Word: wrights
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...time Wright was 19 he was in Chicago working for Louis Sullivan, the most important American architect of the time. Hired as an $8-a-week draftsman, Wright asked for a 125% raise within a few months and quit when he was refused. Sullivan quickly capitulated and was soon paying him $60 a week, a preposterous sum for the time. All his life, no matter how much he made (and borrowed: friends and patrons lent him thousands of dollars at a whack), Wright felt poor, thanks to an unhesitatingly indulged taste for swank -- chamois underwear, high-performance sports cars, whatever...
Much of his greatest work, such as New York City's Guggenheim Museum, is definitively 20th century, yet doesn't fit easily into the standard modernist canon -- Wright's buildings are too craftsmanlike, too exuberant, too strange. Was he the greatest architect of the 19th century (as the young Philip Johnson twittingly called him) or the first great one of the 20th? Even as he was, years ahead of his time, denuding interiors and dreaming up schemes for mass- produced housing, he loathed the new abstract art from its beginning. Johnson planned to include Wright in his epochal 1932 Museum...
...Just as Wright was a modernist who didn't like the rubric, so too was he a prototypical modern figure in all the meretricious pop senses. He was a child of a dysfunctional family. He wore long hair and dressed expensively and eccentrically for effect: broad-brimmed hat, cape, velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs, immense bows, tassled cummerbunds, high heels. He was not just an adulterer but a free-love ideologue. He was a media celebrity; trains and theater curtains were held for him. And he marketed his fame: during the Depression he started charging devotees to come...
...Wright managed to enrapture a particular type of rich man -- Great Lakes ! mercantile magnates. Darwin Martin, a mail-order-soap chief executive from Buffalo, commissioned houses and offices and lent him tens of thousands of dollars. Fallingwater was the country house of Pittsburgh department-store owner Edgar Kaufmann, and for "Hib" Johnson of Johnson's Wax he designed an enormous house as well as a corporate headquarters. Richard Lloyd Jones, the architect's newspaper-publisher cousin, called him a "strutting, self- seeking, self-centered charmer" -- but he loved the house Wright built him, even though it (typically) went 50% over...
...only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived," Wright declared to a friend in the 1930s, "but the greatest architect who will ever live." Faced with such hubris, Secrest is ever the earnest apologist. "Few people," she writes about a similar outburst, "realized how compensatory those comments actually were." But if anyone should be excused his megalomania, it was Frank Lloyd Wright. He created dozens of masterworks, and his influence on a century of architecture is unequalled. Low-slung suburban houses, cathedral ceilings, wide-open interiors, the blurring of the indoor-outdoor distinction, office...