Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright - by Sidney K Robinson (Paperback)

About the Book

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most noted architect, crossed boundaries as he thought and as he designed. He discussed subjects like democracy, machine, convention, alternatively as advocate and adversary, and his architecture crossed the line between inside and out with projections and recesses whose complex boundaries add depth to our experienc...

Book Synopsis

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most noted architect, crossed boundaries as he thought and as he designed. He discussed subjects like democracy, machine, convention, alternatively as advocate and adversary, and his architecture crossed the line between inside and out with projections and recesses whose complex boundaries add depth to our experience of architecture and to our understanding of ideas.

Wright also crossed boundaries of tradition in search of a new architecture he called "organic architecture" that embodied a unique American culture based on nature rather than imported precedent. For him, nature was not just the outside world; it included his own mind that interpreted nature by means of abstraction not imitation. That interpretation was initiated when he saw his mentor Louis Sullivan draw his amazing ornament.

Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright traces how Wright extrapolated the principles that structured Sullivan's ornament to the design of a whole building. Author Sidney K. Robinson proposes that the graphic pattern Wright used in An Autobiography is a diagram of an architect crossing between building and nature, between asserting and questioning. Following this pattern, Wright came to see ornament from the perspective of architecture and architecture from the perspective of ornament. That is how ornament can lead to architecture.

Review Quotes

"Robinson focuses a major section of this analysis on the important place of ornament in Wright's work, arguing that . . . conventional boundaries separating ornament and architecture were crossed: ornament leads to architecture. This is no easy argument, but through analysis and specific examples, Robinson is persuasive, leading to a still deeper understanding of Wright's work and its meaning." --David G. De Long, professor emeritus of architecture, University of Pennsylvania

"This new study by Sidney Robinson succeeds in . . . advancing a surprising and convincing new argument about Wright's use of ornament that . . . will undoubtedly take its place on the small bookshelf of classics of the genre like Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural Content, Norris Kelley Smith's pioneering 1966 study." --Robert Bruegmann, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

About the Author

Sidney K. Robinson is an educator, author, and architect whose lifelong fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright began as a ten-year-old perusing his architect father's Wendingen publication on Wright and by reading his Autobiography in high school. Interest in Wright led him to work for Alden Dow after graduating from Columbia University School of Architecture some four decades after Dow. Robinson returned to his hometown of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan for a doctorate in architectural history with a dissertation on Taliesin and Alden Dow's Studio. Robinson taught at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture for more than ten years until it ceased operations at Taliesin. He also taught design, history, and theory at Iowa State University and the University of Illinois at Chicago with visiting positions at the University of Michigan and Carleton College. Robinson has written books and articles on Wright, Dow, Bruce Goff (whose 1950 Ford House he has lived in for more than 35 years), the Picturesque, and historical preservation.