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"Frank Lloyd Wright"
Photographed by g. Paul Bishop, '57
No. 2 ©2019 G. Paul Bishop, Jr.
- IMAGE NO
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Frank Lloyd
Wright
(Frank Lincoln Wright)
1869 - 1959
Architect
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A Maverick
Who Believed in Form with Feeling
By Belinda Luscombe
TIME 100 Special Issue
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 Robbie House, Unity
Temple and more than 450 other buildings, each a lesson in
poetic functionalism. And the buildings not only fulfilled his
ideals, they worked. Alas, his creations were decorative and
quixotic in an era 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.
__________
Luscpmbs,
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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