The Builder

"I Have no use for the common man," says Frank Lloyd Wright, "except as material to become uncommon."

Wright himself is an outstanding example of the Uncommon Man. He has produced 640 buildings and assorted storms of controversy on his way to becoming the most powerful influence in modern architecture in the past half century. He has made many enemies, but has outlived most of them. With his broad-brimmed hat perched atop flowing white hair, this eighty-five year old rebel zooms about the country in his Jaguar, enjoying his own post-humous fame.

He was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1869. Before his birth, his mother felt certain the child would be male and that he would be a builder. A strong believer in prenatal influences, she clipped woodcuts of old English cathedrals from magazines and hung them in the room that became his nursery.

The boy was brought up on graham bread, porridge and religion. Nights he would lie awake listening to his minister father playing Bach on the piano. In his mind, the music took on structure: he seemed to see the majestic harmonies rising into towering forms like the woodcuts on his wall.

He built almost from the beginning -- with wooden blocks, with sand and stones, with clay, with everything he could get his hands on. He was a rebellious boy -- unconventional from the first. He found getting along with other children difficult. He fought them -- they kicked down his strange towers of clay and stone -- and he built them again.

Work on his uncle's farm hardened his hands and firmed his muscles, but didn't satisfy the creative fires that burned inside him. Troubled, unsure of what he wanted, he ran away from the farm, was brought back, and ran away again.

Wright took his unformed talents to the University of Wisconsin, where he found the answers to a few of his questions, but only a few. While his instructors spoke of ornamentation and classic examples, Wright insisted that the textures of building materials were of the utmost importance and that a structure should harmonize with its surroundings, should "grow easily from its site." His teachers found him brilliant, stubborn, moody, skeptical: an impossible student. He would ask embarrassing questions like "What is architecture?" and when the answers didn't satisfy him, he would supply his own: "Architecture is space to be lived in."

After graduation, Wright shared space with a number of Chicago architectural firms -- supposedly working for them -- but actually, always working alone. In conflict with everyone around him, Wright was then beginning to create the radical, exciting architecture that would revolutionize the building of a generation. But no one could then see, or understand, and so he growled his farewells, and opened a small office of his own.

He began by building homes. Strange homes that looked stark and barren to a people accustomed to the fussiness of Victorian designers. One by one these simple structures appeared -- first in the Chicago suburds, then in other places.

Wright's love life was as turbulent as his career, and for a time, it seemed, almost as productive. His first wife gave him six children, but refused to give him what he really wanted by that time -- his freedom. He took it anyway, moving back to Wisconsin, where he built a combination home-and-workshop which he named after the Welsh poet, Taliesin.

Wright couldn't work long without a woman near him and so a lovely lady joined him at Taliesin. It was her last home. One night while the architect was in Chicago on business, a servant went mad and set fire to the building -- destroying it and seven people, including the lady. Burying his grief in work, Wright rebuilt Taliesin from its ashes.

A few months after the tragedy, he received a letter from a stranger expressing sympathy and understanding. He imagined the writer to be a gray haired, rather elderly woman, and he wrote back, inviting her to visit his Chicago office. She accepted the invitation, adding that she would prefer to meet him after office hours. When they met, Wright discovered that she was red-headed, young and beautiful. As they stood facing one another for the first time, Wright searching for proper words, the beauty asked, "How do you like me?"

Wright liked her very much. They became inseparable, though his first wife refused to divorce him until some time later.

At about this time, one of Wright's Chicago projects was the construction of the famous Midway Gardens, which became a very popular drinking place in those pre-Prohibition days. As he liked to tell it later, when Legislated Thirst took over the land, it cost so much to tear down the solid structure that three contractors went broke in the process.

A man from the orient visited Taliesin II not too long after that. Might the esteemed Mr. Wright be persuaded to design a hotel to be erected in Tokyo? The idea intrigued Wright and he accepted. He and his red-head (they were now married) took the next boat to Japan. Wright was fascinated by the country. He called it the "land of mist, moon, snow, flower -- and woman."

Accustomed, by this time, to defying his fellow men, Wright now was determined to defy Nature herself. Since the dawn of time, Japan had been periodically shaken by devastating earthquakes. When the next one came, Wright decided, it would not shake his hotel.

What form of structure would prevail against an unstable earth, Wright pondered. The answer was simplicity itself: an unstable structure. In a fever of exaltation, Wright went to work. What he created was a loosely jointed thing, built on the principle of the floating cantilever. Other architects were appalled: they declared it a violation of sound construction. Wright ignored them. He was certain that while solid buildings would crack and crumble when the earth writhed under them, The Imperial Hotel would only bend, sway, keep its balance like a champ prizefighter, and then, when the tremor was over, straighten up and stand erect among the ruins.

In 1923, Wright's theory was put to the test -- Tokyo was shaken by one of the worst earthquakes in its history. Wright, in the United States, anxiously read the cablegrams from the disaster-stricken city. Every large structure had been levelled, they said. The Imperial Palace was a mass of rubble, The Imperial Theatre a ruin. Building by building, the list went on. And finally:

The Imperial Hotel. Destroyed.

Stunned by shock and disbelief, Wright stumbled home, pulled out his drawings, pored over them trying to see what could have possibly gone wrong. In the early hours of the morning, another message came through from Tokyo:

From the previous list of devastated buildings, one was to be deleted. Of them all, The Imperial Hotel alone was still standing. Please pardon the error ...

Married life with wife number two was alternately blissful and stormy. During one of the stormiest periods, she left him. A year after that, Taliesin II suffered the fate of its predecessor -- it, too, was destroyed by fire. But Wright was used to catastrophe by then. He had been rebuilding his demolished works since the days when his playmates smashed his childhood castles.

Taliesin III arose from the site of Taliesin II. And the place of his red haired wife was soon filled by someone the newspapers called "a Montenegrin dancer."

But wife number two wouldn't leave them in peace. Wright and his dancer were plagued by sheriffs, lawyers, and judges, and the architect knew some anxious hours behind prison bars. Finally, he was legally severed from the (continued on page 46)The Builder (continued from page 12) red head and legally joined to the Montenegrin.

The press had a fine old time with Wright's domestic difficulties. He is one of the few men who ever hired a public relations man to keep his name out of the papers. Lloyd Lewis was the unlucky guy who got the job and it lasted less than three months. A man like Wright, Lewis discovered, can't keep out of the papers.

Wright is a man of perplexing inconsistencies. On one hand, his thinking is broad and liberal; on the other hand, he can be hidebound and narrow-minded. For instance, he's vehemently against all but American architects, although his work has been influenced by the best of the German and Japanese schools. And yet he is the first to say that "Architecture is our blind spot as a people. We have a civilization, but no culture."

He has been justly criticized because instead of adapting his houses to the people who are to live in them, he demands that the people adapt themselves to his houses. If you were to commission Wright to design a home for you and, when the plans were drawn up, felt the house was not suited to your way of living, Wright quite conceivably might suggest that you change your way of living. Perhaps you might recall the groans of past clients like the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, who said, "I don't know of any Wright project in which the cost was not above the estimate." Remembering this, you might ask Wright for some kind of guarantee on expenses. Smiling gently, he would probably reply (as he has on occasion), "My dear fellow, no architect who is an guarantee anything."

A bold innovator himself, Wright finds the innovations of certain other architects dismaying. The currently popular "box" style, as typified by the United Nations Building, he views with contempt. "The slab's the thing these days," he observes. "The cemeteries are full of slabs, but who wants to live in a cemetery? Why, I wouldn't dare walk on the same side of the street with any of those skinny glass boxes. Fool things might explode. Does that sound arrogant? Let it! Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance."

His latest squabbles involve the representatives of two cities -- New York and Venice. In New York, the City Building Department is looking askance at his plans for the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art. The building will be shaped like a seashell, and is so unlike anything the city has ever seen that existing fire and safety laws can't cope with it.

The Venetian imbroglio started when an Italian contractor invited Wright to design a modern Palazzo to be built on the historic Grand Canal. He accepted with enthusiasm, but has met with opposition from those who feel Wright's vivid modernity won't blend with the venerable structures for which the Canal is famous. This doesn't bother Wright. He shrugs off the objections of "unenlightened sentimentalists" and says: "I intend to be the greatest architect of all time."

All time is a big bite, but Frank Lloyd Wright may be just the man to chew it.