Usonian Architect

About four miles from Spring Green, Wis., the hills splay into two soft ranges to let a fast stream flow toward the Wisconsin River. Facing southwest over this valley a big, long house folds around the summit of one hill, its roof lines parallel to the line of ridges, its masonry the same red-yellow sandstone that crops out in ledges along the stream. Under snow the house melts easily into the landscape. Its name is Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning

"shining brow." Its history is one of tragic irony. Its character is one of extraordinary repose. It is the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect of the 20th Century.

For the past five years Taliesin has been a workshop, farm and studio for more than a score of apprentices who are interested in architecture as Frank Lloyd Wright understands it. During its first winter the Taliesin Fellowship spent most of its time cutting wood in two shifts to keep the fires going. Since then, its life has been less defensive. After nearly a decade, the master of Taliesin has again had work in hand. In California, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Pennsylvania superb new buildings have grown from his plans. Last week the significance to modern architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's new buildings was recognized in an issue of THE ARCHITECTURAL FORUM which broke all precedents for that magazine. Its main body of 102 pages, Lid out and written by Architect Wright, was an album of his work, an anthology of sturdy quotations from Thoreau and Whitman, and a compendium of Weight's building philosophy.

To the U. S. man-in-the-street 15 years ago, the name Frank Lloyd Wright meant, if anything, the builder of a hotel in Tokyo which by some engineering magic withstood the great earthquake of 1923. To the U. S. man-in-the-subway, his name was associated with scandalous episodes ground from the inhuman human-interest mill of the tabloid newspapers. A decade ago, when the brand-new International Style in architecture was seriously taken up by U. S. architects, many of them were surprised to discover that Wright had been its forerunner 30 years before, that by great European architects such as J. J. P. Oud and Mies van der Rohe he was regarded as a master spirit. In 1932 Wright published his Autobiography, a book which combined magnificent self-revelation with the most stimulating discussion of architecture ever heard in the U. S.

Natural Builder, The valley in which Architect Wright lives was settled by his Welsh grandfather when it was wild. Wright was born there and grew up on the farm of one of his uncles. His first adventurous piece of architecture was a windmill. He felt and has developed a stronger sense of the earth's reality than most poets. Wright has conceived himself a participant in Nature, not a communicant. "Man takes a positive hand in creation," he has said, "whenever he puts a building upon the earth beneath the sun."

Words like these would have been unseemly from the mouths of the richly endowed gentlemen architects on whom U. S. Society relied during its last great period of building. Stanford White and Charles McKim were master eclectics who adapted the styles and ornament of Europe gracefully to New York and New England buildings. Ralph Adams Cram was responsible for the Gothic revival. Bertram Goodhue achieved the monumentality of West Point. From these men Wright was isolated by what in their day appeared to be his eccentricity. The isolation is now seen to have been more theirs than his.

Lieber Meister. An erect, impudent youngster of 18, Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887 with three years of engineering school behind him in Madison. U. S. architecture was then on the rise from a period of post-Civil War jerry-building, and with the death of a great and sound Easterner, Henry Hobson Richardson, the year before, Chicago, rising from its ruins, had become the centre of excitement. Richardson's successor as No. i U. S. architect was an immaculate, brown-eyed little French-Irishman of haughty brilliance named Louis Henry Sullivan. Young Frank Wright had not been in Chicago a year before he was a draftsman in the office of Adler & Sullivan.

"Lieber Meister" is what Frank Lloyd Wright has always called Sullivan since his death in 1924. The reverence is due. Louis Sullivan saw with violent clarity that in industrial Chicago the old styles of European architecture would not serve. Chicagoans to whom the noble pile of the Auditorium Building is part of the landscape and St. Louisans familiar with the ten-story Wainwright Building do not often pause for the solemn reflection that in 1889 and 1891 these were great architectural achievements--office buildings framed in structural steel. Louis Sullivan fathered the skyscraper. In 1899 in the Carson Pirie Scott Building he used the steel structure functionally, i. e., naturally, to provide horizontal bands of window space instead of unnecessary walls.

Prairie Houses. While Louis Sullivan was working on public buildings, what few commissions Adler & Sullivan were given for private houses fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to design. At 20 he married and borrowed $5,000 from Sullivan to build his own home in Oak Park. For the sheer pleasure of it as well as to pay the debts he easily contracted for his growing family, Wright took what jobs he could get designing private houses outside the office. This angered Sullivan and in 1894, after nearly six years with the firm, Wright threw down his pencil and walked out on his own.

In the next twenty years he designed and built, for clients scattered throughout the Midwest, nearly 100 houses for which no precedent existed anywhere. In leafy suburbs of Chicago these houses still look strangely civilized and sheltered, with low vistas and wide-spreading eaves. "Taking a human being for my 'scale,' " Wright has said, "I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one--ergo, 5' 8" tall, say. ... I broadened the mass out all I possibly could, brought it down into spaciousness. ... I was working toward the elimination of the wall as a wall to reach the function of a screen, as a means of opening up space. . . . The planes of the building parallel to the ground were all stressed--to grip the whole to Earth. . . ."

Meanwhile the new type of public architecture which Sullivan had made powerful was sidetracked by the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Eastern conservatives turned the fair into a magnificent tour de force of neoclassic buildings, and for a quarter-century eclecticism held the stage in U. S. public architecture. Wright kept off the stage. In 1905 he produced, in protest, a well-lighted administration building for the Larkin Co. in Buffalo, severely without ornament, the first office building in the U. S. to use 1) metal-bound, plate-glass doors and windows, 2) all-metal furniture, 3) air conditioning, 4) magnesite as an architectural material.

Change. Wright had a lifetime's hard work, several lifetimes' invention behind him at 40. He had carried out a great adventure in building. But though Wright had freed domestic architecture he did not feel himself free. Making what provision he could for his wife and six children, he went to Italy with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were never married. Wright thus broke with personal convention as he had long since broken with artistic convention. On their return in 1911, he put all he knew of architecture into the building of Taliesin as a new home for them both. Changes of this kind are ill-fated by ancient superstition, but few have met such a fate as Frank Lloyd Wright's. In 1913, just after he had finished his most light-hearted job, a "goodtime place," as Wright called it, the Midway Gardens in Chicago, a telephone call from Spring Green smote him with catastrophe. A Barbados Negro servant had run amok at Taliesin, murdered its mistress, her two children, an apprentice and three others, burned the living quarters to the ground. Wright went to Taliesin, buried his mistress alone, and lived there alone for months. Then he began to rebuild Taliesin. Finished in 1915, finer than before, the house was Frank Lloyd Wright's professional triumph over the worst blow of his life.

Genius. After 1915, Wright's rebirth in architecture took the form of creative audacity on a grand scale. Commissioned in 1916 to build the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, he produced one of the marvels of modern construction. A vast, low building on a symmetrical plan, it was Wright's first ambitious use of the cantilever principle, which allowed him to rest each concrete floor slab on a central support, like a tray on a waiter's fingers. He roofed the building with light copper sheathing, made the centre of gravity low as a ship's. And like a ship, the Imperial was made to float. Instead of sinking deep piers to bedrock, the architect rested his building on hundreds of slender, pointed 8-ft. piles, distributing the weight evenly on a 60-ft. pad of mud.

Wright finished his work in 1920. He was in Los Angeles when the big quake hit Tokyo three years later. After ten days of anxious waiting, Wright learned by cable from his friend and client, Baron Okura, that the building had ridden out the quake unharmed while other modern buildings were shaking their masonry into the streets.

He had not been back at Taliesin long before the house again burned down, this time destroying hundreds of valuable things Wright had brought from Japan. Again he rebuilt Taliesin. Then his second wife, Miriam Noel, left him. Before he was able to marry Olgivanna, the soft-voiced, Montenegrin woman who is his present wife, they and their baby were incredibly harried by the newspapers, the Noel lawyers and the police, who jailed them, once in Milwaukee. Wright could get no work, could earn no money. Taliesin fell into the hands of a bank and Wright got it back only when a group of old clients and friends incorporated him in 1929.

Since then, bobbing up. for the third time, Frank Lloyd Wright has done per-haps his most amazing work. In 1929 he designed for Manhattan an apartment house of concrete, steel and glass more radical and inventive than any even proposed in functionalist Europe. This and a grander design for a desert resort in Arizona were kept off the ground by Depression. Wright's desert camp of canvas and boxwood, built by his apprentices in 1929, stands as one of his most brilliant pieces of geometrical design. Still ignored by conventional architects, never invited to take part in the Chicago World's Fair, whose blatant "modernism" was an unconscious tribute to his pioneer work, Wright .nevertheless found clients who allowed his designs to materialize.

Practice. One quality these new buildings have in common is the clarity with which their basic problems have been grasped and solved. In Racine, Wis., Contractor Ben Wiltscheck is now finishing a business building for S. C. Johnson & Son (see cut) which is unlike any other in the world. A few miles from Racine, President Herbert Johnson has let Wright build him a house which lies along the prairie in four slim wings. A huge chimney with fireplaces on four sides is in the focal living room. At Bear Run, Pa., Wright has just finished his most beautiful job, "Fallingwater," a house cantilevered over a waterfall for Edgar Kaufmann of Pittsburgh.

The Johnson Administration Building has been built like an expensive watch on what Architect Wright calls a "unit plan," everything fitting into a horizontal scheme of 20-ft. squares, a vertical scheme of 3 1/2- in. brick units. The Johnson Building is the first sizable structure Wright has had a chance to build since the Imperial Hotel, and it ranks with that masterpiece as an engineering feat. Wright's plans for it set the Wisconsin State Industrial Commission on its ear. The columns by which the architect proposed to support his building were neither pillars nor posts but tall stem forms, tapering from a concrete disk 20 ft. in diameter at the top to a base 8 in. thick at the floor. By ordinary reckoning, these slenderizing pencils would take about two tons weight each where they were called on to support twelve. In an official test the column held up 60 tons.

These "dendriform" columns, growing from the floor and increasing the spaciousness of the floor level, were made possible by a distribution of stresses through concrete reinforced by welded steel mesh. The huge main room is lit not by windows but by a wide horizontal rift of glass tubing at the angle of walls and ceiling and by skylights. It is ventilated through two circular ducts or "nostrils" rising through the building. Radiators have been eliminated by a heating system under the floor slabs. Clients. The history of the Johnson Building illustrates perfectly one of the traits in Frank Lloyd Wright which lesser architects have played against him for all it is worth. The architect's original estimate of its cost was $250,000. By mutual agreement this was later raised to $350,000. It is now apparent that the final cost of the building will be nearer $450.000. This sort of thing has happened often in Wright's career, and the hostile argument runs that few businessmen are as able as rich Mr. Johnson to stand the gaff of perfectionism at like cost.

Against this argument the fact stands that, out of more than 150 clients, only three or four have been seriously dissatisfied over money or anything else. Both in the early Oak Park period and later, Wright has in general attracted clients who had enough money to be adventurous but not enough to be stuffy. His personal improvidence is legendary. But the best piece of evidence that Wright will, when really necessary, pay careful heed to the means of his client is the one-story, six-room, $5,500 house which he finished last month for Herbert Jacobs, a newspaperman in Madison, Wis.

Usonia is Frank Lloyd Wright's name for the U. S. A. He found it in Samuel Butler and, eclectic for once, appropriated it because he liked it. It is one of the tricks of speech and thought by which Wright links a curiously old-fashioned Americanism to an Americanism which is still ahead of his time. The Jacobs house he calls a Usonian house and it is his exhibit A in a demonstration of what Usonia might be. It "may help to indicate," he says, "how stifling the little colonial hot-boxes, whether hallowed by government or not, really are where Usonian family life is concerned."

Exhibit B is a project called "Broadacre City" which Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship worked out in a 12-ft. model when they all went to Arizona three winters ago. Broadacre City is Wright's answer to urbanization. He believes some-thing like it is already happening in the movement of people out of cities through suburbs to the open country. Its fulfillment would complete this process, giving every citizen his modicum acre of land in communities spread out along the transportation routes. Frank Lloyd Wright's city, he has said, would be "everywhere and nowhere."

At Taliesin Architect Wright has cultivated such a community in embryo. Guests there nearly always feel a distinct sense of translation to a better world. One cause of this is undoubtedly the house itself, with its flowing lines and receptiveness to the landscape. Another is undoubtedly the house's builder. Gracious, mischievous and immaculate at 68, Frank Lloyd Wright has little of the patriarch about him except his fine white hair. His obvious and arrogant courage has the abstract indestructibility of a triangle. He thinks of himself as in the "centre line" of Usonian independence that runs through Thoreau and Whitman. Whether or not that line is still central in U. S. culture, there can be little doubt that Frank Lloyd Wright is their worthy peer.

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