IT'S ALL IN THE PLAN

EVEN GENIUS NEEDS NURTURING

When Frank Lloyd Wright was asked how he came up with a design, he would often draw a seed and then develop it into a design. A seed has within it the plan of what it will be, but it needs to be pollinated in order to become what is in that plan. So, too, geniuses must master their vocational tools before they can work their magic in their chosen career.

So it was that Frank Lincoln Wright, who came into the world in Bear Valley, Wisconsin, June 8, 1867, was surrounded with photographic images of architectural structures placed in his bedroom by his caring mother. Youthful time in Massachusetts would have revealed to him wondrous structures in such styles as Colonial and Federal.

Where then, one must wonder, did Wright learn the basics of architectural design and the running of an architectural office? For this, we must look to when Wright was in Madison, Wisconsin, and at the two people who were his earliest influences, Lew Forester Porter and Allan Darst Conover, a.k.a. Alan Conover.

Lew Forester Porter was educated at Beloit College and the University of Wisconsin. He was, later, the supervising architect of the Wisconsin State Capitol, the second-highest domed capitol in the country (shorter than Washington, DC, by 19 inches out of respect). Porter was a principal in the firm of Conover and Porter from 1885 to January 1899.

Alan Conover, son of a classics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed a successful science, mathematics and engineering career by teaching engineering and building construction at the University of Wisconsin in the 1880s. He became interested in architecture with the construction of Science Hall by Milwaukee architect Henry Koch, who also designed Milwaukee's city hall. Conover served as the local architect and altered Science Hall during construction, though by how much we do not know. In 1885, Conover began practicing architecture while he continued teaching. It was then that he took on Lew Porter, a talented former student, as partner. Conover handled most of the political connections while Porter handled most of the true architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright commenced his formal education in 1885 at the University of Wisconsin School for Engineering. He took classes part-time while apprenticing under Conover. His exposure to the ideas of Alan Conover and Lew Porter must have opened up a treasure chest of ideas for him. The fact that he was in the office for over two years (perhaps more) left an indelible impact on his formative mind. This experience was a complete college education unto itself since Wright could learn about historical backgrounds, world culture, engineering, client agendas, and construction materials, along with the ins and outs of commercial and residential architecture.

This education must have seemed like a godsend to Wright. The firm began a pattern for him that would be repeated throughout his early career and apprenticeship: that of having two powerfully gifted men as mentors, one oriented more toward business and engineering, the other steeped in design and aesthetics. Alan Conover and Lew Porter formed such a team. Then came Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Cecil S. Corwin. And finally, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.

Perhaps the most important single building that contributed to Wright's development was Conover and Koch's Science Hall. The mark Science Hall had on Wright's thinking is unmistakable. Science Hall was built with a frame made completely of steel beams, three- foot thick walls, double-wall air pockets and little interior wood. It was the first completely fireproof building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus and is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the world that makes substantial use of structural steel.

Here are a few seminal ideas that Wright could have learned from Madison and its Science Hall:

1. Science Hall is built into the hill not on top of it. This thematic core stayed with Wright his entire life, including for Taliesin (S.172), Fallingwater (S.231) and Marin County Civic Center (S.415–S.417).

2. The approach and entryway to the building take the visitor up a series of dramatic turns before compressing space at the entryway and exploding it in the interior. This is standard with Wright from his Prairie works onward.

3. Excess interior and exterior ornament is stripped away. This is decidedly not a Koch contribution to the design, but it is what Conover did as part of his alterations. Unlike many Victorian architects, Conover and Porter found that the integrity as well as beauty of a building lay in its fundamental truth as an architectural statement. Throughout his career, Wright exhibited a proclivity for removing exterior details and simplifying form. Wright laid claim to having designed the Heating Plant building behind Science Hall, a structure that embodies all the fundamental principles espoused by Conover and Porter. In fact, Conover's alleged drawing of a balanced beam structure was reiterated precisely the same way in one of Wright's Madison boathouse projects a few years later.

4. Science Hall uses bricks as bricks, stone as stone, wood as wood. This technique does not attempt to disguise or tease these materials into something they are not. Here we have the essence of "in the nature of materials," later the title of a book collaboration between Wright and Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

5. Science Hall revels in soaring space that virtually hollows out the interior and makes it seem as light as a feather. What Koch-Conover-Porter achieved here is that old Asian proverb (attributed to Lao-Tse) about architecture not being defined by the walls of a building, but rather the space contained within the walls. This flowing, free-form space would become one of the hallmarks of Wright's practice. Unity Temple (S.096) is an excellent example of how this lesson was put into practice years later.

6. Congruent with masterful and dramatic use of space in Science Hall is the atrium. The whole central core — out of which the logic and interior of the building grow — is open and soaring. The earliest example of this open core in Wright's work is Dr. Harlan's home (S.018). It is interesting to note that in Corwin and Wright's collaborations, only Wright seems interested in this theme, which he repeats in the Roloson Rowhouses (S.026), and later on a grand scale, in the Larkin Administration Building (S.093).

7. Science Hall features innovative use of building materials. It is one of the first buildings in the United States to use a steel understructure to frame the building, which was at the time an almost unprecedented use of this material for practical and aesthetic purposes. This steel made the building fireproof, allowed the exterior and interior walls to be dissolved into flowing space, created an inner world inside the outer shell and became an integral exposed design element. Is it surprising that Wright never separated engineering from aesthetics in his commissions?

One can imagine Conover being frustrated...