I've been reading a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright lately. As everybody knows, Wright was kind of the atom bomb of architecture in the 20th century. He's been dead for over fifty years, but his designs are still ubiquitous in books, documentaries, calendars, films, etc. His influence was so powerful and so wide-reaching that even after all this time, he's probably one of the only architects anywhere that your average joe can name. He was a big deal and continues to be.
What not many people know is that when I was growing up, before I wanted to draw comics or write poetry or do anything else, I wanted to be an architect. I don't know where the idea came from -- my mom probably -- but some of my earliest memories are of me drawing plans for ridiculously fanciful houses. (One, as I recall, used a rainbow as an entry sidewalk. That should tell you how young I was when I was making these drawings.) Anyway, when I was twelve, my dad arranged for me to visit an actual architect's office and hang out for a while. John Watson was a family friend and he had a small firm that at the time had its offices on the second floor of a beautiful old building just across from the river in Idaho Falls. I sat at giant drafting table and had my run of all the tools and materials I wanted. I talked with Mr. Watson and he answered all my questions. At the end of that visit, I was more of less resigned to not being an architect. Too much math, too much management and seemingly not enough creativity. I left with the impression that it was an architect's job to just sort of manage everyone else, and that idea didn't appeal to me in the slightest. So I left that idea behind and went on to study portrait painting, landscape painting, literature, and poetry. (Jeeze, is it any wonder I am poor? Look at that list. I might as well have taken classes in "Would you like fries with that?")
Anyway, even though I left it behind as a professional pursuit, I have always been interested in and moved by architectural design. A well-planned, beautifully designed building can be as exciting to me as a good poem, song, story, or movie. I just dig it. Working in downtown Detroit from 2006 to 2009 was kind of a thrill for me because, for all the homeless guys and decay, there were all the gorgeous buildings everywhere I looked. Narrow row houses and Victorian mansions in Corktown, art deco sky scrapers downtown, crazy Modernist and Brutalist campus buildings at Wayne State - it was an architectural bonanza.
So, like a lot of buffs, I'm fascinated by FLW's designs - his big, famous ones like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim but also his small, obscure ones like Teater's Knoll, a tiny artist studio perched on an outcropping of basalt above the Snake River, the only FLW design in the entire state of Idaho. Every aspect of his buildings is fascinating - exterior, interior, landscaping, lighting, all of it. His designs always catch my eye, are always distinct and, I think, really lovely.
So, out of curiosity, I've been reading about him lately. First I finished a small, narrowly focused non-fiction book called Death in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan. It focuses on a story I'd heard about but never really understood. In 1914, seven people were killed and a fire was set at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin. Written by an academic but with a nice literary flourish, the book carefully explains and contextualizes what Wright was doing in rural Wisconsin, who was in the house, who committed the murders, and a lot of other information about Wright's career and life at the time.
Once I finished that, I checked out The Women by T.C. Boyle. The book fictionalizes Wright's relationships with his first wife, Kitty; the mistress he builds Taliesin for, Mamah Borthwick; his crazy, heroin-addicted second wife, Miriam Noel; and his mistress-then-third-wife Olgivanna Lazovich. As that list might indicate, FLW had his issues with women.
While I've been reading these two books, I've been checking out big coffee table books filled with pictures of FLW's drawings, houses, office buildings, textile designs, etc. So I've been going back and forth between full-color evidence of the guy's obvious inspired brilliance and tales of his dishonesty, unfaithfulness, impatience, and just sort of ridiculous hypocrisy. It just combines into a really weird picture in my head.
The guy straight up abandoned his wife and six kids. Left them in the dust and took off with the wife of one of his clients. He was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, borrowing here, taking out loans there, hawking prints and drawings, taking advances against projects he knew he'd never complete, the whole deal. He was a control freak who would manipulate his apprentices' personal lives, use their property as his own (if they brought a car to Taliesin, they had to repaint it to Cherokee red at their own expense to match everything else on site), and generally use them as slave labor on his property. While his creative work continues to influence the world even now, as a person he wasn't very admirable at all. In general, he comes across as deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous as a human being. It seems like he was almost a savant -- super brilliant in one area and almost completely helpless in every other way.
The more I read and watch about people who are the absolute best at what they do (pick anything - sports, arts, politics, etc.), the more it seems they all share a kind of extremity of personality. They're all focused on their pursuit in an intense way that excludes almost everything and everyone else around them. They shut out their families and children because they need to design, write, practice, whatever. Their focus allows them to excel in their field but it also almost always seems to encourage a really messy kind of selfishness in their personal dealings. It almost makes me wonder if someone can be the very best at what they do and still be a balanced, kind, faithful human being or if excellence automatically equates egomania. Or, more realistically, is it simply that they are people like everyone else but none of the rest of us have biographies or feature articles written about us? If anyone researched and wrote about your life, how good would you look? For myself, I imagine I'd come out looking a lot like FLW - deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous, but minus the famous, world-changing influence or lasting works of beauty.
These driven genius types are just regular human beings with hang ups and obsessions and mistakes, but amid all that, they manage to create stuff that lasts, that moves people, that changes the world. I guess I can admire their accomplishments and have compassion for the rest.
