Word: architecte
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Late in life, Jean Monnet, a Cognac salesman who went on to become the architect of the Common Market, mused about his dream for a United States of Europe. He thought back to his birthplace in this brandy-making town of Southwest France, where the grapes ripen slowly in the September sun, then mellow for decades in oaken barrels beneath the limestone distilleries. "The great thing about making cognac," he said, "is that it teaches you above all to wait. Man proposes, but time and God and the seasons have to be on your side...
...Wisconsin to a charming, feckless musician-preacher and a high-strung, single-minded mother -- they divorced when Frank was a teenager -- Wright was inculcated with an overweening sense of his talent and destiny. Anna Wright may have been the first atelier mother: she pushed him hard to become an architect when he was still a child, providing a special set of designer-in-training building blocks...
...time Wright was 19 he was in Chicago working for Louis Sullivan, the most important American architect of the time. Hired as an $8-a-week draftsman, Wright asked for a 125% raise within a few months and quit when he was refused. Sullivan quickly capitulated and was soon paying him $60 a week, a preposterous sum for the time. All his life, no matter how much he made (and borrowed: friends and patrons lent him thousands of dollars at a whack), Wright felt poor, thanks to an unhesitatingly indulged taste for swank -- chamois underwear, high-performance sports cars, whatever...
Despite the cosmopolite profligacy, he described his architecture as the embodiment of some vague Whitmanesque mission, earthy and populist and "organic." In fact, he did design an inordinate number of houses for an architect of his stature, and his best ones are married intricately and sublimely to their natural surroundings -- Fallingwater, one of his masterpieces, seems not so much erected as extruded out of a stony patch of Pennsylvania forest...
Much of his greatest work, such as New York City's Guggenheim Museum, is definitively 20th century, yet doesn't fit easily into the standard modernist canon -- Wright's buildings are too craftsmanlike, too exuberant, too strange. Was he the greatest architect of the 19th century (as the young Philip Johnson twittingly called him) or the first great one of the 20th? Even as he was, years ahead of his time, denuding interiors and dreaming up schemes for mass- produced housing, he loathed the new abstract art from its beginning. Johnson planned to include Wright in his epochal 1932 Museum...