Eric Lloyd Wright Seeking an Organic Way in Architecture--and Life

When Eric Lloyd Wright was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, he applied for service as a noncombatant. On his application forms, he was asked for the name of his priest, minister or rabbi. Without hesitation, he wrote the name of his grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright.

It was Frank Lloyd Wright, the premier figure in 20th-Century architecture, who taught Eric the value of understanding nature and working within it. The senior Wright created the theory of organic architecture. His buildings were meant to merge with their environment, in both the way they were designed and the materials used to construct them. And his designs have proved durable as well as aesthetic. When a huge earthquake leveled Tokyo in 1923, killing some 143,000 Japanese, one of the few buildings left standing was the Imperial Hotel, designed in 1914 by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frank’s son, Lloyd Wright, was also an architect. He designed the original Hollywood Bowl shell, and created the landscaping for the Dodd House, today the site of the Bel-Air Hotel. Lloyd came to Los Angeles in 1919, to help his father with the construction of the Hollyhock House, in what is now Hollywood’s Barnsdall Park. He stayed and built a home on Doheny Drive, between Santa Monica and Sunset. His son, Eric, grew up there, playing in a bean field on the west side of Doheny.

Eric raised chickens and ducks, loved working in the family victory garden and wanted to be a farmer. Then, when he was 15, he spent a summer in Wisconsin, at his grandfather’s studio, Taliesin. He decided then to follow in the family tradition of architecture. As soon as he graduated from Hollywood High, he returned to Taliesin, where, from 1946 to 1954, he was an apprentice to his grandfather.

Wright then returned to Los Angeles to work with his father’s firm, which he took over upon his father’s death in 1978. He has spent a considerable amount of time supervising the restoration of his grandfather’s structures, including the Storer, Hollyhock and Ennis houses in Los Angeles. He’s currently working on a Philadelphia conference center and a pair of housing developments in Riverside County.

Now 64, Wright lives with his wife, Mary, a painter, in a temporary structure on a hillside in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific. He’s building a home there. Made of reinforced concrete, with sod roofing, it epitomizes his interpretation of organic architecture, and is designed to withstand quakes and canyon fires. A large man, with a gentle and thoughtful manner, Eric Lloyd Wright has taken his grandfather’s principle of uniting the elements of nature in design, and applied that dictum to the way he lives his life.

Question: We’ve just watched one of our great technical achievements--our freeway system--buckle and collapse. Have we been hubristic in thinking we’ve learned to conquer nature?

Answer: There is a tremendous power there that we just really don’t understand. Perhaps we never will understand it, but our great mistake is that we have been unwilling to work with nature and are always trying to work against it, to dominate it.

A lot of our problems come from the fact that there are just so many of us. The population pressure forces us to create these gigantic, monumental constructions that grow beyond human scale. We have lost that sense of proportion to human scale--it’s gone from our buildings, we’ve lost it in our education system. Everything has become mechanized, and we put too much faith in that mechanical side, and not nearly enough in the spiritual and emotional sides of our nature.

Q: Is it possible for people to apply your family’s principles of organic architecture to a structure like a freeway--or is a freeway, by its nature, anti-organic?

A: No, we can apply those principles to freeways. Technology is a wonderful tool, and we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath, but I think what’s happened is that we’ve allowed the tool to tell us what to do. Technology is controlling us; we don’t control technology. What has to happen is that human beings have to apply their creative and artistic sides. Those have to be the moving forces, not the mechanical side.

Q: With all the talk about how we’ve been rudely awakened from the California dream, what’s your sense of the collective Southern California psyche right now?

A: There is, right now, a slight sense of despair. We’re living in a very difficult area, in a very difficult time. I’m speaking not just of the earthquake and the fires, but also of the economy.

There is a sense of loss there as well. I suppose what we have lost is a sense of stability. But that will not last. Our memories are short. We move on, and seem to forget what has happened.

In this case, we will beef up the building codes and try to make things stronger, but more people will come in, and we will huddle more, and build more high-rises. There will be more freeways, because we keep pushing in more people.

The people will keep coming, in spite of earthquakes, in spite of fires. And that is because of this unique situation we have here. The earthquake--the very thing that is so damaging--is also the thing that makes California so attractive. It’s what creates our mountains, the physical environment that is so lovely and that surrounds us. And the same with fire. Fires are created by our weather, but everybody comes out here because they love the weather. They are all interrelated.

So if we love this climate, and this natural terrain that is here, we have to learn to live with it, and to live within it.

Q: Having grown up here and watched the city evolve, how could we have done a better job of designing our environment, and how can we do better in the future?

A: One of the first things that comes to mind, and it always sticks in my craw, is the way we’ve treated our open space. Take, for instance, the Los Angeles River. Here we are living in a desert, and here is this unique thing--water--that is worth more than oil or anything else in this climate. And what have we done? We’ve concreted, channeled the river, all because of real-estate speculation.

Everybody just had to build right up to the creek beds and we didn’t give a damn about the water. Instead of making beautiful parks along our waterway, we put our factories and freeways right up against it.

We should have allowed those waterways to be open park space. Then you wouldn’t have to worry when you had a flash flood. The park would have been the only thing to be flooded. It would have woven through the whole Southern California area a wonderful park system, which would have been natural and given us open space.

Another thing is the freeways. I would have actually made them wider than they are, and had rail lines right down the center divider in every freeway.

People love to complain about the sprawl in Southern California, but I think these earthquakes prove that it is a difficult thing to build up vertically and pile a lot of people on top of each other.

It is true that we can technically build our tall buildings now so that they can resist the earthquakes--but we’ve never had the really big one that we’re all waiting for, so we don’t know how these buildings are going to stand up. But what happens when you are on the 40th floor of a building, and the building survives a quake? The whip action could throw you right out a window, or throw a desk against you and pin you to a wall. The building survives, but can the human beings?

Then, as my grandfather used to say, there’s monotony in the difference here. He was referring to the architecture in Los Angeles. Not that everything should be uniform, but there should be a stronger character. We opted for the cheapest form of architecture, which is very boring, just all those apartment buildings in the Valley and storefronts along Pico.

Q: Does the earthquake provide us with any opportunities to correct some of the things that are wrong with the way we’ve designed our cities?

A: It’s difficult, and I don’t know if there is much opportunity. I think people will simply say, “Well, we’ve gotta build our freeways stronger and we’ve gotta make these buildings tougher.” They’re not looking at the real issue--which is how do we create a more beautiful life here. The earthquake may even sidetrack us from that issue. We may become more involved in engineering things, rather than looking at how we make this a more beautiful environment, and by making it more beautiful, also make it safer.

Q: You’ve said that in the ‘90s, we’re finally catching up with a lot of the things your grandfather was espousing in the ‘30s. What was it he was espousing then that resonates now?

A: The primary thing he said is that we have to work with nature and not against it. He always said it should be Nature--with a capital “N.” He said a building should take its form from nature, so that we should look at trees, at sea shells, at other natural forms, in creating designs.

He believed we should build to a human scale, and I think today people want that--they are asking for things to be more human. People are finally beginning to recognize that things are getting out of proportion, that we need to construct our enterprises on a human scale. We keep moaning about how inhumane we’ve made our cities. That was something he was talking about years ago.

He believed that natural materials should be used, and that they should appear natural, not painted-over or disguised. This is something that has begun to catch on in the last 30 years--but he was talking about it in 1905. So it may take a century for us to fully appreciate his idea.

But beyond architecture and design, he used to talk about the way we should live. For instance, my grandfather was very much a proponent of natural foods and always had a garden to grow his own organic vegetables. And he believed, as more and more people do now, that it’s up to us to create our own culture--and that includes our work environment as well as our home and social environment.

We now routinely talk about preservation and how we care for the land--things that were of great concern to him. And in the schools today, there is a great emphasis on our relationship to nature. We had nothing like that 50 or 60 years ago, when my grandfather was talking about it.

Q: The earthquake has sparked new proponents for accelerating the trend toward telecommuting. Do you think our electronic technologies can help us create a more harmonious relationship between work and home?

A: Very much so. I think it is one of the keys to being able to disperse, and not have to concentrate ourselves in cities. We don’t really have to have all these conferences and meetings. Yes, I think technology can allow people to work more efficiently and give them the opportunity to develop a more fully integrated life.

Q: What are the lessons that you have learned personally from nature over these past few months?

A: The basic one is the awesome power of nature. It is a force beyond our reckoning. And yet it’s a force and power we can work with. And by working with, and not against it, we can create a beautiful environment. There’s no reason why we can’t live in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s how we live there that is important.

There is going to be more. This movement is a continual thing here. It’s always changing, always in flux. This is another lesson of nature. Nothing is static, and you can’t hold on and try to make something stay the way it is. It’s always going to change. Often those changes are cataclysmic, and we have to learn to work with that, and understand it.

You know, the people who came out here did so because they wanted to start a new way of life. This is sort of like the end of the road. Here’s the Pacific Ocean, and you can’t go any farther. This is where you have to make your stand, and live the way you want to live. Southern California has always meant that. It’s tried to break away from things that were on the East Coast, or Europe, or wherever you came from. Southern California was a new chance, a new opportunity. It’s still a new chance. I just hope that we can understand and work with this wonderful environment, and continue to create our own ways of living, and our own way of life.