Frank Lloyd Wright's Humanism - documentary on the architect

Humanist, May, 1999 by Tim Sandefur

Ken Burns documentaries have a reputation for impact, beauty, and thoroughness, but often they include a moment--usually a remark by one of his guest commentators--that is shockingly off the mark. For instance, in his three hours on Thomas Jefferson, otherwise brilliantly crafted, historian John Hope Franklin blamed Jefferson for "cursing" America with slavery, ignoring the fact that slavery had existed in America for two and a half centuries before the Declaration of Independence. And Burns' most recent entry, the lovingly made Frank Lloyd Wright, did it again.

In a two-part miniseries aired on PBS, writer Brendan Gill sums up his feelings on Wright:

   What an architect is said to be about, is provide your fellow human beings
   with the best possible shelter at the lowest possible cost. Frank really
   believed that. And then in the making of temples, very ambitious temples
   ... out of his arrogance [he was able to] create something which is
   selfless. Of course he designed those things, but they are purged of him;
   they are not his monuments; they are beyond; they are monuments to all of
   us, and all of us gain from these monuments in a way that is not that
   simple act of egotism on the part of a great man.

To get Wright's work so completely wrong is remarkable. It is precisely because the opposite is true that Wright's work is so epochal an achievement. Putting aside the fact that Wright constantly and unapologetically went far over his budgets, no architect--and perhaps no artist--ever vested his work with so much of himself as Frank Lloyd Wright. When one stands in one of his buildings--his Wisconsin home Taliesin, for instance--the power of his personality, of his whole world view, seems to exude from the walls like the soft and constant light.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Wright faced a cadre of young antagonists who saw it as their mission to create a new sort of architecture that would embody the needs and aspirations of the "common" person. Determined to create a new proletarian culture for the socialist future they thought was coming, architects like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and especially Le Corbusier sought to design not "homes" but "machines for living."

This International School began to cover the countryside with vast flat slabs of anonymous black glass. They eschewed wood and stone, preferring instead the impersonality of steel, arranged in flat, undecorated planes. Like good communists, these Internationalists did not seek to appeal to humanity's soul; Marxism taught there was no such thing, only social forces that created what some mistook for "human nature." "Architecture for the Masses" would be functional, materialistic, utilitarian, compact, and, above all, anti-individualistic in its form and its effect on the viewer. Corbusier had said, in almost Stalinistic prose, that in his buildings "considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitant of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development ... might be carried as far as possible."

Wright despised the International style, which he said was neither international nor a style. To him, humanity did have a soul and beauty did have a place. As another commentator in the Burns film, historian William Cronon, puts it:

   He wanted to be a democratic architect who would educate the American
   people to an aesthetic greater than the one that they had already achieved.
   He loathed architecture of the mob, which pulled architecture down to the
   least common denominator. But he very much wanted to build buildings that
   would enlighten people and lift people up. He was trying to pull the masses
   above themselves and, as a result, there's something deeply impractical,
   and in some ways anti-democratic, about his democratic vision.

Cronon is exactly right. The genius of Wright lies in his appeal to the self of each individual--but not by creating black slates. Instead, Wright set before --or around--his audience his own personality, so powerful that one's own personality responds, as with the work of a great speaker or author. And like a great speaker or author, Wright vested his work with the force of his personality and challenged the viewer to rise up to it.

That image of rising is vital to understanding Wright from theory to practice. His masterpiece Fallingwater seems to leap from the earth to rise like a cliff. And in his 1953 book The Future of Architecture, he wrote:

   What is spirit? In the language of organic architecture, the "spiritual" is
   never something descending upon the thing from above as a kind of
   illumination, but exists within the thing itself as its very life. Spirit
   grows upward from within and outward. Spirit does not come down from above
   to be suspended there by skyhooks or set upon posts.

The meaning Wright built into his homes arises from the materials, the geometry, the idea behind it all.

Hollyhock House in Los Angeles is a prime example, built in the 1920s for a wealthy patron of the arts, Aline Barnsdall. The theme of the building was the hollyhock flower, which Wright then abstracted into a shape and then built upon it, creating a unified whole, like musical variations on a theme. Wright doesn't reach for some removed Platonic ideal; he searches for the human idea found beneath the surface of an image. Hollyhock House doesn't build on actual hollyhocks but on the idea that such a shape inspires in the mind.