An exhibition organized by
the School of Architecture
4.15–
5.16.2022
Ja Architecture Studio
Organic Sway, 2022
For the TSOA Organic exhibition at Arcosanti, we bored the Cooper House, a drawing made by Frank Lloyd Wright circa 1887 when he applied for a job at the Sullivan’s Office.
The boring of the house reveals two characters: the stair with its geometric configuration and the two-sided fireplace with its typological clarity. There are odd role swaps between Wright and Sullivan in the development of their work. Wright reduced the organic to its core geometric principles and allowed it to be the architecture. Sullivan lusciously expressed the organic as an applied but critical layer over and onto the known building types; the tomb, the bank, the palazzo…
The disciplinary sway between these two modes of thinking is still present in architecture and our lightwood frame staging of this sway will bring to the fore the theater between this binary; a binary as constructed as any other in our cultural history, thin and projected, yet persistently at play.
The boring of the house reveals two characters: the stair with its geometric configuration and the two-sided fireplace with its typological clarity. There are odd role swaps between Wright and Sullivan in the development of their work. Wright reduced the organic to its core geometric principles and allowed it to be the architecture. Sullivan lusciously expressed the organic as an applied but critical layer over and onto the known building types; the tomb, the bank, the palazzo…
The disciplinary sway between these two modes of thinking is still present in architecture and our lightwood frame staging of this sway will bring to the fore the theater between this binary; a binary as constructed as any other in our cultural history, thin and projected, yet persistently at play.