Pizza Czar’s Eye for Architecture Demands Only the Wright Stuff

The Monaghans’ first family vacation was Tom Monaghan’s dream trip: to visit as many Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses as could be reached in three weeks.

So, as Margie Monaghan and the four girls waited in the family motor home, Dad knocked on front doors in five Midwestern states and introduced himself as “the world’s No. 1 Frank Lloyd Wright fanatic” in the hope of being invited in.

“If they invited me in,” Monaghan recalls, “I’d talk about Wright as long as they were prepared to hear.” Outside, Margie and the kids knitted and played board games.

A decade later, more and more Americans are hitting the Frank Lloyd Wright trail, and Tom Monaghan--owner of Domino’s Pizza and the Detroit Tigers--is spending a large chunk of his $250-million fortune to promote the architect’s emergence as a culture hero.

“The longer the guy is dead,” Monaghan says of Wright, who died in 1959, “the more people appreciate him.”

Wife Admires House

Margie Monaghan, after weeks of forced knitting, has started to come around. She admits she likes Wright’s Fallingwater, a house built on a waterfall in western Pennsylvania.

She is not alone. Last year, Fallingwater was chosen as the nation’s best building in a poll of the American Institute of Architects’ senior members. Their top 10 buildings also included two other Wright designs--the Robie House in Chicago and the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wis.

Wright long has been regarded as the greatest American architect, but in recent years, “it’s gradually beginning to dawn on people that he’s probably the greatest artist this country has ever known,” says Scott Elliott, a Chicago art dealer.

Attendance is up by a third at Wright house museums such as the Dana House in Springfield, Ill. At Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, four visiting days had to be added to accommodate the crush. A Wright-designed living room has become one of the most popular exhibits at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Private houses designed by Wright also get visitors. Nick Sahlas, owner of Coonley House in Riverside, Ill., came home one day to find a man on a ladder measuring the tiles on the side of his house.

“People come up to me while I’m working in the yard and want to go inside,” he said. To get his work done, “I have to tell ‘em I’m only the caretaker.”

Sales of a new line of home furnishings based on original Wright designs are said to be brisk, although prices range from more than $12,000 for a cherry dining table to $120 for a pair of crystal candlesticks.

An exhibition on Wright’s design principles is to open in Dallas early next year and travel to museums in Washington, Chicago, Miami and San Diego. Visitors to the show will walk through one of Wright’s “Usonian” homes--modest, one-story houses designed for easy reproduction--which will be put up and taken down at each stop.

The surest measure of the Wright revival is found at auctions. In June, a New York gallery bought a Wright dining room table and eight chairs for $594,000, the highest price ever for 20th-Century furniture or decorative art.

To win a nine-drawer Wright chest, Monaghan’s agent had to come up with the highest bid ever made for a single piece of 20th-Century furniture: $264,000.

That was $114,000 more than Monaghan’s prearranged price limit, but he has a rule for his bidding agents: “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

In slightly more than a year, Monaghan, 50, has amassed the world’s greatest collection of Wright artifacts--more than 300 pieces with an estimated value of $10 million.

He bought a Wright bedroom for $500,000, a disassembled Usonian house for $117,500 in a public television auction, a side chair for $198,000--the most ever paid for a 20th-Century chair--and 34 windows from the Coonley Playhouse in Riverside for $3 million.

Wright and Monaghan make an odd couple: an architect obsessed with the idea of integrating buildings with nature and a businessman obsessed with getting pizza to the customer’s door within 30 minutes.

“I’ve been evangelizing Frank Lloyd Wright all my life,” Monaghan said. “I’ve never met anyone yet who hasn’t been impressed.”

Monaghan, says architect Gunnar Birkerts, “is addicted to Frank Lloyd Wright.”

The addiction dates back to the day when young Tom Monaghan, the best at drawing in his class, opened a book about Wright in a Traverse City, Mich., library.

He was only 12, but was “completely taken with the pictures,” he recalls. “All these buildings, so beautiful yet so different, all by the same man. I wondered, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

Wright was a self-described visionary who believed that buildings should enrich the lives of those who used them and that the “box” in which man had dwelt since classical times should be dismantled. “To make a dwelling place a work of art, this is the American opportunity,” Wright wrote.

Wright “gleefully swept out the (architectural) trash,” according to historian James Marston Fitch. “He stripped the cornice of its brackets and the roof of its dormers; he lopped off the phony cupolas and the gingerbread. . . . Whole walls disappeared, and rooms ran together, until a respectable person could scarcely say where the indoors stopped and the outdoors began.”

If Wright’s methods were radical, his materials--wood, stone and brick--evoked the American past, and his long, low houses were centered around a sturdy hearth. In these houses, young Monaghan--who grew up in an orphanage after his father died--could feel at home.

As he got older, Wright’s architecture held an ever-stronger attraction. Once, out on a date, Monaghan found himself preaching to a convert when he learned that the girl’s parents lived in a Wright house.

“I stopped the car right there in the middle of the road and said, ‘Which direction?’ ”

Monaghan says he was so fascinated by a Wright house in Ann Arbor that he would often drive down the driveway, park and just look at it. When Marine Corps service took him to Tokyo, Monaghan skipped the traditional soldier’s amusements in favor of repeated visits to admire Wright’s Imperial Hotel.

When he got out of the Marines, Monaghan couldn’t afford architecture school. He wound up opening the pizza shop that became the world’s largest pizza-delivery company.

Ground has been broken near Domino’s new corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor for a museum that will house Monaghan’s Wright collection. He also plans to erect his Usonian house on the site.

Monaghan has been in the Oval Office of the White House. “It doesn’t do anything for me,” he said. “Just standing in a Wright room,” however, “is an emotional experience.”

Buildings With Impact

Whatever the ultimate merit of Wright’s buildings, few would deny their impact. One woman described “a wonderful feeling of uplift” from entering the Guggenheim Museum’s great rotunda. Another architect, Philip Johnson, once complained that the sound of rushing water at Fallingwater excited his bladder.

People who don’t know the difference between a cornice and a column often admire Wright’s craggy individualism. “Hollywood couldn’t have come up with a better architect,” said Donald Kalec, director of the Wright Home and Studio museum in Oak Park, Ill.

Wright began practicing in Chicago in the late 1880s. His early “Prairie Houses”--horizontal buildings with large hearths, low-pitched roofs, extended eaves and fine views--became primary models of the modern style that would evolve in Europe.

Scandal almost ended Wright’s career when, in 1909, he abandoned his wife and six children to live with the wife of a former client. Five years later, the woman and her five children were murdered by an insane servant who also burned down Wright’s new Wisconsin home, Taliesin.

Wright eventually remarried and rebuilt Taliesin, but that marriage lasted only a few months and the house burned again. Wright eventually married a third time and built the Taliesin that stands today.

By his 65th birthday in 1932, Wright--almost without money or work--was a has-been. Yet he managed a comeback that lasted another 25 years, and produced most of his great buildings, including Taliesin West, his winter retreat, school and studio in the Arizona desert, and two of his last buildings, the Guggenheim Museum and the Marin County, Calif., Civic Center.

In his 72-year career, Wright designed about 1,100 structures; 497 of them were built in 36 states and several are in foreign countries. Today, 307 of the houses and 46 of his public buildings remain standing.

Many of the items Wright custom-designed for these buildings --now the subjects of bidding wars --were unappreciated during his lifetime. In 1943, when furniture from the Dana House was put up for auction, there were no bidders. It all went back to the house, where it remains today.

Scott Elliott said he found Wright’s color sketch of the Millard house in Los Angeles under a stack of old newspapers and a cat litter box in a New York loft on Ninth Avenue that burned down six months later. The drawing is now in the Museum of Modern Art.

Missing Treasures

Some treasures are still missing, such as the living room set from Hollyhock house, last seen when it was moved out during a remodeling in the 1940s--and dozens of sterling silver tea sets from the Imperial Hotel.

Bruce Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation archivist, says he thinks “Mr. Wright would have found it outrageous that people are treating one of his chairs like a Leonardo. His designs were masterpieces, but the objects themselves were meant to be mass-produced, so they could be afforded by the average American.”

Monaghan has no apologies, however.

“I still have a lot of things I want to get,” he said. “That table (lost to the gallery’s bid of $594,000) was not my highest priority.”