Personal Reflections on Doing a PhD on Wright’s Organic Architecture

This article is a little different than my usual consideration of Wright’s theories. Since I am fresh from completing my own PhD on Wright’s organic architecture (December 2018), I thought I would give a bit more personal recollection of the process and thoughts I have gone through in the last 4 1/2 years culminating in my dissertation on Wright. 

One of the first questions I should answer is, why do a PhD on Wright in the first place? After all, I have been running a small design firm for the last 25 years focusing on organic architecture. And while I have been searching for clearer expressions of organic architecture through design practice, I felt there was more to be discovered, and I wanted to go deeper into what organic architecture actually is, that word that gets tossed around so readily and yet its interpretation remains ambiguous after all these years.

But first some basic information. The title of my dissertation is, The Aesthetics Of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Organic Architecture: Hegel, Japanese Art, And Modernism.   I decided to undertake this PhD at the School of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. It is the only school of architecture offering a doctoral program in Wisconsin, and since I live and run a firm in Racine, it worked well for me. The school also provided the benefit of its relationships with Marquette University and UW-Madison, both of which provided some of my coursework in my studies. Dr. Curtis Carter is in the philosophy department at Marquette and is known internationally for his work in aesthetics (not to mention being a former board member of the Wright in Wisconsin organization where I first met him). At UWM’s school of architecture, dean Bob Greenstreet served as my committee chair. Dr. Hilary Snow, an art historian specializing in Asian art at UWM provided important help on Japanese art, a key connection to Wright’s aesthetics. Kay Wells, also a UWM art historian, provided guidance on my section on Modernism and its connection with Wright. Anna Andrzejewski at UW-Madison was my professor for coursework in Madison as well as my intermediate research project (IRP). 

My dissertation lays a foundation for Wright’s organic theory in aesthetics rather than today’s more vogue theories of neuroscience or biological analogies. I think much of this is an attempt to view Wright through the lens of contemporary understanding rather than see him through his own thought and time. I found that over and over Wright himself gives us clues to his own theory, even though often discounted or overlooked. One of these was that Wright himself took an aesthetic view of the organic. Wright’s organic theory was rooted in nineteenth-century Idealist philosophy where the aim of art is not the imitation of nature but the creation of beautiful objects which invite contemplation and express freedom.  Wright perceived this quality in Japanese art and wove it into his organic theory. Hegel’s Aesthetics provided important keys to understanding this foundation.

 The second section looks at Japanese art in Wright’s system, and how it informed his own aesthetic. Wright himself tells us that the Japanese prints changed the way he viewed the landscape and how he perceived space, so I used that to develop a case study on his spatial construction, using the Bernard Schwartz house (compliments of Michael Ditmer) to test my hypothesis. The third section on Modernism makes an important distinction between Wright’s organic architecture and mainstream Modernism that Wright encountered. Hugh Downs asked Wright in an interview in the 1950s if there was any difference between Modernism and organic architecture. Wright replied that they were very different. And yet, even today, we seem to have forgotten what that difference is. 

These three sections then lead up to my model theory of organic architecture, which ties the understanding gained in them to a more structured and defined system of organic architecture. Wright himself never systematized his organic theory in a structured form such as Hegel did in his Philosophy of Fine Art. And while there is a lot of continuity in Wright’s principles and practice of organic architecture over his long career, it can be confusing knowing how to pull it all together into a cohesive theory. The dissertation, then, is to both serve to give greater explanatory power to Wright’s historical organic architecture as well as a basis for contemporary dialogue and its relevancy for today’s architecture as well.  

One might expect the Midwest to be a natural center for scholarship on Wright studies, but  that is not the case for the most part. Ironically, scholars from China and Japan are looking to the Midwest with an interest in Wright’s work, expecting this area to be the center for such studies. Just as Wright traveled to Japan over a hundred years ago in admiration of its culture and art, perhaps new bridges can be made as many in Asia look back to Wisconsin to understand Wright’s roots and ideas. 

Note: Ken’s dissertation is available online through the ProQuest database as well as the UWM Digital Commons.