Frank Lloyd Wright

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• If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.
  • Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941)

• Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.
  • "In the Cause of Architecture", in The Architectural Record (March 1908)

• It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago’s achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.
  • Lecture to the Chicago Women’s Aid (1918); later published as "Chicago Culture" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941)

• No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932)

• So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.
  • An Organic Architecture (1939)

• A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
  • The Future of Architecture (1953), p. 174

• Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
  • The Future of Architecture (1953)

• The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
  • New York Times Magazine (4 October 1953) Sometimes paraphrased: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

• I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.
  • Address at Evanston Illinois (8 August 1954)

• Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.
  • On Boston, The New York Times (27 November 1955)

• New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.
  • On New York and Pittsburgh, The New York Times (27 November 1955)

• If you’re going to have centralization, why not have it!
  • On his designs for "The Illinois" a 528-story Chicago office building (10 September 1956)

• The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
  • As quoted in The Star (1959) and Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green

• I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature".
  • As quoted in Quote magazine (14 August 1966)

• Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.
  • As quoted in The Duality of Vision : Genius and Versatility in the Arts (1970) by Walter Sorrell, p. 28

• Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
  • As quoted in An Organic Architecture (1970)

• Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?
  • On Philip Johnson’s glass house, as quoted in Architectural Digest (November 1985)

• Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
  • As quoted in The Wright Style (1992) by Carla Lind, p. 3

• Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.
  • As quoted in The World's Best Thoughts on Life & Living (1981) compiled by Eugene Raudsepp; also quoted in The Michigan Daily (10 November 1998)

• God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.
  • As quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan

• The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
  • As quoted in My Favorite Quotations (1990) by Norman Vincent Peale

• Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
  • Quoted in A Living Architecture : Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects (2000) by John Rattenbury

The Living City (1958)

• The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears — as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
  • “Earth”

• New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.
• “The-Shadow-of-the-Wall–Primitive Instincts Still Alive”

• To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
  • “Social and Economic Disease”

• All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
  • “Recapitulation”

• I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist’s hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.
  • “Night Is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”

• The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
  • Closing words, “Night is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”

Quotes about Wright

• He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.
  • Philip Johnson

• His place in history is secure. His continuing influence is assured. This country's architectural achievements would be unthinkable without him. He has been a teacher to us all.
  • Tribute after his death in The Journal of the American Institute of Architects

• So long, Frank Lloyd Wright.
  I can't believe your song is gone so soon.
  I barely learned the tune
  • Paul Simon in "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" (1969); on Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)

• Among the great modern architects, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn were arguably deists. ... Wright’s use of the word “nature” did not mean only what-we-find-outdoors. It was something deeper. Wright knew that when people speak of the “nature of things” they mean their very essence, the that-which-makes-them-what- they-are, which is always and only one step away from that-who-makes- them-what-they-are. ... Wright thought not that he was God but that he brought or allowed God into the world through what he did, creating and designing. ... Wright actually thought himself a prophet, which of course is a different to being God, or an angel. ... bringing God into the world in an act of something like mid-wifery from the womb of nature, is not at all Moses-like. It is not a bringing down of Law from on high after personal coaching from God, but a bringing forth of a God already there in potential. There is no presumption of having seen or met God of the Bible. One makes the God one believes in happen.
  • Professor Michael Benedikt, University of Texas at Austin, Director of the Center for American Architecture and Design, in God, Creativity, and Evolution : The Argument from Designers (2005) (PDF document)