RANK LLOYD WRIGHT, the greatest archi-
tect this country has yet produced, was born
two years after the end of the Civil War and
died not quite two years after the launch
of Sputnik—91 years and 10 months on the
earth. In his cape and porkpie hat and those
goofy pants (almost pantaloons) that were pegged at
the ankles, he strutted through our national imagi-
nation for something like a seven-decade career. His
work has been built over three centuries—19th, 20th
and 21st. (I know, it reads like a typo, but I’m referring
to the handful of posthumous works that, for one rea-
son or another, didn’t get around to being built until
long after his death in 1959.)
In his 72-year career as an architect and egotist,
Wright managed to design more than 1,100 things,
a staggering number by any artistic measurement.
They were churches, schools, offi ces, banks, mu-seums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile show-
room, a synagogue, a mile-high skyscraper—and one
exotic-looking Phillips 66 gas station in Cloquet, Min-
nesota. Overwhelmingly, though, they were houses,
shelters for mankind, and by that fact alone, I think
there is something slyly to be said about his funda-
mental decency as a human being. By no means did
all of it get built. Not quite half of all his drawings and
designs and studies were realized, and a little more
than 400 still come magically out of the American
ground looking for the light: Fallingwater near Pitts-
burgh, the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue,
the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, Uni-
ty Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, Robie House on the
campus of the University of Chicago—to cite just fi ve
masterworks by their vernacular names.
One of Wright’s nearly lifelong dictums was that his
buildings were like shrubs and trees, growing upward,
in eff ect, from the inside out, emerging spanking-wet
and blinking their eyes to the world. (OK, that’s a dif-
ferent metaphor.) It was all part of his gospel of “or-
ganic architecture,” even if his defi nitions of that con-
cept were always shifting around, like verbal tectonic
plates, and sometimes seemed to mystify even him. It
was as if he knew what he meant, or at least felt, even if
you didn’t know, and even if in some ultimate spiritual
and intellectual sense he didn’t really know, either. He
didn’t need to know. He just needed to conceive the
thing, draw the thing, and make the thing. “The thing
had simply shaken itself out of my sleeve,” the old sha-
man liked to say, ever his own best publicist.
Shelters for mankind—from the almost impossibly
grand to the utilitarian bare and spare and functional,
and all the more beautiful for such simplicity and envi-
ronmental purity. (He had a term for this latter kind of
house, which I so deeply love—“Usonian .”) The interi-
or of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, whether a great ship
on the prairie or just a little birdlike jewel you swear
you could nest in your palm, is always about many
things, but at the center of each one is the intertwined
idea of openness and fl ow. No matter what else he did
with the design of a house in his nearly three-quar-
ters of a century as a revolutionary architect, whether
hanging it on the lip of a waterfall in Pennsylvania orF
24 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019ALAMY^prologue
No structure
epitomizes
Wright’s “organ-
ic” approach
like Fallingwater,
the 1937 house
in Pennsylvania.
Unesco desig-
nated it a World
Historic site this
past July.IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
Searching for the essence of the prickly,
brilliant, deeply infl uential Frank Lloyd WrightBy
Paul HendricksonARCHITECTURE