Reading exercise 3

Frank Lloyd Wright speaks on Architecture - Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright

Essentially a human art as well as an affair of material, architecture is governed and limited by many practical requirements which do not apply to the work of painters, sculptors and musicians. It also provides a key to the habits, thoughts and aspirations of the people, and without a knowledge of the art the history of any period lacks that human interest with which it should be invested. The study of architecture opens up the enjoyment of buildings with an appreciation of their purpose, meaning and charm. The real tradition of architecture is that a building must express the material whereof it is built, the method whereby it is built, and the purpose whereof it is built.

Architecture through the ages has grown and developed along with technology. ‘New’ buildings came into existence with ‘new’ technology coming to the fore. Architecture has been a reflection of the society at the concurrent time, it has mirrored the past like no record ever can, it has showcased human life on earth like no biography ever can, it has really been the guiding force that encourages every man in his struggle for survival against nature.

Architecture is the very epitome of human life as it puts to end all doubts and arguments about who rules this planet. Through architecture, man has been able to create a second nature that safeguards him the elements of nature that threaten human existence. Thwarting al these challenges and to have come into a position today where only man can destroy himself, man has freed himself of all dependencies on force majoire! But, has he really freed himself from himself? If he has, his architecture does not reflect it.

We have understood that earth revolves around the sun, the sun itself is not the center of the universe. We have understood that man represents the highest point in the evolution of life on earth. We have split the atom, we have discovered the universe and we have discovered the black hole!

And for the first time in the history of mankind, we can boast of technology that is ahead of time. All along, we have had to fight the nature, and by nature is meant to engulf the nature of materials, their availability and ways to use them. All through history every creator has had to develop a new technology to bring his creation to life. But, for the first time, we have the technology and a whole array of knowledge and information to make the job of creation more like solving a jig-saw puzzle, cost being the only prohibitive factor. We don’t really have to worry about masking joints in timber with flutes, we don’t have to worry about ornamentations and carvings and moldings to camouflage ugly junctions and details, we don’t have to worry about buttresses and piers and counterweights to have vaults and domes and arches! Just identify the pieces of the puzzle and put them together to get the entire picture.

But, what are we doing with the technology that we have in hand? Since Renaissance and the industrial revolution, human life has undergone a sea of change. Time is so much a factor of life that it has come to determine human life styles. From being the slave of nature, we have now become the slave of time. As a result, we can see almost ‘instant’ everything in our world today. All of life has moved ahead except architecture. Look at cars or any other mechanical device, and their design and one can realize that aesthetics in machines and aesthetics in buildings are two entirely different entities and a total mismatch.

Another important aspect of architecture is the effect which it has on the average man, which is received by him unconsciously. We know that there are a few people who are keenly alert to technical architectural values, but it is not in their minds that the important result is produced. The important thing in architecture is the effect that is having on the man in the street, who, are subconsciously influenced in their thoughts and action by the kind of forms and spaces which they habitually encounter, and it appears that architects who are engaged in producing these forms and spaces are exerting a quite definite influence on people in general. But if by the average man, it is mean to be the ‘unspoilt man’, the man would be a good audience. It is but a demoralized audience as a rule that we have to appeal to, so to make conscious appeal to the man with little knowledge which is a dangerous thing, would be something like what an actor might experience were he to appeal to the ‘gallery’. I think that as architects we can only look to that which shines for us, and with what intelligence we have when it comes to the essential architecture of our problems. For, after all, when a man does that, he is appealing to the true man, because inherent in all men is the same ideal, shared perhaps in greater of less degree. Usually, every man who truly builds is true to himself. When we make any criterion outside of ourselves, that is to say, when we set up anything as a judge or an objective – call it ‘popular opinion or ‘society’ or what you please- we fall into its power and lose our own, and we cease really to be the artist. Just as an actor, I am sure, were he to have his eye on the gallery- were he to speak his lines and make his interpretation to and for the gallery- would fail, and we know he will fail. We know that type of actor, and I think we know that type of architect who is his counterpart.

The ‘new’ architects are ‘new’ merely because they are more true to tradition almost than any tradition can be true to itself. It is, of course, the spirit of anything that deserves to live and that eventually does live. This is no less true of tradition than of anything else. We have had an erroneous idea of tradition as something entirely fixed, a form fastened upon us somehow by faith and loyalty perhaps, and which eventually takes us by the throat and says ‘no’ to pretty much everything of life we have. But tradition, too, is a living spirit. Architecture is not the buildings that have been built all over the world. The buildings are only the residue, the wreckage perhaps, thrown upon the shores of time by this great spirit in passing. This spirit lives now. To be true to this spirit is what we are all endeavoring to do, each in his way. And to be true to it we must with the materials at hand and in the spirit of our own time produce those forms which are to become characteristic and true forms of our day, as these forms we violate in the name of tradition were true to their day; or else we merely stupidly violate tradition only to keep ‘tradition’ for selfish or sentimental purposes.