ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT ACTUALLY BUILT...

While still in the womb, Wright’s mother predicted her son would build incredible buildings. She lined his nursery not with animals and alphabets, but with pictures of incredible architecture. And it was not drawing (the skill most emphasized for an architect) she turned to inspire her son but building with geometrically shaped Froebel blocks. As Wright later wrote “For several years I sat at the little Kindergarten table-top … and played … with the cube, the sphere and the triangle… These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects … which were ever got into the architecture of the world … these smooth wooden maple blocks… All are in my fingers to this day.”

From a young age Wright built.

This is the second post in a weekly series debunking the myth that Frank Lloyd Wright was only an architect. In fact, based on my research, he was first and foremost a builder.

Here is a link to the first article in the series.

By the time Wright was 11 years old, his mother sent him for summers at her family’s farm in Wisconsin where he was exposed to full-scale building. Harmonious barns and farmhouses, common in agricultural landscapes had their patterns shaped by inherently beautiful forms passed down through the ages. Craft and beauty interwoven as intended. While constructing crops, not buildings, were the focus on the farm, carpentry was a hat worn out of necessity. Wright said Uncle John, who ran the farm “…could do everything, and so well that the others liked to stop and watch him….” and “was always laughing at the same time never afraid of anything.”

Not only was Wright surrounded by farmers that had built a thing or two there, but his mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Thomas, was an accomplished carpenter by trade “and by intense application obtained a sufficient insight in geometry and advanced mathematics, which when applied to his architectural work placed him much in advance of the usual country carpenter.”

As you will see, at this time “Architect” & “Builder” were synonyms in dictionaries and used interchangeably. The architect’s lineage throughout time and place was always that of the best builder and one progressed through the trades. Despite the example Wright set, this changed over the course of his lifetime and an architect was redefined as solely a designer.

While it was never noted that Wright had a formal apprenticeship under Uncle Thomas, he spent seven childhood summers with this influential figure and we know a fair amount of them were filled with swinging a hammer. Despite his affinity for his uncle, long days immersed in the doingness of physical creation and “how to add tired to tired and add tired” led to Wright running away from the farm multiple times. On one such occasion too much carpentry work drove him to escape, but first he discarded the ire of his torture, “…a hammer he seldom put back in its place, he got it, threw it in the creek for good and all, and departed.” In the event he was captured and returned to labor again that dreadful tool of creation would not inflict more damage.

Next week I will share details on Wright’s developing building construction experience.

Love,

David Muniz Supple