Time in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright

Abstract

For a long time Wright’s architecture has been theorized in terms of space. Although space was certainly a key-word in Wright’s discourse, we can neither see it as an objective, three-dimensional space, nor as a more subjective, intimate space. In Wright’s architecture, the third dimension implies time, an axis mundi, a story about the earth as being built. Architecture faces the task to explicate this geological dimension. Geology here not only pertains to the crust of the earth and its materials. It also refers to flora and fauna, all the life having co-built the earth. Designing means the digging up of this natural history of a place that should come to resonate in structure, texture, type, pattern, colour and form. Architecture finds its reason in this geological time, it memorizes that time. Every Wright House is a monument of the American landscape. A new space appears: no longer Cartesian three-dimensional space, not human-centered place-space, but the shallow space of the building as a bas-relief of the earth, “growing out of the ground into the light.”

Wright saw it as a personal assignment to free American architecture from European Eclecticism in order to finally come to “a truly American architecture.” He sought inspiration in the landscape, the earth as being built and as still building itself. Wright’s oeuvre might be read as a journey of discovery of the American landscape. The light, horizontal parts of his buildings refer to an ‘on the way,’ they remind us of vehicles and tents. The stone parts refer to a local earth. The ‘fleet’ of his buildings move over the earth to sample it. In its images we find the archetype of a scientific expedition comparable with the great geographic expeditions of the 19th century. The expedition discovers the styles of American nature as the possible ingredients of a “natural architecture.” The geographic expedition mirrors the adventures of the wanderer and the settler, according to Wright the two characters united in the American soul. It mirrors the adventure of a people of colonists trying to get situated on a terra incognita, trying to root in the American earth while dressing up in American nature.

If nature must become the soul of architecture, geometry is the powerful instrument to analyze nature. It is a an instrument teaching us the intellect of creative nature. Wright used a polyphony of geometric styles, from basic geometric forms to proto-fractals, inventing a style reconciling form with formation. If “an organic building should grow out of the ground into the light, holding that ground as a basic part of itself,” the intelligence of the ground—of nature building the earth—reflects itself in the geometrical patterns of architecture.