Ideation as a natural process

Frank Lloyd Wright wasn't just an outstanding architect. He was also a colourful character, a self-publicist who was not afraid to speak his mind: “Early in my career...I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry.” Not surprising, then, Wright's musings are often quoted. For example, his view on ideation suggests a natural formgiving process that improves through practice: “Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express". (Frank Lloyd Wright, Idea and Essence, September 7, 1958).

Mind's eye

It is said that Frank Lloyd Wright was a mind's eye architect *. '[I] conceive the building in the imagination, not on paper but in the mind, thoroughly - before touching paper. Let it live there - gradually taking more definite form before committing it to the draughting board'. So Wright allowed the idea to germinate in his mind until it erupted as an "insight". The big solution, he believed, must emerge first, then design development and detailing could follow. And this without first jotting down his ideas or preliminary sketches in the pages of notebooks (at least, no sketchbooks have survived). Wright, it seems, built up a "narrative" in his mind's eye, a kind of imaginary designerly walk before committing "the story" to paper. Evidence of his design process, which he described as "fleeting", is that once he put pencil to paper, Wright talked as he worked, what appears like "thinking aloud". And on the drafting table, with T-square and a drafting triangel, and surrounded by his Taliesin apprentices, he talked in an undertone that was both directed to his pupils and a preoccupied expression of his thoughts. * Howard, H. 2016. Architecture's Odd Couple. NY and London: Bloomsbury Press.