"When I was 11 years old I was sent to a Wisconsin farm to learn how to really work. So all this I saw around me seemed affectation, nonsense, or profane. The first feeling was hunger for reality, for sincerity. A desire for simplicity that would yield a broader, deeper comfort was natural, too, to this first feeling. A growing idea of simplicity as organic, as I had been born into it and trained in it, was new as a quality of thought, able to strengthen and refresh the spirit in any circumstances. Organic simplicity might everywhere be seen producing significant character in the ruthless but harmonious order I was taught to call nature. I was more than familiar with it on the farm. All around me, I, or anyone for that matter, might see beauty in growing things and, by a little painstaking, learn how they grew to be "beautiful." None was ever insignificant. I loved the prairie by instinct as itself a great simplicity; the trees, flowers, and sky were thrilling by contrast. And I saw that a little of height on the prairie was enough to look like much more. Notice how every detail as to height becomes intensely significant and how breadths all fall short. Here was a tremendous spaciousness needlessly sacrificed, all cut up crosswise or lengthwise into 50-foot lots, or would you have 25 feet? Reduced to a money-matter, salesmanship kept on parceling out the ground, selling it with no restrictions. Everywhere, in a great new, free country, I could see only this mean tendency to tip cverything in the way of human occupation or habitation up edgewise instead of letting it lie comfortably flatwise with the ground where spaciousness was a virtue. Nor has this changed much since automobilization has made it no genuine economic issue at all but has made it a social crime to crowd in upon one another."
Did Wright speak earlier about the desire, so clearly seen in his work beginning with the Prairie houses, for the "long and low" ? The above words are the only ones I know from his hand, about this vital and intrinsic aspect of the work.
In today's newspaper appeared these manufacturers' photos of current automobiles.
The wish for the cars to appear long and low is revealed in the intentional distortion of
the photographs, evident and obvious in the wheels, which are measurably elliptical
rather than round.
This trick dates to the nineteen-fifties (when car customizers were actively pursuing in
the flesh what the advertisers were imagining on the page) and seems to have been
revived recently.
My question is: What is the attraction of objects like houses and cars in which the height
is suppressed and the length exaggerated ? Is this a twentieth-century phenomenon,
and if so was Frank Lloyd Wright a pioneer of this vision ?
SDR
