Frank Lloyd Wright called New York an “unlivable prison,” “a crime of crimes” and more, but the city gave him refuge from crippling personal and professional troubles and revitalized both his life and career. We talked with Anthony Alofsin, world-renowned authority on Wright, prizewinning author and Roland Roessner Centennial Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin about Wright’s complex relationship with New York – the subject of his acclaimed latest book, and his 92U online class this week.
What was your first encounter with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and what led to its becoming so central to your own work?
My first exposure to Wright was actually through the house my parents designed in Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1960’s. My parents were very progressive – a sophisticated couple with modern taste. They followed Wright’s work in magazines like House Beautiful. When they built their dream house, they were very much emulating the aesthetic Wright put forward, particularly a kind of Japanese influence. Our house was a pinwheel around a fireplace. Each room had a little Japanese garden off of it. It was very zen and true to materials. Without knowing very much about Wright, I grew up in a house that was very Wrightian.
My first encounter with an actual Frank Lloyd Wright building came when I visited the Guggenheim as a teenager. Amazingly, there wasn’t much interest in Wright at that time. Architecture was moving in a very different direction.
My career path had been in fine arts. Wright didn’t become the focus of my work until graduate school, when I became interested in the nature of influence, and began looking at his work. I was doing research and studies and discovered there was a far richer, more complicated story about Wright’s influence in Europe than was being perpetuated. It led to my dissertation and first book, which I researched while living at Taliesen West. It has been a privilege from that point forward.
You’ve been examining Wright’s work for more than 30 years. In your 92U class, you’ll zero in on the period he spent in New York in the 1920s and his complex love-hate relationship with the city. Can you talk a bit about the dichotomy of this time in his work and in his life?
When Wright arrives in New York in the mid 1920s, he needs the city as a place of refuge, after fleeing troubles back in the Midwest. He has a complex response to the city. On the one hand, he criticizes it as a kind of symbol. At the same time, he begins to thrive on its creative energy and its contacts, which begin to revive his career. I see Wright not as the lone individualist he liked to portray, but as a member of a long tradition of writers, artists and others who come to New York, object to how the city wears people down, and at the same time are enormously attracted to it. Think of Herman Melville in the mid-19th Century – he complains about New York, yet it’s his publishers here who make him the star he becomes. Wright is part of that tradition.
How did Wright reconcile his gravitation to openness and flow, to light and space and air, with the confines of a dense, vertical urban landscape? What was the New York he saw? The New York he wanted to see?
What emerges in the early 1920s is an important struggle to define what the nature of modern architecture is going to be in America. It’s a cultural issue – how buildings look and how they function represent collective identity. Critics are identifying the skyscraper as the object that’s going to tell us the nature of the future, and New York City, with its beautiful Art Deco buildings, is leading the way. It’s Jazz Age culture, and the effervescence of that culture repels Wright, who really is a country boy at heart. Still, the skyscraper can’t be avoided, and he sees opportunity. He is asked to design a skyscraper next to the church of St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery. He proposes a tower situated amidst greenery, seeing a future in which New York’s skyscrapers are spread out with lots of space around them. Unfortunately, he presents his design for the building three days after the stock market crash of 1929, dooming the possibility of it ever being constructed.
The Guggenheim is one of New York City’s greatest architectural thrills. Wright is quoted as saying, “the Guggenheim will have the same organic unity any of nature’s creations has.” Was this his guiding principle for the building?
Wright had the belief that basic geometry has symbolic meaning, and the symbolic meaning of geometry resonates with the symbolic language of nature itself. The spiral, which is what the Guggenheim is, is a symbol of aspiration, and Wright turns it upside down – a very modern idea. To take a symbolic form and invert it is a way of confirming its identity but challenging it at the same time. Still, Wright was not a literalist. It wasn’t that you copy nature literally, it’s that you absorb its deepest concepts and principles, and there you resonate.
What do you hope participants in this class will come away with in their understanding of Wright?
Wright has been the subject of biographies that have sensationalized him and reduced him to a two-dimensional figure. My hope is that people will gain an appreciation of his complexity and the perseverance he had in leading a creative life when beset by horrific problems that would lay low many people.
Lastly, If Wright could build something to help revitalize post-pandemic NYC, what might it look like, and what would be his hopes for it?
I love this question. I would like to think that what Wright would do now is focus on the problems of the dispossessed and think about ways of retrofitting empty spaces and finding new models for economical housing. I think that regardless of the houses he created for the well-to-do and the illustrious, he never lost his interest in providing shelter for Middle America. My hunch is that in focusing on New York, which actually was very good to him, he would want to address the city’s serious problems.
We don’t need any more museums. We don’t need the signature buildings of star architects. What we need now is shelter for those who have the least means for shelter. I would like to think that’s what Wright would be focused on in the New York City of 2021.
Anthony Alofsin’s 92U class Frank Lloyd Wright and NY takes place Wednesday, March 10 at 7 PM ET.