Frank Lloyd Wright

This is the culminating series in a very long progression. The total duration of this series of lectures has been almost six years. The purpose has been, overall, one of great strategic importance, I think - independent of whether I have accomplished it or not - and that is to have laid some firm foundation for a new vision of human capacity. Our century suffers from a metaphysical disease. We think that by thinking it in our minds that it must be so and we have unfortunately gotten ourselves away from the basic nature, the basic process by which human beings are able to affect their reality and that is through the medium of human character. Before there can be a meaningful drama of life there must be a cast of characters. And in our time we have been building a lot of consciousness and letting characters slide. And so this program for many years now has been one of reviewing, patiently, the last three thousand years largely of Western history - but we have gone into Asia for several series - and we will at the conclusion of this year have completed our survey of major individuals in world history at least as far as the West is concerned. We will have moved from Homer to the present day, moving person to person, covering around four hundred individuals. And hopefully the single voice that has covered these individuals has maintained itself throughout the years. I've checked it from time to time and it seems at least reasonably consistent and I haven't altered my internal stance and I haven't chosen to use the lectures as a springboard to philosophize about. And thus I think we have a fairly good base, a fairly good foundation, of a repertoire of human character, one that has not been made up by anyone but rather a repertoire which has actually been lived at various times - lives that were quite real during the last three thousand years.

This constitutes overall strategically the first stage, the foundation of a yoga of civilization. The second stage the second phase will be a reviewing of the major threads of meaning usually called traditions and in January of 1986 the first tradition that I will take up is the Taoist tradition starting with Fuxi and moving as far as Li Bo in the Chinese tradition covering the earlier part of that tradition. On the Tuesday night series that will complement it I will take the Hermetic tradition starting in Alexandria of the second century AD and moving up probably as far as Trithemius and Paracelsus through that first series. And we'll try to take the traditions and show the development of meaning as clearly as we can and hope that the interpenetration with the characters will give us an opportunity at some time in the future to see what the interpenetration looks like in terms of a contemporary vision of man's capacities. So that's the strategic overlay which I put in on tape and say for the few of you who have been following this assiduously for some long time and now for those who are just here for an entertainment for the evening the lecture is just on Frank Lloyd Wright. No more will be said.

Wright comes to us at the beginning of the 20th century and the vision that we have been developing of the United States throughout this year is that the American tradition began not with the Constitution, not with George Washington, but began with the life and character of Benjamin Franklin which is quite different. If you see an American as someone who exists as a legal intelligence under the aegis of the Constitution you are missing the experience. This is not America. It may be the United States but it's not America. The character of Benjamin Franklin, as developed in his life, was very particular and we saw that the archetypal significance of his life was that man is continuously capable of development. He never finalizes himself. When Jefferson visited the aged Franklin towards the end of 1789 - Franklin 84 years old - he was in bed writing correspondence trying to put people in contact with each other and told Jefferson that the times were even more crucial than he had feared. And Jefferson, understanding, realizing that he was to take the position of our first Secretary of State in a Cabinet that for all intents and purposes set up the whole American polarized political faction tradition with Alexander Hamilton on the other end. The American tradition began seeing the human individual as someone who is not at all visible against a background of doctrine but someone who is existentially mobile in terms of their capacities to grow and this is different. And that the final referent for meaning is not what is written down but what is envisioned as being possible. If we could only produce the conditions which would allow for this development to occur.

And so the American character we have seen throughout three lecture series now developed along that essential line. Many times during our history this has been shunted aside and forgotten but never with such vehemence as in the 20th century. It's almost as if this tradition of America is exactly what is the blind spot. And we saw that the beginnings of this occurred in the generation that came into power - in the late 1830s, the 1840s, and the beginning of the 1850s - that that generation of people taking advantage of the freedom taking advantage of the open situation saw it as an opportunity to grab as much as they could as fast as they could. And of course because of the primal nature of the American experience, because it had welled up from such deep levels not just from the minds of great individuals but from the aspirations of world history that that one generation of polarizing produced the Civil War, and that the Civil War was a spiritual fall. It was not a political war; it was a spiritual fall. And we saw that the personage of Abraham Lincoln was almost like an archetypal hero appearing on the scene exactly at the right moment to convey the essential vision again that the unity is of the people, for the people, and by the people. And that it is the freedom of the people's experience to relate to each other in terms of their individual development that is the only guarantee of unity. That when it is put on a doctrinaire basis there is always faction because doctrines split pro and con almost absolutely down the middle. There is a negative for every pro and there is a positive for every con. And in this kind of a criss-cross, the Civil War experience almost obliterated the American history. And we saw that many individuals at that time strove mightily to reinstate the vision that Lincoln had done his best in terms of experience but that we found that Walt Whitman above all was the individual who sought to express, in poetry, in the highest formation of language what the vision of freedom was and what the nature of human character within freedom was. And we saw that Whitman's experience during the Civil War was tending the sick and wounded for year after year after year seeing the tens of thousands of wounded firsthand being at their bedside as they died, writing the last letters to their wives or their mothers, and after 3 or 4 years of this Whitman was completely surfeit with the horror of war and with the great individual nobility of mankind. And then almost as if it were by plan Whitman at the end of the Civil War was placed in the most unbelievable office in Washington, D.C. He was placed in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and he was in charge of hearing all the deputations from the American Indian tribes. For they felt that now that the Civil War was over perhaps the American people had learned a lesson about spirit, and about land, and about life, and they all came and sent their deputations to see whether now was not the right time to parley, to welcome all of the people to the land in terms of the land, not in terms of the ideational heritages which were brought with them from other countries from other lands. And Whitman saw how this tradition slowly found itself slipping away. And so his poetry has a cosmic message with a hope of aspiration.

And Frank Lloyd Wright at one of the most crucial points of American history excerpted from Walt Whitman's works. Wright was writing a series of lectures called When Democracy Builds right at the very end of the Second World War. It was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1945. He wrote it from May to November of 1944, and right at this time was nearing his 75th year and he felt impelled from the position which he had attained as 75 years of working to try to understand man's freedom. And in When Democracy Builds he excerpted from Whitman these lines from the section of Leaves of Grass the poem called “And Thou America.” And these are the lines which Wright placed before the title page in the book:

“Thou, too, surroundest all,
Embracing, carrying, welcoming all, thou too
By pathways broad and new approach the Ideal.

The measured faiths of other lands,
The grandeurs of the past, are not for thee,
But grandeurs of thine own,
Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
All in all to all.

Give me, O God, to sing that thought,
Give me, give him or her I love this Quenchless faith in thee.
Whatever else withheld withhold not from us
Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space.”

And with these noble lines Wright then opens up When Democracy Builds with an assessment of the state of the nation as of the end of the Second World War. And he begins with a little parable about an oak tree. And he writes that when an oak is about to die the first thing one notices one year is that a couple of leaves in the top of the oak yellow. And the next year the yellowing of the leaves seems to penetrate down from the top further. And the next year bare branches begin to appear. And he says all of this is because the sap in the oak is beginning not to carry to the extremities. And this is the cause of the death. He says we say then that the tree is dry. But for many years to come the frame of the dead tree stands erect making black marks against the sky as though nothing had happened. Finally rotted at the root the useless top heavy structure falls. He says then that a healthy aesthetic is to a people what sap and leaves were to the great oak. That the most fundamental important thing in a civilization is its aesthetic. And that the health of an aesthetic is the most important understanding that a people can have.

Those who have been following the Saturday series for the last two years are in a position to understand how central art is to consciousness and how in consciousness art is related to the sense of mythic and feeling in nature and that only by a healthy aesthetic is art and myth kept in the right proportions so that their interpenetration is not a shifting of positions. Because when art sinks into an unconscious realm what rises in its place is a political mythology which then usurps an aesthetic by offering an economic and an aesthetic simply degenerates into propaganda. And from this a whole false world is engendered. One gets legalisms, one gets theologies, one gets finally great metaphysical systems that relate only to the mind and cage human beings off from life. So Wright, at 75, had a terrible time in world history - 1944 - writes, A healthy aesthetic is to a people what sap and leaves were to the great oak.

“This book is written in the firm belief that all true human culture has a healthy idea of the beautiful as its life-of-the-soul: an Aesthetic-Organic as of Life, not on it. One that nobly relates man to his environment. This [true] aesthetic sense would make of a man a gracious, potent, integral part of the whole of Life.” And that, ethics, art, and religion are able to survive and be viable for human beings only so long as there is a clear understanding that the beautiful is not a sentiment and that the beautiful is a necessary quality, a necessary realm. “To ignore this truth is to misunderstand the soul of man, turn him over to a science ignorant of his significance and [bind him simply] to his destiny.”

And then Wright shifts from this great civilized philosophic statement to the United States. He says what we have inherited is a “cultural lag.” We have not been given a healthy aesthetic but we have been given a cultural lag. The last great American architect before the generation of Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1890s with Sullivan and Richardson the last great architect before that generation was Jefferson and that almost the whole of the 19th century had passed in pastiche and imitation. But with the great efflorescence of American architecture in the 1890s and the early 20th century there seemed to be hope and then the First World War came and then it seemed as if everything were sliding back again.

In fact when we look at Wright's career, from 1927 until 1935, he only built two houses - one was for a relative. In all that time not a single commission and Wright was in his later years, we have the hindsight of seeing that he lived to be almost 90 but he was 67 before the commission for Fallingwater was offered him. And in fact when that commission was offered him Wright saw this as a spiritual breakthrough. That the dearth had been of great significance and meaning, that Wright had come to represent almost a mythic warrior of the spirit of true art who was not allowed to go into the jousts and tournaments of the world and was being kept out as a symbol for the decay of art and the offering of the commission for Fallingwater was to him a sign that the time had come to show what could be done. Wright accordingly acted with an almost mystical emphasis upon that project and I wish to focus upon Fallingwater tonight because of its nature.

In his practice Wright never went to the drawing boards first. He never took pencil to paper first. He never sketched out. He always turned over in his mind, in his spirit inside, the conditions, the elements, the site, the people, his feelings, the intuitions that he would have. And only then would he use paper and T-Square and triangle to flesh out the nascent ideas as they had stirred up within him. But with Fallingwater nine months went by before he picked up a pencil. In fact the Taliesin Fellowship which had started in the doldrums of the depression 1933 young men and occasionally a young woman who would pay to live and study at the Wright House, Spring Green, Wisconsin, began to wonder if there wasn't something wrong with the old man. Perhaps he had been out of work too long. He had been delivering lectures at Yale and various other places. He was good at writing books. Perhaps he was too old to be an architect. In fact, the man who had offered the commission, E. J. Kaufmann from Pittsburgh - he owned a large department store there - phoned Wright and said that he was on his way to Milwaukee for a business meeting and that he would stop by at Spring Green to review the drawings. And the day that Kaufmann called from Milwaukee there wasn't a single line on a single sheet of paper anywhere in Taliesin about the house. One of the Taliesin fellows recalls how when they were going to breakfast about 6:30 in the morning, that there on Wright's table was a whole sheaf of beautifully rendered drawings that evidently he had gotten up some time very very early in the morning or very late at night and had sat there all alone and put on paper what he had kept only a float suspended in his spirit - I hesitate to say mind - but in his spirit for nine months. And when one looks at those sketches, those first sketches that come out and you compare them to the building that was actually built. It's uncanny. Almost everything is there. Massive accountings of detail are there.

One is tempted to remember in a letter that Mozart once wrote about composition how towards the end of his what turned out to be the end of his career when he was writing great works like the Jupiter Symphony he never wrote anything down until he had heard the symphony in his mind. When his mind's ear had heard the symphony then he committed it to paper that he composed within himself and that writing it down was simply a mechanical transcription. Apparently this was the case for Wright. And in the case of Fallingwater he was testing himself to see what the depth of his spirit was for it was the most unusual commission that had been given him not just because of the timing but because of the nature of the site. The site was a little stream. It's no more than about four miles long in that part of the United States. They don't call them streams they call them runs. Usually they're spring fed and they usually rush very fast from the spring down to some other stream and that stream into a river. In Bear Run, it takes its origin in some springs about twenty five hundred feet altitude and in four miles goes down to about one thousand fifty feet altitude and flows out. It was one of those rural archetypal American experiential focuses the little rivulet that emerges from the ground and contributes eventually to the Ohio River eventually to the massive heartland drainage of the United States.

In the rush of Bear Run there was one spot where there was a waterfall. About twenty, twenty-two two feet high. And E.J. Kaufmann owned a plot of this land and had gone there to relax in an old log cabin structure. And Wright was taken there. And he was shown the site and Kaufmann expressed his interest to have a nice country house built somewhere around twenty to thirty thousand dollars which fifty years ago was considerable, and Wright said nothing. But in his spiritual sense there was something about the land about that particular site that was the pivot of what he wanted to express in his life work. It was in the nature of the American landscape unscathed and that that landscape was wedded to a man whose sensibilities Wright respected. Kaufmann was a very energetic, wise man, extremely capable in his life processes. Wright wanted to fit the man to the landscape in just the right way. In just the right way meant for him to build a house for that man which would be a prism reflecting the landscape to the man. And the essential quality of that land was the waterfall. It was the way in which water and earth and space and insight blend together. And for Wright it was like all of the primal elements came to a focus there. He later on would use that same visionary technique when he built Hollyhock House, the Barnsdall House up here. Where the fireplace is there's a stream that should run through the house. Occasionally they have water in there and one can see the fire burning in the rock fireplace. With the water circulating into the space of the house opening out from that into the air so that all of the elements are brought together including the sense of consciousness which is the quintessential element the understanding which is made conscious by an aesthetic that all of this is in fact meaningful not because of this or that but that its relationality can be sensed as the fulcrum of a house. For Wright the pivotal realization was a huge boulder which Kaufmann stood on to show Wright the landscape which was about twenty five, thirty feet from the waterfall. And Wright kept seeing over and over again in his spiritual sense that boulder and that waterfall were an essential relationship that that man knew. He couldn't quite say it. He couldn't quite say, in intellectual terms what it was, but every time he took Wright to the site he went to the top of that boulder. So when he designed Fallingwater he designed it so that there would be no support beams artificially placed in the landscape. The house was going to be what is called cantilevered out from some central pillar - like a body holding arms out - that the whole structure of the house Everything that supported that house was going to be cantilevered and that the core of the house was going to be placed on that boulder not on anything man made. Well when the plans were first sent to Kaufmann when they were first drawn out, Kaufmann had engineers go and look at the site and they said we don't know about this. How long has that boulder been there? We better sink some piers in. We better put some concrete pillars in. This guy doesn't know about engineering. He's some wild-eyed artist. He's a visionary. Kaufmann sent the report to write and Wright wrote back to him and said just send the plans and forget the house. You don't need it. Kaufmann apologized and said I do need the house. And Wright said very well then I will build it for you. And sent down his own engineers. John Wesley Peters was the man put in charge of the engineering details and the entire structure of Fallingwater is balanced upon that rock, that boulder, which was there by nature. And in fact the boulder’s position is emphasized because the whole inner core structure is built around that boulder which holds the fireplace. And the floor of the fireplace of the hearth is on the top of that boulder. And the structure of the house, as it's cantilevered out using broad planes, is able to cup like a hand to the ear the sound of that waterfall. And because of the structure of the interior space because of a principle that Wright called continuity that the interior space was in no way compartmentalized from any other aspect of the interior space. It was one structure like the inner part of a shell. The planes of Fallingwater’s structure cupped the sound of the waterfall and distributed it evenly throughout the house so that wherever one went there was a sense almost like a psychological white sound of that waterfall, of the movement of the stream over the rock in that land, and that the hearth fire was placed there on that boulder where he used to sit and have a mystical rapport with the land. So that the mystical rapport was still there and was attenuated by the house that the house was a prism reflecting back all of the qualities of the landscape to the man, and to the family surrounding the man. There was room there for the whole Kaufmann family. It is now owned by the Western Pennsylvania Conservatory and there are tours there from April through November. We'll have some slides.

Wright finished that project around 1937 and just seven years later was writing this work here: When Democracy Builds. And he writes, “Just as [great] trees die, so civilizations die…or they are blown down, destroyed root and branch by war: the tempest. Or they're buried by revolution: the flood. But, we are too young a nation to degenerate? We are too vigorous to die a violent death utterly. No, we have never yet attained that high plane from which nations degenerate, although the virus of an earlier culture, coming here in the blood of the immigrant, might be contagion marking us for decay. Our salvation and… protection depend upon the realization that if our Science is carried far enough and deep enough, we will find [that] great Art [is a] sure significance of all [that] science can ever know. We will see that true Religion is a valid prophecy of everything [that] science may discover. We will likewise find that philosophy itself is the science of man from within the man himself - while so-called sciences [can only] work upon him from the outside. [and] Where [his] soul is concerned,” working mostly in vain because such phony sciences as we have practiced have substituted morality for ethics, they have ignored or only imitated art. They have “confused religion, and demoralized philosophy and ethics in the popular mind.” And that there must be a sense of a “universal Unity” even almost to the point of an entity. And he says, “In the immense drift of our… culture lag, the aesthetic sense [thus] unhealthy, neglected, or betrayed, has come down to a raising of a little cup with the little finger [distended or] the easel picture or some poetic pose or eclecticism in… Architecture.” What we need are the honest responses of our pioneering days that the new frontier now is quite different. That, “Once upon a time the [frontier was a] physical or territorial realm.” But now the frontier is to “conquer… [this ugly] commercialism in the machine age, [this] ‘bony fiber of the dry tree’; this conquest is now [our] … Frontier. And, “Only by growing a healthy aesthetic in the Soul of our polyglot people can we win this victory. The greatest of all victories. So this book is on the firing line of… [that] most important frontier of all [frontiers]: the fight for Faith, faith in democracy, faith in the gospel of individuality, [and] faith in beauty that is the efflorescence of the Living Tree. Faith in Man: [and] his faith in himself as Himself.”

The first section of When Democracy Builds and the only one that I'll talk about just briefly was called Earth. That the only way to begin to build an architecture or a sense of art. The only way in which we can begin, as Wright would put it, is to look at the site. Our task is to build and whether we're building character or we're building a sense of life or an understanding or a vision of reality or a building. The first thing is to experience the earth to experience that horizon which naturally does occur. There occurs before we come there occurs while we are there and after we are gone. This sense of earth is the most important sense because it gives us the cue that what is going to take place is natural as distinguished from preempting the natural by the mental. For our facility as urban human beings has been to gloss over the natural and to substitute the mental in its place.

And Wright then says, the citizen then becomes a “slave to the herd instinct” hopelessly “committed to vicarious power - just as the medieval laborer not so long before him, was slave to king or state. A cultural weed grows rank in the cultural field. The weed goes to seed. Children grow up, herded by the thousands in schools built like factories, run like factories: Schools systematically churning out the herd-struck morons as machinery turns out shoes.”

Because Wright was extremely involved with education in Chicago. He was at Hull House in 1903 with John Dewey and Jane Addams when they were seeing what the effects were. When you took children from broken families, children who had psychological and emotional problems, and you brought them into a loving situation into a situation where there was a natural progression of education how in just a year or two these children would transform and change and would be able to actually grow into viable human beings. That there was nothing wrong with the children. What was wrong was the educational system and that it was a system made up by a mind, by a mentality, which did not understand the profundities of nature, of the earth which we must respond to.

So he says this, mentality is what finally grows up to be commercialism. And, “When our men of commercial genius succeed, they become more than ever vicarious.” And, very “Soon these men sink in the sham luxury of their city to produce, but [they do not] create [anything. That they are really,] Impotent. “Life itself is become restless ‘tenant’ in the big city.” That the human being then has, “His unnaturally gregarious life [tending ever more] toward the promiscuous…” He seeks the, “blind adventure of a crafty animal; some form of graft, the febrile pursuit of sex as ‘relief’...” mechanical conflict, the prevailing uproar. In the “Meantime [he is] struggling [always] to artificially maintain, as he can, [his] teeth, [his] hair, [his] muscles, [his] sap, his sight [grows] dim [and his] hearing is chiefly by telephone. He goes against or across the side of traffic, as he must, at the risk of damage or death to himself or others.” And this is a vicarious life eventually “sterilized by machinery,” not by machinery but by the machine.

By the way in which this life manifests itself so that the great modern exaggeration of the Renaissance city machine made is today the form of universal anxious rent. The citizen's very life is rented in a rented world. He and his family evicted if in arrears or the whole system goes to smash. He must make his choice. All is founded upon renting or being rented until the man himself is finally no more than a form of rent. Should his nervous pace ever slacken. Should his anxious step fall out with the lock step of production of landlord money Lord or machine Lord he is a total loss. And over him, beside him, beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps, is this forever ticking taxi meter of rent. Rent for land, rent for money, rent for ideas. Goading this anxious consumer’s unceasing struggle for or against a merciless production driving consumption insane for its insatiable and must be. And so Wright says that we are in a doomed position as long as the individual is not returned to nature and that the natural house is the first beginning, it's the first expressive step in the rejuvenation of this condition that if a human being is stuffed as a content in a box and those boxes tilted on end twenty, thirty, forty stories high then he sees himself only in terms of that context. And if he has a vision of individuality or of life or of value other than this he fears ridicule for he will stand out.

I guess our cassettes are telling us it's time for a break. Let's take a little break.

For those who don't know I have a terrible time with machines. I don't get along with them. And so this is just more of the same. So if the slides don't work don't be surprised. I like this portrait of Wright. He was always dramatic. He said that he very early on realized he had a choice between dishonest humility and honest arrogance and he chose honest arrogance. And he was pretty happy about that. Probably the best revelation of Wright's character is, there's a filmed interview that Hugh Downs did with him in 1953 for NBC which is available - it's about a half hour - and you might sometime get interested and rent that and see it. And Downs is very very good at bringing out Wright's personality. Of course, we have to select out elements to talk about but one of the most important elements in Wright's makeup was his affinity with other cultures and other times his affinity with the Mayan, Indian mind and art, his affinity with things Japanese. The Imperial Hotel was a casualty of 20th century pollution. And it was finally torn down, I think, in November or December of 1967 because the pollution in Tokyo had literally eaten away the details of the soft steel and the economic pressures. It was a huge square block in a very choice section of Tokyo and it needed to be, as the people say, redeveloped. So the Imperial Hotel is no more. But what's extraordinary was that Wright's whole involvement with this came right after the First World War. His first work on it artistically, visually was about 1915. during the [First] World War, and right after the war was over, Wright went to Japan and he spent four years overseeing the construction of the Imperial Hotel. And when he left in 1921 he felt that he had paid homage to the Japanese spirit that he had been able to give back to them something which was to make up for all of the phony tourists who had come and taken things away from Japan.

He had come to believe that he had given back to the Japanese the sense of their genius of being able to find the quintessential element in cultures, Chinese culture or whatever it happens to be, and to refine it. That the Japanese spirit is excellent in its refining capacity. And that in the refinement, the refinement went down to structural levels. that it was not surface, it was not a refinement that was shallow, but that the refinement lay in the ability of the Japanese mind and spirit to penetrate to the essential structure. And so, in the Imperial Hotel it wasn't so much the Japanese flavor of the surface and the decorations but it was the fact that he had found a structure which was based upon the Japanese understanding of earthquakes and had made the Imperial Hotel, in its structural foundations, almost impervious to earthquakes. In fact in 1923 the huge earthquake that struck and leveled almost every building around it, the Imperial Hotel came through with very minor damage, almost completely unscathed. And Wright, in his autobiography, goes to great lengths to talk about the nature of Japan being founded upon the vision of Mount Fujiyama that is not just the aesthetic surface of Mount Fuji that is so extraordinary but the fact that Fuji's roots go down into the very magma of the Earth, that that as we now call it “an induction plate” slides under the Japanese landmass going down so that the Pacific floor is diving into the Earth under Japan and that from time to time the fissures that open up the seawater from these deep deep trenches miles deep goes in to these fissures and causes the earthquakes. And it's like the mother ocean going into the mother land, and Mount Fuji being the expression of this tremendous energy held in graceful balance. And so the structure of the Imperial Hotel was based upon that spiritual cognition and each of the pillars was able to move up and down independently a little bit. So the building was able to roll with the waves of the earthquake but it was unable to withstand the commercial and industrial pollution. This was a lily pond in front here. There's a lot of slides so I won't detain us in each one.

You can see these photos were taken right at the end, 1965. You can see all the pock marks everywhere in the structure. This is all due to pollution. And of course this same thing is going on minutely all over the world. In every major city. It's almost inconsequential whether you give up smoking or not with that kind of pollution.

A detail on a window. Now notice how this Handling of data is recognizable here, and in here. There's an articulation of form according to a perceptual organization which is different from a doctrinaire viewpoint. A lot of Wright's understanding of orientation of a building and of all of its detail was in fact based upon what he called normally the 30 60 so that there is an angle at the base of 30 degrees which then has a complement at the top of a 60 degree angle and that the hypotenuse of this 30 60 facing towards the south gives one a natural orientation to the sun and allows them for the movement of a designer using a triangle on his drafting board by turning that triangle on up he can then have every perpendicular line seemingly at an angle be oriented towards the sun and towards light, towards the source of light. These are just some indications of the tremendous sophistication that Wright had in his eyes.

The interior, I think this is in focus, there. The dining interior. I might say that all of these buildings still exist in plans and could be rebuilt. He designed more than 400 buildings and I would think that if a corporation would rebuild the Imperial Hotel here in Los Angeles maybe in Little Tokyo you would reap great benefit from that. Would be a world tourist attraction. So some of these buildings may be rebuilt. It's like Mendelssohn discovering that people will go to concerts if you play music like Bach or Mozart or Beethoven and not just something that was written yesterday. So the whole idea of classical music being valuable as a repertoire may begin to apply in architecture where classic buildings of the past may be rebuilt. So it's possible.

For Wright in his aesthetic the core of it was what he called continuity. That interior space should be a unity, that the experience of the interior space anywhere in the structure should lead one naturally to what is called the outside, and that the outside grounds should have access into the interior space. And when this is able to be expressed he says then of the form that complements the continuity of space that that form is then streamlined. He's the one who coined that word ‘streamline’ as in stream of consciousness. That the form that the mind sees becomes naturally fluid and unified when the interior space that one does not see becomes unified

For Wright, of course, the initial insight into this was his reading of Lao Tzu the Tao Te Ching and later on he came to recognize it in the ukiyo-e, the Japanese print, especially with Hiroshige and Hokusai. So that, the interior space is not something which is accidentally there because it has been cut out by the imposition of form. The interior space is continuity as the primal reality of the building and of our human experience of that building. And if it is handled with honesty the forms that complement that space will have this streamlined effect. Notice now that streamline does not mean machine smooth. It means that there is no wasted articulation. And it can be quite complex as you see here. Wasted form would be ornamentation.

This is an early house structure and I'm showing it because when we get to Fallingwater we'll see how he expands this. He's attempting to raise the flat ceiling into a window or skylight forms, and notice the fireplace, notice the small thin stone bricks - keep that in mind when we get to Fallingwater we'll see how Wright completely revolutionizes this sense of space. Wright now the space the interior space is enlarged made dome like because the ceiling is raised. In Fallingwater, Wright will understand that you don't have to do that, that the interior space can have its continuity in almost complete horizontal.

This is back to the Imperial Hotel. This is the fireplace there. Notice how the decoration, seemingly decoration or ornament. The mural over the fireplace is an abstract presentation of complex form, rather in the style of Kandinsky. Those who are familiar with Kandinsky or his treatment of glass and a little exit. Now I think we've come over.

This is one more corridor. Wright talked about when democracy builds about the different styles of human nature of how some people are naturally cave dwellers. They like the security, they like the protection of being in the cave, being covered. While some people love the openness of being under the stars, exposed to the sun, exposed to the moon, and that these two modes of human perception of space interplay in us today. And both of them need to be careful of that. Fallingwater is just that. Perfect building and perfect expression of everything that he stood for.

Let's go back. Let's feel that space in the Imperial Hotel about 1920. And let's intuitively feel this space here. About 1936. When Wright had Kaufmann send him the landscape details, the topographical map, he wanted every major tree put onto the topographical map. So they went around and they measured every tree that was more than a couple of inches in diameter and put it on the map. This is not being picky of respecting the fact that the tree is there. This is just the paying attention to the site in a very realistic way. This arc that comes out of this because the tree is there becomes an essential element. It becomes the secondary motif in the whole design of Fallingwater. The horizontal planes are the first but the second is the semi-circle which occurred because of this little detail. And we'll see in a couple of shots how that semi-circle becomes very very important. This is the waterfall as it was before anything happened there. This is in the spring when it's very full. The drop is a little over twenty feet. The water moves very fast. It's very fast. This pool is not part of the river. It's not part of the run. This pool is like a little plunge. It's about fifty, fifty-three inches deep. But this pool is not made by damming up the stream at all. This pool is fed by a reservoir that is across the road from Fallingwater and is kept there as a still water so that the stairs coming down from the house come down to a very still water which is set so close to the stream that it seems like it's a part of it and it's very quiet. And this is a part of the excellence and subtlety of the design of Fallingwater.

That's a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture up at the top there. This is a bridge coming over the stream that arcs back to the water. It was discovered by the construction people. They were carping about Wright's intuitive grasp of architecture and his lack of engineering of preciseness and they found that the level of the ground floor of the main house was only about two feet higher than the level of the bridge that came over the stream some hundred feet or so downstream and that in fact the three steps that come up from the ground level into the living room at Fallingwater are within inches of the level that the floor of the bridge is. He of course paced the site meticulously without measuring - an inner sense of distance. The small details again, the little stream of water. Because besides a waterfall there were all these rivulets and trickles. And so everywhere Wright tries in his detail to put the major motion of the waterfall in the structure of the house. But in the detailing also the sense of trickling. This carries all the way through. The construction people felt that the cantilever was too far out and they built little retaining walls to fudge and help keep it up, and Wright, unbeknownst to anybody went out and took the top layer of stone out from this additional wall. And after about a year he took Kaufmann down. He said you might as well take the rest of the wall down because it isn't doing anything and it was taken down. When you get this kind of a view, stepping back from it, what's interesting is that the natural terrain has in a wild way its own composition. It's not jumbled as in randomness. It's just complex as in wilderness which is different.

And Fallingwater is like the chord scale of that unity. It's like the pitch pipe of proportion and relationality which man can consciously sound like Pan himself and call the wildness of the animal life and the mineral life to his presence and nourish his life. And Fallingwater does that more than any other human residence ever known.

It's a nighttime view being lit up, in among the trees. The back portions of Fallingwater are nestled into the vegetation, nestled into the buff colored cliffs. The limestone. And all of the limestone that is used here was all taken from the site. Not very far away from the site a mile or two from it and dressed by hand. And they did, I think, something on the order of a cord of stone per week. It took a long time to get that new stone.

Buddhas head on one of the terraces. Notice something about the detailing here. The detailing masses. But it masses in such a way that it doesn't lead to a crescendo. It masses and then transforms into another element. This is a very peculiar kind of structure. For those who were here, it's the kind of structure that Alan Hovhaness uses in his music. Complexity not leading to culmination, but leading to transformation. There is no apex. That one is building up towards. One simply changes the mode. Instead of looking at the poem one then looks at the side of the hand. It's that sort of a transition. And so all of the elements of the house, whether it's the dressed limestone here, or it's the glass and steel, or whether it's the concrete reinforced, all of these elements flow into one another. And that flow is guaranteed not by the conception of the architect in his mind but by the integrity of the interior space as it is manifested in its continuity. Thus architecture is an art and not a trade.

Art is sustained by an aesthetic and not by a construction mechanicalness however engineered. And that's the difference. One of the small fireplaces etched into the stone with the glass, and the space, and the light nearby. The light and the fire almost juxtapose. This main fireplace coming down the boulder is right under this structure, about here. The sunscreens and so forth have become almost common language now. They were first utilized in this structure. It will be fifty years, its anniversary next year. Notice again the play of volume here. The play can take place in light and shadow, or in terms of volume texture, or in movement of human beings. The sinuousness of this dragon is in its Tao which is the space, so that this is a natural house. Natural not in the sense of materials that would be shallow to think that it were natural only in the sense of materials but natural in the sense that it is spiritual in its integrity. That's what's natural about it. That the interior continuity is that which is in ours we belong to that and that the life that we would live would have this transforming form rather than this addiction to building up to an apex building up to some culmination and then tapering off building up to a weekend and then Monday again. This kind of phony lifestyle where life is chopped up in a kind of a substitute for reality by shallow agendas. This is what Wright was talking about - it's quite a different thing.

This is natural slate that's set into the floor. And the rugs stop here and then there's just natural slate going into the limestone. And the fireplace is on three sides here with an overhang. And you'll see on another shot, I have a color shot, that they made a large food cauldron, red iron food cauldron that could swing into this fireplace. There's something that Wright wanted to see. The hearth flame in the stone, in the stone. As if it were the insight in the man sitting on the stone talking about how he loved the sight, because it evoked from him a mystical sense of the importance of nature being left as it is. And Wright tried to build Fallingwater as a home for such a man showing him that he can leave nature as it is but amplify his capacity to sense this and not interfere with it. This is what is a natural house. There's the cauldron over outside. That swings in. You can see this slate. You can see the stone. But his furniture is a little uncomfortable. You can sit in it, but it is a little uncomfortable.

At the same time as he was doing Fallingwater he got a commission to do the Johnson’s Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin which is a very superior structure. And he used the same kind of support in Fallingwater as he did in the Johnson's Wax. That you start small at the bottom and you build as you go up. In some of the piers that Fallingwater uses are only about sixteen inches at the base and they come up to about three feet at the top. And then the Johnson's Wax building. He has columns in there that began somewhere around fifteen to eighteen inches and they go up like palm trees and finally fold out in large oval circles upon oval circles until they support the roof. And then the roof very often will have a kind of a circular motif with the dome over it and you get a wonderful sense of the growth of wine. The growth of support. When he did the cedar shake coverings sometimes he would turn the cedar shakes upside down so that they would become larger towards the top.

A winter shot with the waterfall largely frozen. Seems like a great bird. Like snow banks in the forest. The interplay of light and shadow so broken up that it fits into the forest and a reflecting pool up into the forest level complementing the one that's the plunge that's set down by Bear Run. And the movement of the house, the terraces blended in so much to the vegetation now that it seems almost like a natural outcropping of rock not manmade at all. Notice the sparing use of color. Just a hint of red here. Detail of the windows running up into the bottom of one of the concrete terraces. He rounded the concrete on all the edges. He didn't like to work with concrete very much but concrete reinforced with steel allowed him these vast volumes that were to be cantilevered over. Later on an architect who worked with this mode a lot was Felix Candela in Mexico City. The shell concrete structures went quite far really. One could build a building like this room for about five hundred dollars with about six people on a weekend and you could build a better shell concrete. This is the road leading up to Fallingwater; a winter scene; late autumn scene with the snow. Just a few more.

This was the desk for Kaufmann's wife. This is the place for her to sit in her room there's space. And looking the other way this is the vista that you would see by keeping the ceiling lowered like that. And by keeping the floor natural almost like the rock itself. When one looks up one's eye is caught immediately into distance into vista. And when you complement that with the sound of the waterfall, the vision of distance, of immediately transferring the sight from the present space, into the immediate foreground, into the middle ground and into the forest. This brings up the sense of continuity visually and by hearing the water everywhere in the house the echoing and so forth the continuity is there audibly also and that eventually this produces a sensate intuition base for recognizing a new quality in one's self. I think that's our last shot.

Well I'm sorry I have but one lecture on Wright. You can see that we've just begun to scratch the surface but we have a whole century of excellence in this country. And next week we'll look at another American who opened the doors quite wide.

Thanks for coming.