Lloyd Wrights: Organic Architecture - Essay Example

A well-known example of organic architecture is Falling water above, the residence Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Kaufman family in rural Pennsylvania. Wright had many choices to locate a home on this large site but chose to place the home directly over the waterfall and creek creating a close, yet noisy dialog with the rushing water and the steep site. The horizontal striations of stone masonry with daring cantilevers of colored beige concrete blend with native rock outcroppings and the wooded environment.

Organic architecture is a living tradition that is taking on new and exciting directions. It is not a unified movement but is diverse, perverse, contradictory, and mercurial. Always controversial and difficult to pin down, it is best experienced "in the round" with all one's senses by visiting real buildings. Sometimes called "the other tradition", it has a long and celebrated history, from Ancient Greece to Art Nouveau. Organic architecture is rooted in a passion for life, nature, and natural forms, and is full of the vitality of the natural world with its biological forms and processes.

Emphasizing beauty and harmony, its free-flowing curves and expressive forms are sympathetic to the human body, mind, and spirit. In a well-designed "organic" building, we feel better and freer.  The fact that the rectilinear, orthogonal mode came to dominate the 20th century is a reflection of materialist values of an industrially driven age. The post-industrial age is awakening to a new world, which also echoes an older and wiser vision. The re-emergence of organic design represents a new freedom of thought; an expression of hope for the future.

1This is affecting most fields of design from products and furniture, lighting and textile design to architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design. As this occurs, organic design is becoming less of a fringe style than a mainstream design trend. The new "freestyle" approach has also been influenced by modern philosophy as expounded by such writers as Fritjof Capra, and scientific ideas as diverse as advanced astrophysics, chaos theory, and James Lovelocks Gaia theory (that describes the living Earth, "Gaia", as a self-regulating superorganism).

There is a parallel here with the effect that Charles Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution had on Victorian architecture, inspiring decorative natural forms and motifs.