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Usonian Architect

About four miles from Spring Green, Wis., the hills splay into two soft ranges to let a fast stream flow toward the Wisconsin River. Facing southwest over this valley a big, long house folds around the summit of one hill, its roof lines parallel to the line of ridges, its masonry the same red-yellow sandstone that crops out in ledges along the stream. Its name is Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning "shining brow." Its history is one of tragic irony. Its character is one of extraordinary repose. It is the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect of the 20th Century.

For the past five years Taliesin has been a workshop, farm and studio for more than a score of apprentices. During its first winter the Taliesin Fellowship spent most of its time cutting wood in two shifts to keep the fires going. Since then, its life has been less defensive. After nearly a decade, the master of Taliesin has again had work in hand. In California, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Pennsylvania superb new buildings have grown from his plans.

A decade ago, when the brand-new International Style in architecture was seriously taken up by U. S. architects, many of them were surprised to discover that Wright had been its forerunner 30 years before, that by great European architects such as Mies van der Rohe he was regarded as a master spirit. In 1932 Wright published his Autobiography, a book which combined magnificent self-revelation with the most stimulating discussion of architecture ever heard in the U. S.

The valley in which Architect Wright lives was settled by his Welsh grandfather when it was wild. Wright was born there and grew up on the farm of one of his uncles. His first adventurous piece of architecture was a windmill. He felt and has developed a stronger sense of the earth's reality than most poets. "Man takes a positive hand in creation," he has said, "whenever he puts a building upon the earth beneath the sun."

An erect, impudent youngster of 18, Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887 with three years of engineering school behind him. No. 1 U. S. architect was an immaculate, brown-eyed little French-Irishman of haughty brilliance named Louis Henry Sullivan. Sullivan fathered the skyscraper.

While Louis Sullivan was working on public buildings, what few commissions Adler & Sullivan were given for private houses fell to Frank Lloyd Wright. In the next twenty years he designed and built, for clients scattered throughout the Midwest, nearly 100 houses for which no precedent existed anywhere. In leafy suburbs of Chicago these houses still look strangely civilized and sheltered, with low vistas and wide-spreading eaves. "Taking a human being for my 'scale,' " Wright has said, "I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one--ergo, 5'8" tall, say. . . ." But though Wright had freed domestic architecture he did not feel himself free. Making what provision he could for his wife and six children, he went to Italy with a woman named Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were never married. On their return in 1911, he put all he knew of architecture into the building of Taliesin as a new home for them both. Changes of this kind are ill-fated by ancient superstition, but few have met such a fate as Frank Lloyd Wright's. In 1913, a Barbados Negro servant had run amok at Taliesin, murdered its mistress, her two children, an apprentice and three others, burned the living quarters to the ground. Wright buried his mistress alone, and lived there alone for months. Then he began to rebuild Taliesin.

After 1915, Wright's rebirth in architecture took the form of creative audacity on a grand scale. Commissioned in 1916 to build the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, he produced one of the marvels of modern construction. A vast, low building on a symmetrical plan, it was Wright's first ambitious use of the cantilever principle, which allowed him to rest each concrete floor slab on a central support, like a tray on a waiter's fingers. He roofed the building with light copper sheathing, made the centre of gravity low as a ship's. And like a ship, the Imperial was made to float. Instead of sinking deep piers to bedrock, the architect rested his building on hundreds of slender, pointed 8-ft. piles, distributing the weight evenly on a 60-ft. pad of mud.

Wright finished his work in 1920. He was in Los Angeles when the big quake hit Tokyo three years later. After ten days of anxious waiting, Wright learned by cable that the building had ridden out the quake unharmed while other modern buildings were shaking their masonry into the streets.

He had not been back at Taliesin long before the house again burned down, this time destroying hundreds of valuable things Wright had brought from Japan. Again he rebuilt Taliesin. Then his second wife, Miriam Noel, left him. Before he was able to marry Olgivanna, the soft-voiced, Montenegrin woman who is his present wife, they and their baby were incredibly harried by the newspapers, the Noel lawyers and the police, who jailed them in Milwaukee Wright could get no work, could earn no money. Taliesin fell into the hands of a bank. Wright got it back only when a group of old clients and friends incorporated him in 1929.

Since then, bobbing up for the third time, Frank Lloyd Wright has done perhaps his most amazing work. In Racine, Wis., Contractor Ben Wiltscheck is now finishing a business building for S. C. Johnson & Son which is unlike any other in the world. A few miles from Racine, President Herbert Johnson has let Wright build him a house which lies along the prairie in four slim wings At Bear Run, Pa., Wright has just finished his most beautiful job, "Fallingwater," a house cantilevered over a waterfall.

Usonia is Frank Lloyd Wright's name for the U. S. A. He found it in Samuel Butler and, eclectic for once, appropriated it because he liked it. It is one of the tricks of speech and thought by which Wright links a curiously old-fashioned Americanism to an Americanism which is still ahead of his time He thinks of himself as in the "centre line" of Usonian independence that runs through Thoreau and Whitman. Whether or not that line is still central in U. S. culture, there can be little doubt that Frank Lloyd Wright is their worthy peer. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.