Sometimes a single news story will illuminate more than just the usual darkness all around, bringing back a brighter past and, with it, hope for a brighter future.
Like the latest announcement from Crystal Bridges, a not so little museum located in a little town in the heart of the country. This time it has acquired an archetypal example of the work of the one American architect most Americans might be able to name from the last century: Frank Lloyd Wright.
One of Wright’s model little Usonian houses is to rise, if that’s the word for it, on a wooded lot chosen for its natural setting and view of water, like much of the famous architect’s work. For the little house is less separate from the outdoors than part of it. Like so much of Wright’s architecture.
How fitting that students and faculty of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas will play a role in its careful reconstruction, for Fay Jones was a disciple of Wright’s-as talented and innovative but just as much his own man as he was dedicated to Wright’s vision.
Frank Lloyd Wright was the architect of the horizontal, as opposed to those of the vertical school who built soaring skyscrapers that tower above dark concrete canyons like Manhattan’s, shutting out the light and reducing man to a creeper far below. Even when Wright designed his rare skyscraper, it was so man would have an eyrie, a new coign of vantage from which to view the great American expanse all around.
No one who has been to Fallingwater, built over a stream in the Pennsylvania woods, can fail to admire the sweep yet intimacy of Wright’s imagination-from the cantilevered design to every cultivated Art Deco detail within and without.
If his engineering wasn’t necessarily sound, he could always commission engineers to correct his mistakes. His vision was his sublime own.
Much like The Great Gatsby, another masterpiece of 20th Century American art, Wright’s genius represented a revolt against the East, a realization and appreciation of the virtues of the Midwest. No one who could create Prairie Houses, and come to exemplify the whole Prairie Style of American architecture, would ever be confused with a product of the Old World or even the old America.
The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright is a whole new Declaration of Independence.
Just as The Great Gatsby still captures the essence of the American experience, so does Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision, and that essence is: separation and differentiation from all that has gone before. Separation and differentiation from old Europe.
Separation and differentiation even from the old America. We would go on our own, ever-westering course way out here in the wide-open middle of the country.
Maybe the Usonian house never caught on as the kind of mass-produced innovation Frank Lloyd Wright had envisioned, but it’s not a visionary’s job to fulfill his vision, just provide one. And now one will be as close as Bentonville, Ark. Thank you, once again, Alice Walton and all the collectors and connoisseurs and curators she has assembled at Crystal Bridges, the newest capital, shrine and ongoing enterprise of American art.
There’s a moral to this story. It’s symbolized by this little modern house before Wright’s work was eclipsed by the post-modernism of today’s deconstructionist architects. You know the sort: iconic figures whose much celebrated and overpaid efforts tend to come out looking like botched intestinal operations. And the moral of the story is: America is still out here, somewhere in a clearing, waiting to be found again, saved, rediscovered, restored, brought back to life, revived. Then we Americans will be, too.
For this is still a young country and our destiny still awaits, as in rendezvous with. It’s been out here all along, “in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night,” as Nick Carraway discovered at the end of The Great Gatsby and of his time in the East.
That’s when he decides to head back to where and what he came from, and realizes what he needs to be. It’s a realization that tends to hit nice if naive young people who do their apprenticeship up East or out West before coming home to the Midwest or South or wherever they truly belong. Before coming home to America.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Perspective, Pages 77 on 04/20/2014