James Gardner deflates FLW's mythic legacy. (NYSUN)
Wright's Many Wrongs
Architecture

BY JAMES GARDNER
October 25, 2004

It is time for some old-fashioned criticism, the kind one rarely reads any more, the kind that takes a sacred cow, filets it, and serves it up as finger food.

Let me begin by admitting I have never much cared for Frank Lloyd Wright. I understand that the polite thing would be to shut up and keep singing. But a new and illuminating show at the Skyscraper Museum positively extorts this disclosure. Devoted to his work on tall buildings, rather than on the low-lying houses for which he is most famous, "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Vertical Dimension" reminds us not only of the architect's frequent lapses in taste but of his contempt for cities in general and for New York in particular.

In the time since his death, Wright's reputation has enjoyed an almost mythic inflation that few humans could ever live up to. On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum's bookstore, which has perhaps the largest selection of art titles in the city, I found only one volume on Gothic cathedrals. But when I went looking for something on Wright, there were almost 50 works that took up two entire shelves.

Wright would be gratified. In the history of architecture, rich though it is in hare-brained self-delusion, there has probably never been an egomaniac like Wright. To this day, not even Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry has gamed the system or played on the credulity of an insecure public with greater cunning or success. The man had ideas and he applied those ideas. Yet Wright was not a deep thinker, and his forms were rarely as powerful or as ingeniously functional as he liked to believe.

Both the formal and the intellectual traditions that influenced even his latest, most modern works were rooted in the anti-industrial doctrines of Ruskin and in Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement at the turn of the last century. Wright's idee fixe was the notion that, with the invention of the automobile, cities and their density were no longer needed. In his utopian fantasy, Americans would feel liberated from cities and so colonize hinterland from sea to shining sea.

In one audio-loop played at the show (consisting of a conversation with Wright at Taliesin in 1956), the architect calls New York a "pigsty" and an "absurdity" and makes the grandiosely pointless claim, as best I could make it out, that "if America is ever to have a civilization of its own it has to get rid of its cities or we will be destroyed with them."

At the same time - and this is pretty much proof that Wright understood he was speaking nonsense - he developed massive utopian schemes for entire cities, as well as messianic visions for New York. I suspect it was his perpetual lack of success in this regard, rather than any loftier principles, that soured him on urban agglomerations.

Wright desperately wanted, for example, to build four monstrous towers near Saint Mark's Church on the Bowery. But these came to nothing when the developer, after seeing Wright's sheerglass renderings, speculated that "a considerable percentage [of the tenants] will have a strong impulse to commit suicide."

Similarly, despite his general mistrust of tall buildings, Wright tried to sell the developer Zeckendorff on his Mile-High Building, a tower that would be exactly as tall as it claimed to be, five times the height of the Empire State Building. It was only when the hard-headed businessman demurred that Wright started calling him (on the same tape) "the Devil Incarnate."

Another scheme for what he called the "Broadacre City" is illustrated in the exhibition by a drawing of a rural river littered with the recycled buildings (among them the Mile High) that Wright could not erect in Manhattan. Buzzing around them are flying-saucer-like automobiles, which Wright hoped to invent.

Formally, these buildings are of a piece with Wright's back-to-nature ideology. That he had no use for the severe geometry of the International Style is made clear in the conversation already quoted, where he can be heard referring to Mies's New York masterpiece as "the Whiskey Building."

Instead of such rationalist exercises, Wright sought an organic, naturalistic approach to form and function that took its cue from the natural surroundings in which it would be set. The necessary absence of nature in big cities made this more difficult, which may explain why Wright appears to have been somewhat at sea when it came to the skyscraper designs on view in this show.

Nevertheless, I suspect it was the analogy to a tree that inspired him to invent what he called the cantilever system, in which skyscrapers are not underpinned by a steel frame, but by a central trunk of reinforced concrete from which the floor plates irradiate as cantilevers. This is secured by a metal base that extends deep into the earth and that he was pleased to call the tap-root.

Any assessment of the worth of the two tall buildings he succeeded in building - the Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wis., and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla. - is obviously a matter of personal preference. But to my eye the better of the two - the Johnson Research Tower, with its rounded corners - still looks a little dull when compared with what the International Stylists were doing at the time. The Price Tower, with its heavy ballast of corroding concrete, its ham-fisted use of brise-soleil, and its insistence on integrating into this verticality the horizontal ticks of Wright's domestic architecture, seems a progenitor of the crass and ill-conceived projects that devastated our cities in the 1970s.

The ultimate cause of Wright's formal, as well as of his intellectual failings is, I suspect, one and the same: an inability to get beyond his fealty to the Arts and Crafts movement of his student days. Once you understand the roots of his art and ideology, you start seeing William Morris wallpaper everywhere, as well as Voysey's goofy Chaucerian inglenooks. Certain people like that sort of thing, but for some of us, it is not - to put the matter delicately - a watershed in the history of taste.

Though Wright surely had certain powers that these forbears did not have, he shared with them the unenviable knack for thinking with his eyes and seeing with his intellect - such as it was.