Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright American architect (1867 –1959 )

Table of contents

1 God and Nature 2 Architecture and Design 3 Design 4 Art 5 Philosophy 6 Society and Humanity 7 Culture 8 Politics and Government 9 Capitalism and Economy 10 Urban Design 11 Himself

God and Nature

• "I believe in God, only I spell it 'Nature'."

• "Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."

• "God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature, and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing."

• "Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain."

• "Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination."

Architecture and Design

• "A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

• "The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own civilization."

• "Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity."

• "Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun."

• "No stream rises higher than its source. Whatever man might build, could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built."

• "Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition. How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a French Chateau , a bank a Greek temple and a university a Gothic Cathedral . All of the '-isms' are imposition on life itself, by way of previous education."

• "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."

• "A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart."

• "The room within is the great fact about the building."

• "Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age."

• "The architect must be a prophet …a prophet in the true sense of the term. If he can't see at least ten years ahead, don't call him an 'architect'."

• "An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board — and a wrecking bar at the site."

• "Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity."

• "The space within becomes the reality of the building."

• "Space is the breath of art."

• "True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented."

• "All I learned from Eliel Saarinen was how to make out an expense account." (said after he returned from a South American trip with Saarinen, a fellow architect)

• "Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it." (about Le Corbusier )

• "He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head." (referring to an unnamed, well-known architect of Wright's day)

• "We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally."

• "I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture." (1931 )

• "Move the chair." (Wright's response to a client who phoned him to complain of rain leaking through the roof of the house onto the dining table)

• "Architecture is frozen music."

• "I would like to have a free architecture. Architecture that belonged where you see it standing — and is a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace."

Design

• "Less is only more where more is no good."

• "'Form follows function' — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."

• "'Think simple' as my old master used to say. Meaning, reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles ."

• Of a house: "It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other."

• "Get the habit of analysis – analysis will, in time, enable synthesis to become your habit of mind."

• "Mechanization best serves mediocrity."

Art

• "Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art."

• "Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now."

Philosophy

• "Freedom is from within."

• "An idea is salvation by imagination."

• "The truth is more important than the facts."

• "The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes."

• "Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."

• "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking — he knows!"

• "The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind."

Society and Humanity

• "There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

• "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."

• "Life always rides in strength to victory, not through internationalism …but only through the direct responsibility of the individual."

Culture

• "I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture." (on Marilyn Monroe )

• "I wouldn't mind seeing opera die. Ever since I was a boy, I regarded opera as a ponderous anachronism, almost the equivalent of smoking."

• "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." (on television)

• "Chewing gum for the eyes." (on television)

• "Don't eat it. It will kill you before your time. Avoid it." (on pepper)

• "Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes."

Politics and Government

• "Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic."

• "A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it."

• "Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism , communism , fascism , or mobocracy ."

• "Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture."

• "Bureaucrats : they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall."

Capitalism and Economy

• "A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality."

• "I believe totally in a capitalist system, I only wish that someone would try it."

Urban Design

• "It (New York City ) is a great monument to the power of money and greed…a race for rent."

• "Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles ."

• "Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world." (1939 )

• "Abandon it." (Wright, on being asked how he would go about improving Pittsburgh )

Himself

• "Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves."

• "The one on my board right now." (what Wright said when asked which of his buildings was the most beautiful)

• "I feel coming on a strange disease—humility."

• "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change."

• "I've been accused of saying I was was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] — if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony."