Might Frank Lloyd Wright have been wrong
When he surveyed the Depression-era New York City skyline and decreed that the Empire State Building didn’t belong?
Speaking as one with more than average entitlement to his opinion about what does and does not rise to the level of architectural perfection,
Wright sneered, “Why thrill with the glint on an aluminum erection?”
(A disparaging remark whose carnal implications would reverberate soon thereafter in the thrilling, first-time antics of a giant cinematic ape
Palming a hot blonde and jungle-gymming up the skyscraper’s by then already iconic phallic shape.)
The great architect went on to assail the tower with such epithets as “unethical monstrosity” and “piling up of wreckage by means of blind forces,” which sounds inadvertently prophetic
To a world that has witnessed (in the year in which Wright’s bête noire achieved the age of threescore and ten) the destruction of two younger, taller, uglier edifices by pilers up of wreckage whose quarrel with the buildings was not purely aesthetic.
But the point is, if an artist as eminent as Wright was mistaken, how much does it then behoove
The likes of you and me to cultivate the humble corrective of a few second thoughts regarding any cultural innovation of which we’re initially inclined to disapprove?
Chris O’Carroll is a writer, actor, comedian, Pushcart Prize nominee, and two-time Cambridge Poetry Award recipient. You can read his work in Avatar Review, Folly, Iambs & Trochees, Measure, The Melic Review, and other print and online journals.
