Above: Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo John Engstead. Courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.
Romantic, Positive, Extrovert, Versatile, A good
communicator, Orator, Educator, Intellectual,
Youthful, Energetic, Speedy, Nervous,
Temperamental, Easily distracted, Inquisitive,
Curious, Compassionate, Superficial, Impulsive,
Passionate, Driven
Frank Lloyd Wright was a romantic Gemini with one foot
in the past and the other in the future.
He was consequently enamoured with the mythological,
romantic and almost Hollywood cliché of the Japanese and
the Mayan/Aztec.
The Ennis House, which comes from Wright's Hollywood-
Mayan period and now sits in decay in the hills of Los Feliz, is
one of Frank's master works. Yet Wright was equally invested
in the future—the Ennis House is more than just a flirtation
with a foreign style. With this work he developed an entirely
new building technology: the precast concrete textile block.
Wright, also a great advocate of the American individual,
found as much romantic mysticism in the flat plains of
Wisconsin. Wright understood the vital aspect of the American
conception of space. It was big, radiant and horizontal and
demanded a new architectural imagining.
The Gemini holds the capacity to see all points of view equally.
With these things in mind, Wright developed the free plan.
With no singular perspective, everything radiates outwardly
and omnidirectionally from the central core of the hearth. In
the Wrightian plan, the hearth is the loci, the bearing element
from which everything originates and to which everything
returns. These ideas are embodied in his Prairie Houses and
later in his Usonian Houses.
Despite Wright's obsession with the horizontal, some of his
best buildings are the few vertical towers he built. With
the S.C. Johnson Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, Wright
masterfully combines streamline fantasies with picturesque
romanticism, with the columns reflecting the lily pads
of a 19th-century botanical garden. The columns umbrella
the office workers, sitting below at their desks, as a sense
of intimacy is contrasted with the monumentality of the
structural verticality.
Gemini possesses natural skills as an orator and is ruled
by Mercury which is the messenger, according to Roman
mythology. Like another infamous American Gemini, Donald
Trump, Frank had a natural and unabashed capacity for selfpromotion.
Exaggerating and embellishing stories, he was
able to project a mythic image. Wright did not discriminate,
publishing his work in Time Magazine, Life Magazine, Home
Beautiful and Ladies' Home Journal.
After hard times, Frank relaunched his career with a doublepage
colour spread in Life Magazine with his newly designed
Fallingwater. A scenic Hollywood domestic idyll meets Niagara
Falls fantasy house cantilevering off rocky Pennsylvanian
outcrops. Frank bounced back. In an interview with Mike
Wallace, Frank declared that he would outlive Elvis in the
collective memory of the American people. Time will decide
who remains more pervasive.
His ego grew towards the end of his life, verging on
megalomania. Yet as a childlike Gemini, even at 90 Frank
was a perpetual adolescent at heart.
Dan Graham, Jessica Russell
As one of the most
influential conceptual
artists of his time, Dan
Graham first emerged in
the 1960s alongside the
Minimalists. His work
crosses multiple mediums
including performance, film
and video, exploring shifts
in individual and group
consciousness and the limits
of public and private space.
This has evolved into the
installations and pavilions
for which Graham is most
internationally famous. All his
projects are democratically
rooted in everyday urban life.
Jessica Russell studied
and practiced art in
Melbourne, Australia, where
she also worked in film and
television before relocating
to New York where she
currently studies architecture
at The Cooper Union.
Gemini
The romantic Gemini Frank Lloyd Wright understood the vital aspect of the American conception of space.
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- Dan Graham,Jessica Russell
- 20 May 2011
- New York