“All Wright: A Day Like No Other” Lecture Transcript by Dr. Ken Dahlin on Sept. 5, 2025 at Taliesin Estate

It's an honor to be here in Wright's own creation, the Hillside Theater. We have around us the material shell of what was created almost 100 years ago, over 100 years for parts of it, if you go back to the original school, but what was the spirit, the soul that created the space? And how are we to understand or recapture that? On this wall here, although it's hard to see now, Wright stenciled the long passage from Walt Whitman that begins: "Here is the test of wisdom. Wisdom is not finally tested in schools. Wisdom is of the soul, is its own proof. Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul." Whitman's point, and Wright's, is that the deepest things cannot be handed over as data. They must be awakened from within by direct encounter.

Beauty works the same way. No lecture, no algorithm can substitute for the lived experience of harmony made visible. Tonight, in a room literally made and built to unite drama, music, and architecture, let's see how Wright's own search for beauty, what he called the organic, can still provoke that recognition in our own souls.

"Beauty will save the world," Theodore Dostoevsky famously wrote. Yet Alexander Solzhenitsyn poignantly questioned, "When in the bloodthirsty process of history did beauty ever save anyone, and from what?" Despite the skepticism, Solzhenitsyn recognized beauty's profound transformative power, its unique ability to move hearts, transcend divisions, and reveal essential truths. Frank Lloyd Wright held a similar conviction. He saw beauty not merely as decoration or subjective whim but as an objective, fundamental truth deeply embedded in the fabric of reality. Wright viewed beauty as essential to human existence and central to architectural practice. This belief provides a compelling challenge to our contemporary culture which often dismisses beauty as trivial, subjective, or superficial. Tonight we will explore Wright's philosophy and rediscover his enduring vision of beauty which remains critically relevant today.

Some in Wright's own time and even now see his reverence for the great masters of music, his heroes like Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, and assume he was looking backward, an artistic traditionalist actually. They point to his vision of architecture as a grand symphony, a celebration of the arts together, and judge that out of step with modernity. But perhaps the real question is not why Wright looked to them. It is why we have permitted a modernist, materialist view to strip beauty, harmony, and joy from so much of our built environment. The problem is not that Wright reached back. It is that we have let go.

Wright's quote from The Natural House here where he says, "I doubt if there is much hope for the present generations ever learning to discriminate surely between what makes a building good or what it is that makes a bad one. Hope lies within the next generation." The only sadness about that is when Wright mentioned that, I think it's been more than a generation that have passed and we have not seen that restored, but I think he understood it. Have we lost the ability to discriminate in architecture or our environment what is beautiful and what is not? If we don't even recognize beauty as a real thing, then surely we've lost that sense.

So look around. Do our towns and cities nourish us with beauty? Or have we grown numb to ugliness? Have we lost the ability to tell what is beautiful and what is ugly? And why does this matter for our lives, our children, and our sense of home? How central to Wright's thought and architecture was the idea of beauty? As he says here, "The center of architecture remains unchanged. Because, though all unconfessed or ill-conceived, beauty is no less the true purpose of rational modern architectural endeavor than ever. Just as beauty remains the essential characteristic of architecture itself." In American Architecture in 1955 he wrote that: "Just as beauty remains the essential characteristic of architecture itself." And so some people have written, asked me why did I write a book entitled Frank Lloyd Wright on the Path to Beauty? You know, what is this about beauty? Why do I bring that up? One is because people don't bring it up in our contemporary culture and academia and kind of the avant-garde areas of architecture. But Wright did a lot, didn't he? But our generation has lost that. And what is that? We don't even really know what beauty is. There's kind of that intuitive sense of what a thing is that is beautiful. But Wright has some very important principles and discoveries that we can learn from even still today. With so much being written about Wright, is there more to learn about Wright? I believe so.

So we see a clue here how Wright saw both beauty and his idea of the organic. He says here, "This new ideal consciously entering by way of art in modern life is the concept of beauty as organic unity. So we see one clue right there. Beauty as organic unity, as integral in the thing made or work done as we say by man in the same sense as things made or work done as we say by God." He wrote that in 1922.

So what does that mean? It means that beauty must be understood in a relational way. A relationship of parts, a form of unity. And this is actually a very ancient idea. It's not a modernist one. Therefore in my book I treat the idea of beauty as integral with Wright's organic theory and the organic theory as integral with the ideal of beauty in his work.

So for the past 100 years or so or more, architecture and the arts had held with suspicion the notion of beauty, especially as a goal of the artist or architect. The renowned art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto argued that beauty is deceptive as a goal and opposed to the mission of modern art. The modern project has devoted itself to the exposure of the unpleasant truth of our modern condition, repudiating beauty in the process. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in the 1920s about the dehumanization of modern art that its separation of form and content is what distinguishes the elite class. It was a conscious rupture from both the past and from nature. It was the art of the avant-garde. It didn't obey rules of nature or universal principles or common experience because the code resides in a socially constructed system with autonomous rules of interpretation. Beauty in such a system is irrelevant. It's not even the goal of that type of art. When we see Wright from the 1920s on clashing with the European modernists, with the avant-garde, with the elite taste-makers, this is what he's opposing. It's not just that he's always trying to market himself as the best architect—I mean that's kind of the superficial way to see it—but there's something deeper there. He really believed in what he was saying and what he was doing.

So he wasn't against the idea of being modern itself, but the co-opting of modernism by a philosophy that had disconnected itself with nature, with our experience, and with our past. Yet now there's beginning to be a realization that somehow we must reclaim beauty, even if there is no consensus as to what it is. As architect Jeanne Gang stated, "Somehow we need to reclaim beauty, especially now, to acknowledge that it strongly affects us as humans. Yet," she adds, "beauty has lost so much of its meaning and seems somehow trivial. By the early 20th century, beauty had become an easy crutch that had to be avoided in order to deal with the shock of the modern condition. I don't think this holds anymore. In fact, perhaps we need beauty today precisely for this reason." And so we see here in a contemporary architect trying to find a place for this beauty that somehow seems lost to us, but somehow needs to be regained, but there's no foundation in which to evaluate it. And that's itself sad, but it's a good step that there's hope, that there's the idea of going in that direction of finding it, recovering it.

And so today there does seem to be some realization that beauty can no longer be dismissed. But how do they try to legitimize it in our day? So many researchers now try to explain beauty with brain scans. One book says, "Our sense of beauty is just the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems toggling between fight or flight or rest and digest." Another points to a tiny spot in the brain's orbital frontal cortex, field A1, that lights up when we see something beautiful and they conclude that beauty can be measured. The studies themselves are fascinating, but they don't tell us what beauty is. And this is where there's still a disconnect. A brain scan can show that I'm moved by a sunset, but it can't tell me why the sunset is moving. Neuroscience works in the world of molecules and electricity. Beauty lives in the world of meaning, of form, and harmony.

In my book I go into much more detail obviously than I have time here, but when you call a porcelain cup, for example, delicate, what are we saying? Aristotle would say that you're noticing a real quality in the cup's form—in its thin walls, fine curve, subtle glaze. The delicacy belongs to the object before you ever see a brain scan. Philosopher Eddy Zamach updates the point and says science can predict that people will say delicate or beautiful, but the physical description alone never captures the property itself. Measuring a heartbeat doesn't tell you what grace is. Logging a neuron doesn't tell you why symmetry pleases the eye. This is important as a designer of objects or buildings. What exactly, or how, are we to design them in the first place if beauty is our goal? And this has really been a personal question for me as a designer. It's like, yes, it's one thing to have a goal of beauty, but what actually, how can I make that concrete? How do we actually put that forth in physical reality? That's even a bigger challenge. But in any case, yes, let's use science to understand how we react to beauty. But to understand beauty itself, we need to look beyond the microscope and the MRI and talk about order, proportion, and the very nature of things. The territory where Wright, Aristotle, and Hegel felt most at home.

Frank Lloyd Wright's path was not one of compromise. He was no cautious mediator looking for safe ground between tradition and modernism. His work was bold, innovative, and often radical. Yet it was always anchored in principles far older than himself. That is what I mean here by his middle way and I describe that in the book as well. The middle way that Wright took, not that he was compromising. By middle way, I mean an approach that refuses both the imitation of past styles and the severing of all ties with tradition and nature. It is a way that allows architecture to evolve creatively while remaining rooted in enduring truths. Truths found in nature's patterns, human needs, and the accumulated wisdom of building cultures. The middle in this sense is not a bland midpoint. It is a dynamic synthesis, taking what is life-giving from each side and discarding what is dead.

As early as 1900, Wright had already left behind the ornamental revival of the 19th century. His Prairie Houses stretched low and horizontal, rooted in the American landscape. What fascinated his European contemporaries, such as Gropius and Le Corbusier, wasn't only the horizontality but the way he broke down walls, roofs, and windows into crisp planar elements and recomposed them into an integrated whole governed by geometry and rhythm. But as European modernism evolved, Wright saw danger in its trajectory. In 1931, he wrote, "This modern constructive endeavor is being victimized at the start by a certain new aesthetic wherein appearance is made an aim instead of character made a purpose. The new aesthetic becomes old because it is only another appliance." And the International Style , that you see here, although claiming that it was form following function, somehow seemed to repeat itself whether it was in South America or Northern Europe or anywhere in the world. It was applied anywhere. And it really was a false functionalism. It was really an aesthetic of the avant-garde. But for Wright, design was never about style for style's sake. He distrusted movements that chase novelty without substance. This is why he reserves some of his sharpest criticism for Le Corbusier, whom he accused of reducing architecture to a painter's play—the surface and mass a two-dimensional effect masquerading as depth. Wright's own building sought a deeper unity of space, structure, material, and life. In a recorded audio talk from Wright at the Taliesin Fellowship on August 1st, 1948, Wright makes an interesting statement. He refers to the old housing as being a "slum to the body." So referring to traditional architecture, classical architecture, and he was referring specifically in this interview to housing, and he said it's like a slum to the body; it's not sanitary, but it did have a certain element of liberty and a certain freedom, he said. But the new housing, in other words the modernist housing that you would kind of typify that, he says you have a certain sanitation, and they have transferred the slum from the body to the soul. That's all these are, he says, quote, "soul slums," and the others were "body slums," and this is a quote I just came upon just a couple weeks ago. I never even realized he had said that.

Let's take Unity Temple , for example, 1905 to 1908. Its cubic form, reinforced concrete structure might look modernist at first glance, but unlike European International Style buildings, its geometry serves a human and spiritual purpose. The plan keeps the traditional principle of a central sacred gathering space while casting off neoclassical ornament and stylistic features. Concrete here is not a neutral industrial material, but it's textured, warm, and crafted to convey permanence and dignity. He was using at the same time a very new material, the reinforced concrete. But the hierarchy, the proportion, axiality are timeless. The columns do have ornament but an abstracted ornament which he felt expressed the elimination of the insignificant and the subsequent revealing of inner essence. And he was often opaque when he talked about words like that. I'll get into that a little bit more without expanding on that at the moment.

Consider Fallingwater later, of course, 1935-ish. The architectural historian Vincent Scully stated that there was evidence of Wright copying parts found in modernist Europe, in other words, he was seeing a transverse influence from modern Europe back to Wright in this phase in the '30s and in Fallingwater itself. But that's really not even the main point here. It isn't about the identity of the parts, but it's about the composition of the whole which gives meaning to the parts as we will see. It's an amazing example, Fallingwater is, of an integrated whole where the whole includes the character of the natural site: the water, the stone, the trees, and such. The house in floor plan has a geometrical order, but that order is not static in itself, as say with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House or Crown Hall at IIT and such. Here the plan cannot be understood until you see how it integrates into a higher level which is of the natural context.

If I might seem to be too hard on European modernism and being too easy on tradition, Wright was also blunt about rejecting the dead weight of history. As he says here, "We are going to build that new freedom in art upon ground fertilized by the old—ground in which the carcasses of ancient architecture lie rotting beneath our feet. If traditions are to die, where and how and when they should die, that tradition may nobly live." So he's talking about the death of tradition so that tradition may nobly live. So he's using them in different senses. Of course the timeless tradition should live. The static forms that tradition created that weren't relevant should die is what he's saying.

Switching on to the influence of Japan which is a separate chapter. In 1905, Frank Wright visited Japan for the first time. He would return many times and his collections of Japanese prints became one of the largest in the world. This wasn't a passing fascination with Wright or with the exotic. Wright saw Japan as a nation with what he called a profound sense of the beautiful and Japanese art spoke directly to the core of his developing philosophy.

This is Hokusai's Red Fuji, a famous woodblock print. In Japanese art, Wright found a confirmation of something he had already begun to sense: that the highest art strips away the accidental to reveal the essential. Hokusai's Red Fuji is a perfect example of this. A single monumental form fills the frame, reduced to its purest lines and planes, stripped of any detail that does not serve the whole. The sky and slopes become bold color fields. Yet the image pulses with life. This is not mere simplification. It is concentration, the distillation of form until only its essence remains. And Wright himself wrote of the prints, "These simple colored engravings are a language whose purpose is absolute beauty inspired by the Japanese need of that precise expression of the beautiful which is to him, the Japanese artist, that reality immeasurably more than the natural objects from which he wrested the secret of their being." Really important statement right there. The Japanese artist and Wright wasn't after photographic realism. There's something beneath it just like this Red Fuji print. And, you know, the proportion of Fuji here is not the literal Fuji. It's not that steep. You know there was artistic license, as we might say, but to express a certain essence of this piece here.

Wright's sensitivity to Japanese art was shaped in part by Ernest Fenollosa, a Boston-born philosopher and art historian who helped introduce Japanese art to the west. Fenollosa was deeply influenced by Hegel, whose aesthetics taught that art distills the universal essence from the clutter of the accidental. That same idea, shared also by Aristotle's concept of substance, runs through Wright's thinking. In Japanese prints, Wright saw this distilled essence made visible, every line delivered, every element contributing to the whole, nothing extraneous. And this builds kind of the connection of Wright to Hegel. And I have a chapter in the book on Hegel, but I'm not going to be covering it here just for sake of time. But as we continue on the Japanese spatial construction idea.

So one of the key spatial lessons Wright drew from the Japanese prints was their planar structure. Instead of using the Renaissance linear perspective to pull the viewer's eye back into a vanishing point, Japanese prints often layer space in flat planes . Foreground, middle-ground, background, each clearly framed. Minor or irrelevant details are eliminated so that the whole composition reads as a unified field. Here is a print by Hiroshige as an example and I did some PowerPoint overlays just to show the layering. So here you have the base image. Of course we know what the background is. I just put that in blue. So this is the most spatially far back, and it's being done without linear perspective or one-point perspective as we do in the west. We immediately know what's a middle-ground layer. We know spatially we have the reference where that is, up to the foreground, and we see where that is. So these are two-dimensional images and layers that give the impression of three-dimensional space. That's a key concept that Wright picked up on and spoke about. It's also where Gestalt psychology, the idea of the figure-ground relationships described by Rudolph Arnheim, illuminates Wright's method. In Japanese prints, major forms are often framed by contrasting planes, allowing the eye to read depth through the interplay of flat surfaces.

Wright himself after all said that Hiroshige was doing with space in the print what he was doing with space in his architecture. But isn't that interesting? The Japanese print is two-dimensional and it's given the illusion of a three-dimensional object, but architecture is already three-dimensional. So, what is Wright saying about his space? Is he, like they were going from the second dimension to the third, is he saying like he's going from the third to the fourth? Well, he actually makes that connection. But in any case, the Japanese art did not use our Western linear form of perspective to portray depth in their scenes. They made use of contour lines and layered planes to portray that depth.

So this other quote at the bottom there, the Japanese prints. So here you have a new way of looking at the landscape. You're seeing, I don't know exactly how to put it, not in three dimensions certainly, and yet perhaps that is the element of the third dimension made manifest by two. And he's talking about a print here about this transition from second dimension to third dimension, and he's after this third dimension in architecture to the fourth dimension of a type of organic space that he says the European architects are missing and this is that's a very curious concept.

So in my own research, I applied this kind of analysis, this Gestalt analysis, to one of Wright's homes here in Wisconsin, the Schwarz House in Two Rivers . What emerged was a striking parallel to the Japanese prints. Space here is not defined by continuous walls or conventional rooms, but by interlocking planes of floor, ceilings, and walls. The openings frame the views much as the borders of a print frame the subject. Irrelevant visual noise is absent. Every line and material change reinforces the spatial order. And here again, just like I did in the Japanese print, you can see these 2D planes that are architectural, but they're defining spatial zones and layers in the architecture that give it depth, further depth than if it were just a box. So these are all framing of elements that accentuate, amplify that sense of depth of the third dimension.

And this connection strengthens my case that Wright's organic theory rests on an aesthetic foundation. The same principles that make Japanese prints powerful: the distillation of the essential, the planar composition, the elimination of the insignificant are at work in his architecture as well. Wright was not merely borrowing a visual style from Japan. He was absorbing a way of seeing space and form that aligned with his deepest conviction about beauty, nature, and the essence of things.

The integrated whole, of course, that's a very prominent phrase in Wright's language. Many today and in Wright's own time trace the idea of organic growth and becoming back to 19th-century figures such as Goethe, who spoke of the metamorphosis of forms in nature. Others might point to Romantic or natural thinkers like Schelling or Ruskin. While Wright was aware of this lineage, the philosophical ground for his organic theory reaches further back. Aristotle had already articulated a framework for growth and change in his concepts of act and potency. The idea that what something is in potential can become actual according to its substantial form (e.g., plant an acorn and you'll not get a bicycle, you'll get an oak tree). So, Wright's buildings are not collections of parts simply placed side by side. They're conceived as living organisms where each part is shaped by its relationship to the whole. In my research, I call this a relational organization, a system in which every wall, room and opening is given a form that grows out of its context rather than being neutral or a repetitive module. This is not static classicism nor arbitrary modernist freedom but a disciplined growth in harmony with the things in nature. A principle that unites Aristotle's philosophy and Wright's practice.

This principle is clearly visible in the G.H. Winkler House . That's the basic floor plan. In traditional plans or much of contemporary modernist work, rooms tend to be neutral rectangular boxes arranged additively. They relate by proximity but not in form. Wright's plan. In this plan, for example, each part takes a unique shape that both responds to its neighbors and subordinates itself to the larger whole. I'll have a diagram coming up, but I'm trying to show in these gray areas how it's not just rectangular, but you see these kind of L-shaped or C-shaped or kind of deformed areas that in themselves are not a static or complete composition. But when you see it in reference to the other one, it's how they integrate in that makes it special. That's part of that integrated whole. It's not just one part. It's how the part and the whole relate to each other. And this is just to simplify it to the extreme: Additive we might have a series of boxes, rooms or geometric forms. Each of those squares is static and self-contained. Where integrative, we have one form melding and subordinating to another form and vice versa, creating a larger whole by that.

Speaking of Aristotle and some of the more ancient ideas, one of which is the golden ratio, or the golden mean. It's represented by the Greek letter $\Phi$. It comes out to approximately $1.618$ as a ratio expressed by the equation $a/b = b/c$ where $c$ is the sum of $a$ and $b$. This ratio, though, of the golden mean is unique in that the smaller part relates to the larger part exactly as the larger part relates to the whole. It is in mathematical form a wholeness, a proportion in which part and whole mirror each other. This resonates with Wright's organic maxim that "the part is to the whole as the whole is to the part." In the golden mean, neither the part nor the whole is arbitrary. Each depends on the other in a purposeful, harmonious relationship. And we go on to talk about the Fibonacci series, which also relates to this where each number is the sum of the previous two and that also approaches the number $\Phi$ or $1.618$, etc. as it progresses. And this number isn't arbitrary. We see it in nature, from the seed pattern in a sunflower to a nautilus shell to a rose to the unfolding of plants and plant structure. Nature itself is abundant with this. So if Wright is emulating principles of nature, you think this would be important as well.

In the G.H. Winkler House , again, using it as an example, I wanted to see if the golden rectangle appears in his work. And it may be hard to explain or to see, but that ratio of $1.618$ can be expressed as a diagonal line of a certain angle. And so you can see here that this line is representing a golden rectangle. The diagonal can define a rectangle. In other words, we see it again here. We see not just the smaller elements, but we see it repeated on multiple levels of scale even in his architecture. And this again as the ancients had thought was a mark of beauty. And again he's not copying old forms here but he's taking that principle and applying it organically as it would be in nature. Very timeless principles.

If beauty is the fruit, then unity is the tree that bears it. Frank Lloyd Wright said in this quote, "The works of the soul of man are no less fruits of the tree that is man than plums are true to the plum tree or grapes true to the vine. And unless these works as fruit are integral, organic, indigenous, in the same sense, they will decay, become poisonous, and fall. It is by culture only that the tree or vine is brought into bearing. And in the same manner only will the soul of man be brought to bear good fruit or works. That is to say, produce that unity in his work, which is beauty."

This idea that beauty is the fruit of an inner unity ties directly to Aristotle's insight that form and essence persist through change both in nature and architecture. In both nature and architecture, organic unity is not the product of arbitrary novelty, but of growth according to the inner nature of the thing. A growth that is proportioned, harmonious, and alive. And this may seem arcane language maybe because we're not used to this. This is actually very ancient, but architecture today doesn't understand, you know, and it's all about novelty. There's certain functional things, but this is what I think is at the root, what is missing in so much of our environment today in design. So for Wright, unity was not an optional flourish nor was beauty a separate category to be applied after the fact. Beauty was the result of a work being unified, integral from its conception to the smallest detail. This places Wright squarely in the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle taught that a thing is most fully itself when it realizes its form, its essence in the material of which it is made. This doctrine called hylomorphism sees every real thing as a composite of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). The form is what makes the thing one coherent whole and when the form is fully expressed, the unity of the thing shines forth and that unity is beauty.

Robie House. You can see the horizontal lines of the cantilevered roofs, the rhythmic spacing of the windows, the rich texture of the Roman brick, the proportional relationships between each floor. All these things work together to express one coherent idea. It's not one thing fighting after another. The long, sheltering prairie or horizon—remove or alter any major element, and the whole will be diminished. Reminds me of that phrase in Amadeus about Mozart about the emperor saying "too many notes," and then Mozart says, "Which one, sir, would you like me to remove?" And I think Wright would have had a very similar attitude about his architecture. It's there for a reason. It may seem excessive, you know, he's got a lot of trim, especially of course in the earlier Prairie work, but it wasn't there accidentally. He called it the elimination of the insignificant. Doesn't mean minimalism, and that's where people get confused between minimalism today and Wright's organic simplicity. It doesn't mean just a bare sterile box. He wasn't after that.

Fallingwater again. The terraces are anchored to the rock ledge, cascade outward like layers of stone, where the vertical chimneys rise like tree trunks. Every choice, from material color to spatial depth, reinforces the idea of dwelling and seamless harmony with the waterfall and the surrounding forest. Its beauty is not the result of decorative afterthought. It's the visible flowering of a unity that was present in the design from the beginning. Like the Robie House, Fallingwater is the instantiation of Idea (with a capital "I"). As Wright would often say, Wright was not the only one to use that word "Idea." Hegel, again, 100 years before Wright, spoke of Idea being expressed in physical form. And further back, Aristotle encapsulated Idea in the tēlos or end result, the final cause, the whole. Plato also taught about underlying universal ideas, perfect Platonic Forms, being in a spiritual realm, and the physical realm could only imperfectly represent these eternal, perfect forms. When Wright praises Japanese prints for revealing a reality beyond literal depiction, he is expressing the same principle. Reality for him is not just the visible surface. It's the essential nature beneath it. And beauty, whether in a building, a tree, or a Hokusai print, is the visible manifestation of that essential order.

When critics like Philip Johnson dismissed Wright as "the greatest architect of the 19th century," the implication was that Wright had missed the mark of true 20th-century modernism. But in truth, Wright's roots extend deeper than the 19th century. He was not merely an heir of Goethe, Ruskin, or Romanticism. His organic theory resonates with the ideas first articulated some 2,500 years earlier by Aristotle. If we are to understand the philosophical ground of Wright's vision, we must look not only to the 19th century but back to classical metaphysics.

And this I go into more detail in the book, and I am in danger of maybe putting too much out here without having time to substantiate this. But there is some classical language that Aristotle used that we have departed from. So it seems so awkward to us, but it's really very basic. Aristotle taught that what makes a thing what it is—its identity—is what he called its substantial form. A pile of bricks is not a house until form unites them into a coherent whole. Wright echoes this when he insists that architecture must not be an assemblage of parts but an entity. Another word that Wright would use a lot. He used organic in a spiritual or metaphysical sense: that the part is to the whole as the whole is to the part. The essence of a building is not imposed from the outside but discovered latent in site, material, and purpose.

Some of you may have heard of Aristotle's four causes. I won't go into all that here. There's the material cause, the formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. But in the book I tie these together to Wright's idea of organic architecture in a way I think that uniquely makes a lot more sense of Wright's idea, and how it really does tie into this. I mentioned briefly the word hylomorphism from Aristotle's philosophy, and that's the inseparability of form and matter. Every substance, Aristotle argued, is a composite of these two principles. Matter provides a substratum while form gives its structure, its purpose, and its identity. The example helps us see Aristotle's point that nothing exists as pure matter without form or as pure form without matter. A rubber ball without form is just a lump of rubber. The form of the ball without the matter and without the rubber is just an abstract idea in the mind. Only when the two are joined together do we get something real, a ball, and that's how Wright conceived his buildings, not as arbitrary form imposed on materials nor as just a pile of materials without design, but as a true union of form and matter and integrated whole. This is why he insisted that a building's beauty is found in its organic unity, where the part is to the whole as the whole is to the part. Here we could get into the idea of form follows function versus form and function are one. And again, this is where Wright's idea of form and function are one superseding supposedly Sullivan's idea and the modernist idea of form following function is important. Again, I won't go into all that here because it gets more detailed, but it's just beautiful parallels between Wright's organic theory and, in this case, a lot of Aristotle's ideas of his metaphysics.

Pulling this forward. So there's an irony, I think, because I've gone way, way back with history for Wright, not taking him to the future but taking him back to Hegel, but not stopping at Hegel, and now all the way, you know, almost 2,500 years to Aristotle. So why? I mean, that just seems to make it more backward, more out of date, more out of touch than anything, doesn't it? But this is the irony with Aristotle. The very Aristotelian principles that critics once dismissed as outdated are now being rediscovered not just in philosophy but in science. Quantum physics with its concepts of potentiality, holism, mutual interdependence has led many physicists and philosophers to reconsider Aristotle. Werner Heisenberg noted parallels between quantum potentialities and Aristotle's potential. Robert Koons and others have pointed out that quantum entanglement reveals whole irreducible wholes that are irreducible to their parts, precisely the kind of unity Aristotle described. Far from being left behind, Wright's grounding in a metaphysics of wholeness now looks strikingly forward. In an age where architecture often lacks a shared standard of beauty, Aristotelian thought, like Wright's organic architecture, offers something we are missing. A coherent framework for the ought, not just the possible. Such a framework reminds us that buildings should be judged not only on whether they stand up but on whether they stand for something, whether they embody a unity that bears the fruit of beauty.

If unity is the root and beauty is its fruit, then the question before us is, how do we plant and cultivate this in our own time? Wright's organic architecture was not merely a style to be imitated, but a discipline, a way of conceiving buildings as living wholes in harmony with their nature, their place, and their purpose. This requires what I call a metaphysics of wholeness. It is not enough to add sustainability checklists, digital tools, or stylistic nods to nature. Without a guiding philosophy, these become isolated gestures. Wright's enduring lesson is that the whole must be conceived before the parts and that every part must find its place within the whole not by imposition but by growth from within. The principles we have examined—from the part-to-whole reciprocity of the golden mean to the Aristotelian integration of form and matter—offer more than a historical insight. They can serve as a living framework for design today, helping architects navigate the vast and often fragmented field of contemporary practice. In this sense, Wright's work provides a middle way, a refusal both to retreat into historical imitation and to surrender to the novelty-for-novelty's-sake ethos of much modern architecture. His architecture shows that beauty need not be bound to past forms nor severed from the past entirely. It can be timeless without being static, rooted without being nostalgic.

And for purpose of time, I won't go into this. In the book I talk about a model theory of organic architecture tying kind of the loose threads of Wright's seven tenants of the organic, or his nine tenants depending on what you're looking at, and creating a structured model of not really trying to be new but trying to give it a foundation, a more systemized foundation that it didn't have, and again that's obviously more spelled out in the book.

And I'll end with this. So far, we've been moving at a fairly high altitude, exploring Wright's principles, Aristotle's metaphysics, and just showed you the model theory of the organic I did. But architecture isn't just philosophy or theory. Obviously, at some point, it must take shape in wood, stone, and glass, and it must be lived in. To show how these ideas can still bear fruit today, I'd like to show a couple examples here from my own practice. This is a house I designed in Kansas called the Opioa House . It gave me a chance to wrestle with these various principles in real time of essence, of teleology, of proportion, the integrated whole of the spatial construction we see in the Japanese print as a model of updating the Usonian idea in Wright's work as well. And again it takes cues from the Usonian house, but it's not a copy of the Usonian house. It uses plywood, much like the Usonians often, it uses it in a new way and using computer CNC cut detail. So the detailing is integral and organic, as I would say. It's actually structural here and it's all kind of woven out of this warp and weft of the cloth, as Wright would say.

Just a simple 1,500 sq ft house, but it spirals up kind of like a Nautilus shell till you get to the upper area, the sanctum, where the trusses are where you can touch them. The space is more intimate. Wright said that organic architecture is often a great discipline. With something like this, every little part has to be precisely designed in the computer and 3D BIM design for it to work. So, it was quite a bit of effort and work to do this. But again, this the idea of the integrated whole of it all tying together and not just being a pre-manufactured house, but being something that is beautiful and organic. And that was the whole idea.

This is another one on the boards in Detroit just outside of Ann Arbor. Another Usonian house. There's a road here that you're seeing this from. We're trying to get away from the street noise and berm up. And then there's a river to the other side that it opens up to. Again, the warm living room in this case using a lot of the CNC plywood ideas as well, the radiant heat in the concrete floors in this case and this is site plan floor plan.

So anyway, here we are tonight. Wright has to be looked at not just as a stylist or a historical figure but as someone who reached back into the deepest roots of philosophy and art to recover a way of building that puts beauty, essence, and unity at the very center. We have seen how his organic vision draws from Aristotle's sense of form and purpose, how it resonates with Japanese art's ability to strip away the accidental, and how it continues to challenge us today. The question before us now is, what will we do with it? Architecture is not merely about the past. It shapes the homes we live in, the cities we walk through, and the culture we hand on to the next generation. Wright insisted that beauty is not optional. It is essential, as essential as light and air. When we ignore it, our environment becomes fragmented and lifeless. When we honor it, we participate in something greater, something that uplifts human life. My invitation is simple. Don't leave beauty to the past. Don't think of it as a decoration or as a luxury. See it, as Wright did, as the very fruit of unity and essence. The test of whether our work, whatever it is, is truly alive. Whether we as architects, teachers, builders, or simply lovers of place, we are all responsible for asking, "Does this foster harmony or does it fracture it? Does this reveal essence or conceal it?" Wright once told young architects that while the circumference of architecture was changing and always expanding, its center remained the same. And what was that center? He specifically said beauty. That center does not belong only to him. It belongs to all of us. And so as we leave this theater that he designed, as I said again, to unite art, music, and architecture, let us carry forward that center into our own lives—to build, to teach, to create, and to live along that path to beauty. Thank you.