30 Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes on Design

Frank Lloyd Wright quotes on design

4. 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.

5. So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.

7. I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

12. 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.

20. 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.

21. All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

25. A great architect is not made by way of a brain nearly so much as he is made by way of a cultivated, enriched heart.

29. An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board - and a wrecking bar at the site.

32. Architecture is the triumph of Human Imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word 'order.'

34. Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

35. Chewing gum for the eyes.

37. Consider everything in the nature of a hanging fixture a weakness, and naked radiators an abomination.

42. 'Form follows function' - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

47. He exposes all the function on the top and puts the form below. It's as if you were to wear your entrails on top of your head.

52. I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contacts with my own furniture. (1931)

53. I think Ms. Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.

54. I would like to have a free architecture. Architecture that belonged where you see it standing - and is a grace to the landscape instead of a disgrace.

60. Less is only more where more is no good.

62. Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

63. Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

65. Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

67. Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.

68. Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.

70. Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

71. Space is the breath of art.

72. Space. The continual becoming: invisible fountain from which all rhythms flow and to which they must pass. Beyond time or infinity.

79. The space within becomes the reality of the building.

85. True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented.

86. We should have a system of economics that is structure, that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

94. 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.