Sources

Alofsin, Anthony

Save Cite Share

Free

Sources

Anthony Alofsin

Wright and New York: The Making of America’s Architect

The origins of this book go back to my doctoral dissertation, “Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lessons of Europe” (1987). As the late Vincent Scully said about his own dissertation, “At that time, no one liked 19th Century architecture.” The same could have been said about scholarly interest in Wright in the mid-1980s. “My aim was to...

Author

Anthony Alofsin

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32256

Sources

The origins of this book go back to my doctoral dissertation, “Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lessons of Europe” (1987). As the late Vincent Scully said about his own dissertation, “At that time, no one liked 19th Century architecture.” The same could have been said about scholarly interest in Wright in the mid-1980s. “My aim was to rehabilitate it,” Scully explained. “That’s what dissertations should do: bring back great areas of human experience that have been jettisoned.” Inspired by Scully, I set out to find what had been jettisoned in Wright’s “human experience.” Fortunately, the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona, had opened to provide scholarly access to its holdings, and I was able to conduct research and live among the Taliesin Fellows for extended periods of time.

The dissertation became the basis of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years (1993). That work picked up where Grant Manson left off when he defined the Prairie period in his classic Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (1958). In rediscovering what had been “lost” to history, I identified the next dozen years as Wright’s primitivist phase. Wright’s interest in primitivism paralleled that of other European artists, from Gauguin to Picasso, who pursued universal values assumed to exist in the purified forms of ancient and non-Western cultures. Like other primitivists, Wright relied on an idealized vision of an age of innocence, and his convictions propelled exotic projects like Midway Gardens in Chicago and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in the 1910s. But Wright was unique among American architects in this inclination.

When Wright returned to America from Japan in 1922, his primitivist phase had peaked and began to recede gradually. The architect had to reconstruct his personal and artistic lives as he was newly influenced by the terrains of California and the high deserts of the Southwest. In the mid-1920s, when New York took its firm grip on him, he had to somehow legitimize himself when esoteric ideas would only detract from the efforts. However, he never abandoned his belief in the “spell power” of archetypal forms—it only moved beneath the surface, behind what Brendan Gill called one of Wright’s masks.

To pursue those subjects thirty years ago, I needed to study his drawings and his letters. Through the generosity of the late Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, founder of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, I gained the first unfettered access to the whole archive at Taliesin West. While living among the members of the Fellowship, I pored over the original drawings with Bruce, adding for the first time unique accession numbers to each sheet. To me, the drawings, most of which were unpublished, were an endless revelation. But letters were another matter. Wright carefully saved copies of his letters and those he received, as well as drafts of his manuscripts, throughout his career. But the correspondence was unorganized when I encountered it in 1984. To make the letters usable for researchers, I created—with the support of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities—the digital index to over one hundred thousand documents. A print version was derived from it and published in five volumes as Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence (1988). Its appearance has allowed subsequent generations of scholars and others to conduct scientific research on Wright using his vast correspondence.

When I began pursuing Wright into the 1920s, the correspondence provided a vital source—indeed the core of the work that followed. Over the decades I read the letters to and from Wright, and to make sense of their complexity, I created a detailed chronology that tied together correspondence, related documents, and even notes and dates on Wright’s drawings; I have included here a very abbreviated version. This short list benefited from the careful work of scholars Kathryn Smith, Robert L. Sweeney, Jane King Hession, and Debra Pickrel; their publications are cited in the notes. Simultaneously, I looked at and documented all the projects and designs Wright produced from 1922 to 1932. They attested to Wright’s continual creative reinvention despite personal trauma. The artistic evolution of his architecture hovered as an inchoate project in itself, while the story that kept moving forward was more biographical than a monograph on buildings and projects. The detailed study of all the buildings and projects was put aside to give primacy to Wright and New York, an account that was previously unknown.

In 2012, research that began at the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive at Taliesin West moved to Columbia University when the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation sold the physical archive (though retaining intellectual rights) to the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University in New York. Wright’s models went to MoMA, and everything else to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. A major trove of my research material came from the William Norman Guthrie Archive at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I also benefited from studying drawings and photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Period newspapers, magazines, and journals provided not only valuable accounts of Wright’s activities but also ambience and context.

Though based largely on archival and primary sources, this book benefited from the work of historians and critics who have marveled at and diced the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Before becoming the controversial architectural critic for the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp had the prescience to realize a story existed between Wright and the city. His Man About Town: Frank Lloyd Wright in New York City (1983) introduced the subject. Operating with intuition and insight and using secondary sources to extemporize, he hit all the right notes. His viewpoint was that of a critic; mine is more that of a historian. Muschamp did not benefit, however, from the documentary materials—letters, drawings, and manuscripts—that definitively shape the image of Wright as flaneur in New York. For his vitality, exuberance, and imaginative insights, I owe Muschamp a laurel of thanks. My book differs from his pioneering effort by uncovering a more complex story and by weaving together Wright’s life and work in documentary detail. Aware that the definitive study of Wright’s life has yet to be written, I often turned to the extant biographies, particularly Brendan Gill’s Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd (1987).

Several more focused studies provided definition and insight. Joseph Siry’s Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture (2012) contains the first detailed exploration of Wright, Guthrie, and their joint projects. Siry’s consummate work supported the structure—and often details—for my discussions of the architect and his extraordinary client. I benefited particularly from Siry’s analyses of the Modern Cathedral and the tower for St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman’s The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship (2006) marshalled details and fact that had not appeared elsewhere and was a useful source. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer’s Frank Lloyd Wright: The Heroic Years, 1920–1932 (2009) looked at the period chronologically. His account of the period as “heroic” helped to guide my treatment. Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape, 1922–1932 (1996), edited by David DeLong, was indispensable for references to Wright’s work in the 1920s, as it explores the marvels of Wright’s creative efforts at the time. In Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954–1959 (2007), Jane King Hession and Debra Pickrell brought to light Wright’s special affection for the Plaza Hotel. Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (1987), remains a monumental overview and basic architectural reference; it assisted me in creating the context for Wright’s adventures in the city. Though including a vast range of building types, it properly highlights the role of the skyscraper as well as urbanistic visions of the future. Its copious illustrations give the visual context to envision Wright in New York.

The richness of cultural histories about New York is splendid and expanding. The New York that Wright confronted resembled the Gotham defined so cogently by cultural historian William R. Taylor in his book In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (1992). For the city’s early history, I also turned to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998). Wallace’s sequel, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (2017), provides voluminous documentation of the consolidation of the city and set the stage for the 1920s. Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America (2014) features a cast of characters, both celebrities and buildings. Jules Stewart’s Gotham Rising: New York in the 1930s (2016) complements this survey. David Reid’s The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia (2016) looks at the turbulent yet culturally rich years 1945–1950 but also casts back to the previous decades. Two classic studies remain valuable: Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) and E. B. White’s Here Is New York (1949). My standard reference was The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd. ed., edited by Kenneth T. Jackson (2010).

At times I reviewed broad surveys and histories of modern architecture to remind me of the contexts in which Wright’s career evolved. Among them were Martin Filler’s Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, vols. 1 and 2 (2007, 2013); Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4th ed. (2007); and William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd ed. (1996).

In 2017, around Wright’s sesquicentennial birthday, new publications reinforced the themes of this book and added new layers of detail. Francesco Dal Co’s The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece (2017) is a masterful synopsis of the museum’s history and a sophisticated analysis of its construction and meaning. Because it is so synthetic and insightful, I relied on it in discussing Wright and the history of the Guggenheim Museum. Kathryn Smith’s Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions grounded the long history of Wright’s exhibitions with elaborate detail. She corroborates the important role the Museum of Modern Art and, by extension, New York itself played in resurrecting Wright’s career. Monica Penick’s Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home deepens our understanding of Wright’s work in the context of the 1950s by exploring the role Gordon played in promoting him. Bruce Pfeiffer’s final book was a devoted tribute and documentation: From Crna Cora to Taliesin, Black Mountain to Shining Brow: The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. It adds unpublished material about the couple and at times brings New York into sharp focus with detailed and glowing accounts of the city.

The vast literature on Wright ranges from coffee table extravaganzas to detailed academic tomes. I have focused in this book on monographs and articles that support our theme. I regret not including references to a number of fine scholarly studies and contextual works. I owe these authors a debt of thanks, as their works have also influenced my studies on Wright. In addition to the sources mentioned above, general readers will discover a helpful survey in Robert McCarter’s Frank Lloyd Wright (2006). For the panorama of Wright’s built work, consider William Allin Storrer’s Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, rev. ed. (2006) and his Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalogue, 4th ed. (2017).

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()