The final curtain
Filed Under Curt Hennig | Posted on May 3, 2008
FRANK Lloyd Wright was an arrogant man and he cultivated what you might consider a shortcoming into what he saw as a virtue. It is far nobler, to paraphrase Wright, to be honestly arrogant than to be dishonestly self-effacing.
And he had the genius to carry it off in style, even dressing the part, capes and all.
This was just one footnote in the life and times of this icon, articulated by a bright young man who took us on tour of Taliesin West, headquarters for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Arizona.
The overwhelming Wright once built a niche for a piano in a client’s living room. The client asked why the niche. A piano, was the answer. But I don’t have a piano. Wright advised him to get one!
The plus side to this over-confidence was Wright’s ability to create a complete and dazzling package that went from design to construction, interior design, furniture, ornaments, tableware. And Wright, we are told, could extend his designing skills to dresses for the client’s wife so she could be at one with the ambience!
Though a national historic landmark Taliesin is no museum. It is a living, working school as well. About 35 hopefuls apply each year, five of whom, for US$30,000 a year, are selected.
Wright’s goal, when he set out to design and build Taliesin, was to integrate the structure with the nature of the surrounding desert.
“I was struck by the beauty of the desert,” he said, according to an accompanying booklet, “by the dry, clear sun-drenched air, by the stark geometry of the mountains.
“And out of that experience, a revelation is what I guess you might call it, came the design for these buildings. The design sprang out of itself ”
Wright’s idea of what he called organic architecture was to integrate buildings with their surroundings. It was to draw inspiration from the nature of their settings and out of this to provide an ideal environment for working and living.
He would study the site to learn where, for instance, the sun rose and set, considering approaches to the site and he didn’t mind getting into a sleeping bag and bunking on the site truly to get a feel for what he considered the soul and spirit of the place.
The nature of the site was a key element in the Wright vision, which included considerations of materials and methods, “destruction of the box” which the slanting walls of Taliesin reveal and, perhaps surprisingly, “building for democracy.”
Progress, that multiple-edged sword, has a way of upsetting even judicious planning and preparation. When Taliesin West was set up residents could see 150 miles to a mountain in Tucson. But as the Scottsdale suburb grew, bringing it with it a need for more services, plans were drawn up for a string of high-tension wires to be strung across the Taliesin view.
Wright proposed a plan to the city fathers to put the wires underground which they declined for cost reasons. Desperate, Wright called on his friend President Truman, to no avail, and up went the monolithic towers and their wires bestraddling the landscape like something out of a sci-fi movie.
The ever-resourceful Wright reoriented rooms, away from the offending wires, substituting the view of the grid with a view of mountains, in the opposite direction.
Our tour ended, inevitably, in a gift shop comprising mostly works on Frank Lloyd Wright, but including as well, tomes on various aspects of the discipline. And in addition to autobiographical works by Wright there were also treatments of the master by other writers.
I was glad to see works by Ada Huxtable, the architectural writer for The New Yorker of yesteryear and even essayist Alain de Botton’s more recent The Architecture of Happiness.
Here you could see signature Wright designs replicated in all manner of souvenirs, from neckties to refrigerator magnets, and you couldn’t help picking up a token of this remarkable performer.
Regrets: we were, in this visually stimulating place, without cameras, the first time in some 30 years we had left home without them!
And we didn’t have Puru with us that day. Puru is a grandson who, in Toronto, is studying architecture.
Tags: ambience, arrogant man, capes, confidence, curta, curtain, design furniture, egrets, fathe, final curtain, footnote, frank lloyd wright, frank lloyd wright foundation, furniture ornaments, geometry, hopefuls, interior design, national historic landmark, niche, organic architecture, shortcoming, signature, tableware, taliesin west, virtue, young manRelated posts
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