Art: Native Genius

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For six years he served an apprenticeship to the man he called "Lieber Meis-ter." "Form follows function," Sullivan insisted. "Form and function are one, and should be taken into the realm of the spiritual," young Wright replied, and struck out on his own. Soon adventuresome clients began going to Architect Wright's studio in Oak Park, Ill. In the midst of architects busy designing picturesque Queen Anne-style houses and neoclassic copies, Wright lopped off gables and pillars with a stroke of his pencil, created his own prairie houses. He flattened the roof to parallel the earth line, projected eaves to enforce the sense of shelter. Taking the fireplace and low. massive chimney as a central pivot. Wright began to project exuberant wings, bring balconies into living rooms, replace the dark corners with glass.

Famous or Notorious. By 1909 Wright was 40, and at the peak of his career. His Larkin Building in Buffalo had pioneered air conditioning, introduced the first metal-bound plate-glass doors, the first all-steel office furniture; with Unity Church in Oak Park, he had invented a whole vocabulary of cubist forms to express a new building material, poured concrete. Publication of his works in Europe created a sensation.

But at home, it was Wright's marital escapades that made the biggest headlines. After 19 years of marriage and six children, he ran off with a pretty married neighbor, Mrs. Mamah Borthwick Cheney, built the first Taliesin for her on the ancestral Lloyd-Jones acres outside Spring Green, Wis. The liaison ended in tragedy when a mad Barbados servant burned down the house, murdered Mamah and her two children. Wright's second marriage, to monocled Sculptress Miriam Noel, wore thin in three years. Soon Wright was in the tabloid headlines again, jailed for crossing state borders with a handsome Montenegrin. Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich, the woman who later became his third wife.

"I wanted fame," Wright confessed in later years. "Instead, I became notorious." As the Depression of the '30s closed in, Wright went bankrupt, finally incorporated himself and turned the rebuilt Taliesin into an apprentice school for architects. When the Museum of Modern Art staged its historic 1932 show of International Style architecture, Wright was represented, but in effect considered already dead and buried.

New Force. What put Wright back on his feet, and made him once again a force to be reckoned with, was a series of commissions from men as highly individualistic as himself. The result was several of the buildings rated today as among the alltime greats of U.S. architecture. Among them: "Falling Water," in Bear Run, Pa., Wright's first reinforced-concrete house, in which he flung cantilevered floors dramatically out over the waterfall; the S.C. Johnson & Son Co.'s Racine, Wis. wax factory, with soaring mushroom columns in the work space and a 16-story laboratory tower completely sheathed in glass tubing.

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