MAGA Against Brutalism

Actually . . .

Architecture is a very big deal for any thriving city . . . It's not just a sign of prosperity but semi-permanent political statement about the political values of a metropolis. 

Accordingly . . .   

A recent MAGA order hopes to step away from Brutalist architecture that dominates the design of so many government buildings across the nation . . . There's an interesting debate over this mandate that also concerns a renowned builder who designed several local structures as well . . . Here's the money line and further reading . . . 

What’s striking about this list of officially acceptable builders is the name it glaringly omitted: the most beloved—and most American—of all architects, Frank Lloyd Wright.

During a career that lasted seven decades, Wright totally revolutionized architecture, spurning the Neo-Classicism that the upper classes had decreed to be official “good taste” in the 1890s, and offering instead a style that was at once futuristic and welcoming. He became not only the greatest architect in American history, but the only one many Americans today can immediately name.

Wright agreed with Wren that a nation’s values are reflected in its buildings, and that buildings can, in turn, shape the public’s social and political attitudes. But where the monarchist Wren believed in using architecture to propagandize about tradition and authority, Wright aimed to do the opposite. An acolyte of the democratic spiritualism of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he spent his career designing buildings that celebrate individualism and respect the landscape. He liked to call it “Organic Architecture,” or “human scale.”

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Who's Afraid of Frank Lloyd Wright?

If 'America First' applies to architecture, why don't its acolytes prioritize the country's greatest builder?