Frank Lloyd Wright's Texts As a Literary Work 2019

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 2 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

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