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With Wright's dramatic comeback, clients once again sought out the master, but on his own terms. To own a Wright house, young couples went into hock for years, docilely took dictation from the master on how they were to live. In such a favorable climate, Wright was often carried away by the sheer momentum of his own self-confidence. His T-square and triangle elaborated spaces on the drafting table that often owed more to forceful geometry than practicality; he designed hexagonal bedrooms, built shoulder-pinching corridors. For the late Solomon R. Guggenheim he designed a museum in the form of a bowl, with ramps for galleries, which is only now nearing completion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Old, cherished projects from the past were dusted off. For instance, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., erected in 1956, actually derives from a 1929 model. This dated quality often dimmed Wright's luster in the eyes of his rivals.
Tombstones & Coffins. Wright vociferously maintained his claim to originating modern architecture. But when it came back to him from Europe in the forceful form of works by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he belabored these men as "glassic architects" and worse. He dramatically ranged himself against the sweeping tide of .the International Style. Manhattan's United Nations Secretariat was a "tombstone," Lever House "a waste of space," the Seagram Building "a whisky bottle on a card table." The steel-cage frame was "19th century carpenter architecture already suffering from arthritis of the joints." Boxy modern houses he called "coffins for living."
Such pointed barbs, repeated in the late years over radio and TV, did not go unnoticed by his colleagues. "He no longer speaks to the present generation." one architect snapped.
Almost by reflex to the hostility Wright often aroused with his freewheeling comments, the home life at Taliesin became his own world. At its center were Wright and Olgivanna and their daughter lovanna. Around them were 65 apprentices, who happily farmed the vegetables, waited on table and washed the family laundry for the privilege of having a bench in Wright's drafting room. Draftsmen found themselves singing in the a cappella choir of 30 voices, playing in orchestra and quartet, performing with the dance groups. Wright treated them all as extensions of his hand, told them: "You can stay here for years and never touch the bottom, sides, or top of the great principles at work here."
To visitors Wright would boast of his 18 gold medals, declare: "They say I am the world's greatest architect. Perhaps I am. But who else is there? If architecture is what I conceive it to be, there has never been another architect."