Frank Lloyd Wright was an American original. Prolific, visionary, unorthodox
and ingenious, he built for a romantic America, a country with space and
grace to spare. While the turbines of Modernism were fitting and turning
homes, buildings and cities into parts of a huge functional machine, Wright
held on to his belief in an architecture that could dawdle and daydream. His
grand plan for cities seemed fantastical and cinematic---the basic building
block was not a house but a farm, where each man could grow his own food on
an acre block reserved for him since birth---and he was easy to dismiss as
hopelessly Utopian. But fortunately for history, he often got to lay his
dreams down in concrete and clay tile, giving us Fallingwater, New York
City's Guggenheim Museum, the S.C. Johnson Wax building, the Robie House,
Unity Temple and more than 450 other buildings, each a lesson in poetic
functionalism. And the buildings not only fulfilled his ideals, they also
worked. Alas, his creations were decorative and quixotic in an ear that
preferred the planer and the abstract. If Wright's organic architecture did
not spawn a movement, it is not because it was wrong-headed or impractical.
It is because his vision was so personal, so deeply inhabited by him, that
without him it had no breath at all.
__________
Luscombs, Belinda. "A Maverick Who
Believed in Form with Feeling."
TIME 100 Special Issue. VOL. 151, NO. 22
(June 8, 1998) p. 88.
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