Frank Lloyd Wright (6 page)

A picture of Wright and students in 1948

“Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

“The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

There seems to be an endless list of Frank Lloyd Wright’s creations. He would begin one project, and once construction began, he was free to take on the next. For example, in the midst of a chaotic private life, and while the Imperial Hotel was being built in Tokyo, Wright went to Los Angeles and began building the now-famous Hollyhock House for Aline Barnsdall. He was also under contract to build Los Angeles’s New Theater for her.

The Hollyhock House

Aline was a formidable individual with many friends, all of whom wanted to second-guess the design she'd wanted and that Frank was working to create. But in spite of their best intentions, Aline had a very clear idea of what Hollyhock House should be. Like Frank’s mother, who decided he should be an architect before he was even born, Aline Barnsdall decided to call her new and as yet undersigned house Hollyhock House before she'd even hired Frank.

Hollyhock House was known as California Romanza, a reference to a romantic meaning (in music) of free form or freedom to make one’s own form, which described Aline perfectly. Frank built Hollyhock House as he would any house, building it out of the environment rather than for it. In it, he captured a natural ravine for catching rainwater, even though it did unexpectedly flood Hollyhock House, which was surrounded by nothing but arid desert.

Barnsdall loved Hollyhock House. As Frank said, “Individuality is the most precious thing of all.” Aline was a free spirit who traveled constantly, but she spent more time at Hollyhock House than other place else she lived. Then came the unfortunate day when she was accused of being a “parlor Bolshevik” during the Red Scare. In response, Aline Barnsdall gave Hollyhock House away, including George, the Japanese cook. The recipient was the California Art Club, and the donation stipulated that Frank Lloyd Wright’s creation was not to be altered for 15 years.

Also during those years of upheaval, Mrs. Alice Millard hired Frank to design a combination bookshop and house for her in Pasadena. Frank was not fond of the architecture he saw in California. He said so in words that seem inappropriate today when he described it as “Spain—by way of despised Mexico—gradually moved up into this homely invasion.”

Not only was this a godsend after all Miriam had put him through, he also said he was proud that Alice and George Millard had “survived” the first house he built for them and were now asking him to build a second. “Out of 172 buildings, this one made only the eleventh time it had happened to me,” he said.

The Millard home, La Miniatura, became not only a challenge to build something beautiful among the architecture he disrespected, but it also became a new phase in Wright’s architectural venture. It became the first block house, made of concrete blocks. The material was cheap and easy to haul, plus Alice was keen to prevent a firetrap for the books she'd warehoused for book collectors.

La Miniatura

Frank poured a concrete slab, then created double walls with concrete blocks. He called this educating the concrete block. The result was double concrete block walls with hollow spaces to promote coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter. As pictures indicate, it was a unique design.

In 1927, his talent for the original inspired Dr. Alexander J. Chandler to hire Wright to build a resort in the desert. Wright and some 15 others, plus Ogilvana, drove cross-country, leaving in a snowstorm, to reach Arizona. When they arrived, they discovered they could not afford accommodations in the area. Undaunted, Dr. Chandler let them build their own camp. After all, land was plentiful, and Dr. Chandler owned 1,400 acres of it. Wright saw “San Marcos in the Desert” as a welcome challenge, discovering that nothing could be symmetrical in the desert. When the crew built their own accommodations, they named their camp Ocatillo, meaning “candle flame.”

Viewing the landscape, Wright decided to base construction on the design of the Saguaro cactus, with its inner ribbing. He was grateful to be back at work and excited about the prospect of this new and exciting venture. Unfortunately, due to the stock market crash, the project folded in 1929.

The structures at Ocatillo were intended to be ephemera and they were. The local Native Americans carted it all away during the following winter, but not before it was frequently photographed. Those photos are all that is left of Frank Lloyd Wright’s footprint there. Today, it is home to uninspired residential development.

Of course, the erasure of Wright’s buildings proved few and far between, thankfully. A number of his houses and religious buildings open their doors for tours, and Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, continues to run two campuses.

Taliesin, the evolution of Taliesin I, II and II, is a 600-acre campus in Wisconsin, and it offers courses during the summer term. But in 1933, Wright and a crew of others went west, again enjoying the hospitality of Dr. Chandler of the erstwhile San Marcos of the Desert, and there he established the Taliesin Fellowship, which eventually became, in 1937, a second campus. The 500-acre Taliesin West campus is in Scottsdale, Ariz., and is now considered the school's main campus, built over several years by Taliesin Fellowship apprentices.
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Classes are taught at Taliesin West during spring and fall semesters. Students at Taliesin West have the option of living in experimental desert shelters while enrolled in class.

The William Wesley Peters Memorial Library is housed on the Arizona campus, named for Frank Lloyd Wright’s first apprentice. The library houses 27,000 cataloged volumes of documents, maps, sound recordings, videos, slides photographs, drawings, books, pamphlets and correspondence. An additional 100 periodical titles are filed alphabetically, in addition to the cataloged collection.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives are also housed at Taliesin West. Maintained by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the archives include fine, decorative, and ethnographic arts, Wright designed furniture and decorative pieces, historic artifacts, textiles, reference and rare book libraries, and other materials critical to the interpretation of his life and work.
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The Foundation also maintains a list of about 90 Frank Lloyd Wright homes and buildings that are open to the public. The archives maintain an independent website with more detailed information about the location of the buildings, and what is unique about each one. Histories of the owners who contracted Wright to build their homes are also included.

Among them is the B. Harley Bradley House, designed by Wright in 1900. The Bradley House, located just south of Chicago in Kankakee, represents the beginning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School period.
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The Bradley House website includes a century-long chronological account of who owned the house and what it was used for, how it was renovated over the years, and how it is now preserved.

The Bradley House

Hollyhock House is among the structures listed. Part of the Barnsdall Art Park today, Hollyhock House is still at the heart of the arts, and it has recently reopened to the public. Perhaps in keeping with Frank Lloyd Wright’s keen interest in new innovations in the arts, Houzz, a home remodeling and design website, has created a digital tour of Hollyhock House using drone technology.

The Foundation’s website includes photos of Wright’s project that no longer exist, along with detailed information about them. A photo of the Larkin Company Administration Building is included, which Wright said, in his autobiography, represents “a genuine expression of power directly applied to purpose, in the same sense that the ocean liner, the plane, or the car is so.”

When Sullivan, Wright’s old friend and former employer, died, Wright said, “no monument is ever more than a monument to those who erect it.” Elsewhere he said that “monuments are made by those who, voluntarily or not, never did anything but betray the thing the great man they would honor loved most, those who were 'charitable' when he was in need; officious when he died. May hell hold them all!”

When he died in Phoenix, Ariz., at the age of 91, Wright's body was returned to Taliesin II in Wisconsin for burial. His grave was marked with a rough-hewn stone marker. Eventually, his remains were moved to Arizona when Ogilvanna passed away.

A picture of Wright at the White House near the end of his life

Other 20
th
century history titles
by Charles River Editors

Other titles about Frank Lloyd Wright
on Amazon

Hoffmann, Donald. Understanding Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. ISBN 0-486-28364-X

Lind, Carla. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses. San Francisco: Promegranate Artbooks, 1994. ISBN 1-56640-998-5

McCarter, Robert (ed.). Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991. ISBN 1-878271-26-1

Meehan, Patrick, ed. Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1987. ISBN 0-471-84509-4

Nisbet, Earl. Taliesin Reflections: My Years Before, During, and After Living with Frank Lloyd Wright. Petaluma, Calif.: Meridian Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9778951-0-6

Rosenbaum, Alvin. Usonia : Frank Lloyd Wright's Design for America. Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1993. ISBN 0-89133-201-4

Russell, Virginia L. "You Dear Old Prima Donna: The Letters of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen", Landscape Journal, 20.2 (2001): 141-155.

Sergeant, John. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1984. ISBN 0-8230-7178-2

Treiber, Daniel. Frank Lloyd Wright. 2nd ed. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008. ISBN 978-3-7643-8697-9

Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. "In the Cause of Architecture", Architectural Record, March 1908. Reprinted in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1: 1894–1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1992. ISBN 0-8478-1546-3

Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House. New York: Horizon Press, 1954.

Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1961.

Friedland, Roger and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship. New York: Regan Books, 2006. ISBN 0-06-039388-2

Gill, Brendan. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Putnam, 1987. ISBN 0-399-13232-5

Huxtable, Ada Louise. Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2004. ISBN 0-670-03342-1

Secrest, Meryle. Frank Lloyd Wright: a Biography. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-394-56436-7

Twombly, Robert C. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1979. ISBN 0-471-03400-2

Wright, Iovanna Lloyd. Architecture: Man in Possession of His Earth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.

Aguar, Charles and Berdeana Aguar. Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright's Landscape Designs. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. ISBN 0-07-140953-X

Blake, Peter. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1964.

Fell, Derek. The Gardens of Frank Lloyd Wright. London: Frances Lincoln, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7112-2967-9

Heinz, Thomas A. Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide. Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-2244-8

Hildebrand, Grant. The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. ISBN 0-295-97005-7

Larkin, David and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks. New York: Rizzoli, 1993. ISBN 0-8478-1715-6

Levine, Neil. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-03371-4

Lind, Carla. Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995. ISBN 0-87654-468-5

McCarter, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright. London: Phaidon Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7148-3148-4

Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867–1959: Building for Democracy. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004. ISBN 3-8228-2757-6

Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks and Peter Gössel (eds.). Frank Lloyd Wright: The Complete Works. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. ISBN 978-3-8228-5770-0

Riley, Terence and Peter Reed (eds.). Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. ISBN 0-87070-642-X

Smith, Kathryn. Frank Lloyd Wright: America's Master Architect. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. ISBN 0-7892-0287-5

Storrer, William Allin. The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 0-226-77620-4

Storrer, William Allin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 0-226-77621-2