#112 Frank Lloyd Wright

**David Senra** (0:01)
Frank Lloyd Wright was born two years after the end of the Civil War, and died two years after the launch of Sputnik. Ninety-one years and ten months on this earth. In the approximate middle of that near-century span, when he was 47, the greatest architect America had yet produced suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego. Although perhaps that is just saying the same thing twice.
A crazed servant named Julian Carlton set fire to Wright's home and went about murdering seven people, one of whom was the woman Wright deeply loved and had been living with for the past several years, even as his own wife kept praying he'd somehow come to his moral senses and return to his family.
Five years before, in the fall of 1909, having already revolutionized American architecture and produced what other artists might have considered a lifetime's worth of work, Wright had abandoned his practice and gone off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick.
It was not just a local scandal, but a regional outrage and in some ways a national one. She had forsaken her spouse and two little children, and he had forsaken his spouse and six children. And now, after some relative quiet in their lives, 45-year-old Mamah Borthwick was dead. No, not just dead, but slaughtered in the most gruesome way.
As much as this moment had been chronicled, poured over, dreamed into, by what is now three generations of Wright biographers and historians, by playwrights, by newspaper feature writers, by documentary filmmakers, by a handful of novelists, by conspiracy theorists, even as it's been dreamed into and performed on stage by an opera company, there is still so much about it that has to be imagined, conjured, which is to say we know so much and simultaneously so little, which in a way is its own definition of Frank Lloyd Wright himself.
Riddles wrapped up inside of riddles, triangles drawn inside of circles, drawn inside of squares.
One of Wright's lifelong dictums was that his buildings were like plants and trees that grow from inside out and come up from the earth, craving the light. He just needed to conceive the thing, draw the thing, and make the thing.
The thing has simply shaken itself out of my sleeve, the old shaman liked to say, ever his own best publicist. In a 72-year career as architect and egotist, Frank Lloyd Wright shook more than 1100 things from his sleeve, a staggering number by any artistic measurement. They were churches, schools, offices, banks, museums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile showroom, a synagogue, a mile-high skyscraper, and one exotic-looking gas station.
Overwhelmingly though, they were houses, residences, shelters for mankind. Not quite half of all his drawings and designs and studies were realized. And about 400 still come magically out of the American ground looking for the light.
This book isn't intended as a Frank Lloyd Wright biography, not in any conventional sense. Depending on how you count, there are about eight or nine of those. And never mind how many hundreds of historical studies, monographs, coffee table treatments, scholarly examinations of specific Wright buildings or houses or periods. The Wright industry, from calendars to placemats to bathroom glow lights, to keychains, to books themselves, just churns on year after year.
Rather, this book is meant to be a kind of Schenectady, with selected pockets in a life, standing for the oceanic whole of that life.
The aim is to move the narrative backward and forward in time, through these non-linear pockets or storytelling boxes, trying not to confuse you, while also taking things in a general chronological direction and arc, from east to west, that is, from June 8th, 1867, when Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin, to April 9th, 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright died in his sleep one morning, two months from his 92nd birthday. Alright, so that is from the prologue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Plagued by Fire, The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, and it was written by Paul Hendrickson.
Okay, before I jump into the rest of the book, I found Frank Lloyd Wright so fascinating, so interesting, so unique, that not only did I read what this is close to like a 600-page biography that I'm holding in my hand, but I also watched several documentaries this week on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, and I want, I took a bunch of notes, and I'm going to go through those notes before I jump into the rest of the book, because when I was thinking about this is, I approached, before I read the book, I didn't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright. I knew his name, I knew he was an architect, I knew several of the buildings that he built, but I didn't know anything about the personality or, as the prologue, the devastating tragedy that he had to live through. And so when I was thinking about sitting down and talking to you about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, I asked myself, well, what are the things I wish I would have known going into this book? And a lot of those things are the same things I thought were so interesting that I took notes on as I watched these documentaries. So let me work from that document right now before I go back into the book. Now, from that prologue, you probably picked up on two things. All right, you picked up on many things, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that the author used the word ego or egotist twice.