Frank Lloyd Wright:
The Greatest American Architect of All Time and the
Father of Modernism.

That's right, the greatest American Architect of All Time. I stand by that statement because it is true. Frank Lloyd write was born on this date in 1867. Hard to believe that such a structural genious came out of an era when structure was pushed aside as secondary to ornamentation and homogeny. In his 91 year life, he created more iconic American buildings and influential architectural standards than any other American architect ever to exist. Few people understood what Wright meant about "organic architecture" back in his day. I personally believe the resurgence of soft modernism, a natural successor to the organic modernist movement that began as a result of Wright's philosophies of what a building should be, is proof that here was a man who actually knew what the visual and aesthetic implications of his theories were. A kind of clarity of thought and concept that has been almost lost in recent years to a swelling tide of aesthetic complacency. Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings are not beautiful because of what they symbolize, because they symbolize nothing more than the structural concepts of the buildings themselves. They are beautiful because they were created with the intent of looking beautiful. Wright's sense of making a building fit into it's place was quite possibly the most perfect in the entirity of architectural history. Wright's concept of "organic architecture" is now a theorum of how to make buildings that work with their geography in a personal and intimate dynamic that is so abstract that like the great masterpieces of art, film or literature, can not be completely expressed in the form of a methodology. If he had lived long enough to see, and respond to the postmodern theories of Robert Venturi (late 60's and 70's), he would have probably dismissed them all as, "Worship of distaste which in application is a recipe for an ugly world".
I beleive Wright is probably the very antithesis of everything Venturi.

Built after he died, Wright's Kaden Tower was originally the design for a hotel in India. This is a perfect, lesser known example of the degree of sensibility Wright appeared to have in how buildings should be designed to look and work with their surroundings. Modest and natural, by comparison to nearly every other style ever to exist, Wright's paradigm of how buildings should look is one all-too-often not considered anymore.

Since you all know what Wright's best-known house, Falling Water looks like, I won't bother finding a picture of it to put up here since I'm tired now.

# posted by H_R : 10:09 PM