but a new clean construction, from the ground up, based on uses and needs,
towards the American future instead of towards the pain-smeared past of Europe and Asia. Usonia he calls 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, exhorter, Frank Lloyd Wright’s life has been stormy. He has raised children, had rows with wives, overstepped boundaries, got into difficulties with the law, divorcecourts, bankruptcy, always the yellow press yapping at his heels, his misfortunes yelled out in headlines in the evening papers: affairs with women, the nightmare horror of the burning of his house in Wisconsin.
By a curious irony the building that is most completely his is the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo that was one of the few structures to come unharmed through the earthquake of 1923 (the day the cable came telling him that the 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 Americans first learned of his work.
His life has been full of arrogant projects unaccomplished. (How often does the preacher hear his voice echo back hollow from the empty hall, the draftsman watch the dust fuzz over the carefully-contrived plans, the architect see the rolledup blueprints curl yellowing and brittle in the filingcabinet.)
Twice he’s rebuilt the house where he works in his grandfather’s valley in Wisconsin after fires and disasters that would have smashed most men forever.
He works in Wisconsin,
an erect spare whitehaired man, his sons are architects, apprentices from all over the world come to work with him,
drafting the new city (he calls it Broadacre City).
Near and Far are beaten (to imagine the new city you must blot out every ingrained habit of the past, build a nation from the ground up with the new tools). For the architect there are only uses:
the incredible multiplication of functions, strength and tension in metal,
the dynamo, the electric coil, radio, the photoelectric cell, the internalcombustion motor,
glass
concrete;
and needs. (Tell us, doctors of philosophy, what are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be notjailed notafraid nothungry notcold not without love, not a worker for a power he has never seen
that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a man or a woman or a child.)
Building a building is building the lives of the workers and dwellers in the building.
The buildings determine civilization as the cells in the honeycomb the functions of bees.
Perhaps in spite of himself the arrogant draftsman, the dilettante in concrete, the bohemian artist for wealthy ladies desiring to pay for prominence with the startling elaboration of their homes has been forced by the logic of uses and needs, by the lifelong struggle against the dragging undertow of money in mortmain,
to draft plans that demand for their fulfillment a new life;
only in freedom can we build the Usonian city. His plans are coming to life. His blueprints, as once Walt Whitman’s words, stir the young men —
Frank Lloyd Wright,
patriarch of the new building,
not without honor except in his own country.
Newsreel LXIV
WEIRD FISH DRAWN FROM SARGASSO SEA
by night when the rest of the plant was still dim figures ugly in gasmasks worked in the long low building back of the research laboratory
RUM RING LINKS NATIONS
All around the water tank
Waitin’ for a train
WOMAN SLAIN MATE HELD
Business Men Not Alarmed Over Coming Election
GRAVE FOREBODING UNSETTLES MOSCOW
LABOR CHIEFS RULED OUT OF PULPITS
imagination boggles at the reports from Moscow. These murderers have put themselves beyond the pale. They have shown themselves to be the mad dogs of the world
WALLSTREET EMPLOYERS BANISH CHRISTMAS
WORRIES AS BONUSES ROLL IN
Left my girl in the mountains
Left her standin’ in the rain
OUR AIR SUPREMACY ACCLAIMED
LAND SO MOUNTAINOUS IT STANDS ON END
Got myself in trouble
An’ shot a county sheriff down
In The Stealth of the Night Have You Heard Padded Feet Creeping Towards You?
TROTZKY OPENS ATTACK ON STALIN
Strangled Man Dead in Street
Moanin’ low…
My sweet man’s gonna go
HUNT HATCHET WOMAN WHO ATTACKED
SOCIETY MATRON
CLASPS HANDS OF HEROES
GIRL DYING IN MYSTERY PLUNGE
He’s the kind of man that needs the kind of woman like me
Completely Lost In Fog over Mexico
ASSERT RUSSIA RISING
For I’m dancin’ with tears in my eyes
’Cause the girl in my arms isn’t you
600 PUT TO DEATH AT ONCE IN CANTON
SEE BOOM YEAR AHEAD
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The Camera Eye (49)
walking from Plymouth to North Plymouth through the raw air of Massachusetts Bay at each step a small cold squudge through the sole of one shoe
looking out past the grey framehouses under the robinsegg April sky across the white dories anchored in the bottleclear shallows across the yellow sandbars and the slaty bay ruffling to blue to the eastward
this is where the immigrants landed the roundheads the sackers of castles the kingkillers haters of oppression this is where they stood in a cluster after landing from the crowded ship that stank of bilge on the beach that belonged to no one between the ocean that belonged to no one and the enormous forest that belonged to no one that stretched over the hills where the deertracks were up the green rivervalleys where the redskins grew their tall corn in patches forever into the incredible west
for threehundred years the immigrants toiled into the west
and now today
walking from Plymouth to North Plymouth suddenly round a bend in the road beyond a little pond and yellowtwigged willows hazy with green you see the Cordage huge sheds and buildings companyhouses all the same size all grimed the same color a great square chimney long roofs sharp ranked squares and oblongs cutting off the sea the Plymouth Cordage this is where another immigrant worked hater of oppression who wanted a world unfenced when they fired him from the cordage he peddled fish the immigrants in the dark framehouses knew him bought his fish listened to his talk following his cart around from door to door you ask them What was he like? why are they scared to talk of Bart scared because they knew him scared eyes narrowing black with fright? a barber the man in the little grocerystore the woman he boarded with in scared voices they ask Why won’t they believe? We knew him We seen him every day Why won’t they believe that day we buy the eels?