FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S LONG-STANDING LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE MAYA

 

Ennis House in Los Angeles, Photo Trip Savvy.

Though it's believed Frank Lloyd Wright never stepped foot on the Yucatán Peninsula, when he arrived in Chicago in1893 to begin his career in architecture, lore has it the display of Maya artifacts and replicas at Chicago’s World's Pre-Columbian Exposition inspired him.

It was there he glimpsed plaster castings from Maya sites Chichen Itza and Uxmal. A feature of the lesser known Labna site, in southern Yucatán’s Pu'uc Region, eventually became important to his work because of his recurring use of its meaningful arch.

Labna Arch. Photo courtesy of Barbra Bishop.

But Wright's interest in the Maya had developed long before the Chicago exposition. He was drawn to it from childhood when his mother showed him pictures in books about Central America and Mexico. “These images stayed in his mind most of his life,” said Thomas Hines, UCLA architectural historian.

In the 1840s, two books about Central America archeology had become U.S. best sellers: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Part 2, by explorer John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood. These books drew Wright, as a youth, into the Maya world.

MAYAN REVIVAL STYLE

The 1893 exposition's display of the ancient Americas lauded the indigenous people who first called North America home. For the exposition, Wright and his employer, Louis Sullivan, contributed a monumental golden doorway for the Transportation Building and during Wright’s visits to check on it, he would have seen plaster casts of the Maya buildings. Both he and Sullivan were drawn to the style which came to be known as Mayan Revival.

Early on in his career Wright experimented with different styles, incorporating one or more into his commissions. By 1900, he had developed a style that became his signature, the Prairie Style. Considered to be the world’s greatest architect of all time, Wright had never attended a formal architectural school.

He designed over 1000 structures created in harmony with humanity and the environment during a career that spanned 70 years. He dubbed his philosophy organic architecture. His early beginnings were in the midwest where he was born and raised.

Eventually Wright broke with his employer and established his own firm in a Chicago suburb where he designed numerous commissions, gaining ground and notoriety with his well-heeled clients. By now he had married. With his wife, Catherine, and their six children, he settled into a white picket fence existence.

While designing a house for local residents Edwin and Mamah (Mamey) Cheney, Wright and Catherine began socializing at the precise moment that middle age, ennui regarding his Prairie Style designs, and a craving for change and greener pastures collided. Mamey, a feminist and free thinker, could keep up with Wright intellectually. She intrigued him and change won. She and her husband divorced, allowing Mamey to escape the marriage. 

The new couple left for Europe to avoid the tabloids and the brouhaha.

They traveled to Germany and Italy, viewing various architectural styles. On their return to the States, despite his wife refusing to grant a divorce, Wright was determined to build Mamey a house in rural Wisconsin near his childhood home. It would be transformational and a beauty and he would name it Taliesin.

Love and happiness, however, were short lived. In 1914 at a nearly completed Taliesin, Mamey was murdered by a household staff member along with her two children and five others. After the heinous massacre, Wright sought solace far from the midwest. Los Angeles, known as a place for reinvention and recuperation, beckoned. He headed west.

A PLACE FOR REINVENTION AND REJUVENATION

After the murders, he was again exposed to Maya influence at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. As the displays at Chicago had stimulated Wright, now known as FLW, this new glimpse of Maya culture made another lasting impression.

Even though they were based on a Maya fantasy world, the displays cemented the Maya link between architecture and death, "Which was not only the setting for a fantastic pyramid palace but also for human sacrifice; part of the complexes displayed where humans were buried,” said UCLA’s Hines.

"A place where the living could remember the dead.” 

And after the loss of his lover, death was much on the architect's mind. 

The exceptional style of the Maya sites must have greatly intrigued him. 

“It was an outsized influence on his Los Angeles architectural style," continued the UCLA historian.  

LOS ANGELES FIVE

Before his exodus to LA, Wright tested his Mayan Revival style on a 1915 Wisconsin commission, the A.D. German Warehouse. On completion, it more resembled a temple pulled from a Catherwood drawing of the Maya Nunnery at Uxmal than a warehouse. This commission used his Maya motif and became the basis for his residential work in LA. After Wisconsin he accepted an offer to design the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

Today five iconic LA houses render his Maya look. While constructing the first, Hollyhock House, he worked simultaneously on Japan’s Imperial Hotel which helped shape his architectural vision.

Though the houses Wright designed in Los Angeles pre-dated the 1920s Art Deco movement, they have the undeniable air of deco. We'll never know if Wright influenced the movement or vice versa.

Hollyhock House.

In a PBS special titled That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne, writer/director as well as Architecture Critic for the LA Times, examines Wright’s intent for his iconic designs in that city.

FLW completed his first LA commission in 1921, Hollyhock House, located on 36 acres in Hollywood, for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Wright's finished design was basically a Maya temple. Barnsdall had planned on a multi-arts center, and never intended it for residential use.

With 17 rooms and seven baths, it's considered a bridge between Wright's two prominent styles—Mayan Revival, with textile blocks inspired by Palenque temples, and Prairie Style, with its low-pitched roof line.

In 1927 Barnsdall gifted it to the city. But it was at Hollyhock House, named for the flower that Barnsdall most loved, where Wright began working with natural materials.

A cultural nationalist, according to leading Wright authority and author Kathryn Smith, UCLA, he strove to define an original American architecture, shying away from Victorian and Spanish colonial. He believed an indigenous architectural style would better suit the Americas rather than a European style

His concept layout led to massive rooms and enormously high ceilings in some cases creating the feeling of a mausoleum, as those who lived in the houses had said. 

Next came the commission La Miniatura on an acre in Pasadena for the Millards. This is where he refined the concrete molecular block system with his stamped Maya patterns. Flat roofed and mysterious, one historian called it a small temple in a eucalyptus grove. It gives the feel of being at a jungle pyramid site, much like Palenque.

The Millard House.

After the Millard commission came the Storer House in 1923. Built on a steep hillside, the house is dominated by a large upstairs living room with a high ceiling. Maya inspired columns and tall narrow windows dominate. Considered one of Wright’s most thoughtful biographers, author Brendan Gill said it was more like a home for a Mayan god.

Los Angeles’ best known FLW house is the Ennis House, built also in 1923, for Charles and Mabel Ennis, and appears to be another Maya grand palace. Notably seen in a handful of movies including Blade Runner and Day of the Locust, it looms over the neighborhood like an ancient ruin, visible for miles around.

Last of the FLW LA five is the 1924 Freeman House built for dancer Harriet Freeman and her husband. Donated to USC in 1986, this house had the happiest existence. It was home for 62 years to the bohemian couple who befriended Wright and scraped together money for the commission. 

According to Harriet, the house was dense and introverted but it well-suited their purposes. Along with being their home, she used it as a dance center where she entertained and performed. 

The daughter and son-in-law of USC's Dean of Architecture lived in the house while attending university in 2002 for a year. "It felt like a ruin," she said. "Crumbling down all around us." 

Eric Wright, the architect's grandson who lived at FLW's unfinished Malibu hills property until his death in 2023 was interviewed by Chris Hawthorne for That Far Corner documentary. 

When asked what drew FLW to LA, Wright was candid. "He was very upset abut the loss of Mamey and the adverse publicity because they weren't married," he said.

"What was his state of mind when he moved to Los Angeles?"

"Sorrow," Wright said. "He had a wonderful life until her death."

NOT JUST HEAVY BUT HEAVY-HEARTED

Hawthorne asked Tim Samuelson, Chicago's cultural historian, what he made of Wright's Mayan Revival look. "They seem mausoleum-like. They are heavy. One critic described them as dark and macabre—like the dramas of Sophocles. The LA homes were ... brutal, romantic, fantastic, and—strange." 

Filmmaker Hawthorne continues, "The LA houses have funereal aspects. But scholars hesitate to embrace the idea of pre-Columbia death cults. These ideas, however, shaped his understanding of pre-Columbian design and its meaning.

"His LA houses stand apart from his overall world and other LA architecture of the period. They're not just heavy, but heavy-hearted—and in some cases, they are in a state of ruin. I don't think it's because the houses look crypt-like and that's why they are empty. They're empty because they are crypt-like. None are used as full time residences. The houses are shadowed by violence and even death.

"Building these houses was a means to put a troubled period behind him. It exemplified his own uncertain state of mind. They served as a catalyst for him.

"Wright buried Mamey in the Unity Chapel Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin—but she's also buried in Los Angeles." 

Who knew Wright's ongoing obsession with the Maya would rescue him as he worked his way or of grief by creating mausoleum-like pyramid tombs over and over again in reverence of the women he loved and lost.

"His architecture," said Wright historian and architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, "and this mission helped him recover from personal tragedy. His architecture saved him in the end."

The Nunnery at Uxmal Pyramids.

           A special thanks to Barbra Bishop for use of Labna Arch photo.

Stephens and Catherwood Take the Maya World: Review of Jungle of Stone

IN 1839 an energetic American writer and a talented British artist, adventurers to the core, braved the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras and became the first English speaking travelers to explore this region originally known only as Maya.

Though a lawyer by profession, John Lloyd Stephens fell hard for archeology after a two-year sabbatical took him to Europe and the Mediterranean in the mid-1830s.  After trekking through deserts and ancient pyramid sites he came away fueled with a desire for more of the same. Simultaneously he discovered he could write and was dubbed “the American traveler” after he penned his first best seller about Egypt’s pyramids, the Nile, Petra and the Holy Land.

British artist Frederick Catherwood gained his footing during the “Egyptomania”

craze that hit London in the 1820s. A bit older than Stephens, he reached Egypt and the Nile in 1823 and discovered he had an uncanny ability to portray ancient monuments and archeological digs with great accuracy. Egypt was the start of an odyssey that in the end would take him to Copán and Palenque, Uxmal, Labna, Chichén Itzá and beyond.

CENTRAL AMERICA BECKONS

Serendipity brought the adventurers together in London, and shortly afterwards.

Stephens received a special ambassadorship to Central America from President Martin Van Buren to negotiate treaties with several Latin America countries.

Stephens immediately contacted Catherwood and asked him to come along for the ride. After political issues were settled, they’d go exploring for ancient ruins.

The duo headed south and after an intense journey through war torn Guatemala and Honduras, Stephens finished what he could of his diplomatic workload. It was time for exploration with their first destination Copán. Spurred on by a letter written to the Spanish king about ancient sites with large stone structures from an explorer named Deigo Garcia de Palacio three hundred years earlier, Stephens and Catherwood followed the trail of Central American patriot Colonel Juan Galindo. Galindo had discovered the archived letter and traveled to both Palenque and Copán in 1834. Stephens and Catherwood would arrive five years later after pouring over sketchy site coordinates from Galindo’s report made to higher-ups.

ADVANCED CIVILIZATION

Galindo believed whoever built these stone monuments had been an advanced civilization, and the artisans who created the works did so without iron tools. The monuments were covered in hieroglyphics and he conceived it was phonetic writing, which proved accurate, though it would take more than a hundred years to confirm his theory. He believed the site was the seat of a great power, a large population and a people advanced in the arts. The site had a grand plaza that could compete with the coloseum of Rome, he said. He emphasized that local inhabitants had little knowledge of the site’s history. And unbelievably, the account that pushed Galindo to explore Copán had accumulated dust in the archives of a Spanish court for more than three centuries. This mysterious and intriguing report was the reason Stephens and Catherwood found themselves in the depths of a Honduran jungle.

Because terrain in southern Mexico, western Guatemala and Honduras is a thick tangle of vegetation filled with rain forests and swamps, parts of the land were a mystery even to the Maya who lived there. Locals had no explanation for the stone blocks and imposing structures and knew nothing of their creators. So dense was the jungle that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés passed within one hundred miles of Palenque in the early 1500s, never learning how near he was to a massive pyramid site. (The classic Maya collapse occurred around 900 AD).

WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

Galindo’s revolutionary view of an ancient sophisticated civilization with no ties to their Northern European brethren fell on deaf ears. Early explorers of Palenque in 1787 insisted it had classical Roman and Greek influences, speculating somehow one of these cultures had crossed the Atlantic, conquered the native locals, built the structures, never to be seen again. Another explorer said it had to be the work of the Lost Tribe of Israel’s doing, underscoring how hesitant each and every western explorer who came in contact with the Maya was to give an advanced indigenous culture its due. 

These discoveries continued to baffle western intellects and religious scholars alike. The existence of vast sophisticated cities hidden in the middle of Central American jungles threatened the biblical order of the known world. Where did these people come from and how old were their cities? One explorer, a crazy outlier named “Count” Jean-Frederic Maximilien de Waldeck, made an accidentally correct claim when he stated Uxmal was at least one thousand years old, basing his claim on the concentric tree circles he counted from a tree that implanted itself in the building’s entryway after it was already in ruins.

It would take Stephens and Catherwood, seasoned with their old world explorations, to examine the evidence at the sites and forge a new, correct narrative.

CAPTURING COPÁN’S ESSENCE

Though Stephens’ written descriptions of the sites were detailed and informative, it was Catherwood’s otherworldly sketches that would forever change the way the world viewed the mysterious, previously unknown Maya culture. On their first week at Copán, Catherwood would toss out countless attempts at capturing the Maya stelae (stones with hieroglyphs) that he found. At first his western mind could simply not contemplate, then draw, what he was seeing. To him, a western European, the gigantic Copán sculptures, some four to five meters high, were so profoundly different than the antiquities of the mideast that he had a difficult time rendering them. The two veteran travelers who had toured the wonders of Egypt knew they were in the cross hairs of an incredibly advanced civilization and they were now on “new ground” as Stephens wrote later in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, his best seller about the Maya world.

To capture the soul of the sculptures and to assist himself in so doing, Catherwood took photos with his Camera Lucida, the precursor to a modern camera, then from those drawings, he attempted to re-draw what he saw.  Though it took him many tries, a slight shift in his perspective broke through and with powerful persistence, he finally got it right. He filled page after page with drawings rich in detail of the unfathomable hieroglyphics, monuments, sculptings. His drawings would prove so accurate that long into the future, archeologists would be able to read them when they finally broke the Maya code in 1976 at the famous Palenque Round Table.

But at the time, to convince an uncertain world of what they were seeing, it would take not only the stark beauty of Catherwood’s detailed drawings to put Copán, Palenque and other Maya sites on the map, it would also take Stephens’ energetic and romantic prose to seal the deal.

Copán and Palenque were just the beginning of Stephens and Catherwood’s Maya explorations. They would go on to view forty-four sites in all, many detailed in Jungle of Stone. The struggles they endured to bring this discovery to the world hit them hard. Both were forever plagued by side effects of malaria and other diseases contracted while chasing pyramids.

CATHERWOOD’S SKETCHES

Even if you’re not in the mood for a long read, Frederick Catherwood’s incredible sketches shown in the book, many in color, make Jungle of Stone worthwhile. It’s available at Alma Libre Bookstore in Puerto Morelos, 360 pesos.

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Jeanine Kitchel, author of Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, has a new novel out this April, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival.