Living in someone else’s art

We went to tour a Frank Lloyd Wright house earlier this week and it confirmed for me something I have thought about on and off over the years.

As we were leaving the tour, one of my kids said “That was a really cool house—it would be neat to live there.” My response was that it was really neat, but I don’t think I’d ever want to live there. “I don’t want to live in someone else’s art.”

I can appreciate what Frank Lloyd Wright was trying to do with his architecture, and the buildings and spaces he created are spectacular. Walking through the house, though, I found myself repeatedly thinking how miserable drafty and cold it must have been throughout most of the year with its 147 single-pane windows. Our tour guide eventually noted that even with the boiler cranked and all the fireplaces going, the interior temperature never got above 56F in the winters.

Similarly, as I was constantly dodging the brass lighting sconces that extended eight inches from the wall (directly at forehead height) every ten feet, or looking at the very shallow built-in drawers mounted in the bottom foot of the bedroom walls, or imagining trying to furnish the place with anything besides Wright’s entirely custom and wildly impractical/uncomfortable furniture, I tried to imagine what actually living in this space on a daily basis must have been like.

The analogy that comes to mind is that it would be like asking Joan Miró to draw you a map. It would probably be quite striking to look at and would eventually go for $8 million at auction, but would be entirely unhelpful for finding your way to the store.

Frank Lloyd Wright had a entirely understandable reputation for deprioritizing functionality in favor of design, and from what I’ve read, his houses and buildings have never been well known for their durability. Build a house on a waterfall, and you’re guaranteeing endless moisture problems and cracked joints. That’s not even really my complaint here, though. My complaint is that these houses are always going to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, not the homes of the people who live there. To me, that seems like a failure of design; as stunning as they might be as works of art, they are not fit for purpose.