Native Genius

In the still predawn hours, the old man sleeping in a room in St. Joseph's Hospital, Phoenix, Ariz, was heard to sigh deeply, and then he was dead. So last week departed Frank Lloyd Wright, 89, three days after a successful operation to remove an intestinal block. With his passing, the U.S. lost its greatest architect--a lone, yeasty genius who devoted his life to working out his own unique vision of what architecture could be in a democratic society. "If this were an age like the Renaissance." said Architect Eero Saarinen. "Frank Lloyd Wright would have been honored as the Michelangelo of the 20th century."

Architect Wright's great accomplishment was to demolish the concept that a building should be a box. But his genius was prodigal. Any Wright house contained dozens of ideas that lesser men seized upon and made a style. There is hardly a modern house in the U.S. that does not owe at least some of its features to him. Among Wright innovations: the split-level living room, the open plan for house interiors, the corner picture window, modern radiant floor heating, the carport (he coined the name, too).

Wright's concept of architecture was so all-encompassing that it permeated nearly every aspect of his life, from his clothes, cut to his order and design, to the chairs, napkins, bed. and even the desk blotters that he used. Hand in hand with his passion for design went a Nietzschean sense of destiny. Said he: "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.''

Truth Against the World. Wright's jaunty assurance, charm, and dogged determination to achieve greatness were all in evidence by the time he was 19, looking for his first job as a draftsman in Chicago. His mother had destined him from the cradle to be an architect, hung his room with woodcuts of English cathedrals, hand-raised him according to the advanced Froebel kindergarten with its great emphasis on creative play with geometric blocks. Summertimes his mother's family, the Lloyd-Joneses--bearded, hymn-singing Welshmen who still boasted of their Druid motto. "Truth Against the World''--gave him a lesson in farm work that Wright later recalled as "working from tired to tired." His father, an unstable drifter who fluctuated between being a Unitarian minister and a music master, taught him the importance of music and oratory.

The man who recognized his genius was Louis Sullivan, the master skyscraper builder. Though Wright had only three years of engineering training at the University of Wisconsin, Sullivan hired him. But to fellow draftsmen the young Wisconsin countryman, with his flowing tie and long hair, was a natural butt for jokes. Wright fought them to a draw, in eluding one brawl from which he emerged with eleven knife wounds in his back.

For six years he served an apprenticeship to the man he called "Lieber Meis-ter." "Form follows function," Sullivan insisted. "Form and function are one, and should be taken into the realm of the spiritual," young Wright replied, and struck out on his own. Soon adventuresome clients began going to Architect Wright's studio in Oak Park, Ill. In the midst of architects busy designing picturesque Queen Anne-style houses and neoclassic copies, Wright lopped off gables and pillars with a stroke of his pencil, created his own prairie houses. He flattened the roof to parallel the earth line, projected eaves to enforce the sense of shelter. Taking the fireplace and low. massive chimney as a central pivot. Wright began to project exuberant wings, bring balconies into living rooms, replace the dark corners with glass.

Famous or Notorious. By 1909 Wright was 40, and at the peak of his career. His Larkin Building in Buffalo had pioneered air conditioning, introduced the first metal-bound plate-glass doors, the first all-steel office furniture; with Unity Church in Oak Park, he had invented a whole vocabulary of cubist forms to express a new building material, poured concrete. Publication of his works in Europe created a sensation.

But at home, it was Wright's marital escapades that made the biggest headlines. After 19 years of marriage and six children, he ran off with a pretty married neighbor, Mrs. Mamah Borthwick Cheney, built the first Taliesin for her on the ancestral Lloyd-Jones acres outside Spring Green, Wis. The liaison ended in tragedy when a mad Barbados servant burned down the house, murdered Mamah and her two children. Wright's second marriage, to monocled Sculptress Miriam Noel, wore thin in three years. Soon Wright was in the tabloid headlines again, jailed for crossing state borders with a handsome Montenegrin. Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich, the woman who later became his third wife.

"I wanted fame," Wright confessed in later years. "Instead, I became notorious." As the Depression of the '30s closed in, Wright went bankrupt, finally incorporated himself and turned the rebuilt Taliesin into an apprentice school for architects. When the Museum of Modern Art staged its historic 1932 show of International Style architecture, Wright was represented, but in effect considered already dead and buried.

New Force. What put Wright back on his feet, and made him once again a force to be reckoned with, was a series of commissions from men as highly individualistic as himself. The result was several of the buildings rated today as among the alltime greats of U.S. architecture. Among them: "Falling Water," in Bear Run, Pa., Wright's first reinforced-concrete house, in which he flung cantilevered floors dramatically out over the waterfall; the S.C. Johnson & Son Co.'s Racine, Wis. wax factory, with soaring mushroom columns in the work space and a 16-story laboratory tower completely sheathed in glass tubing.

With Wright's dramatic comeback, clients once again sought out the master, but on his own terms. To own a Wright house, young couples went into hock for years, docilely took dictation from the master on how they were to live. In such a favorable climate, Wright was often carried away by the sheer momentum of his own self-confidence. His T-square and triangle elaborated spaces on the drafting table that often owed more to forceful geometry than practicality; he designed hexagonal bedrooms, built shoulder-pinching corridors. For the late Solomon R. Guggenheim he designed a museum in the form of a bowl, with ramps for galleries, which is only now nearing completion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Old, cherished projects from the past were dusted off. For instance, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., erected in 1956, actually derives from a 1929 model. This dated quality often dimmed Wright's luster in the eyes of his rivals.

Tombstones & Coffins. Wright vociferously maintained his claim to originating modern architecture. But when it came back to him from Europe in the forceful form of works by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he belabored these men as "glassic architects" and worse. He dramatically ranged himself against the sweeping tide of .the International Style. Manhattan's United Nations Secretariat was a "tombstone," Lever House "a waste of space," the Seagram Building "a whisky bottle on a card table." The steel-cage frame was "19th century carpenter architecture already suffering from arthritis of the joints." Boxy modern houses he called "coffins for living."

Such pointed barbs, repeated in the late years over radio and TV, did not go unnoticed by his colleagues. "He no longer speaks to the present generation." one architect snapped.

Almost by reflex to the hostility Wright often aroused with his freewheeling comments, the home life at Taliesin became his own world. At its center were Wright and Olgivanna and their daughter lovanna. Around them were 65 apprentices, who happily farmed the vegetables, waited on table and washed the family laundry for the privilege of having a bench in Wright's drafting room. Draftsmen found themselves singing in the a cappella choir of 30 voices, playing in orchestra and quartet, performing with the dance groups. Wright treated them all as extensions of his hand, told them: "You can stay here for years and never touch the bottom, sides, or top of the great principles at work here."

To visitors Wright would boast of his 18 gold medals, declare: "They say I am the world's greatest architect. Perhaps I am. But who else is there? If architecture is what I conceive it to be, there has never been another architect."

But what earned Frank Lloyd Wright the grudging but nearly universal respect of his fellow architects was his insistence that architecture must be an art. "What people want, what they desperately need," Wright said, "is some communication of the spirit, some quality of the soul." It was toward that aim that Wright's whole genius was directed. Almost uniquely among architects, he was able to develop his own particular vision in terms of one highly individualistic but consistent idiom of forms. His prodigious explorations of space and form marked and celebrated Frank Lloyd Wright and his own time on earth. But for the nation, they also comprise a heritage testifying to man's concern with his own nobility and his abiding need for beauty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.