a culture of our own
WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD
a culture of our own FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 1would like to say a word for culture—indigenous, American culture—as distinguished from American education, education not being on speaking terms with...
...In these many years of practicing architecture I have come to regard the common man as the enemy of culture...
...charming little flower, lovely pattern...
...Of course it isn't Thomas Jefferson, but even his effigy is worthy of a bended knee from every living American...
...Davy Crockett showed something of it when he tied the tail of a coon to the back of his coonskin cap...
...But most of it is not new...
...If American democracy means anything at all, it means "the sovereignty of the individual...
...own life, our circumstances, our new opportunities...
...Without that integrity, what hope is there for a future life for the building or its makers...
...We might have something worthy of Thomas Jefferson and his aristocracy...
...That is the dignity and the beauty of the faith we live under and live for...
...painting will picture him to you...
...I never go to Washington that I don't go to the foot of the stair in the Capitol with the big picture of Washington crossing the Delaware to look at the effigy—I won't call it sculpture—of Thomas Jefferson...
...They felt that if human nature were only once able to toe the mark equally, and self-improvement was available to all, out of it we would get a new—an innate—aristocracy...
...We have lived a long time as an independent civilization—more than 175 years—and have done little in that time to make life something beautiful of our own...
...There is one place at least where we can see our failure, one place where we can put our finger on something wrong...
...Why and where have we missed the thing so essential to our future happiness and the very life of our democracy...
...The Middle Ages developed it, and there it was genuine and useful, because only by way of the city could culture be had...
...There is no joy possible to us in the culture of our country until we too recognize the integrity of the indigenous in whatever we call culture...
...We have what we call modern architecture...
...Is that why we are not trying it...
...The crowd becomes the ideal, and the crowd, of course, is the common man...
...Can't we in some manner treat the youth of our country so that they are not merely educated, but developed and cultivated according to the nature of our FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT is the world-renowned American architect around whom there has raged a storm of controversy for more than half a century...
...The beautiful always "pays off...
...you like...
...Literature tells you about him...
...You taste...
...For instance, in the garden is the little larkspur...
...Today, what is "beautiful" in American life...
...To me the stigma of communism lies in the fact that the individual signs away his sovereignty as an individual to a government...
...He didn't live long enough to become aware of organic architecture, but he prophesied it when he built a little four-inch wall on a curve so that the four-inch-thick wall would stand...
...Out of our efforts we get specimens, we get fragments, but only shallow characteristics...
...Culture lies in the nature of the things: it is of the nature of the thing, for the nature of the thing...
...If you knew you wouldn't have to taste, so knowledge is what we need for culture...
...And when quantity lacks quality, don't talk about democracy...
...It is still the medieval plan...
...I can't see how we are going to get true culture out of the trampling of the herd...
...Our universities...
...I think that is the man's degradation...
...Look at them from the standpoint of architecture —a heterogeneous collection of inept antiquities, life gone out of them long ago...
...So until we have indigenous architecture and understand what it means to live in it, until we know the difference between a good building and a bad one, and know what makes the one good and the other inferior, or merely superficial, how can we claim to have a culture...
...It is difficult, if not impossible, to take 20,000 students in a single university and give them anything at all commensurate with what is known as culture, or ought to be known as culture...
...Because architecture is the basic endeavor of mankind, the mother art, architecture presents man...
...And we cannot get it out of books...
...That should be the other way around...
...Probably that is why we of 70 Taliesin are now way off in the western countryside with a group of students who come from all over the world to sit and work, and live in an atmosphere and have the doors and windows open through which they see something which they love and learn to practice...
...If a man wants to be President of the United States, or if he would be a success along almost any line, he must cater to this common man...
...If we do not develop and use our own best and bravest...
...I imagine that if you want an architect, a painter, a teacher, a sculptor, if you want any expression of our life which you can say is directly and intimately related to culture, that is the proper process...
...as H. I. Phillips said, he "is now unconstitutional...
...It was his thought, I believe, knowing now so well that art can be no restatement, that by now new meanings, new ways would enable us to think straight, act with courage again, and provide ourselves with a living culture worthy of our freedom...
...Modern is not necessarily new—as new would be necessarily modern...
...Thomas Jefferson said as much...
...Liebermeister's definition of a high-brow is a man educated far beyond his capacity, and I believe that is what is happening to most of us: we are being educated far beyond our capacity and are missing native, natural culture...
...The first thing education should do if it were on speaking terms with culture would be to teach boys and girls how to live beautifully in a beautiful environment, to know what it is not to have a taste-built culture, such as we have had, which will fall apart at any time, and which is falling apart now...
...Architecture had died, and has been dead 500 years, so far as any true vitality is concerned...
...They found, by going to the root, what the little plant loved best, tried it— and it flourished...
...It looks now as though we were headed in that direction, and I believe that unless we wake up and do something definite to rescue ourselves from this trend toward equalitarianism, toward the idea that every man is as good as every other man, that we will find ourselves settled in it...
...What democracy means is quality, not quantity...
...You taste again because it pleases you, but you will "taste" because you don't know...
...He can't hide from you there...
...So the common man may have brought our democracy, but not the feeling our ancestors had...
...And out of that new aristocracy we would probably become the most fruitful, happy, creative, productive nation on earth...
...There is a great difference...
...Taste is a matter of ignorance...
...We have novelty, we have the old steel frames with the new glass effects—but in structure or form, no change of thought...
...We get traits, but we don't get a developed individual...
...So far as an architect's human experience goes, it is the only pay-off...
...Quantity and quality are enemies...
...Now, of course, it is hard to "culture" the trampling of the herd...
...There is no true culture that is not indigenous...
...Taste is not sufficient...
...if this numerical affair of politics is to wipe out all thought and feeling of our ancestors, I think, as Lord Acton said, we will probably be the shortest-lived civilization in history and the lowest form of socialism in existence...
...Even the Gothic atmosphere in which we so often sit was, in its day, an integral expression of the human soul...
...The common man is a man who believes in only what he sees and sees only what he can put his hand on...
...We cannot get it by bending the knee to the past too much...
...But now, quite differently, it is difficult to get culture by way of the city...
...Nearly everything we have, including the city we live in, is dated...
...Science has so far outrun what we call civilization...
...Architecture is out of the ground into the light—by its nature a great integrity...
...They were sick of a phony aristocracy—an aristocracy that was handed down as a privilege or handed out by self-interests...
...I wish it might fall apart even more quickly—we might then have something we could call our own...
...But if you want to realize him and experience him, go into his buildings...
...You see, perhaps, what we have missed in our educational development: culture...
...He is not on speaking terms with progress...
...Why should we always calculate, arrange, and conduct ourselves by way of numbers...
...The young go there and form hallowed associations with unworthy things, unworthy atmospheres, and they come away with that association...
...But the common man is becoming more and more the prevailing American: more and more powerful because he is numerical, and politics depends on numbers...
...They thought that if all men were free and equal, we would eventually have the greatest and the best in mankind as a natural consequence...
...There seems to have been something wrong with that ideal of an integral aristocracy—not an aristocracy conferred but won from within the man by his character, by his own effort...
...You have to get away from it to find out where culture lies and to share it...
...The uncommon man is extremely unpopular...
...There is no more unfortunate instance of a survival of ancient customs than our present great city of today...
...a culture of our own FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT 1would like to say a word for culture—indigenous, American culture—as distinguished from American education, education not being on speaking terms with culture at the present time...
...Victor Hugo has pointed out to us in a memorable chapter of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that the Renaissance, which we have copied (and there has been a renaissance in Gothic, of our own colonial, a renaissance in all ways), was the restatement of restatements, and he saw that art could be no restatement, that "the one will kill the other...
...It is now coming alive again as Hugo prophesied it would...
...So he declared that the Renaissance was the setting sun all Europe mistook for the dawn...
...you can listen and hear him...
...It is only by way of a nature study intimate, persistent, relentless, that young men or women can inform themselves of what constitutes reality in this life...
...Had we followed those precepts, those hopes, of our ancestors, we would have today an architecture and an art of our own...
...They took the more promising ones, gave them more of what they liked, and kept this up until now, owing to patience and skill in culture, we have the queen of the garden: we call it delphinium...
...It is quite impossible to create a culture where people are so crowded as in the city—elbows in each others' ribs, trampling on each others' feet, everybody crowding to prepare for more crowds...
...He is the only one of the whole series whose clothes fit him...
...Most of us have gone somewhere to be educated...
...Dutchmen saw it, admired it, and gave it "culture...
...That is where you will find him as he is...
...He can't hide from himself...
...I don't believe they can get it just by going to any university or to any educational institution...
...The thing we need most in our nation today is a culture of our own...
...Nothing, I believe, that we have in American thought or enterprise can be a great success and bear fruit unless it is in some respects beautiful...
...I do not think that we, as a people, are sufficiently aware of that difference...
...Well, there is something the matter...
...We have it with us today chiefly because there were in it elements of the beautiful...
...But in American life today, culture such as we have is not indigenous—not our own...
...Somebody asked me the other day, "You've been talking a lot about the common man, what do you mean...
...He may be a truck driver, a college president, or a preacher...
...progress must come in spite of him, even though it is for him...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
