They Have Torn Down the East Wing of the White House. They Should Keep Going.

Frank Lloyd Wright wanted a new capital city and an end to totalitarian rule, sham luxury, façade and the spectre of war. “You cannot be imperialistic and democratic at the same time.”

[This morning, I put out a news release “MIT, Palestinian Grandmother Among Targets of ‘Lawfare’ Regarding Israel” highlighting the contradictions between free speech and Empire. I was just on with Jenin Younes, the featured analyst, and host Dennis Bernstein on “Flashpoints”.]

Some are bemoaning the demolishment of the East Wing of the White House complex.

I wish they’d keep going.

I’m in good company.

Frank Lloyd Wright was basically for demolishing imperial Washington D.C., telling Mike Wallace in a remarkable 1957 interview: “some magazine has offered me the whole magazine if I design a new capital for the country. It ought to be done.” Wright is one of those people whose name is famous and whose ideas — beyond perhaps the phrase “organic architecture” — are barely understood.

Wright actually made plans for a neighborhood — Crystal City — in Washington, D.C. in 1940 which he described as having glass columns instead of stone, and walls of glass giving it an iridescent aspect as it shimmered midst fountains, trees and gardens, ten stories high. There’s an area of northern Virginia which goes by that name now and has none of those attributes. The offices of war crimes profiteers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, CACI and co litter the place, doubtlessly causing Wright — a pacifist — to turn in his grave.

Wright’s Crystal City was never built of course. Eugene Warner of the Washington Times-Herald described Wright during the battle for Crystal City “Lashing out with viper-tongue, he has damned every stone in Washington’s pseudo-classical architecture as a feeble groping for glories that are past. … Wright asserted colonial architecture was as much out of place today as hoopskirts knee-breeches or ‘erukes. Colonial architecture, he said, was brought to this country from England and England, ‘having no culture of its own,’ had stole it from the French.”

Wright charged: “Either this nation goes on upward the democratic way or is mowed down, probably flat, by the totalitarian rule in the totalitarian way.”

Washington Times-Herald, January 12, 1941 via “Crystal City: Frank Lloyd Wright’s long-lost D.C. masterpiece” by Rodrigo Duran

As if parodying Wright’s charges, Trump wants an “Independence Arch” — a ripoff of Arc de Triomphe in Paris — to be built near Arlington National Cemetery.

Wright thought the problem with the US was “we don’t have an architecture, we don’t have an art of our own, we have no culture of our own.”

Rich Ahern has observed that Wright lamented the way that the founders of Colonial Williamsburg brought to our land “the feudal land system, the feudal idea of money, the feudal notion of property rights in everything on earth as a speculative commodity.” He espoused “a new freedom, wherein a man can use and improve a plot of ground thereby making the ground his own as long as he uses. Neither land nor man should be idle, a mere speculative commodity.”

Wright derided the obsession with finding “new speculative commodities” which was becoming a “monstrosity” notes Matthew Skjonsberg, continuing: “And when urban men of commerce themselves succeed, they become more than ever vicarious. Soon these very successful men sink into the sham luxury their city life so continually produces. But they create nothing! Spiritually impotent, a fixation has them where impotence wants them: fixation in a cliché.” Wright wrote of mechanization and over production and “greedy for foreign markets, with the spectre of war as inevitable clearing house.”

Wright denounced “ruthlessly invading other countries simply or largely because we have lost the true meaning of our own.” He wrote, “You cannot be imperialistic and democratic at the same time.”

Wright coined the term Usonian as part of trying to find a true culture of the US.

He charged that not having a real culture made the society vulnerable to all sorts of deranged ideologies and conmen — and that turning to Nature, which he made a habit of capitalizing — was a major remedy.

And actually, Wright might not be in favor of demolishing imperial Washington, D.C., but might instead favor allowing Nature to do the work; allowing at least the imperial portion of the city to return to the swamp from whence it came.

The Mall in Washington D.C. from “Life After People”

See the Wallace interview with Wright and my prior pieces on his work.

Thanks to Peter Chamoun for research help.

Also see my piece: