Frank Lloyd Wright's Humanism.

Ken Burns documentaries have a reputation for impact, beauty, and thoroughness, but often they include a moment--usually a remark by one of his guest commentators--that is shockingly off the mark. For instance, in his three hours on Thomas Jefferson, otherwise brilliantly crafted, historian John Hope Franklin blamed Jefferson for "cursing" America with slavery, ignoring the fact that slavery had existed in America for two and a half centuries before the Declaration of Independence. And Burns' most recent entry, the lovingly made Frank Lloyd Wright, did it again.

In a two-part miniseries aired on PBS, writer Brendan Gill sums up his feelings on Wright:

   What an architect is said to be about, is provide your fellow human beings
   with the best possible shelter at the lowest possible cost. Frank really
   believed that. And then in the making of temples, very ambitious temples
   ... out of his arrogance [he was able to] create something which is
   selfless. Of course he designed those things, but they are purged of him;
   they are not his monuments; they are beyond; they are monuments to all of
   us, and all of us gain from these monuments in a way that is not that
   simple act of egotism on the part of a great man.

To get Wright's work so completely wrong is remarkable. It is precisely because the opposite is true that Wright's work is so epochal an achievement. Putting aside the fact that Wright constantly and unapologetically went far over his budgets, no architect--and perhaps no artist--ever vested his work with so much of himself as Frank Lloyd Wright. When one stands in one of his buildings--his Wisconsin home Taliesin, for instance--the power of his personality, of his whole world view, seems to exude from the walls like the soft and constant light.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Wright faced a cadre of young antagonists who saw it as their mission to create a new sort of architecture that would embody the needs and aspirations of the "common" person. Determined to create a new proletarian culture for the socialist future they thought was coming, architects like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and especially Le Corbusier sought to design not "homes" but "machines for living."

This International School began to cover the countryside with vast flat slabs of anonymous black glass. They eschewed wood and stone, preferring instead the impersonality of steel, arranged in flat, undecorated planes. Like good communists, these Internationalists did not seek to appeal to humanity's soul; Marxism taught there was no such thing, only social forces that created what some mistook for "human nature." "Architecture for the Masses" would be functional, materialistic, utilitarian, compact, and, above all, anti-individualistic in its form and its effect on the viewer. Corbusier had said, in almost Stalinistic prose, that in his buildings "considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitant of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development ... might be carried as far as possible."

Wright despised the International style, which he said was neither international nor a style. To him, humanity did have a soul and beauty did have a place. As another commentator in the Burns film, historian William Cronon, puts it:

   He wanted to be a democratic architect who would educate the American
   people to an aesthetic greater than the one that they had already achieved.
   He loathed architecture of the mob, which pulled architecture down to the
   least common denominator. But he very much wanted to build buildings that
   would enlighten people and lift people up. He was trying to pull the masses
   above themselves and, as a result, there's something deeply impractical,
   and in some ways anti-democratic, about his democratic vision.

Cronon is exactly right. The genius of Wright lies in his appeal to the self of each individual--but not by creating black slates. Instead, Wright set before --or around--his audience his own personality, so powerful that one's own personality responds, as with the work of a great speaker or author. And like a great speaker or author, Wright vested his work with the force of his personality and challenged the viewer to rise up to it.

That image of rising is vital to understanding Wright from theory to practice. His masterpiece Fallingwater seems to leap from the earth to rise like a cliff. And in his 1953 book The Future of Architecture, he wrote:

   What is spirit? In the language of organic architecture, the "spiritual" is
   never something descending upon the thing from above as a kind of
   illumination, but exists within the thing itself as its very life. Spirit
   grows upward from within and outward. Spirit does not come down from above
   to be suspended there by skyhooks or set upon posts.

The meaning Wright built into his homes arises from the materials, the geometry, the idea behind it all.

Hollyhock House in Los Angeles is a prime example, built in the 1920s for a wealthy patron of the arts, Aline Barnsdall. The theme of the building was the hollyhock flower, which Wright then abstracted into a shape and then built upon it, creating a unified whole, like musical variations on a theme. Wright doesn't reach for some removed Platonic ideal; he searches for the human idea found beneath the surface of an image. Hollyhock House doesn't build on actual hollyhocks but on the idea that such a shape inspires in the mind.

Wright didn't stay bound within nature, nor did he--like the Internationalists--force upon nature an entirely alien contraption. He raises out of nature a human spirit. As philosopher Jacob Bronowski said in his 1993 book The Ascent of Man:

   A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or
   reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis,
   putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by
   analyzing nature. Michelangelo said that vividly, by implication, in his
   sculpture.... "Brain and hand unite": the material asserts itself through
   the hand, and thereby prefigures the shape of the work for the brain.... So
   the great temple architecture of every civilization expresses the
   identification of the individual with the human species.

This is precisely the living force behind Wright's work. His buildings do not descend upon the earth, as a Gropius building descends--or as a Corbusier building crashes. Instead, they rise upwards from the earth, expressing the essential humanism of his vision.

"Why point to heaven?" Wright asked. "Why not build a temple to man?" And he did: the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. Lacking arches, a steeple, or vast stained-glass windows, the Unity Temple is simple, small, softly lit. The entryway is beneath the pews--one looks up at the assembling congregation as one enters. Then, up some stairs and into pews which surround the altar closely, in an intimate, almost familial setting. His church doesn't overshadow humankind, doesn't intimidate. Here religion doesn't hand down its precepts in stone tablets from a mountaintop; it raises humankind from the earth with a gentle, almost parental touch.

Wright doesn't abandon the self--quite the opposite. Where the Gothic cathedrals had, with their vaults of heavy gray stone, sought to crush the self out of parishioners, Wright's humanistic vision expresses the power of the human self. It is indeed a "temple to man." It was, Wright said, meant as "a true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit."

Author Ayn Rand based her 1943 book The Fountainhead roughly on Wright's career. In one scene, her character Howard Roark explains a temple he intends to build:

   If you understand the building, you understand what the figure must be. The
   human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both.
   Uplifted in its quest--and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God--and
   finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form.

And the power of Wright's achievement is precisely this: the power of his self, which "raises man up" from the earth to a human idea--first his, then ours. It is supremely individualistic architecture.

Wright even dedicated his projected Broadacre City to a list of great individualist writers, from Nietzsche to Emerson. And, like them, and like his favorite composer Beethoven, he has often been misunderstood--and understandably so. His personality was so powerful that it was even controlling, as when he designed even the clothing to be worn by this clients. Such charismatic force is common in geniuses, from Johann Goethe to Phineas in John Knowles' A Separate Peace.

Burns' documentary, like many commentaries, insists that Wright was "not a very nice man" and that "you wouldn't want to know him." But as Bronowski said, "The ascent of man is not made by lovable people. It's made by people who have at least two qualities: an immense integrity and at least a little genius." Like every great artist, the force of Wright's personality--of his soul--lies at the very core of his work. As he himself said:

   Man takes a positive hand in creation whenever he puts a building upon the
   earth beneath the sun. If he has a birthright at all, it must consist in
   this: that he, too, is no less a feature of the landscape than the rocks,
   trees, bears, or bees of that nature to which he owes his being.... The sum
   of man's creative impulses, we find, took substance in architecture as his
   creative passion rose and fell within it.... Of what use to us are
   miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them?
   We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man;
   we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine!

Timothy Sandefur has a B.A. in political economics from Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he was editor of the Restoration.