Influence of Japanese Architecture on Frank Lloyd Wright
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Throughout his life Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) denied that Japanese architecture had any influence on his own work. He did, however, allow that Japanese prints had exerted an important influence on him. Curiously, Wright has often been taken at his word on this subject, even though there is a great deal of evidence that shows he was, for whatever reason, creating a personal legend in which his creativity owed very little to one of its major sources. The visual evidence of the work itself, scholarly digging into possible influences, and even the nature of the Japanese prints that were admitted to be an influence all demonstrate that Wright was protesting too much. Japanese architecture, whether it was seen in photographs, in person, in the prints, or even seen through the eyes of a mentor, was a major influence on Wright's creation of his theory of organic architecture and on the buildings he designed. To see and understand this influence could not in any way be construed as lessening Wright's own achievement--no matter what he might have thought. Even the tone of Wright's protestations on the subject makes his claims difficult to accept. In an article built around some of his "recollections" from the period 1893-1920, Wright wrote sarcastically, "No, my dear Mrs. Gablemore, Mrs. Plasterbilt, and especially, now, Miss Flattop, nothing from 'Japan' has helped at all, except the marvel of Japanese color prints" (qtd. in Manson 37). This was the direct attack. In an
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ecede in Japanese architecture would seem to be a more likely source for Wright. Preddy's arguments, ingenious as they are, seem to ignore the fact that some relationship between architecture and prints pre-existed any interest on Wright's part. While he may have been intrigued by all the layering and compositional effects that Preddy notes in the prints, these effects derived from the kind of architecture that was being presented in many of these works. Preddy even goes so far as to say that the "reproducibility" of the prints "ties them directly to the standardization of building modules embraced by Japanese builders and later by Wright" (18).
Another critic accepts Wright's claims at face value and argues that the Japanese print was a metaphor for "architectural activity" since, by "analyzing printmakers Wright was actually describing his own methods of work and his own architectural objectives" (Twombley 151). Twombley argues that since one of Wright's major goals was to reduce domestic architecture to its essentials and since the prints did just this to the visual world they depicted, the connection is about working methods. Yet Twombley does not bother to note that it is not just the prints, in which (though he doe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Wright Smith, Persia China, Wright Japanese, Japan's Ho-o-den, Wright Preddy's, Silsbee Silsbee, Hotel Tokyo, Curiously Wright, Exposition Wright's, Wright's Japanese, japanese architecture, frank lloyd, frank lloyd wright, lloyd wright, japanese art, japanese prints, qtd nute, wright japanese, nute 228, domestic architecture, ernest fenollosa, qtd nute 228, wright japanese art, aspects past architecture, qtd manson 37,
Approximate Word count = 2350
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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