Yes­ter­day I picked up this book at a used book store down­town. I’ve never read Wright before so when I saw this beau­ti­ful cover look­ing out at me I knew that I needed to. It’s a chrono­log­i­cal selec­tion of his writ­ing bro­ken up into sev­eral sec­tions with regards to his chang­ing envi­ron­ment, phi­los­o­phy, and style. So far I’ve only read his ear­li­est works from his early 20s to early 30s, around the turn of the century.

Nearly every para­graph is quotable. Wright’s pen spews forth insight even when the sub­ject may not be exclu­sively archi­tec­tural in nature. Take this for example:

“Use­ful Things . Avoid all things which have no real use or mean­ing, and make those which have espe­cially sig­nif­i­cant, for there is no one part of your build­ing that may not be made a thing of beauty in itself as related to the whole.”

and this:

“Dec­o­ra­tion . Dec­o­ra­tion can tell your friends lots of things that you do not know and would not like if you did. It is of no use to you unless you do under­stand and appre­ci­ate it. It would not be suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for you to have it just because it looks rich or because some­body else had it.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, Archi­tec­ture and the Machine 1894

Ince­dently, my great great grand­fa­ther William Gates lived in Chicago and became good friends with Wright and even com­mis­sioned him to cre­ate orig­i­nal pot­tery for his Terra Cotta Com­pany bet­ter known as TECO . I haven’t had a chance to visit Chicago yet, but my sis­ter has recently relo­cated there so I am plan­ning to go.

I hope this can be an ongo­ing theme of dis­cus­sion here as I con­tinue to learn about archi­tec­ture and share my find­ings. Please feel free to send in related information.