Organic Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Principles of Organic Architecture
By Kimberly Elman

“So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no ‘traditions’ essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but—instead—exalting the simple laws of common sense—or of super-sense if you prefer—determining form by way of the nature of materials...”
— Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture, 1939

Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the word ‘organic’ into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to “form and function are one,” using nature as the best example of this integration.

Although the word ‘organic’ in common usage refers to something which has the characteristics of animals or plants, Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture takes on a new meaning. It is not a style of imitation, because he did not claim to be building forms which were representative of nature. Instead, organic architecture is a reinterpretation of nature’s principles as they had been filtered through the intelligent minds of men and women who could then build forms which are more natural than nature itself.

Organic architecture involves a respect for the properties of the materials—you don’t twist steel into a flower—and a respect for the harmonious relationship between the form/design and the function of the building (for example, Wright rejected the idea of making a bank look like a Greek temple). Organic architecture is also an attempt to integrate the spaces into a coherent whole: a marriage between the site and the structure and a union between the context and the structure.

Throughout his 70 year career, Frank Lloyd Wright published articles, gave lectures, and wrote many books. The philosophy of organic architecture was present consistently in his body of work and the scope of its meaning mirrored the development his architecture. The core of this ideology was always the belief that architecture has an inherent relationship with both its site and its time.

When asked in 1939 if there was a way to control a client’s potentially bad taste in selecting housing designs for his Broadacre City project, Wright replied, “Even if he wanted bad ones he could find only good ones because in an organic architecture, that is to say an architecture based upon organic ideals, bad design would be unthinkable.” In this way, the question of style was not important to Frank Lloyd Wright. A building was a product of its place and its time, intimately connected to a particular moment and site—never the result of an imposed style.

In 1957, two years before his death, Frank Lloyd Wright published the book, A Testament, which was a philosophical summation of his architectural career. In an essay entitled “The New Architecture: Principles”, he put forth nine principles of architecture that reflected the development of his organic philosophy. The principles addressed ideas about the relationship of the human scale to the landscape, the use of new materials like glass and steel to achieve more spatial architecture, and the development of a building’s architectural “character,” which was his answer to the notion of style.

An Excerpt From “Inconstant Unity:
The Passion of Frank Lloyd Wright”
By William Cronon

Romantic genius, artistic iconoclast, heroic individualist: these were the labels Wright attached to himself, these the standards against which he measured his own behavior. When he told clients to throw away their belongings or when he cajoled them into spending far more than they had ever intended on their houses, he was serving his vision of an ideal truth. Given his own perennial indifference to money, one can almost imagine that he literally had trouble regarding it as real. When he underestimated costs, he may sometimes have fooled himself as much as he did his clients, for the money (perhaps even the client) was just a means to an end. Indeed, Wright went so far as to suggest that money actually acquired its value by enabling his genius to create, and was as good as worthless if not pressed into the service of some higher good. “Money,” he told his apprentices, “becomes valuable because you can do something with it. If you take away all the creative individuals, all the men of ideas who have projected into the arena of our lives substantial contributions, money would not be worth anything.” 150 All of his behavior is consistent with this principle, however convenient and self-serving the uses to which it could be put. From his own point of view, much of what is most troubling about Wright can be explained as part of his single-minded struggle to overcome any obstacle that might prevent his vision from being realized.

Above all else, Wright’s vision served beauty. When he quibbled with Sullivan’s dictum that “form follows function,” suggesting instead that “form and function are one,” he was in fact revealing that when push came to shove his own true passion was form more than function. 151 What he admired in the Arts and Crafts movement was its commitment to crafting all objects in such a way as to render them beautiful. What he loved about Japan was the idea of a culture in which every human action and every human object were integrated so as to make of an entire civilization a work of art. In pursuit of beauty, he sought to subordinate all elements of his architecture to a consistent style that would express their underlying unity. No matter how radically his individual buildings may differ from each other, they all express his struggle for aesthetic consistency, his habit of seizing a single abstract theme and recapitulating it with endless variations as if in a Beethoven symphony. This man who could sometimes seem so inconsistent in his personal and professional life in fact held up consistency as the highest ideal of his architecture. “Consistency from first to last,” Wright declared, “will give you the result you seek and consistency alone.”152 The vocabulary in which he sought to achieve this consistency was geometrical, so that Fallingwater, to take an obvious case, is an almost obsessive rumination on the possibilities of the cantilever, from the basic structure of the suspended floors right down to the treatment of the bookshelves. “You must be consistently grammatical,” Wright said, for a building, “to be understood as a work of Art.” 153 Geometry was the key to grammatical consistency, which was in turn the key to aesthetic unity, which was in turn the key to beauty, which was in turn the key of God.

But consistency alone was not enough; it was only of value if coupled with the new. By itself, consistency would kill creativity, producing yet another of the lifeless, backward-looking traditions that were the death of art. Newness was proof of creative genius, and consistent newness was the best proof of all. Just as he tried hard not to seem influenced by anyone else’s style, Wright had a restless urge to keep inventing new styles lest he start repeating his own too often. His boastfulness and his competitive need to claim priority over all other architects were surely tied to the horror of repetition. So was his love affair with new technologies, his willingness to experiment with virtually any new material that came his way so he could claim that he, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the first architect ever to have employed it. Describing to his apprentices the many innovations he had supposedly made in constructing the Larkin Building—air conditioning, plate-glass windows, integral desk furniture, suspended toilet bowls, and so on—he concluded, “I was a real Leonardo da Vinci when I built that building, everything in it was my invention.”154

Wright’s love of new technologies was matched by a desire to use old technologies in new ways. His fascination for the new and his need to show off his unsurpassed talents as an architectural virtuoso undoubtedly help explain his tendency to demand so much of his materials, daring to test their limits almost to the point of failure if it meant achieving effects he could claim as uniquely his own. The sags in Wright’s cantilevers are but the logical complement to his perennial testing of limits in the search for new expression. Wright’s defenders sometimes claim that he was simply ahead of his time, that the materials did not yet exist that could do what he wished them to do, and that this explains some of the problems with his buildings. Nothing in Wright’s career supports this argument. Had he lived to be able to take advantage of the newer technologies and stronger materials of our own day, he would surely have pushed them to their limits as well. The proof he demanded of his genius was to go where no architect had ever gone before, and that meant accepting risks that few others were willing to take. If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs, badly heated rooms, sagging cantilevers, and unhappy clients, then Wright was more than willing to pay the price.

Wright combined all these creative qualities—his exploration of new technologies, his invention of new styles, his striving for maximum expressive effect, his search for grammatical consistency in all his buildings—with a remarkable playfulness. There was something childlike about the man even in his late eighties—a powerful sense of romance and an unabashed enthusiasm for his own creations. In one sense, he never ceased being the flirtatious male of Auden’s poem, lounging in the sunlight and performing for mother with seemingly effortless grace. But for all his self-centeredness, he also had a remarkable ability to sweep others up in his vision. Long before the ground for a new building had even been broken, Wright had conjured for his audience a beguiling fantasy of the ideal form that building would represent. No one has described this seductive power of Wright’s better than his son John. His father’s talent, he said, was to build “a romance about you, who will live in it—and you get the House of Houses, in which everyone lives a better life because of it. It may have a crack, a leak, or both, but you wouldn’t trade it for one that didn’t.” This would be true, John said, even if Wright were building you a chicken coop. “He weaves a romance around the gullibility of the chicken and the chicanery of the human being—and you get the Coup of Coops in which every chicken lives a better life on its own plot of ground. You may crack your head or bump your shins on some projecting romanticism, but life will seem richer, the air clearer, the sunshine brighter. The shadows a lighter violet. You will gather the eggs with a dance in your feet and a song in your heart, for your coop will be a work of art, not the cold logical form chasing the cold logical function.” 155

The romantic spirit that Wright brought to all his buildings may point at once to the deepest secret of his architecture and the most profound reason for his leaky roofs. In the end, the leaks and sags did not much matter to him. Although his practical goal was to strive as hard as he could to make his structures conform to the vision in his mind, form mattered more than function to him, and the vision behind form mattered most of all, far more than did its physical incarnation. The building itself would invariably fall short, and could only be an approximation of the Platonic ideal that lay behind it. This may explain why Wright was so willing to modify his buildings even when they were under construction, and why he apparently felt no compunction about altering them once they were complete. Taliesin itself underwent innumerable revisions, with walls and windows and doors and rooms being added and subtracted on an almost monthly basis. No building seemed permanent to Wright, because none could reflect for more than an instant the multifaceted geometric ideal that was in his mind. Perhaps this is why he was apparently so undisturbed when one or another of his buildings was torn down. “I have not learned to grieve long,” he wrote, “now that some work of mine has met its end.” He took comfort from the fact that its image would survive in photographs, and these would spread its memory “as an idea of form, to the mind’s end of all the world.” 156 It was the lesson of the folly: the architecture could not help but be a builder in the sand, and his works could not hope to escape what Wright called “the mortgage of time . . . on human fallibility foreclosed.157 Buildings, like their architects, were mortal, and so they leaked and sagged and aged and eventually passed away. But like the White City, which had leapt into being for but a single summer to realize a dream on the shore of Lake Michigan, it was possible for “an idea of form” to live far longer in “the mind’s eye of all the world.” If an architect aspired to immortality, he had best seek it in the realm of memory, spirit, and eternal ideals, not mortal matter.

Wright finally staked his claim to greatness on the mind’s eye as his best defense against the mortgage of time. “The product of a principle,” he said, “never dies. The fellows who practice it do, but the principle doesn’t.”158“ However inconsistent he may have been about other aspects of his life, he never wavered from this chief article of faith: an organic architecture, like a life well lived, must serve the principles that give order to nature and meaning to the human spirit. ”We learn,‘ Emerson had written, “that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are.’159” However cleverly an architect might manipulate natural materials, however brilliantly he might combine wood and stone and mortar to create breathtakingly beautiful space, his truest creation was not material but spiritual. “Spirit creates,” wrote Emerson. It “does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”160 Where nature and spirit met, there one would find the principles one sought, the lessons that would reveal the secrets of trees and flowers and buildings and even of the architect’s own soul. “The principles that build the tree,” declared Wright, “will build the man.”161 If such language today seems alien to us, if architectural critics now sometimes dismiss Wright’s high-blown romantic words as unreliable guides to his architectural practice, this may be because we have forgotten the ideals that were ultimately more important to him even than buildings. The secret of Wright’s architecture, he would surely have reminded us, will not be found on its surface but in its heart. If we wish to find it for ourselves, we must make our own way to the unity he managed to discover in so many corners of his universe: in the romantic words of a Concord preacher, in the geometric lessons of a kindergarten toy, in the gentle prospects of a Wisconsin landscape, in the evanescent beauty of a Japanese temple that was also a playful folly in the midst of a dream city—perhaps even in the persistent leaks of Wright’s own roofs.

150. Pfeiffer, His Living Voice, p. 74.
151. John Lloyd Wright, My Father, p. 121.
152. Wright, “The Architect and the Machine,“ in Pfeiffer, Collected Writings, Vol. I, p. 22.
153. Wright, Natural House, p. 182.
154. Pfeiffer, His Living Voice, p. 28.
155. John Lloyd Wright, My Father, p. 121.
156. Wright, Autobiography, p. 312.
157. Ibid., p. 31. Wright was here referring not to the fair but to the two domed buildings he had known as a student in Madison, both of which he saw destroyed within a few years of each other.
158. Pfeiffer, His Living Voice, p. 28.
159. Emerson, “Nature,“ Essays and Lectures, p. 41.
160. Ibid.
161. Frank Lloyd Wright, as quoted in Gill, Many Masks, p. 22.

Reprinted by permission from an essay by William cronon in Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994.

The Robie House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his client Frederick C. Robie, is considered one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture. Designed in Wright's Oak Park studio in 1908 and completed in 1910, the building inspired an architectural revolution. Its sweeping horizontal lines, dramatic overhangs, stretches of art glass windows and open floor plan make it a quintessential Prairie style house. Although it was designed more than ninety years ago, the building remains a masterpiece of modern architecture. Tours of the site offer both a first-hand experience of its amazingly contemporary spaces and the current restoration work that is returning the house to its original appearance.