YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Lloyd Wright

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20

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2020-02-24

most recent

2020-02-24

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1

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1. “And so I'll close on this. Let's just think of Frank in these qualities, his decisive inner will, his inability to ever give up or to quit, his unbelievable faith in himself, his dedication to his craft. These are all the positives I want to take away from his life story. And then lastly, the fact that he thought deeply and for seven decades about what he wanted to do and the work that he wanted to do and then the way he would describe it is almost like a religious experience. And you're going to see that here. In the last interview he ever gave, Frank Lloyd Wright said that there could never be great art unless it possessed a spiritual quality. If there was no spiritual quality in architecture, it would just be plain lumber.”

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2. “Of this experience had in Frank's life and why it ties together, why he was able to do something that is so rare and that have this late stage revival at the end of his life. It must nonetheless be acknowledged that she gave her son something in terms of a will and inner strength that seems unquantifiable. And the world reaped the benefit.”

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3. “Those dreams would all have to be diverted and channeled and redirected into her firstborn. So Frank was by far the favorite. And I'm bringing this up, not just to talk about the tumultuous relationship of his parents, but what growing up in that environment. what that gay Frank, okay? So it says. Those dreams would all have to be diverted and channeled and redirected into a firstborn. Did anyone in Frank Lloyd Wright's life ever love him more? Believe in him more? God knows she was never an easy woman. Her life was pioneer hard. Before William and during William and for large parts after but this is what the result”

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4. “And refusal to quit ever that Frank Lloyd Wright clearly possessed that's extremely rare, that is one of maybe the main takeaway for me of the book of you never have to stop. Find something you love doing and keep doing it till you die. Now I want to tie this together with the early tragedy of his life that I haven't even touched on and most every other biography touches on the fact that when Frank Lloyd Wright was around 17 or 18 years old, his father up and abandoned the family and he never saw him again for the rest of his life. Now that is the story. Turns out because there's all kinds of documentation of his parents' divorce that historians and previous biographers and even Frank Lloyd Wright in his own autobiography got the story backwards that his father was”

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5. “Historians would one day say that a Frank Lloyd Wright had conceived nothing but these three buildings if his career had somehow been able to know only the single year of nineteen thirty six, it would have been enough to secure his lasting place There is something deeply inspiring about reading this, about you have a person who had achieved wild success, a downward trajectory for 25 years, was ridiculed and in one day just said, you know what, enough of this. Enough. I've lost everything. I'm a laughing stock. And yet the one thing I still have is this deep, profound belief in my talent, and I'm going to show you. And he did it over and over and over again for the day he died. He lived. He worked until the day he died”

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6. “His back was up against the wall, and this is what happened next. It was late nineteen thirty two, what I just described to you. Within four years, a man who didn't think of himself as a failure, not ever, no matter how the world might be misinformed, was in the process of creating an office cathedral, that's the Johnson Wax building, a backwards Shengolai leaping from a rock, that's falling water. If you want to Google image shirts falling water, you've probably seen it before. It's probably the most famous house. And a mouse house on the western edge of Madison. That's a Jacobs. He wanted to build a beautiful house for normal people because all his previous commissions were really, really rich people. So this was built by like, I think $5,500. It's called Jacobs 1. You can all see that. So it talks about, you know, this is what he did within four years. Many people consider this is his best work. And being thought of as a god again.”

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7. “And here's a bit about the period of his time before he wrote those words. This is Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932. It's broke as broken B. This is his wife writing for help to Frank's sister. We are in desperate condition. We cannot go to the local grocery before we bring them a little money and we only have $5 in cash. For God's sake, can you help us? Frank has not been sleeping these past two nights. We need money as we have never needed it before. We are destitute at the present moment and I can hardly collect my wits. Can you send us three hundred dollars? I cannot sleep or eat. I am simply sick. Can you help us? Frank is in despair in repeating. So from that low point, as when he starts, this is the crazy part of his story. From that low point is when he starts his rise and does the best work of his life.”

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8. “Monster sentence contains only the loosest chronology. So let me tell you a little bit about that, like lost in the desert period of his life. From the age of 48 to 65, who's only able to complete 34 projects? So he did 350 the last 10 years of his life. So 350 in 10 years or 34 in 20 years. So this is him talking about that. He says, my obituaries are all of such nature as to make me want to arise and fight. Indeed, I feel for the sake of the cause. Architecture to which I am so deeply committed, I must come back. The comeback seems to be a favored American institution. It definitely is. Who doesn't love a good comeback story? From now on, you were to find me actively engaged in that performance. Let's go. Let's go. That's fantastic.”

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9. “That blows my mind. I just cannot, I absolutely cannot understand how these is even possible. So the lesson I took away from that, find something you love to do and don't stop until you die. Another bit about his personality. Complete, absolute complete controls over the products. You thought if you were a person working with Frank Lloyd Wright, you hired him to build your house. You thought, okay, I hired him so he could build me a house. No, no, no. He was building that house for him. And you had very little say in this. He spent a lifetime conceiving some blind spaces for our aesthetic contemplation. Although really it was for his aesthetic satisfaction and contemplation to hell with us and to hell with those whom the spaces were supposedly being built and for whom he was allegedly working.”

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10. “Another good thing I learned about himself that you could see based on what I just told you. He did not set any limits for himself. He didn't understand the idea of retiring that made no sense to him. He didn't understand, he saw no reason why he couldn't make his best work right before he died. And many people believe he did. Another thing about this though ego did not diminish with age. This is what he said. He was like 85 years old at the time. It makes me laugh. I love seeing stuff like this. He says, I defy anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn't first done by me.”

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11. “To 92, right? His last 15 years of life. From the time he turns, let's say 77 to 92, let's say the time he was 80 years old, from 80 to 89 was the most productive decade of his life. What that's a first of all, a lot of people are dead by that time. And if they're not dead, they gave up. That shows how much in love with what he like you cannot separate architecture from him. They were one and the same thing. 80 was his most productive decade. Over 15 years he made plans over those 15 years, he made plans for $350 buildings. Every single building was provocative and controversial. How many people can still hold that level of most people would be more conservative as they age, right? Some of his crazy designs came at the end of his life, including the Guggenheim, the famous museum in New York City. That was the last project he was working on. He died right before it was completed. They were describing the work from at this time period late in his life as unmistakably Frank Lloyd Wright. And this is what he said about it. He says, I cannot get them out fast enough.”

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12. “This is something that blew my mind that I'm just going to put right up front, even though it comes later in the book. He lived in 92, right? So he has this like many things. He's multiple chapters in his life, which I'll talk to you more about today, which is he starts out building houses. His designs are so unique, so different from anything else that's happening at the time that he revolutionizes how American houses are built even to this day, right? And he does that from time he was about 20 years old to about 47 when he runs off with this woman and closes up his practice, right? Then he has like a 20 year, almost 25-year gap where he doesn't really do much. He's essentially in poverty, being ridiculed, written off. He's a, has been in the architectural world, even though his whole self-belief never wavered. And then his most, this is what I'm about to read to you, blew my mind. I've never, I've never come across anybody like this before.”

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13. “Positive traits besides his success in this, his love of his craft, he had his single-minded pursuit of his own potential I'm naturally drawn to people like that. That's what I mean. What are we doing here? We're studying excellence. These people are not normal. They're not going to be, they don't write books about normal people. The reason they're essential is what makes them eccentric, their unusualness is what makes them interesting, which is all why I say the main message from reading biographies is lean into whatever makes you eccentric, whatever makes you unique. He was unbelievably nonconformist, and I'll get there in a minute. Single-minded pursuit of his own potential. That's a good thing.”

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14. “He was a complete obsessive. He was extremely controlling, overbearing, and excited. When he built you a house, he would design everything down to the napkin holders, all furniture and furnishings. He'd visit houses that he built and then come back several years later. And he'd find that they added, you know, chots keys or different things. throw them all away. I mean, he is one of the most unique people. I'm trying to get across to you that he's one of the most unique people I've ever come across like you can almost he's almost impossible to categorize when they said that he's in the prologue it says like he's a riddle inside of a riddle squares inside of circles and all this other like he's very very just hard to understand and hard to wrap your your mind around he believed here we go he believed his clients were privileged to be able to work with him that reminds me”

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15. “He said, I'm the greatest architect that ever lived. What he was referring to, he said, forget greatest American living architect. So he constantly be referred to as the greatest living American living architect. He's like, no, no, not greatest American architect, greatest architect, and not just living, but ever. No qualifiers, he said. So there's his ego, right? He was described as being a hustler. This is a direct quote from Frank Wright. If I said I was the greatest architect in the world, I don't think it'd be arrogant. He compares himself to Leonardo da Vinci.”

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16. “Just keep it yourself, what I would recommend. But with Frank, I listened to a lot of his interviews and saw and read a lot of transcripts about this. I think he used that as a way. The way he talked about himself, and I'll get into that right now, was so unique that it fed more press and then the more press he got, the more attention his buildings got, the more attention his buildings got, the more jobs he got. So just know that going in. So I'm going to just read some of my notes. He broke all the rules in his art and life. He was controversial, notorious, unpredictable. He boasted about his genius. He risked his career in scandalous affairs. This is how one of his draftsmen, one of his people that worked for him, described him. Frank Lloyd Wright was 200% alive.”

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17. “So when I think of somebody that I would describe as arrogant, to me that's somebody that doesn't have the humility to understand that they can learn from other people, that they think they know everything. Frank Lloyd Wright learned from all kinds of people around him. He learned from nature. He learned from poetry. He had very much interdisciplinary approach where he'd have this expose himself to constant new flow of ideas and then combine those ideas, synthesize them, and then create something new. Yes, he was extremely confident, but I think one, it's smarter to some degree if you are like that, to hide it from other people, because what Ben Franklin is telling us, that was true 250 years ago, it's still true today. Most people dislike vanity and others. But I think to have self-confidence in your ability, especially when it comes to your craft, like Frank Lloyd Wright does or did, rather, I think that's an overall good.”

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18. “So every single source that I've come across on Frank Lloyd Wright immediately draws your attention to the fact that he was one of the most egotistical people to ever live. Okay, so my, and a lot of people discount his overall contributions to his field and the stuff he was able to build when he was alive because of this. I've said on past podcasts over and over again, My own belief on ego vanity, my personal opinion on this is a very old opinion. It's similar to Benjamin Franklin writing in his autobiography 250 years ago. And this is what he has to say. This is Ben Franklin. He says, most people dislike vanity in others. Whatever share they have of it themselves. But I give it fair quarter whenever I meet it. Being persuaded that is often productive of good to the”

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19. “Of those things are the same things I thought were so interesting that I took notes on as I watch these documentaries. So let me work from that document right now before I go back into the book. Now, from that prologue, you probably picked up on two things. All right, you picked up on many things, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that the author used the word ego or egotist twice. That's something I didn't know about Frank Lloyd Wright. So let me try to, if you don't, if you don't know anything about his personality, right? Like I didn't, the way I would describe him is like a cross between a PT Barnum level of showmanship with the obsessiveness of his craft, like an Enzo Ferrari and the arrogance, vanity, self-belief of like a Kanye West.”

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20. “Okay, before I jump into the rest of the book, I found Frank Lloyd Wright so fascinating, so interesting, so unique that not only did I read, but this is close to like a 600-page biography that I'm holding in my hand, but I also watched several documentaries this week on The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. And I took a bunch of notes and I'm going to go through those notes before I jump into the rest of the book because when I was thinking about this is I approached before I read the book. I didn't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright. I knew his name. I knew he was an architect. I knew several of the buildings that he built. But I didn't know anything about the personality as the prologue, the devastating tragedy that he had to live through. And so when I was thinking about sitting down and talking to you about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, I asked myself, well, what are the things I wish I would have known going into this book?”

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