Week 58: Frank Lloyd Wright and Lloyd Wright
This column has relayed the important role that Frank Lloyd Wright played in Chandler’s history, and how his vision for the city would have completely changed the look and feel of our community. But recent research by staff at the Chandler Museum has revealed that Chandler was just as important to Frank Lloyd Wright.
When Dr. Alexander J. Chandler first approached Wright with the idea of building a grand resort in the desert foothills of South Mountain, he was perhaps surprised at how quickly Wright jumped at the opportunity. Intrigued with Chandler’s pitch Wright toured the site, after which he said “There could be nothing more inspiring to an architect on this earth than [this] spot of pure Arizona desert…at last here was the time, the place, and in Dr. Chandler the man.” In this opportunity, Wright saw his chance to design the perfect hotel and leave a lasting legacy.
At the time, Wright was struggling financially. He had gone through a messy divorce and been arrested for spending time with his third wife while still married. His Taliesin school had faced numerous issues, including two fires, a mass murder, and foreclosure. He hadn’t designed a significant building since the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was completed in 1925. His most recent project, consulting for one of his former students on the Arizona Biltmore, did not pay well and he felt the architect’s approach was a crude imitation of Wright’s idea of constructing the building from textile blocks. Chandler’s idea for The San Marcos in the Desert promised income and an opportunity to show the genius of his textile block idea.
As Chandler and Wright finalized their plans for the hotel and sought investors in October of 1929, the stock market crashed. Chandler stayed positive, writing a week after Black Tuesday of his hope that people “will quit gambling on stocks for a time and this ought to be a great help to our enterprise.” This was not the case, and they were never able to secure funding for the hotel.
A newly discovered letter to Wright written by his son, Lloyd Wright, sheds some light onto how important the San Marcos in the Desert project was to Wright. The undated letter, written some time in 1929, contains some hard truths and strong language as Lloyd tried to convince his father to finish the San Marcos in the Desert. Lloyd laments that his father hadn’t completed a “building of major importance” since the Imperial Hotel, and also his tendency to “pooh-pooh” the business side of things. He suggested that Wright’s contemporaries, whom he referred to as “enemys,” were passing him by and building legacies for themselves while he sat by writing articles and doing radio. In short, Lloyd wrote, “You run when hard pressed and they consider you licked and so long as you do not build you are.”
Lloyd felt that the opportunity presented by Dr. Chandler in the form of the San Marcos in the Desert could be the project to lift Wright’s fading reputation. He urged his father to “get him (Dr. Chandler) and his project safely across the financing stage” (emphasis Lloyd’s) as quickly as possible. Despite the fact that investors could not be found to support the project, Lloyd reminded Wright that Chandler was a wealthy man, suggesting he could finance the construction of the building himself if properly persuaded.
Whether Wright ever actually asked Chandler to be the sole funder of the hotel is unknown. As Lloyd noted, Wright was notorious for ignoring the business side of his profession. Certainly in everything that Wright wrote to Chandler, and in the letter from Lloyd, it is clear that everyone in Wright’s camp felt the San Marcos in the Desert would be the answer to all of their financial problems, in addition to sealing Wright’s reputation as the greatest American architect. Unfortunately for Wright and for Chandler, the stock market crash and the Great Depression doomed their endeavor.