Monday, July 13, 2020

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.

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