FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

In 1961 the editor of the University of Wisconsin Press said to me in response to my submitting a manuscript on Wright's houses of the fifties that he wanted an interpretative study of Wright. 

I was just thinking about the question of what
Frank Lloyd Wright offers us at this point in time.
 
 Are there distractions that cause some to lose
interest in him and in his work?  If really hard
times are dead ahead, then can a study of, and
interest in Wright, help prepare us for those
times?
 
Wright was a thinker to some extent and very
articulate. He was also a Wisconsin populist to
some extent, though Mrs. Wright and the higher
level "pencils" did not always follow him in his
quest to help the common people.  In a speech at
the Student Union of  the University of Wisconsin
in about 1952 he said a "Democrat" is born
distrusting the government. What he meant
by "democrat" was a person believing in the
freedom and integrity of the individual - which
placed him in opposition to government and the
trend toward totalitarianism in our own
government.  I pulled out some other of his more
political type statements like that in a segment
on a cassette tape I have.
 
Many years before Homeland Security and the
Patriot Act, Wright's political views got him into
some trouble with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. 
See  Jeffrey St. Clair's  article, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI in
Counter Punch, at  
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair0813.html
 
Hoover and his FBI harrasssed Wright and the
Fellowship in the thirties and during World War II
because of their political views.  Imagine what
the Bush regime might do if Wright were still
around and opposed the wars against Moslem
countries.
 
I don't think that Wright's idea that organic
architecture is the foundation of a democratic
culture has worked out to be that true.  There is
a kind of truth in Wright's architecture, it does
fit in with Nature, has a beauty, and is
coherent.  Much of modern art is delibertely urgy
and is incoherent.  That is, Wright, unlike almost
all the other Masters of modern art, did not drive
a Wrecking Machine. I know he liked to drive his
road grader, standing up there in his baggy pants
and little nineteenth century tie. Wright was not
out to destroy the Christian-based culture in
America and in Europe.  But most of the Modern
Masters of art, especially the surrealists who had
a dark or occult side, did drive Wrecking Machines
to tear down the Christian-based culture..  
However, Wright  was not a Christian himself.  He
said the only God you will ever know is your own
ideals.
 
And because he was not a Christian, and fully
spiritual in a Christian way, he is not something
we can get hold of to help us go through very hard
times without compromising our morality and
cognitive clarity.

I agree, Wright had some cognitive clarity, but he
was not fully spiritual.  And we need a fully 
spiritual mentality to endure the times.
 
The historians and other inellectuals used to talk
about the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the time.  It
is different now in 2006 than it was in the
fifties when Wright was in his productive period,
designing great houses for the middle and upper
middle class people, those who did appreciate him
then.  One thing the very hard times that are
arriving has done is weaken the middle class, so
that many who are now  the age of those who had
Wright design houses for them in the fifties do
not have the leasure time to contemplate Wright's
organic architecture or the money to build one of
his houses.
 
I remember in 1960 when I talked with the Editor
of the University of Wisconsin Press about
publishing my manuscript on Wright's houses after
1950, that he said he wanted  an interpretive
study of Wright.  I  thought then that Wright had
done a pretty good job of interpreting his own
work, and that Henry Russell-Hitchcock and  Grant
Manson, who had almost the only books out on
Wright's works then, had not done much in the way
of interpreting him either. I was just presenting
the facts on the newer houses that  Russell-
Hitchcock and Manson had not covered.
 
For we in 2006 do not have the same Zeitgeist,
spirit or mentality that those interested in
Wright in the late fifties had, though  most of us
were academics then.  Bruce Radde, myself and
Thomas E. Rickard were graduate students in the
late fifties. John Kienitz, an Art History
professor at Wisconsin then, inspired Radde and
myself to appreciate Wright.  Kienitz was a
personal friend of Wright and sometimes Wright
confided in him.  Once Kienitz told me that Wright
did not  at times like the influence of Mrs Wright
and the senior apprentices.

Thomas Rickard or T.E. Rickard was at Oregon State
rather than Wisconsin.
 
   Maybe now  we have better photographers, or
more of them,  like yourself and Bill Storrer. 
But we all receive something from the culture, and
it seems to me that the culture discourages
cognitive and moral clarity
that probably Wright would recognize as being a
problem, were he around.