FLW on Beauty...
"As an architect for more than sixty years, I have learned that only the beautiful is practical. And conversely, anything that is truly practical, functional and useful is beautiful--whether it be a sunset or some man made object...The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. The earth's beauty grows on me. 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."--FLW, A New Treasury of Words to Live By, edited by William Nichols, copy right 1959

Language is very limited in its ability to express anything well...
that is one of the fascinations of language and our dependence on it.

Plumbers, prize fighters, ballerinas, salesmen, architects, almost any person that does work of any kind at a high level, finds language wanting in explaining what is done and how.

Ironically, language fails writers the same way when they try to use language to explain how they write and what they have written.

Someone like Wright writing about what he does simply makes the inadequacy of the explanatory capacity of language starkly apparent.

Still, I prefer he tried rather than not. It humanized him in a way his exceptional work could not.

So instead of writing, maybe...
... dancing about architecture?

http://www.google.com/search?q="dancing+about+architecture"

hudsonhonu
In FLW's defense, this was a quote submitted to an editor putting together a book of popular quotations about how to live one's life and not drawn from a speech to architects or students. And that was partly why I posted it. I thought it was interesting to see him step down to a simpler commentary for a broader audience. Also, it is not often to get the wisdom of an architect who has worked for 60 years at the time of the quote. :-)

Designers
will speak, and write, whether there is really anything to be said or not. It can't be helped. And of course there are many times when the artist needs to explain himself, to amplify and emphasize (and perhaps to identify origins and confess to influences) -- so not all speech about visual art can be dismissed as easily as I pretend, above.

Take Mr Wright. Some of the best images of his work occur in the mind, while reading what he wrote (so hard to find, among his many words) about his discoveries and his intentions, as he looked back 30 years while writing "An Autobiography" in the early 'thirties. I intend to copy some of that writing here. But first, a passage which immediately follows those pages, and which includes a rare reference to the art of writing:


SIMPLICITY

ORGANIC Simplicity -- in this early constructive effort -- I soon found depended upon the sympathy with which such co-ordination as I have described might be effected. Plainness was not necessarily simplicity. That was evident. Crude furniture of the Roycroft-Stickley-Mission style, which came along later, was offensively plain, plain as a barn-door -- but was never simple in any true sense. Nor, I found, were merely machine-made things in themselves necessarily simple. "To think," as the Master used to say, "is to deal in simples." And that means with an eye single to the altogether.

This is, I believe, the single secret of simplicity: that we may truly regard nothing at all as simple in itself. I believe that no one thing in itself is ever so, but must achieve simplicity -- as an artist should use the term -- as a perfectly realized part of some organic whole. Only as a feature or any part becomes harmonious element in the harmonious whole does it arrive at the state of simplicity. Any wild flower is truly simple but double the same wild flower by cultivation and it ceases to be so. The scheme of the original is no longer clear. Clarity of design and perfect significance both are first essentials of the spontaneous born simplicity of the lilies of the field. "They toil not, neither do they spin." Jesus wrote the supreme essay on simplicity in this, "Consider the lilies of the field."

Five lines where three are enough is always stupidity. Nine pounds where three are sufficient is obesity. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing -- words that intensify or vivify meaning [--] is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination in architecture simplicity. It may be, and usually is, stupidity.

In architecture, expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line and especially textures of material or imaginative pattern, may go to make facts more eloquent -- forms more significant. Elimination, therefore, may be just as meaningless as elaboration, perhaps more often is so. To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity -- toward ultimate freedom of expression.

A good many architects...
talk about seeking balance and harmony in their buildings, but not many are sufficiently driven, and talented, and philosophically informed, and technically skilled, in this direction to achieve it so pleasingly and so often as FLW did.

FLW likely pursued balance and harmony in the composition of his buildings, at least on some deep level, not just in order to satisfy his aesthetic sense, but also to stabilize the psychological asymmetry formed in him in his only-child relationship with his parents, especially the side of the Oedipal triangle that was his hugely doting and pushy mother.

Like many other architects, FLW also strove to make buildings look like what they were made of (his sense of authenticity, anyway), but he did so to a remarkable extent and at a level of thoroughness and richness of materials and constructed forms at every scale of composition that, again he stands apart from most. It is fair again, I suspect, to attribute some of the intensity and rigor (even ardor) of his pursuit of authenticity in his buildings again to the intensity of his need to achieve through work a kind of authenticity that he had to suppress in his childhood. Oedipal triangles always result in a lot of deferred and displaced behavior--the quest for authenticity being one of them.

cont.
Given that one is the kind of person that needs to distinguish oneself again and again and in myriad ways to self-actualize, while living in a cold climate, a broad hat and cape offer extraordinary simplicity of design to a person. To a person who does not need to distinguish himself repetitively to self-actualize, the broad hat and cape may be viewed as stylish, even beautiful garments, but one's wearing of them may be viewed as anachronistic, maybe even bordering on dandy-ism.

His buildings, though I have personally loved (his buildings elicit that strong of an emotion in me) and respected each that I have seen and/or been in, can affect others as self-indulgent anachronism and/or as too precious and impractical. The overhangs at entry are too low. The graduated rising of ceiling level until one gets to the center of the space program feels dramatically pleasing for awhile and then just as being too many low ceilings pressing down on you head in too many parts of the house. The free-standing and built-in furniture, so pleasing to the eye, gets to be a real chore to sit on. The leaks wear on one. The gaps in the glass and wall joints become consequential, when you have to pay the heating bill and see your breath occasionally. The one-off design solutions that work and look great are often a bitch to replace, or repair. And so on.

Simplicity, like beauty, is a strongly collaborative phenomenon between architect and building user. What is simple and beautiful for some architects and building users is not for others. And so to it is with writing. And prefer as some might, we cannot reduce these differences in collaboration entirely to some having good taste and others not in building, or in writing.

It reduces more to some like me still liking and admiring the simplicity and beauty and function of a broad hat and cape, while most others just find them utterly unnecessary and dandy-ish in today's world. But even I would only wear them for a stroll on the promenade in Rapallo these days. Hopefully, I will lose my inhibitions on this and wear one to my neighborhood grocery store one day, but I doubt it. :-)

.
" Frank was one of three children born to Anna Lloyd Wright and William Russell Cary Wright, a widower who brought three children of his own to a troubled marriage that ended in divorce in 1885. Wright's younger sisters, Jane (later known as Jennie) and Maginel (Margaret Ellen, who became Maggie Nell and then Maginel), arrived before Anna denied William her conjugal and domestic services to focus solely on her son, whom she believed to be destined for greatness. From the provision of the right prenatal influences to lifelong support and sacrifice, she dedicated herself to seeing that he achieved it."


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/books/chapters/1031-1st-h1...

Well. . .


Practicing psychoanalysis without a license, on a "patient" you've never met, might be a stretch. Considering that, you got quite a ways down a reasonably valid road, perhaps. That is, just because he had sisters doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't have the sort of relationship with his mother that you describe. Indeed, we might be surprised that he didn't turn out to be gay ! (There is no sign of that, however. . .)

All that about his clothing kind of eludes me -- but then again I'm not a shrink, either, so -- who knows ?

Perhaps we could have some more of the real deal: further quotes from the autobiography ? Coming up. . .

Wright did
not marry Mamah Cheney (may-ma chee-nee), the woman who was killed while living with him at Taliesin, in 1914. He married three other women, however. See link.

Perhaps you are thinking of "The Women," by male writer T C Boyle ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Scott-t.html?_r=1

Nobody said these matters are easily absorbed -- though a little Googling produced the results noted here. (I have not myself committed all the facts to memory, despite reading about them for half a century. . .)

Wright collected Asian art, and particularly Japanese prints, because he loved them; he began dealing in them as well, and eventually used his large collection as a cash resource, and as a source of gifts.


http://marriage.about.com/od/thearts/a/flwright.htm

Not just to defend the Victorian prose of Wright
Wright was imprisoned in his early language and always wrote with his voice not his pen. But?
A sunset is functional, practical and useful. It separates day from night in a gradual display of changing color and light. If given attention, sunsets serve to slowly move our thinking from the flow of dutiful activity into the marvel of the moment. What would night be without with the prologue sunset? Indeed how could the days go from night's dark to light or light to dark without the mediation of sunrise sunset?

Thanks to SDR for guiding me to this forum. Palli

Like it?
To the extent that one can enjoy a book that is...almost certain to end with the heroine's death, yes.

There was something disturbing about Mamah and about FLW's attraction to her. I did not like Mamah, as portrayed, but rather found her morbidly fascinating. Not great writing, but skillfully manipulative story telling that makes you read to the end. Her being large figure with a larger personality made an interesting opposite for FLW.

We are lead to believe Mamah and Frank might possibly have been gotten it all together eventually, had the mad man not shot her.

It is essentially the story of how difficult it is to transform an affair into a functional relationship.

It is also the story of an enormously brilliant woman with a flaw in her character that kept her from ever really accomplishing great things on her own.

Heh-heh.

Well, that may be true. After all, he would sometimes appear to have liked others to see him as the only architect in the world -- other than perhaps Louis Sullivan. (He often referred to his "dear Master" -- using the German phrase, for some reason -- who he gave credit for a propitious start in the profession.)

I don't believe any guns were involved in the 1914 Taliesin massacre; rather, those killed were attacked with an ax, at the only exit which had not been blocked. The residence was then set on fire. The perpetrator was found nearby; he had ingested acid, and died in custody. A very sad tale. Mamah and two of her children were among the victims; Wright was at work in Chicago.

Okay --

enough of this pleasant banter. As promised earlier, here are more of the man's words, from the autobiography. Wright here gives, in a couple of pages, virtually the only description he was ever to provide, of how the Prairie House, his first significant body of work (so named after the fact, by others) came into being. He is writing c. 1932, about events of the late 1890s. These words will have meaning to anyone interested in modernist architecture, I think:


BUILDING THE NEW HOUSE

FIRST thing in building the new house, get rid of the attic, therefore the dormer. Get rid of the useless false heights below it. Next, get rid of the unwholesome basement, yes absolutely -- in any house built on the prairie. Instead of lean, brick chimneys bristling up everywhere to hint at Judgment, I could see necessity for one chimney only. A broad generous one, or at most two. These kept low-down on gently sloping roofs or perhaps fiat roofs. The big fireplace in the house below became now a place for a real fire. A real fireplace at that time was extraordinary. There were mantels instead. A mantel was a marble frame for a few coals in a grate. Or it was a piece of wooden furniture with tile stuck in it around the grate, the whole set slam up against the plastered, papered wall. Insult to comfort. So the [i]integral[/i] fireplace became an important part of the building itself in the houses I was allowed to build out there on the prairie.

It comforted me to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself. A feeling that came to stay.

TAKING a human being for my scale, I brought the whole house down in height to fit a normal one -- ergo, 5' 8 1/2" tall, say. This is my own height. Believing in no other scale than the human being I broadened the mass out all I possibly could to bring it down into spaciousness. It has been said that were I three inches taller than 5' 8 1/2" all my houses would have been quite different in proportion. Probably.

House walls were now started at the ground on a cement or stone water table that looked like a low platform under the building, and usually was. But the house walls were stopped at the second-story windowsill level to let the bedrooms come through above in a continuous window series below the broad eaves of a gently sloping, overhanging roof. In this new house the wall was beginning to go as an impediment to outside light and air and beauty. Walls had been the great fact about the box in which holes had to be punched. It was still this conception of a wall-building which was with me when I designed the Winslow house. But after that my conception began to change.

cont.

WHAT I have just described was on the [i]outside[/i] of the house. But it was all there, chiefly because of what had happened [i]inside.[/i]

Dwellings of that period were cut up, advisedly and completely, with the grim determination that should go with any cutting process. The interiors consisted of boxes beside boxes or inside boxes, called [i]rooms.[/i] All boxes were inside a complicated outside boxing. Each domestic function was properly box to box.

I could see little sense in this inhibition, this cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions, except for the privacy of bedrooms on the upper floor. They were perhaps all right as sleeping boxes. So I declared the whole lower floor as one room, cutting off the kitchen as a laboratory, putting the servants' sleeping and living quarters next to the kitchen but semi-detached, on the ground floor. Then I screened various portions of the big room for certain domestic purposes like dining, reading, receiving callers.

There were no plans in existence like these at the time. But my clients were all pushed toward these ideas as helpful to a solution of the vexed servant problem. Scores of unnecessary doors disappeared and no end of partition. Both clients and servants liked the new freedom. The house became more free as space and morc livable too. Interior spaciousness
began to dawn.

Thus came an end to the cluttered house. Fewer doors; fewer window holes though much greater window area; windows and doors lowered to convenient human heightso These changes once made, the ceilings of the rooms could be brought down over on to the walls by way of the horizontal broad bands of plaster on the walls themselves above the windows and colored the same as the room-ceilings. This would bring ceiling-surface and color down to the very window tops. Ceilings thus expanded by way of the wall band above the windows gave generous overhead even to small rooms. The sense of the whole broadened, made plastic by this means.

Well, as a fan of pleasant...
Well, as a fan of pleasant banter, that very blunt and precise FLW introductory bit on the building of the new house makes any number of things kind of hard to argue with.

And it seems good advice for any number of human endeavors, expository writing included.

"Get rid of the attic ... get rid of the useless false heights below it."

Seriously, no one's answered this yet?
It's been at least 30 seconds...

Little
Bobby Zimmerman, I take it ?

What does
this have to do with the thread subject ?

Oh well --
maybe the subject ran its course. I was glad for the opportunity to scan some passages of Wright's autobiography which I had been meaning to get to for some years. Thanks, dcwilson.