The Wright Word

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, ensconced in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, began to get things rolling last week for the building of his spiral-shaped Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (TIME, Aug. 10). Sitting in his favorite suite in his favorite hotel, where he has been coming for 35 years, Wright busily dispatched lieutenants to make arrangements for a new Manhattan office he is setting up, admired an Oriental painting of marmosets he had just bought, talked to contractors about bids on the museum, and kept up a steady, easy flow of talk.

ON THE PLAZA. It was built by "the Astors, Astorists, Astorites, the Vanderbilts, Plasterbilts and Whoeverbilts, who wanted a place to dress up and parade and see themselves in the great mirrors. So they sent for the finest master of the German Renaissance style, Henry Hardenbergh, and he did this--a skyscraper but not the monstrous thing the skyscraper was to become later. He still managed to keep it with a human sense. There were Ravenna mosaics on the floor, but they covered them up with rugs. A lot of it has been spoiled by inferior desecrators."

ON NEW YORK. "Unless they let grass grow in the streets, the life of New York will be short. Cain was the father of urbanism,* and Cain is still murdering his brother. Like a little boy with a gun, a string of cars or a toy steamer, we are fascinated by the city. We like clamor, and the clamor becomes glamour. We become insensate to beauty--but beauty is a word that soon will be taboo. I only use it when I feel weak and foolish."

ON THE AGE. What would he call it?

"The sanitary age. The symbol of it is the water closet, the bathtub and the two-washbasin bathroom. If we don't watch out, they will have them on the mantelpiece of the future, exhibited in the parlor the way that pots and old kitchen utensils of the past are now."

ON ARCHITECTURE. "It is at the base and root of our culture. Unless architects are recognized, not until then will America have a culture."

ON TALK. "If talk died, we'd be great."

* "... And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord . . . and he builded a city . . ." Genesis 4: 16-17.

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