![]() ![]() Neal's first glimpse of Cooper is as he drills the rigid shaft of his jackhammer into hard but ultimately yielding marble.) There are complications and reversals, and in the end Keating asks Roark to allow him to take credit for Roark's work in the design of a public housing project. (The tone of this romantic interlude in the novel is admirably crystallized in the 1949 movie version starring Gary Cooper as Roark and Patricia Neal as his love interest. He ends up more or less raping her near a stone quarry he's forced to work in. Roark meets a woman who is recognizes his genius but is perversely determined to destroy him before the great unwashed can get around to it. Keating is a duplicitous second-rater who never has an original idea and consequently enjoys much success. In the rest of the book, Roark never compromises and suffers horribly but without complaint. Nonetheless, Wright later told Rand that in his opinion Roark should have had white hair instead of red.) (Although it seems obvious to anyone reading the book, Rand always denied that Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright. Roark instead goes to work briefly for a fictionalized version of Louis Sullivan and then works on his own. His story is contrasted with that of his classmate Peter Keating, a teacher's pet who graduates at the head of the class and goes to work for a firm not unlike McKim, Mead and White, where he ultimately becomes partner. The book begins with him being kicked out of architecture school for doing single-mindedly modern work for class assignments that call for Renaissance villas. Most of our readers already know the basic plot of The Fountainhead and about its hero, the heroic, red-headed architect Howard Roark. I ended up reading it eight times before my junior year of college. ![]() As a bookworm with good grades, bad acne, and no social life to speak of, this central theme had considerable appeal for me. The books usually end with the heroic genius triumphing over adversity, often by delivering an amazingly long speech, and going on to have great sex with another heroic genius of the opposite sex. The central theme of The Fountainhead is the same of most Ayn Rand books: how individuals of creative genius, although the source of all human productivity, are misunderstood and persecuted by the great unwashed. Before The Incredibles, before The Cheese Monkeys, there we found our first designer hero. I read The Fountainhead for the first time in the ninth grade. I mean the chain-smoking, cape-wearing, Russian-accented best selling author, the founder of "Objectivism," the woman who launched a thousand design careers: Ayn Rand. I'm not talking about the relatively obscure father of American graphic design, Paul Rand. And then it hit me: could the connection be Rand? What could this mean? As they explained their positions, some phrases popped up here and there: personal responsibility, suspicion of big government, the primacy of the individual. Ah, that blue state state of mind! So I was surprised when Republican designers stood up to be counted. When I started wondering, before the election, whether graphic designers all leaned left politically, I must confess I thought I knew the answer: yes. Gary Cooper as Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, screenplay by Ayn Rand from her novel, directed by King Vidor, 1949 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |