My thoughts on a few
Lectures by Frank Lloyd Wright
(C) (Copy Right Protected)
I have read a few of Frank Lloyd Wrights lectures and will try to open some of his quotes within the lectures as to how his words relate to designing the way he did.
“In the realm of Ideas”
1930 Lecture
“An Idea is Salvation by Imagination.”
I don’t think we can disagree that, a good idea is one that helps put 2 and 2 together with less energy. The idea might not be new, and it might be obvious to everyone after the fact. But an idea comes only to an aware mind; a mind that is thoughtful of its environment, a personality that sees and questions why, one that is always trying to improve.
“I loved the prairie by instinct as a great simplicity, the trees and flowers, the sky itself, thrilling by contrast.”
Have you not felt the thrill of contrast? Nature gets thrills by contrasts. It’s the yin and yang. Whenever they meet the contrast is felt and thrill is experienced; Male and Female, cold and warm, electrons and protons, the stars and the black holes. Within their time and for their location, the result of the meeting of contrasting things will be thrilling. The studio at Taliesin West with hard desert masonry and a light, flexible canvas roof is thrilling. The Guggenheim Museum in NY is thrilling (a sphere in the land of cubes). The central park in NY is thrilling (a flat open space within the most densely populated area on earth). Life on Earth is thrilling. So whenever I design and think I need to excite and energize the space, I will introduce contrasts.
“…why not a larger application of this element of plasticity (referring to Louis Sullivan’s fondness in using “plasticity” as a word to describe his own scheme) considered as continuity in the building itself? –Why any principle working in the part if not working in the whole?”
This is about how a design incorporates all of its parts to make the whole. The building shall use all its parts to bring to life a whole. The Architecture shall be integrated with its structure as is the body to its bones:
“Integration means that nothing is of any great value except as naturally related to the whole.”
As roots relate to keeping the tree up, and leaves that facilitate in photosynthesis; a good design should incorporate its smallest parts to give viability to the bigger picture. If the bigger picture does not relate to the part, and a fragment is present then we should discard it as irrelative to the design. This process is called “constructive elimination”.
“The ideal of “Organic Simplicity”, seen as the countenance of perfect integration, abolished all fixtures, rejected all superficial decoration, made al electric lighting and heating features an integral part of the architecture. So far as possible all furniture was to be designed in place as part of the Architecture. … any failure of this particular feature of the original scheme often crippled results, –made trouble in this plan of constructive elimination.”
“A different choice of materials would mean a different scheme altogether.”
“The building now became a creation of interior space in light.”
“Significance as new … This new significance repudiates the sentimentality of any symbol; looks the philosophic abstraction full in the eye for the impostor it usually is; reads its lessons directly from the book of creation itself, and despises all that lives either ashamed or afraid to live as itself, for what it is or may become because of its own nature.”
This is to use materials with the original form they are naturally and/or manufactured. We should do our best not use paint on surfaces, as this will become an untrue expression of the material. If the choice of material is incorrect then the whole design is flawed. The significance of an Organic design is that all of its elements are related to the whole. This is to say that the choice of the building material will have great weight on the method of construction which is a big part of bringing to life the thing that we have designed. Again, we start form the local capabilities for construction and how contractors work. Then we try to push them a level higher into what we can see them do. Within this we will have to choose a material that is acquaint with the natural environment and also in which the methods of use are achievable. This is when we will have realized the first guidelines to our design. (1)
(1) Emphasized on page 5 “… the fist great necessity of a modern architecture …“
“To the Young Man in Architecture”
1931 Lecture
“Propagandists, pro and con, classify old as new and new as old. Historians tabulate their own oblique inferences as fact.”
This is to confirm my wife’s recent conversation with Professor Michael Boyle (teaches in ASU). Professor Boyle believed that no Architect had come out of Taliesin due to Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright. Well, my wife brought up a couple of names of Registered Architects and then some very well known Architects that did not have an Architectural degree before they came to Taliesin and after they left they had come up with great designs, such as “John Lautner” that came to Taliesin with an English degree and left to become one of the very well known Architects on the West Coast. To her surprise the historian jumped into his ego and sunk down into his dump of recollections of books he had researched and came up with the conclusion “madam … I am a professor in history and a researcher. You are not, and thus you are not in a position to argue with me.” I know it takes a blind man or a professor of History to say such a thing, but this went to verify what Frank Lloyd Wright had said.
Also I have heard Michael Johnson say a similar thing. Once your work is complete, hire the best Architectural photographer to make your work look like a jewel. It does not matter what it really is. It matters what it looks like in the picture of the magazine.
“But confusion of ideas is unnatural waste of purpose.”
“Too many notes” was the criticism given to Mozart. To many ideas coming into one project can become very distracting, especially when they do not radiate from the same central philosophy. A Spanish colonial house mixed with modern windows and spaces with an English landscaping theme. If you have not seen this blob of space please go to the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona and while looking down from the terrace in front of the Chapel towards South S-W you will see a the peak of confusion in design.
Starting as a new apprentice during the charrettes we did, I would introduce into my design many different and good ideas; but since they were not anchored to a central ideology the design looked busy or out of place. I have come to realize that a good design will have many great ideas that are driven out of the most basic philosophy of the design and which brings continuity to the Architecture.(2)
(2) Refer to page 6 “Internal disorder is architectural disease …”
“But today because of scientific attainment the modern more clearly perceives beauty as integral order; order divined as an image by human sensibility; order apprehended by reason, executed by science. … With integral order once established you may perceive the rhythm of consequent harmony. To be harmonious is to be beautiful in a rudimentary sense:…”
If it is not beautiful it is no worth it. The meaning of beautiful today is the perception of the viewer (client) of the harmonious rhythm. Since more and more of the clients are people with simple views and its not like the old days where the clients were dukes and kings with complicated lives; the Architect must look for simplifying and should hesitate in the use of arbitrary ornamentation, and try to use the structural elements in a manner that brings the Natural beauty of the thing out; a design that looks like the Maple leaf, where the structure and the skin are interrelated and viewable with the naked eye.
“Therefore the fist great necessity of a modern architecture is the keen sense of order as integral. That is to say the form itself in orderly relationship with purpose or function: the parts themselves in order with the form: the materials and methods of work in order with both: a kind of natural integrity,-the integrity of each in all and all in each. This is the exacting new order.” (1)
(1) Refer to page 3 “ … despises all that lives either ashamed or afraid to live as itself …“
Integral ornament as seen in the “Hillside Studio” and the “Robert’s room” ceiling is: the integration of beams/trusses, in a sensible architectural pattern that is in harmony with the ceiling form, and which is a structural necessity to the whole. This is beautiful. When I look at Taliesin West, I see a continuity which inhales the natural environment and exhales as the buildings. Taking in the surrounding stones and using them as walls is one of the examples of such integration.
“Internal disorder is architectural disease if not the death of architecture.” (2)
(2) Refer to page 5 “…Confusion of ideas…”
“Any Architect should be radical by nature because it is not enough for him to begin where others have left off.”
This goes to say that because one graduates form the school it does not mean they are good designers. The methods that hey have learned become a big part of what they come to do afterwards. Architecture students should start from the root and earn their way up to the top. At Taliesin we start from living in a tent—the most basic way that man has come to live in a modern method—and then we design a larger shelter—which we might come to live in and experience it throughout our residency. It is after the first year that we realize our shortcomings; in concept, design, material, methods, structure, construction, or …. Through this realization we grow under the supervision of the Fellowship to only strengthen our roots in the earth for a whole year and then to reach out of the ground, towards the sky with larger and more complex programs.
“… the working of principle in the direction of integral order is your only safe precedent. So the actual business of your architectural schools should be to assist you in the perception of such order in the study of the various architectures of the world—otherwise schools exist to hinder and deform the young.”
Making integral order a primary design principle will help in reaching continuity. It is within this method of thought that Organic Architecture can come to life. I have found most of the recent designs from A.S.U. lack principals which help create true Architecture. At most universities the thought process is to use cubes and to make it as logical as possible (blindly trying to follow the Bauhaus), with no consideration for Architectural spirituality. Fragmented material choices, broken relations, and unsolved connections do not lead to happy forms. If one is caught practicing in an environment that uses fragmented, broken, and unresolved relationships; then the result will come to be for that person to become fragmented, broken, and unresolved.
“But only a radical and rebellious spirit is sage in the schools we now have, and time spent there is time lost for such spirits.”
Being radical is going back to the roots of things. I try to look with an angle that can view the most basic things. If it’s the site that I look, it is the soil, sun, wind, and environment that I see first. If it is a wall that I look, it is the time it was built, material choices, and spiritual relationship to the environment that I see first. It is the relationship between parts and wholes that I first realize.
“But as a consequence of the little modern architecture we already have, young architects, whatever their years, will emerge with less and less punishment, emerge with far less anguish, … That generation will be less likely to advertise to posterity by its copied mannerisms or borrowed “styles” …”
I can see it at Taliesin, we do not hold responsible those whom lack principal and thus most go astray and fall off of the path. Their designs are copies and lack originality. They draw without consideration for spirituality. Making forms rather than Spiritual Architecture, lecturing on old concepts as if it is their own, copying designs with minimal material change to show them as different; these students are stuck in the black-hole of the “modern style”. “Neither old nor new, neither live nor quite dead.” I can give credit to a passionate soul that confirms old ideas and designs on such, but I have no patience towards unscholarly behavior.
“To find out what he needs go whenever and wherever you can to the factories to study the process in relation to the product and go to the markets to study the reactions. Study the machines that make the product what it is. … ideas with bad technique are abortions.”
Wood is a new material to me and I am glad I have been able to learn about wood first hand by working in the woodshop. It is highly important that an Architect master the means and methods of materials. Not many people know how to save money by proposing an easier method to the contractor. This line of thought can only come from an experienced mind, one that knows what it takes to manufacture and build. The combination of a great idea and bad implementation is bad Architecture. Technical knowledge is a necessity for all Architects. Art + Technique = Architecture
“I do not refer to the skyscraper in the rank and file as that something nor does the world refer to it, except as a stupendous adventure in the business of space-making for rent,-a monstrosity.”
Skyscrapers are not the solution and do not represent the cultural depth that an Architecture should. Tall buildings are too regulated through insurance, financial feasibility, and structural necessities. Thus they tend to look mostly like one another and do not relate to the surrounding environment. Their impact on the immediate surroundings is of the highest importance: surrounding neighborhoods will change to serve a sky-scraper. The infrastructure needed for a skyscraper city is very different to what exists today in most cities (public transportation, sewer system, roads/streets/alleys, water supply, emergency response, waste control).
“The future of architecture in America really lies with the well-to-do man of business,-the man of independent judgment and character of his own unspoiled by great financial success,-that is to say the man not persuaded, by winning his own game, that he knows all about everything else.”
“….direct people, who, loving America for its own sake, live their own lives quietly in touch with its manifold beauties,-blessed by comprehension of the ideal of freedom that founded this country.”
What make s a good client? Frank Lloyd Wright emphasizes their characteristics: directness, loving America for its own sake, living their own life, understanding what the founding fathers meant by “freedom”, and most importantly do not think of themselves as the “know it all” genius. This eliminates contractors. Contractors know it all, or at least most of them think they do. I believe it is a good idea to start my carrier working with contractors and learn from them the market and the methods of the professional world. But after I have sufficient marketing and technical knowledge things will change.
“The soul of that new life we are fond of calling American is liberty: liberty tolerant and so sincere that it must see all free or itself suffer. This freedom is the highest American ideal. To arraign it, then, is inner-experience, because there is no “exterior” freedom. Freedom develops from within and is another expression of an integral order of the mind in high estate. Freedom is impossible where discord exists either within or without.”
“…Architecture like freedom cannot be put on, it must be worked out from within.”
I would like to introduce you to how thoughts and philosophies relate to Architecture. American Architecture will come to life out of American beliefs. Here Frank Lloyd Wright speaks about Liberty, and freedom. How do we present freedom in architecture? One way is by breaking the box (open corners), freeing the interior of clutter and extra spaces are another way. To achieve clutter free architecture we will have to look at details that integrate with the whole. Getting rid of any part that is ashamed of being what it is in relation to the whole. To have a democratic government would translate in Architecture as a building that grows out of its natural environment and is not ashamed to show itself as the thing it is. Not lying under oath would suggest the usage of materials as they are, and prohibits the usage of paint for color. Living in America has enabled me to express my self more clearly and I believe if any soul lives in an American Architecture, it will change for the better. As an Architect our designs should help lives, improve understandings, and elevate spirits that pass through them. I also have no doubt that many of America’s problems are derived from the lack of proper Architecture. I have seen many free and liberal souls that live in the cookie cutter houses and after a while loose their inner fire, or add chocolate chips to the cookie to feel better. I have also seen people that retire, move to a different city, and make the mistake of living in a house that does not represent their values; this all results in them un-retiring and going back to work because they cant stand staying a prisoner in that space. One should look forward to going home and feel that home is a place where their spirits can fly. Today most homes are only investments and a temporary shelter to most Americans.
“It is evident that free Architecture must develop from within,-an integral, or as we now say in Architecture, an “Organic” affair. For this reason if for no other reason modern Architecture can be no “mode” nor can it ever again be any “style”.”
“The building as Architecture is born out of the heart of man, permanent consort to the ground, comrade to the trees, true reflection of man in the realm of his own spirit. His building is therefore consecrated space wherein he seeks refuge, recreation and repose for body but especially for mind. So our machine-age building need no more look like machinery that machinery need look like buildings.”
This is a reminder to the designers, whom their livelihood is based on reviving the dead. Their time is over and only imprisoned souls will request such buildings to be built. I have seen contractors -that know clients, or the market- force such designs and commit a crime that is harsh on the owner but even worse for America. People that build and live in such hoses are never happy with them and tend to change them not much after it is built. Also one should allow playfulness into a design to ease the tension that exists in American daily interaction with machines. After a hard days work, home should be a place as warm as a mothers hug, as safe as a fathers shoulders, and as lively as a lovers kiss.
“…, we must not dramatize the machine but dramatize the man. You must work, young man in architecture, to lift the curse of the “appliance” either mechanical or sentimental form the life of today.
But this modern constructive endeavor is being victimized at the start by a certain new aesthetic wherein appearance is made as aim instead of character made a purpose.”
A bad character will be so even if they wear the finest suits in Europe. Appliances only mask and are good for first impressions. In the long run it is character that will win over everything else. The Architect cannot dismiss the client’s individuality, in the creation of a distinguished design that matches its owner’s character.
“… Architecture is born, not made—must consistently grow from within to whatever it becomes. Such forms as it takes must be spontaneous generation of materials, building methods and purpose. … Use and comfort in order to become Architecture must become spiritual satisfactions wherein the soul insures a more subtle use, achieves a more constant repose. So, Architecture speaks as poetry to the soul.”
Whatever touches the soul makes a difference. Food, scent, Art, and many other things find real value with someone that feels them deep within their soul. Architecture must grow to touch the owner’s soul, and as such it will have to reflect the owner’s spirituality. None of this can be achieved if the forms are not grown out of the life that will exist inside a space. Growth insures certain continuity in parts that relate to the whole, which results in individuality. Comparing “derived out of” to “growth” is like comparing mathematics to music; the same difference exists between the “Bauhaus” ideology and Frank Lloyd Wrights Philosophy. Although one exists within the other, as does mathematics in music, it does not become the other due to the lack of soul. The soul element is what makes it worth. Architecture without soul is not worth anything. Empty soul and illogical, “sprawls”—mentioned as “machine age commonplaces”—are shortcuts that the blind driver of America’s future has taken, which is condemning Americans to a life of slavery for the machine.
“… these commonplaces transfigured and transformed by inner-fire to take their places in the immense vista of the ages as human masterpieces. Such interpretation by inner fire as “character in the realm of Nature” is the work of the young man in Architecture.”
“We as Americans may have to submit to foolish experiments used in the American manner as “quick-turnover” propaganda”
“Architecture is the very body of civilization itself. It takes time for it to grow, …”
“It is better for you to proceed from the generals to the particulars. So do not rationalize from machinery to life. Why not think form life to machines?”
Approaching a problem we are advised to start form generals (as when drawing a section of a complex building) and then proceed towards the particulars (drawing details). Putting it in a very general form, the main starting point for a good design will be Nature. Nature is the most general that exist within any Architectural problem. As the details are terminal points that matter a lot we must not undermine the role of the machine; however the machine does not have a soul. A formed material serves a logical method of attachment. Starting with the details is beginning from the machine and would suggest writing a symphony by using math as the key. Although not impossible, this kind of symphony becomes boring after a few times a sophisticated soul listens to it; and so is the faith of such Architecture.
“The horizontal plane gripping all to earth comes into organic architecture to complete the sense of forms that do not “box up” contents but imaginatively express space. This is modern.”
Usually the horizontal line limits the vertical view. Framing the view is good but even better than that is opening the view to provide a sense of freedom. Breaking the box is a very important part of a free Architecture. If we can use the horizontal line to bring together the sky, ground, horizon, and the building, then we achieve something that is one with its surroundings, and feels like it belongs to its location.
“In Organic Architecture the hard straight line breaks to the dotted line where stark necessity ends and thus allows appropriate rhythm to enter in order to leave suggestion its proper values. This is Modern”
The definition of “line” is “the path traced by a moving point” this states that a line is made out of dots. So, if a line were to grow it would do so out of dots. In an Organic Architecture where everything grows; lines grow out of dots. The growth rhythm is consisted of dots and empty spaces—just as music uses notes and the silent note. At Taliesin West the camp grows out of the ground, starting from a low bearing wall, then a flat space (walking grounds) which follows with a higher element like a building. This continuation and growth rhythm is one of many things that make this place modern.
“In Organic Architecture, any concept of any building as a building begins and goes forward to incidental expression as a picture and does not begin with some incidental expression as a picture and go groping backward. This is modern.”
The conceptual phase of a project must start form the center of our universe, which is Nature. Without Nature nothing would exist and what good would the universe be if someone was not there to admire it. Admiration that comes out of spiritual and logical understanding of Nature is our only rout to salvation. Having a picture and trying to make that picture perfect—where the picture is not related to Nature—will result in going backward and deprivation of life.
“…, the enclosure is no longer found in terms of mere roof or walls but as “screened”—space. This reality is modern”
The interior is no longer separated with walls. Spaces are defined through spiritual characterization; a garden that can become one with the living room is a “Garden Room”, a kitchen that can become the dining room is an “Open Kitchen”. Also structural elements must not become growth barriers. The interior must be flexible and free.
“Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders’ spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment—married to the ground.”
An interior space must take light into itself as much as possible. The sun-angles are what direct such decisions. The qualifying factor is; not having the sun hit directly into an interior space unless necessary for the warmth and energy, but at the same time to allow enough light to shine into a space to allow life to continue during the day without artificial lighting. Calculated glazing systems as walls and roofs help in achieving this goal.
For the native environment to appreciate what lies on top of it, the building must use measures that grow out of the natural surroundings.
“Meanwhile by way of parting moment with the young man in Architecture—this he should keep—concerning ways and means:
1. Forget the Architectures of the world except as something good in their way and time.
2. Do none of you go into Architecture to get a living unless you love architecture as a principle at work, for its own sake—prepared to be as true to it as to your mother, your comrade, or yourself.
3. Beware of the Architectural school except as the exponent of engineering.
4. Go into the field where you can see the machines and methods at work that make the modern buildings, or stay in construction direct and simple until you can work naturally into building-design from the nature of construction.
5. Immediately begin to form the habit of thinking “why” concerning any effects that please or displease you.
6. Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful.
7. Get the habit of analysis—analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
8. “Think in Simples” as my old master used to say—meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles. Do this in order to proceed from generals to particulars and never confuse or confound them or yourself be confounded by them.
9. Abandon as poison the American idea of the “quick turnover.” To get into practice “half-baked” is to sell out your birthright as an Architect for a mess of pottage, or to die pretending to be an Architect.
10. Take time to prepare. Ten years’ preparation for preliminaries to Architectural practice is little enough for any Architect who would rise “above the belt” in true Architectural appreciation or practice.
11. Then go as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings. The physician can bury his mistakes—but the Architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
12. Regards it as just as desirable to build a chicken-house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in Art, beyond the money-matter. It is the quality of character that really counts. Character may be large in the little or little in the large.
13. Enter no Architectural competition under any circumstances except as a novice. No competition ever gave to the world anything worth having in Architecture. The jury itself is a picked average. The first thing done by the jury is to go through all the designs and throw out the best and the worst ones so as an average, it can average upon an average. The net result of any competition is an average by the average of averages.
14. Beware of the shopper for plans. The man who will not grubstake you in prospecting for ideas in his behalf will prove a faithless client.”
If you don’t get it … then you don’t get it.
“Planning Mans Physical Environment”
March 1947, Princeton
“…, I believe that were all education above the high school level suspended for ten years, humanity would get a better chance to be what humanitarian Princeton itself would wish it to be, our thinking throughout the educational fabric has been so far departmentalized, over-standardized and so split that like a man facing a brick wall, counting bricks, we mistake the counting for reality …”
Most universities tend to specialize students in a certain field and forget to provide them with the knowledge to utilize the studies in the real world. I graduated as a civil engineer to go to work and find out that I only know about a fifth of what I really needed to know. I hade the base and was a good brick counter but could not see the nature of the wall. I have found Taliesin does a better job at making Architects through their active “learning by doing” approach. Having gone to internship for about 1000 hours and also working on construction with wood (in addition to my prior experience in steel and concrete), I now understand better what makes a design work. I am getting the feeling of the materials and it is different than just reading it in the books.
“… urbanism … unable to live by its own birthrate, living upon the fresh blood of others, sterilizing the humanity …”
Today cities needs are fulfilled through the transportation of goods and services to it. Water, electricity, food, and construction material are only a few that are brought into a city for the city to survive. But through the internet the people of America can somewhat free themselves of the city. The lack of a speedy public transportation that can get people in and out of the city is what is really hurting Americans. Imagine a public transportation that could get you to where you want to be within the city and it would only take 45 minutes if you were living in a radius of 50 miles outside of the city. You would be at home, getting your work done only to send it to your office in the city for review. Your visits to the city would become limited to two or three days a week. You would be close to family, and spending more time with the family insures a better life. But this is not the case today and Americans have fallen slaves to the machine.
“This amazing avalanche of material, we call production, seems to have its eyes shut to all but destruction. The standardizations it practices are the death of the soul, just as habituation kills any imaginative spirit. So within this welter of the misapplied wealth of knowledge, with so little realization—wherein consideration and kindness are so rare, why not develop a little integral know how? …”
The standardization of education and materials allows average people to pose as know it all ignorant architect/contractors that introduce sprawls. If someone takes the time to work with builders/Architects for a few years, they most likely would be able to get a team together and pose as an Architect/builder. Standardization of life has become the downfall of urbanism. Houses that look alike, neighborhoods that looks the same and lack the very essential elements of life, are plaguing American lives. Wisdom to build used to translate to a general knowledge which allowed one person to start and finish general construction of a house or shop or etc. Construction wisdom is now standardized into different fields, and has led contractors to know less about less. Give a contractor anything out of the ordinary and they would not know how it is done. That is why they ask for more money on a well thought solution that utilizes materials in a better way.
Recent Comments