Frank Lloyd Wright on Arrogance

Fellow architects have called him everything, from a great poet to an insupportable windbag. The clergy has deplored his morals, creditors have deplored his financial habits, politicians, his opinions. When you come to New York, as you did today, and you see the skyline of New York, this does not excite you, this does not exalt you in any manner?

It does not. Because it never was planned, it is all a race for rent, and it is a great monument, I think, to the power of money and greed trying to substitute money for ideas. I don’t see an idea in the whole thing anywhere. Do you? What’s the idea?

I understand that last week in all seriousness you said, “if I had another fifteen years to work I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation.”

I did say that. And it’s true. Having had now the experience going with the building of seven hundred and sixty-nine buildings, it’s quite easy for me to shake them out of my sleeve, and it’s amazing what I could do for this country. I think the way of life to which the country is committed needs that change. I wouldn’t like to change so much the way we live, as what we live in, and how we live in it.

You’re saying practically everyone in the United States is out of step except Frank Lloyd Wright?

Frank Lloyd Wright: Not at all. I don’t say anything of the kind. It isn’t their job to build. It’s mine. For five hundred years what we call architecture has been phony.

Phony in what sense?

In the sense that it was not innate, it wasn’t organic; it didn’t have the character of Nature. I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church. And that’s my Church. But because my Church is elemental, fundamental I can build for anybody a church.

What do you think of church architecture in the United States?

I think it’s a great shame because it is a paragon monkey reflection and no reflection of religion.

Something immediately comes to mind. I am not a Catholic but when I walk into St. Patrick’s Cathedral here in New York City, I am enveloped in a feeling of reverence.

Sure it isn’t an inferiority complex?

You feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick’s?

Regret. Because it isn’t the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the sovereignty of the individual, which I feel should be represented in our edifices devoted to culture. I’d like to have a free architecture. I would like to make it appropriate to the Declaration of Independence, to the center line of our freedom. I’d like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and as a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace. The letters we receive from our clients tell us how those buildings we built for them, have changed the character of their whole lives and their whole existence. It’s different now than it was before. Well, I’d like to do that for the country.

Mr. Wright, suppose you were approached by one of your students who felt pessimistic about his future because of the hydrogen bomb, the threat of war, the world’s general insecurity, and he came to you and he said, “help me to understand, give me something to live by.” What could you tell him?

I don’t put a line on a drawing board if the answer isn’t there. The answer is within yourself. Within the nature of the thing that you yourself represent, as yourself. That’s where architecture lies, that’s where humanity lies, that’s where the future we’re going to have lies. If we are ever going to amount to anything it’s there now, and all we have to do is to develop it.

As an intellectual yourself, Mr. Wright, what do you think President…

That is not an allegation, and I refuse to marry that girl.

(LAUGHS) What do you think of?

I don’t like intellectuals.

You don’t like intellectuals, why not?

Because they are superficial, they are up top. They’re from the top down, not from the ground up. And I’ve always flattered myself that what I represented was from the ground up.

Uh-huh.

Does that mean anything?

I’m trying to figure it out.

(LAUGHS)