What is Organic Architecture: Part 2

In the last article, we saw how difficult it was to define organic architecture, and by process of elimination, we saw many things that may be necessary but are clearly not sufficient to define this elusive term.  The fact that Wright’s buildings do seem to have a special connection to nature and yet do not imitate nature nor dissolve into nature and lose their own identity as man-made objects is a clue for us, however.  How is it that we intuitively grasp a great affinity with nature when we experience the spaces of Wright’s architecture even though he never imitates nature?  Has Wright grasped some common element that is both in nature and the human consciousness that we might call organic?  I was struck recently by this quality when I visited Wright’s Bernard Schwartz house in Two Rivers, Wisconsin (although one could use almost any of his buildings for this example).  It was easy to note the signature Wright stylistic features of this Usonian home, such as clerestory windows, red concrete floor slabs, natural materials, horizontal lines, indoor/outdoor connection, etc., but there was something more to it than that. There are many imitators that copy these same elements and miss this other quality.  To use a musical analogy, one might say many people could use the same notes that Wright used but the real work of art lay in exactly how these notes were composed into an integrated whole which is where the true work of artistic genius lay. What I felt in the Schwartz house was an unfolding space and form that seemed to convey the same rhythms, and relational principles as one might experience walking through a meadow or the woods.  

In Wright’s 1912 book, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, he gives us further clues to the underlying principles of his theory: 

 It is a lesson especially valuable to the West because, in order to comprehend it at all, we must take a viewpoint unfamiliar to us as a people, and in particular to our artists — the purely aesthetic viewpoint.  It is a safe means of inspiration for our artists because, while the methods are true methods, the resultant forms are utterly alien to such artistic tradition as we acknowledge and endeavor to make effective. Pg 13.

By emphasizing the “aesthetic viewpoint” Wright is cutting against the grain of Western modernism and its view that architecture is supposed to be the natural, even mechanical outworking of function determining form. Instead, an aesthetic viewpoint implies that there is to be some sort of resonance in the eye of the beholder who views the work of art/architecture.  Historically, this resonance is called beauty.  It also implies that one purpose of architecture is to please the human eye or the experiential senses.  Modern architecture in the Western sense, however, is not concerned with the pursuit of beauty but rather the expression of an intellectual concept presumably reflecting the objective solution to the underlying functional parameters.  This is why many modern buildings are considered to be ugly to the layperson but are considered avant garde to those in the know.  

Continuing with Wright’s text above, we find on pg 14 the following:

A flower is beautiful, we say—but why? Because in its geometry and in its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment of significant expression of that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be Life, …a proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe too vast and intimate and real for mere intellect to seize.  Intuitively we grasp something of it when we affirm that “the flower is beautiful.

The above statement may not actually define beauty, but it does at least give us evidence that Wright was in pursuit of the beautiful, and it also reveals something of why he gravitated to the Japanese ideal of art rather than what Western art had become in the modern movement.  We also see in the quote above some confirmation of the experience I mentioned in the Schwartz house, that is nature’s “eternal harmony” in a way that cannot be adequately comprehended by the “intellect.”     Wright makes the point that this eternal harmony is something internal to the work’s essence that works itself outwards in a similar sense to a plant’s growth. In Bruce Pfeiffer’s book, Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas, he quotes Wright thus: “By organic architecture I mean an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being as distinguished from one that is applied from without.”  One might consider how Renaissance Mannerist architecture, for example, was about surface decoration applied from without rather than something integral to the entire work.  

Here, it seems we might be very close to the core principle of organic architecture, but it is still elusive.  Earlier I stated that modernism’s quest is for design that is a natural outworking of the functional basis for its being (i.e. the conditions of its being). This also sounds similar to Wright’s dictum above for organic architecture.  Previously we had considered the claim of the International Style as being a functionally determined architecture rather than an artistic (i.e. arbitrary) endeavor.  We had seen then that the International Style was not the pure functional expression that it claimed to be. In fact, it was as much about affectation and style and other styles of architecture.  So perhaps the International Style is not a strong example to use here.  Perhaps today’s parametric architecture would be better, for example the Bejing Olympic Stadium by the Swiss architecture firm of Herzog and de Meuron (see photo). Let’s compare this with E Fay Jone’s Thorncrown Chapel (see photo).  The Olympic National Stadium is referred to as the “bird’s nest” and was meant to symbolize “great nature” on the earth.  How might we analyze these two projects in light of Wright’s concepts above about beauty being the embodiment of significant expression of that precious something, and also that which develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being? First, even though Thorncrown Chapel was not designed by Wright, nor does it imitate any style Wright worked in, it intuitively seems to fit his definition of the beautiful and harmonious as well as a sense of developing from the within to the without as if a seed or germ taking root, or in today’s language an expression of its inner DNA.  The Bejing stadium, although regarded as an outstanding work of modern architecture that breaks down the authoritarianism of the older modernism, seems to fail this test.  In some ways the two buildings have aspects in common.  They both have a delicate structural expression and lattice-like quality that plays well with special lighting effects as seen in the two photos.  Yet the stadium lacks the sense of the structure being a harmonious whole with any outworking of an inner geometric pattern.  There is pattern to the stadium’s structure, but it is a (seemingly) random arrangement.  This randomness is intentionally meant to break down any expression of authoritarian structures (a philosophical stance) but in so doing it also denies the integrated whole as an organizing principle.  Further, as a closeup of the structure reveals, the structure itself gives only the appearance of randomness (an affectation) and the actual steel structure is hidden beneath a cutout caricature with no sense of materiality in its joinery.

Much more could be said about this distinction, but suffice it to say that Wright’s organic architectural principles still speak to us today and can be used to evaluate current architecture, even when it claims to be derived from “nature.”  It would not be going too far on a limb to claim that Wright would not have approved of most of today’s contemporary architecture, even though he would have used current technology to its fullest extent.