I've been working on Frank Lloyd Wright since my MIT doctoral years; on his built and unbuilt
community designs.
And the object that we're using for the focal point of my work here is the first site plan
that he did for Galesburg, sometimes called Galesburg Country Homes, sometimes called
The Acres.
It's a housing development about ten miles
south of Kalamazoo.
A group property owners figured that they
would be able to afford much more land if they went outside of town.
They bought a large track.
They approached Wright about designing the subdivision for them, and he agreed to do
it if he could design some of the houses.
He wouldn't charge them for the subdivision plan.
And using the 100 foot survey lines that they
had, he located at first the centers of all the lots on these topo vertices.
And then he would slide lots along the lines in both directions.
So, in fact, every one of the lots is centered along one of those lines and would be very
easy to layout in practice.
When you look very closely, you see these
secondary little circles.
And it turns out there's 17 or so of those and each one depicts a choice open to one
of the communal members.
So each member would choose one of those lots,
and the other one then would go unbuilt on and would be communal space.
And so it turns out that there are almost a million and a half possible configurations
of this.
But, yet, he's in complete control at the same time.
It's brilliant.
The most interesting aspect of the work that
I'm doing that you can literally see here and that we'll talk about with some of the
other drawings is the incorporation of movement.
It's the presence of movement and the changing perspective in his conception of a place or
an object.
And the relationship of that changing perception to the landscape.
How it helps you understand the landscape that you're in and the role of that object
within it.
Okay, so the question of movement and how do you see movement in a drawing.
Well, I would think maybe in two ways.
One is this, the sinuous curving, continual non-stopping nature of these roads.
As you look at the drawing , your eye moves.
Right.
As though you were looking at a vine crawling up the side of a building.
You cannot look at this drawing without your
eye following that.
And so it's simulating.
It's not only representing, it's simulating movement there.
That's one.
The other as we start to look at some of the
other drawings, and we'll see how he actually is moving the drawings and moving pieces of
the drawings and moving layers in relation to one another.
This is the first initial study plan for the great house known as Wingspread that Wright
designed and built in 1937 for Herbert Johnson who was the owner of the Johnson Wax Company.
On this drawing, there's a wonderful little
diagram drawn here of a kind of an octagonal central core with four wings spinning off
eccentrically.
And when he began this drawing, it appears that he has this octagonal-like core, and
that the first wing follows the orientation that's in this little diagram.
But then it's cut out and moved and pasted back in.
And then that position, that relationship of this wing to the core is duplicated.
The initial orientation that was lost in that
is maintained in ghost lines and garden walls and the orientation of a fireplace.
And, in fact, it physically was moved.
And then over the life of this drawing, you'll notice how it's cut in the corners.
The sheet itself was rotated on the drawing board.
So it's a very dynamic kind of process that's going on.
This cut and paste method is a way of dealing
with or--or reenacting movement.
And it's a fascinating process for so many reasons.
One is that if you've ever designed a building,
you lay out the plan.
You know, typically you tape your sheet down, it has one orientation.
And you get comfortable and familiar with that.
And if you come back to it later and it's upside down or it's at an angle, it seems
foreign, and every architect will turn it back to the original orientation because that's
what they understand.
That's the imprint it's made on their mind.
Well, in this project, Wright intentionally
seems to be subventing that and changing that.
So he's constantly thinking of it in a much more complex way that becomes a modus operandi
for some of the later designs.