All language subtitles for PBS.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.A.Film.by.Ken.Burns.2of2.x264.AC3.MVGroup.Forum

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
I think of him always

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
as the great American confidence man

who's changing the world

according to his own images,

who wearing many disguises all the time.

He's right out of Mark Twain.

He's right out of Melville.

He's the man, you know,

in his rebuilt Lincoln Continental,

in which he's taken out the rear window

because he says, "I never look behind."

Narrator:
Frank Lloyd Wright was 62 years old in 1929,

and his long, turbulent career seemed at an end.

Wealthy clients

no longer knocked at his studio door.

Younger architects dismissed him as a has-been,

and his private life

remained tainted by scandal.

But at Taliesin,

the once-magnificent home

he had built for himself

in Spring Green, Wisconsin,

he stubbornly refused to admit defeat.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
There's no point in being an architect

Brendan Gill, Writer:
unless you get to build.

It's very unlike music.

A man can write a symphony,

and it can last for a hundred years unplayed,

and then it could be played,

and the world would be full of wonder.

But an architect who makes a lot of pretty drawings

or a lot of floor plans

and nobody ever builds them,

they... they turn to dust.

Nobody cares.

They never get built after his death.

And the older he grew,

the more passionately concerned

he was with that.

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
We always called him Mr. Wright.

Everybody called him Mr. Wright,

and when Mrs. Wright referred to him,

she would refer to him as, "Mr. Wright said so-and-so."

She wouldn't say,
"Frank said so-and-so."

And there were very, very few people

around him

who called him Frank.

Narrator:
After more than 2 decades of domestic turmoil,

Frank Lloyd Wright had finally settled down.

His third wife, Olgivanna,

a follower of the Russian spiritual teacher Gurdjieff,

was a driven, disciplined woman.

Despite all the difficulties they faced,

her faith in her husband's greatness never wavered.

Tim Wright, Grandson:
She was a woman of extraordinary

intelligence and charm

and, I think, one of the few people who could

fight with Wright

and argue with Wright on his... on his level

and be accepted

by him in a way that my grandmother,

my blood grandmother, was never,

I think, an equal.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
Olgivanna was the one

who smoothed things over, you know.

Olgivanna was the one who made

the wheels work out.

Olgivanna was the one who calmed Wright down.

She was his... his rock, really.

Narrator:
To keep his name and his ideas alive

and to lure new clients,

she urged her husband to lecture and to write,

articles on architecture first,

then a full-scale autobiography.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
I think the autobiography

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
was a really significant move on Wright's part

to sell himself to the public.

He was trying to present himself

as the great architect,

the great man,

the person who could understand

everything about humanity,

everything about the landscape,

everything about your every need,

and was able to make you feel,

as you read the autobiography,

that this is the only person

you should ask to design your house.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
He was very skillful at constructing his own legend.

One of the great works of art

that Frank Lloyd Wright created

was the life story of Frank Lloyd Wright.

I think we have to remember that that was,

in large part, a conscious creation

of a brilliant artistic mind

as much as the architecture was.

Narrator:
In 1932, to help pay their bills,

Olgivanna also suggested

that they start an apprenticeship program

modeled in part on Gurdjieff's teaching,

The Taliesin Fellowship.

It would attract eager and admiring students,

who would each pay $650 a year

to live and work alongside the great man himself.

The Wrights hoped Taliesin would become

a truly self-sufficient community.

All the apprentices were required

to do at least 4 hours a day of manual labor.

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
You have to remember that

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
he starts a fellowship, a school,

never having been in that kind of thing himself

and only had a year at college.

Suddenly he's got 30 people coming,

and they hadn't planned for it.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
As he used to say,

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
"There's nothing I hate worse than a good draftsman,"

and by that he meant, you know,

a professional draftsman,

that's all they do is drafting,

and they're always complaining about this or that.

The young people were all eager.

There wasn't this, "Oh, you can't do it that way."

"No, it can't work."

"Oh, Mr. Wright, that isn't going to work."

There was none of that.

There was, "This is great."

They all believed

that Wright was a genius

and that they were...

uh... you know, in direct day-to-day contact

with this genius and that their own work

was going to flower as a result.

So there was just an atmosphere of intellectual excitement

which I've never found

in any other institution and... and which was

incomparably thrilling.

[hammering]

Narrator:
The apprentices were put to work

whenever Wright decided to build a new building

or remodel an old one

on his now-crumbling estate.

Critics charged

that he gave no formal architectural instruction

at his school,

that Taliesin was a modern-day plantation,

that the students were little more than slaves,

there to do the master's bidding,

but Wright insisted

that they would learn by doing.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
The authentic experience

Brendan Gill, Writer:
was that of being in the presence,

watching him breathe was almost enough.

I think that that's true of all great men.

They don't formally teach.

They have only to be there.

They were lucky to be in his presence.

They were lucky to hear the sound of his voice.

They were lucky to listen to his preachments,

however foolish some of them may have been.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
It was important to be involved

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
in doing the cooking.

It was important to do just the cleanup work

and the... and the sweeping.

It was important to do the farm work.

It was important that

you were involved in creating music

and doing drama and reading poetry

on Saturday night.

They were as important to my grandfather

as working on the drafting room.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
They were all working

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
from 7:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night,

and they were all very happy about it.

I think that Wright had a lovely idea in his mind

of a kind of communal lifestyle,

which actually never quite transpired.

I think that he really wasn't capable

of living the kind of simple farmer's life

that he was so tirelessly promoting.

He wanted to be the head of an enterprise,

and he was.

They had hundreds and hundreds of acres.

They had all kinds of people

constantly working around the place,

and they had their own rather nice, elegant quarters.

Their daughter had rather special quarters.

They decided that they liked the idea of...

of eating on a dais,

a little bit above everybody else, you realize.

They liked the idea

of hearing concerts on Saturday nights,

and just ever so slightly raised above everybody else.

They rather enjoyed this.

Narrator:
Olgivanna supervised everything.

She planned the menus,

picked the music that was piped into the workroom

and over loudspeakers in the fields,

even chose the socks the apprentices wore.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
She was absolutely essential

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
for the creation of the fellowship

because what she took on

was the human-relation part of the fellowship.

My grandfather could not be bothered

with what was going on with relationship between people.

I mean, that just seemed to get into the way of the...

of the architecture and what he was trying to do there.

But she was intensely interested in that.

Narrator:
Olgivanna also controlled

many of the apprentices' private lives,

deciding with whom sexual affairs could take place,

arranging marriages,

and negotiating divorces.

Eleanore Pettersen, Former Apprentice:
Mrs. Wright was a difficult woman.

She was very hard on the women,

very hard on the women,

and, uh...

She had to reign supreme.

Narrator:
One female apprentice remembered that Mrs. Wright

was "The queen bee

who killed everyone dead around her."

Tim Wright, Grandson:
Both grandfather and grandmother

inspired fear as well as love and reverence.

The consequences of displeasing either of them

were exile into outer darkness, and...

Taliesin was not like a school in the sense

that you were celebrated when you graduated.

When you graduated, you went into exile.

It was one of the worst aspects of Taliesin, I think, that...

to leave was not to leave with blessings.

Usually it was to be... a failure.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
Wright wanted to be the chief.

Wright created a situation at Taliesin

where he was the chieftain

surrounded by his followers,

surrounded by his army,

And uh...it regarded itself as an army under siege.

The rest of the world was wrong.

The rest of the world didn't understand them.

They had the right way of doing it.

The master was always right.

It's not a civilized situation,

it's a heroic one.

[sounds of digging]

Narrator:
Taliesin may have bustled with activity,

but to the outside world,

Wright, at 62, was finished.

Only a generation before,

he had been hailed as a revolutionary.

Now the spotlight shone on Europe,

on the radical architects of the International Style...

Le Corbusier...

Walter Gropius...

and Mies van der Rohe.

Since the end of the first world war,

they had been designing what they saw

as a new industrialized architecture

intended to serve the needs of the working class.

Like many architects,

they had been influenced by the simplicity

and openness of Wright's prairie style,

but now they had moved on.

William Cronon, Historian:
I think what the modernists were trying to do,

the International School, more than anything else,

was to create a genuine mass architecture,

an architecture that would serve the people,

in the broadest sense,

and that would create a space that would express

what the 20th century was going to be about

by honoring democracy as an experience for all the people.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
They really envisioned a whole changed world on every level,

and they worshipped modern technology

and sought ways to symbolize it.

They had very little interest in using wood

and stone,

which struck them as old-fashioned materials.

There was much more glass, much more metal.

The building floated often in European Modernism.

It might be on thin columns.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
We were in the 20th century,

and we were very, very proud of it.

The 20th century was a great new world

of the machine, of the industrial system.

So we all believed in the machine,

and he didn't, see.

He was a man that believed thoroughly in the crafts,

the use of the man's hand,

to put one piece of stone on top of the other.

So, we didn't consider him an architect that was

to be conceived as an equal to Corbusier and Mies

because he was over.

He simply wasn't practicing architecture.

Narrator:
For his part,

Wright professed nothing but contempt

for Modernism.

Just because people now lived

in the machine age, he said,

did not mean their houses should look like machines.

The modernists' buildings were
"cardboard houses," he said,

"mechanical,

mannered,

artificial,

soulless."

William Cronon, Historian:
It's one of the impulses of Modernism,

which I think Wright does not share,

that what architecture is is simply the physical thing.

For Wright, it is a spiritual thing,

and the experience of walking into the building

does something to the soul.

It touches the heart in some profound,

deep, deep kind of way.

He was trying always to... uh...

to say that only he knew about nature,

only he knew about building,

and that we were a lot of paper architects

that just uh...

were playing with... with just flat images, you see.

That was a little close to the truth to be... um...

pleasant for us to hear, of course.

[horns honking]

Narrator:
In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art in New York city

mounted an exhibition on the International Style

and invited Wright to contribute a design,

though one of the curators,

a young architectural critic named Philip Johnson,

sarcastically suggested

that Wright might already be dead.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
I once made that terrible mistake of saying...

that uh... Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest architect

of the 19th century.

And, of course,

that was interpreted as the insult

it was meant to be.

Narrator:
Wright eventually agreed

to participate in the exhibition.

But then threatened to withdraw,

sending Johnson a steady stream of letters and telegrams

expressing his fury

at not being given a bigger position in the show.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
He was a nasty man,

and he'd said things to us that was...

unforgivable, and he'd write them down...

that uh...we'd ruined architecture and...

become European slaves and...

and... these most horrible, nasty people in the world...

these New Yorkers.

We'd write really nasty letters back to him.

In the meantime, we were trying to get

a house out of him for our show

because we knew he was great.

So, how to fit him into a show called

"The International Style,"

we didn't know.

He sent a beautiful design...

with a flat roof

and looking out over terraces.

In other words, all the time,
he really wanted to get shown.

Narrator:
The book based on the exhibition

praised Wright for his individualism

but otherwise dismissed him

as just one of a number of older architects

whose work had long since been superseded by others.

His frustration

and his resentment of his own eclipse

and the increasing success of the International Style

continued to fester.

If a fly got too close to his drafting table,

he sometimes liked to give it a name,

Mies, Gropius, Corbusier,

before killing it with a fly swatter.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
When he began to see clearly that he was no longer

the most advanced thinker in architecture,

that these younger Europeans had been doing things

that he really had not been aware of

and had not been able

to accomplish in his own work,

what's fantastic is that he was able to...

take up that challenge

and completely remake himself.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
Remember that an architect

cannot build buildings on his own account.

A painter can say, "Oh, the world doesn't understand me"

and sit in his attic and paint away

and maybe work in the daytime as a...

custom collector, as Rousseau did, or whatever.

An architect has to be dependent on the client.

Every client that comes down the pike is fabulous.

There's a wonderful story about Wright and clients.

He had no work in the late twenties.

He had set up this foundation,

which was a way -Olgivanna's genius-

to get him practically on the dole.

Basically, to keep him some money coming in.

And he gets a letter from this man,

Professor Malcolm Willey

in the Univer... of the University of Minnesota,

asking him if he has time to build a small house.

Time? He had all the time in the world.

So he writes back and says,

"Yes, I can squeeze you in," or something like that,

and when Malcolm Willey

it's said when Malcolm Willey arrives

at the Taliesin studios,

he sees his letter posted on the wall,

on, on the bulletin board with a note

from Wright, a scrawled note across it:

"Hosanna! A client!"

Narrator:
One of Wright's first apprentices

had been Edgar Kaufmann Jr.,

the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh department store owner.

He hadn't stayed with architecture very long himself,

but his father
had become fascinated with Frank Lloyd Wright

and in 1934,

asked him to design

a weekend hideaway for his family

next to their favorite waterfall

along a little stream in western Pennsylvania

called Bear Run.

Wright visited the site,

had the apprentices make an elaborate plot-plan

that showed the location of every rock and tree,

and then did nothing

for 3 months.

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
He never liked to draw

until he knew what he was going to draw.

and every so often, we would ask,

"Mr. Wright, are you going to do something?"

And he'd say yes, and he'd walk by.

All of a sudden, one day

he gets a telephone call from Mr. Kaufmann.

Narrator:
Kaufmann was in Milwaukee,

just a few hours away from Taliesin.

Mr. Wright says, "Hello, E.J. How are you?

Come along. We're waiting for you."

And he hung up.

Milwaukee is 140 miles, 140 minutes,

and he hasn't drawn a line.

Kaufmann, the client, is on his way,

and he sits down,

and he starts to draw,

and he draws a plan,

and he draws the first-floor plan,

how it relates to everything.

It's got to be a bridge

so you can get across the water.

The water there shows just where the waterfall is.

He draws the second-floor plan,

and he goes along and shows how the balconies are,

and he says, "And we'll have a bridge across

so that E.J. and Lillian" -that was her name-

"can walk out and walk from the bedrooms

or from the house up and have a picnic up above."

Then he says, "top floor is Junior's room."

Then he draws what we call a section through the building.

That's a way you can see

how all the heights are.

And he's drawing and drawing,

and Bob and I are feeding him pencils.

He breaks them, and he puts a color on

and then takes it off, and he rubs it all off and so on,

and anytime anyone would walk in the drafting room,

you'd turn around and "shh, go away,"

and people knew if Mr. Wright's working in,

you don't walk through the drafting room.

Then he starts to draw an elevation,

a big elevation of the whole house.

Now, the whole drawing is actually that big.

Normally, we start at a scale where you draw this big,

but, no, he's got it going this big,

and he's putting the trees,

and he knows where every damn tree is,

where every rock is.

He gets that all done,

and then as Mr. Wright's secretary comes in

and says, "Mr. Wright, Mr. Kaufmann is here."

He says, "Bring him in,"

and Mr. Wright gets up.

He just stands up,

and...

he walks toward Kaufmann,

he puts out his hand, and he says,

"Welcome, E.J.

We've been waiting for you."

Narrator:
Wright named his building Fallingwater.

It would eventually become

the most famous modern house in the world...

and he had drawn it all in less than 3 hours.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
Wright asked his client,

"Where do you spend all your time
when you're on this property?"

And they said, "Oh, we love to picnic on this rock."

So what does he do?

He builds the house on the rock,

and they've lost their picnic place forever.

And you can hardly see the rock.

You have to go down in the stream,

and the bugs eat you alive and all that,

to look up and see Mr. Wright's masterpiece.

And indeed it was.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
I think Fallingwater was many things.

It's a beautiful response to its site, most of all.

Instead of standing clear on a grass plain,

it's coming out of a rock.

Its slabs are anchored in the rock.

You go behind Fallingwater,

and you see that they're gripping the rock back there,

and then it goes out,

and it's just barely above the waterfall,

and the water is just under you.

You feel that you're in danger there,

that you are, in fact, in a kind of

suspension in space

which where you have to be careful,

and the water is always moving under you

with that sense of uneasiness as it goes.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
It's an extraordinary house.

These floating planes over the waterfall,

the structural drama,

the spatial drama,

and the incredible serenity of it all.

It's a composition.

It's an intricate and perfect composition

into which we're invited to walk

and, if your name was Kaufmann, live.

It's as if he was saying,

"Ok, Europeans, you want to do it that way,

I'll show you how to do it that way,"

and then he takes some of their ideas,

integrates it with all of his ideas,

and comes up with something so much more

brilliant and beautiful

than anybody else has ever done.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
He was just trying to prove to the rest of us

that he, too, could use flat.

He always hated flat roofs.

But, you see, when he caught on,

"Aha. So there's something in this flat roof business.

I'll show them."

And he did.

I mean, he could make even a...

a 50-by-50 room, which is large,

uh...

look high when it's only 8 feet high.

That's...

Don't ask me how, because if I could do it, I would.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
Great architecture, like any kind of great art,

ultimately

takes you somewhere

that words cannot take you at all,

and Fallingwater does that

the way Chartres cathedral does that,

that there's some experience that gets you in your gut,

and you just feel it,

and you can't quite even say it.

My whole life is dealing with architecture and words,

and at the end of the day,

there's something that I can't entirely say

when it comes to what Fallingwater feels like.

I remember the first time I went to Fallingwater,

taking a long walk down,

looking at it from across the waterfall,

and just wanted to sing.

You just looked at it, and you wanted

to start singing some song

or doing something.

There was nothing really to say.

It was so extraordinary.

[children shouting]

Brendan Gill, Writer:
One of the things about Frank Lloyd Wright

that makes him a great architect,

separate from whether he's a great man or not,

is that he followed, pursued all his life long,

the initial purpose of architecture,

which is to provide shelter for people

that could be built,

as he got it down at one point

to $5,000 for a house

for a family with children

and a kitchen and gardens and... and openness

and which was a highly civilized way to live.

[children shouting]

Mankind needs both

shelter on the humble level

on the level of keeping the rain off oneself

and also having somewhere to go

to offer up a kind of worship

to whatever mystery exists beyond our lives.

Frank did both of those things all his life long.

Narrator:
In 1936, Wright was approached

by Herbert and Katherine Jacobs
of Madison, Wisconsin,

who asked if the famous Mr. Wright

might design a house for ordinary people

that would cost only $5,000.

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

He did, obviously, houses for rich people,

there was no question about it,

but he also did them for...

for people who were just the moderate income,

and all of these people

were coming to Frank Lloyd Wright,

and he said, "Sure, I'll do you a house.

I'll do these little houses."

Narrator:
He called his modest house Usonian,

after the United States.

It was a single story

built on a monolithic concrete slab

and joined to a carport and not a garage.

Wright believed
that it could be replicated all across the country.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
Most of these houses are beautiful.

They are very sleek.

They're very elegant in terms of their detailing,

and what I think is really great about them

is that they have a quality of being

just the right size.

I remember speaking to one owner of a Usonian house

who told me that,

"We moved into the house,

"and it was like moving into a motel room for good.

"Everything was taken care of.

"We never had to buy another stick of furniture.

"We never had to bring anything into the house.

It was all taken care of for us by Wright."

William Cronon, Historian:
To live in a Wright building,

William Cronon, Historian:
any Wright building, but especially the Usonians,

you have to be willing to subordinate your life

and your lifestyle and your possessions

to that building.

These are buildings that have all the elements

controlled by this one architect,

and for a certain kind of person who wants

a beautifully designed aesthetic space,

that's perfect.

If, on the other hand, you're a person,

I think, a more typical American

who owns lots of stuff

and who, across the 20th century,

is owning more and more stuff,

there's a greater and greater need

for closets and attics and spaces

that you can put all of your stuff into,

and Wright stands

very much against that tendency

toward sort of increasing

material possessions

uh... in the 20th century.

Narrator:
In the end, Wright never succeeded

in designing houses that actually cost $5,000.

The elegant details he insisted upon

kept driving up the price.

Only 60 Usonian houses
were ever built.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
He had these great dreams, of course,

that he would

create architecture for the masses,

and in a lot of ways, that was very admirable

because how many other serious architects ever bothered?

But he couldn't handle the notion

that most people didn't really want it so much,

and it drove him crazy.

It sent him into a tailspin.

William Cronon, Historian:
He wanted to be a democratic architect

who would educate the American people

to an aesthetic greater than the one

that they had already achieved.

He loathed architecture of the mob,

which pulled architecture

down to the least common denominator.

He very much wanted to build buildings

that would enlighten people and lift people up.

He was trying to pull the masses above themselves

and as a result,

there's something deeply impractical

and in some ways anti-democratic

about his democratic vision.

Narrator:
Wright now began to complain

that ordinary people,

whom he called the "Mobocracy,"

were destroying the country

with their lack of taste,

and in the years to come,

lesser architects,

inspired in part by his Usonian designs,

would spread the single-story ranch house

all across America.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is a culmination

of all of his 9 symphonies,

and it is the strongest and the best coordinated,

and, of course, he brings in

the chorus at the same time

to make it a final, final thing,

and I've often thought

that the Johnson Wax building

was his Ninth Symphony.

Narrator:
In 1936, a new client approached Wright.

He was Herbert Johnson,

president of the progressive

Johnson Wax company

of Racine, Wisconsin,

and he was looking for someone

to build him a new administration building.

It was Wright's first chance

at a large-scale commission in years,

and he was jubilant.

"What a release of pent-up energy,"

Wright remembered,

"the making of those plans.

Ideas came tumbling up and out onto paper."

As in the Larkin building,

he wanted to create an exhilarating environment

for the workers.

Wright and his apprentices

worked around the clock

for 10 days

to finish the drawings.

Then his assistant Edgar Tafel

drove him to Racine

to make a presentation

to the Johnson Wax board.

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
Wright got out of the car,

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
and I got the drawings and followed him,

and then he stopped and turned around,

and he said, "Give me the drawings,"

and he put them under his arm,

and he says, "The architect carries his own drawings."

We went in,

and Mr. Wright was like a preacher

that you'd never heard before.

He must have talked for an hour and a half.

"You will have a temple of work.

You will have a place you will love to be in."

And when it was finished,

everyone was silent.

There wasn't a question.

Narrator:
He got the contract.

Wright wanted to build the Johnson Wax building

outside Racine,

which he considered a backwater.

Herbert Johnson held the line.

He would not leave the town
that had always been his company's home.

When Wright insisted,

Olgivanna told him,

"Give them what they want, Frank.

You'll lose the job."

Finally Wright gave in partway.

The company would stay put,

but there would be no windows.

Wright would bring two innovations

to the Johnson Wax building:

special pyrex glass tubing

had to be manufactured for the skylights,

and hollow reinforced columns

of astonishing slenderness

were to bear the weight of the great ceiling.

[hammering]

All of it took far more time and money

than Herbert Johnson had bargained for.

"At first, Frank Lloyd Wright was working for me," he said.

"The cost kept going up.

"Then we were working together.

Finally, I was working for him."

The columns presented special problems.

Nervous state inspectors insisted

that they could not possibly bear the weight

Wright's plans called for.

Insulted,

the architect insisted on a public demonstration.

Wright piled on 10 times the weight required

before the column finally cracked.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
My favorite building of Wright's

is the great Racine Johnson Wax offices.

What he did was something

that's unheard of in the business world.

Business world, you have a lot of offices, right?

They have to be 5 feet apart.

They have to be all glass to the outside.

And then you get numbers on them,

and... and then you take an elevator.

This is the normal American uh... program.

"Just build me an office building."

And what did he do?

He built a palace.

He built a church.

He built something that just soared.

It's the finest room

maybe in the United States today.

It still is.

In that room are lily pads

that rise from the floor

then spread out at the ceiling,

but that stem was graceful and marvelous,

and then it came out sort of flat.

Then the pads were circles,

but they didn't touch,

and that's where the light came from.

The light came from in between

and melted, and... and it became

like underwater.

It was perfectly diffused.

I don't think

he ever mentioned light to me in

all the conversations we had.

He talked about how proud he was of the structure

of these concrete.

Well, that's nothing.

Anybody can build a concrete thing.

You call somebody

on the telephone and say,

"come quick and make me a...

a... make me lily pad."

But the genius was in how he knew

that would make the light and how he knew

that the lily pad

was a... a perfect shape.

Neil Levine, Architectural Historian:
Wright said it would be like

working in a glade in a pine forest

with fresh air and sunlight all the time.

No, I think that it's a kind of place

that has a kind of

smoothness and luxuriousness about it

which is absolutely entrancing.

Philip Johnson, Architect:
That is architecture to me and to most architects,

to create a space

where you feel the awe of a religion

without the...

no mumbo jumbo.

It's just a wonderful feeling of being in a space.

Narrator:
Wright declared his building a masterpiece,

but his innovations did not come without a price.

The glass tubing in the roof

could not be sealed properly,

and water poured in whenever it rained.

Herbert Johnson himself

took to keeping an empty trash can on his desk

to catch the drips.

William Cronon, Historian:
There's a long list of failings of Wright buildings,

things like roofs that leak,

cantilevers that sag,

ventilation systems that don't work,

windows that let in cold air,

heating systems that keep the buildings cold.

Over and over again,

there are lots and lots of problems

with these buildings,

and I think that those problems are important

because I think they actually tell us

something important about Frank Lloyd Wright,

which is that, in the end,

what mattered to him most

was reaching for the vision

that lay beyond the actual physical building,

and he was willing to tolerate failings,

uh... and oddly, some of his clients

were willing to tolerate failings

because of that reaching,

that aspiring to something greater

than one could actually achieve

with the materials of the day.

Narrator:
Herbert Johnson was so dazzled by his building

that he asked Wright to design him a home

as well.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
And if it was thrilling

Brendan Gill, Writer:
to be an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright,

it was equally thrilling to be a client,

and again and again,

he would push the client to the edge of...

of a nervous breakdown because...

he would be way over cost,

everything would go wrong,

he wouldn't have the drawings ready,

nothing would be exactly right,

but they adored being in Frank's presence,

and again and again and again,

it is obvious that the most important event

in the lives of many of those clients,

like Edgar Kaufmann,

like Herb Johnson,

but a dozen others,

the greatest event of their lives

was having a relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright.

They never got over it.

They always went back to him.

It was the thrilling episode

that made them feel

grander, greater, more fulfilled

than anybody else

had ever been able to make them feel.

Narrator:
Fallingwater...

The Usonian houses...

The Johnson Wax building.

At 70, Wright's career had been reborn.

He was the subject of an entire special issue

of Architectural Forum.

The Museum of Modern Art,

which had humiliated him

just a few years earlier,

now asked if it might devote an exhibition

solely to Frank Lloyd Wright.

He was back on top.

♪[country music]♪

In December of 1937,

urged by his doctors to winter in a warmer climate,

Wright and Olgivanna led the first

of what would become

annual pilgrimages to the Arizona desert,

1,800 miles from Wisconsin.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
Wright loved automobiles.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
His favorite car was a Cord,

and he painted it his famous Cherokee red,

and he'd pack Olgivanna

and the apprentices in their cars,

and they'd drive, you see,

from the middle west to the desert.

♪ Well, all right

♪ Yeah

♪ Ah, let's dance now

♪ Yeah

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
When we got to Arizona,

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
it was a whole different situation.

There, he loved the sand

and the rocks

and the saguaros

and the various plants and all that,

and he was after

a... a way of architectural life in Arizona

different from anywhere else

because there was only one Arizona,

one way of life out there.

Narrator:
The new Taliesin West

took shape on a low, isolated mesa

26 miles east of Phoenix.

Built almost entirely by hand,

it was constructed out of what Wright called

"desert concrete,"

a mixture of the sand and rocks

they found around them.

It was a remarkable rambling fortress

centered around a dramatic main drafting room

with space for dozens of devoted apprentices

and exquisite private quarters

for Wright and his family.

Anne Whiston Spirn, Landscape Architect:
When you walk around Taliesin West,

you begin to realize that

the structure of the place itself,

the way the paths are organized,

the way the buildings are oriented,

that it's actually

weaving you into the landscape.

Every time you turn,

you're left looking out to the desert.

It makes you feel part of things.

It makes you feel part of the place.

It doesn't make you feel, as a human,

separate from the plants and the animals

and the sky and the mountains around you.

It makes you and your daily activities

feel part of the larger scheme of things.

Narrator:
Wright's growing fellowship would now spend

fully half of every year in the Arizona desert.

He was still the undisputed master of his fiefdom,

overseeing his thriving architectural practice,

entertaining movie stars and visiting dignitaries,

and presiding over elaborate musicales

in his newly built cabaret theater.

Eleanore Pettersen, Former Apprentice:
This was a private world,

Eleanore Pettersen, Former Apprentice:
and it was like living on the moon.

You lived out there in the desert.

You never saw a newspaper,

seldom saw a magazine,

seldom listened to the radio.

You lived in a complete atmosphere with

very little encroachment from the outside world.

When I left, my bloodstream ran differently.

Everything was different,

and I had to catch up

and come back into the world.

Franklin Roosevelt, Radio Archive:
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941...

a date which will live in infamy...

Narrator:
Life at Taliesin was so isolated

that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941,

the news barely disturbed the routine at the fellowship.

Wright was a pacifist

and had been a supporter
of the America first campaign

to keep the country out of the war.

Now Wright urged his students

not to serve in the armed forces,

and several were imprisoned
for resisting the draft.

At the end of the war, the economy boomed,

and the demand for new buildings
was greater than ever before.

Frank Lloyd Wright was almost 80 years old

and about to enter
the most productive phase of his life.

Over the next 15 years,
Wright and his fellowship

turned out drawings and plans
for more than 350 buildings.

Some would not be built.

Some would not be completed
until after he died,

but all would be provocative and controversial,

and all would bear the unmistakable stamp

of Frank Lloyd Wright.

He designed a Unitarian meetinghouse

in his boyhood home of Madison

whose shape, he said, was inspired

by hands joined in prayer;

a gas station in Cloquet, Minnesota;

twin suspension bridges at Pittsburgh;

an electric plant in San Mateo, California,

whose glowing skylights were meant

to illuminate the night sky...

a synagogue in Philadelphia;

and a Greek orthodox church in Wisconsin...

a vast cultural center to be built

in the middle of the Tigris river in Baghdad;

a skyscraper for Chicago a mile high

that would house more than 100,000 people,

carried up and down
in atomic-powered elevators...

and a sprawling, futuristic civic center

for Marin County, California.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
I think the analogy of his... shaking these...

designs out of his sleeve

was like Beethoven.

Beethoven, at the end of his life,

could not hear the music,

so he didn't sit down

pounding out a melody or anything.

He wrote it down, all without any ever hearing it,

and yet he knew what he was writing.

He could hear it,

and it's the same with my grandfather.

He could think this thing up in his head,

and he could formulate it all within his mind,

and then he could throw it down

and draw it on paper,

as Beethoven could put the notes on paper,

and it would come out this great symphony.

Narrator:
Asked how he could possibly conceive and oversee

so many different projects,

more than at any time in his career,

Wright just smiled and said,

"I can't get them out fast enough."

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
Wright never saw any limits for himself.

Most of us, I suppose,

think there are pigeonholes into which we should fit,

and Wright, because he had a deviant view

of the way a creative artist should live,

never gave himself any limits,

and because he was an old man,

it didn't occur to him that he should stop thinking,

that he should stop working,

that he should stop inventing,

that he should stop imagining,

that he should stop

looking at life through the prism

of this acute artistic sensibility he had.

Narrator:
Wright's ego did not diminish with age.

"I defy anyone," he said in 1953,

"to name a single aspect

"of the best contemporary architecture

that wasn't first done by me."

Mike Wallace, TV Anchor, Archive:
Every word that you say,

you say because you believe,

or do you say for calculated effect?

I think everybody must speak sometimes for calculated effect,

and I wouldn't deny so speaking.

I've never pushed myself.

I've never turned over my hand to get a client during my life.

I have never sought publicity of any kind.

I have yielded to it.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
Wright was a media figure

before there were media figures.

He was pretty good at that.

Why is architecture almost a forgotten art?

He made himself available to the press.

He gave interviews.

He wrote books.

He got himself out there

to keep his name in front of people all the time.

man:
Hello, Mr. Wright.

-Glad to see you.
-Nice to see you.

One of the first serious artists or architects

ever to be interviewed on television

in the early days of television.

There was Frank Lloyd Wright, already an old man by then,

but right in there.

He was very quick to jump on new technologies

and understand how they might, in some way,

connect to his life and enhance his fame.

I'm lost.

Mr. Wright has all of my notes,

and he's gazing at them.

The man who has been a fearless nonconformist

each one of his 83 and a good

-fraction of years.
-What am I supposed to do, bow?

No. You're not even listening to me, Mr. Wright.

What is good, true, real, and honest then

is still good, true, real, and

-honest today.
-Out of the ground, into the light.

That is the same principle which you have.

The cities and...

[indistinct]

Yes, the inspiration which moves some people

and stirs the imagination of others

still goes on, part of the...

[indistinct]

Brendan Gill, Writer:
Once, when I was very young

Brendan Gill, Writer:
and at the beginning of our friendship,

I proposed that all the great men of our time

had been more or less charlatans,

like Picasso,

like F.D.R.

there was a quality of charlatanism in them

that made them successful with the public,

and Frank was a little bit upset about that,

but then he volunteered

that the degree to which he had seemed

in the world to be a charlatan,

boasting and showing off and carrying on,

was the degree to which it was possible then

to get his work before the public,

and, of course, it is the excuse that all charlatans use,

but, in truth, he was a great showman,

and to be a showman is to be in part a charlatan.

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
We build in relation to those who built before us,

and we build in relation to those who come after us,

so that the city, from the very beginning,

from the time cities are organized around in Mesopotamia,

the concept of immortality comes along.

Gilgamesh is the king of a city,

and in the end, he decides

that the only immortality he has

is the building he does in the city.

You see what I mean?

Because with the city,

we extend the normal limits of our lives

in the conversation with the past

and with the future.

[horns honking]

Narrator:
Everywhere he went,

Frank Lloyd Wright denounced the modern city.

It was a "prison house for the soul," he said,

"a place for banking and prostitution

and very little else."

Brendan Gill, Writer:
The mystery of how you can be an architect

Brendan Gill, Writer:
and not like cities is unanswerable

because there is nothing for architects except cities.

They invent cities.

That is what architecture is about,

and here was this man

again and again and again abandoning cities.

I'm sorry. I didn't hear you. What did you say?

Why don't they open the center of the avenue...

Narrator:
Striding along Fifth Avenue,

gesturing with his cane,

Wright was happy to dismiss everything he saw,

especially when reporters were nearby.

The celebrated Manhattan skyline

was merely "boxes next to boxes," he said,

"glassified landscape,

style for style's sake by the glass-box boys."

Here you have the window raised to the nth power.

Window, window, window.

It's the most bewindowed structure in existence.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
He says he hated cities.

Wright says he hated cities.

He loved New York, and in the fifties,

I would see him from time to time,

when I was a kid,

on Fifth Avenue

with an acolyte or two behind him.

He was having the time of his life.

Narrator:
Back in 1943, Wright had been asked

to design a museum in New York city

to house the vast collection

of nonobjective paintings

amassed by the copper king

Solomon R. Guggenheim,

works by Mondrian,

Delaunay,

Kandinsky.

Wright didn't think much of abstract art.

"Lessons in finger painting," he once called it.

When he was shown

some of Guggenheim's masterpieces,

he could not resist asking,

"What do you call this stuff?"

Still, he eagerly set to work.

"Wait till you see the blueprints

for the Guggenheim," he told a friend.

"It's going to stand

"almost directly across from the Metropolitan Museum.

"It's going to make the Metropolitan

look like a protestant barn."

Brendan Gill, Writer:
He was haunted by certain shapes

all his life long, for example, the spiral,

and he kept bringing that up again and again.

He tried to do a spiral garage

for Edgar Kaufmann in Pittsburgh,

and finally he got the chance of the lifetime,

of doing the spiral in the Guggenheim.

And here he has an opportunity to do...

a... a...

Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York city.

I mean, this is...

He'd been hoping all his life

for something of this nature.

Narrator:
But the Guggenheim turned out to be the most

difficult commission of his life.

For 13 years, Wright had to battle

to get his museum built.

He and Guggenheim

argued over the projected cost of the building,

which quickly rose from $750,000 to $2 million.

Then Guggenheim died,

and his heirs

threatened to fire Wright and hire another architect.

The zoning board refused to approve

Wright's unorthodox design.

Desperate, he turned to the man in charge

of all major construction in New York city,

Robert Moses.

"I don't care how many laws you have to break,"

Moses told the zoning board.

"I want the Guggenheim built."

At last, in 1956,

ground was broken on the corner

of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The interior was to be one continuous ramp,

and visitors were to start at the top

and work their way down.

But even after construction began,

controversy swirled around the project.

Several prominent critics attacked Wright's design.

Hilton Kramer called it

"an architecture which succeeds

"in having only one organic function:

to call attention to itself."

One writer called him

"Frank Lloyd Wrong."

Vincent Scully, Architectural Historian:
He doesn't want to have to adjust his buildings

to the preexisting urban fabric.

He used to say, "Think of it as a pavilion in a park."

Well, of course, it's not in the park.

It's on the street,

and the reason it looks wonderful on the street

is because the other buildings

obey the law of the street and set it off.

Imagine if the other buildings were gone

and you had more Guggenheims,

you'd have the strip.

Frank Lloyd Wright, TV Archive:
Somebody said the Museum out here on Fifth Avenue

looked like a washing machine.

Mike Wallace, TV Anchor, Archive:
This one that you're building?

That's one of my buildings.

Well, I've heard a lot of that...

type of reaction, and I've always

discounted it

as worthless, and I think it is.

Narrator:
21 well-known artists,

including William de Kooning,

Franz Kline,

and Robert Motherwell,

sent a letter to the New York Times

arguing that it would be impossible to display their work

on the Museum's curved, sloping walls.

Wright fired off a telegram denouncing

the "incubus of habit that beset their minds."

Painters would produce finer art, he said,

if they knew it would hang in his Museum.

Bruce Pfeiffer, Former Apprentice:
And Mr. Wright kept trying to point out,

Bruce Pfeiffer, Former Apprentice:
"I'm trying to make a building where

seeing works of art would be so natural."

You just glide down the ramp.

The paintings would lie on the wall

much they... as they would on the artist's easel,

lit from above,

and the light changing all the time.

He wasn't trying to subjugate

the painting to the building.

He was trying to create a synthesis,

create a marriage between architecture

and paintings that had never existed before.

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
Somebody took a picture of him,

Meryle Secrest, Biographer:
6 months before he died,

on top of the Guggenheim Museum,

and the scaffolding is there, and he's in profile,

and you see him with the porkpie hat,

and uh... he's a man on top of the world,

and he's almost 92.

It's an image of him that

I can't get out of my mind, and to me...

it's the essential Wright.

Narrator:
In the spring of 1959,

the Guggenheim was almost complete,

and Wright was supervising the final details

from his studio at Taliesin West.

Though his eyesight had begun to fail,

he still rose every morning

eager to get back to the drafting table.

When his first wife, Kitty, died that spring,

his son David withheld the news

from his father for several days.

Wright wept when he finally heard

what had happened
to the woman he had abandoned

half a century earlier.

"Why didn't you tell me
as soon as you knew?" he asked.

"Why should I have bothered?" David answered.

"You didn't give a damn about her when she was alive."

Not long after, on April 4th,

Wright complained of stomach pains

and was hospitalized in Phoenix.

Surgery to remove
an intestinal obstruction was successful,

but 5 days later, on April 9th,

Wright slipped soundlessly away.

Tim Wright, Grandson:
I went to the hospital

Tim Wright, Grandson:
right after he died, and...

his body was still on the bed.

He was about 5' 7", and when he died,

you saw how tiny and frail and fragile he was,

and I've never forgotten that.

It was just...

It was as if his charisma died with him,

and he was just this little...

body

and not this larger-than-life guy anymore.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Grandson:
My feeling towards my grandfather

was that he was almost immortal.

At the time that he died, I wasn't at the fellowship.

I had already left and was working with my father.

I remember we got word of it in Los Angeles

and... uh...

had to...

So we got on the plane immediately

and went over to... Taliesin,

and, uh...

I remember my father and I uh...

going into the living room, and uh...

grandfather was there in the casket, and, uh...

we both went up and looked,

and then we just held each other and...

and both cried, burst out into tears.

It was just... it just came, and...

I think that was suddenly the realization

that he was gone,

that he really was gone.

Narrator:
His disciples loaded his coffin into a station wagon

and drove it for 28 straight hours

to Wisconsin,

following the same route

Wright had taken every year in life.

At Taliesin, he was carried to his grave

on a flower-strewn farm wagon,

just as Mamah Cheney, the murdered woman

for whom he had once risked everything, had been.

According to his wishes,

he was laid to rest within a few yards of her

and not far from his mother,

the woman who had first told him
he was destined for greatness.

A unitarian clergyman read
Wright's favorite passage from Emerson:

"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

"Nothing is at last sacred

but the integrity of your own mind."

Edgar Tafel, Former Apprentice:
I think that he didn't think much about the hereafter,

but there is a passage in his autobiography

where he talks about his later life,

that nature was so beautiful,

that he thinks, when he goes for a walk,

that the nature of each tree,
different from each other,

how different grasses are,

and how streams and brooks and things happen.

He thinks it's so beautiful

because heaven couldn't be

as beautiful as the nature on earth.

Narrator:
On October 21st, 1959,

6 months after Frank Lloyd Wright died,

the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

opened to the public.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect:
Wright changed how we see the land,

how we use the land,

how we live in our houses,

how we work in our offices,

even how we relate to paintings.

After the Guggenheim,

who cares about all the art in the museums

if the building itself isn't thrilling?

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic:
What is all art to do?

All art is, in some way,

about some kind of spiritual connection,

some connection to something larger than us,

some connection to something that we cannot

wholly describe or put in words.

"Art is a lie that tells us the truth,"

Picasso once said.

It's about getting to some feeling.

And architecture, unlike any other art,

connects to everyday living at the same time.

It's a roof over our heads.

It protects us from the rain...

And Wright's genius was in his ability to do that,

his ability to serve everyday needs,

which are always part of architecture,

which never go away,

and yet, at the same time,

to kind of grab you in your gut

and make you feel

as if you're

having some kind of transcendental experience almost.

William Cronon, Historian:
I don't think it's unfair to say

that there is no American architect who has ever lived

who has done as much to touch the world,

who has done as much to realize his vision

of what a perfect architecture might be,

than Frank Lloyd Wright.

Brendan Gill, Writer:
What an architect is said to be about

provide your fellow human beings

with the best possible shelter

at the lowest possible cost.

Frank really believed that,

and then in the making of temples,

very ambitious temples,

true temples like the Synagogue

or the Unity temple in Oak Park,

other temples of art, like the Guggenheim,

so that he was able to do both kinds of architecture

and out of his arrogance,

creates something which is selfless.

Of course he designed those things,

but they are purged of him.

They are not his monuments.

They are beyond.

They are monuments for all of us,

and all of us gain from these monuments

in a way that is not that simple act of egotism

on the part of a great man.

Mike Wallace, TV Anchor, Archive:
I want you to give, if you will,

the answer to just one more question.

Are you afraid of death?

Frank Lloyd Wright:
Not at all.

Death is a great friend.

Do you believe in your personal immortality?

Yes. Insofar as I am immortal, I will be immortal.

To me, "young" has no meaning.

It's something you can do nothing about,

nothing at all,

but youth is a quality,

and if you have it, you never lose it,

and when they put you into the box,

that's your immortality.

Mr. Wright, I thank you

for spending this hour with us.

Well, you're welcome.

I hope it's been of some interest...

It has, indeed.

To whoever's been listening,

but I don't know.