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.

ARCHEOLOGISTS AND SCHOLARS ASSIST IN CURBING LOOTING OF MAYA ANTIQUITIES

 

Chichen Itza

“Tombs are robbed, temples are looted, all to feed the international market for antiquities.” Donna Yates, Archeologist and Lecturer in Antiquities Theft and Art Crime, The Netherlands.

In 1997 we drove across Mexico in our Ford Focus wagon, loaded to the nines with our belongings and cat, heading towards a new life on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Our hearts quickened after passing Escarcega. At the end of that lonely 200-mile stretch of road, we'd cross from the state of Campeche into Quintana Roo. Then we'd be homeward bound.

As we left Escarcega in the rearview mirror, the road narrowed and we settled in for the long drive ahead. We decided we’d take a break halfway when we got to some little known pyramids, have a sandwich, and let Max, then just a kitten, walk around.

I'd read about this quartet of pyramids—Kohunlich, Becan, Chicanna, and Xpuyil—near the ceremonial center Calakmul. Though these sites didn't have the star power of Chichen Itza or Tulum, Kohunlich, known for its Temple of the Masks, had gained fame in 1971 when looters tried to sell one of its huge stucco masks to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We saw no other cars on the road and around 4 p.m. we passed Chicanna. Soon after, I spotted the tower of Xpuyil. "Want to stop?" I asked Paul.

He nodded and we drove down a deserted sascab lane through an open chainlink gate into an empty parking lot. I pulled myself from the car while Paul saw to Max. I stretched, went to the car’s back end to find the cooler and brought out pre-made tuna sandwiches. I called to Paul.

He'd put Max back inside the car. We leaned against the door, ready for our snack. After eating I wanted to have a quick look around the site. Just as I bit into my lunch, a white, older model International pulling a sizable tarp-covered trailer drove into the parking lot, leaving dust in its wake. Two men sat inside; an older man was driving.

The vehicle was 300 feet away when the guy riding shotgun jumped out. He was young and lanky and moved quickly across the lot. The truck had Canadian plates and the driver kept the engine idling.

"Weird. Why'd just one guy get out and why didn’t the driver turn off the engine?"

"It is weird," Paul said. We both watched the younger man dart through an opening in the fence and run along the path that led to the site.
With the truck still idling, we viewed the scene warily. "I don't feel good about this."

"Me neither. What are they doing?”

Paul started pushing things into the way-back. I followed his lead and closed the cooler, holding my sandwich in one hand as I tossed things into the car.

"Let's get out of here. Something’s not right. Are they scouting for artifacts? Why the trailer?”

"Not good,” Paul agreed. “And that tarp? Max is inside. Let's go."

The International had parked at just the right angle so we couldn't see the driver, as though that outcome was planned. If these guys were grave looters, we didn't want to be around when INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) discovered them, or worse, the federales. Stealing artifacts is a serious crime.

Paul started the car and headed down the narrow driveway that led to the highway. The International was still idling when I turned around to give it one last look.

"Grave looters?"

"We don't want to know," Paul said as he eased onto the uneven asphalt, revved the engine and we headed towards Chetumal.

IS ANTQUITY THEFT THE WORLD'S SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION?

Antiquity looters come in many guises—unassuming tourist types, locals, businessmen looking to make a buck, collectors.

Art theft is big business. It’s a ‘trade’ worth billions. Ask any dealer of antiquities. And as the international appetite for Maya culture grows so does the hunger for illegal artifacts.

As long as there's poverty in undeveloped countries where ancient civilizations once stood, you can bank on it. Some art dealers call it the world's second oldest profession. 

“Any country in civil war or conflict is ripe for antiquities looting,” says Tess Davis, legal expert and archeologist from Boston University. When conflict erupts in an archeological rich country, the world art market is suddenly flooded with antiquities from that country. Looting becomes a means of subsistence when homelands are war-torn.

THE RISE OF NARCOTICS TRAFFICKING

"This is not just a white collar crime. Insurgents, terrorists, are using the antiquities trade to fund their efforts. Unless we get it together soon, I fear there will be nothing left," Davis said in a lecture titled "Tomb Raiders and Terrorist Financing," for Boston University alumnae.

Most organized trafficking groups dealing drugs and other commodities are business savvy these days and have diversified portfolios. As with real estate, logging and iron ore, the prices antiquities command are too high for them to ignore.

Compared with well known ancient civilizations in Europe and Western Asia, archeological interest in Maya culture came relatively late, partially due to the forbidding nature of the jungles. The outside world was first exposed to Maya pyramids through the writings and drawings of explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. Their memoirs about their early adventuring shone a light on the Maya. 

Soon other adventurers trekked through the Peninsula, conducting rudimentary recordings of archeological sites with limited removal of Maya artifacts. The first excavations were not conducted until the 20th century.

THE BEGINNINGS

Art and antiquity, according to Donna Yates in her thesis, "Displacement, Deforestation and Drugs: Antiquities Trafficking and Narcotics Economies of Guatemala," underwent a huge upheaval in the first half of the 20th century. Aestethic tastes in contemporary art shifted to modern looks and an interest was taken in tribal art. Ancient cultural objects originating from Africa, Asia, and the Americas bore a distinctly different look from classic Western models. 

They didn't conform to familiar Greek and Roman styles and demand grew as connections from them were drawn to famous artists of the day such as Picasso, Kahlo and Rivera. Soon, powerful collectors began to source them from their countries of origin.

At the time, 1957, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York. This was a watershed for the collection of Maya and other primitive cultural properties. The Maya were on the market.

THE MAYA PURGE

Endemic looting of nearly every known Maya site began around 1960, Yates’ thesis explains. Collectors and museums, inspired by Rockefeller, were looking to fill the Maya gap and demanded the best the Maya had to offer. 

Clemency Coggins, a professor of Archeology and Art History at Boston University, wrote decades ago,"In the last ten years there has been an incalculable increase in the number of monuments systematically stolen, mutilated, and illicitly exported from Guatemala and Mexico in order to feed the international art market. Not since the 16th century has Latin American been so ruthlessly plundered.”

RANSACKING RUINS

Coggins’ landmark paper is often credited with exposing the gravity of the situation. It characterizes the 1960s as a time when bands of looters moved freely through the region, particularly in the heavily jungled regions of Guatemala's Peten, mutilating large stone monuments with power tools. Countless Maya sites were looted before they were even located by archeologists. "It was a terrible time," she wrote.

Unfortunately this meant that large carved stone stelas that depicted the events of Maya rulers and their recorded histories along with large architectural treasures from Maya temples were plundered from where they stood.

In order to understand any individual site, it's imperative for archeologists to know the provenance of a stela or piece. Without dates and locations it's impossible to place the site, the structure, even the timeline of looted antiquities.

But looters cared not for the history of the Maya. They had one mission only: how to remove stela that could be 20 feet high, weighing several tons from inaccessible jungles. Taking a power saw to a stela and cutting it vertically removed the face of it. Often they would cut that into quarters to make for easier shipping. The pieces could be sold off separately. Sometimes the inscriptions along the sides were damaged by the mutilation.

This plundering set the archeology world back several decades in trying to break the Maya hieroglyphic code.

“The 1960s looting of the Peten is tied to two jungle economies: the trade in rare hardwoods and tapping gum trees for chicle. In both instances, men (usually) at the bottom of the supply chain moved through vast tracts of wilderness searching for different tree types. In doing so, they encountered poorly protected remote sites as well as Maya cities yet unknown to archeologists,” Coggins wrote.

CHICLEROS PLAY BOTH SIDES

Chicleros, as chicle hunters are known, are credited with locating many important sites in the Peten—including Xultun and even Calakmul, the famous Heritage site. Early in the 20th century, archeologists worked closely with these men, paying them for info about new sites and monuments. But when chicle prices bottomed in the 1970s, financial gains for looting and trafficking antiquities grew. Chicleros could expect higher rewards for reporting an unknown site to a trafficker than to an archeologist. And they could even be employed in the demolition, for added revenue.

Said Victor Segovia, archeologist, as he peered at the damage of a Xultun temple literally cut through the middle, “I believe four more heads lie beneath the rubble but I won’t remove them until I’m certain they’ll be protected. The humans are more poisonous than snakes,” he told reporters, there to view looting damage at the overgrown jungle site.

With antiquity looting in the news, museums world-wide are being forced to return archeological gems to the country of origin. It may be too little too late, but with applied pressure from the U.N. and worldwide cultural ministers, slow progress is being made. And now at long last, the cat’s finally out of the bag.     

Mask at Kohunlich. Photo Dan Griffin 

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

THE MEXICO LAND DEAL—BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

 

A Dock in Quintana Roo

Back in San Francisco we returned to life as we knew it: work, stress and traffic. In our spare time we lived and dreamed Mexico. This Mexico dream Paul and I were creating went back to my flower child roots and gave me hope that I still had a bohemian streak in my now routinely ordinary life. 

Alejandro arrived mid-summer and we had papers drawn up as fully as possible without actual parcel numbers and the legalese required in a land buy. We depleted our savings and wrote Alejandro a check. Now we were one step closer to owning a beachfront lot in the Mexican Caribbean. To finance construction we planned to sell our California house but would wait until paperwork was finalized before taking that ultimate decisive action.

Every chance we had we ran back to Mexico. On one trip we sat down with Alejandro and drew up house plans. Not long afterwards Alejandro was back in the States. It was 1986. He’d finished construction on his Puerto Morelos home, built a cottage in back, and hired a Maya worker as caretaker. He’d placed an ad in travel sections of U.S. newspapers and rented his house out to tourists. Apparently business was brisk. We were impressed . . . again.

And what was happening with the title for the property? That’s why he was back in the U.S. To prepare the property for future sales he’d need infrastructure, electricity and roads, so he was looking for more investors. Paul and I decided to wait to take our next trip south until there was something we could sign, like the fideicomiso. 

By October I hadn't heard from Alejandro and we'd hoped to take a vacation at Christmas if the title cleared. Even though we avoided calling, not wanting to become nuisances, it had been long enough. His secretary put me through. 

"Hello Jeanine. As a matter of fact I'd planned to call you. I have news about the land. Some important news." 

As that sentence dangled before me, he continued. "Things have changed a bit and I've been waiting for confirmation. Now I have it. It was looking a little bleak for a few months and I didn't want to worry you and Paul. But here it is.

"It seems the State of Quintana Roo has decided to pre-empt my purchase of the land near Playa del Carmen. The state needs that land to build a new car ferry to Cozumel. They plan to move it from Puerto Morelos to Playa." 

A thousand thoughts raced through my mind. Pre-empted? Car ferry? "But Alejandro," I stammered. "What about our lot?" 

"That's why I haven't called for some time. I've been in negotiations with the governor's office for several months trying to sort this out. They're seizing the land by eminent domain and had planned on giving me fair market value for the property. Of course, their view of what the property is worth and my view differ widely. Since I purchased the property two and a half years ago, tourism has soared in Cancun and you've seen how Playa has grown. They'd planned to give me $50,000 US for the land and I know it's worth much more than that." 

By this time Paul was nearby and had sensed my anguish. He probably also saw I was hyper-ventilating. 

"What's happened?" he demanded. "What's going on?" 

I lowered the phone's mouthpiece and spoke over it. "They've seized the land by eminent domain and want to give Alejandro $50,000." 

"What?" Paul yelled. "Who seized it?" 

"But hold on, hold on," continued Alejandro. "I have more news, better news. My brother has a friend in the governor's office and he's convinced them that instead of simply giving me market value, they should actually find another piece of land—beachfront—and trade my land for this new property. It's taken a while to find something still available and a worthwhile swap. But we found land nearby. The parcel is much larger and it has potential, with a fresh water stream feeding into the ocean, and cenotes." 

Cenotes are freshwater pools common in the Yucatán as the Peninsula has only a few rare rivers above ground.

“Where it it?” I murmured, feeling like I’d just been hit by a Mack truck.

“It’s four kilometers north of Playa. The land is close to Capitán Lafitte. Are you familiar with that property?”

Of course I was familiar with Lafitte’s. It was a small, picturesque hotel with palapas on the beach and a restaurant. Quite the romantic setting, laidback and off the beaten track.

Well, that didn’t sound so bad. Lafitte’s beaches were something to behold. Maybe Alejandro had dodged the bullet by having friends in high places. Maybe we would still own land in Mexico after all.

But this part of our adventure let me know one thing for certain . . . when buying land in a foreign country, fasten your seat belt because anything can happen. We were heading for a very bumpy ride.

A Beach in the Yucatan

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.