Wright's Might

"Early in life," says Frank Lloyd Wright, "I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility." Today, at 84. Architect Wright would never be accused of humble hypocrisy. But he is also revered, at home and abroad, as the world's greatest living architect. Last week the U.S. could take a long backward look at the array of Wright's achievements, expressed both in words and deeds.

The words were in a new collection of Wright's essays (The Future of Architecture; Horizon Press; $7.50), which express a philosophy of building as original as it is vital. Wright early rejected the traditional concept that architecture is mainly a matter of blocks and boxes. His own buildings derive from the organic constructions of nature. Wright once designed an extraordinarily efficient column after studying the structure of morning glories, and his skyscraper now going up in Bartlesville, Okla. is built on the principle of a tree. "The only safe precedent," Wright likes to say, "is principle."

How Wright translated his own basic principles into practice could be seen in a big, retrospective show of photos, plans and models, on display last week in a giant, slab-roofed pavilion -he designed for the purpose on a vacant Manhattan lot adjoining the Guggenheim Museum. If Wright can overcome the objections of New York City's housing authorities (TIME, Aug. 10), a new Guggenheim Museum, shaped in a spiral that expands upward, will rise on the same site next year. By then Wright's show, which has already toured Europe, will be on tour in the Orient. Among the architectural landmarks on exhibition:P:A full-scale mock-up of the kind of house Wright designed at the turn of the century, which precisely forecast the flat-roofed ranch style of U.S. architecture at midcentury. It featured, among other things, a sunken corner hearth, floor-to-ceiling windows, and storage walls. P: Pictures of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, which Wright built between 1916 and 1922. Flexibly constructed on a broad, floating base of stone, the hotel was one of the few buildings to survive Tokyo's great earthquake of 1923, is still in business as Tokyo's No. i hotel. P: A drawing and pictures of "Falling-water," the reinforced concrete house Wright cantilevered over a brook at Bear Run, Pa. in 1936.

P:Pictures of a Unitarian church built by Wright at Madison, Wis. in 1949-50. Instead of a steeple, it has a steep, triangular roof shaped rather like hands folded in prayer. The triangle, Wright believes, is "the symbol of aspiration." P:Pictures of a house Wright built in Phoenix last year for one of his sons. Made of concrete blocks, it looks like a snail shell somewhat flattened and supported on stilts. Says Wright: "It is in a citrus-orchard district and the orange trees make the lawn for the house. The slowly rising ramp reveals the surrounding mountains and gives security to the occupants."

Even to those who had never seen Wright's work, much of the show seemed strangely familiar. The reason is that modern architects everywhere have seized on practically all of Wright's ideas and have endlessly multiplied examples of them. This practice does not please Wright a jot. "If honest seekers once mastered the inner principle," he explains with a sigh, "infinite variety would result. No one would have to copy anybody else."

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