Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 22, 1993
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 22, 1993
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 22, 1993
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 23, 1993
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 22, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- I'd like to start off with where you were born.
-
FYFE
- I was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1910.
-
VALENTINE
- How did your family come to Oak Park?
-
FYFE
- Well, my mother [Hannah Christabel Beye Fyfe]'s family moved out to Oak
Park from Chicago, seeking a suburban, almost rural atmosphere, I
suppose--because I never saw it, but I was told that they even kept a
cow in their backyard. My father [James Lincoln Fyfe] came from Portage,
Wisconsin. His father [James Fyfe] brought the family to Oak Park, and I
really don't know the reason why. My father and mother met in Oak Park;
they married in 1907. My dad was born in 1869. And my mother was born
ten years later, 1879.
-
VALENTINE
- How did they meet?
-
FYFE
- I don't know, but it was a small community, and very possibly at the H.
W. Austin barn, where they used to have dances and Christmas parties. My
brother was born in 1908.
-
VALENTINE
- What's his name?
-
FYFE
- James. Jim.
-
VALENTINE
- Like your father?
-
FYFE
- Yes. My father was named James Lincoln Fyfe because his father was a
great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. My brother was named James Beye Fyfe,
and his son is named James Arthur Fyfe after Arthur Morgan, the former
president of Antioch College. Arthur Morgan went on to be the first
president of TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] under [Franklin D.]
Roosevelt.
-
VALENTINE
- How important were politics in your family?
-
FYFE
- Well, politics, in the context in which it's used today, really weren't
important to our family, but both my father and my mother had a great
sense of responsibility to the community. Before my dad volunteered to
go into the army during World War I, he'd been on the village board; he
ran for and was elected president of the board just prior to going into
the army. He had served as president of the trustees of Unity Temple. My
mother came from a family that was much involved with the school system.
Her father had been treasurer of the school board. In a village where
they had nine schools named after nineteenth-century authors--Irving,
Holmes, Emerson, etc.--they named a school the [William Beye] School
after grandfather. That's kind of an unusual accolade. My mother was
active in the PTA [Parent-Teacher Association]. She was one of the
instigators of the League of Women Voters in Oak Park, and a curious
thing happened. At one time she was called for jury duty, and then when
she appeared and they found she was of the female persuasion they
decided that it wouldn't be appropriate, so she was turned away. Later
on, not too much later on, they made a case out of it and went to court
and won, so she was responsible for women being on juries in the state
of Illinois.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, good for her.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- You must be proud of her.
-
FYFE
- We are in many ways. Mother and Dad were active in the village, in the
community, but there wasn't politicking in the sense that the word is
most often understood today.
-
VALENTINE
- Were they strong Democrats or Republicans, or did you talk about those
kinds of issues?
-
FYFE
- Everybody in Oak Park was a Republican in those days, [laughter] but I
think my parents switched when Roosevelt was elected.
-
VALENTINE
- I want to know more about your mother because she has quite an
interesting background.
-
FYFE
- Well, I might just wind up with my dad here.
-
VALENTINE
- Okay.
-
FYFE
- He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], and
graduated in 1897 at the age of twenty-eight. He must have been some
kind of a workaholic. In those days, they had only a course in
architecture, no structural engineering, so they improvised special
courses in engineering for him. I don't know whether that was for two
years after he graduated, just how long, but those courses eventually
became the structural engineering courses at MIT. My mother attended the
Art Institute [of Chicago]. She specialized in making jewelry, and when
she came out of school she opened a shop on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
I don't know what it was called in those days, but-- When my brother and
I came along she sold the shop--it became the Kalo Shop, well known for
its silver work for many, many years in Chicago.
-
VALENTINE
- How did she keep up her interest in the arts after that?
-
FYFE
- She did some drawing at home. She made lots of bookplates for friends,
and eventually I inherited two dozen or more. One of the sorrows of my
life is that she made a beautiful bookplate for my brother but got only
about halfway finished with mine. Never did finish mine.
-
VALENTINE
- Maybe she meant for you to finish it.
-
FYFE
- That would be a happy circumstance, but I can't find it.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, no.
-
FYFE
- I really would like to see it again. I haven't thought of finishing it
myself, but it would have been fun. Then, as her family responsibilities
were no longer taking most of her time, she used to do lots of pencil
sketching, mostly outdoors, but in later years she made a studio in the
back of her house in Oak Park and did watercolors and some pencil
sketches there. She illustrated a book called Little Old Oak Park written by May Estelle Cook, and
they're interesting illustrations. They don't look very professional,
but the Oak Parkers love them. It was a marvelous book. May Estelle Cook
was quite an institution in Oak Park. She was an English teacher in
Austin High School in Chicago and was very active in the library in
Scoville Institute in Oak Park. She was much respected by the whole
community.
-
VALENTINE
- So you have a strong tradition for art in your family. A creative
side.
-
FYFE
- Yes, I think so. Dad, a great admirer of Mr. [Frank Lloyd] Wright, was a
good architect and an excellent structural engineer. In fact, he did the
structural work for the Imperial Palace in [Tokyo] Japan, which was just
a couple of blocks away from Mr. Wright's Imperial Hotel. It survived
the same earthquake.
-
VALENTINE
- All right, because the hotel is famous for that. When did he do the
palace? When was that?
-
FYFE
- I can't give you a date.
-
VALENTINE
- Was that before or after or the same time as the hotel?
-
FYFE
- Oh, I think it must have been a little before the hotel. Mr. Wright's
system, of course, was unique. After he got to Japan, the story is that
he changed the foundation drawings that he went over with and devised
that system of many short piles. I'm sure my father's engineering was
more conservative and standard for the period. I worked with my father a
little, and I've seen him even in small problems apply a unique approach
to solving the engineering problems. When he was operating in Chicago,
he would go over to the building department and they would just take his
drawings without any question.
-
VALENTINE
- So he had a reputation.
-
FYFE
- Yes. He worked for an architect by the name of David Adler. No
relationship to Dankmar Adler, but David Adler was the top residential
architect in Chicago for many years. He was getting 15 percent
commissions when the very next architects--there were maybe two, maybe
three--were getting 10 percent. That's indicative of the kind of work he
was doing--all big homes along the lake-shore all the way up to Lake
Forest and Lake Bluff. Dad did most of David Adler's structural
engineering. And it was through that connection, of course, that I began
my career in architecture. While still in high school, I worked in David
Adler's office as a gofer.
-
VALENTINE
- While your dad was there?
-
FYFE
- Well, no. Dad had his own office; he wasn't working in Adler's office.
David Adler had an office over the Chicago Symphony in Chicago, on the
top floor. I guess there were about ten draftsmen. Eventually I got to
do some tracing, but for the most part, I kept the conference room
dusted and ran errands.
-
VALENTINE
- That's the real business of architecture. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- It was a wonderful experience because David Adler's office turned out
incredible drawings--full-size details--lots of them. I remember one
time he had a full-size drawing of a dormer for the William McCormick
Blair House in Lake Bluff. He wasn't satisfied with it so it was up on
the wall all the summer I was there. When David Adler came into the
drafting room, you could just hear him [knocks on table] and he'd stop
and he'd look at that detail. The building got built, the dormer is on
it--I've seen pictures of it--but he never took the drawing down while I
was there. [laughter] And, well, that's enough I guess about that
office. That's where I first met Paul Schweikher. My career sort of
paralleled Paul's for a while after that.
-
VALENTINE
- Right. Well, I want to come back to that later, but let's do more with
your family background. When your father was at MIT, did he know any of
the other so-called Prairie School architects that went to school
there?
-
FYFE
- I don't know. But that was the school in those days. Most of the
well-known architects came out of it. It was a pretty traditional
education.
-
VALENTINE
- [École de] Beaux-Arts-inspired education?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- Did he do any designing or was it all structural engineering?
-
FYFE
- Oh, yes, he was a registered architect as well as structural engineer.
He was responsible for several homes in Oak Park. He did the Nineteenth
Century [Woman's] Club, which was a large building; Hepzibah Children's
Home, another large building; a hospital in Maryland; and some
commercial work. I really don't know how to answer that question very
precisely. Very often, he associated himself with other architects who
were strong in design, and I suppose maybe that's why he was a partner
with [Herman] von Holst. That partnership dissolved when Dad went off to
the war [World War I]. He was commissioned a major in the quartermaster
division and built a camp in Puerto Rico, I believe, and a very large
Camp Pike in Little Rock, Arkansas. He did his own designing for
residential work.
-
VALENTINE
- What kind of designs did your dad do? How would you classify them by
style?
-
FYFE
- Well, again, it's hard to peg it, but he was very much interested in
what came to be known as the Prairie style. His residence work was not
clearly in that style, but some of the smaller homes were definitely
influenced by it. Some of his larger homes, I don't think-- I can't see
that you could call it a "J. L. Fyfe style" or any style in particular.
There were great variations in it. Invariably they were excellent plans,
and--
-
VALENTINE
- And good engineering?
-
FYFE
- Oh yes; yes indeed.
-
VALENTINE
- What was his philosophy of architecture?
-
FYFE
- I do not know. I worked with him a little bit in his later years when he
did some work for the Dearborn Chemical Company. He'd let me arrange the
windows, if you call that designing. He was very meticulous, very
demanding of his draftsmen, I was told. I can't really answer your
question about style.
-
VALENTINE
- Okay. How big was his office?
-
FYFE
- Very small, at least when I knew it, I guess shortly after the war.
Maybe half a dozen. By the time I really got to work with him, we were
into the Depression, and there might be one draftsman. Incidentally, in
the same building at 228 North Michigan Avenue, Perkins and Will had an
office on another floor, and they had exactly one draftsman. As you
perhaps know, it's a huge firm now with hundreds, in several different
cities. I watched it grow.
-
VALENTINE
- But they both kept alive during the Depression. That was something when
most offices were closing. Back to the partnership with von Holst: When
did that begin?
-
FYFE
- My suspicion is that it wasn't very long before it was dissolved, but I
do not know. There's somebody in Chicago that could tell us. I just
haven't taken the time to check that.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, there's an interesting link there with Frank Lloyd Wright because
that was the firm that--
-
FYFE
- Oh yes, yes. It should be in the record that when Mr. Wright decamped
for Europe, he turned his practice over, as the story goes, in just a
day or two, to von Holst. One time my father told me-- Of course at the
time that occurred I was maybe eight years old. At some subsequent time,
and I can't put a date to it, I remember my father saying that he and
Herman von Holst had gone to see Mr. [Henry] Ford. When Wright left, the
Ford account was apparently a possible project. My father's report on it
was that nothing came of their visit with Mr. Ford. I've seen a notation
about that in the book Walter Burley Griffin:
Selected Designs, and it shows a design which is attributed
to Griffin. The rendering is probably by his wife, Marion Mahony
[Griffin]. And there it says-- Shall I read it?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. Who's the author of this book? [David T.] Van Zanten?
-
FYFE
- Yes. Edited by David T. Van Zanten and published by the Prairie School
Press in 1970. It's a very nice drawing, which I'm sure Marion must have
done. And it says, in parentheses, "Marion Mahony Griffin, project for
Henry Ford House, Dearborn, Michigan. Elevation dated 1912, inscribed
von Holst and Fyfe architects, Marion M. Griffin associate. Later
altered to von Holst and Fyfe associate architects, Marion M. Griffin
designing architect. Ink on drawing cloth, courtesy of Northwestern
University." And then it says, "Construction never got beyond the
foundations," which is news to me.
-
VALENTINE
- I always heard it never got that far.
-
FYFE
- I did a house in Mexico City that never got beyond the foundations.
[laughter] I think architectural historians would like to know more
about the von Holst/Fyfe partnership, but I've never taken time to check
it out. When I finally went to Taliesin, this was not clear to me. I
never thought about it, and Mr. Wright certainly never mentioned it.
-
VALENTINE
- Did any of these people who were associated with that firm--?
-
FYFE
- No. But I know where I could find reference to a man who would have
information about all that period of Chicago architects. I'd have to do
some research to find that, and then that would just lead off to
something else. Jack [John O.] Holzhueter, it would be the kind of thing
he'd love to do.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, he would love it. Yes, yes. I wonder if those people ever came to
the house, if you had any contact with them as a child, with Marion
Mahony or--
-
FYFE
- No. My mother was a very good friend of Maginel Wright [Barney], Mr.
Wright's sister, and was in and out of Madame [Anna Lloyd Jones]
Wright's house, which was a little gothic cottage alongside of Wright's
studio [Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio]. She had a daughter,
Elizabeth [Barney] Enright [Gillham], about the same age as my brother,
Jim. Apparently, Maginel and my mother thought that those two ought to
get together, but that was almost one strike against the whole idea if
the parents wanted to foster-- I knew Franklin Porter, who was the son
of Jane Wright Porter. We were about the same age, but we didn't play
together very much. We did some. I remember the time they were living in
the [Arthur and Grace] Heurtley House, a wonderful house to play
hide-and-seek in. Any of the Wright houses, mostly--
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, yes. It's a hide-and-seek with a front door.
-
FYFE
- Jane Porter-- There must be a gene in the Wright family. She was always
instigating picnics and trips out to the tennis club, and we joined her
in this several times. Oak Park was, early on, a very wealthy suburb of
Chicago, about 1910. For the next ten or fifteen years, it was still
growing. I can remember when the northern part was just prairie. And
when my folks first lived in our house on 316 South Euclid Avenue, they
said they could look east and just see prairies out to the east. Shall I
get into my education?
-
VALENTINE
- In just a little bit. I want to finish talking about Oak Park and your
family. The relationship between your mother and Maginel--was that a
childhood relationship or did that continue into their adulthood?
-
FYFE
- It was into their adulthood, and I don't know how far back it went. They
must have been close to the same age.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you know her?
-
FYFE
- No, I never did. In my childhood bedroom there were some of her drawings
on the wall. That's the closest I ever got to Maginel.
-
VALENTINE
- All these connections that we don't know are there, right, when you're
growing up.
-
FYFE
- I know. Most of my life is missed connections.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, I think they're operating anyway. Tell me about Oak Park when you
were a child. What was that community like?
-
FYFE
- As I knew it, it was a pretty cohesive community. They had lectures, and
the Scoville Institute was something that May Estelle Cook was
responsible for getting started. They had intellectual lectures there,
and by the time I came along, they were always held in the high
school--a series every year. My folks belonged to a historical group
that would meet once a month and discuss a book or something of that
sort. Very literate, intelligent community, tree lined, beautiful elm
trees along most of the streets. I could earlier remember when some of
the streets were just brick and Chicago Avenue was just cobblestones.
But very soon the village became-- The streets all became well paved,
and they even paved the alleys. An excellent reputation for their
schools-- The high school was joined in a district with River Forest.
River Forest was quite similar to Oak Park, possibly a little bit more
wealthy community, smaller. The two communities joined certainly in the
high school and a lot of other activities.
-
VALENTINE
- What social class was your family in?
-
FYFE
- Well, we were never considered wealthy, but Mother and Dad were among
the group of people who were kind of getting things done in the village.
Does that answer your question?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. It always surprises me to see [old] photographs of Oak Park, with
those Frank Lloyd Wright houses that are so modern. We think of them in
the context of today, yet the photos show horses and buggies pulling up
in front of them, and the streets are unpaved. It's such an anomaly to
me.
-
FYFE
- I have an old picture of one of my father's houses that he did in the
northern part of the village, and there's a buggy alongside of that one.
It's just amazing to see it, dating it that way.
-
VALENTINE
- It reminds you how modern those houses were of Wright's. What do you
think there was about Oak Park that would commission so many Wrightian
houses that were so futuristic?
-
FYFE
- I don't really have any personal insight into that. Of course, I've read
the book--books I guess--that have attempted to delineate the kind of
people who would retain Mr. Wright. They seemed to be self-made persons
who have done well financially and have inquisitive minds, inventive
minds, and did not have the same social status as the very wealthy
people who were on the North Shore in Chicago. That's what I've
read.
-
VALENTINE
- Do you think that's accurate?
-
FYFE
- I have no way of knowing.
-
VALENTINE
- [laughter] I just wondered what you knew, and what talk was around the
town about those strange houses. Or was that accepted?
-
FYFE
- We had good friends like Caroline and Edward McCready, who could afford
a large house. They admired Mr. Wright's work, but they hired another
architect, Robert Spencer, to do their house in 1907. A banker, Hal
[Harold H.] Rockwell, has a house that is Prairie style, and he, too,
admired Mr. Wright's work, but he had Tallmadge and Watson do his
house.
-
VALENTINE
- Now, were these houses period houses or Prairie houses?
-
FYFE
- They're second cousins to the Prairie design, yes. Mr. Rockwell had an
island [Sapper Island] up north in the Saint Joseph River near
Desbarats, Canada. Mr. Wright did a couple of cottages up there for
members of the Pitkin family. So he knew Mr. Wright's work up there as
well as in Oak Park. But he was a conservative banker and in 1910 he had
Tallmadge and Watson do his house.
-
VALENTINE
- And Wright still had a reputation in Oak Park from a few years before
then? He wasn't quite forgiven?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 22, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- [Prairie style houses] are probably in one of those guides to Oak Park
architecture.
-
FYFE
- Pardon?
-
VALENTINE
- They're probably in one of those guides to Prairie School architecture
in Oak Park.
-
FYFE
- Oh, I'm sure they are.
-
VALENTINE
- What was the feeling towards Wright among the upstanding citizens of Oak
Park?
-
FYFE
- Well, incidentally, I have five or six copies of the Saturday Evening Post-- Is it Finis Farr?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- In 1961 he wrote "Frank Lloyd Wright: The Triumphs and Scandals of a
Genius" that ran for five issues. They go pretty much into details of
Mr. Wright's life. But in my family, that would be gossip; it just never
was discussed. I never heard anything from any of my family other than
praise for the designs and the architecture. Both Mother and Dad admired
Mr. Wright's work very much.
-
VALENTINE
- Good.
-
FYFE
- But as to any of his other activities, we just never talked about it. I
can't answer your question really.
-
VALENTINE
- Was there gossip at school or at the tennis club?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- Because you read so much about that, I just wondered if you had any
firsthand experience.
-
FYFE
- I just don't know. We used to go to the [River Forest] Tennis Club
frequently. That was a marvelous building. I admired that building
tremendously.
-
VALENTINE
- There's another connection there: the tennis club.
-
FYFE
- And I grew up in the Unity Temple.
-
VALENTINE
- Right. I want you to tell me about that--what you remember about Unity
Temple.
-
FYFE
- Well, it goes back to when I was maybe five years old. It must have been
shortly after it was built. I used to go to kindergarten class there. I
really can remember playing "Drop the Handkerchief," and what's the one
about--? "London Bridge." By the time I was in older classes we met
around little tables under the balconies, and there was never really
good provision for separation between classes. We'd meet in the main
two-story space for opening sessions, and they'd try to get us to sing
songs there. Then we'd move into the little classes. By the time I was
in high school, we had classes up in what used to be--it was designed
for the women's sewing group. We had a little more privacy up there. The
thing that I remember best of all in Unity House [the parish house
portion of Unity Temple] was the absolutely superb arrangement for
serving dinners. They used to have frequent church dinners, and high
school kids would often do the serving. The way that it was
planned--they made a place for dishes to be kept and brought to the
table and brought to be cleaned and washed and then put back to where
they belonged. And the separation from the food preparation and the
serving was absolutely marvelous. It worked. In the temple-- I always
had trouble with that word because Mr. Wright called it Unity Temple,
but we all thought of it as Unity Church. Much has been written about
how the temple was designed to bring you in through a preparatory garden
and then into a lobby, and then you were turned and had to find your way
back into the church proper. The acoustics in there were marvelous, and
the arrangement of seats on three sides brought everyone in close
contact with anyone speaking from the pulpit. The thing that I liked
best about it was at the end of the service. As a child coming out of
Sunday school, I remember watching the janitor; when he heard the last
hymn going, he'd open two doors that led from the church proper down
some steps to the entrance foyer or lobby. There were two doors on each
side of the pulpit. So that meant that when the service was over, not
only could the minister pop down there and catch anybody coming out, but
people rose and moved forward toward the front of the church.
-
VALENTINE
- That's nice.
-
FYFE
- So that worked very well, and always there were lots of people standing
and talking before they left for home.
-
VALENTINE
- How did the skylights work?
-
FYFE
- Beautiful. Absolutely stunning. Going back to the church house--when we
were high school kids we discovered a switch that would turn the lights
on over that skylight. That was nice at nighttime, but in the daytime
there was so much dirt on the skylight that very little light came
through. Early on, the [Unity Temple] Restoration Foundation got those
skylights cleaned off, and that was a great revelation.
-
VALENTINE
- I'll bet it was.
-
FYFE
- Beautiful.
-
VALENTINE
- As good as you remembered it?
-
FYFE
- Oh, I never remembered it in daylight before. It was much better. It was
a totally new experience; everybody appreciated it. In the church proper
there has always been reference to the skylights there producing a sort
of a sunshiny glow--lots of yellow-gold in those skylights. The
restoration foundation recently spent a good deal of time and money
getting those put back in top shape and protecting them overhead with a
protecting skylight. Well, while we're talking about the temple--one
often hears about the art glass just under the eaves at the back of the
galleries and over the organ. They're stunning leaded glass windows.
Absolutely beautiful. You may get a glare when you're looking toward the
pastor: you're looking south, and there's no escaping the fact that
there's a troublesome glare produced by them. At one time curtains were
hung there but they got dirty and dusty and looked awful, so that's
gone. The plan of that building has been studied all over the world.
-
VALENTINE
- It's one of the great spaces. It's just wonderful.
-
FYFE
- It surely is.
-
VALENTINE
- It's hard for me to picture Universalists [Unitarian Universalist
Church] in a temple. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- It doesn't seem to ring true. No. [laughter] We used to go frequently to
the [River Forest] Tennis Club, which in my view is another great
building--another building that just worked beautifully. There was a
fire, I guess you know, and very quickly Mr. Wright, Mr. [Charles E.]
White [Jr.], and Mr. [Vernon Spencer] Watson, I think, got together and
planned this building. But I'm sure it's pure Wright. The roof
structure's exposed wood trusses, and they have some painted squares on
them that are beautiful. There are three big fireplaces. It's on a long
north-south axis: a long narrow building, fireplace at each end of the
main room, and out in front of each fireplace, built-in seats facing
each other--a large version of the kind of fireplaces he did in several
of his early houses, especially the [William H.] Winslow House and his
own house in Oak Park. At the north end there is the men's locker
room--pretty good size; at the south end there is a kitchen, and beyond
that, the women's locker room; and on the east side, a long porch where
you could sit and watch the tennis being played out on the courts. Right
now, it's been added to so many times you can't even see the original
building, but it was a stunning building. It was sort of a community
center--well, not a community center because you had to be members of
the club, but Saturday nights tabletops would be put on wooden horses
and white paper rolled out for tablecloths, and there might be parties
of six or sixteen, or even sometimes much larger parties. Women would
bring their casseroles to the kitchen and do their cooking there and
bring the food to the table. The chairs were folding chairs, and that
always was a big deal after dinner to get all those things put away.
Then they usually had dancing. The big events of the season were the
men's show and the women's show. The year that I graduated from high
school, Jeannie Roberts wrote a musical for the high school group. Many
of us were members of the club, but we had some ringers in there. I can
still remember some of the songs. Both Unity [Temple] and the tennis
club just worked so well; it was beautiful to experience them in terms
of planning.
-
VALENTINE
- Did your father comment about the space or the structure or anything in
your presence, going there all those times together?
-
FYFE
- No. He appreciated them, I'm sure.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you know they were special places then, or were you just so
surrounded by Wright buildings that you took them for granted?
-
FYFE
- I think the latter. I was delivering newspapers all over Oak Park and
River Forest and delivering ice cream, too, on my bicycle, and I would
see houses that I liked. They turned out to be by Frank Lloyd Wright.
They were all unusual except some of his very first ones. I remember
when I was maybe a senior in high school, I hired a friend of mine to
take pictures of them for me. He was in the camera club, and he had a
wide-angle lens. This was about 1927 or '28. He took pictures of a half
a dozen houses for me. Actually, this says something about me, I guess:
when I finally got to Taliesin, it was just another Wright house for me.
[laughter] I wasn't bowled over so much, as most people are immediately.
In retrospect I recognize how being in and utilizing Taliesin was
absorbed by osmosis.
-
VALENTINE
- What was your own family house like?
-
FYFE
- Small, but lots of space inside--typical suburban house with a great big
window in front and cut glass and colored glass over the big window. Not
a distinguished house in any way.
-
VALENTINE
- Did your father design it?
-
FYFE
- Oh, no. One thing he did do-- Oak Park had what they called Yaryan heat;
it was a by-product of generating electricity. They piped this through
part of the community, and it came down our alley and into our house.
And I guess when my father bought the house-- Because I know it had a
furnace at one time, but by the time I came along it had all radiators,
and they were all huge radiators, so we never suffered for not having
enough heat. In the wintertime we could see where it came into the house
from the alley because it would melt the snow over the pipe. Those pipes
were made of wood.
-
VALENTINE
- My goodness.
-
FYFE
- So eventually it rotted out and the whole system was abandoned.
-
VALENTINE
- Didn't think that through.
-
FYFE
- Well, I don't know when it started but it must have been about the turn
of the century. Certainly didn't have plastic.
-
VALENTINE
- No, but wooden pipes don't make sense.
-
FYFE
- I never saw one so maybe I'm mistaken about that.
-
VALENTINE
- High school.
-
FYFE
- Graduated in 1928. I did fairly well academically. I won a scholarship
when I graduated.
-
VALENTINE
- What classes did you like?
-
FYFE
- I took art and drawing classes, of course. I liked English best, I
think. There was an excellent club system. Even a book was written about
the clubs at Oak Park [and River Forest Township] High [School].
Freshmen mostly joined the science club, and I joined Brooks Club, which
was a religious education club. By the time I was a junior, the big club
to belong to was either Burke or Lincoln Club. They were both
public-speaking clubs. The drama club was another prestigious club.
There was a fine newspaper--weekly--with four editors that rotated in
turn. I was editor of the Tabula magazine, which came out three times a
year and then published an annual at the end of the year.
-
VALENTINE
- You did very well academically in a school that was known for its very
high standards.
-
FYFE
- I guess that's a fair statement. I took algebra twice and took French
over once. I had trouble with languages. Even when I got to college I
persuaded them not to insist on my going on with French; I said most of
the architectural magazines were in German. I had just as much trouble
with German. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- Where did you go to college?
-
FYFE
- I went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, because my father had
read an article in Harper's magazine about
the college. Arthur Morgan was the newly appointed president. He was a
civil engineer. He created a program where you went to school part-time
and then spent time out in the world in a job somewhere. The co-op work
was not just to earn money; it was to get away from the ivory tower
aspect of schooling.
-
VALENTINE
- It was for your education.
-
FYFE
- It was great. I think Arthur Morgan was a tremendous person. He
influenced my life more than anybody else outside of my family.
-
VALENTINE
- Really? How?
-
FYFE
- Just by being the person that he was. By reading things he wrote. I
didn't have too much personal contact with him, but I had some. His
engineering specialty was large-scale drainage and flood control. He
didn't just devise a means for controlling water; he worked for and with
the whole community, even into the educational system around the
community. He had a holistic attitude about everything and devised the
college experience-- I can't think of the word, the word escapes
me--symmetry, developing the symmetrical person. At Antioch we had days
when we all turned out and worked to clean up the campus. The first year
my off-campus job was in the city of Dayton, Ohio, working as a common
laborer on an office building seven stories high. In those days, that
was a skyscraper. I remember working right alongside day laborers,
mostly black, who were supporting a family on the same salary that I was
getting. I was getting the same salary as they were, and I could hardly
make ends meet for myself. It was a pretty illuminating experience. The
second year, I had a job in an architect's office in Chicago.
-
VALENTINE
- What firm was that?
-
FYFE
- Well, David Adler and Robert Work had a partnership-- Eventually David
Adler withdrew, and Robert Work started an office with another architect
whose name I can't remember, but they were still doing large homes.
-
VALENTINE
- Russell Walcott?
-
FYFE
- Yes. Right. Russell Walcott. There were two Walcott brothers, but this
was Russell. I went to work there.
-
VALENTINE
- Back up for a second. You had worked in David Adler's office between
high school and college as a gofer, is that right? I'm a little confused
about the sequence.
-
FYFE
- That was when I was still in high school before Antioch. I got an
off-campus job when I was at Antioch with Russell Walcott and Robert
Work.
-
VALENTINE
- Okay.
-
FYFE
- While I was there Paul Schweikher came back. He'd gone to Yale
[University] and won a scholarship to travel in Italy, and came back to
Chicago. He came into that office. Paul wanted to do more modern work,
so pretty soon he got a position as designer for Paul Maher. Paul Maher
was the son of George Maher. George Maher was operating at the same time
Mr. Wright was. Paul Maher--that doesn't sound quite right.
-
VALENTINE
- Phillip [B.] Maher.
-
FYFE
- Phillip Maher. Sure. Phillip Maher did many buildings along the near
North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. There were about a dozen buildings.
They were always, like David Adler's, well proportioned and beautifully
designed. Very gracious buildings. But this time he wanted to do a
"modern" apartment building just off of Michigan Avenue on the Near
North side, and he wanted Paul Schweikher to do the design for it. Paul
asked me to come over there and work in that office. They had about
eight draftsmen, so I spent some time over there.
-
VALENTINE
- How old was Paul Schweikher then? Wasn't he pretty young to be chief
designer?
-
FYFE
- He must have been in his late twenties. Paul was an interesting guy. He
came from Denver [Colorado] without a penny to his name, and he had a
wonderful wife, Dorothy Schweikher. She was a medical technician, and
she kept them afloat while he was getting his start. I remember he used
to walk to the office and have an orange and a glass of milk for
breakfast. He was a self-made man. He achieved a great deal. He went on
to be head of the architecture department at Yale University. I don't
think that was a happy experience for either of them. He ended up at
Carnegie [Institute of Technology].
-
VALENTINE
- So you were working as a draftsman in that office?
-
FYFE
- Yes. Well, then I went to work in Phillip Maher's office.
-
VALENTINE
- As a draftsman?
-
FYFE
- Oh, yes.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, you're moving up from gofer to draftsman.
-
FYFE
- Yes. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- Did you know you wanted to be an architect at that point?
-
FYFE
- Sure.
-
VALENTINE
- When did you make that decision?
-
FYFE
- Well, when I was at Antioch, the first job that they assigned-- I didn't
know if I wanted to go into very fine printing or be an architect, and
they sent me over to be interviewed at a little firm that did
beautifully printed books. They handed me a book at the interview and
asked me to look at it. I started from back to front, and they knew
right away I didn't know anything about books. So for the next co-op job
they sent me over to Dayton, Ohio, to be working with McCall's magazine. I started there one day
when coming back from Europe was the Antioch student--their former co-op
student--who'd been with McCall's for
several years. So they wanted him instead of me. That ended my printing
career, and I went to be a day laborer in building construction. Special
courses were created for me at Antioch--very conservative: I made some
beautiful drawings of the Greek and Roman orders, and you know that
trip. At the end of two years, I got permission to go to the graduate
school at Yale University. They accepted two of us that were not
graduate students.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 22, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- You went from Antioch [College] straight into graduate school at Yale
University without a degree from Antioch.
-
FYFE
- Yes, and how did that happen? Well, my adviser at Antioch was a graduate
of Yale University and he knew the campus minister there. He wrote him a
letter, and I just made application, and I guess my record was enough. I
was told later that they were sort of interested to see what somebody
coming out of Antioch would be like. Anyway, I got in. And because of my
experience drafting in an architect's office, I was able to make pretty
good drawings right away.
-
VALENTINE
- What made you choose Yale?
-
FYFE
- At that time, it was still a [École de] Beaux-Arts system, and they were
tops in this country. They won more prizes than any of the other
schools. I think that probably was partially it, and of course I knew
Paul Schweikher had gone there. At the end of my sophomore year I saw a
notice on the board that Mr. [Frank Lloyd] Wright was starting his
school at Taliesin, so at summertime, Max Mason, who was in my class at
Yale, and I drove up to see Mr. Wright, and that's how I got introduced
to the Taliesin Fellowship.
-
VALENTINE
- Who was Max Mason?
-
FYFE
- He was the son of the former president of the University of Chicago, Max
Mason. At the time, his father was the head of the Rockefeller
Foundation in New York. Maybe this isn't the tale you wanted in the
story here, but Max and I came back from Spring Green [Wisconsin], and
he called his father to say that he wanted to go there. The first
question his father asked him was, "What kind of degree will you get?"
[laughter] So you can understand that he went back to Yale and, later, I
went to Spring Green.
-
VALENTINE
- So you decided not to finish at Yale?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- You didn't get a degree there either?
-
FYFE
- Oh, no. I never had a degree--not sorry about it.
-
VALENTINE
- What was your first impression when you went up to Taliesin? Did you
meet the Wrights?
-
FYFE
- Yes, I think that comes in our next interview. Maybe I should go back to
Oak Park [Illinois] and the houses that I knew there.
-
VALENTINE
- Okay.
-
FYFE
- I very much-- I've got them in chronological order here. Mr. Wright's
own house and studio [Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio] I knew, of
course, very well. One time the Art Institute [of Chicago] held classes
in Wright's studio. It was standing empty and they rented it, and I took
art classes in that studio. I knew the [William H.] Winslow House very
well out in River Forest, and the [Chauncey L.] Williams House in River
Forest is the one that has some stone around the front entrance. One
time Mr. Wright was looking through some pictures and saw that and said,
"I tried it, but I'd never do it again." The [Nathan G.] Moore House--I
knew it before the fire in 1922, and I just loved it after the fire when
Mr. Wright came back and had an opportunity to redo it. I think it's an
absolutely stunning display.
-
VALENTINE
- Had you been inside his houses?
-
FYFE
- Well, I'd been inside the Moore House just visiting or going on an
errand, so I remember being received in the study, where there was this
high, narrow window kind of reminiscent of the ones in Unity Temple with
the art glass in them. Another house that I'd been inside was the [Frank
W.] Thomas House, which he did back in 1901. And there I missed the
front entrance; I went up some stairs, not the front entrance. Again, I
was just going on an errand. The [George W.] Smith House, I told you a
little while ago, is the house on Home Avenue in Oak Park, a very early
house of Mr. Wright's. As a youngster I just knew that it was different,
but I didn't know anything about Mr. Wright.
-
VALENTINE
- That was the one near your grandparents' house?
-
FYFE
- Right across the street from my grandparents' house, where I frequently
visited. The [Edward R.] Hills House was for Moore's daughter [Mary
Moore Hills], and that house was an attractive one. It recently burned
down. The Moore House burned and was redone; the Hills House more
recently burned and was redone meticulously to its previous state. It's
in beautiful condition right now. Then the two Martin houses [the
William E. Martin House and the William G. Fricke House, sometimes
referred to as the Emma Martin House] I knew very well from the
newspaper days. The [Arthur and Grace] Heurtley House eventually Jane
Porter purchased. The Porters [Jane Wright and Andrew T.] purchased
that, so I was in and out of that a good bit. A very good friend of
mine, years later-- It was made into two apartments, and the [Marshal]
Jackson family lived there, and I visited them a lot. Unity Temple, we
talked about. The [Mrs. Thomas H.] Gale House on Elizabeth Court--I just
loved that little house.
-
VALENTINE
- That's a nice one.
-
FYFE
- Yes. It's badly in need of repair, but I think somebody's taking it over
now.
-
VALENTINE
- That's what I'd heard.
-
FYFE
- Yes. The [Edwin H.] Cheney House is, I think, one of the nicest houses
that Mr. Wright did all on one story. There's a house that's called the
[Harry C.] Goodrich House that's two doors north of the Cheney House.
The time I knew it, a member of the Unity [Temple] church, Judge Holden,
lived there. More than once I've seen Mr. Wright talking to people about
the Cheney House in photographs, and you could see the Goodrich House in
the background. He never mentions that he also did this two-story
house.
-
VALENTINE
- Why?
-
FYFE
- He's very proud of the Cheney House, which is all on one floor, you
know, and the whole character design there is so much different. The
difference is the Cheney House was seven years after the Goodrich House,
and Goodrich is more typical of the community. I love the [Peter A.]
Beachy House, which also caught fire recently and is being nicely
redone. It's a more heavy-handed design. I've read that [Walter Burley]
Griffin is probably responsible for that, but I'll bet you [Marion]
Mahony [Griffin] was more responsible than he. She also was supposed to
be responsible for the [Frank Wright] Thomas House, which has all the
living quarters up high, almost second-floor level for most of the
houses around there.
-
VALENTINE
- What do you mean by responsible?
-
FYFE
- Well, I don't remember where I picked up, but somewhere I did, that she
was working on the project and made the suggestion. It's the first--
Yes. It was a year ahead of the Heurtley House. The Heurtley House has
all of the living quarters on the upper level, but it also has a lot of
living spaces on the first floor, the ground floor. The Thomas House is
almost entirely up on one level. The [Frederick C.] Robie House I knew
in Chicago, and I've been inside of that several times. It just narrowly
missed being torn down. They were going to put a women's dormitory
there; a friend of mine was to design the women's dormitory, but they
finally did save it, and thank goodness for that.
-
VALENTINE
- That's a wonderful house.
-
FYFE
- The [Avery] Coonley [House, Riverside, Illinois] I just loved.
Especially I was taken so much by--because I've never been inside--those
tile and incisions that are in plaster. I can't think of the word I
want. The Isabel Roberts House [River Forest, Illinois] I knew very
well.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you know Isabel Roberts?
-
FYFE
- No, I didn't; just knew the house.
-
VALENTINE
- She worked in Wright's office, in his studio in Oak Park.
-
FYFE
- Yes, she did. I could easily believe that Mr. Wright was trying to outdo
himself to design that house. He liked it so well he repeated it two or
three times afterwards. Then he did one for [Oscar B.] Balch, Grace
Pebbles's husband. [He] was an interior decorator, and Mr. Wright did
that shop for him on Lake Street. I never liked the house. And finally,
the [Harry S.] Adams House, which was right at the end of Euclid Avenue.
I used to live on Euclid Avenue. Euclid Avenue bumped into the Adams
House and then jogged around it. That was the last one he did in Oak
Park--1913. It was sort of a rerun of all the things he had done before.
In total, there were twenty-seven houses in Oak Park and River Forest
that I came to know, and the Robie House in Chicago, and the Coonley
House in Riverside. So by the time I got to Taliesin I was pretty
familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
-
VALENTINE
- It was just another house to you. [laughter] I love that.
-
FYFE
- When we have our next conference I'll show you a picture of my room
there right next to the bell, so when it rang in the morning--
-
VALENTINE
- You were awake for breakfast. Well, why don't we stop there for now, and
we'll pick up on your arrival at Taliesin next time.
-
FYFE
- I think I'd like to tell you just a little bit more about the Unity
Temple restoration.
-
VALENTINE
- Good.
-
FYFE
- There was a young man in Perkins and Will's office by the name of John
Michaels. He came lately to his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright; it began
with Lake Street at Scoville Park. There was a fountain there that the
sculptor [Richard] Bock had designed and brought to Mr. Wright for his
criticism. Mr. Wright poked a pencil through the drawing and said,
"There should be a hole there." Now there is a hole there. Mr. Wright
has taken credit for designing the fountain [Scoville Park Fountain, Oak
Park]. It is an interesting fountain, with curious sculptures around it.
Human beings had bubblers up above, and then the water drained down into
little pockets for dogs, and from there it went to bigger pockets for
the horses. It was done at the time when there were a lot of horses that
went by on that street. It was falling into disrepair and was going to
be abandoned when John Michaels took an interest in it. He very
carefully took--I forget what you call it--but of all the sculptures and
formed--
-
VALENTINE
- Impressions?
-
FYFE
- Yes, impressions of them. And eventually it was moved a half a block
down to the corner of Oak Park Avenue and Lake Street. He used to bring
it into my office and we'd kind of talk together about how to work a
little park there. So he literally, single-handedly, saved a bit of Oak
Park Wrightiana. In my view, it really was a Bock. That got him
interested in Mr. Wright. John and his wife began going to Unity
[Temple] church, and that got him interested in Unity Temple, and
single-handedly, against great, great pressures, he got people moving
towards the restoration of the temple, for it was falling apart. For
many, many years, he was the guiding force in getting the [Unity Temple
Restoration] Foundation started and organized and the work to go ahead.
He died sort of midstream of it, but I doubt-- The [temple] would have
been in great disrepair if he hadn't got things started.
-
VALENTINE
- He got the congregation to undertake that?
-
FYFE
- Oh, yes. He had to get the congregation moving on it, and funds. It's
terribly expensive. One of the first things he did was to take all of
those front doors, which are oak with art glass panels, and have them
remade.
-
VALENTINE
- They organized a foundation to do that, but where did the money come
from? Did the congregation organize it, or did it come from Wright
supporters outside?
-
FYFE
- The foundation is raising funds separate from the church, and about five
years ago there was quite a schism developing when the church thought
that they weren't-- And you could see there was a delicate situation
there. When the foundation would do something, were they doing it for
the church or were they doing it for the preservation of the building?
They finally worked their differences through and now they have a very
good working relationship. One of the things that I hope they'll get
around to doing is air-conditioning the building. Now, is that for
preservation or is that for the church? And it would be very costly. The
heating system initially was designed for hot air, and it just didn't
work. So immediately they switched over to steam, which bangs around the
place in a terrible way. And those radiators just are an eyesore. So I
hope eventually they'll be able to air-condition.
-
VALENTINE
- Preservation is always a tricky thing with an ongoing institution like
Taliesin itself. People are still living there, and you can't freeze it
in time. What point do you take it back to? Or do you let it grow
organically, or what do you do?
-
FYFE
- In the case of Unity Temple, fortunately, it's always been a church. But
in the case of Wright's house and studio [Frank Lloyd Wright Home and
Studio], they had a terrible time deciding what they'd take it back
to.
-
VALENTINE
- Because he was always changing it.
-
FYFE
- Sure he was. Yes indeed he was. And maybe you've seen this magazine
called Fine Homebuilding, I think it is.
They had an essay showing how they had to redo the foundations on the
studio. And the Herbert Jacobs House in Madison [Wisconsin]--incredible
work to restore that.
-
VALENTINE
- In Madison?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes, yes, they did an incredible amount of work on that.
-
FYFE
- Right. So just amplifying what you said, restoration work is very, very
costly.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- We recently went through a period of fear that the overhangs on Unity
Temple were falling down. And supposedly the best engineers in Chicago
for this kind of work recommended that they all be torn off and
replaced. So we finally got some peer reviews from WASA [Wank Adams
Slavin Associates] in New York that did Fallingwater [Liliane S. and
Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Mill Run, Pennsylvania]. And they were the
first people that came on and said, "That's probably too excessive," and
suggested other avenues. And in the course of the next two, three years
we did more research but with different engineers. They don't have to be
taken off; they're in good condition.
-
VALENTINE
- What is your role in the foundation?
-
FYFE
- Well, I-- What was I called from the beginning? "Consultant." The
foundation is basically now more organized and recognized as responsible
for expending all funds that come in for restoring the building, which
includes taking paint samples. They do now have it back to painted the
colors it was originally. And they repaired-- One of the most difficult
things is to keep-- Well, I'm going all over the board here. The kind of
pebble aggregate on the outside on the cement is unique. It was
something Mr. Wright dreamed up and had done. At one point it was all
plastered over, and the plaster had to be taken off and the finish
restored with Gunite--close to what was there originally. Incidentally,
when I was a kid the building was covered with vines. And they had to be
taken off. I heard Mr. Wright more than once say, "Doctors can bury
their mistakes but all architects can do is cover their buildings with
vines." [laughter] I never had the courage to ask him if he meant Unity
Temple. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- I think he'd be very proud of that one.
-
FYFE
- It's getting to be in a condition that now he might be more proud of it.
The last thing I heard before I resigned was that they're finding some
of these Gunite exterior parts are delaminating around the base. If
that's true, again we're into tremendous costs. I really didn't carry my
weight on the restoration work because I live so far away. It was very
difficult for me to attend meetings, but I tried to keep track of what
was happening, and if something came up that seemed to me particularly
important then I'd try to get in to Oak Park or Chicago for the
meetings. When they thought they were going to tear off all of those
overhangs, I attended regularly.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, I'm sure you carry a great deal of weight with your name attached
to that cause.
-
FYFE
- Oh, no.
-
VALENTINE
- It gives it credibility.
-
FYFE
- About the one sterling thing I did was when some of the members of the
foundation thought that-- Between the lobby and [Unity] House [the
parish house portion of Unity Temple] there's this great big piece of
plate glass. You could look in. And they thought that had been a later
addition, and I said, "Well, it was probably there in 1915." They
decided that that was part of the original building.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- We used to play hide-and-go-seek in the church. I don't know how
familiar you are with the plan, but you could be in the gallery and
squeak and the person that was "it" would try to catch you. There were
about twenty different ways you could get out of there, go down
different stairways. It's a marvelous building.
-
VALENTINE
- It is. How much more is there to do on the restoration?
-
FYFE
- It will go on forever. But cosmetically, right now it's in pretty good
condition, and by that I mean very close to its original condition.
They've instituted some night lighting, so that helps for public
relations. They've never been able to get funds from foundations like
they could for the [Frank Lloyd Wright] Home and Studio. The greatest
impediment to that is that foundations don't like to give money to a
church.
-
VALENTINE
- Right.
-
FYFE
- One of the great things about Unity Temple is that it functions so well
for a church.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- I want to take you back to Yale University and the notice on the
bulletin board about the opening at Frank Lloyd Wright's school at
Taliesin.
-
FYFE
- Well, it was the first I learned of it. At this time I ought to get into
the record that this is sixty years ago--that's more than a half a
century. And one of the things that bothers me about this interview is
that I can remember just little vignettes and incidents without
corroborating experience to put them in the right time and place. I just
know that there was a notice on the bulletin board, and it's one of
these things issued from Taliesin in that rose-colored type of
reproduction that they had. I forget what it's called. And it struck an
interested chord in me, and also Max Mason, who was a student in our
class at Yale.
-
VALENTINE
- Do you remember what the notice said that intrigued you so much?
-
FYFE
- No. I didn't do as much research as I should for this. Probably I could
find it, maybe in the Oak Park Library. I think I had a copy and gave it
to the Oak Park Library.
-
VALENTINE
- We can find it.
-
FYFE
- I don't remember what it said. Anyway, we had an interview with Mr.
Wright, and I cannot remember where it was or what really took place,
except fixed in my memory [is that] as we walked across what he called
the hilltop garden he waved his cane in one direction, "And that's where
the golf course is going to be," and waved it in a little different
direction, "And that's where the tennis courts are going to be." So that
leaves the impression in my mind of the kind of schooling that was in
his mind at the time. This must have been in June 1932, about. And since
then I've learned that in 1931 he began writing to H. Th. Wijdeveld, in
Germany I believe, and he was calling it the Chicago Allied Arts and
Industries School. He thought that maybe Wijdeveld could be the
director, and Mr. Wright would be the chairman. That was on April 6,
1931. By the thirteenth, he was writing another letter, two pages long,
and he was calling it the School of Architecture, the Taliesin
Fellowship. But he still wanted Mr. Wijdeveld to be the director. By
September 5, a one-page letter invites him to come and see the
fellowship in Spring Green [Wisconsin]. A few days later he sent a
telegram to come after October 10. An undated letter follows that,
telling him that the school was being formed: he would still like him to
come as director, but the national economy in the United States was very
poor, and things were kind of rough. That was followed by a telegram on
January 1, 1932, just sending him New Year's greetings. But in February
of '32 he sent another two-page letter kind of backing out of asking him
to come as a director, and he gave his reasons for that; it basically
had to do with the economy--not being able to afford it.
-
VALENTINE
- Who was Wijdeveld?
-
FYFE
- I believe he was a publisher in Germany. I don't know the answer to your
question.
-
VALENTINE
- I just wondered who Wright considered qualified to head his school.
-
FYFE
- Maybe he was an architect. It shows to me how Mr. Wright began his
thinking about a school there. And of course he knew about the [Arts
and] Crafts movement and the idea of designing and then selling their
designs to industry for production, and saw that as a possible income
source.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, there was a strong movement about that in Germany at that
time.
-
FYFE
- Yes, there was. The name escapes me that was the famous one.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, there was the Bauhaus at Weimar [Germany].
-
FYFE
- Oh, exactly.
-
VALENTINE
- The Wiener Werkstaette before that.
-
FYFE
- And Mr. Wright would never admit that that was in the back of his mind,
but I'm sure he was acquainted with it. Well, anyway, we went back to
Oak Park [Illinois], and I told my folks that I'd like to go there. They
were entirely agreeable to it. Max called his father [Max Mason] on the
telephone in New York, and the first question his father asked him [was]
"What degree will you get?" So you can deduce from that that Max went
back to Yale and never came up to the fellowship.
-
VALENTINE
- Did he become an architect?
-
FYFE
- Yes, I think he did, out in California. I kind of lost touch with him. I
still have a watercolor that he made while we were on our trip to Spring
Green of some barns and the hills of Wisconsin. So I then contacted Mr.
Wright to see if I couldn't come up and help get the school ready for
opening in October.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you apply as a student, also, and then offer to come early to help
prepare the school?
-
FYFE
- Yes. So I landed there soon after Edgar Tafel had arrived. [William]
Wesley Peters was there and Yen Liang was there. At mealtime it was like
an old medieval board, with the king and queen at one end of the table,
and then in descending order, the people who had been there the
longest-- Being the last one in, I was at the very tail end.
-
VALENTINE
- Not for long.
-
FYFE
- Not for very long. Right next to Edgar Tafel, I got all kinds of amusing
things as asides, and I'm the only one that would hear them.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, I'm sure. Now, who else was there when you got there besides Wes
Peters and Edgar Tafel?
-
FYFE
- Oh, Sam [Samuel] Ratensky, Rudolf Mock, and Jimmy [James] Drought were
there. Bob [Robert] Goodall, Karl Jensen, Henry and Else Klumb, Yen
Liang, of course Svetlana [Wright] and Iovanna [Wright], and I think
that's it. I was at the far end of the table and behind me was a screen,
and on the other side of the screen, the workers. At that time Mr.
Wright still had workers working for him. They were getting fed in the
next room. We didn't throw our food off to the dogs behind us, but it
had very much a medieval aspect about it. Where was I?
-
VALENTINE
- About the hierarchy of sitting at the table.
-
FYFE
- Yes. At first I was put up in the Taliesin house in the guest room for a
week or ten days, I guess, which was a beautiful room--beautiful
outlook. And I remember a lovely hide: I don't know if it was cowhide or
horse--horsehide, probably--which was draped over the foot of the bed.
After that I had a room for a while downstairs in the lower level of
Taliesin, I guess, until some of the dormitory rooms became available.
Eventually, there was an influx of-- There was never all of a sudden
several people arriving at one time. They just sort of filtered in. Next
I had a room in the tower that surrounded the water tower. That was at
the top of the hill between the kitchen and dining room overlooking the
inner courtyard. It was a beautiful room with windows on three sides
right next to the bell, so when it rang at six or six thirty or whenever
it rang, it just about knocked me out of bed. I stayed there for, I
suppose, a year or so. Eventually I moved over to Hillside [Home School]
before Hillside [Taliesin Fellowship Complex] was prepared, but we fixed
up a room in some of the old classrooms on the wing that goes from the
assembly room out to the theater [Hillside Playhouse]. And I lived there
for a while, even during the winter. We had no heat; we had just a
little metal space heater.
-
VALENTINE
- It gets cold there.
-
FYFE
- It did. It does get cold there. We learned eventually how to stoke a
fire at night with oak. We had a lot of oak available and slabs left
over from getting oak to build with. We learned to build a fire that
would still have coals in the morning so we could get it started up
easily. No running water: I remember we'd get a big cup of hot water
from the kitchens and use that for shaving.
-
VALENTINE
- How were the rooms assigned?
-
FYFE
- That's a good question, but I don't know the answer.
-
VALENTINE
- Who told you that would be your room?
-
FYFE
- I have a suspicion it was just kind of squatter's rights. Yen Liang had
a room in the tower; so did Bill [William Adare] Bernoudy. There were
three rooms in the tower. They were the nicest rooms around. I don't
remember the answer to your question. It's a good question. There's
evidence of the lack of structure: there were never any classes or
prescribed work to be done. I found myself doing things that I probably
would have been doing if I were back at Yale. I made charcoal drawings
of both Jack [John H.] Howe and Wes Peters. I did watercolors. The oak
tree in the middle of the council circle turned a beautiful, beautiful
red-orange color, and I tried to capture that in watercolors.
-
VALENTINE
- You just did this on your own?
-
FYFE
- Just did it on my own. I tried to study a textbook on the strength of
materials. That didn't get very far.
-
VALENTINE
- Were other people doing their own thing too to further their education,
or was there any kind of structure at all?
-
FYFE
- Very, very little structure. I can't tell you really too much about what
other people were doing. I made a list of the kind of activities that
did go on.
-
VALENTINE
- Is this what you expected it to be, or did you expect to have
classes?
-
FYFE
- I tried to illustrate what I brought to the situation from my past.
Nobody else did watercolors; nobody else did charcoal drawings; nobody
else studied textbooks.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you end up teaching anyone else to do it?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- Did anyone teach you while you were there?
-
FYFE
- No. Mr. Wright eventually would try to give a talk-- I guess we won't
call it a lecture--maybe once a week. His heart wasn't in it. [laughter]
And pretty soon it just became a rehash of what we'd heard before. The
way to learn anything from Mr. Wright was just to happen to be around
when the creative spirit was going in him. I did tell you that quite by
accident I happened to be in the studio when he came out and sat down at
somebody else's drawing board. On a topographical map, he did the new
[Malcolm E. and Nancy] Willey [House] in [Minneapolis] Minnesota. Before
he put pencil to paper Mr. Wright had the building clearly in his mind.
The whole house. And he couldn't get it out in pencil. He couldn't get
it out fast enough. The rest of us would design--we'd make a plan, we'd
make some sections, we'd make elevations, and then we tried to get them
all to fit together. The only other person I know who had this ability
to see in three dimensions before he started drawing was Eero Saarinen.
He was at Yale when I was there, and when we were doing a project, he
inevitably started with either a perspective or an isometric and then
worked out from that. Mr. Wright was doing this on a plan--topographical
plan--but up in the edges he'd put a little detail here or a sketch
there. When he got all through, my best guess is that it might have
taken the better part of the hour, maybe more. He used that
phrase--you've seen it in print lots of times--that he just shakes it
out of his sleeves. But he was pleased with what he'd done.
-
VALENTINE
- Did he make any changes after that, or was that pretty much it?
-
FYFE
- That was very much it. I can't tell you how the drawings got made or who
was assigned to do them, but it did eventually--
-
VALENTINE
- Did you work on any of the drawings?
-
FYFE
- Not on that house, no. My own drafting-- I did some for Alden Dow. He
brought three or four houses in to do for Midland, Michigan. I helped
draft on those.
-
VALENTINE
- How long would Wright spend thinking about an idea before he was able to
draw it--shake it out of his sleeve?
-
FYFE
- I have no real knowledge, but it's common knowledge, I think, that these
things would germinate in his mind until he had it all clear. Have you
seen his initial sketch for Fallingwater [Liliane S. and Edgar J.
Kaufmann House, Mill Run, Pennsylvania]? It's a very small and simple
sketch.
-
VALENTINE
- But it's all there.
-
FYFE
- Exactly. Yes, indeed. Something I can't reconcile with a little bit of
the literature that I've seen-- When Florida [Southern College,
Lakeland, Florida] came, I thought it came to Mr. Wright while I was
still there--that Mr. Wright just put it on a back burner in his mind,
just started thinking about it. But nothing I've ever read indicated
that it came in 1934. See, I left in 1934, but I still have the belief
that he had started thinking about it then.
-
VALENTINE
- Let me ask you before we leave the subject about having Saarinen at
Yale, what the differences were between working with Eero Saarinen and
working with Frank Lloyd Wright.
-
FYFE
- Well, you understand that Saarinen was a student. We were in the last
vestiges of the--oh, I can't think of the name of it--kind of training
based on the system in France [École de Beaux-Arts]. So there are a lot
of French words. You go en loge for a day: you're handed a program, and
you have to devise a solution for it in one day. Depending upon the
complexity of the program, you might have that "project" to work out in
maybe three weeks or three months, depending on how complex it was.
Where we saw Eero operating, because he skipped freshman year and just
popped right into the sophomore class, was en loge. As I said
before--and I still have to do it--I have to work from a plan and
sections. Of course, they imply elevations, but it's still a grinding
out of all these details. I forget what the question was, but did I
answer it? [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- Yes, I think so. I think we're starting to digress a little bit. Getting
back to when you first arrived at Taliesin and how Wright prepared for
the school, what were your goals? What did you want to accomplish in the
time that you spent there?
-
FYFE
- I arrived without finding any sense of a formalized school, as I tried
to indicate, and rather quickly fell into just extemporizing daily on my
own. Or sometimes we'd be sent out to do other things. I started to run
down a list of activities that were included. Gardening was one--that
came more or less later; gathering wood, and I can remember going out
with a team and wagon. Mr. Wright had purchased oak forests to be sawn
up into wood for building. The large logs would be brought to Hillside,
where they had a big sawmill. It developed a huge dune of sawdust. But
when we went out for wood, it was for the smaller limbs for burning.
Taliesin itself had thirteen or fourteen fireplaces and three or four
boilers, and they were all being stoked with wood--oak, which was very
good firewood. And the quarrying stone you've surely read about. There
were two quarries. One was limestone, the other was sandstone: sandstone
for Hillside and limestone for Taliesin.
-
VALENTINE
- How did you learn to do that? Who showed you?
-
FYFE
- You just were given chisels and hand sledges. You didn't have to be
taught that. You just did it. Some of the limestone was burned in a huge
kiln in the side of a hill--I guess it was six to eight feet
high--stoked with oak branches. We burned the limestone so that it could
be slaked for plaster and stucco. We got sand from the Wisconsin River.
There was a certain amount of carpentry going on by the apprentices, and
that was difficult because the wood wasn't really cured. I remember I
was trying to make a built-in table one time at Hillside, and Mr. Wright
came by and indicated he didn't think I was going to be a very good
carpenter. But with that kind of wood it was very difficult. I was an
apprentice to a plumber for a while. Again, I can visualize this very
distinctly, but I can't remember where we were doing it. I can visualize
the plumber himself. I learned how to cut threads in pipe and make the
connections, but I don't know if it was Hillside or the basement of
Taliesin. This bothers me not to be able to give very complete details.
We did masonry, of course, working with the stone. I was one of the
first persons to do the projections of movies every Saturday and Sunday.
We had movies to show in the theater; eventually two of us did that.
There was a certain amount of drafting going on. Bob Goodall was doing a
beautiful set of drawings for changing the old Queen Anne house that Mr.
Wright had early on done for his two aunts [Jane and Nell Lloyd Jones]
for their Hillside Home School. Mary Ellen Chase wrote a book called
A Goodly Fellowship, which has a
beautiful story about the school ["The Hillside Home School"]. She
eventually taught at Smith College, I believe, and she came out to teach
in the sisters' school. She describes her two or three years--
-
VALENTINE
- Oh yes, I remember.
-
FYFE
- Anyway, Bob was making a wonderful set of drawings, and I just loved the
way it was shaping up. Building had already begun on the remodeling. And
I think after I left, Mr. Wright had it torn down, much to my anguish
because I was liking-- I think, as I told you, it recalled the kind of
architecture I had grown up with and known in Oak Park. I think I
resonated to that. Mr. Wright would take pleasure in messing up Bob's
drawings.
-
VALENTINE
- Pleasure?
-
FYFE
- Well, yes. He would sort of systematically do it. So finally Bob had two
sets of drawings: when Mr. Wright came around he pulled out a particular
set, and when he wasn't around he worked on the ones he really wanted to
keep neat and fine. I think what Mr. Wright was trying to demonstrate
was that architecture was something more than just a drawing. It's the
only thing-- I think that's the best light I can put on it. Also, Bob,
on his drafting table, had an old cardboard box of English Oval
cigarettes. Now, they were really fancy cigarettes. Mr. Wright would
come and, oh, he's going to have one of those, and he'd open it up. All
Bob did was keep his cigarette ashes in it. It took Mr. Wright two or
three times before he stopped biting on nothing. [laughter] There was
kitchen duty. I never got involved in that, but lots of kitchen duty
showed up eventually. And farming-- I at one time had to do shearing the
sheep. And another time-- I know I worked with the horses because there
are photographs of me sitting up on an old carriage in a Prince Albert
coat and a top hat. How I got a Prince Albert coat and a top hat up in
Spring Green, I don't know. Possibly I brought them from Oak Park.
Anyway, I was driving the horses. When we went out to the woods for
cutting up wood, I drove a team of horses out for that. I can remember
coming back once driving into the wind, and we were just frozen. This
was winter work. It was cold. A very strong wind made it terrible. I
can't remember where the horses were stalled. I can't remember taking
care of them. I just know that I did a lot of work with the horses. One
time I was returning from Hillside to Taliesin and there on the side of
the hill, halfway up before Tanyderi [Andrew T. Porter House], there was
a dead horse. It was there a couple of days, and nobody's doing anything
about it. So I just undertook to dig a hole and bury it. So much for
farming.
-
VALENTINE
- Who made these assignments for farming or horse care or kitchen
duty?
-
FYFE
- *[Assignments were regularly made to individuals to present a formal
introduction of the Sunday afternoon public showing of the movie of the
week, and from time to time apprentices were asked to write for "At
Taliesin," a column appearing in the local newspapers.] There were
sporadic attempts to have a person in charge who would make some of the
assignments.
-
VALENTINE
- Is that the "boss system"? The "supervisor of the fortnight"?
-
FYFE
- Pardon me?
-
VALENTINE
- The boss system that's been described?
-
FYFE
- Well, somebody would be responsible for sending us out to different
jobs, depending on what was needing to be done or what the current
emergency was. We were very often just leaping from emergency to
emergency--pushing the truck and stuff like that. After I left, I
understand that that system was more regularized and operated much
better. I think the person, the leader--I don't know what they were
called--would be appointed for a two-week stint. Probably it even
included taking care of the services at the chapel on Sunday, things of
that sort, as well as duties and work around the house. I'm just about
to the bottom of my list here. At one point Mr. Wright called me: I was
called into the house. I forget whether Mrs. [Olgivanna Milanoff] Wright
was there or not, but Mr. Wright brought out a book called The Book of Tea by [Kakuzo Okakura]. Do you
know that little book? Beautiful book.
-
VALENTINE
- Uh-huh.
-
FYFE
- There's a chapter on making tea. So he used that as a springboard to
suggest that I-- And maybe there was somebody else involved, because I
think immediately two of us were responsible for making tea and serving
it in the council ring.
-
VALENTINE
- So that was the beginning of the tea.
-
FYFE
- That was the beginning of the tea, yes.
-
VALENTINE
- They still have teatime at Taliesin.
-
FYFE
- They still have--
-
VALENTINE
- Yes, they do. It's very important.
-
FYFE
- Yes, it comes at maybe four o'clock. It comes at the close of a really
hard workday, and it's an interval of contemplation--anyway, a change of
pace. It was a great idea. But The Book of Tea told about watching how
the bubbles come, so for a few days we were trying to make it according
to The Book of Tea prescription. That didn't last very long.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, it makes an architectural experience.
-
FYFE
- Yes. And it introduced us to the book. I have given at least a dozen
books to friends who loved it. So that's a rundown on the kind of
activities I can remember.
-
VALENTINE
- What was a typical day like? How regulated was it?
-
FYFE
- Well, the most regular thing was the morning bell.
-
VALENTINE
- Which you heard first.
-
FYFE
- I don't know whether it was six o'clock or six thirty, and then
breakfast would be served for a while. That largely was half a dozen
different cold cereals that you could choose from and dried
fruit--apricots, peaches, and prunes--and the milk was from our own
dairy herd, although I never got involved with the dairy herd. After
that, people kind of filtered back to the [Hillside Drafting] Studio. If
it was a cold day, there'd be somebody to build a fire there, and we'd
stand around warming up to that. In the studio-- Behind the drafting
studio was a workshop where Manuel Sandoval had started a model of San
Marcos in the Desert. Beautiful model, just extremely beautiful, and
very detailed. Lots of work went into that--people helping him making
parts that could go into that model. I don't have a very clear picture
of a typical day. I know that a group of us responded when the weather
was right--it would be after the winter, of course--to gardening. I
think many of the people who came to Taliesin came because of Mr. Wright
and Mr. Wright's architecture. They would invariably want to be
associated with the studio and the work in the studio and looked down on
some of us who were working out in the gardens. But this is a little bit
off the track of what we've been talking about. Finis Farr, in his story
about Mr. Wright, pointed out--and I think it's true--Mr. Wright was
eager to have the apprentices-- Before they could do, they had to be
somebody. So Mr. Wright was anxious that we were whole persons, and
good, whole persons would produce good, whole architecture. You probably
read about it: we used to sing frequently, to the tune of "Jesu, Joy of
Man's Desiring," "Joy in work is man's desiring." We could sing it well.
I don't think many of the apprentices really took it to heart because
implicit in that is that any work is fine and is a good thing. Those of
us who were sort of the mainstay in the garden crew felt that this was
work that needed to be done for the community and were willing to take
it on and do it. At least I know I did. A thing happened to me that
might-- While I was there my favorite aunt [Elizabeth Beye] died, and
the only surcease that was open to me was to go out into the garden. I
remember crawling on my hands and knees in the friable dirt, and I was
going under squash plants: plants that produce great big leaves. The
stems came out of the ground about an inch in diameter, and then they
tapered up into a very small piece and spread out in huge leaves. On my
hands and knees I saw a whole new world--a vegetative world I think
somewhat indicative of how I was pleased to be working in the ground in
the farming end of it. Garnering wood took an awful lot of labor in
wintertime just to keep the fires going. Bill [William] Deknatel's
father had some kind of manufacturing business, and he was trying to
design-- What do you call these little things you put a cup of
coffee--?
-
VALENTINE
- Coaster?
-
FYFE
- Yes, coaster--a design that could be manufactured in great quantities
for sale. It was sort of a Mondrian type of design, and I don't think it
ever went anywhere, but he was active in that for some time. Fred
[Frederick] Langhorst got himself into sculpturing in stone, and he
spent a lot of time on that. Gerry [Geraldine E.] Deknatel was working
on the model. Again, I can't give you a very clear image of what a day
at Taliesin involved.
-
VALENTINE
- Did people more or less self-select to do these things they were
interested in, or were they encouraged or assigned?
-
FYFE
- I think there was a modicum of encouragement--very little assigning, and
that sort of left people to devise their own way of doing things.
-
VALENTINE
- Did they rotate the gardening and the household work or was it always
the same group?
-
FYFE
- Well, different people got assigned to the gardening. There were four or
five of us that were regulars in the garden. Another thing that seems to
me to have been part of the Wrights' plan as the years went by is this
sense of community. As I indicated a moment ago, most of the people were
there with a very individualistic attitude, wanting to know how to
design buildings and to learn this from Mr. Wright. This didn't foster
any real sense of interaction between people for developing community.
I've often wondered how much as the years went by, with the aid and help
of Mrs. Wright--who had been to [Georges] Gurdjieff's school [Institute
for the Harmonic Development of Man, Fontainebleau, France] or whatever
it was in Paris--he moved away from his initial sense of a school to
just apprenticeship: if he saw this as an object lesson for his
Broadacre City, the sense of community. Two of his books came out, I
think, during 1932 while I was still there: The
Disappearing City and his first autobiography [An Autobiography: Frank Lloyd Wright]. Then
The Disappearing City was revised and
enlarged, I think, later on. I don't have any way of knowing but I
rather suspect that he was beginning to see the fellowship of people as
a kind of a prototype or experimental unit for his Broadacre City.
Anyway, it became apparent to me that the school I envisioned when I
first came there--and obviously, as I tried to indicate before, was in
the back of Mr. Wright's mind when I first started--was not going to
eventuate.
-
VALENTINE
- When did you come to that realization? Or when did Wright come to that
realization?
-
FYFE
- Well, I don't think either of us could say yesterday we didn't and today
we did.
-
VALENTINE
- Early on?
-
FYFE
- You've heard about the Sunday evening sessions in that wonderful living
room; it's an absolutely marvelous room. Sophie [Breslau] was a singer
and a friend of Mrs. Wright's. She sang to us in that room, and you just
absorbed it through your pores. The music was all around you. In later
life, when I got into designing auditoriums, I had that very much in my
mind, and I tried to make the rooms where music was to be created rooms
where the hearer could have the sense of being immersed in the sound.
The professors would call it "presence." To me it just is-- I can't
think of the word I want.
-
VALENTINE
- When did those Sunday evening concerts begin?
-
FYFE
- They weren't always concerts. The music developed mostly after I left.
They had Svetlana playing the violin, and some of the others. They
imported some good musicians. But I tried while I was there to write a
song and get a mock music theme going just playing on tin pans and stuff
like that. There wasn't a heck of a lot of music, but this one singer
who came to visit Olgivanna was an exception. Often it was a dialogue
between Mr. Wright and a couple of professors who would come out from
the University of Chicago. Again, the names escape me. It was very
interesting just to listen in on them. I'm sure that we bothered Mrs.
Wright terribly; the costumes that we did or didn't wear around the
place, particularly in the summer. But Sunday evening we were supposed
to dress up, and I understand lately that they still have formal wear on
Sunday. Seems incongruous for the champion of freedom, but--
-
VALENTINE
- I was going to ask you about that.
-
FYFE
- I guess Mr. Wright had his share of inconsisten- cies.
-
VALENTINE
- We all do. But there's a lot of irony there with the common man and the
regulation of behavior--the freedom and independence that's being
fostered at the same time there's a lot of control.
-
FYFE
- Arbitrary control as it came from Mrs. Wright--it probably was
justified, I think, most of the time.
-
VALENTINE
- What kinds of regulations did she impose?
-
FYFE
- I don't know, and while I was there it was never direct from her. It
would only be as she influenced Mr. Wright. I had very little contact
with Mrs. Wright. I can remember the incident where some of us drove
into Madison [Wisconsin] to beat up on Mr. [C. R.] Sechrest.
-
VALENTINE
- I want to talk about that.
-
FYFE
- Okay.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- We should begin by explaining the background to that incident--how Mr.
Sechrest had irritated you.
-
FYFE
- I'd better get my notes out for that one. In November of 1932--or it
would be late October--Mr. Wright was in Madison, where he was attacked
by a man by the name of Sechrest who had been a carpenter working for
Mr. Wright previously. Sechrest wanted to collect money that Mr. Wright
owed him; I don't think it was very much. They had an altercation that
turned into fisticuffs apparently right out in the street in Madison.
Mr. Wright wrote about that quite luridly in his autobiography. He
appeared back at Taliesin with a big bandage on his nose--claimed to
have had his nose broken. So some of the senior associates, men that had
been there longer--I came upon them in the dormitory--were planning to
go into Madison to take care of Mr. Sechrest. Karl Jensen, Rudolph Mock,
and Sam Ratensky were involved, and I apparently volunteered to go with
them.
-
VALENTINE
- Wes Peters was in on this too, wasn't he?
-
FYFE
- Oh, yes. Wes Peters, sure. I'm not very big, and I certainly wasn't one
of the old-timers there, but they apparently let me go. My memory of my
intention was to be the pacific one and calm them down a little. It was
kind of a rainy day, and we got to Madison eventually, about forty miles
away--certainly time enough to change our minds, but nobody was willing
to admit to a change of heart. The site was an apartment house where we
had to go up narrow stairs and maybe a switchback or two. I think the
Sechrests lived on the second floor. The door was open, ajar a little
bit, and words were exchanged, but no loud voices. So we're about to
retreat when I thought, "What the heck," and I led out a punch towards
Mr. Sechrest. I don't think it landed but--
-
VALENTINE
- You instigated it? The punching?
-
FYFE
- Yes. I'm the great pacifist but, well, I just can't imagine something
not coming to some sort of a conclusion, I suppose. Anyway, we
retreated, and a few days later I was working at one of the stone
quarries when one of the apprentices rushed up and said that a deputy
sheriff was at Taliesin looking for me. So I went over, and yes, the
sheriff had sent out a deputy to pick up the five of us. We were taken
into the Dane County Jail. There we stayed for four or five days at
least. What I can remember well is that I attended a religious service
on Wednesday night and again on Sunday, so it was at least that span of
time. The five of us were separated in the jail so we had no
communication. It was a beautiful jail. Clean and sunny on sunny days.
I've since heard people describe that jail today as a quagmire of dirt
and filth. But in those days it was a very respectable place to be. We
went to court, and the first session wasn't conclusive. A young attorney
in Madison was pleading our case for us. The case was rested for a while
until they got an experienced attorney--someone who knew the ropes in
Madison. When we came back into court, our case was just a mild one with
a few fines made.
-
VALENTINE
- What was the damage to Sechrest?
-
FYFE
- None.
-
VALENTINE
- What about the black snake whip that was allegedly involved?
-
FYFE
- Karl Jensen did carry a whip, but I think the black snake was a bit of
journalism, and it was never used. He just had it, held it, but nobody
did anything to Mr. Sechrest at all. It got in the New York Times, apparently, either from Sechrest or a
figment of the imagination of the reporter. I know what happened because
I was there. It doesn't coincide with what the Times had, and it certainly doesn't coincide with Mr.
Wright's report in his autobiography. It was dumb.
-
VALENTINE
- Youth.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- What about when it went to trial? You said your father [James Lincoln
Fyfe] was in the back of the courtroom.
-
FYFE
- When we were moved from the jail to the courtroom, at the end of the
corridor I could see my father just hovering. I don't know how he got
word of it; I can't imagine. I never talked to him about it. I guess he
just was going to be sure that nothing drastic happened. When nothing
drastic did happen, why, he just must have gone back to Chicago.
-
VALENTINE
- And you never spoke about it?
-
FYFE
- No. That's typical Fyfeism.
-
VALENTINE
- He's always there to support you, but you didn't talk about it.
-
FYFE
- Exactly. What else shall we talk about?
-
VALENTINE
- You mentioned earlier the senior apprentices and the junior apprentices.
How did that division work? How did you move from one group to
another?
-
FYFE
- It wasn't an assignment. "Senior" was just for those who were in
attendance before the influx of new apprentices for the fellowship. It
did include the names that I read to you before. I think there's some
question whether Yen Liang was the first apprentice or Bill Peters, and
then Edgar [Tafel] and myself, and after that--I forget the date that it
was supposed to officially open--several other people came.
-
VALENTINE
- So you weren't a junior very long. You were a senior.
-
FYFE
- No, I was a senior at Perkins and Will. I don't know. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- You weren't a senior apprentice?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- But you're one of the charter members of the fellowship.
-
FYFE
- Oh yes, but so were twenty other people.
-
VALENTINE
- Was there any kind of animosity or resentment from one group to
another?
-
FYFE
- Not that I was aware of. There may have been. There was no one-on-one
access to Mr. Wright, and of course, that's why most of the people were
there. One occasion that I had with Mr. Wright, I came out onto the
hilltop court, and we were sitting at the edge of the terrace around the
council ring looking off towards the east as the sun was setting behind
us. He unburdened himself to me, and I never knew why. But he was kind
of lonesome, I think. The burden of what he was saying was that he just
wondered why his peers didn't accept him. He felt very sad for himself
on that score. Another time I met him on the side of the Taliesin hill.
The snow was melting, and we both stood in running water for a while. I
have to give a little background to this. Svetlana, Olgivanna's
daughter, was up in the dormitory--it was largely the men's
dormitory--one evening, and the telephone on the corridor wall rang and
she was unceremoniously told to get the heck back down to home base.
That seemed to me kind of an infringement on her freedom. She was just
being friendly, talking with a whole bunch of us. I said as much to Mr.
Wright while we were standing there, the water trickling down the side
of the hill. The water was coming from the septic tank, actually.
[laughter] Neither of us changed each other's mind, but it was one of
the few occasions that I had a one-on-one discussion. In retrospect, I
think I can see why he was worried--well, concerned. But I would hazard
a guess that Olgivanna put him up to it. Maybe Olgivanna called her; I
don't really know.
-
VALENTINE
- Did he accept criticism from the apprentices? Or did he ask what you
thought about things?
-
FYFE
- No, I don't think he did very much. I've read letters that Bob [Robert
F.] Bishop wrote to his bride or bride-to-be in which Bob seemed to have
several one-on-one conversations with Mr. Wright. I didn't know of
anybody else having any. Of course his secretary did, and eventually
Gene [Eugene] Masselink. Masselink was very close to him. Bob had come
on, I think, before the apprenticeship had started. I can't be sure when
he came, but he was especially taken on to work his way through without
paying tuition. He felt very responsible about that, and he was a very
good worker--excellent worker. He worked a lot over at Hillside so we
didn't have too much contact--mostly at mealtime. Bob was one of the few
people I respected. I had a great deal of respect for him. Jack [John
H.] Howe also was taken on in a similar fashion without paying full
tuition. He was younger than most of us; I think he was just out of high
school. He worked around the home, keeping it clean and building the
fires. Every morning he built the fire in the master bedroom--things
like that. Long after I left, I learned he became sort of chief
draftsman in the drafting room. When I was still there, he was not
involved in any of the drafting or any of the-- He just didn't enter
into the work of any group, if there was a group.
-
VALENTINE
- How much tuition were you paying?
-
FYFE
- I don't remember if it was $125 or $165 for a term. I think we paid for
the first two terms and then stopped paying.
-
VALENTINE
- You paid for two terms and then stopped paying?
-
FYFE
- Mr. Wright said it would be all right to stay on.
-
VALENTINE
- At what point did you start getting paid?
-
FYFE
- I never got paid.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you get an allowance or were you in any way compensated?
-
FYFE
- Room and board. I was looking--very anxiously looking--to develop a
community aspect. So my disappointment arose from the fact that it was
neither the school I had expected it to be--and then I was perfectly
willing to accept the apprenticeship format--but I wasn't seeing a
community developing where there was a focus for community. It always
was sort of an individual, one-on-one. Very definitely some people were
anti-communal. I remember-- I wouldn't give you the name if I remembered
it, but I remember one fellow who just wouldn't take his share in
keeping the communal bathroom clean. And so I finally told him if he
didn't, why, I'd punch him in the nose. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- You're a real pacifist. How were problems like that dealt with--people
who weren't pulling their weight or not contributing enough?
-
FYFE
- Talking about the development of the Hillside buildings, I told you how
delighted I was with the way the old Queen Anne house [Hillside Home
School] was shaping up. But the drafting room had just been built with
green oak. At the end of the first year, a very long eave that extended
all the way around that building had waves like that. Let the record
show that my hands are going up and down like a wave. Mr. Wright must
have an arrangement with somebody up above: wherever that eave was low,
he had it propped up, and lo and behold, before I left a year later, the
eave was nice and straight. Day lighting for the drafting room comes
from a sawtooth roof with glazing on the north side. There had to be a
little ridge at the middle of each one of those valleys, a crocket to
deflect rainwater to the sides. Mr. Wright had the idea, I guess to save
materials, that we would just mix mud, carry it up there, and shape
those valleys so that the water would run off. That was a big operation.
I used to have a photograph of Louise Dees-Porch and Svetlana--they were
about the same size and did a lot of things together--carrying mud. Mud
had to be made in a big trough--where we slaked lime--and carried in
buckets onto the roof. It seemed like a dumb idea then. I don't know how
it worked out; maybe it worked out all right. It certainly added a big
weight load on those trusses. Maybe Mr. Wright was testing his trusses.
That's a beautiful room with those beautiful trusses. I'll speak a
little bit about the fireplace that was at the far north end of the
room. Do you remember my describing the fireplaces in the River Forest
Tennis Club yesterday? This was planned as a larger version of those
fireplaces. On either side were benches facing each other. I happened to
be around when Mr. Wright was at the drafting table and he redesigned
the fireplace at an angle, making the seating come out at an angle. He
got up with an expression of elation, something like "Wasn't that
great." I believe this was an example of his moving away from ordinary
symmetry and rectilinear plans, and a beginning of thinking and planning
more freely in what he called "occult symmetry." Let me read to you what
he wrote in his second autobiography [An
Autobiography] on page 333. Obvious symmetry would claim too
much. I find the too obvious wearies the eye too soon, stultifies
imagination. Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it
begins. There would be nothing but the occult symmetry in the new San
Marcos desert. That's where he was getting onto the idea. I had to look
up the word "occult" to understand his use of it, but it means-- I can't
remember exactly what the dictionary says, but it includes "mysterious."
It seems to me that one of the great aspects of Mr. Wright's
architecture is the mystery that exists therein. Another example of
angularity, it seems to me, is the terrace outside of the Willey House.
The Willey House itself is all rectilinear, but the terrace in front
goes off at an angle. Thereafter, you find the angle interposed in so
much of his work--rearranging seating in the little theater, for
example. Another opportunity when I happened to be around as Mr. Wright
was doing a creative thing: we'd come down from the theater, and he was
sitting at a drafting table--Bob [Robert K.] Mosher's--and he had asked
Bob to design a lamp for the theater. He sat down and didn't say to Bob
that his design wasn't good--it wasn't that good, I could tell that--he
just began designing. Basically it was a cube--a sort of box open at top
and bottom--around the light source itself. Above it and below it were
plywood shelves that would be painted light blue to reflect the light.
There was a series of half a dozen of these boxes, one above the other,
on a hanging support. I thought they were the most beautiful things in
that theater. It was a revelation to see how it was apparently all in
his mind when he sat down at the drawing board.
-
VALENTINE
- Was it in any way related to the design Bob had come up with?
-
FYFE
- No. Totally new.
-
VALENTINE
- You have a picture of that somewhere that you were showing me
earlier.
-
FYFE
- Well, it shows up in some of the photographs--
-
VALENTINE
- I just wanted to give a reference on the tape in case someone wanted to
look at it.
-
FYFE
- --of the theater in that first Architectural
Forum presentation [Architectural
Forum, January 1938]. Thereafter, Mr. Wright thought he improved
on the lamps. There were two, one at each end of the room, and they
became much larger, more elaborate. To my way of seeing, these initial
ones, in their simplicity, made a tremendous statement with the least
effort. I just loved them. I tried to make a companion lamp based on
those hanging lights. There was a stairway leading from the upper level
to the lower level to get into the theater, and it's a place where we
needed to have a lamp. Failed miserably. I was going to have a box
hiding the lamp and light reflected by a plane above. The problem of
holding that sheet above and making it so that you could replace the
bulb when it burned out was beyond me. I never really got it. Another
instance of creativity that happened while I was there, but I was not
party to it at all-- I think Mrs. Wright was responsible for the
curtains that were used in the first theater. They were beautiful. As
Mr. Wright revised the theater, it became more and more complex. The
curtains themselves eventually had to be increased in height. That was
accomplished by a series of strings that held them in place. It worked
out all right because you still saw those beautiful curtains. *[I recall
a comment of Mr. Wright's that speaks to his creativity and possibly to
client relations. I suspect in Mrs. Richard Lloyd Jones Mr. Wright may
have met his match, for his comment indicated that the original concept
for the [Richard Lloyd] Jones House in [Tulsa] Oklahoma was not for the
square piers as built, but for the block piers to be diamond shaped by
turning the piers 45 degrees off the grid lines. Together with the
alternating glazed panels, the piers formed more of a screen than a
wall. Mr. Wright's comment sounded regretful, and there's no doubt in my
mind the effect of the early plans would have been wonderful, but Mrs.
Jones had her way, with the piers squared to the lines of the plan.]* Fyfe added the following bracketed section during his review of the
transcript.
-
VALENTINE
- Did the gift box idea--was that in existence while you were there?
-
FYFE
- No, not even anything like it.
-
VALENTINE
- Was there any kind of marking of Christmas or Wright's birthday?
-
FYFE
- He loved parties. The very first Halloween, we had a grand party. Each
of us was to come in costume. I don't remember what most people did;
maybe most people had to extemporize anyway to make some sort of a
costume. There was one person in a clown's costume that was sitting in a
chair and could blink the eyes, apparently underneath, by pulling
strings. Mr. Wright couldn't guess who it was. That really irritated
him. He kept coming to ask, "Who are you?" It turned out to be John
Lloyd Wright, his son. The Wrights just all loved parties and picnics
and that sort of thing. We'd go-- It's well documented how many picnics
we'd go out on in good weather. They were a chore to get the food and
everything ready and to carry great big cans of milk. Mr. Wright would
always find someplace where we had to climb a hill. Once you got there
it was worth the effort. It was just great. We did get into a little bit
of regularity by going to the chapel on Sundays, and usually we'd have
speakers. Sometimes, very rarely, an apprentice would speak, but I think
later on it became a routine thing for the apprentices to take charge.
Edgar Tafel was always there playing on the harmonium-- Is that what you
call these organs where you have to pump with your feet? If you listened
carefully, every once in a while he'd be playing a popular song, but
playing it with the rhythm of a hymn. It sounded very much like Sunday
school or church music, but it would be--
-
VALENTINE
- That's perfect Edgar Tafel.
-
FYFE
- Exactly.
-
VALENTINE
- What was his costume at the Halloween party, do you remember?
-
FYFE
- No, I don't remember. I do recall--it was either that Halloween or the
next--there was a competition among the apprentices to make a pumpkin.
So most of us went out to the field where we'd planted them and brought
in nice, big round ones or elongated ones. A few--two or three of the
creative people--went out and found ones that were squashed or had crazy
shapes. And they proved to be the best ones, of course. Again, going
back to the point I made earlier, my sense as I arrived at the school
was when Christmas holiday came, you just went home for the holidays. So
I went home for the holidays. I think the Wrights were not happy with
that. They felt that we were their chickabiddies and we ought to stay
around Taliesin.
-
VALENTINE
- You were home.
-
FYFE
- I guess they had a very nice Christmas at Taliesin. Another thing
happened when my mother [Hannah Christabel Beye Fyfe] had written
something to Mrs. Wright--I don't recall the occasion for it--and she
did not put a salutation on it: "Dear Mrs. Wright." Both Mr. and Mrs.
Wright charged out--I guess I was in the studio--and wanted to know how
did my mother write letters. Didn't she use a salutation or something
like that? I interpreted that Mrs. Wright thought she had been
affronted, and I said my mother was unique; she did things differently
and very easily could write a letter without a salutation.
-
VALENTINE
- So the form was more important than the content.
-
FYFE
- Sure. You know this isn't too long after much of the world had turned on
the Wrights.
-
VALENTINE
- Particularly Oak Park.
-
FYFE
- Although I was never aware of it in Oak Park. Let me see-- And I was
away after 1928; I was away at college. I have five issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Is it Finis Farr--was
writing about Mr. Wright. It's very interesting, because to read it in
the Saturday Evening Post, to see what was
current at the same time-- If Jack [John O. Holzhueter] would like to
have them, he may.
-
VALENTINE
- I'm sure he'll grab them.
-
FYFE
- Okay. And then I've seen references to other picnics and parties that
they've had at Taliesin. And I mentioned to you that Mrs. [Jane Wright]
Porter's sister [Maginel Wright Barney] was often eager to have that
same kind of interaction. Incidentally, going back to drafting, that was
one of the jobs that Jane Porter asked me to do--some remodeling to the
lower level of Tanyderi. It was a very simple thing to do: just opened
it with French doors so the lower level came out into a terrace. Didn't
have to move much earth to do it, just put a little framework over the--
I forget what you call it--trellis. I had drawn a perspective to show
Mrs. Porter, and I showed it to Mr. Wright. His only comment was--there
was a shadow that came across the foreground that led up to the
building--"That's a nice shadow." I think he was incensed that his
sister didn't have him do it. Early on--this was an assignment--we were
all to do an abstraction in colored pencils. I have a habit when I'm
drafting of sharpening a pencil and getting a very fine point on it by
scratching it on a piece of scrap paper. So with all the different
colors I was doing that on the side. Mr. Wright came by and said he
thought the side scratches looked better than the abstraction. Generally
speaking, I came to the conclusion you could sum Mr. Wright up as a
benevolent authoritarian, to use Grant Manson's phrase. With one
exception, I'd never seen him really tie into any of us: that exception
came when--again, I can't recall his name so it's just as well, I
guess--
-
VALENTINE
- Doesn't matter who.
-
FYFE
- --had designed a built-in seat for the apprentices' dining room
alongside the fireplace. It would have been something that might have
come out of one of Mies van der Rohe's classes. Very straightforward,
very simple, structurally sound--just a piece of plywood on some
cantilevered supports. Mr. Wright was piqued because it was so out of
keeping with anything else around Taliesin. It was a totally different
grammar of design. That's the only time I saw him take out after any of
the apprentices, and heaven knows we gave him cause.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you?
-
FYFE
- Yes. I remember one time the farming group had a harvest of onions. In
our innocence we knew that they had to be dried, so we took them around
to this one roof over the hog pen, a roof that came close to the
grade--huge roof--and we just laid the onions out there in the sunshine.
When we finally got back they were all cooked. So there went the onion
harvest. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- And what was the reaction? [laughter]
-
FYFE
- None. We were never taken to task for it. I have three things in my
notes here. Another time we were making a display--some of the draftsmen
in the studio--to be shown in Madison. I am one of the world's worst
spellers, and on every drawing where we had an entrance, I spelled
entrance as "enterence." Nobody discovered it until the display was
hung. Mr. Wright never said a word about it. Another time we burned out
a row of sumac Mr. Wright was trying to get established--no harsh
recrimination.
-
VALENTINE
- How did people respond to criticism from him-- like that one instance
with the chair, or someone looking at a drawing?
-
FYFE
- You mean the bench?
-
VALENTINE
- Right. Or his criticism of your drawing or the idea behind it or the
lamp?
-
FYFE
- I agreed with him. It didn't bother me. I just don't remember his ever
taking out or abusing anyone or making anyone feel put down.
-
VALENTINE
- Did he make you feel good? Did he hand out a lot of praise?
-
FYFE
- No, I don't think so.
-
VALENTINE
- How were discipline problems taken care of?
-
FYFE
- I think there were very few occasions when they were needed. When we
came back from Madison and being in jail, as a reward we were taken into
the living room, and Mrs. Wright let us taste her first wines. She was
good at making wines from dandelions and grapes and all kinds of things
like that, so it was a great privilege to be able to taste her new
wines. I cannot recall an instance of someone being asked to leave
Taliesin. Of course we were all on notice that we were there at their
pleasure. I think if there were occasions that needed some action taken,
it was done without any general attention.
-
VALENTINE
- Would he dismiss you or would she?
-
FYFE
- I've never been party to it; I don't know.
-
VALENTINE
- How much gossip was there going on among the apprentices--or
factionalism or groups or jealousies--?
-
FYFE
- Again, I tend to be kind of innocent in that respect. I'm not aware of
any. As I alluded to earlier, those of us that went out gardening and
farming were looked down upon. Speaking for myself and for some of the
others who were in that more intimate group who got to know each other
very well, I think I was closer to the essence of what the fellowship
was all about than those who were just trying to get in on the
drafting.
-
VALENTINE
- Who were just trying to learn something.
-
FYFE
- Yes. Mr. Wright wanted us to be somebody before we tried to do
something. Of course to be somebody is-- There's the irony of the
individualistic: he's all for everybody being his own individual, and
yet-- Which reminds me, lots of times Mr. Wright used the word
"organic." I often tried to puzzle out in my own mind just what he did
mean by that. The nearest I came to it was a matter of growth. It seemed
to me that every house I knew that he did, and practically every
building, therefore, was an individual thing of its own. Within that
individual characteristic there was a growth. It exemplified a growth
throughout in some buildings, where he was able to do it in the rugs and
the furniture and the fixtures and everything else. I saw a sense of an
idea growing to fruition in each one. I think I absorbed that by osmosis
and was able to articulate it in my own mind later on. But he also used
the word "principle" a lot. Design for a principle. I had great
difficulty with that. I remember just writing it on a piece of paper,
and for years the paper lay in the upper layer of my tool box and I
would just see it every once in a while--"principle." Now, in retrospect
I can see growth from within as opposed to adding onto a building
something from the outside--you design on the principle of organic
growth. Everything came to fruition out of the principle of organic
growth. And it means a holistic approach to whatever that particular
project was--which could be a single building, it could be a little
doghouse, it could be a total campus. He also used the word "faith" a
great deal. And that did bother me because faith in what? And I still
wonder what he was talking about. He never elaborated on his faith in
what.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you ever ask him?
-
FYFE
- No, I guess I didn't. Was it a faith in Taliesin? Was it a faith in Mr.
Wright? Was it a faith in organic architecture? And I suspect it might
have been all three of those things at different times. Then there was
another use of the word "details." It hasn't come back to me. He said
that something is in the details. My own definition is that "Definition
is in the details." That makes sense to me, but that is not the word he
used, I know: it was "Resolution is in the details," or "Completion is
in the details," or the finish or the heart or something is in the
details. He said it often, and it may come back to me some other time.
Do you want any vignettes of things that happened?
-
VALENTINE
- Sure.
-
FYFE
- Every night, particularly in the winter when the evenings came early,
along about seven o'clock the lights would get dimmer and dimmer, and
that meant that the water had run out of the dam that operated the
generator. Now, we talked about Edgar earlier--Edgar played Bach
beautifully. There were pianos all over the place. One time, we were
poorer than the proverbial church mice, but Mr. Wright came back from
New York and he'd purchased a huge [Karl] Bechstein grand piano.
-
VALENTINE
- How did he do that?
-
FYFE
- Who knows? I don't know. But he did. There were pianos all over the
place, and Edgar would get away from a lot of chore work--what he would
consider chore work, and what I would consider community
establishment--by going off to practice. Mr. Wright loved it and I did
too, particularly to hear him play Bach. One time half a dozen or maybe
more typewriters appeared in the studio. They were sans serif type; they
were beautiful. I remember I typed up some of Mr. Wright's early
magazine articles, and the typewriters were used generally. But he never
paid for them, so all of a sudden they all disappeared. They were
repossessed. And I told you how much we appreciated the Wrights' living
room. That room was just as nice for two people as for twenty
people.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- You were talking about the chairs delivered to the [Taliesin] living
room.
-
FYFE
- They were a pair of chairs with very nice down cushions on the back and
on the arms. The first thing Frank Lloyd Wright had done to them was he
had somebody come in with a saw and saw off the legs so that they'd be
closer to the floor and fit his own size and shape. You've heard him
admit as far as his own furniture is concerned that he's been black and
blue all his life from sitting in his own chairs.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you find them comfortable?
-
FYFE
- No, never. I think his furniture's horrible. On a Sunday afternoon very
shortly after I'd arrived, I remember there was not much going on, and I
was sitting on the grass in the upper courtyard. Svetlana [Wright] came
out of the dining room just below where my room eventually was--anyway,
the private dining room--and she saw me and rolled an apple across the
grass to me. It was an endearing and caring thing for her to have done.
Again, these are just vignettes; maybe if there are enough of them,
somebody can piece together an impression of life at Taliesin.
-
VALENTINE
- Like a nice quilt.
-
FYFE
- [William] Wes [Wesley] Peters loved tapioca, and tapioca was often
served as dessert because it was good and it was inexpensive. But most
people just wouldn't eat it, so he'd gather up everybody else's and he'd
have a whole stack of saucers at his place. You could turn the saucers
upside down and tapioca wouldn't drop off--glued to it. Mr. Hill was a
big person, physically, and was in charge of the gardening to begin
with. Mrs. Hill was the cook who did all the cooking at first. One time
it was somebody's birthday so she made a birthday cake. Pretty soon
people were having birthdays all over the place.
-
VALENTINE
- Several times a month.
-
FYFE
- Yes. She caught on.
-
VALENTINE
- How egalitarian was the [Taliesin] Fellowship? Did people really feel
like it was a communal experience, or did they feel like there was a
hierarchy and a caste system--some were more equal than others?
-
FYFE
- It's a yes and no answer to that. The people that had been there for a
long time felt a superiority. Henry Klumb deserved it. He had been there
longest and knew best what to do. He didn't throw his weight around at
all, but [Rudolph] Mock and [Samuel] Ratensky and who was the fellow
from Denmark--?
-
VALENTINE
- [Karl] Jensen?
-
FYFE
- Yes. He was Mr. Wright's secretary and he certainly was impressed with
his position. Among those who came later, it never stratified into any
kind of hierarchy that I was aware of--just whatever the person was able
to be or do. That was accepted and that was that. Vada Dow, Alden Dow's
wife, found it very difficult to fit in. She used to come out gardening
with white gloves on and a big floppy hat. She was a good sport about
it, but she just didn't enjoy doing it, and it didn't last very
long.
-
VALENTINE
- How many women were there when you were there?
-
FYFE
- There were a fair number, I would say--I guess about three to four.
Betty Barnsdall was the daughter of [Aline] Barnsdall, for whom Mr.
Wright did the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles. She was there for a
while. Betty [Elizabeth] Bauer [Kassler] went on to become curator at
the Museum of Modern Art, taught, and published. I had great respect for
her. George and Helen Beal, so there was Helen Beal; Bill [William
Adare] Bernoudy; Bob [Robert F.] Bishop; Ernest Brooks; Willets Burnham;
Louise Dees-Porch-- She was a workaholic, and she really should have had
more credit for what she did than she would assume. Gerry [Geraldine E.]
Deknatel, Abe [Abrom] Dombar, Vada Dow, Jimmy [James] Drought, Bitsie
[Elizabeth Barney Enright] Gillham was there. Mendel Glickman, Bob
[Robert] Goodall, Phil [Philip] Holliday, Jack [John H.] Howe, Karl
Jensen, Henry and Else Klumb, Fred [Frederick] Langhorst, Gene [Eugene]
Masselink, Rudolph Mock, Chandler Montgomery-- Chandler Montgomery was
kind of a tutor to little Iovanna [Wright] and so was Phil Holliday.
Mabel Morgan ended up in the kitchen, and she was a very hard worker.
Bob [Robert K.] Mosher, Bill Peters, Sam Ratensky, Marybud [Faustina]
Roberts [Lautner], Manuel Sandoval, Hank [Henry A.] Schubart, Bud
[Irwin] Shaw, Lewis Stevens, Edgar Tafel, Betty [Elizabeth] Weber-- She
had been with Charles Morgan in Chicago, who was somehow related to Mr.
Wright's work. Did you know about that?
-
VALENTINE
- No.
-
FYFE
- She was part of the gardening group--great big brown eyes. In the Morgan
studio in Chicago they used to do exer- cises on bars--Yvonne Wood and
daughter Mimme and of course Svetlana. So maybe it isn't quite three to
four, more like two to four. *[It was never clear to me whether Ernest
Brooks was an apprentice or supposed to be a leader in music.
Unfortunately his predilection for Ravel and Debussy did not fit well
with Mr. Wright's concept of musical building blocks more clearly
evident in Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Mendel Glickman, structural
engineer, was in residence from time to time, but with little direct
contact with apprentices.]* Fyfe added the following bracketed section during his review of the
transcript.
-
VALENTINE
- Was there any difference in the way the women were treated versus the
men--or the assignments they were given or they chose for
themselves?
-
FYFE
- I wasn't aware of it.
-
VALENTINE
- How was the issue of homosexuality dealt with?
-
FYFE
- It never reared its head, at least not to my knowledge.
-
VALENTINE
- How about heterosexuality?
-
FYFE
- It wasn't an issue. And certainly morals-- In the light of Mr. Wright's
and Olgivanna [Milanoff Wright]'s background, you might have thought it
would become some kind of an issue, but it never was--never openly
discussed, and as far as I know, even thought about.
-
VALENTINE
- Were there relationships going on that weren't talked about, or was it
expected?
-
FYFE
- The only two I'm aware of were Betty Bauer and Rudolph Mock and Marybud
and what's his name--
-
VALENTINE
- John Lautner.
-
FYFE
- They were friends before they came and were married while they were
there. I don't think there was any pairing off other than those two. I
did do some more drafting on the [Jean] Schuette residence for Maple
Bluff [Madison, Wisconsin], for the Blue Parrot Celebrity Room for Mrs.
[Grace] Pebbles in Oak Park, and some alterations to Tanyderi [Andrew T.
Porter House] for Jennie [Jane Wright] Porter.
-
VALENTINE
- Right. I want to talk about those projects in more detail.
-
FYFE
- I can't imagine, looking back-- I just dug up drawings for the Schuette
residence downstairs in the files.
-
VALENTINE
- This was your cousin, right?
-
FYFE
- She was my first cousin, and she wanted a colonial house. How I drew
those drawings at the Frank Wright fellowship is beyond my ken.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. How did they let these pages out? I don't know. The paper wouldn't
even accept it.
-
FYFE
- One drawing indicates that I had crits [jury criticism] from some of the
other apprentices. Finally, I simplified the building so it lost many of
its colonial characteristics. The final result: I just told her that I
couldn't do it. Partly a little bit of my own growth represents--
-
VALENTINE
- Why couldn't you do it?
-
FYFE
- I didn't think it was-- Well, that's quite a question, isn't it?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes, it is.
-
FYFE
- I didn't think I should be responsible for another colonial building.
These drawings-- Do any of them show a plan?
-
VALENTINE
- Some beautiful drawings.
-
FYFE
- I think looking at them right now that you spread them out before me,
the plans are not bad. I suppose that Mr. Wright would pretty much say
that they're in the box mode. They do fit into the slope that exists on
the property that I knew very well--Maple Bluff. I'd grown up on Maple
Bluff. I knew the area well. I think the final design--I wouldn't have
been ashamed to have it built.
-
VALENTINE
- And yet you withdrew from the project?
-
FYFE
- Well, I see there are no shutters on it, and I can't imagine how they
would have been acceptable to Jean's desire for a colonial building. I
think she finally got one built--a colonial building, that is.
-
VALENTINE
- It probably wasn't as good as this.
-
FYFE
- I'm sure it wasn't.
-
VALENTINE
- So you were responsible, indirectly, for another bad colonial.
[laughter]
-
FYFE
- All right, all right.
-
VALENTINE
- Now, there's some correspondence about that with your father [James
Lincoln Fyfe] in which you and he share your philosophy about
architecture and what a house should be. Could you speak a little bit to
that?
-
FYFE
- Maybe you could speak better than I because I don't remember. I remember
there was correspondence, but I don't remember what it was. Okay, this
drawing shows a crit from others, and then this is my father's--which
would be really bad architecture.
-
VALENTINE
- Why is that bad?
-
FYFE
- This little porch is just tacked onto the building. It isn't integral to
it. And I think even this bay window isn't integral to it. The one that
I ended up with wasn't much better, but it was integrated into the
architecture better. What more did my father say?
-
VALENTINE
- Well I don't have his letters, but I have your responses.
-
FYFE
- This certainly doesn't demonstrate any open planning: I'm sure if we
were doing it today we'd take that partition out and we'd be able to
move all the way around like that. Given the time and the place and the
climate, I guess it wasn't a bad job. It blows my mind that I was able
to do it at Taliesin. I don't know where or how it was done.
-
VALENTINE
- Did Wright ever see it?
-
FYFE
- No, I'm sure he didn't.
-
VALENTINE
- It says, "A major dilemma for me is whether to do something colonial,
which would, if not exactly, compromise my principles of architecture
only because those principles are not yet formed definitively, which
would, I say, at least be inconsistent for my trend for the sake of
experience involved." You needed experience out of it, but it really
wasn't the direction you wanted to go.
-
FYFE
- Sounds candid to me.
-
VALENTINE
- These are swell letters. [laughter] The word "swell"--
-
FYFE
- I can remember where I picked it up. I was working in Robert Work and
Russell Walcott's office, and they had an interior decorator who said
that some things were "swell." I thought that was a swell term circa
1928. She had some antiques sent up from New Orleans. They were able to
poke into the holes and find the end of them and decided that they were
not worm holes--that they were just holes that had been put there with a
drill. So they returned the furniture, but did keep some andirons.
-
VALENTINE
- How did Wright feel about you taking on jobs like this that were your
personal work and not fellowship work?
-
FYFE
- I think it's part of the transition that went forward. He permitted
Alden Dow to have drawings going out, without Mr. Wright's name of
course. I think that plus the experience with the Pebbles Celebrity Room
solidified in his mind that there would not be any more of that kind of
work brought into-- Anything that would come into the fellowship and go
out of the fellowship would be through Mr. Wright, and he would have a
part in it.
-
VALENTINE
- What was the Pebbles job?
-
FYFE
- Mrs. Pebbles was a longtime friend of Mr. Wright. She was also a friend
of the Fyfes and I knew her very well. I cannot recall how this got
started, but I suspect that she contacted Mr. Wright with the
proposition of doing a room that would be called the Celebrity Room. It
was an adjunct to a larger room--the Blue Parrot Restaurant, which she
had recently opened in Oak Park [Illinois]. She had, along Michigan
Avenue in Chicago, one of the finest and most stylish restaurants in the
Italian Court, and then she had a couple of little ones up the block,
scaled down a little, smaller and less expensive. Apparently, she wanted
to open this one in Oak Park and have this room. I'm sure my
contribution to it was these silhouettes of buildings--Wright buildings
in Oak Park and River Forest [Illinois] that I knew very well. I had
previously made a Christmas card from Hillside [Taliesin Fellowship
Complex] that showed the buildings and trees in silhouette, and then in
the corner, the Taliesin logo. Up one side it had my name, and at the
bottom was "Greetings from Hillside." It was a black linoleum block
print on lovely Japanese gray paper with added white snow on the roofs
and a couple of other places. When Mr. Wright saw it, for once he
approved very much. But he was distressed that it was a personalized
card and that it was from Hillside. He apparently thought that I should
have designed a card that would be for the entire Taliesin
Fellowship.
-
VALENTINE
- What if you had designed a card on your own, without consulting him, and
he didn't like it? What would the response have been?
-
FYFE
- My guess is there would be none, or he would say, "Well, you did that
logo well." [laughter] To kind of repeat myself for the third time, I've
never seen him abuse anybody, with that one noted exception. He had a
very benevolent, kindly presence. Anyway, I very quickly did another
silhouette of Taliesin on a larger card but using the same format, for a
Christmas card just for Mr. and Mrs. Wright. The first one was made with
linoleum block, and I still have the block downstairs. The other one was
just done with India ink on the same kind of paper. I apparently made
two of them because one was for Mr. and Mrs. Wright, and I mailed one to
Oak Park. I have that one downstairs.
-
VALENTINE
- This is also the drawing that became the masthead for the Taliesin
columns ["At Taliesin"].
-
FYFE
- When they used the Hillside card as masthead for the Taliesin columns,
it was cropped a little bit, which did improve it actually. I thought it
was very good.
-
VALENTINE
- I like it.
-
FYFE
- Well, that started the silhouette business and led to the silhouettes in
the Celebrity Room, which I enjoyed doing because I just loved those
buildings in Oak Park.
-
VALENTINE
- These were all houses that you had known as a child?
-
FYFE
- Yes. It did include Unity Temple. I don't know why, but Saint Mark's
[Church] in the Bowery was in there also.
-
VALENTINE
- East Oak Park. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- Just very small in the distance. And then the sort of clouds and trees
and then the foreground abstraction of sidewalks and streets. In one of
the drawings there are some squigglings--I think Mr. Wright was
suggesting that there ought to be some kind of vegetation or weeds. I
don't think they got incorporated into the final drawings. I transferred
the drawings to the walls, and then professional painters started
painting them. Pretty soon costs began to add up, with painters'
time--it took so much time--plus other things. They wanted a little bar
in there and two waitress stations around posts. And other things began
to be added: noise came from one room into the other, so they wanted
doors to shut it out. In the end, I took over the painting just to
reduce the cost. I must have been gone from Taliesin well over a
month.
-
VALENTINE
- You were living at home in Oak Park?
-
FYFE
- I was living at home in Oak Park and working my tail off on this room,
thinking I was doing the right thing. But in Mr. Wright's eyes, it was
very much the wrong thing. I was feeling increasingly estranged the
longer I stayed away. I do not remember that there was any payment in
return for doing this work, although I'd put out for some materials and
Mrs. Pebbles had reimbursed me for that. There was no payment for labor.
Gee, I don't know if I got free meals or not, but I did get free meals
at the Italian Court Restaurant in Chicago sometimes. So it was a
friendly kind of thing that I was trying to do. Eventually-- I can't
remember the fellow's name who wrote "At Taliesin": [Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the
Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937].
-
VALENTINE
- Randolph Henning?
-
FYFE
- Yes. He dug up correspondence that related to this. The correspondence
showed that Mrs. Pebbles did pay Mr. Wright, and at the end Mr. Wright
had appealed for some more money, and she contributed some more money.
Henning thought it was another Frank Lloyd Wright project that just
hadn't gotten into the books yet, but [Bruce] Brooks Pfeiffer thought it
was an apprentice project. I think probably Pfeiffer was correct.
Anyway, that's the way it's gone into history now.
-
VALENTINE
- So it's your project, not Taliesin's. Did Wright make any
contribution?
-
FYFE
- No. Only just that one squiggle that I spoke to you about. I don't
recall his being involved in the design of it. I apparently went to Oak
Park initially to measure up the room. Whether I made the drawings in
Oak Park or whether I made them back at Taliesin, I cannot remember. The
only thing that's clear to me is that the idiom of the silhouettes
stemmed from the Christmas cards.
-
VALENTINE
- It must have been beautiful.
-
FYFE
- Well, I think it had some merit. At one point--slight digression--Mr.
Wright had gotten Aero shades made. They were designed by somebody over
in Waukesha [Wisconsin] or on the coast near Milwaukee somewhere. They
were little narrow slats of wood, parallelogram shaped. They were shades
that would roll up and down, and they were a natural light tan color for
Taliesin. They were beautiful. They also deflected light rays up to the
ceiling. Light just hit the edge of the parallelogram. Later they did
all of Hillside with the Frank Lloyd Wright red color. They weren't as
successful there, I thought, because they were painted instead of
natural wood. Finally some were made for the Celebrity Room, and they
were bright yellow with black cording. I've never liked those; I thought
they were awful in that room.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, the murals were yellow and black, weren't they?
-
FYFE
- Yes, the sky was a soft yellow, but the shades came through in kind of a
hard, bright yellow. I think that that was the beginning of the end for
me. I must have gone back to Taliesin that summer and worked through
until about September and finally decided to leave.
-
VALENTINE
- Why did you decide to leave?
-
FYFE
- I wasn't sensing any community there, and I wasn't aware of any sense of
focus there--either from the top down or generated from the apprentices
themselves. There were few people among the apprentices that I really
respected highly. I don't think that I had any fear of being intimidated
by Mr. Wright; that's not the right word. I guess I thought the
fellowship wasn't going to go anywhere. That could be taken
philosophically or literally because there was talk of taking the
fellowship to Russia. There was talk of taking the fellowship to
Arizona, which of course did eventuate in a few years. I don't think
they ever went to Russia. But obviously it had taken on a whole new
dimension and character from what I had anticipated in the beginning.
When Mr. Wright first was selling the idea to us, [Alexander] Meiklejohn
was supposed to come as a philosopher, Buckminster Fuller was going to
be in charge of the shops, Georgia O'Keeffe was going to be there in
charge of painting, etc. Those are the only three names I remember
offhand. Initially, there was supposed to be painting and sculpture and
other arts and crafts. There were six of these leaders plus Mr. Wright
to make seven leaders and seventy apprentices. There would be shops that
we could work in. There was the hope that we would design things that
would have a marketable aspect to them.
-
VALENTINE
- There was somewhat of a Bauhaus structure.
-
FYFE
- Yes. That calls to my mind-- One time I had a glass about the size of
that one, which is about three inches high and two inches in diameter. I
picked it up I think in a five-and-dime store. It had a nice curve to it
and a very heavy bottom. That's the one time I heard Mr. Wright approve
of somebody else's design. He said he would have been proud to have
designed that. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- That's a high compliment indeed.
-
FYFE
- Yes. Oh, and one time when I came back from being in Chicago or Oak
Park, I had found a white goatskin. You can imagine how big a skin from
a goat might be. In the studio there were benches, and many of the
benches had skins on them for a loose covering. So I brought that
goatskin to Mr. Wright for his bench and he loved it. He wanted to know
all about where did I get it and how much did it cost. In my Victorian
background, you gave a gift to somebody and you didn't tell them how
much it cost. So I never told him. It really pleased him very much to
have it.
-
VALENTINE
- So in the middle of the Depression you decide to leave security,
Taliesin, and go out and make your own fortune?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- And there were no architectural jobs to speak of in this country?
-
FYFE
- Well, I had one apparently, and I can't-- This is what bothers me so
much--definitive details I just cannot bring back up. But almost
immediately after I left, I went to Berlin, Connecticut, and designed
and helped build an addition to an eighteenth-century farmhouse.
-
VALENTINE
- And how did you get that job?
-
FYFE
- When I was at Yale [University], I came under the-- This favorite aunt
[Elizabeth Beye] that I told you about who died was in charge of the Red
Cross, helping people, and she helped the Shephards. Mrs. [Katrina]
Shephard had married Mr. [William] Shephard, who was a graduate forester
from Yale but not making very much money. They were in deep trouble, and
apparently Mrs. Shephard's family had written them off. Eventually,
things brightened. So my connection was through my aunt to these people.
When they knew I was in New Haven they looked me up, and by then their
situation had changed drastically. Bill grew up on sailboats. His father
had been in the coast guard when they had sailboats. Bill had a
forty-five-foot ketch, and he would take college students on as crew.
They had horses, and I used to ride out on their farm. Anyway, that's
how they knew me, and they asked if I would put this addition onto their
farmhouse. So I got immediately into designing and building this
addition. When I finished that, I came back to Chicago and found that I
could go into Paul Schweikher's office. At one time during the
Depression, his was the busiest office in Chicago. Contractors who used
to do huge homes for David Adler and Robert Work would come to him to
see if he had any work he could give them. He had one very big house, a
large house; a forty-eight-page brochure for the Arkansas Soft Pine with
twelve house designs; a dozen small houses for a development in Saint
Joseph, Michigan; and then the Third Unitarian Church in Chicago.
-
VALENTINE
- I'm jumping ahead of myself a little bit, because I want to talk about
your post-Taliesin career the next time. But I just wanted to comment on
the Depression and what impact that had on architecture and how
difficult it was to get work.
-
FYFE
- Yes. Even after the Depression it was difficult. There was many a time
where I literally never knew where my next job would come from. It would
come from all crazy different ways, over the telephone--or an insurance
salesman dropped in on me once, and he told someone else about me.
Crazy.
-
VALENTINE
- Money was always a problem at Taliesin.
-
FYFE
- Oh yes. Not only because of the Depression, but inherent in Mr. Wright's
lifestyle. When we were getting food from this nice little old lady in
Dodgeville [Wisconsin] who had a small store--sort of an
A&P-type store--Mr. Wright would go over in his big touring car
in good weather and just load that thing up to the gills with food on
credit. She carried us into thousands of dollars. And then he'd go down
and buy the [Karl] Bechstein grand piano. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- Who paid for this? Where did the money come from?
-
FYFE
- Well, some money came from the apprentices. And Mr. Wright was writing
books. He was lecturing. I went to three or four lectures with him. At
the invitation of Baker Brownel he was at Northwestern University once.
In the afternoon he talked to a women's club--told them their hats were
dreadful--and to a group of students. In the evening, it was the
downtown campus. I remember we came out from that and it was dark. For
once, he admired the city and the night lights in the city. He had to
admit it was beautiful. Another time he was lecturing in Rockford
[Illinois] at the Congregational church. He really liked that auditorium
because it was kind of an Akron plan where people were circled around
the pulpit and the speaker. You just felt very comfortable. For once, he
complimented them on where he was. He usually goes to a meeting and
tells them how terrible everything is. He was getting money for
lectures. I tried to get him on the lecture series in Oak Park but
wasn't successful in that. I don't think he had very many magazine
articles at that time, but I guess some money from his books.
-
VALENTINE
- There was very little architectural work going on in the period you were
there. Just the [Malcolm E. and Nancy] Willey House, I guess.
-
FYFE
- That's it, yes.
-
VALENTINE
- I wonder if you could take us through that process of how it went from
design inception--that full-blown drawing that he drew, how that project
went through the studio.
-
FYFE
- I don't remember who got assigned to that. It must have happened very
shortly before I left because I have no memory of it being out on the
drawing boards and assigned to persons to carry it on.
-
VALENTINE
- It was going on the whole time you were there because the first
commission came through in 1932.
-
FYFE
- The first one was in '32?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. And then they couldn't afford to build it as he had designed
it.
-
FYFE
- That's right. But I thought it was designed before I was there. It may
have been earlier in '32.
-
VALENTINE
- It may have been. And then they redid the whole thing, so the design
you're talking about is the second version?
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- And that was in '33 or '34.
-
FYFE
- That's part of the transition that I saw in those two years. The first
one harks back to some of the things he'd done at [Lake] Tahoe and other
places. The one that got built, it seems to me, is the beginning of the
Usonian period.
-
VALENTINE
- Very much.
-
FYFE
- For the [Herbert and Katherine] Jacobs House [Madison], which came a few
years after that, he was really into his Usonian period. I think that
his occult symmetry started on the great big fireplace in the drafting
room [Hillside Drafting Studio], and you can trace that into all kinds
of changes away from the rectilinear.
-
VALENTINE
- How much attention or acknowledgment or discussion of world events went
on while you were there?
-
FYFE
- Not a great deal. I remember a discussion of how the Russian experiment
had devolved into a power struggle, but certainly not a great deal among
the apprentices. Bill [William] Deknatel was an admirer of Picasso, and
he took a lot of ribbing on that. On Sunday evening, occasionally we
would have a professor, usually a sociologist, from the University of
Chicago. That discussion never spread out into very many students.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you discuss politics?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- Did Wright discuss politics? Roosevelt? The New Deal?
-
FYFE
- I remember--this isn't politics exactly--when they were first trying to
solve the housing for the poor in Chicago. They built these dreadful
high-rise apartments [Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green]; he said, "They're
institutionalizing poverty."
-
VALENTINE
- He was absolutely right, wasn't he?
-
FYFE
- Absolutely right. As usual, he was about forty years ahead of his time.
I think we were pretty well isolated up there. Insulated, maybe.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you feel insulated when you were there, or only looking back on
it?
-
FYFE
- Looking back.
-
VALENTINE
- So the world had little impact on what happened to you there--what went
on.
-
FYFE
- Quite so. As you've probably read, as I have, he had to let go when-- At
least his version of it is--and I guess it's true in this case--that
when WPA [Works Progress Administration] came in, a lot of the men who
were working for him on scrip and very little money just jumped onto the
WPA programs and got hard cash. Two things happened while I was
there--this is trivia-- Wisconsin issued coins in cardboard and we had
paper scrip during the bank holiday, and the other thing is the dust
storms came through while I was up there. I can remember days where here
the sun was more like the moon, a full moon in the sky, because of the
dust. This would be sometime-- Again, some more trivia: we were sitting
with Mr. Wright on a hill that faced south toward the end of the day,
just resting there--a few of us gardeners. Mr. Wright joined us there
surrounded by a great field of watermelons. He instigated it, we all
followed suit--taking a watermelon, breaking it open, just eating the
heart. That's where the sweetest part is. There were so many
watermelons, we weren't ever going to use them all, so we just had our
fill then. And then we were walking back to Taliesin past Midway [Barns]
and in a field on our right-hand side--a corn field--was a great big oak
tree right in the middle of the field. Mr. Wright turned and queried us,
should he cut that oak tree out? I think none of us was courageous
enough to offer an opinion. I've seen recent pictures with the tree
still there. He was genuinely wondering what to do with it.
-
VALENTINE
- It's a good thing he left it.
-
FYFE
- Yes. It's a magnificent tree. But it's not what most farmers would do.
He often used to talk about little men sitting at the base of a tree. He
used to say, "Why so hot and bothered, little man?" I guess we got that
story while we were looking at that old oak tree--trying to ask us not
to be so uptight about workaholism.
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- I want to ask you what skills you developed from your experience at
Taliesin. Or attitudes.
-
FYFE
- At Taliesin I wasn't the greatest farmer. But in 1935, I met my brother
[James Beye Fyfe] back in Oak Park. He was a graduate structural
engineer and had been working for United States Steel [Corporation] in
Pennsylvania drawing rivets all day long. He was sick and tired of that.
So we agreed we'd like to take a try at farming together. We looked for
farmlands in Michigan, came around the bottom of Lake Michigan, and
started up this side. Just outside of Woodstock [Illinois] was the first
time we found a farm that was good soil that was within our ability to
buy it. And that's how we landed where we are, here on this side of
Woodstock. We took short courses at the University of Wisconsin, that
summer my brother worked for Mr. [Earl] Hughes on his farm, and the next
March we moved onto our farm. My interest in this venture was directly
related to my experiences at Taliesin. I had a faint hope that
eventually if we got this thing going right, we might have visitors come
to stay with us. And I had hopes that we might even have a school for
small children. But none of that ever eventuated. We did have an
excellent herd of holstein-friesians. Over the years, my brother turned
out to be a remarkable herdsman, no question about it. He married and
had a family, and eventually I married and started a family, and 160
acres wasn't going to support two families. So I went back into
architecture and kept the ten acres you see here. The far end of this
house was built during the war. I was in Mobile [Alabama]. Well, that's
part of the next lecture.
-
VALENTINE
- Before we finish today, though, I'd like you to list some adjectives
that describe your experience at Taliesin.
-
FYFE
- I don't know; I'll give them to you at the beginning of the next
lecture. I'll give you a list of adjectives to describe Mr. Wright.
-
VALENTINE
- All right. Rewrite the questions then.
-
FYFE
- I wonder where they are. Somewhere I have a list of adjectives that
describe Japanese prints, and it seemed to me they quite accurately
described Mr. Wright.
-
VALENTINE
- It would be nice if you could find that. Why don't we start the next
session with those two lists?
-
FYFE
- Will do.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- We're in the home stretch now.
-
FYFE
- I think when we parted I was to come back with a list of adjectives
describing Taliesin, and I volunteered to bring a list of expressions
that applied to Mr. [Frank Lloyd] Wright's work. At the time that I
arranged an exhibit of Mr. Wright's work for our local library, I wrote
this part of the explanation: "Expressions applied to the Japanese
prints were 'inventive,' 'unexpected view,' 'oblique angle,'
'asymmetry,' 'dynamic tension,' 'vertical poised against sweeping
curves,' 'simple quietude'--and the Japanese expression for that is
wabe, 'elegant simplicity'--and the Japanese for that is sabe, 'modest
beauty,' 'close to nature,' and 'sensing the eternal core of things.'"
It seemed to me that these expressions applied to Japanese prints are
equally properly applied to the architecture of Mr. Wright.
-
VALENTINE
- That's perfect.
-
FYFE
- Now for adjectives describing Taliesin. I had a very difficult time with
that. I came up with four words.
-
VALENTINE
- Okay.
-
FYFE
- Heterogeneous, nucleus--being Mr. Wright--beautiful, and
frustrating.
-
VALENTINE
- Explain. [laughter] I'm a schoolteacher, what can I say?
-
FYFE
- Well, heterogeneous explains itself, doesn't it? It's a mix of-- It
certainly was not homogeneous. And certainly Mr. Wright was the nucleus
of the place. That it was beautiful--not only the natural setting with
the hills and that part of Wisconsin are just beautiful, but of course
Taliesin itself is a beautiful building, well accommodated to its
situation. Frustrating--that's the one you wanted explained apparently.
That the actuality was so remote from initial expectations I think was
part of the frustration for me. The lack of money available for
promoting and carrying on the Taliesin Fellowship--very many evidences
of that were frustrating to the apprentices, but it must have been
extremely frustrating to Mr. Wright. It seems a miracle to me that the
fellowship finally came through and carried on. My own reactions to my
experience there were embraced in "challenging," "profitable," and
"developmental." Those ought to explain themselves, I hope.
-
VALENTINE
- That's a very good description. It covers a lot of bases. I came across
this letter from Phil [Philip] Holliday to a student who was doing a
survey about participants in Taliesin. In the bottom of this letter, he
says, "One more recollection. A working companion"--which he identifies
as you--"and I were dismissed for twelve hours to pack and depart
because Mr. Wright came back after we had finished an assigned task and,
not seeing us working, assumed we were derelict in the duty. He was
quick to judge, and in this case, misjudge. We kept receiving messages
to appear at local events for the next few hours, and did so to be
ignored until the next morning, a Sunday, when things were straightened
out and we were asked to stay." Is that typical or unique?
-
FYFE
- I don't think it's typical, and it isn't exactly according to my own
memory of it. I remember the incident well. On Saturday, Phil and I were
sweeping out and cleaning up the theater building [Hillside Playhouse]
over at Hillside [Taliesin Fellowship Complex], while all the rest of
the fellowship had gone to the river to go swimming. I don't think we
were assigned that task; we just assumed it because we both lived there,
probably. I think as the day wore on, we were a bit miffed that
everybody was having fun swimming down at the river while we were
carrying forth on, as I remember it, a duty that had been self-assigned.
I do recall distinctly leaving a little pile of dirt right in the middle
of the corridor and abandoning it there. I don't know if we finally went
to the river or not, but that's what Mr. Wright saw. We felt put upon
that we had been alone and cleaning up and getting ready for Sunday and
then were abused for it. The other recollection that he gives us
there--I don't doubt that it's true but it escapes my memory. I remember
us just being very unjustly accused.
-
VALENTINE
- You don't remember being asked to pack your bags and leave?
-
FYFE
- No, but it could have been.
-
VALENTINE
- Edgar Tafel claims to have received the most firings. He was ordered to
leave many times over, and then he'd be forgiven.
-
FYFE
- He was "Peck's Bad Boy."
-
VALENTINE
- I think he lived it to the hilt. He enjoyed that reputation.
-
FYFE
- Sure enough.
-
VALENTINE
- I want to talk about your life as Bill again. When you were at Taliesin
you were called Beye.
-
FYFE
- When I arrived there was Bill [William Wesley] Peters; there were a
couple of other Bills already on the place. Mr. Wright just decided to
call me Beye. He knew the family name, family associations, and knew
them much better than I did. When I arrived, this background material--
I could recollect it, but it wasn't part of my baggage when I
arrived.
-
VALENTINE
- Does anybody still call you Beye or is it Bill?
-
FYFE
- Anybody that was at Taliesin still calls me Beye. We have a son, now,
named Beye. Sometimes a telephone call will come in for "Beye Fyfe,
please," so we get a little mixed up in sorting it out.
-
VALENTINE
- So after you left Taliesin in 1934, then you bought a farm with your
brother [James Beye Fyfe] and became a dairy farmer.
-
FYFE
- Not right away; about a year later. I went immediately out to
Connecticut and had a job to design a two-car garage and living quarters
over it and attach it to an eighteenth-century farmhouse. Not only did I
design it, but I helped build it and worked there through the
winter.
-
VALENTINE
- I take it it was not colonial. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- It was spartan colonial, yes. It was an intriguing challenge to work out
the levels of the addition to the levels of the house on a single
stairway that served them both. It was a lovely occasion for me. I
enjoyed doing the work. A lot of the time I just lived there, bached it,
did my own cooking. That's where I picked up a cocker spaniel dog that
came home with me. By 1935, I was home with my brother and found that we
were both interested in farming, and that's when we began looking for a
farm. In Woodstock we found about three different farms that we looked
at seriously and considered quite seriously. The one that we bought was,
to coin a cliché, dirt cheap. It had previously been a quarter section,
but one corner had been sold off, which we bought later. The original
purchase price was $75 an acre with buildings, the twenty-five acres
that we bought later with no buildings cost $125 an acre.
-
VALENTINE
- How much later was that?
-
FYFE
- Not much. A year maybe.
-
VALENTINE
- You were too successful.
-
FYFE
- It was a good farm, good soil. We began assembling a herd of pedigree
cows--had a good dairy farm going. Eventually, Jim married--we were
bachelors when we came out. We started on March 1; that's when all
farmers move because that's when they have the least inventory to carry
over to a new farm. My first job was to disinfect the barn. The previous
summer I-- My really first job was to put in more windows because the
Chicago health commissioner had edicted that anybody sending milk to
Chicago had to have a certain amount of windows in the dairy barn. My
third job was to build an outhouse. There was no-- I don't think we even
had electricity to begin with; Saturday nights I had to pump water for
baths by hand. It was pretty primitive. Eventually Jim had his family,
and I married and had a family. This farm wasn't going to support two
families, so I went back into architecture. During [World War II], I was
in Mobile [Alabama] working for the U.S. War Department doing camouflage
work along the Gulf of Mexico. A letter came from my brother saying that
he was going to have to sell the herd. I wrote, "Don't sell the herd,"
because I knew it was a very good one. I got permission to come home and
work on the farm. At that time the fear of attack from South America had
evaporated because that German [General Erwin Rommel] who was sweeping
across North Africa in tanks was finally stopped. The fear was that he
would get all the way to Egypt and then cross the ocean to Brazil and
attack this country from the south. At that time we had no protection
along the Gulf. The War Department said, "You can go work on a farm,
that's okay, but if we ever need you, you have to come back."
-
VALENTINE
- Where had your brother learned farming?
-
FYFE
- He had worked on a farm in Maine one summer. All he did was make hay. He
got good and tired of that.
-
VALENTINE
- Rivets and hay.
-
FYFE
- Did I tell you about the rivets?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- Oh, I'm sorry. I'm retelling you a lot of this.
-
VALENTINE
- No, you're not.
-
FYFE
- We were able, during the war, to start this house that we're in. The
thirty-six west feet of it was considered a tenant house on a farm. We
bought all the lumber we could find in different lumberyards. There are
eleven different kinds of wood in that small part of the house. It's
what is now known as a passive solar collector, of course. We did not
have permission to get plumbing materials, but I already had those
stashed away. We had to reapply to get a heating unit because that, too,
had metal in it. The design of the concrete floor took care of all the
ducts so there wasn't very much metal used. Anyway, we finally got it
built. I dug out the entire basement with a spade because we couldn't
find any excavating equipment. We had an old--I forget what you call
it--scoop, I guess. In the olden days a dump scoop behind a horse was
used to excavate. You'd scoop something up and carry it over to another
place and dump it. We found one, but it was so rusty it broke. So much
for the first section of the house.
-
VALENTINE
- Where did you meet your wife, Peggy [Margaret Veuve Reeder Fyfe]?
-
FYFE
- I was teaching at Northwestern University, and she was one of my
students.
-
VALENTINE
- What were you teaching?
-
FYFE
- Interior design. I was lecturing in the downtown campus, and she was
taking that course. We got to talking, and it eventually led to
marriage.
-
VALENTINE
- When was that?
-
FYFE
- Nineteen thirty-nine. I think we were married forty-eight years when she
died of cancer. She had three different cancers and finally a multiple
myeloma, which is incurable. That's the one that begins in the bone
marrow. Once it's discovered, it's already progressed. The prognosis at
the Mayo Clinic was three years or maybe thirty years. She lived for
another three years.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you consider yourself a farmer or an architect during that early
period?
-
FYFE
- I was very much of a farmer. It was hard work and we had a cash flow
problem, of course. Every once in a while I'd go back to the city and do
some drafting in an architect's office. So here's a problem: When I was
milking the cows--we milked by machine but you have to strip the cows
afterwards--my fingers would get toughened up to doing that task. Then
I'd get back into town and I'd have to take a pencil and try to do some
very delicate things with my fingers. So they weren't congenial
activities exactly.
-
VALENTINE
- No, I hadn't thought of that.
-
FYFE
- It was real farming. As I told it on tape, Jim turned out to be a
marvelous herdsman. When he died a tragic death on the farm, that year
he'd been selected Dairy Farmer of the Year by the state. His wife
[Hildegard Haataja Fyfe] had to accept the plaque posthumously. I
enjoyed farming. When I came back from Mobile, we took another farm of
160 acres across the highway. So we had two herds going. We had a nisei,
a Japanese student from a college in California, to help. His family had
been put into a camp in Arkansas. Through the Quakers, we got Koske
[Ijichi] to come to work with us. After he'd been with us--he was just a
great guy--he asked if he could bring his mother and his sister and his
uncle. They came up and lived-- I forget whether they lived in our house
across the way or they lived on this farm. Anyway, the uncle had worked
with a famous agriculturist in California. I'm not going to come up with
his name. He arrived in September, put in a garden, and had vegetables
to eat out of the garden that fall. He knew just where to plant--on the
sunny side of the barn--and he used some mature manure that was
available. It was a very interesting family. Amy [Ijichi], the sister,
graduated from Woodstock High School. I'm getting pretty far afield
here.
-
VALENTINE
- No, it's very interesting.
-
FYFE
- When the war was over and they wanted to go back to California, nobody
would sell Koske automobile insurance. And I said, "Oh, okay, I can get
it for you from the Chicago Motor Company." They also wouldn't sell it
to a nisei. I couldn't get it from the local [American] Farm Bureau
[Federation]. Isn't that crazy?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- Before Koske came, we had to make sure that it would be agreeable to the
neighbors. And the farmer who had been on our farm before we bought
it--name of [William] Fermin; that's a German name-- During World War I
his father had been hounded around the square in Woodstock. He was the
only neighbor that objected to a nisei coming to live with us.
-
VALENTINE
- You'd think he would understand.
-
FYFE
- You'd think he would understand. Before they left, after the war, the
Ijichis were admired and loved by all the neighbors.
-
VALENTINE
- So the sister had no problem in high school.
-
FYFE
- No. Oh, no, she was very much appreciated, and she liked it. No
problem.
-
VALENTINE
- I picture you like Thomas Jefferson, sitting on your farm, dabbling in
architecture, making these award-winning houses.
-
FYFE
- Just the other day I was showing George [A.] Talbot III some drawings
I'd made for a house in Mexico City. They were made downstairs here. I
can't believe how I had time and energy to make that set of drawings. I
think there were fourteen architectural and four mechanical sheets, and
they're almost as big as from here to the end of that table: huge
drawings, beautifully made. I don't know how I combined that with
farming. But I did.
-
VALENTINE
- How many people were working on the farm?
-
FYFE
- Well, just a moment back-- I think Koske was helping me across the
highway. I guess that left Jim alone on this farm. But when we did
anything big, like haying or threshing, we worked together on both
farms. The farm across the highway had woods out in back, and I remember
picking up calves that were born out there and carrying them back to the
barn on my shoulders. That farm was spread out more than this farm. This
farm was a square section. Across the road we introduced contour
farming.
-
VALENTINE
- Where was the barn from here?
-
FYFE
- On this farm?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- Directly east. It burned. One time I got off the train coming back from
Chicago, and the sheriff met me to tell me that the barn was burning. A
metal barn has been put up on the old foundations. When we took over
this farm, we put new foundations under the old barn. So they were in
good shape. The barn and the house and all the sheds are gone from the
farm across the highway. There's just the silo left there; you can see
that. But we didn't have any farm experience behind us. Maybe I told
you--we took a short course at the University of Wisconsin, Jim had had
a summer in Maine, and I'd had some experience at Taliesin.
-
VALENTINE
- Served you well.
-
FYFE
- It all worked out.
-
VALENTINE
- You said you got in touch with Koske through the Quakers. Were you a
Quaker back then?
-
FYFE
- No. I became a Quaker when I married Mary [Pollock Endres Fyfe].
-
VALENTINE
- That's what I thought, but you mentioned that, so--
-
FYFE
- They do some good work.
-
VALENTINE
- They do great work, yes. What was your involvement with Hull House about
that time?
-
FYFE
- I came back from Taliesin, and Bill [William] Deknatel had known me at
Taliesin. Bill was on the board of trustees for Hull House.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, I didn't realize that.
-
FYFE
- They had a director of the art department, Emily Edwards, who was an
excellent director and a fine person. But they were getting a strong
infusion of WPA [Works Progress Administration] workers from the artists
in Chicago. They wanted somebody to supervise that. I think I was
supervisor of maybe thirty-five people. We had more than a dozen
studios.
-
VALENTINE
- This is in your spare time from the farm?
-
FYFE
- No, I was in Chicago by this time. One of the nicest studios was every
Thursday night. A WPA plasterer would come in in the morning and make
four-foot-by-four- foot plaster sections for each student. By evening
class they could each do a fresco in the wet plaster. A serigraphy
studio had a dozen or so of the best artists in Chicago at that time and
a carpenter shop. There were marvelous classes for the young kids that
would come in after school. We'd put a man's shirt on backwards for a
smock, and they had an easel, and each person had a big can of white
paint, blue, red, and yellow--just let them go, with wonderful results.
We put on an exhibit one time. Of course I'm being very objective about
this.
-
VALENTINE
- Of course.
-
FYFE
- It was a terrific show. A few weeks later the Art Institute [of Chicago]
put on their show. Theirs were stilted and stiff and ours were
freewheeling and wild and wonderful.
-
VALENTINE
- So how were you as a teacher?
-
FYFE
- Well, if I tried to teach I was lousy. If I let things go, I was okay.
One of the best meetings I had with the staff, I came completely
unprepared, I got one of the staff to go to the blackboard, and I just
began to get people to volunteer ideas. We were going to work up a
program for Christmastime. It turned out to be the best meeting ever. I
was a lousy lecturer. I struggled hard with that. I remember one time at
Northwestern University where I was on the ground floor. I had a
roadster parked just out in back where I could see it. I could hardly
make myself stand there and talk on a wonderful spring day.
-
VALENTINE
- You have as much trouble as they do.
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- Well, when you were in Chicago, while you were teaching at Northwestern
and working at Hull House, who was working on the farm?
-
FYFE
- By that time, I think I had sold my share to Jim, my brother, and he was
working it alone.
-
VALENTINE
- That's a lot of work.
-
FYFE
- By then, the farm that we rented during World War II was no longer part
of the project. He was just working on his own farm. Then I went to work
for myself in Chicago and in Oak Park [Illinois]. Oh, I remember why I
went into Chicago: I felt isolated out here, and I felt I needed more
contacts with architectural things. After five years on my own, I went
to Bertrand Goldberg. Does that ring any bell?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- They call it Bertrand Goldberg Associates. I was the associate. Then, in
1956 my brother died. He had climbed to the top of a silo, and
apparently the silage gives off a toxic gas. We can only believe he
either had a stroke or a heart attack, because he knew that that was a
hazard. He was very tired. He'd been up to northern Michigan and bought
a farm there because he and his youngest son, Bob [Robert William Fyfe],
suffered from asthma. When he returned to his farm he climbed the silo
to see how much silage he had to sell. His oldest son, Jim [James Arthur
Fyfe], was playing basketball at the base of the silo, and finally
realized his father hadn't come down. Six months later, his widow died.
So their four children [Ellen Fyfe Thompson, Mary Fyfe Engelbrecht, Jim,
and Bob] decided to stay together and to live with us. At that time, I
felt I had to have an assured income so I went to work at Perkins and
Will.
-
VALENTINE
- You had three children [Beye Fyfe, Edward Allen Fyfe, and John Corwin
Fyfe] of your own also.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- So you had seven children now.
-
FYFE
- In this house we put two people in each room. I stayed with Perkins and
Will for eighteen years, retiring in 1975--a recession year. They asked
me to take an early retirement, which I did. I started to work with the
[McHenry County] Planning Commission in Woodstock.
-
VALENTINE
- So you didn't retire; you just moved.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- I want to talk about some of the projects you did both on your own and
with Perkins and Will. The Lewis House--
-
FYFE
- I was working in Paul Schweikher's office at that time. I did not have a
license. Herb [Herbert] Lewis was an artist, and I knew Catherine
[Lewis], his wife, very well. They wanted me to design a house for them,
which I did. It was built in Park Ridge [Illinois]. Paul was listed as
the architect because he had a license. It was a very interesting
experience for me, and the Lewises loved it. There was one wing labeled
on the plan as "studio." I remember going before the village planning
commission, where some of the people of Park Ridge were afraid if they
had a studio there would be naked women running around. [laughter] But
we reassured them and there was no problem. There were not very many
houses around it at that time. A mistake that I made was not to set the
house a little bit higher. By the time the other houses were built
around it, it was a little low relative to the others.
-
VALENTINE
- It was very much like a Usonian house, I thought.
-
FYFE
- I had no notion of what Mr. Wright was doing at that time.
-
VALENTINE
- You didn't keep up with him?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- Follow his work in the press?
-
FYFE
- No.
-
VALENTINE
- That's interesting.
-
FYFE
- How did I finally come to this solution? There was an earlier solution
which I think I have down in the file somewhere. This one worked out
very economically and fit their needs well. The Lewises finally had to
sell it, as they were moving to Arizona. Much later I went back and
found that over the kitchen windows somebody had put scallops, so I
never returned. I remember in House and
Garden the house was published twice. One time mention was made
that the rafters were a little bit busy or fussy. I just loved them:
they were scissor trusses, and I just loved having them exposed as they
were.
-
VALENTINE
- Did you keep in touch with anyone from Taliesin?
-
FYFE
- Not really. One summer Phil Holliday was working for a former roommate
of his at the University of Wisconsin--had a farm by Spring Grove,
Illinois, which is not too far down [Highway] 47 from here. I came out
that summer and worked with him, gardening. I met Edgar Tafel a few
times when he briefly lived in Chicago.
-
VALENTINE
- What was Perkins and Will like during the period in which you worked
there?
-
FYFE
- Growing. I think I probably told you that when they were at 228 North
Michigan [Avenue] in the same building my father had his office, they
had one draftsman, Joe Salerno, a friend of mine. Then they moved over
to the Merchandise Mart and they got a little bit larger, growing all
the time, because they were specializing in schools. This was a time
when a great many schools had to be built. If you follow their work very
closely, first they did a lot of elementary schools, then they did a lot
of high schools, and finally they got into doing a lot of colleges. By
the time I went there, they were beginning to do colleges. I was darn
lucky: I'm not exactly sure why the assignments came to me. The first
were libraries because I had done some libraries. Then there were jobs
that involved campuses. There was a large one in Kansas City [Missouri]
for the Beth Shalom congregation. Eventually they would do a temple
there but this was just a school to begin with. Beautiful site--trees
and hills and dales. I was new in the office. George Hutchinson was a
partner in charge or the senior in charge. We had an associate in Kansas
City to do the working drawings. Bids came in, and I knew that they were
going to be high. Nobody could go down from Perkins and Will at that
time, so I had to go. The bids were way, way high. It was a terrifying
experience for me, but Perkins and Will eventually redid a whole new set
of buildings. Very conventional, I would say. That's the kindest word I
could use. I had made a series of preliminary drawings, including the
temple, using a hyperbolic parabola roof on the temple; then the high
school, leading down the hill to three units; elementary; and then
kindergarten. One time I asked Mr. [Lawrence B.] Perkins if he wanted to
see the prelims. He took them home, and later I learned that if he
hadn't seen those drawings they'd have fired me. It was a good set of
drawings. Then I was assigned to Rockford College--a beautiful
three-hundred acre site, incredibly beautiful and large--and Calvin
College almost simultaneously, each of them to do a master plan for a
new campus in the countryside.
-
VALENTINE
- Why were you selected to do the master plans?
-
FYFE
- I can only guess. Maybe because I'd been at Frank Lloyd Wright's.
Probably. That's the only thing I can imagine.
-
VALENTINE
- It turned out to be a marvelous selection.
-
FYFE
- It fascinated me. I remember walking all over the Rockford campus, and
right in the middle--about where we wanted to build--was a huge willow
tree. So I would walk up and down and around on the hills, and I could
orient myself by that tree in the early springtime because it was bright
yellow. I concluded that we would put the campus itself on the sort of
ridge where you were aware of the city: there wasn't much city around
then, but the world outside. You could hear and see it. The dormitories
would be down below where sounds would be dissipated. There were some
beautiful woods. There was a maple forest there. That's how that campus
got going. The one in Grand Rapids [Michigan] for Calvin College, again,
I just one summer walked all over the site and got a feel for the woods,
meadows, stream, hedgerows--I had a topographical map there, a very good
one, while Rockford had had an aerial topograph that was sort of all
right. Just walking all around the [Calvin College] site I got a sense
of a proposal. That fall, I proposed it to the college, and they
accepted. At Rockford we had a continuing contract. In Grand Rapids, we
had a new contract for every job.
-
VALENTINE
- And there were a lot of buildings, a lot of contracts. That job lasted a
good long time.
-
FYFE
- Yes. At one time the chief draftsman went by my desk and said, "You
going to make a career out of this?"
-
VALENTINE
- You just about did. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- Yes, I did. It also involved our interior department and landscape
department. We had a lot of separate contracts.
-
VALENTINE
- Even after you left Perkins and Will, you were still working for Calvin
College.
-
FYFE
- Perkins and Will asked me to take an early retirement in 1975. There was
a hiatus of about five years until building began again at Calvin. So
then they came back to me and I worked out of my studio here. I don't
remember how many buildings after that there were. I think they were
mostly additions to existing buildings that I had designed.
-
VALENTINE
- What are the principles for planning a new campus?
-
FYFE
- Here you're going to get my short course in architecture.
-
VALENTINE
- Why not?
-
FYFE
- It seems to me that whether it's a building or a room or a campus, your
first ingredient is the client's program. That's one reason that I had
difficulty at Perkins and Will: because I wanted to work with the
client. As Perkins and Will increased in size, it became more and more
horizontally oriented. You were either a job captain, draftsman, or
designer, or you handled the client. And I wanted to do all of those
things, even to working out some of the details if I thought I had some
special idea for them. How did I get off on that?
-
VALENTINE
- The principles of planning a campus.
-
FYFE
- Right. I would make it a cardinal principle that anytime I went to the
board or to ask anybody to make a decision, I would have all the data
available for that person or those persons to reach their decisions.
That meant that part of the program was getting the client to make a
written program. The architect can help but should not do it for them.
Thus it becomes kind of--I can't think of the word--an introspective
experience: they have to look into themselves to understand what goals
they have. Every building is the result of perceived needs; I insist
that they be written out--by the client. I remember in the case of
Calvin College one time, they had assembled an ad hoc committee of some
of the best minds on campus. I was a little late in arriving. When I
did, the committee was deep in a discussion of what type of material to
use on the windowsills. I'm not known for being very--I don't know the
expression--politic? Anyway, by the time we left, the president [Dr.
William Spoelhof] was well aware that he had to do something about it.
So he set the committee to writing their program. I think it took months
before it came back from them, and it was a thick document. But it was
excellent. They approached what the college was there for, what they
were trying to do, and what the library should do in that whole
scheme--what were the requirements and what were the needs of a library?
It took me a long time to digest it, and to help myself I made a table
of contents and then an index. When I sent it back to the college, the
head librarian was quite apologetic that they had not made a table of
contents and that they had not made an index. But they were quite
necessary for me because sometimes things would turn up in two or three
different locations in the program. It was about that thick. Anyway, the
written program is terribly important.
-
VALENTINE
- You frequently have to educate clients to do that, though--what needs to
be in a program and how to approach it.
-
FYFE
- Yes. After the library, good programs always came through for each
building.
-
VALENTINE
- See, you're a good teacher.
-
FYFE
- Well, Dr. Spoelhof was an exceptional president. And the libraries-- I
early on learned that that was one of his great interests. They had a
remarkable library for a school their size.
-
VALENTINE
- How big a school was it?
-
FYFE
- When we started, it was about 2,500 students and we finally got to
planning for 5,000. It never reached 5,000. It leveled off to a little
over 4,000--about where it is now.
-
VALENTINE
- It's a religious school, right?
-
FYFE
- Yes. The Christian Reformed Church. They came to this country for just
the opposite reason that the pilgrims came: their church in Holland was
getting too liberal so they came here to keep their beliefs intact.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, I thought you had a very interesting solution: to build the triad
of buildings that was the center of the--
-
FYFE
- Well, that was a response to the feeling of the administration, I think
primarily Dr. Spoelhof. The science building and the chapel and the
library were the three dominant buildings. The chapel didn't get built
till very nearly the very last thing because that's part of their
religion too: the chapel is no more a religious place than the
classroom. They believe that every hour of every day they're working for
God. Their symbol is, in Latin, "Gladly I offer my hand and my heart to
thee, God," something like that. And they mean it. Wonderful people to
work with. They wouldn't back away from a problem; they'll sit down and
solve it, which a lot of clients won't do.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- So I guess in terms of the campus plan, I tried to learn of their
religious beliefs and needs, and they gave me lots of material to read.
This all happened at their hundredth celebration, so they had a book
about the church that was very helpful to me, coming to them as a
Unitarian. That's about as opposite as one could possibly be, but we had
no problems. They believe in doing good things, and Unitarians try to do
good things, too.
-
VALENTINE
- The fundamental belief is the same.
-
FYFE
- Just don't get involved in theology. [laughter]
-
VALENTINE
- Well, that's a good principle anyway.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- They're very pleased with that campus, from everything I've read.
-
FYFE
- Yes, they are, and they should be. It's a good campus. It has enough
irregularity to-- Well, okay, that's number one in Fyfe's short course
in architecture. The second item is that architecture should accommodate
to the site; it should not abuse the site in any way. This can apply to
things in the city as well as out in the country. These two campuses, of
course, were in the country. It should improve the site, if possible. At
Calvin, again, there were hills and dales and woods and hedgerows and a
stream, Whiskey Creek--which was a big joke--coming through the
property. We never leveled a site for a building--leveled it for the
tennis courts a little bit.
-
VALENTINE
- So you go in the library on the third level because that's where the
hill was or something?
-
FYFE
- Well, many of the buildings-- I guess, to be more accurate, none of them
have really a front entrance except the administration building. I
realized that there would be parents and students coming for the first
time. You just come in under a low ceiling, so there is kind of a main
entrance to that building. But all the other buildings just have
entrances as they respond to internal and external circulation patterns.
Almost every building, therefore, has entrances at different levels. The
library was the-- The seminary, a graduate school, was the first
building on the new campus. It was to be separate from the college, but
not too separate, as it would share space in the library when it would
be built later. Whiskey Creek, some trees, and a slight elevation
clearly indicated an area in one corner of the property for the
seminary. And where did I start off from on this?
-
VALENTINE
- On the site?
-
FYFE
- Oh yes. So the next buildings that were built were dormitories for the
freshmen and the first phase of a library with three classrooms in it.
It was a two-story building. Later, for a very big addition to the
library we continued the two existing levels and added another level
below grade. I attended a seminar on libraries at the University of
Colorado. There the university has a lot of sub-basements in their
library, and I thought, "Well, why couldn't we gain inexpensive space by
having a sub-basement in this library?" So now we have another level
down below grade, and that's how the front entrance is at the third
floor. It's designed-- Every library needs to be designed for expansion
because every library expands.
-
VALENTINE
- That's right.
-
FYFE
- So this library is designed to carry a fifth floor, eventually, and when
I got around to doing a design for a fifth floor I fell in love with it.
It's going to be cantilevered on three sides, and all those windows
around the top will be great. If you have a study table next to a
window, or if that space is devoted to offices--they might do that--it
would be a wonderful place to be. That's number two. Number three in my
short course is what the architect can bring to the project in terms of
insights, experience, inventiveness, or knowledge. *[There you have it:
program, site, expertise. Mr. Wright, I think, was able to perceive
needs that clients themselves had not realized; thus he was able to
program buildings in unique ways. His adaptation to site is legendary.
And his expertise--well, we'd be here a long time trying to cover that.]* Fyfe added the following bracketed section during his review of the
transcript.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, those are three biggies.
-
FYFE
- Yes.
-
VALENTINE
- To get all those things in balance means good architecture.
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
VALENTINE
- If that's what makes a good architect, what makes a good client?
-
FYFE
- Well, again, that's a very penetrating question because an architect
can't make great architecture without a good client. It's some kind of a
chemistry that develops between the two, and respect for each other is
an important ingredient, I think. What makes a good client?
-
VALENTINE
- Is it just luck that you had so many good clients and that [Frank Lloyd]
Wright had so many good clients?
-
FYFE
- I think I worked hard, particularly at Calvin [College], in developing
interactions and communication. In every instance--both Rockford
[College] and Calvin, and in Kansas City [Missouri] as well--I worked
with associate architects. There were four at Rockford, and in the case
of Calvin, there were three different architects, all members of the
Christian Reformed Church: [J. T.] Daverman and [James K.] Haveman in
Grand Rapids [Michigan] and Stapert in Kalamazoo [Michigan].
Intentionally or unintentionally, an associate's office could ruin
whatever we were trying to accomplish. So I made it a point to keep
lines of communication open with the associates and the client. With
Calvin College, from the very beginning we decided that everything from
the college to the architect would go through Henry DeWitt, and that
turned out to be a very, very good choice.
-
VALENTINE
- Who's he?
-
FYFE
- He was the vice president for administration and finance. My first
introduction to him was when we went to apply for the job, meeting the
board of trustees: there was this young man that left the meeting to get
some information from his office, and I thought, "Well, there's a
lightweight boy." He just turned out-- Everybody respected him so much;
by the end of his career he was tremendously effective. He was a hard
worker. He would take the attitude that they're building not for next
year, they're building for fifty years at least, so let's spend a little
bit more and do it right. Afterwards he told me-- Every once in a while
I'd make a suggestion. And after a while I became a little bit
concerned, I guess is the right word, that if I said something, they
just accepted it without question. That was more responsibility than I
wanted. It turned out, I learned later, that sometimes I made some
suggestions that Henry or the college thought were questionable. But I
had a good track record, so they just accepted the suggestions, and they
almost always worked out well. Everything went through Henry DeWitt, and
that meant that we wouldn't get instructions from anybody else on the
campus. It was centralized that way. Another reason that they were a
good client at Calvin is that they-- All the departments were interested
in the welfare of the total college. They weren't trying to make
separate fiefdoms. When we came to doing the science building, there was
a new man on campus as head of the department. He was the first one I
encountered who was just pushing for his own department. He lasted about
one and a half years. So there was a wonderful feeling on campus for the
total college project.
-
VALENTINE
- You know what I like about your architecture and why I think it's good?
It's because it's so people oriented. Everything is aimed at how it will
be used and how to make people comfortable in that space.
-
FYFE
- That's right. It was a cardinal principle with me that the needs are
spelled out and you have to meet those needs. But you try to make it so
that--in the case of a college--that the teacher can do his job well, so
the student can do his job well, and so that they'd be happy there. Of
course this comes directly out of Frank Lloyd Wright. There was a quote
that was in a little brochure that came from the [S. C.] Johnson Wax
project [Johnson Wax Building, Racine, Wisconsin]. Is it there?
-
VALENTINE
- I don't know. Is this it? "The Most Important Factor in Designing"?
-
FYFE
- Sure.
-
VALENTINE
- Read it.
-
FYFE
- I clipped this out and put it with Scotch tape on a card along with a
couple of other quotes, and I had it up in my office at Perkins and Will
for many years.
-
VALENTINE
- Read them all then.
-
FYFE
- "The most important factor in designing," said Frank Lloyd Wright, "is
the human value involved. If you make men and women proud of their
environment and happy to be where they are and give them some dignity
and pride in their environment, it all comes out to the good." These are
quotes that in March 1990 I sent to a student at Calvin who was going to
go into architecture. This one is by Lawrence B. Perkins: "Architecture
is not a question of brick and mortar; it's a response to a problem, an
idea. It's planning for an intended result." And then I had a quote from
Eero Saarinen: "We must have an emotional reason as well as a logical
end for everything we do. Architecture is not just to fulfill men's need
for shelter but also to fulfill men's belief in the nobility of his
existence on earth." That's pretty high-flung, isn't it?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes it is.
-
FYFE
- But from his father [Eliel Saarinen], a noted Finnish architect, Eero
learned always to design a thing by considering it in its next larger
context--for instance, a chair in a room, a room in its building, a
building in its environment, and an environment in a city, which I
thought was pretty-- This was kind of high-level information that a
student probably wouldn't get in a classroom. I got a nice letter back
from the student.
-
VALENTINE
- I didn't see the letter that you got back, but those are things you
probably picked up by osmosis being on that campus.
-
FYFE
- But making people happy to be where they are is important. I recall that
when we started at Calvin the professors were keeping their private
libraries at home, and as soon as their classes were done they were
scooting home to do their work. So the college agreed to improve their
office space in an effort to keep them on campus, and it worked. We
started out with very nice offices in the seminary, the first building
on campus. Always there was a place for their library. They had one easy
chair for a constituent to sit in. They had, in those days, a place for
a typewriter--of course, now they're all on computers--and a closet for
their coats. It did work. The professors began staying on campus, and
for the most part, were pleased. As the campus developed, each
department seeing the last ones built wanted offices just a little bit
bigger. Finally they demanded windows they could open. It got pretty
fussy. I remember offices for the staff in the physical education
department where one instructor wanted his windowsill lower so he could
sit in his chair and look out the window. If there were complaints, they
never reached me, except sometimes through the student newspaper.
-
VALENTINE
- What kind of complaints did they come up with besides that they needed
lower windows so they could sit in their chairs?
-
FYFE
- Well, on the addition to the student commons, on the east side I put
some very small windows. Finally I insisted in every classroom-- I've
sort of shifted gears here. A lot of the professors, I asked them what
kind of classrooms they liked. Some of them used slides a lot so they
didn't want windows. But I insisted that every classroom have one window
at least.
-
VALENTINE
- Good.
-
FYFE
- But the ones that the students objected to I made very small on the east
because of the morning sun coming in. Things like that. There was one
other, but I can't remember what it was.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, that's a pretty good track record for that many years.
-
FYFE
- Yes. When we were designing for the-- I think it's interesting so I'll
tell you about designing for the seminary. They listed their needs, and
they had so many classrooms and so many seminar rooms. Every time,
you're trying to meet a budget and make things more economical if
possible. It turned out that the seminars were all in the afternoon, and
the classes were in the morning. So we designed three classrooms at two
levels. In the morning they would have the full complement of students
at both levels for a classroom, and in the afternoon, they would have
half as many students sitting around a table at the lower level for
seminars. The upper level, roughly a horseshoe shape, produced a sort of
well below for the table. That well was lined with a nice wood, walnut
or cherry, so it was something like being in a study. Another thing that
happened out of that arrangement: there was great interaction between
the professor and the students at the table and with all the people at
the upper level, and there was great interaction student to student
across the table and across the room. Most of the seminary professors
loved it, and we introduced similar rooms every once in a while in the
college. The chemistry people and the scientific people wanted their
classrooms in three levels, which was traditional. It worked out well
with lots of blackboards. For a time this was the type of classroom that
seemed to be most acceptable. Later there were professors who wanted
rooms on one level with no fixed chairs so that they could bring people
into a circle or do anything--very flexible. So there's now a mix of
many kinds of classrooms on the campus. Scale is terribly important.
It's one of the hardest things to teach, this matter of scale, but that
speaks to the humanness of the situation. We were very fortunate in the
brick selection when we did the first building. Samples of about twenty
different bricks were built just to make a selection. The nicest one was
a brick that Eero Saarinen used frequently. I forget what it's
called--buckskin, I think. But it was too expensive. The one we finally
selected was close to it, and it turned out to be a very good selection.
It works; it has a sand finish. I thought-- At one time when the library
was under construction, somebody drew something on a brick interior wall
with a felt pen, and oh my gosh, how are we going to get this out of the
middle of a great big brick wall? Well, it just rubbed off because of
the sand finish. It's a warm, rose kind of color. The photographs don't
tell you that because the color photographs change the colors a lot. So
it worked out very well. I have a brick in the studio if you want to see
it.
-
VALENTINE
- I'd like to see it. The things that you learned about architecture and
that you just know about architecture--how much of that goes back to
your experience at Taliesin or at Yale [University] or from your father
[James Lincoln Fyfe] or from Paul Schweikher or from yourself? Or is it
really a combination of all those things?
-
FYFE
- Mostly Taliesin. Yes. Just in retrospect I can realize it. I think I
told you that in one of my interviews with the students I said that I
just got a lot out of it by osmosis. Really I meant that just by being
at Taliesin, I was picking up on it without making it an issue and not
really paying very much attention at the time. Mr. Wright's buildings,
if you try to analyze them, are very mysterious. Some people even call
it a spiritual quality. But nothing is ever exposed just immediately on
first view. Something always brings you around a corner or up or down
changes in levels: ceilings change, views develop. I never felt enjoined
by the college to frugality, but this campus in Grand Rapids in
particular was incredibly economical. When most college science
buildings were being built, for instance, at about $50 a square foot,
this one was built for $26 a square foot. It was a plan that
concentrated all the expensive utilities in a core, including the
elevator. Then you could feed out to laboratories and classrooms and
other places easily. And all the partitions could be moved easily, as
the walls were nonstructural. We finally discovered the least expensive
partition was a heavyweight concrete block. And they're expendable. You
want to use heavyweight blocks for sound attenuation. If sound
attenuation was very important, why, then we filled the blocks with
sand.
-
VALENTINE
- So it's like the [Malcolm E. and Nancy] Willey House, where budgetary
constrictions made the design much more exciting.
-
FYFE
- Surely. And I think Mr. Wright was growing--
-
VALENTINE
- What would you have done differently if you had had the budget? Where
would you have spent it?
-
FYFE
- I don't know. I can't think offhand of anything we would-- But every
time we did something we knew was spending a little extra money, it was
done with discretion and full of knowledge that we were doing it. One
great disappointment I had--this does not have anything to do with
architecture, this has to do with college campuses. Initially, I
proposed a program similar to universities in England and somewhat like
the separate colleges at Yale. There were to be five colleges called
"guilds." They were to be self-sustaining units with a kitchen and
dining and living rooms and some classrooms, and the several colleges
would use the same gyms and libraries--some of the central features. The
president was all for it, but he couldn't sell it to his faculty. I was
greatly disappointed about that. Every once in a while those drawings
emerge and I look at them again and wish they had been built. I truly
believe they would have fit Calvin's program well.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- It would have been fascinating. It would have helped them in their
growth because they could just do one guild at a time. And when they had
that many more students, do another guild. But the faculty didn't come
on board and that program never went ahead.
-
VALENTINE
- It's been sixty years since you were at Taliesin. What do you realize
now about that experience that you didn't know then?
-
FYFE
- Oh golly. I don't know. I think even when I left I had some concern that
it was too much oriented toward one person--Mr. Wright. And I think I
was right. All I can judge by is the printed material that continues. I
have yet to see anything that I get excited about done by other
apprentices. I know I don't see very much. This is heresy. I don't know
if this should go on the tape or not.
-
VALENTINE
- Put it on. You have nothing to lose. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- I don't resonate to a lot of the later things that Mr. Wright did. I'm
thinking of the [Grady Gammage Memorial] Auditorium [Tempe, Arizona] and
I'm thinking of the [Marin] County [Civic Center, San Rafael,
California] building. The county building is ringed with balls that make
one think of a pawnshop.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes.
-
FYFE
- And I don't know, but I suspect [William] Wes [Wesley] Peters was
responsible for those. But I must quickly add that when we went up to a
seminar at Taliesin in Spring Green [Wisconsin] one time there was an
in-depth slide show of the palace that he did in Iran. Beautiful,
incredible--if you can accept the fact that a palace should be built.
That was Wes's design, I believe.
-
VALENTINE
- One of the criticisms of Taliesin has always been that the people who go
there, and especially the people who stay there, don't really develop a
style of their own. It's largely imitative. And yet people like [E.] Fay
Jones and John Lautner and these great talents have come out of there.
What's the difference between who gets it and takes it and runs with it,
develops it, and who doesn't?
-
FYFE
- That's interesting. Now, Fay Jones is my notion of an excellent
architect. Incredibly great. And he was only there for a very short
time.
-
VALENTINE
- A few months, yes.
-
FYFE
- John Lautner was there for about six years, but I don't know any of John
Lautner's work.
-
VALENTINE
- Well, it's very original.
-
FYFE
- Is it?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. Very strong. And takes the principle and the philosophy of what
Taliesin was about and develops his own idiom with it, I think.
-
FYFE
- Well, gee, I hope to be able to see some of it sometime.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, I'll send you some pictures of it.
-
FYFE
- Oh, you have some? I'd love to see them. Yes, xerox them. One time
Calvin wanted to put a fax machine in here. [laughter] I just didn't
want to be that close to-- You can't fax them, but I'd love to see them.
Did you indicate to me that his health isn't the best right now?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes, I understand he's been very sick the last few months.
-
FYFE
- What kind of sickness?
-
VALENTINE
- He has some kind of muscle problem or weakness.
-
FYFE
- Is most of his work in California?
-
VALENTINE
- Southern California, Los Angeles area. And some in Mexico and the
Southwest.
-
FYFE
- A variety of types of buildings?
-
VALENTINE
- Mostly houses. But do you see a difference in people who stayed there
for a long time versus people who were there a short time? Or is there a
difference in the people who went there and their own innate personality
or talent--that they were able to get it and go somewhere with it?
-
FYFE
- I'm not that well acquainted. You would know much better than I. Is it
Christine Brierly?
-
VALENTINE
- Cornelia Brierly?
-
FYFE
- Cornelia Brierly. I've heard her talk and I read a couple of things
she's written, and I suspect that she was and is a valuable part of
Taliesin. I don't know the others--
-
VALENTINE
- Well, how did you break away from just imitating what Wright was doing
to developing your own understanding of those principles?
-
FYFE
- Well, again, by osmosis. I told you that I get very much wrapped up in
the beginning of any project. Even if it's a house. I've lost clients--
One time, Mary [Pollock] Endres [Fyfe] was married to Ronald Endres and
they wanted me to design a house for them, so I went to interview them
and began asking questions. Have you heard this before?
-
VALENTINE
- No.
-
FYFE
- It led to a divorce.
-
VALENTINE
- [laughter] I had no idea.
-
FYFE
- So I never got around to designing that house. I get very involved in
trying to know what a client wants to do. In Seattle, Washington, I went
to live with Dr. [John] Ingle, his wife, Joyce, and two children for
about a week to find out what their needs really were. I expend a great
deal of energy and time wrestling through whatever a project is, its
uniqueness, and what is really involved.
-
VALENTINE
- But you finally did design a house for Mary [Dr. Mary P. Endres House,
West Lafayette, Indiana].
-
FYFE
- Oh yes.
-
VALENTINE
- A wonderful house.
-
FYFE
- Yes. I'm very proud of that one. Because it works--
-
VALENTINE
- It's a beautiful house. I don't know how she could give it up.
-
FYFE
- She gave it up when she went to Governors State [University]. The house
had a lot of flow spaces, but Mary could have privacy by just going up
the stairs to a landing where there is a bathroom, laundry, and clothes
closets, and then she could go up a few more steps to her bedroom,
study, and worktable. Then at a lower level there were two bedrooms,
bath, and kitchenette. So it adapted itself, I would say, easily to
thirty guests or just to be alone.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. She says the house worked wonderfully well for her life-style of
being alone part of the time and taking people in and giving them
shelter.
-
FYFE
- We did plan a deck, which would have been fun. It was planned to go
around a tree with the tree going through the deck, but that didn't get
built.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO
OCTOBER 23, 1993
-
FYFE
- I've had difficulties with other clients. I started a house for a
couple, Bill [William] and Dorothy Weers here in Woodstock [Illinois],
and the two just wouldn't resolve any problem. They had a great many
problems between them and they wouldn't solve them. It wasn't too far
into the preliminary drawings when I had Bill come here, and I had a
check ready to give him back all the fees so far. I just wanted out. The
plan had a good principle involved. It was built for their elderly years
with all main rooms on one floor. Upstairs was a space under a big roof
for Dorothy, who's very intelligent and has files on everything. And
downstairs, space opened out to a garden. Bill was a nurseryman and
chemist. So the basement was Bill's and the attic was Dorothy's and they
lived happily ever.
-
VALENTINE
- It probably helped. Tell me about your life now. How is your
retirement?
-
FYFE
- We're both showing our age dramatically in the last two years. Losing
memory. [Mary Fyfe enters room and joins conversation] Did you hear that
question? MARY
-
FYFE
- No.
-
FYFE
- Repeat the question.
-
VALENTINE
- I said, how's your retirement? Tell me about your life now. How did you
meet Mary?
-
FYFE
- Oh, that's interesting. When Mary was county superintendent of schools,
as you know, Peggy and I had our first son, Beye [Fyfe]. So that's 1943.
I'd come from Oak Park [Illinois], where we had a wonderful school
system. Out here these were all one-room schoolhouses in the country and
no kindergartens, so I took it upon myself to see the county
superintendent of schools to talk about getting a kindergarten going.
And the county superintendent of schools, flabbergasted by a layperson
coming in to talk about schools, invited me out for coffee and Danish.
And so that's how we first met. MARY
-
FYFE
- And in just a few weeks I was invited for supper or lunch or something
or other, [laughter] and that's when I first met Peg [Margaret Veuve
Reeder Fyfe]. And we've known each other ever since. When Maggie asks
you a question, I think you should answer. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- Why, I did.
-
VALENTINE
- [laughter] And then when Peggy died, you married Mary. And that was
when?
-
FYFE
- 1984. July 3, 6--? MARY
-
FYFE
- Eighth. [laughter]
-
FYFE
- And Mary was a Quaker, so we had a Quaker ceremony, which you may
know--or maybe you don't know. Nobody performs it. We just stood up in
the middle of our meeting--we call a church service a meeting--and said
our vows to each other and then we signed the marriage license. It's
legal in Illinois.
-
VALENTINE
- That's nice.
-
FYFE
- And all the twenty people present signed a certificate of marriage. MARY
-
FYFE
- And then we had a reception in a good friend's backyard, where they had
arranged--wasn't just potluck--a wonderful meal. Then we moved here, a
hundred miles away.
-
VALENTINE
- What role does architecture play in your life today?
-
FYFE
- Oh. I guess if we have a favorite son, it might be John [Corwin Fyfe].
He is a veterinarian living in Maryland. He and his wife Linda
[Mansfield] bought a wonderful piece of property back in some woods.
It's a place where they can keep their horses and any other livestock
that they want to have. And it will always stay that way. But the house
on it is dreadful. [laughter] So they asked me to-- Anyway, I thought
the assignment was just to take that house and do some things to help it
out. So that is one project. And for our yearly meeting, Quaker meeting,
near McNabb, Illinois, we worked out a couple of designs for their
meeting house. It's on the [National] Register [of Historic Places] now.
Additions were happening to it that didn't respect the initial building.
I think they have come around to seeing the necessity of preserving the
original design. And I gave them some drawings. One of Mary's favorite
places, the Fine Line, is a great big barn for art-- MARY
-
FYFE
- Creative arts--mainly weaving but lots of other things, too: jewelry,
dyeing, ceramics, paper making--
-
FYFE
- But it is a real barn. They sandblasted all exposed structures inside to
a beautiful golden brown. And it's very much respected, the barn, but
they did need more space. So I proposed a shed to be attached at one
point, and if the shed is extended it will cover an addition that had
been poorly conceived when Denise [Kavanagh], the leading light of Fine
Line, was in the hospital. So what else have I done architecturally?
MARY
-
FYFE
- Well, I suppose you talked about how long you stayed with Calvin--over
thirty years?
-
VALENTINE
- You still read about it an awful lot too, don't you?
-
FYFE
- They have about six projects that they would like me to do, and I would
like to do them--additions to buildings that are there already. And at
one time, before my eyes gave out, the plan was that I would do them and
the drawings would be "put on the shelf" for when they might be needed.
The student population ceased its upward spiral, and income has leveled
off. I don't think they've done any building of substance since I left.
But I'd dearly love to have finished those projects. I don't think I'll
ever get to do them now. I had a cataract operation recently that didn't
work out. I can still make good drawings, but it's tedious. Sometimes I
even have to use a magnifying glass to be sure the lines meet. MARY
-
FYFE
- Working with Bill Nelson.
-
FYFE
- Oh yes. Maybe I told you about our trade-off? Bill Nelson is in our
meeting and he's an interesting guy. He's an inventor with a delightful
wife and two of the nicest children you could possibly imagine; they've
grown up in our meeting. Little Andrew [Nelson] was-- Eight weeks old?
MARY
-
FYFE
- Eight days old when he first came to meeting.
-
FYFE
- Now they have purchased rural property out west fifty miles down Rock
River. They're in a beautiful area-- have a stream going through their
property. They've made a pond and planted thousands of trees. Now Bill
wants to design his own house and build it himself. He makes drawings on
his computer, and I have the problem of deciphering those into an
eighth-inch scale. And so I'm working with Bill and he's doing carpentry
here on our home in exchange. I enjoy it because of the way his mind
works; it's lots of fun.
-
VALENTINE
- And you still read about Frank Lloyd Wright. You've come full circle
from your Oak Park days.
-
FYFE
- Oh yes. Over the years, if I got a clipping--and a lot of people send me
clippings--I'd throw them into a pile and sort those out for George [A.
Talbot III] to look at. I don't think he paid much attention to
them.
-
VALENTINE
- Oh, I think he did.
-
FYFE
- So I don't know what-- They really aren't important unless someone is
trying to build up a Frank Lloyd Wright file. Anyway, they're available
here if they want them. MARY
-
FYFE
- You can have copies. He will have copies of all of this?
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. MARY
-
FYFE
- So there's something you can put in the file. That's pretty
comprehensive.
-
FYFE
- Well, I get to make some corrections and additions, don't I?
-
VALENTINE
- You'll get to edit it.
-
FYFE
- The word I couldn't come up with--the system of teaching architecture at
Yale when I was there--was the [École de] Beaux-Arts system.
-
VALENTINE
- Yes. The parti system. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time and
sharing your life with us and providing a valuable resource for research
about Frank Lloyd Wright and the experience at Taliesin.
-
FYFE
- *[Maggie, it seems to me as I recall our discussions of the last few
days--which I've much enjoyed-- that these two years, '32 and '34, were
years of transition for Mr. Wright. Surely the fellowship shift from
school to apprenticeship is one marked transition. And it seems to me
that Mr. Wright's turn to his Usonian phase was exemplified in the two
Malcolm [E.] Willey designs. And it seems to me the change of the
fireplace at the end of the Hillside Drafting [Studio] marked a return
to Mr. Wright's sense of "occult" design.]