What Frank Lloyd Wright tells us about late bloomers

Sixty-five years after his death, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright has become an industry. Every year 150,000 people visit his properties in the US. Taliesin, Wright’s home in Wisconsin, attracts 25,000 people alone. Eight of his buildings are Unesco World Heritage sites.

Many of Wright’s most significant buildings, including Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the first Jacobs House in Wisconsin and the Guggenheim Museum, which still stands out futuristically in Manhattan, are the product of a late, unexpected period in his career. At 60, he was in decline; at 80, he was in the ascendant. He did more than half his work in the last quarter of his life. His final decade was his most productive. In other words, Wright was a late bloomer.

Prior to his second act, he had been written off by an architecture establishment that could no longer see his potential. So many late bloomers hide in the open like this: among them Harry Truman, Margaret Thatcher and Katharine Graham. Jonathan Yeo, who produced the portrait of King Charles, only began to paint in his twenties. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her first novel at 60. Young stars may be more visible, more celebrated, but late bloomers lurk among us.

Wright’s career began in the 1880s with houses and churches in the Chicago suburbs. His innovative Prairie houses, inspired by the long, flat lines of the Wisconsin landscape, were widely acclaimed. He and his wife Catherine were respectable middle-class people.

Then Wright walked out of his life. In 1909, aged 42, he abandoned his family, put his business in the charge of an associate and went to Europe with a married client. His practice had declined in 1907, and he had asked Catherine for a divorce in 1908. He’d felt bored, restricted and unfulfilled. Nowadays, we might call it a midlife crisis. But leaving was a bold statement. His son, then aged 19, hit him and knocked him to the ground.

When Wright returned from Europe in 1910, he settled in his home state of Wisconsin and built Taliesin. He was striking out on his own, bolder and more radical than before. For him, it felt like a turning point. To everyone else, his career seemed to have collapsed. Taliesin established a new direction in Wright’s work. It reimagines the long lines of his Prairie houses but takes them further. Built around the crown of a hill, surrounded by red cedar trees, it is an open, organic building. Every room connects to another at the corners so that the house flows freely, with long views through its integrated spaces.

But change came slowly. Taliesin marked the start of a long, difficult period. As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House, by 1932 Wright was considered to be “half-modern” in comparison to the European modernists, “which was to say, he was finished and could be forgotten”. “Wright had vanished from the public imagination,” was how historian Robert McCarter put it. He was also frequently short of money.

But then, in 1935, Wright received the commission for Fallingwater, a house built over a waterfall in the mountains of south-west Pennsylvania, which became his most famous project. It was the start of his most innovative period, with new designs informed by the landscape of the American West, houses that followed the path of the sun, made of affordable blocks hewn from local rock. He also made monumental buildings such as the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1939, whose tree-like hollow concrete columns give the office block a cathedral feel. Wright felt as though he was living his life again. He had watched both his father and his mentor, the architect Louis Sullivan, fall into alcoholic decline and was determined to avoid the same fate. Fallingwater was the start of a period of reimagining what a building could be.

We think of late bloomers as people who don’t really get going until the second half of their lives. Drawing on the work of economist David Galenson, Malcolm Gladwell defined late bloomers, such as Paul Cézanne, as people who take much longer to develop than precocious talents like, say, Pablo Picasso. Frank Lloyd Wright offers a new paradigm, one that complements Galenson. Wright bloomed early and late. He was, if you like, a “double bloomer” whose career has two clear peaks, as seen in the number of his designs that were built in each year of his working life.

Wright never stopped revisiting his earlier designs. And he was always working with the latest materials. A continuous spiral ramp first occurs in a 1920s design; by the time of the Guggenheim commission, in 1943, a new type of concrete made the idea feasible, and he had a patron who shared his visionary ideals.

Since childhood, Wright had been contemplating shapes, which he wrote had a “spell power”. In the boxes and spirals, rectangles and circles he was constantly rearranging, Wright was trying to reach that eternal magic.

Between 1911 and 1923, when his career was sliding precipitously, Wright worked on many projects that found new ways of arranging shapes. He made more than a hundred designs for System-Built Homes, a series of prefabricated affordable houses, though most were never built. He built and then rebuilt Taliesin after it burned down, not once but twice (first, by a disgruntled servant; second by a lightning strike). And he designed the Imperial Hotel in Japan, one of his most monumental achievements, pulled down in 1968. His American career was slow, his designs often unrealised, but his achievements in Japan and at Taliesin reveal his undimmed creativity.

In the Imperial Hotel he developed his trademark cantilever style, which later made Fallingwater so compelling. Taliesin is one continuous passageway of corridors, rooms, nooks and crannies, like a river with inlets and rivulets. The same is true of the Guggenheim Museum, built nearly 50 years later.

Wright’s second phase was also the result of energetic work. When architectural commissions were slow, he lectured, wrote books and articles, proposed crazy schemes for a new sort of city and started a fellowship at Taliesin to train the next generation of architects. It was a demanding, sexist, cult-like institution (Wright was often a bully), but it produced a band of loyal followers. And it was the source of the Fallingwater commission, which came from an apprentice’s father.

The old adage is true. Not giving up really was key to Wright’s second act. One reason why double bloomers succeed is simply that they don’t stop. According to the “equal-odds rule” devised by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, each piece of work a scientist or artist produces has the same statistical chance of being great as any other. Your successes and failures may come in clumps, but you will do your most significant work in the period in which you do your most work. Smash hits don’t come out of nowhere.

A recent study of scientific careers found that scientists tend to do their most significant work when they’re young because that’s when they are most productive. Once scientists have prestige, and tenure, they usually produce less. But if they keep going, the study suggests, they can keep succeeding. The chemist John B Fenn, for example, won the Nobel Prize for a paper which was written after he had been forcibly retired from Yale aged 70.

Now that life expectancy is so high and careers are longer and more varied, more of us are going to become late, or double, bloomers. And not everyone has their second act in the same field as their first. Vera Wang was a near-Olympic level figure skater as a teenager. Realising she wasn’t going to make it to the top, she changed course and became an editor at Vogue. Aged 40, she left journalism when, as before, she realised she wasn’t going to make it to the top. Then, frustrated with the wedding dress market when she was getting married, she decided to reapply her knowledge of fashion to designing dresses.

But Wang’s second career change came at a low point. She was unable to have children, and having quit her job at Vogue, she was feeling stuck. Like Wright, Wang drew on her early success. Her breakthrough in fashion came when she designed costumes for the Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan.

The well-known theory of the U-shaped curve says that happiness declines in middle-age, then begins to increase again. If you find yourself miserable in your forties, its proponents say, don’t worry, it’s a natural phenomenon observed all over the world (and even in apes). Make peace with your sense of disappointment, of unfulfilled potential. Sit tight, because things are about to change.

Wright didn’t think like that. He was raised in the Helena Valley in Wisconsin in the late 19th century by Welshmen and Welshwomen who had settled the valley themselves, building houses and chapels, creating their own communities. That Wisconsin spirit ran deep. Acceptance of failure was anathema. “Add tired to tired,” he would tell his exhausted apprentices.

A disciple of Walt Whitman, Wright knew that success was hard won. “Listen! I will be honest with you,” Whitman wrote, “I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.” If you’d met Wright in the 1920s, you’d have found a man whose old prizes had vanished. A failed marriage, a dead lover, a house twice burned, a second failed marriage, a flatlining career and a personal financial crisis. But Wright did not reach acceptance. He kept fighting. “The day of your power is just beginning”, a friend wrote to him in 1930. The 63-year-old Wright agreed.

A few weeks after he died, at 91, just as spring was breaking out in wintry Wisconsin, members of Wright’s fellowship gathered to break ground on the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church he had been working on until his final days. It remains one of his most stunning achievements.

This essay has been adapted from the author’s book “Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life”, published by John Murray One

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