Frank Lloyd Wright
From Philosopedia
Wright, Frank Lloyd (8 June 1867 - 9 April 1959)
Wright was the son of a Unitarian minister who left his wife and children when Frank was a teenager. The father was never again seen. Anna Wright, his mother, was of the Welsh Lloyd-Jones clan, as was his uncle, Jenkins Lloyd Jones. She was an active member of the Oak Park Unity Church at a time (1886 - 1892) that Augusta Jane Chapin, a suffragette, was the Universalist minister.
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The Early Years
Garry Wills of Northwestern University has written that “The Welsh relative who had greater influence on Wright than anyone but his mother was the liberal Unitarian preacher, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Wright’s ‘Uncle Jenk,’ who became a surrogate father to him after his own father’s defection. Jones was one of Addams’s principal allies, a regular presence at Hull House. Wright met her at his uncle’s dinner table, and was frequently at Hull House himself, where his mother and first wife did volunteer work. He gave one of his most important early lectures there, in 1901, pleading with Morrisites like Ellen Starr not to reject machinery in their regard for handmade arts and crafts. (Wright wrote of William Morris that he) did the best in his time for art and will live in history as the great sociologist, together with Ruskin the great moralist: significant fact worth thinking about, that the two great reformers of modern times professed the artist.”
Wright studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left as a sophomore to obtain a drafting job with the skyscraper builder, Louis Sullivan, around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—Wright was booted out of the firm for moonlighting. He then commenced his own “organic architecture” business, which led to “Prairie style” buildings in Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere in the Midwest. Wright was radically innovative both as to structure and aesthetics, and his work has been imitated widely around the world. An unrealized project was his proposed mile-high skyscraper (“The Illinois”) for Chicago. A Testament (1957) and an autobiography (revised 1943) contain his personal ideas on architecture and philosophy. Of the 800 buildings he designed, roughly half were built. In Madison, Wisconsin, the Unitarian church he built became one he joined as its 696th member. His career had actually begun with his uncle’s construction of a Unitarian chapel, one to which, almost a century later, Wright returned in order to build his own tomb.
Women in His Life
Unconventional in his personal life, Wright proclaimed that it was more honorable to be open and have a mistress than to have secret affairs. In 1910 Wright abandoned the first of his three wives, Catherine Tobin, for the wife of a client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. But because Catherine would not give him a divorce, he built in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a home of “organic architecture” called Taliesin (Welsh for “shining brow”), in which he and Mamah lived, unmarried. When a disgruntled West Indian butler-handyman impulsively set fire to the building, possibly because asked to leave, Mamah, her two children, and four neighbors were chopped to death with the servant’s ax as they attempted to escape the fire. Mamah’s skull was split.
“In his grief,” Ken Burns wrote (Vanity Fair, November 1998), “Wright refused to let the undertaker touch the body of the woman he had loved. Instead, he had his own carpenters fashion a simple wooden box for her. There was no formal funeral either. The coffin was placed on a plain farm wagon, covered with flowers, and drawn by horses. Wright’s son John and two cousins helped him bury her in the little cemetery behind his mother’s family chapel. “I wanted to fill the grave myself,’ Wright remembered. ‘No monument yet marks the spot where she was buried. . . . Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?’ ” Today, however, a small stone resting against a tree marks Mamah Cheney’s grave.
Wright then rebuilt Taliesin as a memorial, installing another mistress, Miriam Noel, a sculptor who wore a monocle and who had fallen in love with his photograph. When Catherine thirteen years after their initial separation granted him a divorce, he and Miriam wed but five months later ended the “luckless love affair.” At the age of fifty-seven, Wright then fathered a child with twenty-six-year-old Olga Milanoff Hinzenberg (Olgivanna Lazovich), a Montenegrin dancer. Miriam sued Wright but was unable to abort the affair, once even trying to move back into Taliesin and forcing Olgivanna into temporary hiding. After their daughter Iovanna was born in 1925 and Wright finally secured a divorce from Miriam, he and Olgivanna wed in 1928 and the two were devoted to each other for Wright’s final three decades.
The Fountainhead
Biographer Meryle Secrest states that Wright had the religious impulse, yes, but he was the god he wanted to be worshiped. He was outraged by Ayn Rand’s portrayal of him in The Fountainhead - one of Rand’s secretaries, however, is said to have claimed that she had another famous architect in mind. Secrest believes that Wright lied through his teeth half the time. This Wright was said to have justified, for after all he was an artist! That he was, as evidenced by the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (which survived an earthquake that killed 150,000), the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and the numerous distinctively designed contemporary homes constructed throughout the nation. Soulless modern architecture he despised, leading many to describe his hedonistically designed structures as spiritually humanistic.
Wright's Inspirations
Wright’s collective writings cite the individuals who had most influenced him. Included were Pythagoras, Aristophanes, Socrates, Lao-tze, Gautama, Jesus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Cervantes, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Melville, Thorstein Veblen. And the man, Louis Sullivan, whose firm once had fired him. He also approved of Samuel Butler’s acronymic name for the United States: Usonia. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of his affordable Usonian houses were built all around the country. They were sleek, stretched-out ranch-style structures which helped define the suburban style that later came to be called “contemporary.”
“I hated him, of course,” said the noted architect Philip Johnson, “but that’s only normal when a man is so great. It’s a combination of hatred, envy, contempt, and misunderstanding. All of which gets mixed up with his genius. . . . Trying to find the genius of a man like that, who you realize is a genius when you’re talking to him, and more of a genius as you get to know his work, is one of those things that probably doesn’t go into words.”
Wright’s 800 or so works included a variety of constructions: churches, banks, businesses, a filling station, a synagogue, an art museum, a hotel, skyscrapers, resorts, a European-style beer garden, houses for the wealthy as well as Usonian structures that cost only $5,500. Unfortunately, many complained, his flat-roofed buildings often leaked water during a rainstorm.
A 2006 Biography
A 2006 biography by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, The Fellowship, The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote that they had found that creative geniuses are often abusive and self-absorbed. Also, when isolated for years, they can end up having a lot of sex, sometimes with one another. Nicolai Ouroussoff, reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, described "the exploitation of the young apprentices by Wright and Olgivanna, a slavish admirer of the now mostly forgotten émigre cult figure G. I. Gurdjieff:
- Under their supervision, the apprentices built the Taliesin complexes in Wisconsin and Arizona, tilled the land, chopped wood and shoveled manure. At one point, Olgivanna encouraged the sexual frustrated young men to take up with another, even forming "sex clubs" to teach them how. (She later founded a corrective heterosexual version when things got out of hand). At another, horny young men are caught scampering through Iovanna's bedroom window.
Ouroussoff continues,
- Buried in all the gossip are some disturbing reminders about Wright's worldview. A self-proclaimed pacifist, Wright continued to speak out against American involvement in World War II even as bombs fell on London. He was prone to making anti-Semitic and racist statements, and despite his close relationships with gay men in private he could be virulently anti-gay in public.
Ouroussoff concluded that the two biographers failed to recognize that contradictory qualities can coexist in the same man.
The Final Days
In 1959 when the Guggenheim Museum (which some have derisively called “the washing machine by the park”) was being finished, Wright’s eyesight had begun to fail. That spring when his wife, Kitty, died, his son David waited a day before informing him. “Why didn’t you tell me as soon you knew?” Wright wept. “Why should I have bothered?” his son answered. “You never gave a goddamn for her when she was alive.” It was not long afterwards that Wright had surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction, and although the operation was successful the ninety-one-year-old died quietly in his sleep. His coffin was loaded onto a pickup truck, and his architectural family drove for twenty-eight hours to Wisconsin where, just as Mamah had been, he was carried on a flower-strewn farm wagon and buried at the Unity Chapel Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The gravestone is a narrow triangular building stone that is surrounded by a circle of wildflowers, and it is inscribed with name and vital dates. A Unitarian clergyman, Max Gaebler, read Emerson’s “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
In 1995, after fifty-seven years of false starts, political sabotage, and dashed hopes, Madison, Wisconsin, construction workers started building the Monona Terrace Convention Center. Wright originally had unveiled the plan in 1938 and revised it in the 1950s, but businessmen who despised his politics and complained about the building’s costs successfully delayed its start. He had the reputation of being a habitual deadbeat who bounced checks and dodged bill collectors, but in making the announcement that finally the civic complex was to be realized George Nelson, a broadcasting executive and head of the development commission, observed, “The money that the city will make off of this - in the economy and the jobs created - will be enough to pay every bill that Frank Lloyd Wright stiffed people for many times over. People said he never paid his debts. He’s paying them now.”
His widow reportedly was heavy into mysticism. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, in a postscript to John Lloyd Wright’s My Father Who Is On Earth (1994), explained that the absence of a memorial service following her father’s (John’s) death “was consistent with a desire - inherited from his father - to keep the emphasis on the living; and, if he cared little for other details of what happened after he had departed, such as legacies, that too was an attitude he inherited.” Her father was an accomplished architect, a noted toy manufacturer, and an active member of his community.
When Olgivanna died in 1985 and her ashes were placed at Taliesin West, her followers secretly exhumed the body of her husband in Wisconsin, had it cremated, and had the ashes transported to Arizona. So despite his having been buried in Wisconsin, Wright’s body was “grave-robbed” to his son David’s and others’ outrage. To this day the remains rest near Olgivanna’s in a garden wall.
Wright, in addition to creating numerous architectural works, wrote his Autobiography (1932, revised 1943) and A Testament (1957), which contained,
- I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Wright's Unitarian Church, Madison, Wisconsin
