JP: The Modern Architectural Revolution, Frank Lloyd Wright. It's fairly safe to say that more has been written about Frank Lloyd Wright than any other modern architect. Everyone who ever met the man, however briefly, seems to have a story. I was with Frank Lloyd Wright many times in many places. He never failed to live up to the legend. In a 1955 interview, I asked him how he felt about being famous. He replied, I don't mind the fame, John, it's the notoriety. Wright enjoyed both fame and notoriety. His life was plagued with notoriety. He was in court in one of his numerous lawsuits when the bailiff held out the Bible and asked him his name. He responded, Frank Lloyd Wright, world's greatest architect. When he returned home, his wife Olgivanna said, Frank, the man was simply asking your name. He replied, but I was under oath. To say that Wright has a talent for publicity is like saying Michelangelo had a knack for sculpture. He was such an astounding public figure that his appearance with a pork pie hat, flowing tie, draped cloak, is as well known as his buildings. When I asked him about clothes, he replied, observe the terminals, the head, hands, and feet. They're the most important parts. His photogenic look was the work of both personal vanity and a sense of the dramatic. No other architect, certainly no other modern architect, lived in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. He designed and built with his students two remarkable residences on extensive estates, Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. While he shared many of the rejections of the Bohemian artist, he never lived like one. One time visiting a recently completed house he designed, I remarked on the wonderful quality of light that came through the clear story window framed with vines. Wright replied it was just luck. All architects have luck. Then he added, but geniuses have more of it. Despite the unabashed reference to his genius, I felt Wright had a surprisingly clear-eyed view of himself. He told me, I went out to New Canaan the other day. I'm building a house for a man named Wayward. It's a good name for one of my clients. It didn't matter that the man's name was actually Rayward.

JP: Tell me a little about how it all began and... FLW: Well how it began is right there in that little round picture. JP: That's with your mother? FLW: Yeah, she was a kindergarten teacher for me. Sat me down at the kindergarten table when I was six. But she wanted an architect for a son. Why I do not know but she was a teacher, and around my room in which I was born, were nine, simply framed with maple, nine of the English Cathedral's engraved by Timothy Cole That's what I saw in the cradle. Then she was determined that I was to be an architect. And all down the line everything was so focused on that that I never had any idea that there was anything else. I didn't know there was anything but architecture. And so kindergarten training by Froebel; and of course the scientific German thorough-going mind of Friedrich Froebel should be the foundation of almost every education of today. Well, I think she felt that she was a disciple of Theodore Parker and quite advanced in her views. And Friedrich Froebel was not a scientist, he was a humanist of the highest degree, and he ought to be brought back and put into school here throughout the nation. And it would be a good start toward art and religion. Friedrich Froebel believed that no child should be allowed to draw from nature. That is look at the surface of things and boom down. He should be taught the elemental forms behind all that that really went to make it what it is to look at. So here was the square, and here was the triangle, and here was the circle. Then you gave those third dimension and you've got the cube, and you've got the tetrahedron, and you've got these spheres. Now there were subordinate forms to be devolved from all those and they had little hooks put in them and hang them up and revolve them, and get subordinate forms. And then he gave you this plated map in colour so you wove in pattern. You've got colour, you've got weaving, you've got form on an elemental basis. And once you got that into your system, it could never be taken away from you. You never can take the feeling of those maple forms out of my fingers. You never can take out of my mind those... the effects of those colours. JP: I thought that... FLW: the sixty-thirty shape, you know here's a whole little box of sixty-thirty blocks, red scarlet on one side, and white on the other. You dump them out on the table and you make patterns. It was very advanced, and in her home the curtains were net and hung straight at the sides. It had to be tied back with bows. She had polished maple floors, and on those maple floors a friend of hers, Mrs. Davis, helped her get coloured rugs from India woven with polychrome on the rugs. And the pictures, instead of having the usual frames of that day, were all narrow polished wooden maple bands. And when she wanted flowers she cut them with the stems long, and always preferred glass that would show the stems, and set them in the water separately by themselves. I grew up in that. And my father, of course, was a musician and a preacher, and music, and all that environment was my babyhood. I used to go to sleep listening to my father playing Beethoven's Sonatas on the piano forte. So I had all that in my system as a natural. My Mother sent me here, and I was eleven, to work with my uncle James over here in the corner. And she saw me as we came back from Boston where my father had a pastorate. JP: Uh huh. FLW: Came back I was going to be a sort of a little Lord Fauntleroy, see - long hair and ringlets she used to curl on her fingers. She saw her man child getting to be rather refined. So she sent me up here to my uncle I never had shoes on nor a hat from the time I was eleven until I was seventeen. JP: Was it great farming country then? Was it the same kind of...? FLW: Better? Yeah, and it was just being broken it was rich virgin soil. Grandfather came here when the Indians were here. They used to bring... he'd have tobacco out on this porch step for him and they'd bring venison. Lay it on the step and take the tobacco. Daniel Webster was a great speculator in western lands and he owned this place down here that I know own, part of it. And of course, this was to him the wild and woolly. Down here at the bridge head, where we're building the restaurant, you can pick up Indian arrows there. You can go around and dig 'em up. Well, that was a crossing where they used to cross the river. JP: A ford, I see. FLW: Indian ford, I think. JP: I see, yeah. FLW: Walk around all over the place and drive around every afternoon. This - we'll take it for a drive sometime - is the most beautiful region you ever saw in your life. I've seen most of the beautiful regions of the world and none more beautiful than that. But what would bring me back? Anyway, I was just quick as a much of this whole valley between my toes barefooted and my whole youth was woven in with this place. Of course them hired men have a couple of the farms that I haven't been able to get back, that belonged to my uncles. JP: I see. How much how much land do you have now? FLW: around four thousand two hundred acres. JP: When you came to go to school you went to engineering school? FLW: we were poor and we couldn't afford an architectural school there was. So Impatiently, I went through nearly four years of it. I had three months left to go and decided after all that the engineering was only rudimentary undeveloped architecture and I struck out for Chicago on my own unbeknown to anybody, including my mother, and trapped the streets there for a couple of days till I found a place with Silsbee and stayed with him a year studying residence architecture. He was the leading residence architect at time in Chicago. So after that year with Silsbee it came apparent that Solomon was looking for somebody to do the drawings for the interior of the auditorium building. He needed an assistant and one of the boys there told him about me. So he told Bill Cox to ask me to come to see him and I went and then he asked me for some drawings. So I'm busy making them. I made a lot of them. I made some of his ornament turned into Gothic and took them along and he glanced at them all until he came to those he said what are these? I thought, I thought we could turn it into Gothic to see how easy it is and he was offended. But he saw the virtue. I was a good draftsman. I had a good touch and he said right you do you've got a good touch. How much do you want? Well, the answer was I've been getting eighteen dollars a week. So I said twenty five dollars and he smiled and he said well we'll fix that as we go along. I could have asked for fifty and got it. Adler was the big chief. He was the big engineering architect with advanced ideas of architecture and was really a strong pillar of the AIA at the time. One of the advanced thinkers and performers. He did central music hall. He did any number of loft buildings for his clientele of that time And he took Sullivan in as a young inexperienced Member from the bulls are who had worked around in offices a little and took him in as a partner believing in his genius. Adler believed in Sullivan's genius as most people believe in God and anything that Sullivan wanted he got. Sullivan, of course, knew very little of the practical side of architecture. That he learned from one of the best masters he could have had, Dankmar Adler and of course the two men played in together like thumb and little finger, thumb and forefinger - Adler the thumb, Sullivan the forefinger. That was the relationship between the two men. And I came in and Sullivan adopted me and was so nice to me when he was insulting to all the rest of the office and always had been that they turned on me and I had to fight for my place there. Sullivan said to me that after I'd been there the first week I got awfully lonesome. Now George Elmslie was one of the boys and syllabus, minister's son like me, there were five minister sons including Silsbee in that office so when Sullivan said to me right get somebody in here under you because if something should happen to you after I've got you going, I won't have anybody. So I got George to come over and George stayed with me during the time I was there as my, in my office with me, as understudy, George was my understudy and I was Sullivan's and after I left, of course, he had George and in his decadent period when he was no longer fit George carried on for him. I had thirty under me. I had charge of the planning and designing end of the office. Paul Miller had charge of the engineering end and the field he was Adler's man, and I was Sullivan's. You see in the plan of the office of that day I was at one end of the drafting room Paul Miller was at the other and the outer office was out here and Dan Adler was right next to the outer office. Sullivan's room was right next to mine the door open from mine into his room, where I sat drawing. I only saw him.