Wrightites v. Chicago

Because Frank Lloyd Wright of Spring Green, Wis. has not been appointed to the commission of architects that is designing Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition for 1933,earnest esthetes gathered in Manhattan auditoriums three nights in succession last week to thumb their long intelligent noses at the Commission,-to honor the man they consider the greatest living architect. Architect Wright, who has never considered bashfulness a blessing, presided like a benign deity over all three meetings: at the University Club, at Town Hall, at the New School for Social Research.

Liveliest was the Town Hall meeting which opened with a few amiable pleasantries from moonfaced, unctuous Alexander Woollcott. Up rose shock-headed Lewis Mumford, author of Sticks and Stones, able commentator on modern U. S. architecture, fervent Wrightite, and proceeded in a slow, booming voice to rend the ''wise men from the East" who are designing Chicago's Fair.

In 1893 at the time of the first Chicago World's Fair, said he, the seeds of a native U. S. architecture were beginning to sprout in the offices of Louis Sullivan, designer of the first steel frame skyscrapers. Frank Lloyd Wright was working in that office. Disregarding Sullivan and Wright, the World's Fair authorities spent all their money on a flamboyant Court of Honor which slavishly followed the Paris Exposition of 1889. Sullivan was given a Transportation Building to do in a back lot of the Fairgrounds, which was heartily damned by U. S. conservatives but promptly won a medal awarded by the visiting French commission of art. The 1933 exposition is to be modernistic, a style which European architects acknowledge stems directly from Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building and the houses that Frank Wright has been designing for nearly 30 years. For the 1933 Fair, Architect Wright has not been given even a back lot job to work on.

"It is like Hamlet," said Mr. Mumford, "without the Prince of Denmark."

Worst of all, according to Author Mumford, the new Fair buildings are not really modern at all, but "eclectic shams." Pronouncing "eclectic" with the same fine scorn with which an Insurgent Senator pronounces the word "Republican," Lewis Mumford insisted that the new Chicago buildings are merely pseudo-classical buildings to which the architects have applied details of the new and at present fashionable style exactly as they applied Gothic, Renaissance, Georgian details to their steel frame skyscrapers.

Frank Lloyd Wright was more specific:

"I'm anti-imitation. I'm for the use of metal, and I'm trying to bring architecture back to America as something real to America. The proposed World's Fair in Chicago is a conspicuous example of modernism sprung up overnight, of superficiality, sham, imitation. They are making a pretty cardboard picture of ancient wall masses. Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson or Norman Bel Geddes could better have done it. [Norman Bel Geddes is designing several theatres for the fair.] They are specialists in spectacle. But the architecture for the Fair is only bad theatre where theatre does not belong. We want genuineness in our architecture--the genuine expression of American life."

With considerable courage, Architect Raymond Hood, a member of the despised Commission, was present. Perspiring with embarrassment, he came forward to say a few words in defense. No one admired Architect Wright more than Architect Hood, but Architect Wright had not been chosen for the committee because he was "too much of an individualist."

"Since the affair is to be built by a commission, I can not see how one with such individual ideas as Mr. Wright could work with it. Our projects are meant to represent a fair cross section of something or other about modern architecture in America and it would be too difficult to harness Mr. Wright to our general ideas."

Architect Hood might have talked about money. The Fair is being promoted financially by Ambassador Charles Gates Dawes and his brother Rufus Cutler. Its total cost has been estimated at $60,000,000, about $16,000,000 of which has been raised or promised. Because growing Chicago has little available land to give to the Fair, it is to be built partly on artificial islands superimposed on the muddy bottom of Lake Michigan, later to be turned into parks and playgrounds. The construction of this land alone will be costly. Two or three of the solid, honest buildings which the Wrightites advocate would use up the rest of the money, leave half the fair exhibits unprovided for.

Last week the first of the Fair buildings was actually in use. Painted bright blue, roofed with an insulation board of cornstalks, the Administration Building faced the artificial islands that have not yet arisen from the lake.

*The Commission: Chairman Harvey Wiley Corbett (New York); Edward Herbert Bennett (Chicago); Hubert Burnham (Chicago); John Augur Holabird (Chicago); Raymond Mathewson Hood (New York); Ralph Thomas Walker (New York); Paul Philippe Cret (Philadelphia); Arthur Brown Jr. (San Francisco).

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