Host of PBS’s 'History Detectives' speaks about Frank Lloyd Wright

There’s more to Frank Lloyd Wright than people are willing to publish, according to Gwendolyn Wright, professor of architecture at Columbia University and host of PBS’s “History Detectives.”

The Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium at the Sheldon Museum of Art was filled to capacity last night with an audience that came to hear Wright’s lecture, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Progressive Suburbia.” The lecture focused on Frank Lloyd Wright’s concern with environmental issues, technology and discrimination in a changing America.

Frank Lloyd Wright is “too famous to write about,” Wright said. Historians are cautious to write about the famous architect because he is considered a “god in American design,” she said. However, Wright managed to give a side of Frank Lloyd Wright apart from his designs for single-family houses.

While other architects of the time were concerned with their own commission, Frank Lloyd Wright focused on creating residential areas that looked at the whole picture.

“He was aware of the suburbs as directly connected to the city, not separated,” Wright said.

He was concerned with infrastructure: roads, transportation, living conditions, flood control and other technological and environmental factors that make a community work.

“It was interesting to get this perspective of Frank Lloyd Wright,” said Amy Wilson, a junior interior design major. “He knew a lot about diversity as far as social class and gender in his designs.”

According to Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright was so ahead of his own era because he listened to the concerns of women by visiting different women’s social clubs and began to “care about a range of opinions to inspire him,” Wright said. After all, women were beginning to venture out of the household. They were getting jobs and needed housing that required less maintenance and allowed more freedom.

Frank Lloyd Wright saw these changes not only in his designs but also in his own office. Despite having several wives over the course of his lifetime and being a stern patriarch in his own home, he hired several women in his own office to work as architects. He even helped them get paying jobs at other firms.

“He thought of equality as something you make,” Wright said. Even in his own office he claimed, “a girl is a fellow here.”

It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovations combining technology and ecology that paved the way for future architecture, according to Wright. She said that his ideas are problems that are resurfacing today.

“History is a conversation with the past about the future,” Wright said in closing. “What are alternatives in history that help us imagine a better future?”

HANNAHDRABEK@DAILYNEBRASKAN.COM