Architecture and the Romantic Tradition

In applying the romantic theory to architecture, Wright holds that a building should be organic. He defines this term in many ways. In a sense the whole of his work, both in his buildings and in his writings, has been effort to state and to embody the organic idea. According to this theory, the form of a building should be determined by its relations to its site and the human use for which it is intended, by the nature of the materials used in its construction, and by esthetic principle of unity analogous to the living, changing unity of a plant animal. Integration, Wright says, or even the very word 'organic' itself, means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose. In another attempt he says that romance is an earnest life-long search for that thing growing out from within the nature of the thing . . . not from anything applied to that thing from without.3

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Romance · Sociology · Visual arts · Wright · Architecture · Architecture and Cultural Influences

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