Sunday, September 26, 2010

Inspiration

Sorry, everyone, this one's all words, no arts. If your an architect, however, prospective or legit, this statement packs quite a punch. With that in mind..
..drop some knowledge on us, Mr. Sullivan.



"And thus, when native instinct and sensibility shall govern the exercise of our beloved

art; when the known law, the respected law, shall be that form ever follows function;

when our architects shall cease strutting and prattling handcuffed and vainglorious in

the asylum of a foreign school; when it is truly felt, cheerfully accepted, that this law

opens up the airy sunshine of green fields, and gives to us a freedom that the very

beauty and sumptuousness of the outworking of the law itself as exhibited in nature

will deter any sane, any sensitive man from changing into license; when it becomes

evident that we are merely speaking a foreign language with a noticeable American

accent, whereas each and every architect in the land might, under the benign

influence of this law, express in the simplest, most modest, most natural way that

which il is in him to say: that he might really and would surely develop his own

characteristic individuality, and that the architectural art with him would certainly

become a living form of speech, a natural form of utterance, giving surcease to him

and adding treasures small and great to the growing art of his land; when we know

and feel that Nature is our friend, not our implacable enemy, that an afternoon in the

country, an hour by the sea, a full open view of one single day, through dawn, high

noon, and twilight, will suggest to us so much that is rhythmical, deep, and eternal in

the vast art of architecture, something so deep, so true, that all the narrow

formalities, hard-and-fast rules, and strangling bonds of the schools cannot stifle it in us, then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a natural and satisfying

art, an architecture that will soon become a fine art in the true, the best sense of the

word, an art that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the

people."

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