Why Was Frank Lloyd Wright Obsessed with the Maya?
His passion lasted a lifetime
Though it's believed Frank Lloyd Wright never stepped foot on the Yucatán Peninsula, when he arrived in Chicago in1893 to begin his career in architecture, lore has it the display of Maya artifacts and replicas at Chicago’s World's Pre-Columbian Exposition inspired him.
It was there he glimpsed plaster castings from Maya sites Chichen Itza and Uxmal. A feature of the lesser known Labna site, in southern Yucatán’s Pu'uc Region, eventually became important to his work because of his recurring use of its meaningful arch.
But Wright's interest in the Maya had developed long before the Chicago exposition. He was drawn to it from childhood when his mother showed him pictures in books about Central America and Mexico. “These images stayed in his mind most of his life,” said Thomas Hines, UCLA architectural historian.
In the 1840s, two books about Central America archeology had become U.S. best sellers: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Part 2, by explorer John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood. These books drew Wright, as a youth, into the Maya world.
Mayan Revival style
The 1893 exposition's display of the ancient Americas lauded the indigenous people who first called North America home. For the exposition, Wright and his employer, Louis Sullivan, contributed a monumental golden doorway for the Transportation Building and during Wright’s visits to check on it, he would have seen plaster casts of the Maya buildings. Both he and Sullivan were drawn to the style which came to be known as Mayan Revival.
Early on in his career Wright experimented with different styles, incorporating one or more into his commissions. By 1900, he had developed a style that became his signature, the Prairie Style. Considered to be the world’s greatest architect of all time, Wright had never attended a formal architectural school. Wielding an avant-garde edge, he thought of interior and exterior places as one.
He designed over 1000 structures created in harmony with humanity and the environment during a career that spanned 70 years. He dubbed his philosophy organic architecture. His early beginnings were in the midwest where he was born and raised.
Eventually Wright broke with his employer and established his own firm in a Chicago suburb where he designed numerous commissions, gaining ground and notoriety with his well-heeled clients. By now he had married. With his wife, Catherine, and their six children, he settled into a white picket fence existence.
While designing a house for local residents Edwin and Mamah (Mamey) Cheney, Wright and Catherine began socializing at the precise moment that middle age, ennui regarding his Prairie Style designs, and a craving for change and greener pastures collided. Mamey, a feminist and free thinker, could keep up with Wright intellectually. She intrigued him and change won. She and her husband divorced, allowing Mamey to escape the marriage. The new couple left for Europe to avoid the tabloids and the brouhaha.
They traveled to Germany and Italy, viewing various architectural styles. On their return to the States, despite his wife refusing to grant a divorce, Wright was determined to build Mamey a house in rural Wisconsin near his childhood home. It would be transformational and a beauty and he would name it Taliesin.
Love and happiness, however, were short lived. In 1914 at a nearly completed Taliesin, Mamey was murdered by a household staff member along with her two children and five others. After the heinous massacre, Wright sought solace far from the midwest. Los Angeles, known as a place for reinvention and recuperation, beckoned. He headed west.
Los Angeles‚ a place for reinvention and recuperation beckoned
After the murders, he was again exposed to Maya influence at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. As the displays at Chicago had stimulated Wright, now known as FLW, this new glimpse of Maya culture made another lasting impression.
Even though they were based on a Maya fantasy world, the displays cemented the Maya link between architecture and death, "Which was not only the setting for a fantastic pyramid palace but also for human sacrifice; part of the complexes displayed where humans were buried,” said UCLA’s Hines.
"A place where the living could remember the dead.”
And after the loss of his lover, death was much on the architect's mind. The exceptional style of the Maya sites must have greatly intrigued him. “It was an outsized influence on his Los Angeles architectural style," continued the UCLA historian.
Before his exodus to LA, Wright tested his Mayan Revival style on a 1915 Wisconsin commission, the A.D. German Warehouse. On completion, it more resembled a temple pulled from a Catherwood drawing of the Maya Nunnery at Uxmal than a warehouse. This commission used his Maya motif and became the basis for his residential work in LA. After Wisconsin he accepted an offer to design the Imperial Hotel in Japan.
Five iconic LA houses set in Mayan Revival style
Today five iconic LA houses render his Maya look. While constructing the first, Hollyhock House, he worked simultaneously on Japan’s Imperial Hotel which helped shape his architectural vision.
Though the houses Wright designed in Los Angeles pre-dated the 1920s Art Deco movement, they have the undeniable air of deco. We'll never know if Wright influenced the movement or vice versa.
In a PBS special titled That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles,1 Christopher Hawthorne, writer/director as well as Architecture Critic for the LA Times, examines Wright’s intent for his iconic designs in that city.
FLW completed his first LA commission in 1921, Hollyhock House, located on 36 acres in Hollywood, for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Wright's finished design was basically a Maya temple. Barnsdall had planned on a multi-arts center, and never intended it for residential use.
With 17 rooms and seven baths, it's considered a bridge between Wright's two prominent styles—Mayan Revival, with textile blocks inspired by Palenque temples, and Prairie Style, with its low-pitched roof line.
In 1927 Barnsdall gifted it to the city. But it was at Hollyhock House, named for the flower that Barnsdall most loved, where Wright began working with natural materials.
A "cultural nationalist," according to leading Wright authority and author Kathryn Smith,2 UCLA, he strove to define an original American architecture, shying away from Victorian and Spanish colonial. He believed an indigenous architectural style would better suit the Americas rather than a European style.
His open concept layout led to massive rooms and enormously high ceilings, in some cases creating the feeling of a mausoleum, as people who lived in his houses had been known to say.
Next came the Alice Millard commission, La Miniatura, on an acre in Pasadena. This is where he refined the concrete molecular block system, with his stamped Maya patterns. Flat-roofed and mysterious, a wall of blocks stamped with diametric crosses is a reference to the Meso-American understanding of the cardinal directions, pointing to elements that establish the shape of the universe. One historian called the Millard House a small temple in a eucalyptus grove. It gives the feel of being at a jungle pyramid site, much like Palenque.
After the Millard commission came the Storer House in 1923. Built on a steep hillside, the house is dominated by a large upstairs living room with a high ceiling. Maya inspired columns and tall narrow windows dominate. Considered one of Wright’s most thoughtful biographers, author Brendan Gill3 said it was more like a home for a Mayan god.
Los Angeles’ best known FLW house is the Ennis House, built also in 1923, for Charles and Mabel Ennis, and appears to be another Maya grand palace. Notably seen in a handful of movies including Blade Runner and Day of the Locust, it looms over the neighborhood like an ancient ruin, visible for miles around.
Last of the FLW LA five is the 1924 Freeman House built for dancer Harriet Freeman and husband Samuel. Donated to USC in 1986, the Freeman house had the happiest existence. It was home for 62 years to the bohemian couple who befriended Wright and scraped together money for the commission.
According to Harriet, the house was dense and introverted, but it well-suited their purposes. Along with being their home, she used it as a dance center where she entertained and performed.
The daughter and son-in-law of USC’s Dean of Architecture lived in the house while attending university in 2002 for a year. "It felt like a ruin," she said. "It was crumbling down all around us.”
Eric Wright, the architects's grandson who lived at FLW's unfinished Malibu hills property until his death in 2023, was interviewed by Christopher Hawthorne for That Far Corner documentary. When asked what drew FLW to Los Angeles, Wright was candid. "He was very upset about the loss of Mamey and the adverse publicity because they weren't married," Wright said.
"What was his state of mind when he moved to Los Angeles?"
"Sorrow," Wright said. "He had a wonderful life until her death."
Hawthorne asked Tim Samuelson, Chicago's cultural historian, what he made of Wright's Mayan Revival look. "They seem mausoleum-like. They are heavy. One critic described them as dark and macabre—like the dramas of Sophocles. The LA homes were. . . brutal, romantic, fantastic, and—strange."
Filmmaker Hawthorne continues, "The LA houses have funereal aspects. But scholars hesitate to embrace the idea of pre-Columbian death cults. These ideas, however, shaped his understanding of pre-Columbian design and its meaning."
"His LA houses," continued Hawthorne, "stand apart from his overall work and other LA architecture of the period. They’re not just heavy, but heavy-hearted— and in some cases, they’re in a state of ruin. I don't think it's because the houses look crypt-like and that’s why they’re empty. They’re empty because they are crypt-like. None are used as full-time residences. The houses are shadowed by violence and even death.
LA houses, not just heavy, but heavy-hearted
"Building these houses was a means to put a troubled period behind him. It exemplified his own uncertain state of mind. They served as a catalyst for him.
"Wright buried Mamey in the Unity Chapel Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin—but she's also buried in Los Angeles."
Who knew Wright’s ongoing obsession with the Maya would rescue him as he worked his way out of grief by creating mausoleum-like pyramid tombs over and over again in reverence of the woman he loved and lost.
“His architecture,” said Wright historian Blair Kamin, “and this mission helped him recover from personal tragedy. His architecture saved him in the end.”
That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles, writer/director Chris Hawthorne for PBS.
Kathryn Smith, UCLA, and author of Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Master Architect.
Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Brendan Gill, author.
A special thanks to Barbra Bishop for use of photo of Labna.
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Great article Jeannine. Thank you for sharing! I call the book "Incidents of Travels in The Yucatán" the SEEDS of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture or the MISSING LINK that connects FLW with his architecture Mayan Style. Thank you so much for spreading the Word to the World so more people know where FLW PRAIRIE style and Organic Architecture come from. The most important of FLR architecture and contribuition to the world was that eventually thru his vast productive life and practice FLW Organic Architecture reached a fabulosa level of sofistication designing amaizing modern buildings like The Gughenheim Museum in NEW YORK CITY or the unbuilt High Mile Tower. I find out about this relationship of Wright with the book when in my thesis year in 1991our thesis professor Mr. David Niland told me to read the bible of all architects the famous FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AUTOBIOGRAPHY. There is where mr. FLW mentioned the then best seller book he saw about the travels by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood discovering the stone temples in the Yucatan and Guatemala. Other famous architects graduated from his private academy TALIESEN WEST. They designed amaizing ORGANIC architecture in California like John Lautner, Bruce Goff, Fay Jones and others. In Chicago he designed in the early 1900s the Unity Unity Temple, a truly Mayan Temple which had influenced many other buildings in Chicago and thru the Usa. Unity Temple also influenced a famous tower in West Wacker Drive in Chicago called the Leo Burnett Tower or 35 West Wacker Dr. Its base is all Green granite its a perfect Mayan Temple. The architect for the tower was Kevyn Roche Pritzker Price award. Roche also designed the 3 Pyramids outside of Indiannapolis. FLW influence is everywhere in the USA architecture. Greetings amiga.
As a native Chicagoan, FLW influence is everywhere here, but I wasn’t aware of the Mayan influences in his western homes. So cool - I love having this history lesson! And if I’m correct, Blair Kamin, was the former writer for the Chicago Tribune covering real estate, architecture etc.