On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Phil wrote:
This past week I was in a bookstore browsing through a thick book about Wright and learned that he was the son of a minister and had grown up reading a lot of transcedentalism, courtesy of his mother. Somehow his mother decided that he should become an architect, and little FLW complied with mom’s vision of the future. I hadn’t known any of that, but as I looked over the photos and sketches of his work, I was struck more than previously by how cold it all was – all straight lines and minimal everything. Which got me wondering what attracted you when we were in high school to FLW. I well remember you telling me about FLW when I not only didn’t know of FLW but hardly knew what architercture was. So (1) how on earth did a 14-year old in Cumberland in 1959 discover this guy, and (2) what about Wright’s very stark and linear designs attracted that teenager?
My Reply:
1) pretty sure it was browsing in the public library up on Washington street. I did a lot of that & I can still see the books by Wright that I firsst took off the shelf there. It was indeed a revelation because—
2) the drawings were stunning. Maybe probably I had never really seen architects’ renderings of their projects before—certainly nothing beyond houseplans in magazines. And Wright—as I later learned—was famous even in his day for his drawings. Many who did not respect him at all much always had to acknowledge that his renderings and blueprint drawings were exceptional works of draughtsmanship and artistic drawing.
What also blew me away after I tried to read his texts was the discovery of transcendentalism, though I did not know the proper name for it for a long time afterwards. But having had Catholic doctrine poured down my gullet endlessly for 13 years, it was amazing to find that one could speak about spiritual things without C doctrine at all and still make sense of things that that doctrine claimed to be the only way to make any sense about such things. I was bowled over by Wright and poured over the books for both the images, the buildings and the philosophy he claimed was behind it.
{ My parents it turned out actually knew someone who lived in a Wright house—-the I. N. Hagans, owner of the Hershey ice cream company. They had a house just down the same road from the extraordinary Falling Water house over in Pennsylvania only their house was built in the late 50s, not the 30s, and was on top of a mountain they owned, not down in a hollow. Eventually I got us to get an invitation to go visit them in their house, but I think it must have been after I tranfered from LaSalle in Philly to Maryland in College Park, and by then I had had the shock described below.}
Now in as little time as four years later—five to be exact I guess—I would be 1) deeper inside the Catholic sphere by being in the religious order formation schooling at LaSalle college and wearing a habit and 2) living there in Phila in a loose replica of a famous Tudor house in England, Compton Wynyates, andl living within a half hour’s walk from that house of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great buildings—reputedly great I guess I’ll add—the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA.
After I got to know the neighborhood and realized that this building was a stone’s throw away, I walked over to it many times, any time I had some free time and could get away that first fall I was up in Philadelphia. It was the first Wright building I had ever seen in person. It was a bit of a shock and a disappointment but it took me a long time to admit to the latter feeling and recognition. In drawings the building looked just extraordinary and magnificent. There is a famous drawing Wright did of the projected structure as it would look at night—so the whole image is black and the “temple” of light is illuminated from within. Really dramatic. Wright wrote all this stuff too about how he had re-read parts of the old testament and talked with the Jewish congregation about what they wanted and his genius had yielded the inspired notion of a building that would hold the congregation in a space like God holding his chosen faithful in the palm of his hand. So inside the floor slopes in gentle angles imitative of a slightly open hand and then above that rises an immense open space imitative of Mt Sinai.
It was remarkably easy for me to look around the building on a Sunday mid-afternoon or even an early Saturday afternoon. I had no sense of when the congregation might use it and no knowledge about Jewish practice. I was able to walk all around it and go inside and really explore it on my own. It is a stunning building as so many of Wright’s are. I would see the Guggenheim in New York only years later.
But I got to like the Beth Shalom from the inside much more than I liked it from the outside. Inside it had beautiful woodwork, lush sand colored carpeting, soft filtered light and a very dramatic semi-translucent sort of atrium-tower rising far above your head. It fit the sense of what a sacred space and place of worship should look and feel like.
Outside however it felt very different. The scale was much more squat and small than I had expected. It sat lower to the ground and felt much more ordinary and suburban than I’d expected. (Years later in a tour of Fallingwater I learned that Wright, sublime egotist, insisted on using his own very short stature as the measure of all scale for his buildings.) I guess I wanted it to look as monumental as St Patrick’s cathedral or the National Shrine in Washington DC. And what bothered me most of all was the whole mt sinai construction. Wright had worked very hard in the fifties to come up with an engineering solution that could give him a large interior space with as little visible scaffolding and structural bridgework as possible. He had worked out some system of cast aluminum for the structure and then covered that with corrugated fiberglass. Those were “cutting edge” technological advances in their day, no doubt. But by the early 60s, a decade after the building had been built, the exterior aluminum had been painted repeatedly with aluminum paint—and you know how tacky that comes to look on any metal. And the corrugated neutral fiberglass panels were semi-translucent but in the sunlight they now looked like yellowed and aged plastic and also very tacky. So the whole building looked like a garden storage shed trying hard to morph into a faux egyptian/etruscan cathedral of some sort and seriously not making it, not even coming close.
Each time a went back to the college dormitory I then lived in more disappointed in the great Wright and more willing to consider the architecture of this very fake suburban Philadelphia mansion copied after a five-hundred year-old Tudor house. I did not know all of that then. I knew only that it was vaguely tudor in style. Years later I found out that indeed there was a Tudor original and it still exists. In 1998 while on sabbatical I went to visit Compton Wynyates and for a long Sunday afternoon in October the owner, Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, entertained me with a wonderful lunch and then gave me leave to wander by myself all through the house.
