All language subtitles for PBS.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.A.Film.by.Ken.Burns.1of2.x264.AC3.MVGroup.Forum

Frank Lloyd Wright:
My father taught me that a Symphony was

an edifice of sound.

And I learned pretty soon that it was built

by the same kind of mind
in much the same way

that a building is built.

And when that came to me,
I used to sit and listen to Beethoven.

He was a great architect.

The two minds are quite similar

because they arrange and build,

plot and plan
in very much the same way.

William Cronon, Historian::
There's a wonderful passage from Emerson

which seems to me to come closer
to capturing Frank Lloyd Wright than any other

in which he says:

"Every spirit builds itself a house

"and beyond its house, a world,

"and beyond its world, a heaven.

"Know then that the world exists for you.

Build, therefore, your own world."

And that vision of the romantic genius,

the artist taking the world and reinventing it,

making it in its own right,

following that personal idiosyncratic vision

is utterly what Frank Lloyd Wright is about.

[♪ piano playing ♪]
Beethoven

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5 in E flat major,
op. 73: 3. Allegro ma non troppo

Architecture is going to be our contribution

to the great civilization of the future.

I'd like to have architecture

that belonged where you see it standing

and was a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace,

where everybody would have room, peace, comfort,

and every establishment
would be appropriate to every man.

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright

was the greatest
of all american architects.

For more than 70 years,

he showed his countrymen

new ways to build their homes

and see the world around them.

He created some of the most monumental

and some of the most intimate spaces in America.

He designed everything,

banks and businesses,

resorts and churches,

a filling station
and a synagogue,

a beer garden
and an art museum.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
Trying to find the genius of a man like that,

that you realize is a genius
when you're talking to him

and more of a genius
as you get to know his work,

is one of those things
that probably it doesn't go into words.

It's probably a matter of how moved are you

by his work and by his personality.

In this case, both.

He, uh... I hated him, of course,

but that's only normal when a man is so great

that ... It's a combination of hatred.

It's a combination of envy and contempt and misunderstanding...

All of which gets mixed up with his genius.

Narrator:
Wright was celebrated,

then ridiculed and forgotten, then celebrated again

as no other American architect has ever been celebrated.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
One can look at him

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
and be awed by the dimensions of this personality

and the achievement, because we are looking at

something we very seldom see in real life,

which is a... a...

a genius.

On the other hand,

when you look at who he was as a human being,

he was so at the mercy of his emotions

that you think he's at the other spectrum,

he's barely a human being.

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright broke all the rules,

in his art
and in his life.

He was controversial, notorious,
utterly unpredictable.

He boasted of his genius
with an arrogance and bombast

that outraged his enemies
and bewildered his friends,

risked his career in a series of scandalous affairs,

and suffered terrible personal tragedy,

but through it all,

he never stopped dreaming of new ways to build.

He was, one of his draftsmen remembered,

"Two hundred per cent alive."

Brendan Gill, Writer:
He had to be onstage, and not only onstage,

Brendan Gill, Writer:
but he had to be in the center of the stage,

and it was actually the case

that when he would be described, as he often was,

as the greatest living American architect,

he would say, "What's that about American?"

and he would say, "What's that about living?"

He said, "I am the greatest architect that has ever lived.

Forget American. Forget living."

He knew or thought he knew or pretended that he knew

where his place was going to be in the world.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
He was a hustler. He was a wild self-promoter.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
He exaggerated his life story, invented all kinds of details,

but he was no less an artistic genius
for having done this.

He transformed our nature of...

our sense of what architecture is and can be.

He had this extraordinary reach and depth

that affected all that would ever come after him.

So what if he made up a few details in his autobiography?

I mean, so what if he was desperate for publicity?

So what if he lived this melodramatic life?

He was a true artistic genius as well.

Mike Wallace, TV Anchor:
And now to our story.

Admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright

hail him as a man 100 years ahead of his time.

Now 88 years old, he's still designing homes and buildings

which are revolutionary,

including plans for a mile-high skyscraper

for which he's had no buyers yet.

I understand that last week, in all seriousness, you said,

"If I had another 15 years to work,

"I could rebuild this entire country.

I could change the nation."

I did say that, and it's true.

Having had now the experience

going with the building of 769 buildings,

it's quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve,

and it's amazing what I could do for this country.

I've been accused of saying

I was the greatest architect in the world,

and if I had said so,

I don't think it would be very... arrogant.

[horse neighs]

Narrator:
He was born Frank Lincoln Wright

in Richland Center, Wisconsin,
on June 8, 1867,

just two years after the end of the Civil War.

"Yours was a prophetic birth,"
his mother Anna told him.

She believed her boy predestined to be a great man,

a master builder,

and she would teach him to believe it, too.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
His Mother shaped him.

When she became pregnant,

she decided that it would be a boy

and that he would be an architect.

So to that end, she put engravings,

uh... so Wright tells us,

of the great cathedrals in her room.

Then when he was born and it was a boy,

she put the engravings of the great cathedral in his room.

Narrator:
His childhood was tempestuous, chaotic,

a by-product of his parents' unhappy marriage.

His father, William Wright, was a hugely charming man

who pursued all kinds of callings,

educator, musician, politician, preacher,

but he was unwilling to stay at any job for long

and unable ever to earn enough money

to satisfy his wife's lofty aspirations.

Although she may have been
bitterly disappointed in her husband,

Anna Wright lavished love and admiration
on her only son.

He was more than a child to her,
one of his sisters remembered.

He was her protege.

He would accomplish
what she and her husband could not.

She bought him a set of wooden blocks

and encouraged him to build things.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
One of the things that Wright often said

was that he was very lucky

to have had the kind of mother he did.

She had the most wonderful quality,

the kind of quality that the ideal mother has.

You know. She was all for you.

Narrator:
When Frank was 11,

Anna reluctantly snipped off his curls

and sent him off
to spend the first of many summers

working on her family's Wisconsin farm.

The Lloyd-Joneses were Welsh,

Unitarian radicals

who were known locally as "the god-almighty joneses"

because of their piety

and the extreme seriousness
with which they took themselves.

Their family motto was
"Truth Against the World."

Frank hated farm work.

He learned only
"to add tired to tired," he remembered.

But during those summer evenings,

he listened eagerly

to the Lloyd-Joneses' lively dinner conversations

about religion,

philosophy,

and Ralph Waldo Emerson's
vision of the American future.

Surrounded by the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside,

he developed the love of nature
he would hold to all his life.

William Cronon, Historian:
What he was interested in

William Cronon, Historian:
was a nature that human beings inhabited

and, in fact, that they transformed

through their own spiritual use of it.

So, for him, what an artist is

is a person who transforms nature

by looking at nature,

passing it through the soul,

and in the expression of

what the soul experiences in nature,

something more natural
than nature itself emerges,

which is as close as we get to god.

[bell ringing]

Narrator:
Frank's father moved his family from town to town

and State to State in search of work,

eventually landing in Madison, Wisconsin.

But his parents' marriage was going from bad to worse.

Finally, in 1884,

Anna told her husband

she would never again share his bed.

William Wright filed for divorce

and walked away from his family.

Frank sided with his mother,

changed his middle name to Lloyd,

in honor of her family,

and refused ever to see his father again.

But the legacy of William Wright

would remain stubbornly alive in him,

in his lifelong love of music,

his enormous charm,

his restlessness,

and his inability ever to live within his means.

Brendan Brendan Gill, Writer:
The father dropped out of the picture,

and Frank chose to go with the mother

and never have anything to do
with the father again

and never even attended the father's funeral,

never did anything about the father,

but there was the great character

who really helped so much

to create the true Frank Lloyd Wright.

Narrator:
In 1886,

Narrator:
Wright took courses at the University of Wisconsin

and learned the rudiments of architectural drafting,

but he already felt himself

distinctly different from his classmates

and dressed accordingly,

wearing a top hat

and stalking across the campus
with a cane.

He was anxious to get away

from the scene of his family's troubles,

eager to be on his own
in the big city of Chicago.

[steam whistle blowing]

Telling no one,

he pawned a few of his father's old books

to pay for his rail ticket

and boarded the train.

With him, he remembered,

he carried only
his mother's most precious gift to him:

a boundless faith that he would succeed.

Frank Lloyd Wright
was now determined to become an architect.

William Cronon, Historian:
The great thing about Chicago

William Cronon, Historian:
is that after the 1871 fire,

when the whole downtown is basically annihilated

by this incredible fire,

the whole downtown has to be rebuilt,

and there's money to do the rebuilding

because the city is clearly going to boom

to be one of the great cities
of the United States.

So all these architects come in,

and they have a tabula rasa.

They have a clean slate

on which to do their work,

and so emerges this sense of

the architect as the person who creates
the universe that we inhabit.

Wright comes into that community,

and he imbibes that vision.

Narrator:
An uncle helped Wright

get a draftsman's job with a respectable firm,

but he wanted more.

In 1887, when he was just 20 years old,

he approached the best architect in the city,

Louis Sullivan,

and asked for a job.

Brendan Brendan Gill, Writer:
Sullivan himself was just a kid, really.

Brendan Brendan Gill, Writer:
He was 31, 32 years of age,

very artistic,
passionately determined to make good,

and into their office came this adorable boy

who obviously Sullivan,
in a perfectly ordinary sense of the word,

fell for

and thought, "Oh, my god.

This is somebody that I can really mold
and make into a great man."

And Frank himself
plainly felt the same way about the relationship.

Narrator:
Louis Sullivan was a revolutionary,

seeking a distinctly American architecture.

William Cronon, Historian:
Probably the single most influential event of the 1890s

that changes the whole architectural landscape
of the United States

is the 1893 World's Fair.

The fair was cast in a neoclassical revival mode

in which all the buildings
had a kind of facade on them

that looked greek or roman,

and it was called The White City.

It moved the visitors to the fair

more than any other single thing that was there,

and it's the reason
why the mall in Washington, D.C.,

is cast in greek revival form

and why every downtown of every American city

built in the 1900s and 1910s

have this kind of greek revival form.

Sullivan reacted very negatively

to that vision of the fair,

and so did Frank Lloyd Wright,

following Sullivan.

Narrator:
Louis Sullivan believed that architectural style

must evolve in harmony with its intended use:

form must follow function.

He designed some of the world's first skyscrapers,

and Frank Lloyd Wright helped him do the drawings.

Soon Wright became what he called

"A good pencil in the master's hand"

and was promoted to chief draftsman

in charge of 49 men.

[horse neighs]

By this time, Wright had fallen in love

with a charming 17-year-old

from a prosperous Chicago family,

Catherine Tobin,
whom everyone called Kitty.

They'd met at a church social,

when they literally collided on the dance floor.

Before long, he asked her to marry him.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
Wright did what we all do when we're young.

He constructed an image

of the most beautiful girl in the world

and... uh... and made someone fit,

and here is this enchanting girl

that sort of falls into his lap,

and he, naturally enough, says,

"This is the girl of my dreams.

"This is the one who's going to accompany me
to the great heights,

and "She is the one who's going to live for me."

Because being an egotist,
a narcissist of the first water,

this is the kind of girl he wanted.

Narrator:
At first, Kitty's parents opposed the marriage.

Wright was too young,
too unconventional, too poor.

Frank's mother was also against the match

and emphasized her unhappiness
by fainting at the wedding.

To ensure that he and his bride

started out amidst the luxury
that he was certain was somehow his due,

Frank talked his boss into giving him a 5-year contract

then persuaded Sullivan personally
to loan him enough money against it

to build himself a fine new home

in the fashionable and conservative Chicago suburb

of Oak Park.

Oak Park was so sedate, so comfortable,

so filled with churches

that local people liked to call it "Saint's Rest."

It would be Wright's home
and center of operations

for two decades.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
And so he married an adorable young woman,

Brendan Gill, Writer:
very good-looking, very fiery and spirited,

and a perfect consort for him,

and they began to hurl

child after child after child into the world.

Narrator:
There would eventually be 6 children,

4 boys and 2 girls.

Kitty looked after them,

and Wright looked after his career.

Wright loved to conduct tours of his own home,

pointing out the big, echoing playroom

he added for the children,

the elegant dining room with its imposing high-backed chairs

specially designed by Wright,

and the fireplace
at the center of the house,

which he believed
symbolized the heart of the family.

Above the mantel was carved

Frank Lloyd Wright's
new family motto:

"Truth Is Life."

The Wrights loved to socialize.

"There were parties somewhere all of the time,"

his eldest son remembered,

"and everywhere some of the time."

Brendan Gill, Writer:
He was a romantic figure beyond anything.

The whole atmosphere of a room changed

when he came into it:

the cape, the cane,

all the accouterments of a superb actor of the 19th century,

and women, understandably,
fell in love with him at once.

He was a far more remarkable figure
than their husbands,

who were lawyers
and dentists and other ordinary folk.

Narrator:
From the first, Wright lived beyond his means.

He collected old books and Japanese prints.

"So long as we have the luxuries," he liked to say,

"the necessities could pretty well
take care of themselves."

When they didn't,
he betrayed Louis Sullivan's trust.

He began secretly designing houses for wealthy clients,

sometimes under an assumed name.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Well, he was in all kinds of trouble all the time,

and he said things that were

so remote from being true,

again and again,

and he would be caught out telling some real whopper,

and he would only say with a smile,

"Well, there you are."

Narrator:
In 1893,

Sullivan found out that Wright was moonlighting

and dismissed him.

Wright would always claim
that he had quit, not been fired,

but he never looked back.

He added an impressive high-ceiling studio to his home,

launched his own practice,

and attracted
a staff of young, talented artists and designers

who would help him do the work.

Over the next decade,

he struggled to develop a style of building houses

distinctly his own.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
He would work all day and all night,

and sometimes
he would go for 3 or 4 days continuously,

working and developing drawings

for just one project,

drawing after drawing after drawing,

and this would go on all the time continually.

This is where he was developing his grammar.

This is in the Oak Park days.

He was really getting it down,

getting what it was that he wanted to do,

how he wanted to move with architecture.

Narrator:
Following the wishes of his Oak Park clients,

he first incorporated elements

drawn from every sort of European style,

including an odd hybrid he called

Hans Christian Andersen,

but he was not satisfied.

It was a uniquely American style
that Wright was after,

based not on models
imported from the old world,

but growing naturally

out of local conditions in the new.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Every great country, as it emerges into greatness,

develops its own architecture.

It goes beyond style,

it goes beyond fashion,

which are common places of change.

In principle, there ought to be something autochthonous,

there should be something coming out of the ground

that says, "This is the way we build in this particular culture."

Frank was trying to say,

"We deserve an American architecture."

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
When Wright began to be an architect,

the typical house, say,
in Oak Park, where he lived,

was on a relatively narrow lot,

maybe 60 or 70 feet wide,

maybe 100 or 125 feet deep.

It had a front porch

where people could gather

in a kind of semi-public relationship to the street.

Wright took that model, and recognizing in part

that the automobile changed the nature of street life

and that while you sat on a porch

and talked to people walking by

or in a slow-moving carriage,

an automobile destroyed that relationship.

So, he recognized that,

and he turned the house 90 degrees to the street.

More importantly,

Wright threw away the porch

and, in fact, always conceals its entrance

in some obscure way.

Narrator:
Some elements of Wright's radical new style

were borrowed from builders overseas,

the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain,

the Secessionist School in Vienna,

and the Architecture of Japan,

but no one had ever drawn upon all of them

as he did.

Wright's houses were horizontal
rather than vertical

to fit into the flat midwestern landscape,

and they featured sheltering overhangs,

low terraces, and sequestered, private gardens.

They would be set back from the street

to ensure greater privacy.

They would be stripped of the decorative detail

Wright considered superfluous.

The outside of the house, he said,

was there chiefly because of what happened inside.

In Wright's houses,

rooms were no longer to be "boxes beside boxes."

Instead, the whole lower floor
was to be one room,

its many different uses suggested by screens

rather than closed off with walls.

"Everything was to be a unified whole,"
Wright liked to say.

"Order out of chaos."

Paul Goldberger:
It's all coming out, still,

of the straight-laced,
tight Victorian and Edwardian periods

where formality, enclosed, discreet rooms,

parlors with double doors

that closed shut and were used for this formal purpose

or that formal purpose and so forth.

Wright's desire

to make everything open and flowing

was a revolution at that time.

It just exploded the whole idea

of what the house had been.

Narrator:
The homes he built for the Coonleys,

the Littles, the Blossoms, and the Robies,

the Prairie Houses, as he called them,

would one day make Frank Lloyd Wright

one of the most talked-about figures

in the world of architecture

and influence
a whole generation of young builders in Europe.

Between 1900 and 1909,
Wright's practice boomed.

He designed 135 Prairie Houses,

mostly in the new suburbs

that were rapidly growing up around Chicago.

To his well-to-do clients,

his houses offered what one critic called,

"A safe and secure harbor to the family

battered about on the uncharted seas of modern life."

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
There really is no environment that I know

that is as serene as a great Wright space.

Partly, you see, it's because it's both firmly organized,

but it seems to have no boundaries.

It seems to go on forever.

And that's one reason for the low ceiling,

so you will associate yourself physically

with that horizontal expansion.

And the other thing is the color.

They're the colors of the harvest.

It's golden-green and golden and gentle browns in there.

There's nothing like it for a sense of serenity

and belonging.

Always wonderful autumn in Wright's houses.

William Cronon, Historian:
Wright considered architecture to be the master art form,

the art form that subordinated all other art forms...

because contained within it

were the visual arts,

the plastic arts,

sculpture.

And so what he tried to do

was to bring in all of these elements,

control them all,

subordinate them to his vision

as a way of creating a perfect realization of beauty...

and his vision of what it would be like

to live within that beautiful space

would be that
it would be genuinely transformative.

It would make the people different

who inhabited that space.

Narrator:
"Every house is a missionary,"

Frank Lloyd Wright once said.

"I don't build a house without predicting the end

of the present social order."

[hammering]

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
The houses are fabulous,

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
but really, American architects

are the only architects in the world

who make careers out of houses.

This is the only country that continually builds houses,

but in the world spectrum,

it's public buildings

that are the buildings that make a career.

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright had earned a reputation

as a builder of handsome
and innovative private houses,

but he still longed
for the kind of large-scale commissions

prized by every architect.

He got the chance in 1902,

when a generous-hearted businessman named Darwin Martin

arranged for him to design
a new administration building

for a large mail-order business
in Buffalo, New York,

the Larkin company.

To get the job, Wright claimed that he,
and not Louis Sullivan,

had designed several of Sullivan's best-known buildings.

It wasn't true, but Martin believed him,

and Wright enthusiastically started work

on the largest commission he'd ever had.

[hammering]

The Larkin building, Wright said,

was intended to transform business life.

It was a huge, austere, fireproof vault

filled with modern, specially designed, steel furniture

and hermetically sealed

to keep out the noise and fumes of the nearby factories.

"It was an essay," Wright wrote later,

"in the third dimension,

"a genuine expression of power directly applied to purpose

"in the same sense that the ocean liner,

the plane, or the car is so."

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
The Larkin building was like a modern cathedral,

and if you consider those engravings

of the great cathedrals that his mother
had put in his room,

if you imagine the cathedral facade

with the vertical towers and the horizontals weaving through,

that's what the Larkin building is,

only abstracted with no decoration.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
What Wright was trying to do in that

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
was to create a modern building

that would give the workers

a sense of what he called a family gathering.

The interior is opened up

into what today we would call
an atrium-like space,

which, in effect, does for the office building

what the hearth or the fireplace did for the family home,

that's to say, provide a sense of focus.

All the women are sitting there typing

on the tables that he designed,

and everything fits in together,

and the mottoes of early individualistic capitalism

were up there saying,

"Work hard and you'll be rewarded," and so on.

Narrator:
Wright went way over budget,

but the directors of the Larkin company

and his new friend Darwin Martin loved their building.

Looking back many years later, Wright said,

"I was a real Leonardo da Vinci
when I built that building.

Everything in it was my invention."

But the critics, accustomed to more classical forms,

were not impressed.

Russell Sturgess, Architectural Record, Archive:
"The lover of architecture who looks,

"perhaps for the first time,

"at a building so entirely removed

"from the traditional styles and schools

"feels a shock of surprise

"which is the reverse of pleasure.

"Few persons who have seen the great monuments of the past

"and who have loved them

"will fail to pronounce this monument

"an extremely ugly building.

It is, in fact, a monster of awkwardness."

Russell Sturgess,
The Architectural Record.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
I was told a story of two teachers

with a house in South Carolina,

and one day a vase arrived at their house,

and they opened it, and it had a little card, and

Frank Lloyd Wright had written something like,

"I thought this would look perfect over the fireplace,"

and indeed it did.

A few weeks later, a bill came...

for the vase.

They had thought it was a gift,

and suddenly they were stuck with the bill.

[children shouting]

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright

expected all of his clients, big and small,

to give him their grateful cooperation.

"It's their duty," he said,

"to understand and appreciate and conform insofar as possible,

to the idea of the house."

He would tell one client that
all his family's possessions were prehistoric

and had to go.

And often insisted on designing all the furnishings,

right down to the napkin rings
used at his dinner table.

At least once,

he designed
the gown the hostess was to wear as well,

and when she dared rearrange the furniture
before he came to call,

he dragged it all back
to where he'd meant it to be.

He can be very overbearing

because you walk into one of his houses,

and you have to live in his head.

You have to live in his imagination.

It's in the furnishings that you get this idea

of how much control he demanded

of the people that were to live in his houses.

I think he was one of the more controlling architects

you could have ever met.

Narrator:
People put up with it all

because of Wright's enormous charm

and his ability to infuse them
with the excitement

he seemed able to summon up
for every project.

He believed his clients were privileged
to be working with him

and somehow made them believe it, too,

even though his buildings would cost

far more than his original estimates.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
They would have to forgive him. They had no choice.

And, of course, he was perfectly conscious of how

spellbinding he was

in being able to sell a project,

but he also was giving full value.

Narrator:
Wright's practice was bringing in a lot of money,

but he was spending still more.

The sheriff of Oak Park

once had to spend the night in his kitchen

for fear Wright would leave town

before one of his checks had safely cleared.

"It was my misfortune," Wright once complained,

"that everybody was willing to trust me."

Brendan Gill, Writer:
He never felt altogether content

except when he was desperately in debt,

and his son wrote about the time

when his father, borrowing money from a friend,

then went out and bought 2 or 3 grand pianos

so as to be deeply in debt again,

all within 8 or 9 hours, you know.

He felt so good on the edge.

The edge was what gave him the stimulus.

Plainly, his adrenaline was filling him up to the brim

when he was in desperate trouble of that kind.

William Cronon, Historian:
He's, in a sense, a man who never grew up.

He remained a kind of golden boy all of his life.

Both his greatest strengths and his greatest weaknesses

come from his childishness.

He's so playful.

He's so supple.

He's so malleable.

He can do whatever he wants and get away with it.

He's used to getting away with things,

and it means that he can play
with other people's money

like a child,
not worrying about ever paying his debts.

Narrator:
"Better be very careful in your dealing with him,"

one battered client warned another.

"If he is sane, he is dangerous."

Wallace:
I understand that you attend no church.

Frank Lloyd Wright:
I attend the greatest of all churches.

I put a capital "N" on Nature
and call it my church.

What do you think of church architecture in the United States?

I think it's, of course, a great shame.

Because it improperly reflects the idea of religion?

Because it is a parrot and monkey reflection
and no reflection of religion.

[bell dinging]

Narrator:
In 1905,

the Unitarian church of Oak Park burned to the ground.

Its progressive minister
and most of his congregation

wanted to replace it
with a bold new architectural statement.

They gave the contract to one of their own members,

Frank Lloyd Wright.

"Why have the steeple of the little white church?" he said.

"Why point to heaven?

Why not build a temple to man

appropriate to his uses

as a meeting place?"

The exterior of his Unity temple

was unlike any other church anywhere.

Some disappointed worshippers compared it

to a prison gatehouse, an ice factory,

a mayan handball court.

But the interior was something else again.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
You come in the back door of that chapel.

You could hear the church, but you couldn't see,

and then you made the 3 turns.

Every turn is a very difficult thing.

A right-angle turn is a wrench,

but he knew you didn't go very far.

It's a small church,

and then being forced to turn

makes you start over a new life.

And by slowing you down
with a right-angle turn,

he prepared you intentionally

for the surprise of the religious feeling.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
When you come into the church,

you come in upstairs
onto the auditorium floor

which is like a raised platform,

which therefore comes to be a spiritual plane.

In other words, it's as if you've risen up to a plane

which is floating literally in air

because it's surrounded by these depressed cloisters

on all 4 sides,

standing on this raised plane

with space dropping away from you on every side.

It's like being on a kind of plateau

or mountaintop out on the landscape,

and I think that's what gives it its spirituality.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
It's not a big building,

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
but I think it's the biggest space in America.

It's a square inside

like the old meetinghouses,

and as in the old meetinghouses,

the preacher is on one side,

and then people are on the other 3 sides,

and they're looking into each other's faces

as well as into his.

So there's an enormous sense of community.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
It's an extraordinary building

because it has staggering civic dignity to it,

and what Wright wanted to do was show

that you can make a modern monumental public place.

That was the real importance of Unity temple.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
I always remember my father

talking about how my grandfather
would work late into the night.

He'd hear him playing the piano.

It would be 12:00, 1:00 at night

that he'd come in from the office.

I think a lot of

my father's looking back was... uh...

a great deal of nostalgia,

I think yearning to have had more of a relationship.

I often wonder just how happy things were.

Narrator:
By 1909,

Frank Lloyd Wright seemed to have everything

an ambitious architect could want:

a successful career, a comfortable home,

a loving wife and family.

But appearances were deceiving.

His practice was flourishing,

but he had no prospects for any more big jobs,

and he felt that he had done

all he could do with the Prairie style.

"I was losing my grip on my work," Wright remembered,

"and even my interest in it.

I could see no way out."

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
He was not getting the kind of recognition

that he felt he deserved,

and, as a result, was not getting the kind of

large-scale building projects that he deserved.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
Here he was pushing 40 at that time,

and he had not had,

except for the Unity temple and the Larkin building,

a major commission.

How many 3-bedroom houses can you do?

How many different ways can you do them?

But more importantly,

how many times can you meet

with Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Smith

and talk about her closets

without going nuts?

Narrator:
And there was trouble at home, too.

He and Kitty were growing apart.

he was an architect, he once explained.

Her profession was motherhood,

and he grew to resent

the amount of attention she paid to the children.

He hated being called papa,

refused to play any part in disciplining his children,

complained when they interrupted his work.

Wright was never a father in the classic sense.

There are pictures of him with his family.

He's always sitting a little bit to one side.

He's not really their father.

He's more like a kid among all these other kids

and, in a way, just as competitive

for the affection of mother,

but I think that Wright never ever was a real father.

[children shouting]

Narrator:
"I have had the father feeling for a building,"

he once said,

"but I never had it for my children."

A few blocks away,

in a handsome house
Wright had designed for them,

lived Edwin Cheney

and his wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

They were good friends of both the Wrights,

but now Wright's relationship with Mamah

ripened into something else.

She was vivacious, intellectual, artistic,

and unsatisfied
with the traditional role of wife and mother.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
She was a writer. She was an early feminist.

She was not your ordinary,
run-of-the-mill kind of suburban housewife.

Narrator:
Their affair began

with long rides in Wright's bright yellow roadster.

Soon they became the talk of Oak Park.

Wright didn't care.

He was captivated with his new love.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
I think the clue here is

that she was all for him

in a way that Kitty was no longer.

Kitty was much too involved in those 6 children

to pay much attention to Frank,

and Mamah was... never made that mistake.

Narrator:
Eventually, Kitty discovered what was happening

but decided to ignore her husband's infidelity

in the hope that it was an infatuation

that would not last.

But it did last.

In the summer of 1908,

Wright asked Kitty for a divorce.

She refused.

A year later, he asked her again.

Again she said no.

Then, in October of 1909,

with no warning to anyone,

Wright closed his studio,

abandoned Kitty and their 6 children,

and ran off to Europe with Mamah Cheney,

who left her husband and children behind

to join him.

"All he left," Wright's son David remembered,

"were bills to be paid."

As I said, when he left home,

he left my mother with a grocery bill of over $900,

which was pretty high at that time.

The butcher shops and the grocery shops were

very kind to us there on Chicago Avenue.

Narrator:
Frank had never forgiven his father

for deserting his family.

Now, at age 42,

after nearly two decades of marriage,

he had done precisely the same thing.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
There was a great deal of tension,

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
especially when my grandfather left the family.

There was actually physical violence,

and my father attacked my grandfather
when he was leaving,

and, um... so there was, uh...

there was tension there.

Narrator:
"I went out into the unknown," Wright wrote later,

"to test faith in freedom,

test faith in life,

as I had already tested faith in work."

At first, Kitty refused to blame her husband.

Her old friend Mamah Cheney,

she told a reporter,

was a vamp.

David Wright, Son:
She was very much in love with him.

She wouldn't give him a divorce

for several years after he left home.

She was always hoping that he would come back,

but he never did.

Narrator:
Now a public scandal erupted.

Newspapers published editorials condemning the couple.

The Chicago Tribune held Wright responsible

for what it called

"An affinity triangle

unparalleled even in the history of soul mating."

In Oak Park, the presbyterian minister preached

that "Such a man as Wright

"has lost all sense of morality and religion

and is damnably to be blamed."

The couple traveled to Berlin,

where he prepared
a portfolio of his own work for publication,

and then to Italy,

where he drank in
all the architectural history he could.

They stayed abroad for a year.

Wright called it "Voluntary Exile."

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
Frank had really constructed an idea of himself

as a superior being.

He was a creative artist,

and he really, I think, innocently thought

that everybody else would think he was a creative artist,

therefore outside the bounds in conventional morality.

Narrator:
In 1910, Wright abruptly returned to Oak Park.

He was out of money

and anxious to see his children,

who had been sending letters

begging him to come home.

Mamah stayed in Europe.

Kitty desperately hoped for a reconciliation,

but Wright was living apart from his wife now

and, using borrowed funds,

had begun building another home

on a hillside in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

He called it Taliesin,

welsh for "Shining Brow."

He told everyone

it was to be a new house for his mother,

but he really meant to share it with Mamah

once she obtained a divorce.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
He, of course, could no longer live in Oak Park,

and even Chicago was difficult.

He had to move away from there.

He had to have a refuge.

And uh...

so he went back to the valley

of his ancestors, the Lloyd Jones,

and there, of course, on this hillside,

he was able to build this wonderful Taliesin.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Voice-over, Archive:
It means "Shining Brow,"

Frank Lloyd Wright, Voice-over, Archive:
and Taliesin is built like a brow

on the edge of the hill,

not on top of the hill,

because I believe
you should never build on top of anything directly.

If you build on top of the hill,
you lose the hill.

Narrator:
Wright's plans for Taliesin

were partially inspired by the villas

he and Mamah had visited in Italy,

but its meandering design was his alone.

So was its relation to the land.

The outside walls and chimneys

were built from rough limestone

quarried a few miles away.

Inner walls were covered with plaster

made from sand

from the banks of the Wisconsin river.

The roof's weathered cedar shingles

were meant to be the color of tree trunks at dusk.

"I wish to be part of my beloved Wisconsin," he wrote.

"My house is made out of the rocks and trees of the region.

It is part of the hill on which it stands."

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
It was to him a retreat.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
This was a sanctuary.

It was a meeting point there of...

of the spirit and the soul,

of nature and of human beings coming together,

and...

to him, it was a sacred thing that was happening here.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Like any architect,

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Frank Lloyd Wright

Brendan Gill, Writer:
wanted to make his own house

an epitome of everything he stood for

emotionally, spiritually,

technically,

and so he built this great long, rambling, beautiful,

hugging-the-ground house,

and it was going to be

his statement to the world.

And he kept losing it,

mortgages unpaid,

bank would take it, he'd get it back,

he'd incorporate himself

and found a new method of...

outwitting everybody around him,

and he hung onto that to his dying day.

It was perfectly wonderful how he manipulated everybody

to preserve his house.

But the house itself was and is a wonder.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
Taliesin is, I think,

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
the most important building Wright ever did.

I think it was the building

that Wright put more into

than any other,

not only in terms of personal physical labor,

uh... but also in terms of thinking about architecture.

Narrator:
To Wright, Taliesin was the perfect embodiment

of what he liked to call "Organic Architecture."

William Cronon, Historian:
I think we're very likely to misunderstand Wright

when he uses that word "Organic."

Because what we think we'd mean

when we use the word "organic" is

something that's just taken right out of pristine,

pure nature and use

in a natural way.

That's not what Wright meant by "organic" or "natural" at all.

What he meant was

things taken from nature

that inspire the artist

to see beyond those natural forms

to some ideal, almost divine form that lay behind

that natural form.

And so it was the job of the artist

to create a vision of nature

that was more natural than nature itself.

Narrator:
Mamah Cheney returned from Europe

and finally got her divorce in the summer of 1911.

And when Kitty Wright

again refused even to consider

granting one to Frank,

he moved to Taliesin anyway

to be with Mamah.

The scandal was reborn.

A reporter noted that Wright had been spotted

carrying Cheney across a stream

and that she had exhibited "a good deal of lingerie

"of a quality not often on display

in that part of Wisconsin."

On Christmas day, 1911,
a defiant Wright held a press conference

to explain his actions to the world.

"The ordinary man

cannot live without rules to guide his conduct," he said.

He, Frank Lloyd Wright, was not ordinary.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
My grandfather always said,

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
"You have to live in the now."

What is happening right now
is the most important thing,"

and I think he really lived that way,

and he didn't look back.

Narrator:
Mamah and Frank

would live together at Taliesin for 3 years,

doing their best to ignore the endless gossip.

She worked on a book,

ran the household,

and enjoyed her children's occasional visits.

He tried to make amends with his own children

and struggled to rebuild his practice,

nearly destroyed by the scandal.

Wright managed to land the commission

for the Midway Gardens on Chicago's south side,

a whole block to be transformed

into a European-style pleasure garden.

Assisted now by his son John,

Wright hurled himself into the construction,

returning to Taliesin each weekend

to be with his mistress.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
In August of 1914,

Frank Lloyd Wright was in Chicago

working on the Midway Gardens,

and he had left Mamah Borthwick in Taliesin.

She was there for the weekend,

and she had her two children,
her boy and a girl were there.

There were a number of other workmen there,

and they were all having lunch one day

when something so awful happened

that I think it's the greatest tragedy

of Frank Lloyd Wright's life.

Narrator:
Wright had hired a West Indian named Julian Carlton

to serve as butler and handyman at Taliesin.

Carlton's wife was to be the cook,

but something went wrong.

No one would ever know what it was,

and Mamah may have told them

they would have to leave.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
The final meal that they were to serve

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
was lunch on Saturday.

Julian Carlton appeared in his white jacket

and served lunch as usual,

and he then asked permission

to... clean some carpets with gasoline.

He was given that permission.

He went outside,

and instead of pouring it on the carpets,

poured it all the way around

the outsides of the windows and doors.

Narrator:
As Mamah and the others were eating their lunch,

Carlton quietly bolted the windows

and all but one of the doors.

Then he lit the gasoline.

In seconds, the house was engulfed in flames.

When those inside tried to flee,

Carlton hacked them to death with an ax.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
If you can imagine,

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
this all happened in a fraction of a second.

He had killed Mamah Borthwick by splitting her skull.

He also did the same with her son.

He attacked her daughter.

Everything was in disarray.

People were screaming,

trying to jump out of windows.

They were a story and a half above the ground.

One man jumped out,

broke his arm, and was in flames,

and was rolling on the ground.

Other men were... were being... butchered.

Narrator:
Wright was in Chicago when the news came.

Frank was called to the telephone,

and he...

came back in the room, and John,

uh... his son, said, "Who was that?"

And he didn't... his father didn't reply,

and he turned around and looked at his father,

and his father was staggering against the table.

His face was...

ashen, you know, just ashen.

Of the 9 people who had sat down to dinner,

7 were dead or dying.

[crow cawing]

Narrator:
In his grief, he refused to let the undertaker

touch the body of the woman he had loved.

Instead, he had his own carpenters

fashion a simple wooden box for her.

There was no formal funeral, either.

The coffin was placed aboard a plain farm wagon

covered with flowers and drawn by horses.

Wright's eldest son and two cousins

helped him bury her in the little cemetery

behind his mother's family chapel.

"I wanted to fill the grave myself," Wright remembered.

"No monument marks the spot where Mamah was buried.

Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?"

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
I suppose someone you have lost,

as Frank lost Mamah Borthwick,

is always going to be...

the one you fantasize about.

And I sometimes think that had Mamah lived,

Frank's life might have taken an entirely other tack.

I think she would have stabilized him,

and I think he never forgot her.

Narrator:
"There is release from anguish in action,"

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote later,

and he consoled himself
the only way he knew how,

by losing himself in his work.

He completed Midway Gardens,

began to rebuild a new Taliesin
on the ashes of the old,

lobbied for new commissions.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
It wasn't in his nature

Brendan Gill, Writer:
to suffer a prolonged bouts of whatever cause.

He bounced back. He liked to be on the edge,

and this was another case where tragedy provided an edge,

and then he came back and started life over.

Narrator:
In 1916, Wright sailed for Japan

to begin work on a project that would dwarf

everything he had ever done before.

The Emperor of Japan had decreed

that there should be a monumental,

western-style hotel in Tokyo

to attract investors from abroad.

Wright had always loved Japanese art and culture

and had fought hard to get the commission.

He would spend most of the next 6 years in Tokyo,

overseeing its design and construction.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
The Imperial Hotel was something that Wright,

I think, really, really wanted badly.

First of all, he had never gotten

a major international commission,

and he had never done a building of that scope.

Narrator:
The vast hotel would contain 285 guest rooms

and would cost more than $4 million.

Wright designed everything,

even the dinner plates and hotel stationery.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
And the problem he faced was to design a hotel

that would reflect both Japanese attitudes

and, of course, western attitudes,

because if it wasn't to reflect western attitudes,

they wouldn't have asked him in the first place.

He was interested in creating a building, as he said,

"that would bring the Japanese to their feet."

Narrator:
Wright worked hard

to ensure that
the building would be able to withstand

the earthquakes Japan was famous for.

His design called for the hotel's walls

to be thicker at the bottom than at the top

and to move independently of each other.

He specified a copper roof

instead of the traditional tiles

and an unusual foundation of concrete posts

that would anchor the building in the unstable mud

that lay beneath it.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
We think of Wright as this triumphant creator

of brilliant aesthetic objects,
which indeed he was,

but he was also a great engineer.

He did phenomenally interesting things

from an engineering standpoint,

and he never forgot

a sense that architecture is construction

as much as it's art.

Narrator:
Covered with ornate stone carvings,

the Imperial Hotel was one of the last

great handcrafted buildings of the 20th century.

When the imperial was finally completed,

Wright's Japanese clients were delighted.

Not long afterward,

a massive earthquake leveled Tokyo.

Wright, back in the United States,

waited anxiously to learn the fate of his hotel.

Arata Endo, Japanese Architect:
September 8th. 1923. Dear Mr. Wright...

The first shock
was enough to lay many buildings flat,

and the second shock
easily leveled what the first had loosened.

Fire billowed from every house,

and those people who survived the crush

and sought places of safety out in the open

were killed by the smoke and scorching hot air,

roasted by hundreds and thousands.

All steel buildings proved fatal...

enough to show that our architects were fools.

What a glory it is to see the Imperial standing

amidst the ashes of a whole city.

Glory to you.

Sincerely, Arata Endo.

Narrator:
Many other buildings survived as well,

but the legend grew,

encouraged by Wright,

that his hotel alone had survived.

Now he was sure

he would be seen as an engineering genius

as well as a great architect.

Madame Noël:
December 12, 1914. My dear sir,

Because I stand aghast at the university of your sorrow,

because my own soul has been chastened by grief...

Narrator:
Shortly after the death of Mamah Cheney,

Wright had received a sympathy letter

from a woman who asked to see him.

She, too, was an artist, she said, a sculptress,

and had suffered terrible losses,

first, the death of her husband,

then abandonment by a lover.

Madame Noël:
...And feel that last touch

in the allness of the universe.

Sincerely, Madam Noël.

Narrator:
Miriam Noël was cultured, wealthy, theatrical,

and she was infatuated with Wright,

whom she called "Lord of my waking dreams."

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
She was a southerner who had uh... somehow

gotten herself to Paris, you know,

and had set up a salon there

and claimed to know Leon Trotsky

and claimed to have all kinds of important connections.

Narrator:
Soon Wright had moved Noël into the rebuilt Taliesin

and then took her with him to Japan

while he worked on the Imperial Hotel.

It would prove a disastrous mistake.

Miriam was violent, unstable, and addicted to morphine.

They quarreled from the first.

He denounced the food she cooked,

the clothes she wore.

She accused him of infidelity,

of being too much under the thumb of his mother,

who hated her.

Still, they would stay together

for more than 8 contentious years.

Then, in 1923,

Kitty Wright finally granted Frank a divorce.

That same year, his mother died,

and despite all the tension with Miriam,

he agreed to marry her

"In an effort to calm her," he would say later.

It didn't work.

Bruce Pfeiffer, Former Apprentice:
He didn't realize what he was getting into.

He didn't realize that she had a problem with alcohol

and with morphine.

He didn't realize that the life they were going to have

was going to be a life of absolute agony.

It was just a doomed relationship from the beginning.

Narrator:
Wright found some comfort in 4 small commissions

he drummed up in Southern California.

There he experimented
with patterned concrete forms,

which he called textile blocks.

Drawing inspiration from ancient mayan architecture,

Wright wanted to create thoroughly modern houses

that were affordable,

easy to maintain,

and fireproof.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
Wright's genius is to carry ideas to their extremes,

to do them with a discipline, a rigor,

a sense of the play of light and shade,

the sense of the sensuousness of surface

when he chose to do that, as in the textile blocks,

that uh... is more than anyone else.

It's not that he doesn't have a great genius.

He has a total genius.

He can make us see all of history afresh.

Narrator:
One of his California houses

was said to have been so admired

by its unhappily married owners

that neither would ever agree to a divorce

for fear of having to move out.

[hammering]

But the California houses were plagued with difficulties.

There were cost overruns,

leaky roofs and walls,

and the textile blocks proved difficult to fabricate,

and Wright estranged himself for a time

from his eldest son, Lloyd,

who had been supervising the construction

and whom he unfairly blamed
for everything that went wrong.

"You are not really reliable,"
he told his son.

"You will buy when you can't pay.

"You will attempt anything and blame failure on others.

You are absolutely
the worst-mannered young man I know."

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
My grandfather, and my father was the same way,

they would get into terrible temper tantrums

and just blow up about something

and just lay everybody to waste.

A couple of hours later,

they'd come in as if nothing had happened, you know.

"What are you sad about?"

or "Why are you, why are you not talking to me?"

you know, as if nothing had been happening,

they just like they didn't realize that... that...

that the... outburst what it had caused

and the emotional stress, and...

and they had moved on, and uh...

everything was ok again.

Narrator:
Meanwhile, there were more quarrels

between Wright and Miriam

and more accusations.

She threatened him with a knife,

finally stormed out of the house in the spring of 1924,

vowing no other woman would ever have him,

but there was another woman.

Olgivanna Ivanova Milanov Hinzenberg

was just 26,

less than half Wright's age.

Born in eastern Europe
and separated from her german husband,

she was a disciple of Georgei Ivanovich Gurdjieff,

a charismatic Russian mystic

who had attracted
a large international following to his teachings

that combined eastern and western philosophy.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
His idea of life was that

most people walked around asleep

and they really weren't aware of themselves

and aware of the life around them.

Narrator:
Wright met Olgivanna by chance

at a ballet performance in Chicago.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
And Frank said something to her

about the ballet dancers,

you know, who were doing some kind of classical dance,

and he said to her something about,

"Well, most of these people are dancing as though...

they are asleep."

She looked at him, and she thought,

"My goodness,

here is somebody
who really sees what's going on in life."

Women in the twenties are all dolled up

with little tight curls and lipstick and everything,

and here was a person with a very plain,

beautiful, slightly tanned complexion,

hair brought back very simply.

Her beauty was such of natural nature

that it appealed to him,

because he loved things that were natural,

and their life began there.

Both married, both seeking divorces,

but he invited her, a few weeks after,
to come up to Taliesin,

and he said to her, "Come with me, Olgivanna,

and they won't see us for the dust."

Narrator:
Olgivanna moved into Taliesin.

Soon, she was pregnant with Wright's child.

A whole new era of scandal began.

Miriam, enraged by Olgivanna's presence,

went to the newspapers,

broke into the house,

threatened to shoot the lovers.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
And she pursued them

like a vengeful bat out of hell.

She hounded him until he was broke.

She hounded poor Olgivanna

until Olgivanna didn't know
whether she was alive or dead.

She threw lawsuits at them.

She stalked them from one town to the next,

from one State to the next.

She drove them mad for the next 3 or 4 years.

Narrator:
Olgivanna's ex-husband pursued them, too.

Finally, the lovers fled to the Minnesota woods,

where they hid out under assumed names

which they could never quite remember.

The local sheriff arrested Wright.

He was charged with violating The Federal Mann act,

which made it illegal to carry a woman

across State lines for "immoral purposes."

Wright spent two nights in jail

before his lawyers could get him out on bail.

He was blameless, he told the press.

The only sin to which he pled guilty

was what he called

"the deadly sin in a democracy of having ideas."

Even members of Wright's own family turned against him.

Tim Wright, Grandson:
Frank Lloyd Wright was an embarrassing relative.

For my father, in high school, he was a torment

because here was this guy

who was notorious rather than,

he wasn't celebrated

as the great American genius in the twenties.

He was regarded

as kind of a dangerous moral influence

and a man of great talent

who was squandering his talent

on salacious romantic episodes

and all that kind of stuff.

Narrator:
In 1925, a fire destroyed the second Taliesin,

and while Wright was rebuilding it,

the local bank foreclosed on the mortgage.

Friends had to bail him out.

Bad luck seemed to haunt Wright's work as well.

Although hundreds of skyscrapers

were going up in cities all across the country,

few of the corporations that were building them

were willing to take a chance on the notorious

Frank Lloyd Wright.

He did manage to win commissions

for an extensive development
in the Sierra Madre mountains,

a summer colony at lake Tahoe,

and a steel cathedral that would seat

one million worshippers in New York city,

but none of them were ever built.

It's odd that when the country was flourishing,

Wright was not.

During the boom time of the twenties,

his career was at rock bottom.

When he was in his 50s, there were articles about

how this quite interesting architect

but now a has-been

was basically washed up.

He hadn't built a building of any consequence in years.

Narrator:
In August of 1927,

Miriam relented and gave him a divorce,

but Wright was now penniless.

Friends and former clients agreed to pay his alimony for him.

He and Olgivanna were married one year later

and returned to Taliesin.

Then came the crash of 1929,

destroying Wright's hope
that his one remaining commission,

an elaborate resort in the Arizona desert,

would ever be built.

Bruce Pfeiffer, Former Apprentice:
It was a terrible time.

Bruce Pfeiffer, Former Apprentice:
In a letter he wrote to one of his clients, he said,

"We're cutting up bed sheets to make handkerchiefs.

We haven't bought any new clothes in 4 years."

His sister Maginel lived in New York

and gave Mrs. Wright a warm winter wool coat,

a secondhand down coat.

It was like gold to her.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Everything he struggled to do

turned to dust and ashes for a period of many years.

Very few people have ever succeeded in recovering

from that degree of failure, persistent failure,

and not altogether, for once, his own fault.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
The kinds of buildings that he'd been building

at the turn of the century in 1905, 1910,

were so far into the past.

They're, you know, things he did 20 years before.

Nobody was interested in the kinds of ideas

that architecture ought to reflect,

the noblest vision of society, you know.

Nobody was interested in that concept anymore.

Wright's position, really, as he went into his 60s,

was probably at the most desperate moment of his life.

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright's career lay in ruins,

a victim of changing times and changing fashion,

of personal scandal

and the excesses of his own ego.

His critics wrote him off as out-of-date,

old-fashioned,

but they had underestimated him.

In the years to come,

he would eclipse everything that had gone before.

[♪ piano playing ♪]
Beethoven
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5 in E flat major,
op. 73: 3. Allegro ma non troppo