The Wright Way Documentary Shows Frank Lloyd Wright To Be As Complicated As His Elaborate Designs

No name in American architecture evokes more reaction than that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Throughout his long life, which ended in 1959 at age 91, he was admired and reviled, celebrated and criticized, respected and resented.

He was, however, seldom ignored.

Wright’s single-minded pursuit of a personal architectural vision resulted in a series of spectacular building achievements — the Pennsylvania home he called Fallingwater, New York’s Simon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Johnson Wax Building of Racine, Wis., etc. — yet kept him barely ahead of his creditors.

He lived long enough to see his reputation, always dependent upon architectural trends of the moment, rise and fall over and over. At various times, he was considered either a master craftsman or a notable has-been. Often, he fell somewhere in between.

But in the long run, time was kind to Wright. Unlike most visionaries, Wright maintained his artistic powers well into old age. He designed Fallingwater in what is often characterized as a three-hour flash of inspiration, on deadline, when he was 66. He died on the eve of the Guggenheim’s completion.

And his long life afforded him the great good fortune to outlive most of his critics. But even that had its down side, for Wright ended up outliving many of those closest to him as well.

What’s most clear from “Frank Lloyd Wright,” the latest documentary by Ken Burns, is that Wright the man was as complicated as his most intricate designs.

For one thing, he possessed the kind of obsessive drive that, given the talent to match it, made it most likely that he would design works that were, and still are, impossible to ignore.

The flip side of such a drive, of course, is that he left behind a number of wives and children who meant less to him than even the mortar between the bricks of these cherished creations.

“I have had the father-feeling … for one of my buildings,” he once said, “but I never had it for my children.”

Such disparity of character, of course, often constitutes greatness. The very depth of his passions, his genius for original design and his penchant for self-absorption is almost Shakespearean. And that makes him the perfect subject for a Burns study.

To Burns, Wright is giant enough to be ranked with his other grand topics - baseball, the Civil War, Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson. Does that, then, make him Burnsian?

Whatever, Burns takes Wright as seriously as, say, Jackie Robinson. And in doing so, he tells Wright’s story in his trademark manner - affecting a stately tone, patiently examining old photographs from every imaginable angle while the sonorous voice of a narrator (in this case Edward Herrmann) explains the significance of what we’re seeing.

Sometimes, the significance relegates Wright the god to Wright the merely mortal.

For example, Wright seemed drawn to women who both challenged him and put him before almost everything else. He deserted his first wife (and the mother of six of his children) after 20 years of marriage, jealous of the attention that she paid the children.

After making a name for himself as a designer of so-called Prairie houses throughout the Midwest, earning a modest fortune in the process, he was ruined by the 1929 stock market crash. Long before that, though, modern architecture had seemed to pass him by.

Then came his biggest comeback. In the following decades, buoyed by founding an architectural school, by designing Fallingwater and more and by marketing himself cleverly on the new invention called television, he rebounded with a vengeance.

Long before our media-fueled culture made obsessive voyeurs of us all, Wright made himself into the first architect celebrity, trumpeting his own importance with such bold statements as “I defy anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn’t first done by me.”

What miffed his fellow architects actually thrilled his many fans, both those who admired his pluck (Ayn Rand was said to have used Wright as a model for her novel “The Fountainhead”) and those who recognized an original when they saw one.

Burns captures all of this outlandishness, but he doesn’t ignore the side of Wright that knew hard times. Anyone who lives the better part of a century is bound to know pain, but Wright experienced more than most of us.

The nadir of Wright’s personal tragedies involves the horrible death of the woman reputed to be his one great love, murdered along with six others in a bizarre mass killing at the Wisconsin estate that Wright had designed as his hideaway from the world.

But, as always, he recovered his balance. And nothing epitomizes that as much as the story about Fallingwater’s creation.

Having accepted a modest commission to build a house on a wooded, western Pennsylvania site, Wright visited the plot and oversaw the drawing of a plan that mapped the topography (including trees and rocks). Then he did nothing for several months.

The story goes that Wright got going only after receiving a telephone call from the anxious property owner. He was just 140 miles from Wright’s studio, he said, could he come and see the plans?

Wright told him to come along. And then he reached for his drafting pencil. And …

But, hey, Burns tells it much better than I can.

Tune in Tuesday and Wednesday and see for yourself.

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” a documentary film directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, narrated by Edward Herrmann, will be broadcast on KSPS-Channel 7 from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday. ***