Read the best vintage articles culled from our archives—including Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark essays, “In the Cause of Architecture,” written for RECORD and published beginning in 1908. View PDFs of the original pages, too!
This business building, the architectural creation of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright of Chicago, is reproduced in many excellent photographs, some of which will be shown in this article and others in the March number of the Architectural Record.
The design for this handsome house bears unusually close relationship to its site: a small, wooded and rocky outcropping overlooking Long Island Sound.
In 1910, Cubism was beginning to make itself known, though some of the artists that Gelett Burgess, a draftsman and illustrator by trade, writes of, such as Picasso, had already made something of a mark (the "Blue Period" was several years in the past). But this essay, which Burgess shopped around before having it purchased by Architectural Record, has become known as a seminal work on this group, even though it is not taken entirely seriously.
Radical though it be, the work here illustrated is dedicated to a cause conservative in the best sense of the word. At no point does it involve denial of the elemental law and order inherent in all great architecture; rather it is a declaration of love for the spirit of that law and order and a reverential recognition of the elements that made its ancient letter in its time value and beautiful.
“Nature has made creatures only; Art has made Men.” Nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason every struggle for truth in the arts and for the freedom that should go with the truth has always had its own peculiar load of disciples, neophytes and quacks.
The Machine is the architect’s tool – whether he likes it or not. Unless he masters it, the Machine has mastered him. The Machine? What is the machine?
John Ruskin and William turned away from the machine and all it represented in modern art and craft. They saw the deadly threat it was to all they loved as such – and eventually turned again to fight it, to the death – their death. They are memories now.