Wright's Middle Way
In the last issue’s Wright Thoughtsarticle, I wrote that Frank Lloyd Wright not only opposed traditional architecture but also the later developing modernism when it took root in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. Even though many have attributed this to the architect’s ego, especially one as large as Wrights, I proposed that there may be something more significant than that which, if understood, will give us greater insight into Wright’s philosophy of design. However, before exploring modernism, first we will look at Wright’s early Prairie period and his reaction against the prevailing traditional styles around the turn of the 20th century.
One of Wright’s early treatises on architecture, “In the Cause of Architecture,” written in 1908 and appearing in Architectural Record magazine was primarily written with the backdrop of the old forms of traditional architecture from which he was proposing an architectural deliverance. First in his list of propositions for a new architecture is that of “Simplicity and Repose”. Expanding on this idea, Wright says that a building “should contain as few rooms as will meet the conditions which give it rise…” and that “an excessive love of detail has ruined more fine things from the standpoint of fine art …than any one human shortcoming—it is hopelessly vulgar.” Further into his essay he becomes more pointed in his attack on traditional architecture and states:
Our aesthetics are dyspeptic from incontinent indulgence in "Frenchite" pastry. We crave ornament for the sake of ornament; cover up our faults of design with ornamental sensualities that were a long time ago sensuous ornament. We will do well to dismiss this unwholesome and unholy craving and look to the simple line; to the clean though living form and quiet color for a time, until the true significance of these things has dawned for us once more. The old structural forms which up to the present time, have spelled "architecture" are decayed.
An then, as he approaches the conclusion of his essay, he makes the sweeping architectural prophecy:
As for the future the work shall grow more truly simple; more expressive with fewer lines, fewer forms; more articulate with less labor, more plastic, more fluent, although more coherent; more organic.
Just a couple of years after In the Cause of ArchitectureWright’s Wasmuth Portfolio (Ausgefuhrte Bauten und Entwurfe von Frank Lloyd Wright) was published and exhibited by Berlin publisher Ernst Wasmuth (1910-11). Featured in this work were wonderfully illustrated drawings of his early work including the Robie House (pictured below) which was perhaps the most influential project of his in Europe.
The Portfolio had immediate impact on the young architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, all essentially apprentices of Peter Behrens in Berlin at the time. Later in 1946 Mies would reflect on this:
At this moment, so critical for us, there came to Berlin the exhibition of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This comprehensive display and the extensive publication of his works enabled us really to become acquainted with the achievement of this architect. The encounter was destined to prove of greatest significance to the development of architecture in Europe. The work of this great master revealed an architectural world of unexpected force and clarity of language, and also a disconcerting richness of form….The dynamic impulse emanating from his work invigorated a whole generation.
(College Art Journal, 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1946), pp. 41-42.)
Given the traditional condition of architectural styles around the turn of the century and the force with which Wright sought to overcome its inertia, it must have surprised even him the degree to which modernism would soon become the architectural avant-garde. The European architects saw in Wright’s work a bold architecture that shed ornament, used horizontal expanses of windows that would become for them ribbon windows, contained a new interior sense of space and horizontal planes that broke free of confinement, displayed honesty of materials, and expressed the art and craft of the machine.
Walter Gropius designed the groundbreaking Fagus Factory in Germany in 1911, a first for completing an entire facade in glass. Le Corbusier, known for his expression, “a house is a machine for living,” designed Villa Savoye which was a study of the white pristine box in a natural French landscape, floating on piloti (thin plain columns), and sporting ribbon windows and some juxtaposed curved elements that caused Vincent Scully to argue that it influenced Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater home designed a few years later. Mies van der Rohe, perhaps the most appreciative of Wright of the three, and author of the famous dictum, ‘Less is more,’ had several important modern buildings by 1930 including the Barcelona Pavilion (pictured below), which seemed to distill Wright’s ideas down to their minimalist limit; ideas such as unified interior space, elimination of ornament, horizontal planes with cantilevered overhangs, honest expression of materials, and the blurring of inside and outside as he deconstructed the box.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Wright initially must have felt satisfaction over his influence in Europe as he saw his ideas take shape in new European buildings— up to a point, that is. When those architects took those ideas further than Wright had done, his image of himself as the architect at the cutting edge of progress must have seemed in jeopardy. And so, we start to see in Wright a reaction against modernism and the International Style in particular.
In the Kahn lectures of 1931, just after the milestone modernist works of the Barcelona Pavilion and Villa Savoye, Wright states his view on the matter:
There is no good reason why forms stripped clean of all considerations but function and utility should be admirable beyond that point: they may be abominable from the human standpoint, but there is no need for them to be so in the artist’s hands….The negation naturally made by the machine, gracefully accepted now, may, for a time, relieve us of sentimental abortion and abuse, but it cannot inspire and recreate humanity beyond that point. Inevitably the negation proceeds upon its own account to other abuses and abortions, even worse than sentimentality.(The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Princeton press, 2008, pg 178).
Here Wright acknowledges the benefit modern architecture provided in purging the architectural world of traditional dead ornament (often referred to by Wright as ‘sentimentality’) but cautions against the de-humanizing effect brought in by modernism that he alludes to here, along with the negation of the role of inspiration in design.
Much later in an interview in 1956 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Wright responded to the interviewer’s comment about a couple she knew that seemed content in a “severely modern” home. He responded, ”They are like goldfish in a globe…glassified homes…an abuse of privilege, abuse of material. Those things will always fall in with a new movement….every movement has its soiled fringe, its extremists, its abusers, its exploiters, … you can’t expect the average man to know the difference.” Again, Wright’s caustic rhetoric belies the deeper reasons behind his reaction.
In his writing, “A Testament” in 1957 Wright states his thoughts on modernism:
Nevertheless the straight-line, flat-plane effects, the new shapes of shelter I had published in Germany (1910) and France (1911) have, by stimulating world-wide imitation and some true emulation, scattered far. …But as yet, no deep satisfaction. This “modern-architecture” we see as a negation in two dimensions. An improvement? Yes, but with too little evidence of the depths of the architecture conceived according to Principle, built from inside outward as organism. The essence of construction itself is yet haphazard or old-fashioned steel-framing of the box. Natural elegance, the true serenity (due to indigenous character) of an organic original seems likely to be lost sterilized by studied stylizing or by careful elimination of all ornament and pretty much all but the box-frame with a flat lid. The tranquil emphasis on space as the reality of the building is mostly missing. Parasitic practices appear everywhere, credit given to this or that new name. Always new names. But no matter how many, such derivations from the outside in all run dry….
Meantime pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment.…As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist….How soon will “we the people” awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom—as declared, 1776?
(The Essential FLW: Critical Writings on Architecture, pg. 386-387)
What can we glean from these writings? Yes, just as with the traditional architecture before him, he had issue with the modernism that followed him. But there was also substance behind his rhetoric against modernism; in fact, it revealed a widening chasm between the two philosophical foundations even when superficial visual similarities might lead one to suppose they both arose from the same fountain. Wright had the dilemma of wanting to take credit for a movement that he could not endorse. In the quotes from Wright above we see him make the distinction between modern architecture and his organic architecture, the sterile and dry versus his deeper, more satisfying architecture. He also speaks against the “pseudo-scientific” mindset, along with those who would adhere to the rationalist mindset vs. those who are actually “enlightened”. Wright also made the case that his organic architecture was more suited to American individual democratic freedom. So, we see Wright separating himself from modernism, at least a certain kind of modernism. Is it any wonder that Philip Johnson slighted Wright when he put together the highly influential 1932 MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibit, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”? The impression given at the 1932 MOMA exhibit was that Wright was an important forefather to modernism but that his time had come and gone and now others were leading the charge of modernism. Johnson referred to Wright as the greatest architect of the 19thcentury, which naturally angered Wright. Many years later, shortly before Johnson’s death, when he was interviewed and asked about this comment, Johnson replied that Wright took his statement as the insult he intended it to be.
We have touched upon some of what Wright thought was missing from modernism. And yet, organic architecture never had the far-reaching influence that modernism did and still does today. Although modernism waned toward the latter part of the 20thcentury after a brief hiatus with Post-Modernism, we currently see ourselves back in the full sway of modernism. So now in the 21stcentury when most academic institutions only treat Wright as a historical novelty, we have to ask ourselves, is Wright hopelessly out of date (as even he appeared to many in the 1930’s) or does his voice point to a blind spot in our age? Has architecture today made Wright’s work moot, or is there something missing in today’s architecture to which Wright had an answer? This question is more relevant today than ever, and I will be continuing this discussion in the next newsletter.
