Scully, Brooks on Wright

[SDR]

It's not difficult to understand why Wrightians might have distrusted historian Vincent Scully, Jr (1920-2017) to appropriately assess the work of
Frank Lloyd Wright, after reading some of what he wrote. Here is an excerpt from an early work, the slender monograph published in 1960 immediately
following Wright's death by George Braziller, as part of the Masters of World Architecture series:





Accusing the young Wright of being behind the curve was bound to raise hackles. Here is the double-page spread intended to illustrate the
connection between Bruce Price's Kent house and Wright's own Oak Park residence:




© George Braziller, Inc 1960


Inexplicably, Scully doesn't complete his argument by publishing the plan of Wright's house.

The 21 pages of text in this little book contain an overview, and a great deal of detail, about Wright's work. Touchstone buildings are dealt with as
examples, the story progressing chronologically. Buildings are described in terms of material, of space, of program, and as responses to or reflections of
both contemporary and historic design and construction. While the Hellenic building tradition is carefully skirted, in deference to Wright's known position,
Bronze-age Cretan, Pre-Columbian, Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance examples are touched upon as references of one sort or another to Wright's
work.

Could it be these references to the "other" which grate upon the sensibilities of some Wrightians, even today ?


Scully on Wright surfaces again, in 1970, with the final essay in "The Rise of an American Architecture," published in association with a Metropolitan
Museum of Art exhibition of the same name. Edgar Kaufmann, jr, is the editor of this volume -- so we find at least one Wrightian who is not offended
by Scully's take on the master ? Scully's essay is titled, "American Houses: Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright."

Aside from an aerial photo of Monticello, this spread is the first set of illustrations to the text:





Now we have Scully comparing the plan(s) of Jefferson's signature architectural achievement to, of all things, Price's Kent house, and to
Wright's Willits plan. (Observed today, it is perhaps surprising that only a hundred years separate the Jefferson achievement from the Wrightian.)
Here is Scully, explaining this pairing -- perhaps not entirely convincingly, in the case of Monticello ?

"[Jefferson's] early plans for Monticello, of about 1770, go perfectly together with the house plans of 1885 by Bruce Price and those of 1902 by Frank
Lloyd Wright. I pointed this out long ago, but should say a fresh word here. Each architect set himself the same problem, which was: how to break
out of the box. Freedom from ancient constraints is the common theme. Jefferson took the merest hint of such from English sources, and, where the
relevant English plan shows only a slight projection of the center block, Jefferson's first scheme already proposes a crossing of two dynamic spacial
directions, an intersection of two roads in space. The plans by Price are much the same. But in Jefferson's succeeding studies the axes are extended
further. The confines of the box are denied and extended by the projection of the polygons beyond the corners; the axes are trying to break free. In
Wright, they finally do so . . ."


Twenty pages on, having looked at Parris, Biddle, Upjohn, Downing, Olmstead, Ware, W R Emerson, Peabody & Stearns, McKim, Mead & White,
Eyre, and Hunt, we come back to Wright:










© 1970 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art


Not a meaningless nor an insensitive appreciation of the work ? Still, Scully again misses the opportunity to exhibit the clearest possible contrast to his
favored Bruce Price Kent plan. That is left to another architectural historian, H Allen Brooks, whose piece on Wright, published a further decade on,
in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, March 1979, is titled "Wright and the Destruction of the Box." It can be found in
Writings on Wright, 1981, MIT Press, edited by Mr Brooks.

Here at last we have the perfect illustration, in a double spread:






And here are two pages of Brooks' short essay, succinctly making the point:




© 1981 by H Allen Brooks

[Tom]

Educational comparisons all over the place.
The front elevation of Wright's Oak Park home makes the Kent house look like a lady in a patchwork dress.
And then he lifts the triangle thru benefit of cantilever, no columns at the ends.
I appreciated the Kent, Willits, Jefferson comparison too.
The River Forest Golf Club - very intriguing.
Also the Scully/Brooks comparison.
Brooks makes it very explicit doesn't he.
Nice post - bravo.

[SDR]

Ars longa, vita brevis. Wright: extra longa.

SDR

[Roderick Grant]

H. Allen Brooks was one of the finest FLW scholars, writing simply, decisively and unerringly on the subject. I profited from many long discussions with him.

Brooks' comparison of Ross and Kent shows, not only the similarities, but the essential difference between FLW and Price. Whereas Price continued the old arrangement of separate and distinct rooms, FLW merged the spaces without sacrificing the functional distinction between them. Both FLW and Price were affected by Jefferson, but that Ross bears similarities to Kent is only by way of Monticello, the first great work of architecture in America.

[SDR]

It seems more likely to me that Wright looked at Price for inspiration -- at least as to exterior expression, which Scully habitually addresses first -- when he designed his own house; he was still working through the available contemporary design influences, wasn't he ? More likely, that is, than to Jefferson, whose Monticello was at that point merely old hat rather than a meaningful precedent ?

In any event I don't read Scully as suggesting that Wright looked to Monticello as a model or even an inspiration; rather, he seems to be pointing to a co-incidence of an impulse to "break the box" and to create a "crossroads in space" -- not a convincing argument to me, in Jefferson's case. Wright was another matter indeed.

The coincidence of the Kent and Ross (first-floor) plans is striking, right down to the surrounding porch and broad central steps. One would think that Scully would have leapt upon it, rather than using the Willits plan to exemplify Wright's innovation -- even if Willits came a year earlier than Ross ? My assumption is that Scully hadn't seen the Ross plan.

I envy your time with Brooks. I imagine him being something other than the self-satifsfied uber-scholar that Scully seems to have become. But Scully's admiration of Wright was apparently a constant for him; the paean to Taliesin West found near the end of "Architecture: the natural and the manmade" is inspiring and seemingly heartfelt. Or was Wright merely the obvious choice of Important Modern American Architect for an historian. . . ?

SDR