City of dreams
He won architectural immortality because of his houses, and such unexpected delights as Marin Civic Center and New York’s Guggenheim Museum, but in the course of his long career, Frank Lloyd Wright also designed a newspaper tower. A mortuary. A voluptuous elongated bridge. Even a wedding chapel on stilts.
None of which were ever built. And all of which were set right here, in the Bay Area.
This local angle makes Paul V. Turner’s “Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco” an unexpectedly fresh addition to the ever-longer shelf of books on the ever-provocative architect. By focusing on his work in and around the region, the relationships with his clients and Wright’s visits, where he happily fed outrageous quotes to an eager press, Turner gives us a scholarly but flavorful history that’s far more satisfying than the lavish monographs or detailed studies that Wright tends to attract.
After a quick nod to hints of a 1900 design for a house in Oakland, apparently never built, the saga begins with Wright’s quixotic effort in 1913 to design a high-rise home for the San Francisco Call at Fourth and Market streets. If he’d been successful, a block now dominated by the jukebox-like San Francisco Marriott Marquis instead would hold a forceful concrete slab 25 stories high, topped by an emphatic cornice extending out over the sidewalk.
There’s no evidence that Wright was approached by the Call owners, and his efforts to drum up work were unsuccessful. Still, Wright thought enough of his unsolicited vision to build two enormous models of it for display in his studio.
Another long-shot extravaganza came after World War II when Wright and engineer Jaroslav Polivka concocted a melodramatic “Butterfly Bridge” that would stretch from San Francisco to Alameda. The promotional fanfare included a sold-out lecture by Wright in which he extolled the virtues of his “tap-roots bridge that goes down into the bed of the bay and stands there, on the bottom, on tiptoes.” Crowds also flocked to see a large model that was displayed on a mirrored surface (complete with sailboats underneath) at the Stonestown shopping center.
Even now it’s a thing of conceptual beauty, with smooth arches and a curvaceous form that widens at the top to make room for a large public park (Spoiler alert: Wright eventually met with Gov. Goodwin Knight, but never heard back). The sideshow conveys something else: Wright’s compulsive thirst for attention, his knack for turning his heads wherever he
went.
In the final decade of his life, one frequent destination was San Francisco. By the time his assistant Aaron Green opened a branch office at 319 Grant Ave. in 1950, Wright was touching down several times a year to meet with clients, give speeches and preen for the fourth estate.
When he submitted plans for the Daphne Funeral Chapels to the city — it would have hovered above Market Street midway between Castro Street and Van Ness Avenue — he was photographed at City Hall eating chocolate cake while explaining to reporters that “a place where you go to see the last of your earthly companions should be a happy place.”
More often than not, he stayed at the St. Francis, perhaps stopping by the exquisite gift shop he designed at 140 Maiden Lane for V.C. Morris to rearrange the displays (invariably changed back after his departure).
As he approached age 90, his schedule still was packed
so tight that Green on one occasion chartered a helicopter to get Wright to the airport from Oakland’s Claremont Hotel, where the owners wanted Wright to design a wedding chapel. Another design unveiled to wide attention and beguiling in hindsight, but never to be.
“Wright’s Bay Area works are distinctive mainly for their diversity and the unprecedented nature of many of them,” writes Turner, an emeritus professor of art at Stanford University. “They demonstrate, perhaps more than his buildings in any other location, the amazing variety and innovation of creations, and the fertility of his imagination.”
Turner’s prose is methodical and so is his approach, with a succession of chapters that begins with the mysterious Oakland house and ends with a deservedly lengthy account of the birth of Marin Civic Center. At times he steps back to fill us in on Wright’s more unusual encounters — including a 1949 symposium on modern art
where Wright shared the spotlight with such luminaries as artist Marcel Duchamp and came off as something of a boor.
The foundation of the book is architecture, including gorgeous renderings from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. But what lingers are the glimpses we receive of Wright as a force unto himself — one scheme for a Telegraph Hill apartment tower went astray because, Green later said, the potential client “wasn’t as effusive as Mr. Wright expects his clients to be” — in a city where you could rent a floor of office space near Union Square for $125 a month.
This isn’t simply a worthwhile addition to the Wright library. It’s a rewarding glimpse of the Bay Area that in some ways is familiar, but with each passing year seems more exotic than ever.