Edgar Kaufmann

Memmo's Lodoli

Some twenty-odd years ago, Rudolf Wittkower wrote of Fra Carlo Lodoli, “his personal influence seems to have been more vital than that of any other theorist of architecture of the eighteenth century.”2 With the word personal, Wittkower was drawing attention to a singular fact: Lodoli had never written his theories for publication. The friar felt that the logical rigor of his analysis of architecture, and the ensuing, unavoidable dethronement of its demigods, could be made acceptable through skilled personal persuasion and explanation; but he feared that, once his thoughts were committed to print, the full gunpower of entrenched academism and vested cultural dominance would be trained on him.3 And for good reasons, as we shall see, he had no stomach for such a battle.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Years of Modernism, 1925-1935

Through almost five years, 1925-1929, the very air Frank Lloyd Wright breathed was thick with catastrophe. His home, Taliesin, was once again fully destroyed by fire. Debts drove him to the verge of bankruptcy. Hysterical persecutions pursued him and the new, beloved family who were to remain close to him for the long rest of his life. These blackest years were survived only through personal love and a secure sense of creative accomplishment. This accomplishment was posited, in 1925, on the sumptuous pages of Wendingen. Soon, at the urging of his wife, Wright started to evoke his childhood, beginning An Autobiography. Unsurprisingly, the architectural yield of these years is strange and ideal, especially in contrast to the immediate past when Wright had built Hollyhock House, his most lavishly embellished design, and the block houses for Mrs. Millard, the Storers, and Ennises, and the Freemans, all in California, and had planned elaborate Death Valley and Chicago projects for A. M. Johnson, an adventuresome insurance magnate. These works and those that followed in the later 1930s bracket a unique decade of architectural ideation in Wrights career. Building almost nothing, he surveyed a number of important avenues that were to lead him to major achievements. And (perhaps stimulated by the extravagant coterie centered on the mistress of Hollyhock House) Wright became an advocate of the idealistic modernism we recognize as the essence of the 1920S. World horizons, technological miracles, the thrill of speed, the challenge of untried potentials were as stimulating then to his imagination as to the rest of the western worlds. In so regarding the spirit of Wrights work in these years I am returning to insights published by Henry-Russell Hitchcock more than twenty years ago and little examined since.