U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [529]
already launched a distinctive style, prairie architecture. In Oak Park he built broad suburban dwel ings for
rich men that were the first buildings to break the hold on American builders' minds of centuries of pastward routine, of the wornout capital and plinth and pedi--429-ment dragged through the centuries from the Acropolis, and the jaded traditional stencils of Roman masonry, the halfobliterated Pal adian copybooks.
Frank Lloyd Wright was cutting out a new avenue
that led towards the swift constructions in glassbricks and steel
foreshadowed today.
Delightedly he reached out for the new materials,
steel in tension, glass, concrete, the mil ion new metals and al oys. The son and grandson of preachers, he became a
preacher in blueprints,
projecting constructions in the American future
instead of the European past.
Inventor of plans,
plotter of tomorrow's girderwork phrases,
he preaches to the young men coming of age in
the time of oppression, cooped up by the plasterboard partitions of finance routine, their lives and plans made poor by feudal levies of parasite money standing astride every process to shake down progress for the cutting of coupons: The properly citified citizen has become a broker, dealing chiefly in human frailties or the ideas and inventions of others, a puller of levers, a presser of buttons of vicarious power, his by way of machine craft . . . and over beside him and beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps, is the taximeter of rent, in some form to goad this anxious consumer's unceasing struggle for or against more or less merciful or mer- ciless money increment.
To the young men who spend their days and
nights drafting the plans for new rented aggregates of rented cells upended on hard pavements,
-430-he preaches
the horizons of his boyhood,
a future that is not the rise of a few points in a
hundred selected stocks, or an increase in carloadings, or a multiplication of credit in the bank or a rise in the rate on cal money,
but a new clean construction, from the ground up,
based on uses and needs,
towards the American future instead of towards
the painsmeared past of Europe and Asia. Usonia he
cal s the broad teeming band of this new nation across the enormous continent between Atlantic and Pacific. He preaches a project for Usonia:
It is easy to realize how the complexity of crude utilitarian construction in the mechanical infancy of our growth, like the crude scaffolding for some noble building, did violence to the landscape. . . . The crude purpose of pioneering days has been accomplished. The scaffolding may be taken down and the true work, the culture of a civilization, may appear.
Like the life of many a preacher, prophet, ex-horter, Frank Lloyd Wright's life has been stormy. He has raised children, had rows with wives, over-stepped boundaries, got into difficulties with the law, divorcecourts, bankruptcy, always the yel ow press yapping at his heels, his misfortunes yel ed out in head-lines in the evening papers: affairs with women, the nightmare horror of the burning of his house in Wis-consin. By a curious irony
the building that is most completely his is the Im-perial Hotel in Tokyo that was one of the few struc-tures to come unharmed through the earthquake of 1923 (the day the cable came tel ing him that the
-431-building had stood saving so many hundreds of lives he writes was one of his happiest days)
and it was reading in German that most Ameri-cans first learned of his work. His life has been ful of arrogant projects unac-complished. (How often does the preacher hear his voice echo back hol ow from the empty hal , the drafts-man watch the dust fuzz over the careful ycontrived plans, the architect see the rol edup blueprints curl yel owing and brittle in the filingcabinet.)
Twice he's rebuilt the house where he works in his
grandfather's val ey in Wisconsin after fires and disas-ters that