Since I’ve been spending time looking at cities this week, I ran across this interview with Poet Carl Sandberg and Architect Frank Lloyd Wright giving their impressions of living in Chicago from October of 1957, by way of the NBC Radio series Life And The World.
Both Sandberg and Wright spent a lot of time in Chicago during their early years. Sandberg put Chicago and himself on the literary map with his poem; Chicago, written in 1916 – this broadcast, from October of 1957, finds Sandberg back in Chicago and debuting a new poem about the city, which he read at a banquet of The Chicago Dynamic Committee, who commissioned the new work. This broadcast features his reading of the poem at that dinner.
In the other interview, Frank Lloyd Wright talks about Chicago from an architectural point of view, and talks about the design and construction of a “mile-high office building”. Having settled in Chicago from Madison Wisconsin shortly after the Great Fire of 1871, Wright’s early work was associated with some Chicago design firms of the day. In this rare interview, he talks about Chicago as it is in the 1950s – how it was still a city with a future.
Two views of a great American city by two iconic figures – one literary and the other Architectural, as given some 58 years ago as part of the Life And The World Radio series, as originally broadcast on October 30, 1957.
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