The past present and future of architecture’s cyber space..Thanksgiving Day 2014.
“What did Bach say to his fellow players in their daily poker game.”I’m going Baroque”.
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“Certainly no doubt about it,” Americans have a lot to be grateful for. A revolutionary passion r for some two hundred and fifty years. A Utopia? A Republic worth hanging out in”regardless of falling short of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation .
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Remembering an iconoclast named Frank Lloyd Wright, he was acknowledged as a pioneer architect post Word War 2 in dream making. He grafted his iconoclastic ideas into Nature , the “theHigh Noon” a tombstone turf, the Painted Desert FlagstaffArizona landmarks savored his urban state of mind..
His thinking was so far out of the box, that a visiting Brooklyn College Historian gave a lecture about his larger than lifeblueprint, rebutting conventional wisdom..playing it safe,transcending his own birthright.
Whether or not he was ahead of his time , he set an example.. But like A. Quincy Jones,(Ucla’s Research Library), RichardNeutra (Robinson Hall) he was ahead of his conventional “play it safe” mode.
That orientation to the state of mind of the West. Monument Valley appealed to John Ford, Duke Wayne’s “Angel”, riding “shogun” with Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, Porter Hall intheir roles as passengers in “Stagecoach”.
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Frank Lloyd Wright gripped our imagination inasmuchstereotypes denied the original road (“The wizard of Oz”) ton post World War2 life.
But it wasn’t a nonconformist 17 year old Freshman from Brooklyn attending a global University that needed that shot in the arm.
Didn’t Stalin’s daughter fall in love with Frank Lloyd Wright’s younger partner, and interestingly enough Morris Ernst who wrote the fireside chats for FDR, aided and abetted her umbilicalchord, from hi s legal dome on the Big Apple’s Madison Avenue. Or his apartment at two Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village.
She fled from her father’s tyranny unlike composerShostakovich, those Siberian dead end camps, liberating Architecture of a crusader like Frank Lloyd Wright and his younger partner..
That human beings are naturals on the planet and therefore whether they sell out their marketplace visions, they are an extension of their cosmos.
Robison Hall, Ophir Drive and Land fair, in Ucla’s WestwoodVillage hills, overlooking the campus and Ed Pauley-coach JohnWooden’s universe, Frank Lloyd Wright found himself afriendly congenial base in Southern California. ….
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Which brings to mind, the passing of another original. Ourcousin Harold’s widow Judy
Edelman whose leadership an passion, transcended the BigApple and the conventional Greenwich Village state of mind,during the first week of October 2014.
Edelman whose leadership an passion, transcended the BigApple and the conventional Greenwich Village state of mind,during the first week of October 2014.
Born in Brooklyn of immigrant parents, she was a graduate of Connecticut College, N.Y.U. and Columbia School of Architecture when females went into design, rather than invade a man bastion and stronghold.
But unlike Cleopatra, she identified with her public servant role, bonding with Harold, into their Edelman and Edelmanpartnership:, living out their dream ,grafting their visions and Frank Lloyd Wright into their determinism..
To think of their destined fate, sharing their dreamed space on Bank Street and its down to earth Reality in the “Village”.
The City that never sleeps. November 27, 2014 An ode to the gift of Thanksgiving.
