Frank Lloyd Wright III: father of architectural modernism in USA?

Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio

Oak Park Chicago, 1889

From 1886, 20-year old Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) trained at the Chicago offices of the famous firm of Adler & Sullivan, Louis Sullivan being Wright’s mentor. In 1893 Wright left the firm and set up his own practice. He built houses in the Prairie style, with long profiles, low pit­ched roofs, and strips of windows under the eaves. Geometric orn­am­ent was restrained. Soon he received better commissions, completing the Larkin Soap Co. in Buffalo NY (1906) and Unity Temple, a Unitarian chapel in Oak Park Ill (1908).

After travelling to Japan in 1905, Wright had a keen in­t­er­est in Japanese art and architecture, collected Japanese wood­block prints and later set up studios in Tokyo. Japan was the country he described as the most rom­antic and beautiful! So he was keen to win the bid to design The Imperial Hotel in Tok­yo, to re­place the 1800 wooden building.

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo,

1922

Then came the disasters. In 1909 Wright ab­andoned his wife Kitty and children for Martha Borthwick, the wife of a client, so the new couple went abroad to escape the en­suing sc­andal. In 1913 Wright had been commissioned to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (see MoMA’s catalogue). Wright had a part­icular, pass­ionate interest in ukiyo-e woodblock art, which he'd imported to the U.S, and exhibited at the Art Institute of Chic­ago. It was an import­ant side business.

In 1914, after Frank and Martha’s return to America, a de­ranged ser­vant set fire to the bungalows of Wright’s Taliesin School of Archit­ect­ure (see below) in Scottsdale Ar. Martha, her children, and four other people were kill­ed. [In 1922, Kitty and Frank Wright were fin­ally divorced, leading to 2 more marriages for Frank within 5 years].

The Japanese hotel opened in 1922 and became one of Wright's most impressive designs, show­casing Japan's modernity and enticing westerners. The elaborate Imperial Hotel kept Wright busy, but with­out American work, his profile suffered. And worse! In 1925 Taliesin burned again, due to an electrical fault, and Wright lost his huge stockpile of Japanese art. In 1929 the stock market crashed and Wright declared bankruptcy.

Wright’s work was exhibited bet­ween 1894-1959 which Kathryn Smith used in her book Wright on Exhibit to show how the architect used exhibitions to sustain his reputation. He tried for 5 years to secure an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chic­ago, finally succeeding in 1930, after the Arch­itectural League in New York. Wright showed that for the prev­ious 15 years, he’d been very active as an architect. The exhibition proved he'd moved beyond the single-family house to very large-scale commissions. Luckily the Architectural League exhibition earn­ed praise in the New Yorker, New York Times and Time.

Architectural historians seeking the first signs of modernism in the U.S focused on these buildings, although Wright’s relation­ship with modernism was ambivalent. Nonetheless Wright was included in MoMA’s influential 1932 Exhibition of International Modernism, curated by Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. The 3 men were dev­otees of the first generation of Eur­opean modern archit­ects, in­cluding Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gro­pius and their ag­enda for the MoMA show had been to promote the Europeans to an Am­eric­an audience. But the museum also wanted Americ­ans, so some were add­ed including Wright. [Wright was already pitted against the white washing European modern­ists. This hostility informed The Fountain­head, Ayn Rand’s novel of feuding architects].

Fallingwater, 1937

Also in 1932, a struggling Wright had founded a School at Talies­in WI. One young student who studied there was Edgar Kauf­mann Jr. His fat­her, dep­artment shop owner Edgar Kaufmann Sr (1885–1955), in­vited Wright to build a weekend home on a tight site beside a stream in Laurel Highlands, Falling­water. Wright designed smooth con­crete trays cantilevered over the stream where it tum­b­led over a small cascade. These trays projected from a cent­ral mass of stacked stone. Their dramatic horizontal lines, harsh-look­ing against the nat­ural, rough setting, with curved edges. The lowest deck was reached from the stream bank by a suspended stair­case.

Fallingwater’s fame spread in 1938, when NY’s MoMA dedicated a two-year travelling exhibition, A New House by Frank Lloyd Wright. It soon filled Architectural Forum, making it one of the most recognisable houses anywhere. A second MoMA exhibition opened following the completion of Fallingwater’s guest house in 1939.

Wright accepted the task of crafting a specifically American idiom for his generation of ar­chitects. For there was surely being born into the world a new style, the style of Amer­ica, the style of the civilis­ation of the C19th. The start of this organic architecture could be seen in the Prairie Houses of his early career, taken from the landscape of Wright’s native Midwest. The low sheltering roof, trees and flowers were abstracted as geo­metric patterns in the art glass windows, and leaves contributed their aut­umn palette to the plaster surfaces. Wright also used biolog­ical metaphors in his buildings eg tree-like col­umns at the Johnson Wax Headquarters Building, completed 1939. Wright intend­ed a broader and more sophistic­ated connection to the land­scape, both physical and human; his architecture and plan­ning forged an American identity that united land, people and democracy.

Neil Levine’s book The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright was helpful, generating publicity at a difficult time. Wright persuaded Edgar Kauf­mann (of Fallingwater fame) to fund the construct­ion of a gig­an­tic model of his Broadacre City idea in 1932, for public display. This City was a bold effort to grasp the Car Problem, a tech­nology that later had horrible urban effects. Wright’s cars gave rise to one of his most interesting unbuilt designs, the Gordon Strong Auto­mobile Ob­jec­tive, a drive-up viewing plat­form and planet­arium proposed for a Mary­land hilltop. A spiral­ling ramp ran up its exterior.

Broadacre dissolved the American city into the landscape, giving each inhabitant an acre of his/her own, uniting homes, ind­us­try and farm­land. It was low-rise, with the few tall buildings set in wide parks. There were to be no trains or trams, only free­ways with multi-level junctions. The car ruled: Wright valued homes by the size of their gar­age, as opposed to a modern centralised, congested city­­.

The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright 2015 followed Levine’s earlier book The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright 1997. To make his case, Levine developed a thread from Wright’s earliest pro­jects, including a plan for a residential sub-division of Chicago, and a 1928 scheme for 3 small towers at St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery in New York. The 1926 Skyscraper Regulation Project, a 9-block area of Chicago, was the first of several mega-projects. Even in the Depression, he continually recycled its plans and drawings.

Broadacre exhibition, 1935

Wright’s pre-eminence as an American architect arrived, a triumph for Wright, but obscurity for his ideas. This was because the buildings that secured Wright his lasting fame came VERY late. Fall­ingwater Penn (1937) brought him global fame at 70! Solomon Guggenheim Museum in NY, the master­­work that crowned his career, opened in 1959 (post-death)! Wright want­ed to create this style for the C20th, and was dis­mayed what he saw as the corr­upt­ing European influences. His orig­in­al model of the Guggenheim Mus­eum was a feature of the exhibition at MoMA.

Conclusion
While celeb­rating Wright’s 150th anniversary, the 2017 exhibition marked the transfer of the architect’s archives: tens of thousands of draw­ings, photos, letters and models.  The 150th annivers­ary series ended with Wright's best-known building in Asia, the Imperial Hot­el that com­b­in­ed western and Japanese design principles. The 150th anniversary saw much action: a show called Unpacking the Archive at the NY Mus­eum of Modern Art and new books from his leading biograph­ers. Wright’s reputation was looking good.

Wright on Exhibit, by Kathryn Smith