Frank Lloyd Wright Did Care

A minor portion of Dave Winer’s memorial post on Steve Jobs compares the late Apple CEO to Frank Lloyd Wright. His characterization of Wright is based on mistaken, but common, perceptions about Wright.

[By the way, I'm not criticizing Winer, I merely want to point out one instance where he is mistaken.

You may not recognize the name, but in the computer world the Dave Winer is a giant. In the 1980s he created the applications ThinkTank and MORE, programs that defined the outliner as a software category (I’ve used MORE or an app inspired by it nearly time I’ve turned on my computer for the last twenty years). He founded Userland, the company the produced one of the early and most ambitious blogging applications (I used it for The Hellenophile for years) Today, Winer’s work underlies every post I write, this one included: I discovered his comments via RSS, a format he was a pioneer of; I wrote up my first thoughts in an outliner inspired by MORE; I exported those notes in OPML format, another format he developed; then I wrote the post in Marsedit, an application originally written by an employee of Dave’s and inspired and based on the work of Userland. Steve Job’s company may have designed my computer, but Dave Winer built the stuff behind the walls that you never see.]

Winer wrote (empasis mine):

To both Jobs and Wright the people who used their products were not as important as the computer or the building. More than the thing itself, what mattered to Wright, and I think what mattered to Jobs is the integrity of his vision. In a way it was a shame that the vision had to be instantiated.

I suspect he’s wrong about Jobs, but I’m fairly certain he’s wrong about Wright.

The architect subordinating mortals to his immortal artistic vision is a mirage created by Ayn Rand for purely didactic reasons (Roark’s “heroic” act is to destroy what he doesn’t control; he’s thug and a Vandal, not artist).

To Wright, the people who lived in his homes were all-important — the house was designed for people to live in, it wasn’t a sterile monument. What didn’t matter to Wright and what didn’t matter to Steve Jobs is what people thought they wanted. When Wright built his first houses in the 1890s, his clients thought they wanted a European house with small, specialized rooms, gingerbread on the exterior and a tall, looming presence on the street. They wanted Victorians on the prairie. Wright taught them what they needed: an American house, built to respect the landscape of the New World with few, open, light-filled rooms, with connections to the natural world outside and carefully constructed spaces to foster the sense of family. In 1998 a computer buyer might have wanted a three-button mouse and floppy drive, but what they needed was a way to focus on what was important — family photos, home movies and the music they loved. Both Wright and Jobs wanted their products to recede into the background as much as possible, to make the house or the computer secondary to living in a house or using the computer.

A Wright house isn’t a building, it’s a philosophical text about family, nature and landscape. An inglenook is important — it draws family and friends into conversations. Views into the surrounding landscape are important — they connect us to nature An Apple product isn’t about buttons and screens, it’s about eliminating barriers between the user and what the user chooses to care about when using the device.

The proof that Frank Lloyd Wright cared is that he sold houses in every decade from the 1890s to 1960s. The proof that Steve Jobs cared is not found in the fact that Apples sells millions of products, but that Apple sells millions of its products to people who already own Apple products. Architects who don’t care about their clients get sued by MIT for $300 million; architects who do care sell their client a corporate headquarters, a house, a mausoleum, another house and then another house — as Wright did for Darwin Martin.

Compare the celebrated Fallingwater to the lesser known Samara in Lafayette,a Indiana (or the Cooke House, or Palmer House or the Laurent House — it doesn’t matter). The first was a showpiece built for one of the richest men in Pennsylvania with an effectively unlimited budget. The other was built with a modest and inflexible budget for a newly hired biology professor at a state university . Both are astounding masterpieces and Fallingwater surpasses Samara only because of its surrounding landscape and larger size; both share the same understanding and respect for the needs of the occupant. At the end of the day, the millionaire department store magnate had a larger, but no better house than the newly-married assistant professor.

Tellingly, Fallingwater and Samara share much with Wright’s own home in Wisconsin, Taliesin.

That is a pattern repeated though Wright’s career. The secretaries in the Larkin Building had as much access to natural light as the executives who wrote the check to Wright, the publishing executive with connections to Wright’s early patrons has a masterpiece across the street from the exquisite house built for Wright’s office assistant and Solomon Guggenheim’s museum shared drafting table space with dozens of the Usonian homes built for teachers, farmers and salesmen.

Put differently, in the last two decades of his life, when he was the most celebrated, coveted, and highly paid architect in the world, while he designed museums and homes for celebrities, a school teacher could ask for, and receive a Wright-designed home — and that home would showcase the same ideas and innovations that Wright put into his own home.

Tell me that Wright didn’t care.

One cliched response to Wright’s work is, “his roofs leak”. That he did not care about (I never said that what he cared about was the same thing that the homeowners cared about). He did not care if you needed an attic to store your crap, or a coffee table to hold your kick-knacks. He didn’t care about these things because other things were more important. The flat roof, the built-in furniture that could not be moved and tree growing through the hallway were conscious choices; a leak-prone roof was necessary for a house that responded to the American landscape, a built-in shelf reduced the clutter that detracts from family life and maybe he just liked the tree where it was.

If Frank Lloyd Wright had given clients what they wanted — if he cared about what they wanted — only academics would remember the architect who built Victorians with big closets and TV rooms. Instead, he cared about what they needed, and he left Fallingwater, the Guggenheim and Taliesin as his legacy.

Frank Lloyd Wrght appeared in this Apple TV ad (narration by Jobs). It’s no coincidence that it features Wright. Steve always knew what we needed.