Organic Architecture and Abstraction

Organic Form in Architecture

• Organic form is a form that shapes itself from the inside out, adapting to its purpose and environment.
• It's inspired by its purpose and environment, moving away from historical rules and typologies.
• Lewis Sullivan coined "form follows function", a shorthand for organic form.
• Frank Lloyd Wright, an apprentice of Sullivan, broke free from Aristotelian thinking to respond to the environment.
  • His philosophy: "The house should not be on the hill, but of the hill."
• Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple is one of the first masterpieces of abstraction.

Abstraction

• Abstraction involves simplifying the central features of something for representation.
• Abstraction is to present an idea or element in a non-representational and simplified manner.

Development of Organic Form

• Organic form enhances the building's effectiveness in serving its purpose in a specific environment.
• The speaker talks about the vertical line representing business aspirations and the horizontal line symbolizing the natural world in the American context.
• Wright tried to integrate these elements, dissolving the clear objectness of buildings into their environment.
  • Example: Darwin Martin House dissolves in an orthogonal, three-dimensional manner with walls, structure, and roof embedded in the natural context.

Larkin Building

• Designed by Wright in 1904 for the Larkin Company.
• Considered the first modern office building with a completely sealed environment, featuring circulated, filtered, and cleaned air.
• Darwin Martin, the client for the Martin House, commissioned Wright for the Larkin Building.
• A digital model has been constructed by Steve Romero who's website is called Hooked on the Past.

Unity Temple

• A groundbreaking building that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
• The first significant building to use concrete as the primary material.
• It is a worship space for the Unitarian church in Oak Park outside of Chicago.
• The temple's simple form conveys a sense of a singular volume of space inside.
• Wright aimed to create a refuge with the sensation of strength.
• He emphasized community gathering over traditional church spires, influenced by transcendentalism.
• The arrangement facilitates community interaction and shared experiences.
• Wright didn't want a spire because there is a story of somebody who left to find the face of God, and he heard a voice say to look to the faces of his neighbors.
• The design facilitates the experience of community and their faith.
• Wright followed the puritan pattern of worship, that the community of believers gather in a room, and hire a minister to help them.

Column

• Wright expressed the column by the feeling it expresses. What does the column tell you and how does it organize your perception of the place?
• Example: Basilica in Paestum had Doric columns and you could feel the way in which a column gathers the weight and slightly bends to hold it up.
  • This can be further exemplified by the intuses, where the sides are smaller than the top.
• Wright ultimately considered the traditional column as a distraction from the community experience.

Interior Design of Unity Temple

• The interior design is characterized by a symphony of lines, with layers and layers of different patterns.
• Skylight provide an abundance of light.

European Modernism

• Joseph Hoffman's Stokely Palace in Brussels focuses on mass and line.
• Adolf Loos's men's shop in Vienna uses lines extensively, replacing traditional furnishings.
• Loos influenced the sterile, blank look of European modernism and the international style.
• Art Nouveau, like the Paris Metro, used line to create movement and draw people in.

Line Usage

• Victor Horta's Hotel Tassel uses line poetically to create a sense of movement, supporting and validating human activity.
• The use of line can be seen in Klimt's The Kiss, a painting on the walls of the Stokulle Palace, and the use of abstraction is to tell a story.

Abstraction in Painting

• Klimt's Forest Beach Grove.
• Early Mondrian's Composition with Trees.
• Henri van der Velde's Sun and Ocean. Captures the beach, waves, and horizon through scribbles.

Purpose of the Art

• The purpose of art is to take time and develop an understanding and what its impact is on you and the way you feel.
• The art is what's going on between you and that.

Wright's Work

• Willett's house uses leaded glass windows to interpret the exterior.
• Meyer May house dissolves the outside view, creating a perceptual condition that blurs inside and outside.
• Coonley house uses pattern and mass to obscure the boundaries of the house.

Paul Cezanne

• Spent much of his life painting a mountain from different viewpoints and weather conditions.

Cubism

• Cubism, pioneered by Barack and Picasso, takes abstraction further.

Early American Abstraction

• John Merrin's landscape paintings evoke emotion.
• Our author Dove's work celebrates the exuberance of natural form.
• Marston Hardley painted a state of mind filled with social tumult.

Vasily Kandinsky

• Kandinsky's story of recognizing a Monet haystack painting upside down, realizing that non objective art is about reaching a sense of power and emotional state.

Open Ended Nature

• Organic form shapes itself from the inside out, considering the circumstances and objectives.
• Nature is open ended and imagine three AIs collaborating to design formwork for concrete out of folded paper.

H. Richardson's Sketch

• H. Richardson's sketch of Marshall Field's wholesale store marks the beginning of this way of thinking in architecture.
• The disciplining of the picturesque occurred in the context of industrial society.