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Genius. After 1915, Wright's rebirth in architecture took the form of creative audacity on a grand scale. Commissioned in 1916 to build the new Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, he produced one of the marvels of modern construction. A vast, low building on a symmetrical plan, it was Wright's first ambitious use of the cantilever principle, which allowed him to rest each concrete floor slab on a central support, like a tray on a waiter's fingers. He roofed the building with light copper sheathing, made the centre of gravity low as a ship's. And like a ship, the Imperial was made to float. Instead of sinking deep piers to bedrock, the architect rested his building on hundreds of slender, pointed 8-ft. piles, distributing the weight evenly on a 60-ft. pad of mud.
Wright finished his work in 1920. He was in Los Angeles when the big quake hit Tokyo three years later. After ten days of anxious waiting, Wright learned by cable from his friend and client, Baron Okura, that the building had ridden out the quake unharmed while other modern buildings were shaking their masonry into the streets.
He had not been back at Taliesin long before the house again burned down, this time destroying hundreds of valuable things Wright had brought from Japan. Again he rebuilt Taliesin. Then his second wife, Miriam Noel, left him. Before he was able to marry Olgivanna, the soft-voiced, Montenegrin woman who is his present wife, they and their baby were incredibly harried by the newspapers, the Noel lawyers and the police, who jailed them, once in Milwaukee. Wright could get no work, could earn no money. Taliesin fell into the hands of a bank and Wright got it back only when a group of old clients and friends incorporated him in 1929.
Since then, bobbing up. for the third time, Frank Lloyd Wright has done per-haps his most amazing work. In 1929 he designed for Manhattan an apartment house of concrete, steel and glass more radical and inventive than any even proposed in functionalist Europe. This and a grander design for a desert resort in Arizona were kept off the ground by Depression. Wright's desert camp of canvas and boxwood, built by his apprentices in 1929, stands as one of his most brilliant pieces of geometrical design. Still ignored by conventional architects, never invited to take part in the Chicago World's Fair, whose blatant "modernism" was an unconscious tribute to his pioneer work, Wright .nevertheless found clients who allowed his designs to materialize.
Practice. One quality these new buildings have in common is the clarity with which their basic problems have been grasped and solved. In Racine, Wis., Contractor Ben Wiltscheck is now finishing a business building for S. C. Johnson & Son (see cut) which is unlike any other in the world. A few miles from Racine, President Herbert Johnson has let Wright build him a house which lies along the prairie in four slim wings. A huge chimney with fireplaces on four sides is in the focal living room. At Bear Run, Pa., Wright has just finished his most beautiful job, "Fallingwater," a house cantilevered over a waterfall for Edgar Kaufmann of Pittsburgh.