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One At a Time
Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who revolutionized American architecture, was equally, uh, revolutionary, when it came to his love life. In 1889, he married Catherine Lee Clark Tobin and set about raising a family of six with her. However, that version of his personal life came to an abrupt end in 1909, when Wright went on an extended vacation to Berlin, Germany—with Margaret Cheney, the wife of a client, in tow. The pair spent more than two years in Europe before returning to Chicago and starting a new life as man and wife (though not legally, as Catherine refused to grant him a divorce). That second coupling would only last until 1914, but, to be fair, its end wasn’t Wright’s fault. That year, a disgruntled member of the family’s hired help set the Wrights’ house on fire after locking all but one door. As the former Mrs. Cheney, her two children, and two other guests fled the fire, the workman axed them to death. The freak incident plunged Wright into depression bad enough to distract him from his work, but not bad enough to keep him from hooking up with another woman less than a year later. He spent seven years with that woman, Miriam Noel, before finally getting his divorce from Catherine in 1922. He married Noel the next year. But, by 1924, Miriam left him, an event from which Wright quickly recovered by falling in love with a Yugoslavian ballerina named Olga Hinzenberg. Amazingly, this relationship managed to last to the end of the architect’s life in 1959.
Simultaneously
While Wright cornered the market on serial sort-of monogamy, fellow architect Louis Kahn kept a slightly busier schedule. Beginning around the early 1950s and until he died in 1974, Kahn kept three different sets of women and children, only one of which he was actually legally wed to. Despite the fact that this was pretty much an open secret in architecture circles, his New York Times obituary famously listed only his wife and her daughter as survivors, leaving out his other two children (and their mothers) entirely.
Comments (12)
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Wow, no wonder George Costanza always wanted to tell people he was an architect. . .
posted by Cynthia on 7-31-2007 at 9:46 am
Maybe that’s why Wright’s buildings often need extraordinary measures to keep from falling down — he was all about looks and not about things enduring.
Straight talk from Sid.
posted by Sid Morrison on 7-31-2007 at 12:40 pm
Well, to come to Wrights defense. When he designed Fallingwater he had a support wall that Edgar Kauffman, the businessman and amateur architect who commissioned the house, said was unneccessary. Wright insisted on the wall so Kauffman told the workmen to build the wall but make it stop 3 inches short of the balcony above, leaving a gap. Kauffman later showed Wright that the balcony was well supported without the wall by showing him the gap. The main problem with Wrights buildings is that the concrete is cracking after seventy or so years of existence.
posted by Tdave on 8-1-2007 at 1:54 am
Unfortunately “Fallingdownwater” (heh heh) isn’t the only example. Wright was arguably a talented stylist and artist, but a mediocre architect, because a real architect has to understand structural engineering, building science, and strength of materials. Wright paid those very very short shrift. High $ custom commision buildings should last HUNDREDS of years with ordinary maintenance, not require extraordinary intervention to keep from falling down in the scant decades after their completition. No excuses (well, OK, the fire at Taliesin wasn’t the fault of faulty architecture!)
posted by Sid Morrison on 8-1-2007 at 6:39 am
*cough*flatroofs*cough*
posted by Maggie on 8-1-2007 at 8:06 am
If we’re really on the subject of being a “ladies man”…maybe it would be appropriate to discuss the possible reasons why these ladies left/he left. FLW was rumored to have encouraged orgies, swinging and homosexuality with his students at his Taliesin West compound in an effort to push their boundaries. Maybe the wifeys didn’t know what they were getting in to!
posted by lulu on 8-1-2007 at 9:03 am
When Mr. & Mrs. Kauffman visited their son at Taliesin, Mrs.K told her husband that she was somewhat disturbed by the amount of what she described as “camaraderie” among the males.
posted by Tdave on 8-1-2007 at 10:21 pm
“…only one of which he was actually legally wed to.”
Really? Can you end a sentence with “to?” I mean, obviously you “can,” you just did, but should you??
REcaptcha: and confusion
posted by Heather Dawn on 11-18-2008 at 9:28 am
\”…I mean, obviously you “can,” you just did, but should you??\”
Im pretty sure someone who is preaching about proper sentance structure shouldn\’t be using two question marks, because, last time i checked -That isnt grammatically correct either.
posted by Jösh on 11-18-2008 at 10:03 am
I love this website but I can not stand the arrogant people it attracts and how they feel the need to prove something to a bunch of strangers on the internet. I’m pretty sure you still knew what that sentence meant, right? Go get a job as an english teacher or an editor and put your energy into that instead.
posted by ugh on 11-18-2008 at 3:10 pm
Can you guys add “Heather Dawn” to the spam blacklist? You don’t have to approve all comments, you know.
Nothing worse than someone smugly enforcing rules he/she doesn’t understand. From the guest post of grammar legend Pat O’Conner:
Myth #2: Don’t End a Sentence With a Preposition.
An 18th-century Anglican bishop named Robert Lowth wrote the first popular grammar book to claim that a preposition didn’t belong at the end of a sentence (as in, What was this guy up to?). Others before him had made the same claim, notably the poet John Dryden.
This affectation, like the one about not “splitting” infinitives, proved popular with Latin-educated schoolmasters, probably because Latin sentences don’t end in prepositions. But the pedants were forgetting one small detail: English isn’t a Latinate language, it’s Germanic. And in Germanic languages, sentences routinely end in prepositions. Great English literature from Chaucer to Milton to Shakespeare to the King James version of the Bible is stuffed with these “terminal prepositions.”
Probably the word “preposition,” from the Latin for “position before,” suggested to pedagogues that a preposition must never come last. Be that as it may, Curme and Jespersen recognized the final preposition as natural and instinctive, and Fowler went further: “The legitimacy of the prepositional ending in literary English must be uncompromisingly maintained,” he wrote. Amen!
(Amen, indeed.)
(mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14636)
posted by i'm with ugh on 11-18-2008 at 3:21 pm
You beat me to it, “I’m with ugh”! That’s exactly the post I was thinking of too.
In any case, loved this post! Very interesting. Would be good to know if all of Louis Kahn’s families knew about each other.
posted by Dawn on 11-18-2008 at 7:48 pm