#112 Frank Lloyd Wright

What I learned from reading Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright by Paul Hendrickson. ---- [0:01] Frank Lloyd Wright suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego. [7:20] Ben Franklin writing about vanity 250 years ago: Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor. [12:38] He held a press conference on Christmas Day to explain his actions. He said ordinary people can not live without rules to guide his conduct. He - Frank Lloyd Wright - is not ordinary. [13:44] Frank Lloyd Wright had a single minded pursuit of his own potential. [18:50] Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. [19:30] Find something you love to do and don’t stop until you die. [23:00] Everything is malleable. Including the truth. [25:25] All Frank Lloyd Wright had was a complete faith in himself. [31:57] Frank Lloyd Wright had a point of view—a conviction— and he tied his point of view to larger ideas. [35:29] Frank Lloyd Wright was terrible with money: So long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves. [36:20] The early career of Frank Lloyd Wright / his mentor was one of the greatest architects ever [39:30] You are going to go far. You’ll have a kind of success; I believe the kind you want. Not everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work and human sacrifice you’ll make for it. [50:05] Wright turned down a fantastic opportunity. He preferred to bet on himself. [53:28] Wright’s mid life crisis and the abandonment of his family. [56:00] We’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets. We’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows—we can’t earn any money that way. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him you do that—and uh—forget the money. If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time... You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid! It is absolutely stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is—somebody is interested in everything—anything you can be interested in, you will find others who are... But, it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See, what we are doing is, is we’re bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we are living—in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life, by bringing up their children, to bring up "their" children, to do the same thing. So, it’s all retch and no vomit—it never gets there. Therefore, it’s so important to consider this question... "What do I desire?" —Alan Watts [1:01:50] The volume of work Wright completed after the age of 60 was astonishing. A third of his total output came after the age of 80! [1:17:30] What the tumultuous relationship of his parents gave Frank Lloyd Wright: “A will and inner strength that seems unquantifiable.” ---- ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01David Senra?

  Frank Lloyd Wright was born two years after the end of the Civil War, and died two years after the launch of Sputnik. Ninety-one years and ten months on this earth. In the approximate middle of that near-century span, when he was forty-seven, the greatest architect America had yet produced suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego. Although perhaps, that is just saying the same thing twice. A crazed servant named Julian Carlton set fire to Wright's home and went about murdering seven people. One of whom was the woman Wright deeply loved and had been living with for the past several years.

• 0:46David Senra?

  Even as his own wife kept praying he'd somehow come to his moral senses and return to his family. Five years before, in the fall of 1909, having already revolutionized American architecture and produced what other artists might have considered a lifetime's worth of work, Wright had abandoned his practice and gone off to Europe with Maima Borthwick. It was not just a local scandal, but a regional outrage and in some ways a national one. She had forsaken her spouse and two little children, and he had forsaken his spouse and six children. And now, after some relative quiet in their lives, forty-five-year-old Maima Borthwick was dead.

• 1:31David Senra?

  No, not just dead, but slaughtered in the most gruesome way. As much as this moment had been chronicled, pored over, dreamed into, by what is now three generations of Wright biographers and historians, by playwrights, by newspaper feature writers, by documentary filmmakers, by a handful of novelists, by conspiracy theorists, even as it's been dreamed into and performed onstage by an opera company, there is still so much about it that has to be imagined, conjured. Which is to say we know so much and simultaneously so little.

• 2:16David Senra?

  Which in a way is its own definition of Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Riddles wrapped up inside of riddles, triangles drawn inside of circles, drawn inside of squares.

• 2:30David Senra?

  One of Wright's lifelong dictums was that his buildings were like plants and trees that grow from inside out and come up from the earth craving the light. He just needed to conceive the thing, draw the thing, and make the thing. "The thing has simply shaken itself out of my sleeve," the old shaman liked to say, ever his own best publicist. In a 72-year career as architect and egotist, Frank Lloyd Wright shook more than 1,100 things from his sleeve, a staggering number by any artistic measurement.

• 3:09David Senra?

  They were churches, schools, offices, banks, museums, hotels, medical clinics, an automobile showroom, a synagogue, a mile-high skyscraper, and one exotic-looking gas station. Overwhelmingly, though, they were houses, residences, shelters for mankind. Not quite half of all his drawings and designs and studies were realized, and about 400 still come magically out of the American ground looking for the light. This book isn't intended as a Frank Lloyd Wright biography, not in any conventional sense.

• 3:51David Senra?

  Depending on how you count, there are about eight or nine of those. And never mind how many hundreds of historical studies, monographs, coffee table treatments, scholarly examinations of specific Wright buildings or houses or periods. The Wright industry, from calendars to placemats to bathroom glow lights to keychains to books themselves, just churns on, year after year. Rather, this book is meant to be a kind of Schenectady, with selected pockets in a life standing for the oceanic whole of that life.

• 4:27David Senra?

  The aim is to move the narrative backward and forward in time through these nonlinear pockets or storytelling boxes, trying not to confuse you while also taking things in a general chronological direction and arc from east to west, that is, from June 8th, 1867, when Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin, to April 9th, 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright died in his sleep one morning, two months from his 92nd birthday.

• 5:03David Senra?

  Alright, so that is from the prologue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is "Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright," and it was written by Paul Hendrickson.

• 5:16David Senra?

  Okay, before I jump into the rest of the book, I found Frank Lloyd Wright so fascinating, so interesting, so unique, that not only did I read, this is close to like a 600-page biography that I'm holding in my hand, but I also watched several documentaries this week on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. And I want, I took a bunch of notes, and I'm going to go through those notes before I jump into the rest of the book, because when I was thinking about this is, I approached, before I read the book, I didn't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright. I knew his name, I knew he was an architect, I knew several of the buildings that he built. But I didn't know anything about the personality, or, as the prologue, the devastating tragedy that he had to live through.

• 6:00David Senra?

  And so, when I was thinking about sitting down and talking to you about Frank, the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, I asked myself, "Well, what are the things I wish I would have known going into this book?" And a lot of those things are the same things I thought were so interesting that I took notes on as I watched these documentaries. So let me work from that documentary right now before I go back into the book. Now, from that prologue, you probably picked up on two things. Alright, you picked up on many things, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that the author used the word "ego" or "egotist" twice. That's something I didn't know about Frank Lloyd Wright. So let me try to, if you don't, if you don't know anything about his personality, right?

• 6:45David Senra?

  Like I didn't. The way I would describe him is like a cross between like a P T Barnum level of showmanship with the obsessiveness of his craft like an Enzo Ferrari and the arrogance vanity self-belief of like a Kanye West. Um, so every single source that I've come across on Frank Lloyd Wright immediately draws your attention to the fact that he was one of the most egotistical people to ever live. Okay, so my, uh, and a lot of people, you know, discount his overall contributions to his field and the stuff he was able to build when he was alive because of this. I've said

• 7:28David Senra?

  on past podcasts over and over again, my own belief on ego vanity, it's my personal opinion on this is a very old opinion. It's similar to Benjamin Franklin writing in his autobiography 250 years ago. And this is what he has to say. This is Ben Franklin. He says, "Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves, but I give it fair quarter whenever I meet it, being persuaded that is often productive of good to the possessor." So I, when I think of somebody that I would describe as arrogant, to me, that's somebody that doesn't have the humility humility to understand that they can learn from, from

• 8:12David Senra?

  other people, that they think they know everything. Frank Lloyd Wright learned from all kinds of people around him. He learned from nature. He learned from, uh, from poetry. All he used, he very, he had a very much interdisciplinary approach where he'd have this, uh, expose himself to constant new flow of ideas and then combine those ideas, synthesize them, and then create something new. Yes, he was extremely confident, but I don't, I think, one, it's smarter at some degree, if you, if you are like that, to hide it from other people. Cause what Ben Franklin is telling us, that was true 250 years ago, it's still true today. Most people dislike vanity in others. But I think to have self-confidence in your, your ability, especially when it comes to your craft, like Frank Lloyd Wright

• 8:53David Senra?

  does, or did rather, uh, I think that's an overall good thing. Just keep it to yourself is what I would do, uh, what I would recommend. But with Frank,

• 9:03David Senra?

  I listened to a lot of his interviews and saw and read a lot of transcripts about this. I think he used that as a way, it was so like the way he talked about himself, and I'll get into that right now, was so unique that it fed more press. And then the more press he got, the more attention his buildings got, the more attention his buildings got, the more jobs he got. So just know that going in. So I'm gonna just read some of my notes. He broke all the rules in his art and life. He was controversial and notorious, unpredictable. He boasted about his genius. He risked career, his career in scandalous affairs. This is how one of his draftsman, one of his people that worked for him, described him.

• 9:45David Senra?

  Frank Lloyd Wright was 200% alive. He said, "I'm the greatest architect that ever lived." For, and what he was referring to, he says, "Forget greatest American living architect." So he constantly referred to as the greatest living, uh, American living architect. He's like, "No, not greatest American architect, greatest architect, and not just living, but ever. No qualifiers," he said. So there's his ego, right? Uh, he was, he was described as being a hustler. Um, this is a direct quote from Frank Wright. "If I said I was the greatest architect in the world, I don't think it'd be arrogant." He compares himself to Leonardo da Vinci. Uh, but listen to how he also describes his craft. Listen to this.

• 10:28David Senra?

  He's very, I mean, he had a, think about doing the same career. He knew he was gonna be an architect since he was a little boy. And he practiced the, the, the, uh, architecture, or being an architect for 72 years. This is how he described his craft. "Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order."

• 11:07David Senra?

  Um, he was a complete obsessive. He was extremely controlling, overbearing and excited. When he built you a house, he would design everything down to the napkin holders. All furniture and furnishings. He'd visit houses that he would, uh, that he built. And then come back several years later and they, they, he'd find that they added, you know, tchotchkes or different things. He'd throw them all away. I mean, he was, he is one of the most unique people ever. I'm trying to get across to you that he's one of the most unique. Uh, people have ever come across like you can almost, he's, he's almost impossible to categorize. Uh, when they said that he's a, in the prologue, it says he like, he's a riddle. Inside of a riddle, squares inside of square, uh, circles and all this other thing. Like he's very, very.

• 11:51David Senra?

  Just hard to understand, hard to wrap your, your mind around. Um, he believed, here we go. He believed his clients were privileged to be able to work with him. That reminds me, the reason I, I brought up the P T Barnum, Enzo Ferrari, Kanye combination. Cause Kanye famously said that his greatest regret in life was never being able to see himself perform live. Like that's something I could see Frank Lloyd Wright saying. Um, he always would live in the now. What, he said, what's happening now is the most important thing. This also led him to be at forty two years old and after twenty years of marriage, he abandoned his kids. Uh, the prologue for, for Mema, uh, Borthwick. Um, all he left them was a bunch of unpaid bills. Um, so again, he's not a perfect person by any means, have at all.

• 12:35David Senra?

  Um, this, this is hilarious. He said rules were for normal people and that he wasn't normal. He said this to the press. He held a press conference on Christmas day because everybody was, uh, at this time in American culture.

• 12:51David Senra?

  Adultery was punishable. Like you could be arrested for it. And so he runs off with Mema, I think this is with Mema Borthwick. Um, it might've been this, his, the, the third wife after this. But he holds a press conference on Christmas day to explain his actions because the press is covering this. Like this genius architect. What is he doing? He's, he's, you know, he's a philanderer or whatever you want to call it. It, he's, he's doing a bunch of immoral scandalous affairs. So he holds a press conference on Christmas day to explain his actions. This is what he says. He said, ordinary people cannot live without rules to guide their conduct.

• 13:25David Senra?

  I, Frank Lloyd Wright, am not ordinary. He's essentially saying, "Listen, society, your rules don't apply to me." He explicitly offered up his life in architecture for critical appraisal, this is actually really smart, insisting that neither could be adequately understood without the other. Another thing I learned from him, some of his positive traits, besides his obsessiveness, his love of his craft, he had his single-minded pursuit of his own potential. I'm naturally drawn to people like that. That's what, I mean, what are we doing here? We're studying excellence. These people are not normal. They're not going to be, they don't write books about normal people.

• 14:07David Senra?

  The reason they're eccentric, what makes them eccentric, their unusualness is what makes them interesting. Which is all why I say, like, the main message from reading biographies is like, lean into whatever makes you eccentric, whatever makes you unique. He was unbelievably non-conformist, and I'll get there in a minute. Single-minded pursuit of his own potential. That's a good thing. This is something that blew my mind, that I'm just gonna put right up front, even though it comes later in the book. He lived to 92, right? So he has this, like, many things, he's in multiple chapters in his life, which I'll talk to you more about today, which is, he starts out building houses. His designs are so unique, so different from anything else that's happening at the time,

• 14:50David Senra?

  that he revolutionizes how American houses are built even to this day, right? And he does that from the time he was about 20 years old to the time he's about 47, when he runs off with this woman and closes up his practice, right? Then he has like a 20-year, almost 25-year gap where he doesn't really do much. He's essentially in poverty, being ridiculed, written off. He's a has-been in the architectural world, even though his whole, his self-belief never wavered. And then, his most, this is what I'm about to read to you, blew my mind. I've never, I've never come across anybody like this before. He lives to 92, right? His last 15 years of life, from the time he turns, let's say, 77 to 92,

• 15:34David Senra?

  let's say, the time he was 80 years old. From 80 to 89 was the most productive decade of his life. What? That's a mo- first of all, a lot of people are dead by that time. And if they're not dead, they gave up, they don't. That shows how much in love with what he, like, you cannot separate architecture from, from him. They were one and the same thing. Eighty was his most productive decade. Over fifteen years, he made plans, over those fifteen years, he made plans for three hundred and fifty buildings. Every single building was provocative and controversial. How many people can still hold that level of, uh, most people would be more conservative as they age, right? He was, some of his craziest designs came at the end of his life, including the Guggenheim,

• 16:18David Senra?

  the mu- the famous museum in New York City. That was the last project he was working on. He died right before it was completed. Um, they, they were describing the work from, at this time period, late in his life, as unmistakably Frank Lloyd Wright. And this is what he said about it. He says, "I cannot get them out fast enough." Another good thing I learned about himself, that you could see based on what I just told you, he did not set any limits for himself. He didn't understand the, the idea of retiring, that made no sense to him. He didn't understand, he, he, he saw no reason why he couldn't make his best work right before he died, and many people believe he did. Um, another thing about this, though, ego did not diminish with age. This is what he said, he was like eighty-five years old at the time.

• 17:03David Senra?

  This, and it, uh, it, it makes me laugh. I love seeing stuff like this. He says, "I defy anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn't first done by me." Um, there's another thing I, I've thought of. Uh, later in life, he was working out of, mainly in Arizona, and, um, grew up in Wisconsin, very, felt very much like, uh, the Midwest was a part of who he was. Um, and he did something, he isolated himself, which we've seen a lot lately. I think of, uh, that's main, the, one of the main takeaways from the life of Henry Singleton, the more I study him, is just like the, sitting in your office, alone with your thoughts,

• 17:46David Senra?

  reading books, coming up with a, I think they said his office produced a cornucopia of ideas, Singleton, that is. Well, and part of that is maintaining focus, which is extremely hard for us to do, right? Well, Wright, you see this a lot, Enzo Ferrari had this, Steve Jobs had the Focus, tons of people had Focus, right? James Dyson, um, but they were explicit.

• 18:06David Senra?

  About maintaining that focus. So in Arizona, now this is a description from one of Wright's employees. In Arizona, it was like living on the moon. We seldom saw newspapers, magazines, or radio. You lived in a complete atmosphere with very little encroachment from the outside world. I have not developed the communication abilities yet to describe that idea, to flush it out. But there is a theme through these biographies where you're seeing this. Like, they shut out the outside world. They do not let it encroach on their ideas and their visions and how they want to live their life. And as a result, they produce things that are unique, that are not common.

• 18:46David Senra?

  Finally, one other thing before I get into the book that I think is interesting to know. And, I mean, he insisted to have a certain poem read at his funeral. And it's a poem by Emerson, and it's called "Self-Reliance." And some of his favorite lines, these two lines I'm gonna read to you, and then we'll get into the book. He says, "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

• 19:17David Senra?

  Alright, so let's jump into the book. I'm gonna spend a lot of time trying to trying to fill in, like, what his personality was like. Like, let's really try to understand who he was as a person. This is one of the best things I've learned from him. "Find something that you love to do and don't stop until you die."

• 19:37David Senra?

  He says, "Nothing so seductive in this life," he once said, "as the prospect of sitting down to a blank piece of paper with a pencil." "There is no being lonesome after that," he said. "It's almost hard to imagine, but in the last decade of his life, Wright designed nearly a third of his total output." He just kept rising, waking up, meaning, and going to his board, to the board, to the... They say tilted board. You ever seen what an architect works out of? I actually want to buy one for myself, because I think they're so cool.

• 20:09David Senra?

  That is amazing to me. Like, I posted notes over and over everywhere today. So I want to make sure that you understand how crazy this is. A third of his entire output happened in the last decade of his life. That, that, that blows my mind. I can't, I just cannot, I absolutely cannot understand how that is even possible. Um, so the lesson I took away from that, find something you love to do and don't stop until you die. Uh, another bit about his personality, complete, absolute complete controls over the products. He, you, you, you, you thought if you were a person working with Frank Lloyd Wright, you hired him to build your house. You thought, okay, I hired him so he could build me a

• 20:52David Senra?

  house. No, no, no. He was building that house for him and you had very little say in this. Um, he spent a lifetime conceiving some blind spaces for our aesthetic contemplation, although really it was for his aesthetic satisfaction and contemplation. To hell with us and to hell with those whom the spaces were supposedly being built and for whom he was allegedly working. So it talks about one of his most famous designs is the, uh, is the Johnson Wax Building. And you gotta look at, let me Google it to see what, um, what, uh, what comes up on Google Images, uh, because the interior of this building is one of the cra- I cannot believe

• 21:35David Senra?

  he designed it almost a hundred years ago. Uh, let's see, it was built from 1936 to 1939. Yeah. Google Image search Johnson Wax Building and see what the interior, I've never even seen a room that looks like this, much less, it could blow your mind that it was built in the 1930s. But anyways, the person that was hiring, the guy that running Johnson Wax, the company, really successfully, he's like, at first we started out and Frank Lloyd Wright was, he was describing the process. He's like, Frank Lloyd Wright was working for me. Then as the cost kept going up, because he was notorious, like Frank was not frugal at all. Uh, he, he had very little money most of his life because he, he insisted on living beyond his means. Um, he did not take debt seriously. He was, this caused him a lot of trouble later

• 22:18David Senra?

  on. He had houses foreclosed upon, uh, got punched in the face because he didn't pay people certain money, uh, money that he owed, whatever the case was. But anyways, he says at the beginning, you know, he said it was gonna cost, let's say, 700,000. I can't remember the exact number. It winds up being like $2 million. And this is in 1936, right? So he says at the beginning, Frank was working for me. Then his costs kept rising. We were working together. And then finally, as costs kept going, I eventually was working for him. And I think that little anecdote is a good way to describe the relationship that Wright had with his clients. Now, something we talked about last week with David Geffen, and we've seen this with Steve Jobs and others.

• 22:59David Senra?

  A huge aspect of Wright's personality is he understood what I feel is true. That everything in life is malleable, including the truth. Now, that could be a negative aspect, and it was in Wright's case because he was, uh, let's see, how would I put this? Seems to be a pathological liar. His autobiography, I couldn't even read and use because it's so riddled with lies. Lies that you can, like, fact-check through other documents. And again, this is why I say he was a very much a showman like a P.T. Barnum. I think he did this intentionally. Alright, so he says, "If he is hands-down our greatest architect, he is also hands-down one of our gold standard artist provocateurs.

• 23:44David Senra?

  He was such a fantastic fabricator on any subject under the sun that it became something of a cliché among his chroniclers to say he barely grasped the basic concept of truth-telling." More about his personality. The reason I think people say he's such a riddle, he's so hard to understand is because he possessed a lot of what we would consider opposite traits simultaneously. So he had bravado and pain, joy and sadness. He says, "Two things can be true at once. You can be so self-satisfied and full of yourself, and also secretly shamed by things and quietly haunted." That's a good description of Frank, I think. He says, and he experienced the full spectrum of life, the highest highs and the lowest lows.

• 24:28David Senra?

  "Ugly things happen. I've said that the best and worst of everything has come to me."

• 24:37David Senra?

  A little bit about his early life. All he really had when he started off, he leaves Wisconsin to go to Chicago to build his architectural career. Chicago at the time was like the epicenter of building. And all he had was a complete faith in himself. Now, this is interesting, there's not a lot about his early childhood. We kind of meet him when he's a teenager and he's the, um, other than like, he said in stories, we don't know if it's true, that his mom insisted that when she gave birth to his son, that he'd be an architect. She'd put like, he writes that she'd put pictures up of great buildings throughout the world in like his nursery, like his, when he was a small kid. So we don't know too much about his early life, um, but we do know, fast forward to about seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, there's a discrepancy on the years on when this actually happened.

• 25:22David Senra?

  But by this time, he's already extremely confident and, and egotistical. So all he had really has is a complete faith in himself. He says, "Mother fueled, father ghosted. Here he comes now, nineteen years old, out of the long grasses of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin prairie. A kid, a rube, a bumpkin by every estimation except his own. Possessed of his own small reveries and despirations and unseen haunts, longing to make history on a large scale." It's interesting that he had giant sized ambition from even an early age. "Longing to make history on a large scale propelled by a boundless faith grown strong in him." That's a faith in himself, that is what they're talking about.

• 26:07David Senra?

  "He had a boundless belief that he will somehow turn himself in short order into a world figure on architect's stage." It's not only gonna happen, but it's not, but, uh, but in not much more than a decade. Now here's gonna be, uh, well, let me not mince words, this is a shitty part of his personality. He says he was a father to his buildings only. I think he had seven, but he had six kids, I think his first wife and maybe one or two after that. But he says, uh, this is him writing, "Is it equality?" Question mark, "Fatherhood?" Question mark. "If so, I seemed born without it. And yet a building was a child.

• 26:50David Senra?

  I have had this father feeling, I am sure, when coming back after a long time to one of my buildings. That must be the true feeling of fatherhood. But I never had it for any of my children." So this is also a very bizarre part because later on, some of his older sons wind up working with him for several years on multiple different projects. So he, he, he left, I think the oldest one when he left was maybe eighteen, and I think the youngest one was like five, three, small. And a lot of them have since written books and given interviews, and they were all very harmed by his desertion, you know? But they did have like experiences with him over the years. I don't think he, I don't know if he ever spoke to his wife again after that, but he

• 27:35David Senra?

  did have somewhat relationships. Now, again, he was only, the way to think about him is, he was supremely focused on realizing his grand potential that he saw for himself. So, everything really comes to the backseat besides his craft, which is why he talks about it the way he does, including his children, his wives, um, you know, just, he was extremely selfish. Um, and again, in the grand scheme of things, that is a negative attribute. Now, the only positive aspect of it that I would see, and I'm not obviously like, this is not behavior I want in my life, and I'm not condoning it, but I'm trying to understand the mindset, was that he believed now was the only important thing, right now, this

• 28:18David Senra?

  moment was the only thing we ever have in life, and that you should do with your life, like what you feel to be true to yourself. And so there's a lot of writings where he's like, you know, I feel bad about abandoning my wife and my kids, but I have to live my truth. Now, to me, that's unethical. I would never do that, like, my daughter's the most important person in my life, by far. Uh, the idea that I would just never like walk away and never, that's, that's silly nonsense to me. I feel like it's, it's a, one of the most beneficial things that ever happened in my life is, once you become a father, um, you realize that now there's a, a life that is more important than your own. And I think that's a deeply profound human experience, the idea that I would die for her, I would sacrifice my life if it meant, like, if she was in danger, I would gladly

• 29:03David Senra?

  give up my own life. That is a level of love that is just not, I, I, comparable to nothing else, right? But, but I also understand that people look at that different, and that we have different morals and ethics, and I find the behavior that, um, that Frank had towards his children disgusting, but I also understand, and I'm not excusing it...

• 29:30David Senra?

  There's something pure about living life for your own selfish needs, even if I wouldn't be willing to do that. Um, so I would try to take the good out of the idea that he's gonna live his truth and he's going to live to create the life that he wants to live in. But I just wish he would also extend that to, you know, still like you, if you wanna be divorced from your wife, whatever, that's your adults, you could do whatever, you know, decide what you need to do. What I don't understand is when people get divorced and then you don't talk to their kids anymore. So that's what I'm saying, like, if you're unhappy in your marriage, go build the life that you wanna build. You know, and in many cases, he had like a huge midlife crisis. He shut down his own firm, for God's sake. Something he built, took 25 years to build up until that point.

• 30:17David Senra?

  But just, just don't abandon your kids, man, they need you. Alright, um, let's move forward here. This is also something I found inspiring, like a lot of the people we study. Um, they're terrible students. They're not good at formal schooling, but they're really good at life. And if you have to choose between the either of those options, like, of course you would rather be good at life. So it says, Frank Lloyd Wright barely attended college at all. He was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin for a total of two semesters and barely that. He, uh, he had barely been admitted in the first place as a special student, that's in quotation marks, since he had not achieved enough credits to graduate from Madison High School. So he's, he did a very short time in college, but didn't even have, didn't even graduate high school.

• 30:59David Senra?

  And yet still is one of the most successful people that's ever lived. So again, that just tells you the, the only the autodidacts are free, the people that are actually capable of and willing to teach themselves. Um, another bit about his personality, obsessive, total control. This is a huge theme in the book.

• 31:17David Senra?

  He liked letting him, this, this is what he would do. Uh, he liked letting himself into his, that's in quotation marks, houses, to begin rearranging the furniture while the owners were out, moving books and photographs and putting their ghastly trinkets in bottom drawers. So he would go back and visit his properties when you, sometimes you weren't even there. He'd let himself into the house and then rearrange and put it back into how he thought it should be. That's a different level of arrogance. That's a different level of control. That is very, very bizarre.

• 31:52David Senra?

  And he also had a lot of really, really good ideas. This is really smart. He had a point of view and he had conviction. So it says, "The interiors of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are about many things, but at the center of each one is the intertwined idea of openness and flow." At that time, open floor plan's probably the most common floor plan in America now, new construction, right? "At the time," though, it says, "Wright was out to break the box, to destroy forever those tight, draped, dark, horsehair, closed-off Victorian rooms." So you'd have a house that have, you know, room for a piano, a room to eat, a room for a kitchen. Like, he's like, "No, just take down all the walls. What are you doing here?" He wanted to let light and space in, air in, life in.

• 32:34David Senra?

  And he did so radically and evangelically. Another thing he did that was smart, he tried to put that point of view to larger ideas. Throughout his life, Wright himself tried to articulate what he was doing in terms of this interlocking idea of openness and harmonious flow as it connects to the larger idea of freedom. And indeed, the still larger idea of America herself. Six years before he died, he wrote, "To say the house planted by myself on the good earth of the Chicago prairie as early as in 1900 was the first truly democratic expression of our democracy in architecture, would start a controversy with professional attics

• 33:19David Senra?

  who believe architecture has no political significance." So let's say that the spirit of democracy, and he defines that as freedom of the individual as an individual, "took hold of the house as it then was, took off the attic and the porch, pulled out the basement, and made a single spacious harmonious unit of living room, dining room, and kitchen, with appropriate entry convenience." Okay, so what is he saying there? He writes really funny, kinda like, a little bit confusing, so you have to parse it, in my opinion. So he's saying, "I took the houses as they were being built. I looked at them. I grabbed them in my hand. And I yanked off all the unessential." That idea that I talk about over and over again on this podcast that I got from Bruce Lee,

• 34:04David Senra?

  that I think is the core to great products and experiences, hacking away the unessential. So to him, Wright hated, he's like, "Stop with all your..." It's weird, really weird, because he'd collect a lot of possessions, but then he wouldn't design houses that had any storage. So he's like, "I don't want, get that attic out of here. Get that basement out of here. You're not having a garage." He claims to be the person that invented a carport. So you see that a lot on his residences. He's like, "I don't want a bunch of places for you to put your stuff. You shouldn't have all this stuff." So he's like, "Listen, I'm gonna take off the attic. I'm gonna take off the porch. I'm gonna pull out the basement. And I'm gonna make one single, big, beautiful room. And then a series of bedrooms." And he did that over and over again. So, and then I love the idea of tying that. He's like, "We're setting the American free inside of his own home,

• 34:47David Senra?

  just like the idea of, uh, the original founding idea of America, you know, having freedom." And he would constantly compare his ideas to philosophical ideas. He'd compare them to ideas he discovered in nature. "I think this is extremely smart and can be applied by anybody in their craft." He just happened to do it, you know, with dwellings. One thing to know about Frank Lloyd Wright, he always lived above his means. He was terrible with money. And as a result, if you're gonna be terrible with money, you're gonna have a shitty, like, you're gonna have a terrible life. Uh, he says, "There'd never been enough money in those years, or any years, really. Uh, and the spend-thrift head of the house had been determined to keep living high above his means." So this is some of the stuff he would buy. "Dandy clothing.

• 35:32David Senra?

  Subscription tickets to the opera. Oriental rugs. Books. Japanese prints. State-of-the-art cameras." And so he had one of his famous quotes. He says, "So long as we had the luxuries, the necessities could pretty well take care of themselves. Who cared if the village grocer had to come around begging for payment on his, on his month's, on his month's past due bill?" Oh, that's terrible. So he was, he was chased by creditors his entire life. Um, one thing to know that he had a, he had a large benefit of going to Chicago, taking that risk and going there because he winds up working. He was extremely gifted at a young age, so he was promoted relatively fast.

• 36:12David Senra?

  But his mentor was one of the greatest architects ever and the person that's credited with the invention of the skyscraper. Uh, Wright had gone to work for his beloved master, the great, gifted, prideful, riddle-filled, and ultimately tragic Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan was the father of the American skyscraper. He was a promulgator, you're gonna recognize, you might not recognize the name, but you're gonna recognize his famous quote. His, he was a promulgator of one of the most famous phrases in all of modernism. "Form follows function." That's Louis Sullivan. If Frank Lloyd Wright is the greatest American architect, then Louis Sullivan cannot be that far behind him.

• 36:51David Senra?

  So Sullivan immediately recognized the talent that Frank had and, um, he's, Frank is working for Sullivan and he gets a lot, he, he makes a lot of rapid progress and then I also want to tell you about his rapid progress, but also he finds a unique solution to building his own house. Keep in mind, at this time, we're talking about Frank since early twenties. So it says, "In no time he'd become a good pencil in the master's hand." That's how he described his work with Sullivan. He was the good pencil, but the master was the one, Louis Sullivan was the one teaching him, right? He earned one promotion and then another and then another and then another. Eventually he was supervising the entire drawing staff. There was something like two dozen people, uh, reporting to him. Um, he's getting,

• 37:31David Senra?

  at the time, there's a bunch of other architectural firms. They're all kind of, um, located by each other, so they compete for talent, right? And so Frank is getting poached and Sullivan stops that from happening. So Frank does something really smart here and he realizes that Sullivan would, is not willing to let him go. So he has a little bit of leverage himself. So he says, Sullivan not wanting to lose him, uh, the partners, Sullivan and, uh, uh, did not want to lose Frank. The partners had proposed a five-year contract, uh, which would make Wright the highest-paid draftsman in the city. But Wright typically had had a different money idea. Could they, uh, could they not pay him the agreed-upon salary? So it's a five-year contract for $5,000, right?

• 38:13David Senra?

  But also loan him an additional $5,000 right away so that he might build his own home. And then he says, "Could not weekly deductions be taken from his paycheck until the note had been satisfied? The partners agreed." So he gets this contract and then borrows an additional $5,000 against the contract to build his own house. He's not gonna last the five years of the contract, by the way. Uh, one of the conditions of the agreement, though, had been that Wright would not do any moonlighting on his own residential commissions. Well, at the very beginning, we talked about Wright did not believe rules applied to him at all. He said, "Rules were for ordinary people. I am not ordinary. I will make it..." You know, this is more of, um... What a lot of people criticize him about is that he would not honor his word.

• 38:58David Senra?

  So he says, uh, "Wright's honor had held for about a year and a half, but the reckless spending, but his reckless spending habits, uh, not to say the arrival of all his children in step order, had caught up. He needed more money." So he gets married around this time and they, I think they have four kids within like the first like five or six years of marriage.

• 39:17David Senra?

  Now, this part is very interesting, because you see a young, raw talent, right? But he's not the Frank Lloyd Wright he becomes. He's not that person yet, right? But he's getting there and you see that potential. Other people see it. So this is how Frank and his work was seen by his closest friend, who was also an architect at the time. Now, at this point in the story, Frank is in his late twenties. He's start, I think he's already jumped out onto his own. Okay? So this is his friend, writing to Frank. He says, "I've found there's no joy in architecture for me, except as I see you do it." Damn, that's a hell of a statement. I'm, "You're so good at the craft that we're both doing that. I'm not, like, I don't even get, like, I don't get joy unless I see you do it." Uh, "It bores me when I try to do it myself."

• 40:03David Senra?

  There's the truth for you. "You are," that's italicized, "the thing you do." That's a great six-word description of Frank Lloyd Wright. "You are the thing you do. I'm not, and I never will be." You are going to go far. You'll have a kind of success. Remember, it's not there yet, but they're seeing this. It's on the horizon. You will have a kind of success. I believe the kind you want. And he talks about, why is this happening? Not everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work and human sacrifice you'll make for it. So this is why I compare him to Enzo Ferrari, because Enzo Ferrari woke up, and he worked on building race cars, and then he went to sleep.

• 40:45David Senra?

  That was his life. Then he woke up, and that's it. He even said, like, the only love he had in his life, besides race cars, was his son, uh, Enzo. And his son dies at like 24 years old. But he even says, like, he's like, it's impossible, like, these people that get married and say they love their wives, it's like, I don't, the only true love I ever had was for race cars and for Dino. Or no, his name wasn't Enzo, it was Dino, wasn't it? He's, yeah, he didn't, it's not Enzo Junior, it's Dino, I'm sorry. Uh, so yeah, um, Enzo's son, Dino, died at 24. I want to make myself clear there. So anyways, this, this, uh, his friend, when Frank Lloyd Wright's in his late twenties, is picking up something. He's like, you're gonna have a success. And it's because, one, natural talent, but two,

• 41:25David Senra?

  you're paying the price in hard concentrated work, just like Enzo woke up and dedicated every single waking hour to his craft. That's what Frank did. Frank, and he burns himself out, unfortunately. That's why he, 20 years after this, he disappears for a long time. He worked seven days a week, constantly. Um, so he didn't really, you know, was not prioritizing building a relationship with his kids. Wouldn't say he was prioritizing building a relationship with anybody, really, but his buildings. And so I just think the sentence, I'm gonna read it again. Not everybody would pay the price in concentrated hard work and human sacrifice that you'll make. So, we saw that very early on.

• 42:08David Senra?

  And I just want to think about that word again for a little bit. Sacrifice. It's a sacrifice to do what he did. That's why I always say, um, like when I'm learning, what I'm personally learning from all these biographies, and I've said over and over again, I feel like, uh, Ed Thorp, in his book, Man of All Mark- Man for All Markets, um, I think Ed Thorp mastered life, because he had the balance that I, like, if I, if I wanted to pattern my life, there's a lot of, you know, traits and, and things I've learned from every person that we've studied, right? But if there's one person that I'd say, damn, I want that life for myself, it'd be Ed Thorp. Because he was extremely successful and innovative in what he did for a living.

• 42:49David Senra?

  Uh, he was financially successful, but he realized that money to a point has diminishing returns. So he wouldn't, he'd, he would turn down lucrative, uh, projects and businesses that he knew would he make a ton of money, because the time required would take away from his wife and kids. And then he had other interests. He, you know, he loved studying mathematics, physics, reading. Uh, he was dedicated to health and fitness. I just saw a video, uh, it's in, you have access to my notes, uh, because this is a Misfit episode. Um, I just took notes on a talk that Ed Thorp just gave, I think like a few months ago. He's eighty-seven years old. Go watch that video. Like, the guy took care of himself. He just says a lot of smart things. He had the balance.

• 43:30David Senra?

  Like, I think that is, if you live a life more like Ed Thorp, on emotional and, and like, life enjoyment level, you're probably more content than the people like Enzo or Frank. Frank optimized for one area of his life. My point is, let's, why don't we pick two or three things that are extremely important? Uh, let's say, let's say Thorp picked four. Financial, you know, work, success, family success, fitness and learning. Those are four great things to me. Um, and then he worked on, he developed systems and dedicated time to all of them, but kept them in like a harmonious balance. I think that, to me, is mastering life. We're, you know, Frank- Had a hard time developing relationships with people. Maybe he didn't want to. I'm not saying everybody has to do the same thing.

• 44:13David Senra?

  But this word sacrifice, I want to hold on to because now we're going to talk about how his youngest son saw Frank Lloyd Wright and how that his, his, the relationship he I guess did not have with his father impacted the relationship that, that, uh, his name is, what's his name? Robert? That Robert has with his own kids. Let me read this section to you. It's really interesting. "He did a conscious turn away from and a deliberate rejection of the vulgar narcissism and arrogance and bombast and egocentrism and reckless financial, not to say moral ways of his transcendentally, transcendentally gifted father." So he's not, I just, I held up Adorup as an example. I want that life.

• 44:56David Senra?

  I want those attributes for my life. Frank's youngest son is looking at his father's life. It's like, I don't want any of that. So it says, "When he was in his seventies, Robert Wright sat down and wrote a handful of essays about his life. He called them 'Letters to His Children on His Childhood.' One of the essays was a ten-page, single-spaced piece entitled 'Your Father's Recollections of His Father.' He might have titled it 'Your Father's Non-Recollections of His Father.'" Now, this is from quoting from his, his writing. "I remember visiting him in Chicago hotel room when I was about 12, and I was seeing him stave off an insistent creditor with jocular excuses," that's a, that's a funny way to say lies, "when the man left, he turned to

• 45:39David Senra?

  me, all smiles, and said, 'Son, that's the way you handle creditors.'" I didn't think so then, and I still don't. Remember, he's writing this to his kids. "To me, he had just gone through such a humiliating experience that I've been afraid to buy anything on credit ever since. To him, it was all of a, it was all a joke."

• 46:01David Senra?

  There is a certain like playfulness of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, where you just kind of realize we're all temporary and you know, you don't really have to take anything seriously if you don't want to. I mean, you apply it to the wrong domains and that could be dangerous, but I think that's an important sentence. To him, it was all a joke. But what the document mostly seems is its own sad proof for the kind of damage Frank Lloyd Wright inflicted on his children. This is how it ends. Now, back to the writing of Robert. "I dutifully restrained myself from a chronological count of all our many brief contacts. Unfortunately, we never had any real rows or any especially tender moments. There's no big fights, but no tender moments either.

• 46:45David Senra?

  He was always kind and affectionate with me, although frequently impatient. The sad truth is that we were friendly strangers and almost any of his favorite clients could tell you more about him than I can." So, this is decades after Frank dies. His son is 70 years old. And I think that echoes to me the sacrifice, that word "sacrifice", that Frank's friend and fellow architect used to describe the eventual success that you will have, Frank. That sacrifice that you made. Now, we reach this idea that I've talked about a lot that is kind of a main theme when you read these biographies,

• 47:30David Senra?

  that no one owns ideas. So, we're going to see the influence. Well, let me read this to you and then let me tell you how I kind of connect this to the other founders we've studied. Now, back to Louis Sullivan, right? This is what he called his master. "Sullivan, from whom Wright would learn more about architecture than from any other person in his life, was always way out ahead of the pupil on the gospel of creating an American architecture for Americans." Think about when this is happening. You're talking about his career last one, like, let's say 19... end of the 1800s to 1950. All right, that's a very like pro-American... this is when like America's booming, right? It says, "Gospel of creating an American architecture for Americans."

• 48:12David Senra?

  Frank Lloyd Wright gets way too much credit for that idea. "Not that he didn't believe in the gospel to his toenails", which he did, "or to understand it in deeper ways than Sullivan", which he did, "or raise it to far more brilliant levels", which he did, "but the dream didn't originate with him." So, the author...

• 48:31David Senra?

  That's not the point. Like, I understand it didn't originate with them, but nothing originates with anybody. No one owns ideas. So Frank is learning an idea from Sullivan that he takes and runs with. That is perfectly fine. That is normal. That's how, like, that's how humans learn. So you could even, like, I've talked about this over and over again. So a lot of things that Steve Jobs is credited with saying, "I'm building a company at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, liberal arts and science, liberal arts and humanities," different words in different times, that came from Edwin Land of Polaroid. Like, we're all influenced by somebody else. You study Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, and Jim Sinigal. Jim Sinigal is the founder of Costco. A lot of the stuff that comes out of those three guys' mouths came from Sol Price, who I also did a podcast on. This is, that is the nature of things.

• 49:13David Senra?

  The same thing that we're doing right now, which is learning good ideas, and in this case, a lot of bad ideas from the past, is the same thing they all did too. And the same thing that entrepreneurs, artists, anybody in the future will be doing in the past. This cycle will continue over and over again. So I just, I don't buy that. I think it's a lie. No one owns ideas. You can take them, you can borrow them, you can add to them, you can manipulate them, and then you can use them as a tool, which I think is the smarter way. And that's exactly what Frank did. The fact is that he talked about his work in like a spiritual, almost like he had a religious reverence for it. That is unbelievably smart to do. One, it's like, it's completely compelling to people that are reading his words or listening to it, and he wrote a lot, and like, he did a lot of op-eds, you know, major publications,

• 49:58David Senra?

  newspapers. And he, that, it's so important to tell people why you're doing what you're doing.

• 50:05David Senra?

  Okay, so at this point in the story, Wright is already out on his own, he's developing a lot of houses, getting a lot of attention. And then he does something which I think is essential to a life well-lived. He bets on himself. He turns down a giant, fantastic opportunity to bet on himself. So there's another famous architect, a guy named Burnham, once, he's like, "Frank's gifted, I want him on my team." Burnham had been hugely impressed by Wright's Winslow House, and was willing to underwrite a kind of all-expense-paid, six-year postgraduate education in Paris and Rome. She's like, "Come, come with us to Europe. We're gonna build, we're gonna study the architecture there and then build over there, and I'll pay for everything." Wright turned him down.

• 50:48David Senra?

  He would stake his chances on his own visions.

• 50:53David Senra?

  This is a quick overview of Frank Lloyd Wright's 91 Years on This Earth. Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are trying to reproduce his own history of calamitous fall, improbable comeback, lurid headlines, quiet beauty, incalculable sorrow, financial desperation, sexual intrigue, unsolvable riddle, and not least, the determination to survive. No, to triumph. That's a hell of a sentence. It's one of my favorite sentences in the entire book. Okay, so now we got to the part where I think it's probably the most inspiring part of his story.

• 51:34David Senra?

  And at first, it has to do with great amount of tragedy that he experiences and his family experiences. And this is the midlife crisis. Now, I fast-forward way ahead in the chronology. And chronology? What's the word I'm looking for? You know what I'm trying to say. So, you know, he was 32 last we checked in with him. Now, he's almost 50. And at this point in his life, he gives, he essentially looks around his life and says, "Eh, I don't like this anymore. Let's hit the complete reset button." And what I mean by inspiring about this is that he spends, you know, 20 years, something like that, maybe even more, trying to, like, wandering around aimlessly, trying to figure out what he wants out of life.

• 52:15David Senra?

  And then eventually supersedes his past accomplishments. If he had stopped right here, he closes down, never opens up architecture, he's probably one of the best architects ever lived, right? Not, I don't think, as he characterizes him, the best ever. But what's most inspiring is that he goes through the most painful, horrible experiences of his life during this period, and then comes back better than ever. That is the main thing I want, that I took away from the story of Frank Lloyd Wright and that I want you to take away. As long as we never stop, as long as we don't quit, like, there's always possibility in the next day. And it just, again, I want to go back to the fact that a third of his total output

• 53:00David Senra?

  happened in the last 10 years of his life. Alright, so let's go to the midlife crisis, and we're gonna see some crazy stuff here. Alright. "In Wright's case, there were other issues too, not least the work itself, and where he felt it was leading him nowhere." Imagine being obsessed your whole life with your craft, you put your heart and soul into it, and then 25 years later, you're completely dissatisfied. Oh, that's heartbreaking. "This absorbing, consuming phase of my experience as an architect ended about 1909. I was losing grip on my work and even interest in it. Every day of every week and far into the night of nearly every day, Sunday included." That's what he was talking about, that was his work schedule.

• 53:45David Senra?

  "Because I could see no way out because I did not know what I wanted. I wanted to go away. Everything personal or otherwise bore heavily on me. What I wanted, I did not know. So when my family life in the spring of 1909 conspired against the freedom to which I'd come to feel every soul entitled, and I had no choice, and I had no choice would I keep my self-respect but to go out, a voluntary exile into the uncharted and unknown, to get my back against the wall and live, if I could, an unconventional life." What's he saying there? He's like, "My life became too conventional, it's too normal.

• 54:29David Senra?

  I'm designing the same houses, various, the same houses over and over again, I'm married to the same woman, I'm living the same life, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and I don't want it anymore." Now, that's pretty crazy, but think about the poem, that line from the poem he wanted read at his funeral. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. I don't like that he hurt the people around him." That is, you know, that's, I don't like it, I can't say it another way. Like, I obviously am not telling you to do that. At the same time, he felt he was not living his own truth, and he felt that he wasn't, he wasn't living the life he was meant to live. I just wish, you know, he went about it in a different way, where it wasn't so damaging to the people around him, but I think it's important.

• 55:15David Senra?

  There's a great quote by Alan Watts I always think about, and he says it's so important for you to, to answer, I'm gonna kill this quote, you know what, let me just look for it, so I don't mess it up.

• 55:28David Senra?

  Okay, I found the quote. I'm gonna read the whole quote. I was gonna read you the last sentence, but it's so good. I listen, listen, I'm also a little crazy. I have this quote in, in audio format, and I listen to it a lot as a reminder. Like, I have, you know, quotes, pictures, things that like re-center me, keep me motivated, that I have to expose myself over and over again, because we always talk about this idea that your mind isn't defeated, constantly plays tricks on you, confuses you. And so I have a collection of things that I refer back to as kind of a way to center myself and keep me on the path that I want to be on. And one of this is this quote from Alan Watts. He says, "We'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows, we can't earn any money that way. What do you want to do?

• 56:12David Senra?

  When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, 'You do that, and, uh, forget the money.' If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. It is absolutely stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you really do like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, somebody is interested in everything. Anything you can be interested in, you will find others who are. But it is absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like and to teach

• 56:57David Senra?

  our children to follow in the same track. See, what we are doing is, we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives that we are living, in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children, to bring up their children to do the same thing. So it's all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there." And this is the most important sentence, the last of the quote, and what reminds me about what's happening in Frank Lloyd Wright's life right now. "Therefore, it is so important to consider this question: What do I desire?" And I think where we're at, Frank Lloyd Wright's life is him coming to the realization that what he desires is not the life he built for himself.

• 57:39David Senra?

  And that could be absolutely devastating when you've built a life and with other people, and that's what happens. His wife held on to the fact that he'd come back for decades, and he never did. The destruction and the pain he caused her and the children...

• 57:56David Senra?

  It's almost impossible to add up. And the reverberations of those pains through generations and how they affected their relationship with their own children. And at the same time, Wright oriented himself around, what do I desire? So he said, "The archetype absorbed the father in me, perhaps, because I had never got used to the word nor the idea of being one. As I saw them all around the block and met them among my friends." So he's saying like, everybody around me, they have these families, they love spending time with their kids. They take pride in being a father. I told you, obviously, you know, I've said it over and over again. It's the most important job I have in my life, I feel like. But Frank didn't.

• 58:41David Senra?

  He didn't. And as hard as that for us to accept, like, he decided, "I'm gonna live my truth. The integrity of my own mind." Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind, so. Okay, let's get back to the book. This is how a family friend described Frank Lloyd Wright when he was 41. This is right before he left his family. Frank Lloyd Wright is a strange, delightful soul. A radical, original thinker, working out his ideas. This is now, I just got done talking about the negatives to Frank, right? In large part, the negative things that he did to other people. This is a positive, though. He's a radical, original thinker. He's working out his ideas consistently as an artist.

• 59:26David Senra?

  "Much of his buildings, to me, are too bizarre and away from tradition to be beautiful." But that's, again, it's subjective. All art is subjective. Architecture, I love, I'm surprised this is the first, I think this is the first architect I've covered on the podcast, because anytime I go to a new city, some of the first things I do is like, walk around and look at the architecture. I think it's, like, I'm fascinated by it. And so for some weird reason, I separated that activity that I do all the time with studying the people that build the buildings. I don't know why I missed that disconnect. And this, I should, I don't know if I pointed this out earlier, but I never even thought to cover Frank Lloyd Wright. A misfit sent me this book. So, again, please do keep the book recommendations coming, because I learned so much. Like, I didn't know this book existed, and now, you know, I've spent countless hours this week studying this guy.

• 1:00:11David Senra?

  All right, "Much of his buildings, to me, is too bizarre and away from tradition to be beautiful, but he has big ideas and is gloriously ruthless in sticking to what he believes."

• 1:00:23David Senra?

  And now somewhere towards the end of the book, we find the author explicitly telling us what the central argument to this book is. And it's why I keep going back and forth between the unbelievable, I want all the unbelievable positive traits of Frank Lloyd Wright, without all the negative like pain and agony and that happen around him. And that's why I kept bringing up over and over again, the fact that this guy is like a riddle. He's very unique and hard to even explain. So it says, "At times shame-filled and self-justifying, this letter would fly in the face of anyone who wishes to think of Frank Lloyd Wright only as an egoist incapable of self-examination,

• 1:01:05David Senra?

  or incapable of looking back, or regretful reflection. A person whom ordinary life never touches." That's the idea of it, of him, right? But that's not true. In fact, as is the central argument of this book, it was always touching him, haunting him, visibly and not. So again, he said, "The integrity of my own mind is sacred, and I'm going to live my truth." Right? And then go back to that word "sacrifice." And he was willing to do that, but he sacrificed a lot. And in this case, we see a lot of evidence where he's looking back and he's full of regrets. He's full of them.

• 1:01:48David Senra?

  And now we're back to another inspiring part. "The volume of work that he completed after the age of 60 was astonishing. And it came after two decades of people saying, 'This guy, he's a has-been, he's a loser, he's got a bunch of good theories, but he's not building anything.'" You can't be a... He looked at himself as an artist, but he talked about the difference of architecture as other artists is, if you don't build anything, it doesn't matter. So it says, "What he really was saying was that the 64-year-old, this is an architecture critic, talking about Frank Lloyd Wright, what he was really saying was that this 64-year-old was through. He called him an aging individualist, the idol of certain intellectuals,

• 1:02:33David Senra?

  an artist with a martyr complex, a builder better known than his buildings, somebody who seemed more genius than architect, and who, when you added it all up, had designed comparatively few buildings to support his manifold theories."

• 1:02:51David Senra?

  That's a huge insult. He's calling him an architectural theorist. That's a slap in the face, especially for somebody like Frank who, again, his self-belief never wavered. As an architectural theorist, Mr. Wright has no superior. But as an architect, he has little to contribute for comparison. So that is one of the main architectural critics of the day.

• 1:03:14David Senra?

  Telling you what he thinks of you. That, yeah, you have a lot of good theories, but you haven't built enough, right? Especially over the last 20 years.

• 1:03:23David Senra?

  And so Frank uses this as fuel. And this is where he rattles off the best work of his life. So this is a wild summary of Frank Lloyd Wright's last few decades. Between late 1914 and mid 1936, so 1914 is when Mamaw Berwick is killed.

• 1:03:42David Senra?

  And he goes into like this exile. So we're talking about 22 years here. An interval of not quite 22 years, Frank Lloyd Wright got catastrophically, catastrophically, catastrophically involved with a bad morphine addict named Miriam Noel. He marries her. She's a drug addict and a psycho. So he gets involved with a morphine addict. They have like a 14-year relationship. Violent.

• 1:04:05David Senra?

  Violent and, uh...

• 1:04:09David Senra?

  What's the opposite of calm? They were crazy. He built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He conceived a child out of wedlock. He suffered taliesin, burning down again. Taliesin is where Mamaw, one of his residences, most famous residences he ever built. Where Mamaw was killed and then it burned down. It burned down like a bunch of times. He kept rebuilding it. Suffered taliesin, burning down again, spent a couple of nights in jail in downtown Minneapolis on charges of moral turpitude. So what they're talking about there is, I think he tries to escape with a young, I think it's his third wife. She's like 20 something years younger than him. And he goes across state lines and I guess that was illegal because they were both married at the time. So you could go to jail for it at this time. Isn't that crazy? Uh, spent a couple nights in jail in downtown Minneapolis on charges of moral turpitude,

• 1:04:53David Senra?

  lost his house in foreclosure and experimented semi-successfully with textile block housing in California. Got married for a third and final time. Went begging for work and clients, seethed at his professional obituaries, watched himself being replaced by lavishly embraced glass and steel European modernists, which he hated. Began what he called the Talasen Fellowship. Think of the Talasen Fellowship as like a school. He was very, he was bankrupt at this time. So his third wife gives him the idea of like, why don't we have a lot of room on this property? Uh, they started their own school. Says, okay, you come here, you pay. Uh, I forgot how much it was. I thought I covered it. I think I have some notes on it. But you know, essentially he's still world famous, even if he handed me money.

• 1:05:37David Senra?

  So you come here, you pay, let's say a thousand dollars or whatever. And you study under the master, Master Frank Lloyd Wright. But you're also doing like chores and stuff like it's a, it's a giant like almost, not a farm is the wrong way to put it, but they had to like, cut the grass and chop wood and do all like those kind of things. So that's what they're talking about there. Uh, it says, he began what he called the Talasen Fellowship as a wily way of trying to stave off both oblivion and further poverty. Got his nose broken courtesy of an enraged exploy to whom he owed $280 in back wages. And then nearing the age of 70 and against all career and personal odds came roaring back to something greater and even more arrogant than what it, what he was before, if that can be imagined. And that's only half of it.

• 1:06:22David Senra?

  What happened to Frank Lloyd Wright in these years? Incidentally, the monster, this monster sentence contains only the loosest chronology.

• 1:06:33David Senra?

  So let me tell you a little bit about that, like lost in the desert period of his life. From four, from the age of 48 to 65, he was only able to complete 34 projects. So he did 350 the last 10 years of his life. So 350 in 10 years or 20 or 34 in 20 years. So this is him talking about that. He says, "My obituaries are all of such nature as to make me want to arise and fight. Indeed, I feel for the sake of the cause, architecture to which I am so deeply committed, I must come back. The comeback seems to be a favored American institution. It definitely is. So who doesn't love a good comeback story?

• 1:07:12David Senra?

  From now on, you are to find me actively engaged in that performance. Let's go. Let's go. That's fantastic.

• 1:07:22David Senra?

  And here's a bit about the period of his time before he wrote out those words. This is Frank Lloyd Wright in 1932, as broke as broke can be. This is his wife writing for help to Frank's sister. "We are in desperate condition. We cannot go to the local grocer before we bring them a little money and we only have $5 in cash. For God's sake, can you help us? Frank has not been sleeping these past two nights. We need money as we have never needed it before. We are destitute at the present moment and I can hardly collect my wits. Can you send us $300? I cannot sleep or eat. I am simply sick. Can you help us? Frank is in despair and repeating, what can we do? What shall we do when our last dollar goes? Try to do something, please.

• 1:08:05David Senra?

  It is more terrible humiliation than I can tell you." So from that low point is when he starts, this is a crazy part of his story. From that low point is when he starts his rise and does the best work of his life. "The will to survive, always that. A bold idea had struck. Actually, it had been hatching for several years. Why not start a work school for aspiring architects? Who would learn at the master's feet? All the while milking his cows and chopping his wood and painting his barns? Was it a cynical try at forestalling pernery on the backs of some youthful right worshippers? Or a heroic humanist experiment?

• 1:08:50David Senra?

  Probably portions of both. Books have been written about the Taliesin Fellowship. To say this much here. The fee was $675 and in 1933 it got raised to $1,100, which was more than Harvard's tuition." The fellowship was announced to open in late October 1932. By the end of the year, a couple dozen candidates from all over the country and a few foreign countries, some fresh out of high school, others with graduate degrees, had shown up for sweat and glory at Tallison. Momentarily, the beast of bankruptcy had been thrust from the door.

• 1:09:32David Senra?

  His back was up against the wall, and this is what happened next. It was late 1932, what I just described to you. Within four years, a man who didn't think of himself as a failure, not ever, no matter how the world might be misinformed, was in the process of creating an office cathedral. That's the Johnson Wax Building. A backward shangri-lai leaping from a rock, that's Fallingwater. If you want to Google image, sure, it's Fallingwater. You've probably seen it before. It's probably his most famous house. And a mouse house on the western edge of Madison, that's Jacobs. He wanted to build a beautiful house for normal people because all his his previous commissions were for really, really rich people.

• 1:10:14David Senra?

  So this was built by like, I think $5,500. It's called Jacobs One. You can all see that. So it talks about, you know, this is what he did within four years. Many people consider this his best work, and being thought of as a god again. Historians would one day say that if Frank Lloyd Wright had conceived nothing but these three buildings, if his career had somehow been able to know only the single year of 1936, it would have been enough to secure his lasting place.

• 1:10:45David Senra?

  There is something deeply inspiring about reading this. About you have a person who had achieved wild success, fell essentially downward trajectory for 25 years, was ridiculed, and then one day just said, you know what, enough of this. Enough. I've lost everything, I'm a laughingstock, and yet the one thing I still have is this deep, profound belief in my talent, and I'm going to show you. And he did it over and over and over again for the day he died. He lived, excuse me, he worked until the day he died.

• 1:11:22David Senra?

  Alright, this is a reminder that everything is a remix. For a good while now, history and historians have been aware of a rich irony. That in the miracle comeback year of 1936, a washed-up man essentially beat the European modernists at their own game. So there's completely different styles in his, and I like a lot of their architecture, actually. Frank did not, but he also stole some ideas from them. So this is like, you know, out with the old, no one cared about Frank Lloyd Wright's designs anymore, and he had other architects that were being, like, presented in his place, right? So they're the European modernists, I'm gonna skip their names, but it says, "In the previous 10 years, the architecture had been, uh, the architecture has been named Frank Lloyd Wright had not executed more than five buildings.

• 1:12:06David Senra?

  But here he was now, in the second half of 36, working on those three ones I just told you about, all at once. He was more than back. He was pulverizing his would-be peers. The metabolizer and world-class assimilator had sto-" That's such an interesting description of him, right? And that's what he does. He takes ideas from all different domains, and he lets that work through his own mind, and it comes up with something unique. I think that's a trait that we should steal from him. "The metabolizer and world-class assimilator had stolen out from under the two other modernist architects, there's no way I could pronounce their names, so I'm not even gonna try, slices of their own vision, and converted them to his. He married his own ideas about the romantic and the organic to their ideas about the

• 1:12:51David Senra?

  functional machine, and the result was greater than the sum of the parts. He'd been watching them all along, even as he'd scorned them." And a great summary of this section, "What followed for a 70-year-old over the ne-" Think about the, that's insane sentence. 70 years old, he's having a resurgence, a renaissance. "What followed for a 70-year-old over the next two decades was a late-life explosion of creative energy that no one, doubtless not even he, saw coming. This improbable burst, call it fire, took him, more or less, right up to the end."

• 1:13:35David Senra?

  Now, I want to attempt to tie together this undying will and refusal, refusal to quit ever, that Frank Lloyd Wright clearly possessed, that is extremely rare, that is one of, maybe the main takeaway for me of the book of, you never have to stop. Find something you love doing and keep doing it till you die. Now, I want to tie this together with the early tragedy of his life that I haven't even touched on, and most every other biography touches on the fact that when Frank Lloyd Wright was around 17 or 18 years old, his father up and abandoned the family, and he never saw him again for the rest of his life.

• 1:14:20David Senra?

  Now, that is the story. Turns out, because there's all kinds of documentation of his parents' divorce, that historians and previous biographers, and even Frank Lloyd Wright in his own autobiography, got the story backwards, that his father was pushed out by his mother who most likely had severe mental illness, his mother did. So, there's a lot, I mentioned earlier, like, we don't really have too much information about, like, what was Frank Lloyd Wright at 8 years old, or 10 years old, or 12 years old? It's kind of like, we just meet him as this person leaving Wisconsin to go, as a young man, late teenager, leaving Wisconsin to go chase his dreams in Chicago, right?

• 1:15:04David Senra?

  And so, I want to bring you into a little bit of background, because the author goes into exquisite, like, research and detail about this. So, before I read this, like, this is like the summary of, like, what he, the author in this section is telling us his opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright's early childhood, based on all the additional research he did. And so, I need you to know that Frank Lloyd Wright's dad, his name is William, and his mother is Anna. So, I'm going to tell you about them here now.

• 1:15:36David Senra?

  When I began peering into William's life, remember that's his dad, I had imagined him as more or less innocent in the bargain. He wasn't. He was wrong terribly, but he wasn't blameless. "I can almost feel tinges of sympathy for Anna." Now you put in quotations mark, "they tended to dissolve quickly." Anna was violent to some of her stepkids. He was... Frank's wife, or Frank's mother was crazy. "I can almost feel tinges of sympathy for Anna. They tended to dissolve quickly." There was something close to foolish and infuriating about William, no matter all his gifts. So what they're mentioning there is William Wright, Frank's father, widely known, everybody's like, "he's a gifted, gifted person," yet he quit. This is what we always talk about, like, the people that we're studying, the right, the people that

• 1:16:21David Senra?

  other people write biographies of, they have all one thing in common. They don't give up. And that makes them extremely rare, because our default mode as humans is to quit. And so William had, he was really smart, had a lot of gifts, but he tried to, he focused on one thing for maybe a year. Changed his mind, he'd move around. He could never hold down a job, he could never focus. And so it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you keep quitting and you keep focusing, you're never, you're never gonna realize your potential, and you're gonna have a terrible life. So he's saying like, uh, you know, it's foolish and infuriating when you, when you analyze his behavior. "What I now believe happened was that Anna, with her awful and ungovernable temper, with her terrifying will, suffered a prolonged siege of mental illness,

• 1:17:04David Senra?

  brought on, at least in part, by the realization that none of her own dreams for personal fulfillment would ever come true as William's spouse. Those dreams would all have to be diverted and channeled and redirected into her firstborn." So Frank was by far the favorite. And I'm not, I'm bringing this up not just to talk about the tumultuous, um, relationship of his parents, but what, growing up in that environment,

• 1:17:38David Senra?

  what that gave Frank, okay? So it says, um...

• 1:17:44David Senra?

  Those dreams would all have to be diverted and channeled and redirected into her firstborn. Did anyone in Frank Lloyd Wright's life ever love him more? Believe in him more? God knows she was never an easy woman. Her life was pioneer hard. Before William and during William and for large parts after. But this is, this is what the result of this experience had in Frank's life and how, why it ties together, why he was able to do something that is so rare. And then have this late stage revival at the end of his life. It must nonetheless be acknowledged that she gave her son something in terms of a will and inner strength that seems unquantifiable.

• 1:18:31David Senra?

  And the world reaped the benefit.

• 1:18:36David Senra?

  And so I'll close on this. Let's just think of Frank and these qualities, his decisive inner will, his inability to ever give up or to quit. His unbelievable faith in himself. Uh, his dedication to his craft. These are all the positives I want to take away from his life story. And then lastly, the fact that he thought deeply and for seven decades about what he wanted to do and the work that he wanted to do. And then the way he would describe it is almost like a religious experience and you're gonna see that here. In the last interview he ever gave, Frank Lloyd Wright said that there could never be great art unless it possessed a spiritual quality. If there was no spiritual quality in architecture, it would just be plain lumber.

• 1:19:24David Senra?

  So I'm going to leave the story there. If you want the full story, I recommend reading the book. It is a gigantic, difficult, twisting, just emotional experience. I can't describe it any other way. This is one of the most, not only the way the author writes is extremely unique. But the life that he's trying to help to teach us about is extremely unique and just

• 1:19:50David Senra?

  I'm at the end and I still feel I don't really know who he was. I know traits and things that I want to copy and I want to emulate and things I don't want to copy or emulate, but he is very much a mystery. Even, you know, after being covered to such a degree by so many different people. And I think that's, that just speaks to the true, unique human being that he was. If you want to read the full stuff, if you want to read the book, you want the full story, and you want to support the podcast at the same time, please tap the link that's in your show notes. It's an Amazon affiliate link. If you buy the book using that link, Amazon will send me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. It's a great way to help out yourself because you get something that can teach you something, a book that may change your life.

• 1:20:34David Senra?

  You help out the author who spent countless hours and years accumulating this research for us, and you also help out the podcast at the same time. So it's a win-win-win. Thank you very much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.