Let’s not lose sleep over the destruction of a privately owned home at odds with architectural tradition.

On Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal published a piece lamenting the impending demolition of the Booth cottage in Glencoe, Ill., a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Bemoaning the fate of a “modernist landmark”, Michael J. Lewis quotes an ad from the time of construction that describes the house as “marvelously beautiful.”

I have just one question for Lewis: Have you seen the Booth cottage? It’s just another small, suburban house — and an uglier-than-average one at that. I’d be willing to bet that 99 out of 100 Americans driving by wouldn’t give the cottage a second look. 

A visitor watches an interview with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 2009
A visitor watches an interview with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 2009 © Vincent West/Reuters

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Frank Lloyd Wright is not a victim of the destruction of our cultural heritage but a major player in it. Wright’s style, of which the Booth cottage is more or less typical, is all about undermining traditional aesthetics, substituting simple geometry for ornate design. He went a step beyond the common modern motto “form follows function” in saying that “form and function are one.” His work in the period of the Booth cottage is entirely minimalist and utilitarian. It is architecture that is not art. (The same is not necessarily true of Fallingwater, Wright’s later masterpiece, but the undeniable beauty of that estate rests much more on the natural landscape than on the jumble of right angles and windows that Wright jammed into it.)

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