Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led To Architecture traces how Wright extrapolated the principles that structured his mentor Louis Sullivan’s ornament to the design of a whole building. Author Sidney Robinson discusses how 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. Wright 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.

Speaker: Sidney K. Robinson
Architect/educator Sidney K. Robinson has taught at Iowa State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. His books include The Architecture of Alden Dow, The Prairie School in Iowa, The Continuous Present of Organic Architecture, and Inquiry Into the Picturesque, as well as numerous articles on Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff and organic design.

Purchase Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led To Architecture here.

Thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy for providing use of this video with the OA+D Archives.