Two Wrights can Make a Wrong: Guggenheim at Fifty

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward (Skira/Rizzoli, 2009, $75.) Weighing 2.5 kilos, it’s the heaviest take yet on the uppity Wisconsin lad who dropped out of the University of Wisconsin at 20 after two years, to be anointed chief draftsman at the top Chicago firm, Adler-Sullivan.

Six years later he founded his own firm, and American architecture has never been the same, and rarely better. My ultimate ambivalence about Wright was set in stone by a formidable serendipity: the day he died in 1959, I had scheduled the first big speaker for my new Penn course on “The Mass Society”: Lewis Mumford. He was clearly moved: he abandoned his prepared text for an ad lib obit which expressed his regret that Wright was an adolescent who never fulfilled his great potential, especially in New York City.

(This formidable volume commemorates the 50th anniversary of the still contentious Guggenheim Museum.) The noun “Project” dominates this celebratory book’s contents, up to and including his 1959 plans for the cultural center of Baghdad. Mumford argued Wright was bid on concepts, less so on follow through. (And he cheated clients! His Bartlesville, OK, building, was originally conceived as St. Mark’s in the Bowery in Greenwich Village! Abandoned by his businessman admirer, it tried to be a hotel and then a University of Oklahoma architecture Center!)

I love the Goog, more and more, the more I once more submit to its unfunctional wiles. One of my more serendipitous memories was finding myself gawking on opening day alongside Adlai Stevenson. As much as I despise celebrity cults (and as much as I admired him), I asked playfully if he’d let me take a photo to tease my GOP Penn students. His wit was instantaneous: “O.K.—but nothing more far out than a Cezanne!” (A week later, I read in the New York Times how his Soho pals had been trying to esthetically upgrade the Governor by showing off the post Cezanne stuff to the artistically too old fashioned Illinoisan.)

The only equivalent thrill the Big G has given me was 21 years later when I came to the press preview of George Costakis’s superb collection of Russian Modernists. The house photographer didn’t show up so my Contaflex subbed at their scheduled proletarian fashion show. When the exhibition moved to Indianapolis their “Star” published my first (and only!) color spread. It gave me courage to abandon Academe a few months later.

The only imaginative gimmick I devised in 20 years of teaching American Lit was to require a term paper on a great American building. To turn them on, I took them on a tour of Wright’s Beth Shalom in nearby Elkins Park. They were always wowed (as was I, no matter how many times) except for one middle-aged mother who complained. "This place is great—except when the roof leaks at your daughter’s wedding!” Nitpicking. Well so did I when I went to Taliesin West to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Wisconsin Taliesin. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer took me around since I was then writing for Connoisseur.

I was puzzled by some concrete structures painted redwood! He explained that when Wright first visited Scottsdale he was dazzled by the way the redwood irrigation sluices gleamed when the water gushed through them. Alas, when there was no water, redwood evanesced into the hot sun! How was he to know?

Fallingwater, of course, is my all time all Wright structure. That luminous June 1980 lark in my new Honda from Philly to Cincinnati (where the AIA was holding its annual convention) remains a high point of my life. My guides at Fallingwater were the sweetest young Chicago couple ordinarily working for the late Bertrand Goldberg, my favorite American architect of all our eras. (He was humble, principled, and inventive!) And nearby in Pittsburgh the Carnegie was displaying the visual magic of my favorite artist, Sonia Delaunay, a.k.a Sophie Terks from Odessa. I parked my Honda in their Greyhound garage and slept soundly until the driver dropped me off at that Art Deco jewel of Cincy’s Union Station.

And who do you suppose was there at that ungodly hour, no less than architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, then of the New York Times. Committed Serendippie that I am, I was radiant—until I discovered that he not only wouldn’t let me hitchhike back to the convention hotel with him, he wouldn’t even say hello! Wow. Not that you have to be civilized to write great criticism.

But I had recently sloughed off Roman Catholicism for the easier faith of Architecture with a capital A. (I console myself to this day by looking for serious errors in his crits. DAMN, but he’s good. Too good for my own sake!) And there were oodles of friendly architects at the Hilton where I gouged on my New Dogma until it was time to snooze back to my new sleeping Honda, whereupon I fondly Hondaed back to Philly, full of grace. Thinking about Fallingwater. And its venial sins.

First of all, no six footer me (5’8”), still I had to bow down to get through FLW’s doors. Damn. That arrogant squirt (who shamelessly used a Porkpie hat on his tiny top as well as High Heels on his dinky feet to simulate the giant he construed himself to be!) was making himself the module! Frank, really!

And although I concede that the HEARTH should be the HEART of the home, I was seriously upset by the fact that his giant pot for heating food was too big to ever get hot enough to cook! (Call it his Crackpot.) And what is less, the crane designed to swing the pot over the piddling fire didn’t swing!

Then I remember telling my students at Beth Shalom that his client Edgar Kaufmann had asked Wright when presented with those glorious drawings in 1934 if he ought to have his engineers check out the math for the cantilevered rooms. Frank blew his top. (You don’t ask a genius to have his math checked!) Unfortunately, those cantilevered bits of Fallingwater are about to fall into the water of Bear Run. And as a Pennsylvania taxpayer I flinch at the estimated repair costs—from 11 to 23 millions!

So Lewis Mumford and that bride’s mother were right, Frank. And the $75 volume the Guggies have assembled to praise their half century of custodianship is much too lenient on their undisciplined genius. In a cultural democracy every taxpayer has a vote. This book is much too self-congratulatory. My wife has filched my favorite Latinate TV shirt which reads, ERRARE HUMANUM EST. Right, Frank? That’s what our architects need to remember.

That great Finn humanist, Alvar Aalto, said as much as the epigraph to his centennial retrospective in Helsinki: “Never forget: Architects make mistakes.”

A version of this article has been published by Broad Street Review.