Frank Lloyd Wright’s sumac window, 1902, Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois. |
By the dawn of the 20th
century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered something I didn’t learn
until the 21st century — that kleptocapitalism must finally and necessarily
destroy the standards of every profession with which it comes in contact.
In his 1900 speech to the
Architectural League of America in Chicago, titled The Architect, Wright “…reminded his colleagues that in this
country commerce had triumphed over art,” wrote Robert C. Twombly in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture.
“The lust for money had reduced the architect to a servant of the business
community.”
Wright charged that the American
architect “…panders to silly women his silly artistic sweets,” trading
experimentation and individuality for financial security.
“(The architect) now modeled
commercial buildings after Greek temples and luxury homes after Louis XIV
palaces, all because the businessman and his wife ‘knew what they wanted,’”
Twombly wrote. “No longer an independent spirit, the architect had become a salesman,
peddling prepackaged ‘styles’ from the files of huge ‘plan-factories.’
“At the height of the industrial
revolution in America, Wright was painfully aware that the new corporate elite
had usurped the status of the professional, reducing him to an employee at its
beck and call.”
In 21st century capitalism-gone-wild
America, that sad state of professional degradation applies not just to
architects but to physicians, educators, military officers, police officers,
attorneys, journalists, you name it.
For pity’s sake, judges have been caught framing innocent
American children because they’ve been bribed by private prison corporations to
provide warm bodies in order to increase the corporation’s lucrative taxpayer
subsidy.
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