Chapter Content
Okay, so, Frank Lloyd Wright, right? What a guy. We're talking about a re-examined life here, someone who just kept...evolving, you know?
Imagine standing in this little chapel, Unity Chapel, kinda forgotten out in the Helena Valley in Wisconsin. You look up towards the river and bam, there they are. Three buildings designed by Wright, totally modern but, like, somehow perfect for the landscape. Like the lighthouse on Lake Michigan, or even just the tall trees, you can't miss 'em.
There's the Romeo and Juliet Windmill, covered in cedar, then the Midway Barn, a low, flat version of those Wisconsin barns you see everywhere, painted that classic red. And then there's Taliesin, this house wrapped around the top of a hill, just drowning in oak and cedar. It looks like it just grew out of the hills, the stones, the tree bark, all blending together. You can almost see turkey vultures and bald eagles circling above it all, you know, just hanging out.
So, all these buildings were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who, let's be honest, is now seen as one of America's greatest architects. Crazy, right? His family actually settled in that valley way back in the 1800s and built that little Unity Chapel. He spent summers there as a kid, visiting his uncle's farms. Later, he went down to Chicago to become an architect, learning from Louis Sullivan, who taught him that design and function have gotta work together, you know, be a team.
Then, boom, twenty years later, he's back in the valley, totally reinvented. He called himself a "Wisconsin radical," which he said meant "roots." He was like, "Wisconsin is my somewhere." And it was. From there, in his middle age, he transformed himself into one of the most original architects of the 20th century. I mean, if he hadn't been a late bloomer, or a second bloomer, we wouldn't have a lot of his most famous buildings. He had a midlife crisis, which, honestly, sounds like it fueled the fire. And he believed, like, completely believed, in himself.
His ego, right? His immense self-belief. That's what pulled him through the tough times and into this second act. But, y'know, it wasn't all sunshine and roses. His ego made him...domineering. Even violent. It's weird, because he’s almost the opposite of someone like Katharine Graham, who needed to be free from her husband to succeed. Wright? He gathered people around him that he could, well, impose himself on.
Apparently, Wright was *supposed* to be a prodigy. His mom, she decided he was going to design amazing buildings while she was still pregnant. She bought him these Froebel Blocks, and from a young age, he was just arranging and organizing these shapes, and that's what influenced his later work. He learned to see the geometric structures in everything. It's like he could see through into these basic forms. You see it again and again, in his Prairie houses, his temples, everything.
But it wasn’t just the blocks. His mother read John Ruskin's stuff to him, art and architecture criticism, and she hung pictures of Gothic cathedrals above his bed. His dad got him into literature and music. Wright would often compare buildings to musical compositions, which is kind of cool. He even read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" when he was fourteen and took away that books had taken over from architecture, and he wanted to change that, bring architecture back to its rightful place as, like, the mother of the arts. He was still thinking about this in his eighties when he was designing the Guggenheim.
So, his career started in the 1880s, and by the 1930s, people thought he was done. Finished. He was known, sure, but rejected by the modernists, the architectural establishment. But get this, people commissioning the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church and even the Guggenheim thought he was dead. Seriously.
Before 1909, he designed houses and religious buildings in the Chicago suburbs. Those Prairie houses, they were a hit. He and his wife Catherine, they were like, the picture of middle-class respectability.
Then, bam, 1909. He's forty-two, a successful architect, and he just...abandons his family. He leaves his business to someone else and goes to Europe with Mamah Borthwick, a married client. Scandalous, right? He'd been having issues. His business had slowed down, and he'd asked Catherine for a divorce. He wanted to integrate work and home, you know, the Arts and Crafts thing. Leaving was a big statement. He went from being bourgeois to eccentric. One of his own sons even hit him!
When he got back from Europe, he went to Wisconsin, to the Helena Valley, and built Taliesin. That was a turning point. It was where he started experimenting with extending his early ideas and finding a new direction. From that valley, he kicked his career back into gear. It was the start of a long, tough period, personally and professionally. Between 1911 and 1925, Taliesin burned down *twice*, his lover Mamah Borthwick was killed in a terrible way, and his next marriage fell apart with accusations of violence. He was on the fringes, considered old-fashioned by the modernists, ignored, or even made fun of by the International Style people. By 1932, people were saying he was "half-modern," which was basically code for "washed up." He was also broke a lot of the time.
He didn't get many commissions in the US during this time, and the ones he got often failed. But he wasn't just sitting around. He completed the Imperial Hotel in Japan, which was huge, physically and imaginatively. It survived an earthquake the year after it was built, which was pretty incredible. Back home, his attempt to create affordable homes was a failure. He had to start writing and lecturing, and running an apprenticeship program. During the Great Depression, it looked like his architecture career was, well, done for.
But then came the second act. Boom. Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, and the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House. It was Wright’s most innovative period, with those Usonian, heliocentric, and textile block homes, these totally original designs based on the landscape of the American West, and monumental buildings like the Guggenheim and the Johnson Wax Company. It was like he was reliving his life, reimagining his career, like he was constantly recreating those patterns he learned as a kid.
So yeah, Frank Lloyd Wright, both an early and a late bloomer. He did more than half his work after he turned sixty-eight. His last decade was his most productive. His belief in himself and the importance of his work is what led him to create those crazy experimental buildings later in life. At sixty, his career was going down, but at eighty, he was on top again. He worked like crazy. The year before he died, at ninety-one, he did a hundred drawings for a cultural center in Baghdad.
The thing is, Wright was able to have that second peak because he kept innovating, reworking his ideas in new ways, constantly re-examining life. Between 1911 and 1917, he designed over a hundred houses for the System-Built Homes, which was supposed to be affordable housing. But it didn't work out. World War I, him working in Japan, the finances... it all stopped the project. But even after it was canceled, he was still thinking about using those design elements in later projects. He went back to the idea of affordable housing with Jacobs I in 1936. So even with the failures, that middle period was ambitious. That Bogk House, for example, it shows the influence of the Imperial Hotel, and it's completely different from the Prairie houses he was building before.
Later on, he built those monumental spaces like the Beth Shalom Temple and the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim is like something out of a sci-fi movie, like it just landed in Manhattan from outer space, totally futuristic. He didn't just repeat himself, he rearranged his ideas. The ideas behind the Johnson Wax Headquarters? You see them first in a design from 1931. The spiral ramp idea? That's from the 1920s. By the time he was doing the Guggenheim, there was new concrete available that made it possible, and he had a patron who believed in his vision. It wasn't just a rehash, though. It showed how Wright could see possibilities in simple shapes and work with new materials. Those tree-shaped pillars at Johnson Wax? That was all because of reinforced concrete. His second phase was all about re-examining his earlier ideas in new ways. He said it himself, this "creative faculty" is about "getting himself born into whatever he does, and born again and again with fresh patterns as new problems arise."
So, how did he do it? Well, let's look at Michelangelo...
Okay, so before Michelangelo, not many design drawings from architecture survive. The printing press made paper common, and artists like Leonardo were starting to use sketching to come up with new ideas. The Renaissance was a time of generalists. Many of the architects were painters and sculptors first. It was an era of late blooming. Brunelleschi was a goldsmith who became an architect in middle age and figured out how to build the dome of Florence cathedral, which people had been struggling with for a thousand years.
Michelangelo got interested in architecture in the middle of his career and became the greatest Renaissance architect as an old man. Like other artists, he learned architecture through drawing.
Instead of going to Rome to study ancient buildings, Michelangelo got inspired by classical styles from books. He learned by drawing them, like he learned to draw nude figures for his paintings. He understood that drawing was a way of thinking, a way of discovering new things.
Michelangelo's drawings are full of repetition. He'd draw the same figures over and over, making small changes to the pose or angle. That's how he learned the basic forms and how he found ways to be original. Through drawing, he really understood shape. He told his students, "Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time!" In that repetition, that refiguring, ideas are found. Michelangelo came to each project with his head full of shapes that he could reimagine to find something new. His skill came from painting and his interest in anatomy. He would even dissect bodies to understand anatomy better.
From his books, he learned forms that he could rework in his building projects. He saw architecture as a way of framing sculpture. As he worked on the Sistine Chapel, where the painting had to fit the architecture, he saw architecture as interesting in its own right. Now, the architectural frame and the sculptural figure were unified in his mind. He reinvented classical architecture.
He wasn't abstract. He came to his architectural ideas like he did his artistic ideas: through drawing, repeatedly, with slight variations, until he found the right answer. He took forms like human anatomy or architectural structures and just kept chewing on them over and over. Creativity comes from that kind of hectic, repetitive work. And that's how Frank Lloyd Wright sustained such a long, inventive career. He was turning and refiguring the shapes of his childhood seventy, eighty years later, like Michelangelo sketching arms and columns. That's how the Guggenheim was designed. Wright turned shapes his whole life.
What drawing was to Michelangelo, imagination was to Wright. He'd think it all out in his head before picking up a pencil. Because his memory was so good, he could do it without drawing. Famously, when Edgar J. Kaufmann called Wright and said he was coming to see the progress on Fallingwater, Wright hadn't done anything. He went out to the studio and drew three complete, detailed drawings in two hours, straight down on the paper. Kaufmann was blown away. Wright had imagined the building so thoroughly that he could just produce it.
So, you know, we can describe the way Frank Lloyd Wright walked out of his life in 1909 in a few different ways. It looks like a midlife crisis. He was bored and unhappy with his work, his marriage had gone bad, and he wanted to change something. We could also talk about Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, his heroes, the great prophets of American individualism, and see Wright as a bohemian trapped in a bourgeois life. Or we could say he was at the lowest point of the happiness curve, and he just decided to bolt. Maybe all of these things played a part. He was probably feeling trapped and depressed. Maybe his work would have developed the same way if he'd stayed with Catherine, but probably not. It's unlikely that he could have developed if he felt dishonest.
Going to Europe reinforced Wright's idea that there shouldn't be any ornament separate from function, and it informed his later work. He studied the plans of European buildings, saw the connection between folk tradition and ordinary buildings, which influenced Taliesin, and came away more firm in his mission to create an original American architecture. He saw that classical architecture was organic with its environment and believed that putting those styles on other times and places was not right. Reproducing classical forms in modern America wasn't real. He believed that training only the intellectual side of an architect would lead to imitative building.
The next two decades led up to the major turning point of his late career. This period of troubles was when he realized his vision. After 1910, Wright was no longer the same architect. The model of form and function being one that he learned from Louis Sullivan was "expanded and reworked." Sullivan had given a sense of the whole in his ornament, but Wright wanted wholeness to be a feature of the entire building. He made spaces, not buildings. He turned ideas over in his mind to find new possibilities.
The hearth had been the center of his Prairie homes before 1909, a focus of domestic space. The Larkin Building had a huge, light, central atrium. He separated the corners of the building from the walls with glass, pulling the walls apart and making the building a space with a series of screens around it, rather than a box of walls. Similarly, in the Unity Temple, he made the worship space "the soul of the design." He didn't yet have a theory of space, but after Europe and Japan, the idea of space was increasingly central to him.
The idea of continuous space reaches new heights in his circular projects such as the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church and the Guggenheim. The glass rifts of the Larkin Building come back stronger at Fallingwater, and at the Guggenheim, the glass rift becomes the dome roof. In the Johnson Wax Headquarters, there's a clerestory of glass tubing between the wall and the ceiling, bringing light down. Similarly, at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, the roof rests on a clerestory of circular windows.
Taliesin is most important to the concept of a build as a space. He built it not on the hill, but around it, like a rock later protruded into Fallingwater. He came back from Europe ready to build Taliesin, reinventing the idea of a European estate in an informal, organic way to integrate it into the Wisconsin landscape. In Taliesin, almost all the rooms are connected to each other, and the view expands and changes. You never feel boxed in; the space is always opening up or closing in around you. It's one continuous passageway of corridors, rooms, nooks, and crannies, like a river with inlets. The same thing is true of the Guggenheim.
Wright built Taliesin on a diagonal axis, which became central to his work. The corner window in the living room has no join, "breaking the box" of modernism and integrating the house with nature. At Jacobs I, the door to the living room opens onto the garden at the corner. At the Elizabeth Murphy House, there's a wall immediately to the left after you go in the front door, which blocks the view of the living room, drawing you into the center of the house where you have a more open view.
Taliesin was a personal retreat, a place for Wright to be independent and to live with Mamah. But in 1914, a servant started a fire and killed seven people, including Mamah and her children. The building was destroyed. In 1923, Wright married his second wife, Maude "Miriam" Noel, but it was an unhappy marriage. She was a morphine addict and mentally unstable. When they divorced, she accused Wright of violence. In 1925, he met Olgivanna Hinzenburg, and they were together for the rest of his life. They moved to the rebuilt Taliesin. But that year, Taliesin burned again, in a fire started by an electrical fault. He rebuilt Taliesin, again. His situation was precarious.
Shortly before the first Taliesin fire, Wright started working in Japan from 1913 to 1922. He found in Japanese art the geometries of the circle, square, and triangle that corresponded with the spiritual qualities of infinity, integrity, and structural unity. Japan's influence remained in Wright's work for the rest of his life, especially the idea that pre-industrial Japan had lived in constant harmony with nature.
In 1921, he realized that he had been working in the wrong way. His experience in Japan taught him how difficult his ideal in architecture was. He realized how inadequate his supervision had always been and how much his clients had to give in patience to get what they wanted. Learning to supervise everything was the secret behind the construction of St. Peter's. The results were clear. The hotel survived an earthquake, and Wright was included in Who's Who in America for the first time.
The Imperial Hotel relied on cantilevered steel-reinforced concrete, a material and a technique that were important to Wright's later work. His ideas always matured through projects and flexed to current demands and available materials. One of the hotel's controversial aspects was the use of floating foundations. Rather than drive deep pillars into the ground, the piles were only driven into the soft mud below the hotel. Wright believed that this would let the building float on the mud during an earthquake. He made the building light and lowered its center of gravity with sloping walls.
By the start of the Great Depression, Wright's career had stalled. When he established his apprenticeship program at Taliesin in the late 1920s, there was often no architectural work to do. Instead, they farmed the land and repaired the house. To the architectural establishment, he was the eccentric past. But Wright knew that life doesn't give you prizes, you have to fight for them. He had long believed that an honest arrogance was preferable to a hypocritical modesty. He took combative inspiration from criticism.
In the decade when he was short of work, Wright might have declined the way his mentor, Louis Sullivan, had done. Wright visited Sullivan, bought him an overcoat, and wrote consoling letters. But he did not follow him down that path. He had learned to yield nothing, to dominate his own fate.
From this came forth a whole second career. The apprenticeship scheme at Taliesin would provide him with the commission that would make his mark incontestable. This was another long-meditated idea.
It wasn't easy. Financial troubles were perpetual. Bills were unpaid. Nor was the apprenticeship as successful as he wanted. Turnover among recruits was high, there were no commissions, and his grand vision was ignored.
The Taliesin fellowship was the route back to architecture. Apprentices were supposed to revere him. But the ones who stayed and were able to be deeply loyal to Wright without losing their sense of self were part of a singular enterprise. And they became Wright's network. He created his own network, putting himself at the center of its sphere of influence.
Wright frequently got in his own way. He told racist jokes. He disapproved of homosexuality. He was openly sexist. His daughter Iovanna saw Wright throw Olgivanna to the floor and hit his other daughter Svetlana's head against a cabinet. This could be the result of his own unhappy childhood, his patriarchal attitude, or his ego.
Wright was a genius, but also a crank. He was never forced to control his tendencies. He wanted to be a prima donna. His vision for architecture came first, it was his only touchstone.
Despite his flaws, the apprenticeship rolled on, and when the new commissions arrived, Wright was ready. Taliesin, Broadacre, and the Imperial Hotel had laid the basis for a new burst of invention. That was when the chaos of financial and family problems was at its peak, but those problems made it necessary to earn money. Wright also attributed the effort of those years to the "children of my mind" that he found unignorable. The year 1925 was also when he designed the Gordon Strong Planetarium, the first time he proposed a spiral as the shape of a building.
The fundamental lessons about shape he absorbed in his childhood are vital to this final phase, where Wright reimagines these shapes like kaleidoscopic patterns again and again. The most important shape to this part of his career is the spiral, the shape of the Guggenheim.
To Wright, geometry was eternal, fundamental. He compared it to Plato's Forms. Each shape represented a basic ideal from nature and corresponded to certain human moods.
He designed the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, inspired by churches in Rome and formerly of the central church of Orthodoxy. The spiral represents organic progress, and the circle represents infinity. In the Guggenheim and the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, those ideas reached their high point in Wright's work, right at the end of his life.
The Guggenheim is often compared to shells, or to an ocean wave. But the closest thing are the birds of prey in the Helena Valley circulating above Taliesin. His career is like a widening spiral. Circles and spirals recur throughout the late period. As he aged, rather than imitating his earlier style, Wright was inspired by the infinite circle and the organic spiral to keep reconsidering his ideas into startling originality.
Wright's transformations were designed to encourage people to look up and think about something greater. He transformed this symbol into one of organic growth reaching for the infinite, for God, but also for his own work, which continued to change and grow throughout his life.