A Breathtaking Paean to the Genius of Wright

San Diego architect J. Spencer Lake sees Frank Lloyd Wright as a godhead of 20th-Century architecture. To Lake, Wright’s buildings are spiritual touchstones.

It’s not difficult to see why Lake finds Wright heroic. Throughout his career, Wright refused to compromise his visions. He consistently persuaded clients that his revolutionary designs--not the status quo--were exactly what they needed. The provocative and visionary nature of Wright’s work has not been equaled by any other American architect of this century.

During the early 1980s, Lake pushed San Diegans to expand their ideas about architecture through a series of lectures, slide shows and public gatherings he called “Spark Forums,” which touched on a variety of architectural ideas and personalities. This summer, he has unveiled a 60-minute multimedia tribute to Wright titled “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture as a Quality of Mind.” The last two showings will be given Sept. 14 and 28 at the San Diego Womens’ Club, to coincide with the exhibition “Frank Lloyd Wright: in the Realm of Ideas” at the San Diego Museum of Art, which closes Sept. 23.

Lake took most of the show’s 500 photos during a five-year period beginning in 1985, traveling more than 75,000 miles back and forth across the country. The slides dissolve gracefully in and out to a sound track of rare recorded speeches by Wright, interspersed with Lake’s brief narrations.

Prayer-like in its understated reverence for Wright, Lake’s production leaves you almost breathless. It opens with the sun rising over a dark, curving horizon--a photo Lake snapped in England at Stonehenge. Then it proceeds through Wright’s best work, including the Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y.; Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill.; his studio in Illinois; the Robie House in Chicago; Fallingwater, near Bear Run, Pa.; Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Ariz.; Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wis.; the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wis., the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and many more.

Explanations of the work in Wright’s own grand orator’s voice set an appropriately somber mood; Lake assembled the audio track by acquiring tapes of the Wright speeches. From San Diego architect Ken Kellogg, for example, Lake borrowed a recording of a 1957 talk Wright gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in which he explained the relationship between the blocks he played with as a child and the strong geometries that showed up in his mature work.

Elsewhere, Wright’s ornery stripe is in full view. He calls the Lincoln Memorial and the nation’s Capitol Building in Washington “old mistakes,” says that an architect is “not an architect if he doesn’t know about engineering,” and laments that “architecture has had no philosophy for 500 years.” Wright, of course, stepped in to supply one.

The current San Diego museum exhibition, while visually impressive, takes what Lake calls a “grandfatherly” approach to Wright, at times relegating him and his work to the realm of nostalgia. For Lake, Wright, who died in 1959, is still very much alive.

“He was a firebrand,” said Lake, who hopes that his tribute will preserve the master’s spirit in an era when architecture, especially in San Diego, seems more driven by economics than a Wrightian search for fertile new ideas.

Lake laments that San Diego is an “OTL mecca,” a reference to the popular beer- and sun-soaked Over the Line softball tournament played each summer on Fiesta Island. It’s a place where it is “easy to relax,” where the nouveaux riches have built “unremarkable, bloated and inflated houses” in places such as Fairbanks Ranch.

The full extent of Lake’s obsession with producing the ultimate tribute to Wright isn’t apparent to the casual viewer. For example, he had to fly twice to Taliesin East, Wright’s headquarters in Wisconsin, to find snow on the ground for a photographic sequence depicting the seasonal change from fall to winter.

Many of the photos were taken with an unusual Widelux camera. As each photo is exposed, a moving lens scans a field of vision 140 degrees wide, giving a much broader perspective than a conventional camera.

“Wright is the architect of the environment,” Lake said. “He was doing his work before ecology was a popular word. He had great respect for the landscape. So you must show an entire picture of the buildings in their settings.”

Lake, 45, has been a Wright devotee since 1958, when, in a high school drafting class, he first saw the master’s work in an issue of Architectural Forum magazine. “I was a skinny kid who got beat up and excluded from many activities by my peers,” he said. “My being outside put me in a situation where I used the circumstances constructively. I read about architecture and practiced drawing.”

From 1963 to 1967, Lake earned an architecture degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He spent two years doing military intelligence work in Washington before returning to San Diego in 1969. Through the 1970s and early ‘80s, he worked with a variety of local architects, including Wright disciples Sim Bruce Richards and Ken Kellogg.

In 1985, Lake gave his first talk on Wright, but soon realized he had only scratched the surface of Wright’s life and work. He began refining the presentation and, in 1988, unveiled an early version of the current show at Fallingwater, as part of a 50th anniversary celebration of the house, Wright’s most spectacular residential design.

Although Lake has devoted most of the past five years to his Wright program, he still considers himself an architect first and an architectural rabble-rouser second.

Designing in an imaginative mode that often pays homage to Wright, Lake has never had huge success with his architecture. Some of his best designs--a small, undulating house of corrugated metal called “Roller Coaster” and an inventive 54-unit La Jolla condominium project--have never been built.

One of his favorite jobs was an interior he created for an ice cream parlor in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown that is now out of business. He has collaborated on projects with local designer Robert Thiele, including the new fountain in the San Diego Museum of Art’s lobby. His most recent design credit is a sensitive addition to a Richards house in Del Mar, completed last year.

Lake is also a talented graphic designer. His poster for his Wright show, designed in a Wrightian style, is subtly striking.

He has paid a price to create “Architecture as a Quality of Mind.” He estimated he has invested $100,000 worth of time and materials, with little monetary compensation. For the moment, he lives with his mother near San Diego State University. He looks weary.

In October, he’ll be in a “recovery mode.” Then he plans to pursue his own architecture full time, although it’s possible that the Wright show will grow into other projects, perhaps a book or a video.

The final two presentations of “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture as a Quality of Mind” are Sept. 14 and 28 at 6 and 8:30 p.m. at the San Diego Women’s Club, 2557 3rd Ave.

Lake has organized other events in conjunction with this summer’s Wright exhibition in Balboa Park, including two Sept. 15 symposiums presented with the San Diego Architectural Foundation in the art museum’s Copley Auditorium . Titled “Living in the Wright Century,” they will feature experts telling about Wright, including his granddaughter, architect Elizabeth Wright Ingraham. (Tickets are $75; call 278-TIXS).

On Sept. 27, Lake will moderate a Wright-oriented “Spark Forum” on “Real Architecture,” with Kellogg and Los Angeles architect (and Wright disciple) John Lautner as guests, at 7:30 p.m. in the Copley Auditorium. Admission is $5.