Wright's Time

A quarter-century ago, Chicago and the Midwest were startled by the appearance, here and there amid the contemporary melange of Victorian residences, of an occasional long, low rectilinear structure with severe walls of stone or stucco, and wide, overhanging roof casting deep horizontal bands of shadow on the walls. Such houses looked simple to build, serene and solid, but their blocky squareness, their squatness, aroused comment more hostile than surprised. People with established fortunes and homes suspected that only the ''newly rich" would employ so queer an architect. In the East, with its colonial traditions and propinquity to European standards, the new geometric style of Frank Lloyd Wright was deemed "mad" if not vulgar, and quite beneath notice. Architect Wright did not worry. He found plenty of Midwesterners either new-rich or bold enough to take an interest in his personality and ideas. The farther west he went the better he was received. In California his rectilinear houses seemed a natural evolution of the Mission tradition. He designed the square-cut Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and his theory that architecture should be adapted to modern materials and building methods was justified when the structure withstood the earthquake of 1923. In Buffalo he built a factory for Larkin Co. which was one of the first to emphasize pier and grill construction. The ateliers of Europe long ago paid respect to Architect Wright. Progressive U. S. architects long ago fell in with his rectilinear mode because it is easy to build. Hand-carved traditional ornament, always eschewed by Wright, is almost universally regarded now as an artificial extravagance in a machine age. Steel skeletons and stone sheathing are, as Wright predicted, expressed rather than concealed. Architects are proud to design power stations which look like power stations, skyscrapers which do not resemble distorted Classic Temples. Last week the East joined the Midwest. West and Europe in acknowledging Frank Lloyd Wright as a pioneer in modernism. The Architectural League dined him formally in its Manhattan clubhouse. After dinner the company witnessed the opening of the first Wright exhibition in Manhattan. On the walls were quotations from Mr. Wright's writings. Excerpt: "A good word in architecture is 'clean.' Another is 'integral.' Still another is 'plastic'--one more 'quiet.'" On view were two of his latest projects: an 18-story glass-walled residential tower built on the cantilever principle; a mammoth skyscraper for the Chicago offices of National Life Insurance Co., whose walls involve a minimum of masonry, whose multitudinous windows are accented horizontally instead of vertically. Architect Wright conceives of architecture as joined substantially with the earth. With the horizontal line, even in skyscrapers, he emphasizes this union. Comment at and on his Manhattan show must have persuaded Architect Wright that he had lived to see his own time.

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