1 - The Wright Space

The W/Right Space
By Patrick D. Miller

THERE is little argument that Frank Lloyd Wright was America's greatest, most original, and most influential architect.

Though, during his lifetime, he often went for long periods without significant architectural assignments, the body of his work-including houses, public buildings, business establishments, churches, and hotels-is substantial and, in many respects, revolutionary. His work and his writing have shaped American architecture in large ways. The renovation of the Guggenheim Museum, his last major building, has called attention once more to the individuality and impact of his vision. And while several biographies of Wright have appeared through the years, the front page of the New York Times Book Review recently featured yet another one.

Among the latest studies of Wright's work is one by Grant Hildebrand entitled The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses. The author applies to the analysis of Wright's houses a pattern or theory of landscape aesthetics first set forth by Jay Appleton. Hildebrand claims, persuasively, that the houses Wright designed reflect a group of features human beings innately prefer in natural and designed environments, features he finds present in Wright's houses in rich fashion. They are complexity and order, prospect and refuge, hazard, and mystery. The body of his book seeks to demonstrate, through a large number of examples, the prominence of these features.

Hildebrand's analysis is confined to private houses. One may ask, however, to what extent such features, if indeed in any sense innate or preferred by human beings, belong to the shape of a church, both architecturally and congregationally. That is, do church buildings and church communities manifest-or seek to do so-the characteristics that Hildebrand finds fundamental to family buildings and the communities that inhabit them? Whether or not they do, one might argue that Hildebrand suggests an angle of vision on the "shape" of a "church"-with all the ambiguity that both terms carry.

Even a casual perusal of Wright's houses reveals great complexity within and differences among them. Yet, it is clear that several basic patterns governed his plans, and that, beneath the complexity of any given house, there is much order. What they suggest for church structures is the possibility that surprise and novelty can coexist with a

2 - The Wright Space

fundamental sense of coherence, that one who enters the building or the community may find difference, incongruity, even at times or in various modes, disorder and irregularity. There is an openness and freedom that means not everything is predictable and simple. Yet, within and underneath the surprises and differences, there exists a fundamental order, so that a sense of the whole is discernible, a way of characterizing and seeing how novelty and irregularity are not chaos, but the interaction of freedom and rootedness. It may not be the case that surprise and novelty are set before the architects of our contemporary churches as necessary ingredients anymore than they are prized in congregational life. But there is something in our human being that desires to encounter the novel and the more complex, as long as it does not seem to undermine the stability that keeps us from seeming to fall apart.

The joining of prospect and refuge in a single structure is powerfully realized in Wright's houses, as Hildebrand demonstrates and any visitor to a Wright house will soon perceive. The fireplace occupies a central place in the house as a center of refuge. Entrances may be invisible or cave-like, and walls loom large and dominant. But upon entry, one always finds openness, the release of high ceilings along with the intimacy of low ones, visibility out and up and down, views of the outside world and of other rooms in the house. The world and nature are drawn in as much as they are shut out. Hildebrand's claim is that the combination of strong refuge signals with strong prospect signals makes a house pleasurable for human habitation. If so, the same combination suggests a way of being in the world that belongs to the "shape" of our churches. They are refuge in design and function. The sense of retreat for worship and prayer and from the cares of the world is a large part of their function and often visible in their design. What is true of the building is true also of the community. It is the mix, however, of both refuge and prospect that makes a house pleasurable and perhaps makes a church more human and inviting. Its refuge from the world joins with a way of seeing and viewing that same world, of being open to the outside as much as hidden from it. So, in a small church I served as pastor, a visitor would encounter a simple brick-walled structure, inviting as a refuge or retreat from the world outside. Entry into its sanctuary, however, presented the visitor or member with one of the main walls as a mass of windows and doors opening visibly and actually on to the world outside. (It also provided a regular mix of order and complexity, routine and surprise, as the familiar service of worship might be interrupted with the appearance of a neighbor's guinea hens in the trees outside the wall of windows.)

Hildebrand mentions two other features that are more minor and less frequent in Wright's houses. In his discussion of Fallingwater, the Edgar Kaufmann house, built over a waterfall and arguably the most famous house in American architecture, he analyzes Wright's incorporation of hazard or threat into the architecture. It is seen especially in the flowing waterfall but also in the dizzying balconies that soar over

3 - The Wright Space

the water and look, by Wright's design, permanently precarious. Hazard conditions may seem to have nothing to do with the "shape" of the "church," but the point ought not be dismissed too easily. For it has to do with the capacity of the design of the church, structural and congregational, to deal with societal intrusions and natural hazards. The incorporation of hazard conditions is an indication of the willingness of the church to be daring and to risk, to let the blending of prospect and refuge be a way of not simply retreating and viewing the world, but of encountering and being reminded of its threats and realities.

The dimension of mystery seems foreign to most private houses. But Hildebrand suggests it is present in a number of Wright's houses in the way in which their inhabitants sense that "spaces lie beyond spaces," "the suggestion but not the immediate revelation of distant spaces," and the recognition that "if more information about that sensed but unseen space is sought, it cannot be had without investigation." Where in the church are there such spaces beyond spaces, realms suggested and intimated but not immediately accessible, territory that must be investigated if one is to know more? What is true of Wright's houses belongs to the "shape" of the church in a far more fundamental way, to its shape architecturally, so that the structure itself suggests possibilities that must be explored and that give one a sense all is not self-evident, and to its shape congregationally, so that the life of the people does not assume a certitude without intimations of unexplored and unknown territory or a familiarity that is sure what is discernible in space and time is all that matters and everything is in hand. The challenge is larger than the one Wright saw and constantly overcame. It is not only human space that is unseen and to be explored. It is the reality and mystery of God our structures are to intimate in what they show and do not show.

Architecture is the art of shaping space. The church in its architecture and architectonics-and we are still talking about both concrete and human structures-declares something about its identity and how it lives in the world. The argument here is that the Wright sense of space tells us something right about the space of the church. In the way we build the church, we "shape" its character and its life. It is one way we say who we are, what we are about, and what one may expect within our bounds or walls.

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

This issue of THEOLOGY TODAY includes articles by some of the newer voices in American theology. You will find here essays representing the current thinking of those who promise to be among the theologians setting the agenda for theological discussion in the coming decades.

- THE EDITORS