Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture

464 Pages·1978·10.86 MB·English

by  Robert Twombly

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title: Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life and His
Architecture
author: Twombly, Robert C.
publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (US)
isbn10 | asin: 0471857971
print isbn13: 9780471857976
ebook isbn13: 9780585277509
language: English
subject Wright, Frank Lloyd,--1867-1959,
Wright, Frank Lloyd,--1867-1959--
Influence, Architects--United States--
Biography.
publication date: 1979
lcc: NA737.W7T95eb
ddc: 720.92
subject: Wright, Frank Lloyd,--1867-1959,
Wright, Frank Lloyd,--1867-1959--
Influence, Architects--United States--
Biography.
Biography.
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Page 1
Chapter One
Nearly Everything to Learn 18671893
Frank Lloyd Wright's early years were nomadic and unsettling. Before he
was eleven he lived in six towns in four states from Massachusetts to Iowa
while his restless father searched for a better situation. In his early teens he
worked summers to supplement family income, and when his parents
divorced he left high school to take a job. He started college but after two
unproductive semesters moved to Chicago where he worked for three
employers in a year. A week before his twenty-second birthday he married
his eighteen-year-old fiancée, his first romantic attachment. Despite a
provincial background and lack of formal training, Wright by his mid-
twenties acquired the social and architectural credentials necessary to
become an upper middle class professional.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Like the wandering pioneer of American folklore, Frank Lloyd Wright's
father willingly subordinated family stability and familiar surroundings to a
relentless search for personal fulfillment. William Russell Cary Wright was
born a minister's son in 1825 at Westfield, Massachusetts, a few miles from
Springfield. A precocious young man, he entered Amherst College in 1839
at age fourteen intending to study music and law. Although he registered
for both his freshman and sophomore years, he completed neither, left the
college in 1840, and moved with his brother, the Reverend Thomas G.
Wright, to Clare-

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Page 10
with proceeds from the music studio he opened in Madison by March 1880,
he could not support his family and was forced back to the lecture platform
and the pulpit in other denominations to supplement his income. In October
1881 he opened a series of meetings at the Spring Green Congregational
Church. "As a lecturer, Mr. Wright is one of the best," a local paper
observed, "and none should fail to hear him." But many did, for even
though his talk on Ireland "was without doubt one of the best we ever
attended," the turnout was "very small." Nevertheless, Wright spoke to the
Congregationalists periodically until late 1884, meanwhile continuing his
Unitarian functions into the summer of 1885.
15
Frank Lloyd Wright was now conscious enough of his surroundings to have
clear memories, some of which he recorded in his autobiography. He and
his sister Maginel both remembered his close friendship with Robert M.
"Robie" Lamp (for whom he designed a house in 1904). Frank, Robie, and
their friends engaged in the usual boyish activities; they "invented" things,
published a one-sheet neighborhood newspaper, and had lots of parties and
after-dinner singing sessions. Frank was popular among young people but
shy around girls. He had a tendency to fantasize, and in his attic "sanctum"
read, drew, and painted frenetically, retreating for hours at a time into
Arabian Nights or the plans for a daring new kite. His father taught him to
play viola in the family orchestra, supplemented on occasion by young
musicians from the neighborhood. Frank was at once withdrawn and
outgoing, physically active, and intellectually comtemplative. In short, he
seems to have had a relatively normal adolescence.16
From sources other than memoirs it is possible to reconstruct additional
aspects of young Wright's Madison yearsespecially important ones for him
as it turned out. His family lived at the corner of Gorham and Livingston
Streets on the East Side, about a block from the Second Ward Grammar
School he attended during the late 1870s and early 1880s. Spotty evidence
shows he went to Madison (now Central) High School from October 1884
through March 1885, though he may have enrolled earlier. His grades were
not outstanding: "average" in rhetoric and botany, both good and poor in
physics, and poor to average in algebra, which he failed once. Most of
Madison's school records for the period have been lost or destroyed, but
there is nothing anywhere to indicate that he graduated from high school,
which may explain why young Wright was admitted to the University of
Wisconsin on "Jan. 7, 1886 as a Special Student."
During the months between March 1885, when he is known to have last
attended high school, and January 1886, when he started college,

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Page 100
Figure 4.4
The Larkin Administration (1904), Buffalo.
From The Inland Architect, July 1907.
Russell Sturgis, a prominent architectural critic of the day, acknowledged
the Larkin Building was comfortable, futuristic, eminently practical, and
exceptionally well planned, but deemed it hopelessly ugly. Architect
Charles E. Illsley, on the other hand, commenting for Inland Architect,
praised its many advances in the science of fireproofing, its desks with
chairs attached on pivots for easy movement, and several other innovations.
"Never before were the essentials of a modern office building, viz.: safety
and light, with elbow room, ventilation and convenience more fully
provided," he wrote, "nor more skillfully and beautifully combined for the
daily toil of 1,800 clerks and officials." The exterior, he continued, "is such
a wide departure from

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Page 101
tradition that views must differ." They did, but the prestigious Architectural
Review considered it "about as fine a piece of original and effective
composition as one could expect to find."
4 Three officers of the Larkin Company must have agreed since they
commissioned Wright to design their homes.
Unity Temple consists of two massive cubes, the larger an auditorium
connected by an entrance hall to the church's community and secular
activities in the smaller cube. Its poured concrete exterior seemed to Wright
the most "natural" way to express its boxlike shapes. The symbolic
importance of the cubes and their mutual relationship was clearly stated
(Fig. 4.5): the spiritual aspects of Unity's work took precedence over the
secular, housed in the smaller space, but the two were inseparably united by
the sturdy bond of the entrance hall, itself set back from the building line
and hidden by the auditorium from the main thoroughfare. The reporter for
Oak Leaves, a local newspaper, congratulated Wright for making Unity
"indescribably beautiful" (see Fig. 4.6). "The eye and mind were rested and
the soul uplifted," he wrote, and then in a paean of unrestrained praise
Figure 4.5
Unity Temple (19051906), Oak Park.
From The Inland Architect, December 1908.

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