The trouble with Frank Lloyd Wright

At 2.5 kilos, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward is the heaviest take yet on the uppity Wisconsin lad who at age 20 dropped out of the University of Wisconsin after two years to be anointed chief draftsman at the top Chicago architectural firm, Adler-Sullivan. Six years later he founded his own firm, and American architecture has never been the same, and rarely better.

But my ultimate ambivalence about Wright was set in stone by a formidable serendipity: The day he died in 1959, I had scheduled the first big speaker for my new Penn course on "The Mass Society": Lewis Mumford. Mumford was clearly moved by Wright's death: He abandoned his prepared text for an ad lib obit that expressed his regret that Wright was an adolescent who never fulfilled his great potential, especially in New York City. (This formidable volume commemorates the 50th anniversary of the still contentious Guggenheim Museum.)

The noun project dominates this celebratory book's contents, up to and including Wright's 1959 plans for the cultural center of Baghdad. Mumford argued that Wright was big on concepts, less so on follow-through.

(And he cheated clients! Wright's building in Bartlesville, Oklahoma was originally conceived as St. Mark's in the Bowery in Greenwich Village. Abandoned by his businessman admirer, it tried to be a hotel and then a University of Oklahoma architecture center.)

To be sure, I love the Goog more and more. But only as long as I submit to its unfunctional wiles. A nice place to visit, but would you want to work there?

Leaky roof at the wedding

The only imaginative gimmick I devised in 20 years of teaching American Lit was to require a term paper on a great American building. To turn my Beaver College students on, I took them on a tour of Wright's Beth Sholom Synagogue in nearby Elkins Park. They were always wowed (as was I, no matter how many times), except for one middle-aged mother who complained. "This place is great— except when the roof leaks at your daughter's wedding!" Nitpicking.

Well, so did I when I visited Taliesin West to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Taliesin, Wright's Wisconsin estate. I was puzzled by some concrete structures painted redwood. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Wright archives, explained that when Wright first visited Scottsdale he was dazzled by the way the redwood irrigation sluices gleamed when the water gushed through them. Alas, when there was no water, redwood evanesced into the hot Arizona sun! How was he to know?

Midgets only, please

Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania, of course, is my all-time all Wright structure. Although I'm no six-footer (five-foot-eight, actually), still I had to bow down to get through Wright's doors. Damn. That arrogant squirt (who shamelessly used a porkpie hat on his tiny top as well as high heels on his dinky feet to simulate the giant he construed himself to be) was making himself the module! Frank, really!

And although I concede that the hearth should be the heart of the home, I was seriously upset by the fact that Wright's giant pot for heating food was too big to ever get hot enough to cook! (Call it Wright's Crackpot.) And what is less, the crane designed to swing the pot over the piddling fire didn't swing!

I remember telling my students at Beth Sholom that Wright's client Edgar Kaufmann, when presented with those glorious drawings in 1934, had asked Wright if he ought to have his engineers check out the math for Fallingwater's cantilevered rooms. Frank blew his top. (You don't ask a genius to check his math.) Unfortunately, those cantilevered bits of Fallingwater are about to fall into the water of Bear Run. And as a Pennsylvania taxpayer, I flinch at the estimated repair costs—from $11 to $23 million.

Self-congratulatory

So Lewis Mumford and that bride's mother were right, Frank. And the $75 volume the Guggies have assembled to praise their half-century of custodianship is much too lenient on their undisciplined genius.

In a cultural democracy, every taxpayer has a vote. This book is much too self-congratulatory. My wife has filched my favorite Latinate TV shirt, which reads, ERRARE HUMANUM EST. Right, Frank? That's what our architects need to remember. That great Finn humanist, Alvar Aalto, said as much as the epigraph to his centennial retrospective in Helsinki: "Never forget: Architects make mistakes."♦


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