The real Frank Lloyd Wright issue

What has bothered me about the discussion of FLW has been that so many people simply parrot the FLW was a "genius" line without being able to explain why. Such thinking is everywhere; I found a choice one from Robert Campbell of The Boston Globe:

"The greatest artist this country has ever produced seems at last to be coming into his own. America's other great artists -- our painters, sculptors, composers - don't really rank with the tops of all time. They're not Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Beethoven. Wright alone has that standing."

But no one (in the blogosphere) seems to grapple with the question "Why is he a genius?" Some people take it as an outrage against decency to even ask and rely on prior collective opinion. No thanks.

So the issue for me which comes out of these various posts on now at least half a dozen blogs is not whether FLW was in fact a "genius" --- (I maintain than no one in any of the "pro-FLW" posts really explained in detail and with specificity why they thought him on par --- personally it makes me laugh --- with Shakespeare and Bach) --- but how such opinion is formed and what it means for public policy, which is the only place anything so nebulous counts.

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Another issue of course has been that very few commentors had actually seen say, Fallingwater, one of the prime suspects in the claims of FLW's genius.

I, too, have been meaning to visit Fallingwater so I can judge for myself but I see that Terry Teachout has beaten me to it; don't miss his post here. It's a very interesting post but I am still not sure if I get it. I guess I'll have to go see Fallingwater for myself.

Comments

[Michael Blowhard]

Terry's posting on Fallingwater is really good, thanks for pointing it out. Very positive but very on the money too.

Just 'cause I'm in the mood to do so, here's what I wrote about Fallingwater in my initial FLW posting, which seems to have set the arguing-about-FLW ball rolling:

When The Wife and I made our own pilgrimage to Fallingwater some years ago, we were amazed; we came to worship and went away snickering. (The crowds we were among probably hated us.) And for more than a few reasons. There's the celebrated approach to the house. You walk to the house through the woods. At a certain point on the path, you turn a corner and see the house, perhaps an eighth of a mile away, from just the perfect perspective. It's a beautiful moment and a beautiful sight. It's also a wildly over-art-directed one -- even as you gasp in admiration it dawns on you that the master whose hands you're in is quite the domineering control freak.

How about that "nature" thing people go on about? "He understood that people were creatures of nature," goes a typical appreciation, "hence an architecture which conformed to nature would conform to what was basic in people." But what struck us most vividly wasn't that the house was OF nature, it was that the house was ATOP the stream. Atop nature. How to read this? Our take finally was that the last thing the house was saying was "I am an outgrowth and expression of the American land and spirit"; instead, what it said to us was, "Frank Lloyd Wright is bigger than nature, and maybe even God."

Inside? Sadistically low ceilings (my six-foot-tall Wife explored the house in constant fear of bumping her head); sleep-inducing and inescapable white noise from the never-ending rushing water; a chilly damp rising up from the stream below no matter which room you were in; a fanatical overemphasis on horizontals that makes you feel like you're gotten lost in a stack of pancakes; and the hard-to-avoid psychological fear that the entire precarious structure was on the verge of dissolving back into the wet sand from which it had been formed.

[Ron]

Here, here. Short guy building homes with low ceilings. Does that show an appreciation for "nature." Don't think so. Nature doesn't have a ceiling. Tell ya' what folks, I love the 8 ft. ceilings in my old Victorian....

Groundbreaking and thought-provoking? Yes. Genius? Bach has nothing to worry about!

Piltdownman

[Larry Kestenbaum]

I've seen Fallingwater, too, and though it was interesting (I do have a fondness for the unusual in architecture), I agree with the points above. I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

One startling aspect: since all the famous pictures of the place are b&w, I suspect most people think it's all in subtle grays and whites. The actual colors of the building seem weirdly garish.