What is Organic Architecture: Part 1

In Wright circles, the term ‘organic’ is used so often that we take it for granted.  We see and experience Wright’s architectural works and intuitively agree that the word organic seems an appropriate classification.  But when you try to be exact in putting down a definition of organic architecture, it is anything but a simple matter.  Even Wright himself, who wrote extensively on his ideas, seems to have had difficulty conveying what it was he was after.  Does organic as Wright used it mean biological? No, Wright himself said it isn’t something ‘hanging in a meat market’.  Is it then biomimicry and the imitation of nature? Wright was strongly opposed to any imitation of nature.  He felt one needed to find the underlying structure or geometry of nature, its inner principle, and abstract it as he did with his art glass designs for example.   Does organic mean using natural materials or materials in the nature of what they are? Yes, this is an important facet of organic architecture, but surely we have many examples of buildings using wood and stone and do not classify them as organic.  Does it mean using horizontal lines?  This is how he described the development of the Prairie style and its relation to the horizontal planes around Chicago just before the turn of the twentieth century, but no, this in itself is not sufficient to classify a work as organic.  For then his mile-high skyscraper, the Price tower, Guggenheim museum, Kalita Humphreys theater, and others would not be organic.  

After LaoTzu, Wright claimed that the essence of a building wasn’t the walls themselves but the space contained within that was the essence of the building. Is this what defines organic? Here again, we can cite many buildings where a central space is the key organizing principle, such as many atrium hotel buildings, but once again most of these are not organic either.  What about the destruction of the box and opening up spaces?  Well, Mies and Le Corbusier did that after Wright also with their International Style, but Wright never felt theirs was an organic architecture.  

On the Taliesin website several definitions of organic architecture are given such as the following example:

“The Dictionary of Architecture and Construction defines Organic Architecture as ‘architecture whose design is established in accordance with the processes of nature rather than based on an imposed design.’” This seems reasonable on the surface, but it falls short of closing the gap of really understanding the principle. For instance, what does it mean to design in “accordance with the processes of nature”?  What are the processes of nature?  We have many things to consider such as the force of gravity, the path of the sun and the seasons, the various states of water from solid to gas, wind patterns, etc.   However, any building that actually gets built and survives must be designed in accordance to those laws and processes of nature. Some may not be as energy efficient, but generally all buildings are pretty good at obeying the law of gravity. And do we call all those energy efficient or sustainable buildings organic?  Not necessarily.  And what about the last part of that definition, “…rather than based on an imposed design”?  How is design anything but an intentional action that is imposed on materials and methods?  This cannot mean following the process of a Jackson Pollack painting of (seemingly) random patterns emerging from the medium can it?  To be sure, one of the cutting edges of architectural design is through parametric design and digital fabrication, following formulas and calculations that seem to take the human “imposition” out of the mix.  But there are two problems with this scenario.  One is that the seemingly non-imposed design in reality never loses the designer’s setting up of the parameters, testing them, judging them and finally coming up with a design deemed appropriate to the problem at hand.  There is today an assumption that with our technology and understanding of the natural world we will design more appropriate and natural buildings.  Part of this assumption is that if we take into consideration all the functional, technological, environmental, and social needs of building design that somehow the form (and beauty) will naturally follow as if automatically by formula.   The complexity today of building technology, the increasingly difficult and complex environmental and urban conditions and regulations, and social contexts makes it difficult to even meet a few of the important design criteria today and so often the “big picture” is missed and we have come to accept architecture that simply looks ugly to the layperson.  

But even more problematic for us is that Wright clearly didn’t agree with this “non-imposed” method anyway.  Never did Wright try to replicate nature nor fail to create a contrast between his architecture and its natural setting.  With all Wright’s talk about Nature, his own works are still very “man-made,” expressing the “art and craft of the machine” in expression and intentionally so.  Often we see in Wright’s works straight lines that form angular prows that cut into natural hillsides like a boat cuts through water, not disappearing or dissolving into nature but setting up a relationship to the natural realm. This relationship is a very special one, to be sure, in dialogue with nature; however, it is as though neither nature nor architecture lose its own identity in the process. I think we can agree that there is something special in this dialogue with nature that Wright established.  Above, we looked at where the answer doesn’t lie.  In the next article we will look more into where the idea of organic architecture may lie.