Frank Lloyd Wright
Thought Leader
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Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the greatest innovators in the history of architecture. He apprenticed in Chicago with Louis Sullivan, one of the great pioneers of modern architecture who first brought clarity to skyscraper design. Wright experimented with new design vocabularies and building systems. Typically Wrightian is the joining of the structure to site, integrating it with the landscape. Wright was also an early proponent of environmentally conscious design.
Wright's architecture is about ideas. He had a clear vision and philosophy of designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment. During his lifetime he designed over 1000 projects out of which over 530 projects were executed and each building reflects his thought process and yet holds a unique appeal through coordinated design elements. The purity of materials used to transform his idea and how he addressed every element of nature around the building was just incomparable. He believed in expression through building elements themselves. Wright, a committed modernist, always designed humane, warm architecture in harmony with its environment. modernism He is indeed the greatest American architect of all time.
Following are some favorite Frank Lloyd Wright quotes:
Form follows function- that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
All fine architectural vales are human values, else not valuable.
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.
Buildings, too, are children of the Earth and Sun.
Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest of terms, getting back to first principles.
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.
No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.
What ever 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.
Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.
Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to everyone and married to the ground.
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.
Space is the breath of art.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
The mother art is architecture. Without architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.
The space within becomes the reality of the building.
Less is only more where more is no good.
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.
If you foolishly ignore beauty, you'll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
An idea is salvation by imagination.
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright
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