Frank Lloyd Wright in Rhode Island – Architecture Critic Morgan
Monday, March 07, 2022
Frank Lloyd Wright was the most influential form giver of the modern era, and unquestionably America’s most famous architect. Despite an industry of Wright scholarship and an army of worshippers, few people know that this cultural giant once lived in Rhode Island.
Wright did not wear his fame modestly, often calling himself the greatest architect who ever lived. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility, and I chose the former.” Yet Wright’s autobiography, which he re-wrote at least twice, was notoriously misleading; facts for Wright were malleable (he pushed the year of his birth forward by a couple of years, for example). But we do know that he spent two years, one in Central Falls, the other in Pawtucket in the early 1870s, when he was around five.
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Thanks to the sleuthing of Chris Bleyer, a Smithfield builder and Wright maven, we now know exactly where Wright lived in Pawtucket. Bleyer is still digging in city directories, maps, and diaries to try to ascertain where the architect lived in Central Falls, although it was somewhere near the intersection of Cross and Hawes Streets.
Wright’s father, William, was a peripatetic Baptist and sometimes Unitarian minister (his pulpit here was the Second Baptist, a new church that replaced one burned in 1868, but which was too costly for the congregation to maintain). To believe the architect’s own tales, his mother Anna Lloyd Jones was a saint, while his father was a scoundrel, although the reverse was true. Regardless of the unhappy family dynamics, the Wrights’ years in Rhode Island were difficult and marked by debilitating poverty. The time spent in the wee house on Blackstone Avenue did not contribute the happiest of childhood memories.
The cramped worker’s cottage may have inspired the child’s later revolutionizing domestic design. His open-plan, early 20th-century Prairie Style houses, as Wright declared, broke up the box configuration of the typical American home. His low-slung houses, with neither attics or basements, featured continuously flowing living spaces, anchored by a prominent hearth–a paradoxical combination of our national restlessness and yearning for rootedness.
Sixty years later Wright penned his best-known work, Fallingwater, a spectacular design that may be the single most recognized house in the world. This weekend retreat in the mountains of western Pennsylvania for a department store mogul is dramatically cantilevered over a water fall (most architects would have placed the house with a view of the stream, not as an integral part of it). Although just a happy coincidence, one cannot help but smile upon learning that Pawtucket is the indigenous people’s word for falling river.
How could the booming post-Civil War mill city not have made an impression on the young Wright. A Welsh-speaking rarity in francophone Pawtucket, Wright surely wandered the streets and along the shores of the Blackstone, not least of all to get away from his parents’ bickering. He never wrote much about the Rhode Island years, but who does not retain some vivid memories of early childhood haunts and experiences.
The space-shattering Guggenheim Museum in New York, one of Wright’s last works.
Akin to the phenomenal popularity of painter Vincent Van Gogh, Frank Lloyd Wright's worship has spawned millions of acolytes. In addition to reproductions of his furniture and interior designs, there is a vast network of Wright houses open to the public from New Hampshire to California–he designed over 500 buildings. These are not, say, the log cabin birthplaces of presidents or the studios of artists and writers, but they are important cultural shrines. So, too, the boyhood home of the great architect in Pawtucket deserves recognition.
It is unlikely that Wright pilgrims will flock to 12 Blackstone Avenue, yet the fact that the most significant architect of the past two centuries lived here is worth remembering. The flash of huge big-bucks projects to save a once-great but now down-at-the-heels city, such as the currently under-construction Pawtucket Landing, are always tempting, if rarely transformative. Yet, Pawtucket has an incredibly rich legacy of notable architecture–Ralph Adams Cram’s library, Raymond Loewy’s Apex, the old railroad station, and scores of magnificent mill buildings. Treasuring and protecting these landmarks of the past should be important building blocks of the future.
The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright was a staple of critic Morgan’s teaching at schools such as Princeton, Louisville, and Roger Williams.
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