Public Libraries Sponsor Talk on Frank Lloyd Wright
By
Frank Lloyd Wright
Racine, WI – Submitted by K. Van Outryve, the public libraries of Oak Park, Illinois and Racine, Wisconsin, recently sponsored a talk by New York City architects Anthony Romeo and Dale Laurin, titled: “Can We Really Be at Home in the World?—the Life & Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.” Both speakers teach architectural history at the City University of New York (CUNY) College of Technology and are on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in Manhattan. Their talk was based on Aesthetic Realism, the education founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, the American poet and philosopher who stated: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
They discussed works from the long, prolific career of America’s great architect, who lived from 1867 to 1959, from his early house designs–many of which still grace the streets of Oak Park–to his groundbreaking Johnson Wax Building in Racine, to his final achievement, New York’s Guggenheim Museum, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition of the architect’s work. They showed how Wright’s designs put together opposites in a way new in American architecture.
They quoted Eli Siegel’s book Self and World: “We all of us start with a here, ever so snug and ever so immediate. And this here is surrounded strangely, endlessly, by a there: in other words, we are always meeting what is not ourselves, and we have to do something about it. We have to be ourselves, and give to this great and diversified there, which is not ourselves, what it deserves. This means we have to be personal and impersonal, snug and exterior.”
S.C.Johnson residence, "Wingspread," Racine, Wisconsin Photo Credit: Anthony Romeo
Here and there, snug and exterior are related to opposites the speakers showed were central in Wright’s work: inside and outside. Wright himself once wrote that the outer wall of a house should not just be “the side of a box” but should help “to bring the outside world into the house and let the inside of the house go outside.”
Meanwhile, in his personal life, Wright, like most people, could see the world as inimical, to be fought, not welcomed. His arguments with clients and contractors are legendary, yet, as Laurin and Romeo said, “Wright’s inward debates and self-questioning were deeper than any of his biographers recognized. He was trying to answer a question that Aesthetic Realism sees as crucial in the life of every person: Is the world to be respected or despised?”
Heurtley House, Oak Park, Illinois Photo Credit: Anthony Romeo
Anthony Romeo, Director of Capital Projects for Queens Library, described how Wright’s work was inspired by the hills and plants of his native Wisconsin, which he saw as having large, impersonal meaning. Dale Laurin, a team leader at the New York City Department of Design and Construction, said, “Aesthetic Realism explains that contempt for the world and people different from ourselves is the cause of all injustice, including racism, and war. Architecture, like all art, is always based on respect—and the best work of Frank Lloyd Wright shows this.”
This talk was enthusiastically received by audiences in Oak Park and Racine, including an official of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. who called it “outstanding.”
K. Van Outryve is a journalist and consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.
Posted @ 9:00 a.m.
