WHY WAS FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT OBSESSED WITH THE MAYA?

 

The Ennis House, Los Angeles (photo TripSavvy).

Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by many to be the greatest architect of all time, never attended a formal architectural school. Wielding an avant-garde edge, he thought of interior and exterior places as one. This concept extended to his building forms and construction methods. Wright's signature on a certain type of architecture became not only an embellishment but a trademark. 

During a career that spanned 70 years, he designed over 1000 structures, created in harmony with humanity and the environment in a philosophy he dubbed organic architecture. His early beginnings were in the midwest where he was born and raised. That too is where he began his formal career as an architect in Chicago in 1893, after moving from rural Wisconsin.

THE PRAIRIE STYLE

From early on he experimented with different styles, incorporating one or more into his commissions, and by 1900, had developed a style that was to become his signature, the Prairie Style.  

Taliesen West (Architecturemagazine.com)

Coonley House/Prairie Style (Curbed Chicago)

1893 WORLD'S PRE-COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION

Though it's believed that Wright never stepped foot on the Yucatán Peninsula, home to numerous Maya pyramids, when he arrived in Chicago, lore has it he was inspired by the display of Maya artifacts and replicas at the 1893 World's Pre-Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was there he glimpsed plaster castings from major Maya sites, Chichen Itza and Uxmal. A feature of the lesser known Labna site, in the Pu'uc Region in southern Yucatán, became important to his work due to his recurring use of its meaningful arch.

Nunnery Quadrange, Uxmal site (Archeology.eu)

Wright's interest in the Maya was piqued early on, from childhood. He was drawn to the Maya world when his mother showed him pictures in books about Central America and Mexico."Those images stayed in his mind most of his life," said Thomas Hines, UCLA architectural historian.

INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL BEST SELLER 

Las Monjas, Chichen Itzá (Frederick Catherwood)

In the 1840s, two books about Central America archeology became 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. The 1893 exposition's display of the ancient Americas lauded the indigenous people who first called this continent home. It was one of Stephens' books that drew Wright into the world of the Maya.

GOLDEN DOORWAY

Wright and his employer, Louis Sullivan, had contributed a monumental golden doorway for the Transportation Building at the fair and during his many visits to check on it, Wright would have seen Stephens' casts and photos of the Maya buildings. Both he and his employer were drawn to the style which would eventually be known as Mayan Revival; they both distained the European Neo-classical style that dominated other buildings at the expo.

Golden Doorway for Transportation Building

Eventually Wright broke from his employer and established his own firm in Oak Park, Illinois, where he designed numerous commissions, gaining ground and at times notoriety with many well-heeled clients. By this time he was married. With his wife, Catherine, and their six children, he settled into a white picket fence existence.

Edwin and Mamah Cheney house (compositiondelascasa.com)

THE CHENEY HOUSE

While designing a house for local residents Edwin and Mamah (Mamey) Cheney, Wright and Catherine began socializing with his clients at the precise moment that middle age, ennui regarding his Prairie style designs, and a craving for change and greener pastures collided. Mamah, a feminist and free thinker, could keep up with Wright intellectually. She intrigued him. Change won. She and her husband divorced almost immediately, allowing Mamah to escape the confines of her marriage. The couple soon left for Europe to avoid the brouhaha and the tabloids. They spent time in Germany and Italy, where he viewed various architectural styles. On their return to the US and despite his wife refusing to grant an immediate divorce, Wright was determined to build a house for Mamah in the rural fields of Wisconsin near his childhood home. It would be transformational and a beauty, and he would name it Taliesin.

Taliesin (Wisconsin Visitor Bureau)

TALIESIN 

Love and happiness, however, were short lived. At a nearly completed Taliesin in 1914, his lover Mamah Bothwick Cheney 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.

Mamah Borthwick Cheney (history.com)

After the murders, he was again exposed to Maya architecture and pyramids at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. As the displays at Chicago had stimulated Wright, mentioned by Thomas Hines, the Panama Pacific Exposition glimpse of Maya culture made a lasting impression.

Though the displays were based on a Maya fantasy world, they 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."

WRIGHT IN LOS ANGELES

"A place where the living could communicate and remember the dead," said Hines. "And after the loss of his lover, Mamah Cheney, death was much on the architect's mind. The exceptional architectural style of the Maya sites must have greatly intrigued him, for it was an outsized influence on his Los Angeles architectural style," continued the UCLA historian.

A.D. German Warehouse (franklloydwright.org)

Prior to his exodus to LA, Wright tried out his Mayan Revival style on a Richland, Wisconsin commission in 1915, —the A.D. German Warehouse. On completion, the site hardly looked like something that would house the wares of a green grocer in a small Wisconsin town—it more resembled a temple pulled from a Catherwood drawing of the Maya Nunnery at Uxmal.

This commission helped test the Maya motif that would become the basis of his residential work in Los Angeles. On completing Wisconsin, he accepted an offer to design the Imperial Hotel in Japan.  

Hollyhock House (photo Curbed LA)

MAYAN REVIVAL STYLE

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

Though the houses Wright designed in Los Angeles pre-dated the Art Deco movement that began in the 1920s, they have the undeniable air of deco. We'll never know if Wright influenced the movement or vice versa. And though the Mayan Revival style itself had begun at the turn of the 20th century, its popularity accelerated once Wright got on board. This style is most notably seen in his Southern California open-concept layouts built from concrete stackable blocks molded with local materials and natural color schemes, and stamped with bold geometric motifs.

Hollyhock House, his first LA commission, was completed in 1921 for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall who had purchased 36 acres on the eastern edge of Hollywood. Wright's finished design was above all a Maya temple. Barnsdall had planned on a multi-arts center, and never intended it for residential use.

The hearth at Hollyhock House (photo Curbed LA)

HOLLYHOCK PLUS FOUR 

With its 17 rooms and seven baths, it's often noted as a bridge of Wright's two prominent styles: Mayan Revival, with textile blocks inspired by temples from Palenque, and Prairie Style, with its low-pitched roof line. 

In 1927 she 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 Kathryn Smith, Los Angeles, he strove to define an original American architecture and shied away from Victorian and Spanish colonial styles. Though of Welsh origin, he believed an indigenous architectural style would better suit the Americas rather than a European style architecture.

Kathryn Smith said he sought out traditional materials on the lands where he was building, making the concrete blocks from sand and granite, stamping them with motifs resembling Maya symbols. His open concept layout led to massive rooms and enormously high ceilings, in some cases creating the feeling of a mausoleum, as people who actually lived in his houses had been known to say.

Next came the Alice Millard commission on one acre in Pasadena, La Miniatura. This is where he truly refined the concrete molecular block system, with his stamped Maya patterns. Flat-roofed and mysterious, a wall of blocks stamped with equi-distant diametric crosses greets one at the property's edge. One historian said the cross is a reference to the MesoAmerican understanding of the cardinal directions, pointing to the cardinal elements that establish the shape of the universe. Some called the Millard House a small temple in a eucalyptus grove.

The Millard House

The placement of the house is in a ravine, with two towering eucalyptus trees standing nearby, and gives the feel of being at a jungle pyramid site, much like Palenque. 

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. It's believed that this house was built on spec. It was owned by Joel Silver, Hollywood producer, from 1984 until 2002. He gave it a thoughtful renovation including a pool that had been in the original plans. Brendan Gill, one of Wright's most thoughtful biographers, said it was more like a home for a Mayan god.

 

The Storer House (Californiahomedesigns.com)

Probably the best known FLW house in Los Angeles is the Ennis House, built also in 1923, for Charles and Mabel Ennis. It very much appears to be another Maya grand palace, but the Ennis' insisted that Wright incorporate some of their desires into his design. Notably seen in a handful of movies—Blade Runner, Day of the Locust, The House on Haunted Hill—it overpowers the environment and looms over the neighborhood like an ancient ruin, visible for miles around.

The Ennis House (TripSavvy.com)

Ennis House stamped wall of concrete Maya blocks (photo Galerie)

And last of the FLW LA five is the house built in 1924 for dancer Harriet Freeman and her husband Samuel, the Freeman House. Donated to USC, the daughter and son-in-law of the Dean of Architecture lived in the house while attendeding university. "It felt like a ruin," she said in 2002. "It was crumbling down all around us."

The Freeman House

Of Wright's LA houses, the Freeman House had the happiest existence. It was home for 60 years to the Freemans, a Bohemian couple who befriended him and scraped together the money for Wright's commission. Notably it was the only Wright house in LA to hold long-term occupants. The Freemans lived there until 1986 when they donated it to USC. According to Harriet Freeman, the house was dense and introverted, but it well suited their purposes. Along with being their home, Harriet, a dancer, used it as a dance center and salon where she entertained and performed.

GRANDSON ERIC WRIGHT

Eric Wright, 91, the architects's grandson who lives at FLW's unfinished Malibu property high in the hills, was interviewed by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the LA Times, for his documentary on Wright, That Far Corner. When Hawthorne asked what drew FLW to Los Angeles, he was candid. "He was very upset about the loss of Mamey and the adverse publicity because they weren't married," Wright said.

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

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

Eric Lloyd Wright in Malibu (Los Angeles Magazine)

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

FUNEREAL ASPECTS

Filmmaker Hawthorne continues, "The LA houses have funereal aspects. They're sinister, lacking joy. But scholars are hesitant to embrace the crude character of pre-Columbian death cults. These ideas, however, shaped Wright's understanding of pre-Columbian design and their meaning."

"His architecture," historian Blair Kamin said, "and this mission helped him to recover from personal tragedy. His architecture saved him in the end."

"His LA houses," continued Hawthorne, "stand apart from his work overall and apart from the rest of LA architecture of the period. They are not just heavy, but heavy-hearted—their starkness, and in some cases, their state of ruin. I don't think it's because the houses look crypt-like and that is why they are empty. It's because they are crypt-like that none are used as full-time residences. They are off-putting. The houses are shadowed by violence and even death.

"At the time, building these houses was a means for Wright to put a troubled period behind him for good. It exemplified his own uncertain state of mind. I believe they were a catalyst for putting aside that very troubled period.

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

                        

                                                                  

Unity Chapel, Spring Green, Wisconsin—FLW's first commission

Who knew that Wright's ongoing obsession with the Maya would rescue him as he worked his way out of grief by creating mausoleum-like, cathedral/pyramid tombs over and over and over again in reverence of the woman he loved and lost. As the historian said, his architecture saved him in the end.

Gravestone for Mamah Borthwick Cheney in Spring Green, Wisconsin

Resources for this post came from Curbed LA—Demystifying Frank Lloyd Wright's Most Eccentric Homes; Coming Around to Frank Lloyd Wright—Architecture Magazine; Getting it Wright: Today's Prairie Style; Trip Savvy's Frank Lloyd Wright LA Homes; Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: Peek Inside 7 Iconic FLW Houses; ChicagoCurbed.com's Take a Walking Tour of FLW's Oak Park Homes; WendyCity'sChicago.com's World Fair Moments: Sullivan's Golden Door; Sunset Ranch in LA: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles; Los Angeles Magazine's Inhabiting a Legacy; Curbed LA—Frank Lloyd Wright's Forgotten Hollywood Sand Castle; Artsy.net's How Frank Lloyd Wright's Take on Mayan Temples Shaped Hollywood; Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan; and the documentary That Far Corner, by Christopher Hawthorne.

If you want to read more about the Maya, Mexico and the Yucatán, sign up at the top right for my bi-monthly blogs, or check my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, my memoir on life as an expat is available on Amazon. Also there check out my Mexico cartel thrillers, books one and two in my Wheels Up trilogy: Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown. For a journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, check out Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy.