MARSEILLES – We may not think of architects as cultural heroes or game-changing innovators these days, in the way that Steve Jobs (or Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, for that matter) get appreciated for their creative genius. But those who have made breakthroughs in design and how we live in cities surely deserve recognition.
If there’s one American architect who is celebrated and broadly known, it is Frank Lloyd Wright. At Fallingwater, the modern architecture masterpiece built over a river in southwestern Pennsylvania, the visitors rival those flowing through the gates of Disneyland. Many more make the trek to Taliesan West in the foothills northeast of Scottsdale, a serene complex where the great master trained his apprentices. And in San Rafael in Marin County, the 50th anniversary of Wright’s civic center, one of his last buildings and his only public commission, is being celebrated this weekend with pomp and reverence.
A quirky and passionate man with a somewhat raucous love life, Wright is known for his fresh approach, clean lines and cantilevers, all intuitively recognized as something special that occurred beginning in the early 20th century. His buildings are embraced as a matter of pride and cultural heritage. When the sellers of a house Wright built for his son in Phoenix threatened to have the place bulldozed, the public outcry was immediate and earnest. It would be unthinkable to let his work fall into disrepair, much less be destroyed.
I was reminded of Wright during a recent trip to France, where a similar celebration of a famous architect is unfolding -- though the surprise is that Europe would wait so long for someone revered there even more, arguably, than Wright in the United States. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who renamed himself Le Corbusier, is Europe’s version of Wright and then some. If Wright was Bill Gates, Le Corbusier was Steve Jobs – hoping to change the way people lived through design, turning out villas and apartment buildings and government offices and churches that defined modernism and the International Style. He was a swaggering figure, had a similarly eventful love life, and exported his brand of modernism to South America, Russia, Japan, India, and beyond, traveling on dirigibles and ocean liners and the earliest jet planes.
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