Inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright

by philg

One of the highlights of my trip to Phoenix was a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer camp for teaching and working. I learned that parents may be able to influence a child after all, contradicting The Nurture Assumption to some extent. Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother home-schooled him and filled his childhood with architectural drawings and models. Her plan for him to become an architect worked out spectacularly well.

Frank Lloyd Wright provides an inspiration to older folks. He established Taliesin West at the age of 70. He did approximately 30 percent of his work between the age of 70 and his death at age 92. He worked until five days before his death.

Related: 2008 posting about Fallingwater.

4 thoughts on “Inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright”

  1. Glad you saw it. From 5th to 11th grade I was positive I was going to be an Architect. Perhaps one of the only benefits of living in Wisconsin was being so close to such amazing work. The “Great Workroom” in the Johnson’s wax facility was a couple miles away from my house. Before the conventional structural engineering types would let him build that place they told him his radical pillars wouldn’t hold 2 tons, and he had to prove they’d hold 12. He built one, and loaded it with 60 tons. I only wish I coulda been there to see the looks on their faces as he passed 12, just kept going until 60 tons of material hit the ground all at once- Racine’s great earthquake.

    So now every time I read of the Burj Kahlifa I think of Wright. Sadly, I run frequent EMT calls to a house designed by the Taliesin Fellowship shortly after Wright’s passing. The narrow hallways, tight corners, and multiple levels do make life difficult but, the beauty of the place is unmistakable.

    I do hope the biggest parallel between Wright’s life and mine is the age to which he was able to work. At 27 with a mediocre IT job, and a desire to retool as an ER doc I’ll need to work until just about 90 to pay it all off!
    Shoulda stayed in architecture!

  2. He would have lived longer, but his (much younger) wife killed him with a sticky, doughy dessert that he loved and had once a year.

    The cult of personality is so strong on Wright that the apprentices are STILL there, staying in the same rooms at Taliesen West. Crazy.

  3. Re Wright’s lifelong creativity, it is nice to see studies that support historic observation. Here is the abstract of a paper by David Galenson, who is a professor in the Department of Economics and the College of the University of Chicago and author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.

    “Recent research has shown that all the arts have had important practitioners of two different types — conceptual innovators who make their greatest contributions early in their careers, and experimental innovators who produce their greatest work later in their lives. This contradicts a persistent but mistaken belief that artistic creativity has been dominated by the young. We do not yet have systematic studies of the relative importance of conceptual and experimental innovators in the sciences. But in the absence of such studies, it may be damaging for economic growth to continue to assume that innovations in science are made only by the young.” http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/15838.html

    It is also nice to see the ubiquitous carrot of economic growth used in a fresh perspective. 🙂

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