“The Embodiment of the Concept of Organic Expression: Frank Lloyd Wright”

AboutTraces the intellectual genealogy of "organic architecture" from Plato through Schiller, Kant, Goethe, and Coleridge to Emerson and Whitman, arguing that Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were the theory's two most significant architectural exponents. Davies contends that Sullivan articulated the philosophical concept of organic expression while Wright, his draughtsman for six years, translated it into actual built form, quoting extensively from both men's writings on nature, function, and imagination to demonstrate the close correspondence of their thinking. The essay focuses in detail on the design and construction of Unity Temple, Oak Park (1904–08), which Wright himself repeatedly described as the first building he consciously conceived as an expression of organic architecture, examining its concrete construction, its "H"-shaped plan resolving two functions, and Wright's own account of the creative process behind it. Davies closes by surveying how later critics (Pevsner, Giedion, Hitchcock, Banham, Peter Blake, Walter Curt Behrendt) have understood Wright's achievement, arguing that most have isolated formal or stylistic aspects of his work without grasping the underlying organic philosophy inherited from Sullivan.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0066-622X%281982%2925%3C120%3ATEOTCO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O