Reassessing the Wright Stuff

By Wolf Von Eckardt.

New appreciation for a great architect's domestic interiors

A Frank Lloyd Wright Revival seems to be in the making. Exhibitions, symposia and books on the master's volcanic life and titanic work proliferate. One of Wright's two "Tree of Life" stained-glass doors brought $110,000 at Christie's in New York City in May, a record for an American stained-glass panel. Starting next week, 100 of his architectural drawings will be offered at Manhattan's Max Protetch Gallery for $7,000 and up. Wright buildings from coast to coast are being devoutly restored, the most important of them his first Home and Studio, on which construction began in 1889 in Oak Park, Ill. This boldly simplified yet intricate shingle-style house, along with 29 other Wright structures in its vicinity, attracts more than 30,000 admirers a year on organized tours alone.

Two or three decades ago, Americans regarded Wright (1867-1959) as their greatest architect mostly because of the furious stunts with which he reacted to the International Style--his spiraled Guggenheim Museum in New York City or his proposal to build a mile-high skyscraper in Illinois. The present revival, however, focuses on Wright's early domestic architecture, his houses and, significantly, their interior designs. Last year the Metropolitan Museum placed the reconstructed living room of his Francis Little House (1912-14) of Wayzata, Minn., on permanent display, joining the Temple of Dendur and other landmarks of the march of civilization. Wright was despotically insistent on designing every interior detail of his houses, right down to flower vases and table linens; he even wanted to redesign the telephone.

This aspect of Wright's work is exemplified in "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School," a show of more than 250 furnishings, drawings, photographs and documents that opened last week at New York City's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's national museum of design. The exhibition, which will run until Dec. 31, is an almost intimately informal survey of Wright's brilliant beginnings, from his tracing of a Louis Sullivan ornament in 1892 to his drawings for the Dorothy Martin Foster House in Buffalo in 1923, which marked a new direction in his work.

Wright started not with a style but with an idea, a Weltanschauung, a principle, which he called "organic architecture." What he meant by it was that humans are part of nature, subject to the laws, rhythms and mysteries of nature and happiest if they live in harmony with it, and their dwellings should reflect this unity inside and out. Wright's canon of organic design (which, being a loquacious and somewhat argumentative man, he often confused and even contradicted) is no Thoreauvian Utopia. He shared the American faith of his time in the blessings of technology. "This thing we call the Machine," he said in 1901, "is no more or less than the principle of organic growth working irresistibly the Will of Life through the medium of Man." But machine products, he believed, must be designed by artists. The objects on view at the Cooper-Hewitt remind us of what could be achieved with such a shaping vision.

Wright was the leading exponent of the short-lived Prairie School, America's most successful attempt to achieve a national style, a unified design. The Prairie School emerged in the first decade of the century from a riptide of social change. Previously the American middle-class home was a small-scale, small-budget imitation of the English country house--backstairs, servants' quarters, butler's pantry and all. With industrialization and urbanization, however, the servants left for factory jobs; fathers and sons and even daughters began to earn their bread outside the homestead. The household changed from producer to consumer, and wives became household managers.

Wright's response to this shift was to make the kitchen an efficient workshop and to gather the family around the hearth, as if to hold it together. Large, central fireplaces are the dominant element in his Prairie houses. Prominent chimneys stake them to the earth and provide structural support for the sheltering roof. The entire ground floor around the hearth is one room, a family hall flowing from the vestibule to the living room to the dining room. It is as different from the stiff, old parlor as it is from the informal recreation room of today's suburban home. As Wright saw it, the hearth was the place both to entertain guests and to relax in family privacy.

The Cooper-Hewitt show only hints at this architectural premise of the Prairie house, taking it for granted. Nor does the exhibition play up the uniqueness of the school. The Cooper-Hewitt, set as it is in the ornate decor of the former Carnegie mansion on Fifth Avenue, is fortunately forced to forgo the latest museum-display fad of dark rooms with theatrically spotlighted star items. Instead, the objects are presented as a proud collector might show them to his guests. The viewer discovers for himself that it all adds up to a wonderful harmony, a unified style.

The early manifestations of that style--sketches for the Susan Lawrence Dana House of 1903 in Springfield, Ill., for instance--just barely escape the "hot breath of Victorianism," as Actress Anne Baxter, Wright's granddaughter, once called it. For the Darwin D. Martin House of 1904 in Buffalo, Wright designed a table whose cantilevers echoed those of the house itself. Later, in a chair and monumental dining table for the Henry J. Allen House of 1917 in Wichita, Kans., the style, still complex in its details, reveals itself in almost naked simplicity. The natural beauty of the wood gram dominates the form.

Wright eventually claimed that he created the Prairie Style "alone, absolutely alone," but the exhibition shows that the Prairie School was indeed a school. Many of its designers--among them, Walter Burley Griffin, his wife Marion Mahony Griffin, William Drummond and Barry Byrne--were closely associated with Wright as the Prairie Style developed. Mahony drew many of the exquisite pen-and-ink renderings that came out of the Wright office. Griffin went on to design Canberra, the Australian capital. The foremost ulterior designer working with Wright was George M. Niedecken, whose confident drawings deserve the special attention that the Cooper-Hewitt show gives them.

Most viewers will leave the show painfully aware of the qualities missing in our present surroundings. Foremost is the matter of scale. Although some Prairie School designs appear monumental, they are still comfortably related to the mortals who view them and use them. Wright, a short man, managed to give grandeur to a chair or a room or a house without intimidating us with its size. Nor does Prairie School ornament appear in the self-conscious manner in which post-modernists now glue or paint it on their designs. Wright and the Prairie School's precise geometric decorations--the leading on the glass, the pattern of brick and wood panels and curtains, the carvings of wood or stone--all seem organic, as much part of the object as the markings on the wings of a butterfly.

It may be that we suddenly take to the warm, womblike darkness, the friendly formality of wood furniture and the comforting earth colors of Wright's interiors because we desperately need what they convey. Although we may be fleetingly thrilled, we are surely not satisfied with what fashionable ulterior design offers today. The model living room, as depicted in the stores and decorator magazines, has become America's disaster area. We have a choice between bizarrely abstract furnishings in chrome or lacquer, alienated from living reality, and eclectic kitsch heaped on like the toppings on ice cream sundaes--not much of a choice. --By Wolf Von Eckardt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.