"Frank Lloyd Wright"

Frank Lloyd Wright was indisputably one of the greatest and most influential architects of the twentieth century. His reputation took time to grow and his achievements were first applauded abroad, principally in Germany, before his countrymen recognized his innovative significance. His long career of over 70 years encompassed modern technological developments in both building materials and techniques and Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the first architects to explore and exploit the new opportunities that these exciting technological developments made possible.

Inevitably, over such a span, many of his plans never saw fruition and remained unbuilt, but he left behind extensive writings and drawings, explaining and illuminating his ideas so that his thoughts at least are not lost to posterity. Unusually, perhaps, for such a great architect, much of his most significant and innovative work was domestic, and no example of his genius remains outside the United States, besides a house in Canada, two residences, a girls' school and a fragment of the lobby of the demolished Imperial Hotel in Japan, and a rebuilt office in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His work is also surprisingly parochial, fully two-thirds of the buildings he designed are in the Midwest - 88 in Illinois and 43 in Wisconsin.

From a distance it seems that Wright spent much of his life embroiled in controversy: from the quarrels within his own family between his parents, the emotional conflicts he brought on himself by abandoning his wife and mother of his six children for another married woman, his noisy pacifism during the war which brought him many new enemies, not to mention his anti-establishment stance towards fellow architects, other people's architecture, planning regulations as well as bureaucracy and society in general. Always arrogant and disinclined to listen to the opinion of others, Frank Lloyd Wright, while able to make enemies with ease, also made strong friendships and inspired tremendous loyalty from his followers.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born to his father's second wife, Anna Lloyd Jones, on June 8, 1867, at Richland Center, Wisconsin. Right from the start she championed his cause to the detriment of everyone else, especially her husband, and even her two subsequent daughters. Frank's father, William Cary Wright, was a New Englander from a family of nonconformists who had emigrated from England early on in the seventeenth century. He earned his living as a music teacher and traveling Baptist minister, until he finally settled his wife and three children at Lone Rock, Wisconsin. Money, as ever, was tight so they took in boarders, one of whom was Anna Lloyd Jones a schoolteacher of God-fearing Unitarian Welsh stock whose wealthy land-owning family lived in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

When William was widowed in 1864 at age 44, Anna made up her mind to marry him; after all he was an attractive and intelligent man and a good catch for a strong-willed, plain, 29-year-old woman already considered over the hill by her family. Two years later, despite the age gap and their religious chasm, her family reluctantly agreed to their marriage. Within ten months baby Frank Lloyd Wright was born; two years later, in 1869, Jane arrived, and then nine years later, Maginel.

Sadly, the marriage was not a success: there was no meeting of minds - William cared only for music and Anna for education, specifically her son's education. She drilled into him her Unitarian values of faith in the family and a general liberal philosophy towards life. In 1876 an important, possibly life-changing, influence was experienced by the young Frank Lloyd Wright. His mother went to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Here his mother was enthused with the ideas of the great German educationalist, Friedrich W. A. Froebel. As part of his thinking he developed the kindergarten system for very young children and, more pertinently for Frank and his mother, had developed a system of games which involved putting together simple, primary color, geometric shapes to make imaginative constructions. They were, in essence, building blocks. In his autobiography Wright claimed that these simple "toys" (as Froebel called them) were deeply influential to his architectural work.

Back in Wisconsin the following year, relations between his parents disintegrated further. Anna disliked her step-children and sent them away, and Frank had little further contact with them. Instead he got to know his cousins when he and his sister spent the summers on his uncle James Lloyd Jones's farm in Spring Green. Here, although he hated the holidays, he found in himself a interest in nature and the feel of the land.

His father left home when Wright was 18 and eventually divorced Anna. This left Wright completely under the influence of his fearsome mother, so much so that he became increasingly estranged from his father, even to the extent that he didn't attend his funeral.

Despite his mother's intensive educational ideas and promptings, Wright failed to graduate high school and in 1885 became apprenticed to the only builder in Madison, Allan D. Conover. As luck would have it, Conover was also dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin, and he allowed his young apprentice to attend classes in the department of engineering. Here Wright received the only strict training he got of any sort - in draftsmanship; at the same time he was getting practical building experience in the office. The two years of classes he had before he dropped out showed that the young Frank Lloyd Wright had a remarkable ability for draftsmanship.

In 1887 Wright moved to Chicago. He was now 20 years old and moving to one of the most exciting cities in the United States. Devastated in 1871 by a great fire, it was only really now recovering and rebuilding fully. Architects and designers from all over America, especially the eastern seaboard, were arriving to take up the golden architectural opportunity this presented. Notable among these men was Joseph Lyman Silsbee, a much sought-after architect of mainly residential buildings in the Norman Shaw "Shingle Style." Wright had an easy introduction to him as at the time Silsbee was working on a new building for All Souls' Church where his uncle, the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, was pastor. In spring 1887 Silsbee took on Wright as an apprentice and allowed him to do a little work on the church.

Still living with his mother and sisters who had moved to Chicago to be with him, Wright started reading voraciously. The anti-establishment stance of John Ruskin, the social theorist and greatest English art and architecture critic of his time (he had championed the Pre-Raphaelites' cause) appealed to Frank, as did the progressive ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris. As for work, he rapidly became bored with the "safe" architecture of Silsbee's practice and in the fall of the same year moved on to work for the firm of Adler and Sullivan. Their progressive style was much more to his taste, and in the end Wright stayed for six years. Louis Sullivan was a 31-year-old Bostonian and already a noted architect, considered by many to be the greatest American architect of the time. His epigram "form follows function" came also to be at the heart of Wright's work. Very soon Sullivan was to design and build the world's first skyscraper, the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri.

Frank Lloyd Wright quickly settled into the firm and in 1889 signed a five-year contract. By this time he was given the majority of the domestic commissions that came to the firm as the principals worked on their larger, public commissions, and the following year he took sole responsibility for all domestic work handled by the firm. Wright greatly admired Sullivan, whom he came to call his "Lieber Meister," and was further influenced by Sullivan's personal interest in and collection of "Orientalia".

Around this time Wright met and soon married Catherine Lee Tobin, the daughter of a successful Chicago businessman. For their home he purchased the plot of land in Forest Avenue, Oak Park, next door to the house he shared with his mother and sisters. With $5,000 advanced by Sullivan he set about designing and building a six-room bungalow. The building shows the influence of the "Lieber Meister` and other eastern seaboard architects such as Richardson. In common with all his houses throughout his life, this was only the beginning of continuous redesigns and rebuilding.

In 1893 Frank was exposed to two more crucial influences on his development as an architect, when the World's Colombian Exposition was held in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus. The first was pre-Columbian architecture as represented by the replica of the Mayan nunnery at Uxmal; the other was Japanese culture. Already aware and intrigued with Oriental art, the latter caught his imagination in the form of a half-scale replica of a wooden temple from the Fujiwara period.

The previous year Wright had gained a degree of recognition with one of his domestic commissions, the Charnley House; furthermore his own house at Oak Park became greatly admired. Now, although he was only a draftsman, clients, many of them wealthy suburban businessmen and Oak Park neighbors, started coming to him personally to design and build their homes. Wright called these his "bootlegged houses." They were done in his own time in evenings and at weekends and holidays and didn't violate his contract with Adler and Sullivan - he was careful to keep to the letter, if not the spirit, of his contract. Such work proved a great financial boon as his five children were proving cripplingly expensive. Inevitably Sullivan found out and, predictably, was not impressed with Wright's explanations. They parted company after a furious row and were not reconciled for twenty years: however, in 1924 Wright wrote Sullivan's definitive obituary.

It was now 1893 and together with several other young architects Frank set up his own practice in Steinway Hall, Chicago. The work flowed in and he was able to build up a successful, if unremarkable, business doing "period" homes for local clients, again many of them his Oak Park neighbors. These comfortably-off men invariably spent more on their houses than they had originally intended - especially if Wright designed the furniture and fittings for the interiors as he liked to do as well - but they were usually ultimately very glad that they had done so!

In 1894, at the age of 27, Wright wrote his first essay on architecture - "The Architect and the Machine" - which he read to the University Guild at Evanston, Illinois. It was the first of many papers and writings in which he would expound his theories. At the same time he completed his first house: for William H. Winslow in River Forest, Illinois. Wright found that he increasingly liked working from home, despite the size of his family. To keep them away from his work, he built himself a separate studio in 1895. There, a couple of years later, he gathered around him a group of enthusiastic young assistants to work under his direction. His most significant works of this period are the Romeo and Juliet Windmill he designed and built for his aunts Nell and Jane Lloyd Jones in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and the 1898 River Forest Golf Club, since demolished.

By 1900 Wright's architectural style had matured and he built the Bradley House and Hickox House in Kankakee, Illinois. He was now into his Prairie House period in which he built 33 houses between roughly 1900 until 1910. Characteristically these were low and spreading houses without attic or basement, emerging from the surrounding landscape and vegetation. Inside the space was open and free, designed around a simple X, L or T shape and filled with light, usually from a ribbon of celestory windows on the first floor under wide-spreading eaves. These popular homes lacked any external ornamentation except lead or art glass windows and an ornamental foliage pattern frieze, often in terra cotta, just below the eaves. Furthermore he brought himself to more than just parochial architectural attention in 1901 when he was commissioned to write two articles in The Ladies' Home Journal, "A Home in a Prairie Town" (February, 1901) and "A Small House with 'Lots of Room in It'" (July 1901). His project for the first article was to develop a comfortable home for about $7,000. He accepted the challenge wholeheartedly and he presented a revolutionary approach to flexible, open-plan living. Although nobody took up the idea at the time, it attracted much attention and brought him to a public beyond Illinois and Wisconsin. In time, this innovative concept became to be considered his earliest major contribution to modern architecture and was the germ of his Prairie houses.

Exhausted by the traumas of building the Larkin Company administration headquarters in Buffalo, Frank Lloyd Wright decided to recover with a visit to Japan in 1905, a country whose culture and traditions - particularly artworks - had been of considerable interest to him for some time. Accompanied by his wife and two clients with whom they had struck up a friendship, Mr. and Mrs. Ward W. Willits, Wright took the opportunity to buy a considerable quantity of Japanese art. He was especially attracted by woodblock prints and the work of ukiyo-a artists like Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro, Harunobu, Kiyonaga, and Sharaku. He didn't stop there; he bought bronzes, kakemono Japanese hanging scrolls), ceramics and textiles as well as folding screens of the Monoyama and Edo periods. In time he acquired a valuable collection of Oriental art and became a considerable expert on Japanese works in particular, especially the prints which he so loved.

Three years later this interest in Japanese cultural traditions led him to collaborate with Frederick Gookin, an authority on Japanese prints, to present a collection of Hiroshige prints at Chicago's Institute of Art. They became good friends and Gookin, an enthusiastic fan of all things Japanese, became convinced that Wright was the only man who could design and build the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Gookin, therefore, determined to secure the job for his friend. The existing hotel was about to be pulled down and rebuilt, partly with the intention of attracting more American tourists. One of Gookin's many Japanese contacts was the manager of the imperial, Aisaku Hayashi, and he eventually convinced him that Wright was the only man who could combine the spirit of Japanese architecture with American building techniques and standards.

However, back in Illinois, Wright had rashly fallen in love with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of his neighborhood clients. Unable to live together in such a conservative society, they decided to flee to Europe, Wright being able to take up a timely offer from the German publisher Ernst Wasmuth to publish a complete monograph of his architectural work to date. So in the fall of 1909 he shut down his Oak Park studio that had thrived for 16 years, and abandoned his wife and six children. At the same time he uncharitably justified his actions by blaming his family for his financial problems, which actually had far more to do with his own extravagance than anything else. Such lame excuses did nothing to reduce the ensuing scandal, which escalated when Mrs. Cheney left her husband and two children to join him in Europe. Far away from Chicago and the personal reproach, Wright and Mamah settled down to live in Berlin, he to his drawing board and she to a teaching post. For winter they went to Florence to avoid the heavy snow falls, taking a house in Fiesole, near Florence and decided to stay on there, all around them, captivated by the wonderful Tuscan villas and gardens. To help with the vast number of ink drawings required by the monograph, Wright sent for his son Lloyd and one of his draftsmen, Taylor Woolley.

By 1911 the monograph was finished and they decided to return to the United States. But where could they go? Chicago was impossible, so they decided on the old family domains of Spring Green, Wisconsin. Wright's mother helped out by giving him a tract of family land which she had earmarked for a cottage for herself. The land, although very hilly and rocky, was ideal for a rural estate and Wright christened it Taliesin, the Welsh for "shining brow." Wanting to make Mamah his legal wife, Wright pleaded with Catherine for a divorce, but still deeply hurt and angry, she refused.

True, as ever, to his own extravagant impulses, the building of Taliesin proved beyond his means. It turned out to be a never-ending expense and Wright got himself ever deeper into debt. He had intended to open an office in Chicago, but found that he preferred working from his own studio at Taliesin. Here he was able to develop fully and display his ideas of using natural materials and elements combined in a setting of harmony and sympathy with the overall environment. Wooden sculptures were carefully positioned around the house, while bronze, iron, and stone Chinese and Japanese sculpture strayed out into the garden, combining and merging the internal and external worlds. As an integral interior theme, Wright displayed his precious Japanese artifacts: the folding screens were laid flat against the walls bordered by a strip of cypress, while the prints were mounted on soft tan paper and displayed on freestanding easels. Japanese hanging scrolls were hung beside Chinese landscape paintings: all were used as major focal points against the cypress woodwork used throughout the house.

Meanwhile, the German monograph of his work, Ausgefiihrte Bauten and Entwiirfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, was published, making his works and name well-known throughout Europe. Commissions were rolling in and he would have made a comfortable living were it not for his penchant for expensive clothes, stylish cars, extravagant living, and, of course, compulsive Japanese art collecting. The commission for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was still in the offing and in 1913 Wright returned (with Mamah) to Japan to press his case. By now a number of influential friends and admirers were also calling for him to get the job; even so, Wright still didn't secure the commission until 1914.

He was, however, commissioned by Edward C. Waller to design the Midway Gardens pleasure palace in Chicago. This and other jobs convinced Wright of the necessity of opening a Chicago office to be nearer the majority of his clients and contractors. Then, one day in August 1914 while he was working on the Midway Gardens, he was called home from his Chicago office, back to Taliesin. There a scene of devastation and tragedy was set out before him. A cook had gone berserk; while Mamah and her two visiting children were having lunch, he had locked the doors and poured gasoline around the entrance. He then set fire to the building and, as the victims tried to flee, he attacked them with an axe. Seven bodies were laid out on the lawn in the garden court when Wright arrived home. As well as Mamah and her children, three apprentices and a workman were slain, one of them the son of his craftsman, William Weston. Taliesin was a charred ruin. The murderer committed suicide by taking poison, never explaining his motives in the three weeks it took him to die in prison.

Shocked and bereft, Wright nevertheless vowed to rebuild Taliesin -and in the process all but bankrupted himself. Again the building was continually rebuilt and extended into a great rambling building of geometrically shaped desert rock pieces superimposed on each other, all with a tent-like canvas roofing - such an innovative composition was only possible in a desert environment. Then out of the blue, from all the letters of sympathy and condolence he received, one letter in particular caught his attention. It was from a woman he had never met, called Miriam Noel. She expressed such empathy through her letter that he agreed to her request to meet him. So started a self-destructive relationship that lasted the better part of ten years. Miriam was artistic but unbalanced, her emotional state aggravated by her addictions. She was also weak and depressed, emotions that Wright felt attracted by, but such raw feelings rapidly took away from their relationship.

In December 1916 they sailed for Tokyo together, where they lived while Wright worked on the Imperial Hotel project for which he had accepted a $300,000 fee. By now Miriam was a social recluse, but given to violent outbursts, many of them rooted in her constant insecurity. Yet somehow they stayed together despite their raging rows. With the money he was earning from the Imperial, Wright bought yet more Japanese art, but also forged ahead with the new Taliesin. To supplement his income further, and as a logical corollary of his own interest, he bought Japanese art for other American collectors, most notably for Mr. and Mrs. William Spalding of Boston, his close friend Frederick Gookin at the Art Institute of Chicago, Howard Masefield of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and Sally Casey Thayer whose collection eventually went to the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas.

Frank Lloyd Wright didn't desert the United States completely during the time he was supervising the building of the Imperial Hotel. He made frequent trips to the Midwest and, more particularly, to California. Back in 1914 he had met Aline Barnsdall, heiress to a Pennsylvania oil fortune. She was a keen thespian, whose dream was to build a theatrical complex, complete with homes and shops. She was a temperamental woman, prone to extreme mood swings, constantly changing her mind about what she wanted and completely paranoid about being taken advantage of for her money. Despite all the problems and the abandonment of the bulk of the project, Wright would complete one of his best known works - the Hollyhock House - and two other houses for her. He maintained that in his entire career no other client had caused him so much trouble, or given him so much grief. The problems were worth overcoming. Recalling the Mayan nunnery replica he'd seen in 1893, the poured concrete structure of the Hollyhock House has since been designated by the American Institute of Architects as one of 17 buildings designed by Wright to be retained as an example of his architectural contribution to American culture.

Wright and Miriam returned full time to the United States in 1922 when the Imperial Hotel was six months away from completion. The project had been all-encompassing, he had designed every aspect of the building down to the carpets and door handles. His ultimate triumph was to produce an earthquake proof design which survived the 1923 Kanto 'quake which leveled everything else around it. At last Catherine agreed to grant him a divorce on the grounds of 12 years' desertion. Wright hoped that by marrying Miriam he would be able to give her the emotional security she so badly needed and this would improve their relationship. Unhappily, this proved a terrible miscalculation: they separated after six intolerable months. Wright returned to Taliesin. On his own now he threw himself into working on a variety of ideas in company with a number of new assistants, many of these eager young architects from Europe. However, no major contracts were coming in.

Wright was convinced that California, particularly southern California, was the place for his future. Its pre-European past gave the landscape an intangible romance, and the fact that much of the state was desert appealed to him - he liked the vastness, the room to spread, and the idea that the land could be literally transformed by the introduction of water. This was nature in the raw, but it could be made accessible. Wright was adamant that it should be experienced by man living in close affinity with the land and the natural elements of nature. To his mind this could only be achieved by the extensive use of the private automobile.

Life took a better turn for Frank Lloyd Wright in November 1924 while visiting his friend, the painter Jerome Blum. One evening they went to the Russian ballet and, while waiting for the performance to start, a striking young woman with long black hair caught up into a bun took the last seat in their box. As luck would have it, Blum had met her at a dinner party in New York not too long before. She was Olgivanna Lazovich Hinzenberg, a dancer from a patrician Montenegrin family who had been educated in Tsarist Russia. She possessed interesting and advanced social ideas, many of them garnered from the Gurdjiff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France.

It transpired that they were both waiting for a divorce, and Olgivanna was further fighting for custody of her daughter Svetlana. In fact, her husband pursued her to Chicago to contest the possession of their daughter. Within three months Olgivanna moved into Taliesin and late the following year, she produced lovanna, a daughter for Wright. Such flagrant immorality put off many potential clients and Wright found work very hard to come by. Meanwhile, at Taliesin, Olgivanna took over the reins of managing the house and servants with the specific intention of removing daily worries and chores from the mind of the great architect, to allow his genius to reside on a higher plain.

Through the 1920s, the majority of Wright's projects were private residences for Californians. Many of these buildings were romantic and dreamlike, reflecting his feelings about living in close harmony with nature and the land, and mirroring in the use of decorative stonework, pre-Columbian architecture. In total he saw 24 buildings completed, although a further 30 remained unbuilt, a number of these latter projects cancelled when their patrons lost money in the great stock market crash of 1929.

In spring 1925, disaster visited Taliesin again when an electrical storm started a fire in some faulty wiring. The living quarters were razed to the ground by the conflagration. Rebuilding Taliesin yet again piled up even more debt for Wright at a time when little work was around. His scandalous lifestyle aroused such hostility that, on the advice of close friends, he and Olgivanna quietly withdrew from Wisconsin and moved for the summer of 1926 to a cottage in Minneapolis, where they lived for a time under assumed names. By now Frank Lloyd Wright's career seemed at an end; he was generally considered to be one of the establishment figures in architecture, unable to keep up with contemporary developments in the building world.

With nothing much to occupy him, Wright again took up writing. At the prompting of Olgivanna, he started an autobiography, and began preparing an exhibition of his work that would tour Europe and the United States. Money was still very much a problem and in 1927 he sent a number of his Japanese prints to auction in New York. The sale helped to reduce his debts, but expenses continued to mount and his affairs got so bad that he was forced to turn Taliesin and the remains of his art collections over to the bank. Homeless, he moved to stay in New York with his sister, Maginel Wright Barney, now an illustrator of children's books.

In 1928, the prospect of work at last appeared when he was asked by the McArthur family to act as consultant on the building of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. While staying for three months in Phoenix, he met Dr. Alexander Chandler, the owner of a large hotel and founder and owner of much of the town of Chandler. He wanted to build a large, elegant, hotel-cum-resort in the desert outside Chandler, where the rich could escape the rigors of winter. The project was called San Marcos-in-the-Desert, and Wright lived on the spot for a time and then at La Jolla in California.

Finally, on August 25, 1928, Frank and Olgivanna married in a quiet ceremony in the garden of an inn in Rancho Santa Fe. Also at much the same time, a number of his friends and former clients formed Frank Lloyd Wright Inc., a scheme to bankroll the great architect and keep him from debt, which also made his return to Taliesin possible.

In the winter of 1929, with his family and followers, Wright returned to the Arizona desert where they built a temporary town out of canvas and box boards. Called Ocotillo Camp, he stayed there while working on the San Marcos project, and liked it so much that the camp became the prototype for the winter home he would design in 1937 for the Taliesin Fellowship - Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The stock market crash of 1929 brought all commissions to an abrupt halt - including, most notably, the San Marcos- in-the-Desert project. The only work he was left with was a large house he was building for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Otherwise work was again scarce and Wright had to turn to writing and lecturing for the bulk of his income. In 1931 Wright lectured at New York's New School for Social Research, but he wasn't a very good teacher. His ideas were too individualistic for students to find useful. The following year An Autobiography was published by Longmans, Green and Company. Although shamelessly biased and self-promoting, it stimulated new interest in him and his work and young architects started to consider him as the sage but eccentric elder statesman.

With such encouragement and a general revival of interest in his work, Wright established the Taliesin Fellowship at Spring Green. This was conceived along the lines of a utopian community of worker-apprentices who paid a fee to come and work and live with the great architect. The community grew as apprentices arrived, and much of their attitude was fostered by Olgivanna, who put into play her advanced social theories learned at the Gurdjieff Institute. The core of her approach was to deliberately create an almost mystical reverence for Frank Lloyd Wright; he was presented as the revered master at whose feet they were privileged to learn and pay homage. Despite paying for the honor, part of the apprentices' daily routine was to do chores around the house and grounds between working on their assigned design projects. They helped to run the home and office and helped on many of his projects with drawings and model-making. Some of them later went on to work for Wright on Taliesin West. In time his best assistants were given his projects to control and he rarely supervised his work personally (one of the later exceptions to this was the Guggenheim Museum).

The building of Fallingwater in Pennsylvania for Edgar Kaufmanna in 1936, and the completion of the S. C. Johnson & Son Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin (1936-39) saw Wright's reputation resurge. His confident incorporation of new building methods and materials impressed the new generation of up and coming architects. A major problem of these Depression years was finding good quality, economic houses for middle class families. Wright came up with the concept of the "Usonian" house which would bring into full play new developments in building, in particular the use of pre-cast concrete. (Usonia was Wright's term for the United States and its culture and was first used in his 1925 essay "In the Cause of Architecture: The Third Dimension" published in the Dutch Wendingen.) The first Usonian house was built in 1936 for Herbert Jacobs in Madison, Wisconsin and he would build over a hundred more. (See page 212 onward for more about the principles of the Usonian house.) Such homes he foresaw as being integral to his dream of a wide-spreading utopian development he called Broadacre City - a dream project he would work on for the remainder of his life. Wright was also becoming a well-known exponent of decentralization and was very ambivalent towards any form of state control - particularly with regard to building rules and regulations. However he did believe that the government should provide the basic infrastructure. He was not averse to using influence, and to this end he personally - but unsuccessfully - petitioned the President to protect the Arizona desert from the ravages of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who took powerlines right across his panoramic view from Taliesin West.

Between 1940 and 1942, with U.S. involvement in the war in Europe a looming threat, Wright became a vocal opponent of participation. He aired his pacifist views in 10 essays, the most notorious of which was entitled "Wake up America!" (published in Christian Century in November 1940). His stance gathered Wright more enemies, as did his sympathy for the Japanese, which he still promoted even after Pearl Harbor. As a consequence he fell out with a number of his friends, including his once close friend Lewis Mumford and even his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones.

In 1943 Duell, Sloan and Pearce published his revised An Autobiography, and in June that year a letter came out of the blue from Baroness Rebay asking whether he would consider designing a new museum to contain Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection of non-objective paintings. He was immediately attracted by the prospect, met Guggenheim, and signed a contract with him on June 29, 1943. But the museum had no site for nine months and Wright became increasingly frustrated at not knowing what he had to deal with. This was the inauspicious start of what proved a very enervating period. New York and its bureaucracy, its planning authorities, in particular the Commissioner Robert Moses, became the bane of his life. Intellectually their minds had no meeting point: Moses had plans for New York which included building high-rise, high density housing. Wright, in complete contrast, saw dispersed low-level homes as the only answer to housing the urban masses. A personal antipathy developed, in which Moses did all he could to obstruct the building of the museum.

The battle to build the Guggenheim Museum lasted for the next 16 years, during which time the project consumed Wright. Over such a long period the costs, of course, escalated and accordingly the plans were revised time and again to reduce the expense as much as possible. In total Wright drew up eight complete sets of plans (the first set contained 29 architectural drawings and 13 structural drawings). Guggenheim himself actually believed that building costs would drop in time, so he postponed the project - he was wrong, everything just got more expensive. During the war nothing could be done as all building materials were diverted into the war effort.

For the duration of the Guggenheim project Wright moved to New York, perversely a city that he loved. His favorite place to stay was the Plaza Hotel where he had a two-room apartment refurbished to his specifications. He had always worked where he ate and slept and this was no exception, one room was part office and reception. As usual, he surrounded himself with expensive luxury. He installed sleek black lacquer tables, a golden peach wool carpet and dark purple velvet draperies; for wall coverings he had gold-flecked rice paper and around the room he arranged his oriental art.

In November 1949 Solomon Guggenheim died. The project was in jeopardy for a time until his bequest was sorted out. The following year Harry S. Guggenheim was appointed president of the Foundation and supported Wright in his endeavors to get the building built. Still politically vocal, particularly with his anti-war views, Wright drew the attention of Senator McCarthy from his home state of Wisconsin, who tried to have him impeached as an anti-American communist.

In January 1951 a world touring exhibition of Wright's work entitled "Sixty Years of Living Architecture" opened in Philadelphia. This showed his original drawings, architectural models anal huge photographs of many of his buildings and decorative objects. The exhibition arrived in New York in 1953 and helped to keep up the momentum for the Museum. Building work on the Guggenheim finally began in summer 1956, and it opened to the public on October 21, 1959, six months after Wright died. The innovative, spiral building was initially loathed by the public as being totally unsuitable for elegant Fifth Avenue. The artists whose work was displayed inside, hated the way their work was suspended against the sloping, off-white walls.

The entire Guggenheim Museum project was a fight from start to finish and took its toll on Frank Lloyd Wright's health. He returned to Taliesin West to recuperate when the end of the building was in sight. Now aged 91 Wright was operated on in hospital in Phoenix, to remove an intestinal obstruction. Despite his frailty he came through the operation and appeared to be making a good recovery when, five days later on April 9, 1959, he died. His body was taken back to his old home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where it was placed in the family burial ground a few hundred yards from Taliesin North, next to his mother and Mamah Cheney. There he remained for 26 years until 1985 when Olgivanna died; her last wish was that in death they should be together, so his remains were disinterred and taken to Taliesin West in Arizona, where their ashes were mingled together and buried in a new grave.

When he died, Wright was working on plans for Marin County Civic Center, at San Rafael in California, a complex that included offices, libraries, and spaces for social activities. The project was finished in 1962 after his death. It was the nearest he got to realizing his dream of a utopian city.

By the time of his death, Frank Lloyd Wright was recognized as the greatest architect that America had produced to date. The American Institute of Architects designated 17 of his buildings as deserving of special recognition. These comprise all his personal dwellings - his Home and Studio at Oak Park, Taliesin at Spring Green, and Taliesin West; domestic commissions - the Winslow House, the Kaufmann House ("Fallingwater"), the Hanna "Honeycomb" House, the Robie House, the Ward Willits House, the Aline Barnsdall "Hollyhock" House; - and his public buildings, the Price Tower, the V. C. Morris Gift Shop, the S. C. Johnson (Wax) Building and the Guggenheim Museum; as well three places of worship were listed - the Unitarian Church at Shorewood Hills, the Unity Temple, and the Beth Shalom Synagogue.

This information taken (word for word) from
"Frank Lloyd Write" 3rd Edition
by Iain Thomson
™ 1997 Promotional Reprint Company Ltd.