Projects and Writing Samples by Martha O'Connell
By Martha Russis
When he was 9, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother handed him a set of Froebel blocks. Named for the German educator who invented them, they taught him form and geometric design and disciplined him for his life’s calling.
"I soon became susceptible to constructive patterns in everything I saw," Wright said about the blocks in 1957, near the end of his life. "I learned to see this way and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of nature. I wanted to design."
When he was in his nineties, Wright said he could still feel in his fingers the blocks that fascinated him as a child.
Even before his birth in 1867, a pregnant Anna Lloyd Jones knew intuitively that she carried a boy and was determined that he would one day create great buildings. She hung engravings of English cathedrals on the walls of his nursery, and sure enough, her son fulfilled his destiny.
But Anna was no whimsical dreamer. She planted the foundation for her first-born son to become one of the leading 20th-century architects.
Wright’s modern style and success is rooted in his understanding of nature, which he gained in his youth.
The son of poor Welsh-English parents, he spent a considerable part of his childhood in Wisconsin, where he worked summers on his uncle’s farm. He learned the value of hard labor and developed an appreciation of simple things crafted from natural materials.
Those beliefs became the essence of his "organic" form of architecture – that a building should fit in with its natural surroundings. The 1,100 homes and commercial buildings he produced in his lifetime showed bold originality and rebelled against traditional design.
He opposed preconceived styles and his pioneering style is recognized with top national honors. Nearly 100 of his buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and as National Historic Landmarks. Many are examples of his famous prairie style.
Those Froebel blocks had a profound effect on Wright. The simple childhood toy fostered his ability to concentrate and conceptualize buildings in his head, a method he used over and over again with many of his commissions.
Apprentices said it was as if he "shook the ideas out of his sleeve." He seldom put anything down on paper until he completed it in his mind.
That’s how one of his most acclaimed residences, Fallingwater, first appeared around 1935. The client, department store owner Edgar Kaufmann, gave only a few hours notice that he was coming to Wright’s office to see the plan for his rural Pennsylvania home. Wright’s apprentices worried because there was nothing on paper. On top of that, the design required great ingenuity because it was to be built over a waterfall.
Wright drew it out in a few hours from the vision in his head and presented it. Kaufmann loved it.
"He had tremendous concentration. It was just amazing," said Bruce Pfeiffer, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives and an apprentice of Wright’s. "He could shut out anything around him and concentrate on whatever was on the table."
His principle that architecture harmonize with nature grew from the strong spiritual beliefs that shaped his work.
His father and uncle were Unitarian ministers. Wright also explored Buddhism and Taoism.
He never did jobs just for he paycheck. In fact, he was plagued by financial hardship throughout his career but still chose to stick to his brand of architecture, even when the real estate market was slow.
"He was looking for spiritual values in the work he was doing. To him, what was religion was nature and he integrated that into his architecture," said Eric Lloyd Wright, Wright’s grandson and a Malibu, Calif., architect.
Wright’s contemporary architecture went against the then-popular Victorian and neoclassic design. His ideas were novel to his clients, but he was adamant about following through. Some of his fellow architects scorned him, but he never let criticism halt his creativity.
"That stemmed back to his mother, who instilled in him that he had something great to offer," Eric Lloyd Wright said. "He had a lot of respect for himself. I think that was very important to his success. He had a very positive self image and that allowed him to stand up to what he was doing."
Those buildings turned out to be lasting monuments like New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, built in 1959, the Robie House in Chicago done in 1909, Tokyo’s former Imperial Hotel that withstood a massive earthquake, and the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, Calif. completed in 1957.
"My work is only great insofar as its philosophy is sound, and if my philosophy is unsound, my work will not endure," Wright said in a 1957 speech. "The fact that it has endured, and now has a chance to continue beyond any lifetime, is simply due to the fact that the philosophy behind it all was a sound one. If that philosophy didn’t inspire my work it wouldn’t exist very long."
For most of his career, he lived and worked at the same place, often falling into bed at night and getting back up at the crack of dawn to return to the drawing board. It was a habit that stayed with him from his early days on his uncle’s farm.
He claimed that by having the close connection between office and home, he increased his work output 33 percent.
He never refused a commission and always figured out a way to accommodate his clients’ budgets. That ensured that most of his designs actually got built. He treated every client like "a prince," Pfeiffer recalled.
It was part of Wright’s view that in a Democratic society, middle-class America ought to be able to have his homes, not just the wealthy. For instance, around the mid 1930s, he would do a 1,200-square-foot home for around $5,000.
If a client couldn’t afford his initial proposal, he’d revise the drawings to bring the price down. Sometimes he’d offer them sweat equity where they could physically work to construct the house in exchange for a cost reduction.
"He would show you that you could cut down the cost by doing this, this, and this because he wanted these people to have these houses. He had a humanitarian approach here – he got to know his clients and like them and they got to like him,’’ said Jeanette Fields, a founder of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
His mentor and one-time boss in his early career, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, taught him that architecture and ornamentation must fit with its surroundings and be based in nature. Wright also was inspired by philosophers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A prolific writer, Wright took every opportunity to promote himself. He accepted invitations to write about his work, show it and lecture. He gave interviews and was one of the first serious artists or architects ever to be seen on TV.
In January 1938, he was on the cover of Time magazine. He even did a radio spot in an unlikely pairing with Groucho Marx and his caustic wit..
Academia shunned Wright because his style was tough to teach, but the schools Wright set up helped his style lived on after his death in 1959.
Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wis., and Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Ariz., both instruct fellowship recipients to this day.
His apprentices experienced his methods firsthand, but they seldom heard him reminisce about past projects. Wright was constantly thinking how he could improve his designs and focusing on what was before him at the moment.
Often asked which of his buildings was his masterpiece, he always replied, "the next one."