FLW

Well, I feel I have no right to talk about the London bombings in my blog. But I didn’t want to write in my blog and not acknowledge them either.

I can’t wrap my mind around it, it’s painful and confusing and that’s all I can say about it. I don’t know what to say. So instead, I’ll talk about the surprisingly fascinating life of a one Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright.

He was one of those “always knew what he wanted to do,” types, working on his daddy’s farm and learning about “nature”. Stones, bricks, grass, trees, etc. He went to work for Sullivan and Adler right as they were building the Auditorium Theater, so they gave most of the private homes to Wright. He went ahead and designed all those houses we think of when we think of FLW. The cantilevered roof over hang, flat, horizontal, a house built for the prairie, for the flatlands.



He was always about building in the country and in later years got kinda confused when asked what to do with city building, as opposed to our other master builders, Mies and Corbu, who built expressly for cities.

Anyhoo, FLW is building, he gets married, meets another woman, falls in love and tries to divorce his 1st wife who won’t divorce him. He runs away with new woman to Wisconsin where he builds his own beautiful house. A little while later, one of his servants goes berserk, kills his mistress and 8 other people and burns down his house.

FLW comes back, rebuilds the house and it burns down again! Poor FLW.Then meets another woman, who he finds out is nuts, gets a divorce from the first wife to marry the 2nd so she wouldn't be so nuts, then she freaks out and dies in a sanitarium.


Meanwhile, as Mies is learning to strip his buildings bare and Corbu is building streets on their side for skyscrapers, FLW is learning how to make his buildings “plastic”. He wants to get back to nature as his mentor Sullivan wanted to do and began trying to make them curved, rounded. He went from flat prairie homes, to believing the shell to be the strongest influence.

It’s weird then, to watch his buildings go from flat, horizontal and wide, to curved, rounded, white.




Corbu and Mies were part of the “machine art” where new technology allowed them to do new things with buildings and to celebrate the fact that the machine built their building, to allow it to look like that.

FLW didn’t want his buildings to look like machines. He wanted the new technology (Concrete wrapped around steel) that could make his buildings plastic, but didn’t fall prey to the Miesian “it has to look like what it is”.

I still don’t like his buildings as much, but I certainly see what he did. And his life! My lord, that poor man. I want to write a book about it.

Is it 5 yet?