Wright Documentary

“Wright documentary shows genius, ego,” The Daily Cardinal, November 10, 1998

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” a new documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick airing Tuesday and Wednesday night on WHA, traces Wright’s turbulent life, a 91-year history fraught with controversy and contention, appalling self-promotion, infamy, disrepute, catastrophe and sorrow. But ultimately, Wright placed his name at the vanguard of American architecture, assuming a place of eminence few architects have enjoyed.

There was Fallingwater, the house he designed in 1936 in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, for Pittsburgh millionaire Edgar Kaufmann. Then there were the Usonian houses, a series of comparatively modest dwellings conceived at the behest of a family in Madison who wished to live in an affordable Wright home. The Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wright’s first large-scale commission in years, was only one in a long series of crowning achievements, an impeccable embodiment of his singular and transcendent ambition. And, finally, there was the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, completed after Wright’s death in 1959.

Employing many of the graceful techniques that have come to typify Burns’ productions, collaborators Burns and Novick have handsomely translated Wright’s three-dimensional mystique to the two-dimensional television medium. Burns and Novick take the viewer on an intimate tour of Wright-designed constructions, spanning 70 years and two coasts. The three-hour film honors Wright’s architectural legacy in glowing visual and oral tributes accompanied by the music of Beethoven, to whom Wright often compared himself.

In recounting Wright’s personal foibles, of which there were many, the film is less generous, portraying Wright to be the self-absorbed egotist many knew him to be, most tellingly through archival television footage of Wright himself.

“It’s amazing what I could do for this country,” Wright said in a 1957 interview, certainly not minimizing what he had already done. “I’ve been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world. And if I had said so, I don’t think it wold have been very arrogant.”