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CounterPunch
August
13 / 19, 2002
Usonian Utopias
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Frank Lloyd Wright once boasted that he didn't
design his buildings to last for more than a century. It's not
something you hear from many architects. But that doesn't mean
Wright was being humble. Indeed, there's a hefty element of hubris
to this admission. With Wright, you always get the sense that
the conception, as realized in his beautiful drawings, was more
important than the structures themselves.
Then again it was true. While most of
Wright's homes have stood up pretty well over the years, a few
of his better designs began to crack and crumble soon after they
were erected. Usually, this was a result of Wright trying to
build on the cheap, often by using local sand as a source for
the reinforced concrete that became a signature of his later
buildings, such as La Miniatura, the house in the Hollywood Hills
that looks like a compact Mayan temple. (Of course, it took the
giant temples of Tikal 600 years to acquire the characteristics
of a ruin and La Miniatura only a decade.)
It's also an idea that Wright swiped
from the Japanese, whose traditional houses were temporal structures,
built to last for only for a few years. Characteristically, Wright
didn't credit them, though he did admit to a fondness for Japanese
art, especially the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai.
More fundamentally, Wright held to the
theory that a house should be designed to reflect the specific
needs and personality of its occupants. It was a tenet of his
notion of "organic architecture". According to this
mode of thinking, there was no reason for a building to outlive
its owners. Houses should be constructed to function well for
forty years or so and then torn down to make way for new structures
for new owners.
This was a way to keep architecture moving
forward, to keep on, as Wright said, "breaking out of the
box". It was also an attitude that may have grown out of
some his personal peeves. Wright hated the English and described
most of their architecture (Edwin Lutyens, the Walter Scott of
English architecture--was a notable exception) as monuments to
British imperialism. He so thoroughly despised the old Victorians
that loomed near his house in Oak Park, Illinois that he built
a wall around his home and studio and designed that house's curious
windows so that he wouldn't have to look at the hulking outlines
of the older structures.
Even so, Wright spent most of his first
20 years as an architect drafting up homes as sturdy and immutable
as anything conjured up by Antonio Palladio or Christopher Wren.
The justly famous prairie designs of the early 1900s weren't
houses so much as striking horizontal mansions for millionaires,
equipped with parlors, music rooms and discreetly hidden quarters
for servants.
These days, of course, the super-rich
couldn't care less about Wright's houses, except as they are
portrayed in coffee table books, and they cringe at the prospect
of actually living in them. It's mega-square footage and techno-wiring
that matters now. Wright's houses (even the big ones such as
Hollyhock House and the Frank Thomas House) are too small to
contain the accumulated trappings of today's millionaires. And
they are downright impossible to re-decorate, intentionally so,
since Wright didn't trust anyone's taste over his own. Most of
his houses didn't even have closets, where would all the shoes
go? Plus people (often of the most noisome disposition) are always
showing up at the door wanting a peek at the structure. Much
better to buy up the land, then hold the house for ransom with
a wrecking ball and wait for a buy out.
That's exactly what happened to the Gordon
house, the only structure Wright designed for construction in
Oregon. Wright drafted plans for the house in 1957 and it was
constructed on a bend in the Willamette River near Wilsonville
in 1963, four years after his death, for Conrad and Evelyn Gordon.
After the Gordons died, the house fell into disrepair following
the predictable familial spat over whether or not to subdivide
the homestead.
In 1999, the property was bought by David
Smith for $1.1 million dollars. Smith had no plans to live in
the house, a t-shaped two-storied structure made of cinderblocks
and Oregon cedar. Instead, he announced his intention to bulldoze
it and build on its grave a sprawling mansion to rival the other
executive monstrosities that line the Willamette River these
days. Apparently, Smith and his wife Carey had no idea who Wright
was and didn't much give a damn after they found out. They had
good reason to be smug. Within the past couple of years, the
Portland area (supposedly home to the most progressive zoning
and historical preservation laws on the continent) has seen houses
by three of its most notable local architects, John Yeon, Walter
Gordon and Pietro Belluschi destroyed, with barely a squawk of
protest.
But Yeon--Oregon's version of California's
Bernard Maybeck, doesn't' enjoy Wright's cult following and once
word leaked about the Smith's plans, an international crusade
was launched to save the structure. It is a testament to the
power of the Wright name and the influence of the Frank Lloyd
Wright Building Conservancy that not one of the remaining 350
structures designed by Wright has been demolished in the last
12 years.
The Smiths offered to give the house
to anyone who'd take it (they weren't keen to pay for the demolition),
as long as they removed it within 105 days or they'd flatten
it themselves. Ultimately the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy
and the Oregon Chapter of the Institute of American Architects
stepped forward to claim the house. It was dismantled, moved
to a botanical garden 30 miles away in the tourist town of Silverton
and reassembled, under the supervision of architect Burton Goodrich,
who apprenticed with Wright in the 1950s. The Smith's ended up
with a nice tax deduction and a shiny new McMansion looming over
the Willamette.
Wright would surely be bemused at the
effort and expense that has gone into saving his buildings from
the wrecking ball. After all, the Gordon House was one of his
"low-cost" Usonian homes and was built for less than
$10,000. Before it's over, the project will end up costing more
than $1.2 million to relocate and restore the house. This is
architecture as a kind of cultural fetish object.
A half-century after his death, Frank
Lloyd Wright remains something of a brand name. And it's been
that way since nearly the beginning of his career. Brendan Gill,
writing in Many Masks: a Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, suggests
that many of Wright's clients didn't want a Wrightian solution
to their architectural needs so much as they simply craved the
Wright name attached to their house, thus inaugurating the birth
of name brand architecture. During the early days of Wright's
fame, there's little doubt that his older contemporaries, Daniel
"Uncle Dan" Burnham, John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan,
were equally, if not more, accomplished. But, among his many
other talents, Wright was a genius at the game of self-promotion.
He was the first architect as celebrity.
Wright was both a Utopian and a narcissist.
He could jive talk his way through almost any crisis and there
were many of them, usually of a financial nature. Wright was
especially adept at snowing corporate titans, such as Herbert
"Hib" Johnson, CEO of the Johnson Wax.
The Wright style with CEO's was unique,
a full-frontal assault more than pandering. "He insulted
me about everything," Johnson said of his first encounter
with Wright. "And I insulted him. But he did a better job.
I showed him pictures of the old office, and he said it was awful.
He had a Lincoln-Zephyr, and I had one, it was the only thing
we agreed on. On all other matters we were at each other's throats.
If a guy can talk like that, he must have something."
Although they became very close friends,
Wright didn't trust Johnson to present his plans before the Johnson
Wax board. Hib Johnson agreed to let Wright attend the meeting,
but warned him: "Please, Frank, don't scold me in front
of my own board of directors."
Like most narcissists, Wright was an
unrepentant mamma's boy, pampered and coddled by an attentive
mother who told him he was a genius when he was three years old.
Anna Lloyd-Jones Wright trained her son to be an architect almost
from the crib, giving him the famous Freobel blocks that he continued
to play with his entire life. Indeed, the floating planes of
the Usonian designs seem directly traceable to simple structures
made from wooden blocks that Wright would assemble in a matter
of seconds on his desk to dazzle prospective clients.
The crypto-fascist Philip Johnson famously
dismissed Wright as the greatest architect of the 19th Century.
[Perhaps, architects who build glass houses shouldn't throw stones.]
There's a certain grain of truth about this, though not, certainly,
in the sense that Johnson, who embodied the worst strains of
modernism (and post-modernism), meant to convey.
Wright was a utopian, in the grand romantic
tradition. He was grounded in Rousseau and often let slip that
his favorite poets were Walt Whitman and the dreamy Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Along with fellow poet (and snitch) Robert Southey,
Coleridge cooked up an idea for a utopian community in western
Pennsylvania they called, somewhat clumsily for two poets capable
of stunning lyricism, the Pantisocracy. They were going to pay
for the land on the proceeds of a long poem chronicling the life
and death of Robespierre. But the plan ultimately fell apart
over violent disagreements between the two on sexual freedom
(which Coleridge advocated) and slavery (which Coleridge abhorred).
Interestingly, the Pantisocracy, charted out only on maps in
Coleridge's house in Keswick, was to have been located not far
from where Wright built his most famous house, Fallingwater.
Wright also pored over Robert Owen's
experiments in socialist communities, most notably in New Harmony,
Indiana, where, as fate would have it, Wright's rival Johnson
later built his open-aired church shaped like death's cap mushroom.
But the class divisions and authoritarianism of Owens' community
proved anathema to Wright's innate egalitarianism. He was more
drawn to the Modern Times commune in Brentwood on Long Island,
established in 1851 by the American anarchist Josiah Warren.
Among other things, Warren's community was organized on the principles
of "no police" and "free love", earning it
the unyielding animosity of the snobs of New England who disgustedly
referred to it as the "Sodom of the Pine Barrens."
The early half of the 19th century was
a time of incredible optimism and radicalism in the United States.
In the 1840s, there were 100,000 people living in more than 150
socialist/utopian communities across the country. "Those
towns stood for everything eccentric: for abolition, short skirts,
whole-wheat bread, hypnotism, phonetic spelling, phrenology,
free love and the common ownership of property,'' wrote the journalist
Helen Beal Woodward in 1945 article on utopian communities. The
Civil War largely put an end to all that, but the utopian spirit
continued to thrive after the war, particularly in the prairie
states, through the rise of the populist parties and the Wisconsin
progressives.
But it was good old Rousseau, perhaps
more than anyone else, who seems to have shaped Wright's thinking
the most. In one of his notebooks, Wright highlighted this passage
from Emile: "Men are not made to be crowded together in
ant hills, but scattered over the earth to till it." Throw
in a free car (Wright preferred fast ones, such as Jaguars) and
you've got the basis of Wright's utopian community, Broad Acre
City.
Broad Acre City wasn't a design for a
single community, as much as a kind of organic zoning plan for
the entire country: a kind of motor-age update of Jefferson's
vision of rural America. Wright believed each American family
should be entitled to an acre of land and a car. The property
lines and building sites would conform to the contours of the
landscape, not the rigid grid system proposed by Jefferson and
his followers and enacted in gthe famous survey whose consequences
can be seen from any plane flying over the plains states. There
would also be a pattern of greenspaces, community gardens, walking
trails, parks and wildlands, concepts that he adapted from the
English garden cities designed by William Morris . Wright's idea
was that each town would be self-sufficient, with growth limited
by available water supplies and arable land.
It wasn't until the 1910s that Wright
began to think seriously about designing low-cost housing for
working class people. But World War I and then the depression
intervened. Then followed a real dry spell. Between 1928 and
1935, only two structures designed by Wright (other than his
own house and studio at Taliesin) were constructed.
Then in 1935 Wright received a visit
from Herbert Jacobs and his wife Katherine. Jacobs was a columnist
with the Madison Capital Times, the city's most progressive newspaper.
He was an admirer of Wright's work and wanted the great man to
design their house. The problem was Jacobs was far from wealthy.
Wright had little else on his plate and agreed to design a house
that would cost $5,500, including his customary 10 percent fee.
He called the design: Usonian.
What does Usonian mean? Who knows? Some
suggest that Wright came up with the name during his first trip
to Europe in 1910, when there was some discussion about referring
to the USA as "Usona" in order to distinguish it from
the new Union of South Africa. (In those days, as for much of
the century, it's easy to see how the two nations could be confused.)
Wright once said he took the name from Samuel Butler's utopian
novel Erewhon. But no one's been able to track it down there.
(I did a word search of the online edition of Erewhon and couldn't
find it.) Most likely it was a joke. After all, read in a mirror
the title of Butler's novel is Nowhere.
Even so what Wright produced was little
short of a revolution in American architecture: a beautiful structure,
efficiently designed to sit on an odd (and cheap) lot, at a price
affordable for lower income families. But the Jacobs House, and
the dozens of Usonian designs that would follow, did more than
that. It was truly one of the first environmentally-conscious
designs, utilizing passive solar heating, natural cooling and
lighting with his signature clerestory windows, native materials,
radiant floor heating, and L-shaped floorplan that anchored the
house around a garden terrace.
The Jacobs house was an immediate hit
in Madison, nearly as popular an attraction as the Johnson Wax
Building, which was under construction at the same time further
east, in Racine. On weekends so many people showed up at the
door, the Jacobs began selling sold tickets to tour their new
house. At fifty cents a pop, they quickly recaptured enough money
to pay Wright's fee.
Over the next 30 years, Wright produced
hundreds of Usonian designs, never wavering far from the original
concept. "We can never make the living room big enough,
the fireplace important enough, or the sense of relationship
between exterior, interior and environment close enough, or get
enough of these good things I've just mentioned," Wright
wrote in a 1948 issue of Architectural Forum. "A Usonian
house is always hungry for the ground, lives by it, becoming
an integral feature of it."
The Usonian homes inspired great loyalty
in their original owners. In 1975, John Sergeant did an inventory
of the homes and found that over 50 percent were still owned
by the original families, more than 35 years after construction.
The same thing can't be said for his larger projects. The beautiful
Robey House, near the University of Chicago, was inhabited for
less than a full year, while Fallingwater served as little more
than a weekend retreat.
So what happened? Why didn't the Usonian
design take off? Why are we left only with the barest elements
of the design, the cookie-cutter ranch houses that came to dominate
the lots of suburban America?
There's no simple explanation. But one
thing is clear. Wright's plans to revolutionize the American
residential living space ran afoul of interests of the federal
government. Think about this: in his 70-year career Wright didn't
win one contract for a federal building. Not even during the
heyday of the New Deal.
It all came down to politics. Wright's
politics were vastly more complicated and honorable than that
embodied by Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's self-serving portrait of
Wright in her novel The Fountainhead. Sure there was a libertarian
strain to Wright, which Rand seized on and distorted to her own
perverse ends. But he also was drawn to the prairie populism
espoused by the likes of the great Ignatius Donnelly. It's this
version of Wright that makes an appearance in John dos Passos'
USA trilogy.
Wright was a pacifist and his i outright
opposition to war cost him government commissions, the great
lifeline of the professional architect, especially during the
Depression and World War II. Thus it's no accident that Wright
was down and out most of his career. The high points came at
the beginning and the end. He made more than 50 percent of his
designs after he turned 70, and these weren't hack work, but
some of the most innovative plans of any architect then working.
John Sergeant, in his excellent book
on Wright's Usonian houses, argues that there's a mutual admiration
between Wright and the noted anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. In 1899,
Kropotkin moved to Chicago, living in the Hull House commune,
set up by radical social reformer Jane Addams, where Wright often
lectured, including a reading of his famous essay the Arts and
Crafts Machine.
But, in those crucial decades of the
20s and 30s, Wright's political views seemed to align most snugly
with Wisconsin progressives, as personified by the LaFollettes.
In fact, Philip LaFollette served as Wright's attorney and sat
on the board of Wright's corporation.
None of this escaped the attention of
the authorities. From World War I to his final days, Wright found
himself the subject of a campaign of surveillance, harassment
and intimidation by the federal government. In 1941, 26 members
of Wright's Taliesin fellowship signed a petition objecting to
the draft and calling the war effort futile and immoral. The
draft board sent the letter to the FBI, where it immediately
came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who already loathed
Wright.
Twice Hoover himself demanded that the
Justice Department bring sedition charges against Wright. He
was rebuffed both times by the attorney general, but, typically,
that only drove Hoover to expand the surveillance and harassment
by his goons.
But, as a review of Wright's FBI file
reveals, the Fed's interest in the architect extended far beyond
his pacifism. Hoover's men recorded his dalliances with the Wobblies,
his continuing attempts to combat the US government's dehumanization
of the Japanese during and after the war, his rabble-rousing
speeches on college campuses, his work for international socialists
and third world governments, including Iraq, and his rather unorthodox
views on sexual relations (the Feds noted that Wright seemed
to have a particular obsession with Marlene Dietrich).
It could be more sinister than ironic,
then, that Carter H. Manny, one of Wright's apprentices at Taliesin
West during the years when the architect and his cohorts were
under the most intense scrutiny by the Feds, would go on to design
the FBI headquarters (1963). The building, as conceived by Manny,
exudes a bureaucratic brutalism that is far removed from anything
that ever came off Wright's pen. Unlike most Taliesin fellows,
Manny spent less than a year under the Master's tutelage, instead
of the normal three. Some Wright devotees believe his tenure
there had a more nefarious purpose.
The FBI wasn't the only federal agency
giving Wright a hard time. Indeed, Hoover's snoops were only
a minor irritant compared to the real damage that was done by
the Federal Housing Authority, which routinely denied financing
to Wright's projects. There's no surer way to crush the career
of an architect, particularly one trying to revolutionize the
housing of working class people, than to cut off his clients'
access to mortgages.
The Federal Home Loan Association also
refused to underwrite mortgages for Wright's houses, often citing
Wright's signature flat roofs as a lending code violation. Here's
a paragraph from one of the rejection letters: "The walls
will not support the roof; floor heating is impractical; the
unusual design makes subsequent sales a hazard." All bullshit,
of course. But if there's anyway to kill architecture for working
class people, it's to deny them loans.
A disgusted Wright wrote in his autobiography
that the federal government had "repudiated" his Usonian
designs. In truth, it wasn't so much repudiation as flat-out
sabotage. No paper trail has yet been discovered linking the
FBI's harassment of Wright with the FHA's refusal to issue mortgages
for his houses. But it has all the hallmarks of a Hoover black
bag job.
There were other attacks on Wright. In
1926, the State Department even tried to get Wright's third wife,
Olgivanna, deported as an undesirable alien. They were once again
saved by the fast legal footwork of Phil LaFollette.
The IRS began harassing the architect
in 1940, socking him with back taxes, penalties and interest
dating back at least a decade. It was the kind of bill that can
never be paid off and it haunted Wright for the rest of his life.
Even after he died, the Agency kept after him. In 1959, the IRS
audited the Wright Foundation, which was the main funding source
for Wright's troublesome colleagues at Taliesin. The Feds saw
the Taliesin Fellowship as troublespot and wanted to extinguish
it. It was after all a kind of commune, where the architecture
students not only designed structures, but grew their own food,
milled timber and ran a private school. {Not to mention the rampant
bed-hopping.] Eventually, the tax agency forced the Foundation
to sell off many of its most prized assets, including what remained
after two awful fires at Taliesin of Wright's remarkable stash
of Japanese prints, perhaps the best private collection in the
United States.
Wright's plans to put portions of his
Broadacre City model into reality ran into other problems with
federally-connected lenders. Several of Wright's cooperative
communities, including one in Michigan and another in Pennsylvania,
came to nothing because banks refused to back the plan. The reason?
Wright and his clients refused to include restrictions prohibiting
houses from being owned by blacks and Jews.
***
Kimberly and I visited the Gordon house
on a hot and muggy June afternoon. Hot for Oregon anyway. The
house now the feature attraction of The Oregon Garden, which
bills itself as a world-class botanical garden. It's nothing
of the sort. Indeed, it's little more than a permanent dog-and-pony
show for the chemical agricultural industry and the timber lobby.
There are better gardens in any old neighborhood in Portland
or Eugene than you'll find here.
It was close to 90 outside, but inside
the house was cool, breezy, shaded by the jutting roofline. Wright
detested air conditioning almost as much as contractors and academics.
Even his home at Taliesen West, in the frying pan of Scottsdale,
Arizona, uses natural features and architectural tricks to keep
the building livable.
The Gordon House, like most of the Usonian
designs, is a collage of Wright's influences: Japan, Central
America, the curves, angles and tones of the American landscape
itself. It is a beautiful mix of visual puns and little tricks
of light as subtle and deceptive as a painting by Wright's contemporary,
Eduard Vuillard.
The shape of the house is fairly simple.
Wright called it a polliwog design, a t-shape with the kitchen
and bedrooms massed in one section of the house, with the living
room jutting out like the tail of a tadpole.
Even the design was political, reflecting
Wright's disdain for contractors, those middlemen of the construction
trade who do so little work but pocket so much cash, consequently
driving prices through the roof. Wright wanted to do away with
them, particularly at the level of the American home. In fact,
Wright wanted the Usonian houses to be so simple to put together
that they could largely (and ideally) be constructed by the owner
of the house. The prefabricated home becomes an extension of
the Emersonian tradition.
One of Wright's dictum's for the Usonian
designs is that the houses should "spring from the ground
and into the light." By and large they do.
That's one of the most frustrating things
about the migration of the Gordon house. It was originally designed
to sit on a small bluff, with a view of the Willamette River
to one side and the glacier-clad pyramid of Mt. Hood on the other.
Each Usonian was different, fine-tuned to the site. The uprooted
Gordon house seems alien to me, like a snow leopard I saw many
years ago in the Cincinnati Zoo.
Once you take one step out of place,
it's so much easier to take the next one. The restored Gordon
House now sits over a basement. Wright hated basements and they
certainly weren't part of the Usonian plan, which used a concrete
floor mat laid over gravel and hot-water pipes as a source of
radiant heating. The addition of a basement (in order to serve
as an office for the docents) destroys the very nature of the
house.
So what remains is really little more
than a shell, a kind of exoskeleton of Wright's original house.
Instead of being a low-cost home, it's now been transformed into
a mauled museum piece, a model home for the path not taken in
American residential architecture.
J. Edgar Hoover must be laughing as he
roasts in Hell. CP
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August 14
/ 19, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
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Staff
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