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SDR
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 Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:03 pm Post subject: |
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I imagine that will go over the heads of some -- as indeed does the refined aesthetic of our great architects and designers, perhaps.
I agree, Solid; considering how difficult it is to get anything good built, or even to build at all, we should be grateful for those few who a) know what really good is, and b) have the strength of character and sheer stubborn-ness to see that the crucial decisions are made, that distinguish the superior from the ordinary.
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csintexas
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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Well I think it is somewhat unfortunate that Wright became associated with this phrase since he did not practice it much in actuality.
As for being good I consider that a relative judgment call (relative to any other American architects of the past century)
Well flowers are functional. Nature seems to be able to accomplish both beauty and functionality at the same time whereas most architects try (and generally fell miserably) to concentrate on beauty. What they don't understand is that it takes both. That is why for the most part Wrights work is sad.
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csintexas
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:15 pm Post subject: |
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An Excerpt From “Inconstant Unity:
The Passion of Frank Lloyd Wright”
By William Cronon
http://www.pbs.org/flw/legacy/essay2.html
Romantic genius, artistic iconoclast, heroic individualist: these were the labels Wright attached to himself, these the standards against which he measured his own behavior. When he told clients to throw away their belongings or when he cajoled them into spending far more than they had ever intended on their houses, he was serving his vision of an ideal truth. Given his own perennial indifference to money, one can almost imagine that he literally had trouble regarding it as real. When he underestimated costs, he may sometimes have fooled himself as much as he did his clients, for the money (perhaps even the client) was just a means to an end. Indeed, Wright went so far as to suggest that money actually acquired its value by enabling his genius to create, and was as good as worthless if not pressed into the service of some higher good. “Money,” he told his apprentices, “becomes valuable because you can do something with it. If you take away all the creative individuals, all the men of ideas who have projected into the arena of our lives substantial contributions, money would not be worth anything.” 150 All of his behavior is consistent with this principle, however convenient and self-serving the uses to which it could be put. From his own point of view, much of what is most troubling about Wright can be explained as part of his single-minded struggle to overcome any obstacle that might prevent his vision from being realized.
Above all else, Wright’s vision served beauty. When he quibbled with Sullivan’s dictum that “form follows function,” suggesting instead that “form and function are one,” he was in fact revealing that when push came to shove his own true passion was form more than function. 151 What he admired in the Arts and Crafts movement was its commitment to crafting all objects in such a way as to render them beautiful. What he loved about Japan was the idea of a culture in which every human action and every human object were integrated so as to make of an entire civilization a work of art. In pursuit of beauty, he sought to subordinate all elements of his architecture to a consistent style that would express their underlying unity. No matter how radically his individual buildings may differ from each other, they all express his struggle for aesthetic consistency, his habit of seizing a single abstract theme and recapitulating it with endless variations as if in a Beethoven symphony. This man who could sometimes seem so inconsistent in his personal and professional life in fact held up consistency as the highest ideal of his architecture. “Consistency from first to last,” Wright declared, “will give you the result you seek and consistency alone.”152 The vocabulary in which he sought to achieve this consistency was geometrical, so that Fallingwater, to take an obvious case, is an almost obsessive rumination on the possibilities of the cantilever, from the basic structure of the suspended floors right down to the treatment of the bookshelves. “You must be consistently grammatical,” Wright said, for a building, “to be understood as a work of Art.” 153 Geometry was the key to grammatical consistency, which was in turn the key to aesthetic unity, which was in turn the key to beauty, which was in turn the key of God.
But consistency alone was not enough; it was only of value if coupled with the new. By itself, consistency would kill creativity, producing yet another of the lifeless, backward-looking traditions that were the death of art. Newness was proof of creative genius, and consistent newness was the best proof of all. Just as he tried hard not to seem influenced by anyone else’s style, Wright had a restless urge to keep inventing new styles lest he start repeating his own too often. His boastfulness and his competitive need to claim priority over all other architects were surely tied to the horror of repetition. So was his love affair with new technologies, his willingness to experiment with virtually any new material that came his way so he could claim that he, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the first architect ever to have employed it. Describing to his apprentices the many innovations he had supposedly made in constructing the Larkin Building—air conditioning, plate-glass windows, integral desk furniture, suspended toilet bowls, and so on—he concluded, “I was a real Leonardo da Vinci when I built that building, everything in it was my invention.”154
Wright’s love of new technologies was matched by a desire to use old technologies in new ways. His fascination for the new and his need to show off his unsurpassed talents as an architectural virtuoso undoubtedly help explain his tendency to demand so much of his materials, daring to test their limits almost to the point of failure if it meant achieving effects he could claim as uniquely his own. The sags in Wright’s cantilevers are but the logical complement to his perennial testing of limits in the search for new expression. Wright’s defenders sometimes claim that he was simply ahead of his time, that the materials did not yet exist that could do what he wished them to do, and that this explains some of the problems with his buildings. Nothing in Wright’s career supports this argument. Had he lived to be able to take advantage of the newer technologies and stronger materials of our own day, he would surely have pushed them to their limits as well. The proof he demanded of his genius was to go where no architect had ever gone before, and that meant accepting risks that few others were willing to take. If the cost of gambling on greatness was some leaky roofs, badly heated rooms, sagging cantilevers, and unhappy clients, then Wright was more than willing to pay the price.
Wright combined all these creative qualities—his exploration of new technologies, his invention of new styles, his striving for maximum expressive effect, his search for grammatical consistency in all his buildings—with a remarkable playfulness. There was something childlike about the man even in his late eighties—a powerful sense of romance and an unabashed enthusiasm for his own creations. In one sense, he never ceased being the flirtatious male of Auden’s poem, lounging in the sunlight and performing for mother with seemingly effortless grace. But for all his self-centeredness, he also had a remarkable ability to sweep others up in his vision. Long before the ground for a new building had even been broken, Wright had conjured for his audience a beguiling fantasy of the ideal form that building would represent. No one has described this seductive power of Wright’s better than his son John. His father’s talent, he said, was to build “a romance about you, who will live in it—and you get the House of Houses, in which everyone lives a better life because of it. It may have a crack, a leak, or both, but you wouldn’t trade it for one that didn’t.” This would be true, John said, even if Wright were building you a chicken coop. “He weaves a romance around the gullibility of the chicken and the chicanery of the human being—and you get the Coup of Coops in which every chicken lives a better life on its own plot of ground. You may crack your head or bump your shins on some projecting romanticism, but life will seem richer, the air clearer, the sunshine brighter. The shadows a lighter violet. You will gather the eggs with a dance in your feet and a song in your heart, for your coop will be a work of art, not the cold logical form chasing the cold logical function.” 155
The romantic spirit that Wright brought to all his buildings may point at once to the deepest secret of his architecture and the most profound reason for his leaky roofs. In the end, the leaks and sags did not much matter to him. Although his practical goal was to strive as hard as he could to make his structures conform to the vision in his mind, form mattered more than function to him, and the vision behind form mattered most of all, far more than did its physical incarnation. The building itself would invariably fall short, and could only be an approximation of the Platonic ideal that lay behind it. This may explain why Wright was so willing to modify his buildings even when they were under construction, and why he apparently felt no compunction about altering them once they were complete. Taliesin itself underwent innumerable revisions, with walls and windows and doors and rooms being added and subtracted on an almost monthly basis. No building seemed permanent to Wright, because none could reflect for more than an instant the multifaceted geometric ideal that was in his mind. Perhaps this is why he was apparently so undisturbed when one or another of his buildings was torn down. “I have not learned to grieve long,” he wrote, “now that some work of mine has met its end.” He took comfort from the fact that its image would survive in photographs, and these would spread its memory “as an idea of form, to the mind’s end of all the world.” 156 It was the lesson of the folly: the architecture could not help but be a builder in the sand, and his works could not hope to escape what Wright called “the mortgage of time . . . on human fallibility foreclosed.157 Buildings, like their architects, were mortal, and so they leaked and sagged and aged and eventually passed away. But like the White City, which had leapt into being for but a single summer to realize a dream on the shore of Lake Michigan, it was possible for “an idea of form” to live far longer in “the mind’s eye of all the world.” If an architect aspired to immortality, he had best seek it in the realm of memory, spirit, and eternal ideals, not mortal matter.
Wright finally staked his claim to greatness on the mind’s eye as his best defense against the mortgage of time. “The product of a principle,” he said, “never dies. The fellows who practice it do, but the principle doesn’t.”158“ However inconsistent he may have been about other aspects of his life, he never wavered from this chief article of faith: an organic architecture, like a life well lived, must serve the principles that give order to nature and meaning to the human spirit. ”We learn,‘ Emerson had written, “that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are.’159” However cleverly an architect might manipulate natural materials, however brilliantly he might combine wood and stone and mortar to create breathtakingly beautiful space, his truest creation was not material but spiritual. “Spirit creates,” wrote Emerson. It “does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”160 Where nature and spirit met, there one would find the principles one sought, the lessons that would reveal the secrets of trees and flowers and buildings and even of the architect’s own soul. “The principles that build the tree,” declared Wright, “will build the man.”161 If such language today seems alien to us, if architectural critics now sometimes dismiss Wright’s high-blown romantic words as unreliable guides to his architectural practice, this may be because we have forgotten the ideals that were ultimately more important to him even than buildings. The secret of Wright’s architecture, he would surely have reminded us, will not be found on its surface but in its heart. If we wish to find it for ourselves, we must make our own way to the unity he managed to discover in so many corners of his universe: in the romantic words of a Concord preacher, in the geometric lessons of a kindergarten toy, in the gentle prospects of a Wisconsin landscape, in the evanescent beauty of a Japanese temple that was also a playful folly in the midst of a dream city—perhaps even in the persistent leaks of Wright’s own roofs.
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SDR
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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I think Cronon gets closer to what Wright was, and wasn't, than any other writer, perhaps.
But "sad" ? What's the point of that ?
I think Wright's work deserves the rare privilege of being judged on its aesthetic merits alone -- and by those who have actually visited the buildings, which I have not, by and large. I believe the spacial and material merits of the work, and its pioneering place in the history, justify an exemption from the ordinary criteria by which successful building is separated from that which fails in its purpose. For the purpose of Wright's work is aesthetic (as Cronon makes clear), I think.
Isn't there room on the Earth for "poetic" building -- structurally dubious yet aesthetically stellar -- building as Art ? Perhaps it belongs in a gallery (under shelter) instead of on somebody's land -- but it deserves to exist, and I'm glad it does.
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ArchiMotion
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 12:58 pm Post subject: |
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It seems these issues are being confused at some point along the stretch of this "hybrid car discussion" -- Program, goals, aspirations, image of the project.
Some are attempting to dissect program from function. In so doing, they proceed to reflect on project aspirations. They then conclude that function could be in some cases second to aesthetics, when the project aspirations are oriented towards aesthetics, and that in some way then the functions determined by the aspirations are not in fact functions but become mere aesthetic concerns. This is somewhat of confused thinking, and no doubt this has gone over the heads of many, due to it's elusive confused thinking.
Now, the Aptera example clearly illustrates the case of a prototype developed with the strict function of stream-lined efficiency determining a basic form, and aesthetics coming in and refining this form. This does not mean in any way that in all cases function will set the aesthetics. In many cases, and in those of industrial design is should. But in the case of architecture, we have a different ball game altogether, and this is what many do not seem to understand. In architecture we don't have a self-evident program. It must be elaborated by the architect based on the project goals, desired functions, desired aesthestics, circulation patterns, context and related issues. This only demonstrates that some have not understood the concept "program" in architecture.
With regards to a technical connection between form and function in nature - this is true. In nature the forms are determined as a result of the best shape most adapted to each function.
But in architecture we can see there is no best shape adapted to a complex set of functions, programmatic requirements and aesthetic concerns. This, the reason for multiple theories, styles, and visions in architecture. If this were not the case, we would all be following the functional formalistic requirements of by-gone eras of architectural trends of thinking.
As Solidred has suggested, many implications reach into the realm of "anthroposophy", the study of ultimate human proportions, and led to many developments and opposing ideas during the time of the modernists and even during the time of Wright himself. Architecture, (well stated Solidred), will always blend the pursuit of the spiritual with the craft. With this in mind, there is no such direct equivalence as in natural processes, but rather a mentalized embodiment of distinct forces that direct the mind of the designer to personify and embody the processes and views in his mind into the built environment.
Further, what could be considered "the refined aesthetic of our great architects and designers" ? This also seems subjective as well.
And " Well I think it is somewhat unfortunate that Wright became associated with this phrase since he did not practice it much in actuality"...
This seems to be an arbitrary statement, given the fact that Wright is one of the original proponents of a more organic architecture tied to nature. Many would like to tarnish this image.
and
["Above all else, Wright’s vision served beauty. When he quibbled with Sullivan’s dictum that “form follows function,” suggesting instead that “form and function are one,” he was in fact revealing that when push came to shove his own true passion was form more than function."]
The anti-Wright sentiment can be clearly seen in such articles and viewpoints on Wright...They claim that Wright was more concerned with form then function, in reality, by being overly fanatical about aesthetics. This, another way to discredit Mr. Wright....This same author goes on to assume Wright was obsessed with consistency, and relied on childish type geometrical studies, to express his obsession with consistency --["The vocabulary in which he sought to achieve this consistency was geometrical, so that Fallingwater, to take an obvious case, is an almost obsessive rumination on the possibilities of the cantilever, from the basic structure of the suspended floors right down to the treatment of the bookshelves. “] This, again, another attempt to discredit Wright.
Further remarks in the article discredit Wright -->>
["His boastfulness and his competitive need to claim priority over all other architects were surely tied to the horror of repetition. ]
Now, as far as Wright trying to take credit for inventions which may have existed at the time, that is an issue which is debatable. It all comes down to a matter of application and the means and ways it was being employed. So it may not be completely false for him to assert he was the first to employ it in such a fashion.
and
[Although his practical goal was to strive as hard as he could to make his structures conform to the vision in his mind, form mattered more than function to him, and the vision behind form mattered most of all, far more than did its physical incarnation."]
Another personal opinion on the part of the author, not based on fact, but on opinion and personal interpretation of Wright and his intents and methods of practice....
Truly Wright expressed it well here -->>
]If an architect aspired to immortality, he had best seek it in the realm of memory, spirit, and eternal ideals, not mortal matter."]
This sums up what I had expressed earlier above.
What many fail to see in all this is the ultimate aspiration of Wright - to embody the aspirations of the spirit, of the heart, and create some type of physical representation of the ideal as established by Emerson -"Spirit creates"...or the same type of spirit that can be seen in the created flower can empower man's soul to create the same unity of form and function. |
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csintexas
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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Now, the Aptera example clearly illustrates the case of a prototype developed with the strict function of stream-lined efficiency determining a basic form, and aesthetics coming in and refining this form. This does not mean in any way that in all cases function will set the aesthetics. In many cases, and in those of industrial design is should.
now that's a riot 
First of all, from what I have read the car has the same amount of drag as a hand would produce stuck out of a car going 55mph. So I doubt that they made any efforts toward aesthetics and all efforts towards reducing drag.
Secondly this topic is about form follows function and what that means. There are plenty of people (seemingly like yourself) who do not agree with this theory.
But in the case of architecture, we have a different ball game altogether, and this is what many do not seem to understand.
I certainly understand that you don't agree with this theory. The point is that we don't have a "different ball game". This is what form follows function means whether you agree with it or not.
I don't think you will find a bigger Wright fan than SDR and I actually like his later work. If he would have paid more attention to function he would have been much better.
I always get a laugh out of people who think think you can't have both. That somehow Wrights work is more beautiful because of it's disfunctionality. There is no plot to discredit Wright his work speaks for itself.
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SDR
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:31 pm Post subject: |
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"That somehow Wrights work is more beautiful because of it's disfunctionality."
Who among us -- or anyone else, for that matter -- said that ?
I was arguing for an (admittedly) more difficult-to-defend stance: that his work be judged without reference to functionality.
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SDR
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ArchiMotion
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:39 pm Post subject: |
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There is always a natural tendency to laugh or make fun of what we do not understand, rather then to try to understand what is being said and react in a rational way.
"....So I doubt that they made any efforts toward aesthetics and all efforts towards reducing drag."
You didn't read the initial article, how they hired the famous designer and almost tied him by chain next to the functional developer of the form.....
Now, about what this topic is all about - that is a fluid matter and not pre-established. It cannot be dictated that the topic establishes as a pre-condition that form must follow function. This is alluding somehow that I have not understood the topic.
To simply go on and say "this is what form and function means, whether you agree or not" is not an argument. It is an adherance to a belief. This is far from an argument and not based on logic by any means.
So in other words one cannot have form and function at the same time......huum....where is this discussion leading.....a disfunctional disfiguration of the issues and a characterization of opposing proponents....... not a successful tactics by any means..... |
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djswan
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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Very enlightening link Chris. The smart ones get what Sullivan was trying to teach.
I smell something .
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Richard Haut
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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for what seems to be the umpteenth time of having to point this out - can people kindly note that Louis Sullivan said "form ever follows function".
as for the simplistic discussion about aerodynamics, are we now pretending that "form follows Streamline Moderne" ?
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ArchiMotion
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:09 pm Post subject: |
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["That somehow Wrights work is more beautiful because of it's disfunctionality."
Who among us -- or anyone else, for that matter -- said that ?
I was arguing for an (admittedly) more difficult-to-defend stance: that his work be judged without reference to functionality. ]
Thanks for explaining SDR, good point.
Cheers. |
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djswan
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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Everyone should know by now that the idea came from an artist.
Sullivan just put it in context
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csintexas
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:16 pm Post subject: |
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All they needed the designer for is to do the drawings. The engineers actually did the design.
(Which is very much the way architecture is headed because architects decided to specialize in aesthetics and rendering instead of architecture)
for what seems to be the umpteenth time of having to point this out - can people kindly note that Louis Sullivan said "form ever follows function".
yes, but we still don't care.
as for the simplistic discussion about aerodynamics, are we now pretending that "form follows Streamline Moderne" ?
huh?
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ArchiMotion
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 2:27 pm Post subject: |
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The answer is that ever since GMsbrought us the tail fin, automotive design has been about emotion — form, not function. Aptera's Typ-1 reverses that paradigm, allowing aerodynamic efficiency to guide aesthetics. Still, the company had to appeal to those form-loving car buyers. Fambro hired designer Jason Hill, who did the original work on the Smart Fortwo and the body styling on the Porsche Carrera GT. Then, Fambro says, "I chained him to a desk" with Aptera's aerodynamicist, Miles Wheeler.
[" All they needed the designer for is to do the drawings. The engineers actually did the design. "]
I don't think so. Can't see how a famous car designer would bring himself so low as to become a draftsman and do no design. Not believable, simply. Another statement based on belief, rather then empirial facts...... this is beginning to bore me... got better thing to do then argue with statements such as this.... uffaa... |
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