Posts Tagged ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’
A Geodesic Life
After three years of work—and more than a few twists and turns—my latest book, Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, is finally here. I think it’s the best thing that I’ve ever done, or at least the one book that I’m proudest to have written. After last week’s writeup in The Economist, a nice review ran this morning in the New York Times, which is a dream come true, and you can check out excerpts today at Fast Company and Slate. (At least one more should be running this weekend in The Daily Beast.) If you want to hear more about it from me, I’m doing a virtual event today sponsored by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and on Saturday August 13, I’ll be holding a discussion at the Oak Park Public Library with Sarah Holian of the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, which will be also be available to view online. There’s a lot more to say here, and I expect to keep talking about Fuller for the rest of my life, but for now, I’m just delighted and relieved to see it out in the world at last.
“You’re destroying the scale!”
[Frank Lloyd Wright] often used to tell us, paraphrasing his own essay on house building: “I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, as the human scale. If I had been taller, the scale might have been different…”
Someone once remarked to him, “Whenever I walk into one of your buildings, the doorways are so low my hat gets knocked off.” Mr. Wright merely suggested, “Take your hat off when you come into a house.” While I was at the Fellowship, the tallest apprentice around was Wes Peters, six feet and four inches. Mr. Wright never let him forget about his height, since both Wes and the Taliesin ceilings were six feet four. Occasionally, when we gathered in one of the rooms at Taliesin, Mr. Wright would roar out at Wes, “Sit down, Wes! You’re destroying the scale!”
Frank Lloyd Wright on music and architecture
Music and architecture blossom on the same stem—sublimated mathematics. Mathematics as presented by geometry. Instead of the musician’s systematic staff and intervals, the architect has a modular system as a framework of design. My father, a preacher and music teacher, taught me to see—to listen—to a symphony as an edifice of sound. All my lifetime I have listened to Beethoven—especially—as the master architect of all time: the most profound student of Nature known—one whose inspired imaginative resource is beyond comparison. I am grateful to music and to him for genuine refreshment in architecture—my field of creative endeavor. Dissonance will take care of itself.
Alec Nevala-Lee 