Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture PDF
Preview Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture
redirecting... cover next page > 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. cover next page > < previous page page_1 next page > 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- < previous page page_1 next page > < previous page page_10 next page > 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, < previous page page_10 next page > < previous page page_100 next page > 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 < previous page page_100 next page > < previous page page_101 next page > 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. < previous page page_101 next page >
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