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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ON ARCHITEC TURE Selected Writings 1894-1940 Edited with an Introduction by Frederick Gutheim AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Five books in one volume IN THE NATURE OF MATERIALS The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright By Henry-Russell Hitchcock FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AN A U TO B IO G R A PH Y DUE L L . S L O A N A N D P E A R C E , NE W Y ORK I943> COPYRIGHT, BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Second printing PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS Book One: Family 3 Book Two: Fellowship 61 Book Three: W ork 121 Book Four: Freedom 301 8 Book Five: Form 379 5 6' l y jjt Y Index 561 R E D N BI M F O U g r U l C c M 8 4 0' 3 R P A FAMILY CONTENTS PRELUDE THE BOY THE MOTHER BACH GIFTS TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD / |\ ADDING TIRED TO TIRED UNCLE JAMES TO her! SUNDAY ROBIE IN MEMORIAM A MAN THE HORSE THE SOW THE COW THE HEN THE HOE MAIN STRENGTH AND AWKWARDNESS peace! beauty! satisfaction! resti THE FATHER THE FRESHMAN PARTY TRAGEDY PRELUDE A LIGHT blanket of snow fresh-fallen over sloping fields, gleaming in the morning sun. Clusters of pod-topped weeds woven of bronze here and there sprinkling the spotless expanse of white. Dark sprays of slender metallic straight lines, tipped with quivering dots. Pattern to the eye of the sun, as the sun spread delicate network of more pattern in blue shadows on the white beneath. “Gome, my boy,” said Uncle John to his sister Anna’s nine-year-old. “Come now, and I will show you how to go!” Taking the boy by the hand he pulled his big hat down over his shock of gray hair and started straight across and up the sloping fields toward a point upon which he had fixed his keen blue eyes. Neither to right nor to left, intent upon his goal, straight forward he walked—possessed. But soon the boy caught the play of naked weed against the snow, sharp shadows laced in blue arabesque beneath. Leaving his mitten in the strong grasp, he got free. •He ran first left, to gather beads on stems and then beads and tassels on more stems. Then right, to gather prettier ones. Again—left, to some darker and more brilliant—and beyond to a low-spreading kind. Farther on again to tall golden lines tipped with delicate clusters of dark bronze heads. Eager, trembling, he ran to and fro behind Uncle John, his arms growing full of “weeds.” A long way up the slope, arrived at the point on which he had fixed, Uncle John turned to look back. A smile of satisfaction lit the strong Welsh face. His tracks in the snow were straight as any string could be straight. The boy came up, arms full, face flushed, glowing. He looked up at his Uncle—see what he had found! A stern look came down on him. The lesson was to come. Back there was the long, straight, mindful, heedless line Uncle John’s own feet had purposefully made. He pointed to it with pride. And there was the wavering, searching, heedful line embroidering the straight one like some free, engaging vine as it ran back and forth across it. He pointed to that too—with gentle reproof. Both stood looking back. The small hand with half-frozen fingers was again in its [3] mitten in the older, stronger hand; an indulgent, benevolent smile down now on the shamed young face. And, somehow, there was something . . . not clear. Uncle John’s meaning was plain—Neither to Right nor to the Left, But Straight, Is the Way. The boy looked at his treasure and then at Uncle John’s pride, comprehending more than Uncle John meant he should. The boy was troubled. Uncle John had left out something that made all the difference. [4] FAMILY THE BOY BACK in Wales in the Victorian Era, there lived a hatter, stalwart maker of strange, black, high-pointed cones. The witches wore them when riding on their broom-sticks. The Welsh wore them for hats. The hatter was proud of his work and peddled his hats at fairs. He would throw one down on the ground and, “Stand on it!” he would say to anyone likely to buy. On Sundays he preached; a firebrand of a man, questioning how man should be just with God, rejecting the answers most men, and women too, gave him. He was tall, this Richard Jones, dark-eyed—an impassioned, unpopular Unitarian. The daughter of an old Welsh family, Mary Lloyd, heard him and fell in love with him. “For there is the just man who perisheth in his righteousness, and there is the wicked man who prolongeth in his wickedness. “But he that knoweth God and serveth him shall come forth of them all.” So she believed, and went away with him against her parents’ will. If her wealthy family looked askance at her staunch man, what did that matter? She loved him and, so, trusted him. They had seven children, whose family name became Lloyd-Jones. Then his outspoken liberality offending conservative popular opinion made America seem a hope and a haven to the Unitarian, and he came with a delicate wife and their seven to The West. He came to find a farm where his stalwart strength might make a home and a place to work in a land where speech was free, because men were. So the hatter-preacher in his fifty-third year became the Wisconsin Pioneer, with his Thomas, John, Margaret, Mary, Anna, Jenkin and Nannie. Little Nannie, dying on the way, was left behind in strange ground. They came by canal-boat and lake-steamer to Milwaukee on their way to Ixonia, Wis consin. Six years the pioneer couple lived there, where they invoked four more children, Ellen, Jane, James, and Enos, to join their little band before they found the valley by the Wisconsin River. “The Valley,” they all lovingly called it in after life, and lovable it was, lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end. A small stream coursing down each joined at the homestead and continued as a wider stream on its course toward the River. The lower or open end of the [5] Valley was crossed and closed by the broad and sandbarred Wisconsin, and from the hills you could look out upon the great sandy and treeless plain that had once been the bed of the mighty Wisconsin of ancient times. When the virgin soil was broken by the grandfather and his sons, friendly Indians still lingered in the neighborhood. By the eldest son, Thomas, a carpenter, a small house was built on a gently sloping hill side facing south. Balm-of-Gilead trees and Lombardy Poplars were planted by the Mother and her brood around the little house and along the lanes: lanes worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests which clung to the northern slopes and hillcrowns. The southern slopes were all too dry for wood, and were bare except where rock ledges came through. The stables were roofed with straw like the old Welsh thatch. The small simple house, however, was “modern,” clapboarded and shingled by Thomas and his brothers. The kitchen was a lean-to at the rear. An outside stairway led to a cool stone cellar beneath. A root-house was close behind, partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth. Here in “The Valley,” the family tree of Richard Lloyd-Jones, Welsh pioneer, with its ten branches and one scar, struck root in the America of his hope. It was now his haven. Up to this time he had preached, even while traveling on the ships or the canal-boats or at the inns where the family stayed. Usually he was listened to with respect. There was fervor, exaltation in him. He read the Bible his own way with strong Welsh accent, but no one could mistake his meaning. It was often new to his lettered betters and would change their thought. He was pioneer, not on the earth alone, but in mighty reaches of the spirit where the earth grows dim. He had a Church during his-years in Ixonia but again, “where speech was free because men were,” the Church proposed to try him. He said, “You need not. If I am intrusive, I will get out. I cannot quell my spirit.” He had for family crest, the old Druid symbol: /JY “Truth Against the World.” Grandfather preached as Isaiah preached. “The flower fadeth, the grass withereth— but the word of the Lord, thy God, endureth forever.” His children had to learn that chapter of Isaiah, the fortieth, by heart so they could recite it. The boy, his grandson, grew to distrust Isaiah. Was the flower any less desirable because it seemed to have been condemned to die that it might live more abundantly? As they all went to work in the fields, the grass seemed always necessary to life in the Valley, most of all when it withered and was hay to keep the stock alive in winter so the preacher himself might live. The flowers have closed their eyes beneath the stars, opened to the sun, dropped their [6] seeds into the bosom of friendly earth these thousands of years away from Isaiah and bid fair to be unfaded when the “word of our Lord,” as Isaiah heard it, has been much modified in the mouth. . . . Might it not be then before all, that this very grass and these flowers, too, are in truth themselves the very word of God. There seemed base ingratitude in the boastful thunder of that hateful text. When storms swept the Valley from bank to bank of its ranges of hills, then black against a livid sky—lashing the trees, drowning the helpless small things, in the destruction that was wrought and the wreck that followed, the boy would see Isaiah’s “Judgment.” Ah, yes! In this prophet Hell enlarged itself and opened “her” mouth without measure! Woe! Woe! that word “woe” struck on the young heart like a blow—“O Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine and mingle strong drink!” Nor was there to be pity on “the fruit of the womb.” Little children were to be trodden under foot. Isaiah’s awful Lord smote the poor multitudes with a mighty continuous smite, never taking away the gory, dreadful hand outstretched to smite more; never satisfied with the smiting already done. And yet, according to Isaiah, were you willing to argue the matter, to reason with “Him” (none seemed to know whether Isaiah or His Lord was meant by “Him”), your sins would be white as snow. Why? Verily this Holy Warrior was a prophet making God in his own image. Turning his own lusts into virtues because they were on the side of pain instead of on the side of pleasure. What a curse to put upon the mind of any child! How much too much to thrash him! How much less than too little to lead him! His grandson would see the stalwart figure, legs straight in stirrups, of this spiritual brother of Isaiah, his dreaded, beloved Welsh Grandfather, white-bearded and hoary- headed, sitting up straight upon his horse, Timothy, like a Patriarch; stick with shepherd’s- crook hung over the left forearm, the Bible of his faith firm against his side. And his grandson would see that he was thus able to whack his horse on the flank without losing his hold on the Book. W EEK days grandfather believed in the gospel of hard work. Relentlessly he taught his children to add tired to tired and add it again, until the fountain of energy he himself was, working out through his offspring, began to cut away the forests and establish a human [7]