Frank Lloyd Wright
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter Frank Lloyd Wright Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works. In the same series Michel Foucault David Macey Jean Genet Stephen Barber Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws Franz Kafka Sander L. Gilman Guy Debord Andy Merrifield Marcel Duchamp Caroline Cros James Joyce Andrew Gibson Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter reaktion books To Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2006 Copyright © Robert McCarter 2006 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in The Netherlands by Krips B.V. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McCarter, Robert Frank Lloyd Wright. – (Critical lives) 1. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867–1959 2. Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867–1959 – Criticism and interpretation 3. Architects, United States – 20th century – Biography 4. Architecture, Modern – 20th century 5. Architecture – United States – 20th century I. Title 720.9'2 isbn 1 86189 268 3 Contents Introduction: Wright at the Defining Moment 7 1 Unity and Nature’s Geometry 9 2 Chicago and the Tradition of Practice 26 3 White City and New World Monumentality 44 4 Prairie House and the Progressive Movement 62 5 Europe and the Shining Brow 90 6 Eastern Garden and Western Desert 103 7 Fellowship and the Disappearing City 120 8 Natural House and the Fountainhead 144 9 Usonia Lost and Found 171 Epilogue: Wright in the Rearview Mirror 201 References 204 Bibliography 217 Acknowledgements 223 Photographic Acknowledgements 224 Frank Lloyd Wright in 1926. Introduction: Wright at the Defining Moment This book examines both the critical events and the defining works of architecture – and the places, occasions, relationships and ideas that shaped them – in the life of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). Wright’s life and architecture have been the subject of a seemingly endless number of books and writings, beginning in 1900, when Wright was aged 33, and continuing unabated to this day, at the beginning of a new century. Yet within this outpouring the reader will discern a consistent division between those books that document and analyse his architectural works, largely excluding any discussion of his daily life, and those books that tell the often sensational tale of his life, with barely a passing reference to either the buildings themselves or the countless hours he spent working on his designs. Also too often overlooked in existing studies are the ideas and beliefs that shaped Wright’s work, the larger intellectual context in which he worked, and the manner in which these affected, and are reflected in, his architecture. The result is that, despite the large number of books on Wright, the most essential part of his life – his life as an architect, working, as he said, ‘in the cause of architecture’ – remains virtually unexplored. This book, which endeavours to give an account of Wright’s life as an architect, may thus be defined as an architectural biography. During a life and career that spanned the greater part of the United States’s second century, Wright actively engaged and endeavoured to shape American democracy’s emergence and 7 evolution in the modern world. Joining ancient place-making geometries to contemporary ideals of Transcendental philosophy, Wright sought to develop an appropriate architecture for both the young American nation and the new world of the twentieth century. Wright believed it was his task to house the experiences of daily life in a new architecture that was formed by integrated conceptions of both collective monumentality and individual dwelling. Wright’s work thus redefined our understanding of the city, the ideal of the community, and the nature of the single family house. In this way, Wright’s architecture crystallized key conceptions of both private dwelling and public citizenship for the young American society, as well as serving as the primary inspiration for the emergence of Modern architecture around the world. Today, almost 50 years after his death, Wright remains by far the most widely recognized Modern architect in the world. Though he came to maturity in the nineteenth-century American culture of immigration and Emerson, and was already middle-aged at the turn of the twentieth century, Wright’s buildings, and the ideas that underlie them, nevertheless continue to inspire new architecture in the twenty-first century. Wright’s architecture is timeless and affects us in a manner that is as aggravating to historians, intent upon chronological, comparative and conceptual categorizations, as it is endearing to the general public, who recognize in Wright’s architecture both its appeal to fundamental, unchanging human qualities and its spirited engagement of contemporary life. Wright himself felt that, despite their unparalleled formal, material and spatial variety, all his architectural works originated from the same ordering principles, consistently applied throughout his 72-year career. Frank Lloyd Wright’s built works fully embody his ethical ideals for architecture, his conception of democracy founded on both individual and collective integrity, and his vision of modern life in harmony with nature – all of which continue to be as valid today as when he first conceived these exceptional places. 8 1 Unity and Nature’s Geometry 1867–87 Frank Lincoln Wright, so named by his parents William Carey Wright and Anna Lloyd Jones Wright, was born on 8 June 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. Wright would maintain through- out his life that his date of birth was two years later, and much has been made of this in biographies of Wright. This includes 1 the assertion that Wright’s life ‘starts with a lie’, and the equally questionable claim that this change of birth date was the begin- 2 ning of Wright’s ‘lifelong habit of turning fact into fiction’. In this case, it is perhaps more appropriate to note this as a very effective example of Wright’s turning fiction into fact, for Wright’s revised birth date of 1869 is today, almost 140 years afterwards, still to be found in many highly respected and widely employed reference books. Wright always maintained that he believed his birth date of 1869 as given by his mother, yet Anna Lloyd Jones had also 3 changed her own date of birth by four years, from 1838 to 1842. In her case the motive is fairly clear, for it allowed her to main- tain that she was 24 years old at the time of her marriage in 1866, rather than her true age of 28 – late to be getting married in that period and place. Wright likely knew from a fairly early age that his mother had changed the date of his birth, yet he chose to maintain his public belief in his mother’s modified version until the end of his life, when, just two months shy of his 92nd birth- day, he passed away in Phoenix, Arizona. At the time of his death, 9 preparations were under way for what virtually everyone involved thought would be Wright’s 90th birthday party in June. Even without the two years of added youth, Wright was as pre- cocious an architect as the world had ever known. In no small part this must be credited to the remarkable family, time and place into which he was born. The first significant influence on Wright’s early development was his mother’s extraordinary family, the Lloyd Joneses, a Celtic clan of religious revolutionaries who had broken away from the established Protestant church during the Methodist revival, and played a part in the founding of the Unitarian sect 4 in Wales in 1726. Considering themselves Nonconformists and Dissenters in their religious practices, the Lloyd Joneses were among the numerous freedom-seeking refugees and rebels from Europe arriving in the New World at this time. From 1840 to 1890 some 15 million immigrants came to America, accounting for one- third of the nation’s population increase during that period. For European immigrants, America offered the possibility of a new beginning, and this appealed particularly to the radical ministers and educators in the Lloyd Jones family, who brought with them a tradition of holding to their own thoughts and beliefs in the face of all opposition. Wright’s grandparents, Richard and Mallie Lloyd Jones, emigrated to America in 1844 from Llandysul, Wales, bringing their seven children, Thomas, John, Margaret, Mary, Anna, Nanny and Jenkin. Nanny died during their subsequent travels in search of a homestead, and four more children, James, Enos, Nell and Jane (called Jennie), were born in America. In 1852 the close-knit family began purchasing what would eventually total 1,800 acres of land outside Spring Green, near Madison, along the Wisconsin River. In 1864, as the end of the Civil War approached, the Lloyd Joneses settled in what came to be known as ‘The Valley of the God-Almighty 5 Joneses’, adopting as their family motto the phrase ‘Truth against the world’. 10 Large family portrait of the Lloyd Jones family, c. 1883, in Madison, Wisconsin. The future architect sits to the right of the empty chair. Traditional Celtic society was structured around close family relations, and a child was considered to belong to his mother’s 6 side of the family, rather than to his father’s. Without question, Wright’s mother’s family was of the utmost importance in the shap- ing of his world-view, as is indicated by his decision at the age of eighteen to change his name from Frank Lincoln Wright to Frank Lloyd Wright, thus becoming a full-fledged member of the clan.