Frank Lloyd Wright - Simplicity
I was in Kansas City a few years ago for a yearbook conference. One of the instructors mentioned that the Community Christian Church, just down the block, had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I'd never seen one of his buildings in person before. He died 60 years ago today.
When I saw the building it was something to photograph, not something to teach me something about photography or art in general.
In my education, Platon was the first to draw a line between architecture and photography. “My deep respect for form, and positive and negative space comes from studying Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of compression and expansion,” he said in a documentary (that I have seen many times). “Simple, bold, clear…If it’s necessary, it’s in there, if it’s not necessary, then it’s not there,” he said.
That hadn’t sunk in by the time I was walking past this Church. If it had I would have lingered.
"Space is the breath of art," said Wright (although I do not know where or when he said this). Wright’s Organic Architecture was an attempt to change American culture by changing individual Americans. He planned to change individuals by changing the spaces they lived in.
“As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
He considered himself deeply religious but was not a member of any particular church. "I believe in God, only I spell it ‘Nature’.”
Fascinating.
“As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal - something we are to become - some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish.”