Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America

Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest ever American architect.

Buildings like the Guggenheim Museum,

the Johnson Wax building,

and Fallingwater are masterpieces that redefined what was possible

and became famous the world over.

But I think the true nature of Frank Lloyd Wright's genius

has become lost, buried under tales of his tempestuous life,

or made into the stuff of coffee table books.

I'm Jonathan Adams, an architect from Wales,

and my 30-year career has taken me all over the world.

Throughout it all,

Frank Lloyd Wright has been a constant touchstone.

Now, I'm going to travel across America

to get to know Frank Lloyd Wright's greatest buildings for myself.

I want to understand how they were conceived, how they work,

and how they make us feel.

Most of all, I want to explore the underlying philosophy

that all these buildings share.

Frank Lloyd Wright called it organic architecture.

And today, 150 years after his birth,

I think it puts him back at the heart

of modern architectural thinking.

In a career that spanned seven decades,

Frank Lloyd Wright built over 500 buildings.

And the one he's best known for is his final one -

the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The Guggenheim isn't just something that's beautiful to look at.

All his life, Frank Lloyd Wright strove to create buildings

that expressed an idea of how we should live

and understand the world.

I'd like to have a free architecture.

I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing,

and was a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

And the letters we received from our clients

tell us how those buildings we built for them

have changed the character of their whole land,

and their whole existence

is different now than it was before.

Wright's own life was turbulent, involving financial ruin,

adultery, and tragedy.

Through it all, he stuck to a personal creed based on hard work,

a love of nature, and a fierce independence of thought.

They sound like thoroughly American ideals.

But I think to understand what really shaped Wright's ideas

and the man himself,

you have to begin the story far away from America,

and closer to where I come from.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Welsh roots are no secret.

He was proud of them and spoke of them all his life.

His mother, Anna Lloyd Jones, was born in 1838

near Llandissilio in West Wales.

Their family was large and devout,

and at their chapel, they practised a radical brand of Christianity

known as Unitarianism.

All his life, Frank Lloyd Wright would draw inspiration

from this freethinking spiritual inheritance.

Unitarianists see God in anything and in all things.

We often talk of the wonder, the awesomeness, the magnificence of...

of nature, and of the world that we're all a part of.

We've always placed a huge emphasis on the individual's freedom

to choose and to pick and to decide for themselves

where their understanding of God and of human nature lie.

Unitarianism fit in with the people here,

the people who were everyday, hard-working, low-paid people

looking for that freedom and for that spirit of liberalism.

It might have been the search for religious freedom

that took Anna's family away from Wales.

In 1844, the Lloyd Jones clan -

parents, children, aunts, and uncles -

left home, bound for a new, freer life...

in the new world.

The family sailed to New York

and then, with pioneer spirit, set off westward to find a new home.

What they were looking for was something familiar,

something like the land they knew and understood.

Finally, they came upon their new Wales.

Wooded, gently sloping land near Spring Green, Wisconsin.

To Frank Lloyd Wright,

this place would become a lifelong spiritual touchstone,

known simply as The Valley.

The valley that they chose to live in

became so identified with them and their purpose

and their way of living

that some people called it the Valley of the God Almighty Joneses.

They didn't really want to become Americans, you know?

They wanted to be Welsh...

..on American soil.

It was into this world that in 1867 Frank Lloyd Wright was born.

It was here, too, that his values were shaped.

Throughout his childhood,

Frank would spend his summers here in the valley,

labouring on the farm, living a rural life,

and hearing the Welsh language of his aunts and uncles.

For the rest of his days,

he would look back on those summers as a kind of paradise.

Frank's mother encouraged his early ambitions to build.

After studying engineering at a local college,

he left home to seek an architectural apprenticeship.

As luck would have it,

the nearest city was one of the most exciting places

in the entire world for an aspiring young architect.

Chicago.

New styles of building were being created here...

including the skyscraper.

Before long, Wright's youthful energy and talent landed him a job

with the city's leading architect.

And it was in Chicago, too, that he found his first love.

Catherine Tobin, known as Kitty, was just 16 when they met.

Within two years, they were married,

and had a child of their own on the way.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a young man in a hurry.

Borrowing money from his boss,

he bought a plot of land here in the respectable suburb of Oak Park.

The place where, it was said, the saloons ended

and the steeples began.

And it was here that he first built a home for himself.

It might be difficult for anyone looking at this today

to see it as anything other than a slightly quirky

gable-fronted suburban house.

It's only when you put it alongside all of the other houses

of the same period, here or anywhere else in the Western world,

that you realise just how strange it is.

Take this massive symmetry.

It's highly classical, but stylised.

You can see the faint outlines of the triangle pediment

of a Greek temple, with the two bays at the bottom

instead of columns supporting the weight.

It's classical discipline applied to a small cottage.

The upper part of the house conveys a huge sense of weight and sanctity.

So you might expect the inside to be pokey and dark.

But what you actually find is the opposite.

The rooms all flow, one into another.

It must have been a huge surprise to people back in the 1880s.

This is open-plan before the idea of open-plan really existed.

Perhaps this is where it began.

The free flow of Wright's design reflects an idea of family life,

learned in the Unitarian value of his childhood -

honest, equal, and communal.

He even inscribed these values above the hearth, clear for all to see.

In its open spaces and its open spirit,

Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park home was his first step

towards a new kind of architecture.

Over the next few years, Wright's career took off.

His house attracted the attention of curious neighbours,

and commissions flowed in.

He would eventually design over 50 houses for local clients.

Many, like his own, subtle experiments with traditional forms.

By now, Frank and Kitty had six children.

Wright was in his late 30s, and more than ready for his big break.

But when that came, it was a bolt from the blue.

Every Sunday, Frank Lloyd Wright and his young family

would walk a half-mile to worship at the local Unitarian church.

It wasn't the kind of building that he really approved of.

It was vaguely Gothic with a pretentious spire.

And then, one night in 1905,

it was struck by lightning and it burned to the ground.

Never slow to see his chance,

Wright proposed a new building for the site.

It was unlike anything seen before in America.

Wright's plans for the new building cast aside all traditional styles,

as he seized the chance to express his own spiritual

and architectural beliefs.

Gone would be ornament, arches and the showy spire.

What emerged instead was Unity Temple,

the world's first truly modern building.

Few people even today would guess that this is a church.

The building doesn't even have an obvious way in.

The very material the Unity Temple is constructed from

seems unsuitable for a place of worship.

These walls and every detail of the exterior

are made from solid, unadorned, reinforced concrete.

Wright's justification was that it was cheap -

a utilitarian material used for low-grade engineering structures.

The impoverished church committee was persuaded to go along.

But Wright's real reason for using concrete

was that it was a new and exciting technology with unlimited potential.

It put Frank Lloyd Wright just where he wanted to be -

on his own at the frontier of architecture.

If the exterior of Unity Temple expressed an idea of the divine,

it was in austere geometric forms.

But the space that those forms created on the inside

was among Frank Lloyd Wright's most beautiful

and spiritually uplifting rooms.

The sanctuary of Unity Temple is a perfect square.

Golden light streams in through coloured glass

in the coffered ceiling...

while ornament and structure combine to unite the whole.

This building is unique.

It is hard to figure out how to even get into the sanctuary.

And when you find it, it just opens up and it's a gem of a space.

I love the intimacy,

this capacity to worship while in community with one another,

being able to see one another.

It's the most important part of the building for the most of us.

Wright based the distinctive interior layout of Unity Temple

closely on the Lloyd Jones family chapel back in Wales.

But his new building's overall radicalism

was still too much for some in its congregation.

It's said that they prayed for ivy, and were happy when ivy came.

All the while that Unity Temple was taking shape,