From the site of the Heritage Area Planners, part of the Rosenblum Group, with permission. Some formatting changes have been made.
OPPOSING VIEWS:
Rediscovering America at the1893 World's Columbian Exposition
Adapted from USONIA, Frank Lloyd Wright's Design for America by Alvin Rosenbaum
published in Blueprints, the journal of the National Building Museum.
Vol. XI, No. 1, Winter 1993, pp. 2-7.
May 1, 1893, Jackson Park, Chicago, Illinois
The fair was a year late. The World's Columbian Exposition was promoted to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America, but the organizers had problems securing a sufficient number of exhibitors in time, a consequence of the financial panic on Wall Street and an epidemic of bank failures. When the gates finally swung open, Frank Lloyd Wright among the hordes inspected Daniel Burnham's Great White City. The era's leading architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler called the fair "the most admired group of buildings ever erected in this country," explaining its appeal as "a success of unity, a triumph of ensemble."
This unity was achieved by the establishment of uniform height for its buildings and by a strict classical hegemony, rooted in Burnham's Swedenborgian sense that heaven in reality was a pristine earth with beautiful cities, a perfect and perfectly organized society. Inside these perfect buildings were perfect exhibits, arranged in a careful system of classification by the Smithsonian's G. Brown Goode (a distant cousin to the 20th century Smithsonian archivist, James Goode), an effort "to formulate the modern," as Goode quoted Whitman in an explanation of his task. But perhaps even more important to the sense of unity that captured the nation's attention was Frederick Law Olmsted's landscape plan for the fair which was essential to the creation of an idealized vision in picture postcards, inspiring vistas that became a combination of both the Washington Mall and the Disney World of its day.
A minority report on the exposition's architecture was posted by Louis Sullivan, who declared that "the damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date if not longer." Frank Lloyd Wright was still in Sullivan's office when the fair opened. As a designer, he had completed his Oak Park residence at 428 Forest Avenue (now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation), in Richardsonian shingle-style also completing another similarly-styled building to house his aunts' Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Outside of family projects, he had designed an ensemble of summer cottages at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, for Sullivan and his friends, including one for James Charnley, who also commissioned a Chicago town house from Sullivan that year, which was executed by Wright at Astor Place near Lake Michigan, the first of his designs that was characteristically Wrightian. By summer, he had left his Leiber Meister and his moonlighting assignments to found his own office on the 15th floor of the Schiller Building on Randolph Street, beginning with his first official commission, a house and stable for William H. Winslow in suburban River Forest.
At the fair, Wright first toured the Transportation Building, a note of Gothic amid the orchestration of Beaux Arts classical revival and rococo. The structure's great golden archway was designed by Sullivan, but design of the building itself was dictated by Burnham's office, although executed by S. S. Bemen in Sullivan and Adler's office. Once inside, Wright may have lingered at a garden cafe on the mezzanine before strolling to the central court, where Wright undoubtedly studied the large scale model of the "ideal" community of Pullman, Illinois, which had been constructed outside Chicago in 1880 as a labor management experiment by the railroad sleeping car company.
After seeing Sullivan's great portal and the exhibits inside, Wright walked north along the lagoon, then across to the Midway, discovering the madness of it all--elephants, gondolas, Greek statues, the original Ferris Wheel, the "Ottoman's Arab Wild East Show." Seeking higher-brow pleasures, Wright visited the Fine Arts Building, discovering the Japanese wood block prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Reversing his course, he then crossed a bridge finding Japan's compound far from the hubbub on a wooded island in the lagoon, admiring the Ho-o-den, a half-scale temple dating from the time of the Fujiwara shoguns in the 13th century. Set apart, this seemingly-natural place, made of woven straw and unpainted wood, scrolls of rice paper, and panels of plain plaster, was the part of the fairyland most appealing to Wright, a patch of peace among the babel, Little Egypt's hootchy-kootchy, and the blast of saxophones from Florenz Ziegfeld's big band revue.
Others who also strolled through the idealized White City plan at the fair that summer included 11-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, accompanied by his uncle, railroad-executive-cum-regional-planner Frederic Delano, who later became the leading light of Chicago's Regional Planning Association, moving on to the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission in Washington and finally, the Roosevelt's chief of the National Planning Resources Board.
The exposition was also the site of a wide variety of special events, including the annual meeting of the American Historical Society, held somewhere inside the fairground's gates amidst all of the hoopla. Thirty-one year old University of Wisconsin professor, Frederick Jackson Turner, read his paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in America," presenting ideas that were perhaps larger than the fair itself. Turner concluded the the American frontier had been the source of individualism self-reliance inventiveness [and] the restless energy of the American character American democracy," said Turner, " came out of the forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."
The fair's message--empty, classical piles of snowy white plaster palaces, their arrangement in axial order--represented the antithesis of Wright's training under Sullivan and of his own instincts, while Turner's thesis became Wright's religion. As Turner declared the closing of the frontier as a consequence of the industrial juggernaut, Wright saw an opportunity to transform the hackneyed architecture of old Europe into a new sensibility that would grow out of the purebred colors and home-grown vistas of the American landscape.
At a dinner party across the street from the Winslow house construction site, the 47-year-old "Uncle Dan" Burnham, as Wright called him, made an offer to the brash 26-year-old architect. Years later, Wright remembered Burnham saying, "he would take care of my wife and children if I would go to Paris--four years at the Beaux Arts. Then Rome--two years. All expenses paid. A job with him after I came back. I sat embarrassed, not knowing what to say." Burnham continue to try to convert Wright to his mission: "The Fair, Frank, is going to have great influence in our country. The American people have seen the Classics on a grand scale for the first time. You've seen the success of the Fair and it should mean something to you too. We should take advantage of the Fair."
The World's Columbian Exposition spawned a revolution and a counter-revolution in American style and taste, forces that continue to clash even now, a hundred years later. Burnham's achievement in bringing together the best architects of the day was joined with his leadership with a group of Chicagoans in an experiment that rose above conventional ambition, seeking an urban utopia founded on deeply-held beliefs. According to University of Maryland James Gilbert, their backgrounds were strikingly similar: Philip Armour, Daniel Burnham, John V. Farrell, Marshall Field, Lyman Gage, Turlington Harvey, Harlow Higinbotham, Potter Palmer, and George Pullman were all born in the 1830s and 1840s in the area in and around Oneida, New York, the place and time of the "hottest conflagration of preaching and religious turmoil" in American history.
These manufacturers and retailers created a retail revolution, a style of presentation and display that we now see in department stores, in festival shopping arcades, in amusement parks and resorts, and in hundreds of shopping malls across the country. Architecture as fantasy lifted people's spirits, filling them with optimism, stimulating sales, creating civic pride, and providing enormous opportunities for to invention of a uniquely American style having two cornerstones, commerce and democracy.
Burnham's greatest legacy was perhaps that introduction of the idea of classical building as an orchestration, as in Periclean Athens. The men that made the fair--Burnham and Olmsted, together with architect Charles McKim and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens--were recruited en masse by Michigan Senator James McMillan to develop an ambitious plan for public buildings and parks for the Nation's Capital, resulting in sweeping a transformation: a complete renovation of the White House by McKim; a beaux arts library at Mount Vernon Square and Burnham's Union Station down Massachusetts Avenue; Memorial Bridge and a site plan for the Lincoln Memorial, and later, the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial. Over time, the Mall, White House, Capitol Hill, and Rock Creek and many of their adjacencies evolved into a single inspiration, extending to Cass Gilbert's Supreme Court and John Russell Pope's National Archives Building, with strict design review by the Fine Arts Commission (1910) and future planning by the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (1926). These efforts began with Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal extended through Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, providing hundreds if not thousands of neo-classical government buildings and city parks across American, and continuing even today in such projects as the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Commission, and in parks and historic preservation projects.
For Frank Lloyd Wright Burnham's vision for American was rooted in the dead cultures of the past rather than the modern American engine of progress. He had been deeply moved by "This Will Kill That," a chapter in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, which he later called "the best amateur essay on architecture ever published." While still in short pants Wright came upon Hugo's idea that the Renaissance was the end of architecture. "It is to this setting sun," Hugo wrote, "that we look for a new dawn." Wright believed that the new dawn was organic architecture, a set of principles rather than a style, but still antithetical to Burnham and the convential architectural wisdom of the era. Hugo had predicted that "the great good fortune of having an architect of genius may befall the twentieth century, like a Dante in the thirteenth," leaving the lasting impression on Wright that he, and only he, was that architect.
According to Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel, "every architectural episode in Mr. Wright's life had to have a villain." For Wright, the villain was usually the city, whether Dickensian tenements and crime-invested alleys or Burnhamesque plazas with great snowy-white edifices. Both Wright and Burnham shared a vision for elaborate site plans and architecture as ensemble, yet each selected a different page from a similar spiritual heritage to articulate their vision. Stated simply Burnham looked to Western civilization and its most refined expression in the Renaissance for his muse, while Wright looked to nature and geography for his inspiration.
The fair in Chicago followed on the heels of the Paris exposition of 1889 with its Eiffel Tower and glazed dome exhibition halls. According to the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, the Chicago fair's architecture was derivative, a "failure to attain a native style," which were exactly Wright's sentiments as he toured the fair and contemplated its meaning in the following months and years, setting themes that continued throughout his career.
In three large undertakings by Wright from 1911 to 1915--his Wisconsin home, Taliesin, Midway Gardens in Chicago, and Tokyo's Imperial Hotel--all developed with elaborate sites plans, not unlike Olmsted's approach, but actually more similar to ideas promoted by Andrew Jackson Downing and John Burroughs, both via Henry David Thoreau. The design of Wright's buildings reflected variations in nature, a byplay of prospect and refuge, providing asymmetrical alternatives between places to experience magnificent distances and places to hide, qualities, according to Seattle architect Grant Hildebrand, where "in combination they reinforce one another, creating an ability to see without being seen. " Finally, Wright brought the idea of the whole down to the smallest details, in textiles, furniture, and tabletop items.
As Daniel Burnham created a plan for Chicago and Washington, enlisting the enthusiasm of his principal patron, Frederic Delano, then Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Wright developed his opposing views in his Broadacre City, plans for decentralization based on the advent of the massive grid of roads and power lines spawned by Ford's Model T and Edison's electrification. Taken together--objects, buildings, site, and community, Wright extended his ideas to include the whole expanse of the United States, a place that he called Usonia.
As the McMillan Plan for official Washington was nearing its completion, Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in the nation's capital to address 600 federal architects assembled in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, October 25, 1938, providing an eloquent treatise on his alternative vision for America, conditioned at the time by the burdens of the Depression. Wright had come from a visit to Williamsburg and began his talk with a reminder that well-heeled English commoners with borrowed French tastes who first built in America imitated the styles of barons and dukes, insisting on a "grandomania" in private and public buildings that marched into the modern era. "We are bankrupt culturally, by way of these hangovers from feudal times; impotent by silly idealism; made ridiculous by mawkish sentimentality that will keep on keeping men from demanding their own." Attacking the neo-classic of federal buildings, Wright reminded his bemused audience that "Romans were just as incognizant as we of the things of the spirit. They, too, had no culture of their own. England had non of her own and we, having none, got what we have as substitute second, third, and fourth hand from [the Greeks]."
Wright's answer for this "over-educated cultural lag" in America was organic architecture, which he observed was found more abroad than at home: "This 'organic' way is the spiritual way of doing things, a "spirited" way of being and doing that is already going around the world." By then Wright had lived in Europe and Japan and had traveled extensively and was using Japanese, Javanese, Mayan, and native American concepts in his design ideas, approaching architecture like a growing thing--"out of the ground and into the light"--in contrast to Burnham's concept of the celestial city, as a heaven on earth descending from the sky rather than emerging from the soil.
December 12, 1991, Smithsonian Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. Five gray eminences of Usonia gathered at the center of the cavernous marble foyer for a photo opportunity and reception after their panel discussion on the Usonian houses of Frank Lloyd Wright: Edgar Tafel, a 1932 charter member of the Taliesin Fellowship; Professor John Sergeant, a Cambridge don and architect, author of the authoritative Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian Houses; architectural historian and Wright expert Richard Guy Wilson from the University of Virginia; Loren Pope, Frank Lloyd Wright's Washington client who built the National Trust's Usonian Pope-Leighy House in 1941; and Tom Casey, dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and a member of the Taliesin community since 1950.
At the other end of the foyer, a colossal figure of George Washington, sculpted in 1840 by Horatio Greenough, officiated over the assembly. In a classical pose Washington is seated on a throne, clad in a toga, his left hand offering a sword, his right hand raised, a finger pointed to the heavens. Henry Steele Commanger observed that the World's Columbian Exposition and Roosevelt's New Deal architecture was a vindication of Horatio Greenough, the pedagogic sculptor who,"just half a century earlier had been rebuked for his figure of George Washington in a toga [and now, half a century later] American statesmen and diplomats should all have worn togas to match the post offices, banks, and other public buildings "
Ironically, it was Greenough the essayist who was the first to relate form with function in American architecture, the foundation of the modern movement, which turned into the dicta "form follows function" by Louis Sullivan, updated to "form and function are one" by Frank Lloyd Wright. In his treatise, "Form and Function," Greenough, like his contemporary Victor Hugo, predicted that "These United States are destined to form a new style of architecture," and also presented a sensibility that has endured the ages:
The law of adaptation is the fundamental law of nature in all structure. The edifices in whose construction the principles of architecture are developed may be classed as organic, formed to meet the wants of their occupants, or monumental, addressed to the sympathies, the faith, or the taste of a people.
At one end of the transept of the great Smithsonian hall, the proponents of organic architecture were posed in a tableau; at the other end, the monumental George Washington was seated in repose, looking ridiculous, yet also as solid as an Ohio post office, an embodiment of traditional American partialities, providing another version of America's sensibility.
The Smithsonian's giant pendulum swung back and forth between the two, marking these alternating inspirational visions of how we live and should live. For Daniel Burnham, Greenough's prediction of a new American architecture translated lofty ideals that were rooted in Europe into urban civic design writ large--boastful, ageless, and commanding. For Frank Lloyd Wright, the earth-bound forms and colors of nature were the fabric for his Usonia, imagined with the endless vistas of spectacular American places quite unlike other sceneries, a modern vision that balanced landscape with the machine and a mobile citizenry, with a beauty that glowed from within, its power subtle, but penetrating.
The monuments of these alternative Americas remain, now only their meaning is obscure. Today's architects move between them, to and fro, like the Smithsonian pendulum, seeking somehow to synthesize the two, a summary without a conclusion. Planners also struggle to find the golden mean between exciting city streets and the pastoral peace of the countryside, fighting mindless sprawl at the edge that join the worst of both into interminable traffic against an ungainly foreground. But among the jumble new forms will emerge, perhaps giving us a vision for the rediscovery of America.
© The Rosenbaum Group Inc., 1995