After all, the city was designed by country boys—Mies van der Rohe, Burnham and Root, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan—all wild and dashing, dreaming up the city in the soft thrum of the countryside. But the buildings that most reflect nature, at least midwestern nature, in all its dark and hidden fertility, are those by Franklin Stadbakken, the so-called architect of the prairies, that great and troubled mess of a man I once knew. THREE YEARS AGO, WHEN I was a senior at Northwestern, I sent Stadbakken a packet of drawings and a statement of purpose. Every year Stadbakken chooses five apprentices to come live with him on the famous grounds of Fialta, his sprawling workshop, itself an architectural dream rising and falling over the gentle hills of southwestern Wisconsin. My sketches were of skyscrapers, set down with a pencil on pale blue drafting paper. They’d been drawn late in the night, and I knew hardly anything about how to draw a building, except that it ought not to look beautiful; it ought to be spare and slightly inaccessible, its beauty only suggested, so that a good plan looked like a secret to be passed on and on, its true nature hidden away.
