Spring Green

I was invited to meet the master
architect Frank Lloyd Wright for
a private conversation at his
remote farmstead residence on

a hillside near Spring Green in
southwestern Wisconsin — this
appointment arranged by mailing
to him a letter of introduction
from a former secretary of his —
and the date granted was Tuesday,

June 8th, 1954 that happened to be
Wright’s eighty-seventh birthday,
when I was in my twenty-third year,
but during the first minutes of our
time together, it seemed to me the
six decades that separated our ages
miraculously disappeared from the
room of local timber and limestone,
uniquely designed and harmoniously
decorated, where I had been taken
to await Mr. Wright who presently
entered, immaculately dressed and

smiling and cordially asking, “Well,
young man, just what is it you need
to be talking with me about?” and so
we sat and I told him of my upcoming

discharge from military service and
my present indecision about pursuing
higher education, and then he rested
both hands on the knob of his cane
and said, “Colleges are in business
selling diplomas as endorsements of
a student’s long preparation for a
certain kind of career, and this
pigeonholes many individuals who

are more imaginative and creative
and possess a poetic temperament
that naturally resists being laced
into an academic straitjacket, but
you can skip a cap-and-gown degree
and instead just buy the classes
you think might offer guidelines
for developing your own personal
interpretation of life, and then
you can proceed as we do in my
field of architecture, learning
the basics of your chosen work,
such as the laborious mixing of
earthen slush with straw, and
molding this into bricks needed
for building some kind of plan,
from a mud hut, up to a towering
cathedral,” and although I later

found out that this brick-making
metaphor was the favorite advice
Mr. Wright often gave to admirers
arriving at his door — no matter
what their line of endeavor — I
decided to follow his suggestion,
also keeping a clear recollection
of that grand old man pointing the
handle of his cane to indicate a
solitary painting hung high on

a nearby wall — the portrait of
a stately matron — and saying,
“America still needs pioneers,
like my mother there, as our
nation continues to enter all
sorts of newfound frontiers
that challenge individuals
to rise above the commonplace
and become uncommon, which in
this democracy is actually our
Constitutional Right” and then
he stood and extended to me a
firm hand of the irrepressible
builder-thinker-radical-patriot

who showed people the world over
how to cultivate the supreme art
of living in accord with Nature.