FLW

 True, the setting
of Wingspread is a landscape of rolling meadows, interrupted here’ and
there by adroitly planted clumps of pines, while the settings of most of
Wright’s turn-of-the-century Prairie Houses were comparatively cramped
suburban lots and therefore not authentically of the prairie at all; neverthe-
less, “Prairie House” evokes a sense of ground-hugging simplicity of form
and, within that form, the prospect of an equal simplicity in the conduct
of life. Wingspread evokes something very different; it is an exceedingly
large mansion, having a floor area of fourteen thousand square feet and
shouldering the sky with the self-important eccentricity of some mock-
Gothic castle in the Thousand Islands. A true folly, it imposes itself upon
its site instead of accommodating to it. Wright may well have sensed this
(to him) unwelcome fact, since he took care to praise Wingspread for the
opposite reason: he boasted that its presence improved the site, giving it
a charm that it lacked when it was merely so much untampered-with nature.
When Wingspread was under construction, Johns0n’s wife died and
Johnson was tempted for a time to abandon the project. At Wright’s urging,
both for the sake of the children and as a memorial gesture to his dead
wife,Johnson finished the house and occupied it for twenty years, accepting
with good humor the fact that it leaked as profusely as the Administration
Building ‘(lid and that its scale was far too grand for the family shelter he
had had in mind. Johnson was an ideal client in his willingness to forgive
the defects that Wright’s buildings almost invariably possessed~defects
that Wright managed in most cases to turn into proof of his high aesthetic
intentions. (At the beginning of the Administration Building project,John-
son visited the house that Wright had designed for his cousin Richard
Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa; innumerable tubs and canning jars were scattered
throughout the house to catch water leaking through the roof. Mrs. Lloyd
Jones apologized to her guest with a kindly witticism: “This is what happens
when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

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More than a quarter of a century has passed since the Wingspread
Center was dedicated. Today it flourishes under the direction of William
B. Boyd, husband ofJohnson’s daughter Karen (for whom Wright designed,
in 1954, a pleasantly romantic house on a bluff above the Racine River).
It was to Karen that Wright once extended a remarkable invitation. Visiting
Wingspread, he fell ill after lunch and mistook indigestion for a mortal
heart attack. He lay down on a couch in the living room, composed himself,
beckoned to Karen, and said splendidly, “Come and watch how a great
man dies.”