art | Sydney Schuster

Okay, I’ll just straight-up own this right now: I’m a Frank Lloyd Wright fan. There. I said it and I’m proud.

I was planning a trip to visit an assortment of Wright homes until the covid-19 pandemic torpedoed it. They’ve got Wright homes now where you can do sleepovers. They’re awesome and I’m not gonna live forever, so I’m pissed about possibly missing out on that. But as long as there’s an internet I can still drool over them.

I’m already lucky enough to have visited the extraordinary Guggenheim Museum in NYC (Wright said people complained it looks like a washing machine) and Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, Wright’s glorious 1939 experiment where I endeared myself to the tour guide who kept dragging me from underneath built-ins where I was looking to see how they were made.

BFFs 4-Ever
Born in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, Wright was still alive when I was a mid-century suburban kid and he’d inexplicably become a punchline. My parents built a couple of houses themselves, sturdy if not brilliant ones (my bedroom had no windows), and considered themselves experts. They delighted in making fun of Wright, for reasons I didn’t understand. I was a child, FFS; I knew squat about architecture but I knew what I liked. Not for nothing, my Barbie Dream House that I loved desperately was a dead ringer for a Usonian home.

No surprise, then, how thrilled I was to spend quality kid time in an amazing Texas home my parents assured me is a Wright house. It isn’t. (They were wrong a lot, though I’m sure they meant well.) But it was close enough. The Prairie-style beauty was designed by Wright student Larry Morton Gernsbacher for the founders of the Fort Worth Symphony and the Van Cliburn International Competition.

Gernsbacher trained at Wright’s Taliesin West. His Brachman-Aragon House features sparkling terrazzo floors and a soaring hexagonal fireplace among other stuff Wright would’ve hated, and generally doesn’t hit the same level of OCD detail that was Wright’s gift and albatross. But it’s fabulous nonetheless, also the first building I ever got lost in that wasn’t an airport.

Me and some nerdist pals getting crumbs in the Wrightian sunken couch at Brachman-Aragon House. © Sydney Schuster

Fickle Fans: The Mothers of Reinvention
Popular appreciation for Wright’s rangy, landscape-hugging Prairie style just kind of faded away mid-century, along with America’s infatuation with ranch houses in general. Wright was unfazed. He waited out the Great Depression working as a teacher before reviving his career with Fallingwater, then shifted gears again in the 1950s to design more homes for the middle class. Climbing into the Boomer-boom lifeboat with modernists like Richard Neutra and Carl Strandlund enabled Wright to achieve yet another revival before clocking out in 1959.

Some of his scaled-down populist works were more successful than others. Many Usonian homes, like the Seth Peterson Cottage and Pope-Leighey House, are exquisite jewel boxes, their designs often incorporating chunks of Fallingwater. Others look like if you walked inside, there’d be a Gap.

It wasn’t until much later that Wright came to be considered “the greatest American architect of all time,” as the American Institute of Architects put it in 1991. There was simply no one like him — the vision, the arrogance, the blatant disregard for society’s speedbumps. He was a master manipulator of light and proportion, a genius at making things look big that aren’t [insert joke of your choice here].

Perhaps most importantly, Wright had no more f∪cks to give. His futuristic Norman Lykes House in Phoenix looks like a Federation starship. It was his last residential design, commissioned a decade before James T. Kirk supposedly went where no man had ever gone before.

The houses Wright designed in California in the 1920s came from another place no one had ever been before — the inside of his head after his wife was murdered and their estate torched. The Ennis House, the last one Wright built in Los Angeles, is like a relentlessly accessorized tomb with great closets and ample parking.

Years ago I lived in LA within walking distance of the Ennis House, which I mistook to be some creeptastic masonic temple and steered clear. My friends were equally unimpressed. (“What is that thing?” “Dunno. Go up and look.” “I’m not going up there. You go!”) I regret that now. Great, steaming gobs of regret.

Upon closer inspection, Ennis House turns out to be merely a three-bedroom split-level with rooms taller than they are wide, nestled in a bundle of optical illusions. (Photo below: Here’s the pool side, left, looking all towery and Olympian; now check it out, right, with people for scale. Suddenly it looks like an old Disneyland attraction, and a tiny one at that.)

Its modest sleeping accommodations and theme-park ambience aside, Ennis House is neither suburban cliché nor dark ride. It’s a magical mindf∪cking fairytale someone lives in now. Don’t show up unannounced, but if you’re in LA and there’s a tour, you should go.

A Feature, Not a Flaw
Ironically, what elevated Wright as an architect was that he wasn’t so much a great builder as a great artist whose medium happened to be buildings. Fantastic, gorgeous, fanciful buildings, riddled with face-palm-inducing design slop. An engineer he was not. His goofs are as spectacular as his hits. Let’s review!

Wright roofs leaked. “Move the table,” he famously chided the Herbert F. Johnson family when they complained that their Thanksgiving dinner guests at Wingspread got rained on. The architect Philip Johnson once called Fallingwater “a seventeen-bucket house.” Fallingwater’s original owners affectionately nicknamed it “Rising Mold.”

Wright houses listed and sank. Wright’s Mayan Revival creations were a personal challenge to tart up what he called “the cheapest and ugliest thing in the building world.” The modular blocks in his LA “organic” houses — an early iteration of cinder block made of crap dug up in the yard, mixed with water, and shoved into molds onsite — crumbled liberally over time, taking their buildings’ equilibriums with them. (The Ennis house, built in 1924, has been restored three times.)

Wright homes were wholesale firetraps. The Rose Pauson House in Phoenix burned down when it was only a year old, after a spark from its stately open fireplace set the curtains ablaze. The plate warmer in Rochester’s Boynton House consists of an open flame inside a wooden cabinet. Really. When the current owners wanted to restore it, the local gas company laughed and refused. There’s a 1927 Wright filling station in Buffalo with roof-mounted gas tanks situated directly over a fireplace inside. What could go wrong?

Chicago architect Gunny Harboe, who renovated six Wright buildings, told Insider.com that Wright “didn’t really understand how things would perform over long periods of time, nor did [he] probably care about it.” Wright was only interested in making something he had in mind “and doing it in a beautiful way. And how that would get dealt with in the future was sort of left up to others.”

In short, Wright was maniacal about optics but cavalier about their underpinnings. By 2001 Fallingwater’s famed cantilevered terraces had nearly collapsed for lack of proper reinforcement. When the living room of Minnesota’s 1912 Francis W. Little House was reconstructed within Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum in the 1980s, the crew was shocked that nothing in it was square or plumb. (I saw it. It’s stunning. Oof!)

Wright buildings often had light fixtures with no service access and dead bulbs sealed inside. And his trademark butted-edge glass windows? Unmatched at embracing views, useless at repelling rain.

So what I’m saying is yes, Wright really was America’s greatest architect, and his imposing buildings are deceptively ephemeral and someday people will get sick of propping them up. If you ever have the chance to visit one, don’t hesitate. Next time you go to New York City, even if you do nothing else, just go to the damn Guggenheim already. The inside’s bigger than the outside! You’re welcome.

Many thanks to Joanne Barron at Historic Fort Worth, Inc. for her help in researching this post.

My new book Ravenswood: The Lost Paradise is available on Amazon.

Sydney Schuster and Dead Spot Books neither approved nor endorse any non-Dead Spot Books advertising that may appear here, nor do we derive any income from it. Some of it is really gross and we apologize, but the web host puts it there and we have no control over it. Try to ignore it. Thanks.

Sydney Schuster

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Not Wrong About Wright

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