FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT - HERB GREENE

Go Back

Frank Lloyd Wright www.franklloydwright.org	I first heard the name of Frank Lloyd Wright from a spinster match teacher while in 10th grade. She talked an entire class period about a sarcastic and superior Wright who talked down to his lecture audience. A year later, I cut a small photo of a model of a Wright house from the New York Times. As a freshman I saw the 1938 and 1948 issues of Architecture Forum dedicated to Wright. I studied them closely and couldn’t get enough of his work. After transferring to Oklahoma University to study under Bruce Goff, I was further exposed to Wright through Goff who could recognize a Wright house by a random photo or a small detail. While at Oklahoma University I began to think of Wrights' designs as expressive and as an important model, an organization of forms that spoke of how the world of nature and art was organized with a center or terminal of interest from which the rest of the composition was organized. I consciously sought to break away from this conception to express something of randomness and indeterminacy which was stemming from recent science and philosophy. My design for a private school in a 4th year project at Oklahoma University shows my initial effort. Wright was a genius of the first rank, I am awed by his best work, but Wright thought HE was architecture and denigrated Gaudi as a "mud pie" architect. Gaudi for me is the world's greatest architect: a blend of joyful and aspiring forms.
	In a successful work of art, the pattern of the whole conveys a feeling that essential relationships exist between the data in the image and the world beyond the image. The result is a feeling that there is something important to be unraveled in the manner in which the pattern in the image is connected to the world. I first felt the force of this idea while studying the floor plans of Frank Lloyd Wright. The plan of the Martin House (floor plan shown at right) can be enjoyed as a two dimensional composition irrespective of its function as a floor plan. Wright must have felt this, because he had the plan rendered to dramatize its compositional values.	click to enlarge
	The composition displays balance, gradation, terminals, interpenetration, and other valued elements. The beholder responds because of his lifetime of experience with these elements. The pattern appears as an idealization of relationships and elements derived from the world of times and places beyond the present pattern. Our awareness of experience on two simultaneous levels is also strong when we are in the presence of the actual built spaces of Wright’s architecture. We feel the space with our immediate awareness of its characteristics of shelter, variegated light, harmoniously combined materials, and spatial extensions that lead the eye beyond the perceived space. The awareness places us fully in the Now and Here. At the same time, Wright’s composition calls up an awareness of an idealized pattern that represents an important understanding of a Then and There world beyond the presently perceived space. An emotional and intellectual response accompanies this awareness of an idealized time (past, present, or future) involving itself in the Now and Here.