The architect Frank Lloyd Wright's views

[Green]

[BBvideo 560,340:1boa1g5i]http://youtu.be/DeKzIZAKG3E[/BBvideo]

The Mike Wallace Interview
Frank Lloyd Wright
9/1/57 and 9/28/57

"This interview was recorded in two parts. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America's youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death."

Wow. I would be surprised if Ray Peat wouldn't have anything to say about Wright.

WALLACE: You write at some small length anyway in your latest book A Testament published by Horizon Press, you write about your religious ideas. I understand that you attend no Church.

WRIGHT: I attend the greatest of all Churches.

WALLACE: Which is?

WRIGHT: And I put a capital N on Nature, and call it my Church. And that's my Church.

WALLACE: Uh-huh. You... Your attitude towards organized religion is...

WRIGHT: That's what enables me to build churches for other people.

WALLACE: Well, I want to... this I do want to understand.

WRIGHT: If I belong to any one Church, they couldn't ask me to build a church for them. And because my Church is elemental, fundamental I can build for anybody a church.

WALLACE: What do you think of church architecture in the United States?

WRIGHT: I think it's the cause of great shame.

WALLACE: Because it improperly reflects the idea of religion?

WRIGHT: Because it is a paragon monkey reflection and no reflection of religion.

WALLACE: Let's go to...

WRIGHT: Is that a little bit too fantastic?

WALLACE: No, no, as a matter of fact, no one has asked me, but I heartily agree.

WRIGHT: You can take that to the Universities and take it to the kind of atmosphere in which they administer education for the young, and get exactly the same failure.

WALLACE: Well now wait, wait. I said that I heartily agree, and yet something immediately comes to mind. When I walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and I am not a Catholic, but when I walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral here in New York City, I am enveloped in a feeling of reverence.

WRIGHT: Sure it isn't an inferiority complex?

WALLACE: Just because the building is big and I am small you mean?

WRIGHT: Yes.

WALLACE: Hmmm. I think not.

WRIGHT: I hope not.

WALLACE: You... you feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick's?

WRIGHT: Regret.

WALLACE: Regret? Because of what? Because...

WRIGHT: Because it isn't the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the sovereignty of the individual which I feel should be represented in our edifices devoted to culture.

WALLACE: When you go out into a big forest, with towering pines, and this almost a feeling of awe, that frequently you do get in the presence of nature, do you then not feel insignificant, do you not feel small in the same sense that I feel small and insignificant?

WRIGHT: On the contrary, I feel large, I feel enlarged and encouraged, intensified, more powerful, that's...

WALLACE: Let's talk...

WRIGHT: And that's because, why? Because in the one instance you are inspired by nature, and the other instance you are inspired by an artificiality contrary to nature. Am I clear?

WALLACE: You are clear, although I must say that I don't agree because whatever inspires, whatever inspires a feeling of reverence, a feeling of goodness, a feeling of under... not understanding, that's not...

WRIGHT: No, no, now you are on dangerous ground.

WALLACE: Not understanding I say, it's good for the insides, it's good for the soul.

WRIGHT: Maybe very bad, very bad. We are... Our natures are now so warped in many directions, we are so conditioned by education, we have no longer any straight, true, clean reactions that we can trust, and we have to be pretty wise and careful what it is we give up to, what it is we admire, what it is we are inspired by? I dare say that the stevedore's inspired by the prostitute whom he seeks, I dare say that all these things may be good so far as they go because they are necessary. But I wouldn't say that they are what should be, I wouldn't say that they are ideal.

Full Transcript of The Mike Wallace Interview: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/vi ... oyd_t.html

A piece from "Frank Lloyd Wright: A Testament (1957)"
(http://www.bolenderinitiatives.com/fran ... ament-1957)
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So the poet in the engineer and the engineer in the poet and both in the architect may be seen here working together, lifelong. William Blake — poet — has said "exuberance is Beauty." It took me sometime to know just what the great Blake meant when he wrote that. For one thing, this lesson, now valuable to the creative architect, I would finally illustrate here; in this poetry-crushing, transitory era of the Machine wherein development of a national culture or even a personal culture of one's own has long been so recreant. Blake meant that Beauty always is the consequence of utter fullness of nature in expression: expression intrinsic. Excess never to be mistaken for exuberance; excess being always vulgar. He who knows the difference between excess and exuberance is aware of the nature of the poetic principle, and not likely to impoverish, or be impoverished, by his work. The more a horse is Horse, a bird Bird, the more a man is Man, a woman Woman, the better? The more a design is creative revelation of intrinsic nature, whatever the medium or form of expression, the better.

"Creative," then, implies exuberance. It is not only true expression but true interpretation, as a whole, of the significance, truth and force of Nature, raised to the fullest power by the poet. That design revealing truth of inner being most abundantly is best design. Design that lasts longest; remembered by mankind with greatest profit and pride.

Art formalized, empty of this innate significance, is the cliché: cut and dried content no longer humanely significant. The so-called modern "classic" has become cliché and does not live under this definition of exuberance. Only the mind of one who has left the region of the soul and inhabits the region of the nervous system in our time mistakes florid or senseless elaboration for exuberance. The "efficient" mind that would put Pegasus to the plough never knows the difference between the Curious and the Beautiful or the difference between the prosaic and the poetic.

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In a conversation with his wife Olgivanna a few weeks before he died:

Blake would be a perfect guest for tea, Wright remarked, confessing that "I would sit at his feet and worship him. Such a wonderful man! He would understand us, Olgivanna. There would be a remarkable bond between the three of us just as has been between you and me. And it occurred to me recently that in the distant future when they think of us, they will think of us as one. We blend Olgivanna. We are one.

 

[gretchen]

I spent the first 10 years of my life in a FLW inspired ranch- type house. I've never really forgotten it and think from time to time what it would be like to live there again.

Earlier this year I visited Scottsdale but got sick :-/ and didn't make it over to Taliesin. I might try again some other time.

 

[Green]

I like ranch homes. Must have been nice. One day I'll make the 6 hour drive to the "fallingwater" designed by Wright and leave changed. I bet.

We are shifting in what we live now; we don't really live in it. We don't really understand what it is to live in an organic building with organic character.
...
I would like to make it appropriate to the Declaration of Independence, to the center line of our freedom; I'd like to have a free architecture, I'd like to have architecture that belonged where you see it standing, and as a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace. And the letters we receive from our clients tell us how those buildings we built for them, have changed the character of their whole lives and their whole existence. And it's different now than it was before. Well, I'd like to do that for the country.

A man like Ray Peat. Towards the restoration of nature. I think his plan compliments Peat's plan nicely.

 

[pboy]

wow, awesome. What a master. Ive been to the falling water house...its true epic architecture woven in nature...like amazing, I suppose only such a person with that kind of mind would build something like that

 

[vrd2107]

FLW was very much a true master. May we all aspire to be a master of our craft in this way.

 

[BRMarshall]

Very interesting!