First.

Wright, Kitty Hawk, 10:35 A.M., 1903

On this day in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful man-powered airplane flight, near Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Happy Birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright

Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.

Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867

Happy Birthday, Wright

I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.

Wilbur Wright, born on this day in 1867

Experts are the worst.

S.

As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Happy Birthday, Wright

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject--marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless excess and the demoralization of the profit-system -- yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. 

Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming.

Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867, from A Testament

Authenticity.

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

Philip K. Dick, from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

Thank you, Casey.

Knows.

An expert is man who has stopped thinking because "he knows."

Frank Lloyd Wright

Treasures.

Wright, Hampton Court House, 1765

On the following morning, the sun darted his beams from over the hills through the low lattice window. I rose at an early hour, and looked out between the branches of eglantine which overhung the casement. To my surprise Scott was already up and forth, seated on a fragment of stone, and chatting with the workmen employed on the new building. I had supposed, after the time he had wasted upon me yesterday, he would be closely occupied this morning, but he appeared like a man of leisure, who had nothing to do but bask in the sunshine and amuse himself.

I soon dressed myself and joined him. He talked about his proposed plans of Abbotsford; happy would it have been for him could he have contented himself with his delightful little vine-covered cottage, and the simple, yet hearty and hospitable style, in which he lived at the time of my visit. The great pile of Abbotsford, with the huge expense it entailed upon him, of servants, retainers, guests, and baronial style, was a drain upon his purse, a tax upon his exertions, and a weight upon his mind, that finally crushed him.

As yet, however, all was in embryo and perspective, and Scott pleased himself with picturing out his future residence, as he would one of the fanciful creations of his own romances. "It was one of his air castles," he said, "which he was reducing to solid stone and mortar." About the place were strewed various morsels from the ruins of Melrose Abbey, which were to be incorporated in his mansion. He had already constructed out of similar materials a kind of Gothic shrine over a spring, and had surmounted it by a small stone cross.

Among the relics from the Abbey which lay scattered before us, was a most quaint and antique little lion, either of red stone, or painted red, which hit my fancy. I forgot whose cognizance it was; but I shall never forget the delightful observations concerning old Melrose to which it accidentally gave rise. The Abbey was evidently a pile that called up all Scott's poetic and romantic feelings; and one to which he was enthusiastically attached by the most fanciful and delightful of his early associations. He spoke of it, I may say, with affection. "There is no telling," said he, "what treasures are hid in that glorious old pile. It is a famous place for antiquarian plunder; there are such rich bits of old time sculpture for the architect, and old time story for the poet. There is as rare picking in it as a Stilton cheese, and in the same taste—the mouldier the better."

Washington Irving, from Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey

Great.

Is this tiny pond

The great big lake in which

I swam as boy?

Richard Wright

Thanks, Rachel.

Awake.

Pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?

How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom -- as declared, 1776?

Frank Lloyd Wright, from A Testament

Seldom.

Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all.

Frank Lloyd Wright, from A Testament

I don't agree with this, but it's interesting to think about.

Within.

Having no roots, they can only age and decay, so studious, sincere youth retires, defeated. American youth, capable of becoming serious competent artists, under such pressure as this on every side, confused, try not to give up -- or "fall in line." This is the nature of about all that can be called American education in the arts and architecture at this time. 

As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you"--that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy.

Frank Lloyd Wright, from A Testament

Happy Birthday, Wright.

Wright, Wright Home and Studio, Great Room, 1889

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this day in 1867.

Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him. This of course not antagonistic by sympathetic to the growth of all men as brothers. Free emulation not imitation of the "bravest and the best" is to be expected of him.

Uncommon he may and will and should become as inspiration to his fellows, not a reflection upon them, not to be resented but accepted--and in this lies the only condition of the common man's survival. So only is he intrinsic to democracy.

Persistently holding quality above quantity only as he attempts to live a superior life of his own, and to whatsoever degree in whatever case he finds it; this is his virtue in a democracy such as ours was designed to be.

Only this sense of proportion affords tranquility of spirit, in itself beauty, in either character of action. Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm. The assumption of the "firm countenance, lips compressed" in denial or resentment is not known to her as it is known to civilization. Such negation by human countenance may be moral (civilization is inclined to morality) but even so not nature. Again exuberance is repose but never excess ...

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?

Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. 

Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority?

Frank Lloyd Wright, from A Testament

Soars.

No bird soars in a calm.

Wilbur Wright

Experience.

Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.

Frank Lloyd Wright

S.

As we live and as we are, Simplicity - with a capital "S" - is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Invest.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Vice-versa.

Hansen, The Woodcutter, 1985

INTAKE INTERVIEW

What is today’s date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice-versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

Franz Wright

Breath.

Ranzoni, Landscape with the Ruins of an Ancient Arch, 1914

Space is the breath of art.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Happy birthday, Wright.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this day in 1867.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America ...