Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

‘Architecture’s Odd Couple’: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson

#1
C C Offline
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...story.html

EXCERPT: “When architects get jealous, it always means there’s something special going on,” said Ulrich Franzen, a brutalist architect who died in 2012. He’s one of the large cast of characters who enliven Hugh Howard’s entertaining double biography of Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. “Architecture’s Odd Couple” traces the career of these two extraordinarily long-lived designers from before the beginning of the 20th century until almost the end of it. It casts their rivalry — and sometimes bitter personal relationship — as essentially productive, a wary dance of scorn and admiration, and ultimately mutual influence and emulation, between two men who advanced American architecture from the Victorian age to the emergence of the post-modernism in the 1970s.

They were very different personalities, with radically different approaches to the craft they pursued. Wright was an idealist, steeped in a romantic rhetoric of Art and Democracy, American to his core, intent on reforming the world through an organic architecture that was rooted to place, embedded in the natural world, horizontal in form, and pre-industrial in its rich, handcrafted detail. Johnson was an opportunist, a dilettante and a showman, better at finessing the social, bureaucratic and economic obstacles to building than at actual design. Wright had ideas and made them manifest; Johnson played with ideas and made them sexy. Between them, they shepherded American architecture through the age of muscular modernism, with its utopian aspirations in the real world, to the age of discourse, where what architects say about their work often matters as much as the work itself....
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Insane Canadian Architecture Yazata 3 160 Nov 17, 2023 09:34 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Research 1000s of ancient structures still hidden deep in Amazon (rain forest architecture) C C 0 81 Oct 11, 2023 04:26 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article 2019 Notre Dame fire reveals a major surprise hidden in cathedral's architecture C C 0 56 Mar 20, 2023 11:04 PM
Last Post: C C
  Wood ash cement & fired brick hut (primitive architecture) + New aquaculture designs C C 0 89 May 7, 2022 05:57 PM
Last Post: C C
  The ancient Persian way to keep cool (architecture) C C 1 98 Aug 12, 2021 03:45 AM
Last Post: elte
  Derinkuyu: the ancient underground city, once home to 20,000 people (architecture) C C 0 65 Jul 16, 2021 06:02 PM
Last Post: C C
  Transparent wood could be architecture's windows of tomorrow C C 0 136 Oct 8, 2020 09:17 PM
Last Post: C C
  Hostile architecture C C 3 365 Aug 26, 2020 12:32 PM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  The coolest architecture on Earth is in Antarctica C C 0 273 Jan 11, 2020 03:13 AM
Last Post: C C
  5 perfect examples of Mid-Mod Architecture that no longer exist C C 2 319 Jan 2, 2020 10:23 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)