Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930

by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a new introduction by Neil Levine
Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2008
176 pp., illus. 7 b/w. Trade, $29.95
ISBN 13: 978-0-691-12937-2.

Reviewed by Boris Jardine
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge

bj210@cam.ac.uk



When he took to the lectern to give the Otto Kahn lectures for 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright was at a nadir. He had written and built little since the mid 1920s, and was acutely aware that continental developments were reaching an advanced stage, already making him look outdated and outmoded in his thinking. Though Wright didn’t know it, he hadn’t even been first choice to give the lectures — Princeton had initially approached the Dutch De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud, only turning to Wright when Oud dropped out through illness.

In his meticulously researched introduction, Levine shows how Wright used the Kahn lectures — in a somewhat cynical attempt to reverse his fortunes — to paint a portrait of himself as the pioneer of the modern movement. Indeed the Frank Lloyd Wright we are presented with is no longer the great hero of American counter-modernism, but rather a dishevelled imitator, fabricating his own role in the architectural avant-garde by re-dating and re-drawing his previous projects, and undermining his European contemporaries with spurious arguments.

Doubtless we should applaud Levine’s detective work (though why an argument based largely on pictorial evidence should include no illustrations is anyone’s guess). And doubtless also Wright played fast and loose with the facts, not giving credit where it was due and exaggerating his own importance. But there is another Frank Lloyd Wright in the Kahn lectures, and it seems almost masochistic to publish such a faithful and attractive facsimile without a more positive appraisal of the book’s original author.

That other Wright emerges most clearly in the first lecture and in the correspondence Levine cites, in which Wright argues that his ornate and verbose prose is in no way contradictory to the modern spirit:

“The preface, perhaps is the place to explain that so called ‘functionalist’ writing is as easy for me as for anybody. — But I came to Princeton to preach. I chose the guise of the preacher as pleasant and heretical at the moment.”

The first lecture is entitled ‘Machinery, Materials and Men’, and is a magnificent ode to technological modernity:

“Here is this thing we call the Machine, contrary to the principle of organic growth, but imitating it, working irresistibly the will of Man through the medium of men. All of us are drawn helplessly into its mesh as we treat our daily round.”

The Machine, for Wright, is so intertwined with the workings of urban culture that to work against it would mean certain ruin. His purpose is to show a way in which technology can be put to work, without damage being done to the human spirit. This sentiment does indeed share parallels with European modernists, but those are not nearly as interesting or informative as the parallels that can be drawn with Wright’s American contemporaries. A more sympathetic and nuanced analysis of the lectures would include writers like the poet Hart Crane and the architectural critic Lewis Mumford. The former issued his masterpiece, The Bridge, in the same year as Wright delivered his lectures, and in his antiquated style Crane was engaged in precisely the same project as Wright — to humanize and acclimatize a mechanized society that was already too well established to reject. Like Wright, Crane made oblique reference to modernism, but it is more natural to seem him as using the formal tools of American Romanticism. Mumford too gave a poetic critique of contemporary industrialized culture in 1934 with Technics and Civilization, and had been working throughout the ‘20s to theorize technology as part of a specifically American historical narrative.

Following the brilliant first essay, Wright offered a series of increasingly polemical talks. Lecture 2 is entitled ‘Style in Industry’ and makes explicit the Romanticist claims of the first:

“But the sense of Romance cannot die out of human hearts. Science itself is bringing us to greater need of it and unconsciously giving greater assurance of it at every step. Romance is shifting its center now, as it has done before and will do constantly — but it is immortal. Industry will only itself become and remain a Machine without it.”

Lecture 3, ‘The Passing of the Cornice” is perhaps the most poetic, dealing in stylized terms with Wright’s own architectural development, and rejecting sham ornamentation. Lecture 4 targets the pared down modernism of Oud et al, again comparing over-simplification in language and architectural style. In lectures 5 and 6 Wright is at his most emphatic, rejecting first the skyscraper and then the contemporary city. It is here, I suspect, that most readers will find him at his most relevant; this, also, is the area in which Wright perhaps deserves some criticism. His misreading of the fate of the city is of course forgivable, but his vision of an endless strip-mall suburbia is as bizarre as it is undesirable.

This all leads more generally to speculation about the need for re-issuing the lectures. Modern Architecture is a beautiful book, and Wright’s prose soars within the pictorial covers; but surely the task of an introduction is to properly situate and bring up to date the text that follows. We can hope, at least, that Modern Architecture’s re-lease may stimulate the further research needed for its justification.