Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this day in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

Wright's earliest influences were his doting mother, who had decided he would be a great builder before he was born, and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sought to define for America a wholly American aesthetic and a wholly American way of life; it would be Emerson's exhortations which would subconsciously play through most of what Wright tried to achieve in his work during his enormously productive 92-year life.

He found his passion for architecture early, preparing for it by studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin. After working as a draughtsman and later as chief assistant to Louis Sullivan, he opened his own firm and was immediately successful. His first commission, a dramatic house for W. H. Winslow, launched a period of critical acclaim, and among his earliest champions was Charles R. Ashbee, the well-known Arts-and-Crafts designer.

During this early period he sought in each design to develop a style which was distinctively Midwestern, and soon became the leading interpreter of the architectural movement known as the "Prairie School." For Wright -- stimulated by the writings of Ruskin, the aforementioned Arts-and-Crafts movement and Japanese architecture -- this style developed into "organic architecture," in which buildings were integrated into and inspired by the landscape rather than imposed on it. His credo: "No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together and each the happier for it." His interiors replaced the traditional compartmentalization of a home with one in which large, open living spaces predominated and interior rooms flowed into external balconies and terraces, and into which nature was invited through the use of expansive windows.

While most of his commissions were for private residences (such as the Kaufmann House, known as "Fallingwater," in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, 1935-48, his masterpiece), he also designed many public buildings, including schools, churches (notably the Unity Temple in Chicago, 1905-08), corporate headquarters (such as the Johnson Wax Building, 1936-39), and hotels (including the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, 1913-22, which survived the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake only to be torn down during civic modernization in 1967), as well as the astonishing geometric exercise that became the Guggenheim Museum (New York City, completed 1960).

In all, Wright designed about 800 buildings, 380 of which were built. His designs were known for their originality, spaciousness even in small structures, and, unfortunately, for their chronically leaky roofs -- but, as one client quipped, "this is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain."

Wright's personal life was scandal-ridden, a fact that decreased his popularity for a time: he and his first wife separated soon after their sixth child was born, and Wright lived for a time with a mistress until she was brutally murdered with her children in his home by a deranged servant; he married a second time to a morphine-addicted sculptor before running away at age 58 with 26-year old Olgivanna Hinzenburg, with whom he had a child before taking her as his 3rd and last wife in 1928. His primary home in the Wisconsin countryside, Taliesin, burned during the murder episode, was rebuilt twice and temporarily seized by the bank when Wright's finances were at a low ebb.

When it looked as though his career was over in his 60s, Wright outflanked the International Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier with his own new revolutionary style, and began to extend his evangelical efforts when he built Taliesin West (1937, Scottsdale, Arizona) as a studio and retreat for his student disciples. He had a colossal ego and did not collaborate willingly; for the sake of his architectural vision, clients sometimes found that his designs did not always accommodate their personal objects, or they might bump their heads on his stubbornly low doorways. In fact, Wright had a talent for making even the most progressive thinkers appear to be philistines: when modern abstract artists Willem deKooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell publicly denounced his design for the Guggenheim Museum, he ended up making them look like reactionaries after enlisting the aid of Robert Moses (of all people, a man who preferred to build expressways than anything remotely like human-scaled shelter) to make sure the Guggenheim would be completed.

Up until his death on April 9, 1959 in Phoenix, Arizona, Wright collected promising young architects around him in his Taliesin Fellowship -- incidentally leaving them, according to disciple Edgar Tafel, with a shared lack of a solid grounding engineering principles, but exhorting them nonetheless to explore new technologies, to maintain consistency in device, and to use a minimum of "design" to achieve maximum aesthetic effect.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh -- architect, designer and painter -- was born on this day in 1868 in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mackintosh studied at the Glasgow School of Art and in Italy (obtaining a solid grounding in the Arts-and-Crafts style) before joining with his soon-to-be-wife Margaret, her sister Frances and friend Herbert McNair (known collectively as "The Four," "The Mac Group," the "Glasgow School" or the "Spook School") to produce posters and decorative pieces, marked by an Art Nouveau-inspired calligraphic style but without the exaggerated floral motifs.

His architectural work, beginning in the 1890s (Glasgow Herald tower, 1893; Queen Margaret's Medical College, 1894-6; Martyr's Public School, 1895; Glasgow School of Art, 1897-1909; Hill House, Helensburgh, 1902-3), is a departure from out-and-out Art Nouveau, seeming to be more of a class with Louis Sullivan's view that "form follows function"; in Mackintosh's own words, architecture needed to be more than "a mere envelope without contents." In search of functional sturdiness, Mackintosh drew upon Scottish vernacular architecture (forts, Medieval towers) to produce an austere overall effect, but accented it with curved metalwork, deployed like calligraphy.

The designs by Mackintosh and his wife for the interior of Kate Cranston's Tea Rooms (1897-9) -- white high-backed enamel chairs, leaded glass accents, everything down to the teaspoons and waitress' uniforms -- were a comprehensive statement of Mackintosh's personal vision of combining the rational (function) and the expressive (realized through Art Nouveau decoration) with graceful elegance. Through their participation in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna in 1901, Mackintosh and MacDonald enjoyed greater influence in Germany and Austria than in Scotland and England where, after Mackintosh became a partner in the architectural firm of Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh, his buildings fell out of favor, attacked by hardcore Arts-and-Crafts critics as being infected by corrupt Art Nouveau influences. In his later years, most of his designs were for residential interiors, fabrics and book covers. He died on December 10, 1928 in London, England.

Brunelleschi's Dome

"In the taut curves of its profile, the force of its volume, and the dynamism of its upward leap, the shape of Brunelleschi's dome suggests the new absolute of the Early Renaissance, the idea of the indomitable individual will . . ." -- F. Hartt.

Filippo Brunelleschi, known to his contemporaries as Pippo, died in 1446 in Florence at the age of 69.

While his early rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti, would be known principally for just two works, the bronze doors on the north and east portals of the Baptistery of Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi is best known today for just one unconventional and breathtaking accomplishment, the design of the cupola for the Duomo, the Cathedral of Florence, which he worked on intrepidly with eyebrows gleefully raised high for 20 years.

Pippo's father was a member of the Cathedral design committee when Pippo was a child, so he had grown up with models and drawings of the early designs for the Cathedral. By the age of 21, however, Brunelleschi has entered the goldsmith trade, and in 1402 he was optimistic about his chances of winning the public competition being held to select a sculptor to create new bronze doors for the north portal of the Baptistery outside the Cathedral. His competition effort was well received, but in the end he placed second to Ghiberti -- and he never forgave him. After his disappointment Brunelleschi found it easy to give up sculpture for architecture, and served along with Ghiberti on the Opera del Duomo committee of 1404, doing his best to make the young sculptor look silly by exposing Ghiberti's lack of engineering expertise at every opportunity.

It is possible that the beginnings of Brunelleschi's vision began to take hold when the committee asked then-current Cathedral architect Giovanni d'Ambrogio to lower his three semi-domes. In 1407, as Vasari records, the Opera del Duomo adopted Brunelleschi's suggestion that a drum be inserted between d'Ambrogio's semi-domes and the center, thus preparing to "lift the weight off the shoulders" of the semi-domes to accommodate a massive central dome. Brunelleschi's influence on the evolution of the Cathedral's design increased in the years that followed until the Cathedral was finally declared his own project in 1420. Thereafter, the Cathedral ultimately took on the characteristics of what is often called Brunelleschi's "paper architecture," his conception of proportional architectural shapes as if on paper, elegantly partitioned and measured across the eye's plane with a geometric simplicity and order unseen in Gothic architecture.

The gigantic central dome itself, visible for miles around Florence, was literally the crown of Brunelleschi's career as a designer, a triumph of engineering as well as a stylistic statement which in some ways set the optimistic tone for the century of Renaissance artistic expression to follow. Brunelleschi solved the engineering problem of building such a large, tall dome -- the largest, tallest dome ever made until that time -- by erecting an internal dome with an exceptionally strong herringbone masonry pattern, surrounded by oak reinforcing beams held together with iron chains and fixed to stone buttresses which connected the inner shell with the outer shell.

While working on his lifetime project, Brunelleschi also managed to work on other projects, such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti (begun 1419) and the Chapter House for Santa Croce (1433), and he revolutionized the plan of church interiors with his designs for San Lorenzo (1425) and Santo Spirito (1434).

April Freshness

"Renaissance artists and writers were emphatic in their insistence that Giotto was their true ancestor. Perhaps at no other moment in the entire history of painting has a single idea achieved so rapid, widespread, and well-nigh complete a change." -F. Hartt.

The painter Giotto died on this date in 1337 in Florence.

Universally recognized, even in his own lifetime, as the first great Italian master, Giotto was born around 1266 in Vespignano, near Florence, and early on was apparently a student of both Cimabue and Nicola Pisano. Yet Giotto's work represented an astonishing departure from the works of his teachers, the first draft of a bold line between the formalistic religious painting of his Medieval predecessors and the foundations of the Italian Renaissance.

In his earliest work, a cycle of frescoes of the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ on the walls of the Arena Chapel at Padua, Giotto immediately reveals a new, more naturalistic vision of religious painting. Unlike his predecessors who, influenced by the painting traditions of Byzantine iconography, arranged stylized figures on gold leaf backdrops with little discernible emphasis on dramatic intensity or personality, Giotto drew from nature and portrayed his weightier figures in the midst of psychologically familiar moments; imbued the Arena Chapel scenes with clear, uniform light; placed his characters on firm, solid ground with vegetation and architectural ornaments providing a real-life context; and, most startlingly, used beautiful glowing colors -- blues, greens, reds and ivories.

Noting the contrast with Giotto's earlier contemporaries, the critic John Ruskin called attention to the "April freshness" of Giotto's panels; forgiving the modern association of that phrase with laundry detergent, Ruskin's observation is accurate when one looks at the drearily gilded panels being painted in Italy at the time. Giotto's other important works included frescoes at Santa Croce in Florence and a panel, the Ognissanti Madonna.

Just before his death, Giotto designed and began the building of the campanile (bell tower) for the Duomo Cathedral in Florence as official architect of the city. He was one of the best known personalities of his day when he died, and his name was celebrated in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Dante, incidentally, by legend once asked the homely Giotto why his children were so ugly, to which the artist replied, "My frescoes I make by day, and my children by night."

The Gates of Paradise

Lorenzo Ghiberti's lofty reputation begins and ends with essentially 2 works: the bronze doors depicting New Testament stories on the north portal of the Baptistery (just outside the Cathedral of Florence), on which he worked for 21 years (1403-24), and the bronze doors on the east portal of the same building, on which he worked for 23 years (1425-52).

In 1402, as a 24 year-old painting student without any formal affiliation in metallurgy he entered the competition for a set of bronze reliefs for the north doors, the test subject of which was a panel depicting Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac, and was chosen as one of the top 2 entrants, the other being Filippo Brunelleschi. Comparing Brunelleschi's design to Ghiberti's, it is not hard to see why Ghiberti was given the commission. While Brunelleschi's design is bold, naturalistic and dramatic, his twisted figures tearing their way to and fro within the boundaries of the quatrefoil panel, Ghiberti's entire composition displays a graceful, delicate unity, subtly revealing the inner lives of Abraham and Isaac while drawing the eye along the sweeping shapes and lines through a deliberate use of lighting effects. His figure of Isaac is sometimes referred to as the first truly Renaissance nude figure, demonstrating naturalistic values in his detailed rendering of young Isaac's musculature, while at the same time letting the figure exist quietly, in the manner of the very silent nudes of antiquity. (In addition, it turns out that Ghiberti's bronze casting technique was less costly than Brunelleschi's would have been. The Baptistery booster club may not have known anything about art, but they sure knew how to save money.)

Brunelleschi never forgave Ghiberti for winning the competition, and in 1404, when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were chosen as part of a committee to design the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence, Brunelleschi did his best to make Ghiberti look silly at every turn, setting engineering traps into which the less experienced Ghiberti repeatedly and publicly blundered. For the most part that mattered little to Ghiberti, who was shrewd enough to retreat quietly from the project and to spend most of the energies of the rest of his life finishing the Baptistery doors.

In 1425 he was given the commission for the east doors, which have come to be known as the "Gates of Paradise" (according to legend, so named by Michelangelo, who said they were truly worthy of the honor), depicting Old Testament stories, this time in heavily gilded square panels appearing like paintings rather than reliefs.

Soane

The son of a bricklayer, born on this day in 1753 in Goring-on-Thames, England, John Soane studied architecture at the Royal Academy through the kindness of surveyor James Peacock and architect George Dance. In 1778 he went on the "Grand Tour" in Europe on a King's Travelling Studentship award, soaking in Roman classicism and meeting some influential British friends. He cut short his tour in 1780, however, and moved to Ireland, ostensibly to design and build a home for the Bishop of Derry, Lord Frederick Hervey; but unfortunately for the penniless Soane, nothing ever came of the project.

Returning to England empty-handed, he married a wealthy heiress and slowly built a solid reputation as an honest and capable builder. After supervising the renovation of the home of William Pitt the Younger (a cousin of one of his Grand Tour buddies), Soane was named Surveyor of the Bank of England in 1788 and began to receive a number of prestigious commissions around London. Although some of his major works (the Law Courts, built in the 1820s; Freemasons' Hall in Great Queen Street, 1828; and the Bank of England, to which he devoted 45 years of his life) have been demolished or rebuilt on new designs, his exteriors have been highly admired by modern architects for their masculine simplicity, particularly where budgetary constraints forced him to pare them back to ordinary bricks with accents of Portland stone.

His own home in London at 12-14 Lincoln's Inn Fields exemplifies Soane's aesthetic interests from exterior to interior: plain and quiet on the outside, inside it is an intricate set of neoclassical catacombs, fastidiously outfitted with mirrors and colored glass skylights to create unusual top-lighting effects; and today it is filled with his vast, somewhat macabre collection of classical antiquities (some purchased from the estate of his former employer, architect Henry Holland) and other works of art (including Hogarth's original Rake's Progress painting series and a number of works by Canaletto), as well as with examples of his favorite decorative obsession, the architectural imagery of death -- urns, sarcophagi, and so on. Soane was so disappointed with his squandering sons that he obtained an act of Parliament before he died in 1837 which turned his prized home into a public treasure, now known as the Sir John Soane Museum.

The Winchester Mystery House

Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1839, Sarah Pardee was a charming young woman, blessed with musical talent and a facility with languages, when she married William Wirt Winchester -- the son of Oliver Winchester, founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company -- in 1862. Just two years before, Oliver Winchester had unveiled the Henry Rifle, a magazine-loaded weapon which averaged one shot every 3 seconds; it was the first true repeating rifle, and it was the instrument behind the deaths of thousands during the Civil War.

In 1866, Sarah Winchester gave birth to a daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, but the infant Annie died just 11 days after her birth from "marasmus," a disease in which the body wastes away rapidly. Sarah became deeply tormented by her loss and retreated from the outside world. Sarah and William never had another child.

When William died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1881, the still relatively young Sarah inherited the arms fortune of the Winchester family -- $20 million, 48.9% of the Winchester Company, and an untaxed income of $1,000 per day. Distraught, Sarah consulted a spiritualist medium, who told her that the deaths of her daughter and husband were due to the curse of thousands who had died by the repeating rifle and were seeking vengeance on the Winchesters. Guided by seances, Sarah Winchester moved to the Santa Clara Valley in California and bought a 17-room home on 162 acres.

Then she began her life's work. Keeping 22 carpenters at work, year round, almost 24 hours a day from 1884 until 1922, Sarah Winchester feverishly directed the construction of a never-ending house to atone for the rifle deaths which infiltrated her consciousness. Sketching her whimsical plans on napkins and tablecloths and insisting on the best building materials, Winchester's mansion was gradually transformed into an Escher-like spatial conundrum (much of it, say her interpreters, designed to thwart the onslaught of malevolent spirits), a maze with staircases that led to nowhere; upside-down fixtures; skylights over skylights; doors that opened to blank walls; and others that opened to sheer drops inside and out. All tolled, Winchester built a 4-story house (before the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the house reached 7 stories) with 160 rooms, 467 doorways, 950 doors, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases and 2 ballrooms.

Amid the seeming chaos, Winchester shows flashes of genuine talent as an architect, and even patented several devices she designed for the house. The house became a cause celebre, but Sarah stubbornly preserved her privacy, even turning away an attempted call by Theodore Roosevelt (to his fury) in the year of the earthquake. She died on this day in 1922.

Out of her reclusive fear and despair, Sarah Winchester created a forcefully personal work of art, a perfect and harmonious expression of her discordant psychosis -- no less valid than, say, the manic piano pieces of Alkan, the torturous writings of Kafka, or the wildly iconoclastic projects of countless other "legitimate" artists. The mansion is open to tours to this day, peddled as a ghost house built by a crazy woman. Well, take it how you will.

A Home

I am celebrating my fifth anniversary in my home -- designed by Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Peter Berndtson around 1960-4 -- by bringing in a bunch of contractors, aided by an architect who understands the work of Peter Berndtson and can help me make choices that preserve Berndtson's vision and intent. This summer I am renovating two of the three decks on the second floor.

Another architect, Albert Walters, once said of Berndtson: "Peter was one of the most totally self-centered people I have ever known . . . [he] embodied the character of Howard Roark [from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead] more than anyone I ever knew." Others have disputed this characterization (Edgar Tafel told me that Berndtson was a "nice man" -- whatever that might mean), but it is clear that in learning his craft at the knee of Wright, Berndtson also learned to emulate something of Wright's elitism and arrogance.

A some-time designer of stage sets, Berndtson joined Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin in 1938 and became one of Wright's most devoted pupils and disciples, working with the master on his renderings of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. During the 1940s, Berndtson settled in Pittsburgh with his second wife, Taliesin architect and historian Cornelia Brierly, where he became an important designer of Wright-influenced residences -- "organic" structures which were designed with uncompromising discipline to be integrated with the land in their basic lines, their materials and their treatment of natural light. He passed away in 1972.

This excerpt from Miller and Sheon's book Organic Vision: The Architecture of Peter Berndtson, explains a bit about what is special about my particular house:

One house that tested all of the architect's ingenuity was 'Springwater Hills,' the home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Parkins . . . The Parkinses owned 40 wooded acres surrounding a handsome grassy knoll -- on which stood a typical late Victorian clapboard farmhouse with gable roof. Berndtson first saw the site in 1953. He suggested razing the small farmhouse and starting fresh. At the time the Parkinses felt the expense prohibitive and in any case did not want to start from scratch. Ten years later they began long discussions about adapting the house.

' Peter was amenable to an adaptation,' Parkins said. 'But he told me it would be a most difficult challenge to make his architecture come together with the existing building. We knew what he meant. He looked over the place a few times and then disappeared for about six months. When he finally came out with the plans, the drawings were incredible. We fell in love with his ideas right away. Even if we had been inclined to, after seeing what he intended we probably could not have looked for another architect. You just couldn't deny his work,' the Parkinses said.

'I said I thought Micarta surfaces would be practical in the bedrooms,' Arthur Parkins remembered. 'If you want that you'll need a different architect,' Peter replied.'

'We let him do what he wanted,' Loretta Parkins said, 'because everything he did was beyond our expectations. The house, with three decks on the second floor, four bedrooms and two baths, is like a sculpture. We have made no attempt to overdress it. Just a few flowers. Peter included corner flower boxes on the northwest deck. There was nothing that we didn't let Peter do. He had total freedom and we're not sorry!'

Parkins agreed. 'Peter had a unified design. He nurtured ideas like sculptural entities and he never deviated from his ideals.'

On of their house's most unusual features is a long walkway with a redwood canopy that extends many feet from the front of the house in the direction of a separate garage. The house has a strong Japanese quality with its stark redwood exterior. Except for one area of the original roofline, there is nothing to indicate the house's beginnings. Berndtson enclosed the original structure but refinished the interior as the core of his enlargement. It was a brilliant experiment.

One feature of the house that Miller and Sheon fail to mention, except in passing, is its surroundings -- the thick, green woods; the lush rhododendrons that hug the structure on the east and west sides; and the gentle hiss of the two springs that traverse the land on which it is situated. The land itself was part of the attraction for me, and one of the things that drew me to visit when I first read that this Berndtson house was for sale by the Parkinses. It was an emotional experience for me to wake up in this forest for the first time five years ago after moving in. In the master bedroom, with glass expanses on either side of the built-in platform bed, and narrow windows on either side of the fireplace at the far end of the room, it was easy to be overwhelmed by being enveloped within the forest's colors and sounds. In this most private haven, it was as if there were no sense of time.

No Place Like Home

California savings and loan magnate Howard F. Ahmanson was born on this day in 1906 in Omaha, Nebraska.

One of the towering names in Southern California business, Ahmanson's Home Savings & Loan loaned money to more home buyers than any other S&L, and was one of the driving forces behind the Southern California housing boom after World War II. He started in insurance, and became wealthy during the Depression by dealing in foreclosures. In 1947 he bought a modest little S&L, Home Savings of America, for $162,000, and through additional acquisitions and internal growth he managed to create the nation's largest S&L, with more than $1 billion in assets by 1961.

It was his instincts as a salesman, however, that steered him to success. Realizing that Depression-era depositors were looking for stability in their chosen savings institution, Ahmanson cultivated an image of permanence for Home Savings by commissioning the construction of over 60 monumental stand-alone edifices for the branches of the S&L around Southern California -- a contrast to the dingy rented storefronts occupied by other S&Ls. Designed by California painter/architect Millard Sheets, Ahmanson's Home Savings buildings, with their massive, exaggeratedly dignified gold-accented exteriors, expansive courtyards containing bronze, accessibly-modern sculptures of playful nuclear families (by Albert Stewart), grand mosaic murals by Sheets himself and grandiose marble interiors, became instantly identifiable fixtures of the Southern California landscape, and were undoubtedly influential on the design of stand-alone buildings for banks and other financial institutions as the car 'burbs sprouted drive-in business districts. (Perhaps as a form of retribution, in 2000 the Santa Monica Landmarks Commission refused to grant landmark status to the Home Savings branch at 2600 Wilshire, calling it a "mediocre" example of "Italian Fascist architecture.")

TV commercials featuring earnest ex-comic straight-men such as Harry Von Zell and George Fenneman telling future homeowners that there was "no place like Home" rounded out the Home Savings image of dependability.

When Ahmanson died on June 17, 1968 in Los Angeles, the S&L had assets of $2.5 billion; in 1999, it was acquired by Washington Mutual Savings. Ahmanson's son, Howard, Jr., is a major California philanthropist, sometimes called the "paymaster to the political right" for his support of Christian conservative think-tanks -- a West coast Scaife, as it were.

Stone Cold Jefferson

"Doesn't it give you chills?," asks a woman standing inside John Russell Pope's justly praised memorial to Thomas Jefferson on the south side of the Tidal Basin in Washington.

Yes, that about sums it up: we admire Jefferson-the-icon enough to give him a breathtaking monument, but as a man he leaves us a little cold. Sure, there are Jefferson cultists among us, but as much as we Americans adore our innovators, we sometimes rebel against our icy know-it-alls, especially when we get a whiff of their intellectualism; we love our founding fathers, and square-jawed Jefferson is principal among them, but few among us can identify with the kind of nation he wanted to create. We even hold a special place in our hearts for our presidents, but Jefferson himself regarded this status so poorly that he neglected to mention it among his achievements on his self-written epitaph.

Even among today's political philosophers, there is disagreement about the meaning and significance of Jeffersonian thought -- ranging from the depiction of Jefferson as a founder of modern American conservatism (based on his opinion that "that government is best which governs least"), to the idea that he is the father of progressive liberalism (for statements such as "laws and institutions . . . must advance to keep pace with the times" and "a little rebellion now and then . . . is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government"), to the view that Jefferson was at best a woolly-headed dilettante as a theorist without anything resembling a coherent philosophy -- to the bizarre notion, advanced by one lunacritic, that the 20th century leader who best embodied Jeffersonian values was Pol Pot.

Then, of course, there's the story of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and the slave children he supposedly sired with her after the death of his wife (a charge that recent DNA tests have established to be "highly probable," although this is still a matter of dispute); mix these circumstances with his then-radical assertion that "all men are created equal," his periodic calls for the end to the slave trade, and his simultaneously harsh assessments of the character of African-Americans, and we cannot help but come away with a disturbing sense of his asymmetry as a man, at best -- or of his hypocrisy, at worst.

These paradoxes, his apparent feet of clay, tend to move us here in the 21st century to try to understand him as we do the national politicians of our own time -- flawed giants we hate to love, and love to hate, in whose hands we place our collective fate. It is perhaps best to remember him as a multi-faceted man, in a poetic echo of John Kennedy's famous tribute, that an assembled gathering of Nobel prize winners was "the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Born on this day in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, the son of a social climbing Virginia planter, young Thomas Jefferson studied Greek, Latin and French with local parsons until, shortly after the death of his father, at age 17 he enrolled at the College of William and Mary. At 19, he began reading law with George Wythe, and after an extraordinarily long clerkship, entered the Bar at age 24.

After 2 years of law practice (during which he spent a good deal more time focusing on the initial design and construction of Monticello, his neo-Palladian plantation manse, with which he continued to tinker throughout the rest of his life, adding weather devices, clocks, retractable beds and innumerable other features of his own design), he followed in his father's footsteps by getting elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he quickly aligned himself with the anti-British faction. In 1774, around the time that he inherited his father-in-law's acreage and 135 slaves, he penned A Summary View of the Rights of British America, drawing upon the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers -- an assiduously well-reasoned argument against control by British Parliament which was intended as a set of instructions for Virginia's first delegates to the Continental Congress; published anonymously, as his authorship came to be known it earned him a minor following as a theoretician of liberty among other anti-British politicians throughout the colonies.

Shortly thereafter, as a member of the Continental Congress, he was the logical choice of a specially charged committee (consisting of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Sherman and Robert R. Livingston) to draft what would become America's Declaration of Independence; his 1,322-word text (in final form, after some minor wordsmithing by his congressional colleagues, as well as the deletion of his condemnation of the slave trade at the demand of Southern delegates) was, in his own words, an attempt "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent."

The Declaration made him famous, or rather infamous in some quarters, and he returned to the Virginia legislature with greater political clout during the Revolution, pushing through reforms abolishing primogeniture and establishing religious freedom in Virginia. The war came to Virginia as Jefferson entered the statehouse as Virginia's governor in 1779, a period which would not prove to be Jefferson's finest hour: when the British invaded Richmond in 1781, Jefferson resigned as governor and fled on horseback to Monticello; with the British now in pursuit of Jefferson as one of the foremost of the traitors to the crown, Jefferson and his family fled again, this time to Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg, Virginia (the later site of his neoclassical octagonal retreat, which he completed in 1812), where he remained in seclusion until 1783 -- humiliated and accused by some of cowardice under fire (although an official inquiry later cleared him of the charge).

There he devoted himself to writing Notes on the State of Virginia (published in 1786). Ostensibly a statistical snapshot of the demographics and economic conditions of the state, Jefferson also devoted a large section of the work to natural history, countering the prevalent European view that the flora and fauna of the New World were inferior to those of Europe. Furthermore, throughout the finished product he provided a more comprehensive view of his ideas for political and social reform -- touching upon slavery, native Americans, education, religion and his desire to cultivate and encourage a decentralized, minimally-governed agrarian society, with gentlemen farmers, ample elbow-room and workshop-sized industry, without the plague of a corporate aristocracy; it would be the touchstone of Jeffersonian philosophy, largely written in the detached manner of a man who had given up on his own ambitions to effect change.

With the death of his wife Martha in 1782, however, he cut short his premature retirement and spent another term in the Continental Congress, where he helped to establish the decimal system of American coinage that we use today. He sat out of one fundamental phase of post-Revolutionary America -- the drafting and enactment of the Constitution -- while serving as minister to France (1785-9), although he cast his lot with his colleague James Madison on the scene, ultimately supporting the idea of a strong federal government in exchange for the reservation of the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, perhaps in reaction to the excesses he saw in the French Revolution.

Jefferson returned to the newly formed United States to become the first Secretary of State, under President Washington, in 1790, but as his disagreements with Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton over dealing with Britain and France grew more intense, Jefferson resigned in 1793.

He returned to Monticello, content to farm and tinker, but as Washington looked forward to retirement, Madison began to agitate for Jefferson's election as president, hoping to avoid Vice President Adams' imminent favoring of Britain over France; although Jefferson lost the election in 1796, under the Constitution, as the second highest vote-getter, he was elected vice-president -- a position Jefferson loathed, but nonetheless used as a platform to criticize aspects of Adams' Federalist program, including the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Portrayed as the friend of individual liberty and states' rights, Jefferson beat Adams in the 1800 re-match, and was reelected for a second term as president in 1804. It is surmised that Jefferson's greatest accomplishment as president was his purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803, doubling the size of the U.S. for a mere $15 million. In 1806 he dispatched his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and soldier William Clark to explore the territory and provide a comprehensive report on its flora, fauna and ethnography, an executive act still celebrated as the grandest of national gestures to the spirit of discovery, for the benefit of science and knowledge. He also signed into law a bill that abolished the importation of slaves beginning in 1808; but his effectiveness was called into question with the disastrous economic results of his embargo against Britain and France, and when his second term was complete, he was relieved to be retiring to Monticello for the last time, to engage in winemaking and other agricultural and scientific pursuits.

He was, however, deeply in debt due to bad business decisions, and it was not until he sold his 6,500-volume book collection to the Library of Congress (recently gutted when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812) that he was able to recover a comfortable financial footing. His final years were devoted to his establishment of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (an attempt at fulfilling his vision of an education enabling every citizen "to know his rights" under government), for which he designed the buildings, chose the faculty and served as rector.

As every schoolchild knows, Thomas Jefferson died a few hours before his alternating friend-and-foe John Adams, the other surviving founding father, on July 4, 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence -- a poetically well-ordered conclusion which cannot help but direct our eye back to what is fundamental about Jefferson's message: the unassailable common sense of liberty.

Michelangelo

If no one with genius other than Leonardo da Vinci had been available to groom the collective aesthetic of the Italian capitals of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the High Renaissance might have been a much colder and darker period. As it was, Michelangelo Buonarotti would not sit still for Leonardo's detached skepticism; Michelangelo's unabashed creative gestures were passionate invocations of the divinity of human muscle and flesh, to be rehearsed openly in the beauty of divine daylight.

As creator, Michelangelo aspired to be a star, to achieve nobility through his craft -- a most improbable outcome for a short, squat, unwashed, doodling stonecutter with a broken nose, in his time or perhaps in any other -- but he certainly achieved stardom at some level, raising the social station of the grand artiste in the process.

His abusive father had been the mayor of Caprese, the Tuscan town where Michelangelo was born on this day in 1475, and he claimed noble lineage, which to him was inconsistent with Michelangelo's desire for an artistic career. Perhaps as a result, Michelangelo's mercurial persona would be defined by the inner struggle between his supreme exterior self-confidence in his abilities and his barely submerged fear of not being appreciated; plagued by both pride and guilt in their most painful extremes, he labored to prove to his father that his pursuits were genuinely noble, while dutifully sending his father and brothers money for their care and feeding.

At 13, Michelangelo became an apprentice to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After 3 years with Ghirlandaio, however, Michelangelo felt he had learned all he could there and transferred to Bertoldo di Giovanni's school in the Medici gardens, focusing on his true love, sculpting, and studying the Medici collection of antiquities. Staying at the home of Lorenzo de Medici, he would often dine shoulder to shoulder with the despot, getting first-hand lessons in being larger than life. Michelangelo was 17 when Lorenzo died, and his services were no longer required as the political situation in Florence began to shift, so he went briefly to Bologna, where he carved a few small figures for the tomb of St. Dominic, before arriving in Rome at age 20.

In Rome he came into his own. His super-large full-length nude figure of a brash and drunken Bacchus (1496-7) was an homage to the pagan antiquities he studied at the Medici palace. Its sensuality was striking and new for its time, but it was the sheer artistry of the piece which helped to secure for him a commission by a French cardinal for a massive piece to be, by contract, "the most beautiful work in marble" in Rome, a work which was to become the Pieta (1498-1500): a quiet yet majestic tableau of the timeless grief of the young and beautiful mother Mary holding the lifeless body of Christ in her gigantic lap. When it was unveiled, the crowd at St. Peter's speculated that it must have been the work of a mature and seasoned sculptor, inspiring Michelangelo to steal into the cathedral at night to carve his signature into the finished piece so that there would be no mistakes in attribution.

In 1501 he accepted a commission in Florence for a statue of David for a buttress on the Duomo. The finished work (1501-4) was a 14-foot tall rustically muscular nude, a defiant warrior at rest whose confidence seemed to be a much more fitting symbol for the Florentine Republic; the Republic in fact hijacked the piece from the church and placed it in front of the main entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, where it became not only a symbol for Florentine democracy, but for the confluence of classical harmonies and heightened sense of drama which would define the High Renaissance. He also turned out a graceful Madonna and Child (known as the Bruges Madonna), a brightly-colored round painting of the Holy Family (the Doni Tondo), a round relief (the Taddei Tondo) and began work on a battle mural for the council chamber inside the Palazzo Vecchio which was to face a likewise unfinished battle mural by da Vinci, before his time in Florence was cut short by a summons from Pope Julius II in 1505 to work on a design for Julius' future tomb.

The tale of Julius' tomb is a long and frustrating one: Michelangelo designed a grandiose free-standing structure ornamented with over 40 life-sized figures; Julius interrupted the commission in 1506 to divert funds to the building of St. Peter's; Michelangelo left in a huff, but returned to the project on and off for 40 years with the end result that Julius' tomb was redesigned on a more modest scale in accordance with the wishes of Julius' cheap heirs, and the only figure Michelangelo actually contributed was the imposing, horned Moses (c. 1515).



In the midst of Michelangelo's disgust over the project, Julius goaded the reluctant sculptor into undertaking the painting of a fresco cycle on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, a project which put Michelangelo on scaffolding for the next 5 years. He worked quickly, even heroically, to complete cycle -- peopled with muscular studies of the Old Testament prophets, classical sibyls, scenes from Genesis (including the potently mythic Creation of Adam, with the white-bearded Lord extending His finger and bestowing upon the first human a potential particle of His divinity) -- in a relatively short period of time given its impossible scope. At their freest, his compositions were dizzying, painful tangles of arms and legs, bathed in fresh, sunlit coloration, and his characterizations are vibrant and emotionally alert; and his loving attention to the beauty of the human form -- Michelangelo's conception of the holiness of Man -- became the touchstone for a generation of Mannerist painters. He was instantly hailed as the supreme master of the age.

Back in Florence after Julius' death, Michelangelo was now feeling his power as a boundless visionary, and did not hesitate to plunge his energies into architectural projects at San Lorenzo, attempting to create a union of architecture and sculpture in designs for the Medici Chapel and the Biblioteca Laurenziana before political instabilities drew him personally into the conflict between the Republicans and the Mediceans. He took the side of the Republicans and assisted in fortifying the city. When it fell to the Mediceans in 1530, the order was put out for his assassination, but the canon of San Lorenzo hid Michelangelo until a pardon could be obtained for him so that he could complete his work on the Medici Chapel.

Feeling chastened by Florence, and perhaps a little out of sorts over his ill-fated "pursuit" (possibly platonic, but ardent nonetheless) of a young Italian nobleman through letters and poems, Michelangelo moved to Rome and never returned. There Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel (1536-41), another triumph, but very different from his ceiling frescoes; given the atmosphere of war and treachery which blazed through Italy at the time, it is not surprising that Michelangelo's mood would be darker, even wrathful.

For the last 20 years of his life, Michelangelo served as the architect of St. Peter's, designing the finishing touches of the project which had begun under Bramante in 1506 (including its distinctive dome) and ultimately defining the massive, explosive style which dominates that corner of Rome to this day. He was working on another, rougher Pieta when he died of pneumonia on February 18, 1564, the undisputed star of Renaissance sculpture, painting and architecture.

Fallingwater Audio

The WDUQ-FM Fallingwater anniversary report, featuring a discussion between author Franklin Toker and Edgar Tafel, the last surviving apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright present at the birth of Fallingwater, is now available at WDUQ's audio site (Quicktime required).

WDUQ-FM to air Fallingwater Story

As an update to my previous posting on the subject (see Edgar Tafel at Fallingwater), I have been informed that WDUQ-FM (90.5 in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas) will air its story on Edgar Tafel at Fallingwater on Thursday morning, September 22, 2005, the 70th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's first drawing of the house. The story will air during the 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. half-hours in the middle of the local cutaway from WDUQ's broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition.

Included in the story are portions of my interview with Franklin Toker, author of Fallingwater Rising, and Toker's discussion with Tafel about Fallingwater's birth.

Edgar Tafel at Fallingwater

I am not a real radio reporter. However, I do have an unhealthy interest in a dizzying array of topics far and wide across the vast plains of topicdom, and I guess I’m vocal enough about these odds and ends that people seem to know this about me. So, it wasn’t a complete surprise when a friend of mine from a local NPR station asked me to “cover” an event taking place at Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated creation known as Fallingwater, located just 50 miles south of my own home outside of Pittsburgh.

September 22 will mark the 70th anniversary of Wright’s original concept drawings of Fallingwater, often described as the single greatest piece of architecture of the 20th century. Thus it is that 93-year old architect and former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel visited Fallingwater last Saturday, to stand on one of his master’s famous balconies in front of a documentary film crew and, as a witness to history, to discuss Wright and Fallingwater with University of Pittsburgh professor Franklin Toker, author of a definitive study of the house, Fallingwater Rising. (Photo of Toker and Tafel at left.) Tafel is, in fact, the last surviving human being to have been present when Wright drew the house.

I am fortunate enough to own a home designed by another of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, the late Peter Berndtson; my home is featured in another book, Organic Vision: The Architecture of Peter Berndtson, by D. Miller & A. Sheon (The Hexagon Press, 1980). Armed with my enthusiasm for the work of Wright and his Taliesin fellows, after a crash course in sound engineering given to me by my reporter friend, I arrived early at Fallingwater on a rainy Saturday morning, wearing one of my best suits. (I doubt that Edward R. Murrow wore anything else, unless he was in a war zone. Even then . . .) My job, handed to me by an apparently seriously understaffed news department, was to meet with Tafel and Toker, record their conversation, and if possible ask a few questions of my own.

Although Tafel and the film crew were running late, shortly after I arrived I encountered Franklin Toker, a scholar with a twinkle in his eye. We discussed Wright, Fallingwater, Tafel and Berndtson, and he regaled us with tales from his “eighteen years” of research on Fallingwater Rising. Although he is principally a scholar of medieval Italian architecture, Toker was inspired to write about Fallingwater for a number of reasons. First, if you are an architect in Pittsburgh, it is simply expected that you should be able to say something intelligent about Fallingwater. Secondly, Toker points out that while booksellers will claim that dozens of books have been written about Fallingwater, in his own experience he came to believe merely that dozens of books have a picture of Fallingwater on their cover, and that no single work had come close to telling the full Fallingwater story.

Toker’s usual research involves translating medieval Latin texts, so researching Fallingwater was a challenge in that he actually had to sit down and interview people. He noted that it was often the emotional content of an interview, rather than the facts elicited, that was of most value in compiling oral histories – especially where the frail memories of people in their 90s were concerned.

The day's star nonagenarian, courtly Edgar Tafel, seemed anything but frail when he arrived. Sporting a snazzy gold print jacket and a collarless black shirt, he was hobbled a bit by arthritis, but it was also clear that he enjoyed basking in the glow of his master’s creation, and that it gave him a certain energy to be in its presence. As the camera crew readied itself and I concentrated on my sound chores, plugging in to the sound of the obliging film crew, Tafel chatted jauntily with Toker, and even sang a few bars of an old Taliesin song (“we love Mozart . . . we hate Beaux Arts”).

Tafel has been telling the story of Wright first putting pencil to paper for so long, it has an air of being rather rehearsed at this point. But Tafel is part showman, to be sure, so as he tells the tale, he is measuring his audience's reaction. He tells how Wright and his team were ensconced at Taliesin in Wisconsin, when they received a call from E.J. Kaufmann, Wright's anxious client, informing Wright that he and his wife had just landed at Milwaukee and would be arriving soon, wanting to see his preliminary drawings. There were none, of course, at that moment, so Wright sent his assistants scurrying to make Taliesin ready for his visitors, and with pencils flying, a mere couple of hours later Wright had a picture of Fallingwater on his drawing table, waiting for E.J. and Liliane. The design just poured out of him, Tafel recalls. He had not sketched one line prior to Kaufmann's call.

As the discussion took its course, Toker invited me, standing off camera, to shoot a couple of questions at Tafel. I noted that Tafel was part of a select group of architects who had received their early training from Wright, many of whom had gone on to interesting careers, and asked if there was one thing that all of the Wright apprentices seemed to share from their experience with Wright. Tafel’s answer meandered a bit, but by the giddy end it was clear that the one thing that the Wright apprentices all shared was a poor education in engineering – most had to supplement their education in order to be certified, and many, like Wright himself, were never certified as architects. I think I can attest to this, given my own experience with the work of a Wright apprentice. Roofs seem to be a special problem for Wright-style homes. It reminds me of the comments of one of Wright’s clients regarding chronic roof leaks: “That’s what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

I also asked Tafel what he hoped people would be able to take away from Fallingwater 70 years from now. He paused, then quietly mused, “Who can tell? . . . who can tell?”

With the formal interview completed, Tafel was led off by Fallingwater curators for a board meeting, leaving Toker and I to wrap up some final thoughts on Fallingwater. His answers to my questions were so beautifully rendered, I will await the transcript and bring them to these pages in a later installment.

Luckily, my excitement did not interfere with getting good sound -- the crisp tones of Tafel and Toker, with the gentle hiss and bubble of the famous waterfall underneath. I am hoping to report in a few weeks that some portion of it will be airing locally.