Frank Lloyd Wright versus America: the 1930s

The second flowering of Frank Lloyd Wright's extraordinary career began in 1928 when he was sixty-one.In that year he married his mistress Olga Lazovich.Together they planned a future that, if it was to be successful, required the re-creation of Wright the active man, not the legend.With only a few architectural commissions since the early 1920s, Wright's image had to be reconstructed and revitalized.The fabled life of his first golden age had to be reevaluated and the nightmare of the recent past put behind.All was exposed in an autobiography.The second life of the newly active man was anticipated in a number of ways but primarily by the formation of an institute for young people.Here the Wrights practiced their notions of paideia, work, and thought united in a community of apprentices they called the Taliesin Fellows.The Wrights had developed a holism that revolved about their idea of an organic architecture.They vigorously promoted both the idea and the fact that their daily lives, in concert with the Fellows', were devoted to its practice.Their concerns were not just for buildings in cities but for new villages in and on the North American landscape; not just villages but an organically complete life; not just complete personal lives but a healthier, refurbished, and philosophically unified America.The means to these ends were focused on Wright's talent and life as paradigms incorporating an interpretation of the great American dream of individual liberty.The Wrights therefore argued against the doctrines that supported European hegemony, against traditional prejudice, and against the political left.As lord and lady they broadcast their ideas from a manor, a modern castle moated by grain fields and psychological privacy.The word also went forth from lecture platforms, in exhibitions, and onto the pages of magazines and books.The Europeans, the English, and the Soviets were impressed and intrigued, but fellow Americans soon became confused.In emphasizing his philosophy Wright's rhetoric seemed to damn everything American-history, cities, home, and nearly all else.Wright could not be ignored.Finally he acquired two architectural commissions.For them he composed two seemingly opposite concepts of architecture for dissimilar sites.When the buildings were complete, the world again took note.The first commission became one of the most beautiful houses of any century, the Kaufmann country home Fallingwater on Bear Run Creek in Pennsylvania; the second was the Johnson's Wax Administration Building at Racine in Wisconsin.Both were theoretically brilliant.