The Taproot Podcast - 🏛️Frank Lloyd Wright and the Psychology of Architecture

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

#FrankLloydWright #DesignThinking #psychology 🏛️✨ The Psychology of Architecture: Unveiling the Influence of Frank Lloyd Wright 🌟🔮 Explore the profound impact of 🏗️🧠 #architecture as we dive into the inspiring world of #FrankLloydWright! 🌆✨ Discover how Wright's visionary process transcends boundaries, resonating with #psychology, #design, and beyond. 🌌 Join us on this captivating journey where soft sciences meet intuitive design, and where the beauty that defies words awaits. 😍🏡✨ Immerse yourself in the transformative power of Wright's spaces, perfectly blending with nature, functionality, and deep symbolism. Embark on a captivating exploration into the #psychologyofarchitecture today! 🚀🎥🔍 🔑 #ArchitectureInspiration #DesignThinking #SpatialPsychology 🌿 #NaturalHarmony #FunctionalDesign #SymbolicSpaces 💡 #ArchitecturalPhilosophy #HumanSpirit #TimelessBeauty Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]  Email: [e-mail] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. #Jung #Therapy #psychology #EMD #DepthPsychology #anthropology #sociology #philosophy #mythology #psychology #psychotherapy

Hi, this is Joel Blackstock with the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, and today we have an article about architecture that I'm going to read that is called Frank Lloyd Wrong, Why We Didn't Take the Right Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright's Legacy. If you want to look at the article on our blog, in addition to listening to it on the podcast, there are some photographs that go along with it, which make it a little bit easier to see. And so I will begin that article now. So I mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright quite a bit on the blog.

We talk about design and the psychology of design and architecture and psychology in different parts of life. A lot of people have asked why. What is it that they see him, I guess, as kind of dated to lump him in with all of the modernist architects that have flat roofs. So what is it that I see in Wright's work? Why do I think that he is interesting? And the answer is I think his process is a little bit more interesting than all of his designs. Because I think design is always a work in progress.

Or design is always an imperfect process. It's more about finding the way that you do it, not just making the perfect design. Now there's hard answers and there's soft answers in psychology. And so hard answers are objective things like, penicillin cures this infection or this randomized controlled trial shows that this thing works best on this kind of patient for this diagnosis. Soft answers are going to be more subjective and they're going to be less testable.

So when Bessel van der Kolk says something like, you know, neuroscience research shows that the only way that we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves. It makes sense that he's saying that we have to acknowledge all the parts of us. We have to experience those parts. We have to deconstruct ourself into a series of parts. And we have to realize that we are all of those parts, not just the ones that we like and kind of reidentify. Like we can intuitively understand that, but we can't do a test to say, is this right or wrong? There's not a way to do a randomized controlled trial

about that. Yet we know what it means. It's a soft answer. And so, you know, with soft sciences, you're always in the process of trying to get it right, but it's never quite done, you know. And art is never done, goes the quote. You know, it just stops in nice places.

I think Da Vinci said that. And so it might've been Michelangangelo um please don't uh email me um but design is something that will always be us off science you know we'll never build the perfect house or create the definitive couch that never needs any further iteration design is always kind of trying to meld process style meet the limitations of any point in economics and society and manufacturing. And in doing that, it's never done. You don't just say, okay, we did the perfect one. Now let's try and design something else. It's always changing. And so it's probably easier to say what Frank Lloyd Wright was not than what he was. He was not a very good guy. Despite his

talent as an architect, Wright was erratic and just indefensible as a person. He was a narcissist. He was a serial adulterer. He was a liar. He's been called a compulsive liar before. I'm going to say no. He was just a liar because when you are a compulsive liar, you lie about things that do not benefit you. And most of Wright's lies were to get what he wanted. He would lie about the value of art, or he would lie about, you know, when the Frank Lloyd Wright's building in Japan was not demolished

during the earthquake that happened. He went to everybody and was like, my building was the only one that didn't fall down. Well, most of the buildings didn't fall down. But so anyway, most of the things were in service of narcissism. I don't think he was a compulsive liar, but he definitely did not have a problem lying. He was a mean spirit and just kind of an inveterate overspender. He exploited his workers. He's just not a good guy. So that's not why I look up to him or not look up to him, but that's not why I admire his process. I don't look up to him. So many times a person's biography shows clues as to why they have this kind of disordered personality and what they're compensating for.

Wright's biography doesn't really give you a reason for him to be the way that he was. I mean, I think he was just brilliant, and he was prophetically influential. A ton was wrong with the kind of artistic and industrial assumptions of the time, and he knew he was right. He had a massive superiority complex. He knew that he was seeing the future and he didn't mind humiliating people

and telling them that. And so he never really integrated any of his gifts as an artist into a coherent or healthy psyche. He did experience tragedy as an adult. You know, his wife and his children or her child, he married one of his client's wives at one point, and she left her husband, and she was murdered, along with her children and some of his staff at Tally's in his home. But that's pretty late in life. I mean, he was kind of a bad guy before that, so I'm sure that didn't make, you know, that was definitely traumatic for him.

But I don't know that that explains anything like some people try and and do and right also just isn't always a perfect architect like i don't love everything he did um he tries a lot which i think is better than just kind of doing the same thing forever he definitely is like always wrestling with um new ideas and and how to move on to the next thing but some of his revival periods are just really cold and they move away from his original ideas of form before, you know, he puts form before function in some designs, I think, in the service of experimentation that doesn't really pay off, even though that goes against his own principles. And so what makes him a mandatory design reference point to me,

why you have to talk about him even if you don't like him when you're talking about design and style not just in architecture is it's kind of a soft answer um he was able to pull a ton of things together and articulate what architecture was in a way that i don't think had been done before um if it was done before it was done by you know somebody like h Arendt or philosophers, not architects. They were talking about the nature of art, but he did it as a professional, not as a philosopher. I had a college professor who told me one time that reading works in translation is like making love through a plate glass window. He was talking about reading Latin and Greek and that you really, unless you speak Latin and ancient Greek, you don't really get the

feel for what the Odyssey, how beautiful the writing is. And architecture is kind of the same way. There's some photos on the blog, there's some visual tours of his stuff, but really, you just go into his spaces, you feel something. That is what I'm describing. You feel something that he says over and over, what the point of architecture is and what he wants you to feel. And I'll talk a little bit about what that is, but a big part of what it is is I think

he makes the structure a node between our humanity, the way we use a space, you know, practically what we need, the natural world around it, which is why none of his buildings in different places are the same. He matches the natural world and the site. He would contemplate this a whole lot. And then thirdly, a sort of elevated spiritual idea of the purpose of the building so there's a practical purpose

more of like a subjective spiritual um higher purpose and then there's the natural world and so these things intersecting was what he tried to feel, and I think that's really neat. He called his architecture organic architecture. And so he believed that the building should emerge naturally from their surrounding and blend seamlessly with the environment around it. You look at a poem like Wallace Stevens, The Anecdote of the Jar, that when you put something in a place, that thing changes the place you put it that thing changes the place you put it in and the place you put it in changes the thing because they're in conversation with each other and wright was really into that um he sought to enhance the beauty of the site and to participate in the beauty he he was viewing it like he already had a painting the nature was the painting and he had to make a change to it so he's going to be respectful he wasn't just going to come to a picture of a landscape and then all of a sudden

you know paint uh spray paint graffiti on it he was going to try and make the thing he was adding to it part of it in a way that a lot of architects didn't do at the time or they saw the point of architecture as beating back or taming overcoming nature nature, not really conversing with it. And so his designs, they often feature like horizontal lines and angles that mimic horizons. He would kind of echo the ripples, curves, peaks, whatever the surrounding geography was in the structure. And then he would use local materials that looked like they came from the site or did come from the site, like wood and stone and try and keep paint the same colors as what things would be at different times of year. I mean, he would look at these buildings sometimes,

the sites for the buildings, you know, for a year or two years before he built something, because you know, he wanted it to work in the winter too. He wanted it, you know, it was talking to seasons. You know, just incredibly complex ability to listen to detail in a way that I think is very mindful and interesting in his, you know, professional life, something he never was able to do personally. He was not a mindful person. He was always in debt. He was always having affairs. He was always having fights. But he was able to do this professionally. And so, you know, for right form followed function, meaning that you built the thing to be useful.

And then you once you had the usefulness, you made it pretty. You didn't just do what we think design is now, I think, too much where we just make something cool looking and then say, OK, well, that's neat and that great because it looks good, but it doesn't work as a house. It doesn't work as a phone. It doesn't work as a toaster. It's designed to be stylish, not to do its job. And Wright believed that function was the point of architecture.

You were figuring out how people lived. You were observing them. Not just nature. He would observe these families. I mean, sometimes he'd go to their house and he would take tapes and he would watch them and he would see how they cooked dinner and what they ate and where they walked to build something that may enhance their routine practically. And then also was a part of nature.

And then thirdly, enhanced their routine spiritually, which is my next point. So not just does he matching the way that the form followed the function of what the space was for materially and practically he also kind of would would echo greater cultures you'd religious themes he would take um these patterns that i think are really neat and he would infuse the structures with these repetitive motifs that created this sense of continuity and coherence because they happen on a big scale a middle medium scale and a teeny tiny small scale. Sometimes the carvings are so intricate and even if you don't notice it intellectually, you're feeling that pattern kind of ripple from the outside when you're walking up

to the building, to the inside when you're looking at the structure of the windows, to the teeny tiny cuts on the grates. They all sort of flow together. They're a pattern that is starting very big and then becoming very small. And a lot of them had a lot of symbolism and meaning. You know, sometimes he documented that in the plans and would tell you that this represented, you know, this Indian tribe's belief or this land or this thing. And then other times we don't really know what he, there was meaning there, but it wasn't, it was his, it wasn't something that he said what it was. And so one of the things that's really interesting to me about Wright's spaces is he didn't really design them. Like he was an architect. Um, you know, we think about the person who takes out a blank sheet of paper and starts drawing this big, pretty thing. Um, or if you

know any architects, maybe they take out a cocktail napkin and draw on it. You know, they're sort of always doing this. But Wright didn't do that. I mean, instead, he went and he listened to the space. He listened to the people. And then he listened to the kind of spiritual or metaphysical or higher purpose. The third point doesn't quite fit neatly into one word. It was a conversation with a practical purpose of people, what they needed the building for,

what the natural world was imposing on the space, and then thirdly, this sort of higher ideal. And what that higher ideal is, Wright never articulates perfectly, but he is adamant that that's something, that third thing is something that you need to be aspiring to fuse, not just with the natural world, not just with the structure, what is needed for people, but also with a higher ideal. And so, you know, what you want to call that, I don't know, but I think that's an interesting concept. So, you know, good design to me is always somebody who's actually willing to sit with all of these limitations that make design harder and then try and wrestle them together. It's pulling these things that are conflicting forces and limitations into each other in a way that is ingenious. And,

you know, if you're following a fad or a trend, everything looks the same, or you know that, well, gun metal's in this year, so I'm going to throw out my wardrobe and just do this. You're not really thinking, you're just kind of following what you're told and that stuff will look dated very quickly. One of the reasons why Wright's buildings don't look dated, most of them, I think is because his design is kind of timeless. His process resulted in this timeless message you can still hear. And that started with him listening to something. He didn't just sit down with a blank page and say, I'm going to draw a building. It was really trying to hear the building as it was supposed to exist. And so, I mean, even though Wright was a raging narcissist that took a credit for a lot of things, some of them not true, he didn't really

take credit for that design process. He saw it as this form of intuition that anyone could tap into and that more architects should tap into. And he thought, I think he, well, he says, you know, I'm better than everybody just because I do this. Y'all could do it too if you want to, but you're too proud and you're too broken by academia and you're too in your own head about intellect and style that you can't just hear what's supposed to be built. And so I think that's interesting. He did, however, take a lot of credit for other people's work because he would sort of do these loose sketches and his process was pretty intuitive.

His draftsman and his construction workers a lot of the time that the tradesmen they would just sort of fill in the patterns like he expected them to do that we don't know exactly how much especially his larger projects of the tiny minute details he did by hand because he taught them how to make these patterns and then they did them he didn't pay his people very well, and he didn't credit them. He took credit for the building, even though they were doing a lot of it. So he didn't take credit for the process.

He thought that anyone could just hear this intuition and do it, but he did take credit for other people doing his process, if that makes sense. So one of the ways that his process is articulated that I think is just gorgeous, Taliesin was one of the houses that he built. There's a fire and a murder, and then he goes into a period of mourning, and then later in life he goes back to it. He redoes the house, designs it again, and then now it's like an architectural school.

I don't know if they still do it on site. I think they ran out of money. I'm not really sure what the Franklin Wright Foundation's doing, but for a while during his life and after his death, Taliesin was in architecture school. And so one of the, this is something he wrote himself, but this is one of the lessons from that. It was teaching the people how to do architecture, do design. So this is Frank Lloyd Wright writing to the students.

Prepare a geometric study of any Wisconsin wildflower, endeavoring to get the essence of its inherent character. Organize this pattern into a design structured upon a unit system, and strive to establish a grammar which will be inseparable consequence of the design and element and unit system. Grammatical pattern must be consistently of the same source, of the same direction of from that source and on a separate overlay isolate a geometric unit system in linear pattern only know the common name of the wildflower and then bring a few of those flowers to class every design worth considering as a work of art must have a grammar of its own and grammar in this sense means the same thing in any construction whether it be of words or of

stone or of wood it is the shape relationship between the various elements that enter into the constitution of the thing your work must be consistently grammatical for it to be understood as a work of art so i'm going to stop for a second here he's saying that you have to be able to have a consistent system with which you listen to all parts of something if it's really going to be art. If you're not doing that, you're just repeating a style or a fad if the tradition's 100 years old, or if it's just what's in vogue that summer. It's not design because you're just copying something. You're not hearing something. So back to Wright back to rights sheet grammar may be deduced from some plant that has appealed to me as a certain property in line or form of the sumac

i used in the dana house in springfield and the motif is adhered throughout the building all my planning was devised on a properly proportional unit system i found that this would keep all to scale ensuring consistent proportion through the design, which became like a tapestry. A consistent fabric woven of interdependent related units, however various, they invariably, it appears in organic architecture as a visible feature in the fabric of the design, ensuring unity of proportion, the harmony of texture is thus with the scale of all parts within the complete ensemble. Let us learn to see within at least far enough to grasp essential patterns and all created things. Method and creation will come

freely to him who learns to see in the abstract. Study the geometry that is the idea of every form. A quail, a snail, a shell, a fish. Take for analysis the more simple, obvious things first, and then take the texture of the trees. Learn the essential patterns that make the oak and distinguish it from the essential pattern that makes the pine, and then make new new ones try after this the curling vine flowing water or the curving sand and then try the flowers the butterflies and bees and a chrysanthemum is easy a rock or a rose is difficult and I do not mean to take the obvious surface effects that differentiate each but to go within and find the essential geometry of pattern that each but to go within and find the

essential geometry of pattern that gives character to each and that is the proper study for an architect who would find a method and get legitimate effects try this method and gradually discipline your power to see get patiently to the point where you naturally see this element of pattern and everything frankly right so the heart of what he's saying there is he's like don't just draw get patiently to the point where you naturally see this element of pattern in everything. Frank Lloyd Wright. So the heart of what he's saying there is he's like, don't just draw the thing as a pattern because it isn't. Listen to the thing, even if it's a rock, even if it's a rose, and try and look up the tiny pieces of what make that thing itself.

So don't take it and make a pattern out of the shape of the rose. Listen to the pattern that is making of the rose. Listen to the pattern that is making up the rose and then draw that. You know, take everything as a part of a small part, see the pattern that makes it up, and then the larger pattern that it is a part of. And that's very much how we saw the structure. It was this thing that was in between the natural world and the world of the human. And also, you know, this sense of time, timelessness, that you were listening to something older to predict what was going to happen in the future. That if you were just chasing the fad that was around you, it was going to be outdated.

But if you looked at the way that the natural world and people had always kind of eternally moved and functioned, and you brought that into style that that style would be timeless and i think you can see examples on the if you look at the blog article of people doing this have a picture of the real plant and then i have a picture of people who did this assignment that went through his school what they drew um and it's neat, um, to see how that works. It's hard to explain what he's saying there, but I think it's incredibly profound. You know, like I can, I can hear a lot of things in Frank Lloyd Wright's thought process. Um, there's definitely a lot of, um, Plato and a little bit of Aristotle.

Like he's kind of into forms and into this theory of like an absolute truth. And you kind of hear that in his writing. He never mentions Jung. He mentions Japan all the time. He really likes this one scholar who does a lot of work with Japan. And then he gets really into Japanese art and culture. But as far as I know, I mean, I think Wright stayed as far away from psychology as he could. He probably encountered Freud just because that was more in the water.

But I don't think he ever came across anything like Jung or archetypes. I've never seen him mention anything, not just say that he read it. It's not just that he doesn't. I never found any place where somebody said he read young or he said something about young I'm more that when you read his writing about places where Jungian ideas would come up You don't see any of that in his thinking so I don't think he ever encountered it A lot of times and I haven't read everything that right wrote But a lot of times I think when someone is talking about something, you can tell not

their influences, but you can tell based on their vocabulary and the way they organize ideas, what kind of thinkers they've encountered and how they're that's affected their thinking, even if they're not aware of it. Um, I don't see that in right. So I don't think that he knew who he was. Um, you can also look, if you Google or look up, um, Seguero forms, that's my favorite piece of stained glass. It's a pattern that Wright

made. It's also in one of our therapists, Christy Woods office on a blanket. Um, her right, her office is very frankly, right. Inspired. There's some architecture stuff on the walls and then there's some, you know, arts and crafts furniture. Um, so Wright was an outsider artist and he believed that true architectural genius came from subjective experience you feeling something and your intuition and this innate understanding of environment and communication it didn't come from education it didn't come from academics that put him at huge odds with a lot of other architects who wanted to stand on all of the well i have a phd from Beaux Arts University or whatever.

Or Beaux Arts. Some people say Beaux Arts. I don't know what's right. I know I don't really like the style very much at all. But a ton of these people at the time were trying to replicate these old patterns. And they had, you know, you had to go all the way through, you know, French New Empire and Queen Anne style. And all these styles going back to the ancient Greeks and it was all about the style. It wasn't really about the structure,

but it was about the kind of, you know, I don't want to say style again, but the way that these buildings were decorated was what they thought was important, not what the buildings really were. They were just sort of repeating older forms and Wright didn't like that. So he drops out of university.

He can't complete it. I don't think at that time you even needed an architecture license. I think if somebody paid you to build a building, you could just do it. I don't know how that worked, but I know he didn't even have a degree. And if he had stayed in college, he probably would never have been on, been gone on to do the architect that he did. Um, he, he's, he wanted to get people who had not yet been corrupted by academia and then teach them his process of listening and turning on intuition.

And he felt strongly that when your ego was very entrenched in intellect and thinking, and you were puffed up with all of that, you just couldn't get it out of your head. It kind of broke people and they weren't able to hear this thing that was just an eight and precious and available to everybody who had ears to hear it so you know his disdain for academia um puts him at odds with a lot of people he gets in a lot of fights uh he saw those institutions as being very prohibitive for the profession moving in a good direction and And he created buildings that were not only functional, but they were supposed to contribute to the overall well-being and happiness of the occupant.

And he saw those old styles and traditional forms as ways of listening to the Roman Empire and the needs of somebody from the Bronze Age, but not from the person now. And so he saw the traditional floor plan and the ornamentation of popular styles as hindrances to good design that would be meeting somebody where they were

and giving them what they wanted to see, what they wanted to live in, and in the way that they lived. And so a lot of, you know, I talked about this in a couple articles, but there's two schools of architecture. There's the modernists and the classicists. That's kind of the biggest schools where the most fights happen.

And the classicists are repeating historic styles. And then the modernists are trying to throw old styles out and build modernist-like new materials. And so they're saying, well, let's try and you could never. They only built the Parthenon because they didn't have this cool plastic stuff. We could build this crazy shape, um, that they couldn't with stone. And then the traditional architects, the classicists are like, no, the Parthenon's perfect. Your big wibbly, crazy shaped building is ugly. And these schools fight a lot.

I don't really see Frank Lloydoyd wright as being a part of either of them he always gets lumped in with the modernists because his buildings are not you know terribly traditional and there's not you know there's things like flat roofs that you see in modernist architecture but a lot of the other modernists modernists like le caboussier and all these people like their buildings did not work like even in their lifetime the flat roofs were leaking and they didn't use material very well. They just sort of did crazy stuff just to do it. And Wright's buildings are still there and they still work well.

And, you know, there aren't know if he is a modernist. Classicists typically hate him. And then modernists don't really see him as anything special but accept him into the movement. I don't see him as a modernist. who is another architect who his stuff he draws these crazy wibbly lines and just goes wild making these weird things but when he does that there there's no thought to how someone's actually going to use this space like when i went to his one of his buildings it's a museum and there's like it's this huge wibbly sheet metal stuff and it's kind of impressive when you're walking up to it because you've never seen

anything like this and then you go inside and it's like okay so those wild walls meant that half of this is unusable you know like why didn't you put the air conditioner somewhere where i couldn't see it you know up in the top and hide it or why didn't you so why is half this room at some weird angle where it's using up all your sight and all your room, but no one have like bumper rails because the wall came down at this angle for somebody who is visually impaired because they would walk into the wall and get hurt since your walls are angled so now there's this clunky rail that they're would have to use for their cane to tap on and that's making people trip and over like There's no thought in a lot of modernists. They really just get on AutoCAD or Revit and they draw something nuts. And then they just put rooms in it.

And there's nothing about how things fit together, how people use space, what the flow is. The sort of archetypal ideas of when somebody walks into a building, their brain is just going to kind of naturally take them to the right. I'm not going to kind of naturally take them to the right. Like, you know, people have these, I'm not going to go terribly into that, but people have like a lot of biases in the way that they use space that are genetic. I mean, they're just inborn. They've done all these studies. There's no reason for it.

It's cross-cultural. It's just, if you build a store one way, people won't know how to use it. And a lot of the modernists like Gary, they don't use any of that stuff. And so the buildings, you know, one, they don't really hold up. They just are so expensive to work on. And, you know, his crazy shape isn't to be like, Frank Gary's crazy shape isn't to be like, okay, so the water is going to fall off here. So I better put another angle here so that

I pull water away from the building. Because if I pull water away from the building, then it's going to last longer because it's not going to rust or it's not going to leak. And so this is visually neat, but the purpose is to manage. No, he just makes a giant sheet metal cube and water pools up and somebody makes it out of steel. But there's not any thought other than self-indulgence. And like one of the things that Frank Gehry's house, if you ever see it, he has like this giant cube and then glass wall in the back of the house. And somebody like Wright, who's listening to a site for like a year, sometimes before he would even draw anything because he wanted to see how all the seasons affected it and the storms and the wind and how the family lived. And they're putting a ton of thought into really hearing

what is needed from the people and hearing what is needed or reflective of the nature um the reason that frank gary did that addition to his house is that he was just shaving and then he like looked up at the corner of his bathroom and he was like i wish natural light came through there what if it came through there so he got a hammer basically and just started beating his wall and ripped a thing out and then was like that looks kind of cool i like that you know that's neat and then he left the structural boards there but ripped all the plaster wall out and then put like a sheet of had people come in and put a sheet of glass there and then was like okay out here what could i well just put like a giant cube and it can also be the greenhouse will be made of glass. So like one of the walls coming off of his back bathroom, even though his house is more of a traditional architecture thing that he added onto, it was like this crazy glass wall.

But that's how he got there. He just literally was shaving and was like, I kind of want to see light. I'm going to knock a hole in the wall. I mean, very impulsive and self-indulgent and not a thoughtful guy. You know, um, you know, he can talk about it later, but that's how he did it.

Um, you know, and somebody like a director like Zack Snyder, I'm going away to the woods here and away from the article, the article on the blog might give you a better overlay of information, but a director like Zack Snyder, who I don't really like at all, um,

who nothing feels intentional in the movies. It just feels like he's sitting there being like, well, that would be cool. This would be cool, too. Well, this should happen next. And nothing happens. There's no character development. It doesn't do anything original. It doesn't build to anything.

It's just somebody grabbing random crap. And that is not, you know, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. It's an enormous amount of architects. But that's what I see in a lot of modernism that I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. It's an enormous amount of architects, but that's what I see in a lot of modernism that I don't see in Wright. And that's why I have a hard time just putting Wright in that movement. I don't know that that's what he is.

But again, he does blow up all these classical principles. If he doesn't break them, he could never have done the cantilevered structure that made Falling Waters so famous. That does not come from classical design. It's a totally modern process. He would never have been able to use all the asymmetry he used. I mean, that's another reason that his buildings look so modern is that they're not symmetrical.

He didn't have a problem about making everything mirror the way that Renaissance and Roman architecture does. does and you know he based a lot of things though like a classical architect would on these mathematical formulas like the golden mean and the golden ratio and these concepts of mathematical proportion that come from nature that are used in Renaissance mathematics and architecture and to a certain extent in Greek and Roman architecture. But what's kind of funny to me is like they always make fun of Wright, the classicist, for not being symmetrical, that his buildings will not have this symmetry. But then you look at like the golden mean or the golden ratio like, it isn't symmetrical. It sort of opens

like a shell. So sometimes he's actually modeling the patterns that Renaissance architecture was built on more accurately, maybe than classical traditions, which is, is kind of this weird thing. Like, um, you know, the classicists want to go back to Greek and Roman architecture. Uh, and I think Wright wanted to go further back than that. He wanted to go all the way back to the early spiritual heart of mankind and the early spiritual patterns and, and bits of nature. He wasn't trying to go back to, they wanted to keep everything in this one point.

And Wright was not really reaching for the future. He was also reaching for the past, but I think he was reaching further back than a lot of classical architects that only wanted to stop with, you know, the Western architecture, starting with Greece and Rome. And Wright was trying to hear something that was more profound and probably more ancient. He wanted to make architecture about the people of today, not traditions of the past, but he didn't want it to just be about a myopic sense of the people of today. He wanted it to be about the future, but he didn't want it to just be about a myopic sense of the people of today. He wanted it to be about the future too. And if you're trying to define that higher power thing that I keep talking about in Wright's work, that is it, I think, is that it wasn't just for the family that he was building it for. It was for the family when they were 20 years older than the

clients that he had right now, when they were dead and their families were living in the building, their extended families, when there were people who were encountering these structures in the future. It wasn't just about doing the thing that people wanted right now. It was about giving them this gift that they would want in the future. And I don't see a ton of that in modern architecture. It tends to age pretty quickly. So the takeaway that I think is the point of Wright is really a deep and profound intuition or ability to listen. And, you know, intuition is at its root, the ability to see very complex patterns within something. And so the best musicians do that sonically, while the best

therapists do that through analysis of somebody's emotions and their family structure and their identity and their speech patterns. You're looking for patterns as an intuitive. Wright's architecture was a semi-unconscious tuning into the patterns of the natural world and of human life and about our artistic and our spiritual aspirations. And so when you visit Wright's spaces, you can still hear him listening to patterns that we've kind of forgotten how to hear. You know, Wright's houses often wrap around the family like a shell, you know, or arms like in this kind of hug, the family areas of the house. And unlike Victorian buildings that needed to communicate

power and class towards the street, you know, big yard, social standing, the origin of the yard is that I make enough money that I don't have to use my land to grow food, I'm just gonna grow grass. And you know, a lot of the detail and ornamentation you put onto things like columns and the outside of the house, it was about saying who you were. Wright sees that as not relevant anymore. You know, his buildings shelter the family from the street and then they open towards the backyard like a shell. In Wright's homes, the focus of the house is on the hearth and the family room

and the central garden or a pool a lot of the time. The street facing walls are stripped of detail and his houses often have this minimalist rock or brick exteriors facing the street. He did a lot of houses, so this is generally true of all of them, but they do vary where he built them geographically. You know, prairie homes look very different than you can revival, but they do vary where he built them geographically. You know, prairie homes look very different than you can revival, but they do have not the same floor plan, but the same pattern the floor plan is built on. And they often include kind of water or rock moats and usually small slit windows with a little bridge that goes to the, to the house. And, and there I see them as kind of a re-imagining of the European castle is the

center of civilization, but in an American setting and on a smaller scale. So he's saying, you know, these buildings, um, you know, society used to center around a king or a social hierarchy, but now American society centers around the middle class and the family. And that message I think is important in the way that he built homes. His homes are some of his most interesting buildings. So if there's anything in Wright's biography that occurred early enough in his life to provide some kind of psychological explanation for just the madness of his personal life, it probably would be the contentious divorce of his parents that some people felt like had caused him distress. And it's possible that that early loss of this spiritual emotional and familial center in his life informed his career trajectory by you know making him want

to re-center the profession of architecture around the idea of a nurturing maternal community built space and also a greater spiritual or emotional center. He felt like architecture had lost its center. And it's possible that because he, you know, a lot of times our artists, this projection of youth, um, was doing that because of something that happened to him as a kid. And so, you know, I think good design is a kind of simulacrum, you know, it's a simulacrum as a copy without an original or something that's been copied so many times that its origins are not as visible as the changes through the copying. And it is, you know, good design is a copy of something

that is unconscious and deep within us that does not come from nature, but it comes from a reflection of nature within ourselves. And our inability to deal comes from a reflection of nature within ourselves. And our inability to deal with the outer realities of nature or the inner realities of the way that we internalize it, they become what we project into art. So often our artistic center comes from an early childhood pain. And the shadow projection becomes, you know, where we've, where we are excellent professionally, but we fail interpersonally and it becomes where we excel with unconscious intuition. But a lot of times that unconscious intuition is never actualized in a way where we can bring it consciously into our personal lives. And so we repeat and we create our trauma until we face it. And I wish that we could say that most artists face their trauma, but unfortunately most people choose not to go into these scary places. Um,

you know, I've said a lot, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people come into therapy, but underneath all of them, there's really only one choice that we're making. It's, do I go into the scary thing? And I feel like if I go back there, I'll die. And do I face that? And if I face it, do I grow or do I just kind of choose to avoid and ignore and run from that my whole life or blame other people for it or whatever? And I think Wright definitely fails to grow as a person, but he does grow a lot as an architect. But sadly, a lot of his unconscious, his intuition remains unconscious. And that's true of a lot of artists. I wish that I could say it wasn't true of a lot of therapists, but's, I, you know, I wish that I could say it wasn't true of a

lot of therapists, but it is, I have to fight that tendency in myself. Um, you know, all therapists should be in therapy and where I think therapy becomes damaging is where somebody says, well, I've done all my work. This is how I got better. So that's how you have to get better. And that's where therapy can become problem. Um, because you, you, you haven't dealt with something and you're trying to give other people the medicine that you need. And you see that obsession where a therapist like really want the patient to, the patient won't do this. It's like, well, okay, well, maybe they want to. There's an energy. And you see that. And I think that's definitely who Wright was. But timeless art and architecture

is inseparable from psychology because it requires us to set our individual ego aside and make contact with something that is deep inside our collective humanity. And so we don't design this stuff at random. I mean, maybe Frank Gehry did. I don't think Wright does. My criticism with Gehry is that it's not that the stuff doesn't look cool. It's that if you had come to him on a different day, you would have gotten a completely different building. He sits down without any thought, and then he draws something that's kind of crazy. And there isn't, it's not in service of anything greater. Um, there's not a process other than this is kind of a crazy thing that I can build.

And you look at art, right. And you think if you got the little men in black, you know, memory eraser thing, and you brought him back to the same site with the same family he would have come up with a building that was almost the same you know if you deleted this from his memory and then had him design it again because his process was so um depth oriented that it would have pulled up a lot of the same elements and so you know we don't do these things in a vacuum um they come from our psychology which is which is why i'm putting it on a podcast and a blog about psychology um something about architecture and i don't think all of wright's work is perfect but i think his conception of the role that architecture plays in our lives is profound you know by infusing his structures with meaningful patterns and symbols

taken from nature and human culture, Wright transcended the boundaries of mere functionality. He created spaces that stirred emotion and connected deeply with the human spirit. He saw architecture as an intersection of the human, the natural, and the metaphysical, and his buildings were designed more like altars to hold the interplay of these forces he saw as sacred. And architecture does shape our lives and it does enrich our experiences. Whether we notice it or not, architecture is affecting you and it is helping you or harming you at any moment when you are in a building for most of your life. And that building has an effect on you, whether or not you know what it's doing and where that effect comes from. And the contemporary buildings that we inhabit today, they still talk to us. But what they say

is now problematic. They tell us that we're disposable cogs on a set of business transactions and that the most temporary and disposable structures that can be built are all we deserve. We send our children into these windowless cinderblock buildings with linoleum and concrete floors and drains on the ground so they can be hosed down and they're encircled by chain link. And most American schools are built like prisons. And we send kids there to learn. But what are we sending them in there to learn you know in this cinder block hell you know leon career was an architect that i talked to a while back um on the podcast and one of the things he told me i got a kick out of was that he had met um the union analyst james hollis at one point he's union uh james hollis is dead now but he had met him years ago and he told

him that uh you know european offices are designed so that the eye moves upwards in this aspirational way to look at heaven and the point of the building like the lines draw you up almost like a church and american offices are designed with this harsh fluorescent lighting and these cheap drop ceilings that styrofoam like tile they put up there um so that you would looked away from it and you had to peer down into hell and i always thought that was funny um because i really do not like drop ceilings i don't know why we ever agreed to do that and so much so much of the stuff like i just don't get you know it's like i was so frustrated when i saw where my daughter was

going to school and we're in the school system that's supposed to be good. And it's like, there's not windows. It's just cinder blocks. And everyone's like, well, that's just how everything was built in the 60s and 70s. And it's like, look, there was any point in history where this was the way that we built things. One, we need to apologize about that forever and look at it. And we don't need to rest until all of this stuff is corrected. Because I don't want a child to go into this place it looks like they committed a crime you know my elementary school i went to

shades common homewood it had these big windows it had these sconces it had all of this light i mean what i remember when i think of school elementary school was like looking out at trees and like looking out at nature and like looking out at nature and seeing like the orchard and seeing watching the weather while the person was talking and feeling like I was in a community and I was like in a place where I was supposed to learn something good you know my high school was built like a cinder block hellscape and my middle school and I just remember the stark contrast of going in there and being like I don't want to be here this place is feels like an attack on me it feels like I did something wrong it feels like this is not a good place and I don't think everyone is as conscious of that as I was

but I still think that affects everyone and design is something that has a pretty big hold on our psychology that we are hearing whether or not we are listening to it. And, you know, so when Wright designed, he listened to the harmony of the intersecting patterns of nature and human life. And he represented these visually across the spaces that he designed. He took broader natural patterns of the landscape and he had them ripple across the structure in, you know, macro, meso, and micro scales. When he broke the rules of classical architecture, it was only in service to support the practical function or to communicate the broader significance of place and setting and purpose. We live in a natural world, but we must make it partially a human one. And we also serve a higher purpose. And we should think mindfully about what we want that purpose to be. Where we

live changes how we live and how we live together. And architecture used to make our lives art. And now it's an afterthought in this process of turning our lives into a profit. And you feel that in these structures. They are an attack on you. And they're telling you exactly what you're worth. And that's why they make me mad like that. That's cool. Now, our buildings, they're still altars, but they are altars to very dark gods now. You know, grandiosity and ego and competition and hierarchy and greed are what we were building temples to. And the modern runes and hieroglyphs that we put on our cities are advertisements and warning labels and, you know, cheap sentiments from Hobby Lobby,

wall wraps of, you know, friends, hate, family, you know, not anything that is as real as what Wright was trying to hear, you know, kind of cheap sentiment or trends. And we need to remember our higher purpose. You know, the natural world and developing our own soul is why we're here. And we need to trust intuition and innovation and nature again. And when I say that, and not just the nature like leaves on trees, nature like our own human nature that we act like we've transcended, you know, we need to be able to be present in who we are and where we come from. And when I say that right is an important person, that's what I mean. That's the best explanation.

I wrote this in answer to people that had said, why is it? What do you see in him? That's the best articulation, imperfect articulation of what I hear. And I really wish that our civilization could remember these patterns. And they are still there. If you take the time and you, you take a moment to listen. All right. That was the episode for today. If you have a question or a comment, please send me an email. I'm doing a lot of stuff about design recently. We also did a podcast on chairs, the history of design and chairs and the Eames chair. And then sometime in July, we're going to sit down with a friend of mine, Will Selman, an urban planner. He's going to

share his stories, publishing a book, which is about the fusion of Jungian psychology and urban design, which is a very Tabroot Therapy kind of guest to have. So we're excited for that. Keep checking in. We're not going to do design forever. We've just kind of been on a kick there. But yeah, let me know what you think. Like this topic, a lot of the topics are curated from just questions that I get and try and think about to give you a mindful answer. So if you got one, please send it. I do read those. I am always out of time, but I will get to you as soon as I can. And thank you so much for listening. Have a nice week.