof that Wright never thinks of 
architectural design except in relation to the third dimension, plus movement through 
space. Hence the perpetual breathless sense of surprise one receives. . . . One looks at 
two-dimensional compositions and exhausts them in a view or two, but one must go 
through Wright's work, finding new compositions, new revelations, new relationships at 
every step." The exhibition, he wrote, showed Wright at the top of his form, "undoubtedly 
the world's greatest living architect, a man who can dance circles around any of his 
contemporaries." {The New Yorker, February 12, 1938.} 

Two years later Wright was paid another compliment by MOMA, a retrospective 
exhibition devoted to his career: plans, drawings, photographs, models and plenty of 
captions. Through what seems to have been a misunderstanding there was, however, no 
catalogue, and the installation was confusing, critics pointed out. Wright, always 
supersensitive to any hint that he was less than perfect, responded with his usual 
defensiveness but recognized the validity of the criticism. Someone was needed to write 
about his work and put it in the proper chronological order. What he needed was not so 
much a critical review as an interpretation of his ideas. He even had a title: In the Nature 
of Materials. The month the MOMA exhibition opened, November 1940, Wright wrote to 
Hitchcock inviting him to be the author. He offered to pay all expenses {T, November 23, 
1940.} plus a further five hundred dollars and to split the publisher's royalties between 
them, two-thirds to Hitchcock and one-third to Wright. Hitchcock jumped at the 
chance. {T, November 27, 1940.} 

He [Hitchcock] also thought he would need more money soon, and Wright, in the spring of 
1941, was at his most welcoming. However, that did not make him an easier man to deal 
with, since he was always ready to fancy himself ill served whenever money was involved. 
He did not like the oblong format that the publisher had settled on, and thought that the 
fault must somehow be Hitchcock's. {T, June 7, 1941.} He was then outrageous enough to 
tell Hitchcock he distinctly remembered that he had suggested a royalty split of fifty-fifty, 
but had reconsidered and, in light of all the work he had done himself, and money spent, 
now thought he should get three-fourths to Hitchcock's one-fourth. {T, June 13, 1941.} 
It was Wright at his least attractive, settling old scores perhaps, and Hitchcock ought to 
have held him to their earlier agreement, since he had it in writing. Instead, he wrote that 
he would be happy to accept whatever arrangement Wright wanted. He just hoped he was 
not being asked to pay for the book out of his own pocket since he could not afford it. {T, 
June 16, 1941} That defused another potential storm, and Wright had the grace to thank 
the author, once the book appeared. {T, May 28, 1942.} 

The publisher for In the Nature of Materials, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, had taken up 
Wright's cause with enthusiasm and was planning to publish three books about him. The 
second was an anthology of his writings, Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, edited by 
Frederick Gutheim, and the third, a new edition of An Autobiography. Gutheim said, "I 
was a friend of Cap Pearce [another partner] and I remember him calling me to say that 
Longmans, Green and Company, which had published his autobiography in 1932, had 
gone bankrupt. The plates of that edition were for sale." Gutheim suggested he buy them, 
which he promptly did: for four hundred dollars. "Then we had to persuade Wright to 
bring his autobiography up to date by another ten years and cut 35,000 words from his 
early life. {Frederick Gutheim to author} We finally managed to do that." Gutheim was 
the one who suggested that the three books appear as a group, as they eventually did: his 
own in 1941, Hitchcock's in 1942 and Wright's in 1943. All of them were valuable 
additions to the slim collection of books about Wright then available. Hitchcock's was 
particularly important because it was one of the first evaluations of Wright's career by a 
fully trained architectural historian, as Gutheim said. Evaluation may, however, be too 
strong a word. Hitchcock's commentary is, by and large, blandly diplomatic, as one would 
expect of a book the copyright of which is jointly owned by the writer and the subject of 
the text. It would be decades before Wright's work was subjected to independent critical 
scrutiny; not that this was anything Wright wanted or needed at that point. In terms of his 
growing public, what he needed was precisely what Hitchcock provided: a levelheaded, 
impeccably researched survey, placing his work in precise chronological order and 
showing its coherent development. In the Nature of Materials became one of the standard 
reference works about Wright and has never been out of print. 

Wright's choice of title, emphasizing materials and their use, seems partly defensive, as if 
to rebut the charge that he was no longer modern and "up-to-date," concerned with the 
latest technology. This may have been a reason why he was so ready to experiment with 
relatively untested materials in his most ambitious and visible projects such as the Johnson 
Wax buildings. Articles he wrote for the Architectural Record in the late 1920s are almost 
entirely concerned with technical questions, in the use of sheet metal, concrete, glass, 
stone and so on. He had to be continually pushing the limits of his craft if he wanted his 
claim to be far in advance of the crowd taken seriously, but it would be doing him a 
disservice to believe this was the only motivation. His temperament would have ensured 
that he explored new methods even if no question of status were involved. And he 
belonged to that small band of architects who had seen, as Curtis wrote, that 
mechanization had reached a crisis. {CU, p. 144.} This particular subject was very much 
on his mind after he returned from London in the summer of 1939, where, to general 
surprise, he had been invited to give a series of lectures by the Royal Institute of British 
Architects. Two years later that august institution would present him with the same award 
it had also offered to John Ruskin, the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. {Ruskin caused 
consternation by refusing to accept the Royal Gold Medal, in protest against what he felt to 
be the neglect and destruction of historic buildings in England (May 20, 1874).} 

Wright was also invited to dine at the Art Workers Guild. In his letter of invitation, his old 
friend Ashbee expressed the belief that the dinner would be far less stuffy and pompous 
than the one he had attended, held by the R.I.B.A. The guild's present master was a 
cabinetmaker and designer; Ashbee himself had been master in 1929, and Lutyens had 
followed him. William Morris was master in 1892-wasn't that the year they had met, 
Ashbee asked, incorrectly. {T, May 9, 1939.} As it happened, Wright could not be there. 
He was on his way to Paris, but was delighted to say he had met some of Ashbee's old 
comrades, including Lutyens and Voysey. {T, May 11, 1939.} The trip had brought back a 
host of memories and old associations, and perhaps this was the reason why he decided to 
address the Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House in November of that year. When he had 
first given his famous lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine" there almost forty years 
before, he had truly believed it could become a tool for creative expression, if placed in the 
right hands. That dream had died as, by degrees, he saw advertising and 
commercialization take over to such a degree that the machine now owned man and the 
depression had demonstrated the havoc that this state of affairs could cause. He had 
returned out of "parental solicitude" to exhort the young to learn to see life as structure and 
to grasp the essential nature of materials so that they could, in their turn, develop a truly 
indigenous, organic architecture. The speech was, in its rambling way, quintessentially 
Wrightian: quixotic, contentious and idealistic. It was clear-as he panned the British for 
the revival of the Neo-Georgian style that had driven out the Arts and Crafts Movement 
in the same breath that he denounced the vogue for the colonial that had accomplished the 
same thing in the United States-that what he was mourning was the death of the Arts and 
Crafts Movement and all that it had symbolized. In a sense he had not resigned himself to 
it, and never would. In all essential ways he remained true to his statement of 1908 that 
"radical though it may be, the work here illustrated is dedicated to a cause conservative"; 
but the words radical and conservative were coming closer than ever before: "Were our 
eyes opened we would see that the radical is the actual conservative." {"Dinner Talk at 
Hull House: November 8, 1939," Frank Lloyd Wright; "unashamed preference . . .": Peter 
Fuller, Modern Painters, spring 1989, p. 31.} He had, in other words, remained true to his 
belief in himself as a radical dissenter who, by virtue of his personality and conviction, 
would cleanse his art of its stylistic sins and create a Utopian present. He was still 
responding to beauty in the only way that Ruskin would have approved of, that is, with his 
whole moral being. He had, like Ruskin, kept intact that most vital aspect of himself, his 
imaginative and spiritual responsiveness. In common with many British artists of the 
twentieth century, he had instinctively rejected modernity, clinging to his "unashamed 
preference for an older, romantic and spiritual tradition," as Peter Fuller wrote. He had 
remained faithful to the good, the true and the beautiful, and always would. 


The Revolutionist as Architect 

Because I never forget the fate 
Of men, robbed of their riches, suddenly 
Looted by death-

"The Wanderer" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 65} 

The image of Wright as embattled advocate, the one with which he became identified 
during his struggle for recognition in the 1930s, had the effect of attracting some loyal 
adherents. As the decade drew to a close Wright was emerging as something between a 
prophet and a public scold, but certainly an artist whose work was keeping alive "a rich 
and poetic conception of architectural metaphor at a time when the theory of architecture 
was being reduced . . . to a matter of petty problem-solving and of desiccated technics," 
as Norris Kelly Smith wrote. {SM, p. 157.} If he was still a highly visible target for his 
critics, he was, at the same time, the logical choice for those clients who were instinctively 
opposed to modernism as defined by the Bauhaus. Almost the quintessential examples of 
these were Dr. and Mrs. Paul R. Hanna, both college professors who earnestly desired to 
build to the highest principles-they were children of ministers-but who had rejected the 
International Style's purism and austerity. Then they discovered Wright's volume of 
Princeton lectures and sat up half the night reading it to each other. They immediately 
wrote to congratulate him and were promptly invited to visit Taliesin. They subsequently 
spent a day there, most of which seems to have been spent listening to Mr. Wright espouse 
his now-familiar themes. In short, they were the ideal clients, intelligent, malleable and 
adventurous, although it would be almost five years before Hanna joined the Stanford 
faculty and they were ready to build on a handsome scale. They wanted a house big enough 
for themselves and their three children, and to accommodate up to thirty people for dinner 
and a hundred guests for receptions, cocktails and teas, as well as overnight guests and 
student seminars. They expected to be surprised but were taken aback to discover that the 
architect intended to experiment on them by building a house on the hexagon. Every 
corner, in other words, would be 120 degrees, and the inevitable bedroom "tail" that, in the 
Jacobs house, formed the end of its L shape, could now be more completely integrated with 
the main part of the house. The Hannas gamely agreed, insisting only that Wright's 
original plan for a single large bedroom for their three children (with screens between 
beds) be amended in favor of separate rooms. Once the final site had been approved, a 
hilly slope of about an acre and a half on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, 
California, Wright responded by designing a magnificent, U-shaped, wood-and-brick 
one-story plan, with immense walls of glass taking advantage of the view, while other 
rooms turned toward intimate terraces, the same concept that he had followed for Taliesin. 
Wright continued to experiment with the hexagon for some time before returning to his 
tried-and-tested module of the square. At least one reason seems obvious; most 
furniture is designed for rooms with 90-degree corners, and the built-in furniture and 
hexagonal tables, chairs and the like meant steadily rising costs, as the Hanna 
correspondence shows. Nevertheless one can see why Wright was attracted to the 
honeycomb motif, since it gave him enchanting opportunities for the constant shifts of 
direction and emphasis in which he delighted, the patterning of the maze. It was as if, like 
a player absorbed in a solo game of chess, he were setting himself ever more baffling 
challenges as he arranged these kaleidoscopic shapes to form complex and seamless 
unities. If the Hannas believed that theirs was the most amazing house Wright ever built, 
their pride is pardonable. 

Squares and hexagons having lost some of their mystery, Wright then began to tackle 
triangles, parallelograms and, more and more in later years, the ultimate challenge of 
spirals, crescents and circles, themes he had begun with the Johnson Wax building. It was 
his good fortune that the kinds of clients who sought him out were invariably from the 
educated and articulate, but not necessarily well-heeled, professional classes. Like the 
Hannas, they were often on the fringe of the arts. There was, for instance, Isadore J. 
Zimmerman, a prominent physician who was, along with his wife, Lucille, a passionate 
amateur musician. The Zimmermans also pounced upon the Princeton lectures and 
subsequently commissioned a Usonian house for their site in Manchester, New Hampshire, 
in 1952. Or there were Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, struggling along on a journalist's 
tiny salary, who had given Wright a present in disguise by challenging him to build them a 
cheap house. That had turned out brilliantly, and when the Jacobs family, having 
outgrown its Usonian prototype, asked Wright for a larger one, the architect seized upon 
the opportunity. His demonstration that small houses could be aesthetically satisfying had 
been a triumph. His plan for Broadacres was proof that he had found it extremely 
interesting and instructive to consider social needs as well as personal ones. His experience 
of designing a tolerable environment in the inhospitable desert had been another 
resounding success, and during World War II the idea of saving on heating costs would 
have been newly fashionable. So when Jacobs invited him to design a five bedroom house 
for his family in Middleton, Wisconsin, and presented him with an exposed hilltop site 
swept by icy winds in winter, Wright wrote enthusiastically that they were to be made "the 
goats" for his latest experiment, a solar house. 

The Jacobses were duly presented with a crescent-shaped structure cunningly built into 
the hillside, where it was protected from severe winter weather by a berm of earth and, on 
the opposite side, faced a beautiful view. There, banks of windows would be surrounded by 
a half-circle of garden sunk four feet below floor level so as to provide, he explained, a 
pocket of air immediately in front of the windows and dead calm whatever the weather. 
This was a solution he had used once before when, at an early stage in his career, he had 
designed a boathouse and shed in Madison that had required a windless mooring shelter. 
Wright's term for his design was "streamlining," the fashionable word {Building with 
Frank Lloyd Wright, Herbert Jacobs, p. 83}; nowadays it is looked upon as an audacious 
early experiment in solar design. He had envisioned a roof that would protect the windows 
from the sun's summer heat but allow it to penetrate the rooms in winter. In short, it was 
further proof of the way his imagination soared when stimulated by the requirements of a 
demanding but beautiful site. It is rightly celebrated for its innovations, and yet, from the 
perspective of Wright's personality, what seems most notable is the fact that this most 
contemporary of dwellings looks, from one direction, exactly like a medieval 
fortress-turrets, gun emplacements, stone walls of gray limestone and all. This fa-ade is 
reminiscent of those interpretations of the castle that were being made by a gifted English 
contemporary, one of the few architects Wright admired. Sir Edwin Lutyens successfully 
re-created the same sense of enclosure and security in his designs for castles that were, 
for all their fidelity, clearly the reinterpretations of a twentieth century sensibility. Only 
Lutyens rivaled Wright in his ingenious ability to breathe new life into ancient traditions, 
and perhaps this is why one is reminded of Lutyens's design for Lambay Castle 
(1905-08), Dublin, built on the site of an old house, surrounded by a circular rampart 
also constructed of gray limestone and including a range of buildings that was also 
partially sunken. At Lambay, the inhabitant is also protected from the elements, and 
Wright's design for the second Jacobs house is a reminder of the way visual metaphors 
took charge of his imagination whenever certain needs were uppermost. Absolutely 
impregnable from one vantage point, ravishingly open to every influence from the other, 
the second Jacobs house reconciles its opposites in one perfect statement of stone and 
glass. 

The story of his houses that Herbert Jacobs, like the Hannas, felt almost compelled to 
write, makes it clear that a great deal of the construction of this second venture was done 
without Wright's involvement. Something terrible happened. Jacobs had made a written 
mention of the fact that Wright, then working on revisions to An Autobiography for a new 
edition (published in 1943), had "sought his help" in going over the manuscript. {Building 
with Frank Lloyd Wright, Herbert Jacobs, p. 97} It seemed innocent enough, particularly 
since Jacobs had found nothing to add, but it struck Wright as meaning that "he sought my 
help in writing it," Jacobs continued. An awful schism opened between the two men that 
was later repaired, but it did demonstrate the perils that even ideal clients might expect to 
face in the delicate business of employing an architect of temperament. Another friendship 
was put to a similar test at about the same time, revolving around the building of a house 
for Lloyd and Kathryn Lewis. 

Wright and Lloyd Lewis had known each other almost back to the days when he was 
known as Frank without the fancy middle name and certainly without the abbreviation of a 
double l. They met in 1918 at the Tavern Club for writers, journalists, playwrights and 
artists at the top of a Chicago skyscraper when Lewis was a sportswriter for the Chicago 
Daily News (he later became its editor) and struck up a friendship. During Wright's years 
of crisis, he took the ingenious step of hiring Lewis to keep his name out of the 
newspapers. (Wright fired him when he failed. {A2, p. 496.}) There was some Welsh in 
Lewis's background, or Wright though there was, and he periodically addressed his friend 
as Llewis, demanding to know why he refused to employ the double l abbreviation. They 
were both friends of Wright's old friend from Oak Park days, Alfred MacArthur, who later 
became a Chicago banker and would finance Lewis's house. In the old days the three of 
them would steal off on Friday afternoons for a picnic, roasting corn over an open fire, and 
MacArthur's daughter recalls their yodeling songs about the Buffalo Skinners at weekend 
parties. {Georgiana Hansen to author.} 

Wright knew Libertyville, the area on the Des Plaines River where Lewis had bought a lot, 
and was aware that the flattish, dampish, shady site presented problems. He therefore 
designed the house high above the ground, with a handsome second-floor living room 
that would provide the same kind of panoramic view of the river and marshes that Taliesin 
commanded over the Wisconsin countryside. The house, a long, low structure supported by 
brick pillars, represented a return to his earlier rectangular plans, with the added fillip of 
an entrance at ground level that gave no hint of the glories to be encountered at the top of 
the stairs, the splendid hearth, the screened terraces and the expansive vistas. Naturally 
enough, the Lewises were thrilled with the plans even though the estimated cost jumped 
rather quickly from the $15,000 they had called their top figure in June 1939, to a total of 
$17,600 a few months later. {on February 23, 1940, LCL, p. 204.} It jumped again after 
Lewis received an estimate of $19,500 from the contractor Wright had recommended. 

As Lewis was recovering from that blow, Wright and MacArthur were engaged in a 
bantering correspondence having to do with the architect's disinclination, the banker said, 
for using standard materials and practice. MacArthur reminded him that bankers must be 
practical, that the money must be repaid, and that the house must look like a good resale 
proposition, concepts that were loftily spurned by Wright. 

Meantime the architect was exerting the full force of his persuasive powers. The points 
Alfred raised showed that he completely misunderstood what the architect intended, not 
that the misunderstanding would last for ten minutes if they were to sit down together. 
And Wright apologized for having asked for architect's fees in advance from Lewis. He 
was in Arizona, he had been extravagant as usual, and he thought someone would lend 
Lewis the money if Alfred did not. Then Lloyd and Kathryn drove adventurously to 
Arizona to visit him in the company of their friend Marc Connelly, the playwright, and 
once they were back home in April all the difficulties had been resolved. By early summer, 
construction was underway. 

Almost from the start, problems surfaced. Inspecting the work in the summer of 1940, 
Lewis was horrified to discover that the cypress boards that had been erected on the back 
wall were of inferior quality, uneven in color, full of knotholes, and some were cracked. 
Lewis was insistent that Wright do something at once. He urged Wright to inspect the 
work himself. {August 29, 1940} Wright did not, but instructed Edgar Tafel, who had 
been sent to supervise construction, to reject the labor and have the unacceptable boards 
removed and replaced. {August 31, 1940.} Other reproofs soon followed. The balconies, 
as designed, were so high that no one sitting in the living room, bedrooms or study could 
see the ground or the river-the tops of trees alone were visible. If Wright simply removed 
the top board, the problem would be solved.  

What could be insulting about his discovery that the balcony was high? It seemed a natural 
enough mistake and easily corrected. However, if it meant that much to Wright, he, Lewis, 
was not going to insist upon a change and have it destroy their friendship because Wright 
was worth more to them than any house. His letter was indignant, heartfelt and sorrowful, 
and it had the desired effect. Wright had not, he wrote by return mail, made the balconies 
an arbitrary height. Such decisions were calculated to the last inch, and for aesthetic as 
well as safety reasons they had to remain that height. But if Lewis really insisted upon it, 
Wright was prepared to perforate the top board (so as to give glimpses of the view). As for 
the kitchen, he had given it four toplights that would solve the problem. {LCL, p. 207.} 
Wright thought Lewis and Kathryn had been "swell" to that point. Lewis called Wright's 
letter "swell," and the crisis passed. 

It was to be the first of many, revolving around the fact that Wright simply had not made 
the proper allowances for the extremes of heat and cold in that climate. This elementary 
error perhaps stemmed from his understandable desire to give his friend what he had 
asked for, i.e., another Taliesin living room. By elevating the main living floor up a level, 
he had resolved one problem but created another. MacArthur put his finger on the flaw 
when he pointed out that the air constantly circulating under the main living floor would 
make it impossible to heat. It would be far better to redraw the house as a one-floor plan 
and place the heating pipes in the usual concrete slab. He also rightly pointed out how 
much heat would be lost through the large glass windows Wright had designed, and 
although storm windows were not mentioned, they were implied. He was quite correct, as 
Tafel later acknowledged; the hot-water pipes Wright designed to run under the main 
living floor never worked efficiently, even after insulation had been added. Furthermore, 
the lack of adequate insulation in the roof, walls and floor (it is unclear whether this was 
the fault of the builder or the architect) guaranteed a series of anguished letters from the 
new owners. They must have moved into the house just before Christmas 1940, because on 
December 19, Tafel wired Wright that the home's bedroom, entry and dining rooms were 
"uninhabitably cold." A letter from Lewis soon followed. The house was exquisitely 
beautiful and caused visitors to gasp with admiration, but the living room temperature 
sank to sixty-three degrees whenever the wind blew against the glass, the bedroom was 
colder than that, and the main entry had to have a radiator. To top it all off, the fireplaces 
refused to draw. He raised the taboo subject of storm windows, for which he was getting 
estimates. Wright, with many dark hints about "interference," vetoed the idea. They were 
expensive and ugly. What the house needed was the proper weather stripping, a better 
pump on the hot-water system and adequate floor and roof insulation; walls were not that 
important. The spring was on its way, he wrote from Arizona in March. The house he had 
built was intended to be beautiful and sensible. It was important pioneering. Lewis replied 
promptly that Wright's notion of comfort seemed to be that of a man living in the tropics. 

Problems with heating were followed almost immediately by the discovery that the house 
was impossibly hot in summer, and there were no screen windows. Again, Wright was 
unable to understand how anyone could be so bothered by "a passing petty epidemic of 
special little green bugs," but since Lewis was threatening to move out, Wright dispatched 
Caraway to oversee the installation of the proper screens, as well as rock wool insulation 
for the roof. Then, in the autumn of 1941, the house started to spring leaks. Lewis wrote to 
remind Wright that he had already told him the roof leaked and asked whether the builder 
would honor his year's guarantee to make the proper repairs. Now there was a new 
problem: water was coming in through the wall, as well, and that was decidedly novel. 
There were pots and pans everywhere. At last, Wright appeared personally to inspect the 
problems. One by one the issues were resolved, although the fireplace that refused to work 
properly defied even his ingenuity, he confessed in 1943. One day it would learn, he 
insisted. 

Despite its flaws, it was clear that the Lewis house was a great success. Among those at the 
gala housewarming were mutual friends of the Lewises and the Wrights: the playwright 
Charles MacArthur and his wife, Helen Hayes; Harpo Marx; Marc Connelly; and 
Alexander Woollcott. The last-named was about to crown his career by becoming an 
actor; he would play himself in a comedy that had been written about him by Moss Hart 
and George Kaufman, The Man Who Came to Dinner. He was a frequent houseguest of 
the Lewises, perhaps a closer friend of theirs than of Frank's, and he penned many graceful 
tributes. By then he was the toast of Broadway, but he had another in a series of heart 
attacks and his days as an actor were over. He died a few months later. Lewis himself 
would die of a heart attack one evening in 1949. Writing to Wright, his widow said that 
her husband's last eight years had been his happiest, since he felt in such close contact 
with the creativity and proofs of Wright's affection in evidence all around him. Wright felt 
his loss acutely. What a dear man Lewis had been, he told Carl Sandburg in 1957. He 
missed him more than ever.  

Although Wright continued to be primarily concerned with domestic architecture, it was 
almost faute de mieux, since he was always looking for the ideal scheme that would go on 
supporting his expensive habits for years to come. He had designed several apartment 
buildings, the first of these the Robert Roloson apartments (actually a series of row houses) 
at an early stage in his career (1894), and was delighted to be given an opportunity to 
design such units on a more sophisticated plan for a site in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. 
Suntop Homes, as they came to be known, were originally planned as a group of four 
apartment buildings, each having four units, based on his Broadacre City models, and 
amplified when Wright thought he had obtained a government contract to build them in 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He lost his chance when local architects objected, and only one, 
the building in suburban Philadelphia, was ever built. Instead of stacking units on top of 
one another or in a row, Wright conceived the idea of dividing a single building into 
quarters, each two stories high and containing a basement, carport and sunroof. The 
building was constructed of brick and horizontal lapped wood siding and must have looked 
promisingly low cost, even in those days of inexpensive home construction, since each unit 
cost only four thousand dollars in 1939. All the utility areas were buried in the center of 
the building, leaving outside walls free for expansive areas of glass. But the real triumph 
was the way Wright had fitted together his asymmetrical design so that no front door was 
beside any other, each dwelling had cross-ventilation, and rooms gave onto completely 
private gardens. It was a masterly demonstration of how to achieve privacy and space on a 
tight budget, and so logical one would have thought it would now be common practice 
instead of remaining an apparent anomaly. Trees have grown up around Suntop Homes in 
Ardmore and modified the original concept of those roof terraces open to the sun, but the 
superior merit of the design is still evident on an otherwise conventional suburban street. 

It has been said that the stages of Wright's development, from his first great industrial 
building, the Larkin, to the last of his great accomplishments, the Guggenheim, took him 
from an architecture that, although still rectangular, had its own elegant monumentality to 
"an architecture that was fluid, plastic, continuous, and has utterly changed our ideas of 
the nature of space and structure." One of the stages along the way was the commission to 
design buildings for Florida Southern College in Lakeland. It was the only college campus 
Wright would build, and he contributed a chapel, a library, a theater, an administration 
building and numerous classrooms. Work began in 1938 and continued to provide reliable 
employment for Taliesin's drawing boards for the next fifteen years. The campus was built 
on sixty-two acres of a former orange grove, sloping down toward Lake Hollingsworth, a 
pleasant but undistinguished site. Perhaps as a result, Wright's 1938 master plan is bold 
and complex. Of all the buildings he designed (the campus was not complete at the time of 
his death), perhaps the most successful is the chapel named in honor of Annie Pfeiffer, a 
generous contributor to the campus building fund. Based on the diamond, or double 
triangle, the Pfeiffer Chapel, built of steel-reinforced cement in Wright's textile block 
design and with a diamond-patterned tower of glass, steel and cement, has no windows 
as such. Light is admitted through the tower and through fifty thousand cubes of colored 
glass embedded in the walls and roof that create constantly shifting patterns of colored 
light, the kind of effect Wright delighted in. As the campus took shape it began to display 
other theatrical, if not cinematic, influences that may have been an unavoidable aspect of 
most "advanced" design of the period. One recalls that Wright was an enthusiastic admirer 
of Hollywood films, sometimes watching a particular favorite repeatedly, and that his son 
on the West Coast had worked as head of the design and drafting department of 
Paramount Studios. Lloyd Wright's designs for such unbuilt projects as his auditorium for 
the Institute of Mental Physics (late 1950s) have that otherworldly, science-fiction air one 
would expect, but his gifts as a delineator were such, his color so delicately nuanced and 
his line so ethereal, that one suspends disbelief, aware that one is in the presence of a 
powerful poetic imagination. Wright's designs for Florida Southern College are lacking in 
this kind of conviction, and for that reason it is doubtful whether they have changed 
anyone's concept of space and structure. The Pfeiffer Chapel, for instance, has some 
details-it is resting upon squat triangular pillars-that give it an almost comically 
spaceship look. It is perhaps possible that Wright's main motivation was a desire to beat 
the Futurists at their own game. One recalls that the chief emphasis of the New York 
World's Fair of 1939 was socially visionary, the brave new world of tomorrow that was just 
around the corner. Wright, who had been excluded from participation in the Chicago 
World's Fair of 1933, was not invited to participate in the New York event either. 

Writing in the late autumn of 1940, in a review of Wright's exhibition at the Museum of 
Modern Art, a critic noted that the architect was placing more emphasis upon his recent 
work than the accomplishments of his Oak Park years, and that was a pity. {Geoffrey 
Baker in the NYT, November 24, 1940.} The observation was certainly valid, and of a 
piece with Wright's willingness to focus his energies on the ideas that still lay, 
half-formed, at the back of his mind. But if he had looked backward he would not have 
found much to celebrate. The Midway Gardens, for which he had taken such pains, 
designed to stand for a century, barely functioned as the sophisticated pleasure palace that 
had been planned, was demoted to a beer garden and demolished (at considerable expense) 
in the late 1920s, an early victim of changing tastes in architecture. Various other 
structures, such as the Municipal Boat House in Madison (1893), in which he took such 
pride, came down in 1928, and anonymous garages, summer cottages, smaller houses and 
miscellaneous structures gradually vanished, their passing unremarked and unchronicled. 
The Larkin Building, which has now gained immortal fame, had already been 
substantially altered, and defaced, by the 1930s. In 1939, the Larkin Company faced 
bankruptcy, and the building's days were numbered. It would be torn down in 1950 (again, 
at some cost) to make way for a parking lot. 

That jewel in Wright's crown, the Imperial Hotel, which took another phenomenal effort 
from him and demonstrated its worth through earthquakes, had become so rundown and 
neglected by the start of World War II that it was considered structurally dangerous. Nor 
were many of Wright's masterpieces of domestic housing in much better condition. As has 
been noted, Darwin Martin's heirs tried desperately to divest themselves of the punitive 
responsibility for keeping that mansion in good repair. Hollyhock House, which Aline 
Barnsdall gave to the city of Los Angeles in 1927, would suffer the same not-so-benign 
neglect. Some patchy attempts at refurbishing it did, however, have the result of protecting 
the original paint colors and providing specialists in restoring Wright's building with some 
valuable clues in years to come. His own home and studio in Oak Park, though still 
standing, had been subjected to some radical attempts to make them of some use to 
somebody. Other houses would be drastically remuddled, like one characteristic Wright 
design, which subsequent owners attempted to transform into a Mediterranean villa, 
complete with classical balconies and round-headed windows. {Progressive Architecture, 
November 1987, p. 129.} This attitude toward Wright's designs and buildings seems 
cavalier to the point of sacrilege nowadays, but one doubts whether it would have been 
particularly unusual for its day. Sir Hugh Casson recalled that in the 1930s he had 
radically remodeled a stylish country house owned by the dilettante Edward James in the 
style of his good friend, the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Casson observed, "Nowadays 
you couldn't get away with redesigning Lutyens, but at that time it seemed acceptable." 
The survival of Wright's work depended, at that juncture, upon the whims of his original 
clients and their families. Twenty or thirty years after construction, the clients were aged 
or dying or had sold their houses. 

One of the most ambitious houses of Wright's Prairie Style, and the first to be built with a 
two-story living room, was commissioned in 1902 by Susan Lawrence Dana, daughter of 
a prosperous railway magnate who had made a fortune with silver mines in Oregon and 
who had left her, by one estimate, a $3 million inheritance. The heiress, a socialite of 
renown but also a feminist with a passionate interest in spiritualism, took the adventurous 
step of hiring the young architect Wright instead of a well-established firm in her 
hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and once the house opened in 1906, she invited a 
thousand guests in two receptions that were the talk of the season. But, by the late 1930s, 
Dana was in failing health and hospitalized, her house abandoned and her finances a 
shambles. When it was announced that her house and its contents would be sold, enormous 
crowds came to view the layette set she had bought on her honeymoon in Paris but had 
never used, the seventy-diamond necklace Tiffany had designed for her, costing $24,000, 
the paintings, sculpture, furniture, china, cut glass, Japanese curio boxes and Orientalia 
that had filled her mansion. Few, however, would buy, and the bids were abysmally low. 
That summer of 1943, the auction opened with an admission charge of one dollar, which 
was higher than some of the prices that would be paid for Wright's furniture. 

Since Wright's attitude toward much of his work was that it deserved to be torn down, it is 
not surprising, perhaps, that one finds little in his voluminous correspondence amounting 
to a call to action to save a threatened building. The exception was the proposed 
demolition, in 1941, of the Robie house, one of the great designs of his Prairie period. 
Built in 1908, the house, as has been noted, demonstrates all the hallmarks of his style at 
that time: the sleek, sculptural horizontal lines, the wide overhanging roof that in this case 
(and thanks to the early use of welded steel beams in the roof) was cantilevered twenty feet 
beyond the last masonry support, the tiers of balconies allowing the owner to sit and see 
without being seen, the flowing interiors, the massive central fireplaces, the glorious use of 
art glass, the mischievously hidden entrances, the sense of drama, surprise and of 
jewel-like corners of repose in the midst of a big city. Another aspect of the Robie house 
that is much admired was the way Wright integrated its mechanical and electrical 
equipment into the concept of the whole. For instance, the overhead lighting fixtures in the 
living room, a series of globes, were designed to form the visual punctuation points of the 
beamed roof, reinforcing a row of horizontals that is opposed by banks of French doors 
along one wall, with exquisite art glass inserts. Looked at in one way, the Robie house 
living room has such a powerful presence that it is difficult to find furnishings that can 
hold their own against such a dominating design. But from another vantage point, most of 
Wright's living rooms, in contrast to the antiseptic bareness of much modern design, and 
rooms containing nothing more emphatic than white walls and a window, are never 
empty, even when devoid of tables and chairs. At least one owner of such a room said it 
had always been his ambition to live in it with no furniture at all. {"The Organic Ideal: 
Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House," by William H. Jordy, Progressive and Academic 
Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: American Buildings and Their Architects, p. 
211.}  

Frederick C. Robie, the enterprising manufacturer of bicycles who had commissioned the 
house, lived there with his family for only two and a half years. It passed briefly into the 
Taylor family, and was then sold to Marshall D. Wilbur, who lived there with his family 
until 1926. It was subsequently bought by the Chicago Theological Seminary, which used 
the building as a dormitory and conference center for the next fifteen years. Then the blow 
fell. It was too massive, too expensive to keep going and not well suited to the seminary's 
particular needs. Fortunately, the advent of World War II put a stop to plans to tear the 
building down. In 1957, when the seminary again proposed to demolish the Robie house, 
even more voices were raised in protest. As a result, the building was eventually acquired 
by the University of Chicago. It is on the city of Chicago's list of architectural landmarks 
and is one of seventeen Wright buildings designated by the American Institute of 
Architects as worthy of being retained as an example of his work. Because of a 
combination of luck and public opposition, the Robie house has been saved. Other Wright 
landmarks would languish for years before their plight was discovered, and repairing the 
damage decades afterward would cause other problems. But the idea, that Wright had 
made such an important contribution to American architecture that his buildings deserved 
to be preserved, and that destroying them would be an act of vandalism, was being taken 
seriously for the first time in those early days of 1941. 

Where Wright was concerned, Mumford was always as generous as his strict sense of 
fairness would allow, no doubt from an awareness that the architect needed continual 
reassurance from one whose ideas he trusted and whose support he needed. In actual fact, 
Wright's original mind had more than made its influence felt by the time Mumford wrote 
that comment, well after the end of World War II. Geoffrey Baker's review of his Museum 
of Modern Art exhibition would not have pleased Wright since Baker had accepted the 
view that the architect's principal contribution was having "come closer than anybody else" 
to what was called "modern" architecture at such an early date. This critic did think it 
extraordinary, however, that he should have been neglected in the United States, without 
adherents or imitators, until the 1930s. Christopher Stull, reviewing Gutheim's collection 
of Wright's selected writings for the San Francisco Chronicle, was more respectful. If 
Wright was "ahead of his time" in 1894, he had remained so, and his latest articles were 
proof that the rest of the world lagged behind him even though his "authority" had been 
recognized at last. "For whether or not you belong among the ranks of his severest critics . 
. . you will find it impossible not to acknowledge him one of the greatest theoreticians of 
our century." {May 4, 1941.} A critic for another California paper noted that he was "one 
of the most challenging philosophers of our time." {Oakland Post-Enquirer, June 7, 
1941} The New York Times thought that the ideas Wright first formulated in 1894 were 
as relevant as they had been then: "Simplicity, repose, individuality; adaptation of the 
building to the owner, its purposes and its environment; bringing out 'the nature of the 
materials"; use of the machine to do the work it can do well; sincerity, integrity-these are 
virtues of architecture now as they were, or should have been, then." {NYT Book Review, 
August 3, 1941.} The News of Chicago thought no one since Leonardo had described so 
explicitly what he intended and, "It is difficult to find a flaw in his major theory." {April 
8, 1941.} Wright's old friend Ben Page, who had once been in charge of controlling 
Wright's purse strings, was among those to notice the change in his fortunes. Page was full 
of admiration for his tenacity and courage and the "wonderful comeback." Page then went 
on to say that the years had not been kind to him. He was living on his old-age pension of 
thirty dollars a month and whatever he could recover from loans he had made in happier 
days. Page reminded Wright that he had contributed five thousand dollars to save Taliesin. 
Frank did not owe him a cent, of course, but if he felt able to send a few dollars once in a 
while, it would be a tremendous help-for old time's sake. {T, September 29, 1940.} 
Wright's reply to this letter, if any, has not been recorded. 

Wright resurgent, Wright triumphant, one of the "greatest theoreticians of our century": it 
must have been a heady moment. If there was any criticism, it had to do with his insistence 
that the Europeans had simply picked up and assimilated ideas of his own that others had 
carried abroad; his strange reluctance to give full weight to Sullivan's influence on his 
work; in short, what looked like a streak of jealousy in his character. Since Wright's rivals 
in the International Style had already, generously, acknowledged his contributions, it was 
time America's "undeniably great architect" admitted that "new machines, new materials 
and new architectural ideas appeared almost simultaneously here and abroad, and that 
many men, great and obscure, had a part in making them productive." {R. L. Duffus, NYT 
Book Review, August 3, 1941.} Wright would, of course, never have admitted anything of 
the kind. In the process of becoming himself, that is to say, in standing up stubbornly, 
almost recklessly, for his own opinions, however unpopular they might be, he had 
stumbled on the best of all ways to advance his own interests, having perfected the 
technique of "insulting you and making you like it," as the saying went. When dealing 
with important and influential critics he was always careful to antagonize no one, 
cultivating friendships with editors and publishers. It is probably true, as Peter Blake 
asserts in The Master Builders, that this tireless courtship made it possible for him to 
control what was said and written about him in the professional press so that, at least in 
later years, "no really critical evaluation of his work" appeared during his lifetime. {BL, p. 
389.} 

As has been noted, Wright's condemnations were becoming more inclusive and the targets 
of his attacks broader as World War II began. As might be expected, his opposition to war 
was, if possible, more pronounced than ever. Lloyd Lewis joked that since Alexander 
Woollcott was known to be in favor of helping the British, he expected the two to battle it 
out while their friends provided the necessary cooling breezes and buckets of cold water. 
{T, April 4, 1941.} He was referring to Wright's now-celebrated pacifism and his earnest 
conviction, as Uncle Jenk had preached, that war solved nothing. War was simply a 
political tool used by financiers, the ruling-lite and corrupt politicians to advance their 
own ends, which usually boiled down to profit and power. Wright's suspicion of the 
motives of powerful nations, including his own, seldom extended to those countries that 
past experience had disposed him to like, such as Germany, Japan and Russia, focusing 
instead on the nation prejudice had taught him to hate. Like all good Welshmen he 
believed that Britain (and France as well) was fighting, not to preserve democracy or 
freedom, but its empire. Wright began expounding upon the large issues. Modern warfare 
had made borders obsolete. It had made the concept of war itself obsolete. The only 
solution was a world without borders, the establishment of world citizenship and "Nature's 
organic law," whatever that meant. {unpublished essay, "The New Discretion."} That his 
high-minded convictions might not be shared by Hitler or Mussolini was the hole in the 
argument, one he blankly refused to entertain. Wright embattled, as he himself conceded, 
was Wright ever more suicidally bent on retaliation. As luck would have it, this 
unfortunate chain reaction was set in motion by his principal supporter and proselytizer, 
Lewis Mumford, who happened to be the illegitimate son of a Jewish lawyer, Jacob Mack, 
from Frankfurt am Main. {Lewis Mumford, A Life, Donald L. Miller, p. 10.} Wright must 
have seen the danger signals in April 1941, after Mumford wrote asking whether Wright's 
political views had caught up with his architectural ones, arguing for war. {T, April 20, 
1941} Wright's reply was measured. But then he rashly sent Mumford his latest broadside. 
Mumford was horrified. He wrote, 


In this strange tirade you use the word gangster, not to characterize Hitler and his 
followers, but to castigate those who would fight to the death rather than see Hitler's 'new 
order' prevail in any part of the earth. You hurl reproaches against the system of empire, 
meaning by this only the British Empire, an empire that widened the area of justice and 
freedom and peace: but you have not a word to say against the Slave Empire that Germany 
would set on its ruins. . . . 

What a spectacle! You shrink into your selfish ego and urge America to follow you; you 
are willing to abandon to their terrible fate the conquered, the helpless, the humiliated, the 
suffering; . . . In short: you have become a living corpse: a spreader of active corruption. 
You dishonor all the generous impulses you once ennobled. Be silent! lest you bring upon 
yourself some greater shame. 


It was a terrible rebuke, perhaps the most dreadful one Wright ever received, and made 
worse by Mumford's further decision to submit it for publication to a pro-war magazine 
(the Leader), as Wright noted bitterly in his reply of a few days later. {on June 3, 1941.} 
Worst of all, Mumford had questioned Wright about just what position he thought his 
country would be in once Hitler's "new order" prevailed. This was precisely the issue 
Wright had evaded and would continue to avoid answering, along with his indefensible 
double standard where Germany was concerned. He was obliged to fall back on the 
argument that there was no such thing as a just war, that Mumford had misunderstood him 
and twisted his words. He was a deserter, a traitor, vengeful and conceited, "another writer 
out of ideas." He was a hypocrite and should examine his heart, wherein he would find 
"impotence and rage." {LAR, pp. 146-148} What must have made it all worse was the 
fact that the terrible quarrel took place just as Mumford was putting the finishing touches 
to an article for The New Yorker praising Gutheim's new book and "[t]he color of Wright's 
personality, the wide range of his mind, his healthy aplomb, his deeply moral feeling about 
life and art. . . ." {The New Yorker, pp. 60-61.} Mumford's further comment, "When he 
is talking about nature, when he is finding a new beauty in the rocks or the vegetation of 
some little-known region, interpreting its values for architectural form, Wright is at his 
supreme best," published on June 7, 1941, four days after Wright wrote his reply, must 
have been the final twist of the knife. 

To add to the ironies of the situation, Wright was being taken up by the London press, a 
direct result of his having received his gold medal from the Royal Institute of British 
Architects, almost a decade before that august body's American counterpart would see fit 
to do the same. In short, he was in a somewhat awkward position of snubbing his 
admirers, one that would have become most embarrassing had anyone known about his 
anti-British stance, which does not seem to have been the case. Even as he wrote, London 
was being bombed to ruins, and the News Chronicle invited him to write an article on how 
it should be rebuilt. The result was, perhaps, one of the strangest documents ever to issue 
from his pen, since his lack of empathy for the city that had asked for his advice could 
hardly be masked. The suffering and devastation were somehow the fault of the British for 
trying to hold on to their empire. His exact phrase was "one of the most evil games ever 
played by Empire." (Italics added.) London would have muddled along in the same old 
way had not these forces done it the favor of destroying the feudal monster so that "the Art 
and Science of human habitation" might enter. Given Wright's characteristic impatience 
with old buildings, one can see a certain Wrightian logic in his brisk admonition to the 
British to pull up their socks. But then the newer Wright, the one advocating radical 
reform, not just of housing and interiors but society itself, came to the fore in the form of 
vague and flowery exhortations to seek a cleaner, purer, more organic, etc. future. "1. No 
very rich nor very poor to build for. No gold. 2. No idle land except for common 
landscape. No realtors. 3. No holding against society of the ideas by way of which society 
lives. No patents." Since further bombings were inevitable, and since the machine age had 
ushered in a new scale for the city, twenty-five feet now being the equivalent of one foot 
formerly, the new London must be twenty-five times larger. He went on to describe a 
decentralized city that, not surprisingly, sounded greatly like his plan for Broadacre. {in 
the News Chronicle, January 17, 1841.} 

The reaction came quickly. That interesting Welsh architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, 
builder of Portmeirion, led the spate of letters criticizing Wright's Arcadian visions. He 
wrote, "I was startled to find him much more impractically Welsh than I was myself, full 
of fine and generous emotions that soared far away and beyond the sordid consideration of 
How and When that kept me doubtingly earthbound." {News Chronicle, January 21, 
1941.} He continued, "No one will disagree with his three clearly enunciated sociological 
and economic postulates demanding an end to exploitation, but what little else is clear 
seems to me highly dubious. 

"We are apparently invited to replace London for the convenience of millions of 
motor-cars rather than for men: yet further to inflate it 25 times its already menacing 
size, and to build it on the hopeless assumption that 'bombing is here to stay.'" 

In Wright's defense it must be said that he had, perhaps, too much time on his hands at 
that moment. His love of fast foreign cars (Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Riley) never faltered, 
nor did his lifelong habit of driving at a terrifying speed. Despite his wife's insistence that 
he was a very safe driver (because he had such good reflexes), he was bound to get into 
trouble and had his share of accidents from which, with his usual good luck, he escaped 
unscathed. On one occasion, for instance, he encountered a florist's delivery truck 
(entering the highway at a snail's pace, no doubt), and bounced it on its side. Fost Choles, 
the driver and owner of the business, went to the hospital; Wright merely made his way 
into Madison and continued his journey by train. {CT, November 13, 1933} His good luck 
was bound to run out, and, eight years later, driving the California roads near Fresno, he 
had a head-on collision with a truck. He thought so little of the matter that his 
miraculous escape hardly concerned him. Instead, he grumbled to Hib Johnson, and joked 
that he was about to switch to horses. However, he had been thoroughly shaken up and put 
to bed where, having nothing else to do, he took up his pugnacious pen. 

During those months before Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war (on December 
8), a storm was brewing that centered on an old and seemingly insoluble problem, the 
apprentice who had served long enough. For years, Edgar Tafel had been one of Wright's 
principal assistants, acting as supervisor for the construction of some major projects, 
including Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building. He was ambitious to become a fully 
fledged architect, and since he had just married there were the practical problems of 
dentist's bills and clothes, impossible luxuries so long as his sole employer was Taliesin. In 
addition, he had attracted the attention of some new clients and thought, perhaps naively, 
that Wright would be delighted to get the work, particularly because he agreed to have his 
designs bear the Taliesin imprimatur and to split the fees. 

However, the atmosphere soon became strained. "Mr. Wright saw the problem. Naturally, 
the apprentice would want to tend to his own work first. Mr. Wright wanted apprentices to 
attend to Wright's projects first." {TAF, p. 205.} That was one issue, but the basic question 
appeared to center on the emergence of young rival architects at Taliesin, the issue Klumb 
had tried to resolve some years before. Wright was absolutely determined that this was not 
going to happen. If his helpers wished to bring in work that he would design, that was 
fine, but the split would be smaller: two-thirds to Taliesin, one-third to them. Tafel was 
even prepared to accept those terms and brought in a new client. But when no money was 
forthcoming, he went to talk the matter over with Mr. Wright and was handed a crumpled 
hundred dollar bill. It was clear that the arrangement would never work. Once Tafel had 
talked the matter over with other "oldsters," he found a great deal of support for his 
position. One by one, seven of them left; some, like Tafel, were in tears. {TAF, p. 205; 
some in tears: ditto, pp. 206-207.} 

The loss of some of his best and brightest may have been one reason why Wright fought so 
hard to keep those who remained. He certainly was aware that the entrance of the United 
States into the war would destroy the edifice he had built up so painstakingly over the past 
decade, denying him at one blow not only all that help in the new drafting room (which, 
by some irony, finally opened in 1942) and on his enormous farm, but also the raison 
d'-tre for all those new buildings in Wisconsin and Arizona. Even if he had not been so 
opposed to war, he would have fought to keep them and thought he had come up with the 
solution, in the spring of 1941, after a new law was passed requiring able-bodied young 
men to register for the draft. He would ask that his men be exempted on the ground that 
they were needed to keep his farm and architectural workshops going. That might have 
been a persuasive argument, but then a paragraph was included about the futility of war 
and asking that the twenty-six members of the Taliesin Fellowship who signed the 
document be put on record as objectors to the compulsory military draft. {dated March 28, 
1941.} (Wright disclaimed authorship of this document.) 

Once the United States entered the war the focus shifted from the Taliesin Fellowship to 
Wright or, rather, what the latter might have done to persuade all those young men to 
oppose the will of their government. The issue came to a head after Federal Judge Patrick 
T. Stone of the Western District of Wisconsin, while hearing the case of Marcus Earl 
Weston, twenty-seven, son of "Billy" Weston (who refused to appear for induction into 
the army), announced from the bench that he would ask the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation to enter the case. It was the judge's considered opinion that Wright was 
"obstructing" the war. Weston denied that he had been unduly influenced by the great 
man's opinions, but the judge was not convinced. He said, "I think you boys are living 
under a bad influence with that man Wright. I'm afraid he is poisoning your minds." {CT, 
December 10, 1942.} Officials of the local draft board in Dodgeville, predictably, turned 
down the petition of the twenty-six Taliesin Fellows for exemption from the draft. Frank 
Lloyd Wright, of course, heatedly denied that he had unduly influenced his apprentices (as 
did they) or had encouraged them to shirk their patriotic duty. He published a letter to that 
effect and told anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, the FBI was now very interested in 
the opinions and possibly unlawful acts of Wright, an interest that reached to the highest 
levels. In March 1943, its director, J. Edgar Hoover, sent a memorandum to the assistant 
attorney general, a copy of which has been made available under the Freedom of 
Information Act. The memorandum asked whether there had been a violation of the 
sedition statutes and requested a ruling on whether the investigation should be continued. 
{March 24, 1943.} A month later the assistant attorney general replied that the facts did 
not warrant prosecution or further investigation. {April 22, 1943.} The now-familiar 
pattern had been repeated: the FBI detailing its suspicions and the government declining 
to prosecute. And, as before, the FBI was unwilling to let the matter drop. 

It was, perhaps, just bad luck that the review of Wright's revised Autobiography, published 
that spring of 1943 in the New York Herald Tribune, should have as its headline, THE 
REVOLUTIONIST AS ARCHITECT, or that the reviewer should comment, "One might 
read it for the story of a man who does not fit into the common pattern in his living any 
more than in his art, and of how the world treats him for that subversiveness. . . ." {review 
dated June 6, 1943} That seemed curiously apropos, given Director Hoover's 
memorandum. It also fitted in with Wright's more recent acts: the fact, for instance, that 
he was a contributing editor to a magazine called World Unity (described by one source as 
a radical organization), or that he had agreed to attend a Russian War Relief Benefit held 
in Madison Square Garden in the autumn of 1941 (as advertised in the Daily Worker), or 
that he had personally criticized President Roosevelt{March 21, 1941.} for having 
implied, during a speech about Lend-Lease, that he was prepared to send the U.S. Army 
and Navy into battle, or that he had made speeches, just two months before Pearl Harbor, 
to the effect that the Japanese were really nice people and Americans ought to let Japan 
have whatever it wanted in Asia. {FBI files, October 18, 1941.} {Wright's opposition to 
the entry of the United States into World War II continued unabated, and accounts for his 
slighting references to the decisions of presidents Roosevelt and Truman.} 

It was perhaps inevitable that at least one family with a son at Taliesin did not approve of 
Wright. In this case the parents were those of Allen L. ("Davy") Davison, who had taken a 
degree in architecture from Cornell, then joined the Fellowship and met and married Kay 
Rattenbury. This union, in 1941, placed Davison, a young idealist who was a talented 
artist and photographer, inside Taliesin's inner circle by virtue of his wife's close 
friendship with the Wrights. It seemed more than an accident that Davison, who also 
declared himself a conscientious objector, was not to be dissuaded and served a prison 
term. (Weston and Howe were also sent to prison for failure to report for military service. 
Curtis Besinger, later professor of architecture at the University of Kansas, and Howard 
Tenbrink went to C.O. camps.) This made Davison's views suspect, but it is clear from his 
letters to his parents that he was sympathetic to Wright's ideas even before he joined the 
Taliesin Fellowship in 1938. (This would have buttressed Wright's argument, one aspect of 
which was that his apprentices came because they shared his views, not because they were 
easily persuadable.) Davison's letters are almost wholly concerned with reassurances that, 
far from being the negative influence they feared, Wright's work and philosophy, and the 
high standards he espoused, could only improve his character. But Davison made 
comments, artless or not, that were hardly designed to set his parents' minds at ease, 
making it clear that he thought the war was being waged to benefit Wall Street profiteers, 
and hurling defiance at "Mr. Roosevelt." His admiration for the Wrights, whom he called 
"his parents in Ideal," was another remark hardly calculated to reassure his own, and all 
the more remarkable since he admitted that he and Wright were not always on the best 
terms. Davison's respect continued despite a birthday party the architect used as an 
opportunity to reproach his followers for refusing to develop minds of their own and using 
the Fellowship as a refuge from the outside world. Those who had just left might have 
found that a curious accusation, coming from him. Davison took the rebuke meekly and 
expressed a new surge of loyalty for Wright. {on June 10, 1940.} 

In short, the correspondence seemed innocent enough and, in any event, simply reiterates 
views Wright had never tried to conceal from anyone. Once their son proved determined to 
go to jail, however, the Davison parents must have been looking for a scapegoat. Extracts 
of letters purporting to show the extent of Wright's influence were made available to the 
U.S. attorney in Madison and then passed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (This file 
was also released under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.) In July 1943, 
Hoover wrote anew to the assistant attorney general enclosing copies and asking once 
more whether the sedition statutes had been violated. {July 17, 1943.} Again, the assistant 
attorney general advised that no action was warranted. Hoover subsequently told 
authorities in Milwaukee of the decision, asking them, just the same, to keep an eye on 
Wright and send along any more evidence that might come to light. {September 2, 1943.} 
As the New York Herald Tribune review of Wright's Autobiography concluded, the 
harassment Wright received for his "subversive" views did little credit to "American 
customs or citizens." {June 6, 1943} As for Wright, he continued to speak out against the 
folly of war, although his admiration for Germany appeared to dwindle somewhat after it 
invaded Russia.  

Howe went off to the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota, to serve for 
almost four years. He said, "I was on the staff, teaching architecture and drafting and had a 
very interesting time of it. There were all sorts of people there: Black Muslims who refused 
to salute the flag, Trotskyites and Jehovah's Witnesses. I remember a farmer and his three 
sons from North Dakota who were very religious but who were just damned if they were 
going to join up. One of the high points was the day Mr. Wright came to lecture about 
architecture. Of course he didn't talk about architecture at all, but about the war, and the 
warden kept trying to shush him up. I'll never forget the sight of them all appearing in the 
courtyard below while we watched from our dormitory windows: Mr. and Mrs. Wright, 
Svetlana and Wes and Kay. They all crossed the courtyard and we just collapsed 
emotionally." {interview with author.} Four more pivotal figures were gone, others had 
joined up and only a few were left, among them William Wesley Peters, Gene Masselink 
and Cary Caraway. Work at the drafting boards had ground to a halt, which did not stop 
Wright from inventing all kinds of new schemes. He had thought up a new method for 
building defense housing and was trying to interest a manufacturer in a prefabricated 
method of constructing planks three inches thick and a foot wide that could be used for 
interiors and exteriors. {Buffalo Courier, September 27, 1942.} It looked promising, and a 
fiberboard manufacturer was intrigued, but then Wright asked $100,000 for the patent and 
the deal collapsed. {Building with Frank Lloyd Wright, p. 73} 

Wright was as full of breeze and bounce as ever, Herb Jacobs noted, whenever he visited 
them during those dreary winters of 1943 and 1944, although Olgivanna Wright seems to 
have been in poor health. Wright told his son Lloyd in the winter of 1943 that she "was 
and still is in a highly nervous state-unable to stand any strain . . ."-a state that 
continued for some months thereafter, judging from grandson Eric's report to his father. 
Her husband was keeping her close to home and working on the final section of An 
Autobiography, hoping the income would help keep the Fellowship on its feet. Meantime, 
he wrote, "we are hard to take-like Stalingrad." Uncle Enos had died at the grand old age 
of eighty-eight, and Wes was planning to take over his farm where, it had been decided, 
Gene Masselink, also a talented artist, would have his print shop. Wes Peters recalled that 
his father had been opposed to World War I. His earliest memory is of playing at his 
father's feet the day word arrived of the sinking in 1915 of the Lusitania. (Over 100 
Americans died out of a total of 1,153, and the attack by a German submarine on an 
unarmed British liner did a great deal to shift American sympathies toward the British 
cause.) Peters immediately championed Wright's position during the early days of World 
War II and added that, before Pearl Harbor, most Americans felt the same way. He 
recalled the attacks of Judge Stone, as well as a spirited defense of Wright by William 
Evjue, founder, editor and publisher of Madison's liberal newspaper, the Capital Times, 
who asked in an editorial, "Upon what meat are some of these judges feeding?" Those at 
Taliesin knew that the FBI was conducting an investigation, but no one thought much 
about it. Peters recalled that, during the war, tires were in short supply and he had gone to 
some lengths to stockpile those they had in the basement. 

"One day I came down into the boiler room where the tires were stored and saw two 
strange men looking them over." Thinking they were about to be robbed, "I performed a 
citizen's arrest. I was scared. I had a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun so I came down 
behind them and told them to put up their hands. Then I marched them out onto the front 
terrace. 

"They said, 'We're members of the FBI.' 

"I said, 'That's a likely story.' I looked under their coats and saw they were wearing 
shoulder holsters. I made them drop them and picked up the guns. Then I asked to see 
their certification and demanded to know what they were doing without a search warrant. I 
threw their magazines out of their guns and told them to leave. They said, 'We'll be back 
with the sheriff,' and I said, 'When you do, bring a search warrant.' They were trying to 
prove that we had some bootlegged tires down there." 

Peters modestly neglected to mention that most of the credit for the success of the farm 
was due to his herculean efforts. Eric told his father that Wes was the hardest worker there 
and put up fifty bales of hay single-handedly. {EW, September 6, 1944.} Peters said, 
"Every winter we filled the cellar with root crops. It was the closest we ever came to Mr. 
Wright's dream of living from the land. 

"All of our profits went directly back into Taliesin. People forget that Taliesin needs 
constant repair. It's an architectural sketch. Originally Mr. Wright had made use of the 
Welsh basement, that is to say, he built shallow trenches filled with gravel into which the 
foundations were placed, the idea being that water would drain through the gravel. He 
used this method with some success but, unfortunately, when the house burned in 1926, 
and they were rebuilding, they just leveled off the land, pushed the ashes off the hill and 
built right on the ground. That gave us a lot of problems later. 

"Once when I was digging a new trench, five or six feet deep, I came across a Han 
[dynasty] horse's head in fragments and bits of Ming roof tiles. Mr. Wright said, 'Wes, 
finders keepers.' Did I keep them? Sure I did." {to author.} 

At the conclusion of the revised Autobiography published in 1943, Wright wrote, "Life 
always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism . . . but only through the 
direct responsibility of the individual." {A2, p. 560.} As he was sitting out the war in 
Spring Green and living his dream of self-sufficiency in The Valley, a small, 
dark-haired Russian novelist with an arresting gaze was putting the finishing touches on 
a novel inspired by these and similar statements by Wright. She was Ayn Rand, born in St. 
Petersburg in 1905, whose ambition it had been to escape from her homeland to the haven 
of the United States. As a brilliant young university student her experiences during the 
Russian Revolution had stimulated her to formulate a procapitalist, anti-Communist 
philosophy later codified as "Objectivism." It seems to have points in common with what 
Kenneth Clark called "Heroic Materialism," {in Civilisation, Kenneth Clark, p. 326.} a 
new religion that took as its temples the iron foundries and in which was offered up "to 
Gain, the master idol of the realm, perpetual sacrifice," as Wordsworth wrote. Where 
others saw the exploitation and dehumanization of man, Rand saw in the growth of the 
free enterprise system a limitless expansion of the powers of mankind. It led to a lifelong 
belief in "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral 
purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his 
only absolute," she would explain. {The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden, p. 52.} 

Kenneth Clark also wrote, "Certain philosophers, going back to Hegel, tell us that 
humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy, self-indulgent condition, spiritually much inferior to 
cruelty and violence. . . ." {Civilisation, p. 330.} Rand would not have expressed it exactly 
in that way. She believed man had a moral imperative to be upright and heroic and to 
cultivate an inner integrity, but she feared and mistrusted altruism, since it could be 
construed to give the state, or society at large, power over human destiny. As a lifelong 
atheist, her antagonism extended to the church. She also valued reason and logic above all 
other attributes. The reasonable man, her ideal hero, acted from impeccable and logical 
postulates, and the notion that human emotion might have validity was, as her biographer 
Barbara Branden showed, as irrelevant to her view of herself as it was to her philosophical 
stance. 

Once she had succeeded in emigrating, had settled in New York and met Wright through 
his writings, her next ambition (and Rand was nothing if not single-minded) became to 
meet him. She was not famous as yet, she wrote with a kind of artless hauteur, but she had 
already published two novels. She planned to write a third about an architect who would 
rise to triumphant heights despite every obstacle and whose life, although it would not be 
patterned after his, would reflect the superb qualities she had found in it. She quoted from 
his writings. She said that her new book would be a monument to his life and work, and 
asked only for the chance to meet him so as to be inspired. It was the kind of letter that, 
from anyone else, would have produced an immediate invitation to visit Taliesin{T, 
December 12, 1937.}; but perhaps something in it struck the wrong note. Or perhaps it 
came at the wrong moment. It was her bad luck to be writing in December 1937, just as 
Wright was absorbed by his plans to build a new Taliesin in the Arizona desert and the 
problems of moving his Fellowship there. The reply to her letter, written with evident 
haste by Masselink, made the perfectly truthful excuse that Mr. Wright had already left for 
Arizona and did not know when he could see her. {T, December 31, 1937.} (The letter 
was addressed to "Mr." Rand.) 

She was disheartened but not deterred. Some months later, in the autumn of 1938, when 
Wright was to lecture in New York before the National Association of Real Estate Boards, 
Rand made plans to go, using introductions to Wright through Mrs. Alfred Knopf, wife of 
her publisher, and also Ely Jacques Kahn, in whose office she was then working to learn 
about architecture at first hand. "I spent three hundred and fifty dollars out of my savings 
to buy a black velvet dress and shoes and a cape, everything to match, at Bonwit Teller's, 
which I had never entered before," she said later. {The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 189.} "I 
felt this would be an unrepeatable occasion, because I was to meet a man who was really 
great." They met after the lecture, but there was no immediate rapport, or not the one she 
had hoped for. So she wrote a letter, sending him the first three chapters of what would 
become her phenomenally bestselling novel The Fountainhead. 

Had Rand known more about Wright, and had she not been disposed to see in his work a 
man who was not there, she would have realized at once that her association with Louis 
Kahn, the American architect most influenced by Le Corbusier, had already made her 
suspect, and that what Wright had gathered from those first three chapters would have 
confirmed the diagnosis. Those chapters were enough to show him that she had perceived 
nothing about the essential Wright, and that her instinctive sympathies, he must have 
realized, were in accord with the rational and geometric purism of the International Style. 
Her hero ought to have been an ascetic like Le Corbusier, or any of those other 
Internationalists who, like Hitchcock, could have said, "If Humanism be not, so much the 
worse for it." She later stated that her hero was not Frank Lloyd Wright, but she acted as if 
he were, and Wright was rightly confused. Either he was or he was not, and if Roark was 
meant to be him, he was not at all sure he had been complimented. In taking as her model 
an architect who is rejected by the Establishment and reviled for his genius, Rand might 
have been confident of her ability to give Wright the mirror in which he wanted to look. 
But she did not understand that the Establishment now seeking to discredit Wright was the 
one whose ideas, ideals and political views she represented. The fact that she was an 
atheist ought to have made her aware of his profoundly religious impulses, instead of blind 
to them. As a proselytizer for capitalism, she, of all people, ought to have seen the ample 
evidence that Wright was at the other end of the political spectrum, supporting the cause 
of exploited masses and the international socialist movement everywhere, an error the FBI 
certainly had not made. She, a lover of the city, gave Roark a skyscraper as the crowning 
achievement of his career, as if she had not understood Wright's roots in the natural world, 
his conviction that the city was dying and his scorn for skyscrapers, those corrupt symbols 
of a discredited capitalism. The climactic moment of her novel comes when her architect is 
given the chance to build a housing project and then sees it defaced and degraded by other 
hands. Denied every other form of protest, he sends the building sky-high with a stick of 
dynamite. In the same circumstances Wright would have prevailed long before his design 
was ruined by anyone, but even if this had happened, he would have roared his defiance, 
then found something good to say about the result and cashed the check (because, in all 
likelihood, the money would have already been spent on Japanese prints). These essential 
differences were apparent to Wright, no doubt, which has not prevented the continued 
misconception that Rand's hero is somehow Wright personified. 

After the novel became a best-seller Wright mellowed to the extent of believing himself 
marginally pleased. The author had, after all, found him a man of nobility and personal 
integrity, or so she said. She was still pursuing him. Her book had been sold to Hollywood, 
and Wright was approached to do the sets, an idea he flirted with before rejecting it. She 
then asked him to build her a house. All of this meant that Wright must try to find some 
virtues in this curious person, and try he did. She was invited to Taliesin and was as 
repulsed as delighted. {The Passion of Ayn Rand, pp. 190-91.} He would have been 
equally put off by her dogmatic certainties and, in fact, all the ways in which certain 
aspects of her character resembled his: her imperious demands on friendship, her need for 
a circle of admirers, her alacrity in passing moral and psychological judgments, her 
readiness to blame others. Her personal habits certainly did not endear her. She smoked 
two packs of cigarettes a day and, it is said, kept chain-smoking and blowing the smoke 
in Wright's face. Finally he took the cigarette out of her mouth, threw it into the fireplace 
and walked out. That was the start of the absolute prohibition against smoking in Wright's 
presence and ought to have been the end of his friendship with Ayn Rand. But he 
persevered and designed her a house she absolutely adored, or so she said in 1946. There 
was one problem. It would cost $35,000. When she voiced her objections, Wright told her 
airily to go out and make some more money. Not too long after that, she and her husband 
found a streamlined example of the International Style by Richard Neutra for sale in the 
San Fernando Valley. Neutra had built it for Josef von Sternberg in 1935 and it would 
become one of his most famous buildings. The price was $24,000, so they bought it. No 
doubt this act, which represented a symbolic rejection of Wright's philosophy and ideas, 
and her choice of an architect whose style was an absolute anathema to him, told this 
"uncommon man" everything he needed to know. 


That Strange Disease, Humility 

The Phoenix's breast is a flickering rainbow  
Of color, bright and beautiful. 

"The Phoenix" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 116} 

In those years just after the war a certain event, almost a ritual, was repeated over and over 
again at the gates of the Taliesins in Wisconsin and Arizona. 

At any hour of the day or night, young men and women could be seen straggling toward 
them armed with letters of introduction or, almost as often, drawn there, uninvited, by 
some mysterious inner compulsion, proposing themselves for the night or the weekend or 
the rest of their lives. 

They came by bus and train or hitchhiked, often with backpacks or no luggage at all, and 
two dollars in their pockets. Or, like Babette Eddleston, a young architect who became a 
water colorist, print maker and sculptor, they drove a thousand miles and arrived one 
summer morning. She had no invitation, but knew a former apprentice at Taliesin in 
Wisconsin. After driving west from Madison along Route 14, she caught sight of a 
building up on the hill, off to her right. There was a rural mailbox standing nearby, but the 
name was unreadable. She stopped to ask a farmworker driving a tractor whether that 
building above them, ocherous, sand-colored, the color of masking tape, could be 
Wright's house. It was, and that was the driveway. Arriving in the courtyard, she was 
introduced to Gene Masselink and explained that she would like to stay for the weekend. 
That was impossible, he said, but he would show her around. Then he went off to send a 
telegram, and she was left to wander through the rooms and garden terraces of this 
"magical kingdom," gaining a confused impression of drafting tables, stone columns, 
sheepskins and cushions, a fireplace bench padded with gold, branches of trees, patterns of 
leaves, petunias and the incongruity of this amazing building on the side of a hill after so 
many miles of farmland. She was meeting a host of young apprentices. {from an 
unpublished account.}  

An unpromising reception and then a dazzling about-face because the arguments were 
persuasive: this kind of response was encountered more than once. Carter H. Manny, Jr., 
now director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago, 
said he had grown up in Michigan City, Indiana, and that his parents had been friends of 
Wright's son John and daughter Catherine. This was enough to get him an invitation to 
spend the weekend in Spring Green. {November 1945.} He had a pleasant stay and was 
finally interviewed by Mr. Wright. 

By then he was wondering how he had ever managed to get himself invited because the 
great man was so discouraging. His own hair was too short, Wright said. (It ought to be 
around his ears.) He should throw away his glasses and strengthen his eyes with exercises. 
The fact that he had graduated from Harvard in 1941, magna cum laude, was another 
mark against him. Finally, he had asked to be admitted for a part of the year, and Mr. 
Wright refused. 

The would-be apprentice left, but his note of thanks for the weekend included an appeal 
to Mr. Wright to change his mind. He received a cryptic note. Manny reappeared joyfully, 
joining the Fellowship in Arizona, and his dexterity with a hammer and saw soon 
convinced his employer that he was capable of living down his Harvard background. The 
whole camp was the scene of intense activity as the Fellowship attended to the problems 
caused by the years of neglect during the war. The great redwood girders spanning the 
drafting room and garden room of the Wrights' quarters had to be straightened and 
reinforced and new, snow-white canvas stretched over them. A new cabinet was needed 
in the apprentices' dining room, a new door for Wright's quarters and a host of other 
repairs and improvements were to be made. Fortunately there was no shortage of help. By 
the autumn of 1946, the Fellowship numbered sixty-five, the largest group ever, plus 
assorted wives and children. Manny noted that almost half were from abroad-England, 
Ireland, France, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, India and even more exotic places-and several 
of the Americans had taken advantage of their G.I. Bill of Rights to pay their tuition. 
{from a letter to William Marlin. n.d.} One of the postwar apprentices, for instance, was 
the twenty-one-year-old Prince Giovanni del Drago (from one of the oldest and most 
aristocratic families in Italy), who was doing kitchen duty along with everyone else, 
although he drew the line at serving a countryman, the Marquis Franco D'Dyala Valva, 
because that gentleman was beneath him socially. There were Indian apprentices 
representing the Brahman, warrior and merchant castes (each refusing to speak to the 
other), and wealthy American boys and apprentices like Andrew Devane from Dublin, who 
arrived penniless, having spent his last dollar on a one-way bus ticket. 

The day at Taliesin West began at about six. Breakfast was at seven, followed by a 
half-hour's choral practice led by Svetlana Peters-"Svet," as she was called-who 
rehearsed them in works of Bach, Palestrina and C-sar Franck. Work began at 8:30, 
stopped for an hour and a half at noon for lunch and a rest, then resumed until about five. 
Dinner was at six and evenings were free. In these postwar years Wright had somewhat 
relaxed his dictum against leaving the camp, and a group would sometimes drive to 
Phoenix for a beer and a movie, though trips of this kind were usually saved for 
Wednesdays when everyone had the afternoon off. 

In the evenings long discussions on architecture were the rule, but Manny soon tired of 
them. Jack Dunbar, who became a Taliesin apprentice in 1946 on the G.I. Bill, found 
evidence of the same attitude one day when he discovered Homer, one of the hired help, in 
the back burning books, including Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture. The solution, 
for Manny in Arizona, was to escape into music.  

Having completed a herculean amount of work, Wright was just as likely to hold up the 
final drawings indefinitely while he tinkered with them. Peter Matthews, the English 
architect who was also there after the war, said, "When he saw Mr. Wright coming, Jack 
[Howe] would say, 'For God's sake get that drawing out of the way,' because there were 
deadlines to meet. It was amusing to see the way people protected him from himself. And 
he had his own way of doing things. I remember giving him an adjustable set square and 
he said, 'Take that thing away and bring me a triangle.'" {Peter Matthews, interview with 
author.} 

After the hiatus of the war years, when many of the projects on which he was engaged-an 
ambitious complex of a hotel, shops and theaters called Crystal Heights (1939) in 
Washington, D.C., for instance-remained unbuilt, work was pouring in. In 1943 he had 
been given the great chance at his first building for New York City, a museum to house 
modern art commissioned by Solomon R. Guggenheim, which would absorb a large part of 
his energies for the rest of his life. A year after that, he was commissioned by Hib Johnson 
to design a new building, a fifteen-story research laboratory, as a companion to the 
Johnson Wax company's administration building. In 1947, some thirty-two commissions 
were in hand, and the pace would continue to quicken. {LAP, p. 159.} The pressure of 
work, for a man close to his eightieth birthday, was formidable. In those years after the 
war he had estimated that, to keep the foundation solvent, he needed to provide some 
$75,000 a year. He boasted to Carter Manny at the same period that he had received $1 
million in architect's fees. Assuming that this was an exaggeration, it still meant that he 
was retaining considerably more than "a living," although the truth of the matter is hard to 
unravel. What does seem clear is that he would always think of himself as poor, as if 
nothing had changed since those days when, during one of the innumerable 
reconstructions of Taliesin, he appeared at a Spring Green hardware store to pick up the 
supplies he had ordered and, when presented with the bill, opened his billfold and 
extracted a single ten-dollar note. {Sherry Lewis, letter to author, September 24, 1987.} 
For money came in spurts, whenever the checks arrived. Wright was as disorganized as 
ever, capable of filing away checks in his back pocket until they were hopelessly crumpled 
and out of date, and in between, there were sixty-five mouths to feed. {Carter H. Manny, 
Jr.} Peter Matthews confirmed that Wright was still looking for credit and being 
considered a bad risk, because he was sent farther and farther afield to buy timber in those 
days. {interview with author} Fortunately there was always another fee due from Edgar 
Kaufmann for one or another of his many visionary schemes. Meantime, there were the 
interminable repairs. A window somewhere at Taliesin was always breaking, and tiny 
birds would fly about the room, beating their breasts against the tall glass doors. 

Evidence that, after years of disastrous miscalculations, Wright had improved as a judge of 
character, can be discerned from the fact that by the late 1940s he had gathered around 
him a devoted, capable and sterling group of senior assistants. Jack Howe, who ran the 
drafting room with such a sure hand, had become absolutely indispensable, as had Wes 
Peters, the authority on engineering, and his beloved wife, Svet, who worked just as hard 
as he did. There was the equally loved Vladimir Lazovich, Mrs. Wright's brother, "Uncle 
Vlad," and his wife, "Aunt Sophie." Wright's daughter-in-law Betty Wright called Aunt 
Sophie "a darling old-fashioned woman with a wonderful voice." Uncle Vlad had been a 
great rake, a dashing officer in the czar's army and, even in old age, was a formidable 
figure, fully capable of intimidating anyone who wandered onto the premises by silently 
appearing and inquiring, with great courtesy, "Can I help you?" {Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 
interview with author.} They did not stay in Fellowship quarters-"Aunt Sophie wanted 
her own nest," Howe said-but lived over the dining room where they, as caretakers, had a 
commanding view of everyone who arrived. {interview with author.} There was Ling Po 
(Chow Yi-Hsein), who arrived in 1946 and would become a gifted designer and artistic 
delineator. There was Cornelia Brierly, whose special gifts as an interior designer had 
become so valuable to Wright. There was Tom Casey, a talented architect from Los 
Angeles, and the devoted husband-and-wife team of Charles and Minerva Montooth. 
There was the young art student Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, who arrived not knowing "which 
end of the hammer you picked up," he said, and would become Wright's archivist. There 
was Marcus Weston, who had proved to be so loyal during the war years, Curtis Besinger 
and Davy Davison. There was Kenneth Burton Lockhart, whose expertise as a certified 
construction specifier was essential to the smooth functioning of what had become a large 
and successful business. 

Wright would have been completely overwhelmed by success had he not, by then, put in 
place a first-class firm of architects. But to call them only that would be to ignore the 
underlying factor, the ability of the Taliesin group to work as a team. The old Lloyd Jones 
gift for gathering kindred spirits among The Valley families, with whom they had worked, 
fought and intermarried, had been continued and amplified with the creation of this 
extended family, men and women with whom Wright shared similar aspirations and 
ideals. They were the companions of his waking hours. They rejoiced at his triumphs and 
mourned his sorrows, looming inevitably larger than his own children, now scattered 
across a continent, or even his fond and devoted sisters. And Catherine was gone forever, 
or was she? Jack Howe said, "Did I meet the first Mrs. Wright? I don't know. Everyone 
was on a picnic one Sunday and I was left alone to work in the studio, when a group of 
ladies appeared. One of them came up to me and said, 'I just wanted my friends to see this 
place.' She evidently knew her way around and after a while she left. I always wondered if 
that was Catherine." {interview with author.} 

One of the pivotal figures in the smooth functioning of Taliesin was Wright's internuncio, 
Gene Masselink. Born in South Africa of Dutch parents, Masselink grew up in Grand 
Rapids, Michigan, and took a degree in fine art from Ohio State University. He had won a 
first prize in art at the precocious age of four, and his great love, all his life, was painting 
in oils. His younger brother, Ben, recalled that Gene met Wright in 1932. He began as 
Wright's secretary and became the indispensable intermediary between the architect and 
his clients. Howe said, "He'd write the letters and Mr. Wright would sign them. He could 
write Frank Lloyd Wright letters." {interview with author} 

Ben Masselink thought his brother was absolutely selfless, and this was not without its 
problems. Over the years Masselink created Wrightian murals and paintings for clients. 
He helped establish the Taliesin Press, designed programs, stationery and invitations. Bill 
Calvert, another apprentice, remembered the exquisitely designed work lists that 
Masselink would draw up, minor works of art in themselves. Masselink was always hoping 
for some free time to work on his art, and would be promised time off "between two and 
four in the afternoon and then something would come up and he'd have to stop," Howe 
said. His brother said, "He worked all the time." 

But then, they all worked hard. Another of the pivotal figures at Taliesin was Masselink's 
assistant, Richard Carney, now managing trustee and chief executive officer of the Frank 
Lloyd Wright Memorial Foundation. He had been in the war and had enrolled at 
Washington University in St. Louis, but soon became disenchanted by the commercial 
emphasis of the architecture department. One of the requirements of the course was that he 
study in an architect's office, but he could not find an opening. Then he happened to meet 
one of the first Taliesin students, Bill Bernoudy, later an architect in St. Louis. His first 
letter went unanswered, but Carney persisted and was soon given his chance. His father 
had been a Baptist minister, and at the point when Carney met the Wrights, he had 
become practically an atheist. {interviews with author.} 

As Taliesin's numbers grew, the demands on Wright as an architect became ever more 
pressing, and inevitable changes took place within the Fellowship. The yearly round, of 
traveling between Wisconsin and Arizona, continued, as did his weekly monologues on the 
nature of society and democracy and the organic, during which he "loved to quote himself 
and Mrs. Wright would look for a door to escape," Howe said. Parties that had been small 
and unpretentious became more formal and the guest lists more distinguished; among their 
visitors were Sherwood Anderson, Mike Todd, Charles Lindbergh, Helen Hayes, Charles 
Laughton, Leopold Stokowski and Clare Boothe Luce, although Wright was never able to 
snare some of the others he wanted, including Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish or 
Gertrude Stein. And then there were people who occasionally felt they were not wanted. 
Rupert Pole, Eric Wright's half brother, whose mother, Helen, was Lloyd Wright's second 
wife, took the writer Ana-s Nin to visit them in Arizona.  

Parties also became more elaborate. Ben Masselink recalled one birthday party at which an 
astonishing surprise had been prepared. The Wrights were escorted to chairs on the bank 
of the river, the word was given and, suddenly, a Spanish galleon came around the bend in 
full sail. It had been designed, built and outfitted by Wes Peters and was manned by a crew 
in full regalia. The ship came alongside, and the crew landed, carrying a treasure chest, 
the birthday box for that year. 

In the old days, Wright's personal imprint had been on every aspect of the work and daily 
round. He liked to call himself "the general cook and bottle washer." Now he was just as 
willing, but his resources of energy were no longer limitless, leading to the delegation of 
tasks he once led himself. The result was to somewhat sharpen the distinction Manson and 
others had noted before the war, i.e., between the private life of family and guests and that 
of the rest of the Fellowship. No longer did the Wright family, artistically grouped, with a 
dog at their feet, sit on a dais only on weekends when they listened to the evening's 
entertainment, but they ate on a dais as well. Ayn Rand noted disapprovingly that theirs 
was a special menu, while the rest of the Fellowship was served fried eggs. {The Passion 
of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden, p. 190.} Some quipped, paraphrasing Churchill, "Never 
have so many people spent so much time making a very few people comfortable." But a 
larger split was developing between those whose lives revolved around the work of the 
architectural firm, known as the "studio crowd," and the rest, many of them wives. Mary 
Matthews, Peter's wife, in common with other observers, believed that Mrs. Wright had 
become a masterly manipulator. "She would see an opportunity when someone was 
uncertain or slightly at fault, and she would tear them to shreds to see how they would 
react, find their weak points. I was given the task of typing up the cookbook and missed a 
detail on the method of making baba, and she started on me. But I was not about to let her 
get the upper hand, and she finally said, 'The trouble with you is you stand before me like 
a rod when you should bend like the grass before the wind.'" {to author.} Speaking of 
these surprise attacks, which often came to the unwary apprentice before large groups of 
people, Mrs. Wright "sometimes had to crack heads open to put something new in them," 
her friends explained. {Eloise Fritz to author.} Or, as she herself would write, "It is better 
to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools." {"Our House," 
CT, January 14, 1957.} Most people thought they saw evidence of the training Mrs. 
Wright had received in Fontainebleau in such tactics and, in fact, Gurdjieff's name was 
constantly being invoked. Mrs. Kassler said, "In the first six months when I was there, I 
rather doubt that any of the draftsmen or apprentices even knew the name. But when I 
returned in 1948 his influence was very evident. We all had to sit and listen to Mr. Wright 
reading aloud from this tedious book by Gurdjieff. Perhaps it was All and Everything and I 
remember my eyes closing." It was around that time that Iovanna, who was studying with 
the famous French harpist Marcel Grandjany, went to France to spend time with Gurdjieff 
and returned with the ambition to become a dancer. She said, "He was like the rising sun. 
He had no weaknesses," a view apparently shared by her mother and members of her 
mother's circle. {to author.} That came to be called "the little kitchen crowd," so called 
because, it was said, people would sit there and wait, sometimes for hours, in order to talk 
over their problems with Mrs. Wright. It was as if Mrs. Wright were preparing to assume 
her aging mentor's mantle (Gurdjieff died in 1949), as well as his dogmatic certainties. 
Asked if she ever admitted that she was wrong, the Howes just laughed. 

Now in middle age, Olgivanna Wright was still an attractive, even striking woman, with 
the same slim dancer's figure, although she was also "austere and distant, unless you were 
close to her," Jean Kennedy Wolford, wife of another apprentice, said. Rupert Pole, who 
was not one of her admirers, said, "As an actor, I saw through her. I thought she was a 
very designing woman, powerful and egotistical." {to author.} She supervised every aspect 
of running the household, setting the tone and stamping out whatever she saw as 
pernicious influences, from smoking cigarettes and wearing beards to such details as the 
wrong color socks or even the way an apprentice combed his hair.  

Not only did Mrs. Wright make herself available for counseling, she practically required 
that everyone at Taliesin, including her daughter, Iovanna, reveal the intimate details of 
their lives. And while Iovanna was an adolescent, just beginning to date, her mother, and 
father as well, were determined to keep a close watch on her movements. Iovanna said 
that, unknown to her, her father had wired her room to an alarm clock placed beside his 
bed so that whenever she returned to her room, sometimes late at night, his alarm would 
go off. {Iovanna Wright to author.} 

This attitude changed in a curious way in the years to come. Bill Calvert, who admired 
Mrs. Wright but was not blind to her idiosyncrasies, said, "I pretty much accepted a lot of 
Mrs. Wright's criticisms because I knew they were valid. {Reminiscences of Taliesin in 
interview with author.} However, I drew the line one time after I came back to Taliesin for 
a visit. I had been on good terms with Olgivanna, and she and Iovanna cooked up a 
surprise birthday party for me. Iovanna was the hostess and it was a wonderful party, but 
she kept insisting I stay afterward. At the same time I knew that a lot of fairly 
freewheeling liaisons were being arranged by the 'little kitchen.' By eleven or eleven thirty 
I could see the writing on the wall. I was thinking, 'Oh my God, I am getting sucked into 
something,' but I still didn't want to go through with it. 

"I also knew that a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking went on in the 'little kitchen.' 
A lot of us steered clear for this reason. You were expected to kiss and tell. And if you 
didn't perform . . . let's say, you'd be called in and corrected. I couldn't cope with it. Next 
morning I was up and left before anyone knew it. I knew what Olgivanna was capable of. 
We'd get someone new, a boy called Michael, and a couple of months later she would 
interview him and say, 'Oh, you are doing a wonderful job. Joe and Ken keep telling me 
how well you do. Now, why is it all the boys like you? What's the matter with you? Are 
you a homosexual?' and poor Michael would break down in tears." 

Given this amount of eavesdropping on their lives, apprentices often left without much 
ceremony. Jack Dunbar says that Wright's influence on his ideas-the principles he 
absorbed while he was there-had a profound effect, but he rebelled at what he saw as an 
unscrupulous attempt to manipulate his private life. "I snapped," he said. "I walked back to 
my room and started packing." Several couples, including Peter and Mary Matthews, 
believed that a more or less determined effort was being made to destroy their marriages. 
After Mrs. Matthews moved out of the Fellowship, she said that she never received a letter 
from her husband, or he from her, although they were writing to each other frequently. 
{interview with author} Perhaps the most famous marital breakup was that between Wes 
Peters and his second wife, Svetlana Alliluyeva, whose book The Faraway Music places a 
great deal of blame for the failure of her marriage on the divide-and-rule tactics of 
Olgivanna Wright. But even when Mrs. Wright's Balkan suspicions were not aroused, 
married couples had difficulty with the problems intrinsic to Taliesin's communal life. 
Cary Caraway said, "I met my wife Frances through Taliesin and we had two children 
there. We left when the children were preschool age. Mr. Wright talked a good philosophy 
about family life but it never existed. He could never let go of the need to have your 
energies focused on his work. And the mother didn't have enough free time with the 
children. There are no successful apprentice families that survived staying at Taliesin." 
{interview with author.} 

Bill Calvert said of Mrs. Wright, "On balance, I am on her side. In many ways she was a 
second mother to a lot of people. I was only eighteen when I went there, and she filled a 
real gap in my life. There was a lot of warmth and acceptance coming from her too. There 
were a lot of wonderful things she did for us." People remember her thoughtfulness. Soon 
after both her husband and sister had died, Mrs. Kassler went to Taliesin for a visit. 
Perhaps it was a warm evening, but she found herself shivering. "Olgivanna said, 'Let me 
get you a stole,' and she found something right away. The message I received was, 'Get 
warm and get happier.'" 

Calvert continued, "Keep in mind that Mrs. Wright was running a branch of the czarist 
court, and absolutely anything was possible. I am not exaggerating a bit. She was a master 
of intrigue but Mr. Wright hated it." Tony Puttnam, another member of the Fellowship, 
agreed: "I thought he was remarkably patient and good-humored. He'd suffer students. 
He'd make an attempt not to catch people out, so he would clear his throat before he came 
into a room." A great deal of effort was sometimes expended, Calvert said, to keep Wright 
from finding out. "Here is a typical example. Some guy would get a girl in the town 
pregnant. There would be the threat of scandal. Olgivanna's approach would be to try and 
solve it quietly. Talk to the girl and pay her off. But we all dreaded what would happen if 
Mr. Wright found out. He would call everyone in. The message would be, 'Don't stop to 
change.' The phone would be ringing extra loud. Your whole life starts flashing before 
your eyes and you are thinking, 'I'm going to be exposed. I'm going to have to parade 
around with no clothes on.' We'd all be sitting there, and Wright would say, 'Let's get this 
out into the open. Find out how many guys are sleeping with girls.' Then he'd say, 'Okay, 
Joe, why did you do it with this girl? Haven't you heard of prophylactics?' Putting on heavy 
boots and tramping through peoples' lives. He'd go around the room. 'Okay, Bill, you were 
living next door. Why didn't you stop this?' The worst sin at Taliesin was lying to protect 
yourself. All the wrath would turn on you and your crime was greater. But it was more 
subtle than that. You said what was necessary to get you through. You had to learn to 
perceive what was required. The little lie. The point at which they stopped. You had to be 
quick on your feet and know what role to play. Sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lie, 
and if you did it right, you'd be called in later and complimented. It made a skillful liar out 
of you, that's for sure. We none of us liked it. But you have to understand. She wasn't an 
ogre. It's hard to convey. She was operating on a different principle. Her goals were to 
keep Wright going and Taliesin intact, and she did it brilliantly." 

Mrs. Wright became very adept at dealing with her husband too. Calvert recalled one 
occasion when Wright had brought back boxes of "little twinkling lights" from San 
Francisco, the kind that are "now used on Christmas trees. Well, we had a surprise party of 
some kind in the desert, and Gene, with Mrs. Wright's permission, opened up the boxes 
and decorated the theater with these lights. But it turned out that Mr. Wright had wanted 
to use the lights for something else. There was a big cocktail party with a lot of important 
guests, and everyone went into the theater and Mr. Wright saw the lights. He flew into a 
rage. Who could have done this? Olgivanna was asked whether it was her. She, for 
expediency, said, 'No, Gene did it.' Gene knew he would have to take the fall for public 
consumption. It was a charade; later on, he would be forgiven. To simplify the problem. 
The evening went on and they were having dinner. I'm serving at the family table but he 
had not stopped complaining. 'Gene, where do you get off? You've assumed too much 
responsibility. You don't know your place.' All this in front of guests. Finally Gene got up 
and walked out, which he had never done before. So Mrs. Wright ignored the guests and 
turned on Mr. Wright. She totally humiliated him, something she had learned from 
Gurdjieff. 'You've ruined the meal for everyone. No one has touched their plates,' which I 
knew was true, because I carried them out. 'You're acting like a child.' He threw down his 
napkin and left. She was trying to salvage the evening after that, and we all assumed we 
wouldn't see him again. I was aware of his pacing around outside. I was just serving 
dessert when I saw him coming back. 'Oh, my God, he is going to throw everyone out.' Not 
a bit of it. He had returned to apologize personally to Gene and all the guests. Then he 
embraced Mrs. Wright. 'Come on, Mother, let's have a party.'" 

No one who saw them together doubted that the Wrights had a deep and enduring love for 
each other. He depended upon her completely for the day-to-day running of two vast 
estates, for dealing with the inevitable conflicts and antagonisms, for lightening his load in 
all major ways, for companionship, for a special kind of nurturing, for the constant 
challenge of her able mind. They continued, of course, to be jealous of each other's 
flirtations, if that is not too strong a word, and sexual jealousy, it is said, was the cause of 
any continuing friction between them in later years. {Frank Lloyd Wright in the Realm of 
Ideas, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, p. 170.} Olgivanna Wright has provided evidence that 
jealousy was not exactly the issue. What seemed to have been happening was that her 
emerging role as the iron hand on Taliesin's smooth functioning had, inevitably, placed 
her in a much more powerful position than either of them had anticipated when the 
Fellowship began. It was one thing for a young wife to oversee the cooking, the cleaning, 
the laundry, the canning of fruit and vegetables and the making of wine and the 
organization of such mundane tasks, playing a subordinate role. It was something else 
entirely to be married to a woman at the height of her power and authority, who was on 
equal terms with him at home, however much she might be just a famous man's wife in the 
outside world. That the balance was shifting must have been apparent to him, and he was 
too narcissistic and insecure not to resent it. This much is made clear by Olgivanna Wright 
herself, describing her husband's reaction to the publication of her first book, The Struggle 
Within, by Horizon Press in 1955. She described his rage and insulting behavior on 
several occasions, always an indication that he felt severely threatened. It was not enough 
that his wife should now rival him in importance at Taliesin, but now she wanted a 
position in the outside world. She had become an author, he sneered. He threw her book 
down, had temper tantrums and, in short, made himself thoroughly unpleasant. {CD, p. 
114} Wasn't it enough for her to be his wife, he wanted to know. Things reached such an 
impasse that, after an evening of more abuse, in 1955 Olgivanna Wright decided that she 
had enough. She was going to leave him. She wanted to have a life of her own, not simply 
live in his reflected glory, but he, she told him, "wanted me to be the same as you said 
Sophie was to Uncle Vlado, a pair of trousers that you can put on and take off at your own 
will." That he should, at some level, see her emergence as an individual as a threat 
summarizes the dilemma he faced in all his relationships with women, one he never 
resolved, although in this particular case he patched things up by persuading her to stay. 
He gave her his word of honor that, from then on, he would only praise her work as a 
writer. When Our House was published in 1958, he was as good as his word. {Frank Lloyd 
Wright in the Realm of Ideas, p. 175.} 

Besides, Wright had his own way of getting even with Olgivanna. The story is told that 
she came into the drafting room one day to meet him, as they had planned to make a trip 
into Madison. The day was hot. He did not appear, and she left. Finally, Wright came into 
the room and wanted to know where she was. He was told she had left, so he went down to 
the parking lot at Hillside, thinking she might be waiting in the car. She was not there 
either, so he turned to an assistant and said, "Go back to the drafting room and get me 
some scissors." Although the day was sweltering he was wearing one of his beautiful 
English suits, tailor-made for him in London, of heavy tweed, with a hat and tie. The 
scissors were delivered. Wright commanded his apprentice to cut off his pants above the 
knee. {William Calvert, interview with author.} That was the spectacle he presented when 
his wife finally found him. She was, the apprentice said, "in a rage." 

Wright also knew that, in ways that really counted, Olgivanna would always play the right 
part. When the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded him a 
gold medal in 1950, Mrs. Wright went along, and gave the president, Alfred Bendiner, 
precise instructions about the food to be served to the great man. "One piece whitefish, and 
this is to be cooked not in the fire or on the fire or under the fire, but directly over the fire, 
dry without any butter or sauces or mishmash. Then maybe one baked potato but 
absolutely dry with no butter, and a little fresh peas, and then maybe a little raspberry 
Jello, and maybe a little coffee, and then you will go and buy one quart skimmed milk, 
Grade A, and bring it back and show this to me, so I am sure," she told him. She 
concluded by reminding Bendiner that her husband's life was in his hands. {"How Frank 
Lloyd Wright Got His Gold Medal," Harper's, May 1958.} 

There was one further factor affecting Olgivanna Wright's life in those postwar years. 
Svetlana, her beautiful, enchanting daughter, the one who greeted family members on their 
visits and saw that they were comfortable and well cared for-Svetlana was dead. {from 
contemporary accounts and CT, September 30, 1946.} 

Ben Masselink said, "Gene and Wes and Svet went everywhere together, like the trio in 
the famous film Jules et Jim. I think Gene must have been in love with her. She was 
dark-haired, almost Tahitian, with full lips and dark eyes, of medium build, 
five-foot-four, and very slim. Gene was very self-effacing, like me, and Svetlana was 
very vivacious, the life of the whole place." For several years, she and Wes had no 
children. Then Brandoch was born; then came Daniel, and in the autumn of 1946 they 
were expecting their third child. 

One September morning, Svetlana Peters was on her way to Spring Green from Taliesin 
driving a jeep with Brandoch, four, and Daniel, one and a half, inside. She had stopped at 
a garage near the river to make a few purchases before traveling the remaining mile and a 
half to Spring Green. She had crossed the river and was approaching a smaller bridge over 
a slough, protected from the running brook beneath only by a railing about a foot high. 
Then something happened. One theory was that she could have had a fainting spell-it 
was said she had been prone to them at the time. Another was that she was carrying a 
small kitten in the car and it had made a sudden movement. Wes Peters said his son's 
explanation was that Daniel started to fall out of the car. Peters said, "A wartime jeep 
responded very quickly, and I think that as Svet tried to make a grab for Daniel the car 
made a fast swerve." It leapt over the railing, plunged into four feet of water and landed 
upside down. Brandoch was thrown clear. His mother and brother were trapped under the 
partially submerged jeep. The little boy made his way to the road just as Glen Richardson, 
operator of the garage, and his employee, Donald Fogo, were on their way into Spring 
Green driving a wrecker. Seeing the little boy, they stopped, and he shouted, "The jeep ran 
into the water!" They raced to the scene and tried to pry the car loose, but it was stuck fast. 
Richardson reached into the wreckage and pulled out Daniel, but was unable to free 
Svetlana until they had hitched up a cable and lifted the car clear. That took five or ten 
minutes. 

Peters said, "I remember I was working in the Hillside drafting room when I got the news. 
As I arrived, Glen Richardson was just getting the car out and we got Svetlana out of 
there." {interview with author.} By then the local doctor was on the scene. He had no 
artificial-respiration equipment, and the nearest hospital was in Madison, so he ordered 
the two to be taken there. Peters drove them-an hour-long trip-with the Irish architect 
Andrew Devane. They took turns applying artificial respiration to Svetlana. "Daniel had 
been fatally hurt, so we concentrated on her. To add to the problems, as we got into 
Madison a tire blew out." The two were pronounced dead at the hospital. Peters said, "The 
doctors said that they both had internal injuries and couldn't have survived." He and Gene 
Masselink dug the graves for Daniel and Svetlana themselves in the Wright family 
cemetery in Unity Chapel yard. Perhaps it was after the loss of his wife, son and unborn 
child that Wes Peters, who had always stood so tall, began to stoop. 

As it happened, both of the Wrights were in Chicago, and Jack Howe was delegated to 
relay the bad news. Howe said, "He absolutely couldn't believe it. He kept saying, 'It can't 
be that bad,' and I said, 'It can't be worse.'" As for Olgivanna, "She was inconsolable." Kay 
Rattenbury remembered going to the scene of the accident and seeing Svetlana lying on 
the grass, "white and inert." She was there when Olgivanna Wright came back to her 
room, cleaning it. "I knew she would be upset, but I had no idea. . . . She came into the 
room weeping and sobbing. 'Oh, Kay, leave me alone," she said. Oh, God, it was awful. I 
hate to think about it." Olgivanna was prostrate, but Frank Lloyd Wright was magnificent. 
Peters said, "He never failed. He'd always rise to the occasion. When the cards were down, 
he always came through." He personally made arrangements for the funeral and would not 
allow Svetlana's casket to be placed in the living room, because, he told Olgivanna, "If we 
do that you will never go into that room again. We will put her in the garden room." {Kay 
Rattenbury to author.} Olgivanna Wright continued to mourn her daughter's death. Dr. 
Joseph Rorke, her close friend in later years, believed she refused to eat and that she was 
living in a tent; "Mr. Wright finally made her stop," he said. And, for whatever reason, she 
blamed Svetlana's death on cats. Bill Calvert said, "She would fly into a rage if a cat 
appeared and it would have to be removed." There is another story that, sometime after the 
death of Svetlana, Wright went to visit a client. The client asked where Mrs. Wright was, 
and he replied, "She's in the car crying." {anecdote related by Jonathan Lipman.}  

In 1949 still more commissions were coming in. That year Wright was asked to design 
twenty houses; eleven would be built. He was designing a self-service garage for Edgar 
Kaufmann in Pittsburgh; a vast concrete bridge, called the Butterfly Wing Bridge, to be 
built south of San Francisco; a theater in Hartford; a building for the YWCA in Racine, 
Wisconsin; and many others. He found time to publish a biography of Sullivan, Genius 
and the Mobocracy. Two years earlier the National Institute of Arts and Letters had made 
him a member, and other honors crowded in on him during those years: honorary degrees 
from Princeton, Cooper Union, Florida Southern College, Yale, Wisconsin and Temple 
universities, among others. Foreign organizations, such as the Academie Royale des 
Beaux-Arts of Stockholm, the National Academy of Finland and the Uruguayan National 
Academy of Architects, made him an honorary member. The University of Wales claimed 
him for its own with an honorary degree of doctor of philosophy. One of the other honors 
of those years was the gold medal for architecture, given by the American Academy of 
Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was the stellar attraction 
the day he received the honor, but by no means the only one. Marianne Moore was 
receiving the gold medal for poetry, and Ivan Mestrovic, the award of merit for painting. 
Elizabeth Bowen was giving the address, Archibald MacLeish was in the chair, and Louis 
Kronenberger was conducting the induction of new members of the institute, among them 
Rachel Carson, Reinhold Niebuhr and Delmore Schwartz. In addition, the elegant 
nineteenth century New York town house in which the ceremony was held was the scene 
of an exhibition of the work of those being honored, and included the sculpture of 
Mestrovic and William Zorach and the paintings of Louis Bouche, Leo Friedlander, 
Hyman Bloom, Francis Speight, Jacob Lawrence and others-about a hundred items in all, 
exhibited in the main gallery and subsidiary rooms around it. Felicia Van Veen, the 
academy's former executive director, said they had invited Wright to contribute a small 
exhibit. He arrived with perspective studies and models for his major works at the time, 
including a perspective and general plan of the Guggenheim; a model of a proposed 
skyscraper for the H. C. Price Construction Company of Bartlesville, Oklahoma; a glass 
chapel for the family of E. J. Kaufmann; a circular house for his son David; perspective 
studies for a small library, to be called the Masieri Memorial and built on Venice's Grand 
Canal; and other items. Almost before she knew it, Mrs. Van Veen said, Wright had 
commandeered the choice exhibition space and was pushing Mestrovic's sculpture, which 
had a prominent position, out of the way, and replacing it with his own models. "He was 
terribly fresh and I had to speak up," she said. He took over her office and began making 
calls all over town to tell the press he had arrived. He made everyone work after hours 
because he was so demanding. She recalled that she had persuaded someone to donate a 
cheap rug for the occasion. It had a small red stripe around the edge. That would not do, 
Wright said. It had to be erased, not with a paintbrush, which would have been relatively 
simple, but with colored inks. His crew "sat up all night inking out this tiny red stripe," 
she said. "I thought he was obnoxious, but his men were his slaves. They'd stand on their 
heads for him. Anything he wanted, they did." {interview with author} Another staff 
member, Lydia Kaim, had a slightly more positive impression. "He came every day," she 
said. "He was in his eighties but he looked wonderful. I'd say, 'How are you?' and he would 
reply, 'Couldn't be better!' with a glint in his eye." Naturally, he did not approve of the 
introduction Ralph Walker, a New York architect of large industrial plants, office 
skyscrapers and housing projects, and the president of the American Institute of 
Architects, had seen fit to give. "I had no idea how outrageously inadequate this 
introduction . . . would be," was his opening remark. "Couldn't you do better than that?" 

He continued, "As these honors have descended upon me one by one, somehow I expected 
each honor would add a certain luster, a certain brightness to the psyche which is mine. 
On the contrary, a shadow seems to fall with each one. I think it casts a shadow on my 
native arrogance, and for a moment I feel coming on that disease which is recommended 
so highly, of humility. . . ." It was an irresistible remark, much quoted, and it laid bare, 
artlessly or not, the roots of Wright's marvelously sustained outrageousness, and what lay 
behind it, try though he might to pretend it was not there. Architects were artists and 
poets, or they were nothing, and to be a poet in America "puts you rather in the backyard 
and out of things and the procession goes on without you," he explained. But the 
procession, at last, had paused, and invited him to join. 

These heady tributes were accompanied by one even more illustrious, that of the gold 
medal of the American Institute of Architects, at its eighty-first annual meeting in 
Houston in the spring of 1949. {Account of the awarding of the gold medal, from letters of 
Arthur Cort Holden to author, September 19, 1988, and June 19, 990; A.I.A. banquet 
description, in Architectural Record, May 1949, pp. 87-88; speech, Journal of the 
American Institute of Architects, vol. XI, no. 5, May 1949, pp. 199-207.} The 
recognition came very late-as he was the first to remind them-and almost despite him, 
since he had made such a point of never becoming an A.I.A. member and had criticized 
almost every aspect of the profession. Given what the members knew must happen, it has 
to be considered an act of forbearance on their part to award to this contentious and 
maverick artist their highest honor. If they expected to be lectured and harangued once 
more, they were not disappointed. Wright, saying he came prepared to "look you in the 
face and insult you," launched into an attack on the inferior cities they had built, Houston 
being an excellent example (speaking of a new hotel, the Shamrock, he quipped, "I can see 
the sham but where's the rock?"), and all the ways in which they had fallen short of their 
great and noble opportunity to build for democracy. Nothing of any value had been built, 
he said, sweeping away the achievements of the century as so much detritus. But it was not 
too late to reform, seek an organic architecture of spiritual qualities, internal strength, 
nobility of purpose and so on. And, in case they should want to pin on him the label with 
which he had been identified, i.e., as an early proselytizer of the machine, he wanted them 
to be disabused. Where he had once been enthusiastic he was now scornful, if not 
despairing, of the changes the machine had wrought on society; science had "ruined us. . . 
." It was all vintage Wright, and no doubt the capacity audience, which jammed the Rich 
Hotel for the presentation dinner, would have been disappointed if he had acted otherwise. 
They gave him a thunderous reception, and perhaps there were only a few left that night 
who thought he did not deserve to be so received. Arthur Holden, who was attending the 
meeting as new regional director from New York, and had joined the A.I.A. board, knew 
something of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that had taken place, with older men 
who thoroughly disliked and disapproved of Wright finally being outvoted by younger 
factions arguing in his favor. Among those opposed, Holden recalled, was Bronson 
Gamba, a member of the board of directors from Detroit, who told him that Wright would 
be awarded the gold medal "over his dead body!" Another enemy of Wright's was a former 
president of the Milwaukee chapter, Leigh Hunt. That night, he happened to be seated 
beside Holden. Holden recalled that Hunt had known Wright and his first wife, and 
remembered having supper with Wright one evening in 1909 when he appeared tense and 
on edge. Wright finally burst out with the news that he intended to leave Catherine. Hunt 
was horrified. That was the end of the friendship between Hunt and Wright, Holden said. 
"I remember Leigh Hunt telling me that he couldn't stay in the room while this 
presentation was taking place and he did step out a window to a balcony outside." 

Mrs. Kassler also remembered the A.I.A. convention because she was arranging flowers in 
the dining room in Taliesin in Arizona when Wright appeared. "He strode in looking 
awfully pleased with himself. He had just returned from the convention and was so proud. 
Usually I was so intimidated I never talked to him, but this time I could not help asking, 
'Why are you so pleased about this?' He replied, 'One is never too old to want the approval 
and admiration of one's peers.' I was really moved, as well as surprised." {interview with 
author.} Then there was the time when Peter Matthews was asked to take Wright his 
breakfast in bed one morning. "I went into the room and he said, 'See that box over on the 
table? Open it.' I did so and inside was the gold medal. He said, 'Put it on!' I did as I was 
told, and he laughed, and said, 'Now you can't say you have never worn the gold medal." 
That was Wright, full of radiant good humor, his face glowing, striding across the 
platform to savor the victory, in Houston or New York, or, as he would do in Mexico City 
in 1953, the one man, among a host of his peers in formal evening dress, wearing a white 
linen suit. {CD, p. 34.} 


The Shining Land 

So the blessed one survives his death  
And goes back to the shining land that was his  
In a former life. 

"The Phoenix" 
Poems from the Old English {p. 117} 

Don Anderson, publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, wanted Wright to sell him one of 
the portraits he had acquired at reduced cost from Karsh of Ottawa and, by the way, 
Anderson said, "Karsh also told me that you and George Bernard Shaw were the two most 
interesting people he had photographed." {July 1, 1954} The United States Information 
Agency came to Spring Green to make a record of Wright at work and play: in the drafting 
room, walking over the hills and posing with his photographs, drawings and models, with 
Beethoven for the sound track. Wright observed that the federal government had never 
thought him good enough to award him a commission, and was now sending a film about 
him around the world-a supreme irony. Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin read into 
the Congressional Record a statement about "the universally acknowledged architectural 
genius, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright." {on April 23, 1955.} He was so famous that taxi 
drivers, porters at stations and even waiters in modest side-street restaurants in New 
York recognized him. One morning, when he had unaccountably forgotten to bring any 
cash with him to breakfast, the manager of the diner cheerfully accepted an autograph in 
lieu of payment. {"Our House," CT, June 5, 1961.} Gone were the days when his perpetual 
last-minute dash placed him in peril of missing a train. Now, trains were held for him, 
and so were theater curtains. A friend was sitting in a Madison audience one evening, 
wondering why the play had not yet begun, when she saw the familiar figure appear. "As 
he was walking down the aisle, all eyes followed," she said. {Mrs. Ernest L. Meyer to 
author.} 

As a national living treasure, he was an inviting subject for portraitists. One of the most 
successful, apart from Karsh (whose photograph captured the quixotic stubbornness of his 
subject), was the writer and television personality Alistair Cooke. He went to interview 
Wright in his Plaza Hotel suite and found him "stretched out on a sofa, his fine hands 
folded on his lap, a shawl precisely draped around his shoulders. In writing about him 
thus, I hope that I am not so much arranging a suitable atmosphere as conveying a 
psychological shock. One expected a tyrant, a man constantly caricatured by the press as a 
bellowing iconoclast. And here was a genial skeptic whose habitual tone was one of 
pianissimo raillery. . . ." {the Washington Post, April 26, 1959.} And if he was still 
automatically contra-Cooke discovered that, when asked to turn his head for the right 
camera angle, the great man loudly refused-the damage could be repaired if one appealed 
to his sense of humor, and that made him "as malleable as an aging cat." {the Washington 
Post, April 26, 1959.} 

Those wishing to capture a physical likeness generally faced the greatest challenge. Back 
in 1931, when Wright was a comparative whippersnapper of sixty-four, he complained 
that the photograph Steichen had taken of him made him look "about ninety-five years 
old." {to Steichen, T, December 9, 1931.} For the fact was that his features had elongated 
in a way that made it difficult to flatter him. There were crevices in his cheeks, his upper 
lip had lengthened, his mouth had contracted into a thin line, and, as another artist, 
Arizona art teacher and critic, Dr. Harry Wood, noticed, it settled into a dour fold when he 
relaxed. Some daunting folds around his mouth, beginning at the nostrils and descending 
into the chin, would have to be addressed, and some way found to widen those eyes that, 
although "like gimlets," retained "a blueness and intensity and total focus I shall never 
forget," Dr. Wood said. {interview with author.} Something else in his face, perhaps 
having to do with the heavy lids or perhaps the right eyebrow, as eloquently arched as 
Garbo's, gave another kind of impression, one Wright noticed himself. In the summer of 
1944 he complained to Lloyd that he "looked like an old hag,"  {EW, July 11, 1944} and 
by the middle 1950s he was avoiding photographers altogether because "they all make me 
look like an old woman." {CT, February 27, 1956} (As a curious corollary, in some 
pictures Olgivanna Wright began to assume a distinctly soldierly look.) Even cartoonists 
had a hard time making a recognizable likeness. That veiled yet penetrating look, the 
mulish set of the chin, the challenge of the mouth-if these presented problems enough, 
there was the further handicap of the sitter himself. Wood, who painted Wright a few 
months before he died, wrote revealingly that his sitter would give a minute criticism of 
his progress at the end of each session, demanding that he remove details that, at the end 
of the next, he would just as arbitrarily want restored. This was not designed to inspire a 
relaxed mood in the artist himself, and the better Wright knew him, the more likely the 
whole exercise was to end in chaos. 

A case in point was a bust begun by his friend Oskar Stonorov, a German-born architect 
of distinction who had become director of the Philadelphia Housing Association and was a 
noted town planner. He had studied sculpture with Maillol, was a clever portraitist and had 
conceived the ambition to sculpt Wright's head. That was a compliment, but then Stonorov 
decided he must work in Wright's bedroom. Perhaps he hoped to insulate his subject from 
the demands of the studio, but it made the work-in-progress far too tempting a target. 
One evening, thinking her husband quieter than usual, Olgivanna Wright went into his 
bedroom and found him at work on the bust. She wondered what Stonorov would have to 
say about that. "I worked on it before," her husband replied gaily, "and he did not notice 
anything." This time might be different, she responded, since the change was evident. Her 
husband conceded the point, but wanted to know whether he had improved the result. She 
studied it, and concluded that the nose was somewhat too long and the spacing of the right 
eye was at fault. Before she knew it, they were both attacking the bust. They pursued their 
improvements for some time and, at length, declared themselves completely satisfied. But, 
next morning, she discovered that Wright had added some additional touches that had 
quite ruined the effect. Stonorov seemed blind to the embellishments but eventually 
wondered aloud what could have happened to his bust. The moment to confess was upon 
them. Wright looked him straight in the eye and said that Olgivanna had done it. She 
concluded, "Needless to say, the bust was never finished." {"Our House," CT, August 3, 
1961.} The one sculpture of Wright that they did like is now on exhibit at Taliesin. The 
artist was a young apprentice, Heloise Crista, who hit upon the idea of having her subject's 
eyes raised, making his habitually raised eyebrow seem logically placed, and having the 
effect of widening his eyes. The architect, at the moment of inspiration: it was a brilliant 
solution. Since it was only the second piece of modeling she had ever done, Wright must 
have reasoned that she could not do much harm, and left her to her own devices. 

Stonorov's abortive attempt to portray Wright was the result of having been asked to 
organize a retrospective exhibition of the latter's work, "Sixty Years of Living 
Architecture," the largest that had ever been attempted. The idea was suggested by 
Frederick Gutheim, expanded upon by Wright and worked out in detail by Stonorov. {as 
related in his lecture, "The Frank Lloyd Wright I Knew."} It would capitalize upon an 
offer from the Italian Academy of Art to exhibit in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, one 
that could not be accepted because the Italian government was not able to pay for 
transportation, and neither could the architect. It was Stonorov's idea to seek the 
sponsorship of the Gimbel's department store in Philadelphia. If Wright were to allow that 
store to mount a preview, Gimbel's would pay travel costs (it eventually contributed 
$50,000 toward the project), and Stonorov's bust would have a place of honor in the 
Palazzo Strozzi. The materials used for the project-hundreds of renderings, nearly a 
thousand original drawings, photomurals, twenty-five models and an actual exhibition 
house-would form the prototype for another successful exhibition, "Frank Lloyd Wright 
in the Realm of Ideas," held decades later. The exhibition was an immediate success when 
it opened in Florence in May 1951. 

One of the projects that most excited him during that period was the chance to build in 
Venice. A young Italian architectural student who had seen the exhibition in Florence, and 
who had been fired with enthusiasm for his work, was on his way to Arizona to 
commission Wright to build him a house in Venice when, outside Philadelphia, he was 
killed in a car accident. His family decided to commission Wright to build a memorial to 
their son in the form of a small architectural library, with space to accommodate twelve 
students. They had the site, at the rear of Santa Maria Novella on the Grand Canal, and 
Wright thought he had the design, in white Pavonazzo marble and Murano glass, 
punctuated with tiny balconies, that would reflect, in contemporary terms, the balance, 
proportion and classical grace of the adjoining Renaissance palaces. The Masieri 
Memorial, as it was called, was admired in Italian architectural circles but considered a 
sacrilege in others, and the Venetian Committee on Tourism finally exerted such pressure 
on the project that it was abandoned. {LAP, p. 181.F} Among those opposed was another 
octogenarian and aesthete, a longtime resident of Florence, the Italian Renaissance art 
historian Bernard Berenson, and so was Ernest Hemingway. The latter's parents had lived 
in Oak Park, and Wright had met them in his younger days. Subsequently, Wright could 
be heard complaining about the narrowness of all literary men and artists in general, with 
the exception, of course, of architects. {to William H. Short, in an interview August 21, 
1954, Princeton University Archives.} 

Another favorite project of those years was the nineteen-story skyscraper Wright built for 
the Harold C. Price Construction Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Wright's views 
about the skyscraper as a desirable form had undergone a number of shifts since the early 
days when he, influenced by Sullivan, saw it simply as an architectural problem to be 
solved. There the matter rested until he was invited to design St. 
Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie for New York, and it is clear from the resultant structure, 
with its concrete roots, hollow trunk and projecting, swastikalike wings, that he had fully 
grasped the potential possibilities. Vincent Scully commented, "St. Mark's Tower, rising 
like a jewel out of some of Wright's most tormented years, best expresses of all his projects 
the structural, spatial, and formal abstraction through which he hoped to evoke nature's 
organic forms." {SC, p. 26} The depression had destroyed all hope that this masterpiece 
might be built. Somewhere, however, in the recesses of his mind there lingered an 
unquenchable fondness for what he had wrought with St. Mark's and a natural desire to 
see the idea resurrected. So when he was eventually given the opportunity to build a 
version of it, as an office and apartment tower in an Oklahoma town, it was perhaps not 
surprising that he decided to seize the chance first and worry about the rationalizations 
later. For the fact was that this modified version of the great St. Mark's project was, and is, 
a perfect delight. Its patrons, Mr. and Mrs. Harold C. Price, were a farsighted couple, 
lovers of the Orient, who had made a fortune in oil and natural gas pipeline construction 
and were generously willing to let the grand old man have his way. They cheerfully 
acquiesced to his proposal to build a building with no square corners (so much dead space, 
he told them), accepting his argument that he would have to design special furniture and 
fittings for the triangular and parallelogram-shaped rooms. They agreed upon the 
reinforced concrete-glass-and-copper building, with its stamped copper plates of 
special design and the gold-tinted glass, paid an estimated $6.5 million for it, and 
allowed Wright to emblazon a quotation from Whitman in the lobby, a conceit that must 
have seemed most old-fashioned by the 1950s. ("Where the city that has produced the 
greatest man stands, / There the greatest city stands.") The Price Tower has been 
dismissed as a much-watered-down version of the original, but to at least one visitor, 
that was part of its charm. {SC, p. 26} If Wright's Millard house looks insistently 
monumental, despite its miniature size, the reverse can be said for the Price Tower, despite 
its height of 221 feet. And, since every aspect of the building has a different facet, one has 
the overwhelming impression of a piece of sculpture, of sublime delicacy and refinement, 
unaccountably deposited at a modest corner of Sixth and Dewey streets in Bartlesville. It 
has been designated as one of the buildings worthy of being retained as an example of 
Wright's work by the A.I.A., and is on the Department of the Interior's register of historic 
buildings. 

The success of the Price Tower seemed to convince Wright that a case could be made for 
skyscrapers after all. And, being Wright, to be persuaded was to become an ardent 
advocate. Four years later, in 1956, he was proposing that the city of Chicago erect an 
office building on its waterfront a mile high, that is to say, approximately four times as tall 
as the Empire State Building, to house one hundred thousand people. This monstrous 
project-the drawing alone was twenty-two feet long-seemed such an anomaly, coming 
from Wright, that most people did not take him seriously. Lewis Mumford, the old friend 
with whom he was by now reconciled, was perfectly disgusted and refused to have 
anything to do with it. Wright's "Sky City" died a quiet death. {Sophia Mumford to 
author} 

These and other vast projects-a synagogue in suburban Philadelphia, a Unitarian church 
in Madison, a music building for the Florida Southern campus, a Greek Orthodox church 
for Milwaukee, an opera house for Baghdad and a gift shop in San Francisco with an 
imposing facade and a spiral ramp interior-show that, far from moderating his pace, 
Wright was even more productive than ever. During the last nine years of his life he 
executed three hundred commissions. One hundred and thirty-five of them were built, 
nearly a third of his total output. He kept up this astounding pace, in addition to the usual 
migration between Wisconsin and Arizona, more and more frequent trips to New York in 
connection with building the Guggenheim, and six trips overseas: to London (1950), Italy 
(1951), Paris (1952), Zurich (1955), Wales (1956) and Iraq (1957). {Prof. Jack Quinan} 
None of it deflected him from the kind of work he loved best. Even before World War I, he 
had been an enthusiast for simplified construction and, he repeatedly said, would rather 
"solve the small house problem than build anything else that I can think of." {TW, p. 
337.} In the face of constantly rising costs, some way had to be found to economize still 
further on his most successful idea, the Usonian house. Early in the 1950s he thought he 
had found a method of construction so simple that anyone could use it-his answer to the 
do-it-yourself movement. He decided to try using plain hollow blocks, lighter and less 
costly than the original versions, knitted together with reinforcing steel rods and grouting. 
In principle any child could play with the block system, usually designed on a 
two-by-four-foot module, since the system could span openings, accommodate glass 
and appeared to be easy to use. {Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses, John Sergeant, p. 
145} After one of his students, Arthur Pieper, managed to build himself a house using the 
method, with some help from Charles Montooth, Wright decided to launch these 
self-build houses, which he called Usonian automatic, and the most successful subsequent 
example was the Benjamin Adelman house in Phoenix, Arizona, of 1953. However, cost 
was again the problem. As John Sergeant, author of a valuable study of Wright's Usonian 
houses, explained, "Great care had to be taken in construction to ensure that block joints 
occurred on module, otherwise an incremental error soon built up, and the necessary fine 
tolerance was difficult to achieve in homemade blocks." The method, in other words, was 
impractical for the novice, and that meant skilled help, and the costs shot up once again. 
Wright had optimistically assessed the cost of the house at $5,000; the Adelman residence 
cost $25,000. 

Undaunted, Wright came up with a new answer to the concept of prefabrication, a modern 
version of the ready-cut houses he had invented in 1911 and actually built. This time he 
would make use of panel construction systems that were, in later versions, wall panels 
made from synthetic fiber and externally boarded studwork. Wright designed four different 
versions, teamed up with the Marshall Erdman Company in Madison and announced that 
these standardized techniques would cut the cost of a new house to $16,000. Magazines 
gave the idea wide publicity and, according to the manufacturer, at least twenty such 
houses were built. But again, there were flaws in the scheme. Despite his best intentions 
Wright was constitutionally incapable of compromising and would insist, for instance, on 
such details as genuine mahogany paneling and piano hinges, far handsomer than the 
usual door hinge, but more costly as well. Once the extra costs of crating and shipping had 
been added, the price had jumped again, to between $30,000 and $50,000: hardly the 
cheap house he had hoped for. 

Those who knew him best, the members of his family, never expected Wright to give them 
anything inexpensive. Robert Llewellyn, his youngest son, who became a successful 
Washington lawyer, had wanted his father to build a house for his family for years. But 
Wright had always insisted that they buy a two-acre lot, and in the early days they could 
not afford that. Finally, in 1956, they bought a site a builder did not want because it was a 
steep wooded slope. That was quite perfect from Wright's point of view, and since by then 
all his experimental work was encompassing circular forms, he designed a two-story 
hemicycle made from concrete block and specially curved boards of Philippine mahogany, 
with plenty of extra mahogany used for interior detailing, no doubt to counteract the 
roughhewn appearance of the concrete block walls. Robert and his wife, Betty, loved the 
whole concept, but were dumbfounded to discover that his father's international reputation 
did not help at all when the moment came to finance the house. "We borrowed from a 
friend to get the house constructed," Robert Wright said in 1974. "Then we had a time 
finding an appraiser who would say it was worth half what it cost. It cost $40,000 and we 
wanted a $20,000 mortgage. . . . The appraisers didn't like the site or the slag block, but 
they weren't used to anything different."  {the Washington Post, June 2, 1974.} Their only 
regrets, in retrospect, were that they had scaled down some aspects of the original design 
because, as they also observed, the house was, for all practical purposes, impossible to 
enlarge. 

The house Wright designed for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys in Phoenix 
was even more of a tour de force, as he must have known when he put it on exhibit at the 
National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1953. This time he was making use of concrete 
blocks built by the Besser Company, with which David Wright was an executive. The 
house is reached by a spiraling ramp, decorated with trailing vines and with a trickling 
stream running alongside, and living space is raised above the ground in curved-line 
fashion. The concrete floors have been cantilevered from piers, also made of concrete 
block, and these carry the air conditioning and other utilities. Building curved forms from 
square materials was a virtuoso performance indeed, and placing the living quarters a level 
above the ground (so as to avoid the dust of that arid climate) had the further advantage of 
providing spectacular views of the surroundings. From the living room one looks past an 
almond-shaped pool and across citrus groves to the distant mountains. The house, with 
its bold, curving forms, its panoramic vistas, its wonderful, comfortable living room with 
its collection of Japanese prints, plates, bowls, jars and tiny potteries that once belonged to 
Catherine, and a glorious, custom-made carpet designed in circular motifs, has earned a 
prominent place in the pantheon of Wright's achievements. 

David, the fourth child, cannot remember ever seeing much of his father, except on 
holidays and birthdays. He said that, for all practical purposes, he never had a father. 
{interviews with author.} As a young man, he served in World War I and took jobs in steel 
mills and then as a traveling salesman: "I was a man of all trades." He continued, "I've 
been in some tough situations. The thirties were the worst period of my life. Taking hold 
of myself and making do. But my mother gave me good training. She taught us to be 
responsible and self-sufficient. Llewellyn was his father's boy and I suppose I was my 
mother's. 

"What I really care about nowadays is, I'd like to have my mother understood. I am 
appalled that, in Oak Park, they are telling stories about my father's last wife in my 
mother's quarters. Very few people have given the first Mrs. Wright her due in developing 
her family. She raised six successful children; my father didn't." 

After Catherine Wright's marriage to Page ended, she went to live with her daughter 
Frances in West Virginia. Then, in 1933, she returned to Chicago and took an apartment 
with Llewellyn on the North Side. After that, she spent her time traveling between 
children, ending her days in a sanatorium in Los Angeles. She had a bad knee, and, David 
Wright thought, her daughter Catherine, with whom she often stayed, did not understand 
the problem and kept trying to make her walk. Eventually she fell and had to go to the 
hospital. For a while she managed to use a walker, but then she broke her leg and never 
tried to walk again. David said, "Catherine was very impatient and intolerant of her 
mother's condition. So she was a nomad in later life, not a very satisfactory arrangement." 
Mrs. Robert Wright added, "Catherine-she wanted to be called Nancy in later years, and 
that's what her grandchildren called her-never really adapted herself to life alone and not 
having a big place of her own where she could have her family. She was a very interested 
and loving grandmother, and I liked her a lot, although it was not easy having her in the 
house. She was very critical. Finally my husband found her a room near us and she lived 
there for a while. She became rather bitter and my husband would make excuses for her." 

Her granddaughter Elizabeth Wright Ingraham added, "At the end of her life she was 
living in a twilight world and my father, John, would not go to visit her in California. I 
think he thought she was more of a child than he was. My own view was that nirvana, for 
Nancy, was being completely taken care of." 

At least two large public building projects that should have come Wright's way during the 
final decade of a brilliant career did not, and a third was threatened, at least partly because 
of a widespread perception that he was a communist sympathizer, if not actually Red 
himself. These suspicions might have been put at rest after the FBI tried, and failed, to 
have Wright prosecuted on charges of sedition during the war. Unfortunately, Wright gave 
everyone plenty of reason to go on impugning his patriotism. He continued to insist hotly 
that the imperialist ambitions of Roosevelt and Churchill had brought about World War II. 
{from FBI files, October 25, 1943} He caused a furor at a League of American Writers 
meeting in 1944 by telling them that if they wanted to do something useful they could start 
by getting the president out of the White House. He never hid his dislike of Truman for 
what he thought were similar predilections. He caused another commotion some years 
later by suggesting that his interviewer, Jinx McCrary, add a postscript to a letter she 
proposed to send to Mrs. Eisenhower: "You married a military man. Kindly restrain him." 
The interview was seen on television, and the subsequent headline was NOTED 
ARCHITECT APES MOSCOW'S LINE ON TV BROADCAST. {October 30, 1953.} The 
FBI files grew longer. Repetitious summaries of the reasons for suspecting Frank Lloyd 
Wright went back to 1915, reviewed all the old Mann Act accusations, drew a veil over the 
repeated refusals to prosecute and painted him as a notorious lecher, a champion of draft 
dodgers and now, in his dotage, a communist spokesman. 

For, in those immediate postwar years, Wright's stance was as antiwar and pacifist as ever, 
and that made him ready to suspect American foreign policy and champion those who 
seemed, to him, to be the underdogs in the debate, i.e., the Russian people. Years ago it 
had been concluded that Wright was not so much pro-German as anti-British. Now it 
could be said that he was not so much procommunist as against his country's militarism 
and opposed to what he saw as a disturbing development of the cold war: a climate of 
paranoia and suspicion. Wright on the defensive for his views was Wright alerted to the 
dangers facing free men everywhere. It was almost axiomatic that the more he was 
attacked, the more rash his pronouncements would become, the more defiant his attitude 
and the more prepared he was to damn the whole world. 

Wright had, of course, never needed much encouragement to be controversial. In a speech 
at Princeton just after the war he proposed that all American cities be decentralized and 
higher education suspended for ten years. (He advised architecture students at Carnegie 
Tech in Pittsburgh to "Go home and make something of yourselves." {Architectural 
Forum, July 1949, p. 14.}) Two years later, in Washington, he avowed with a straight face 
that he had been trying to persuade Mr. Truman to join him in his campaign to "move the 
capital out West, west of the Mississippi." The president quite agreed with his project but 
"did not promise his support." {NYT, May 26, 1949.} The State Department ought to be 
abolished, but so should the presidency, as it presently existed. The atom bomb that the 
war had unleashed was a cataclysm; it had thrown everyone "off base," "making all we 
have called progress obsolete overnight." It became more imperative than ever to work for 
world peace. Wright added his name to a prominent list of supporters for the Cultural and 
Scientific Conference for World Peace, held in New York City in the spring of 1949. The 
group sponsoring the event was cited as a "Communist front" by the House Un-American 
Activities Committee the following year. A year after that, in 1951, Wright's name was on 
that committee's list of Americans who, it claimed, had been "affiliated with from five to 
ten Communist-front organizations," along with actors Jos-Ferrer and Judy Holliday, 
singer Paul Robeson, artist Rockwell Kent, authors Dashiell Hammett and Thomas Mann, 
playwrights Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, composer Aaron Copland and scientist 
Albert Einstein. Wright's response was to continue his inflammatory statements about the 
need for world peace and the necessity for the United States to take the lead in 
disarmament, saying, "We have nothing to fear in abandoning the atom arms race. Russia 
wants peace just as much as we do." {NYT, June 9, 1950.} 

In the summer of 1950, he signed a World Peace Appeal, another subversive act according 
to FBI memoranda, since the organization involved, the Permanent Committee of the 
World Peace Congress, had received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Supreme Soviet. 
He supported the establishment of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1951, 
formed in response to the perceived threat to constitutional guarantees of free speech and 
numbering a large proportion of professors and ministers in its ranks. This, too, was a 
suspect body, the main basis for suspicion appearing to be the amount of space its activities 
was being given in the Daily Worker. Further sinister connotations were seen in the fact 
that Wright had written an article on Russian life and architecture for the magazine New 
Masses in 1937, that he had shown Russian films at Taliesin during World War II, and 
that he was one of seventeen prominent Americans who had signed a Christmas appeal for 
the parole of eight out of an original ten Hollywood figures sentenced to prison as a result 
of their appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 
1947. {the Daily Worker, December 21, 1950} It was only a matter of time before the 
Taliesin Fellowship would also be suspect. 

In the spring of 1954 someone visited the Los Angeles office of the FBI to report that the 
school of architecture being conducted by Wright in Spring Green and Scottsdale, which 
had Veterans Administration accreditation (meaning that the federal government was 
paying for the tuition of former G.I.s), had no actual classrooms. The Fellowship seemed 
to be a religious cult following the teachings of an oriental metaphysician. Students, the 
informant declared, held dances to the moon and were told what to think. Their 
movements were closely monitored, their freedom restricted, and attendance was required 
at "certain meetings" that had nothing to do with schoolwork. The student body harbored 
draft dodgers, conscientious objectors and homosexuals. In short, it was a subversive 
organization whose teachings were contrary to the American way of life. This anonymous 
message was duly forwarded to the Veterans Administration by the FBI. 

As it happened, Taliesin, which had qualified as a training ground for veterans in 1946, 
had again received approval, the year before this letter was written, from an elect 
governor's committee of distinguished educators. This new examination had been made to 
comply with amendments to federal law. The committee's report, given in Madison in the 
autumn of 1953, concluded that the Taliesin Fellowship was "unique in concept and 
operation," being, essentially, a well structured and supervised apprenticeship in 
architectural training and, as such, should be approved for the training of veterans. That 
report should have been persuasive, but, unfortunately, Wright was then approaching the 
climax of a long battle with the town of Spring Green, which claimed that Taliesin should 
not be tax exempt. The amount owed the town was small (it was finally assessed at $886) 
but more was at issue, because if the town were successful then the state would have to be 
paid as well, and that would be expensive. Wright had explained to anyone who would 
listen that Taliesin had been run as a nonprofit foundation since 1940, and that all income 
from architectural fees went to maintain it as a school and farm. He had asked for a further 
ruling, and, as luck would have it, the case was to be heard by the state supreme court of 
Wisconsin in 1954 just as, Mumford wrote, "the fear and suspicion and poisonous hatred 
and irrationality now rampant among our countrymen" was at its height. {to Wright, T, 
February 28, 1953.} Commenting on the subsequent verdict, the Capital Times observed, 
"In view of the conservative outlook of many lawyers, and of most judges, it is likely that 
Wright suffered from hostility before he even got into court. The judicial mind, which 
dwells so largely in the past, is probably not interested in a modern approach to 
architecture, or likely to recognize a school that does not conform to all the red tape and 
forms so dear to the legal mind." The verdict of the state supreme court of Wisconsin, 
handed down in November 1954, was that Taliesin did not qualify for tax-exempt status. 
The court found that, after expenses, the Fellowship had enjoyed a usual annual profit of 
between $12,000 and $40,000 (for the years 1946-50), that Wright had continued to exert 
the main financial control, and that the main function of Taliesin was architectural 
practice, not education and farming. Taliesin owed back taxes to a total of $18,646. {CT, 
November 9, 1954.} 

Editorial comment was uniformly sympathetic. The Weekly Home News of Spring Green 
published a front-page editorial, and other writers observed that Wright had twice offered 
to give a "butterfly type" bridge design to the state, one for the Wisconsin River near 
Taliesin and the other near Wisconsin Dells, and that the state had twice refused. Wright 
was outraged. He would leave Wisconsin. He would sell his sixty-head herd of cattle and 
Taliesin. He would burn Taliesin down.  {CT, November 11, 1954} That was such a 
terrifying thought that his friends and supporters rallied at once. A former apprentice, 
Cary Caraway, now associated with the University of Illinois, was the leading spirit in 
organizing a testimonial dinner, attended by the governor and several hundred other 
dignitaries, which raised $10,000 toward paying the taxes. Wright declared himself deeply 
touched by the ovation and said he would not leave the state after all. He said, "After that 
demonstration of feeling and affection . . . I don't think it would be possible for me to leave 
my native state. I was born in Wisconsin and I belong in Wisconsin." {CT, February 11, 
1955.} 

One of the public building projects affected by the accusations swirling around Wright in 
the early 1950s was his grand design to give his boyhood home of Madison a new civic 
center. He had first launched the idea in 1938, having been commissioned by several 
prominent citizens who were opposed to a routine scheme for a new city-county building. 
Wright's ambitious project would have required the filling-in of some part of Lake 
Monona to make a large graceful curve that would accommodate a garden park, fountains 
and walkways, and beneath this, levels containing auditoriums, convention space, 
exhibition halls and government offices, including courtrooms. There would even be a 
railroad station, a bus depot and a marina. The cost was staggering (an estimated $17 
million), but there was no doubt it was a brilliant plan, conceived by Wright at the very 
peak of his renaissance. In arguing for it, Wright was at his most persuasive. The original 
plan was defeated by a single vote. However, that unfortunately meant the loss of several 
hundred thousand dollars in federal funds. Factions split for and against Wright, but then 
the war intervened, and the whole question of building Monona Terrace, as it came to be 
called, was shelved until 1953. By then the plan was simply the latest and largest of a 
series of Madison houses, churches, hotels, apartments and the like, thirty-two designs in 
all (not all of them built), that amounted to a decade-by-decade collection of Wright's 
oeuvre, beginning in the 1890s. A revised Monona Terrace plan would be the jewel in the 
crown, simply the latest and most brilliant of all his schemes. As before, the citizens were 
almost evenly divided between those who fervently supported Wright and those who 
condemned him. John Hunter, associate editor of the newspaper, the Capital Times, which 
consistently supported the Monona Terrace project, said the problem was that the good 
folk of Madison never ceased to disapprove of Wright's unconventional life and refused to 
believe he was anyone of real importance. Hunter cited, as an example, a decision made 
decades later by the congregation of the Unitarian church Wright had designed in 1947 to 
sell his furniture and uncomfortable chairs. "When the time came to put up the chairs for 
auction, to their astonishment they sold for five thousand dollars each," he said. Even so 
the city managed to approve a scaled-down version of Monona Terrace in 1954, the year 
its old city hall was torn down, and authorized a $5.5 million bond issue. Wright was 
narrowly approved as architect by a margin of 1,300 votes. 

Almost as soon as the referendum was passed, and victory assured, his opponents sprang 
into action. Carroll Metzner, a prominent lawyer, succeeded in persuading the state 
legislature that Wright's new civic center, some sixty feet high, would block a view of the 
lake from the State Capitol. Another opponent gave a speech before the state legislature 
stating that he had a secret dossier on Wright and that, were its contents divulged, 
members would be induced to take action against Monona Terrace. {MJ, memo, May 20, 
1957.} Wright was "unfit to characterize the city of Madison," he said. {Jackson's speech 
was reported to Douglas Haskell by Robert L. Wright, May 13, 1957.} The legislature 
subsequently passed a bill limiting the height of any new structure to twenty feet. This 
effectively destroyed the city's hope of building anything on Lake Monona, and certainly 
not Wright's project. In 1959 the law was repealed, but by then it was too late. 

It was perhaps just bad luck on Wright's part that the revival of the Monona Terrace 
project should come just as the state supreme court was about to return its unfavorable 
verdict against Taliesin. He was fighting to save his reputation on yet another front. When 
the air force announced a competition for a new academy, to be built in Colorado Springs, 
Wright submitted a design. The field was narrowed down to Skidmore, Owings and 
Merrill, a prominent Chicago architectural firm, and himself. The final decision was about 
to be made when, in July 1954, the American Legion threatened to make a public protest if 
Wright were chosen. Wright then withdrew from the competition. None of this was known 
until August 1955, when Architectural Forum magazine stated, "The American Legion 
had readied a public blast at Wright, dredging up past anti-militaristic activities and 
associations of the architect, which, front-paged for America in its 1955 mood would 
have made it awkward for the Air Force to consider Wright and his group. The Legion's 
price for silence: elimination of Wright." {AP, August 11, 1955} Wright said, "I do not 
know why the American Legion puts me on its blackened page unless because I hate war 
and openly oppose it. I equally hate American Legion opposition to the exercise by others 
of the same rights it takes to itself." And, when Congress held hearings to consider the 
merits of the eventual academy, prepared by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Wright was 
one of the star witnesses who attacked the ultramodern, International Style design. {May 
28, 1955} Revenge may have been sweet, but that was yet another desirable commission 
lost in the cause of character assassination during the turbulent 1950s. 

The FBI files reveal that Wright was once more investigated for sedition in 1955. No 
charges were ever brought. 

Two years before he died, Wright was still fighting the same battle. By then he was the 
architect of choice to design an $8 million civic center for Marin County on 130 acres just 
north of San Rafael, California. The building, which includes a main administration 
building and hall of justice, as well as offices and a library, is a long, low structure 
designed of concrete and metal, linking two hills. Once it was learned that Wright planned 
to make a personal appearance before the Marin County board of supervisors and sign an 
actual contract, a seven-page dossier was introduced at the meeting by a local resident, 
who said it had been written by J. B. Matthews, former chief investigator for the House 
Un-American Activities Committee and former staff director of the Senate Investigations 
Subcommittee. (Matthews had resigned four years earlier after writing an article accusing 
the Protestant clergy of supporting the communist conspiracy.) The dossier began, "Frank 
Lloyd Wright, America's best known architect, now in his 89th year, has a record of active 
and intensive support of Communist views and enterprises. He belies the popular notion 
that youth alone is beguiled by the appeals of radicalism and subversion. . . ." {San 
Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, NYT, August 3, 1957.} At that point, Wright stood up 
and left the meeting. The supervisors, voting four to one, refused to listen to a full reading 
of the document. As one of them, Vera Schultz, said, the Marin County board did not 
inquire into the religious or political beliefs of any of its employees and, "It is most 
inappropriate that we should subject a man of Mr. Wright's caliber to the reading of 
unfounded and unsubstantiated charges." Two hours after that, the architect was back in a 
good humor, had gone on a tour of the site and signed the official contracts. He had also, 
in passing, delivered his last and best word on the subject: "I am what I am," he told the 
meeting before he left. "If you don't like it, you can lump it." 

Had he not made such a statement, of course, someone would have invented it, and there 
was no more richly appreciative audience in those days for Wright as showman than a 
university campus. Yale, for instance. In the autumn of 1955, Richard P. Goldman and his 
roommate, Henry F. S. Cooper, organized a lecture series, inviting fifty or sixty prominent 
participants. Wright was one of the first to accept. Goldman said, "I was a nervous 
twenty-year-old dealing with this genius. In retrospect I think he was having fun at our 
expense." {interview with author.} Wright arrived by train from New York to New Haven 
to find that, owing to a misunderstanding, no one was there to meet him. He was about to 
turn around when someone rushed in and coaxed him in the direction of the Taft Hotel 
and WYBC, the Yale Broadcasting Company's offices in Hendrie Hall. Then there was 
another spate of flustered apologies when he arrived for his interview half an hour early. 
Wright "waved his stick, swirled his cape, and marched across the Green to the Taft, 
kicking pigeons out of his way as he went," Cooper, who was editor, subsequently reported 
in the Yale Daily News. About twenty minutes later the reception committee attempted to 
coax the great man back to the studio. They were finally ready for him but he had changed 
his mind. He was taking the 7:10 back to New York. But sir. . . . They explained that he 
would be speaking to an audience of at least four hundred. There was a pause. "Well, . . ." 
he said. {as described by Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., in a column, "Sound and Fury," written 
for the Yale Daily News, September 22, 1955.} 

Some moments later the elevator door opened, and Wright "sailed" into the lobby, kicking 
ottomans aside and unleashing criticisms of the hotel's poor design as he "stalked" back to 
WYBC. Arriving at the studio he caught sight of Philip Johnson, now a famous architect. 
He greeted him warmly, exclaiming wickedly that he thought he was dead. Cooper wrote, 
"Mr. Johnson sidled up and explained that he really wasn't dead at all." To think of it, said 
Wright, reminiscing, "'Little Phil, all grown up, an architect, and actually building his 
houses out in the rain.' Philip Johnson, one of America's top architects, wiggled his toes 
(you could see the top of his shoes moving) and sidled off." 

Wright was having a wonderful time, surrounded by undergraduates eager to hear his next 
epithet or, as Cooper put it, "awaiting any barnacles of wisdom which might fall from the 
venerable craft anchored before them." It was perfectly marvelous to see the positive 
genius Wright had for disconcerting people, and then watch him at dinner, dumping his 
ice cream in his coffee, brushing sauce from his pinstriped suit and signing his name in 
the guest book several inches high. It was still more fun when a packed audience in 
Sterling Stratcona Hall, which had gathered to hear Wright lecture, listened to the courtly 
introduction that was being made by Mr. Johnson. Cooper wrote that Johnson was 
"praising him in one sentence after another-I think he even called him 'America's 
greatest living architect.'" And as these honeyed phrases fell from Johnson's lips, the 
subject of the encomiums could be heard to comment, in a stage whisper loud enough for 
the back of the hall, "Attaboy, Phil," and, "Try a little harder." 

For Wright had never forgiven this young man, whose collaborative efforts with Hitchcock 
had, he felt, been so destructive to his reputation. He was, at bottom, too insecure, for, as 
William Short, who became clerk of the works for the Guggenheim and saw a great deal of 
him in those last years, observed, he was still bitter because he felt that he was being given 
less recognition than practitioners of the International Style. Despite his tremendous 
personal success, critically he was still being considered a forerunner of modernism, his 
best ideas forty years old. {Prof. Jack Quinan.} Lewis Mumford averred that the 
International Style, with its dogmatic assertiveness, its emphasis on mechanical function 
and the aesthetically puritanical, was becoming outdated. He wrote in 1947, "The modern 
accent is on living, not on the machine," but his conclusion was somewhat premature. 
{The New Yorker, October 11, 1947.} Johnson, working with Mies van der Rohe, was in 
the midst of building the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, a skyscraper of "grand and 
honorific character, sober and symmetrical, clothed in elegant materials such as 
bronze-tinted auburn glass," Curtis observed. {CU, p. 266.} It was being erected opposite 
another symbol of the triumphant ascendance of the International Style, the Lever 
Building of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, built four years before. (Wright liked to call 
them the "Whiskey" and "Soap" buildings.) The new United Nations Headquarters 
overlooking the East River, designed by Harrison and Abramovitz, had clearly been 
adapted from an earlier idea by Le Corbusier; in short, the "glass-box boys," and their 
"elegant monuments of nothingness" had swept the stage clean. No wonder Wright was so 
ready to launch an attack on "Skiddings, Own-More and Sterile," as he childishly called 
them, when Congress gave him an opportunity to testify on the Air Force Academy in 
1955. In his mind he was still, and would always be, the outsider. 

In retrospect it is easy enough to see why Wright's design for the Guggenheim Museum, 
his first and only commission for that prominent showcase, Manhattan, took the form that 
it did. If he had never experimented with circular forms, he would still have concluded 
that, having only one chance to make his mark, and in light of everything that was boxy, 
streamlined, uniform and regimented, his must be flowing, asymmetrical, idiosyncratic 
and free-form, in a word, curved. However, to suggest that a desire to display his superior 
gifts was the main motive would be unwarranted. As has been seen, Wright had been 
experimenting with a particular form for decades, beginning with his urnlike design for a 
house for himself in the Mojave Desert. This fascination with the enclosing, enveloping 
shape, symbolized by the cauldron, was an enduring metaphor for his spiritual quest, the 
"architecture of the within." As others have pointed out, he had experimented for years 
with a central open space ringed with balconies, and its consistent appeal for him was 
shown by the Larkin Building, Unity Temple, the Johnson Wax Administration Building 
and others. The ziggurat design, which he had already developed for Sugarloaf Mountain 
but had not built, was simply a refinement of that undeviating choice, "fully expressive of 
the sculptural freedom possible with reinforced concrete," as William H. Jordy pointed out. 
It was the final expression of his search for logical movement through space. {The Impact 
of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century, William H. Jordy, p. 280} Jordy 
wrote, "It is not the spatial continuity characteristic of European modernism-that is, not 
an open box of space encouraging activity in all directions-but a molded space forcefully 
conditioned by the path of movement through it." It was "both monumental and ultimate." 
Wright set on a certain course, as has been seen, was Wright stubbornly determined to the 
end. But there was a special quality to this perseverance, as he drew and redrew the 
museum's design from the time that it was first commissioned, in 1943, until it was finally 
constructed in 1959, leading one to believe that this particular choice meant as much as 
life itself to him. 

From the point of view of a museum dedicated to abstract art, his plan made superficial 
sense. The viewing public would be taken to the top floor in elevators and then, at its 
leisure, would walk down its spiraling balconies to the ground floor. It must have looked 
marvelously creative and original on paper, but, as has been amply demonstrated since, it 
was most impractical for hanging paintings. The curve of the walls was pronounced and, 
given the modern artist's preference for larger and larger canvases, that meant an 
immediate mismatch. The walls sloped outward as well, giving each painting a backward 
tilt, and Wright's ingenious rationalization notwithstanding-he argued that this made the 
picture look as if it were on an easel-it was a slant no one else liked. Standing to view the 
paintings on a floor sloping imperceptibly downhill was another disconcerting detail, and 
there were problems of lighting, rotating exhibition space and many other basic issues to 
contend with. These practical shortcomings were clear enough once the museum opened, 
but they had been foreseen beforehand, guaranteeing endless points of conflict. Of all his 
commissions, the Guggenheim Museum probably gave Wright the most problems. 

The guiding light of the original decision to build a "temple" for the display of 
non-objective painting, as it was called, was a German baroness and connoisseur, Hilla 
Rebay, who was curator of the collection of major works by Vasily Kandinsky, Rudolph 
Bauer, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Hans Richter and others amassed by her great and good 
friend, the multimillionaire Solomon R. Guggenheim. Hilla Rebay was enthusiastically 
convinced that Wright's buildings had the necessary spiritual qualities to provide a fitting 
background for her collection, and there was never any basic point of disagreement 
between the three principals. But there were endless delays. First, the right site had to be 
found. Then the war ended, and Guggenheim, in the mistaken belief that a building slump 
was imminent (Wright argued, unsuccessfully, that the reverse would be the case), wanted 
to wait. The years dragged by, and in 1949, just as the future looked bright, Guggenheim 
died {March 11, 1949.}, throwing the whole question of a museum in doubt. The baroness 
began to behave irrationally and to attack Wright, the trustees expressed profound lack of 
interest, and, just as all seemed lost, Solomon's nephew, Harry Guggenheim, was 
appointed the new president of the museum's foundation. The project was then revived, 
and, as actual preparations for construction lurched forward, Hilla Rebay was replaced as 
future director of the museum by James Johnson Sweeney. 

Hilla Rebay had not been easy to deal with, but she was, at least, committed to Wright's 
ideas. Sweeney, whom one former Guggenheim staff member described as "large, rumpled 
and opinionated," appeared to have the professional status and diplomacy necessary to 
guide the museum through the crucial building stage. But his interest in Wright's design 
had to be how well it fulfilled its function, that is, to show the art. He would be bound to 
see its shortcomings, and Wright seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in dismissing 
Sweeney's valid concerns and asserting the primacy of his architecture which, he liked to 
remind Hilla Rebay, was "the mother art." When one reflects that Wright had banished 
paintings from the walls of his houses at an early stage, conflict between the two seemed 
almost guaranteed. The situation was certainly not improved by Wright's fondness for 
going through the museum twirling his cane at a canvas, saying, "What do you call this 
stuff?" as Sweeney turned redder and redder. {Doris Murray Kuhns to author.} Such 
studied lack of interest did not, of course, stop him from interjecting his opinion on 
matters of art, especially if Sweeney were involved. When the latter expressed an interest 
in buying Picasso's sculpture The Bathers and exhibiting it in the museum's garden, Time 
magazine published a letter from Wright suggesting that this "concatenation lacks the 
quality of art and will simply disgrace the great purpose of the Guggenheim Museum." 
{Time, March 26, 1959.} That must have set the director's teeth on edge. 

However, a year after Sweeney's appointment, there was a more immediate issue, i.e., the 
resistance of New York's building authorities to the whole idea of the museum itself. Since 
the trustees had made the safe assumption that the museum's design would not be easy to 
maneuver through New York's building department, Arthur Cort Holden, a partner in the 
firm of Holden, McLaughlin and Associates, was engaged to act as mediator and facilitator 
for the various regulatory procedures involved. First questions had to do with the 
reinforced concrete Wright planned to use, which did not meet New York City codes, but 
there were many other objections, involving the slope of the ramps, the clear glass in the 
entrance doors and partitions, the construction of elevator shafts, fire exits and other 
matters. Finally, the authorities objected to the fact that, at its highest point, the museum 
would project four and a half feet over Fifth Avenue. That year of 1953 was spent dealing 
with objections and revisions and attempting to get a verdict from the board of standards 
and appeals. The atmosphere appeared cordial, and Holden was kept believing that 
permission was just about to be granted. Finally, the issue was taken up with Robert 
Moses, who liked to say that he had a "roundabout family relationship" with Wright and 
who, by virtue of his positions as head of the city and state of New York park systems and 
as the city's construction coordinator, was a very powerful man. He immediately interceded 
on Wright's behalf with the head of the city's board of standards and appeals with the 
words "Damn it, get a permit for Frank. I don't care how many laws you have to break. I 
want the Guggenheim built." {NYT, May 11, 1987.} Holden also believed that Moses 
advised Wright that "if he expected to get along in New York, he had 'to pay the tolls.'" 
{from a memoir by Arthur Cort Holden, Princeton University Archives.} A special 
inspector was hired to expedite matters. The bill was $3,000. Peters said, "Guggenheim 
grumbled, but paid." {William Wesley Peters to author.} 

There were some battles on other fronts that year. One of the influential figures in the New 
York magazine world was Elizabeth Gordon, editor of Hearst's House Beautiful. She 
recalled that she and Wright became friends after she ran an article critical of the 
International Style and received a mysterious telegram. It read, I DIDN'T KNOW YOU 
HAD IT IN YOU. I AM AT YOUR SERVICE FROM NOW ON. It was signed THE 
GODFATHER. That was peculiar, but the dateline was Spring Green so she was soon 
asking Wright exactly what he meant by being at her service. She was welcome, he said, to 
make use of the Taliesin staff. Eventually, she was using the services of four of Taliesin's 
members (including John DeKoven Hill, who became the magazine's editorial director 
and, as such, a very important ally for Wright). 

House Beautiful's attack on the International Style was published in April 1953 and 
centered on a discussion of a new house Mies van der Rohe had designed for a Chicago 
physician and close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Blake has called the building "the most 
complete statement of glass-and-steel, skin-and-bones architecture Mies or anyone 
else will ever be able to make. It is, also, the ultimate in universality, the ultimate in 
precision and polish, the ultimate in the crystallization of an idea." {BL, pp. 242-243} 
The house was, for Elizabeth Gordon, the detestable symbol of a threat to the new 
America. She believed "that a sinister group of International Stylists, led by Mies, Gropius, 
and Corbu, and supported by the Museum of Modern Art, was trying to force Americans to 
accept an architecture that was barren, grim, impoverished, impractical, unlivable, and 
destructive of individual possessions, as well as of individuals themselves." To the 
admirers of the International Style, the attack seemed wildly off the mark, but to Wright it 
must have seemed like a voice from heaven. Not only had Gordon said exactly what he 
believed, but she had said it at a moment when he must have been feeling particularly 
embattled. The New York authorities might never give permission for his Guggenheim 
design to be built. Monona Terrace might go down to defeat again, just as it seemed to be 
resurrected. All those years of struggle had taken their toll. His mood, that spring of 1953, 
can be inferred from a reply sent to him by Douglas Haskell, the sympathetic young critic 
who had become editor of Architectural Forum, the magazine that consistently supported 
Wright. Wright had submitted his own attack on the International Style, no doubt 
emboldened by Elizabeth Gordon's emphatic position, and he wanted Haskell to print it. 
But for once that editor refused, citing the tone of bitterness that lay "across the page like a 
murky glass." {April 3, 1953, Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University.} He 
advised Wright not to publish the article at all. Wright ignored the advice, and a somewhat 
revised version of the article, along with a letter from him, was published in Architectural 
Record in June. The International Style, Wright declared, was "an evil crusade" and a 
manifestation of "totalitarianism," fostered by the relentless publicity it had been given by 
the Museum of Modern Art, which had made "a sinister attempt to betray American 
Organic Architecture." {Architectural Record, September 1953, p. 12.} It is interesting to 
find Wright using terms that sound more like those used to denounce communism than an 
architectural movement, suggesting that he was influenced, more or less unconsciously, by 
the political barbs being directed at him. The publication of the article did not help his 
cause at Architectural Forum. Haskell commented in a memo, "I'm afraid FLLW is simply 
displaying the complete development of his Messianic complex." That same year there was 
what seemed like another defection, this time by Lewis Mumford. When Wright's 
exhibition "Sixty Years of Living Architecture"arrived in New York, housed in a 
temporary building on the site of the future Guggenheim Museum, along with his 
exhibition house, Mumford wrote a two-part essay summing up the work of his lifetime. 
It was sympathetic and admiring, but by no means uncritical.  

Mumford began by calling Wright the most original architect the United States had 
produced and "one of the most creative architectural geniuses of all time"; at this stage, 
"the Fujiyama of American architecture, at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine. . . 
." {quotations are from two columns in The New Yorker, November 28 and December 12, 
1953.} His radical reform of housing design, with his interiors of unadorned brick and 
wood, his vast fireplaces and immense roofs, brought to domestic architecture the 
benevolent influence of "the whole Romantic movement, which popularized the picnic, the 
play school, the virtues of country living. . . ." Mumford rightly observed that many of 
these innovations for which Wright was now claiming sole credit, the open plan, for 
instance, were not his inventions, but that he had grasped their significance and made 
unique use of their advantages. These changes had come about so gradually, and had been 
so widely disseminated, particularly through the modern ranch house, that they seemed 
almost old-fashioned. This passion for unity sometimes led to excesses, as when Wright 
seized upon a certain motif, such as a hexagon or triangle, and applied it relentlessly to 
every single aspect of his total design, and, "One's eye vainly seeks relief from this almost 
obsessive reiterativeness." A more basic objection, for Mumford, was that Wright's work 
was so deeply personal that it was difficult to separate his personality from the work, for, 
as Sir Herbert Read had noted, "carried to its logical conclusion, a sense of unity . . . 
implies that every house Mr. Wright builds is his own house and the people who live in 
them are not his clients but his guests." 

What also seemed to rankle, for Mumford, was Wright's insistence, of recent years, that 
the flowering of his genius owed very little, or almost nothing, to other influences, and 
certainly not foreign ones, when it was perfectly clear that his ideas had been drawn from 
every direction under the sun, and that in fact his ability to synthesize was one of his great 
strengths. Another Wrightian statement that Mumford believed seriously misguided was 
Wright's assertion that cities ought to be abolished. {NYT, March 7, 1947.} Developing 
this theme, Mumford claimed that Wright's designs were all "solo performances." To say 
this required ignoring the evidence of Oak Park, although it certainly could be said for the 
later houses that "ideally, each building of his must stand alone . . . in a completely natural 
setting." That, for Mumford, showed "the limitations of Romanticism, with its rebellion 
against everything that demands conformity to a general social pattern." 

Mumford was, perhaps, too close to his subject to see what a triumph the decade of the 
1950s represented for Wright. If nothing else, this final burst of astonishing creativity put 
the lie to the general cultural expectation that old age brought with it a dwindling and 
drying up of the artist's creative powers. Mumford missed what Wright's life demonstrated, 
that is, that great men can delay indefinitely the process of aging. Wright, if he ever 
thought about it, would immediately move to demolish such an assumption. On his 
eightieth birthday he said, "a creative life is a young one. . . . What makes you think that 
eighty is old?"  {Architectural Forum, July 1949, p. 14.} He also said, revealingly, "The 
purpose of the universe is play. The artists know that, and they know that play and art 
creation are different names for the same thing. . . ." {CD, p. 31.} As Bertrand Russell 
observed, "The decay of art in our time is not only due to the fact that the social function of 
the artist is not as important as in former days, it is due also to the fact that spontaneous 
delight is no longer felt as something which it is important to be able to enjoy. . . . [A]s 
men grew more industrialized and regimented the kind of delight that is common in 
children becomes impossible to adults, because they are always thinking of the next thing, 
and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the 'next 
thing' is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind. . . ." 
{Authority and the Individual, Bertrand Russell, p. 27.} Wright's lifelong refusal to 
cultivate in his personality what Russell called "prudence and foresight" may have 
stemmed from an instinctive awareness that to do so would smother in him that capacity 
for joyful self-expression, which was the wellspring of his art, leading him on the artist's 
eternal exploration, "and since self-knowledge is a never ending search, each new work 
is only a part answer to the question, 'Who am I?'" {The Dynamics of Creativity, Anthony 
Storr, p. 289.} What is strikingly evident is the fact that, with one or two minor 
exceptions, Wright's work, seemingly such a bewildering variety of styles, has an inner 
consistency firmly based on his vision of what architecture should be, the vision he had 
first formed as an adolescent reading Ruskin. He remained faithful to that inner ideal long 
after it had gone out of fashion and become almost an object of derision. But every instinct 
told him he was right. That inner knowledge proved to be his greatest strength, carrying 
him through bankruptcy, arrest, murder, fires, divorce, indifference, hostility and years of 
social ostracism-successive blows of fate that would have destroyed anyone less 
committed, convinced, or indomitably courageous. He had survived it all, and he had 
triumphed. Five years later, he would be standing on the top balcony of the almost finished 
Guggenheim Museum, looking with profound satisfaction at all that his energy, will and 
gifts had wrought. 

Wright's response to Mumford's measured words seemed almost halfhearted and certainly 
not the outburst of rage one might have seen in past years. For the fact is that, ageless as 
he might essentially be, he was beginning to hear "time's winged chariot" at last. His 
mood, if not introspective to any marked degree, was certainly elegiac. His 
daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert Llewellyn Wright, thought he mellowed considerably 
during those last years, an opinion that was shared by other relatives and friends. He began 
to look backward with a certain awareness that there were aspects of his life that had been 
left unexamined for, as he told an old friend and collaborator, the architect Charles 
Morgan, it was difficult to find happiness in places where there were the ghosts of so many 
past failures. 

After the Cheney house was sold, it passed through numerous hands and was standing 
empty when Mrs. Joy Corson moved there with her parents in 1941. She said, "Perhaps the 
house did not fare well because people thought there were ghosts. The story is that Mamah 
Cheney haunted the house. I never did see anything, but the floors sure creaked a lot. I 
used to be afraid, because they creaked exactly as if someone was walking across them." 
Even so, they loved living there, worked hard to restore it and lived there until 1962. Her 
mother, Mrs. Joseph Brody, added, "It was unusually efficient. Inside, there are dividers 
between the living and dining rooms, but the wall only comes up to your eye. We had 
plenty of shelves for books, and wonderful art glass, and plenty of light. 

"It was not unusual to have people appear unannounced. They'd show up in busloads, 
college students studying architecture. For a time my dad kept a guest book. Well, one day 
this man appeared. I think I was painting. I went to the door, and he said, 'Mr. Wright is 
in the car. Can he come in?' 'Oh, of course!' I ran to tell my family, and they said, 'Sure he 
is!' They couldn't believe it. He went around looking at everything and asking about 
everything. On the way out, we took a picture of him. He is gesturing with his cane and 
saying, 'Those gutters have to be fixed!' They were his parting words." 

Norris Kelly Smith wrote, "Toward the end of his life Wright confessed rather ruefully . . . 
that the one area in which he felt he had failed was that of human relationships." {SM, p. 
29.} Typically, his first impulse would be to make amends. Bill Short, who used to meet 
his plane at Kennedy International Airport, then called Idlewild, said, "His reaction as he 
got into the car was to talk about his fall, which he had two weeks ago." (This diary entry 
was written on February 5, 1958.) "He said, 'I thought that was the end and I am 
chastened. It made me think that enmity is a very petty thing and I do not want to die with 
any enemies, so I am going to call up Philly Johnson, Sweeney, Mies and Henry Russell 
Hitchcock and have them all in for dinner.'"  {William Short papers, Princeton University 
Archives.} One doubts that any such dinner ever took place, but the impulse behind it was 
genuine enough. That there was a desire to heal the breach between himself and 
Catherine, tearing down the old barriers, is clear. 

Bill Calvert recalled that as plans were being made to erect the exhibition house on its site 
at the Guggenheim, along with the immense collection of photographs and models that 
had toured the world, his team was encountering the usual problems with unions and city 
officials. "Wright's response to that was, as usual, 'Come on boys, we are going to New 
York to finish that house and show them how it's done.' The 'Taliesin spirit.' We were to 
jump to and finish everything, work all night if necessary. It sounds great, but in fact they 
never did finish. In 'pushes' of this kind, the work was done hastily and for show, because 
they were working with a lot of amateurs, minor Italian royalty, who would do a flashy job. 
But it wasn't good work. 

"Anyway, Edward Thurman, who was in charge, was a responsible person and a pretty 
good administrator. One day as the exhibit was almost finished, Wright told him that he 
wanted the whole Fellowship to go to Long Island, where he had bought up a whole 
nursery, and spend the day there digging up plants. At the same time he had arranged to 
have Mrs. Wright go out of town; she would spend the day with friends in Bethel, 
Connecticut. On that particular day Wright's daughter Frances, who lived on the East 
Coast, arrived just before noon. With her was an older woman. Mr. Wright embraced the 
lady, full of smiles. He said, 'See, Mother, do you remember when we did this one?' They 
went through the whole exhibit arm in arm." 

By then Wright might have been able to show Catherine his latest find, two small stone 
lions sitting on their haunches, which he had bought to grace the entrance to the 
exhibition. The story is that the exhibition hall and house were almost finished, and 
Wright, who paid to have them built, had the last installment in his pocket when 
something made him go on the hunt for a beautiful, exquisite object-shades of Richard 
Lloyd Jones! He returned, triumphant, with these two wonderful sculptures. (Holden did 
not think they were Chinese.) He was, of course, penniless. Holden added that employees 
of the museum took up a collection and raised the rest of the money. {Catherine Wright's 
visit to the exhibition: interview with author.} That was Wright, consistent to the last. But 
he may have felt that the museum could afford to assume some of his financial burden. 
And much as he may have wanted to settle his differences with Sweeney, there always 
seemed to be a new dispute. From the very start, Sweeney had disapproved of the idea of 
holding a Wright exhibition on the site and argued against it. He seemed deaf to Wright's 
often-repeated argument that Solomon Guggenheim had wanted the kind of museum he 
had designed. Sweeney kept reviving old objections and raising new ones when the 
museum's construction was far advanced. In fact, his objections seemed to become more 
heated as the completion date grew closer. 

Bill Short said of Wright, "Yes, he was formidable, but he didn't scare me and I would ask 
provocative questions. I never saw him put anyone down. He was very gentle and I thought 
he was a very decent person as a man, with a very deep sense of his work and all the 
obstacles. He certainly was suspicious of people, including Sweeney's motives, and with 
reason. I thought of him as a man embattled and holding his own, rather than as someone 
looking for trouble. 

"Wright certainly had no respect for paintings, and this was a continuing problem. But it 
is also true that Sweeney was set on creating this very pristine museum. He was trying to 
move beyond Hilla Rebay's original concept. His idea was to have an absolutely white 
interior with fluorescent lighting to display paintings that Wright didn't like. There was 
constant friction, and Sweeney and Wright ended up refusing to speak to each other. Both 
sides were at fault. I think Sweeney wanted to prove it wouldn't work. I was in the middle. 
. . ." 

Another problem, for Short, was the one historically faced by architects Wright was 
supervising, i.e., that he was indignant if they made decisions that he, for one reason or 
another, would not make himself. In the case of the Guggenheim, Wright was annoyed 
because the trustees refused to pay travel expenses for Wesley Peters, and would not send 
him. In the fall of 1957, he complained that Short had not properly "conveyed to the 
owners the idea that he, Wright, had been supervising the job." Short replied that he had 
not meant to imply this, but there were questions that could be taken up with Peters, to 
spare Wright himself. Wright answered testily, "Wes is not qualified to make decisions," 
and "you are to report directly to me on all questions." 

Things were not particularly easy for Peters either. Calvert recalled that he helped install 
the first telephone dial system at Taliesin. "Before this we had a magneto phone system in 
Wisconsin, one you crank, and no telephone at all in Scottsdale. Wright used telegrams 
and letters. Using the phone was so difficult in Wisconsin. The office was on a party line 
with ten others. Wright had a private line in the house, but it was linked to Hillside, and 
he used it only for bare necessities. Gene [Masselink] and Dick [Carney] pressed and 
pressed to have a dial phone in Scottsdale, and Mr. Wright finally agreed to let them have 
one in the office. But Wes wanted one in the drafting room, too, and Mr. Wright was 
absolutely against that. He didn't believe in too much efficiency and convenience. So Wes 
had one installed, secretly, at one end of the drafting room. Wes would go there with the 
Guggenheim drawings, and whisper over the phone to Bill Short in New York so Wright 
wouldn't hear his voice." 

As for the color of the walls, Wright wanted ivory, the same color as the exterior, but said 
he would take any color but white, the only one Sweeney wanted. Then there was the 
matter of how the paintings should be hung. On that seemingly minor issue the two fought 
out their basic differences to the last. Wright wanted the paintings to rest against the 
slanting exterior walls, lit naturally from continuous wall skylights that were controlled by 
adjustable louvers, with added spotlights. Sweeney argued that the paintings would be too 
far from the viewer and wanted them thrust forward with a system of vertical poles. He 
wanted to do away with natural light altogether and bathe the exhibits in fluorescent 
lighting. Wright, having lost the battle of the color scheme, was even more determined not 
to lose this one. When Guggenheim decreed that both men present demonstration models 
of their own systems for the trustees to decide, Wright refused to allow Short to cooperate 
on Sweeney's plan or present his own in a competition. So the matter stood when he died 
in April 1959. Short is not at all sure Wright would have attended the museum's opening, 
had he lived. Louise Svendsen, a former employee of the Guggenheim, remembers seeing 
Mrs. Wright at the dedication, sitting on the platform, looking stern: "She is reported to 
have said, 'This is a sorry day. They have spoiled a great monument.'" Short confirmed 
that Mrs. Wright was antagonistic, and noted that Harry Guggenheim planned the 
dedication ceremony so that neither Sweeney nor Mrs. Wright made a speech, and invited 
them to separate dinners. 

An indication that his last great battle was taking its toll was that Wright became subject 
to recurrent attacks of Meniere's syndrome. This is characterized by sometimes violent 
waves of dizziness, nausea and vomiting, along with a painful throbbing in the ears, 
thought to be an indication that the adrenals are exhausted. {Adelle Davis in Let's Get 
Well, p. 290.} The acute symptoms sometimes lasted as long as a month and cast a 
shadow over Wright's generally robust health, because he never knew when he might fall. 
Peters recalled an occasion when Wright became ill in his Plaza Hotel suite in New York. 
Peters said, "He had no sense of balance and was crawling around the floor on his hands 
and knees. It was terrible. Olgivanna was also ill. She called me up and said, 'Wes, you 
have got to take my place.' It lasted for the better part of a month and was not entirely 
cured when we went home. 

"When the symptoms were at their worst, the Baroness showed up. She had this doctor in 
Germany who applied leeches and claimed to have added years to Solomon Guggenheim's 
life. Anyway, she came in one day to see Mr. Wright and learned he was ill. Her 
conclusion was, 'He's in bad hands.' Next morning she appeared with two roundtrip airline 
tickets to Germany to see this doctor. I couldn't see how he could travel. I talked to him 
and he said no, but he was overcome by her forcefulness and in no position to resist. 

"So I decided to call up Mrs. Wright and ask her. {Peters to author.} She was furious at 
the idea that I had not made the decision myself. Of course he should not go, she said. In 
the end, he didn't." 

During those last years he had a more or less permanent office in a second-floor suite at 
the Plaza, one set of windows looking out over the tops of trees in Central Park, and the 
others facing Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. Loren Pope stayed there just as Conrad 
Hilton, the new owner, was making great changes and removing all traces of the beautiful, 
but old-fashioned, interior decor designed by its architect, Henry Hardenberg. So did 
Wright. Appearing at his suite one day, his sister Maginel found the door unlatched, but 
the room was empty. She called for her brother and found him sitting on a chair in the 
bathroom, because he could not bear the new Hilton furnishings. {Elizabeth McKee Purdy 
to author, December 9, 1987.} Wright soon redecorated the suite to his own specifications, 
with gold walls and deep wine-colored curtains. Among the objects in it that were listed 
in an inventory made after his death-along with the Hokusai prints, the details of carving 
from the Imperial Hotel, the vases and objets d'art-were a small portable typewriter, a 
wool lap robe, a drawing board, an umbrella, an electric iron and two hammers. 

Maginel Wright Barney was a frequent visitor, smuggling up paper bags of baked ham and 
potatoes cooked in their skins in response to her brother's call, made with a kind of a roar, 
for "Plain food!" She remembered his walking about the room, hands clasped behind his 
back and head thrust forward, pacing and talking about architecture.  

Wright visited Wales for his first and last trip three years before he died, in 1956, to 
receive his honorary degree from the University of Wales. He went to Bangor and 
Portmeirion in the scenic and mountainous northwest, driving all over Wales, 
accompanied by Olgivanna and Iovanna, in the space of a few days. {CD, p. 31} Although 
it seems likely, there is no record of a visit to Llandysul, or the family homestead or even 
to the chapels founded by his distinguished ancestors, now deserted and gently decaying. 
He might have been expected to take a particular interest in Capel Llwynrhydowen, for 
instance, founded in 1726 by Jenkin Jones, and famous thereafter for the ministry of 
Gwilym Marles, (great-uncle of Dylan Thomas), who became such a champion of the 
poor and oppressed, and who was ministering to his flock in 1844 when Richard and 
Mallie Lloyd Jones left for the New World. But Clough Williams-Ellis, who 
accompanied them on part of their trip, noted that Wright had visited the tomb of Lloyd 
George in Llanystumdwy, North Wales, and the small garden that he had designed as a 
shrine. The Welsh architect wrote that the tomb, "being all boulders built amongst old 
trees and poised above a rushing river, gave him special satisfaction." As An 
Autobiography demonstrates, Wright was too much of a Welshman not to attach 
importance to the symbolism of the final resting place. In fact, he wrote a kind of fantasy 
about his own death, ready to laugh at himself, yet unable to let go of the idea. In his 
imagination it seemed to him that he was walking through the family graveyard one 
evening at dusk, looking at the graves of "Ein Mam" and "Ein Tad," and all those 
headstones of their sons and daughters. Then he sat on a low grass-covered mound in the 
chapel yard, and began to hear voices. Soon he saw his mother, and the ghosts of other 
members of his family, with a message for him: he should look at the symbol carved upon 
the gate. {A2, p. 441.} 

He continued, "Wondering still and remembering I looked back at the gate. There it was in 
stone . . . Truth Against the World, the revered . . . symbol old Timothy had carved there 
on the gatepost for the Lloyd-Joneses. . . . 

"Strange . . . a new meaning. . . . Why had I not seen it before? . . . 

"'The truth to set against the woes of this world is Joy!'" 

The last time Herbert Fritz, who had become a successful architect, went to see his old 
mentor was in the autumn of 1958. He had heard about Wright's dizzy spells, and how 
potentially dangerous these were for a man of his advanced age, and was concerned. When 
he arrived with a loaf of homemade bread as a gift, he found Wright sitting in a screened 
area off the living room, overlooking the Taliesin pond and dam. He was wearing a dark 
suit and looked wonderful. He seemed unchanged, but it was disturbing, just the same, to 
think of him in less than perfect health, although the Fellowship was making elaborate 
plans to celebrate his ninetieth birthday, in June 1959 (actually, his ninety-second), as if 
nothing could go wrong. 

Fritz wrote, "But early in April, soon after the Easter Breakfast, which at Taliesin was 
equal in importance to Christmas, we heard that Mr. Wright was in the hospital." Frances, 
the second of his children to die, had died in Washington that February at the age of 
sixty-one. The news came to him in Scottsdale where, as was his custom, he was 
spending the winter. A month later, Catherine Wright died, one day short of her 
eighty-eighth birthday. Her son David was at her side and returned to Phoenix on his 
mother's birthday, March 25, the day she was cremated in Santa Monica. He went straight 
to Taliesin West to give his father the news and was surprised to find that Wright was very 
upset by it. David Wright said, "He wanted to know, 'Why didn't you tell me?' and his eyes 
watered up. I said, 'You never showed any interest.'" {to author.} On Saturday, April 4, 
just ten days later, Wright was admitted to the hospital. He had an operation on Monday, 
April 6; he died on Thursday, April 9. His death was a shock to almost everyone except 
those members of his family who, like Frances's daughter, Nora Natof, held to the fatalistic 
conviction that because Catherine's father, Samuel Clark Tobin, had succumbed soon after 
the death of his wife, Flora, Frank Lloyd Wright would do the same. In fact, Tobin died in 
December 1916, ten days after his wife. 

Years later, Herb Fritz would write, "I dream of him often. This week I saw him in a 
dream: Mr. Wright and I were both very old and were making our way up a hill. There 
were a few deserted buildings on each side of the road and we were helping each other up 
the hill. Beyond the buildings were bald hills covered with golden grass with large 
limestone outcroppings. Our progress was slow, but then we were on the ridge and 
suddenly we were young men dressed in buckskins and riding fine horses. Our horses 
began walking, then broke into an easy canter and we disappeared into the distance." {"At 
Taliesin," An Uplands Reader,April 1979, p. 148.}