The sublime in architecture: Wright’s transcendentalism

Lucas Martins
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
ORCID: 0000-0002-3702-428X

Ana Tostões
Center for Innovation in Territory, Urbanism and Architecture, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
ORCID: 0000-0001-9751-9017

Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos

Center for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
ORCID: 0000-0001-8234-5974

ABSTRACT: Why are certain buildings able to generate the feeling of the sublime? The American architect
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1859) designed several structures that have this ability. A feeling comparable to
the emotions experienced during human interaction with dramatic landscapes. The feeling of the sublime can
also be experienced in structures located in different latitudes of the globe, designed by architects who
admired Wright’s work, such as the Brazilian Vilanova Artigas (1915-1985), the Danish Jørn Utzon (1918­
2008), and the Portuguese Fernando Távora (1923-2005). Can we explain the feeling of the sublime in archi­
tecture based on Wright’s organic principles? We defend that Wright’s ability to translate emotions through
construction was structured by the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803­
1882). We present Emerson’s transcendentalism, highlighting the impact that both Romanticism and German
Idealism had on his ideas. We also explain Wright’s interaction with Emerson’s work and its impact on
Wright’s interest in Japanese architecture. Finally, we relate the organic principles used by Wright to evoke
the feeling of the sublime in his structures and buildings designed by architects from different latitudes. We
conclude that Wright’s exposure to transcendentalist ideas guided him in his quest to bring self-awareness
through architectural manifestations that are intricately associated with Nature and our experience in Nature.

Keywords: Frank Lloyd Wright, Sublime, German Idealism, Transcendentalism, Organic architecture

Why are certain buildings able to generate the feel­
ing of the sublime?
Throughout his extensive career, the American
architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1859) designed
several structures with the ability to generate the
feeling of the sublime. The Larkin Building (1904­
1906) in Buffalo, one of Wright’s first projects, and
the Guggenheim Museum (1959) in New York, his
last work, are iconic examples of this ability. Wright
named his architectural principles ‘organic architec­
ture’ in a 1908 essay entitled In the Cause of Archi­
tecture (Wright, 1908).
During the construction of his organic principles,
Wright became familiar with Western and Eastern
notions of sublimity; both were based on Nature. The
transcendental ideas of the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) reached Wright through
the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882). For Kant, the highest goal of Art is to
generate the feeling of the sublime (Chaui, 2000,
p. 324). Such a feeling is experienced, for example,
when people interact with dramatic landscapes: it is
created by the tension of being simultaneously hum­
bled and exalted and is followed by a sense of self-
awareness (Doran, 2015). Japanese culture and art
were major influences on Wright’s architecture, and, in
Japanese culture, the feeling of the sublime is related to
the sense of completeness (Elçi & Yurt, 2020). Wright
incorporated these two notions of sublimity into his
organic concept, which embraced “not only the func­
tional and the rational but the aesthetic and subjective,
the symbolic and the spiritual” (Davies, 1982, p.120).
The feeling of the sublime can similarly be
experienced through other structures constructed all
around the globe, designed by architects who shared
a great admiration for Wright’s organic principles.
Major examples of this effect are the College of
Architecture and Urbanism – FAU-USP (1961), in
São Paulo, designed by the Brazilian architects Vila-
nova Artigas (1915-1985) and Carlos Cascaldi

DOI: 10.1201/9780429299070-20 157

Part II – Architecture/urbanism/design
(1918-2010), the Bagsværd Church (1968–1976),
near Copenhagen, designed by the Danish architect
Jørn Utzon (1918-2008), and The Boa Nova Tea
House (1958-1963), close to Porto, designed by the
Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza (1933-). These are
all celebrated architects who played an important
role in the development of the Modern Movement in
their native countries (Frampton, 2003).
Can we explain the feeling of the sublime in archi­
tecture based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic prin­
ciples? In this article, we defend that Wright’s ability
to translate emotions through construction was struc­
tured by the work of the American transcendentalist
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. We have divided
this article into three sections, besides this introduction
and the final considerations. In the first of these sec­
tions (Section 1), we present Emerson’s transcenden­
talism, highlighting the impact that both Romanticism
and German idealism had on his ideas. In Section 2,
we examine Wright’s interaction with Emerson’s work
from childhood until his association with the Chicago
School of architecture. In Section 3, we present
Wright’s interest in Japanese architecture and its affin­
ity with transcendentalism. Furthermore, we associate
the references that shaped Wright’s organic architec­
ture with the strategies applied by Wright and archi­
tects from all over the world, seeking to understand
why they generate the feeling of the sublime.
1 TRANSCENDENTALISM AND THE
SUBLIME
1.1 Transcendentalism in America
Even though Frank Lloyd Wright was generally known
for not acknowledging his inspirations, Emerson was
one of the few exceptions (Pinnell, 2005, p.24). It is
difficult to dispute the fact that Wright’s organic phil­
osophy was structured around Emerson’s ideas. The
resemblance between the description of Wright’s
organic principles and goals, published in Architectural
Record under the title of In the Cause of Architecture
in 1908 (Wright, 1908), and Emerson’s ideas, as
expounded in his essay Nature, written in 1836, is
quite remarkable. This gives us an insight into the
impact that Emerson had on Wright. According to Wil­
liam Cronon (1994, p.12), to understand “the language
and ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright today, one cannot
avoid a serious encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
Emerson played a major role in the development
of a philosophical movement known as New England
Transcendentalism, which can be described as a:
[…] passionate outcry on the part of a number of
brilliant and highly articulate young Americans
who had become so intoxicated with the spirit of
European romanticism that they could no longer
tolerate the narrow rationalism, pietism, and con­
servatism of their fathers. (Borchert, 2006, p. 572)
158
German Idealism, a philosophical movement that
emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries (Bowie, 2003), was a major
influence on Emerson’s work. The German philoso­
pher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), who was
a key figure in this movement (Trombley, 2012), was
introduced to English readers by one of the founders
of the Romantic Movement in England, the poet and
critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Magee, 1998,
p.157). Emerson admired Coleridge and met him
during his trip to Europe between 1832 and 1833
(Butler-Bowdon, 2017, p. 97), an encounter that
eventually led to the epiphany that would structure
his transcendental ideas.
1.2 German idealism: Kant and schelling
The work of Schelling, like that of other members of
the German Idealism movement, such as Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), was a radical response
to, and further development of, Kant’s groundbreak­
ing work (Bowie, 2010). Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (1781) is the result of his quest “to reconcile
the physical and the metaphysical” and his question­
ing whether there is a place for morality in this
apparently “clockwork universe” (Butler-Bowdon,
2017, p.157). As the German literary scholar Peter
Szondi (1929-1971) pointed out, German Idealism
sought to regain “the unity of subject and object,
mind and nature” (Bowie, 2003, p. 49).
Kant incorporated his principle of the purposive­
ness of Nature into his theory of sublimity, further
developing it by portraying Nature as “particularly
suitable for our judging faculty” (Doran, 2015,
p. 204). According to this principle,
[the] idea that nature is meant for us, either for
our pleasure (the beautiful) or as a spur to
rational transcendence (the sublime), or for our
scientific need to perceive organization and sys­
tematize (or totalize) objects of inquiry, intro­
duces a unity between feeling, cognition, and
morality […]. (Doran, 2015, p. 205)
For Kant, this principle enables Nature to evoke
a sense of “design” – “even if it cannot be con­
sidered intentional in any empirical sense” (Doran,
2015, p. 204). From the second half of the eighteenth
century onwards, there was a paradigmatic shift in
the appreciation of nature in its wild state, such as in
the Alps. Nature became valuable because it could
not be controlled. For Kant, humankind experiences
the sublime when contemplating dramatic land­
scapes or experiencing threatening natural phenom­
ena, such as lightning, from a safe distance. During
this interaction, Nature overwhelms our human cap­
acity to grasp it, and “the idea of freedom is mani­
fested in our sense of the limits of what we can
rationally and empirically grasp” (Bowie, 2010,
 The sublime in architecture: Wright’s transcendentalism
p. 20). This notion of freedom is related to self-
awareness, a feeling generated by these limits. In
other words, we do not know what lies beyond them,
but, nevertheless, they have been reached. In Kant’s
eyes, the main goal of Art is to generate the feeling
of the sublime (Chaui, 2000, p. 324). The Romantic
artist William Turner (1775-1851) shared a similar
perspective:
[…] nature always reflects and expresses man’s
emotions. We feel small and overwhelmed in
the face of the powers we cannot control, and
are compelled to admire the artist who had
nature’s forces at his command. (Gombrich,
1995, pp. 493-494)
The relationship between nature and the sublime
established by Kant clearly influenced Emerson’s
essay Nature, which became a vital reference in
Wright’s organic architecture. For Eric Wilson,
Emerson’s implied theory of the sublime draws on
Kantian transcendental paradigms (2000, p. 41). In
the first chapter of Nature, Emerson evokes
a transcendentalist discourse of the sublime, associ­
ated with the “overwhelming vastness of space – the
infinite fires of the heavens – but also with
“design” – law, order, harmony” (Wilson,
2000, p. 40).
[…] if a man would be alone, let him look at
the stars. The rays that come from those heav­
enly worlds will separate between him and
what he touches. One might think the atmos­
phere was made transparent with this design, to
give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual
presence of the sublime.” (Emerson, 2008, p. 3)
Kant’s theory of sublimity embraced concepts
from other treatises. For Robert Doran (2015), there
are three classic Western discourses of the sublime,
those of Longinus (first century AD?), Edmund
Burke (1729-1797), and Kant. The Greek fragment
entitled Peri hypsous (On the Sublime), written in
the first or third century and attributed to Longinus,
had a “structuring effect on the modern discourse of
sublimity” (Doran, 2015, pp. 8-9). Longinus intro­
duced a dual structure of sublimity formed by the
tension between two poles of a single experience –
wonder and amazement – linked to the idea of being
elevated, which is associated with the notion of
going outside or beyond oneself (Doran, 2015,
p. 10). This tension of “being at once below and
above, inferior and superior, humbled and exalted” is
what produces “the special dynamism of the sub­
lime” (Doran, 2015, pp. 10-11). According to Doran,
“this dual structure can be found in all the major the­
ories of sublimity,” including in Kant (2015,
pp. 10-11).
Friedrich Schelling developed his ‘philosophy of
nature’ by seeking to show that soul and nature are
159
identical (Hansen, 2013). In other words, “both
activities of the mind and freedom are inherent in
nature’s own ‘productivity’” (Bowie, 2010, p. 33).
Therefore “nature is originally identical with what is
known in us as intelligent and conscious” (Bowie,
2010, p. 42). According to Bryan Magee, for
Schelling:
[…] there is a crucial difference between this
creativity in man and creativity in the rest of
Nature in that in man the process is self-aware.
In the best of his art man is exploring and get­
ting to understand the innermost depths of his
own being. But since man is an integral part of
Nature this means that in creative art Nature is
attaining profound self-awareness. (1998,
p. 157)
Schelling believed that artists could express the
“connections between the material world and the
immaterial spirit in poetic language by recording the
evocation of sensations” (Stougaard-Nielsen, 2020,
p. 168).
1.3 Emerson’s transcendentalism
In 1833, during a visit to the Jardin des Plantes, in
Paris, Emerson had an epiphany about the intercon­
nectedness of things, triggered by his exposure to an
array of plants displayed according to the natural
system of classification developed by the French bot­
anist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748-1836). For
Emerson, this display “suggested interconnection,
transformation, and all-encompassing unity” (Robin­
son, 2015, p. 81). David M. Robinson (2015) high­
lights the fact that the American transcendentalist:
[…] saw vitality in this collection of living
plants, the constantly transmuting yet inter­
woven processes of the natural world, a unified
cosmos defined by its perpetual energy and
unending metamorphosis. (p. 81)
The aftermath of this experience was the publica­
tion of Emerson’s essay Nature in 1836. This major
work illustrates Emerson’s advocacy for resorting to
the natural world and sublime landscapes, both as
a way of extracting knowledge to be applied in con­
temporary struggles and as a way for each individual
to reach self-awareness (Emerson, 2008). In
a lecture entitled The American Scholar delivered at
Cambridge in 1837, described as America’s intellec­
tual declaration of independence (Reynolds, 2009,
p. 129), Emerson defended the notion that the laws
found in Nature are the laws of our own minds
(Emerson, 1837).
Emerson’s awareness of the importance of resort­
ing to Nature to stimulate human development was
a feature that could also be found in Eastern philoso­
phy. In his book The Tao of Emerson: The Wisdom
Part II – Architecture/urbanism/design
of the Tao Te Ching as Found in the Words of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Richard Grossman (2007) traces
parallels and similarities between Emerson’s writ­
ings and the ideas presented by the Chinese philoso­
pher and writer Lao Tzu, in his masterpiece Tao Te
Ching from the sixth century BC.
Written in 1841, Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance
“promoted personal responsibility and the duty
always to be oneself in the face of social conform­
ity” (Butler-Bowdon, 2017, p. 93). We associate this
notion of the role of “oneself” in the dynamics of
social interaction with Emerson’s concept of inter­
connectedness. Every single entity in Nature is
a manifestation of a specific set of circumstances
and has a role in the construction of the ongoing
whole, being both a singularity and a part of the
whole. By manifesting the singularity, we can get
closer to the understanding of the whole. Emerson
was “in favor of an individual intuition that would
lead to a state of spiritual transcendence over the
physical world” (Trombley, 2012, p. 54). We believe
that Emerson’s work incorporates both Schelling’s
concept that “nature is originally identical with what
is known in us as intelligent and conscious” (Bowie,
2010, p. 42) and Kant’s belief that the main goal of
Art is to generate a feeling of the sublime.
2 WRIGHT AND EMERSON
2.1 Context
Frank Lloyd Wright’s interaction with Emerson’s
ideas started from an early age and accompanied
him throughout his career, operating as a compass
for his architectural associations and interests. It is
crucial to point out that the spirit of European
romanticism flooded the city of Chicago through
the influence of German culture (Frampton, 2005).
As the British architect and critic Kenneth Framp­
ton (2005) points out, by the time the Columbia
Exhibition was held in Chicago in 1893, Germans
represented a third of the city’s population. At the
beginning of his career, the city that Wright
encountered boasted two daily newspapers in
German and had numerous German clubs and
associations.
The glorification of nature in art occurred in paral­
lel with the scientific evolution in biology and
botany during the nineteenth century. The most
emblematic scientific paradigm shift was the first
edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Spe­
cies, published in 1859, the same year that the Brit­
ish architect Philip Webb (1831-1915) and William
Morris (1834-1896) designed the Red House in
London. This attitude highlights the popularity of
the naturalist view of the world during this period,
which was understood in accordance with Nature’s
laws and behaviors.
160
2.2 Emerson in three dimensions
Emerson’s ideas were introduced to Wright in three
different ways, which complemented one another:
theoretically, through literature; analytically, through
the methods of the German educator Friedrich
Fröbel (1782-1852); and empirically, through
Wright’s exposure to the sublime landscapes of
North America’s Prairie region. Literature inspired
Wright to find wisdom in the natural world. During
his childhood, Wright was encouraged by his mother
to read naturalist writers such as Emerson, Whittier,
Lowell, Blake, and Thoreau (Lind, 1992).
Like Emerson, Fröbel believed in the “underlying
unity of all things” and was “influenced by the out­
standing German idealist philosophers of his time”
and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Curtis, 2021).
Through the Fröbel method, the child came to
“understand that there was an inner coherence in all
things, and that the material and spiritual worlds
were one and the same” (McCarter, 2006, pp. 16­
17). The Fröbel method emphasized:
[…] learning from nature […] structuring every
natural and manmade thing - to see each thing
‘in its organic unity’, as Froebel himself
explained […] Froebel training […] was dir­
ected primarily towards the development of
analytical thinking. (McCarter, 2006, pp. 16-17)
Wright’s intense exposure to sublime dramatic
landscapes from an early age provided him with an
awareness of the importance of human contact with
the feeling of the sublime in order to achieve self-
awareness. His metaphysical interaction with the
natural world is linked to Kant’s concern “with rela­
tionships to nature that cannot be explained by scien­
tific laws” (Bowie, 2010, p. 9).
2.3 Chicago school
Our premise is that Wright’s “Emersonian” intellec­
tual upbringing led him to interact with architects
who belonged to the Chicago School of architecture.
While still in his twenties, Wright had the chance to
join the firm formed by the German-born American
architect and civil engineer Dankmar Adler (1844­
1900) and the American architect Louis Sullivan
(1856-1924) (Frampton, 2003, pp. 56-57), a leading
figure of the Chicago School and a supporter of tran­
scendental ideas. Like Emerson, Sullivan believed
that democracy would be attained “when humanity
came to a communication with cosmic principles in
an understanding beyond intellectual capabilities”
(Menocal, 1981, p. 3).
Sullivan saw himself romantically as fulfilling
that fundamental tenet of transcendentalism that
held man to be a hero who surrenders his indi­
vidual volition to nature’s supreme will and
 The sublime in architecture: Wright’s transcendentalism
who understands that a sublime joy lies in that
submission. (1981, p. 3)
Louis Sullivan became Wright’s mentor and
a fundamental influence on the formulation of
Wright’s organic principles (Pinnell, 2005). Further­
more, Wright referred to Sullivan as his Lieber Meis­
ter, which “testifies to the strong hold that German
culture exercised over Chicago during the last quar­
ter of the nineteenth century” (Frampton, 2005,
p. 170).
Influenced by transcendental ideas, there was
a desire among Sullivan, Wright, and several other
architects from the Chicago School to react against
foreign culture’s influences and establish a native
architectural language that would reflect the specifi­
cities of their time (Frampton, 2003, pp. 61-68). By
the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century,
“the ideas and principles of the École des Beaux
Arts already prevailed throughout the country”
(Charernbhak, 1981, pp. 99-100). The Chicago
School’s desire to break away from foreign influ­
ences and express the “new” through the uniqueness
of a particular context was synthesized in Emerson’s
own words:
And why need we copy the Doric of the Gothic
model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of
thought and quaint expression are as near to us
as to any, and if the American artist will study
with hope and love the precise thing to be done
by him, considering the climate, the soil, the
length of the day, the wants of the people, the
habit and form of the government, he will
create a house in which all these will find them­
selves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be sat­
isfied also. (Emerson, 2008, p. 113)
Sullivan and Wright were trying to answer the fol­
lowing questions: What genuine phenomena are
exclusively present in our country? Which social,
cultural, and artistic manifestations were unique in
our country prior to the arrival of foreign influences?
Their answer included architectural references
related to sublime natural landscape formations, ver­
nacular and indigenous settlements closely linked to
Nature: physically, esthetically, and spiritually
(Frampton, 2003, pp. 61-68).
3 WRIGHT’S TRANSCENDENTALISM
3.1 Transcendentalism and Japan
In our opinion, the combination of Wright’s intel­
lectual upbringing embedded in transcendental
ideas and his interaction with the Chicago School
of architecture propelled his interest in Japanese
architecture. Wright developed a unique under­
standing of this culture, which, on many levels,
161
encompasses aspects and concerns presented by
both German Idealism and Emerson’s own tran­
scendentalist ideas. One prominent aspect of Japan­
ese architecture is the celebration of the uniqueness
of the context and its value as a generator of form
by adaptation.
In Japanese culture, the feeling of the sublime is
achieved by sensing the awe that belongs to extraor­
dinary phenomena: “It is not something related to
vastness or the magnitude. It is the sense of com­
pleteness.” (Elçi and Yurt, 2020, p. 145). We believe
that both traditional Japanese architecture and Frank
Lloyd Wright strove to achieve this sublime sense of
completeness in the way their structures related to
the landscape. In Wright’s organic architecture, “the
site and understanding of it as it appears in the build­
ing is a measure of your success as an architect”
(Meehan, 1984, p. 91).
The layout of the Japanese house is in any case
neither fixed nor rigid, but free and flexible; in
this respect the Japanese house is related to the
English country house. The rooms are con­
nected in a natural fashion with each other
according to their use without following any
rigid pattern. (Yoshida, 1969, p. 74)
This lack of rigidity combined with the principle
of the tatami module allows the building to simultan­
eously adapt to the specificity of the site while
expressing the relationship between the parts and the
whole: the unit describes the whole, and the whole
describes the unit. This relationship resonates with
Schelling’s organicist concept:
[…] that every part exists for the whole and the
whole for each part, that everything from min­
erals and plants to animals and humans, the his­
torical progress of culture, the geological layers
of the earth and the heavens, are connected by
a common spirit. (Stougaard-Nielsen, 2020,
p. 168)
It is important to highlight the presence of Schel­
ling’s organicist concept in Wright’s organic prin­
ciples. Schelling’s concept can also be associated
with the term Gesamtkunstwerk, which describes
a “work of art that makes use of all or many forms
of art” (Tostrop, 2014, p. 179).1
Another important aspect of Japanese architec­
ture is the desire to integrate man and nature by
blurring the boundaries between the manmade and
the natural world. Wright defended the unity
1. According to Elisabeth Tostrop, the term “was used by
the composer Richard Wagner in his 1849 essay “Art and
Revolution”. During the 1890s, the concept enjoyed
a revival when painters and architects began to integrate
different art forms to design exterior and interior
architecture”.
Part II – Architecture/urbanism/design
between garden and building, and he considered
that in any virtuous “organic structure, it is difficult
to say where the garden ends and where the house
begins, or the house ends, and the garden begins”
(Wright, 1939, p. 12). Inside and outside are part of
a weaving system of spaces, resulting in a sense of
spatial continuity. These aspects of Japanese archi­
tecture evoke Emerson’s idea of interconnectedness
and his belief in the importance of human inter­
action with the natural world in other to reach self-
awareness.
We believe that traditional Japanese architecture
embraces Kant’s understanding of the purpose of
art by abstracting and translating phenomeno­
logical manifestations in the natural world that
generate the feeling of the sublime into architec­
ture; through the orchestration of space sequences,
light, shadow, tectonic principles, and “carefully
constructed views” (Oshima, 2017, p. 63). This
orchestration evokes Longinus’s dual structure of
sublimity. The tension of being simultaneously
humbled and exalted can be experienced in the
relative darkness of the interior of traditional
buildings, where “Gold, silver, smoothly finished
lacquerware, and mother-of-pearl inlay are used to
reflect small amounts of light and bring moments
of brightness into the shadows” (Locher, 2012).
The Japanese novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886­
1965) evoked the dual structure of sublimity in his
essay on Japanese aesthetics entitled In Praise of
Shadows (1933):
The quality that we call beauty, however, must
always grow from the realities of life, and our
ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, pres­
ently came to discover beauty in shadows,
ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s
end. (Tanizaki, 1977, p. 18)
In 1905, Wright spent seven weeks traveling
throughout Japan. The journey provided Wright with
a spatial understanding of building in the context of
surrounding mountains and forests, which he noted
was “a great educational experience” (Oshima,
2017, p. 63).
3.2 Sublime: Wright and nature
According to Emerson’s transcendentalism, Nature
is a “sea of forms radically alike and even unique.
A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make
an analogous impression on the mind” (Emerson,
2008:15). In Wright’s architectural production, we
identify both a drive and a sense of confidence in
trying out a “sea of forms” that would simultan­
eously adapt to the site condition and evoke “an
analogous impression on the mind” of phenomena
found in the natural world. Following principles
found in Nature, Wright developed two clear
162
strategies to translate Emerson’s ideas into architec­
ture. In both cases, just as in Japanese architecture,
the circumstances of the site were key factors for
determining form, spatial sequences, tectonic strat­
egies, and the relationship between inside and out­
side: all seeking to promote a transcendental
connection with Nature. The first strategy was
applied in case the site provided a harmonious
dialog with Nature. Wright blurred the boundaries
between inside and outside through an interlocking
spatial sequence that incorporated the site’s morph­
ology and its specificity. The context should be
intricately associated with tectonic principles and
formal composition to bring a sense of unity.
According to Hugh Dalziel Ducan, Wright “accen­
tuated the horizontal plane, the human plane of man
on earth” inspired by the Prairie landscape (Ducan,
1965, p. 5). An early example of this strategy is
reflected in Wright’s first breakthrough project, the
Fredrick C. Robie House built in Chicago (1908­
1910).
If the site was hostile in Wright’s eyes, his
instinct was to turn his buildings inward. The
American architect would instead use his ability to
abstract natural phenomena from Nature and gener­
ate the feeling of the sublime through dramatic vari­
ations in ceiling heights, natural light conditions,
and tectonic principles. Similar to Japanese archi­
tecture, these architectural gestures evoke Longi­
nus’s dual structure of sublimity. The Larkin
building designed by Wright in 1903 (Frampton,
2003, p. 66) is one of the early examples of such
a strategy, which displayed a transcendental atmos­
phere also found in light beams penetrating
a cloudy sky in the Prairie landscape. According to
Cronon,
[…] in the case of truly urban sites such as
those of Unity Temple, the Johnson Administra­
tion Building, or the Guggenheim Museum, he
shut out the surrounding environment altogether
and replaced it with a beautiful inner space […]
(Cronon, 1994, p. 19)
3.3 Self-awareness in three latitudes
The atmosphere created by the Larking building can
also be sensed in buildings designed by the American
architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974), such as the Kimbel
Art Museum (1966-1972) and the Phillips Exeter
Academy Library (1965-1972). Architecture for Kahn
was “thus the expression of timeless ideals through
contingent realities” (Leslie, 2005, p. 9). These time­
less ideals, in our view, are embedded in buildings that
have the ability to generate a sense of self-awareness
among their occupants. Considering this premise,
some of Wright and Kahn’s buildings fulfill “Emerso­
nian” and Kantian ideals.
 The sublime in architecture: Wright’s transcendentalism
Figure 1. The Bagsværd Church (1968–1976) © Utzon
Archives/Aalborg University & Utzon Center.
The Danish architect Jørn Utzon, winner of the
Pritzker Prize in architecture in 2003, shared similar
architectural concerns with Wright (Frampton,
2004). His admiration for Wright’s organic prin­
ciples led Utzon to North America in 1949. During
his time there, he visited some ancient architectural
sites in Mexico that had a spiritual connection with
Nature and some of the buildings designed by
Wright, as well as the American architect himself
(Montaner, 2001, p. 89). Utzon enjoyed
a remarkable understanding of sublime landscapes
and their potential for generating self–awareness.
Like Wright, he explored different ways of evoking
the sublime in architecture. A pertinent example of
his approach is the Bagsværd Church (1968–1976),
near Copenhagen (Figure 1), a building that reveals
his “Kantian” intention to reproduce the feeling
experienced when observing the sky. A sketch by
Utzon indicates “the idea of an open-air congrega­
tion, gathering on a plain under rolling cloud forma­
tions” (Frampton, 2004, p. 19).
Further south, the Boa Nova Tea House (1956­
1963), close to Porto, evokes both Wright’s desire to
integrate nature and construction and his awareness
of the horizon as a generator of the feeling of the
sublime (Figure 2). Designed by the Portuguese
architect Álvaro Siza (1933-), who was also awarded
the Pritzker Prize in 1992, this structure displays
several of the strategies applied by Wright, as well
as others found in Japanese architecture. The articu­
lation of the different spaces, alternating moments of
introspection with exposure to the specificities of the
site, allied with the interplay of light and shadow, are
powerful gestures for evoking the sublime. How the
horizon is carefully framed through fenestrations,
combined with the orchestration of the floor levels in
relation to the rocky landscape, demonstrates
163
a complete awareness of the place. The Portuguese
architect Fernando Távora (1923-2005), who was an
important influence on Siza, used to say that the
“quality of a good setting gives [a building] a certain
air of eternity” (Machado, 2011). Távora’s admir­
ation for Wright took him to Arizona in 1960, where
he visited Taliesin West (1937), Wright’s winter
home, and desert architectural laboratory (Tri­
gueiros, 1993, p. 93).
Figure 2. Boa Nova Tea House (1956-1963). Photo:
©Steven Evans.
Wright’s influence on Siza is a theme that would
certainly benefit from further research. However, the
Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), who
applied parallel principles used by Wright, was
a major reference in Siza’s work. An example of this
influence is the Banco Pinto & Sotto Mayor in Oli­
veira de Azeméis (1971-1974), which illustrates
Siza’s desire to integrate his buildings into existing
site conditions (Burkhardt, 2014). According to
Marchand, Siza based the axes that geometrically
structure this project on specific points of the exist­
ing morphology of the site (2015).
It should be noted that Wright’s architectural con­
cerns were also to be found in other influential Por­
tuguese architects, such as Raul Lino (1879-1974)
(Tostões, 2014), who believed that the conditions of
the site played a major role in the generation of
architectural solutions (Ramos, 2011, p. 112). Like
Wright, besides being exposed to German culture
during his education, Lino was also influenced by
Ruskin (Ramos, 2011) and acquainted with Emerson
and Henry Thoreau’s literature.2
Closer to the equator, the College of Architecture
and Urbanism – FAU-USP (1961), in São Paulo,
designed by the Brazilian architects Vilanova Artigas
and Carlos Cascaldi (Figure 3), encompasses similar
strategies to those found in Wright’s repertoire: the
2. Rui Ramos found copies of both ‘Essays by Ralph
Waldo Emerson’ and ‘Walden or Life in the Woods’ by
H. D. Thoreau in Raul Lino’s personal library.
Part II – Architecture/urbanism/design
introspectiveness of the building in relation to the
environment, the roof structure incorporating sky­
lights, the interconnectedness of spaces supported by
a system of ramps, and the sense of unity between
the parts and the whole, built tectonically using
exposed concrete. The central atrium, filled with nat­
ural light, evokes the transcendental qualities found in
Wright’s Larkin Building. Wright’s influence on Arti­
gas is more explicit in projects such as the architect’s
first house (1942). Like Utzon and Távora, Artigas
experienced buildings designed by Wright during his
study trip to the US in 1947, where he also visited
dramatic landscapes such as the Grand Canyon
(Ferraz, Puntoni, Pirondi, Latorraca & Artigas, 1997).
Figure 3. College of Architecture and Urbanism – FAU­
USP (1961). Photo: ©Virgínia and Vilanova Artigas
Institute.
4 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Already in 1908, Wright predicted how his organic
architecture would evolve:
As for the future – the work shall grow more
truly simple; more expressive with fewer lines,
fewer forms; more articulate with less labor;
more plastic; more fluent, although more coher­
ent; more organic. (Wright, 1908)
We consider that Wright’s prediction can also be
applied to the work developed by Utzon, Artigas,
Távora, and Siza. The ability and the intention to gen­
erate the feeling of the sublime is a constant feature in
all their work. We feel Nature in these buildings, both
in principle and in the way that we experience Nature
in its original form. The “Kantian” vision of the goal
of Art is thus fulfilled: a feeling comparable to emo­
tions experienced in the presence of dramatic land­
scapes, often followed by a sense of self-awareness. If
we were to compare Wright’s first breakthrough pro­
ject, the Frederick C. Robie House built in Chicago
(1910), and his last major structure, the Guggenheim
Museum in New York, concluded in 1959 – the year
164
of his death – it would not be obvious to uninformed
eyes that the same architect designed both buildings.
Nevertheless, these two projects have been consist­
ently celebrated as uncompromising examples of
Wright’s organic principles. Wright’s aspiration to
translate Kant, Schelling, and Emerson’s ideas into
architecture may explain the origin of this consist­
ency. As Cronon explains:
Wright shared with his nineteenth-century con­
temporaries a deep conviction that the chief task
of science and art was to discover underlying prin­
ciples of order – present not just in architecture
but in literature, philosophy, music, mathematics,
and, indeed, in the entire organic and inorganic
universe – which would reveal the hidden unity of
humanity and nature. (1994, p. 10)
Louis Kahn “often said that it is more important to
know what to do than how to do it” (Leslie, 2005,
p. 244). Wright knew “what to do” through his expos­
ure to transcendentalism: to create self-awareness
through architectural manifestations that are intricately
and simultaneously associated with Nature’s principles
and our experience in the natural world. Just as Emer­
son did, Wright embraced the changing of times to dis­
cover “how to do it” throughout his long career.
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