An exhibition organized by
the School of Architecture
4.15–
5.16.2022
Studio Sean Canty
Swirling Flats, 2022
"Why not let walls, ceilings, and floors become seen as component parts of each other, their surfaces flowing into each other? Why not throw away all implications of post and beam construction? Have no posts, no columns, no pilasters, cornices or moldings or ornament; no divisions of the sort nor allow any fixtures whatever to enter as something added to the structure. Any building would be complete, including all within itself. Instead of many things, one thing. I promoted plasticity as conceived by Lieber Meister to continuity in the concept of the building as a whole."
Organic conjures up a set of qualities, processes, and formal gestures. Swirling Flats engage the term through the latter; these explorations tease out a combinatorial logic between the horizontal and vertical, the graphic and the spatial, and curved and flat figures. Without use, they are not useless and echo Wright's spatial idea of plasticity through its formal qualities and its logic of aggregation. The proposal offers the possibility of endless configurations, of many wholes. A scaleless inquiry, the proposal could operate as a shading device to alleviate the pressures of a warming planet in urban cores, or an elevated ground that embraces water and aqueous forms of architecture. Each is seen as an imminently possible future. Taken together, the proposal is an invitation to think organically about how elemental forms of architecture can resonate with multiple functions of use and a formal system that is easily mutable for precarious environmental circumstances.
—Frank Lloyd Wright,
An American Architecture.
Organic conjures up a set of qualities, processes, and formal gestures. Swirling Flats engage the term through the latter; these explorations tease out a combinatorial logic between the horizontal and vertical, the graphic and the spatial, and curved and flat figures. Without use, they are not useless and echo Wright's spatial idea of plasticity through its formal qualities and its logic of aggregation. The proposal offers the possibility of endless configurations, of many wholes. A scaleless inquiry, the proposal could operate as a shading device to alleviate the pressures of a warming planet in urban cores, or an elevated ground that embraces water and aqueous forms of architecture. Each is seen as an imminently possible future. Taken together, the proposal is an invitation to think organically about how elemental forms of architecture can resonate with multiple functions of use and a formal system that is easily mutable for precarious environmental circumstances.