The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture

by Frank Lloyd Wright Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Princeton University Press, Woodstock Oxfordshire, 2008
464 pp., 103 halftones. US $49.00 UK £ 29
ISBN: 9-780-69113318-8.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

The book is a tribute to the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The ideas of Lloyd Wright about technology are very interesting and they are presented mostly in the chapter entitled The Art and Craft of the Machine (1901). Despite being depicted as the second tower of Babel, technology is portrayed as a mixed blessing that can simultaneously enhance human intelligence or destroy it due to our own selfishness. Machines are what will draw the distinction between the arts of old and the art of the future or the art of democracy as Lloyd Wright calls points out. Technologies can be compared to a modern Sphinx whose riddle the artist must solve. Machines are then at first sight, a destroyer of our present ideals but can also be our salvation in disguise. Technology then can be reinterpreted as a monster image of ourselves that will eventually destroy us unless we conquer it. The assembly of machines is then the potential forerunner of democracy because it can form an art and craft society that educates itself in a collective way. All this technical apparatus is the ultimate tool for both artists and architects, but if we do not master our tools, they will master us.

Therefore, the author considers the study of machines to be the first duty of the modern artist. Technologies are then a means to a great end in art. Nonetheless, they are not neutral and not better than the mind that drives them. They are an element of human life that is mastering the drudgery of the world, widening the margin of human leisure. The book describes creative artists as workmen in love with what they are doing, for the love of it. This is how they master their creations: by learning the nature of them, by practice, by finding out what they do and how they do it, and by discovering what they do best for one thing. This is true also for architects that must master the industrial means of their era before being masons, plasterers, carpenters, sculptors or painters. He makes clear that this does not mean that art should take the place of science because it is not pure reason, but is always a reasonable discourse. Today —Says Lloyd Wright—we have a scientist or inventor in the place of Shakespeare or Dante. Captains of industry seem to be the modern substitutes for kings, potentates and great artists as well. This type of scientific research is not opposed to an aesthetic labor because someone with genius is the one who blames himself if he fails to find the beauty of its own time. Artists are also described as people who are not afraid of suffering from the destruction those envious individuals who might not appreciate something of tremendous value to their environment.

Undertaking courage, passion and patience, an architect or artist should then work towards freedom and organic integration. The modern man will perhaps be a poet or someone capable of acting as an arbitrator of the diverse, the equalizer of his age and land. For Lloyd Wright, any of the arts called “fine” are poetic. And poetic does not mean to escape from life but does mean life raised to intense significance and higher power in which the machine is used to conserve life not to destroy it. It is curious that the word technology is not used once in the text even when it is one of the most remarkable achievements of modernity as a historical period. The text speaks of development and the prominent role of scientific knowledge but does not often use the word progress. Even when modernity and his ideals of beauty, unity and progress had been considered as some sort of utopia mostly after the onslaught of technologies developed just for war and their concomitant World Wars, most of Lloyd Wright’s ideas still have vast value.

His writing somehow foretold the abolition of great architectural styles because the solidarity will grow scarce in a time in which the rebellion inherited from avant-garde thinking will flower and there will be as many styles as individuals capable of style. From this radical perspective, it is almost necessary to reject renaissance ideals because otherwise it will mean living as a parasite of the past. This is perhaps the most provocative statement of the whole book besides the vindication of rebellion as a honourable instinct that discards previous architectural history so that people can build the modern home. This is a surprising thought coming from an architect considered to be modern because it will be more predictable to find plain disregard for history in postmodernism.

The majority of the book is inspiring and presents a very good recompilation of the life work one of the most important architects of the twentieth century that was also very concerned with organic architecture and conservation of the natural environment. In addition, this hardbound book is made of high quality materials, it is well written, and it is a must-have resource for architects and scholars.