Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Eliška Hulcová

Explaining the Organic: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Texts as a Literary Work Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph. D.

2019

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. for his support, my mother for being who she is, and Láďa for being a wonderful friend.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Context ...... 1

1.2 Methods ...... 2

1.3 Goals, Research Questions, and Background ...... 4

1.4 State of the Research ...... 6

2. Wright Reading His Favorite Authors ...... 9

2.1 “A Reading of William Blake” ...... 13

2.2 “A Reading of Victor Hugo” ...... 14

2.3 “A Reading of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’” and Fallingwater 16

2.3.1 Walt Whitman’s “A Song of Myself” ...... 16

2.3.2 The Fallingwater and Whitman ...... 17

3. Space as Machine ...... 21

3.1 The Architect and the Machine ...... 21

3.1.1 House and Home ...... 25

3.2 The Art and the Crafts of the Machine ...... 27

4. Taliesin ...... 29

4.1 Taliesin Fellowship ...... 30

4.2 1927 Taliesin ...... 32

4.3 1939 Taliesin ...... 35

4.4 1956 New Education ...... 39

5. The City ...... 40

5.1 1929 The City and 1931 The Disappearing City ...... 41

5.2 What Is Broadacre City ...... 47

5.3 1943 Broadacre City ...... 50

5.4 1951 Broadacre City and 1956 Urban Planning ...... 55

6. Describing the Organic ...... 57

6.1 1936 Organic Architecture ...... 58

6.2 1952 Organic Architecture and 1953 Organic Architecture ...... 59

7. Apprentices’ Writings on Wright ...... 61

8. Conclusion ...... 65

9. Summary ...... 70

10. Works Cited ...... 73

“The mission of an architect is to help people understand how to make life more beautiful, the world a better one for living in, and to give reason, rhyme, and meaning to life.”

– Frank Lloyd Wright, 1957

1. Introduction

1.1 Context

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) was born in Wisconsin, but he studied in

Chicago and created his early works there. After a short episode in Europe, he returned to Wisconsin, where he founded a studio and an informal school of architecture called

Taliesin as a reference to his Welsh predecessors. Since the 1890s, he had published a lot of works, but his early texts did not survive as manuscripts due to frequent fires. The first texts, however, are incomplete and date back to the 1920s. The official foundation of Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture (the fellowship program) was the milestone and educated almost 700 apprentices between 1932 and 1959. Wright created a particular plan of education for prospective architects, based on traveling between

Taliesin, WI, and the new Taliesin West, AZ. The whole fellowship program was subject to particular social rules, norms, and ways of work structure.

Whereas Wright is considered one of the most imaginative and prolific 20th- century architects, who intentionally created the image of the Starchitect during his lifetime, his extensive publishing activity remains hidden from the floodlight of his architectonic and pedagogical work. Architects and architecture historians make use of

Wright’s writings for interpretation of his realized and unrealized works, yet documents have not been analyzed as solitary literary works from both language and cultural points of view. Their analysis and interpretation can cast light on the evaluation of Wright’s

1 world view, his way of creative work, thinking in his exceptionally long productive life as well as the way how his myth was created – by himself and his apprentices.

Thanks to the recent transfer (2012 – 2017) of Wright’s complete archive from

Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ to Avery Library at Columbia University, which made it possible for researchers to analyze the significant part of it, it is now possible to explore

Wright’s writings in its complexity. The critical approach to Wright’s myth, his time, gender, racial, and nationalist stereotypes prove to be pivotal. We may compare the versions of Wright’s selected texts from different periods, comparison of Wright’s writings with other relevant literary works, such as Walt Whitman’s literary works as well as essays by other contemporaries – Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or

Walter Gropius. We may also use the case of Wright as a symptomatic starting point for texts written by architects as a distinctive literary genre.

1.2 Methods

As it was mentioned above, the goal of the thesis is not to write about Frank

Lloyd Wright’s architecture and analyze it from the point of view of architectural history, but to focus on his writings, thus the most suitable method is a textual analysis.

The aim is not a text analysis regarding morphology and syntax, but an analysis of writings as a cultural phenomenon. I am going to analyze the act and its shift, the purpose, which was continually changing during Wright’s long life as he enhanced and edited his works, and the scene, meaning specific situations, which led to the changes, edits, shifts of meaning, emphases and merits in particular documents. Wright kept rewriting and changing his works during his long life and extremely prolific career. The manuscript of the book Organic Architecture from 1934, for instance, is fragments of articles Wright wrote almost forty years earlier. As two unique manuscripts (“In the

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Cause of Architecture” and “Organic Architecture”) show, Frank Lloyd Wright made notes and corrected wording in essays that had already been published. As a document was, for Wright, a continually changing statement, I have chosen archival research and a comparison of different versions of selected writings set in the context of history and his life.

The already published selections of Wright’s writings, edited by Bruce Brooks

Pfeiffer, with prefaces by Kenneth Frampton, cannot be employed for the aim I have chosen. Although these books provide the analysis of the development of Wright’s ideas through the course of gradually published writings on topics permeating Wright’s work, such as urbanism, houses, organic architecture, democratic nature of architecture, teaching architecture, etc., they do not show how Wright worked with the written text and how he transformed it. Due to this fact, it was necessary to refer to the archival source of Wright’s original writings.

As far as the system of sources is concerned, I work in compliance with the archival policy, created by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer in Wright’s archive; the Avery

Library in which the archival materials are stored now maintains the arrangement as well. A variety is a group of writings with a similar or identical title, which resulted from one publication process (drafts –> transcripts –> proofreading –> published version –> post-publication notes). The variety is bound to one specific publication of the writing, and individual types differ in the date of production (they may be rather significant as they can span over sixty years; see the chapter on “Space as Machine”).

Each variety has a different inventory number in the Avery Library archive unlike versions which are always linked to one text variety and they play a different role in the process of publication (a draft, transcription, proofreading, published version, and post- publication notes frequently overlap, or it is not clear enough what they were, there

3 could be more drafts, etc.). In the Avery Library archive, whose system is employed in this thesis, the respective versions have the same inventory number and they are distinguished by letters (A, B, C...).

1.3 Goals, Research Questions, and Background

The Avery Library archive is extensive, but there were two short texts that caught my attention in the first place. The first one, called Poor Little American

Architecture from 1929, is Wright’s commentary on Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s article on American architecture and himself. The other one is To the Neuter from 1932, in which Wright speaks about the topic of creativity. In the time when Wright was writing

Poor Little American Architecture, Hitchcock was teaching at a minor university in

Connecticut, occasionally publishing in Architectural Record and other journals. The primary impulse in his career – the offer from the first MoMA director Alfred Barr to work with Philip Johnson, whom Wright could not stand as an architect – came one year later. In 1929, Hitchcock published the book American Architecture. The tension between Wright and Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Wright’s contempt for Hitchcock’s first work is relatively apparent in Wright’s critical essay as he writes about the historian: “It is useless to ask why men will write about things they know so little about” (2). In his criticism in the four-page manuscript, Wright deals with Hitchcock’s specific phrasing only at the end when he writes:

I am interested in an organic architecture. Mr. Hitchcock is not because, for one

reason, he does not know what it is: for another, because he knows he wouldn't

like it anyway if he did know what it was! Mr. Hitchcock is delightfully

facetious in certain phases of his book: especially so in dividing his flock into

New and Old Traditionalists, New and Old Pioneers - a systematic perversion by

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him of qualities and circumstances in order to better serve the purposes of the

empirical Latin mind. As a matter of fact, all that is valuable in either Tradition

or Pioneering is old in the new, or new in the old. (3–4)

The first two and a half pages are devoted to the description of Hitchcock as a person, which serves as a basis for Wright’s implicit judgment of both his (negative) traits and the lack of professional competences, but he primarily emphasizes the fact that

Hitchcock (no matter how confusing his name is) as a Frenchman cannot understand distinctive American nature in American architecture. However, Wright is wrong in this respect because Hitchcock and Johnson later wrote a classic book on the International

Style, which does not recognize any architectural qualities that would be conditioned by nationality. The flagrant argumentation ad hominem, inconsistency in argumentation, is as antithetical to ideas of a liberal modernist (as Wright is often described) as Wright’s nationalism.

In the second text, To the Neuter, which was published three years later, Wright goes even further. He compares creative power to the image of sexual selection, and he perceives the International Style as unnatural:

The eunuch has certain advantages by way of his operation. The urge of his pro-

creative power, let's say, if the character is good, gives way to a calm attitude of

intellectual appreciation. … So it is surprising at this juncture that the

‘internationalists’ should so soon go off virility of spirit and try to substitute, for

feeling in action, a vicarious mental formula as a habit. This, equivalent of the

consequence of the operation - impotence - is the result of over-indulgence -

sentimentality or the practice of self-abuse - eclecticism. But, Nature (the

creative mind) her custom holds, let shame (the style internationalist) say what it

will. (1)

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Since the ideas are somewhat challenging to be accepted by the contemporary state of research, I have decided to focus on the critical analysis of the writings as such.

The thesis focuses on an analysis of selected texts by Frank Lloyd Wright. Their selection was subject to two criteria – first, it was necessary to choose writings with as many variations and versions as possible, published frequently in various modifications to be able to compare the versions and trace the implied shift in thinking. Secondly, the selection needed to be varied in topics in order to cover various (but pivotal) aspects of

Wright’s legacy: urbanism, teaching activities, space as a “machine for living”, the concept of organic architecture and its development as well as the role and status of an architect in the modern world. Having the above in mind, the main research question should be: What was and is the quality of Wright’s writings from literary and cultural points of view? We may also ask some other questions: was he the pioneer in the genre of architects’ own writings, or was it only a by-product of working on his image? Were

Wright’s texts about enforcing democracy and freedom groundbreaking in enforcing freedom (women’s and non-white races’ access to architectonic works and education), or did they confirm the exclusive states of heterosexual white men? How Wright’s writing about architecture has influenced his generation and the generation of his followers and apprentices?

1.4 State of the Research

The proposed outcome of research focused on literary and cultural analyses of

Wright’s texts, as it was performed with the emphasis on the comparison of various versions of the documents, represents a new approach, yet it is based on some recently published books. The first and probably the most important publication is the book by

Kenneth Frampton, who graduated in architecture, but he has been a historian and

6 architecture interpreter for his whole life. He represents phenomenology as he is engaged in phenomena in the history of the art of construction. Frampton’s most recent book is closely associated with the topic of the thesis out of all books on Wright.

Frampton has analyzed Wright’s work before and dealt with his technological innovations (the “textile blocks unit system” in particular) and communication in the living space of his houses. Thus, he has dealt mainly with a functional analysis.

However, Wright has been the object of Frampton’s attention due to other reasons as well: Bruce La Bruce, the director of Wright’s Archive, which was stored in the Wright

Foundation in Taliesin West at that time, initiated the unabridged edition of Wright’s writings of 1894–1959. Five volumes published in 1992–1995 had the foreword written by Frampton, in which he tried to interpret main topics Wright wrote about in his texts.

Frampton’s forewords have been recently published as collected works and represent the essential chronological characteristics and interpretation of Wright’s texts divided into five stages according to the original publisher’s plan. Nevertheless, Frampton follows technological and architectonic innovation Wright gradually kept revising; he neither analyzes writings from the literary point of view nor approaches them from the point of cultural analysis: colonial, racial, and gender studies. The book is thus the metaphorical signpost of Wright’s writings, although their interpretation will be thematic, and will analyze and interpret them as any other cultural phenomenon.

As far as a cultural analysis of Wright’s ideas in his architecture and writings is concerned, the most important publication is the catalog Frank Lloyd Wright:

Unpacking the Archive. The book is an extended catalog for the last year’s exhibition in

MoMA, New York, at the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Wright’s birth. It is a collection of thirteen essays regarding various aspects of Wright’s architectural work.

The main articles follow twelve parts of the exhibition made by twelve curators.

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Whereas some passages are very traditionally oriented (essays on Wright’s ornament or his effort to standardize housing and architectural engineering), others bring fundamentally critical points of view: these are papers on the Nakoma Country Club project (Elizabeth Hawley) and Rosenwald schools (Mabel Wilson). In the first paper, the author writes about criticism of Wright’s appropriation and exploitation of Native

American cultures she founds culturally offensive due to Wright’s superficiality and lack of knowledge. The other author criticizes the project of Rosenwald schools for black communities in the southwestern states of the USA. On the one hand, it provided education for slaves’ offspring in the most conservative states, yet the segregation deepened. Political criticism like this may be a drawing point for its application on critical reading of Wright’s texts.

The book, which has significantly shaken the world of architecture and the

Wright myth, but is also an acknowledged publication, is The Fellowship: The Untold

Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship. The book does not aim to be an academic paper, yet a journalistic piece based on interviews with witnesses alive. It sharply criticizes creating and maintaining Wright’s cult and myth by his students and apprentices. The book addresses the directive and hierarchical way of how activities in

Wright’s studio were organized as well as the way how Wright and his wife supervised the leisure time of the community members. The supervision and control often went into offensive details, such as supervision over their sexuality and romantic relationships. The community founded by Wright on a cult principle is described and analyzed in particular as a highly problematic phenomenon. Yet it is the everydayness of social relationships within Wright’s studio, and the effort to create his own myth and pedestal of originality with which Wright’s texts need to be critically confronted.

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Information about the history of architecture and interpretation of Frank Lloyd

Wright’s architecture is based on Neil Levine’s unequaled book. The work by the leading US architecture historian The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, which has been recently extended with The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright, is a basic and the most significant critical analysis of Wright’s work apart from Henry Russel-Hitchcock’s monograph. Unlike Kenneth Frampton, Levine did not deal with technical innovations but rather with the ability of Wright’s architecture to create social communities. He introduced the idea for the first time in the collective book Frank Lloyd Wright: From

Within Outward, published by MoMA, New York in 1994. Three years later, he compiled his monograph, in which he dealt with organizing the architectural space to bring people together and the way how Wright made social relations and built various communities in the course of his long life. Levine’s conclusion is a revisionist point of view, which aptly analyzes contradictions of how Wright created and denied the

American national cultural identity through architecture and his opinions. Levine’s social point of view is a fundamental standpoint of the thesis in progress.

2. Wright Reading His Favorite Authors

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, who assumed he had a talent for more disciplines than just architecture. He loved listening to himself and was intoxicated by what he considered brilliance. His journals and lectures may serve as proof that literature ranked among Wright’s most important sources of inspiration. There are not many architects, who would be prolific both in architecture and in writing, but Wright was one of them. Throughout his career, he felt he needed to explain his motivation and ideas to professionals and the general public, which resulted in writing the remarkable number of “sixteen books and hundreds of articles and lectures” (Pfeiffer 1). He was

9 very particular about the style of writing, which, in some respects, resembled the process of constructing and building. He started with pencil sketches, which he developed into more sophisticated texts, adding notes and comments, resulting in the final version. Yet the final version was not always conclusive, as he appeared to be a perfectionist, who kept rewriting his works. He thought only a few of his written works to be final; there was still room for improvement.

As far as his stylistics is concerned, his writings may be seen as flowing, and his lectures, on the other hand, do not seem to have the beginning and the end. Readers are caught rather in the middle of his inner talk, which he – at one point – decides to reveal to the others, but he does not realize that readers or listeners are not psychic and cannot read his mind. Thus, they find themselves in the middle of what may be called a unique way of the stream of consciousness, with ideas flowing in the vast universe of Wright’s mind, and it depends only on them to adapt to the pace sooner or later. However, he did not babble about nonsense, his mind was organized from the very beginning, and he knew what topic he was going to talk about (Pfeiffer 1), but he often was not able to fulfill the resolution. This fact seems to contradict with points mentioned in analyses of the texts as the records usually start with unorganized thoughts, giving instructions to his apprentices, commenting on what is happening around. Thus, his lecture on Blake, for instance, does not start until page 6 of the transcribed record. Kenneth Frampton, based at Columbia University, is one of the most outstanding figures dealing with

Wright not only as an architect but also as a writer. He defines Wright’s writings as

“Wright’s lifelong vocation of the transformation of industrial technique through art”

(Frampton, “Wright’s Writings” 13).

Throughout his Autobiography, the first edition of which was published in 1932,

Wright keeps dropping names of literary figures and their works which influenced his

10 attitudes and ideas, although he also keeps repeating himself: Ruskin and Goethe are mentioned at least twice (Wright, “Autobiography” 33-34, 53), for instance. His favorite authors and works include Jules Verne, The Arabian Nights, Whittier, Longfellow,

Bryant (Wright, “Autobiography” 34), Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero

Worship, Past and Present, Plutarch’s Lives, Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, Modern

Painters, Stones of Venice, Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, Shelley, Goethe’s Wilhelm

Meister, William Blake and others (Wright, “Autobiography” 53). Moreover, in the issue of Scholar magazine from September 1932, Wright also remembers his father

“experimenting with changes of intonation and accent, evidently reading the poem, book in hand, and occasionally trying over certain passages again and again” (Wright,

“Autobiography” 49) with this practice providing him a good background for his literary analyses and comments.

Whereas Wright repeatedly refers to many literary and cultural authorities, such as Ruskin, Blake, Goethe, Longfellow, and others, only three records dealing with the writers mentioned above have survived in Wright’s archive. However, none of the files were intended to be published, all of them are recordings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s lectures in Taliesin or Taliesin West. The first one is “A Reading of William Blake”, dated on March 4, 1956, the second one is “A Reading of Victor Hugo”, dated on April

8, 1956, and the last one is “Reading of Walt Whitman's “A Song of Myself", which is dated on May 6, 1956. All these talks were presented in the narrow circle of the

Taliesin Fellowship (the first ones probably took place in Taliesin West, the last one in

Taliesin), and they were later transcribed from audio recordings. It would be rather intriguing to find out what copies of the respective authors could be found in Wright’s library, which would prove whether the selection of Blake, Hugo and Whitman was

11 typical for Wright’s reading and they were proportionate in Wright’s books, or whether it is rather a random selection.

The fact that can be proved is that Wright dedicated three talks on outstanding literary figures and their works within two months in spring 1956. The meetings were more discussions than talks, as it is demonstrated in the record of “Reading Blake”, in which Wright’s speech is interrupted by Gene Maselink, Wright’s apprentice and secretary. The conversation with Maselink shows that the record is a dialogue instead as the meetings took place very often in the morning – some files have the explicit title of breakfast talks.

The other five meetings interspersed three meetings dedicated to Blake, Hugo, and Whitman in March, April, and May 1956. The talk on Blake – “A Reading of

William Blake” – was interrupted by conversations on an entirely different topic of

Japanese culture, which was Wright’s lifelong passion and regularly reflected Japan in texts and discussions. Other talks included “Form Follows Function - Study of Nature of Nature”, “Common Man”, and “Free Form”. All of them were topics on which

Wright repeatedly expressed his opinions as architecture was supposed to be understandable and useful for ordinary people. It was meant to be functional, thus related to nature, and free, which should allow free movement and use. Wright kept repeating the principles in his established writings, while he rarely mentioned interpretations of literary pieces.

There was only one discussion between the meetings dedicated to Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman. It took place on April 15, 1956, on a miscellaneous topic, which is not even specified in the title of the recording. It dealt with architecture in Japan and

Andrey Vlasov as Wright kept expressing his opinions on politics and the recent history of the Soviet Union, and he also participated in the congress of Soviet architects in

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1936. Between the meeting on April 15 and the meeting dedicated to Walt Whitman on

May 6, there was probably a migration from Taliesin to Taliesin West in Arizona, which is demonstrated in the introductory sentence of the talk on Whitman: “Since it's such a nice day, and also since we're here now to start in again...” (1). Migration was the most important ritual in the life of the Taliesin Fellowship, which virtually divided the life of the Fellowship into two parts of the year.

2.1 “A Reading of William Blake”

This record is dated on March 4, 1956, and contains 18 pages, but Wright’s comments start only on page 6. They are preceded by a one-page dialogue with

Olgivanna Wright and two short notes about Shakespeare. The first three pages contain the interview with Gene Maselnik, interrupted by Olgivanna and Wright’s daughter

Iovanna, talking about miscellaneous issues. Pages 7-17 include Wright’s quotes from

Blake and his comments. The last page of the record contains the dialogue between

Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Wright.

It may be a coincidence that the maiden name of William Blake’s mother was

Wright (Davies 47), but it may draw yet another connection to the architect. Blake was engaged both in visual arts and literature, having created his own philosophy; moreover, he was influenced by mysticism and had prophetic dreams. Thus, Wright had a perfect role model for his architecture and writing. However, Wright’s recorded contemplations of the figure of Blake start with a lengthy introduction and recording of a discussion about William C. Gannett’s The House Beautiful – with the name of the book written manually later in the manuscript , which leads to the assumption that the secretary was not familiar with the author or his book as his name is misspelled as well (Wright, “A

Reading of William Blake”1). Wright was the illustrator of the book.

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Wright starts with an extensive introduction, comparing himself to students sitting in the room and listening to him. He emphasizes education once again, saying that Blake’s book is “what you can’t get in the university. Oh, you can get it, but it would be overlooked unless you picked it up” (7). He continues by quoting Blake’s lines, asking somewhat rhetorical questions, whether the students understand – “I’m sure you don’t get that one” or “you get that one?” (8). After having read a couple of lines, he summarizes his interpretation of Blake’s poems. He identifies with Blake’s idea that humans should stick to faith, not a religion, and the fact that education is vital.

The lecture goes on with Wright reciting several lines and commenting or summarizing them for the students in one or two sentences. He does not touch upon the topic of architecture at all, but switches to Blake’s vocabulary: “When you’re stirred to the depth of fury you see as you never will see when you’re in calm state of mind” (15).

Wright was so drifted away in his thoughts that his wife had to remind him that it was time to go: “You know you have to leave in half an hour. I wish you’d come and just rest a little bit” (18), but she does not disturb his concentration, and he finishes with an impressive summary, highlighting Blake’s Christianity and ending with a warning “and the harm will do you good” (18), which was eventually omitted. The fact that he wandered in his mind and got lost in all the ideas he wanted to communicate is somewhat symptomatic for both Wright’s talks and writings.

2.2 “A Reading of Victor Hugo”

This record is dated on April 8, 1956. The document has six pages, the text is on the first five pages, and there is only one line on the last page. It is Wright’s concentrated interpretation of Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is interrupted by one note and one question of an unidentified listener on page 5.

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French literature appears to be crucial for Wright’s ideas on architecture as he mentions Viollet-le-Duc’s Habitations of Man in All Ages and Raisonné, which he believed to be, at the time of his reading, “the only sensible book on architecture in the world” (Wright, “Autobiography” 75). On April 8, 1956, Wright gave a long talk on

Hugo, though the transcript is short, six pages only, and starts in the middle of Wright’s sentence, saying that people often skip the chapter inserted, which “really profoundly affected my future as an architect” (1). He starts with quoting the title of the chapter from The Hunchback of Notre Dame “The One Will Kill the Other”, commenting on it that “we are pretty nearly witnessing it as prophesied” (1), which is most likely a minor reference to the onset of the Cold War, given the date of the speech. It is somewhat ironic that Hugo writes about the rise of media and the decline of architecture – the idea

Wright identifies himself with – yet he is the glowing example of an architect, who was a prolific writer and a Starchitect, a media figure. Wright also comments on art and religion, saying that “if you kill the one, you kill the other” (2), and then he continues to read long passages from Hugo’s book, which are not transcribed. Wright’s interest in

Hugo was first reflected in his essay “The Art and Craft of the Machine”, in which he speaks about his feelings after having read Hugo’s assumption about architecture, which would be replaced by the printed word (Frampton, “Wright’s Writings” 17). Wright was fascinated by Gothic architecture and, he saw Hugo’s novel as “one of the truly great things every written or architecture” (Wright, “Autobiography” 78), and Wright never forgot to remind his audience of the greatness of the book and its author. Wright also drops the name of Victor Hugo in his Autobiography when he speaks about reading Les

Misérables at school. He describes the event when “students were to complete the study

[on Hugo] with a costume party, characters of the tale appearing as Victor Hugo

15 designed them” (76). That means that Wright was under Hugo’s influence since he was a teenager, and his thoughts kept appearing in his writings throughout his life.

2.3 “A Reading of Walt Whitman's ‘A Song of Myself’” and Fallingwater

The record is dated May 6, 1956. It is a recording that has five pages, out of which 4.5 pages are filled with writing. Unlike the record of the discussion on William

Blake, Wright dives right into it and focuses on his comments on Walt Whitman’s collection and the poem “Leaves of Grass” in particular for the whole time of the record.

2.3.1 Walt Whitman’s “A Song of Myself”

Wright’s lectures were unlike any of his colleagues. As his apprentices or admirers surrounded him, one may say, in Taliesin, this fact facilitated his perception of the cult of personality. On May 6, 1956, one of his secretaries recorded his speech on

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” – there is a little note at the end of the transcription that says “end of reel” (5), which indicates that he spoke to his listeners and did not write the text. His speech starts with an introductory sentence, evoking the atmosphere of a community breakfast and asking for the rest of his apprentice group to join the others in order to listen to his talk: “Are they finished out there now in the kitchen? They might as well come in and be fed” (1). At the beginning, Wright proposes to his students to have “a shot in the arm” (1), which is represented by Wright reading Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in public, although he claims that it is instead a shot in the arm for himself because he reads it “once or twice a year just to keep going” (1). By this, Wright may suggest that the figure of Whitman, despite being a poet, not an architect, is crucial for his opinions and attitudes. When he learns that there are only a few people familiar with

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Whitman’s work, he sounds disappointed and applies a truly schoolmasterly approach:

“Anyhow, now you will have read it” (1). And he starts reciting his idol’s poems.

Certain parallels may be drawn between the figures and mindset of Wright and

Whitman. Whitman’s poem starts with the verse “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume” (Whitman), which may be interpreted as

Wright’s attempt to compare himself to the canonical American poet: as if birds of a feather flock together. Wright also emphasizes the importance of diversity to his students, when he quotes Whitman’s “I resist anything better than my own diversity”

(3) twice in a row, interpreting Whitman’s words as “his own resilience. His own ability to perceive, receive, give and take. Not a proscripted, prescribed life or (of?) an individual, but free” (3), which is the system Wright aimed to introduce in Taliesin.

Freedom was an essential concept for Wright, and he did not strive to be bound by rules imposed by the society and mentions it in his other works, such as “Broadacre City”.

For Wright, Whitman’s poem is “song of the free. Inclusive, exclusive only to be inclusive, and inclusive only to be exclusive” (3). Several lines later, Wright quotes

Whitman’s lines about nature: “This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is, and this the common air that bathes the glow” (3). As these lines refer to grass, water, and air, they might have played a crucial role for Wright when he was designing his famous Fallingwater/Edgar J. Kaufmann Senior Residence, an organic house through which a waterfall runs.

2.3.2 The Fallingwater and Whitman

The Fallingwater case does not only represent a unique and complex realization of what Wright imagined as organic architecture but also the real function of his published texts – they were supposed to spread his fame and strengthen reader’s belief

17 in Wright’s extraordinariness because it was necessary to spend some time in his company. When Wright’s Autobiography was published in 1932, it found its way to the heir of Kaufmann’s Department Store Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who was twenty-two at that time. After reading the somewhat open and unrestrained story, which was rather unusual in the time of its publishing, he decided to meet Wright. Because he came from a wealthy family, it was not a problem for him to meet Wright in Taliesin, Wisconsin, and he immediately became a member of the Taliesin Fellowship. He was not very talented, though, but his father compensated it for Wright by funding the Fellowship.

Edgar Jr. soon arranged the meeting of Wright and his father, Edgar Kaufmann Sr, who started to think about building a new summer house for the family. They lived in a very luxurious romantic house La Tourelle, which was out of fashion already, as it had neogothic spires and a formally designed park (Toker, 141–165). There was a cabin situated in the woods close to the waterfall, and Wright designed an outstanding work after his visit shortly before Christmas 1934, which represents a new way of luxurious living and organic architecture.

Organic architecture is a concept that can describe various principles: a building, which uses or employs natural and local materials, a building, which is sensitively located in nature and opens towards it, or a building that has shapes and ornaments inspired by nature. The word organic, in fact, is popular with Wright as, according to him, this is the word Whitman wants to arrive at: “The whole thing is organic, and after that, part is to part, as part is to whole. And there is no use taking it apart” (Wright,

“Reading of Walt Whitman 4): this idea sounds like an inspiration for the setting and design of Fallingwater as well, having in mind that Wright held this speech some twenty years after finishing the construction.

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Fallingwater is one of a few houses representing all three principles. The house can be accessed from the hill. The upper floor has sleeping rooms – a closet, master’s bedroom, and guest bedroom with two bathrooms — the main residential room, spanning across the floor without any partitions, descending to the lower level. The apartment has a big hearth, which is commonly the core of all Wright’s residential buildings, but at the same time, the room opens with three walls to nature and the river.

There are sofas along the walls, and there is no furniture in the middle. There is one more space next to the hall, which is a private staircase leading to the kitchen. There is another staircase from here to the platform above the river. The uppermost floor has only a study and a small space to sleep, but the primary function is access to the roof terrace. The house stands on three props under which water flows to the nearby waterfall. There are natural materials (such as big stones on the floor in the main hall, stonework in the underpinning) as well as artificial materials (reinforced concrete in the main construction) present in the house. The indented ground plan and the system of terraces and balconies, which are often divided by a glass wall only, confuses visitors as they are not able to sufficiently distinguish between indoors and outdoors. The interior becomes the exterior and vice versa. As Neil Levine notices, none of the spaces is finished and always offers a complicated spatial point of view: “The view from the entry of Fallingwater, for example, draws the eye diagonally across the living room and out the glass doors leading out onto the western terrace.“ (McCarter, 252).

Whereas we can consider Wright’s Fallingwater to be the most complex embodiment of principles of organic architecture because Wright worked with almost an unlimited budget – the cost was nearly 155,000 USD (Frost) – it was probably

Wright’s most modern building comparable to works by avant-garde architects as

Fallingwater was compared with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s projects from the 1920s

19 and 1930s due to the openness of the residential floorplan and flow in the plan, as well as some buildings by Wright’s former student Richard Neutra in Los Angeles (Lowell

House in LA).

Harold Bloom, the author of The Western Canon, dedicates Chapter 11 in his book to Walt Whitman, saying that Whitman is “the Center of the American canon”

(Bloom 264), and Wright probably felt at the same level in architecture. Bloom mentions Whitman’s autoeroticism, which is only rarely discussed (267), but certain parallels may be drawn here. In his Autobiography, speeches, articles, and other texts,

Wright seems to employ a version of autoeroticism as well, as he often mentions the fact that he is the star – and Starchitect. Whitman’s notebook contains fragments of sentences about his supernaturalism: “I am myself waiting my time to be a God; I think

I shall do as much good and be as pure and prodigious as ever” (Bloom 270). This may be related to the personality of Wright as well as the notes in his Autobiography indicate that he saw himself as the superior designer and architect. Wright points out to the fact that, according to his mother, he was predestined to be an architect. “The boy, she said, was to build beautiful buildings” (Wright, “Autobiography” 11). His mother shaped his attitudes not only by supporting him to become an architect – as she “intended him to by an Architect” (Wright, “Autobiography” 11) with a capital A – but also in teaching him not to dislike dull things as “her idea of food was that everything in cooking should be left as simple as possible, natural flavor heightened but never disguised” (Wright,

“Autobiography” 15). While Whitman is seen as a genuine American poet, Wright is the iconic American architect. Whitman represents the poet of American religion

(Bloom 286), Wright is the architect of America. He did not become the architect of

America for a single concept or idea, yet in his career spanning over sixty years, he came up with several key and innovative principles that became distinctive for

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American architecture. These concepts and their reflection in Wright’s writing will be analyzed in the following chapter.

3. Space as a Machine

This chapter is going to deal with the comparison of two texts, “The Architect and the Machine” (1894) and “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1950). It will analyze the way how the metaphor of machine changed in Wright’s thinking as well as the way Wright’s writing on this topic altered in sixty years.

3.1 The Architect and the Machine

“The Architect and the Machine” has a single version with seven pages. It is by far the oldest preserved manuscript in Wright’s archive. The sheets of paper are written on a typewriter, but they are charred, like many Wright’s manuscripts until 1914, when

Wright’s studio and the Taliesin house in Wisconsin were set on fire, in which Wright’s partner Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children, and two other people died.

Wright’s library and archive with manuscripts and correspondence burned down, too; thus, it is rather rare that the manuscript was preserved. There are many alternations, deletions, and notes in pencil, which will be subject to the following analysis. The next article, “The Art and Craft of the Machine”, has three text varieties.

The first version (referred to as 241.002-A in the bibliography) consists of a two-page undated introduction and twenty-seven pages of typewritten copies with many handwritten notes. The second version (241.002-B) contains a clean copy of twenty- seven pages without handwritten notes. The third version (241.002-C) is only one sheet of paper, which is probably an excerpt from another clean copy.

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The first text, “The Architect and the Machine”, appears in Bruce Brooks

Pfeiffer’s and Kenneth Frampton’s five-volume selection from Wright’s writings

(Pfeiffer, 20–26). However, the way Pfeiffer worked with additional notes and deletions is rather unusual. Pfeiffer incorporated the first two paragraphs that are deleted in the manuscript, as well as the first sentence of the third paragraph on the second page.

However, he left out the last sentence of the second paragraph on page two. Pfeiffer’s selection of writings is an excellent example of how to get a basic overview of Wright’s work, but Pfeiffer is inconsistent in secondary alterations and editions – he sometimes follows them, sometimes he does not.

The text “The Architect and the Machine” is an integral part of Wright’s contemporary writing. It is a rather shallow insight into designing and furnishing a house. This text may rank among Wright’s articles for magazines for women (Ladies’

Journal, for instance). Wright is fully aware of the fact that the article should not be aimed at professionals, but rather an entertaining paper: “I should like to give you a set of golden rules for house building that would forever settle the matter for you as some

‘plan-books-for-one-dollar’ do, but I should play the ‘fool who rushes in where angels fear to tread’ to your amusement perhaps and my own confusion no doubt” (2). What

Pfeiffer’s selection does not say is the fact that quotation marks in “plan-books-for-one- dollar” and “fool who rushes in where angels fear to tread” were added in secondary editing. It proves that Wright really wrote the way he spoke, without mincing words or differentiating between colloquial or euphemistic expressions, and he decided to edit the phrases later.

The 1894 version of the essay has not been published and was written as a lecture. Wright read the text to University Guild in Evanston, Illinois, and it can be seen as an attempt to write an educative and inspirational article, or simply infotainment.

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Wright starts with the educational and rather philosophical sentence, which foreshadows the focus of his writing in general: “The more true culture a man has, the more significant his environment becomes to him” (1). As far as the structure and contents of the text are considered, it may remind the readers of contemporary articles written by

Marie Kondo, the queen of tidying up, cleaning, and organizing personal life, with

Wright being her precursor. Like Marie Kondo, whose career is based on advising how to tidy up, Wright uses a very similar style, trying to explain his thoughts and ideas like a teacher, using comparisons. At the beginning, he speaks about well-being in general, saying that “it is a great thing to really live, and we only live by the insight to keep in touch with the beauty of our own little world within the great world for every man’s home should be that to him” (Wright, “The Architect and the Machine” 1). His lines compared with those by Marie Kondo sound almost identical as Kondo says “it is about choosing joy” (It Is About Choosing Joy) and describes herself as “a renowned tidying expert helping people around the world to transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration” (It Is About Choosing Joy).

Wright’s “The Architect and the Machine” was written to present a set of golden rules for home building. His writing style was presumably inspired by that of Ladies’

Home Journal, to which he also contributed (Wright, “A Home” 16), thus trying to adapt to the target audience with his language and style. He explains his ideas step-by- step, making them look like a to-do list or a self-help book. Readers may sometimes have difficulties to distinguish between texts written by Wright and Kondo if they did not know who the author is. For instance, Wright writes: “Avoid all things which have no real use or meaning, and make those which have especially significant for there is no one part of your building that may not be made a thing of beauty in itself as related to the whole” (3), which is somewhat similar in idea and style to Marie Kondo’s “keep

23 only those things that speak to the heart, and discard items that no longer spark joy.

Thank them for their service – then let them go” (It Is About Choosing Joy). Wright continues:

Consistency from first to last will give you the result you seek and consistency

alone. Not sensation, not show, not meaningless carpenter work and vulgar

decoration, but quiet, thoughtful consistency throughout brings this harmony to

be a factor in your daily lives, and it is good for your sore eyes and tired nerves.

(3)

The implementation of his ideas is nicely illustrated in the edition of Ladies’ Home

Journal published in 1901. The article “Inside of a Hundred Suburban Homes. Giving

Glimpses into One Hundred American Suburban Homes” presents Wright’s interior design with a picture and a caption “here is an effective arrangement of windows with bookshelves underneath in the library of the house at Kankakee, Illinois. The furniture is also worthy to notice. From plans by Frank Lloyd Wright” (8). One year earlier,

Wright published an article “A Home in a Prairie Town” in the very same magazine, with the subtitle “Modern Suburban Houses Which Can Be Built at Moderate Cost”.

Wright was given a full page with six illustrations, which he fully utilized. His description of the house combines practical information about the house, such as the plan, materials used and the price, and Wright’s self-promotion. When Wright speaks about the perspective view, he does not limit himself to a technical description of the house, but employs the focus on feelings and emotions:

The ground plan, which is intended to explain itself, is arranged to offer the least

resistance to a simple mode of living, in keeping with a high ideal of the family

life together. It is arranged, too, with a certain well-established order that

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enables free use without the sense of confusion felt in five out of seven houses

which people really use. (17)

In this paper, Wright elaborates on the idea even further as he speaks house and home, and, in fact, he fells these concepts being antithetical.

3.1.1 House and Home

Wright was genuinely interested in the arrangement of households as well as efficiency and convenience, which Kenneth Frampton describes as “cleaning of the

Augean stables” (“Wright’s Writings”, 17). One of the crucial features of the text the difference between “house” and “home”: “Many people nowadays are content to live in houses instead of homes, hiding behind the plea of small means, which can never wash their sins away, for ‘home’ means more than money and the smaller means sometimes show the very best results” (Wright, “The Architect and the Machine” 1). Although this passage depicts and summarizes the core of the first half of the essay, in which the thesis is developed, Wright deleted it in the manuscript. It may illustrate the fact that he probably did not want to reveal the point at the beginning but to arrive at it with the layering of arguments. He repeats the point later: “Houses are built today on too narrow gauge a plan with a petty economy that does not economize further than to get the contractor paid in the first instance .... “(4). Wright continues: “There should be as many types of homes as there are types of people, for it is individuality of the occupants that should give character and color to the building and furnishings.” (5). The rest of the essay deals with furnishing the house and the suitability of decorations and ornaments:

“As to further decoration, never have any unless you understand it thoroughly” (6), or

“[t]he cheap furniture to be had in the market now is for the most part vicious because our remarkable scientific possibilities are bent to turning out clear imitations of the old

25 hand-carved type” (7). Wright speaks about patterns – the routinely designed houses compared with contextually and sensitively designed homes. Houses are something that lacks an attitude (to a person and needs of the builder) and what is estranged traditional architectonic work.

The line of reasoning, language, and the group of topics is, in this case, similar to the journalistic activity of architect Adolf Loos. At that time, Loos published his works in Das Andere (The Other) magazine, in which he published short but scathing and controversial essays about housing, housing architecture, and modern lifestyle.

Thus, we can apply the same measures to Wright’s writings as Talia Perry did for Loos:

His words, written and spoken, have a certain informal character, a

conversational way of speech that begs to be questioned and hopes to provoke a

response. He doesn't give up the game all at once, but "hints," waiting for

someone else to pick up his lead. ... Loos finds a way to give unspecific

examples that boost the validity of his argument without the rigor (or pretentious

tone) associated with an academic scholarship. This results in a high number of

generalities that sound a lot like absolute. (Perry 4, 11)

In the same way, we can think of Wright’s writings as being informal and structured more as talks than journal papers. Sometimes he only briefly touches upon the subject and does not actually finish his thought, so the omnipresent trait of Wright’s writings is the fact that they are too general and vague: readers may have trouble imagining the exact thing Wright had in mind. Although Wright was a true teacher and kept mentoring everybody he met, he was not favorable to academia and academic language like Loos; thus, Wright’s writings can be characterized by argumentation inconsistency and vagueness.

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3.2 The Art and the Craft of the Machine

The history of the later writing is rather complicated. As well as the first essay, this one was printed in the selection of Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer’s choice with the date of

1901 (Pfeiffer, “FLW Collected Writings” 58–69) whereas version A contains an introduction, which says that “this paper was read at a meeting of an incipient Art and

Craft Society (the second) at Hull House, 1893–4” (1). Version A is then dated as “by

Frank Lloyd Wright, Nov 24, 1950, Reprinted at Taliesin.” (27). The version Pfeiffer published lacks essential passages that are in the 1950 versions and the typescript, as well as appended notes and edits. Whereas Wright saw machine as positive for the development of science, technology, architecture, and arts at first, after WWII, in 1950, he realized that technology could not be perceived as salvation for progress and development. The version Pfeiffer printed allegedly in 1901 says that

the only comfort left to the poor artist, sidetracked as he is, seemingly is a mean

one; the thought that the very selfishness which man’s early art idealized, now

reduced to its lowest terms, is swiftly and surely destroying itself through the

medium of the Machine, (Pfeiffer, “FLW Collected Writings” 61) whereas in version A dated back to 1950 Wright writes that

the only comfort left to us, the poor artists, sidetracked as we are, is seemingly a

mean one; the thought that the very selfishness which man's early Art once

idealizes is, is now reduced to its lowest terms and will be swiftly and surely

destroyed by itself through the very medium of the glorified Machine. Glorified

means to a horrible end. (Wright, “The Art and the Craft of the Machine” 11)

The 1950 version reflects bigger humbleness (Wright saw himself as one of the sidetracked poor artists), accuracy (destroying of the ‘original’ art has not happened yet,

27 it will happen in the future), and intensity (glorification of the Machine and the

‘horrible’ end of the arts).

The content of the essay is the relation of design and arts to new and rapidly developing reproduction and computer technologies. Wright starts his text with references to the British artist, designer, architect, and political activist William Morris.

He says that despite the fact his graphic works and utility designs were spread with reproduction technologies, his attitude to automatization of work was rather critical.

Being a socialist, he saw that automatization and mechanization estranges the final product from its creators – the person, who keeps tightening the bolts like in Chaplin’s famous movie, does not know the meaning and value of his work and has no relation to the final product; unlike the craftsman, who processes an object from material to the final product and has a connection to his work and product. Wright concluded it by saying, which may be associated with Arts and Crafts members: “Without the interest and cooperation of the manufacturers, the society cannot begin to do its work, for this is the cornerstone of its organization” (Wright, “The Art and the Craft of the Machine”

21). The machine does not represent a metaphor like in the first essay, “The Architect and the Machine”, in which the machine was the euphemism of cheap schematism. In this essay, machine is a specific entity – a printing machine, then more modern reproduction machines, and we may assume that the escalation of Wright’s vocabulary in the 1950 version was elicited by Wright’s ideas about the possibilities of employing computers in designing architecture and urban landscapes. Machine represents a specific machine society wants to use to substitute authors and authentic production. In

1950 it was also probably Wright’s opposition to scientifically oriented International

Style, which represented the younger generation of architects and believed that a math formula is enough for designing architecture. In “The Arts and Crafts of the Machine”

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(1950), which is substantially longer, Wright’s vocabulary seems to be more sophisticated: expressions like thenceforth, hence, nevertheless, etc. that are not in the first text are rather frequent here, but all comparisons and descriptions of situations are vague. What Wright imagines as Machine is more challenging to understand as it seems that he means any omnipotent inanimate entity, which can deprive people of their souls: this was a somewhat popular idea in science-fiction, which was thriving at that time and an idea that appears in his talk on Hugo. Wright’s message to the reader is not clear either. Whereas the first text represented clear instructions and advice what to do (or not to do) during construction and furnishing of the house, readers are now seen as passive observers, who cannot intervene in the situation whether the glorified and monstrous entity of Machine smashes the spirit of authentic (architectonic) production or not.

Objectivity, unambiguity, and the train of thoughts are rather tricky for Wright to keep, and he employs them in the genre for non-professionals.

Despite the apparent shift in employment and meaning of the word machine in both texts, Wright’s attitude does not change: an architecture maker should be a person whose natural creativity, education, and freedom can guarantee – as the only feature – preservation of the spirit of architecture and arts.

4. Taliesin

In his writings, Wright reflected Taliesin and Taliesin West at two levels. Both of them concerned the home he designed, built, repaired, and furnished himself, with his family, associates, and apprentices. Whereas Taliesin near Spring Green in Wisconsin is

Wright’s birthplace (he was born in Richland Center located close to Spring Green, but he spent the whole childhood here), a private place of memory, whereas Taliesin West in Scottsdale in Arizona represents Wright’s chosen home. The second aspect is the

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“school”, Taliesin Fellowship, which was inspired by the romantic image of the medieval workshop of “learning by doing”, which, at the same time, created a community and a network of kinship.

4.1 Taliesin Fellowship

Throughout his extraordinarily long career, Wright had a number of associates and students, who stayed with him for various periods of time and learned from him.

Although they worked for him, Wright thought they should pay for the stay and the opportunity to learn from him. Thus, he and his wife Olgivanna founded the Taliesin

Fellowship program, which was supposed to standardize conditions for the stay in

Wright’s studio. It is necessary to say that the aim of the Fellowship was never reached due to Wright’s quick-tempered character and the ambiguous attitude to financial issues, and many students were accepted because of their undeniable talent, without the duty of paying tuition.

Since 1928 when Wright and the group of his associates came to Arizona to design the San Marco hotel, Wright began the migration tradition. At first, he founded the simple Ocotillo Camp, where architects slept and worked in framed tents. Only later

Wright bought a vast area between the Ancala and Sienna Canyon settlement and started to build Taliesin West, the prototype of desert architecture. The migration took place between Wright’s original seat situated close to Spring Green, Wisconsin, and the new seat of Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, in mid-April (from Arizona to

Wisconsin) and in mid-October (from Wisconsin to Arizona). Wright compared it to the migration of animals/birds between summer and winter (The Taliesin Fellowship).

Apart from the fact that students had the opportunity to learn from Wright, they participated in running both seats (repairs, finishing of the construction) and community

30 life (working the land and harvesting crops in Wisconsin, community cooking, laundry, music, and theatre evenings, etc.). However, Wright also built the community of his students and associates as a kind of a sect with a guru being himself. Students and associates were supposed to be referred to as apprentices, who were “initiated” into

Wright’s skills and thinking. After Wright’s death, most of them could not achieve the acknowledgment of their teacher. However, Wright also said that the apprentices did not need any contact with the outer world as everything they needed was available within the restricted area and community of Taliesin or Taliesin West, including all social, partnership, and sexual needs (Friedland 429).

Between 1932 when Taliesin Fellowship was founded and 1959 when Wright died, Taliesin Fellowship hosted 625 official students. Yet it is not possible to determine the exact number of students due to incomplete archival sources; the quantity listed is taken from John Geiger, one of the apprentices (“Apprentices”). However, it is not clear how many of them were women, and if they were real apprentices and participated in architectonic projects. As the recent Hanna McCann’s article says, many women, who really worked as architects, had a different official function, such as Isabel Roberts, who was listed as a librarian, but she participated in architectonic work (“The Women”). The relationship between Wright and his apprentices was ambivalent. Their access was not limited in any way, but Wright did not take into consideration unequal opportunities for women to even become interested in architecture. Despite this fact, the 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of women working with Wright not only as architects but also as artists or professionals in applied arts. The most important architects with the Taliesin Fellowship background were Amelia Jane Duncombe, Eleanore Pettersen, and Beverly Willis.

Their work and opinions on how Taliesin Fellowship worked is depicted in the short documentary “A Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank

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Lloyd Wright”, which is also unique as it interviewed many of them shortly before their death.

In the following part, I will try to compare the content and form of three selected writings from 1927, 1939, and 1956 that reflect Wright’s relationship to both Taliesins and shaping the Fellowship.

4. 2 1927 Taliesin

The essay “Taliesin”, dated 1927, has three versions. The first handwritten one has seventeen pages, the second typewritten one has 20 pages with scarce notes, and the third one has twenty-one pages and rare handwritten notes. I am going to analyze the last one (referred to as 2401.028-C in the bibliography). The two previous versions have the date 21 December 1927, and the handwritten one was probably produced in the same year, maybe a short time before. The content of the essay is construction changes in Taliesin in Wisconsin until 1914 when it was destroyed by fire.

The final version of the “Taliesin” manuscript is an introduction to the mythological Welsh background of the original figure of Taliesin. It continues with the description of Wright’s Taliesin project, and how he found himself to be part of it. It is basically a chapter of his Autobiography, in which he analyzes the family background and motivation to commence a project like this. Taliesin burnt down twice in its history, and the 1927 version is written after the second fire when Wright had in mind the third version of the project. Wright never forgets to mention that he was predestined to live at the premises his family-owned and does it in a rather preposterous contrast with the very formal and impassioned text full of natural imagery, when he says “the pre-

32 destined architect, that is me, grew up, raised a family in the city” (Wright, “Taliesin”

2). This represents yet another example of how highly he thought about himself.

Another exciting feature in the 1927 version, which is a typewritten transcription of Wright’s manuscript from the same year, is Wright’s correction. There is probably no paper Wright wrote and saw, in which absolutely no editing is done. Wright was obsessed with making corrections in his own texts, polishing them, and paying attention to every little detail. He is also famous for correcting lower-case letters in the words he considered essential or those that needed highlighting or addition of meaning, like in the case of Nature and Idea in his talk “Urban planning, Taliesin Fellowship, New

Education” from December 2, 1956. However, in the second version of “Taliesin”

(referred to as 2401.028-C in the bibliography), he corrects the words for trees (Beech tree, Oak, Pine…).

Wright describes the structure he was gradually building and adapting as his home and office, which organically emerges from a gentle slope on which it is built, and the system of ponds under it, in which it mirrors. For Wright, his home in Taliesin was an ultimate pattern, and the ideal of organic architecture that utilized local materials was agriculturally self-sufficient. Agriculture was also sustainable because it was based on naturally occurring sources, employed renewable sources of energy, and buildings respected the natural shape of the landscape (14,18). Wright wrote: “No house should ever be on any hill or on any hill. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together, each the happier for the other” (3). Wright explains the choice of a site for building his house in the following way: “This hill on which Taliesin now stands as a 'brow' was one of my favorite places as a boy” (2). Then he speaks about the name of Taliesin again:

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Colonial wouldn't do. Nor French nor English, nor anything at all I had ever

seen. Aby more than Italian or Spanish. This country was something else. I was

something other. ... A Welsh name would be appropriate for such human back-

ground as that house would have, mostly harking back at Wales. There was the

legend of Taliesin, the primeval-artist with the shining brow! Why not 'shining

brow' for the hill? The hill crown rising unbroken above it. (4)

In the other passages of the essay, he speaks about other inhabitants in the neighborhood, whose stories are marginal, but they show that not only nature and the landscape setting created the identity of the place, but Wright cared about the social network, local people, their stories, history, memory, and craft.

Pages 9-12 analyze the rooms – the way they are designed, and which materials were used. Wright also tells short episodic stories with craftsmen and suppliers. Then

Wright continues in describing the history of Taliesin. He mentions the deadly fire, which he portrays in the following way: “And then, out of a clear sky, a thunderbolt, human but inhumane, crashed upon the heart of it sweeping it down in terror and in flame. A black gaping wound lay open on the hillside where once Taliesin shone” (12).

Wright continues: “Was it for heresy? Was this some trial at some judgment-seat, like grandfathers, to quell a spirit that would not be quelled?” (12). It is somewhat noteworthy that Wright, unlike other bits and pieces described in this essay, does not explain what happened, but he speaks in metaphors and blurred references. Readers who do not know what happened would hardly understand it from Wright’s three- paragraph-long reflection. After the fire, Wright left Taliesin (he was engaged in the project of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo), but he returned shortly with his students, associates, and apprentices:

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Young people came from all over the world already attracted by Taliesin's fame

abroad as America, to share its spirit; to learn message indigenous America had

for Europe, And, evenings, after good work done, the piano, violin, cello spoke

there the religion of Bach, Beethoven and Handel. William Blake, Samuel

Butler, Walt Whitman, and Shelly often presided there. Carl Sandburg, Edna

Millay, and Ring Lardner too, had something to say or sing. And life in the hills

revived... (15)

Unlike the description of the first fire, in which Wright lost his partner and her children, the other fire was described in detail on two pages: “I put the fragments aside to weave them into the masonry fabric of Taliesin III. that was now to stand in the place of

Taliesin II. I believed I could make it happen. And I went to work” (18). Another building that was created, according to Wright, followed the motto of “The Good, The

True, The Beautiful”. This passage is located at the end, when he, in the very final part, connects the “Holy Trinity of Life” and American values and illustrates his patriotism on rebuilding Taliesin.

4. 3 1939 Taliesin

The writing “Taliesin Fellowship”, or “Taliesin”, is one of the program documents Wright made official in 1931, but he lacked financial balance he imagined in the long run. Thus, he kept promoting Fellowship and wrote new articles about it to entice students, who would be both talented and provided for. Because accuracy in wording was immensely crucial for Wright, ten varieties were preserved – all of them typewritten with more or less handwritten notes. I am going to work with version I, which is most complex and most extended (referred to as 2401.236-I in the

35 bibliography). This version has fifteen typewritten pages, with the last page containing six lines and a typical signature with an address, place, and date.

The Taliesin Fellowship, as Wright says, was born organically in the group of those interested in voluntary work and internship with Wright, and the desire to live in

Taliesin, later in Taliesin West, in the company of Wright and other apprentices.

However, Wright starts his essay from a different point of view: he assumes that the pivotal sense of the Taliesin Fellowship is to offer an alternative to the classical architectonic education at public universities, and the alternative to public architecture and urbanism, i.e., architecture and urbanism paid from public money. Wright writes: “I should say that present ideals and systems of government spending and popular education are exactly wrong if genuine architecture is the concern of either education or government” (1). Unlike his other writings that are either a stream of consciousness or layering incoherent quotes, Wright attempts at logical argumentation here because the aim was to convince those who were interested in coming (and paying the fee) to

Wright. Thus, he develops his arguments that contemporary public education at schools is bad because we cannot find architecture that would manifest “from the country itself” or would be “true to any life in it that might be called native” (1). Wright follows this idea on contemporary education, saying that no previous training is necessary:

“Previous education is usually a hindrance. All begin afresh (if they can begin at all) to think about building as interpretation of life as lived now or soon” (2). However, he also confirms the fact that accepting anybody in the Fellowship depends only on him. He underpins Fellowship’s communal spirit, yet he somewhat singles himself out of it:

“They are the working comrades of one who has been 'seeing it through" long enough to have gained some little wisdom from the actual experience of getting the principles of integral architecture into concrete form. That 'one' is myself” (2).

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Wright develops the relationship between the apprentice and the master even further.

Although Wright managed to create an environment in which his apprentices were probably not afraid to speak up or bring up any ideas, no matter how stupid, the difference between the master and the apprentice was significant. In the program document Taliesin, Wright wrote, though: “But in any case apprenticeship was something like this one at Taliesin, back there in the feudal middle-ages, but with this important difference; the apprentice then was his master's servant; at democratic

Taliesin he is his master's comrade” (3). As the research of medieval workshops (art- or construction-related) shows, there was no such relationship between a master and a servant. It is Wright’s romanticizing idea about the “dark ages”, which was the opposite of progressive. As Foucault already showed, the mechanism of power and control is the product of the New Age. However, there was something different that mattered to

Wright: description of the apprentice, who is equal to his master, has equal opportunities for the realization of his creative needs like his master, with the liberal environment in the whole community, when the exact opposite was true, had purely advertising purpose. The passage with the description of the benefits of being a member of the Fellowship, compared with mechanical and obsolete public school of architecture, is followed by a sentence about funding: “Unfortunately, the novice must bring some money to Taliesin with him to begin with in order to take his living off of us while he is still a beginner” (3). Wright continues, saying that the apprentice would not receive any salary or share in the project he works in even later because “I have seen the damage that can do to a good cause” (4). In the following paragraphs, Wright develops the principles of “learning by doing”. He outlines how apprentices participate in adjustments and finishing of both Taliesins, and how the Fellowship lives according to the laws of organic life in compliance with nature. At the end of the essay, Wright

37 opposes any possible theory and humanities, art history in particular. He writes that teaching art history at schools of architecture kills production. He does not try to teach art history but creates it. The final part of the article has yet another exciting moment when Wright writes: “No, Taliesin Fellowship is in no danger of becoming a radical

'cult', Its leader despises cults far too much for that to happen to us now” (12). Even the fact that Wright writes about himself in the third person singular foreshadows a particular pathological issue, but according to recent research, Taliesin Fellowship really became the cult. Friedland and Zellman write about it in detail, when they describe contemporary evidence of Wright’s god complex and cult: Wright made his apprentices throw away all the clothes they brought from the outer world and have bizarre uniforms tailored for the rest of money they brought, but Wright himself was wearing formal tailor-made suits, coats and berets. (Friedland, 261–262).

I would also like to mention one important note more about the essay “Taliesin”.

Wright was proud of the fact that he did not make any difference between men and women and was willing to accept women in his Fellowship – and he actually provided this opportunity for many women. He comments: “For some years past a small, changing group of about twenty-five (young men and women – all volunteers) have formed the working group of apprentices to myself” (1). However, in the remaining part of the text, Wright refers to the current and potential apprentices as men. If we accept another Foucault’s thesis that language is a symbolic demonstration of power, like other communication media, and actively creates a structure of power, it is yet another proof of the fact that the Taliesin Fellowship cannot stand the test of the current point of view of genuinely equal opportunities.

38

4.4 1956 New Education

One of Wright’s last writings, which explicitly mentions architectonic education in its title, is a record of a morning talk titled “Urban Planning, Fellowship Drawings,

New Education” from December 2, 1956, that has twenty-two pages. The first part focuses on urban planning in the contemporary US (see Chapter 5) and the second part deals with education. Like the passage dedicated to urban design, the section on education is based on Wright’s imminent experience from his travels. The lecture at an unspecified school of architecture contained the following information:

And that goes up against Yale and Harvard, the new type of education which is

the family-type where we all live together, and there's no time wasted to and fro.

There are no clubs, no this-that-and the other and no curriculum, as a matter of

fact, no race around. (15)

Wright also mentioned the itinerary exhibition of his work, which he presented as being collective, but it was advertised with his name only. Visitors could see it in New York and Los Angeles, but we do not have any information about Chicago and San Francisco:

I want the Fellowship to come out and we're going to have - this year, next year

- a full rounded exhibition of the work of these boys of mine since 1932. We

have about – let's see – about 20-40 of these boxes, contributed to by quite a

large number of talented boys. It will make an exposition that will astonish most

educational institutions, to say the least. We'll open it in New York and it will go

from New York to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles and probably

home - or someplace. (17)

It is worth mentioning that the Fellowship is referred to as “my boys”, although women were members at that time as well. The possessive pronoun “we” is, once again, in

39 contradiction to Wright’s declaration that he does not build a cult and that the relationship between the master and the apprentice is equal.

The writing illustrates how Wright’s attitude toward shaping the Fellowship did not change much, although he invested a lot of energy in its media and PR image. The

1939 version, which was supposed to entice more students, seems to be outstanding in logical structure and logic of argumentation, unlike Wright’s other writings that are somewhat chaotic.

5. The City

Although urbanism was not his aim and specialization at the beginning of his career, Wright became acquainted with it somewhat early. Neil Levine identified some of the first urban design projects from 1896, which was the time when Wright was looking into several independent architectonic contracts for luxurious houses in Oak

Park. Wright’s interest in urbanism was a secondary product of his architectural thinking. However, it must not be assumed that Wright’s urban designs, unlike his architecture, were not original. They were rather trailblazing and represented eclectics of contemporary opinions on urban planning. Wright soon found his bearings in this particular discipline and started to implement revolutionary impulses to the development of American cities. Levine described Wright’s first urban design in the following words:

Looked at from a certain distance, and in more abstract terms – as Wright would

do over the next several years – the Roberts 1896 development plan contains the

outlines of a completely new way of thinking about the residential block in terms

of the square geometry of the ideal American grid. (Levine, “Urbanism” 28)

40

In his various orders and environments, Wright kept coming up with new ideas about organizing an urban environment until his death in 1959.

It is quite noteworthy in this context that he did not write anything, which would deal solely with urban design. Yet it must be said that he gave his opinions on urban design and city organization in other writings and lectures with a chaotic structure when he always switched topics. Thus the following chapter will analyze handwritten notes for Wright’s book Disappearing City published in 1932, the lecture “Broadacre City” dated 1943 as I will pay attention to the shift in meaning between writing the concept of

“Broadacre City” and its reflection after ten years, and the interview with the same topic dated 1951 (another ten years later), and the lecture dated 1956 with the issues of urban design and education. As these are various literary types (notes, commentaries, an interview, and lectures), I will not focus on literary and linguistic qualities of the writing, but on shifts in meaning, having in mind the time span of more than 25 years among various sources.

5.1 1929 The City and 1931 The Disappearing City

“The City” (referred to as 2401.064-A in the bibliography) is a typewritten paper with eleven pages. A fragment of a note with the quote by a Babylonian prophet is attached to the second sheet. Although the document is recorded as undated in the

Avery Library, there is a little note – a crossed-out typewritten footnote with the address of Taliesin dated 29 September 1929. The other document is an H version, which is an introductory essay for a chapter in the book Broadacre City. The paper contains seven pages, with the last one being filled with writing up to one third, with notes and editing done in pencil. It is also recorded as undated in the Avery Library, but the last page has the footnote of May 1931. The essay with the original tile “What Is Modern”, which is

41 crossed-out and corrected as “Going into the Disappearing City”, was eventually published in the book as “What Thought – As Modern – Is Bringing Relief?” (35-38).

The fact that Wright often changed titles of the texts or incorporated them as chapters in books without any association with previous or following sections is symptomatic of his writing. His writings are so generalizing and all-embracing that they can be published with virtually any title, or they can be arranged before and after anything else, which is similar in generalizing and being non-specific. Wright did not write in the style that he would gradually employ arguments and made any conclusion: most of his declarations are presented as self-confirming. All other versions of this paper (A-G) are handwritten notes in pencil, and they are not going to be analyzed in this thesis. The I version is a two-page type typescript, representing a commentary to the already published book The

Disappearing City, which I am going to refer at the end.

In the older (A) version of “The City”, Wright identifies complicated issues of a contemporary city on the first seven pages in a very condensed matter and with no link to anything else:

In the streets and avenues of the city acceleration due to the sky-scraper is

similarly dangerous and to any life the city may have left, even though we yet

fail to see the danger. The city as we know it today, I believe is to die. We are

witnessing the acceleration that precedes dissolution. (2).

Yet Wright’s conclusions are questionable because skyscrapers and unbearable density were present only in several US cities, such as Chicago and New York. The first high- rise buildings in Los Angeles were built only in the 1930s. Wright describes the solution of this problem from page eight, which was later to become Broadacre City – the density of settlement and living space of one acre for one family (unit). At that time, the

42 real estate business started to develop intensively due to federal legislation across the

USA. Wright asks and answers his question at the same time:

Why in present circumstances should land, where there is so much idle, be

parceled out by realtors, in strips 25'0'' wide or 50 or even 100' wide. This

imposition is a survival of feudal thinking: of the social economies of the serf.

An acre to the family should be the democratic minimum if this Machine of ours

is a success! (8)

In the rest of the manuscript (9-11), Wright deals with various and incoherent predictions of the future. Some of these predictions have been fulfilled, and some have not. They show that grounds Wright used as fundamental ideas were more related to science-fiction than architectonic visionary ideas:

The movies will soon be better seen at home than in any hall. Symphony

concerts, opera, lectures will be more easily taken to the home than the people

there may be taken to the great halls in old-style. ... Schools will be smaller and

become more specialized and charming features of every country-side. ... There

will be no privately owned theaters - good plays might be seen at these

automobile "objectives" from end to end of the country in various national

circuit. (10)

The concept of “Machine”, which was analyzed extensively earlier, has a solely negative connotation:

How mitigate meantime, the horror of human life caught helpless or unaware in

the machinery that is the city? How to easiest and soonest assist the social-unit

to escape the gradual paralysis of the individual independence that is

characteristic of the Machine-made moron, a paralysis of the nature necessary to

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the triumph of the Machine over Man? That is the architect's real problem as I

see it. (11)

In this case, Frank Lloyd Wright employs a dual vision of the future: the first one is identified with Machine, and it can be associated with the movie Metropolis, which became a film phenomenon immediately after its premiere in 1927. Regarding Wright’s interest in cinematography and the most recent movies that he ordered or had them delivered, he was most definitely familiar with this new movie. In Metropolis, the inhabitants – workers oppressed by mechanized society – live in overcrowded and dehumanized urban environment. The performance demanded by wealthy tycoons is the only value here. Whereas in Metropolis, underground in catacombs, in which people can find freedom, is the alternative to machinized society, Wright saw freedom in reinventing the rural. He writes: “Ruralism, as distinguished from Urbanism, is

American and truly democratic” (8), by which he expresses the ultimate ideal of his solution.

The essay “What is Modern?” dated 1931, which was later published with a slightly altered title in The Disappearing City, has a significantly different structure.

The essays react to the original title with four negative answers, for instance: “Certainly not the same old thought that made our Cities a landlord's triumph” (version H, 1). In the following passage, Wright lists five impacts of the “old thought”, such as “that same old thought now makes the City a conspiracy against Man-like Freedom, - makes

American Architecture a bad form of surface-decoration” (1). He once again refers to the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, which brought new impulses in

American urbanism at that time, but Wright now writes that its repetition and “face- lifting” is utterly unsuitable in 1933 because the times had changed radically. The following pages contain the list of general rules for architecture, urbanism, everyday life

44 or transport Wright arrived at in the past decades, such as: “Modern architecture sees walls as solid-walls vanishing,“ or „no free Man on a modern America need 'box up' or

'hole in' for protection any longer - in any building or any City” (3). All these axioms constitute new paragraphs, and they are not associated with one another. The style of the essay is as if Wright wanted to write a manifesto: a piece that is perspective focuses on the future, but is, at the same time, general enough, so it will be valid independent from the future development.

The passage Wright crossed out in the manuscript; thus, it did not appear in the final manuscript of The Disappearing City, is noteworthy as well:

The super-material – Glass, as we have it in this Age – is one means to this

Liberation. The super-material – Steel, as we see it - tense in the strand, as John

Roebling used it in the Brooklyn Bridge to usher in a new Era - is another means

to this Liberation. (4)

We may assume that the passage was eventually left out because the year 1932 saw the publication of International Style by Philip Johnson and Henry Russel-Hitchcock and was linked to the exhibition of International Style in MoMA. The main attribute, material, and bearer of meaning acknowledged internationally was glass and steel. At the same time, Wright openly criticized Russel-Hitchcock (see Chapter 1.3), and he probably did not want to be perceived as a person who identifies himself with the principles of International Style and architectonic avant-garde, which excluded all artistic laws from architectonic design.

Wright concludes the essay “What Is Modern” with a compelling yet undeveloped thesis that comes out of the blue after several pages of vague theorems:

“When he (the modern, Free man) will see that what is Modern is what is noblest in what is Old” (8). Whereas the previous essay “The City” consistently deals with the

45 issues of a modern city (despite being exaggerated as they concerned only several cities in the USA) and their solutions, the essay “What Is Modern?” only touches upon the urbanism challenges in a shallow way. However, the above-mentioned two-page appendix (referred to as the I version in the archive) is somewhat noteworthy. It is a commentary, whose purpose is not clear, but it must have been written after publishing

The Disappearing City in 1932. Wright deals with what was necessary for publishing the book in 1,000 copies in order to have as significant an impact on the change of thinking about architecture and the city as possible. Apart from the other, rather egoistic wishes that should boost Wright’s popularity and defend the book from the expected criticism that it is not academic and factual enough, the book was supposed to be a political weapon. Wright expresses two theses: on communism and fascism.

Communism was supposed to solve “low living conditions in the city backward conditions in the country. By improving standards of life-reduce the terror of unemployment by balanced industrial and agrarian work” (I-version, 1), whereas fascism represented “a stupid last resort used by the Capitalist to hold his power. The need for using strong arm methods would no longer be there. Substitute a better and more humane method for it” (2). I assume that this commentary is essential for understanding Wright’s visionary ideas and utopianism, although he disagreed with calling his concept of Broadacre City utopian. Although Wright’s clients were wealthy capitalists and businessmen, Wright’s political thinking was more leftist, which was conditioned by the contemporary concept of the left-wing, and it was written before

Wright’s visit to the Soviet Union. The exploitation of soil and moving the housing issue in the hands of a free market (building of unsuitable houses with the primary purpose of making money for the developers, not accommodating people) was absolutely unacceptable for Wright. He also opposed mechanization of work and, using

46 his terrifying description of Machine, the estrangement of work and manufacturing plants, although he never referred to Marx. Wright’s Marxism was intuitive and inspired by Britain, following William Morris and his Socialist League, with topics of the revival of the countryside, crafts, bearing traces of romanticism of “the good old pre-capitalist times”.

5. 2 What is Broadacre City?

As Wright’s texts show, his urbanistic ideal was at first something he called

Living City. Neil Levine, the architecture historian, convincingly proved that Wright’s attitude to how an American city should look like followed two antithetical ideas

(Bergdoll). The first thesis is Levine’s concept of density. Since the 1940s, Wright started to design huge urban macrostructures, building complexes, which were supposed to fulfill various urban functions – living, shopping, local administration, etc. Such examples are St Mark’s Towers, designed for New York, or Crystal Heights in

Washington. They were designed as open structures with dominating residential towers, with lower floors full of shops, kindergartens, schools, parking lots, etc. This concept of a megalomaniac building with integrated complex urban functions reached its peak in the Mile High Building project in Illinois, which was planned as a real mile-high building as an autonomous and self-sufficient urban unit with all services, shops, schools, administration, etc. This kind of urbanism is also demonstrated on several other projects: Civic Center – Monona Terrace in Madison, WI, or in Pittsburgh, PN

(Langmead, 161). The enormous multi-level building complexes should concentrate all public functions of the city – from administration, legal institutions, cultural institutions, such as theatres, opera, congress center, gallery, etc. to hotels, parking lots, and shopping malls.

47

The opposite approach to urbanism, which Levine calls dispersal, is based on the dispersal of urban functions in space (Langmead, 394). Wright follows several modern urbanistic principles – the first one is undoubtedly Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities of tomorrow. In the late 19th century, he claimed that production, living, and administration should be divided into the city so that each of them had enough space for the development and made it possible for workers to have comfortable and healthy living in the green. The division of functions served as inspiration for avant-garde architects to make city zones and creating a Functional City, which was the result of the

Athens Charter led by Le Corbusier in 1933. Although Wright kept opposing functionalistic avant-garde, he identified himself with many conclusions in the Athens

Charter, such as Article 74: “The city should assure both individual liberty and the benefits of collective action on both the spiritual and material planes” (Charter of

Athens). The most fundamental idea Wright transformed was City Beautiful. It was a concept that was born between 1893 (World Fair in Chicago) and 1904 (Louisiana

Purchase Exposition), which partially dealt with the separation of the residential part of the city and production, administration, and business. Unlike Garden City, City

Beautiful followed geometry, and there was a promenade designed in the city center; it served as inspiration for Daniel Burnham and the Chicago regulatory plan in 1909.

Although Wright did not participate in it at that time, he later developed it into “make

Chicago beautiful” (Wilson, 126–146).

Although Wright designed solitary buildings until the 1930s, he understood that their context and setting in the city or landscape is essential. Building projects that did not consider merging into its neighborhood, their function, and role in the urban organism could not make a modern functional world. In 1932, thanks to Edgar

Kauffmann’s financial support, Wright started to build a vast city model with his

48 unrealized projects. When the captions stood the test of coexistence with Broadacre

City, it was the time for Wright to make them public. Broadacre City is a utopian and a newly built urban structure in the area of one mile. Wright divided the city into four rectangular sections: A, B, C, and D. Unlike avantgarde urban planners, Wright respected the original landscape and natural features, such as a lake, river flow, slopes, and hills. Each city part contained various versions because each of them

(entertainment, living, administration, industry, agriculture, university, ZOO, stadium, etc.) needed a different structure. Highways interconnected all these parts with interchanges. Wright also designed his own types of cars. Yet the density was the essential feature: one acre should accommodate five people maximum, which guaranteed enough space, but rather short distances among residencies.

The size of Broadacre City was not incidental; it was planned as an autonomous unit in growing plants and industry – nothing should be imported; everything needed to be produced and grown locally. Broadacre City was not a project, which could expand forever due to the lack of self-sufficiency. Wright wrote a manifesto for Broadacre City, which was on a big plaque attached to the enormous model:

An acre of ground minimum for the individual; Broadacre City makes no change

in existing system of land surveys; Has a single seat of government for each

county administration by radio or aerotor; Architectural features determined by

the character and topography of the region; No major or minor axis; No private

ownership of public needs; No landlord and tenant; No housing, no subsistance

homesteads; No traffic problem; No streetcars; No grade crossings; No poles;

No wires in sight; No ditches alongside the roads; No headlights; No light

fixtures; No glaring cement roads or walks; No tall buildings except as isolated

49

in parks; No roadside advertising; No slum; No scum; No public ownership of

private needs. (Reading Broadacre).

To study and understand the Broadacre City concept, Wright recommended students to read the following humanist authors: Laozi, Jesus, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire, Walt

Whitman, Henry George, William Blake, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and not forgetting: Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

However, as Neil Levin says, the actual urbanistic inspirational figures for Wright’s

Broadacre City were Thomas Jefferson, and Henry George (Levine, “Urbanism” 176).

5.3 1943 Broadacre City

The 1943 writing on the topic of Broadacre City is a recording of a lecture or a morning talk. It is a document with twenty-three pages, dated December 1956.

Although it is not stated it is a morning talk like in other records, it is clear from the context. The first two pages contain information about the operation of the Taliesin

West site; then the lecture begins: the note in pencil says “begin” and the previous passages are crossed out. Wright explains the overuse of capital letters: “An idea should be written with a capital I. You know, when you write God, you write it with capital G, don't you? ... Because I believe the idea is God – or at least God is the idea” (2). Wright deals with this idea on the following two pages and develops his employment of a capital letter in the word nature:

Nature with a capital 'N'. I am fond of saying, and I feel when I use the word

'nature', that nature is all the body God has by which we may become aware of

Him, understand his process, and justify the capital we put on the word 'God'.

Now that justifies us in putting us on the word 'Nature'. So when the architect

uses the word 'Nature', he should capitalize the word and in his life and work, he

50

should also take off his hat to the word because it will do more for him and be

his only valid education. (4–5)

His Autobiography mentions nature many times, mostly in an adoring way: nature as the visible song (Wright, “Autobiography” 301), or nature with a capital N, pointing out that “in spite of all the talk about Nature that ‘natural’ was the last thing in this world they would let you be if they could prevent it …. But how about the nature of wood, glass, and iron – internal nature?” (Wright, “Autobiography” 89). These passages, which are not directly linked to the topic of Broadacre City, are essential for understanding Wright’s style of writing and thinking – they express the ambivalence of modernism. On the one hand, rationalism and empiricism were adored, but at the same time, privileged representatives of modernist thinking considered themselves the chosen prophets, and their way of writing was supposed to be a divinatoric act, the descend of transgressive truth through their words. Their idea of being exceptional without any self-critical reflection was typical for Wright and his writing. If the “truth” should descend on the author from places outside this world, it does not need logical arguments.

Wright returns to religion in the next part of the talk, when he mentions he actually did not want to talk about ideas in the first place, but “something brought it up”

(5), and is carried away by comparing his Sunday talks to preacher’s morning, which, once again, makes him remember his childhood and contemplate his attitude to religion, in which he does not seem to be particularly interested at that time as he has had enough of it and does not want to be engaged in it again (6). At the bottom of page 6, Wright eventually gets to the original topic of his talk – the Broadacre City – and encourages students to ask him questions. One of them asks him what he would have changed in the original plan of Broadacre City if he had had the chance, and Wright promptly answers

51 that it would be the mile-high because it would “absorb and justify and legitimatize the gregarious instinct of humanity” (6). Wright revisits his older ideas and admits that the concept of a city he designed is rather absurd now, yet he focuses on the USA at present

(i.e., the year 1956) and warns against the structure of contemporary cities: “Unless they are destroyed, we will be” (7). Wright then got a question from apprentices, which he answered:

Q: ... If you brought the concept of Broadacre City up to date, or if you wanted

to change it, what would be the major changes? Mr. Wright: The major change

would be the mile-high. And the mile-high would absorb and justify and

legitimatize the gregarious instinct the gregarious instinct of humanity, and the

necessity for getting together surrounding an idea ... which would be the sky-

city, and that would mop up what now remains of urbanism, and leave us free to

do Broadacre City. (6–7)

Wright realized what Levine or Barry Bergdoll wrote about the clash between density and dispersal. But Wright shifted from the ten-year-old concept of Broadacre significantly. He knew it was not the only sustainable model for the future, as he had said ten years earlier. It was not about the substitution of Broadacre City by something else and abandoning this concept. In this talk, Wright noted that the idea of the

Broadacre City does not rule out concentrated life, work, and free time in one self- sustainable megastructure. If we build these megastructures in centers of contemporary cities, for instance, we will make the use of the space in these areas more efficient and will solve the issue of their unregulated density and (laissez-faire); thus, we can build the Broadacre City in free spaces. Another part of the recording casts the light on this idea:

52

Q: Mr. Wright, isn't the mile-sky the antithesis of Broadacre City? Mr. Wright:

Yes, is is an attribute — paved the way to Broadacre City. Q: Maybe it's a

Tower of Babel. Mr. Wright: Yes, it's the modern Tower of Babel. Q: Well, isn't

that the very defeatism of Broadacre City? Mr. Wright: No. The contradiction in

terms is only seeming. The mile high is a necessary step in the direction of

Broadacre City and a mopper-up for the coming of Take it from the nature. (7–8)

The fact that Wright was very self-centered and arrogant can be demonstrated in the next paragraph, in which the student asks whether Wright’s idea of destroying New

York City, leaving only Central Park, is by any chance related to Le Corbusier’s work.

The student is interrupted by Wright, saying that he is not aware of what Corbusier’s ideas are (9), yet several lines later, Wright unconsciously admits he is familiar with Le

Corbusier’s work when he describes his thoughts and concepts. However, Le Corbusier was not, according to Wright, perfect and because “he wanted people to in those things

[mile high building]“ (9), at which Wright, on the contrary, does not aim because mental exercises are essential: to be in the countryside, to explore greenery, to be surrounded by nature. But how did he want to achieve that? He proposed an intermediate belt, which he considered important because when he later edited the printed text, he underlined the whole page with the detailed description in the Broadacre

City in a red pen. “You live where you want to live, with whatever you want to live with, as far away as you care to go” (10). Ironically, Wright highlights and mentions nature on so many occasions that it seems somewhat bizarre that he did not design the

Broadacre City for pedestrians – they should be expelled outside the proposed area.

Wright instructed the inhabitants to come by helicopter, by car or by plane because “the whole area of the United States has been thrown open to occupation by people who desire to live beautifully” (10). However, he does not say how beautifully you can live

53 with all the vehicles, fumes, and parking lots/heliports all around. Wright continues to argue that he does not want people to live like pigs in a pen, being piled up, but wants them to “go afield and sympathize a little more with nature, give a little more attention to beauty of living, beauty of life” (10), which is something that is in fierce opposition with the ecological tone he set at the beginning of the paper. Then another question is raised, and it is an opportunity for Wright to return to playing his role as the messiah of culture and society.

Culture means that we should be free from the mistakes in which we were born.

[…] Tradition has made a hurdle which ideas have to take; instead of being

sympathetic and receptive to ideas, tradition and education are afraid of ideas,

and that’s why we have rebellious outposts like the Taliesin Fellowship. That’s

our great service to society and humanity. The fact that we will not lay down our

arms to a tradition that now makes no sense. (13)

Tradition seems to be the concept that bothers Wright a lot. The description of his disapproval of it, comparing it to rubbish and garbage, takes a page and a half, yet the handwritten notes say that this idea was later very different. The talk ends with Wright’s advice to his students: “Your coming in contact with the truths and the various experiences of life – that’s the only place you can learn from” (16).

The following part of the essay refers to more general phrases and axiom, which

Wright concluded with a general saying, having Wright’s essential vocabulary, yet without any association with Broadacre City or the gist of the contemporary issues in urbanism: “The organic character of life and everything connected with it, which is what should be the basis of an architect's knowledge and of his services to him in it”

(23). The shift in Wright’s thinking in the upcoming decade can be illustrated in the following papers: editing done in an interview and another morning talk.

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5.4 1951 Broadacre City and 1956 Urban Planning

The 1951 Broadacre City essay has two versions, and it is Oscar Stonorov’s interview with Wright. The first version is a typescript with numerous editing notes in ink, and the second one is the final version, which was eventually published. To trace the shift in conceptualization and retrospective reflection of Broadacre City, I am not going to analyze Wright’s editing work in version A, and I will use version B instead.

Version B has six pages, and the last page has four lines only (referred to as 2401.458-B in the bibliography). Whereas in the first question, Wright repeats his good old belief in democracy and harmony between human beings and nature, the interviewer wants

Wright to be more precise: “O. S.: I would like you to make still clearer to me what the meaning of Broadacre City is. Am I right to assume that Broadacre City means the abolition of all artificial distinctions between city, suburb, and country. F. Ll. W.: You are right” (2). Wright does not say anything new in the interview and does not speak about any criticism or shifts in thinking as if the previous consideration of a parallel concept of a dense megastructure did not happen at all. The interview is full of general phrases on organic architecture, nature architecture and democracy Wright understands as a system per se, which is not necessary to define or specify more; he does not distinguish between various models of democracy and he does not express his opinion on community soil in Broadacre City and a non-hierarchical economic model, which was the basis for Broadacre City. He comments on socialist agriculture and organization of labor very vaguely at the end of the interview: “If you can see "horizontal farming" contour plowing, properly applied to crops, pastures, animals and all such well related to the people ... then you are getting a glimpse of the country-loving life of ... our democratic future” (5–6). We may only assume that, for Wright, horizontal farming was both spatially horizontal agriculture, and the non-hierarchical one, owned by a

55 community. Nevertheless, he does not explain it to the readers, and any shift cannot be observed. It seemed in 1943 that Wright was thinking about the concept of Broadacre

City and reinventing it, but the interview in 1951 proved that he immersed in old stereotypes and generalities, with no attempt to update a utopia from twenty years ago.

The last source referring to Broadacre City is a morning talk dated 1956. It is yet another record of a morning talk on December 2, 1956, the title of the lecture is “Urban

Planning, Fellowship Drawings, New Education” and has twenty-two pages. As the title says, the talk does not have a single topic, and Wright describes experiences from field trips and the 33rd National Municipal Association Congress, which took place on

November 22 in St. Louis, in which he took part (Hearings, 44).

Wright clearly set his opinions on the exploitation of urban plots by the wealthiest capitalists. The real estate developer William Zeckendorf took part in the congress as well, and Wright commented:

You know, Zeckendorf is the boy who guided together the land for Mr.

Rockefeller on which the U. N. now stands and which Mr. Rockefeller have free

to the United Nations. By giving it free to the United Nations he made ten times

what the land was worth, by buying up the land around it which Zeckendorf did.

So Mr. Zeckendorf knows the prices. (5)

Wright also comments on the situation when nobody understood Zeckendorf’s speech; he was smugly happy with himself, and Wright demonstrated his criticism in his speech after Zeckendorf: “Mr. Zeckendorf had put a price tag on everything in sight. I said I was sure he was sitting there with at least a million dollars in his pocket, but I ... didn't think either of them had anything to do with the case” (5). Wright does not express any opinions on the urban design or Broadacre City in his talk, but it demonstrates how his thinking was actually transcribed into the real American urbanism. The congress

56 discussed the distribution of billion dollars, which the federal government wanted to assign to the construction of roads and other infrastructure. Wright, as it is anchored in his concept of Broadacre City, fought against the majority of capitalists when he wanted to employ the egalitarian distribution of wealth in using soil and land. This is the reason why his open criticism of William Zeckendorf was significant because when the federal government took responsibility for urban development, it violated the private interests of rich realtors. Wright did not make concessions to the principles of Broadacre City, although, as it was demonstrated, he did not develop or update them in the 1950s, yet he was not afraid to enforce them in negotiations about real and specific plans that have changed the landscape and infrastructure significantly.

6. Describing the Organic

One of Wright’s key concepts is organic architecture, which is represented by various buildings, such as Wright’s own house in Oak Park, Chicago, Fallingwater,

Marina Civic Center in San Rafael, or the Guggenheim Museum in New York. What did actually Wright mean when he spoke about his architecture as being organic? Is it possible to find an unambiguous answer in his own texts, or do Wright’s writings make it difficult for us to understand “the organic” in Wright’s architecture? I will try to answer this question by comparison of two essays: one dated 1936, the other dated

1952, and the third one dated 1953. I will also try to demonstrate, whether there was any shift in understanding the organic, like in Wright’s architectonic works, and what the change was like.

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6. 1 1936 Organic Architecture

The 1936 variety of Organic Architecture has twelve versions, but I am going to work with the J version, which seems to be the most comprehensive and most concise.

It is a typewritten essay without editing and notes, with nineteen pages. Wright decided to interpret the history and development of what he considered organic architecture in

American and European architecture. As far as American architecture is concerned, he sees the beginnings between 1893 (which is the time when he started to work) and

1920; the years 1920 and 1936 are set for Europe. The first section is dedicated to the description of a typical American house in the 1890s and its unsuitable dimensions, architectonic form, and the fact it was not economical. An important part is dedicated to the description of his childhood at the farm in Wisconsin, where he learned about the laws of nature and agriculture; ruralism, for Wright, is a drawing point of organic architecture. Wright sees himself in the central point of the narrative of the development of organic architecture and he consolidates his own role as a trailblazer: “I had an idea - it still seems to be my own - that the planes parallel to the earth in buildings identify themselves with the ground - do most to make the buildings belong to the ground” (3).

Although Wright had a different idea about the structure in society than capitalism, he also designed organic architecture within its structure. The plan and design of the house still depended on the location of a servant room:

To get the house down to the horizontal in appropriate proportion and into the

quiet relationship with the ground and as a more humane consideration anyway,

the servants had to come down out of the complicated attic and go into a

separate unit of their own attached to the kitchen on the ground floor. (4)

The following pages contain the description of Wright’s rediscovered topics, such as the utilization of various materials – glass, steel, wood – and he gives a short description of

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Machine, the automatization of work and life. Wright refers to the linear story of organic architecture on page 13 and mentions his teachers Louis Sullivan and Charles

Robert Ashbee. Wright also returns to the undesired examples from the past:

Classical - that is to say ancient Western or pagan buildings have been greater or

lesser blocks of buildings material, sculpture into shape outside, hollowed out

within and 'decorated' so they might be looked at with pride by those who lived

in them. (17)

Wright eventually talks about the definition of organic architecture, when he writes about architecture that it should be “something to be lived to the full resources of time, place and man to give us an architecture that is inspiring environment at the same time that is a true expression of that life itself” (21). The essay yields to vague axioms, illustrates Wright’s egocentrism – he writes about himself and his experience when trying to historicize organic architecture – and the inability to elaborate and specify his ideas. Wright’s essay begins and ends with thoughts that seem to be too general and vague.

6. 2 1952 Organic Architecture and 1953 Organic Architecture

The 1952 Organic Architecture is a manuscript with three versions. I am going to work with the last C version, which is the longest one. It is a typescript with handwritten notes and a length of five pages. Wright uses an unusually short space to give another interpretation of the development of what he considers organic architecture

– yet he is not so explicitly egocentric. The essay starts with the following sentence:

“Organic-architecture was born Middle West. Out of the ‘Cradle of Democracy’ it came to us at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century as prophesied by Victor Hugo” (1). The old concept dies due to the onset of organic

59 architecture – at least according to Wright. In fact, monumental and classical architecture did not die, and it thrived in the 20th century in the USA. But towards the end of his life, Wright probably needed to assure himself that he had been the historical winner. “Building as a box or a containment of life, was gone ... By thus 1893–1901, entirely free of European influences, this great negation of box-building transpired in

America” (3, 5). The uniqueness of the phenomenon of organic architecture, when

Wright did not provide any coherent explanation of what he meant by that, apart from works he produced and the fact it was supposed to be a genuinely American invention, is symptomatic for Wright’s writings on organic architecture. The last significant book is Organic Architecture with six pages dated 1953. Wright writes down nine key terms that make up organic architecture: Nature, Organic, Form follows function, Romance,

Tradition, Ornament, Spirit, Third dimension, Space. Wright then provides a commentary on each of the concepts or phrases. He writes about the organic:

The word ORGANIC denotes in America not merely what may gland in a

butcher shop, get about on two feet or be cultivated in a field. The word organic

refers to entity, perhaps integral or intrinsic would therefore be a better word to

use. As originally used in architecture, organic means Part-to-Whole-as-Whole-

is-to-Part. So Entity as integral is what is really meant by the word Organic. (2–

3)

It is definitely beneficial for readers that Wright tries to explain his concept of organic architecture using nine elements, whose combination is supposed to make something organic, but none of them is sufficient for further development.

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7. Apprentices' Writings on Wright

Wright’s aura was reflected in literature too. Most of his apprentices – with some exceptions – were not able to punch above Wright’s weight and break free from his creative influence. Short yet intensive experience in Taliesin Fellowship was an exciting and once-in-a-lifetime episode as well as something that could make good use at the book market. The years spent with Wright became an independent autobiographic genre. The aim of the chapter is not to present a comprehensive overview of literary activities of all apprentices, who wrote about Wright, but to show only several of them and concentrate on their literary qualities.

The most crucial literary reflection of some of Wright’s associates is his wife

Olgivanna’s book Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life, His Work, His Words published in

1966. Seventeen chapters of this book describe Wright’s main principles and projects.

The chapters are dedicated to (theoretical and real) projects, such as The Living City and Fallingwater, yet Olgivanna puts the emphasis on the section “Architecture and

Education”. It was not clear what would happen with Taliesin Fellowship and buildings in Taliesin and Taliesin West after Wright’s death. Olgivanna wanted to preserve the program and both schools, and she succeeded: she was the director of Taliesin

Fellowship until her death in 1985. The important thing for her was to articulate school principles, and the way Wright’s apprentices would refer to his legacy. Thus, the book became a canonical work for building Wright’s myth. Olgivanna mixes stories her deceased husband told her and Wright’s teachings, her own interpretation of Wright’s work and legacy, and telling stories she experienced. It is not a memoir, but the stories are told in the third person singular as if the narrator was unconcerned and presented objective facts. Reading is complicated by a clumsy style – Olgivanna was not trained in writing, and English was not her native langue. Despite the fact that the book was

61 edited, and the language is formally correct, the author lacked a sense of style, and the result is somewhat puzzling, speaking of content and formal features.

The very opposite approach is represented by books, which are very pleasant to read, written in the first person singular, combining a personal point of view of events and everyday life in Taliesin Fellowship with the description of Wright’s social circle.

This is the case of Edgar Tafel’s book Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to

Genius. Unlike Olgivanna’s chronological narrative, starting with chapters “The First

Years” and “The Beginning of Work”, Tafel decided to begin with his first encounter with Wright in 1935. The following section is about Wright’s death. He also tries to describe the educational process in Taliesin Fellowship by depicting places where

Wright worked and which were vital for him, yet he keeps employing the retrospective point of view: how Wright remembered them at the time Tafel was in touch with him or when he later visited them with Taliesin Fellowship. He focuses on Taliesin,

Fallingwater, Johnson Wax Headquarters, and Taliesin West. It is only the epilogue, which deals with Wright’s life after Tafel left Taliesin Fellowship in 1944. “In April

1959, a radio announcer said: 'Frank Lloyd Wright [my heart sank] died yesterday in

Phoenix, Arizona...' No, it couldn’t be; yes, it was inevitable. My tears streamed,“

(Tafel, “Years” 212) Tafel wrote, and he described Wright’s funeral in the last two paragraphs.

Earl Nisbet decided to follow a similar attitude. Nisbet was a carpenter and a self-taught designer from San Mateo, CA, and he was part of the Taliesin Fellowship in

1951 – 1953 (Kinchen). His book deals with only two years, when he stayed in Taliesin

Fellowship, and projects he participated in. All the memoirs that are written in first person singular and focus on the time authors spent with Wright rather obsessively describe circumstances under which they were brought to Taliesin Fellowship – who

62 introduced them, how they got there, who opened the door for them etc. (Nisbet 11–31).

Whereas Tafel and Nisbet depict a reasonably short time span (nine and two years),

Cornelia Brierly has a different experience. She spent more than seventy years in

Taliesin Fellowship as she started in 1934 and continued after Wright’s death as well.

Literary reflections of other authors and apprentices were full of acknowledging

Wright’s myth as they tried to describe their own share in Wright’s fame as trustworthy and convincingly as possible, but Brierly chose a different approach to her memoir – one of the reasons being the fact that she spent most time in Taliesin Fellowship after

Wright’s death. In her chapters (Tafel’s chapters have 20-30 pages, Brierly’s have about

10), she is more interested in depicting atmosphere in both Taliesins, people who spent there short or long time, apprentices’ partners and Wright’s colleagues who also lived there, neighbors in both Taliesins and adventures on the road between both areas, which sometimes resemble Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in their effervescence, when she describes how she had a sciatica attack:

Filled with pain and apprehension and topo miserable to leave, I showered.

Then, putting me on the couch, he sutured me with oil, manipulated me toe-by-

toe, and pummeled me muscle-by-muscle. Mr. X gave a running dialogue as he

displayed the tattooed butterfly that opened and shut at his elbow, the mermaid

that appeared to swim, the angel whose wings moved as flexed his back

muscles, a peacock on his chest, initiated bleeding hearts concealed under one

arm, monsters of the sea, and many other works of the tattooer's art. Subtly, his

manipulations began to change to caresses. You have beautiful eyes, he said. I

felt terribly weak, and my only thought was escape. Edgar [Tafel] burst in:

Ready? (Brierly 31)

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Each chapter seems to be an episode with its own point, focused on different people, and it does not differentiate between “great architecture creators” and “common” neighbors, visitors, or people they met on the road”. Brierly does not avoid purely personal topics, such as the opportunity to have a private life in Taliesin Fellowship, or even bringing up children. Cornelia Brierly’s episodic style of narration may seem to focus too much on various figures, yet it puts together a bigger linear story and may remind readers of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which also focuses on a socialized group of people, community and a specific place.

Edgar Kaufmann Jr. wrote about his experience with Wright in a different way: he never became an architect, but an architecture historian and tried to analyze Wright’s work from a historical point of view. After publishing the short book Frank Lloyd

Wright: Writings and Buildings, his last book was 9 Commentaries on Frank Lloyd

Wright, in which nine commentaries contain independent historical studies related to particular Wright’s project. The most sophisticated essay is – of course – the one on

Fallingwater as Wright built it for Edgar Kaufmann’s father.

John Geiger selected a different medium for his literary reflection of work and time spent with Wright. Geiger actually put his memories, commentaries, and archive material on a website with the only comprehensive and relevant list of Wright’s apprentices and other associates. Geiger does not describe the whole time of cooperation but deals with the first and last year only. Geiger’s testimony is rather notable as he does not avoid – unlike the others – describing Wright’s negative traits and events that eventually led to falling out with Wright. Wright deceived Geiger in front of a client when they prepared an exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum in 1954.

Nevertheless, Geiger asked Wright to write him a letter of recommendation:

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I received the letter and the following cover letter in May 1956, 'Dear John:

Hope you will come and see us some time. We miss you. Affection, Frank Lloyd

Wright.' I was flattered by the invitation but did not respond. Mr. Wright did not

anticipate that I would. (“In the Cause of Architecture”)

Yet Geiger concludes his narration forgivingly and says that negative experience and fall out did not prevent him from ceasing to believe in what Wright did in architecture:

The Fellowship was a glorious spiritual, intellectual, and romantic adventure in

the cause of architecture: a love affair in search of the truth, an affair of the

spirit, but as we all know, there is nothing quite so final as a love affair that is

over. The love endures; the affair is history.” (“My Last Summer”)

The ability to create a community of people who make something, believe in something, and try to do something as well as to make a formative experience from the stay in

Taliesin Fellowship no matter how long it lasted is a frequent topic of literary reflections. However, they differed significantly in form and interpretation –

Olgivanna’s depersonalized narration, Edgar Tafel’s, and Earl Nisbet’s lineal detailed description of their stay in Taliesin Fellowship, Cornelia Brierly’s episodic mosaic,

Edgar Kaufmann’s historical papers, or John Geiger’s blog-like commentaries.

8. Conclusion

Wright’s writings are characterized by their overproduction. If we compare it with Le Corbusier’s or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s writings, it is a diametral multiple of what they had ever written. Le Corbusier is the author of five short books with a narrow topic (Toward an Architecture, 1923; Aircraft, 1935; The City of Tomorrow,

1947; When the Cathedrals Were White, 1947 and Modulor, 1948), whereas Ludwig

Mies van der Rohe and his collected writings in 1922–1969 will make up one volume

65 and they are going to be published next year (Pizzigoni). If we compare Wright’s

Autobiography and Corbusier’s When Cathedrals Were White, which is also a comprehensive autobiography, the differences in literary quality are rather striking.

Speaking of the quantitative difference – Wright’s autobiography of the first two-thirds of his life has 562 pages. Corbusier’s biography of his first three-fourths of his life is less than a half. Corbusier structures his memoir topographically: chapters are divided according to places he visited or where he lived, and serve as a starting point for various principles (New York as a Vertical City, etc.). On the other hand, Wright divides his autobiography into five sections (Family, Fellowship, Work, Freedom, Form), which are, again, so vague and extensive that the content does not hold together and it is a very distinctive and frequently incoherent stream of consciousness about various topics.

Corbusier is not afraid to be politically correct, he talks about his opinions on the war, the policy of the after-war division of the world, but he very aptly comments on the issue of colonialism in short and concise chapters, which are ordered chronologically.

Le Corbusier writes about American colonialism:

The colonists - for there actually are colonists and the American spirit itself is

strongly marked by the disciplines and irruptions of a society which is a sense

has just disembarked, attracted by violently opposed motives: some wishing

save and maintain their faith, their religion, or their ethical attitude, others eager

for adventures, for deeds, for money-making - the colonists are renewed every

day. (Le Corbusier, “When the Cathedrals Were White” 106)

Wright was not capable of such apt criticism even in relation to Americans or political affairs.

Wright had a similarly ambiguous relation to the emancipation of Afro-

Americans, when he built Rosenwald Schools – schools for black neighborhoods,

66 which, on the one hand, confirmed and reproduced stereotypes on specific educational needs of Afro-Americans and confirmations of their ghettos, yet, on the other hand, it was a systematic effort to solve educational disbalances between white and black population (Wilson, 156–170). As I have tried to illustrate on several places in this thesis, Wright’s Fellowship became famous due to making architectonic education accessible to women and Wright’s proclamations that it was a completely equal attitude, but Wright’s language, which was typical for employing the masculine gender for apprentices even in official and promotional materials, and he also called his students as

“my boys”, shows that Wright was not reconciled with equality even at a symbolic level. A similarly ambivalent relation was true about Wright’s allegedly liberal attitude toward sexuality. There were queer men in the Fellowship who had sexual relationships supported by Olgivanna Wright (Friedland 431–433); thus, the question of whether they had equal opportunities arises as well as the issue of marginalization, disregard, or bullying from heterosexual colleagues in the Taliesin Fellowship.

As the analysis of selected writings and topics showed, Wright had a unique way of writing: his works were never finished, he kept rewriting and adapting them, even after their publication. Throughout more than sixty years of his career, Wright arrived at several key concepts: organic architecture, Broadacre City, Usonian House as part of the Broadacre City structure, Architecture and Machine, and others, which he kept repeating, did not analyze them further and this system created a referential network, in which one concept confirmed the other. Wright’s writings are distinguishable by strange inconsistency in argumentation, the inability to logically structure an essay and virtually banal syntax, accompanied by vague expressions. The essential question arises: it is possible for a creative architect to produce architecture of excellent quality and accompany it with writings with extraordinarily low quality? Wright’s writings were

67 supposed to co-create the cult of the originality of Wright’s architecture in media.

Wright was a trailblazer of the Starchitect concept Ponzini and Nastasi write about (11-

19). The general public is not interested in architecture, its qualities, and benefits as much as in the architect’s personality, his private life, affairs, and statements. This increases his financial value at the architectonic market. This aspect apparently worked well as Wright managed to provide for many other people, maintain two vast areas of

Taliesin and Taliesin West, keep a high standard of living, and continuously travel all around the world. However, Wright’s literary production has ceased to work as an ultimate explanation of his architectonic thinking. The concepts, whose description is disguised in flowery and pompous phrases, are now obsolete, thus architecture historians work with interpretations of architecture, plans, other non-discursive sources, or objects of everyday use, such as letters and bills; they utilize Wright’s writings as a proof of inconsistency between author’s writing and an artwork. In her article, Lori A.

Norton Meier speaks about bad literature for children and states that crappy literature should cultivate literary thinking. She writes:

The very presence of crappy literature in my classroom allowed my students to

become better readers of and responders to literature. Lehman (2007) discusses

the importance of the teachable moment when promoting literary thinking. This

was essential in each of the vignettes presented here. (194)

When Wright’s writings are taken for comparison, works by his contemporaries, such as

Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, or Walter Gropius excel due to their consistency, logical structure, precise vocabulary, and economical content, which was something at which Wright failed. If we speak about Wright as an architect, his qualities are indisputable. His qualities as a person, organizer, and a privileged white man are

68 ambiguous, based on archival materials and research, yet the most problematic issue is the aspect of his literary production.

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9. Summary

The diploma thesis presents the original research in the archive of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). The archive has been recently transferred from Wright’s Foundation to the Avery Library in New York and was made accessible to the general public. The collection documents Wright’s extensive architectonic work as well as a complete archive of Wright’s preserved manuscripts and lectures. This documentation showed that Wright’s published collected writings are insufficient as they are inconsistent in dealing with Wright’s additions, and they often do not contain edited sections or passages Wright crossed out, yet they are visible and are part of the original manuscript. Materials were thus a basis for the analysis focused on the literary aspect of Wright’s texts and their cultural analysis.

Writings are not organized chronologically but thematically in the following groups: Space as Machine, Taliesin, The City, and Describing the Organic. The last chapter compares literary adaptations and reflections of experiences his apprentices had with Wright as a teacher. As the writings are thematically organized, even though there may span of several decades between them, the shift’s an architect’s meaning, and changes in his argumentation strategies are nicely illustrated. However, there were no significant shifts in the groups of interest, although he kept rewriting, adapting, and re- using his writings for new opportunities of publication. Wright’s writings now seem to be a tool for building his own myth, or cult, which is also mentioned in contemporary literature, rather than a tool for the explanation of new ideas and architectonic designs, which could be developed and followed. It may be one of the reasons Wright and his school became a solitary phenomenon because of the direct experience with Wright’s original thinking that could not be communicated. Concepts like organic or democracy in architecture still remain vague. They are materialized in Wright’s architectonic works

70 than in his literary production. The writings also reflect Wright’s ambiguous attitude towards topics like gender equality, postcolonialism, ethnic equality, marginalization of sexual minorities, etc. Wright’s writings also show how some sections influenced personal relationships and conflicts with Henry Russell-Hitchcock, for instance.

Předkládaná diplomová práce představuje původní pramenný výzkum v archivu amerického architekta Franka Lloyd Wrighta (1867–1959). Archiv byl před nedávnem převezen z Wrightovy nadace do newyorské Avery Library a zpřístupněn široké veřejnosti. Součástí sbírky je nejen dokumentace nezvykle rozsáhlého Wrightova architektonického díla, ale také kompletní archiv dochovaných Wrightových rukopisů a přednášek. Na základě této dokumentace se ukázalo, že publikované Wrightovy sebrané spisy jsou nedostatečné, protože nejsou konzistentní ve vypořádání dodatečných

Wrightových editací a často neobsahují doplněné pasáže a neobsahují často pasáže, které Wright vyškrtl, ale jsou čitelné a byly součástí původního rukopisu. Na základě tohoto materiálu je v předkládané práci provedena analýza, která se zaměřuje na literární skladbu Wrightových textů a jejich kulturální analýzu. Texty nejsou seřazeny chronologicky, ale tematicky do následujících okruhů: Space as Machine, Taliesin, The

City a Describing the Organic. Poslední kapitolu tvoří porovnání literárních zpracování a reflexí zkušenosti jeho žáků (apprentices) s Wrightem jako učitelem. Tematickým seskládáním textů, které často dělí i několik desetiletí, se tak lépe ukazují posuny v myšlení architekta i proměny argumentačních strategií. Jak se ukázalo, k výrazným posunům u Wrighta v jednotlivých oblastech příliš nedocházelo, přestože své texty neustále přepisoval, upravoval a znovu využíval pro nové publikační příležitosti.

Wrightovy texty se tak ukazují především jako nástroj budování vlastního mýtu až

"kultu", o němž současná literatura také píše, než jako nástroj výkladu nových myšlenek

71 a architektonických návrhů, které by mohly být dále rozvíjeny a mohlo na ně být navazováno. Patrně i proto se Wright a jeho škola stali tak solitérním úkazem, protože přímá zkušenost s Wrightovým originálním myšlením byla nesdělitelná. Pojmy jako organičnost či demokratičnost architektury tak zůstávají nadále vágními a materializuje je spíše samotné architektonické dílo, které Wright zanechal než jeho literární produkce.

V textech se rovněž odráží Wrightův rozporuplný přístup k tématům jako byla genderová rovnost, postkolonialismus, etnická rovnost, marginalizace sexuálních menšin atd. Nakonec se ve Wrightových autorských textech ukazuje, jak některé pasáže ovlivňovaly osobní vztahy a konflikty, např. s Henry Russellem-Hitchcockem.

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