Frank Lloyd Wright the Art and Craft of the Machine 1901 Summary

The Art & Arts and crafts of the Motorcar

Frank Lloyd Wright | Apr 7, 2021

This essay extract has been taken from ane of Frank Lloyd Wright'southward earliest and most seminal lectures where he seized upon the ways in which industry, pedagogy, and compages could foster more than inclusive and equal communities.

Introduction by Jennifer Gray, invitee editor of the Summer 2020 Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, The Ground of Democracy: Frank Lloyd Wright on Customs, Education, and Opportunity.

In 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright delivered a seminal address called "The Art and Craft of the Machine" to an audience at Hull House, an organization that offered social services, such as education, childcare, and legal aid, to poor communities in Chicago. The themes Wright outlined in his talk would preoccupy him throughout his life, namely the relationship between machines, instruction, architecture, and democracy. Calling the machine "the great forerunner of commonwealth," Wright invokes an argument advanced past the French author Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 that reflects on the power of the printed word. Before the age of Gutenberg, architecture centered on the handicrafts and was the "universal writing of humanity." The invention of the printing press—arguably the get-go groovy machine, Wright points out— transformed architecture but as well social relations. Books democratized access to knowledge. While any individual book may appear imperceptible or frail, the sheer number of them, the number of people reading them, and the ability to reprint them renders "printed thought … imperishable … indestructible." Widespread literacy and access to knowledge ultimately contributed to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, including the American Revolution.

Wright embraces the machine, broadly speaking, as capable of reducing human labor and expanding lives and "thereby the ground of the Democracy upon which we insist." From the standpoint of architecture, the machine reduces waste and lowers costs so that "the poor besides as the rich may enjoy to-twenty-four hours the beautiful surface treatments of make clean, stiff forms." Indeed throughout his career Wright would experiment with various ways to harness the advantages of machine production to design quality, affordable housing for large numbers of people. Wright laments, towards the finish of his essay, that education in America has not forged connections nonetheless between "Science and Art" or adopted curriculums of "nature-study." However progressive educators, such every bit John Dewey, who founded the experimental Laboratory School at the Academy of Chicago in 1896, and Wright's ain aunts, Jane and Ellen Lloyd Jones, founders of Hillside Home Schoolhouse in 1886, were in fact advancing new pedagogical models centered on agile learning from feel and on unifying practical or manual training with intellectual pursuit. Informed past their theories, Wright ultimately attempted to bind together these forces— education, machines, compages, and democracy—when he founded the Taliesin Fellowship in the 1930s.

… The Machine was the great forerunner of democracy.

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That the Machine has dealt Art in the 1000 old sense a death-accident, none will deny. The evidence is too substantial.

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Art in the thou old sense—meaning Art in the sense of structural tradition, whose craft is fashioned upon the handicraft ideal, ancient or modern; an art wherein this class and that grade as structural parts were laboriously joined in such a style every bit to beautifully emphasize the way of the joining: the million and 1 ways of beautifully satisfying bare structural necessities, which have come down to us chiefly through the books equally "Fine art."

For the purpose of suggesting hastily and therefore crudely wherein the machine has sapped the vitality of this fine art, let us presume Architecture in the erstwhile sense every bit a plumbing equipment representative of Traditional-art, and Printing every bit a fitting representation of the Machine.

What printing—the car—has done for architecture— the fine fine art—will have been done in measure of time for all art immediately fashioned upon the early on handicraft ideal.

With a masterful mitt Victor Hugo, a noble lover and a slap-up student of architecture, traces her fall in "Notre Dame."

The prophecy of Frollo, that "The book will kill the edifice," I retrieve was to me equally a male child one of the grandest sad things of the earth.

After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb way, showing how in center ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one indicate—compages—he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves nether the discipline of architecture. The were the workmen of the great piece of work. The architect, the poet, the chief, summed up in his person the sculpture and windows, music which set up his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs—there was nothing which was not forced in club to make something of itself in that time, to come up and frame itself in the edifice.

Thus downwardly to the fourth dimension of Gutenberg architecture is the principal writing—the universal writing of humanity.

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In the fifteenth century everything changes.

Man idea discovers a style of perpetuating itself, not but more resisting than compages, but however more simple and easy.

Architecture is dethroned.

Guttenberg's letters of pb are well-nigh to supersede Orpheus' letters of stone.

The book is about to kill the edifice.
The invention of printing was the greatest consequence in history. It was the first great automobile, after the neat urban center.

It is man thought stripping off one grade and donning another.

Printed, idea is more imperishable than ever—it is volatile, indestructible.

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All the life, leaving architecture, comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs and flows, press swells and grows. That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in edifice is futurity to be expended in books; and architecture, every bit it was, is dead, irretrievably slain by the printed book; slain because it endures for a shorter time; slain because human idea has found a more simple medium of expression, which costs less in human being endeavor; because human thought has been rendered volatile and indestructible, reaching uniformly and irresistibly the four corners of the globe and for all.

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The Car is Intellect mastering the drudgery of world that plastic fine art may alive; that the margin of leisure and strength by which man's life upon the earth can exist made cute, may immeasurably widen; its function ultimately to emancipate man expression!

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Information technology is not more likely that the medium of artistic expression itself has broadened and changed until a new definition and new direction must be given the art activity of the future, and that the Machine has finally made for the artist, whether he will yet own it or non, a splendid stardom between the Art of old and the Art to come? A stardom made by the tool which frees human labor, lengthens and broadens the life of the simplest human, thereby the basis of the Democracy upon which we insist.

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At present let us learn from the Motorcar.

It teaches us that the beauty of forest lies offset in its qualities as wood; no treatment that did not bring out these qualities all the time could be plastic, and therefore not appropriate—so not beautiful, the machine teaches u.s.a., if
we take left it to the machine that certain simple forms and handling are suitable to bring out the beauty of woods and certain forms are not; that all wood-carving is apt to be a forcing of the material, an insult to its effectively possibilities every bit a material having in itself intrinsically artistic properties, of which its beautiful markings is 1, its texture another, its color a tertiary.

The car, past its wonderful cutting, shaping, smoothing, and repetitive capacity, has fabricated information technology possible to and then use information technology without waste matter that the poor too equally the rich may savour to-solar day beautiful surface treatments of make clean, stiff forms …

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I will venture to say, from personal observation and some feel, that not i artist in one hundred has taken pains to thus educate himself. I volition go further and say what I believe to be true, that non i educational institution in America has equally however attempted to forge the connecting link between Scientific discipline and Art by grooming the artist to his bodily tools, or, by a process of nature-study that develops in him the power of independent thought, fitting him to apply them properly.

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Upon this faith in Art as the organic heart quality of the scientific frame of things, I base of operations a belief that we must look to the artist brain, of all brains, to grasp the significance to club of this thing nosotros telephone call the Machine.

This essay by Frank Lloyd Wright, The Fine art & Craft of the Machine, originally appeared in the Summer 2020 member-exclusive Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly mag featuring guest editor Jennifer Gray.

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