Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence

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Chapter One

1926-1929

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Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford begin corresponding during the greatest building boom the United States had yet experienced. Wright, with his individualistic, organic approach to architecture, belongs to none of the current camps of architects and, furthermore, the few buildings he designs during this decade are located far from the real-estate epicenter of New York City. Subsequently, his work is largely ignored by his peers and by architectural critics. Mumford is the exception. A young, New York-based journalist, Mumford created a sensation with his 1924 book, Sticks and Stones, in which he undertook a social analysis of American architecture and found most of it wanting. Although he has not yet seen Wright's work in person, he recognizes in it an original streak that contributes significantly to modern life and that stands apart from the prevailing "poison of good taste."

    The initial exchange of letters between Wright and Mumford occurs in August 1926 and the two first meet in person in January 1927. Not until 1928, however, does the correspondence gain momentum. Although Wright is nearly thirty years Mumford's senior, the two men establish common ground quickly on a variety of matters, ranging from the professional to the personal. The letters also touch on such major figures in American architecture as Fiske Kimball, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., and Douglas Haskell, and on the group of European modern architects who are beginning to gain attention stateside, including Le Corbusierand Walter Gropius. Wright floats the idea of a school to be built around his organic design principles. He also invites Mumford and his family to Taliesin, his compound in southern Wisconsin, but Mumford declines.

Dear Lewis Mumford,

    I want to tell you how much I liked your "Poison of Good Taste" in the Mercury.

    It was so clear and sound.

    Your pen seems pointed in the right direction and could I wield mine as effectively I might be a better champion of a cause where I am confined to a hod of mortar and some bricks—as the matter stands.

    I have been interested in reading my "obituaries" in WENDINGEN. The heart and brain of my work is apparently effectually concealed by thought—The language in which I architecturally clothe mine seems to have been a successful disguise—which none of my critics have penetrated.

    Your article was interesting and sensible until you touched me and then you seemed to be trying to do the fair thing by something you did not quite understand and reluctantly sympathized with "on principle"-

    I think if we were to "walk and talk" together a little your judgement might be in a similar direction but different. It struck me as somewhat "diffident"

    A "poet in architecture" means something not included in the estimates of my generously inclined colleagues—when they turn critic—, if I am to be trusted. But I am grateful just the same.

    You can be of great service to an ideal, the one that has persisted since time began and must prevail, for it is Nature raised to the nth power. This "ideal" that is now, as before, and will be, swamped by a little brief authority. The ideal will take care of itself—it always has done so—. But if only someone could take care of the fools who waste our birthright as a "free people" in this rash mortgage they forge, to be paid by posterity with usurous interest. They "blow in" the proceeds therefore on the masquerade with us more than a half-hearted false-pride gratified, to show for it.

    We are agreed on many matters in principle, I am not one of them but am

Faithfully yours,
[signed]
Frank Lloyd Wright
Taliesin Aug. 7th, 26

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THE MAPLES
AMENIA, NEW YORK

23 AUGUST 1926

Dear Frank Lloyd Wright:

    Your letter was very welcome; for I have been on the point of writing you more than once; and this gives me my opportunity.

    Your comments on my Wendingen essay are quite accurate. I had doubts as to whether I ought to write the essay at all, not because I am lukewarm in admiration; but because, unfortunately, I have not yet been west, and have not yet seen your work. Photographs are useful only as shorthand memoranda: the building itself is usually much better or much worse than the photograph. What you felt in my article was, assuredly, timidity; but this was occasioned not by a failure to grasp your work but by an ingrained distrust of saying anything about buildings I had not seen and walked around and gotten into.

    Professor Lorch has asked me to lecture at the University of Michigan this coming winter: and one of my reasons for accepting this engagement is my desire to see the actual examples of your work. I trust this will also enable us to meet. It was brash of me to write about your work at all for Wendingen; but when I get out a new edition of Sticks and Stones, after I've become genuinely acquainted with it, you may trust me to make amends.

    It seems to me, at a distance, that most of the foreign critics have misinterpreted you by reading into your work a rigorous mechanistic tendency which, in fact, you have passed beyond. They have merely caught up with the machine; whereas you have carried the machine, as it were, into a new phase. Is this misreading you, too? Ernst May's enthusiasm for your work when he returned from Chicago greatly reassured me; for he is a humane fellow, and has no obsessions, and knows what men and women and children need to be happy!

    I am grateful for the impulse that prompted your letter.

Faithfully yours,
[signed]
Lewis Mumford

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[TELEGRAM]

Received at 267 EIGHTH AVE
N143 51 BLUE.SPRINGGREEN, WIS 21 1149A
1927 OCT 21 PM 2 59

ROBERT M LOVETT, CARE: NEW REPUBLIC.
21 ST.

CIRCUMSTANCES LEAVE ME ALONE AND LONESOME FOR SEVERAL WEEKS[.] COME UP WITH LEWIS MUMFORD AND BRING YOUR WIVES AND CHILDREN FOR A WEEK OR TWO AND DO YOUR WORK HERE[.] BEAUTY OF COUNTRYSIDE AND HOME INTOXICATING[.] EXPENSE OF TRIP NO MORE THAN A FEW EVENING[S] IN NEW YORK[.] FORGET THE NEW REPUBLIC.

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ALBERT CHASE MCARTHUR
ARCHITECT
311 WEST JEFFERSON STREET
PHOENIX
ARIZONA

APRIL 30TH, 1928

Mr. Lewis Mumford,
4112 Gosman Avenue,
Long Island City, N.Y.

My dear Lewis Mumford:—

    Fiske Kimball has just sent me a copy of his new book,— a well written brief for the "Classic" bracketing McKim, Meade [sic] and White's thought in Architecture with Lewis [sic] Sullivan's. God save the mark! And this is "History."

    It would be hard to beat that for grave-robbing, I say. I write this because of a note from the Century Company, asking for views of "Taliesin" to illustrate your article on "American Architecture" in which you make "a kindly reference to me." (See copy of enclosed letter to Fiske Kimball).

    I am heartily sick of the historical falsifying of the real course of ideas in the Architecture of our Country, unconsciously done as most of it is. A true concept of "modernism" in origin or effect is so far almost wholly lacking. Why don't you record it? No man has yet stood up to the task, learning anything further West of Manhattan,—the commercialized monstrosity,—than Buffalo, New York.

    Why not you? Come afield and see for yourself the healthy undergrowth coming through this rank obscuring growth of pseudo-classic weeds. A healthy undergrowth rising from seed planted in the prairie soil thirty years ago? Pseudo classic has only been a "cover crop" as the farmers say, for that future harvesting!

    You will write what you please, as you please, but until you have "come" afield, "led by myself," you will not write with more than the artist's instinct which is dangerous in a historian, unless based upon the fundamental acts contributing to the subject he views and records. Pardon the seeming attempt to "preach." It is perhaps uncalled for and an egotistic assumption on my part, but I am just smarting from Fiske Kimball's well-meant "obituary." Why allow Corbusier—et al to "beard us" in our own den?

Faithfully yours,
[signed]
Frank Lloyd Wright

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[SENT TO LEWIS MUMFORD]

APRIL 30TH, 1928

Mr. Fiske Kimball,
Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Art
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Fiske Kimball:—

    A copy of your attractive new book came to hand, forwarded to me here in the Desert yesterday.

    I have been reading my obituaries to a considerable extent the past year or two, and think, with Mark Twain, the reports of my death greatly exaggerated.

    You were very kind to me though you used me to point your moral and adorn your tale, and left me in exile. Yours was no donkey's kick at a "dying lion." Nor am I a lion, nor dying, nor am I in exile.

    Sometime let someone come far enough away from Manhattan to mark what the thought-built houses they called the "New School of the Middle West" have done (consciously or unconsciously) to three out of five buildings from Buffalo to Los Angeles, quietening the skyline, broadening and strengthening the mass, ordering the openings, reducing the "fancy features" marrying all of them to the ground to some extent, and be convinced of the potency in America of those ideas. Those ideas are more potent today than ever before, though their origin is growing obscure in the flood of pseudo-classic. This to offset inevitable abuse.

    A lost cause? "The Triumph of the Classic"? Dear man! The cornice has gone. The Larkin Building, about which you write so well, struck it fast. No cornice, no classic! Life goes on! From your honorable niche in the museum in conservative Old Philadelphia, does that ancient dream "The Classic" still possess and obsess you? Or are you merely comforting the abstraction that was lost at the Columbian exposition thirty-two years ago,—lost—because it was only again reborn to be commercialized. Trying to make it open its lips, eyes it never had,— and seem to speak.

    You write well, so well. I think we need you in the constructive movement. I intend to take the pains to enlist your pen in behalf of the nature of the thing—as architecture—whereas the nature of the thing as practiced is what you have been talking about—and how!

    Meantime my best to you, faithfully. You are a friendly enemy. They make ultimately the best friends.

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4002 LOCUST STREET
LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y.

11 MAY 1928

Dear Frank Lloyd Wright:

    Your letters and your photos came very happily: the latter just in time for inclusion in my second article for Architecture. The reference to your work there is inadequate, partly because I spent so much energy in damning everybody else's; but I promised Lee Simonson to do a full dress article on your work next fall, for Creative Art; and if you will let me keep the photos till then I shall be very grateful. I saw your work in situ for the first time in 1927, as you perhaps know: my timidity in writing about it up to that time was based partly upon the fact that I hadn't seen it from four sides, and partly because I was woefully incapable of writing about anything except general tendencies. In my Creative Art's article I shall try to get down to brass tacks. I sympathize with your feelings about Kimball: to me he is a very capable jackass, who is capable of grubbing together all sorts of good reasons for defending very bad things, and all sorts of bad reasons for attacking very good ones. Unfortunately, he is capable; and so can do a lot of damage. Your recent work has made my heart leap with joy: if it is work of a "dead one" the sooner the rest of us stop living the better. Your California houses should put the quietus upon those who want to wrap you in the mummy-cloth of a formula; they should, but nothing will stop people who prefer mummies to living bodies. As for most of your European admirers—good people though so many of them are—they fall into raptures over the articulated skeleton, and despise the flesh, whilst your work, being more whole than theirs, has skeleton, flesh, and all necessary organs, and so will be, I hope, the mold of all our new architecture. The young men are coming along well, though: you have plenty of admirers and followers and, best of all, understanders among them. So take heart. I wish I could take another trip through the West: but a hundred things prevent me—some of them equally attractive things, like the book I'm writing, some of them less attractive, the usual limitations of time and money. Before another year or so is out I hope to make the trip, however, clear to the coast. Good luck in the meanwhile!

Ever yours,
[signed]
Lewis Mumford

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[C. JUNE - JULY 1928]

Dear L. M.

    This from the strongest paper on the "Coast" is better—

    It is a surprise too. I don't know who Millier is except that he edits the section of Art and Artists. The "break" you see is coming all down the line!

To you!
[signed]
F.LLW

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AMENIA, NEW YORK

10 JULY 1928

Dear Frank Lloyd Wright:

    Many hearty thanks for your letters, notes, & photographs: your comments have tamed Hitchcock's essay into a precious document: and I am happy to be the custodian of it! I have met Hitchcock & know that he heartily admires you: as for the conspiracy, it is wholly an unconscious one, although none the less depressing for that reason. Hitchcock is a young man: an instructor in art at Vassar. He belongs to the post-war generation, and that, I think, is one of his main difficulties. Like the Frenchmen he admires, & like some of the Germans of the same guild, his esthetic ideas are biased by an inadequate sociology: he fancies that the age of art is over, and (like Spengler) he thinks the architecture of the future will be engineering or nothing. This view is an expression of impotence, on the part of men who, like Gropius, are artists to their fingertips: they feel no "must" insides of them: so, unlike the academic impotents, they acknowledge their emptiness honestly. Your work is necessarily a challenge to these men, as health & vigor is a challenge to the invalid: they excuse their own inability to go on with it, to develop it in response to their own situation, by affecting to regard your work as a fore-runner to their own. As I see it, things stand just the other way about. Root's & Sullivan's early skyscrapers are the equivalent of Corbusier's designs today: they are both primitives of the machine: while your work is a step beyond this, with fuller mastery of the materials & freer expression. Expressed in time, you are still 30 years ahead of Corbusier. I shall say some of these things in the fall: but I am still trying to decide what form the article should take & where it should be published. The clipping you just sent is very good criticism indeed. I am glad to know that such people are working on the coast. I am dickering with the Denver Art Museum over a course of six lectures they've almost invited me to give: so there's a chance that I may see more of your work—and more mid-American work generally.

Ever yours,
[signed]
Lewis Mumford

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[PRINTED INVITATION]

MARRIED
AUGUST 25
RANCHO SANTA FE CALIFORNIA
OLGA IVANOVNA
DAUGHTER OF
IVAN LAZOVICH AND
MILITZA MILAN OF
CETTINJE MONTENEGRO
TO FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
SON OF ANNA LLOYD-JONES
AND WILLIAM CARY WRIGHT
TALIESIN WISCONSIN 1928

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AMENIA, NEW YORK

24 SEPTEMBER 1928

Dear Frank Lloyd Wright,

    Your telegram came to me while I was working on the hardest part of the biography I'm writing; and in the meanwhile a fortnight has gone by. Forgive my delay in putting matters straight: but I have had a long and exhausting pull. This is how it all came about. In May I discussed with Lee Simonson a series of possible articles on architecture; among them was one that I proposed to do about you, and he put that at the head of the list. Douglas Haskell is a very able young writer, who became interested in architecture four or five years ago when he traveled abroad, and came back and edited a whacking, satirical number of the New Student on architecture in our colleges—for which I gave him various leads and suggestions. During the last year, he has taken seriously to architectural criticism; and, since he is serious and very promising, I suggested to him that he go around to Simonson and have a talk with him, saying that I was quite willing to relinquish any of my subjects if he felt that he could handle them. He is a genuine admirer of yours; and arranged to do the article on you—for Simonson wanted to lead off with that this autumn, and I had told him that I would be out of commission for a while. I was not aware that this arrangement had been made definite till Haskell wrote me in the middle of the summer to ask me for more photographs. I accepted it gladly, however, first because Creative Art could not give me enough space to write a thorough article about your work and ideas, second, because I was busy with my Melville and could not return to architecture till this fall; and third, because I wanted Haskell to have a tip-top subject to sail into. I have not seen his article: but I am sure it will be an understanding one. It doesn't interfere with my own plans for writing about you in the slightest. There are three or four magazines that are pretty well open to anything I write; and when I get back to New York I shall put my ideas together for an article which might also serve as an introduction for an American book of your work, supposing it were wise to get such a book out. I can't promise any definite date for this yet: I am not through with Melville: and I need time to recuperate from that before undertaking anything that requires more than half-witted application; but I jolly well want to do it. Haskell is worth while encouraging: please bear with him. Bear with me, too, please: a book is the worst sort of pregnancy. Your wedding announcement was a very happy, as well as a very beautiful one; and I wish you all joy and serenity—and many great buildings!

Faithfully,
[signed]
Lewis Mumford

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Mr. Lewis Mumford
Amenia, New York

Dear Lewis Mumford:

    You will be glad to know I am no longer walking the New York streets, hat in hand. Taliesin is regained. We are established here, again at work,—interesting work,—not to brag about it, but to reassure you; —Working on the Desert-Resort Hotel in the simon-pure Arizona desert,—half million dollar commission for Dr. Chandler at Chandler, Arizona near Phoenix,—(cactus among the cacti), nearby where I established the textile-block construction in the "million dollar" Arizona Biltmore, now nearing completion;—A new house in spirit and letter for my editor cousin at Tulsa, Oklahoma;—A twenty-three story copper and glass apartment-tower for your barbaric New York City;—St. Mark's Tower in-the-Bouwerie; "the architect triumphant over the Machine;"—let us hope; a school-house for the Rosenwald Foundation,—you know,—the negroes in the South. I have tried to make this one theirs. The Yankee things they have been getting seem to me rather hard on them: this is another modest excursion into the nature and feeling of an alien race such as was the Tokio [sic] hotel on a grand scale.

    Have also signed a life contract with Leerdam Glassfabriek to make glass designs for all sorts of things on a royalty basis. Trying my hands at the arts and crafts, you see.

    Read the prospectus of the school herewith and write me a "brief." The University is already interested? Your supporting word would...

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz. Copyright © 2001 by Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Estate of Lewis Mumford. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.