Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

Organic architecture

I'm spending part of this Fourth of July holiday building a Lego model of one of the great works of American architecture, Fallingwater. Building this is a fascinating process; it's from a plan worked out by a professional, and he did an excellent job of conveying a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright's key ideas in the building process. For example, one begins by building up the landscape; the point at which you begin building up the house proper is only clear in retrospect, the house grows out of the environment so seamlessly. Then you assemble a construction which is unambiguously "house;" but when you attach it to the already-laid foundation, the boundary again becomes confusing. The wall of the house could just as easily be a rock escarpment; the window, a waterfall.

It's giving me a real appreciation for FLW's work on this house. I need to walk around and look at some other houses and see how they handle the relationship of the structure to its environment; I suspect that a big part of the reason that so many suburban houses look, well, so suburban is that they have no clear relationship to it at all, and look rather like they got dropped on an otherwise empty lawn by aliens.
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  • 7 comments

arndis

July 6 2010, 00:54:57 UTC 5 years ago

You're right about surburbia not having much relationship to the land. This becomes obvious on visiting a suburb where the trees have had time to grow up and the gardens to grow in -- it still looks suburban, but also like someplace that humans might want to live for reasons other than it being cheap.

Other factors are that suburban buildings are so rarely in scale with the landscape, or made of materials that belong to the place. Much but not all modernist architecture has that second disease, which is why it too rarely looks like it was meant to be there.

At least, in my experience.