The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship

DEDICATION

For Debra, the light of whose eyes

still sets my life on fire.

—R. F.

To my wife, Gail, who, with both her love and her ideas, supported this obsession beyond all reason. And to Margaret, who so wanted to live to read her little brother’s book, though it was not to be.

—H. Z.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE: ROSA

I. MASTERS AND DISCIPLES

1. THE ARCHITECT OF PROPHECY

2. THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER

3. PARALLEL LINES

4. THE MAD GENIUS OF THE PIG BRISTLES AND MR. BELLYBUTTON

II. TAKING ROOT

5. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, SCHOOLMASTER

6. A STATION FOR THE FLIGHT OF THE SOUL

III. THE FELLOWSHIP

7. EVERYTHING TO DREAM

8. FLIGHT

9. COMINGS AND GOINGS

10. SORCERERS’ APPRENTICES

IV. CULT OF GENIUS

11. SOMETHING TO DO

12. THE TEST

13. PARADISE VALLEY

V. BEHIND THE LINES

14. LITTLE AMERICA FIRST

15. SPACE LOVERS

16. SPACE WARRIORS

VI. THE STRUGGLE WITHIN

17. A FRESH START

18. A USONIAN IN PARIS

19. THE SEX CLUBS

20. A NEW CALF AT TALIESIN

VII. LOSING GROUND

21. LAWS OF BEAUTY

22. HEADING FOR THE COSMOS

23. SUCCESSION

VIII. OLGIVANNA UNBOUND

24. GRANDOMANIA

25. FAMILY MATTERS

26. SPIRITS IN THE WALL

27. AN HEIRLESS HOUSE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CITATIONS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

ROSA

IT’S A MIRACLE YOU FOUND me, Rosa is telling us. Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let those bastards stop you. Don’t let them tell you I am too ill to talk to.

Insiders from the Taliesin Fellowship had steered us away from her. She was, they told us, incoherent, a lunatic, had spent time in a brothel hotel in Marseilles. Visiting Rosa would be a waste of time. Nobody volunteered where to find her, and it was clear that it would have been imprudent to ask.

From the outside, Las Encinas, a dark Shingle Style structure surrounded by handsome trees and manicured gardens with fountains, looks like a luxury hotel from the 1920s. It is, in fact, a hospital, a residential treatment center for the depressed and the addicted in Pasadena, California.

Cut into the wooden lintel above the entrance is the admonition Non est Vivere Sed Valere Vit: Life is not being alive but being well. We pass under a low, timbered porte cochere and through the front door. The receptionist calls ahead for clearance, and then directs us back along a pathway toward the building where this longtime Taliesin resident awaits us.

The architecture deteriorates as we leave the elegant old building and move through the gardens toward a complex of buildings that would never appear in the hospital’s glossy brochure. We pass a cordon of modest two-story apartment buildings where patients who are well enough live independently. A white, single-story stucco structure stands at the rear of the grounds, a metal grille over its front window; if not for the heavy security door, it might be a laundry facility. A muscular attendant opens the door a crack until we have confirmed who we are.

Rosa is in lockup. Patients who are a danger to themselves, or others, are placed here so they can be observed and controlled. A glass-enclosed nursing station overlooks a bare common room, with a few institutional couches, some chairs, and a single pay phone where patients can receive calls from the outside. The walls are bare, unbroken by decoration or pictures. A bank of doors, always ajar, opens into the patient rooms.

Rosa is the most colorful thing in this sterile, smudged whiteness. She is dressed in a powder-blue robe and slippers, her hair specially permed for the occasion, nails painted gold. Rosa wants to flash.

You are not afraid to be all alone with me, are you? she asks as we enter her room. Rosa is angry that the hospital staff has confiscated our tape recorder, angry that she is being kept here against her will, angry that we cannot be in her room with the door closed, alone.

With her gaunt face and a mischievous smile that is more gum than tooth, Frank Lloyd Wright’s sole surviving child is strangely fierce and piercingly lucid as she lies in her bed, a skinny but formidable presence. This seventy-five-year-old woman prefers to be called Rosa, not Iovanna, the name her father and mother bestowed upon her.

For her, this is a bad day.

Frank and Olgivanna Wright’s only child together was pushed here, she wants us to know—expelled from Taliesin, from the only home she had ever known. Rosa came here more than a decade ago. She had heard that it once attracted glamorous creatures unable to sustain an earthly orbit. It had comforted her that Spencer Tracy had been a patient, that W. C. Fields had spent his last days here. With its lush landscaping, its hardwood-paneled main hall, she tells us, I thought this would be a nice place to rest. She had no idea, she declares bitterly, that she would not be able to get out. I have been traveling this road alone.

Rosa wasn’t used to being alone. In 1932, she was just seven years old when Wright and Olgivanna, his third wife, launched the Taliesin Fellowship at their home in the isolated wooded hills of southern Wisconsin. Her parents had met at their lowest ebb. Olgivanna had just fled penniless from Paris to America into yet another exile, with no prospect of remunerative work. Wright had recently returned from Tokyo, where he had designed the sumptuous Imperial Hotel—only to find that his latest accomplishment had made little mark at home. Its originality is so antiquated that it embalms and mummifies the brains of the beholder, the reviewer remarked in Architect and Engineer. Most observers in America still believed that the energies of his genius had been spent. His low-slung, open-planned Prairie Houses, the Unitarian church in Oak Park, the Larkin Building were all well behind him. When the Fellowship was founded, Wright was sixty-six years old and almost without clients. In the world of curators and critics, he was a has-been.

Just across the river from Spring Green, Taliesin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, and his ideal of what home could be. It was also his architectural practice, around which he and his wife attempted to build a perfect world, a beautiful community that was itself always under construction. The Taliesin Fellowship would eventually attract more than a thousand young men and a few women who were drawn to Wright’s creative powers, who sensed his prophetic voice and believed in his vision. They came to participate in its realization, to live in this radiant exemplar, and to glean for themselves the principles by which they might dare design for a new land.

Taliesin, built into a landscape that was itself carefully molded and manufactured, was an encampment for the production of a new particularly American beauty. The apprentices who came to live there—some for a year or two, some forever—were as central to that landscape as its farms, residences, and drafting rooms. Mr. and Mrs. Wright sought to redesign their lives, too. Everything and everyone was to partake of that new, handsome, rugged beauty that Frank Lloyd Wright promoted under the enigmatic term organic architecture.

For the Wrights, the making of men and the making of buildings were driven by the same vision, the same compulsions. To understand Wright’s later architecture, one must understand the extraordinary atelier from whence it came. The Taliesin community was a housing for Wright’s imagination, the seedbed where some of America’s most important architectural creations were produced. Without the Fellowship, the landmarks for which Frank Lloyd Wright is best known today—Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, the Guggenheim Museum—might never have been created.

Most people who know the name Frank Lloyd Wright know the story of the first tragedy at Taliesin—of what happened in 1914, when his lover Mamah Cheney and several others were murdered there by a deranged servant, and Wright’s first Taliesin house was burned to the ground. But that is the least of it. For all its magic, the fealty of its knights to their king of beauty, the cultivated grace of its routine, Taliesin is a haunted house. It has held its secrets, its mysteries and its madness, well. Few know of Taliesin’s unsung heroes, the apprentices who gladly sacrificed themselves to make Wright’s architecture happen—and fewer still know of its victims, men and women whose lives were irreparably damaged by life in the Fellowship, part of the cost of constructing greatness, of building a cult of genius.

The house that was once so loved and so lived in is slowly dying, Rosa Wright says, as she warms herself beneath a tattered brown plaid blanket. It is the same blanket in which her father had once draped himself, as he warmed himself before the fireplace in the late afternoons. And I have no legal power to change it.

IOVANNA LLOYD WRIGHT’S life tracks the story of the Taliesin Fellowship, from its beginnings as a visionary community with the promise to change American life and landscape, to its current status as a beautiful relic whose inhabitants survive off of the residues of her parents’ charisma. The Taliesin Fellowship was an extension of the Wrights’ home, an extended family fashioned by two powerful personalities, each holding the apprentices to a standard of perfection. Frank Lloyd Wright espoused an all-encompassing philosophy of organic architecture. Olgivanna Lazovich Wright cleaved to a particular strand of esoteric mysticism. The intimate collaboration and titanic conflicts between them set the Fellowship in motion, and shaped its course. An embattled architect staving off the end of his career, and a mystical dancer desperate to find the way—the Fellowship was the result of their remarkable union. Each had suffered fiercely, had sought to touch the sacred; each was reaching for immortality. Each brought a passion, indeed a madness, to the place.

Their collision produced both brilliant architecture and a bizarre social order that still inspires—and haunts—many of those who lived by its inscrutable tenets.

PART I

MASTERS AND DISCIPLES

1.

THE ARCHITECT OF PROPHECY

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, a small town in a countryside studded with meadows and cliffs and smooth, soft wooded hills. He told me that he had made his entrance into the world on a stormy night and described it to me as though he had witnessed the prophetic initiation. The wind rose over the earth forcing trees low to the ground. Lightning ignited the clouds and thunder struck like a giant in fierce fury. The elements shook the little house which stood up bravely against the attack. Yours was a prophetic birth, his mother told him.

OLGIVANNA LLOYD WRIGHT

PARIS, 1910. IT WAS A storm locals would long remember. The Seine had flooded its banks. Near the river nothing worked: no electricity, no buses or streetcars. In a café on the Boulevard St. Michel, Frank Lloyd Wright sat alone, sullen, listening to the music.

A cellist picked up his bow and played Simonetti’s Madrigale. Wright used to accompany his son Lloyd as he played the same old Italian tune on the same instrument. On this January day, the sounds opened memory’s eye. [T]he familiar strains now gave me one of those moments of interior anguish when I would have given all I had lived to be able to begin to live again.

The forty-three-year-old architect’s longing and sorrow had little to do with the wife and six children he had just abandoned in Oak Park, a prosperous Chicago suburb. It was not repentance, he recalled. It was despair that I could not achieve what I had undertaken as Ideal.

Wright walked out into the rainy night, wandering about until dawn, when he found himself somewhere near where I had started out on the Boulevard St. Michel. The architect was just blocks from the cathedral of Notre Dame, which towered twenty stories above the low-slung city; he could hardly have avoided seeing the Gothic icon.

As a boy, Wright would awaken to the sight of engravings of Gothic cathedrals his mother had hung on his wall. He was only fourteen when he first read Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, popularly known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Folded into the story of a beautiful woman, a deformed man, and a building was an essay on the fate of architecture. Wright would later describe it as one of the truly great things ever written on architecture. It was also one of the grandest sad things of the world.

The would-be architect had been devastated by Hugo’s argument that the invention of movable type had enabled the book to dethrone architecture. Architecture is dead beyond recall, killed by the printed book, he had read. Throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in the Gothic era, the great cathedrals had not only symbolized Europe’s great ideas—they were literally encrusted with them. [A]ll of the intellectual forces of the people, Wright paraphrased Hugo, converged to one point—architecture.... Whoever was born a poet became an architect. Then books grew cheap and ubiquitous; flimsy paper, Hugo noted, became more permanent than granite. The boy whose mother had told him he would be the greatest of architects could now only aspire to become the high priest of a second-rate pursuit.

Hugo had allowed one slim hope. The great accident of an architect of genius, he wrote, might occur in the twentieth century as did that of Dante in the thirteenth. Wright took Hugo’s hope as prophecy. He would be architecture’s redeemer, a T-square-wielding Dante who would dethrone the book and restore architecture to its rightful place. And he would do so in a most unlikely way, by transforming the humble family house into the new cathedral. The printed book was powerful, Hugo had written, because, like a flock of birds, it was everywhere. Wright would make houses into the birds of architecture.

Now, a quarter of a century later, he was finally in the presence of Notre Dame, the set piece around which his dreams had revolved, the building that embodied the Ideal. It was the megalith that likely drove him to despair. How could he ever hope to translate its soaring power into the design of a mere house?

MARKED BY VIOLENCE and animated by madness, the house where Wright had grown up was nobody’s ideal. It was divided between man and wife—divided, in fact, over young Frank. In that setting, the boy struggled to safeguard his sanity and achieve his manhood. Neither task was assured.

Frank’s father, William Wright, was a diminutive Baptist preacher and music teacher who had moved to Wisconsin from Hartford, Connecticut, in 1859. A well-dressed polymath, the elder Wright had studied not only music but also law and medicine at Amherst College. He carried his medical satchel on his rounds as a circuit-riding minister.

William had three children with his first wife, Permelia, one of his music students. In 1864, two weeks after giving birth to a stillborn child, she died. Two years later, William married Anna Lloyd Jones, a frontier schoolteacher who had briefly been one of the Wrights’ boarders. Anna would make a wonderful stepmother, Permelia had counseled him just before she died.

Anna had grown up in an extended clan of Welsh Unitarians that eventually ended up near Spring Green, Wisconsin, about forty miles west of Madison. Her brother Jenkin became a nationally known Unitarian minister in Chicago. Unitarians were nonconformist Christians who rejected the trinity—hence the unity of God—while emphasizing Christ’s humanity, man’s natural capacity for moral intuition, and the use of reason to understand scripture. The Lloyd Joneses were known in the valley as pious, serious folk. Some found them pretentious moralists. God-almighty Joneses, Frank’s sister would call them.

Anna was an independent-minded woman; the valley folk remarked that she rode horses like a man, wearing a soldier’s cape with a hood and brass buttons. She was also considerably taller than William, who was forced to preach at the side of the pulpit in order to be seen by his congregation. But with his capacious mind and knack for inventing melodies, William Wright must have seemed a catch to the twenty-four-year-old spinster. Men were scarce in the wake of the Civil War, and the intellectual horizons of what men were left in the valley did not extend much beyond the acreage they owned. So Anna gave up her job as a schoolteacher and began to tend to her new husband.

The boy who became Frank Lloyd Wright was born Frank Lincoln Wright on June 8, 1867. (His father, who revered Abraham Lincoln, had delivered a eulogy for the slain president just two years before.) Anna seethed with resentment against her stepchildren, who refused to call her Mamma. But from the start she poured her energies into her own boy, whom she adored. Frank, she would say, was to build beautiful buildings.

Anna’s boundless faith in her son stood in bitter contrast to her growing disappointment with his father. A Baptist minister, lawyer, classical musician, music teacher, composer, party official, and tax collector, William seemed a dilettante who could barely provide for his family. Unable to afford hired help, she increasingly came to resent the physical labor required of her. William moved the family often—from Richland Center to McGregor, Iowa, on to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and then to Weymouth, Massachusetts. Returning to Wisconsin, William converted to his wife’s creed. With all his talents, Frank’s father accumulated no money, no consistent career, not even a solid faith of his own.

Bitter at the way Anna doted on Frank, William directed his rancor at the mama’s boy. Frank remembered feeling that his parents’ disagreements were all focused on him: mother always on the defensive, father taking the offensive. He also feared his father. Once, while pumping the church organ’s wooden lever as his father played, the seven-year-old’s arms and back began to ache. He knew he would be beaten if he didn’t pump through to the end of the piece. Bach’s heroic chord progressions briefly energized the boy, but Frank soon began crying as he pumped on and on, until finally he collapsed. William said nothing as he led his son home.

While William was severe with Frank, Anna was vicious to her stepchildren. Subject to tantrums, she beat William’s daughter Elizabeth without cause. One Wisconsin winter when she was eleven, Elizabeth recalled, her stepmother jumped up and down and pumped water as fast as she could and threw it over me and yelled with every jump. Terrified and soaking wet, the girl ran outside, her clothing instantly freezing to her skin. And that wasn’t the only such incident. In other confrontations, Anna dragged Elizabeth across the kitchen by the hair, beat her black and blue with a deeply ridged, wooden meat tenderizer, and brought the tines of a meat fork perilously close to the girls’ eyes.

Exhausted by her own hysterical ravings, Anna would be bedridden for days at a time. When William discreetly asked her relatives whether there had been insanity in the family, his queries got back to her, only infuriating her further. Fearing for his daughter’s life, William finally had Elizabeth sent away to relatives.

MANHOOD DID NOT come easily to Frank Lloyd Wright. He loved beauty—both his own and the world’s—a little too much. He had to work at becoming an American man. As a pre-teenager, the boy wore his hair unusually long. A beautiful head of hair, his mother told him, was Nature’s most beautiful gift to mortals. There were no forts, no Indians, no sports in Frank’s early childhood, only drawings, music, and the precocious sensitivity of an aesthete. One day, when he happened on some men plowing a field thick with wild daisies, he was mortified. Seeing the threat to what he loved, he recalled, he darted in front of the horse-drawn blades to rescue as many as he could. Realizing that most would be buried alive, he threw himself in the way of the plow and wept.

When Frank was a ten-year-old in Pawtucket, his mother noticed what he later called his delicate psychology, and feared that he was becoming effeminate. The mother saw which way her man-child was going, Frank admits, astonishingly, in his autobiography. She was wise and decided to change it. Convinced that the citified life of the East was responsible, Anna pushed for the family to return from New England to Wisconsin. She was afraid, Wright recalled, that he was becoming too detached, dreamy, perhaps too sensitive.

Anna and William returned to Wisconsin, where Anna’s brothers gave Frank a job working on their farms and William became an itinerant preacher. Weeping, Anna Wright sheared Frank’s blond curls and sent him to Spring Green to labor with his uncles. One day, as the now eleven-year-old trudged hand-in-hand through the fresh morning snow with his uncle John, he was once again seized by nature. Leaving his mitten in his uncle’s hand, he broke free and ran about gathering the dry plant skeletons—stems, tassels, flower heads—in his trembling bare hand. But Uncle John spurned his offering. Instead he pointed back at the straight path his footsteps had made through the snow. When Frank looked back at his own embroidering path, he was shamed by the sight. Beauty and manhood did not lie easily together. The valley-folk feared beauty, he recalled, as a snare for unwary feet.

Anna Wright had sent her son to the Lloyd Jones farms to become a man, and eventually the lessons of farm life sank in. Frank herded and milked the cows, shoveled manure, cut and carried wood, repaired fences. He adjusted to the sickening smells of fermented feed, urine, and excrement. In the morning he put on his sweat-stiffened clothing. There were times when the teenage boy ran away, exhausted and weeping. But his uncles worked him, teaching him to harness and drive horses, to bale sheaves of grain. By the time he was fourteen, he was being sent out alone to work—and getting paid for it to boot. He gloried in being treated like a man. At summer’s end he returned to Madison, and, although he had since let his hair grow unfashionably long again, he began to make manly things: a catamaran, a bobsled, a cross-gun, an ice-boat, bows and arrows.

And the teenager had also begun romancing girls—imaginary girls, at least. When he was unable to sleep on the farm, Frank sometimes walked barefoot up to the ridge, where he dreamed of a fairy princess whose image rose in pale amber and amethyst nights. After the surge inspired by this dream girl, he felt the dew [that] came upon the flowers that stood beside his naked legs. He did not, however, allow real girls into this moist dream space. They frightened him. There was something mysterious, he confessed, between [my]self and the mystery of womankind.

The Wisconsin farms of the Lloyd Jones family were a guarantor of Wright’s masculinity. On this land he would ultimately find himself shepherding scores of boys into manhood.

ALTHOUGH ANNA WRIGHT had long seen the makings of architectural greatness in her son, Wright himself would take years to distill its precise form. What he would eventually label organic architecture began at home, with the Transcendentalist speakers who had wowed his parents when they took him and his siblings back to his father William’s native New England.

The Transcendentalists, who saw God in nature’s beauty, went beyond the Unitarians’ stress on reason and ethical choice. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was much read in the Wright household—sought to fashion a new American culture, seeking inspiration from an inner light found in all creation, including man. Nature’s beauty, they were sure, would reveal the principles of form on which both an American democracy and an American architecture could be built. And Emerson declared that all beauty must be organic. This principle would have a profound influence on Wright’s vision: Truly beautiful architecture, he saw, should be designed in Nature’s way.

For Wright, Transcendentalism offered a way to love beauty, to be manly, and to be uniquely American, all at the same time. True beauty, he learned, had to be protected from the womanly. Artistic genius, Emerson taught, was a mark of manhood, to be guarded against the feminine rage of the cultivated classes.

The Transcendentalists deplored the sentimental. [I]t was thought that I was a sentimentalist, and tickled the ears of ‘weak women,’ who came to delight themselves and be filled full of poetry and love, Francis Parker, one of the great Transcendentalist preachers who inspired Wright’s parents, wrote with scorn. To be sentimental was to be overly emotional—unable to engage with reality or to harness the powers of the spirit for the purposes of man. Transcendentalism, rather, involved a romantic quest—though not in the contemporary sense. To be romantic, for the Transcendentalists, entailed a courageous engagement with reality, a heroic struggle to construct a new world. It was this impulse that drove the Transcendentalists to fight for both abolition and women’s suffrage.

William Wright did not approve of what he called his son’s sentimentality. William gave Frank his first lessons in architecture by teaching him about music. A symphony, he explained, was an edifice of sound. But he warned his son that sentimentality could spoil the composition and performance of a piece of music. Frank—who would later find inspiration for his architectural forms in the carefully structured works of his father’s beloved Beethoven—would come to identify the sentimental with any architecture that aimed for surface effects, dismissing such design as dishonest, untrue to its materials and structure. In his view, such sentimental architects made pictures, painted two-dimensional scenes; Frank would call their work erotic foolishness.

WRIGHT ENTERED ADOLESCENCE in verdant Madison, Wisconsin, a small burg tucked between two lakes with its classically domed capitol building hunched over the city’s central square. His father soon stopped preaching, turning to music and opening a conservatory. After eight barren years, his musical gift was back and he was determined to use it. Some of William Wright’s songs were published, including The Atlanta Waltz and Nymphs of the Woods. Ever the omnivore, William even studied Sanskrit, seeking to grasp the mystical truths of the East in their original language. Learning the mantras and hymns of the Vedic texts, he attempted to replicate sounds that helped man apprehend the aspects of divinity present in the cosmos and the psyche.

William worked hard, but Frank despaired at the sight of his father spending hour after hour scribing notes on staves, the ink smearing his hands, face, even his teeth. Though Frank believed in his mystically inclined father’s talent, William’s music never brought in enough money to keep up with his mother’s spending.

The Wright family found themselves living in genteel poverty, one summer making do on huckleberries, bread, and milk. Anna persuaded her brother James to bring a cow forty miles from his farm near Spring Green. The Lloyd Jones family also sent chickens, barrels of apples, and honeycombs. As desperate as they were, Anna used her grocery money to buy new maple flooring and folding chairs upholstered in Brussels carpet. William was furious. And Anna was humiliated when her husband forced her to take her small children to live on her father’s farm for an entire summer, to ensure that they would be provided for.

For William it must have been emasculating to have to depend on the generosity of his wife’s brothers. For Frank it must have been fearful indeed. For, while he was his mother’s darling, he was more like his father: short, charming, aesthetically inclined, drawn to and capable of multiple forms of expression. Despite these similarities, young Frank found himself unable to identify with the very man whose failings his mother expected him to redeem.

TRAPPED IN A house divided, Frank retreated into a world of his own. SANCTUM SANCTORUM. KEEP OUT, read the sign on his attic bedroom door. The room was littered with things, he remembered, with which he would ‘fix up effects’ in the childlike desire to make ‘pictures’ of everything—including himself. In this waking dream space, he manipulated the dry heads of flowers, colored blocks, and even the structure of the toccata and the symphony, playing off their hidden forms. It was a refuge where a vulnerable boy could live in the spaces of his beautiful compositions. Wright’s capacity to manipulate these spaces in his imagination would be the source of his fabled ability to conjure a three-dimensional structure before ever putting pencil to paper—an approach he would later urge on his apprentices, though it would prove impossible for many of them to follow.

Wright also read voraciously. Along with Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, he devoured A Thousand and One Nights—and fancied himself a young Aladdin.

BUT A SANCTUM sanctorum was hard to preserve in the little house. As Frank lay in his attic bed at night, he could hear his father playing Beethoven and Bach, and practicing the recitations he still gave at church. But what would haunt him forever was the sound of William Wright reciting Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven as he paced around the room. These eavesdropped moments—particularly this sensuous dirge by his father, who likely loved his first wife more than he ever would Frank’s mother—pained him. Frank saw that his father’s talents were unappreciated by his mother and unrewarded by the world. The fact that his mother had chosen Frank to outstrip his hapless artistic father—with whom the boy sympathized, but whom he could never quite love—must have been unbearable. All this, Frank would confess, would fill a tender boyish heart with sadness until a head would bury itself in the pillow to shut it out. In adulthood he camouflaged his sadness, he later told a cousin, by drawing everyone into his beautiful visions, his heroic postures, his irreverent, outlandish claims, even his eccentric dress.

WHEN FRANK WAS sixteen, William crossed a line. One day, in the stable of their Madison home, William was about to thrash him for some disobedience. But several summers on his uncle’s farm had muscled Frank up, and the boy pinned his father on the stable floor, which was saturated with cow urine and horse manure. Frank refused to let his father up until he promised to leave him alone. Frank returned to the house white, shamed, and shaken, he recalled. ‘Father ought to realize, he told his mother, that he had grown too big for that sort of thing.

Anna responded by banishing William from her bed, to sleep alone in the coldest room in the house. She also began to attack him physically. Frank’s older half-siblings pleaded with their father to leave Anna. And, at long last, he did.

In 1884, William Wright filed for divorce, and the request was granted a short time later. Yet William soon had second thoughts. I will stay if you ask me, he told Anna, standing outside the door, his violin under his arm.

I do not ask you to, she replied. He left.

Months later, William happened on his shabbily dressed daughter Maginel on her way home from school. He took her to buy a pair of shoes with copper toes and a straw hat. When Anna—who by now was approaching penury—found out, she stuffed the articles into the stove and let them burn in its purifying fire.

Anna told Frank and his sisters that she didn’t really want the divorce, but had agreed to it for their sake. Frank knew she had him in mind. He had already entered manhood by physically defeating his father, an action backed up by his mother’s sexual banishment of her husband. That confrontation, Wright believed, precipitated his parents’ divorce.

Around this time, Frank replaced his middle name, Lincoln—his father’s choice—with Lloyd, a nod to his mother’s clan. The fault line had been drawn.

Adding to the understandable trauma of his father’s leaving was the shame of divorce—an extraordinary recourse in the days of Wright’s childhood. In those times a woman without means would endure enormous abuse just to be assured of survival. William did not provide much, but he did provide. There is no mention of material want in the divorce proceedings. In the late ninteenth century, divorces—relatively rare in themselves—were typically filed by wives, not husbands.

Wright’s feelings of guilt and anxiety over his parents’ divorce never left him. Memories, he wrote, would haunt the youth as they haunt the man. They also haunted his architecture. It was no wonder that Wright devoted his career to designing the architectural casing for the perfect American home—undertaking it as a religious calling, equal parts duty and obsession. He was seeking to rebuild what he never had—and to replace a father for whose failure he held himself partially responsible.

WHEN HE LEFT the family, William Wright took nothing but his clothes, his violins, and a mahogany bookcase, leaving most of his books behind. Anna sold many of them to help pay for a piano for Frank and his sister Jane. But Frank must have made sure she didn’t sell the treasure in the lot—his father’s favorite volume, a calf-leather bound edition of Plutarch’s Lives. The book’s most heavily thumbed section, he later wrote, was the story of Alcibiades. He would return to this text throughout his life, not only forty years later, when he wrote his autobiography, but also at the end of his life, when he composed his last book.

Wright identified with Alcibiades. While Plutarch’s volume is filled with stories of Greek and Roman heroes, scoundrels and kings, Frank was captivated by the story of this Athenian orphan boy who lisped charmingly and who became a warrior, a great general, and eventually a tyrant. Alcibiades was eloquent and cunning, arrogant, impulsive. He was also extraordinarily good-looking, an amorous object for scores of well-born Greek men, each of whom sought to flatter him with unmanly fondness. For the free men of classical Greece, after all, true love was something that occurred between adult men and adolescent youths, preferably lean and muscled young men whose hair had not yet sprouted on their chins and armpits.

Alcibiades was a scandal, not only in the Victorian America of Wright’s time, but also in Alcibiades’s ancient Greece. An Athenian boy destined to become a citizen was not to give himself to anyone too quickly, nor to take pleasure in an erotic union with his adult suitor. Young Alcibiades, however, took pleasure in being sought, and in pleasuring the men who sought him. Fortunately he had ignited the ardor of the ultimate mentor, the great philosopher Socrates, who sought to interpose, and preserve so hopeful a plant from perishing in the flower, before its fruit came to perfection. In battle Socrates threw himself in front of his young wounded lover to save him from death or capture. Nonetheless Alcibiades repeatedly deserted his mentor to pursue all the carnal delights, making Socrates intensely jealous.

Frank read of how Alcibiades loved to have his beauty admired. According to the story, he perfumed his body and wore long purple robes like a woman, which dragged after him as he went through the market-place. And Frank could relate: At the time he himself was a long-haired dandy who sported skintight pants, toothpick shoes, and a mink collar he had his mother sew onto his overcoat. An incorrigible sentimentalist, Wright later observed in self-deprecation. Yet the Alcibiades he admired was also a figure of manhood, a brave warrior and brilliant military strategist who galvanized his soldiers. This was just the kind of divided soul Wright felt himself to be.

NOT LONG AFTER William walked out, Anna got Frank a job in Madison working for the University of Wisconsin’s dean of engineering, a practicing civil engineer. Frank, who had a poor record in high school, was admitted to the university’s engineering school on a trial basis as a special student. He certainly thought himself special. Just before he enrolled at Wisconsin, with no architectural education or experience whatsoever, he had proposed himself as architect for a small chapel his mother’s family intended to build in their valley. (Wright was rebuffed; instead they hired Joseph Lyman Silsbee, an eclectic Chicago designer now working primarily in the Shingle Style.)

While the University of Wisconsin had no architecture school, the civil engineering coursework included structural engineering, a component of architectural training. Beauty, however, is of little concern to the engineer, and Wright, the budding aesthete, found the assigned academic texts a waste of time. Instead, he read widely and voraciously. His mother introduced him to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which they read together. In the novel the young Wilhelm Meister falls in love with an aspiring actress, rejecting his father’s base occupation as a merchant businessman and leaving home to become an actor and playwright—indeed, a champion of a new national German theater.

The prospect of becoming a kind of Midwestern Wilhelm Meister, daring to seize destiny by the throat, both thrilled and frustrated the bored engineering student. The handsome Goethe offered Wright not only a heroic model of action, but a philosophy for his art and artistry. Goethe, a champion of the Gothic, saw a parallel between the unfolding of the human individual and the development of all living forms, plants in particular. In his vision, a true artist, like a flower, was born to his art.

For those who could appreciate its ineffable force, Goethe proclaimed, nature’s beauty provided a sublime aesthetic experience, sensual yet divine. Frank was enthralled by the writer’s words, which confirmed the very feelings of communion with nature that had transfixed him from childhood. Aligning oneself with the delicate powers of the natural world—with the structure, beauty, and life force of flowers and plants—could be a path toward manly heroism, not away from it. Throughout his career, Wright would train hundreds of male apprentices to love flowers and plants. Learning flower arranging, he instructed them, was an integral part of architectural training.

Wright may have been excited by his outside reading, but nothing he encountered in his university studies captured his attention. During his second term, his efforts in descriptive geometry and drawing—subjects that tested the skills required of an architect—were rewarded with a grade of average. The fault was not his, he felt; the university had failed him. Education, he declared, with its oppressive rules, was a vague sort of emotional distress, a sickening sense of fear.

Wright’s hero, Goethe, had also despised rote learning and copybook instruction. Goethe was an exemplar of a new kind of romantic hero that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—neither warrior nor king, and still less inventor or entrepreneur, but the new modern aristocrat, the artistic genius destined to design things no one had ever even imagined. The genius derived his artistry not from training, but from birth—and from his struggle to realize and act on his vision. His art was a kind of beautiful madness. The practice of one’s artistry, Goethe repeatedly proclaimed, was the real test of one’s potential.

After viewing a cast of Goethe’s hands on display at the Wisconsin campus, Wright was pleased that his own looked so similar. After a while, however, merely reading Goethe began to frustrate him, for action, again action and more action was his urge.

FINALLY THE ASPIRING architect could wait no longer. After only two semesters, the eighteen-year-old quit the university. Pawning his father’s watch, his mink collar, and some of his father’s remaining books (including Gibbon’s Rome and Plutarch’s Lives), Wright boarded the train to Chicago.

In 1887, the wind-chilled slaughterhouse city was still rebuilding after the great fire. In the process, Chicago was also just starting to invent the towered skyline of the combine and the corporation. Architecture firms were booming. Here, at last, Frank hoped he would be able to learn architecture by doing it.

He arrived in the city one drizzly spring evening, disembarking at the city’s arc-lit Wells Street Station. He had never seen electric lights before. Out on the street, his supersensitive eyes were assaulted by more arc-lamps and glaring signs. I wondered, he recalled, where Chicago was—if it was near.

In the morning, leafing through the city directory looking for architecture firms, he spied the name Silsbee—the man chosen over him to design the Lloyd Jones chapel. But I wasn’t going there, he recalled. Not wanting to be hired based on family connections, he claimed, he spent the next few days dropping in on architects, misrepresenting himself as two semesters shy of an engineering degree. He was rejected at each office.

On his fourth day, embarrassed but desperate, the teenager finally appeared at Silsbee’s office—and was offered a job. The firm had just finished a new church in Chicago for Frank’s uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones. But that, Wright would have us believe, played no part. Liked the atmosphere of the office best, he recalled, as if deciding among multiple offers.

With this new position, Wright was finally able to send his mother some money. Anna was so destitute, she wrote him, that she was contemplating suicide. I have been very sad of late, she added, bemoaning the state of her garden and how expensive everything was becoming. I am afraid that I cannot pay my debts by fall.... What can I do about your debt here?

AT SILSBEE’S OFFICE, Wright was particularly impressed with one colleague, a fine looking cultured fellow with a fine pompadour and beard. Cecil Corwin, who was humming the Messiah, paused to ask Frank if he sang. His sleeves were rolled above the elbow, Wright recalled. His arms were thickly covered with coarse hair, but I noticed how he daintily crooked his little finger as he lifted his pencil. He had a gentleness and refinement.

Wright inquired nervously if he could enter Corwin’s office. I believe we could get along, Corwin answered, looking Wright over. The two became inseparable, and soon they were spending days and nights together. Frank received many invitations from other people; he turned them all down. I preferred Cecil’s company.

Even though Cecil was extraordinarily handsome, he knew no girls. And neither did Frank. Writing about Cecil more than thirty years later, Wright lovingly recalled being captivated by his older friend. When Frank was hungry, he wrote, nothing ever tasted so good as the corned beef hash to which Cecil introduced him. He never enjoyed a concert as much as those he attended with Cecil. The two danced together in a friendly tilt when Frank returned to Silsbee’s office after briefly working in another. When they appeared in his autobiography, just as Wright was establishing the Taliesin Fellowship, these passages caught more than one potential apprentice’s eye.

JOSEPH LYMAN SILSBEE was an adroit copier of styles, from Gothic Revival to the more modern Shingle Style. But it bothered Wright that Silsbee was just imitating a style. It wasn’t long before Wright heard of somebody in Chicago who was designing something absolutely original. Louis Sullivan, together with his engineer partner, Dankmar Adler, was pioneering what would become the skyscraper, with its steel skeleton and clean-cut windows. This new phenomenon would convince Wright that Hugo’s predicted revival of architecture had begun. When a fellow Silsbee draftsman told him that Sullivan was hiring, Wright recalled, [m]y heart jumped. The only thing that seemed to concern him was leaving Cecil behind, but Corwin, who had previously worked with Sullivan, urged him on.

Sullivan was also drawn to the Gothic, not the Greek and Roman imitations that had begun sprouting up in every American city. Rather than mimic Gothic tropes, however, Sullivan was trying to use its underlying principles to make something radically new. And Sullivan also followed the theories of the great English critic John Ruskin, believing that what elevated a building to the status of architecture—rather than a utilitarian structure like a wasp nest, a rat hole, or a railway station—was the addition of something useless: ornamentation.

Louis Sullivan was the undisputed American master of ornamentation. The efflorescent tendrils and blooms that snaked their way along his arches and capped his capitals were delicate, yet stunningly powerful. When Wright arrived in Chicago, Sullivan was designing one of his extraordinarily ornamented projects, the Auditorium Building. Combining an office tower with what would then be America’s largest theater, the Auditorium’s interior boasted ornamentation that was likely derived from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s drawings for the nineteenth century restoration of Gothic buildings—most prominently Notre Dame de Paris, Wright’s Ideal since childhood.

If Frank was excited about the chance of working for Sullivan, his mother was adamant that he stay just where he was—with Silsbee. Father used to tell me always, she wrote him, stick to the same place if you can, even for less money—for that shows character, and there is much in it, Frank.... I cannot bear the thought of your changing. Wright’s mother was terrified that her son would shame her in the eyes of her brothers. Don’t let our enemy get the victory by seeing you go bad.

But her son wasn’t listening. Instead he accepted an invitation from Sullivan to show him his work, making drawings of ornamental details, some of them Sullivan-like and others based on Gothic motifs. Frank, who was little more than a decade younger than the thirty-two-year-old Sullivan, felt rather unnerved when the architect first turned his big brown eyes on him, seeming to grasp even his most secret thoughts.

Sullivan, a short, bearded man who dressed impeccably, looked at Wright’s samples; then, without a word, he removed the cover sheet from over his own work and resumed drawing. Wright gasped with delight. Watching the touch of Sullivan’s pencil, the languid lines coursing through his ornamental detailing, seemed to Frank like that of the passion vine. The sight so entranced the young apprentice that he was ashamed by his own pleasure.

You’ve got the right kind of touch; you’ll do, Sullivan finally said. Wright was hired to draw foliage for the Auditorium’s interior.

Wright’s mother was not pleased. Oh, my boy, stop where you are now. I thought you were doing well. You are too much in a hurry. Why do you ignore all my advice. I told you not to leave Silsbee until you get more experience. Of course, my boy, you have not yet the experience. You are not yet twenty.

AS A STUDENT, Wright had been a failure; as an apprentice, he was a stupendous success. A quick study, he soon became Sullivan’s closest assistant, with a private office right next to the master’s. And there was much for him to learn—about both architecture and the world at large. Dankmar Adler, Sullivan’s engineer partner, was a Jew—something Wright had seldom, if ever, encountered in his sheltered life. So were many of Frank’s fellow draftsmen, as well as many of Sullivan’s clients.

As an inexperienced apprentice who rose dramatically in the firm, Wright was resented by some of the others. Anxious about defending himself, he secretly began taking boxing lessons—which came in handy when one of his colleagues, a man named Ottenheimer whom Wright described as a heavy-bodied, short-legged, pompadoured, conceited, red-faced Jew, wearing gold glasses, began goading him. Wright beat Ottenheimer to a pulp; nobody bothered him after that.

In after-hours sessions, Sullivan revealed to his young assistant the philosophy underpinning his architecture. Much of it, a variant of Ruskin’s organicism, would have already been familiar. Wright had read the theorist’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture years before with his mother. Ruskin, like Goethe, believed that God’s law could be discerned in nature. Biological organisms—birds, trees, flowers—weren’t designed to be pretty, Sullivan explained. Their forms evolved in response to their environment, in whatever way was necessary to best perform specific functions. Buildings, he told Wright, should be designed the same way. The greatness of Gothic architecture, for example, came from the fact that it was designed from nature’s template. This principle gave rise to Sullivan’s famous dictum: Form follows function.

Wright was soon calling Sullivan his lieber meister, or beloved master. Sullivan instructed him about not only architecture, but also art, poetry, philosophy, and music. The chubby-cheeked, bearded architect sang from Wagner’s operas while he sat with Wright at the drawing boards, conjuring up the scenes as they worked. Sullivan, whose own photographs of roses inspired his ornamental designs, also taught Wright how to take pictures. It could not have escaped the young man’s notice that Sullivan was as multitalented as Wright’s father, with one difference: He was a success.

In private moments, Sullivan also bragged to his young apprentice about his sexual gymnastics. Although he had many casual liaisons with women, however, he loved none. Rather, the evidence suggests that Sullivan was animated by homosexual desire. As a younger man, he had been a member of the Lotus Club, a group of intellectual men who loved flowers and developed their bodies by rowing, body-building, and racing. The Lotus Club Notebook was largely composed of drawings of naked men wrestling and swimming. Sullivan himself sketched male bodies in loving detail; his drawings of women, in contrast, were few and unflattering.

In the same year Sullivan hired Wright, the architect also wrote an adoring letter to the poet Walt Whitman, whose poetry and life bespoke a new model of manly, homosexual love. In Leaves of Grass and elsewhere, Whitman conjured not the effeminate fairy, but the man whose love for other men was manly, an eroticized intimacy between comrades that he saw as democracy’s emotional core. I, too, Sullivan penned Whitman, ‘have pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair,’ reaching for the basis of a virile and indigenous art.

Frank Lloyd Wright had found his Socrates. Though Sullivan’s sensuousness made him uneasy, Wright’s relationship with him was his template for what apprenticeship could mean: a relationship with an older man that went far beyond the technical aspects of architecture, embracing all the arts and perhaps more, and energized by passionate identification.

VICTOR HUGO NOT only provided the plot line for Wright’s architectural career, but his characters also played a role in finding young Wright his first love. It all started when the Victor Hugo Club at All Souls Church, his uncle’s parish, decided to stage a Les Miserables–themed costume party. Frank dressed up as Enjolras, the novel’s tall, bourgeois young leader of a secret revolutionary student club in Paris. The character of Enjolras, Wright read, is not aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one passion—the right. When Enjolras is captured, he offers his breast to the guardsmen. The guardsmen hesitate; one lowers his gun. It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower, he says.

With Cecil Corwin’s help, Wright threw himself into the role, donning tight white trousers and a scarlet military jacket with gold epaulettes, a sword with a leather scabbard at his side. He begged Cecil to join him at the church, but Cecil declined. At the party, it was the girls who approached Frank and asked him to dance. And Frank had trouble controlling his sword. [T]he infernal slab-sided sword was slung so low that if I took my hands off it, it got between my legs.... I tried a dozen schemes to control it for I wouldn’t spoil the fine figure I was making by taking it off! I was going to hang on to that swinging, dangling, clanking thing if I mowed the legs off the whole ‘Les Miserables’ tribe and broke up the party.

That night, Frank literally bumped into Catherine Tobin by accident; they would spend the rest of the evening together. Thus, to his mother’s dismay, began a two-year courtship with the Victorian beauty, a woman Wright described as having a frank, handsome countenance in no way common.

In 1889, when the couple decided to marry, Cecil Corwin was crestfallen. He argued with Frank about it. She’s awfully fond of me, Cecil, Wright reassured his friend. Well, Cecil replied, so am I. He wasn’t the only one disturbed by the marriage: Anna Wright fainted at the wedding.

Catherine became pregnant immediately, and Wright convinced Sullivan to offer him a five-year contract with the firm. He also persuaded his employer to lend him money against the contract, and to hold a mortgage on the new house Wright had designed and constructed for himself and his family in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. In the living room, he incorporated flowery ornamental pieces derived from Sullivan’s Auditorium designs.

On March 31, 1890, precisely nine months after the wedding and shortly after moving into their new home, Catherine gave birth to a son, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. Wright’s mother moved in next door.

It was also a productive year at the office. Frank was in the office when Sullivan sketched the Wainwright Building, the first true skyscraper, in a matter of minutes. Its façade was inspired by Reims, another of the great French Gothic cathedrals.

Within the next few years, Wright is said to have become the highest-paid draftsman in Chicago. But in 1893, near the end of his contract, Sullivan fired him. Always in need of money, Wright had been taking freelance commissions on the side. Sullivan claimed that this violated the terms of their agreement. I was scared to death, Wright would later confide to his apprentices about the rupture. I thought to myself—this is awful—how can I do it.

Wright’s departure wasn’t the only change for Sullivan that year. For some time the architect had been moving in a radically more florid, ornamental direction. The Golden Doorway he designed for the Transportation Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—its interior inspired by Notre Dame—sported a multicolored façade in reds and golds, its arches ornamented with Islamic motifs, a wild contrast to the bleached, neoclassical forms of the White City exposition. The spectacle initiated Sullivan’s fall from public favor. At a time when the stern white columns of Beaux Arts architecture seemed to capture the nation’s burgeoning power, Sullivan’s architecture suddenly appeared womanly, its façade crowded with intricate flowers, right there for everybody to see.

WRIGHT HAD HAD help in his moonlighting from Cecil Corwin, and now he and Cecil opened an office together—in Sullivan’s Schiller Building, no less. But Corwin soon left, discouraged that Frank had so little time for him and unable to compete with his young friend’s astounding creativity. Indeed, Corwin left architecture altogether. "You are the thing that you do, he told Wright. I’m not and I never will be." Wright pleaded with him to stay, but to no avail. When Corwin left, Wright was miserable. That place … soon seemed nothing at all without him, Wright later said. The two men would never see each other again.

Wright was now on his own—free to begin his quest to transform the lowly American residence into a cathedral. Opening his own practice in Chicago, he began searching for clients who needed houses.

"TO DENY THAT men of genius yet to come may be the peers of the men of genius of the past, Frank Lloyd Wright was telling an audience at Northwestern University, would be to deny the ever-working power of God." In 1896, three years after going out on his own, the twenty-nine-year-old architect was standing before the University Guild of Evanston, giving one of his first public lectures.

Having left the drawing board—to play the role of preacher, as he put it—Wright seized the moment and declared himself the genius architecture needed if it were ever to recapture its lost glory. Throughout his long career he would remind his audiences of the powerful impact Notre Dame de Paris had on him. But only on this occasion, his first lecture, did he explain so forthrightly just how he intended to overcome architecture’s death sentence.

[I]f great architecture in the old sense no longer exists, he announced, in domestic architecture today we have finer possibilities and a measure of salvation. The architect should translate the cathedral’s beauty to the homes of the people, he instructed, transforming average homes into sermons of stone.

Hugo had predicted that if architecture were to somehow revive, it would have to bow to the sway of literature. Wright took this as a practical injunction; he would make architecture into a book, designing according to his reading of the souls of its inhabitants. The homes of the future will be biographies and poems, he declared, appealing to the center of the human soul.... There should be as many types of houses as there are types of people.

The Northwestern speech also marked Wright’s first public use of the term organic in describing architecture. Organic architecture, he said, offered Americans a new beauty through which they would be redeemed. There is not, nor ever was, he later preached to the Architecture League of Chicago, room in right living for the ugly. Ugliness in anything is the incarnation of sin, and sin is death—ugliness is death.

It was a critical moment in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ascendance from architect to public visionary. For the rest of his life, Wright would variously cast himself as preacher, prophet, sometimes even messiah, striding forth to save the American home from the sin of ugliness. But to fulfill this mission, he needed disciples.

IN 1898, TWO years after presenting himself as the genius of Hugo’s prophecy, Wright built an architecture studio alongside his Oak Park house. A bas relief image on the columns forming the entry says it all: a floor plan of an ancient cathedral connected by a short corridor to an octagonal baptistery. The plan embossed on the columns bears a remarkable resemblance to the studio beyond.

The studio’s portico is a miniature version of the entry to the building carved on the columns, a design familiar to anyone who has visited Europe’s great cathedrals. Rather than walk straight into the building, the doors are likewise located to the sides. A short hallway to the left of the studio leads to a drafting room flooded with sunlight from its high clerestory windows, as in the nave of a cathedral. Just beneath the windows, an octagonal mezzanine hovers over the wood drafting tables below. Wright suspended it on heavy chains, an old trick of the Gothic builders. Even more remarkable is the octagonal room found at the end of a short hallway to the right of the studio, clearly modeled after a baptistery, the place of initiation into Christianity. Wright used this space, among other things, to deliver the gospel of organic architecture to his draftsmen.

Such cathedral elements, including cruciform floor plans and clerestory windows, soon began to find their way into the houses he designed for his clients. Wright placed living rooms—along with their high cathedral ceilings, as we now call them—on the second floor. He even treated the furniture for his houses as though he were designing for a church, fixed in place like old wooden pews, built-in, in complete harmony, nothing to arrange, nothing to disturb—and almost invariably uncomfortable.

In the medieval world—as another of Wright’s inspirations, the great scholar of the Gothic Viollet-le-Duc, had written—clerics functioned as architects. If the cleric could become an architect, Wright would have reasoned, the architect must become a cleric for architecture to be restored.

WRIGHT CALLED HIS revolutionary new designs Prairie houses, a term he applied to most of the dwellings he worked on for the next two decades. While Wright’s Prairie house designs varied widely, all were based on common principles he folded into his evolving theory of organic architecture. The first principle is the primacy of the interior. In contrast to Renaissance buildings, which are said to draw the eye to