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At The School of Architecture, new voices unpacked Frank Lloyd Wright's trickiest design principle

100% Organic

At The School of Architecture, new voices unpacked Frank Lloyd Wright's trickiest design principle

The stairwell of Arcosanti’s Craft III building features works by SO–IL, ArandaLasch, and the Tawaw Architecture Collective. (Courtesy The School of Architecture)

The desert ignites the imagination. In the stark vastness, you’re reminded that you’re a tiny, fleshy piece of something unending. It was in this context—of small acts of lively expression within a larger arid wilderness—that visitors to the School of Architecture’s (TSOA) Arcosanti campus encounteredOrganic, anexhibitionthat ran for a month through mid-May. The show offered a contemporaneous view of an unagreed-upon design term that continues to hold special relevance for TSOA.

Organized by director Stephanie Lin, the exhibition acknowledged that, as a design term, organic is both cumbersome and lacking in clarity. It continues to be strongly associated withFrank Lloyd Wright, who foundedTaliesin Westin 1937 as a winter campus for his namesake design school; in 2020, the institutionrebranded and movedto Arcosanti, a utopian settlement established in 1970 north of Phoenix by Wright acolyte Paolo Soleri. Connotations of the organic are many and varied. The index for the five-volumeFrank Lloyd Wright: Complete Worksis a hilarious indication of this, listing approximately 35 specific classifications of its use.

Organic通过强调靠近这模棱两可part-to-whole relationships that characterize today’s information-rich, materially conscious global society. Putting aside Wright’s formal ideas, the show collected ten pieces by North American designers, which ranged from a delicate, ceiba-seed-imbued silver necklace to a rigorous architectural model. The vagueness but also spareness indicated by this use of organic (the term) makeOrganic(the show) feel especially relevant to contemporary aesthetics.

small art objects installed beneath a building
Various pieces were staged in the building’s undercroft space. (Courtesy The School of Architecture)

The objects were installed in the interior and exterior of Arcosanti’s Craft III building. After descending a staircase, visitors encountered two works:Petrichor、粗制的纸浆paper vessels produced by the experimental studioAranda\Lasch, andBreathe, a scaled-down version of a housing prototype the Brooklyn officeSO–ILoriginally installed at the Salone del Mobile 2017. Next up wasTawaw Architecture Collective’s elegantThree Sisters, a slowly twirled mobile that was framed by a circular aperture punched into a concrete wall (a distinctive feature of Arcosanti’s design). The remaining objects were moored on a gravelly expanse in a covered area below the building. Most were small and similar in size. This scalar relationship did a few clever things, such as underline the formal differences, and thematic resonances, between objects, while also training attention on the texture of the surrounding surfaces. Frequent gusts of wind made visitors notice the fragile stature of the objects, and given their tactile qualities, one felt drawn to touch them.Six Bellsby the Arcosanti Ceramic Studio rang out, andJa Architecture Studio’sOrganic Swayrocked in the breeze. The latter expresses an idea about how organic has long been the subject of disputes within Wright’s history. The piece name-checks an 1887 drawing of a house Wright made in the course of a job interview with Louis Sullivan. In the margins, the two dueled over conflicting uses of organic in the design: Wright reduced the term to an understanding of the plan’s geometry, while Sullivan used it to describe architectural ornament.

small art objects installed in a rocky outcrop
Studio Sean Canty’sSwirling Flats(2022) in front ofOrganic Sway(2022) by Ja Architecture Studio (Courtesy The School of Architecture)
a hanging art piece
Six Bells(2022) by the Arcosanti Ceramics Studio. (Courtesy The School of Architecture)

Other pieces, likePRŠIĆ & PRŠIĆ’s废对象,took on a cheeky interpretation of organic that imagined ceramics as a recyclable resource. Fixed with globules of goop and looking messy but intriguing,Scrapwas an incredible contrast to Terrol Dew Johnson’sForm over Function,another compelling assemblage that acrobatically curled in on itself to form a flexible U-shaped basket. Made from materials (wood, bear grass, sinew) sourced from the Tohono O’odham Nation,Formexpresses the pre-Wright, Indigenous impulse that “form and function should be one.”T+E+A+M’sConesconveyed an idea about organically producing material through postconsumer construction debris found on vacant sites in Detroit. Altogether, the show felt wonderfully coy, subtle, experimental, and communal.

It also charted a path forward for TSOA. Lin, who joined the school in 2021, noted that the exhibition gave TSOA the opportunity “to step back and reexamine the term organic in order to identify new opportunities and relevance and with a new set of participants in the conversation.” She added that the school’s move to Arcosanti “has leveraged our ability to explore alternative and future forms of pedagogy, experimental design, community, and connections to our environments and landscapes.”

a shell-shaped sculptural artwork
Terrol Dew Johnson’sForm over Function(2014). (Courtesy The School of Architecture)
art objects instsalled in a rocky landscape
PRŠIĆ & PRŠIĆ’sScrap Object(2022) withOrganic Sway(2022) by Ja Architecture Studio at the right. (Courtesy The School of Archiecture)

Organic, ultimately, was about process: Converting raw material into a finished product was core to each artifact. TSOA’s reevaluation of the term comes at a time when society has grown politically anxious and the planet continues to be depleted of resources. What does it mean to value “the organic” in our current moment of crisis? Time is explicit in organic processes, which variously evolve, unfold, and grow. Design is similar, as it requires ample time and resources to grow an initial thought into built form. The ten works inOrganicare a gentle reminder of the precariousness of humanity’s relationship to the environment but also of design’s potential to navigate new and complex challenges through integrated approaches.

Nick Shekerjianis an architect atExhibau USAand founder of ONS, a design studio in Phoenix that investigates massive spatial scales, representation, and nature.

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