Frank Lloyd Wright
Louis Proyect
last two evenings on PBS, was predictably apolitical. This guy could
make a documentary on the rise of Nazism and spend half his time
discussing the fashion statement embodied in SS uniforms.
That being said, the show did raise a number of interesting questions
that I had never considered before. Although I have toured through
some of Wright's houses, I never gave much thought to what inspired
him. As it turns out, part of the inspiration was the arts and crafts
movement launched by William Morris, the English Marxist, artist and
utopian thinker. (Morris's utopianism was of the best kind. It simply
was presented as a dream about the future.) Morris explained how art
and humanity should interact in "The Lesser Arts of Life":
"You understand that our ground is, that not only is it possible to
make the matters needful to our daily life works of art, but that
there is something wrong in the civilisation that does not do this: if
our houses, our clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not
works of art, they are either wretched make-shifts, or what is worse,
degrading shams of better things.
"Furthermore, if any of these things make any claim to be considered
works of art, they must show obvious traces of the hand of man guided
directly by his brain, without more interposition of machines than is
absolutely necessary to the nature of the work done.
"Again, whatsoever art there is in any of these articles of daily use
must be evolved in a natural and unforced manner from the material
that is dealt with: so that the result will be such as could not be
got from any other material: if we break this law we shall make a
triviality, a toy, not a work of art."
This credo was central to Frank Lloyd Wright's early approach not only
to architecture, but to design as well. He often took pains to design
not only the house in a "natural and unforced manner" but even the
furniture and utensils within the house. For one client's wife, he
designed the dress she was instructed to serve food in, at a dining
table and plates that he also designed!
Wright was also insistent that houses not dominate their natural
environment but meld into them. The documentary quotes his explanation
of why he refused to put one house at the very top of a hill. He said
that the top of the hill belongs to nature and should be enjoyed on
its own terms. The house was placed on the brow of the hill instead.
So it would be fair to say that Wright expresses a certain possibility
for socialist architecture. His designs are an expression of the
William Morris direction in Marxism toward an ecologically sustainable
living environment that abolishes town-country distinctions. Wright,
by the way, was outspokenly anti-urban. He viewed most urban
architecture as hostile to the human spirit.
Now the other dialectical possibility in socialist architecture is
represented by the German Bauhaus. The Bauhaus movement got its
inspiration from the Russian revolution and the Futurism artistic
school which celebrated industrial progress and technology. Bauhaus
architects such as Gropius were inspired by modern industry and had
very little interest in blending in with nature. In fact that insisted
on using unnatural components such as glass and steel in their
buildings. They also were quintessential urbanists. They designed
urban apartment houses for the industrial proletariat, while Wright's
clients were suburbanite millionaires.
Indeed, as Wright became more and more established in his profession,
he became more and more attuned to the overweening ambitions of such
clients, whose life-style he himself began to emulate. The need to
connect to broader humanity, a key element of the arts and crafts
movement, was dumped overboard as Wright became a pyramid-builder for
the ruling-class. By the time he reached middle-age, Wright openly
complained about the "mob-ocracy" that was destroying America. He
began to resemble the libertarian architect hero of Ayn Rand's "The
Fountainhead."
Politically, Wright becomes a typical American eccentric. A life-long
pacifist, he joins America First in opposition to WWII. Some of his
apprentices, who share his beliefs, actually spend time in prison for
refusing to serve in the army. He also learns to exploit his workers
like every other American boss, making them work long hours at low pay
in pursuit of the "higher goals of the firm". There is an added twist
in Wright's exploitation. His third wife, who helps him satisfy his
careerist lusts, is a disciple of the Russian cult-leader Gurdjieff.
Her knowledge of the inner workings of this spiritualist sect surely
helped him create his own cult of worker-bee disciples.
Philip Johnson supplies much of the commentary in the documentary.
Johnson was single-handedly responsible for developing the
post-modernist style. Originally influenced by the modernist/socialist
Bauhaus school, Johnson soon dropped the commitment to working-class
improvement and retained only the industrial aesthetic. David Harvey
has nailed Johnson's pretensions to the wall:
"But the increasing affluence, power, and authority emerging at the
other end of the social scale produces an entirely different ethos.
For while it is hard to see that working in the postmodern AT&T
building by Philip Johnson is any different from working in the
modernist Seagram building by [Bauhauist] Mies van der Rohe, the image
projected to the outside is different. 'AT&T insisted they wanted
something other than just a glass box,' said the architect. 'We were
looking for something that projected the company's image of nobility
and strength. No material does that better than granite' (even though
it is double the cost of glass). With luxury housing and corporate
headquarters, aesthetic twists become an expression of class power."
Like Wright, as Johnson lost his ties to the socialist aesthetic that
originally shaped him, he also went off to cloud-cuckooland. While
Wright opted for America First, Johnson leapt directly from the
frying-pan into the fire and became a fascist sympathizer. This is
from a review of Franz Schulze's biography of Johnson that appeared in
the Los Angeles Times:
"Slender, intense, drop-dead handsome, with a cleft chin to set off
his chiseled features, he was a model of young WASP privilege. Then,
inexplicably, he threw it all over -- except his private fortune --
and became a camp follower of Huey Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, Father
Coughlin and other home-grown Populist demagogues, returning to
Germany before the outbreak of World War II as a correspondent for
Coughlin's Social Justice. On the eve of the blitzkrieg William L.
Shirer spotted him as 'an American fascist' and suspected him of
'spying' on the other foreign journalists 'for the Nazis.' Philip has
never refuted the charge, and only late in life did he make a tepid
apology for his activities.
"Was he a Nazi agent, or simply a sympathizer like Charles Lindbergh?
By his own admission, he was bowled over by the uniforms, the leather
belts, the storm troopers, above all the gigantic Hitlerian rallies
staged by Albert Speer. Schulze, in a major discovery, has found that
Johnson felt something like 'a sexual thrill' when he watched the
Nazis burn and destroy a Polish village."
It would seem that architecture is the art that lends itself most the
task of the socialist transformation of society. Unlike painting or
music, architecture encloses us in our living and working
circumstances. We are part of it and it is part of us. If socialism
would combine the ethos of precapitalist hunting-and-gathering
societies such as the kind so admired by Engels and Benjamin Franklin
alike with modern technology, what more appropriate goal than to
create the tipi of the future. The tipi was the center of the tribe's
social life, while it was a unique artistic statement. The
architecture of our socialist future will take this paradigm to a
higher level.
What is clear, however, is that architecture at the service of
capitalist profit is a very corrupting business. Whether characters
like Wright and Johnson were gargoyles to begin with, or were
transformed in the process of interacting with the corporations who
paid them is almost an academic question. What is not academic is the
need to abolish the system which shaped them.
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