Crossing Boundaries: How Ornament Led to Architecture - Paperback

by Sidney K. Robinson (Author)

Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most noted architect, crossed boundaries as he thought and as he designed. He discussed subjects like democracy, machine, convention, alternatively as advocate and adversary, and his architecture crossed the line between inside and out with projections and recesses whose complex boundaries add depth to our experience of architecture and to our understanding of ideas.

Wright also crossed boundaries of tradition in search of a new architecture he called "organic architecture" that embodied a unique American culture based on nature rather than imported precedent. For him, nature was not just the outside world; it included his own mind that interpreted nature by means of abstraction not imitation. That interpretation was initiated when he saw his mentor Louis Sullivan draw his amazing ornament.

Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright traces how Wright extrapolated the principles that structured Sullivan's ornament to the design of a whole building. Author Sidney K. Robinson proposes that the graphic pattern Wright used in An Autobiography is a diagram of an architect crossing between building and nature, between asserting and questioning. Following this pattern, Wright came to see ornament from the perspective of architecture and architecture from the perspective of ornament. That is how ornament can lead to architecture.

Author Biography

Sidney K. Robinson is an educator, author, and architect whose lifelong fascination with Frank Lloyd Wright began as a ten-year-old perusing his architect father's Wendingen publication on Wright and by reading his Autobiography in high school. Interest in Wright led him to work for Alden Dow after graduating from Columbia University School of Architecture some four decades after Dow. Robinson returned to his hometown of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan for a doctorate in architectural history with a dissertation on Taliesin and Alden Dow's Studio. Robinson taught at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture for more than ten years until it ceased operations at Taliesin. He also taught design, history, and theory at Iowa State University and the University of Illinois at Chicago with visiting positions at the University of Michigan and Carleton College. Robinson has written books and articles on Wright, Dow, Bruce Goff (whose 1950 Ford House he has lived in for more than 35 years), the Picturesque, and historical preservation.