Russel Wright and the Domesticated Naturalism of Manitoga
by Robert Schonfeld

By the middle of the 20th century, Russel Wright enjoyed by far the greatest name recognition in America in the field of industrial design, an area of professional activity that was young when he began his career in the late 1920's.[1] As the most widely distributed designer of works for the home in the country's history, he had earned fame and financial comfort. By placing his distinctive, loopy signature on the underside of about a dozen lines and millions of individual pieces of dinnerware, he had become a comfortable presence to a like magnitude of consumers.

But just a few years later, Wright was "disgusted with my own work and my own profession."[2] With the death of his wife, Mary Small Einstein in 1952, Wright had lost his most faithful partner. Mary was the guiding intellect behind the powerful branding of her husband's name. In the years following Mary's death, Wright seems to have drifted willingly away from the work on which she had kept him so closely focused since establishing their home and business in New York City in the late 1920's. Uncharacteristically, he accepted an invitation from the International Cooperation Agency in 1955 to examine the craft industries of a number of Asian countries and to provide a report with his recommendations for the development of those industries in each country. Wright disliked travel, but nevertheless consented to an arduous trip of more than two months duration. He threw himself into the task with a typically thorough effort that continued to occupy his time, writing reports and mounting trade exhibitions, with considerable success, for more than a year after his return.

Although Wright's travel to Asia would uncover rich new veins in his sensibility, including the creation of the notable Theme Formal and Informal lines of porcelain, pottery and glassware, he nevertheless felt that during this period, he had "neglected my staff and my business."[3] His productivity notwithstanding, this was not an altogether surprising sentiment, given the designer's longstanding aversion to the practicalities of commercial life.[4] Without Mary to center his thinking, he allowed the return of a deep instinct, and "turned against materialism."[5] At least one idea that Wright developed as the result of his observations and experiences in Asia was his feeling that "Communism had a better answer."[6] He chose not to elaborate on this view in his recorded memoirs, and prudently kept his unformed sentiment to himself in a time when such a reference, apolitical or not, could attract unwanted attention. By the early 1960's, with the benefit of the refreshed outlook that is so often a consequence of travel, Wright took stock. He found himself approaching sixty, exhausted, with a practice depleted of key staff as well as significant accounts, and "nothing but a Chinese restaurant to design."[7]

He decided to spend more time at his place in the country.

This decision, prompted by circumstances and reflection, proved to be the most important of the designer's career. With it, he turned on its head the strategic principle of design for the masses that he and Mary had first articulated decades earlier. In place of the public and manufacturers, he took himself as his client and began in earnest the design of the landscape on his property, some 80 acres on the steeply sloping ridges above the Hudson River at Garrison, New York. Over the course of the rest of his life, he would create not only his personal masterpiece, but one of the most ambitious and important works of American domestic landscape design of the 20th century. In doing this, Wright would also dramatically widen his view of contemporary domestic life to include not just the home, but nature itself.

Throughout his life, Russel Wright displayed a consistency of thought and purpose, often holding ideas in his memory and using them more than once in his work.[8] In the case of Manitoga, Wright carried forward numerous experiences, most notably those from his childhood connected with the wooded southwestern Ohio landscape, and, in particular, the fields and woods behind his family home in Lebanon, Ohio. Thinking back to his earliest childhood memories, Wright fondly recalled his earliest "childish" ambition to be a farmer.[9] He remembers visiting a cousin in Springfield, Ohio, where there was a barnyard. His child's eyes also committed to memory other outdoor features: granite cliffs, a spring, and nearby woods. As an adult looking back, Wright believed that the two or three summers he spent making these visits were "a very important influence in shaping Dragon Rock."[10]

For the visual acuity with which he perceived the landscape, Wright gave credit to his mother and his maternal grandmother. He admired his grandmother's paintings, and received encouragement in his own ambition as a painter from his mother. His aspirations in this area often took him outdoors on Sundays, a practice that was frowned upon by his devoutly observant family.

Young Russel also enjoyed the outdoor spaces at the family home with his friends, sometimes exploring with them "to pick wildflowers and to track down wild animals;"[11] sometimes improvising theatrical performances, and a couple of times organizing them into "little peoples' villages," which failed by virtue of rebellion "against the governing given them by their mayor, which was me."[12] Even as a child, Wright showed a penchant for very specific, oftentimes complex and demanding scenarios for acting out his view of the best way for people to achieve the goals of "easier living."[13]

These important early experiences were underpinned by a family environment that instilled a strong sense of responsibility in the young man. In addition to the draw of the local landscape, Wright's strongest early memories were the lessons of a purposeful life. He attributes to his Quaker father, a judge, and to his paternal grandmother, the moral message that one's work should have a social purpose.

Against the siren backdrop of the woods, the sensitive boy struggled to cope, as he did all his life, with competing, sometimes contradictory, influences. From his mother's side of the family came the encouragement of beauty. Also from this side came a vague sense of distant privileged status.[14] From his father's side came plain speaking, gratitude for the grace of God, and a belief in the obligations attendant to socially progressive ideals.[15] Although the effort to reconcile apparently divergent teachings would give fits and starts to Wright's early experiences, it would also mark him unambiguously with something that can fairly be called an American spirit. Wright recognized this in himself and he cherished it. At pivotal moments in his career, he used his American-ness to define himself and his work. Most prominent among these is the creation of Manitoga, the idea and the place.

The land comprising Manitoga, which means "Place of the Great Spirit" in the local Algonquin dialect, has been in use for thousands of years. An arrowhead found in the area called Mary's Meadow in 1979 has been attributed to the Lamoka Phase, a Late Archaic Period (3,000 - 4,000 B.C.) woodland Indian culture.[16] Later tribes created an elaborate system of trails for navigation of the highlands above the river. European settlers cut great quantities of first growth timber for firewood and quarried the native stone, leaving the land damaged. In his adaptive, ecologically alert, regenerative use of the land, and in his creation of an extensive arrangement of paths, Wright not only honored the nondestructive practices of the Indians, but he also fulfilled both the aesthetic urgings of his mother, and the progressive imperative of his father in a masterful synthesis that made whole cloth of a life's work.

Mary Wright was not only Russel's business and promotional mind. It was she who was most anxious to escape New York City for a getaway in the country. In 1939, following the highly successful establishment of the American Modern line of dinnerware, the Wrights set off on a two-and-a-half-week trip by automobile across the country. With Los Angeles, and visits with friends such as Bette Davis and George Cukor as their objective, the drive awakened Russel's fascination "with American scenery and how the landscape and the color changed from state to state."[17] By the time they arrived in LA, the couple had "decided it was ridiculous to continue to live in the East," and they began looking for land in Hollywood and outside San Francisco. "But as we drove eastward, the spell wore off. We felt that while we were welcome as guests, that we would be unwelcome as competition. New York seemed the more hospitable option."[18] And so the Wrights began to think seriously of looking for land back home. At the same time, "this trip also further developed my love and allegiance for America, and it was on returning that I conceived of the idea for my American Way project."[19] The well-intentioned American Way was a failure, but the Wrights' search for land was a success, resulting in their purchase in 1941 of about 80 acres in Garrison, in Putnam County, 50 miles north of New York City. Mary would have about ten years to enjoy weekends in the country. Russel at last had his own woods.

These were not the woods of his fondly remembered childhood, though. This was a "typical monotony" of second-growth oak and hemlock forest, defaced by logging and stone cutting and then abandoned.[20] The air was close; there were no views. Gradually, carefully, Wright began to thin the trees near the "bungalow"[21] acquired with his property, with the aim of making the transition to the woods more gradual, and to alleviate the sense of claustrophobia he and Mary felt in their house.[22] Then, with the curiosity that was natural to him, he began to explore. He found running streams, massive boulders, impressive trees, and endless, fascinating detail in the indigenous plants and wildflowers of the forest understory and floor, wild strawberry and blueberry, lady slipper orchids, ferns, mosses and flowering shrubs such as mountain laurel, among many more. Just as he had organized and designed things all his life, Wright began to think about designing his property and organizing human interaction with it. He began to lay out a series of paths.

In designing his woods, Wright placed himself squarely in the American tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted and Jens Jensen. Jensen was the progenitor of the Prairie School of American landscape design. James Rose, an important figure in his own right in American landscape architecture, writes, "He [Jensen] was one of the first landscape architects to think in terms of ecology, being interested in the design relation between types of trees and shrubs growing together."[23] Continuing this Americanist thread, Rose notes that Jensen worked for a time with Frank Lloyd Wright, who was among the earliest American architects to think in terms of "integrating the natural environment with the design of his houses."[24]

Jensen also sought liberation from the Old World in the curved line:

Straight lines spell autocracy, of which most European gardens are an expression, and their course points to intellectual decay, which soon develops a prison from which the mind can never escape. The free thought that produces the free curve can never be strangled…Landscape must follow the lines of the free-growing tree with its thousands of curves.[25]

By the mid-1930's, Surrealism in painting and sculpture had tangentially begat Biomorphic Abstraction. Designers in turn gained a vocabulary of curves that, at the least, proclaimed emancipation from the rigidity of Classical garden design. In California, which led the country in seeking the newest pleasures in outdoor living, it gave license to kidney-shaped swimming pools, around which the fruits of American prosperity would be charred over many a hyper-ignited barbecue. Activities such as cooking and dining, previously reserved largely for the interior of the home were being brought outside. Wright had always appreciated the use of outdoor spaces for customarily indoor domestic proceedings. He was enthusiastic about applying these ideas to his dream home.

Along with Mary, Russel had long argued for uncoupling from the Old World ways. As he had for his entire career, he set about the design of the landscape at Manitoga as an individualist with the purpose of enhancing and managing the domestic experience. Unlike Olmsted or Jensen, his work at Manitoga was not a public commission; unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he lacked the egotistic insistence of putting himself at the center of it all and separating himself and his work from their surroundings; unlike James Rose or Richard Neutra, he did not face the challenges of working on a relatively small scale. He was, by the early 1960's, free to work for himself, on his own "experiments", in the setting he frequently referred to as his "laboratory".

With the nagging feeling that his design "work had become dull,"[26] Wright looked forward to building his new house and landscape with the self-knowledge and confidence that "as soon as I entered a new field I [would do] something that had real vitality and was an innovation."[27]

Just as Wright shows kinship with the urban naturalism of Olmsted and Jensen, and the Modernity of Neutra and Rose without signing on with any of them, so too does he manage to evoke the Japanesque at Manitoga without leaving the deep groove of his own style. Wright is here again in the mainstream of an American aesthetic, in this case, Japonisme, which filtered perception and very limited experience, but no real expertise, in aspects of Japanese culture into Western modes of self-expression. With respect to landscape design, the Japanesque asks the gardener to work within the context of the natural world as it is found. This is in contrast to the European view, which seeks to superimpose man's own design on that of God and nature.[28]

More specifically, Wright's designs at Manitoga share kinship with the Japanese stroll garden, which, rather than being viewed from one or more fixed positions, is meant to be walked through with sensory attentiveness to the season, the time of day, and all the variables that comprise the beat of nature, from the smallest to the most grand. It was this idea - that the woods offered experience to visitors - that caused Wright to conceive Manitoga as "a garden of woodland paths,"[29] and it was this experiential cornerstone that seamlessly extended the Wright brand of domesticity out of doors.

The paths at Manitoga today comprise about four miles, and offer sufficient diversity of interest to reward many repeated visits.[30] Before Wright could begin to lay them out, it was necessary to anchor his property and his vision to the strategic locus of the large abandoned quarry pit, which lay like a great sore on the land, above the small, older house that Russel and Mary had occupied together. To do this, he redirected a stream into the big hole in the ground. This diverted flow would be shaped by Wright and the small, dedicated crew that worked with him into a dramatic falls of some fifteen separate levels. The other crucial anchor was the new house, which Wright sited with extreme care to take advantage of its relationship to the waterfall and the quarry pool.

The first path Wright made is now called the Core Path. He intended it largely for the use of his guests, as a logical broadening of the concept of modern informal living and entertaining that he and Mary had pioneered with their work and in their 1950 manifesto, "Guide to Easier Living."[31] He meant a walk along this path as a distilled encapsulation of the entire woodland experience at Manitoga:

I use it as an introduction to Nature. My most urban guests walk it in a short time and feel that they have gone through the woods. It is designed for Spring and Summer strolling and many elements are arranged to make it feel cool as ours is a very hot region in the Summer.[32]

Wright's thorough treatment of the natural experience at Manitoga is articulated in these remarks from a slide lecture he often gave on the subject of the house and property:

In many…ways, the house is a study both of BLENDING and CONTRASTING. For instance, by blending, I mean that rocks, boulders, even trees are brought into the house. For CONTRAST, the rectangular shapes of the windows contrast with the organic pattern of the landscape seen through them.[33]

Perhaps the most perfect example of the blending Wright achieved at Dragon Rock and Manitoga is contained in this one sentence describing the views from the mezzanine "den" in the house (where there hung a print of Audubon's "Wild Turkey", plate number one from the "Birds of America" and found in the woods outside the door):

Looking over the balcony you see the waterfall, and looking straight down, you see the dining table.[34]

The dining table, the center of gravity in Wright's view of domestic life, was most likely to be set with one of the designer's lines of dinnerware that featured plants found on the property: Iroquois Casual in the Nutmeg color, decorated with Garrison Shepherd's Purse, Knowles "Botanica", or Russel's favorite, Harker "White Clover."[35]

Ultimately, the boy who loved the Ohio woods carried the experiences of a lifetime into a woods of his own making. At the end of his life, he returned to the childhood lessons gained from his parents, and sought a social purpose for his talent of designing with, and explicating, nature. But in contrast to the expectations of success that accompanied nearly every undertaking of his professional life, the idea of making the Manitoga woods accessible to the public as a vehicle of social service and education proved a difficult one:

I have this concept, this aim to try to start this interest in Nature that is romantic and sensual, and to make this the beginning of an important part of American culture. Thus far I have found no one who understands or believes in it. Am I wrong or am I right? Will it be a failure or will it be a success?[36]

Russel's first choice as custodian for his most important work was the Audubon Society, an idea he got from a nature center the Society had created for the Schlitz family in Milwaukee. His second choice was the New York Botanical Garden. Neither of these relationships came to pass. Another, with the Nature Conservancy, was achieved, but was ultimately dissolved. The property is now a private foundation, fully committed to Wright's goals, and well positioned to accomplish them, although it is in constant need of financial support and volunteer help. Manitoga is on the National Register of Historical Places, and has recently been designated as a National Historic Landmark, an extraordinary level of recognition for a 20th century property. It is a masterpiece of American design, brought into being out of the deep feeling that the family, the home and the native landscape lie at the core of the American Experience. Now dedicated to the service of the public - Russel Wright's family in its own way - it continues in the mission derived from that philosophy. Among the designer's last words on the subject were these: "I am going ahead with this, so pray for me."[37]

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