Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 (review)

When he took to the lectern to give the Otto Kahn lectures for 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright was at a nadir. He had written and built little since the mid-1920s, and was acutely aware that continental developments were reaching an advanced stage, already making him look outdated and outmoded in his thinking. Though Wright did not know it, he had not even been the first choice to give the lectures—Princeton had initially approached the Dutch De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud, only turning to Wright when Oud dropped out due to illness.

In his meticulously researched introduction, Levine shows how Wright used the Kahn lectures—in a somewhat cynical attempt to reverse his fortunes—to paint a portrait of himself as the pioneer of the modern movement. Indeed the Frank Lloyd Wright we are presented with is no longer the great hero of American counter-modernism, but rather a disheveled imitator, fabricating his own role in the architectural avant-garde by re-dating and re-drawing his previous projects and undermining his European contemporaries with spurious arguments.

Doubtless we should applaud Levine's detective work (though why an argument based largely on pictorial evidence should not include illustration is anyone's guess). Doubtless also Wright played fast and loose with the facts, not giving credit where it was due and exaggerating his own importance. But there is another Frank Lloyd Wright in the Kahn lectures, and it seems almost masochistic to publish such a faithful and attractive facsimile without a more positive appraisal of the book's original author.

That other Wright emerges most clearly in the first lecture and in the correspondence Levine cites, in which Wright argues that his ornate and verbose prose is in no way contradictory to the modern spirit: "The preface, perhaps, is the place to explain that so called 'functionalist' writing is as easy for me as for anybody. But I came to Princeton to preach. I chose the guise of the preacher as pleasant and heretical at the moment."

The first lecture is entitled "Machinery, Materials and Men" and is a magnificent ode to technological modernity:

Here is this thing we call the Machine, contrary to the principle of organic growth, but imitating it, working irresistibly the will of Man through the medium of men. All of us are drawn helplessly into its mesh as we treat our daily round."

The Machine, for Wright, is so inter-twined with the workings of urban culture that to work against it would mean certain ruin. His purpose is to show a way in which the technology can be put to work without damage being done to the human spirit. This sentiment does indeed share parallels with European modernists, but those are not nearly as interesting or informative as the parallels that can be drawn with Wright's American contemporaries. A more sympathetic and nuanced analysis of the lectures would include writers like the poet Hart Crane and the architectural critic Lewis Mumford. The former issued his masterpiece The Bridge in the same year that Wright delivered his lectures and, in his antiquated style, Crane was engaged in precisely the same project as Wright—to humanize and acclimatize his readers to a mechanized society that was already too well established to reject. Like Wright, Crane made oblique reference to modernism, but it is more natural to see him as using the formal tools of American Romanticism. Mumford, too, gave a poetic critique of contemporary industrialized culture in 1934 with Technics and Civilization and had been working throughout the 1920s to theorize technology as part of a specifically American historical narrative.

Following the brilliant first essay, Wright offered a series of increasingly polemical talks. Lecture 2 is entitled "Style in Industry" and makes explicit the Romanticist claims of the first:

But the sense of Romance cannot...