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Documentary, Frank Lloyd Wright - Part 2-Ken Burns American Lives PBS
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00:00:00I think of him always as the great American confidence man who's changing the world according
00:00:17to his own images, who's wearing many disguises all the time. He's right out of Mark Twain,
00:00:22he's right out of Melville. He's the man, you know, in his rebuilt Lincoln Continental in
00:00:30which he's taken out the rear window because he says, I never look behind.
00:00:35Frank Lloyd Wright was 62 years old in 1929 and his long turbulent career seemed at an end.
00:00:59Wealthy clients no longer knocked at his studio door. Younger architects dismissed him
00:01:06as a has-been. And his private life remained tainted by scandal.
00:01:12But at Taliesin, the once magnificent home he had built for himself in Spring Green, Wisconsin,
00:01:19he stubbornly refused to admit defeat.
00:01:24There's no point in being an architect unless you get to build. It's very unlike music.
00:01:32A man can write a symphony and it can last for a hundred years unplayed and then it can
00:01:37be played and the world will be full of wonder. But an architect who makes a lot of pretty drawings
00:01:43and a lot of floor plans and nobody ever builds them, they turn to dust. Nobody cares.
00:01:49They never get built after his death. And the older he grew, the more passionately concerned
00:01:56he was with that.
00:02:04We always called him Mr. Wright. Everybody called him Mr. Wright. And when Mrs. Wright referred
00:02:11to him, she would refer to him as Mr. Wright said so-and-so. She wouldn't say Frank said
00:02:17so-and-so. And there were very, very few people around him who called him Frank.
00:02:24After more than two decades of domestic turmoil, Frank Lloyd Wright had finally settled down.
00:02:30His third wife, Olgivana, a follower of the Russian spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, was a driven, disciplined
00:02:37woman. Despite all the difficulties they faced, her faith in her husband's greatness never wavered.
00:02:45She was a woman of extraordinary intelligence and charm. And I think one of the few people
00:02:52who could fight with Wright and argue with Wright on his level and be accepted by him in a way
00:03:00that my grandmother, my blood grandmother, was never, I think, an equal.
00:03:05Olgivana was the one who smoothed things over. You know, Olgivana was the one who made the wheels
00:03:10work out. Olgivana was the one who calmed Wright down. She was his rock, really.
00:03:20To keep his name and his ideas alive and to lure new clients, she urged her husband to lecture
00:03:26and to write. Articles on architecture first, then a full-scale autobiography.
00:03:33I think the autobiography was a really significant move on Wright's part to sell himself to the public.
00:03:43He was trying to present himself as the great architect, the great man, the person who could
00:03:50understand everything about humanity, everything about the landscape, everything about your every
00:03:56need, and was able to make you feel, as you read the autobiography, that this is the only person
00:04:03you should ask to design your house.
00:04:07He was very skillful at constructing his own legend. One of the great works of art that Frank Lloyd Wright created
00:04:15was the life story of Frank Lloyd Wright. I think we have to remember that that was in large part a conscious creation
00:04:23of a brilliant artistic mind as much as the architecture was.
00:04:30In 1932, to help pay their bills, Olgivana also suggested that they start an apprenticeship program,
00:04:38modeled in part on Gurdjieff's teaching, the Taliesin Fellowship.
00:04:44It would attract eager and admiring students, who would each pay $650 a year to live and work alongside the great man himself.
00:04:56The Wrights hoped Taliesin would become a truly self-sufficient community.
00:05:01All the apprentices were required to do at least four hours a day of manual labor.
00:05:07You have to remember that he starts a fellowship, a school, never having been in that kind of thing himself,
00:05:15and only had a year at college. Suddenly he's got 30 people coming, and they hadn't planned for it.
00:05:22As he used to say, there's nothing I hate worse than a good draftsman. And by that he meant, you know, a professional draftsman.
00:05:30That's all they do is drafting, and they're always complaining about this or that.
00:05:36The young people were all eager. You know, there wasn't this, oh, you can't do it that way.
00:05:40No, it can't work. Oh, Mr. Wright, that isn't going to work. There was none of that. It was, this is great.
00:05:47They all believed that Wright was a genius and that they were, you know, in direct day-to-day contact with this genius
00:05:55and that their own work was going to flower as a result. So there was just an atmosphere of intellectual excitement,
00:06:03which I have never found in any other institution, and which was incomparably thrilling.
00:06:10The apprentices were put to work whenever Wright decided to build a new building or remodel an old one on his now crumbling estate.
00:06:31Critics charged that he gave no formal architectural instruction at his school,
00:06:36that the Taliesin was a modern-day plantation, that the students were little more than slaves,
00:06:42there to do the master's bidding. But Wright insisted that they would learn by doing.
00:06:51The authentic experience was that of being in the presence. Watching him breathe was almost enough.
00:06:57I think that that's true of all great men. They don't formally teach. They have only to be there.
00:07:04They were lucky to be in his presence. They were lucky to hear the sound of his voice.
00:07:08They were lucky to listen to his preachments, however foolish some of them may have been.
00:07:13It was important to be involved in doing the cooking. It was important to do just the clean-up work and the sweeping.
00:07:23It 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.
00:07:35They were as important to my grandfather as working on the drafting room.
00:07:42They were all working from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, and they were all very happy about it.
00:07:51I think that Wright had a lovely idea in his mind of a kind of communal lifestyle, which actually never quite transpired.
00:08:05I think that he really wasn't capable of living the kind of simple farmer's life that he was so tirelessly promoting.
00:08:18He wanted to be the head of an enterprise, and he was.
00:08:24They had hundreds and hundreds of acres. They had all kinds of people constantly working around the place.
00:08:30And they had their own rather nice, elegant quarters. Their daughter had rather special quarters.
00:08:36They decided that they liked the idea of eating on a dais a little bit above everybody else, you realize.
00:08:43They liked the idea of hearing concerts on Saturday nights and just ever so slightly raised above everybody else.
00:08:51They rather enjoyed this.
00:08:56Olga Vanna supervised everything.
00:08:59She planned the menus, picked the music that was piped into the workroom and over loudspeakers in the fields,
00:09:06even chose the socks the apprentices wore.
00:09:10She was absolutely essential for the creation of the fellowship.
00:09:14Because what she took on was the human relation part of the fellowship.
00:09:18My grandfather could not be bothered with what was going on with relationship between people.
00:09:24I mean, that just seemed to get into the way of the architecture and what he was trying to do there.
00:09:29But she was intensely interested in that.
00:09:33Olga Vanna also controlled many of the apprentices' private lives,
00:09:39deciding with whom sexual affairs could take place, arranging marriages, and negotiating divorces.
00:09:48Mrs. Wright was a difficult woman.
00:09:52She was very hard on the women, very hard on the women.
00:09:56And, uh, she had her reign supreme.
00:10:02One female apprentice remembered that Mrs. Wright was the queen bee who killed everyone dead around her.
00:10:10Both grandfather and grandmother inspired fear as well as love and reverence.
00:10:16The consequences of displeasing either of them were exile into outer darkness.
00:10:22And Taliesin was not like a school in the sense that you were celebrated when you graduated.
00:10:28When you graduated, you went into exile.
00:10:31It was one of the worst aspects of Taliesin.
00:10:34I think that to leave was not to leave with blessings usually.
00:10:39It was to be a failure.
00:10:41Right wanted to be the chief.
00:10:45Right created a situation at Taliesin where he was the chieftain surrounded by his followers,
00:10:51surrounded by his army.
00:10:53And, uh, it regarded itself as an army under siege.
00:10:58The rest of the world was wrong.
00:11:00The rest of the world didn't understand them.
00:11:02They had the right way of doing it.
00:11:04The master was always right.
00:11:06It's not a civilized situation.
00:11:09It's a heroic one.
00:11:15Taliesin may have bustled with activity.
00:11:18But to the outside world, Wright, at 62, was finished.
00:11:24Only a generation before, he had been hailed as a revolutionary.
00:11:28Now, the spotlight shone on Europe,
00:11:37on the radical architects of the international style.
00:11:43Le Corbusier,
00:11:45Walter Gropius,
00:11:47and Mies van der Rohe.
00:11:50Since the end of the First World War,
00:11:54they had been designing what they saw as a new industrialized architecture,
00:11:59intended to serve the needs of the working class.
00:12:05Like many architects,
00:12:06they had been influenced by the simplicity and openness of Wright's prairie style.
00:12:12But now, they had moved on.
00:12:19I think what the modernists were trying to do,
00:12:21the international school more than anything else,
00:12:23was to create a genuine mass architecture.
00:12:26An architecture that would serve the people,
00:12:28in the broadest sense,
00:12:29and that would create a space that would express
00:12:31what the 20th century was going to be about,
00:12:34by honoring democracy as an experience for all the people.
00:12:38They really envisioned a whole changed world on every level.
00:12:42And they worshiped modern technology
00:12:46and sought ways to symbolize it.
00:12:48They had very little interest in using wood and stone,
00:12:53which struck them as old-fashioned materials.
00:12:57There was much more glass, much more metal.
00:13:00The building floated often in European modernism.
00:13:03It might be on thin columns.
00:13:07We were in the 20th century,
00:13:09and we were very, very proud of it.
00:13:11The 20th century was a great new world of the machine,
00:13:16of the industrial system.
00:13:19So we all believed in the machine.
00:13:23And he didn't.
00:13:24He was a man that believed thoroughly in the crafts,
00:13:27the use of the man's hand to put one piece of stone on top of the other.
00:13:31So we didn't consider him an architect that was to be conceived
00:13:35as an equal to Corbusier and Mies, because he was over.
00:13:39He simply wasn't practicing architecture.
00:13:42For his part, Wright professed nothing but contempt for modernism.
00:13:47Just because people now lived in the machine age, he said,
00:13:50did not mean their houses should look like machines.
00:13:55The modernists' buildings were cardboard houses, he said,
00:13:59mechanical, mannered, artificial, soulless.
00:14:04It's one of the impulses of modernism,
00:14:06which I think Wright does not share,
00:14:08that what architecture is is simply the physical thing.
00:14:12For Wright, it is a spiritual thing,
00:14:14and the experience of walking into the building
00:14:16does something to the soul.
00:14:17It touches the heart in some profound, deep, deep kind of way.
00:14:22He was trying always to say that only he knew about nature,
00:14:27that only he knew about building,
00:14:29and that we were a lot of paper architects
00:14:31that just were playing with just flat images, you see.
00:14:36That was a little close to the truth
00:14:37to be pleasant for us to hear, of course.
00:14:41In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City
00:14:45mounted an exhibition on the international style
00:14:48and invited Wright to contribute a design.
00:14:51Though one of the curators,
00:14:53a young architectural critic named Philip Johnson,
00:14:56sarcastically suggested that Wright might already be dead.
00:15:00I once made that terrible mistake of saying
00:15:03that Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest architect
00:15:06of the 19th century.
00:15:08And, of course, that was interpreted as the insult
00:15:11that it was meant to be.
00:15:13Wright eventually agreed to participate in the exhibition,
00:15:17but then threatened to withdraw,
00:15:19sending Johnson a steady stream of letters and telegrams
00:15:22expressing his fury at not being given
00:15:25a bigger position in the show.
00:15:27He was a nasty man, and he'd said things to us
00:15:32that were unforgivable.
00:15:33He'd write them down.
00:15:36That we'd ruined architecture and become European slaves
00:15:41and these most horrible, nasty people in the world,
00:15:45these New Yorkers.
00:15:47We'd write really nasty letters back to him.
00:15:50In the meantime, we were trying to get a house out of him
00:15:53for our show because we knew he was great.
00:15:57So how to fit him into a show called The International Style,
00:16:00we didn't know.
00:16:01He had a beautiful design with a flat roof
00:16:07and looking out over terraces.
00:16:10In other words, all the time he really wanted to get shown.
00:16:15The book based on the exhibition
00:16:19praised Wright for his individualism,
00:16:22but otherwise dismissed him
00:16:23as just one of a number of older architects
00:16:26whose work had long since been superseded by others.
00:16:30His frustration and his resentment of his own eclipse
00:16:34and the increasing success of the international style
00:16:37continued to fester.
00:16:39If a fly got too close to his drafting table,
00:16:42he sometimes liked to give it a name,
00:16:45Mies, Gropius, Corbusier,
00:16:48before killing it with a fly swatter.
00:16:52When he began to see clearly that he was no longer
00:16:54the most advanced thinker in architecture,
00:16:56that these younger Europeans had been doing things
00:16:58that he really had not been aware of
00:17:01and had not been able to accomplish in his own work.
00:17:04What's fantastic is that he was able to take up that challenge
00:17:09and completely remake himself?
00:17:19Remember that an architect cannot build buildings on his own account.
00:17:24A painter can say, oh, the world doesn't understand me,
00:17:27and sit in his attic and paint away
00:17:29and maybe work in the daytime as a custom collector,
00:17:32as Rousseau did or whatever.
00:17:34An architect has to be dependent on the client.
00:17:37Every client that comes down the pike is fabulous.
00:17:40There's a wonderful story about Wright and clients.
00:17:43He had no work in the late 20s.
00:17:45He had set up this foundation, which was a way,
00:17:47Algevanna's genius, to get him practically on the dole, basically,
00:17:51to keep him with some money coming in.
00:17:54And he gets a letter from this man, Professor Malcolm Willie,
00:17:57of the University of Minnesota, asking him if he has time
00:18:01to build a small house.
00:18:03Time he had all the time in the world.
00:18:05So he writes back and says, yes, I can squeeze you in
00:18:08or something like that.
00:18:09And when Malcolm Willie, it's said,
00:18:11when Malcolm Willie arrives at the Taliesin Studios,
00:18:13he sees his letter posted on the wall, on the bulletin board,
00:18:18with a note from Wright, a scrawled note across it,
00:18:21Hosanna, a client.
00:18:24One of Wright's first apprentices had been Edgar Kaufman, Jr.,
00:18:28the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh department store owner.
00:18:31He hadn't stayed with architecture very long himself,
00:18:35but his father had become fascinated with Frank Lloyd Wright,
00:18:39and in 1934 asked him to design a weekend hideaway for his family
00:18:44next to their favorite waterfall along a little stream
00:18:47in western Pennsylvania called Bear Run.
00:18:58Wright visited the site,
00:19:00had the apprentices make an elaborate plot plan
00:19:03that showed the location of every rock and tree,
00:19:06and then did nothing for three months.
00:19:11He never liked to draw until he knew what he was going to draw.
00:19:17And every so often we would ask,
00:19:19Mr. Wright, are you going to do something?
00:19:21And he'd say, yes, and he'd walk by.
00:19:24All of a sudden, one day,
00:19:26he gets a telephone call from Mr. Kaufman.
00:19:29Kaufman was in Milwaukee,
00:19:31just a few hours away from Taliesin.
00:19:34Mr. Wright says, hello, E.J., how are you?
00:19:37Come along, we're waiting for you.
00:19:39And he hung up.
00:19:41Milwaukee is 140 miles, 140 minutes,
00:19:45and he hasn't drawn a line.
00:19:46Kaufman, the client, is on his way.
00:19:49And he sits down, and he starts to draw.
00:19:52And he draws a plan.
00:19:54And he draws the first floor plan,
00:19:57how it relates to everything.
00:19:59It's got to be a bridge so you can get across the water.
00:20:02They show just where the waterfall is.
00:20:04He draws the second floor plan.
00:20:07And he goes along and shows how the balconies are.
00:20:10And he says, and we'll have a bridge across,
00:20:13so that E.J. and Lillian, that was her name,
00:20:16can walk out and walk from the bedrooms or from the house up
00:20:20and have a picnic up above.
00:20:22Then the top floor is Junior's room.
00:20:25Then he draws what we call a section through the building.
00:20:31That's the way you can see how all the heights are.
00:20:35And he's drawing and drawing,
00:20:37and Bob and I are feeding him pencils.
00:20:39He breaks them, and he puts a collar on,
00:20:41and then takes it off, and he rubs it all off, and so on.
00:20:44And any time anyone walks in the drafting room,
00:20:47you turn around, and you don't wait.
00:20:49And people knew if Mr. Wright's working,
00:20:51you don't walk through the drafting room.
00:20:54Then he starts to draw an elevation,
00:20:57a big elevation of the whole house.
00:21:00The whole drawing is actually that big.
00:21:02Normally, we start at a scale where you draw this big,
00:21:05but no, he's got it going this big.
00:21:07And he's putting the trees,
00:21:09and he knows where every damn tree is,
00:21:11where every rock is.
00:21:13He gets that all done,
00:21:16and then his Mr. Wright secretary comes in and says,
00:21:19Mr. Wright, Mr. Kaufman is here.
00:21:21He says, bring him in.
00:21:22And Mr. Wright gets up.
00:21:24He just stands up, and he walks toward Kaufman,
00:21:29and he puts out his hand, and he says,
00:21:31Welcome, E.J. We've been waiting for you.
00:21:38Wright named his building Falling Water.
00:21:42It would eventually become the most famous modern house in the world.
00:21:47And he had drawn it all in less than three hours.
00:21:53Wright asked his client,
00:21:55Where do you spend all your time when you're on this property?
00:21:58And they said, Oh, we love to picnic on this rock.
00:22:01So what does he do?
00:22:02He builds the house on the rock,
00:22:03and they've lost their picnic place forever.
00:22:05And you can hardly see the rock.
00:22:07You have to go down in the stream,
00:22:09and the bugs eat you alive and all that,
00:22:11to look up and see Mr. Wright's masterpiece.
00:22:16And indeed it was.
00:22:18I think Falling Water was many things.
00:22:21It's a beautiful response to its sight, most of all.
00:22:31Instead of standing clear on a grass plain,
00:22:36it's coming out of the rock.
00:22:38Its slabs are anchored in the rock.
00:22:41You go behind Falling Water,
00:22:42and you see that they're gripping the rock back there.
00:22:45And then it goes out,
00:22:46and it's just barely above the waterfall.
00:22:49And the water is just under you.
00:22:54You feel that you're in danger there,
00:22:56that you are in fact in a kind of suspension in space,
00:22:59where you have to be careful.
00:23:01And the water is always moving under you,
00:23:03with that sense of uneasiness as it goes.
00:23:16It's an extraordinary house.
00:23:18These floating planes over the waterfall,
00:23:21the structural drama, the spatial drama,
00:23:25and the incredible serenity of it all.
00:23:31It's a composition.
00:23:38It's an intricate and perfect composition,
00:23:41into which we're invited to walk,
00:23:44and if your name was Kaufman, live.
00:23:47It's as if he was saying,
00:23:59OK, Europeans, you want to do it that way?
00:24:02I'll show you how to do it that way.
00:24:04And then he takes some of their ideas,
00:24:06integrates it with all of his ideas,
00:24:08and comes up with something so much more brilliant and beautiful
00:24:11than anybody else has ever done.
00:24:13He was just trying to prove to the rest of us
00:24:16that he too could use flat...
00:24:18He always hated flat roofs.
00:24:20But you see, when he caught on,
00:24:22aha, so there's something in his flat roof business,
00:24:25I'll show them.
00:24:26And he did.
00:24:28I mean, he could make even a 50 by 50 room, which is large,
00:24:32look high when it's only eight feet high.
00:24:36Don't ask me how, because if I could do it, I would.
00:24:46Great architecture, like any kind of great art,
00:24:51ultimately takes you somewhere that words cannot take you at all.
00:24:57And Falling Water does that the way Chartres Cathedral does that.
00:25:01There's some experience that gets you in your gut,
00:25:04and you just feel it, and you can't quite even say it.
00:25:09My whole life is dealing with architecture in words,
00:25:12and at the end of the day,
00:25:13there's something that I can't entirely say
00:25:16when it comes to what Falling Water feels like.
00:25:20I remember the first time I went to Falling Water,
00:25:23taking a long walk down,
00:25:24looking at it from across the waterfall,
00:25:27and you just wanted to sing.
00:25:29You just looked at it,
00:25:30and you wanted to start singing some song,
00:25:32or doing something.
00:25:33There was nothing really to say.
00:25:36It was so extraordinary.
00:25:38One of the things about Frank Lloyd Wright that makes him a great architect,
00:25:51except for whether he's a great man or not,
00:25:53is that he followed, pursued all his life long the initial purpose of architecture,
00:26:12which is to provide shelter for people that could be built,
00:26:15as he got it down at one point, to $5,000 for a house, for a family,
00:26:20with children, and a kitchen, and gardens, and openness,
00:26:24which was a highly civilized way to live.
00:26:27Because mankind needs both shelter on the humble level,
00:26:34and the level of keeping the rain off oneself,
00:26:37and also having somewhere to go to offer up a kind of worship
00:26:41to whatever mystery exists beyond our lives.
00:26:44Frank did both of those things all his life long.
00:26:46In 1936, Wright was approached by Herbert and Catherine Jacobs of Madison, Wisconsin,
00:26:59who asked if the famous Mr. Wright might design a house for ordinary people
00:27:03that would cost only $5,000.
00:27:08It was a challenge to him.
00:27:10He did, obviously, houses for rich people.
00:27:13There was no question about it.
00:27:14But he also did them for people who were just the moderate income.
00:27:20And all of these people were coming to Frank Lloyd Wright and said,
00:27:23Sure, I'll do you a house. I'll do these little houses.
00:27:29He called his modest house Usonian, after the United States.
00:27:34It was a single story built on a monolithic concrete slab
00:27:38and joined to a carport and not a garage.
00:27:42Wright believed that it could be replicated all across the country.
00:27:47Most of these houses are beautiful.
00:27:50They are very sleek. They're very elegant in terms of their detailing.
00:27:54And what I think is really great about them
00:27:56is that they have a quality of being just the right size.
00:28:01I remember speaking to one owner of a Usonian house
00:28:05who told me that we moved into the house
00:28:08and it was like moving into a motel room for good.
00:28:11Everything was taken care of.
00:28:13We never had to buy another stick of furniture.
00:28:15We never had to bring anything into the house.
00:28:18It was all taken care of for us by Wright.
00:28:25To live in a Wright building, any Wright building,
00:28:27but especially the Usonians,
00:28:28you have to be willing to subordinate your life
00:28:30and your lifestyle and your possessions to that building.
00:28:34These are buildings that have all the elements
00:28:36controlled by this one architect.
00:28:38And for a certain kind of person who wants
00:28:40a beautifully designed aesthetic space, that's perfect.
00:28:43If, on the other hand, you're a person, I think,
00:28:45a more typical American who owns lots of stuff
00:28:47and who across the 20th century is owning more and more stuff,
00:28:50there's a greater and greater need for closets and attics
00:28:52and spaces that you can put all of your stuff into.
00:28:54And Wright stands very much against that tendency
00:28:57toward sort of increasing material possessions
00:29:00in the 20th century.
00:29:05In the end, Wright never succeeded in designing houses
00:29:08that actually cost $5,000.
00:29:11The elegant details he insisted upon
00:29:14kept driving up the price.
00:29:16Only 60 Usonian houses were ever built.
00:29:21He had these great dreams, of course,
00:29:25that he would create architecture for the masses.
00:29:28In a lot of ways, that was very admirable
00:29:30because how many other serious architects ever bothered?
00:29:33But he couldn't handle the notion
00:29:36that most people didn't really want it so much.
00:29:40And it drove him crazy.
00:29:42It sent him into a tailspin.
00:29:44He wanted to be a democratic architect
00:29:48who would educate the American people
00:29:50to an aesthetic greater than the one
00:29:52that they had already achieved.
00:29:54He loathed architecture of the mob,
00:29:56which pulled architecture down
00:29:58to the least common denominator.
00:29:59But he very much wanted to build buildings
00:30:02that would enlighten people and lift people up.
00:30:05He was trying to pull the masses above themselves,
00:30:11and as a result, there's something deeply impractical
00:30:13and in some ways anti-democratic
00:30:14about his democratic vision.
00:30:22Wright now began to complain
00:30:24that ordinary people, whom he called the mobocracy,
00:30:28were destroying the country with their lack of taste.
00:30:31And in the years to come, lesser architects,
00:30:34inspired in part by his Usonian designs,
00:30:37would spread the single-story ranch house
00:30:40all across America.
00:30:55Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
00:30:56is a culmination of all of his nine symphonies,
00:31:00and it is the strongest and the best coordinated.
00:31:04And, of course, he brings in the chorus at the same time
00:31:08to make it a final, final thing.
00:31:11And I've often thought that the Johnson Wax Building
00:31:14was his Ninth Symphony.
00:31:19In 1936, a new client approached Wright.
00:31:23He was Herbert Johnson,
00:31:25president of the Progressive Johnson Wax Company
00:31:27of Racine, Wisconsin,
00:31:29and he was looking for someone
00:31:31to build him a new administration building.
00:31:34It was Wright's first chance
00:31:36at a large-scale commission in years,
00:31:38and he was jubilant.
00:31:40What a release of pent-up energy, Wright remembered,
00:31:43the making of those plans.
00:31:46Ideas came tumbling up and out onto paper.
00:31:49As in the Larkin Building,
00:31:59he wanted to create an exhilarating environment
00:32:02for the workers.
00:32:05Wright and his apprentices worked around the clock
00:32:07for ten days to finish the drawings.
00:32:11Then his assistant, Edgar Tafel,
00:32:13drove him to Racine to make a presentation
00:32:16to the Johnson Wax Board.
00:32:19Wright got out of the car,
00:32:20and I got the drawings and followed him,
00:32:23and then he stopped and turned around,
00:32:25and he said, give me the drawings.
00:32:27He put him under his arm, and he said,
00:32:29the architect carries his own drawings.
00:32:31And we went in.
00:32:34And Mr. Wright was like a preacher
00:32:37that you'd never heard before.
00:32:39He must have talked for an hour and a half.
00:32:43You will have a temple of work.
00:32:47You will have a place you would love to be in.
00:32:50And when it was finished, everyone was silent.
00:32:54There wasn't a question.
00:32:59He got the contract.
00:33:06Wright wanted to build the Johnson Wax Building
00:33:08outside Racine, which he considered a backwater.
00:33:12Herbert Johnson held the line.
00:33:15He would not leave the town
00:33:17that had always been his company's home.
00:33:19When Wright insisted, Olgivana told him,
00:33:26give them what they want, Frank.
00:33:28You'll lose the job.
00:33:30Finally, Wright gave in part way.
00:33:34The company would stay put,
00:33:36but there would be no windows.
00:33:42Wright would bring two innovations
00:33:44to the Johnson Wax Building.
00:33:46Special Pyrex glass tubing had to be manufactured
00:33:49for the skylights.
00:33:52And hollow, reinforced columns
00:33:54of astonishing slenderness
00:33:56were to bear the weight of the great ceiling.
00:33:59All of it took far more time and money
00:34:02than Herbert Johnson had bargained for.
00:34:07At first, Frank Lloyd Wright was working for me, he said.
00:34:12The cost kept going up.
00:34:14Then we were working together.
00:34:16Finally, I was working for him.
00:34:26The columns presented special problems.
00:34:29Nervous state inspectors insisted that they could not possibly
00:34:33bear the weight Wright's plans called for.
00:34:35Insulted, the architect insisted on a public demonstration.
00:34:56Wright piled on ten times the weight required
00:34:59before the column finally cracked.
00:35:14My favorite building of Wright's
00:35:15is the great Racine Johnson Wax offices.
00:35:18What he did was something that's unheard of in business world.
00:35:22Business world, you have a lot of offices, right?
00:35:24They have to be five feet apart.
00:35:26They have to be all glass to the outside.
00:35:29And then you get numbers on them
00:35:31and you take an elevator.
00:35:33This is the normal American program.
00:35:37Just build me an office building.
00:35:39And what did he do?
00:35:40He built a palace.
00:35:41He built a church.
00:35:43He built something that just soared.
00:35:47It's the finest room maybe in the United States today.
00:35:51It still is.
00:35:53In that room are lily pads that rise from the floor
00:36:08and then spread out at the ceiling.
00:36:10But that stem was graceful and marvelous
00:36:14and then it came out sort of flat.
00:36:17And the pads were circles but they didn't touch.
00:36:21And that's where the light came from.
00:36:23The light came from in between.
00:36:25It melted and it became like underwater.
00:36:29It was perfectly diffused.
00:36:34I don't think he ever mentioned light to me
00:36:36in all the conversations we had.
00:36:38He talked about how proud he was of the structure
00:36:41of these concrete...
00:36:42Well, that's nothing.
00:36:43Anybody can build a concrete thing.
00:36:45You call somebody on the telephone and say,
00:36:47Come quick and make me a...
00:36:49Make me a lily pad.
00:36:52But the genius was in how he knew that would make the light
00:36:55and how he knew that the lily pad was a perfect shape.
00:37:00Right said it would be like working in a glade in a pine forest
00:37:10with fresh air and sunlight all the time.
00:37:13No, I think that it's a kind of place that has a kind of smoothness
00:37:18and luxuriousness about it, which is absolutely intrinsic.
00:37:25That is architecture to me and to most architects.
00:37:28To create a space where you feel the awe of a religion without...
00:37:33No mumbo jumbo.
00:37:35It's just a wonderful feeling of being in a space.
00:37:38Right declared his building a masterpiece.
00:37:51But his innovations did not come without a price.
00:37:55The glass tubing in the roof could not be sealed properly
00:37:58and water poured in whenever it rained.
00:38:02Herbert Johnson himself took to keeping an empty trash can
00:38:05on his desk to catch the drips.
00:38:08There's a long list of failings of right buildings.
00:38:20Things like roofs that leak, cantilevers that sag,
00:38:24ventilation systems that don't work, windows that let in cold air,
00:38:28heating systems that keep the buildings cold over and over again.
00:38:31There are lots and lots of problems with these buildings.
00:38:34And I think that those problems are important
00:38:36because I think they actually tell us something important
00:38:38about Frank Lloyd Wright, which is that in the end,
00:38:41what mattered to him most was reaching for the vision
00:38:44that lay beyond the actual physical building.
00:38:47He was willing to tolerate failings.
00:38:49And oddly, some of his clients were willing to tolerate failings
00:38:52because of that reaching, that aspiring to something greater
00:38:55than one could actually achieve with the materials of the day.
00:38:58Herbert Johnson was so dazzled by his building that he asked Wright
00:39:04to design him a home as well.
00:39:07And if it was thrilling to be an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright,
00:39:11it was equally thrilling to be a client.
00:39:13And again and again, he would push the client to the edge
00:39:16of a nervous breakdown because he would be way over cost,
00:39:20everything would go wrong, he wouldn't have the drawings ready,
00:39:22nothing would be exactly right.
00:39:24But they adored being in Frank's presence.
00:39:26And again and again and again, it is obvious
00:39:29that the most important event in the lives of many of those clients,
00:39:32like Edgar Kaufman, like Herb Johnson, but a dozen others,
00:39:36the greatest event of their lives was having a relationship
00:39:38with Frank Lloyd Wright.
00:39:40They never got over it.
00:39:41They always went back to him.
00:39:43It was the thrilling episode that made them feel grander, greater,
00:39:48more fulfilled than anybody else had ever been able to make them feel.
00:39:58Falling Water, the Usonian Houses, the Johnson Wax Building.
00:40:05At 70, Wright's career had been reborn.
00:40:10He was the subject of an entire special issue of Architectural Forum,
00:40:15the Museum of Modern Art, which had humiliated him just a few years earlier,
00:40:20now asked if it might devote an exhibition solely to Frank Lloyd Wright.
00:40:27He was back on top.
00:40:29In December of 1937, urged by his doctors to winter in a warmer climate,
00:40:45Wright and Olgavana led the first of what would become annual pilgrimages
00:40:50to the Arizona desert, 1,800 miles from Wisconsin.
00:40:55Wright loved automobiles.
00:41:00His favorite car was Kord.
00:41:02And he painted it his famous Cherokee red.
00:41:04And he'd pack Ochofana and the Apprentices and their cars,
00:41:07and they'd drive, you see, from the Middle West to the desert.
00:41:11Well, all right.
00:41:14Yeah!
00:41:16All of us dance now.
00:41:21When we got to Arizona, it was a whole different situation.
00:41:34There, he loved the sand and the rocks and the saguars and the various plants and all that.
00:41:42And he was after a way of architectural life in Arizona different from anywhere else,
00:41:50because there was only one Arizona, one way of life out there.
00:41:55The New Taliesin West took shape on a low, isolated mesa, 26 miles east of Phoenix.
00:42:10Built almost entirely by hand, it was constructed out of what Wright called desert concrete,
00:42:16a mixture of the sand and rocks they found around them.
00:42:25It was a remarkable rambling fortress, centered around a dramatic main drafting room,
00:42:31with space for dozens of devoted apprentices and exquisite private quarters for Wright and his family.
00:42:39When you walk around Taliesin West, you begin to realize that the structure of the place itself,
00:42:54the way the paths are organized, the way the buildings are oriented,
00:42:58that it's actually weaving you into the landscape.
00:43:04Every time you turn, you're left looking out to the desert.
00:43:10It makes you feel part of things. It makes you feel part of the place.
00:43:14It doesn't make you feel as a human separate from the plants and the animals and the sky and the mountains around you.
00:43:22It makes you and your daily activities feel part of the larger scheme of things.
00:43:29It makes you feel part of the land.
00:43:31Wright's growing fellowship would now spend fully half of every year in the Arizona desert.
00:43:37He was still the undisputed master of his fiefdom, overseeing his thriving architectural practice,
00:43:46entertaining movie stars and visiting dignitaries,
00:43:49and presiding over elaborate musicales in his newly built cabaret theater.
00:43:55This was a private world, and it was like living on the moon.
00:44:10You lived out there in the desert. You never saw a newspaper, seldom saw a magazine, seldom listened to the radio.
00:44:18You lived in a complete atmosphere with very low encroachment from the outside world.
00:44:24When I left, my bloodstream ran differently. Everything was different.
00:44:31And I had to catch up and come back into the world.
00:44:34Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.
00:44:52Life at Taliesin was so isolated that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941,
00:44:59the news barely disturbed the routine at the fellowship.
00:45:04Wright was a pacifist and had been a supporter of the America First campaign to keep the country out of the war.
00:45:12Now Wright urged his students not to serve in the armed forces, and several were imprisoned for resisting the draft.
00:45:21At the end of the war, the economy boomed, and the demand for new buildings was greater than ever before.
00:45:42Frank Lloyd Wright was almost 80 years old, and about to enter the most productive phase of his life.
00:45:57Over the next 15 years, Wright and his fellowship turned out drawings and plans for more than 350 buildings.
00:46:07Some would not be built. Some would not be completed until after he died.
00:46:12But all would be provocative and controversial.
00:46:16And all would bear the unmistakable stamp of Frank Lloyd Wright.
00:46:21He designed a Unitarian meeting house in his boyhood home of Madison,
00:46:27whose shape he said was inspired by hands joined in prayer.
00:46:33A gas station in Cloquet, Minnesota.
00:46:37Twin suspension bridges at Pittsburgh.
00:46:42An electric plant in San Mateo, California, whose glowing skylights were meant to illuminate the night sky.
00:46:52A synagogue in Philadelphia.
00:46:55And a Greek Orthodox Church in Wisconsin.
00:46:59A vast cultural center to be built in the middle of the Tigris River in Baghdad.
00:47:09A skyscraper for Chicago, a mile high, that would house more than 100,000 people, carried up and down in atomic-powered elevators.
00:47:21And a sprawling, futuristic civic center for Marin County, California.
00:47:30I think the analogy of his shaking these designs out of his sleeve was like Beethoven.
00:47:58Beethoven, at the end of his life, could not hear the music.
00:48:03So he didn't sit down pounding out a melody or anything.
00:48:06He wrote it down, all without any ever hearing it.
00:48:10And yet he knew what he was writing.
00:48:13He could hear it.
00:48:15And it's the same with my grandfather.
00:48:17He could think this thing up in his head.
00:48:20And he could formulate it all within his mind.
00:48:22And 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.
00:48:29Asked how he could possibly conceive and oversee so many different projects, more than at any time in his career, Wright just smiled and said,
00:48:41I can't get them out fast enough.
00:48:44Wright never saw any limits for himself.
00:48:49Most of us, I suppose, think there are pigeonholes into which we should fit.
00:48:56And Wright, because he had a deviant view of the way a creative artist should live, never gave himself any limits.
00:49:06And 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.
00:49:27Wright's ego did not diminish with age.
00:49:31I defy anyone, he said in 1953, to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn't first done by me.
00:49:43Every word that you say, you say because you believe or do you say for calculated effect?
00:49:50I think everybody must speak sometimes for calculated effect.
00:49:54And I wouldn't deny so speaking.
00:49:57I've never pushed myself.
00:49:59I've never turned over my hand to get a client during my life.
00:50:03I have never sought publicity of any kind.
00:50:07I have yielded to it.
00:50:13Wright was a media figure before there were media figures.
00:50:16He was pretty good at that.
00:50:18Why is architecture almost a forgotten art?
00:50:21He made himself available to the press.
00:50:24He gave interviews.
00:50:26He wrote books.
00:50:27He got himself out there to keep his name in front of people all the time.
00:50:32Hello, Mr. Wright.
00:50:33Nice to see you.
00:50:34Nice to see you.
00:50:35One of the first serious artists or architects ever to be interviewed on television in the early days of television.
00:50:41There was Frank Lloyd Wright, already an old man by then, but right in there.
00:50:45He was very quick to jump on new technologies and understand how they might in some way connect to his life and enhance his fame.
00:50:55I'm lost.
00:50:57Mr. Wright has all of my notes and he's gazing at them.
00:51:00A man who has been a fearless nonconformist, each one of his 83 and a good fraction of years.
00:51:08I'm not going to do a bow.
00:51:10No, no, you're not even listening to me, Mr. Wright.
00:51:13What is good, true, real, and honest then is still good, true, real, and honest today.
00:51:20Out of the ground into the light.
00:51:22That is the same principle which you have.
00:51:26The city is the only reality.
00:51:28Yes, the inspiration which moves some people and stirs the imagination of others still goes on.
00:51:36Part of the...
00:51:39Once when I was very young and at the beginning of our friendship,
00:51:42I proposed that all the great men of our time had been more or less charlatans, like Picasso, like FDR.
00:51:49There was a quality of charlatanism in them that made them successful with the public.
00:51:54And Frank was a little bit upset about that.
00:51:59But 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.
00:52:13And, of course, it is the excuse that all charlatans use.
00:52:17But in truth, he was a great showman.
00:52:20And to be a showman is to be in part a charlatan.
00:52:29We build in relation to those who built before us, and we build in relation to those who come after us.
00:52:41So that the city, from the very beginning, from the time cities are organized around in Mesopotamia, the concept of immortality comes along.
00:52:50Gilgamesh 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.
00:52:59You see what I mean?
00:53:00Because with the city, we extend the normal limits of our lives in the conversation with the past and with the future.
00:53:13Everywhere he went, Frank Lloyd Wright denounced the modern city.
00:53:40It was a prison house for the soul, he said, a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.
00:53:47The mystery of how you can be an architect and not like cities is unanswerable.
00:53:55Because there is nothing for architects except cities.
00:53:59They invent cities.
00:54:00That is what architecture is about.
00:54:02And here was this man, again and again and again, abandoning cities.
00:54:07I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.
00:54:09Why don't they open the center of the avenue?
00:54:11Striding along Fifth Avenue, gesturing with his cane, Wright was happy to dismiss everything he saw, especially when reporters were nearby.
00:54:20The celebrated Manhattan skyline was merely boxes next to boxes, he said, glassified landscape, style for style's sake by the glass box boys.
00:54:33Here you have the window raised to the nth power.
00:54:38Window, window, window.
00:54:40It's the most dewindowed structure in existence.
00:54:45He says he hated cities.
00:54:47Wright says he hated cities.
00:54:49He loved New York.
00:54:51And in the 50s, I would see him from time to time when I was a kid on Fifth Avenue with an acolyte or two behind him.
00:54:58He was having a time of his life.
00:55:00Back in 1943, Wright had been asked to design a museum in New York City to house the vast collection of non-objective paintings amassed by the copper king Solomon R. Guggenheim.
00:55:15Works by Mondrian, Delaunay, Kandinsky.
00:55:21Wright didn't think much of abstract art.
00:55:24Lessons in finger painting, he once called it.
00:55:27When he was shown some of Guggenheim's masterpieces, he could not resist asking,
00:55:32what do you call this stuff?
00:55:39Still, he eagerly set to work.
00:55:42Wait till you see the blueprints for the Guggenheim, he told a friend.
00:55:46It's going to stand almost directly across from the Metropolitan Museum.
00:55:51It's going to make the Metropolitan look like a Protestant barn.
00:55:57He was haunted by certain shapes all his life long.
00:56:00For example, the spiral.
00:56:01And he kept bringing that up again and again.
00:56:03He tried to do a spiral garage for Edgar Kaufman in Pittsburgh.
00:56:07And finally, he got the chance of the lifetime of doing the spiral in the Guggenheim.
00:56:14And here he has an opportunity to do a museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
00:56:20I mean, this is...
00:56:22He'd been hoping all his life for something of this nature.
00:56:26But the Guggenheim turned out to be the most difficult commission of his life.
00:56:32For 13 years, Wright had to battle to get his museum built.
00:56:38He and Guggenheim argued over the projected cost of the building,
00:56:42which quickly rose from $750,000 to $2 million.
00:56:47Then Guggenheim died, and his heirs threatened to fire Wright
00:56:52and hire another architect.
00:56:55The zoning board refused to approve Wright's unorthodox design.
00:57:00Desperate, he turned to the man in charge of all major construction in New York City,
00:57:06Robert Moses.
00:57:08I don't care how many laws you have to break, Moses told the zoning board.
00:57:13I want the Guggenheim built.
00:57:16At last, in 1956, ground was broken on the corner of 89th Street
00:57:24and Fifth Avenue.
00:57:36The interior was to be one continuous ramp,
00:57:39and visitors were to start at the top and work their way down.
00:57:43But even after construction began, controversy swirled around the project.
00:57:52Several prominent critics attacked Wright's design.
00:57:55Hilton Kramer called it an architecture which succeeds in having only one organic function,
00:58:01to call attention to itself.
00:58:04One writer called him Frank Lloyd Wrong.
00:58:09He doesn't want to have to adjust his buildings to the pre-existing urban fabric.
00:58:14He used to say, think of it as a pavilion in the park.
00:58:17Well, of course, it's not in the park.
00:58:19It's on the street.
00:58:20And the reason it looks wonderful on the street is because the other buildings obey the law of the street and set it off.
00:58:28Imagine if the other buildings were gone and you had more Guggenheims, you'd have this strip.
00:58:33Somebody said the museum out here on Fifth Avenue looked like a washing machine.
00:58:39This one that you're building?
00:58:41That's one of my buildings.
00:58:42Well, I've heard a lot of that type of reaction, and I've always discounted it as worthless, and I think it is.
00:58:51Twenty-one well-known artists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, and Robert Motherwell,
00:58:58sent a letter to the New York Times arguing that it would be impossible to display their work on the museum's curved, sloping walls.
00:59:08Wright fired off a telegram denouncing the incubus of habit that beset their minds.
00:59:14Painters would produce finer art, he said, if they knew it would hang in his museum.
00:59:20I kept trying to point out, I'm trying to make a building where seeing works of art would be so natural,
00:59:26we'd just glide down the ramp.
00:59:28The paintings would lie on the wall, much as they would on the artist's easel, lit from above, and the light changing all the time.
00:59:35He wasn't trying to subjugate the painting to the building.
00:59:40He was trying to create a synthesis, create a marriage between architecture and paintings that had never existed before.
00:59:50Somebody took a picture of him six months before he died, on top of the Guggenheim Museum.
01:00:00And the scaffolding is there, and he's in profile.
01:00:05And you see him with the pork pie hat, and he's a man on top of the world.
01:00:12And he's almost 92.
01:00:15It's an image of him that I can't get out of my mind, and to me, it's the essential Wright.
01:00:22In the spring of 1959, the Guggenheim was almost complete, and Wright was supervising the final details from his studio at Taliesin West.
01:00:37Though his eyesight had begun to fail, he still rose every morning, eager to get back to the drafting table.
01:00:49When his first wife Kitty died that spring, his son David withheld the news from his father for several days.
01:00:56Wright wept when he finally heard what had happened to the woman he had abandoned half a century earlier.
01:01:03Why didn't you tell me as soon as you knew, he asked.
01:01:07Why should I have bothered, David answered.
01:01:10You didn't give a damn about her when she was alive.
01:01:13Not long after, on April 4th, Wright complained of stomach pains and was hospitalized in Phoenix.
01:01:23Surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction was successful.
01:01:27But five days later, on April 9th, Wright slipped soundlessly away.
01:01:36I went to the hospital right after he died,
01:01:39and his body was still on the bed.
01:01:44But he was about five feet seven inches,
01:01:46and when he died, you saw how tiny and frail and fragile he was.
01:01:51And I've never forgotten that.
01:01:53It was just...
01:01:55It was as if his charisma died with him,
01:01:58and he was just this little body,
01:02:01and not this larger-than-life guy anymore.
01:02:06My feeling towards my grandfather was that he was almost immortal.
01:02:13At the time that he died, I wasn't at the fellowship.
01:02:17I had already left and was working with my father.
01:02:20I remember we got word of it in Los Angeles,
01:02:23and had to...
01:02:26So we got on the plane immediately,
01:02:29and went over to Taliesin.
01:02:32And...
01:02:34I remember my father and I going into the living room,
01:02:39and grandfather was there in the casket,
01:02:42and we both went up and looked.
01:02:47And then we just held each other.
01:02:51And both cried and burst out of tears.
01:02:56It was just...
01:02:57It just came, and...
01:03:00I think that was suddenly the realization that he was gone,
01:03:04that he really was gone.
01:03:06His disciples loaded his coffin into a station wagon,
01:03:19and drove it for 28 straight hours to Wisconsin,
01:03:23following the same route Wright had taken every year in life.
01:03:27At Taliesin, he was carried to his grave on a flower-strewn farm wagon,
01:03:38just as Mayma Chaney, the murdered woman
01:03:41for whom he had once risked everything, had been.
01:03:49According to his wishes, he was laid to rest within a few yards of her,
01:03:53and not far from his mother,
01:03:55the woman who had first told him he was destined for greatness.
01:04:02A Unitarian clergyman read Wright's favorite passage from Emerson.
01:04:06Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
01:04:11Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
01:04:16I think that he didn't think much about the hereafter.
01:04:27But one, there is a passage in his autobiography
01:04:31where he talks about his later life,
01:04:35that nature was so beautiful,
01:04:38that he thinks when he goes for a walk
01:04:41that the nature of each tree, different from each other,
01:04:45how different grasses are,
01:04:47and how streams and brooks and things happen.
01:04:53He thinks it's so beautiful
01:04:54because heaven couldn't be as beautiful as nature on earth.
01:04:59Jesus, he thinks it's so beautiful.
01:05:00Amen.
01:05:01Jesus, his love, is I'm a devil?
01:05:04Jesus!
01:05:05Jesus!
01:05:10Jesus!
01:05:11Jesus!
01:05:14Jesus!
01:05:16Jesus, his love, is I'm a king!
01:05:18I'm a king.
01:05:20Jesus!
01:05:21Jesus!
01:05:24Jesus!
01:05:27On October 21st, 1959, six months after Frank Lloyd Wright died, the Solomon R. Guggenheim
01:05:43Museum opened to the public.
01:07:18Wright changed how we see the land, how we use the land, how we live in our houses, how
01:07:26we work in our offices, even how we relate to paintings.
01:07:34And to the Guggenheim, who cares about all the art in the museums if the building itself
01:07:40isn't thrilling?
01:07:47What is all art to do?
01:07:51All art is in some way about some kind of spiritual connection, some connection to something larger
01:08:00than us, some connection to something that we cannot wholly describe or put in words.
01:08:06Art is a lie that tells us the truth, Picasso once said.
01:08:13It's about getting to some feeling.
01:08:19And architecture, unlike any other art, connects to everyday living at the same time.
01:08:25It's a roof over our heads.
01:08:26It protects us from the rain.
01:08:30And Wright's genius was in his ability to do that, his ability to serve everyday needs, which
01:08:38are always part of architecture, which never go away.
01:08:41And yet, at the same time, to kind of grab you in your gut and make you feel as if you're
01:08:52having some kind of transcendental experience almost.
01:08:58I don't think it's unfair to say that there is no American architect who has ever lived who
01:09:15has done as much to touch the world, who has done as much to realize his vision of what
01:09:23a perfect architecture might be than Frank Lloyd Wright.
01:09:29What an architect is said to be about providing your fellow human beings with the best possible
01:09:34shelter at the lowest possible cost.
01:09:37Frank really believed that.
01:09:39And then in the making of temples, very ambitious temples, true temples like the synagogue or the
01:09:45Unity Temple in Oak Park, other temples of art like the Guggenheim, so that he was able
01:09:50to do both kinds of architecture, and out of his arrogance, create something which is selfless.
01:10:00Of course he designed those things, but they are purged of him.
01:10:03They are not his monuments.
01:10:05They are beyond.
01:10:06They are monuments for all of us.
01:10:09And all of us gain from these monuments in a way that is not that simple act of egotism
01:10:14on the part of a great man.
01:10:20I want you to give, if you will, the answer to just one more question.
01:10:25Are you afraid of death?
01:10:27Not at all.
01:10:28Death is a great friend.
01:10:31Do you believe in your personal immortality?
01:10:34Yes.
01:10:35Insofar as I am immortal, I will be immortal.
01:10:41To me, young has no meaning.
01:10:45It's something you can do nothing about.
01:10:48Nothing at all.
01:10:49But youth is a quality.
01:10:51And if you have it, you never lose it.
01:10:54And when they put you into the box, that's your immortality.
01:10:58Mr. Wright, I thank you for spending this hour with us.
01:11:01Well, you're welcome.
01:11:02I hope it's been of some interest.
01:11:04It has indeed.
01:11:05It has indeed.
01:11:06To whoever has been listening, but I don't know.
01:11:08It has indeed.
01:11:09It has indeed.
01:11:10It has indeed.
01:11:11It has indeed.
01:11:12It has indeed.
01:11:13It has indeed.
01:11:14It has indeed.
01:11:15It has indeed.
01:11:16It has indeed.
01:11:17It has indeed.
01:11:18It has indeed.
01:11:19It has indeed.
01:11:20It has indeed.
01:11:21It has indeed.
01:11:22It has indeed.
01:11:23It has indeed.
01:11:24It has indeed.
01:11:25It has indeed.
01:11:26It has indeed.
01:11:27It has indeed.
01:11:28It has indeed.
01:11:29It has indeed.
01:11:30It has indeed.
01:11:31It has indeed.
01:11:32It has indeed.
01:11:33It has indeed.
01:11:34It has indeed.
01:11:35It has indeed.
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