"The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion." Frank Lloyd Wright, "Chapter 4--The Cardboard House" Modern Architecture, Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, page 65
I recently came across a wonderful description in a guidebook about Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the western US. It's in the section on the Hanna or Honeycomb House at Stanford.
"Jean and Paul Hanna both grew up in Minnesota. Married in 1926, they had three children. When they were both teaching at Columbia, between 1925 and 1935, they came across a review of Wright's Princeton lectures of 1930. They subsequently bought the book of them, Modern Architecture, Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, and sat up all night reading it to each other. They were so taken with it that they wrote to Wright, and met him in Taliesin the following summer on a trip to Minnesota." From Heinz, Thomas A. 1999. Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide: West, Volume 3, page 33
It goes on to describe the process they went through to work with Wright to build a house at Stanford, where they re-settled in 1935.
I post on here about Wright buildings not because I'm enamored by his homes and want to live in one like them but because they are interesting, many are in the Madison and Chicago areas, and I'm attracted to his ideas on organic architecture. What I've been thinking about is how the couple became so enthusiastic together that they took turns reading to each other into the night and I guess breaks to talk about it. I wonder if they laughed together at the quote I put above and talked about what it meant. This kind of closeness is what I think is important in life.
Here's the first part of that paragraph starting Chapter 4:
"Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body. Electric wiring for nervous system, plumbing for bowels, heating system and fireplaces for arteries and heart, and windows for eyes, nose, and lungs generally. The structure of the house, too, is a kind of cellular tissue stuck full of bone, complex now, as the confusion of Bedlam and all beside. The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects--objects, 'objects d'art' maybe, but objects always. There the affected affliction sits, ever hungry--for more objects--or plethoric with over plenty. The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion."
Paul Hanna was a leading figure on elementary school education and the Social Studies Editor for World Book Encyclopedia for 35 years. [More on him in "Paul Hanna at Stanford University"] Jean Hanna was also an expert on childhood education, but I haven't found much yet on her career.
Sachs Covered Bridge; Adams County, PA
Sachs Covered Bridge; Adams County, PA
2 comments:
Oh, I think I should have gone through this post before I read Think About Some Films Made in Baltimore. The quote in the sixth paragragh of this post is an interesting analogy. Is it to better illustrate this sentence:"The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion"?
I'm not sure to what extent that whole paragraph is about the indigestion idea. I think Wright's main target in that sentence is what he thought of as too many objects in people's homes, something close to the anti-clutter movement or fad that's spread in the US in recent years. So Wright's homes too often lack the amount of closet and storage space that many Americans think is necessary.
I've noticed that I usually feel more comfortable in homes and offices filled with stuff connected to that person and others who use that space. But I guess that Wright wouldn't. There's an interesting experiment in which people were placed into a room cluttered with stuff and I think the same room without clutter then given a creativity task. It was to come up with various uses for some object--I think a ping-pong ball. Those in the cluttered room tended to come up with more creative uses and a longer list.
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