FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

ARCHITECT

EDITED BY

TERENCE RILEY

WITH

PETER REED

ESSAYS BY

ANTHONY AlOfSIN

WILLIAM CRONON

KENNETH FRAMPTON

TERENCE RILEY

GWENDOLYN WRIGHT

The Museum of Modern Art/ New York

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WILLIAM CRONaN

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

"A foolish consistency:' runs one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most behavior from afar, inconsistencies such as these often looked like irre-
famous and misquoted aphorisms, "is the hobgoblin of little minds, sponsibility-or worse, dishonor. Even today. when one inquires 'about
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consis- Wright's reputation in his home state of Wisconsin , one usually hears.
tency a great soul has simply nothing to do."1 Rarely has anyone pur- first. that he abandoned his family and, second. that he was not a man
sued this Emersonian injunction with greater single-mindedness than of his word-not a man whose honor could be consistently trusted.
Frank Lloyd Wright. Intent on proving the greatness of his soul from "You know." people say with considerable feeling almost half a cen-
a very early age, Wright cherished his inconsistencies as if they were tury after the fact, "the man didn't pay his bills."
among his most beloved creations. The extraordinary talent that It would be easy to regard such personal inconsistencies as mere
enabled him to produce such an astonishing array of architectural peccadilloes that fade into irrelevancy when set against Wright's unde-
forms was matched by an equall~' exrraordinary ability to revel in the niably brilliant artistic achievements. Certainly there is much ro be
polarities of his own soul no matter how incompatible they seemed. learned by moving beyond the distractions of his formidable person-
Remembering Louis Henri Sullivan's quest for "the rule so broad as to ality to confront his buildings directly. The trouble. unfortunately. is
admit of no exception," Wright declared that "for the life of me I could that Wright himself clearly believed his architectUre to be an organic
not help ... being most interested in the exception proving the rule expression of the very personality that. in many ways. seems so prob-
useful or useless. "2 Rebel. iconoclast, trickster: one might almost say lematic. Indeed, his affection for the inconsistent hobgoblins that strike
that exceprion and inconsistency were the unifying passions of Wright's terror in little minds was everywhere apparent in his professional prac-
life. the ultimate proofs of an independence he cherished above all tice. Proclaiming the need for a new "organic" architecture, he argued
other things. that buildings should respond to the natural conditions of their sites-
In his personal conduct. for instance. Wright's inconsistencies are and yet one of the most important innovations of his so-called Prairie
as notorious today as they were during his lifetime. Here was a man of style was to introduce shallow-pitched roofs into northern climates
great charm and charisma. able. as his son John said, to "win over any- where winter snow accumulations threatened the integrity of any roof
one when he really wanted something," who sooner or later offended. not steep enough to shed its load by force of gravity. The leakiness of
alienated. or infuriated almost everyone who crossed his path. l The Wright's roofs is nothing shorr of legendary, even to this day. Wright
jumble of adjectives that still swirls around his name-arrogant. gen- espoused a deep devotion to the "nature of materials." arguing that
erous, grandiose, whimsical, bullying. tender, manipulative, playful, each should be employed onl), in ways that were consistent with its
and many others no less accurate-suggests how successful he was at innermost qualities, and yet he repeatedly pushed those materials to
leaving his audience perennially off-balance. half-outraged at his bom- the extreme limits of their tolerance. ro the verge of failure and beyond.
bast and his violation of social norms. half-amused at his unpre- He treated people in much the same way. Although he claimed
dictability and his unabashed enthusiasm for his own performance. that an architect should design each house to reflect the individuality
Here was a man whose self-love seemed limitless, whose ego appar- of its owner, in fact, he behaved as if the owner's individuality mat-
ently knew no bounds, who nonetheless hungered for the validation tered far less than the architect's.' In his view clients simply did not
he could only receive from admirers, disciples. and lovers. An extreme understand their own needs, and so the architect should reeducate
proponent of individualism and personal independence, he did his best their tastes to bring them in line with his own. 6 "le's their duty," he
work only when burrressed by soul mates who believed in his talent declared, "to understand. [0 appreciate, and conform insofar as possi-
even more unshakably than he did. Wright said of himself that "he ble to the idea of the house. "i And so we have famous stories of
couldn't live, move and have his being. so it seemed, without a heart- houses with ceilings so low that anyone much taller than Wright-
ro-hearr comrade."" And yet his mistrust for his own dependence on who stretched truth and height alike when he claimed to be five feet.
such soul mates helped produce the lurches in his domestic life for eight inches tall-would regularly bump his head, and of homeowners
which he eventually became infamous. The consummate designer of who, after inviting Wright to spend the night, awoke [0 discover their
domestic space, who invariably made the hearth and its fire a metaphor living-room furniture completely rearranged, or even discarded, to
for the sacred family circle. fled that circle when he feared that it threat- match his own vision of the room. s (To be fair, many clients were
ened his own freedom. For ordinary people who watched Wright's quick to admit that Wright's taste was superior to their own, and
 expressed real gratitude for the new aesthetic values he taught them.' roofs have failed this simple task. They have not kept organic nature-
His peremptory attirude toward anyone else's individual expression rain and snow-at bay. Some of the leaks are by now so famous [hat
extended beyond his cliems to the srudems who came ro learn archi- they have virmaJIy become cliches. The angry phone call that Herbert
tecture at his feet. Although he constantly lectured them about the F. Johnson, the president of S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc., made to
,
need for artistic independence and the paramount goal of developing Wright in the midst of a dinner party at his new house, Wingspread
~
their own individualiry, in practice he demanded conformity, consis- (see plates 275-277), because that parry had been interrupted by a
tently refusing them the space co articulate any artistic vision at odds steady drip onto Johnson's bald head, and Wright's suggestion that the
i
I,
I

with the master's.1O Indeed, one can nor imagine Frank Lloyd Wright as irate owner solve the problem by moving his chair, is so familiar that
I:
a student in his own Taliesin Fellowship. anyone acquainted with Wright will probably have encountered it I
"With consistency a great soul has simply nm:hing to do." If many times, sometimes even told about completely different houses
!
!
I

Emerson's preaching is true, then Wright's paradoxes surely seem ro and owners.12 The Johnson Story may now be 'too familiar. but only I:
confirm the greatness that is everywhere evident in his buildings. And because the experience it describes is so typical. When I recently visit-
yet our dilemma in this is that Wright's inconsistencies are so endlessly ed the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin, of 1945-51 (plates
fascinating and seductive (just as he intended [hem to be) that they get 368-370), 1 gradually became aware during the sermon of a rather
in the way of deeper questions abour the sources of his inspiration (just pleasant rhythmic sound from the back of the auditorium. When I
as he intended they should do). The legend of Frank Lloyd Wright is rurned to discover its source I saw amid the parishioners twO garbage
no less masterful a creation than his architecture. and the twO buttress cans collecting the steady streams of water dripping from the ceiling. I )
each other. No artist has ever worked so hard to claim rota] originalifY The Madison Unitarians have learned to take such events in stride,
for himself; none has sought more assiduously to deny the obvious though perhaps with not quire the good humor of Mrs. Richard Lloyd
influences thar contributed to his special vision. To be inconsistent Jones. the wife of Wright's cousin, who responded to an inquiry about
even in one's own behavior was another way of asserting that ordinary her own leaky roof by saying: "This is what happens when you leave a
rules could nor possibly apply to a genius so unprecedented that it work of art out in the rain."14
claimed to violate virtually every tradition of Western architecture. In fact, the leakiness of Wright's roofs is only one item in a long
Nothing would have pleased Wright more, surely, than for us to draw list of struCtural failings-some of them much more serious-that have
this lesson from the many paradoxes that he left 'scattered like red plagued his buildings. For this reason, trivial as they may seem, anec-
herrings across his path. dotes about the drip on Johnson's head or about garbage cans catching
And so the historian faces several riddles when confronting water amid church pews carry the burden of a much larger question
Wright's life and work. One is the obvious question about his intellec- about Wright's work. For his critics, such stories stand as an implicit
mal roots, the architectural traditions and broader cultural movements indictment, suggesting that for all his supposed brilliance he failed to
that, despite his many denials, did in fact lay the foundations for his meet some of the most basic obligations of sound architectural prac-
own great achievements. In Wright's case, we are also faced with his tice. His supporters respond defensively by blaming such problems on
amazingly prolific ourput not just of buildings bur of words, for the builders who, through perfidy or incompetence. failed to follow
man was an indefatigable talker and writer. Rarely has an architect said Wright's instructions; alternatively, they argue that all roofs eventual-
so much in defense of his own vision or tried harder to articulate a phi- ly leak, no matter how competent the architect. For Wright's defend-
losophy that would make aesthetic and moral sense of his creations. ers his leaky roofs are a persistent embarrassment; for his critics they
In reading his many books. lectures, letters, and polemics, one quick- offer a perennial opportunity to prick his inflated reputation. Bur the
ly becomes aware of Wright's obsession with certain ideas that he riddle they pose becomes much more interesting if we cake them seri-
believed underlay all of his work. Over and over again he tells us that ously: they are, after all, a perfect symbol of the many other paradox-
a truly great work of architecmre must express harmony, simplicity, es in which Wright took such obvious and mischievous delight. If we
order, organic beauty, natural integriry, unity-indeed, even "consis- acknowledge at the outset that Wright was unquestionably among the
tency. "II Here the mystery deepens. for this seemingly most inconsis- most brilliant and creative architects in all of human history-and
tent of men was among the most consistent defenders of consistency there is no reason to deny him this claim-what then should we make
as a cardinal virtue in life and art. The challenge he has left us is thus of his leaky roofs? What clues can they give us about the unifying prin-
to discover the unifying principles-what Emerson might have called ciples that defined order, integrity, and beauty for this strangely incon-
the unfoolish consistencies-that can resolve his many apparent sistent but consistently visionary man?
contradictions.
In trying to discover the abstract principles that gave order to this
THE LLOYD JONES LEGACY
disorderly life, one can begin by posing a very concrete riddle: Why
did so many of Frank Lloyd Wright's roofs leak? Surely the ability of a Any investigation of Wright's unifying principles and the sources from
roof to keep out water is JUSt about the most basic proof of any build- which they sprang must begin with one of the more curious paradox-
ing's integriry, and yet sooner or later a remarkable number of Wright's es of his long career: this man who more than any ocher symbolizes

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK llOYD WRIGHT 9

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 modern architecmre in t\ventieth-century America was in fact pro- Wright learned to embrace this romantic vision of a divinely
foundly a child of the nineteenth century in his aesthetic vision and ordered and principled universe at a very early age. Of this we can be
moral philosophy. The architect Philip Johnson was perhaps unfair bur sure, even though his childhood is so shrouded in self-conscious myth-
not entirely wrong when he described Wright as America's greatest making that it is difficult to extract reliable information from his later
nineteenth-century architect. ls Born in 1867, Wright was already accounts of it. His favorite fable-that his mother knew even as she
approaching middle age at the rum of the new century and had long carried him in her womb that he was predestined to be a great archi:
since imbibed the core values that would sustain him for the rest of his teer-has all the earmarks of hagiography, and there is little reason to
career. His longevity and his protean ability even very late in life (Q worry much about its truth or falsehood. 18 Whatever Anna Wright's
keep reinventing new architectural vocabularies should not obscure the role in directing him toward architecture. she and her family were
fact [hat his moral compass never wavered from the belief" he acquired unquestionably the most important early source of his romantic ideal-
as a young man. To the core of his being, Wright was a nineteenth- ism. There also can be no doubt about her high ambitions for her son,
century romantic, steeped in idealist traditions that reached back on whom she lavished far more love and devotion than on her hus-
through Louis Sullivan and Wah Whitman to the New England Tran- band William. Wright's father emerges from the record as a rather
scendentalists and beyond. pathetic figure, a charming, personable, footloose spendthrift, talent-
To say this about him is neither to deny the originality of his ed but unfulfilled, who could never satisfy his demanding wife.
genius nor to label him as somehow old-fashioned. Even a genius must William Wright finally walked our on his family, much as his son
speak in the language of his own day. respond to its obsessions. and would do a quarter of a century later-though William's wife was eager
work with [he artistic and cultural resources it makes available to him. for his departure and Frank's was not. Frank Lloyd Wright seems [0
Indeed. one might say thar the task of genius is to take ideas that are have remembered his father chieAy for giving him an enduring love of
very much "in the air," profoundly a parr of their time and place, and classical music, especially Bach and Beethoven, and a belief that music
demonstrate their possibilities for the future in such strikingly origi- was a near perfect metaphor for the principles that informed great
nal ways that they suddenly seem innovative and obvious at the same architecture. "The composer," Wright later said. "is a builder. My
time: 6 This is surely what Wright did with such brilliance. One of the father taught me to listen to a symphony as an edifice of sound ....
clearest proofs of his ability to speak to the t\Ventieth century in the Building is the same thing. It's taking a motif. a theme and construct-
language of the nineteenth is the very vocabulary in which he did ing from it an edifice that is aLI consistent and organic-an organism
so, as much in his words as in his buildings. When Wright used terms as a whole."19
like organic, individualism, democracy, and nature he was expressing William Wright was a popular but discontented preacher, a com-
nineteenth-cemury values that are subtly but crucially differenr from petent linguist, a fine musician, and a frustrated composer. In his son's
our own. AJI were infused with the values of romanric idealism. Wright eyes-and his wife's-he roo often fell short of the very ideals he
shared with his nineteenth-century contemporaries a deep conviction preached. 1o And so he helped set the stage for a classic oedipal drama
that the chief task of science and arr was to discover underlying prin- in which a brilliant son struggled without much difficulty to win his
ciples of order-present not JUSt in architecture but in literature. phi- mother from his father's affections. The egotism and arrogance that
losophy, music. mathematics. and, indeed, in the entire organic and would so typify Wright in later life were obvious legacies of that early
inorganic universe-which would reveal the hidden unity of human- family contest. In the words of his sister Maginel. Anna Wright "gath-
ity and nature. To know these principles was to come as close as ered all the strands of her yearning, wove them together, and fastened
humanly possible to a direct encounter with God. Herein lay the them once and for all to her son. He was more than her child. He was
meaning of the lines Wright so often quoted from Alfred Lord her protege, her legacy. He would accomplish what she and her hus-
Tennyson: band could nOt. From the starr, her devotion to Frank was over-
whelming. "21 Wright put it more succinctly: "The lad was his mother's
Flower in the crannied wall,
adoration. She lived much in him."21 Although her love for him was
I pluck you out of the crannies,
absolute, so were the standards by which she measured his perfor-
J hold you here, root and all in my hand,
mance. She served as his teacher. his taskmaster. and his most demand-
Little flower-but if J could understand
ing but adoring audience, becoming his personal archetype of the
What you are, root and all and all in all,
devoted female companion who would unquestioningly subordinate
1 should know what God and man is. 17
her life, passion. and sense of mission to his own. Perhaps for this very
The nineteenth-century figures (0 whom Wright turned for inspira- reason, as his sister also reported, "she was not always easy with him,
tion all shared with Tennyson this central conviction, which was far and she made the mistake of failing to mask her disapproval of the
more literal for most of them than it would be for their t\Ventieth- women to whom he was attracted. though sometimes they were strik-
century counterparts: the flower in the crannied wall was as much an ingly like her in looks and in spirit."z3 From her, surely, he acquired
ideal as a physical object, and the principle it disclosed was nothing the lifelong habit of regarding hi,mself as a golden boy, an enfant terri-
less than the face of God. ble, a man-child so used to being forgiven no matter how grievous his

WilliAM C~ONOt'--.
 Figure 1: The Lloyd Jones family, 1883. Frank Lloyd Wright's grandfather Richard Lloyd Jones is seated to the left of the empty chair. His parents, Anna and William Corey
Wright. are in the back row, third and fourth from the right; in front of them is his sisler Jone. He is seated 10 the right of the empty chair, with sisler Maginel on his lap. At Ihe lar
right. second row, is the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones.

faults-but also so needing to confirm that he still deserved the love his Perhaps most important. the family had a tradition of religious
father had so pathetically lost-that he could not resist repeatedly test- dissent, its members espousing a version of Unitarianism that mingled
ing the limits of those around him as a way of proving his own wor- passionate, Welsh nonconformist beliefs with the more rarefied intel-
thiness. As Wright's own son would say, Anna helped him become lectualism of the New England Transcendentalists. Theirs was an
what he would never cease to be, an "overgrown. undisciplined boy extreme form of liberal Protestantism, suspicious of any institutional
with a genius for architeccure."24 religion that gor in the way of an individual's search for spiritual truth.
Anna's concriburions to Wright's genius were by no means limited "Truth Against the World" was their family mono, implying their
to his basic character and emotional needs. She came from a brilliant, belief-so basic (0 Wright's later sense of his own mission-that any-
clannish Welsh family, the Lloyd Joneses, and from them much morc one who sought the truth and found it would surely have to defend ir
than from his father's kin Wright acquired his sense of family identity. against the falsehoods of others whose motives and vision were much
his religious and philosophical outlook, and his first sustained less pure. "The Unitarianism of the Lloyd-Joneses," Wright wrote, "was
encounter with what would become for him an ideal human landscape an attempt to amplify in the confusion of the creeds of their day, the
(figure I). Christened Frank Lincoln Wright at birth, the would-be idea oflife as a gift from the Divine Source, one GOD omnipotent. all
architect changed his middle name as a teenager to signal his commit- things at one with HIM. UNITY was their watchword, the sign and
ment to his mother's family traditions. ls The Lloyd Joneses had mi- symbol that thrilled them, the UNITY of all things!"l6 When the fam-
grated to Wisconsin in 1845, eventually settling at a place called ily built its own small church in 1886-giving young Frank his first
Hillside near where the Helena Valley met the Wisconsin River oppo- practical building experience as an assistant to the Chicago architect
site the small town of Spring Green. Anna and her siblings had grown who designed it-they predictably named it Unity Chapel (figure 2).
up there, and as a boy her son Frank spent his summers working on his Wright's own commitment to Unitarianism and to the principles
uncles' farms. Despite being farmers. the Lloyd Joneses read widely of spiritual unity it espoused continued for the rest of his life. l ? One of
from the leading thinkers of their day and were deeply committed to his first large public buildings was Unity Temple, built in 1905-08 for
education and self-improvement: cwo of Anna's sisters eventually the Unitarian congregation in Oak Park, Illinois (plates 74-82). In the
opened a progressive school near the family homestead. and one of her 19305 he formally joined the First Unitarian Society in Madison. Wis-
brothers went on to become a leading liberal theologian in Chicago. consin, and a decade later designed its famous meetinghouse (true co
Family members were infused with the feeling that to be a Lloyd Jones his family traditions, it was only with some difficulty that the congre-
was to be a person of special talent and conviction, whatever the line gation persuaded him not to carve the word Unity on the scone that
of work he or she might foHow. still serves as its pulpit).l8 Wright would later say of it: "There, you see

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 11

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 ECHOING EMERSON

Unitarianism exercised an influence on the intellectual life of

nineteenth-century America that was out of all proporrion to the num-
ber of people who formally declared their allegiance to its doctrines.
This was pardy because, as the liberal successor of New England Con-
gregationalism, it dominated the area around Boston, a city that was
home to far more than its share of the nation's intellectual elice. For
much of che nineteenth century. many of Boston's most prominent
thinkers and artists called themselves Unitarians; indeed. the Harvard
Divinity School essentially served as a Unitarian seminary. Because
Unitarians so eagerly embraced the progressive intellectual movements
UNIIltV @HAPEL, qELENA, WIS.
of their day, declaring their confidence that there need be no necessary
Figure 2: Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Unity Chapel, Helena. 1886. Perspective. conflict between liberal religion and the beliefs of an increasingly sec-
Whereabouls unknown. Earliesl known published drawing by Frank Lloyd Wrighl ular age. it is easy from the perspective of the twentieth century to for-
get their faith and regard them as merely secular. The denomination
aligned itself with romanticism, humanism, and liberalism-the secu-
the Unitarianism of my forefathers found expression in a building by lar trinity that would help lay the foundations for modernity as the
one of the offspring-the idea of unity-Unitarian. Unitarians twentieth century would know it. Indeed. one of the most important
believed in the unity of all things. Well, I tried to build a building here early expressions of American romanticism-the group of writers and
that expressed that sense of unity. ":1.9 When he died a few years later. his artists who called themselves Transcendentalists-began with a tech-
funeral service was conducted by the minister of the Madison congre- nical dispute among New England Unitarians)' Unitarianism served as
gation, and he was buried in the cemetery of Unity Chapel near the an important vehicle for introducing romantic idealism into the main-
Lloyd Jones farmsteads. Unitarianism's impatience with traditional srream of American thought, which is why the convergence of these
Christianity, its refusal to impose any formal doctrinal tests on its two movements in the thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright was no acci-
adherents (not even the divinity of Christ or the existence of God), its dent. Much of his understanding of them in fact flowed from a com-
eagerness to ransack all the world's great religions in its search for mon source, and the name of that source was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
sacred meaning, its tolerance of iconoclasm and individual eccentric- Nothing serves as a better gauge of how far twentieth-century
ity, its embrace of science as a necessary parr of any modern search for Americans have drifted from their nineteenth-century roots than the
enlightened knowledge, its humanism, and above al1 its faith in the spectacular decline of Emerson's popularity. Today, he is read mainly as
unity of spirirual truth-all of these values were made to order for the a mandatory assignment in college classrooms on the few occasions
likes of Frank Lloyd Wrighc. when he is read at all. and most people find him far less accessible than
The faith of the Lloyd Joneses was more than just a religion for such writers as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman. or John Muir,
Wright; it also schooled him in the moral rhetoric that would forever all of whom regarded themselves as his followers. Yet no American
shape his speech and writing. Wright might have been a great archi- writer enjoyed more universal acclaim in the nineteenth century; none
tect even if he had never been exposed to his family's Unitarianism, was more influential or widely read than this renegade Unitarian min-
but it is hard to imagine his words and ideas without its influence. ister turned popular lecturer and romantic philosopher. To understand
Reading his essays today, one repeatedly has the sense of listening to a the language and ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright today, one cannot avoid
sermon. Here, too, there was a powerful family example close at hand a serious encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is true despite
to serve as Wright's model for the intellectual as preacher, the preach- the fact that Wright himself did not lay great stress on Emerson's con-
er as intellecrual. Wright's uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones was one of tributions to his thought: following his usual practice of obscuring his
Chicago's most popular ministers, a religious liberal who eventually greatest intellectual debts lest they seem to diminish his own original-
found even Unitarianism too conservative for his humanistic tastes, ity, Wright did not even mention Emerson's name among the thinkers
and the editor of a weekly religious magazine tided-what else?- whose work he had "long ago consulted and occasionally remembered"
Uniry)O When Wright set up his Taliesin Fellowship in the [930S, he in writing An AutobiographyY
included as parr of its ritual activities a Sunday-morning gathering at Some have argued that Wright came to his knowledge of Emer-
which the assembled community listened to classical music. readings sonian ideas only indirectly, through Louis Sullivan's affection for Walt
from favorite authors, and rambling lectures about architecture, life, Whitman. Certainly Wright was himself a fan of Whitman and read
and morality by Wright himsel It was like nothing so much as a Uni- the poet's work regular1y to the apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship.33
tarian service. a ritual gathering at which his uncle Jenkin and the But it was Emerson, not Whitman, who throughout Wright's child-
other Lloyd Joneses would surely have felt right at home. hood had served as high priest in the intellectual and spiritual pan-

2 WI.LIM!' CP.ONO',

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 theon of the Lloyd Joneses. His sister Maginel tells a wonderful betray one's own genius. "The objection to conforming to usages that
anecdote about the family's piano, which Wright-exaggerating as have become dead to you." Emerson wrote. "is, that it scatters your
always-described as a Steinway. She knew with absolute certainty that force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character."4 0
her brother was wrong about this, because she associated the piano Wright said much the same thing to his apprentices at Taliesin. declar-
with a revealing childhood confusion on her part. "I know very well ing that nothing was more detrimental to an architect's vision than "to
that it was an Emerson," she wrote, "because I remember the awe and have deep in his heart one wish and to have to conform [0 the condi-
admiration I felt. believing a man of that name could build pianos and tions and demands of another. That's what makes a bad marriage and
write books. too-books that one's mother, father. aunts, and uncles will also make a bad architect .... Really to believe in something is the
were always quoting: 1\s Mr. Emerson says."'H If they agreed about greatest boon, I think. and to believe wholeheartedly in it and to serve
nothing else. William and Anna Wright shared a passion for Emerson, it with all your strength and your might is salvation, really. "4 1
and Anna even taught classes about his work during her years in Oak But Emerson's influence on Wright went much deeper than sim-
ParkY It would hardly seem co matter, then, how Wright acquired his ply to serve as a role model for romantic genius. When Wright spoke
familiarity with the sage of Concord; what does matter is that no voice of his search for an "organic" architecture, a way of building that would
echoes more resoundingly in Wright's own prose than Emerson's. look to nature for its models and inspiration, he was using the word
Emerson. for instance, gave license ro Wright's fiercely defended nature in a peculiarly Emersonian sense that is much less familiar today
conception of himself as iconoclast. individualist, genius. The archi- than it was in the nineteenth century. It is precisely here that we are
tect's self-centeredness and willful refusal co march [0 anyone else's bear most likely to misunderstand Wright's thought. The crude popular
had powerful roots in his family psychodrama, but also conformed to view today is that romantics like Emerson or Thoreau, or for that mat-
Emersonian notions of personal integrity. Self-reliance was a favorite rer Wright. celebrated the beaury of nature in a literal sense much as
Emersonian [heme that had deep resonance for WrighL "To believe many modern environmentalists do. believing that the world's crea-
your own thought." Emerson wrote, "to believe that what is true for tures and landscapes are intrinsically beautiful in thei r own right.
you in your private heart is true for all men,-that is genius. "36 Par- In fact. raw nature was much less compelling for most nineteenth-
ticularly in the years after 1909, when he abandoned his family to century romantics than it is for modern nature-lovers. The romantics
embark on a scandalous love affair with another man's wife, Wright regarded plants and animals and the rest of creation as the outward
embraced almost to the point of caricature the romantic image of manifestations of an all-encompassing spiritual unity whose name was
genius that is so much a part of Emerson's thought. The elaborate God. It is a textbook truism to say of romanticism that one of its prin-
myth that Wright constructed in his autobiography of a lone genius cipal tasks was to secularize Judea-Christian values by relocating Onto
fighting against great odds and nearly universal opprobrium to defend nature the sublime transcendence that had once been reserved for the
his architecmre against intellecmal philistines. as well as the attack he deity. But this statement can just as easily be inverted, for the secular-
mounted against conventional morality for not accepting his love ization of God was also the sacralization of Nature. This is why Wright
affairs. his loose ways with money, and his "honest arrogance"J7-all could declare: "I think Nature should be spelled with a capital 'N,' not
of these. in Emersonian terms, could serve as proofs of the indepen- because Nature is God but because all that we can learn of God we
dence. originality, and integrity that revealed true genius. "Whoso will learn from the body of God. which we call Nature."4!
would be a man," wrote Emerson, "must be a nonconformist. He who Once we recognize that romantic conceptions of nature were fun-
would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of damentally religious, we can begin to understand that for romantics
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred like Emerson and Wright. nature's value was primarily spiritual.
but the integrity of your own mind."lR Indeed, nature acquired its meaning for them only in relation [0 the
Here was a philosophy that could justify Wright's unconvention- human soul and the divine spirit of which the soul was a manifestation.
al lifestyle at the same time that it endorsed his artistic mission. In "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spirimal fact," said Emerson. 43
Emerson's thought, the lone search of individual genius to find origi- The multitudes of natural forms were only so much dead matter until
nal meaning in the world began with the radical Protestant impulse of touched by spirit. and so it was the role of human beings-especially
Unitarianism to know God directly. without reliance on biblical artists-to breath life into matter by relating it [0 the whole of cre-
prophecy, but extended far beyond formal religion to all of art and life. ation and thereby giving it spiritual meaning. "Nature is a sea of forms
"Let me admonish you. first of all," Emerson had [old the graduating radically alike and even unique," declared Emerson. I'A leaf, a sun-
class of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, "to go alone; to refuse the beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the
good models. even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, mind. What is common to them all,-that perfectness and harmony,
and dare to love God withour mediator or veil. ... Thank God for is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural
these good men. but say. II also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above forms.-the totality of nature.... Nothing is quite beautiful alone;
its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. "39 To nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far
give in to conventional wisdom. to succumb to the opinion of the beautiful as it suggests this universal grace."44
world. to imitate someone else's creation. could only adulterate and The role of the artist in relation to this all-encompassing univer-

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 13

- ~ & - ~ ~ --- - - - - -
 sal spirit was to distill its virtues into a concentrated vision so that the Somehow 1 had always thought when 1 read the word "nature" in a
resulting work of art would serve as a microcosm for the beauty of the book or used it in my own mind that it was meant that interior W~)~
whole. Emerson's metaphor for this was the alembic, the laboratory Not the other measly. external W~J~ ''Fools!'' They have no sentiment for
glassware that chemists and alchemists had long used to distill and con~ nature. What they really mean kv "nature" is just a sentimentalizing of
centrare liquids. "The poet, the painter. the sculptor, the musician, the the rudimentary animal"'>
architect," he wrO[e, "seek each to concentrare this radiance of the
world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of For Wright, the purpose of art and architecture was not slavishly to
beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art. a nature passed copy external nature, but ro use it in the way Emerson recommended,
through rhe alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through as the occasion for exploring inner nature and thereby expressing uni~
the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works."4) The high- versal spirit. For the artist, nature was raw material awaiting transfor-
est expression of this artistic impulse was the human love of beaut}', mation into some greater vision of a still more divine ideal. "Nature is
which found its roO[s in the graceful forms of organic nature but drew not fixed but fluid," Emerson had declared. "Spirit alters, moulds,
its true inspiration from the spiritual essence that lay behind and makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spir-
beyond those forms. Indeed, Emerson went so far as to argue that the it: to pure spirie, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit
world existed more than anything else to act as a mirror in which the builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond irs
soul could see beauty reAected back as the foremost expression of God's world, a heaven. Know then. that the world exists for you .... Build,
presence in the world. "The world thus exists to the soul," he wrote. therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure
"to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proporcions."so lr would be
reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in irs hard to imagine a dearer statement of the mission-arrisric, moral,
largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God and religious-that Frank Lloyd Wright pursued with such passion
is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness. and beauty, are but different faces throughout his long life. His house. his world, his heaven, would even~
of the same AlL "46 Natural beauty was of value only insofar as it reflect- tually extend from Taliesin to Broadacre City to produce a visionary
ed divine beauty. "Beauty in narure is nO[ ultimate. It is the herald of statement of the architectural and aesthetic space [hat, in Wright's eyes,
inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory could serve as the ideal canvas for a truly American democracy.
good. Ir must stand as a parr, and not as yet [he last or highest expres- Wright learned from Jenkin Lloyd Jones and other members of
sion of the final cause of Nature. "47 That final cause was spirit, which his family how to defend his artistic vision in the language of a ser-
could be found only in the soul's awareness of its own divine nature. mon; he learned from Emerson the sacrament of beauty and spirit,
Following Emerson, one could thus believe thar art was a truer. richer, which became for him the moral content of that sermon. It is thus no
more organic expression of nature's beauty than were the natural forms accident that his polemics on behalf of an "organic architecture" are
on which it was modeled: indeed. if one wanted truly to encounter so often expressed in words that are overtly moralizing. The unity of
Nature. one could do so more readily in Arc than in nature itself. truth. beauty, nature: this for Wright was the very name of God. 51
Wright's beliefs about nature and art were wholly congruent with "Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue," Emerson had written.
Emerson's. which is why we are so apt to misunderstand his arguments "Every natural action is graceful. "~2 Wright openly expressed his alle-
on behalf of an organic or natural architecture if we interpret these giance to this principle by declaring: "} believe thar Emerson was right
words according to their most common meanings in our own time. when he said, 'Beauty is the highest and finest kind of morality: ... If
The great principle that the Lloyd Joneses had held up in their strug- you are attuned, and you love sincerely, harmony, rhythm and what
gle to defend "Truth Against the World" was Unity. Their offspring we call beauty, instinctively whar is ugly will become offensive to
would turn their own Emersonian ideas against them by arguing that you. !In Ugliness was not merely a violation of aesthetic values; it was an
the family had overemphasized "the beauty of TRUTH" and "did not offense against God. a sin. "There is not. nor ever was. room in right
so well know the truth ofBEAUTY."4 H In the name of truth and beau- living for the ugly. Ugliness in anything is the incarnati<!n of sin, and
ty alike Wright followed Lloyd Jones traditions in atracking contem~ sin is death-ugliness is death."s4 To avoid this sin meant answering to
porary artists and critics who embraced too literal an understanding a catechism of unity in which the most sacred terms were all finally
of nature's meaning: synonymous. "The SOrt of expression we seek," Wright wrote, "is chat
of harmony, or the good otherwise known as the true, otherwise
J began to see that in spite ofall the talk about Nature that "natural" known as the Beautiful."5s These were the principles to which Wright
was the Last thing in this world they would let you be ifthey could invariably appealed in trying to make sense of his 1ife and work. How~
prevent it. What did they mean when ''they'' used the word nature? Just ever much he might stray from them or use them to rationalize actions
some sentimental feeling about animals, grass and trees, the out-ofdoors? whose motives were sometimes less pure, however arrogantly and self-
But how about the nature ofwood, glass and iron-internal nature? righteously he might wield them to condemn those with whom he
The nature ofboys and girls? The nature ofLaw? Wasn,. that Nature? disagreed. there is no reason to doubt the moral passion with which
Wasni nature in this sense the very nature afGod? he embraced them. They were quite literally his religion.

Will I A ,v., C=lONor;

-- - - - - - ~ - '" - - - - ~I
 2 , @ Ita.,. ....... ....." later years Frank Lloyd Wright regularly cited the Froebel Gifts as one
of the most profound influences on his approach to architecture. "I
give you my word." he would say, "all those things are in my hands
today-the feeling for those maple forms."~6
Scholars have spent considerable energy demonstrating that
Wright'S buildings can be derived from Froebelian forms.57 As the
architect himself nored-probably in part as a way to claim prior inspi-
rarion for a method Le Corbusier had championed-Wright's habit of
designing on a modular plan directly paralleled the formal exercises in
which Froebel encouraged children to arrange wood blocks on a two-
dimensional grid to form geometric patterns and miniature structures.
"There," Wright said, "is the modular system that has been back of
every design I ever made."s8 Froebel helped nurture Wright's lifelong
fascination with a small collection of geometric shap~s. different com-
binations of which can be used for periodization of almost his emire
oeuvre: the line and the spiral, the circle and the sphere, the square and
the cube. the triangle and the tetrahedron. Prairie houses, Larkin
Building, Unity Temple, California Romanzas, Fallingwater. Johnson
Administration Building, Usonian houses. Guggenheim: in the long
parade of Wright's prodigiously diverse structures one has linle trouble
imagining him in a perennial childhood game of combining and
recombining simple wood blocks. the most basic of geometric forms.
as a way displaying his own incredible ability to push them to the fur-
thest limits of artistic expression. "When you had mastered the inter-
play of those things upon one another," he said of the Froebel blocks.
"when you had taken them by different angles and revolved them to
get subordinate shapes, there you got a perfect language of form."s9
Figure 3: Friedrich Froebel's blocks, as depicted' in Kindergarten Gifts
and Occupation Material, 1876 The Froebel blocks cannot by themselves. of course, explain
Wright's later brilliance in manipulating interior and exterior space.
Not only was it long after his kindergarten training that he eventually
developed his mature style. but many other influences were at least as
TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF STYLE
important in shaping the particulars of his aesthetic vision. In this
Emerson did nm. of course, invem romantic idealism. He served as its respect, attempts to show that Froebel's blocks can be rearranged to
most prolific and popular missionary in the United States, and was mimic Wright's structures are a little beside the point. The significance
almost surely the ultimate source for Wright's moral philosophy, but he of the blocks in fact lies much deeper, as Wright's allusion to a perfect
was by no means alone in transmitting romantic ideas to Wright or to language of form suggests. 60 Froebel did not design his kindergarten
American culmre generally. Romanticism had many roots on borh exercises simply to give his young pupils an analytical tool for breaking
sides of the Atlantic, permeating nineteenth-century life in so many complex shapes into their constituent parts and assembling them again
ways that one encoumers it everywhere. It was, for instance, the foun- into new structures. He intended that children begin to associate dif-
dation of the often cited kindergarten training that Anna Wright gave ferent shapes with well-defined symbolic meanings. He wrote of the
her son. In 1876, while visiting the Centennial Exposition in Philadel- sphere. for instance, that "the spherical is the symbol of diversity in
phia, she saw a display of educational playthings called "Gifrs"-in the unity and of unity in diversity."61 Wright was arguing from this gener-
form of colored strips of paper, two-dimensional geometric grids, and al Froebelian perspective when he declared that "certain geometric
wood spheres, blocks, and pyramids (figure 3). All were designed so forms have come to symbolize for us and potently to suggest certain
that mothers and schoolteachers could train children following the human ideas, moods, and sentiments-as for instance: the circle,
educational philosophy of Friedrich Froebel, the German inventor of infinity; the triangle. structural unity; the spire. aspiration; the spiral,
the kindergarten, who had developed an elaborate series of exercises organic progress; the square, integrity."61 The Froebel blocks permitted
designed to educate a child's sensory experience of the world. Like a child to explore not just the innate physical properties of different
other American mothers of her day. Anna was much enamored with shapes. but their relationship to the underlying spiritual meaning of
Froebel's system and went so far as to seek formal training so that she the cosmos, and it is here that we will discover their most imporrant
could educate her son following the German educator's methods. In influence on Frank Lloyd Wright.

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRtGHT 15

&. _ ___ - - - - r -- __ ~ _ -
 For FroebeI, Euclidian geometry expressed a Platonic order, and
the endlessly shifting patterns of his blocks were but guises of the Uni-
versal One. Listening to him describe the most important goal of his
pedagogy, one instantly recognizes the idealist voice of nineteenth-
century romanticism:

In ali things there lives ana' reigns an eurnallaw. . . . This law has been
and is enounced with equal clearness and distinctness in nature (the
externa/), ill the spirit (the internal), and in life which unites the two.
This all-controlling law is necessarily based on an all-pervading,
energetic. lhing. self-conscious. and hence eternal Unity. ... A quiet(l'
observant human mind, a thoughtful, clear human intellect. has never
foiled. and will never foil, to recognize this Unity. This Unity is God.
All things have corne from the Divine Unity, from God, and have their
origin in the Divine Unity. in God alone. 6~

The American textbooks on which Anna Wright probably relied in

transmitting Froebel's ideas [0 her son made clear that mere geometry
was hardly the most important lesson she should be trying [0 teach.
As one declared, the exercises were "intended as an aid to secure the
union berv..een mother and child. between God and the world. "64
Another announced with some frustration: "Hundreds of well-
meaning friends of the Kindergarten who have not had time to look
beneath its surface. still class Froebel's Gifts with the trivial playthings Figure 4: Frank Lloyd Wright. Tree of life stained-gloss
of the roy-shop .... Froebel's Gifts are serious things. freighted with window. Darwin D. Martin House. Buffalo. 1902-04

life, endowed with a soul, and not to be handled irreverently without

injury to the thoughtless culprit."6 s Their final, most cosmic lesson was
one thar young Frank Lloyd Wright had been imbibing from his Uni- they represent as to capture the essence of those forms. The best-known
tarian family for as long as he could remember. "This is the soul of examples are stained-glass, cast-concrere, and copper plant motifs thar
Froebel's gifts: Unity in Universality, and Universality in Unif)'-One have come to be associated with individual Wright buildings: the tulips
in All, and All in One."66 We can almost see Anna Wright. Jenkin ar Wright's Oak Park House and Studio of 1889-98; the sumac at the
Lloyd Jones, and Ralph Waldo Emerson nodding in agreement. Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield of ]902-04; the hollyhock
Froebel helps us understand yet another important way in which at the Aline Barnsdall House in Los Angeles of 1916-21; the Spanish
Wright's relationship to nature subtly differs from our own. The Ger- moss at Auldbrass Plantation in Yemassee, South Carolina, of 1938-42;
man pedagogue was adamant that his young pupils not make draw- the Tree of Life at the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo of 1902-04
ings or any other artistic representations directly from real objects until (figure 4).69 In choosing to decorate his "organic" houses with such
after they had spent long months working through his formal geo- abstract designs, Wright was declaring his allegiance to Froebel. Both
metric exercises. The idea. as Wright described it. was that a child men sought an ideal language that could capture the inner meaning of
"should not be allowed to draw from nature, to imitate the look of outward forms to reveal the cosmic unity of nature and spirit.
objects until he had mastered the fundamental forms of nature. "67 In Euclidian geometry may have been the grammar of that language.
this way kindergarten children would come to understand the ideal bur beyond mere grammar-beyond the Froebel blocks-was the
Euclidian geometries that organized and structured the exterior sur- more challenging question of the particular vocabulary and the cho-
faces of the world. enabling them to recognize the "shapes that lay hid- sen style in which Wright himself would try to speak. Here a number
den behind the appearances all about."68 Wright had learned from of leading nineteenth-century art critics and architectural theorists
Emerson the primacy of inner spiritual nature as reflected in his own helped him add flesh to the bare bones of Froebel's geometry. From
soul; he learned from Froebel that inner nature had a Euclidian gram- the English critic John Ruskin, for instance, he found explicit suppOrt
mar. This helps explain why an architect who consistently described for the idea that artists should convey not just the natural appearance
his work as "organic" or "natural" could just as consistently refuse to of an object. but its meaning for the artist's soulJo Ruskin taught that
include naturalistic designs in his structures, apparently preferring "all most lovely forms and thoughts are directly taken from natural
highly abstract patterns that on the surface seemed much more objects," so that the artist should always turn to nature for inspiration.
artificial. The vast majoriry of Wright's decorative motifs are geomet- And yet he also declared that art must abstract from nature to convey
ric abstractions designed not so much to look like the natural forms its deepest trurhs. 71 This was especially the case with architecture,
Ruskin wrote, \I..,.hieh "delights in Absuaction and fears to complete One other author whose influence Wright explicitly acknowledged
her forms. "-;'! An artist should distinguish bet\'Veen mere imitation and from his early years as an architectural apprentice was the English critic
truth. "There is a moral as well as material truth," Ruskin wrote, "a Owen Jones, whose book The G1'IlmmarofOmamentconrained hun-
truth of impression as well as of form-of thought as well as of mat- dreds of sample decorative patterns from the grear civilizations of
rer; and the truth of impression and thought is a thousand times the human history. Anna \Xiright's kindergarten textbooks had been simi-
more important of the rwO."7.~ By using signs and symbols that con- larly filled with designs for the child to imitate with his Froebel blocks,
veyed deep emotional meaning even though devoid of any narurallike- bur Jones's designs were far more complex and beautiful. awash in
ness. an artist could represent the highest truths. Not ro strive for those bright colors and geometric patterns. After checking the book out from
truths was ro violate artistic integrity. "Truth." wrote Ruskin in an his uncle's church library, Wright bought a packet of onionskin paper
aphorism that echoed the Lloyd Jones family motto. "cannot be per- and traced the ornaments for many evenings. As with Viollet-Ie-Duc's
sisted in without pains; but is worth them."!'; Dictionnaire raisonne. he was searching in Jones for a vocabulary in
Similar lessons came from Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the which ro express his personal vision. Bur Jones offered more than just
great French architect and theorist whose Dictionnaire raisonne made a collection of pretty designs. He. coo. was in search of principles and
such a deep impression on the young Wright that he later called it "the offered thirty-seven numbered "propositions" as formal rules for his
only really sensible book on architecture in the world.'-;-' Unlike G1'IlmmarofOmamem. "I read the 'propositions,'" Wright wrore forty
Ruskin, who was adamantly opposed to the use of machine-made years later, "and felt the first five were dead right. "81 Jones argued that
objects or new construction materials such as cast iron. Viollet-Ie-Duc the decorative arts existed to serve architecture, which must in turn
encouraged architects ro explore any rools and materials that technol- reflect and serve the material and spiritual needs of its age. Archirecrun:
ogy had pur at their disposal. demanding only that they employ those and decoration should be combined so as co produce "fitness. propor-
materials honestly."6 \V'hcn Wright repeatedly wrote of the need for tion, harmony. the result of all which is repose." Jones's 6fth proposi-
architects ro make their work conform to "the nature of materials." he rion had an especially familiar ring to it: "That which is beautiful is
was relying on Viollet-Ie-Duc as one of his chief authorities. Most of true; thar which is true must be beautiful. "8~ Jones also offered more
all, though. the French architect gave Wright a concrete architectural specific advice. which added further syntax to Wright's own Euclidian
restatement of the abstract idealist philosophies the young man had grammar. "All ornament," he argued, "should be based upon a geo-
imbibed from so many sources during his youth. In the long entry on metrical construction," and "every assemblage of forms should be
style in the Dictiormaire raisonne, for instance, Viollet-le-Duc argued arranged on certain definite proportions; the whole and every partic-
that "no creative work ... can truly live unless it possesses what we call ular should be a multiple of some simple unit. "R3 The specific propo-
style." And how did one achieve this key to artistic greatness? The sitions may have been new, but the principles behind them already
young Wright would surely have recognized the language in which the seemed quite natural to the young architect.
French architecr stated his response: "Style." he wrote, .. is the man~fos Wright read these and other authors in his restless search to define
tation ofan ideal based on il principLe. ,,-- his own architectural voice, his own expression of an ideal based on a
To achieve style, Viollet-Ie-Duc declared. the architect must go to principle, and in 1900 he synthesized what he had learned in an essay
nature and observe it closely to discover the principles that already titled ''A Philosophy of Fine Art," one of the least well known bur most
existed in the order of the universe. "Architecture, this most human of important of his career. In it he centered his theory of art on the doc-
creations." he wrote. "is bm an application of principles that are born trine of "conventionalization."K4 The artist, he declared, must do more
outside of us .... Gravitational force existed before we did; we mere- than merely imitate nature; he must see "with a prophetic eye." His
ly deduced the statics of it. Geometry. too. was already existent in the job was to distill natural beauty into its "conventional" essence. so that,
universal order; we merely took note of its laws. and applied them. The for example. the decorative lotus on an ancient Egyptian temple would
same thing is true of all aspects of the architectural art; proportions- long survive the natural flower that had inspired it. Through this "rare
indeed. even decoration-must arise our of the great natural order and dif6cuh process," Wright said, the Rower's "natural character was
whose principles we must appropriate in rhe measure thar human really revealed and intensified in terms of stone, gaining for it an
intel1igence permits us to do SO."78 Starting from this premise, Viollet- imperishable significance, for the Life principle of the flower is trans-
Ie-Due set our ro demonstrate how the laws of geometry could be used lated to terms of building stone to satisfy the Ideal of a real 'need.' This
to derive the structures of natural crystals (Wright would surely have is Conventionalization, and it is Poetry. "8~ The purpose of such
recognized in this an almost identical exercise that Froebel had his abstract ornamentation was far more than simply to clothe a building
kindergarten pupils perform) and that the laws of these crystals could, with superfluous decoration. In Wright's view, the task of art was to
in turn. be used to discover the most natural and appropriate principles conventionalize the state of nature-define its symbolic meaning-
for handling architectural materials. 79 Applying these basic principles, lest civilization forget its own rootS and decay. "Of all Art, whatsoev-
one could then assemble all of a building's parts into a unified whole by er," Wright declared, "perhaps Architecture is the Art best fitted to
subordinating them to a common architectural scale. "What is the teach this lesson. for in its practices this problem of 'conventionaliz-
scale?" Viollet-Ie-Duc asked. "It is the relation of all the parts to unicy."RO ing' Nature is worked out at its highest and best.... A work of Arch i-

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 17

- - - ~ -- - - . - - - - - -
tecture is a great coordination with a distinct and vital organism, but to have been partly the expressions of Wright's unfailing competitive-
it is in no sense naturalistic-it is the highest, most subjective, con- ness with other architects, as when he sometimes hurried to outdo the
ventionalization of Nature known to man, and at the same time it European modernists at their own game. But whereas the story of
must be organically true to Nature when it is really a work of Arr."86 Wright's design grammar keeps circling back to a common idealist cen-
ter, any comparable story about his difterent design vocabularies nec-
essarily wanders over much broader terrain, feeling more like a whim-
THE DANCE OF OUTWARD FORMS
sical treasure hunt in uncharted waters than an unswerving pilgrimage
Having placed Frank Lloyd Wright in the context of Emerson. Froebel, to a known shrine.
Viollet-Ie-Duc, and other romantic idealists, it finally becomes possi- Where will we find the chief sources for Wright's favorite aesthetic
ble to understand what he meant when he called for an "organic" tropes? These, [00, for the most part came early. One of the most
architecture. In arguing that architecture should strive as much as pos- important was the Wisconsin landscape itself, especially the rolling
sible to be natural without being naturalistic and should emulate the countryside around the Lloyd Jones family farms where Wright even-
principles of nature without imitating its forms. he was joining some tually built Taliesin. 89 A region where fields and scattered woodlands
of the most influential thinkers of his time. Thus he could write in mingle easily amid low hills and gentle valleys, southwestern Wiscon-
1896: "Say ro yourself: my condition is artificial. So I cannot copy sin was a classic pastoral landscape, neither wholly anificial nor whol-
Nature and I will not slavishly imitate her. but I have a mind ro con- ly wild. As a boy, Wright spent long hours exploring the cerrain to read
trol the shaping of artificial things and to learn from Nature her sim- in it "this marvelous book-of-books, Experience. the only true read-
ple truths of form. function, and grace ofline. Nature is a good teacher. ing. the book of Creation." For the rest of his life he believed that
I am a child of hers. and apart from her precepts cannot flourish ... ~ "from sunrise to sunset there can be nothing so surpassingly beautiful
One way to think about \Vright's long career is to regard him as a man in any cultivated garden as in these wild Wisconsin pastures."I)O The
whose aesthetic theory and moral philosophy were more or less com- boy learned the common weeds and trees he encountered. and later
plete by the first decade of the twentieth century. One gets very little declared-following Emerson and Viollet-Ie-Duc-that "the secret of
sense that he changed his mind thereafter about anything that really all styles in architecture was the same secret that gave character to the
mattered to him. despite the fact that his architecture continued ro trees. "91 Despite repeated rebellion at the hard physical labor his uncles
evolve along strikingly diverse lines and his personal life underwent demanded of him, Wright's later descriptions of his summers in the
several major upheavals. Throughout it all, his core principles Helena Valley are openly sentimental. Even the repetitive farm work,
remained rigidly intact. But because the grammar of his thought was which he often hated. eventually became a kind of metaphor for the
ultimately Platonic and sought its expression in the endless multitude rhythmic patterns of music and of "the obvious poetry in the mathe-
of forms in which a shape-shifting nature clothed itself. it could accom- matics of this universe"<):-though he also not so sentimentally told
modate virtually any vocabulary Wright chose to adopt. And so this an apprenrice that farming was "all pulling tits and shovelingshit."9'
most unbending and single-minded of men could also be astonishing- Southwestern Wisconsin is, first and foremost, a sedimentary
ly protean in his ability to assimilate new forms. Organic unity was the landscape in which limestone and sandstone take turns serving as
key ro organic diversity: the unchanging inward principles were the bedrock for the general topography.94 The limestone in particular has
still point of a turning world. a stage for the kaleidoscopic dance of thin hori7.0nral bedding planes that fracture the rock and give it a rec-
outward forms. tilinear appearance that resembles nothing so much as rough masonry.
For this reason, any search for the specific vocabularies in which For a child already accusmmed to looking for the underlying geome-
Wright designed his buildings means rummaging widely to look for tries of nature, the lesson of this blocklike stone must have seemed a
eclectic influences large and small. Some were quite fundamental, con- striking confirmation of Wright's kindergarten training. "See the prin-
stituting such deep obsessions that they operated almost as core prin- ciple that 'builds,' in nature, at work in stone," he wrote. "Geometry
ciples themselves. changing their form but always recapitulating their the principle, busy with materials.... Read the grammar of the Earth
deeper meanings. Here one thinks of such basic materials as limestone in a particle of stone!"95 No building material was more evocative for
and raw wood. to which Wright always returned, and of certain spatial Wright chan limestone. He had his masons lay it according to a regu-
devices-the concealed entrance. the central hearth, the constricted larly irregular formula so that the resulting walls would mimic the orig-
passage leading to releasing space, the opposition between tree house inal strata of the quarries from which it came (figure 5).9 6 So strong
and cave, prospect and refuge. 88 Others seem to have resulted from was his attraction to this effect that he sometimes forced other materi-
chance encoumers with people or materials or ideas that for whatever als into the same pattern. Thus, the sandstone at Fallingwater, which
reason stuck with Wright long enough to leave a mark on at least a few in its original form has little horizontal bedding, is laid in such a way
of his buildings. Some of these were passing fancies, often involving as to make it virtually indistinguishable from a Wisconsin limestone. 9 ?
experimental new materials like the individually cast concrete blocks of One could argue that the same is true of Wright's favorite crick in
the California Romanzas, the glass tubing at the Johnson Administra- masonry walls of using brick-colored mortar [0 disguise vertical joints
tion Building, the corrugated fiberglass at Beth Sholom. Others seem and raking out horizontal joints to mimic the natural strata of sedi-
 an outcrop itself. To inhabit a limestone ~andscape was to be sur~
rounded by bubbling springs. meandering streams, eroding slopes, dis~
solving stone, the signs of a terrain visibly responding to the flow of
time and malleable to human hands and human dreams-a funda-
mentally forgiving. nurturing place. One of Auden's most striking pas-
sages aboUt the homelike qualities of this landscape could almost have
been written to describe Wright himself:

What could be more Like Mother or a fitter background

For her son. the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That/or all his faults he is loved.' whose works are but
Extensions ofhis power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains. from a wild to a formaL vineyard.
Are ingeniolls but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers. whether
By pleasing or teasing. can easily take. lo :!

There is one orher aspect of this scene that speaks to Wright's aes-
theric vision and his larger attitudes toward nature. When Wright first
knew the Helena VaHey as a child. it was still on the cusp of a dosing
frontier. a place that had ceased to be wild during the lives of Wright's
Figure 5: Frank Lloyd Wrighl. Detail of house and sleps, Taliesin III, own grandparents. The human and the natural seemed comfortable
Spring Green. 1925
neighbors here, and this came to be Wright's model as well. If one
arranges American cultural conceptions of landscape along an abstract
continuum-from city to suburb to pastoral to wild-then Wright's
mencary rock. 9S Indeed. the much~vaunced horizomaliry that charac~ preferred spaces lay between the two poles, shifting from suburb
tcrizes the buildings of Wright's Prairie period surely owes at least as toward pastoral in the years after his ignominious flight from Oak
much to the geology of midwestern limestones as it does to the flatness Park.IO} Wright had little use for nature in the raw bur was also increas~
of midwestern prairies. ingly hostile to cities, and so he was drawn to middle landscapes. to
Bue there is anorher property, subtler and less obvious than hori~ worked countrysides that had been domesticated and made beautiful
zancal bedding planes, which limestone and sandstone share. Both by rhe human labors upon them. When forced to build in any other
rock.<; erode easily. so that when they appear as OUtcrops on the crests setting. his impulse was to turn his buildings inward, sheltering them
of hills. they have a weathered. ancient appearance. "In Wisconsin," with protective walls, recessed windows. and overhanging eaves as in
Wright said. "erosion has. by way of age, softened everything. "99 This his suburban Prairie houses. In the case of truly urban sites such as
soft quality is familiar to anyone who has lived in a well~weathered sed- those of Unity Temple, the Johnson Administration Building, or the
imentary landscape. lending it a gentle. homelike feel that can only be Guggenheim Museum. he shut out the surrounding environment altO-
described as domestic. No one has described this quality more mov- gether and replaced it with a beautiful inner space that was wholly
ingly than W. H. Auden in his poem "In Praise of Limestone," which artificial.
begins: "If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones I Are Only in places like the Helena Valley did he wholly open his struc~
consistently homesick for. this is chieAy I Because it dissolves in tures to their surroundings. 10-1 Taliesin looked OUt not on wild nature.
water. "100 The result. Auden wrote, is a region of "shorr distances and but on fields and pastures-a classic pastoral retreat. Wright devoted
definite places." whose inhabitants. "accustomed to a stone that almost as much attention to shaping the grounds of his estate-plant~
responds." easily become "Adjusted to the local needs of valleys I ing orchards. adding a millpond. constructing new farm buildings.
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking. "101 This was maintaining the fields-as he did on the house itself. l05 For the whole
Wright's ideal landscape. where one could gaze from atop the weath- of his life, he tried to situate his structures in an ideal space that mim-
ered outcrops across woodlots and cornfields to farms nestled in their icked this one. "When selecting a site for your house," he advised his
protective valleys. The themes of prospect and refuge that recur so fre~ clients, "there is always the question of how dose to the city you should
quently and profoundly in his mature architecture are everywhere pres~ be, and that depends on what kind of slave you are. The best thing to
ent in such a place. When Wright built Taliesin on a hillside near his do is go as far out as you can get.... Go way out into the country-
uncles' farms. he placed it-the shining brow-to make it seem like what you regard as 'too far' -and when others follow ... move on. "106

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 19 I

I
- - - - - - -- - - - .. - - - - - -- -- ~
 In thus recomme.nding a pastoral landscape as the ideal site for his Sullivan's most important influence on Wright may have been
r,:
..
i:

houses, he was also recapitulating the contradictions of the American both more mundane and more cosmic. He educated his young pro-
frontier experience, in which the migrations of those who sought new tege in the nitty-gritty details of architectural practice. helped finance
homes and wide open spaces eventually reproduced the very crowding the construction of Wright's House in Oak Park of 1889-90 (plates
they sought to flee. His urban utopia. Broadacre City, would be the 5-7, 21-26). and unintentionally launched his independent career.
ultimate embodiment of this paradox, proposing a complete decen- In the realm of ideas. Sullivan was as steeped as Wright in Emersonian
tralization of urban life. "We can go forward to the ground." he wrotc, romanticism. regarding himself as a disciple of Walt Whitman. His
"not the ciry going to the coumry hur the country and city becoming own dearest wish was to fulfill the romantic vision of the architect as
one. "IOi That in such a secring Wright himself would almost surely universal artist, heroic individual, and prophet of democracy. while
have felt compelled to move on as his neighbors pressed in on ever}' also embodying the no less romantic role of the artist as cultural crit-
side was a contradiction he never resolved, perhaps because he did not ic. For Wright, Sullivan was first and foremost a model of the artist
live long enough to see it happen to the valley that had inspired this striving for original style. refusing to compromise with the reigning
vision of a natural city. orthodoxies of his day (in this, both men looked for inspiration (0 the
Wright did not, of course, launch his architectural career in the example of Henry Hobson Richardson). Sullivan also spoke and wrote
Helena Valley. despite his early efforrs helping construct the Lloyd in an oracular prose that tried to emulate Whitman-admittedly with
Jones family chapel. For his first quarter-century of professional prac- modest success-and it is perhaps from him that Wright acquired
tice he worked in a far more urban setting. Chicago, and this too cer- some of his own literary style and ambition. Although Wright later
cainly left its marks on his aesthetic vocabulary. When he arrived there asserted [hat he never actually read Sullivan's 1924 Atttobiograp/~JI ofan
in 1887. it was very much a ciry on the make. irs downtown still enjoy- Idea (a statement that is itself evidence to the contrary). its parallels
ing the extraordinary building boom that followed the Great Fire of with Wright's An Autobiography are striking enough to make this claim
1871. No doubt because of that boom Chicago was a place where archi- almost laughable. 109 In Sullivan. Wright recognized a kindred spirit
tects often seemed larger than life, veritable culture heroes who were who also worshipped where nature and spirit met-at the divine altar
single-handedly remaking the ciry in their own image. When Hen ry of Unity.
Blake Fuller wrote his classic novel With the Procession about Chicago Sullivan gained his fame by designing tall office buildings; Wright.
in the 1890s, he included an architect among its principal characters by designing houses. In fact, both were contributing to the new urban
to reflect the special role such men were playing in the city. lOS Among landscape of late-nineteenth-century America, for the downtown in
those who embraced this romantic image of the architect as hero, none which Sullivan worked was the necessary counterpart to Wright's sub-
did so more self-consciously than Louis Sullivan. The young Wright urban neighborhoods. The commercial buildings of the central busi-
soon managed to gain a position with Sullivan's firm, which was then ness district provided the workplaces for commuters (most of them
at work on the Auditorium Building of 1886-90. one of the most men), who left their children and spouses (most of them women) in
famous of the tall office buildings that were transforming the Chicago the comfortable houses on large lots that distinguished new suburbs
skyline. For the next half-decade. Wright served as chief assistant to such as Oak Park. River Forest. and Riverside. Even the names of these
the man whom he would call Lieber Meister for the rest of his life. places suggested the image of pastoral retreat that their developers were
The extent of Sullivan's influence on Wright is today rather trying to promote. The suburb was meant to embody domesticity. a
difficult to assess. Certainly Wright is unusually generous in acknowl- place to which harried businessmen could retreat at day's end, where
edging the training he received from Sullivan. who gave him his first families could nurture children in isolation from the crowds. dangers.
extensive experience in running a large architectural firm. It was Sulli- and vices of the city. Wright's houses were intended to serve this
van and his partner Dankmar Adler who introduced Wright (0 the domestic ideal. and many of their most familiar features-the central
engineering technologies that were so dramatically transforming archi- hearth. the sheltering eaves. the windows from which a person could
tecture in the late nineteenth century. Sullivan's own most distin- see without being seen-were metaphors for enclosure to protect the
guishing trademark-the almost eroticaJly florid vegetative surface sanctity of the family. In 1896-97 Wright embellished and helped pub-
decorations with which he covered his buildings-appeared only lish a book tided The House Beautiful, written by WiJliam C. Gannett.
briefly in Wright's work. One sees echoes of this ornamental influence a Unitarian minister who was a close friend of his uncle Jenkin. In
in Wright's William H. Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois. of that book Gannett described an ideal house whose purpose was to
1893-94 (plates 9-13), bur he rapidly moved on to rhe much more geo- embody the principle of family love. and situated that house in "A
metric patterns for which he later became famous-patterns that world of care without; I A world of strife shut out; I A world of love
would seem to owe more (0 Froebel. Owen Jones. and the Arts and shut in!"JlO He argued that it should nurture the spirit no less than it
Crafts movement than to Sullivan's ornamemal practice. But stripped sheltered the body.~ home." Gannett declared. "should be home for
of their surface decorations, Sullivan's buildings shared this basic con- all our parts. Eyes and ears are eager to be fed with harmonies in color
cern for geometric expression and so were of a piece with the mher and form and sound; these are their natural food as much as bread and
intellectual influences that were shaping Wright's aesthetic sensibility. meat are food for other parts." If an architect could feed the soul in

iNllllAM CROt\. J:.

these ways, he would make of the home "a building of God, a house But whereas Sullivan always viewed the fair as the beginning of
not made with hands."1II Wright's lifelong architectural commitment the end for his own career, it was much more of a starting point for
to the domestic ideal is surely, in parr, a product of the Chicago sub- Wright. in twO important ways. One is by now well known. At the
urbs where he raised-and then abandoned-his own family. World's Columbian Exposition, Wright almost surely visited Japan's
Gannerr's book reflected another influence that touched Wright Ho-o-den exhibit (figure 6), a reconstructed temple on a rustic island
in Chicago. By the 1890S the city was home to a group of artists who set well off from the formal axes of the classical main fairgrounds.
were deeply influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement that William Wright had already encountered Japanese art in the print collection of
Morris and others were promoting in England. m Dedicated to pre- his first employer. the Chicago architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee. and
serving traditional artisanal relationships to craft production, Morris's probably elsewhere as well, given the general Western interest in Japan-
movement had fostered communities of artists who worked together in ese culture during the late nineteenth century. Until then. though, he
all mediums-printing, glassware, pottery, textiles, furniture, and not had never actually seen a Japanese building. We will never know how
least architecture-as a way of retrieving skills that might otherwise be he reacted to the Ho-o-den. whether it came as a sudden revelation of
lost to machine technologies. Their collective work had a profound new architectural possibilities. or simply planted th.e seed of an idea
effect on Wright, and The House Beautiful. which he produced on a that would not finally flower for another seven years.. But there can be
handpress with his cliem William H. Winslow. was an expression of no doubt about the many parallels between Wrights mature style and
that influence. Although Wright never embraced Morris's communi- Japanese domestic architecture. The open floor plan. the flowing inte-
tarian values or his socialist politics, he did gather around himself a rior space partitioned with movable screens, the light-colored panels
group of artists working in different mediums to produce the sculp- outlined with dark wooden strips. the generous fenestration with its
tures, murals. and stained glass that so distinguished his Prairie school attendant abundance of light. the overhanging ea~ the shallow roof,
houses. Later. the Taliesin Fellowship upheld this early commitment and the overall feeling of a building half-tempted to float free from its
to the decorative arts. and Wright's books echoed Arts and Crafts print- foundations with apparent indifference to the ordinary demands of
ing traditions right up to the end of his life. Wright, of course, broke gravity-all of these were elements that Wright surely absorbed into
with Morris (and with John Ruskin) in defending the virtues of the core vocabulary of his Prairie houses. 1I6
machine production. bur he did so in the service of more fundamen- Wright himself went well out of his way to deny all this, which in
tal values-the integrity of materials, the unity of form and function, his case is usually a good sign that the thing being denied may repre-
the belief that even the most mundane object should be made beauti- sent an influence so deep that it threatened his own heavily defended
ful-that he shared with the Arts and Crafts movement. 1I3 Wright's sense of originality. Pc;rhaps as a way of acknowledging his debt with-
furniture and ornamentation clearly owed much to Arts and Crafts out admitting its direct architectural significance, Wright repeatedly
influences. and even his early houses owed something: flatten the roof asserted that it was Japanese prints, not buildings~ that had affected his
of a Tudor revival building, remove its vertical members, and it is not mature style. "I have never confided to you," he told the Taliesin Fel-
hard to see what is left as a transitional step on the way to a Prairie lowship in 1954. "the extent to which the Japanese print per se as such
house. has inspired me. I never got over my first experience with it and I shall
Among the most important Chicago influences on Wright's design never probably recover. I hope I shan't. It was tbe great gospel of sim-
vocabulary, however, is one he tried hard to hide and for which we plification that came over, the elimination of all that was insignifi-
therefore have the least documentation. In 1893 Chicago played host to
the World's Columbian Exposition, one of the most remarkable fairs
ever held in America. Under the influence of the architect Daniel H.
Burnham, one of Sullivan's leading rivals, the fair's managers adopted
neoclassical Beaux-Arts motifs for the buildings of its central Court of
Honor. The result was the "White City," a magnificent vision of archi-
tectural beauty that would help spur a classical revival throughout the
United States for at least the next three decades. Architectural histori-
ans ever since have used the fair as a benchmark in the Story of mod-
ern architecture. Most have agreed with Louis Sullivan that it
represented a kind of setback-Sullivan would have called it an unmit-
igated disaster-for the new forms of architecture that he and other
members of the Chicago school had tried to pioneer. 114 Wright himself
certainly agreed that the fair's aesthetic was a step in the wrong direc-
tion, and he opposed all such revivalism as essentially hostile to his
own search for an organic architecture that would spring from Amer-
ican soil.1I5 Figure 6: Ho-oden, World'$ Columbian Exposition, Chicago. 1893

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 21

 perfeCt architectural beauty (figute 8). Whether or not one agreed with
that vision-whether one was drawn to the Beaux-Arts classicism of
the Court of Honor, or to Louis Sullivan's polychromatic Transporta-
tion Building (figure 9) or [0 the exotic Oriental structures of the Mid~
way Plaisance or to [he elegant Ho-o-den itselt~was almost beside the
point. If [here was no concern about [he permanence of such Struc-
tures. one could call them into being as if by the wave of a magician's
wand. constructed of steel and dad in plaster to give them the appear-
ance, if not the substance, of eternal beauty. Wright later objected to
such illusions as a dishonest use of materials, but he can hardly have
failed to notice the extraordinary effects that could be achieved archi-
tecturally-the amazing array of forms that could be paraded before
the eyes of an awestruck audience-if solidity and permanence were
not the paramount goals. The materials used at the fair would. for the
most pan. never have survived a midwestern winter. but that hardl:'
mattered to rhe millions who were struck dumb by what the architects
had achieved there. Virtually everyone who saw the White City regard~
ed it as one of the wonders of the age. A British journalisr who visited
it just before it was scheduled to be torn down was typical in declaring.
"Nothing that I have ever seen in Paris, in London. in St. Petersburg.
or in Rome. could equal the effect produced by the illumination of
these great white palaces that aUtumn night." They left on the mind
"an impression of perfect beauty."121
Figure 7: Katsukawa Shunsho. The Actor
Ichikawa Danjuro V. c. 1777-B6. Brocade
For all rheir grandeur and glory, the buildings of the fair were
print. Formerly collection Fronk Lloyd Wright meant to express an ideal that could nm have been realized had they
been required to last for a long time. Like all the great nineteenth-
cant. "117 Wright became a great collector of Japanese an (figure 7) and century fair architecture, from the 1851 Crystal Palace forward, they
published a major essay on irs significance in 1912, claiming for it the were follies. achieving wonderful cffects at rhe expense of perma-
same lessons of anrinaturalism and formalism that he associated with nence,12.2 They enabled their builders to play with rhe larest materials
Froebel's pedagogy. "A Japanese anist." he declared, Ugrasps form and technologies. showcasing the miracles [hat new ideas and inven-
always by reaching underneath for its geometry.... The forms, tor tions could achieve. As such, they expressed a number of high ideals:
instance, in the pine tree (as of every natural object on earch). the progress, improvement. the achievements of science and an, the genius
geomctry that underlies and constitutes the peculiar pine character of of heroically creative individuals. the onward march of civilization. and
rhe trec-what Plato meanr by the eternal idea-he knows familiarl~'. the triumph of mind, spirit. and will. But among the mosr profound
The unseen is to him visible, "IIH No other people, he argued, had more lessons of the fair was one that could be expressed only as a paradox.
completely committed themselves to conventionalizing their morals On the one hand. the Exposition's goal was to point toward [he future
and their vision of namre into an integrated whole, making the entire~ by inventing a fantasy world-a White City-that was as yet beyond
ty of Japanese civilization "a true work of An."119 In this, Japan served the outer limits of human possibiliry: i[ attempted to embody, howev-
as the most perfect possible example of the integrity and unity that er briefly and beguilingly, an eternal ideal. On the other hand. the very
Wright believed to be the object of his own art. "No more valuable fact that the fair's buildings could not survive, that they would be dis~
object lesson was ever afforded civilization than this instance of a peo~ mantled once the crowds had left and would henceforth live only in
pie who have made of their land and the buildings upon it, of their memory, was itself a metaphor for all human creation. However glori~
gardens, their manners and garb. their utensils, adornments, and their ously one might seek an ideal. one could never finally and permanently
very gods, a single consistent whole, inspired by a living sympathy with attain it. Even the Acropolis was now a noble ruin. Since all architec~
Namre as spontaneous as it was inevitable."llo ture would eventually suffer a similar fate, one could reasonably ask
The Ho-o-den would have been lesson enough for Wright to take whether it was better to strive after the illusory hope of designing a
away from the World's Columbian Exposition, but there may have building that would last forever, or to point toward an ideal so com-
been one other lesson so deep that it has not heretofore been much pelling that it would survive the building that expressed it. Certainly
noticed by scholars. It was simply this: the fair was temporary. The Japanese architecture did not include permanence among its highest
extraordinary buildings that atose beside Lake Michigan on the south goals, and the same was true of the White City. Its purpose was to
side of Chicago had been called into being to realize an ideal vision of showcase technological and aesthetic possibilities that would influence

'.\'Illlt.,"v' CRO"JO~.

~ -- - - - - _ _ _ _ _ _ - - ~ ~ ~ h Y V ~_
Figure 8: View from the Peri~tyle, World's Columbian Expo~ilion, Chicago. 1893 Figure 9: Adler and Sullivan. Golden Doorway, Transportation Building,
World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago. 1893

the course ofhismry itself. In so doing. it implicitly asked whether the architecture when, less than three years after the fair, he erected the
architect's most important achievement should be the physical struc- Romeo and Juliet Windmill near his aunts' school in the Helena
ture or the impact that such a structure might make upon the human Valley (plate 49). Although he intended the structure to be permanent
mind. The fair suggested thar it might be possible to leave a profound and it held up reasonably well over the years-albeit with significam
impression on the collective cultural memory with "demonstration" restoration and eventual reconstruction-it shared with the buildings
buildings capable of resonating through a thousand subsequent works of the fair a clear sense that its utilitarian function was merely an excuse
even if they did nor themselves survive the ebb and flow of time. 1l3 We for its extravagantly elegant, playful. even ribald form. It would have
will never know whether Frank Lloyd Wright consciously pondered been right at home on the Midway Plaisance in Chicago.
such questions as he stood before the Ho-o-den and wandered about Throughout his career Wright was drawn [Q fantasies such as this
the Court of Honor. but his later practice suggests that he knew full one, many of which he must have known were not likely to be real-
well the expressive possibilides of an architecture that flirted. follylike, ized. Some, like the wildly exaggerated Tudor of the Nathan G. Moore
with impermanence. House in Oak Park of 1895. or the vaulting Crystal Palace-like skeleton
of the remodeled Rookery Building lobby of 1905. or the explicit fo)-
lies of Chicago's Midway Gardens of 1913-14 (plates 133-144), actually
THE RIDDLE OF A LEAKY ROOF
did come into being. Many more remained ideas on paper, memories
One great legacy of the World's Columbian Exposition for Wrighr, without physical expression: The Mile High Illinois skyscraper of 1956.
therefore, was the lesson that every building, no matter how humble or the Doheny Ranch Resort of 1923, the Cottage Group Hotel and
small, could enjoy the expressive freedom of the folly and also pro- SpOrts Club for Huntington Hartford of 1946-48, the Marin Counry
foundly influence the structures of architects working far in the future. Fair Pavilion of 1957-59 (see plates 19 8- 199, 316-318, 34J-342. 388).
The buildings of the Exposition had achieved a unique playfulness and Broadacre City and the Usonian houses were more constrained in their
freedom by pretending that time did not exist, and they did so in such impulses, but they tOO sought 0 serve as visionary templates trans-
a way as to affect the course of American architecture for the next thir- mitting a Wrightian legacy to the landscapes and memories of the
ty years. Like all follies-like all temporary buildings that revel in their future. Built or unbuilt, all such designs expressed the visionary joy of
own evanescent opportunities-the fair gave its builders the chance m folly architecture, all were made as much of memory as of masonry or
try experimental ideas, explore extreme effects, and express their most mortar, and all served as demonstration buildings whose purpose was
exuberant visions in ways that would nor have been possible under any [Q leave Wright's unmistakably personal mark on all who would fol-

other circumstances. Certainly Sullivan's grand entrance to the Trans- low in his footsteps.
portation Building went beyond anything he had attempted in more Looking at Wright's drawings of such projects today, it is hard [Q
permanent structures, and the same was true for many other architects believe that he really imagined they would ever be built. But because
and engineers whose works ranged from the great Ferris Wheel to the one could easily say the same of so many other Wright buildings that
Court of Honor itself. Wright himself experienced the pleasures of folly did come to fruition, one must be very careful not to draw the wrong

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 23

conclusion about the meaning of these fantasy projects. Above all,
Wright sought the freedom co express his own creative genius as an
artist. During his years at Oak Park. when he was still trying to uphold
a conservative suburban lifestyle not unlike that of his bourgeois neigh-
bors, Wright for the most part reined in his more playful side. He built
structures that for all their originaliry still upheld Gannett's tradition-
al family values, still conformed to many ordinary expectations about
domestic architecture. still usually managed to be built more or less
within his clients' budgets. After fleeing the staid environs of Oak Park.
however, Wright's impulse toward more exuberant structures began to
playa greater role in his work. The possibilities that he had first dis-
covered in the follies of the 1893 Exposition increasingly encouraged
him to explore the endlessly plastic manipulations of geometry and Figure 10: Frank Lloyd Wright. Unitarian Church. Madison. 1945-51.
form that were (he core of his idealism. If we wish to answer the riddle Interior view with buckets for collecting water

of his leaky roofs, it is here. to the folly and the imperatives of roman-
dc individualism, that we must finally turn. roofs for houses in temperate latitudes. he increased the likelihood that
As I suggested at the outset, the riddle is more profound than it they would have to carry their winter snow burdens for longer peri~
first seems. The practical failings of Wright's buildings are so numerous ods. At the same time, he eliminated the attic so as to increase the
that one cannor hope to catalogue them in an essay of this size. height of public rooms, which could now soar right to the top of the
Although the interruption of Herbert Johnson's dinner parry by Wing- building-through the space that the anic had formerly occupied. I27 In
spread's leaking roof is undoubtedly the most famous example of these the process. he failed to recognize that the attic existed in vernacular
failings, it is hardly the most dramatic. When members of the Beth architecture to serve several important functions. Most obviously. it
Sholom Synagogue (plates 372-375) held their first High Holy Days enabled the roof to be more steeply pitched-but then. Wright was no
celebration in 1960, water literally poured ontO their heads from the fan of pitched roofs during his Prairie years. (Later. he sometimes used
rain outside, requiring the congregation to move elsewhere. The rabbi steep pitched roofs for aesthetic effect, as at Beth Sholom and the Uni-
confessed that he was a nervous wreck each time he had to plan a ser- tarian Church. bur leaks remained a persistent problem.) The attic pro-
vice or a wedding. and jokesters in Philadelphia began to ask. "Why go vided extra storage space-but Wright was generally opposed to
on the Water Wagon? Join Wright's Beth Shalom and get your water cluttering his designs with the kind of chaos chat usually accompanies
free. "114 Workers at the Johnson Administration Building became so storage. Finally, it served to comain the extreme swings of temperature
accustomed to the leaks from its Pyrex glass-tubing skylight chat they and moisture that occur at the topS of most buildings-but Wright
were never without five-gallon buckets near their desks to catch the was for some reason not always arrentive to the importance of vapor
drips-though buckets could not protect them when the glass itself barriers and ventilation in the ourer shell of his houses. The result was
occasionally descended to the floor.'lS And yet falling tubing was noth- that Wright's roofs could experience problems from many different
ing compared to the problems that parishioners faced at Wauwatosa's sources. The copper roof of the Unitarian Church (figure 10) has
Greek Orthodox Church (plates 376-379). There, Wright's blue tiled leaked from rain and snow, and sometimes simply from the moisture
dome experienced frost heaving within a few years of its being com- that the congregation itself exhales while breathing in the room
pleted and began [0 leak. The roof's accumulated moisture gradually beneath this natural vapor barrier. The flat-roofed Usonian houses have
loosened the two-inch asbestos insulation behind the church's interior had moisture problems as well. When. for instance, the new owner of
ceiling. which began to sag in 1965. On Easter Sunday 1966, a large the first Herbert Jacobs House in Madison of 1936-37 (plates 241-245)
section of the ceiling collapsed. fortunately at a time when the sanctu- sought to restore it in the 1980s. he discovered severe structural dam-
ary was unoccupied. The asbestos insulation was eventually replaced age in the roof where inadequate insulation had encouraged frequent
with urethane foam, which provided a more effective vapor barrier. but leaks and condensation from the repeated freezing and thawing of
not before so much moisture damage had been done to the dome's poorly drained snow.IlS
exterior tiles that they too had to be replaced with a more durable Roofs were not the only places where these sorts of design prob-
material at considerable expense. 126 lems could occur. Wright's frequent wish to make his buildings appear
Such stories, alas. are only the tip of the iceberg. In the case of to defY gravity produced a lifelong love affair with the cantilever. which
these three buildings. Wright was working with unusual materials, so he often extended farther from its structural supports than conservative
it is hardly surprising that they did not perform quite as originally engineering practice advised. Although he loved to boast that he knew
anticipated. BUI: leaks occurred even when he worked with more tra- more about such ma[(ers than the engineers, and although few of his
ditional materials. especially when he wished to stress a building's hori- cantilevers have actually failed, deflections have been common and
zonraliry. We have already seen that by diminishing the pitches of the occasionally severe. Edgar J. Kaufmann nervously commissioned sev-
-..-......--------------------------
eral engineering studies to determine whether the sags and cracks in by no means limited to houses that had to survive a northern winter.
Fallingwater's famous cantilevers (plates 234-240) might pose a seri- Wright placed La Miniarura, his beautiful house for Mrs. George
ous threat to the building's safety, and one gets the feeling that he was Madison Millard. on the floor of a desert arroyo despite being warned
never completely reassured on this poinr. 129 Not long after it was com- of the attendant danger of floods (plates 178-181). When the inevitable
pleted, the choir loft in Madison's Unitarian Church had deflected happened, he excused himself by declaring that no one had seen such
downward by more than a foot and needed extensive structural repair; rain "in fifty years. "133 The danger at Fallingwater was more calculated.
the cantilevered eave over the building's entrance today sags so much and most visitOrs would probably agree that the risk was well wonh
that those over six feet are in serious danger of bumping their heads running. but it too has suffered damage from floods. IH
on it. The third-floor roof of the Robie House is similarly deflected When his mind was set on a particular architectural effect. Wright
downward by many inches. 130 Any number of Wright buildings have could be as unwilling to compromise with a building's inhabitants-
had to have discreet props added to hold up their sagging cantilevers. his clients-as he was with its natural environment. The uncomfort-
Some of the worst problems are at Taliesin itself, where Wright's lack ableness of his furniture is so legendary that even he complained of
of money often led him to adopt less than optimal solutions to the having been "black and blue in some spot. somewhere, almost all my
design problems he faced. Walking along the building's eastern ter- life from too intimate contact with my own early furniture. "13S Own-
races, for instance, which initially appear to be made of solid stone, ers of Wright houses frequently found them difficult to decorate
one detects an odd springiness underfoot. The reason becomes clear because their architect had so forcefully imposed his unitary vision
when one looks below and sees that flagstones have been laid directly upon them. Ordinary furniture and ornament JUSt did not look right.
on wooden joists. which have not fared well from this treatment. The and even Wright's own furniture could be arranged in only a limited
south terrace beyond Wright's own bedroom. as of 1992, was on the number of ways to suit the space. When owners did the best they could
verge of collapse and required extensive reconstruction before it could with the furniture they possessed. Wright complained that "very few of
safely be used again. Sags and deflections such as these are the norm at [he houses ... were anything but painful to me after the clients
Taliesin. and the total bill for repairing them is estimated in the tens of brought in their belongings."I J6 His preferred solution was for
millions of dollars. them to throw most of their old things away. He told Herberr and
Wright's game of chicken with the force of gravity was matched Katherine Jacobs, when he saw their original possessions: "This stuff
by other refusals to accommodate the surrounding environment. These is all prehistoric, and it will have to go."137
seem especially perplexing when one considers his reputation as an But perhaps Wright's most important refusal to compromise with
"organic" architect whose highest goal was to design buildings that the needs of his clients was financial. His frequent and seemingly will-
would be "naturally" suited to their sites. On the one hand. Wright ful inability to complete his buildings within their promised budgets
could display extraordinary environmental sensitivity in the siring of was nothing less than extraordinary. Wright was quite shameless about
his buildings, practicing passive solar architecture long before it even underestimating costs. When told that the original architect for the
had a name. Whenever possible. he oriented his houses so that three of Johnson Administration Building had estimated that it might COSt
their four sides would receive ful] sun for part of the day: moreover, about $30,000. Wright "snorted and said it was tOO damn much
he tried to extend his eaves JUSt far enough so that they would provide money for the job and he could do a better functional job in more
shade in summer but permit direct lighting from the lower midwinter appropriate manner for a lot less. "1.\8 In the end, his building COSt
sun.I}1 On the other hand, he was also capable of introducing at the nearly $900,000, admittedly for reasons that were not entirely in [he
Jacobs House an innovation called the carport which did away with architect's control. I19 The most extreme cases of Wright's exploding
the four walls of a garage as a way of saving money (and presumably of budgets-the Johnson Building, Fallingwater. the Guggenheim
using yet another cantilever-which has, inevitably, sagged and need- Museum-involved clients who could afford to pay Wright's balloon~
ed repair). To introduce a garage without walls to the cold winter cli- ing expenses, but others were by no means spared. He promised the
mate of Wisconsin, and worse, to place it on the northwest corner of Madison Unitarians that their new church would cost $60,000; the
its building. where it must bear the brunt of winds and drifting snow, final bill was $213.487.61, and that did not include the large amounts
does not seem a particularly sensitive response to the environment. of volunteer and donated labor that were needed to finish it. 140 Beth
Similar indifference to winter cold is reflected in' Wright's regular Sholom and the Wauwatosa Greek Orthodox Church experienced
use of single-paned glass. his intense dislike for double-hung windows. comparable increases. l p In the case of the Usonian houses, which were
his habit of butting glass directly against stone or masonry, where designed to carry a much lower price tag. Wright was somewhat more
caulking will regularly fail, and the general difficulty of keeping his successful at coming in close to budget. though even there he fre-
buildings warm. Herbert and Katherine Jacobs reported that their quently set up circumstances that pushed his clients into paying more
house could be very cold in the early years. and Wright's decision in than they had intended. When. [or inseance. he designed the first
the 1930S to migrate semiannually between Wisconsin and Arizona house for the lot that Herberr and Katherine Jacobs had purchased for
must surely reflect his tacit admission that it was a losing battle to try it, he so filled the property [hat they instantly recognized they would
to keep Taliesin warm.IJl Environmental problems such as these were have to double the size of their lot. 141 Later, he frequently fell into the

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

 ,
habit of blaming any problems with such buildings on his clients' Workroom were located between two layers of glass cubing with no
inability to pay for better materials or more features. Some were so per- easy way co gain access to them; a fifteen~foot-high wheeled scaffold
suaded by this argument thac they felt apologetic about complaining.143 had to be kept in the room so that tubes could be removed and bulbs
The reasons for Wright's cost overruns were manifold. Some were replaced. 147 At the first Jacobs House. the radiant heating system
common 0 virtually all modern architecture. The impulse 0 design beneath the floor had never been wholly successful, bur when its casr-
innovative forms using radically new materials could hardly help but iron pipes finally began to leak, there was no way to gain access to
entail steep learning curves that were bound to be costly, which is why them. The only solution was to remove the entire floor and start over.
Wright was hardly alone among major modern architects in under- The Greek Orthodox Church's congregation made a similar dis-
estimating expenses (or in designing roofs that leaked, for that matter) covery when it sought to clean the ventilation conduits in its building:
-he merely committed the sin more consistently and unapologeti- the conduits were more constricted than usual, had unexpected bends
cally than most. His blueprints could be noOriously difficult to inter- in them, and Wright had left no way to get at them. Special devices
pret, and rhis, combined with his unusual designs, meant that had ro be employed co clean them mechanically. Many other problems
contraccors wasted much time and money trying to figure oue how to have surfaced as well. The congregation holds one of the nation's
work from them. Worse, Wright constantly modified his plans as new largest fund-raising festivals each year, and the bulk of the money it
ideas occurred to him on the construction site, and this toO inevitably raises goes toward maintaining Wright's difficult structure. As a result
jacked up cOSts. He did not hesitate to offer an extremely low esdmate of experiences like these, many of the church's members are more than
in order to gain a contract; then, once the dient was hooked, he offered a little jaded about Frank Lloyd Wright, and some even regard their
any number of reasons why changes in the plan would entail increased building as a great albatross. They are surely not alone. Surveying the
COSts. Money apparently meant very little co him, as his son's descrip- hundreds of Wright buildings that still stand and seeing the many ways
tion makes clear: "He carried his paper money crumpled in any in which they are now decaying, one realizes thar the cost of fully
pocket-trousers, vest, coat or overcoat. He would have to uncrumple restoring them is astronomical. It would unquestionably run to hun-
a bill to see its denomination. He never counted his change. He never dreds of miJIions of dollars. and could easily exceed a billion.
put his money into interest-bearing investments .... He either paid And so one returns co the riddle of these many leaky roofs. What
too much or too little for everything"-if. one might add, he paid at do they tell us about this greatest of all American architects? Surely
all. 144 In Wright's view, apparently, the client's money was a means co Wright's high Emersonian ideals-his pleas for honesty and truth in
the artist's end, with consequences that could be expensive only for the the service of an organic architecture whose integrity would rest on
cliene. One early Wright patron summed up the problem with the fol- nature's own principles-are more than a little inconsistent with his
lowing advice: "Better take warning and be very careful in your dealings personal behavior and the practical failings of his buildings. How could
with him. If he is sane, he is dangerous."145 an organic architect fail to respond to so basic an environmentaJ con-
It is worth mentioning one additional problem with Wright's straint as the need for a house to fend off winter's cold or the need for
buildings that also has important financial implications. They were not its roof to shed water? How could a man of integrity so frequently fail
just expensive to build; they also have proved to be remarkably costly to pay his bills and so often mislead his dients about the bills they
to keep up. All their many problems-the leaks, the sags, the failing themselves would have to pay? How could an artist so devoted to
,~
materials-of course entail repair costs. Wright's affection for using nature surround himself with so much artifice? How could a man so -.:.

expensive or unusual building materials that are not easily replaced has committed to truth so frequently lie? Were these mere inconsistencies,
not helped either. Jeffrey Chusid, the architect in charge of resOring foolish and otherwise, or were they deep contradictions, hypocrisies
the Samuel Freeman House in Los Angeles of 1923-24 (plates 187-191), even, in the very soul of Frank Lloyd Wright?
described the problems he is facing in trying to deal with its twelve By now, the answers to such questions should be reasonably clear.
thousand concrete blocks, of which perhaps a thousand or more have Wright remained throughout his life the romantic he had been since
experienced serious deterioration: "Remember how Tolstoy begins childhood. As such, he brought a romantic's vision and romantic's scale
Anna Karenina by saying that every happy family is alike, but every of values to the practical challenges of his life. "Trust thyself," Emerson
unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way? Well, in this house had taught. "Great men have always done so, and confided themselves
we have t\velve thousand unhappy families. "146 childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the
:Ji'
But there is another source of costs that is more surprising and absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their
more interesting. In many instances, Wright apparendy did not try to hands, predominating in all their being. "148 More than anyone or any-
anticipate the ways in which his buildings would require regular main- thing else. Wright trusted himself. Steeped in a tradition that saw the
tenance of their mechanical systems. As a result. he rendered some of genius as a visionary individual doing battle with the forces of blind
their most basic utilities almost inaccessible, dramatically escalating convention (Truth Against the World), he felt wholly justified in ignor- .~

cOSts when something did in fact go wrong with them. Even so simple ing the niceties of conventional behavior-the foolish consistencies-
a matter as changing a light bulb could cause problems. At the if they got in the way of his higher truths. Lesser men might think him
Johnson Building, for instance, the incandescent bulbs of the Great arrogant, but in his own eyes he was bearing righteous witness to the

26 WllliM/I CRONON
truth of his own vision. "I am telling you now the truth," he declared sistency alone. "15 2 The vocabulary in which he sought to achieve this
in the final year of his life: consistency was geometrical. so that Fallingwater, to take an obvious
case, is an almost obsessive rumination on the possibilities of the can-
No man who believes in himselfand who is nor pretentious. who is not
tilever, from the basic structure of the suspended floors right down to
trying to swindle you out ofyour eyeteeth pretending that he is something
the treatment of the bookshelves. "You must be consistently gram-
that he isn't. no such man, ifhe is sincere, is arrogant. we have come to
matical." Wright said. for a building "to be understood as a work of
mistake this thing we call arrogance. mistake the sureness ofone's self, the
Art. "IB Geometry was the key to grammatical consistency. which was
faith in one's selfwhich rejects the inforior, which will not countenance
in turn the key to aesthetic unity, which was in turn the key to beau-
interference or destruction . ... It is not arrogance. I am not an arrogant
ty, which was in turn the key to God.
person and I never was. But I am a person who believes in whatf
But consistency alone was not enough; it was only of value if cou-
believe in. and f am aLways willing to fight for what I believe in, and
pled with the new. By itself. consistency would kill creativity, produc-
I am never willing to take less than what. to me. is the best. 149
ing yet another of the lifeless, backward-looking traditions that were
Romantic genius. artistic iconoclast. heroic individualist: these the death of art. Newness was proof of creative genius. and consistent
were the labels Wright attached to himself. these the standards against newness was the best proof of all. JUSt as he tried hard not to seem
which he measured his own behavior. When he told clients to throw influenced by anyone else's style. Wright had a restless urge to keep
away their belongings or when he cajoled them into spending far more inventing new styles lest he start repeating his own too often. His
than they had ever intended on their houses. he was serving his vision boastfulness and his competitive need to claim priority over all other
of an ideal truth. Given his own perennial indifference to money. one architects were surely tied to this horror of repetition. So was his love
can almost imagine that he literally had trouble regarding it as real. affair with new technologies. his willingness to experiment with virtu-
When he underestimated costs. he may sometimes have fooled himself ally any new material that came his way so he could claim that he.
as much as he did his clients. for the money (perhaps even the client) Frank Lloyd Wright, was the first architect ever to have employed it.
was just a means to an end. Indeed. Wright went so far as to suggest Describing to his apprentices the many innovations he had supposed-
that money actually acquired its value by enabling his genius to cre- ly made in constructing the Larkin Building-air conditioning, plate-
ate, and was as good as worthless if not pressed into the service of some glass windows. integral desk furniture. suspended toilet bowls. and so
higher good. Money," he told his apprentices, "becomes valuable on-he concluded. '~I was a real Leonardo da Vinci when [ built that
because you can do something with it. If you take away all the creative building, everything in it was my invention. "154
individuals, all the men of ideas who have projected into the arena of Wright's love of new technologies was matched by a desire to use
our lives substantial contributions. money would not be worth any- old technologies in new ways. His fascination for the new and his need
thing. "150 All of his behavior is consistent with this principle, however to show off his unsurpassed talents as an architectural virtuoso
convenient and self-serving the uses to which it could be put. From undoubtedly help explain his tendency to demand so much of his
his own point of view. much of what is most troubling about Wright materials. daring to test their limits almost to the point of failure if it
can be explained as part of his single-minded struggle to overcome any meant achieving effects he could claim as uniquely his own. The sags
obstacle that might prevent his vision from being realized. in Wright's cantilevers are but the logical complement to his perenni-
Above all else, Wright's vision served beauty. When he quibbled al testing oflimits in the search for new expression. Wright's defenders
with Sullivan's dictum that "form follows function," suggesting instead sometimes claim that he was simply ahead of his time. that the mate-
that "form and function are one," he was in fact revealing that when rials did not yet exist that could do what he wished them to do. and
push came to shove his own true passion was form more than func- [hat this explains some of the problems with his buildings. Nothing in
tion. ISI What he admired in the Arts and Crafts movement was its Wright's career supports this argument. Had he lived to be able to take
commitment to crafting all objects in such a way as to render them advantage of the newer technologies and stronger materials of our own
beautifuL What he loved abOUt Japan was the idea of a culture in day. he would surely have pushed them to their limits as well. The
which every human action and every human object were integrated so proof he demanded of his genius was to go where no architect had ever
as to make of an entire civilization a work of art. In pursuit of beauty. gone before. and that meant accepting risks that few others were will-
he sought to subordinate all elements of his architecture to a consis- ing to take. If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs,
tent style that would express their underlying unity. No matter how badly heated rooms. sagging cantilevers. and unhappy clients. then
radically his individual buildings may differ from each other. they all Wright was more than willing to pay the price.
express his struggle for aesthetic consistency, his habit of seizing a sin- Wright combined all these creative qualities-his exploration of
gle abstract theme and recapitulating it with endless variations as if in new technologies. his invention of new styles. his striving for maxi-
a Beethoven symphony. This man who could sometimes seem so mum expressive effect, his search for grammatical consistency in all his
inconsistent in his personal and professional life in fact held up con- buildings-with a remarkable playfulness. There was something child-
sistency as the highest ideal of his architecture. "Consistency from first like about the man even in his late eighties-a powerful sense of
to last," Wright declared, "will give you the result you seek and con- romance and an unabashed enthusiasm for his own creations. In one

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

 sense, he never ceased being the flirtatious male of Auden's poem, not help but be a builder in the sand, and his works could not hope to
lounging in the sunlight and performing for mother with seemingly escape what Wright called "the mortgage of time ... on human falli-
effortless grace. Bm for all his self-centeredness, he also had a remark- bility foreclosed. "1~7 Buildings, like their architects. were mortal, and so
able ability to sweep others up in his vision. Long before the ground they leaked and sagged and aged and eventually passed away. But like
for a new building had even been broken, Wright had conjured for his the White City, which had leapt into being for but a single summer to
audience a beguiling fantasy of the ideal form that building would rep- realize a dream on the shore of Lake Michigan, it was possible for "an
resem. No one has described this seductive power of Wrighr's better idea of form" to live far longer in "the mind's eye of all the world." If
than his son John. His father's talem, he said, was to build "a romance an architect aspired to immortality, he had best seek it in the realm of
abom you, who will live in it-and you get the House of Houses, in memory. spirit, and eternal ideals, not mortal matter.
which everyone lives a better life because of it. It may have a crack, a Wright finally staked his claim to greatness on the mind's eye as his
leak, or both, bm you wouldn't trade it for one that didn't." This would best defense against the mortgage of time. "The product of a princi-
be true, John said, even if~iright were building you a chicken coop. pIe," he declared, "never dies. The fellows who practise it do. but the
"He weaves a romance around the gullibility of the chicken and the principle doesnr."1~8 However inconsistent he may have been about
chicanery of the human being-and you get the Coup of Coops in other aspects of his life, he never wavered from this chief article of
which every chicken lives a better life on its own plot of ground. You faith: an organic architecture. like a life well lived, must serve the prin-
may crack your head or bump your shins on some projecting roman- ciples that give order to nature and meaning to the human spirit. "We
ticism. bm life will seem richer, the air clearer, the sunshine brighter. learn." Emerson had written, "that the dread universal essence. which
the shadows a lighter violet. You will gather the eggs with a dance in is not wisdom, or love. or beauty. or power. bur all in one. and each
your feet and a song in your heare, for your coop will be a work of art. entirely. is that for which all things exist. and that by which they are. "IS9
not the cold logical form chasing the cold logical funcrion."I~~ However cleverly an architect might manipulate natural materials,
The romantic spirit that Wright brought to all his buildings may however brilliantl~' he might combine wood and stone and mortar to
point at once to the deepest secret of his architecture and the most pro- create breathtakingly beautiful space. his truest creation was not mate-
found reason for his leaky roofs. In the end. the leaks and sags did not rial but spiritual. "Spirit creates," wrote Emerson. It "does not build
much matter to him. Although his practical goal was co strive as hard up nature around us, but puts it forth through us. as the life of the tree
as he could to make his structures conform to the vision in his mind, puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. "160
form mattered more than function to him, and the vision behind form Where nature and spirit met, there one would find the principles one
mattered most of all, far more than did its physical incarnation. The sought, the lessons that would reveal the secrets of trees and flowers
building itself would invariably fall short, and could only be an approx- and buildings and even of the architect's own soul. "The principles that
imation of the Platonic ideal that lay behind it. This may explain why build the tree," declared Wright. "wil1 build the man."161 If such lan-
Wright was so willing [0 modify his buildings even when they were guage today seems alien to us, if architectural critics now sometimes
under construction, and why he apparently felt no compunction about dismiss Wright's high-blown romantic words as unreliable guides to
altering them once they were complete. Taliesin itself underwent innu- his architectural practice, this may be because we have forgotten the
merable revisions, with walls and windows and doors and rooms being ideals that were ultimately more important to him even than build-
added and subtracted on an almost monthly basis. No building seemed ings. The secret ofWright's architecture, he would surely have remind-
permanent to Wright, because none could reflect for more than an ed us, will nor be found on its surface but in its heart. If we wish to
instant the multifaceted geometric ideal that was in his mind. Perhaps find it for ourselves. we must make our own way to the unity he man-
this is why he was apparently so undisturbed when one or another of aged to discover in so many corners of his universe: in the romantic
his buildings was torn down. "1 have learned not to grieve long," he words of a Concord preacher, in the geometric lessons of a kinder
wrote, "now that some work of mine has met its end." He took com- garten toy, in the gende prospects of a Wisconsin landscape. in the
fort from the fact that its image would survive in photographs, and evanes<;ent beauty of a Japanese temple that was also a playful folly in
these would spread its memory "as an idea of form, to the mind's eye the midst of a dream city-perhaps even in the persistent leaks of
of all the world. "15 6 It was the lesson of the folly: the architect could Wright's own roofs.

28 WILLIAM CRONON
 NOTES
The author would like to rhank Diana Balmori. Nan Fey. John mingo Accept the place the divine providence has found for 31. A key event in the Transcendentalist revolt against more tra-
Holzhueter, Jeffrey Limerick, Cesar Pelli. Petcr Reed. Terence you. the society of your contemporaries. the connection of ditional Congregationalist and Unitarian beliefs was Ralph
Riley, and Vincent Scully for helpful comments on an earlier events. Great men have always done so. and confided them- Waldo Emerson's scandalous address to the graduating class of
draft of this essay. selves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their per- the Harvard Divinity School (then called Diviniy College),
ception that the absolutely rrustwonhy was seated at their heart. delivered on July 15. 1838. It is today read primarily as a docu-
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance." in Ralph Waldo working through their hands, predominating in all their being. " ment of American romanticism. but in fact it was mainly writ-
Emmon: ESfil'/l and Ltuus (New York: Librarv of America. ten to contribute to a very particular theological debate abOUt
17. Alfred Lord Tennyson. "Flower in the Crannied Wall," in
1983), p. 2.65: It is consistent with the spirit of rhis famous biblical authority veuus direct personal revelation as the best
11,~ Pomu and Plays 0/AIft~d Lord Tmn.son (New York: Mod-
remark rhat it is often misquoted as referring to a toolish incon- source of religious inspiration. Emerson. "An Address Delivered
ern Library, (938). p. 72.1. Wright used these lines as the fron-
sistency. Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,' Essays
tispiece for his design of the fine-art edition of William C.
and LlUrtl, pp. 13-92..
1. Frank Lloyd Wright, All Aurobiography (1931; rev. cd .. New Gannen. Th~ Hous~ Bt'aurifol (Rive~ Forest. lIl.: Auvergne Press,
York: Duell. Sloan and Pearce. (943). pp. t07-08. 1896-97; he also had Richard Bock inscribe them on the }2.. Wright. Autobiography. p. 561: for one of Wright's few refer-
famous starue of the muse of architecture that Wright original- ences to Emerson. see p. 17. Wright did go so far as to includc
3. John Lloyd Wright. '''(y Fath~r Who Is on Earrh (New York:
ly designed tor the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield a long passage from Emerson's essay on farming as m appendix
G. P. Purnam's Sons, 1946): reprint ed My Fath~r. Frank lloyd
and later reproduced as a central icon at Ialiesin. Narciso G. to Th~ Living City, and Emerson's name appears among the
Wrighr<New York: Dover. 1992). p. 74-
Menocal has discussed (he poem in a way that complements my great thinkers Wright listed on his Broadacrc City display as
4. Wright. Autobiography, p. 31. own argument in "Taliesin. the Gilmore House. and the having been among its inspirations.
. Flower in the Crannied Wall,'" in Narciso G. Menocal, cd ..
S. In one of his earliest pronouncements on the goals of domes- j3. Pfeiffer. Hu Living voic~. p. 65. says Whitman was "a prime
Wright Studi~s. Vol. I: Tali~s;n 191I-1914 (Carbondale: Southern
tic architecture. Wright argued: "There should be as many types favorite of Wright's: see also Randolph C. Henning. cd . 'Jolt
Illinois UniversiY Press. 1991), pp. 66-69.
of homes as there are types of people, for it is the individuality Tafitrin~' Nnvspap" Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and tht Tal-
of rhe occupants that should give character and color to rhe 18. Wright. Autobiography. p. 11. it'sin hllowship, 1934-1937 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
building and furnishings." Frank Lloyd Wright. ''The Architect versity Press, 1991.). Brendan Gill also seems to think that
19 Pfeiffer. His Living \tOirt', pp. 69-70: sec also pp. 169-70.
:rnd the Machine" (1894), in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, cd .. Frank Whitman was more important than Emerson in influencing
Wright used almost cxactly these words to describe his father's
Lloyd Wr(l;'hr: Col/t'crrd Writings, vol. I (New York: Rizzoli. Wright's thought. though he arrives at this conclusion bc:cause
teachings about music: sec. for instance. Wright, Autobiogra-
1992.). p. ll he finds both Whitman and Wright muddled and sloppy in
pll,'Y. pp. 11.-13. and also p. 47.
their intellectual reasoning; he apparently believes Emerson to
6. Frank Lloyd Wright, Thr Natural Hous~ (19H; reprint ed..
10. Wright described his father "composing" (the editorializing have been a much more rigorous thinker. Anyone who knows
New York: New American Library. 19701, p.611.
<luotation marks arc Wrights). pencil in his mouth, "weird" Emerson well will probably find this a curious description of so
i. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, cd.. f'rank Llo.vd WTl:rtht: His Living black smudgcs on his face. and asked: Was music made in such mystical. protean. and shape-shifting a philosopher. Gill. Many
l!tJir~ (Fresno: Press at California Slate UniversiY. 1987), p. 186. heat and haste as this. the boy wondered?" Wri~hc's own answer Mil!ks, p. 339. Vincent Scully also emphasizes the poet's
to this rhetorical question was dearly no. Wright. AUlobiogra- influence; sec: Vincent Scully, Jr., Frank Lloyd Wright (New
8. The most tamous furnirure-rearranging s[Ory is that of Her-
bert Johnson, whose wife Irene Johnson never forgave Wright phy. p. I}. York: Bra;r;iller, 1960). p. Il.
for {he insult. Sec Samuc:l C. Johnson. "Mr. Wright and the 11. :viagincl Wright Barney, Thr Valky of Ih~ God-Almighty H. Barney. Vallry ofrht God-Almighty Jontrts. pp. 59-60.
Johnsons of Racine, Wis.: Reminiscences of 'Wingspread' and jOIl~us: R~minisunus o/Fmnk Lloyd Wrighti Sum (1965: reprint
Its Architect." AlA journal (january (979), reprinted by the 3). Gill. Many Mil!ks. p. 39; Secrest. A Biography. p. 12.~.
ed . Spring Green: Unity Chapd Publications, (986). p. 64.
Johnson Foundation. Herbert and Katherine Jacobs were told 36. Emerson. "Self-Reliance: usays and Ltum. p. 2.59.
by Wright that most of their existing furniture was "prehiSloric" 22.. Wright. Autobiography. p. 49.
and would "have to go." Herbert Jacobs with K;uherine Jacobs, J7 Meehan. Masm Architt, p. 5S.
~J. Barney, Valley o/t"~ God-Almighty jomftS, p. 151.
Building with Frank Uoyd Wright: An liJUJtraud Mtmoir (1978: l8. Emerson. Self-Reliance." Essays and L~(tum. p. 261.
~4. John Lloyd Wright. My Fatht'r. p. 100.
reprint cd., Carbondale: Southern Illinois Universicy Press.
1986). p. I. 39. Emerson. "An Address." Essays and Ltum. p. 89.
l~. Meryle Secrest. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York:
9. For clients' rcportS on the experience of working with Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). p. 79. 40. Emerson. ~Self-Reliance:' usa)s and uttum. p. 16J.
Wright, see Jacobs and jacobs. Building with Frank Lloyd 16. Wright, Amobiograpky. p. 16. oli. Pfeiffer. His Living l!tJiet. p. 103.
Wright; and Paul R. Jnd Jean S. Hanna. Frank Llo.vd Wr/:~hls
Hanna Housr: Tht! C/itnts Rrporr. lnd cd. (Carbondale: South- 17. john O. Holzhueter has discussed Wright's relationship to 4l. Gill. Many Masks. p. 1.1..

ern Illinois University Press. 19871. Sec also Brendan Gill . ltIll>lV Unitarianism in an unpublished lecrure. "Frank Lloyd Wright.
oll. Emerson. "Nature.' Essays and LtuT~s. p. 20.
M<tsks: A Up O/Ft'{l~k Llo.vd \'(Iright (New York: G. P. Putnam"-s Unitarianism. and Community,' delivered at the First Unitari-
Sons. 191171, pr. 189-90. an Society. Madison, Wisconsin. September 29. 1992.. Merrie 44. Ibid . p. 18.
Secrest also emphasizes this theme in her biography.
10. For a sample ofWright'slecrures on this theme. see Pfeiffer. 45. Ibid .. pp. 18-19
~8. The Reverend Max G;t.cblcr. longtime minister of the First
His Living Voiu. passim. but esp. p. 78. Wright's son John has 4 6. Ibid .. p. 19.
described his father's teaching abilities as loUows: "Dad. with L:nitarian Society in Madison. is my source tor the story about
his uncanny genius in architecture. is not a good teacher.... Wright's wanting the word Ullity[O app'ear on its pulpit. After 47. [bid. The Unitarian basis for these Emersonian ideas, and
Dad has always told his students that they could learn from his being persuaded by his wife to abandon his Baptist beliefs for hence their links to the principles Wright imbibed from the
school but that he could not leach the~ anything. Bur [ can Unitarianism, Wright's father served for a brief time as the Lloyd Jones family religion. can be clearly secn in the following
sec now that his teaching, even though apparently without founding secretary of the Madison congregation: consistent passage: "Each creature is only a modification of the other; the
method, had a very definite one. He taught me not to say 'Old with the rest of his troubled career. though. he failed to receive likeness in them is more than the ditference. and their radical
Antique' by laughing at me when I said it. [ had to analyze the the call to a Unitarian pulpit. law is one and the same. A rule of one :Irt. or a law of one orga-
phrase myself before I knew why he laughed." john Lloyd nization. holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this
29. "Meet Mr. frank Lloyd Wright: A Conversation with Hugh
Wright. My Fatlur. p. 131. Unicy, that. it is easily seen. it lies under the undermost garment
Downs." broadcast May 17.1953, reprinted in Patrick J. Mee-
of Narure. and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For it per-
II.This last word occurs in Wright's earliest extant essay. "The han. c:d.. T"~ Masr~r Arrhirt: Convmarions with Frank lloyd
vades Thought also. Every universal truth which v...: express in
Architect and the Machine": see Pfeiffer. Colierit'd Wriri1lJs. \Y/righl (New York: Wiley-Interscience. 1984), p. 49; a slightly
words. implies or supposes every other truth. Omn~ v~rum ~ro
vol. 1. p. 26. ditferent version appears in "A Conversation." reprinted in
(OllSonar. It is like a great circle on a sphere. comprising all pos-
Frank Lloyd Wright, Th~ Flltuu ofArrhitfclU" (19S3: reprint
12. For an authoritative telling. see Johnson. "Mr. Wright and sible circles: which. however. may be drawn and comprise it in
ed.. New York: New American Library. n.d.), p. 2.9.
the johnsons." like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens [Absolute
JO. Wright's sister Maginel remembered Jenkin's "sonorous voice Being) seen from one side. But it ha.~ innumerable sides." Ibid ..
13. When I inquired about whether the church had any pho- in the: pulpit, august and cadenced with magnificent rolling r's. P3 0
tographs of such leaks. the minister replied that [ was welcome We children used to play church and imitate him." Barney. VaI-
48. Wright, ArflobiograplJy, p. 16.
to come take one mysc:lf "on any rainy day." le,v 0/ r"~ God-Almighty jon~ftS. p. 99. To compare jenkin's
.rhetorical style with that of his nephew. see Thomas E. Gra- 49. [bid. p. 89. The year bctare he died. Wright was still saying
14 Cited in Gill. Many lIt/Inks. p. 37S.
ham. ed . TlJt' Agricrdtural Sorial Gosp~' in Am~rica: TlJt' Gosp~1 much the same thing: "We use the word 'nature' in a very care-
IS.lbid .. p.)35. ofth~ Farm by jenkin Lloydjon~s. Studies in American Religion. less way. Nature to us is the cows in the fields :rnd the winds
vol. 19 (Lewiston. N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press. 1986). Many of and the bees and the trees. unfortunately. But the theory of
t6. On this theme. see Emerson. "Self-Reliancc: usays and L-
\Xlright's Taliesin "sermons" have been recorded. and a sample nature goes deep into the character ot' whatcver it is. What is
tum. p. 260: ''Trust (thy)self: every heart vibrates to that iron
can be heard as well as read in Pfeiffer, His Living Voir~. the narure of this thumb of minc--or anything else you want to

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 29

 lake ro investigate-what is the nature Ont? There lies the vcr)' fully understood this idealist goal of Froebel's system is sug intended image to the mind, without destroymg the unity of
essence of its character: the very essence of that thing. which by gested by his description of it in the very last interview he ever the object they arc: employed to decorate. " Jonc:~. Grammar of
study. you come to know." Meehan. /Ilimur Arehittcl. p. 234. gave. JUSt six days before he died: hAll teachers," he declared. Orna11lt'1Jt, p. 6.
"should study and learn Plato. and ,hen take it on to the:
~o. Emerson. Nature." a"s alld Ltctum. p. 48. 86. Wright. "A Philosophy of Fine .-\rt. in Pfeiffer. ColkCll'd
children. A child should begin 10 work with materials JUSt as
Writj,lgr, vol. I. P.43.
~1. Carl Sandburg once chided Wright ior using words such as soon as he is able to hold a ball. By holding a ball. a child gets
brflllry. trlllh. and tdtal which made his prose so abstract and a sense of the universe and there is a closeness 10 God. The ball 87. Frank Lloyd Wright. "Architect. Architecture. and the
difficult to follow. ar!!uing that Wright would be more readily or sphere leads the child to other geometric shapes: the cone. Client" (1896). in Pteiffer. CoiltCll'd Wlilings. vol. I. p ..,1.
understood if he would get "down to brass tacks and talk about the triangle. the cylinder. I\'mv he is on the threshold of n:mlfl'
81l. One of the most suggestive ana[~'lies of these devices is by
barns and nails and barn doors." Wright's reply was revealingly hersc:l( ... A new world is opened to him: Cited in Meehan.
Gram Hildebrand. Tht Wright Spou: Paturn alld /I,-1eaning in
Emersoman: "Those words-romance. poetry. beauty, truth. lV/asttT Arr/,itect. P.313.
Frallk Lloyd Wrights HOllsts (Seattle: Unh'ersity of Washington
ideal-are not precious words nor should they be sptciou.<
67. Pfeiffer. His Living VOlet. p. 3:1.. Press. 1991). The literature here is enormous: other important
words. Thev are elemental human svmbols and we must be
works surveying these very general Wrightian themes include
brought ba~k again to respect them by using them significant. 68. Wright. Alltobiogrnphy. p. 14.
Henrv-Russell Hitchcock. In tht Nantrttlf'Maurials: T/;r Build-
Iy if we use them :u all. or go to jaiL" Frank Lloyd Wright. "In
69. The most thorough discussion of Wright's decorative style is ings ~f Frank Lloyd Wright. 1887-1941 (;942: reprint ed .. New
the Cause of Architecture. IX: The Terms." ArrhiuCfural Rrrord
by David A. Hanks. TIlr DtrOralivt Dl!Signs of Frank llo.rd York: DaCapo. 1973): Manson. Whghl to 1910; Scully, Frank
64 (December 1928): reprinted in Pfeiffer. Col/tcud l'Vritil1g
Wright (New York: Dutron. 19791. Less analrtical. but lavishly lloyd '~right; H. Allen Brooks. Tht 1711irit School: Frank Lloyd
vol. I. p. 110.
illustrated. is Carla Lind. The Wright Stylt: &-mating tilt SpiriT Wright and His Midwm Conrnnporarits noronto and Buffalo:
s!. Emerson. "Nature," LtClUrts and Essa,.,s. p. 16. o,fFrank Lloyd Wright (New York: Simon & Schuster. 1992l. University of Toronto Press, (972); John Sergeant, Fr(mk Lloyd
Wrights Usollioll HOJlm: TJ~ Uut'.fiJr Orznic Arrhit/'Cturt (New
$3. Pfeiffer. His Lil'ing yoiu. p. 68. 70. References 10 Ruskin are relatively few in Wright's work-
York: Whitne} Library of Design. 1976): McCarter. A Primtr
more often than not. Wright linked him with William Morris
H. Frank Lloyd Wright. "A Philosophy of Fine Art" (1900). in on ArelJitfflurnl Prinriplts: and Paul La~eau and .Iames lice.
as a representative of the Arts and Crafts ambivalence about the
Pleiffer. Col/teud Wi-hillgs. vol. I, p. 39. Frank LIo;'fi Wi1~ht: Bmvt'tII Pril1ciplt 1I1u1 Form (New York: Van
machine-50 that it is hard to judge how direct the English cril-
Nostrand Reinhold. 1992).
~~. Ibid . p. 41. ic's influence on the young architect may have been. Wright
may ha\'e been covering his tracks in this case. or he may haw 89. An ahistorical but provocative ,1ungi:m readin~ of this sub-
~6. Cited in l'vic:ehJn. MaSl~r Arc/mea. p. l16. See also Wright.
been exposed 10 Ruskinian ideas mdirectly. tor instance. in the: ject is !;iven by Thomas H. Beeby. \Xiright and Landscape: ,A"
Alltobtograp/~I" pp. 14-1).
writings ofViollet-h:-Duc. which we know he read closely. My Mythicallntcrpret3tion: in Carol R. 8o[on. Robert S. Nelson.
p. The: earl\' work on this subject is bv Grant Carpenter Man own inclination is 10 suspect that Wright read some: orRuskin'~ and Linda Seidel. ed~ .. nJt NatZlrt of hilt//", Llo.vd Wright
son: "Wright in the Nursen': Thl: InHucnce of Froebel Educa work and acquired some of it indirectly. but that it was so much (Chicago: Universit} of Chicago Press. 1988). pp. IH-7l. ,A"
tion on th~ Work of Frank Llovd Wright." Arrlmtctural Rtvim' of a pu:ce with ~o many other idealist sources one detects in more historicized interpretation is that of Jonathan Lipman.
113 (June 19B). pp. 349-~1: and idem, Fmnk L1o.I'd WEright to Wright's work that general osmosis may be as likely an expla "The Architecture of Arcadia." in Tht' \l(;'~~lt Stalt: Frank Llo,ld
/IJ10: Thr- Fim Go/drn Agr(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. nation as any. \rlrighl in Wi's{omill (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum.
1958). pp. ~-IO. It has been discussed more recently in greater t9921. pp. 11-31. Wright'S biographers emphasi:te his relation-
71. John Ruskin. Thr Stl'l!n Lamp! ofArchiltrturt (lnd ed . 1880;
detail in R. C. MacCormac, "Froebd's Kinder~arten Gifts and ship 10 the: Wisconsin landscape as well.
reprint cd .. New York: Ooycr. 1989). p. 10).
the Early Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," Enviro~mrntand Plan-
1)0. Wright. Autobiography. p. 26.
ning B, no. t (1974). pp. 29-~0; and idem. "Form and Phil051l- 72. Ibid" p. 124.
phr: Froebel's Kindergarten Training and the Early Work of 91. Ibid., p. 27.
73. John Ruskin, lvJodmt Paintm. voL I (t843), quoted in
Frank Lloyd Wright." in Robert McCarter. ed .. Frarrk Llo.,d
Rober! L. Herbert, ed .. Thr Art Criticism ofjolm Ru!kirl (Gar- 92. Ibid., p. 40.
Wrigbt: A Primrr on Arrhitt'ctural Principlts (New York: Prince-
den City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 1964), pp. to-ll.
IOn Architccmral Press. 1991). pp. 99-113. See also Jeanne S. 9,. Gill. Map/.l' Masks. p. 48.
Rubin. "The Froebd-Wright Kindergarten Connection: A New 74 Ruskin. Srvm Lamps ofArrhutctrlrt. p. 31.
94 Wisconsin limestones have a high magnesium content and
Perspective." jouTl/al oftbe Socirty ofArchittctural Hittorians 48
75. Wright. Autobiography. p. 75: cf. John Lloyd Wright. A~r are technicallv known as dolomites: in the text I use the morC'
(March 1989). pp. 24-37. and letters responding to same, ibid.
Fathrr. p. 69, which also includes a lon~extract from Viollet-Ic:- familiar. gen~ric term.
(December 19H9), pp. 413-17. Manson and McCarter are ust"-
Duc's DisrOlirItS 011 Ar(b'U(turl'.
fully criticized in Edgar Kaufmann. Jr..... Forol Became Ftt'ling: 9~. Wright. "Meaning of Materials-Stone: in Pfeiffer. Col-
A New View of Froebcl and Wrighl." in Kaufmann, 76. See. for instance. M. F. Hearn. ed .. The Architrrtrmll Thro l(Cud \'Vlitillgs. \'01. I, p. :t7~.
9 C"ommmtarirs on Frank Uo,'1d Wright (New York: Architec- ry of Violltt-lt-DIlL: Rtadings a"d Commtnrnry (Cambridge.
96. Ibid., p. 174.
tural History Foundation. 1989). pp. 1-6. The link between Mass.: MIT Press. 1990), p. t87. For Ruskin's belief that caSt
Froebd's system and Wright's architecture was discussed 35 iron and any machine-made ornament represented "deceits." 97. For illustrations of the: effect and of the original appearance
early as 1900: see Roben C. Spencer. Ir.. "The Work of Frank see Ruskin. St'VI!lI lAmps ojArchiu(turr. p. 3). of the sandstone. see Ed(l3r Kaufmann. J r.. Fallin.v:wattr: A
Lloyd Wright." Archittcturnl Rtvitu' 7 (June 1900). pp. 6t-71: Frank li".vd Wrighr Lountry Houst (New York: Abb~ille Press.
77. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-Ie-Duc. Thl' FoundatioTlS ~f
reprinted in H. Allen Brooks. ed .. Writings on Wright: &ftcud t9861. esp .. pp. 19, JI. 36-45, S8. 76-77. Wright explicitly com-
ArchlUrtliTt': Stlt'(tiom from tlu D,(tiollnnirt raiIonn~ h8541.
Commmr on Frank Llo.vd Wright (Eambridge. Mass.: MIT pared Fallingwater with Taliesin in his interview with Hugh
trans. Kenneth D. Whitchead (Nc:w York: Braziller. (990).
Press. 1981). pp. IO~-IO. Downs (see Meehan. MllSttr Architect. p. 371. and Donald Hoff-
p. 1H: italics in original.
mann. writing of Fallingwater. was so taken by the similar
58. Meehan, Mmtt"r Ar(hitl!((. p. 2t7.
78. [bid., p. 235. stonework of the rwo buildings that he miS(akenly assumed Tal-
59. Pfeiffer. His Lh.ing Voiet. p. 32.. iesin's masonry to be sandstone. Sec: Donald Holfmann. Frank
79. "CryStals arc proof of nature's architectural principle." Frank
Llo.Vd Wrights Fallingwnur: Tilt Houst' and Its History (New
60. Despite problems with his historical argumentation. Edgar Lloyd Wright. "In the Cause of Architccture: III: The Meaning
York: Dover. 1978). p. t8.
Kaufmann. Jr. is right to stress this point in his "Form Became: of Materials-Stone" (1928): reprinted in Pfeiffer. Col/feud
Ftt/ing." Writings. vol. I. p. 270: this passage was omitted from the orig- 9B. The Heurtler House (1901) is a particularl~' striking exam-
inal Arrhittetural Rf(ord article. ple of this effect. which is \'ery common in Wri~l's brick build.
61. Friedrich Froebd. Tht Education of Man. trans. W. N.
ings.
Hailmann (New York: D. Appleton. 1899), p. 169. 80. Hearn. Arrhiuctllral Thtory ofVioilrt-lr-Dur. p. 22.1).
99. Meehan. Masta Archiltct, p. 44.
62. Frank Uoyd Wright, Tilt japanm Prim: An InttrpTt'tAtio', 81. Wright. Autobiography. p. 75.
(Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour. 19111: reprinted in Pfeiffer. 100. W. H. Auden. "In Praise: of limestone." sa~/'Ud Pot'try of
82. Owen Jones. Thr Grammar ofOrnamtnl (1856; reprint ed ..
Col/fcttd W,itings. vol. I, p. 117. \~ H. Autkn (New York: Modern Library. t959). pp. "4-li.
London: B. Quaritch, 1910), p. ~.
63. Froebcl, Education ~fMan. pp. 1-2. 101. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
64. Maria Kraus-Boelte and John Kraus. Tlu Kintkrgartm 102. Ibid .. p. 115.
84. Wright. ",A" Philosophy of Fine Art" in Pfeiffer. Col/teftt!
Guidt. Vol. i: TIJI' Gifts (New York: E. Steiger. IB77). p. 37. It
Writingr. vol. I. pp. 39-44. The Oxford English Dictionary attrib- 103. A polemical and now quite dated reading of Wright's
seems likely that this book may best reflect the particular meth-
utes the first occurrence of the: verb "conventionalize" [0 John antiurbanism can be found in Morton and Lucia 'lG'hite. Tht
ods that Anna Wright followed in performing Froebclian exer-
Ruskin in 1854. InttlkclUlZl VtrSus tht City: From Thomas ftffirson to Frank Llo.'1d
cises with her son. Sec: Manson, Wrightto 1910, p. 5
Wright (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press and MIT
85. Ibid., p. 43. In this passage. Wright was echoing Owcn
65. W. N. Hailmann. lAw of Childhood. alld Other Papm Press. 1961). pp. 189-108. A more balanced view can be found
Jones's thirteenth proposition: "Flowers or other natural objects
(Chicago: Alice B. Stockham. IB89). p. 43. in Robert Fishman. Urban UtopIas in tht Twmtieth Cmrnry:
should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representa-
EbtllfZtr Howard. Frank lloyd Wright. u Corbusirr (New York:
66. Ibid . p. 41; italics in originaL That Frank Llord Wright tions founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the
Basic Books. (977). pp. 89-160.

10 WILLIAM ~P'ON()h;
104. Taliesin achieves privacy despite the openness of its plan p. (7). At the Susan Lawrence Dana House (1902-04), Wright's 131. Wright. Natural House. p. 150..
and fenestration by its height and distance from prying neigh- debt to Japan seems explicitly acknowledged in his treatment
131. On heating problems at the first Jacobs House. sec Jacobs
bors; Fallingwater. which is perhaps the lean private of Wright's of the roof. For a classic discussion of Japanese domestic archi-
and Jacobs. Building with Frank Lloyd Wright. pp. 54. 59-60.
houses. relics on its remote site to perform the same service. tecture itself. see Atsush i Ueda. Th~ Inntr Harmony ofthe Japan-
m Hous~ (1974). trans. Iwanami Shoten (Tokyo: Kodansha 133. Wright. Autobiography. p. 249.
lOS. On the landscape of Talicsin, see Walter L. Creese. Th~
International. (990).
Crowning of th~ Am~rican Landscap~: Eight Gr~l1t Spaces and 134. Kaufmann. Faliingwaur, pp. 62-63.
Their Buildingr (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 198~). 117. Pfdlfer, His Living voil't. p. 32.
135. Wright. Natural House. p. 37.
PP141-78. 1111. Wright. Th" japantst Prim, in Pfdlfer. Collecrtd Writings.
1}6.lbid.
106. Wright. Natural How~. p. 134. vol. I. p. 118.
1}7. Jacobs and Jacobs. Building with Frank Lloyd Wright. p. IS.
107. Ibid.. p. 135 119. Ibid .. p. 119.
138. Jack Ramsey to Herbert Johnson. July 19. 1936. as quoted in
loB. Henry Blake Fuller. With th~ ProcessIon h89,; reprint cd .. 120. Ibid.
Lipman. Johnson Wax Buildings. p. 12.
Chicago; University of Chicago Press. 196~).
121. William T. Stead. "My First Visit to America: An Open
139. Ibid., p. IH
109. Wright, Autobiography. ~61; Louis Sullivan. The Alltobiog- Lctterro My Readers." Rt/!itw ofRnlitw19 (1894). pp. 414-15.
raphyofan ltka (1924: reprint ed.. New York: Dover. (956). 1';0. Mary Jane Hamilton. Th~ Muting House: Htritagt and
1:1.2. The word foi(v today carries mainly a negative meaning in
Vision (Madison: Friends of the Meeting House. 1991). p. 16.
[10. Gannett, Tht Houst Btautifill. In the first and last of these English, so that the Pmgllin Dictionary ofArchiucturt defines it
excerpts Gannett is quoting another author. but I have been as "a costly but useless structure built to satisfy the whim of ql. See Davis. Together Thry Built a Mountain: and Gurda.
unable to determine the original source. Wright was still qUOt- some eccentric and thought to show his folly; usually a tower :VtW World Odystt].
ing Gannett as late as the 19~os. when he prominently displayed or a sham Gothic or classical ruin in a landscaped park intend-
142. Jacobs and Jacobs. Building with Frank Lloyd Wright. p. 17.
a passage from The HOlISe Beaut~fili in the auditorium of the ed to enhance the view or picturesque effect." John Fleming.
Unitarian Church ill Madison. Hugh Honour. and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pmguin Dictionary of 1';3. Ibid .. p. 60. The standard explanation for leaks at the Uni-
Archittct/lre (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books. (972). p. 100. tarian Church is that the roof is supposedly a thinner gauge of
1ll.Ibid.
Nineteenth-century usage of the word still carried more of the copper than Wright originally intended. and Ihis rationale has
112. The best essay on Chicago's Arts and Crafts community is sense that its French cognate. Ia foli~. maintains as one of its been offered for other leaky Wright roofs as wdl. But an engi-
by Richard Guy Wilson. "Chicago and the Intern:uional ArtS standard meanings: a structure built solely for pleasure at a villa neering report in 1993 revealed that the roofwas built precisely
and Crafts Movements: Progressive and Conservative Tenden- or rural retreat. intended (0 express :\ caprice and serve as the to Wright's specifications. which were well below industry stan-
cies," in John Zukowsky, ed.. Chiea,'{o Arrhiucwr(. 1872-IOZ2: ~i(c tor romantic rendezvous. In the text. I intend my usage to dards of the day.
Birrh ofa Mt'Jropolis(Munich: Prestel-Verlag.19S7). pp. t09-27. convey some of this older. more favor.lble connorarion.
144. John Lloyd Wright. lvly Father. p. 92.
See also Nikolaus Pevsner. Pionetrs o/Modem Design: From
12,. Terence Riley rightly encouraged me to stress the role of
William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin. 19,6; 145. W. E. Martin to D. D. Martin. September 19. 190~. as
the Exposition in teaching Wright the importance of "model"
1975); Peter Stansky. Redesigning the World: \'(Iili;(lln Morris. th~ quoted in Gill. Many Mask. p. 159.
or "demonstration" buildings as a wav of inRuencing public
[880s. and the ArtS and Crafts (Princeton: Princeton University
memory and cultural values. 1,;6. J!:Irrey Chusid. conversation with author. November 9.
Press. 198~); Gillian Naylor. T/JI! Arts and Crafts Mo/!tmmt: A
199 1 .
Study ofIts So,In:fS. ltkals and Infllmlet' 011 DtSlKn Theory (1971; 12';. Palricia Talbot Davis. logt'lh~r 1'I)(:r 811;/t a ,\-foumain
reprint ed.. London: Trefoil Publications. 1990); Leslie Greene (Lititz. Penn.: Sutter House. (974), p. 147. 147. Lipman. johmon \WI.\' Buildin.(1. p. 169.
Bowman. Amtrjran Arts and Crafts: Virtllt'in Dmf,n (l.os Ange-
I!S. Jonathan Lipman. Frank Lloyd Wri,f,hr and the Jo/msoll Wax 148. Emerson. "Self-Reliance:' Essa.vs and Ltcmm. p. 160.
les: Los Angeles County ~1useum of Art. (990): and Elizabeth
8llildinf! (New York: Rizzuli. (986). p. 169.
Cumming and Wendy Kaplan. l1)e Am atld Cr411 Movemtnt 149. Meehan. Masttr An:hitt. p. 140.
(London; Thames and Hudson. (991). 126. John Gurda. New World OdflSty: Annunciation Grftk
ISO. Pfeilfer. His Living Voiu. p. 74.
Orthodox elmr./J and Frank Lloyd Wri,'{ht (Milwaukee: Mil-
113. As its vety title suggests. Wright's most lamous single essar.
"The Art and Craft of the Machine" (1901). is at once a criti-
waukee Hellenic Community, 1986). p. 114. 151. John Lloyd Wright. M,y Fathtr. p. ItO.
cism of the ArtS and Crafts movcmt:nt tor its hostility 10 the 12~. Crant Hildebrand dcscribes these changes well in T"~ I~;:. Wri!!;hl. 'The Architect and the Machine." in Pfeiffer. Col
machine. and a defense of Ihe movement's underlying values. Ir'ri,e,ht Sparf. pp. H-t7: tor Wright's own celebration of these I,,<'ted Writings. vol. I. p. 12.
Wright reprinted the essay throughout his career and revised it innovations. see Wright, lv'atural House. pp. P.-H.
IS}. Wright, Namrai House. p. Ill2.
many times. but the standard version is prohably the one prim-
128. James Dennis. "Rcsrorin[! Jacobs I." let:rure delivered in
ed in Pfeiffer. Col/wed \Vrilin,~s. ... 01. I. pp. ,8-69. 1\+ ptciffer. Hi! Lilting ~oiCt'. p. 31.
Madison. Wisconsin. Septe~ber t4, 1991. Sergeant. Frank
114. Sullivan's classic account can be found in his AlltobWgrap/~'1 Llo.vd Wr~'{hts Uso,lial1 Houm. pp. 1.7-30. says that the overall I~~. John Lloyd Wright. '''~r Fathtr. p. 121.
Of.lll MM. pp. ,I71f. t:xperience of most Usunian owners has becn positive. but for
:\6. Wright. Alltobi{)gmpiJy. p. ~I!.
some reason tails to mention the root~. Eugene R. Streich. "An
liS. Wright. Alaob;ogl'(/pj~'1. pp. 12~-2S.
Original-Owner Interview Survey of Frank Lloyd Wright's Res- (~7. Ibid .. p. ~t. Wright was here n:lerring not to thc fair but to
116. Grant CarpcnIer Manson's discussion of the Ho-o-dcll idential Architecture' (1972). in Brooks, W'r-itillgs on ll1right. two domed buildings he had known as a student in Madison.
inRuence (Wright to 1910. pp. 34-41) remains among the bcst pp. 35-45. claims that the thirty-three original owners of Wright both of which he sa~' destroyed within a lew years at each olher.
we have. despite his evident discomfiture at the heated denials huildings he intcTVlewed complained of "very few" leaks.
ISS. Pleifter. Hi! Li,illg ~-oiC/'. p. 28.
of his still-living subject. See also Dimitri Tsdos. "Exotic
129. Kaufmann, F,1llingwattr. pp. 49-S4; HotTmann. Frank
InRuences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright," ,"fuga- 1S9. E.merson. "Nature. - ssl1.vs and L({fllres. p. 41.
Llo.vd Wright! FailinKU1l11tr. pp. ';1-48. 56-P.
zintofArq6 (ApriI19~}). pp. 160-84. Vincent Scully lollowed
160. Ibid.
Tsclos in pointing out the parallels between the Ho-o-den and I}O. Hildebrand. Thf \'(Iright SpilU. p. 177; on pp. 176-77 Hilde-
the Ward W. Willits House (1902.-031. which many regard as brand supplies a long list of significant ddlections in Wright 161. Frank Lloyd Wrighl. as quoted in Gill. M1111.v Masks. p. 22.
Wright's first true Prairie style house (Scully. Frank Lloyd Wright. structures.

INCONSTANT UNITY: THE PASSION OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT