At Wright’s Taliesin, maybe the walls can talk

IT won’t take long for readers of “The Fellowship,” an ambitious new study of Frank Lloyd Wright by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, to realize that the book is no ordinary exercise in architectural history. Maybe it will happen on Page 8, when the authors describe the teenage Wright daydreaming about sex, drifting into his “moist dream space.” Or on Page 17, when they write that the young architect was so entranced watching his mentor Louis Sullivan at the drafting table -- “the languid lines coursing through his ornamental detailing” -- that he became “ashamed by his own pleasure.”

It will certainly have become clear by Page 47, when we learn that the mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, a Svengali of sorts for Wright’s third wife, Olgivanna, possessed a “feline yet powerful body” and eyes that “could penetrate one’s psyche” and “bring a woman to orgasm from across a room.”

Wright is in many respects the Abraham Lincoln of architectural history, a figure who has inspired enough books to fill a small library. With “The Fellowship,” Friedland, a professor of religious studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Zellman, a Los Angeles architect, enter this crowded field with an unusually detailed account of the architect’s unorthodox design process, in particular the role played by the apprentices, many of them gay men, who surrounded Wright at his Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. Nine years in the making, the book provides a sustained look at the Fellowship during the period when Wright produced the masterpieces of his late career: Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and the Guggenheim Museum.

Yet it is an almost bizarre hybrid, a serious piece of scholarship wrapped in melodrama, spiritualism and sexual innuendo. And if you think that’s a charge that will bother the authors, well, think again.

“We tried to have it both ways,” Friedland cheerfully admitted, sitting near his coauthor during a recent interview in Zellman’s Pacific Palisades living room.

Zellman then pulled out the book’s first published review, in BookPage, and proudly pointed out a passage comparing “The Fellowship” to a soap opera.

“We wanted to create a certain intimacy, a sense that the reader is part of the day-to-day life of Wright’s Fellowship,” Zellman said. “And that’s how a soap opera works too.”

Theirs is not an entirely new approach to the study of Wright, of course: The architect’s life was fodder for the tabloid press and the scolding moralists of his own day, particularly after Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney, and two of her children were killed at Taliesin by a servant in 1914. The Wright who was hopelessly, sometimes cruelly, self-absorbed shows up in nearly every treatment of his work, including Brendan Gill’s 1987 biography, Ken Burns’ 1998 PBS documentary and even the short volume Ada Louise Huxtable wrote for the Penguin Lives series in 2004.

But the Fellowship itself has never come in for the same level of scrutiny. In part this is due to the tight control that Olgivanna held over Wright’s archives until her death in 1985. But it also has much to do, the authors maintain, with a cult of genius among historians as strong as the one that held sway inside Wright’s drafting room.

“There’s an incredible collection of books on Wright -- something like 1,000 publications altogether,” Zellman said. “And most are filtered through this lens of genius. We essentially decided to treat Frank Lloyd Wright as an ordinary person while acknowledging his enormous talent.”

As a result, the book describes in great detail not only how the designs for Fallingwater and the Guggenheim came together but also Wright’s anti-Semitism, his isolationist politics and the drugs abused by his troubled daughter Iovanna (alcohol, sleeping pills, phenobarbital, daprisal, diet pills and amphetamines). Taliesin and Taliesin West as painted by the authors are hothouses of competition, jealousy and longing -- much of it orchestrated by Olgivanna, who was three decades younger than Wright and who married the architect in 1928.

Some Wright scholars, including Alan Hess, author of “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Houses,” among other books on organic architecture, find the approach refreshing. “We need to reinvent Wright for the 21st century,” Hess said. “A lot of these stories have been rumored or floating around, but it’s fascinating to see them documented and spelled out over the decades.”

Others are not so sure. Huxtable, the former New York Times architecture critic, said she has not read the book but that an emphasis on the role of Gurdjieff, in particular, risks diminishing Wright’s architectural achievements. “Olgivanna liked very much the idea of establishing the Fellowship along the lines of what she’d learned from Gurdjieff, whose influence on her was significant,” Huxtable said. “But I don’t think Wright gave a damn. If she wanted to run the domestic side of things, as long as he had enough apprentices around to call on, he was happy. But his work is certainly independent of all that.”

When their collaboration began, Zellman and Friedland had a very different book in mind. They met when Friedland, who has since moved to Santa Barbara -- where, according to the book’s flap copy, he studies “the intersections between culture, religion, and eroticism” -- and his wife hired Zellman to design an addition for their house in Los Angeles. Not long after, the two men were in the same class of fellows at the Getty Research Institute and teamed to write a history of Crestwood Hills, the postwar Modernist cooperative in Brentwood.

Crestwood Hills had a Taliesin pedigree: Its designers included Jim Charlton, who had been a Wright apprentice, and its layout was inspired in part by Wright’s concept of the Broadacre City, which promised a combination of the pastoral and suburban.

They envisioned devoting a single chapter in the Crestwood Hills book to Taliesin, Friedland said, “but then we looked around and there was nothing written seriously on the Fellowship. We realized that part of the story was potentially quite extraordinary.”

*

Founded in 1932, during a period when Wright, in his mid-60s, was floundering professionally and personally, the Taliesin Fellowship, modeled loosely on Arts and Crafts communities in Europe, offered a way to raise funds and keep his architecture studio fully staffed even when he had no clients. In fact, as Zellman and Friedland make clear, Taliesin deserves to rank among Wright’s most brilliant creations as an ingenious ploy to keep his practice afloat and his expensive lifestyle from flagging.

The apprentices, who paid the equivalent of a college tuition each year, were put quickly to work serving meals and farming -- doing everything, that is, but sitting down for lectures on organic architecture or the Usonian house. The same was true once a satellite campus was established in the Arizona desert and Wright began spending winters there.

Over time, the most talented and reliable of the apprentices became draftsmen and were able to absorb Wright’s architectural philosophy first-hand. As Wright began to pick up more work -- beginning with Fallingwater, built for the department-store magnate Edgar Kaufmann and finished in 1937 -- they took on the roles of associate architects and engineers. The distinction between the Fellowship and Wright’s architectural office, quite thin to begin with, ultimately disappeared altogether.

A few of the apprentices, notably E. Fay Jones and John Lautner, went on to significant careers of their own, but to a large extent Wright’s legacy of organic architecture dried up after his death in 1959, at age 91. The Fellowship continues to operate, but it has become a historical relic, its role in architectural practice peripheral at best.

“Wright made it perfectly clear that there wasn’t much opportunity for upward mobility within the Fellowship,” Zellman said. “If you wanted to be yourself, if you wanted to find your own voice, you had to leave. But leaving was tantamount, for Wright, to being a traitor. The people who stayed tended to be the people willing to accept this notion of apprenticeship for life, of service to genius.”

They also, as the years went by, tended to be young, gay men. They were attracted to the Fellowship from the beginning -- drawn in part, Zellman and Friedland say, by passages in Wright’s 1932 autobiography about his effeminacy as a boy and his close relationships with men. And as more of the heterosexual men left the Fellowship to start families, the percentage of gay apprentices grew.

“For a gay man,” the authors write, “a place like Taliesin -- like the navy or the seminary -- could be a kind of heaven.”

*

The book is published by Regan Books, the Harper Collins imprint run by Judith Regan, who recently relocated to Los Angeles. True to its reputation as a purveyor of an aggressive mixture of high and low culture, Regan Books is promoting “The Fellowship” as the story of “deep sexual dysfunction.” Already, the sections that deal with homosexuality -- including a chapter called “The Sex Clubs” that details Olgivanna’s attempts to pair off the apprentices -- have generated plenty of talk in architecture circles.

“A lot of Wright scholars know bits and pieces of that part of the story already, and I think many of them are happy to see it discussed in these terms, even if they’d prefer not to do it themselves,” Friedland said. “At the Fellowship, on the other hand, there is a fair amount of concern. They see it as unseemly.”

But the role of Wright’s gay apprentices seems highly relevant to any depiction of life inside his studio. The architect, after all, had what can only be called a flamboyant personal style, sweeping through rooms in flowing capes; but he also projected an aggressive, if effortful, masculinity, digging shirtless in the fields with the apprentices, bragging into his 80s about how often he and Olgivanna were having sex and dismissing personal enemies with gay slurs. It is hardly a stretch for a scholar to look for connections between that seeming ambivalence and Wright’s career-long effort to strike the perfect balance between Sullivan’s flowery, elaborately ornamented buildings and a more muscular, self-reliant style.

In the end, it’s the pages and pages of material on Gurdjieff, who visited Taliesin only occasionally, that prove tangential and salacious -- and, more to the point, rather unproductive in defining, or redefining, Wright’s work. The book promises important evidence of Gurdjieff’s influence on Wright’s architecture but never really delivers it.

Still, it’s not hard to understand why Friedland and Zellman viewed Gurdjieff as the pivot around which the whole story turns. He’s certainly a crucial character in the soap opera of it all. And so the shakiest but also the most original part of their thesis is the notion that he and Olgivanna helped Wright open up to a mystical sensitivity that made possible his surprising late burst of creativity.

Thanks to Gurdjieff and Olgivanna, the authors argue, Wright’s architecture came to reflect his awareness of his own “cosmic importance” -- particularly the Guggenheim, whose spiraling forms they see as a mystical abstraction, floating free of the nature-based symbols that ground much of his other work.

It’s an odd twist, perhaps, that as Zellman and Friedland continued to pile up evidence of Olgivanna’s zeal for manipulation and Wright’s heartlessness and megalomania, both men fell under Gurdjieff’s spell.

“At the beginning of our research I had a level of skepticism about Gurdjieff that was limitless,” Zellman said. “But by the end I’d come to the conclusion that he’s the most reasonable person in the whole book.”

*

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

Hawthorne is The Times’ architecture critic.