As an exhibition in New York marks 150 years since the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright, is it time for a reappraisal of this flawed hero ... ?
“June 8 1869 will for ever mark the beginning of a new epoch for the world,” gushed Olgivanna, third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright. On this day, she said, “a great gift was bestowed” – she meant her husband – a man who “led his fellows to the creative forms of a way of life which liberated man from being imprisoned in his own dwelling”. She was echoing an often-stated view, not least by Wright himself, that he was a great, great man, a genius.
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You may by now have done the maths. 1869, you will object, was 148 years ago, not 150. This is true, but Olgivanna’s declaration was not. In which instance she was following her husband who, as Wright’s biographer Brendan Gill wrote, “was a virtuoso at bearing false witness”. In his florid, self-aggrandising autobiography, and, indeed, whenever he felt like it, he made up stories at will, about his parents’ marriage, for example, or his authorship of works actually by others. “Hotel Stands Undamaged As Monument Of Your Genius”, went a telegram allegedly from Tokyo, when his Imperial hotel survived the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Gill suggested, with evidence, that Wright had the telegram sent to himself. His economies with the truth included the year of his birth, which Olgivanna dutifully repeated.
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His faulty relationship with reality helped him in his lifelong habit of duping clients into paying much more than they wanted for buildings that worked much less well than they wanted. Again and again they would write letters of mounting frustration and receive replies claiming they would get “the most perfect thing of its kind in the world – a domestic symphony, true, vital, comfortable” that will proclaim the client “to subsequent generations as the lover of the good! the true! the beautiful!”. On his Johnson Wax building in Racine, he ambitiously used arrays of Pyrex tubes to keep out the Wisconsin weather. When they predictably failed, he blamed the state of contemporary technology for not keeping up with his ideas.
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So, almost, they are. But too often in Wright’s buildings I have felt a particular sensation, which is that his obsessive, crabby, dominating personality won’t leave you alone. I have felt it in a relatively obscure work, the campus of Florida Southern College, where colonnades of questionable usefulness march on seemingly for miles, along with insistent geometric ornament that never seems to stop. I have felt it in the Robie House, a masterpiece of his early years in Chicago and an example of what is called the Prairie style. Its long horizontals are supposed to evoke the freedoms of the wide-open spaces of the New World, but every detail and every move is so minutely predetermined that you, the human occupant of the space, feel superfluous. The Guggenheim ramp, majestic though it is, only offers one route to take.
The most pleasurable of Wright’s works are from his extremely late, kitschy, you might say senile period, such as the Marin County Civic Center near San Francisco. This is a fusion of a UFO and a Roman aqueduct rendered in baby blue, pink and gold, whose sheer silliness, combined with undiminished bravura and invention in placing it in the landscape, relieves the asphyxiation of his more revered achievements.
Wright resembled a cult leader, charismatic, fraudulent and dominating, and attracted plenty of acolytes willing to sacrifice themselves for him. He pushed to the limits the idea of the impossible genius that, incidentally, gives later architects a pass on pushing themselves – if genius is impossible, why try? Or else it gives licence to lesser talents to act like idiots. Even his greatest works – Fallingwater and the Guggenheim – were seriously flawed. But, then again, the world would be a poorer place without them.