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The
Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright &
The Taliesin Fellowship, by Robert Friedland
and Harold Zellman.
Although the authors, in their exhaustive, ten-years-in-the-making
account of Taliesin, take Wright's Fellowship as its subject,
their overarching goal seems to be to deflate the myths
of who many consider the greatest architect of the 20th
century, if not all time. The myths are many, stemming from
Wright's arrogance, his many public relationships, his reckless
spending, his words, and his architecture. One of the most
often-told stories is about Fallingwater, where Wright supposedly
created the basic design in less than two hours, in the
time from the client's phone call to his arrival at Taliesin
in Spring Green, Wisconsin. While the authors don't flat-out
refute the story, they quibble over details and eventually
conclude that Wright carried the design around in his head
long before he put it to paper, deflating the myth that
he could design a house in two hours.
While this episode is but a small part of The Fellowship,
it is a good example of what the authors try to accomplish:
humanizing the architect who has become larger than the
life through other writings, films, and stories carried
down over time. This goal is not a bad thing, but to accomplish
this the authors spend a lot of time dwelling on the architect's
less-than-decent traits: his temper, his racism and sexism,
his exploitation of students through his Fellowship program.
But just as taking an extreme position to sway somebody
in politics can backfire, here their storytelling runs the
same risk.
The book starts with a brief background of Wright's early
years and then spends a good chunk focusing on his soon-to-be
third wife Olgivanna's time in Europe studying under the
mystic Georgi Gurdjieff. In another myth-breaking exercise,
the authors ascribe much of the Fellowship's basis to these
two characters, though Wright's love of the former was equaled
by his loathing of the latter, in an apparent clash of geniuses.
Ending the book after Wright's death, when Olgivanna pushed
the Fellowship in her own direction, the authors are never
really able to reconcile the relationship of the various
characters and their undertaking at Taliesin. But perhaps
that's the point, that Wright's genius was manifest in a
haphazard, of the moment way, where things like the Fellowship
happened in response to an immediate concern but evolved
over time. This take on his personality is backed up by
his frivolous spending, his relationships, and his method
of designing buildings like Fallingwater. Sure, this isn't
the final word on Frank Lloyd Wright, but perhaps it's one
step toward understanding him as a man rather than a mythological
figure.
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