Art: Wright Apprentices

Whenever Architect Frank Lloyd Wright has a good idea, he does something about it. The best idea he ever had was Frank Lloyd Wright. He has been doing things about that for 63 years. His latest idea is to found a practical architect’s school to educate architects in Frank Lloyd Wright’s image. The school would be across the valley from “Taliesin,” his studio-estate in the dairy country near Spring Green, Wis. He would be the chief faculty member, teaching male and female pupils his basic architectural law: that the architect must integrate his building with its surroundings (function, terrain, climate), make plain its structural elements and if possible develop them as ornamentation. He would teach them the feel of materials by having them blast stone, hew timber, dig soil, work in a machine-shop. They would study, sweat, play and brood in unison. They would be called, not ”students” as in other colleges, but by the fine old medieval guild word, “apprentice.” Last week Architect Wright had done something about his school idea.

Across the valley from ”Taliesin” was the Hillside School, established by Frank Lloyd Wright’s aunts, built by him. He has restored its one big building of native stone laid flat. He will hire a faculty of a director, three assistant sculptors, a painter, a musician and several industrial technicians. Opening in October, the Taliesin Fellowship will have room for 70 apprentices at a little over $500 yearly apiece. Among them will be Manhattan Sculptress Lucienne Bloch, Peiping ArchitectYen Liang and Vischer Boyd, son of a Philadelphia architect.

The permanently startled look on Architect Wright’s face is rightly come by. His Autobiography was a naive exhibition of martyrdom, rage, scarifying tragedy and adolescent yammering. One time he was stabbed eleven times in the back. Soon afterward he was married, had six children,left them and moved in with another man’s wife and two children, until August 1914 when a disapproving Negro butler killed the woman and children and four neighbors and burned down the house.

In his working hours Wright had developed steel-&-glass city buildings, windows covering two sides of a corner, houses made as nearly as possible of one material, the cantilever foundation principle(Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, floated on a mud base to rock with earthquakes), and the unit cement block system of construction chiefly used in California. His great reputation is that of a revolutionist, based on his long campaign against traditional architecture and architects. Once considered in Europe the greatest U. S. architect, he was conspicuously omitted last year from the staff of architects for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition for 1933 (TIME, March 9, 1931).