Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright is the most innovative and influential architect in the 20th century. He shaped the way we think about buildings today, and put architecture at a different level of thinking. Buildings look simple in design but modern in method of the art of architecture. Even if you are an architect or not, you will enjoy this documentary.

And, when speaking about America's most-beloved/most-hated architects of them all - Does one properly refer to this man as being Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, or should he really be called Mr. Frank Lloyd Wrong?

Needless to say - There can be no doubt that Frank Lloyd Wright (who was/is probably the most celebrated and misjudged architects ever) was destined to redesign the entire world, but, for some unforeseen reasons, this towering vision of his was simply never realized.

Born in Wisconsin in 1867 - I think it's really very surprising to note that Wright's most productive years in his field of work didn't come around until he had reached the age of 80 (!!).

Throughout his 70-year career as one very ambitious, strong-willed and arrogant architect, Wright not only designed private homes and office towers, but he's also credited with the design of churches, schools, hotels and, yes, even gas stations and furniture, as well.

Even though this 2.5-hour documentary (directed by Ken Burns) had its fair share of notable merits and strengths to its advantage, it also racked up a few demerit points for itself by (for one thing) placing way too much emphasis on Wright's very turbulent personal life.

In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright died at the age of 91.

I don't think I like Ken Burns very much. We are at cross purposes. He comes to give me a good story, tight with no lapses, that moves smoothly without holes. What I come for is insight, the holes, the spaces, the sight you get from emptiness. I cannot imagine a less suitable topic for the Burns approach than this particular mind.

He wants to tell the story of a genius, and like so many storytellers he constructs the man and assumes that as we know him, we will know his works, which are assumed to flow from his makeup. So we get a linear history: birth, life (a long one), death. Events happen and along the way out pops a building which we take the time to briefly visit. The passion of the man and indeed the transcendence of some of the spaces are conveyed not through firsthand cinematic experience, but through the passionate reporting of experts. I must admit their passion is contagious and they held my interest.

But there was no experience with the space. Apart from grand notions of unitarian communion with nature, no spatial ideas. We have a truly unfortunate decision, that architecture in the first moments is made analogous to music, the constructions being the same. Then when a spatial experience is expected, we get swelling of this and that classical piece; Beethovan caps it as we tour the Guggenheim.

The documentary moves at the now standard TeeVee pace with no long form building because of those commercials (yes, in public broadcasting). While it flows, the whole world of Wright is about stillness, holding, breath not yet breathed. His spaces do not flow, like say his contemporaries Horta or the best of Gaudi. They are of the landscape, inspired by Japanese Buddhist ideas of still containment. The form of the film fights the architecture and the ideas behind it.

I advise you not to see this because it will mess you up.

Until he was 63, Wright was an essayist, not a novelist. He made buildings as statements, not as working whole environments. They were not designed to work, but rather to give the impression that they could. This makes them important of course, but you need to appreciate that the best architecture is not the one with signs, and probably not the one that seems easy to read. It surely is not the one that bends people to the space rather than the other way around.

It is good to know about his history, the family, the Ouspensky-inspired apprentice program and the obsession with Japan. It is good to know that he was a passionate man, sexually attuned and spiritually bound to his women. But the impression we get is that he was a ball of creative fire, throwing grand designs off casually. That was the myth he invented. In fact he was an ordinary architect and a second-rate celebrity until 63 and he knew it. He was promoting a talent larger than what he had or could be. At 63 — exactly like Kurosawa — his inner demons drove him nearly to suicide. Kurosawa tried.

At that point, considered obsolete he reinvented himself into a man of true vision. It would have been good to have been told that this came from constant fawning attention from the curated apprentices his wife surrounded him with. And that he had a sensual-spiritual- sexual awakening at that age. Everything after that was about the form. He would lack subtlety until he died, but he could conceive the form whole first and then explain it to the paper, carrying the scrolls like scripture.

That crisis that changed him among the many crises he had. That dry period where he knew he would die having never mattered no matter how much bluster was expended. That's what we needed to know.

And doggone, Burns needs to allow that great architecture is a matter of having the great ideas first. We invent a history afterward to explain why we like what we have been convinced to like. There is an intrinsic beauty to great architecture, but it is because the talent of the artist is in how he sells it to our souls, and not what he sells so much. Burns has let us down.

But I am glad he did not kill himself, and Kurosawa as well. Because after 63, they helped invent me.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This is an absorbing and informative documentary on an architect who in most expert opinion - and certainly in his own! - was one of the greatest architects ever. His buildings are of particular interest to film buffs, because they have been used as the locations in many movies. For example, the Ennis-Brown House in LA was the House on Haunted Hill and was also in Blade Runner. But, in fact, where this documentary scores is in focusing on Wright's amazing life, as much as on his architecture. Born in 1867, Wright had early success in building houses around Chicago, but after a scandalous and tragic personal life he was more or less finished professionally by the 1920s.

But then, with the encouragement of his wife Olga Lazowich, his career revived and took off when he was over 60. In the 30 years before his death in 1959 he and his associates designed hundreds of buildings, the best known being the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Guggenheim is probably his most striking external design, and resembles an abstract sculpture, though ironically Wright had a poor opinion of the 20th century non-objective paintings it houses. The film is admirably linear, with none of the gimmicks found in many modern TV documentaries; it has beautifully angled shots of Wright's best structures; and is enhanced by Beethoven music, since Wright thought musical composition had affinities with architecture.

I think the thing to remember about this documentary is that it's called "Frank Lloyd Wright," not "The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright." There are many other resources for those wishing to learn about his designs and the structures he built. (A personal recommendation is the 2002 documentary, "Restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Heurtley House").

The format that Ken Burns's films use is well known by now: pans of many still photographs, informative narration -- often jam-packed with facts but clearly presented and in a generally objective tone. Shifts in time and place are smoothly integrated such that it's unlikely that an attentive viewer will get lost.

Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 at age 91, and there were very few years in his long life that were not without controversy. He broke all kinds of rules with his architectural designs to create some truly remarkable structures -- "Fallingwater," the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and most especially the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They are all examples of his iconoclasm. They and other structures sealed his reputation as the most famous American architect of his or any other generation. But it was the personal scandals, generally involving other men's wives, that forced him to flee the country on a number of occasions, and put his career in a deep freeze for long spells.

By his own admission Wright was an absent and negligent father to his many children; he seems to have been serially unfaithful until late middle age, and he was wild and extravagant with money -- particularly other people's. Clips from a 1958 TV interview with a chain-smoking Mike Wallace are interspersed throughout, and a snippet of it concludes the documentary with Wright proclaiming his immortality. Wright the man seems to have been insufferable, and he seems to have gotten little joy out of life.

Yet his doesn't appear to have been a tortured soul; his personal life may have been absent any harmony, and yet that quality repeatedly found its way into his work. Many of Wright's buildings are in breathtaking concert with nature. His interior designs, including that of the Unity Temple and almost all of his stained glass, suggest they are the creation of an unfettered and free spirit. Wright may have been such a man, but if so he directed those energies in many of the wrong places. His self-centeredness, arrogance and certainty of his genius hurt a lot of people around him.

It's well to ask why anyone wanted to work under him, and yet the waiting list for the scholarship program he operated at his Taliesin West studios in Arizona in the 1930s, 40s and 50s was a mile long. Students of Wright's were bent to his will; they had to do four hours' manual labor a day, grow their own food, submit to having their love relationships and even some marriages orchestrated by his wife, Olgivanna. The place was run like a boot camp, but the opportunity to work side by side with Wright was enough to keep the applications flowing in. Several graduates of the school are interviewed in the documentary, and for all of them working with Wright seems to have been the seminal experience of their lives -- they don't recall the hoops they had to jump through and the indignities they signed on for in order to have that privilege.

To truly love and appreciate the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, it's almost better if you don't know too much about their designer. Still, the dichotomy between the man and his sublime creations makes a great story, and this documentary is a largely successful attempt to bridge that gap.