Ahead of His Time

Frank Lloyd Wright, 78, was a little worried. While designing a mortuary for San Francisco's Nicholas P. Daphne, the dean of U.S. architecture got to wondering "if I felt as well as I should. But Nick had a way of referring to the deceased, always, as 'the merchandise,' and that would cheer me up. I pulled through. . . ."

The current issue of the ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, devoted entirely to his work, shows how lively old Frank Lloyd Wright still is. Not long ago, he asked a news photographer to use tissue over his flashbulbs so as not to accent Wright's wrinkles; but the new wrinkles in his architecture are impossible to hide. He crammed the FORUM with diagrams of fresh ideas as seemingly wild as the spiral museum he designed for Manhattan's Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Let it Rain. Most of the projects shown have not progressed beyond the blueprint stage. But the cumulative evidence of Wright's designs--almost all of them planned during the last ten years--proved that he remains the most creative of living architects. In its introduction FORUM declares that Wright is "designing (and this is much more our tragedy than his) not for life as it is in our own perilous time, but for life as it can be--and some day will be." "I have $13 million worth of [building] lined up," Wright complained, "and can't build anything. . . . There should be no shortages."

Among the FORUM'S few photographs of actual buildings were shots of Taliesin West, Wright's winter headquarters in the Arizona desert, which after ten years is "still under construction" by his students. Wright admits that the white canvas ceiling is likely to leak, but it is "translucent and attractive beyond expression." He considers light and space as important to houses as the roof itself.

"We can never make the living room big enough," says Wright, "the fireplace important enough, or the sense of relationship between exterior, interior and environment close enough. . . ." One new Wright house, designed for a California cliff top, seems to rear up no feet out of the ocean, like the cliff it stands on.

Let It Shake. Other recent Wright projects: a Dallas hotel which, "unlike most commercial hotels . . .is planned chiefly for comfort and entertainment of guests," and a sports club for the Hollywood hills, featuring vast saucers of concrete, cantilevered out from a central shaft. The lowest saucers would hold a tennis court and a swimming pool. Those who dared to go higher could get a cocktail, or, at the very top, a sun bath. "The construction," said Wright blandly, "would have the same chance in a temblor as a tree with a taproot. The dramatic character. . . is achieved at no sacrifice of either economy or good sense. . . "

Wright has made a habit of confounding engineers with buildings which looked plain foolish and turned out to be foolproof. He scorns the cold functionalism of most modern architecture. What makes him a revered revolutionary at 78 is his insistence that buildings are not just "machines for living."

Architects, Wright believes, should concern themselves as much with human aspirations as with human needs. "Organic" architecture, he concludes in the FORUM, must have "the integrity, where the human spirit is concerned, of a tree or a plant. It is that character in the buildings shown here that should interest you. . ."

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