Last summer, having accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania, I was in Philadelphia looking for a house. Leafing through the pages of a real estate agent’s directory, I came across a postage-stamp-size photograph that looked familiar. It showed a building that I remembered visiting thirty years earlier as an architecture student on a traveling scholarship. The house was an unusual design, a sort of quadraplex; that is, it was one of a four-unit cluster whose cruciform arrangement ensured privacy for each of the dwellings. According to the directory, the house was located in Ardmore, a suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. It wasn’t where we were intending to live, but I thought the house itself would be worth a visit.
The building was almost completely hidden from the adjacent sidewalk by trees. We went up the short driveway, under a large overhanging balcony that sheltered the carport (which previous owners had partially enclosed to create a study), turned right, and faced an unprepossessing front door. Once inside, we were in the corner of a room that unexpectedly rose to a sixteen-foot height, and two of whose tall walls were entirely glass. The garden, which seemed like an extension of the room, was full of foliage that screened us from the street. There was a deep fireplace in one corner and a cozy built-in settee in the other, and the brick walls were lined with built-in cupboards and bookshelves. The floor was polished concrete. The owners were in the process of moving out, but even empty this was a beautiful, serene space.
The modest materials, and the profusion of built-in furniture throughout, reminded me that when it was built—in 1938—this was intended to be an affordable starter house for young couples. Each twenty-three-hundred-square-foot unit, which cost $4,000 to construct, consists of a master bedroom and two additional bedrooms (“Boys” and “Girls”) with bunk beds. The house is on three levels, with two large roof terraces that augment the outdoor space of the small garden and make the upper rooms feel like penthouses—the development was originally called Suntop Homes.
A narrow stair led from the living room to an eat-in kitchen that was on a balcony overlooking the living room and the garden beyond. Additional light was provided by an ingeniously designed clerestory window. The table was flanked by a built-in banquette. The compact bathroom (which reminded me of a Pullman sleeper), the master bedroom, and a tiny nursery were also on this level; the two children’s rooms were above. The kitchen was conceived by the architect as a kind of command post “where the mistress of the house can turn a pancake with one hand while chucking the baby into a bath with the other, father meantime sitting at his table, lord of it all, daughter meantime having the privacy of the front room below for the entertainment of her friends.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of Suntop Homes, wrote this in 1948. One can excuse the author his misogynist views—after all, he was born in 1867—but there is nothing old-fashioned about the Ardmore houses. The only thing that may be dated is the example of someone of the stature of Wright—then the most famous architect in the United States—applying himself to the mundane problem of the small suburban house. Famous architects today seem to be too busy building museums and corporate offices; Wright built those, too, but he never lost his concern for the common man. That generosity and breadth of vision explain why, thirty-five years after his death, Wright and his work maintain such a strong hold on the public imagination.
Even by the frenetic standards of contemporary architectural publishing, which churns out illustrated monographs on individual architects—living and dead, famous and obscure, gifted and hacks—by the score, last year’s flurry of books on Frank Lloyd Wright is impressive. Rizzoli, in conjunction with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, is issuing a multivolume series of the celebrated architect’s collected writings that has, so far, covered the period from 1894 until 1939. The editor of that series, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, once a Wright apprentice and now director of the Wright Archives, has also written the text that accompanies the lavish photographs of thirty-eight Wright buildings, including several lesser-known houses such as the Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina and the Zimmerman House in Manchester, New Hampshire. Alvin Rosenbaum, a planner who grew up in a Wright-designed house in Alabama, has produced an uneven memoir titled Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Design for America, and this year Pedro Guerrero, who was Wright’s photographer for twenty years, published Picturing Wright, which includes some charming pictures of the architect at home. Academics have always found in Wright a rich lode to mine, and there are two new studies of Wright’s international influences: Kevin Nute’s examination of the role of traditional Japanese art and architecture in Wright’s work, and Anthony Alofsin’s fascinating analysis of Wright’s European travels between 1910 and 1922. Then there is William Allin Storrer’s valuable The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, a comprehensive guide to the almost five hundred buildings that Wright realized during his fruitful life. About three hundred of these buildings are still in existence, carefully maintained by their owners or restored by corporate or individual effort, and Storrer provides a useful index of street addresses for the interested traveler. This year, fueled by a comprehensive retrospective that has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art, one can anticipate ever more Wrightiana.
The public interest in Wright’s work has always been sustained by the personality of the man himself. “He is a fascinating, adorable, and utterly irresponsible genius, full of magnetism, selfish to the extent of violating all the conventions if he sees fit; and an artist to his finger tips,” wrote his friend Frederick Gookin in 1919 in as good a capsule description of Wright as anyone has provided since. The melodramatic contours of the famous architect’s life, which are recounted in two recent popular biographies, by Meryle Secrest and Brendan Gill, are well-known, but they are worth summarizing. The rube from Wisconsin, whose domineering mother has told him that he will be a famous architect, comes to Chicago, catches the eye of an old master—Louis Sullivan—at whose feet he learns the rudiments of his profession. Impatiently, the youngster soon strikes out on his own, and almost immediately—effortlessly—he begins to produce work that bears his own individual stamp. His career blossoms, the clients come, the commissions multiply. And then, willfully, he throws it all overboard—wife, six children, flourishing practice—and runs away to Europe with the wife of a client. They return, and though they are the subjects of scandal, they live together in a beautiful country house of the architect’s design. He resumes his practice and attracts new clients. Then, tragedy: a deranged servant kills Wright’s mistress and her two children and burns the beautiful house to the ground. However, the architect is unstoppable. He rebuilds the house—it is even more beautiful than before. He remarries, and he produces more masterpieces. By the age of fifty—not old for an architect—he has already built three great buildings: the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, Unity Temple in Oak Park, and the Robie House in Chicago. He takes up with a young Montenegrin ballerina, they have a child out of wedlock, and as a result of the ensuing scandal (he is threatened with indictment under the White Slave Traffic Act) he almost goes to jail and is driven to the edge of bankruptcy. He is now sixty, but there are still thirty-one years of the saga to go. Thirty-one years during which he will design some of his best—and best-known—buildings: the Fallingwater house, the Johnson Wax Building, and the Guggenheim Museum, as well as his own remarkable desert retreat in Arizona. He lives to be ninety-one, a grand old man surrounded by young acolytes, making oracular pronouncements, the most famous architect in the country, just as his mother promised.
The only other twentieth-century American architect who stands comparison with Wright is Louis Kahn. (Mies van der Rohe’s buildings are predominantly in America, but their roots—and their essence—like their transplanted maker, are European.) Kahn’s talent flowered late. Nevertheless, among the handful of buildings that he completed before his death in 1974, there are some major masterpieces, like the sublime Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the great capital complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh. But Kahn never achieved the public recognition that was accorded to Wright. For one thing, his buildings, despite their cool beauty, are intellectual exercises in minimalism of a sort that architects find attractive but that often leaves the layman unmoved. The unplanted, paved courtyard of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, for example, drew plaudits from critics, even though it provides an uncomfortable setting where a shaded and welcoming garden was surely called for. Kahn’s architecture, which is characterized by monumental forms based on abstract geometry, is often described as “timeless,” but it could as well be termed “placeless.” His designs look equally at home—or not at home—in Bangladesh as they do in a Texas suburb or in a Southern California industrial park. This placelessness gives Kahn’s work a mysterious, almost mystical air, which may explain why, although his influence in the United States was short-lived, his ideas have taken root in India, where they continue to be explored by gifted architects like B. V. Doshi and Anant Raje.
In Wright’s buildings, the American public recognized a homegrown product. This set him apart from almost all of his contemporaries and from succeeding generations of American architects. Classicists like John Russell Pope, John Carrère, and Paul Cret were every bit as skillful, but their skill derived directly from the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts; eclectics like Stanford White and Horace Trumbauer met the demands of their East Coast clients by manipulating the historical architectural styles of Europe. The influence of Europe was equally strong in the first generation of immigrant modernists—not only Mies van der Rohe, but also Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Marcel Breuer—who dominated the American architectural scene in the postwar years and whose successors—Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, and Philip Johnson—followed in their footsteps. To modernist architects, Wright—who had known such historical figures as Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham but who continued to practice until the end of the 1950s—appeared to be an anomaly or, at best, a leftover from the past. “America’s greatest nineteenth-century architect,” quipped Johnson, in an ill-disguised attempt to put Wright in his place.
The postmodern architecture of the 1970s, which was a reaction against the abstract internationalism of glass-box building, might have signaled a return to a native American architecture. Indeed, the domestic work of Robert Venturi and the late Charles Moore is rooted in the American vernacular, as Vincent Scully has convincingly argued. Moore, especially, was particularly adept at playing with regional styles (California, southwestern, New England) in a series of exuberant houses. Venturi, too, played on American motifs. But the interest of both designers in architectural history also led them to explore European themes; so did Robert A. M. Stern’s fascination with early twentieth-century eclecticism. The buildings of Michael Graves, arguably the most talented of the postmodernists, progressively owe more and more to European classicism, especially to the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.
Nor is Americanness an issue in the work of what passes for the avant-garde today. Not only is the outlook of architects like Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman international, like their practices, but if deconstructivism has any roots—other, that is, than in the Euro-American world of high fashion—it’s probably in the abstract architecture of the Russian constructivists of the early Soviet Union.
As the millennium approaches, it is obvious that Johnson was mistaken: Wright was—is—America’s greatest twentieth-century architect, not only by dint of his considerable architectural accomplishments, which have proved remarkably durable, but also because of their very Americanness. His buildings belong to America in the same way as Whitman’s poems, Faulkner’s novels, and Gershwin’s music do. Wright’s Americanness is not merely a question of style, although style has a lot to do with it. The use of natural materials, the drive to simplify, the fascination with what are often technological gimcracks, the unabashed use of dramatic effects (especially the masterly use of concealed electric lighting), a love of novelty, and a willful evasion of history all add up to a style that spoke—and still speaks—to most Americans.
It isn’t just the style of the buildings but also the style of the man. Brash, self-promoting, largely self-taught, individualistic, he also embodies most Americans’ notion of the great artiste: bohemian in behavior and dress, extravagant, emotional, inspired. The Bauhaus architects dressed themselves up like proletarians in leather jackets and flat caps; Le Corbusier preferred black suits and severe horn-rimmed glasses. Wright, on the other hand, wore striking costumes of his own design and drove in flamboyant Cords and Packards, specially painted in his favorite color, Cherokee red. Decades before the term came into common use, Wright made himself into a celebrity.
Wright’s untutored self-sufficiency—also a part of his Americanness—was carefully cultivated. No European architect had influenced his work in any way, he consistently maintained. This was true inasmuch as Wright avoided explicit references to European classicism as well as to European modernism. Nevertheless, as Anthony Alofsin amply demonstrates in Frank Lloyd Wright—the Lost Years, Wright learned many lessons from Europe, especially from the Austrian Secessionist architect Joseph Maria Olbrich and from artists and craftsmen associated with the Wiener Werkstätte. At an earlier moment in his life, Wright was also influenced by Japan, and he developed a style of perspective rendering that was clearly derived from Japanese pictorial art. It may also be, as Kevin Nute suggests, although not altogether convincingly, that Wright drew on Japanese architecture for the open planning of what he came to call his Usonian houses. But while it is possible, and even valuable, to question Wright’s blatant assertions of creative autonomy, this does nothing to diminish the extraordinary impact of his work. You don’t have to be an architect, or an architectural historian, to appreciate Wright’s buildings—their impact is immediate and visceral.
Before Wright, most famous American architects were associated with a particular city or region. H. H. Richardson with Boston and New England, Louis Sullivan with Chicago and the Midwest, Frank Furness with Philadelphia, Bernard Maybeck with the Bay Area. There are more Wright-designed buildings in Illinois and Wisconsin than elsewhere, but he was really a national architect, realizing projects in thirty-seven states. Although Wright did not always alter his architecture to suit different regions—the concrete-block technique that he developed for houses in Los Angeles pops up later in Oklahoma, Ohio, and New Hampshire, and the great sweeping roofs of his so-called Prairie houses show up in Colorado and Northern California—he did develop ways of using local materials that do seem, on the whole, admirably suited to their climate and geography. Heavy stone walls in the Southwest; patterned concrete and flat roofs in Southern California; plant-draped trellises and pergolas in the South; wood walls and protective overhangs in the Midwest.
What makes Wright’s architecture American, however, is not only its appearance. Most of his work was residential, and his acceptance—and celebration—of the single-family house is also quintessentially American. Wright did design some grand villas in the British country-house tradition (apart from his own homes in Wisconsin and Arizona, Wingspread is probably the grandest Wright country house). But most of his houses were middle-class homes, and especially after the 1930s projects like the Suntop Homes were intended to be affordable by owners with modest means. These are not scaled-down versions of Tudor mansions or Palladian villas, nor are they adapted Cotswold cottages. They are different from these predecessors not only because of their appearance but also because they are designed to contain a way of life that is different: more casual, more connected to the outdoors, more aware of technical conveniences, that is, more American.
In the popular imagination, a Frank Lloyd Wright house is surrounded by a natural landscape, built on the flank (never the top) of a hill or in the open desert. There were such houses, but more typically they were situated on a street, close by other houses. (This was not always evident in the photographs of his so-called Prairie houses, which were mostly in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.) Here is, I think, another aspect of Wright’s continued popularity: he was America’s premier suburban architect.
Unlike almost every architect of the twentieth century, Wright did not live and work in a city. For the first sixteen years of his independent practice, his home-cum-office was in Oak Park; later he moved to rural Wisconsin and still later constructed a winter retreat outside Scottsdale, Arizona. Nevertheless, urbanism did interest him, and in 1935 Wright unveiled a theoretical proposal for a new kind of city, as unusual, in its own way, as the earlier ville radieuse proposal of his European rival Le Corbusier. Broadacre City, as Wright called it, consisted of buildings in the landscape, linked to each other by a system of roads and highways. The residential areas consisted of individual houses—the smallest lots were one acre. Shopping was to be carried out in “wayside markets” and “distributing centers for merchandise of all kinds” that were located at highway intersections. Office buildings, factories, and community centers were scattered. There was nothing resembling a downtown in Wright’s suburban vision; indeed, his first book on town planning, published in 1932, was titled The Disappearing City.
Wright continued to tinker with Broadacre City for the rest of his life, but for most architects and planners, whose allegiance was to the traditional city, this proposal was a bit of an embarrassment, an old man’s foible. It turned out that the old man was right—or at least mostly right. The latest census confirms that the United States has become a nation of suburbs: more people now live in the suburbs than in traditional central cities. And these suburbs are no longer dormitory communities but self-sufficient metropolitan areas, with retail and entertainment facilities and with employment opportunities. (Nationwide, only 19 percent of worker commutes are from suburb to city, while 37 percent are from suburb to suburb.) Moreover, the physical environment of these new suburban cities, or “edge cities,” as Joel Garreau christened them, resembles Broadacre City to an uncanny degree.
It seems likely that in one way or another succeeding generations will continue to find their own meanings in Wright’s rich oeuvre. For example, his exploration of figurative ornament in the second and third decades of the twentieth century is surely something that current architects, many of whom are, once again, interested in decoration, would do well to study. Wright’s use of stained glass, murals, and handmade furniture in his buildings also anticipates a contemporary concern with the crafts. His attempts to develop low-cost building methods for houses, while they may be technologically obsolete, remain a telling reminder that affordability does not have to negate architectural quality. Perhaps most appealing is Wright’s ability to combine individualism with a broader sense of humanity. In a period when the individual feels increasingly powerless in the face of corporate and governmental bureaucracy, Wright’s valiant protracted struggle to affirm his—and others’—personal worth may be the most moving example of all.
Shortly after this was written, in 1993, Shining Brow, an opera based on Wright’s life, premiered in Madison, Wisconsin. In the subsequent decade, almost twenty titles a year have been added to the sagging Wrightian bookshelf, including a short biography by Ada Louise Huxtable, Neil Levine’s magisterial The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Franklin Toker’s gossipy Fallingwater Rising, and two fictionalized accounts of the architect’s scandal-ridden love life. In 2012, following a public outcry, an anonymous buyer paid $2.4 million for a Wright-designed house in Arizona threatened with demolition.