Arts and Letters

One of our giant redwoods has fallen, and left a space we cannot fill by any quick plantation of lesser trees. For years men will build new buildings from the mere loppings of the giant's branches, without even approaching the main trunk, which must remain inviolable. Like our other venerable sequoias, this tree has a name, Frank Lloyd Wright. By general agreement today, he counts as one of the greatest creative artists the nineteenth century brought forth in any field; while as architect, through the scope of his fantasy and the range of his formal experiments, he towers above his contemporaries, young and old. It took three centuries to grow this man, and it may take an even longer time to plumb the depths of his genius and to follow through to their ultimate destination all the trails he opened up.

In none of the arts has our country produced a figure of more indisputable originality than Wright, or one more deeply colored by his native soil, and by the folkways of the genial, cornfed, sky-open Middle West, the land that nourished his literary contemporaries, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and one greater than they, Abraham Lincoln, before him. In Frank Lloyd Wright's work the old agrarian democracy finally took form in buildings so deeply indigenous that they mark a final break with our colonialism. Yet because of Wright's confident commitment to all that science and technics could offer, his creations pointed to a future in which mechanization and standardization and mass production would themselves come under the formative influence of art. Thus Wright embraced both sides of the New World personality: the pioneer and the inventor, the romantic and the utilitarian, the defiant rebel and the genial extrovert asking for nothing for himself he did not demand, as of right, for his fellow citizens.

Even in his lesser moments, this proud upstanding man was deep in the American grain. Consider well one of the last of his designs, that for a Mile High Skyscraper—what was this but a Tall Story in every sense of the word, in the pioneer tradition of Paul Bunyan: a building whose foundations might well have been laid in "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Even Wright's breezy arrogance, which he preferred, he often said, to an hypocritical and dishonest humility, had the innocent if seemingly outrageous swagger of the old frontiersman, ready to match his strength against all challengers. That aplomb and that daring were in the spirit of Jefferson, who, when writing to one of his daughters, observed that "it is in the nature of the American character to regard nothing as impossible." Wright indeed carried into a later age the sense of inexhaustible human possibility that quickens the pages of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville.

Loving Emerson from his youth, Wright must have taken as a sort of personal blessing Emerson's dictum: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. His gifts of originality were so high, and his contempt for the derivative and the imitative so deep, that he disdained to pay the homage of imitation even to his own earlier work, and treated every fresh design as if it stood alone. So he kept alive, even in his old age, the creative powers, the sheer fecundity and exuberance, of his youth. Wright dared greatly in all that he undertook, and above all he dared to be himself. Even in his lifetime Wright's personality had a kind of mythic potency, magnified and marvelous; for he actually said and did and wrote and built what other men hardly dare to anticipate in their dreams.

But let us now begin at the beginning. Frank Lloyd Wright was born close to the heart of mid-America itself, in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1869, and before he reached the end of his three-generation career, on April 9, 1959, he had planted his buildings in almost every region in America. From his father, who was a preacher and an organist, Wright inherited both his love for the music of Bach and Beethoven and perhaps the didactic tendencies of his later years; but this was mixed with traits he derived from the Welsh Joneses, his mother's family; and it was his Welsh inheritance that lay closer always to Wright's heart and prompted him to bestow on his own home the name of the fabulous Welsh bard, Taliesin.

Even before his birth Wright's mother, Anna, consecrated him to the profession of architecture; she hung pictures of great cathedrals around her young baby's crib; while the constructive toys she found for him at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, geometric shapes with bright primary colors, deeply influenced his ornament, on his own confession, throughout his life. From his mother, too, came his taste for the simple and the natural: food that kept its natural flavors, wood that showed its natural grain and color, structures that respected the nature of the materials. All this was deepened by his apprenticeship as a farm boy to the soil itself; for that part of his boyhood spent on his Uncle James's Wisconsin farm toughened his body and fortified his spirit, making him able to withstand adversity and invite success through his high physical vitality.

For an architect of his period, Wright had the unusual good fortune to get a grounding as an engineer in the School of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. This supplied the needful tools for his intuitive engineer's imagination, while it made him more ready than most of his contemporaries to espouse the new processes and methods that the machine offered to an architect ready to work with them. And in addition Wright had the good fortune to complete his early architectural education by serving as chief draftsman in the office of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, two masters of the Chicago School. Once Wright set up in practice for himself, he was at first chiefly occupied with the transformation of the American dwelling house, carrying out more consciously and more thoroughly the work originally begun by H. H. Richardson in the eighteen-eighties. That whole story is by now too well known to be repeated here; but its outcome was to establish a new idiom in American architecture, an idiom which, like our regional landscapes and climates was responsive to many different moods, from the Robie House to the Coonley House, from his own succession of Taliesins to the Millard House or the Kaufmann House, Falling Water.

So rich was Frank Lloyd Wright in invention, so fertile and abundant in bringing forth fresh forms and images, so numerous his actual buildings, that one cannot attempt even a brief summary of his achievements. The great buildings that were built, like the Larkin Building in Buffalo, and the great buildings that remain unbuilt, like the Baghdad Opera House, testify equally to his genius. Even if only his drawings remained he would still be identifiable as a consummate artist and an original architect. What one should stress, perhaps, in conclusion, is the relation of Wright's innovations in architecture to those that were made in American literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. For Wright's architecture was just such a defiant break with the past, such an attempt to establish a firm American core, as Whitman had carried out in Leaves of Grass; in a sense, Wright's whole work, from first to last, might be described as another "Song of Myself." In every sense, then, Wright was a chip off the old American block. If this accounts for his isolationism, his anti-Europeanism, his denial of the historic and the traditional, it also lay beneath his originality, his gay generosity, his imaginative audacity, his boundless affirmation of life, his sense that the world need not remain decayed and corrupt, but might be made over anew in the morning. This affiliation with an older America, while drawing freely on all the energies of our present age, accounts for much of Wright's most characteristic contributions; not least the fact that he was more at home with the architecture of the Maya, the Japanese, the ancient Mesopotamians, than he was with the Romans and the Greeks. Yet the fact that Wright's work was as warmly received, from the beginning, in Europe, as well as in America, shows that in the very act of liberating architecture from the dead forms of the past, he had produced buildings that, for all their idiomatic richness, were universal in their appeal.

The movement of ideas that had begun in the works of Emerson and his contemporaries, plumbing to its depths the experience of New World man, and attempting to give organic structure to the life that was here being created, was brought to completion in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. With Wright's death, a great age passes away; and in the act of closing with beautiful finality one part of the American past, this bold spirit summons us forth on a wider quest.