Frank Lloyd Wright's Humanism - documentary on the architect

Humanist, May, 1999 by Tim Sandefur

Wright didn't stay bound within nature, nor did he--like the Internationalists--force upon nature an entirely alien contraption. He raises out of nature a human spirit. As philosopher Jacob Bronowski said in his 1993 book The Ascent of Man:

   A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or
   reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis,
   putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by
   analyzing nature. Michelangelo said that vividly, by implication, in his
   sculpture.... "Brain and hand unite": the material asserts itself through
   the hand, and thereby prefigures the shape of the work for the brain.... So
   the great temple architecture of every civilization expresses the
   identification of the individual with the human species.

This is precisely the living force behind Wright's work. His buildings do not descend upon the earth, as a Gropius building descends--or as a Corbusier building crashes. Instead, they rise upwards from the earth, expressing the essential humanism of his vision.

"Why point to heaven?" Wright asked. "Why not build a temple to man?" And he did: the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. Lacking arches, a steeple, or vast stained-glass windows, the Unity Temple is simple, small, softly lit. The entryway is beneath the pews--one looks up at the assembling congregation as one enters. Then, up some stairs and into pews which surround the altar closely, in an intimate, almost familial setting. His church doesn't overshadow humankind, doesn't intimidate. Here religion doesn't hand down its precepts in stone tablets from a mountaintop; it raises humankind from the earth with a gentle, almost parental touch.

Wright doesn't abandon the self--quite the opposite. Where the Gothic cathedrals had, with their vaults of heavy gray stone, sought to crush the self out of parishioners, Wright's humanistic vision expresses the power of the human self. It is indeed a "temple to man." It was, Wright said, meant as "a true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit."

Author Ayn Rand based her 1943 book The Fountainhead roughly on Wright's career. In one scene, her character Howard Roark explains a temple he intends to build:

   If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The
   human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both.
   Uplifted in its quest--and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God--and
   finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form.

And the power of Wright's achievement is precisely this: the power of his self, which "raises man up" from the earth to a human idea--first his, then ours. It is supremely individualistic architecture.

Wright even dedicated his projected Broadacre City to a list of great individualist writers, from Nietzsche to Emerson. And, like them, and like his favorite composer Beethoven, he has often been misunderstood--and understandably so. His personality was so powerful that it was even controlling, as when he designed even the clothing to be worn by this clients. Such charismatic force is common in geniuses, from Johann Goethe to Phineas in John Knowles' A Separate Peace.