Dr. Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman Residence, Manchester, NH (1950) (S.333)
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Images By Mark Hertzberg
WRIGHT'S WORK, THE FELLOWSHIP AND MORE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN GEIGER
By Mark Hertzberg, July 2, 2007
Photos and interview copyright Mark Hertzberg
http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=14017John Geiger relaxes in his living room in West Los Angeles, reflecting on a lifetime of Frank Lloyd Wright. He does not fawn over Wright, and quickly steers the conversation to a critical look at the Taliesin Fellowship, the apprentice program which Wright started in 1932, when he was in dire financial straits. “Mr. Wright was a complicated man. I guess I’ve had some cause to reevaluate my relationship with him recently.”
Geiger, 85, was an apprentice to Wright from 1947 to 1954. He supervised construction of the Zimmerman House in Manchester, New Hampshire (1950), and helped supervise the “Sixty Years of Living Architecture” Wright retrospective exhibits in New York and Los Angeles (1953-4). He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Wright, an extensive Wright library and a stupendous computer data base that tracks every imaginable aspect of Wright’s work.
Geiger’s first exposure to Wright’s work was in 1938, when he took a course in Modern Architecture at the University of Minnesota. “There was Fallingwater on the screen. You can be a neophyte architect, and you see Fallingwater, and you know there is something there.” Geiger and a handful of classmates later visited Taliesin and Wright commissions in Chicago and Michigan.
Geiger then spent four years in the Army. “I went to Taliesin on the GI Bill. I didn’t have any illusions about Mr. Wright. It was a Faustian bargain. No apprentice expected a Nirvana of democracy. This was an autocracy, and we as apprentices, gave up a certain degree of autonomy for the privilege of being there. On the other hand you were free to leave at any time. There was nothing holding anybody there except your own desire to be there.
“I have concluded that the tie that binds was “In the Cause of Architecture” [a series of essays written by Wright for the Architectural Record]. We were, after all, participating in the creation of some of the greatest architectural monuments of the 20th Century. Even the lesser works have become national treasures. “In the Cause of Architecture” is what it was all about. It was not Wright as a personality. It was architecture.”
Geiger in his living room in West Los Angeles.
He left the Fellowship in 1954. “I don’t regret a day that I spent there, by the same token, it was time to go.” He decided to leave when he was building a temporary pavilion to house the “Sixty Years” show in Los Angeles. “The building [for the show] in New York had a pipe scaffolding framework.” The same structure was proposed for Los Angeles, but it was not earthquake proof. “The building department wouldn’t buy it.”
He made a new set of working drawings substituting welded pipe framing for scaffolding. “I just wrote Mr. Wright to tell him what we were doing. I never heard from him. I worked my tail off and we built the building in 21 days. The day before the show opens, Mr. Wright walks in at three in the afternoon, and moves the entrance. We had to tear out a chunk of concrete 12 feet square, remove 12 feet of existing wall and install 32 feet of new wall including the entrance doors. Morris Pynoos, the building contractor, was a jewel and by 11 the next morning, the walls had been moved and the fast setting concrete poured.
“Mr. Wright arrived unannounced about 3:00 that afternoon, dressed in black, ready for the 8:00 PM opening. He walked straight across the freshly poured concrete, which had set by that time, with no comment about the moved entrance. I guess he just took it for granted that the deed would be done. When he turned the corner into the main hall he was confronted by the gaping garage door opening instead of the slide screen he had expected to see. I knew that the slide show was important to him, so I had made plans to see that it would be ready for the opening that evening. I had given the foreman a drawing of the screen that morning and told him that no matter what was going on at 5:00 p.m., he was to stop whatever he was doing and build the screen frame and install the Translux screen I had calculated 45 minutes for him to do it.
“When Mr. Wright did not see the screen he started ranting and railing at me. I had worked my tail off to get the show open on target and was in no mood to put up with this temper tantrums. So I let him have his tantrum, but decided that unless he cooled down and treated me with a semblance of respect I would tell the foreman to forget about the screen. I approached him twice and he wouldn’t acknowledge me. On the third try, I got a grudging response and the deal was on. At 5:45 the screen was in place, the projector focused and the contractor’s wife, Rita, had arrived with a station wagon full of folding chairs for the viewers. The show was on.
“I never went back to the Fellowship. It was just time to go. I went back to Minneapolis to remodel my mother’s house. Wes (Peters) called me. He wanted me to come back to supervise the Milwaukee (Annunciation Greek Orthodox) church or do drawings for it. I told him I couldn’t. I felt absolutely no qualms about refusing to do that. I had done my thing and it was just time to go.”
Geiger talks about Wright’s expectation that people would bail him out financially. Wright is known for having borrowed money from people, including Peters, his son-in-law, apparently with no intention of paying them back. “He had absolutely no conscience about that at all. He was a user of people, there’s just no two ways about that.”
Then comes the inevitable discussion about Olgivanna Wright, the architect’s third wife. She was a proponent of the mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, who insisted that the apprentices join her in “Movements” or exercises that promoted Gurdjieff’s philosophy. The Fellowship was divided between apprentices loyal to Wright and more interested in architecture, and those loyal to Olgivanna, and willing to indulge her efforts to promote Gurdjieff’s ideas.
Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman write about this tension, which was particularly divisive to the Fellowship in the 1950s, in their controversial book “The Fellowship” (New York: Regan Books, 2006). Geiger remembers the tension well. He hosted a reception for the authors and for a number of apprentices last fall. He says that Zellman told him that Mrs. Wright “really hated” him. “I take that as a badge of honor. To generate that much enmity in her, I must have been doing something right.”
Wright died in 1959, but his former apprentices still invariably refer to him as Mr. Wright, never as Frank, and rarely as Wright. I asked Geiger about that. “When I am talking about Mr. Wright in a personal sense, it is Mr. Wright; in a generic sense (like a Wright building) it is Wright. Mr. Wright was essentially Victorian, his relationship with the apprentices was a formal one. It was not Frank this or that, or buddy-buddy.
“You would never call a client by her first name until after a job is done. That is how he treated the apprentices, like a business relationship with a client. He kept a formal relationship with them as opposed to Mrs. Wright. I heard Mr. Wright tell Mrs. Wright to stay out of their personal lives [although Friedland and Zellman are emphatic that she did not].”
Geiger returned to Los Angeles in 1955 and took his first real paid job with Daniel, Mann & Mendenhall for a few months. He then moved to Victor Gruen for a year or so. John Hill asked him to do the working drawings for the House Beautiful Pacesetter House, around 1957, and he used that pretext to establish a private practice. The practice lasted for four or five years but, Geiger, says, he didn’t have the aggressive personality necessary to promote himself, so he ended up in the retail business selling gifts and collectibles.
“It was always a balancing act between quality and solubility. It was good training for an architect. Your decisions were quickly verified as being valid or invalid.” He gained extensive experience working with computer data bases and developing mailing lists during his career, and uses that knowledge and those skills in his studies of Wright’s work. He has been retired for more than 20 years.
“I spend a lot of my time developing my data base, analyzing Frank Lloyd Wright and his work, both the man and his work. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s no secret geometry played an important part in his work. As a way of examining the entire work I went through the Futagawa [Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer’s twelve-volume “Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph,” Edited and Photographed by Yukio Futagawa. Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1984-1988] volume by volume, and entered it into the data base. I forced myself to examine all the work in detail. Every drawing I entered, you have to look at for a couple of minutes. In doing so, I’ve come to the conclusion there is one basic geometric relationship inherent in all of Wright’s best work, and lacking in his lesser work and that is my (thesis).” He will not divulge what he thinks that relationship is. The answer will come in his book or on a web site he is developing.
He is asked his opinion about different buildings designed by Wright. “It’s a matter of comparison, obviously. I have all the work in a data base, and I’ve gone through and rated everything on a scale of 1-10. I took as a 5 the straightforward job that didn’t have a lot going for it, that was just a good straightforward job with no particularly outstanding characteristics. I've rated all the work on that basis. I've made a decision on the merit of all the residential work.
“For the tens, I've only reserved Fallingwater, the two Taliesins, Johnson Wax, and Jacobs #1. The Freeman House [which I had toured that morning] seven or eight. All the block houses have serious problems structurally. Curiously enough, I like the Ennis House best, of all the block houses. It’s got the most interesting spaces. The dining room is really an interesting space. It goes over into the entry way, it moves around, goes into the living room. It's just an interesting house I think. The Taliesin Fellows arranged a tour of all four block houses for 200 people in June, 1992. It was a serious undertaking, in one day.” Such a tour is not possible today because the houses are not all open to visitors anymore.
One of Geiger’s other great contributions to the Wright world is that he maintained the mailing list for the Taliesin Fellows. The list was invaluable to Friedland and Zellman, who he says, interviewed 90 of the apprentices in the decade they researched their book.
Geiger puts the Taliesin Fellowship in perspective, as discussion turns to Friedland and Zellman’s book about it. Many discussions of the book focus on the tension that revolved around Olgivanna and her emphasis on Gurdjieff, and on the chapter that discusses the sex lives of many of the apprentices. Geiger is emphatic about the importance of the apprentice program, no matter what shortcomings others may see in it.
“In my correspondence with a Wright scholar, it became clear that the contribution of the Fellowship ‘In the Cause of Architecture’ was of epic proportions. In the first 10 years they restored Hillside and opened the Playhouse in the first year. The parking terrace and Mr. Wright's balcony were also built. In three years they built Taliesin West from scratch. I visited it in the winter of 1941-42 and it was essentially complete. You also have to include Fallingwater, Johnson Wax, Jacobs #1, and numerous other first class houses. Were it not for the Fellowship none of this would have happened and Taliesin would be in ruins.”
The Fellowship was certainly a place for the apprentices to learn from Wright, but he did not always share information with them. Jaroslav J. Polivka was a Polish-born structural engineer who collaborated with Wright on projects in the 1940s. He had written a ‘fan letter’ to Wright, after reading that engineers had expressed doubts about Wright’s engineering of the cantilevered terraces at Fallingwater (doubts which, time has proven, were not misplaced).
Polivka devised a way to cantilever the entire ramp assembly from the stairwell/elevator core when he was working on early plans for the Guggenheim Museum. He applied the same engineering to designs for the stayed cable bridge for Wright’s unbuilt Pittsburgh Point Project. “The stayed cable bridge was a new concept in the US at that time and would not have been possible without Polivka,” says Geiger. But, Wright did not share Polivka’s idea with his apprentices.
Geiger learned that Wright did not share Polivka’s ideas, only recently. “I have to admit I was angry with Wright for not sharing this new concept with the apprentices. How did Mr. Wright pass this information on to the apprentices? The answer was that he didn’t. I concluded he felt absolutely no obligation to pass information on to apprentices or take them into his confidence. It changed how I viewed Mr. Wright. He said, ‘‘I’m not a teacher, I’m not here to teach you. You can see what I’m doing, and get what you can from observing what I do.” He did not spoon feed the apprentices as it were, take them into his confidence. It was the reverse. I think he went out of his way to not inform the apprentices. It was up to the apprentice to figure it out. The question really changed my outlook of Mr. Wright.”
He continues, “If you follow Wright's income from the sale of Japanese prints as documented in Meech's Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan (Harry Abrams, 2001), it becomes obvious that his main income for many years was from the sale of prints... The point is that after the loss of income from the sale of Japanese prints in 1920, economic life for Wright became difficult. The Fellowship rescued Wright from financial insecurity and allowed him to live a financially secure life from the post war years until his death. But the main contribution was “In The Cause of Architecture.” Imagine the architectural scene without Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and Taliesin West. It is unlikely that any of them would have happened without the Fellowship. No one, including Freidland and Zellman, seem to recognize this.”
He wonders what the “main attraction” was for many of the apprentices who joined the Fellowship, and why so many stayed for so long. “I have concluded that the answer to the first question is that the attraction was “In The Cause of Architecture” to use Mr. Wright's phrase. For the prospective apprentice it was the opportunity of a lifetime to participate in the creation of a world class architecture. It had nothing to do with Wright as a personality. It was all about the architecture and not to be missed. We were not indentured servants, as some scholars seem to think, or employees, but apprentices who made a conscious decision to participate in an endeavor that benefitted both society and ourselves.”
“I stayed seven years, which included supervision of the Zimmerman house, the New York and LA “Sixty Years” shows. They were exciting times and would not have missed them for the world. I have no regrets for my years at the Fellowship. In the 50's Mrs. Wright's influence increased and the focus changed from him to her and the quality of the work declined. But that is another story, as is why some people spent there entire adult life there.”
Curtis Besinger mentions Geiger in his autobiographical perspective about the Fellowship (“Working with Mr. Wright: What it was Like,” Cambridge University Press, 1997). Olgivanna Wright wanted the apprentices to help her prepare for a demonstration of Gurdjieff’s Movements in Chicago in June, 1953, while Mr. Wright wanted them to concentrate on the “Sixty Years” exhibit in New York. “John Geiger... has about had his fill of the ‘soul searching’ establishment that we are turning into...You see Mr. Wright’s philosophy and Mrs. Wright’s do not mix. As near as I can tell they are in direct opposition. The division of the effort of the Fellowship into two camps regarding Mr. Wright's show in New York and Mrs. Wright’s show in Chicago is an example of this.”
Geiger looks forward to refining his Wright data base and developing a web site of his own. He puts the conflicts at Taliesin in perspective. “I was four years in the Army, including two years in the South Pacific. I’d been around...I learned survival tactics in the Army, so Taliesin was a piece of cake.”
Geiger's library includes a first edition of the “Wendingen” collection of Wright's work, autgraphed by Wright. The formal title of the book is “The Life of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright,” published by C. A. Mees, Stanport, Holland, 1925. It consists of consecutive issues of the art magazine “Wendingen.” Geiger remembers, “I bought my copy from William Helburn in New York in January of 1944. I had just received my commission as 2nd Lieutenant and paid $125 for the book, which is $1,409 in 2006 dollars.” It is inscribed “To John Geiger at Taliesin - This now rare first edition - Frank Lloyd Wright”
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