![]() Wright was “one of the most creative architectural geniuses of all time,” the critic Lewis Mumford wrote, though each building “stands in self-imposed isolation.” The esteemed contemporary architecture critic Paul Goldberger once put it this way in regard to Wright: “He really did feel that America, as this new democratic country.needed a new architectural expression.that was horizontal, open in plan, open across the landscape, a sense somehow that it was connecting to that great open American land.He saw that American landscape, the openness of it, the sense that it was always moving across the land, pushing westward.” He did it initially, and most radically, in his “Prairie Houses,” in and around the turn of the 20th century, which alone are enough to have made him immortal. It was a way of thinking and feeling he never let go of. He wanted to let light in and space in, air in, life in. ![]() No matter what else he did with the design of a house in his nearly three-quarters of a century as a revolutionary architect, whether hanging it on the lip of a waterfall in Pennsylvania or sticking it miragelike in the middle of a desert in Arizona, he was out to “break the box,” to destroy forever those tight, draped, dark, horsehair, closed-off, Victorian rooms of our 19th-century forebears. (He had a term for this latter kind of house, which I so deeply love-“Usonian.”) The interior of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, whether a great ship on the prairie or just a little birdlike jewel you swear you could nest in your palm, is always about many things, but at the center of each one is the intertwined idea of openness and flow. Shelters for mankind-from the almost impossibly grand to the utilitarian bare and spare and functional, and all the more beautiful for such simplicity and environmental purity. “The thing had simply shaken itself out of my sleeve,” the old shaman liked to say, ever his own best publicist. He just needed to conceive the thing, draw the thing, and make the thing. It was as if he knew what he meant, or at least felt, even if you didn’t know, and even if in some ultimate spiritual and intellectual sense he didn’t really know, either. (OK, that’s a different metaphor.) It was all part of his gospel of “organic architecture,” even if his definitions of that concept were always shifting around, like verbal tectonic plates, and sometimes seemed to mystify even him. One of Wright’s nearly lifelong dictums was that his buildings were like shrubs and trees, growing upward, in effect, from the inside out, emerging spanking-wet and blinking their eyes to the world. Not quite half of all his drawings and designs and studies were realized, and a little more than 400 still come magically out of the American ground looking for the light: Fallingwater near Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, Robie House on the campus of the University of Chicago-to cite just five masterworks by their vernacular names. Overwhelmingly, though, they were houses, shelters for mankind, and by that fact alone, I think there is something slyly to be said about his fundamental decency as a human being. They were churches, schools, offices, banks, museums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile showroom, a synagogue, a mile-high skyscraper-and one exotic-looking Phillips 66 gas station in Cloquet, Minnesota. In his 72-year career as an architect and egotist, Wright managed to design more than 1,100 things, a staggering number by any artistic measurement. (I know, it reads like a typo, but I’m referring to the handful of posthumous works that, for one reason or another, didn’t get around to being built until long after his death in 1959.) His work has been built over three centuries-19th, 20th and 21st. In his cape and porkpie hat and those goofy pants (almost pantaloons) that were pegged at the ankles, he strutted through our national imagination for something like a seven-decade career. Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect this country has yet produced, was born two years after the end of the Civil War and died not quite two years after the launch of Sputnik-91 years and 10 months on the earth.
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