Frank Lloyd Wright (4 page)

“Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

Just prior to World War I, Edward C. Waller commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design and build Midway Gardens, near Hyde Park. It was intended to be just a place to go, and maybe do some dancing, but it became an embarrassment to Wright.
“I often thought, ‘Why will someone in mercy not give them the final blow and tear them down?’” Wright once said of Chicago’s Midway Gardens, after he'd built them. Eventually someone did, in 1929, and at the time, Wright declared that, save for the Columbia Exposition, the Arts had yet to come to Chicago. They certainly did not arrive by way of Midway Gardens, in spite of Frank Lloyd Wright’s every effort.

Admittedly, it was built in a hurry. The entire gardens were constructed in a mere 90 days. The gardens had not even been completed by opening day, nor were they ever completely finished, according to Wright’s design due to money, war, politics, and misunderstandings getting in the way. Nonetheless, i
n keeping with Wright’s commitment to the notion of the architect designing everything, he hired artists to sculpt decorative Sprites as outdoor art. This hearkened back to his belief that the decorations—the art work—were to be created by the builder, and not left to chance for the owner to supply.

Wright hired a woman, Catherine Dudley, to pose for the sculpting of the Sprites. When the Builders Union heard about this, they naturally wanted to protect their members. The union wanted Catherine Dudley and the sculptors to get Union cards, or be replaced by union workers. It was just one of many instances where those in building trades did not understand Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision. Wright wrote a check to the union representative, never heard anything more on the matter, and the work was completed by his sculptors.

Midway Gardens fell short of the hype. It held tremendous potential, especially with the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright at the helm, but one setback after another took its toll. The owner, Edward Waller, went bankrupt two years after Midway Gardens opened in 1914. In desperation, Waller (or the bank) sold Midway Gardens to Edelweiss (Schoenhofen) Brewery Company who renamed it “Edelweiss Gardens.”

“
The Gardens were never ‘beer gardens’ in any sense. The Edelweiss did not know that,” Wright said in retrospect. When Prohibition arrived and the nation went dry, the Edelweiss beer garden closed, as there was no beer to sell, and the owners could not envision the gardens without it.

The Midway Gardens

It was remodeled along the way, without the slightest heed paid to Wright’s designs as commissioned by Waller. The incomplete sections were built according to the whim of whatever current owner had taken it upon himself to paint or otherwise renovate.

Eventually, Midway Gardens was sold once more, this time to the E. C. Dietrich Midway Automobile Tire and Supply Company. Again, it was renamed, and became “The Midway Dancing Gardens,
”
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but it never became fully what Wright had intended, both in design and function.

Finally, in October 1929, Midway Gardens was permanently closed and subsequently demolished. In a testament to Wright's
design, the building was so solidly constructed that tearing it down sent the wrecking company into bankruptcy.
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Frank had finally gotten his wish; the man who had devoted his life to building lived to see and celebrate the razing of the one structure he disliked most out of all that bore his name on the blueprints.

One of his more enduring projects was Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. This was, perhaps, an unexpected legacy, given that there was never any love lost between Frank Lloyd Wright and organized education. As he once put it, “Never have I found support for radical or organic ideas from architects or professors.”

Nonetheless, in the early 20
th
century, Wright and his wife formed a school at his home called Taliesin on the LloydWright family property near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Taliesin’s legacy was the culmination of Wright’s lifelong learning. He determined that education at Taliesin would emphasize painting, sculpture, music, drama, and dance "in their places as divisions of architecture." Embracing the “Wisconsin Idea” of the entire state as a classroom, the Wright family and the University of Wisconsin combined forces to create a unique program based on learning by doing.
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K. Murphy’s picture of Taliesin

Wright’s intellectual views formed over a number of decades, and once established, he stood by them. Just as his architectural style developed organically, so did his standards. For instance, he refused a chance for a full, two year, paid leave of study of Beaux Arts in France. Wright bared his soul in his autobiography, as he looked back over decisions he had made, saying, “Suddenly the whole thing cleared up before my eyes as only keeping faith with what we then called 'America' and I now call 'Usonia,'” he later explained.

“Usonia” was a term coined by Wright, combining “The United States” and “utopia.” He frequently mentioned Usonia, the Usonian Village and the Usonian House in his autobiography. He speculated that people would leave large cities in favor of smaller villages, or even isolation, for economic reasons. “The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem but the problem most difficult for her major architects,” he wrote. He sincerely empathized with the less fortunate, trapped in the world of rent and renter, with no hope of a way out. Wright attributed the cause to people not really knowing how to live. He scoffed at what passed for beauty in the average life, which as he saw it, was a poor imitation of what the more affluent enjoyed.

Wright even coined terms for what he saw as preventing Usonia from materializing, including “monkey-fied” business and “culture-lag” that prevented the simple living of a life. His proposal was that heating, lighting, and sanitation must be simplified in order to liberate people so they might live the way they wanted to and should live. His concepts of design and his philosophies were merging into a single process.

As Wright evolved, his definition of how to create better houses encompassed nine principles, each of them describing something that needed to be eliminated from house design. In spite of half a century of architecture since then, the offending items remain part and parcel of new construction. At least six of the items—which in his mind needed to be done away with--remain the subject of a plethora of advertisements barraging the American public every day: visible roofs, garages, gutters, paint, plaster, and furniture. The Usonian home would be devoid of all of these items as they only served to increase cost, and creating a home that is difficult to maintain.

He would also do away with basements, which he deemed “plagues.” He proposed no trim or molding, no paint, no plaster, and no radiators or light fixtures. The home should heat and light itself in what he called the “hypocaust” way, with light and heat sources placed between the flooring.

Instead of traditional building materials, he advocated the use of five materials only: wood, brick, cement, paper and glass. As one publication put it, “Few architects have given us more poetic translations of material into structure than Frank Lloyd Wright,”
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and Wright had an absolute fascination with glass. Ever at the cutting edge, in 1894, Wright became a contractor for the American Luxfer Prism Company.
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This was one of the early instances of him replacing traditional windows with glass blocks in commercial buildings. Wright’s love affair with glass also continued throughout his life, as did the use of other, innovative, new building materials. Furthermore, when he was hired to design a Chicago skyscraper for the National Life Insurance Company in 1920, he opted for glass as the main building material. The entire building was a cantilever glass frame as a result.

Along the way, Wright worked alongside John Wellborn Root, who is considered the founder of the Chicago school of skyscraper design.
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In 1873, John Wellborn Root’s architectural firm, Burnham & Root, built The Rookery, 11 stories tall and one of the tallest buildings in the world at the time. It was Root who experimented with combining masonry and metal construction, the birth of what Wright later called “weaving” building materials, when he expanded on this concept. Wright continued to build on this concept through the rest of his life, constantly experimenting with new materials and new combinations of materials in order to create unique designs.

Root

Wright borrowed liberally from Root, who invented the concept of the floating foundation, a technique Wright implemented in the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. But first, in 1905, when Root’s The Rookery was due for renovation, it was Frank Lloyd Wright who was granted the commission. In true Wright style, much of Root’s iron ornamentation was removed and replaced with white Carrara marble and gilded with gold.

Not only was Wright fascinated with steel and glass, but he was intrigued by ferro, or armored concrete. All were newly discovered building materials, meant to replace the use of wood. Ferro is the process of embedding steel rods inside concrete so it can withstand bending. Wright considered the concept of steel-in-tension truly liberating—with it, a square was no longer destined to be a square.

He had the opportunity to test its capabilities when Baron Okura, chairman of the board representing the Imperial Royal Household, was hired to construct the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Wright had long been interested in Japanese art and eventually wrote a book entitled,
The Japanese Print: An Interpretation.
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Wright also saw Tokyo as a unique challenge to the entire field of architecture, given that earthquakes were a daily occurrence, and even a small quake could cause damage and kill people. He called on his experience with John Wellborn Root to create a building that incorporated his concept of beauty without sacrificing safety.

Taking his own advice to know the client and the environment before beginning work, Wright learned as much as he could about Japan, firsthand. His experience in Tokyo had a lifelong impact on his sense of design, and he began to incorporate sliding walls and panels into his architecture as a result. Among other things, he discovered what those who had gone before him failed to observe that thousands of Japanese had been killed—murdered, he called it—by roof tiles falling during earthquakes. His solution was to replace roof tiles with a light, hand-worked, green cooper roof. After all, as he asked, “Why kill more?”