Founders - #112 Frank Lloyd Wright

Starting point is 00:00:00 Frank Lloyd Wright was born two years after the end of the Civil War and died two years after the launch of Sputnik. 91 years and 10 months on this earth. In the approximate middle of that near century span, when he was 47, the greatest architect America had yet produced suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego. Although perhaps that is just saying the same thing twice. A crazed servant named Julian Carlton set fire to Wright's home and went about murdering seven people, one of whom was the woman Wright deeply loved and had been living with for the past several years, even as his own wife kept praying he'd somehow come to his moral senses and return to his family.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Five years before, in the fall of 1909, having already revolutionized American architecture and produced what other artists might have considered a lifetime's worth of work, Wright had abandoned his practice and gone off to Europe with Maima Borthwick. It was not just a local scandal, but a regional outrage and in some ways a national one. She had forsaken her spouse and two little children, and he had forsaken his spouse and six children. And now, after some relative quiet in their lives, 45-year-old Maima Borthwick was dead. No, not just dead, but slaughtered in the most gruesome way.

Starting point is 00:01:40 As much as this moment had been chronicled, poured over, dreamed into by what is now three generations of right biographers and historians, by playwrights, by newspaper feature writers, by documentary filmmakers, by a handful of novelists, by conspiracy theorists, even as it's been dreamed into and performed on stage by an opera company, there is still so much about it that has to be imagined, conjured, which is to say we know so much and simultaneously so little, which in a way is its own definition of Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Riddles wrapped up inside of riddles, triangles drawn inside of circles, drawn inside of squares. One of Wright's lifelong dictums was that his buildings were like plants and trees that grow from inside out and come up from the earth craving the light. He just needed to conceive the thing, draw the thing, and make the thing.

Starting point is 00:02:47 The thing has simply shaken itself out of my sleeve, the old shaman liked to say, ever his own best publicist. In a 72-year career as architect and egotist, Frank Lloyd Wright shook more than 1,100 things from his sleeve, a staggering number by any artistic measurement. They were churches, schools, offices, banks, museums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile showroom, a synagogue, a mile-high skyscraper, and one exotic-looking gas station. Overwhelmingly, though, they were houses, residences, shelters for mankind. Not quite half of all his drawings and designs and studies were realized, and about 400 still come magically out of the American ground looking for the light. This book isn't intended as a Frank Lloyd Wright biography, not in any conventional

Starting point is 00:03:50 sense. Depending on how you count, there are about eight or nine of those. And never mind how many hundreds of historical studies, monographs, coffee table treatments, scholarly examinations of specific Wright buildings or houses or periods. The right industry, from calendars to placemats to bathroom glow lights to keychains to books themselves, just churns on, year after year. Rather this book is meant to be a kind of Schenectady, with selected pockets and a life, standing for the oceanic whole of that life.

Starting point is 00:04:26 The aim is to move the narrative backward and forward in time through these nonlinear pockets or storytelling boxes, trying not to confuse you while also taking things in a general chronological direction and arc from east to west, that is, from Juneth, 1867, when Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin, to April 9th, 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright died in his sleep one morning, two months from his 92nd birthday. All right, so that is from the prologue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Plagued by Fire, The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright,

Starting point is 00:05:12 and it was written by Paul Hendrickson. 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 what 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 want, 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.

Starting point is 00:05:46 I knew several of the buildings that he built. But I didn't know anything about the personality or, 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 Frank the life of Frank Lloyd Wright I asked myself what what are the things I wish I would have known going into this book and a lot of those things are the same things I thought were so interesting that I took notes on as I watched 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

Starting point is 00:06:30 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 get 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 like a P.T. 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. 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, you know, discount his overall contributions to his field and the stuff he was able to build while he was alive because of this. I've said on past podcasts over and over again, my own belief on ego vanity, it's 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.

Starting point is 00:07:45 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 possessor. 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 a very much uh interdisciplinary approach where he'd have this uh 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 don't i think one it's smarter

Starting point is 00:08:38 yeah to some degree if you 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 your ability especially when it comes to your craft like frank lloyd wright does or did rather uh i think that's an overall good thing just keep it to yourself is what i would 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. It was so like 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.

Starting point is 00:09:23 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 career 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. He said, I'm the greatest architect that ever lived. And what he was referring to, he said, forget greatest American living architect. So he constantly referred to as the greatest American living architect. He's like, no, not greatest American architect greatest architect and not just living but ever no qualifiers he said so there's his ego right uh he was he was

Starting point is 00:10:12 described as being a hustler um 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. But listen to how he also describes his craft. Listen to this. He's very, I mean, think about doing the same career. He knew he was going to be an architect since he was a little boy, and he practiced the architecture, or being an architect, for 72 years. This is how he described his craft. Architecture is the triumph of human imagination

Starting point is 00:10:45 over materials, methods, and men to put man into possession of his own earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order. 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 tchotchkes or different things he'd throw them all away i mean he was he is one

Starting point is 00:11:31 of the most unique people i'm trying to get across to you that he's one of the most unique uh people i've ever come across like you can almost he's he's almost impossible to categorize uh when they said that he's a in the prologue it says he says he's a riddle inside of a riddle, squares inside of circles, and all this other stuff. He's very, very just hard to understand and hard to wrap your mind around. He believed, here we go, he believed his clients were privileged to be able to work with him. That reminds me of the reason I brought up the P.T. Barnum, Enzo Ferrari, Kanye combination, because Kanye famously said that his greatest regret in life was never being able to see himself perform live. That's something I could see Frank Lloyd Wright saying. He always would live in the now. He said what's happening now is the most important thing. This also led him to be

Starting point is 00:12:20 at 42 years old, and after 20 years of marriage, he abandoned his kids at the prologue for Maima Borthwick. All he left them was a bunch of unpaid bills. So again, he's not a perfect person by any means at all. This is hilarious. He said rules were for normal people and that he wasn't normal. He said this to the press. He held a press conference on Christmas day because everybody was, at this time in American culture, adultery was punishable. Like you could be arrested for it. And so he runs off with Maima,

Starting point is 00:12:57 I think this is with Maima Borthwick. It might've been the third wife after this. But he holds a press conference on Christmas day to explain his actions, because the press is covering this this. This genius architect, what is he doing? He's a philanderer or whatever you want to call it. He's doing a bunch of immoral, scandalous affairs. So he holds a press conference on Christmas Day to explain his actions. This is what he says. He said, ordinary people cannot live without rules to guide their conduct. I, Frank Lloyd Wright, am not ordinary.

Starting point is 00:13:32 He's essentially saying, listen, society, your rules don't apply to me. He explicitly offered up his life in architecture for critical appraisal. This is actually really smart. Insisting that neither could be adequately understood without the other. Another thing I learned from him, some of his positive traits, besides his obsessiveness, 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?

Starting point is 00:13:59 We're studying excellence. These people are not normal. They're not going to be like they don't write books about normal people the reason they're they're essential what makes them eccentric their their unusualness is what makes them interesting which is all why i say like we the the main message from reading biographies is like lean into whatever makes you eccentric whatever makes you unique he was unbelievably non-conformist and i'll get there in a minute. Single-minded pursuit of his own potential. That's a good thing. This is something that blew my mind that I'm just going

Starting point is 00:14:33 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 in 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 the time he was about 20 years old to the time he was 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, his self-belief never wavered. And then his most, this is what

Starting point is 00:15:19 I'm about to read to you, blew my mind. I've never, I've never come across anybody like this before. He lives 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? 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 in the same thing. 80 was his most productive decade.

Starting point is 00:15:56 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 craziest 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.

Starting point is 00:16:22 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:16:47 It 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.

Starting point is 00:17:07 He says, I defy anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn't first done by me. There's another thing I've thought of. Later in life, he was working mainly in Arizona and grew up in Wisconsin, felt very much like the Midwest was a part of who he was. And he did something, he isolated himself, which we've seen a lot lately. I think that's one of the main takeaways from the life of Henry Singleton, the more I study him, is just sitting in your office, along with your thoughts, reading books, coming up with a—I think they said his office produced a cornucopia of ideas, Singleton, that is. Well, part of that is maintaining focus, which is extremely hard for us to do, right? Well, right—you see this a lot.

Starting point is 00:17:58 Enzo Ferrari had this. Steve Jobs had the focus. Tons of people had focus, right? James Dyson. But they were explicit about maintaining that focus so in arizona that now this is a description from one of wright's employees in arizona it was like living on the moon we seldom saw newspapers magazines or radio you lived in a complete atmosphere with very little encroachment from the outside world. I have not developed the

Starting point is 00:18:26 communication abilities yet to describe that idea, to flush it out, but there is a theme through these biographies where you're seeing this. They shut out the outside world. They do not let it encroach on their ideas and their visions and how they want to live their life, and as a result, they produce things that are unique that are not common finally one other thing before i get into the book that i think is interesting to know and i mean he insisted to have a certain poem read at his funeral and it's a poem by emerson and it's called self-reliance and some of his favorite lines these two lines i'm going to read to you, and then we'll get into the book. He says, Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Starting point is 00:19:17 All right, so let's jump into the book. I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to fill in what his personality was like. Let's really try to understand who he was as a person. This is one of the best things I've learned from him. Find something that you love to do and don't stop until you die. He says, nothing so seductive in this life, he once said, as the prospect of sitting down to a blank piece of paper with a pencil. There is no being lonesome after that, he said. It's almost hard to imagine, but in the last decade of his life, Wright designed nearly a third of his total output.

Starting point is 00:20:00 He just kept rising, waking up meaning, and going to his board, to the board, to the, they say tilted board. You ever seen what an architect works out of? I actually want to buy one for myself because I think they're so cool. That is amazing to me. I posted notes over and over everywhere today, so I want to make sure that you understand how crazy this is. A third of his entire output happened in the last decade of his life.

Starting point is 00:20:29 That blows my mind. I absolutely cannot understand how that 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:21:04 although really it was for his our aesthetic aesthetic contemplation although really it was for his aesthetic satisfaction and contemplation to hell with us and to hell with those who whom the spaces were supposedly being built and for whom he was allegedly working so it talks about one of his most famous designs is the Johnson Wax Building. And you've got to look at it. Let me Google it to see what comes up on Google Images. Because the interior of this building is one of the greatest. I cannot believe he designed it almost 100 years ago. Let's see.

Starting point is 00:21:38 It was built from 1936 to 1939. Yeah, Google Image Church Johnson Wax Building. And see what the interior, I've never even seen a room that looks like this. Much less, it could blow your mind that it was built in the 1930s. But anyways, the person that was hiring the guy that was running Johnson Wax, the company, really successfully.

Starting point is 00:21:56 He's like, at first we started out and Frank Lloyd Wright, he was describing the process. He's like, Frank Lloyd Wright was working for me. Then as the cost kept going up because he was notorious like frank was not frugal at all uh he had very little money most of his life because he insisted on living beyond his means um he did not take debt seriously he was this caused him a lot of trouble later on he had houses foreclosed upon uh got punched in the face because he didn't pay people certain money money money that he owed whatever the case was

Starting point is 00:22:26 But anyways, he says at the beginning, you know, he said it was gonna cost let's say 700,000 I can't remember the exact number winds up being like two million dollars and this is in 1936 dollars, right? So he says at the beginning Frank was working for me then his cost Kept rising we were working together and then finally his costs kept going I eventually was working for him. And I think that little anecdote is a good way to describe the relationship that Wright had with his clients. Now, something we talked about last week with David Geffen, and we've seen this with Steve Jobs and others, a huge aspect of Wright's personality is he understood what I feel is true,

Starting point is 00:23:04 that everything in life is malleable understood what I feel is true, that everything in life is malleable, including the truth. Now, that could be a negative aspect, and it was in Wright's case because he was, let's see, how would I put this, seems to be a pathological liar. His autobiography, I couldn't even read and use because it's so whittled with lies lies that you can like fact check through other documents and again this is why i say he was a very much a showman like a pt barnum he i think he did this intentionally all right so it says if he if he is hand down hands down our greatest architect he is also hands down one of our gold standard artist provocateurs. He was such a fantastic fabricator on any subject under the sun that it became something of a cliche among his chroniclers

Starting point is 00:23:53 to say he barely grasped the basic concept of truth-telling. More about his personality. The reason I think people say he's such a riddle, he's so hard to understand, is because he possessed a lot of what we would consider opposite traits simultaneously. So he had bravado and pain, joy and sadness. He says, two things can be true at once. You can be so self-satisfied and full of yourself and also secretly shamed by things and quietly haunted.

Starting point is 00:24:20 That's a good description of Frank, I think. He says, and he experienced the full spectrum of life, the highest highs and the lowest lows. Ugly things happen. I've said that the best and worst of everything has come to me. A little bit about his early life. All he really had when he started off, he leaves Wisconsin to go to Chicago to build his architectural career our Chicago at the time was like the the epicenter of building and all he had was a complete faith in himself now this is interesting there's not a lot about his early childhood we kind of meet him when he's a teenager and he's the other than like he said in stories we don't know if it's

Starting point is 00:25:01 true that his mom insisted that when she gave birth to a son that he'd be an architect. She'd put like he writes that she'd put pictures up of great buildings throughout the world in like his nursery, like when he was a small kid. So we don't know too much about his early life. But we do know fast forward to about 17, 18, 19. There's a discrepancy on the years on when this actually happened. But by this time, he's already extremely confident and and egotistical so all he really has is a complete faith in himself he says uh mother fueled father ghosted here he comes now 19 years old out of the long grasses of wisconsin wisconsin prairie a kid a rube a bumpkin by every estimation except his own,

Starting point is 00:25:48 possessed of his own small reveries and desperations and unseen haunts, longing to make history on a large scale. It's interesting that he had giant-sized ambition from even an early age, longing to make history on a large scale, propelled by a boundless faith grown strong in him. That's a faith in himself. That's what they're talking about. He had a boundless belief that he will somehow turn himself,

Starting point is 00:26:11 in short order, into a world figure on architect's stage. It's not only going to happen, but in not much more than a decade. Now, here's going to be, well, let me not mince words. but in not much more than a decade. Now here's going to be, well, let me not mince words. This is a shitty part of his personality. He says he was a father to his buildings only. I think he had seven, he had six kids, I think his first wife, and maybe one or two after that.

Starting point is 00:26:40 But he says, this is him writing, Is it equality? Question mark. Fatherhood? Question mark. If so, I seemed born without it. And yet a building was a child. I have had this father feeling, I am sure, when coming back after a long time to one of my buildings. That must be the true feeling of fatherhood. But I never had it for any of my children.

Starting point is 00:27:05 So this is also a very bizarre part because later on some of his older sons wind up working with him for several years on multiple different projects. So he left, I think the oldest one when he left was maybe 18. And I think the youngest one was like five, three, small. And a lot of them have since written books and given interviews and they're all very harmed by his desertion you know but they did have like experiences with him over the years uh i don't think he i don't know if he ever spoke to his wife again after that but he did have somewhat relationships now again he was only the way to think about him is he was supremely focused on realizing his grand potential that he saw for himself. So everything really comes to the backseat besides his craft, which is why he talks about it the way he does, including his children, his wives.

Starting point is 00:27:54 You know, just he was extremely selfish. And again, in the grand scheme of things, that is a negative attribute. Now, the only positive aspect of it that I would see, and I'm not obviously like, this is not behavior I want in my life and I'm not condoning it, but I'm trying to understand the mindset was that he believed now was the only important thing right now. This moment was the only thing we ever have in life and that you should do with your life, like what you feel to be true to yourself. And so there's a lot of writings where he's like, you know, I feel bad about abandoning my wife and my kids, but I have to live my truth.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Now, to me, that's unethical. I would never do that. Like my daughter is the most important person in my life by far. The idea that I would just never like walk away or never relate, that's silly nonsense to me. I feel like it's one of the most beneficial things that ever happened in my life is once you become a father, you realize that now there's a life that is more important than your own. And I think that's a deeply profound human experience.

Starting point is 00:28:57 The idea that I would die for her. I would sacrifice my life if it meant, like, if she was in danger, I would gladly give up my own life. That is a level of love that is just not comparable to nothing else. Right. But, but I also understand that people look at that different and that we have different morals and ethics. And I find the behavior that, um, that Frank had towards his children disgusting, but I also understand, and I'm not excusing it, there's something pure about living life for your own selfish needs, even if I wouldn't be willing to do that. So I would try to take the good out of the idea that he's going to live his

Starting point is 00:29:46 truth and he's going to live to create the life that he wants to live in. But I just wish he would also extend that to, you know, still like if you want to be divorced from your wife, whatever, that's your adults. You could do whatever you decide what you need to do. What I don't understand is when people get divorced and they don't talk to their kids anymore. So that's what I'm saying. Like if you're unhappy in your marriage, go build the life that you want to build. You know, and in many cases he had like a huge midlife crisis. He shut down his own firm for God's sake.

Starting point is 00:30:11 Something he built took 25 years to build up until that point. Um, but just, just don't abandon your kids, man. They need you. All right. Um, let's move forward here. This is also something I found inspiring. Like a lot of the people we study, they're terrible students. They're not good at formal schooling, but they're really good at life. And if you have to choose between either of those options, like, of course, you'd rather be good at life. So it says Frank Lloyd Wright barely attended college at all. He was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin for a total of two semesters and barely that. He had barely been admitted in the first place

Starting point is 00:30:47 as a special student, that's in quotation marks, since he had not achieved enough credits to graduate from Madison High School. So he did a very short time in college, but didn't even graduate high school. And yet still is one of the most successful people that's ever lived. So again, that just tells you that only the autodidacts are

Starting point is 00:31:05 free, the people that are actually capable of and willing to teach themselves. Another bit about his personality, obsessive, total control. This is a huge theme in the book. This is what he would do. He liked letting himself into his, that's in quotation marks, houses to begin rearranging the furniture while the owners were

Starting point is 00:31:26 out, moving books and photographs, and putting their ghastly trinkets in bottom drawers. So he would go back and visit his properties. Sometimes you weren't even there. He'd let himself into the house and then rearrange and put it back into how he thought it should be. That's a different level of arrogance. That's a different level of control that's a different level of control

Starting point is 00:31:46 that is very very bizarre and he also had a lot of really really good ideas this is really smart he had a point of view and he had conviction so it says the interiors of frank lloyd right houses are about many things but at the center of each one is the intertwined idea of openness and flow at that time the open floor plans probably the most common floor plan in america now new construction right at the time though it says wright was out to break the box to destroy forever those tight draped dark horse hair closed off victorian rooms so you have a house that have you know room for a piano a a house that had room for a piano, a room to eat, a room for a kitchen.

Starting point is 00:32:28 He's like, no, just take down all those walls. What are you doing here? He wanted to let light and space in, air in, life in. And he did so radically and evangelically. Another thing he did that was smart, he tried to put that point of view to larger ideas throughout his life wright himself tried to articulate what he was doing in terms of this interlocking idea of openness and

Starting point is 00:32:50 harmonious flow as it connects to the larger idea of freedom and indeed the still larger idea of america herself 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 in 1900 was the first truly democratic expression of our democracy and architecture would start a controversy with professional addicts who believe architecture has no political significance. So let's say that the spirit of democracy, and he defines that as 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 a single, spacious, harmonious unit of living room, dining room, and kitchen with appropriate entry convenience. Okay, so what is he saying there? He writes really funny, kind of like a little bit confusing, so you have to parse

Starting point is 00:33:50 it, in my opinion. So he's saying, I took the houses as they were being built, I looked at them, I grabbed them in my hand, and I yanked off all the unessential. That idea that I talk about over and over again on this podcast that I got from Bruce Lee that I think is the core to great products and experiences is hacking away the unessential. So to him, right, hated, he's like, stop with all your, it's really weird because he'd collect a lot of possessions, but then he wouldn't design houses that had any storage. So he's like, I don't want to get that attic out of here. Get that basement out of here. You're not having a garage. He claims to be the person that invented a carport. So you see a lot on his residences. He's like, I don't want a bunch of places for you to put your stuff. You shouldn't have all this stuff. So he's like, listen, I'm going to take off the attic. I'm

Starting point is 00:34:32 going to take off the porch. I'm going to pull up the basement and I'm going to make one single big, beautiful room. And then a series of bedrooms. And he did that over and over again. So, and then I love the idea of tying that. He's like, we're setting the American free inside of his own home, just like the idea of the original founding idea of America of having freedom. And he would constantly compare his ideas to philosophical ideas. He'd compare them to ideas he discovered in nature. I think this is extremely smart and can be applied by anybody in their craft. He just happened to do it with dwellings.

Starting point is 00:35:10 One thing to know about Frank Lloyd Wright, he always lived above his means. He was terrible with money. And as a result, if you're going to be terrible with money, you're going to have a shitty, like you're going to have a terrible life. He says there had never been enough money in those years or any years really. And the spendthrift head of the house had been determined to keep living high above his means. So this is some of the stuff he would buy. Dandy clothing, subscription tickets to the opera, oriental rugs, books, Japanese prints, state-of-the-art cameras. And so he had one of his famous quotes.

Starting point is 00:35:40 He says, so long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves. Who cared if the village grocer had to come around begging for payment on his months past due bill? That's terrible. He was chased by creditors his entire life. One thing to know that he had a large benefit of going to Chicago, taking that risk and going there because he winds up working. He was extremely gifted at a young age, so he was promoted relatively fast. But his mentor was one of the greatest architects ever and the person that's credited with the invention of the skyscraper. Wright had gone to work for his beloved master, the great,ful riddle field and ultimately tragic lewis sullivan lewis sullivan was the father of the american skyscraper he was a promulgator you're

Starting point is 00:36:31 going to recognize you might not recognize the name but you're going to recognize his famous quote his he was a promulgator of one of the most famous phrases in all of modernism form follows function that's louis sullivan if if frank ll If Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest American architect, then Louis Sullivan cannot be that far behind him. So Sullivan immediately recognized the talent that Frank had. And Frank is working for Sullivan, and he makes a lot of rapid progress. And then I also want to tell you about his rapid progress, but also he finds a unique solution to building his own house. Keep in mind at this time we're talking about Franks in his early 20s

Starting point is 00:37:07 so it says in no time he'd become a good pencil in the master's hand. That's how he described his work with Sullivan. He was a good pencil but the master was the one Louis Sullivan was the one teaching him right? He earned one promotion and then another and then another and then another. Eventually he was supervising the entire drawing staff. There was something like two dozen people uh reporting to him um he's getting at the time there's a bunch of other architectural firms they're all kind of um located by each other so they compete for talent right and so frank is getting poached and sullivan stops that from happening so frank does something really smart here and he realizes that from happening. So Frank does something really smart

Starting point is 00:37:45 here and he realizes that Sullivan would, is not willing to let him go. So he has a little bit of leverage himself. So he says Sullivan not wanting to lose him. The partners, Sullivan and the, did not want to lose Frank. The partners had proposed a five-year contract, which would make Wright the highest paid draftsman in the city. But Wright typically had had a different money idea. Could they not pay him the agreed upon salary, so it's a five-year contract for $5,000, right, but also loan him an additional $5,000 right away so that he might build his own home?

Starting point is 00:38:18 And then he says, could not weekly deductions be taken from his paycheck until the note had been satisfied? The partners agreed. So he gets his contract and then borrows an additional $5,000 against the contract to build his own house. He's not going to last the five years of the contract, by the way. One of the conditions of the agreement, though, had been that Wright would not do any moonlighting

Starting point is 00:38:38 on his own residential commissions. Well, at the very beginning, we talked about Wright did not believe rules applied to him at all he said rules were for ordinary people i am not ordinary i will make it in this you know this is more of um what a lot of people criticize him about is that he would just not would not honor his word so he says uh right's honor had held for about a year and a half but the reckless spending but his reckless spending habits uh not to say the arrival of all his children in step order had caught up he needed more money so he gets married around this time and they i think they have four kids within like the first like

Starting point is 00:39:14 five or six years of marriage now this part is very interesting because you see a young raw talent right but he's not the frank lloyd wright he becomes he's not that person yet right but he's not the frank lloyd right he becomes he's not that person yet right but he's getting there and you see that potential other people see it so this is how frank and his work was seen by his closest friend who was also an architect at the time now at this point in the story frank is in his late 20s he's start i think he's already jumped out onto his own okay so this is his friend writing to Frank. He says, I've found there's no joy in architecture for me, except as I see you do it. Damn. That's a hell of a statement. I'm you're so good at the craft that we're both doing that.

Starting point is 00:39:56 I'm not like, I don't even get, I don't get joy unless I see you do it. Uh, it bores me when I try to do it myself. There's the truth for you. You are, that's italicized, the thing you do. That's a great six-word description of Frank Lloyd Wright. You are the thing you do. I'm not, and I never will be. You are going to go far. You'll have a kind of success. Remember, it's not there yet, but they're seeing this.

Starting point is 00:40:22 It's on the horizon. You will have a kind of success. I believe the kind you want. And he talks about why is this happening. Not everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work and human sacrifice you'll make for it. So this is why I compare him to Enzo Ferrari because Enzo Ferrari woke up and he worked on building race cars. And then he went to sleep. That was his life. Then he woke up, and he worked on building race cars, and then he went to sleep. That was his life.

Starting point is 00:40:46 Then he woke up, and that's it. He even said the only love he had in his life besides race cars was his son, Enzo, and his son dies at like 24 years old. But he even says, like, these people that get married and say they love their wives, he's like, the only true love I ever had was for race cars and for Dino. Or no, his name wasn't Enzo. It was Dino, wasn't it? He's, yeah, it's not Enzo Jr.

Starting point is 00:41:08 It's Dino. I'm sorry. So yeah, Enzo's son Dino died at 24. I want to make myself clear there. So anyways, his friend, when Frank Lloyd Wright's in his late 20s, is picking up something. He's like, you're going to have a success. And it's because, one, natural talent. But two, you're paying the a success and it's because one natural talent but two

Starting point is 00:41:25 you're paying the price in hard concentrated work just like enzo woke up and dedicated every single waking hour to his craft that's what frank did frank and he burns himself out unfortunately that's why he 20 years after this he disappears for a long time he worked seven days a week constantly um so he didn't really you know he was not prioritizing building a relationship with his kids. I wouldn't say he was prioritizing building a relationship with anybody, really, but his buildings. And so I just think the sentence, I'm going to read it again. Not everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work

Starting point is 00:41:57 and human sacrifice that you'll make. So we saw that very early on. And I just want to think about that word again for a little bit. Sacrifice. It's a sacrifice to do what he did. That's why I always say, like, what I'm personally learning from all these biographies, and I've said over and over again that I feel like uh Ed Thorpe in his book man of all mark man for all markets um I think Ed Thorpe mastered life because he had the balance that I like if I if I wanted to pattern my life there's a lot of you know traits and and things I've learned

Starting point is 00:42:36 from every person that we've studied right but if there's one person that I'd say damn I want that life for myself it'd be Ed Thorpe because he was extremely successful and innovative in what he did for a living. He was financially successful, but he realized that money to a point has diminishing returns. So he would turn down lucrative projects and businesses that he knew would make a ton of money because the time required would take away from his wife and kids and then he had other interests He you know, he loved studying mathematics physics reading He was dedicated to health and fitness. I just saw a video. It's in you have access to my notes

Starting point is 00:43:15 Because this is a misfit episode I just took notes on a talk that Eddard just gave I think like a few months ago He's 87 years old go watch that video Like the guy took care of himself. He just says a lot of smart things. He had the balance. Like I think that is if you live a life more like Ed Thorpe on emotional and like life enjoyment level, you're probably more content

Starting point is 00:43:39 than the people like Enzo or Frank Frank optimized for one area of his life. My point is, let's, why don't we pick two or three things that are extremely important? Let's say, let's say Thorpe picked four. Financial, you know, work success, family success, fitness, and learning. Those are four great things to me. And then he worked on, he developed systems and dedicated time to all of them, but kept them in like a harmonious balance. I think that to me is mastering life where, you know, Frank had a hard time developing relationships with people. Maybe he didn't want to, I'm not saying everybody has to do the same thing, but this word sacrifice, I want to hold onto because now we're going to talk

Starting point is 00:44:16 about how his youngest son saw Frank Lloyd Wright and how that his, his, the relationship he, I guess, did not have with his father impacted the relationship that his name is, what's his name, Robert, that Robert has with his own kids. Let me read this section to you. It's really interesting. He did a conscious turn away from and a deliberate rejection of the vulgar narcissism and arrogance and bombast and egocentrism and reckless financial, not to say moral, ways of his transcendently gifted father. So he's not, man, I held up Ed Thorpe as an example.

Starting point is 00:44:55 I want that life. I want those attributes for my life. Frank's youngest son is looking at his father's life. He's like, I don't want any of that. So it says, when he was in his 70s, Robert Wright sat down and wrote a handful of essays about his life. He called them letters to his children on his childhood. One of the essays was a 10-page single-spaced piece entitled Your Father's Recollections of His Father. He might have titled it Your Father's Non-Recollections of His Father. Now this is from quoting from his writing.

Starting point is 00:45:26 I remember visiting him in Chicago hotel room when I was about 12. And I was seeing him stave off an insistent creditor with jocular excuses. That's a funny way to say lies. When the man left, he turned to me, all smiles and said, son, that's the way you handle creditors. I didn't think so then and I still don't don't remember he's writing this to his kids. To me, he had just gone through such a humiliating experience that I've been afraid to buy anything on credit ever since. To him, it was all of a, it was all a joke. There is a certain like playfulness of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright where you just kind of realize we're all temporary and you know you don't really have to take anything seriously

Starting point is 00:46:10 if you don't want to I mean that's you you apply it to the wrong domains and that could be dangerous but I think that's an important sentence to him it was all a joke but what the document mostly seems is its own sad proof for the kind of damage Frank Lloyd Wright inflicted on his children. This is how it ends. Now back to the writing of Robert. I have dutifully restrained myself from a chronological count of all our many brief contacts. Unfortunately, we never had any real rose or any especially tender moments. There's no big fights, but no tender moments either. He was always kind and affectionate with me, although frequently impatient. The sad truth is that we were friendly strangers and almost any of his favorite clients could tell you more about him than I can. So this is decades after Frank dies. son is 70 years old and I think that

Starting point is 00:47:09 echoes to me the sacrifice that word sacrifice that Frank's friend and fellow architect used to describe the eventual success that you will have Frank that sacrificed you made now we reach this idea that I've talked about a lot that is kind of a main theme when you read these biographies that no one owns ideas. So we're going to see the influence. Well, let me read this to you and then let me tell you where I, how I kind of connect this to the other founders we've studied. Now back to Louis Sullivan, right? This is what he called his master. Sullivan, from whom Wright would learn more about architecture than from any other person in his life, was always way out ahead of the pupil on the gospel of creating an American architecture for Americans.

Starting point is 00:47:56 Think about when this is happening. You're talking about his career last from, let's say, end of the 1800s to 1950. That's a very pro pro-american this is when like america's booming right uh it says uh gospel creating on american architecture for americans frank lloyd wright gets way too much credit for that idea not that he didn't believe in the gospel to his toenails which he did or to understand it deeper ways than sullivan which he did or raise it to far more brilliant levels which he he did. But the dream didn't originate with him. So the author, that's not the point. Like, I understand it didn't originate with him, but nothing originates with anybody. No one owns ideas. So Frank is learning an idea from Sullivan that he takes and runs with.

Starting point is 00:48:41 That is perfectly fine. That is normal. That's how humans learn. I've talked about this over and over again. There's a lot of things that Steve Jobs is credited with saying, yeah, I'm building a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, liberal arts and science, liberal arts and humanities, different words in different times. That came from Edwin Land of Polaroid. We're all influenced by somebody else. You study Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, and Jim Sinegal. Jim Sinegal is the founder of Costco. A lot of the stuff that comes out of those three guys' mouths came from Sol Price, who I also did a podcast on. That is the nature of things. The same thing that we're doing right now, which is learning good ideas, and in this case, a lot of bad ideas from the past, is the

Starting point is 00:49:19 same thing they all did too. And the same thing that entrepreneurs, artists, anybody in the future will be doing in the past. This cycle will continue over and over again. So I just, I don't buy that. I think it's a lie. No one owns ideas. You can take them, you can borrow them, you can add to them, you can manipulate them,

Starting point is 00:49:35 and then you can use them as a tool, which I think is the smarter way. And that's exactly what Frank did. The fact is that he talked about his work in like a spiritual, almost like he had a religious reverence for it. That is unbelievably smart to do. One, it's like, it's completely compelling to people that are reading his words or listening to it. And he wrote a lot and like he did a lot of op-eds, you know, major publications, newspapers, and he, that, it's so important to tell people why you're doing what you're doing. Okay, so at this point in the story, Wright is already on his own.

Starting point is 00:50:09 He's developing a lot of houses, getting a lot of attention. And then he does something which I think is essential to a life well lived. He bets on himself. He turns down a giant, fantastic opportunity to bet on himself. So there's another famous architect, a guy named Burnham. Once he's like Frank's gifted, I want him on my team. Burnham had been hugely impressed by Wright's Winslow house and was willing to underwrite a kind of all expense paid six year postgraduate education in Paris and Rome. She's like, come with us to Europe. We're going to build, we're going to study the architecture there and build over there and I'll pay for everything. Wright turned him down. He would stake his chances on his own visions. This is a quick overview of Frank Lloyd Wright's 91 years on this earth.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are trying to reproduce his own history of calamitous fall, improbable comeback, lurid headlines, quiet beauty, incalculable sorrow, financial desperation, sexual intrigue, unsolvable riddle, and not least, the determination to survive. No, to triumph." That's a hell of a sentence. One of my favorite sentences in the entire book. Okay, so now we got to the part where I think it's probably the most inspiring part of his story. And at first it has to do with great amount of tragedy that he experiences and his family experiences.

Starting point is 00:51:39 And this is the midlife crisis. Now I fast forward way ahead in the chronology. What's the word I'm looking for? You know what i'm trying to say um so you know he was 32 last we checked in with him now he's almost 50. and at this point in his life he gives he essentially looks around his life and says yeah i don't like this anymore let's hit the complete reset button and what i mean by inspiring about this is that he spends you know 20 years something like that maybe even more trying to like wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what he wants out of life and then eventually supersedes his past accomplishments if he had stopped right

Starting point is 00:52:23 here he closes down never opens up architecture, he's probably one of the best architects ever lived, right? Not, I don't think, as he characterizes him, the best ever. But what's most inspiring is that he goes through the most painful, horrible experiences of his life during this period and then comes back better than ever. That is the main thing that I took away from the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and that I want you to take away. As long as we never stop,

Starting point is 00:52:52 as long as we don't quit, there's always possibility in the next day. And again, I want to go back to the fact that a third of his total output happened in the last 10 years of his life. All right, so let's go to the midlife crisis. We're going to see some crazy stuff here. All right. In Wright's case, there were other issues too, not least the work itself and where he felt it was leading him. Nowhere.

Starting point is 00:53:15 Imagine being obsessed your whole life with your craft. You put your heart and soul into it, and then 25 years later, you're completely dissatisfied. Oh, that's heartbreaking this absorbing consuming phase of my experience as an architect ended about 1909 i was losing grip on my work and even interest in it every day of every week and far into the night of nearly every day sunday included that's what he was talking about. That was his work schedule. Because I could see no way out because I did not know what I wanted. I wanted to go away. Everything personal or otherwise bore heavily on me. What I wanted, I did not know. So when my family life in the spring of 1909 conspired against the freedom to which I'd come to feel every soul entitled,

Starting point is 00:54:07 and I had no choice would I keep my self-respect but to go out, a voluntary exile, into the uncharted and unknown, to get my back against the wall and live, if I could, an unconventional life. He's saying there, he's like, my life became too conventional. It's too normal. I'm designing the same houses, variations of the same houses over and over again. I'm married to the same woman. I'm living the same life seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and I don't want it anymore. Now, that's pretty crazy, but think about the poem, that line from the poem he wanted read at his funeral. Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind. I don't like that he, that he hurt the people around him. That is, you know, that's, that's, I don't like it. I can't say it another way. Like, I obviously am not telling you to do that. At the same time,

Starting point is 00:55:01 he felt he was not living his own truth, and he felt that he wasn't living the life he was meant to live. I just wish he went about it in a different way where it wasn't so damaging to the people around him. But I think it's important. There's a great quote by Alan Watts I always think about, and he says it's so important for you to answer it. I'm going to kill this quote. You know what? Let me just look for it so don't I don't mess it up okay I found the quote I'm gonna read

Starting point is 00:55:29 the whole quote I was the only read you the last sentence but it's so good I listened listen I'm also a little crazy I have this quote in in audio format and I listen to it a lot as a reminder like I have you, pictures, things that recenter me, keep me motivated, that I have to expose myself over and over again because we always talk about this idea that your mind isn't defeated. It constantly plays tricks on you, confuses you. And so I have a collection of things that I refer back to as kind of a way to center myself and keep me on the path that I want to be on.

Starting point is 00:56:00 And one of this is this quote from Alan Watts. He says, We'd like to be painters. We'd like to be poets. We'd like to be poets. We'd like to be writers. But as everybody knows, we can't earn any money that way. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money. If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living,

Starting point is 00:56:30 that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. It is absolutely stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you really do like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, somebody is interested in everything. Anything you can be interested in, you will find others who are. But it is absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't

Starting point is 00:56:56 like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See, what we are doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives that we are living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing so it's all wretch and no vomit it never gets there and this is the most important sentence the last of the quote and what reminds me about what's happening in frank lloyd's rights life right now. Therefore, it is so important to consider this question. What do I desire? And I think where we're at, Frank Lloyd Wright's life is him coming to the realization that what he desires is not the life he built for himself. And that could be absolutely devastating when you've built a life with with other people and that's what happens

Starting point is 00:57:45 his wife held on to the fact that he'd come back for decades and he never did the destruction and the pain he caused her and the children it's almost it's almost impossible to add up and the reverberations of those pains through generations and how they affected their relationship with their own children. And at the same time, Wright oriented himself around, what do I desire? So he said, the archetype absorbed the father in me, perhaps, because I had never got used to the word nor the idea of being one, as I saw them all around the block and met them among my friends.

Starting point is 00:58:23 So he's saying, like, everybody around me, they have these families. They love spending time with their kids. They take pride in being a father. I told you, obviously, you know, I've said it over and over again. It's the most important job I have in my life, I feel. But Frank didn't. He didn't. And as hard as that for us to accept, like he decided I'm going to live

Starting point is 00:58:46 my truth, the integrity of my own mind. Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind. So, okay, let's get back to the book. This is how a family friend described Frank Lloyd Wright when he was 41. This is right before he left his family. Frank Lloyd Wright is a strange, delightful soul, a radical original thinker working out his ideas. This is now, I just got done talking about the negatives to Frank, right? In large part, the negative things that he did to other people. This is a positive though. He's a radical original thinker. He's working out his ideas consistently as an artist. Much of his buildings, to me, are too bizarre and away from tradition to be beautiful. But that's, again, it's subjective. All art is subjective. Architecture, I love, I'm surprised it's the first art, I think it's the first architect I've covered on this podcast, because anytime I go to a new city, it's one of the first things I do is, like, walk around

Starting point is 00:59:41 and look at the architecture. I think it's, like, I'm fascinated by it. And so for some weird reason, I separated that activity that I do all the time with studying the people that build the buildings. I don't know why I missed that disconnect. And this, I should ask, I don't know if I pointed this out earlier, but I never even thought to cover Frank Lloyd Wright. A misfit sent me this book. So again, please do keep the book recommendations coming because I learned so much i didn't know this book existed and now you know i've spent countless hours this week studying this guy all right uh much of its buildings to me is too bizarre and away from tradition to be beautiful but he has idea big ideas and is gloriously ruthless in sticking to what he believes

Starting point is 01:00:20 and now somewhere towards the end of the book, we find the author explicitly telling us what the central argument to this book is. And it's why I keep going back and forth between the unbelievable, I want all the unbelievable positive traits of Frank Lloyd, right? Without all the negative like pain and agony and that happened around him. And that's why I kept bringing up over and over again, the fact that this guy is like a riddle he's very unique and hard to even explain so it says at times shame-filled and self-justifying this letter would would fly in the face of anyone who wishes to think of Frank Lloyd Wright only as an egoist incapable of self-examination,

Starting point is 01:01:06 or incapable of looking back, or regretful reflection. A person whom ordinary life never touches. That's the idea of it, of him, right? But that's not true. In fact, as is the central argument of this book, it was always touching him, haunting him visibly and not. So again, he said the integrity of my own mind is sacred and I'm going to live my truth, right? And then go back to that word sacrifice. And he was willing to do that, but he sacrificed a lot. And in this case, we're taught, we see a lot of evidence where he's looking back and he has, he's full of regrets. He's full of them. And now we're back to another inspiring part.

Starting point is 01:01:51 The volume of work that he completed after the age of 60 was astonishing. And it came after two decades of people saying, this guy, he's a has-been, he's a loser. He doesn't know what, he's got a bunch of good theories, but he's not building anything. You can't be. He looked at himself as an artist, but he talked about the difference of architecture as other artists. If you don't build anything, it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:02:18 So it says what he really was saying was that the 64-year-old. This is an architecture critic talking about Frank Lloyd Wright. What he was really saying was that this 64-year-old, this is an architecture critic talking about Frank Lloyd Wright. What he was really saying was that this 64-year-old was through. He called him an aging individualist, the idol of certain intellectuals, an artist with a martyr complex, a builder better known than his buildings, somebody who seemed more genius than architect, and who, when you added it all up, That's a huge insult. He's calling him an architectural theorist. That's a slap in the face, especially for somebody like Frank who, again, his self-belief never wavered. As an architectural theorist, Mr. Wright has no superior, but as an architect,

Starting point is 01:03:07 he has little to contribute for comparison. So that is one of the main architectural critics of the day telling you what he thinks of you, that yeah, you have a lot of good theories, but you haven't built enough, right? Especially over the last 20 years. And so Frank uses this as fuel. And this is where he rattles off the best work of his life. So this is a wild summary of Frank Lloyd Wright's last few decades. Between late 1914 and mid-1936. So 1914 is when Maima Berthwick is killed.

Starting point is 01:03:41 And he goes into this exile. So we're talking about 22 years here. An interval of not quite 22 years, Frank Lloyd Wright got catastrophically, catastrophically, catastrophically involved with a bad morphine addict named Miriam Noel. He marries her. She's a drug addict and a psycho. Uh, so he, he, he gets involved with a morphine addict. They have like a 14 year relationship, violent, violent. And, uh, what's the opposite of calm? They were crazy. Uh, he built the empirical, uh, Imperial hotel in Tokyo. He conceived a child out of wedlock. He suffered, uh, taliesin burning down again. Taliesin is where, um, Mamaw, one of his, his residents, his most famous residences he ever built

Starting point is 01:04:29 where maymaul was uh killed and then it burned down and burned down like a bunch of times kept rebuilding it uh suffered taliesin burning down again spent a couple nights in jail in downtown minneapolis on charges of moral turpitude so that what they're talking about there is i think he tries to escape with a young i think it's his third wife she's like 20 something years younger than him and he goes across state lines, and I guess that was illegal because they were both married at the time. So you could go to jail for it at this time. Isn't that crazy? Spent a couple nights in jail in downtown Minneapolis

Starting point is 01:04:51 on charges of moral turpitude, lost his house in foreclosure, and experimented semi-successfully with textile block housing in California, got married for a third and final time, went begging for work and clients, seethed at his professional obituaries watched himself being replaced by lavishly embraced glass and steel european modernists which he hated began what he called the talusine talusin fellowship i think it was a talusin fellowship as like a school he was very he was bankrupt at this time so his third wife

Starting point is 01:05:22 gives him the idea of like why don't we have a lot of room on this property? They start their own school. It says, okay, you come here, you pay. I forgot how much it was. I thought I covered it. I think I have some notes on it. But, you know, essentially he's still world famous, even if he hadn't any money.

Starting point is 01:05:37 So you come here, you pay, let's say, $1,000 or whatever, and you study under the master Frank Lloyd Wright. But you're also doing like chores and stuff. Like it's a, it's a giant, like almost not a farm is the wrong way to put it, but they had to like cut the grass and chop wood and do all those kind of things. So that's what they're talking about there. It says he began what he called the Taliesin fellowship as a wily way of trying to stave off both oblivion and further poverty.

Starting point is 01:06:03 God is nose broken courtesy of an enraemployee to whom he owed $280 in back wages. And then, nearing the age of 70 and against all career and personal odds, came roaring back to something greater and even more arrogant than what he was before, if that can be imagined. And that's only half of it. What happened to Frank Lloyd Wright in these years, incidentally, this monster sentence contains only the loosest chronology. So let me tell you a little bit about that lost in the desert period of his life.

Starting point is 01:06:42 From the age of 48 to 65, he was only able to complete 34 projects. So he did 350 the last 10 years of his life. So 350 in 10 years or 20 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'm so deeply committed I must come back. The comeback seems to be a favored American institution. It definitely is. So who doesn't love a good comeback story? From now on, you are to find me actively engaged in that performance. Let's go. Let's go. That's fantastic. And here's a bit about the period of his time before he wrote out those words this is frank lloyd wright in 1932 as broke as broken be this is his wife uh writing for help to frank's sister

Starting point is 01:07:33 we are in desperate condition we cannot go to the local grocer before we bring them a little money and we only have five dollars 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 $300? I cannot sleep or eat. I'm simply sick. Can you help us? Frank is in despair and repeating, what can we do? What shall we do when our last dollar goes try to do something please it is is more terrible humiliation than i can tell you so from that low point is when he starts the cra this is a crazy

Starting point is 01:08:13 part of his story from that low point is when he starts his rise and does the best work of his life the will to survive, always that. A bold idea had struck. Actually, it had been hatching for several years. Why not start a work school for aspiring architects, who would learn at the master's feet, all the while milking his cows and chopping his wood and painting his barns?

Starting point is 01:08:40 Was it a cynical try at forestalling pernury on the backs of some youthful right worshippers, or a heroic humanist experiment? Probably portions of both. Books have been written about the Taliesin Fellowship. To say this much here, the fee was $675, and in 1933 it got raised to $1,100, which was more than Harvard's tuition. The fellowship was announced to open in late October 1932. By the end of the year, a couple dozen candidates from all over the country and a few foreign countries, some fresh out of high school,

Starting point is 01:09:19 others with graduate degrees, had shown up for sweat and glory at Taliesin. Momentarily, the beast of bankruptcy had been thrust from the door. His back was up against the wall, and this is what happened next. It was late 1932, 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 backwoods shangri-la leaping from a rock. That's Fallingwater. If you want to Google image shirts Fallingwater, you've probably seen it before. It's probably his most famous house. And a mouse house on the western edge of madison that's

Starting point is 01:10:05 a jacobs uh his he wanted to build a beautiful house for normal people because all his um his previous commissions were from really really rich people so this was built by like uh i think 5 500 it's called jacobs one uh you're gonna see that so it talks about you know this is what he did within four years so many people consider this is his best work and being thought of as a god again. Historians would one day say that if Frank Lloyd Wright had conceived nothing but these three buildings, if his career had somehow been able to know only the single year of 1936, 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,

Starting point is 01:10:57 fell essentially a downward trajectory for 25 years, was ridiculed, and then one day just said, you know what, enough of this, enough. I've lost everything, I'm a laughingstock. 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, excuse me, he worked until the day he died. All right. This is a reminder that everything is a remix. For a good while now, history and historians have been aware of a rich irony, that in the miracle comeback year of 1936,

Starting point is 01:11:36 a washed-up man essentially beat the European modernists at their own game. So there's completely different styles in his, and I like a lot of their architecture, actually. Frank did not, but he also stole some ideas from them. So this is like out with the old. No one cared about Frank Lloyd Wright's designs anymore. And he had other architects that were being presented in his place. So they're the European modernists.

Starting point is 01:11:57 I'm going to skip their names, but it says, in the previous 10 years, the architecture has been named Frank Lloyd Wright had not executed more than five buildings. But here he was now in the second half of 36 working on those three ones I just told you about all at once. He was more than back. He was pulverizing his would-be peers. The metabolizer and world-class assimilator had stood.

Starting point is 01:12:21 That's such an interesting description of him, right? And that's what he does. He takes ideas from all different domains and he lets that work through his own mind and it comes up something unique i think that's a trait that we should steal from him the metabolizer and world-class assimilator had stolen out from under uh the two other modernist uh architects there's no way i could pronounce their names so i'm'm not even going to try. Slices of their own vision and converted them to his. He married his own ideas about the romantic and the organic to their ideas about the functional machine, and the result was greater than the sum of the parts.

Starting point is 01:12:56 He'd been watching them all along, even as he'd scorned them. And a great summary of this section. What followed for a 70- old over the neck think about the that's insane sentence 70 years old he's having a uh a resurgent a renaissance what followed for a 70 year old over the next two decades was a late life explosion of creative energy that no one, doubtless not even he, saw coming. This improbable burst, call it fire, took him, more or less, right up to the end. Now, I want to attempt to tie together this undying will and refusal, 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.

Starting point is 01:14:02 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 pushed out by his mother who most likely had severe mental illness. His mother did. So there's a lot.

Starting point is 01:14:47 I mentioned earlier, we don't really have too much information about what was Frank Lloyd Wright at eight years old or 10 years old or 12 years old. It's kind of like we just meet him as this person leaving Wisconsin to go, as a young man, late teenager, leaving Wisconsin to go chase his dreams in Chicago, right? And so I want to bring you into a little bit of background

Starting point is 01:15:07 because the author goes into exquisite research in detail about this. So before I read this, this is the summary of what he, the author in this section is telling us his opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright's early childhood based on all the additional research he did. And so I need you to know that Frank Lloyd Wright's early childhood based on all the additional research he did. And so I need you to know that Frank Lloyd Wright's dad, his name is William and his mother is Anna.

Starting point is 01:15:32 So I'm gonna tell you about them here now. When I began peering into William's life, remember that's his dad, I had imagined him as more or less innocent in the bargain. He wasn't. He was wrong terribly, but he wasn't blameless. I can almost feel tinges of sympathy for Anna. Now you put in quotations, Mark, they tend to dissolve quickly. Anna was violent to some of her stepkids. He was Frank's wife or

Starting point is 01:15:57 Frank's mother was crazy. I can almost feel tinges of sympathy for Anna. They tended to dissolve quickly. There was something close to foolish and infuriating about William, no matter all his gifts. So what they're mentioning there is William Wright, Frank's father, widely known. Everybody's like, he's a gifted, gifted person, yet he quit. That's what we always talk about. Like the people that we're studying, the people that other people write biographies of, they have all one thing in common. They don't give up. And that makes them extremely rare because our default mode as humans is to quit. And so William, he was really smart, had a lot of gifts, but he focused on one thing for maybe a year, changed his mind, he'd move around. He could never hold down a job. He could

Starting point is 01:16:41 never focus. And so it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you keep quitting and keep focusing, you're never going to realize your potential. You're going to have a terrible life. So he's saying like, you know, it's foolish and infuriating when you analyze his behavior. What I now believe happened was that Anna, with her awful and ungovernable temper, with her terrifying will, suffered a prolonged siege of mental illness brought on at least in part by the realization that none of her own dreams for personal fulfillment would ever come true as William's spouse. 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 not, I'm bringing this

Starting point is 01:17:27 up, not just to talk about the tumultuous relationship of his parents, but what growing up in that environment, what that gave Frank. Okay. So it says, those dreams would all have to be diverted and channeled and redirected into her first porn. 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 of this experience had in Frank's life and why it ties together, why he was able to do something that is so rare

Starting point is 01:18:15 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. 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

Starting point is 01:18:47 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. So I'm going to leave the story there. If you want the full story,

Starting point is 01:19:27 I recommend reading the book. It is a gigantic, uh, difficult, twisting, just emotional experience. I can't describe it in any other way. This is one of the most, not only the way the author writes is extremely unique. Um, but the life that he's trying to help to teach us about is extremely unique. And just, uh, I I'm at the end and I don't, I still feel, I don't really know who he was. I know traits and things that I want to copy and I want to emulate and things I don't want to copy or emulate. Um, but he is very much a mystery. Um, even, you know, after being covered to such a degree by so many different people.

Starting point is 01:20:08 And I think that just speaks to the true unique human being that he was. If you want to read the book, you want the full story, and you want to support the podcast at the same time, please tap the link that's in your show notes. It's an Amazon affiliate link. If you buy the book using that

Starting point is 01:20:25 link, Amazon will send me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. It's a great way to help out yourself because you get something that can teach you something, a book that may change your life. You help out the author who spent countless hours and years accumulating this research for us. And you also help out the podcast at the same time. So it's a win-win-win. Thank you very much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.

Founders - #112 Frank Lloyd Wright

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