Art, Vision, and Symmetry

When Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that certain “principles behind the effects” gave his buildings “such vitality, integrity, and magic as they have,” he confronted us with a dual challenge: first, to uncover these principles, and, second, to explain how they yielded the remarkable qualities of “vitality and magic”— always suffused with a clarity, immediacy, and harmony that imbue all his works with a lucent aesthetic “signature.”

He gave us our first clue when he wrote that each building emerges from “the differentiation of a single, certain, simple form.” But then he left it for us to find the “the ideal of internal order, the integration that is organic” that led to and characterized the finished masterpiece.

This book traces the emergence of that “ideal of internal order.” In twelve representative case studies it presents the differentiation process by which a final well-integrated building plan emerges from a single, simple form. We see simple geometries repeat, grow, crystallize, and overlap, usually disciplined by their internal symmetrical structure, to yield unique and beautiful designs. The generative geometries are highlighted and presented in sequence.

The critic can evaluate them for himself; the interested amateur will enrich his understanding of Wright’s works; and the student will find in them an exacting discipline which he may wish to apply to his own work.

To explore the link between method and its aesthetic “magic,”the book then examines his method through the lenses of the sciences of perception. Here we explore basic mechanisms by which the eye and mind make coherent vision possible, and conclude that the freshness, clarity, and vitality of Wright’s oeuvre follow from his discovery and employment of some of the most basic mechanics of perception, by which he created for the eye maximum pleasure from least effort. From this follows a theory of aesthetics.