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U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [492]

By Root 31528 0

thousand miles east and south and north, three thou-sand miles west, and everywhere, at mineheads, on the shores of newlydredged harbors, along watercourses, at the intersections of railroads, sprouting

shacks roundhouses tipples grainelevators stores

warehouses tenements, great houses for the wealthy set

-428-in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hil s, hotels churches operahouses auditoriums.

He walked with long eager steps

towards the untrammeled future opening in every

direction for a young man who'd keep his hands to his work and his wits sharp to invent. The same day he landed a job in an architect's

office.

Frank Lloyd Wright was the grandson of a Welsh

hatter and preacher who'd settled in a rich Wiscon-sin val ey, Spring Val ey, and raised a big family of farmers and preachers and schoolteachers there.

Wright's father was a preacher too, a restless il adjusted Newenglander who studied medicine, preached in a

Baptist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and then as a Unitarian in the middle west, taught music, read Sanskrit and final y walked out on his family.

Young Wright was born on his grandfather's farm

went to school in Weymouth and Madison, worked

summers on a farm of his uncle's in Wisconsin.

His training in architecture was the reading of

Viol et le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stone-masonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis Sul ivan in the office of Adler and Sul ivan in Chicago. (It was Louis Sul ivan who, after Richardson, invented whatever was invented in nineteenthcentury architec-ture in America). When Frank Lloyd Wright left Sul ivan he had

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.

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