Video: Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio - Oak Park, IL

[DavidC]

visiting house and studio frank lloyd wright - (5:06)


David

[Roderick Grant]

It could be argued that this 'estate' is the most important design of FLW's career: The original House of 1889, when FLW was a mere 22, may have precedents in the shingle style popular at the time, but try to find another such to compare favorably to the elegance of FLW's interiors. One would have to go to Stanford White's much larger, costlier Isaac Bell House of just 3 years earlier, when White was 35, with many years more experience. The Playroom of 1893, designed when FLW was 24, is one of the great interiors of the 19th and 20th centuries, and holds up today. It is an example, given the scale, of why it is essential to experience his houses first-hand. Then in 1898, age 31, the Studio, an unquestionable masterpiece inside and out. The double height main Studio, the Entrance, the Library, are 3 of the finest spaces in America. The arrangement of the street-front masses is masterful.

Frank Lloyd Wright has been picked apart, demeaned and trivialized for decades because his academic record was limited to a high school diploma and a few months of college. How could this parvenu possibly have designed a building as refined as the James Charnley House? Well, go to Oak Park and find out. At 22 he was doing what architects double his age were unable to accomplish, on his own, without a mentor. He is the one for whom Alexander Woollcott reserved the title Genius ... even though Wright himself once said, "Once they have labeled you a genius, they are through with you."

[loo tee]

Yes, greatness flourishes away from academia. It has often been pointed out that Wright, Mies, and LeCorbusier excelled free from the burden of academic training. In other fields, so did Abraham Lincoln and Samuel L. Clemens. Free college education for all is a quite silly goal.

[SDR]

Your last sentence is not the logical extension of the preceding---is it ? That is, because certain iconoclasts have demonstrated that an advanced education is not the only path to success, it is not therefore evident that ready access to that level of education is of no benefit---to anyone.

S

[Roderick Grant]

The most cogent argument against "Free college education for all" is that it is impossible. Someone down the line pays for it.
Another argument against college at all when it comes to the arts is that it is more likely to constrain than liberate.
There is an underlying sameness to all the 19th century Ecole des Beaux Arts-trained architects that FLW, Corbu and Mies avoided, and which the school could have avoided if it had educated rather than inculcated.