Art and Craft of the Machine
10 Installments—Entirely free
(Preview)
Members' Rating: 
from 2 Ratings and 1 Review
Tags: Architecture, Classics, Lectures
Description
In March of 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most well-respected and innovative architects in the world, presented a lecture to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. In this famous address, The Art and Craft of the Machine, Wright appealed to his fellow artists to consider the good that technology could bring to their creative endeavors. At a pivotal moment in American arts and industry, Wright championed the place of the machine in the Arts and Crafts movement. Rather than recoiling from machinery as foreign to the creative process, Wright felt that technology might be the key to progress in the arts, opening avenues of expression and achievement that had never before been possible. Speaking to such an influential society, Wright made waves and opened many minds. Take a seat in the audience and revisit Wright’s fascinating words of wisdom.
Back to top
Opening Lines (Experimental)
As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal - something we are to become - some work to be done. This, I think, is denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish. In the years ...
Back to topMember review
5/5 
Reviewed by robhunt510 on Jan 8, 2009
A Timely Text
Substitute "architecture" for any number of contemporary "professions" - but let us begin with journalism, or the teaching of history - and we find embedded here a message about the machine, mass reproduction, and a diurnal search for the authentic. Wright is considering the machine: in 1910, an enigmatic and ambiguous form. Today that machine is the digital sea of information; and our struggle is to find the new "plastic" forms that evolve from this most networked of machines, and are generative, rather than objects that "repurpose" the old. Just as Wright contrasts the craft of the Middle Ages with what he reads as the inauthenticity of the "Renaissance" so we are left to contrast the twentieth century world of books, newspapers, arts and crafts, and visceral art, with the virtual future. Wright is in search of a soul; we, I suspect, will make do with some kind of "trust".
Login to review this book
Not yet registered?
Ratings for 'Art and Craft of the Machine' by Wright, Frank Lloyd
| BabsG |  | 2008-12-07 | |
| robhunt510 | | Read review | 2009-01-08 |
Art and Craft of the Machine
Send 10 installments for free as a gift.
Art and Craft of the Machine
Receive installments for free
