Flying Solo
In the twentieth century, perhaps no person was more emblematic of eminent creativity than Frank
Lloyd Wright. In 1991, Wright was recognized as the greatest American architect of all time by the
American Institute of Architects. He had an extraordinarily productive career, designing the famous
Fallingwater house near Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum, and more than a thousand other
structures—roughly half of which were built. In a career that spanned seven decades, he completed an
average of more than 140 designs and 70 structures per decade.
Although Wright was prolific throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, beginning in
1924, he took a nine-year nosedive. As of 1925, “Wright’s career had dwindled to a few houses in
Los Angeles,” write sociologist Roger Friedland and architect Harold Zellman. After studying
Wright’s career, the psychologist Ed de St. Aubin concluded that the lowest Wright “ever sank
architecturally occurred in the years between 1924 and 1933 when he completed only two projects.”
Over those nine years, Wright was about thirty-five times less productive than usual. During one two-
year period, he didn’t earn a single commission, and he was “floundering professionally,” notes
architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. By 1932, “the world-famous Frank Lloyd Wright” was
“all but unemployed,” wrote biographer Brendan Gill. “His last major executed commission had been
a house for his cousin” in 1929, and “he was continuously in debt,” to the point of struggling “to find
the wherewithal to buy groceries.” What caused America’s greatest architect to languish?
Wright was one of the architects invited to participate in MacKinnon’s study of creativity.
Although he declined the invitation, the portrait of the creative architect that emerged from
MacKinnon’s analysis was the spitting image of Wright. In his designs, Frank Lloyd Wright appeared
to be a humanitarian. He introduced the concept of organic architecture, striving to foster harmony
between people and the environments in which they lived. But in his interactions with other people,
he operated like a taker. Experts believe that as an apprentice, Wright designed at least nine bootleg
houses, violating the terms of his contract that prohibited independent work. To hide the illegal work,
Wright reportedly persuaded one of his fellow draftsmen to sign off on several of the houses. At one
point, Wright promised his son John a salary for working as an assistant on several projects. When
John asked him to be paid, Wright sent him a bill itemizing the total amount of money that John had
cost over the course of his life, from birth to the present.
When designing the famous Fallingwater house, Wright stalled for months. When the client, Edgar
Kaufmann, finally called Wright to announce that he was driving 140 miles to see his progress, Wright
claimed the house was finished. But when Kaufmann arrived, Wright had not even completed a
drawing, let alone the house. In the span of a few hours, before Kaufmann’s eyes, Wright sketched out
a detailed design. Kaufmann had commissioned a weekend cottage at one of his family’s favorite
picnic spots, where they could see a waterfall. Wright had a radically different idea in mind: he drew
the house on a rock on top of the waterfall, which would be out of sight from the house. He convinced
Kaufmann to accept it, and eventually charged him $125,000 for it, more than triple the $35,000
specified in the contract. It’s unlikely that a giver would have ever been comfortable deviating so far
from a client’s expectations, let alone convincing him to endorse it enthusiastically and charging extra
for it. It was a taker’s mind-set, it seems, that gave Wright the gall to develop a truly original vision
and sell it to a client.