Architectures of Autobiography/Autobiographies of Architecture:
Reading Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marion Mahony Griffin

The Project:

This book manuscript examines architectural autobiography, specifically the movement between the American autobiographical tradition and architectural treatise in the autobiographies of three associated Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Marion Mahony Griffin. These architects, from whom the first notions of an indigenous American architecture were born, wrote lengthy and detailed autobiographies–texts that embedded polemical theories of architecture within autobiographical narratives. Although these architects wrote into a tradition of American autobiography that regularly made use of argumentative form, there has been limited analysis of the rhetorical nature of this tradition. This book project, then, does three things: it describes these three architectural autobiographies in terms of each other and of the architectural practice these authors/architects hoped to shape. Second, in a larger, sense, it interrogates usual readings of autobiography as literary narrative, substituting instead a rhetorical "architecture" as an important framework for understanding not only these three texts, but many kinds of autobiography. Finally, it considers the role of gender and sexuality in the ways in which these architects’ texts have been received: Frank Lloyd Wright, as a hyper-straight man; Marion Mahony Griffin, as a woman; and Sullivan, as a closeted gay man. I discuss how the reception of their texts in secondary sources always depicts uneasiness about the gender/sexuality of all but Wright. (However, Wright’s hyper-masculinity, perhaps the most bizarre of these constructs of sexuality, is not mentioned, interrogated or questioned.)

This project will specifically examine Wright’s An Autobiography, Mahony Griffin’s The Magic of America, and Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea. Although unpublished, The Magic of America is available in microfilm form (a copy of which I own), as well as being housed in archives at The Art Institute of Chicago’s Burnham Library and The New-York State Historical Society. I will also use a variety of secondary sources that will help document the ways in which literary scholars and architectural historians have read and rearticulated these texts. These sources, a brief bibliography of which appears in this document as Appendix A, include biographies and research from both the disciplines of literary, rhetorical, and architectural studies spanning a period of scholarship beginning from that produced during these architects’ lifetimes to today.

This manuscript will be a short book, 200-250 pages, divided into seven chapters and a conclusion. The chapters are all topically related, examining three related autobiographical texts, but making an argument that is not linear or one-dimensional. Rather, it examines a series of complex relationships among these texts, particularly the ways in which they function polemically, making arguments about these architects’ lives and work. Below I list briefly the material each of the chapters will include:

Chapter One: This chapter provides an introduction to the tradition of architectural autobiography, the architectural and textual work of the architects of the Prairie School, and the literary figures who influenced their architectural and autobiographical production: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. This chapter reviews the small amount of pertinent literature that discusses these architects as autobiographers, and argues for the necessity of re-examining their textual production as a means to illuminating and understanding their architectural production, their lives, and their roles as interpreters of American intellectual culture.

Chapter Two: The second chapter examines architectural autobiography as a theory of practice; Wright’s, Sullivan’s and Mahony Griffin’s texts were all written in order to document and explain bodies of architectural work and the theoretical concerns that led to the architecture’s development. This chapter examines not only the primary texts and their similarities, but architectural historians’ uneasiness with texts, as well as literary scholars’ discomfort with texts that are more argumentative than literary. This chapter asserts that these scholars have overlooked the three texts’ similar rhetorical architecture: Emerson’s organic, recursive style as a metaphor for the organic, indigenous architecture these architects attempted to create.

Chapter Three: This chapter examines three issues that remain contentious in architectural studies: the intersections among gender, genius, and genre. By examining the ways in which secondary sources reacted (and still react) to these texts, it becomes clear that generic classification was never a simple thing, but has been instead a thing shaped by these architects’ gender and sexuality and perceptions about the relation between gender and genius. For example, because of her gender, Mahony Griffin’s architectural work has been more difficult to attribute (it is regularly attributed to her husband or Wright) and her textual work has proven difficult to generically classify, in spite of its similarities to the other architectural autobiographies.

Chapter Four: Chapter four discusses the critical discomfort at the homoerotic elements of Sullivan’s texts that surface in secondary sources as "closeted" allusions to Sullivan’s possible homosexuality or descriptions of his unconvincing heterosexuality. And although early secondary texts never directly mention the architect’s sexuality, they do present a picture of Sullivan that is highly feminized. This feminized language, which is nearly always derogatory in architectural studies, represents the uncertainty of early historians responding to homoerotic texts. It is significant, though, that this uncertainty remains long after historians established Sullivan’s canonical position.

Chapter Five: Frank Lloyd Wright’s An Autobiography was written so early in his life that it required repeated revision; Wright not only updated and republished the text, he also wrote several other texts that allowed him to completely revise his life, like Genius and the Mobocracy and Testament. This chapter examines Wright’s revisions, arguing that a close reading of these revisions can help us better understand Wright’s dawning understanding of "the mechanics of fame" to use Roxanne Williamson’s term. Wright’s autobiographical production was an explicit attempt to cast himself as a singular genius and guarantee his position in the architectural canon.

Chapter Six: This chapter argues that scholarly misrepresentation of Mahony Griffin’s autobiography has occurred only because the text has never been considered part of the same tradition that produced Sullivan’s and Wright’s works. Not only is her text not understood as part of an equivalent genre, scholars who quote and employ the other two texts dismiss hers as unreadable. I argue that all of these texts are best understood as part of the same conversation about architecture, democracy, and the individual, a conversation that extends the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (among others).

Chapter Seven: Building on the assertions in chapter six, I argue for reading architect Marion Mahony Griffin’s autobiography as a hypertextual document, asserting that the complex architecture of hypertext creates the best medium for understanding this message. By framing a reading of Magic of America with a discussion of theories of hypertext and a discussion of the contemporary hypertextual turn in architectural studies, I clarify the ways in which Mahony Griffin’s text seems a vibrant and contemporary example of what architectural theory can and should be.

Conclusions: I end by discussing the ways in which architectural autobiography can help illuminate the rhetorical architecture embedded nearly invisibly in autobiographical expression. Examining the many connections between the architectural and autobiographical works of these three architects sheds light on both the architecture of autobiography and the ways in which architecture functions as a autobiographical art.

My methods are mainly rhetorical; this is a rhetorical analysis project wherein I provide a close reading of a range of primary and secondary texts, beginning with these architects’ own texts. In addition, I reread secondary texts, considering the ways in which these architects are written, based on an understanding of their argumentative stances in their individual texts. For example, Wright’s and Sullivan’s autobiographies tend to be treated by secondary sources with a great seriousness that was never extended to scholarly readings of Mahony Griffin’s text. So although these methods are mainly rhetorical, the project’s actual research component requires the traditional tools of literary studies. These include a close reading of texts, meticulous research into the authors’ lives and social milieu, and a familiarity with the range of available archival and secondary resources, including the structures to which these architects’ texts refer.

But not only is this work inviting interest in disciplinary contexts, it also challenges the ways in which disciplines discipline their borders, and therefore, how they construct new knowledge. Specifically, my research challenges the ways in which architectural historians have traditionally read these autobiographical texts as architectural history or theory (ignoring the explicitly autobiographical content) and the ways in which these texts have been largely ignored by the discipline of autobiography studies because they are less literary than polemical. This manuscript provides an illuminating point of intersection for these fields. Because Prairie School architecture, issues of gender and architecture, and autobiography studies are all important topics of scholarly inquiry right now, this research has a wider potential interest than much academic research and many academic manuscripts.

Finally, this research will increase understanding of the ways in which life stories inform architectural practice and the ways in which rhetorical architectures are embedded within autobiographical texts. Neither has been explicitly or adequately studied, either alone, or in tandem. Both provide an opportunity for re-envisioning humanities research as interdisciplinary and informing a broad understanding of the intersection of human lives and histories and practice in the arts.