Frank Lloyd Wright and his Inner Circle-A Grandson's View

you people are so busy explaining how much Frank Lloyd Wright loved money he didn't love money he loved something called beauty and he says that I think the best thing that you can do for yourself I'm roughly paraphrasing him is to put more beauty in your life I believe a home is much more a home for being a work of art and I think until it is a work of art it lacks the essential characteristics of the home he wanted you to live in a beautiful circumstance as beautiful as you could make it and so in 1932 he started an architectural school devoted to that kind of thing he espoused at an organic architecture that came from mountains trees Leafs what-have-you and wanted you to extract the principles from those things and apply them to a building he was very big on people working and construction and he ultimately got this place in Arizona so that Taliesin people could work outside all year round doing construction you were given a square slab of concrete out in the desert and sheep herders tent and told you could elaborate on that site of course you wanted to elaborate on that site and every student considered himself in his mind's eye to be a Rudolph Valentino of sort and could see himself as the Sheikh of something and so launched himself on an elaborate project to make his dreams come true only to find out a how difficult his scheme was and be he was under it when it blew away in the rain or whatever he had the miserable nests that he could have attached to an to a client instead of himself but at Taliesin he got the materials to build an elaborate scheme and learned from it you might think that Frank Lloyd Wright was just had a good time all the time but I don't think he did really my grandfather went to Tokyo when he was commissioned to build a giant hotel there he did they came back he was paid a huge sum for the building which he invested entirely in oriental art works and they were in their crates when a second Taliesin burned down and they were burned his entire fee was burned my grandmother said she was really worried at that point that they were gonna lose him because he simply wouldn't move he wouldn't he he wouldn't drink he just sat and finally she coaxed him out of it by saying Frank we can rebuild this place but we can't rebuild it if you're gonna sit here and face the wall we need you to come out and tell us what to do most talented really talented people I know have very high highs and much lower lows the normal people do and he certainly was that way if he ever got launched on something severe everybody was in trouble when my mother was alive that was her particular gift she could charge right into the lion's mouth and in ten minutes my father said she could have him laughing again my father said after her death we learned what a useful thing that had been to get him calmed down so quickly they're gonna talk this morning about several of the people that were close really close to my grandfather that he considered his very able assistants the two people I'm gonna describe first gene masse Lincoln John Hill were like uncle's to be gene was one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known he was always the most elegant of people one of those talented artistic people who could just take a few basic materials and make art out of it gene began to abstract the designs from a leaf or from Iraq with lichen growing on it in Arizona there were many lichens that would grow on a rock green and red and so forth and he would make abstractions of those things and what he was doing was something it was very close to my grandfather's heart and that is he was trying to get at the principle of the design of the thing not that he was trying to see the Lord's work or maybe was but he never told me that he was really trying to see how it was constructed what made it work and his hundreds of abstractions are the finest thing that I have seen of the Fowler my grandfather was looking for a color he had an idea of the color and he could almost see the color but he couldn't see a manifestation of it on any houses or on cars or whatever and he and gene were walking down Central Avenue in Phoenix all of a sudden my grandfather yells at gene there it is there it is and this Nash Rambler is going down Central and my grandfather says catch him find out what that color is gene runs back to the car car turned into a Nash garage that was just off of central gene wheeled in behind him said where did you get that color so the band told him it was a standard color and gene said well does it have a name do you know what that is he said yes I believe it's called Cherokee red it was a color that my grandfather adopted immediately and painted everything in sight that color they came as very young men and they were left one of them John Hill when I asked him in 1984 why didn't you just leave do something else and his answer I think would have been the same for all of them he said when mr. Wright was bringing these new concepts forward all the time each of them contained some new design element heretofore unseen in fact he would show us the drawings and we would say oh well very nice you know isn't that great isn't that wonderful and he would become extremely angry and say what's the matter with you how long have you been with me now you know twenty years don't you see what's happening here that's altogether new and we didn't but then when he told us about it we did and that was reason enough for the whole thing because we were looking forward to the next sign the next remarkable invention architectural invention you

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Views: 18,272

Rating: 4.9038463 out of 5

Keywords: Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright and his Inner Circle, Taliesen, Brandoch Peters, William Wesley Peters, Organic architecture, Olgivana Wright

Id: J8YsNxBfB1c

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2016