Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Gift” of Genius

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is probably the most famous architect in the world. He is author of undoubtedly the most famous private home in the world, Fallingwater, which perches so dramatically on the cliff overhanging the eponymous waterfall near Pittsburgh. How did this acknowledged masterpiece, this work of such singular genius, come to be? The story of Fallingwater's inception serves as a perfect introduction to the persona that Wright, and to an extent those who knew him, fashioned for popular media consumption. It is related by one of his Taliesin fellows, Edgar Tafel: Fall 1935. Taliesin, Wisconsin: "Come along, EJ. We're ready for you," boomed Mr. Wright into the hand-cranked telephone. The call was from Pittsburgh and EJ. was Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., department store president. Mr. Wright was to show him the first sketches for his new house, "Fallingwater." I looked across my drafting table at the apprentice in front of me, Bob Mosher, whose back had stiffened at the words. Ready? There wasn't one line drawn. Kaufmann, an important client, coming to see plans for his house, and was Mr. Wright still carrying the design confidently around in his head? . . . He hung up the phone, briskly emerged from his office, some twelve steps from the drafting room, sat down at the table set with the plot plan, and started to draw. First floor plan. Second floor. Section, elevation. Side sketches of details, talking sotto voce all the while. The design just poured out of him. . . . Poetry in form, line, color, textures and materials, all for a greater glory: a reality to live in! Mr. Wright at his eloquent and romantic best- he had done it before and would often do it again- genius through an organic growth along with nature. (1-3) If we are to believe Tafel's report, the complex interlocking forms of the home- its cream-colored, cantilevered horizontals piled rhythmically atop one another and anchored by the dark, striated masonry, the interstices filled with diaphanous glass channels- all this was disgorged in one creative torrent onto a blank piece of paper, much as Beethoven's symphonies were reportedly "heard" in their entirety before being written unhesitatingly down by the maestro in a fair hand (Steffensen, "Wright and Beethoven" 24). Or, perhaps even more succinctly, as the ninety-year-old Wright himself was later to say of his designs in a 1957 television interview with Mike Wallace, "It's quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve" ("Wright Television Interview with Wallace"). Frank Lloyd Wright, who shook Fallingwater out of his sleeve, who designed the world-famous careering spiral of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, who launched a thousand quips- "I think Ms. [Marilyn] Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture" ("Wright Television Interview with Wallace")- is the granddaddy of the so-called celebrity "starchitect" of the twentieth century.1 He got that way not merely by dint of his revolutionary ideas, Herculean output, and sheer, undeniable talent, but also because he was one of the first architects to harness the modern media machine for his own purposes. Wright created an image of himself as the modern architecthero so potent that he remains today, nearly half a century after his death, a figure that looms even larger than the actual influence of his work (overshadowed in terms of widespread popular adoption by the practitioners of Bauhaus- or International-Style modernism). He accomplished this feat through the canny manipulation of his image via a prodigious output in print, as well as photographs, radio, and even the nascent medium of television. His popularity in his own lifetime may be epitomized by his appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1938. It may be that Wright's greatest creation was, ultimately, Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, genius, hero. How was this creature born? How Wright fashioned this image of himself is one of the most fascinating case studies in an American tradition of self-fashioning. …