Frank Lloyd Wright : The Early Years : Progressivism : Aesthetics : Cities

Donald Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317133179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Years: Progressivism: Aesthetics: Cities examines Wright's belief that all aspects of human life must embrace and celebrate an aesthetic experience that would thereby lead to necessary social reforms. Inherent in the theory was a belief that reform of nineteenth-century gluttony should include a contemporary interpretation of its material presence, its bulk and space, its architectural landscape.

This book analyzes Wright's innovative, profound theory of architecture that drew upon geometry and notions of pure design and the indigenous as put into practice. It outlines the design methodology that he applied to domestic and non-domestic buildings and presents reasons for the recognition of two Wright Styles and a Wright School. The book also studies how his design method was applied to city planning and implications of historical and theoretical contexts of the period that surely influenced all of Wright's community and city planning.

The aesthetics of progress

2 Education

Beginning in his teen years, Wright was intimately and extensively involved with education. Educational theories and practices of the late eighteenth century up to those of immediate experiences insinuated themselves into his personal and professional lives and his theoretical ideas and design expressions. Education is one key to understanding his personal life, yes, but withal it was an impetus to become a revolutionary and reformist architect. It was education as an act of acquiring knowledge through farming and working with nature’s way, through observing educational activities, listening to recitations of family beliefs in Emersonian Transcendentalism and Unitarianism, receiving his father’s artistic sensibilities and practices, through Froebel’s thoughts on kindergartens, the theology of his uncle Reverend Jenkin Jones, the practical architects Joseph Silsbee and Dankmar Adler, the dedication of Hamlin Garland, the impractical pragmatics of a philosophical Louis Sullivan, through wife Catherine’s strong familial and social commitments, and who or what else? Education was not just information or know-how or means but a holistic adventure, intellectually, religiously, and socially driven and satisfying; at least, that was the dream.

Wright’s father William, his mother’s Jones family, his boss Silsbee, and the others, were among those in the late nineteenth century who enjoyed reading authors who followed Rousseau’s call in the 1760s to cherish and learn from nature. Humans had become alienated, his followers complained, from their fundamental associations with nature principally by the persuasive artificiality of urban society, by its social conventions and inherent deceptions. This had encouraged egoism, pride, and ruthlessness, they argued, with the loss of the natural virtues of kindness, decency, and honesty. Society’s construct of culture was false, a product of vanity; science and technology encouraged idleness and the counterfeit. Therefore, mechanical and social mechanisms thwarted natural vital forces, human vitalism, and demanded control over human actions and shepherding thought. Humanity is happiest, they said, in tribes –thus, in small rural communities. As it was for the polemicists of the English Picturesque around 1800, the city was a gross simulation, an abomination, filthy.

Anxious poets and authors who glorified the natural world included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth (“The world is too much with us”), Alfred Tennyson, and John Ruskin in England; the Russian Leo Tolstoy; the Americans William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; in France, Victor Hugo; and Johan Goethe in Germany. After their return from Europe in 1910, Wright’s mistress (as then called) Mamah Borthwick Cheney translated what she believed was an obscure poem by Goethe. They had discovered it in a Berlin book shop, but it was in fact very popular. Titled “A Hymn to Nature,” one line is:

• Each of her Works has its own individual Being – each of her
• Phenomena the most isolated Conception, yet all in Unity.

Another is:

• We obey her Laws even when we most resist them, we work with her
• even when we wish to work against her.¹

Around the same time, Thoreau observed that “It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination”: 1851. Painters included the Europeans John Constable, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Honrè Daumier, Claude Monet and French Impressionists, and the Americans Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, George C. Bingham, George Catlin, and Winslow Homer.

Each author and artist insisted on the necessity of beauty; not as something transcendentally “out there” but as an instructional reality derived from nature. Beauty provides emotional delight and a sense of purpose that engages our insight into and feelings of freedom and openness. The evolution appetite and mundane acts of living are best served when clarified by visions of purpose. Meaning and intelligence, therefore, are found in nature and beauty, not in fickle human abstracts. The converse is ugliness, where the senses find entrapment, dirt, triviality, and a festering boredom. Moral ugliness is potent in gray cities, harbors of the insensible. One must educate in order to overcome the failings of urban society and to find meaning and beauty, and that logically begins with the young. So said Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Tolstoy, Froebel, Parker, and so too the experiences of the Wright and Jones families that composed Frank’s inheritance.

J.-J. Rousseau and after

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil….

The natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole, dependent only on himself and on his like….

In the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it.

This epigram might have been penned by Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Froebel, John Dewey, or Wright’s Uncle Jenkin. But they are the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They encapsulate his long, repetitive, at times wandering, ill-disciplined yet compelling treatise Emile, or, On Education, published in 1762.² Maurice Cranston, a Rousseau specialist, has neatly summarized the influence of the Frenchman on Western thought. Marking the end of the so-called Age of Reason, Rousseau announced

the birth of Romanticism. He propelled political and ethical thinking into new channels. His [proposed] reforms revolutionized taste, first in music, then in the other arts. He had a profound impact on people’s way of life; he taught parents to take a new interest in their children and to educate them differently; he furthered the expression of emotion rather than polite restraint in friendship and love. He introduced the cult of religious sentiment among people who had discarded religious dogma. He opened men’s eyes to the beauties of nature, and he made liberty an object of almost universal aspiration.³

Kenneth Clark was succinct: “Whatever his defects as a human being … Rousseau was a genius: one of the most original minds of any age.”⁴ In an introduction to a new printing of Emile, the French-literature specialist André Boutet de Monvel was also brief:

Rousseau’s work, in which philosophical speculation is closely interwoven with visionary dreams … flows entirely from the propositions … on the goodness of nature and the corrupting influence of society.⁵

Although necessary for many reasons, in the latter part of Emile, Rousseau placed cities at the extreme opposite of nature. At one point, he said he did “not exhort” people to “live in a town, on the contrary, one of the examples which the good should give to others is that of a patriarchal, rural life, the earliest of man, the most peaceful, the most natural…”:⁶ that of primitive societies.

Nearly the whole of Wright’s written works post-1904 in some manner further Rousseau’s speculations about individuality, nature, the state, and so forth, including attacks on the vile city and the joys of small towns. Wright was a latter-day Rousseauan in architectural guise. Carlyle, Spencer, Ruskin, Emerson, Froebel, and Viollet-le-Duc were intermediaries. But Rousseau’s education of parents about the education of their children also intrigues.

Emile is both a novel and a series of episodic and didactic lectures, sometimes hintingly Socratic, about the education of a rich man’s son, that “prig,” Dewey called him.⁷ The voice is a tutor whose task is to condition the son for the onslaught of society’s constructions in preparation for republican citizenship. But Rousseau does not set out an instructor’s guide. Rather, by a lengthy series of circumstances encountered by child and tutor, Emile offers intuitively drawn explanations that advise on nature’s way, preparations for society’s vain world, and how to reconcile nature and society.

At all times, a teacher must counteract the societal forces of “vice and error” by “manipulating pressures that will work with nature and not against it.”⁸ “You think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is only learning the map.” Dewey saw this last phrase as describing “the defect of teaching about things instead of bringing to pass an acquaintance with the relations of the things themselves.”⁹ Rousseau prepared the way for subsequent enquiry and experimentation, most usefully for modern Progressive education, that was undertaken by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

Rousseau was not interested in educating the peasantry or rural town folks. Pestalozzi, however, used Emile and Rousseau’s The Social Contract (also 1762) as models for a radically innovative pedagogy that extrapolated the one-on-one dialogue suggested by Emile. In the beginning, Pestalozzi abandoned theological studies to farm in native Switzerland. There, he took in poor children in an attempt to prepare them for a trade. An unsuccessful venture, he then focused on the importance of a mother’s role in early education, the development of individual faculties to enable independent thought and action, the central role of nature, and of Rousseau’s naturalism. Finally, he directed the Yverdon Institute, again a school for children of local workers and the poor.

Pestalozzi believed that a child’s innate faculties should evolve to enjoy independent thinking by proceeding from observation to comprehension and only then to the formulation of ideas. Religion-born morality was a preeminent component. Practically, this involved group and participatory activities in writing, singing, drawing, physical exercise, collecting, field trips, and mapmaking. He regarded “education as a fostering of all the potentialities inherent in a human being as a process which must be rooted in natural relationships and conditions.”¹⁰ His “method” received Europe-wide attention and attracted foreign pupils and observers.

A few American education reformers were attracted to Prussian education methods. The few included Horace Mann, Calvin E. Stowe, and Henry Barnard, each post-1850. Their interest was not on gymnasium but the volksschule, or people’s schools. They were impressed to find that, in some principalities, schooling was compulsory and state endowed for children age five to fourteen, that the state had special tertiary schools to train teachers (seminaries or normal schools), and that educ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Biography
• Preface
• Abbreviations and acronyms to notes and captions
• Conditions
• The aesthetics of progress
• The city scientific
• Appendices
• References
• Index