Not too long ago we visited the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Buffalo. FLW is regarded as an artist who brooked no interference from his clients. In one bedroom, the built-in bed was 4 feet long. When the clients complained, he told them it was their own fault. They had insisted upon a closet, so he put it at the head of the bed. Couldn’t he have extended the tail end another two feet? he was asked. There was room. No, he could not, he said, that would mess up the lines of the house.
He also had a phrase of “client-proofing” the house, building in furniture in such a way that it would be impractical for clients to bring in their own. And lastly, this particular client had a lot of books, but FLW wanted them tucked away for appearance sake. He concealed a bookshelf area around the chimney/heat grate which was also concealed. “Wouldn’t that harm the books?” my wife asked. “Not his problem,” the guide answered.
Few clients wanted to see Wright ever again after his work was finished. However, Darwin Martin, the Buffalo client, was an exception. A self-made man, he was in awe of Wright’s talent. When he died, Wright said he had lost a great friend, “and I think he was a better friend to me than I was to him.” This is because, after an initial creative spurt, Wright’s personal life fell into scandal, so that people crossed the street when they saw him coming. Martin saw him through, continually lending him money (which was never repaid), and thus made possible the second half of Wright’s career in which he designed even more ambitious things.
At the guide’s mention of scandal—it involved ditching his family to take up with another woman, a most peculiar one—something clicked. Yet, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it and wracked my brains trying. It seemed as though it didn’t involve Wright directly, only someone who was taken in a defrauding by his new weird wife. Wright was taken in by this cultish woman, also, and they prevailed over their own utopian community. The guide was no help to me. She kept track only of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural life, not his private life which got strange.
At last it dawned upon me the next day. It was Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva. She had defected to the West in the late 60s. The Indian embassy where she requested asylum, then the Italian embassy where she was quickly transferred, didn’t even know that Stalin had a daughter. A manuscript she had smuggled of life under her father’s Soviet Union made her wealthy. But, raised communist, she knew nothing of money nor how to manage it. unscrupulous ones managed to syphon it all away, the greatest of whom was Wright’s strange wife and the society she ran. She died, if not in poverty, then at least in very modest circumstances. I’ll tell the tour guide about it, should I see her again.
Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are a nightmare to maintain. The architect designed them beyond the technical capacities of the time. Martin’s company, the Larkin Soap company, where he served as right-hand man, at one time the highest paid employee in all America, went out of business during the Great Depression. In time, the house fell into disrepair. It surely would have met the wrecking ball had not another architect bought it just for the sake of preservation. The back quarters—the conservatory and carriage house—actually was demolished, leaving only the home proper. Later, these items were rebuilt to true specifications so that the visitor cannot tell they are not original.
You can’t take pictures inside, however you can stroll the grounds at any time. Had I been permitted to take pictures, I might have shown how Wright liked to “hide the corners” of a room. Take a 15 foot wall, for instance, and build twelve feet of it up front, protruding. It has the effect of concealing the end pieces not protruding. Wright grumbled that Americans “lived in boxes.” He didn’t want his designs to reflect that.
I might, had pictures been permitted, documented how Wright brought the outdoors in via the use of outdoor materials extended inside. And, I probably would have shown the compressed (lowered) ceilings in places where Lloyd didn’t want people to linger—the front porch, for example, where people were either to leave or enter, but not remain. Figuring a man’s home was his castle, Wright worked to conceal the front doors, conveying that you don’t come to visit without an invitation. The ceilings of hallways were compressed, too. People were not to remain there. They were to pass through quickly to join the life in one room or the other.
And yes, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is inspired by Wright’s career, our guide confirmed. This conflicts with the view of another architect I knew who said it wasn’t. However, he probably meant to convey that it was not a biography of the man. It clearly is inspired by him. Wright’s radical breakaway from Louis Sullivan, his former employer, to form his own unique American architecture free from Roman or Greek influence, parallels exactly Howard Roark’s rejection of his day’s traditional architecture. Now that I think of it, Roark was used to channel Ayn Rand’s own peculiar ‘objectivism’ philosophy, and the latter Wright also was attracted to offbeat things and a strong woman who championed them. Maybe there are more parallels than I first thought. Ah, well—a project for another time.
****** The bookstore
