Stone and Grief: A Builder's Suspicion

A curious rumor has reached my desk here at Menlo Park — something passed hand to hand like a contraband pamphlet, purporting to describe the work of one Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect I know by reputation as a man of considerable ornamental ambition, building fortress-houses out in Los Angeles some decades hence. The dispatch speaks of 'textile blocks' and personal tragedy woven into masonry. I confess I read it twice, squinting. Now, I have nothing against a man who builds well. A sound structure is a sound structure, and I respect any fellow who can take raw material — stone, timber, pressed concrete, whatever California affords — and make it stand against wind and earthquake. That is honest labor. But I grow impatient when I hear that a building's chief merit is the grief encrypted in its walls. Grief does not conduct electricity. Grief does not spin a dynamo. I have buried colleagues and pressed on before the morning was cold, because the work demanded it. If Wright — or whoever this man proves to be — devised a new method of interlocking block construction that reduces cost per square foot, that interests me enormously. I would want to know the compression figures, the material expense, the labor hours saved. I would want to know whether a factory could reproduce the block at volume, and who holds the patent. Those are the questions worth asking. But 'a mechanism for processing grief'? Gentlemen, I process grief by returning to the laboratory. I process loss by filing another application with the Patent Office. A building that stands for forty years and shelters a family is a fine achievement. A building praised chiefly because its architect was sorrowful strikes me as monument to sentiment over sense. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps this Wright fellow found in his California stone some structural principle that outlasts fashion. If so, I should like to buy the patent or hire the man outright. I have done both before with less promising material. But until I see the load-bearing data and the dollar figures, I shall remain, as ever, skeptical of any invention whose primary recommendation is the suffering of its inventor. Suffering is common. Results are rare. I built my laboratory on that distinction, and I do not intend to abandon it now.