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/^ GETTYIMAGESsticking it miragelike in the middle of a desert in Ari-
zona, he was out to “break the box,” to destroy forever
those tight, draped, dark, horsehair, closed-off , Victo-
rian rooms of our 19th-century forebears. He wanted
to let light in and space in, air in, life in. And he did so,
radically. Evangelically. It was a way of thinking and
feeling he never let go of. He did it initially, and most
radically, in his “Prairie Houses,” in and around the
turn of the 20th century, which alone are
enough to have made him immortal. The
esteemed contemporary architecture crit-
ic Paul Goldberger once put it this way in
regard to Wright: “He really did feel that
America, as this new democratic coun-
try...needed a new architectural ex-
pression... that was horizontal, open in
plan, open across the landscape, a sense
somehow that it was connecting to that
great open American land....He saw
that American landscape, the openness
of it, the sense that it was always moving
across the land, pushing westward.”
Throughout his life Wright himself
tried to articulate what he was doing in
terms of this interlocking idea of open-
ness and harmonious fl ow as it connects
to the larger idea of freedom and indeed
to the still larger idea of America itself.
Six years before he died, he wrote:
“To say the house planted by myself on the good
earth of the Chicago prairie as early as 1900, or ear-
lier, was the fi rst truly democratic expression of our
democracy in Architecture would start a controversy
with professional addicts who believe Architecture
has no political (therefore no social) signifi cance. So,
let’s say that the spirit of democracy—freedom of the
individual as an individual—took hold of the house
as it then was, took off the attic and the porch, pulled
out the basement, and made single spacious, harmo-
nious unit of living room, dining room and kitchen,
with appropriate entry convenience.”IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to step inside any Wright
work, but especially his houses (and mind you, he
always tended to think of them as his houses, hell
with the client), and not get something of this ineff a-
ble feeling of openness and freedom that somehow
seems greater than the (beautiful) building itself.
There are certain moments, standing in such spaces,
if the light is falling right, when it will begin to seemas if Whitman is singing to Emerson, or vice versa,
channeled through an ego that could see both of
theirs in the great stakes game of fame and self-love,
and raise it by half. There are also moments when
what comes, as others before me have said, is the
wonder of a religious feeling.
What comes to me, I suppose, not every time, but
often enough, is the glad idea of my Americanness,
and not in any corny or jingoistic way.
For all the terrible dross and refuse of
his ego and arrogance, this confound-
ing man and supreme artist left us with
something essential that helps defi ne us
as Americans, or so I believe.
(Although let it be said: He wasn’t the
fi rst. His mentor, the great Louis H. Sul-
livan, from whom Wright learned more
about architecture than from any other
person, was always way out ahead of the
pupil on the gospel of creating an Amer-
ican architecture for Americans. Wright
gets too much credit for that idea, not
that he didn’t understand the gospel in
deeper ways than Sullivan or raise it to
far more brilliant levels. But the dream
didn’t originate with him: just one more
instance of the lifelong capacity for
smooth appropriating.)
This feeling I am trying to pin down,
the ineff able aspect, the American aspect, the sea-to-
shining-sea democratic aspect, comes to me almost
every time I go back to my hometown of Kankakee,
Illinois, and stand quietly before the B. Harley Brad-
ley House. It is my boyhood Frank Lloyd Wright, the
one I fi rst saw circa 1953 on a J.C. Higgins maroon
three-speed. (The bike was under the Christmas tree
that year.) The Bradley is the precursor Prairie, the St.
John the Baptist Prairie. It came right at the light of
the new century, 1900. Every time I go back, I am awed
again by its interior gleams and quarter-sawn-oak an-
gularities and sheltering eaves and narrow bands of
glittering art-glass windows, but not least awed by its
uncanny interfl owing spaces. Yes, he broke the box.
Heck, I wonder if I even really knew the name Frank
Lloyd Wright in 1953. I was just a downstate Catholic
kid pedaling past an American wonder with the wrist
strap of my Spalding ball glove hooked to my han-
dlebars. This century on, the Bradley is there, on the
same street that I once lived on, South Harrison Ave-
nue, haunting my imagination.prologue
Wright was “one
of the most cre-
ative architec-
tural geniuses
of all time,”
the critic Lewis
Mumford wrote,
though each
building “stands
in self-imposed
isolation.”26 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019Adapted from Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank
Lloyd Wright. By Paul Hendrickson. Just published by Alfred K.
Knopf. Copyright © 2019.Paul Hendrickson, the author of numerous books,
BYLINE teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania.ARCHITECTURE