Author Description

In May 1939, when London's architecture could only wait helplessly before the coming destruction and man's spirit—and spiritual claims—were at a low ebb, Frank Lloyd Wright delivered four talks to some young British architects. In these talks he affirmed his belief in the future with a positive conviction that was reinforced by the derision with which his acidulous wit reacted against the sterilities of the past. Wright on this occasion was as ever the conscious radical jeffersonian whose message resonates with every "younger generation": At the outset I may as well confess that I have come here with a minority an informal Declaration if Independence. Great Britain had one from us, July 4, 1776: a formal Declaration of Independence which concerned taxes; this one, May 2, 1939, concerns the spirit. Am I, then, a rebel, too? Yes. But only a rebel as one who has in his actual work, for a life-time—or is it more—been carrying out in practice day by day, what he believes to be true. This book is the verbatim text of those four talks, which a champion of Wright's has called "one of the best statements of his principles and his ideas." The talks, like all of Wright's productions, are free-ranging and spontaneous in inspiration, solid and workmanlike in execution. In speaking to Londoners at this point in their history and at this point in his own development, Wright is prompted to universalize his concept of organic architecture. Perhaps more than this in his other books, the emphasis shifts from an American—Usonian—architecture growing indigenously from the soil of the American heartland to a more general concept of an architecture than can take root in many landscapes as an honest expression of both the nature of diverse materials and the nature and living needs of diverse populations. What is architecture anyway? Is it a vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying tastes of the various lords of