Building Taliesin Read online

  Fig. 119. Queene Ferry Coonley.

  Queene Ferry Coonley disliked the typical American schoolroom “with rigid little seats screwed relentlessly into the floor.”

  Eaton concluded that Queene Coonley was the deciding factor in the choice of Wright. “It was, after all, Mrs. Avery Coonley who first went to Wright after seeing an exhibition of his work at the Chicago Architectural Club,” Eaton says.47 She told Wright they were seeking him out “because it seemed to them they saw in my houses ‘the countenance of principle,’” Wright recalled. (“Principle” was a word used in Christian Science, a faith founded by a woman, to refer to a divinity that embraced both male and female.) “This was to me a great and sincere compliment,” Wright said. “So I put the best in me into the Coonley house.”48

  Now, in 1911, he had a new opportunity. Queene Coonley’s original Cottage School, offered free to children ages four and five, was expanding and adding grades. Once again Wright and Queene Coonley saw eye to eye. Both believed in Froebel kindergarten methods and John Dewey’s dictum that “school is not a preparation for life, it is life.” Both of them saw traditional schools as wrong for children of American Democracy. She called the typical school “a building consisting of a group of rooms with rigid little seats screwed relentlessly into the floor.”

  Fig. 120. Frank Lloyd Wright’s first plan for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo shows the compound from the side and above. The hotel was to have low bedroom wings embracing gardens and a stepped-up central building containing the hotel’s social and ceremonial functions. The rendering is several feet long and is drawn on panels. It was rendered in 1913 by Taliesin draftsman Emil Brodelle, who was one of the seven murder victims in 1914.

  In her school, “a children’s community,” the idea was “not so much to teach what others had thought or grown-ups had done, but for the children themselves to do something.”49

  Wright’s solution was a joyful, churchlike open space with two naves, all banded with brilliant stained-glass clerestory windows portraying a parade of geometric balloons, American flags, and confetti. The centerpiece at one end of the classroom was a triptych of tall windows of clear glass accented at the top by circles and squares of the same bold colors—red, blue, green, and yellow. Wright called these windows his “kindersymphony,” or children’s symphony, and they are his most famous decorative design. Viewed from inside the room, they transmit light and color but are too high to distract children.

  The classroom had round tables and chairs for little groups of children. One nave had a kitchen. The other nave had a craft shop. “Students were involved in cooking the lunches, making useful objects for the school, and in weaving, printing, and woodwork. When studying literature and history they researched the era, made costumes, and acted out the subject.”50 Wright placed a stage with a fireplace at the upper end of the main room. That was the reason Wright called the building a “playhouse,” even though Coonley fought the name, fearing that critics of progressive education would think it frivolous. “There’s a workshop in it, after all,” she told Wright. “Why don’t you call it a workshop?”51

  Fig. 121. An early brochure for Wright’s Imperial Hotel has the appearance of a classic Japanese print, with off-center perspective and subtle colors. The hotel and Mount Fuji are presented as icons of modern Japan.

  Queene Ferry Coonley remained a lifelong friend and ally to Wright. She turned a blind eye to his love life. Her daughter recalled: “People would say to her, ‘I don’t know how you can go along with Mr. Wright, with these three wives, one of which he hasn’t even married!’

  “And mother would say, ‘Only one at a time.’”52

  THE EMPEROR’S NEW HOTEL

  On July 8, 1913, while Wright was off to Boston to show his prints to the Spauldings (he was expected there on July 9), Mamah Borthwick wrote to Ellen Key from Taliesin. “I wanted you to know of our delightful trip to Japan,” she said. “Frank is to build the Imperial Hotel in Tokio and a few other things, not the property of the Emperor, so less important. The main object of the trip was, however, Japanese Prints, of which you know Frank is a collector.

  “I have a dream of you coming to America, visiting us, and then of our going over to Japan together. Will you realize it, do you think possibly? Frank must go again in connection with the hotel, so we expect to have a little house there where you would again be our guest, during your stay in Japan. Would you consider it? Of course you would be perfectly independent to make whatever side trips you might wish.”53

  “I have a dream of you coming to America, visiting us, and then of our going over to Japan together. … Frank must go again in connection with the hotel, and we expect to have a little house there. … Would you consider it?”

  —Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, 1913

  This trip was not to be, for Borthwick or for Key. Mamah would die and Wright would eventually return to Japan to build the hotel accompanied by a new lover. But in 1913, fresh from his travels, which included a stay at the old Imperial Hotel, he drew an elaborate plan for a gracious hotel compound featuring gardens and pools—a new meeting place and clearinghouse for East and West.54

  Japan had moved its capital from Kyoto to Edo in 1868, a year after Wright was born. The Emperor Meiji declared that its name would be changed from Edo, or “bay-port,” to Tokyo, or “Eastern Capital.” The move was a sign of Japan’s rapid change from a closed feudal dynasty to an outward-looking modern state.

  In 1890 the first hotel for Westerners was built, an ornate neo-Renaissance building designed by a German-trained Japanese architect. With three stories and just 60 guest rooms it soon proved too small for the influx of foreigners, and the Imperial Household turned to Wright. His inside track came from Frederick Gookin, who knew the manager, Hayashi Aisaku, and recommended Wright for the job of architect in the fall of 1911. Another reason Hayashi may have been receptive was that there was a Badger State connection—he had attended the University of Wisconsin.55

  Fig. 122. Table service in the outdoor garden of Midway Gardens was on several tiers. Food was sent from the kitchen by tunnels to service stations, such as those at left and right. A dance area can also be seen.

  Wright was in a mood to think big. In 1913 he produced plans for the two biggest projects of his career, the Imperial Hotel and Midway Gardens in Chicago. Both plans gave him the chance to play the uber-artist, orchestrating all the arts and designing every feature of a massive project down to the rugs, china, and crystal. This was not new to him, but the scale of these Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art, then a European vogue, was vast.

  Wright’s hotel, which was to have 285 guest rooms, was laid out in a large H intersected by an I. The central section contained the ceremonial and social functions—promenades, theaters, a cabaret, and banquet halls in ascending structures. The low private bedroom wings of the H embraced the gardens and pond. It would be “a world complete within itself,” formal and green in the heart of the bustling city, across from Hibaya Park and within sight of the Imperial Palace. Wright said it was to be a protest against the commercial “office hotel.” The Imperial, honoring Japan’s love of nature, would be “a system of gardens and sunken gardens and terraced gardens—of balconies that are gardens and loggias that are also gardens—and roofs that are gardens—until the whole arrangement becomes an interpenetration of gardens.”56

  “[Geometric] forms could be made into a festival for the eye no less than music made a festival for the ear. I knew. And all this could be genuine building, not mere scene painting.”

  —Frank Lloyd Wright on Midway Gardens

  Fig. 123. A promotional pamphlet for Midway Gardens shows the building on Cottage Grove Avenue looking like a fantastic battleship. The Gardens complex was built in just three months in 1914 and opened on June 27. It had two good years before troubles set in.

  Wright also pictured the Imperial as an ocean liner, another kind of self-contained world. Part of its virtue was “conservation of space by con
centrated conveniences,” he said. His hotel rooms would be like staterooms.57

  But the ocean liner’s main virtue was its ability to ride swells—like the swells of an earthquake. Wright’s “floating” Imperial would gain fame in 1923 when it survived the greatest natural disaster in Japanese history, the great Kanto earthquake and firestorm of September 1 that left between 100,000 and 110,000 dead.58

  Wright put great artistry and detail into the preliminary plan he prepared in 1913, which was put on display at his Art Institute show in Chicago in the spring of 1914. The huge rendering, mounted over several panels, takes up a large amount of wall space. It shows the Imperial from the side in an aerial perspective that Neil Levine says gives it motion and modernity. Its renderer, Emil Brodelle, who had a special talent for the bird’s-eye view, was slain at Taliesin just three months after the Chicago show.

  THE GEOMETRY OF PLEASURE: MIDWAY GARDENS

  The year 1913 was already turning into a very good time for Frank Lloyd Wright, with his triumphs in print dealing and the capture of the commitment for the Imperial Hotel. Then, in the fall, he was handed another huge opportunity: a chance to exercise all his skills and show Chicago that he was still the greatest.

  A group of developers offered Wright the chance to design an entertainment complex that would occupy a full city block on Chicago’s south side. Midway Gardens, located near the Midway Plaisance boulevard that was created for the Columbian Exposition, would be a place to see and be seen in all seasons. It would have a summer concert garden with terraces on three levels and an enclosed winter garden with taverns, restaurants, and dancing. Symphony orchestras and dance bands would offer both popular culture and high culture.

  Wright described the “Aladdin” moment when the project’s 36-year-old leader, Edward Waller Jr., spun out his proposition.

  “Well, Aladdin and his wonderful lamp fascinated me as a boy, but now I knew the enchanting young Arabian was just a symbol for creative desire, his lamp intended for another one—imagination. I sat listening, myself ‘Aladdin.’ Young Ed? The genii.”59

  Wright saw another chance to conceive and design an urban gathering place down to its last detail, with the architect commanding an army of artists and artisans. It was also a chance to try out a new design approach that would leave “realism” and historical styles behind and go for something sleek and abstract. He said he was aware of European experiments in abstract painting and sculpture that “excited the esthetic vanguard.“ But those same experiments insulted “the rank and file.” He would try to win over the rank and file with pure geometry, using “my trusty T-square and triangle.”

  “[Geometric] forms could be made into a festival for the eye no less than music made a festival for the ear,” he said. “I knew. And all this could be genuine building, not mere scene painting.”60

  he construction schedule was brutal. “Working drawings were to be ready for contract in 30 days and the construction completed 90 days later,” John Lloyd Wright recalled. Originally this meant a starting date for drawings of January 1, 1914, and a project completion date of May 1. After some delays, the clock was reset. “From the setting of the foundation in early April to the plastering of the inside walls in late June, Midway Gardens was, indeed, built in three months,” says Paul Kruty, author of Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens.61

  On the eve of the June 27th opening there were still 500 workers on the site, setting up and putting the finishing touches on Wright’s “city by the sea” while the newly-formed national Symphony Orchestra of Chicago under conductor Max Bendix struggled to rehearse. “The grind of concrete mixers and the shouts of the gang bosses drowned out the rehearsing orchestra,” the Chicago Tribune reported.62

  On opening night, several thousand concertgoers had arrived for the opening and nearly as many had to be turned away. “The odor of wet mortar was strong in the air,” a Tribune critic noted.63

  Fig. 124. A colored postcard shows Midway Gardens crowded under a full moon in Chicago in July 1914, soon after its opening. Opposite page: A Midway Gardens plate designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  The lucky visitors who made it in on that summer night encountered an enchanting sight: a sea of tables covered in white linen, a stage bathed in light, the terraces illuminated by “electric needles” pointing to the sky, light stalks with cube-shaped lamps, walls decorated with patterned cement blocks, and sculpture all about— Decorative “totem poles” and deco-like human figures called sprites and spindles, created by sculptors Richard Bock and Alfonso Iannelli, who used Wright sketches. Some sprites held up the building blocks of architecture: the cube and octagon, the pyramid and sphere. A winged sprite, called the “Queen of the Gardens,” thrust a cube aloft.

  It was a celebration of architecture—and of the architect, who included in his design a special “architect’s box” for himself. It would be nice to think that Mamah Borthwick joined him in it on opening night, but there is no evidence. Wright remembered it as “as brilliant a social event as Chicago ever knew.”

  “In a scene unforgettable to all who attended, the architectural scheme and color, form, light, and sound had come alive,” he said. “Thousands of beautifully dressed women and tuxedoed men thronged the scene. And this scene came upon the beholders as a magic spell. … Chicago marveled, acclaimed, approved. And Chicago came back and did the same marveling again and again and again.

  “To many it was Egyptian, Mayan to some, very Japanese to others. But strange to all. It awakened a sense of mystery and romance in the beholder… And for the remainder of the season, Chicago, the unregenerate, came to rendezvous with a new beauty.”64

  During the first three weeks, Midway Gardens attendance was “almost frightening,” the Tribune reported, with 17,000 coming in just one weekend. When the last concert was done on September 7, Musical America reported that the first season attendance had totaled more than 200,000.65

  The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1911–1914

  Program of the Chicago Architectural Club’s 27th Annual Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago, April 9–May 3, 1914

  MODELS

  306. Office Building, San Francisco

  307. Midway Gardens, Cottage Grove Avenue and the Midway, Chicago.

  308. Figures Decorating Winter Garden of the Midway Gardens. A. Iannelli, Sculptor.

  The Cube.

  The Sphere.

  The Triangle.

  The Hexagon.

  Sprites.

  309. Terminals of Exterior Piers.

  310. Little Play House, Riverside, Illinois, for Mr. and Mrs. Avery Coonley.

  DRAWINGS

  311. Imperial Hotel, Tokio, Japan.

  Ground Plan.

  Sections and Elevations.

  Outline Perspective.

  312. Midway Gardens.

  Perspective Study.

  Detail of Garden Furniture.

  Detail of Interior Furniture.

  314. Recreation Pavilion, Banff, Alberta, for the Canadian Government.

  315. River Forest Tennis Club House.

  316. Carnegie Library, Pembroke, Ottawa.

  317. Post Office, Ottawa, Canadian Government

  318. Double House, Ottawa, Canada.

  319. Model Quarter Section.

  Plan.

  General View.

  Detail of Typical Block.

  320. Cement Exhibit, New York, for Universal Portland Cement Co.

  321. Hotel Madison, Wisconsin.

  322. Country Inn, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

  323. State Bank, Spring Green, Wisconsin.

  DWELLINGS

  324. Jerome Mendelson, Albany, N.Y.

  325. Sherman M. Booth, Glencoe, Illinois.

  326. Henry S. Adams, Oak Park, Illinois.

  327. Residence at Palm Beach, Florida.

  328. Herbert Angster, Lake Bluff, Illinois.

  329. Low Cost Suburban Dwelling.

  330. Edward Schroeder, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  331. E. Ebe
nschade, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  332. Arthur W. Cutten, Country House, Wheaton, Illinois.

  333. Francis W. Little, Summer Home, Minnetonka, Minnesota.

  334. Mr. and Mrs. Avery Coonley, Riverside, Illinois,

  Kindergarten.

  Little Play House.

  Detail of Glass.

  335. Taliesin, Hillside, Wisconsin.

  Country Studio Home of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Plan. Elevation. Perspective.

  Photographs.

  Detail of Gates.

  336. Taliesin, Workman’s Cottage.

  337. City House.

  Plan and Perspective.

  A Florentine Study.

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  DETAILS OF FURNITURE AND GLASS

  EDUCATIONAL TOYS

  Marionette Theatre, made for Llewellyn Wright.

  A Toy Garden Scheme, worked out by Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr.

  Child’s Building Blocks, worked out by John Lloyd Wright.

  WOODEN PRINT STANDS

  Three Types. Utilizing Japanese Color Prints for Interior Decoration, after the manner of the statuette.

  Fig. 123a. Midway Gardens plate.

  SUMMING IT UP, SHOWING IT OFF

  On March 30, 1914, Wright sent an urgent telegram from Taliesin to his trusty friend Taylor Woolley in salt Lake City. “Need your help to prepare architectural exhibit open April 9th,” it said. “Can you come at once?”66