Frank oder Wright
1867 was born in Wisconsin, USA. Father is a lawyer. 1893, I started to set up my own personal office. From the end of 19 to the beginning of 20th century, he designed many small houses and villas in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan in the midwest of the United States. The residential buildings designed by Wright in this period are called "prairie houses". The Larkin Company Building in Buffalo, new york was built at 1908. 1, such as 8J, the ruby house designed by Chicago, USA is one of its early masterpieces. New york Guggenheim Museum is the only building in new york designed by Wright. The design of this building began at 1952, and the construction began at 1956, but it was not completed and opened until 1959, and Wright just died in the spring of this year. Wright emphasized the growth and change of architecture in his architectural creation, which formed organic architecture's design philosophy. He is an American architect in the 20th century and enjoys a high reputation in the world.
The following is a letter he wrote to his young friend, in which he talked about his architectural ideas.
Goethe once said that death is a natural strategy, so that she can gain more life. In that way, you can know why there must be a new one and why this new one must always be the old cause of death. But if you stick to the principle, then this tragedy only needs to happen in the form. This is because we have never relied on principles, so human genius now shoulders a new burden to discover a brand-new house, which will be a more direct purpose of applying energy than at any time in history. But let me repeat, that is, when we explore the beauty we perceive in the external nature in the constant standardization of representing today's "energy", we should not dramatize machines, but dramatize people. Young man, you must try to eliminate the curse of being a "tool" from today's life, whether it is mechanical or emotional.
But this modern constructive effort was deceived from the beginning by a new aesthetic point of view, in which appearance rather than quality became the goal. This "new" aesthetics has become "old" from the beginning, because it is just another "tool". The French seem to have replaced the soul with all their elegance and charm, and made great contributions to the accessories of these instruments at the right moment with their unique gesture talent. So many short-lived founders of the "art movement" know the opportunity of another "movement". Both the new world and the old world are aware of a new order, that is, the beauty of the naked and rigid appearance of the machine, and appreciate the external simplicity formed by a direct mechanized construction. But some aestheticians-the French, out of sympathy or friendship-try to convince us that this external simplicity, as a new decoration, is the proper "appearance" of everything in this machine age. French paintings foolishly claim to look first-stupid because we have already seen them ourselves. However, the modernism of French architecture transformed it into a two-dimensional development of plane, that is, from the length and width. Although the effects of these surfaces and bodies have been well handled in our country (two dimensions are completed by surfaces parallel to the earth, and the third dimension holds the whole house tightly on the ground), Paris still despises these, because of its unique desire for "movement" and the establishment of a unique machine appearance in two dimensions (that is, the effects of surfaces and bodies that Paris is familiar with), so architecture has become an ornament. You can see from those fashionable shops that when France wants to sell her handicrafts in the United States with a house of 5,400 yuan, the United States is busy building enough cars and running around.
Some inspirations represent the initial understanding of France, but the mediocre competition becomes repetitive, and finally nothing appears except another kind of "fashion", and another aesthetic maxim is declared as superficial fashion. Another "socialist", another "socialist" went through the motions-this time not by carriage, but by plane.
Yes, America is young and healthy, and suddenly impatient with its own shortcomings. Our shortcoming is that we are not familiar with the mysterious depth of feelings. He is a protester. Protesters are useful, but rarely beautiful. When he stops protesting and becomes a construction worker, we can wait and see that some new protesters will take their place.
However, for young America, a ray of light that has been turned into selfish use for too long has experienced rich propaganda and confusion, and today it shines again. This kind of light is the manifestation of the overall order, a deeper and more consistent order than the world has fully understood before, where energy is applied to the e in architecture just like mathematics is sublimated into music. With this light, you can clearly see that there is no beauty where there is no overall order, although this order will not be clearer than the mathematics in music.
It is not surprising that novices think that the machine itself is the prophet of the new order. However, don't forget that although music is the sublimation of mathematics, mathematics professors can't compose music. PhDs, architects and enthusiastic archaeologists can't create buildings.
The rationalization of any machine and aesthetic factory can't confuse the fact that architecture is grown, not made. No matter what it becomes, it must always grow from the inside. It must be a naturally occurring material, construction method and purpose, and it takes this form. The human mind is a great tool with great craftsmanship; But in the building, you participated in the wonderful feeling of human life when we lived on the earth and interacted with others. The highest significance of organic architecture's exploration of use and the more detailed significance of comfort are manifested in the organic simplicity. This is what you call architecture. Use and comfort must be transformed into spiritual satisfaction in order to become a building, where the mind ensures more subtle use and obtains more frequent tranquility. Therefore, architecture is like poetry to the soul. In this machine age, as in all other times, to reveal such a poem as architecture, you must learn the natural organic language, which will always be a new language. To understand any language, you should know the letters. The characteristics of our architecture in the machine age are the properties of steel, glass and concrete-the properties of machines as tools and the properties of new materials.
What language is that?
The poverty of architecture, the language of human mind, is aggravated by artificial unnatural use, and becomes unfortunate and miserable because of blind worship of tools, whether they are regarded as machines or emotional tools. Popular historical sympathy is defined as standardized knowledge, which confuses art and archaeology. In this academic confusion, I still can't promise the principle that architecture is a flower of the soul that grows from our own essence, just as flowers grow from the land.
To make architecture grow, now you must realize that the basic motive force of our civilization can never be expressed by any superficial words of factories or mechanization, that is, written in long capital letters. If you are loyal to the center of the building, no matter what the boundary of the building may be, you will regard the machine as an unparalleled tool, otherwise you will think that any machine itself is boring. When you are absorbed in the serious struggle of new technology, you should not ignore your love for romance, except for the romance that has been foolishly abused like our sadness or aging now-that is our barren land for a long time.
I tell you, the facts that appear in my own experience are at least enough to prove to me that people can use the energy of machines to build varied and imaginative buildings without hindrance.
No soul will doubt that our industrialized and valuable products can also provide us with more digestible artistic appreciation food, such as ancient Italians, Italian imitations or medieval ones. But these artistic appreciation should not and cannot mean that ordinary things in the machine age are accepted as valuable things. This can be understood as these ordinary things have been changed and changed by their inner enthusiasm, and gained the status of human masterpieces in endless memories of various eras. This description of nature in the natural kingdom with inner enthusiasm is the work of young people engaged in architecture.
Well, America will have to go through many superficial experiments with you. We Americans may succumb to stupid experiments, such as American-style "quick turnover" propaganda. However, we should be patient, because architecture is long-lasting.
Architecture is the real entity of civilization itself. It takes time to grow, and only when it is the product of thought can it become a building, that is, it is a complex completed at the beginning of reason, which is as natural as breathing, rather than pretending to be modern.
The United States will be more industrialized and employed, and many Americans will die on the side of the road before any goal is achieved because of decoration phobia and decoration mania. She will hear many reasons from all sides and will only despise most of the ideal cancers. Among you, she will see similar thoughts and mud of many teams or factions, trying to run and hit a goal for personal honor in the so-called "modern movement" that we have fully understood. You will personally understand the development of perfect and unreasonable ideals through every corner of every important country on earth. When American women's clubs discovered the great significance of our family life in this rapidly changing order, they just started to learn from antiques and called it modernity. In addition, the United States will be biased towards misunderstanding in a unique way, abusing things for their own sake and leaving them behind. As a unique abuse, I have seen fake classical architecture cut off its picks, branches and pillars, but it has remained basically unchanged, and it is regarded as modern on a huge scale, which makes us uneasy. I will still see more and more such buildings on a larger scale soon. But the false classics after ear washing can't make the building modern. A curse formula can modernize the design factory overnight, that is, all buildings are modern and have no decoration. Another disturbing formula makes the decorator "pause", that is, the surface with sharp corners is modern. It doesn't matter, we will accept everything, so that the reappearance of aging will not become a new aesthetic.
Yes, modern architecture is a young building, and the joy of youth will inevitably bring it. The love of youth, eternal youth will inevitably develop and maintain it. You should regard this building as intelligent, but it is not even as intelligent as sensitivity and yearning, nor as scientific as perception, nor even as inspirational masterpiece as Feichuang.
Please think carefully, the house is a living machine, but with this appearance, the heart is a pump. Conscious people start from the place where the concept of heart ends.
Please think about it carefully, the house is a living machine, but the building starts from the place where the concept of house ends. All life is a machine in an incomplete sense, but the machine just has no life. Machines become machines only because there is life. You'd better go from ordinary to special. So don't rationalize from machines to life. Why not think from life to machines? Practical appliances, weapons and automata are all electrical appliances. Songs, masterpieces and buildings are the expression of human enthusiasm-the joy of human beings in the victory of life: we caught a glimpse of infinity. This glance or fantasy makes art an internal experience, so it is sacred. In this era, it is much more unique than before.
Architecture presents human life, machines can't, and any instrument can't anyway. Electrical appliances can only serve life.
The lack of evaluation of electrical appliances and living quarters should be the cause of those annoying and carefully selected pseudo-classical things in the United States. In big American cities, our modernization is more successful, but buildings are still busy wrapping steel frames with bricks and stones. Instead of fundamentally correcting this mistake, does any shallow aesthetics pretend to be new, making this same lack of evaluation of architectural principles as an abstraction of a machine punish us again in another 30-year cycle? If this is the case, then, between the building as an emotional tool and the tool as a machine, and even between the aesthetic abstraction itself as a tool, the United States had better choose the tool as a machine. But then organic architecture will have to keep it in its own narrow field. In this world of our own, boxes lack imaginative outlines, rigid lines and bare faces, all of which have floors, just like carpets have floors on the ground, but the naked high court creed, as a high fever, has no place to stand. The horizontal plane grasped everything on the earth and began to enter organic architecture to complete its formal meaning. It does not limit the content, but shows the imagination of the space. This is modern.
In organic architecture, this stiff straight line is broken into dotted lines where the hard potential needs to stop. In order to let the right rhythm enter, it left a prompt for correct evaluation. This is modern.
In organic architecture, any imagination of any house, as a house, is from the very beginning, moving towards making a painting-like improvisation, rather than groping backwards from making a painting-like improvisation. This is modern.
Because repeated bare ordinary things make eyes tired, where the light is rejected by the blank surface or dimly trapped in some caves carved on it, organic architecture lets people face the changing colors and deep shadows of nature and observe the fresh prospects of local and creative human thoughts and local feelings presented in the inspiration of thinking. This is modern.
In organic architecture, the feeling of interior space as an entity is in harmony with the expansion method of modern materials. The house is now perceived in this sense of internal space; This fence is no longer considered as just a roof or a wall, but a "shielded" space. This entity is modern.
So in real modern architecture, the feeling of surface and volume is eliminated in the light, or it becomes the combination of IT and power. This kind of composition is the expression of the principle of "energy points to purpose", which can not be found in any modern instrument or practical machine. Modern architecture proves that the space where the sun shines is a higher human feeling. The organic house is spider-like strength and lightness. They are depicted by light, nourished by the original characteristics of the environment and integrated with the earth. This is modern.
When we are apart from young people engaged in architecture, the ways and means we should remember are:
1. Forget the architecture in the world, unless they have their own methods, there are some beautiful things in their time.
2. You shouldn't engage in architecture for living unless you love architecture. As a positive principle, be as sincere about it as you are about your mother, your partner or yourself.
3. Beware of architectural schools, unless they are the interpreters of the project.
Go to the site, where you can see the machines and methods for building modern houses at work. Or stay in the construction directly and unconditionally until you can naturally enter the house design from the essence of construction.
5. immediately start to form the habit of thinking about "why", and what effect does it have on you to make you happy or bored.
6. Don't take it for granted that everything is beautiful or ugly. Divide each house into several pieces and clean every feature. Learn to distinguish beauty from strangeness.
7. Get into the habit of analysis-analysis will eventually make synthesis a habit in your mind.
8. "Think with simple things", as my older teacher often said, means breaking the whole into parts and restoring those original principles with simple words. This is to go from the general to the special, and never confuse or confuse them or confuse yourself with them.
9. Throwing away the "quick turnover" of American ideas is like throwing away poison. To be "immature" is to sell your natural right to be an architect with a bowl of porridge, or pretend to be an architect and die.
10. It takes time to prepare. In the initial stage of architectural practice, it is not enough for any architect who wants to be "outstanding" in the evaluation or practice of real buildings to prepare 1 1. Then get as far away from home as possible and build your first house. Doctors can forget their mistakes, but architects can only persuade residents to plant vines.
12. Building a henhouse is as desirable as building a church. The scale of the project is not important in art, except for the loan. What is really valuable is the characteristic quality. Features can be large, medium and small, or small, medium and large o.
13. Under no circumstances should you take part in the construction competition unless you are a novice. In the field of architecture, no competition has ever brought anything of value to the world. The jury itself is a select average. The first thing the jury did was to review all the designs and select the best and the worst. So as an average, it can only get an average in an average. The final result of any competition is just an average from many averages.
14. Be wary of people who inquire about the design market. This kind of person is unwilling to fund you to explore your imagination for his benefit, which shows that he is an untrustworthy customer.
You don't need to commercialize everything in your life, just because your fate coincides with the machine age. For example, architecture walking in the street today seems to be a prostitute, because "finding a job" has become the first principle of architecture. For architecture, jobs should be found by people, not by people. In art, works and people are better than birds; Neither party can buy or sell from the other. At this moment, because what we are talking about is a higher and finer whole, you should keep your sincere ideal so high that the most precious interests in your life will call you to be a loyal person and declare yourself fairly. Hold your sincere ideal so high that you can never fully achieve it.
Respect for masterpieces is the real respect for people. It is rare to have such a great man, who lacks everything like this.
(Wang Tan translated from Edgar's Works and Architecture, this translation is selected from Selected Works of Modern Western Art Aesthetics and Architectural Aesthetics, Literature and Art Publishing House, Liaoning Education Publishing House Du 1989).