Frank Lloyd Wright on American Wrongs

Frank Lloyd Wright’s sumac window, 1902,
Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois. 

By the dawn of the 20^th century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered something I didn’t learn until the 21^st 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 21^st 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.